Shanghai again …
6 days in Shanghai, now at Pudong Airport, waiting to go to Hong Kong. Although I’ve been to this airport about 5 or 6 times in the last few years, this is the first time I’ve noticed that it’s right by the sea. The picture shows looking out past the loading area for planes, to the open sea beyond. Who knew? Various hearing adventures this trip, which I’ll spend this post talking about.
I was here to attend an Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS) conference, and I really shouldn’t react the way I do. I should probably just accept what I find at academic conferences like this, but I have a hard time containing myself. Basically, we have a bunch of European and American composers of a very specialized type of music, talking about each other’s music and the music of their teachers. And no one but me seems to be bothered by how insular and self-serving the whole thing is. Although there were several pieces on the concerts which were quite lovely, there were also quite a few which sounded completely hackneyed and like they were written according to a formula of how this particular music should be written.
Even worse, the papers were often talking about a kind of orthodoxy which says that one must follow the prescriptions of the founder of acousmatic music, Pierre Schaeffer, in order to do things “properly.” And I just don’t get it. What does this have to do with creativity and the act of composing music and presenting it to an audience? I spoke with Robert Normandeau, a composer who seems to buy into the orthodoxy, but also writes some quite beautiful music, about trying to strike up a dialog about these issues, and even though we didn’t really begin anything at the conference, perhaps we will over email, or elsewhere.
I chide myself for these complaints … why should I complain about these insular attitudes if it is a comfortable environment for the people who subscribe to it? In as much as it seems to me a little bit like a religious belief for some of the people at the conference, you’d think I’d leave it alone, just as I wouldn’t think of arguing with anyone about their religious beliefs, regardless of what I think about them. But this is a little different, because it’s talking about music and music technologies, which I feel very engaged in, and very passionate about. So maybe the answer for me is just to avoid these kinds of events, which is what I’ve actually done for many years …
One way that this is strange for me is that one of the features of “electroacoustic” music as defined by EMS seems to be an avoidance of melody, harmony and metrical sense. So, the entire theoretical focus is on how to classify and organize the traditionally “extra musical” sound features which remain. Which ends up with a strong focus on the “morphology” of “space” and “spectral” identity. Which means, how do sounds move in a 2 or 3 dimensional space, and how do you classify timbres. All this in order to permit analysis of the work in an academic setting.
But for me, the question comes up: what do I do with this spatial morphology if I can’t hear the location of a sound? Is this music something I’m specifically excluded from because of my limitations? Or, is there some way for a listener with my limitations to hear and appreciate the music even if the spatial information is inaccessible? If I listen to music by Gabrielli or of Henry Brandt, it isn’t necessarily inaccessible because I can’t hear antiphonal effects. I do of course miss something, but the music still contains enough emotional content that it can reach me and move me even if I miss that spatial parameter of location. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to be the intent of the “acousmatic” composers.
There’s also a kind of catechismic espousal of one of Pierre Schaeffer’s dicta that “acousmatic listening” involves divorcing a sound from it’s source, from the physical object which creates the sound. It makes the music more “pure.” It also seems, and has always seemed, patently stupid to me. The primary interest I find in sampled and processed sounds is in the relationship to the physical source of the sound, and the complex layers of meaning that arise from this recognition. Why on earth would I want to make something so “pure” that it loses this dimension? There’s enough about music which is abstract, that I always want to hold on to those things which make the meaning more tangible and concrete (pun intended).
Although by being diligent about attending the conference I didn’t really get to make any new explorations of Shanghai this time, I did at least get a chance to play a concert at a club with my young Shanghai buddies, WANG Changcun, Mai Mai, and Xu Cheng. It was really refreshing, after several days of totally cerebral discussions about an extraordinarily conservative and proscribed musical genre to hear each of their solo sets: Wang Changcun played some very rhythmic deconstructed samples, Mai Mai played a drone e-bow guitar, sort of a la David First in NYC. And Xu Cheng did another sort of sample deconstruction piece, noisy and interesting. And quite different from Wang Changcun’s. A bit of a breath of fresh air for me.
