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Category: Music
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Plagues, Autos-da-fé, and Music
I was looking for an excuse to sing with some of my favourite musicians: Nick Roth, Francesco Turrisi and my sister Deirdre O’Leary. I’d had the pleasure of working extensively with all of them in the past, but never all together at once. Since we all come from and inhabit different musical worlds I had to find a place where those worlds could overlap harmoniously. Nick plays saxophones and percussion in mostly jazz and contemporary realms. Francesco plays keyboards and percussion in mostly early music and jazz domains. Deirdre is a classical and contemporary-classical clarinettist and I sing mostly early music and traditional songs. We all delight in improvising.
I’ve long been drawn to the fabulously intricate music of the fourteenth century Ars Nova and Ars Subtilior, an even more sophisticated sub-genre of the Ars Nova that developed in the last quarter of that century especially at the court of the anti-pope in Avignon. This music features rhythmically and contrapuntally complex lines that remind me of avant-garde jazz, lines of notated ornamentation playing against each other like wild improvisations.
I wanted a story that could be spun into a musical project and, having a penchant for all things gothic (especially of the fourteenth century kind), started researching the Black Death. While I was studying the effects of the plague in Ireland I came across a remarkable story of colliding cultures in medieval Kilkenny, a story so grimly enthralling that it could have come straight out of Hollywood (I wish it could have been directed by Stanley Kubrick!).
The story took place in Ireland at a turbulent time, a time of invasions, war, lawlessness, famine and plague. A time of fear, violence and almost unimaginable mutability.
In 1317 Richard de Ledrede – an English Franciscan of the Order of Friars Minor – arrived in Kilkenny, appointed by the papal court in Avignon as the new Bishop of Ossory (1317–1361) and immediately set about challenging the secular authorities and making a name for himself as a zealous moraliser and “scourge of heresy”. In 1324 he arraigned Dame Alice Kyteler, a wealthy businesswoman and serial espouser (she married four times) on the charge of being a witch. He alleged that she denied Christ, enchanted the citizens of Kilkenny with magic potions – made from entrails of cocks which had been sacrificed to demons, dead men’s nails, hair and brains of boys who had been buried unbaptised – all cooked up in the skull of a decapitated thief, that she had an incubus named Artisson with whom she had sex and who manifested as either a cat, a shaggy black dog or a black man, and that she murdered her first three husbands and was poisoning her fourth.
Dame Alice, however, had powerful allies who protected her and facilitated her flight to England where she vanished from history. The notorious inquisition that ensued was peppered with political intrigue, excommunication, charges of heresy and counter-charges of heresy with the bishop himself being imprisoned in Kilkenny castle for seventeen days during which time he placed the entire diocese under interdict (no masses, baptisms, marriages or burials could take place). When released, he refused to leave quietly, but had his full episcopal regalia brought to him and, with his clergy and parishioners, made a solemn procession to St Canice’s Cathedral where a Te Deum mass was celebrated.
Though Dame Alice escaped with her life, her servant Petronilla de Meath was not so fortunate. She was captured, flogged through six parishes and a confession of sorcery was extracted. She was burned alive at the stake for the heresy of witchcraft, the first person in history to be thus charged and immolated.
Dame Alice’s son William Outlaw was charged with heresy for defending his mother. He was forced to recant, hear at least three masses a day for three years, feed the poor and to pay for the roof of St Canice’s Cathedral to be covered with lead. The roof subsequently collapsed under the weight.
This became the backdrop to our music.
The Red Book of Ossory is a fourteenth century medieval manuscript compiled in Kilkenny. Pre-eminent among the manuscript’s texts are sixty remarkable Latin poems by Bishop Richard de Ledrede. The same fertile imagination (Ledrede’s) that composed the phantasmagoric sorcery charges also composed beautiful, esoteric and richly imagistic poetry. The bishop instructed that these verses be sung by the priests, clerks and choristers of St. Canice’s “on the important holidays and at celebrations in order that their throats and mouths, consecrated to God, may not be polluted by songs which are lewd, secular, and associated with revelry, and, since they are trained singers, let them provide themselves with suitable tunes according to what these sets of words require”.
“Well,” I thought, “I’m a trained singer!”. So I set to work finding suitable tunes. I spent countless (happy) hours wandering through various medieval music sources (Chansonnier du Roi, Llibre Vermell de Montserrat, Codices Chantilly, Modena, Squarcialupi, etc.) and made speculative reconstructions of many of the bishop’s hymns.
Then, together with my fellow band members, in what was a charmed and wondrous process, we deconstructed those reconstructions. It was a true joy to make music with Nick, Deirdre and Francesco, a very happy and collaborative collision of cultures both in our rehearsals and onstage. And when we came together to make a record of our project, the synergetic spirit lived on as we made an essentially live recording, making music together in the same space and time.
With the name Anakronos I feel we are allowed (if not obliged) to take certain liberties with traditional notions of proper chronology. So, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone and Nord synthesizer breathe electric life into music that was written at least five centuries before electricity was harnessed, music that was written before and after the bishop’s poems, but that could have been sung to his words in his lifetime. And music that I wrote and we improvised.
But why sing the words of a witch-burner? Because they’re beautiful and I find it interesting to contemplate the contradictions that exist within people. As Stanley Kubrick said when asked if his characters were good or evil, “They are good AND evil!”.
For more about Caitríona O’Leary’s work see her official website. Anakronos ‘The Red Book of Ossory’ is now available via Heresy Records as a CD and high-quality download (available here) and streaming across online platforms.
