Music and Change in Performing John Luther Adams / November 5, 2025 by Liquid Music

By Trever Hagen

*Crossing Open Ground* performance at Snow Canyon State Park, 2025. Photo: Jayme Halbritter.

Last week an ensemble of 40 musicians performed John Luther Adams’ Crossing Open Ground in Snow Canyon State Park outside of St. George, Utah. Scattered across sandstone and lava flows, the ensemble’s tones emerged and dissipated into desert air revealing a piece that invited audiences not just to listen but to inhabit a soundscape shaped by the land itself. As we left the canyon to trod back to the parking lot, a trail steward said: “Snow Canyon will never be the same.” It made me think about music and change – what must take place in order to significantly alter the perception of place through aesthetics?

How music is involved in change is opaque, undetermined and rarely a matter for contemplation. Yet we have all felt that change in our lives – perhaps an anxious moment is lifted by a song that appears on the radio (your mood: changed); or maybe you’ve just heard a pipe organ at a funeral that has helped you grieve and accept loss (your ontological security: changed); or it’s a song played at basketball game where everyone rises to their feet and begins to clap (your collective body: changed). These are micro-changes of everyday life that music gets into.

There are difficulties measuring change, providing stable units of analysis, or how long change might occur. But something does happen. We could call it magic, yet these moments of change are social experiences underpinned by aesthetics that humans, and groups of humans, have been having since we started playing bone flutes in resonant caves. From music in conflict resolution to music in social movements to turning on the radio in morning. Music, with its property of taking place in real time, brings us from one edge of an experience to another. And that change is, if not measurable, quite observable and felt.

Musical experiences have three distinct points of time: before, during and after. Using these points, we can begin to see and understand how music underpins micro adjustments, changes to the perception of reality, or perhaps attunement to it.

TIME 1: BEFORE

Utah Tech students meet with Dimitri Chamblas. Photo: Kate Nordstrum.

The first unit of temporal analysis of a musical event or experience is the most difficult because “before” refers to everything that has happened to a person that has brought them up to the musical experience. Everything. Childhood, schooling, family, race, class, gender, etc – “before” is the supreme collection of all of your preferences, habits, techniques, tools, skills that have been accumulating in your body and mind that amount to what we call an identity. In an effort to define terms and units to understand change, let’s designate our “Before” as beginning 5 days prior to the performance, when the entire ensemble met in St George, Utah.

The ensemble rehearsing at Utah Tech. Photo: Kate Nordstrum.

The 40 musicians required to perform Crossing Open Ground were primarily made up of band students from Utah Tech University, along with seasoned section leads from across the US. The important point here is that we had 5 days to rehearse a collective body, not only the music but also getting our bodies onto the same page in order to perform Crossing Open Ground, which requires the ensemble to move across a space. Not something instrumentalists do much of outside of marching band.

Dimitiri Chamblas, our choreographer, led movement workshops and exercises before we would begin playing everyday. We worked on pacing, corporeal awareness and pair/group action (blindfolded-walking led by a partner, rising up from the ground slowly over the course of 30 seconds, creating human statues, etc). These exercises – new to most of us – had the ensemble working outside our comfort zones, certainly. Yet everyone was up for the task and enthusiastic to incorporate extra-musical direction into the process of learning the piece. Following the collective body work, we staged the movements of Crossing Open Ground off-site giving us our first encounter with intersection of breath, movement, sonic projection and coordination. As this was an entirely novel challenge for many, we were all in the same boat. This was important: our bodies – as an ensemble – were aligning. The beginning of a sense of what could change.

Nadia Sirota guides rehearsal. Photo: Kate Nordstrum.

Rehearsing the music proved equally challenging in that Crossing Open Ground doesn’t unfold as other compositions might do. Nadia Sirota was our musical director and guided us through the intricacies of the music and how it unfolds in space and time. The score allows for variable duration—between fifty-four and eighty minutes—because time here is not mechanical but geologic, solar. Time was not a narrative device, as such. Rather, Adams divided the piece into 27 sections, each lasting approximately 2 minutes to give a performance that should be at least 54 minutes. At section 14, we are at the center (or rather climax) of the piece. The musical lines are palindromic units: sections develop from 1 - 13, center at 14, and then the lines 15 - 27 are reversed so you end up playing what you started with. It is up to the discretion of the player to perform the musical line within the unit of time. Often these lines were shared and doubled by other instruments in the ensemble. Thus the performance relies on the decision-making of the individual player within a large ensemble of identical musical material – only a difference in timbre. This was a curious feature that highlights indeterminacy and perception within a closed system.

So drawing together the “Before” experience of rehearsing together, our bodies and collective musical performance were beginning to take shape set against the compositional materials of movement, time and harmony. We were becoming the ensemble and becoming the music.

TIME 2: DURING

Instead of treating composition as an argument with history or technique, Adams approaches sound as an ecology – an interplay between human musicians and the larger systems of earth, air, and time. Thus, the choice of Snow Canyon mattered. The sandstone walls, the desert silence, the shifting thermals – all of these played the piece as surely as the brass and percussion did.

On the day of the performance, listeners walked into the canyon to take their places seated across the natural amphitheater. Once set, the 40 performers entered the canyon and situated themselves across a wide circle at the top of the canyon. The piece begins with gentle percussion and with the woodwinds and brass in the upper register – high up, just as our bodies were perched. As we moved through the 2 minute sections, we descended further into the bowl of the canyon, moving through the audience and down the 30% grade of Snow Canyon. Our musical materials began to drop into the lower registers as we descended. As we moved to the center of Snow Canyon, our circle became smaller, the tones lower and louder with more movement and less breath between phrases. We passed through the center and, beginning our palindromic phrasing, started to walk across to the opposite side of the canyon from where we started. The higher and higher we climbed, the higher and higher our lines became, until we couldn’t go higher and all there was left to hear were the sounds of our breath.

Performing Crossing Open Ground had multiple compositional affordances that differed from a standard score. The music relies less on the conventions of scenes, drama, action and narrative and more on naturally occurring harmonic series – intervals of 2nds, 4ths and 5ths – the type of music that feels like it has always existed and will always exist if we just tune our ear. To this end, the music made possible a different musical experience that wasn’t about one’s personal style or voice but rather like the sublime vision of witnessing something bigger than you that can wash away personal identity; that can reconfigure the dichotomy of human vs nature, or the boundaries of composition vs improvisation.

In short, while playing the piece – the “During” of our three units of time – the music brought me out of modern shackles of the attention technoscape, out of the egotrip of social media, out of the island of self-reliance, out of the economy of consumption. The “During” was collective emplacement in space and time, the “During” was a re-convening with the ways attention is dispersed throughout mind and body, the “During” was dissolution.

TIME 3: AFTER

“Snow Canyon will never be the same,” the trail steward said after witnessing the performance. The site – so mighty in its geologic history – had now been shaped by the impermanent materials of frequencies and breath, engraved in memory. It was clear that the sense of “us-as-ensemble” from rehearsals had grown during the performance to include the audience members, as the trail steward indicates, and the performance site. Human and non-human actors bound together through a shared musical experience.

“Crossing Open Ground is both a journey and a dwelling, a way of moving through a landscape and letting it speak back.”

What is the shelf-life of musical experiences after the final notes pass? Impossible to tell, but no matter how long the afterglow lasts, it hopefully bridges the distance to the next spectacular shared aesthetic experience. Crossing Open Ground is both a journey and a dwelling, a way of moving through a landscape and letting it speak back. Adams’s works expand beyond the concert hall, unfolding in landscapes where silence, wind, and echo become part of the score. This shift sets him apart in contemporary composition: he does not simply write about nature, he writes from it. And that initiative allows us to be a part of nature and art through listening. I can’t think of a more phenomenal effort.

John Luther Adams’s music has always asked us to listen differently. It trains us in the practice of listening. It is environmentalism through perception. In that sense, this performance was not just a concert but an experiment in how art can convene community around land. It is a form of environmental activism – not by protest but by practice. To cross open ground together is to admit we share it, and to listen in that space is to learn how to live within it.

Crossing Open Ground at Snow Canyon State Park was made possible by Kayenta Arts in partnership with Utah Tech University.

Trever Hagen is a trumpet player and scholar, performing and presenting research on sound, music and noise at universities and conferences in the US, Europe and Asia. He is the author of Living in the Merry Ghetto: The music and politics of the Czech Underground on Oxford University Press.

Follow John Luther Adams:
Website: johnlutheradams.net

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Instagram: @t.r.e.v.r

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Aquatic Ecology: Reaching New Depths of Listening with Gabriella Smith and yMusic // Gabriel Cabezas + Nadia Sirota / October 30, 2025 by Liquid Music

By Amy Chatelaine

Gabriella Smith backpacking in Argentina, 2017. Photo: Erik Petersen.

“So many unknown languages, to think we have / only honored this strange human tongue…” reflects Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Limón offers this recognition in her poem “Startlement,” which she wrote as an introduction to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, and published in a collection under the same title (Startlement: New and Collected Poems, Milkweed Editions, 2025). I met these lines while steeped in research for the interview you’ll read below — research that gleefully pulled me into the internet’s many tributaries, hoping to surface recordings of unknown languages among our fellow species.

Which is all to say: Gabriella Smith’s music is an invitation into joy and enchantment. It is also a visceral encounter with all we risk losing, and an invocation for that reckoning to flow into local climate action.

In Aquatic Ecology, the environmentalist and composer turns the mic — or rather, dips the mic — in the direction of aquatic voices we seldom allow to capture our attention. For the creation of her recent composition, Smith submerged a hydrophone into the waters of various ecosystems — the Olympic Peninsula (Washington), Green Island (Oregon), the island of Huahine (French Polynesia), among others — gathering field recordings of underwater languages, from chattering dolphins to crackling shrimp to munching parrotfish. And she tapped yMusic to join the conversation and transmute it for a broader listening audience. With every mimetic stroke, scratch, pluck, and breath, the genre-leading sextet makes the foreign feel more tangible, evoking a connection unlike many have ever experienced with submerged creatures, great and small.

Smith is a longtime collaborator with yMusic, and ongoing creative partner of cellist Gabriel Cabezas. Together, they released Lost Coast, a dynamic album created in response to the impacts of climate change on Smith’s home state of California. Smith and Cabezas’s innovative collaboration extends back to the early days of their friendship while students at the Curtis Institute of Music. The two will open the November 8th performance with selections from Lost Coast and more.

Ahead of presenting this Twin Cities premiere of Aquatic Ecology, Cabezas and yMusic violist Nadia Sirota offered reflections to take with you into the performance: on Smith’s enchanting ability to alter perceptions of sound, on expanding the voice of their instruments through encounters with aquatic languages, and on the singular experience of making chamber music with a choir of humming fish.

You might enjoy exploring your own reflections to the opening question:

Gabriel Cabezas (left) and Nadia Sirota (right). Photos: Zoe Prinds-Flash.

What acoustic landscapes have been formative for each of you, personally?

Gabriel Cabezas: I’ve always been a pretty urban guy, but I’m a sucker for sounds you might hear outside in winter — wind, snow, ice melting or cracking, and the sound of crackling fire always do it for me.

Nadia Sirota: There are so many incredible sounds out there! Crickets in the Northeast peeking through during rests in summer chamber music concerts, ocean waves in conversation with wind on rocky beaches, hearing a breeze make its way towards you via treetops, just to name a few.

For the Cal Performances premiere of Aquatic Ecology early this year, the program notes included a brief reflection from yMusic, where you share: “We love this music, which feels like an extension of who we are and what we hold dear.” For those discovering yMusic for the first time, who are you? What is it that you hold dear? And how has this project been an extension of that?

Sirota: I have always held that the best and most compelling performances come from sharing work that you love dearly. In the 17 years of yMusic’s existence, the six of us musicians have created a body of work together that we feel resonates with us the most; we love discovering new music, and learning about each other through art. We are more into the joy of music and music-making than a specific genre or format. We understand that attending a concert of new music is an act of trust, and we aspire to earn that trust through furious and thoughtful curation.

As an ensemble, yMusic has been sought after as collaborators with a dynamic array of composers and performing artists (Paul Simon, Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Marcos Balter, to name a few). Reflecting this, The New York Times wrote: “With yMusic, the performers act as co-conspirators in the compositional process, interacting with the music as a living document, not an abstract ideal.” Could you talk about how that came into play in your work with Gabriella Smith for this piece?

Cabezas: All of the composers yMusic has worked with have come to our initial collaboration as good friends of at least a couple members of the group. The inherent trust in these relationships can allow us to push different sounds or ideas further than a composer’s initial ideas might have been. For this piece, there are a lot of extended techniques in the different instruments that we workshopped with Gabriella to find good matches with the field recordings, and she gives us a lot of room to play around and at times improvise with the palette that she’s created with us. It’s a privilege to get to dive deep into a sound world you create with other musicians and make something new in every performance.

Sirota: We love to workshop new works, and Gabriella is a compulsive workshopper in the best way. We got together in the studio before she began composing the work and tried tapping, scraping, pinching, and manipulating our instruments in every way we could think of. As the piece has matured and evolved, Gabriella has been liberal with texts, voice memos and more, trying to realize her vision in the context of this group and our strengths and proclivities. We LOVE to work this way! And I believe you can hear the gorgeous result in the piece.

If this will be someone’s first encounter with Gabriella Smith’s work, what would you share to invite them into the piece? What would you be excited for them to listen, or even watch for?

Cabezas: One of my favorite things about Gabriella’s music is how she’s able to alter our perception of the different sounds that instruments can make. In this piece, she often pairs individual instruments, or groups of instruments, with sounds of different natural phenomena (ice melting, whales, fish eating coral, etc) — I love the idea of nature and chamber music becoming one in this way.

Sirota: Gabriella has an incredible knack for creating new textures with old instruments, using them in a new way, employing a new technique to create something very unique, yet she can then combine these new textures in ways that sound organic and almost inevitable. It’s a phenomenal ability, and we are so excited to perform her work!

Could you describe what it was like to work with the field recordings? Did you have a favorite?

Cabezas: A personal favorite of mine is an extended passage where I imitate some very long whale songs in glissando. It’s a super fun technique, and I love the reassurance that I’m doing the right thing from the pre-recorded whales.

Sirota: Definitely the plainfin midshipmen. These fish HUM PITCHES!! Gabriella put choirs of them together and they are so fun to perform with.

Thanks to Gabriel and Nadia for sharing your insight and enthusiasm.

From Deep Listening to Loving Response

Gabriella Smith, 2023. Photo: Erik Petersen.

“People coming to my concerts are aware of the climate crisis, but they just feel despair, which isn’t useful, and music is a good tool for feeling the things we need to feel in order to do the work that we need to do. … I want to provide that link from feeling things to being involved in some kind of integral, local action.”

— Gabriella Smith in Local News Matters: Bay Area (March 5, 2025)

To experience a live performance of Gabriella Smith’s work is to experience the alchemical — not only in her transmutation of hidden sounds, but in her facilitation of a greater fluency between the listening audience and their local ecosystem.

Cabezas pointed to the experience of presenting Aquatic Ecology at an outdoor performance with Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana. The site was once a sea bed, with prehistoric fossils visible to the casual passerby. “It was amazing to hear the piece reflected off the land,” he shared, “and to be reminded how close we are to the history of changing underwater ecosystems wherever we are in the world.”

For her Twin Cities premiere, Gabriella located a site sixteen miles west of the Walker Art Center, where you can find one of the best remaining examples of the Big Woods forest in Minnesota. Wolsfeld Woods SNA (Long Lake) hosts stretches of oak forest, emergent marsh, and some of the state’s largest sugar maple trees. You can join Gabriella there the morning after the performance for a collective effort of buckthorn removal, a widespread invasive species. We’re grateful to the Minnesota DNR’s Scientific and Natural Areas Program for this opportunity to pair deep listening with tangible response, and to continue the conversations sparked by Aquatic Ecology with others in the audience.

Sun, Nov 9, 10 am—2 pm
Register here (free, spots are limited)

An Evening with Gabriella Smith & yMusic

Sat, Nov 8, 7:30 pm
Walker Art Center
Aquatic Ecology was commissioned by Liquid Music, Walker Art Center, and Schubert Club

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Amy Chatelaine is a writer and creative producer based in the Twin Cities. Her work interweaves wisdom and best practices from her cross-disciplinary background in public health, contemplative spirituality, and the arts. Amy holds an MDiv from Emory University and BA in Biology from St. Olaf College. She is also a cellist with the Prodigal Quartet, and frequent visitor of Minnesota’s state parks.

Follow Gabriel Cabezas
Website: gabrielcabezas.com
Instagram: @starbuckcello
Facebook: @gabrielcabezascello

Follow Nadia Sirota:
Website: nadiasirota.com
Instagram: @nadiasirota
Facebook: @nadiasirota

Follow Gabriella Smith:
Website: gabriellasmith.com
Instagram: @gabriella.coati

Follow yMusic:
Website: ymusicensemble.com
Instagram: @ymusicnyc
Facebook: @yMusicensemble

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Writer Karl Ove Knausgaard and Wilco Drummer Glenn Kotche Collab for Liquid Music / October 27, 2025 by Katie Hare

By Steve Marsh

This is an excerpted conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard and Glenn Kotche for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, published in full at mspmag.com on October 24, 2025.

Ever since the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard dropped his six-volume memoir My Struggle—Book 1 was translated into English in 2012—there hasn’t been a bigger global literary rock star. So when Liquid Music announced Historia, Knausgaard’s collab with Wilco’s drummer Glenn Kotche, Nov. 2 at Northrop, it (almost) made sense.

Turns out Kotche was the one who asked Knausgaard to dance—and yeah, he was slightly apprehensive about approaching the archdruid of literary realism, even though they’re friends.

“Yeah, it was a little like, Should I reach out?” Kotche said. “And then it’s like, What's the worst that can happen? He'll say no? It's not like someone's going to unfriend you because you asked them to collaborate.”

I kept that same energy when I asked Liquid Music’s Kate Nordstrum if she would ask Kotche and Knausgaard if they were available to jump on a Zoom and talk about their show. What’s the worst thing they could say—no? The three of us spoke about drumming, time, and muting your self-editor. Knausgaard vaped throughout our entire conversation.

Glenn, I was reading a thing that you were interviewed about, about the concept of a drummer's voice and the uniqueness of it. And I was thinking that drumming is often described as “keeping time.” And time is universal—not usually considered to be individualistic. So when do you think you developed your own drumming voice? I know you first destroyed a drum kit at the age of three.

Glenn: I don't know when that would have happened, but I think it's due to a collection of my experiences—just like any writer or visual artist or singer-songwriter. It's kind of like you have this collection of influences and somehow by imitating those things, you take little bits and pieces and eventually, you come up with your own voice.

Was there a tipping point though?

Glenn: It was when I graduated college, specifically. I had done so much marching percussion, I'd done so much classical percussion, and after I got out of college, I had no more outlets for all of that—it was just my drum set. So I thought, why waste those 10,000 hours I spent in the practice room, working on timpani and marimba and vibes and hand drumming and all that other stuff. I tried to incorporate it into the drum set. And when I started doing that, and thinking in terms of not just timekeeping, but also like an orchestral percussion—providing texture, color, other things to assist the music besides just the beat—that’s when I got my voice.

