It Makes Us Who We Are: Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks on Musical Improvisation, from Jazz to Punk Rock and Beyond by Liquid Music

“What I love about this group is that everyone is a leader, and everyone has their own unique improvising style. Everybody’s an improviser.”

Despite having trained in different genres, classical musical conservatory and punk rock, respectively, Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks forged a friendship in the Chicago music scene. Over the years, these two artists have incorporated improvisation into their work in unique ways. Finding themselves both part of the Walker’s 2023–24 Performing Arts season, Reid and Locks sat down to discuss how collaboration, community, and life experience continually informs and reforms their music.


Damon Locks: You know this, but not everyone reading this might know: you were my original idea as a member for Black Monument Ensemble.

Tomeka Reid: I know, right? Isn’t that funny?

DL: You, Nicole, and the percussionist I was working with at the time, Damien Thompson. We came so close, just the dates didn’t work.

TR: Learning that we’re both from D.C., and we both went to the same junior high school, but 10 years apart—that was kind of wild. It was these merging worlds for us: similar friend circle, similar appreciation for the different music worlds that we’re in. I was mostly focused with jazz and improvised music, and you were coming out of punk hardcore music. Everything’s expanded from there.

DL: What are you bringing to the Walker this season?

TR: It is a chance for me to bring together two groups that formed in different places. When I was living in Chicago around 2015, I got an opportunity with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival to write some music for a string group. That birthed this Tet idea. I love strings, I love improvising, and I like working with other string players. It was a perfect opportunity to explore that.

When I moved to New York in 2016, I didn’t have the finances to bring the Chicago people to New York, so I started a New York version of the same group. In that case, I did music that was in response to some of my mother’s visual art. I’ve always wanted to record both of those works as well as possibly write a new book, and that is what I’ll be doing at the Walker. I feel really honored that I can combine both these groups.

It will be 16 pieces, and Conductor Taylor Binum is going to be doing some of the conducting There will be composed music, but then also moments [of] string improvisation, because what I love about this group is that everyone is a leader, and everyone has their own unique improvising style. Everybody’s an improviser. Oftentimes you can work with string players who may not be comfortable with improvising. I’m excited to have this whole band of string players that really want to get in there with the improvisation. How about you?


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Sun Dogs: A new film-sound series debuts by Katie Hare

A new series from Liquid Music, Sun Dogs asks inspired composer and filmmaker collaborators to create short-format films with new music for live orchestra.

Typically, a composer responds to a director's images and ideas in a film scoring capacity, or a director is engaged by a musician to create a music video. Sun Dogs explores how stories can be told (both musically and visually) from equal footing. The series’ title is inspired by the rare atmospheric phenomenon that appears like a doorway to another realm. Sun Dogs are mysterious and enlightening at the same time. These films give audiences a glimpse into stories that are more than meet the eye.

The first three offerings premiere Oct 14-16 with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by CSO Creative Partner Matthias Pintscher and presented in partnership with the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, merging groundbreaking creators and first-time collaborators. 

Composer Daniel Wohl and GRAMMY-winning composer/vocalist Arooj Aftab join forces with filmmaker Josephine Decker (Shirley, Madeline’s Madeline); sound artist Rafiq Bhatia (Son Lux) pairs up with internationally recognized Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives); and Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) collaborates with French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop (Atlantics) and Paris-based publisher and filmmaker Manon Lutanie.

Ahead of the world premieres, we checked in with participants to get a sense of their work and the collaborative process. Continue reading for a glimpse into what to expect Oct 14-16.


Rise, Again | Daniel Wohl, Arooj Aftab, and Josephine Decker

Growing out from improvisations, Rise, Again’s film and music feature an intimate repetition that layers the individual with community. Four mothers raise their four different children with fortitude and love when faced with eviction. A deep rhyming of experience inspired the form. Created collaboratively with women supported by Upward Bound House, the concept emerged from four completely unique experiences that resonated so deeply the collaborators felt they were listening to each other share their own stories.

A note from Daniel Wohl:

“Arooj, Josephine and I held several brainstorming sessions that led to numerous ideas, some of which we didn’t end up pursuing. During this process it became clear to us that we needed to take into account perspectives and practical considerations that none of us were accustomed to. For example, we had to consider what was possible for film while also taking into account how the music would be performed live by an orchestra. Over the next few months, we each went our own way to come up with material.

One of the most exciting moments for me was when we learned that the demos Arooj and I created were being played by Josephine for the women she was working with in her film. Bringing the music so directly into the filming process really gives it an extra significance for me as a composer. From the feedback that was conveyed to me, the music seemed to resonate deeply with their stories and became part of their conceptualization of the final film.”


ON BLUE | Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Rafiq Bhatia

On Blue is a companion piece to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2018 film Blue, where a woman (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) lies awake at night, and nearby, a set of theatre backdrops unspools itself, unveiling two alternate landscapes. Upon the woman's blue sheet, a flicker of light reflects and illuminates her realm of insomnia. In On Blue, Weerasethakul imagines that Jenjira's insomniac fire will eventually die down, and she will be able to sleep.

Upon encountering Weerasethakul’s work, Rafiq Bhatia was immediately inspired by the glacial pacing and patience. “Though there isn’t much music in Apichatpong’s films, the environmental sound always feels intrinsic, even primary. Above all, there is a sense that Apichatpong creates from a place of deep engagement with his own memory and experience, a practice with which I strongly identify,” he shared.

On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon’s consistency. It’s predictable yet brings tremendous change.

A note from Apichatpong Weerasethakul:

“I reflect on the past years as we appear to have slept through the pandemic. Perhaps we are ready to wake up. On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon's consistency. It's predictable yet brings tremendous change.

Revisiting Blue was like re-observing and rearranging a dream before dawn. Perhaps our brains are hurriedly retreating their fragmented scenes, storing them in the shadows before consciousness emerges. I saw a blue sheet crumble like a dream. An old cinema set was reanimated for the last performance.  

When first light reaches the eyes, there is a profound sense of clarity. The color blue was giving way to the morning gold. Dream and reality coexist, memories and conditionings fade. Even the word "blue" has lost its meaning. In an instant, we are newborns with no ties to anything.”

A note from Rafiq Bhatia:

“During my first viewing of the visuals for On Blue, I heard music in the gestures I saw on screen. Using instruments built from orchestral sound sources (often quiet actions intensely magnified), I set about searching for what I had imagined. Through careful tuning and timbral changes, I tried to let the musical sonorities melt like the sheets on screen. Harmonies unravel, flex, ripple and relax like their visualized counterparts. Is the state of dreaming always tranquil, or are dreams volatile, like waking life?

Residing in densely populated New York, I feel the city experiencing the night together in phases, despite the asynchronicity of our REM cycles. Here, as in the jungle where Jenjira sleeps, environmental sounds seep into our experience of the night, guiding us along the journey towards wakefulness. I sought to craft the music so that the birds, frogs, insects, and pulley sounds from Apichatpong’s film would function like members of the orchestra—or even as featured soloists—while the CSO’s instruments and Nina Moffitt’s playback voices could conjure the aviaries and ocean waves within Jenjira’s dreaming mind.

To my ear, the sounds of the softest techniques convey a hyperreal intimacy, vulnerability and ephemerality, as they are usually rich with evidence of the delicate human action it took to produce them.

When I was presented with this opportunity to create new work for a full orchestra, one of the things that excited me most was the chance to explore the very quietest end of the sonic spectrum. To my ear, the sounds of the softest techniques convey a hyperreal intimacy, vulnerability and ephemerality, as they are usually rich with evidence of the delicate human action it took to produce them. There is, of course, a relationship between the volume and timbre (or “character”) of a quiet sound, but many instruments playing quietly at once can convey the latter without being as constrained by the former. From the outset, I imagined a full dynamic range of textures that could still feel hushed when they grew immense, where even mountainous accumulations might retain a whispering, ghostly quality at their apex. But as I began to work, I was reminded of what William Blake once wrote: “without contraries there is no progression.” It’s after thunder that I most appreciate the stillness of a soft rain.

I am grateful that this commission provided an occasion to deepen my collaboration with orchestrator Taylor Brook, as well as Nina Moffitt, Chris Pattishall, and Ian Chang, who made invaluable contributions to the electroacoustic component of the piece. Those who listen closely may notice nods to György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

I look forward to experiencing On Blue as it comes to life on stage each night in Cincinnati. As Apichatpong wrote to me in an early correspondence: “Silence is never repeated.”


NAKED BLUE | Devonté Hynes, Mati Diop, and Manon Lutanie

Naked Blue features Oumy (age 13) who lives in Paris and trains as a dancer. In a film studio painted blue, she dances in front of mirrors and salutes an imaginary audience.

It also gestures to the transition from childhood to adolescence, wakefulness to trance, sadness to its overcoming—as well as to the interstitial, tenuous nature of such passages.

“Oumy is thirteen and the daughter of Valeria, a close friend of ours. Her dance training, particularly in ballet, is intensive, and we have long wanted to film her. This collaboration with Dev Hynes for a commission from the CSO was an occasion to finally work with her,” shared Mati and Manon.

“The fragile, ambiguous nature of the images evokes archival footage of rehearsals for a school show or film shoot. It also gestures to the transition from childhood to adolescence, wakefulness to trance, sadness to its overcoming—as well as to the interstitial, tenuous nature of such passages. It is also a portrait of Oumy at a specific moment in her life, a moment that is deeply moving to us and that we wanted to capture. The dramatic intensity of Dev’s musical composition, performed by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, accompanies Oumy’s movements, mirroring their magnetism, cohesion, and radical autonomy.”


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What is Liquid Music: A Playlist by Patrick Marschke

By Liquid Music blog contributor Patrick Marschke

Liquid Music Graphic and Logo by Andrew Jerabek from the 15.16 season

A few weeks ago our friends at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum asked us to curate a playlist for their communal gathering areas in their beautiful riverside building in Winona, Minnesota. The collaboration felt like an immediate fit, and not just because of the serendipity of our names (a museum featuring the art of water partnering with a series called Liquid Music feels stranger than fiction). Below the surface of the obvious mnemonic connection, it became clear that the impetus for our collaboration seems to have more to do with MMAM’s mission to “push the boundaries of what marine art can be,” an idea that’s closely tied to the essence of Liquid Music.  

MMAM’s atrium, where you can currently hear our Liquid Playlist.

As any person who has tried to put together the perfect playlist for a friend or crush can tell you, it is a subtle art and can be deceptively challenging. Early in the process Liquid Music’s founder and curator Kate Nordstrum pointed out that the challenge of creating a water-themed playlist is not so different from curating a special project series within an orchestral institution: “It’s not about simply ‘fitting in’ to the constraints, but actually embracing them — using the unique parameters as a way to pull yourself out of preconceived notions. It has always been something that I actively seek out, and often results in surprising and novel ideas and opportunities.” After all: a Liquid is a fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a constant volume independent of pressure… (thanks Wikipedia).

At the core of any great music series or playlist is a story. As Kate and I embarked on the work to put together a collection of marine-inspired music for MMAM, we realized that there was an important question to answer before its story would become clear: What is Liquid Music? 

Back in 2017 I skirted around actually answering this question in an introduction to an interview with Kate about the origins of Liquid Music:

“‘Liquid Music’ has become its own adjective, especially for longtime followers of the series. You’ve probably caught yourself listening to something and thinking ‘this would be perfect for Liquid Music’ or maybe been caught with a lack of words when describing the series to a friend who has somehow remained unfamiliar. Perhaps you have discovered an artist and have watched their career flourish since. Each year the definition of ‘Liquid Music’ gets refined but no less familiar and useful.”

Avoiding answering the question is easy to do: Liquid Music can feel as slippery as its name implies. While I think everything I said there still holds up, I don’t think that this description really “defines” anything. 5 years later, I think I am ready to try again. So what are the specific components of Liquid Music that make it Liquid Music

THE SYMBOLIC

If we are going to truly boil it down to the symbolic “Liquid Music” is simply a name for a concert series. It happens to be a very good name. So good I found that I never even thought to question it — upon first hearing about the series it just made sense. Maybe you had a similar experience. 

Eventually, I thought to ask about the origins of the name: It emerged from an intense conversation and visioning session with Kate and composer and frequent LM collaborator William Brittelle. Most importantly, after a quick online search, they were surprised to discover that the phrase hadn’t been used yet and the domain was miraculously available. And thus it came to be. The names’ origins feel quaint in an age where brand development is a billion-dollar industry. It is one of many right-time-right-place scenarios that seem almost predestined in hindsight, but it also speaks to the need for a forward-thinking music series like Liquid Music in the early 2010s.

Another important side of the semiotics of Liquid Music is its graphic identity. The series has had a distinct and sophisticated visual aesthetic from the outset. From the seasonal brochures, digital presence, and thoughtfully staged shows, Kate has been uncompromising in making sure that the look and feel of everything Liquid Music were and are as deliberate and refined as the work being presented. 

Designer Andrew Jerabek has been integral to the look and feel of both print and digital assets along with developing the original Liquid Music logo. His detailed and tactile graphics aesthetically unified each season’s diverse set of projects, providing a subtle and necessary coherence throughout. The visceral and organic infrared photography GMUNK was utilized for the 17/18 season. In early 2020, longtime LM friend and collaborator Andrea Hyde refreshed the logo and look of Liquid Music for the new decade. 

Liquid Music Director, Curator, & Executive Producer Kate Nordstrum

THE CURATION

Coordinating all of these collaborative aesthetic efforts is, of course, the curator herself: Kate Nordstrum. She is the visionary, the aspirational leader, and the true believer. It would be easy to say that Kate and her curation IS the series, but she would be the first to acknowledge that Liquid Music is in many ways a collaborative platform. Curation is putting a spotlight on artists, seeing the potential they might not quite see, and providing a context for that potential to flourish into something greater than anyone expected. 

An underappreciated component of the curatorial process is helping others see that potential, which is made even more difficult when a project has yet to come into existence. There is a heroic effort that goes into every Liquid Music project description. The core motivating factor behind this is to serve that latent potential, even for projects in their most nascent form. Writing about music is hard: if it was easy to articulate the meaning of a work with words, then musicians probably wouldn’t have resorted to music in the first place. Liquid Music has always sought to provide a space to do the messy work of finding the words for the transcendent work of our featured artists.

A key space for this work has been the Liquid Music blog. I essentially learned how to write in this space, and am constantly flattered that my work is featured alongside incredible writers like Trever Hagen, ​​Katie Hare, and Nick Lanser (to name a few) along with essays by and interviews with the countless unsurprisingly articulate Liquid Music artistic collaborators. In going through the archives as we prepared for our playlist duties I found an essay from MPR Classical Host Steve Seel that says in 40 words what it has taken me 1043 (so far), along with Liquid Language deserving of its own MMAM didactic:

“...And so, nothing is solid where the true experimenters of music work; ideas flow and crash into each other like waves, effortlessly. They shift their shape eternally depending on their ‘containers.’ The only constant in Liquid Music is motion. Fluidity.”Steve Seel from his 2015 Liquid Music blog What Makes For Truly “Rebellious” Art?

Steve Seel interviewing composer William Brittelle

THE MUSIC 

From Liquid Music’s “Bedroom Community and Friends” show at the American Swedish Institute, a previous collaboration between LM and MMAM’s new Executive Director Scott Pollock

As Steve so eloquently captured above, Liquid Music is the music — specifically the music of the boundary-defying featured artists. Their work challenges and transcends classification, striving for that which is just beyond, reaching into the unknown, and often arriving somewhere completely unexpected. But this music wouldn’t mean much without the dedicated audience that so graciously receives it. And it wouldn’t be possible without the venues, partners, donors, advocates, friends, families, interns, funders, sponsors, and countless other individuals — they all are integral to making Liquid Music what it is. 

Liquid Music will continue to embrace its boundless fluidity. What better way to celebrate than with a Liquid Playlist!

Included are key LM Alumni and longtime friends of the series such as Nico Muhly (a pivotal player in Kate’s proto-Liquid Music endeavors at The Southern Theater), Helado Negro, Minneapolis-based Poliça, Saul Williams, Angélica Negrón, and many more!

Share any music you think deserves to be included on our Liquid Playlist on socials! Find a text version of the full track list here.

To hear the playlist in its intended setting, stop by The Minnesota Marine Art Museum sometime soon! And give them a follow if you’d like to hear about their upcoming exhibitions and events:

MMAM Website // Facebook // Instagram // Twitter // YouTube

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum, located alongside the Mississippi in Winona, MN


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To Find An Enduring Connection // Adam Tendler’s Inheritances by Patrick Marschke

Collage from composer Darian Thomas's commissioned score, We Don't Need to Tend This Garden. They're Wildflowers

On its surface, the concept of inheritance touches on two out of the three of the most emotionally fraught words in the English language: Death and Money — with an extra serving of awkwardness, grief, class, and privilege. Just past its surface, inheritance sparks more philosophical and abstract questions: What have I inherited? What have we collectively inherited? What will we leave behind? What are we to do with the sins and spoils of our predecessors, literally or figuratively? Who is responsible when the recipient has no choice in the matter?

It is easy to avoid thinking about these questions and beguiling to find someone confronting them head-on. But pianist Adam Tendler doesn’t always process things like other people. It is this spirit of questioning and self-discovery that’s at the heart of his latest project titled Inheritances, a truly collaborative commission that used Adam’s own monetary and symbolic inheritance as a launching pad for 16 new works for piano, created by a broad spectrum of sound artists and composers.  

Map of Adam’s 88x50 tour

Inheritances isn’t the first time that Adam has taken on a wildly ambitious, conceptual, and personal project. Upon graduating from music school, he decided that he wanted to perform in all 50 states. “I’d gone to [music] conservatory and I came out of it a ball of nerves. It almost made me more anxious as a performer,” he reflected over Zoom in April 2022, sitting in front of his piano, laptop propped where the sheet music normally goes. He knew that more school wasn’t the answer. His rationale was simple: all he needed was a simple “yes” — from a church, coffee shop, or hall. With the gradual accumulation of small yes’s, laser focus, and zero know-how, he made this seemingly unprecedented project happen, which he eventually turned into 88x50: A Memoir of Sexual Discovery, Modern Music and The United States of America, a book chronicling his journeys.

Adam and his father

Inheritances began in 2019 when Adam's father died unexpectedly. By Adam’s own account, his relationship with his father at the time was complicated: “I wouldn't say we were estranged, but we didn't talk that much,” said Adam. “We talked maybe about two or three times a year, like on my birthday, or holidays…” Adam was pretty close with his dad as a kid, even after his parent’s divorce. But this closeness faded over time in a vague and blurry way that made the eventual experience of his fathers’ passing similarly obfuscated. 

“With his absence, there was definitely a sense of confusion. It wasn't like when some people die, what the survivors are left with is this hole, this gaping sort of loss and absence. I didn't have that. I know that sounds really weird. What I lost was access. It was sort of like, oh, well, I guess a part of my life with this person is now over and all the things we shared… that book is closed,” said Adam. At the time he didn’t know anything about his father’s financial situation, but when he eventually heard that there was an inheritance, he had a feeling that it “was gonna be something bizarre.”

“It wasn't a lot of money. And it was in cash,” explained Adam. “It was handed to me in a manila envelope by my stepmom in a Denny's parking lot in Lebanon, New Hampshire, the same border crossing of Vermont and New Hampshire where I was transferred between parents as a kid.” Initially, Adam didn’t do anything with the money. “There seemed to be something sort of sad about letting this symbolic money go into something as stupid as like debt, or subway fares, or rent. It seemed weird for it to just disappear like all my other money disappears,” he said. 

It wasn’t until a few months later at a concert that he had one of those simple, profound, frustratingly platitude-like thoughts that seem to only hit with such force in the depths of emotional strife: “Music is Amazing!” And what better way to celebrate the transformative and cathartic potential of music than by commissioning work with this symbolic cash? So, without a venue, premiere date, record deal, or any other practical justification for the project, Inheritances came to be. Adam started to reach out to composers, asking them if they would write a piece on inheritance, paid from the inheritance he had just received. Incredibly, every single artist that Adam asked to participate in Inheritances said “yes,” materializing, as Adam puts it, “the coolest f**king lineup I could have ever imagined. There's not a single person that I am not stoked about.” Liquid Music signed on to premiere the work and Adam was able to secure matching funds to ask even more artists to participate.

Adam emphasized to all the artists involved that the commissioned works didn’t have to be about him, his father, death, grief, or anything prescriptive. The pieces he eventually received are as diverse as the set of artists behind them. However, to Adam’s surprise, there still does seem to be something tying the works together. “These pieces all have really stunning restraint,” he said. “It’s like they knew that they could actually do something very, very personal and be safe with me.” 

Adam and his mother

Grief expert J. William Worden suggests that there are no set stages to the grieving process and that we approach grieving through tasks that can happen in any order. Those tasks are: 

  1. To accept the reality of the loss

  2. To process the pain of grief

  3. To adjust to a world without the deceased

  4. To find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life

Unbeknownst to him, Adam’s outreach to Inheritances’ composers perfectly encapsulates the fourth and most important task of grieving — finding an enduring connection with the deceased while finding a way to move forward. As he wrote in his initial email to the artists, he was seeking “to plant that cash in the soil of something that may actually grow and—if you'll forgive me—live on.” 

It is not at all that surprising that the collaborators, when asked to reflect on inheritance in a time with no shortage of grief, responded reflectively with such sincere authenticity. In his own unique way, Adam Tendler has invited us all to participate in the transmutation of his extremely personal experience of ambiguous loss into a beautifully communal ritual of enduring connection — providing us all an overdue opportunity to utilize the emotionally alchemic potential of music to process our immeasurable and nebulous griefs. Accepting, processing, adjusting, and finding hope… 

Join us Saturday, April 23 for ADAM TENDLER: INHERITANCES and hear the premiere of brand new works by commissioned composers Devonté Hynes, Nico Muhly, Laurie Anderson, inti figgis-vizueta, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Angélica Negrón, Christopher Cerrone, Marcos Balter, Missy Mazzoli, Darian Donovan Thomas, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Scott Wollschleger, Mary Prescott, Timo Andres and John Glover.


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Liquid Music + National Gallery of Art + yMusic // "True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870" by Katie Hare

Last summer, the National Gallery of Art enlisted Liquid Music curator Kate Nordstrum as “guest artistic director” to illuminate works within their transporting exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870. In the months that followed, Nordstrum and her selected ensemble yMusic had the immense pleasure of immersing themselves in paintings by artists who sought to capture light and atmosphere in breathtaking landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes. We want to share with you their thoughtful program, which would have taken place this Sunday, April 19, with images from the exhibition and musical accompaniment.

Fritz Petzholdt, Tree Crowns in a Forest (Ariccia?), c. 1832, oil on paper, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, Gift of John Schlichte Bergen and Alexandra van Nierop, Amsterdam

Fritz Petzholdt, Tree Crowns in a Forest (Ariccia?), c. 1832, oil on paper, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, Gift of John Schlichte Bergen and Alexandra van Nierop, Amsterdam

The Program

Tessellations by Gabriella Smith
Cribbea by yMusic
Peter Inn by yMusic
Music in Circles by Andrew Norman
Zebras by yMusic
Flood by yMusic
Year of the Horse by Sufjan Stevens/arranged by Rob Moose
Their Stenciled Breath by Caroline Shaw
Maré by Gabriella Smith

A Note From Liquid Music Curator Kate Nordstrum (Guest Artistic Director)

yMusic is one of the first ensembles I worked with as a fledgling curator in 2010. A decade on, I continue to be inspired by the way they navigate the ever-evolving landscape of new music. As individuals and as a group, they are dynamic, hungry to share their musical passions, and deeply emotionally engaged in any project they commit to. It’s been a pleasure to “grow up” together in music and to shape this special program for the National Gallery of Art. We hope that it illuminates the exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 and inspires the imagination. Many thanks to Danielle Hahn for inviting me to take on this guest artistic director role and to yMusic for their creativity and openness.

Photo by Graham Tolbert

Photo by Graham Tolbert

A Note From yMusic

As an instrumental chamber ensemble, we spend a significant amount of rehearsal time exploring timbres and colors. Wrangling six individual performances, a tangled mix of strings, winds and brass into one cohesive performance requires some effort, and often we lead each other to discover new sounds by describing our ideas with visual prompts. 

Visual thinking has always been a hallmark of our process, and we’d like to think it shows; after many of our concerts, audience members come to us and can vividly describe a scene that unfolded in their imagination while hearing us play.

We were immediately excited when Liquid Music curator Kate Nordstrum approached us with the idea of programming a concert for the National Gallery that would map our repertoire to specific works of art. It felt very natural for us to tie our repertoire to paintings from the en plein air tradition. Our rhythmic patterns interweave as though they are streets in a city, rows of farming, or leaves on a tree. Sometimes shocking and even violent dissonance occurs and evokes jagged rocks or the threat of a distant volcano. Surprising textures, unusual instrumental combinations and unconventional sound techniques can convey a hot summer day or a cool breeze by the water, perhaps even an ocean spray by a grotto.

We have had a blast matching each piece on this program with specific landscape styles based on our experiences of inhabiting these soundscapes. But as music is ephemeral and intangible, we invite you to let your imagination run wild! Bring your own personal canvas along with your open ears and paint the landscape of your imagination.


Rocks, Trees, Caves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Tessellations

Tessellations is a short piece about patterns – patterns that fit into each other like an Escher print, additive patterns, subtractive patterns, patterns that disintegrate and dissolve into chaos and then re-form.  –Gabriella Smith

Achille-Etna Michallon, French, 1796 – 1822, The Oak and the Reed, 1816, oil on canvas, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

Achille-Etna Michallon, French, 1796 – 1822, The Oak and the Reed, 1816, oil on canvas, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge


Nocturnes
yMusic
Cribbea; Peter Inn

Cribbea and Peter Inn represent yMusic’s first foray into composition.  The melodies, textures, harmonic progressions, and form of these works were written collaboratively by all six members of the group.  Mining the ensemble’s fluency in multiple musical idioms, as well as their skills as arrangers, improvisers, and interpreters of contemporary music, these pieces mark a new chapter for the sextet as it enters its second decade.  

Baron François Gérard, French, 1770 – 1837, A Study of Waves Breaking against Rocks at Sunset, oil on millboard, Private Collection, London

Baron François Gérard, French, 1770 – 1837, A Study of Waves Breaking against Rocks at Sunset, oil on millboard, Private Collection, London


Capri/Naples/Volcanos
Andrew Norman (b. 1979)
Music in Circles 

Music in Circles is one of yMusic’s all-time favorite pieces to play.  The folklore surrounding the work is that Andrew Norman composed it one hot New York City summer at his writing desk, which had been placed as close as possible to the life-saving air conditioner.  Stumped by writers block, he started transcribing the sounds of the machine, ultimately crafting a fanciful piece that whips silence into gorgeous streaks of color and melody. Andrew writes music that is nearly impossible for performers to phone in.  We can never resist the raw power and emotion in this piece, which can leave us nearly breathless. We love where this work takes us, and while it was inspired by a machine, it’s just as easy to imagine creaking ships, whipping winds and stormy seas.

Johann Jakob Frey, Swiss, 1813 – 1865, Cloud Study (4), oil on paper, mounted on canvas, Private Collection, London

Johann Jakob Frey, Swiss, 1813 – 1865, Cloud Study (4), oil on paper, mounted on canvas, Private Collection, London


Giuseppe de Nittis, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1872, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

Giuseppe de Nittis, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1872, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

Capri/NapLes/Volcanos
yMusic
Zebras; Flood

Zebras and Floods are two of the newest pieces we have written as a group. Zebras was initiated during a recording session at Red Bull Studios, continued at a writing session at my apartment, and finished during a residency at USC. We debuted the song at the Bower Ballroom in January. Flood was written with the dual goals of having uptempo instrumental and a virtuosic feature for Alex Sopp. We purposefully wrote the bulk of the piece for just trumpet, bass clarinet, violin and viola and left room for the flute and cello to engage in conversant and dueling material.  –Rob Moose


Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Sufjan Stevens (b. 1975)
Year of the Horse (arr.
Rob Moose)

Year of the Horse, Year of the Dog, Year of the Dragon, and Year of the Boar are some of yMusic’s favorite pieces to perform. They started their lives as electronic works on Sufjan Steven’s 2001 record, Enjoy Your Rabbit, and were adapted by myself and a variety of other arrangers for string quartet in 2008.  When yMusic first formed and was in desperate need of repertoire, I brought in a new arrangement of Year of the Dog as a candidate for our very first concert. We loved it, and it quickly achieved a consistent presence in our live shows.  In the decade since that first performance, we have adapted and enjoyed many pieces from that album. yMusic’s Year of the Dog and Year of the Boar were recently collected on a limited-edition vinyl collaboration with visual artist Gregory Euclide. Tonight’s performance of Year of the Horse will be seamlessly connected to its programmatic neighbor, Their Stenciled Breath from Carbone Shaw’s Draft of a Highrise

Léon-François-Antoine Fleury, The Tomb of Caecilia Metella, c. 1830, oil on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.16

Léon-François-Antoine Fleury, The Tomb of Caecilia Metella, c. 1830, oil on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.16


Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High-Rise

Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High Rise by Caroline Shaw started out in the composer’s mind as a riff on architectural renderings and their depictions of people - evocative yet surreal, uncanny valley-esque figures interacting with nearly there concrete and steel constructions flanked by gauzy flora.  The piece, however, was being constructed during the last presidential election, and when texted about the work, Caroline admitted, “it’s not a political piece exactly, but more like my response (both consciously and subconsciously) to the political shitstorm of fall 2016... so I guess that would qualify.”

The work lives in a funny place and time; it’s a solid concept distracted by current events - something that feels very familiar these days. –Nadia Sirota

Michel Dumas, French, 1812 – 1895, Fountain in the Roman Campagna, c. 1838 – 1840, oil on canvas, mounted on wood panel, Private Collection, London

Michel Dumas, French, 1812 – 1895, Fountain in the Roman Campagna, c. 1838 – 1840, oil on canvas, mounted on wood panel, Private Collection, London


Water: Coasts, Falls, Waves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Maré

Maré is the Portuguese word for “tide”.  I wrote Mare while in residence at Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil.  The artist colony was right on the beach of a beautiful island in the Baía de Todos os Santa’s called Ilha de Itaparica. The slope of the beach into the ocean was very gradual, so the horizontal distance between low and high tide was extreme. When the tide was high, it would come all the way up almost to the gates of the artist colony. And when it was low, it would retreat far away, leaving behind a huge expanse of beautiful beach. So the rhythm of the tides became integrated into the rhythm of our daily lives. Maré is inspired by these tidal movements and the way in which they became a part of me during my time there. –Gabriella Smith 

August Kopisch, German, 1799 – 1853, View of Capri, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

August Kopisch, German, 1799 – 1853, View of Capri, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris


Read and view more paintings from the National Gallery of Art’s “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870” here.

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Words & Sound: An Interview with Dorothea Lasky by Kate Nordstrum

By Liquid Music blog contributor Katie Hare

Still 02 - My soul was a man (1).jpg
Still 01 - Live things.jpg

Ted Hearne’s new work, In Your Mouth premieres at Walker Art Center Nov 21-22 in a theatrical, 12-song suite. The source material and inspiration behind the work comes from the lush, stinging poetry of writer, author, and educator Dorothea Lasky. Along with a quintet and a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, Lasky’s words will be vocalized throughout the piece in an evening reflecting a complicated, loving mediation of the personal and domestic, while savoring the depths of wildness within. Featuring an introduction written by Ted Hearne, this interview with Dorothea delves into her background, the relationship of words and sound, and her collaboration with Hearne.

a note by Ted Hearne:

I first came across Dottie's work in 2016 and was instantly struck by the simplicity of the language – her poems just felt like song lyrics – but also the complicated and ambiguous identities, the dark and tumultuous sense of self, and the rich worlds of different "I"s her poems seemed to be able to harness and hold next to each other.

Photo courtesy of Lasky’s blog.

Photo courtesy of Lasky’s blog.

What does it mean to be wild? My first impulse to set this text was driven by an unironic identification with this idea that the wildness within could be embraced more fully. Perhaps I've never felt more drawn to set a text earnestly because I resonated with the feeling that I was keeping a true part of myself from the rest of the world. Or was the rest of the world holding me back?

Everyone keeps me from my destiny
Keeps me from it
And keeps me locked away from beauty
And they can’t feel my beauty
In me reaching out
Like glass into itself
And everyone keeps me from myself
Cause the self they had imagined
Was flesh and bone
And this flesh I am is glass
— Dorothea Lasky

As I started setting these poems for myself to sing, all sorts of intriguing complications set in. Funny how words that felt so empowering to read, and felt empowering to hear in Lasky's voice at one of her readings, sounded differently to my own ears when I heard them sung in my voice. Who was I to be singing her words? Do the words change when I sing them as a different person? As a man singing words written by a woman? Could I assume to put her words in my mouth? 

There's a complicated and fluid “I” in Lasky's poems, which seemed to reflect and nicely counteract these compounding questions of mine, and with Dottie's encouragement, that relationship is what led me through writing this piece.


Meet Dorothea lasky

Lasky_Dorothea_2019-20_01.jpg

Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Lasky earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachussets Amherst. She is the author of Animal, a book of poetry lectures, and co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac with Alex Dimitrov. She has also written five full-length collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. Lasky now resides in New York, and is an associate professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.


Tell us a bit about your introduction to writing, and your journey into identifying as a writer.

I've been writing poetry since I was a little girl. When I was around 7, I started writing in a journal late at night because I didn't like going to sleep when my parents told me to. So, I've always written, but it took me a long time to identify as a writer or poet per se, because I tended to feel like the instinct was narcissistic and didn't help others. It has taken a long for me to realize that writing is capable of helping others, but I think being a teacher of writing has helped me feel the most comfortable in the role. 

I’ve read that your earliest poems were meant to be spoken, and always about soundthe idea of a listener. Can you expand on how that idea has translated through your work over time? And perhaps, how it correlates with your collaboration with Ted Hearne?

I feel that my poems are still meant to be spoken. Sound is the biggest motivator for me when it comes to writing and finishing a poem, and I value a word's sound over its meaning. I think because of this it is extra exciting that Ted has decided to put my poems to music, because there is (hopefully) a naturally musical quality to them that will be enhanced by his own beautiful sounds. 

What is your thought process behind presenting your work (or any work)? How does space and audience affect your readings?

Space and audience is very important to my poetry readings, because I am a performative person. There is very little that excites me as much as the stage and I see a poem as the ultimate stage. 

What inspired you to become an educator, and what do you like most about it?

My mother was a professor and I grew up going to her classes, so I feel an almost inevitability that I have ended up as one as well. I love the space of the classroom, because empowering people to be their most creative makes me endlessly happy.

How do you stay motivated to create?

I try as best as I can to create for the future. This motivates me because I know there will be future readers who will need me. 

Screen Shot 2019-11-14 at 4.45.58 PM.png

We’re looking forward to your upcoming talk ‘The Strange Hexacomb’: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace, as well as your pre-performance reading at Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis! Can you tell us more about those? What are you most looking forward to on your visit?

Thank you so much! I am so looking forward to these events as well. The bee conversation will be so exciting to be a part of, because I will be talking with actual scientists and artists who do work on and with bees. I will love to learn from them and I have a feeling that the conversation will inspire me to write more about bees in the future. But the thing I am most looking forward to is hearing Ted's songs. 

What have you been reading lately?

I have been obsessed with Shirley Jackson a lot the past few months and can't stop now. 

Anything else you’d like Twin Cities audiences to know about you and your work before experiencing In Your Mouth?

Just that I would I thank them so much for having me in their beautiful town! 


See Dorothea Lasky in The Strange Hexacomb: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace Books on Thursday, Nov 21 at 1:30pm. She will also share a few poems and discuss her collaboration with Ted Hearne in a preconcert happy hour reading on Nov 21 at 7:00pm at Walker’s Cityview bar.

BUY TICKETS TO IN YOUR MOUTH NOV 21-22 AT WALKER ART CENTER
Co-presented with the Walker Art Center
Co-commissioned with the Walker Art Center and Carnegie Hall

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Ted Hearne: exploring notions of truth, radical openness, and the promise of the unexpected by Kate Nordstrum

by Liquid Music blog contributor Trever Hagen

Photo by Jen Rosenstein

Photo by Jen Rosenstein

“I think I’d like to call it In Your Mouth, actually,” Ted says, pondering a last minute name-change. We are discussing the composer’s forthcoming piece – originally titled Live Things ­– which will be performed at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center November 21-22, 2019. One’s imagination attempts to portray what might take place based on Mr. Hearne’s brief description of the process of creating the piece.  However, as with many other Ted Hearne performances, your mind’s eye will never be prepared for what is to come. Anticipation and expectation are difficult to conjure up when you are exploring unfamiliar aesthetic worlds. Partly this is due to Hearne’s up-ending of genre definitions but also in addition to his readiness to collaborate across media in order to realize wholly new performance experiences (and thereby illustrating a depth of expression that necessitates multiple forms of affect). Conveyed across multiple intersecting media currents – sound, language, visuals – and directed by theater veteran Daniel Fish, In Your Mouth calls out the promise of the unexpected.

This is Ted’s first full-length piece for Liquid Music, although he has performed and composed previously for the series. Liquid Music has highlighted the challenging and provoking world of contemporary composition in the Twin Cities, offering artists the opportunity to premiere new work. “I wanted to write my voice into the piece,” Ted explains. “This is the first time I have done this,” he continues. For the text to vocalize, Ted was attracted to the radical openness of the poetry of Dorothea Lasky. “I started really falling for Dottie's poetry in 2016, and it came to be something really special for me over the next year. I wrote a few individual songs before I started to think that I needed to dig deep and make a whole song cycle, and it wasn't until last year that I decided it needed to be an evening-length theatrical work.”

The twelve-song cycle of In Your Mouth will be performed by a quintet, which as Hearne admits, is basically like a rock band performing an album. Put this way, we already can imagine how Hearne draws on a wide range musical references to create a type of meta-language of music. Along with Hearne on voice and electronics, the composer will be joined by Ashley Bathgate (cello), Taylor Levine (electric guitar), Nathan Koci (keyboards), Diana Wade (viola) and Ron Wiltrout (drums).

Together with the quintet and Lasky’s poetry, the performance will incorporate a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, who has collaborated with Hearne on previous occasions. “In terms of working with these three incredible artists, they've each brought a different approach to my understanding of the poetry and of the project. Rachel's analogies in color, material and light; Daniel's patience in experiencing and processing the work in time, and looking to the text and the music to determine how the piece should be structured; and Dottie's big woolley ideas and colorful, sometimes contradictory, always poetic associations that really connected me to the sensuality and timeliness of her work.”

Young Voices

Mr. Hearne grew up in Chicago. His mother was a classically trained vocalist steeped in Baroque performance, which Hearne experienced as a child. Ted joined the Chicago Children’s choir where he learned and sang in a multi-cultural ensemble of voices and compositions. “My mom encouraged me to learn and perform music, but she didn't push me to do it even though it's the thing she loved most in the world. I credit her for getting me involved, but she knows me well enough to know I would probably balk at the time commitment and steep hill of work I'd have ahead of me if she had applied pressure,” Hearne states.

