BOOKS AND ARTICLES

What leads us to understand an object as a musical instrument? Its capacity to produce sound, or the intentions of the person who plays it? What do the performers' gestures tell us about their music? And how do we interpret it in a recording when they are audible but not visible? How have electricity and digital technology changed music and musical sound?

Approaching music from the viewpoint of its instruments rather than vice versa, Wade Matthews explores the history of musical instruments from Paleolithic bone flutes through contemporary digital technology emphasizing their music, the myths and ideas that surround them, and music's evolution with the arrival of computers, binary processes and the information age.

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Nearly three decades ago in CRUCE, now the oldest surviving artists' collective in Madrid, Wade   Matthews launched ¡ESCUCHA!, that city's first free-improvisation concert series, Conceived as part of a collective strategy to "put Madrid on the map" among free improvisers worldwide, ¡Escucha! has done exactly that. Needless to say, doing so called for the active participation of improvisers and collaborators who proved crucial to its success. Published in 2019, to celebrate twenty-five years of CRUCE, and twenty-four of ¡ESCUCHA!, CRUCIALES presents Wade Matthews' interviews with twenty-three improvisers directly involved in the creation of today's thriving scene in Madrid.

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This book grows out of questions I have asked myself over various decades of professional activity as an improvising musician. It is born of practice, and of ideas generated by daily contact with improvisation as a way of making music, experiencing it, and sharing it with other improvisers and listeners. A native English speaker, I wrote this book in Spanish—my third language—because there was so clearly a need for it in the Spanish-speaking world. Its four parts address free improvisation in the context of musical creation, free improvisation and its relation to other musical practices, the art of improvising (listening, time, silence, musical instruments and musical language, etc.), and the visibility of free improvisation, its teaching and programming.

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Edited by composer/philosopher Pedro Alcalde and musicologist/philosopher Marina Hervás, this collection of essays by  twelve figures intimately involved in contemporary music addresses questions posed by its practice in the twenty-first century. My contribution was initially titled, Attributes Without Man (or Woman): the Dismaterialization of the body in 21st Century Music (an allusion to Robert Musil's The Man without Attributes). When the book was published (2020) I discovered, to my dismay, that my text had been renamed. Published exclusively in Spanish by Antoni Bosch editor, S.A.U. in 2020  193 pages it is available here,  

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As Daniel Halaban explains: "This book is indispensable for thinking about relations between music and technology today." Edited by Argentinean electroacoustic composer and improviser Gonzalo Biffarella, it presents the ideas of twelve musicians intimately involved in creating music with new media. As one of only three authors from outside Latin America, and the only non-native Spanish speaker, I was pleased to be invited to share my perspective on these matters in a text titled Musical Thought_New Media, which constitutes chapter II. Published in Argentina, this book offers a pleasantly cosmopolitan view of recent experiences in this fast-moving field.

Published in Spanish by Suono Mobile editora, 2023. It is available here.

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According to Jaime Munárriz, "Sonic Encounters at the School of Fine Arts - Complutense University of Madrid arose as a connection among the visual arts, sound art and experimental music. With its open format, it offered sound artists different spaces to carry out concerts, installations, workshops, reactivations and analytical sessions. Each was followed by a colloquy that involved the artists and the public, often with very interesting results, given the high level of all parties."  After three years of activity, Munárriz invited the artists to contribute to the book. Having played the inaugural concert, I was invited to write one of three lengthier chapters, which I titled: Encuentros. Published in Spanish it is available here.

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In 1993, I was invited by the Ortega y Gasset Foundation to coordinate an  issue of the Revista de Occidente, a review founded by philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1923.  Titled Music in our time, it contained new articles by musicians and musicologists of various generations as well as established texts considered fundamental.  Among the former were  essays by Llorenç Barber, Pedro Elías, Jerome Harris and Oriol Graus, while the latter included excerpts from John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio as well Theodor Adorno's interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen. My own contribution is titled "I Sing the Body Electric." Reflections on Music in the Electronic Era. This issue is now a collector's item.

