Jennifer Walshe: Amplified music
Jennifer Walshe is a new music composer, performer, and improviser. She widley uses multimedia, performative elements and archive material in her pieces. She frequently performs as a vocalist, specialising in extended techniques. Many of her compositions are commissioned for her voice either as a soloist or in conjunction with other instruments, and her works have been performed by her and others at festivals all around the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Walshe is currently Professor of Experimental Performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart.
The interview is co-created by Laura Švītiņa who created text version of this interview.
What is good music composition?
I’m interested in works where the author has created a world that I can step into. There’s some sort of unity to that world, and even if the aesthetic isn’t immediately appealing, the world is built strong enough that I want to be in there and investigate it.
How would you describe your musical signature?
The answer varies on the day that you ask me because I do view music as a holistic experience. I think that music (as long as people are performing it) is by its nature performative even if we go to see a work that is ostensibly “non-performative”. I view a Beethoven string quartet in the same terms that I view my pieces. They`re just performative in a different way and the vocabulary is different.
So you are thinking of music as a watching experience?
Yeah, but cognitively that’s how we perceive it. There is a difference if we’re listening to the radio and in the last couple of years, I’m more interested in this medium. But if we go to a concert, a huge amount of the information that our bodies are receiving is from a visual sense as well as tactile, smell, and other different things. I sort of think that in music colleges or conservatories, they try to teach music as something independent, music as an abstract relationship of pitches. That’s true to some extent when you analyze just the music, but mostly the perception of music is a much richer field of sensory experience.
How did you come to this notion?
It wasn’t like I discovered this aspect and then thought it would be an interesting thing to explore in my work. If I look back on the work that I’ve done, it becomes clear that it’s the way that I think about things. It’s just simply my perception of the world. Maybe also a part of that is the time when I was a young performer, a trumpet player. I was the only girl in the brass section of the Irish Youth Wind Orchestra, also one of the very few girls in the brass section of the European Youth Wind Ensemble. And people always commented on the fact that I was a girl and from age of 10 and onwards it was very clear to me that me being on a stage had a different meaning than a boy playing the trumpet next to me. The fact that I wasn’t a boy was something that stuck with people enough to ask me about it and comment on it. So definitely this fallacy that music is an abstract art form, completely independent from the body, was shown to me to be completely untrue as a child.
Whilst watching your works I got the feeling that you are using language as perspective of social commentary.
I’m interested in language. My mother and many of my friends are writers and I’m very interested in literature, fiction, and poetry. But when I was a young composer I thought that if I’m going to use text in my work, then I need to pick a very good poem. I thought of music and text independently. And when I got to know the work of Robert Ashley, that really blew my mind because he’s writing his texts and I thought it’s just astonishing. Nowadays, the way that I work with text is I’m constantly writing, but I’m also collecting texts. There’s a huge amount of texts linked to technology. So when I’m working on pieces, I’m sort of drawing on all of these texts, the same way that DJ would go through boxes and boxes of records looking for the right track, so they all get sort of sewn together. It’s a very useful way to keep me alert and make me pay attention to the world around me. As an example, I can mention a piece about AI using AI called Limitless Potential (2020) that I wrote together with Wobbly also known as Jon Leidecker. A part of how we build pieces together is we’re constantly messaging text, video, images, and sound files to and from. For example, we got interested in the way that corporate text sounds. We were looking at documents about WeWork and pulling weird quotes out of the text because we thought that the texture of the way this text sounds, the verbs they use, the way they put words together, really comes from the specific corporate surveillance capitalism space. So as long as you’re interested in language as it’s spoken and written now, of course, politics and social life and cultural commentary are going to come into it because they’re reflected in the structure of the language.
What is your way of composing? How do you start and what stages you go through?