In addition to the fulfilling and grueling regimen of a composer-conductor (e.g., commissions, curations, teaching duties, writing and collaborations), Mr. Hearne finds time, as he will in Minneapolis, to perform as a vocalist. The nature and intent of how Ted sings is immediately gripping. For instance his 2007 Katrina Ballads features him performing the piece “Brownie you are doing a heck of a job” – as much as it is the musical materials that are captivating it is the execution that captures a sardonic energy, which serves to remind listeners of the out-of-touch FEMA response to the 2005 disaster. The place from where he is performing these words seems antagonistic, tongue-in-cheek: a curious vibe reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s disruption of expectations and the status quo. A crowning achievement for the social potential of new music. In this manner, Hearne’s patterned ability for taking mundane or everyday speech and musicalizing it recalls Harry Partch’s vocalisms transformed into musical worlds and phrases.  

In addition to his score-writing credits, Hearne also performs in the duo R WE Who R We. “R WE WHO R WE is a band I have with Philip White – we co-write all the songs, so this is very different from almost anything else I do.  Also, as a band, everything we write for R WE is for us and only us to perform, and actually we don't "write" anything down at all, although it's just as specific as any other compositions I've written.” 

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Most recently, in 2019 Mr. Hearne released the album Hazy Heart Pump, which begins with the composition “For the Love of Charles Mingus”. Ted asserts: “Charles Mingus is one of my favorite composers and has been a huge inspiration for me – the way he controlled chaos, harnessed a feel and employed it abstractly, the beautiful sloppiness. My piece For the love of Charles Mingus for six violins, which is the first track on my new instrumental album, is inspired by the way the opening of "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" pulls the rug out from under you ­– setting you up to believe you're existing in one 'feel,' only to discover the music is actually being governed by a different time, one you can't hear at first. This underlying pulse that you can't always hear is a source of poetic inspiration for me.” 

The Inspiration of Injustice

Being raised in Chicago certainly lends itself to the urban experience of inequality – homelessness next to skyscrapers. Segregation and access to education. Where life expectancy in one affluent neighborhood is ninety and 9 miles away residents live to sixty. Even though urban centers may offer the world’s residents greater economic opportunities and the potential to sustain large groups of people efficiently, we have still yet to uncover how to provide fair access to resources as governments attempt to organize people. As consistent with the history of the civilization, race, class and gender continue to be the lines upon which inequality falls. And for these reasons Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound.

Clearly these forms of injustice move Hearne’s compositions. Not by moralism but rather by Hearne’s witnessing of injustice – particularly social inequality and stratification – is the departure point from which he composes. How might the experience of gentrification be expressed in a score? How might reading the gruesome details of military conflict be composed? These musically-mediated emotional and cognitive responses to the contemporary world are manifest in Hearne’s work. The musical-social mélange of Mr. Hearne’s upbringing sensitized him to the plight of modern daily survival like many processors before – from John Steinbeck to Sebastião Salgado.

Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound.

Plunderphonics and Compositions

We speak for a moment about using samples within orchestral arrangements – taking a listen to Hearne’s 2015 The Source we hear samples from “Mac the Knife” and Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”, popular sounds that filled the ambient radio waves of those years. These plunderphones – recognizable audio bits – serve to ground listeners by using the bits to reference the time of creation and consumption. It is a real-time experience of how culture builds on culture, how memory and associations provide context and coherency for the future. How plunderphonics runs counter to intellectual property and capital. This in itself makes Hearne’s pieces decidedly political by how and which sounds are used.

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The use of samples shows how genre material is used to reference genre as a frame of perception. Ted draws on genre at the meta-level – using some of the signs and sounds of genre while using other musical languages. For example, electric distorted guitars sounds against a string quartet. The result is an intriguing soundscape of associations and the juxtapositions are entirely new contexts – the samples and composition create a type of infoscape (to borrow from Appadurai’s thoughts on how we encounter information, an Ives-ian presence of all materials happening at once) that remove the listener from the initial work into a more reflective and considered point of receiving information.

(Absolute) Truth

“Truth isn’t truth” – the phrase uttered by former New York mayor Rudy Giulliani sticks in one’s mind as emblematic of the 21st century social-techno reality of perception management. Indeed, ideas of absolute truth have been dissipating for nearly a century as scholars have brought to our attention fragmented realties and multi-centered universes of the post World War post-modernism world.

What might truth mean in contemporary times? Has it lost its absolute value? This leads us to the question, “Can music lie?” which perhaps might feel like an absurd thought but one that is perhaps relevant in the so-called post-truth world of media and information. “Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you,” he continues. Hearne speaks about how music has allowed him to explore notions of truth and explore other cultures. Indeed, music is precisely this pathway between peoples, places and cultures. And for this reason, music has the propensity to be movingly political.

Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you.

Hearne is not hesitant to call his work political. His labeling of his music is an indication of the hyper self-awareness that comes with contemporary identity politics, news cycles, pastiche ideologies, and an informed sense of political agency. Hearne’s work has decidedly fallen upon what many call ‘political’ because of the content it uses: 2015’s The Source, 2018’s Sounds from the Bench. Political, as such, emerges as a comment or presentation upon information and events. ‘Political music’ occupies a different social space than the ‘politics of music’ – the latter being the zone of censorship, discrimination and stigma. The sometimes unintended social reactions to music. In addition to the content, Hearne reveals where the politics emerges from: his response to information. The role of the witness.

Sounds from the Bench, 2018

Sounds from the Bench, 2018

The Source reveals an emotional response to the information leaked by Chelsea Manning (as opposed to say a composer taking this information and then writing a piece that is intently conveying a political position). Sounds from the Bench is a piece based on the Supreme Court oral arguments of Citizens United, which gave corporate entities personhood by granting them legal rights as people. Sounds from the Bench was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which was given that year to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn.’ Hearne, no doubt grateful for the placement in the prestigious prize’s shortlist, commented, however, about the exclusionary practice of the award against people and music of color.

Aesthetically, Sounds from the Bench uses voices and electrified instruments to underpin the line between humans and non-humans. That is novel about Ted’s politics: it is something fresh but also reflected in political discourse nowadays – the subjective nature of truth or rather how we respond to truth, how machines are entering further into our daily lives, how political governance is failing at organizing social needs of communities. In other words, Ted’s music is not a truth-claim but an impression of the truth, and this impression is what is communicated musically.

Musical Pathways

So what is socially engaging music? Is there any music that is not? Or is it that Mr. Hearne’s music attempts to connect the fields of society and aesthetics in a way that we do not commonly encounter? Ted’s music has been touted as such. The label is curious because Ted’s music seems to highlight that however we once thought of the autonomy of music from social forces (that 19th century notion), it clearly shaped and is shaping, of the social forces around. In other words, every music is socially engaging by virtue of it being music – music being a social practice.

Music leads the way for our social explorations. Aesthetic risks, challenges and comfort involved in much of Hearne’s music. To dwell on the trope of being “ahead of one’s time” asserts music’s bullish properties: Hearne’s music is not reflecting society, it is actively showing us a way forward. That finger that music is point back at us is, in fact, leading the way.

Still from Blue Falling ©2019 by Rachel Perry

Still from Blue Falling ©2019 by Rachel Perry

BUY TICKETS TO IN YOUR MOUTH
NOVEMBER 21-22 AT WALKER ART CENTER

Co-presented with the Walker Art Center
Co-commissioned with the Walker Art Center and Carnegie Hall

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Finding Freedom in the Format // An interview with Ashwini Ramaswamy by Kate Nordstrum

by Liquid Music Blog Contributor Patrick Marschke

Collage by Peter Groynam

Collage by Peter Groynam

There often seems to be a paradox at work in the world of Western classical music. How is it possible for orchestras and classical music organizations to stay relevant and contemporary while preserving and venerating music that was created decades and sometimes centuries ago? In response to this dilemma, one of the primary missions of Liquid Music over the course of the past 8 seasons has been to discover and showcase all that is new and alive in the world of classical music. Yet, is this perceived tension between the binaries of new versus old, contemporary versus classical, and boundary-pushing versus tradition-bound a uniquely “Western” point of view? 

For many music cultures and traditions, exploring the past through vibrant contemporary art practices while respecting lineage and heritage is standard procedure. In the Twin Cities we have been lucky enough to have one such institution in our community since 1992: Ragamala Dance Company, which approaches the South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam as a living, breathing language that speaks about the contemporary human experience. Ragamala’s Ashwini Ramaswamy is pushing this mentality even further with her Liquid Music commissioned work Let The Crows Come, premiering November 8–9 at The Lab Theater in Minneapolis. 

The work takes place in three unique choreographic worlds: Ramaswamy’s section explores her take on Ragamala’s specific lineage of Bharatanatyam, while dancer/choreographers Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren interpolate Ramaswamy’s movements and gestures through their own distinct and refined schools of movement. Similarly, each of the three sections of solo dance is accompanied by uniquely composed sonic worlds: a Carnatic chamber ensemble consisting of mridangam, voice, and violin; Brent Arnold’s electro-acoustic approach to cello; and Jace Clayton’s live sampling, acousmatic, and DJ aesthetic.

Jace Clayton’s research around digital music culture seems particularly salient to this work and for that reason scattered throughout the conversation below you’ll find quotes from Jace’s book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture, which deeply resonated with Ramaswamy’s creative process. Both the book and Let The Crows Come challenge readers and audiences to embrace the idea that no art form is frozen in time, and that artists will continue to find freedom within their framework.

“If this poetry from 2000 years ago is still relevant and we can layer it with something that you might connect with now then we can directly show that past, present, and future are interconnected.” — Ashwini Ramaswamy


[This interview took place on October 14, 2019, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.]

Patrick Marschke: So, where is the project at at this point? 

Ashwini Ramaswamy: All the choreography is done for the dancers: Berit Ahlgren, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, and I. We've been working for about a year, just in little spurts. Now the main big “to do” is integrating dance and music. 

Photo by Tanner Young

Photo by Tanner Young

I leave on Sunday to meet with all the musicians in Akron, Ohio, to the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron. It'll be a chance to see how everything sounds and how it looks on stage. It's also the first time that everyone's getting together for the show. Jace [Clayton], unfortunately, can't make it to that but he'll Skype in. It's my hope that there'll be some opportunities for overlapping musicians within sections. Up until this residency, I've only worked with a very rough recording of my section. Brent and Jace are still composing, and they need to see the dance to bring everything to life. It's going to be very cool to see the dynamics at play after next week and then how it evolves as the piece tours.

PM: I happened to be at your work-in-progress conversation at The Parkway last winter — It seemed like even at that point the overall conceptual framework was really strong, so it could hold up to things moving around within that and lots of exciting development.

AR: Yeah, there's a lot that I'm excited about because it's been in my head for so long. I'm kind of excited for the unknowns, which is a lot of what we're going to encounter next week.

PM: What is the specific orchestration for the three sections?

AR: So far the thinking is Brent will be the instrumental constant amongst the three sections. He won't play in every single part of every section but because all the effects he creates on his cello, he can work in both the electronic and acoustic realms of the music and can bridge the two worlds together. What we did at our Baryshnikov Arts Center residency last year in New York, when Brent came in for the first time, we had an opening song where he played his cello like the tanpura instead of having the drone box, which ended up being really cool. Even if it's just something as subtle as that, it adds a different texture.

For my solo, we have Carnatic vocals by Roopa Mahadevan, Carnatic violin by Arun Ramamurthy, and mridangam/ghatam/kanjira by Rohan Krishnamurthy. Then the second section is Brent's piece, which I know will definitely at least incorporate some of the percussion and probably violin, too. As of right now, Jace is basically DJing the third section so that there's still the live component. Depending on how everything sounds Jace will be sampling earlier sections and potentially performing live with The Carnatic ensemble as well. 

You have to be very careful about mixing genres in a way that's not going to be obvious, cheesy, or appropriative. Everything has to feel really comfortable with each other. And when you don't have a ton of time, you want to make sure that it doesn't look like they're putting something on top of something else.

Something that I really want to try is to change the order of the dances from night to night so that it's not always going from Carnatic to classical to contemporary — or whatever you want to call each of the sections. The terms don’t really do it justice. Ideally, we wouldn’t necessarily know what the order is going to be until the day of the performance. So as an audience member, just understanding like, "oh, this could be in any order. What would that look like?" and knowing that it's malleable, is exciting to me. 

PM: There's a really good quote in Jace Clayton’s book that applies to what we are talking about. He was talking about a completely different genre of music but he said 

"The seeming effortlessness with which lifelong musicians summon voices from their instruments always takes my breath away. A guitar, in my hands, is just a strangely shaped piece of wood, a book in a language I can’t read. I whipped out my phone to grab some video, then my thumb froze above the touch screen. If I recorded it, I’d never watch it. These unrepeatable moments are as throwaway as they are priceless — they have to be. There is value in being free and as lost as all the music before Edison. Improvisation gives lightness to history’s weight" (pg. 236, Uproot). 

You are obviously very studied in Bharatanatyam and part of a very long lineage, but it seems like the modularity with this specific piece lightens the weight of all of that.

AR: Exactly. Then you get that sense of "the unknown" as I mentioned earlier. As an audience member that's exciting.

PM: Yeah, there's a risk that is perceivable as well. It has a little spark to it. So are each of the musicians correlated with specific dancers?

AR: Yes — I'll perform with the Carnatic Ensemble, Brent is with Alanna, and Jace's portion will be with Berit. 

PM: Have you considered making any other part of the performance modular?

AR: Well, there are sections where we're all dancing together within each solo. So everyone does get to perform with everyone else’s music. That wasn't always the intention, but I just felt it was too stark to only have three solos. Basically I'm just being guided by what I want to see on stage. And so if I was to go to this show, I would want to see us dancing together. Maybe not in a way you might expect, but we will be on stage together at various points in addition to the solos. And personally, I want to dance to all the different kinds of music as do the other dancers. It's an exciting challenge.

PM: It sounds like some aspects of the piece have changed rather significantly since your initial conception of it. Where were you at in your life when you first thought of this idea?

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AR: It's really taken a lot of twists and turns. First, the whole thing started when I was thinking about how a DJ takes a song and mixes it, changes it up, changes the beat, just even in the most basic way — you have an essence that is kept and then you have a new version. I saw a similarity to being a second or third generation Indian-American where you have facets of you that have to navigate. It's code-switching. What parts of yourself do you want to keep around for which conversation? How Indian are you today? How American are you? My own experience almost felt like a remixing of culture. So that was just something I was thinking about. 

Without any idea of a bigger project, my husband Zach actually suggested that I connect with Kate [Nordstrum, Liquid Music’s Curator]. I've known her for a while since she worked at the Southern Theater when I used to perform there all the time. I knew that she was working with the SPCO on Liquid Music projects and very well versed in contemporary composers, so I basically wanted to just ask her if there was any musician that I should check in with to develop something. She immediately suggested Jace. This was three years ago now. 

Since then, it's been a lot of building and lesson learning because I'm pretty new to choreography. This is only my second or third evening-length work and my first time working with non-Indian dancers. Initially, I think in my mind I thought the project would be a solo piece. But once we started talking to Jace, then the concept or theme of Let The Crows Come begin to overlay with what we were trying to do with the music. Then things just kept changing since we had the luxury of time.

PM: Which is so rare!

AR: It's been amazing because I'm also full time here at Ragamala and we have been creating work at the same time as I was creating Let The Crows Come. Sometimes it's nice to be like "I only have a year," but it was kind of nice to say: "we can see how the project takes shape as it should." And then once it became three dancers instead of solo it sort of seemed to make sense to have three composers instead of two. 

I always intended to have an Indian composer for my section — I wanted to use a Carnatic composer as well because there's so much to learn regarding traditional Carnatic compositional practices. I didn't want to put two things together that were so separate without having some connection musically to Bharatantyam. That connection is really important to me. About a year and a half ago was when we decided to add a third composer. It's all sort of been slowly working and re-working from there.

PM: Has it felt like too much time? Would you take another year if you had a chance?

AR: I would not take it. I think that'd be too much time!

PM: So now it feels like you're perfectly where you'd want it to be?

AR:  I would say yes. For the first year we were Liquid Music’s artists in virtual residency. We took that year and just talked a lot about the project. We got together three times that year just to see what would make sense.

PM: So it started off more inherently exploratory thanks to the virtual residency?

AR: Absolutely. At first, Kate was thinking it'd be a split evening: I would do half an evening and another artist would do the other. And then I said, “No, I want the whole evening!” [chuckles]

PM: In a way, it has kind of organically grown into that in its own way with the three choreographers and composers.

AR: Yeah, and I'm learning so much because I'm sort of the director of the whole thing. And, as I said, I'm basically being guided by personal aesthetics. It lets me ask, “What do you want to see? What do you want here? What do you want to do?” Sometimes it can be overwhelming to be like, "Well, what if what I want to see isn't what everyone wants to see?" But at some point, you can't fixate on that. That gut instinct is what you have to go with.

PM: Yeah, totally. And you can put your trust in your collaborators as well.

AR: Well, that's a huge part of it is: you pick people that you know are gonna kill it. 

PM: I read that there was an open call for dancers. What was your thinking behind just rather than just reaching out to people that you just knew or had worked with previously?

AR: I did some of that. But people are really busy and it was hard to figure out schedules so I decided that I would just put out an open call. I got a bunch of videos. Both [Alanna and Berit] came from TU Dance. I was drawn to the fact that they both have very different but very highly trained dance backgrounds, and they're both dance backgrounds that I really like to watch. Alanna I've known of and had been watching for a long time. We've both wanted to work with each other for a long time and finally, the scheduling worked out for this project. And then for Berit, I was actually on a grant panel and saw her work sample, and based on that I reached out to her. 

PM: So Berit works within the Gaga framework. What school of dance is Alanna coming from?

AR: She went to Juilliard. And she's got a lot of Graham, but she also has roots in Trinidad and so she's been working with Afro-Caribbean dance. And then of course TU Dance has an Ailey lineage. All that sounded interesting to me. 

It kind of worked out perfectly, because before I had dancers cast the whole structure was: one dancer will do an extrapolation of gesture which requires long lines and flow, which Alanna has beautifully. The other was: we'll watch my choreography in reverse and see what sticks out as interesting — what looks odd and what looked beautiful. Gaga is a form I am fascinated by and works very well for this purpose. That reversal is actually part of their process: they learn movement in reverse so that the body has a greater grasp of what it can do. So when I brought it up with Berit said: “oh yeah, we often do that in class.” And so she really took to that.

Ashwini Ramaswamy, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren at The Parkway Theater for a work-in-progress conversation in early 2019

Ashwini Ramaswamy, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren at The Parkway Theater for a work-in-progress conversation in early 2019

PM: To step back a little bit maybe give some context for Bharatanatyam. Are there a few words that you feel really capture Bharatanatyam?

AR: Well this would probably apply to all styles of dance worldwide, but there are just so many subtle and vastly different schools of Bharatanatyam thought and technique. So I can only speak to the very specific lineage that we [Ragamala/Ramaswamy family] come from. 

Our teacher in India, Smt. Alarmél Valli, has done something which I find unique within Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam is a very spiritual dance form, that is pretty common throughout all of the styles. But our teacher takes the idea of where it came from (which is depicting Hindu mythology) and will find poetry from a variety of sources, not just Indian poetry, that speaks to her deeply and her own truthful emotion. Texts that she can understand and she can feel and she'll layer meaning on top of that so that you what you end up with is not simply a retelling of an old story, but a personalization of something that feels really true. It's not a regurgitation. It's not: "I went to the park today." It's: "When I went to the park today, I saw this flower which reminded me of my grandfather..." and so on. 

