Derek Bailey's Practice/Practise

DEREK BAILEY'S PRACTICE/PRACTISE DOMINIC LASH HE ENGLISH GUITAR PLAYER, Derek Bailey (1930–2005), was a pioneer of freely improvised music. His forty-year career saw him performing all over the world with a dizzying range of collaborators.1 He also ran a record label, Incus, and in the mid-seventies presented a series of radio programs on improvisation, which served as the basis for the first edition of his book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. The publication of the second edition of the book, in the early nineties, coincided with the production, with Jeremy Marre, of a series of television programs for Channel Four in the UK.2 Bailey's music is subject to a growing level of critical interest, but the specific details of his material and how it related to his music often remain somewhat murky or, worse, are misrepresented. In what follows I shall attempt to outline some features of Bailey's practice, not only in the sense spelt with a "c" (as in "artistic practice") T 144 Perspectives of New Music but also the other, more familiar musical sense, spelt (in British English, at least) with an "s"—as in what he "practised" on his instrument. I shall focus on the way in which Bailey constructed his mature improvisational vocabulary according to very specific criteria which did not aim at sonic novelty for its own sake, but rather submitted willingly to certain musical and physical constraints with the intention of pursuing that which was continually malleable. In doing so I shall draw heavily on an invaluable and previously uninvestigated source: unpublished manuscript notes by Bailey, many of them towards a projected but never completed book about the guitar. These are held in the Incus archives, and I am enormously indebted to Karen Brookman for allowing me both to have access to them and to reproduce some of them here.3 EARLY DEVELOPMENT In 1966 and 1967 Bailey made recordings of his solo playing for his personal study and reference, which were eventually released in 2002 under the title Pieces for Guitar.4 These include short, throughcomposed pieces, the earliest of which are somewhat harmonic: "G.E.B." (1966) includes a passage that moves straightforwardly around the circle of fifths. Bailey's "Three Pieces for Guitar" (1967), however, exhibits a serial treatment of pitch, inspired by Webern. Elsewhere on the CD one can hear examples of fragmentary motifs ("bits") that Bailey notated for himself. Although he soon stopped writing any through-composed music, Bailey continued the practice of writing down such "bits" throughout his life, the aim being to develop a range of improvisational resources rather than to combine them into compositions. I have not found the scores for any of these pieces in the Incus archives, most of which dates from later in Bailey's career.5 The archives do, however, include some notes that seem to date from the same period. Almost none of the material in the archive is actually dated, but circumstantial evidence can help. A small notebook contains references to a version of "G.E.B." for trio, which suggests it dates from around the same time as the Pieces for Guitar, when Bailey was working with Gavin Bryars on bass and Tony Oxley on drums in the band Joseph Holbrooke (a chapter of Improvisation is devoted to the activities of this group). We see in the notebook examples of memos that Bailey had written for himself on what to practise. One text runs as follows: "runs—intervals over octave—non-repeating intervals," Derek Bailey's Practice/Practise 145 which is perhaps compatible with the interest in serial treatment of pitch already mentioned. (This page also provides evidence of Bailey's interest in the work of Samuel Beckett—corroborated elsewhere in the archive by the existence of fragments of a composition by Bailey based on Beckett's short text, Ping.) In what seems likely to be a later notebook we can see the kind of exercises that Bailey developed when working on the stereo amplification setup he frequently used during the 1970s. The text runs: "Practise: Fast pitch osc[illation] with slow pedal movements + slow p[itch] o...

Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences