KENNETH
KIRSCHNER:
NASCENT AUDIO - OCTOBER 2005
By
Josh Russel
You
have released numerous works with the piano as the only source
element. What is it about a piano?
The piano was the instrument that didn’t change my life.
I started studying piano when I was 5, and was a disinterested,
unmotivated student. I have a very clear memory of sitting at
the piano at a young age and my mother saying to me, “Write
something!” And I remember very clearly thinking: it’s
impossible. I had this immediate, intuitive sense that it was
actually literally impossible – impossible to write anything
new, anything truly new. It seemed to me that here was this
instrument that had been around for hundreds and hundreds of
years, played by who knows how many millions of people, and
it just seemed like every possible combination of notes that
could be written must have, at some point in the past, already
been written. Of course, I now realize that this isn’t
literally true – and yet it was kind of a profound thought
for a little kid, this sense that somehow the possibilities
of music had already been exhausted.
But the synthesizer changed all that. I first saw a little toy
Casio at the age of 12, and it was like a whole new world opening
up before me. And I never looked back. But what’s interesting
is that the piano has always stayed with me. I return to it
again and again, because I know it, and understand it, and know
what I can do with it. It’s like that old, damaged humanity
one can never quite give up – as if electronic music,
which is this strange, alien world of the future, somehow allowed
me rediscover where it was I came from.
I’ve seen Morton Feldman’s name come up
a in a number of reviews I’ve read of your work. Do you
feel he influences you? Also, you use chance procedures to generate
potential source audio for your works. Do you feel an affinity
to John Cage as well?
No, I wouldn’t say that my work is influenced by Feldman;
I’d say my work is a complete and total rip-off of Feldman.
I had this terrible realization walking out of a recent Feldman
concert: that I’ve spent the last decade of my life expressing,
at some fundamental level, someone else’s vision. To a
certain extent, of course, this is inevitable: I don’t
really believe in originality, in spontaneous, autonomous creation.
Music isn’t something that’s created out of the
void – it’s a process that flows through people,
and “composers” are merely nodes in a much larger
network that we can barely perceive. So it’s inevitable
that you imitate your influences, and just as inevitable that
this imitation fails – but hopefully I’m a bad enough
mimic that my work starts to take on its own character.
And Cage too is crucial to me – though more, I would say,
on a methodological level than an aesthetic one. I use a huge
number of Cagean techniques in my work – most obviously
chance procedures and, recently, indeterminacy – but anyone
who listens to the end result must surely realize it’s
Feldman I’m trying to sound like.
I’ve always felt that Feldman had a knowledge of the universe
akin to that of the great physicists – a basic, fundamental
insight into the laws of matter and the nature of the cosmos.
And I sometimes feel like one of those indispensable minor scientists
whose job it is to clean up the great theoretician’s hypotheses,
correct his minor omissions, and tinker helpfully but insubstantially
with the structure of his work. For so many composers today,
Feldman is the giant on whose shoulders we stand.
What are your influences?
Nowadays I talk a lot about Feldman and Cage, but I started
out on 80s pop music, especially Gary Numan, and that remains
a big influence that I really embrace. As a teenager I got into
Philip Glass, who was my first major influence among modern
composers. Laurie Anderson has always been a great inspiration,
and one of my big heroes these days is Meredith Monk. I love
dance music, jazz, Bach, African and Indonesian percussion.
The list goes on and on…
What inspires you to create your music?
My mother was a potter, a ceramics artist, and she created wonderful,
functional art – plates, cups, everything we used in the
house, both beautiful and very practical. She had a studio in
our basement, with a kick wheel, a kiln, glazes, everything,
and as a kid I’d go down there often to try to “throw”
a pot, as they say. I was terrible, of course, and my pots always
collapsed – but there was this real joy of getting dirty,
making a total mess, getting completely soaked with mud, covered
with clay and dirt, splattering it everywhere. It was wonderfully
tactile, great fun. And that’s really the way, today,
that I feel about sound. There’s a tactility to it, a
real sensuous materiality. It seems strange, of course, because
you’re talking about something so immaterial – compressions
and rarefactions of air. And yet anyone who’s ever worked
with electronic music knows that it’s a very material
process, that it’s all about the physicality of sound,
and the sculpting and shaping of it. So it’s perhaps not
so far from pottery and the messy fun of it as one might think.
