Bodies making music: composer Anne Hege

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The Babblery
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Bodies making music: composer Anne Hege
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“It’s really kind of transcendental, this way that a group can come together to bring meaning to sound through our bodies.”

Composer Anne Hege practices a rarefied profession. Not only does she compose “New Music” (which non-fans might think of as “modern classical”), but she composes Avant Garde music. And not only does she compose opera, but she scores them for laptop instruments.

You may be confused. But not for long!

I approached Anne hoping that she’d be able to use words as a conduit to help listeners understand what she does and why she does it. I got that, and more. Anne and I spoke at length not just about her compositions, but also about singing, the body, technology, community, and why we all need music now more than ever. She speaks eloquently about technology as a tool, in her case a tool that builds an instrument that connects with a human body to make sound.

With selections from her compositions to illustrate, we explore the importance of making music with our bodies. We explore the themes of grieving together, exploring together, and taking risks. We also talk about her “day job,” as the conductor of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, and the importance of singing together. [Click for transcript]

“It’s so important to make music with electronics where the body is empowered, where the body is like a big part of it. It’s a deep commitment for me as an artist that I’m not making music where our bodies disappear, that disembodied perfect music. I want deeply grounded, bodied music where I feel the presence of this union of spirit, mind, and body.”

Anne’s work:

Music:

  • Performed by Peninsula Women’s Chorus under the direction of Anne Hege: “Suscepit Israel” by J.S.Bach and “Os Justi” by Anton Bruckner
  • Performed by Sideband: excerpts from “From the Waters” by Anne Hege 
  • Performed by the Stanford Laptop Orchestra: Excerpts from “The Furies” by Anne Hege

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Bodies making music with composer Anne Hege

[00:00:00] Anne Hege: When you’re grieving, you know, a lot of people ask you to talk about it and I just didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to move. I Felt like I could not sound, but I really wanted to move with people and make sound, but not be the sounder myself.

Segment 1: What is New Music?

[00:00:42] Voiceover: I’m your host, Suki Wessling. If you’ve listened to the last few episodes of The Babblery, you might feel a sense of whiplash, because this episode is not about politics. It’s not about issues. There is no problem to be solved here.

[00:01:01] This episode is about music. And not only that, it’s about vocal music, and even further, it’s about avant garde music. If your finger is hovering over the pause icon, hang on. Pause before you pause.

[00:01:16] Anne Hege: Hello, my name is Anne Hege and I am a composer and creator of, operas for laptop orchestra and live voices.

[00:01:29] Voiceover: I find that some musicians I’ve spoken to, especially composers of “serious” music, are not very good at using words as a conduit for understanding their music. They often say things like, just listen, but that’s not terribly helpful for people who don’t know what they’re listening to.

[00:01:47] When I reached out to Anne, I hoped she’d be able to create that conduit, and I think she has. The first challenge I offered her was to explain what she does to an audience who might not even know that her corner of the music world exists. Some people refer to it as modern classical, but people in the field might term it new music. Let’s hear Anne explain it.

What Anne does

[00:02:11] Anne Hege: When I’m asked what I am, I say I’m a musician, so that it’s nice and broad, and in the field I do a lot of things. So, I say that my day job is as the artistic director of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, so I am a choral director, and, my passion projects are my composition projects where I write music and create music and perform music for voices almost always, but also including electronic instruments and building my own instruments.

[00:02:47] Voiceover: So at heart, I suppose you could say that Anne is a musical inventor, definitely an experimenter.

[00:02:53] During this episode, we’ll delve into what she does and connect her musical experience to the wider question of why we make music with our bodies. Because her work is so physical and visual, you can find links to videos in the show notes for this episode. I hope you enjoy the music and the conversation.

[00:03:10] Anne Hege: I like thinking of music often as a kind of, um, apprentice lineage line. So, um, you really know a lot about composers based on who they study with and kind of the schools that they come from. So I really have come from kind of a line of the avant garde. I did my undergraduate at Wesleyan and worked with Ron Kuivila who did a fair amount of electronic work. And I went on to study at Mills College, which is here in the Bay Area.

[00:03:45] And it, It really is the home of experimental new music and kind of the bastion of experimentalism for the United States, in my opinion. When I was at Mills, I got to study with, Alvin Curran and Pauline Olivares, who introduced me to deep listening and this practice of, of thinking of music as both sounding and listening and thinking of those as kind of equal parts, and I got to work with Chris Brown, who does a lot with, um, electronics.