To be honest, I just believe in being in the room and putting time into working. With any project, I’m going to sit down and spill out a whole pile of ideas and try lots of different things out. I believe that the piece sort of emerges from a huge amount of material. The metaphor I often use is — it’s like I have a block of marble and I have a rough idea of something that’s in there. I’m going to carve away, but also I’m going to keep everything that I chipped off in case I have put some of them back on with pink glittery, crazy glue, or something like that.
How has your music changed in the last 10 years?
Definitely, there’s been a huge shift in the last 10 years. I would say a huge amount of that has to do with the internet that has changed the way that I make music. I would say that the biggest shifts were being able to easily get hold of archival footage, being able to easily send big files back and forth, having everything in the cloud. Also being able to make film parts more easily as I have a phone in my pocket all the time. Maybe over the last five years, I’ve seen a big shift with students being more interested in using film and things like that in their work. But I suppose the more general shift is just as I get older, I sort of understand that we don’t have that much time on this planet. So I just want to make my work as honestly as I can and not feel any pressure to make it in a certain way.
To be more authentic, right?
Yeah and I think just to do what you want to do on the stage because if you think even 10, 15 years ago, there were a lot of conventions that still exist within new music — you walk on the stage, you are all black, you don’t ever speak to the audience, just smile politely, bow, sit down and play, smile, politely bow, and then you leave. Whereas now I feel much more comfortable wearing whatever I want and communicating with the audience.
The other big shift for me has been that I was extremely used to doing free improvisation festivals as well as new music festivals. But over the last 10 years, I’ve played a lot of my pieces at more underground festivals or more experimental sound festivals where I might be the only person looking for a music stand. That has been fantastic and I love it because it teaches me a lot about the pieces. Because it’s not just that one new music audience, it’s a lot of different audiences.
Regarding your musical language, there’s one important feature — in a lot of works you perform as well.
I perform in a lot of them. I love both. I love to do work so I don’t have to perform and then I can just put all my energy into directing the work. Last year I wrote a huge piece called Ireland: A Dataset (2020) and it was performed as an eight-camera live stream at the National Concert Hall in Ireland. Just putting that together was so stressful because Dublin had just gone into level five restrictions, there were so many rules about how we had to function in the building and I was really happy to just be directing and be the person queuing the video and making sure everything worked right. But I also like being on my pieces too, because to be honest, it’s just really fun. You get to know people in a different way if you play music with them. It’s just that simple. You see how the piece changes and reacts to the moment that it’s in and absorb parts of that. And that’s a real honor and a privilege because it tells you something about the piece. And that’s maybe why I’m sort of a little bit sloppy with documentation because when a piece is performed live many times I get to see how it reflects the light in a different way at different points in time and space. I become less fixated on that one fantastic YouTube documentation because I know that I can’t ever capture what it’s like to do that piece 15 or 20 times. I love that.
Which technological artifacts shaped you the most?
I would say the simplest one is just fast internet, meaning that I can get access to archives. For a lot of projects, there’s research behind, so from 2011 onwards I’ve worked a lot with Prelinger Archives. The iPhone is massive because it means that I have a camera in my pocket all the time. When I made The Total Mountain (2014) I had a rule for myself that the footage is shot only on iPhone. I wanted to learn what’s possible with the iPhone and what are the limits. Over the last few years, I’m working a lot with artificial intelligence. The widespread ubiquity of the simple off-the-shelf AI tools everything from Magenta through to really trashy things like Amadeus, which makes terrible AI pop songs. All of that gamut impacts work. And then the people that I’m collaborating with when I’m doing AI projects are much more advanced coders than I am, that they can go to GitHub and download massive neural networks and start training them. There is access to graphics cards and cloud computing and things like that, that people can do the training on.
Can you explain how you work with the archives?
There is a project that I’ve made that is an archive like Aisteach which is a fictional archive of Irish avant-garde music. That is one where I’ve decided that I’m going to make up this parallel history where there were Irish Daoists or Irish Surrealists, and I just made it up. I could imagine that the idea of making up the Latvian avant-garde archive and making up completely imagining figures would be something that would appeal to Latvian kids in the same way it does the Irish kids. We’re not from these central powerful, rich European nations like Germany, France, or the UK. I also think of archives as spaces that you can dream in. I’m not going into them rigorously as an academic researcher, but I’m going in looking for weird little files, looking for inspiration, ideas.