Do you ever score out your music? Have you ever worked
with graphic scores?
I have this theory that I suffer from some basic musical dyslexia
when it comes to Western classical notation. As a kid, I struggled
and struggled with sight reading, and never really improved
– it just seemed like a language I could never truly speak.
Particularly with rhythm. I used to ask my piano teachers to
play each piece I was working on, and I would watch carefully,
memorize their every move, and then perfectly imitate the rhythms
they used – all to avoid actually having to read them
off the page. So at some level there was clearly a degree of
musicianship there, even though I couldn’t handle the
established way of doing things. And if it weren’t for
electronic music, I probably would have been locked out of music
altogether.
But when I was starting out, I always had this sense that I
wasn’t doing “real” music. Electronic music
really wasn’t accepted then; there was a hostility, a
quiet but pervasive cultural sense that these new technologies
somehow represented a betrayal of the spirit of music. As if
electronic music were somehow unethical, immoral, wrong. It
seems strange to say now, but that feeling was really out there
– I certainly didn’t make it up. And it got to me.
So when I went to college I swore that I would pull myself together
and start writing music the “real” way – i.e.,
with a written score. And it was a total disaster. Forcing myself
into this foreign mold really just crushed anything that was
beginning to be original in my work. I realized this soon enough,
abandoned the academic approach, and moved to New York. And
I’ve been writing ever since.
This is of course not to say that you can’t do interesting
and exciting work with conventional notation – again,
look at Feldman. It’s just that it’s not the path
for me.
As for graphic or alternative scores, I’ve just never
really had a need. Since breaking with academic composition,
I’ve always conceptualized my work as culminating in a
recording, rather than a performance, and so I’ve never
had to communicate the structure or details of a piece to a
performer. The recording just is the piece. And that’s
something I’ve grown completely comfortable with over
the years.
Ideally how would your pieces be listened to? Loud or soft?
Headphones?
If it was up to me, the only way anyone would ever hear my work
would be sitting in my studio wearing the exact same headphones
I wore when writing it. So it’s good it’s not up
to me! I actually have friends who listen to my work on the
subway, which is unbelievable to me – I mean, can they
hear anything at all? They swear it’s interesting. And
so I really try to let go of the whole thing, and accept that
my work will inevitably be heard in a wide variety of environments
and situations whether I like it or not.
That said, I do agonize a lot about this, because I don’t
consider myself a great engineer, and I worry that my recordings,
from a technical point of view, don’t always stand up
as well as they should in different contexts. But hopefully
people can get the general gist.
The post_piano CD idea was very interesting. What gave
you and Taylor Deupree the idea to publish audio that way? Have
you received any reinterpretations of the original sample?
Well, first off, yes, we’ve received some wonderful interpretations
of post_piano – ranging from straight-up experimental
type stuff, to dance remixes, to even Japanese bossa nova. That’s
the best part of it all – hearing what people do, and
the truly unexpected adaptations.
As for the idea, well, it was certainly something that developed
gradually as we worked on the project. I had originally not
meant to take my little sketches seriously – they were
just going to be raw material for Taylor to chop up. But as
I worked on them more, I began to develop a real affection for
them, and started to feel like they had some merit – not
so much as full, serious artistic statements, but rather as,
well, sketches. Drawings instead of paintings. I thought people
might be interested in hearing them. And that’s when I
got the idea to do the data partition, to include the sketches
as mp3s – and from there followed the idea of including
the source sample, so that people had all the components we
had used right there. And there was a little bit of showing
off, too – of Taylor and me wanting to say hey, look what
we’ve done – don’t try this at home!
