Kate Moore: Cyclic music
Read my interview with Kate Moore on her music, her perspective and her views on new music. She is an acclaimed Australian composer, who is currently based in the Netherlands. With unique sound machines and instruments, she creates melodic and authentic pieces that come from a curious place of wonder and amazement of sounds and the world. Her works are performed by Asko|Schönberg, Bang on a Can, Icebreker, Slagwerk Den Haag, Ensemble Offspring, the Australian String Quartet, The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Groot Omroepkoor, among others. Text version of this interview was created by Estere Budzena.
What are your criteria for a good musical composition?
That is a really deep question with many layers. I think that it is a composition with a lot of sincerity to it. There is sincerity to the aesthetic, to the form and structure, the technique for which the piece represents. Whether it is in one idiom or another, whether it is improvised music or written music, there has to be an authenticity to the core of the piece. Authenticity is what I search for in a composition for myself and for others.
Can you give an example of such an idea? Perhaps something recent?
I am currently working on this project initiated by a Dutch harp player Beate Loonstra, who has a residency in a church in Amsterdam. Every day musicians come to spend three hours in the church. The visitors come and tell a story and the musicians then interpret it and create a spontaneous composition. I am also one of the musicians. This concept, this idea speaks to everybody on various levels. It sort of breaks down the hierarchy of the concert hall and brings the audience close to the musicians. It is a two-way conversation between the public and the musicians, rather than just the musicians telling the public what they should listen to. I am very attracted to this project and this concept of bringing people closer and breaking down the hierarchy. The idea comes from a very pure place and has a really authentic background to it.
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What is your musical idea and signature?
I am constantly searching for new questions and answers regarding music theory, technique and performance practices of my own training. I question myself, take statements and look at them under a microscope. For example, the scales. I spent many hours practising scales as a cellist as a child and I was constantly asking myself: ‘Why are these intervals more important than other intervals? Why do we do this particular sequence when it could be something else?’ So, I think about the symbolism of intervals and equal temperaments and then break that down. Essentially, it is an approximation of a Pythagorean scale. In a way, I come from a very technical background but that technical background also speaks to me on an emotional level. I find myself through music by reanalyzing it and trying to reshape the memories I have. I am challenging traditions for myself. It is an inquiry, rather than standing up and making a manifesto of ‘we must never work with equal temperament every game, because it’s out of tune’. It is more like ‘How does it make sense for me or how does it not make sense for me?’.
Our first encounter was at the Minimal Music Festival. Do you attribute yourself to minimal music?
That is a very good question. I find myself having an adverse reaction to the word minimalism.
Well, I am trying to figure this out for myself as well. That is my very pure, sort of emotional reaction to the word. I dislike the word minimalism and, from my personal perspective, I feel like it is a very generalising label. It misses a lot of the facets of so-called minimalism, like tradition, where it comes from, who is writing it and in what context. I certainly feel like the word points to a certain period in history, a place and a certain number of composers. I guess in some ways I am linked to it. Through generations, teachers, places, through how I have been brought up. It is my language and it is my heritage, but I am also interested in other music traditions, which somehow define it better. That is more about what I am interested in, especially concerning music theory from its beginning, rather than from a particular place in time. I see minimalism in the context of from the beginning, what it has taken from history and other music traditions. I try to find the folk music traditions of my heritage and that is what comes through in my music. The languages of cyclical structures, for example, Indian music theory or Arabic music theory use repetition and I feel much closer to that. So with regards to the word minimalism, I would say that I am uncomfortable with it.
The first work of yours that I saw, was a multimedia project, an installation on the stage, with melting eyes and sensitive microphones that caught the sounds. When was the first time you started using multimedia and what made you start using multimedia in your pieces?
It always comes from the perspective of sound and a concept. For example, the piece that you are talking about is Klepsydra. It is an ancient water clock. We have clock towers with bells and I considered the possibility that the sound of the bells came from the original klepsydra, as falling water in ceramic material also makes a bell sound. I wanted to create a sound piece where a clock was a sound object. The foundation for the piece was the sound of water falling upon ceramic and then the piece itself is about the structure of time and the durations of the phrases and the rhythm.
I do not use videos that much. It is something that interests me, but it is not really my skill set. A video speaks very powerfully if done in the right way, but to be honest, when I use multimedia, it pretty much always has a sound component and it is that which interests me and becomes the instrument in the piece.
