AMM at UEA
14th February 2005
Chance is a fine thing. The conjunction of staff circumstances, the intake of a particularly lively community of students and a speculative e-mail from John Tilbury about his forthcoming book on Cardew, led Jonathan Impett – Head of the School of Music at UEA – to designate a ‘themed’ year in which improvisation would underpin a significant part of the curriculum and associated activities. So over the twelve or so months preceding Valentine’s Day evening 2005 John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost had become regular visitors to Norwich, giving lectures and workshops, and an AMM performance was to mark the culmination of this activity. Hoping for something special I set up a pair of microphones and let the tape run……….
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the experience for me was its immediate memorability. Even before replaying the recording I had a clear aural memory of the sequence of events/sounds – a response which was shared and commented on by other members of the audience – and replaying the tape I found myself anticipating the musical development with an eerie accuracy. Three months on I’m marginally less accurate, but the experience is just as engaging.
Tilbury and Prévost's technological and sonic resourcefulness is revealed anew here partly through the opportune positioning of the microphones between the two, placing us as listeners in the middle of the stage, with John on the left and Eddie on the right. Among other things we are immediately aware ‘who is doing what’, although occasionally this seems to defy instrumental logic. Despite availing themselves of entirely different technologies, they can produce sounds which are almost identical, or fuse sounds through awesome real-time skill and intimate awareness of their vastly different resources: a moment where John’s piano clusters isolate and make explicit the pitches in Eddie’s bowed cymbal is one magical example here.
Improvisers tend to share with other performers a physical language of ensemble – of eye-contact, of hands poised, of coincident signals – but there seems no need for this between these musicians. Their confidence in the sound world (and each other’s abilities) is such that they have little recourse to such explicit strategies, indeed in this performance they barely looked at each other until the end.
One final observation: there’s something extraordinarily beautifully ‘composed’ about their activity, albeit composed in real-time. I think it’s the unequivocal quality of what they do that makes this performance so immediately memorable. As musicologists increasingly acknowledge the often unplanned and messy practice of composers (as distinct from the romantic mythologizing and naïve assumptions of ‘intention’) it becomes quite evident how insufficiently complex and subtle are our discussions of the relationship between improvisation and composition. In a world of ubiquitous computing where increasingly we can make ‘real-time’ decisions with complex outcomes this becomes an urgent issue. Neither composition nor improvisation results from banal preference, but both are born out of the reality of a musically-active life, availing themselves of characteristic sets of strategies and procedures, speaking of relationships between objects, sounds, people and ideas. There’s an ethical perspective here, which is intimately bound up with the aesthetic one, and this isn’t something which distinguishes AMM from previous musical precedent (whether we call it composition or improvisation) but rather is something which ties them absolutely to the way good music has always been produced.
Simon Waters
3rd June 2005
Norwich, recorded in February, 2005, at the School of Music, University of East Anglia, presents the current two-member AMM of Prévost and Tilbury — the third two-man version of the group (Prévost played as AMM with saxophonist Lou Gare and then Rowe in the 1970s). Rowe's departure is a tremendous shift, of course, both for his extraordinary sonic resourcefulness and his sometimes abrasive electronics (including his use of random or found verbal and musical messages). However, it is much more important to dwell on what the new AMM is. Norwich achieves an extraordinary tranquility, a gradual sense of calm unfolding and subtle isolated sounds, a spaciousness that may suggest George Crumb's Night Music or the quiet dynamism of Feldman—although, as improvisers, Prévost and Tilbury take the processes of subtle gradation much further.
Stuart Broomer
Music Works
04/11/2006 I
In the spring of 2004, due to personal and philosophical disagreements, Keith Rowe suspended his involvement with AMM, an association that went back to his role as founding member in 1965 (albeit with an almost decade-long disenfranchisement through the '70s). The remaining members, percussionist Eddie Prevost and pianist John Tilbury, elected to continue on as AMM. Oddly, the liner notes to Norwich by Simon Waters fail to mention Rowe's name or the events surrounding his departure, a striking omission given the group's 25-year history in its incarnation as a trio. Prevost and Tilbury had actually recorded a duo session the previous year, Discrete Moments, a more hit-and-miss affair with little of the "feel" of an AMM session. Here, it seems as though the duo was into more of an AMM frame of mind, and the result is a lovely recording. If it doesn't reach the aesthetic heights of the finest of AMM work and if Rowe's presence is sorely missed (which it might be if one chooses to think of it in such a way -- arguably not the proper listening approach to take), it remains a fine offering from two masters.