It gives you this place of depth and texture and meaning that is very difficult to get to. But if you are able to achieve it, it's very defining in our lineage of Bharatanatyam. True emotion and being able to get people on board with that on stage, coupled with a very rigorous physicality and dexterity of feet and hands. When it all comes together, it's just a very complex, multidimensional form.

PM: It's so fascinating to hear that her practice is so rooted in extrapolating sources through her own medium, which seems to be at the heard of Let The Crows Come.

AR: Exactly. So it's a way of creating work that I think we have absorbed just as being her students for all these years. We've seen how she layers and recontextualized sources while staying true to the technique in the form that she's learned from her teacher. You get a really personalized version of an ancient form. I think all art *is* contemporary in that way. It's just how she chooses to do it.

PM: So for someone that doesn't know anything about Ragamala or Bharatanatyam can you talk about how a work is created within your specific lineage?

AR: I would say there are two different tracks that work ends up being created: One is when you are introduced to or you meet another artist you want to work with and you build the work around that. Maybe a musician or another dancer that you seek out. The second track being a theme that you really want to explore. You take that theme and usually add other sources to it, layering music and other poetic, theatrical, or literary texts. Bharatanatyam is inherently multidisciplinary. It is meant to bring to life sculpture. It is meant to bring to life psychology, theater, and music. Whatever you start with, you will eventually build it to become multidisciplinary. 

The initial inspiration for Ragamala's last work, Written in Water, was a board game called Paramapadam, which the British made into Snakes and Ladders. It was a game meant to teach children about destiny and fate: if you roll this one way you may go to upper a ladder to heaven or you may go down a snake. And because all of these myths and all these games and ideas have multiple meanings and varied ways of thinking about them, it's not all literal. So it's mining their subtext. The music ended up being a combination of classical Carnatic and Iraqi maqam created by composer/trumpeter Amir ElSaffar. We commissioned original projections from Keshav, an artist in Chennai, India. Everything was layered to become this multimedia work. 

PM: So when you travel back to India to study with your teacher is she teaching you choreography that ends up in Ragamala’s work?

AR: No, Ranee and Aparna choreograph all of Ragamala's work, and I began choreographing with them in 2015. We go back to her for technique and to keep gaining knowledge. It's somewhat like going back to graduate school to get a creative writing MFA: you need to do your research, do your reading, hone your craft, and then you can create your own work. It's very much like that. We often compare it to writing because people have a hard time grasping that the choreography is new even though it is created within our lineage of Bharatanatyam -- it's like having a vocabulary that you draw from instead of having to create a completely new language every time you start developing a new work.

PM: I can't think of like a parallel to the academic rigor that there seems to be at the heart of Carnatic music and dance. Do you have a good way of describing the “Carnatic Academy” and Indian society’s relationship to it?

AR: Well, it's daunting to be from someone who's from America because all the people who grew up in India, all that cultural context is just absorbed in them. So it's interesting when my mom and sister and I get together because my mom has cultural knowledge of the music, customs, rituals, traditions, and language deeply embedded within her-- everything is second nature to her. My sister was born in India and came here when she was three so she has had a deeper connection to India than I do having been born here. But I have influences and experiences here that they don’t have. So we work in this continuum. 

But it is complicated. There's so much knowledge out there that you will never attain. And I think part of the appeal of practicing this art form is that you are never going to be a master. I think more people should embrace that because you could be great, but you are probably never going to be the greatest. You never know everything, and that's an important and humbling and very central to Indian & Hindu philosophy. You have a guru. As long as your guru is there, someone knows more than you. That is very important.

PM: How would this work be viewed from the Academy setting in India?

AR: People are experimenting with genre, dance, and music all over India too. It's definitely not just people in the West. Ragamala has toured in India, and people seem to really appreciate the fact that we don't change the core of our dance practice. What we prefer is a subtextual, nuanced, and subtle approaches to creating our work. 

There's a lot of social justice slanted work in the contemporary Bharatanatyam realm happening in India and other places. I think that what we feel is that just by creating work you are guided to hopefully feel a certain way but not told what to think about the work at all. We try to give our audiences a little bit more agency to take from it what they want. 

We try to give our audiences agency to take from it what they want. Creating work as an immigrant woman is in itself kind of radical. That's kind of the space that we encompass, which is not to tell you what to think about this or that issue, but rather if this poetry from 2000 years ago is still relevant and we can layer it with something that you might connect with now then we can directly show that past, present, and future are interconnected.

PM: So it's not necessarily building a work around a politic, but that the process of making it work is inherently instilled with politics.

AR: Yeah, I think so. There's nothing wrong with any of those approaches. It's just a personal preference, like any other creative approach. We want our audience to take from it what they, and hopefully keep thinking about the piece for a while after seeing it. 

PM: Do you feel like you have to make sure that your technique is perfect to be taken seriously?

AR: Well, first of all, we have a teacher who is very exacting. She will do something a thousand times — and it's not even about perfect technique. It's about feeling like you won't get that truth out of a performer if they don't 100% know their stuff. You gotta know your stuff! Only then you can start exploring and improvising. So I think that is more of where we're at: It's not about "you have to have perfect technique." It's: "If you haven't done the work to make it the best it can possibly be, then what business do you have?" I do think that in order to showcase our art and have it taken seriously here, there should be no doubt that you put in that work. I think that about all art forms.  

PM: I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between Carnatic music and “Western” music (for lack of a better term) — I find it fascinating that Carnatic music is able to create so much tension with rhythm and melody alone as opposed to Western music’s reliance chord changes to create tension and resolution.

AR: I like that the musicians can manipulate the rhythm to the point that the listener won't quite understand where the beat is. It adds a lot of excitement to the dance. But also the ragas you choose, of which there are probably infinite, have a huge effect on the performance. I find I'm drawn almost exclusively to Ragas that don't feel resolved, that have a "minor" quality and aspects about them that sound a little haunting, and even end that way. And every time I say I like a raga it will have some sort of minor or some kind of key jump that doesn't ever feel resolved or sweet, it's more haunting or something. And so the combination of picking a raga or these times signatures in the way that you can play with them just gives so much opportunity for... not necessarily tension but surprise, which I like.

PM: There’s a paragraph in Uproot that I thought might resonate with. Jace is talking about DJing at The Loft in NYC in the 2000s:

“Those late nights at the lofts taught me never to take an audience for granted. It's not something that just materializes and passively consumes your creation. Especially in the visual arts, there's this sense that an artist makes his or her work, installs it in a gallery and that's it. Little consideration is given to who's going to see and how they might engage with it. Whereas up in the Loft, engagement with the audience was everything: the crowd responded to the energy of the mix and the DJs fed off that creating a tight feedback loop. The audience became a form of intelligence and expression in of itself. The people in the room were never entirely separate from the performers.” (pg. 11, Uproot)

How does like listening to the music and then in performing for audiences in such tightly structured work like Bharatanatyam relate to that?

AR: It's interesting because in its original state Bharatanatyam is a solo dance with live music. So it's not as tightly constructed as you might think because the dancer has practiced so much that they can kind of follow the musicians and vice versa. So the dancer won't do it the same every time. 

Photo by Tanner Young

Photo by Tanner Young

Indian Arts have a philosophy called Bhava and Rasa, Which is the relationship between audience and viewer and that it's reciprocal, that you need each other, which I very much believe. There is a conversation happening there. In India the audiences are much less formal than audiences here. People will walk around and talk, and you know, "Aha!" and "Bravo," basically talking to the performers and clapping whenever they want. It's much more of an active participation. Which is cool in some ways. But also in some ways, it's also like, sometimes you don't really want people walking around or talking during your performance. But they feel comfortable, which is nice. 

I've always been fascinated with DJs having to read a crowd and change what they're playing based on what they think people are going to respond to. I think it would be really hard. It seems like sometimes people think that a DJ is just hitting play on a recording but it's very much like being a live musician. That's part of what we're playing within this piece: we've got this tradition of Carnatic music, where they're playing instruments live and improvising. You should feel the same way about what the DJs are doing.

PM: It seems like the word “improvisation,” at least in the way use that word when talking about American music, doesn’t really capture what you are talking about here.

AR: It's hard. So much of this is a language barrier. That's part of the whole practice and technical proficiency thing we were talking about earlier. If you do a piece three times a day, even just in a very basic way spatially, you start figuring things out. Like if you go to this part of the stage and turn this much. You might do it a different way that feels equally good and then feel much freer because you know all of the options and you can fully explore any of those options. You have to practice that much in order to get that improvisatory feel, which I think might be counterintuitive to some people, but to me, it makes total sense. 

A lot of improvisation in Bharatanatyam has to do with space: taking up more or less space or where you're going and then having this vocabulary to draw from. Specific hand gestures definitely mean certain things, but you have multiple options for each word or each meaning that you could potentially draw from and change as long as the musicians know this is what I'm going to do to finish it up, and then we can go onto the next thing.

PM: It seems really difficult to capture in words how improvisation works within Bharatanatyam — I’d imagine that a lot of folks see it as very “tight.” But at the same time, the mridangam player is basically doing calculus to resolve on the correct beat while improvising and reacting to the dancer.

AR: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that for improvisation in dance from a Western perspective also sometimes feels more "free in a space" or like "jamming" — it doesn't feel as "set." What we do is more "set" like in the traditional sense of the word. There are still a lot of rules. We just find the rules very freeing. It's technique and when you're able to follow rules in some ways you can play with them more. 

PM: Are there any aspirations for this piece to live on past this initial tour?

AR: Well it will definitely tour for the next two years. Who knows about what will happen after that! I'm definitely interested in continuing this idea of using other dancers who don't do Indian dance — working with them on some of the principles of the dance form and kind of manipulating and extrapolating on them.

PM: Has any part of the creative process in developing this piece been especially surprising or has it all felt very organic and intuitive? 

AR: I mean... at this point, I literally have no idea what it's gonna look like because we have never all been in the same room...

PM: Is that exciting or terrifying?

AR: I've seen all the sections on their own, so I know it'll work. And the Lab is going to be an interesting space for it because you can't really hide in there. There's no wings or anything. So we're just gonna embrace that and not worry about trying to disappear and be in that space together. It's going to be fine [chuckles].

PM: Another quote from the book that seems relevant to our conversation: 

“Sampling can forge cultural links just as easily as it can sustain a stereopype … more and more I saw sampling used to maintain cultural distance.” (pg. 184, Uproot)

It seems like you use the words “extrapolation” and “interpolation” to describe the process of the other two dancers interpreting your choreography. It might be another failure of words to describe art, but can you differentiate “extrapolation” from “appropriation?” 

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AR: I'm working very closely with the other dancers — they are directly taking from my solo, right? Every movement that the other dancers are doing I've directed in some way based on what I'm doing. So I still feel like it has to do with my personal feelings of having different experiences as an American. I take what I want from being Indian, and use it in different ways -- it's a lens into a crazy multicultural experiment. Though I do want to be careful with what we're doing. It's definitely not "I'm giving you this thing and you're just going to do what you want with it." I'm very much overseeing everything and making sure that I feel like it makes sense and that it feels like me.

PM: Yeah. And it's a two-way dialogue. It's not taking, it's sharing.

AR: Right. Exactly. So they all feel like it's them too. I've definitely never wanted to teach another non-Bharatanatyam person to do Bharatanatyam — that was never the point. It was more like: "you're amazing" and "what does this, what does this remind you of?" and then we work from there.

PM:  Do you foresee this style of collaboration being a big part of your work in the future?

AR: Yeah, I think so. Maybe a goal would be to see if someday a non-Indian company would want someone like me to set work on them. It doesn't really happen like that for culturally-based forms in the way it does for other dance forms. You see that there are all kinds of non-ballet choreographers setting work on ballet companies even though they're not trained in ballet. I'm not sure I'd be interested in that specifically, but it is something I'm thinking about. 

PM: It seems like having self-produced all of your own work you've developed a director brain that is valuable in so many different performative art practices, even outside of dance.

AR: There's a lot more to learn too. I'd like to keep expanding on these ideas, maybe starting with solos and going into more group stuff. It's very stressful at the beginning and then it becomes kind of fun as long as you don't worry about it being a huge failure [chuckles]. And in some ways, it's like, why are we doing this if we are not trying new things?

PM: Can you talk more about the symbology of the title of the work, Let The Crows Come?

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AR: I had been reading an article about crows, and realized that I never really thought about crows. I think it was a short article in The Guardian about how crows are very misunderstood. They're very communal; they defend each other and can make tools— and more of these cool little stories. I had always thought of them as a nuisance or creatures that predict doom. 

In Hinduism, there is a belief that crows play a major role in linking the living to the dead. In this sense, they bring to vivid life the spirits of the past. Pitru Paksha (meaning fortnight of the ancestors) is a period when Hindus pay tribute to their ancestors so that the departed souls can rest in peace. After burning a mixture of sandalwood and camphor, rice is offered to the crows. 

I developed the visual language of Let the Crows Come from a variety of textual sources, including the epic poem Ramayana, second-century Tamil Sangam poetry, and ancient Sanskrit texts called the Brihatsamhita and Kakajarita. These sources allow us entry into a world where the human, the natural and the metaphysical — as well as past, present and future — are forever engaged in sacred movement. 


“There is no set way ever": An interview with Darkstar's James Young by Liquid Music

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DARKSTAR & JAMES MCVINNIE


COLLAPSE

James Young, one half of the London-based electronics duo “Darkstar”, talks with Liquid Music blog contributor Nick Lanser about their new work Collapse, a collaborative effort with world renowned organist James McVinnie commissioned by Liquid Music and premiering at Northrop on May 4.


Nick Lanser: How did you and Aiden come to start making music together? Did you have earlier music projects before delving into the electronic music world?

James Young: Aiden and I started passing ideas back and forth around 2005, I’d been going to a nightclub called fwd in London and we started making sounds that would sit in on the periphery there. Darkstar was our first thing we tried to be honest. We lived in West London and started making tracks that were being played on Pirate Radio. Once we forged a sound that was our own I think people started to take note that we were trying something a little different for that context and it worked for us. 

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NL: What was your earliest memory of electronic music? What inspired you to start creating independently?

JY: Earliest memory probably Thriller, the Linn drum used in that, the way it was so rigid but worked so well. What got me making music was probably tape packs and just scraps of paraphernalia from clubs in the North West of England, flyers, posters, radio, the odd cross over tune, I started wondering what if at that point and began dj’ing, then bought a sampler and went from there. 

Foam Island, an album by Darkstar on Spotify

NL: Walk me through your creative process. When you are creating new music, what comes first? Do you start with a concept? Or improvisation?  

JY: Both really, there is no set way ever. Not one piece of music ever starts the same – in my eyes anyway. I always think it just happens or we dig and dig until there’s something there to move forward with but each time there are differences. We’re not precious about what we use or where we make music we just try and get time together and look for something we both like without over thinking what we’re doing, the overthinking comes much later when we have seven or so tracks then we’ll try and look at it conceptually or explore how it all fits together. 

NL: How did you start working with James McVinnie? How did you know he’d be a good collaborative match for Darkstar?

JY: We began working with James on a piece called “Dance Unity” performed at the Southbank Centre. It was part of the PRS New Music Biennial. We had an idea in mind to delve into archives of old 90’s records we liked and somehow re-contextualize them with the organ. James was really open to our ideas and it worked perfectly. I think from a musical stand point, because we have a certain type of part that is common in a lot of our work, looped intricate melodies, James could grab onto this and evolve it through performance. So not only was our work identifiable through the piece, James was also progressing our ideas through nuances in how he manipulates the organ. 

NL: What have you set out to say or to achieve with Collapse? Is there a planned evolution for the work post-premiere?

JY: We wanted to try and delve more musically knowing what the organ and James are capable of. We wanted something quintessentially Darkstar yet expansive. To try layered loops that build and develop into often explorative compositions. Something that would swell and evolve, fall back and rest, like a cycle of  harmonic layers constantly shifting. 

I think there will be an evolution with this work but what yet I have no idea, it’s always hard to think ahead after just finishing it. But we will I’m sure look to progress it or use again. 

NL: Where do you find inspiration outside of the music world?

JY: We have been doing a lot of youth work recently and that has been inspiring. To see so much talent and enthusiasm for music was energizing and I think probably changed our approach to recording slightly. How? I’m not sure just yet but after working in different settings with people that don’t have the means to make music everyday like we do… it left a lasting impression on how we use our time and how we develop Darkstar from this point. It feels like a crossroads but one we’re happy to be at. 


Liquid Music presents the world premiere of Collapse by James McVinnie and Darkstar Saturday, May 4 at Northrop. BUY TICKETS HERE.

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James McVinnie on organs, electronics and “Collapse” by Liquid Music

James McVinnie

James McVinnie

On May 4, Liquid Music presents renowned organist James McVinnie with London-based electronics duo Darkstar in the world premiere of Collapse at Northrop (Minnesota debuts for all artists). McVinnie’s boundless approach to music has led him to collaborations with a fascinating variety of distinctive artists across musical genres. From 2008 to 2011 he held the post of Assistant Organist of Westminster Abbey. Read McVinnie’s generous program note for Collapse, which overviews more than his collaboration with Darkstar, but gives insight into his life as an organist and his relationship with electronic music.


I come from a thoroughly traditional background as a classically trained organist — I’ve held positions in church music and played the majority of the core organ repertoire. Music with less traditional roots has however always been a big part of my musical makeup and a fire to my imagination. It was through my record label, Bedroom Community, that my knowledge of electronic music really started to blossom. I came to know, as friends, a network of artists who were creating groundbreaking work — particularly Valgeir Sigurðsson and Ben Frost at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik — and a whole new world slowly revealed itself to my ears and mind. I’ve become fascinated with synthesis in music and how that relates to the pipe organ; the two seemingly opposite sides to a coin are in fact much closer to one another than one might imagine.

Northrop’s Aeolian-Skinner Pipe Organ

Northrop’s Aeolian-Skinner Pipe Organ

Each organ is different; each has its own unique disposition of ‘stops’, ‘registers’ (or ‘instruments’ in all but name) which are voiced to sound their best for the acoustic space they inhabit. The room that houses the organ therefore becomes part of the instrument itself and organists therefore become orchestrators — each piece has to be fitted to each new instrument, often taking into consideration the wishes of the composer and/or conventions about which ‘registers’ or ‘stops’ to use according to national styles or fashions of the day. Organists thus develop a highly attuned ear for adapting music to a particular instrument and acoustic space, a process which is identical to that of a producer, creating and mixing music originating from the studio using synthesised instruments.

The sound of the organ is created by air resonating through pipes. This sound is without modulation or change; the note stays sounding the same until your finger or foot releases the key (often unfairly earning the instrument an unmusical, inflexible reputation!). This super-flatness encourages the player to use various different registers (or ‘stops’ as described above) of the organ in imaginative ways to create variety of sound, just as a composer would chose their instruments in an orchestral work, or like how you would program a synthesiser. These registral colourations, coupled with careful and intricate deployment of compositional textures and figurations, provide limitless possibilities for musical exploration.

McVinnie at Eaux Claires’ Baroque Installment

McVinnie at Eaux Claires’ Baroque Installment

One of the most appealing aspects of the organ is that its vast symphonic capabilities are accessible to a single person. The organist can change registration (through simple sequencing technology) in an instant. Tom Jenkinson (better known as the electronic musician Squarepusher who has written me a large body of music for organ) writes:

Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher)

Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher)

There are aspects of writing for organ which I find comparable to writing music for electronics. There is a very tangible weight to the amount of technology around you in an organ performance, unlike any other acoustic instrument I have any experience of. Sounds may be accessed by the touch of button, such that sonic variety is achieved by mechanical means as much as it is by the performer's skill. In that way I see the organist as immersed in technology much more than performers of other acoustic instruments and, despite its long history, it thus seems an eternally modern instrument. Maybe there is something reminiscent of the dark glamour of a computer genius about the organist, wrapped up in machinery, remote from and indifferent to praise.

