Charlemagne Palestine is an influential composer, performer and visual artist. Throughout the 1970s, Palestine produced a seminal body of performance-driven, psychodramatic video works in which he activates a ritualistic use of physicality, motion and sound to achieve an outward articulation of internal states. Intensely personal and often violently charged, these phenomenological exercises are characterized by a visceral enactment of physical and psychological catharses. Performing in isolation with a hand-held, moving camera, Palestine taps the body as a conduit for the self. The very titles of his pieces — Internal Tantrum (1975), Running Outburst (1975) — suggest literal and metaphorical catalysts for release or escape from confinement.
Movement and sound, as they relate to the body and the voice, are the vehicles through which Palestine expels internal energy. Ritualistic vocal expressions — hypnotic chants, trance-inducing tones — become physical translations of anguish and pain, as does the use of the video as an extension of the body. Running frenetically with the camera or strapping it to a moving motorcycle, Palestine uses motion as metaphor. Challenging identity and perception, he positions the viewer behind the camera, in a subjective point of view. Seeing through his eyes, moving with his body, the viewer is both participant and voyeur.
A contemporary of artists such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley, Palestine’s music and sound compositions have garnered a devoted following since the 1960s. In recent years, he has collaborated with a diverse group of experimental musicians including Pan Sonic, David Coulter, Tony Conrad and Michael Gira. He has released more than twenty solo albums and has performed in festivals around the world such as The Meltdown Festival, London in 1999; Transmediale, Berlin in 2010; All Tomorrow’s Parties, UK in 2010 and Numina Lente, NY in 2011.
In his work in performance, music, video and related media since the late 1960s, Palestine uses certain emblematic objects, including teddy bears, cognac and scarves, as signatures — what he terms "symbols of identification."
Charlemagne Palestine was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. He studied at New York University, Columbia University, Mannes College of Music and California Institute of the Arts. He has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other organizations. His work has been exhibited internationally, at festivals and institutions including the Venice Biennale, Italy; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland; Long Beach Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Documenta 8, Kassel; Walker Art center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal. In 2010 Palestine’s video works were featured in the solo exhibition "VooDoo" at Wiels in Brussels. Palestine has been selected to participate in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Palestine lives and works in Brussels.
Playing on a Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano surrounded by stuffed
animals Palestine unfolds a sound structure that transforms difference
and repetition into complex sound clusters.
In the Ocean, is a more straight-laced documentary by Scheffer about the history of the Bang on a Can festival and its associated movements in modern music. There are spoken contributions from and excerpts of music by John Cage, Philip Glass, (a fairly angry) Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Louis Andriessen, as well as the can-bangers themselves. It is informative, thought-provoking, and aesthetically pleasing. Worth a look for anyone with an interest in contemporary music. — Ionarts blog, Charles Downey, February 19, 2009
This absorbing film inlcudes performance of the musicians’ own pieces, and interviews with composers such as John Cage, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who were all an influence on Eno himself. — MOJO Magazine, Mike Barnes, February 2009
Ellen Fullman has been developing her installation, the Long String Instrument, for nearly 30 years; exploring the acoustics of large resonant spaces with her compositions and collaborative improvisations.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and residencies including: a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award; two Center for Cultural Innovation Grants (2008 and 2013); a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission/NEA Fellowship for Japan (2007); and a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency (2000).
Photo John Fago
Fullman has recorded extensively with this unusual instrument. Releases include: Through Glass Panes (Important Records, 2011); Fluctuations, with trombonist Monique Buzzarté (Deep Listening Institute), selected as one of the top 50 recordings of 2008 by the Wire and awarded an Aaron Copeland Fund for Music Recording Program Grant; and Ort, recorded with Berlin collaborator Konrad Sprenger (Choose Records), selected as one of the top 50 recordings of 2004 by the Wire. Fullman’s work was cited by Alvin Lucier in his Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) and by David Byrne in How Music Works (McSweeney’s, 2012. Ellen has been invited to give the Distinguished Alumni Lecture for 2016 at her alma mater, the Kansas City Art Institute. Photo Martin Meyer
Ellen Fullman (b. Memphis, Tennessee, 1957) is a composer. Known
principally for music she has written for an instrument she invented,
the long string instrument, Fullman studied sculpture at the Kansas City
Art Institute. She has performed with the Deep Listening Band and Paul
Panhuysen.