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In 2001, coinciding with my involvement in the organization of a major improvised music festival in Madrid, I was invited to coordinate an issue of the bilingual (Spanish/French) music review, Doce Notas-Preliminares, which was published in December 2002 as Improvisation, Creating in the Moment.  Alongside texts by Fernando Carbonell, Chema Chacón, Carmen García-Ormaechea, Derek Bailey, Paul F. Berliner, Josep Manuel Berenguer and Scandinavian linguist Per Aage Brandt, this issue contains the first Spanish translation of Lê Quan Ninh's Alphabet on improvisation (incomplete), as well as my Fifteen Seconds to Decide. "Instant Composition" and Other Received Ideas about Musical Improvisation.  Available here.

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In 2018, Llorenç Barber invited me to contribute a text to a monographic issue of the music review Quodlibet  on Sound art. Released as issue no. 68 (May-August 2018), it featured texts by leading figures in the field, including Barber, Carmen Pardo, Ruth Abellán, Arturo Moya, Makis Solomos and Sonia Megías, as well as my own contribution, titled Son(de)ando el campo expandido. Reflexiones de un improvisador. Although the following issue was intended to complete the selection of texts on sound art, no. 68 marked the end of Quodlibet's second period. So far, there do not seem to be plans for a third one. Copies are available here.

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In 2003, coinciding with the Alicante Festival of Contemporary Music, the Spanish Society of Musicology held a three-day congress on Musicology and Contemporary Music. It consisted of three session: Musicology and Current Creation: Confluences and Misunderstandings; Contemporary Music, a Challenge for Current Documentation; and Criticism and Musicology; Differences and Coincidences. I was invited to present a paper, titled: Collectivity and Intentionality in European Free Improvisation: Guiding Criteria for a Musicological Study, which was later included in a collection of the papers presented at that congress, available here.

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In 2013, composer Miguel Ángel Tolosa invited me to write a text on whatever subect I chose for a forthcoming issue of the German music magazine Kunstmusik. I had recently read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and was struck by the first line: "Supposing philosophy were a woman. What then? For my text, I decided to invent three suppositions about music and answer them accordingly. I deliberately chose three suppositions for which I had no immediate answer, forcing myself to improvise my replies as best I could. Truth be told, I don't remember having so much fun writing in a very long time. The results were published in English in the spring, 2013 issue, no. 15, which can be ordered here

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In 1998, I read Stockhausen. Entrevista sobre el genio musical, in which, among many other things, he described how an enormous, barking dog had ruined the premiere of one of his works in Florence. Amused by his outrage at not being able to control absolutely every aspect of that concert, I decided to propose other possible perspectives on his anecdote. The result is an essay both amusing and, hopefully, enlightening. When I shared it with Spanish musician and semiologist Gonzalo Abril, he offered to publish it in the aesthetics review, La balsa de la medusa, where he was a member of the editorial committee. Titled Intimidad y límite, reflexiones sobre el perro de Stockhausen, this text was published in La Balsa de la Medusa nº 49 (1999)

In 2013, I was asked to contribute a text to a planned book “about creative improvised music.” I decided to examine the role of imitation in jazz and free improvisation, to my mind, the two leading Western forms of “creative improvised music.” To my surprise, the text was rejected as the coordinator considered that it “falls somewhat outside the subject matter… that is: jazz and improvisation. It deals more with free improvisation and, at times, it even seems to reject improvisation in jazz.” In its treatment of imitation, this previously unpublished text deals openly with appropriation, race, labels and other uncomfortable subjects. To me, this constitutes its greatest value. I invite the readers to decide for themselves.

