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.
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