One last interesting thing … I sort of didn’t notice my ear. Maybe it’s because the sound system was mixed to mono, like most club systems. At least that’s what the sound guy told me, since I couldn’t tell. But basically, I just set up, and played. I was really into the music, and the 45 minutes or so of playing just went by, and I hardly noticed it at all. Felt like it went well, and I just didn’t notice the distortion in my ear or anything. Not that it wasn’t there, but it just didn’t matter.
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.
right ear focused …
Just went through an intense ear week. And seem to have come out OK. Last Wed & Thurs got the Economic Engine band together for rehearsals, did the performance on Sunday (with me on stage for a solid hour and a half), editing Hammer & Hair for the CD on Monday up in New Paltz, then long recording session on Tuesday, and about 13 hrs of editing on Thursday.
It now feels like my gone/white noise afflicted left ear is pretty well settled in. I’m getting more and more adept at just ignoring it when I need to. For example, as we set up on stage last Sunday, I realized that the wierd stage arrangement meant that the speakers were basically aimed at my missing ear. I made a quick attempt to re-arrange things so that I’d be turned around, but the small stage area and the need to accommodate 9 players without any re-setting of the stage during the concert mean that I was pretty much stuck in this unfotunate position. Deep breath, then I figured I’d just hear what I hear, and would have to work with that. A little scary since in the first two pieces I was playing laptop solos, and then was mixing pre-recorded effects, and finally for Economic Engine controlling and mixing real time effects. But the very good (and ever more appreciated) right ear came through, and all seemed to go well.
Mixing and recording in Jody’s studio in New Paltz presented different, but not dissimilar challenges. Jody understands that I can’t hear stereo, so we talk about the stereo for each piece, and he implements that. For the actual recording and mixing processes, it feels pretty much as though I just have to focus my attention to the right ear. With the right ear i can hear the musical relationships just fine, and I think I’m hearing balance of parts and levels as well. At least Jody doesn’t react as though I’m hearing anything different that he’s hearing. Plus, the way the studio is set up, I turn sideways so that my good right ear is aimed at the stereo speakers, and I get to look out the big window at the apple orchards and hills which surround Jody’s house. So that’s a nice side benefit of the unfortunate situation.
One of the things which has been most interesting about this whole processes is that as I share my problem with people, either through this blog or through conversation, I’m becoming aware of how wide spread hearing problems are. Musicians, in particular, have spoken with me via private email or in person, describing various scenarios in which they’ve lost some of their hearing. Perhaps musicians are just more attuned than others to the quality of their hearing. Or perhaps we’re more at risk because of exposure to loud sounds. Or perhaps we’re more at risk because of a general cosmic sense of irony at compromising the sense which we depend upon for our creativing and careers. Whatever the reason, I’ve heard from an awful lot of musicians who have been dealing with some form of hearing loss.
One of the things this makes me think about is a more philosophical issue. We communicate with sound, with words and with music. And that communication depends upon us agreeing on the fact that what we hear is the same for me as for you. But if many of us are dealing with a loss of hearing, then what we each hear may be quite different. Yet we are able to agree on it all enough to be able to talk and to listen to and enjoy music. So how does my experience of hearing differ from yours? I have some sense, because my hearing now is quite different from my hearing before. But I’d be reluctant to say that what I hear now is less real, though it clearly is lacking the dimension of spacial location.
As I look forward, I’m thinking more and more about how this kind of thinking might be reflected in a conscious way in my music. I’ve written up a couple of grant applications recently in which I’ve proposed to create a series of works which will explore this idea, and the general experience I’ve gone through. Quite different from the usual process I go through, where I write a piece for a particular performer or a particular situation. This would be starting out with the thought of trying to reflect and respond to a personal situation, rather than fulfilling a specific compositional task. It will be interesting to see where this goes … probably have time to do this beginning sometime mid-2009. We’ll see.
the way it is …
Went to hear David Little’s Soldier Songs this evening at Poisson Rouge. Very effective music, though unrelentingly grim. Also recently finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is even grimmer. While the concerns of both Little and McCarthy are very sympathetic to me, I’m not convinced that a representation of the grim toll being a soldier takes on one’s life is really the most effective way to communicate it. I have an underlying feeling that some portion of humor and irony are necessary to keep us really engaged.
