Rūta Vitkauskaitė

Programme Note

Understanding the compositional idea as something beyond the notation, and the instrument, inspired me to try to deliver it to performers in an alternative way, within a frame of the composition Between Us In Nashville. For the first performance in 2012 I collaborated with all the Blair School of Music in Nashville, and Royal Academy in London exchange workshop participants, students and teachers: Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Michael Slayton, David Gorton, Midori Komachi, Shelby Flowers, Lindsey Reymore, Peter Dayton, Carly Lake, Caroline Hart, Agatha Yim.

First, I invented composition with my own collection of instruments – shell, Jewish folk flute, ocarina, gliding pipe, and violin. Instead of rewriting the piece for other instruments and passing it to performers to rehearse, I booked a one hour session with each musician individually. Together, we found ways of replaying and notating the music. Often, the sounds I played inspired the performer to use techniques they had never tried before, to create a similar sound on their instrument. At the end of the session, each instrumentalist had a sketch of their version of the composition. Looking very different, each sketch represents their own personal way of playing exactly the same piece of music, including the last section of the piece – the melody, which I played to them once and asked them to remember and play back. Some of the musicians sketched their memory straight away, while others trusted themselves to remember it approximately. The melody, although appearing differently, still carried the concept of the original one. This ‘personalised’ composition was performed in a personalised way – performers were asked to go into the audience, find one listener they wanted to play to, and introduce themselves before starting playing. The natural spatialisation of the piece appeared in this way around the hall, and the whole composition started as a naturally unsynchronised, multiversional canon. A few ‘chosen’ listeners had very different experiences of the piece – proximity to and attention from the performer naturally encouraged the listener to filter that one solo instrument from all the others, further away. The rest of the audience had a gallery of sounds to choose from – a version of the same composition, with different delays, and intensities, from every direction.