Northwestern University New Music Conference April 24, 2021

Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Katherine Young

Jennifer Walshe

Conversation with Jennifer Walshe

“Experimental Bodies, (Anti-)Political Lives”

Ryan Dohoney, Kerry O’Brien, and Ted Gordon

“Jill Johnston’s Closet Criticism”
Kerry O’Brien

“This is your local reporter always ‘looking elsewhere’—for the nonthing of the thing—for whatever isn’t settled, labeled, canned, caulked, cherished, claimed, and consumed,” wrote Jill Johnston in December 1967. As a dance and music critic, Johnston had become known for an idiosyncratic writing style, where her attention veered away from formal concerts and toward the details of artists’ everyday lives. She wrote from inside composer La Monte Young’s living room, describing the nonstop sine waves coursing through his home and through her body; she recounted eating mushrooms with John Cage; and she narrated the cliffside lesbian wedding ceremony of Pauline Oliveros—all in weekly installments in the Village Voice.

Johnston rejected the notion that criticism was a secondary artform, subservient to an artist or an artwork. Instead, she aimed to write “closet criticism,” a type of writing that acknowledged her own subject position and drew attention to the quotidian or closeted parts of experience, typically off limits in journalism. Johnston herself was not closeted. By the early 1970s, she was best known as a lesbian separatist and author of Lesbian Nation (1973). For Johnston, the personal was not just political. Personal experience had aesthetic significance that she deemed newsworthy.

“No Ideas But In (Doing) Things: The Politics and Materialities of Alvin Lucier’s Early Works”
Ted Gordon

Alvin Lucier has been widely celebrated as a composer whose works, in the words of one of his students, reveal “the nature of sound itself.” Working with a wide variety of instruments—acoustic, electronic, musical, scientific—Lucier has, since the mid-1960s, composed dozens of scores that instruct performers to engage in various forms of disciplined actions, producing vibratory energies with extreme ranges of frequency and amplitude, creatively transduced between electromagnetic radiation, air, water, and other media. Contemporary performances of Lucier’s early works, such as Music for Solo Performer (1965), often stage this apparent revelation of “sound itself:” electrodes attached to a human performer’s head transduce their brain’s electrical activity into sound, through an electronic “black box” and a set of resonators placed on percussion instruments. In the words of Cristoph Cox, Lucier’s work, following in the tradition of John Cage, “is never about the signifier but always about the sonic real, sonic materiality itself.” 

In this talk, I show how this understanding of Lucier’s early works not only avoids addressing the social and political consequences of how this work was developed, financed, and performed (namely, through Lucier’s connections with the cold war military-industrial complex); it also ignores these works’ development of ascetic, self-disciplined practices that valorize a performative co-production of sound between humans and instruments, a natural-cultural process that Lucier imagined as theatrical, playful, and incomplete. Looking carefully at early works and sketches that have been withdrawn or forgotten, I show how Lucier developed practices of performative self-discipline that expanded human capacities for sensing and producing sound—sharing research goals, technologies, methodologies, and materials with the military-adjacent institutions that supplied him with novel technologies. I argue that historically situating Lucier’s work can lead to more ethical performances that foreground social and political, rather than metaphysically transcendent, dimensions of sound. 

Presentations from the NUNC! 4 Call for Presentations.

Sergio Cote Barco
“The (Un)Avoidable Force of Knowledge: Repetition, Canon Formation, and Ideology in Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer and Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces”
Descriptions of institutions as nesting environments, together with the power they exercise in people’s life, portray an omnipotent collective will comparable to an unavoidable faith granted by gods. This approach, however, proposes “an unacceptable view of human agency,” according to Mary Douglas. As sociological functionalism, this perspective leaves no space for a subjective experience or will. This presentation will deal with two cases of artistic creation that, while appearing within certain institutions, present tensions with the normalizing forces of that establishment. These cases consist of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer, which was first performed by the composer himself in 1965, and Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces, which she premiered in 2007. The focus of my discussion will be on repetition, which I draw out into two possibilities: as normalizing force or as resistance to it. I will base my argument about repetition as a normalizing force on Louis Althusser’s ideas of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. I will then turn to Badiou’s writing on the formation of knowledge and truth in relation to status quo and event, respectively. Moreover, together with Peter Hallward’s reading of Badiou, and Badiou’s Ethics, the argument will move into the concept of repetition as resistance in which the construction and decisions on documentation and scores play a fundamental role.

