A conversation with Joe Bates, Ralegh Redford Rome Awardee, in which he speaks about the work he has produced during his residency at the BSR from September to December 2024, ahead of the Winter Open Studios.
I came to Rome to learn to give up a little control. As a composer, I tend towards harmonic scrupulosity, a desire to coax melodies into preconceived chords. In this, I perhaps go further than most: I am interested in ‘microtonal’ harmony, which uses notes that fall between the keys of a piano. I love creating strange harmonies that lie outside our standardised tuning system, trying to craft them into places of resolution as well as sites of tension or dissonance. Effecting this transformation has turned me into a builder of systems: of new tonal schema, of new ideas about musical syntax. (Look at all the diagrams below. Am I not validated by their impenetrability?) I am drawn to this theorising, despite my scepticism of it, and remain proud of the music that it has enabled. In some ways, this systematisation has allowed me to feel freer, to assert a more personal voice within frameworks that I have learnt to manipulate intuitively. But there comes a moment when you need to loosen up a little.
Recently, I have become more interested in our sensory experience of intonation. When we tune, we bring together our intentions, our habits, and the physics of sound. The interaction of these cross-cutting impulses produces peculiarities: non-standard tunings that feel right, standard tunings that sound like you’ve never heard them before. I have noticed, for example, that the children often pitch the third note of a major scale very low. The harmonic and associative properties of this low third mingle strangely, resulting in an object ripe for recontextualisation and play. I have learnt that the surprising chords I am drawn to need not be derived from number games but can be found in the collision of our bodies, cultures, and physics. The strangeness is in us already.
This train of thought brough me back to a composer whose work has long been important to me: Giacinto Scelsi. Scelsi was an eccentric Italian count who, from his home on the Capitoline Hill, produced a series of uncategorisable masterpieces from the 1940s to the 1980s. These works were created through an unusual process. Scelsi recorded improvisations, playing synthesiser, guitar, or piano, on reel-to-reel tape, which he would sometimes overdub, reverse, or time-stretch. These multilayered improvisations were transcribed by assistants, then edited by Scelsi and his collaborating musicians. This unique composer’s atelier produced works marked by an intuitive sense of form and gesture and an extreme economy of means. Many of his works unfold a single pitch for minutes at a time, using microtonal pitch bends and octave doublings to create a pulsing, thrumming music.
My admiration for Scelsi’s music and method influenced the creation of a novel synthesiser, the Hyasynth, which I named for Scelsi (Giacinto is the Italian for hyacinth). I made the Hyasynth because I realised that the instruments I played did not allow for an instinctive use of microtonal pitch. On a violin, you can pick out any note along the string, no matter whether it is within customary tunings or not. The keyboard instruments I used for composition, however, tuned for me: I was bound to a role as a button presser, not a pitch picker. The Hyasynth works more like a violin: pitches are tuned during performance.
The Hyasynth unlocked a new world of instinctive microtonal improvisation. But my first sets on the Hyasynth (one solo, one duo with violin) quickly calcified. While the compositional process was exploratory, I rapidly fixed on a given structure. I felt safer working in a precomposed framework.
So here in Rome, I have been trying to improvise freely, to give up a little bit of control. I have spent hours at the Scelsi archive, thanks to the generosity of the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, listening to the original recordings of Scelsi’s improvisations. I have learnt a lot from them: that a gesture can take a long time; that each sound can (must?) be imagined as if it were something truly new; that simple transformations can create complex new meanings; and that processes of translation create sedimentary layers of meaning.
My new improvised set is oriented around a simple act of transformation. I improvise, I record the improvisation, I reverse the recording (sometimes slowing it down) and continue improvising over the reversed recording. This creates what I think of as a living palindrome: a structural mirroring that continues to accumulate and proliferate on each reversal.
This work taps into a long obsession with symmetry and proportion. Music is a temporal medium that lends itself to spatial metaphors that resists specificity. When we hear something as symmetrical in music, we are insensitive to the exactness of this symmetry (whereas our eyes are judgemental, quickly noticing the flaw in a mirror). This gives a composer the opportunity to play with musical mirrors, manipulating our sense of symmetry and proportion and creating surprising new forms. In my time here, I have become particularly obsessed with the symmetrical patterns of book-matched marble. I feel that these beautiful, hallucinogenic forms have seeped their way into the work I will present at the upcoming open studios.
