MAKING NOTES
The Composers In Their Own Words
Museums, Composers and Communities has been an unprecedented experience for all involved. Below, Museum Loan Network Director Lori Gross speaks with the three composers about the program's challenges and rewards.
Lori Gross: What is the one thing you wish you knew about museums before you embarked on this project?
William Banfield: I didn't know that museums had these huge vaults of things. I imagined that these things were housed somewhere, stored, taken care of, but it's an elaborate secret world that museums are about. That was fascinating. I'm glad I know about that, and I think that it helped me to think about my art as a piece that has to be preserved in a certain way. I couldn't appreciate that until I actually walked through with curators and saw how much detail goes into all of it.
Gabriela Lena Frank: There isn't really anything that I needed to know before the project, because I am being educated very well. That was part of the point - to bring the arts together and [bring] everybody together to learn from one another. But there are many parallels that can be drawn: things that you find in the music world you will find in the art world translated into a different lingo. That is a wonderful thing to be learning about as well.
Jim, you're the only one who has been really working with non-art objects. Do you have a different perspective about this?
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| Jim Cockey recording in Woodstock, N.Y. (Photo courtesy of the Museum Loan Network) |
Jim Cockey: Yes and no. In terms of the project and the process, I don't wish I had known more, because the collaborative process with the folks I was working with was really one of mutual self-discovery. The fact that I wasn't all that familiar with museums and museum people before going into the project made me very aware … of the uniqueness of the museum perspective as opposed to the musical perspective.
Museums, by and large, have a visual kind of orientation as opposed to music, which has an aural orientation. That awareness spawned the whole idea of what happened with the exhibit in Montana, where we created a sound booth that was primarily an aural experience in an otherwise visual environment. I think not knowing about museums really helped me become aware of that discovery process.
Gabriela, you're the only one who didn't go on the travel grant, so you were coming in after the objects had already been selected, which put you in a slightly different position. Do you think it would have been different had you had an opportunity to travel with the staff to actually pick the objects?
Frank: I'm not sure it would have been that different. Each of the three [compositions is] inspired in a different way by the whole residency. The first is a small work inspired by a specific painting.
The second, the piano concerto, is going to be entitled "Compadrazgo," [which is a Spanish word for] the godfather/godchild kind of relationship. It is really the bringing together of people. In this work, I'm talking about compadrazgo of the arts coming together, the compadrazgo between the piano and the orchestra. I'm going to pair up the piano with soloists from the orchestra.
I'm also thinking about the compadrazgo between the curators as they went on the travel grants. I'm so charmed and enchanted by the whole story they told me about the obvious friendship between them. It would have been fascinating had I gone along during the whole process thinking about the artwork, but I was already inspired. I'll be trying to capture the whole travel element in this work. It would have made it clear to me how the pieces were brought together, but I don't think it would have changed what caught my interest [and] what caught my imagination.
It sounds like you spent a lot of time speaking with the curators.
Frank: The field of Latin American studies is so huge. I've been privileged to be able to connect into a community of scholars and artist intellectuals who are not musicians, but where the common ground is some familiarity with Latin America. I would have killed for this residency for the free education and learning opportunities and for the access I have to these great minds. I feel that all I'm doing is writing a little bit of music, while they've been really lifting me up. So there is a lot of dialogue going on, definitely.
Cockey: Whatever scenario we find ourselves in creatively, we make use of it and go from there. But there is no question that the travel grant was integral to my process. A lot of the change of focus of the exhibit from Frederick [Billings] to the [entire] Billings family was because of the interactive dialogue between the curators and myself. As a composer, I was much more interested in the interpersonal relationships than in just a very large historical figure.
Frank: I think you have a kind of freedom when your imagination is the limit, but when you're trying to tie [a composition] to an object there are constraints or stimulants depending on how you look at it. It's not enough just to work with the content or the subject. There's got to be a reason why that music is inevitably tied to this painting.
Banfield: It would be nice for the pages of the score to become objects so that 50 years from now, when a child is coming to the museum, artistic processes and music become the objects and are put under glass too. A page from this wonderful score put under glass and installed in the museum as a representation of this collaboration would really leave the composer's mark.