Sounds Heard: Mike Baggetta—Canto

Sounds Heard: Mike Baggetta—Canto

What makes Mike Baggetta’s approach to the prepared guitar on Canto particularly stand out is his desire to use these new sonorities specifically to create new kinds of melodies and, ultimately, structural shapes that are recognizable to listeners. To that end, he constructs his solo performances mostly from basic AABA song form, yet there is still a great range and versatility.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.


III by Mike Baggetta

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Mike Baggetta: Canto
Mabnotes Music

Performers:
Mike Baggetta, prepared guitar

 

A little over 70 years ago, John Cage began preparing pianos and created an entirely new musical instrument that was something of a percussion ensemble capable of being controlled by a single player. Musicologists have found older antecedents for such “inside the keyboard” tampering going back to the earliest pianos. Similarly, in the mid-1960s, British free improv pioneer Keith Rowe started performing on electric guitars that had been laid on tables and altered in various ways. So Canto, a recording of nine solo prepared guitar etudes composed and performed by Brooklyn-based jazzman Mike Baggetta, comes from a long and illustrious lineage of musical experimentation.

Extending an instrument beyond its assumed timbral associations can be a surefire way to avoid potential idiomatic clichés associated with specific musical instruments. What makes Baggetta’s approach herein particularly stand out is his desire to use these new sonorities specifically to create new kinds of melodies and, ultimately, structural shapes that are recognizable to listeners. To that end, he constructs his solo performances mostly from basic AABA song form, yet there is still a great range and versatility. In his other recording projects, Baggetta has explored a broad spectrum of musical expressions—solid, straight-ahead material with his own quartet, as well as some pretty far out experimentation in his duo with trumpeter Kris Tiner (which also involves prepared guitar). And that full spectrum of approaches informs the kind of music he makes when he is left to his own devices, so to speak, as well.

To claim that the material on Baggetta’s other recordings has in any way informed Canto, however, is a bit disingenuous since it turns out that Canto predates most of Baggetta’s discography. Although just released on his own Mabnotes Music label, Canto was actually recorded in 2003 and a very limited unmixed and unmastered run of approximately 50 copies was issued on the now defunct New Jersey-based Optical Sounds label. In an email exchange with Baggetta, he stated that the original release had a different track order, although the nine etudes on the current issue are very definitively ordered by their titles, which are simply Roman numerals I through IX. All of this material was created in real-time with no overdubs or electronic modification. And while the nine etudes are mostly improvised, Baggetta created detailed performance notes in the weeks leading up to the session which outline his thoughts for each of them.

According to Baggetta’s program notes for the CD, each of the nine etudes deals with a specific sonic investigation with similar material. “I” hints at Indonesian gamelan music while “II” involves bowing and scraping. “III” slowly alters and extends a five-note pitch set while the more abrasive “IV” is primarily an exploration of textures. “V” is a totally grooving series of strums on both sides of the bridge. “VI”, to my ears at least, uses the preparations on the instruments to deliver a kind of off-kilter be-bop. “VII” alternates extremely percussive sonorities with an unhinged, almost blues-like bent-note melody and harmonics. “VIII” has a driving ostinato that gets interrupted with various slides and behind the bridge plucks sounding like a dobro gone haywire. “IX,” which uses metal clips on the strings, ends the collection with another in-depth journey through pure texture.

While these abstract Roman numeral names offer listeners very little grounding for such probic sonic material, the overall name Canto, which is Latin for “I sing” also conjures up Ezra Pound, whose polyglotal verse did to language what Baggetta is doing with a guitar to some extent. Baggetta is mindful of the correlation. In fact, he explained to me his overall musical output, while instrumental, is hugely influenced by poetry. In his own words:

Some of my other pieces for my quartet (with Jason Rigby, Eivind Opsvik and George Schuller) and my duo, Tin/Bag (with trumpeter Kris Tiner) use standard notation but are visually laid out to look like stanzas. This can help to give a sense of how the phrasing should be interpreted, like the meter in poems. […] There’s definitely a correlation to Pound! Good on you for digging that. He’s known so much for blurring the lines between verse and prose and for pushing boundaries with language… I think the similarities, as you’ve pointed out, are clear. The blurred lines between the common practices of composition and improvisation in the way that these pieces were conceived and produced was a big one for me.