Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Commissioned by Julia Dawson

Digital premiere May 2020
Julia Dawson, mezzo-soprano; Guillaume Faraut, violin; Scott Ordway, piano

MEDIA

NOTE

1.

We are all inside our homes these days, experiencing interiors in ways that most of us have not experienced them in the past.

Through a series of new compositions—Interiors—I am creating work that fits these strange circumstances: music that is composed inside and alone, performed inside and alone, and listened to inside and alone. I wrote the first piece in this series for Julia Dawson, a Canadian opera singer with whom I have collaborated closely for several years and whose artistry I respect enormously, to sing with violinist Guillaume Faraut and with me performing as pianist, which is something I do not normally do.

Interior No. 1 “we are all made of time” intersects with a new initiative Julia and Guillaume are launching called “Gone in 60 Seconds”, featuring short new compositions by living composers. When Julia graciously invited me to create the first work for her new series, it felt like the perfect place to begin my own exploration of music for our new reality.

This short piece presents a single line of text: "we are all made of time." The past feels impossibly remote these days and the future does not exist, at least not in the way it did before. Our sense of time has collapsed inward and, in the process, has become more concentrated. We have an abundance of time, but we value it differently and we use it differently because we cannot plan for the future. We focus on things which can be accomplished in an hour, or a day, or a few days. We are all made of time.

In this essay, I will discuss the concept of interiority, what it means and has meant to me as an artist, and how it subverts some of the norms and expectations of traditional classical music performance. First, though, I will discuss some of those norms and how they function.

2.

Most classical musicians work diligently to create a kind of "exterior" that they use when performing in a concert hall. The most literal expression of this exterior is the clothing they wear onstage. It does not resemble the clothing that they wear in most other contexts, even on other formal occasions such as weddings, funerals, religious ceremonies, or important dinners. In addition to these highly mannered clothes, which are often very beautiful, musicians develop a repertoire of gestures, facial expressions, and movements that are designed to be seen from a certain physical distance, as well as from a certain social distance.

The performer and the spectator wear different clothing and they use their bodies differently. Musicians use their voices and their instruments to create sounds which do not resemble the sounds we hear anywhere else in the natural world or in the built environment. These differences create the invisible barrier which separates us from them, and which can make concert-going magical. We are seeing and hearing something from the beyond, something that appears not to be real, and is not part of our daily experience. This, when done well, is thrilling.

Concert halls are meticulously designed to reinforce this separation. When a hall fails in this task, we see briefly past the exterior and this experience of seeing is unpleasant. It takes us away from the performance and breaks the spell. We do not typically welcome the sound of creaking floorboards or noises from the street when we are listening to a performance. Nor do we welcome sounds that come from the performers themselves, but which are not part of the music-sound. These include loud page turns, dropped pencils, scratched itches, or conspicuous breathing and other sounds that mouths and bodies inadvertently make.

In most concert halls, these sounds happen because they follow human beings wherever they go, but they are not transmitted from the stage to the audience because they are mostly very quiet and do not carry from the place where the sound is created to the places where members of the audience are sitting. The concert hall creates a membrane through which, ideally, music-sound can pass but other-sound cannot.

When we see a performer who has not developed their exterior, or who has developed a strange exterior, it can also make us uncomfortable. The exterior is vitally important to formal live performance, and both musicians and audiences respect it intuitively. But it relies on the physical environment of the concert hall for its effectiveness. Removed from this context, these exteriors quickly lose their expressive power. They become absurd. Any orchestral musician will confirm this - just ask them about the first time they went out for a cheap dinner after a gig still wearing white tie and tails or a floor-length ball gown.

In recent years, many classical musicians—myself included—have engaged in a very deliberate effort to subvert the traditional conventions of concert performance. But in most instances, this is a matter of exchanging one exterior for another. On stage, we still behave in ways that we wouldn't behave elsewhere, ways which extend well beyond the basic act of singing or playing instruments.

During the covid-19 pandemic, musicians do not have access to concert halls, which are the most effective technology for reinforcing and reifying their exteriors. Some musicians will quite reasonably choose not to perform until they regain access to this resource. Others will use microphones, cameras, and the internet to perform from their homes or from other private spaces to which they have access during the quarantine. But these tools are not designed to create distance between subject and viewer. Instead (and this is ironic under conditions of social distancing) they are designed to eliminate that space.

Microphones record every sound, however small, and not just in the room where the performance is taking place but also in the other rooms of the house and sounds that are created outside the house. They record the sound that is produced by the instrument, but also the soft, auxiliary sounds that are created in the process of producing the main music-sound: creaking benches, strained piano pedals, fingers sliding along strings, keys clacking softly against the body of a wind instrument, the sound that a mouth makes when it opens before a phrase can be sung, or closes after one has concluded.

A camera will capture the carefully crafted exterior-image of a musician’s performance. But it will also capture the size and shape of the room behind them, the texture of their skin, the quality of the light coming through their windows, the objects and possessions with which they have chosen to furnish their homes. We use the camera because we hope to capture something beautiful: a musical performance. But it acts as a kind of dragnet, capturing many other things at the same time. For some musicians, this presents no problem at all. They are proud to share their homes with the world. For others, this is uncomfortable and something they wish they could avoid. For all of the very real and widely-discussed social barriers which can be erected by concert halls, they do also have an equalizing effect insofar as every musician appears against the same backdrop, is illuminated by the same lights, and is flattered or hindered by the same acoustic conditions.

Cameras, microphones, and concert halls are all devices which mediate the act of performance. Concert halls create a filter which allows music-sound and exterior-image to pass while other-sound and interior-image do not. Cameras and microphones do the exact opposite.

What does it mean, then, to compose and perform interior music that cannot rely on this this filter, which is such a basic premise of live performance?

Is it possible to welcome atmospheric sounds into the fabric of the composition itself? Can I leave space where nobody plays or sings with the understanding the birds outside my studio will fill that silence with song? Or that the birds outside my window will sing alongside birds outside the windows of the other performers in their cities, in their countries, on their continents? Can these sounds create a meaningful imprint of place on a composition?

In live performance, there is a natural lower limit on how softly someone can play or sing before it becomes inaudible to the audience. But instruments and voices produce very beautiful colors of sound as they approach this limit. Through the microphone, these colors can be captured and then set in balance against other, louder musical elements by a recording engineer. What possibilities emerge when the perennial concert-hall problem of “balance” is made obsolete through recording techniques?

How does it change our frame of reference when a recording is no longer tethered to an imagined concert experience, because the concert experience itself is something we can no longer imagine?