James Saunders - #[unassigned]

Confront
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James Saunders’ “#[unassigned]” manages to raise a number of interesting questions while remaining a very enjoyable listen to at the same time. The work is presented on two discs. The first has 66 brief tracks for unaccompanied cello (played by Anton Lukoszevieze), the second 65 similarly short tracks for solo clarinet (Andrew Sparling). The lengths of each cut hover around the one minute mark, though they vary. The listener has the choice of playing the discs “normally”, that is to say individually or he can play them simultaneously on two systems. When the latter method is employed, he has the additional options of playing the pieces in shuffle mode and/or not beginning the discs in synchrony. I chose to approach the piece using both random track ordering and asynchrony, always playing both discs at once.

Saunders writes:

The whole #[unassigned] project aims to explore how a change of context or synchronisation affects the way we perceive events, and how we derive meaning from this. I am interested in the listener gaining an alternative perspective of a piece at different hearings, with each reinforcing a global perception of the piece, and one that is subject to (at times radical) change. see essay here

Clearly, if one does anything aside from listening to them individually in sequence, the result, between random tracks and non-synchronous start times will make for an infinite number of possible variations. “Success” or “failure”, therefore, leaves the hands of the initial creator to a greater degree than usual and falls into the lap of the listener who also, as noted above, will likely strive to find “meaning” in a given set of patterns though the whys and wherefores of that discovery are intriguing (problematic?). While these are akin to ideas Cage and others have generated in the past, it’s always interesting to reinvestigate them, with idiosyncratic variations by subsequent composers.

One feels that Saunders’ scoring for the two instruments is the key to the piece working as well as (for me) it does. The “modules”, as the composer refers to them, are either through-composed or the result of indicated areas of activity. There’s a strong tendency toward the quiet and grainy/breathy although you’re kept on your aural toes as several of the sections are just the opposite, loud and harsh, generating both variety and an amount of suspense. The number of times the clarinet and cello appear to compliment each other is testament to the acuity of Saunders’ conception while, at the same time, generating questions as to what exactly one means by “complement” when any direct causality is at best tangential. Should any set of sympathetically programmed sounds be able to dovetail so smoothly? I found it both subtly stimulating and relaxing, able to hear it equally by itself and as part of the general ambience. In certain respects, it bore comparison to a strategy I occasionally use at live events, that of moving myself to various positions in the space, some of which at a far enough remove from the “action” that the ambient sounds of the area carry equal or greater weight with the music proper. There’s also a sense of not having to “listen through” to the work, of being quite able to walk in and out of the room where the speakers reside. I could imagine, had I the set-up, of placing a disc in two players on separate ends of the apartment; I think that would go quite well.

“#[unassigned]” has been performed well in excess of 100 times since 2000 by a wide variety of musicians and instrumentation though this is its first commitment to disc. In the title, the word “unassigned” is replaced by the month, day and year (mm/dd/yy) of a given performance. While representing only a tiny fraction of possible renditions (infinitely tiny, I suppose, though then you get into Cantorian nested infinities), this release is a fascinating, altogether enjoyable document and well worth the time of anyone interested in contemporary aesthetic organizational strategies.

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