Interview: Katinka Kleijn on Forward Echo

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

Interview: Pierce Gradone on writing for Andy Nogal

Ammie Brod interviews composer Pierce Gradone about On a Blue Burst of Lake, which will receive its world premiere on January 18, 2020.

“The Harbor
Carl Sandburg
Passing through huddled and ugly walls,
By doorways where women haggard
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.”

AB: I *love* the Sandberg poem that the title comes from. Who brought that to the table, and does it factor into the piece in musical ways? And does this piece have a special connection or resonance with Chicago, either musically/artistically or emotionally? 

PG: I’m fairly certain that I’ve wanted to set Sandberg’s “The Harbor” since I moved to Chicago. I live about a block from Lake Michigan, so it’s played a large role in my daily life, be it walking my dog on the water or barbecuing at Promontory Point. I think I chose this title because Andy and I share a love for this part of the country, and the lake in particular; so I wanted this piece for him to reflect that. 

The poem does play a musical role in the piece, albeit in a somewhat subtle way. The two movements represent the dual nature of the lake: the first as a tempestuous duel between piano and oboe; and the second as the placid calm on a sunny day, when the lake is nearly transparent. It also roughly mirrors the two-part structure of the poem, in which the narrator walks through the industrialized gloom of early 20th century Chicago and suddenly finds himself captivated by this “blue burst of lake."

AB: How much did you and Andy collaborate through this process? Are there specific things about Andy as a person and/or performer that had impact on the piece itself? 

PG: Andy and I have worked together many times, so many of the technical issues were already understood. However, we did have one workshop in which we explored some of the timbral and harmonica possibilities of combining some of the oboe’s richer multiphonics (multiple notes played at once) with chords in the piano. I would also (as I tend to do with most commissions), send mostly completed sections or movements for review.

AB: Do you have any nuts and bolts stuff that you'd like to mention about the piece? 

PG: I think this piece is as close to a “sonata” as I’m likely to get (except that it’s perhaps a sonata for both instruments in terms of technical difficulty). In certain ways, the piece has a romantic sensibility, despite a richly chromatic harmonic structure. Perhaps it’s the voice-like nature of the instrument, or that I simply have a romantic notion of the city and its lakefront. I often struggle with slower movements, but I must say that I really love the slow second movement of this piece, especially its simplicity of line and color.  As I’m growing older, I’m far more accepting of simple, unadorned moments in my music, and I think that this movement is a good example of that.

Listen to Andrew Nogal perform the world premiere of On a Blue Burst of Lake at the Holtschneider Performance Center on January 18, 2020.

Chris Fisher-Lochead: Stutter-Step Revisited

One of the cornerstones of Party 2018 is “stutter-step the concept” by longtime ensemble friend (and fan) Chris Fisher-Lochhead. Originally premiered by Dal Niente at the Ear Taxi Festival, we’ll be playing an updated and expanded version on June 2nd. Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod chatted with CFL about his revision process, creative sources, and baroque object rotation.

Ammie: So we played this piece before, in 2016, but I know you’ve made some substantial revisions since then. Wanna talk about that?

CFL: I wrote stutter-step during a really chaotic period in my life - I was finishing grad school, working on my dissertation, and moving to a totally different part of the country - so my original creative process felt a little rushed and hectic. Basically, I liked the piece but I also knew I wanted to do more with it. In addition, I like it when creative processes are allowed to have multiple stages, and my revisions had more of an additive quality than anything like a total reworking. I wanted to layer more material on top of the structural skeleton I’d already built, to embellish and flesh it out, not to totally reconceive the piece. 

Ammie: When we initially played this piece, I know we were all really struck by a sentence in the performance notes where you describe the piece as “a baroquely detailed physical object which is slowly rotating, exposing its many aspects,” and then you go on to talk about how the piece is a series of sonic “slices” of musical material. Those two ideas really form an interesting picture of the piece before it even gets going, and I’d like to talk about how you got there.

