Category: Articles

Photo by Jack Vartoogian

Just about all the music I have written for dance (over 25 scores) can stand alone as concert music; and the brunt of the repertoire that I play in concert, both solo and with chamber groups and bands, is music that I originally composed for dance. Sometimes I need to do a few things to tweak the dance scores for concert performance, like adding or subtracting repeats or adapting the orchestration for what I have available, but those are more issues of arranging than composition.

The big difference between my dance and concert music lies in genesis and process. Dance is a collaborative medium and, as such, I have many head sessions with the choreographer before beginning work on a dance score. Often times the choreographer already has a strong dramatic, thematic, or structural idea from which to start. I begin by making several sketches of possible musical material, recording it, and presenting it to the choreographer (or playing it over the phone!). The choreographer, in turn, works with it and gives me feedback on what, if any, of the material is suitable; and perhaps even a videotape of the dancers rehearsing with the music. With this in mind, I go back and work alone, continuing to develop the material we’ve agreed upon. With a really good working relationship, this give-and-take continues throughout the whole process, with neither of us getting too far ahead of the other. While the choreographer never offers musical suggestions, they will often ask for a change of direction in a place or way I might never have thought of, and that is an exhilarating and liberating part of the process for me.

Hear a RealAudio sample of Guy Klucsevsek’s newest recording

Watch a clip from one of Wing/Prayer with music by Guy Klucevsek

Photo courtesy Paul Dresher

I have three different approaches in writing for dance: 1) works that are primarily recorded; 2) works to be performed by my own electro-acoustic ensemble; and 3) acoustic chamber works for other ensembles. In all cases I feel a great freedom to use composition for dance as a testing ground for developing new ideas and typically, some of ideas first developed in the dance form will beg for further exploration and will end up in works (recorded or performed) that don’t require the dance in any way. In fact, this commerce between performance media has gone both ways. In 1984 a work composed for the San Francisco Symphony, re:act:ion, had the main element of one section developed in a vastly different (but still readily recognizable) fashion for a small electro-acoustic group in Shelf Life (1987) for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. More typical would be the circumstances that yielded Double Ikat (1990), a work for the Abel/Steinberg/Winant trio. This score began as the work Loose The Thread by choreographer Brenda Way and ODC San Francisco. The form of this 30-minute collaboration was largely determined by the choreography. After the dance work was completed, I took the most promising material and recomposed it into Double Ikat, a two-movement, 23-minute work. In the process, a number of sections were thrown away and the work was completely reformed with new transitions and with much more development within each section.

Watch a video clip from The Gates with music by Paul Dresher

Photo by David Coulter

Yes, I would say that gender has played a part in shaping my work as an artist in general, and my writing and arranging in particular. Gender roles were a curiosity even when I was a little girl. A line of feminist women in my father’s family, artists, and gardeners, had taken male names. My great-grandmother called herself “David” (“Granny Boy” to her grandchildren) and named her own daughter—my grandmother—”Carroll,” spelled the male way. I found this fascinating, daring, and romantic. To me they were like spies, secret agent women in a masculine world. And as a kid, I learned to read upside-down, in a manner of speaking. With books like Catcher in the Rye and all the rest, where the main protagonists were boys, I just read them as if the heroes were girls, flipping all the gender roles in my mind. In retrospect, I think Mary Martin‘s Peter Pan also gave me the idea to do this. The habit stayed with me, transmogrifying in various ways.