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In 2022, following a solo concert at Madrid's CRUCE: arte y pensamiento contemporáneo, a very capable Catalonian improviser told me he found it difficult to effectively use silence in his music. Soon thereafter, composer Pedro Alcalde suggested I write an article about some aspect of free improvisation for the Mexico-City-Based 17 Instituto de Estudios Críticos, which was eager to explore free improvisation in the Spanish-speaking world. Seeing an opportunity, I decided to clarify my own ideas by writing a text about how silence is, or can be, used in free improvisation. I think this text, a combination of reflection and analysis,  will eventually be part of a book published by 17, but there is no particular reason to wait that long to share it with interested readers.

When I had been programming concerts at the Madrid-based artists' collective, CRUCE: arte y pensamiento, for around twenty years, it seemed like time to found a record label there.. One of the first two CDs we planned to bring out on the Cruce label was Sounding the Museum, a compilation of two concerts in which I had been involved in March and August of 2013, respectively. The first was a solo at the Museo de Arte in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The second was a performance by my duo, Genmaicha (with guitarist Javier Pedreira), at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Valencia. The Cruce label never became a reality, but my liner notes for Sounding the Museum contain a series of ideas readers may find worth perusing. They are presented here in the original bilingual PDF intended to accompany the CD, which was never released.

My first sound portrait was Crossing, a work based on my recording of walking across the Brooklyn bridge in 1985.  Since then,  my ideas and criteria for these works have become increasingly clear, so when Manolo Rodriguez and Carlos Costa, from Tenerife, arranged for us to make sound portraits of the Canary Islands with guitarist Javier Pedreira and release them as a CD/book, I was able to include a text about how I conceive (of) these pieces. This is one of three texts about my work in this area and, while it speaks specifically of this group of seven pieces, it also clarifies my approach to this surprisingly fecund practice. I recommend also reading Algunas ideas acerca de los retratos sonoros for a more general overview.  The sound portraits from Ínsulas are here.

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In 2013, the same year I made Ínsulas, I was invited to give a concert and create a sound installatiion for the Subtropics Festival in Miami Beach. The festival director, Gustavo Matamoros was familiar with my sound portraits and invited me to spend a night in the Everglades Swamps, recording the noises of alligators, frogs and innumerable insects, including helicopter-sized mosquitos that required protective clothing (see the photo of me recording there, above). Returning to Florida the following year, I took the time to write an essay about my criteria for sound portraits, and about field recordings in general. My thanks to Gustavo Matamoros, Claudia Ariano-Hanna and Juraj Kojs for their generosity and hospitality.

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In 1998, at the behest of philosopher Teresa Aizpún, I was invited to join a group of artists and architecture students to visit the Alhambra and propose creative projects to help rethink the possible functions of this monumental palace and gardens and their relationship with contemporary society. After the project concluded, I was invited to contribute a text to the catalog, titled Poetics of the City. The Image of the Alhambra, Published in 1998 by Grupo Editorial Universitario, it includes my text with the self-explanitory title Making Music in the Alhambra, which reflects upon my experiences there. The catalog is available here.

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In 2020, with obligatory masks and severely restricted travel, friend, violinist and fellow improviser Luz Prado asked me to help her with the art project Monumento al desencanto, which she was carrying out in Málaga, her hometown. Her original plan was to record herself playing inside a truly huge industrial chimney popularly known as the Torre Mónica and located directly on the beach. This proved impossible at that time, so she opted to continually circle the monumental structure, actually dragging her violin against the bricks! I was there to record the event, which was no small matter, as we were walking on a small ledge, more than six feet above the ground. I was so impressed by this project that I wrote a brief text that was later included in the project's catalogue.

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Commissioned by the electroacoustic-music laboratories in Albi in 2003 with a command d'état grant from the French government,  Lieux constitutes an entirely different approach to sound portraiture. Using recordings of Madrid made specifically for this piece, I applied collage techniques to create virtual "places" in and with which to improvise with my bass clarinet and alto flute. I wrote the text in French for Lieux's premiere at the VI Rencontres de musique et quotidien sonor in 2004 and later translated it into Spanish for its Iberian premiere at the Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid in 2006. These sound portraits can be heard (and purchased) here.

