The purpose of this essay is simply to consider Ellen C. Covito’s work not from the idea of what it does for its audiences, but instead from what it does for its performers. I write it because I understand what work does in the world as equally relevant to both groups. The basic idea I posit here is that Covito’s works are a form of pedagogy for performers. Her works begin with the assumption that a performer is already a skilled technician, and as a result do not seem to employ pedagogy as method that teaches artists skills. Instead, her works address training itself as problematic by challenging the access of the performer to skills they have learned.

A true analysis of performers, however, is beyond the scope of this short essay. This is in part due to the fact that the work of performers is, in itself, too far-reaching in its subjectivity. The basis for the existence of performers takes for granted the idea that mastery is a point reached when certain people are more worth watching than others because they have trained to be so. This pedagogical idea of mastery extends beyond measurable skill, becoming instead an issue of captivation. Performer education assumes this ability to “captivate” is a nuanced matrix of powers obtainable through knowledge of techniques, instincts, experience, and sometimes (and hopefully) further augmented by apparent “natural” access, variously attributed to beauty, originality, charisma, etc. It is therefore the situation of the performer to not be able to conceive of the value of their ability, but simply to attend to its continued progress by any means considered possibly useful. These means usually take the shape of an activity called practice. Performers work toward naturalizing the various techniques of their trade, transferring non-natural actions like reading music and dancing ballet into intuitive availability. Such performers bring the act, for example, of reading music, as close to the act of seeing itself as possible. And these are the kinds of performers most interesting in Covito’s works, precisely because they have habituated the abilities that Covito challenges by, for example, rendering the ability to sight-read subject to the quality of one’s vision.

Covito’s work intentionally confounds traditional conceptions of skill by turning to the most basic technologies of the performing human body. The physical “givens” of the performer’s bodies are just as relevant to the work as given trained abilities. In the simplest example, eyesight is as important as the ability to sight-read in the eye-chart score (Composed Improvisation E). In this kind of work, what the performer cannot do, as determined by the physical properties of their bodies, is as relevant to the production of the performance as is skill. In Composed Improvisation E, instruments drop out as various performers cease to be able to read the eye chart. The sound of the work is determined by the way in which the training of the performers is subjected to the properties of their eyesight.

The perspective of performers typically isolates conditions from actions. This perspective assumes that because the condition of the body is always compromised, the action of performance must be one of transcendence. Covito’s work ignores this basic formula, opting instead for the idea that all abilities (and therefore possible actions) are conditions for a performance work. The performance of Covito’s work is a byproduct of the interaction between all the conditions present, and the performers are but a part of that total, interactive system. In this case, technique is but one of many “technics.” As a condition of performer bodies, it is taken at face value in Covito’s work, and manipulated through its physicality, regardless as to whether it be an acquired capacity (playing an instrument, reading music, dancing a jig) or one “inherent” to the body of the performer (eyesight, height, etc). As such, technic also encapsulates the conditions of the objects put into use, which are also manipulated via their physicalities. Giant cloths inscribed with music notation are folded up into their most compact sizes, drumsticks are retrofitted with magnets so they attach to the metal objects played, pages of a score are glued together. In this way, conditions continually manifest as the interactions between the various components (both human and object) brought together within Covito’s work. In the case of the giant “floor score” of Composed Improvisation M, for example, the conditions of the score determine the conditions of how the performers stand and move in the space, which determines the conditions under which the score is folded, which determines the conditions under which the performers read the score, which determines the conditions of their playing of the instruments. In this domino effect of conditions, the composer has bracketed out the pathos of performative intent, opting instead for physical conditions. But for the performer, whose only way to relate to everything-as-conditions is to “do the best I can,” the experience is marked deeply by a kind of pathos of proverbially “captaining a sinking ship.” In this case, mastery is not a means toward transcendence, but instead a means by which physical compromise is navigated. And in this way, Covito’s work unhinges what is and has always been the greatest burden of the performer: That of being worth watching. What is seen in Covito’s work is not the worthiness of the performer but conscious contention with physical conditions in which both the consciousness and the conditions are equally powerful.

I have long thought that the master improviser should understand all works as flops, and must therefore consider every work as one that must be saved, not through the undoing of the flop, but through the intelligent navigation of malfunction (in which the assumption is that malfunction is always a driving creative force in the state of improvisation). Covito’s works operate like a computer bug; they crash the performer’s known methods for information transference. And in this situation, the audience is left to observe the breakdown of a system and the instant coping methods of the conscious performers within that system as they seek to navigate the disabled vehicle of the piece toward a safe landing.

In most cases of improvisational works, the basis for malfunction is simply that the performers don’t know exactly what is supposed to be done. Yet, in the case of Covito, the malfunction is more likely a form of sabotage designed into the work itself, and directed precisely at the most primitive of the performer’s technic. In many cases, the performer him or herself unintentionally drives this sabotage. The score is precise and determinate, for example, in Composed Improvisation G, but as the pages of the score are glued together, it becomes compromised when the performer separates the pages in order to read them.

