Full article on Disclaimer here

Folk Music from an Imaginary Planet

There’s something refreshingly direct, even folkloric about the Naarm born Aviva Endean’s experimentalism — folk being connected to place. Her parents migrated to Australia in the 1950s; her mother coming from Amsterdam after hiding as (non-religious) Jews throughout the war, and her father coming from Dublin. And to say, as she does; “Aviva Endean is a clarinettist, composer, sound artist and performance-maker dedicated to connecting people with each other and their environment through attentive listening”¹ seems to summarise a grounded practice. Although, of her duo with guitarist/organist Nick Ashwood, Driftwood, she complicates this, saying, “It’s like stepping into another world, almost as though the music is a folk tradition from an imaginary planet we have only ever visited in our dreams.”² Indeed, Driftwood’s melodies and chords are woven with such otherworldly tonal intervals they’d make a better substitute score to the movie Avatar (2009) than James Horner’s cliched soundtrack.

Aviva’s recombinant instrumentalism — which plunges into gritty, indeterminate materiality — is connected to a lineage; a historical ecology. From a niche within that ecology she vitally and poetically musicks, and yes, connects people with each other, although (as it is for Humanity in general in our era) her audio’s connectivity to environment is complex, even troubled (as the Denver, Colorado-born theorist Donna Haraway puts it).³ Aviva’s musicking is problematised by complex intersections between performativity, places, non-places, technological Beings, Cybourgs, and audio spatiality. Dreamscapes are constructed from close-in microphony, non-place studios, overlaid performances, and meticulous mixing and mastering; a sculpting of sonic time. This is common to the vast majority of musical audio produced these days, be it mainstream or experimental. Yet Aviva’s soundings pose a question: can auralized⁴ dreamscapes — virtual spaces — be understood as environments? Can they ground musickin?⁵

I’ll stay with this trouble, but first a disclosure: Aviva is one of my favourite musickin; I’m persuaded of Aviva’s immanent unmediated commitment to co-creation with ecologies through highly developed auditory perception and unique clarinet-ing/singing/fluting. We first played together sometime in the mid-2010s, winter, in a downtown Naarm (Melbourne) blue-stone lane. As Aviva was resident on Dharug Lands (Sydney) for much of 2021, we played on a weekly basis with the Splinter Orchestra. November that year, with the artists Victoria Stolz and Adam Gottlieb, we hiked into the Hidden Valley, Budawang Mountains, Yuin Country, sleeping in caves, cooking on fires, and over five magical days musicking with each other and the Budawangs. You can listen to the mediated artefacts of our time there on the release In Weather Volume 1: The Hidden Valley (2022).

Trouble with Clarinet

Aviva exclaims; ‘I shouldn’t have been a horn player.’⁶ She explains that there’s expectation, especially in improvised music circles, that wind instrumentalism is fast, high, and loud — showy (although, one can construct a milieu of great Australian wind players that counters that doctrine: Louise Elliot, Natasha Anderson, Rosalind Hall, Laura Altman, Aviva…). Aviva agonised over this expectation leading up to her first solo show (sometime in 2014 or 2015 in a bar on Sydney Rd) eventually performing a drone piece on her black wood Bass Clarinet’s bottom b flat, thereby aligning her instrument with this continent’s iconic instrument, Yidaki, (Didgeridoo).

She tells me that when travelling by air, in the anxiety of luggage not materialising on the carousel, she’s most concerned of losing a highly specific, irreplaceable found plastic tubing that accidentally and perfectly combines with her mouthpiece to create unique sounds, rather than her replaceable — albeit expensive — “standard” clarinets. I admit a similar ambivalence to my instrument: flute being weighed down with Aussie daggy-ness; think Greg Ham braiding a nursery rhyme, Kookaburras, Down Under, Men at Work, and the legal system all together with fluting; think the obligato flute to Kath and Kim’s theme music, The Joker (1964); or, most damning — Ja’mie King of Summer Heights High-fame is a flautist. Clarinet is less an Aussie character than the flute — or at least, less parodied — and Bass Clarinet, because of its low frequency potential, in some circles might almost be cool. Initially only a clarinettist, Bass Clarinet took up Aviva in her third year at the Victorian College of the Arts.