Darkstar

Darkstar

The pipe organ is famed in popular culture for its gothic ‘dracula’ appeal, a notoriety which belies its subtlety, great nuance and strangeness. In working with James and Aiden on this project, I have tried very hard to make the organ not sound like an organ — I’ve tried to pair the notes written with unusual, characterful registral combinations to try to blur the edges between electronics and pipes. This performance represents our largest scale collaboration to date.


Liquid Music presents the world premiere of Collapse by James McVinnie and Darkstar Saturday, May 4 at Northrop. BUY TICKETS HERE.

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Six days out: Six questions for Dustin O'Halloran by Liquid Music

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In anticipation of Liquid Music’s Double Header: New Music & Dance Duos on April 17 & 18, Liquid Music blog contributor Nick Lanser interviewed composer Dustin O’Halloran to learn more about his collaborative project with dancer/choreographer Fukiko Takase, 1 0 0 1. Here they discuss inspiration, creative process, and the animating concepts of 1 0 0 1, a half-evening of new music and dance exploring territories of technology, humanity, and mind-body dualism in our electronics-forward existence.


Nick Lanser: How did you and Fukiko come to work with each other? What about each other’s art or practice made you want to collaborate?

Fukiko Takase

Fukiko Takase

Dustin O’Halloran: Fukiko and I first met when we worked together for Wayne McGregor's contemporary dance piece ATOMOS. I was so impressed with her instincts and intellect toward dance and felt that we had a connection in this way, and we planted the seed to one day do something together. 

NL: When composing for dance, do you have movement in mind? As you create arrangements to support movement, do you have a different approach than you would, for say, a film score?

DO: Film is very much a box in some ways; it has defined borders, and timelines which can be restrictive. Dance is a much more open concept of working for me, and I approach it how I would write for myself, like a blank canvas that needs filling. I think its one of the purest ways music and visuals can connect as its completely organic. I learned from working with Wayne McGregor that music for contemporary dance doesn’t necessarily have to support movement in a traditional sense as much as it needs to create an atmosphere and environment that can evolve and shift and give space. This freedom is fundamental to me and its an area to be very creative and explore new ideas.

NL: Your Liquid Music project is about technology, humanity and mind-body dualism as we “approach the age of AI.” How did you and Fukiko arrive at this concept? Did another piece of artwork or literature inspire it? 

DO: We're inspired by the concepts from the Japanese anime classic The Ghost In The Shell and also this new frontier that seems to be coming soon with AI and what it will mean for humanity. There are so many questions about the soul and technology and where it will lead us. We found these concepts inspiring for us as we both wanted to explore taking organic materials and transforming them with technology and how this could be interpreted through dance and to search for new languages in our art forms.

NL: What has been the most significant moment in the creation of this work, thus far, with Fukiko?

DO: It's always incredible how creative connections can inspire you, so for me each time seeing pieces of the choreography gave new light to the music and the directions it could go. It was helping me be more open and deeper into the process and take bolder steps where perhaps I would not alone. Also the conversations we had with our lighting designer, which were very inspiring as we discussed concepts of the soul, new languages and technology.

NL: Your body of work as a film composer is substantial. What has been your favorite film project thus far and what do you have coming up?

DO: Its been a busy few years, the highlight being the film Lion which I co-composed with German composer HAUSCHKA, it's rare when all elements come together like this. We just finished a new film entitled The Art Of Racing In The Rain which will come out this year, and I’m also completing a new record with Adam Wiltzie my partner in the ambient/drone project A WINGED VICTORY FOR THE SULLEN.

NL: What is the biggest non-musical influence on your work?

DO: Paintings and books are always a significant influence on me. A great book will stay with me like a dream, and these subconscious thoughts still find themselves in the music. Abstract painting for me is always how I experience music, inexpressible colors and feelings that are visceral. 


Purchase Tickets for 1 0 0 1, part of Liquid Music’s New Music & Dance Duos double header April 17 & 18, also featuring Mike Lewis and Eva Mohn’s When Isn’t Yet.

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“Your body has it's own mind": Fukiko Takase in conversation with Berit Ahlgren by Liquid Music

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Fukiko Takase was born in New York and raised in Japan. She has been dancing since the age of two under her mother Takako Takase and Katsuko Orita's dance training. When she was 14, Fukiko started creating and performing her work for competitions to develop her creativity and physical capabilities. She received the Cultural Affairs Fellowship from the Japanese government, studied at Codarts Rotterdam Dance Academy, London Contemporary Dance School. As a dancer, she worked for Henri Oguike Dance Company (2006–2010), Russell Maliphant (2010), and Company Wayne McGregor (2011–2018). Fukiko danced with Thom Yorke in a music video and featured in projects for AnOther Magazine, County of Milan, Channel 4, The Brits, BBC Late Night Proms and Uniqlo. Her choreography includes Autumn Hunch and Cultivate a Quiet Joy.


Berit Ahlgren: It’s an honor to speak to you, Fukiko! Your work is very inspirational for me as a dance artist, and when I was asked by Kate [Nordstrom] to take this opportunity, I said “wow, yes”. So first, thank you, it will be really interesting to hear from your voice about your art and creative process.

Lets start at the beginning! Your parents were both dancers, and knowing this, I am curious what you were exposed to as a young child that no doubt shaped your interest in dance from a young age.

Fukiko Takase: I think about my Mom who danced with both Kei Takei’s company Moving Earth in Japan and New York City-based Laura Dean. Also, Tetsuhiko Maeda, a really talented Japanese costume and set designer, shaped my creative interests. But really, so many choreographers and dancers I saw daily. I was surrounded by lots of adults when I was little, constantly with my mom in this circle with different creative people. In the studio, theater… a lot of time it was like a kindergarten for me, hanging around in auditoriums watching my mom perform. I got in to a bit of naughty acts! I used to blow the ash out of ashtrays and make a mess, jump around the greenroom sofas and do things that kids do, it was just always in a theater setting.

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BA: Like being on a playground.

FT: Yeah! I think I sort of naturally had an understanding of the theater space as a small kid. Being in the a black box and the sensing the people in it—or not!— with the effects of the lights within the space. The theater has a sense of, I don’t know, spirituality to it for me, as well as the studio. The studio has something. I was clearly interested in environment just hanging around in these spaces, and feeling how the thought comes up in a creative process. Sort of like a painter, looking at the paper, or similar to a raindrop—you drop it somewhere and it starts from there, whatever you feel with it.

BA: It’s really beautiful to consider the theater or the studio as, like, a sacred space, almost.

FT: Yeah, yeah.

BA: What comes to mind are temples and churches or place where some sort of precious, important ritual of sacredness happens. Regardless of whatever you believe in, a divine source of creation takes place. It’s a really beautiful way to think about that.

FT: Yeah, I mean sometimes I try to do some exercise at home but it’s not the same as in the studio.

BA: No, never, right?

FT: Weirdly. You think the same things working in spaces outside the studio or theater, but you don’t have the same feeling of tension. Maybe not the tension, but your body doesn’t quite get it.

BA: Agreed. The body doesn’t respond in quite the same way. Speaking of studios, your foundational training was in Japan, followed by Codarts Rotterdam Dance Academy and then London Contemporary Dance School—building a strong contemporary ballet base. Are there dance techniques that you wish you had studied or that intrigue you now that could be pursued at this point in your career?

FT: This is maybe slightly different, but quite recently I went to see a battle of Tutting. Dancers have one minute each with their choice of music or DJ, then improvise. Tutting is very specific form of dance using hands and arms to create the shapes and geometric structure in the space. I’m not that great at it, but it’d be nice to do a workshop. It’s totally different. I’m super curious and mesmerized by it, so I maybe start learning from a video, just the basics like figure eights and drawing. Perhaps one day!

BA: Are you still working with Wayne McGregor in London?

FT: I graduated from that last year. Maybe I’ll go back, I don’t know, but for now I want to focus on my work. We’re still in touch, but I’ve got to move on with my curiosities and interests.

Wayne McGregor

Wayne McGregor

BA: Mr. McGregor’s work is well known as being innovative, multi-disciplinary and technically precise. In terms in the way that he works as a creator and choreographer, and how you are making your work, do you find similarities, or are there things that you absorbed from working with him?

FT: Oh definitely, definitely. I learned a lot from working with him, as well as other choreographers over the years. He works with a neuroscientist, so imagery is very important to the process. I still use this lens, and constantly analyze what I’m getting data from in order to know, to understand, my thought process within the choreographic process. You know, I am quite anal with where the step is coming from. What is the source of the step? What does it mean? Why do I do this? Why am I in this space in this particular spot? To make sense of the piece, to understand thought process is quite important. It’s the key to the work.

BA: That sounds very scientific!

FT: Yeah, I know!

BA: …and organized and different. Not everyone choreographs in that way, so that’s really nice to hear! And in terms of collaborating with musicians, especially since 1001 is a shared project between you and Dustin O’Halloran, how has that fit in to your creative process and where might such collaborations lead? Is this something you really love to do, working with musicians?

FT: I first met Dustin through Wayne’s work Atomos. That was maybe 2013, and we clicked as friends but also… we sort of speak the same language! I’m not talking about English or Spanish, it’s an artistic language. We often said “lets do something together” but of course we’re busy people in a busy time, but I’m so blessed by this project with Liquid Music to make the time. I’m really happy to work with Dustin, he inspires me. When we discussed collaborating, we talked about how he approaches the music, how I approach the dance. Our lighting designer Yaron also speaks the same language. So just by talking on Skype or having a meeting, it doesn’t have to be a long phrase, it could be just one word, and it’s already inspiring for us what is exchanged. The notes, how he thinks about the chords, how I say “oh it sounds like this” or “I want a little bit more of this feeling”. We inspire each other by sharing our work.

BA: That’s great. I’m really excited to see and hear what you’ve put together, as well as the work of your lighting designer. It sounds like his involvement is a very important key to the piece! Speaking of 1 0 0 1, in this premiere you explore aspects of technology. It sounds like you and Dustin have known each other for a bit, so was there a specific process that distilled to this concept?

Dustin O’Halloran

Dustin O’Halloran

FT: We talked about what should we do, and around that same time the film Ghost in the Shell came out. I’m a bit of a fan of animation, so when I saw the film I was really impressed by it but I was also thinking “what’s next” from that animation. It was a mixture of feelings. You watch it and know it’s technology, but you know, at the same time, it gave me question as to our sense of reality. It’s a mind game. And it got me thinking how we could do that with the music. So that’s the beginning. But you know 1 0 0 1 is not about Ghost in the Shell, obviously. I thought, how can I relate to that feeling of a machine that has consciousness, and that the consciousness evolves? But the real question is “what is human being?” Because, basically if you have a source of consciousness, a human could be in anything. It could be a refrigerator, an icicle… those things could be human if it has consciousness or feeling.

BA: And so you’re saying consciousness and feeling are related, or connected—in order to have consciousness you have feeling, or if you have feeling you have consciousness.

FT: Yes, and that you are in it—your soul, your consciousness— you just have a shell of some form. But maybe also in some other form at the same time, out there showing intelligence, artificial life. It’s a crazy world we live in.

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BA: Very, increasingly so.

FT: Right? And that idea evolved into considering the realm. We have a realm that we live in, and also the spiritual realm, and now there is the world wide web realm.

BA: The world wide web is it’s own massive realm.

FT: Exactly! And that’s why it’s such a confusing time. We had two and that was a handful, and now we have three. It’s crazy. There’s a lot of people doing a cyber detox—they stop emailing, Instagram, Facebook, everything. I do it as well sometimes. And when you do it you feel more dead than before. Like you’re dead to the world almost, but of course you’re not dead.

BA: It’s as if you don’t exist if you don’t have a form of yourself that’s on a screen. When you drop those profiles, you can’t exist or coexist or get around the day. It’s pretty fascinating. That these other versions of us are so real, yet so two-dimensional.

FT: I know, right? I mean, there are many things, it really doesn’t stop. It’s so unknown, there’s so much possibility. It’s really exciting but also daunting at the same time!

BA: Elaborate on the questions you ask the audience regarding 1 0 0 1: “How will a new form of consciousness manifest inside a body? What will happen to our soul?” What ideas were on the table for you and Dustin that got distilled down to these core queries? Do you feel these questions have been somewhat answered for you, and offered for the audience to sit with?

FT: I think for me the closest thing to relate to a machine feeling is when I performed some of Wayne’s pieces for 5 years, some pieces for 8 years. Some of those performances I remember feeling like a machine. When you do the same things over and over, you lose this raw feeling from the premiere to the 200th time you’ve done it. You don’t have the same feelings of excitement from the first time it premieres, but you’re still striving for perfection as a dancer.

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BA: Always.

FT: Always, right? Your body has it’s own mind. It’s a result of repetition, striving for perfection, and such an intense concentration on your work. Also it’s a performing art, so you’re doing it in the theater—in a sacred space—with an audience of 2,000 people’s eyes on you. In this black box, every performance happens, but it’s not the same. This robotic feeling is muscle memory in dance, and it’s the same with music as well. Dustin plays piano, and his muscle memory is at work, as well as thoughts, feelings…

BA: You can become a bit numb with muscle memory.

FT: Yeah, exactly!

BA: Like you were saying before, performing over and over the same choreography is the most similar thing to being a robot that you can imagine. The more you perform a certain work, go through the motions, know the parts that are going to be more exhausting than others and how to mentally and physically to get through the piece… it becomes numb to the real experience of dancing instead of the joy and freshness that was once there.

FT: Yeah. I think I am still investigating, and it’s not an easy task for me. But something about repetition and maybe the way of repeating something.

BA: And predictability?

FT: Yeah, maybe predictability and also the accumulation of things.

BA: Moving forward, where do you hope to go from here? I know that’s a very general question, but you’re at a transition in your career. While you’ve done so much independent work already, where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years, considering the work that you’re making now collaborating with other artists? Is there some, I don’t want to say a “dream” idea of what life would look like, but something itching where we can find you in the future?

FT: I’ve always worked solo. I get to know myself by finding my language. In a dream, doing this commission with Liquid Music is a perfect opportunity for me to find myself. I want to keep doing this self inquiry. I’ve done it since I was 14 years old, though I haven’t been consistent with it. In contemporary dance, this research could be anything. There are so many combinations of steps, it’s not like traditional ballet, and I want to see how language evolves within me. Of course I’m getting older so I cannot do the stuff I could do 10 years ago, but that’s also a good challenge for me. The more restriction I have the more creative I have to be.

BA: Absolutely.

FT: And I have this opportunity to do Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. It was first performed in 1964, ages ago. Yoko sat in a gallery with scissors in front of her and audience members cut her cloths, freely. It was up to them, so she, herself, became the artwork. I haven’t done it yet. I’m scared about that, but really excited. This is totally different—I’m not dancing in the gallery, I’m just sitting. To do these new challenges in this time period is an opportunity to grow as an artist. I want to do more of that, maybe more to do with interacting with other forms of art. I don’t know what will happen!

BA: One thing at a time!

FT: Yeah.

BA: Where do you call home now? London still, or…?

FT: I am here in Japan now and want to call Tokyo home again as an artist. London was home for the past 14-15 years. My family is in here, and I want to make Japan home too. That’s another project I have. But perhaps the country doesn’t really matter, I just want to find the place I can feel home after I’ve traveled around so much for a long time. Possibly a life where I can have a dog!

BA: That’s great, and a very important project that requires an artistic mind as well!


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Berit Ahlgren makes dances and performs in other peoples’ work, searching for ways to best implement how these two activities weave most beautifully with the world around her. Her work as both performer and independent movement researcher has taken her from Klamath Falls, OR, to Rishikesh, India, with many well-established and tiny towns between. In addition to teaching gaga/people and gaga/dancer classes regularly in New York City and the Twin Cities, she’s been a guest instructor at the New York University, Wesleyan University, University of California Berkeley, Carlton College, St. Olaf College and The Royal Ballet School of Sweden to share her knowledge in the Gaga Movement Language. While a company member of TU Dance from 2006-2014, she made significant creative contributions to the projects of resident choreographer Uri Sands, and retains close ties to the company and its dance school, based in St. Paul, MN. Ahlgren completed her M.F.A. in Dance from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts in May 2016, and continues to invest herself in dance that resonates for both the artistic team and curious audiences with equal importance. Ahlgren’s global citizenship leads her in fresh directions regularly, and offers myriad opportunities to be humbled while learning from the surroundings she lands in. 


Purchase Tickets for 1 0 0 1, part of Liquid Music’s New Music & Dance Duos double header April 17 & 18, also featuring Mike Lewis and Eva Mohn’s When Isn’t Yet.

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Receiving Music with Mike Lewis by Liquid Music

by LM blog contributor Trever Hagen

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Perhaps it is a bit tongue-in-cheek to call Mike Lewis a local musician. The saxophonist regularly (and literally) plays to hundreds of thousands of ears every year across the globe. But calling Mike Lewis “local” accomplishes three things: first, it gives us who live in the Cities some kind of pride, I suppose, that we can call him one of our own; second, it tethers ‘local’ to something socially organic, a luxury in the distributed digital culture of modern relations; third, Mike does in fact play remarkably often in the Cities. So how is he not local? For example you’ve surely heard Mike blow as part Happy Apple for the past twenty years. You’ve probably seen him at the Khyber Pass Café in St. Paul on Thursdays with Fat Kid Wednesdays. Or maybe you caught him singing background vocals while playing bass for Alpha Consumer at the Turf Club? Possibly you were lucky enough to catch him at First Ave. when Gayngs played their Last Prom (remember Prince gazing on from the side stage?). Or certainly you saw Mike playing with Bon Iver at Rock the Garden. If you haven’t seen him on any of these stages, then you have absolutely heard his recordings on KFAI or The Current. Mike is never far away, if you are listening.

This is all to say that Mike is a person whose depth of musical communication is matched only by his social grace. Furthermore, he has an innate ability to articulate his reflections on creative expression, which makes him well-poised to offer point after point of wisdom for any performer or curious mind. Why call it wisdom? Well, it seems that Mike has digested quite a bit of the contours of performance, improvisation, theory, narrative, storytelling, abstract communication and affect. He has digested it in a manner that feels natural—as if music was his mother tongue rather than a language learned in a classroom or through memorizing vocab flashcards. It is much less about the display of knowledge as it is about actually trying to engage communication. I recall some years ago asking Mike about his practice schedule when he was younger; I figured that he would confirm my assumption of musical learning by listing a host of jazz pedagogical materials. Rather, Mike stated: “I don’t like practicing alone, I just like to play with others.” Perhaps that statement could be considered an overarching ethos of Mike’s approach to playing music: to connect with other people.

On April 18, Lewis brings this ethos to When Isn’t Yet, a piece for Liquid Music with dancers Eva Mohn and Sarah Baumert, and Maggie Bergeron on lights. When Isn’t Yet is like a Zen koan, a linguistic paradox to expose intuition and reality. Their approach is with clear improvisatory intent, which requires one to shore up all of their perspectives on the unfolding drama of existence. Mike’s most recent work with dancers has been with TU Dance and Bon Iver’s Liquid Music-commissioned collaboration, Come Through. That project began with rehearsals in the spring of 2017 and most recently was performed at the Kennedy Center in spring 2019. However, Come Through is a much different collaboration than what we will witness in April. I caught up with Mike in Cincinnati via phone while he was on tour with Bon Iver to discuss how When Isn’t Yet will be realized.


