Posts Tagged ‘daniel j. kushner’
SONiC Festival Interview #1: Alex Temple
It is no secret that the new music community has found a vital home in New York City in recent years. The creative minds behind what is known as “contemporary classical music” are innumerable, and gaining prespective can be an overwhelming task for audiences.
Beginning on October 14, however, the SONiC Festival (Sounds of a New Century) will venture to make sense of the scene–particularly as it pertains to composers under the age of 40–with a 9-day festival in New York featuring a staggering 100-plus composers and more than 17 word premiere performances of newly commissioned works.
I recently spoke with Alex Temple, a composer of one such work, whose Liebeslied for female voice, electronics, and chamber orchestra will be performed by the American Composers Orchestra at the SONiC Festival’s opening concert at Zankel Hall on Friday, October 14.
Alex Temple performing with new music ensemble The Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles.
Daniel J. Kushner: You’ve described your new composition, Liebeslied—which will be premiered by the American Composers Orchestra and soprano Mellissa Hughes as part of the SONiC Festival—as a “dreamlike refraction of love songs from the 1940s and 50s.” Can you talk about your specific inspiration for this piece?”
Alex Temple: The piece I wrote for ACO and Mellissa [Hughes], it was inspired by a realization I had while listening to the song “Till There Was You” [from The Music Man]…So I was listening to “Till There Was You,” and I was listening to the lyrics, and for some reason it occurred to me to take them literally, and I thought, This really scary. “There were bells on a hill, but I didn’t hear them ringing/Till there was you”—well that’s really kind of a frightening idea. And then I was thinking about “I Only Have Eyes for You,” which is the opposite but equally scary. Rather than being unable to perceive the world until the singer meets their beloved, in “I Only Have Eyes for You,” the singer—as a result of being with the person, can’t perceive the world. And I was thinking about the line “I don’t know if we’re in a garden or on a crowded avenue”—I’m like, this sounds like something out of Last Year at Marienbad or something, some kind of disorientingly [sic] surreal film. And then the other thing I was thinking about is that a lot of music from that period sonically also seems very eerie to me, partially because the vocals are mixed a little too high with respect to the instruments—which makes them sound somehow enlarged or heightened—and partially because there tends to be a lot of reverb….
[In Liebeslied] there’s sort of an introductory passage which is simulating reverb orchestrally, but once the voice comes in it starts out more or less being in the style of a ballad from the 40s or 50s. But it kind of is edging in towards German Romantic orchestral lieder too in certain spots because I was interested in the idea that those two repertoires are more similar than they’re sometimes given credit for, both textually and musically. I found some really strange chord progression—I can’t remember what it is now—in Tony Bennett’s “Because of You,” and I was thinking, Strauss could have written this and it wouldn’t have seemed out of place.
And the piece as it continues gradually starts taking these cells apart and abstracting them and taking them into darker and stranger places, but the initial impetus for it was really specifically conceived of in reference to an existing musical repertoire, and I feel like that’s true of 75-80% of the pieces that I write. I’m very interested in commenting on the musical and cultural history. “Commenting” makes it sound like there’s a specific message, which isn’t necessarily true. And “playing with” sounds a little too humorous, maybe. The best way to put it would be “engaging with.”
DK: It sounds like Liebeslied takes the already existing lexicon inherent in these love song standards and makes them literal and interprets them in a way that’s more true to the experience of falling in love.
AT: That would be a very cynical view of love. I think if anything it’s a critique of how love is portrayed in those songs. I find a lot of the ways that love is portrayed in art in general, both popular and formal, to be very creepy. It tends to be obsessive, it tends to be stalker-ish—it tends to be overwhelming to the point that it destroys your ability to function. I don’t think that’s what a good relationship is like. I don’t think anybody who has good relationships thinks that what a good relationship is like. And so I look at these songs and I think, What a horrible idea, that love would actually make you blind to the world around you. For example, another song I was looking up is “Laura.” That one’s interesting ‘cause it’s in the second person, actually. So the listener is put in the position of imagining themselves as somebody who lost a lover at some point in the past and just absolutely can’t stop thinking about her. “The face in the misty light” and the “footsteps you hear down the hall,” everything that the fictional listener hears or sees is Laura. And again, I’m thinking, That sounds awful! I don’t think it’s romantic, I think it’s distressing.
Alex Temple’s A Presentation to the Board
AT: I’ve written a lot of pieces that are stylistically referential, but I‘ve been moving increasingly over the course of the last nine years or so toward being interested in the meanings of the things I’m referencing. Because when I started out doing it I originally just thought of it as fun and playful, and increasingly I’m interested in it as—well, initially as an oblique cultural commentary and then more and more as actual social critique….Definitely part of my intention is to say, “Hey, wait a second: the images we’re using to represent love—and although those songs are not current the ideas are still around—these images are actually really disturbing. I don’t want to say too much about the ending of the piece because I want it to be a surprise, but I’ll say that the protagonist of the song—I don’t think the relationship that she’s in is such a good one.
For more information about the SONiC Festival, visit the official SONiC Festival website.
Beautiful Mechanical : yMusic, The Ready-Made Collaborators
Chamber music ensembles tend to form because of a palpable chemistry felt between the individual players. But yMusic isn’t quite like many of its contemporaries. The New York-based sextet– clarinetist Hideaki Aomori , trumpeter/French horn player CJ Camerieri, cellist Clarice Jensen, violinist/guitarist Rob Moose, violist Nadia Sirota, and flutist Alex Sopp–came together because it sensed an unnecessary musical disconnect between its individual members and wanted to correct it. During a concert at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008 for which indie rock sensation The National had hired violinist/guitarist Rob Moose, trumpeter/French horn player CJ Camerieri, and clarinetist Hideaki Aomori as backing musicians, Moose noticed a lack of musical intimacy.
yMusic, left to right: Hideaki Aomori, Clarice Jensen, CJ Camerieri, Rob Moose, Alex Sopp, Nadia Sirota; photo by Ilya Nikhamin.
I remember during one of the songs at The National show, seeing CJ standing like 60 feet from me across the room and not being able to hear him, and we’re playing the same song but we’re not even having a shared experience. [I] was just feeling like, You know, it’s really great that bands are having more instrumentalists play with them, but the experience was feeling a little bit lacking in terms of actual interaction and arrangement-wise, things were starting to feel a little thrown together…. Since we view the music of these bands with the same amount of integrity that we would put into a chamber music performance, there should be a group that is able to do both things.
Similarly, Camerieri saw a need for a new ensemble:
Nadia was at the after-party, we were like, Why wasn’t Nadia playing? This is insane. Hideaki was on different songs than me and Rob were on–we were like, Why aren’t people using all of us? And they we sort of realized it was because we hadn’t made it obvious that they should be using all of us. So in a weird way, yMusic , the first time we thought conceptually about the group, it was just to make it obvious to other people who we wanted to play with when they hired us for gigs. If you hire me, you should know that I’m gonna want you tor hire Hideaki to play clarinet.