Ah.

Glenn: And that would probably be around the time when I joined Wilco, or just before that, when I had a strong feeling of, This is what I want to do.

You joined Wilco after their first three albums. You were working with Jeff Tweedy and Jim O’Rourke on a separate project, and then you joined. So were you in your 30s by then?

Glenn: I remember this, because I turned 30 on New Year's Eve. And I came in on January 2nd or 3rd to play percussion and vibes on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And Jeff pulled me aside and asked me to join the band. So I had just turned 30, yeah.

Karl Ove, you’ve written about finding your writing voice when you committed to the hyper-realistic style and subject matter in My Struggle. But you are also a drummer. Did you ever find your voice as a drummer in the way you found it as a writer?

Karl Ove: I love music and it was an important part of my teenage years—it was all basically music and football. So I wanted to be in a band and I learned how to play the drums, but I wasn’t very good, so I started to write about music instead. So I wrote about records and it was easy—I wrote like six to 10 pages a day, no problem. It was just flowing. Then, when I was 19, I came to a course in creative writing at university. And I was shown the masterpieces of modernism, and basically they were laughing at me. I was 19, and they were 75. And then I couldn't write for 10 years. I really tried. Then when my first novel came, it was not quite my own voice. It was changing my voice into something else, writing about something else. And then something started to happen. I made a discovery—I realized that writing is like reading. And from then on, I could write. I wrote about many topics. And like reading, writing is like entering a space you haven't been in before. And you can surprise yourself, because literature is something objective—and if you pour yourself in there, something else comes back. But I can't even say I’m a drummer in this company. I was in the band because my brother is a musician—he's a guitarist—so I knew they wouldn't fire me.

We’re obviously reading your novels in translation, so we can’t truly be certain about your poetic tempo in the original Norwegian. But is there a time signature in your head while your write?

Karl Ove: Well, that's a good question, and I think it's incredibly relevant because what I'm not interested in when I'm writing is thinking or planning. It’s like an improvisation and it's only possible if you practice a lot. And it’s the same with an instrument—if you play, you can't think. You have to be in it, and that's the place to be. I think that's for all the arts really. If you start to think then you have blown it, in a way. I envy musicians because they're right in it. It's different with writing. It's a much more intellectual thing, because it's words and concepts and it's not so direct, but that's where I want to be. So I never think about rhythm, but I never edit either. So what you read is what I wrote.

[Continue reading at mspmag.com]

Karl Ove Knausgård and Glenn Kotche: Historia

Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 7:30 pm
The 92nd Street Y, New York
Produced by Liquid Music

Sun, Nov 2, 2025, 4 pm
Northrop, Minneapolis
Copresented by Liquid Music and Northrop

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Follow Karl Ove Knausgaard
General info and updates: penguinrandomhouse.com

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Website: glennkotche.com
Instagram: @glennkotche

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Mpls.St.Paul Magazine: mspmag.com/topics/steve-marsh
Instagram: @stephenhero

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Crossing Open Ground: Performing the Aesthetics of John Luther Adams / October 14, 2025 by Liquid Music

By Trever Hagen

“Please forgive my silence,” John Luther Adams wrote in a delayed reply to a series of questions I had sent him for this article. Now living in Australia, the time difference proved difficult for arranging a phone interview. At first the simple acknowledgement of the social convention of an email reply drew my attention to the difference between silence in the social world of communication — as a faux pas — and silence found in the natural world, where it has no convention, no appropriate response, no determination. Yet as John Luther Adams has taught us through his compositions and their performances: we are a part of the silence through listening. And with listening, indeed comes a sense of responsibility: a profound social convention that rarely emerges in musical experience.

In the landscape of contemporary music, John Luther Adams has cultivated a body of work that resists the usual poles of avant-garde experimentation and orchestral tradition by re-centering listening itself as listening to weather, landforms, seasonal light, and the nonhuman. Whereas much postwar concert music defines itself by musical materials and technique, Adams has defined his practice through place. He often composes for outdoors or for ensembles situated across wide spaces, turning performance into an act of environmental attention rather than a only a display of human virtuosity. For example, Adams works such as Inuksuit and Sila transplant the concert into parks and plazas, making wind, echo and audience movement part of the score.

Adams’s orchestral language similarly departs from narrative drama. In Become Ocean, the orchestra’s three spatially separated groups rise and fall in long, palindromic waves. Harmonic motion is slow, tidal, and impersonal; the piece is less a symphonic argument than a geologic process unfolding in time. The result, recognized with the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and a 2015 Grammy, is music that feels simultaneously elemental and ethical, pointing attention toward Earth-systems rather than short-term human stories.

These Earth-systems emerge through Adam’s “sonic geography.” He treats sound as an ecology — a network of relations among place, weather, and listener — so the boundary between composition, place and environment blurs. Further, he has used environmental data directly in installations (as in The Place Where You Go to Listen). The “work” is not just notes but a particular place-time of listening, and that philosophical shift is what sets Adams apart from many of his contemporaries.

Music, nature and environmentalism

If many composers write about nature as a topic, Adams writes from nature as context. His memoir Silences So Deep frames composition as a practice of solitude, listening, and responsibility amid a changing climate. Become Ocean explicitly invokes sea-level rise in its program notes. Across these works, he asks whether music can cultivate the habits of perception we need to live within planetary limits. The pieces situate listeners by slowing pulse, expanding scale, and turning the audience’s bodies into sensors for wind, distance, and resonance.

Adams’s ecological commitments predate his international recognition as a composer. Moving to Alaska in the mid-1970s, he worked for conservation groups and served as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center. In his Alaska years he helped advocate around landmark conservation legislation (ANILCA) and has been associated with Green politics in the state. He later left professional activism to devote himself to composing. However, an activist's ethic of attention to the environment remained, shaping his music’s aims. Today, when Adam’s music appears in civic spaces like Lincoln Center’s plaza or public parks, it carries that background as a civic invitation: to gather, to listen together, and to imagine human culture not above the more-than-human world but inside it.

Presenting Crossing Open Ground at Snow Canyon State Park

Within the more recent oeuvre of John Luther Adams is the piece Crossing Open Ground, a large-scale outdoor work for winds, brass, and percussion, composed in 2023 and dedicated to the writer Barry Lopez. Scored for 40 musicians (or multiples), it has a variable duration, roughly 54 to 81 minutes, allowing the music to breathe with terrain, light and audience movement. The world premiere took place at the Aspen Music Festival (2023).

On Saturday, October 25, 2025, the Liquid Music-produced Crossing Open Ground will be presented by the Center for the Arts at Kayenta in Snow Canyon State Park, a high-desert landscape of lava flows and Navajo sandstone that forms part of the Greater Zion region near Zion National Park. Snow Canyon’s Whiterocks Amphitheater is the perfect backdrop to the score’s long-tone calls: brass chorales are refracted by canyon walls, percussion cracks with dry air; silences that are truly place-specific.

Presenting the piece here also draws a line from Adams’s northern work to the desert Southwest, two extremes of North American ecology that nonetheless share vulnerabilities to heat, drought and shifting seasons. Within that frame, Crossing Open Ground becomes an act of listening-as-stewardship: the audience walks into a protected landscape, the ensemble activates it with sound and for an hour we practice a form of attention that may be as politically meaningful as it is musically beautiful.

The artistic team includes music director Nadia Sirota and choreographer Dimitri Chamblas, alongside section leaders Douglas Perkins (percussion), Laura Cocks (voice/flute), C.J. Camerieri (french horn), and Trever Hagen (trumpet), in collaboration with an ensemble of 36 local musicians in partnership with Utah Tech University to complete the full ensemble. Crossing Open Ground is not only a score but a community-scaled event, integrating movement, site and ensemble practice.

NadiaThreeQuarters by Zoe Prinds-Flash (1).jpg

HAGEN press photo_credit Graham Tolbert.jpg

Crossing Open Ground at Snow Canyon State Park was made possible by Kayenta Arts in partnership with Utah Tech University.

John Luther Adams: Crossing Open Ground

Directed by Dimitri Chamblas and Nadia Sirota
With Laura Cocks, Doug Perkins, CJ Camerieri and Trever Hagen
Produced by Liquid Music
Presented by Center for the Arts at Kayenta
October 25, 2025, 11 am & 3 pm
Snow Canyon State Park, Southern Utah

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Follow John Luther Adams:
Website: johnlutheradams.net

Follow Trever Hagen:
Instagram: @t.r.e.v.r

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Instagram: @liquidmusicseries
Facebook: @liquidmusicseries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Surrendering to the Process // Jlin / September 26, 2025 by Liquid Music

Composer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) brings her program, n! = 3! (Permutation of Three), to the Walker Art Center on Thursday, October 2. This visceral evening of collaboration —copresented by the Walker, Liquid Music, and Northrop — demonstrates Jlin’s expansive musical universe, featuring solo electronic material; collaborations with omnivorous violinist and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain and renowned tap improviser and choreographer Leonardo Sandoval; and the Kronos Quartet-commissioned Little Black Book, performed by musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO).

Artist and writer Yaz Lancaster sat down with Jlin ahead of the show to explore the philosophical connections between her work, the power of creative surrender, and the art of finding infinite possibility in a blank creative canvas.

This interview took place on September 16, 2025 and has been edited for clarity.

Yaz: How did you discover footwork music? What drew you to it?

Jlin: I was four years old. I heard it for the first time at a neighbor’s house — I could kind of hear it through her headphones. I was very fascinated by the sound. She took her headphones off and told me it was a footwork track, and that it was music out of Chicago. I just never forgot that sound.

I got reintroduced to footwork again in high school during a talent show, and then again in college. High school was where it really probably sparked, though. After that moment I remembered how much I loved it.

During all of this, were you listening to recordings and music online? Or were you also going out and seeing DJs too?

No, the first concert I ever been to was my own. So no.

Oh, that’s really awesome actually. I love footwork too — as more of a fan and listener. I’ve been expanding my practice through DJing recently, and I opened for DJ Manny and DJ Paypal in Brooklyn back in July. But I didn’t play any footwork at all. I was like, ‘I should let them do that.’

I think that’s actually smart. I don’t like when people open up for me and they start playing footwork music. I applaud you for doing that — you should do your own thing!

Totally! Anyway, sort of the same question, but how did you get into classical and contemporary classical music?

I’ve always loved classical music. I would say that my earliest memory is probably watching The Hours (2002). Philip Glass composed that score. I was older — I was in junior year of high school — so it resonated with me a bit harder. It moved me in a different way.

When did you realize that you can sort of put these two things — electronic dance music and classical music — together?

I always knew that I could because I knew that art is art. We as human beings put things in genre but music is music. Vibration is vibration. Sound is sound. They’re just different expressions of the same thing. I never separated them — I didn’t say ‘Oh, this is classical and that’s trap and that’s blues and that’s gospel.’

However it comes out is how it comes out. I create from a very blank canvas space, I don’t have a blueprint. I never know what I’m going to do til I sit down and do it.

So what is the process like if you’re working on a piece? When you do something like the track for Kronos, or one that’s purely electronic, is that process the same? Maybe how it’s communicated is just what’s a little different? Because I assume Kronos would be reading from some form of notation.

Yes, but I still have the exact same approach. And that approach is: I have nothing, but I know everything is in nothing. As far as the technicalities, I usually just send over my stems or the MIDI files depending on what each collaborator needs. But other than that it’s the same.

I surrender myself to the creative process. I know in surrender is where I have the most control. I’m not even trying to understand what’s happening in the creative process, I’m just creating. I don’t need to know the mechanics of it — not even in my own process.

I love that. So, jumping into the actual show at the Walker Art Center — I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about the program. What can people expect to hear?

So as you can see, it’s like a math equation (n! = 3!). There is this combination of three entities. We all are derived from each other as artists, because there’s nothing new under the sun. But in the process of that happening, that means that now you have created combinations of different outcomes.

Once you create these combinations, now you open that up into infinite spaces because one thing derives from another thing derives from another thing, and you keep producing these different combinations of things.

And so that’s the idea. It’s never just this or that, it’s an inclusiveness of everything. Infinite space to me is very definitive, but it’s very open. It’s about the [Saint Paul Chamber] Orchestra, Daniel [Bernard Roumain], Leo[nardo Sandoval], and myself coming together and deriving from the same space of art.

Have you collaborated with these musicians before?

I’ve collaborated with Daniel on an improvisation, and I’ve collaborated with Leo for my album Akoma. And I also recently collaborated with [Leo] this year for a performance of Precision of Infinity. I played it and he tapped to it.

That’s sweet. Is the tap dancing meant to be sort of a connection to, or maybe departure from footwork?

I wouldn’t put it under the context of footwork. I love footwork, but I’m not just a footwork artist. The tap is a form of expression that for me, especially being Black, starts as a very tribal thing. A lot of times, Leo performs in a very tribal way. He brings it into the forms of stepping, and other forms of dance. I love that about his work. It’s so smooth, and it’s fluid. That goes very well with the way that my music is — it’s rhythmic and it shifts and it’s unpredictable. We understand each other’s space of creativity pretty well.

Oh, that’s so beautiful… I wish I could see this show!

Your sound is so distinctive, but it’s also really open and encompasses a lot of different styles and genres and disciplines — you’re not concerned with fitting into one thing. How do you find these different sources of inspiration? Are you super tapped in online and able to find a lot of things via the internet? Or do you go out and see a lot of different shows and art?

“I never go in thinking ‘this is the space I’m looking for.’ I feel like I’m very much ‘Be water, my friend.’ I want my music to be able to adapt to anything that it touches. It can go from a dance floor to fashion to a movie — I’m never thinking of it in one specific space. I think it’s very arrogant and egotistical of me to dictate my work and say ‘it only belongs here.’”

The internet is a very big help, but I also think some things I was tapped into before I knew I was, as a kid. And so I think they come back into my memory now. I feel like some things were instilled, some things I grew up on or was introduced to at a young age. And the things that stick with me, I know they mean something. Those are things I need to explore more.

Percussion is always so wide open all the time. African drumming, Indian drumming, Taiko drumming… That goes back into the creation of infinite possibility. If you can see it in your mind, then you can create it. If you can hear it in your mind, then you can make it sonically. It might not come out exactly the way it sounded in your head, but if you can envision it, then you can absolutely create that space.

As someone who also navigates this space between the experimental/contemporary classical side of things and club music/DJ-ing, I’m curious how much you think about the setting and spaces your work takes place in. Are you already thinking or envisioning that in the creation process?

I never go in thinking ‘this is the space I’m looking for.’ I feel like I’m very much ‘Be water, my friend.’ I want my music to be able to adapt to anything that it touches. It can go from a dance floor to fashion to a movie — I’m never thinking of it in one specific space. I think it’s very arrogant and egotistical of me to dictate my work and say ‘it only belongs here.’

Is there anything you find challenging when you’re working on a new project?

Everything. Usually the fight is me. I go through periods where I dread working because the last piece may have taken so much out of me. Or if I’m in a season where the music is flowing and I’m having these great downloads of music or creative process, but then that’s over and I have to start again. Sometimes it’s just a matter of sitting down to create and you realize ‘Oh damn, that wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought.’ I was just making it harder than it was in my own head. I dread those moments. I’m sure you know what I mean.

Yeah. I think especially with commissions sometimes — it becomes ‘Oh, this is a job.’ It’s privileged and lucky, but it’s still work. And the idea of the music, your love, being work can be really frustrating to me.

Exactly. At the end of the day it is still a job. Your collaborators try to make it as easy as possible for you to have fun and do your thing. But in your mind you still know ‘I signed a contract! My management team negotiated this thing.’

But there's beauty in it. Rarely is it seamless. But when you get those moments, bask in them.

On the flipside, what do you feel like is the most rewarding part of getting to do this?

The most rewarding part is being vulnerable in front of people, and them being vulnerable with me. I don’t have an expectation for my audience. Something I’m learning is how to be present in the creation and the performance. The older I get, it’s becoming less easy.

Why do you think that is?

Because I’m more of a composer than I am a performer. I can perform, but composition has always been my first love. But I’m cool with that. I want people to see that I’m not in that performance space right now. A month from now, I may be way better.

I just want people to enjoy themselves. Don’t come in with any preconceived notion. Just enjoy it. Or if you don’t, that’s cool too. Feel how you feel!

Jlin / n! = 3!
With Daniel Bernard Romain, Leonardo Sandoval & musicians of the SPCO

Thu, Oct 2, 2025, 7:30 pm
Walker Art Center
Copresented by Liquid Music, Northrop, and the Walker Art Center
Produced by Liquid Music and Pomegranate Arts

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Yaz Lancaster is a NYC-based experimental artist and writer whose practice is grounded in queer, DIY, and liberatory frameworks. Their solo work includes performances with violin, voice, and electronics comprising songs, improvisations and composed music. Yaz also performs as death ambient and hardcore DJ duo project "medium." with gg200bpm. They are a freelance music/arts writer with work in I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, Musicworks, Which Sinfonia, among other publications. They are a member of NYC-based and communally-active PTP Vision artist collective; and the creator/curator of HEAVY HEARTS performance series celebrating the community and vulnerability in harsh/experimental sonics.

Follow Jlin:
Website: www.jlintheinnovator.com
Instagram: @jlin_p
Facebook: @jlintheinnovator

Follow Yaz Lancaster:
Website: www.yaz-lancaster.com
Instagram: @yeehawyaz

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A Musical Exploration of Human Connection and Concern // Davóne Tines / April 23, 2025 by Amy Chatelaine

Dancer-choreographer, educator, and artist organizer Alanna Morris spoke with curator, creator, and performer Davóne Tines ahead of his performance at the Minneapolis Institute of Art on May 1. Tines and his band The Truth will premiere RITUAL, featuring Tines’ work MASS + THE TRUTH in dialogue with Mia’s Giants exhibition.

This interview took place on April 14, 2025, and has been edited for the Liquid Music blog by Amy Chatelaine.

Alanna Morris: I thought since this musical contribution is surrounding the Giants exhibit, Giants might be a good place to start.

Davóne Tines: Yeah, I just love the idea of Black folk putting their resources towards collecting works from our broader diasporic world, that are reflections and incarnations of us. I think it's beautiful, and I think it's complicatedly beautiful in a world where objects and art are commerce. There's something about the gain of resources from capitalism, utilizing that to purchase and hold certain objects, but the fact that it's a transference of those resources to artists with the multiplying factor of adding value to those objects in a greater context — that has really interesting implications. Being involved with this project is going to make me think about that more.

Morris: I listened back to the conversation that the Deans (Swizz Beats and Alicia Keys) had with the curator of Giants (Kimberli Gant). Swizz talked about the theme, “the giant in you”: how often, artists of color aren't giant collectors of our own culture. This idea of collecting and sharing an archive is what I experienced you doing through sound and performance in your most recent recital, the ROBESOИ project.

Why Paul Robeson, for you? And what is it like to be a curator and connoisseur of the work of your own culture?

Tines: Well, I'll start speaking about that ancestor by talking about another one.

As a Black, male, gay artist who does things that are a little bit out of the box, it's very helpful and necessary and grounding to find ancestors. Often I'm asked, Who do you look up to in opera? And I'm like, Nobody. Those aren't my idols.