I’ve always questioned: With the singing voices that humans possess (hark Aviva’s lovely folkloric singing hocketting against her fluting on track four, Distant Song from Cinder – ember – ashes {2018}) why is there musical instrumentalism at all? This question is extra salient now, in awareness of coloniality on this singing Continent, criss-crossed as they are with lines and spirals.⁷ Homo sapiens already possess inbuilt generators for musicking — voices — perhaps not as virtuosic as Lyrebird Syrinx’s stereophonic mimicry,⁸ but perfectly adequate for the endless mutability required for musicking. So how to explain the compulsion to engage (on Country) with Eurocentric tools for sounding? Is it merely settler positionality habit? Many of Aviva’s projects and bands confront these questions head-on with anti-colonialism. Check out The Cloud Maker, an interweaving of her folkloric experimentalism with Wellington based artist and singer Te Kahureremoa’s knowledge of the Maori Tāonga Pūoro (including nose flutes, bone flutes and poi), Sunny Kim’s Korean vocals, Freya Schack-Arnott’s cello and nyckelharpa, and Maria Moles’ drumming. Or Aviva’s duo with David Wilfred (Yidaki) Gadayka/Grenadilla from the band Hand to Earth.

The Bass Clarinet that you hear on that track has their own weighty lineage, and as I just claimed, centres (at the beginning) in Europe. In the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich, stands an instrument made in the mid-1700s by a family of instrument inventors and makers, the Mayrhofer from Passeau. Looking like a Brancusi sculpture, their fantastical experiment is a snaking wooden column with a full 180-degree twist towards a flaring metal bell. The overall length of the air column is about 177cm, and the bore varies from 1.58cm to 1.67cm. This proportion of air-column length to bore is what then defines this single reed instrument as Bass Clarinet.⁹

1842 Belgium: Adolf Sax, the inventor of Saxophones, made “standardisation” of Bass Clarinet his first project.¹⁰ His “modernisation” produced roundness of tone, and enhanced well-tempered-ness, so composers started orchestrating. Viennese born (from Mazzesinel¹¹) Arnold Schoenberg requires Pierrot Lunaire’s (1912) clarinettist to double on the bass. Tellingly their dark tones moonlight the song Nacht (although the loudness of the last part of this song engenders a harsh tone one never hears with Aviva’s soft, intimate gestures). Los Angeles born Jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy’s early 1960s solo re-configurations of Billy Holiday and Arthur Herzogs’ God Bless the Child metamorphised Bass Clarinet from Eurocentric orchestral Being to Afrological improvisational Being.¹² That this Eurocentric Enlightenment invention transindividuating¹³ with Aviva would still have a chrysalis-like Australogical emergence in the 21st century seems a miracle in our computing age.

Instrumentalism can become a bodying that engages with technicity to the extent one experiences in the first track of Aviva’s first solo album, Burst in Black (under). Here, a curving, flaring Contrabass Clarinet, amplifies and entones the precisely positioned vibrating reed resonating the mini-caves of the hard rubber mouthpiece, Aviva’s mouth and respiratory system, the Contrabass body, and beyond these labyrinthine entwined bodies and cavities, billowing out into surrounding resonant bodies and place. In this fleshy expression, this acousticking, this multiplicitous bodying, any distinction between Aviva and Clarinet dissolves. Or, perhaps it’s better conceived as not pre-existing; Clarinet not an external tool, but an added on organ.¹⁴ Aviva/Contrabass Clarinet is a ‘technological being,’¹⁵ a symbiotic actant, a transidividuation which negotiates a unique transaction with worlding,¹⁶ and whose sonic expression engenders the musicking.

As with most contemporary audio, this recording is contextually stark; microphones largely only transduce Aviva/Clarinet. What Place is this, what is the time? Recorded at Rolling Stock Studios, Collingwood’s inner city grittygrot is unrevealed; it could be a Sydney, rural, or Lima studio. Or is this non-place? Or Tardis Lite? Re-played into our car, bedroom, living room, headphones on the bus, or computer speakers, audio-ed Aviva/Clarinet materialises, Dr Who-like, into other timespaces. Although unlike the full Tardis, this version can’t take you back before the originary recording session date.

