Sound Crawl Nashville edition 3

The downtown Art Crawl generates a swarming, buzzing mass of people, squeezing themselves in and out of galleries, diving for miniature cups of wine, and talking about art, artists, and everything else. For all the intensely social quality of the event, people do have their eyes open. And once a year two musical entrepreneurs ask them to have their ears open when they add the buzzes, clicks, swooshes, and blips of electronic music to the buzz of people in the Arcade. 

For three years now, Kyle Baker and Aaron Doenges have curated Sound Crawl a festival of electronic music presented in conjunction with the Art Crawl. Each time they’ve tried something a bit different, but the basic idea is to invite composers from around the country to submit works that will be played in the Arcade and environs during the Crawl. From the first, Sound Crawl has had an enthusiastic response from composers looking for audiences for their music, and the sounds in the Arcade heighten the 40-ring circus feel of the evening.

Baker and Doenges use the term Sound Art rather than electronic music for what they present, a signal to the audience that what they will hear won’t have many of qualities people (unless they are familiar with contemporary classical music) will associate with “music.”  As Doenges puts it, these works have “no notes. Usually no instruments. There isn't a performer. And rhythms (even arhythmic rhythms) are often obscured by the newness of the listener to the medium. "Sound Art" leaves people without a preconceived notion of what they will be hearing so we feel that they come with more openness to the experience.”

However, most of the pieces follow the basic rules of music—they have a beginning, middle and end and are composed with a logic in their sequence of sonic events. And therein lies a problem. While the Art Crawl provides a great opportunity to introduce a lot of people to these unfamiliar sounds, it isn’t the best environment to really hear the works. In the Arcade, you’re more likely to catch a snippet here and there, not the full shape of the composition.

The problem is no different than most video art, also a time-based medium. With video, you usually walk into the room somewhere in the middle of the piece and decide whether to stick around for the end or not. Plenty of people sample a few random seconds of the video and move on. You have to evaluate the length of the piece and decide if you want to take the time with it. Sound Crawl limits its submissions to 7 minutes or less, so listeners don’t have to wait forever to come around to the beginning, but they don’t have video’s title sequences and copyright notice at the beginning and/or end to provide orientation.

While the Arcade is lively on Crawl night, there’s no way to make it a place where you can concentrate on music with an abstract structure. So last year Baker and Doenges also presented pieces in more of a concert setting in the sanctuary of Downtown Presbyterian Church. It’s a great room for music, but off the beaten path and it required taking a break from the flow of Art Crawl.

This year Doenges and Baker have new variations in the Sound Crawl events. They will still present pieces in the middle of the Arcade in the middle of the Crawl—it keeps the festival connected to the crowds in the galleries, and Doenges adds “I just think it’s fun to do.” To this they’ve added two events, one later on Saturday and the other on Sunday evening that will expand Sound Crawl into settings where their material becomes the destination—people won’t stumble across the performances while visiting galleries, but will make a decision to attend these separate events. Part of the purpose of the project has been to expose this music to people who will just bump into it at the Crawl. Now they are taking a little more risk and seeing if they can also get some people to search it out.

After the Art Crawl on Saturday, Sound Crawl will sponsor a kind of after-party at the Bank Gallery on 3^rd Avenue.  Calling this event the “Listening Room,” they will present some of the selections from the Sound Crawl in less hectic environment. According to Doenges, “we wanted to provide a space where people who were more interested in the works could really listen but without the strange formality of being in a concert hall with nobody on stage.”  

The next night, on Sunday, they are inviting people to come back downtown to Downtown Presbyterian Church for “Art of the Future,” which looks like the core of the Sound Crawl this year. Using several rooms in the church, they will present a series of performances sequentially (not simultaneously), along with listening stations for purely recorded work. In addition to the basic ticket price ($10, $5 for students), there’s a VIP ticket for $20 that includes dinner.

The Sunday offering at Downtown Presbyterian Church represents an evolution of Sound Crawl from recordings of electronic compositions into electro-acoustic material with live performance, improvisation, and work that extends beyond pure music composition into a realm that more justifies preference for the name Sound Art over electronic music.

