The Sheer Frost Orchestra: A Nail Polish Bottle, A Guitar String and the Birth of an Orchestra

The Sheer Frost Orchestra, since its birth in 1993 when I was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, has been creating improvised music—and improvisers—from an essentially random pool of participants: women whom I approach and invite to participate, regardless of prior music experience. I provide them with a playing technique that they can learn in an evening (Fig. 1): a series of named, one-handed gestures, a list of musical parameters to consider (fast versus slow, dense versus sparse, sudden versus gradual, etc.) and a gridlike score (Fig. 2) that instructs their actions in 60- or 30-second intervals. The seating of the orchestra—in a single line the approximate length of 17 guitars laid on the floor end to end (or about 70 ft)—produces a standard orchestra's broad timbral spacialization, with discrete sound sources (i.e. amps) spread out across a stereo field, and resembles, if anything, a cross between a gamelan ensemble and the Radio City Rockettes. A row of a hundred or more nail-polish bottles divides audience from the musicians and visually demarcates the "stage." Participants have to come up with an electric guitar and, ideally, an amplifier too, but that is usually not too difficult.

The point is to recruit nonmusicians and enable them to transform themselves into musicians or, as I sometimes characterize it, people "making musical decisions in real time." The technique I teach, playing the guitar by laying it on its back and striking it with a hard, inanimate object (Fig. 3)—a nail-polish bottle—is incidental to the original intention, which is to give my players a way to be involved in a mystical and enthralling activity: playing electric-guitar music live. I also like the contrary relationship my "sheer frost"-style guitar-playing technique has to "normal" guitar-playing. We do not actually touch the guitars at all, since the glass surfaces on the bottom of the bottles mediate our touch; and the instruments rest on the floor instead of on our laps or crotches. This represents a fundamental alteration of the classic manner of contact between bodies and electric guitars. As guitarists, we are cold instead of hot; in formation and in uniform, in fact, we're frosty, glassy, impermeable, opaque, sheer—and all that the bottles say about the polish inside. And the ruffled tuxedo shirts I collected for performances are "cool" colored and rock 'n' roll too, a Ricky Ricardo-esque touch that I think emphasizes both our individuality and our identity as a newly formed group, for the other transformation that takes place is that this cacophony of disparate personalities inevitably becomes an organism—an orchestra.

Fig. 1.

Sheer Frost Orchestra rehearsal, 2001. (Photo © Jason Schmidt)

Although I originally believed we were "antivirtuosos," rejecting the worshipful attitude of rock-star hopefuls and fans alike toward guitar "gods" and their exaggerated "skills," the orchestra has evolved its own kind of virtuosity. For each orchestra, I explain the six hand-and-nail-polish gestures—the drop, the scratch, the hop, the drone, the slide and the "A" (for Anything, or All, or sometimes Anarchy; in other words, combinations, alterations and/or whatever innovation a player has independently evolved)—and do a sort of freestyle lecture demonstration on what "making music" could be in this context. Sometimes I add crib sheets to the score that recommend thinking in specific ways about concepts such as pitch or dynamics. I home in on the ways I think I can expand the field of the communication we are attempting, including refinements of the scoring system, the workshop/rehearsal process and the socializing that always goes with it. But the main variable is always the players and the infinity of musical variation they already embody even before they pick up a guitar or a nail polish bottle. Composing with this "raw material" in mind, my idea is essentially to produce a generative situation, or a series of situations, that brings the latent music into sound...