Blasio Kavuma

“It’s one thing I’ve tried to move away from — that musical ideas exist in this pure, metaphysical realm. I don’t think they do. We experience things musically for a host of reasons, and one of those reasons is the cultural associations we have with them.”

Blasio Kavuma

Blasio Kavuma is a London-based composer, producer and DJ based exploring how to integrate Black musical thought into his work. He was a Royal Philharmonic Society Composer of 2023, a Nonclassical Associate Composer from 2019-21, and a Sound and Music Pathways composer in 2017. Blasio studied an MA in Composition at Bristol University, and is currently undertaking a PhD at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, exploring how to unite Afro-diasporic and Western classical musical traditions. Blasio has also composed for theatre and opera, including Dawn Walton’s production of Antigone and Sky Arts’ Gods of the Game. His dance collaboration SPIRIT LEVEL was recipient of the 2019 George Butterworth Award, with choreographer Si Rawlinson.

We caught up with Blasio at the Barbican café, London, and spoke about jungle, Afro-diasporic traditions, cyclical time frameworks, signifying, cultural associations, and more…

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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Blasio — thanks for joining us today! I first discovered your work through the premiere performance of your cello and electronics piece Soundclash, as part of Nonclassical’s 2019-20 Artists-in-Residence programme; tell me a bit about how the concept for the piece came together — and what’s changed since the piece’s initial performance in Hackney in 2021?

Blasio Kavuma: It’s been a long journey, this piece. It started life in 2012 — [as] a solo violin piece for a sound installation. It was about interpretations of dream — I made this dreamy, Jungian violin solo. It sat unattended for a number of years; and then over the course of time, I got this Nonclassical opportunity — the Artists-in-Residence [scheme] — and they wanted all of us to do a gig night. At the time, I was getting seriously into jungle music; I still am.

So my idea was to do this jungle night. I managed to find this guy who [made] these really brilliant theatre performances based around jungle and the Amen break. I got a couple of DJs in, I got this jazz bassist — Tom Mason — to do some jungle sets, as well. My idea was to approach it from a classical perspective. I took this original piece of mine, and I wanted to do things to it that jungle producers would do — I took the percussive, extended techniques in there, and made them into beats. I spent a lot of time with Cecilia Bignall, the cellist, and [we] did a lot of experimentation.

Because it went down so well, I thought: do you know what? Nonclassical should release this. We were going to release it, and then life happened… But we kept the conversation going. Since the Nonclassical gig, I’ve added a lot more “effects” that you’d find in dub, [in] Jamaican music. I wanted to trace that lineage of jungle music from dub, and reggae, through to electronic dance music.

Tell me a bit more about your collaboration with Cecilia Bignall — how did the two of you approach the process?

Cecilia is a brilliant improviser. That was really important. She worked with Nonclassical quite a lot, so she seemed like a natural choice. She was really up for it; she’s very open-minded as an artist. I came with a piece, but it changed a lot after I met her. She had this brilliant effects pedal — this is when I was just getting into music production, and sound design — she had this flange pedal, and I was just like “woah”… That was a gateway for me to start adding all of these other timbral effects. I got her to record these really percussive sounds.

One thing we found was that because of the way the instrument is, it’s very hard to play it in a very metered way. Especially if you’re doing extended techniques. So I ended up pre-recording a lot of it. It was quite an organic process; we’d meet, experiment, see what works, see what didn’t. It just seemed a natural choice to make these beats — transition from very classically orientated sounds to somewhere where she’s riffing over quite intense, jungle-inspired beats. The contrast is very sharp between those two — it takes most of those twenty minutes to get to that point, but once you get there, it makes sense.

Let’s talk a bit about your musical background. You’ve mentioned having a kind of musical “promiscuity” in your practice…

Since that promiscuity comment… I think I’ve settled down a bit since then. -laughs- Looking back over the last five or six years, I can see how all of these different influences were leading me down this path that I’m on now. Growing up, my dad was forever playing Black music of all sorts: soul, blues, jazz, rumba, the list goes on. As a composer, I’ve always wanted to incorporate these influences — but they were so far-ranging, and I couldn’t settle on one. What I was actually doing was looking at Black music as a tradition, rather than just as one particular expression of Black music. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life trying to incorporate jungle into classical music, you know — it’s just one step along that path that I’m on now.

