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Schweben - Ay, but can ye?

by Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra

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about

Composed and directed by Barry Guy:

This rather cryptic title made up of German and Scots reflects the diverse sources that have informed the composition of this score for the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO).

The sources - various paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated into Scots by Edwin Morgan and my own imagination for the marshalling of large group music are not meant to appear clever and overly obscure. These sources have fortuitously come together mostly by accident in the sense that Kandinsky and Mayakovsky happened to be in front of my eyes when considering the proposal for GIO.

The very nature of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra suggests a way of working where individual expression within the collective opens up many interpretive possibilities. Individuals and the collective seemed to me the key to this piece through Kandinsky's painting "Schweben" (To Float). I envisaged a scenario of Principals and Partners that would reflect the geometric/constructivist aspect of this work which in effect became a "control" graphic. This however would not represent just a "follow the dots" situation. To free up the structure I have devised a series of interventions (Vetoes) that can be activated spontaneously in performance to offer musical deviations.

The brief for the GIO piece asked for a flexible composition that could adapt to the changing numbers and abilities of the players. Also, the piece had to function without the composer being in attendance nor the necessity for a musical director. So the composing of the new piece was based on a series of probabilities built around the principle of more or less players, seasoned or non-seasoned improvisers, music readers and non music readers etc. The piece also had to be adaptable to receive guests that would add an unknown dimension to the music. These are known as the "Floaters".

Mayakovsky's poem in its Scots translation has the title "Ay, but can ye?". Other than providing the text for the vocalist(s) it proposed an interesting play on words with the German "Schweben" (To Float). The graphic controls the overall musical movement, but also asks some players to float inside and outside the boundaries and begs the question "but can ye?" - a question we often ask ourselves in daily life.

Appended to the Sweben graphic are thirteen Kandinsky paintings that offer, through their images and titles various suggestions as to the way in which the improvisation might proceed - in effect a springboard.

Despite the apparent complexity of the workings of the piece, at the end of the day , I hope for a flexibility of interaction that celebrates the music, art and written word.

- Barry Guy

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Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra:

Our relationship with Barry Guy goes back to 2000, before GIO was formally founded, when Pete Dowling and Graham McKenzie brought together a group of musicians to perform Barry's 'Witch Gong Game II/10' at the CCA in Glasgow. Five years later, GIO performed a full version of 'Witch Gong Game' in Callendar House in Falkirk, and the idea of commissioning him to write a new piece for us began to take hold.

As we were setting the project up, Barry said to me "So. What is it you want then?" I mentioned a few of the things that make his music unique; the unity of composed and improvised passages, the concern for the capabilities and strengths of individual players, the way in which small groups are part of larger structures of his major pieces... Could we have some of that please? There was a short silence, and the conversation moved on.

A few months later, the astonishing score of 'Schweben - Ay, but can ye?' appeared in two enormous packages. His handling of the brief was masterly, and left my confused remarks far behind. The inclusion of the Edwin Morgan text was a complete surprise, and spoke right to the heart of GIO's relationship to the language and politics of Scotland.

Rehearsals took place in the Jordanhill campus of Strathclyde University, not far from where Edwin Morgan was living at the time. He was too ill to visit, but some weeks later Nick Fells recorded him reading the poem which introduces the piece.

- George Burt, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra

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Ay, but can ye? - Can you, really?

Take two cities - Moscow, Glasgow - and two poets identified with the industrial and creative energies of each: Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930) and Edwin Morgan (1920 - 2010). Choose a poem written at the start of one revolutionary decade, Mayakovsky's 'Could you?' (1913), and its translation into Scots language as the 1960s opened - a different sort of revolution. Add the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra taking off from the work of another modernist Muscovite, Wassily Kandinsky, whose 'Schweben' provides the inner architecture of this new piece by Barry Guy. Playing a painting? Ay, but can ye?

Radical socialist politics is part of the picture, focussed here in the (now mainly) proletarian Scots language of Morgan's translation. His question 'Ay, but can ye?' gives a combative edge to a poem fortelling the revolutionary years in which Mayakovsky flourished and died. Futurist, suprematist, constructivist, editor, artist, playwright, and propagandist as wll as a poet, Mayakovsky put his prodigious talents at the service of the new soviet state. The toll of personal stress involved finally led him to suicide.

