Issue #3 - Jon Gilbert - Blaise Sales - Ed Cooper

CHORAL: Collaboration as Approaching Bob Cobbing’s ‘Chamber Music’

Jon Gilbert, Blaise Sales, Ed Cooper

Any imitation is an investigation, a study of the components of the subject that is imitated. What elements the imitation draws on not only offers insight into the imitated, its imitable gestures, but also reveals the imitator.[1] Here, I deploy this methodology to Bob Cobbing's 'Chamber Music', to explore imitation as creation, and as a means of investigation.

Bob Cobbing was a concrete and sound poet, active between the 1950s and 2002, contributing significantly to British visual poetry scenes. Cobbing’s piece ‘Chamber Music’ (1967) presents a score comprising twelve segments, with words and phrases formatted as crosses, spread uniformly on a page. These are scored for multiple voices, with no given duration, nor performance instructions, leaving the performers to decipher and arrange the materials themselves. To gain insights into the ontological possibilities of ‘Chamber Music’ as a text, then, I rework Cobbing’s methods of language organisation from the inside and deploy tactics of creative collaboration. In the first instance, poet Blaise Sales and I wrote the score for our piece CHORAL, which strongly resembles Cobbing’s ‘Chamber Music’ in ways that implicate him as a posthumous collaborator. Sales and I then performed our work, which was recorded and edited by composer Ed Cooper. This network of collaboration provokes readings of ‘Chamber Music’ that would not have otherwise been possible; namely, how the unconventional form emphasises the method of reading itself, foregrounding the physicality of the words and the implied, ‘unspoken’, material relationship between the voices beyond grammatical ‘rules’. Furthermore, the method of production for CHORAL, as an act of creative imitation, troubles still long-standing notions of originality and authorship. CHORAL is, at once, a homage to Cobbing, an investigation of his techniques and practices, and a creative exploration in and of itself.

Themes: Collaboration, poetics, visual poetry, performance, scores, voice, materiality

Listen to CHORAL here - https://soundcloud.com/getcoopered/choral/s-ztYuFxFW2gX?si=31f157881bbd40fb8c9454749bdc0076&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

We thought the most fitting way to address the theme of co-authorship and its relation to CHORAL would be to have a conversation between the three co-authors. We’ve each transcribed a section from certain points of this conversation, presented here with all the fillers, hedges, repetitions and hesitations left in. This was a stylistic choice on our part to best capture the modus of the piece, letting topics trail off, re-emerge and circling around points in spoken interaction with each other without reaching a fixed or finalised end-point.

 

CHORAL — Ed Transcription — 2:02 – 5:35

Ed: … So I guess I’ve come in from… er… A sort of ‘not-knowing’ position, I guess. So, I guess what I’m saying is that I haven’t been informed knowingly or directly by Bob Cobbing, but I have been informed by you two, I suppose. So, I wonder if there’s this chain of collaboration, where the text exists between you, Jon, and Cobbing, then the performance between perhaps you [Blaise], Cobbing, and Jon, and the recording exists between… I suppose us three. But within each of those—the recording, performance, or text—there might be some kind of, like, crossover of authorship, but there’s also different degrees to that. I don’t think there’s a parity within those things.

Blaise: Yeah, and, like, each time it changes as well. Like, through each, sort of, level, like, something changes and, like, something is gained. Like, Cobbing’s initial influence kind of, like, wanes a bit as it goes on.

Jon: Yeah, I think, um, yeah, I can’t remember exact quotes off the top of my head now, but one of the things that I was thinking about when we started was the Matthew Goulish stuff. He talked about, y’know, things, criticism getting a life outside of its target, and that’s what I think you’re getting at. As this process carried on, it strayed further away from its point of origin to get some sort of life of its own. I, I hope that’s what happened [laughs] Yeah.

Blaise: Yeah. Um, I think it’s interesting thinking about, like, materials as well, like, passing between people. Because, like, the material sort of changed at every step. Like at first, you, like, were inspired by Bob Cobbings’ text and then wrote your own, like, transcribing it. And then, like, we performed it and that was a different sort of material element, because then I was contributing my voice and, like, your voice to it, and that changed how it was, like, kind of, I don’t know, ‘consumed’ is the wrong word, but processed, and then Ed, like, edited, like, recorded it, and then edited the recording. So, like, at each, like, level, there’s been some sort of, like, material transformation as well.

Ed: Yeah, definitely.

Jon: And like, I think, I think that… Yeah… This is what makes a point of collaboration, right? Is that something is… Every part of that chain that you’ve identified, something happens to the material. But then, I have… but to what extent do we call that, yeah… ‘Co-authorship’ is a strange… I’m not…

Blaise: Yeah, I think there’s a difference between, like, collaboration and authorship, and, like, co-authorship, like they have different meanings. So I feel like this piece was more of a collaboration rather than working with ideas of authorship.

