The great American poet and early digital innovator Joel Weishaus was a good friend of mine when we both lived in Albuquerque. His Collected Poems have just been published and I've been enjoying them ever since:
Now living on opposite sides of the country, he's in California and I'm in Pennsylvania, we remain friends but, of course, not in touch nearly so often as we were then. When my book, Silencing the Sounded Self, was first published Joel asked me if I would like to do an "internet interview," where we would write back and forth with the end result published by an internet magazine, quite a novelty at the time. I was living in Heidelberg, Germany when the long-distance discussion began and internet was solely available in my office at the Anglistisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg, where I was teaching during a Fulbright year (1999-2000). If memory serves, we worked on it for months. Here's a photo taken in the office of my friend and colleague (and Fulbright host) Prof. Dr. Dieter Schulz. In it you can see a picture of the two of us, taken during the time of this interview, which will give some visible sense of how long ago it occurred!
I revisited my conversation with Joel Weishaus after reading some wonderful poetry, Beginner Mind, that Joel had just finished and can be found here:
I was surprised by how directed our conversation was--in the sense that my life over the years has followed rather closely my concerns and interests as they were discussed and developed during the long conversation between Joel and I. In the end, the published version ran to nearly twenty single-spaced pages! As many are aware, "The Dialectics of Experimentalism" is the research project I've been working on since Silencing the Sounded Self. Now nearing completion, it was fascinating to see, as I read our conversation again, how my thoughts were already beginning to flourish in a direction that quickly produced the initial fruits of that study, before I ever visited the library at Darmstadt and first read the German translations of Cage's lectures at the Ferienkurse in 1958. Intuition had begun my study of John Cage in the late 1980s producing the research conclusion of Silencing; and now I see intuition has been behind my last decade of research too.
Peer magazine is no longer in existence and though the text can be found on our websites, the print is rather small on my site. So I decided, with Joel's permission, to publish it here, dividing it into parts, meeting the needs of blog-sized discourse, which I'm (slowly) learning and also to include, where possible, musical and visual examples of what we discussed. Those contributions are shown in italics.
I'll add in conclusion, what a great surprise it was to find a YouTube recording of the Metropolitan Temple Church of God in Christ Choir, including an inspired moment thanks to Bishop James L'Keith Jones. They will always be my church and he will always be my Pastor!
Peer Magazine: Silencing the Sounded Self
Christopher Shultis and Joel Weishaus in Conversation, 1999 (Part I)
Christopher Shultis is Professor of Music at the
University of New Mexico, where he was Director of Percussion Studies from
1980-1996. He also holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor of American
Studies. In 1993-94, Shultis was Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the
Institut fuer Anglistik, University of Aachen, Germany. He held this same
appointment at Heidelberg University, 1999-2000.
Shultis' publication record includes
"Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of
Non-Intention" (The Musical Quarterly) and "Cage in
Retrospect: A Review Essay" (The Journal of Musicology), which won
a 1996 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage
and the American Experimental Tradition (Northeastern University Press,
1998). As a composer and creative artist, his selected performances include the
1992 Percussive Arts Society International Convention, the 1993 Society of
Composers International Convention, the German American Institute's Seventh
Annual Festival of Experimental Music and Literature, 1994, and the University
of Illinois Composers Forum, 1995. In 1993, KNME (PBS) television produced a
nationally syndicated half-hour program devoted to his music.
Joel Weishaus: Chris. I'd like to begin with
percussion, which you taught in the University of New Mexico's Music
Department, for the movement it initiates of air to eardrums-an inferred
circle. Where did it (you) begin?
Christopher Shultis: The circle for me always
seems to have originated elsewhere, in the sense that I've always wanted to be
elsewhere, and that being somewhere I didn't want to be has always been the way
in which the things that have mattered most to me (the most necessary, the most
essential) have always been the result of a surprise: the unexpectedly pleasing
results of being other than what I wanted to be and--perhaps most important
because place is one of those "essentials"--living in a place other
than where I wanted to be doing something entirely other than what I really
wanted to do.