Three years and seven commissions later, yMusic’s debut album Beautiful Mechanical was released on September 27 via New Amsterdam Records. The album features the works of six composers–among them indie singer-songwriters Gabriel Kahane, Annie Clark of St. Vincent, and Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, all of whom yMusic had worked with extensively in the past. “In the end we realized that we have these two branches,” says Moose. “We are a commissioning ensemble that performs independently and we’re an auxiliary ensemble that performs with bands and can create arrangements for them and really help put that whole experience together.”
As an ensemble, the musicians’ cohesion transcends that of many professional ensembles entrenched in the classical tradition. Rather than interpreting the music as a group of instrumental layers that merely interact with one another, the players create a fully integrated fabric of sounds inextricable from one another. While many chamber ensembles attempt to sound as one voice, yMusic achieves it.
Beautiful Mechanical is singular in its execution: “contemporary classical” compositions packaged in a pop album context of seven tracks and a breezy 43 minutes. Each cut is a self-contained sound world all its own–from the skittish propulsion of Ryan Lott’s (Son Lux) title track to the cinematic undulations of “Daughter of the Waves” by Sarah Kirkland Snider to Judd Greenstein’s pinpoint post-Minimalism on “Clearing, Dawn, Dance.”
yMusic has created something stunning and uncanny–a vital document of the indie-classical movement that simultaneously resists and transcends the connotations associated with the subgenre. Programmatically, there is an implicit narrative of collaboration at work. Four of the six composers were featured as part of the Greenstein-curated Ecstatic Music Festival earlier this year, and three of the seven compositions were premiered at Snider and Worden’s March 16 Ecstatic concert. yMusic is also the featured band on Worden’s upcoming My Brightest Diamond album All Things Will Unwind, out October 18 from Asthmatic Kitty Records. In speaking about the ensemble’s collaboration with Worden on that record, Camerieri had this to say:
[Shara Worden] didn’t write a flute part, a clarinet part, and a viola part. She wrote an Alex Sopp part, an Hideaki part, and a Nadia Sirota part…she wrote for their individual characteristics and how they play and what’s significant to the way they sound. So it’s really specifically these people, and not their instruments….All of her special relationships with us and the way we play really come through super clear on the record. That’s sort of what yMusic is all about. It’s about us forging these releationships and making this music happen that wouldn’t normally happen, we don’t think, without the collaborative process.
Violist Nadia Sirota clarifies the unifying principle of yMusic:
I don’t think we ever really set out to be like, Oh man, let’s have this rock sensibility and apply it to chamber music or let’s have a classical sensibility and apply it to rock music. I think part of the reason we gravitated towards each other is because all of us have very, very wide-ranging tastes, and we like to be involved in projects where we just perceive the music to be good, no matter in what side of the aisle it lies…. to be a successful player of orchestral instruments in the early part of the 21st century means finding a niche and doing some weird stuff there.
“We Added It Up” from the forthcoming My Brightest Diamond album All Things Will Unwind (release date October 18).
In collaborating with the ensemble, composer Ryan Lott sees yMusic’s virtuosity extending beyond technical ability in a way that distinguishes the group among its peers. “If you want to call them classical musicians, they’re classical musicians for an iPod world, where Mozart and Mos Def are together on a playlist,” says Lott. “They’re the product of a world in which music is profoundly diverse, and they have the skill and the open-mindedness to embrace all of it.”
Lott’s contribution to the album is the title track, the name of which is indicative of yMusic’s overall style, according to Rob Moose. “I think sometimes the danger in classical training and classical music is that you get lost in the pursuit of the technique or the craft, and can lose sight of the music behind it,” says Moose. “So our group’s aesthetic is obviously to always project those things simultaneously and let them energize each other. The name of that piece kind of sums up how we approach music.
Composer/singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane explains the group’s singularity in this way:
I had taken for granted the rarity of their masterful hybrid musicianship as individuals, and as a group, by which I mean: nowhere else will you find a group of players who have both an innate sense of phrasing in the more ‘legit’ classical sense, and at the same time have exquisite sense for rhythm–not the case among your average highly-trained classical musician–and pop-oriented groove. It’s a real glory when writing the kind of music that my peers and I do to have such intuitively resourceful musicians to interpret it.
Beautiful Mechanical Compositions In Focus
Composer: Annie Clark (St. Vincent)
Track: “Proven Badlands”
- Compositional Features: A coolly seductive flute melody underscored by an unsettling cello ostinato and punctuated by cityscape trumpet accents.
- What to Listen For: Echoes of “Marrow,” from 2009’s Actor, particularly the four-note motive reminiscent of the line, “H.E.L.P./Help me, help me.” You can hear Clark’s voice in the flute melodies. More overtly, “Proven Badlands” is a continuing exposition of the central melodic theme of “The Sequel.”
Composer: Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond)
Track: “A Whistle, a Tune, A Macaroon”
- Compositional Features: Woodwind-centric textures—including what sounds like sonic archery—and plenty of quivering tone colors,
- What to Listen For: The clarity of melodic tone, tranquility, and an uncluttered and deliberate splatial sense reminiscent of “If I Were Queen” tranquility from A Thousand Shark’s Teeth.
Composer: Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond)
Track: “A Paper, a Pen, a Note to a Friend”
- Compositional Features: Worden’s most vivid and idiosyncratic writing for instruments yet, full of fits and starts and loaded with nuanced articulations. Tongue-in-cheek for the ears, this a subtle and deceptively complex work.
- What to Listen For: The danceable opening groove is a close relative of the expressionistic percussion painting of “Ding Dang” (from the forthcoming All Things Will Unwind) and the thumb piano motives in “Apple” (from a Thousand Shark’s Teeth) and “Everything is in Line” (from the former album). A continuation of the overall playful, almost coquettish quality of the instrumental writing from All Things Will Unwind.
Composer: Gabriel Kahane
Track: “Song”
- Compositional Features: Spacious Americana courtesy of the trumpet, complete with the characteristic inscrutable melody and chromatic movements; plenty of chord suspensions with delayed resolutions
- What to Listen For: Significant chordal accompaniment in the guitar, as on the forthcoming Where Are the Arms; the flute contains traces of a descending melody from “Craigslistlieder I: You Look Sexy.”
Note: The phrase “ready-made collaborators,” referenced in the article’s title, is attributed to Nadia Sirota.
For more information about yMusic’s Beautiful Mechanical, visit New Amsterdam Records here.
