from The Seattle Times:
On paper, the practice that Butch Morris calls “conduction” sounds like a recipe for musical chaos. But after more than three decades, Morris is a maestro of spontaneously directed ensemble performance, an artist capable of transforming an ad-hoc group of musicians into a thrilling vehicle for instantaneous arranging and composing.
Using a system of graphics and gestures, Morris has honed a semaphoric vocabulary that allows him to shape a performance in real time, initiating or altering harmony, timbre, dynamics, melody and any other musical dimension. After leading hundreds of conductions around the world, he doesn’t set out with a stylistic agenda, preferring to suss out his collaborators through rigorous workshops.
“Every situation is different,” says Morris, 63, who concludes a 10-day residency at Cornish College of the Arts with his first Seattle conduction on Saturday at Poncho Hall.
Continue reading at The Seattle Times.