#008 – Alexander Hawkins – Some Questions from the Field: A Performer in Conversation with New Instruments

Although I have only ever worked as a professional musician, I did obtain a PhD in law before beginning my career. This was in a somewhat liminal area of the subject: my university called it ‘law’, but others might have called it ‘sociology’, others ‘criminology’, and so on. I also taught many ‘law’ undergraduates during my doctoral studies: but the philosophers, historians, economists, statisticians, and others would all have recognised much of the territory as their own. An ‘augmented instruments’ group may well bear out something similar, in terms of a variety of disciplinary approaches, and we are probably all familiar with the fascinating insights this variegation can yield, as well as the frustrating moments of somehow ‘talking past’ each other.In my musical career, there is possibly something similar going on. I am fortunate to work regularly with artists of wildly different aesthetics, in contexts which are sometimes fully improvised, and sometimes fully notated; which sometimes look like ‘jazz’, sometimes like ‘classical’ musics, sometimes like ‘traditional’ musics, sometimes like ‘electronic’ musics, and so on. ‘Idiom’ and ‘innovation’ are therefore ideas on which I reflect a great deal. I would like to think that I spend a lot of time chasing sounds which I’ve never heard, but at the same time, have to acknowledge my instrumentalist’s obsession with control and technique.In this seminar, I would like to take a ‘liminal’ stance, and think out loud about what augmented instruments might mean in the context of my own practice as a composer-performer: as a way of teasing out some conceptual ideas, as well, perhaps, as some of the insecurities and questions of the musician who is fascinated by, but not necessarily fluent in, the possibilities.