But I do find people connected to that world. One of them is Langston Hughes, for utilizing his poetry to encapsulate Blackness in a way that just hadn't been done before. I've done a lot of work connected to Langston Hughes, including making a fully staged musical called The Black Clown, based on his very underseen poem. In 320 words, he outlines the idea of Black people being oppressed by the caricatures they're assumed into, and then places that narrative within 300 years of American history. He walks through that timeline, and then shows deliverance from that structure by a Black man realizing that he and his people have survived. All of that, in 320 words. That's why I consider him a genius.

I wanted to get as many people as possible to understand that poem. So we made it a Broadway-style musical that has an all-Black cast, all-Black band, and just so much vibrant music. It’s very beautiful. But it also punches you in the gut with its truth.

That deep dive with Langston Hughes has been pivotal and foundational for me.

Davóne Tines in The Black Clown | Photo: Richard Termine

Mr. Robeson is somebody who I've been shying away from contending with for a while, partly because when I was a younger singer, people were like, You sound like Paul Robeson, do you sing Old Man River? And I was like, I don't know who that man is, and I don't know what that song is. It felt like a very cursory assumption.

I had a bit of scant knowledge about Robeson being an activist and part of the socialist movement, but I got to know a lot more about him during the pandemic. And of course I was blown away by really listening to his voice, and understanding the depth of his work in America and abroad, trying to unite working peoples of the world. And I was like, Oh, and he was a pro football player and an international activist, doing Shakespeare on the West End, but also performing on Broadway in New York. In his time, he was one of the most famous, if not the most famous Black person in the world. But not many people know about him today. So part of my work is trying to reawaken visibility for Robeson, and also contending with him as my own individual self, as a young Black artist who's been assumed into his legacy.

Our voices might be in a similar range if I decide to sing a certain way, and yeah, I’ve always done socially engaged work – which people always misconstrue is activistic work. It’s a hard line to toe between activist work and other work, because I do make things that are very pointed and try to change people. But wasn't Beethoven doing the same thing? Like, why write Ode to Joy which has the words, “Let us bring together what has torn apart,” unless you're trying to socially move people? All art should do that if it's present.

Aside from the superficial connections to his voice, the point of connection I found is Robeson’s vulnerability. I was like, Oh, you're a person. You did all these great things, but you're a human that was weighed down by the world. And that is a reason I can assume myself into Robeson’s lineage, because I've dealt with similar situations. I’ve survived those things, and I'm still here. I know that the triumphal return from those places of darkness is something I will always respect and continue to try to share with people, which is partly an inspiration for the MASS program.

Morris: Yeah, to share the art itself with people is wonderful, and then what do I take away when I go home at night? Socially engaged art is like, I want you to be immersed: I’m inviting you to be in dialogue, to have a conversation. And it’s going to meet you in your blood, in your guts.

Tines: It’s very overt. What we do in classical music or in theater is so abstract, right? It's in languages that people commonly don't speak, or delivered in ways people don't commonly engage. So, just in my own artistic practice, I don't need to make things more abstract. The medium is abstract itself. In fact, our job is to use that medium to make clarity. And also, I want to have a real connection with people, in real time. I've learned that from certain colleagues I love and trust, and it's also what turns me on as a performer. Like, I'm fine in rehearsal — I show up for work, I do my job. But on performance day, I show up, you know? My spirit as a performer comes alive when I have to communicate something to people. I feel that energy. I respond to it. It feeds me. My alchemy attunes to the context.

Morris: I also saw this theme in the Giants exhibit: the words collect, protect, respect. Could you respond to those three words in light of what you’re bringing to Mia on May 1 through RITUAL?

Tines: “Collect” is picking and choosing the right things, the things that you respond to. And then “protect” is putting them in a context that protects their meaning, or protects a space for them to be engaged. I can protect a song by having my technique and skill at a certain consistent place when I interpret or replicate those pieces. It's done with a care that protects their integrity. That also is intrinsically tied to “respect,” because if you do that, you are respecting the art.

Specifically with MASS — there are so many ways I could talk about this, but maybe it's nice to talk about it in a new way. So that structure, the structure of the Catholic Mass with all those Latin titles. I asked a composer friend, Caroline Shaw, to write a miniature Mass. Usually Masses can go on for 25 minutes. I was like, Nope, just one little version of everything, after the essence of it. Distill it.

The Credo Latin text is the longest text. To her credit and genius, Caroline distilled it down to one word: Believe. And it's like, Oh, cool, that does the same thing, delivered with clarity and conviction. You could just say, “I believe.” As a listener, I can take that with me. So I wanted to distill all these things into their nuggets of meaning.

“My spirit as a performer comes alive when I have to communicate something to people. I feel that energy. I respond to it. It feeds me. My alchemy attunes to the context.”

In MASS + THE TRUTH [featured in RITUAL], each section is defined by you, and you can enter it in three different ways: You can hear the word “kyrie” and know what that means. You can hear me sing a Kyrie, which kind of gives you its aesthetic flavor. Or you can read the question that's associated with the word Kyrie, which is, What are you worried about? So if you can't read that kind of nuance in music, if you don't know Greek or Latin, you can just read the question in English. All of the questions are very open ended; they're formed in a way to make sure everybody can enter. Because everyone has worried about something, so everyone can answer that question.

I guess how an artist or an art collector would collect Blackness and put it on display, I do that sort of curation through musical choices. I originally chose music from either Baroque composers that wrote liturgical music or Black composers, both passed on and current, so that these very different times and cultures could have an ongoing conversation about spirituality. So you can be like, Bach wrote about it this way, and Margaret Bonds wrote about it this way. They're all talking about the same things, but this is how they chose to do it. And then it's for the audience to have the deeper conversation within themselves of, well, who did it better? And it's often whatever touched you.

MASS is decidedly Blacker. It's saying, We can do Mass too, and this is how we choose to do it. You can see if going to that service on Sunday morning touched you, or if this thing touched you. And it's not about competition, but about the curiosity of the effectiveness of certain modes of doing a ritual.

Morris: I'm seeing so many parallels between the Giants exhibit and this MASS + THE TRUTH project. Both involve radical curatorial choices that are deeply personal, and that are very pro-Black. But your choices in MASS are also about the framework it's tethered to. Could you say more about that?

Tines: One of my many, many jobs after undergrad was singing for the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC. It's the best paying choir job on the east coast.

But sitting there on so many Sundays, I was like, Why am I here? What am I getting out of this? I wish I was just going to my home church in northern Virginia with my family and eating Sunday dinner, but I'm here in DC. So I was like, I need to find something in this for me. I don't know if it's religious, but I can't just be sitting here collecting a paycheck knowing that I'm missing out on a deeper spiritual journey that I could be having with a community I love.

So I started interrogating what it was that I was sitting in. And I was like, if you look at the text, if you look at these rituals, it's basically a process for dealing with human problems.

Like, a Kyrie is, you need mercy, you need help. Or you're worried about something. So a Kyrie is just the question, What are you worried about?

Agnus Dei, Lamb of God, is sacrifice: What do you need to give up to change that problem?

A Credo is belief: Do you believe that change is possible?

A Gloria is being thankful for the change, or even the possibility of change.

A Sanctus, which means holy, is the fact that I identified something I needed to change within myself or the world, that I had steadfast belief that the change was going to happen, and that I reached the other side to say “Glory."

All the stuff inside of the Catholic Mass — the certain storytellings, the certain white cultures — you can leave behind, or you can look at as metaphorical. But the structure itself is sound, I think. And a proof of that is that it's a ritual people have invested in doing for centuries. So it behooves me to try to understand what that is.

That's what I came away with: I wanted to make a non-denominational Mass and walk people through the steps of dealing with their problems. So I gave the title of each section a question. It’s hopefully always very clear, I’m going to sing this song at you, but this question is where you need to be.

“I’m excited for that possibility of conversation between Alicia Keys, Swizz Beatz, and myself as curators working in different mediums, and what it means for the audience to witness that conversation.”

Morris: I grew up Evangelical, and I've personally never been part of a Mass. Yet MASS + THE TRUTH feels so relevant for me. Hearing the song, reading the quotes, meditating on the meaning, and getting this distilled version. Even the 100 works in the Giants collection – that's still a type of distillation. I'm seeing how powerful this whole experience is going to be for folks.

Tines: Yeah, it's an archive put in conversation with another archive, right? The archives are very different mediums, and I deeply believe that everything is a metaphor for everything else.

And so there might be ways that you read the MASS that allow you to read the Giants collection a certain way, and there are ways that reading the Giants collection will change how you read the MASS.

I'm excited for that possibility of conversation between Alicia Keys, Swizz Beatz, and myself as curators working in different mediums, and what it means for the audience to witness that conversation.

Morris: And for our eyes, our hearts, to be opened by Black artists.

You started our conversation by reflecting on the collection and dissemination of resources in this capitalistic, marketplace-type economy, and how we as Black artists don't often get to be a part of that. There's a nuance in there, which is, do we want to be? And you are doing something very different, in my opinion: you're doing soul work, you know? When I was listening to Swizz and Alicia, they were saying the way they curate is from the heart. That’s definitely what I felt. So thank you for doing this heart-centered work that's also deeply intellectual and so tethered to history.

Any last words you want to say?

Tines: Thank you. I just hope people bring their full selves, and their problems, to the show.

Davóne Tines and The Truth: RITUAL
Thu, May 1, 2025, 7:30 pm
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Borman Gallery, 2nd Floor Corridor
FREE, tickets not required

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Alanna Morris is a dancer-choreographer, educator, and artist organizer. After a 10 year career with TU Dance, she founded the arts & cultural organization, I A.M. Arts to support critical dance performance, (w)holistic education, and community life. Alanna is Director of the Roots and Wings Institute for Embodied Wisdoms, which launched in 2024, empowering creatives and nonprofits with project management and elevating individual wellness through integrated health services. The Institute is the home of Black Light Research: a methodology of ritualized living and performance practice. Morris is an adjunct professor at Hamline University.

Follow Davóne Tines:
Website: alsoanoperasinger.org
Instagram: @alsoanoperasinger

Follow Alanna Morris:
Website: iamartss.com
Instagram: @i.a.m.arts // @roots.and.wings.llc

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The beating pipe organ: Kali Malone's "All Life Long" / March 12, 2025 by Liquid Music

By Trever Hagen

Kali Malone's All Life Long is a profound exploration of sound, blending traditional instrumentation and harmony with contemporary minimalism to create a wholly new affect. Malone’s work with the pipe organ has challenged conventional perceptions of the instrument, inviting listeners into immersive auditory landscapes, such as All Life Long. As she prepares to perform on the Northrop pipe organ, audience patrons can anticipate a compelling experience that bridges historical reverence with avant-garde innovation.

I received a text from a friend a few years back, just before sunrise.

“Hunting deer.”

Along with the message was a link to an unknown album, Kali Malone’s 2018 The Sacrificial Code. Curious to what was the soundtrack of my friend’s November morning in a deer-stand, I pressed play and, as if a film editor was neatly trimming my life’s experiences together, I was transported to the dormant, still, auburn fields of the midwest in which my friend sat, calmly waiting to pull a trigger. In my ears were the slow, beating movements and harmonies a pipe organ, a familiar sound from an unreal place; like gazing and observing a landscape move in sync with the wind. It was — and is — drone music that out-drones the canon of droners.

Malone’s music, which delves into minimalist composition by utilizing instruments like the pipe organ, seems to intuitively straddle a curious position within modern composition: it lies somewhere in-between ritual and self-expression. It comforts me to think about someone holding down those organ keys — not with virtuosic intent but in a therapeutic manner. As if someone is listening and looking out for you. And when All Life Long emerged in February 2024 (culmination of Malone's meticulous compositional process, recorded between 2020 and 2023) featuring collaborations with ensembles such as the Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass, it evidenced a dimension of Malone’s sonic palette we had not yet heard.

The twelve compositions of Malone’s sixth album All Life Long, traverses various instrumental configurations, from organ-centric pieces to choral and brass arrangements. This diversity showcases Malone's ability to adapt her minimalist aesthetic across and through conventional, known timbres and harmonies to produce music that exposes a forgotten life-pace, grieves a lost sense of narrative, and pleas for contemplation over action. It connects with you like a phone-call telling you someone has passed: it brings you to the fragile present moment, bursting with the truth of what it means to live. And in that same breath of truth the music offers an escape from realities and responsibilities of social attachments; a sonic fetal position.

All Life Long is the sound of air being compressed and pushed through metal pipes into a space where it reverberates, sending waves that wash over one’s ears — the material and matter of the intangible. You are not a spectator from a pew — you are in the chorus, next to the pipes, between the trumpets, with the hot breath of a tenor on your neck. The hollow harmonies offer not comfort but like a welcomed process of judgement; a hungry walk at dawn.

Critics have lauded the album for its depth and emotive power. Pitchfork noted the album's regal quality, emphasizing that Malone is "truly writing for brass ensemble," which in itself feels like a bold move in that brass ensembles are rarely featured in the charts these days. Similarly, the New Yorker highlighted Malone’s singular compositional approach, stating that her music employs "restrictive systems and unique rhythmic patterns, creating an eerily beautiful sound."

And there is no doubt a sense of peace in the music of All Life Long — or more specifically an obvious, proscribed sense of sanctuary that “liturgical” evokes. It is transportive to a pre-digital world where the fastest moving thing was a horse. This music can feel (welcomingly) ancient and strikingly relevant and needed, somehow. As if my ears have been starved for the warm isolation of these timbres; at this moment I am so fortunate that someone living in the 21st century is composing music like this.

Born in Colorado — whose mountains have posed an enduring impression on Malone’s life, hanging in the background of her memories — Kali Malone's musical path has been characterized by a deep exploration of such tonalities, timbres and textures. Her journey into the pipe organ started in Stockholm, Sweden where she moved when she was 18 to study at Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Music. There she began working and doing an apprenticeship with an organist, learning organs are tuned, taken care of and designed.

“This work challenges listeners to engage deeply at a level of observation rather than attention, transforming the organ’s sound and performance into a meditative experience.”

Such knowledge of the affordances of the instrument — from technical, harmonic and expressive but perhaps not performative — has been emblematic of her aesthetic innovation, featuring extended organ pieces that emphasize subtle tonal shifts and sustained harmonics. This work challenges listeners to engage deeply at a level of observation rather than attention, transforming the organ's sound and performance into a meditative experience. Moreover, Malone employs just intonation and unique tuning systems throughout her work that further distinguishes her compositions and illustrates her commitment to evolving the organ's voice in modern composition.

Historically, the organ's grandeur and dynamic range made it a focal point in religious and ceremonial contexts. However, composers like Olivier Messiaen reimagined its potential, integrating unconventional rhythms and harmonies that expanded the instrument's expressive capabilities. Messiaen's work between 1930 and 1952 played a pivotal role in developing the organ as an avant-garde instrument, from where Malone has similarly reimagined the instrument in an equally profound direction.

*Northrop’s historic Aeolian-Skinner Opus 892 organ. Photo: Patrick O’Leary.*

Kali Malone is set to perform All Life Long on the renowned Northrop pipe organ, an event that underscores the significance of her work in contemporary music. The Northrop organ, with its rich history and expansive tonal range, provides an ideal platform for Malone's compositions, allowing audiences to experience the depth and nuance of her music in a live setting. As well, Malone will be joined by brass instrumentalists and vocalists from the University of Minnesota School of Music. This performance and composition not only highlights Malone's innovative use of the organ but also celebrates the instrument's enduring relevance in modern artistry; and likewise, Malone as a composer to lead our ears into new fields of listening attention and experience.

Kali Malone: All Life Long

Copresented by Northrop and Liquid Music
Thu, Mar 20, 7 pm
Northrop

Learn more + Get tickets

Follow Kali Malone:
Website: www.kalimalone.com
Instagram: @hotscorpions (instagram.com/hotscorpions)

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Website: www.northrop.umn.edu
Instagram: @NorthropUMN (instagram.com/northropumn)
Facebook: facebook.com/NorthropUMN

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The Making of Sun Dogs: Creating Conditions for the Spectacular // Daniel Wohl x Kate Nordstrum / November 6, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

Top (L to R): Daniel Wohl, Arooj Aftab, Josephine Decker, Devonté Hynes; Bottom (L to R): Mati Diop, Manon Lutanie, Rafiq Bhatia, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

In the Northern Hemisphere, we sense the departure of autumn through familiar cues: daylight wanes, the ground hardens, the temperature drops as bodies curl inward, creating a protective shell around our heartspace. Breath shallows. But the coming winter months hold within them a promise of possibility, chance moments when the gaze may lift with the draw of a spectacle. The chest, in turn, expands — allowing breath to enter new spaces, create new openings.

Your world breaks free from its norm for a moment, is how Liquid Music Artistic Director Kate Nordstrum describes the human effect of beholding the natural phenomenon known as a sun dog.

And it’s that kind of breaking free — that breaking open, that inbreaking — that you’re likely to experience in the final performance of Liquid Music’s fall season.

Yet Sun Dogs is far more about a way of making — one that hopes to inspire within the shared realms of image and sound, and across a landscape where so much can feel broken. This singular project pairs artists across the distinct languages of filmmaking and music composition as storytellers on equal-footing, from inception to performance:

Rafiq Bhatia (composer) + Apichatpong Weerasethakul (filmmaker)
Devonté Hynes (composer) + Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie (co-filmmakers)
Arooj Aftab & Daniel Wohl (co-composers) + Josephine Decker (filmmaker)

This November, Sun Dogs will tour across continental America with live accompaniment by the “unusually versatile, reliably exhilarating new-music ensemble" (The New York Times) Alarm Will Sound. You can trace their path through Saint Charles, MO, (The Emerson Black Box Theater), Brooklyn (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Minneapolis (Northrop), and Los Angeles (Center for the Art of Performance UCLA).

I spoke with Kate Nordstrum and composer Daniel Wohl ahead of the tour, drawn in by a shared enchantment, sent onward with a radiant question: What lasting gifts might this natural spectacle imprint on our ways of creating and being, through something as equally ethereal and atmospheric as music — as spectacular as light captured on film?

This interview took place on October 28, 2024, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Amy Chatelaine: I’d love to hear more about the title Sun Dogs. What’s evocative about that image as it relates to the concept for this project?

Kate Nordstrum: In the natural world, there are these special moments when elements combine in unique ways, and they offer a momentary spectacle. I spot a sun dog once or twice a winter, here in the North. And it's always a reminder to me that known quantities — like how I see the sun and its light — can shift and offer me another perspective. The collaborations within the program are similarly meant to offer small spectacles and new ways of seeing and sensing.

“For me, a sun dog feels like a portal ... It reminds me that it is possible for the world to break free from its norm for a moment.”

— Kate Nordstrum

For me, a sun dog feels like a portal: I always see the sun in this one particular way, but a couple times a year, I'll see it differently. It reminds me that it is possible for the world to break free from its norm for a moment. It triggers a reminder that I think is special.

We're seeking to break open the norm here with this project, too. By effective element combinations and new ways of working.

Chatelaine: That's gorgeous.

How did the two of you come together around this project?

Daniel Wohl: Kate and I had done some multimedia work together back in 2017, and we continued in conversation over the years.