The 54-minute uninterrupted set is structured very much like what admirers of the group have come to expect: it emerges from the existing sound-space in an unobtrusive manner, tinges the environment in various ways, and departs back into the ether. At the beginning, Prévost appears to be plucking at some sort of stretched string (the innocent listener may even suspect the presence of an acoustic bass!) while Tilbury operates initially from inside the piano, the stringboard of which has been prepared with sundry objects, before moving to some hazy ruminations at the keyboard. Interestingly, at this point it sounds as though Prévost is employing some sort of mechanical device, whirring and striking some resonant strings, perhaps as a little homage after the fact to Rowe. Tilbury, in duo format, becomes a somewhat more active participant than he often was in the trio, forcing the action a bit more than floating atop it, bursting into abrupt Taylorisms here and there in addition to his more delicate arpeggiating. Prévost, for his part, does a masterful job of sinking into the background, coloring the proceedings with precisely the right shadings and accents, staying almost entirely off of the drum set as such, concentrating far more on gongs, bowed cymbals, metal and wooden objects, and other esoterica.
Despite the occasional violent outburst, the prevailing mood is subtle and mysterious, Prévost sometimes going entirely sub-aqueous with cetacean moans of uncertain parentage bouncing off Tilbury's impossibly soft, ultra-low key depressions. Delights abound, and picking out individual moments is something of a fool's errand, but special mention should be made of the gorgeous sequence of notes Tilbury develops during the closing ten minutes of the performance. Perfectly placed and chosen, hovering in the air, it's some of Tilbury's most beautiful improvising on record. While experienced AMM listeners may well feel that something's lacking, Norwich, heard on its own merits, is a very fine recording and a strong addition to an already amazing catalog of work..
Brian Olewnick,
All Music Guide
In the spring of 2004, due to personal and philosophical disagreements, Keith Rowe suspended his involvement with AMM, an association that went back to his role as founding member in 1965 (albeit with an almost decade-long disenfranchisement through the '70s). The remaining members, percussionist Eddie Prevost and pianist John Tilbury, elected to continue on as AMM. Oddly, the liner notes to Norwich by Simon Waters fail to mention Rowe's name or the events surrounding his departure, a striking omission given the group's 25-year history in its incarnation as a trio. Prevost and Tilbury had actually recorded a duo session the previous year, Discrete Moments, a more hit-and-miss affair with little of the "feel" of an AMM session. Here, it seems as though the duo was into more of an AMM frame of mind, and the result is a lovely recording. If it doesn't reach the aesthetic heights of the finest of AMM work and if Rowe's presence is sorely missed (which it might be if one chooses to think of it in such a way -- arguably not the proper listening approach to take), it remains a fine offering from two masters.
The 54-minute uninterrupted set is structured very much like what admirers of the group have come to expect: it emerges from the existing sound-space in an unobtrusive manner, tinges the environment in various ways, and departs back into the ether. At the beginning, Prévost appears to be plucking at some sort of stretched string (the innocent listener may even suspect the presence of an acoustic bass!) while Tilbury operates initially from inside the piano, the stringboard of which has been prepared with sundry objects, before moving to some hazy ruminations at the keyboard. Interestingly, at this point it sounds as though Prévost is employing some sort of mechanical device, whirring and striking some resonant strings, perhaps as a little homage after the fact to Rowe. Tilbury, in duo format, becomes a somewhat more active participant than he often was in the trio, forcing the action a bit more than floating atop it, bursting into abrupt Taylorisms here and there in addition to his more delicate arpeggiating. Prévost, for his part, does a masterful job of sinking into the background, coloring the proceedings with precisely the right shadings and accents, staying almost entirely off of the drum set as such, concentrating far more on gongs, bowed cymbals, metal and wooden objects, and other esoterica.
Despite the occasional violent outburst, the prevailing mood is subtle and mysterious, Prévost sometimes going entirely sub-aqueous with cetacean moans of uncertain parentage bouncing off Tilbury's impossibly soft, ultra-low key depressions. Delights abound, and picking out individual moments is something of a fool's errand, but special mention should be made of the gorgeous sequence of notes Tilbury develops during the closing ten minutes of the performance. Perfectly placed and chosen, hovering in the air, it's some of Tilbury's most beautiful improvising on record. While experienced AMM listeners may well feel that something's lacking, Norwich, heard on its own merits, is a very fine recording and a strong addition to an already amazing catalog of work..
Brian Olewnick,
All Music Guide