Setting aside sci-fi (for the moment), Aviva/Bass Clarinet’s braiding is both novel and primordial; human musickin have been engaging in technicity like this since vulture bone flutes or gum leaf play. In our era, think of Sydney born — to an Iraqi Jewish family — Oren Ambarchi’s mosh as Guitar/Mixing-Desk/Marshall-Stack/Lesley-speaker, think Magda Maya — Berlin based composer/performer born in Münster, Germany, her mother Czech and her father Lebanese — and her timbre-tango with prepared Piano. These musickin (instrument/players) are free to engage in continuous feedbacking of sonic material and entwined bodying, because the content, the phenomena generated — tones, harmonies, noises, rhythms, patterns, timbres, melodies — become authentic expressions of transindividuation. There’s immediate tropistic unity between the bodying and the hearing, listening, thinking. Instrumentality becomes a biofeedbacking, and when fissures appear in the material, these instrumentalists squeeze through to dive beyond into new horizons. This opposes Sax’s standardisation, where the ‘same’ phenomena attempt to be replicated from one player/instrument to the next across times, ensembles, Concert Halls, Cities, Countries, Continents. There’s nothing standard about Oren, Magda, or Avivas’ explorative modifications and extensions to reconfigure the off-the-shelf. Magda writes;

‘The process of finding/choosing the adequate objects is a complex one–it happens by way of chance, discovery, searching, making, systematic improvement… this is often a process which happens over many years and leads to personal relationships with and compositional approaches through objects.’¹⁷

Hence Aviva’s anxiety for potential loss of her found plastic tube; they’re essential for her recombinant Clarinet.

This biofeedbacking instrumentalism only fully blossoms without predetermined scores. The transindividuated instrument/musickin is then free to plunge into the indeterminacy of creation without boundaries. But it doesn’t mean one must adhere to some notion of “pure” improvisation. Much of Aviva’s music could be described as indeterminate composition, derived from initial improvisations, the parameters of her inquiry are narrowed so she can patiently interrogate a configuration.

Previously mentioned was the soft intimacy of Aviva’s sounding. She claims that her most rewarding performance mode is one-on-one with a blindfolded audient; she wants that person to experience the closeness of her perception of her instrumental dance. The recording of Aviva’s album Cinder – ember – ashes (2018) fulfils that desire as microphones close in. With the song Burst in Black (under) one feels her breath gesturing deeply resonant fundamental tones, simultaneous with unfolding higher overtones. This isn’t an assembly-line Contrabass Clarinet; a hole drilled into the body of the instrument for inserting a mic affords a unique harmonic series. Gleaning becomes a constant adding-to and subtracting-from her instruments and then going with the new phenomena afforded by serendipitous recombination. Way too positive to be themed as deconstruction.

Burst in Black’s (under) tone-ing isn’t atomised and then discrete tones systematised into twelve, or any other number. Aviva/Clarinet’s gestures richly stack-up into a verticality, even when fundamental-ing, always latent with overtone-ing or multiphonics. This multiplicity is sometimes rocketed by tongue moving away from the reed creating a small ‘vacuum,’ causing the reed to move further away from mouthpiece, together with tongue. When the contact between tongue and reed is broken, a percussive slap explodes.¹⁸ Lung pressure, tongue-slap, cushioning and gripping lips, column of air, and fingerings, all intra-penetrate together to engender waves.

The eight minutes of Burst in Black (under) unfolds 47 breath-length waves. As with beach-scapes each wave (phrase) is unrelentingly unique. One can conceive these phrases as miniatures; Aviva’s breath rhythm-ing a series of micro-variations. As such they seem cyclic, although not assembly-line sampled, electronic loops; Aviva/Clarinet’s loops are each, like beach waves, indeterminate, playful. But there’s flatness, no phrase is more important than the preceding or next, and you feel this musicking isn’t going anywhere, it lacks the teleology of Western Art Music; there’s no cathartic high point or dramatic ending; the piece could go on indefinitely. It seems negative to name this feeling ‘non-teleological,’ a concern not with what should, could, would, or might be, but rather with what actually is. The liner notes tell us:

‘This album took inspiration from the musicologist Andrew Killicks’ concept of ‘holicipation’ — a term he coined to describe solo musical practices that are not rehearsals, not practicing for something, but are playing for oneself. The playing is ‘holistic’ in the sense that it constitutes audience, composer and performer, and has no investment in a musical future, but instead finds nourishment in the present.’

