Ammie Brod interviews Katinka Kleijn about her work Forward Echo, which was premiered by the Instigation Festival Orchestra in 2019 and which Ensemble Dal Niente will perform on March 24 at Thalia Hall and March 28 at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN.
You wrote a piece! Tell me about it!
Forward Echo was written for the Instigation Festival Orchestra and its co-founder Steve Marquette. The Instigation Festival is this awesome thing that happens in New Orleans and Chicago every year, with a very diverse group of musicians and musics, improvisation and dance, and performance art. It’s this incredibly inspiring and fertile experience because everybody involved is down for whatever you can come up with, so it opens up a space to push yourself in new directions as a performer and creator. My recent collaboration with Lia Kohl (Water on the Bridge) started there, and so did Forward Echo.
I love those kinds of spaces. Why not do all the things? Opening up creative space is a great way to make experiences feel welcoming instead of careful or even suspicious, and that’s really the way it should be.
Definitely! Steve’s festival has a lot of hungry and curious artists, and I bring a background that includes experiences with contemporary classical music, notated as well as improvised, to an increasingly eclectic mix. I love that all of the worlds are coming together more. It can be hard culturally or in terms of training to cross lines like that, but it helps to think about what you love doing as a performer, and what another performer might love, because then you can write and perform as a whole person.
I’d dabbled in composing before, and I’ve enjoyed previous exploratory projects around the combination and interaction of composers and performers/interpreters. The advantage of being a performer is knowing how other composers have worked with me and what I’ve liked about those experiences. I like music that uses processes, like Lucier and, you know, Bruckner [laughs], and I like knowing that when composers use improv it implies trust and a sense of giving. It feels very inspiring. I wanted to create a sense that as interpreters, the performers could make the piece new and their own every time, because when the lines get blurry it can open you up to be invested in more than just playing the notes. Music is always a learning process for individual musicians, and I want this music to be something people feel excited about playing.
Yeah, that’s a great feeling! I have pieces that feel like that to me, and it’s hard to describe the joy and inspiration that gives me as a performer. So how did you go about actually composing the piece, coming from these particular places?
Well, I knew the piece was going to be premiered in the May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery, and I knew who the performers were going to be, people like Aurora Nealand, for example, and Ken Vandermark. I didn’t want to perform in the piece myself, but I wanted it to feel like a performer, like it was the extra person in the ensemble and I was present in that way. I was thinking about the specific musicians, and about New Orleans and its musical history, and about the chapel itself. I started with ideas of things that I would love to hear these amazing musicians run with, specific clusters and combinations of sound, and I wrote down a bunch of concepts on cards (a hymn by female voices, loud tutti interjections, let’s use the organ! Stuff like that) and then put them together like a puzzle so I could think about different flow scenarios for the piece. I liked that combining the same ideas in different ways can tell different stories.
Of course that makes me think of George Lewis’ “Artificial Life 2007”, which includes a grid of descriptive words that players can follow in an order they choose.
Yeah, totally. I like things that move from a kind of connected individuality towards a structured coming together, and I wanted to create something that let that happen.
How did you approach that, after you got the basic ideas down?
I wanted to connect the piece to the space, and when I started looking into the history of the May Chapel I found out that there are six drummer boys from the American Civil War buried there. I didn’t realize that boys who were too young to fight were sometimes conscripted as drummer boys. Not only that, but the drums were actually used as communication because they could be heard over the sounds of battle, so there were all of these drum beats that meant different things to the men fighting.
It really got me thinking about sound as communication and how that was different in pre-tech societies, and how people would have used music in more and different ways. I found out that a lot of books about the rudimentaries of drumming were written after the Civil War, and that part of the musical heritage of New Orleans comes from all of those wartime brass instruments being sold in pawnshops after it was over. New Orleans has traditionally and famously forged a special connection between death and celebration, and I wanted that to be part of the piece too. I started thinking about two armies meeting and how that could happen sonically à la Charles Ives.
The piece starts from silence, and then a drum triggers small tiny sounds, like wind in a cemetery. We used the sounds to activate the space in a circle using things you can barely hear, and then the performers improvised to extend the echo of the space (I was thinking of Pauline Oliveros). We wanted to engage the hall as an element of the piece instead of being incidental to its performance.
Eventually, we had five musicians upstairs in the choir balcony and six below, with a regular drum downstairs and child’s drum set upstairs. The upstairs people were completely hidden from view. Both groups would listen simultaneously for the opposite group’s drum commands and then follow guidelines in the score regarding how to react individually, whether that was musically, conceptually, or with movement. On a battlefield you have to try and follow commands in the midst of larger things, and I wanted to create a balance of structure and freedom for the performers. Retreat can mean different things to different people at different times, you know? But when things really got cacophonous people had to start following more specific commands as a group. I thought about each individual performer and assigned people to each other in specific combinations, and when things eventually entered a new section with irregular jazz rock-out rhythms they grouped themselves together and turned into a New Orleans jazz party. The piece ended when they all dispersed into the cemetery to walk around quietly by themselves.
Damn! That sounds awesome! How are you going to translate this piece for new spaces and new performers? Because Dal Niente is a lot of things, but New Orleans jazz band we are not.
What I want is for the piece to be able to become a different “person” in new places and with new people, so we’ll be refiguring parts of it to fit with the people of Dal Niente and the spaces we’ll be performing in. Everything you play leaves something inside of you, and so each person has their own extensions and experiences and flexibilities and information about what is meaningful to them. We all carry our own compositional messages and techniques from the things we make our own. I love processes that make pieces into themselves, music as a live organism. I love watching something create itself. Forward Echo is going to be a different piece with Dal Niente in Thalia Hall, but it’s also still going to be itself.
I for one can’t wait to hear it. Do you have any final thoughts for us?
Just that doing something allows you to know more about it. One of the things that I learned from Water on the Bridge, my project with Lia Kohl, is that cellos slowly rise to the surface even when they’re full of water, and how that has its very own quiet beauty. It’s the resistance of the materials to be in their own state; even underwater, they’re still cellos. I’ve been a cellist my whole life and I didn’t know that. But when you look at something on another horizon you can learn new things about it.
I think we’ve reached a point where we more readily cross-pollinate between different types of art, and festivals like Instigation and Big Ears are super important because they just have such a wide variety of things in them. Quality speaks, and when we open up spaces where people can hear new things they can discover for themselves what they find to be good. It gives us keys to new doors, and new worlds.
Cover photo credit: Todd Rosenberg