Trever Hagen: What would be different for you in this scenario of dance and music? How do you approach performing something like this?

Mike Lewis: The primary thing is trying not to get so lost in what I'm doing—like the orchestration of what I am doing—so that I'm unable to pay attention to what's going on with the movement. That is part of the reason that I'm considering pulling JT [Bates] in. Just so I don't have to rely on myself for every single part of what I want to pull off.  With what ends up being the composition or the general structure, I want to make sure that I can be engaged on a level beyond just the musical. Because [JT] will be taking on this conductor-type role and performing role I suppose. And yeah, just catching cues and providing them and trying to make sure that the narrative is somewhat clear. So that’s what I want to get [the performance] to be.

Is the narrative or orchestration something improvised or is there actually material you are composing?

We kind of put together an initial idea about it last year and right from the get go, we wanted to make sure that improvisation was a large part of it. Because that was actually the first conversation I ever had with Eva. [Dance can be] such an incredibly structured world and it's rehearsed so heavily—down to the most minute details—that we're kind of trying to play more with an idea of real-time reactions to things. Having areas that we know we want to hit, energies that we want to explore. So having “zones” that we arrive at but then within those zones, we try to have room to have things happen in real-time that are that are different. That's a nebulous answer. [laughs]

Sarah Baumert and Eva Mohn in residency at Carleton College, September 2018

Sarah Baumert and Eva Mohn in residency at Carleton College, September 2018

We're trying to embrace the title of the piece. It's kind of playing with the idea “what is yet”, or “when ‘when’ isn't yet”, kind of that idea. It’s the mastery of “Why did things happen when they do?”, “Why do you make the decisions that you make when you make them?”, “What makes one decision feel better than another one or translate better?” So much of the answer to these questions has to do with years and years and years of learning to create in abstract contexts. So improvisation is definitely a huge part of it. We're going to be relying on those skills that we've honed over long periods of time, and, you know, and try to really get inside of why those things happen when they do.

In terms of aesthetic decision-making, this approach or awareness you are speaking about seems to tease out all of this tacit knowledge we carry on our bodies.

It's like we're driving from where we have arrived at after all of this time. Like figuring out how to improvise—figuring out how to have it not just be wild scribbling but rather how to be centered in an idea, in an energy. So a lot of how we've talked about it thus far has been maybe not even necessarily like “Okay, when this happens, we'll do this.” Instead we'll talk about how we've been feeling that day; we've talked about film or what spaces and moments feel like.

So attempting to connect almost on an extra-musical level first?

Things are interesting, like simply the world that you exist in on a daily basis, just as a human being. And how that is affecting you. Like the way that people relate to each other, or like the way that people relate to a time in their lives and their equilibrium within that: communication between people even if you don't have anything in common. How do you connect? How do we translate something into something not necessarily extremely descriptive and specific, but how do you create an energy? How do you create the kind of give and take and release that everybody deals with? That's a difficult question.

How do you attempt that or know when that occurs?

There're definitely moments when it happens. Yes for sure, you know when you know. You're weirdly always able to tell when you're in the midst of one [of these moments] and that has to do so much with an openness and an energy that you're offering, how it's received and reciprocated by people that are in the room with you. And once you have successes in those lightning strikes, it's like [that energy] tells you when to do the next thing. You just get immersed in it and then that helps you, like, hold a note out longer or hold the pose. How do you make something come off pretty? How do you create tension in dissonance and then release it into something that makes people feel like they’ve had some travel?

It's like if we pull it off, if we do a good job with this piece, I think there will be moments that are goofy and funny and I think there might be moments that are really lonely and kind of scary and desolate. You decide to make meaning out of it for you. I think that's what we're playing with right now.

There's a lot of intent in that but you're leaving so much up to like just emergence. As if it isn’t completed until the audiences hears it.

Yeah which is why it is hard to put any of “improvisation talk” into exact words. This approach [with Eva] is almost obsessively restorative in terms of what a performance could be for people together. It's like you go back to the title of the piece and realize how true it is. It's like how do you know “yet”? It probably won't known until the day of the performance. You kind of have to just show up. That's the biggest, most important thing. And actually a measure of that.

Do you see dance and music as two different languages? Or could you say they're the same language? Or there's two different languages speaking together on the same topic?

Mike in residency at Carleton College

Mike in residency at Carleton College

I'd say like two different vocabularies. But not wildly dissimilar conditions. My understanding of modern dance is basically nil. I am approaching that purely from a completely reactionary and up to certain extent, obliterated perspective. But I'm also trying to trust my ability. Instead of just deciding that, I don't know anything and deciding that I don't get it. If you know who you are, where you are, and what you think about, then you're able to be able to receive—like the ethereal part of [performance]. At the end of the day, that's how any artistic output is working. Because you can’t expect anybody to know anything about what’s going on.

Indeed, aesthetic affect should be able to be received no matter of what age, concept, background, school, etc.

I think that about jazz music all the time. It's sometimes a major downfall with jazz music. Especially when it comes to the musicians who are working in such a small camp. It is so misunderstood, for lack of a better term. So often the way jazz music is sold is like what's playing in the background while you eat dinner or it's like a weird, corny aesthetic that people make fun of. And I think a lot of musicians get bitter about that and then just end up saying, like, “Well, you wouldn't get it, because you don’t know Eric Dolphy.” Or “You wouldn't get it because you don't know what was happening in New York in the 50s.

I think that's really unfortunate. I think it's understandable because we're all human beings, we're all real and we're insecure. And it's like, so easy to kind of lash out in the context of that insecurity. And to get defensive. We're all animals. It's like if you're afraid of something, you lead with anger. But I do believe that if you drop me in the middle of a shopping mall food court in Oklahoma City, you know, with JT and we played free music, I think we could translate something. And I could get some people with an open heart and with the idea of like, truly trying to connect as opposed to some ego-based activity. Something to make myself feel better. I think that you can translate to anybody and I don't think that prerequisite knowledge has to be involved.

Fat Kid Wednesdays

Fat Kid Wednesdays

I have a tendency to I lean away from the “placard”, you know? I know they're there. But I also know that that's somebody’s summation of what I'm supposed to receive. I don't know if I want to be told. Maybe that's why I'm an artist. I would rather know absolutely nothing and be completely cleared out so that I have every faculty available to me. Like in terms of how I think about the world at large or how I live so that I can be more fully present with a completely open mind as I'm receiving whatever that given moment offers.

How do you see this type of so-called specialized language and its relation to communication?

It's not like ridiculous to want to showcase your work. But it's a very slippery slope. That's why when you're younger you're amassing so much knowledge and technical ability to play fast or to play complicated or jam, you know, like or if you're writing, you know, you have an insane vocabulary and an understanding of all these different theoretical ways to write where you can display the raw intelligence of whatever. And I think sometimes it takes a long time to realize sometimes you get so far down the rabbit hole of that you're not—after all this work that you already did—in the present moment anymore.

It became for me a long time ago so much more about how do I clear as much of my fragile human psyche. The vessel, you know. How to clear as much of that shit out as I possibly can? So that whatever actually is happening is something that I can translate to whatever actually is happening in the room.

How do you see theory entering into our understanding of musical communication?

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Some of my favorite [former students] to teach were kids who wanted to learn about theory, you know? And it's like, “Okay, cool. Let's talk about theory.” But understand that theory is math. It's a code. It's a way to code what's happening. It's not the reason why. And it doesn't mean some people don't take theory to such an infinite degree that it becomes just a tool with which they used to arrive back at that original point. Why you're doing anything in the first place.

Theory lessons for me, inevitably, always turned into: let's play the melody of the song. Where did that melody come from? Where's the song from? It had lyrics. Go back and listen. Oh there's this whole other phrasing. It is all about relation. What is the trail of breadcrumbs? In any given piece of art—what is the melody? What is the theme? Then as you create around that, that's why the melody sounds like it does and it becomes so malleable and simple in a way. You can add more color wherever you want to. But it has so much more to do with the relation of the colors next to each other. No color exists purely on its own. You don’t know red until it's next to blue.


Many of these conclusions that Mike speaks about are kind of like musical exemplars: phenomena that happen while making music that can be abstracted in order to understand non-musical situations. How can we approach our fears that arise from lack of knowing? How can we shed perspectives that do not arise from direct experience? How can “the unfamiliar” in fact be a place of learning? How can all that knowledge that we share and confirm with those around us be used to connect to people far away from us who have different ways of receiving information? How do you communicate with other people when speaking languages that complement rather than denote or specify? How can “room for error” be a positive thing? Perhaps these questions are only for the world of ideas and philosophy, but only if you wish for them to remain there. Music, clearly, is a limitless resource. Music, in anybody’s hands, can be a champion of communication, a point of connection, a way to understand humanity and a method to negotiate one’s fragile place in it all. The context of music is people, in other words.


Trever Hagen, PhD is a writer, researcher and trumpeter living in Minneapolis. A former Fulbright Fellow, JSPS Fellow, and Leverhulme Trust Fellow, Hagen’s work targets how the arts function in societies. Hagen's newest book, "Living in the Merry Ghetto: the music and politics of the Czech underground" will be out on Oxford University Press in 2019. 

Visit this link to purchase tickets for When Isn’t Yet April 17 & 18, part of Liquid Music’s New Music & Dance Duos, also featuring Dustin O’Halloran and Fukiko Takase: 1 0 0 1.

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Ben Frost on “Braids” and the Utility of Self-Imposed Parameters by Liquid Music

by William Gardiner

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Ben Frost is an Australian composer and electronic musician who has been based in Reykjavík, Iceland for well over a decade now, where together with fellow composers Valgeir Sigurðsson and Nico Muhly, he co-founded the Bedroom Community record label.

Ben is one of my musical heroes, and my interest in his work started long ago and took me all the way to Iceland in the summer of 2016, where I was lucky enough to get to work with him for several months, and we’ve been in touch ever since. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Ben’s music, and to report on a quick chat I had with Ben about his upcoming piece for Liquid Music as he made his way to the USA from Russia, where he had been performing.

Perhaps a good place to start with Ben’s work is to note that many of the ideas involved in his pieces originate in visual artist sensibilities, and indeed his formal studies were in visual art rather than music. For instance, his most recent record The Centre Cannot Hold was inspired in part by the rich, deep glow of the pigment ultramarine blue, while also being a response to recent political currents. In this sense the work is often highly conceptual, which enhances its ability to reach for and grapple with ideas and issues from the wider world—as will be seen this is very much the case in his upcoming work for Liquid Music.

So that starts to give a sense of the cerebral dimension to Ben’s music. But what really sets Ben’s music apart, for me, is that at the same time as being thoughtful, conceptual, aware, and all of those things, it is at the same time some of the most unabashedly visceral music I know. He has a reputation for making some truly fearsome sounds, which he meticulously places into sometimes unrelenting, even violent arrangements. The boldness, the sheer gall of this visceral quality was what struck me when I first heard his music, and I remember the feeling was disorienting, even upsetting, because something important about how I then understood music was turned on its head: the visceral and the cerebral do not have to be opposites.

Ben’s piece for Liquid Music, Braids, draws its text from testimonies of three survivors of a human-trafficking disaster that occurred in late 2015 when a boat carrying 300 refugees capsized in the Aegean Sea. Ben Frost was there in artist-journalist mode, together with visual artist Richard Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, seeking to document what was going on.


WG: Ben, how did you approach working with the voice in this piece? I know that in the past you have worked very closely with singers—for instance when you directed your opera The Wasp Factory—and the dynamism that results from that is certainly evident in the recording for that piece. Will you be working closely with the singers in this project?

BF: For this piece I used the original interviews I recorded and the individual pacing and phrasing of the speakers to dictate the translation—and it was very much a translation—to notation. When I am dealing with what is ostensibly witness testimony I feel there is a heavy obligation to stick to that testimony as closely as possible.

Creatively I think my work has always benefited from coming up against rules—inherent or self-imposed. I like the way working within strict parameters forces my hand, and makes me work a bit harder, to get away with something. Perhaps it’s a Catholic school thing.

Technically I am taking these recordings, processing the audio to slow down the rate of speech to a more singable pacing, listening to the rhythm of the resulting phrases, and building melodic structures out from those. I don’t write notation in any meaningful way, so by using the audio as a guide it allows me to circumvent the need to work in a traditional way and allows me to instead drag this process back into my realm. In the score there is a great deal left to chance and to interpretation by the ensemble which I’m really excited about seeing play out. These stories are presented democratically; they are ostensibly different camera angles on a singular event. In my mind the way it should work is that the ear functions not unlike a lens pulling focus. All these phrases kind of dovetail in and out of one another in such a way that the language kind of rearranges itself to create a myriad of chance phrases out of individual words unified in space. In my mind this speaks to the secular nature of these events and the unyielding strength of the testimony.

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WG: The harrowing texts for your piece, transcribed from interviews with survivors of the disaster, reveal trauma at work, almost in real time. Trauma is a profound concept, and one which I have only recently begun to appreciate more fully in large part due to reading Bessel van der Kolk's book on the subject. It changes people, in ways that can be tragic, but equally: the capacity for resilience people can show, in the ways they adapt in order to survive unthinkable adversity, can be truly inspiring and life-affirming. Could you talk a little about the subject matter this piece deals with?

BF: In the waning tide of human trafficking into Southern Europe, say in comparison to Greece the fall of 2015, I think there is too little attention given to the fact that beyond the trauma of events like the ones described in this piece, even now years later, families, often multiple generations are still divided. Initially by climate change and the ensuing conflicts in Syria and Iraq but now again within the safety of Europe. It is one thing to say, ok, you are welcome to come and live in say, Sweden, as a registered refugee and there is solace in that, but what of the lasting violence of making it a condition of that registered refugee status, that you have no ability to travel outside of Sweden? That you don’t have the rights of other Europeans like myself who can move freely? I have personally witnessed customs officers in Berlin airport now in 2019 straight up racially profiling incoming passengers on flights from other EU countries. Refugees are often never allowed to leave their host country, even though a spouse might be similarly trapped in Greece, parents still in Iraq, even children in another country.

Being a refugee often means being in solitary confinement from everyone you love, sometimes for years. The psychological cost of this is devastating. The same is true in the US for migrants from South and Central America who manage to make it to the U.S.—they can’t leave for fear of risking not being allowed back in, or worse. Epigenetic research is demonstrating that stress-induced rises in cortisol levels such as those inflicted on children at the U.S. southern border when they are ripped away from parents and isolated in a cage—events like that are capable of changing genes. These are state sanctioned intergenerational crimes.

WG: And lastly, could you say a little about what drew you to this project--i.e. contributing a piece as 'rep' as part of a program in which the performers are separate entities to yourself, and present works by several composers? That's a roundabout way of describing the usual situation when presenting 'classical' music, I suppose. Of course you've done it before, notably with Bang on a Can, but it's not so often that we hear your work presented this way; you are more often performing evening length solo sets, your opera projects, scores for dance, and so on.

Frost with LM curator Kate Nordstrum, Berlin July 2015

Frost with LM curator Kate Nordstrum, Berlin July 2015

BF: I suppose simply I don’t really have so much rep to pull from, most of my music doesn’t exist in a traditional score. But also it’s changing shape constantly as I tend to work in a range of scenarios, often simultaneously, which maybe confuses a lot of people? But I’ve been working with Kate for over decade now on a range of projects and so she is one of the few people who kind of gets that irrespective of album cycles, or touring, or film commissions, I am perpetually mulling away on ideas that are often just in need of a gentle push, an outlet. And that is a really precious thing for an artist like myself, to have someone say ‘I have this space, at this time, and these tools- could you imagine that being useful in your current work?’ This is common practice in the visual art world, but not so much in music.


William Gardiner is an Australian composer who works with both acoustic and electronic instruments. He studied composition with David Lang at the Yale School of Music, and has also worked under the mentorship of Ben Frost at Greenhouse Studios in Iceland.


Letras Para Cantar with Angélica Negrón by Liquid Music

by Liquid Music Blog contributor Patrick Marschke

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“Accessibility” is a slippery word in 2019, particularly when referring to music. It seems to imply some sort of dichotomy, but it isn’t always clear with what exactly. Is the opposite of “accessible” music, “inaccessible” music? Is anyone really passionate about “inaccessible” music, or does that just imply that it isn’t accessible to the frustrated listener because of their lack of context, training, pedigree, or privilege? This process of othering, whether intentional or simply an inadvertent societal byproduct, continues to be a huge barrier for arts organizations and art makers, especially regarding audience development and maintaining relevance in an exponentially hastening cultural climate.

But there is a generation of creators that have been on every side of this othering and have built careers out of completely transcending it. Composer, multi-instrumentalist, educator, advocate, and technologist (to name a few) Angélica Negrón epitomizes this:

“For me, access is all about communicating. It could be with an ensemble but mostly with the audience and listeners: there are different ways that you can approach that relationship so that it's more accessible. And I'm not talking only about style or stylistic decisions or choices. I'm talking about where the music gets presented, how it's advertised, the people that are on stage, how they look, that the people in the audience can feel like they are seen, or that they are represented by the people that are onstage or behind the stage writing the music as well. That's really important to me.”

I spoke with Angélica in preparation for the upcoming premiere of her jointly commissioned work for ModernMedieval, and in our conversation we explored some key examples that exemplify the utility of accessibility.


Why Do They Sing Like That?
The technique that operatic vocalist utilize is sometimes referred to as “Bel Canto,” which translates to “Beautiful Singing” from the original Italian. One can imagine its colloquial use during the time of Opera’s origin being mostly used as a qualifier, only to be distilled over the decades into a rigorous formalized institution. Opera singer’s technique had a utility during its time — singers had to sing really loud to be heard over the orchestra while somehow maintaining a “beautiful sound.” So techniques were developed to utilize the full potential of the diaphragm and resonance of the mouth. It is easy to point out how “unnatural” the result of this technique can be, but that’s true of any extreme human feat — there isn’t anything particularly “natural” about running a 4-minute mile or walking on the moon either.

The disconnect comes when the technical optimization outlives its practical utility and starts to take on more of a symbolic role — particularly when that symbolism is preserving and pedestalizing a time and place such as 16th and 17th century Europe. In comes ModernMedevial who specialize in early music that mostly utilizes “Straight Tone” singing (vibrato-less) in addition to regularly working with contemporary composers like Angélica.

I asked Angélica about her experience writing a new work for ModernMedevial:

Angélica Negrón: I love chant and pure voices with no vibrato. I'm a little bit put off by vibrato in voices. That's something that has just never been my thing. And so immediately, ModernMedieval's voices, because of the nature of a lot of the work that they sing, it's closer to this more pure and straight tone, which works a lot better with the music I write. So this piece has moments of kind of echoing minimalist gestures and at the same time, it's very pop-driven too.

In my piece it's kind of a combination of the things I love to hear in the voice, like tiny gestures, a lot of glissandi, and kind of echoing melodies, and at the same time combining it with the things that I heard from them that they do best and that they sound really good at.

Patrick Marschke: Do you find that you prefer straight tone singing for aesthetic reasons, or is it more of an aversion to opera-ish singing due to its cultural baggage?

AN: That's a really good question. I think a little bit of both, actually. I think, for me, it's definitely at a sonic level, like more of a timbral and textural element that I think just blends much better with my aesthetic — when it's *not* with vibrato. But I also feel like whenever I hear vibrato there is this kind of cultural baggage and all the associations that we have with that type of voice. It's very distancing for me as an audience member or as a listener. So I'm immediately like, okay, I'm watching this "virtuosic display" of the voice and I just can't get into the narrative or into the story or into the mood as much.

