Joan La Barbara

Aaron Gonsher

Joining us on the couch today is an undisputed titan of American avant-garde and experimental music, both as a composer and a vocalist, who, over almost 40 years of work, has created entirely new worlds of sound. Please help me in welcoming Joan La Barbara. (applause)

Joan La Barbara

Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever been called a titan before. That’s great. I like it. I’ll put that in the PR.

Aaron Gonsher

We’re going to cover a lot of different areas of your career, but I wanted to start with something that first came out in 1980 and play some music just to frame a little bit of what you’ve been doing over the years. This is “Klee Alee” from Reluctant Gypsy in 1980.

(music: Joan La Barbara – “Klee Alee” / applause)

Joan La Barbara

Thank you.

Aaron Gonsher

“Klee Alee” was reissued in the early ’90s on a record called Sound Paintings. What exactly is a sound painting for you?

Joan La Barbara

I should explain that I see sound as I make it, and so I see the energy of a vocal gesture. Let’s stick with the voice for a moment. When I score, or when I make notations in my journals, I tend to draw the shape of the sound. It’s not so much an envelope as actually the way sound moves along linearly in space. The idea of painting with the voice onto, years ago it was magnetic tape, now it’s into a computer, but I think of these pieces as something that you experience in time. When you go to a museum or a gallery, you look at a painting, you spend some time with it, you may look at different parts of the painting, you may think a little bit about the structure.

What I’ve done in translating from visual into sound – because we’re going from basically a static medium into a time-based medium – I’m translating from the visual, various aspects of the visual. In this particular case, it was a very specific painting by Paul Klee. I believe it was Main Street and Side Streets. The colors of the painting were predominantly greens and blues. What I did was to build up blocks of sound, those persistent sound blocks that you hear. The painting had a certain thickness that you could actually see and what Klee evidently did was, after layering the paint to a certain thickness, then take a sharp instrument and carve into the thickness of the paint with that instrument.

So I’m trying to translate aspects of the painting using the voice. Creating these blocks of sound colors, individual pitches, building kind of a wall of sound. Then, using different kinds of vocal techniques, carving into the thickness of the paint with different kinds of technique, to get that result. In the mix then, afterwards, what I’m trying to do, because the piece exists for x number of minutes, I’m trying to draw the listener to a particular event, sound event. I’m really directing your attention, almost like if you have a guide in a museum, and they’re saying, “Look at that, look at that, look at that.” I’m doing that in post-production. I want you to be experiencing the whole thing as a whole painting, which is why they exist for a long period of time, relatively. I want, from time to time, you to be subtly drawn to a particular aspect of what the sound is.

Aaron Gonsher

In “Klee Alee” what is that?

Joan La Barbara

In the very beginning, I’m introducing the materials, the sound blocks. The carving into the sound blocks is pretty subtle in the beginning. Then gradually, as the piece progresses, I may be putting more emphasis on those little characters, or little squiggles, let’s say, that have been carved into the thickness of the sound. As the piece goes on you may notice that you’re paying more attention to one kind of sound or one kind of sound event than the overall picture. Then, I’ll recede that back into the whole texture.

Aaron Gonsher

I know that to be able to translate all of these different elements of a painting into sound takes a lot of practice and technique on your own instrument, which has predominantly been the voice. Can you take us back to before you even started training as a vocalist? Was there any experience growing up that really solidified for you the power of the voice as a transformative instrument?

Joan La Barbara

I was always singing. My mother tells me that I told her when I was about two years old that I was gonna be a singer. That’s way, way back. The transformative power... I don’t know. I sang in church choirs, I sang in school choirs. At a certain point, I recognized... I remember being in girl scouts, and I would always be called on to start the songs. I realized that there was something about my voice that people were drawn to.

Aaron Gonsher

Were those just girl scout songs, or popular songs of the day, more like chants and things like that?

Joan La Barbara

You know “Kumbaya” and whatever. Campfire songs and stuff like that. I was always called upon to sing the solos in school productions and stuff like that. I had a folk music group when I was in high school, four women. We were called The Calicos. We went around and played coffeehouses in the Philadelphia area. At a certain point, I decided that I should get serious about getting some training. I was living in the suburbs outside Philadelphia and there was this woman who taught voice, but also taught trumpet and piano and French horn and whatever she could think of. Let’s just say she was not an expert in vocal technique. She had this heart-felt desire to have someone sing the “Bell Song” from Lakmé. For those of you who don’t know that, and I’m seeing a lot of blank faces out there, it’s a coloratura aria. I had no business singing a high coloratura aria ever in my life. When I went around colleges and I was auditioning I was using repertoire I had no business singing and I was squeaking through auditions. Did anyone see Florence Foster Jenkins, the movie? Oh god. If it’s still around, please, please go see it. It is so wonderful. Meryl Streep does this amazing job. Evidently, I can’t prove it: supposedly she does the singing in it.

Aaron Gonsher

Can you explain who Florence Foster Jenkins was for people who might not be familiar?

Joan La Barbara

Florence Foster Jenkins, oh my god, was a very wealthy patroness of the arts in Manhattan at a certain [point], what, early to mid-20th century. I think she died in the ’40s but don’t quote me on that. I don’t remember. But she had so much money that she could afford to rent Carnegie Hall, which she did, to give a solo recital. She had someone, a very well-known conductor and coach at the Met teach her. But she really couldn’t sing. It’s just painful to listen to it. There was a recording that was done I believe of the Carnegie Hall recital.

Aaron Gonsher

It’s a classic now, almost.

Joan La Barbara

Oh, you’ve got to listen to it. It’s just... I don’t blame you if you turn it off after a few seconds. But in the film there is this wonderful star turn by... Oh god, I can’t think of his name right now, but he’s on...

Audience Member

Big Bang Theory.

Joan La Barbara

Yes, he’s on Big Bang Theory. What is his name? OK, we’ll get his name before the day is up. But the moment… He plays the accompanist and the moment that he first hears her sing, what he does as an actor where he’s trying so hard not to break out into gales of laughter, it’s the kind of thing, well, you’re biting your tongue and chewing on your cheeks and everything you can do to try not to respond to that. It’s a priceless moment in cinema.

Anyway. I was going around doing these auditions, squeaking my way through these auditions. So I did not get into a conservatory, thank god. I went, I started out at Syracuse University and I did study voice, but I was duly enrolled in the Music Department and also the English Department because I was also doing creative writing at the time. Every year that I was at school, I would send out college applications to try to go someplace else. I’m just that…

Aaron Gonsher

What was so bad about Syracuse?

Joan La Barbara

Oh it was very cold. It’s in the snow belt, so once it got to be sort of mid-October, it snowed and it didn’t like thaw until mid-May. But if you guys are up here in Montréal it’s probably a little similar. Anyway, I just, I couldn’t wait to get my career started and eventually came to New York, finished up my degree work at NYU and I studied along the way with Phyllis Curtin, who was a very famous, I think she’s still alive, opera singer who also did a lot of contemporary music. I also studied with Helen Boatwright, again, contemporary, and she was a very well known Bach soprano. My last teacher was a woman from the Julliard School, Marion Szekely-Freschl. She was a great big, six foot one, Hungarian contralto, and she called me Jon. “I vill fix your voice Jon, und zen I can die.” (laughs) She tried her best to fix my voice.

I think I... over the years I put together a technique from studying with various different people. My warm up exercises for example are physical exercises. They’re warming up the neck and the shoulders, tongue exercises because the back of the tongue is connected to the vocal cords with cartilage, so when you gently exercise and stretch the tongue, you’re actually bringing blood up to the primary vocal mechanism. When I began, and I did begin this sort of in the latter years of college, to investigate the voice let’s say, I heard a lot of instrumentalists who were working with various techniques on the instruments, and I thought, “No reason why the voice can’t do similar kinds of things.” Of course, there was Cathy Berberian who had introduced sort of natural sounds, gasping, laughing, coughing, screaming.

