FEATURE
Page 22: Eastern State Penitentiary interior, photo © Mark Perrott 1992 Jason Moran and the Bandwagon
Among the many projects that PMP will support this season, three invite composers to base new works on specific objects and places, including paintings, quilts, and the historic Eastern State Penitentiary. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has commissioned pianist Jason Moran to create a work inspired by the upcoming exhibition, “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt,” and Chamber Music Now will produce a concert of thematic commissions inside the penitentiary’s dramatic Cellblock Seven. Network for New Music will present a full season of concerts with commissions responding both to visual artwork and historic locations, from 19th-century oil paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to a remote kingdom in northern Nepal.
Looking at Inspiration: Visual Art and Historic Sites Spark Composers’ Imaginations by Alyssa Timin
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Jason Moran ranks high among the most inventive pianists of his generation. Recently named in Smithsonian magazine’s “37 Under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences,” he has repeatedly set his creative sights beyond the traditional boundaries of jazz. Early in his career, Moran embraced one of hip-hop’s signature elements by incorporating recorded samples into his works. These days, he and The Bandwagon (bassist Tarus Mateen, guitarist Marvin Sewell, and drummer Nasheet Waits) enter the stage accompanied by a tightly edited mix of influences from all over the musical map. Visual art history plays an increasing role in Moran’s large-scale projects. For 14 months in 2004 and 2005, he served as the Walker Art Center’s artist in residence (a title he transferred to his most recent album). Moran had the privilege of sifting through the Center’s permanent collection, eventually choosing the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper to guide the composition of “Milestone.” Specifically, he focused on “The Mythic Being; I/You (Her),” a series of photographs from 1974 in which the subject’s racial and gender markers slowly transform while her/ his running monologue describes the disintegration of trust in an undefined relationship where “You instinctively perceive me as the enemy.” Moran assembled the text for “Milestone” from conversations with Piper, his wife, and with his quartet, exploring questions of race and identity from an autobiographical standpoint. For “IN MY MIND: Monk at Town Hall 1959,” one of Moran’s most recent commissions, the composer enlisted help from Glenn Ligon, a contemporary artist who has inherited the tradition of text-based work from Piper and others (Ligon’s soft-white neon sign, negro sunshine, graced the cover of Artforum in May 2006). The artist created a black-and-white painting, repeating “IN MY MIND” in roughly stenciled lettering that smudges illegibly toward the bottom of the canvas. Always resistant to being pigeonholed, Moran denies that he is particularly interested in text-based visual art. Instead, he emphasizes, “I’m into what people do really well,” adding that he takes opportunities to make connections among artists of all disciplines. He feels a special commitment to fostering community among African-American artists but hardly does so at the exclusion of other artists who interest him.
Moran seeks to outdo himself with each project, and he increasingly turns to “outside forces” to help take his compositions to the next level. He is “constantly talking to artists,” he says. For his current commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Moran sought advice from performance and video art pioneer Joan Jonas, with whom he worked in 2005, on performing in the cavernous Great Stair Hall. A professor at MIT who holds dual appointments in visual art and architecture, Jonas has long been recognized for her sensitivity to the aesthetic properties of space. Although his ideas for the PMA performance are still gestating, Moran says their correspondence has led him to consider building a wood room inside the Hall as its set. “I was not going to turn down a challenge like that,” the pianist remarks of the PMA’s invitation to write a work inspired by the quilts of Gee’s Bend. Produced within a tight-knit and secluded AfricanAmerican community in rural Alabama, the quilts are renowned for their masterful construction and bold, improvisational style. While they are beautiful in themselves, the quilts also testify to a remarkable community tradition. Women in Gee’s Bend have quilted for generations—almost certainly since before the end of slavery, when their home was still a plantation. Pieced together from available scraps of fabric, including worn out work clothes, the quilts serve very practical purposes, keeping homes comfortable and warm, while also providing a special means of individual expression, social distinction, and continuity between generations. Though secluded, Gee’s Bend attracted attention throughout the 20th century. As early as the Great Depression, the cohesion and creative spirit of its residents earned it the nickname “An Alabama Africa.” During the 1960s, “Benders” played a significant role in the civil rights movement, particularly under the ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr., who visited the rural community and spoke at their church. However, the quilts’ reputation as fine art only solidified as recently as 2002, when an Atlanta-based art dealer collected 70 quilts for a traveling museum exhibition. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” began at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and caused a sensation at its second stop, the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt” follows up on the initial tour with stops in Denver, Louisville, and Philadelphia. In the past six years, the quilters have formed a collective, a foundation, and gained gallery representation in New York. Unfortunately, the massive exposure provided by the exhibitions has also spawned a lawsuit and subsequent rifts among the quilters. Moran is well aware of these recent chapters in the history of Gee’s Bend, and he wants his composition to address the problems associated with the quilts’ commercialization: what happens when they are hung behind glass in a museum, and objects that once functioned inside homes become decoration? Moran observes that he has not yet gone to meet the artists, and he is prepared for the visit to “change everything.” Still, some details are clear. He has invited jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, who has a strong affinity for American folk art forms and already took his own trip to Gee’s Bend, to augment the Bandwagon. The ensemble will also include Moran’s wife, the soprano Alicia Hall Moran, and children from North Philadelphia’s AKWD (“Any Kid Will Do”) Preschool.
