Hal Rammel: Invention’s Perspective on Improvisation

Hal Rammel is featured on a number of Crouton projects, including his solo work and with the group Raccoons. The following is an essay he wrote regarding some of the instruments he’s built over the years and how they fit within his work.

INVENTION’S PERSPECTIVE ON IMPROVISATION

Poetic logic is the sensuous apprehension of what we do not yet
understand in the presence of reality. (Frederick Sommer)

I built my first musical instrument in l976, a small mbira (thumb piano) with a wooden cigar box-sized resonator and flattened steel rods fixed to the soundboard in a manner copied from a Nigerian mbira I bought many years earlier. I made perhaps a dozen of these, experimenting a bit with shapes, numbers of rods, and multiple rows of rods. All were intended for personal musicking. I began to experiment with string instrument forms a few years later, slowly, as ideas and raw materials presented themselves. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, after taking up the musical saw, that I gained the confidence to become more public with these musical activities.

Much impetus to design and build new instruments comes to me through collaboration with other improvising musicians. While new forms and adaptations frequently arise by the significant contributions of happenstance, playing technique is a vital experimental component, and, without doubt, the actions of playing are most fully stimulated in the context of group improvisation. Dedication to the exploration of opportunities that the unforeseen may present is a singular necessity, with a sense that the unexpected often holds greater treasures than the rigidly prescribed. Engaging my new instrumental voices with more familiar instruments played by individuals whose generosity of spirit and inventive imagination entwine in a common sonic space, attracts me to a far greater degree than any inclination to construct an ensemble of newly invented instruments. I’ve chosen to focus briefly here on four instruments whose shape and sound have evolved by just such interaction.

The Snath

The scythe handle (snathe) that was to become the single-string snath sat around my home for many years before I formulated its design in l983. My alertness to that handle’s shape had been triggered by a sculpture by Arshile Gorki, who had found his own inspiration in the shape of ploughs’ handles and blades. With the scythe handle the challenge lay in shaping a resonator around such a reverie of three-dimensional asymmetry. The high bridge offers 360 approach to a solitary string, as in other forms of the musical bow (e.g. the berimbau). Without a finger board, pitched sounds are most readily available by use of a slide or by damping the string with one hand and tapping it with the other. One or two toy drumsticks held in the right hand work quite well in this manner, and it was in my collaborations with John Corbett’s acoustic guitar that I learned much about playing the snath. His guitar preparations cajoled it most perfectly.

The Triolin

I built the first triolin in l985 using an old chair leg rescued from a Chicago alley and wood out of the bottom of a discarded dresser drawer. The five triolins I’ve built since then are of slightly different proportion, but each has the same configuration of triangular resonator pierced by a lathe-turned handle. The sounding rods (thin brazing rod) protrude vertically in circular arrangement out of the top. The rods extend only through the soundboard, not into the bottom of the resonator. I’ve grown to prefer the drier sound this offers. Some rods become more resonant this way (when the rods are fixed close to their nodes); others vibrate sympathetically or barely vibrate at all. Over time (six months to a year) the rods become quite loose, rattling and striking one another as the instrument turns, and it becomes time to build a new triolin.

The first triolin was a abrupt departure from an initial attempt to make a nail violin. I cut the rods in random lengths. There are no uniform rises or falls in pitch; long and short rods are arranged randomly. At times I’ve felt the intransigence of this instrument to be overwhelming. I called my first solo improvisations on the triolin “Love Song for Little Lulu” in tribute to the panels of Marge Piercy’s Little Lulu comic books when Little Lulu, forced by her father to practice her violin, set forth an unforgettable “screeeeeech” bursting out of the panel’s borders. On the other hand, early reinforcement for the triolin’s distinct voice appeared to me in recordings of Inuit fiddle music. I quickly found holding the triolin in my left hand, turning, spinning, or oscillating it against bow or mallet in the right, to be a very accessible approach and a way out of frustrations I felt in the past with instruments that required more conventional actions in the left hand. Pitch may rise or fall by bowing up or down the length of the rod. Melodic fragments may be repeated or varied with fast or slow oscillations of the triolin against the bow. An improvisation may concentrate on a single section of rods or spin off in a whirl of furious harmonics. In spite of a significant amount of unpredictability, musicality may be coaxed or, more often, wrestled from the triolin’s angular body. At Chicago’s Emergency Theatre in the late l980s, cellist Russell Thorne’s ability to instantly echo and elaborate the triolin’s most rapid lines continually pushed me to new levels of facility with the instrument.

