extended techniques: a thought

Hi, blog. Haven't touched your noodley appendage in a while. But that's not why I'm here today.

Earlier today, I read this here blog about extended techniques, posing the question of whether they're unfortunate gimmicks or legitimate devices to advance musical craft and composition. I started typing a comment, but pulled myself away when I realized that the comment would ultimately wind up longer than the original post, and no one likes a thread-hijacker.

The short of my take on the issue is that, at this moment, it should not be an issue. Any sound produced by an instrument, and quirk or bizarre (assume for the moment I'm taking the perspective of a nominal audience member and not a musician of 20+ years) result from a half-hole, alternate fingering, or bowing technique should be, and needs to be, embraced by composers, students of composition, and, especially, performers. This seems like a radical approach, but considering historical precedents - Rossini's Il Signor Bruschino; Berlioz's...well, Berlioz; Nielsen's wind quintet (with its extend-a-bassoon Contra A); Stravinsky's usage of harmonics in Firebird or Le Sacre - precedents now nearly 200 years old, the dialectic of ever-gimmick or ever-acceptable (which logically quickly leaps into the hoary old "bad versus good music" world) has become quite long in the tooth. The conversation to be had now is how to seamlessly integrate these techniques in a manner that won't piss off Loren Maazel* and educate performers unaccustomed to these techniques on why they should embrace them, let alone, of course, the conversation on how to best educate younger composers on the benefits and uses (and universalization) of these techniques.

A thorough discussion of standard Western instrumental or vocal practice pedagogy is well outside the scope of this meagre little entry, though the question of how to handle extended techniques in the teaching setting as we are shaping new performers needs to resurface here, even if briefly. When is the proper time to discuss extended techniques with younger students? Once they've mastered (for their age level) their 12-Tet scales in all keys, or once they've managed become secure in extended tonality, or once they've become confident in their abilities regarding intonation and stamina? For string players, how soon should we discuss ponticello and col legno tratto? Certainly, there are those students who learn (well, "learn") about such devices on their own - a curious student will respond positively to dropping the wood of the bow on a string, and do it again, and again, to see what happens. An impassive student will just whisper "oops," turn the bow proper, get the hair parallel to the bridge, and continue sanding down the burrs on the spiky new etude. I've never met a seventh-grade clarinetist linger long once a squeak has been released from the horn, but college-aged musicians should (at the very least) be informed that now they have the rules of the game, they can break those rules when a composer calls for it. The primary approach, perhaps, is to instruct performers in develop a broad palette of aesthetic coping mechanisms so quarter-tones and behind-the-bridge bowing doesn't elicit snarls or shudders. Beyond that is the necessity to evince a level of acceptability as performers that Quantz's corpse isn't being trod upon when a flutist uses some tongue percussion or that Joachim's mode isn't being destroyed by 17-Tet: this does cause a certain degree of pedagogical cognitive dissonance in a student, but if the comparison can be made moreover as one between styles rather than so much as technique, then perhaps we may gain traction. Jazz sax technique differs a bit from classical; Klezmer differs somewhat from classical clarinet; performing Corelli on a violin is going to be significantly different from Ysaye or Sibelius. Perhaps this stylistic comparison can be made (even if we're nowadays eviscerating stylistic paradigms) to gain buy-in and lose the truculence seen. Of course, there's always the vernacular of the style - standards of notation vary, occasionally wildly, from composer to composer; still, nothing beats a thorough description (and pictures, sound files, and the like) to assist exactly how far down G4 should be lipped on a bassoon to create a multiphonic.