Some pieces have elements of theater, like Elizabeth Roberts’ “Title,” which is her response to an artistic depiction of an antique chair. The performance incorporates the chair into a stage setting with an electronic track and piano improvisation.  Michael Kalstrom’s “Life is Dreaming” is a sort of short opera where video accompanies a vocalist, an instrumental soloist and electronics. Visual elements obviously will figure prominently in a piece of video art by Quinn Collins and Tyler Kinney where the sound and images are integral to each other.  Paul Schuette goes further into the middle ground between sound and visual art with an instrument he built called Mobile2 that combines several oscillators that mimic the properties of an Alexander Calder mobile. 

Most significantly in this evolution for Sound Crawl, they have installed a system built around a software called Weiv which uses Wii controllers to allow several users to interact with video scenes projected on a clear projection surface that floats in air like a hologram. This system will be used with for a performance of a movement from Derek Webb’s recording “Feedback.”   

The selections in the Sound Crawl may not always live up to the level of medium transcendence suggested by the phrase Sound Art, but looking at them as musical compositions points to an even more audacious quality of this event. Baker and Doenges have created a festival of contemporary classical composition in plain sight in Nashville. Our town does not have a prominent contemporary music ensemble like the Contemporary Music Forum in DC or Boston Musica Viva. The Symphony and Alias program contemporary pieces regularly but not in great concentration. No one in Nashville presents as much work by living composers to such a large audience in a focused format as the Sound Crawl does each year.

A shorter version of this piece appears on the Art Now Nashville website.

WRVU goes to WPLN

A couple of years ago when WPLN switched over to a mostly talk format, I went through perfunctory motions of complaining about the death of classical music. Truth was I listened to the talk shows then on the AM station and not the classical programming. The switch accommodated my listening patterns. Well, classical music is back with WPLN’s purchase of WRVU, which gives me something else to complain about.

WPLN and Vanderbilt followed the same playbook as KUHF and Rice in Houston. Rice had (or has depending on what you think about internet broadcasting) a superb station, better than Vanderbilt’s. They put it on the block, and the NPR station associated with the University of Houston bought it and created separate sister stations for talk and classical music. Public radio seems to work that way—one station works out something, others pick it up. Several years ago I read some articles about a consultant who worked with the public radio stations on programming that always seemed to end up with less music more talk. Over time, I think most people feel reasonably good about NPR and local public radio as primarily news outlets. The decline of newspapers and the transformation of TV news makes the radio stations very important.

College stations like KTRU at Rice at WRVU at their best became interesting venues with room for a wide range of sound and inspired, idiosyncratic programming. They were places where a fringe improviser could do a live spot on radio for a few minutes. Some DJs emerged with very distinctive ideas—the Sunday afternoon jazz shows on KTRU, or their weeknight world music and experimental/electronic shows, Brian and Elizabeth’s Brazilian and local show on WRVU, Pete’s R&B show, the jazz shows John Rogers did. Chris Davis had a show at various times that was often remarkable, informed and broad-minded, and subversive.

Whenever these stations came under threat, I always wanted the Universities to see these stations and the programming mix that evolved as cultural assets major contributions to the life of the community like a series of art exhibits or classical music concerts. But there’s no getting around the fact that the universities saw these stations as student activities, possibly a training ground. And as student activities radio stations had probably outlived their relevance. I haven’t done a poll, but I can believe that fewer students listen to their college radio station today than way back in my day. Too many options.

According to the press release WPLN bought the frequent for $3.3M and Vanderbilt is going to set aside the money as an endowment for student communications. That means they didn’t sell the frequency to cash in on it. They will save some money on operating costs, and it might free up space, although maybe not if they continue to operate as an internet station. The $3.3M will go into an investment that would generate $165K a year at a 5% payout, $132K at 4%. In other words, not enough that these funds will make a difference for Vanderbilt’s bottom line.

