Volume 9 Issue 4 - December 2003

piece. ·1 think if something .is too
expected, there's no room for anyone
to enter into a dialogue. You need
to have some kind of discrepancy or
flaw that Jets peopl~ into the music.
STEENHUISEN: Do you think
things like timing and expectation
change with _the decades?
PALMER: Acting and singing
styles definitely change. And certainly,
timing is key to a lot of those
changes . . So, yes, it's certainly possible.
If you're wondering whether
those changes might affect how a
piece is received in the future, I'd
say I'm not so worried about posterity.
1bat's more a 'composer-hero'
thing. But I think performers are
adept at making sense. of music from
·the past, at adjusting the music's ·
pace to our own. In 1990 I worked
with a ,Chinese poet called Gu
Cheng. His poetry was simple and
jarring, very present-tense - a bit
like graffiti. I wrote a couple of pieces
with him including Se/ffor three
percussionists. It's a very physical
piece, where the performers' movements
embody the text. At one point
they run as fast as possible around
the entire percussion battery playing
and speaking. Their panting afterwa.rds
is as much a part of the piece
as the sounds of the gongs.
STEENHUISEN: When you 're
talking about the pieces it's as
though the elasticity of thinking and
. that quality you 're looking for really
is concentrated more on theatre than
it is on how you deal with materials.
PALMER: No, not necessarily. I
· think it manifests itself that way in a
music theatre piece, but in a concert
piece like Mother Hubbard it was
the compositional process itself that
was playful. I wanted to see what
would happen when I cut together
instrumental transcriptions of found
sounds with the original si:>urce materiiil
from the internet. If I cut them
into small enough pieces and mixed
them,. would they start to form a new
substance? In a way l\m playing a
game with these materials, and the
listener and myself get to judge what
the result of that game is. Does that
seem like a game to you? .
STEENHUISEN: It has that quality.
PALMER: It was an experiment:
how much would I edit that process
before it was presented? Mother
Hubbard is one of the more raw examples
that I have unleashed to an
audience. The piece is different every
time because the ensemble is not
chained to the CD part. Tiiey're just
playing along ·separately - when
they collide, they collide. If something
beautiful happens that's serendipity.
· IfI did that piece again, I'd
like to deal with individual sound
files and silences, with some trigger-
DECEMBER 1 2003 - F EB RU ARY 7 2004
ing from the ensemble or conductor.
Still playfulness and unpredictability,
but more causalitY. '
STEENHUISEN: One consistent
factor in your pieces is that they constantly
wok outside of themselves.
PALMER: Absolutely. For me to
sit down and play a chord on the piano,
starting at the beginning, and to
go from there plucking pitches from
some beautiful pure soundworld
hovering around me ...I don't work
like that. There will be something
that strikes me in my everyday life.
Take the soulld in Mother Hubbard.
The computer part all comes from
one little audio clip of the Quebec
Summit protesters that I found on ·
CNN's website. The other sound is
a burst of digital distortion which my
computer added somewhere along
the line. What pulled my ear to that
particular clip was the incredible .
emotional depth in such a flattened
sound. The sound quality is really
wretched, but there's this amazing
sense of so many people gathered
together to fight this huge machine of
corporate globali7.ation. Just the
sounds of their voices and their
drumming w.ere incredibly moving.
More recently I wrote a piece for
J'Orchestre Metropolitain du Grand
Montreal, and was sandwiched between
Stravinsky's Firebird and
, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. I ended
· up writing a piece called Buzzard, a
hideous-looking bird that doesn't
even sing. The music is completely
scavenged from those two pieces.
STEENHUlSEN: So, in woking
outside 'of the pieces, you 're wanting
to tap into signification?
PALMER: Yes, I'm not in~rested
· in a pure music. I'm very engaged
in the world around me. I don't
know if it's a political music. "1bat's
a very slippery term. I'm not sure
whether political music even exists.
But, I certainly can't separate my p6-
litical concerns from the way I would
approach music or what would motivate
me to write a piece. You don't
want to beat people about the head,
but I also don't want to put iny time
and energy into something that is
simply entertaining o.r decorative.
STEENHUISEN: Each of the
pieces you've mentioned also deals
with juxtaposition?