July 18th, 2002 on your CON-V release is different from
your piano work. Could you explain a little about the process
involved in that piece?
In the years leading up to that piece, I had been working with
really, really limited resources. I had a very old computer,
and couldn’t afford to upgrade, even as I watched all
my friends doing these very high-tech, state-of-the-art sounds.
Finally, in 2002, I was able to get a new machine, and 7/18/02
was the first successful piece I did experimenting with the
new possibilities I had available. So there was a real excitement
there, and even though there were several pieces of that lineage
that followed, 7/18/02 is still probably my favorite. The process
was almost entirely digital, starting with soft synths, creating
sounds, recombining and layering them in the sequencer, and
then processing them very brutally through plug-ins. The large-scale
structure, as with most of my pieces, was decided by chance
procedures. And then there’s just lots and lots of editing.
For your TERM release you recorded environmental sounds
into a cassette recorder. Many of the samples used in your piano
pieces have a grittiness too them. There seems to be a lo-fi
aesthetic to your recorded sounds. Could you talk about that
for a bit?
Well, there’s two sides to this story. One – let’s
be honest – is really just making a virtue of necessity.
With no money, limited resources, etc., you work with what you’ve
got. That was certainly the case of the 2000-2001 field recording
series, all done with very low-tech cassette. That said, I do
have a true and genuine love of these old, dirty sounds. There’s
a warmth and character, often a real sadness, that goes with
hearing something that sounds old and damaged – I love
it. I’m a huge Duke Ellington fan, and have many recordings
of his work – but my favorites are always the old scratchy,
78-sounding ones. Somehow the clean and clear stuff just doesn’t
have that same feeling. And so, in my own work, I’m often
trying to replicate that sense of beautiful decay, of age and
time, because there’s a very strong emotional component
there for me.
You have released numerous works on various net-labels
as well as make all your audio downloadable from your personal
site. You have published a CD that encourages the buyers to
make their own interpretations of the same source material.
You seem to be trying to sand down the wall between artist and
end-listener. Is this something you are consciously trying to
do?
It’s always deeply shocking to me that not everyone writes
music. I mean, why wouldn’t you? Especially today, when
the tools for electronic music in particular are so accessible.
So yes, there’s definitely a conscious desire on my part
to say hey, this is easy – do it yourself!
What is it that is interesting to you about free net-audio?
Why is it important for you to have all your stuff available
freely on the net?
It’s always been my dream and my ambition to release my
work freely online – “always” meaning since
the late 80s or early 90s, as soon as the concept of cyberspace
and the direction we were headed became clear to me. There’s
a political component, an aesthetic component, a philosophical
component to this – and yet nowadays it just seems immediately
clear that it’s the right thing for me, without any need
for long-winded explanations. And the people who get it get
it. And that’s very rewarding for me.
What do you feel about the development of the net-label
culture that seems to be emerging lately? Any recommendations
on labels to watch or releases people should download?
It’s very inspiring to see so much happening so fast,
and it really gives me great hope for the future of music that
is free – free in the broadest sense of the word. For
years I felt like I was the only person concerned about these
issues, and that everyone thought I was crazy. I was clearly
wrong – at least about being the only one concerned.
In terms of recommendations, one thing I don’t often see
listed among net-labels is www.quietamerican.org, the site of
my friend Aaron Ximm. Aaron’s a super-skilled field recording
guy, and publishes all his stuff online. It’s indispensable
for anyone interested in fieldwork. He also curates a wonderful
little series called “One Minute Vacations,” which
are basically tiny little one-minute field recordings of something,
somewhere. Great fun – check it out.
What are you working on now?
As I write this, Taylor and I are just wrapping up work on post_piano
2, which we hope to see released early this summer. I’ve
just finished up a site update with the latest piece in my indeterminate
series (1/15/05), plus a slightly edited version of a recent
live show I did in Madrid (12/18/04). My plan now is to catch
my breath (briefly!) and get back to writing.