Was there any particular moment on your compositional journey did you realise you were on that path of incorporating this tradition?

By the time I joined Nonclassical, I was beginning to talk more coherently about Black music as a tradition. There wasn’t really a cutoff point. I think it’s slowly coalesced into this idea that I’m not thinking about a particular form, or particular aesthetic. But it also came out of a slight frustration in my own work: I always felt that I was trying to incorporate different ideas from Black music, but there was always something missing. Looking at my work, and the work of other composers who are trying to do similar things, for me, I realised that adopting an aesthetic isn’t enough. If you want to understand the form of music, you have to understand it aesthetically, [but also] procedurally, performatively, sociologically — the philosophical apparatus that’s going on underneath.

Of course — not just incorporating “base” elements aesthetically, but really engaging with the art form on a deeper level. In what ways did you first start exploring that?

I started off really exploring aesthetic elements; things like groove, syncopation. I wrote a big string quartet — that was a bit of a turning point for me. Later on, as I started to want to go deeper, I started looking at certain rhetorical devices that you see throughout Black music. One thing that crops up a lot in Afro-diasporic music — in African-American music, especially — is something called signifying. This idea, in Black music, that you have a rhetorical dependence on what’s come before; maybe it’s music you heard growing up, or music that’s influenced the scene, or tradition, that you’re in. You take that — those ideas — and you repurpose them.

Sampling in hip-hop music is a really good example of that. I wrote an orchestral piece — ‘Signification for Orchestra’ — and adopted that rhetorical framework. That wasn’t [just] about hip-hop, it was about Black musical thought. So that was really satisfying for me. But in terms of how the process went, it was entirely classical; it was me writing a score, handing it over, they play it, all classically trained musicians.

Of course. Are there any more recent projects where you’ve worked across those traditions?

The last project I did — a piece called ‘The Separating Line’, with Manchester Camerata — was probably my most “serious” attempt to bring the two traditions together. To create something that is “neither”, but is also “both”. That’s kind of what my doctoral research is about. I had a string orchestra, and a gospel choir; I can put them on top of each other, and they’ll be able to do their own thing, and that’s cool. What I thought was: why don’t I look even deeper?

One thing that is really prevalent in the literature around Black music is the relationship between the sacred and the secular. It’s very fluid; a big part of Black music’s progression has been that interaction between sacred and secular expressions. Whereas speaking as a composer… I think I work in a completely secular musical tradition. Obviously, its roots are not secular — but we’re at a point in history where Western classical music is entirely rationalised, entirely secularised. So I made a parallel between the rational and the intuitive.

Long story short, I wrote a piece of music where I forced both the choir and the strings to come out of their musical knowledge a little bit. My hope was that something moved with them out of that. It worked on some levels; and there were some things that really showed me how far I’ve got to go. -laughs-

Would you say you were also working classically with this piece? In what ways did you try and create these parallels in the compositional process?

So, yes and no. I wasn’t quite afforded enough time to work seriously collaboratively. And this is one of the pitfalls of working in a very “classical” framework; everything has to happen very fast. The score is kind of doing the work. But I made a point of working in a much more intuitive way. I recorded myself doing improvisations, and layering them up. I would then analyse them in a very rational way, in a very classically-trained way — see what was going on, and extrapolate more material from that. And I would repeat that process back and forth through the whole piece.

There were points where I asked the gospel singers to improvise these kinds of clusters, which was so far out of their comfort zone. But they’re used to working intuitively; so even though they were adopting a very “classical” sound world, they’re doing it in a way that is not unfamiliar to them. With the strings, there were moments where I don’t give them any direction [in the score] — but I worked to give them enough material to improvise on. To signify on that, if you will. My aim with that piece was to really be strict with myself. Being a composer that’s always wanted to control everything, I made a point of taking away information, so the strings were more reliant on their ears, and their intuition. What’s going on around them.