Caitríona O’Leary (photograph by Laelia Milleri) -
Musician of the Month: Damien Lennon
Thought Experiments from Time’s End
History …is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.
(Walter Benjamin, XIV, Theses on the Philosophy of History).
Grammar expresses a human desire to control time. Regimented in terms of right and wrong, grammar draws lines by which people can express themselves as concurring or not with their own era. Breaking with grammar rules has often been seen as a form of resistance against the dominant forces of a time: take le verlan in disaffected French suburbs for example. But in corona times this paradigm has been inverted: the notion that humanity is at the heart of time has been annihilated. And now, our era has rejected us. Suddenly our grammar is exposed as fantasy. But wasn’t there always an implicit arrogance in the phrase “next week I will be sitting in Tulum drinking tequila”? It seems hubristic that humans are grammatically equipped to script their own future when anything can happen. Such reflections have been on my mind since our latest release flukishly coincided with the pandemic.
In 2016 Zeropunkt recorded some dystopian improvisations and then parked them. Fort Evil Fruit expressed interest in 2019 and we jumped. We decided to call the album Future Perfect Continuous, inspired by the presumptuousness implicit in the tense, and the promise of an eternally blissful and unshakable utopia suggested in the actual words. The album took slightly longer to release than planned, ultimately concurring with the pandemic, making the title uncanny in a world where time had stopped. Life as we knew it had ended. We’d left the rigid regime of “time” and entered what Henri Bergson called durée (duration).[i] Human temporality had been exposed as an absurdity. Suddenly duration, not time, reigned over human existence, and we were in profound existential shock.
The collapse of routine temporality can have a revolutionary feel about it. Seismic events upending time systems have occurred before. A revolutionary calendar was adopted in Republican France from 1793 to 1805. And Walter Benjamin mentions the later 1830 revolutionaries shooting at public clocks in Paris in order to stop time.[ii] A collapse of normal temporality can feel like a messianic occasion for progressive change. And it can be. But this overlooks how forms of human order can tend to just exchange places. Old order time gets replaced by revolutionary time, which becomes new order time, which in turn becomes old order time replaced by ‘new’ time, etc.. Humanity gets encircled by its own temporal systems, enclosed in its own bubble. Meanwhile, non-human time scales, the geological and the cosmic, continue happily in their duration – simply being.
The coronavirus suggests we’re not special after all. Our personal and collective narratives hang by a thread, overblown in their significance and existing within scripted histories. Geological and cosmic history are very indifferent to our stories. There is undeniable arrogance in assuming our (hi)stories are the ultimate ones. We’re not the official account of the world – not by a long shot. Our consciousness of cosmic immensity doesn’t help us live our miniscule lives any better. Specialists in morbidity despair at the vast nothingness of the universe, but most people ignore it altogether. However, denial increases our nausea and dread doesn’t help. Being a speck in the void isn’t reassuring, but if you think about it, speck and void need each other to be.
Remember that famous Carl Sagan “pale blue dot” poster, depicting Earth as “a mote of dust in a sunbeam”? Our planet is shown as a tiny dot in the cosmic dark. It should make us despair, but we realise that without the dot the immense darkness is indecipherable nothingness, and without the black backdrop the tiny dot cannot be seen. They both need each other to be what they are. Our microscopic relevance to the cosmos might not seem encouraging, but that immense emptiness can’t be discerned without our tiny cogitations. And, of course, if nothingness is the cosmic majority, doesn’t that make our puny somethingness a very concentrated sort of special? In a way, we register the cosmic existence because we express it. The cosmos can’t recognize itself – its recognition happens in the expression we give to it. This doesn’t mean the cosmos only exists when we exist. It just means its being is not registered – because we aren’t there. Our expression is the thing that gives being recognition.
The desert is the best place to go if you are obsessed with these things. It immediately tames any extravagant ideas you might have about human narratives. I visit the Mojave Desert semi-regularly. There, human time really does appear pathetic. When you immerse yourself in its rocks and dust, you are stunned by the vast theatre of geological time.
Photograph by Damien Lennon The desert is geological time’s grand museum. There are rocks there of unfathomable age. The time-scape of the desert constantly reminds you it can swallow you in a cosmic equivalent of less than a microsecond. In fact, gazing into it, you realise that it already has, that you are behind it in temporal terms. The “you” standing there is a premonition of the ghost you haven’t yet become to yourself. The significance of your story has already been unwritten in dust. The desert is way ahead of you, and way behind you. As a temporal expanse, it precedes you so thoroughly, and succeeds you so thoroughly, that whatever little moment you think you are having there is just an insignificant vanity. To the desert it means nothing whatsoever. Thinking like this makes it hard to reckon the place of the human story.
Even botanical time in the desert can be extraordinary by human standards. There are creosote bushes in the Mojave called “King Clone” which are about 11,700 years old. When you see them in the searing sun they look quite mundane. You would never imagine them to be extraordinary. And I suppose, on a cosmic or geological scale, they aren’t. But we don’t process time that way. Such scales make us feel even more irrelevant when considering how difficult it is to survive the desert. Most humans wouldn’t last than 10 days there without water. That’s quite a contrast with 11,000-year-old bushes.
Walter Benjamin both loved and doubted the human story. He dreamt of blasting fragmented instances out of oppressive narrative history, disrupting its clean lines by elevating sudden intensities that blow the continuum apart and resonate across time. A salient shard from the past would slice into a stunned present – bleeding chronological time to death. I wonder what he would have made of the Mojave, a zero point that obliterates linear time utterly. There, all credibility in human continuity from past to present to future vanishes. The desert proves continuity is not the succession of moments, not a continuum, but continuance: one cosmically long state of being.
