A “transparency” is better known as a component of 4 color printing, a partially see-through layer that contributes only one of the colors that, when combined, can yield the full spectrum of possible color. And, moving from sight to sound, this kind of layering, whether of instruments, voices, or tracks, is already a pretty common feature of all kinds of music.
Now, imagine two people telling even wildly divergent stories, but both narrations include some of the same words; and, the speakers pace themselves to land together on each of these shared words at exactly the same time. This is what I mean by a musical transparency: change “words” to pitches in two or more intersecting melodies, and here we are.
I came upon this in my own experiments as a designer of sound environments (this is what most people call a “composer”) for improvisers. I’d been thinking about not only how to more flexibly extend melodic patterns but about how to equally distribute the dynamics of drum language throughout an entire ensemble and in that way help diffuse the figure-ground hierarchy between rhythm section players and everyone else. Rhythm is social organization. Polyrhythm, many rhythms at the same time, coordinates social diversity. And sometimes, rhythm may be an agent of social revolution that changes how we might move together.
In a transparency interface, each rhythmic pattern or pulse can be identified through its distinctive melody, which functions as much as a cueing system among the musicians as it constructs sonic architectures for the listener. These shared points of common reference also help facilitate a music’s self-orchestration as players collaboratively shape the total sound of the music from each of their own individual perspectives.
The design challenge is to construct patterns that are easy and clear enough for players to identify while improvising. Each layer has to configure a distinctive contrast from all the other patterns while sounding well together or in sequence.
Conducting signals play a helpful role in terms of steering the dynamics in play from an outside-in perspective (in contrast with the inside-out perspective of improvisers). Different layers may be visually cued. Varying ways of altering pitch can be indicated. Certain relations among players may be spontaneously choreographed. And, most importantly, subtractive procedures—leaving things out, accenting silences, and so forth—help keep the music’s circulation fluid as it evolves, with varying densities between full ensemble and smaller combinations of players. And there are moments when the musicians are so comfortable with this menu of possibilites that such conducting might almost disappear,
What’s also important is that the seven-to-twenty-plus-musician transparency kestra is a specific social structure as well as a musical habitat. The modular layers of a transparency adapts well to scheduling complications that often come up when coordinating so many people, sort of an emulation of functional redundancies in ecology, where varying actors may alternately assume the same role in a biological system. In other words, any combination of instruments and players may accomplish the music’s possibilities on any occasion, which is an added source of resilience. Transparencies’ compositional decentralization also hints at a political vision where (at least) musical decision making is neither top-down nor unanimous, but is instead collaborative and interactive, enabling the display of a drama of how people in nearly any context might themselves cooperate and creatively respond to ever changing circumstances.
Whenever possible, we present in two sets. First, an open rehearsal where people can observe the process of how the music is being put together (That’s yet another level of transparency) . There’s room also for back-and-forth talk with listeners about the music. And all this is followed by a performance that always, I mean always, travels in ways unexpected by all.