Of the options, what happened at Rice and Vanderbilt is not as bad as I feared. The frequencies could have gone to the religious outfits that dominate the left side of the dial in some times, or ended up broadcasting C-SPAN or whatever it is that took over the public bands in DC (radio has been terrible in DC for over 10 years). I can’t say I’ve been listening to WRVU in recent years. While I never got turned on by much of WPLN’s classical programming, some of their stuff is well done. I don’t listen to Live in Studio C as much as I should, but it seems like they plug in well to concert programming in town. As the Nashville Symphony gets more interesting, they’ll ride with them. There is every reason to think that they will come up with new things.

A few suggestions

Drop the convention of avoiding music with words. Most classical music radio sticks to instrumental music, I believe in recognition of how people use classical radio, often as background music. Words and the human voice draw attention to themselves.

Grab programming from other stations, even if it is not actively syndicated. WQXR in New York recorded and archived the performances from the festival of North American symphony orchestrasat Carnegie Hall.

Do locally-produced programs of electronic and contemporary music. Find someone who can say put together a program on French spectralists or recordings by Ursula Oppens. If you must, put it on the air at some God-awful time, but archive it.

Buy recordings, don’t just rely on what record labels are pushing.

 
One of the best shows on WRVU was a program of contemporary classical and renaissance music hosted by Angela Lin, a professor in the German department. She died at the early age of 40. WPLN, in the form of WFCL, could honor her memory by trying to match the insight and range of her show.

Lost World

Visiting the Zoo is a depressing experience. This still comes as a surprise to me. I took such delight in zoos when I was a kid. I knew my way around the National Zoo well, got to the point where I could identify nearly every bird there. 

I went back this weekend, to something irreversibly diminished and damaged. In part it comes from getting older. The Zoo seemed so big back then, endless in the new things to see. As an older, larger person, everything is easier to comprehend. I also think the zoo has reduced the number of exhibits. Back in my childhood days, zoos were just beginning to create naturalistic environments for animals, and the National Zoo still had many locked up in row after row of cages. You can fit in more animals that way. Now that they need to give the animals more room to stretch out, there's room for fewer of them. Also, in the intervening years there has been more awareness of the stress on cold climate animals living in such a warm places. A lot of places have gotten rid of their polar bears. I think the National Zoo did that.

Zoos are suspect now. If you’ve paid any attention you know that no zoo provides a great environment for most of the animals. All animals have their habitats and natural patterns of roaming and movement. No way you can catch that in an enclosure.

Habitat brings us to the worst part. Every exhibit, in the interests of education and honesty, describes what has happened to the natural range of the animal on display. And nearly every one is in danger of disappearing in the wild. Indian Elephants, tigers, Central American amphibians. There are so few wild places left, government preserves hold on tenuously and suffer incursions, mysterious diseases sweep from one end of a continent to another, and introduced species drive out the old ones. The exhibits at zoos always talked about conservation in my memory, but somehow back then, back in my childhood, it seemed to be a matter of identifying cases that need attention and getting people to work on those. And there were heroic people who would eventually prevail, in spite of any setbacks. Now seems like we've got a massive series of last ditch efforts across species, geography and ecosystems. I’m not sure anyone believes in restoring balance, only in arks like the seed vault on Spitsbergen in Norway.  Gather a breeding stock of each thing that exists and try to keep it safe, map its genome, hold on for who knows what, and hope and pray that events—climatic, political, social—don’t overtake the effort.  

A Zoo visit today tolls mourning, for what was lost and what seems impossible to avoid losing.

When I visited as a child, in the 60s and 70s, I saw the zoo as a storehouse of wonders and a gateway to a much larger world where these animals lived in many places I hoped to visit.

At the time I made those visits, the forces were in motion that robbed the world of these places. Modernization, economic integration, the creation of a universal capitalist market and its unrelenting demands to realize economic potential in everything that contained it. Technology and human population too great for anything delicate—like an ecosystem, or a social system—to resist.  And chaos generated by all of that.

That pleasure of discovery proved to be innocent and ignorant. And age dispels some ignorance. At the end of the day knowing is stronger. But maybe the breaking of illusions which inevitably accompanies age makes up the bigger part of the mournfulness.

