The Blue Shroud project and the development of an innovative free-improvisation approach on classical guitar

By working with the Blue Shroud Band on Barry Guy’s composition The Blue Shroud, and through further live collaborations with members of the group (in the form of ‘small formations’), I have developed a free-improvisation approach that has resulted in a re-imagining of the continuum of the ‘classical guitar’ in both its historical repertory and its physiognomy.
The Blue Shroud employs various modes of notation (standard, aleatoric, graphic, mobile). While crediting one composer, Barry Guy, the work invites performers to actively participate in a shared compositional process during the act of performance. The Blue Shroud Band comprises leading musicians such as Maya Homburger and Michael Niesemann who excel in numerous modes of performance practice (historically informed practice—HIP; jazz improvisation, free improvisation, contemporary music interpretation, etc.).
In playing The Blue Shroud and participating in the small-formation live events, I have had to develop strategic models of performance integrating de-historicized free improvisations alongside historicized engagements with past genres. I have further implemented distinct methodologies of performance from HIP to the use and development of extended techniques:
• ‘Prepared’-guitar techniques employing sticks and tuning forks in the strings ‘deconstruct’ the instrument — when the fret board is divided into three regions, latent sounds are released
• The use of a bow transforms a plucked-string instrument into a bowed string instrument
Improvised compositional processes push the boundaries of musical structure and content.
This practice-led research leads to a recalibration of received ‘classical’ training. No longer hermetically sealed, it pivots on an innovative performance-compositional praxis that simultaneously looks back and forward. Additionally, it has fomented a philosophical framing of improvisation I call tiento (touch) endorsing the significance of the (historically undervalued) technê (τέχνη) mode of knowledge inquiry and re-situating the bio-semiotic framework of Umwelt to include a consciousness-based understanding of human-environment communications and intra-actions.