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THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIENCE OF TIMBRE IN TYSHAWN SOREY'S AUTOSCHEDIASMS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2023
Abstract
Autoschediasms, the American composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey's conception of spontaneous composition, casts the participants as equals. The decision-making power is balanced between Sorey and the instrumentalists. Focusing on the 2020 performance of Autoschediasms by Sorey and the contemporary-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, presented as part of the ensemble's Video Chat Variations series, this article limns the experience of Autoschediasms and asks: what is the sensory counterpart to Sorey's democratic ethos? In Autoschediasms, I argue, it is timbre that synchronises the performers’ interactions, in all their care and openness, with the pressures and freedoms of listening. Timbre activates absorbing, unforeseen, manifold variation in the composition. This sonic impression of democratic music-making around and across difference comes to reflect the conditions of radical humanity and vulnerability inherent in spontaneity. Through close listening, and in dialogue with critical improvisation studies and timbre theory, I suggest that Autoschediasms illuminates the ethical dimension of timbre: what timbre can do for the aspiration towards musical inclusivity.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Tyshawn Sorey and Alarm Will Sound, ‘Tyshawn Sorey & Alarm Will Sound – Video Chat Variations Episode 2 (Autoschediasms)’, 30 October 2020, https://youtu.be/JdhM4IibBkQ (accessed 7 October 2021).
2 Alarm Will Sound and Aleba & Co., press release, 13 July 2020, https://mailchi.mp/alebaco/aws-video-chat-variations?e=972b74fa91 (accessed 18 May 2022).
3 Seth Colter Walls, ‘17 Players in Five States, Composing Over the Internet’, New York Times, 30 October 2020.
4 Ibid.
5 Patrick Marschke, ‘The Sonic Universes of Tyshawn Sorey’, Liquid Music, 4 January 2019, https://www.liquidmusic.org/blog/tyshawn-sorey (accessed 7 October 2021).
6 See, for example, on, Fred Moten ‘the freedom drive that animates black performances’, in Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 12Google Scholar.
7 ‘Tyshawn Sorey by Claire Chase’, BOMB Magazine 148 (Summer 2019), p. 76.
8 George E. Lewis and Arnold Davidson, ‘On Improvisation’, Televisionism, https://vimeo.com/71972632 (accessed 23 May 2021). See also Lewis, George E., ‘Listening for Freedom with Arnold Davidson’, Critical Inquiry, 45, no. 2 (Winter 2019), pp. 438–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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13 Peacocke, ‘5 Questions to Tyshawn Sorey’.
14 On relationships between music and democracy, see Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch, eds, Finding Democracy in Music (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020).
15 Peacocke, ‘5 Questions to Tyshawn Sorey’. This sharing of responsibility fits within what Georgina Born has called the first ‘plane of social mediation’. Born, Georgina, ‘After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic’, in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, eds Born, Georgina, Lewis, Eric and Straw, Will (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 43–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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18 See, for example, Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
19 Alan Pierson and Tyshawn Sorey, ‘Behind-the-Scenes: Interview with Tyshawn Sorey’, 30 October 2020, https://youtu.be/t8h9gBZwDAI (accessed 6 October 2021).
20 Ibid.
21 Wallmark, Zachary, Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 84–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Tyshawn Sorey, ‘Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine: Aesthetics, Discussion, and Reception’ (DMA dissertation, Columbia University, 2017), p. 2.
23 Schoenberg, Arnold, Theory of Harmony, trans. Carter, Roy E. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 421–2Google Scholar.
24 Wallmark, Nothing but Noise, p. 85.
25 Ibid., p. 174.
26 Eidsheim, Nina Sun, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Pierson and Sorey, ‘Behind-the-Scenes’.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Lewis, George E., ‘Improvisation and the Orchestra: A Composer Reflects’, Contemporary Music Review, 25, nos 5–6 (October/December 2006), p. 433CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 On Attali's conception of a ‘new way of making music’, see Brian Kane, ‘The Voice: A Diagnosis’, Polygraph, 25 (2016), p. 104.
32 ‘Conversation with Judith Butler I’, compiled by Bronwyn Davies, in Davies, ed., Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 3. Butler's words here are allied with their concept of ‘sensate democracy’.