[00:04:19] And I, also worked with Fred Frith with a lot of improvisation. So there’s kind of this world there at Mills where all these things were intersecting. And so that was kind of a starting point for this idea of, Um, kind of new music being all those things woven together. I think most important to me was this idea that it was always an experiment, music for me is not about necessarily creating something beautiful, but asking questions and kind of coming into these questions through sound and thinking about what are the ways that we are together as people, and what does music model about the ways that people gather together, and what can we learn about our bodies and ourselves through sound and through making sound.

[00:05:13] So there’s a way in which I really love the experimental kind of questioning like through line into music that I think you find in American experimentalism, which I don’t think is as present in what I would consider classical music in its frame. I really had the privilege of going on to study at Princeton with Dan Trueman, who started the Laptop Orchestra, which is a kind of, um, an orchestra for laptops.

[00:05:44] And it was just, and really digging into, uh, instrument building. And that, um, was just mind blowing for me in this kind of merging of electronics and ensemble work, which, I really, at the root of it all, I’m interested in groups of people together. That’s, that’s often the through line of, many things that I do.

[00:06:17] There are people exploring what electronics is with a group, but, um, the laptop orchestra is a very special space to do that with because of some of its unique properties with kind of individual, speakers for each station, and the ability to be really musical to have this listening that can happen from each player.

Experimentation in New Music

[00:06:44] Suki Wessling: You separated what you do out of the classical tradition using this word experimental.

[00:06:52] Anne Hege: Mm.

[00:06:53] Suki Wessling: What is experimentation and what’s the what’s the root of it in human behavior and what’s the value of it in music?

[00:07:01] Anne Hege: Mm. I think the underlying purpose of the process is important to define. So I often think that in classical music. There’s a purpose of recreating a score in the way that it was intended originally. There’s an intention of beauty and form as found in that style, often a perfection of technique.

[00:07:30] And I think the values of experimentation are really different. So often, um, beauty is not at the center. There’s often questions of extending technique, exploring new technique, kind of broadening the capacity of the player or broadening what music even means, like the idea of, well, if listening and sounding are equal, maybe there’s a lot of silence and maybe so like forerunners, you think of John Cage, maybe the whole piece is silence, which is really the sounds that always surround us. And maybe, there’s different ways of communicating with our players through different kinds of scoring.

[00:08:19] For me, experimentalism, at the root of it is, like, it’s this idea of adventure, of, of the desire to explore, the desire to expand, uh, curiosity of, of figuring out a new way of being, or a new way of connecting, or a new way of communicating. And possibly even new values for what music making can mean. To me, there’s a lot of risk. I often think that for me, music is really entwined with vulnerability and risk taking. And when I find something moving in music, it is often when I am seeing a big risk. There is something about people being on stage and, you know, performing and attempting something that is like, that the technique is almost impossible, or that, you know, like in computer music and early networking where systems might fail, or where people are being asked to try to hear something that is almost inaudible, that these, these risks and kind of the ask of extension of both the player and of the audience to me are, are really engaging.

What do we hear when we listen to music?

[00:09:42] Anne Hege: I also feel that that engagement is what I look for in music. Like I, I just finished a piece with Volti, a professional chorus in San Francisco. And an audience member came up to me and was like, just tell me more. What exactly was happening there? And I had written a piece for Volti with Laptop Orchestra. So with, um, these four station setups and this rope that they move and they sing and they move the rope at the same time and in different sections, the rope controls different kinds of sounds. But the excitement of his desire to understand and his curiosity, he wasn’t lost, he wasn’t like upset. It was just this like desire to know.

[00:10:35] I also feel that when I, when I watch often New Music where I’m thinking, what, what exactly, what, how is this working and, and what, what am I hearing and, and, there, there’s something about that part of listening that I love, that kind of curiosity engagement that, that for me is, both what I want to offer and what I want to experience when I see music or hear music.

[00:11:04] Voiceover: You are listening to a piece called From the Waters. Anne Hege’s music may be unusual and avant garde, but her intent is not to distance the audience. In fact, she says that she sees a connection between what she does and the popular music of today.

Connection with popular music

[00:11:45] Anne Hege: Because people have so much interaction with popular music in the radio, and there’s so much electronics and actually pretty complicated use of electronics, of filtering, of effects, of kind of ways that people are interacting with the production of the music itself, that I’m often amazed at how much people really do hear when they’re listening to music. They often put classical and popular in different spaces. The other space that they’re quite trained in is I just went and saw Wicked, and there’s a moment where they cut off, they really cut off the reverberation of the main singer, so that it’s as if she’s in a dry space, and it’s this really moving moment. You feel her, like she moves outside and you can feel that there’s no longer this reverberation of a, of an indoor space. And, they use reverb in that movie in really interesting ways on the sung voice. And I, I feel like people, they maybe can’t articulate it, but they do hear it and they do notice it.

