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Posts Tagged ‘interviews’

Interviewing The Furies on P.M.S. (People Menstruate Show)

The Furies is a contemporary violin duo whose mission is to bring intersectional feminism into the concert hall through immersive performance experiences that challenge our audience and community, for us to learn more about the histories of women in a white male dominated canon, and to encourage audience members to demand more diverse programming from their musical institutions. New Classic LA caught up with the string duo to chat about their upcoming Equal Sound show on March 1st with ~Nois and all things PMS.

NCLA: What has the process of working through your upcoming show P.M.S. (People Menstruate Show) been like? Any similarities or differences in your preparations from A Cure for Hysteria?

Kate: Our new show, P.M.S. (People Menstruate Show) is an examination of the seriousness and the silliness surrounding the culture of menstruation. There are a lot of stereotypes about people who menstruate, some of them harmful, some of them silly, but all of them are important to address. It’s wild to me that I have been getting my period monthly since I was 12 years old, and I still feel awkward talking about it with friends, like it’s this big secret that we all know is there but would rather not talk about. We’ve watched a lot of old commercials selling period products in the process of working on this show, and it’s fun to think if an alien visited earth and only learned about menstruation by watching those commercials, what would they think it is?? Anyways it’s been pretty freeing to talk so much and so openly about menstruation in the making of this production!

Maiani: We’ve been experimenting with the presentation of our ideas without being too tied to our former show ACFH. Although ACFH has helped lay somewhat of a groundwork for us, we are not married to any one way of presenting our shows, which is so fun! With ACFH we presented a much more abstract show, whereas P.M.S. has a new approach; more direct and invasive… much like PMS itself.

Working on P.M.S. has been a cathartic experience. There are moments in the show that are taken from our personal life experiences and fears, so finding an artistic way of expressing these stories and fears requires a great deal of vulnerability, especially while crafting a show that includes media we don’t necessarily dominate. We strongly believe there is no one right way to make art, it’s a big part of our creative ethos, but I personally still have a way to go in unlearning some of the classical dogma that classical musicians are taught. We idealize the canon and the rigid code of conduct, and I find myself having to actively challenge the biases and fears that came with my formative musician years. All of that to say that we find it all too confining for what we as The Furies want to do. For example, I’m playing a gigue from Bach’s Partita 3, but Kate and I have decided to play around with how it’s presented. I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say it will be a mixture of autobiographical experiences and anxieties as it relates to the loss of innocence/coming of age theme of this show.

We also find it interesting to explore the fact that Bach was a devout Christian and his greatest muse was his god. We are pairing what some would consider divine music with a theme that is often intentionally overlooked and also stigmatized in the ideals of organized religion: our biology. I think such veneration of customs demands a “sacrilegious” critique.

Kate: I think another big thing in this new production has been giving ourselves permission to try out some new shit. The best part about creating these two shows has been having a clear vision, and then learning whatever skills we need to learn to make that vision come true. We are trying a lot of things we were not taught to do in our classical training, like movement, comedy, electronics, singing, percussion, etc., and it’s been liberating and terrifying incorporating all these new performance techniques into our shows.

NCLA: Anything surprising or unexpected surface as you were creating the project?

Kate: It has been interesting to discover similarities in some of the feelings and responses that came up making this show in comparison to our hysteria show. On the surface, talking about menstruation can seem to be one thing, but actually it relates to so many other challenges that people face, and it was challenging to pick and choose which elements we wanted to focus on. For instance, our last show, A Cure for Hysteria, was about the concept of disenfranchising people who seem “hysterical,” and menstruation is a part of that. So it’s hard to isolate topics that deal with oppression from each other because they all intersect at some point. There are plenty of people who don’t menstruate, but are still subjected to feeling shame, loneliness, isolation, distrust in their own bodies and feelings. So in a way, though we are talking about menstruation, we are trying to address broader feelings that come with the ways in which our culture tries to use our own bodies againsts us, to discredit us, to make us question our own feelings and convictions.

NCLA: You recently treated New Yorkers to an evening with friends ~Nois. What can listeners expect for the LA double bill experience?

