And Yet It Moves

I thought I'd talk a little bit about my doctoral thesis project in the works (well, the main one, at least). I haven't done something quite like this before, so it's probably good I write down the working process and figure it out as I go along. The piece, titled 'And Yet It Moves' is a 15-minute-long epic music video of sorts, and it features three locations on the CU Boulder campus: the Observatory, Old Main, and Norlin Library.

I've written/conceived of music for each section, which will then be recorded and layered on top of one another. Then, the recording will be 'lip-synced' of sorts into a music video, though the videotape will be much more abstract than a traditional concert video. I'm considering it more like a sound and image "collage" like my sound pieces for Origin of the Sun and Moon rather than a tried and true music video with narrative or a concert video showing all the little details of performance.





The three sections of the work all center around the concepts of learning and discovery, and of motion. Firstly, the motion of the sun-- the Observatory piece is about the chemical composition of the Sun and all of the elements in the Sun that give us the visible spectrum.

The section in CU's first building on campus, Old Main, is about the movement of human bodies in time and tells abstractly the story of Mary Rippon, CU's first female professor. Rippon, a foreign language professor, had a secret child with one of her students, and kept the whole affair (and the baby) secret from the University. This story takes place at a time when it was illegal to be a female professor and be married, let alone be a mother. Apparently at the turn of the 20th century, people (likely men) thought that all the intellect would get drained out of a woman if she were not single and childless. I digress. Rippon ended up taking a sabbatical and had the baby in Germany, and her husband/student Will took a boat to Germany later to pick up the baby at a care center. The child was raised as Mary's 'niece' for her whole life, and didn't know that her Aunt was her MOTHER until the baby was something like 60 years old. CU didn't know about this story until the 1990's, and I thought the story was too delicious not to tell. I set Mary's and her husband Will's texts into choral works for the piece.

The third "layer" is in the main Library on campus and is a very John Cage-like piece, with only minimal instructions and very little music score to be seen; people will take books off the shelves and read them in different tempos, and they'll throw papers in the air and generally have a good time being academic. Graciously the staff and faculty from all three buildings were very encouraging about me using their spaces.

I guess it's a bit of a love story, a swan song, to my time as an academic. My (ridiculous number of) years studying in the collegiate settting are coming to an end within a year or so, or so we hope if I can finish everything on time. I think I've selected a few places which have inspired me throughout the years, in one way or another, like the areas of science, and poetry, and architecture, and there's even some electronic music in there too. I like the idea of the large-scale "solar" section in contrast with the "human" section and the "neurological" section of thoughts flying around in the library. If it all works, it should be a really fun time.

Recording everything will be done in a million tiny pieces and then stuck together like a puzzle. Videotaping will probably be the same way, so in a way it is very much like a collage. And recording sessions start soon so I best get to typesettin'!

News and Clips

Too much has been happening in this composer's life. For one thing I've been taking time for myself, which is keeping me sane. Literally. For a while after Christmas I thought I was being pulled in all different directions- I had said "yes" to a lot of projects that I should have said "not right now" to, and it totally took a toll on my body! Luckily I am coming back to reality once again, and the creative juices are beginning to flow once more.

In the news, I've had a few new works performed or documented lately.
Two clips of "Tame Your Man' are up on YouTube, but you can watch them here! Each clip is about three movements' worth, enough to give you a general sense of the piece.




I had the premiere of my first electro-acoustic work on the Pendulum New Music Series concert this past week. All I had to do was push "play" but that went well. It's a work that creates an atmosphere like slowly drifting icebergs in a glacial lagoon. I learned a lot about the program Abelton Live to create the piece, and I hope to work more with that in the future- it's good for both audio effects, and should I want to become a sweet beat-droppin' DJ I could cue up jams and add beats and samples in Abelton as well.

Upcoming on March 20 is yet another premiere of a work, this time for a duo of a guitar and a nykelharpa. You might be wondering what that instrument is, and in short it's a Swedish stringed instrument that sounds like a fiddle, but it works more like a hurdy-gurdy. You can read up a little on the nykelharpa here.

