{"id":10206,"date":"2019-12-28T07:37:49","date_gmt":"2019-12-28T12:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=10206"},"modified":"2025-06-28T11:06:01","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T16:06:01","slug":"musical-occasions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2019\/12\/28\/musical-occasions\/","title":{"rendered":"Musical occasions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Music is an occasional topic<\/a> on this blog (as shown in the Soundscape<\/a> category). It was my first university discipline and love (when I was an undergrad at York’s wonderfully eclectic Music Department), still figures in my scholarly work from time to time (as in my work on Cape Breton Island<\/a> and the Chernobyl Zone<\/a>), and I continue to harbor thoughts of one day doing for music what Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/a><\/em> did for cinema<\/a>. Of course, the 130 year history of cinema is not the 130,000 year history of music<\/a>, so an ecophilosophy<\/a> of the latter will have to be a much different, and much more humble, affair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I haven’t done here is shared anything about the music I’ve made over the past 35 years. You can now get some of that over at Bandcamp<\/a>, where I’ve recently updated my page<\/a> to include things spanning a diversity of projects over the years: electronic and electroacoustic music made in the days before digital (some of it at York’s Electronic Music Studio), psychedelic and “oceanic” improvisational forays (including with my bandmates in the ethno-psych-Slavic-folk-thrash band Stalagmite Under a Naked Sky<\/a>, a.k.a. \u0412\u0430\u043f\u043d\u044f\u043a\u0438), avant-jazzy piano work (some of it utilizing alternate tuning systems in the vein of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, other pieces inspired more by Cecil Taylor, Matthew Shipp, Keith Jarrett, and modernist composers Dane Rudhyar and Aleksandr Scriabin), and even an album of choral work<\/a> from the years when I conducted a Ukrainian choir in Toronto. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those interested in the connection between music and philosophy, there’s a certain trajectory that tracks with the evolution of my ecophilosophical inclinations and obsessions: from the eco-apocalyptic and “mockalyptic” themes of the earlier albums (Storm Warning<\/em>, Age of Aquariums<\/em>, Resurrected Fields<\/em>) to the “process-relational strategies” of the Pluto Descends<\/em> trilogy. The latter is most evident, I think, in the intonational experimentalism of Distempered Landscapes<\/em><\/a> and the chromatic abstraction of Mercury Rises<\/em><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I would make a case that the “comprovisational” methods I keep coming back to are a form of process-relational<\/a> practice: in setting up a compositional system, situation, or set of options (a kind of Brian Eno<\/a>-like cybernetic forethought plus “non-thought” to open the way) and then following an immersive, time-based improvisational path into and through it (a form of Francesco Varela’s “laying down a path in walking<\/a>“), comprovisation is a form of actively responding to processes underway, all the time remaining maximally open to the situation at hand. Whereas improvisation<\/em> suggests a kind of spur-of-the-moment “extemporising” in relation to what’s there, comprovisation<\/em> acknowledges its own hand in shaping the initial situation, even if that hand limits its own movement in very specific ways. (An early rendition of my argument about composition, published long ago in Musicworks<\/em> magazine, can be read here<\/a>. It’s perhaps one of the reasons why I like to favor the “com-” in composition over the “im-” in improvisation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since there’s a lot of music on that Bandcamp page, and on the hunch that music is supposed to have some practical applications, here’s a guide to a few sample trajectories for journeying through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n