This is musicking patiently satisfied in each moment; it’s suspended.

Moths and Stars

This holicipation isn’t continued in Aviva’s second solo release Moths and Stars (2022). Here she expresses a very different environmentality, where multiplicitous space/time-travelling Avivas swarm at you from every which way, the flash-mobbing suggesting narrative. Aviva writes about the work;

‘Sounds are freed from being confined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky.’¹⁹

The first track Between Islands starts with multiple Moths flutter-tonguing left to right against a background of harmonic-rich flutes, then seamlessly evolving into the more ambient Nightwork (track two) where a microtonal humming choir of Avivas spiral, leslie-speaker-ed in vast stereo “space.” Unconfined to one place it becomes an auralized dreamscape.

The previously discussed materiality of Aviva/Clarinet is buried here as the gestures become computational, the weaving of layers compositional. Occasionally flute, vocal, or clarinet gestures pop up above the dark oceanic turbulence, and then towards the end of track three, Moths and Stars, there’s a dramatic ending — distortion corrupts and eventually sucks up everything to a full stop. Freed from the “confinement” of one time, one perspective, by the audio’s end I’ve extrapolated that the Resources Development Administration (RDA), the antagonists of the Avatar films, has extracted all the mineral wealth from Pandora and there’s an abrupt ecocide.²⁰

There’s environmentality to solo multi-tracking. 1930s: Les Paul built his own acetate cutting machine convincing himself that Sound on sound recording arose from desire to record a song when bandmates were unavailable:

‘That was the toughest thing in the world to do—to take two pick up arms and put them down at the same time and start them off together. But I kept at it, and in a few days I had the thing so I could play back a rhythm section in sync and play my part over it… That was my first attempt at trying to do multitracking with the guitar. It was very crude…’²¹

Magnetic tape made this less crude. In his London home after the break-up of the Beatles, another Paul, with Studer four track recorder and one mic, played everything — drummer, bassist, guitarist, pianist, vocalist, recording engineer, producer (with only Linda supplying backing vocals) — on his first solo release McCartney (1970). Environment here includes Microphone, Studer, and the particles dancing on magnetic tape.

Although she’s not replicating a band, Aviva multitracks Moths and Stars ‘to discover happy accidents… unusual conditions revealed sound worlds that were fresh and fascinating to me and took me deep into processes that would unfold into the tracks that ended up on the album.’²² Moths and Stars sound worlds can be said to take place populated with Aviva’s binaural microphone, cassette players, Leslie speaker, her Apple Macintosh, studio monitors, the multichannel-ing and digitally processing software. Perhaps this isn’t the meaning of “environment” Aviva was attempting to conjure when summarising her practice, but the sum total of all the living and non-living elements and their effects that influence musicking includes our co-creation with technological Beings, be they Clarinets or Computers, and a moving with, from and in between places, non-places, and virtual spaces. These are the environmental cards Cyborg musickin are dealt in the 21st century.

Plunging bravely but gently into worldings, some directly grounded, such as blue-stone Naarm lane, and some such as Moths and Stars, kinda sci-fi, Aviva co-creates powerful audio and performance works generated by recombinant clarinet-ing, reciprocal generosity, and an auralizing of fantastical soundscapes. These auralized dreamscapes — virtual spaces — can be understood as environments. In troubled ecological times her folkloric experimentalism connects us to environmentalism.

Contributor/s

Jim Denley is one of Australia’s foremost improvisers. Over a career spanning four decades his work has emphasised the use of recording technologies, co-creation, and a concern with site-specificity.