I have a piece called Days and Nature which was written for the Asko/Schönberg ensemble and in this piece I had to include a machine. I wrote a piece on an artist’s residency, where I was listening to the sounds of nature and the birds. At nine o’clock in the morning, a saw would turn on every day. A mechanical device, which is a human intervention, would disrupt the peaceful atmosphere. My focus was on the juxtaposition of nature and the industry from a sound perspective. The piece has a very organic structure of phrases that are expanding like branches of tree trunks and there is organic growth circling and growing like a forest. Then, at a certain point in the piece, a machine turns on to represent the human intervention. Particularly, a saw cutting down the trees. In the process of producing the piece, I sent myself on a journey of searching for machines and I found a visual artist based in The Hague called Peter F. van Loon, who makes music machines. He is a sculptor who makes sound sculptures — machines. I thought that was a brilliant situation to employ his music machines in my piece, therefore his sculptures became part of the piece.
When was the first time you used sound sculptures in your pieces?
I have to go back a long way because I have been doing it since I began composing. I am also a visual artist and have worked in both fields for a long time, even when I was a child. It comes a little bit with using electronic music and sound sculptures; they come together when making an electronic piece. To find an original sound source I make an object that has its own sound and then sample it and create it. The first sound installation I made was in 1999 called Sentience, which was a collaboration with visual artists. This was an electronic piece based on the resonant frequencies of a tam-tam. I sampled the tam-tam and used these frequencies to make the tam-tam vibrate in real-time. It was set up on a speaker in the middle of the gallery space and then I would play my composition into the tam-tam. It would vibrate and we put water on it and then there was a video installation reflected on the water, so you could see it move. So, I guess that was my first official piece using sound sculpture; sound and sculpture together.
The second major work for my undergrad honours degree was to create an interactive sound installation in a gallery space, where I set up eight columns of speakers. The audience members would come and there was a microphone set up. I would ask them the question of where was their space and then they would tell me a story about it. The story became the composition through the microphone. It would circle on a loop, sort of spiralling, getting softer and softer and then eventually disappearing. All the stories were doing this spiralling thing, so it was a real-time composition, as well as a sculpture.
How do you start writing a composition and what are the main steps?
It always starts with an idea. I am quite childlike, I guess it is like playing. I wonder ‘What happens if…? ’or ‘What does that mean?’ and then I circle it for a bit and then I go on a journey. I read everything that I can about a certain thing and it becomes an adventure. Then I start to build up things and sometimes the music only comes at the very end. I build it up and up and then it is bubbling, and then I have a piece to write. It is like a tree growing and then a flower at the top of it.
Can you talk about how you started working with porcelain?
This is a long and cool journey. It began with Klepsydra. I was fascinated by how water acts upon a ceramic surface and I wanted to build it out of porcelain. I designed it and then asked a porcelain maker to make it for me, and so he did, but he misinterpreted my dimensions. I indicated a radius, but he interpreted that as diameter, so all the pieces were tiny. Of course, the bigger they are, the more resonant they are, so these tiny, little bells were very high-pitched and had almost no resonance. However, I committed to these little pieces and tried to explore how I could make them work anyway. In that process, it was picked up by Ranti Tjan, who was the director of the European Ceramic Workcentre. That was a very coincidental connection and he invited me as a composer to be an artist-in-residence at the European Ceramic Workcentre, to do a residency and to make my own instruments. At the same time, Slagwerk Den Haag, a percussion group in the Hague, was also really interested in my inquiry into ceramic, because it was written for the Asko|Schönberg ensemble and Fedor Teunisse was the director of both. He thought that it would be really interesting to develop these ideas in a piece for percussionists, so they commissioned me to explore this. I spent three months in the workshop learning how to build porcelain and then I built my own instruments and created a 16-minute piece using these instruments. I made a series of small pieces which represented different acoustic shapes to explore how resonance works. I made tubes, plates, bowls and shards and every shape has a completely different resonance and that was a fascinating way to explore how resonance works.
As I am making the pieces, it is very much based on the limitations of the instruments. I have to learn how to make the sound from the instruments. The composition part is in the final stages of the project. The concept of the composition itself is to create a ritual space that explores the symbolism of music, sound, water and time. It is a ritual space. The underlying compositional idea is a clock. I divide time in a metric way and then I use water pipes, like a vase of water. These very mysterious little chants on the water pipe represent non-metric time, the feeling of time because you have a sequence of notes — a melody, but the duration flows according to the feel. The percussionists are keeping this strict time and the recorded player is playing with the flow of time.
What do you fear the most as a composer?
I fear nothing; I am fearless! Well, in all honesty, I fear not being able to meet my deadlines, because I get so caught up in the peace that I forget that time is passing. It is a hell of a lot of work to write a piece and sometimes I feel overwhelmed by how much work I have to do to meet the deadlines. I fear my life passing as I am writing notes in isolation. The time passes so fast that I fear missing out on the vitality of the experience of living and life.
Why do you still compose?
