Invitations.
Vice Versa co-founder Brendan Sweeney talks about how the ideas and collaborations inside the collective have influenced his creative process.
I remember the first time I really felt freedom expressing myself as a performer. It wasn't - and hasn't been - playing repertoire works of classical music with highly prescriptive notation. That always felt like taking a test, where the goal was scoring a perfect 100, and any deviation from the pre-determined "correct" interpretation was viewed as an error. I never could break the mentality that someone was keeping score every time I failed to sound like Bud Herseth playing Petrushka or Sergei Nakariakov playing the Tomasi Concerto.
The freedom first came in big band and combo class, as a graduate student. Something had switched in the years since I left Jazz in high school - where anytime someone put changes in front of me I played root of every chord and tried not to look terrified. Now I felt like I had been let loose. This wasn't music where there was a right answer. This was music where I was invited to give my own take, my own perspective. Literally an invitation to make something up. And this time around, after many hours of practice, study, and some acne treatments, it was liberating.
This new found liberation left me asking: how do I get this freedom into my compositions? It took me much longer to find that answer, but it eventually began to take shape on the page. And the shape it took was graphic scores.
The first toe dipped into the chromatic waters of swapping out quarter notes and five line staffs for swooshes and bubbles was a self-preformed piece for my doctoral recital. For reasons both philosophical and pragmatic, it felt like the time to write something introspective and for myself. The whole goal of the work was to create a massive sound collage out of the recording of my first ever composition - a simple piece for trumpet and piano - and sit in and and respond ten years later. I originally performed this work completely without a score; the score came later when other people asked to see it. Sheepishly, I would tell them I had made it up. But after saying that once or twice, I realized that was no different than anything else I had written and fully notated. The difference was that this piece was different every time it was played, and asked the performer to respond to what they were hearing and feeling in the moment. So this first score arose out of an effort not to codify minutiae of what happened sonically every time the work was performed, but to show process and a general arch of the electronics in relation to time.
The next work I felt was a massive leap forward. I have always been a fan of mazes, particularly how their form and intended experience differ form standard formal expectations of music. Most music (at least most music I've experienced as an american born at the turn of the century and raised on radio and then streaming) is meant to take you from a start point to an end point, while the listener is able to clearly orient themselves inside of the musical form for the duration of the journey. The destination is the goal. Mazes subvert this. In Henry Elliot's book Follow This Thread, he talks about the point of mazes being the journey itself, losing and finding the path and one's self as you explore the many different avenues you can traverse before the maze ends. Historically mazes were made literal passtimes, a thing to do when you were in no hurry and interested in being somewhere or in a state of mind not pre-occupied with where you had to be next. The journey is the goal.
A project for my friends in RE:Duo - I wanted to reimagine the cosmetics of chamber music while keeping the what I view as it's core aspects; performers listening and communicating with each other to coordinate action and intention. Performers enter the mazing by holding one of the fermata's at the twelve waypoints, and the piece lasts as long as it takes the performers to successfully echoe locate one another and arrive at a unison. How the performers sonically traverse the maze is entirely left to them.
The latest culmination of this work took form for Vice Versa's inaugural show in Long Island City, May of 2025. The theme was Rock Paper Scissors and we had tasked the seven collaborators with each bringing their own interpretation of the prompt to the project. Wanting the vary the sonic background for what was to be an evening length performance and feeling unsatisfied with the last piece I wrote him, I decided to write a piano solo for Dan Townsend.
What struck me about the theme was the formal implications of the game itself. Rock Paper Scissors has three possible outcomes per game, - win lose or draw. I thought of what it would mean to give Dan a series of provocative cells, some notated and some graphic, and leave it to him whether to advance to the next cell, retreat to the previous cell, or repeat the current cell. In this way an emergent form that shifted with every performance is possible, where Dan may fully reshape the overall scale and scope of the work with each performance. The result stunned me. Dan is such an incredible performer that I doubt I will be satisfied with this effort for him for too long, but it did finally allow him the room - in my estimation - to be completely, musically him, inside of one of my pieces.
This work - and the previous two to different extents - felt like finding the right balance again between the composer in me who wanted to dictate specific sonic events, and the one who wanted to invite performers to make works their own. They are, to me, refreshingly open while retaining a distinct identity as works outside of free improvisation. I still happily write fully notated works where every dynamic, rhythm, pitch, and articulation is decided on by me. But these works are were the ideas and inspirations that both came to be and came from Vice Versa live.
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