CFL: My basic approach to this particular piece came from a desire to consciously channel my love of hip-hop into a notated work. I intentionally drew on the tradition of building beats out of samples, discrete units of material, which are the “slices” I’m talking about. I love how hip-hop uses unexpected juxtapositions to create something new that can’t really be achieved through other means, and I wanted to use that idea to build a sonic surface like a mosaic of heterogeneous musical atoms. I mean, I don’t think anybody could reverse-engineer their way from my piece to hip-hop without knowing the connection, but there it is. The initial work was very pointilistic and intentionally didn’t smudge boundaries or create larger washes; it wasn’t really trying to go anywhere, but was instead an exploration of ways to look at the components that it’s built from. In this updated version, I did allow some amount of more intuitive creativity. Basically, I wanted to take the sampling technique and allow the ways in which those samples are combined to give rise to a fuller musical language. In my mind, I was thinking of this as an analog of the linguistic process of creolization, in which severed and decontextualized pieces of different languages integrate throughout generations to form a new systematic whole.

The way I intuitively crafted these embellishments on the slice structure feels reminiscent of improvisatory group dynamics. As an improviser myself, I've thought a great deal about how to create some sense of coherence and individuation within an ensemble where everyone is improvising. Of course, in this case, the level of detail and complexity that is prescribed in the score is totally unlike the ethos of freedom in improvised music; but, for me, both approaches serve a similar purpose. Reflecting on this kinship between improvisation and notational complexity reminds me of a personal epiphany I had in my early twenties. At the time I was really anti-complexity, but one morning as my music library was playing on shuffle, I ended up hearing John Coltrane's Sun Ship and Brian Ferneyhough's Second Quartet back-to-back. Right then, it clicked for me that both musicians were trying to do similar things in entirely different ways. Coltrane was using these unruly rhythmic gestures and pairing them with an intimate and extensive knowledge of how his instrument worked to articulate a revelatory catharsis of musical energy; Ferneyhough was applying a deeply considered critical awareness of how musical notation works and what instrumentalists are capable of within that framework and doing the same thing by stretching notation and technique to the breaking point. Realizing that these two different approaches could provoke similar outcomes broke the spell of some pretty naive aesthetic prejudices that I was holding on to at that time.

Ammie: Yeah, I definitely wasn’t like, ah yes, hip-hop, when I got my part, but that makes sense. What else went into this piece that the listeners (and musicians) might not know?

CFL: When I was looking back on this, I realized that it was written in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign. I remember thinking a lot about the overt use of images and words to coerce, cajole, or persuade people, and I was so disgusted by that constant manipulation that I think I subconsciously tried to avoid narrative musical devices. I came to think of the music as something formally concretized, not as a temporal succession of sounds organized tendentiously to elicit an emotional reaction. In other words, I imagine that the experience of listening to the piece would be more like viewing a sculpture than hearing a story, thus the object rotating metaphor.

“stutter-step the concept” comes to Constellation Chicago on June 2nd as part of Party 2018. You can find more information about the other pieces on the program (shadow puppets! escalators!) and ticket information here.

Sky Macklay: Escalator

Sky Macklay’s new piece for Dal Niente, to be premiered at Party 2018 on June 2nd, is a double concerto for oboe and horn that the composer has described as “wacky”. Violist Ammie Brod skyped (well, google hangout video chatted, because she’d forgotten her skype password) with Sky about mega-instruments, people movers, and her dual roles as a composer and performer of new music.

Ammie: So your new piece for Dal Niente is called Escalator! That’s such a fun name, and I’d love to hear more about why you chose it.

Sky: Well, I think this piece has a lot in common with the multitude of experiences you might have while riding on an escalator or moving walkway: accelerating, getting blocked by people, stopping and starting, and the whiplash of getting off. The musical material plays with drastic accelerations  and decelerations of energy and dramatic directional stuff, sharp ups and downs.

*Cue dramatic story about dog poop, a moving walkway, and the horrifying confluence thereof*

Ammie: Wow! Well, back to the music, now that I have a new and very vivid little mental movie to reflect on... Can you tell me more about that musical motion and overall structure?

Sky: The piece basically has three sections. In the first, the horn and oboe play together to form a sort of mega-instrument (interviewer’s note: YESSSS), starting simply with a sort of sad little three-note descending gesture. That gesture gets expanded through a transparent and additive process, getting longer and more heterophonic as other instruments join and start decorating the same expanding phrase. It’s like the steps on the escalator: you start on one, but as you go up or down there’s a longer and more advanced line of them marching out behind you.  