Those are a couple examples of how I got each “force” to interact on each others’ terms. And for me, as well. I’m so used to rationalising everything; I’m a very logical person, normally decisions have to have a reason for being there. But it was very liberating to say “I’m going to write something, I’m not going to think about it, then I’ll back and allow myself some rational indulgence.”

From there, I’d love to know more about the role of the score in your practice. How has your relationship to notation, and scoring, shifted as you’ve incorporated different traditions into your practice?

It’s always changing, my relationship to the score. A big wakeup call was working on a piece called ‘SPIRIT LEVEL’. I hired two jazz musicians — a pianist and a drummer — and three contemporary street dancers. Especially where the pianist was concerned: the more information I gave him on a score, the less “free” he felt — the less able to perform as his training had taught him.

Increasingly, as I start to introduce elements of improvisation and indeterminacy, the score often becomes a barrier to achieving an intuitive “moment” in music. I’m learning to strip away information — be very discerning about what information I give, and what information I take away. So it’s not about more information: it’s about less, but how. That’s a question I’m still trying to answer. A lot of experimentation has gone on with scores.

It’s great you brought up indeterminacy — I understand you’ve had a piece performed a number of times recently by CoMA London…

Yeah — ‘Pathways’ is a good example. The score became a kind of anchor, keeping everyone on the same reference point at all times. But I was quite bold about how I took information out. A lot of the pitches you hear are indeterminate.

Especially where classically trained people are concerned, the score is kind of part of their psyche, almost. But with musicians working with Black music, you have to be very careful what you allow them to see — if anything. When I did ‘The Separating Line’, I gave the choir quite a lot of information explaining the score, explaining what you’re doing in steps. But when I went up to them in [the] final rehearsal, they hadn’t seen any of it! Like: “We’re performing this now, you know that?” -laughs- But they’re so reliant on memory, and their ears, it wasn’t a problem. I just explained what they’re doing, and they were like “okay, yeah”. So what I’ve also found is, if I’m working in this transcultural context, textual information becomes very important. How you word it.

Tell me a bit more about your collaborative process — when you’re working across different art forms, how does your relationship to textual / notational information change?

When it comes to collaboration with non-musicians, I tend to very much have a “blank slate” approach. Wherever possible, I try and bake in workshop time to the process. I’ll often come with ideas, but I try and take the approach of: get together, play around, improvise, and see what comes out of it. Normally, that forms the basis of the work. That’s definitely the case with ‘SPIRIT LEVEL’. It was extremely new territory for me; but I knew that the more I tried to “force” it into this idea that I have, rationalise it, streamline the process, the more resistance I was potentially facing — the harder the journey would be. I had to go in there with an element of faith that the process would generate something worthwhile, and it did.

That’s how I tend to approach collaborations nowadays. That tends to be the norm in Black music, actually; without me realising it, I was working in that kind of spirit. I don’t know if you know D’Angelo — his album Voodoo is a really good example of this in Black music, where the interaction between musical agents is what generates the musical ideas. No one’s come with a template; people have come in with skills, influences, and they play together. That’s what generates musical knowledge. So I’m trying to work more and more in that spirit.

I resonate with that, especially in my own creative practice nowadays — less about the instruments, more about the people.

The composer’s role becomes less about “fixing”, framing outcomes, than it becomes about collecting different voices to produce an outcome. Trying to somehow do both is a journey I’m still on, you know: how can I incorporate those two processes?

You mentioned a bit about signification: in terms of the compositional process, what does that look like for you?

One thing signifying is useful for is looking at how we view history, and the past, as composers. There’s this idea — perhaps [called] into question — that there’s this linear trajectory throughout Western classical music; [that] things are being treated in a linear fashion, in an inexorable way. I don’t know about you, but I feel like there’s a sense at which that’s kind of run out of road. -laughs-

So signifying is interesting because it reflects this treatment of time in Black music, where instead of it being linear, it seems to be cyclical. That’s not just taking things from the past, recycling them, repurposing them to make something new — that’s absolutely fundamental. It’s also about treatment of things like rhythm. You get polyrhythms, and grooves, and syncopation, and it all comes out of this interdependence of different rhythmical forces, working in a cyclical fashion. So I wanted to try and incorporate that.