Keeping engaged, for me, is also an aural problem. Much more than I’d like to admit, it was just impossible for me to understand the singer’s words. And I have the feeling the fault was in my ears, not in the singer’s voice. Maybe this impacts my take on the music. Or on the theatrical presentation. I’ll never really know, but it is something which scares me about dealing with my own music … particularly finishing up this next CD. Sometimes I feel as though my consciousness slips around the constant white noise … and while I always do hear it, sometimes I forget that I’m hearing it. But then, when I can’t hear things clearly, I wonder if the white noise is just screwing up everything I hear, or try to hear.
Keeping busy and musically engaged does help me forget about the white noise. But then complications come up, and it gets to a point where I may notice it, but I just can’t pay any attention to it because other things require my attention. I’m somewhat here now: Saturday night (i.e., last night) at about 11pm I found out that one of my players for the Economic Engine is ill, and may need surgery next week. Which would mean she couldn’t perform. And since it’s one of the Chinese instruments, there aren’t a lot of subs in New York City. I’ve been looking and contacting all the players in NYC, as well as players as far away as Minnesota and San Diego. So far, no one can do this on such short notice. Sunday night now, we start rehearsals Wednesday evening, perform on Sunday, and record the piece for the CD the following Tuesday. Assuming I can complete the ensemble before the performance.
Of course, everything was set over a month ago. But life (and illness) get in the way and screw things up. Part of me wants to whine about how this happens. But in reality, any kind of long term major project is vulnerable to this kind of problem. The important aspect of any situation like this is not about whether or not you can avoid the problems, but if you can deal with the problems and avoid a catastrophe. Although everyone here in NYC is much more professional than they were in Beijing (as I’d expect), shit still happens and is beyond my control. What’s not beyond my control is the fact that I can keep pushing to make something come together to make the piece work. It’s more or less universal this this is siply the way it is … so the best I can do is deal with it as best I can.
last concert (in China, for now) …
On the plane back from Beijing. Last night was the final concert of the trip in Beijing’s 798 Art Area, and it was all the good and bad of working in China rolled up together. Good was eventually having a room full of maybe 200+ people cheering and applauding for music they definitely didn’t anticipate, and probably had never heard anything like. Bad was the day of complete chaos leading up to the concert, with the director and crew showing up 3 hours late, electricity being brought to the room at about 5:30, and an incredibly loud DJ party in the plaza outside the hall. Oh yes, and the fact that the hall itself was a concrete box on the top floor of what appeared to be a defunct worker’s dormitory for an old munitions factory.
The hearing adventure began when a student arrived (about an hour after our supposed set-up time of 11am) to take me to the room where I was to leave my equipment until the sound system arrived at 1pm. The room, maybe 30 ft wide by 120 ft long, was four flights up a crumbling staircase with shattered tiles on the steps and a view into the defunct communal bathrooms on each landing. The room had a reverberation time you’d normally associate with a gothic cathedral. Probably 1.5 seconds of rolling, jumbled reverberation after any sound. I called the director, who said he knew but he was sure it would get better when there was an audience. In any case, there was nothing to do about it. Don’t worry.
Left a student to baby-sit my gear while I went and got some lunch and looked around some galleries. Came back at 1:30, as we’d agreed on the telephone, since the sound system and director were going to arrive at 1pm. No one was there. Worse, there was a major outdoor sound system set up in the plaza four stories down, now pumping out DJ background music for whatever event was going on down there. Not a lot of people in evidence, but lots of boom boom boom boom. The eight musicians who were to play Economic Engine arrived about this time for our scheduled rehearsal from 2-6, and we sat around a bit in the 90º heat trying to figure out what to do with no sound system and with the DJ’s sound inundating the room. Open the windows and you can hear nothing but the DJ. Close the windows and you bake. Probably up to 95º by mid-afternoon. Calls again brought the response that the sound system would be there any minute, and the DJ in the plaza would stop by 5 pm, and an air conditioning system would be delivered. Don’t worry.
2:30 pm still no sign of director or sound system, and I was back on the phone, beginning to get pretty upset. The director’s boss called me back and said he wanted to talk to the director, then was surprised he wasn’t there. I began rehearsing the musicians acoustically, all of us trying to hear through the echo chamber-like room and the booming DJ outside.