Meek's Cutoff

Currently showing at the Belcourt, Meek's Cutoff is Kelly Reichardt's story of 3 families making their way to Oregon in 1845, among the first Americans settlers moving into the territory in large numbers. Their party is led by Stephen Meek, a mountain man type who dresses the part with buckskin jacket and long matted beard. You get the sense that even at this point in the West, he was self-conscious about image, marketing himself to these families by looking precisely what they would expect of a frontier guide. And he's gotten them lost taking a short cut to the Wilamette Valley from the main Oregon Trail. So they wander apparently aimlessly in the Eastern Oregon desert and before long have to turn their trek into a search for water.

Along the way they encounter and take captive a Native American man--unarmed, speaking a language none of them understand, which leaves them free to speculate about his motives--will he take them to water, lead them back to a larger band from his tribe, lead them on a suicide march. Or maybe he's as lost as they are. The encounter between settlers and the indigenous people starts with nearly complete incomprehension on both sides. Understanding derives from rudimentary gestures of interpersonal power--Michelle Williams' character helps their captive so he'll owe her something, and it forms the basis for a sliver of a connection between them that in the end dominates the group in which people otherwise fail to gain credibility with each other.

In the sermon in church last weekend my minister talked about moral and spiritual space. Space looms large in Meek's Cutoff. The spaces are open, dry, with the most minimal ground-hugging vegetation in a dormant state. The characters wander through it. The space itself threatens to overwhelm them and destroy them, putting too much distance between them and water, giving them no guideposts to lead their way. This space becomes a moral crucible, breaking them down but on the other side they don't build a new sense of direction in a moral universe, but just seem defeated. After a process of trying to sort out reality and truth from misperception and illusion, the characters resign themselves to not reaching truth or insight, just a political accommodation and a need to plow ahead in some direction. The movie ends without resolving what appears to be the main drama, whether they find water. In the end it doesn't matter, because of the moral space they've been through. The people who will or will not reach the Willamette Valley have been damaged by thsi time in the desert. They've shed so much, such as the expectation of comfort and connection as well as the fundamental idea that what matters is to arrive at a right decision.

I haven't seen Kelly Reichardt's earlier films, which were set in the more contemporary Northwest. I wish I had seen them, because it looks like she is making a more sustained argument about the moral character of the society that emerged from the frontier experience. Rather than ennoble the people who went through it and form the basis for an almost utopian society, the Frontier Experience damaged Americans, created trauma that had physical, epistemological, and moral dimensions. The frontier on some level defeated people, who today wander through a different kind of desolate landscape, where the economy threatens more than beckons and social connections break down.

Obscure abstract

One roughly breaks the universe of art into people you’ve heard of and those you haven’t. You trust that this sorting represents a measure of relative importance. The names of the major painters of each era are easily accessible. When you run across an unfamiliar name, my first reaction is not “how did I miss this” but some assurance that the figure occupies a more esoteric place in art history. I don’t think I was familiar with Georges Lacombe before I ran across a distinctly Gauguin-esque painting at the Norton Simon Museum, African-mask like figures gathering chestnuts in a strange forest dominated by bright reds. I’m sure Lacombe’s name rolls readily off the tongue of a connoisseur of the Nabis, but I’m complacent enough to assume my ignorance doesn’t represent a serious gap—in fact, these little gaps allow me the pleasure of discovery even at my advanced age.

This certainty breaks down as you move closer to the present in history.  For contemporary artists, the prominence of artists in my consciousness, if you did one of those word maps that weight the frequency of terms in a document or other source, is to some extent and within certain bounds, a random process. While it may be impossible to avoid John Currin, I track on Jiha Moon, who is quite interesting, but there are undoubtedly a hundred others of comparable importance of whom I’m utterly ignorant.

On one hand the sorting process of historical significance has not started. 40 years from now maybe people will discuss Bob Durham rather than Currin. I can imagine a case where a “provincial” painter (not residing in New York, LA, Europe, or China) like Bob gets rediscovered, like someone from a small Dutch town in the 17^th century.

We also will have to see if the end of a unifying art historical narrative means that artists from our day will always remain part of an undifferentiated blob of 1,000s of names.