Ultimately along cosmic and geological scales, we are irrelevant. And despite earning our own era, the catastrophic Anthropocene, the monumental expanse of cosmic time from nothing to nothing surely relegates us to the smallest universal footnote. Maybe we take ourselves too seriously, but do we have any other option? We are clearly in some sort of time, so how do we live it? Perhaps we should abandon the sense of ourselves as a story, a narrative; a beginning, middle and end.
Instead we could think of ourselves as a state of being only – before which we were nothing, and after which we will be nothing. If there is immense nothingness before us and after us, should we despair? We’re not as enduring as helium and hydrogen, and we are a minute blip on the universal scale. But instead of despairing, maybe we could be minimalist and egoless about it. Couldn’t we see our lives as a thrilling fluke, a fleeting thing dense with multivarious experience, like some rich sub-atomic, micro-temporal explosion? Something the cosmos knows as a glitch, but we experience as the condensed totality of our passions. Maybe we could be irrelevant and exceptional.
For anybody these questions are pretty traumatic. For an artist they get invasive. I prefer improvising music to writing it, because I want to engage the single moment and then let it go. When it works it’s really something. But sometimes it doesn’t. We’re not always pre-disposed to being-in-the-present – we get distracted. And I’m not suggesting it’s “better” to improvise than write. I really do admire people who write great songs or pieces of music, who leave some sense of legacy. Most of my heroes are these people. Yet I’m half suspicious that this is an atavistic romanticism I got contaminated by. I can’t help feeling I’ve accepted this idea of legacy (a sort of calcified time product) as a necessary fiction we assent to, despite knowing it’s bullshit. I mean, five minutes in the desert tells you it’s bullshit.
Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore can help us out of this paradox. They promoted the notion that poetry can happen when we recognise our existential fictions as fictions and still “believe” in them.[iii] They advocated the idea of being “literalists of the imagination”, people tasked with creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”[iv] That breaks with a certain type of “grammar” of course. It rejects a logical order – that distinct category between imaginary and real. But it also creates while destroying. We use the rules to break the rules, spinning in our circles. Our era has rejected us, absolutely. It wants to void us. And yet we are here, modest as a speck. Time appears perhaps to be an imaginary garden after all, but we are the real things who must inhabit it.
Damien Lennon is a member of experimental improv group Zeropunkt. His new collection of minimalist poetry was recently published in a dual edition with Rosmarie Waldrop by hardPressed poetry (available here).
Photograph by Paddy Kiernan [i] Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Cosimo Inc. 2007.
[ii] Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1973.
[iii] Wallace Stevens. “Imagination as Value”. In The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.
[iv] Marianne Moore. “Poetry”. In New Collected Poems. Heather Cass White ed. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017.
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Quarantine (and then there will be the music)
It was the silence. The sound of total silence. A deep peaceful vibration carrying the bells from a church I never knew I could hear from this window. The acoustic of silence was able to carry it as if it was across the street, like an apartment in Paris or Vienna, but here in NYC around the corner from Leonard Bernstein Way, birds were singing louder than any singer at nearby Juilliard or Lincoln Center. This was April 4th 2020 and the city for the first time, the world for the first time, was totally shut down. No noise on West 66th Street except for the sound of birds and the feel of a clear breeze. A personal miracle just happened to me because of the pandemic, I don’t have to move out of my apartment of twenty-four years in a building I’ve lived in for thirty-five.
Twenty-nine years ago, 1989 my first Saturn return, I had been given my first big break by one of the greatest channelers of music, of language, of life, Leonard Bernstein. LB chose me to go on for an ailing famous singer, it was the only time he conducted Candide the operetta/musical he wrote for Broadway after his signal identifying masterpiece, West Side Story.
Leonard Bernstein
I had been anointed by the master. Though I was in love with Prince as much as Mozart, LB was a conduit, a crystal microcosm to what my life would be about for the next twenty-nine years. My second Saturn in 2019 resulted in an amazing bookend, I was onstage singing several roles – one of them Queen Elizabeth I – in the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando, at the Vienna State Opera. I had sung in just about every major opera house except for this jewel of a theater which has been bedazzled by the presence of all the great opera composers. But Saturn brought me to this mystical coda and with it, I brought ten years of having had a Uranian shock, a change in musical direction from a very successful classical career into the realms of pop, funk, rock, jazz not only singing and on keys, but as a songwriter, music director, producer, arranger and record label founder.
So on December 9th 2019 – almost twenty nine years to the day when I stepped on stage with LB and the London Symphony orchestra – the call coming on a pay phone outside of the Belgian National Opera in Brussels; all happening so quickly and inexplicably, that no one could be there to witness it, having to patiently wait years before the video that was made could be viewed on something not even invented yet: YouTube. However, in 2019, this Saturn return, this opening night there was the time to make sure everyone could be there that was important in my musical life. George Clinton, the Godfather of Funk with whom my beloved funk-rock band, Miss Velvet and The Blue Wolf had toured the globe for the past three years; friends, family, fellow musicians, all were there in the hallowed hall of Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven and Berg, documenting this spectacular evening on iPhones, Instagram, Facebook, and live streaming.
New York
The planets were all converging behind the scenes to set the stage for the coming Age of Aquarius; the convergence of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn; heralding the end of an era and the last big party before Covid-19. I returned to New York from Vienna in mid-January after spending my birthday there alone, enjoying the solitude and loneliness after a busy and exciting year. Always superstitious of how one spends one’s birthday and New Year’s, as a way to set a tone for the coming year, in hindsight, it was not only precognitive, but I guess good to know I felt pretty damned good in my solitude.
