artist q & a: rebecca bruton

May 5

by Jesse Locke.

An interview with rebecca bruton, in advance of New Works Calgary’s upcoming performance at King Eddy Classical, co-presented with the National Music Centre. For more information on this May 15th event, and to purchase tickets, follow this link.

Jesse Locke: How did you first become interested in music?

Rebecca Bruton: I come from a pretty musical household. My parents aren’t musicians per se, but they’re both very musical. My dad is a big collector of records, tapes, and CDs. He’s thoughtful about it and has very wide ears. I often mention to people about how he told me to watch Eraserhead when I was 12 or 13.

Wow, your dad is a head!

Yeah. In my memory there’s a mix of the Eraserhead conversation and also him telling me about Robert Fripp because he started doing all of those tape experiments. My dad suggested that I should listen to Robert Fripp’s song “NY3”, which includes stolen audio from a family conflict. It’s all musique concrète.

All that to say, I developed wide ears from one of my family members, but my parents also took me to the Calgary Folk Festival when I was really little. That’s a big family tradition. I fell in love with fiddle music when I was about five or six. I wanted to play the violin because I was in grade one and I saw a girl in grade three do “Old McDonald Had A Farm” on violin at a show and tell. I was like, “yup, that’s it for me.” I begged my parents to let me play the violin. They said I could play piano.

Violins are expensive.

Oh yeah. And they had just bought a piano. I started there, and the deal was that if I played for a year I would get a violin. I think the hope was that I would forget about it by then, but I did not. I started on violin and really, really loved classical music and fiddle music. That was in the early to mid ’90s when there was a lot of interesting East Coast stuff happening. Natalie MacMaster, Ashley MacIsaac, Great Big Sea were all huge. I saw them all at the Folk Fest at that time, so that planted a seed.

I did classical training, but never really elite or competitively. I did a few RCM exams, and started playing fiddle through the Bow Valley Fiddlers in junior high. Around the time I met you, I was going to all-ages shows in Calgary. That was a big shift for me because the energy around self-organizing young people felt like a really exciting underground movement outside of formalized institutions. There was a lot of personal growth and self-exploration that went on alongside that.

I read in another interview that you played in punk bands. Is that true?

That’s semi-true. You’re a person who would probably know, which is interesting. [laughs] I had a band called Les Filles Bicyclette, but we only played a few shows. We had a worldbeat quality mixed with a bit of riot grrrl, and then I was playing fiddle. I’d say it wasn’t exactly a punk band but it existed within a DIY punk world, so in that sense it was a punk band.

That’s what was nice about the Calgary all-ages scene at that time. Azeda Booth, Women, and The Consonant C could all be on a bill together.

Yeah, for sure! Although those bands really took off after I left Calgary in 2007. It would have been 2003 to 2007 that I was there. Your band S.I.D.S. was happening, The Pants Situation, Hot Little Rocket, The Grim Beat, Seven Story Redhead, oh my god…

I remember that band The Winks played in town a few times when they came on tour from Vancouver. They were huge for me, I think because they coincided with the Eastern Canadian chamber-pop and chamber-folk, but had a grungier, punky approach to what they were doing. It was more DIY than say, the Arcade Fire, although the Arcade Fire started as a DIY project too, before they became so produced. There was that sweet spot at the time when they released their first EP. I also remember getting together with my friends to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. That sounds really weird… [laughs]

It’s probably the kind of thing I would have done back then too! [laughs]

The band Beirut was big for me as well. It’s interesting because I now have all kinds of sociological critiques of where that band fits into the music world, but it was huge for me! I ended up going to York and studying Balkan vocal music because of that band.

I was really into visual arts as well, so I remembered wondering what it would be like if I decided to go to ACAD. Lots of musicians have gone there, like Chad VanGaalen and the Flemish Eye people. The tipping point for me when I was playing in bands, playing fiddle, and doing classical violin was that I decided I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. I wanted to get out of Calgary, and had a real narrative for myself of going east to Toronto, the big city. A good way to do that was to get into school.

York University really appealed to me because they had a jazz and improvisation program. I went to study jazz violin because I wanted to be a contemporary violinist playing in bands. They had this whole “world music” program, one part of which was the Balkan Ensemble led by a woman named Irene Markoff. She’s a Bulgarian ethnomusicologist who taught vocals, so I studied voice music all throughout university.

There wasn’t a clear path for me like “I’m going to grow up and be a musician.” It was just the decisions I made at the time colliding with the particular scene that was happening. Then there was the desire to get out of Calgary, getting into school, and it’s continued since then. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I’ll get super busy with projects, and then when things slow down I’ll think “do I still want to do this?” [laughs]

Oh yeah.

It’s been hard occasionally, but it’s been 15 years since I first left Calgary, and I’ve been a musician pretty much that whole time.

Congratulations!

Thanks! I’m still here! [laughs]

Let’s talk about the two string works you’re performing at this event, starting with All I dreamt; twice as much. I was totally knocked out by this piece. The way you use handwritten scores, interpretive instructions, and a shuffled deck of cards to create elements of chance is really astonishing to me. How did you begin to imagine something this conceptually complex?

That piece was written for the Bozzini Quartet in something called the Composer’s Kitchen. It’s a composers intensive they do every year with a small group. That was immediately after finishing my graduate degree. My project Sugar’s Waste was everything. I wanted to do all the things: write it, perform it, and direct it.

I came out of that and had a real feeling of being exhausted by that kind of work. I was also thinking about shared ownership. A part of music that I love is the collective process of transformation. It’s really fatiguing to carry all of that yourself. Right after my MFA I decided I didn’t want to do songs for a while, and I started getting a bit of attention from the chamber music world. I had a bunch of pieces commissioned in the first two years after my MFA, which was sort of a surprise and not totally intentional.

All I dreamt was about paring everything way down. I was interested in working without text for a while, and seeing what were the fewest tools I could use. Can I make work that’s not philosophical or based on texts? That started with sensations I was drawn to, while I was studying with Chiyoko Szlavnics, a just intonation composer living in Berlin. A lot of her music explores “beating”: the phenomenon of two pitches getting closer together, and how that creates a vibrating feeling.

That vibration also shows up in Bulgarian music. Pieces end on major and minor seconds, and there’s a poetic pedagogy around that. You know that you’ve finished or gotten it right when you hear that beating ringing out like a bell. In Western harmony you would never end on a second because that’s considered discordant. It’s interesting how something becomes musically meaningful when you treat it as material instead of discordance. It’s about privileging that auditory sensation that happens, as something pleasurable.

Soft pain for pleasure.

That’s what I wanted to do with this piece. It started with these very narrow intervals. I feel there’s a sense of intimacy between the way the pitches line up, with two violins or one violin and a cello playing descending lines at very close intervals. For me, there’s a delightful sensory experience that’s almost a kinesthetic sense of touching. I tried to figure out how I could create that physical sensation, and that’s where it started.

I got a chance to workshop it quite a bit with the ensemble, and I found that the sensation I was looking for was more successful if I notated it as a very simple graphic. On the topic of reducing my amount of control, that’s where the shuffleable deck came in. I was reading Tarot cards all the time and was interested in the idea of them being a modular book. Things take on different meanings depending how the cards are arranged. I was also interested in a time-based medium and how that impacts it. The entire piece is shuffleable, though I haven’t heard it played certain ways.

I just really followed my intuitive sense of how to grow that work. Then there’s this whole whistling section at the end. That gave me a feeling that I had created a Zen-like, almost meditative work, like the painter Agnes Martin who just created very still, well-balanced squares. That was interesting to me but it didn’t make me feel like I needed to be inside the music and would follow it forever. I was looking for that feeling!

