Musikgeschichtsschreibung findet nicht nur in Büchern statt. Auch Medien wie das Fernsehen sind daran beteiligt, welches Bild und welche Erzählung von der musikalischen Avantgarde überliefert wird. In „Tele-Visions“, einem der Programmschwerpunkte des Berliner Festivals MaerzMusik (22. bis 31.3.2019), werden selten zu sehende Filmraritäten und Dokumente aus über 20 Fernseharchiven gezeigt, erläutert und kommentiert. Einer der Kuratoren ist der amerikanische Komponist, Posaunist und Musikwissenschaftler George Lewis. Die nmz stellte ihm Fragen zu seiner Programmierung für MaerzMusik.
neue musikzeitung: MaerzMusik 2019 setzt mit dem Projekt „Tele-Visions“ einen Schwerpunkt auf die kritische Reflexion der geschichtlichen (Selbst)Darstellung der Neuen Musik im Massenmedium Fernsehen. Sie arbeiten für das Projekt als Kurator. Wie gehen Sie vor? Welche Filme wollen Sie zeigen und warum?
George Lewis: Als jahrelanger Konsument des US-Fernsehens war ich bereits mit dem Nichtvorkommen von Frauen und insbesondere von Farbigen in den Medien-Narrativen über zeitgenössische Musik vertraut. Ich bin keineswegs ein Filmexperte, daher besteht meine Haupttätigkeit als Kurator des Projekts „Tele-Visions“ darin, auf Filme hinzuweisen, die ansonsten übersehen werden könnten. Und zwar Filme, die größtenteils, wenn auch nicht ausschließlich, aus den USA stammen, wo zeitgenössische Musik nie einen großen Teil des TV-Programms ausmachte. Während meiner Zeit als Kurator bei „The Kitchen“ in New York in den frühen 80er-Jahren, wurden zahlreiche Versuche unternommen, die Mauer des Schweigens über diese Themen zu durchbrechen, die sowohl von kommerziellen als auch von nicht-kommerziellen Kanälen, das heißt, dem öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunk und seinen Vorgängern, errichtet wurde.
Großstädte wie New York haben öffentliche TV-Kanäle wie Roulette TV, die experimentelle Musikkünstler einem Nischenpublikum präsentieren. Private Initiativen von Kleinproduzenten wie Roulette stellen ein alternatives Archiv dar, und in den wissenschaftlichen afro-amerikanischen Studien von heute gibt es inzwischen eine beträchtliche Feldforschung hinsichtlich persönlicher Künstlerarchive – Sammelalben, Tagebücher und dergleichen. Heutzutage haben viele Menschen auch Videoarchive von Camcordern und Smartphones, die seit vielen Jahren im Einsatz sind. Ich als Vielreisender habe solche Aufnahmen in vielen Teilen der Welt über fast drei Jahrzehnte gemacht. Für das „Tele-Visions“-Projekt werden wir mein persönliches Videoarchiv aus dieser Zeit untersuchen. Wahrscheinlich werden wir Ereignisse wie die Live-Aufzeichnung eines Konzerts auf der Bühne durch die Musiker selbst, die gemeinsame Nutzung eines Camcorders während des Auftritts, einen Spaziergang am Platz des Himmlischen Friedens 1996 mit Han Bennink und Misha Mengelberg und einen Besuch im Haus von Leon Theremin 1991 erleben. Diese persönlichen Archive bieten das, was der Literaturwissenschaftler Brent Hayes Edwards „einen Kontrapunkt zur institutionellen Denkweise“ nennt, die allzu oft den Umfang der Arbeit von Frauen und Farbigen minimiert oder ganz ausschließt und das, was die Musikwissenschaftlerin Dana Reason „den Mythos der Abwesenheit“, nennt, beibehält – nämlich die falsche Behauptung, dass überhaupt nichts davon zu sehen ist.
Elektronik und Improvisation
nmz: MaerzMusik präsentiert die deutsche Erstaufführung ihres „A Recital for Terry Adkins“. Können Sie uns ein paar Hinweise zur Entstehungsgeschichte geben?
Lewis: Im Sommer 2010 traf ich Terry, seine Frau Merele und ihre inzwischen studierenden Kinder, die sich dem Ende ihrer einjährigen Rom-Preisresidenz an der American Academy in Rom näherten, und ich war dort Fromm Composer-in-Residence. Wir haben uns sofort verstanden, unser gemeinsames Interesse am elektronischen Klang, unsere Erfahrungen in der Instrumentalmusik (er hatte mit dem Saxophonisten Eddie Harris gespielt, der ein wichtiger Einfluss dahingehend wurde, wie wir Elektronik und Improvisation betrachten) und die abstrahierten Dialoge mit der afrodiasporischen Kultur, die unsere Arbeit prägen.
