Finding the ‘erotic’ in music, or composing music as a path towards connection
Talk Given at the 2020 Composers Conference
Finding the ‘erotic’ in music, or composing music as a path towards connection (Transcript)
Amadeus Julian Regucera
Thank you, Kurt and thank you to the Composers Conference for inviting me to participate in this year’s edition. I am truly grateful and humbled to be able to share my work with you today.
I have never been able to separate my creative life from the one I live day-to-day—what composer can, really? And for as long as I can remember, I ‘ve been searching for a kind of intensity, or presence, that would help everything feel real to me. Everything about my upbringing and my adolescence was physical; my body, was a corporeal, fleshy container I never asked for, inside which I had to maneuver through a seemingly careless world. Of course, like any weird kid, I had an imagination that was “too rich” and perhaps too expansive, but I was always reminded that that imagination resided inside a body.
In hindsight, I’ve found my compositions to be manifestations of my subconscious, like these pieces are trying to communicate something I can’t articulate but am always feeling. Hence, my process is often emotionally exhausting and fraught; it isn’t the joyous process of discovery that I hear from some of my peers.
My compositional work then is like a catalog of lived experiences, or a ceaseless process of becoming and self-articulation, trying to make sense of myself in a world where I often feel confused and terrified. Where my natural instinct is to retreat, never to take up too much space, never to speak too loudly, to disconnect and dissociate as a form of protection. From this perspective, it seems only natural that the experiences that seem the most real and the most vital to me are the ones that are the most intense, the loudest, the quietest, the ugliest, the most extreme, grotesque, and physically immediate.
In terms of compositional material, I employ instrumental techniques that ACTIVATE and provoke the body in some way. For instance, many composers have a particular way they approach the technique of a scratch tone on a string instrument and of course there are many ways to play and use a scratch tone. Upon first hearing one, I reacted to its abrasive sound, and in a very “emo” reaction, immediately felt like it reflected my own “ugly” subjectivity. So I used it as a such: as a potent expressive technique. What I slowly came to realize with this technique and many others was that the expressivity of it, for me, didn’t lie in the technique as it was or as it’s heard but it was in the physical energy brought forth to it by an equally intense bodily movement and a degree of acutely focused concentration. I began to focus on the ways that I could somehow HEAR the physicality.
I developed a lexicon of techniques and strategies that would help me continue to get to that “excited” state when the physicality of the music could be felt: different inharmonic or noisy techniques, propulsive rhythms that emphasized upbeats, breathless tempos, extremes in dynamics and articulation, formal structures with outsized proportions and repetitions, or the integration of the performers’ voices in the dense and sometimes opaque orchestration.
In my work Crave from 2014, a duo for bass flute and harp performed by my friends Stacey Pelinka and Meredith Clark, I attempted to integrate many of these techniques in what ended up being a of study intimacy.
Crave (00:00-04:10)
I think it was in this piece, Crave, that I discovered the potent sensuality and eroticism inherent in these techniques and how they revealed another side to the performance of contemporary music, a practice that has been neutered by the formalist experiments of 20th century modernism.
Following that, I wondered how this compositional approach and these techniques could be applied to larger forces. In OPHELIA. Her heart is a clock for 10 instruments from 2015, I set out to create a formal scenario in which the performers’ enacted their own music with and against each one another, the sum of which became a kind of “theater” of instrumental music. I was actually quite happy with what I eventually stumbled upon in the writing of it: the piece’s moods spanned the affective gamut, its sound-world seemed prismatic and mercurial. When I listened to it last night, I felt as if the ensemble itself resembled a body, or perhaps a transformer, Voltron, or Power Ranger Megazord body where the constituent parts were just as animated as the whole. But in this piece, I tried to make the ensemble breathe, pulse, slash, bang, speak, and scream. Often they are orchestrated in unison, musical figures muscling their way through some formal structure. In this way, the whole thing, to me, is a kind of exhibitionist musical spectacle.
OPHELIA. Her heart is a clock (05:00-10:38)
In these pieces and several since, I am searching for some sort of expressive threshold. That in some liminal space between a sound and the body that creates it, I could feel something–I wasn’t sure what it was exactly I was looking for, but I chased after it like a junkie trying to relive my first fix. I continue to deepen and expand my investigation into the role of the performers’ body within these two forms: the intimate and the spectacle. While the latter affords me to paint large swaths of expressivity among large ensembles and orchestra, I think it’s my exploration of the intimate that has shown and taught me the most and so I’ll speak more in that direction.
