CATALOGUE   NEW RELEASES   David Breskin's Notes for Frisell

THE RICHTER 858 BOOK PROJECT An Interview with David Breskin by Lily Prillinger (excerpts) Russian Hill, San Francisco, September 2, 2002 The musical component of RICHTER 858 really complements the shimmering, lustrous terrain of these pictures. What were the qualities of Bill Frisell’s compositions that lead you to anticipate his mastery of and his desire to be involved with this type of project and how does his work style relate to the texture and density of these paintings? I wouldn't focus so much on the word 'composition' as I would emphasize the idea of 'playing.' Of course, as a jazz musician, Frisell does have a compositional style and a thematic style. My attraction to Frisell wasn't so much because of his compositional style so much as his relationship with the instrument, particularly the electric guitar. Here's why: what Richter does with paint in these abstractions I think Frisell does by analog with music, with sounds. Okay, what does Richter do with paint in these abstractions? He bends it, covers it. He erases it, he torques it, and he layers it. He subverts it – he inverts it. He is playing with it in a way that exists in time in a sense because he is not doing it all at once, and obviously 'time' in painting functions differently than 'time' in music. The duration is different. If you compress that idea and consider Richter's time in making a painting; let's say you had a time-lapse visual record of the process in film and you compressed it into 44 minutes and 44 seconds which is the length of time it take's Frisell to play through all eight pieces with his musicians, I would argue that what Frisell does is quite analogous to Richter. Well, what does Frisell do with sound, particularly the electric guitar? He shapes it. He torques it. He inverts it – he reverses it in time, things come backwards. He modulates pitch. He changes tunings. When I consider all the improvisers that I know or all the kind of master musicians, he has a relationship to the guitar when producing sound that is closer to Richter's relationship to producing paintings than anyone else. He uses all these rack-mounted devices, uses all these signal-processing devices to take his original sound – comparing that [to? with?] Richter's original surface of paint on a canvas –and transforms it. Frisell is doing it in real time. We did no overdubbing or editing. He could be doing it by adding all along throughout the duration of the piece. Instead he is doing it in real time. For instance, Frisell may play a phrase and put it through one of his delay units and then the sound comes back, and it changes – and it keeps changing. There is so much uncertainty in that. Actually it is very similar to Richter, in the sense that Richter knows well the effects he can get form running the squeegee over a wet section of paint or over a fairly dry area that has wet paint on top of it, just like Frisell knows the effects he can achieve by feeding a certain series of notes into his delay, and then letting them come back and then playing over them. And yet neither Richter nor Frisell have perfect or total control of the process and things happen which they can't predict. As the sounds morph he has to change what he does because of what he's hearing back. In other words, he's playing with himself as the sounds come back in real time. Well, that was the kernel of the idea as to why I used Bill Frisell. I also felt there were other aspects that were not particularly analogous to Richter but I felt they would be more surprising than say, what Steve Reich or Philip Glass might do. I think they both have great relevance to Richter and it’s not a surprise to me that Richter and Steve Reich are both interested in each other and that Richter has now done a project that is like an homage to Steve Reich. But I sort of know what that music may have sounded like before I had heard the music. With Frisell I didn't know. In fact, what he's been doing in the last few years has been much more in the direction of Americana – with lap steel guitars, with banjos, and all sorts of stuff. You know, one of my early phrases to Bill was: "No banjos for Richter." Anything that would have had a vernacular feeling would have been anachronistic because the paintings don't feel vernacular at all. They just feel contemporary. So we didn't want the music to have any vernacular elements to it. If it felt like a swampy blues, it would have felt wrong. Although, there is this unbelievable sequence where the viola and the violin together sound very much like a harmonica. It's strange and it caught me by surprise. So that's why I wanted Frisell. Another aspect of my interest in Bill was reflected in my initial phrase to Bill: that the music should involve investigations "deep into the language of electric guitar." The paintings are on aluminum, you know seven of the eight, and it’s a modern metal and I wanted the music to be very modern. We were going to use strings but I didn't want it to feel like [an?] 1878 string quartet. So, the three strings are quite acoustic – nothing electronic going on with them. Once again we were setting up this formal structure, like in my warped sestina, where you have the strings stand in for some classical order or European tradition. Let's look at it like European concert music: cello, viola, violin – suddenly up against electric guitar which is clearly not a European concert instrument. It is a very modern, contemporary thing, specifically in the