Wir haben uns geschworen, zusammenzukommen, um zusammenzuarbeiten und unsere erste Gelegenheit kam 2014, als wir ein ausführliches Kolloquium für das „Artforum“ verfassten, in dem wir die Situation afrodiasporischer Künstler diskutierten, ebenso wie umfassende Theorien zur Kreativität und der Rolle der kreativen Künstler bei der Förderung des sozialen Wandels. Wir dachten, dies könnte als Vorschau für unsere gemeinsame Kunstproduktion dienen, aber Terry starb, gerade als der Artikel in die Presse kam und er auf der Whitney Biennale vorgestellt wurde.
Nun kann ich auf den Aspekt „Recital“ eingehen. Zuerst plante Terry Adkins die Verwendung des Begriffs Recital, der sich auf Live-Performances innerhalb eines Teils seiner Ausstellungen bezog, die ihn sein Werk als „verjüngt“ empfinden ließen. 1987 gründete er ein Ensemble, das Lone Wolf Recital Corps, das die Vorträge aufführt. Laut dem Oxford English Dictionary stammt der Begriff „recital“ jedoch nicht aus der Musik, sondern aus der Rechtswissenschaft und bezieht sich auf eine „formale Aussage über relevante Fakten“. So waren Terrys Vorträge oft historischen Persönlichkeiten mit Bezügen zur amerikanischen Kultur gewidmet, wie Jean Toomer, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Bessie Smith und Matthew Henson. Die Performances stellten als Live-Komponente die „formalen Aussagen zu relevanten Fakten“ dar, indem sie abstrakt, ohne platt Bilder mit direkten Bezügen zu den historischen Figuren zu verwenden, an deren Vermächtnis erinnerten. Ebenso verwende ich in meinem Vortrag Video und Audio aus Terry Adkins Installationen, die ich auf eine Weise remixe, die meiner Meinung nach seiner Art der Abstraktion entspricht.
Terry sagte über dieses Verfahren: „Es ist eine Möglichkeit, ihr Erbe zurückzugewinnen und aufrechtzuerhalten und sie wiederzubeleben.“ Das ist es, was ich mit meinem Recital für ihn tun möchte. Es ist mir ein persönliches Anliegen, über meine Bewunderung für seine Arbeit zu sprechen und über meinen großen Wunsch, ihn gerne besser und länger gekannt zu haben.
Das Gespräch führte Andreas Kolb
Und hier ergänzend das Interview mit George Lewis in der Originalsprache:
With the project „Tele-Visions“ the festival MaerzMusik 2019 focusses on critical reflection of the historical representation of contemporary music in TV and mass media. You run the project as one of the curators. Can you describe your way of proceeding? Which films do you want to show and why?
After years of being a consumer of US television, I was already familiar with the usual absences of women, and people of color in particular, from media narratives about contemporary music. I am by no means a film expert, so my main activity as a curator on the project is to point out films that might otherwise be overlooked, coming mostly though not exclusively from the US situation, where contemporary music has never been a major part of television as we know it.
During my time as music curator at the Kitchen in New York in the early 1980s, numerous attempts were made to break through the wall of silence erected by both commercial and non-commercial channels, i.e., Public Broadcasting Service and its predecessors. Large cities, likeNew York have public access channels that performance spaces such as Roulette (Roulette TV) are still using to place experimental musical artists before a limited public. Otherwise, if you received a large chunk of your cultural information from TV or radio, and you did not live in major US cities, you could be forgiven for finding it surprising that this kind of music-making existed at all. This could be a distinction from the European social democratic media model, where contemporary music does appear from time to time on major channels.
The private initiatives by small producers like Roulette amount to an alternative archive, and in African American studies now, there is considerable field work being done on artists’ personal archives—scrapbooks, diaries, and the like. These days, many people also have video archives from the camcorders and smartphones that have been in use for many years, and as a frequent traveler, I have made such recordings in many parts of the world over nearly three decades. I have used the audio from these films to make both live performances and multichannel audio installations, but for the Tele-Visions project, we will be exploring my personal video archive from that period. We will probably see events such as a live recording of a concert on stage by the musicians themselves, sharing a camcorder while performing; walking near Tiananmen Square in 1996 with Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg; and a visit to the home of Leon Theremin in 1991. These personal archives offer what literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards calls “a counterpoint to an institutional sort of thinking” that all too frequently minimizes the scope of the work of women and people of color, or excludes it altogether, maintaining what musicologist Dana Reason calls “the myth of absence,” the spurious claim that there is nothing at all to see.