[00:13:08] And so when, when it comes to electronic music, I actually feel that people are, there’s a lot there that are inroads into something that people are more familiar with. Um, I really care. I, I’m a strong believer in caretaking for both my audience and my performers. Nobody likes to be lost. I, I, I’ve known a lot of other composers who, you know, really have opinions of, Well, I’m just going to do what I want to do. And I don’t care if people get it or not. I do care if people get it. And, and I also feel that there’s things that I can do as a composer to help pull people in and to help give them information about what is happening. So for example, a long time ago, I, and I still play it. I built this instrument that’s a live looping tape machine.

[00:14:24] So it’s a cassette tape loop that runs around and I sing in at one, at a record head here. And it has one end that’s a playback point here and a playback point on the other side. So it’s, there’s no computer there. It’s just the tape. And there’s a generational thing. So most people who are maybe 35 and older understand what a cassette tape is.

[00:14:54] And the minute they see that they really understand what’s happening. There’s this real like wonder of, Oh, Oh, and they can hear me slow the tape and they can hear me kind of play around with the playback. They can hear the feedback that’s coming cause there’s speakers that then lead back and create this loop. And there’s this way in which I’m really trying to guide, like You can put this together. And then you can listen. I’m giving you enough, information about how this instrument is constructed, that most times people aren’t lost and that once they get that, then they listen, they listen in this really curious way.

[00:16:23] I have often been, quite pleasantly surprised with how much people already know and this kind of curiosity about this space. in my laptop opera work, one of my main goals was that these projects, especially the first one, that it stands as an opera. That if somebody is used to going to classical music and used to going to opera, they can come to my opera and say, that was an opera.

[00:16:48] And that if somebody’s used to going to, laptop orchestra concerts and, instrument building concerts and just electronic music concerts, they could say, Oh, that was a laptop orchestra piece. And I do think it hit that goal that both communities felt comfortable and that they could then see kind of an intro into the other space.

[00:17:14] Suki Wessling: I love how you, you had this experience listening, watching a movie that I think most people without any sort of musical training would have reacted viscerally to the sudden lack of reverb. But you understood the mechanism of it, which is really interesting to me how, how that works.

[00:17:53] Anne Hege: Yeah, it’s, it makes movie watching really fun because they’re often doing, they’re really guiding our listening in, in really interesting ways. They’re guiding our eyes. It’s like they’ll start, you’ll start to hear them pan sounds or you’ll hear them, um, augment the sound. I just saw this crazy movie called The Substance and they do all this stuff with mouth noise, which makes most people crazy, but you know, they, they hyper, hyper augment this kind of chewing and, you know, it’s kind of this, it creates this disturbing effect, but also it’s combined with these real closeups of these faces.

[00:18:33] Suki Wessling: Uh huh.

[00:18:33] Anne Hege: And new music has been doing that also for a long time. So it’s these really interesting intersections between kind of the popular and experimental space.

[00:18:44] Suki Wessling: Yeah, it’s interesting how, how the experimental starts in these more rarefied sort of situations and then filters in because I think partly because there are those people who inhabit both spaces. There’s an overlap and there’s also how things filter into our culture and become part of what people expect and understand, even though at first it’s, you know, it’s enough to make people storm out in anger.

[00:19:12] Anne Hege: Yes.

[00:19:14] Suki Wessling: As, you know, it happened in, in the past with innovators.

[00:19:18] Anne Hege: Yep.

[00:19:19] Voiceover: You’ve been hearing Anne’s piece From the Waters in the background. In modern culture, we’re used to listening to recorded music, but I urge you to watch Anne’s music as well. You can find links to videos at Babblery. com. When we return from the break, we’ll talk about how this music is created. And lest you think Anne’s just pressing a button on a laptop, we’ll hear how the musicians actually physically interact with laptop instruments to create sounds with their bodies.

[00:19:46]

Segment 2: Technology and music

[00:20:15] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling, Anne Hege writes operas. And most of us probably think we know what those are. Vaguely, at least. There’s an orchestra in a pit, and singers on the stage.