On top of the history of Gee’s Bend, the visual power of the quilts, and questions regarding their status as decorative art, the pianist also wants his composition to acknowledge contemporary experiences of race in Philadelphia. One gets the sense that he is not willing to permit the impression that struggle and solidarity among African-Americans only happened in the past, or only happens in the South. A composer of conscience and ambition, Moran is driven to fold more and more of the world into his art. Those who go to his concert on December 12th will hear his latest synthesis. The local presenting organization Chamber Music Now will probe the shadows of Philadelphia’s past in a concert of new works held inside and inspired by the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP). Situated less than half a mile from the PMA, the Penitentiary is one of the city’s most impressive historic sites. It attracts the most visitors around Halloween, when the decommissioned prison is transformed into “Terror behind the Walls,” perhaps the most elaborate (and expensive) haunted house in the region. However, the place manages to be delightfully creepy year-round. From 1829 until 1970, ESP operated as one of Philadelphia’s main penal institutions. Designed by architect John Haviland, the Penitentiary kept convicts in complete solitude, on the theory that the protracted isolation would by itself bring about their reform. This utopian fallacy is made eerily visible in ESP’s architecture: cellblocks extend from a central rotunda in radial symmetry; they exude the pristine, unconscious cruelty of overly ambitious social engineering. The surrounding wall is so tall and deep, and built with such stony conviction, that it looks almost new. Inside the old cellblocks, however, plaster has been sloughing off the walls for decades, burying abandoned mattresses with white dust and flakes of paint. The atmosphere is thick with loneliness and lost time. Richard Belcastro and David Laganella, the directors of Chamber Music Now, turned to ESP for their major production for the season. They have made an annual tradition of commissioning new works around a unified theme. Having been on the hunt for a new performance space, Belcastro and Laganella hit on the idea of the Penitentiary as a way to solve two problems at once, albeit temporarily. They take pride in keeping their productions “a local affair,” working almost exclusively with local composers and musicians and often making an aspect of Philadelphia their theme. Still, their upcoming concert at the Penitentiary marks their first concert to take place “in the source of the inspiration.” After receiving approval from the ESP’s Board of Directors, Belcastro and Laganella agreed that the commissions would be “too fun to give away.” Each season, the two directors—also both composers—choose a PMP 23
Looking at Inspiration: Visual Art and Historic Sites Spark Composers’ Imaginations
concert on which to program their work. Neither could resist the Penitentiary’s sinister allure, so they took on half of the program themselves and commissioned two other area composers, Richard Brodhead and Philip Maneval, to complete the bill. The recently established Ensemble CMN, a resident group including soprano Rachael Garcia, cellist Miguel Rojas, violinist Hanna Khoury, clarinetist Joshua Kovach, and percussionist Gabe Globus-Hoenich, will perform. In the quest for an angle on the storied site, the account of one of ESP’s first female inmates captured Belcastro’s attention. Ann Hinson was among the first four women sentenced to the Penitentiary and was central to a highly publicized investigation into the integrity of the institution a mere five years after it opened. Under the watch of an underkeeper’s wife, records indicate that Hinson received certain privileges, including special housing and a job as a cook in the penitentiary’s public quarters. Both she and Mrs. Blundin, the underkeeper’s wife, as well as other members of the administration, were accused of “licentious and immoral practices,” as well as late night dancing and “carousing.” As historian Leslie Patrick coolly notes, the warden received a reprimand, “though he would be allowed to keep his position,” Mrs. Blundin was “required to leave the premises of the prison,” and “Hinson was never heard from again.” The threadbare life story of this female convict makes her feel just out of reach, a frustratingly inaccessible phantom. Caught with too many privileges and too few rights in an apparently lawless penal institution, she seems to have been swallowed up by circumstances beyond her control. Intrigued by Hinson but deprived of her perspective, Belcastro