Professional Documents
Culture Documents
H.Smith@unsw.edu.au
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HS: But how can you tell what the audience is like if you
are not very directly interacting with them? How can
you tell what the range of intelligence is? I was
wondering all the time during the performance what kind
of audience you were pitching it at.
DA: You don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the
beginning of a piece I have a tendency to be fairly
exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away.
There is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see
how they work for you but also whether people find them
intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon
them. But you get a sense from body language whether
people are with you or not with you and there are ways
of playing it that are so completely intuitive I don't
even know how I do it. That is I spend a fair amount
of time circling the material before plunging in, to
achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning
relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a
prologue. In other words in standard orchestral
situations they tune because they have got to reach a
particular pitch, but I have freedom of tuning because
no one tells me whether I need just tempered or equal
tuning.
DA: Most people are. I don't have a set feeling about it.
My sense is that people are there of their own free
will and I offer a kind of human engagement with them.
In other words I don't deal with material that is
impossible for them to deal with. I deal in a space
that I presume this intelligent audience can arrive at
in some manner. The length of the piece has something
to do with the audience's interest, and sometimes the
question is how much I can push the material and keep
the audience still with it. I think that I can also
tell whether people are dialoging with the piece.
When I am talking what I say is never quite what I
intend to say. There is a kind of relationship between
the sense of one's own intentionality and what one
does, because if one had a complete match between what
one intended and what one said, one wouldn't have to go
any further, one would never have to reformulate. So
there is a kind of slippage and sometimes what you say
is better than your intention and sometimes worse or
sometimes merely to the left or right of it. And so I
am always conducting a kind of dialogue with myself, as
well as a dialogue with the audience, and the audience
is always conducting a kind of dialogue with me, but
also spinning off. I feel that's good. One of the
reasons I use a less tight presentation mode is that I
want the audience to have room to pursue its own
interest and loop away and loop back, which I think
they do. I think people associate off into things that
are like my experience but different, and that they
might have said in a different way. So they pursue
their agreements and disagreements with me through
parallels of support, this allows them a full-scale
dialogue. And to the extent to which they are involved
in it, they are interested in the piece and they have
this kind of intense but intermittent attention.
HS: Could you give me any idea of the process by which you
generate the talks, how you get from one item in them
to another?
DA: No, and my work is about the unity of thinking and the
absolute absence of the dichotomy between what we call
irrational artistic thought and rational thought. It
basically engages with the idea of raiding across the
two terrains to insist on the unity of the terrain.
Logic is a function of human character, people are
basically in some sense logical when they think at all.
But logic is broader than that. The truth-table fable
is a fantasy but if you could lock down the categories
in such a way and you could position them rigidly
between here and there, you could quantise between the
true and the false in a particular curious way. But
usually the categories are too slippery for anything
significant to be put into this position for very long.
What happens is that the slippage in anything you use
generally causes you to have to approach it in a number
of different ways, "as long as this holds to be true"
and "as long as this is like that then it follows from
that that this is this."
HS: How do you think the talks relate to your normal talk
or your normal speech?
HS: The knotting and the unknotting you talk about wouldn't
be so prevalent in a conversation would it?
HS: That was another thing that struck me when I saw the
talk; it reminded me of the lecture situation in some
respects.
HS: Yes that it was very much what I had conjured up from
the text.
RD: Except that you are presumably doing that over a much
longer time-span and you are also thinking
retrospectively about what you thought in the process
of thinking when you performed--i.e., by now, thought.
It is kind of a combination of the two, isn't it?
RD: That raises the other question which comes from the
realization of the two stages. Why do you really need
to do the performance verbally in public? Why can't
you do the thinking at the computer.
DA: No, not at all, I'm perfectly happy with them doing it.
If they start out from false premises and do terrific
things. I've got nothing against it! It is the theory
that I sometimes find foolish but the outcome of the
work is often terrific. So in a sense if Coltrane or
Ornette do things that are breaking up a grammar it is
only when you take grammar in the narrow sense of the
grammar of music, because if, for example, you suppose
that the deep grammar of music is different from the
grammar that was imposed on it, in my sense they look
for the deep grammar. I would say they are looking for
the deep grammar in music and that was the greatness of
free jazz, the fact that it was so coherent. I taught
one entire 3 hour course with a group of people where
we tried simply to take one whole performance of the
Coltrane group in 65 and we were listening to it and we
tried to find a way to talk about it that made
intelligent sense about the articulations and the moods
that were made. And we needed a kind of theatrical
vocabulary to discuss it and we were trying to re-
formulate, and it seemed to us that the work was
extraordinarily coherent and in some sense humanly
grammatical because it was intelligible.
DA: Yes, as long as you can figure out how to work together
in a physical sense and a team-like sense. It seems to
me that we could do it in ways that are not the most
obvious ways.
HS: Do you feel that the talks you give now are very
different in certain ways?
HS: Do you think there are certain topics that you are
really obsessed with, which keep coming up time and
time again in your talks? I am sure if I went through
I could find certain recurring themes.
DA: Probably some that come up more than others and new
things show up once in a while. I like to think that I
am not so completely closed that I always talk about
the same things. On the other hand we have our habits
and concerns and things that are not resolved. What is
resolved I don't bother dealing with. For example in
_the other_ certain things familiarly fit into it. On
the other hand it was not a subject I had thought about
in any significant way before and if you take it at the
micro-level, some of the concerns are the same, but you
are looking at them from different points of view. So
my sense is that there is a mixture. I am sure if I
went through the talks I would find things that were
familiar, but then one isn't infinite in one's
capabilities.
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The Interviewers: