Choreographers

Bella has been listening to my music... a LOT.  As she's been walking through the house with my old tracks blasting on the iPad, I've caught snippets of songs I haven't heard for years...  so it got me to pull a playlist together and listen to some of this stuff.

From 1989-1993 I did a number of pieces of music for choreographers - first for my old roommate in the French house, then for others...   In all I did music for 5 major works - the first was only 8 minutes, the middle three were about 20-30 min, but my last was over an hour.

As I listen to this music, I'm pretty amazed at what I pulled off.  This was all just done in my spare bedroom direct to DAT, a wall of synths with me riding the knobs and levels as it went.  It really was a performance.  It's not all brilliant - I'd say that each piece has at least 15 minutes of really good stuff, and 10 minutes of "ok".  Some of it had to do with trying to get to a time the choreographer wanted, so there's some stretching...   Also, because the choreographers were getting a lot of music for no money, they didn't really edit or push me to fill out the lighter bits...

I was very influenced by David Van Tieghem, who worked with Laurie Anderson, and did two very good instrumental albums of music adapted from dancepieces for Twyla Tharp.   The influence is strong, but the pieces weren't derivative, at least.  They all sound like ME.

But listening also got me a bit sad:  In almost all cases, I worked very hard on the music, only to have the choreographer turn it into an improv movement piece:  In each case, I saw the premier, was happy to see a few "coincidental" moments where the body was thrown down right on a big "boom" in the music...   only to have that moment not happen at all the next night.  In fact, in once case, the dancer threw himself down to the ground in a very similar manner, but a solid two beats AFTER the big boom, which made it feel like a mistake.

I confess I never truly understood the language of dance, but it seemed to me that the movement could have been matched better - or "choreographed" a little better.  Maybe the dancer was doing an "echo" movement...   But each time, I figured "maybe next time".  

But what broke me was the hour long piece - it was huge and ambitious - I was writing tons of music, and when I arrived, a few things happened:  First, the facility wouldn't let me manually cue the tapes - they wanted me to lay it all down onto one long tape.  But they had very poor facilities, so the process added a layer of hiss to the music, and their techs couldn't reduce it.  So it didn't sound as good as I wanted.

But worse, the choreographer was having massive issues with writer's block, and she made an 11th hour decision to abandon her choreography and turn it into an improv:  The problem is that this was with 15 dancers of varying skill, trying to tell a narrative story, filling up an hour of time across 10 pieces of music I had written. 

The premier night, I was sitting in the sound booth hearing my music with hiss on the top, watching 15 dancers MAKING CRAP UP for a full hour.  I had worked so hard on this, to have it come out so poorly, it was just heartbreaking.  

After that, I made myself unavailable for this work:  a few chorographers called me up with ideas, but I begged it off.  And the choreographer of that last piece, apparently oblivious to my disappointment, left me a lot of messages for more dances.  I never returned the calls.  In general, when it comes to music for dance, I liked the music I wrote for the dance a lot more than I liked the end result.  After five times, I figured it was time to move on.  

But I have been enjoying listening to the music again.  It's good stuff.