Tuned in just intonation, the long string instrument is played by
walking along the length of incredibly long strings and rubbing them
with rosined hands. This produces longitudinal vibrations, and her music
explores the nodes of vibration. Her early pieces were notated with
choreography.
Dame Evelyn Glennie, who was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2007 New Year Honours List, is one of the best-known figures in contemporary British music. An extraordinarily virtuosic percussionist as well as an engaging personality, she has long been subject to considerable media interest.
Touring internationally with her huge array of instruments (the world's first full-time classical percussion soloist), she has played with all the world's major orchestras, consistently winning massive critical acclaim. Her sixteen solo albums (including twelve on the RCA/BMG label) have reached a remarkably diverse public, as have her numerous collaborations with musicians from the non-classical world.
She has performed with Indian, Indonesian and South American traditional musicians, and in the mid-'90s co-wrote and recorded several songs with the Icelandic singer Björk, including the hit single My Spine. Her 2000 solo album Shadow Behind the Iron Sun, produced by acclaimed rock music producer Michael Brauer, entirely comprises studio improvisations by Evelyn.
In addition to her life as a performer and recording artist, Evelyn has established for herself a considerable reputation as a composer for film and television. One of her earliest credits was her music for a series of Tony Kaye-directed TV commercials for Mazda Cars in the mid-'90s - which was so original that it spawned a host of imitations. She was nominated for a BAFTA Award for her music for the first series of Lynda La Plante's ground-breaking crime drama Trial & Retribution (La Plante Productions for ITV), and has gone on to record many subsequent series of the show. Other drama credits include two four-hour versions of Bramwell (Whitby Davison Productions for ITV); and Blind Ambition (Coastal Productions/Yorkshire Television).
Documentary credits include 3BM TV's 4-part study of the history of terrorism, The Age of Terror, produced by Oscar-winning producer Jon Blair and transmitted on the Discovery Channel to coincide with the first anniversary of the September 11th outrage. She also composed the title music for two series of the BBC's Soundbites, which she herself presented.
In 1999 Evelyn scored her first feature film, The Trench, a First World War drama written and directed by the novelist William Boyd. In 2004 Evelyn collaborated with the film-maker Thomas Riedelsheimer on his film Touch the Sound. Described as "A Sound Journey With Evelyn Glennie", the film explores the phenomenon of sound as Evelyn experiences it, in her life and work, and contains much original music by Evelyn, some co-written with the renowned guitarist Fred Frith. The soundtrack has been released by Normal Records.
Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
A documentary which explores the connections among sound, rhythm, time, and the body by following percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is nearly deaf.
Featuring Ornette Coleman, David Izenzon, Charles Moffett
Director Dick Fontaine set out to catch the music, the thoughts and the personalities of Ornette Coleman's mid-1960s trio during two days in Paris while they worked on scoring a film. He did that job exceptionally well. There is a memorable performance of Ornette's 'Sadness' (complete and uninterrupted from David Izenzon's bowed introduction to the end!) during which Fontaine quickly cuts away from images of the musicians responding to the movie screen to concentrate his cameras directly on the players' serious, passionate involvement with their improvisations. It is one of the best filmed jazz performances ever captured on video.
Hans Richter (Johann Siegfried Richter) was born in Berlin on April 6, 1888. Following a brief program in architecture at the University of Berlin in 1906, Richter attended the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Berlin and in Weimar in 1908 and 1909, respectively. His early commitment to the arts was interrupted by service in the German army between 1914 and 1916, at which point he was wounded on the Russian front and given his discharge.
