-Morton Feldman

“John’s music … had nothing to do with improvisation. That was one of the major confusions that people made, and that, clearly, was dead wrong. We’re getting now to the period of the Variations sequence, which really pushed the notion of what constituted a piece of music, because nothing was said about anything except you had to make yourself something out of these lines and dots and things that were on plastic sheets. … But what always struck me as so mysterious was that what people did with those things almost all the time would come out sounding like John’s work. … There’s this mysterious thing that in those days people would try some of John’s chance techniques, but their music wouldn’t come out sounding like John’s.”

The first version I ever heard was from Berio’s Folk Songs song cycle.  I found this nice video on youtube, which scrolls through the score as the piece goes along:

Not my favorite performance (I’m attached to this recording, with Christine Schadeberg), but good.

There are all these other great performances, though.  Nina Simone’s is just haunting.  There are several videos online of different performances of hers.  I quite like this one, for her piano playing as much as her singing.  I love the beginning in particular, while she effortlessly keeps playing while a “roadie” adjusts the piano bench underneath her. The second part of the video, with Emile Latimer singing and playing guitar (starting around 3:25), I love less.

Joan Baez does a nice version, probably closest to the folk ideal of the ones I’ve heard:

Then there’s the famous recording by the enigmatic, influential jazz singer Patty Waters, with a totally improvised accompaniment by Burton Greene. Completely brilliant and otherworldly:

The sequenza for voice particularly stood out for me (last night was the first time I’d heard it live). I don’t write a lot of vocal music, of any variety. The voice, as an instrument, has always been somewhat enigmatic to me. But after Daisy’s amazing performance, I got to thinking about the vocal works which have really moved me, and I thought I’d put up a quick post with a few of them. There are more, of course, than these, but these are the first that come immediately to mind. They all strike me as wonderfully playful. It seems extended vocal techniques (the incorporation into music of vocal sounds not typically thought of as musical – speech, groans, laughs, gargles, tongue pops, even coughs), require a commitment to playfulness in a way that those for other instruments often don’t (except in certain instances the trombone). If the performer makes that commitment, the result is really fantastic.

First, here’s the Berio (I like this one, but Daisy’s was better):

Of course, Pierrot Lunaire…

One I’ve just discovered: George Aperghis’s Beaux jours après la pluie (Beautiful days after the rain):

Here’s two short ones from The Books, “Bonanza” and “PS” (both from the album “The Lemon of Pink”)

The incredible Messa di Voce

Lastly, there’s a piece called Erotic by Pierre Schaeffer, a movement from his musique concrète masterpiece Symphonie pour un homme seul. There is a video up on Youtube, but it’s very, as they say, NSFW, so I don’t want to post it here. But just search “schaeffer erotic” on youtube and you’ll find it.

I met cellist/composer/performance artist Jessie Marino in 2006 at Manhattan School of Music. She was in the last semester of an undergraduate cello degree, and I was in the last semester of the masters program in composition.  I was preparing a recital of original electronic music, and was looking for a cellist to perform with an interactive KYMA patch I had designed.  I was introduced to Jessie by a composer friend, asked her if she’d be interested in giving it a shot, and was taken aback by both her enthusiasm and her amazing, thoughtful improvisation.

Since then, after a stint in Berlin, Jessie has been working with the innovative ensembles Pamplemousse and Wet Ink, started a new project called On Structure with flutist and composer Natacha Diels, and has worked on a number of interesting independent projects, including an upcoming solo CD of works for cello and electronics.  Last week, as part of SOHO20’s Visual Volume festival , Jessie premiered her latest creation, IGLOO, a sound sculpture built from styrofoam cups, contact microphones, and music boxes.  I attended the festival, and asked Jessie if I could ask her a few questions about the installation and other aspects of her work.

AS: What is IGLOO?

JM: IGLOO is an inhabitable sound structure. Its a quasi-geodesic dome (I say “quasi” because I never finished my high school math classes, so while it looks pretty even, the mathematics behind the construction are lucky at best!) made from about 800 styrofoam cups.  Small transducers amplify the sound of music boxes inside the dome, and excite the styrofoam, which vibrates sympathetically, acting like a giant low-fidelity speaker.

AS: Where did the idea come from?

