Q1.
Will you tell us how you become interested in composing
a piece for Axis Dance Company?
I first came across
Axis
when June Watanabe made a piece for them using some
music from my solo guitar record Clearing. I found the
basic idea intriguing. Not least because I took part
(as a musician!) in a dance performance by Sally Silvers
in New York in the early 1980s, and I had to play in
a wheel chair that was being pushed by one of the dancers,
so I had an intimate feeling of how restricted that
felt. So of course I wanted to find out how the dancers
worked with that. When Margaret Jenkins proposed a collaboration
I was very excited - both because of the opportunity
to work with Axis, and the by the fact that I'd never
collaborated with Margy before, so it was a double challenge.
Q2. How did you and the choreographer communicate
to work on the musical component of this dance piece?
The first step was
a meeting with Margy, her assistant Melanie Elms, and
Judith Smith (one of the dancers and directors of Axis)
We talked about anything that seemed like it might be
important- the 'issue' of the wheelchairs, including
from my perspective what they sounded like, and the
kinds of worlds we were all leaning towards creating,
to see if there was common ground, or at least a common
starting point. Out of this meeting came a desire on
my part to listen to the wheelchairs (two of which are
electric) in the space where the dancers rehearse. So
I arranged to watch Judith moving in the space, and
also arranged to record it, so that I had a library
of typical wheelchair sounds. There were two basic reasons
for this. The first was because I like to integrate
mundane everyday kind of sound into my work, and the
hum of the wheelchairs is a mundane everyday sound for
the folks who 'live' in them. The second has to do with
a purely practical consideration - the chairs emit a
pretty audible hum at a pitch somewhat higher than G#,
and any music that I was going to write would have to
either overcome that or to integrate it. By recording
the chairs I aimed for the latter.
Q3. How did you
understand the nature of the dance piece to develop
the compositional ideas?
There was the G# issue,
which led me to write the piece in E major and G#minor,
and to retune the recording of the piece precisely to
the sound of the chairs by transferring it to analog
and changing the tape speed. Then there was the desire
of the dancers to have music that was somehow pulse-based,
and my wish to include the recordings as part of the
music. All that was in one way purely technical, but
it led down a certain path. After that it was a question
of thinking about how the chair sound in the space would
mix with the music, and to start writing down ideas.
I decided to have six 'voices' to parallel the 6 dancers
(guitar, trumpet, violin, piano, percussion, and bass)
and to play with hocketing, so that the voices would
create melody through interdependence, trying to imagine
a kind of 'dance'-like interaction between them. I had
a residency in Switzerland, and just started writing
and didn't really stop until I was finished. I felt
that it wrote itself really. During this process I had
only one e-mail exchange with Margy, who was creating
the piece in Oakland in my absence. We created verbal
images for each other. Hers centered on the idea of
"traffic" as a metaphor for action, and on
what it means to be "mobile". Mine was based
on an observation of Judith dancing, which I described
as "fiercely detached, like a hawk", if I
remember rightly. These small observations were enough
to link us together without interfering in each others'
process.
©Heike Liss
2005 |
Q4. What kind of
the approaches did you take to compose the music for
this piece?
I think I described
them as accurately as I can. There were four elements.
First the understanding of how to begin. Then the acoustic
composition. Then the recording to hard disk, the subsequent
transfer to analog and speed alteration, and the return
to hard drive again. And finally the mixing process.
After I brought the first mix we sat and watched and
listened and we knew that the mix was an exciting success.
But I still needed to go back and change a couple of
small things, to get the length to fit more exactly,
and to intensify one part with more wheelchair sounds,
because it wasn't keeping up with the intensity of the
performance. But the basic approach stayed the same:
6 instruments, matched tuning, mixture of recording
with wheelchair sound recording, and mixture of whole
with actual wheelchair sound.
Q5. How did you
decide the instrumentation of the music?
As is often the case,
the decision was based more on people with whom I have
a long-term working relationships than on a desire for
specific sound. So it's not so much written for piano,
violin, trumpet and percussion as for Heather Heise, Carla
Kihlstedt, Darren Johnston, and Willie Winant, with everything
they bring to a piece, which means unique understanding,
fantastic technique, and passionate engagement.
Q6. What kind of
the compositional techniques did you use to realize
what you wanted to express in your music?
The basic form is of
a slowly unfolding melody that reveals itself more and
more over time but is framed in a number of different
ways. The basic material is quite limited, I just examined
it from a lot of different angles, to try and see how
much I could get out of it. Then there's the recording
side, which is where the piece really took shape, because
that's my medium really. And then there was an editing
and modification process, also in the studio. It was
all very simple.
Q7.What was your
emotional response to this dance piece and how did you
express it in your music?
The question is back
to front because I wrote the music without seeing the
dance. When I did see it I was struck by how powerful
it was, but also by how if you ask the right questions
and have the right collaborators, the elements will
fit together in ways that you couldn't predict, and
will be more arresting than if you "react"
to what you see or hear in the making of the piece.
John Cage and Merce Cunningham figured that out a long
time ago, and it's been borne out in my own collaborations
again and again.
Recent
Release :
Music for Dance Volume 5
Performed by a stellar
cast of musicians and featuring the ethereal electronic
manipulations of Patrice Scanlon, this record contains
music for two dances created by Amanda Miller for
The Pretty Ugly Dance Company, one based on Igor
Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, the other a deliberately
"Western" look at "Japanese"
culture.
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