Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Pamela Z and Elinor Armer

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 219: Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Pamela Z and Elinor Armer

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Today we revisit Pamela Z’s and Elinor Armer’s perspectives on working with text as part of their artistic practice. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Pamela Z and Elinor Armer, check them out here and here. Parts of this episode originally premiered in July 2021, click here, and in January 2021, click here.

This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, SF Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/19545913

Co-Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-Producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Christy Xu

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our Da Capo Conversations, a mini-series where we'll be giving familiar segments a topical twist. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]  Today, we revisit Pamela Z's and Elinor Armer's perspectives on working with text as part of their artistic practice. Here's what Pamela Z had to say.

Pamela Z  00:40

The way that I often start the process of composing a new work is to conduct a series of interviews with a large number of people – ranging from a handful to often as many as 20, or 30 – one at a time. I bring them into my little soundproof recording booth in my studio, if I can. Otherwise, I have to just find the most clean, pristine recording environment to get the interview in. And then I will record, I'll ask them a lot of questions, and I'll record the interview. And then when I've amassed a whole series of these interviews, I will, in Pro Tools, edit each interview, to isolate and make what we used to call regions, or I think they now call them clips, of little speech fragments that will become part of the music. And those can be as long as full sentences or phrases. But more often, they're just like, maybe a single word, or even syllables or just phonemes. And I name them so that they're searchable for me later. So I have this bin that is full of hundreds and hundreds of these little named clips for any given project. And there'll be named things like"NM: um," or "GR: yes, I think so". And then when I'm searching those, I can pull them up and build the music from them. And then I just start assembling these little clips into tracks in Pro Tools. And they actually kind of almost look like Legos. They're like little building blocks, that if you look at any of my Pro Tools sessions, they have sort of bricks that are spread along throughout the tracks, layered and overlapping with each other. And that's how I actually compose the music because these speech fragments actually become the music itself. So when I do these interviews, the answers that people give me are both inspiration for making the work and giving me ideas for making the work. But they also are the actual material that I use as to make the music. Most of the music is actually made out of the sound of those people speaking. And then I often build the pieces by listening to those phrases, and fragments and the pitches and rhythmic figures that are embedded in them. And I sort of tease out those sounds from the speech sounds themselves. A lot of people actually think of speech as being unpitched. But in fact, it's not because there is no such thing as an unpitched sound. All sounds have frequency and pitch is frequency. So if you take little passages of spoken text, you can actually find the pitches, and the rhythms that are being spoken. And those could be transcribed and notated musically so that they can be played or sung by musicians. So I often find some of the material that becomes the work through transcribing the rhythms and pitches in this found text.

Nanette McGuinness  04:38

Here's what Elinor Armer had to say.

Elinor Armer  04:41

Well, you may remember that some time ago, you sent me the plans for the upcoming seasons, you know, of E4TT. And one of them was to be on the theme of of mothers and daughters. And I selected that one, because I thought I would be able to find some poetry that would that I would like to set. And I you know, I'm, I'm very close to that subject. I am both a mother and a daughter. I, originally, you may remember, was all wrapped up in the idea of the Persephone myth. You know, you and I went round and round with some poems related to that. And then somehow that got discarded. A lot of the poems were too long and thoroughgoing and some of them rather Frank, in their imagery, and so on. So I continued looking, and I was in the process of going through my old friend and collaborator, Ursula Gwynns. Poems, looking for poems to set, I'm making a memorial album of my settings of her poetry. And I remembered coming across the one that she wrote called a song for my daughter, and that just hit the spot, totally hit the spot. Partly because of its symmetry of generations. That particular poem, you know, refers to her daughter first, as I believe, mother of my granddaughter, or granddaughter of my mother, I can't remember which came first. But there's all kinds of verbal inversion. Going on there y actually created little motives to represent daughter, granddaughter, and mother. And they, of course, were invertible Invertible counterpoint if you like, if you want to sound very fancy. And those motives worked their way into the, into the piece, which is essentially tonal or modal. It didn't seem to me to call for any experimental harmonic, you know, advanced harmonic, super modern ideas, and I don't think any of Ursula is work has ever been anything more than just sort of naturally tonal or almost total, for me and and preferred by her. She has, in the past mentioned some other settings of her work that she didn't like for this reason, or that and so I always tried to avoid doing those things that she did, like, you know, from other composers. The poem was meaningful to me because I have known Elizabeth, her daughter, for longer than I knew her. It was actually through Elizabeth that I met Ursula Le Guin. I met her at Elizabeth's wedding. And Elizabeth had been my student long ago, at the San Francisco Conservatory, and a brilliant student, she was and now look at her, she said, you know, in a very important position, down at UCLA, and very highly considered and so on. But we, we have remained friends, of course, through all of this. And speaking of friends, I was going through other poems, sets of poems, specifically a book called audible Dawn by an old friend of mine, Rella Lossy and we were very good friends. She She has long since been Castaway, but I've always loved her poetry. And I don't want to spill a bean here. But the poem that I chose by her was actually addressed to her son. But we won't tell anybody that because it works just as well, to pretend that it's addressed to a daughter. So I was very happy to find that one, by her and child, your eyes, and the the, the vigor of it and and the spontaneity and the strength of it in a sense of was a wonderful contrast to the more lyrical, more regular poem by by Ursula, I thought they would work very well together. And I always like working with poetry by my friends and loved ones. When I have the chance, I when I have the chance, I do it, and I'm fortunate to, to know or to have known many poets. So it's just all in the family, if you will.

Nanette McGuinness  10:11

[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure's Da Capo Conversations, and a special thank you to our guests for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at www.E4TT.org. This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to Co-producer and Audio Engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]