In March, 2026 I received an email from Michael Knopp, a British music student currently in the process of writing a dissertation on how music technology shapes genre and culture. He also is engaged in constructing a new instrument of his own design: “My instrument’s basically a variation on the musical saw; however, while the musical saw struggles to maintain consistent pitch, making it bad for ensemble playing, my instrument is a bar of spring steel held in a frame with a resonant chamber, allowing each bar to play a consistent pitch.” Michael asked the following questions.
MK. A lot of your music is defiantly somewhat unusual. Do you find that striving for new and innovative ideas sometimes ends up as somewhat of a burden on the quality of the music, or do you find it always a good thing?
BB. As a composer, searching for innovative ideas for the sake of being new, or even original, is not part of my process. During the 1990s I found a systematic approach to a harmonic language that sounded new to me. It was based in a very personal response to listening to a non-Western, and non-harmonic, musical source (North Indian raga) and engaging with it using certain traditional western harmonic structures. Fortunately for me as a composer, the system continues to be deeply fertile and productive. For more details about this take a look at my article Finding a Voice in The Cambridge Companion to Percussion, ed. Russell Hartenberger (CUP, 2016).
MK. Many of your performances with Nexus have been improvisational. How much of the music is pre-agreed upon (key, time signature, etc.) or is it entirely made up?
BB. For around three years following our first concert Nexus performances were entirely free improvisations, with no attempts to define how the music should unfold, nor even how long it should last. The particular instruments brought to a performance by each individual member were not discussed in advance, and the onstage setups were different for every show. Everything about these events was spontaneous. Later in the group’s career, formal composed pieces were gradually added to our programs. Eventually, improvisations became one of a number of elements on a concert, but they remained entirely unplanned and unrehearsed.
MK. Do you have any tips when it comes to performing improvisational music?
BB. As you know, there are many kinds of music that incorporate improvisation. The free and spontaneous style that we’re discussing requires curiosity and an adventurous sensibility on the part of the players. It also requires an open mind and a commitment to listening intently to all of the sounds being produced. From one point of view, improvisation may be considered to be spontaneous composition. It also may be spontaneous orchestration: choosing pitches, timbres and dynamics, as well as deciding on instrumental doubling and colouring – all in real time. Any traditional composer is concerned with all of these elements too, but has time to refine, or even discard, ideas as they appear, and of course has the option to return to the music at a later time and revise what has been developed. Improvisation, for better or worse, doesn’t allow that kind of consideration. It demands presence in the moment, and a willingness to accept and engage with what is unfolding on stage in front of an audience.
One thing that we did in Nexus, both with our first non-public experiments, and then with almost every public show, was to record the performance, and later listen to the playback together. We listened to these recordings carefully, often with amusement but, for the most part, without judgment. Hearing how the sounds of our various instruments worked together, and how our personal musical gestures inter-related (or not), contributed to the evolution of a group style. Bill Cahn developed a systematic approach to teaching free improvisation based on this idea in his book Creative Music Making. There are numerous posts about the book and about workshops relating to the concept on Bill’s blog on the Nexus website. For example, HERE.
MK. Do you find composing/arranging for less common instruments is harder than for instruments we see and interact with every day (piano, guitar, violin, etc.)?
BB. I don’t know. I don’t use “unusual” instruments in my compositions. I can’t speak for other composers, although I can imagine that it is not difficult to compose or arrange music using such things. The problem is notating the parts accurately and persuasively, and then finding performers who own the instruments and can play them well. I have nothing against working in this way, but it almost insures limited options for music sales and performances. For composers who are also members of a dedicated ensemble (percussion or otherwise), it can be a reasonable way to develop personal repertoire. Two composers who dealt with this dilemma, at least during their own lifetimes, were Harry Partch and John Cage.
MK. It mentions on the page dedicated to Nexus’s history on your website that you’ve played several shows where all the material is older compositions, not necessarily written for the line-up that Nexus has (Stravinsky – Les Noces for example), how do you go about interpreting music that wasn’t written for a percussion ensemble? And what, if anything, is lost in that transition?
BB. All except one of the original members of Nexus were conservatory trained, and had lots of experience in chamber and orchestral performance. Several members maintained full-time positions in major symphony orchestras during much of the group’s career. When we appeared as the “percussion section” in pieces such as Les Noces, Carmina Burana, Carmen Suite (Shchedrin) et al., we approached the music in the traditional orchestral manner. Of course we had our personal ideas about instrument choices, and perhaps our experience playing and touring together lent some authority to the overall feeling of ensemble. This was certainly the case when we appeared as soloists in concerti composed for us.
MK. Do you think my instrument (or at least what it is based on what you know about it) could have any applications in the type of music you make?
BB. Your instrument certainly could have found a home in the instrumentation used for Nexus improvisations. In fact, one of our members, Bill Cahn, experimented with musical saw, even creating a mechanism that allowed multiple saws to be played one-handed using a foot pedal. You can see a photo and read about it on his blog Instruments You Can’t Buy, HERE.
MK. What’s (in your opinion) the instrument that gives you the most trouble from a composition/arranging perspective? And how do you feel that particular instrument could be improved to make it more usable?
BB. It sounds as if you’re asking about percussion instruments specifically. For many composers, the most problematic instruments to write for are ones that they can’t play themselves. That’s true for me as well, and for that reason I often rely on “pre-rehearsals” to help identify and clarify issues with things like fingering, bowing, and articulation for strings and winds. To some extent, I feel the same concern regarding specific percussion instruments that are either new to me (a category that is ever-expanding) or instruments that I understand, but have only rudimentary technical abilities to play. In my composition work, I generally do not use percussion instruments outside of the standard orchestral family, which includes the major keyboard instruments, piano, standard drums and toms, timpani, cymbals, and crotales. I want to feel confident that the instruments required for my pieces will be: 1) readily available; 2) technically well-understood by most professional performers; and 3) universally manufactured to an expected standard. This is certainly true for the string, woodwind and brass families connected with European classical music as it is found currently throughout North America, Japan, and other parts of Asia. As a composer, I am focused on exploring structures and relationships that have been developing in my music now for more than 30 years. I’m not interested in scoring for unpredictable exotic sounds, unusual technical approaches, or non-standard tuning systems. I need to know what sounds to expect, and to know that if I do my job with providing a clear and comprehensible notation, performers will be comfortable and secure in realizing my intentions. When all of that is in place, a superior performance usually results.
