Apropos of my post a couple days ago, about Cage’s sound, I want to quote a few lines from Christian Wolff, who’s interview with William Duckworth I’m reading in the latter’s Talking Music:

“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.”

For fun, today, I traced my musical lineage back a bit. I’d like to do this in a more serious way some day, actually do a bit of real research. The only logic here is that these are all pieces for piano, which I acknowledge is rather arbitrary. Here it is:

Anton Bruckner

Bruckner’s student, Alexander von Zemlinsky

Zemlinsky’s student, Arnold Schoenberg

Schoenberg’s student, Anton Webern

Webern’s student, Stefan Wolpe.

Wolpe’s student, Morton Feldman

Feldman’s student, Nils Vigeland

Vigeland’s student, me:
io(sorry, no video of this performance)

I have a little obsession lately with the Appalachian folk song, “Black is the colour of my true love’s hair.”

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:

Home just now from tonight’s concert at Issue Project Room, the S.E.M. Ensemble performing works by John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Petr Kotik, part of the Darmstadt: Essential Repertoire Festival.  Wonderful concert, I’m really glad they do this series (and really glad to see the capacity crowds!).

Listening tonight to Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (Joseph Kubera on piano), I recalled a post from a week or two ago by Kyle Gann, where he pointed out that the NY Times, in a companion piece to his review of a new book on Cage, asked John Adams “whether he actually listens to Cage’s music.” Gann posted Adams’s answer: “It sounds absurd to say that Cage was ‘hugely influential’ and then admit you rarely listen to his music, but that’s the truth for me, and I suspect it’s the same for most composers I know.”  Well, yes, actually, it’s completely absurd.  It’s ridiculous. I’m tempted to say it’s offensive. Gann rightly asks, “would [the Times] have asked the same question about any other composer?”

It’s an attitude one runs across a lot, that Cage is very interesting to talk about and to think about, but not satisfying to listen to.  This attitude starts in the classroom, in fact.  Some of the first things one learns about Cage as a music student are that he was admittedly terrible at harmony, didn’t have an “ear” in the traditional sense, and that famous anecdote where Schoenberg calls him, and I’m paraphrasing, a genius but not a composer.   I think I learned these things before I ever even heard a note of his music or looked at a score.  More recently, in response to something I posted about listening to a recording of Atlas Eclipticalis, and a friend (also a composer) said something to the effect of “great concept, but it fails as a piece of music.”

This attitude just baffles me, though, because I so often find such incredible pleasure listening to performances of Cage’s music.  Tonight’s performance just absolutely glistened.  It was incredible.  The crowd applauded heartily for what seemed like several full minutes.  I have this experience a lot, actually.  As another example, in 2007, when I still worked full-time for EMF, I produced that year’s Ear to the Earth Festival, which included the NY Premiere of Cage’s A Dip in the Lake.  A couple hundred people came out for that piece, which was over an hour long, the visual aspect of which consisted only of three musicians standing and pressing buttons on CD mixers, and the crowd simply roared when it was over.  Like tonight’s packed house, they weren’t cheering the idea of the piece.  They were responding to the music.  Recordings of Atlas Eclipticalis, 101, Winter Music, Williams Mix, Imaginary Landscape No. IV, Music of Changes, several Music for pieces, and many of Cage’s other works are constantly in rotation on my iPod, not because I’m studying them, but because I get pleasure from listening to them. The guy understood something about sound, about time, about proportion, about wonder, about attention, and, if this isn’t going too far, about love.  The music moves and shimmers and lulls and surprises.  It’s glorious!

I think Cage probably suffers from how interesting he is.  People get so obsessed with the randomness that they ignore the decisions!  Cage’s oeuvre has a style – there is most certainly a Cageian sound, and it’s no accident.  It’s right there in the notation.  Plenty of composers work with chance in one way or another, but few get the kinds of results Cage does.  He knew what he was freaking doing.

Last night I went to hear a concert of Berio’s first ten sequenzas, put on by the Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde series. It was a night of wonderful performances. I was especially moved by Josh Modney’s performance of the violin sequenza (no. 8), Chris McIntyre’s version of the sequenza for trombone (no. 5), and Daisy Press’s singing of the sequenza for voice (no. 3).

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.

For some time now, I’ve had the idea to start a series of interviews with composers, performers, and artists I think are doing really interesting work.  The following is the first installment.

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.

A couple mp3s of stereo excerpts from my installation, Moving Parts.

excerpt 1 | excerpt 2

a sketch for a new piece I’m pondering…

In January of 2010, I composed my first graphic score (listen).  My most recent piece, Uninhabited, is my second one.  Both are open compositions, but the score of the earlier piece, Study No. 1 for Amplified Acoustic Guitar, is much more “notation”, in the strict sense of the word.  It uses a kind of staff, and specific sounds are prescribed via specific symbols, all of which are explained at length in the performance instructions.  It is open in that all of the sounds are defined spatially rather than according to a timeline (the positions of markings indicate where on the instrument to make a sound, not when to make it).

