Numb at first …
So, I think it’s time to re-start this blog, but this time with a broader focus. In previous entries I tried to talk mostly about the actual experience of my hearing loss. From here on out, I think I’m going to focus more on the music I’m writing now, which is very much in response to the situation I chronicled in earlier entries.
Last week I did the first trial performance of the 2nd piece for MONO: Numb. It’s based on a text by an anonymous contributor to the project who lost the sense of touch on the skin of her breasts and belly after cancer surgery. The preparation for the performance was pretty dicey. The way the piece is set up, the text begins scrolling across a video screen while a string trio with digital processing plays. About a 3rd of the way through, a soprano starts speaking parts of the text as they go by, and the text loops and is combined with or processed by the music of the trio. Eventually more and more of the text is sung, until a real “song” emerges for the last couple of minutes.
I planned to use a kind of processor called a vocoder, which effectively superimposes the artifacts of speech on a carrier signal – in this case, the carrier signal is the strings trio, often playing in rhythmic unison with the speaker/singer. The effect is to make the strings seem to talk or sing. As I usually do, I got this all worked out in the studio, making “virtual” string parts on the computer, and recording the singer. The first two rehearsals, one with strings along, and one with strings and singer, just didn’t work. The players were fine, but I couldn’t hear the processing at all. The second rehearsal disintegrated when I ended up with the microphones and processors feeding back uncontrollably, and the players said they couldn’t take it any more and split. What a nightmare! And no matter what I did, I couldn’t duplicate the effects I had in the studio in a rehearsal with live instruments.
I spoke (via email) with my friend and incredible sound engineer Jody Elff, who was on tour in Seoul, South Korea. Back and forth, it seems I was doing everything right, but Jody responded that what I was trying to do was difficult, and that monitoring and balance, as well as adjustment of the parameters of the vocoder and compression of the incoming signals from strings and voice were key elements which I’d need to get right.
The reality of performance, though, is that there’s never enough time in rehearsal to get it all right, at least not for one-off performances like this one. And when we were rehearsing, I just didn’t trust what I heard. I had to ask the players what was coming out of the speakers, because I can’t tell what’s coming from the speakers and what’s coming from the instruments. It’s all just coming from the same place for me. There are a few players who are close friends and long time collaborators, with whom this might work. But not in this situation, where the musicians expect things to roll out as planned. It was the first time most of these players had played my work, and they don’t have a long term commitment to it or investment in it, other than as professionals who are playing what they’re asked to play (and who play spectacularly, I might add). But dealing with my hearing limitations isn’t what they signed on for. This was another situation where I should have hired a sound person to make the necessary adjustments and tunings of the processing for me, someone who knows my work and whose ears I can trust. But there was no budget or time for that with this gig.
The solution was to go back to the studio, where I have more or less unlimited time, up to 24 hrs a day, and use recordings of the players to make a separate track of the processing, generated by the interaction of the strings and the voice as I’ve recorded them. This way I can minimize the problems with my hearing. I can monitor just the processing, or just the live recording, and I can take everything apart to listen to it, and to make sure that the sounds I want to have happen are happening. What a weird way to make music! But it works. The fact remains that I have a very clear aural image in my head (or somewhere within my body) of what the music should sound like, including what the digital processing should sound like. In performance, I just don’t trust what I hear in terms of processing, so I don’t have any reliable instincts on how to tune it in real time … which is something that have I counted on, and assumed, for years.
Ultimately, of course, this isn’t about me being able to do what I do in real time in performance. It’s about making the music work, and sound the way I want it to sound. This “pre-recorded effects” solution worked like a charm. The sound guy on the gig was able to do a great job of keeping my effects-track in balance with the sound from the live players, and the audience had no inkling that the effects weren’t happening in real time. And the nice thing for me was that I seemed to get great feedback from the audience about the piece, which many people said they found moving. Which was, after all, the main idea.