Creatures of Habit: A Response to Gabriel Kahane Concerning Spotify
This past week, composer/singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane wrote a poignant editorial about the emergence of the music service Spotify and how it may adversely affect the way we consume music. As someone who has recently begun to use Spotify as a resource, I found his opinions to be particularly timely.
And yet I was somewhat troubled by what I perceived to be a prevailing idea–that the medium with which we listen to music ostensibly dictates how we listen:
I’d like to propose a third stream: that the problem we face is not one of economics, but of the spiritual nature of how [we] consume music. That is to say: what Spotify and illegally downloaded music have in common is that they both spiritually devalue music by making a surfeit of it too accessible.
Mr. Kahane seems to be saying that universal, unparalleled access to all music is somehow inherently bad. This seems dangerously paramount to saying, “The devil made me do it.” It’s not the mechanism with which we consume music that makes or breaks our listening experience, but rather what we do with that mechanism. How do we use Spotify and other technologies in an intelligent manner that rewards diligent and deliberate listening habits?
Ultimately, we as listeners must take personal responsibility for how we consume music. I concede that mediums such as the record player/vinyl challenge us to listen more intently, and in a way I consider more positive than others. But I can’t accept that listening to music digitally makes the experience any less meaningful because I now have access to more of it and will somehow listen “less.”
Discovering Spotify did not cause me to investigate more music less thoroughly. Rather, I applied my existing listening habits to my use of Spotify, particularly as a way to supplement my experience of a particular artist’s biography or to listen to specific recordings of a seminal work. In this way, the service can be used advantageously by completists or by intrepid listeners seeking to compare different recordings of the same composition.
Mr. Kahane refers to the onset of Spotify and “the demise of curation as it applies to one’s music collection” as cause-and-effect. But with regard to Spotify’s practical function, is that really true? Users may “star” songs and entire albums for later perusal, and there is of course the ability to create playlists. This latter function is arguably the most important aspect of the Spotify experience. How else can one organize a seemingly limitless library of music but through the use of personalized playlists? If this isn’t curation, what is it?
New developments in music consumption are inevitable, and increased access is part and parcel. Soon enough, the heir apparent of Spotify will emerge from the primordial sludge of technological innovation. But was our listening experience decimated in the path of the last digital music victor,in the wake of iTunes and the iPod and their irrevocable trajectories? No–essentially, we merely transferred our music collections to another format.
Now here is where Spotify’s function differentiates itself, and the subject of “complete access” becomes especially contentious. Is it really my music collection if I have access to everything? And herein, I think, is the underlying crux in Mr. Kahane’s perspective: What constitutes a personal music collection? Beyond a matter of spiritual value, I think Spotify raises vital questions about ownership and music-as-commodity.
Unfortunately, this is also where our topic, “Spotify and the Personal Listening Experience,” becomes derailed and turns instead into an economic quandary. By allowing users to access a vast cache for amounts ranging from free to $9.99, Spotify obscures the monetary value of music and fosters a communal atmosphere. And this is a real problem in an era in which the avenues for artist compensation are increasingly unclear. And as the following articles attest, Spotify similarly seems to have been largely ineffective in compensating artists for their craft.
First, some background history:
Guardian, August 2009 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-labels-spotify
The Music Void, October 2009 - http://www.themusicvoid.com/2009/10/spotify-labels-win-artists-lose/
The latest events:
Billboard, August 2011 - http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/century-media-label-pulls-music-from-spotify-1005309442.story
Music Ally, August 2011 - http://musically.com/blog/2011/08/11/spotify-payouts-top-100m-as-it-responds-to-indie-label-critics/
Monetary issues aside, it’s important that we the listeners hold ourselves accountable for how we listen to music and how we use services such as Spotify. If we have caught ourselves devaluing the music listening as a spiritual experience, perhaps the enemy is us.
More Adz and Ends: Sufjan Stevens Bonus Interview
In the course of publishing an interview, editing is inevitable. My recent three-part interview with Sufjan Stevens is no exception. In this post comprised of discussions that didn’t make it into the interview proper, the artist talks about the music of Asthmatic Kitty labelmate Shara Worden–who will open for Stevens at his August 2 concert in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park–architecture,the term “composer,” his perspective on contemporary music criticism, and more.
Daniel J Kushner: Your music has been appropriated for a wide variety of music purposes, as string quartet music, hip-hop samples, and also as ballet music. Does this extrapolation of your work s inform how you think about what you do?
Sufjan Stevens: Yeah. I mean, I think that music has a function, and we forget that it can have mutiple functions and it can be site-specific…And I think there’s something very iconoclastic about going into an H&M store and being accosted by techno music or dance music, because I think that that’s a misuse of form. The form itself, it’s meant to engage with movement and bodies, and you know, the dance floor. And we go in the restaurant, and there are these speakers everywhere and they’re imposing this music on us. And I think that we’ve become even careless in how we do music and exploit it, and it’s part of this constant soundtrack. So I think about function a lot.
One of the reasons why I don’t like to play outdoor festivals is cause I think there’s something really sacrilegious about blasting sound through a huge PA system in an outdoor environment. There’s something very environmentally irresponsible about that, you know? There’s something very strange about that that I’ve always had trouble dealing with. I like to think that music can have multiple functions but should always be sort of deliberate and responsible and sort of accommodating to each environment….I don’t think as a society we’re ever going to grow weary of music. I think it’s always going to be valuable. It’s funny, cause I think of architecture as being vital. Architecture is this sort of discipline in creating space which [sic] we inhabit, and architecture matters more than anything else because it’s all about physical matter that covers us. We live in these rooms, in these spaces.
Music has no physical matter at all, it’s just waves, I guess. I don’t even know what it is. It’s just waves. And yet emotionally and psychologically it matters to us probably far more than architecture. I think people have more opinions and allegiances to songs and styles than they would to architecture, for some reason. And I don’t know why that it is, even though it doesn’t matter—like physically doesn’t have matter. It still matters more to people. It’s a mysterious thing.
Kushner: I wouldn’t ask the question about labels if it didn’t seem so relevant. In talking to contemporary composers, it just seems to be this ever-present issue that some people really take personally. Is it contemporary classical? Is it indie classical? There are all these terms floating out there that people choose either to utilize or avoid. It’s a really perplexing problem without a real answer. The label itself doesn’t say anything or explain anything about the music itself.
Stevens: Yeah, well music journalism and music criticism today is pretty sloppy and irresponsible with language, and there’s actually no accountability in terms of the kind of flagrant labels they use. There are a lot of run-on lists of descriptors and modifiers that aren’t usually very responsible. And I think I’m less interested in these descriptors and modifiers than I am in concrete nouns. I think if you’re going to call something what it is, you should use a noun, because a noun holds up better…
[Writers are] really desperate to kind of describe something, but they describe it as a list of modifiers that are constantly cross-referencing or alluding to previous work. It just feels very kind of insular and circular and reductive….it makes for really clumsy prose, cause as a reader you have to wade through all those references and there’s no concrete terminology on which to stand so that as a reader you feel confident about the subject at hand. Maybe it’s just an inherent problem in music journalism or writing about music, because music doesn’t have shape or form—like you said, it’s ephemeral. It’s extremely subjective, and it’s a mysterious phenomenon, and the desperate need to categorize is indication of how mysterious music is.