Obviously, this is a terrible listening environment, even for someone with two good ears an no ubiquitous white noise generator following them around. But the immediate bottom line was that I was pretty much able to hear the instruments playing (or not) their parts, and was able to give them some direction about dealing with the various ensemble problems. But it was sort of like listening to a 78 rpm record which has been left our in a sand storm.
3pm or so and the sound system arrives, along with great numbers of workers hauling scaffolding for the video projector and at least three seven-foot tall air conditioners and compressors to go outside. This makes the task of rehearsing even harder, particularly since people keep shouting and clanking the equipment without any regard to the fact that musicians are working. And everything was in an echo chamber.
4pm we stop the rehearsal for a few minutes while I set up the microphones for the instruments. Then I’m told that they’re waiting for the electricity. Turns out that the electricity needs to be brought up from the plaza below (with the DJ) and they’re trying to find a 200 meter long extension cord to drop down the four story building and pull across the plaza. We rehearse acoustically for a little while longer, then I tell the musicians to take a break, and I’ll call them when we get electricity. I set up my gear as though the electricity were there, in hopes that it will be quicker to get it going once there’s juice.
5pm Bruce Gremo arrives and sets up his gear despite the lack of electricity. 5:30 we finally get electric power!! I call the players back, Bruce and I each make sure we’ve got sound, then I check the feeds from each of the players. There are three bad mic cables. First the sound man refuses to believe it could be his cables. Then he says there are no more cables. I have a temper tantrum and tell the sound man and the director that they need to find more cables. I say get five, so that if there are any more problems we’ll be covered. They send a student down to the DJ in the plaza and she comes back with two more cables. Another temper tantrum.
6:15 I ask the director when they’re going to stop the DJ downstairs. He says 5pm. I point out that it’s 6:15. He howls like a wolf and yells at someone to go down and talk to them.
By about 7pm I’ve done all the testing I can of the cables, and we’re short one – which means we’re short one mic, because the bad cable on the cello seems to cause a low frequency hum, which grows into a huge boom. I go ahead and try to rehearse with the electronic processing, keeping the cello way lower than she should have been because of the bad cable.
Here’s where the combination of hearing problem and listening environment really kicked in (not to mention the frustration of waiting in a loud hot room for 6 ½ hrs for the set-up which was supposed to happen at 11am). I could hear if delays happened, and I could sort of hear some of the more obvious distortion effects. But I really couldn’t tell much of anything about the quality of the sound or the balance of the mix of live and processed sound. Bruce went to the audience area and gave me feedback, and also mentioned that in the back of the hall the reverberation was so overwhelming that it was hard to distinguish anything.
7:45 we’ve done everything we can and stop for the 8pm concert, since the hall is already filling with people. I change my clothes in one of the empty dorm rooms, which is coated with at least ¼ in of dirt and dust on all surfaces. I head to the bathroom, which is in a building across the plaza, only to find the building locked. So I have a pre-performance pee behind some kind of 20 ft tall storage tank near the plaza and head in to the performance. I get back to the hall, and it’s packed with people, with more filing in. Cindy and the director are trying to make the video projection work, while the audience waits and watches. Just as I’m about to go on, the student who was looking for more cables runs up to me and says she’s found one more cable and do I want to test it now? Too late, I tell her. We start closer to 8:30 than to 8.
People seemed to love A Robert Johnson Sampler and Gate Beats. Wild cheering, and a young woman as MC (in Mandarin) egging them on to further shouts and cheers. I, on the other hand, could hardly hear anything. My stage monitor mix was present, but between the white noise and the din of the room, I couldn’t really hear any detail of what I was doing. So it seems a bit unfair for me to take credit for playing well, though I’m glad everyone liked it.
Next Bruce (playing the sillia – his homemade electronic flute-like controller) and Cindy (video) and I do a 20 minute improvisation. Again, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the audience. I really enjoyed playing, and particularly the sense of exchange and interplay with Bruce’s playing. But as in the rehearsals with the ensemble, I felt like I was mostly working on the level of events, not really being able to get in and hear the details of the sounds. Some of this the room, some of this my hearing.
