Minibabble: Listening with our bodies

Posted on February 9, 2025February 9, 2025 by suki

The Babblery

The Babblery

Minibabble: Listening with our bodies

00:00 / 12:56

Last month, I interviewed avant garde composer Anne Hege about her work as a musician, composer, and conductor. Find the full episode here. In this short piece, we focus on Anne’s ideas about music. You’ll hear her start by talking about experimentation as a general concept, then speaking about how she brings experimentation to the audience by drawing them in. Then she’ll explore the idea of singing as the most body oriented instrument and how her training as a singer led her to design her electronic instruments so that they engage the body. Finally she’ll address technology and our struggle to use it in healthy ways.

Anne is an extraordinary musician, composer, and speaker. I hope you enjoy her ideas and her music. [Click for transcript]

Anne’s work:

Music:

Performed by the Stanford Laptop Orchestra: Excerpts from “The Furies” by Anne Hege
Performed by Sideband: “From the Waters” by Anne Hege

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[00:00:29] Voiceover: I’m your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a Minibabble. Last month, I interviewed avant garde composer Anne Hege about her work as a musician, composer, and conductor.

[00:00:38] You can find the full episode on babblery. com. In this short piece, we’ll focus on Anne’s ideas about music. You’ll hear her start by talking about experimentation as a general concept, then speaking about how she brings experimentation to the audience by drawing them in.

[00:00:55] Then she’ll explore the idea of singing as the most body oriented instrument and how her training as a singer led her to design her electronic instruments so that they engage the body. Finally she’ll address technology and our struggle to use it in healthy ways.

[00:01:10] Anne is an extraordinary musician, composer, and speaker. I hope you enjoy her ideas. We start with her composition for Laptop Orchestra, From the Waters.

What is experimentation?

[00:02:03] Anne Hege: 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?

[00:02:31] The values of experimentation are really different. Often, 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 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.

[00:03:14] 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.

[00:03:46] 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..

The relationship between the composer and the audience

[00:04:39] Anne Hege: 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.

[00:05:13] 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.

[00:05:37] I have often been, quite pleasantly surprised with how much people already know and this kind of curiosity about this space.

Singing and the body

[00:05:58] Anne Hege: I was raised as a singer. I have been a singer my whole life. And I love singing and I love that feeling of making sound.

[00:06:24] 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 really love that idea of becoming a technical singer and understanding the body as an instrument.

[00:06:47] 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 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.

[00:07:16] 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.

[00:07:50] I want deeply grounded, bodied music where I feel, the presence of this union of spirit, mind, and body

[00:08:01] 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. The minute we start warm ups, the minute we start rehearsing, they have something that focuses all that energy.

Making music in time

[00:08:37] Anne Hege: 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.

[00:09:00] 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.

[00:09:25] It’s a really different beast. With electronics, there’s often a risk that the sound just might not happen.

Technology and music

[00:09:34] Anne Hege: 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 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 listening for our balance and for our, our tuning and for these ways in which we are a part of each other.

[00:10:19] 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.

[00:10:51] 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.

[00:11:08] Voiceover: Thanks to Anne Hege for sharing her music and her work with us. You can hear more at A-N-N-E-H-E-G-E .com. You’ve been listening to her composition for laptop Orchestra from the Waters and her laptop opera, the Furies. Thanks for listening.