The Devil’s Fiddle

The devil’s fiddle (or bumbass, bladder and string, etc.), defined principally by a small pair of cymbals perched atop a tall pole with a drum sounded by bowing - with a notched stick - a string stretched across its surface, appeared in my arsenal as part of research on these instruments for an article in Experimental Musical Instruments (2). As I improvised with an instrument originally designed for raucous carnival or street-corner percussion (with a history extending back several hundred years), I realized, beyond the limitations of its curious drumroll effect and lumbering thud (the high-hat is sounded by hitting the instrument’s ‘foot’ against the floor), I was offered a way to approach percussion in not so very different from the way I play the triolin. The left hand manipulates the body of the instrument against a mallet or bow in the right. The second devil’s fiddle I built added multitude of sounding elements (bells, woodblocks, scrappers, a larger drum) as this technique made it possible to juxtapose wood, metal, and skin sounds in a wide range of timbres with great ease. The work of John Stevens, Paul Lovens, and Paul Lytton pointed me in directions such combinations might take. In this instrument I found percussion pitched squarely in the dynamic range I frequented in acoustic improvisation and played in much the same manner as I had explored in my handheld instruments. Exploring multidimensional percussion (to borrow a phrase from Jerome Cooper) in a relatively quiet musical context (with acoustic guitar and violin in the trio Van’s Peppy Syncopators) directed me to design an array of new mallets and notched bows and to rearrange the numerous sounding devices mounted on the devil’s fiddle’s five-foot stalk.

The Amplified Palette

The amplified palette was my first attempt to revise the triolin into an electroacoustic instrument. I had been playing with cellist Russell Thorne in Chicago for several years and his methods of processing amplified cello were an ongoing inspiration. There was very little experimentation with the form of this instrument; from the beginning the shape of the artist’s palette was an obviously intriguing and ergonomically logical form. The first palette’s were arrayed solely with wooden rods around the outer perimeter and I played them with various combinations of violin bows and superball mallets. Innovations gathered on the body of this instrument over the past 16 years with the inclusion of smaller ‘inner’ circles of metal and wooden rods, bamboo sticks, the combs from broken music boxes, and so on. Most importantly, and this largely arising in the heat of collective improvisation, the elaboration of various mallets (macrame beads, cork, balsa wood, rubber stoppers) and plectrum (guitar strings, dental floss, fishing line) create subtle variations with dramatic consequences when the instrument is amplified. The palette has steadily evolved from a bowed instrument into versatile percussion battery ranging from cello or violin to miniature gamelan-like percussion.

* * *

Improvising music has consistently reinforced my inclinations to devise, design, and redesign sounding objects. Playing provokes the quest for other possibilities, a provocation felt most intensely in the course of small group improvisation, duos and trios, where call for response is most acute. John Corbett, in an essay which touches on these concerns, describes instrument reconstruction as “redistribution of technique produced on the body of the instrument” (3). Instrument invention, drawing on John Corbett’s phraseology, arises out of gestural redisciplining, invention or, perhaps, desperation in the fray of others’ gestures. Instrument building is my more labored response to the situational tensions of musical circumstance. The vividness of such experiences readily impose their will in the workshop. The heart of this discussion lies in musical interchange, in unwillingness to close the door on eithers’ experience of the other, directed toward meaning which may never appear quite clear in the face of sound’s evanescence. Music’s swift decay is fiercely defied in our desire to draw upon all of experience and all of imagining at the service of discovering and conversing in a mutual world.

- Hal Rammel, December 2007

Notes:
(1) Frederick Sommer, “The Poetic Logic of Art and Aesthetics,” Sommer Words (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), p. 39.
(2) Hal Rammel, “The Devil’s Fiddle: Past and Present.” Experimental Musical Instruments, Vol. VII, No. 3 and 4 (November 1991 and January 1992).
(3) John Corbett, “Ephemera Underscored: Writing Around Improvisation,” Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. by Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 234.

Reprinted and revised from Rubberneck 22 (June 1996). Rubberneck, an excellent little magazine devoted to experimental and freely improvised music as well as film and video, was edited by Chris Blackford. The paragraph on the amplified palette is the added portion to this revised text.

Photographs of instruments with details on their construction and development as discussed in this essay may be found at
http://www.halrammel.com/instruments2.html