language that Frisell is using. So you have this modernity if you will, or you could say 'post-modernity'– whether Richter is the post-modern genius that everyone makes him out to be and I'm not sure that wouldn't be damning him with faint praise, actually – this modernity that is against, inside, and around these strings which represent a certain European order and tradition. We considered this tension even in the way that we mixed the record with the guitar. The cello was slightly towards left, the viola was towards the middle, the violin was toward the right and the guitar is through all of them. It's farther left, it's farther right – and it's all underneath and on top without being louder. I wanted those other instruments swimming in, and up against that guitar that has a very different sound and arrives with a very different sound envelope than those string instruments. Another reason we recorded those strings in such a way was to create a real intimacy. This 'intimacy' is the equivalent of looking up really close to a painting. This approach contrasts the situational aspects of a 'normal' string quartet up on stage at Carnegie Hall where you might be sitting in the 33rd row. It may feel so perfectly preserved and sounds as such that it could be 1878. If you listen to this recording, there is no way it could feel like 1878 because you hear the string sounds of the string players, and you hear the breathing of the players at some moments. You can hear the wood of the instruments. Without it being a hyper-presence, we were trying to create a super-presence. We were trying to make it very tactile in the way the paintings are. I mean the paintings are not Rothkos, and even though Klaus does call them diaphanous at one point, they're not these purely atmospheric pieces with all the edges filed off. They are not ethereal in the same way. So in the recording, we were trying to make the punishment fit the crime. We wanted to make the recording feel like the paintings. We wanted there to be a very strong presence so that one almost feels as though you are sitting in the middle of the string quartet, as opposed to being part of the audience listening in the 33rd row. Maybe this proximity is a little uncomfortable at times – and that's okay. We wanted the recording to feel like these paintings, not another set of paintings. So there were thousands of decisions to be made about how we would make the recording feel like it belongs to this specific work. You know, if it had been a traditional string quartet the music would be equally valid, but we would have compromised the 'rightness of fit'. On a similar level, this corresponds to our decision to put the book in the aluminum slipcase. I mean, I don't know if there has ever been an aluminum slipcase before. I have never seen one. I have seen some metal books. I mean there is a Sugimoto portfolio that comes in an aluminum box, but that's a different thing. This was a one-sided thing, where the book slips in and out. It is a deliberate reference to the 'empty canvas'. I think I asked you before about your "Notes Towards Structure and Aesthetics" that you prepared and presumably gave to Bill Frisell prior to his composition process. Yeah, I put them together December of 2001. Those notes were intensely playful, yet disciplined and earnest in their attention to detail. If you had to make a hierarchical list of the constraints and necessary elements of this composition and notation process, what would you find to be the most significant factors for him to interpret this project? Well, those sorts of working notes were more specific than I would normally prepare than if I were just making a normal record. I have worked with Bill before. I did a record with him in 1984 and 1987 - a long time ago. There have been fifteen years since I last worked with him. I didn't want to put him in a straitjacket, but I felt it would be better if we had some ground rules. It would be better for him and he was actually seeking such and had indicated to me that he was wanting some kind of dialogue with me about the work to help him frame what the possibilities would be. Part of my willingness to do it, or my interest in doing it was shaped by my experience in July of 2001 of recording the 23 Constellations of Joan Miró with Bobby Previte that was triggered by the Miró 'Constellations.' I learned a lot doing that project about specificity, about framework. There were a lot of similarities with the projects and there were a lot of differences. So, I thought it would be constructive to get Bill thinking in certain ways about the architecture of Richter's work in the ways that Previte had thought about the architecture of the Miró work. I thought that would be productive and that he would spend less time wandering down blind alleys or finding himself in a cul de sac, than if he had these initial thoughts to go by. Those notes were sent originally as an email attachment and in the original body of the email I wrote: "When you write something out as opposed to speaking it, it seems like a fact, even when it’s just a suggestion." So all those thoughts were suggestive and not prescriptive with a few exceptions that were prescriptive. Those were issues of structure, and some of those were issues of taste, and the 'rightness of fit' I have mentioned before. I said to him, "Look, it can't be pretty." He hadn't seen the paintings yet at the time but he had seen the reproductions but I wanted him to know that these were not pretty paintings. There might be