Next week I do a repeat performance, with the full crew of singer, strings, video and two dancers. It’ll be preceded by MONO Prelude, which by now feels like an old friend. And in which I do the processing live. I’m eager to see how these two work together in order to put together ideas about how the whole piece will go. The fact of starting with the focus on me and my senses, and then expending to other people and their sensory challenges is really the direction I want to move in with the piece. We’ll see how it goes.
china wrap …
This picture is of pianist Vicky Chow and me rehearsing FAITH for the final concert on our tour of China. (Thanks to Vicky’s brother Johnny for the picture, via Vicky’s Facebook page.) With his back to the camera is composer/saxophonist Demetrius Spaneas, who joined us on the Beijing/Hong Kong legs of the tour. Besides playing FAITH in Shanghai, twice in Beijing and finally in Hong Kong, the tour also gave me an initial chance to try out the Prelude to MONO in all three cities. It was very interesting and instructive for me.
Particularly at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, where the text was projected in Chinese in coordination with my speaking in English, people seemed to be genuinely moved by the piece. My concerns … that the musical materials would seem too simple, or would somehow not work with the spoken text … didn’t seem to be a problem.
What I was aware of, and perhaps can fix in the next few days, is that the way that I handle voice processing in the piece is not really as refined as I’d like. Basically, I’d like to make each looped segment of recorded speech have a unique and somehow meaningful type of processing. At this point, it feels like most of the loops just have various delays, echoes, pitch shifting … but that it’s never really relevant to what is being described, nor does it necessarily reflect the condition I’m experiencing. I think particularly of the place where I mention tinnitus … and right now I have a multilayered delay. Wrong. It would be interesting if I could really ease in a sound which would convey the white noise aspect of what I really hear, without just overwhelming the audience with a blast of white noise. Similarly, when I talk about sounds on my left side seeming to come from a kazoo being played across the street, I should take some time and embody that state of hearing.
I’m due to perform the piece again in New York at the Cornelius Street Cafe on Monday night. I have some time this evening in my hotel in Hong Kong. I wonder if I’ll be able to make an initial pass at fixing these things tonight or Sunday in NYC, in order to have a revised version on Monday?
Another issue which came up repeatedly for me was the problem posed by performing with my disabled ear. Specifically, do I use my hearing aid when I perform (which means I hear everything with a patina of heavy distortion on the left side), or do I turn off the hearing aid (which means I just don’t hear what’s on the left side)? For the most part, I’ve always tried to just put the stage monitor on my right side, and turn off the hearing aid. For several concerts during this trip, though, that wasn’t possible. Last night I had to monitor myself from the house speakers, and I could really only hear the one on stage-right, which was by my left ear. So I kept my hearing aid on, and just dealt with the distortion.
There’s a certain sense in which all of this is very strange. Before the SSNHL performing was all about listening closely to the SOUND I produced. Now, it’s more about imagining the sound, and monitoring what I can to make sure that the sound is what I want it to be, even if I can’t really hear it. It’s very odd, since my internal sense of what I want is so very clear … the timbres, the way the sounds move in space, the fullness of the stereo image … but I can’t hear any of this clearly with my ears. So I’m sort of working off of cues as to what is going out, hoping that I’m interpreting what I do hear accurately. I sort of imagine that it’s what it must be like to do surgery with a remote controlled robotic arm. You don’t have the real sensory input that you’d expect touching flesh with your fingers, but you hope you’ve got enough feedback from the mechanism to do as good a job as if you were there in person.
A few words about touring in China again. While the person who arranged the Beijing and Hong Kong legs of the tour showed an amazing incompetence … didn’t seem to realize that it was necessary to arrange for equipment or figure out the repertoire to be played by the various artists he’d brought, nor take responsibility for coordination of publicity … the composers and performers on the tour managed to fill in the blanks, and the support from the institutions in China was really wonderful. In Beijing Tammy Huang of the Pearl Shell International Cultural Exchange was a warm, professional and thoughtful host, and the club D-22 and the Central Conservatory both provided great support for our concerts. In addition to the concerts, I ended up doing a surprise recording session at the Beijing Film Academy with Demetrius and flutist/cilia performer Bruce Gremo, at the instigation of recording engineer Jürgen Frenz, who heard us improvise for an hour of so at D-22. Hopefully this will become another CD, the first improvisational recording I’ve done since Fish Love That in 2001. In Hong Kong, the Chinese University of HK provided us with the support we needed, even though they hadn’t received any information from the producer about the gig, including tech needs and publicity info, until we sent it 2 days before the concert, when we figured out that the producer had dropped the ball.
