Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas – Arnold Schoenberg.
There is only the musician and his piano on stage. Nothing else is required. The room is dark and in the glow of the stage lights, the piano’s lid becomes a mirror – a window into process and methodology – revealing the hands, the strings, the making of the music.
For the debut instalment of HOW | Showing the Making, presented by SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea, the celebrated South African pianist and composer Kyle Shepherd presents a two-night demonstration of his work. Over the course of these two evenings, Shepherd shares the creative process that informs his distinctive compositional style through an interplay of conversation, demonstration and performance.
Evening 1
Evening 2
Improvisation as the scaffolding of sound
Shepherd’s demonstration opens with an improvisatory performance in which he presents and plays with a number of his well-known compositions, breaking them down and testing their form. With nothing but the sound of the piano, and Shepherd humming the melodies to himself under his breath, it is like bearing witness to a private rehearsal session.
The performance is a mixture of melodies and compositions, and is predominantly improvisatory. Improvisation, says Shepherd, can be understood as the scaffolding of sound, and much of the work in studio involves exercising one’s improvisatory muscle. In this way, there is also a struggle against one’s body when it comes to free-flowing improvisation and experimentation. It is the need to work against the muscle memory of one’s own training and to break away from the rigidity of Western musical composition.
On composition: “Moving it all around like pieces of a puzzle”
What of the initial moments of a composition? Melody, harmony, rhythm and form provide a musician with the fundamental components, explains Shepherd, while the chromatic scale provides the 12 notes that musicians draw on to bring colour and emotion to their music. After sourcing six random notes from the audience, Shepherd proceeds to build a composition in real time, laying down his melody, adding harmony and developing a full, surging composition. All the while, he annotates his process, allowing the audience to locate and trace these melodic notes as they develop and give way to a more resolved sound. “So, it’s this exercise of taking these little melodies, flipping them on their head, using your harmonic knowledge or your melodic knowledge and moving it all around like pieces of a puzzle,” explains Shepherd. “Eventually, by the act of just playing endlessly, you will hopefully find something that resonates with you as a piece of music – something that you want to recreate and repeat.”
Letting your hands land on the keys
There is also something pivotal, something vital in the act of making music that refuses neat theory and ready interpretation. Above and beyond putting one’s areas of musical knowledge to work, a great deal of music-making comes from the inspirations one finds in other musicians, other pieces of music, other places and ideas, explains Shepherd. The daily practice of allowing one’s hands to fall on the keys of the piano and begin to improvise, to explore and compose, is where this knowledge and inspiration is put to work.
Following a brief Q&A session, Shepherd begins to perform once more. It is in this second performance of the evening that we are able to sit and witness his process again, although this time with a clearer idea of the many parts, impulses and sources of inspiration that inform his practice.
And so, the simple answer to the “how” is most often found in the “doing”. On the second evening of Shepherd’s demonstration of his work, he does not speak, choosing simply to sit down and engage in the act of doing. To the audience, this is both a performance and an insight into process. Shepherd performs for an hour, riffing, improvising, exploring. He ventures into sounds old and new – Belhar/Repetition and Reflection, Coline’s Rose, Ebhofolo (after his former mentor, the late Zim Ngqawana) – each one blending into the next and providing a segue into greater play and experimentation. Here we see Shepherd shirking convention, one hand on the keys of the piano, the other on its strings, muting and manipulating sound as he goes.
For those who attended the first evening of his demonstration, this is a window into the practical component of Shepherd’s pedagogy. Though for those who were only able to attend the second evening, the experience is no less rich – the methodology is forever present in the performance, the process laid bare in the act of making.
– David Mann