In much of my work, there has always been an ethical dilemma: what right did I have as a composer for me to push my performers to some self-designed expressive and physical threshold in some masochistic-cum-voyeuristic experiment. I began to wonder what my part was in all of this? Why was there a line between my body and theirs in this experiment? What discussions around consent were or were not happening? What were the expressive limits of sound and how it’s produced in these pieces? Was there some sort of trauma cycle I was perpetuating by pushing my performers, ostensibly my friends, into performative situations that could be potentially harmful?
I decided that if I was going to explore the expressive threshold, I had to do two things: 1) involve my own body in the creative process, and 2) change the paradigm of collaboration. In 2017, I started a 10-month collaborative process with Stacey on a piece for her on bass flute and piccolo, myself, and video projections. For the first month or so, Stacey and I would just hang out–she taught me some Feldenkrais, some breathing exercises and stretches, and we talked shop about the Bay Area music scene where I work in production and administration and where she performs regularly. We talked about her daughter’s Waldorf education, cool pieces for flute, her background, my background, discovered our common Catholic upbringing and from there I began to examine–with Stacey–how certain traumas related to my upbringing could be recognized, expressed, and perhaps exorcized through a performance ritual. From there we explored the connection between ritual, endurance, breath, recitation, and tradition to create a form and we experimented with movements, gestures, words, or techniques that could possibly articulate that form. Some of these gestures (like hyperventilating at fortissimo for 30 seconds) would render us exhausted during rehearsal, meaning that we could only rehearse or workshop certain sections once or twice a day. So, the work was slow, sometimes grueling, but always rewarding. Somehow, the compositional process was less fraught than before and a sense of communitarian spirit and deep friendship emerged over the course of preparing this piece. From the beginning, I knew that this work would include projections, but what material, where they would be place, what kind of imagery would be used, was all developed as the piece developed. The combination of the musical material, the movement, the props, and the imagery effected a kind of synthesis between intimacy and spectacle and directly evoked the voyeurism implicit in the Western musical gaze. Moreover, I felt a kind of directness and immediacy through my own participation, that I had not only built empathy and connection with Stacey, but with the audiences as well. This piece is called The trauma you keep safe is the pain you pass along.
The trauma you pass along is the pain you keep safe (00:00-5:22) – Content &Trigger warning/Epilepsy Warning
Immediately after this piece, I was approached by Andy Meyerson, percussionist with the Bay Area-based duo The Living Earth Show, to write a new work for solo percussion. I’ll just read now from my original program note:
When Andy asked me to develop a piece with/for him, the first thing I did was ask “how far” he was willing to go…physically. His seemingly cavalier answer was “as far as you want.” I knew Andy mainly though his work in The Living Earth Show (more, though only through professional engagements which is to say I didn’t know Andy at all really). Though I didn’t know him that well, I knew him to be a committed player and even more committed advocate for new work. I wanted to respect that but also push Andy into a liminal space where the music making process was new and extremely challenging — for me as well. I wanted to create a piece for him that reflected my interests in bringing together movement and music but was singularly rooted in the body and visceral relationship between the three.
As a percussionist myself (if formerly), the bass drum was always the instrument that spoke most to me, personally. It was a body unto itself; skin, stretched across a frame, the bowels of the orchestra, resonating at the depths of any instrumental group, mysteriously grounding a musical texture with its spectral rumbling, sometimes unheard but rarely unfelt. But whose presence is also violent and immediate when struck.
In this piece, I treat the drum as Andy’s “partner,” an Other, that is gazed upon and caressed but it’s also a surrogate for Andy’s body and vice versa. Bringing together two different bodies in this sensual and physical way always implies a sexual dimension but not always so. There is a lot of gestural and material symbolism in the piece but I hesitate to say that it all has to do with sex. It has to do with power. With dominance and who has the agency to inflict and receive pain. Within the context of the composition, one might point out that the bass drum doesn’t have this agency. Yet to me, the musical instrument and its sounds are not innocent. The instrument, how it’s played, and how it sounds is couched in history and in a musical “Tradition,” one which colonizes and punishes its practitioners and one which I am complicit in and a victim of. I don’t really want to go into the ins and outs of being a Filipino-American composer trained in a Western European tradition and who participates in its community…the intricacies are implicit in that sentence. The deed is done. What I want to do with my training is to continually tease out the generative aspects of the problems inherent in that cross-cultural morass, I want to find out what I can mine for impactful creative work.