Maiani: One of the fun things about sharing a double bill with ~Nois is the contrast in how we present our programs. Despite our different styles (both in presentation and musical selection), what ties our sets together well is an informality and genuine interest in sharing our work. There is nothing pretentious about ~Nois; they are an amazing band who have successfully held on to the playfulness of music making. I hope our audience feels similarly about The Furies. We super enjoy listening to and playing with them, so perhaps we will play an encore together at the very end… we shall see!

NCLA: We are so fortunate to be able to use the arts as a platform for change and calling out social inequities, and The Furies don’t shy away from big subjects that are unabashedly female centric and socially taboo. How has this been received by audiences? Anything that you’ve discovered in these formative years as a duo?

Maiani: Our performances have generally been well received. On occasion there is an audience member who is uncomfortable and leaves mid show, and I’m actually fine with that. If some people don’t have an adverse reaction to our programs then we aren’t exactly doing a good job of presenting taboo topics.

Although we never doubted the thoughtfulness of our audience, we’ve discovered that most of them are much more receptive than we had expected. But of course that’s a limiting perspective as we have yet to play in very conservative cities. These formative years as a duo have taught us, among other things, that we want to create even more discomfort.

Kate: It’s been really informative for us to see how many of our peers and audience members crave live performance experiences that ask questions in a different way. We have been really fortunate so far to hear some great feedback at our shows. It’s been nice to see our musical community reach out wanting to share our ideas on their concert series or create new projects together.

It has also been revealing hearing some of the criticisms about the work we do. They often have less to do with the content and quality of the shows, and more to do with whether or not they think we’re jumping on a trend. It is just one more clear example of how there is this scarcity mindset in classical/new music communities, that somehow when we do the thing that challenges us and is a creative outlet for us, we somehow are taking away from other things people are doing. Maiani and I feel empowered by what we are doing.

Maiani: Ironically this criticism has come from people who’ve never attended our shows. We don’t think culture and music making is a zero-sum game.

NCLA: Anything else you would like to share?

Maiani: YES! We are having a tampon drive for The Midnight Mission! We will be collecting unopened boxes of tampons before and after our show. We hope that by encouraging people to donate boxes of tampons, we will not only help a large number of menstruators in need, but we will also motivate non-menstruators to get over their irrational discomforts of buying tampons… Doing good is a great motivator. A win-win!

Interview: Aron Kallay on Beyond Twelve

Pianist, composer, teacher, theorist, writer, festival organizer, man-of-many-nouns-used-as-modifiers Aron Kallay has a concert this Saturday at Beyond Baroque, and it sounds just awesome. For this closing event of Microfest, of which Aron is the assistant director, he’s commissioned a bunch of composers to reimagine what can be done with a piano. With all that this guy does, I’m lucky that he had a moment to talk about the project. See you there.

Let’s get right down to business: you commissioned works for piano using two ground rules, 1) re-tune the keyboard, pretty much in any way imaginable, and 2) re-map the keyboard. How have the composers you’ve commissioned responded to or interpreted these guidelines?