I’m also really interested in the extramusical material you include with the score – like the song “Blue Velvet”, which is associated with the David Lynch film – to conjure a feeling of sentimental melancholy. What interests you in guiding performers that way?

I think it’s important for me to use as many tools as I have available to create the music that I want to hear. That’s what guides my cravings and what will be satisfying to me. Also, what am I not hearing in what I’m listening to? In that score, there are a bunch of Dropbox links to recordings that I think of as opening doors. One is a recording of an old clock that we got from my grandmother, who was an antiques dealer. It’s a super complex Swiss music box that plays a pretty simple piano piece. The mechanical parts are a bit wonky, so everything sounds warbly, magical, and strange.

I think I first heard the song “Blue Velvet” in the movie, but I also like the song on its own. Particularly the Bobby Vinton version. It’s a classic crooner ballad. There’s this amazing thing David Lynch does throughout his career, which he mastered on Twin Peaks: The Return. He takes something that’s an awkward moment between two people, makes it really clear about what that is, and then leaves slightly too much space between what people are saying. It creates this oozing, awkward energy that’s addictive. You can’t pull away from it.

In a movie like Blue Velvet, there’s this feeling that everything is just a bit too much. Everything is slightly magnified. Working with sentimental music like that, it’s easy to extract that feeling and push it until it’s gone too far. That’s what I was looking for. We were going really far in the direction of nothingness, so how do you go really far in the sentimental melancholy direction? And how do you make sure that you know what you’re doing?

I’m not really a proponent of the way of thinking where you don’t know what you’re doing. I think it’s important to be specific about what I want to hear. I know what I can offer and I’m pushing it far so the listener really hears that. The inclusion of those extramusical things was all about folding the ensemble into the musical world I was trying to evoke, without being like “this is about a music box.” I wanted to hear something, and having them hear the music box helped them get there.

What do you like about Nikki Reimer’s poem, which provides the titles for each section of your piece?

Some of the things I was going through in my life weren’t included in the piece, but I was living them. Part of my connection to Nikki is that I was dating someone whose brother died, and her brother also died. I spent a good period of my 20s learning how to become a good grief partner. It was strange because I didn’t know his brother, but he had died less than a year before we met.

That relationship started disentangling and falling apart as that piece was written. What I really experienced was not only grieving the experience, but grieving the grief. Grief was a tangible presence in my life for years, in the way that someone’s absence becomes its own presence. I connected so deeply to that poem by Nikki, her work around grief, and how she lives around it. It was important for me to learn that death isn’t something you recover from. Life cracks open and you live in a new way.

It’s also kind of ironic that the piece of music was an attempt at being more neutral, or not being about a thing, but then one of the most difficult sets of experiences I’ve ever had happened while I was writing the piece.

I love how Nikki apologizes for her work being about grief, and then toys with the idea of what a “work” is, describing how she strokes her work’s jawline like a cat. It’s pretty psychedelic.

That sense of laying yourself down, and the pitifulness of it breaks my heart, but in a really satisfying way. Then there’s this surrealism to it as well. It’s glowing and only sounds like Nikki’s world that she creates.

When the velociraptor came in I had no idea what was happening!

It’s clearly procedural, but then it creates whole new worlds. That was another inclusion where the poem was in the world of the piece but it wasn’t about that.

I love how you explicitly instructed people not to recite the poem out loud as part of the performance. Read it, and think about it, but don’t say it.

I think that makes sense with everything I’ve said so far. You can have a piece of poetry that’s an intertext, but the audience will never know it’s there. The players might know it’s there, and I think it adds to a sense of the score because I love materiality and object culture. I don’t think the audience needs to see the score, but it can exist as a curious object with many areas to explore.

I love the modularity of depending on where and when you encounter the score, you’ll have a different experience of it. As a composer I don’t have control over those variables. It’s kind of up to whoever encounters it to put those things together. There’s a looseness to it, an agency to how the players choose to interpret it, and for how the listener chooses to hear it. In spite of that melancholy mood, I don’t think I’m forcing any particular emotion onto it. There’s so much space that you can just come to it and be with it.