I thought I had a reasonably good grasp on the post-war years, so I would know what to expect from Surface Truths: Abstract Painting in the Sixties. a show at the Norton Simon Museum. Instead, it made me feel quite stupid. The first room was dominated by names I did not recognize at all: Frank Lobdell, Harvey Quaytman, Takeshi Kawashima, Ray Parker, Thomas Downing, Ralph Humphrey, and Stephen Greene.  These guys  were all in the first of the two rooms. There were also names more familiar to me: Agnes Martin, Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Stella, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin. But I only reached them after a series of unfamiliar names that made me wonder if this was completely an alternative history of art in the 60s.

My parents are great about recognizing names like these.  They know more about art than I do by leaps and bounds. But I’m sure I’ll occasionally be able to pull the same trick 40 years from now. “Oh yes, Tara Donovan, she piled up mounds of uniform, mass-produced common objects—plastic cups, pencils—to create not so miniature worlds.”

Thomas Downing was DC-based, so I’ve probably heard his name. A grid of large circles in various shades of reds. They look machine made, but they were hand painted free-hand. The variety and sequence of colors has a pleasing rhythm, with a distinct but not over-bearing pulse. The painting goes well with Ralph Humphrey’s painting, which also deals with gradations of tonality, in this case a surface covered with green, mostly olive, but loose variations in hue and paint thickness that give this painting a complex texture.

One of the points of this exhibit is that even after Abstract Expressionism, as Pop was taking center stage, some people kept on in abstraction. It’s not a very interesting idea. Yes, people kept painting. Rackstraw Downs’ little book of remembrances describes his experience of art in New York consisting of a very different set of painters. 

The paintings in this show are very fine. The Downing and Humphreys paintings are satisfying.  The work by Ray Parker consists of two large patches of dark green hovering in an abstract ground. Again, they are painted loosely, the shapes not precisely the same or neatly trimmed off. The color of the two differs subtly, and some sections have been built up and worked over more.  Frank Lobdell’s work is a sea of vivid orange-red with chains of marks crossing it on diagonals, like some sort of track or a distorted rendering of some sort of figure.  The primary chain has thick dark outlines filled with yellows and oranges. The crossing chain consists mostly of faint outlines that look overpainted, partially eradicated. The colors, between the background and the yellows and others in the chain remind me of a stone I had as part of small rock collection I had as a kid, which had the most vivid oranges and yellows occurring together. I don’t remember what the mineral was. I don’t think it was anything precious, just pretty.

As I would expect, California and Western artists are well-represented—Lobdell was in California most of his career, as were Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, and I associate Martin with New Mexico. Of course, it seems true more often than not that shows about this period make an effort to acknowledge the West Coast scene. Several of them have the same story—grew up in the Midwest, served in the war moved to California. The exhibit includes a black and white photo from the period of each artist. These are pictures from that time before the 60s counter-culture started, the men with clean white shirts and short hair, serious and optimistic.

Many of the paintings in this show do connect in my mind with minimalism. There is the most subtle Agnes Martin I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. A grid of rectangles in an overlapping brick-wall pattern done in pencil. The lines are all light, but their thickness varies distinctly.  The piece by Robert Irwin is mostly a monochrome field of a subdued red.  The only features are two horizontal lines that run nearly but not quite border to border. One is in a contrasting slate blue color. The other echoes this line above, in the same color as the ground but distinguished by extra layers of paint, making it present through texture.

The paintings in this show are uniformly pretty large, which gives them the heft to stand alone and makes a show of about 20 or so objects sufficient. Each is sort of big gulp. The assessment might be unfair, but I left feeling these were as I said very fine paintings, paintings you can enjoy, but I don’t know if they are important.  The fact of these paintings and painters, and of Rackstraw Downes’ account of his New York, can lead you to question whether there really is a narrative for art history, or whether the confusion we experience today is all there really is.

Maybe that narrative isn’t really about art at all, but about cultural impact, and that’s something else.  What we end up writing about is not what’s good, but what makes and impression and has an impact, even a transitory impact. So what artists today have an impact? And on whom? Other artists? Or a broader society, though maybe limited to those engaged with elite culture. So who? Matthew Barney or Jeff Koons? Some subset of the Chinese. Ai Weiwei if things keep going the way they are.