Moving to Zurich, neutral capital and international haven for pacifists and war resisters, Richter encountered the Dadaists in 1916. Although his participation in the movement was limited, he did contribute to their journal, Dada, and occasionally participated in their events. Richter's early Zurich style betrays strong roots in Expressionism, especially that of Wassily Kandinsky, as well as the influence of Hans Arp who, like Richter, resided in Zurich at the time. By 1918 this tendency began to give way to a more abstract style in which any traces of naturalism were almost completely suppressed. It was in 1916, while living in Zurich, that Richter received his first one man show at the Galerie Hans Goltz in Munich. Exhibitions of his work in Zurich included two group shows, Dada and Die Neue Kunst: Dada, in 1917 and 1918 at the Galerie Corray and the Salon Wolfsburg.
In 1918 Richter was introduced to Viking Eggeling, also a Dada sympathizer, with whom he worked closely for the next seven years in the formulation of an abstract cinema. Although no films were actually made in Zurich, studies, often in the form of scrolls, were arranged contrapuntally. In their succession of images they suggested strong sources in and close analogies to music.
In 1918 Richter returned to Berlin, where Dada had preceded him by one year. In Kleinkolzig, near Berlin, he and Eggeling further pursued their work in the cinema. By the early 1920s Richter had produced his now-famous Rhythm 21, closely followed in time by Rhythm 23 and Rhythm 25. Although loosely affiliated with the Berlin Dada group, his interests were quickly moving in the direction of International Constructivism, as were those of Raoul Hausmann and other members of the Berlin Dada group. Nevertheless, Richter clearly perceived Dada as an important part of his young career and in Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1965) provided the movement with one of its most complete and reliable memoirs.
Richter's new sympathies were clear from his substantial contributions to the Dutch journal De Stijl. Edited by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, it became the publication organ of what was Western Europe's most systematic movement in the non-objective arts. These activities, spanning a period from 1921 to 1927, were paralleled by Richter's own publication, "G" (Gestaltung), in Berlin. For Richter, the Dada/Surrealist side of his nature was never in conflict with the Constructivist side. Thus in 1927 he worked on a film, never completed, with the Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich at the same time that he collaborated with the Surrealists on the film Ghosts After Breakfast. The latter was as full of typically irrational juxtapositions as the former was informed by rigor and discipline.
The 1920s and early 1930s were a time of intense activity for Richter's filmmaking. Following a short stay in Russia he returned to Switzerland in 1933 and began rein-vestigating some of his earlier pictorial concerns. That same year his Berlin studio was raided by the Nazis and much of his work was destroyed. Richter's return to earlier concerns is partially reflected in his inclusion in 1937 in the exhibition Konstruktivistern in Kunsthalle, Basle.
In 1941 Richter emigrated to the United States. He was naturalized ten years later, in 1951, the year of his marriage to Frida Ruppel. Upon his arrival in America he joined the American Abstract Artists group—a distant cousin of De Stijl—and was exhibited in Maitres de l'Art Abstrait at the Helena Rubenstein Gallery in New York. From 1942 to 1956 Richter taught and served as director at the Institute of Film Techniques at the City College of New York. Richter's second one-man show was held in New York in 1946 at the Art of This Century Gallery, an organization founded by Peggy Guggenheim and of which Richter became president in 1948. One of his best works, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1946 to 1948), was made during these years in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder. Later in his career Richter, who always walked a fine line between spontaneity and structure, was much esteemed as one of the important founders of Concrete Art.
Among countless others, Richter received prizes at the Venice Biennale (1948) and at the Berlin International Film Festival (1971). He was awarded the Cross of Merit and the Grand Cross by the German government in 1964 and 1973 respectively. After a varied and important career, Richter died in Locarno, Switzerland, on February 1, 1976.