The first instance of this concerns percussion--which
is why I brought it up. I played drums when I was very, very young. I have a
picture that ended up in my high school yearbook of my Dad and I playing on
Quaker Oaks boxes, in a drum set configuration, and I imagine I couldn't have
been more than 2, perhaps 3 years old. I also played drums in one of those fake
Beatles bands, where kids (we were all about 5 years old, living at the time in
an Italian/Catholic neighborhood between 6 and 7 mile road on the east side of
Detroit) would use badminton rackets to imitate guitars and sing along with
Beatle records.
As an aside I remember having a superb collection
of Beatle cards, now lost, as the result of how successful these events--my
first public performances--were since the admission was a certain number of
Beatle cards that the "band" would then divide amongst themselves.
Anyway, the point is I always wanted to play the
badminton guitars and sing the McCartney-Lennon songs (who on earth besides
Ringo would have wanted to sing his songs!) but because the drums were my Dad's
he'd only let me play them. I kept playing the drums to Beatles songs but was
also concurrently playing an old upright piano, which was, along with the
drums, also located in the basement downstairs. My Dad was a great drummer--he
was the principal timpanist of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra when he was in
college and studied with Frank Perne who was once a drummer with the John
Philip Sousa band. So he had great drums and I always, as a result, heard
percussion sounds that were very good sounds because he tuned them well and
they always sounded great, much better than the school rental instruments and
drum kits that kids get for Christmas presents.
In spite of that, when I started school band I
wanted to play the saxophone. I can't think of a single musical reason why, so
it must have been because of how great the saxophone looks and how cool people
look when they play it. However, saxophones then and now are very expensive to
rent and my family couldn't afford it. So once again, drums were the only
option. And since I had a great drummer for a teacher we didn't even have to
pay for lessons.
Eventually I took piano lessons, but, after the
teacher found out I wasn't reading the music, I eventually quit and
concentrated my formal training on the drums at least until I went to college.
What would normally happen is that the teacher would play the music and I would
copy what she read off the page by ear. The way she finally caught on was by
playing the music in a key different than what was written. When I repeated it
in the different key I was caught! This, for me, remains a genuine bias in
university music programs. I was learning "by ear," and had a pretty
good one, obviously, but the result of the situation described here is that I
was doing it "wrong" by not learning how to read. While this is
literally true, I certainly would encourage the student with this ability.
There are way too many musicians who can read everything but can't hear a
thing. Better to take longer to learn to read than learn how to read so quickly
that it replaces the ability to hear. I think percussion, because it does not
exclusively have a bias toward pitch, and also has a long tradition of being
able to play by ear (either with kettledrums/timpani's necessity of matching
pitches in the orchestra or simply by playing drumset in bands), kept my ears
open in a way that playing the saxophone never would have.
And that, then, is basically my point: Had I done
what I wanted to do, I'm quite certain that the results would have been
entirely other--and less interesting--than what occurred as the result of
having had to do what I initially didn't want to do. My discoveries about
playing percussion, as my technical and musical abilities increased over the
years, eventually became absolutely essential to the way I experience--listening
to and thinking about--music. And it's something that, at the beginning at
least, I adamantly didn't want to do.
JW: I connect your bias toward audition with oral
literature, the decline of which, for better or worse, has lost to most of us
the art of mnemonics, which was subsumed by the printing, then analog and
digital storage systems. Before these, poets had a specific job: memorize and
repeat, and no doubt embellish, the culture's literature. In music, however,
and theater, at least some of this tradition carries on. For example, am I
amazed at the repertoire some singers have memorized.
