for any number of singers and players of acoustic instruments.
Go to outside environments (urban, rural, hostile, benign) and record by any means (memory, written notations, tape recordings) the sound situations of those environments. Returning to an inside performance space at any later time, re-create, solely by means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of your memory devices (without additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations.
When using tape recorders as memory devices, wear headphones to avoid an audible mix of the recorded sounds with the re-created ones.
For performances in places other than Hartford, use the name of the place of performance in parentheses at the beginning of the title.
Perhaps a good way to start would be to ask what “memory space” means in the title.
Well, it’s an awkward title because it’s just putting together three words, three ideas in which I was interested. One was the idea of space, not so much articulating it as I did in “I am sitting in a room” or Vespers, but simply in asking players to go to an outside space and observe it. The word “memory” was used because the players would have to remember it as accurately as possible. I was interested in the time delay, the lag between when they went out to observe the space and when they came back to play it. What would happen in the meanwhile? What events or experiences would the players have that would change or influence or alter their perception of the original sounds? And the first word, “Hartford,” was simply the place in which the first performance took place.
I had had an unpleasant experience in downtown Hartford a few years before when filmmaker Takahiko limura and I went there for a concert. Two men had tried to steal an amplifier from the back seat of my car. We were having hamburgers in a luncheonette and could see them plainly through the plate glass window. It was broad daylight. To stop the crime, I simply walked across the street toward the car, slowly enough to give them time to move away from it gracefully. After that incident I began thinking, along with so many other people, about the frightening quality of our urban environments. I started thinking about survival in a hostile environment and how certain insects, fish, and animals imitate the physical characteristics of their surroundings in order to survive. Then I remembered the street musicians in Rome and how their playing changed one’s feelings about living in a city. So I mixed these ideas of animal mimicry and street music and decided to make a piece for players in which they would have to disguise themselves, go into an unbenign environment, and play in such a way as to blend in sonically and socially with the sounds around them. They would have to imitate the environmental sounds directly and cut the art out of their playing. Then I modified that idea and decided to make a safer piece with environmental sounds as source material.
How do the artistic re-creation and the urban environment relate to one another?
You mean how do the players relate to one another?
No, how does the re-created environment relate to the original environment?
Well, it’s supposed to be as faithful as possible to the original, insofar as it’s possible to re-create it on conventional instruments. I hoped that there would be spin-off from this procedure, I hoped the players would extend their technical resources, that is, extend what they were able to play on their instruments. For example, if a cellist were trying to imitate the sounds of automobile tires, and she heard a predominance of high harmonics, she would have to play sul ponticello or in some more unconventional way. She would then have learned something about the sound of tires and something about what she can do with a bow and a string. You see, I was asked to provide a piece for students at a conservatory, which pleased me. It had been a long time since I had written anything for instruments, and I thought it was too bad to be a composer and to have all these young people who want to play their instruments and not have anything for them to play, but the thought of composing a score in the traditional sense was, for me, out of the question. I was thinking that good players like to play difficult things, good players enjoy difficult tasks, and this would be an impossible task, but the attempt to accomplish it, if only partially, was an interesting thing, and a challenge that I thought these young players might find interesting.
There’s an odd correspondence between the artistic event and the urban environment. If you think of the urban environment as the threatening place, the artistic re-creation of the environment eliminates the threat.
Right.
So the artistic situation must be . . .
Yes, but you don’t need the camouflage anymore . . .
Right, because it’s a friendly place . . .
. . . because you’re in a concert hall.
How does the composer fit into this whole thing?
Well, my ideas about composition don’t have anything to do with the environments into which they went. If I had composed anything it would just get in the way. Also, I had to warn the players against improvising because that would get in the way, and I didn’t want anything to get in the way. I envisioned the piece for some future date when people’s brains would be more developed than they are now and they could remember all the audio events. It would be inconceivable to expect a player now to remember an hour’s worth of sound activity because there’s just too much going on, so I gave them alternatives. One was to make some kind of visual sketch, or to go several times to the same place and get a general idea, or to concentrate on just a few events. Of course, I really would have been pleased if they could re-create the whole thing. Another alternative was that they could record these events with a tape recorder, come back to the concert hall, and with earphones on, use the tape as an audio score. In other words, the player would play his or her instrument by imitating the tape. It struck me that tape is now memory; you can store information on tape just as you can store it in your brain, only it’s more accessible. So tape for me was a substitute for using your brain to remember.