Aaron Gonsher

She later disowned many of those.

Joan La Barbara

Oh, well, that’s another lecture. Yeah. Yeah, because she wanted to stay in, let’s say, the legitimate world. There’s the piece “Cathing,” which we probably didn’t put on our play list, but I did a solo concert of my music at the Holland Festival in 1977 and someone from the radio said, “Well, can you come and do a live interview in the intermission of your concert?” I said, “No, I’ve got to prepare for the second half.” But Cathy was willing to do the interview.

Someone after the concert came up with a cassette tape and they said, “You’re going to want to listen to this.” I played it and she went on this whole tirade about people who do extended vocal techniques. At that point in time there were only maybe a handful of us doing it. She said something like, “You know, it would be a foolish composer who would write for one of these people, because it’s a special technique, and it’s hit an impasse,” she said, “a kind of a stop.”

Aaron Gonsher

I actually have this recording.

Joan La Barbara

Oh you do.

Aaron Gonsher

So I think we should listen…

Joan La Barbara

Oh so I don’t have to like…

Aaron Gonsher

... to a bit of it.

Joan La Barbara

Sure, OK.

Aaron Gonsher

So this is…

Joan La Barbara

And we can talk about it.

Aaron Gonsher

This is “Cathing,” and it came out on Tapesongs in 1977.

(music: Joan La Barbara – “Cathing”)

Aaron Gonsher

So it sounds like she had a bone to pick with extended vocal techniques.

Joan La Barbara

Well yeah. And I mean, this was my payback.

Aaron Gonsher

Can we go back and talk about what exactly is an extended vocal technique though? We haven’t defined that yet.

Joan La Barbara

Yeah, we haven’t defined that. It’s true. When I was sort of just breaking away from the classical tradition, I started imitating the sounds of instruments and I would work with one instrument at a time. I believe I started with trombone because a friend of mine Garrett List who was also a composer was willing to just sit there and play long tones for me, and I would use my voice and try to imitate the sound of the trombone, and then analyze how close I had come to that, and then began manipulating the mask, what we call the mask, our face. Because when you start working with changing the shape of your face what’s happening is you’re literally changing the shape of the vocal tract. You can begin to get a number of different sounds. You can really shape the timbre that you’re creating. My journey, while it started with long tones and individual instruments, began then to improvise with other musicians and imitate their sounds but also really stretch what my vocal instrument could do. That was what I was very curious about.

Aaron Gonsher

What period was this when you were first starting to do that improvisation?

Joan La Barbara

I would say about 1969, ’70.

Aaron Gonsher

There was another thing that Berberian said where she says it would be a very foolish composer for people to write for someone who used extended vocal techniques. Your career has been a definitive rebuttal of that based on the composers that you’ve worked with. There were some in particular that you worked very closely with, one of whom was John Cage. Can you talk about your very first interaction with John Cage?

Joan La Barbara

Yes, I was working with Steve Reich at the time. We were touring Europe.

Aaron Gonsher

Another foolish composer.

Joan La Barbara

Another very foolish composer. John Cage and David Tudor were also on tour in Europe at the time. We would wind up in the same cities because we’d all be playing festivals. We got to Berlin and I went to see a performance of harpsichord at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. There was an orchestra in one room playing something. There were harpsichords and various electronic keyboards around. There were people playing the instruments, not playing the instruments. There were slides being projected of the moon landing and various things. There were thousands of people milling around. Everybody was talking, it infuriated me. It was 1972 I believe. I was young and impulsive and very headstrong. I found Cage. Of course, I knew what he looked like.

I walked right up to him and I said, “With all the chaos in the world, why do you make more?” The devotees who were kneeling at his feet gasped. I thought, “I’m not going to get an answer to this.” I turned on my heel and walked away. A few minutes later I felt this tap on my shoulder. I turned around and it was John. He was smiling beatifically. He said, “Maybe when you go back out into the world, it won’t seem so chaotic anymore.” It didn’t change my mind about what I was experiencing, but it make me think a great deal about this human being who I had basically affronted and who cared enough to find me in this incredible melee of people and give an answer to my question. A response, let’s put it that way. Several years later when I had become a composer and I had started doing my own music, I happened to see John at a concert at Phill Niblock’s loft in New York. Phill Niblock is a filmmaker who became a composer and has run a concert series in his home loft for, I don’t know, 40…

Aaron Gonsher

Decades.

Joan La Barbara

Decades, certainly 30, maybe 40 years. Anyway, John was there. I was about to do the first performances of my work. I scribbled out on a piece of paper where these concerts were going to take place. I walked up to him and I said, “I’m going to be doing these performances of my work and I want you to be there.”

Aaron Gonsher

Did he remember you from the first confrontation?

Joan La Barbara

No. In fact, I told that story on many occasions. I remember that when John was getting an award that was being given at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and I was brought out to do the presentation of the award and I told that story. When I came back to sit down at the table he said, “You know, you’ve told that story a lot. I don’t remember it. I believe you, but I don’t remember it.” It was meaningful to me. Anyway, when I gave him this list of where I was going to be performing he said, “OK,” and he showed up at this tiny little gallery space on lower Greene Street in Soho. I was doing a performance of one of my really early études called “Voice Piece One Note Internal Resonance Investigation.” I was really hard core back then.

It takes a single pitch and places it in different resonance areas inside the head and neck so that you really explore timbre-ly what’s going on with the material. Then, I actually allowed myself to get into overtone focusing and multiphonics. Back to the question about extended vocal techniques, these all now have terms that we can use. When I started doing them I was just making sound and reacting to different things. But at any rate, I finished this piece. John came up to me afterwards and he said, “Oh, marvelous, just marvelous. Would you like to work with me?” I said, “Sure.” He came prepared, he handed me “Solo for Voice 45” from the Song Books.

The Song Books are a collection of 98 solos mostly for voice, but some of them are traditionally notated, some of them have graphics, some of them are theatrical instructions about, let’s say for instance, “Leave the stage by flying and return wearing an animal head.” You can do this if you’re in a professional theater that has rigging. I have done it a couple of times. Some are with electronics and some not. Anyway it took me six months to do all of the work that was necessary to prepare this piece.

Aaron Gonsher

Six months?

Joan La Barbara

Six months, yeah.

Aaron Gonsher

Why such a lengthy period of time?

Joan La Barbara

Because I had 18 pages of this stuff to do and then I had to learn it all to sing it. When I felt I could do that I called him up. I was living in a loft on upper Greene Street in Soho at the time, John came over to my loft and I sang it for him. He said, “It’s marvelous, it’s very beautiful, but it’s not as fast as possible.”

Aaron Gonsher

Six months.

Joan La Barbara

Yeah. I was breathless. I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I mean it like calligraphic gestures, like birdsong, like (makes sounds), and that’s 10 notes.” I said, “OK.” All that work went into creating these shapes, using the pitches to create shapes, and then singing those shapes as opposed to singing… As a trained singer what your impulse is is to sing the pitches, and that’s not what he wanted. I went back to work and in 1976, July 3, at the festival in La Rochelle, France, we presented the first simultaneous performance of “Solo for Voice 45” from the Song Books, two pianos playing “Winter Music,” and an orchestra playing “Atlas Eclipticalis” for two hours and 40 minutes. Oh dear, OK, I’ll say it, it was the Orchestra of the Hague and John had had trouble with that orchestra before.

Aaron Gonsher

Trouble.

