Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives through playing together or just talking about ideas?
CLARA LYON: Collaboration is everything. It’s the quickest way to learn and to get to the heart of an idea. Working with Spektral for six years has really taught me that and I’m fully indoctrinated in this idea now. We bounce ideas off each other constantly, but we regularly work with other artists so that we are always learning, always drawing on new perspectives, and challenging our notions.
Collaboration is not a substitute for doing your own work, it’s the natural extension, to see how your work coexists and contends with the work of others as in a dialogue, to learn more about a kind of practice, and to inspire and be inspired. I also have some projects outside of Spektral that draw on different disciplines: I’m working now on a project that involves a composer, a visual artist, a poet, an animator, and a set designer. What our work says to each other, and the words we use to say it, has been very revealing.
Each collaboration takes it’s own form because of the people involved. Building in a long period of getting to know each other is important, because the collaborative process tends to develop exponentially as it goes through the process of accumulating a shared vocabulary. Discussing priorities is important. Knowing what each other loves is important: sharing inspirations and love for other art, eating meals together, etc. Spektral has started a whole series of digital events based around this idea of getting to know what our collaborators love: in our “Floating Lounge” series we ask a guest to share a playlist that we listen to live, in front of an audience. It’s been huge fun and a great way to get to know new music.
How is preparing music, playing it live and recording it for an album connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?
CLARA LYON: A live concert performance is a fluid organism. An album is a snapshot of a moment in time. The difference in construct/product makes it essential to consider what risks are worth it when recording. For instance, it bothers me when a Classical album sounds overly produced or like the artist is playing it too safe. But if you go too far the other way, you may end up with a bunch of takes that are just not usable at all because they’re not technically consistent enough.
You have to determine those moments of risks that you just can’t live without, and practice them in different conditions so that you’ll be able to execute them on the day of the session. When you’re on the group’s clock and it’s not a solo record, it’s even more important to be able to consistently get your ideas across in the music so you’re not dragging the session down. For this album, it was a priority to us that the music feel as live and spontaneously inspired as possible. We recorded in longer chunks than we usually do: sometimes playing whole movements over and over, to replicate that experience of live performance just for our own continued inspiration.
Composition and improvisation….both still have a framework, a structure. The difference is sort of related to that risk factor idea. In an improvised piece you are responding freely to a devised set of parameters or are defining those parameters in real time. It can feel super risky! In a composed piece, where many more parameters are defined, the question as an interpreter becomes: “How much can you color outside the lines before your musical gesture begins to not resemble the composition anymore?” The process of answering this question is a way to consider your artistic voice and priorities.