In non-music-related news, my boyfriend has said two more things in his sleep: "2 4 8", and "snowin' so far". I had a dream the other night that I was being held against my will, but I got released through a cunning game of music trivia, and my winning question to my weird captives was that I could sing a melody from Verdi's opera La Traviata and they couldn't guess what opera it came from. In real life, I don't know if I could even think of a melody from La Traviata, let alone but thank goodness my subconscious self knows the way out.

More Things I've Made and Ate

Here is another chapter in the saga of Things I've Made and Ate in Iceland. This one's just about as random as chapter one! In no particular order:

A necklace out of sea-glass from the Reykjavík coast, it could be quite nice for a bride's dress or something summery and formal. Potential brides: cawl me, we'll tawk.


Some no-bake chocolate-oatmeal-peanut butter cookies, and a Pittsburgh favorite (thanks, Mark!), sage and carmelized sugar-coated pecans.


Icelandic lamb, two ways! I splurged one week and bought Icelandic lamb, and one medium-sized steak was enough for several meals. First it was a lamb masala! The mix was from a jar but it was some of the best out of a jar I've had. I used potatoes, chickpeas, and onions for the veggies. And then made a collage that day too. Then came steak salad, with leftover veggies. Really quite good- the lamb is fatty but not greasy, so it kind of melted, it wasn't chewy at all. Absolute yumsh.



Bracelets made out of fish skin leather! I made four of these beauties and they should be on sale at Mattress Factory in a bit, for those stateside people that want some elegant salmon and spotted wolf-fish around their arms. And don't it look lovely.


Also in the meat family, some beef curry. Maybe the winter has influenced me into making a lot of stews. They're certainly easy and I can also leave them while they simmer away. This curry came with some bamboo shoots, but I added the rest.


And finally, two small collages of Mount Esja in two seasons. I just worked on these this weekend and they're simple but I love them! I hadn't collaged anything in months, and it was about time. I also don't really do figurative things or landscapes, but being here and looking at the mountain all the time, it's hard not to at least use a mountain shape. The works are on silver paper too, which has a really shimmery glow. I'm really happy that I found a piece of magazine that had colorful stripes in it- I think it's a picture of the pavement, but it works really well for imaginative mountain layers.

Olde Timey collage

I put this in a shadowbox for added depth, even though all the layers are flat. I love the cutout shape of that pool combined with the orangey bit from an old map of Eastern Europe.

Five Characters/Man at Carnival

Two oldies as collage studies: here's a hunky model relaxing near a ferris wheel and I think I see the Coliseum in there somewhere, circa 2001. Strange, but I kind of like all the textures and the vivid colors happening in this one. And an old friend's handwritten letter is in the background as our model's thought-bubble.

And here's an old collage-slash-drawing I did where Bill Clinton is holding out fort next to Bjork and a frog-shaped eraser. Naturally. It's good to know that my drawing style has not evolved much since age 16. Maybe an art class or two could boost the intellectual complexity of cartoony snakes and alien tentacles.

Fall 2009

It's fall! Raise your flags (higher, higher!) in excitement for long sleeves and cups of tea.
To celebrate: an old work not so much of a collage as an alteration of an old magazine ad, with japanese maple leaves and some scraps of tissue paper.

Aiport collages

Sally and I recently made some tiny collages canvases and tried our hands at a collaborative art piece. Participants sent a few dollars in the mail to 'The Canvas Project' at the Atlanta Airport, and we received five tiny 2" by 2" canvases in the mail, and five random words chosen by the participants. We then made the canvases as inspired by those words, and the one that we made to the title of 'pilgrimage' made it up on the wall of the airport. It's not our favorite of the set we made, but it is very cool to see such a collaborative project take flight... get it? Airport art? Please, hold your applause.
Our canvas is among these, third row down, fourth from the left. But it's not really about us, it's about the collective appearance, and there are certainly a lot of canvases on display!