JM: The idea came from my shower, where most of my ideas come from! I had been building these little floor lamps for friends out of plastic dental cups, and then one day as the hot water was flowing I just thought, “What if I made one of these lamps humongous, and out of styrofoam, and instead of light, I use sound?”  Hot water and grogginess are a pretty amazing combination, creatively speaking!

AS: What was your path from playing classical cello to building sound sculptures?

JM: I didn’t start playing the cello until high school, so there was a mad rush to learn how to play a foreign instrument as well as kids who had been playing since before they could run. But in a way, I think that my late start and late entrance into the “classical world” has been fortunate. I don’t feel required to be faithful to classical music. I love classical music, but have no need to interact with it anymore.

The path from studying an instrument to building sculptures is not as far as you would expect. Its all about committing to a task. It used to be playing Boccherini Concertos, then it became deciphering Lachenmann scores, now its building electronics and making these weird dream like ideas in my head come to life.  I’d love to make some sort of deeply philosophical connection between species counterpoint and igloos made of trash, but honestly it’s all about seeing the idea through, regardless of its origin or intent.

AS: Is there a connection between IGLOO and your other current work as a cellist and composer?

JM: It’s a new arena for me, and one that I’m really enjoying at the moment, but there is definitely a connection with my other work as a cellist and composer. The sound world that I am using in all of my work is pretty consistent with my own improvising and with the pieces that I write and perform with Ensemble Pamplemousse.

AS: Do you have plans to continue in this direction?  If so, what’s down the pipe?

JM: Katie Shima, from Loud Objects, and I have been talking about doing a project together, which I’m actually super excited about! Besides being an awesome musician, she is also a working architect! There are so many things that I don’t even know exist that she knows exactly how to do, so that is very exciting.

In the immediate future, the next big project that I’m going to take on is building a pedal chain for my cello. All those guitar pedals are really cumbersome to play with, so I’m going to build a bunch of them on a smaller scale and try to figure out a way to attach them to the body and sides of my cello so that i can tinker and tweak them more idiomatically during performance.

AS: You have a performance coming up on Friday, 12/10, with On Structure, your performance art duo with Natacha Diels.  What is On Structure, and how did it begin?

JM: It started with Natacha and I wanting to perform more together as a duo. We did a lot of improvising after I moved back from Berlin, and played a few shows that incorporated a lot more “performative” elements (dancers, yarn, ping pong balls, filtering speakers with physical objects). Now we are not really playing our instruments in our sets, but more composing sonic motion. I like the idea of movement as a compositional material, and I think that is one of the driving ideas behind On Structure.

AS: On your site, there is a performance piece, Rot/Blau, a tape piece, and an acoustic work for flute & cello.  How are these pieces related?

JM: The pieces on the website track our progression from being a flute and cello duo to our work now which incorporates movement and light as well as sound. The tape piece that Natacha wrote also has this beautiful visual element where she manipulates green and red lasers and reflects them on the walls in these gorgeous abstract patterns. We’re still working on getting some good documentation for that piece. It’s tricky filming things in the dark!

AS: Rot/Blau is a very cool piece.  I like the precision and the theatricality.  There seems to be an element of absurdity as well.  Can you say a few words about this piece in particular?

JM: Thanks! Yes, the piece is totally absurd!  I am fascinated by the juxtaposition of severity and absurdity. There was a time when Natacha and I were getting confused for one another by many of the people we were meeting. We had very similar hair cuts and have similar body types so it was understandable that people were getting us confused. But then it started happening all the time!  I wanted to write a piece where this confusion was happening on purpose. Throughout the piece we are switching which color we are (red or blue) and which side of the table red and blue sits at.  The idea is that, if you don’t know us personally, you might not even recognize that there is a different person wearing the blue wig at the end of the piece, that you would only identify with the characters by their most obvious physical attributes.

AS: Do you consider the sections of rot/blau to be movements, in the traditional sense?  What was your approach to time/rhythm in that piece?

JM: I do consider them to be movements, but not in the traditional sense. There wasn’t any consideration for traditional formal structures that happen in a sonata or a symphony, for example. The “time” and “rhythm” in the piece happen pretty organically. They’re inherent in the actions themselves.

AS: Are there particular artists or projects, contemporary or from the past, that inspire your work?