A major posthumous retrospective exhibition was held at the Akademie der Künst, Berlin (1982). Richter's work may be found in the collections of The National Gallery, Berlin; Museum 20 Jahrhunderts, Vienna; Galeria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome; Musée National d'Arte Moderne, Paris; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others.
Richter himself was an active and articulate author and began publishing in 1920; see The Political Film (1941), Dada Art and Anti-Art (1965), and Hans Richter by Hans Richter (1971). Besides these and other books, Richter wrote and published many articles on film history and theory and for extended periods worked as a film critic. Hans Richter (1965), introduced by Herbert Read, includes an extensive autobiographical text by the artist. Useful discussions of Richter are included in The Pictorial Language of Hans Richter by Roberto Sanesi (1975), although the best guide to his work is the catalogue for the Berlin exhibition Hans Richter, 1888-1976: Dadaist, Film-pionier, Maler, Theoretiker (1982). Additional material is readily available, including monographs, catalogues of various aspects of his work, and a large body of periodical literature.
This interview with Morton Feldman was conducted in 1967 by composer and musicologist Jean-Yves Bosseur, then aged twenty. Bosseur went on to study composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. The interview was conducted in English originally, but the audiotapes have been lost. Therefore until now this interview has only been available in French translation.
My “re-translation” to English was facilitated by Jean-Yves Bosseur’s French translation, which captured the spirit of Feldman’s cadence. Anyone familiar with Feldman’s copious interviews, lectures, and essays quickly recognizes the vocabulary and concerns that recur frequently throughout his career. Just as in Feldman’s late music, certain motifs return again and again, but they are never exactly the same, and it is this variation which is compelling.
Today interest in Feldman’s music is still limited in France, compared to Germany and the English-speaking world. Therefore it seems all the more relevant to provide access to this important interview to English speakers, despite the small transformations in vocabulary that will inevitably occur in any translation, let alone a “double” translation. The richness of the interview’s content will hopefully compensate for any discrepancies.
The interview was originally published by Editions Klincksieck (Paris) in their journal Revue d'Esthétique, in the "Musiques nouvelles" section of the 1967-68 edition, pages 3-8. It was republished in Jean-Yves Bosseur’s excellent book about Feldman, Écrits et Paroles (Éditions L’Harmattan, 1997).
-Ivan Ilić
JYB: Does silence play a role in your music?
MF: My music is inside the silence. That’s all I can say. To use a fashionable term, it’s a “mystique!”
JYB: What meaning do you give to musical time?
MF: (prolonged silence) I don’t understand it.
JYB: Among the different musical parameters, is there one you favor?
MF: Objection, your honor! If you use terms like that in front of Morton Feldman, that means you’d like to think about his music in a different context. So, if you like, this question doesn’t apply to me.
JYB: Do you feel that your work is developing?
MF: Ouch! Another one of those words, “develop,” that one can’t apply to me. I don’t think that I belong to a musical continuity.
JYB: What about moment form?1
MF: It’s like a kid at play. First, he plays with lead soldiers, and then he gets sick of them. He goes and finds his doll; he tosses it aside. Then he goes back to his little train. That’s moment form. It’s the idea of the immediacy of what you’re hearing, without the obstruction of any kind of dialectic. But when you’re talking about moment form, you’re thinking of Stockhausen, right? (Feldman gives me a mischievous little look) I’m right, aren’t I?
JYB: Yes.
MF: So, Stockhausen makes a dialectic out of this state that others of us think is completely normal! You get it?
(I must admit that I don’t really get it.)
MF: It’s simple; we no longer have to make a system to live in the present.
JYB: What are the problems, in your opinion, that most composers face today?
MF: Problems are always personal, not collective.
JYB: What are the qualities that a young composer must have?
MF: Guts. The young are impatient, they want everything. This problem of having everything, it’s what they’ve lived with, and it’s the reason why they don’t get much of anything. Outside of music, they want to make a life, a community. For an artist, that’s not possible. This idea is my last vestige of an old-fashioned composer: working in solitude.