Denise McMorrow Mahone

I just bought-slash-won my first painting at an art auction!
It's a painting by the artist Denise Mcmorrow Mahone.
The museum hosted an event the other night for the Sherry Everett Scholarship Fund, which helps African American kids receive scholarships for college. They were setting up their silent auction items as I was leaving, and I thought, well, there aren't many people here yet, so I'll just start the ball rolling with a big near its starting price (which seemed ridiculously low to begin with). I outbid someone else by five whole dollars, and put my name and phone number down. I also bid on a cute little licorice plant for my bedroom. But sadly no one called me to tell me I had won, so I thought that was it. Then I came into work the next morning and I had won both items! I was almost excited not to have to buy them, thinking that more money had been raised with higher bids (and a little buyer's remorse). But I'm now excited to have this in my apartment. I loved that it had music pages collaged underneath layers of paint, and Italian and French texts. It's also sort of abstractly geometric, and has some slight pencil markings on top for a fancy finish.
I'm quite taken with Ms. McMorrow's installations as well, as most of her works seem to deal with topics like language, collections, obsolescence (great for you librarians out there!). I'm always curious about things like memory, spirituality, and nostalgia; even contemporary artists like Joseph Cornell and personalities like Lord Whimsy remind me of a Victorian time and place that I never experienced, what remains of creepy antique dolls, doorknobs, old books, lace, garden tools. I know they've been capitalized in movies and retro-lifestyle magazines, but I can't help feel a certain attraction to their well-lived lives. In a way, it's a nostalgia for a life you never lived. In short, I can't wait to look at the painting for a long time as it now lives with me. Come visit it!

(Above: the painting I purchased, Los Vestigios: Even; copyright Denise McMorrow Mahone.)

Nuclear Babies

This collage was a goodbye present of sorts to J & B who are moving to Washington, DC for better work (and real-people salaries...sniffle). They'll be missed, but they'll always have this strange collage to remember me by. Who doesn't love the combined forces of engineering drawings and pyschological subjects, and one picture of a lolcat, with some graphs and charts over top of it all?
I hope it finds a good spot on the walls of their new place so when I come visit I can point out how I really captured its owners essences (not really).

Cookie Monster Model

Okay, now Cookie, you're going to stand here and pretend you're the letter F in front of this brooding model. Fur is the new skin, people! And Monster with No Name (who are you, anyway?), you're going to pet his titties. Beautiful! Work it, people, work it, I'm loving it! Give me more! Now Vogue!

Guy in armpit

This is a very important collage, done circa 1999. I'm sure it will be remembered long after I'm gone for its ingenious use of scale and proportion. Look at how that model uses another model as an armpit crutch! That's what you're allowed to do when you're rich and fashionable.
What you can't see was the high-heeled shoe on the right was attached to a head of Britney Spears (but no body, just a head coming out of a leg), and also somehow the head of Patrick Swayze was attached in there too. But I had to do some serious cropping to get the armpit shot into view.
This also probably infringes on copyright by using pictures of models without any kind of creative manipulation to the images. Way to go, me! I'm so creative it hurts sometimes.

Lips as Umbrella, Cameldog on Volkswagon

An oldie but a weirdie: a collage comic that could only be explained with Surrealism or crack, and I've never done crack.

Hazy Collage

I made a new collage! It's untitled, but the inspiration began with the hazy background squares in the upper left. In a way, the work is also a response to a CD that I've been loving, by the artist M83. I just got the CD for my birthday (thanks, Cassandra!) and I love the autumnal-looking nostalgic photography. The new album is called, appropriately, Saturdays=Youth. This collage reminds me of the cooler, hazier parts of summer, and coincidentally, also of my childhood. As a kid, I would play outside in the woods, finding interesting plants and twigs and making houses under the branches of low trees. We have a creek at home and to this day I find old pieces of bottles and mugs half-buried in the creek bed and I save them. Perhaps that's why the cut-out of the ceramic sieve found its way in there. Or perhaps I just needed something white to balance out that hot pink thing.

Some collages that I make for myself never turn out as good as the things I make for other people. But with this work I was determined to just enjoy whatever became of it. I tried to use both torn papers and cut papers together, in geometric shapes and abstract shapes. I noticed that in previous collages I've really stuck with geometry- squares on squares, straight lines, et cetera. Who doesn't love a good grid? But I think I can do more interesting things when I add strategically-placed blobs, or layers of photographs, and underlying layers. There's also some windshield glass and actual pebbles from Boston Harbor thrown (glued?) in there for good measure.