[00:20:26] The singers perform quite mannered music often in amazing costumes with intricate sets, and they tell a story. Some of these aspects of opera are found in Anne’s Laptoperas, but at the same time, Anne’s work is fundamentally different. So I asked her to start at the beginning and walk us through what a Laptopera is and how the music is produced.

[00:20:53] Anne Hege: The laptop orchestra is an invention of Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, who were two professors at Princeton University, one in music, one in computer science. And was based on Dan Trueman’s work on these hemispherical speakers.

[00:21:12] So it’s a speaker that’s like a, actually Stanford built some out of, um, salad bowls. So it’s a speaker that has actually six speaker heads in it, and it radiates much more like a, in, the body of a real instrument. So there’s a way that sound moves based on the features of the instrument itself.

[00:21:38] Like when a person sings, you hear the sound out of their mouth, but you actually hear there’s resonance that happens in the body. In a cello, you have the resonating of the full wooden body. And most instrumentalists understand the importance of the instrument itself, how the sound is resonated, and then how it carries through space.

[00:21:58] In electronic music, historically, it’s been a kind of a PA system. And there’s a lot of limitations to those kinds of setups of what you can actually hear, especially if there are multiple people playing.

[00:22:14] So one of the ideas was, well, actually, why don’t we have each player with their own kind of speaker that resonates like a beautiful instrument and they started a class called the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, where they had 30 of these. And each student, would then play their station.

[00:22:36] So the way we would qualify it is that a laptop orchestra is made up of however many stations you need for your piece. Each station has a laptop, a speaker, so a hemispherical speaker usually, and, often they have some kind of a controller. So the controller could be anything. It can be just people typing on the laptop.

[00:22:59] It can be video input. I often really like to use something called a game track tether controller, which is a box with two strings and the strings have retraction in them. So the strings will automatically get pulled back into the box. Each string sends the computer its length and its x and y axis points.

[00:23:23] So for each tether controller you get six axes of information. I love these boxes for a lot of reasons. They’re really reliable, they’re really durable, and they’re really musical. So there’s a way in which you can pull them and you can, feel like you’re collaborating with something as you go through the controller versus any kind of wireless or if there’s no retraction, there’s kind of like, I’m in an open space and they’re, for me, they’re a little less interesting to play.

[00:23:55] For my first opera, The Furies, we had five stations in kind of a Pentagon setup. And so the stations are set up on stage and the controller’s with the station. And then there’s a way that each person playing the station can hear their sound.

[00:24:15] So this allows for them to make dynamic changes. So often there’s a component within like, if they’re playing the tether, length of tether might be how loud or soft it is. But you can, you can design the interaction to be anything. So it can be pitch, it can be trigger sample, triggering different samples that play.

[00:24:34] All you’re taking in are these axes of information, which can then do anything to control your sound. So the basic setup are these stations and then you have your players. so there’s a couple main thoughts about it for me. One is that the instruments, Rather than having these kind of violins, cellos and flutes and everything in the pit, which are creating kind of often the musical context for everything, this musical world, what if these instruments were actually, helping and a part of the narrative itself? In classical opera there’s no relationship. of the violin body and sound to the story on stage. Like, it’s just a, it’s a missed opportunity with, with this idea of What the sounds could mean and, and what the physicality could mean of, of the playing itself.

[00:25:39] Suki Wessling: So what is in the computer? What are the tethers doing to the computer? Well, how is the computer responding?

[00:25:46] Anne Hege: So in the first opera, the Furies, there’s a lot of different interactions. So I think we counted, there’s over 13 different instrument designs over the course of the opera. They change in different scenes. Because the instruments can do anything, um, for example, I’ll just give you a couple examples.

[00:26:06] There’s one section that, uh, is kind of, uh, a community gathering. There’s a ritual that happens in the town, and the tethers, um, are acting as a kind of horn instrument. So what we did was we attached the end of the tethers to a stick so that each player, so that, and there were two main players, and they’re almost like It’s almost mimicking, like, what would be a trumpet action.

[00:26:36] So they go, gong, gong, and they change the location of the end of this tether line. Once they pass a certain point, then it changes the pitch. And they’re always in these pitch But then we said, well, well, then why not just have a trumpet? So the question was, well, howcan we use the electronic as an added element of the sound and of the character?

[00:27:25] And so in this scene, there’s an argument, a power, kind of a power battle between two characters. And so every time one of the characters sings, it’s this kind of lighter, flutier sound. And every time this other character sings, it gets, uh, kind of grittier and more distorted and kind of heavier. And so the players are able to do this in a left to right space.

