Mapping Participation: Lawrence Halprin's RSVP Cycles Meets Richard Barrett's fOKT

Abstract

Visionary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (1969, New York: George Braziller) is an interdisciplinary model for collaborating through and with notation. In this article, I outline RSVP’s potential to articulate undertheorised connections between notation, collectivity, and improvisation in the work of a number of present-day composer-performers through the case study of British composer-improviser Richard Barrett’s fOKT series (2005). At the same time, I show this music can help redress a number of blind spots in Halprin’s own ideas about scores—especially the inclusive, participatory political vision that grounded them.

Keywords:

• Experimental Music
• Improvisation
• Notation
• Participation
• Collaboration

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A notable exception is the excerpt and commentary printed in Lely and Saunders (2012).

2 It is important to emphasise that ‘scoring’ in this expanded context could include practically any written or visual artefact whatsoever, not only conventional architectural notations such as blueprints and elevation maps. Halprin often worked with speculative or conceptual types of notation, such as the ‘ecoscores’ in The Sea Ranch discussed below. In this article, I take a similarly ecumenical approach to musical notation, including verbal, graphic, and conventional Western forms.

3 For images of all these scores, see Halprin (1969, 117–47).

4 The Sea Ranch was built on grazing land; there were no existing community residents to involve in the valuaction. Resident participation did, however, form a core element of other Halprin projects from the 1970s employing the Cycle, such as the Take Part workshops – see Hirsch (2014, Chapter 4). Although these later projects are perhaps richer examples of the liberatory potential of the Cycle, The Sea Ranch is more appropriate for musical comparison because the ‘participants’ in question are builders (as are musical performers) rather than end-users (as would be audience members).

5 As Halprin scholar Alison Bick Hirsch (Hirsch 2014) has pointed out, Halprin's ambivalent relationship to authorship was an Achilles heel in many of his RSVP-inspired projects. A common source of conflict was tension between Halprin's earnest attempts to place community members at the center of a given project and his own modernist inclinations toward aesthetic control. In both cases, the Cycle does not reflect hierarchy.

6 Following Lewis (1996) and Piekut (2011), I conceive of experimental music here as a broad network of methods and backgrounds, rather than a single canonical (i.e. post-Cageian) avant-garde tradition.

7 Philosopher Nelson Goodman's classic Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Goodman 1968) and various texts by musicologist Carl Dahlhaus (1979; 1983) are emblematic instances of this perspective. But it is still prevalent even among more progressive practitioners such as Kanno (2007).

8 Six versions in total were written between 2005 and 2009. In 2012, Barrett also co-composed a piece with Obermayer for fORCH entitled spukhafte Fernwirkung. Scores are available at http://www.tactilepaths.net/barrett/.

9 According to Barrett, Kager was at the time ‘in charge of the jazz department at SWR; one of his last acts there before the restructuring of the company impelled him to resign and return to his home two of Vienna was the commissioning of spukhafte Fernwirkung, so that he's been involved in fORCH for its whole history so far. The inclusion of Wolfgang Mitterer in the original lineup was his idea’ (Barrett, personal email to the author, 23 August 2016).

10 Though each score was meant to be performed for separate concerts, the three comprise a unified bundle. They all make use of a similar notational format and refer to the same legend, instructional modules, and musicians.

11 For an in-depth discussion of entextualisation in a musical context, see my chapter on Ben Patterson's Variations for Double-Bass in Williams (2016; http://www.tactilepaths.net/patterson).

12 Barrett: ‘Fairly early in the rehearsal process it became clear that octet improvisations were a possibility, which I hadn't dared to put into the original schedule. The subsequent concerts in London, Aberdeen and Huddersfield followed the format of a fOKT piece plus a free octet improvisation of about the same length (Paragraph 5 [from Cardew's The Great Learning, CW] rearing its head again!)’ (Barrett, personal email to the author, 23 August 2016).

13 For an acute critique of the common overvaluation of spontaneity and the concomitant undervaluation of history and memory in writings on improvisation, see Lewis (1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher A. Williams

Christopher A. Williams (1981, San Diego) makes, curates, and researches (mostly) experimental music. From 2021–2025, he will lead the research project (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics (Austrian Science Fund ZK 93) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. As a composer and contrabassist, Williams’ work runs the gamut from chamber music, improvisation, and radio art to collaborations with dancers, sound artists, and visual artists. He co-curates the Berlin concert series KONTRAKLANG. His artistic research takes the forms of both conventional academic publications and practice-based multimedia projects. www.christopherisnow.com