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This brief article, was included in the first and only issue of a long forgotten art-history journal dedicated to the idea and significance of ruins. The invitation to include a text led me to question their existence in the world of music, and  their possible import for musicians and musicologists. Today, the television announced that artificial intelligence had recently been used to restore a badly damaged cassette recording of a previously unreleased Beatles song, apparently with considerable fidelity. This might have comforted Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was quite concerned about insuring that his electroacoustic works (and his personal image) would live on, preferably forever.

My choice of the term "Sound Portraits" to describe this genre implies at least some consideration of the ideas behind portraiture in general, and especially in the visual arts. Here, in what is probably the only text I've written on the subject in English, I explain how some of these ideas have influenced my work. And while this is true of all of my sound portraits, I discuss it here in the context of Punto Cero. Aragón, which I had the pleasure of creating with native Aragonese percussionist, improviser and composer, Luis Tabuenca. The pieces themselves can be heard here.

In Spanish sculptor Evaristo Bellotti's studio, I met José Ramón Álvarez a professor at Fu Jen University in Taipei, and the director of an annual review that chronicles cultural interacción between East and West. In that context, many Western musicians, including myself, have been influenced by the writings of ancient Chinese philosophers, especially the I Ching and the Tao te Ching. Western creators, however, often understand their ideas in quite different ways than the original readers. In my text I argue that this (mis)understanding has proved no less fecund—for composers and improvisers alike—and no less illustrative of contemporary aesthetic values. The review is available here.

In Madrid, the new century ushered in a new director of the now defunct Center for the Diffusion of Contemporary Music. Jorge Fernández Guerra had already taken an interest in free improvisation when he ran the music section of ABC's Sunday Cultural supplement. From his new position, he was able to actually finance it, something no one in his position has ever done before, or since. The result was the largest festival of improvised music in Spanish history, with 21 concerts in less than a month. As coordinator of the festival, I wrote a text to help listeners understand what, in fact, they were hearing. I have found no trace of it online, so here it is. I no longer share all of the ideas it contains, but many still seem relevant, and I believe the document itself merits attention.

In 2009, the well-known British record label, Another Timbre, released a series of CDs featuring collaboration among acoustic and electroacoustic improvisers. I was and still am very happy to be included in that series with Arethusa, a duo with Beirut-based French improviser Stéphane Rives. The fact that both of us were expatriates, and the degree to which that experience had transformed us, led me to write liner notes exploring a similar case from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The text is quite short, but its ideas will be readily recognizable to anyone who is, or has lived some part of their life, as an expatriate.  Here is the music.

My early training in music was almost entirely instrumental, yet my awakening to just how intensely thrilling music could be came when, at the age of 10, I first heard Delia Derbyshire's electroacoustic  arrangement of the Doctor Who theme. It wasn't until twenty years later that I was actually able to set foot in an electroacoustic music studio. By then, I was professionally capable on the saxophones, the alto flute and the bass clarinet. Nonetheless, when computers were fast enough, I abandoned them all to construct my own computer-based electroacoustic instrument. I've never been happier. The present text reflects upon that process, not so much biographically as in terms of ideas. It has never been published before.

In March, 2024, I was invited to compose music for an exhibition of silkscreen monotypes in Capistrano, Italy. I was subsequently invited to contribute a brief text for publication in the catalogue. The exhibition, Non solo per gli occhi (Not Only For The Eyes) sought to place the sound on an equal footing with the images in such a way that their colors and forms reflected each other. This, of course, called for a clear understanding of specific aspects of the visual works, as well as decisions about how their process of making could be mapped to compositional processes in music. This brief text explores those questions as well as exploring how form works in concert music as opposed to music for art shows.