[00:28:08] And so you get this augmentation of kind of, it’s almost as if the world changes depending on who is singing.

How the musicians interact with the instruments

[00:28:16] Suki Wessling: The singers are often asked to play some of these instruments. It is a lot to learn the laptop orchestra instruments on top of singing, they’re also designed to help the vocalists enter their character.

[00:29:06] Anne Hege: So, for example, one of the characters was, Aegisthus and he had a scene where he really does a solo with his tether. As he moves with the tether controller, he’s mixing through these different samples that augment the sounds of the space that he’s in.

[00:29:20] So it kind of magnifies, this inner turmoil that he’s feeling. And by the end, by the time we premiered the piece, he had this connection to that instrument and he said it really helped him sing, and play the part in this deeper way. It was immersive in a way that you can get in really great chamber music, but because it was also with his movement, it was, really unified for him as a character. And so that instrument uses this kind of machine learning. So we were able to train his movements that he felt he wanted to have in that moment to reinforce with these sounds. So there’s this real back and forth with what is comfortable for the singer, what feels like their natural body movements, what feels like that character’s movements. And then that’s how we can reinforce with, with the sound.

[00:30:42] The instruments are, are designed not like a violin where it’s like, well, here’s the design, fit it to your body, but here’s this idea and now what does your body feel like is the right movements for that?

[00:31:08] And then we design the instrument to fit. So it’s, it’s quite different.

[00:31:14] Voiceover: Anne Hege uses laptops to generate sounds, which means that her music is highly technical. But Anne is deeply aware that music is grounded in the human body, so she works to make the laptops almost invisible to the performers making music with them.

Technology in temporal music

[00:31:30] Suki Wessling: Before we met, we had a meltdown. I had another meeting online that didn’t happen because of this big software meltdown. And so it sort of set me up to ask this question, which is, of course, with any kind of musical performance, you have anything from laryngitis to broken strings, to all of these possible pitfalls.

[00:32:08] But when it comes to technology, what is it like to incorporate technology, which is, I think of it to a certain extent, as it’s, it’s so young in many ways that it’s sort of a brittle thing. You know, when it breaks, it is, broke. You know, that, that like, if, if this, this room where we are recording this had not come back online, our conversation would have just been irreparably broken by technology.

[00:32:37] Whereas if a string is broken, uh, in the middle of a solo, you can sort of work around it. Or if it’s, you know, between solos, you can run off stage and grab a new string. It’s a very thing to put into music, which is temporal speak a little bit about, about using technology in your art this way.

[00:32:57] Anne Hege: Yes. So, I love this question because, it is very true that there are many things you have to do, there’s kind of backup levels upon backup levels, upon backup levels and testing upon testing to try to really assure reliability. It also means that the singers that I work with understand that, especially in the process, there is less reliability.

[00:33:27] So, only some singers are really up for that kind of process. So for example, after my conversation with you, I’m meeting with one of my instrument designers. So this is Curtis Ulrich, who helped me with the first opera. We worked on a lot of things with instrument design.

[00:33:47] And the big thing at the end was this idea of, an instrument design system. So making sure that we had an infrastructure for all of our instruments that would allow us to restart. If there was a major crash, we could restart in an instant. It allowed us in rehearsals to start and stop at different points, which is, really crucial.

[00:34:10] A lot of electronic instruments are time based. So things get triggered as you go. And so they’re made to run in a through path in time. But when you’re rehearsing with a lot of people, you need to be able to start and stop and musicians are really used to, well, we’re going, we’re starting from measure 43, let’s start there.

[00:34:28] And you actually need a whole system to allow for that kind of beginning. And you need to think about how the instrument design allows for that or doesn’t, and then lead rehearsals accordingly. So it’s, it’s a really different way of thinking about not only reliability, but also rehearsal planning and the process of putting it all together.

[00:34:53] It’s a really different beast. So this, this most recent project I did with Volt the artistic director there is Robert Geary. And he had told me 10, probably 15 years ago, he said, I don’t work with electronics because I love a chorus. I give a beat, their mouths open, the sound happens. There’s no, there’s no, you know, there’s no risk that no sound is coming.

[00:35:19] Whereas with electronics, there’s often a risk that the sound just might not happen. In that piece, for example, one of the things I did was there was, um, a reinforcement, so there were four laptop stations, but they weren’t unique instruments, they were all reinforcing each other. So if one fails, you’re still getting sound from the other three.