This pedagogical thinking, though, brings up something smelling of Derrida: will we have to reconsider what "extended technique" means once the vocabulary becomes more present in the embouchures and right-hands of musicians, or will we get to toss the 200-year-old baby out with the bath water? This implies, of course, that extended techniques will somehow become the parallel or equal to traditional performance technique; while my radical soul yearns for it, my practical composer self doesn't see it happening. Multiphonics, funky bow techniques, and microtones create the assumption that a performer can elicit sounds between the sounds of Common Practice performance. In a sense, there's an atomic level of A-440 and Bb-466.16, with a molecular extrapolation to find pitches between those two equal-temperament molds; in order to produce an E-dominant multiphonic, a performer must be aware of the nature of that chord. To put it another, better, way, I see extended techniques as dialects of common Western musical vernacular that are learned and absorbed: they're part of the language, granted, but found in compositional regions and territories only relatively recently fully explored and demonstrated. While such things as col legno or piano harmonics are not so much "extended" any more than playing a high E on a bassoon, unknown multiphonic fingerings, bowing behind the left hand, and preparing a piano still are reasonable extensions of "typical" playing style. This leads to a question of idiomatic tendencies in support of the dialect idea: a contrabass can get away with certain musical elements that a violin cannot, and vice versa. So, now, we have to speak about the dialect of each instrument or instrument family (in broad cases). There's no solid way to produce the same multiphonic on every woodwind instrument, so there has to be an intensive learning of capabilities of each instrument - of every regionalect of the orchestra down to local color of specific instruments. I have, on more than one occasion, discovered that something I or another performer can do on their instrument can only be done on that particular horn or fiddle and cannot be replicated. This is not to dismiss the reduction of what we cover as "extended," but to reasonably assure ourselves and our performers that hyper-specific dialects - as we find when traveling - can be cumbersome and lead to frustration. And then we have issues with certain instruments: in particular, the piano. Few pianists enjoy preparing a piano, and, unlike a multiphonic or behind-the-bridge bowing, it does subtly damage the instrument. The vast number of pianists I've known over time have preferred to speak The King's Musical English than to even bother with Eraser and Nut/Bolt speak. While I'm mixing metaphors a bit, I'll speak briefly about computers in the pejorative, which is odd given how much I compose for electronic media. Intermedia pieces using MAX or SC make it easier to produce those "weird" sounds we attribute to extended techniques, which in turn may open the door a bit to keep performers from learning them, thus spoiling and sheltering them from having to learn the various ways their instrument can speak. This is very much a nightmare-scenario, especially since performers who will themselves to be miked and fed into a MacBook are typically pros at extended performance abilities, but the philosophical implication still lies in wait.

Then, there's the difficulty in knowing exactly when overuse of a technique spoils the fun. For instance, every orchestral and wind ensemble piece composed as High Art in the 1980s seems to indulge in the crotales and chimes, to the point where those colors are no longer "special." I've pored over scores by Berio, Xenakis, Lachenmann, and Maderna, pieces that use nothing but extended techniques but to great effect, such that standard performance practice bits, when they do happen, are jarring and brutal, rising out of the previous textures and (non)harmonies like a blood-curdling scream in a quiet library. I've sat down with Robert Dick's output where equal measures of standard and extended flute techniques seem to mesh well. Musicality can be burnished and improved upon, but rarely simply taught; it's difficult to pinpoint when a musical technique becomes a gimmick except through relativistic listening and comparisons with other works by the composer. There's the novelty of a bizarre sound to a lay listener, and then there's the "oh, he's using that again" to the seasoned musician. The end result is a chimerical bifurcation, though (to contradict myself a little) when extended techniques are used as onomatopoeia or in place of sound effects (e.g., flutter-tongued, sung-through trombone is meant to resemble a car horn) and happen only once in a work, it may then begin to verge on "gimmick" - the other side of that coin, though, is incremental aesthetic teaching to performers and audiences that such sounds are fine to have around. This may be the first step to better-validating these techniques, though caution must be taken to ensure performance techniques beyond the "norm" are not relegated to the role of comic relief, or - worse - pure novelty.

* A famous anecdote circulates - most likely from an interview I cannot find now - that Maazel complained that he has two rehearsals and then a performance (back when he was in Cleveland) and doesn't have the time to explain to his cellos about how, where, and how hard they should hit their instruments with a Coca-Cola can. I encountered this in undergrad, nearly 15 years ago, and it struck me then as pompous, tenuous, and dogmatic - basically, he was making an excuse.