Nordstrum: Daniel regularly expressed a desire for new systems or approaches for composers and filmmakers to work together. I heard that from other artists, too. That activated my producer-mind. I thought, How could we build a platform that could assist here, and see what results?

We feel very fortunate that the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra took this on as a big investment, because it’s not just the commissions; it's the production budget necessary to make a short film. The CSO partnered with FotoFocus, a lens-based organization, to make it happen.

Chatelaine: Daniel, I'd be interested to hear from you what this project and its shift in approach has offered you. What has it made more possible?

Wohl: My experience has mostly been in blending music with visuals in multimedia projects, where either filmmakers or video artists are responding to my work, or I'm composing for a film, TV show, or documentary and responding to what’s already created. I've also worked on music for dance and choreography, where the process is much more collaborative, building a project from the ground up. I was curious to see if something similar could happen with film, and that’s really where the project began — a curiosity and a sense that something was missing in the usual filmmaker-composer dynamic. It turned out others were also interested in exploring that more collaborative approach.

Chatelaine: How do you begin that creative conversation, when one is coming from the language of sound and the other from the language of visuals? What’s Day 1 like?

Wohl: I can't speak for how it was for Dev or Rafiq, but for Arooj and me, it was a bit awkward at first because there’s no real blueprint for this kind of thing. Film scores often don’t make sense on their own since they're designed to respond to visuals. Arooj and I had to create something musically coherent, while Josephine had to bring that coherence visually and narratively. So, there were a lot of phone calls between Arooj, Josephine, and me as we brainstormed how those two elements would come together. The first musical ideas were Arooj’s vocals and some violin playing that we sent over just to spark ideas, which in turn evoked certain images for Josephine. It was a very intuitive process but also one that required a lot of early conversations, with us working separately for a while and then coming back together with more developed ideas.

“The project began [with] a curiosity and a sense that something was missing in the usual filmmaker-composer dynamic. It turned out others were also interested in exploring that more collaborative approach.”

— Daniel Wohl

Nordstrum: And what I like is that none of the pairs started with a story in mind. They came together because they wanted to work together; that was the impetus. And from that intention, they had to think about what they wanted to say, and decide how to start working together without the story given. They all ended up with pieces that they wouldn't have made without the other. And that's pretty special.

Chatelaine: This year, the films will feature live accompaniment from the New York-based ensemble Alarm Will Sound. Could you share a little bit about the group — their approach, and what appealed to you about partnering with them?

Nordstrum: We've both worked with them before separately. They're great — always open to ideas. We premiered Sun Dogs with the Cincinnati Symphony — an 80 piece orchestra — and we knew that in order for this piece to have legs, we needed to scale down. Alarm was eager to collaborate, and to continue a series along these lines together.

Alarm Will Sound | Photo: Thomas Fichter

Wohl: Yeah, I think they're one of the best chamber orchestras out there. It’s a 16-player group with really versatile instrumentation. They’re also very open to non-traditional projects and sounds, with a lot of experience working with composers who aren’t strictly from the contemporary classical world. So far, everything has been really seamless.

Nordstrum: They want to partner beyond just playing the piece; they’ve connected with the composers on their newly arranged works, and they’re finding residency support to develop this further together. Daniel and Rafiq are working with them as co-creators for some sort of program overture. They’re also involved in a new work that Daniel is premiering in Minneapolis with Northrop’s in-house organ, a special feature of the space.

Chatelaine: Is there anything you’d like the audience to know about that piece before the performance, Daniel?

Wohl: Yeah. This piece was created specifically for this iteration of Sun Dogs, and it includes Arooj’s vocals and some harmonies from the piece we did together. I’m taking elements from that piece and reimagining them for pipe organ, electronics, and vocals. In a way, it serves as an overture for the whole night. I thought it was cool how, in silent film, the live organ was the central soundtrack before music became integrated directly with the visuals. So, using the organ as an overture here felt like a nod to a new way of composing for film and orchestra — not exactly an homage, but definitely inspired by that idea of setting the scene for a kind of spectacle.

The organ really was the original 'fake orchestra': with all its pipes —flutes, strings, and other timbres— it could do everything. When an orchestra wasn’t an option, you had the organ, and it brings with it that whole history of church music. The piece has this kind of ethereal feel, and to me, the organ naturally brings out that spiritual quality — maybe even a sense of the ‘sun dog’ realm, in a way.

Chatelaine: Are there particular moments from the process, for either of you, that give testament to what becomes possible in this approach? Did any creative challenges arise that you found particularly worthwhile to navigate?

Nordstrum: Well, it's such a personal process. There were some key moments of healthy friction between first-time collaborations.

When you've committed to working together as equals, no one automatically has the final word — that had to be negotiated. This project called for co-directorship.

Wohl: One thing that struck me, along with a lot of the composers and filmmakers, is how thematically related the three films were, unintentionally. The commonalities across the three were both interesting and completely unconscious.

Nordstrum: Yeah, no one knew what the others were working on. Each pair was doing their own thing, on the same time horizon. The CSO premiere was the first time the group experienced the pieces back-to-back. There were overlapping threads and reflections, kind of echoes of the films across the three. It’s fascinating.

Wohl: It was also amazing what we were able to do in Cincinnati — running it six times or so, which is almost unheard of in an orchestra setting. That process really allowed us to refine things. Even though this iteration is different, it’s evolved from that initial groundwork. It was really lucky to have Kate and Nate Bachhuber (who was the CSO director then) put that process together.

After hearing it, Arooj was like, I really want to work with orchestras more, and it sparked her interest in adapting her work for that medium. I think it also opened some eyes for composers who usually come from a band background, showing them what’s possible in an orchestral setting.

Chatelaine: All the artists involved are exceptional in their fields — and I’m also appreciating the amount of risk and vulnerability asked of them to take on this new way of working.

I'm thinking, too, of our audience members, who may resonate with some of the creative challenges you’re touching on, at both an individual and societal scale. The creative challenges — again, that image of sun dogs — in navigating these big shifts in our ways of working together that change our orientation, our perception of one another.

Are there any fruits from this process you could see reaching beyond the performance hall?

Nordstrum: I think the coming together with mutual respect, without an outcome in mind, but knowing that you are signed on to get there together. That you make a commitment to one another to create something beautiful and true and meaningful. That beginning together without a final story in mind, willing to come to the table with yourself and with your skills and with mutual admiration, is good practice.

“Beginning together without a final story in mind, willing to come to the table with yourself and with your skills and with mutual admiration, is good practice.”

— Kate Nordstrum

Wohl: And I think I was also hoping to open up new pathways for communication, to avoid getting stuck in just one way of working. Going back to your original question, it was about discovering a fresh approach to creating across disciplines.

Nordstrum: Another good practice is to ask institutions to consider formula change from time to time. Orchestras don't typically consider commissions outside of music. It's not what they're seeking. But this project provided a new way for composers to work and imagine, which of course benefits orchestral music. It’s always worth asking for gaps to be addressed. I'm willing to do that.

A GLIMPSE OF SUN DOGS

On Blue
Rafiq Bhatia, composer
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, filmmaker

Naked Blue
Devonté Hynes, composer
Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie, co-directors

Rise, Again
Arooj Aftab & Daniel Wohl, co-composers
Josephine Decker, filmmaker

Learn more + get tickets

Follow Daniel Wohl:
Website: danielwohlmusic.com
Instagram: @dwohl_ (instagram.com/dwohl_)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Southern Bodies World Premiere // Kit Downes / September 30, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

“Music, for me, is a lot about intention and being present in the moment — how people deal with the moment together.”

— Kit Downes

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

The sounds emitted from Northrop’s historic Aeolian-Skinner Opus 892 often and readily cluster into constellations familiar to the pipe organ; in the hands of master-keyboardist Kit Downes, they are more likely to venture into the infinite unknown, beckoning the imagination up, out, and beyond. When the house lights go down, the stops are pulled, and wind rushes through the grove of pipes, a listening audience will find themselves swept up in the “boundless musical curiosity” so defining of the man recognized as a premiere British talent throughout the United Kingdom.

Kit’s upcoming performance at Minneapolis’s Northrop Auditorium is the world premiere of his latest endeavor, Southern Bodies. For such an occasion, the luminary jazz guitarist Bill Frisell will share the stage. We, along with Kit, couldn’t be more elated — and it continues. In the interweaving of their distinct timbres, Kit and Bill will be joined by members of the prestigious Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra: Eunice Kim (violin), Daniel Orsen (viola), and Richard Belcher (cello).

Southern Bodies is copresented by Liquid Music and Northrop. You can secure your tickets for what is sure to be an unforgettable evening right here.

We are grateful to Kit for the reflections offered below, a small window into the upcoming performance for a curious audience.

A Q&A with Kit Downes

The world premiere of Southern Bodies is coming right on the tails of another release, Breaking the Shell, another exciting collaboration with Bill Frisell. How did your musical relationship with Bill begin?

Reflections from Kit Downes, Bill Frisell, and Andrew Cyrille at the release of Breaking the Shell (September 26, 2024)

Kit Downes: Breaking the Shell came about through the producer Sun Chung, whom Bill, Andrew [Cyrille], and I had all worked with separately for ECM. He set it up, and I was lucky to be involved! Like millions of other fans, I have been listening to Bill’s playing and composing since I was very young. He is a huge part of how I think about music; it’s hard to understate what an impact his music had on me. So getting to play with him on that recording, and for this concert, makes my head spin. It’s like hearing my own childhood memories coming from the stage in real-time — it’s unbelievable. I feel so lucky to be able to share some music with him.

Liquid Music is recognized as a laboratory for artists across genres, with an interest in nurturing bold ideas from composers and performing artists. Certainly the pipe organ and guitar are less conventional conversation partners! What would you say has been nurtured by taking the imaginative risk of that collaboration?

*Left: Kit Downes, photo courtesy of the artist | Right: Bill Frisell, photo by Monica Frisell*

Downes: Instrumentation is an important factor for sure when making new music, but not the only one, or even the biggest one, I think. Music for me is a lot about intention and being present in the moment — how people deal with the moment together. This can happen on any combination of instruments and still be interesting. Of course the instrument choices add detail to the puzzle, and a strong context, but for me it’s about the people involved, and what they want to say and how they communicate as a group.

Of the many distinctive qualities of the pipe organ, one is that it’s site-specific — requiring a process of acquaintance for you, both of the instrument and the space. What are you anticipating with Northrop’s Aeolian-Skinner organ, and the space that holds it?

Downes: I’m familiar with the make of organ, having played one in the US before. I remember the balance and style of the instrument in general, although this instrument will have its own specifities and nuances, I’m sure. The space is the big unknown factor for me, and also the music itself — as much of it is brand new, as is the ensemble itself!

You’ve shared that Southern Bodies is, at least in part, a reference to the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. The celestial is also present in some of your past work — Light from Old Stars, as an early example. Is there an affinity, or curiosity for you there? What has it offered to your musicianship, if anything?

Downes: I tend to pick titles that touch on a few different things simultaneously that are going on — chance encounters and recurrent themes, both. They often are quite arbitrary anyway! One thing I would say about the night sky is that it’s this huge constant cosmic companion, wherever you are in the world — especially if you befriend it, learn some of its constellations. The familiarity of it helps me feel less alone when I am far away.

Your sound has been described as at once “ethereal” and “earthy” — polarities that hold in common an elemental quality as a reference point. I’ve enjoyed reading reflections on the role of landscape throughout your work — with Obsidian, for example, and “Kasei Valles” on Breaking the Shell. Would you say that’s a particular access point for you as you explore the sounds and textures of your work?

Downes: That’s such a nice observation, I never thought of it. I guess I was always drawn to old traditional music because of this connection with nature, somehow. Something folk-ish, that anyone can appreciate, or that can be reinterpreted and relived a thousands different ways over a very long period — also like natural processes. It can be a mutual point that people with different ways of seeing things can take off from.

What is something outside of music that is animating you right now, that is life-giving?

Downes: Raising my daughter, definitely — I see everything differently now.

Follow Kit Downes:
Website: www.kitdownesmusic.com
Instagram: @kitdownesmusic (instagram.com/kitdownesmusic)

Follow Bill Frisell:
Website: www.billfrisell.com
Instagram: @bill.frisell (instagram.com/bill.frisell)

Follow The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra:
Website: www.thespco.org
Instagram: @thespco (instagram.com/thespco)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Liquid Music at Chaillot // Emily Wells x Dimitri Chamblas / September 19, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

“Liquid Music is thinking more broadly about where, why, and with what partnerships to mount a project. What, in the world, is any given project calling for?” – Kate Nordstrum

Emily Wells performs Regards to the End | Photo: Karlie Efinger / Scott Carr

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

This week, Liquid Music arrives in the lustrous heart of Paris. Ours is one pulse in the company of performances animating the upcoming Chaillot Expérience, at the invitation of the visionary choreographer Dimitri Chamblas. Over four days, Chamblas will spotlight his current projects, collaborations, and ongoing partnerships.

With a kindred appreciation for the generative valence of movement and sound, Chamblas asked Liquid Music’s Kate Nordstrum to select a performing artist to fill the foyer of the historic Théâtre National de Chaillot. And we are delighted to have Emily Wells – polymathic composer, producer, and video artist – with us for this very special international venture.

But first:

Kate, Dimitri, and Emily trace the confluence of their pathways to the temple of dance in the city of light — a story told in three movements.

I.
Liquid Music x Studio Dimitri Chamblas:
“An artistic conversation that’s only just begun”

Kate Nordstrum reflects on the origins of the ever-developing creative partnership between Studio Dimitri Chamblas and Liquid Music:

I was introduced to Dimitri in 2018 through Ben Johnson, who was then the Director of Performing Arts for the city of Los Angeles (now Director of Arts for the city of Minneapolis). Ben knew that Dimitri had begun collaborating informally with Kim Gordon [Sonic Youth co-founder] and thought that might be something I'd be interested in for Liquid Music. I was working part-time with the Los Angeles Philharmonic that year, planning their centennial season Fluxus Festival (2018-19), so there were opportunities to meet a number of times without agenda in the beginning. I wanted to learn about Dimitri's work and vision, and we found we shared artistic priorities. I was very inspired by Dimitri's energy and spirit of "anything is possible."

Kate Nordstrum outside of Los Angeles at a shooting range, creating the score for Dick Higgins' *The 1000 Symphonies* in preparation for a Fluxus Festival event. As part of the festival, Kate would hire Dimitri to direct David Lang's *crowd out* for 1000 voices.

Kim Gordon, Kate Nordstrum, Dimitri Chamblas

Both Dimitri and I have brought each other into our individual opportunities as curators and producers over the last six years. I feel challenged by our dialogue, and honored to be seen and valued by a colleague I admire so much — and sometimes even feel jealous of! Knowing ours is a long-term relationship is probably the most rewarding aspect. This is an artistic conversation that's only just begun.

II.
Chaillot Expérience:
An invitation to “the temple of dance”

Théâtre National de Chaillot | © Patrick Berger

Dimitri Chamblas shares the context of his work with Chaillot, and the theater’s historical significance in France:

Chaillot Expérience was proposed to me, as Palais de Chaillot does for maybe four or five artists every year. Palais de Chaillot in Paris — that's “the temple of dance,” right in front of the Eiffel Tower — it’s this big, amazing building with a program of such incredible curation. Historically, it was the théâtre populaire, which means “the theater for everyone.” And now it's the théâtre de la danse — still totally “populaire,” of course, but with an emphasis on dance as an art form, as a practice.

For Chaillot Expérience, I wanted to start the thinking in relation with my piece takemehome, which I'm showing the whole week in Chaillot. Basically, I wanted to continue exploring new possibilities of the relationships between moving bodies and sounds and music. That’s the whole curation of Chaillot Expérience. There's a workshop for 30 electric guitars. There's a participatory voice piece. There are different performances of dancers and musicians. There's music curation. There's a lot, a lot, a lot of things happening until late in the night. And then from the Palais de Chaillot, it will move to a nightclub to keep continuing — having a different type, though, of relation with moving bodies and music!

“I feel very close, in my relationship with dance, to what Liquid Music is standing for: exploring different forms, approaching music in relation to other arts, and presenting in different types of spaces to give access to a large diversity of audience.”

— Dimitri Chamblas

The idea of inviting Liquid Music, inviting Kate, to come and participate is, for me, an invitation to collaborate around this topic — sharing ideas and giving her the possibility to invite an artist to be part of that. She proposed Emily Wells, who I discovered because of Kate. And of course I really loved her music, but also its relation with moving images and archival dance film. And also, I would say, some of the history of dance that she invites in the space of her live performance. So, yeah, I can't wait to have Liquid Music in Paris, and Kate and Emily.

I feel very close, in my relationship with dance, to what Liquid Music is standing for: exploring different forms, approaching music in relation to other arts, and presenting in different types of spaces to give access to a large diversity of audience. All of those goals and values are shared between myself and Liquid Music through Kate's leadership.

III.
Regards to the End:
A centering moment in the “beating heart” of Chaillot

Kate Nordstrum shares what inspired her pick of Regards to the End as Liquid Music’s feature in the Chaillot Expérience:

Regards to the End is an ever-evolving, magical piece of art by Emily Wells that Liquid Music has actively supported over the years. I wanted to deliver something that could bring big feelings into a large space full of bodies — a centering moment in the grand Foyer de la Dance, the "beating heart" of the building. I thought about Emily's brilliant use of archival dance films in her set, interwoven with images of early AIDS activism and extreme climate events, that stun and move viewers in inarticulable ways. Emily's music and visuals enliven the senses and bring people together in body and spirit. Her love of dance and awareness of how music moves in and through the body make her a beautiful fit for Dimitri's Chaillot Expérience.

“Emily’s music and visuals enliven the senses and bring people together in body and spirit.”

— Kate Nordstrum

Emily Wells offers an intimate look into the life and movements of Regards to the End:

Music, or rather writing music, is a way for me to think, to explore literature, theory, visual art, and then respond through my most sentient language. I think about the climate crisis a lot: it’s at the foundation of life decisions, of worry, of grief. And in wrestling with this presence in my life, I looked for analogs from the past. That’s where I started to find links with the early AIDS crisis — the denial, bureaucracy, enormity, scapegoating of the weak — but those connections were just the door to what became Regards to the End.

I started reading a lot about climate crisis and the AIDS crisis. Then the pandemic descended, and I realized that I needed to expand the scope of my research, that “one cannot survive on terror alone.” So I turned to the people I knew best how to learn from: artists. I fell into their most sentient languages as a way to learn the muscle for myself: the muscle of survival in crisis, the absurd ability to hope and adapt that is innate in the process of making art.

Regards is a relic of that hope and survival. I hope it points to these teachers who, through their work, left us road maps for dealing with enormous unthinkable suffering and complicated togetherness. Their desire for beauty, joy, spontaneity, and most of all each other, was not snuffed out. That gives me courage.

Bringing Regards to Paris

Part of the excitement for me around the coming performance in Paris is the chance to be swept into a larger vision and community of makers. My performances tend to be quite meticulous in their planning and their engagement with the technology I employ. For Chaillot, I’ve tried to give myself a looser leash — and in that, to make way for improvisation and collaboration, including an invitation to Darian Donovan Thomas to sing with me on a few songs.