Finally the musicians came out and we did Economic Engine. We lost half the audience on this one … I’m not sure if it was because they were put off by the more classical nature of the piece, or if it was that the concert was going about half an hour over the stated end time because we started late. In any case, the players suffered from the room sounds, and had difficulty hearing each other. Which was made worse by the fact that people leaving generated walking talking and chair-scraping noises, which filled up the reverberant sound space. Also, the pipa continued to play wrong notes, which has a pronounced harmonic effect on the piece, and two pages of the first violinist’s part were evidently blown away by the air conditioning, which was turned on right before the concert started. And of course, I was mixing according to the presence of processing events, not really able to discern the quality of the sounds in the mix.
The remaining audience was still enthusiastic about the piece, and quite a few people waylaid me afterwards with thanks and congratulations. I’m glad we got to play the piece this second time, and I feel like I have a very good sense of what needs to happen musically to improve it for the New York performance. But I also think I need to have Jody (or someone else, if he’s not available) help me out on the mix in NYC to make sure it really works there. I actually think it’s a really cool piece, but it’s going to take some additional effort to make it work as it ought to.
This whole experience serves to remind me that much of what I hear as a musician takes place in my head, and that as long as I can hear clearly in my head, I can probably deal with the manifestations which come through my damaged hearing equipment.
Which brings us back to the plane. For the first hour and a half of the flight I had an very good conversation with the man sitting next to me, a North Carolina lawyer who was doing educational and missionary work in rural southern China for two weeks with US high school students. Unfortunately, he’s sitting on my left. Rather than get into the details of my hearing problem, I’ve just been turning my head to the left so that I can hear him with my good right ear. So, airplane noise, white noise, and then the conversation on the wrong side of my body. I think I was able to pick up about 80% of the conversation. Not bad. But it’s another reason I hope things will improve enough to enable me to get to a hearing aid …
rained out …
I’m packed up and ready to head off for my final concert in China this evening. Was supposed to play a preview last night, and had a relatively normal situation for here. When I first arrived the producer asked if I could do a 10 minute preview slot in the big outdoor party show which would open the festival on the 20th … the night before my concert. So I arrived at 2pm as requested for sound check, and for time to work with the video artist. Video artist didn’t arrive til after 3pm, and they didn’t get to our sound check until about 5:30. It was a hot, muggy, smoggy day, but everyone was in good humor and waiting around 798 Art Area for 3 and a half hours wasn’t a terrible way to spend my next to last day in China. Sound check went OK when we got it … the very professional sound man even was able to adjust my stage monitor to deal with my non-hearing left ear.
Cindy, the video artist, and I were to receive an award right before we performed out 10 minutes – I was to play Gate Beats, and Cindy was to do her “ink video” performance, which actually involves liquids like coke and beer and milk and soy sauce, as well as ink. The half hour before we were to go on there were some rumbles of thunder, and a couple of random rain drops, and all the gear for the show was covered with plastic, just in case. I was told to prepare my table of gear to be carried on to the stage. Just as I was uncovering it and starting up my computer, the heavens opened up. Huge downpour, which kept up for about an hour, on and off. By the time everyone was convinced that the rain was over more than half the audience was gone, and our section of the program was long gone because there was concern about the sound and projection gear. So I got the nice award, thanked everyone, and asked the audience to join me the following evening (tonight) for my concert. The evening continued … mostly seeming to be very funny spoken performances in Chinese, which I of course couldn’t understand. I was, at this point, mostly very concerned about my gear, and ended up packing up and heading home.
Hopefully this evening’s concert will actually happen. At least it’s scheduled to be indoors.
To just add a note about listening and hearing: the amplification for the sound check was very clean, but even with adjustments from the sound guy, it was very difficult for me to really feel like I was inside the sound. Partly, I think the problem was that our sound check was preceded by sound check for a very very loud rock band. While it wasn’t necessarily louder than Torturing Nurse, given the outdoor venue as opposed to the small club in Shanghai, it was much more difficult for me to tolerate. The guitar in particular just seemed like it blotted out everything, even my persistent white noise. Though I’m not sure it’s a good trade off.
noisey NoiShanghai …
When I’m in relative quiet (like right now, back in my little Beijing apartment), I’m very aware of the white noise in my left ear. When I’m with a crowd of people, like last night in Shanghai with a crowd of young, mostly Chinese musicians and friends in a small restaurant near the Live Bar venue for the NoiShanghai show, I’m aware of fighting with the ambiance and my diminished hearing on my left side, turning my head constantly so that my good right ear is pointing at whomever I want to hear. Less aware in that situation of the constant white noise (which is still there) than of having to listen through that and through the undifferentiated noise of the restaurant and group conversation.