Now, take the Americans: the artist himself, in principle, is the machine, by [virtue of] what he does: everything is inside him in the beginning, then he penetrates his work. His creation is not the machine, it’s something else; there’s a dialectic inside, [that’s] included. We live in a great virtuosity, not in machinery, in a frenzied attempt to try to explain everything.
The number of misinterpretations of Cage’s philosophy is crazy. People took his ideas too literally. You know, when he talks about art being included in life, the two becoming one, when he says that everything is music … well now! One can find that, in his music, not everything is music: he uses instruments, contact microphones, [but] he’s not taking over Messiaen’s aviaries. Really, there’s a lot of life that he leaves on the side, he doesn’t use Mallarmé, Char, Artaud; obviously you don’t find that in his music. You see, there’s a gap, a discrepancy between what he says and what he does — just an illusion.
Honestly, I couldn’t live inside my art. I’d die inside. You understand? I like to live well, to eat well, I like to live fast, because in my art I feel myself dying very, very SLOWLY.
JYB: Which audience is the best?
MF: I don’t know what to think. Everyone listens for different reasons. They like you for ridiculous reasons, they hate you for stupid ones — what I want to say is, the public surprises me more than I surprise them with my music.
JYB: How do you work, harmonically speaking?
MF: You know the expression “playing by ear”? You know, these people that sit down at a piano, and … I compose by ear, and there you have it. Boulez, they say, doesn’t necessarily care about the way a piece sounds; he puts the emphasis on the structure of a piece. I’m only interested in what I can perceive.
JYB: What do you think about composers who close themselves off in a technique, in a system?
MF: That’s like those guys who are forty years old who still live in their mother’s skirts.
JYB: Give some advice to a young composer!
MF: You know The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann? In it he said: “Farewell! You’re going to live now, or fall. You haven’t got much of a chance.” That’s the only meeting point between art and life.
Cage studied with Schoenberg. One night, Schoenberg told him, “I ask myself why you persevere; you have no sense of harmony. And if a composer has no feel for that, it’s as if he is banging his head against a wall.” And Cage replied, “Then I’ll spend the rest of my life banging my head against that wall.”
That’s interesting: how can one compose and continue without dialectics? Even someone like Kierkegaard, who one could imagine was less of a dialectician than Hegel — no, he was even more of a dialectician — thought that he wouldn’t be able to think unless he knew dialectics like the back of his hand.
I was born differently: I am incapable of thinking if I haven’t driven away all traces of dialectics from my mind. Dialectics has nothing to do with logic, [it] has nothing to do with reason; it’s just an idea, fixed; nothing.
What does that mean? I have to have an idea, then another idea, bigger this time, then another, and that becomes a mentality. I leave one idea for another. I leave yesterday’s form for tomorrow’s form, for a “momentary form.” It’s a mentality, to live in moving ideas. An artist must throw himself in somewhere, stick to it, and not look for salvation … or ideas.
That’s what “moment form” is. “Oh yeah, but … ” the French are going to say, “Baudelaire insisted on the tyranny of the moment.” OK, it’s true; I’m constantly oppressed by the moment … but only in my own art. (laughs) Without a doubt the French are oppressed every moment of their lives, but not in their art. (a malicious laugh)
JYB: Are you stimulated by electronic means?
MF: Can my music stimulate electronic means? (laughs) I have no idea. I don’t like electronic sounds: it’s like a beautiful woman … who’s bald.
JYB: What instruments do you like to work with?
MF: I like instruments that have a certain anonymous quality, that can easily metamorphose themselves to enter the musical world. If you really want to know the truth, instruments embarrass me. It’s like musical time: I don’t understand it. I hear a sound: an instrument makes it, for example by its breath, [the instrument] changes it, gives it its own color, destroys it abstract quality, or its reality.