pretty passages inside the paintings but as a whole, one wouldn't say they are pretty. Or if they were lyrical, it would have to have kind of a tough lyricism, not a gentle lyricism. No doilies. No embroidery. Bill has an incredible way of phrasing melody. He can make the most humdrum stuff sound beautiful but I didn't want it to go towards the bucolic type of sound – and I've talked about the negotiation of sounds between the urban and the rural, or nature and culture, or whatever. I wanted him to be thinking about these things because the work that he has done more recently as opposed to less recently, has been more towards the direction of music that doesn't have that much conflict within it. It tends to be very soothing, or it may work as background music or foreground music for sure. He has been working in vernacular traditions such as Bluegrass, Country, things like that, things that he's been rightfully wanting to explore because he has been so interested in them. I felt, however, that these traditions would not be the right context. So, some of those notes were set up to make sure that if we had a difference of opinion aesthetically that I would know it early on and we could deal with it, as opposed to finding it out when we got into the recording studio. That would have been difficult. It is confounding: music and images. I mean music is so abstract. It is, by far, the most abstract art that we have. The most representational music is far more abstract than the most abstract painting, in the sense that you can't see it. Sight is our primary sense in some ways. We are at first visual people before we are anything else. Let's just put it this way – there have been many great, brilliant blind musicians. You can't be a blind painter. Although…some of the work these days makes me wonder... Similarly, in your notes for Frisell, you posed some questions for him to consider with regard to his musical interpretation of the pieces. How would you consider these types of questions when applied to poetic interpretation of the 858 series? Excerpt: (Original Notes Towards Structure and Aesthetics for Frisell) SOME FUNNY QUESTIONS AND THOUGHTS TO REMEMBER, FORGET AND / OR IGNORE a) What is the role of process as a determinant of ‘style’? b) What is the difference between a mechanical process and an organic process? c) What is the role of gesture (in paintings #1, #6, #7) versus mechanical procedure? d) What is the link between a ‘cut’ or ‘tear’ in a Richter abstract picture and chord change? Key change? Shift in tempo? Abrupt Shift in dynamics? [Tone, tempo, dynamics] e) How does space operate in a painting? vis a vis music f) What musical [poetic] analogs or corollaries are there to the grid the brushstroke the knife cut the horizontal sweep the palimpsest I think these aspects are present in a lot of the poems. If you look at them on the page - one of the great things about poetry when you compare it to prose is that it's visual. The way I paired certain details to certain poems had to do with how they actually look together. What is the information inside the detail and what does the poem look like? Whether there was a kind of horizontal focus, or depending on how 'blocky' it was, or the elements of line, there were instances when I would consider types of elements just a visual level about the poems and their corresponding details. I could show you and go through some of the linkages I was tempted to make. There are some visually analogous things such as how the words existed on a page. Then, thematically, there are certain ways in which language is used that show 'knife cut' or a certain kind of 'sweep' – or the horizontal sense, of say, what happens in a Sestina, or something like Jorie Graham's long-line which is a very prosy line. Density. How things expand and contract. One point about Richter's paintings that is confounding is how there is an overall sense of these things – but there is this unbelievable contraction of space when very small things happen that are seemingly impossible but seem to stop you in the flow. Once again it is the both / and. Let's look at Morris Louis as a contrary example. There's no stopping, its all flow. Or a Marden monochrome, that's another kind of flow. With Mondrian, it's all kind of stopping. But in Richter both kinds of things happen. Well, you can do that in language when you are choosing how things abut other things. How structures change. How the scan of certain lines change. How the poets use rhythm in the work to move you and stop you and change up. And then there are some things that are quite specific. When we think of erasure, for example, in the Robert Hass poem, he actually gets into erasing in the third section of the poem. He is actually erasing text, letters inside the poem. And in reading his poem, one is still trying to make these meanings but there are things taken out and there are these spaces – it's a very strange thing for Robert Hass to have done. I don't know if there is a precedent in his work for that but it comes specifically out of these particular paintings. He wanted to create an analog and he approached it in a semi-dumb, literal way – and obviously I don't mean that he's dumb – but in a very literal, knock-you-on-your-head kind of way he wanted to just see what could happen. There's an example of erasure. Cutting would be something else. I do plenty of cutting in my poem. Or if you think of a subtle rhyme scheme or a slant rhyme, look at Jim McManus' poem – now there's a poem that is very tight and it