I walked around Vienna on January 13th and reflected on what had happened in just a year’s time from one birthday to the next: the release of my second solo album, High Tides with a radio tour on the label I founded, Isotopia Records; accompanying George Clinton and his wife on the red carpet at the 2019 Grammy’s; a tour to Hawaii, Australia and Japan with Miss Velvet and the Blue Wolf; playing with the band upon our return at the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards to honor George Clinton, then forty-five more shows with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic on the One Nation Under the Groove Tour; the release of the band’s second album which I produced this time with George Clinton as featured guest; the release of a new artist, Lemoyne Alexander and then suddenly it was October and the contract I had held in my hands for three years for the Vienna State Opera, was about to become more than a promise and a piece of paper, it was about to become real. And this time, my two mini dachshunds would come with me as I would be in Vienna for three months.
Upon my return to 66th street, dragging twelve suitcases and the nostalgia of leaving Europe behind, I found that the front door to my apartment had been taken down and replaced with a new door by the building’s management company. Of course, no one noticed that on the door they disposed of was a painting I had done years before and the new door was a plain white generic one made to fit in with the ‘new renovations’ to ensure everything looked uniform, corporate, anodyne. The dis-ease of greed and herd decorating. I left my suitcases unpacked tripping on them every day, with the excuse ‘well you have to move and now with this vulgar white door, who cares, you can do it’.
Creative Sanctuary
You see this apartment was my spot, my creative sanctuary I came back to ten years earlier after my life had fallen apart. Discovering that having doormen who knew me since I walked through those doors as a hopeful twenty-three year old singer – being there through my parents’ divorce, two failed marriages, bringing stepchildren back and forth, the deaths of close friends and pets, my successes and disappointments, discrete and not so discrete love affairs and always the suitcases – were more comfortable and reassuring than family at times.
The Wheel of Fortune allowed me to keep my apartment in New York City and staying in this spot had become mystical – not only because 65th street would be named Leonard Bernstein Way – but also because I had inherited Andrew Watt’s piano, the great pianist who also received his big break from LB.
Andre was approached at the last minute to go on for an ailing Glenn Gould for the nationally televised broadcast of the Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic Live from Lincoln Center series. Andre would be the first African-American pianist and classical artist to break that glass ceiling. His story is what brought me to this building and New York in the first place: the longtime partner of my piano teacher’s daughter in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, Andre and my parents’ generosity opened the door to my dream of being able to move to NYC, as he had an apartment across the street from Lincoln Center with a piano he wasn’t using. So, in 1984 after a summer as the youngest apprentice with Santa Fe Opera, I was told the best way to build a career as an opera singer was to move to New York or Europe; little did I know that history would magically repeat itself presenting me with the same opportunity as Andre, to jump start my career.
I didn’t unpack after Vienna and for weeks tripped on my suitcases, what was the point of unpacking since I had to move – the new door being a daily reminder. I was finding the emotional strength to say goodbye to my adult roots: my paintings all over the walls and my recording studio, the foundation of Isotopia Records.
In February, I saw more Broadway shows than I had in years; I went to New York City Ballet as often as possible, off and off-off Broadway shows, foreign films, it was as if I knew something was coming. I was voraciously having every New York experience as if for the last time. I even produced a music video on the coldest day in February – all over the city – with everyone involved feeling the love and magic of this one of a kind world haven for creativity and inspiration.
We could be next…
By the time the week of March 11th came around and the rumour of this virus running through Italy had ravaged and shut down that country, I was feeling like we could be next as New York is a city of international visitors. Friday March 13th, our lives changed on a dime. By April 4th it was clear I wasn’t going to have to move. They were going to let me stay another year. With the shutdown in place I couldn’t move my suitcases to storage, so as I write this on day seventy-five, they sit as a reminder of the years of being a global citizen, artist, the adventure of travel and discovery.
I painted the new door and it looked better than the one before it. I went to the piano and pressed the record button.
Every day at 7:00 pm when those of us who don’t have second homes to run to or the finances to escape, we cheer out the windows to remind each other we are here, we are not alone in our circumstantial solitude; the cheers, whistles, pot banging and trumpet blowing applauding the health care workers who for me had personal meaning as they saved a cherished friend’s life during this disaster; a five minute expression of our love and memory of the dream for what this city was and will be again, but it will be in a new way of discovery and communal survival. And then there will be the music…
Constance Hauman’s new album The Quarantine Trilogy is out now on Isotopia Records: https://isotopiarecords.com/. For more details of her work see: https://constancehauman.com/
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Joy
‘Art is only a ‘substitute’ as long as the beauty of life is deficient’ (Piet Mondrian, ‘Pure Art and Pure Plastic Art’ (1937)).[i] My work notebooks are full of quotes I have written out similar to this. Looking through the notebooks I have made over the past twelve years I find I am drawn repeatedly to artists who tend to be on the austere side. And I go beyond even these artistic “saints” and scribble down quotes from actual saints, monks and nuns. It was while reading Paul Schrader’s book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer that I came upon the only recorded statement from Fra Angelico: ‘art requires much calm and to paint the things of Christ one must live with Christ’.[ii]
I jotted that down in February 2017 – I must have already achieved my New Year’s resolutions by then and thought I could set the bar a bit higher. The second track on the album Joy, ‘a’ once had a subtitle which I had heard the Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho recite at the beginning of a talk he gave: ‘brothers and sisters in suffering, old age, sickness and death’.[iii] I eventually hid this subtitle as I was worried it might scare people away – I had even forgotten until this week that I had this text in my mind when I wrote the piece. I had spent the last few months wondering to myself what on earth this piece might be about and now I know!