To perceive composition, or “intelligent design,” one must perceive something that has the quality of reliability. And this perception of composition is as necessary to performers within works as it is to the audiences who view from the outside. Covito’s works are designed to be clear, complete, and vastly unreliable. Her works are specifically designed to be subject to various forces of de-composition often caused by their very performance. Facing this scenario, performers turn to themselves as the only reliable compositional factor (by perceiving themselves as the subject of their own limited control), thus following the traditional mode of improvisation. Yet they find in themselves their own foil. In the case of Covito, to be a good follower of instructions is to set one’s own booby-trap. The most common response of performers in such cases is to thus escalate their own reliability and seek to provide the consistency that the composition itself abandons as it is being fulfilled. And there the construction of the work emerges, between the decomposition of the conditions and the steadfastness of the performers, who, in various states of compromise, carry her works to their ends to the best of their abilities.

In the simplest terms, what performers experience in Covito’s work is that to be good at something is not good enough. And so, the question becomes: What value is that information to the performer? Through all her hindrances and methods of handicapping, Covito exposes to the performer the experience of being a component in a system designed to expose its own operations through malfunction. As such, the performer can experience him or herself as (1) a component and (2) necessarily malfunctioning. Though I doubt Covito would agree with this statement (she would not consider her own works as “malfunctioning” at all—they are instead operating exactly as planned) I maintain that the pedagogical experience of performers in the work begins with the issue of malfunction, or the sensation that the performance of the work gets in the way of the performance of the work. Never able to complete the task without anomalies, or only saddled with task-as-anomalyproducer, successful performers weather Covito’s work more than aptly perform it.

Lindsey Drury is a dance artist, body studies scholar, and curator from

Brooklyn, New York. Recent collaborative projects with No Collective

include curating and producing Ellen C. Covito’s Percussions/Repercussions

at The Woods Cooperative for their jointly-run performance series

{The Room}, and the large-scale work Vesna’s Fall.

1

As she herself has proclaimed at least on one occasion, Ellen C. Covito is not the first composer to explore the potentials of the seemingly oxymoronic term “composed improvisation.” John Cage reconciled with his long hatred towards improvisation late in his life, engaging in a series of compositions to which he bore the very word that had troubled him throughout his career. These pieces, the composer explained, circumvented the general danger that lurks in improvisation—that of falling back to one’s boring habits and subjective tastes—by taking recourse to either of the following two tactics: (A) the use of indeterminate instruments in which the causal relationship between their manipulation and the resultant sound is unknown and thus uncontrollable; (B) the use of “variable” timebrackets which are flexible in terms of their beginnings and endings, as well as the exact timing for the occurrence of sounds inside them. The former approach created pieces such as Child of Tree (Improvisation 1) (1975) or Inlets (Improvisation 2) (1977) in the mid-1970s; the latter resulted in a series of works collectively entitled c Composed Improvisation (1987-90) towards the end of the following decade (and all the so-called “number pieces” actually, though these were never referred to as ‘improvisation’ per se).

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Nevertheless, as most things concerning Cage, this resolution with improvisation had an unacknowledged precedent. Already in the late 1950s, Christian Wolff, upon facing a shortage of rehearsal time before a concert, began introducing a certain degree of freedom into the system of time brackets he had previously learned from Cage: “What we did was a kind of improvisation—the score dealt only with spaces of time and groups of notes from which we could select.” (*1) In the program note for Duo for Pianists I (1957), the first piece composed in this manner, Wolff described his approach with a peculiar wording: “an experiment in ‘composed’ improvisation.” (*2) In the subsequent years, Wolff would pursue the logical extension of these initial experiments, developing an intricate system which employed sonic cues (mis)heard by performers during performance. Thus, the brackets are not just “variable,” but they remain indeterminate until the actual performance. One prime motive to move in this direction, Wolff explained, was the fact that David Tudor always prepared determinate scores from any given indeterminate graphic score, successfully relinquishing all indeterminacy by the time he performed it on the piano. Around the same time, however, Tudor had begun to tackle the same problem on his own: implementing electronic amplification to his piano to attain a state where “you could only hope to influence” (*3) the instrument. In both cases, then, indeterminacy is obtained in the phase of performance through the intervention of an external element that cannot be fully composed beforehand. For Wolff, it is the fluctuating sonic cue that serves as a real-time score; for Tudor, it is the indeterminate instrument.

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Accessed via these historical precedents, the distinctness of Covito’s Composed Improvisations becomes readily apparent: while preserving the determinacy of both the instrument and the score, it is the access to them that her works render indeterminate. Thus, for instance, in Composed Improvisation L (2010), the necessity of light to see the score, as well as the instrument, is subverted through the use of a glow-in-the-dark score; Composed Improvisation G (2011) distorts the physical articulation of the score pages, whereas in Composed Improvisation T (2009), the generally presumed singularity and staticity of a score is nullified; Composed Improvisation E and M (2010) both play around with the scale of the score and of the individual notes respectively, putting into question the appropriate distance for perceiving a score (an important precursor piece which implements the same principle to instruments, is Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Distance (1961)); Composed Improvisation J (2009) extends the same problematics to time, by exploiting the lack of temporal buffer generally presupposed in the act of sight-reading.