Orchestration doesn’t interest me in that sense. What interests me is that instruments should make beautiful sounds; not that beautiful sounds should make the instruments themselves sound good. That’s what gives me a lot of problems. I have to find a compromise between the sounds and the instruments. I hate doing that. The problem is psychological: there are instruments, there is my music, and both have to be adjusted. One could ask why I don’t invent other instruments; I don’t have the time.
When we listen to a recording, we accept the compromise. The recording is not equivalent to the reality of the music: it’s more than larger-than-life. The recording enlarges, [and] looks at the music through a microscope. What I want is to listen to music through a telescope. The scene unfolds by a window facing the Invalides in Paris. Feldman grabs a coat-hanger that bears a striking resemblance to a bicorne hat, and puts it on his head.
MF: For most composers, Boulez is Napoleon, right?
MF: So what! Stockhausen is just Bismarck, that’s all!
JYB: Are there any works which have influenced you?
MF: I love all music that isn’t aggressive, [music] which lets you hear what you want to hear: Josquin, Machaut, Mozart.
JYB: … and what about literature? Mallarmé, Artaud, Char …
MF: NO! Just music!
JYB: Are you close to oriental theories?
MF: I am an oriental. (laughs)
JYB: What do you think of the generation that followed Boulez’s generation?
MF: After Boulez you get “pre-Boulez,” with no philosophy.
JYB: What do you think about the influence of Cage?
MF: What do you think about the influence of Socrates?
JYB: A great man, without a doubt!
MF: Yeah, but they killed him.
JYB: So, you think that Cage might be … ?
MF: That’s what’s happening, because we’re starting to accept him.
JYB: What do you think about La Monte Young?
MF: In art, I never discourage anything that’s “composive.” If you do something once, it is “composive”; two times, it’s “imposive.”2 Looking for correlations between my music and, say, paintings by my friends, can only be interesting in an oblique way. It’s a problem of temperament more than anything else. For example, the temperaments of artists like Rothko, Pollock, [de] Kooning, and Kline are very similar to mine. I know their research intimately.
How does one define these temperaments, these attitudes?
They are, at any rate, fundamentally different than European temperaments.
Look, take a French painter — since this is a French interview, we can even take two: Delacroix and Poussin. They imagined art like an incredible machine. By the way, Delacroix talked about his painting like a machine. And then, he fabricates it indefinitely, this incredible machine where everything is thought through, where all the elements relate to one another.
JYB: Do you think your music can have the same effect on the public as a drug?
MF: I always thought that drugs could do you a lot of good.
JYB: So, you don’t think that your music … ?
MF: No. I think that hypnotism happens when people listen to music, that is to say very rarely. (laughs) The experience is so foreign to them!
JYB: What do you think of Pop Art?
MF: Socialist Realism for the rich!
JYB: According to you, isn’t the musical life of Paris totally sophisticated?
MF: Not more than in the Congo! You shouldn’t worry about it too much.
Last year, Cage was invited to the University of Honolulu. When he got back, I asked him, “What’s going on over there?” and he replied, “They’re one hour behind us!” The musical life of big cities like Paris, London, New York, Moscow (Moscow is a big city, you know!) is wrapped up in the artistic politics of the country. I would say, wisely, that an artist can never rise above the politics of his country. Whatever the politics, such will be the art. Let’s take a city like Paris, which has its own politics. All the young composers can get caught up in its politics.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the closer you get to big cities, the more you realize that the intelligentsia there is rigid, jaded. Living in Paris or in New York is like having a passport for stupidity.
New York is no different than Paris; New York has its own pride. The people are from New York, they are New York, which they would like to believe can’t be bad. I just came from Great Britain, I spent three weeks there. I left from Scotland. Their audiences are informed; they knew my music. Then, I went down, down, closer and closer to London. Cambridge? Stupid!
That’s why it’s best to stay away from the big cities; too many things, too many stupid things…