I started incorporating dance into my video work as a way to be less lonely on stage, and it’s grown into a deep relationship with the form and its history, as well as with choreographers — specifically with my frequent collaborator and friend, Raja Feather Kelly. I also became interested in the way footage of dance, documentations of activism, and captured moments of extreme climate events are linked; something about the way the bodies move in tandem, in reaction, and with tremendous agency, feels like shared language. Projecting these images while I play is a way to extend meaning, and to make more room for the immense emotional selfhood of each individual present.

One thing I've learned is that there is a desire, a need, for real human proximity — and that music can help facilitate that. Also, that people in a room together have a power that cannot be simulated. And that making work is in itself a belief in the future.

A few things for climate activism inspired by the early AIDS activists: we have to be talking about it, not mired or alone in fear, and we have to be loud and specific about what we want and need. Significantly, they knew how to inject their protests with both humor and poignancy.

I wish I could say I’ve had some clear epiphany about the future and how to proceed in it through my time sharing Regards. I think I still have more to learn, and more honestly, more to act on. But the one thing I’m certain of: it’s going to take a lot of us to make anything move.

Follow Dimitri Chamblas:
Website: www.dimitrichamblas.com
Instagram: @dimitrischamblas (instagram.com/dimitrichamblas)

Follow Emily Wells:
Website: www.emilywellsmusic.com
Instagram: @emilywellsmusic (instagram.com/emilywellsmusic)
Spotify: Emily Wells

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

The Conversations That Make a Voice // Josh Johnson / September 9, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

What a curious play of perception, how readily the ear can mistake the vibration of wood or the push of breath through brass for the human voice. Some argue the cello most closely mimics our particular timbre; others stand fervently for the French horn. For composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy Award-winning producer Josh Johnson, it was the saxophone whose likeness called to him from an early age, and would draw him into a vibrant array of reed-mediated conversations for years to come. A prolific collaborator, you can hear Josh in the company of Jeff Parker, Meschell Ndegeocello, Marquis Hill, Harry Styles, Broken Bells, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (check out his full discography if you relish a divergence of discoveries and surprise encounters). He also served as musical director for Leon Bridges from 2018 to 2022.

In recent years, Josh has achieved two albums as a solo artist. His latest, Unusual Object, will be the parlance of his Minneapolis debut. And if you’ve yet to spend an evening nestled amidst the islands of velvet and light at Berlin, let this be your introduction to the North Loop’s oasis for jazz and delectable company. Find your tickets here for Josh’s September 27th performance, co-presented by Liquid Music and Berlin.

Berlin | Minneapolis, MN (Photo by Isabel Subtil)

But as you’ll read below, Josh takes the category of “solo album” and turns it into a question, one central to the composition of Unusual Object.

Perhaps the singularity of Josh Johnson is, paradoxically, a voice that both holds and invites conversation with multiple (and yes, sometimes unusual) others. To be present to his sound is to join a broader consideration of the voices we lean toward, and those that might repel — to an effect that inspires you to keep in the dialogue. It is an invitation to be part of an audience whose attention brings questions like, What feels familiar, and why? And, What feels jarring, and why? And then perhaps, What happens next?

We hope to meet you there. In the meantime, for your eavesdropping pleasure, a conversation with Josh Johnson:

This interview took place on August 16, 2024, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Amy Chatelaine: This will be your Minneapolis debut as a solo performing artist. You’re currently based in LA, but from the Midwest originally, is that right?

Josh Johnson: Yeah. So I was born in Maryland, but when I was pretty young, we moved to Illinois, about an hour from Chicago. That's where I grew up.

Chatelaine: What do you remember about your earliest draw to the saxophone? And what was going on in your life at that time that specifically sparked a connection with jazz?

Johnson: Well, I started on piano first when I was a bit younger — I don't know if it’s in fifth or sixth grade where, in band, you get to pick an instrument. And actually, saxophone wasn't my first choice initially; it was drums. But there was something about saxophone I connected with. I don't know that I would have articulated it this way at 10, but it felt like the saxophone could be like the human voice.

More specifically, a year or two into playing I had asked my parents for Christmas for some recordings of people playing the saxophone, and they went out and bought four or five CDs, different stuff. There was one in particular that I really connected with, this compilation of recordings of the tenor saxophone. And I remember thinking, even at that age, it sounds like somebody's speaking to me, like I'm hearing someone's voice. And I think that ignited something in me. I felt a connection to that possibility of, wow, through an instrument you can speak to somebody in a literal way. It just captured me. It had this swagger and this freedom, but also a singular method of expression that I really connected with.

Josh Johnson performs "Marvis" (listen in full)

Chatelaine: As a highly sought-after collaborator, much of your musical career has been very conversational. And in the past few years, you've achieved two solo projects, Unusual Object the most recent. You’re quoted in the release by Northern Spy Records, describing this project as “a development and documentation of a more personal world of sound” after time spent further sharpening your own compositional voice. Would you say the conversational nature of collaboration played a particular role in finding your singular voice as a solo artist?

Johnson: Absolutely. I feel very lucky to be trusted often with other people's music. One of the things I love about collaborating is getting insight into how other people experience the world and hear and see. It allows me to access, or get to consider, different perspectives — and all of that from so many different sources. It has helped me zero in on what speaks to me, and to expand the things that I see.

I take a lot of lessons from other people and get to be like, What's it like to explore this in my own world? For every person, there are certain things that are really flexible, and certain things that are rigid. And it's really different in every context. I'm often encouraged in collaboration by seeing places where I maybe have been less flexible but somebody else is very flexible, and it encourages me to explore that within my own sonic world.

Collaboration has offered me a space to develop a lot of my ideas as well. A big one, and maybe an important influence leading to Unusual Object, is playing with Jeff Parker. Specifically, there's a band called the ETA Quartet, which improvised together for many, many years. I've been interested in electronics, but I really got an opportunity to explore that solely through improvisation in shared space with Jeff and Anna [Butterss] and Jay [Bellerose]. A lot of the things I found through improvising with all this stuff in real time. Over time I started to catalog, to accumulate a palette. And as I got closer to considering what my next record was going to be, I had the feeling of, I've gotten to explore and connect with all these sounds, but what's it like to now try to put a frame around it, to design the architecture myself?

Chatelaine: It strikes me that there’s a significance to improv being inherent to that process. The search for one’s unique creative voice can sometimes become overly earnest, or stressful in some ways. But improv by nature feels so permissive and playful, and just a good spirit to go on.

“ I think that [playfulness] comes as a byproduct of authenticity, or just being honest and attentive to the things that you’re drawn towards, the things that move you.”

— Josh Johnson

Johnson: Yeah, the exploration with play is completely important to my practice and just my existence since, both in and outside of music. I think that comes as a byproduct of authenticity, or just being honest and attentive to the things that you're drawn towards, the things that move you.

Chatelaine: Does that come naturally to you, that playfulness? Or is it something you've cultivated over time?

Johnson: That's a good question. When I got into music that was present, definitely. But I think somewhere in the midst of the study of music it got lost a little bit. I think that can happen, I feel like I have many friends and collaborators who've experienced something similar. I had to relearn or reengage with that playfulness and understand it as a strength, that it's actually foundational to my experiences with music.

Chatelaine: How do you go about continuing to cultivate that, or returning to it when it feels like it's gone out of reach?

Johnson: Especially in improvisation, one way that I try to reconnect to that is by allowing myself to get lost. It pushes me into a sort of problem solving and attentive state. So for me, part of that practice in music is getting lost, or trying to get lost, because that forces me to find a creative way back. It’s almost like it gives me something to react and respond to. And it has to be playful by nature. It's like, Okay, how do I get out of this? Or, How do I make it back? What's the creative pathway I can find back to wherever it is trying to get to?

“For me, part of that practice in music is getting lost, or trying to get lost, because that forces me to find a creative way back.”

— Josh Johnson

It took me a while to, maybe it seems simple, but to understand that you can be serious about the work and about the art, but you don't have to take it too seriously. I've had some examples, mentors for me who — I think I took a while to understand the beauty and having both of those things. A certain amount of play suggests a comfortability or a confidence in your ability to navigate something.

When I'm collaborating with or improvising with other people, sometimes that looks like in the moment really choosing to redirect my attention. It might be that I want everything I play to be in conversation with the bass drum for a little bit, or something that just gives me a different access point to creativity.

Chatelaine: You mentioned you've had several mentors that you look to that really lift up and dignify the role of playfulness. Who are some of those mentors for you?

Johnson: Yeah, I moved to California for a master’s fellowship program — it was more like direct mentorship, and one of the people that I was most excited about spending time with was Wayne Shorter, who recently passed. To me, he was somebody who really embodied that sense of play, and with so much depth and deep feeling. If you care to zoom in and get analytical, there's so much to be excavated. But even with all that depth, there always was a sense of play and a sense of humor. It's almost like it had the ability to make all of the colors more complex. Or it's like adding texture to color, or something like that.

And in the time I got to spend with him, so many of the lessons and directions didn't utilize musical language. They'd be like, What's it like for you to improvise as if you're this actor playing this role? What's it like to pretend you don't know how to play? All these, not always just prompts, but things that encouraged play and encouraged me to zoom out in a way that still gives access to all these things, but also another doorway and one that might actually have the ability to expand what it is that I’m trying to do. It’s playing music that's influenced by so many other things besides music.

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A post shared by Josh Johnson (@joshuaajohn)

Chatelaine: Turning to Unusual Object now, what were some of the things you were in conversation with when composing that album? Or is there a particular conversation you feel it's having on its own?

Johnson: Yeah, maybe some of both. One question initially it was, What is a solo album? There's a rich tradition of solo saxophone albums, maybe trending towards the avant garde. But the contemplation of that, and just asking myself, What does that really mean? and trying to come to a definition of my own was less instrument specific, but more about inputs. Whereas I do a lot of collaboration, this contrasted in being this one input — and that can be saxophone, that can be electronics, that can be synthesizer, but it's really just one source. And that to me is a version of a solo album — one that is maybe explored more in vocal music, but in instrumental music, I don't know that there’s the same framework. Or often, if there is a framework for a solo album, many times its goal is to demonstrate virtuosity on an instrument specifically. That was not for me; I was interested in not being that.

In terms of being in conversation with other things, there's quite a lot in there. I think I'm interested in poking at genre and asking, What? Why? Why we have a need for it, and who stands to gain from genre, to fit things into a frame, perhaps. [Unusual Object] is in conversation with some things specific to jazz, some stuff specific to electronic music. And also blending it all together, and blurring the lines. I feel really interested in the stuff on the margins and the ways in which when you reach the limits of something, stuff that's unexpected happens. You can also utilize that as a tool and develop a voice on the margins, and often that might lead you to something that is really personal and unique.

Chatelaine: And maybe gaining a hearing for other voices there, too.

Johnson: Mmm.

Chatelaine: There was an interview you gave back in 2020 that described your creative vision as being “equally parts fresh and familiar.” And then, “homey without ever being comfortable.” How do you think about holding those two experiences together? And when did that become important for you?

Johnson: I think it's always been important to me, or I've experienced so much music that way. Music has been an entry point or a catalyst to so many thoughts and conversations outside of music. And there's been so much music that's encouraged me and made me believe we can imagine something better than what we already have and what we know.

“There’s a lot in the world in this moment that seeks to make things flat and one dimensional. I’m interested in participating in, and trying to create experiences that encourage us to reconnect with the fact that there’s so much more color.”

— Josh Johnson

I'm interested in opening a door to a space for somebody, less than dictating an experience. But I believe that people want to feel things deeply. And I think we have a need for that, even if when we put on music that's not always what we think we're doing it for. I’m interested in creating a space that’s hard to define. Not out of trying to push people away, but that has layers in a way that reflects humanity. Maybe that sounds grandiose, but in ways that — I don't know how to describe this exactly, but that's very much the experience of being a human, you know? There's a lot in the world in this moment that seeks to make things flat and one dimensional. I'm interested in participating in, and trying to create experiences that encourage us to reconnect with the fact that there's so much more color.

Chatelaine: This has been such a lovely conversation, Josh, thank you. As we draw to a close, what are some things outside of music that are animating you right now, that are life-giving?

Johnson: So this is hobby-world, but mending clothing is an interest of mine. I’ve been interested in things and practices that encourage me to slow down and pay attention, because there’s so much that is doing the opposite, you know? And I can feel the effects on my attention span. I love sitting with something, and just using my hands, and engaging all of my senses.

Also, increasingly I find myself drawn to poetry for small bites of beauty. That’s something that’s been energizing me and lifting me up. I have a few different collections around the house, but I have a little book next to my bed, and I’ve been trying to — not always succeeding — but instead of reaching for the phone the first thing in the morning, what if I experience something beautiful, and that’s the way my day starts?

Follow Josh Johnson:
Website: joshjohnsonmusic.com
Instagram: @joshuaajohn (instagram.com/joshuaajohn)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Terminal Habitat Collapse // Trever Hagen x Josh Berg / September 4, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

A Point of Entry

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

We are at the doorway of our 2024 Fall Season of Liquid Music, about to step out onto a vast plain of fresh performances — discovering new entry points along the way in the space between movement and sound, time and place, audience and performing artist. We begin with Trever Hagen (composer, performer, writer) and Josh Berg (producer, engineer), in their presentation of Terminal Habitat Collapse.

In these first days of September, Hagen and Berg are together in Minneapolis for a Northrop artist residency to endeavor this new collaborative project, an idea that took root in early 2024. Terminal Habitat Collapse presents a sonic narration of the Anthropocene, creating an “immersive soundscape of ecological change” through engagement with quadraphonic sound.

You can experience this work-in-development as a special feature of the Northrop Open House on September 12, copresented by Liquid Music. Come take this first step with us into the new season, and roam the halls of Northrop for a rare look behind-the-scenes of a local gem in the Minneapolis arts community (full schedule here).

Left: Trever Hagen (Photo by Graham Tolbert). Right: Josh Berg (Photo courtesy of the artist).

Hagen and Berg offered a short introduction to Terminal Habitat Collapse, sharing these words ahead of their departure to Minneapolis:

pre-residency Q&A with Trever Hagen + Josh Berg

How did the two of you come to work together on this project?

Trever Hagen: We first met in Berlin in 2016 as part of the first PEOPLE festival and have been collaborating on various collective projects since then. In Spring 2024, I attended a quadraphonic ensemble in LA that Josh had recommended me check out and, after discussing, we decided to put our heads and hearts together to create a new piece. We combined my interest in “new pastoralism” with Josh’s experiments in quad under the idea of Terminal Habitat Collapse.

Josh, you’ve worked with a range of performing artists, from Ye to Bon Iver to the late Mac Miller. How would you describe your role in creative production?

Josh Berg: My role is: CREATE SPACE TO CREATE. In order to facilitate the work, I discover what the artists need and implement the process. This always involves technical work but it also engages a sympathetic understanding where I can see the artists’ vision and make sure that they have a clear path to get there.

What exactly is quadraphonic sound?

Berg: Sound coming from four discrete sources. Think of four perfectly spaced dots along a circle. Solstice and equinox. This overlays perfectly with our natural experience of the four corners of a room making quad the simplest representation of how we actually experience the world sonically.

What was the draw to pastoralism as an aesthetic framework — one you’re renovating in Terminal Habitat Collapse?

Hagen: Pastoralism represents a nexus of aesthetics and ecology formed by the human gaze. It’s seemingly what human culture wants nature to be at some level: bucolic, placid but submissive, dominated. A couple summers ago I was canoeing in the Boundary Waters thinking about pastoral landscapes as I looked at the sunrise on a lake. Along with that sunrise there was also a haze from the Canadian wildfires. In that moment pastoralism felt ridiculous in the hubris of human activity and in the face of what is arguably a new sense of the pastoral: whole towns burning (e.g. Lahaina, HI), rising sea levels displacing people (e.g. Tuvalu), waterways that poison those who drink it (e.g. Flint, MI). This is the pastoral now. This is what nature is becoming for humans in the short term, with the long term conclusion being terminal habitat collapse for our species. So “new pastoralism” is simply an aesthetic perspective or set of sensory materials that aims to shine the light on the relationship between nature and humans as we know it at the beginning of the 21st century.

What will be unique about the audience experience of this performance?

Berg: For most it will be to actually experience a piece written in and for quadraphonic sound. We defy the idea that you “look at” a performance and rather invite the audience into the circle, literally. We also reframe the understanding of where we are going as a species by offering a less ambiguous term to describe our destination and sonically narrating the journey.

Hagen: As Josh noted, I think listeners have a lot of agency in quadraphonic performances in that you are invited into the performance. The outcome or the performance may be less determined, this way — almost like a happening.

Experience the performance at the 2024 Northrop Open House
Copresented by Liquid Music
Thursday, September 12 | 4:30–5:00 pm
Northrop Rehearsal Studio (Ground Level, East)
Free and open to the public

Learn more

Follow Trever Hagen:
Website: treverhagen.com
Instagram: @t.r.e.v.r (instagram.com/t.r.e.v.r)

Follow Josh Berg:
Website: infinitevibrationtechnology.com
Instagram: @love_burg (instagram.com/love_burg)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Sounds Continue to Migrate: A Conversation with Moor Mother / September 4, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

“I believe it’s all one continual story, one continuous moment, vibrating at different frequencies.”
– Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother)

Experience Moor Mother's The Great Bailout on September 14 at the Walker Art Center, presented in partnership with Liquid Music. Find your tickets here.

An excerpted conversation between Camae Ayewa and her collaborator Brandon Stosuy, published in full at walkerart.org:

Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, is a poet, visual artist, touring musician, and professor of Composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.

Her recent large-scale work, The Great Bailout, uses as its starting point the United Kingdom’s 1837 Slave Compensation Act, which gave tax bailouts to former slave owners, but nothing to the liberated people. The resulting unwavering sonic meditation—dark, powerful, deeply political and personal—is a nonlinear word map that charts connections across colonialism, slavery, and commerce in Great Britain, along with its modern parallels in the United States.

Ayewa released The Great Bailout as a proper album in March of 2024. It was followed a few months later by an expanded edition, which included earlier versions of the pieces recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra. The upcoming site-specific Walker performance of The Great Bailout is the first large-scale presentation of the project in the United States.

Brandon Stosuy: I’ve seen you perform dozens of times, and you never do the same show twice. Over the years, as you’ve worked more with classical music and in large-scale institutions like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, your live performances have grown more ambitious, with additional collaborators and variables.

When people perform the same set over and over, it offers a bit of a safety net, but you keep experimenting. What is it that inspires you to approach live performance this way?

Camae Ayewa: I love the concept of reworking: that the music continues to breathe, the music continues to live, and in different situations, the music continues to grow. That’s important to me. I never want to stay locked into the sounds. The sounds continue to migrate, they continue to grow—they continue to have their own life, shall I say. And it’s my job or my passion to keep finding new ways to approach the work, but also new ways for the work to still be grounded in the present. And that’s what’s really interesting to me.

My writing style is about leaving space for the unknown and for the stories of the present moment. I believe it’s all one continual story, one continuous moment, vibrating at different frequencies. It is important to bring out all the layers, present all the layers, as if it was an infinity mirror that continues to shine light, that continues to reflect.

BS: The Great Bailout, the basis for your performance at the Walker: Can you give a bit of background on it?