One must mention you as one of the pioneers of music performance and electronic music. Today the combination of music, electronic, text and moving image has become a common standard. How are you doing between all this multivoiced young musicians? The revolution destroys its origin? Or did your reach the aim of your dreams?
My first interactive computer piece, Chamber Music for Humans and Non-Humans, dates from 1980, so I guess that is a long way back. The latest recording on Rogue Art, Voyage and Homecoming, with me on trombone and laptop, Roscoe Mitchell, and an interactive computer pianist that people call “Voyager,” was recorded live at the 2018 CTM Festival in Berlin. My way of doing performance interactivity seems singular if not unique, although I should probably get more into machine learning now.
I’m not any kind of pioneer in interactive installation, although I have been making this kind of hybrid work for longer than many people realize. My first piece of that kind, Information Station No. 1 (2000), is a three-screen videosonic interactive work that is permanently installed at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Diego. Rio Negro (1992 and 2007) is a robotic, acoustic-electronic sound installation made in collaboration with Douglas R. Ewart (1992) and expanded by us with Douglas Repetto in 2007. That one has been shownin a number of places. Ikons (2010) was commissioned by the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad as a set of seven sculptures made by Canadian artist Eric Metcalfe. I put speakers and ultrasound sensors in them; a computer program read that information, and reorchestration of samples from my composition for eight instruments of the same nameresponded to visitor movement.
The latest pieces are Whispering Bayou (2015), multi-channel videosonic installation, created in collaboration with Carroll Parrott Blue and Jean-Baptiste Barrière and shown at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and Remains of the Sky (2018), an interactiveinstallation with multichannel spatialized sound and light, composed for the James TurrellSkyspace at Rice University in Houston. The work summarizes, in light and sound, the previous fifteen hours of weather around the university for that day, as a forty-minute nightly sequel to Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany.
I don’t think I have any messages for young people. My job is to pay attention.
MaerzMusik presents the German premiere of your work „A Recital for Terry Adkins“.What is the meaning of „recital“ in this special case?
First, I should tell you a little bit about how this work came to be. In the summer of 2010, I met Terry, his wife Merele, and their now college-age children, when Terry was nearing the conclusion of his year-long Rome Prize residency at the American Academy in Rome, and I was Fromm Composer-in-Residence there. We hit it off immediately, given our mutual interest in electronic sound, our experiences in instrumental performance (he had performed with the saxophonist Eddie Harris, an important influence on how we look at electronics and improvisation), and the abstraction-imbued dialogues with Afrodiasporic culture that marks our work.
We vowed to get together to collaborate, and our first opportunity to do so was in an extended2014 colloquy for Artforum, in which we discussed the situation of Afrodiasporic artists, as well as larger notions of creativity and the role of creative artists in fostering social change. We thought this might serve as a preview for our joint artmaking, but Terry passed away just as the article was going to press, and just as he was being featured in the Whitney Biennial.
Now I can talk about the recital aspect. First, Terry's use of the term referred to live performances scheduled as part of the run of his gallery shows, which he felt "rejuvenated" the work. In 1987 he created an ensemble, the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, to perform the recitals. However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “recital” originates not from music, but from the law, and refers to a “formal statement of relevant fact.” Thus, Terry’s Recitals were often dedicated to historical figures with resonance in American culture, like Jean Toomer, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Bessie Smith, and Matthew Henson, where the live component performs “a statement of relevant fact” by invoking their legacy--but abstractly, rather than using imagery directly related to the historical figures. Similarly, in my Recital I use video and audio from Terry’s installations, which I remix in ways that I feel are in accordance with his way of abstraction. Terry once said, "It’s a way of reclaiming and upholding their legacies, reviving them." So this is what I aim to do with my Recital for him--and also, part of it is personal, about my admiration for his work and my longing to have known him better and longer.
Adkins, Terry, and George Lewis. “Event Scores: Terry Adkins and George Lewis in Conversation.” Artforum (March 2014): 244-253.
Lewis, George E. "The Sound of Terry Adkins.” In Terry Adkins: Recital, edited by Ian Berry, 105-129. Saratoga Springs, New York: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College; Munich, London, and New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017.
Lewis, George E., "Foreword: After Afrofuturism.” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 2 (2008): 139–153.
Critic Kurt Gottschalk mentioned in a review, that your recital would be not just beperformance but either installation und ritual. He saw the piece in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University. Does it work in the secular atmosphere of MaerzMusik too?
