|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The natural world is celebrated for its visual beauty, but also often heralded for its peace and quiet — almost an absence of sound. But if you know where to look and listen, objects like rocks, ice, shells, bones and even seaweed have their own music within them. San Francisco-based composer and performer Cheryl E. Leonard discovers and shares these sonic secrets of nature, constructing musical instruments from some objects, and composing works that draw on their hidden sounds.
Leonard will perform this unique music on March 20 at the latest Forms & Frequencies event at the Cantor Arts Center.
The Forms & Frequencies series brings musicians and sound artists to perform at the Cantor in free events that draw on themes featured in one of the museum’s current exhibitions. The series launched in September, with several programs during the fall highlighting the themes of the museum’s “Spirit House” exhibition. Leonard’s performance and other Forms & Frequencies events this spring will be offered in conjunction with the recently opened “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene.”
“The Bay Area has such a rich experimental sound and music scene that we really saw this as an opportunity to be able to support and also introduce the Peninsula and the Bay Area to those wonderful artists, ” said Vivian Sming, associate director of Academic and Public Programs at the Cantor Arts Center, who organized the series together with Public Programs Associate Kwang-Mi Ro.
With the museum now open Thursdays until 8 p.m., the Forms & Frequencies series aims to make the most of those later hours and show visitors a different side to the institution and its offerings. Events are held around once a month.
“We are actually pairing with the exhibitions. The performances and music can echo these exhibition themes through the sound. So this is going to be a really good multisensory experience for audiences. I think it’s going to be a good reflection and conversation about the things that we are creating through the museum,” Ro said.
Leonard’s background is as a traditional composer and she holds a master’s degree in composition from Mills College. Her interest in using unconventional objects began with coaxing unusual sounds out of traditional instruments like violins or pianos, which then evolved to playing found objects from the street as percussion instruments or using a violin bow on them. She began playing natural objects as she was spending more and more time outdoors, hiking, rock-climbing and mountaineering.
“Things happen, like you’re hiking on the trail and you kick a rock, and it makes a beautiful musical sound, and so I started to think, ‘Well, I should be working with found objects from nature, rather than just, you know, old bed springs.’ It was kind of a way to bring together the things that I loved in my life,” she said.
Working with her instruments isn’t as straightforward for Leonard as it is for conventional musicians, who know what range of sounds to expect when they play their chosen instruments. She starts with a process of discovery and experimentation to learn what techniques best suit a material.
“Objects from nature are not as refined as, say, a finely crafted violin. So there is always some level of uncertainty as to what they will actually do when you play them. They have their own voices, and the smart thing to do as a composer is to work with what the objects want to do, versus trying to make them do something they don’t want to do — you know, not inflict your opinion on them too much, but listen to what they would like to say. It’s fun for me, because life is a lot of uncertainty, and you have to learn to roll with the punches and learn from the material,” she said.
Leonard draws from an array of techniques to make music from natural objects, some of which borrow from music and others from basic technology like amplification and recording.
“Mostly I’m using amplification because the objects are not very loud on their own. So I get to pretend like I’m a mad scientist. I put a microphone on the thing, be it a shell or some driftwood or bones or feathers, and then I just try different ways of playing it. So I would maybe try tapping or brushing or rubbing or taking a violin bow and bowing it,” she said.
“I used to play the viola, so in my heart, I’m still a string player. I do like to bow everything, if possible, and then from whatever interesting voices I find, then I will use those in a composition, and often together with field recordings from the area where the object came from.”
Field recordings capture the sounds of the environment where Leonard is working and might feature everything from the sound of wind in the trees to penguin vocalizations.
While researching artists for Forms & Frequencies, Ro discovered a video of Leonard performing at San Francisco science museum The Exploratorium.
“She was using ice and stones and driftwood that she actually picked up hiking. She used those natural materials to make very immersive soundscapes. So I think she was really a perfect fit for this ‘Second Nature’ theme,” she said.
The “Second Nature” exhibition features the work of 44 photo-based artists exploring the “anthropocene” era, a term coined by scientists in the last 20 years, according to the exhibit website, to mark a “new geological epoch marked by human activity.”
“I’m going to play a set of pieces about climate change to connect with the photography exhibition,” Leonard said. “I’m going to start out in the polar regions. I have been to both polar regions. I went to the Antarctic Peninsula, and I’ve also been to Svalbard, which is an archipelago north of mainland Norway. I’ll be doing pieces about changes to environments in both places. And then we’re going to end with a piece about a local place, i​​nspired by a landslide area in the Marin Headlands.”
Among the instruments Leonard will be playing at the Cantor is one constructed of Antarctic limpet shells. A driftwood log, which serves as the base, bristles with nearly a dozen upright brackets made of smaller pieces of wood that are holding oval-shaped shells of various sizes. The piece has a graceful, sculptural quality to it.
“I wanted to bow the shells, and I was literally just holding it in my hand and bowing it with the other hand, which is pretty awkward. So I tried to figure out a way to mount them so I could play a set, and then I didn’t want it to look ugly,” she said.
Her 2009 trip to Antarctica added other unusual objects to her collection of instruments, including found penguin bones.
“When I’m playing them on stage, people can come up and see the penguin bones. It’s another way to connect the audience with a place that’s far away and yet affects our lives in many ways,” she said.
An instrument with a more local origin that will be featured in Leonard’s Forms & Frequencies performance is a kelp flute, made from a piece of bullwhip kelp that dried in a loose spiral shape. Bay Area beachcombers will recognize this smooth brown kelp, which washes up on beaches as long hollow stalks that are slightly tapered at one end, with a prominent bulb shape on the other end.
Leonard, who used to play traditional flutes, found the dried piece of kelp on the beach and realized it might work as a flute. She used a Swiss Army knife to punch a hole in the bulb end; blowing across the hole produces notes much like a wind instrument — or like blowing across the neck of a bottle. The uneven edges of the hole contribute to the sound.
“I think because it’s not a perfect hole, I get these sort of rich multi-phonics — just a more interesting sound than if the hole was super clean,” she said.
Other instruments she’ll be playing include clam shells, featured in a piece about walruses because one of their favorite foods is clams, Leonard said. These shells, dangled from strings of varying length, mobile-style, produce a jingling sound.
The Forms & Frequencies series not only seeks to introduce audiences to such new sounds, but also offer a different experience at the Cantor.
“Part of the program is that the performances take place in different spaces at the Cantor. So we are collaborating with the artists and they can choose which space really fits their sound and their experimentation. We’re not a music venue and we do have some sonically challenging spaces, but I think a lot of the artists that we’re talking to really are open to working with those unique challenges.” Sming said.
While some events so far have taken place in the museum’s lobby, and one was planned for the Rodin sculpture garden but relocated due to weather, Leonard’s performance will take place in the auditorium, as her music requires “more focused attention,” as Sming said.
Sming said that she hopes the Forms & Frequencies performances bring listeners “an awareness of the Bay Area sound and music community — just that there are artists working in this way, and also that the museum can be a space for different kinds of experiences. The museum offers a variety of programming, as well as art, and that it might be different from what they’re expecting.”
Cheryl E. Leonard performs at Forms & Frequencies, which takes place March 20, 6:30-8 p.m, at the Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford. Admission is free. events.stanford.edu. For more information about Leonard and her work, visit allwaysnorth.com orinstagram.com/allwaysnorth