In Glasgow, at ten years old, Morgan read a newspaper report of Mayakovsky's death. This is his claim in 'Epilogue: Seven Decades (1990). He also declares he learned his first word in Russian at this time, 'lyublyu': 'I love'. An only child, he had a precocious skill in language and rhymes. His 'Collected Translations' (1996) contains work from a dozen languages, notable Russian and Hungarian. In the mid-1930s, in dark and depressed Glasgow, he became fascinated by propaganda pictures of Russia's post-revolutionary architecture, seeming signs of a bright new future.

He first encountered Mayakovsky's poetryat Glasgow University, adding Russian to his undergraduate studies of English, French and Political Economy. His choice of Russian was partly urged by his attraction to a fellow student, a Communist. But the poetry bowled him over too. Morgan's studies were interrupted by war-time service in the RAMC. Returning in 1946-1947 to complete his degree and then lecture in English Literature, he discovered translation was more publishable at first than his own poetry.

Mayakovsky's focus on technological dynamism and liberated popular speech appealed to a Scottish poet at home in steel-making, ship-building Glasgow. Morgan tried translations into English, but felt these could not match the racy colloquialism and verbal inventiveness of the Russian. Turning to Scots, he saw similarities between Mayakovsky's experimentation and the vein of fantastic satire running back through Scottish poetry to the Middle Ages - from modernist Hugh MacDiarmid, through Robert Burns right to William Dunbar. With the 18th-century unification of Scotland's and England's parliaments, English had replaced lowland Scots as the language of power. Two centuries on, many writers keen to see a republican, socialist and separate Scotland now used its older language on the streets and fields for political as well as aesthetic reasons - to play new nocturnes on that rough drain-pipe flute.

Here are Morgan's Scots version of Mayakovsky, and my translation of his.

'Ay, but can ye?'

Wi a jaup the darg-day map's owre-pentit -
I jibbled colour frae a tea-gless;
Ashets o jellyteen presentit
To me the gret sea's camshach cheek-bleds.
A tin fish, ilka scale a mou -
I've read the cries o a new warld through't.
But you
Wi denty thrapple
Can ye wheeple
Nocturnes frae a rone-pipe flute?

'Can you, really?'

One splash, and the long day's map is covered
by tints of tea spilled from my cup;
platefuls of jellied mousse discovered
the oceans's cheek-bones twisting up.
Fishmonger's sign: each tin scale shouts
that revolution's breaking out.
But you there
with your dainty throat
could you toot
nocturnes from a drain-pipe flute?

- James McGonigal
Authour of 'Beyond the Last Dragon - A Life of Edwin Morgan'

credits

released January 1, 2012

Principal players (in order of appearance):
Gerry Rossi - prepared piano
Peter Nicholson - cello
Matthew Studdart-Kennedy - flute
Chris Barclay - trombone
George Burt - guitar
Aileen Campbell - voice
John Burgess - bass clarinet, tenor saxophone
Catriona McKay - harp
Emma Roche - flute
George Murray - trombone
Frances Direen - violin
Una MacGlone - double bass
Raymond MacDonald - soprano and alto saxophones
Nick Fells - laptop
Neil Davidson - guitar
Armin Sturm - double bass
Nicola MacDonald - voice

... and throughout:
Robert Henderson - trumpet
Stuart Brown - drums, percussion
Rick Bamford - drums, percussion
Maya Homburger - baroque violin
Barry Guy - double bass, director.

Live Recording at Stringfest double bass Festival, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, 19th March 2009.

Recorded by Aliistair MacDonald
Remixed by Jim McEwan and Ferran Conangla
Edwin Morgan recorded by Nick Fells
Produced by George Burt and Barry Guy

Thanks:
James McGonigal
Nick Fells
Una MacGlone
Jim McEwan
Gerry Rossi
Michael Schmidt and Carcanet Press
Alistair MacDonald
David Peller
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (formerly RSAMD)
Frances MacArthur
Iain Smith
Tamsin Mendelsohn
Victoria Loong, Gimpel Fils Gallery, London
Creative Scotland

maya-recordings.com
2012 Maya Recordings

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Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra Glasgow, UK

Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra is a large improvising ensemble of around 20 musicians from diverse artistic backgrounds. They perform across the UK and Europe, host an annual festival of improvisation and run regular events.

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