Memory, Sister of Imagination: The Collaborative Process of Call and Response

For the past few months, I’ve been working with Invoke string quartet to build a concert program centered around musical memory —in particular, the aspect of our sonic memory that brings past experience and feelings back to us. The project began with a series of questions that were posed to participants of KMFA’s intergenerational Star Notes Project, which offers opportunities for deep connection through conversations and experiences centered on music and meaning. These questions led to a list of songs and musical works that became the basis for the entire project.

The Call and Response app, a canvas of retrospection.

As part of this project, I created an app that explores ideas about time, memory, and perception while borrowing compositional procedures from musique concrete (which is the practice of making a musical composition by combining recorded sounds, originally done in the 1940s with magnetic tape). The app is available as a free download for anyone to use. It comes loaded with three lists of songs, indicating the three intergenerational pairs of participants. There is also an option that allows anyone to load their own song choices into the app for sonic manipulation.

The app serves as a canvas of sorts, and the user is able to create collage pieces that are then used in the compositional process as we generate the musical material of the Call and Response project. We composed music that interweaves with the memories (the name given to the sonic collages). Using my augmented guitar device GRADUS (Gesture Responsive Analogue and Digital Untethered System), I will trigger the memories in real time as we perform the work. Additionally, I have created interactive software that processes our live sound in a way that is reminiscent of the kinds of sounds produced by the Call and Response app: the strum of a guitar might be reversed, slowed down, and played back as a distant echo, or the sustained sound of the violincello might become perpetuated and then gradually degraded and glitched. All of this live processing is controlled by GRADUS as well, which has, among other controls, a gyroscope and proximity sensor –allowing me to control various parameters of the soundscape as the music evolves. The end result is at times aleatoric, improvisational and, at other times, very predetermined; but always evocative of memory, nostalgia, forgetting, and reimagining. . .

The ideas embedded within the app are taken from the writings of Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nattiez, Charles Peirce, and Geoffrey Sonnabend. These ideas are combined in an irreverent and general sense. . . The Rhizomatic web within the app presents a hierarchy of sorts, which is contrary to the true meaning explained by Deleuze and Guattari. The “madeleine” feature is more intentional and controlled than Proust’s involuntary memory –yet I find it to be somehow evocative of that phenomenon all the same. Geoffrey Sonnabend’s strange, apocryphal, and poetic theories of forgetting hold sway over the entire canvas of retrospection that is represented by the Call and Response app, as does Bergson’s persuasive arguments against the accuracy of our imaginative projections forward and backward in time.

Invoke is an amazing group of players who I have had the privilege to work with on many occasions. They play brilliantly, sing, compose, arrange, and improvise. They have an amazing ability to adapt around a project and find sonic possibilities that I hadn’t imagined. . . Our work together is always very collaborative, but this project has given us a way to engage with each other creatively that I’ve found uniquely satisfying. We’ve divvied up the compositional duties, but there is a wonderful thread that weaves through it all that comes from the sonic collages: the memories.

If you’d like to download and use the app yourself, you can get it here. It comes loaded with music selected by our participants, which we freely adapt and include in the concert on April 18th. This event has passed, but you can still see it here

Call and Response streams on Sunday, April 18th at 5pm.

Thomas Echols with Invoke String Quartet

Joe Williams, Artistic Director, Austin Classical Guitar

Carla McElhaney, Artist Director, Draylen Mason Music Studio, KMFA