seems like its about something completely unrelated. Nevertheless, McManus uses the metaphor of 'the shuffle' – the card shuffle. Well, what happens in the shuffle? It's a chance event. Color: what are the symbols on your cards, what's the color? That's what decides whether you make money or lose money, or whether you can stay in the game or not. There are these slant rhymes that are happening subtly inside, and in the way that Richter may make one piece and another piece rhyme in a way. It is not an obvious rhyme. It is an internal rhyme. So, I do think there are dynamic shifts, too. We know that in music there are dynamic shifts such as from quiet to loud, but it is also in the poetry. The dynamics within the poems were considered when the poems were paired with details. Connie Deanovich's poem suggested this romantic, bucolic quality that moves towards Impressionism and so I chose a detail that looks the closest thing to a Monet water lily to be paired with that page. I am speaking about a certain thing that is inside the paintings that is perceptible if you look for it. Then there is just the fascination that is aroused by the radically different art forms like painting and music and how one make analogies, or analogs that investigate how space operates in both, how time operates in both, and how different they are. Well, what do you get out of those differences? In other words, we are trying to ensure that you really feel the form at which you are looking. We are hoping that you may feel the poem even more because there is music involved, and image, and text involved in the same space, than say, if you read a poem that was in a book with nothing but other poems. We are trying to take all these distinct and separate things and make you feel the differences between them as well as the similarities and the linkages. The specific things related to music – well, you could write a lot – books and books, in fact. For instance, shifts in tempo. Let me give you a specific example of that, to take one thing. There were a couple times in rehearsal where Bill would come up with more than one version for one piece. We would say to each other, "This one could work for number five and this other piece also could work for number five. Well, which one are we going to use -- the 'pizzicato' at the start and at the end, and /or the 'Mighty Mouse Meets Monk' in the middle?" The answer was: "Both!" You are feeling this and you are also feeling this. This is radically different from this – but let's put them together and get 1+1=3 and figure out what the transition will be. Well, there were huge shifts. In number seven for example: it is a very somber meditative piece in the beginning before that vamp starts with the cello, which is a sort of dance in a hornpipe in like 12/8 time. Well, if it was just the dance, it would feel strange perhaps because it feels like a rather somber painting though it may be kind of joyous, and the dance could seem over-the-top joyous. It would also make it seem not so linked to number one in terms of the narrative. And if number seven had just contained that somber element at the front end of that piece, it would maybe feel a little too muted, and too much like number eight. Number eight comes right after it and it is the coda. It was very important to us to allow piece eight number seven to encompass both ambiances. There are huge changes in dynamics, huge changes in tempo – it is very abrupt, and yet it feels like painting seven. In the painting itself there are those huge changes with those drawn lines, or those painted lines that look like they could be fingerprints wiping across it. Those gestures are very horizontal and feel like or appear to be in front of, but are actually behind some of the vertical element. So, you get this crossover, this grid, this mesh of very strong horizontals after the verticals. They are behind the vertical, coming out from the vertical, or whatever. They are in front of and behind simultaneously. The piece ends with instruments dropping out. The musicians are actually walking off, and you have the viola player by himself playing this very horizontal-like figure skidding away, outside the confines of the rectangle. So yeah, we were making analogs but not building them as purely literal versions. If they had been literal it would been too slavish. Then I think we would have been getting into more of the translation problem as opposed to transforming the paintings into music and poetry. How is this painting emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically – triggering its own thing? How do we make the work that comes from the Richter work not dependent on it? It's its own work that stands there even with it. It is not an echo of the Richter work. It's a dialogue. This project is not simply a response to the work, because a response suggests an answer in a way. A dialogue is not an answer – it's a give and take. It should have a life of its own. And I said to the poets, "it would be great if what you wrote worked perfectly in the book -- that is the most important thing first -- but that you also felt good enough about the poem that it works outside of the context." I think all the poets feel like their work did accomplish this duality. And I know Frisell almost surprised himself about how much he feels like 'that thing' should have its own life and hopefully will come out as its own CD. One can very easily listen to that music while being 5000 miles away from these paintings or never having seen these paintings.