Sound Scripts
Abstract
The painter Jackson Pollock reputedly claimed, “I am nature,” while George W. Bush saw himself as “a gut player. I play by instincts.” Donald Trump echoed these sentiments, insisting he was “a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right.” But can these instincts be put to good use? Perhaps one solution lies in channelling these forces into more creative endeavours, transforming the masculinist approach of Pollock into a more collaborative and joyous action in music. “Action Music” (2013) and “Action Music 2” (2017) are two compositions of mine in which I have employed both in-the-moment improvisation as well as an analytic yet abstract transcription process. Both musical scores are characterized by an alternation of highly detailed, prescriptive musical symbolism, which demand precise realization, which are set against fantastical hand-drawn and painted abstractions (some inspired by Pollock’s drip painting) which invite active creative participation. Performers are required to shift between radically opposing interpretive modes: the one highly objective, the other intuitive or emotional. A single cohesive narrative is denied, and instead, we must find meaning in the dialectic between concrete and abstract, fact and fiction.
Recommended Citation
Griswold, E.
(2019).
Action Music and Action Painting in the Twenty-First Century.
Sound Scripts, 6(1).
Retrieved from
https://ro.ecu.edu.au/soundscripts/vol6/iss1/10