It is just part of who I am. I eat, breathe and compose. It is my language, my mode of expression. I am much more at home creating a sound space of the language, a story through sounds than I am in other areas of my life. Words do not come so naturally to me but music does. It is my way of reflecting on myself, of discovering who I am. Feeling, finding and researching.
How has your music changed over the last ten years?
There has been a very slow evolution of style because every piece leads from one to the next. I am going more and more into free-flowing music which is, in a way, the opposite of my first works, which have a very clear structure. I sort of break down the clear structure and then it sounds very free-flowing. It has syntax and grammar.
How has the music landscape changed in the last 25 years?
I think it has changed enormously. I think it has been the biggest change in music in centuries. Technology is a huge part of that, it has exploded. When I began, it was still sort of difficult. I was in the first class in my school to work with digital technology. The class before me still worked with tape, but I have not done that. I started with these very slow computers with very small memory, and now everybody has a laptop and access to very advanced technology, which works fast and has a huge capacity. Technology is embraced, it is everybody’s language. Technologies are excessively accessible to everybody very easily and the reliance on technology has also become integral. When I began, we were encouraged to write with a pen, but now nearly all the students that I have or have worked with use a software program.
Another big explosion, which I hope keeps exploding, is breaking down the hierarchical structures of previous generations, embracing, and allowing a diverse language and the acceptance of women. It has taken way too long for that to be realized and it is still very slow, but the discussion is there and there are huge developments. Getting rid of misogyny in the art, in musical arts and composition is a big step and it has to go as fast as possible. Also, embracing and realizing privilege and allowing those, who are not as privileged in. To have a voice, to give voice to other perspectives and not just the status quo or the normal and accepted values. I think it is a warmer scene now and less about us and them and more about all of us together and that is opening so many doors of possibilities and so many ideas, thoughts and perspectives which gives us a more complete picture of the human experience.
What piece of technology do you use the most?
I sort of feel like a slave to technology, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. I have my laptop which I take with me everywhere: it is my bread and butter. Without my laptop, I would have a difficult time functioning. I make my scores on a software program, but I still write on paper. The programs that I use are MaxMSP, Logic Pro, Ableton Live and Sibelius. With MaxMSP I make my own environments, my own patches. I don’t use pre-made patches and that is the fun of it. It is about what sounds I can make and how I can use it. With Logic Pro and Ableton Live, I use the preset samples on occasion but for the most part, I make my own samples.
Can you talk a bit more about the piece in which you used the sensitive microphones?
So it is called Space Junk, and it was for the World Minimal Music Festival. That was a huge production, a 90-minute concert piece with a number of my pieces leading up to this very big one. There was a melting ice sound sculpture with samples of glass harmonica. It was a very big electro-acoustic installation, about 12 channels around the concert hall. I designed everything and then the production team built it for me.
How has the audience changed? Do you think it is disappearing?
I do not see the audience disappearing. Every concert that I have been involved in is always a full house, whether it is big or not. The concert hall that I mainly work at is always more or less full. However, in the past, I found myself having to advertise the concert a lot to let everybody know that they could come along. Now I do not even bother because it is already sold out before I even know that it has been put up! In one way it is a good thing; that is how concerts should be. They should just be on and people should come. You should not have to go out and rally to get an audience, it should be an event that people know and go to because they get something from it. That it gives them soul food.
It still seems to me that older audience comes more often. Of course, we always like to bring in young people, and there is a lot of promotion for that, but to be honest, I embrace it as it is. There are many reasons why things happen the way they do and why a certain type of concert appeals more to a certain generation than another. It is partly because of time and how a young person’s life is structured. They do not have the time to go to a concert at eight o’clock, because they probably have other things to do.
What are the future trends of music?
I think it is a very open space now, with a lot of different possibilities. I think it is, perhaps, the most creative time ever. There are no limitations and we are never short of creative people who want to say something, so our art form is not disappearing. It is growing and growing and, I think, whereas in past generations there was an emphasis on hierarchy, the idea that there is a top dog and everything trickles down, I do not think that that works anymore. It is much more of a cyclical circle structure of how everyone is related to each other; it is a very organic environment. I think that is beautiful, new and different from before and I would never want to go back. I do not think that is necessary or healthy or in any way good.
What is the role of new music?
New music is a creative outlet. Everyone is burning with creativity and they are exploding to let it out. It is about connecting with people through creativity, invention, new ideas, inquiry, exploration and through colour. The music is colour it is the colour of the soul. We see colour with our eyes, but the soul feels colour through music. Music, well, I should say frequency, is very powerful, it has a binding quality and brings people together. No matter what we do, what we compose, what we perform, what our instruments are and no matter what our technology is, frequency is there and it connects. We always utilize it, it is like a resource, an essence like water is an essence.
Selected works composed by Kate Moore