Probably the most austere of all is one of my longtime heroes: the painter Agnes Martin. As if to chastise myself for the way I have spent my life I wrote this into my notebook: ‘art work… is not beneficial, nothing is gained from it, and it does not tell the truth. It is enjoyed or not according to the condition of the observer. A very small gesture of exultation’ (Agnes Martin from ‘The Untroubled Mind’).[iv]
Notes and sketch from the composer’s notebook You may ask why on earth do you find these quotes useful? I fully own up to having a tendency towards the austere myself: over the past five years I have gone at least twice a year on silent retreats in a Buddhist monastery and my biggest disappointment during this lockdown has been missing out on a cancelled ten-day silent meditation retreat at the monastery led by an amazing nun. But also reflecting on it for this article I suddenly realised that I probably need a corrective or balance to clichéd notions of what the arts exist for and the gush spewed out from the art and music worlds to continue making anything. Maybe I am very contrary (okay, I am) but when I read blanket statements about how art needs to reflect life (whatever that means and what if mine is really boring and mundane?!) I think of Martin at her fiercest: ‘art work…does not represent life because life is infinite, dimensionless. It is consciousness of itself. And that cannot be represented’ (Agnes Martin from ‘What We Do Not See If We Do Not See?’).[v]
So to save me from being lost forever in extreme austerity and the writings of Saint Theresa of Avila, I, and maybe you, have to thank the fact that I started performing my own work fourteen years ago. It has forced me to engage with the messier sides of life and realise the creative act is a bit blurrier than Martin might believe. After the first time I performed a piece of mine solely by myself a close friend came backstage and sobbed in my arms for around five minutes. It was a bit awkward as I had not expected such a reaction. Twenty minutes later another man had a good cry in front of me due to what he had felt my piece had said. A year later a couple asked me to play this piece ‘In Beautiful May’ at their wedding: I asked them repeatedly “are you sure? It doesn’t seem the most celebratory piece and seems to make grown men sob?” But, I ended up performing it at their wedding and everyone seemed extremely happy. As an aside, this is a good lesson in never second-guessing your audience.
‘The Spirit of Art’ performance by Betzwieser, Syha, and Hamilton at Halle 14 in 2011 And the first track on the on this new album ‘The Spirit of Art’, is far from austere and was the result of a process of what could be called grown-ups playing. A gallery in Leipzig, Halle 14, invited myself, the writer Ulrike Syha and the designer Hagen Betzwieser to make a work responding to the idea of archives. This was due to the gallery being the repository of failed applications for an Art fair. In the end we built a castle of boxes filled with the rejected artists’ work and we imagined some type of Art God living in the castle and I sang ‘The Spirit of Art’ inside the building while Hagen manually made dry ice.
Another of these new works, ‘product #1’ started as a love song and thank you to the man who organized a trip to Gdansk for us in 2008 after a particularly dark time. And ‘May’ was a melody that appeared from nowhere as I walked near Alexanderplatz in Berlin full of sadness and apparently a “sick stomach” missing an absent friend. It is clear from these examples that life always seeps in.
Andrew Hamilton with an array of birds visiting Sopot, Poland in 2008 It is there, also, of course in the monastery, sitting for hours on the ground where the real messiness of life presents itself but after a few days looking unflinchingly at the mess sometimes you can find brief glimpses of happiness that does not rely on anything external – maybe this is akin to what Agnes Martin refers to as ‘a very small gesture of exultation’.[vi] Perhaps that is the best I can aim for and in all my work I try to take these personal moments and transform/convert them into the abstract, to distill them. Indeed this process can be heard worked out over the duration of ‘product #1’. What begins as a love song gradually gets cut-up and manipulated until by the end it is like viewing an abstracted memory of that song, the personal becomes what Martin would call ‘dimensionless’.
Sketch for ‘May’ (2008) And how even if one piece begins with a clear idea or emotion during the work many other scraps get ‘pulled in’ to the creative momentum. For example I remember ‘a’ was also the result of seeing a painting by Klee called Freundlicher Ort (Friendly Place): I thought no one writes pieces about ‘friendliness’ in new music and that might be fun. Perhaps this made me reflect on childhood as I ended up using different systems of solfège in ‘a’ to recall the embarrassing memories of myself as an upstart boy during theory exams at the Royal Irish Academy of Music on Westland Row. During the sight-singing exams I would inform the examiner I could do it without solfège (I had an irrational hatred of solfège) and they, kindly and without laughing, allowed me.
The text by Ajahn Sumedho ‘brothers and sisters in suffering, old age, sickness and death” is saying, maybe, that we are all in this together and that is what the piece ‘a’ is probably about but it is also about friendliness, solfège and I even threw fragments of other pieces at it. But then again I forgot all of this completely when I had to find a way to actually structure the material and ultimately I went back to Mondrian and it was his dictum of ‘It is necessary that a horizontal or vertical line be constantly interrupted: for unopposed, these directions would again express something ‘particular’’ that guided how I wrote the final result. So, for me, once the actual writing begins, I often forget what gave the piece the initial ‘ignition’, the abstract takes over (perhaps Martin is saying that life ‘cannot be represented’ because it is so multi-faceted and memory so unreliable).
