Butch Morris and the Art of Conduction
Doctoral Dissertation/University of Maryland, College Park
Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris has spent the last twenty-five years of his professional life developing, refining, and implementing a method for creating unique long form ensemble music using a patented vocabulary of conducting gestures. "Conduction® (conducted improvisation/interpretation) is a vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct a real-time musical arrangement or composition," writes Morris in the notes accompanying Testament, a 10-CD box set documenting his first fifty Conductions. He adds, "[e]ach sign and gesture transmits generative information for interpretation by the individual and the collective, to provide instantaneous possibilities for altering or initiating harmony, melody, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, or form" (Morris, 1995). Morris' method involves instructing an ensemble in a closed vocabulary of bodily gestures (performed with the arms and hands, with and without a baton); rehearsing the ensemble under the restrictions of that vocabulary; and then performing a work (usually before a live audience). In stark contrast to the role of the conductor in the Western orchestra, which is chiefly regulatory and highly invested in fidelity to a score, Conduction's instructions are generative in nature thus collapsing the roles of conductor and composer into a single job description. While Conduction cannot accurately be subsumed under jazz, Morris' working life as player and composer places his Conduction project within the greater arc of jazz history even as the venues and ensembles featuring his work seem to have increasingly been more closely allied with so-called new classical music. Conduction's considerable freedoms are compartmentalized and refracted through the macrostructural prerogative of the one performer whose instrument (his baton) is sonically mute. Butch has a well-developed conceptual grasp of his music and an idea of its value and importance that he has articulated at length and publicly in writings, lectures, and workshops. With my analysis I hope to be able to add some appreciation of what Conduction teaches us about the general human capacity for language and the relation between notational systems and musicality.
I began working on my PhD in 2003 and successfully defended my dissertation in November, 2009. I've had the opportunity to make observations at performances, rehearsals, and workshops in the dense network of small-to-medium lower Manhattan venues that define Butch's home turf as well as some pretty far flung college appearances. I do believe history will prove Butch to be a rare genius and it has been an absolutely amazing opportunity to observe him under so many different conditions and degrees of intimacy over the past handful of years and in that time to gain his confidence as a serious student of music. The feature that I wrote on Butch for Signal to Noise is in the <documents> section as is an article on Greg Tate's use of Conduction in Burnt Sugar and a set of program notes ("The Importance of Conduction") written for an Italian performance that was cancelled. My dissertation is available to scholars on request. Butch Morris' official site can be accessed here.