Joan La Barbara

Trouble. I’ll explain. Trouble. He gave a talk to the entire orchestra before one of the rehearsals and the talk was so beautiful, it was about what separates us from other animals is that we have the ability to take on a task and to do it to the best of our ability and really apply ourselves to the task. I was so moved and I thought this is going to be such an incredible experience. It was an incredible experience but it was one of the hottest, driest summers that Europe had experienced in many years and because the duration of the performance was two hours and 40 minutes, John, bless his heart, provided two refrigerators off stage with cool things to drink and he said… Each of the parts has long spaces in it. “If you feel the need to refresh yourself you can quietly leave the stage and get something to drink and come back.” That’s all the license that they needed.

I would say 60% of the orchestra behaved badly, meaning talking to each other. The oboe player… He had rearranged the positioning of the instruments on the stage so they were not in their normal order and the oboe player was downstage center, right in front of the conductor, Richard Dufallo, who was a clock, he was conducting time, this is 15 minutes, 30 minutes, etc. This oboe player walked on stage carrying two bottles of wine and offered wine to different members of the orchestra and never picked up his instrument, drank himself into almost a stupor over the two hours and 40 minutes. I sang my little (makes sounds) and the pianos were doing their part. One of the pianists was Richard Bernas. Those of you who are from the UK may know of him, he does radio on the BBC, he’s a conductor and pianist, everything. Anyway, I sang. At the end of the performance John was purple with rage and he was surrounded by all of these French journalists. When he got done talking to them he came up to me and he said, “It was marvelous, you did exactly what you were supposed to do.” He said, “I want to tell you now I am with you always.” Every time I tell that I break up. It was a lifetime commitment and it certainly was very meaningful to me but it was his commitment to me for all of his life.

Whenever I encountered problems, issues, whatever: I tried not to call him for simple things but if I had a life-changing issue that I had to deal with, I would go to him and I would talk to him about it and he would listen, and most of the time he would say, “I think you’ve already made the decision.” He was my sounding board. He also was incredibly supportive for my work and I worked with him for nearly 20 years from that point until a week before he died. He encouraged me so much in my own work and he’d say, “Don’t worry about what people think, don’t worry if they laugh, keep doing it, keep doing your work.” That’s something that I’ve done all these years, I keep doing it. I’ve done a lot of outrageous things.

When I first started doing solo concerts I would find people in the audience would start giggling and tittering and you keep doing it and then they calm down. The problem was when I first started doing some of this stuff it was using the voice in a way that people were unaccustomed to hearing and it made them nervous. I did understand that. What it made me do was to stay… What I felt was the best that I could do for the audience was to stay in my cocoon, my personal space, let’s say, and keep doing what I was doing and convince them that what I was doing was valuable. Over the years I think it’s turned out that way.

Aaron Gonsher

It’s clear that your relationship with John Cage was really powerful and that you learned a lot from him as a composer, but I’m very curious to hear what do you think he learned from you?

Joan La Barbara

Ha ha. I think he learned a lot about what the voice could do. I think he imagined that there were things the voice could do but the way that I realized some pieces I think were surprising even to him. One of the pieces in Song Books, it’s called “Solo for Voice 67 (Navajo Yébîchai),” because he wanted the extremes of the voice, the very upper end and the very lowest sounds, and it’s all graphic, it’s these little dots in the upper end and then little squiggles down on the bottom. The accompaniment is that of a pile driver. Pile driver, does that translate?

Aaron Gonsher

Jackhammer?

Joan La Barbara

No, much louder. There’s probably a pile driver around here in the streets, tearing up the streets. It’s a big metal, huge… Taking a girder and dropping it on the ground, that’s the best way I can describe that sound. I’m doing these little dots and squiggles and every once in a while at an unpredictable moment the pile driver happens, that’s a fun thing. I had a student a couple of years ago from Japan and he was in music technology and one of the reasons he wanted to study with me was because he was very interested in noise. He took that particular piece as an example of my use of noise as well as other sounds that I use.

Aaron Gonsher

That “Cathing” and the song “Solo for Voice 45” was in 1977, but you’d put out your first record a year before that and I want to play something from that so we can discuss it. This is “Circular Song” from Voice is the Original Instrument in 1976.

(music: Joan La Barbara – “Circular Song” / applause)

Joan La Barbara

Thank you. That’s not quite the mid point of the song and I don’t do it quite so long these days but maybe we could put the score up because I think it’s interesting.

Aaron Gonsher

This is image one, please.

Joan La Barbara

It is, it’s a graphic score, obviously. It is, it’s a process piece. You start at the top with that single descending glissando on the exhale and when you get to the bottom… You chose your vocal range first. When you get to the bottom then you inhale on the way back up, so that’s the next figure heading down clockwise. Then, you sort of go over the top, so that’s the transitional figure, that’s why there’s a little T there. You get to the point where you’re changing breath directions at the mid point. Then, you break it into thirds and fourths and then, what I sort of refer to as the Christmas tree, it sort of goes up and back down and up and back down. Then, it gets to the central point, down at the bottom, which is noise, basically. I use what looks like a capital I to refer to multiphonic because you’re basically having two tones but in this case, by the time you get there it may not be a pure octave, which is one of the ones that I like to use but it’s more (makes noise) It’s just noise, inhaled and it’s... Aaron asked me before, “Is it all one breath?” It is constantly changing from exhaled vocal production to inhaled vocal production. It’s very easy to exhale a descending glissando. It is difficult to inhale a descending glissando. Similarly, it is easier to inhale an ascending glissando than it is to exhale, I mean you can exhale, yeah, that’s easy but anyway, the degree of difficulty is keeping the sound going, which is why from time to time you’ll hear I close my mouth, so you get more of a humming because that allows the saliva to trickle down your throat. If you don’t do that at a certain point, your vocal cords just rebel and insist that you have to swallow. You have like a little gulp in the sound. I try not to let that happen, which is why I close the lips and let the saliva go back. The very first time I did this piece… And I was very influenced by conceptual artists who were putting themselves in various situations.

Aaron Gonsher

Any specific ones?

Joan La Barbara

Oh Vito Acconci, for example, who either currently or not long ago had a retrospective at PS1 in New York. Dennis Oppenheim, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, to a certain degree. Douglas Huebler. These were people who were investigating psychological states of the mind, certain kinds of confrontational things, issues relating to the body, and so this particular piece... When I rehearsed it, I never rehearsed it all the way through, so the very first time that I did it in public was the very first time that I did the entire work. It was a challenge, physically, to see if I could get through it. And as you’re working on something that is this incredibly difficult, I mean you begin to use your body in a way that is not, let’s say, normal for vocal production. In other words, I was actually emphasizing the movement of my stomach because it gave me a different kind of control over the whole physical apparatus because the voice doesn’t want to do that I was making it do. You’re fighting that, the whole time, and by physicalizing what I was doing, I was able to get control of that situation. As you’re going through the piece, you have to be aware of what’s going on in your instrument and calculate how many repetitions you think you can get through and be able to get all the way back to the initial starting point.

Aaron Gonsher

You just described this as a process piece, and there’s another song on that record that has investigation in the title, so it seems like your earliest works as a composer were really being positioned almost as research into the human voice: research, investigation. I was curious if it was ever a struggle to try to balance the positioning of your work as research, while maintaining that it was also a work of art, a piece of music that could be enjoyed in its own right.