Sketch for ‘a’ (2014) The ‘beauty of life’ Mondrian referred to in the opening quote is found in the transformation of individual emotions or moments into pure energy and structure. We can experience a form of liberation from being able to ‘drop’ life in the actual making, performing and listening. Maybe Martin and on the opposing side, those who want art to reflect life and the world today are both right? (or maybe both completely wrong!).
Ultimately, then for me, it is about how I can combine and try to balance the man who loves abstraction, distilling everything down and goes on silent retreats with the man who often gets disapproving looks in the monastery for laughing loudly and sobs every time at that scene when Meryl Streep sings in Mama Mia! Here We Go Again (2018). I hope both can belong: I think the writer Robert Walser finds the balance and distills what could be my borrowed manifesto when he writes (in ‘My Endeavours’), ‘if I sometimes wrote at a venture, on impulse, it looked a bit comical to deadly earnest people; but I was experimenting with language, hoping that it contains an unknown livingness, the arousal of which is a joy’.[xi]
For more of Andrew Hamilton’s work see his official website: https://andyfhamilton.com/. Andrew’s album Joy is released on Ergodos today as a download and a limited edition CD (with download): https://ergodos.ie/shop/releases/joy/.
[i] Piet Mondrian, Pure Art and Pure Plastic Art, and Other Essays, New York: Wittenborn and Company, 1947, p. 32.
[ii] Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2018, p. 113.
[iii] Ajahn Sumedho, The Way It Is, Hertfordshire, England: Amaravati Publications, 1991, p. 140.
[iv] Agnes Martin, Writings, Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1992, p. 16.
[v] Ibid., p. 155
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Piet Mondrian, Piet Mondrian: From Figuration to Abstraction, London: Thames and Hudson: 1988, p. 198.
[viii] Ol Parker (director), Mama Mia! Here We Go Again, California: Universal Pictures, 2018.
[ix] Rober Walser, Speaking To The Rose: Writings 1912-1932, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, p. 102.
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Musician of the Month: Richard Egan
Considered Silence
An artist’s journey is one from noise to silence. In the beginning they need and want to be heard yet, at some point, silence will be required to stay sharp. They should never choose the sound of their own voice over the work. Staying quiet is not what artists are very good at but it is what needs to be done sometimes. Silence doesn’t have to last forever and invariably there will come a time when a fork in the road is reached: one way ‘stop talking’, the other ‘continue speaking’. The artist will feel in their bones when this fateful day arrives.
When I was younger I felt a lot more confident in my inner voice. I used to think of my subconscious as a shield against outside forces that might bring me down and also, as a key into a world behind the veil – where truth could be spoken without thinking too much. Songs felt like magical opportunities, a chance to present the best of myself to the world, and receive the wonders of it in return. A typical writing session would consist of me sitting, zoning out, letting a thought or idea come. And when a worthwhile thing came along I would attempt to fashion it – using the craftsman side of my brain – into something resembling a piece of art I could stand behind, and release.
I was conscious of looking for something that could be intimate and personal and also universal in a way. The first line that came to me when I wrote ‘Graveyard’ (2008) was ‘I kissed you in the graveyard’. This deceptively simple line was the exact kind that could open up a whole banana-bunch of possibilities. I was thinking about T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) and imagining the idea of a kiss in a world of death as a good old two-fingered salute to the grim reaper – the idea of two lovers sharing a brief, graveside moment, a microcosm of their whole lives. And the ambiguity of a line like, ‘it’s a short, short distance from the nipple to the soil’ appealed to me.
A song, about sneaking into a graveyard with a lover, could maybe communicate the shortness of life and the quicksilver importance of transcendental moments. These moments where time seems to freeze in order to allow your memory bank to open up a little wider to take in a scene you know you’ll never forget.
Experiences that make life worth living are perfect fodder for a song. Translating them is usually a sure-fire way to get people to nod and say, ‘Ahh I feel that…. where’s the merch table?’. This was how I used to write back in those times. I could kind of tell when an idea would resonate, and it was important for me to ‘be seen’ so I ran with this, and it was fairly successful for a while. Then I reached that fork in the road.
The silence began to present itself to me.
After a little success arrived for my songwriting I became suspicious of my methods. They did not provide the succour my soul was crying out for. In order to satisfy my own very personal itch I had to try something else. My work felt cheapened by taming the initial subconscious Eureka moment into something tailored to get people to notice. I could probably say goodbye to a mansion in Dalkey.
I began to dissect why the secondary part of the process felt so wrong. The craftsman side of my brain moulding the initial idea into a sellable shape bothered me and I struggled to understand why. It felt egotistical and selfish; it was like a vegetarian eating steak, completely ‘allowed’. Still, by the standards I had set myself, a failure of sorts (there’s nothing wrong with failure of course). My job as a songwriter changed. I now listened for ideas and lines except once they arrived I did not attempt to shape them. This method felt closer to a purity worth aiming for, closer to the unarguable truth of silence.
I listen to songs on my latest record Sentinel (2019) and I only have a vague idea what they are about. I like them all the more for it. In a track like the ‘The Sea Shade’ I can see it is somehow about loss but it doesn’t spell itself out. The tonality and the textures speak as much as the words, my voice submerged in the lake of its surroundings. And it’s not as much mine any more – it feels like everything – and yet it is me, inching towards saying something by not saying anything, trying to evoke silence by making noise.