has set out to write a work—including the text—imagining the life of his tragic muse. Maneval similarly plans to dig into the Penitentiary’s archives for stories of inmates’ experiences. Before he dives into the details, however, he reports that he is absorbed in the “broader themes of incarceration, isolation and redemption.” In contrast to Belcastro and Maneval’s somber meditations, Laganella has been thinking about reality television. Specifically, he has been thinking about an episode of “Ghost Hunters” filmed inside ESP. His work, he remarks, is taking shape in response to the theatricality of ghost stories. He plans to cast his soprano in the role of “apparitions,” animating her part with all the imaginary magnetism of the undead. Brodhead, the fourth composer on the program, plans a different approach. Rather than focusing on the history of the Penitentiary, his attention has fallen on the acoustical properties of the space itself. He is considering placing the performers at differPMP 24
ent ends of the cellblock, or even in separate blocks altogether. Network for New Music (NNM), one of the region’s longest-standing experimental ensembles, has dedicated its entire 2008–2009 season to “Explorations in New Music and Art,” although audiences can also expect historic and site-specific references among their remarkably varied programs. Coincidentally, NNM has commissioned works from Laganella and Brodhead for a performance in the rotunda of the Historic Landmark Building of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). Both composers will write in response to works in the Academy’s permanent collection. In keeping with his contemporary sensibility, Laganella chose a 2006/2007 work in ink and graphite by the emerging artist Ben Peterson. The composer saw California Ten, a six-foot-by-ten-foot, minutely detailed drawing, before it went under glass in one of PAFA’s galleries of new works. “As soon as I saw it,” he affirms, he knew it was the image he wanted. Peterson’s drawing depicts an absurd, gently humorous vision of the havoc wreaked by a major earthquake. A wedge of coastal real estate has heaved and curled like a wave. Astroturf hangs over an abyss, and a house has left its innards— mostly appliances—on a weirdly blank plane beneath the surface of the earth. Laganella has been gazing at a “tiny black-and-white version [of the drawing] taped to my wall next to where I work.” Only three weeks into writing and already working on the second movement, he is “kind of shocked” at how quickly the composition is coming together. Simultaneously, Brodhead is composing one of his largest chamber works to date. Drawn to paintings in PAFA’s collection from the 19th and early 20th centuries, he settled on four images, each of which informs one movement. The first movement responds to Thomas Eakins’s Arcadian Scene. Brodhead interpreted the painting’s “sense of blended colors and something more discrete emerging” as a melodic idea developing from initial “atmospheric material.” Willard Metcalf’s The Twin Birches, Morris Hall Pancoast’s The Pennsy Train Shed, and James Whistler’s The Thames will guide the latter movements. NNM’s November concert at NEXUS/foundation for today’s art follows a similar format but embraces a very different aesthetic. Gene Coleman and Kyle Bartlett, both experimental composers who make use of extended techniques, take on the postmodern visual vocabularies of Sherif Habashi and Jennie Thwing. Bartlett, who describes her approach to composition as “microscopic,” seized on a sense of fragmentation in Habashi’s paintings. Scored for two flutes and two basses, the vast range of her piece aims to evoke “the
open, blank field.” Coleman, known for cultivating new sonic ground between disparate instruments, has also studied painting and filmmaking. His interest in deconstructing musical boundaries should mix well with Thwing’s complex installations. Summer 2009 brings the Hidden City Festival to Philadelphia, a celebration of some of the best-kept secrets and longest forgotten buildings in town. NNM will collaborate with producer Peregrine Arts on a concert in the abandoned Royal Theater. Built on south Broad Street in 1919, the Royal formed an important center for Philadelphia’s African-American population. “During an earlier time,” writes Inquirer reporter Linda K. Harris, “performers such as Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey, Billy Paul and Bessie Smith took the stage, singing and dancing for an adult crowd dressed to the nines.” In June, Network’s ensemble will perform a new site-specific production created by members of the Ridge Theater—composer and violinist Todd