Yes. Alex Paxton likes to say YES! Yes to everything. Just like an improviser has to say yes to everything that happens in the room. And, there’s no rubbing out. No erasing.
John Cage tells a story about Schoenberg: “One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, ‘This end is more important than the other.’ After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.” For Paxton, mistakes are part of what is honest. The goal is to make anything that isn’t satisfying into something that is satisfying. He works with the materials he creates, including the mistakes. “My ultimate motivation, that I’m true to most of the time, is that I’m trying to make something that is as sonically stimulating in any one moment of the music.”
He’s a composer and an improvising trombonist and he comes from a world of brass bands in the Midlands as a youngster and then jazz and then high modernist music and then to the music he composes. Harrison Birtwistle was his go-to modernist but also Anthony Braxton, Rebecca Saunders, George Lewis and just about every trombonist that anyone might wish to mention. Birtwistle’s note to note procedures and relationships – that state of constant exposition like flowing lava and the multifaceted observation to the musical object from every angle – had preference over the 12 note systemisation of Schoenberg and those who followed him. Also important these days is the idea of beginning to write a piece without knowing where it is going. “Each piece I write now, I start and know less and less about what’s going to happen.” The music ventures out into the unknown.
Melody and harmony – the “notey stuff” as Paxton calls it – often comes in great swarms with modal gravitational fields sculpting and shaping and pulling the pitches together. In chaos theory, these kinds of forces are known as ‘attractors’ and when the basins of attraction are chaotic they become known as ‘strange attractors’. Stuff lumps together unpredictably and surprisingly but Paxton points out, “The cacophony in my music isn’t haphazard, it’s very composed.” His thinking about notes and harmony owes more to George Russell’s book ‘The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation’ – although he’s never read it – than to Schoenberg’s ‘The Fundamentals of Musical Composition’. The music doesn’t belong in the George Russell world but it comes out of there: Paxton has never written an atonal piece.
He writes everything in short score and then colours it in. And his orchestration is informed by everyone from Paul Dukas to Rebecca Saunders with the addition of noisy electronics, cassette machines and synthesized sounds with names like ‘mono dirty plastic bag space vacuum cleaner’. Words like this are written into the score. The word ‘crazy’ also appears frequently. Conventional orchestral instruments and electronic resources exist on a spectrum. “I found this really liberating thing ... if you’ve got speakers onstage, anything can come out of them. It’s a particular kind of musical ecstasy.”
The idea of ‘colouring in’ comes from a painterly approach to working, from thinking pictorially. The composer Howard Skempton said that experimental composers “consort with painters”. In Paxton’s case the painter is himself. He says that he has no “determinate technique”, that he’s not been trained in the visual arts and began making images as a kind of therapy for himself. He refers to these artefacts as “improvised paintings”; something he might enjoy looking at, made in about an hour and a half or two hours. He speaks about indeterminate layers and moving the materials around: paint, sand, glue, string, tiny objects, cartoon stickers, googly eyes, almost anything that is to hand. And then, when he’s composing, he might think ,‘What’s the musical equivalent of what I did visually?’ Not that there’s a direct correlation – the images are not part of research done for a piece, the music isn’t a representation of an image – but maybe some of the processes are similar ... and there’s no rubbing out, no erasure.
There are also other painterly allusions and allusions to painters. The worlds of Pieter Bruegel (Younger and Elder) and Hieronymus Bosch connect tangentially with Paxton’s thinking. The intensity and frenzy of the pictorial narratives, the bustling activity and the astounding, zoom-in detail in pictures like ‘The Fight Between Carnival and Lent’, ‘The Wedding Dance’ and ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ correspond with the vigour and effusiveness of the music in this album. Here, Paxton has created the picture and the story and painted himself in as one of the characters.
The works collected here are joyous, high-spirited and vivacious and Paxton is present playing the trombone and sackbut in addition to being the composer. ilolli-pop is written with space for an improvising performer. The other instrumental parts are precisely notated. The piece was commissioned and premiered by Ensemble Modern. The music trickles in like the first drops of a deluge snaking around an arid plain then lines of melody and rhythm tangle together to create montaged scenes that always move forward but exactly towards what or where is uncertain. At the end, after a voyage around those strange attractors and modal gravitational fields, we’re left with the solo trombone in dialogue with a kind of heavy metal, distorted Stylophone and synthesized strings. The strings depart leaving the Stylophone momentarily discoursing on the journey until it too departs.
Sometimes Voices is a Teletubbies ‘again .. again ... again’ synthesizer, sampler, drummer rough and tumble. Stop go stop go Spike Jones prog rock, new(ish) complexity gone haywire. The Soft Machine played at 78rpm. But it’s all written down. There is nothing haphazard here. Even Thora Hird threatening us with cream crackers is carefully located in the score. The trombone appears immediately in Corn-Crack Dreams. Only it’s a sackbut, a Renaissance precursor of the modern instrument. The sampler and drum kit accompaniment is busy and abrasive. The piece is inspired by corncrakes whose call is like a broken fuse box looping incessantly, fizzing and glitching, sending out sparks that threaten anyone approaching.
Paxton’s solo trombone completes the album. Mouth Song is improvised. His work as a trombonist is a physical embodiment of working at his desk. He’s making a voice, focusing as a performer. He says that the possibilities here are narrower but deeper. It is something he works on every day, year after year.
One other characteristic that stands out in this album is humour. Not so much being funny – “I’m not playing for laughs” – but maybe absurdity. The speed, the gags, the cross references, the googly eyes of the music that’s made with everything creates a bubbling effervesce. But everything also makes us ponder and think and wonder and marvel and ask, ‘Did I get that?’ No doubt, Alex Paxton would say, YES!
©2022 Robert Worby
ilolli-Pop Alex Paxton
CD + DL
Out on Thu 6 Oct