[00:35:40] And that’s one, one thing you can do with a laptop orchestra is this idea of reinforcement, which helps assure your odds of something sounding and there was also nuance with each player. So every, although they’re all sounding, they were all a little bit different based on the movement of the player.

[00:35:57] There’s a lot of different strategies for creating reliability, It is something that you absolutely have to consider. And it’s also something where, for example, I’m always directing the rehearsals because I understand how the rehearsals need to be organized based on the instrument design, which is quite specific.

The Mother Singers

[00:36:18] Suki Wessling: You mentioned very early in our conversation that your day job is with the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, which is how I got connected with you. I sang in it long ago. You were not then the director of it.

[00:36:47] And what I know of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus leads to this question. So I will explain to the listeners that this chorus was originally called the Mother Singers. It was an informal group of women who had been singing together, and they decided to hire a director.

[00:37:04] And they, this was I think in the 60s, and they’ve been going ever since. And although there are now auditions, in general, this is a large group of women who are not professional musicians, and they are out there singing, and singing, singing is the most visceral, body oriented way to make music. There is nothing else like it because it is your physical body.

[00:37:36] You can train your physical body all you want, but you are still using what you were born with.

[00:37:42] Anne Hege: Yeah.

[00:37:43] Suki Wessling: Can you talk a little bit about the experience? Because your work with the Laptopras is so much on the opposite scale from working with people who are just producing sounds with their bodies. Can you talk about the experience of producing sound with your body?

[00:38:02] Anne Hege: So I was raised as a singer. I started singing with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir when I was seven. I sang with the Oakland Youth Chorus when I was in high school. I have been a singer my whole life. And I love singing and I love that feeling of making sound.

[00:38:19] I’ve loved my study of singing and really understanding how the body works as an instrument, the physics of sound, where I’m resonating, how I’m resonating, the shapes. I love teaching music that way. I love teaching to groups for alignment. So everything that I do with PWC, I really love that idea of becoming a technical singer and understanding the body as an instrument.

[00:38:49] And then this merging of our individual life stories, our individual connections with with our bodies as instruments and our ability to bring the emotion through with the guidance of this song with some kind of a score. And, to me it is really, it’s really kind of transcendental this way that a group can come together to bring meaning to sound through our bodies.

[00:39:19] Voiceover: When we return, we’ll talk more about the body as instrument and our modern popular music culture.

Segment 3: Music in the body

[00:39:27] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. A lot of the music that people listen to today is simply a product. The artists are largely inconsequential. It’s the producers who really do the music making.

[00:40:06] But fundamentally, music comes from the body. All humans have music, and all of our music used to come through our voices and moving our bodies against objects we call instruments.

[00:40:17] My guest, Anne Hege, has two very different relationships with music. Her day job is conducting the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, PWC, a group of amateur singers performing choral works with their bodies.

[00:40:29] Her passion project is her Laptoperas, which meld technology with bodies and voices. And as much as some people criticize music made through technology as unemotional, the inspiration for Anne’s first major work was grief.

Connecting technology with the body

[00:40:43] Anne Hege: So my first big piece for laptop orchestra was a piece called From the Waters. And it was a time when I was really grieving the loss of my brother. I decided that I wanted to try to write a ritual for laptop orchestra. And that one of the things is when you’re grieving, you know, a lot of people ask you to talk about it and I just didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to move. I couldn’t even really sing. I was just really upset. I felt like I could not sound, but I really wanted to move with people and make sound, but not be the sounder myself.

[00:41:29] And so I designed this instrument where each station had, there were eight stations, they each had a tether controller, and the tether controllers were attached to a rope. So everybody who was playing the piece would hold the rope, and move the rope together and depending on how they move it in different directions there’d be different chords or different tones and then there was a second layer where it was like different- it would mix and kind of mix through different kinds of samples that could be played, that would create kind of a, um, for me it created a soundscape. And that there were ways in which we could add samples that would be related to people that, there was a kind of performance practice of this piece, but I actually ended up leading some workshops with the piece. And people could bring in samples, memories of people they had lost, their voices, and it would become part of this soundscape.

[00:42:31] And we could play it together. Part of the inspiration was this feeling that not everybody learns how to sing. Not everybody learns what it is to, like, find that harmony with others and, and really sing into a chord and have, it takes a lot of training to sing in a chorus where you can feel the joy of making sound and, and music with others.

[00:42:58] But I was like, what if I make this instrument where all you have to do is move it and listen? And you’re within the sound and you’re making the sound and it feels like singing, but you don’t need 10 years of learning how to sing and read music. And it is really fun to play this with other people and it can be very moving.