CA: The project came about when I was commissioned by the Tusk Festival in England to present a work with an orchestra and to create a theme. At that moment, when I was thinking what I could do, I felt it was imperative to focus on a historical moment that still has its residue, or remnants, here in the present. This was, of course, a risky move, to put this type of work out there, but I felt that we had to honor the creative mind and honor all the things that have happened on this planet, really. To dwell into that and close the timeline.

BS: This is the first full-scale performance of The Great Bailout in the U.S. How did you arrive at the approach for the Walker performance?

CA: My approach was to pick the right ingredients…

[Continue reading at walkerart.org]

Learn more + Buy tickets

Follow Moor Mother:
Website: moormother.net
Instagram: @moormother (instagram.com/moormother)
Facebook: facebook.com/MoorMother

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Partners in Process, in Art + Life // Kate Wallich x Perfume Genius / July 9, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

“Standby lights…”

“Lights on…”

“Standby music and haze…”

“Music and haze go…”

Unfurling across the stage, a thick fog poured into the rapt audience scattered throughout Minneapolis’s Northrop auditorium. An atmospheric shift is what it felt like, the room charged with electric tensions caught in the spotlight beams hovering overhead.

Choreographer Kate Wallich and Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas and Alan Wyffels) are back together as creative partners following their 2019 success, The Sun Still Burns Here, joined now by collaborator Tate Justus. We were about to enter the first contours of their new movement landscape, the highly-anticipated sophomore project scheduled to premiere in the 2025-26 arts season, commissioned by Seattle Theatre Group and Liquid Music l Northrop.

And we couldn’t be more thrilled.

“Standby shrimp on ice…”

“Enter shrimp on ice…”

An amplified voice continued to cue the opening scene into being, element by element, its source imperceptible until a crewmember slowly wheeled a limp figure forward from stage right. Splayed across a pile of empty Culligan bottles, Kate Wallich rested one arm across her chest, a microphone tilted up to her mouth.

You might expect to hear cues like this during a rehearsal for traditional stage performances. But when collaborating on a work-in-progress across artistic genres, what cues create a container for an entirely new world to emerge? What cues signal that it’s working?

The fog continued to roll and wrap us in its ambiguities — between performance and daily life, voyeurism and participation. It was not a fog for us to decode as an audience, but to enter with the performing artists as they traversed these points of tension across the stage.

Ten days of their first creative residency yielded an astonishing 30 minutes of material, presented by Kate, Mike, Alan, and Tate, and brought into the minds and bodies of the audience in the vibrant talk-back that followed.

TURNING TO THE AUDIENCE

House lights came up, and the quartet pulled up chairs at the stage’s edge, joined by Kate Nordstrum, Liquid Music Founding Director and facilitator of the Kate Wallich x Perfume Genius match in 2019.

Wallich opened the talk-back by turning the mic to the audience of Liquid Music | Northrop subscribers and guests, inviting us to share our impressions and observations: “Any sort of ‘Wow, that made me feel dark,’ or ‘That made me feel light.’ Not necessarily, ‘I liked that’ or ‘I didn’t.’”

After a brief pause, the first hand went up: “When you looked directly into the camera, that felt exciting.”

Then — in the familiar levee-break of most Q&As — the gates opened to a flood of voices from across the room:

“The flow of going from a lot of music and sound to just the fan felt very intense.”

“It felt like getting sucked inside a TikTok video.”

“I felt my pupils dilating.”

“There was something very liminal and intimate and other worldly.”

Welcoming the audience into a shared starting point of the body — its sensation, its associations, its knowing — was in many ways a brilliant primer for us to step into their creative process as collaborators in our own right, offering crucial feedback in these early stages of discovery.

Photo by Jayme Halbritter

While you wait in this gestation period ahead of the 2025-2026 season, know your anticipation is shared as Kate, Mike, Alan, and Tate continue to meet over the course of the next year: to listen, and to move their way through what this piece has to say, to what it wants to become.

In the meantime, I sat down with Kate Wallich for a deeper dive into their process of becoming — as cross-genre collaborators, and as publicly engaged artists.

IN CONVERSATION WITH KATE WALLICH

[This interview took place on June 23, 2024, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.]

Kate Wallich: I’ve always said my skill set is — and this is the dancer side of me — that I can feel where there is a lack in the world, and then figure out how to bring the right people together to meet the need. It’s when I want a place to go that doesn’t exist, a place to belong. I start to build, and then assess if it’s the right thing: going through rounds to see if it’s a fertile thing, if my desire for a place to belong is shared, if there are other people who need that, too.

I started a series in Los Angeles called WIP, which stands for work-in-progress. One of the goals is to shepherd an audience through the creation of a work. Each WIP features a moderated dialogue kind of like what we did with Kate [Nordstrum] at the show, and I feel that conversations like this are important when you’re just starting to develop a work: understanding where we’re at as a society, and understanding the public implications of the work.

Amy Chatelaine: How would you say your WIP approach is informing this current project?

KW: Mike and I made The Sun Still Burns Here in 2019 — that creation process actually started in 2018, and was the last stage work that I’d made. Post-pandemic, I made a huge move to Los Angeles. Mike and Alan live in LA, and that was part of the reason I wanted to move. We’d developed a deep artistic relationship and a lot of movement language through the creation of The Sun Still Burns Here. In order to go harder and deeper into those, we needed to be in closer proximity.

My desire to make dances has shifted as I’ve gotten older — I’m no longer functioning in the confines of a dance company, which I did for 10 years. Part of the reason why I brought in the idea for WIP is because I was feeling myself go through a process in my body where I was going to the studio alone, and it wasn’t like this end goal, but something that was developing. And I needed an opportunity to put that in front of an audience and see what exactly was happening, why I was having that desire.

I was using my practice I’d always used in a dance company: I go into a studio, I start to develop a movement language, and then I start to see how I can transcribe that onto other dancers. In that process, I actually realized what I was working through was a self-care practice, and that a desire to transcribe movement onto dancers in the same way I had done inside the context of a dance company wasn’t really there anymore. It was clear that throughout the pandemic and this really profound experience I had with Mike and Alan through the creation of The Sun Still Burns Here, that something in my cycles of creation were shifting in a major way.

I think because I have this entrepreneurial side to me, sometimes I need a container in order to discover something about my creative practice, before I can find the expression. And so I did that with WIP, and a lot of major discoveries came out of that. And it was also a confirmation for me that I did want to go deeper and harder into this relationship with Mike and Alan and figure out what this movement world is going to be.

We have a lot of questions going into this project, but the leading questions are defining themselves right now. And so what you saw [in the open rehearsal] was all the past experiences we’ve had — of movement languages, body memories, rehearsals, understandings — they were all coming into this pot, and for this first time being looked at. Not even sorted through, not even strategized, really. Just looked at, witnessed, and then put out into a play zone to start seeing what could be there.

AC: During the talk-back, you emphasized the role of trust in making a collaborative piece like this, and it’s really clear that you’ve developed that across these six years of your artistic relationship. And it’s also sounding like part of the draw to a WIP approach was to cultivate that sense of trust in yourself and your intuition. I just hear that as the work so many of us are doing right now, developing trust in our bodily intelligence.

In your creative partnership, how do you support one another in tuning into and really staying with, remaining curious about, and respecting the intelligence of your intuition and what the body holds?

KW: It’s really interesting, because I have this deep relationship with Mike and Alan — it’s both very professional and very personal. We’re also friends and spend a lot of time together, almost more like family. And Tate is a new tone and personality that we brought into that mix.

So to speak about bodily trust and supporting each other throughout the creative process — you had mentioned the role of cueing. One of the things that has been coming up so far in this process — I did work with a dance company for a long time, and for dancers, it’s like “noted, locked in, sealed.” It’s just part of their body intelligence; they can remember choreography. Not only am I working with three non-dancers who don’t really have that, but Tate has never really been inside of our structured rehearsal or creation process. There’s not the body memory to become three-dimensionally aware. Part of that cueing was to create repetition, which builds body memory. It was really a practical thing.

All of us are in a place of trying to trust and support each other, and I’m also trusting what that’s revealing for the piece we’re creating as well. And not just in terms of cueing. Like Tate’s desire to just come on stage with those boots — I didn’t direct that. That was Tate’s idea. He didn’t really have the idea, even; he just did it. And I love that.

“There was this pair of boots that were just hanging out in the hallway for a while. We’d all been eyeing them, and this morning I just put them on. They made a really great sound, so I just kind of took a gallop. And that’s a lot of what you’re seeing – people getting together, pulling at our psychological attractions: seeing them, wearing them, looking at them different ways. I mean, we’re pulling from our life: it’s just random sometimes, and we’re seeing if it makes any kind of sense. And this is just the beginning stage of it.”
Tate Justus (May 2024 open rehearsal)

As a choreographer, I have my own internal ways of strategizing behavioral outcomes inside of a room, especially when dealing with a lot of different dynamics. But everybody else has their own approach to that and their own practices, and what’s coming out is a mixture of that. And I think that’s because there’s this mutual — I don’t even know if it’s really even trust right now; it’s almost like an openness, and a mutual respect, or awe, maybe? Like we’re all in awe of each other — and maybe that’s too grandiose. I’m like, “I like your ideas. I want more of your ideas.” And because we all have that for each other, I think that something interesting is coming out.

I think bodily trust is something that comes with time, and learning and listening, and practice.

AC: Hearing you reflect on this, I keep going back and forth between practices in your process and practices in public life. Like your practice of role reversal, which I’ve seen used by facilitators in conflict transformation work, when bringing people together across significant difference — in ideology, in values, in approaches to live into those values. And hearing you say that before trust is even established, there’s a necessary openness and respect, and even something like awe — that just strikes me a wise starting point for the creative work of our civic life as well.

I’m wondering, for those practices, where did you first encounter them as a tool in a collaborative process?

KW: I think a lot has come down to finding practical solutions for a need. And a lot of this is coming from my body. I’ve always been in the works I’ve created, because as a dancer I need to experience something in my body in order to understand what needs to happen, and what choices I need to be making.

In my early days directing in a company, I could step outside and watch and be like, Yes. No. Or, Yes, but slow down your thought process. But being inside the role of the dancer, I needed someone to tell me I was making decisions too fast. Because I couldn’t do both at once.

I realized earlier on in my practice that in order to do two things at once, I needed to develop a practice of duality. So I started to put duality practices into our morning warmup: how can I be thinking of the physical endings of my body while also seeing the birds eye view of my body? And that took so much control, because I’m really responsive and reactive.

But I also realize, when you talk about process and public life, that can be a really unhealthy way of being a person in the world. So I also had to develop these practices in my actual life, to be able to hold back feelings I may have in my body and have that bird's eye view in my real life as well. If something triggers me, I’m not just going to react in my body. If I was taking the director’s role, I wouldn’t want to see that either — that’s unhinged. Maybe there are times for unhinged on the stage, but that’s very designed and contained.

So I had to develop practices to practice that. I love a framework, like: when a text activates you, you wait 20 minutes to respond — that’s a framework I can follow. I think because I’m a choreographer, when I’m in the studio that’s already how I think, you know? I’m a container / framework person. And so figuring out how to build those practices into my life in some ways comes from choreography. And then sometimes I would learn a framework from the world, or from having to go through a mediation process with someone, and I’d be like, “Oh that’s actually really helpful. Are there ways to integrate that into the studio as well?”

AC: Totally, it’s all creative work at the end of the day: human relationship and stage production.

At the very beginning of the open rehearsal, you were reflecting back to 2018 when you first met Mike and Alan, and you said something really gorgeous: that you saw two people living their life in the way you were wanting to, in the relationship between the art they were making and how they were living. Could you say more about that?

KW: Yeah, exactly. And speaking of frameworks or tools to navigate being a person in the world, I think we all spend a lot of time on that and we like talking about it. So when we met, I think we had this cosmic moment of “Oh, we can do that together.” It’s very rare that you meet people who are willing to go to that line. Or maybe you don’t get the opportunity to, because when you are in a dance studio or in a process, that’s a level of intimacy you don’t just get meeting someone in a coffee shop, or honestly even with a casual friend.

AC: Do you have a shared litmus test for when something’s working as you’re creating this together?

KW: I think it’s a relational sense of alignment we’ve developed over time.

Part of the 2018/2019 commission was that we were co-directing together, which was new for me. When Mike and I started working together, I think I was very attuned to that shared leadership. But also, Mike didn’t have the experience of directing in this genre. I wanted him to feel a part of the dance making process, and he wanted me to feel a part of the music making process. So I suggested an infrastructure to be able to find alignment, to pose questions that helped us say, maybe we didn’t like this, or, could you consider the fact that you don’t like what I’m suggesting right now. To actually have that conversation.

And I think since, we’ve been able to build on that. This is where role reversal comes in. I’m like, “Mike I really want you to see this, because I want you to see if you like this direction we’re going.” But then also creating these opportunities for everybody.

When things feel right, my metaphor I use a lot for sensing energy — things can sometimes feel like your spine is out of whack, or your back is slightly off, and when you can just crack it into place, that’s alignment. And I think we can all sense that. And then you can invite languaging and ask people to make sure everyone is aligned before making a decision to go on.

AC: You were talking about how, as a choreographer, there’s this fluidity between the containers and frameworks you’re finding in the world and what you’re bringing into the studio, and vice versa. Going back to the role of the audience in an open rehearsal, as witness to your creative process, specifically: do you have hopes or curiosities about how they might pick up the practices you shared, and bring them into their own lives, especially in the world as it is now?

KW: I think we really do, and I think we learned a lot from The Sun Still Burns Here. Oftentimes in other practices, the curator plays a significant role and wall text is a big deal. And dance and live performance is such a visceral thing. Not to say visual art isn’t visceral; it totally is. But I think one of the things we lacked in The Sun Still Burns Here was getting people to feel what we were feeling, and to fully understand what we were attempting to do.

Now, I feel like we’re in this place where we’re like, Okay, we’re continuing this collaboration: what do we want people to go away with? What do we want people to feel? And also, what are we exploring? And how are we turning this into a question, or a statement, or a thesis in some way?

We honestly don’t know what that is right now. I think in a lot of ways, we brought in questions, we brought in practicalities of, Who’s here? What are our identities? What are our identity politics? What are the shared viewpoints? What are the universal viewpoints? Where are we at right now in the world, in our lives? These are all big things, but I think what’s revealing itself is this deeper thing.

So right now we’re creating this space for tonality, for a certain energy in the room with an audience. And we’re trying to figure out what that is. What is that space doing, how is that space creating a larger echo or imprint on the world or culture? I think that’s rooted in queerness and in non-traditional relationship dynamics. I think that’s rooted in our own privileges as white people. There’s a lot in there that’s hard to pinpoint, but is rooted in who we are as people, and who we are in the world.

AC: Everything you named, I think we can get so locked in our heads about, so philosophical about — and distanced from the lived realities. And the thing that’s so striking, so convincing about your process is having the starting point being in these body-based practices. I think that attunement to the body, its intuition and its stored memory, is both an old intelligence but a fresh intelligence I see others reaching for as a corrective that’s fertile and helpful.

KW: I made a work in 2017 that I would describe as more about creating space to tune into the mundane or the boring. The way the work manifested was really slow, like when you watch a slow movie, even if a lot is happening. Or something like watching a garden grow. If you remember [from the open rehearsal] that sort of desperate landscape where we were all doing our own task-based things — imagine that for a whole hour.

I do think that in taking the approach of psychological attractions — letting everything just be in the pot — that the greater conceptual meaning will start to reveal itself over time. But you actually need time for that to be revealed. And that’s why I’ve been so excited about starting this creation process with a residency. We’re probably going to use a lot of what we developed already. But in terms of what the work is, what the work means, how the work is resonating with people, I think it’s going to take some time to pinpoint.

AC: What does it look like from here?

KW: This was a big start, and we’ll need more creation. We’re planning more residencies for the next year in various places to keep visiting the work, spending time away from it, going in and out – kind of like how a painter paints and steps away, and then returns. It takes a long time to make the painting, and that’s kind of what we’re doing right now.

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It Makes Us Who We Are: Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks on Musical Improvisation, from Jazz to Punk Rock and Beyond / February 27, 2024 by Liquid Music

“What I love about this group is that everyone is a leader, and everyone has their own unique improvising style. Everybody’s an improviser.”

Tomeka Reid. Photo by Michael Jackson.

Damon Locks. Photo by Kristie Kahns.

Despite having trained in different genres, classical musical conservatory and punk rock, respectively, Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks forged a friendship in the Chicago music scene. Over the years, these two artists have incorporated improvisation into their work in unique ways. Finding themselves both part of the Walker’s 2023–24 Performing Arts season, Reid and Locks sat down to discuss how collaboration, community, and life experience continually informs and reforms their music.

Damon Locks: You know this, but not everyone reading this might know: you were my original idea as a member for Black Monument Ensemble.

Tomeka Reid: I know, right? Isn’t that funny?

DL: You, Nicole, and the percussionist I was working with at the time, Damien Thompson. We came so close, just the dates didn’t work.

TR: Learning that we’re both from D.C., and we both went to the same junior high school, but 10 years apart—that was kind of wild. It was these merging worlds for us: similar friend circle, similar appreciation for the different music worlds that we’re in. I was mostly focused with jazz and improvised music, and you were coming out of punk hardcore music. Everything’s expanded from there.

DL: What are you bringing to the Walker this season?

TR: It is a chance for me to bring together two groups that formed in different places. When I was living in Chicago around 2015, I got an opportunity with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival to write some music for a string group. That birthed this Tet idea. I love strings, I love improvising, and I like working with other string players. It was a perfect opportunity to explore that.

When I moved to New York in 2016, I didn’t have the finances to bring the Chicago people to New York, so I started a New York version of the same group. In that case, I did music that was in response to some of my mother’s visual art. I’ve always wanted to record both of those works as well as possibly write a new book, and that is what I’ll be doing at the Walker. I feel really honored that I can combine both these groups.

It will be 16 pieces, and Conductor Taylor Binum is going to be doing some of the conducting There will be composed music, but then also moments [of] string improvisation, because what I love about this group is that everyone is a leader, and everyone has their own unique improvising style. Everybody’s an improviser. Oftentimes you can work with string players who may not be comfortable with improvising. I’m excited to have this whole band of string players that really want to get in there with the improvisation. How about you?

continue reading at walkerart.org

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Sun Dogs: A new film-sound series debuts / October 12, 2022 by Katie Hare

A new series from Liquid Music, Sun Dogs asks inspired composer and filmmaker collaborators to create short-format films with new music for live orchestra.

Typically, a composer responds to a director's images and ideas in a film scoring capacity, or a director is engaged by a musician to create a music video. Sun Dogs explores how stories can be told (both musically and visually) from equal footing. The series’ title is inspired by the rare atmospheric phenomenon that appears like a doorway to another realm. Sun Dogs are mysterious and enlightening at the same time. These films give audiences a glimpse into stories that are more than meet the eye.

The first three offerings premiere Oct 14-16 with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by CSO Creative Partner Matthias Pintscher and presented in partnership with the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, merging groundbreaking creators and first-time collaborators.