However, at the NoiShanghai concert, I wasn’t aware of my own white noise at all. For the most part, I was awash in a sea of often very loud, sometimes very interesting, and generally very passionate music making. But not everything was terribly loud. There was a young student from London, in Shanghai studying Chinese language & culture, who did a very quiet performance by spreading out various sound-making objects on the floor, and rolling around with them, making very small, very soft sounds. Various tibetan bowl gongs, jingle bells, small cassette players with internal speakers, and a mandolin which he bowed. WANG Changcun, who was my original contact in the group, did a beautiful piece that was sort of repetitive and looping, but quite elegant. Then there was the Chinese composer who basically attacked a small guzheng (like a zither or a koto) which had contact mics on it. Attack is definitely the right word. Though part way through he put it up to his mouth, and I wasn’t sure if he was humming through it, or if he was administering oral sex, and the instrument itself was moaning appreciatively. In any case, it was all incredibly and relentlessly loud and noisy. Luckily, at the beginning of the concert Changcun had come over with a napkin to tear up and stuff in my ears. So I was able to listen without feeling I was damaging my remaining hearing.
Then there was the featured act (besides me), the Shanghai band Torturing Nurse. Basically, 2 guys (one of whom is XU Cheng, one of the founders of NoShanghai) making very very very very loud electronic sounds, mostly seeming to come from feedback and cheap guitar pedals. And they keep it up for 20 minutes. Then, I guess, there’s the nurse. A young woman who screams for 20 minutes non-stop into a microphone. This is not singing really hard, so it sounds like screaming. And it’s not singing with a screechy timbre. This is screaming. I think she took a couple of breaths in the 20 minutes, but I’m not entirely sure. Mostly, just non-stop screaming. And the dynamic level is probably about as loud as I’ve ever heard amplification.
In this case, I didn’t depend upon the napkins stuffed in my ears to protect my remaining hearing. I spent the whole set with fingers jammed firmly in ears. Both ears. And it was still about the loudest thing I’ve heard. However, it was also a really compelling performance. The energy and sense of total commitment from each of the three performers was palpable, and XU Cheng’s audio output from a table top full of stomp boxes was really imaginative. It was very high-energy and propulsive, but also beat-less. An interesting combination.
I ended the show with A Robert Johnson Sampler. Also fairly loud, but nothing like Torturing Nurse. Was going to play Gate Beats as well, but it had been a very long concert, and everyone seemed to like the Robert Johnson piece, so I just ended it there.
Was interesting setting up for my performance, though. I sit sideways on stage, with the audience to my right. They initially had a little monitor speaker for me set up behind me … which meant on my left. So, of course, I couldn’t hear the monitor speaker for shit. Another time when honesty is the best policy: I told the engineer that I couldn’t hear from my left ear, and they obligingly moved the monitor to my right side.
All in all, doing things in the academic music conservatories here and then outside the academic realm has been fascinating. There were maybe 25 people in the NoiShanghai audience, and the club was a dark, slightly smelly venue called Live Bar next to a bunch of auto repair shops in north east Shanghai. But I had the sense that all the people were there because they loved the scene and were really engaged with the music (and noise). There’s no money, but they were very gracious and took me and the other artists out for dinner afterwards, and certainly made me feel appreciated. At the conservatory, there was no social engagement at all, and the students seemed to be doing what they were supposed to do, rather than what they loved to do. Which might work if you were studying to be a dentist, but I don’t think works so well if you want to be a musician. My contact at the Shanghai Conservatory, Qin Yi, was quite intrigued by my discussion of this split that I’ve experienced, and talked about the potential of getting her students engaged in a non-academic scene. But I don’t think she’s in a position for do this in the face of a government run educational bureaucracy, which probably wouldn’t see the value of playing to 25 people in a smelly bar. I, fortunately, am not constrained in this way. I find immense hope and inspiration in being allowed to get to know this scene, in which I don’t believe any of the musicians are more than half my age.
looking & listening …
I’ve spent and interesting few days. I’ve been fixing the various problems with Economic Engine’s digital processing, which has meant re-listening to what I did in performance, and re-thinking how I make use of the processing. I also just spent today rehearsing with Bruce Gremo and Cindy NG Sio Ieng, my video collaborator, for the concerts on June 20 & 21.