The really great part of the trip, as usual, was the interaction with the various people I got to see and meet and work with. And at this point, there are some continuing friendships developing with folks in China. The American and Canadian musicians in Beijing and Hong Kong were a pleasure to work with, performing with Vicky is always a treat. And meeting new friends and contacts in all three cities makes me hope I’ll be able to find ways to continue coming back here.
down & up in Shanghai …
So, here is my healed foot. It’s 2 1/2 months since the last blog entry, my foot is pretty much healed (you can see the scar if you look closely). It’s on a window sill in my hotel room overlooking Shanghai, where I landed day before yesterday. And this does, surprisingly, relate to my hearing, and to MONO.
I was to premiere the prelude to MONO, which I’ve been working on feverishly for the last month or so, this past Sunday. What happened instead was … 10pm concert scheduled on a Sunday night, in an out of the way East Village club, on the first cold and rainy weekend of the Fall … no one showed up. Imagine that. I couldn’t imagine it, and was incredibly stunned & depressed by the whole (lack of) event. Two weeks after a full house at the Smithsonian, I end up canceling a concert that couldn’t attract an audience to hear a new piece. What goes up, must come down.
What I did notice during the should check was that the pianist commented on the interesting use of stereo in the opening of my excerpt of MONO. Which I’d thought about, and planned for … but of course hadn’t noticed because I can’t hear it. So, I walked away from it with an awareness of two things: first, I need to really go back and make sure that I have made sense of movement from stereo to mono in the piece as it stands now, and second, that in the long run I’m going to need to hire someone to work with me on making an effective use of spatialization in this piece as it develops, since I really can’t hear it … and I’ve been living with this long enough that I forget that I can’t hear it.
I tackled the first of these issues, probably in a temporary way, by doing a little bit of reprogramming on the plane from NY to Shanghai on Monday-Tuesday. Now, in the final couple of minutes of the piece, a droning background and all the speech shift fully to the right side, so everyone else gets the sense of one-sided mono sound. On the other issue I’ve made a first contact with an audio person via email, and we’ll see where that goes. Meanwhile, the concert that didn’t happen will have its most important parts …. the NYC premiere of the MONO Prelude, and a performance of Hammer & Hair by Kathy Supove and Ana Milosavljevic, on my Monday night concert on Nov 9 at the Cornelia St Cafe. So, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.
Then, of course, there’s Shanghai. I’m still suffering a bit of jet lag. Well, a lot of jet lag. Was on my way out to dinner last night with some friends, and felt it hit me. Had to bail out of a wonderful looking Hunan dinner, come back to the hotel and crash. Only to wake up at 4:45am, when I get to look out the window at this interesting “Shanghai Education Activities Center” across the alley from my hotel. What you can’t see in the picture is how it’s framed against the 30 story+ towers of apartments and office buildings which make up Shanghai’s skyline, nor the shady streets of plane trees which form the French Concession area where I’m staying, near the Conservatory.
Yesterday I did the real first performance of the MONO Prelude for a group of students at the Shanghai Theater Institute. I’m not sure why I was asked to give them a 2 hr lecture, or what they got out of it, though they did have quite a few questions and responses at the end. Then came back to the Conservatory where I got to do a run-through of FAITH with Vicky Chow. Was very encouraging that we were able to get through it OK, and she played it with real feeling … which makes me feel great. We have another run through in about an hour, at 10am, then perform it as the opening of a Bang On A Can All-Stars show at the Festival this evening. Which will be the China premiere of that piece. And which I presume will attract a crowd, and won’t be canceled because no one shows up. Then Sunday Vicky and I head off to Beijing for at least 3 more performances of both FAITH and MONO, and then to Hong Kong.
And finally … it’s my birthday today. 62 years old, and here I am off on the wrong side of the world. I got to have a nice skype with Wendy this morning, and will again this evening. It’s actually more connected than another birthday I remember being away on, must have been 1978, with a crew from IRCAM, performing at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, while Wendy and 3-yr old Chloe were back in Paris. Then I was sick, terribly angry at being labeled part of the tech crew rather than being acknowledged as a performer by the IRCAM heirarchy, and miserable beyond reason. Now I’m a little lonely, but glad to have seen Wendy this morning on skype, and excited about the performance this evening. So hopefully, not a bad birthday.
out into the world …
Today was Thurs … on Tuesday I posted my request for stories. Starting almost immediately, I’ve been inundated with responses. Only about 9 responses on the blog as of now, but literally dozens coming to me by email. Now, of course, I need to digest them. And there are a number of things which look like they’ll take a while to actually take shape and get to me. All very interesting to me.