JM: Well, Ensemble Pamplemousse is a big source of inspiration for me.  Working with them always gives me new ideas, and they almost never say, “No, we can’t do that.”  It’s awesome to be able to work with them on a regular basis. I’d also say that George Aperghis and Manos Tsangaris are big influences of mine. They are the hip guys in the European experimental musical theater scene.

AS: Judging from the imagery on the On Structure site, I get the impression that a thread of comedy, or perhaps satire (at least, irreverence?) runs through the On Structure project.  Is that correct?  Is there anything in particular, in the art/music world, or the world at large, that On Structure is responding to?

JM: Hm… I don’t think so. We’re just writing and performing pieces that challenge our own comfort zones, and that we think might be interesting. We’re giving ourselves another performance platform to fool around with.  It’s certainly a playful group, but I wouldn’t say that there is any intentional comedy or satire.  We just really enjoy goats!

AS: You mentioned your time in Berlin being important in your going in these new directions (performance art, sculpture, installation), and that Aperghis and Tsangaris are influences.  What was your time like there? What was your reason for going?  What did you work on there?

JM: I think you only move some place totally new for love or money. I fell into the former catagory, but once my personal relationship fizzled out, I fell deeply in love with Berlin. There were endless amounts of time (a dream in terms of constantly doing work, but a nightmare for actually finishing it!), which allowed me to explore a lot of different kinds of music that I probably wouldn’t have been directly involved with in New York. Wandelweiser and text-based scores, reductionist improvisation, IDM, sound art, and experimental musical theater. This last category, I think, can really only exist on a regular basis over in Europe because of public subsidies, so I tried to fill up on my fair share of theater in my last few months of living there. Composers like Aperghis and Tsangaris were really hot at the time (they both subsequently taught at Darmstadt) so they were being programmed quite a bit. I guess what I’m trying to get at in a very long and convoluted sort of way, is that my work there was to listen. I listened to everything and tried to play in as many random scenes and settings as possible. I was filtering the aspects of all these kinds of music that I liked and disliked, and trying to figure out a way to incorporate my own voice. It was after I left Berlin, that I started composing.

I was thrilled to be part of this interview along with composer/sound artists Charles Lindsay and Annea Lockwood.  It was a particular thrill to be on the show with Annea, who is one of the masters of the soundmap form, and in part from whom I drew the inspiration to do this new work (In fact, she’s on to talk about her newest river work, Soundmap of the Housatonic River. Previously, she has mapped the Hudson and the Danube.)

Standing Water is a soundmap in that the recorded material marks locations along a particular route, but it differs from Annea’s work in two important ways: 1) I take slightly more liberty with the material.  Annea’s work is remarkable for how little she does to it – she uses great mics and finds amazing natural sounds.  Standing Water is largely faithful to the original recordings, but a couple of the movements are more edited, and 2) There’s an instrumentalist.  Eleonore Oppenheim is lending her incredible artistry on solo double bass, playing in counterpoint with the recordings.

Standing Water is going to be performed on Saturday, October 30, at 8pm, at White Box.  I curated this particular evening, entitled New York Soundscape, which will also feature works by Paula Matthusen, Miguel Frasconi, and Jennifer Stock.  Four very different types of work on the theme of water in New York City.

More info on New York Soundscape

More info on the complete Ear to the Earth festival

Before I take a little break, though, there are three more events this month, the first of which is tonight, Thursday, October 14, from 7-8pm. It’s the premiere of a new work, Uninhabited, a graphic score to accompany my generative sound installation, Moving Parts, running all month at Participant on the lower East side. Tonight’s show features four amazing and innovative musicians: Eileen Mack (bass clarinet), Jessie Marino (cello), James Moore (electric guitar), and Mike McCurdy (drums). As the installation runs and the players play, you’re invited to walk around the gallery and check out The Fourth Space, a show of video art
by Cecilia Dougherty.

Next Thursday, October 21, we’ll do Uninhabited again with a slightly different lineup.

Finishing out the month, on October 30th, is the premiere of another new
work, Standing Water: A Soundmap of the Gowanus Canal, featuring the incomparable bassist Eleonore Oppenheim. More information on this one coming soon.