The second section starts fast and aggressive, lots of overblown low notes and playing up and down in a single overtone series, and then gets slower and more drone-y as it continues. As it moves into the third section there’s more back and forth between the oboe and horn inside of increasingly perceivable compound meters, jaunty bouncy gestures. The horn and oboe dialogue back and forth with the horn playing pitches related to the oboe multiphonics, and the strings are in this kind of weird A-minor circle-of-fifths thing, coming together briefly for chords that immediately dissolve upward into noisy clustery gestures. The whole thing plays with tonal information from the oboe multiphonics, and starts in the world of metered classical music but then goes to weird places from there.

Ammie: Why horn and oboe? I mean, I love it, but that’s not a combination that I get to hear a lot of.

Sky: When I started talking with Dal Niente about this piece, you expressed interest in writing for some of the less-programmed instruments in the ensemble, and since I play the oboe and I knew Matt and Andy would be down for anything it seemed like a logical choice. I also included harp and guitar for the same reasons, and as it turns out they’ve ended up acting as the kind of disturbing force within the string section.

Ammie: Matt and Andy are totally down for anything! I do know, though, that you’ll actually be playing the oboe solo for the premiere. Can we talk a little bit about what it’s like to perform your own music with other people?

Sky: Sure! I actually perform my own music pretty regularly with a group that I play in called Ghost Ensemble. I wrote a piece called 60 Degree Mirrors that we play regularly, and I’ve enjoyed that because I know so intimately what I want from the parts, and my part in particular, and I can make changes and add small details on the fly as we play it more times. In some ways it’s a lot easier than playing music by other composers, because I know just how flexible I can and want to be with the music.

Ammie: A related question: has that experience changed your relationship to other performers who are playing your music?

Sky: I really like asking for and hearing performers’ opinions. Sometimes performers will have a better way to get to the idea that I had when I was writing the parts, and discussion is a good way to ensure that we all know what that idea is. I’m really open to that discussion, and I definitely want it to feel like I’m welcoming others to the conversation.

Sky Macklay’s new piece, “Escalator”, will premiere on June 2nd at Constellation Chicago as part of Ensemble Dal Niente's Party 2018. This commission is generously supported by the Fromm Foundation.

The Body of the State: Snippets

Eliza Brown's The Body of the State premieres on October 20 at the EDGE theater. Here, the composer shares a handwritten sketch of part of Scene III and an audio clip from her recording session at the Indiana Women's prison.

Handwritten manuscript from The Body of the State, Scene 3

Interview with Eliza Brown: Epistemic Injustice, Juana of Castile, and the Women of Indiana Women's Prison

“My bondage shall not / keep my story bound
”

— Brittney Watson, "Voice of the Dead"

In this interview, EDN violist Ammie Brod sits down with composer Eliza Brown to ask some questions about The Body of the State, Brown's new monodramatic work that Ensemble Dal Niente will premiere as part of its STAGED series in 2017-2018.

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Q: First off, can you tell us a little about the history behind your monodrama?

A: The Body of the State is a monodrama for soprano and ensemble about Juana of Castile. Juana, born in 1479, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of what is now  Spain. At 16, she was married to Philip of Burgundy, who soon proved abusive and unfaithful, denying Juana power in the household and locking her in her chambers as punishment.

In 1506, both Isabella and Philip died, leaving Juana, at age 27, sole heir to the Castilian throne. She found herself locked in a battle for power with her own father, who strong-armed her into signing away her governing rights, leaving her queen in name only. Rumors of her insanity were spread by her political enemies, and her father had her confined to a house in Tordesillas, surrounded by servants and priests whom he paid to lie to her, control her, and interrogate the legitimacy of her faith

Q: That’s very . . . operatic, isn’t it?

A: It is, and that’s part of what got me interested in Juana’s story. I was initially drawn to this as a “hidden narrative” of women’s history, the dark origin story of the Hapsburg empire. But I also appreciated its operatic-ness: the scale of its drama, its emotionally fraught scenarios, the family power plays that affect thousands of people, and as a composer I was interested in the opportunity to allude to and subvert the operatic trope of the madwoman.