On the title track ‘Sentinel’ the lyrical theme loosely revolves around kindness and accountability while it, crucially, floats above these concepts (you can check out the premiere of the beautiful 16mm video from director TJ O’Grady Peyton below). This looseness keeps me interested in continuing to work. I need to be confused by what I’m doing in order for me to allow it to be. Some might argue this could result in obtuse and self-indulgent work. I have allowed myself to place a bet that eventually this confusion will lead to understanding. That’s the artist’s wager.
Of course I have to accept that this might be folly and lead me to a place of complete redundancy. ‘The cruellest trick is that Sisyphus believes he is making progress. He would give up but the mountain peak seems closer every time’ (tweet via @ctrlcreep). I suppose we’ll see about that some day.
A few years ago I saw an artwork that was a piece of paper that the artist had stared at for many hours. The end result was this simple white sheet of paper in a frame, hung up for all to see – completely blank. This is where I know I’m heading to. The final form, the ultimate song.
Considered silence.
For more about Richie’s work as Jape:Official website: http://www.japemusic.net/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearejapeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/richiejape/Twitter: https://twitter.com/richiejape -
The First Cassandra Voices Podcast – Italian Library Music
Without music, life would be a mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Library Music’ is a vast catalogue of Italian records made mainly in the 1960s and 1970s by some of the finest musicians in the country, with Rome and Milan the centres of this exciting scene. Generally commissioned by RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster, musicians of the calibre of Piero Piccioni, Egisto Macchi, Alessandro Alessandroni – to mention a few – were hired to score background music to accompany TV shows, advertisements, and documentaries.
Although this phenomenon began life as generic soundtrack music, it was the genesis of a fertile music scene. Many of the musicians carried on their careers outside RAI, pursuing different styles, breaking new borders, forging a peculiar spaghetti western or polizziescogroove. Or like Ennio Morricone achieving worldwide recognition for scoring soundtracks like Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966).
This Italian Library — while sometimes referred to as obscure — encompassed avant-garde composition, classical harmony, psychedelia, and funk with brash horns, guitars, and futuristic synths prominent. It was a fertile ground for experimentation and creativity, strongly influenced by the social, economic and political dynamics of that epoch.
Voice and writing: Nicola Bigatti
Podcast Editor: Massimiliano Galli
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Musician of the Month: Maija Sofia
“It was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it and walk through.”
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
I’m going to start with a secret: I haven’t written a single good song since last August. It was the night after the sudden death of one of my favourite songwriters in the world, and I had spent the whole day writing an obituary. The summer had passed me by in a long, slow unshakeable depression, I was reeling from one too many painful happenings, and my desire to stare at the ceiling alone and cry and do nothing had far-overpowered any constructive desire to write.
Then, one hot night in August I was dog-sitting alone in an echoey, affluent house in Rathmines. The lights kept flickering off and the dogs kept barking at vague invisible things and I was on edge and jittery. To distract myself, I sat down at a plastic toy-keyboard in the kitchen and my first song in months fell fully-formed out of my hands. I played it over and over again and made a rough recording on my phone. The next day I walked around in the sun listening to the song over and over to remind myself that there is something in me, despite everything, that comes out when I least expect it, and gives me a song.
Ever since my album came out last November, I’ve been asked to talk about songs almost constantly – how I write them, why I write them, songs that I like, songs that have been important to me – and the more I have found myself trying to talk about songs, the more I become convinced that to talk too much about songs, to unpick them too delicately, is to do them a great disservice. The whole point of making a song is to evoke the strangeness that occurs when the right words are put to the right chords and something that cannot be addressed in everyday speech is expressed. I’m talking about good songs, there are plenty of dreadful songs out there that evoke nothing but the need to immediately switch it off.
I’m suspicious about people who talk about songwriting like it’s a day job, like it’s a tap that can be turned on at will and new words and melodies will flow out in abundance. I secretly think the people who work in this way rarely produce anything good. Maybe I’m jealous; if I sit down with the intention to write a new song, it won’t work, whatever I write will feel forced and boring and I’ll begin to convince myself I’ve lost the ability to do it. The truth I have had to accept is that if I knew how to write songs, if I knew how a song worked, I’d do it far more often. That said, there are some things that I do know.
Firstly, I know that it is very important to not let your ‘self’ get in the way of the work. In my experience, a good song can only be written after you’ve successfully gotten yourself out of the way. You have to try and accept that you are a conduit for the work and that the work is not you, it just travels through you. This is infuriating because we live in a world that measures our human worth against our capacity to produce. I think in order to write well you have to discard any sense of your art being a reflection of you – that way you can forgive yourself for the bad work, and also not let the good work go to your head too much.
A good song will be unshadowed by your intention or personality and will just be a mystery that reveals bit by bit itself over time, until months later will you realise – oh yes, that’s what that was about. I think I succeed to do this every ten songs or so, but it’s also important to write nine bad songs in order to really recognise a good one when it arrives.
Secondly, I know that in order to write good songs you have to truly love songs. This is obvious, but I think I started writing songs because as long as I can remember I have loved songs more than anything.
I recently read Mary Gaitskill’s strange and excellent novel Veronica, near the start, the pretty – dislikeable – protagonist Alison describes the want to live inside of music. To live her life as though inside of a song. She doesn’t explain quite what she means by this, but reading it, I thought, oh yes, I know. I think I’ve spent my whole life looking for ways to live inside of songs, I have an obsessive streak, an inability to ever do things gently, and when I find a new song I love I want to be folded up and made small enough to be held inside it.
