Fred Frith
 


[LINK]

http://www.fredfrith.com/


"Waypoint"
/Axis Dance Company
choreographer: Margaret Jenkins
composer:Fred Frith
http://www.axisdance.org

Fred Frith Interview
Dance and Music
 Ayako Kataoka [Dance and Media Japan/San Francisco]
21DEC 2006
ノイズ、インプロヴィゼーション、アンダーグラウンド。日本ではそんなイメージで知られているフレッド・フリス。ところが実は30年以上、ダンスのための音楽を創作しています。ダンスと音楽についてインタビュー。
 

©Heike Liss 2005
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.




©Heike Liss 2005
Fred Frith, composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist, has situated himself for more than thirty years in the area where rock music and new music meet. Co-founder of the British underground band Henry Cow (1968-78), he moved to New York in the late seventies and came into contact with many of the musicians with whom he's since been associated, including, for example, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Tom Cora, Zeena Parkins, and Bob Ostertag. Fourteen years in New York gave rise to groups like Massacre (with Bill Laswell and Fred Maher), Skeleton Crew (with Tom and Zeena), and Keep the Dog, a sextet performing an extensive repertoire of his compositions.
Fred has written for dance for more than 30 years, working with choreographers Bebe Miller, François Verret, Amanda Miller, Peggy Piacenza and many others. He also composes for film (The Tango Lesson, Rivers and Tides, Thirst, Yes), theatre (with Matthew Maguire's Creation Company in New York), and for ensembles such as ROVA Sax Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Arditti Quartet and his own critically acclaimed Guitar Quartet. Best known world-wide as an improvising guitarist, he has performed in a variety of other contexts, playing bass in John Zorn's Naked City, violin in Lars Hollmer's Looping Home Orchestra, and guitar on recordings ranging from The Residents and Ren? Lussier to Brian Eno and Amy Denio.
Fred is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel's award-winning documentary film Step Across the Border. He is currently Professor of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California.