I was too quick, though, in dismissing the more essential point of the post, namely that composers of new music work really hard for very little recognition. Widespread public recognition is essentially off the table from the get-go, but recognition from critics and even one’s peers is hard to come by as well. Given the essentially non-commercial nature of the work a lot of us do, what keeps us going is the chance to have great ensembles play our music, to collaborate with (for example) a video artist we admire, even just putting out a record (leaving aside profiting from it), taking part in interesting festivals, getting to a point where we’re taking the gigs we want to take, not just every gig that comes along. I am at a point in my career where some of these things are just starting to happen for me. I have an amazing 22-month-old son, an incredible wife who does work that just blows my mind, and for the first time since starting a family, things are beginning to pick up for me, compositionally. From my perspective, in other words, the new music scene (and life, generally) is full of exciting potentialities, some of which are beginning to be realized. Gann’s perspective, though, which he fleshes out a bit in his responses to several commenters (I encourage you to read the whole thread), is totally valid, and is based on decades of experience I don’t have, so I should not have dismissed it. He writes in the comments, “I thought that with enough work, what Malcolm Gladwell calls a tipping point was going to arrive, at which time everything would be no longer uphill.” I can certainly identify with the upward-looking nature of being a composer in this environment. It is unbelievably oppressive, and I would imagine the higher one climbs, the harder that next rung is to reach.

One thing I consciously strive for (and it’s a different kind of striving – more inward – than striving for recognition) is to get to a point where I can compose entirely for myself. I of course don’t mean no longer interfacing with the rest of the music world, but writing the music I want to write because I want to write it, without thinking so much about what anyone else (audience or critic) will think about it. I’m convinced that whether the recognition comes or not, I’ll be happier if I’m able to do that.

In short, I do think Gann was painting with a bit of a broad brush, and that there is a lot that is gratifying in composing new music, but I wanted to offer a small mea culpa for painting his post with an equally broad brush.

[PS Thinking about all of this, it strikes me that maybe what we need when we get down about the tough lot we've chosen for ourselves as new music composers is Alec Baldwin's character from Glengarry Glen Ross, berating us: "Money's out there. You pick it up, it's yours. You don't, I got no sympathy for you. You wanna go out on those commissions tonight and compose, COMPOSE. It's yours. If not you're gonna be shining my shoes. And you know what you'll be saying - a bunch of losers sittin' around in a bar. 'Oh yeah. I used to be a composer. It's a tough racket.'"]

“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist.”

First of all, as Gann himself points out, this is coming from someone who has had success, by every reasonable measure.  He’s a widely-known figure in the new music world, he’s the respected author of several books (and not unknown books one can only find in niche online stores – I’ve seen his 4′33″ book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble), he teaches at Bard (not a bad gig for someone so down on academia), and has an active composing career, not to mention a successful blog.  But, he writes, “People meet me, and I’m not the composer, I’m not even the author, I’m the blogger,” and, “why do I do anything but blog?”  Poor guy.  What an unfortunate circumstance, to have so much recognition and success that he can’t choose which of his pursuits gets recognized the most.

More to the point, though, Gann is being unnecessarily gloomy about the choices facing those of us devoted to new music.  First of all, I don’t think terribly many composers on the downtown/experimental/electronic spectrum (or “uptown” for that matter) get into this particular line of work with the expectation of signing a million-dollar record deal, so even to list that as something we’re unable to make a dent in seems a bit of straw-man.  I don’t know enough about the orchestral market to respond to his comment on that point, but I suspect he’s right about having to know the right people and start young.  His sweeping indictment of the quality of the music, though, is inappropriate, disrespectful, and stupid.  Lastly, academia, imperfect though it may be, gets treated really unfairly.  In my experience, academia has every kind of composer you can think of. The ivory-tower, we-only-respect-serialism thing is at best out-of-date, and I suspect that it was never really as pervasive as it gets credit for having been.  There are just too many schools in too many places with too many composers working in them to be such a monolithic force.

I reject Gann’s pessimism.  The new music scene is really exciting right now.  There are too many amazing ensembles to mention, and it seems like every single night there’s a concert I wish I had the chance to go to.  I wish I could keep up with all of the opportunities out there for composers.  I look at my friends and colleagues, at the amazing work they’re doing, the prizes and commissions they’re winning, and I’m incredibly excited to be working right now.  It’s easy enough to moan about not having a gold record or a bunch of orchestral commissions, but the opportunities don’t end there.  A lot of composers I know don’t even have those things on their radars, so not achieving them isn’t much of a disappointment.  There’s simply too much else to do.