Kushner: I was wondering what you thought of the current music scene in New York, particularly the Ecstatic Music Festival?
Stevens: [Shara Worden] did a My Brightest Diamond show with all new material…I was kind of blown away by Shara’s new songs because they’re really exuberant and very generous and dynamic, and they were very confusing too. I was having that conundrum, that labeling conundrum, wanting to to reduce it to a formula, form or term, and afterwards I was just baffled by it all. And I kind of liked being really confused. Some of it was like weird 60s Gospel/Broadway theater, there was like a theatrical element to it, there was dance. Some of it was just real simple folk, but then it had all these really kind of dense wind arrangements, tone colors and flourishes. But then it had these big fat beats too. It was very beat heavy, and it felt kind of like poppy and hip-hoppy. She’s becoming more soulful…I was really confused by it all, but where her other previous stuff has been very focused, you know? She was doing this dark gothic rock thing, and all this new material is really turned away from that and is much more dynamic, more joyful.
Kushner: It seems like she’s emerging into the most natural version of her creative self, or a fuller representation of her creativity. I think that was the nature of that festival as a whole. I think if you walked away confused in terms of how to categorize something, it’s probably a good thing. For me, this happens in your music too. In the cases of songwriters like you and Shara and others, I don’t really separate composer from singer-songwriter. I think you’re all composers who happen to use song as your medium of choice.
Gustav Mahler is a composer, but he’s most well known for writing songs. Technically, he was a songwriter, but no one refers to him as a songwriter. I don’t know what distingiuishes someone from being a composer or not being a composer. I don’t make that distinction, but as we’ve determined, that distinction doesn’t matter so much. [Editor's note: Upon initial publication, the quote contained in this paragraph was incorrectly attributed to Sufjan Stevens. This quote was in fact spoken by the interviewer.]
Stevens: Who cares what I think, too, because I think that my hesitation with the term composer, it’s like personal hang-ups with the connotations of that word, composer and composition. And my instinct is to dumb down what I do. I always just want to keep it simple. People ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I write songs.” They say, what kind of music, and I just say, “Pop music.” End of conversation. It’s such a vague, kind of all-encompassing term, but it’s good enough for me.
Kushner: Is the connotation of the composer that it’s too complex and not accessible enough?
Stevens: Maybe, that it’s too important, more important than I’m willing to concede.
Kushner: Maybe music somehow feels more personal [than architecture]. You can take ownership and make it your own more than you can take ownership of that great building you walked by. I think that’s what it is, at least in part…
Stevens: An object, just by the nature of its physical being, resists possession in a way because it’s an object, you know. You can’t carry around a building obviously. You can’t possess it, in a way. I guess you can own it, like real estate, but that’s short=lived anyway. Music is nebulous. We talk about intellectual property of music, but that’s just politics. I don’t know what that means. That’s why I really believe that the song sustains its own consciousness and is dispossessed of its owner, and then it basically yields to the multitudes of listeners, of consumers, and everyone owns the song.
It’s such a relief for me to acknowledge that because I feel far less possessive of my own music, and I feel lest earnest and less despairing about its worth, or its value, and more willing to just make it, create it, do my best work possible, and then give it away.
Kushner: Precisely because it never belonged to you to begin with?
Stevens: Yeah. It’s not concrete so it doesn’t feel like I own it. It feels nebulous.
Kushner: The implication that you’re presenting is really interesting, which is that the physical things that one can make into a commodity or possess, those are the things that you actually can’t control, and it’s the things that seem totally intangible and unattainable, and those are the things you can really own. I think that’s a really epiphanic thought. It’s kind of revelatory, and it flies in the face of our culture for sure…
Stevens: We’re born into this world naked and screaming, with no possessions. And we leave in the same way, you know? We can’t take it with us. All we have is our bodies and our souls and that’s it. I don’t even think our bodies are our own. I think that’s just borrowed. So give it away, that’s what I say. Give it away.
NOTE: Sufjan Stevens’s August 2 concert at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn is sold out. For more information on the August 3 concert, visit Celebrate Brooklyn! here.
Adz and Ends: An Interview with Sufjan Stevens (Part 3 of 3)
Following rigorous U.S. and European tours supporting Adz, Stevens and his band set upon the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of New York City’s Celebrate Brooklyn! summer festival on August 2 and 3 to sing the (seven) swan song of The Age of Adz tour.
Among the stage show’s inluences, Stevens cites such distinctive influences as Royal Robertson, Sun Ra, Parliament, the dance aesthetics of Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, and the movie Tron. In part three of my interview with the artist, Stevens talks about striving to write the perfect song, his gravitation toward noise, and Royal Robertson and the cliche of the tortured artist.
The Age of Adz; photo by Josh Higgason.
Daniel J. Kushner: How do you feel about genre labels and their level of usefulness?
Sufjan Stevens: Yeah, I think they’re only useful in commodity, in kind of an economic sense. They’re useful in just categorizing for marketing. And I guess as listeners, unfortunately we’re obsessed with identifying and categorizing and putting everything in its place. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s necessary for our understanding of it and relationship to it and proximity to it. But for me, I guess I decided now that I shouldn’t concern myself with categories, and just let the music be its own thing, and speak for itself.
All the lines are blurred now, more than ever. The music industry’s much smaller, and I think that that gives songwriters and musicians and composers greater freedom to meander from one form to another without too much, there’s very little backlash or criticism, I guess. I wouldn’t say I’m a composer. I still say I’m a songwriter. And my objective is to write the perfect song.
Kushner: Do you think that’s something you could ever achieve?
Stevens: No, I don’t think it’s attainable but I think that the effort itself is the achievement, more so than the song. I don’t think it’s identifiable—the perfect song. The perfect song is different to everyone.
Is there anything I failed to bring up?
When I did press for The BQE, I was always shocked that nobody talked about the film, and The BQE was the film, like it was a movie, and they would talk about the music as if it was like an album. And the same thing with this Age of Adz, I’ve had a lot of conversations with writers, and they never asked about Royal Robertson. I just assumed that maybe they knew everything and they would just kind of fill in the blanks themselves.
Get Real, Get Right from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Definitely, the album made me more aware of Royal Robertson, and then having recently seen the documentary Make, that definitely filled in some other blanks. It seems that in pretty much all of your work it’s definitely very theme-centric. I know that’s a very generic thing to say, but the music itself almost functions like a documentary in that way. And I’m wondering if that’s something you’re conscious of and of this latest focus on Royal saw you approach the way you write about subject matter differently.
