Light, music and improvisation
Simon Rose, Lena Czerniawska, Emese Csornai, Viola Yip · 2024
This chapter explores light, music and improvisation by offering three accounts by artists who work with light in different ways. For this book’s concern with artistic practices working together through improvisation, light provides a constant and essential presence that is more often overlooked. Working with lighting, drawing and objects, Lena Czerniawska frequently collaborates with musicians, developing techniques whereby she can ‘embrace any space’. For her, improvisation in music nurtures cross-disciplinary self-discovery; improvisation is a ‘super skill’ with which to bring ‘the best of yourself, your time’. Lighting designer Emese Csornai gives a detailed account of her light practice and calls into question the inadequacy of terminology surrounding light and lighting, as she puts it: ‘the significance of light seems to be pretty much left out.’ Emese asserts improvisation’s potential as a ‘serious proposition’ of determined decision-making and collaborative artistic commitment to the moment of performance. Composer, musician and researcher Viola Yip’s integration of light within music performance is her site of research. The performance of light creates other experimental, political and aesthetic registers. Through themes of intermediality , the body and performativity , the development of her practice is ‘a conversation between my performance in sound and light, but also between my musical identities as a composer and a performer.’