As a matter of course, I tweak the lyrics to songs in the standard repertoire to reverse the gender. I try to be subtle about it most of the time, priding myself on a notion that most people would find it all very natural and wouldn’t notice a thing. In “Have You Met Miss Jones,” boy-meets-girl becomes girl-meets-boy, as “he” says: ‘Miss Jones, I’m a man who understands you’re a girl who must be free'” (instead of “you’re a girl who understands I’m a man who must be free”). I enjoy being sort of devilish in this one, teasing him, still having him call her a “girl,” even as he tries to show his raised consciousness by acknowledging that she might want to remain unfettered. It gives me a perspective on the lyric that I can relate to, some nuance, some ambiguity. On other tunes, a lyric tweak will just be to make the roles more equal, rather than reversed. In “Alone Together,” I say “we’re not too proud to see, together, we’re strong as long as we are free together.” Clinging together doesn’t make us strong. It’s seeing that we can be separate and yet bonded that gives the relationship strength. I do this to so many songs, I can’t begin to count. I wouldn’t be able to sing a lot of the great standards if I didn’t, and I really love singing them. I’m not the only one who does it. Nancy King‘s “Mountain Greenery” (on her Impending Bloom album) is a great example. I love it when she sings, obvious grin on her face: “And if you’re good, I’ll search for wood, so you can cook, while I stand looking.”

In my own pieces, gender comes into play in a variety of ways. I wouldn’t say that I necessarily set out consciously to go against type or tap into archetypes, but once the opportunity presents itself, I’ll often take it on. My “Walrus” piece (on the Soulmates album) is told in the voice of siren, taunting this big fat male animal to leave the security of his safe shore, where he scavenges old cigars and fish-heads thrown by dockworkers. She beckons him to fish with the mermaids in the deep uncharted female ocean. It’s not meant to be a morality narrative exactly, but some feminine imagery and perhaps the suggestion that it might not be so dangerous in that woman-underworld after all.

Most recently, I did some sex-shifting in a couple of Ferlinghetti‘s poems in composing for a project entitled A Mumbai of the Mind (co-composed with Richard Oppenheim, all settings of Ferlinghetti poems). I had to screw up my courage to tell Ferlinghetti what I’d done to his “Poet Like an Acrobat” piece. The poem grabbed me because it describes so beautifully the high-wire act of creative expression, particularly for singers, who work without the “net” provided by a physical instrument apart from the human body. But I just had to change the gender. Ferlinghetti was very gracious about it, but at first he was concerned about what I’d do with the image of “beauty,” who stands waiting in the center of the poem, as the poet takes a death-defying leap to approach her. My response was simple: beauty is a man. He was satisfied with this, but it’s striking that it didn’t occur to him at first. You really don’t find too many poems or lyrics where “beauty” is a man. It was a pearl, I think. The poem is amazing.

The role of singer is so strongly gendered, that it sometimes reads as “woman” as much as “voice,” especially in jazz. In a recent project of John Cage‘s compositions (La Faute de la Musique), it was fun to stand the usual roles on their head a little. The score to the recording’s title track “La Faute de la Musique,” for instance, is just text with graphic alterations. My arrangement had the instrumentalists all “singing” the words with their instruments; even Bill Goodwin‘s drums “sang” the lyric. They did it beautifully, and in varied ways, sometimes melismatic, sometimes syllabic. For me, working in a context where instruments functioned as interpreters of text was a gender-bending experience.

Sometimes lyrics have nothing to do with it. I used the old seditious bebop move of writing a new line on an old set of changes in writing “Twin Sisters.” The A-sections are just a new melody with essentially the same melodic rhythm as “Four Brothers”; the bridge is a bit different. It allowed me to find a comfortable aesthetic space vis-‡-vis the composition, even though it’s just a scat piece.

In the jazz profession, I’m constantly reminded that I’m a woman and a singer, for better or worse. It’s certainly not the only thing, nor is it the most important thing. It’s simply there. It can be fun, or it can be a drag. So, in my art, I try to have some fun with it. A lot of us do, I think, as a matter of sanity and survival.

Photo by Jack Vartoogian

In the music world that I travel in, composition and improvisation are completely entwined and most often I have fielded questions about how a feminine perspective might effect my sound as a jazz soloist. It’s new to me to think about what gender factors might be at work in my composition without a relationship to my playing as well.