Yeah, because of the emphasis on sound, and a lot of the subject is on emotional well being, or mental health and physical health, the sounds are much more kinetic and I think inspired by that, by the nervous system in the body. I’m glad that you can kind of perceive that in this music, that there is a language to the music and the arrangements that’s communicating, documenting something that’s not explicit necessarily in the lyrics. And I think a lot of listeners have a hard time managing that. They’re obviously aware unconsciously of how the music affects them, but I think that most of us are probably predisposed to hone in on the lyrics and the subject itself as it’s manifest in the narrative of the song. And I don’t know if the lyric-writing on this record is strong enough to kind of stand on its own. I think it really requires the environment in which it’s contained, the sounds themselves. A lot of that’s coming from Royal because there’s script all over his paintings and drawings, but it’s nonsense or it’s non-sequiturs, it’s grammatically flawed, and full of expletives, and he disrupts himself, interrupts himself. And you kind of have to take it all as a whole, and none of it is very appealing or beautiful necessarily as a whole. It’s all very problematic.
There’s almost this sort of duplicity in his feelings toward his estranged wife Adell. If the phrase “love-hate relationship” was ever more apt, I’d be hard-pressed to find the context. He obviously really loved her, but his work is totally infested with this vitriol against her. Do you feel that dual nature of relationships present in the album?
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Royal’s a real messed up guy, and I think it’s frustrating to engage with that malicious quality in his work. It’s really frustrating. I don’t know why, I really felt akin to that in some way. I felt that I also had these issues of really longing for and desiring something, but then also feeling repulsed by it. And I think it comes out of that quality of masochism in my work, ‘cause I’m drawn to the disorder and the cacophony, and al the disruptions and the noise. And I’m drawn to all of that, and I find that as I engage with it, even if it’s an unhealthy kind of obsession with noise, that I really want to draw from it an experience that’s joyful and beautiful and satisfying. But then I often leave feeling kind of disturbed and injured. And I don’t know where that’s coming from or why that is.
Sufjan Stevens in the spotlight; photo by Josh Higgason.
You mentioned in your show last year in Toronto that the story of Royal Robertson is in part a cautionary tale about the potential “disease of the imagination.” Could you elaborate on that and how might relate to your own creative process?
Yeah, I wonder if “disease of the imagination” is just a euphemism for mental illness or schizophrenia. And I don’t know where I stand on this issue, but I sometimes feel that all creative endeavors are in some way related to mental illness or madness, because the imagination is such a kind of unwieldy, limitless environment in which one can reside for long periods of time and lose track of reality, ordinary life. I mean royal was really, really sick, and isolated for years and years. I definitely don’t have a mental illness, and I’m not autistic or schizophrenic—I don’t hear voices. But I do know that when I’m really fully engaged in writing, music, or whatever, that I do feel a kind of, like a sense of losing my foundation, like losing sense of reality, and sense of what’s kind of like normal and ordinary. I become kind of asocial and I spend a lot of time alone, and stop shaving and stop doing the dishes, kind of thing. And ordinary life becomes really disorganized, a mess. Yeah, I kind of forget about ordinary living.
Do you think that being tortured is almost a prerequisite for making art, or quality art?
I don’t know if it’s torture but I do think there’s fundamentally there’s a necessary masochism involved, especially with the kind of work that I’m doing, which isn’t natural. It’s very unnatural, and requires kind of a habit of risk-taking and a habit of running into obstacles, and there’s a kind of inherent masochism in that. And I think I get a thrill out of punishing myself through creative effort. And a lot of people I work with suffer the same kind of of symptoms of the creative willpower. I don’t want to romanticize mental illness, and I also think that the tortured artist is a cliché. I think it’s work, and effort, and you know it’s sort of our curse is to toil and labor. Creative life is no different than the sort of working class, blue collar life of labor. I feel like they’re more related than we might think.
Is noise a sonic manifestation of masochism, do you think?
No, maybe I’m sort of unethically imposing that term on the sonic environment that doesn’t really have any meaning necessarily. But I think a lot of people are really afraid of noise. There’s a sense of obligation and duty in the songwriter to arrange sounds in a way that they’re really beautiful and harmonious, and most people would rather switch to something that’s pleasing, but there’s a big part of me that really likes noise improv, and that kind of disorder. I was never really into punk rock or anything, but I would go to these shows where, back in the day when Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo would just like do feedback for an hour, and everyone would just stand there kind of simultaneously appalled, bewildered, and pleased by the whole effect. It gives you a headache, but it draws you into a meditative environment.
I think it’s the difference between listeners whose relationship to the song is predicated mainly on having a pleasant experience and listeners whose relationship to song is more about a reflection of what they’re feeling, and those feelings aren’t always particularly beautiful. Why do people like Joy Division? Is it just because they’ve come into vogue as this seminal band? I mean I guess that’s part of it. I mean their music isn’t particularly pretty. It doesn’t necessarily sound very good. Ian Curtis is not a particularly gifted singer, but it’s able to resonate because it’s so authentic to so many experiences for whatever reason.
I agree. I think you’re talking about an indescribably phenomenon that we might call authenticity or honesty or truth. I tend to use the word realness. The value, the substance of realness, of a man’s work, of a person’s craft. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s just resonance as real, as true.
NOTE: Sufjan Stevens’s August 2 concert at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn is sold out. For more information on the August 3 concert, visit Celebrate Brooklyn! here.
Adz and Ends: An Interview with Sufjan Stevens (Part 2 of 3)
Following rigorous U.S. and European tours supporting Adz, Stevens and his band set upon the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of New York City’s Celebrate Brooklyn! summer festival on August 2 and 3 to sing the (seven) swan song of The Age of Adz tour.
Among the stage show’s inluences, Stevens cites such distinctive influences as Royal Robertson, Sun Ra, Parliament, the dance aesthetics of Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, and the movie Tron. In part two of my interview with the artist, Stevens talks about his period of disillusionment, discarding his signature whispered vocals, and the prospect of alienating Illinoise era fans.
Sufjan Stevens and band performing "Too Much;" photo by Josh Higgason.
Daniel J. Kushner: Your temporary disillusionment with songwriting was fairly well documented, particularly on the Asthmatic Kitty web site. How did you ultimately rediscover the value of the song?
Sufjan Stevens: Well I think I just got fed up with my own existential quandary, and got really bored with this sort of circular, philosophical pondering and my obsession with naming things and categorizing things. I think I wasn’t so much [disillusioned] with songwriting as I was disillusioned with form, and I was really frustrated with the limitations of the song. And I think a lot of that was suffering the repercussions of The BQE and having spent way too much time investing in that project and trying to render something meaningful out of this ugly modern urban expressway. And I really wanted to challenge the form, the format of the song. And that piece, by making it a film, and making it a soundtrack, and making it a photo-essay and exposition, and everything else except for song…when it was all finished I realized that I felt really sort of creatively spent but unsatisfied, you know?
