Four 4
Dominic LashEven though it’s not the first piece I wrote that I remain happy with, I consider for four as, in a way, my opus one. Its contents are easily summarized: next to each of the roman numerals from I to IV are listed a timing (every 10 seconds; every 25 seconds; every 40 seconds; every 55 seconds) and a behaviour (identical, converging, diverging, unique). Apart from the further note “from one minute to one hour” that’s about it. It’s more of a kit than a composition, perhaps. It’s only been played by quartets, but I’d love to do an orchestral version (any orchestra at a loose end should get in touch). I imagine such a performance happening after a day or two of rehearsals, the whole group working together to develop a sense of what it might mean to play this piece orchestrally. Fantasy though this it is, it’s an example of what I like most about this piece: the way it’s poised. It’s musically minimal, but it’s also minimal in the sense that one could write out a whole range of fully orchestrated versions of it.
Before for four, I felt that that was the kind of thing that a proper composer ought to do, but I could rarely muster the motivation to do so: partly out of laziness and partly from an inability to deal with the inevitable arbitrariness of compositional decision-making. Why this note and not another? In improvising, the answer is that that’s the note you played—deal with it. But composing seemed to demand different justifications. This piece was the first that I wrote that seemed to contain “just enough” to make it a distinct piece, and not a whisker more. It helped me shed the idea of composition as the production of little Platonic forms, which might just find their way into the phenomenal world with careful handling. To escape the idea that if a piece wasn’t so laden with instructions that it could be performed by anyone it wasn’t a real composition (an aesthetic which, if taken to extremes, would require a solo violin piece to come with a manual on fiddle playing). That it was OK if a score was written with a certain group of people in mind and left much unsaid, because all scores do that anyway. It also helped bridge the differences between the kinds of work I do, which had previously worried me a little. Great as it is to challenge them, I’m not the kind of person to deliberately make my collaborators uncomfortable.
Improvising freely with (say) John Butcher, playing knotty scores with Alex Ward (for example) as well as stripped-down, Wandelweiser-inspired work with (e.g.) Sarah Hughes needn’t render one schizophrenic—it’s just about getting the most out of one’s chances to collaborate with those people one is interested to work with.
Perhaps I should have had this insight years before, but I didn’t, and without this piece it would have taken me even longer to have it.
In 2015, Wolf Notes invited composers and musicians to write a short text about one of their own pieces. A word count of no more than 500-words was the only guidance given.
Dominic Lash is a freely improvising double bassist and electric guitarist who the Free Jazz Collective has called an "exceptional creative musician". He also both writes and performs composed music and, as an academic, researches and writes about film.