[00:43:21] So there were ways in which, for me, that’s this kind of middle space. Although they seem so far apart, um, there’s a way in which Everything I create with this electronics is, is deeply about being in our bodies. I never make pieces where people are typing on their laptops.

[00:43:41] I just, I just won’t do that. And I actually think it’s so important to make music with electronics where the body is empowered, where the body is like a big part of it. It’s, it’s a deep commitment for me as an artist that I’m not making music where our bodies disappear, that disembodied perfect music.

[00:44:05] I want deeply grounded, bodied music where I feel, the presence of this union of spirit, mind, and body like all there.

Professionalism and amateurism in music

[00:44:23] Suki Wessling: Something you said made me think of two things about our modern musical culture. One is that most of the music that is popular now is so heavily produced, it’s almost as if it’s not from the body. Even when people are going to live shows, the voice is so heavily processed that what they’re hearing coming out of the sound system has very little relation to what’s actually coming out of the singer’s body or the musician’s bodies, right? And the other is this question of professionalism, versus amateurism in music and amateurism used to be the dominant thing and it is no longer in American culture. So could you talk about those two things?

[00:45:12] Anne Hege: Yeah. So the first, this question of the production and kind of, um, in some ways I think it, it, it’s about hiding the body or, I mean, it, in many ways it’s in alignment with all that’s happening in the visual space to this kind of perfecting and fixing, and, there are times when I just think that is no longer music to me, that’s not what I value in music. That’s not what I value in people. It’s not interesting to me.

[00:45:43] Those are moments when I think music has kind of divided.  There are moments when I hear some of that on the radio and I think to me, that is no longer, that is not what I work in. That’s not the same discipline. And again, it goes back to what I value is risk and vulnerability and exploration and this kind of authenticity, like the, the realness of our lives and, and those lives and bodies. but I realized that, that that’s not, um, you know, those are kind of unique things to value.

[00:46:19] And, and I’m more and more okay with my path being kind of particular. Um, but then going back that it’s very connected to the amateurism, amateur versus professional space. There’s, there’s an interesting thing happening in the, um, like the economics of being professional in music at this point. It’s, it’s just really hard to make a living in music.  The professional singers that I know, they, they have to have second jobs and second careers, or they need to be teaching a lot.

[00:46:53] So although there’s this definition between professional and amateur, in fact, the, the whole career within the music space is, is shifting. I think in terms of, who can make a life in that space. Although I agree with you that the amateur space, space is, um, getting smaller, I would like to counter it with, I think of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, I mean, our membership, although we are amateur, the commitment that those women make to the chorus is just phenomenal.

[00:47:29] They, they, it’s just an incredible amount of work that they put in and some of the issues are just making sure that we have a program that’s flexible for the way that women’s lives work now.

[00:47:40] Suki Wessling: But I do see that people really want and need to make music with others. And I just see how much they get out of it. And I also see in younger people, you know, within the technological space where they can make music quickly and easily, like GarageBand and Ableton Live, if they have that, or, you know, that there’s these spaces where they can mix things up and they can make their own albums and they can put them out and release them.

[00:48:18] Anne Hege: There’s, there’s this like low bar for how people can record and make things that are interesting to them and that they want to share. So there’s ways in which, I mean, I do think music is still thriving and that, that always makes me hopeful.

Music and culture

[00:48:34] Voiceover: Many years ago, I sang with the Peninsula Women’s Chorus. We toured through Northern Europe and the Baltics, and I was shocked to find out that in Latvia, the average person could sing a huge library of songs from memory, thousands of folk songs. When I was a child, I suppose Americans had a smaller version of that library, from America the Beautiful to This Land is Your Land.

[00:49:09] But by the time I raised my children, popular music had supplanted that cultural knowledge. And now, streaming music has fragmented our musical culture such that ten random people taken from disparate parts of our society probably couldn’t sing a song in common besides Happy Birthday.

[00:49:26] Let’s return to our conversation with Anne Hege, moving from her work in the esoteric sphere of avant garde opera back to the idea of people in their bodies, singing.

[00:49:36] Suki Wessling:

[00:49:39] There’s just so much going on in the social sciences about the lack of interaction, the lack of community, the lack of real world interaction. You know, you look at the number of people who are spending hours and hours a day with their device and not with people. So can you talk a little bit about the amateur music sphere, the space that you’re working in with the chorus and, and also just that what you were saying about creating music and sharing it with people, what’s important about doing this stuff?