It made me really question, well what is a song? Why are we so limited by these parameters? And then at some point I just got fed up with the kind of whiny, existential questioning, and I realized that really wasn’t my business to differentiate these categories, that my role was to do the best work possible, and not try to categorize it beforehand. I also got really sick, and you know, and couldn’t write for a while, cause I went through all this crazy physical stuff, and then when I came out of that, I sort of felt kind of this necessary revitalization, and I just felt like I had a second lease on life. I was really excited about writing—didn’t even want to question it anymore.
Kushner: You were trying to reconcile the difference between song and symphonic work, or something that’s other than song, and then trying to categorize it?
Stevens: Yeah. I think I was getting tired of my creative habits, and I was trying to challenge all of that by imposing all of these other kind of variables. Who’s to say a song has to be four minutes long? And wanting it to have multiple movements within sort of one comprehensive form, and really questioning the role of the voice and the narratives, and even melody—you know, everything, I was just kind of like taking apart and over-theorizing.
And I think that generally the least common denominator of the audience—they don‘t even care. They don’t question these things. They really approach everything on instinct, whether you like it or don’t like it. Does it sound good? Does it have a beat? Does it make me feel good? Most people aren’t really too preoccupied with the kind of theorizing of music, and I actually think that I learn something from the audience, from the consumer, and deciding that the creator, the artist, doesn’t need to be so preoccupied with knowing and the theorizing. ‘Cause I think intention—an artist’s intention—is kind of irrelevant. It doesn’t have much bearing. ‘Cause I think the song—its greatest realization—becomes its own, has its own consciousness, speaks its own truths, and belongs to the listener more than it belongs to a writer.
"Vesuvius," Age of Adz tour; photo by Josh Higgason.
While writing The Age of Adz, was there any concern that the record would alienate some fans of your music, particularly those who had fallen in love with the Illinoise era?
I was aware that the textures and the sonic environment was a little dirtier, more cacophonous, or whatever. I was aware of that, cause I feel like I was also extremely aware during the making of Illinois of how much effort I put into making it listenable. It’s such a populist record—there’s just so much effort in appealing to the listener, you know there’s such a kind of a pageant of sound, and it’s constantly entertaining and rewarding, and it’s just sort of a patchwork of this sort of harmonic beauty, harmonic what do you call it, I don’t know—It’s very harmonious.
You know, The Age of Adz, these are pop songs, but they’re based on sound experimentation and noise. They’re more aggressive, and even my tone of—the way I’m singing—it’s more in my throat and not always pretty. So I was aware of that, and I just felt like an imperative to experiment with these tones, and generally, I think now more than ever, I’m making music for that elite 5%—you know, the listener who’s been with me from the very beginning and understands my interest in electronic music and noise and in sound sculpting and minimalism and all that stuff. So I think that that record, The Age of Adz, is really for that listener, you know? I don’t think it’s meant to be for the casual listener who likes the song “Chicago,” which is fine. There’s no condescension at all in that remark. I don’t condescend to any of my music or to any listener. But I just am not in a season right now of feeling that kind of populist thrust. I don’t feel motivated to make things so listenable.
"I Want To Be Well," Age of Adz tour; photo by Josh Higgason.
In the summer of 2010, All Delighted People was released, and it was really the first indication, that compositionally something had shifted, particularly in your vocals, which now seem less whispered, and much more emotive and vulnerable even. Can you expound upon that a bit?
Yeah, I think my voice is my Achilles’ heel, ‘cause I’m not a great singer and I was involved with music very early on but I didn’t start singing until I was in my 20s, and I’ve always felt really self-conscious about my voice. And I think maybe that might explain all the sort of dynamic arrangements, and the shifts in styles and fashion from song to song, and also it might explain why I use so many background singers, cause I always feel like I’m so limited vocally. But then in terms of instrumentation and arrangement and style I don’t feel self-conscious at all, obviously, ‘cause I’m kind of jumping all over the place.
And so recently, in the past few years, I decided to really be more engaged with my voice and try to be more expressive and soulful, and to kind of step up and be a singer. And I was getting tired of the kind of coy and fey whatever-you-call-it, kind of assertive innocence or sensitive whispery tone of voice—what I’ve been using for years. I sang like that partly out of self-consciousness and partly just because I was singing to myself and writing in isolation and so my singing was very kind of quiet and intimate and almost like conversational. More recently, I’m becoming more emotive and dramatic and dynamic, and even kind of trying to be more for soulful. I guess I felt sort of like I needed to be more responsible as a singer and to take more challenges, more risks vocally. Whether or not I could hit a note, it didn’t matter, like I just kind of try go for it.
And I toured with Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond, and she’s a singer of great facility, and she’s extremely soulful and she’s got a pretty wide range. She’s been really inspiring, ‘cause sometimes when I’ll write a line in my mind myself I always think of her, I think of someone like her. And then when I actually sit down to sing it in the studio, it’s like this kind of challenging gymnastic trick that I have to do multiple takes.
I feel like that might even be perceptible on the EP and the latest record, in that it seems that in parts some of the lines are a little more florid than maybe they were in the past.
Yeah. Less breath and more body, too, you know? I’m singing more in my throat or through my nose, and it’s a little more nasal. It’s not as beautiful. I’ll admit to it: I think it’s prettier when I sing more quietly. To me, sometimes the quiet singing feels put on, pretentious, and a little bit coy. And I really just want to be more human and more real.
NOTE: Sufjan Stevens’s August 2 concert at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn is sold out. For more information on the August 3 concert, visit Celebrate Brooklyn! here.
Adz and Ends: An Interview with Sufjan Stevens (Part 1 of 3)
It was eleven short months ago that Sufjan Stevens effectively returned to songwriting. A five-year hiatus had separated the venerated indie singer-songwriter/composer from what many considered to be his last “proper” studio album, but in late August of 2010 he released the All Delighted People EP, an album-length appetizer to the feast of idiosyncrasy that is The Age of Adz, released two months later.
Following rigorous U.S. and European tours supporting Adz, Stevens and his band set upon the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of New York City’s Celebrate Brooklyn! summer festival on August 2 and 3 to sing the (seven) swan song of The Age of Adz tour.
Among the stage show’s inluences, Stevens cites such distinctive influences as Sun Ra, Parliament, the dance aesthetics of Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, and the movie Tron. I recently spoke with the artist about his theatrical stage show, pre-concert Quiet Craft Time, and what he learned from the Michael Jackson movie This Is It.
