This festival, held at the Whitney Museum lasted about a month between July and August. One the third floor of the Whitney, There was an exhibit devoted to his visual art. The exhibit also served as a performance space for his conceptual music pieces. The two performances I caught were "Ephemera" performed by Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori and "Wind Up Guitar" performed by Mary Halvorson.
Ephemera is a strange take-off on the concept of the graphic score. Marclay collected a vast array of items featuring musical notation in non-functional form (i.e. as a decoration or design, not meant to be played.) He then wove images of these items together into a musical score. The result is a graphic score that, well... also has musical staves in it. The players are free to musically interpret both the musical notation and other parts of the score, and to elaborate freely on any of the melodic ideas presented there.
I can't be certain what effect it had on the musicians. Although the musicians did seem to pay attention to the score and were honestly devoted to the piece, the result mainly sounded like Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori improvising. Of course that is something that those two do very well.
Perhaps no one has done as much to realize the potential of extended piano technique in improvising as Sylvie Courvoisier. She has developed a variety of techniques, including the use of chinese exercise balls and duct tape. Furthermore, she has really studied them to the point of being able to incorporate them into improvisation flawlessly. She can fluidly switch between the keys of the piano and it's insides and sometimes even plays both at once. This way, the use of her extended techniques is never forced; she can access them at exactly the necessary moments. She also has a phenomenal conventional technique with which she produces some brilliant figures that sound totally alien to any sort of conventional jazz.
I know less of Ikue Mori as a musician. I have always had a little bit of trouble relating to music coming out of a laptop computer. This performance sold me on her a lot more. Her and Courvoisier have a tight-knit musical relation, and hearing the interaction between them helped me to appreciate Mori's skill in improvisation.
The piece "Wind-Up Guitar" consists simply of having a guitarist improvise on an instrument built by Marclay. This instrument is a small acoustic guitar with about ten wind-up music boxes built inside of it, and the wind-up keys protruding from the instrument's body. Each of the boxes played typical music box fair, but when several of them were started at once, the result was a dissonant and surreal fog of ringing sound.
Hearing Halvorson play solo (fairly unusual, as I understand) revealed a lot about her as a guitarist. She proved herself to possess a more impressive technique than I had believed. Power-chords were a pretty frequent facet of this performance. I guess come to think of it, I can imagine her at a young age being just another kid who took up the guitar to follow after their rock idols. (I'd imagine that next she discovered Sonny Sharrock or Keji Haino and then...) These rock-like chord riffs would then develop in complexity until they became dissonant and thrashing waves of noise. At other points, she played twisted and harmonically angular vertical lines.
The music boxes inhabited a very separate world from the guitar playing. Halvorson's improvisation evolved alongside the music box melody, but with only the faintest hints of any relation. At some points, when she played her loudest chordal figures, the music boxes would be totally obscured. When she subsided, the audience would catch a few seconds of tinkle-tinkle before she launched another attack- a very effective technique. As simple as the concept of this piece was, it worked very well for me.
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