Q: Has the focus of your interest changed as you’ve delved deeper into the story?

A: It has, for a number of reasons. As this project developed over the last few years, Juana’s story came to feel more and more relevant to the modern world. Women are still used as political pawns via arranged marriages. The stigma of mental illness is still used to discredit the voices of survivors of abuse and oppression. Educational disparities still undermine the human potential of women and girls around the globe. Incarceration is still used as a method for controlling the non-conforming and the politically threatening, and women still face intense opposition when they pursue political power. This is not only a historical story, but a human story.

Last fall I was involved in a faculty/staff reading group at DePauw University which met via videoconference with the graduate class at Indiana Women’s Prison. We read articles by philosophers and by women in the prison about the concept of “epistemic injustice.” Epistemic injustice occurs when we discount someone’s ability to be a knower, reducing that person to a knowable object. This form of injustice affects many marginalized people, including the incarcerated. As I learned about epistemic injustice from the women at IWP, I felt it perfectly described Juana’s situation. This changed my understanding of the character, and of the text and music she ought to sing.

I felt an ethical responsibility to tell the IWP scholars that their work had influenced mine, and an ethical desire to offer them a way to participate in this project as a small corrective to epistemic injustice. A number of women were interested in participating, and we scheduled a series of meetings to discuss the form that might take.

“
The body of Juana of Castile is likened unto a strikingly luminescent orb. An orb floating about the land of her people, equally tangible and intangible, equally desired and repulsed, beautiful, but hard to look at, hard to take in....In the story of power misused against her and the dilution of her own power, we see a woman who had no real possession of her body.”

— Michelle Jones, Thoughts on Juana of Castile: A Body that Belonged to the State

Q: There are so many levels of collaboration going on in this project! Can you tell me more about the form that this specific collaboration ended up taking?

A: It was important to me to approach this particular collaboration in a way that minimized the position of power I was systemically assigned to, so at first I asked a lot of questions: how do we do this together? Initially, we discussed excerpts of a book about Juana, and then the women wrote responses to it in the formats that felt most appropriate to them. We picked through these responses together, editing and combining them into a libretto. We went through several rounds of editing, giving feedback, and then editing again.

More concretely, I wrote the libretto for the second scene before the collaboration; the librettos for the first and third scenes were written with them. We have no text actually written by Juana to work with, despite her presumed education; all we know of her life is what other people wrote about her. Much as I wanted this monodrama to subvert the operatic paradigm of the mentally unstable female, I wanted this collaboration to subvert the epistemic injustice that prisoners, including both Juana and my collaborators, experience on a daily basis.

Q: Aside from the concrete contribution of a libretto, were there other ways this collaboration shaped your piece?

A: Absolutely. The piece now includes aspects of Juana’s story and psychology that I had not prioritized.  For instance, the character now mentions her children several times, and at one point mistakes someone else on stage for one of her sons. I had initially planned to leave out references to her children for the sake of theatrical simplicity, but the women thought we had to find a way to include them.

Our conversations also complicated my perception of Juana as a constant victim. My collaborators picked up on her ability to maintain small forms of resistance to injustice, even if that resistance was sometimes to her detriment. They saw her as strong, because she’s aware of the injustices in her world and resists them instead of being broken by them. Juana heroically attempted to assert her agency against all odds, despite losing battle after battle and despite the opposition of everyone around her. Her story is simultaneously tragedy and triumph.

They’ve also had a hand in the sonic world of the piece. Juana’s mental health is somewhat ambiguous in the historical record: was her mental instability innate, or imposed by circumstance? Some of the women I’ve been working with have had personal experiences with mental health that are not unlike Juana’s, and this prompted a discussion of sound and what sounds could be used as triggers for or symbols of her mental instability within the scope of the piece. Some of these--an electric guitar string being scraped while a flute plays a particular sound, for instance--will be included in the final score. I will also record the women’s voices and incorporate those recordings into the electronics, and I’ve invited them to choose some of their individual text responses to the subject matter that can become part of the background info surrounding this piece. [Two of these texts are quoted above.]

Q: Any final words on this collaboration or your work in general?

A: I’d just like to thank the women I’ve worked with at IWP for their insights into Juana’s story, and the education program at IWP for approving and facilitating this project.