Joan La Barbara

Yeah, this piece and the voice piece “One Note Internal Resonance Investigation” were very much études. They were explorations of particular extended techniques. The other piece on that recording, “Vocal extensions,” uses some electronic boxes that were designed for guitar players, basically. There was a phase shifter, something called a frequency analyzer, which acts a bit like a ring modulator, and the wonderful Roland Space Echo that I could use to give myself different reverb, different echo delay periods. And it had dials on it, so I could change the distance of the repetitions, the rapidity of the repetitions, so I used those boxes to improvise with the boxes the way that I would improvise with another human being. And I would just spin the dials and get to some... and then have to react instantly to what was going on with that. That piece, I think, was moving on from the experimental pieces to something that I would say is actually getting into what I refer to as real time composition, in other words, improvisation. You are, as a composer, a living composer, composing in front of the audience with a situation like that. At that point in time, I wasn’t yet using multi-track tape, but shortly thereafter, I think my first multi-track tape piece that I can recall is “Twelvesong.” That was done at Radio Bremen in northern Germany. I was invited there by the person who was formerly the head of the music division, Hans Otte, to do this recording. I was working with a dance company, Sara Rudner, had done a bunch of performances, and left New York the evening of the last of our performances, arrived in Bremen in the morning, and went right to work. I don’t do that anymore.

We went into the studio and I had my little funny looking drawings, and I was presented with a team of master engineers. Usually, in Germany at that time, there were five people. One of them was the tonmeister, who wants to see the score. One of them was the person who handled the tapes with white gloves. One of them handled the mics, usually also with white gloves. Anyway, they weren’t used to anyone like me. Of course, at that point, there wasn’t really anybody like me. When they wanted to see the score, I said, “You can look at my journals, but the score is here in my head.” I said, “You’ve got to trust me.” Funny thing to say to five guys, big German guys. They did and I went in. We set up all the stuff and I started recording. With “Twelvesong” what’s interesting is I think there’s a bit of a misconception. When people listen to my work, they think it’s loops. It’s not loops. Each of the tracks of that multi-track tape I sing for the entire length. “Twelvesong” is 12 minutes and 12 seconds, 12 tracks. I sang each track all the way through. Once we got the foundation tracks laid down, which were micro-tonally shifting variations on the same pitch to create this sonic terrain underneath. Then, I began layering on additional material. Again, singing all the way through.

I would build up a very, very thick texture of sound, more than I actually needed, and then begin to shape it by taking things away and only using what was really necessary. When I got finished, many hours of recording, I think I saw something on the faces of the engineers that stays with me. It was a kind of respect. They said, “OK, you did your job, now we do ours.” They taught me about how you mix, how you actually take these sounds and place them in the sonic horizon so that they each have their individual space and exist in that space. It gave it a kind of shape and presence that I certainly would not have been able, at that point in time, to do. I greatly appreciated the expertise that they gave me at that point.

Aaron Gonsher

Was that idea of picturing the mixdown as a physical plane, as a physical presence, did that eventually impact your own compositional style, in terms of how you laid things out or how you were generally thinking about the interactions of sounds on the page, when it comes to scoring something?

Joan La Barbara

Yeah, yeah, certainly when I think about the stereo horizon or if I’m working in surround sound, or even in stereo, how you move sound in space. There’s a work of mine called “Autumn Signal” that was inspired by Merce Cunningham and how he moved his dancers in space. Using the Buchla synthesizer, I was able not only to modify the text material that I put into it but also let the some of the sounds actually walk around the periphery of the sonic geography. Some of them fly across. Some of them will be spatially located. It was a similar kind of thing that I did with “October Music: Star Showers And Extraterrestrials.”

Aaron Gonsher

That was the show on Sunday night at the planetarium for those who were there.

Joan La Barbara

Yeah, that was the second piece on the show. The first one, “Solitary Journeys Of The Mind,” is real time composition. It was just voice alone. The second one, “October Music Star Showers And Extraterrestrials” I thought would be perfect to do in a planetarium. That one I actually recorded and engineered myself at IRCAM. My husband, Morton Subotnick, had a commission to work at IRCAM with all of the wonderful electronics that they had there and computers and everything. I was there because who wouldn’t want to live in Paris for a couple of months?

Aaron Gonsher

When was this?

Joan La Barbara

This was 1980. David Wessel, some of you may know of him, was there, and he was in the education department at the time, and he said, “We’ve got this analog studio down in the basement, nobody’s using it.” He said, “Do you want to use it?” I said, “Sure.” He taught me how to use the equipment, and I had several weeks to engineer and record that work. I think it came out first on an LP on Nonesuch called The Art of Joan La Barbara. Then, I remixed it and we brought it out digitally on CD also. Then, you heard it the other night in the planetarium, those of you who were not in the pool.

Aaron Gonsher

I think it’s important for people to know that the work that you were doing kind of infiltrated the mainstream in a way that might not be expected, normally. To illustrate that, I want to play a video that was from 1977. This is Joan La Barbara contributing to Sesame Street in 1977. If you could play video three, and then we’ll talk about that afterwards.

(video: Joan La Barbara Signing Alphabet, Sesame Street / applause)

I need to know what the response was by Sesame Street producers when you turned in that.

Joan La Barbara

It was the head of the music department who asked me to do it. I was working at that time with a number of different composers. Cage...

Aaron Gonsher

Who were some of those?

Joan La Barbara

Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, David Borden, Robert Ashley. Mimi Johnson, who is the owner and head of Lovely Music and Performing Artservices, was the manager for all of those composers. She decided to put on a concert series at a place called the Diplomat Hotel, I don’t know if it even exists anymore in Manhattan. Each night a different composer was represented, and I remember that with Lucier we were doing a piece called “The Tin Doll Variations” where I was singing with Bunsen burners. Using the voice, you’re trying to bend the flame of the Bunsen burner and get it to make little dancy things and finally extinguish it.

Anyway, the head of the Sesame Street Children’s Television Workshop came to these concerts, and came up to me afterwards and said to me, “Would you like to compose a score for the signing alphabet?” which is what this is. I said, “Sure.” I took my electronic boxes that I’ve already described into the studio, and basically did it in real time watching the film. I wanted to make it fun because the idea was they were trying to encourage hearing children to get intrigued with signing so that they could begin to communicate with deaf children. That was the theory. This has played for years since 1977, and every once in a while a check comes in the mail for $32.17. I think, “Wow, it’s still playing somewhere.”

Aaron Gonsher

When you were working on a composition for a specific intent, where did these ideas come from initially in the sense of wanting to explore the paintings of a certain artist, or the sculptures of a certain artist, or the words of a certain artist, and translating that into a sound that was representative of your own art?

Joan La Barbara

I have always been drawn to, sorry for the pun, to museums and galleries. I love looking at visual art. I did a lot of creative writing as a young person, so my interests were very broad. It was sort of natural for me when I began exploring the vocal instrument to think about painting with this instrument, as opposed to painting with a brush. Those early sound paintings like “Twelvesong,” “Klee Alee,” “Shadow Song,” “Urban Tropics,” it was a way of translating from the visual into sound, and how you use your vocal instrument or other instruments to give a sense of what that visual is inside your brain. I don’t know if that really translates, but it’s my way of sounding a painting.

I did an orchestra piece a couple of years ago. I first experienced the work of Agnes Martin in I think 1976. I was performing at a gallery in Italy and the gallerist had some of Agnes Martin’s early drawings, which now would cost a fortune, probably cost a small fortune then. At any rate, I just absolutely fell in love. They were extremely minimal, just like graphite on very small canvases or on paper. I had wanted to do an orchestra piece in this immersive way of placing the audience inside the orchestra. What I did was, when I got a commission from the American Composers Orchestra, I started by creating my version of what painters to do when they prime the canvas. I created this kind of wash of sound with vocal breath, bowing very, very lightly on harp, running the palm over the strings on the inside of the piano, so you begin to get this sort of… beyond white noise texture.

I had placed the musicians very specifically in places in Zankel Hall, which is one of the halls in Carnegie Hall. It used to be a movie theater, now it’s a concert hall. There’s an upper gallery on two sides, so I placed a lot of the string players up in the two sides. I was on stage, the piano and the harp were on stage. In the back of the auditorium was the percussion, and on some upper balconies I had flute, I think trombone. In the audience itself I had clarinet and bassoon, because you could have them seated in the audience and they didn’t have to use their arms a lot. It was my way of really surrounding the audience with the sound.