I looked at these moments in modernism that I like — things from my own classical heritage — and I wanted to repurpose them. To give them a slightly more cyclical treatment of time, that still progresses linearly. I wanted to create this dependence on the actual associations that we have. So I used the Mozart [ed. the overture to ‘Clemenza di Tito’] as a starting point. There’s already so much baggage with that. I wanted that baggage, I wanted to play on these associations — so that every idea I try and warp, I want it to sound a little bit more like a Stravinsky idea, or a Bartok idea. There’s this weird cycle going on between me, classicism, modernism… There’s this tension between the idea, and what I’ve done with it, and the new thing that’s come out of it.

Of course — there’s something to explore in there about how we treat existing musical material. Thinking about ways we play around with genre, or pastiche — like taking melodies from pop songs, or taking “conventional” musical material and juxtaposing them through different processes.

What I was trying to move away from, slightly, was this reliance on irony. If you look at someone like Berio, ‘Sinfonia’… It’s like he’s playing some weird game. All these myriad pieces that he’s referencing; pastiche, irony, this kind of collage mentality to it. I see reflections of that in the way Black music treats its musical memory; but I think there’s something a lot more productive in the way Black music treats what’s come before. Really, it’s about generat[ing] something new from the process of taking something old, repurposing the ideas, and creating something original — but also is entirely unoriginal, at the same time. Hopefully, I’m doing that — trying to move forward, and reassess[ing] how we see time, as not always linear. There are associations with these musical ideas that are there — and we like to pretend perhaps that they’re not, we like to treat them in a slightly detached way — but the experience of the piece massively changes depending on your experience of Mozart, your experience of hip-hop, your experience of Stravinsky. I’m very aware of that as I’m writing the piece. Creating a dependence on association, rather than a detached irony from them.

When working in this kind of way, how important are the audience’s associations for you? What’s the starting point for you?

The starting point is my own. Being a composer, it’s a fairly self-absorbed activity — so naturally, I want to start with my own experiences, and my own associations. But I don’t have those in a vacuum. I have these associations, and I’m not the only one. -laughs- That’s how I see it. But it’s definitely something I want to start exploring again in future, work and be really blatant about it: “this is a reference from xyz, but listen to what I’ve done to it”. It’s not just this new piece, it’s the old one as well at the same time — what’s that like? Because that’s what happens in hip-hop. The sampling, and what’s happening [to the samples], is not lost on its audience.

It’s one thing I’ve tried to move away from — that musical ideas exist in this pure, metaphysical realm. I don’t think they do. We experience things musically for a host of reasons, and one of those reasons is the cultural associations we have with them. It’s a nice way of engaging with that.

It’s breaking down the barriers, essentially. A lot of composers talk about “breaking down barriers”, but it can often be a way of reinforcing those barriers…

Because the framework doesn’t change. I’ve done this. It’s easy to think you’re being original by taking from other spaces, musical traditions; but fundamentally, things aren’t changing. I spent a lot of time, energy, and thought into thinking about why that is.

One of the problems is [that] there’s a slight lack of self-awareness about some of the assumptions that we have as composers, about how we’re operating. This idea that the composer makes the musical decisions, and frames the musical remit — and there’s this divide between the composer, the conductor, the performer[s], the audience, at every step. Then the issue is: how much can you change that before it stops being classical? It makes talk of barriers a little bit problematic; if you really want to break down barriers, how far are we willing to go with that? Do we really want to sit, and look at ourselves, and how we think, and understand that? Because then you’re breaking down barriers, as far as I’m concerned.