Also interesting is the process of figuring out what it all will mean in terms of the piece. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last couple of days trying to imagine the first segment of the piece, which I’ll need to have for concerts here and in China in October. It’s the first time in a long time I’ve had the task of writing for a computer alone. That part is almost more daunting than the task of making the piece make sense in terms of being about hearing loss, or about other sensory changes. Virtually all of my writing for computers over the last 7 years or so has been about the interaction between instruments or voices and computers. So I need to decide whether I’m continuing to work that way with myself as the performer, or if there’s a new direction for me to follow. Am I going back to playing samples from the keyboard, as I did in the 80s? Or recording and processing myself live playing percussion or speaking?
Also, as I’ve been writing more and more instrumental and vocal things, I’ve developed a very personal process of working out and exploring my musical materials … not sure how I’ll do that working with samples … and not at all sure I want to be working with synthetic sounds, or at least not totally with synth sounds.
And then there are all the story responses I’m getting. While I’m thinking of them mostly in terms of long term structure for the larger piece, maybe I need to start right in with one of the stories, using the words, or some paraphrase … ?
Short ear note: today, for the first time in a while, I forgot to put in the hearing aid. Because I was mostly in the studio, it didn’t make a lot of difference (since I turn it off when I make music, anyway). But when I went out in the street a few times to run some errands, I was shocked at the sound, or lack of sound. Where I normally have very loud distorted sound on my left side, particularly on city streets, I now had silence on the left. Chatted with people on the street, and had to turn my head to hear them with the right ear. On the one hand, it’s a void I can feel, physically. On the other hand, the noise I hear through the hearing aid is so harsh and loud, that it’s kind of peaceful to just hear left-eared silence.
moving on …
I’m back, after about 10 months. Even got a new picture, and expect to have more. Because things change. Many things have changed in 10 months. On the ear front, I’ve accepted that I’m likely to have to deal with hearing with one ear from here on out. I continue to hope for a miraculous change. But I don’t expect it. On the other hand, it’s not exactly true that I only hear with one ear now. That little purple crescent with the little clear bud on the end is my hearing aid. It gets sound into my left ear with enough amplification so that I can hear something.
Unfortunately, the ear itself is still fucked, so everything I hear there sounds like it’s being blasted through a big kazoo. It’s useful for hearing speech in an environment where people will be all around me, and for being aware that there is sound coming from the left (useful when I’m riding my bike in Manhattan traffic). But for any kind of musical listening, or focused quality listening to the environment, it’s just unbearable. Like the whole world is a blown speaker. So in those situations, I turn it off. When I first got the hearing aid, I was distressed at how painful, physically painful, it was to play the piano. Then I discovered that I could turn the hearing aid off, and the piano turns back into something more or less similar to what it was when I had two ears.
What else has happened in the 10 months since my last blog entry? My mother died. My 3rd grandchild, Damon, was born. The CD of The Economic Engine was released, got good reviews including in the NY Times Arts & Leisure Section. I’ve gotten progressively more used to performing with one ear. And I’ve finished up two more big pieces, Faith for piano and computer, and Extended Family for string quartet (and no computer). More about those another time … they’ll both be having a number of performances in the Fall.
The real reason I’m restarting the blog, though, has less to do with what has happened, and more to do with what’s coming up. And that’s work on another big project. This one’s called MONO, and I imagine it’s going to occupy me here for a while.
The most direct way it relates to the blog is that I’m using the blog as a place to collect stories from other people who have suffered some kind of loss or change in one of their five senses. The idea is to use material from these stories to create a narrative to hold together a series of pieces which examine how we perceive beauty and meaning even when we have “lost” some part of the way we perceive.
There’s a blog page set up for people to leave stories: if you’ve suffered some kind of sensory loss or change, please tell me about it here. There’s another page describing the MONO project. I’m about to send out a major email blast to try to get people to share their stories with me. We’ll see how it goes.
