esperanza spalding Releases “Formwela” Album

This past July this site discussed esperanza spalding’s launch of the Songwrights Apothecary Lab and the three compositions entitled “Formwela” that she created as part of that launch process. At that time I described the nature of the lab as follows:

The “laboratory” provided a venue for collaboration among musicians, researchers, and practitioners in a variety of disciplines. The goal was to explore “how songwriters may meaningfully incorporate therapeutic practices and knowledge into their process and production.”

This was clearly a lofty vision that left me feeling more than a little skeptical. Furthermore, I have to confess that the home page for the Songwrights Apothecary Lab is far from user-friendly. Indeed, my primary impression is that anyone visiting the site is obliged to figure out how to explore it in the absence of any user-friendly interface. In other words the act of exploration is, itself, a creative act to be exercised by the explorer.

For better or worse, that Web site also served as a platform on which spalding would post her “Formwela” compositions as she created them. The project resulted in twelve songs numbered from one to thirteen with twelve omitted. A few months ago the entire cycle was released as an album, entitled SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB, by Concord.

When I first wrote about the early stages of this project, the longest of the compositions was a little over seven minutes. Now there is “Formwela 8,” which is somewhat longer than eleven and a half minutes. This tends to undermine my initial impression that these pieces could be treated a musical haiku! I continue to be skeptical about spalding’s use of the phrase “therapeutic practices and knowledge;” but, to be fair, when I was involved with a research project that called itself “sensemaking,” I had to deal with my own encounters with skepticism!

Whatever one may say about the lofty goals of the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, there is much that is compelling in spalding’s vocal work in performing her “Formwela” compositions. When I encountered the “first round” of these pieces, I suggested that the music “seems to trigger the deployment of a unique set of cognitive processes.” I suppose my previous encounters with “sensemaking” are coming back to haunt me. However, there is nothing particularly scary about those hauntings, just a sense of plunging into an unknown without fear of every getting totally lost. I suspect that I shall be visiting the track on Songwrights Apothecary Lab with more frequency than I may have originally intended.