Jazz players are so rooted in the definition of a personal sound that it is almost impossible to imagine the music without the personality. I am a spontaneous composer and a compositional improviser. Female jazz saxophone role models were not present in my music background but female vocalists certainly were (Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, etc). There’s no question in my mind that early listening to these women’s voices shaped the expressive quality in my voice as a saxophonist and that that experience resonates differently with me than with male players.

With the exception of one female music composition teacher in high school, all my composition mentors were men. In the absence of immediate role models I gravitated toward drawing inspiration for compositions from women that I admired in other disciplines (sports, dance, politics, etc). I’ve written pieces about top fuel racecar driver Shirley Muldowney and Olympic ice dancer Jane Torvill.

I became a composer because it was as natural as breathing to me from the start but also because as far as I could see then the male-dominated jazz world didn’t embrace women instrumentalists as collaborators. I could work if I became a band leader/ composer with my own musical vision so I started performing original music from the very beginning of my career. And then it wasn’t long before I realized that it was necessary to start my own record label (Outline Records) to document and distribute the music as well. That’s about the time that I arrived in New York City.

In looking back at myself during those years I don’t think I was entirely aware of the social pressures that contributed to the decisions that I was making for myself. I had a passion to be an improvising musician and figured that I had to be just as creative about how I improvised my career. The end result of that early commitment to independent thought was the development of a body of original music that has guided my thinking up until today. Out-of-the-box thinking led to commissions for the NASA Art Program, the National Air and Space Museum‘s Einstein Planetarium, the Houston Astrodome, the American Composers Orchestra, the Pilobolus Dance Company, the Houston Texas Museum of Fine Art‘s Jackson Pollock collection, and others. I realize now that those projects and my present creative life are an unmistakable result of who I am as a woman navigating the music world.

Photo by Stephanie Berger

I am a singer first—then a composer. Singing is the direct and immediate expression of my experience. My voice finds form inside my body, so, at that fundamental level, gender forms my music. To quote a Joel Forrester tune that I often sing, “I am what I am and that’s all.”

My voice is a product of classical vocal training, which I continue to pursue today. I didn’t set out to become a jazz singer. My music grew out of relationships with jazz musicians because they were the most capable of playing my musical ideas. Early performances developed song by song without a stylistic or musical agenda. I have been as inspired by Laura Nyro, Jimi Hendrix, Merle Haggard, Puccini, or Mozart, as I have been by Abbey Lincoln, Coltrane, Mingus, or Miles.

I sing to tell stories. Song is a distilled story, corralled by melody and time. I want to express my cultural location, historical time and point of view. My life, imagined experiences, laments, furies, and desires become song.

I compose two distinct kinds of works. I call one type morphed tunes and the other straight-ahead songwriting. The morphed (or recombinant) tunes are assembled by layering multiple melodic and lyrical sources. By using overlay and collage with diverse sources, employing their individual nuances, and manipulating the assonance and dissonance occurring between them, the original materials become juxtaposed in ways that create a new composition. New works spring from the fragments of others through this kind of sampling or mash up idea (see Neil Strauss’s “Spreading by the Web: Pop’s Bootleg Remix,” NY Times, 5/9/2002).

I draw from jazz, popular, classical, and traditional American folk motifs. Removing a section of music from its original context and placing it in a new relationship shifts the thing itself. An example of this would be a piece I call “Killer/Run.” In this work, I introduce the first 16 bars of Benny Golson‘s “Killer Joe,” having overlaid the guitar and drum riff from Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” On top of the mix I sing the melody and lyrics from Credence Clearwater Revival‘s “Run Through the Jungle,” along with some of my own melodies and lyrics. Then “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is sung over an improvised instrumental section. The resulting montage creates a cacophony of recollection. The listener engages with familiar cadences, recalling their own personal experiences and thereby addressing the conflicting emotions of war.

