For myself, I feel like I would hope to think that Mozart felt: I want my music to totally connect with people. --Randall Woolf.
Woolf never strikes me as being very interested in sound; he wants to tell the audience a story, and will use whatever style of music is at hand to serve his purpose. -- Kyle Gann, The Village Voice
Even a perfunctory reading of Randall Woolf's CV reveals him to be a composer with abundant imagination and great friends; the kind of creativity that reaches out and, through collision and collaboration, becomes bigger than itself. Perhaps more telling than his admittedly outdated bio is his myspace, where he lists Bach, Marilyn Manson, Steve Reich, David Foster Wallace, Joni Mitchell, and Public Enemy (among others) as influences. As a composer he seems to be perpetually at the point of discovery, with the characteristic humility of an explorer. His learning has taken place among garage-rock bands and under the tutelage of masters at Harvard and Tanglewood. His genre-bending is really beyond my abilities to describe, so just read his bio and myspace and this and this.
I first became interested in Woolf's music through a piece called Holding Fast, which includes beautiful and engaging footage from Darjeeling, India. Over a month ago I attended a premiere of eight works by members of the Common Sense Composers Collective performed by The Robin Cox Ensemble at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. Almost all of the pieces made use of electronic instruments, recorded sounds or some spoken word, but Holding Fast featured the only video of the night. My immediate reaction was, "Oh, here's some stuff I can think with," as if imagery was more tangible than sound. Randall Woolf met filmmakers Mary Harron and John C. Walsh while working on the score for American Psycho. Walsh and Harron traveled to Darjeeling to shoot daily life in a Tibetan refugee camp. The uncut footage and the ambient sounds of the camp served as the inspiration for Woolf's piece for solo violin.
During the performance I noted that the music and video were inseparable; one does not outweigh the other and neither are mere accompaniment. The action of the video--rocking shoulders, spinning wheels, passing feet--is truly wed to the movement of the music. Says Woolf: "The way we do these projects is the music comes first. We all agree on a topic but then they give me the footage they've got or parts of it, excerpts, and I watch it and get the sounds." The final video was edited to fit the composition. This division of labor allows the artists to collaborate while maintaining private space and work habits. It's worked well for Woolf, who likes his freedom but doesn't want complete control. "It's collaborative in a different way," he explains. "I'm sensitive to the footage they shot and their ideas about the [refugee camp] and they're really senstive to the music, but there just isn't a lot of changing back and forth. I know my limitations; I'm not really one to tell them what to do, to tell you the truth."
What I haven't mentioned is how moved I was by the piece. Shortly after the performance I emailed Woolf with this: "I have been thinking about the intersection of the arts and so-called 'global witness,' or how art can bridge cultures in meaningful ways. I was struck by the perspective in your piece: it was seamless...not about an artist looking at another culture, or about the viewers' excitement over the exotic...I felt myself looking through many different eyes all at once, or focusing on the way certain sounds complemented actions in the video. It was very present and very human." In my experience, art by (U.S.) Americans that handles cultural differences without being voyeuristic or self-congratulatory is rare.
I asked Woolf if the political nature of this project made him uncomfortable and was surprised to hear, "I didn't think of it from the political angle at all." He went on to say, "I'm much more interested in what you and some other people have said to me in some letters lately about my presence there as a westerner...and not making it some sort of travelogue or some kind of 'pity the Tibetans' thing. I didn't feel uncomfortable with it at all, [but] it was really difficult." That's exactly what I sensed as an audience member. If you want to see it, too, you'll have to wait for a screening/performance in your area.
Woolf was very receptive when I wrote him and agreed to a phone interview. This act of generosity supports his claim that he is not out to impress an audience so much as to connect. Toss out your visions of the uncompromising artist; Woolf works hard at being accessible. As a composer he is both flexible and restrained, writing pieces that are playful, yet plainspoken. As he puts it: "It's part of a desire to be, let's say, naturally contemporary. You know, with a lot of 'New Music' things it's like they live on some separate island, which they don't."
This doesn't mean musicians must revert to familiar sounds and traditional forms to be relevant in the "real world." Randall is part of the New Music world himself and tests boundaries, but he admits he wants to be liked. "For me, I think everything I write is completely involved with how it affects people, and for me one of the things I don't like about modernist--I like a lot of modernist pieces--but the sort of attitude about it: 'Well I'm gonna do my thing no matter what and I've got this personality that can't be compromised and I don't care if some people don't like my music for that reason.' I think all of that is bullshit; I've never met anybody who doesn't care."
So how does one overcome the barrier of doing something-no-one's-done-before and actually make an impression on others? Randall has confronted this dilemma with collaboration, especially collaboration across mediums. Holding Fast is not the only piece attached to a video. The (in my opinion) sound logic of combining music with video is this: "People watch a lot of TV, movies and so forth, so just that one simple element makes it a lot more meaningful to people." Of course! We know how to watch a video; we don't necessarily know how to listen to new instrumental works. That's why (not counting John Cale) Woolf rarely collaborates with other musicians.
For a piece titled BYOD (Bring Your Own Dancer), Woolf joined dancer Heidi Latsky, videographer Margaret Busch and writer/director Valeria Vasilevski to parody an infomercial. Here, again, accessibility was the measure: "You know, it's a parody of an infomercial, so one of the chorus' is like [dun dun dun..]--just a simple thing like that repeated--and I spent probably a day and a half trying to make that more interesting, and every time I did that I said, 'Well now it doesn't sound like it's from an infomercial.' I definitely would prefer to do the thing that sounds like an infomercial rather than show off my ability to make a lot of fancy melodies or something."
Woolf had a similar story to tell about a collaboration with his wife, pianist and performance artist Kathleen Supové. Woolf and Vasilevski wrote Sutra Sutra, a piece that combines string theory and Sufi mysticism in hypnotic music and text. Supové is required to move and make recitations while facing the audience. "I gave her a part that's just the highest note on the piano going [ping ping ping]. The story of the piece sort of has to do with the particles of physics, so it's like there's just one little particle of sound, but I actually wrote it so she would be able to stand up and turn and face the audience. So it comes to theatre stuff like that. You really try to make it a theatrical experience."
It seems Woolf's partnership with Supové and his exposure to performance art has shaped the way he works. He knows that by giving his music over to performance he is relinquishing control. "It's scary in some way, you really have no idea. It's like everyone says, the exact same material in front of a different audience can be funny and not funny." He also understands that a performance done right can grab peoples' attention and influence how they listen. This simple awareness of presentation, Woolf believes, is lacking in the New Music world.
While working closely with Woolf, Vasilevksy began using the term Concert Theater, defining "a musical approach to theatrical presentation," wherein "theatrical elements such as movement, recited text and visual imagery are all made parts of the unfolding musical process." In Woolf's words, "It's really all about how to repair this thing of New Music concerts looking like an open rehearsal....When we go to theatre things, I love the presentation: you don't see them waiting in the wings, they aren't casually doing this or that--everything is very thought out. Even the applause, the bows, are thought out." It's the old question of how your medium affects your message, and Woolf has traversed enough mediums to give this some serious thought.
For a sampling of Woolf's diverse projects check out the following (some made newly (and more widely) available ten years after their debut, thanks to the internet!):
Revenge, set to animation by Ladislaw Starevitch.
Some musicians rehearsing some of his music.
Woman at an Exhibition -- another collaboration with Heidi Latsky.
Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" Ballet (SO COOL!)
I think a lot of Woolf's thoughts, and his compositions, are relevant to the Existential Media community and some conversations we've started. So lets keep the conversations going!