Composer Daniel Wohl and GRAMMY-winning composer/vocalist Arooj Aftab join forces with filmmaker Josephine Decker (Shirley, Madeline’s Madeline); sound artist Rafiq Bhatia (Son Lux) pairs up with internationally recognized Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives); and Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) collaborates with French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop (Atlantics) and Paris-based publisher and filmmaker Manon Lutanie.

Ahead of the world premieres, we checked in with participants to get a sense of their work and the collaborative process. Continue reading for a glimpse into what to expect Oct 14-16.

Rise, Again | Daniel Wohl, Arooj Aftab, and Josephine Decker

Growing out from improvisations, Rise, Again’s film and music feature an intimate repetition that layers the individual with community. Four mothers raise their four different children with fortitude and love when faced with eviction. A deep rhyming of experience inspired the form. Created collaboratively with women supported by Upward Bound House, the concept emerged from four completely unique experiences that resonated so deeply the collaborators felt they were listening to each other share their own stories.

A note from Daniel Wohl:

“Arooj, Josephine and I held several brainstorming sessions that led to numerous ideas, some of which we didn’t end up pursuing. During this process it became clear to us that we needed to take into account perspectives and practical considerations that none of us were accustomed to. For example, we had to consider what was possible for film while also taking into account how the music would be performed live by an orchestra. Over the next few months, we each went our own way to come up with material.

One of the most exciting moments for me was when we learned that the demos Arooj and I created were being played by Josephine for the women she was working with in her film. Bringing the music so directly into the filming process really gives it an extra significance for me as a composer. From the feedback that was conveyed to me, the music seemed to resonate deeply with their stories and became part of their conceptualization of the final film.”

arooj_hires_01 credit @alxmvh (2) (1).jpeg

JOSEPHINE_DECKER_Photo by Eric Rudd_Indiana University.jpg

ON BLUE | Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Rafiq Bhatia

On Blue is a companion piece to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2018 film Blue, where a woman (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) lies awake at night, and nearby, a set of theatre backdrops unspools itself, unveiling two alternate landscapes. Upon the woman's blue sheet, a flicker of light reflects and illuminates her realm of insomnia. In On Blue, Weerasethakul imagines that Jenjira's insomniac fire will eventually die down, and she will be able to sleep.

Upon encountering Weerasethakul’s work, Rafiq Bhatia was immediately inspired by the glacial pacing and patience. “Though there isn’t much music in Apichatpong’s films, the environmental sound always feels intrinsic, even primary. Above all, there is a sense that Apichatpong creates from a place of deep engagement with his own memory and experience, a practice with which I strongly identify,” he shared.

“On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon’s consistency. It’s predictable yet brings tremendous change.”

A note from Apichatpong Weerasethakul:

“I reflect on the past years as we appear to have slept through the pandemic. Perhaps we are ready to wake up. On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon's consistency. It's predictable yet brings tremendous change.

Revisiting Blue was like re-observing and rearranging a dream before dawn. Perhaps our brains are hurriedly retreating their fragmented scenes, storing them in the shadows before consciousness emerges. I saw a blue sheet crumble like a dream. An old cinema set was reanimated for the last performance.

When first light reaches the eyes, there is a profound sense of clarity. The color blue was giving way to the morning gold. Dream and reality coexist, memories and conditionings fade. Even the word "blue" has lost its meaning. In an instant, we are newborns with no ties to anything.”

A note from Rafiq Bhatia:

“During my first viewing of the visuals for On Blue, I heard music in the gestures I saw on screen. Using instruments built from orchestral sound sources (often quiet actions intensely magnified), I set about searching for what I had imagined. Through careful tuning and timbral changes, I tried to let the musical sonorities melt like the sheets on screen. Harmonies unravel, flex, ripple and relax like their visualized counterparts. Is the state of dreaming always tranquil, or are dreams volatile, like waking life?

Residing in densely populated New York, I feel the city experiencing the night together in phases, despite the asynchronicity of our REM cycles. Here, as in the jungle where Jenjira sleeps, environmental sounds seep into our experience of the night, guiding us along the journey towards wakefulness. I sought to craft the music so that the birds, frogs, insects, and pulley sounds from Apichatpong’s film would function like members of the orchestra—or even as featured soloists—while the CSO’s instruments and Nina Moffitt’s playback voices could conjure the aviaries and ocean waves within Jenjira’s dreaming mind.

“To my ear, the sounds of the softest techniques convey a hyperreal intimacy, vulnerability and ephemerality, as they are usually rich with evidence of the delicate human action it took to produce them.”

When I was presented with this opportunity to create new work for a full orchestra, one of the things that excited me most was the chance to explore the very quietest end of the sonic spectrum. To my ear, the sounds of the softest techniques convey a hyperreal intimacy, vulnerability and ephemerality, as they are usually rich with evidence of the delicate human action it took to produce them. There is, of course, a relationship between the volume and timbre (or “character”) of a quiet sound, but many instruments playing quietly at once can convey the latter without being as constrained by the former. From the outset, I imagined a full dynamic range of textures that could still feel hushed when they grew immense, where even mountainous accumulations might retain a whispering, ghostly quality at their apex. But as I began to work, I was reminded of what William Blake once wrote: “without contraries there is no progression.” It’s after thunder that I most appreciate the stillness of a soft rain.

I am grateful that this commission provided an occasion to deepen my collaboration with orchestrator Taylor Brook, as well as Nina Moffitt, Chris Pattishall, and Ian Chang, who made invaluable contributions to the electroacoustic component of the piece. Those who listen closely may notice nods to György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

I look forward to experiencing On Blue as it comes to life on stage each night in Cincinnati. As Apichatpong wrote to me in an early correspondence: “Silence is never repeated.”

NAKED BLUE | Devonté Hynes, Mati Diop, and Manon Lutanie

Naked Blue features Oumy (age 13) who lives in Paris and trains as a dancer. In a film studio painted blue, she dances in front of mirrors and salutes an imaginary audience.

“It also gestures to the transition from childhood to adolescence, wakefulness to trance, sadness to its overcoming—as well as to the interstitial, tenuous nature of such passages.”

“Oumy is thirteen and the daughter of Valeria, a close friend of ours. Her dance training, particularly in ballet, is intensive, and we have long wanted to film her. This collaboration with Dev Hynes for a commission from the CSO was an occasion to finally work with her,” shared Mati and Manon.

“The fragile, ambiguous nature of the images evokes archival footage of rehearsals for a school show or film shoot. It also gestures to the transition from childhood to adolescence, wakefulness to trance, sadness to its overcoming—as well as to the interstitial, tenuous nature of such passages. It is also a portrait of Oumy at a specific moment in her life, a moment that is deeply moving to us and that we wanted to capture. The dramatic intensity of Dev’s musical composition, performed by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, accompanies Oumy’s movements, mirroring their magnetism, cohesion, and radical autonomy.”

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danielwohlmusic.com
aroojaftabmusic.com
josephinedecker.com
rafiqbhatia.com
kickthemachine.com
@devhynes
@matidiop
@manon_lutanie

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What is Liquid Music: A Playlist / June 16, 2022 by Patrick Marschke

By Liquid Music blog contributor Patrick Marschke

*Liquid Music Graphic and Logo by* *Andrew Jerabek* *from the 15.16 season*

A few weeks ago our friends at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum asked us to curate a playlist for their communal gathering areas in their beautiful riverside building in Winona, Minnesota. The collaboration felt like an immediate fit, and not just because of the serendipity of our names (a museum featuring the art of water partnering with a series called Liquid Music feels stranger than fiction). Below the surface of the obvious mnemonic connection, it became clear that the impetus for our collaboration seems to have more to do with MMAM’s mission to “push the boundaries of what marine art can be,” an idea that’s closely tied to the essence of Liquid Music.

*MMAM’s atrium, where you can currently hear our Liquid Playlist.*

As any person who has tried to put together the perfect playlist for a friend or crush can tell you, it is a subtle art and can be deceptively challenging. Early in the process Liquid Music’s founder and curator Kate Nordstrum pointed out that the challenge of creating a water-themed playlist is not so different from curating a special project series within an orchestral institution: “It’s not about simply ‘fitting in’ to the constraints, but actually embracing them — using the unique parameters as a way to pull yourself out of preconceived notions. It has always been something that I actively seek out, and often results in surprising and novel ideas and opportunities.” After all: a Liquid is a fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a constant volume independent of pressure… (thanks Wikipedia).

At the core of any great music series or playlist is a story. As Kate and I embarked on the work to put together a collection of marine-inspired music for MMAM, we realized that there was an important question to answer before its story would become clear: What is Liquid Music?

Back in 2017 I skirted around actually answering this question in an introduction to an interview with Kate about the origins of Liquid Music:

“‘Liquid Music’ has become its own adjective, especially for longtime followers of the series. You’ve probably caught yourself listening to something and thinking ‘this would be perfect for Liquid Music’ or maybe been caught with a lack of words when describing the series to a friend who has somehow remained unfamiliar. Perhaps you have discovered an artist and have watched their career flourish since. Each year the definition of ‘Liquid Music’ gets refined but no less familiar and useful.”

Avoiding answering the question is easy to do: Liquid Music can feel as slippery as its name implies. While I think everything I said there still holds up, I don’t think that this description really “defines” anything. 5 years later, I think I am ready to try again. So what are the specific components of Liquid Music that make it Liquid Music?

THE SYMBOLIC

If we are going to truly boil it down to the symbolic “Liquid Music” is simply a name for a concert series. It happens to be a very good name. So good I found that I never even thought to question it — upon first hearing about the series it just made sense. Maybe you had a similar experience.

Eventually, I thought to ask about the origins of the name: It emerged from an intense conversation and visioning session with Kate and composer and frequent LM collaborator William Brittelle. Most importantly, after a quick online search, they were surprised to discover that the phrase hadn’t been used yet and the domain was miraculously available. And thus it came to be. The names’ origins feel quaint in an age where brand development is a billion-dollar industry. It is one of many right-time-right-place scenarios that seem almost predestined in hindsight, but it also speaks to the need for a forward-thinking music series like Liquid Music in the early 2010s.

Another important side of the semiotics of Liquid Music is its graphic identity. The series has had a distinct and sophisticated visual aesthetic from the outset. From the seasonal brochures, digital presence, and thoughtfully staged shows, Kate has been uncompromising in making sure that the look and feel of everything Liquid Music were and are as deliberate and refined as the work being presented.

Designer Andrew Jerabek has been integral to the look and feel of both print and digital assets along with developing the original Liquid Music logo. His detailed and tactile graphics aesthetically unified each season’s diverse set of projects, providing a subtle and necessary coherence throughout. The visceral and organic infrared photography GMUNK was utilized for the 17/18 season. In early 2020, longtime LM friend and collaborator Andrea Hyde refreshed the logo and look of Liquid Music for the new decade.

*Liquid Music Director, Curator, & Executive Producer Kate Nordstrum*

THE CURATION

Coordinating all of these collaborative aesthetic efforts is, of course, the curator herself: Kate Nordstrum. She is the visionary, the aspirational leader, and the true believer. It would be easy to say that Kate and her curation IS the series, but she would be the first to acknowledge that Liquid Music is in many ways a collaborative platform. Curation is putting a spotlight on artists, seeing the potential they might not quite see, and providing a context for that potential to flourish into something greater than anyone expected.

An underappreciated component of the curatorial process is helping others see that potential, which is made even more difficult when a project has yet to come into existence. There is a heroic effort that goes into every Liquid Music project description. The core motivating factor behind this is to serve that latent potential, even for projects in their most nascent form. Writing about music is hard: if it was easy to articulate the meaning of a work with words, then musicians probably wouldn’t have resorted to music in the first place. Liquid Music has always sought to provide a space to do the messy work of finding the words for the transcendent work of our featured artists.

A key space for this work has been the Liquid Music blog. I essentially learned how to write in this space, and am constantly flattered that my work is featured alongside incredible writers like Trever Hagen, Katie Hare, and Nick Lanser (to name a few) along with essays by and interviews with the countless unsurprisingly articulate Liquid Music artistic collaborators. In going through the archives as we prepared for our playlist duties I found an essay from MPR Classical Host Steve Seel that says in 40 words what it has taken me 1043 (so far), along with Liquid Language deserving of its own MMAM didactic:

“...And so, nothing is solid where the true experimenters of music work; ideas flow and crash into each other like waves, effortlessly. They shift their shape eternally depending on their ‘containers.’ The only constant in Liquid Music is motion. Fluidity.” — Steve Seel from his 2015 Liquid Music blog What Makes For Truly “Rebellious” Art?

*Steve Seel interviewing composer William Brittelle*

THE MUSIC

*From Liquid Music’s “Bedroom Community and Friends” show at the American Swedish Institute, a previous collaboration between LM and MMAM’s new Executive Director* *Scott Pollock*

As Steve so eloquently captured above, Liquid Music is the music — specifically the music of the boundary-defying featured artists. Their work challenges and transcends classification, striving for that which is just beyond, reaching into the unknown, and often arriving somewhere completely unexpected. But this music wouldn’t mean much without the dedicated audience that so graciously receives it. And it wouldn’t be possible without the venues, partners, donors, advocates, friends, families, interns, funders, sponsors, and countless other individuals — they all are integral to making Liquid Music what it is.

Liquid Music will continue to embrace its boundless fluidity. What better way to celebrate than with a Liquid Playlist!

Included are key LM Alumni and longtime friends of the series such as Nico Muhly (a pivotal player in Kate’s proto-Liquid Music endeavors at The Southern Theater), Helado Negro, Minneapolis-based Poliça, Saul Williams, Angélica Negrón, and many more!

Share any music you think deserves to be included on our Liquid Playlist on socials! Find a text version of the full track list here.

To hear the playlist in its intended setting, stop by The Minnesota Marine Art Museum sometime soon! And give them a follow if you’d like to hear about their upcoming exhibitions and events:

MMAM Website // Facebook // Instagram // Twitter // YouTube

*The* *Minnesota Marine Art Museum, located alongside the Mississippi in Winona, MN*

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UPCOMING LIQUID MUSIC EVENTS

To Find An Enduring Connection // Adam Tendler’s Inheritances / April 18, 2022 by Patrick Marschke

by Patrick Marschke

Collage from composer Darian Thomas's commissioned score, *We Don't Need to Tend This Garden. They're Wildflowers*

On its surface, the concept of inheritance touches on two out of the three of the most emotionally fraught words in the English language: Death and Money — with an extra serving of awkwardness, grief, class, and privilege. Just past its surface, inheritance sparks more philosophical and abstract questions: What have I inherited? What have we collectively inherited? What will we leave behind? What are we to do with the sins and spoils of our predecessors, literally or figuratively? Who is responsible when the recipient has no choice in the matter?

It is easy to avoid thinking about these questions and beguiling to find someone confronting them head-on. But pianist Adam Tendler doesn’t always process things like other people. It is this spirit of questioning and self-discovery that’s at the heart of his latest project titled Inheritances, a truly collaborative commission that used Adam’s own monetary and symbolic inheritance as a launching pad for 16 new works for piano, created by a broad spectrum of sound artists and composers.

Inheritances isn’t the first time that Adam has taken on a wildly ambitious, conceptual, and personal project. Upon graduating from music school, he decided that he wanted to perform in all 50 states. “I’d gone to [music] conservatory and I came out of it a ball of nerves. It almost made me more anxious as a performer,” he reflected over Zoom in April 2022, sitting in front of his piano, laptop propped where the sheet music normally goes. He knew that more school wasn’t the answer. His rationale was simple: all he needed was a simple “yes” — from a church, coffee shop, or hall. With the gradual accumulation of small yes’s, laser focus, and zero know-how, he made this seemingly unprecedented project happen, which he eventually turned into 88x50: A Memoir of Sexual Discovery, Modern Music and The United States of America, a book chronicling his journeys.

Inheritances began in 2019 when Adam's father died unexpectedly. By Adam’s own account, his relationship with his father at the time was complicated: “I wouldn't say we were estranged, but we didn't talk that much,” said Adam. “We talked maybe about two or three times a year, like on my birthday, or holidays…” Adam was pretty close with his dad as a kid, even after his parent’s divorce. But this closeness faded over time in a vague and blurry way that made the eventual experience of his fathers’ passing similarly obfuscated.

“With his absence, there was definitely a sense of confusion. It wasn't like when some people die, what the survivors are left with is this hole, this gaping sort of loss and absence. I didn't have that. I know that sounds really weird. What I lost was access. It was sort of like, oh, well, I guess a part of my life with this person is now over and all the things we shared… that book is closed,” said Adam. At the time he didn’t know anything about his father’s financial situation, but when he eventually heard that there was an inheritance, he had a feeling that it “was gonna be something bizarre.”

“It wasn't a lot of money. And it was in cash,” explained Adam. “It was handed to me in a manila envelope by my stepmom in a Denny's parking lot in Lebanon, New Hampshire, the same border crossing of Vermont and New Hampshire where I was transferred between parents as a kid.” Initially, Adam didn’t do anything with the money. “There seemed to be something sort of sad about letting this symbolic money go into something as stupid as like debt, or subway fares, or rent. It seemed weird for it to just disappear like all my other money disappears,” he said.

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A post shared by Adam Tendler (@adamtendler)

It wasn’t until a few months later at a concert that he had one of those simple, profound, frustratingly platitude-like thoughts that seem to only hit with such force in the depths of emotional strife: “Music is Amazing!” And what better way to celebrate the transformative and cathartic potential of music than by commissioning work with this symbolic cash? So, without a venue, premiere date, record deal, or any other practical justification for the project, Inheritances came to be. Adam started to reach out to composers, asking them if they would write a piece on inheritance, paid from the inheritance he had just received. Incredibly, every single artist that Adam asked to participate in Inheritances said “yes,” materializing, as Adam puts it, “the coolest f**king lineup I could have ever imagined. There's not a single person that I am not stoked about.” Liquid Music signed on to premiere the work and Adam was able to secure matching funds to ask even more artists to participate.

Adam emphasized to all the artists involved that the commissioned works didn’t have to be about him, his father, death, grief, or anything prescriptive. The pieces he eventually received are as diverse as the set of artists behind them. However, to Adam’s surprise, there still does seem to be something tying the works together. “These pieces all have really stunning restraint,” he said. “It’s like they knew that they could actually do something very, very personal and be safe with me.”

Grief expert J. William Worden suggests that there are no set stages to the grieving process and that we approach grieving through tasks that can happen in any order. Those tasks are:

To accept the reality of the loss
To process the pain of grief
To adjust to a world without the deceased
To find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life

Unbeknownst to him, Adam’s outreach to Inheritances’ composers perfectly encapsulates the fourth and most important task of grieving — finding an enduring connection with the deceased while finding a way to move forward. As he wrote in his initial email to the artists, he was seeking “to plant that cash in the soil of something that may actually grow and—if you'll forgive me—live on.”

It is not at all that surprising that the collaborators, when asked to reflect on inheritance in a time with no shortage of grief, responded reflectively with such sincere authenticity. In his own unique way, Adam Tendler has invited us all to participate in the transmutation of his extremely personal experience of ambiguous loss into a beautifully communal ritual of enduring connection — providing us all an overdue opportunity to utilize the emotionally alchemic potential of music to process our immeasurable and nebulous griefs. Accepting, processing, adjusting, and finding hope…

Join us Saturday, April 23 for ADAM TENDLER: INHERITANCES and hear the premiere of brand new works by commissioned composers Devonté Hynes, Nico Muhly, Laurie Anderson, inti figgis-vizueta, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Angélica Negrón, Christopher Cerrone, Marcos Balter, Missy Mazzoli, Darian Donovan Thomas, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Scott Wollschleger, Mary Prescott, Timo Andres and John Glover.