I have always been intrigued by the deep feelings stirred and called forward with the stimulation of memory. For me, growing up as a girl in the rock-n-roll culture of the late ’70s, I often felt outside of music and objectified by popular song. One way I have specifically engaged this is by changing a song’s gender pronoun or singing a tune in the first person. That simple action shifts meaning and reflects considerably on the historical content of the song. An example of this is my treatment of the Jagger/Richard‘s tune “Ruby Tuesday.” Singing the song in the first person makes it mine—about me—and it becomes an anthem of personal freedom:

Ask me why I need to be so free?
I’m gonna tell you it’s the only way to be.
I just won’t be chained,
To a life where nothing’s gained,
And nothing’s lost,
At such a cost.

Say goodbye to Ruby Tuesday.
You can’t hang a name on me.
When I change with every new day,
You’re gonna miss me.

The listener recognizes the lyrics, but the shift draws them into a new intimacy with the material. I am curious about the way songs give solace, incite a group, or define a position. In my straight-ahead songwriting, I am currently working on a new song cycle: the working title is Breaking Tradition. It is a cycle of compositions drawn largely from American folk and operatic musical motifs, employing only whispers of source material and hinting at familiar songs. I am attempting to relate hymns and anthems to pop and love songs—how the spiritual and corporal, the sacred and secular intersect—in order to expose the paradoxes and contradictions that abound in cultural metaphors and myths.

One song I have completed for Breaking Tradition is called “What I Want,” which moves from a jaunty 4/4 country pop feel into an anthemic æ section. It investigates the timeless well of ceaseless yearning and never ending want—not explored as a sexual theme, typical of a female pop song, but as something common to the human condition. Want, and discovering our lack of power over that want, is a right of passage from childhood to adulthood. I wanted the voice to become the rhythm section as the soloists improvise over a repeated lyric. The voice (word and sound) is the frame of the tune—inverting the usual role and position of the vocal lyric as supported by instrumental elements. This change of roles between voice and instrument makes the tune become, in a way, what it is describing.

Song can capture beauty, declare grief, or profess yearning for communion. I am searching through songs to reveal a new story, one with deep roots into the honored soul of the past

Photo by Joerg Steinmetz

Gender has definitely had an effect on my compositional voice—which I only came to realize gradually in conjunction with my research about women composers in jazz.

What becomes the “mainstream” in jazz—and virtually all other kinds of music—has primarily been determined by men. Women and men tend to be guided towards different socially predetermined choices of instruments and musical styles. Often, women musicians grow into jazz without a peer group and are not encouraged to explore professional careers outside of classical music. This places many women outside the mainstream. It also tends to encourage other—and often very interesting—forms of artistic expression, adding significantly to the multiple forms of jazz-based music played today. The concept of a mainstream seems to shift towards a multitude of musical expression, reflecting today’s broader understanding of gender. We have moved from the classic dichotomy of maleness and femaleness towards a variety of ways women and men identify with gender.

While I was growing up in Oldenburg, Germany, the music education available to me took the form of classical lessons. Trained on the recorder and then piano, I dropped those lessons at age 15 and began studying the music I was more attracted to—at first, folk and rock; later jazz and other forms of improvisation. Local musicians who played in rock or jazz bands around town told me that you “can’t learn how to improvise.” Fascinated by the school rock band, it didn’t even occur to me that I—as a girl—could have sat down at that drum set. Listening to Jethro Tull, I started to learn the flute, playing along with Ian Anderson’s solos on the record. But without any context (like a band or a workshop), I eventually stopped doing it.

When I was 21, a jazz workshop with pianist Ann Ballester and guitarist Mimi Lorenzini in southern France opened up whole new musical worlds for me. I realized there actually were methods to learn how to play jazz. Having a woman pianist as my instructor added significantly to my new enthusiasm.

I subsequently studied music education in Kassel, Germany, one of the few universities to offer a broad range of classes, including a big band and group improvisation. There was only one jazz harmony/arrangement class available and I was the only student to finish an entire big band arrangement. However, it was never performed by the big band and I was not encouraged to continue writing. I felt that this absence of support had to do with my being a woman. Giving my work public exposure would have meant taking me seriously as a musician. The university environment didn’t seem to be ready to do that.