The whistling adds a really interesting quality, and that’s a common feature of both string works you’re performing at this event. What do you like about whistling?

I just really like the sound of whistling! [laughs] Being a creator, there’s an important sense of what music really feels like mine and is my voice. There’s something about whistling that I find endlessly inspiring. You work with an ensemble of players who are super technically proficient and have gone to these elite schools to learn how to do elite things. They’re professional musicians and their whole body is part of that, so why not include whistling if they can do it?

In that piece, it was particularly because I knew that Clemens Merkel, the first violinist in the Bozzini Ensemble, is known for being an extremely really good whistler. It shows up in a piece called Philip the Wanderer by Cassandra Miller. I love his whistling. It’s just stunning!

The other thing from a historical standpoint is that whistling has really changed over the last 100 years. If you hear a man in his 90s whistling, it sounds totally different. It sounds like that person was raised in the ’40s. It’s like how women’s voices have dropped in general over the past 60 years. In the 1950s, women talked a lot higher in a part of the voice that resonates a bit better. There have been really interesting studies about social things that have led us to drop our voices.

Whistling is the same. It’s this cultural detritus that some people can do and some can’t, that also tells us something about our culture.

You last performed The Turning Larch with an amazing group of Toronto musicians including Ryan Driver, Zoë Alexis Abrams, and D. Alex Meeks. Did you handpick those people?

Yes. Ryan I don’t know that well, but when I first moved to Toronto it was kind of peak Rat-drifting era. The local improviser scene made up of composers and players on the label was super influential to me. My friend Jason Doell describes my work as being part of “the Toronto croon.” I think of the crooner trifecta as Ryan Driver, Doug Tielli, and Eric Chenaux… oh, and Sandro Perri! [laughs] But there’s also female voices! Lisa Conway, Jennifer Castle…so that was part of it.

D Alex I met in my first few weeks at York. We’ve been good friends forever, and I knew that he could whistle and play the saw. Zoë and I lived together. It’s mostly the people I know. I was invited to do that show by Nick Storring when I was working on a body of country music.

That performance sounds pretty similar to the music you make as Rebecca Flood.

Definitely. I took about five years away from doing that stuff after my Master’s, and then came back to it after doing a lot of chamber music. I’m drawn to people that make music sound warbly. All of those players have non-fretted instruments or things that are warbly where the tuning is off. The idea of getting them all together in the same space seemed delicious. And they all said yes!

How will these two works be performed in Calgary?

All I dreamt; twice as much will be performed by an ad hoc string quartet. Very brave players. I’ve never met any of them so I’m pretty excited about that. Martin Arnold, the composer and one half of the original Rat-drifting founders also plays in the Ryan Driver Sextet. He’s one of my people who I always call before I have to get something ready. I called him the other day freaking out because I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out, and wasn’t even sure if everyone in the quartet could whistle. He made this point that it’s a really good practice to just be open to having a piece played in not ideal circumstances.

Some of the musicians can’t whistle, so they’re going to hum, and I think that’s great. The piece has enough space that the musicians can bring their own skill sets to it. It might sound a bit more classical because they’re mostly CPO players. It might have more vibrato, and I’m OK with that. It’s going to be a process to get that together.

For The Turning Larch it will be a string quartet and Wayne Garrett playing pedal steel. He’s an amazing weirdo. Wayne plays amazing country guitar, but then also tours the world with his partner Caitlin R.C. Brown. They’re sound artists and they do sound art light shows. For this performance, I’m going to sing and we’re going to divvy up the parts depending who’s in the room and who wants to play what. There’s also a collection of really short whistling pieces, and I’m hoping we can do one or two of those, too.

I’ve not really had much of my music performed in Calgary ever, so I’m a bit nervous but just curious about who will even show up at the concert, and how the band puts it together. I love Lesley’s music and I think it will be a really beautiful pairing. So that’s it.