Then with this wash, then sort of creating this foundation, I then started one string, at a time, introducing these lines. I used a flautando technique on the string, which is very, very light pressure. You’re just sounding the string, it’s almost flute like. It was my way of translating the graininess of the graphite and this very almost thin sound, and building it one pitch at a time until I had this sonic painting going on over top and surrounding the audience.

Aaron Gonsher

When you're doing work like that, does it feel like you're not only translating the paintings of Agnes Martin, but trying to capture a bit of her personality as well? You’ve been inspired by other artists like Joseph Cornell or Virginia Woolf and I’m just curious how much of the results of these works you feel are identified with their own personalities, and not just the final output of the work that you’re drawing inspiration from.

Joan La Barbara

I’ll tell you a little anecdote. I lived for about 18 years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Agnes Martin lived in Cuba and then eventually in Galisteo, and I think she spent the last years not in Galisteo. When I met her, I was at a restaurant with my husband. We saw some friends of ours and I said, “Hello.” This friend said, “Do you know Agnes Martin?” I said, “No.” We were introduced and Agnes went to the bathroom, and I said, “Is that the Agnes Martin?” I was already in love with her work. This person said, “Yeah, yeah.” I said, “Well I would just love to talk to her.” She said, “Well, go out and visit her. Take her a pie.” I said, “OK.”

Aaron Gonsher

This was in Santa Fe?

Joan La Barbara

I was living in Santa Fe, she was living in Galisteo which is a little south of Santa Fe. I went out, she lived in this great huge ranch.

Aaron Gonsher

No pie though?

Joan La Barbara

I took her a pie. I don’t remember what kind, but I took her a pie. I also took her some of my music. I took her my work “Rothko,” which is inspired by specifically the paintings in the Rothko Chapel in Houston. It’s layers and layers and layers of voice doing multiphonics and overtone focusing and bowed pianos. It’s a long piece. I put it on, sitting there listening very proud of my work. She let it go for maybe a couple of minutes and she said, “Oh, take that off.” So I stopped it. She said, “It’s very long.” I said, “OK, it’s a sound painting. It exists in time.” I said, “Well, you know, what music do you like to listen to.” She said, “Oh, Beethoven.” I thought, “OK, all right.” Then she said, “You want to see some of what I’m working on?” I said, “Sure.” We went out to her studio and she pulled out these huge canvases. Remember, I’m in love with the little ones, the little minimal canvases. Huge paintings of stripes. It was like, I don’t know if any of you have been in love with someone’s work and saw something that was like a betrayal, but it was to me a betrayal. I hate to say this, but after she died, I thought, “Well, now I can do my orchestra piece. She’s not going to say, ‘Oh, take it off.’” I was released back into my hero worship of this artist and her work, the period of her work that I really loved, and I could then do this work. I must say, it’s a little bit easier to work with dead people than living ones, in some cases.

Aaron Gonsher

Dead people aren’t asking for changes to the score.

Joan La Barbara

I’ve done a lot of collaborations also over the years. I’ve had wonderful experiences with a number of artists from different disciplines. Jane Comfort, of course, comes to mind. Wonderful choreographer who did, and is still doing, a lot of brilliant work. A lot of it political. Should we get into An American Rendition? Are you ready or you want to…

Aaron Gonsher

Let’s play a song. Can you introduce what An American Rendition is and then we’ll play something from it.

Joan La Barbara

An American Rendition was the second collaboration that I did with Jane. This is referred to as a spoken word opera. An American Rendition refers very specifically to people who were kidnapped and spirited away to some undisclosed location and tortured for the information that the powers that be thought that they might have. This particular piece is, we experience in the course of this, it’s a dance piece also, complicated, we experience the abduction of a male dancer/actor and various depictions of essentially psychological torture. This particular segment, and it was in segments this piece, it uses very loud rock music and it starts out with sort of, I mean you’ll hear it, kind of sensual things and the abductee had been stripped down to his underwear at that point. The dancers begin crawling over him. It’s so horribly invasive. This piece is called, “Down the Rabbit Hole.”

Aaron Gonsher

“Rabbit Hole Acid Trip.”

Joan La Barbara

“Rabbit Hole Acid Trip,” ok.

Aaron Gonsher

Even better.

(video: Joan La Barbara and Jane Comfort – “Rabbit Hole Acid Trip” / applause)

Joan La Barbara

Thank you.

Aaron Gonsher

That’s obviously very different from some of the music that we started with. How have you continually tried to push your own compositions forward and not gotten stuck in a place that maybe people might have wanted you to stay. Maybe there are people who have experienced something like An American Rendition the same way you experienced Martin’s stripe paintings, as a sort of betrayal. I’m more interested not in that betrayal, but how you’ve been challenging yourself to continually innovate and change the structure and intentions of your own work.

Joan La Barbara

When I started working, we started with that question. I was developing a vocabulary of vocal sounds, an orchestra if you will, of vocal sounds. Some that I think are more string like, some more reed like, some more percussive. Then I created a number of pieces using very abstract sound. Really shying away from language and trying to express purely with the vocal instrument. As I began collaborating with different people, Jane would come to me with ideas, or Kenneth Goldsmith, with whom I created 73 Poems. It’s a combination of visual and text and voice and electronics and sculpture. Each work actually has its genesis, its beginning, and then how I approach it, I’m following a meandering path into the work. I do several things as I start a new piece. One of them is, once I have the idea or a proposed idea, I do a stream of consciousness writing, just text. I just write and write and write and I try not to censor myself. When I finish this brain dump, I go back and I read what I’ve written and find the music from the words.

Aaron Gonsher

How much do you take between writing it down and returning to it usually?

Joan La Barbara

It depends. Sometimes I’ll do several days worth of just writing and then after that there’s a long period of finding the music and beginning to map out what I’m gonna do with it. The third piece that I did on Sunday night, “Windows”, is part of an opera that I’ve been working on since 2003. It started out as a piece called “Woolf Song.” I was working with my ensemble, Ne(x)tworks. It was inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. The first version of it, I distributed the musicians around, it was a gallery space, around the room, and I said to them, it says, “if you’ve been strewn into this landscape by an unseen hand.” I said to my cellist, at that time, it was Rubin Kodheli, I said, can you play lying down? He said, “Sure, I do it all the time.” So, I placed them in unusual positions, and then gave them fragments of text from Woolf, and I said, “You can proceed through this at your own rate of speed.” Sometimes it was two, three words, rarely more than three words. They were translating, as I do, from text into sound. These were musicians that I had worked with for a while, so I really trusted their instincts.

Over the years I’ve added in now, the life and work of Joseph Cornell, an American sculptor. I hope, if you don’t know his work, you will go see it. Beautiful, exquisite, small boxes. He came out of the surrealist tradition so dreams were very much a part of his work process actually. Sleeping was part of his work process, to try to dream and then to not quite leave the dream and go into work. These boxes exist somewhere between fantasy and the subconscious. This kind of realization. He also kept exquisite journals. Some of the inspiration that is going into this piece are the little fragments where he would describe some of the dreams.

Aaron Gonsher

Are you generally interested in exploring that boundary between fantasy and reality in your own work? Why do you think the line between the two can be such a fruitful area for artistic exploration?

Joan La Barbara

I think each of us, when we’re confronted with a piece of art, whether it’s text art or visual art or sound art, have a reaction to it. That’s what makes each of us different. One of the things is that we have our own personal reaction to things. I am interested in exploring that territory, exploring subconscious ways of reacting to things and letting your imagination have some degree of freedom before you bring the tools in to make it a piece. Exploring fantasy and ideas and the labyrinthine territory that is inside your head.

