unlearning bass.

Unlike some decades ago, there are plenty of bass players nowadays who pursue research on their instrument, its history, playing techniques and repertoire. When I look around to discover new and unknown music for the bass, I am always amazed at the many great studies that contribute to expanding our knowledge and perspective on the bass. Yet I feel that much of that research just remains in the shelves of (digital) libraries, in the hallways of academic institutions or in small, localized communities of practice and does not reach the community. With a series of reviews I want to showcase people and their work that contributes towards enlarging the common understanding of the double bass. Alongside with that I also expand the literature section on this website to become a growing bibliography of bass research. My focus remains contemporary music, playing technique and modern repertoire, but I will also put a focus on work that expands the diversity of practices, and can contribute to a more diverse image of bass playing and bass players in society.

I am excited to repost this tutorial video by Benjamin Pastrana Markovitz on playing techniques for the tip of the bow. There are so many sounds to be discovered!

Listening is one of the topics that follow me since a long time in my musical life, and it is also a central topic for all musicians - especially contemporary music requires a highly specialized ear training on sounds, sounding space, instrumental subtleties and much more. This piece by Luc Döbereiner places listening at its core. The electronic part of it is partly inaudible to the audience, but it gets played into the players' ears like an auditory score or guideline. Listening inside and to the outside at the same time is a special challenge during performance, and the experience of performing this piece is something very hard to capture and communicate in the medium of an online video.

Improvisation and composition have a lot in common, and as I work with both I like to reflect on what I do on stage. In this project with Viennese percussionist Elisabeth Flunger, we decided to talk out our relationships that unfold during and iimprovised music performance. While playing, we call out our decisions and musical ideas, so the audience gets both the music as well as a sometimes funny, ironic and engaging commentary on the musical creation process happening in real time.

One of the most complex and demanding pieces for bass that has been recently written, I am extremely happy and honored that I was recently invited to perform "kaleidoscopic memories" (2016) by Beat Furrer, which was written for and initially performed by my teacher Uli Fussenegger. This is music with which you can spend a long lifetime learning, growing and enjoying every performance. The special feature of the music is its mirror-like structure - the electronics part is like a fractured double of the soloists, imitating and shifting sonic gestures and motives, and also in the sound diffusion both live instrument and the prerecorded tape blend together in a kind of trompe-l'oreille way.

Recently a new book came out - Rethinking The Musical Instrument - that features a chapter of mine, in which I write about physical effort in music performance. I take both my perspective as a player as well as the third-person-eye of a researcher or musicologist to explain why my own perceptions in playing sometimes differ from the preconceptions and impressions that audience members have about me and my playing. The book is edited by Mine Dogantan-Dack, professor of Music at Cambridge, and it is an excellent collection of articles by scholars and musicians on musical performance - get it here!

In some recent collaborations with composers, a recurring topic are multiphonics and their playing techniques, as well as other unstable complex sounds. I am doing some research on this and will publish a short series of explanations, demos and thoughts on those here in this place across the coming weeks and months, hopefully as a helpful resource for other composers.

I have been posting here already about Rebecca Saunders' piece "fury" for double bass. It is one of my favourite repertoire pieces that I enjoy to play frequently. Recently I had the chance to perform the extended version for ensemble plus solo bass with Schallfeld Ensemble in Graz. Enjoy the beautiful video documentation of that performance!

In a research project that recently happened in iem Graz, Interagency, I collaborated with Italian performer, composer and digital instrument creator Giacomo Lepri on a setting in which instrumentalists can play with an autonomous computer music system that interacts with the human players in ways that are both rule-based and surprising. During the setup, preparation and exploration of the system we began a wider reflection on human-machine-interactions, posthuman anthropology in performance and improvisational HCI ethics. Can we create computer music systems that do break rules and take over unexpected, quirky, faulty, absurd behaviours? When are we willing to accept a machine as an independent player with a personality? What happens if we consciously avoid the paradigms that are normally taken on in technical design but rather put the diversity of human experiences and interaction and a performance anthropology at the centre? Can we create software that features "impureData" or "situated data" rather than abstraction? This points towards a critique of algorithms and AI as it has been recently put forward by initiatives such as the feminist AI group. Our project is called "the opposite" and we will continue with it, inviting more artists and researchers and extending our musical and technical adventures.

This is the recording of a trio piece by Katharina Roth, made in March 2021 with musicians from Schallfeld Ensemble at Bruckneruni Linz. The bass part features a wide variety of extended techniques, among which is also some playing with objects that was developed in contact with the composer: glissandi with a selfmade superball, resembling the low rumbling percussion sounds.

Playing with preparations, bass lying down is a setting I have been using and exploring a lot over the last years. Here is a recent video of a streaming performance I did at VNM Graz, together with Josef Klammer (e-drums) and Nick Acorne (el). Most of the bass sounds you will hear are quite musique-concrète-like, they are rather quiet and only get audible close-miced: using sticks, threads, rubber, fingers and bow. 

I keep posting some of the lectures I did over the past years on my Mixcloud channel, to make them accessible as open access materials. There you can find my thoughts about performing Xenakis’ Theraps, and a talk I did on Beat Furrer as a podcast. (I have also written an article on “Lotofagos” a while ago, you can find it here.) Feel free to listen and leave me some feedback.