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Liquid Music + National Gallery of Art + yMusic // "True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870" / April 8, 2020 by Katie Hare

Last summer, the National Gallery of Art enlisted Liquid Music curator Kate Nordstrum as “guest artistic director” to illuminate works within their transporting exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870. In the months that followed, Nordstrum and her selected ensemble yMusic had the immense pleasure of immersing themselves in paintings by artists who sought to capture light and atmosphere in breathtaking landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes. We want to share with you their thoughtful program, which would have taken place this Sunday, April 19, with images from the exhibition and musical accompaniment.

Fritz Petzholdt, Tree Crowns in a Forest (Ariccia?), c. 1832, oil on paper, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, Gift of John Schlichte Bergen and Alexandra van Nierop, Amsterdam — Fritz Petzholdt, *Tree Crowns in a Forest (Ariccia?)*, c. 1832, oil on paper, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, Gift of John Schlichte Bergen and Alexandra van Nierop, Amsterdam

The Program

Tessellations by Gabriella Smith
Cribbea by yMusic
Peter Inn by yMusic
Music in Circles by Andrew Norman
Zebras by yMusic
Flood by yMusic
Year of the Horse by Sufjan Stevens/arranged by Rob Moose
Their Stenciled Breath by Caroline Shaw
Maré by Gabriella Smith

A Note From Liquid Music Curator Kate Nordstrum (Guest Artistic Director)

yMusic is one of the first ensembles I worked with as a fledgling curator in 2010. A decade on, I continue to be inspired by the way they navigate the ever-evolving landscape of new music. As individuals and as a group, they are dynamic, hungry to share their musical passions, and deeply emotionally engaged in any project they commit to. It’s been a pleasure to “grow up” together in music and to shape this special program for the National Gallery of Art. We hope that it illuminates the exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 and inspires the imagination. Many thanks to Danielle Hahn for inviting me to take on this guest artistic director role and to yMusic for their creativity and openness.

A Note From yMusic

As an instrumental chamber ensemble, we spend a significant amount of rehearsal time exploring timbres and colors. Wrangling six individual performances, a tangled mix of strings, winds and brass into one cohesive performance requires some effort, and often we lead each other to discover new sounds by describing our ideas with visual prompts.

Visual thinking has always been a hallmark of our process, and we’d like to think it shows; after many of our concerts, audience members come to us and can vividly describe a scene that unfolded in their imagination while hearing us play.

We were immediately excited when Liquid Music curator Kate Nordstrum approached us with the idea of programming a concert for the National Gallery that would map our repertoire to specific works of art. It felt very natural for us to tie our repertoire to paintings from the en plein air tradition. Our rhythmic patterns interweave as though they are streets in a city, rows of farming, or leaves on a tree. Sometimes shocking and even violent dissonance occurs and evokes jagged rocks or the threat of a distant volcano. Surprising textures, unusual instrumental combinations and unconventional sound techniques can convey a hot summer day or a cool breeze by the water, perhaps even an ocean spray by a grotto.

We have had a blast matching each piece on this program with specific landscape styles based on our experiences of inhabiting these soundscapes. But as music is ephemeral and intangible, we invite you to let your imagination run wild! Bring your own personal canvas along with your open ears and paint the landscape of your imagination.

Rocks, Trees, Caves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Tessellations

Tessellations is a short piece about patterns – patterns that fit into each other like an Escher print, additive patterns, subtractive patterns, patterns that disintegrate and dissolve into chaos and then re-form. –Gabriella Smith

Achille-Etna Michallon, French, 1796 – 1822, The Oak and the Reed, 1816, oil on canvas, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge — Achille-Etna Michallon, French, 1796 – 1822, *The Oak and the Reed*, 1816, oil on canvas, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

Nocturnes
yMusic
Cribbea; Peter Inn

Cribbea and Peter Inn represent yMusic’s first foray into composition. The melodies, textures, harmonic progressions, and form of these works were written collaboratively by all six members of the group. Mining the ensemble’s fluency in multiple musical idioms, as well as their skills as arrangers, improvisers, and interpreters of contemporary music, these pieces mark a new chapter for the sextet as it enters its second decade.

Baron François Gérard, French, 1770 – 1837, A Study of Waves Breaking against Rocks at Sunset, oil on millboard, Private Collection, London — Baron François Gérard, French, 1770 – 1837, *A Study of Waves Breaking against Rocks at Sunset*, oil on millboard, Private Collection, London

Capri/Naples/Volcanos
Andrew Norman (b. 1979)
Music in Circles

Music in Circles is one of yMusic’s all-time favorite pieces to play. The folklore surrounding the work is that Andrew Norman composed it one hot New York City summer at his writing desk, which had been placed as close as possible to the life-saving air conditioner. Stumped by writers block, he started transcribing the sounds of the machine, ultimately crafting a fanciful piece that whips silence into gorgeous streaks of color and melody. Andrew writes music that is nearly impossible for performers to phone in. We can never resist the raw power and emotion in this piece, which can leave us nearly breathless. We love where this work takes us, and while it was inspired by a machine, it’s just as easy to imagine creaking ships, whipping winds and stormy seas.

Johann Jakob Frey, Swiss, 1813 – 1865, Cloud Study (4), oil on paper, mounted on canvas, Private Collection, London — Johann Jakob Frey, Swiss, 1813 – 1865, *Cloud Study (4)*, oil on paper, mounted on canvas, Private Collection, London

Giuseppe de Nittis, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1872, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris — Giuseppe de Nittis, *Eruption of Vesuvius*, 1872, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

Capri/NapLes/Volcanos
yMusic
Zebras; Flood

Zebras and Floods are two of the newest pieces we have written as a group. Zebras was initiated during a recording session at Red Bull Studios, continued at a writing session at my apartment, and finished during a residency at USC. We debuted the song at the Bower Ballroom in January. Flood was written with the dual goals of having uptempo instrumental and a virtuosic feature for Alex Sopp. We purposefully wrote the bulk of the piece for just trumpet, bass clarinet, violin and viola and left room for the flute and cello to engage in conversant and dueling material. –Rob Moose

Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Sufjan Stevens (b. 1975)
Year of the Horse (arr. Rob Moose)

Year of the Horse, Year of the Dog, Year of the Dragon, and Year of the Boar are some of yMusic’s favorite pieces to perform. They started their lives as electronic works on Sufjan Steven’s 2001 record, Enjoy Your Rabbit, and were adapted by myself and a variety of other arrangers for string quartet in 2008. When yMusic first formed and was in desperate need of repertoire, I brought in a new arrangement of Year of the Dog as a candidate for our very first concert. We loved it, and it quickly achieved a consistent presence in our live shows. In the decade since that first performance, we have adapted and enjoyed many pieces from that album. yMusic’s Year of the Dog and Year of the Boar were recently collected on a limited-edition vinyl collaboration with visual artist Gregory Euclide. Tonight’s performance of Year of the Horse will be seamlessly connected to its programmatic neighbor, Their Stenciled Breath from Carbone Shaw’s Draft of a Highrise.

Léon-François-Antoine Fleury, The Tomb of Caecilia Metella, c. 1830, oil on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.16 — Léon-François-Antoine Fleury, *The Tomb of Caecilia Metella*, c. 1830, oil on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.16

Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High-Rise

Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High Rise by Caroline Shaw started out in the composer’s mind as a riff on architectural renderings and their depictions of people - evocative yet surreal, uncanny valley-esque figures interacting with nearly there concrete and steel constructions flanked by gauzy flora. The piece, however, was being constructed during the last presidential election, and when texted about the work, Caroline admitted, “it’s not a political piece exactly, but more like my response (both consciously and subconsciously) to the political shitstorm of fall 2016... so I guess that would qualify.”

The work lives in a funny place and time; it’s a solid concept distracted by current events - something that feels very familiar these days. –Nadia Sirota

Michel Dumas, French, 1812 – 1895, Fountain in the Roman Campagna, c. 1838 – 1840, oil on canvas, mounted on wood panel, Private Collection, London — Michel Dumas, French, 1812 – 1895, *Fountain in the Roman Campagna*, c. 1838 – 1840, oil on canvas, mounted on wood panel, Private Collection, London

Water: Coasts, Falls, Waves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Maré

Maré is the Portuguese word for “tide”. I wrote Mare while in residence at Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil. The artist colony was right on the beach of a beautiful island in the Baía de Todos os Santa’s called Ilha de Itaparica. The slope of the beach into the ocean was very gradual, so the horizontal distance between low and high tide was extreme. When the tide was high, it would come all the way up almost to the gates of the artist colony. And when it was low, it would retreat far away, leaving behind a huge expanse of beautiful beach. So the rhythm of the tides became integrated into the rhythm of our daily lives. Maré is inspired by these tidal movements and the way in which they became a part of me during my time there. –Gabriella Smith

August Kopisch, German, 1799 – 1853, View of Capri, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris — August Kopisch, German, 1799 – 1853, *View of Capri*, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

Read and view more paintings from the National Gallery of Art’s “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870” here.

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Words & Sound: An Interview with Dorothea Lasky / November 15, 2019 by Kate Nordstrum

By Liquid Music blog contributor Katie Hare

Ted Hearne’s new work, In Your Mouth premieres at Walker Art Center Nov 21-22 in a theatrical, 12-song suite. The source material and inspiration behind the work comes from the lush, stinging poetry of writer, author, and educator Dorothea Lasky. Along with a quintet and a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, Lasky’s words will be vocalized throughout the piece in an evening reflecting a complicated, loving mediation of the personal and domestic, while savoring the depths of wildness within. Featuring an introduction written by Ted Hearne, this interview with Dorothea delves into her background, the relationship of words and sound, and her collaboration with Hearne.

a note by Ted Hearne:

I first came across Dottie's work in 2016 and was instantly struck by the simplicity of the language – her poems just felt like song lyrics – but also the complicated and ambiguous identities, the dark and tumultuous sense of self, and the rich worlds of different "I"s her poems seemed to be able to harness and hold next to each other.

What does it mean to be wild? My first impulse to set this text was driven by an unironic identification with this idea that the wildness within could be embraced more fully. Perhaps I've never felt more drawn to set a text earnestly because I resonated with the feeling that I was keeping a true part of myself from the rest of the world. Or was the rest of the world holding me back?

“Everyone keeps me from my destiny
Keeps me from it
And keeps me locked away from beauty
And they can’t feel my beauty
In me reaching out
Like glass into itself
And everyone keeps me from myself
Cause the self they had imagined
Was flesh and bone
And this flesh I am is glass”

— Dorothea Lasky

As I started setting these poems for myself to sing, all sorts of intriguing complications set in. Funny how words that felt so empowering to read, and felt empowering to hear in Lasky's voice at one of her readings, sounded differently to my own ears when I heard them sung in my voice. Who was I to be singing her words? Do the words change when I sing them as a different person? As a man singing words written by a woman? Could I assume to put her words in my mouth?

There's a complicated and fluid “I” in Lasky's poems, which seemed to reflect and nicely counteract these compounding questions of mine, and with Dottie's encouragement, that relationship is what led me through writing this piece.

Meet Dorothea lasky

Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Lasky earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachussets Amherst. She is the author of Animal, a book of poetry lectures, and co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac with Alex Dimitrov. She has also written five full-length collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. Lasky now resides in New York, and is an associate professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Tell us a bit about your introduction to writing, and your journey into identifying as a writer.

I've been writing poetry since I was a little girl. When I was around 7, I started writing in a journal late at night because I didn't like going to sleep when my parents told me to. So, I've always written, but it took me a long time to identify as a writer or poet per se, because I tended to feel like the instinct was narcissistic and didn't help others. It has taken a long for me to realize that writing is capable of helping others, but I think being a teacher of writing has helped me feel the most comfortable in the role.

I’ve read that your earliest poems were meant to be spoken, and always about sound—the idea of a listener. Can you expand on how that idea has translated through your work over time? And perhaps, how it correlates with your collaboration with Ted Hearne?

I feel that my poems are still meant to be spoken. Sound is the biggest motivator for me when it comes to writing and finishing a poem, and I value a word's sound over its meaning. I think because of this it is extra exciting that Ted has decided to put my poems to music, because there is (hopefully) a naturally musical quality to them that will be enhanced by his own beautiful sounds.

What is your thought process behind presenting your work (or any work)? How does space and audience affect your readings?

Space and audience is very important to my poetry readings, because I am a performative person. There is very little that excites me as much as the stage and I see a poem as the ultimate stage.

What inspired you to become an educator, and what do you like most about it?

My mother was a professor and I grew up going to her classes, so I feel an almost inevitability that I have ended up as one as well. I love the space of the classroom, because empowering people to be their most creative makes me endlessly happy.

How do you stay motivated to create?

I try as best as I can to create for the future. This motivates me because I know there will be future readers who will need me.

Screen Shot 2019-11-14 at 4.45.58 PM.png

We’re looking forward to your upcoming talk ‘The Strange Hexacomb’: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace, as well as your pre-performance reading at Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis! Can you tell us more about those? What are you most looking forward to on your visit?

Thank you so much! I am so looking forward to these events as well. The bee conversation will be so exciting to be a part of, because I will be talking with actual scientists and artists who do work on and with bees. I will love to learn from them and I have a feeling that the conversation will inspire me to write more about bees in the future. But the thing I am most looking forward to is hearing Ted's songs.

What have you been reading lately?

I have been obsessed with Shirley Jackson a lot the past few months and can't stop now.

Anything else you’d like Twin Cities audiences to know about you and your work before experiencing In Your Mouth?

Just that I would I thank them so much for having me in their beautiful town!

See Dorothea Lasky in The Strange Hexacomb: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace Books on Thursday, Nov 21 at 1:30pm. She will also share a few poems and discuss her collaboration with Ted Hearne in a preconcert happy hour reading on Nov 21 at 7:00pm at Walker’s Cityview bar.

BUY TICKETS TO IN YOUR MOUTH NOV 21-22 AT WALKER ART CENTER
Co-presented with the Walker Art Center
Co-commissioned with the Walker Art Center and Carnegie Hall

FOLLOW DOROTHEA LASKY FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Twitter: @DorotheaLasky
Instagram: @dorothealasky

FOLLOW TED HEARNE FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Twitter: @hearnedogg
Instagram: @hedtearne

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Music and Change in Performing John Luther Adams / November 5, 2025 by Liquid Music

TIME 1: BEFORE

TIME 2: DURING

TIME 3: AFTER

Aquatic Ecology: Reaching New Depths of Listening with Gabriella Smith and yMusic // Gabriel Cabezas + Nadia Sirota / October 30, 2025 by Liquid Music

From Deep Listening to Loving Response

An Evening with Gabriella Smith & yMusic

Writer Karl Ove Knausgaard and Wilco Drummer Glenn Kotche Collab for Liquid Music / October 27, 2025 by Katie Hare

[Continue reading at mspmag.com]

Crossing Open Ground: Performing the Aesthetics of John Luther Adams / October 14, 2025 by Liquid Music

Music, nature and environmentalism

Presenting Crossing Open Ground at Snow Canyon State Park

John Luther Adams: Crossing Open Ground

Surrendering to the Process // Jlin / September 26, 2025 by Liquid Music

Jlin / n! = 3!With Daniel Bernard Romain, Leonardo Sandoval & musicians of the SPCO

A Musical Exploration of Human Connection and Concern // Davóne Tines / April 23, 2025 by Amy Chatelaine

The beating pipe organ: Kali Malone's "All Life Long" / March 12, 2025 by Liquid Music

Kali Malone: All Life Long

The Making of Sun Dogs: Creating Conditions for the Spectacular // Daniel Wohl x Kate Nordstrum / November 6, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

A GLIMPSE OF SUN DOGS

Southern Bodies World Premiere // Kit Downes / September 30, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

A Q&A with Kit Downes

Liquid Music at Chaillot // Emily Wells x Dimitri Chamblas / September 19, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

I.Liquid Music x Studio Dimitri Chamblas:“An artistic conversation that’s only just begun”

II.Chaillot Expérience:An invitation to “the temple of dance”

III.Regards to the End:A centering moment in the “beating heart” of Chaillot

The Conversations That Make a Voice // Josh Johnson / September 9, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

Terminal Habitat Collapse // Trever Hagen x Josh Berg / September 4, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

A Point of Entry

pre-residency Q&A with Trever Hagen + Josh Berg

Sounds Continue to Migrate: A Conversation with Moor Mother / September 4, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

Partners in Process, in Art + Life // Kate Wallich x Perfume Genius / July 9, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

TURNING TO THE AUDIENCE

IN CONVERSATION WITH KATE WALLICH

It Makes Us Who We Are: Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks on Musical Improvisation, from Jazz to Punk Rock and Beyond / February 27, 2024 by Liquid Music

Learn more + buy tickets:

Sun Dogs: A new film-sound series debuts / October 12, 2022 by Katie Hare

Rise, Again | Daniel Wohl, Arooj Aftab, and Josephine Decker

ON BLUE | Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Rafiq Bhatia

NAKED BLUE | Devonté Hynes, Mati Diop, and Manon Lutanie

What is Liquid Music: A Playlist / June 16, 2022 by Patrick Marschke

THE SYMBOLIC

THE CURATION

THE MUSIC

To Find An Enduring Connection // Adam Tendler’s Inheritances / April 18, 2022 by Patrick Marschke

Liquid Music + National Gallery of Art + yMusic // "True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870" / April 8, 2020 by Katie Hare

Rocks, Trees, CavesGabriella Smith (b. 1991)Tessellations

NocturnesyMusicCribbea; Peter Inn

Capri/Naples/VolcanosAndrew Norman (b. 1979)Music in Circles

Capri/NapLes/VolcanosyMusicZebras; Flood

Rome and the Roman CampagniaSufjan Stevens (b. 1975)Year of the Horse (arr. Rob Moose)

Rome and the Roman CampagniaCaroline Shaw (b. 1982)Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High-Rise

Water: Coasts, Falls, WavesGabriella Smith (b. 1991)Maré

Words & Sound: An Interview with Dorothea Lasky / November 15, 2019 by Kate Nordstrum

a note by Ted Hearne:

Meet Dorothea lasky

Jlin / n! = 3!
With Daniel Bernard Romain, Leonardo Sandoval & musicians of the SPCO

I.
Liquid Music x Studio Dimitri Chamblas:
“An artistic conversation that’s only just begun”

II.
Chaillot Expérience:
An invitation to “the temple of dance”

III.
Regards to the End:
A centering moment in the “beating heart” of Chaillot

Rocks, Trees, Caves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Tessellations

Nocturnes
yMusic
Cribbea; Peter Inn

Capri/Naples/Volcanos
Andrew Norman (b. 1979)
Music in Circles

Capri/NapLes/Volcanos
yMusic
Zebras; Flood

Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Sufjan Stevens (b. 1975)
Year of the Horse (arr. Rob Moose)

Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High-Rise

Water: Coasts, Falls, Waves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Maré