Aaron Gonsher

I want to play a video that is actually an example of you working in the reverse, where you had something very specific to work with that you had to create sound for. This video is quite graphic, actually. It’s the sound that matters. If it gets too graphic, just close your eyes and listen. Can you play video two please?

(video: clip from Alien Resurrection)

I do have a good reason for showing that video. Can you explain what we just watched and why I’m showing that video that we just watched? What was it exactly?

Joan La Barbara

We euphemistically call that, voiceover work. I was hired by the sound designer to come in and to voice the alien newborn, which is the monster.

Aaron Gonsher

Which Alien movie was that?

Joan La Barbara

This is the fourth one, Alien Resurrection. The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, we had long conversations, long and relative, when they brought me out to Hollywood, to Burbank, and showed me these clips. We talked about the fact that the alien newborn is actually a clone of Ripley, Sigourney Weaver, and the alien queen, the monster. The alien is part human. They had hired someone before me who made monster sounds, and they decided that they wanted something that didn’t sound so much like Godzilla. Talking about boundaries and territories, there’s this really delicate boundary. We talked about the fact that it’s actually infanticide. When you see the alien come up and rub its face against Sigourney’s face, it’s a child. It’s a baby. Jeunet wanted some elements of humanity in it, but not too much.

To get the voice I really studied the physicality of the head of the monster. It’s got this enormous cranium and this big, resonating thing in the back of its head and this huge tongue. You see Sigourney take some of the saliva. The saliva to any other being would be acid, which is why when she throws it against the window it burns through the window of the spaceship. Because she and it share the same DNA she’s able to actually take this and she knows what she’s doing. There is this very poignant moment when the baby, essentially, in my mind I was saying, “Why are you doing this to me? Why did you do this, Mama?” She reaches out and says either, “My baby” or “I’m sorry” or some combination of the two. It’s a very emotional scene. They had shown me the death scene, obviously. They had shown me this in short clips, like two or three seconds. I said, “No, I don’t want to do it that way. I want to do that whole sequence where it’s being sucked out through the window in one long take.” It’s about 11 point something seconds. I did it constantly inhaling and exhaling so that you... Because I felt that if I broke it up into sections, marrying those sections back together would not be as horrifying as what you actually experience which is the physicality of just that length of time, of realizing what’s happening, going through that, “Why have you done this?” and being actually, literally, pulled apart as you go out through the space ship.

Aaron Gonsher

It’s not just a physical preparation for that sort of performance…

Joan La Barbara

Oh, no, no.

Aaron Gonsher

It’s very much emotional, getting into the roots of what the actual situation is.

Joan La Barbara

You’re playing a character. You have to become that being, whatever it is. I had to imagine that I was experiencing this and to use the sounds, and not really think so much about the sounds once I was doing it, more just do it. Experience it viscerally, what was happening to my body as it was being sucked out through this tiny little hole.

Aaron Gonsher

There’s a piece you’ve been working on recently that also has fairly dark subject matter. I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about that because you’re having to teach people how to access that character in this sound. Can you introduce “A Murmuration for Chibok”?

Joan La Barbara

Yes. I was commissioned by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City about a year or so ago to write a piece for young singers. Francisco Núñez, who is the music director and conductor, said, “We don’t want any old choral piece. We want you to do your thing with our singers.” I thought about it for a while. I went to some of their performances.

It was not long after April 14, 2014 when over 200 girls were kidnapped from their school in Chibok, Nigeria. As a human being, of course, but as a woman I responded incredibly to the fact that these girls had so much courage to be attending school at all. The fact that they were kidnapped because they were going to school. I said to Francisco, “I want to do a work honoring these girls.” Over 200 of whom are still missing. I think the number, I don’t remember exactly, but it was up in the neighborhood of about 290 some. There are about 219 still missing, 21 were released about two weeks ago. Some are now dead. I wanted to do a work honoring the courage of these young girls. What also upset me deeply was, when it first happened there was a great deal of worldwide attention on this, outrage. Hashtag Bring Back Our Girls was something that was started. Then, as happens with news stories, we lose interest and the news media moves onto something else. A year later, in April of 2015, there were a few articles, a few remembrances but then it disappeared again and I thought, “These girls are still there.” I wanted to do something. Francisco and the Young People’s Chorus agreed to let me do this work.

I then did some workshops with them, teaching them my vocal techniques to see what they could do. I chose certain techniques that I thought that they could do very well. One of them was the ululating sound. We’re going to demonstrate it at some point. When they all did it, this whole room full of girls doing this wonderful fluttery thing, it just sounded so joyful and I thought, “Oh, this is the beginning of the piece.” This is the girls coming together because they had all gone home and they had come back to school to take a physics exam. To me, this ululating sound was the joy of these girls coming back and seeing their friends, and talking, and saying, “Oh, I’m happy to see you.” The beginning of this piece is this whole ululating, joyful sound that is sculpted in time by the conductor using language that is not language, it’s the sound of language but it’s not actual words. That is then stopped by a clap stick. It’s two pieces of wood hitting each other. Then it continues on into the piece.

At first I worked wordlessly, then I realized that it needed some words. I went to a librettist, a wonderful Vietnamese-American novelist, Monique Truong. She agreed to do the work with me and she was adamant that the girl’s names, at least some of their names, had to be part of the piece. We do, at a certain point, speak and sing some of the names to honor these girls and to keep them in our present awareness.

Aaron Gonsher

Can we bring up image four? I think people would be interested to see where you start with a composition like that. What are we looking at?

Joan La Barbara

OK. When I started working, after I had done the workshop, I got images and ideas and I start by doing drawings. Outside my window, I live up the Hudson River, a little outside New York, there was a tree branch that was hanging down. The left side is actually the top and this thing was hanging down and I drew it. Then I thought, “Well, if I turn it horizontally it becomes a musical line or a collection of musical lines.” The center stem is this undulating tone and the branches that drift away from it are just gentle sighs (makes sighing sounds) and then there’s a steady tone. I don’t have recordings of this work yet because it’s being premiered in New York November 4th and November 6th.

Aaron Gonsher

You’ve mentioned around this piece, going into the Young People’s Chorus for the first time and trying to teach them some of your techniques. Could you maybe try to teach us some of them now?

Joan La Barbara

(laughs) Nice transition, Aaron, very nice. I’m going to use this other microphone. Those of you who are singers and sound engineers know that microphones are very different and I happen to like this one very much. I did a lot of testing. It’s not great for speaking, but it’s great for doing other things. This other mic is better for speaking. I won’t really try to teach you because that takes quite a while, but I’ll just demonstrate some of the vocal techniques, like the inhaled glottal click, for example. (makes sound) It’s not really inhaling, it’s sort of setting the vocal apparatus in a particular position and what you’re doing is ever so slightly inhaling, but it’s a sub-tone. It’s basically a sub-tone. (makes sound) Just by moving your lips and tongue, then you can sort of speak on that. (makes sound) I like the inhaled version. The exhaled version of it is called a vocal fry, but I like the inhaled version because you can actually get almost individual clicks happening. The vocal fry is more (makes sound) It’s the vocal fry because it sounds like a frying egg. People gave names to these things after I and some other people started doing it, but you can use the vocal fry to create a multiphonic. Multiphonic is basically sounding two pitches simultaneously. You can either start with the vocal fry, and using your brain, begin to bring it from a sub-tone up to recognizable pitch (makes sound) or you can start with a comfortable mid-range pitch and let it drop. What technically you’re doing, which I didn’t know I was doing at the time, is that you are getting the false vocal folds to sympathetically vibrate with the true vocal folds. You’re actually tuning a secondary voice producing mechanism within your throat. (makes sound)

The most predictable of these is the octave. Sometimes, if you can relax everything, you can get an octave and a fifth. I don’t know if I can actually do that. (makes sound) Sort of gravely and it comes and goes. Ululation, it’s laughing. It’s basically laughing. When I teach it, that’s what I say, “Just laugh.” (laughs) You’re laughing on pitch, right? (laughs) What I’ve got the girls to do, which is like a yodel flutter. You get to the break point. Each of our voices has a sort of break where you go from one register to another. (makes sound) That’s like fluttering back and forth cross-registerly. If you add imaginary language to that, you get this sort of wonderful sound that I’ve got the girls doing. (makes sound) I said, “Your voices...” They were all so wonderfully young. They were high school age, so their voices can go much higher than mine can at this point in time. I said, “Use that whole terrain and really play with it.” (makes sound) You can imagine like 30 voices doing this. It’s incredibly, wonderfully joyful.