What Do All Those Knobs And Wires Do?
Electronic Music, though only having been around since electricity came along, has also found itself prone to “distancing” the audience  in a similar fashion to classical voice. any of the earliest experiments in electronic sound came out of Bell Labs, where a leading team of research scientists was tasked with improving Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary telephone technology. These were highly trained electrical and mechanical engineers designing cutting edge tools for other highly trained engineers. This ethos of technicality was embraced by early composers of electronic music as if the technicality somehow legitimized and made “serious” their music. The not so subtle implication being that non-technical uses of electronic sound should be reserved for cellphone ringtones and muzak.

In her work, Angelica has actively tried to find ways to break down the mystique of electronic performance, and bring the audience more directly into what is happening on stage.

AN: A lot of my work is preoccupied with demystifying electronic music performance and hoping that it's more accessible and engaging to the audience. That the action behind the sound is very visible and clear and that it is not about like all these "fancy things that you would never understand." It is about bringing out the more playful and visceral aspect of it so that it connects to people and it's not about the technology behind it but about your connection to it and what it adds to the work itself.

For this piece, I will use a synthesizer called Ototo that makes it so that anything that conducts enough electricity can act as a trigger for a sound. So I have sounds that I have recorded, mostly phone sounds, mapped on my computer. With this interface, I use alligator clips to map out notes to objects that are conductive. So then when I touched those objects, that triggers the sound. So instead of playing a keyboard or synthesizer, I could be playing vegetables or plants or in this case, most likely water. It adds another visual layer to the piece. For me, it is another kind of interesting way to bring to life the electronics in a piece that would otherwise be pre-recorded or playing an instrument that's a more traditional like a standard keyboard.

PM: So it is more tactile?

AN: Yeah, it has a tactile component. It's also really important to find like the precise material and object that I'll use.  It all has to do with the text of the piece and the concept of the piece. Like for example, with the water in this piece, I'll most likely color the water with certain colors that I feel match the textures and sounds of the piece. It's very much like another essential component of the work itself.

PM: Do you find that audiences and listeners end up being more curious about what you are doing when you use your Vegetable Synth or using water as a trigger?

AN: Yeah, well, that's my hope. And definitely after concerts, I get a lot more people curious about what I'm doing then when I used to use other more conventional tools like a sampling pad or things like that. It came out of my wanting to see that in other performances of live electronic music. A lot of my music is about trying to find ways to make the sounds more visible to the audience so that they can connect with them on a deeper level. So my approach is trying to try to think of this in the same way as a string quartet: there's something very satisfying and visceral about like just the bow on the string that you hear that but you also feel it. I want electronic music to at least try to get closer to an experience like that.

I'm oftentimes disappointed [with electronic music performances] I think it's because I come from a Puerto Rican tradition, not only thinking of classical music but just like the two main kinds of music that I heard when I was growing up. I was studying classical music because I grew up as a violinist, but I was also hearing a lot of folk music being played around me in Puerto Rico. There's this physicality behind the sound that for me kind of almost... It's impossible for me to separate but I also really love electronic music. So a lot of my music is kind of trying to reconcile those two things. Seeing what else can I add to the meaning of the piece by making my own custom made instruments and also having this as a bridge for the audience to be more connected to it and to spark their curiosity to look at a vegetable or water in a different way and start looking and listening to the world around them differently. Hopefully.

PM: What was your first experience with electronic music?

AN: I had this old tape recorder from Radio Shack, like a compact portable one that I recorded things with. Even though I grew up playing violin, I had no idea that composing was a possibility, they never played music by living composers so I never saw myself or even, I'm not even talking about as Latina woman, just like someone living and breathing writing music. So before I realized that I was very interested in other instruments.I was studying violin, but I was also teaching myself the accordion and taking cello and harp lessons.

At the conservatory in Puerto Rico there was this harp room I could spend a lot of time in because no one else that needed it to practice harp. I was *not* practicing harp that much. I was just there with my tape recorder recording a bunch of sounds in the harp and spending a lot of time on the soundboard and trying different objects to play the strings with and just experimenting with sounds and recording those sounds and then going home and then kind of editing those sounds with, I think at that moment it was like, Cool Edit Pro. It was like very simple software to edit. And then I was using at the time, Fruity Loops. Do you know about that?

PM: Oh yeah! That was the first music software I ever used. It still exists! I think a lot of current Top 40 producers use it…

AN: Well in Puerto Rico, a Fruity Loops was very popular and still is because a lot of Reggaeton is made using it. So I remember if you would go to a music store they would sell you the computer with Fruity Loops, like "Reggaton kit" ready. So that's how I heard about Fruity Loops and I didn't really like the sounds that came with it, but I did realize that you could load your own samples. So after editing those sounds from the harp or of me playing violin I started isolating those sounds and loading them in Fruity Loops and using it mostly as a sequencer. And that's how I started making a lot of the first music I wrote, mostly using Fruity Loops. That started kind of I started developing an aesthetic that was very much ambient driven and kind of low-fi ambient because of the nature of the technology I was using. I loved having the sounds that were very beautiful, sounds like harp, but then they were recorded at not the best quality. There was some kind of grit and character to them. Even now, if I'm recording with higher quality technology I am really drawn to kind of sound.

PM: Having worked with some of the most talented young music makers in the country, what do you think the future of new music will look like?

AN: Big question! I would say, and this is more of my hope, more like the world around us, and that it sounds like the world around us, and that it doesn't feel exclusive to spaces or looking certain way or writing in this specific style in order to be taken seriously. I think my hope is that there comes a point that those things don't even matter and it's just about music and at the same time all voices are represented in a way that feels like something that is accessible to everyone and that it's more inviting and not exclusive to only a few.

PM: What is the biggest non-musical influence on your work?

Mariela Pabón’s Turistas

Mariela Pabón’s Turistas

AN: I would say comedy. I love stand up comedy, comedy podcasts and just comedy in general. But also in term of things that have infiltrated my work I would say there are young artists in Puerto Rico that are doing like comic books or zines through a comedy lens, digging into very important and social themes that we need to take a look at — all from a very DIY mentality.

One is from Puerto Rico, it is this woman, her name is Mariela Pabón, she does this horoscope she puts up monthly that are hilarious and it's very specific to like Puerto Rican culture and slang. And then she also has this zine that she published a couple of years ago called "Turistas," (which translates to tourists) that I actually wrote a piece for the Bang On A Can All Stars inspired by it. It's illustrations based on her working in the lobby of a hotel in San Juan and it's all kind of accounts that she had with customers at the hotel. A lot of it has to do with like the ignorance of tourist, of knowing more about our relationship with the U.S. and that we're American citizens.

PM: Comedy! That’s surprising for some reason, perhaps because it is so antithetical to the vibe of a lot of the New Music world.

AN: That's kind of what got me really interested in Meredith Monk. Her work is incredibly rigorous and gorgeously crafted, but at the same time, it's not taking itself too seriously. And the work is so good that it's more than plenty — it's more than enough. It doesn't have to refer to itself or look at itself like "look at me, look how intricate I am" or "look how elevated or academic or rigorous I am." It has a lightness and a playfulness to it without it feeling childish. I'm not saying it's not serious, it's just there is that kind of a joy. There is almost a sense of irreverence that I really appreciate in art as well. She's a very big influence.

PM: When did you first start working on this specific project with ModernMedieval?

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Via Wikipedia

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Via Wikipedia

AN: About seven to eight months ago I met with Jacqueline from ModernMedieval. We talked about some ideas for text and a little bit about how they blend chant and the ancient and the new — that's a big part of what they do. And previous to that I'd been really curious about this Mexican poet and nun, her name is Juana Inés de la Cruz. She's from like the 17th century. And so I was like, okay, this sounds like the perfect project to set her words to music. So I remember at that meeting I remember we talked about this idea and then for the following month after that I started very much into digging into Juana Inés's poetry and trying to find the poem that would be the right fit for this project. Since then I've been writing the piece on and off for the past four months.

The piece is very atmospheric, very textural and kind of mysterious. And I would also say, at least to my ears, has kind of sensual vibe to it as well. For me that was like *the thing* that I wanted to capture from Juana Inés de la Cruz's words because it's very spiritual. A lot of her poems are about really intense friendships or relationships to other women. So a lot of the times she's kind of she's known as one of the first openly lesbian poets... Well, maybe not openly lesbian... But a lot of people feel like her poetry is very queer. Though some people disagree and think that she's just talking about friendships or that it is just a metaphor for something else. But a lot of her poems are directed to other women and they're very intense and sensual and have a lot with a kind of desire and disappointment and kind of being love sick. There's a lot of vivid imagery and it's kind intense too. So I kind of wanted to capture that with my music and find a way of writing a piece that would also kind of maintain that essence and that mystery while at the same time being a little provocative too.

PM: How did you come about her work in the first place?

AN: I don't remember exactly where I heard about her work. I remember that I'd been hearing about her work for a long time and because she's kind of this controversial figure of the 17th century and also that she was not only a nun, but also a poet and a self-taught scholar and philosopher and very well known in alot of Latinx feminist circles too. So she's a very important figure.

She has a very famous poem called, "Hombres Necios." I don't know exactly how that translates. Maybe like: "you dumb men" kind of... There might be might be a better translation, but it's all, it's a very aggressive and interesting poem kind of calling out men. Like "you complain about woman, but you did this, this, this and this." It is something that you could read it right now and it's still incredibly relevant. *And* she wrote it in the 17th century. Actually, that was the poem that I initially wanted to set, but it's one of her most well known poems. And then I happened to stumble upon this one when was looking deeper into her work and the title itself captivated me: "Letras Para Cantar", which translates to something like "Verses for Singing" And I was like, okay, this sounds like it's asking for it. As soon as I started reading it I knew I was going to use it. It's a pretty long poem so I use about half of the poem and took some liberties. There are some excerpts of other moments that I wanted to highlight but it was definitely one that I felt resonated with me particularly for the voices of the women in ModernMedieval.

Verses for singing
Narcisa’s lovely voice
gently pierced through the air.
And through the mouth of
its wounds, the air echoed in reply.

She stops celestial Axes
from spinning in their tracks.
And Elements call a truce
in their unrelenting discord.

Slaying echoes

Her lethal features
exert a mortal change.
The eyes dart harmony.
The lips spew lightning.

Do not dual-wield your weapons,
beautiful slayer!
For death has no place
where there is no life.

Letras para cantar (excerpt)
Hirió blandamente el aire
Con su dulce voz Narcisa,
Y él le repitió los ecos
Por boca de las heridas.

De los celestiales Ejes
El rápido curso fija,
Y en los Elementos cesa
la discordia nunca unida.

Homicidas, ecos

Homicidas sus facciones
El mortal cambio ejercitan;
Voces, que alteran los ojos
Rayos que el labio fulmina.

No dupliques las armas,
Bella homicida,
que está ociosa la muerte
Donde no hay vida.

Hear the world premiere of Angélica Negrón’s new work for ModernMedieval along with new works from Ben Frost and Julianna Barwick and some very old works from Hildegard of Bingen live

Presented and commissioned by liquid music and walker art center


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Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek and "The Living Word" by Liquid Music

by LM blog contributor Charlie Mogen

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A Grammy Award-winner for her work with vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek has since founded the trio ModernMedieval alongside Roomful of Teeth vocalists Eliza Bagg and Martha Cluver. ModernMedieval presides at the intersection of early and new music, with repertoire that spans a millennium. Liquid Music and Walker Art Center are proud to present ModernMedieval: The Living Word — ecstatic chants of Hildegard von Bingen alongside new music by Julianna Barwick (commissioned by Ecstatic Music Festival) and world premieres by Angélica Negrón and Ben Frost (commissioned by LM and WAC) March 22 & 23 at Summit Center for Art & Innovation in Saint Paul. I was recently able to chat with Jacqueline about the group’s formation, inspirations, and the strong ties between ancient and contemporary art.


CM: What ideas/inspirations led to you forming ModernMedieval? I love (and subscribe to) the idea that ancient music and new music complement and advise each other much more so than “newer” (romantic/classical) work—does that notion push the programming and commissioning of the group?

JHQ: I am from the U.K., and before I moved to the U.S. I was primarily a singer of new music, premiering works by Judith Weir, Iannis Xenakis and Sir Harrison Birwistle, amongst many others. When I came to the States and later joined Anonymous 4, that was my introduction to medieval music, and I fell in love with it partly because I felt it related to the new music I had been singing, both creatively and sonically. As A4’s new music person, I facilitated new commissions from David Lang, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir John Tavener, and after A4 stopped performing, it was a dream of mine to combine the two worlds in more tangible and deliberate ways, and the concept of ModernMedieval came about largely because of that.

MMwAbigail.png

I didn’t know that your background is in the new music world! So that means that the entire group (Horner-Kwiatek alongside Eliza Bagg and Martha Cluver, as well as Abigail Lennox who perform March 22 & 23) has experience in both the medieval and new music worlds. Is that makeup intentional? How do the two ideologies work together in music making?

The make-up was deliberate in that I wanted singers who were at home in both worlds and were open to adventurous and non-conventional programming in addition to more conventional projects. I wanted colleagues who could do it all and that is what I got—Martha, Eliza and Abigail are fantastic!

I find it interesting that you’ll be presenting works of Hildegard von Bingen in a space (Summit Center for Arts & Innovation) that was initially constructed as an Episcopal Church for the performance of similar works. Beyond acoustic implications, are there certain works that “fit” spaces better or worse?

It’s always nice to sing music in the kind of space for which it was intended to be performed, and certainly if you are singing a program of sacred music, a sacred space is the right “fit.” It is preferable to have a good natural acoustic if you are singing chant, or a cappella vocal music. I think in the end it’s our job to make the music work, no matter what space we are in—though judiciously placed mics to add reverb and cushion the sound don’t go amiss in some places!

Talk to me about Julianna’s work “Adder,” its construction, premiere, and evolution since.

It was commissioned for The Ecstatic Music Festival at Merlin Hall in NYC and received its premiere in May 2018. It was a great chance for us to get to sing with Julianna as well as perform her beautiful, haunting music. It has actually not been performed since, so we are all very excited that it will receive its second ever performance with Liquid Music!

The two commissioned composers for this performance are Angélica Negrón and Ben Frost. What draws ModernMedieval to their work?

I am always looking for composers that will challenge us, and ideally who will take the concept of an early/new music collaboration and apply that to their own artistic vision. Angélica and Ben are risk takers and fascinating artists and I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

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The main vocal groups that ModernMedieval draws lineage from, Anonymous 4 and Roomful of Teeth, produce some peculiar, unique sounds through extended technique. Do you have any specific techniques that you’re particularly proud of/enjoy performing the most? What is the weirdest sound you’ve had to produce in a written work?

I can’t think of any specific techniques, other than the ensemble techniques of listening and awareness needed to bring voices together to produce a unique sound. Small, one-on-a-part ensemble singing is deceptively difficult, but when the blend and the unity of purpose come together, it is a magical feeling!

Regarding the weirdest sound…. Singing while inhaling is always a challenge, and when a large group of singers is doing it, can be pretty funny!


Visit this link to purchase tickets for ModernMedieval’s March 22 & 23 performances.

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Interview: Brent Arnold on "Let the Crows Come" by Liquid Music

On February 11, cellist and composer Brent Arnold will join Minneapolis-based Bharatanatyam dancer-choreographer Ashwini Ramaswamy in dialogue about her Liquid Music commission “Let the Crows Come” (the talk also features dancer-choreographers Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren). Liquid Music’s Nick Lanser interviewed Brent in anticipation of the work-in-progress conversation (with live music by Arnold) hosted by TU Dance Artistic Director Toni Pierce-Sands.

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Nick Lanser: Tell us about your musical background and upbringing. How did you come to the cello?

Brent Arnold: In a very unorthodox way! I don't come from a musical family, and my first instrument was the guitar... I grew up with rock music and was obsessed with Jimi Hendrix, that was my thing. But in my late teens, as my interests were expanding out into jazz and classical music and world musics and experimental stuff, guitar started to seem like the boring and safe choice, somehow! Around then I borrowed a friend's cello, and got obsessed. It's not an instrument that lends itself to casual learning, so I sort of created my own curriculum, which included seeking out teachers who could give me technique while being open to my other explorations. In one of my very first lessons I brought in a Miles Davis song and said "how would I play this?" Of course, he'd never really considered such a question.

NL: You compose for a variety of different musical genres and this project will likely find you collaborating with Carnatic ensemble. Is this familiar or new territory to you?

BA: I've never formally studied Indian music, which is such a deep and rich subject of inquiry. But I've been listening to it and learning from it for years, and I've drawn a lot of inspiration from the concepts, strategies and philosophies. I've also collaborated quite a bit in the last few years with an incredible tabla player, Aditya Kalyanpur. He comes from the Northern, Hindustani music tradition, so now I'm learning more about the Carnatic side. And I've found it so easy to work with Roopa and Arun, they are just incredible musicians and chill people, and that really helps. 

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NL: In addition to your solo work, you are a co-founder of the Ghost Quartet and have collaborated with a diverse range of musicians. What projects have especially stood out, and what makes “Let the Crows Come” unique?

BA: Well I've worked with so many artists, in all kinds of disciplines, and all of that informs what I do now. I'd say these last several years working with Ghost Quartet have been a revelation for me... it's quite a special thing, four musicians playing songs which become a theater piece with all sorts of recurring characters and interlocking stories and themes. Dave Malloy, the composer, has such a free and yet productive way of working, and the other collaborators, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford... we each get to bring our unique selves, and we get to cover so much ground, musically. 

For Let the Crows Come, I'm integrating my solo cello & electronics with new compositions for a very eclectic mixed ensemble—with these great musicians from an Indian music background, and with Jace [Clayton], who comes from DJing and synthesis and so forth. For quite a few years I've been creating this body of solo work, with unusual cello techniques and live electronic manipulation of the cello, so I have a sort of repertoire with that. And I'm creating compositions based on those explorations, which integrate these fantastic players coming from totally different directions. I love composing with specific, unique, and idiosyncratic musicians in mind. It's challenging and also inspiring. 

NL: The February 11 work-in-progress conversation at the Parkway Theater is part of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Tapestry festival, which is centered around the question “How do I recognize my home?”. What role has music played in recognizing your home? How has this idea come through in your collaboration—thus far—with Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton?

Ashwini Ramaswamy

Ashwini Ramaswamy

BA: Interesting question! I grew up moving around a lot, and I think of myself as pretty comfortable not being rooted in any certain place. And in this case, it might be more about creating a home wherever you are. The collaboration with Ashwini is brand new, and Jace and I have worked together off and on for many years. It's a bit like finding yourself in a new place with some familiar elements and making it into a home, for the moment. Like asking "what if I lived here? Where would I go in the morning for my coffee? What would these people or this particular architecture make me think about?"

NL: Is composing for dance a new experience for you? How does the process of creation shift when in service to movement / in collaboration with a choreographer? 

BA: I had great experiences composing for dance back when I lived in Seattle. Jarrad Powell, a brilliant professor of mine at Cornish College of the Arts, started a composer/choreographer lab in conjunction with the dance department, and that led to many interesting projects and relationships. But since I've been in New York, I haven't done nearly as much with dance, which is something I should remedy. Dance is so mysterious to me, and so abstract, but when it grabs you it is so powerful. Jarrad told me something I've never forgotten, which is that it's great to work with dancers because they care more deeply about music than anyone else. It's so true! They will come to know your music in ways even you don't. For a composer, that's exciting and humbling.

NL: Liquid Music encourages its audience to be ever-seeking of new music experiences. What music or performance gripped you in 2018?