The center of gravity is really [outsider artist] Royal Robertson. We kind of go off on a lot of tangents, but really his design and his aesthetic is the foundation on which we’ve built the whole show.
–Sufjan Stevens on The Age of Adz show
Sufjan Stevens Concert Trailer: Age of Adz / Prospect Park from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.
Daniel J. Kushner: Did this past tour feel different to you compared to past tours?
Sufjan Stevens: Yeah, it actually did. [indistinct] I feel like I kind of designed the show as a way of communicating more than the music communicates on its own. And I think in the past I’ve always just like made the record and then the live show was sort of struggling to present the song in the best way possible. And I think for some reason, this tour, it felt like the songs were kind of more fully realized on the stage, at some points, than they were realized on the record.
Kushner: Does that mean that your intention for the record is larger than perhaps the medium of a song can encapsulate?
Stevens: Well I think the music in some ways is finite, and it communicates multitudes on its own, but it’s still very self-contained and limited. And then the show became kind of an experimentation [sic] with multiple mediums….We kind of turned it into theater, in a way, like multimedia theater, for better and for worse.
It seems that The Age of Adz live show is very much like experiencing a live music video, particularly during songs like “Too Much.”
Yeah. The video stuff, with the dancing and the kind of graphic, Tron-esque neon kind of laser lights—those were all created for the show, but we ended up posting some of it as like a music video because it was…I never really had done a music video before, so it felt like a lot of times the show itself was like that—it became a live music video ‘cause there was all the dancing and the choreography and the lights were all really kind of designed and everything was kind of fabricated.
How did you settle on neon gaffer’s tape as part of the aesthetic look of the tour?
That kind of happened midway through the American tour, ‘cause I think the U.S tour, the first two weeks were really just a trial run, you know we were still working stuff out, like live rehearsals. And this was the first tour I had a pretty fundamental production crew…they use gaffs to mark positions on the stage—instruments and objects….I remember at one point we just started putting it on our bodies because the lighting designer was using black lights, and it just looked really cool. The girls were really well costumed, but the rest of us were kind of thrown together. The costumes weren’t really fully realized, and so halfway through the tour, when things started to get kind of ragtag, we started just taping everything together with gaff tape, and it just kind of turned into its own thing.
So it wasn’t just an aesthetic choice, but a practical one as well?
What happened is that people in the band had some time before the show and there was gaff tape lying around, and they just started taping up their arms and their legs and putting tape on their shirts…at some point we realized that there was like a good 20 to 30 minutes of like Quiet Craft Time per stage. Once they got their parts down they would spend more time on their gaff design than they did, you know, during soundcheck, ‘cause we had the music figured out, so we just spent most of the day using gaff tape.
David Stith (background) and Sufjan Stevens (foreground) in full regalia; photo by Josh Higgason.
The costumes have gotten considerably more elaborate as the tour has progressed. Can you talk about the evolution of this concert element?
I mean it’s the same show, it’s the same music, and generally it’s the same video, but it’s become a lot more dramatic and more choreographed. The dance is a lot more developed, and movement—we’re just much more confident the way we move….I think what we realize is that this is actually theater, and even though it’s just pop music and it’s still me just up there singing, and I feel like ultimately I’m a folk songwriter at heart. I feel like this material has a kind of dramatic, dynamic quality that requires a real suspension of my own kind of suspicions of theater.
It requires us to engage with the theater element of it, and we just decided to own it. We watched the first half of the Michael Jackson documentary This Is It, and it’s about all these dancers, and they’re trying out and rehearsing to get into this show; and they’re really young but they’re really committed, and they’re just wholeheartedly invested in this project, and we kind of took inspiration from it and decided that we weren’t going to be coy about this. We weren’t going to be ironic about it. We were just going to own it, and engage with the kind of psychological theater and try to make it as big as possible….
It was the dancers, you know, they’re being interviewed, and this is before Michael Jackson’s death, and there’s a kind of hysterical allegiance to the form, the dance form—the language, the dance language that Michael Jackson created in his lifetime. Those people know it so well, and they’re committed to it and want to be part of it. And the enthusiasm is really inspiring, cause I think a lot of people in my camp—there’s a kind of lackadaisical aethstetic. You don’t want to try too hard, you don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard. There’s kind of a sense of paying allegiance to what’s natural, and usually what’s natural should be sort of easy and instinctual. But I don’t know, my whole school of thought is pain—through pain and work and willpower, and through constant challenging and discomfort, that’s how I sort of engage with my work.
The Age of Adz Bliss-Out; photo by Josh Higgason.
Will the Prospect Park concerts be the last time people can see the stage show that is The Age of Adz?
Yeah, yeah, it’s the finale. We’re going to retire the show, and I’ll move on to something else. I don’t know what though.
Do you have any idea as to what might be next for you?
I don’t know. I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder nd more distressed and more aggressive, but I don’t know if that’s something that would be suitable for public consumption. It might just be like a private exercise in which I spend time alone making all those sounds, and then at some point get back to songwriting…my imperative or my objective is songwriting. And I think it’s safe to say that The Age of Adz is a bit of a tangent away from songwriting. It’d be nice to kind of return to songwriting again.
NOTE: Sufjan Stevens’s August 2 concert at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn is sold out. For more information on the August 3 concert, visit Celebrate Brooklyn! here.
Sarah Small’s Tableau Vivant: The Subtle Epiphany
The photographs can be jarring. The video documentation can seem acutely intense, almost aggressive. But the live performance impact of Sarah Small’s Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions at Skylight One Hanson, featuring a cast of more than 100, was much more subtle.
Mini-Tableau at Gallery 9B, DUMBO, May 8, 2010
I wasn’t certain that I was even going to write about the Tableau post-performance. I knew I didn’t want to write a review–and this recollection certainly does not fall under that category. I was expecting to experience some extreme visceral reaction, some epiphanic episode. In short–the former, no; the latter, yes. But this revelation is of the slow-burning variety, and I am still unpacking what I witnessed. It is accurate enough–albeit reductive and facile–to label the Tableau as performance art. Beyond that, in terms of labels, the performance adds up to more than just the sum of its individual artistic components.
Although the Tableau is based on Small’s photography series The Delirium Constructions, photography itself is not an active part of the live performance. Although this latest performance does contain choreography (by Vanessa Walters), the movement, restricted almost entirely to the upper half of the body, is not exactly dance. That being said, its inclusion was reminiscent of the inclusion of ballet in French grand opera. The music of Tableau Vivant, under the highly capable direction of Rima Fand, was an ever-present force, and yet, decidedly this was not a concert. Not the reason for attendance, the music was entirely encapsulated within the whole drama of what was transpiring on the stage. The performance also lacked many of the time-tested conventions of concertgoing–the persistence of picture-taking (no flash of course) being perhaps the most obvious departure from traditional concert etiquette. Neither was the performance a piece of theater. While acting did indeed take place, there was no explicit over-arching narrative, no dialogue, no named characters. Then, of course, there was the wedding ceremony officiated by the Small herself.