PALMER: 1bat's true. 1bat's an
essential condition of how we live. .
Particularly now. We're not living
in a holistic, agrarian culture where I
grow a tt:ee, make it into the beautiful
chair, sit on it and eat a bowl of barley
that I grew in my garden. We
live in an age of juxtapositions where
geographic and temporal realities are
constantly colliding. Those kinds of
juxtapositions permeate my music .. .
to me, it seems inevitable.
STEENHUISEN: Can
y(JU talk a bit more
about that, specifically in
relati,on to Secret Arnold?
PALMER: When .
· asked to write the piece
in 1999, I said, '·'what
am I listening to?" And
I was listening to Portishead
and a fairly obscure
dub album by Clive
'Randy' Chin. I wa~
also reading Bernstein's
The Unanswered Question.
He writes about the last movement
of Schoenberg's second string
quartet where the soprano suddenly ·
comes in .out of the blue, singing "I
feel air from other planets" and the
language moves us into the new
realm of the twelve tone. So, in that
piece, I wanted to create a space
where these three very different musics
could cohabit. What was fun
about it, was that once I started to
break them down, there were so
many areas of overlap. It was kind
of spooky. The Portishead and the
dub clip, shared this wonderful harmonic
space, and then the Schoenberg
formed ii counterpoint. .. it was
surprising how they opened up to
each other, like characters finding
things in common and making music
together.
STEENHUISEN: Do you try and
achieve a Unity oetween them or separately
amongst them?
PALMER: At times they're playing
with each other, so to speak.
And other times, one strong identity
interrupts. So, there is that juxtaposition
of very different musical materials.
1bat being said, some of·the
·most extremejuxtapositions are of
materials derived from the same composer.
I'm not keeping one person's
identity So intact that they' re the same
throughout the piece. It's more what
happens if you speed the Portishead
up and slow down the Schoenberg ..
Do they start to ooze into each other?
I think of that process as a way of
re-listening and re-hearing music
that's already familiar to you.
STEENHmSEN: Are you seeking
out corinections between them despite
their disconnection ?
PALMER: Yeah, but I don't want
to bomogenize them into each other.
It's more an experiment of what happens
when· they share space.
STEENHUISEN: How do you
want it to be pe_rceived?
PALMER: In that pi~e . I felt there
were elements of humour in the interpolations
of the comrasting materials.
But also there are moments that
turned out to be very.beautiful,
where you heard something that in
WWW. TH EWHOLENOTE. COM
dub is raw and funky, but when orchestrated
becomes luscious ·and
Mahlerian. 1bat's fascinating to me
- a character showing another side
of themselves that you hadn't realized
was there.
STEENHUISEN: That's a recontextualization
thing ?
PALMER: Perhaps. I hope that
people who think these divergent
musics have nothing in common
would maybe think again, would
open their ears in a new way.
STEENHUISEN: What would
Schoenberg have .{o say about that?
PALMER: I'm sure he'd be fine
with it. I followed dodecaphonic
procedures throughout (laughing).
STEENHUISEN: How have these
ideas come together in your recent .. '
work?
PALMER: I just had a piece mindmeat
premiered in New York, which
was for piano and percussion. The
texts were by Dennis Lee, from his
new book UN. The players had '
wanted something theatrical, but in
fact, ihe theatricalities ended up being
pretty subtle. They don't really
move, other than to play their instruments
and to,sing and speak the text.
STEENHUISEN: What is the subject
matter i>f the texts?
PALMER: It's a cycle. of 54 very
short poems. The language itself is
breaking down and reconstitliting itself
into words that don't exist, but
which make absolute sense. It's
about the destruction of our world.
There's a cyber-apocalyptic-bebop
feeling to the whole book: the poems
are utterly dark yet beau~ifully musical.
In some movements the words
aren't heard explicitly, but in others
the players sing or speak them. The
performers (Danny Tunick and
Kathy Supove) were blown away by
Dennis' poetry. It's very bleak, but
the energy of the poems sustains you '
through that bleakness. ·
I'm also writing a piece for Continuum
for February. Each of the players
is keeping a dream diary. It's
. kind of an alanning prospect, but I
thought I'd like to hear the music of
'their dreams.
•
27