The heart of my work is singing. I think of my work as a big tree with two main branches. One main branch is the singing and it started from my solo work, exploring the human voice and all its possibilities. That's been a very strong discipline for over 30 years, working with my own instrument and discovering all the different possibilities. And then that goes also into making CDs, and, compositions with the Ensemble, and other groups singing this music.

And then the other branch is the composite forms, which could be operas or musical theater pieces, or installations, or films. And that ’s where different elements are woven together into one big composition. But I always feel that those forms are put together, in a sense, musically. Even with images, it's really thinking of rhythm as the basic underlying ground of everything. And not necessarily just metric rhythm, but rhythm, I would say, is the underlying ground of these weavings together of different perceptual modes.

As a fourth generation singer in my family, I came from a music background. My mother was the original Muriel Cigar voice on radio and she was on CBS, ABC, NBC in the '40's singing soap commercials. I had a lot of singing in my background. My grandfather was a singer, bass-baritone; and my great-grandfather was a cantor. Singing was a tradition in my family and it was, in a sense, my first language. I was comfortable singing. It was my personal language.

I was born with an eye challenge, where I can’t fuse two images together, so as a child I was uncoordinated physically. My mother heard about Dalcroze Eurythmics, and took me to these two wonderful Polish sisters Mita and Lola Rohm at Steinway Hall. Dalcroze Eurythmics is a way of learning music through movement; a lot of conductors study it to get coordinated physically.

But, for me, it was really learning physical movement through the music, because as a young child, I already had a strong rhythmic proclivity. I remember, there was a lot of work with rhythm sticks. I don't remember the music itself but I remember improvising to music, and throwing balls in precise time, and exercises dealing with music in relation to parts of the body. For me, it was a revelation. It integrated sound, space and movement. I loved it so much, and so my whole body thing opened up. Having that background, experiencing the voice or music and the body as one was something that has influenced me without me even knowing it all these years.

I think that the revelation I had as a singer came around 1965. I came to New York in 1964. At Sarah Lawrence, I was in the voice department and I was in the dance department. And I was also doing some theater, too. I had designed a program for myself called Combined Performing Arts where two-thirds of my program was in performing arts. I had one academic my last year and they let me do it, which was great. I had also done a lot of folk singing. I earned my way through college partially by singing at children's birthday parties with my guitar, and I had been in one or two rock and roll groups.

But when I first came to New York, my pieces were more gesture-based with a kind of cinematic syntax and structure. I was thinking a lot about images. How you could perform images that would cut in the way that film does? How would these very disparate elements go together? The sound aspects of those works were tapes that I made myself. In those days, there weren't multi-track tape recorders, but I was working with a two-track tape recorder and then layering.

But at a certain point, after being in New York for one year and doing a lot of performing in different galleries and churches and places like that, I really missed singing a lot, straight out singing,so I sat at the piano and started vocalizing. There was a one day sometime in 1965 when I realized,in a flash (…it really was a flash experience…),that the voice could have the kind of fluidity and flexibility of the body, say, like the articulation of a hand. That the voice could be an instrument and that I could make a vocabulary built on my own voice the way that I had in movement. In movement, I had a lot of limitations physically. That was to my advantage on a certain level because I had to find my own idiosyncratic way of moving. In some ways, technical limitations are good, because you have to find your own way. So then when I applied that same principal to my voice, I already had a more virtuosic instrument to begin with because of my family legacy. It was as if the whole world opened up, and then I realized that within the voice there could be different textures, colors, ways of producing sound, different genders and ages, characters, ways of breathing, landscapes. The other aspect was that it was also my way of going back to my family tradition and yet doing it my own way. Because it was always hard in that family to find your own spot as a singer.

Well, every piece is different. Sometimes it begins by me sitting at the piano and finding a phrase; sometimes it begins with an image or an idea. Composing music is a continuity ­ I am always working on music. Then from time to time, I gather enough energy to make large works that incorporate different perceptual elements. If it's a large piece, I begin by generating different layers or materials such as musical materials, images, costume and lighting ideas, spatial concepts, movement material. At a certain point, I'll chart out these layers and try different ways of putting them together. This usually happens after I have been in rehearsal trying out the material with the Ensemble or if it's a solo piece, with myself. The joy and challenge of working this way is that the unknown is very much part of the process. Each piece is like a mystery that has to be solved. The thrill of discovery makes tolerating uncertainty worthwhile. The main thing is to get out of the way enough so that the piece will make itself known.

I'm thinking a lot about the notation of my music, because I think that with my music, it's difficult to capture the essence and the principals on paper. And basically, I've worked in what I would call the aural tradition, in that I pass material down face to face or really work with the people who are singing themselves, rather than learn by looking at a score.

In terms of passing my music down, the first possibility is the tradition of which the music is passed down from generation to generation, from teacher to the next student, to the next student, you know, down through the generations.

I have some problems with this tradition in that sometimes it's hard for me to articulate some of the principles that I know instinctively. It's hard for me to verbalize or to convey to other singers where they have to really stick with the more precise intricacy of the forms. So, some of the detail gets lost with it. I worry how much this will influence the methods passed on to the next generation and the next generation. Despite its potential flaws, this seems to be the way that I've been working so far.

Then the other whole tradition is the putting music on paper. I think that some of my pieces can be notated in such a way that other people can get something out of them. Perhaps a musical-score along with a tape. A practice tape and a lot of directions on how you would perform the piece. And then, hopefully, while we're all alive, some help teaching things to other people.

I do have some reservations about passing my material on, but I also want to stay very open hearted-- and generous about how many other people sing this music, because it's really wonderful to sing it. Ultimately, I feel good about the idea of other people experiencing and singing the music.

Well, I think that I always am considering what being an artist means in the world that we live in. And how I can be useful as an artist in the world. It seems now that it's very, very important to affirm the imagination, mental freedom, creativity, and following your own path. All these qualities can get lost very easily in the society that we live in.

Live performance is a unique experience. It's really one of the only communal group experience that we have, other than going to church where there is an interaction between human beings.

I think that what art can do is to slow you down enough so that you really become more aware of reality. So that you actually wake up to look at the moment, what's going on in the moment. And you wake up to your own memory, your own heart, your own mind and-- and it gives you a little bit of space to-- let go of the habitual ways of-- of dealing with seeing and hearing and experiencing things.

In that sense, art becomes a prototype or template for the richness of experience in the world that we're living in. And I think emotionally, because of the overload of speed and the kind of fragmentation that we live with and the density of information, I think that our nervous systems start numbing out.

And in a way I think, if you have art that really has a certain power or vision, it becomes a way of getting in touch again. And I think that that's something that's very important.

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