[00:50:21] Anne Hege: Uh, I mean, I think I’m going to, I’m going to partially speak for myself. Uh, one of the things I’ve learned about myself is in many ways, I’m an introvert and my best, my best self with people is making music with people. Music gives me the structure that I need to be easily with people that I know how to listen.

[00:50:46] Music guides our, our minds in a way that I think is so useful. You know, otherwise people are, to me, I often think people can be unwieldy, you know, people are thinking about a lot of things and people are often upset about the things that they’re thinking about. There’s something so magical to me about being in a rehearsal space where you have 60 women together with lots of different things happening in their lives and a lot of like, there’s a lot of input in those 60 bodies and 60 minds and yet the minute we start warm ups, the minute we start rehearsing, they have something that focuses all that energy.

[00:51:34] And if the music is chosen right, then that’s where the minds linger and they think about. So the last concert we did was about hope. And I had designed it where each piece was kind of what I saw as an ingredient of hope, whether it was like a tradition or a practice or a beautiful text.

[00:51:56] And then you start to hear during break people talking about the music and talking about, you know, the ways in which their lives are interacting with, with these texts and with these, these beautiful pieces of music. And it’s, to me, it’s such a great way of structuring ensemble and structuring community through ensemble.

[00:52:19] And I think that the, the truth is what I see is that people who grow up with it, people who grow up in a children’s choir, people who grow up singing, people who grow up playing in music in high school, understand that they then miss it, that it is a powerful thing.

[00:52:35] If they haven’t been introduced to it at a younger age, they don’t fully know what it offers to be in a musical ensemble. But I was, it’s interesting. We just had three new auditions into PWC in the last year with almost no choral experience where they just really love to sing and they just really wanted to sing in a chorus and they found us and they’re working really hard and they’re doing great.

[00:52:59] And it’s, it’s actually really wonderful for me to be reminded that you don’t have to grow up with it, to want it. But it does, I think, fulfill a huge need in kind of a guidance of connecting. I think some people connect easily, but not everybody. And I think, for many of us, music is a really good way of helping be with others, being in community without, um, you know, having to struggle with that togetherness.

Technology as a tool

[00:53:32] Suki Wessling: So let’s get back to technology. We, we’ve been talking about a women’s chorus about people just singing. Why use technology? What’s important to you about technology?

[00:53:44] Anne Hege: Yeah, I think about this one a lot. I really feel that it’s crucial that we continue to make sure that, our technology is considered a tool, that the technology is helping us be more human, better humans. I think there’s often a story lately about the robot that’s going to save us or the way AI will just fix everything.

[00:54:13] I think it’s a much more useful way of thinking about technology as all technologies have been, which they are tools that help us to an end, but we’re always needing to support these moral and human integrity elements of, of empathy and care and listening, all the things that I feel like are actually essential in music, this way of really witnessing the others and, and listening for our balance and for our, our tuning and for these ways in which we are a part of each other.

[00:54:58] The technology won’t fix that, but the technology can help us do it better.  I like to think that the kinds of music I’m trying to make with technology are ones that model that technology is, is guiding a more expressive, a more human, more feeling art because of the ways that technology guides our listening and guides our movement, and helps us tell the stories.

[00:55:29] Suki Wessling: You know, it’s funny you say that because I, that’s what I say to my students. This thing doesn’t own you. You own it. It’s a tool. If it’s not, if you are not using a tool in a way that helps you, take that tool and put it down and find the tool you need.

[00:55:51] Anne Hege: And we don’t get to just say, well, I’m no longer responsible. That tool is going to do it for me. Pauline Olivares, when I was studying with her, would tell the story of when she got her first tape recorder as a gift from her mother when she was maybe 18 or something.

[00:56:09] It was an early cassette recorder and that she started recording and hearing things on the recorder that she had not heard in the moment. You know, all these details of the birds and sound and she thought, Oh my gosh, I’m missing so much. And it was this use of the recorder to remind her to listen and to really be ever improving her ability to listen. I really identify with that. These tools can just help us help remind us and help deepen our abilities, but they, they won’t listen for us, we’re missing something if they’re listening for us.

[00:56:56] Voiceover: Thanks to Anne Hege for sharing her life and music with us. Learn more at annehege. com. That’s A N N E H E G E dot com. You’ve been hearing selections of music composed by Anne and other selections performed by the Peninsula Women’s Chorus. You can find links to music, videos, and information mentioned on the episode page at Babblery. com.

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