Several years later, I studied with Joanne Brackeen in New York. I had long been fascinated by her music and it was my first time studying with a woman musician since my experience in France. Her initial assignment was to have me finish some musical drafts and a week later I had completed two jazz compositions that are still being played today. I wrote a series of original pieces and then Brackeen recommended that I practice more “traditional” writing and do a “standard-type tune.” I couldn’t do it to my satisfaction. What came out was a harmonically modern piece in standard A-A-B-A form. Anything closer to a jazz standard felt like a clichÈ—stealing, copying, plagiarizing music that I didn’t consider my own no matter how much I loved it.

While working on my dissertation, “It’s Gotta Be Music First: Zur Bedeutung, Rezeption und Arbeitssituation von Jazzmusikerinnen” (“On the Impact, Perception and Working Situation of Women Jazz Musicians,” now published by Coda, 2000), I studied other women’s biographies, their approaches to music and composition. Many women instrumentalists play instruments less common in jazz: high woodwinds and strings instead of rhythm section and brass instruments.

It has been my observation that a high percentage of women composers have developed strong individual voices and incorporated a variety of stylistic elements. For example, a number of big bands composers, such as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Carla Bley, Maria Schneider, Anita Brown, or the United Women’s Orchestra in Europe, have each developed very distinct sounds. This seems to indicate that lacking peer groups, traditions, or a mainstream can lead to different artistic results.

In my own approach to improvisation and composition, this realization opened up a new set of choices. Like many women musicians, I felt that not having grown up with jazz from an early age presented a strong musical disadvantage and catching up on musical experience and technical skills seemed almost impossible. Instead, feeling that it’s “okay” not to become a mainstream player, finding a lot of music outside of the mainstream and significant contributions by women has helped to free me from the initial pressure to ground my work exclusively in the jazz tradition.

Today, my music is informed by a larger set of role models, inspirations, and settings than during my first years studying jazz. I experiment with different styles of jazz, including European and American forms of free improvised music, and listen to various contemporary composers and improvisers from both the “downtown” and the “uptown” scenes. Currently, my compositions tend to use frameworks for improvisation other than jazz tunes written for specific ensembles.

For example, at the Music OMI artists’ residency last summer, I did a conceptual piece for sixteen musicians which played to everybody’s strengths ranging from jazz to computer music, including a theremin, tabla, and turntables. At the moment, I am writing some pieces for an upcoming recording session on the CIMP label for my quartet, a group that largely plays free improvised music, and am also preparing music for a trio performance with piano, synthesizers, live electronics, and voice. During this year’s documenta, the world’s largest avant-garde art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, I curated an international collaboration between eight musicians of very different musical backgrounds from the U.S., Germany, Eritrea, India, and Afghanistan. Although I use different settings and concepts, my background as a jazz player is always an integral part of both my improvisation and my compositions.

Photo by Sandra Eisner

When asked if gender has had an influence on my compositions, my reaction was of surprise—surprise that I hadn’t been asked that question before, not in 20 years of performing. I’ve been interviewed by the press, radio, television, and during panel discussions. There have always been questions regarding the experience and difficulties of being a woman in the jazz profession, but not about the ways gender might affect my compositional style. I hadn’t thought much about it.

In reflecting on that question, I will respond in two parts. I can’t say that I’ve ever thought about it consciously, nor that I have any specific ideas about how gender affects my writing style. I have never sat down and tried to write anything that I thought would reflect my gender or tried to write a piece that would have “feminine qualities.” I’ve never thought about masculine or feminine qualities of music, but instead about color, tension, beauty, contrast, density, transparency, intensity, tranquility, groove, feel, etc.