The Uninhabited score, on the other hand, has no “legend”, and only broad strokes in terms of instructions on how to read it.  The score comprises three pages, each with 12 drawings.  Each drawing is a sketch inspired by the parts of buildings people don’t live or work in (basements, boiler rooms, crawl spaces, etc), often in extreme close up, or from an unusual angle.  In several of the drawings, the depicted object is very clear (a faucet, a bare lightbulb, a beam, a valve, etc), but for the most part they are either so zoomed in or so spare that they become abstract lines and patterns of shading.  Here are the three pages (forgive the crappy iPhone pictures).  Click to embiggen:

The instructions to the performer are as follows:

Uninhabited can be played by between four and eight performers, on any instruments, with or without the 6-channel sound installation Moving Parts.  In most cases, the performers should be spread out from one another such that each occupies his or her own space in the performance area.  When playing with Moving Parts, amplification may be used where necessary to ensure balance. Performers should agree at the outset on a total duration (usually not less than 30 minutes).

The score comprises 3 pages, each containing twelve sketches.  Each sketch corresponds to one continuous stretch of improvisation, lasting anywhere from around 20 seconds to around 3 minutes, or longer. They may be played in any order, and each may be repeated any number of times. No performance need include every sketch. Following each, there should be a period of silence, as little as several seconds or as much as several minutes.

For each new improvisation, players will initiate one of the following: 1) a sustained tone, chord, or noise; 2) a repeating melodic figure, ostinato, or noise pattern; or, 3) a continuous texture which, though not a sustained or repeating sound, maintains an consistent character (eg, an improvisation using a single technique, or drawing from a finite set of gestures).  The character of the chosen sound may be informed by the sketch, or by the player’s momentary interest.  Generally speaking, players should avoid extremely loud playing, except for very short intervals.

Once a sustained, repeating, or continuous sound has been initiated, players should, in their mind’s eye, chart a course through the chosen sketch, moving in different directions, using its contours and shadings to color and shape their playing.  For example, one may choose to map darkness of shading to the loudness of a sound, or to the noisiness, tempo, articulation, spectral richness, etc., thereof (or any combination of these – a “macro”, if you will).  Sustained, continuous, and repeating sounds thus acquire motion.  This “movement” through the sketch is free but must be intentional, making an effort to really explore it musically. Players are encouraged to give preference to the exploration and development of their own ideas over ensemble considerations.  Each performer should aim above all to maintain his or her independence.

The piece was performed three times – 10/14, 10/21, and 11/5 – each time with my generative sound installation, Moving Parts (itself based largely on recordings of building noise).  The instrumentation varied from one show to the next.  The first performance had bass clarinet, cello, electric guitar, and drum set; the second had flute/alto flute, alto saxophone, trombone, cello, and electric guitar; and the third had tenor sax, violin, electric piano/toy piano, and drum set (a total of ten players lent their talents to this project, to whom I’m very grateful).

A bit about some of the philosophical underpinnings of the piece: two recent interests of mine are the juxtaposition of independent systems, and the transposition of generative composition from computer music to live, acoustic music (score as algorithm, player as processor).  In the case of Uninhabited, each player is an independent system – imagine several computers running the same program simultaneously with different starting variables (experience, taste, etc.), and different types of output (different instruments).  This is the basic model for the piece.

The analogy breaks down, though, because of the complexities of human experience and the limitations of human information processing (particularly the speed thereof). It wouldn’t make any sense to write a generative piece for humans which was truly faithful to the computer model.  The “processor” is unpredictable and impressionable, so the “algorithm” – the score – almost has to be interpretive and poetic rather than rule-oriented, except for certain basic rules.  There’s still an input-processor-output model, but each step of the process is relational rather than mathematical.

I was struck when listening to the three performances of Uninhabited by how “right” it sounded, despite how little the score prescribed.  The sounds were right, the textures were right, the proportions of textures were right – the piece sounded how I intended it to sound.  I asked several of the performers to reflect on their experience playing the piece, and on the score in particular, and got quite a range of responses.  Some wanted more information to work with, others described it (somewhat to my surprise) as “straight-forward”.  One criticism I received a few times had to do with my instruction to “give preference to the exploration and development of their own ideas over ensemble considerations.”  This was meant more as a nudge, something to keep in mind while playing, rather than as an absolute command, but I completely understand the difficulty of constantly trying to fight an instinct to react to other sounds in the room.  Perhaps in a future installation, I’d try to aim for greater isolation of the performers, say by miking their instruments, and sending the feeds directly to headphones, so that they can only hear themselves, or perhaps literally isolating them, putting them in different parts of the building, and piping their playing to a common area, where the sounds can mix.

One thing I was gratified by was that most players found the drawings interesting to improvise to.  Some found those that clearly represented objects more interesting to work with, while others found the more abstract textures more fruitful, but universally the players reported finding something interesting to work with in the score.  With 36 images, each improvisation lasting an average of around two minutes, substantial periods of rest, and the stipulation that drawings may be ignored or returned to several times, I think it’s okay that not every player be interested in every drawing – the idea is that they use the ones they are drawn to.

Here are a couple excerpts:

excerpt 1 (from performance #3, with Argeo Ascani, Mike McCurdy, Joshua Modney, Kathy Supove)

excerpt 2 (from performance #2, with Jen Baker, Jessie Marino, James Moore, Jessica Schmitz, and Alvin Scott)