Play Liner Notes

As many different sounds 

As there are people

In the room

(One random instruction card from Hannes Lingens’s Play)

 

The improvisatory character of ‘Play,’ where people meet in space to play together, resembles practices used in Noh theatre. In Noh productions, the actors learn their part alone, and they meet on stage in front of an audience for the first time together as an ensemble during a play performance. This practice of ‘alone together’[ness] is not strange to the improvising musician's life. They continue to nurture their alone-ness with all sorts of substances, special personalized diets, and a mutual fixation on a long quest to pursue evaporated airwaves. Meeting other vibratory-like creatures is part of the play practice, part of developing the self in contrast to the other, keeping one's contours and dissolving them at will.

 

“When you’re an artist, you’ve got to be careful in your training. Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.” (Henry Threadgill in Easily Slip into Another World: A Life In Music. Henry Threadgill & Brent Hayes Edwards)

 

When we learn to play a game, we develop certain routines and strategies; we use specific muscles to impose our will. We rely on our short or long playing experience to repeat what we already know while the game unfolds. At the beginning of the last century, Frederick Matthias Alexander developed a method (later known as The Alexander Technique) to overcome habitual patterns ingrained deeply in people. His most significant discovery might have been the understanding that one cannot change their shortcomings only by free will and direct intent. People will repeat the same physical patterns repeatedly without inhibition and observation. Hannes Lingens’s Play is a safe space, a playground for different habits to coexist without compromising one’s strengths to realize the score. If we assume that any one player can not go against their habitual patterns, or play differently from what they are used to, then Play is an ideal vehicle to inhibit before jumping into the pool of sound. The score consists of one hundred playing cards for an ensemble, distributed evenly between the players. Each player follows the written text on the cards at their own pace, individually. The text printed on the cards varies from instructions like 'a very long sound’, ‘what your neighbor played just before,’ ‘21 long sounds with pauses in between' to name some examples, to more abstract cards like ‘a question,’ ‘something that calms you down,’ ‘on top of everything’ and ‘something with a hole.’ Listening, reading, thinking, processing, and interpreting the cards one by one is crucial to the ability to pause momentarily and go on to a different direction, which is less evident in the personal continuum of the players involved. The cards serve as indifferent sign marks that impose some of their wills on the piece's development.

 

Try to play, especially in timing,

in such a way that some awareness

of all the sounds,

even the quietest,

is possible.

(Christian Wolff, from the instructions to Berlin Exercises, 2000)

 

Christian Wolff’s quote appears to reference the piece, and he might be considered a direct connection in a broader sense. One might be the sense of transparency in his music and his democratic and non-hierarchical approach. Another might be the way of listening to every sound, going back to his early days as part of The New York School (see John Cage’s text no. 4 in Indeterminacy on Wolff playing a piano piece while the windows were open). Wolff had two compositions named ‘Play’ as part of his prose collection, which include works like Stones and Edges (written in London and played by AMM, Fredric Rzewski, and Wolff himself). It is interesting to think about Wolff as one of the predecessors of ‘game pieces’ in general, even though he has not referred to it directly. But his pieces over the years carry a strong sense of bringing people together and allowing them to make choices and decisions within a given framework. Wolff's ideas about society and humanism reflect a continuous line during a lifelong of inspiring and far-advanced musical thinking in which the active listener can sense vital concepts of change, teaching (conveying ideas to listeners and participants alike), indeterminacy, freedom, and noise. Hannes Lingens’s  Play carries over that lineage in a different manner and character, and it is interesting to observe Hannes’s offering enfolding to our ears in this diptych, realized by two groups, resulting in different ways yet carrying within them a strong concept of the secretive game they convened to play.  Play as a concept and reality is also a place for acceptance, friendship, and generosity within a group of people. They construct a multidimensional space while listening, negotiating, and playing the score together. 

 

No, no, no. We are not speaking of instruments. We are not speaking of instruments.

No, we are speaking of ideas. I mean look at people who have written string quartets. 

Look at John Cage who’s written a string quartet. Look at Michael von Biel who’s

written a string quartet. Look at Benjamin Franklin who’s written a string quartet.

You can see immediately that the concept of the instrument is different. I mean an in-

strument is not just an instrument which everybody uses in the same way.

(David Tudor in Reminded By The Instruments, David’s Tudor Music. By You Nakai)

 

The origin of a device in Middle English comes from Old French  devis, based on Latin divis - ‘divided,’ from the verb dividere. The original sense was ‘desire or intention,’ found now only in leaving someone to their own devices. Today, one of the definitions of a device is an instrument. Another definition is a plan, method, or trick with a particular aim. In corporate capitalism, the term BYOD stands for bring your own device, and it lets employees use their personal devices to connect to the company network. Here is the opposite. We take BYOD as an invitation not to set a certain global flattening standard. A thread is spreading between all these meanings and ideas, connecting playing music, as a technical and creative endeavor, to planning, conceptualizing, and thinking. Each device is an idea, as Tudor said, and those different ideas make the present personnel in these recordings engage in tracking and deciphering. 

 

Lingens's task is similar to a team manager in soccer or basketball who has to assemble a team and watch the results from the stands. But what is interesting about  Play is that it is an assemblage and an ensemble simultaneously. It stacks different approaches and devices within its space of existence yet lets them coexist and operate. What eventually turns a group of diverse people into an ensemble? Hannes's proposition succeeds in walking between the lines, not making things too tight or loose yet in control, and thus offering a space for projection where music lies between people and ideas.   

 

Tom Soloveitzik

Tokyo, June 2023