CS: Hearing and memory are, for me, separate
things that only sometimes need each other. I like the immediacy of hearing
and, as such, I like the ephemeral nature of performing and/or listening to
music. I respect oral traditions but, at the same time, I see them occasionally
as a means of trying to hold on to something, as a way of trying to protect it
from the inevitability of change. Actually, to be clearer, I should go back and
say that living oral traditions are constantly changing and that's a positive
thing. Those who attempt to "preserve" those traditions, or try to
sustain them in ways that "fix" or in some way keep them
"traditional" or "pure," are, for me at least, getting in
the way of what makes an oral tradition so beautifully unfixable, so remarkably
resistant to categorization in ways that enable one to say things like
"tradition" in the first place. I understand the desire to protect
things that are in danger of disappearing altogether and I don't mean to infer
that I disapprove of those who are working very hard to keep that from
happening. I am only speaking of my own personal experience and in that regard
let me just say that I love hearing music that comes from a place other than
where I am and I try as hard as I can to not move from that place of discovery
or experience to what one might call a place of knowing or understanding.
On the other hand, memory and its ability to be
turn what one experiences into something other than what actually happened is
something I cherish and appreciate. I've had the opportunity to sing in a
gospel choir at the Metropolitan Temple Church of God and Christ in Albuquerque
where my family and I go to church.
Here's a recent performance of the choir I
mention above, featuring Sister Cheryl Russey, my director at the time 0f this
interview, singing lead. Bishop James L'Keith Jones, still my pastor after all
these years, (even though I live 2000 miles away), takes the podium after the
choir stops singing, around seven minutes in:
The songs we sing are all committed to memory,
there's rarely any written music, and even when there is, it's only used to get
you to the place where you don't need it any more so that it's possible to make
music instead of reading it. And what I discovered as I was learning and
performing that music is that your memory kicks in as you hear it again. So
that the memory of, say, fifty or so songs may not be there "on
call," as it were, but when you hear it again it comes back, in some
cases, as it goes along where, for example, you might not remember what comes
next but then a chord will appear that jostles just the right place in your
memory so you can at least get through the next couple of phrases until the
memory hopefully kicks in again. Eventually, of course, those songs get
committed to memory so that the mid-point I'm describing disappears, but I
vividly remember the feeling of joyful displacement where I literally was
relying on what I heard as I sang as a means of getting from one point in the
music to the next. And I suspect that even when you know those songs so well
that you could sing them "on call," the point isn't their cultural
authenticity in itself so much as it is the singer or the choir's use of a song
as material. In other words, as material for making something new, something
that is authentically from a culture to be sure but is at the same time changed
by the way in which one individually or collectively expresses it. I love the
energy that comes out of that kind of experience, of being so in the present
moment that you feel as if you are in an electrical circuit where the energy is
being transmitted in bursts with moments in between of complete and utter
uncertainty. And I've grown to love the connection between memory and direct
experience that one gets by participating in so-called oral traditions, in this
case, the great oral tradition of gospel music.
JW: To go on to another point you make. Not doing
what you want to do, as opposed to what you need to do, seems to be a pattern
in your life. For example, percussion depends on the agility of one's hands,
but something traumatic happened that swerved the direction of your career. Can
you elaborate this story?
CS: This is a difficult point because it concerns
the connection between necessity and suffering. What I mean by that is likely
obvious to everyone but I'll elaborate upon my own specific situation just to
be clear. I began to lose the ability to use my hands as a percussionist a
little over ten years ago. I had an undiagnosed problem in my neck--two
slightly herniated disks--that pushed against the nerve that travels down the
length of my right arm. At that time, at least at the beginning, all the
medical advice I was able to get (and I sought advice both locally and
nationally) concentrated on the symptoms that were felt exclusively in my arms
and hands. It was only much later after a significant period of treatment that
I began to feel the pain in its original location in the neck. But, at the
beginning, I only felt the radiated pain as it found its way to the place I
used most: my arms and hands. Before I was correctly diagnosed several years
later, I was not only unable to perform (I'd long since given up ever doing
that again) I was unable to write, to drive, to carry anything--I was becoming
a person who had no use of their arms and hands. I even looked into
voice-activated computers so that if or when I couldn't type at all anymore (at
that time I was doing so as infrequently as possible and in significant pain) I
would continue to be able to write and compose. A piece I wrote from this
period was called "Metaphysics" (which begins with one of my favorite
lines, "Music is our enemy/because time is our enemy") a vocal piece
whose complexity is the result of using eight tape players that record my
spoken voice in real time but are then replayed until after several repetitions
my actual voice disappears and the listener instead hears only my recorded
voice. I felt then as if I were in actuality approaching that silence. That my
self, at least the one I'd lived with until then, was being silenced by my
rapidly disintegrating physical condition.