It’s been fascinating, to say the least. I deliberately chose composers for this project whose music I really liked. I wasn’t looking to commission “microtonal” composers, necessarily, but rather composers who I knew would take on the challenge of exploring alternate tunings. For many of them, like Tom Flaherty, this was their very first excursion into the microtonal world, and the results have been nothing short of stunning. Some of them divided the octave into many more than twelve steps. Kyle Gann’s Every Something is an Echo of Nothing, for example, has thirty, and they are all out of order! Other composers went back in time to find their tuning. John Schneider goes all the way back to Pythagoras, basing his tuning on a string of pure fifths. The most novel approach, however, goes to Brian Shepard. He started with the most basic of scales, the pentatonic, and created something so vertiginous that it needs to be experienced to be understood.
What sparked your interest in microtonal music? It seems like a bit of a surprise move for a pianist…but perhaps that’s why it’s working so well.
Ah… it was a surprise move for a pianist, before the advent of physical modeling software and really fast computers. The problem with microtonal music for an acoustic piano is that the number of pieces that can be performed on a given concert is directly related to the number of pianos in the hall. There are an infinite number of tunings available to composers and they rarely choose the same one for each piece. Add to that the complication that pianos don’t like to be retuned, and we have a problem. Often, it takes five tunings to get a piano to hold its pitch, even for something relatively straight forward like lowering the instrument a quartertone. The software I’ll use for this concert (pianoteq) models all of the intricacies of the piano while taking the new tuning into account (how the sound board reacts, sympathetic vibrations, key noise, etc…). The result is something not entirely unlike a retuned acoustic piano. In fact, it’s pretty darn close to the real thing.
As far as who sparked my interest in microtonal music, that’s easy… It was Professor Bob Moore at USC. He is one of the great unsung new music heros of Los Angles. I took two years of his 20th/21st century music theory class while working on my doctorate. He would often start lectures with something like: “One day, I was sitting at the bar with Takemitsu talking about X when Morton Feldmen walked in all mad about Y, and you won’t believe what Bernstein had to say on the subject.” This was a great class… When he played Ben Johnston’s Amazing Grace quartet for us, I was sold.
You’re also known for your work in combining acoustic instruments with electronics. Could you talk a bit about the challenges of both composing and performing in this medium? I ask partially out of self interest, as I’m writing a piece for guitar and field recordings and finding it extremely hard to make the two work together, as opposed to sounding merely juxtaposed on top of one another.
It’s funny to think that I’m known for anything at this point of my career, but thanks for the ego boost!
Not to avoid your question here, but I think that it really comes down to style vs. substance, to steal from Charles Ives. The great monuments of the electroacoustic literature, Stockhausen’s Kontakte, Babbitt’s Philomel, any of Davidovsky’s Synchronisms, for example, work not necessarily because the electronics are integrated with the live instrument, but because of the depth of meaning in the musical material. In other words, the electronics were never conceived of as separate from the acoustic part, they were necessary to the composer’s vision.
Of course, there are tricks that performers can use to help the composer out… Speaker placement, sound projection of the live instrument, effects, etc…
You’ve certainly covered a lot of musical bases around LA – composing, performing, teaching, running a festival, co-directing an ensemble of sorts…do you view aspects of our scene differently when you approach them from different perspectives? Or are there things that you’ve found to be true no matter what role you’re playing?

It’s interesting, and this is something that I think about all the time: the creative precess is pretty much the same for me regardless of the medium. If I’m curating a concert for MicroFest, I come up with a vision, or allow the music to dictate the vision to me, and try to shape a program that will fulfill that vision. The vision can be narrative or abstract, or a combination of the two, depending on the material. The result is like a meta composition–a symphony in several acts to hopefully be experienced as a whole by the audience. Whether or not I’m successful is actually beside the point. If the process is sound and I’ve created something that is true to the vision, people will come, and if they don’t, well, then I need to find a new profession.

The same is true when I wear my performer’s hat. I need a vision, and I need to be true to that vision, regardless of the dictates of “tradition” or “performance practice” or even what the composer is asking for in the score. If I don’t own that piece of music on the stage, then no one will be happy, not me, not the composer, and certainly not the audience!

What’s the most fun for me is something like Beyond Twelve, where I get to produce, curate, commission, promote, and perform. It’s difficult to wear so many hats at once, but talk about owning an event! And, even if it falls flat and there are ten people in the audience, at least I’ve helped to create new microtonal repertoire, which really is the point in the end.

What’s your favorite thing about new music in LA?

The abundance of amazing performers in this city. I’m not sure if it’s having the studios or institutions like USC and the LA Phil or the weather, but I’d put our musicians up against those from any city–any day of the week.

And your least favorite, or something you’d like to see change?

We need a more geographically contained city, or a transporter like they have on Star Trek! The only thing new music has going for it in places like New York is that everything there is closer together.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Nope! Time to get back to practicing!

Info about this Saturday’s show is available at beyondbaroque.org/events.html. Learn more about Aron and his projects at AronKallay.com and MicroFest.org.