Essentially, one could say that it’s easier to identify Tableau by determining what it is not than by pinpointing what it is. I would maintain, however, that while labeling such an artistic endeavor is not of paramount performance, ascertaining the identity of Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions means having to look somewhere unexpected. Not photography, not fully dance, not a concert of music, and not theater.
Sarah Small, Tableau Vivant Artist (photo from Bushwick Daily)
The common adage is that art imitates life. Here, in the world of Sarah Small’s Tableau Vivant, life imitates art. The tableau has all the trappings of performance, culled from various mediums and artistic disciplines. Yet ultimately, Tableau Vivant is, somehow, not performance. The term performance implies that the “performer” puts something on–a character, an onstage persona, a musical manifestation of the composer, etc. Here, the performer actually takes something off–and no, I don’t mean his or her clothes (although there is plenty of that as well). The cloak of performance itself, of pretension, is discarded. The outer shell, which one erects in order to hide the true essence of him or herself in our daily moments, is shattered. In its place, the performers are simply themselves, responding to the seemingly artificial environment with genuine emotions and organic responses. Performance has given way to experience. The participants of Tableau Vivant aren’t creating a performance–they are living a moment.
We the audience members were witnessing their lives, much in the same way that we witnessed the young couple’s wedding. This was life, clothed in the trappings of art, yet somehow gloriously unadorned. And I envied it. It seemed to me that the real, ideal experience was not the viewing of this scene, but being an active participant in it. I was struck with the fullness of the participants’ activity, which reflected back to me my relative inactivity in that moment, playing the role of the empty voyeur. And somehow, I suddenly was the one in the harsh spotlight. I was the tragic actor, who had been called once again to this stage to perform my mundane role of onlooker, and I obliged.
To be a witness to this event firsthand only meant experiencing it secondhand. Sarah Small’s Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions is incapable of categorization unlike any work of art I’ve ever witnessed, and I wanted to be a part of this world that the artist had unveiled, this world of reality unfurled.
Tableau Vivant: A Performer’s Perspective
The Sklylight One Hanson performances of photographer Sarah Small’s 120-person Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions are upon us.
If you haven’t done so yet, I highly recommend reading mezzo-soprano Abigail Wright’s blog Skydiving for Pearls, in which she details her experiences as singer and nude model in Tableau Vivant.
For those attending one of the performances (May 23, 7 p.m. and May 24, 8 p.m.), be on the lookout for your expectations prior to the Tableau, and how those expectations may have changed, been met, shattered, etc. It strikes me that this aspect of the audience experience will be crucial–I’ll definitely be aware of it personally. See you there.
Wearing Intercourse: Sarah Small’s “Tableau Vivant” (NSFW PHOTOS) [Part 2 of 2]
I read on the subway. When people are reading books, I read people, and really think all the time about what is happening between the interactions.
~Sarah Small
This is Part 2 of an article about Brooklyn-based photographer and musician Sarah Small’s Tableaux Vivants (living picture), a series of performance art pieces featuring live models–both clothed and unclothed–music, and dramatic movements. Having successfully presented seven small-scale tableaux featuring anywhere from five to 36 models at various venues through New York City, Small will stage her largest performance to date–Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions, with a cast of 120 under the direction of Adam J. Thompson, an expanded musical score featuring Brooklyn Rider, Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, and Rima Fand, choreography by Vanessa Walters, and two authentic wedding ceremonies officiated by the artist–at Brooklyn’s breathtaking Skylight One Hanson on May 23 and 24.
What compels Small herself to pursue such a daunting multidisciplinary artistic statement, particularly through the use of nudes?
Since the beginning of her career as a photographer at the age of 13, Small’s aesthetic, reminiscent of 16th century Mannerism, has explored the phenomena that occur when two or more seemingly irreconcilable themes, embodied by her models–aggression vs. placidness, youth vs. experience, sexuality vs. discretion.
Laura at Evelyn’s
“I’ve always, since Day One, been very interested in getting up close and as close as possible,” remembers the artist. “It’s always been about just like here: all my pictures in high school are almost all heads and/or bodies and as humanly close and intimate as possible.” This fascination solidified in the form of an ongoing series of still images entitled The Delirium Constructions, which became the foundation for Tableaux Vivants. Fundamentally, a Small Tableau strives to illuminate a human experience in which freedom of expression is of the utmost value. The artist explains:
In actuality, I’m not very interested in working with subjects that are contextualized into a certain subset of person or subculture or something like that. That’s one of the reasons I like working with nudes…I think where the relationship between the viewer and the imagery–be it the Tableau or the still work–comes from is this kind of off-balance feeling of like ‘What exactly is shocking me? Why is this shocking when it is simply just an angry woman or a nude?’–and I really think it has to do with the contrast or the state between the two or three elements, and less about the elements as individual placeholders.
Pearl Ring
The nudity is vital not so much because of the visual aesthetic, but rather because of what the state of being nude does to the model, and by extension, the person watching. For mezzo-soprano Abigail Wright, participation in Tableau resulted in an epiphany regarding the essence of performance. “The one thing I really love, and would absolutely recommend to any singer I know–even though I know that 95% of them would never take me up on the suggestion, just even the audition process– singing nude for somebody completely changes your concept of singing,” asserts Wright, “because the minute you take your clothes off, you’re like, ‘OK, what do I do with my arms? What do I do with my…wait what do I…wait…OK.’ “
In short, the relationship with the audience changes, and Wright’s priorities as performer snap into focus. “They see everything,” she says. “It makes no sense to do anything that’s not honest. And it’s like pushing a button that just resets your vulnerability and your honesty, and it’s fascinating.”
Small corroborates the importance of being nude, rather than appearing nude. “It’s less about nude and it’s more about naked–actually being in a state without clothing,” says Small. “That nude somehow equals sexy or sex, immediately, to a lot of people–I feel like that element has gotten in the way of achieving what I’m trying to achieve.”
Molly Watching Wes
The desired result is what the artist calls the “inflation of reality.” The artistic process, including the device of nudity, seems to be a means to a revelatory end, for both the performers and the audience members. “My job as director is really just to promote excitement, safety, and just open communication,” clarifies Small. “People grow out whatever sense of themselves, whatever pocket of expression that maybe they’ve been hiding or maybe is fully them that they want to experience or reflect outward publicly.”
All images courtesy of the artist.
For ticket information on the May 23 and 24 performances of Sarah Small’s Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions at Skylight One Hanson in Brooklyn, N.Y. visit http://www.livingpictureprojects.com/.