Reynolds, filmmaker Bill Morrison, and theatrical designer Laurie Olinder. Although Reynolds acknowledges that his partners’ creations often evoke nostalgia, he contrasts himself as “not a very literal composer,” and confirms that he does not plan to “pull spirits out of the walls.” Instead, having long loved the popular music that made the Royal famous, he looks forward to rekindling its energy in his composition. Likewise, he strongly supports Hidden City’s marriage of archaeology, cultural history, and contemporary performance. Reynolds enthuses, “I thrill to the idea that people are willing to dig down into a city, into history, to reopen the conversation about the history of Philadelphia.” However, Philadelphia is not the only place to have captured the imagination of local artists. Tibetan Buddhism comes to the foreground in a daring collaboration between composer Andrea Clearfield and painter Maureen Drdak, who will trek together to Lo Monthang, a semi-independent kingdom in the Upper Mustang region of northern Nepal. Clearfield is an omnivorous composer, constantly embracing new material, and she has always wanted to go to Nepal. In the kingdom whose name means “Plains of Prayer (or Aspiration)”, she plans to make digital recordings of both folk and ceremonial music. In particular, she hopes to capture a fraction of the thousands of songs written and performed by Tashi Tsering, royal singer to the Mustangi Raja. Clearfield’s compositional ideas center on the metaphor of ascent to higher and higher planes. The image is essential both to the mountainous terrain of Central Asia, as well as—perhaps not coincidentally—to the Tibetan Buddhist vision of spiritual attainment. In naming their project “Lung-Ta,” the collaborators establish a guiding concept that helps illuminate connections that Tibetan Buddhism makes between the physical and metaphysical universe. The term translates most literally to “Wind-Horse” and refers to the colorful prayer flags often associated with Tibet. Riding on the wind, these flags traditionally depict the horse that, according to
local mythology, carries the “Jewels of Buddhism,” the benefits of religious practice, up to the heavens. Lung-ta are vehicles for prayer. At the same time, explains Drdak, the word also applies to “a quality of the individual.” Just as the flags carry and transmit the dedicated merit of practitioners, so too the practitioner bears his merit within himself. In this sense, lung-ta signifies a kind of conflation of health and spiritual attainment based on a spiritualized idea of the wind or breath. A person whose lung-ta is up easily overcomes obstacles; when a person is “muddling, or can’t get it together,” Drdak adds, her lung-ta is said to be down. The painter has already made one trip to Lo Monthang and connects deeply with the spiritual worldview of the isolated kingdom. Although she treasures the culture’s purity, she also celebrates the inevitable commingling of historically and socially disparate elements. To that end, she and Clearfield view the project as an attempt to bridge distinctions between East and West. Drdak’s paintings will depict the lung-ta in stylized “biomorphic” form. The mythical horse is largely abstract, a muscularly curving shape intersected by rays of gold leaf “signifying the flaming energy of the Buddhist Dharma.” To more fully invest the images with motion, Drdak plans to take her canvases off their stretchers and hang them loose above the stage at the University of the Arts where Group Motion Dance Company will join Network’s musicians. Composers are wonderfully free when it comes to subject matter. A source can guide every note of a work or a single element of its structure. This season of PMP-funded projects suggests that, regardless of discipline, artists can interpret one another endlessly. Moments of inspiration and gestures of creativity forge links across time and space. The individuality of artists and their objects blend into a kaleidoscopic conversation among forms. Like artworks, historic sites are dense with suggestion. You walk into them and perceive an abundance that surpasses whatever you yourself are likely to comprehend. When the spark of creativity passes directly from one artist to the next, it is perhaps easiest to appreciate how meaning can be refreshed and renewed by change, or by falling into a stranger’s hands. Alyssa Timin’s writing on music and visual art has appeared in New Music Box, Visual Arts Journal, Finnish Music Quarterly, and Sequenza 21.
Page 24: Lung-ta detail, painting by Maureen Drdak Page 25: Network for New Music Ensemble, photo by JJ Tiziou
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