Elaine Fitz Gibbon
“Coney Island’s Strange Doubling: Music, Theater, and Uncanny Bodies in Steven Takasugi’s ‘Sideshow’”
The year 2009 marked a radical change for the Japanese American composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi (b. 1960). Before composing Sideshow (2009–2015), a work of music theater for amplified octet and electronic playback, Takasugi had exclusively written electronic music to be experienced in an environment of solitude, devoid of any sensory input aside from the sounds emanating from headphones. Sideshow takes as its subject Coney Island’s hallucinatory spectacle of pleasure and gruesome theatricality, being as Takasugi describes, “a meditation on virtuosity, freak shows, entertainment, spectacle, business, and the sacrifices one makes to survive in the world.” Takasugi is part of a recent group of new music composers referred to as the New Discipline, founded by Irish composer Jennifer Walshe in 2016, who have made an anxiety-laden return to theater. Joining together the sublime excesses of Coney Island ca. 1910s and pre-WWI Vienna through the aphorisms of satirist Karl Kraus, Sideshow reflects on the violence of theatrical spectacle, implicating audience members and the music industry in its carnivalesque critique of contemporary New Music consumption and politics. In my paper, I discuss Sideshow’s staging of gruesome self-sacrifice in order to demonstrate what is at stake in this return to theater. Engaging with Seth Brodsky’s recent psychoanalytic interrogation of modernism and its structures of repression, and with the model of modernism’s community-oriented cosmopolitanism articulated by Brigid Cohen in her work on Stefan Wolpe, I historically position the New Discipline’s return to theatricality nearly a half-century after 1968. Additionally, I demonstrate how an understanding of this explicitly political, theatrical turn contributes to recent work on affect and embodiment in contemporary American music.

Daniel Tacke
“Expressive Performance Practice in Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s ‘Shades of Silence’”
The use of specialized instrumental idiom to explore the expressive and structural potential of sonority has become relatively commonplace in contemporary music, yet effective meeting points between “extended techniques” and more conventional musical practices remain elusive, and the ways in which a composer confronts these distances often become a powerful source of inspiration and identity within a work. In Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Shades of Silence, composed in 2012 for the early music group Nordic Affect, these questions are raised within the specialized arena of historical performance practice. This paper explores some of the ways in which Thorvaldsdottir’s work articulates and integrates these seemingly conflicting worlds to create a powerfully expressive performance practice rooted in a syntax of fragility and memory, both in its material content as well as in its networks of developmental correspondence. The resulting work is at once isolating and engaging, an invitation not only to become immersed in the unique sonorous qualities of the music, but also to experience familiar things in unfamiliar ways and, in so doing, to enter into a dialogue of new possibilities with the “conventional” music of the past.

Ben Zucker
“im in ur discipline, making u music: Jennifer Walshe’s Composition of the Digital Everyday”
Jennifer Walshe’s recent compositional output, especially as informed by her concept of “Post-Internet Music,” is one of many compositional discourses that seeks to use the sounds of everyday life. In this presentation, I set works by Walshe, namely Everything Is Important and Church Of Frequency & Protein, in analytic dialogue with studies on musical temporality, namely Jonathan Kramer’s analysis of moment form and ‘vertical time’ as technological analogy, as well as works from media studies on the temporality of new media forms such as the GIF. I contend that Walshe’s formal on large and small scales reinforces and aligns with the contemporary appearance of her material, giving performers and audiences more than a surface-level comprehension of the modern era. By doing so through musical analysis, I hope to draw attention to technical aspects of Walshe’s composing and performing (beyond the conceptual approach common in many current studies), and situate its use of ‘modern’ temporality amongst other discourses of ‘everydayness’ in new music, such as the TV operas of Robert Ashley and the works of contemporary diesseitgkeit composers.

A live-streamed performance by the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, with vocal and violin soloist Alyssa Pyper. 

Alan Pierson and Ben Bolter, co-directors
Jennifer Walshe, guest composer
Alyssa Pyper, violin and vocal soloist

The Contemporary Music Ensemble concludes the Northwestern University New Music Conference (NUNC! 4) with music of Jennifer Walshe and Alyssa Pyper. Jennifer Walshe’s HYGIENE is a theatrical work for musicians, a reflection on the German concept of mental and physical hygiene. Following the performance of her work, Walshe joins Contemporary Music Ensemble co-directors Alan Pierson and Ben Bolter for a live conversation.

Singer-songwriter-violinist Alyssa Pyper created Cradle as part of a symbolic journey into the trauma of growing up gay and Mormon, and as part of a quest for healing. Cradle reckons with the personal and cultural “mother wound,” informed by Pyper’s experience in the Mormon faith. She joins the ensemble live from Port Townsend, Washington for this performance.

Program:

Jennifer Walshe, HYGIENE
Alyssa Pyper, Cradle (featuring Alyssa Pyper as violin and vocal soloist)