What do you as composers fear the most?
I don’t know. I fear that nobody will be interested anymore and my music will not be performed again. But I suppose that’s a fear for every person on the earth and if I try to take the question from a slightly different angle then my only fear would be that it’s 50 years in the future and we haven’t changed the way that new music functions. I think there are amazing things about it like the culture and the community of new music, but there are things that are problematic or need work. And so my fear would be that we’re still in that same position.
What are the things that we need to change or work on?
Well, there’s a massive diversity problem, whether we’re talking about ethnicity, gender, or class. For example, if I take the issue of class — a lot of people who would be really interested in new music feel completely shut out of the conversation because they didn’t go to a conservatoire because most people who went to a conservatoire come from a middle-class background and particularly in certain countries where you have to pay for education, or there are no music classes in school, you’re not going to end up studying the violin unless your parents had enough cultural capital to want you to study the violin and they had enough spare money to pay for violin lessons.
In a broader sense some kind of decolonization of musical space?
Oh yeah, completely. And I think it needs to happen. If you look in conservatories it’s quite common that you see students that are not engaged with the broader conversations about the decolonization which is happening, for example, in an art school. It’s quite common that studying instrumental students never think of their programming in terms of race or class, or gender. They’re just thinking in terms of what they need to play to win the audition or to show their technique. And so there is a feeling of disconnect and feeling of a cultural gap that things are lagging behind. I would love to see some things changing there, but it’s a slow process and it’s very exhausting to be calling for that change in institutions. But on the other hand, I do have great hopes because there are a lot of kids in the young generation who are coming up with demanding changes.
Why are you still composing?
It’s my way of being in the world. I just enjoy making things. And to be honest, whether it’s composing or writing texts, or doing projects, that’s the way that I am the happiest living. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t days where I get up and I don’t feel like it. It’s a way of being alive and a way of accessing flow. I like making things and through making them I’ve found that I’m more aware of what’s going on in the world, it forces me to engage more deeply.
How music and the musical landscape have changed during the century?
I’ve seen a lot of different changes, really. First, it’s very common that in the new music world you see huge amounts of amplification and composers wanting to write shows rather than writing pieces. In the very early two-thousands, composers wanted to write an orchestral piece that was the big signature piece. Of course, composers still love writing orchestra pieces, but now it’s like, people don’t want to write a 10-minute piece they want to write a 45-minute piece and they want there to be lighting and video and usually everything’s amplified. So that’s a massive change that I’ve seen.
I’ve also seen a lot more people interested in visual and performative elements. And I think that maybe it is also linked to the Millennial and Gen Z generation composers that have always lived with the idea of having a brand online. For example, François Sarhan or me, or even Simon Steen Anderson, all got away with having terrible websites. Because our careers launched at a point where you seemed to just get gigs by entering one festival, and then somebody wrote you an email and said, we’d like to invite you to a different festival. Nobody had the technology to be hosting recordings, let alone video documentations online. So I definitely think that if you look at composers, even 10 years younger, their websites are crucial for their careers.
I definitely think that even composers who write pieces that are never amplified or don’t use any technology in the performance, mostly they’re using Finale or Sibelius, or Dorico or they’re using Abelton Live or they’re using Logic. When I was a student, if you talked about computer music composers, they seemed to be this very special sect, even more extreme than tape music composers. Whereas now we have all become computer music composers.
Another trend that I have seen is composers who are more collaborating with musicians where the score isn’t fixed and there are little bits of improvisation. And I think some composers do it very well, but some composers do it in a way, which doesn’t recognize the input of the musicians or credit them in the correct way, or even think about ways they could be compensated for their contribution to the piece.