Editor/sTiarney Miekus

Notes

1. Aviva Endean biography, https://www.avivaendean.com/biography/ (accessed 26th September 2024). Emphasis added. ↩
2. Driftwood (2024), Room 40 https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/driftwood (accessed 26th September 2024). ↩
3. “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” Donna J Haraway, “Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene.” Duke University Press, 2016, P1. ↩
4. ‘Auralize’ is a term coined by architect Mendell Kleiner for acoustic simulations of rooms and buildings. This term is also apt for referring to inner sound and sounding, or sounds and sounding heard mentally. It replaces the word ‘imagination,’ used with reference to all senses. Image, of course, is a visual term. So there is a cognitive dissonance when using ‘imagination’ to refer to hearing inner sound. Pauline Oliveros. (2011). Auralizing in the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and Sounding. Journal of Visual Culture, 10(2), 162-168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412911402881. ↩
5. Hannah Reardon-Smith coined the term musickin to describe the human and more-than-human critters and energies one can share improvisation with. They have thought of the term as both verb and noun, as a descriptor and an intention. Hannah E. Reardon-Smith, “Sounding Kin: A Queer-Feminist Thinking of Free Improvisation” (PhD diss., Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, 2021), 42. ↩
6. Interview with the author 25 September 2024. ↩
7. Here I’m referring to the well known term songlines, and the Gay’Wu Group of Women (a self-described “dilly bag women’s group,” since it is a collaboration between five Yolngu women and three non-Aboriginal women) describe song spirals—the way songs travel far and are about the journey of animal and spirit beings, who can be person, animal or both. These have existed forever, coming from the land and creating it too: “they keep on creating it, and us, and everything in our country.” Gay’wu Group of Women, xvii. ↩
8. “The lyrebird’s syrinx is the most complexly-muscled of the Passerines (songbirds), giving the lyrebird extraordinary ability, unmatched in vocal repertoire and mimicry. Lyrebirds render with great fidelity the individual songs of other birds and the chatter of flocks of birds, and also mimic other animals, human noises, machinery of all kinds, explosions, and musical instruments.” Jerry A. Coyne, The amazing vocal skills of the lyrebird, https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2009/03/22/the-amazing-vocal-skills-of-the-lyrebird/ (Accessed 23rd October 2024). ↩
9. Phillip T Young. “A bass clarinet by the Mayrhofers of Passau.” Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society (1981): 36-46. ↩
10. Henri Joseph Bok. “The deep-rooted microtonality of the bass clarinet.” PhD diss., Ph. D Dissertation. Universiteit Leiden, 2018. ↩
11. “So many Jews continued to live in Leopoldstadt even after the 1867 constitution gave them the right to reside elsewhere that it was derogatorily nicknamed Mazzesinsel–Matzah Island…” Harvey Sachs. Schoenberg: Why He Matters. Liveright Publishing, 2023, P4. ↩
12. George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91, https://doi.org/10.2307/779379. ↩
13. Gilbert Simondon conceives the subject being as a more or less perfectly coherent system of three successive phases of being: the pre-individual phase, the individuated phase, and the transindividual phase, all of which partially but not completely correspond to what is designated by the concepts of nature, the individual, and spirituality. Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 349. ↩
14. Merleau-Ponty writes in “Eye and Mind,” [PDF] timothyquigley.net 12, “Our organs are not instruments; on the contrary, our instruments are added on organs.” ↩
15. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, UP (2013) 230. ↩
16. Worlding indicates that creation is an ongoing generative process; the world is concurrently and constantly becoming, never arriving at fixed states. I also use this term as a substitute for the visually skewed, and fixed worldview. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest evidence for worlding from 1567, in the writing of poet and Church of England clergyman Thomas Drant. ↩
17. Magda Mayas, “Orchestrating Timbre—Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance” (PhD thesis, University of Gothenberg, 2019), 85. ↩
18. Henri Joseph Bok. “The deep-rooted microtonality of the bass clarinet.” PhD diss., Ph. D Dissertation. Universiteit Leiden, 2018. ↩
19. Aviva Endean, Liner notes to Moths and Stars (2022) https://room40.org/edition/moths-stars/ (Accessed 27th September 2024. ↩
20. Avatar (2009 Film) Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film) (Accessed 10th October 2024. ↩
21. Les, Paul, Cochran, Michael. Les Paul in His Own Words. United States: Backbeat Books, 2016. ↩
22. Aviva Endean. Track-by-Track: Aviva Endean’s “Moths & Stars” Foxy Digitalis
    https://foxydigitalis.zone/2022/11/29/track-by-track-aviva-endeans-moths-stars/ Emphasis added, (accessed 8th October 2024). ↩