Cartoony Pants- The Sequel

A colleague in the music office liked my collage Cartoony Pants so much that she commissioned me for Cartoony Pants Part Deux! Nothing quite compares to the original, because how can you ever use the same pieces of paper over again when they're all found from magazines and clippings and old books? But I attempted a similar feel, this time with a frame with a depth of about 1.5". I also ran the images over the sides, including a lobster, whose claw you can only see poking out from the left-hand side, and a wierd Hungarian folksong that went something like "if you don't know how fat a mosquito is you are dumb as a horse, dumb as a horse, oh". Snappy tune. I think it turned out pretty great. I love that the pants are leaping over paper clips, and out of its backside comes a giant speech bubble.

As much as feels strange and frustrating to transition out of grad school and into a working world again (though I don't quite know what I'm doing yet) it also feels good to do things other than music all day! I've had more time to read actual books and make collages again. And on Labor Day, I can relax and write this post. I ran into a British man on the street this morning who asked me directions to the coffeeshops near me. He wondered why the streets were so quiet and everything was closed today, and assumed it was a national holiday or something. He doesn't usually get the pleasure of Labor Day, but then again, I don't get the pleasure of Guy Fawkes Night. Or being British, for that matter. Bollocks.

Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh

I made it through my first "Retreat" practice with The Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh today, marking my first singing with a real choir in almost exactly seven years! It was exhilarating, and I like a lot of the people there. I'm singing some sweet low Bass parts. We also did some Dalcroze Eurythmics. I'm most excited to be a part of John Adams' work, On the Transmigration of Souls, his gorgeous and haunting "memory space" response to 9/11.
Speaking of quotation marks, I also start a new "job" on Monday, as my last day in the music office was Friday. Sniffle...but also, hooray! I don't have to deal with some of those (unnamed) divas ever again. And I will be back to visit, as I'm writing the incidental music to one of the Drama School plays in February.
I start temping for two weeks, and/or until a "real" job may materialize for me downtown, which I'm really hoping will happen soon. But after hoping that I'd have a few days of pseudo-vacation while I look for work, I was psyched up for some relaxing, and I wish I was inside this collage right now! Perhaps I'd be enjoying cucumber sandwiches on a boat in the Bahamas, surrounded by a coral reef of precious stones. While butterflies waft by. That's one good way to enjoy unemployment. I made the collage for Kate, for whom it is totally suited.

In other news, Amy has an amazing steamer/wardrobe trunk in her apartment which she found on the street and it has a tag inside of it from its previous owner. The man, Percival Hunt, checked into the Pittsburgh Sports club exactly 100 years and 10 days ago. That's luggage longevity.

In other other news, I bought for the first time a pair of pants size 32 waist. I've been a slim 29 or 30 waist for 15 years! I think the one pair is a bit of an anomaly, but I can actually notice my body type changing. A little more hip fat, a little more arm muscle, but hopefully no beer belly any time soon.

Kites

I miss flying kites! Every spring my family would go to my aunt's backyard, which was a big open field with lots of wind. Everyone's hair would end up looking really windblown-glamorous for the rest of the day. The winds usually died before the kites got into the air, of course. Or it would be too windy, and all our kites would be torn into pieces. I miss those days.

Moby and a Bee

Abercrombie Suggestive

Gone are the days of the nearly-pornographic Abercrombie Quarterly. Now only billboards remain, with their shirtless hunks, reminding us of better days of old, of times gone by...you know, circa 1999. This was a time when one could convince one's mom to buy him/her a magazine full of naked people, selling clothes by not wearing any at all. Brilliance. The clothes are pretty awful, anyway, so it's better marketing to not show them in the first place.
This is an old collage in tribute of those days. Notice the strategically placed anemone with little bits of text that I found from in a UPS magazine!

Study in Shapes and Colors

Random colorful strips of paper with overlaid squares, and in the squares, circles.

New Handmade Cards

This one is nature-themed. Perfect for sending to grandmas. Which I proceeded to do.
Sewed some thread on vellum and layered some graphic ad underneath. What a bright idea. Har-Har.
This card uses vintage photos of historic architecture taken out of an old dusty book (thanks Amy!) The front is a Swiss castle. But the inside of the card is a cathedral with bright stickers that look like explosions!! Religion was never so exciting!!
Lots of dots on which I wired buttons. I liked the swoopy black and white font art at the bottom.
This one's great: a family of admirers looking at a giant fashionable Kirsten Dunst!