BA: Off the top of my head... the jazz pianist Myra Melford's album The Other Side of Air was a beautiful one, it got me excited about that format of music again. And, in a totally different direction, Tierra Whack's, umm, creation... I'm not sure whether to call it an album or... we need a new term! She created this 15-minute video, a musical and cinematic artwork, made of one-minute pop/rap songs and videos. It's so audacious and I love that. 

RESERVE TICKETS FOR “LET THE CROWS COME” work-in-progress conversation and showing FEB 11, 2019 at the parkway theater


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Intentions of the Day: Speaking with Pekka Kuusisto by Liquid Music

by LM blog contributor Trever Hagen

photo courtesy of Sonja Werner

photo courtesy of Sonja Werner

As a Finnish violinist who spent time in his youth in the United States, Pekka Kuusisto is a mobile musical personality that is difficult to pin down. To be sure, his proficiency as a conductor, performer and composer is a family affair: his grandfather was composer and organist Taneli Kuusisto, his father is the Finnish composer and conductor Ilkka Kuusisto, and his brother is the acclaimed conductor Jaakko Kuusisto. As a child, Pekka began playing violin at the age of 3, crafting his fluency in the intricate depth of Bach as well as exploring the world of improvisation. Combining these twin pillars of musical approaches, Pekka has carved out a distinct voice (or force, I should say) in contemporary music.

Kuusisto brings these talents to the Twin Cities as an Artistic Partner of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, warmly introducing listeners to new compositions by 21st century composers in addition to the ageless beauty of the classical cannon. This progressive programming is on full display January 1720 when Pekka returns to direct the SPCO. Unfortunately for the ears of Twin Cities, an arm injury will prevent Pekka from picking up the violin but not the baton. The program begins and ends with Beethoven—in between we hear Grammy-nominated Missy Mazzoli’s string quartet piece You Know Me From Here and Peruvian-born, Finnish-trained, American-based composer Jimmy López’s Guardian of the Horizon. Such programming evidences the complexity of Kuusisto’s and the SPCO’s intention to bring new sounds, new approaches and new canons to audiences in St. Paul and Minneapolis. 

In December, we sat down together to discuss his involvement with the SPCO. Right away we get deep into talking about the most innovative musicians and festivals in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Kuusisto’s comments and enthusiasm reveal a curious mind of depth and breadth; someone who puts his attention to the task at hand regardless of his relentless schedule of performance. Quickly our conversation turns from musical voices toward social questions of belonging, nation, music and history. As two white men sitting across a table from each other, the energy is familiar. It makes me think about the social situations we are drawn to, comfort zones of information we reside in, both offline and online. It makes me wonder about the duty we have as we age, to continue refreshing the perspectives that we grew up with. How might music aid in these efforts? What is music’s role in these relationships?

In this open context of communication, we explore topics of Finnish-ness, privilege, class, race and language. In particular we discuss how people belong—to canons, to nations, to groups, manners of exclusion/inclusion, and how history is written.


Trever Hagen: As much as English is our national tongue, it is certainly not a mother tongue for many people in the U.S. How does language and nationality feel for you and your self-perception?

Pekka Kuusisto: Finland is so small, about 5.5 million people—it is more of a club than a country. Finland has been incredibly white for such a long time—longer than Sweden I think or Norway. Now we have a generation with different kinds of skin colors who are born in Finland. I read a lot about the experience of people with different skin tone. Like people not believing you are born in Finland. People believing you are not Finnish even of you are born there and speak Finnish perfectly. We can do better. 

Have you encountered these mechanisms of exclusion—like language or appearance—in music?

The further back you go in classical music, the more difficult it is to find scores written by women for many reasons. That is why in contemporary music, the situation is much better. It is fantastic in comparison. One thing that I find somehow important when we are speaking about composers: to try to avoid talking about “female composers” and then just “composers”. That happens all the time back home—“female conductors,” since there is so much male dominance. Although, Finland was the first country to give voting rights to women and the first country to have female parliamentarians. And this was a hundred years ago.

It is interesting that in the West we might all perceive ourselves as being on the same page or developing at a similar rate. But this is such a striking example of how countries differ across time.

Yeah, we (Finns) were kind of like world leaders.

To this day these countries in Scandinavia are leaders or at least provide models of society for other countries. Are you trying to communicate any perspective, like a progressive Finnish perspective, at all with your music?

I don’t want to make a Finnish concert or a Finnish piece. I would try to erase as much of that as possible. It shouldn’t feel like something nice that I am bringing from home. I’m a white guy from a country that is very wealthy and we have things that we take for granted that seem like absolute miracles—impossibilities for most of the world I imagine, or most of the people in world. Like, I went to music school for free in Finland. I studied at the University for nothing. I had a baby and it cost us only $150. If I’m at home and I get cancer, it won’t cost me to go to the hospital.

photo courtesy of Felix Broede

photo courtesy of Felix Broede

We talked about the Sami musical traditions and about not wanting to bring in any of Finnish traditions to a performance—music on one hand can help us erase boundaries and on the other it can be used to enforce or understand who a people are. So where might music fit into this equation?

I was in a professional string quartet some years ago. I have spent enough time improvising—from when I was 3, I started—and improvised music has always been present for me and this is not always typical in classical violin playing. Actually it is quite rare. It gave me a language—I encountered all these sounds that no one could ever compose.  The sounds that you know are only yours then start to bleed into other people’s music when you play. So you develop a language. I have quite a clear sound. I know that people who have heard my playing recognize it when they hear it again. There is something that tells them: “This is the Finnish guy.” When I went into this professional quartet, my aim was to erase all of that as much as possible—my voice. To become like a blank player in order to then be able to rebuild together with the 3 other people. It didn’t work out at all because we all had very different ideas of how building a quartet language happens. So it didn’t happen but I still thought that my idea was good: if not for a quartet then as an exercise to make yourself invisible. This is something I talk a lot about with my musician friends: the amount of yourself you put into your performances and is it even possible for you to see or gauge how much you are doing it? What kind of perspective-enhancing drugs do you need to be able to distance yourself from something you have done since you were a kid? It is complicated, but maybe that is what I would like to accomplish here. To kind of not bring the part of me that always plays Finnish folk songs. Or uses the bow in way that trad-Finnish fiddlers would use. Or to even talk about Finland because I talk about Finland constantly.


As our conversation drew to close, Kuusisto’s musical attempt at erasing identity within a string quartet reminds me of the challenges we face as groups of people living together in 2019. It reveals how, even in a musical situation, it is difficult to let go of identities even when there is a language, such as music, to try out these ideas. But this difficultly shouldn’t put off anyone – these musical intentions and gestures are experiments to move our societies forward. If the stage acts like a laboratory, then the arts are the ingredients for change and growth. For these reasons, having a program that brings together the history of humanity (e.g., Beethoven’s canonical compositions) along with the future of humanity (e.g., new compositions) is not only a unique musical experience, it is a bold roadmap stated in a radically open manner.

Buy tickets to see Pekka conduct the SPCO January 17–20


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The Sonic Universes of Tyshawn Sorey by Liquid Music

by Liquid Music Blog contributor Patrick Marschke

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There is a clarity to the way Tyshawn Sorey talks about music and his relationship to it. A way of speaking that becomes a bit disorienting when considering how prolific and diverse his career has been from such a young age. He could claim many titles  — composer, performer, teacher, musician, scholar, trombonist, percussionist — but all seem to barely scratch the surface of his artistic identity. In a recent conversation with Sorey, I realized that there is one thing that ties these facets together, and simplifies his prolific and perplexing body of work. He summed it up when speaking about his expectations of the musicians he works with:

“We’re all creating something, and we are all equally responsible for how the composition, in the end, comes out.”

Sorey sees music-making as a very serious responsibility — one that he is willing to go very far to serve. And within each segment of his practice, you can see that he is willing to go just a bit further to truly serve the music than most. In taking on full responsibility for each of the sonic universes he participates in, he has found novel and unique ways to challenge himself to serve the music completely, going so far as placing extreme limitations on his own instrumentation or removing himself as an instrumentalist altogether as we will see in his upcoming performance with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra via a unique approach to large ensemble improvisation generally referred to as conduction.

Sorey has developed his own vocabulary of conduction, called Autoschediasms, which he described as “essentially a lexicon of visual and gestural cues that I use — it is essentially a duet for conductor and orchestra.“ He is quick to note two of his main influences in his approach to conduction — Butch Morris and Walter Thompson.

Butch Morris, the originator of the practice, defines conduction as:

“The practice of conveying and interpreting a lexicon of directives to construct or modify sonic arrangement or composition.”

Walter Thompson’s “Soundpainting” is a similar gesturally controlled improvisation that Sorey cites as influential on his practice. Thompson describes the practice as “a universal multidisciplinary live composing sign language for musicians, actors, dancers, and visual artists.”


I asked Sorey if there are common misconceptions about the practice:

“I think what happens is that one falls into the trap of thinking that conduction is one language and the music is always going to sound pretty much sound the same because you have the same gestures and the same cues and everything. But the user is what makes each interpretation of it very different. So one common misconception is that people think that it is always going to be the same thing where in fact it isn’t.

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Also, conduction is not really a free for all. There is no such thing, to me, as some kind of existential freedom when it comes to performing conduction in any kind of music setting. A misconception from audience members is that they think that all these musicians up there are just creating some random songs, like picking notes out of thin air without any kind of thought paid or any kind of attention paid to what they are doing and that couldn’t be further from the case. No matter what gesture I give a musician they have to own up to whatever the sound you contributed to the situation. We’re all creating something and we are all equally responsible for how the composition, in the end, comes out. This is not an opportunity for somebody to get up there and take a solo and display some kind of crazy virtuosity or something without regard to anything that the other orchestra members are doing.

I think people tend to think that whenever there is a conduction situation or everybody is not reading a bunch of music on the stage that everybody is just playing some random noise or some random sounds. The way that I use conduction is far from that — I’m thinking compositionally all the time. All the players should also think compositionally in their decision making and understand that any actions that they make are going to affect the overall outcome of the total composition. They can’t take any part of the music making process for granted at any point, no matter if you have 25 musicians or 100 musicians up there. Every contribution you make has to be something of value and something that can be useful for the creation of a real-time work with all of the rest of the orchestra.”

I asked Sorey if he thought it was important to see conduction in person rather than just hear the results:

“I think it is very good that people see it, that people see the process of what is going on. But I also don’t want to give people too much information about the process itself because I’d rather they experience the music itself.

I think to see it would be a rewarding experience to anyone coming to witness because I don’t think it is something that is seen all that much: A conductor up there potentially with just a baton and a bunch of musicians there with no sheet music in front of them and yet they are able to develop something that is as coherent as any written composition by any composer of any century. I think it is pretty much seeing what one could view as impossible, where in fact it is very possible to craft something in real time with a large or small group — it’s just as just valid as anything else.

I think it is as important for an audience to come witness conduction and to actually see the process of how it’s done so that way they can take with them the fact that everybody is communicating using a particular language because that’s all I am interested in in the end: communication. I think that will give the audience something to realize about themselves and their way of picturing what music should or about how music should be made. It will change for their whole conception of that, which I always would hope and strive for even in my own music.”

Tyshawn seems to rarely show up to a performance with the same instrumental set up more than once, and I wondered if he thought of the instrument selection process for his set up as part of the compositional process, and if so, had he always utilized orchestration in improvisation in such a way:

“I’ve always thought of it that way since I’ve first started making music — the drumset is just one part of it. What I call a percussion setup could also involve a piano or a trombone. Even though the trombone is not a “percussion” instrument per se, I see it as being part of one big sound world. I’m not quite sure what to call my setup — I don’t want to call it a “multi-instrumental setup” because then one instrument out of the setup might get favored.

Part of the reason why I do that, especially in my own music is not that I get “bored” of the drumset at all, it’s really for reasons of wanting to be as explorative as I can be in my music. Where I can contribute to the music by creating a sound world that maybe I wouldn't get to create just using a regular drum set. I want to get to the other thing in my music. I am always interested in how the set up can affect the music or how it can affect the outcome of the music.

I see it as these multiple universes that are existing within a small unit. That’s how I like to look at the way that I produce sound: this universe for me to go to one place to explore one sound world and then come to another place where I explore a different sound world. Just to go between these multiple sound worlds at any given time.”

I asked if Sorey if he had recently been inspired by anything not related to music:

“One thing that inspires me so much is my daughter, raising my daughter and taking care of my family — that is a very big influence for me. Watching my daughter discover things and watching her grow and just seeing how her mind develops from different things, related to art or not. That stuff is super influential, just in terms of understanding the process of openness and understanding the process of discovery. And the realization of one’s potential for making something or becoming something. I think that stuff is so important to see.

Sometimes what is missing in a lot of us as musicians is that we tend to get stuck in a particular way of thought or doing things as related to music or as related to whatever it is we are doing — sometimes we forget what it means to experience something for the first time or what it means to discover something that we really like and we want to have more of that experience. We forget that and take that stuff for granted. Just to watch my daughter grow and really become curious about things that even as far the music that I play or anything else, it’s never a judgemental kind of thing that exists. She's receptive to whatever information is out there. She picks stuff up very very quickly. To see that going on for the last two years that I have been raising my daughter is just fascinating just to watch that happening.

Children, in general, are inspirational in that regard.“

See Tyshawn Sorey with Jennifer Koh and Vijay Iyer

See Tyshawn Sorey perform his Autoschediasms with The SPCO


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Collective Gaze: Eva Mohn on "When Isn't Yet" by Liquid Music

by LM blog contributor Charlie Mogen

photo courtesy of Randy Karels

photo courtesy of Randy Karels

Throughout her career, dancer Eva Mohn has prioritized the betterment of the collective above advancement of her own name. Originally from Jasper, MN, Mohn studied dance at the University of Minnesota before finding success in St. Paul, New York, and Stockholm. However, the limelight will be hers with the premiere of When Isn’t Yet, a Liquid Music commission to be presented April 17 and 18 at the Lab Theater in Minneapolis. In her words, Mohn has chosen to work with those who “have devoted the labor of their artistic work to being collaborators, company and ensemble members, supporting roles, and who have done so intentionally at the expense of their own solo career for the joy and reward of collaborative energy.” The result: a collective of artists striving to put the goals of the whole before individual accolade. I was able to chat with Mohn about career growth, difficulties in collaboration, and the pursuit of artistic oneness.


CM: You were a member of St. Paul dance company (and LM alumnus) TU Dance. What does it mean to present new works in a return to your former stomping grounds?

Former Alvin Ailey company member/Mohn mentor Toni Pierce. Photo by Jack Mitchell.

Former Alvin Ailey company member/Mohn mentor Toni Pierce. Photo by Jack Mitchell.

EM: My work today feels like a collection of so many parts and innumerable influences. Studying at the University of Minnesota and working with TU Dance connected me to an array of artists, those working in dance as dancers, those working in dance as choreographers, visual artists, musical artists, all types of media and medium. I feel so grateful for the people that I met and community I found through choosing to stay in Minneapolis, where I come from, starting with Sue Gunness in Waconia, MN. At the University I also met Toni Pierce-Sands who was that kind of teacher, mentor, guide, who says just what you need at just the right moment to propel your life forward in monumental ways. I am deeply grateful for her work and her interventions in my life. She convinced me to keep dancing when I, repeatedly, had the proverbial towel in hand ready to throw it in. This will be the first time I’ve performed in Minneapolis in more than 7 years, the last time being with TU Dance. This will be the first time I present my own work in the United States on this scale. I have no idea how it will be. I feel like a lot has changed for me. My body is changing rapidly and I view dance very differently now than I did 7 years ago. It’s exciting for me to have this opportunity to see what comes out, what falls together. I feel so honored to come back and offer something to the community that supported me so much.

What is your experience with compositional collaboration? How does your experience as a musician shade this collaboration and the creative process?

During my work at The Cullberg Ballet we have tended to work side-by-side with composers during the process. The musician is sometimes even watching how we warm up to understand what sort of environment we are marinating in. Our work there is rarely choreographed “on music” or “to music,” but they weave together. Likewise the light design. This has shifted my perspective on how composition can work. How image and sound can illuminate each other. In When Isn’t Yet we are trying to have the music and movement be married so that the sound infiltrates the dance and the dance infiltrates the sound. Given that I also have been a song writer and dabbled in music composition, I am constantly composing movement together with the sound of my own body, my own singing, the rhythms that my feet make. They always come out together in the laboratory time. In this collaboration with Mike we have ping-ponged back and forth the music I imagine, the songs that are coming up for me as I am dancing, and the sound that he sees in the movement we make. It’s like we are playing magicians or clairvoyant mediums and together figuring out what sort of composition wants to get made by us and doing what we can to let that happen, trying to make way for the very subtle voices of the “whens” and “not yets” of composing.

You and musician-composer Mike Lewis recently completed your first creative residency—walk us through the initial creation process, ideas, snags, etc. that you experienced.

We had a working month in Minneapolis in September 2018 to map out our methods and blueprints of the piece. During that month we had a great three day residency at Carleton College in Northfield where we could stand the piece up in a theater with incredible acoustics and let the scale expand beyond the studio version. We (Michael Lewis, Sarah Baumert and myself) were amazed by what we could accomplish together in three fully concentrated days of work. The biggest snag is the resource of time. I have been shocked, actually, at the amount we all have to work on our other work. It’s almost financially impossible for people, artists, us, to be able to set time aside to dive into a project. I thought that the biggest snag would be distance, since I live full time in Sweden, however it has added something special that we continue our personal practice of this piece from our satellite locations. It is time as a material that is scarce. Work, as in the stuff we have to do to make a living, takes a disproportionate amount of time. If I could do something to provide Michael, Sarah, and Maggie a solid month of time to focus solely on practicing their way of doing this composition, I would. But that would take a much larger restructuring of economics and how we value. Yes, value as a verb.

Many young Midwesterners have a romantic notion of leaving the area in pursuit of artistic greatness. How has your move changed how you think, create, or act?

Leaving the Midwest surely can feel like a romantic notion of finding “new” or “more”. And then coming back to the Midwest can have this romantic notion of returning to where there is fertile and sustainable life. I think that I realized that what I want to pursue the most is continuity of my person, whether I am in Minnesota, or working in New York, or in Stockholm, whether I am working as a dancer, or choreographer or teacher. I am pursuing that my person and my values stay consistent. It’s very easy to jump into some other value system working in a larger, more economically driven city, or jumping roles from a dancer to a director or teacher. I think I want to consider that my pursuit of “artistic greatness” is about consistency of practice. One thing for sure that has changed for me though, is that I am much slower than I was when I was living and working in the States. When I come back to work in the US I always feel like I have to gear up to keep up with how much people do in a day. I can effectively do about two things, and one of those is make food.

Do you have a favorite piece of music you’ve danced to? Favorite choreography?

My favorite music so far is a piece designed by David Kiers for a work called Plateau Effect choreographed by Jefta Van Dinther and performed by Cullberg Ballet. David makes heavy, subterranean music and it’s impossible not to be moved by it. I have to mention also a light designer Minna Tiikkainen. She interprets dance and sound in ways that have shifted my performance experience in big ways. My favorite dance experience to date is doing a piece by Deborah Hay called Figure a Sea. I have performed or practiced this dance alongside my colleagues at Cullberg at least 50 times, and it only gets finer and more rich and more surprising. Her method of asking questions and offering dance-defying scores is an endless exercise in curiosity. She has influenced greatly how I think dance. Not think about dance, but think dance.


Visit this link to purchase tickets for When Isn’t Yet April 17 & 18, part of Liquid Music’s New Music & Dance Duos, also featuring Dustin O’Halloran and Fukiko Takase: 1 0 0 1.

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