For example, my most recent writing projects have been for my septet. Many of the pieces that I’ve written for this group have been influenced by Bartók, Stravinsky, and Ives. From the conceptual to the specific, each piece incorporates an idea into the jazz idiom, whether it be rhythmic, motivic, metric, or through orchestration. I use this as a way to expand the form for improvisation. Other influences include context, hearing something new that I want to learn about or explore, visual art, and other musicians who inspire me.

The second part of the answer is simply that my compositions (hopefully) reflect who I am, my experiences, feelings, and musical tastes. Since I’m obviously a woman, it’s probable that my experiences as a woman are reflected in my “world view,” shaping who I am and my music in turn.

Photo courtesy Also Productions, Inc.

Gender doesn’t have anything to do with my compositions. Well, not that I know of. My music comes from how I see my life, how I see other people, nature, my experiences, things that I see and think about. You could be either male or female to do it that way. So, I don’t have much to say about it.

As far as I know, I’ve never lost a gig for being a female. I was always encouraged and I never felt slighted or anything negative. Never. I’ve had some people come up and say, “Man, can you play? Are you good?”—you know, just messing with me. And I’ll just say to them, “Well, I’ve been playing a long time. I should be by now.”

I was encouraged to compose in the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) by members who were in there before me. I was not one of the charter members, but I had moved to Chicago in ’63 and joined in ’65 or ’66, right after it was organized. I was playing in a trio in a club with the drummer Ajaramu ñ he brought me into the AACM—and I started hearing other things. Ajaramu would always say to play what you hear.

There was so much going on in the AACM—a beehive of activity—and you got information. It was very, very stimulating. I had not been outgoing musically, but I was encouraged by Muhal Richard Abrams to play the music that they had and then I realized that I could write from watching what others were doing.

I saw the musicians making their own—I won’t say styles, because it wasn’t styles—but they were creating, opening up new territories of writing. You don’t have to follow a formula of eight or sixteen bars, or have a piano, bass, and drums. You could do all sorts of things. Everybody had a different way of writing music: [Anthony] Braxton, [Wadada] Leo Smith, Roscoe [Mitchell], Muhal, and Kalaparusha [Maurice McIntyre]. They were also drawing and painting. And I thought, “Oh, music can be made all sorts of ways.” I realized I could do that, too, that I could write and that what I wrote would work. It was open to any kind of creativity that you could think of. That made the music grow.

That’s what was so great about the AACM. It created new methods. That’s about the best way I can describe it. But we created that organization in order to have a place to play, to express ourselves. Also we had a program for underprivileged children, you know, free music lessons. Some of us were dying musically in Chicago because the places were closing down, so we created our own space. Otherwise, we would have had nowhere to work or play.

Being female did not make a difference. There were other female members in there from time to time. A couple of piano players, dancers, singers. There weren’t a whole lot of us, but we were interested. I can’t say why there weren’t more females. Nobody was turned down if they were creative and they wanted to belong. You know, in a lot of these musical organizations, there are often more men than women. It’s just happened that way. There are other women in there now. You know, I’m still a member. It’s still going on.

My compositions come from the creative spirit, my ancestors, the angels, and other spiritual beings. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s very difficult when you have to sit down and just write something. For instance, I have an eight-voice choir. (Originally, it was sixteen, but it’s eight for touring.) I was getting ready to brush my teeth and three little motifs came to me. I had a lyric coloratura soloist and one of them was a melody that came for her with a snare drum accompaniment in a military style. In another song I was writing, I had wanted to use all the names of the creator: God, Hosanna, Jehovah. I had already started writing that particular song, but things came to me that were very, very simple and effective. So, I let go of the one that I had started writing, the one I had been just making myself write, and went with the feeling that came. Another time, I was sleeping and a whole song came to me. I got up and wrote it down. It’s called “Blessings.”

I believe that there are other beings around us like our spiritual guides. Sometimes when you’re trying to create, you get stuck and you think I don’t know how I’m going to do it. They’ll help you.