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EKPHRASTIC VOICE: ON JOAN LA BARBARA'S SOUND PAINTINGS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2022

Ryan Dohoney
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Abstract

A considerable portion of Joan La Barbara's compositional work has been concentrated in her ‘sound paintings’ – works that translate into sound the visual and energetic sensation La Barbara experiences when encountering art. Many of these works are ‘ekphrastic’ – that is, they render aurally a pre-existing work. In this article, I analyse three such sound paintings: Klee Alee (based on Paul Klee's Hauptweg und Nebenwege), Rothko (based on Mark Rothko's Chapel paintings), and In solitude this fear is lived (inspired by the early work of Agnes Martin). I argue that these works extend the mimetic impulse of her vocal practice and use translational semiosis to produce their ekphrastic effects.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 76 , Issue 301 , July 2022 , pp. 73 - 85
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 See Bell, Gelsey, ‘Extended Vocal Technique and Joan La Barbara: The Relational Ethics of Voice on the Edge of Intelligibility’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 1, no. 2 (2016), pp. 143–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lucie Vágnerová, ‘Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical Body’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2016), pp. 15–58.

2 David Chapman, ‘Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble in Downtown New York, 1966–1976’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University in St Louis, 2016). See also the articles of Kerry O'Brien and Bernard Gendron in this issue.

3 Barrett, G. Douglas, ‘Contemporary Music and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art’, Twentieth-Century Music, 18, no. 2 (2021), pp. 223–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My endorsement of Barrett's framework for a ‘musical contemporary art’ does not extend to his view of postconceptualism as normative criterion of artistic relevancy.

4 Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005).

5 Joan La Barbara, ‘Voice Is the Original Instrument’, interview, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, Show #448 (3 January 2004), https://econtact.ca/12_2/LaBarbaraJo_KD.html (accessed 7 February 2022).

6 Ibid.

7 Joan La Barbara, interview with Libby Van Cleve, 17 February 1998, transcript, ‘Major Figures in American Music’, Oral History of American Music, Yale University, pp. 15–16.

8 La Barbara, ‘Voice Is the Original Instrument’.

9 Ibid.

10 For a selection of her sound paintings, see Joan La Barbara, Sound Paintings. 1991, Lovely Music, LCD3001.

11 Louise Marshall, ‘Deep Listening: The Strategic Practice of Female Experimental Composers post 1945’, vol. 2 (Ph.D. thesis, University of the Arts, 2018), p. 251.

12 Joan La Barbara, interview with the author, 3 January 2022.

13 La Barbara, interview with Van Cleve, p. 49.

14 La Barbara, interview with the author.

15 Turino, Thomas, ‘Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircean Semiotic Theory for Music’, Ethnomusicology, 43, no. 2 (1999), pp. 221–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 224.

16 Larry Austin, ‘La Barbara: the name, the sounds, the music’, The Virtuoso in the Computer Age – III. 1993, Centaur, CRC 2166.

17 Venuti, Lawrence, ‘Ekphrasis, Translation, Critique’, Art in Translation, 2, no. 2 (2010), p. 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Venuti, ‘Ekphrasis, Translation, Critique’, p. 140.

19 Bruhn, Siglund, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

20 Thomas C. Connolly, ‘Walking in Color: Another Look at Musical Ekphrasis through Marc Chagall's Jerusalem Windows’, Mosaic, 51, no. 1 (2018), p. 163.

21 La Barbara frequently sang live with her taped sound paintings, sometimes removing tracks that she recreated in performance, other times adding another layer over the work. For an instance of the latter, see her performance at New Sounds San Jose in 1982, https://archive.org/details/NS_1982_05_08_1. Last accessed 6 May 2022.

22 Roland Barthes, ‘Loving Schumann’, in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkley: University of California, 1985), p. 297.

23 My comments refer primarily to the recorded version La Barbara prepared for her Shamansong album. Joan La Barbara, Shamansong. 1998, New World Records, 80545-2. A radio broadcast featuring an excerpt of the premiere of Rothko in the Rothko Chapel can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/giorgidimontana/joan-labarbara-rothko-at-the-rothko-chapel-excerpt-a-lapaix. Last accessed 6 May 2022.

24 Joan La Barbara, letter to Morton Feldman, 4 October 1983. Morton Feldman Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation. For more on La Barbara and Feldman's Rothko Chapel, see Dohoney, Saving Abstraction. For an exploration of her role in the composition and performance of Feldman's Three Voices, see Ryan Dohoney, Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), pp. 122–36.

25 Musicians supported by de Menil money include Feldman, Reich (whose Tehillim was commissioned for the Rothko Chapel), La Monte Young (supported by the DIA Foundation) and Philip Glass.

26 Dohoney, Saving Abstraction, pp. 219–32.

27 Joan La Barbara, programme note for Rothko for the concert ‘Meditations’, New Music America, 5 April 1986. The programme also featured works by Wim Mertens, Tom Plesk and John Celona. Personal collection of George Dupuis.

28 La Barbara, interview with the author.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 La Barbara, programme note for Rothko.

33 La Barbara, interview with the author.

34 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Landes, Donald A. (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 231Google Scholar.

35 de Menil, Dominique, ‘Inaugural Address at the Rothko Chapel’, in The Rothko Chapel: Writing on Art and the Threshold of the Divine (Houston: Rothko Chapel, 2010), p. 18Google Scholar.

36 La Barbara, interview with the author.

37 The title is borrowed from Agnes Martin's lecture ‘The Perfection Underlying Life’. La Barbara came to know the lecture in the catalogue Agnes Martin (Munich: Kunstraum München, 20 November–22 December 1973), pp. 33–60.

38 A recording of the premiere of In solitude this fear is lived is available at https://soundcloud.com/foundationforcontemporaryarts/in-solitude-this-fear-is-lived. Last accessed 6 May 2022.

39 La Barbara, interview with the author.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 La Barbara, in her vocal warm-ups, enjoins us to ‘Remember, singing is just a matter of brains and breath.’