If you strip away the urban environment, so you’re suddenly performing in the concert hall, it’s actually a visual transposition also. You take away the buildings and what you have is a clean white concert hall.
Actually we didn’t play the piece in a concert hall, we played it in an art gallery in which an artist and his students had made an environment with objects taken from the city, although he wasn’t doing what we were trying to do. I guess I wanted the players to learn something, and I thought that if they all played, it would be like looking at a map. Each of the players had gone to a different geographical place in the environment and when they came into the performance and played everything simultaneously, it was as if you had a composite sound map, a displaced remembrance of the downtown.
Do you expect the audience to feel differently about the downtown after hearing the piece?
Yes.
Are they actually experiencing the downtown in some way when they hear the piece?
They’re hearing it once removed, somewhat like a copy or a photograph is a more or less faithful image of a real thing, although the photograph is a real thing. The performance was a real thing too; it was a musical event.
In what way do the performers and the audience share the experience? Are they sharing the same experience, or are the performers telling something to the audience?
I don’t know about that. I was concerned, though, that the performers didn’t share anything among themselves before or during the performance, since they weren’t supposed to improvise. I wanted them to stick as closely as possible to their remembrance of the environment, so I isolated the players from one another. It was as if each of them were on an island but the audience could see and hear all those islands. The islands could be parts of the town, or places in the streets, and the audience would see and hear a composite of which the individual players were only a part. But even though they tried to play it as faithfully as they could, I’m sure that they influenced each other, because nobody’s absolutely perfect, and players are influenced by any sonic activity around them. And that situation I find all right, too.
Then how social is the idea of a performance of (Hartford) Memory Space? In what way is it a social event if the players are separate from one another in what they do?
Well, they do come together and they each have a part in a larger thing. People come and witness what these performers are doing and can go from one performer to another. You go from one street to the other and you hear different things at each street. If I ever made a recording of this piece, I would have microphone handlers walk around from one player to another so you would be able to visit one player at a time, each representing one part of town.
Did Ives’ music have anything to do with this idea?
Well, I suppose it’s somewhat like pieces such as Central Park in the Dark and The Housatonic at Stockbridge, but they’re programmatic. Art is in those. The idea is not to imitate, but to give an artistic impression of a particular place. My idea is to cut that art out and to just have the direct imitation.
Suppose the players hear music in the environment, do they try to re-create the music? What kind of music do they make out of music?
Well, we had that problem with conversation. The players said, “If we hear people talking, can we talk?” But the idea was to have the conventional instruments do all the work. The idea of what is conventional on an instrument came into play too, because what is conventional on an instrument changes all the time. Players now use electronic aids in performance, but I didn’t want them to do that. I wanted them to use what I think is almost an obsolete state of affairs, the instruments of the nineteenth-century orchestra. I wanted to find a way to put those in my art because so many electronic composers imitate conventional instruments with electronic devices and I was thinking of reversing the situation. I would have players imitate an environment which is pretty much electronic and mechanical by playing their own old-fashioned acoustic instruments.
But you’re not trying to imply that people can’t survive in the urban situation, even though you’ve taken away their powers of speech.
Well, if they imitated speech by speech then there wouldn’t be any medium displacement and I wanted (Hartford) Memory Space to have to do with that, with imitating one set of sounds with another. And the fact that I’m imitating a contemporary set of sounds with old instruments was a parallel to having a time lag between the players’ observation of the sounds and their performance of them. In both cases, it was a question of time delay.
It seems as if the purpose of the players, first in the urban situation and then in the concert hall or museum, is to become the environment.
Right. It’s the old story about prehistoric man, who when he was afraid of an animal, drew pictures of it on the wall and thereby controlled his fear of the animal, if not the animal itself. At first, most of the players said that they found the sounds of the city disagreeable, but by the end of the performance, they all agreed that they enjoyed them because they had to take them seriously. They learned to deal with them by playing them.