Live at the Library: “Evening” with Thomas Echols & Invoke
Dr. Thomas Echols - performer, composer, songwriter, instructor at Austin Community College – is one of the most creative artistic innovators we know. At home in many styles and multiple media, Echols was the mastermind behind ACG’s Summer Series NARRATIVES that rolled together poetry from Argentina, Portugal, and England, minimalism, ancient and modern instruments, synthesizers, and contemporary responsive composition.
On Sunday, December 1st at 2pm (doors at 1:30), Echols will be joined by award-winning and supremely imaginative Invoke String Quartet for the first of two ACG Live at the Library shows. The event will be held at Austin’s new Central Public Library, it’s free, and open to the public.
We asked Echols to share a few thoughts on the show, which he’s calling, EVENING:
ACG: Tell us about EVENING?
TE: Evening” presents a sonic landscape that is inhabited by songs, compositions, and improvisations. The focal points of the performance are four songs, somewhat sparse and inward looking, that unfold out into instrumental forays. At times, the players are guided by GRADUS, a contrapuntal algorithm that I built to be an additional participant in the work. GRADUS performs a complex role: providing pitch content to be played by us, processing the sounds captured from our instruments, and performing newly generated material through various types of synthesis. The emotive content of the songs is rather soft, dark, and heavy. GRADUS provides a kind of levity, by revealing that a lot of these same sonic experiences can come from a source essentially devoid of emotion (a computer). To help GRADUS to follow our expressive intent, I have made a device that mounts to my guitar that sends the algorithm information about the physical movement of my guitar and monitors the motion of my left hand, as I engage in a kind of hyperbolic expressive histrionics to communicate musical intention.
ACG: What do you love about working with Invoke String Quartet?
TE: Invoke, is amazing! They are a top-shelf string quartet that has chosen to ardently pursue a path of deep creative work: improvising, composing, song-writing, and working with new composers. With Invoke, I can provide a skeletal layout of what we are working on, and we can improvise around it until we come to something we love. I can also give them a detailed score and they can read it easily. They are a dream.
ACG: What do you wish everyone knew about working with synthesizers/electronic music?
TE: It’s more than people often think it is. Synthesizers are an amazing way to learn about traditional instruments: by creating a “patch” that resembles the sound of a clarinet or snare drum, you learn quite a lot! So, it is a means of learning to orchestrate. But just as importantly, computers, synths, circuits et al are a way of exploring new sounds and textures, new ways for musicians to engage with themselves, other musicians, and their audiences through various interactive techniques.
ACG: Why is creativity important to you, to humanity?
TE: When thinking of creativity, I really come to focus on two things: the idea of free will and of learning as its expression. A hot take on free will through a Tolstoyan lense is that we have it, but we have a whole lot less than we like to think. We are bound by a multitude of constraints that determine so much about our live, but in spite of that, we do guide the ship in some way.
About learning.... Creativity, for me, is the natural end result of learning, with learning and creating being somewhat like inhaling and exhaling. The creative act is the trace left by the fire that was the learning.
The creative part seems to come about through an important need: the need to connect with others, while continuously learning about the next thing that we will eventually create serves as a kind of path towards greater freedom. So, going back to the free will thing, a creative life allow a person to have greater agency, providing us with the most obvious mean of having a say in what we become. That's the long and short of it, so I tend to focus on learning and then find myself creating as a kind of happy accident, at least in the initial inception of the thing!
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Thank you Dr. Tom! We can’t wait. Learn more about Thomas Echols on his website or by checking out his band here.