A while back I went to a concert put on by my friend in his friend’s Bed-Stuy-area loft, which included some soundscapes, guitar-playing, and melodic vocals, almost suited to the singer’s tessitura. The reason I say almost is because singers who write their own songs (a.k.a. singer-songwriters) tend to write songs built for their own voices, with their own strengths on display. Joni Mitchell writes melodies that leap into her soprano head voice; T-Pain writes melodies where the smallest inflections become effortless coloratura. The singing was disarming because the words, especially at the lower ranges, began to be obscured, until the melodies jumped up again into clarity.
The other thing about vocals is that no one is under any illusion that the singing is improvised in any large degree. The words are on a page, and the singer sings them. This is not at all true for the guitar, particularly during guitar solos, intros, and transitions where the melodies might veer into the semi-melodic and particularly angular, as if mistakes were being made. In fact, it is often impossible to tell if many particular guitar phrases are improvised until they are repeated. This process of repeating something that may seem strange upon first listen must cement it as “right”–right, because it happened twice–and then the guidelines have to be rewritten.
It is also important to say that the projections behind the musicians were the only light in the room. Maybe for this reason, the projections were mostly splotches of noisy black and white and some greys, but what was clear is that the projections were important in their aggregate. Consider this: in sound, a bar band must cut through the noise of the crowd in order to truly matter at all. They’re playing Journey covers becuase when Steve Perry (or his temporary stand-in) hits the high notes they can be heard through the conversation-yelling happening throughout the bar; we hear the note and the melody, because it different from the layer of noise we have taken for granted. In contrast, a concert that occurs in silence should be concerned with the entire extent of the sound. This sound happening on stage is the only sound that we hear, so our ears adjust. Likewise, when the projection is the only light in the room our vision adjusts.
This has potential power, because of the way that our vision or our ears are controlled by the sound and aggregated light. When our ears are tuned to be sensitive, they are also vulnerable to unexpectedly loud sounds. Likewise with light, as anyone who has sat in a dark movie theater when the screen flashes from black out to all white knows.
But the room never went completely white or completely black until the end. This would be too expected, so it never happened. As the guitar melodies angled off into acute corners, the light shifted around on the wall: shifting, but not quite changing the whole of things.
I’m writing this at risk of sounding like I’m extending the performance too far, or maybe getting away from the performance: I was listening to Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet (the six-hour one) the other day, and it struck me how the sound just happens, then changes inexplicably. It doesn’t change in a logical way, like the harmonic or aural motion of minimalist process or in an illogical (extra-logical?) way like the stochastic Cage. It’s a difficult pill to swallow in the 20th (even 21st) century: the arbitrary change. So, I’m willing to say that this connection between Matthew’s songs and Feldman’s succession of wonderful string phrases occurred arbitrarily in my head, without any real attachment to what may have been intended, or even been there.