What’s different between amplified music and non amplified music?
I think definitely there are the technical things — if you’re hearing amplified music, it’s usually through a pair of stereo speakers, whereas if it’s unamplified music your ears are picking out the individual instruments that are making it. But there’s more to that — because of this amplification people start to attach it more to a pop world. Because pop music is all amplified. So your ears are placing it in that context. And of course, you’re not going to ever get that same natural thing, for instance, comparing amplified violin in a black box theater and to a non amplified violin in a beautiful church. But at the same time, for me as a singer, I’m a cyborg. I’m not an unamplified singer. That’s not how my voice works. I think of my voice as a collaboration with a microphone and speakers. So I think maybe I have a slightly different view on it because I’m an amplified singer.
How do you perceive the audience?
I think the audiences are completely different depending on the festivals, that’s my perspective. Because unlike a lot of the composers I know whose work I love. My work is done in festivals, which are not only new music festivals. So I see very different audiences. So for example, I played at the Open Ear festival in Ireland and everybody at the festival is drinking, people are high. People are having an amazing time, they’re camping for the weekend, eating vegan burgers. And when you do a performance at that sort of festival, you realize that it’s a very specific type of audience. And I have to go out there and I have to be aware of that. And I mean, when I began the set at Open Ear, people were heckling me. And I had the urge to win them over. And I did it and it was ecstatic at the end of it. But you don’t get that into the new music sphere because nobody’s going to heckle you during a set, so there are many different types of audiences in different places at different types of festivals. Here again, I would say that all human beings are affected by technology. Some of the rudest people I’ve witnessed have been those who are supposed to be educated people at a new music festival. The second the piece is over you see them take out their phone and tweet something horrible about what they just saw. And you just think it is supposed to be an educated supportive community, but it’s not. One of the things that are amazing about the internet is that I get to meet people that I would never have met at a new music festival, people who listened to my work on Bandcamp camp or watch a video and email me. You have this possibility to reach people you’ve never could have guessed.
What are the biggest trends or factors that would shape the musical future?
If I take a sort of cynical perspective on what could be shaping the music forward is recommendation algorithms, because composers are desperate to get their work out there. If you’re putting it on YouTube, there’s going to be certain things that will be served to you or fed into somebody’s algorithm. I view Facebook as a place where a lot of new music discussion is happening, but it’s a highly problematic platform with a very specific way of manipulating the feed. So even if two composers log on at the same time, there’s no guarantee they’re going to see the same post. The algorithm will boost anything which gets interaction — either it’s somebody having a baby and somebody writes congratulations in response or somebody’s giving out stink about something and then it turns into a big discussion. I think that the discussion of new music is being mediated by social media platforms to a huge degree. Like my students, when they’re interested in a new composer, they just go to YouTube and put the composer’s name into the search bar. Half the time they don’t start by googling the composer, they just go to look at what they can find on YouTube. So therefore YouTube’s recommendation algorithms are going to be extremely powerful because if they liked this composer and then they see other composers being served next to them, they’ll probably click through. As a result of this, we have these weird filter bubbles that emerge when people click through and it’s not an equal link. So I think that is going to affect composer’s lives, cost people commissions and gigs because they just simply won’t be seen in the massive onslaught of all that stuff.
What is the role of new music in society?
I think it’s the same as any art which is to process the world around us. And that’s done in different ways and with different esthetics by different people. And I would ardently defend the rights of somebody who just wants to make abstract work, where you can’t attach to real life in any way, as much as somebody who wants to make a deeply personal memoir. It’s there and people draw on it in different ways. Like poetry — sometimes people need it when they’re getting married or when there’s a funeral or when they’re feeling really, really down and they need to know somebody else has been through this. People sometimes just want to read poetry because they don’t want to think about things. I believe we need a lot of different kinds of art for different people in different moods, at different points in their lives.
Selection of works created by Jennifer Walshe