I don’t see why it shouldn’t work in a wide variety of spaces. It was very well received in a very different, more secular performance space in Philadelphia. Secular rituals exist too, andperhaps my Recital is a hybrid of the spiritual and the secular. In the end, as I learned from my actor friends, the performers create the space.
In your speech at the Festival Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1917 you mentioned Terry Adkins „Synapse (from the Black Beethoven series). Oeuvre video, 2004“ as an example for outstanding African American Art.
There’s certainly a very strong case to be made for the audacity of Terry’s video work.
Also you quoted once a listener of your own works: „Well, you’re doing electronics. That’soutside the Black identity matrix“.
That quote comes from my Artforum colloquy with Terry. When I was coming along, many people claimed that it was un-natural for Afrodiasporic composers and musicians to be involved with electronics and computers. It was a spurious issue of race that neither thecontemporary music people nor the jazz people seemed able to get beyond. Now there’s all this talk of my being a “pioneer,” etc.
Lewis, George E., “Too Many Notes: Computers, complexity and culture in Voyager.” Leonardo Music Journal 10 (2000): 33-39.
I feel that the reception of my work with computers has benefited from the recent prominence of Afrodiasporic electronic artists, hip-hop producers and turntablists, to the extent that many younger curators and artists don’t remember (or perhaps didn’t notice) a time when electronic music and sound art were portrayed as basically white. This comes in part because the production of all-white male histories and curation strategies is coming under severe pressure from a new generation of historians and curators bent on decolonization.
Is African American Art still so diverse from American Art today?
When I was in Paris in January 2019 I saw a huge Centre Pompidou production titled “The Polish Avant-Garde.” Artists are always in dialogue with culture, which is the point of these kinds of exhibitions--except for the issue that Fred Moten has remarked upon, of a standard formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. So there is still a lot of currency in what Kodwo Eshun said at the Julius Eastman evenings at Maerzmusik 2018, that the work of forgetting the black avant-garde never ends. The fanciful notion of a colorblind, raceless, culture-free art experience, whether in the US or elsewhere, constitutes a powerful discursive tool in support of forgetting that African American art is part of American art.
So if we can have an exhibition on the Polish avant-garde, there is every reason for me to focus on the work of Afrodiasporic contemporary classical composers since 1960, which ispractically unknown in Europe; how Benjamin Patterson was pushed to the side by earlier Fluxus historians; the Africobra art movement, absent from earlier art histories; and the work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which continues to confoundrace-based notions of genre.
Lewis, George E. “Expressive Awesomeness: New Music and Art in Chicago, 1965–75.” In The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, edited by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, 115-127. Chicago and London: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in association with the University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Lewis, George E. "Benjamin Patterson's Spiritual Exercises." In Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, edited by Benjamin Piekut, 86-108. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
You bring with you the Ensemble Pamplemousse to Germany. It is a composer-interpreter chamber music ensemble. Tell us more about your collaboration with Pamplemousse, please.
I have been working with Pamplemousse since 2012, when I made the situational-form work Impromptu for them:
Impromptu (2012), for ensemble with improvisation. Written for Ensemble Pamplemousse(fl/picc, perc, pf, soprano, vl, vc,. Variable duration, around 10 minutes in one movement, premiered December 9, 2012, Brecht Forum, New York City.
Lewis, George E. “Soprano Part for Impromptu.” In BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing, edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, 106. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
They are all accomplished composers whose work has strongly influenced my own, even when some of them were students at Columbia--I can learn cross-generationally! I would even say that working with Pamplemousse was a major contributing factor in the acceleration of the wide-ranging changes in my music that have been ongoing since around 2007. They are experimental composers comfortable with the far fringes of sound and glitch, intermedia artists working with technologies such as interactive eye-tracking, performance artists who create personal experiences through story-telling, and installation artists who create invented electronic instruments. This is an extraordinary range of activities for such a compact formation.
Is there a special challenge for Pamplemousse in your recital?
A Recital for Terry Adkins is the most complex work of mine that Pamplemousse and I have attempted together. While the work incorporates some improvisation, it is not a situational-form work, and most of the score can only be realized by people trained in the realization of contemporary notation. At the same time, performers need to take the initiative themselves, rather than waiting for cues or to be conducted in and out. The members of Pamplemousseare superb interpreters, composers, and improvisors, and they are active in intermedia work as well, so this extraordinarily wide range of mediums make them ideal to realize this work. For my part, rather than sitting in the audience as “the composer,” which is the main thing I do these days, in the Recital I act as an electronic performer on sound and image transformations.