I think this kind of obsession is a bad and nauseating trait to possess in most aspects of life, but very necessary for the writing of songs. I know the difference between a good song and bad one because when I write a bad one it feels flat and rolled out and beige, but when I write a good one it feels like a full and elaborate structure, colourful and strong enough to hold me inside for days while I work the words out.
Thirdly, when I am really stuck and feeling dreadful, I think going for a long walk, doing some physical work in the garden or having a blisteringly hot shower sometimes helps.
Finally, I have two things I remind myself of when I’m in long phases like this one in which I haven’t written a good song in several months and it’s started to wear down my confidence in my ability. They are, firstly – that thinking your work uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism and a self-indulgence best to be avoided, and secondly, that you always think you’ll never write again, but you always, eventually, inevitably do write again.
For more on Maija Sofia’s work see:
Bandcamp: https://maijasofia.bandcamp.com/album/bath-time
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maijasofiamusic/
Instagram: @maijasofiamakela
Twitter: @maija_sofia
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Musician of the Month: Niwel Tsumbu
We’re living in a time where musical forms and styles are fusing more than ever. However, this is an ancient process that has been happening ever since humans have sang, travelled, and interacted with each other. People have always moved around the world with their songs, dances, instruments, and thus, the music evolves. With technology, this process is faster than at any previous time – you can hear music from anywhere by clicking a button or touching a screen, in an elevator, on the radio, and so on.
I remember between the ages of seven and eleven years old, I went to the church with my grandparents most Sundays. This church was special because it originated from the village and moved to Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of the Congo. The music was traditional – every row of seats had a bell and a shaker for anyone to play. The big drums in the front had no dedicated drummer – anybody who felt like playing would go in front and play during a song. As kids, we would gather around the drums with sticks and hit them on the side – this could possibly have been my first performing experience.
After the church we’d come home and I would sit on the pillar of the balcony in our house, which was dangerous as there was a twenty-five metre drop to the floor. Obviously I was not allowed to sit there, and my grandfather – who is my biggest influence, looking after me now from the beyond – would give out to me and even give a few slaps to stop me sitting there (this was normal, not child abuse!).
When I started learning the guitar between the age of sixteen and seventeen years of age, I was really interested in learning music that was not from the DR Congo. I had a great mentor who taught me jazz and I enrolled myself into classical music school to learn how to play with my fingers. It is only then I realised why I was so obsessed sitting on the balcony years earlier.
I found out it was the music on the radio that was making me sit on the balcony as I recognised most of the pieces I was hearing students and teachers performing around the school. The pieces were by most of the familiar famous classical composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and many others. To this day, whenever I hear their music, the memories of my grandfather, the church, the scents of that time, rush into my body like crazy.
Classical music is truly part of my existence and experience. It is also clearly an art form rooted in the tradition of Western culture, but I believe it is also my traditional music as a human being. I had no idea it was called classical music sitting on that balcony but it touched me and has made a big impact in my life.
My music is a glimpse into my perception of life and inspired by my experiences. It should be dynamic, beautiful, adventurous, and take risks. These elements inform the new album I will release later this year, along with the great Éamonn Cagney (percussion), a natural evolution of fifteen years of collaboration.
My guitar playing is influenced by many great guitarists of DR Congo and the world such as Franco Luambo Makiadi, Roxy Tshimpaka, Paco de Lucia, Wes Montgomery, and many others. However, my approach to rhythm is really what is unique about me. I have been told this by virtually all the musicians I have played with.
It is very strange for me to hear people talk about pure ‘African Music’ that doesn’t exist – unless you go back thousands of years before humans started roaming around the globe. This concept is simply not true, and frankly, it drives me crazy when people, especially African musicians who use equal-tempered tuning with Western instruments, say so. I will give a talk on the the influence of colonialism on Congolese and African music (and a performance) at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in Bath University this April [Editor’s Note: this has since been cancelled].
I’m from the Yombe tribe (part of the Bakongo people) on the western side of the Congo – the first tribe to welcome the Europeans in 1482. It’s very easy to see the Western influence in my tribe, musically or socially (for example, we always eat with a fork or a spoon unlike any other tribe). We are the only tribe in Congo who would traditionally have a choir with a conductor singing three- and four-part harmonies, like you hear in the Catholic Church. The melodies are very diatonic and similar to Gregorian chants, except with a strong rhythmic approach. It is also the most popular traditional form of music in the Congo and has influenced the popular music much more than any other traditional music.
We are conditioned to hear music in a certain way as a collective entity shaped by our society – and to label it for business purposes. However, music affects us individually, much more than we realise and touches us way deeper than we know. It doesn’t matter where it originates from: colonialists, black, white, transgender, gay, or whatever social group a person identifies with.
The fact of the matter is that sound travels through our ears to the receptor cells inside the inner ear. These cells change the sound vibrations into electrical signals, which pass along the auditory nerve to the brain. This means, whether you like it or not, the music you hear literally touches and, alters your mind.
For more of Niwel’s work see:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Musician-Band/Niwel-Tsumbu-Sounds-212103155519751/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/niweltsumbu/?hl=en
Twitter: https://twitter.com/niweltsumbu?lang=en
Spotify:
Niwel is currently preparing a new album for release with percussionist Eamon Cagney. He has performed with the finest Irish and international musicians while continuing to craft his own distinctive fusion of new jazz, rhumba, world, flamenco, rock, soukous, and classical. Niwel has collaborated and performed with artists including the Crash Ensemble, composer Roger Doyle, DJ Donal Dineen, Loah, Baaba Maal, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Mik Pyro (Republic of Loose), Eamonn Cagney’s Treelan ensemble (with Martin Tourish), and many more.