What else did I do? Inhaled singing. I’ve had people say, “You can’t sing on the inhale.” Well, of course you can. We all can. If somebody stepped on your toe, you’d go, “Oh.” Or something like that, or maybe curse them out. Basically, it’s that sound slowed down. When I teach it, I teach by just breathing. Breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. At a certain point on the inhale, begin to sound the inhale, and then slow it down. (makes sound) That’s all there is to it. You can sing on the inhale and on the exhale. Those are some of the techniques I use. You need other voices to do the microtonal thing, but you know. (applause)

Aaron Gonsher

My last question for you before we open it up to a Q&A. How have you seen these techniques infiltrate the mainstream over the course of your career? What do you think have been the real tipping points in these extended vocal techniques? Going from something that people might have giggled at in 1976 to being heard in a major song somewhere that is heard all over the world in what would normally be considered pop music, or not necessarily pop music, but the mainstream in general.

Joan La Barbara

Yeah, of course when I first started working and other composers got interested, people would write pieces for me but they tended to use extended vocal techniques to connote madness. I thought, “Well, gee, yeah, OK,” but it’s not only that. It’s so many, many other kinds of things. Certainly now, if you look at the work of Caroline Shaw, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year I think it was, for a work, a choral work for A Room Full Of Teeth, she’s using a lot of extended techniques. I do remember, well there was a vocal ensemble called Electric Phoenix in London. The Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble in San Diego at UC San Diego. There were composers who were writing for these quartets of voices. As I said some individual composers wrote for me, but I guess it was maybe in the early ’90s I was teaching at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and one of my students brought me the work of Björk. It was the first I had heard of it and I thought, “Wow, OK, I recognize this.” I was really intrigued at her uses of the voice. Her layering of voices. In some cases beginning to use electronics with voice.

Actually the other night when I heard Lucrecia and Pan [Daijing] performing, I heard what I feel is maybe some of my influence in some of your work. I could hear little bits and pieces of things that I thought, “Oh yeah, I remember that.” It’s an instrument. We use the instrument. We all use the instrument. We use it in different ways. I’m happy when I hear this. It’s very funny, I think that when I began working I thought there would be an avenue into classical music, fine art music, but it seems that it was sort of short-lived in that arena, with a few exceptions, and that it’s gone quite happily into let’s say a more pop or commercial territory where uses of the voice, noise and breath sounds and language and various kinds of sounds that are now incorporated into beats. Oh, beat box singing is really fantastic.

Aaron Gonsher

Thank you for joining us today. (applause) Are there questions from anyone in the audience? There should be a microphone going around.

Audience Member

Thank you so much for being here.

Joan La Barbara

Thank you.

Audience Member

Could you... would you be okay to talk a little bit about Morton Feldman?

Joan La Barbara

Sure.

Audience Member

How you met him and maybe talk a little bit about Three Voices?

Joan La Barbara

Yes of course. I met Morton Feldman I think probably around 1975. I was really just beginning my work and I had composed a piece called “Thunder” for voice with electronics and six timpani played by two timpanists. It was semi-improvised. There was a line that was the sort of central line that was played on the timpani. The voice did more sort of lightning, so the thunder had the melody and the timpani and the voice was more lightning with these electronic things. Anyway, Feldman was on, I learned afterwards, was on a panel that gave me my first grant. It was The New York State Council in the Arts. They had something called the Creative Artists Public Service Program so they gave you a bit of money to do some work and then you were supposed to do something, some public service of some sort.

After that, so of course I developed my work “Thunder” using that grant money, and my public service I did two lecture demonstrations. One at the UN and one at AT&T for their lunchtime meeting or something. There is actually a connection with AT&T because of Bell Labs. Some of you may know of Bell Labs. Then Feldman invited me in ’76 to be a visiting composer at the State University of New York in Buffalo. It was the year of the great snowstorms and I actually couldn’t get there for a long period of time. Eventually I did get there and I worked with what was then The Creative Associates at Buffalo.

Some years later, I was in Berlin, living in Berlin, and whenever I would hit a kind of dry spell as a composer, I would reach out to some of my friends and say, “Why don’t you write me a piece?” I wrote a letter to Morty Feldman and I said, “Morty, I just, I really would love to have a piece from you for voice and orchestra. You know, something like ‘The Viola In My Life.’” He wrote back and he said, “Do you have an orchestra that’s going to play it? Because it’s an awful lot of work.” I wrote this long conversation, Berlin to Buffalo, and I said, “No I don’t.” He said, “Well I’ve got an idea,” and he sent me, some months later, Three Voices. It is three lines of vocal material, very, very similar. In the letter that he wrote to me he explained that you record the top two lines and they are to be played back separately. One in the left, one in the right speaker, and then the live voice sings the bottom line.

In performance, the pre-recorded voices are only to be brought up to the live voice singing pianissimo. It’s another 18-page work and took me a long time to do the work. It doesn’t have a metronome marking on it and it doesn’t have any kind of indication of what vowels or vowel-blend you use. At the mid-point he introduces the beginnings of the fragments of text from Frank O’Hara’s Wind, so I, in looking at the work, I found the fastest moving figure which was five in the space of one quarter note and… Or eighth note, eighth note I think, and had to learn to sing that at what I was, as fast as possible. We’re talking about a different kind of as fast as possible than Cage’s 'as fast as possible'. I called him up because I wanted to program it and I said, “How long do you think it is?” He said, “Oh, 45.” I said, “Great, OK.” I programmed it on several concerts. Then I started recording it and I called him up and I said, “Morty it’s going to be more like 90,” and he said, “Yeah I always thought it was going to be 90.” He really… In the letter that he wrote to me when he sent it to me he said, “It’s sort of like a cocktail dress with a long train.” You’ve got to know Morty’s voice. He said, “I think of it as like a fast slowness or a slow fastness.” As far as the vowel blend, I tried to use as pure vowels as I could. “Ooo” is the purest vowel. It has the least coloristic overtones, but you can’t sustain that for a long period of time. I did a kind of “ooo” with an “aw” or “aw” with and “ooo” depending on how you’re shaping your mouth, so it’s a blend of vowels.

What you get when you do pure and as little vibrato as possible, is you get combination and difference tones, which is one of the things that I think is so magical about that piece, is because it has all of this buzzing that’s going on in the space, that is so much of the beauty of the piece. Then again by mouth shaping, you get specific overtones that are ringing through into it.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Aaron Gonsher

I think we have a couple more questions.

Audience Member

Hi. Thank you for the lecture. Your connection with imagery and music, it’s sort of like a two-part question. Do you see colors as well or is it only motions and shapes? And your conversion of the imagery into sound and music, was it something that you’ve always had or was it something that you developed? I sort of have the opposite. I sort of see motions and shapes from music, but it’s something that I was never able to quite exert because to me it was literally a sixth sensation of being smack bang in the middle of sound and imagery. I could never exert it. I was interested to know if you developed it or if you’ve always had that ability to convert it.