At the end of the day, so many of us are trying to overcome this stuffiness — but we’re writing music that requires a certain level of concentration, and introspection. And we do it on purpose! If you’ve got a DJ set going on in the background, that music is loud, and persistent, and will be able to exist and maintain itself despite your loud conversations. So what needs to change, then, if people are going to engage with it — [and] does it need to? Are we talking about breaking barriers because it’s trendy? Or are these things that are valuable — that introspection, that quietude, the depth of philosophical investigation that goes on in composition. Maybe it’s counterproductive. I don’t know.

It’s difficult, because so much of our artistic identities as composers can get tied up in these barriers, as well.

These are big challenges. We’re asking these questions because we’ve come into contact with so many other musical traditions that think so differently. Can you imagine the classical tradition coming up with anything that sounds like a hip-hop beat? There are reasons, thought processes, musical values, that result in these completely different sounds and experiences.

But people have tried — and we can tell when it doesn’t work. -laughs-

I’m convinced that when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work because it’s not seeing that whole picture. If I try and make a string quartet play something resembling a dubstep beat — I might pull it off, but a cello is never going to resemble a sub bass. It doesn’t matter how loudly you play it, it’s never going to have the same acoustic impact — or bodily impact. A cello is so different to an electronically produced sub. It’s very easy to fall into that trap of “I’m a classical composer, I can take these ideas, and I’ve got the ideal framework to incorporate them” — it’s not true. This is what I’m trying to address in my research: what is it that needs to change?

Tell me a bit about what’s coming up — how are you further expanding this research?

I’ve got a bit of a relationship with CoMA ensemble. The great thing about CoMA is they are really up for workshopping; really getting into [the] process. One thing I really want to do is to have a small ensemble, and I find a way to bring their musical voices together — like I’m curating these different musical voices. I want to really emphasise this idea of groove. I really want to embed myself in the process of that. That runs very deep in Black music, and it’s very counter to what we do as composers. That’s one avenue I want to go down — where I’m addressing the curatorial process of Black traditions, not just the aesthetic tools.

I’m trying to take a bit of an autoethnographical approach with my doctorate. One way I’m doing that is getting more and more into my DJing. What I’ve been learning to do for the past two years [is] to incorporate that into my composing as much as possible. When you’re a DJ, you feel like you’re performing the music — even though you’re just pressing play. It’s like the audience feel like it’s your music, even though it’s obviously not; you’re just queueing it up. There’s so many implications [from] that.

I guess one could argue you’re curating the experience, right? Like sampling — you’re taking existing materials and creating a new experience out of it.

Exactly — that’s a good insight. It feels like DJing is a type of composing. The deeper I go into it, the more implications it’s going to have for my practice. I did a DJ set when I went to the Classical:NEXT conference in Berlin. It was a bit experimental. I did a DJ set which mixed classical pieces with 808-y electronic dance; there’s one where I mixed [Carl Orff] Carmina Burana and that Bobby Shmurda track, ‘Hot N****’…

Holy shit. -laughs-

Mate, they went mental. -laughs- I had to speed it up — Carmina Burana — to fit the BPM, but it’s in the same key. There’s one I did [with] this really iconic dubstep track — Mala, ‘Changes’ — [and] Bach’s Mass in B minor. You’d think “oh, eye, roll”, but it worked really well. It showed me there’s so much more potential for bringing those two traditions together.

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Learn more about Blasio and his practice at:

• https://blasiokavuma.com/
• https://royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/composers/rps-composers-programme/recipients-2000-to-date/blasio-kavuma
• https://soundcloud.com/blasio-kavuma/
• https://www.instagram.com/blasiokavuma

References/Links:

• “Amen Break”, loop from The Winstons’ ‘Amen, Brother’ (1969)
• D’Angelo – Voodoo (Virgin Records, 2000)
• Luciano Berio – Sinfonia (1969)
• Carl Orff – Carmina Burna, ‘O Fortuna’ (1935-6)
• Bobby Shmurda – ‘Hot N****’ (2014)
• Mala – ‘Changes’ (2007)
• J.S. Bach – Mass in B minor, BWV 232 (1749)