The news in terms of hearing is that there really is no news. No matter what I heard the other day in terms of stereo, something from my left ear, I’m basically hearing the sounds in the air as mono. That said, I’m hearing. So I think that my improvisations with Bruce today were sometimes quite beautiful, I was able to hear what we were doing (except for the stereo), and the real point is in how we hear each other and how we interact and react. And that didn’t feel like it was impacted by the hearing problem at all. Maybe I tend to pull back dynamically a little earlier than I might otherwise, because I think I can hear distinct sounds a little less clearly when they get dense than before. And when the chaos is impenetrable, I tend to pull back and try to refocus and see how I fit in.
Likewise, reworking the processing in Economic Engine felt like it was a matter of figuring out my direction and my concept, rather than struggling to hear what I can’t hear. Once I knew in my mind what I wanted the processing to sound like, and how it could develop, there was no problem hearing what I needed to hear to make it work.
Maybe less on focus regarding hearing, I had an interesting day on Monday going to visit an artist village outside Beijing with a woman who has been helping Cindy with video for the Economic Engine, and who living in the village. The village is called Song Zhuang, and my host was Xiao Shan. She took me to meet several of her friends and artists living in the village, including WANG Chuyu, a performance artist who is in one of the video segments of Economic Engine.
Evidently Song Zhuang has something like 3000 artists and maybe another 3000 farmers living there. Visiting the various young artists in their homes/studios was fascinating. Everyone was very warm and welcoming. The housing was a little rustic (toilets and kitchens generally in a courtyard, in separate buildings from the main living quarters), but generally quite nice, with each house focused on its individual courtyard. Several of the artists, including Chuyu and Pei Feng, the video editor we worked with on Economic Engine, had bought old farm houses. Pei Feng was just in the process of moving in, but the house and gardens have incredible character and spirit. Chuyu’s house, which he’s lived in for 10 years is very comfortable and feels settled in to. With a nice garden in the courtyard, some fruit trees, and a huge garden next door, outside the wall of the courtyard, full of vegetables.
I had a wonderful lunch cooked by Xiao Shan’s husband, and delicious zungzi (stuffed sweet rice cakes) made by Chuyu’s girlfriend’s mother. The a great spicy meal outside at a restaurant on the town’s one main street with Xiao Shan, her husband and WU Wencheng, another of the artists we’d visited during the day.
It’s not at all clear to me how everyone in Song Zhuang lives. People seem to just make art, and certainly aren’t supported by the government (though the town’s farmers are, evidently). The housing is rustic but comfortable, and the community feeling seems quite rich and supportive of their work. Lots of galleries, museums, etc.
Walking around with Xiao Shan, I just asked her to always walk on my right so I could hear her better. When she forgot, I reminded her and re-adjusted our positions. One of the things I was aware of was that this isn’t so unexpected in someone my age. Most of the artists I met were in their late 20s or early 30s I think, and they saw me as in interesting old foreign artist/musician. Sometimes old people don’t hear so well. Big deal.
I’ll be curious to get back to NYC and have another hearing test. Walking around Song Zhuang, and rehearsing today, I was certainly aware of not hearing with my left ear … though there is a sense that something is coming in, though it’s mostly quite distorted. Yet the other day I did hear stereo in the headphones while listening to Balkanization. So I don’t really know what to believe … whether my hearing is improving an little, or whether it’s just wishful thinking.
My sister Kyle wrote after my entry about hearing stereo, that maybe I really am hearing something in my left ear, and this is just my body adjusting and learning how to hear what’s there. I guess it’s also possible that my stereo episode was just a projection of wishful thinking. I guess that’s why it would be nice to have another test and try to get a more quantitative evaluation. It’s interesting that I haven’t listened with un-adapted headphones again. I think I’m a little afraid that i won’t hear it again. That probably tells me something too.