In the same way that the composition deals with power, I had to reckon with my own power as a composer with Andy as a performer. The composer/performer paradigm as it had become (it’s shifting now) in the late-20th century almost made the performer a slave to the music, and indirectly or directly, to the composer. This was always weird for me. Some strands of virtuosic contemporary music of the recent past is masochism, straight up. I wanted to make this blatant in IMY/ILY, yet I wanted the process to involve something that is often absent in contemporary music performance-practice yet is so foundational to physical relationships – consent. “As far as I want[ed]” wasn’t carte blanche for me to inflict untold harm onto Andy. When he strikes himself and hyperventilates or holds his breath to sing to the point of exhaustion, I ask him to do it because we’ve both agreed that it adds something of artistic or aesthetic merit to the piece. I was always ready to change something if we didn’t both commit. Why I chose the “musical” actions I did are because of my tastes and my background. Andy got to know those things as the piece was written, as we got to know each other over the course of many breakfasts and many rehearsals, traveling together, and working closely. In essence, developing trust. My personal, cultural, and musical background and my tastes are all very physical and very violent. That is my inheritance. I needed Andy’s consent before that became his inheritance also – as the performer of a piece of music from a composer. Andy asked me an interesting question recently when I wondered what to write here – “what does it mean that you, the audience, then are participating in the inheritance.” You were not a part of this long conversation about consent. I confess, I don’t have the answer.
When I speak of violence, I also speak of trauma – that subterranean current of dread that passes from one to another by sheer force over time, sometimes generations. I don’t know what to say about it other than I don’t think I can ever get rid of mine. There are a lot of psychotherapeutic ways to deal with it, some more accepted than others, but they all seem a little inept at teaching me how to get rid of it. But some are more helpful than others in helping me deal with it. Repetition is a common and useful rhetorical and musical device in terms of memory and defining form. It’s also incredible at cementing a difficult memory into our bodies. If we relive something terrible, repeatedly, it’s unclear whether it remains more securely or whether it will eventually leave us. Lately, I’ve just been trying to find healthiER ways of integrating it (or at least try to). One of these ways is to ritualize the repetition in musical form. I’m never after catharsis or transformation in my music but I often try to find some kind of release. Both in the score, measure to measure, and in the process of making music.
Part of that process is meeting new performers, simpatico with my musical desires and experiments. By witnessing this performance and listening to what I’ve said about its creation, you’ve also watched the development of friendship.
IMY/ILY (10:45-17:53) – Content &Trigger warning/Epilepsy Warning
The collaborative processes I went through with Stacey and Andy were very different, mainly because the dynamics between Stacey and I and Andy and I are so different. These differences of course, were shaped by our individual and discrete perspectives and bodies which became parameters in the development of the music: just as pitch, rhythm, or timbre.
So, finally, what are the erotics of sound production? To me, it’s the centering of the physical body or bodies in music-making, the intense physicality that is the foundation of musical performance.
It is also the examination of how a body, as a physical form and as a container for personal experience, is a nexus for a multiplicity of possibilities for subjective expression.
But an aesthetic reading of the word might tend towards “sensuality,” a tactile sensuousness: touch, breath, force of gesture, or utterance–the sensory experience of music and its power. As a composer, it’s how attune we are to these things that create sound, music. And how we can organize, arrange, share, or even manipulate them to create a musical situation where the vitality of being a living human being can be felt—by the performer and the audience.
Attempting an erotics of performance (~10:00)
On Sunday, you’ll hear a performance of my recent and only work for solo piano, Portraits (for a quiet end), a set of four quiet miniatures that composed as companions for some of György Kurtag’s Játékok. Here, I wanted to focus on the erotics of touch: a single finger upon the key, the gentle force of pressing it, the lyricism of its release, and how the pedal makes this minute encounter linger just a little longer. It’s a micro-intimacy but like all miniature forms, has the potential to communicate universes.
I’ve spoken on the role of my personal identity in my music, how it has informed my techniques, my thinking, and my path – and in the past few years have come to a resolution that I am in fact attempting to communicate. Earlier in the conference, Kurt had begun to explicate the difference between “communication” and “connection” with the former having to do with an explicit message to deliver. I still have not been able to explicitly articulate what I am trying to do with my music or why I still compose music when everything about our world suggests my irrelevance. I suppose that feeling I’m searching for, the “excited” state that drew me into this direction, was a sense of connection. What endless swiping, tapping, and cruising on Tinder, Grindr, Scruff, or other hookup apps might promise but often fail. That the expressive threshold I approached or sought wasn’t necessarily a place from which I could simply SHOW or TELL people who I am or what I do or why you should like me; instead, the threshold is a place where I can invite someone else, someone I trust and who trusts me, to share an experience with a truly connect.
At the risk of repeating myself, composition is the mode by which I constitute and communicate my “Self”, and it is the means by which I invite others to do the same with me.