Jon: But then are we privileging the idea of ‘the text’ then? The author’s worked on something written rather than the performance. Because I think I’d make, I dunno… I suppose I’d potentially make some sort of tentative case that CHORAL is the performance of CHORAL rather than the text of CHORAL.

Blaise: Mhmm. But then I feel like the relationship between them is very important because…

 

CHORAL – Blaise Transcription – 23:56 – 27:20

Ed: … I think, maybe, what’s important is to think about, and perhaps necessarily because of thinking of ‘work as a verb’ is not thinking that you do something to the work, but rather that there’s this kind of, it’s a bit more of like a back-and-forth, which I think is maybe accentuated or highlighted when you have to work in these collaborative ways. Whereas I suppose if I were to be composing by myself, well –

I suppose this is it as well – if you, you know kind of think of, like, Cobbing, as a kind of like, um, spectral author in this, then I suppose in that sense then you never fully work alone. But I guess if I’m not working with real life people, then I suppose it still happens then of, like, it’s not just like this thing where I have an idea and put it down on paper. There’s a kind of like back-and-forth of, you know, the work requiring work. Which then requires me to kind of, you know, it’s not just like me inscribing something. There’s a more back-and-forth. But I just wonder if, how that’s different, or how to express that that’s different in this setting, where there’s three of us here and we have three different instances of the same work.

Blaise: Mhmm. Yeah. I like this idea of like a spectral author, and like Cobbing being a sort of spectral presence behind it. Because I think actually in the recording itself, and in having this recording, our voices kind of become like those spectres. Because it’s not like our voices now: it’s as they were. And you even kind of made it more, like, spectral, because you added all these, sort of, well the whispering bits, and the different overlayerings of the voice, and it did have a sort of haunting quality to that particular recording. And so yeah. I kind of like the idea that every time this is performed it kind of carries with it, like, all the previous, like, recordings. Just being imbued with this spectral quality.

Jon: Mmm. It’s interesting as well, like, both on the large scale and the small scale, of… I’m just trying to think about how this stuff works, you know. Like, you make an offer, and that offer is… Well, I think in this kind of process in particular that offer is accepted, and then reworked into another offer, which then becomes accepted again. And that’s how a lot of, in the moment, the performance worked. But I think on the wider scale, you know, it becomes this expanded offer, of ‘oh, we’ve, I’ve created this thing – will you perform it with me? Yeah. Oh, we’ve created this thing – perform it with me? Would you like to, um, you know, be a part of the editing thing? Yeah’. And then it performs itself, of ‘oh I want to take this performance this way, by shouting or by whispering or whatever’, and then you will be yes, or no…

 

CHORAL – Jon Transcription – 34:05 – 36:44

Jon: So something I’ve been thinking about recently is – I mean and partly because of this kind of stuff – is like, to what extent is is the process an internal one that the performer does. You know like, an audience member won’t necessarily see the score and wouldn’t necessarily be able to chart our journey through it, but its something that we experience, finding these pathways, and having these conversations. You know, they, the audience might enjoy listening/watching our conversation, as it were, but it’s something that we’re having, and that we’re doing, it’s something that we’re experiencing, right?

Blaise: Mhmm. Hm.

Jon: So yeah, I wonder to what extent stuff like this, I mean, is process, and the biggest, the biggest, effect of that process is on the performers, not necessarily the audience.

Ed: Mhmm.

Jon: I mean, yeah, you said yourself, that you enjoyed this moment of collaboration perhaps more than the piece, so is it, is this kind of stuff more about having a go [laughs]? Than like, I don’t know. It seems very, it seems very exclusive to push the audience out like that and say ‘oh no, it’s about us’.

Blaise: Mmm.

Ed: Well, but also they don’t have to listen. I mean, just to be, you know I mean, there’s, to think of art making as a social practice, in the way that you might play like a sport or whatever

Jon: Mmm.

Ed: Like, I mean, I wouldn’t have thought that lots of amateur football teams really care if there’s a crowd there [laughs]

Jon: Yeah.

Blaise: Mmm.

Ed: Cause it’s not, I guess, perhaps it’s not, which I guess, you know, I guess its not a direct, you know, you can’t collapse those two things neatly into each other but I mean I guess there are [inaudible] you know to think that you need an audience is, I don’t know, I mean that’s kind of inadvertently buying into ideas about art and performance that

Jon: Yeah, yeah, totally

Blaise: Yeah, yeah, and kind of this like binary between like the author and the audience, and like the author is producing something for the audience, whereas we’re kind of like resisting that idea of like there being one author, and it’s like more open, so like the audience could potentially like be readers and like kind of change the performance as well.

Ed: Yeah, that’s true, that’s true.

Jon: [inaudible] you know performing for ourselves, performing for each other, or performing to the spaces as well, if we’re thinking about live elements or performance elements again…

[1] Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying, (London: Harvard University Press, 2010).