Here's
a recording of me performing Metaphysics, recorded by Steve Peters for the CD
series he produced, The Aerial, now out of print:
It's easy to draw out philosophical and spiritual
connections between the art I made then and my actual experiences. And I think
it would be easy for someone to make inferences between the two by reading the
above. I however would rather empathize the "difficulty" I alluded to
at the beginning. I respect the difficulty of suffering and how it finds its
way into all of our lives (that's what I would view as its
"necessity") way too much--even the little I've experienced knowing
that there are others who have experienced and/or still do experience far
greater examples of suffering than what I'm addressing here--to try to draw
comparisons between the suffering itself and what I learned as a result or how
it influenced what I did as an artist at the time. There is a comparison, to be
sure, but I would never want to appear to be saying that it was good to suffer.
It wasn't good and it's never good. But it is necessary in the sense that I had
no choice but to suffer through that experience. However, rather than say that
I tried to make the best of it, let me just instead put it in the context of
what started my reaction to your question to begin with. There have been places
where I have not wanted to be that were, of necessity, where I was and those
places have, as they always do, or at least they do to me, greatly determined
what I experience and how I respond to those experiences as an artist.
I know that where I am right now is solely the
result of all the experiences I've had in the past, that the ephemerality that
I love about my present existence is, as long as I'm living at least, all
bundled up with the memories that I have accumulated from that past. That it is
only those memories that I presently carry with me, but that those memories of
what happened are not, as John Cage once said, "what happened." We
are all, in that sense I think, oral traditions and when we disappear it is
only the memories others carry of us that live on.
I used to be very influenced by what John Cage
had to say about relationships in music, about how he preferred the word
"interpenetration" where everyone individually maintained their own
center of experience so that we were all centers of experience collectively while
maintaining our individuality. I'm not expressing this in nearly a complex
enough way and I'll try to do so later if it is possible. Cage was critical of
relationships, and of the fundamental role memory plays in their formation, and
I, as a result, began to think about and experience things "in
themselves" as it were, which, as one might imagine, sent me to a very
interesting and fertile artistic, philosophic and spiritual place with a great
and long tradition (in all those areas) behind it. We can touch on that point
later if you like. But first, I just want to close at this point by saying that
I've grown to love the possibility of relationships in art and in life. And I'm
increasingly willing to give up my autonomy in order to do so. A partial reason
behind that I think is that while I have no interest in immortality it is
obvious to me that we do live beyond our temporal experience in the memories of
others. That, to me, has a lot to say about the relationship between freedom of
the self (which is what I think Cage was emphasizing) and responsibility to
others (which I think, especially in the United States, could stand to be more
emphasized).
I'm presently living a life that tries to balance
individual freedom with social responsibility. And that's very hard to do. An
essential part of my book on John Cage concerns the question of control versus
co-existence in artmaking. I place Cage on the side of co-existence so that
means I'm seeing Cage as someone who doesn't wish to impose his individual
freedom in such a way that it either controls or gets in the way of others. I
also place memory and relationships on the side of control. But I do think that
it not possible for me to do so (to co-exist with others) without forming
relationships. Because what is missing otherwise, at least from my perspective,
is the ability to love. It may be my bias but I cannot experience love, as I
see it at least, outside of a relationship. And what I'm looking for in both
art and life presently is a way to experience and express love in the fullest
and deepest way possible. And to sustain it as long as possible, preferably for
as long as I live. For me, love is a way of being in relationship, and a way of
experience that includes memory, by seeking serve rather than control others.
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