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Grasped from a slightly different angle, Covito’s indeterminacy can be seen as being located within the physical conditions that govern the visual intelligibility of music notation (and instrument, albeit to a lesser extent). Curiously, this paraphrase brings Covito’s Composed Improvisations closer back to Cage—not to his later improvisational pieces, but to his much earlier pursuit of graphic scores beginning in the 1950s. For the basis of Cagean graphic notation was a simple, yet radical, recognition: as a graphic composed of points and lines, any notation is indeterminate to begin with (and herein lies the crucial difference between his and other composer’s—such as Morton Feldman’s—approach). Determinacy, in other words, is never an attribute of a given score; it is rather a correlative of the convention that governs the translation from the graphics on paper to the notes to be performed (though Cage himself too often confounded this fundamental insight with a facile fetishization of the graphic; and others, of course, followed suit.) Cage could thus refute with a simple argument the blind belief in an singular relationship between the score and sound, shared among so many of his contemporary composers: “If it is on paper, then it is graphic.” (*4) In other words, a (graphic) score for Cage could be thought of as a giant indeterminate machinery (which includes the performer) that obfuscates any determinate causality between its input and output. But unfortunately, this indeterminacy exists only for the composer. As the performer inside the machinery, Tudor spent days and weeks making determinate performance scores out of Cage’s indeterminate graphic notations. The composer’s solution succeeds in eradicating the score’s predetermined control over the performance, but it does so only by relegating the same control to his performers.

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Rather than establishing a definite answer, Cagean indeterminacy remains therefore merely a way to procrastinate the problem of control, leaving it to be solved within the time of performance. Tudor and Wolff ’s struggles to overcome this issue have already been depicted. Covito’s solution, however, takes place right in between that of Cage and Tudor/ Wolff. On the one hand, she preserves Cage’s idea of rendering the very reading of the score (the composition) indeterminate, but on the other, she enacts this very indeterminacy in the real-time of performance (as improvisation). What differentiates her strategy from countless other employments of graphic notation is the shift from readability to visibility that she applies to the Cagean model when transferring it to the phase of performance. The score is present at the performance, but no longer functions as a determinate controlling device over the sounds to be produced—and not because what is written remains ambiguous and merely suggestive (an elusiveness which tends to be bartered quickly with a fetish for the graphic), but be cause the physical conditions which allow a score to be seen in the first place is altered. The question thus becomes focused on how things are read, and not what. Hence, the notion of a “found score”—the score need not be invented; it merely suffices for it to be found.

6

As for the two part Improvised Composition F+M (2011), Covito’s focus seems to have switched from the performer and the act of reading a score to the composer and the act of writing a score. It is still possible to observe—rather tenaciously—a resonance with Cage’s 0’00” (4’33” No.2) (1961) where the composer, at the premiere, chose as the instructed “disciplined action,” the writing of instructions for the same piece with contact microphones attached to his pen. Thus, the act of composition is itself staged as performance. But the differences are also obvious, for Covito preserves the basic distinction between the functional roles of the composer and performer: the former writes what the latter renders into music. Both what is written, and the process of its rendition, remain determinate. The only intervention here is again on the level of accessibility. The singular and predetermined access to performers is canceled by the pluralization of the composers/choreographers who either rush to provide their scores to the performers who wait on a first come, first served basis in M, or must rely on a unconfirmed pairing with a given dancer in F.

7

Maybe there is something that Covito’s Improvised Compositions and Composed Improvisations both leave out of sight. The performer’s reading process of the score is treated as a given when the writing process is put into question, and the process of obtaining scores (whether composing or transcribing them) never becomes part of the performance when the focus is on the visibility of the ready-made notation. Improvised Composition thus assumes that instrumentalists can always sight-read; Composed Improvisation, that scores are always found. For this reason, it is interesting to notice that the most recent of her compositions, Improvised Composition S and R (2012) seem to be attempts to deal with this issue. The former by an uncanny setting of equality between the process of writing a score and performing it (in addition to the usual removal of accessibility); the latter by demanding a radical annulment of the very procedure required to write the score (which is none other than the process of rehearsal) in order to perform it. Sure, the results might be less visibly entertaining in these works, but more seems to be kept in sight. (And that leaves us pondering about the only remaining level in Covito’s works that never seems to be questioned nor relativized: her linguistic instructions.)

*1 Christian Wolff, “Taking Chances: From a Conversation with Victor Schonfield,” in Cues: Writings & Conversations. Cologne: Musik-

Texte, 1998, 72.

*2 Wolff, “Program Note for Duo for Pianists I (1957),” in Cues, 488.

*3 Quoted in Ray Wilding-White, “David Tudor: 10 Selected Realizations of Graphic Scores and Related Performance (1973),” Los Angeles: David Tudor Papers, Getty Research Institute, Box 19, Folder 2.

*4 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 177.

You Nakai makes music and other things as part of No Collective,

among other things. His account on Ellen C. Covito’s music and the

works of No Collective can be read in “The Music of Ellen C. Covito: An

Interview with You Nakai by Elizabeth Hoffman,” Perspectives of New

Music (Winter, 2013).