Watching
performances of John Cage’s
Solo for Sliding Trombone (1957-58), I see the trombonist washed up on the foreshore of the stage robbed of familiar melodies, rhythms and harmonies, and stripped of the iron-warm camaraderie of the trombone section – but carrying on, chin up, regardless. What’s left is a remnant of that former self, granted some solace by the curated paraphernalia of bizarrely shaped, clanking pottery. This vestigial character, battling away, offered (in the late 1950s, at least) a new way of seeing and hearing this instrument through a demonstration of isolated, rich, barely-there, powerful, delicate, blurry and focussed sounds. Such a mode of performance draws attention to
every sound in the performance, including, for example, the clumsy racket of all those theatrical, hardly-necessary mute changes. In preparing the electronic element for
Matthew Gee’s re-imagining of this piece, I focussed on these residual sounds in deference to Cage’s reframing of the trombonist and, of course, in pursuit of some new and interesting noises. There are three elements to the electronics: 1) time-stretched segments from selected passages of Matthew’s performance that provide a kind of counterpoint (with a nod to
Mike Svoboda’s multi-layered rendering); 2) triggered samples of the in-between sounds that would’ve normally been thrown away (breathing, foot noises, the percussive table of mutes, the incidental clink of the jar) selected at random from a palette of 18 sounds; and 3) a reharmonisation of the live performance using intervals derived from the performed segments but selected at random. At times, the trombonist will bathe in and compete with an intense, primal wash of sound that remains recognisably, but residually, Matthew’s trombone. At other times, the trombonist will be left to navigate silence and just-perceptible wind and scraping. Either way, every movement and sound of this lone figure, up there in the light, unable to retreat, is magnified and laid bare in a rich interplay of vestiges.