Joan La Barbara

Thank you for that question. It’s interesting to try to figure that out. I don’t know that I always had it. I think at a certain point when I started exploring with the voice, I realized... First of all, when I improvise, my left hand gets very active. I just let it do its thing because it allows my brain to focus on what I need to focus on. I did recognize at a certain point that I was seeing sound as shape and sometimes as I was singing, I was actually seeing shapes. Then, when I would try to translate from physicalizing the sound to putting it down on paper, either for myself just to remember what I was doing or in creating a score for someone else maybe to look at, I wanted to get the shape of the sound. I drew my scores for a long time on blank sheets of paper, even if I was using a five-line staff to get specific pitches. I would oftentimes do that notation as well as a graphic because to me the graphic showed how I wanted the sound to flow and then the traditional notation would actually indicate the pitch terrain and where it had to go. Does that answer that?

Audience Member

Pretty much, yeah. Thank you.

Joan La Barbara

Thank you.

Aaron Gonsher

There’s one more question over here, and then one in the front after that.

Audience Member

OK. Thank you. I have a question. There was a lot of mention about research on voice and your voice techniques, you call this. Describing these extended vocal techniques, right? If I listen to those extended vocal techniques as opposed to the common vocal techniques, which seem to me a little bit reduced, I feel very reminded of music that we can hear all around the world. Maybe in Africa, South America, in the jungles, or in Tibet, whatever, where there’s a lot of techniques that are obviously neglected by more Eurocentric approaches. I wonder if, on the one hand, if during your research does it seem to be an internal research or is it a research that reach towards other techniques in other places of the world or maybe nature, birds, whatever? In connection to that, because I have a little bit of difficulties with notation systems and stuff, there is one thing you mentioned and maybe it might relate to your answer also. You said real time composition. I wondered what is the difference between real-time composition and improvisation and if that is related to this research? Thank you.

Joan La Barbara

Let’s take the first one first. When I started, I was exploring my own instrument. Then, gradually, I began imitating other instruments and animals and sometimes people would come to my concerts and they would bring me cassette recordings of specific vocal music in other cultures. Now we’ve got access to the Internet and you’ve got access to all of these sounds, but the click language in Africa, the Swedish cow callers, the Inuit throat singers, and the Tuvan throat singers, and the Tibetan monks. Certainly I listened to a lot of this, and monkey chant. All sorts of things. I did actually, when I was teaching at Cal Arts, I took a class in monkey chant just for curiosity, and I also took a class in North Indian vocal singing. Just scratching the surface, but to get a sense of a bit of a window opening into some of those sounds.

Certainly the influence finds its way into my music. In a work I did in 1983 called “Berlin Dreaming” I actually incorporated my interpretation of the Inuit, this inhaled (makes sound) this kind of thing where they sing into each other’s mouths. I put that into it. I think because I’ve been in Berlin over the course of my life many, many times, and sometimes I participated in a festival called Metamusic that attempted to bring western cultural music in contact with music from other cultures, which was a wonderful opening for the audience to get to experience different kinds. So the idea of using sound influenced by Inuit Eskimos in a piece about Berlin made a lot of sense to me. Notation, was that the next?

Audience Member

Real-time composition.

Joan La Barbara

That was it, OK. Yes. The piece that I started out with on Sunday night called “Solitary Journeys Of The Mind” is, for me, real-time composition because it contains a number of specific sound gestures that are the kind of pillars of that work. Then how I move, it always now starts with this big leap and then gets into a (sings) gets into it like a language thing. That’s a gesture that is part of that composition. The real time aspect of it is how I work those sounds. If I repeat the sounds, how I repeat the sounds, how I choose to shift away from the sound or expand on the sound. That, of course, it’s improvisation, but I guess what makes it real-time composition for me is I’m working with specific elements that make it, for me, a piece. As opposed to pure improvisation, where I’m really reacting in the moment either to another person who is responding to me or the sonic environment that I’m in or whatever.

There’s a fine line between the two. I think that people who write on paper are actually doing both also. They’re doing real time composition on paper, but also they’re improvising in their minds. To a more or less finite degree, if they’ve decided on, let’s say, a harmonics structure first. There are different gradations of all of that.

Audience Member

Thank you for the lecture and the wonderful performance on Sunday night. Just as a note to your first question, your second piece on Sunday night really reminds me of the way we communicate through singing in my hometown in the mountains. It’s like this high-pitched singing and distant echo. It was really beautiful. My question is, we’ve been talking about instruments, I consider our body, including voice and gesture and moves as a first-hand instrument and electronic hardware or other acoustic instruments that we have to touch or play as a second-hand, like we have to process it. While using the first-hand instrument, it requires the composer, the performer, to be much more vulnerable. I don’t know how do you feel about being vulnerable on stage or in the composition. Does it bother you? Because it makes me become more self-aware than, for example, playing with hardware. I don’t know how you feel about this and through all these year, you’ve been working with other people. How do you put yourself in front of all these things and how do you feel about it?

Joan La Barbara

Complicated. Thank you. In the first piece that I did the other night, which was voice alone, and it’s funny I was talking to somebody last night and he was not watching, and so he said, “How did you feel as you were listening to that?” I said “What do you mean?” I said, “I was doing it.” He thought that it was layers of sound because of what I was doing vocally. In a way, that piece is very, very freeing because I’m using the state of the instrument at that moment in time and how it’s responding to what I want it to do and how I’m using the acoustic situation. In the case of the second piece, which has no electronics, it’s just layering of voices. It’s very interesting because that piece was done in 1980 and my voice has lowered now. There are some sounds that exist on that recording that I can no longer match and participate with. I, then, am in the situation of using a different part of my range so I can participate in some of the mid-range and certainly in the multiphonic aspects of that.

The third piece that I did the other night uses not only multiple layers of my voice, but also instruments and electronics and recordings of natural sounds. Water. The wind is all me. I’m creating all the wind. It’s really difficult to record wind. Anybody who’s ever tried it, so it’s much easier to make it with voice. As far as the vulnerability is concerned, because when I’m working with pre-recorded material and I know it very well, I can choose to anticipate some sounds that are coming up. The vulnerability comes in if what I want to, let’s say pre-roll, introduce before it happens. I don’t always know precisely what the pitch is going to be. I have to either go into a territory and then if the other sound comes in and it’s not quite matching I have to find a way to make it match. There’s that aspect of vulnerability. I’m not sure that’s actually addressing your question because I think what you’re talking about is more about maybe the physicality or what’s different about the primary instrument as opposed to the secondary, which is the electronic, introducing different elements at different points in time. Is that?

Audience Member

Yeah, but actually you answered my question because you were talking about you also worked with pre-recorded material so you can anticipate what is coming up. I think it becomes more vulnerable when you are doing absolute improvisation on electronic sounds and you have to find the harmony or you get surprised by how your voice sound together with your recordings. That kind of vulnerability.

Joan La Barbara

Yeah. I was sort of approaching that in answering. When I want to anticipate something that I know is coming, but I’m not quite sure that I’m going to get exactly the pitch. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll introduce a melodic pattern that has the terrain of what I know is coming but may not actually match up with the specific pitches that are coming. Because of the way I’m introducing it, it’s like I’m setting up this pattern that is coming and then when it appears in the pre-recorded material, you recognize it. If it is right on, you recognize it one way. If it is an interval-ic relationship with that pattern, you recognize the pattern and how it differs, maybe, if you’re listening that closely to what you’ve heard before, what has been introduced into your subconscious listening experience.

Audience Member

Thank you very much.

Aaron Gonsher

Thank you again, Joan, for joining us today. (applause)