Annie Gosfield
Photo by Josh Gosfield

I first encountered Annie Gosfield in the year 2000, when, as a member of the Flux Quartet, I recorded her piece Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery. At that time I was fascinated by her ability to translate factory noise into instrumental music. I continue to be impressed by her unusually effective use of string instruments. In recent years Annie's music has been a source of inspiration to me as a composer.

Last spring I had the pleasure of perfoming her piece Lost Signals and Drifting Satillites, and I'll be playing it again on November 29 at The Stone. Also on the program will be works by Corey Dargel, Anna Clyne, Alexandra Gardner, and Huang Ruo. This will be a wonderful opportunity to hear Annie's work live, in the context of other new and recent violin music.

Annie also writes wonderfully about music and composition.

Dufallo: Can you name a few of your musical influences?

Gosfield: I’m so fascinated by the everyday sounds around me that my primary musical influences are often non-musical: traffic noise, distant voices, machine sounds, and the intricate layers that build as these sounds overlap. I find it much more compelling to listen to the sounds that I hear on the streets in New York than to block them out with an ipod. But I do also listen to music at home. When I start a new piece, I usually go through a period of immersion, in which I work closely with a soloist or group, and listen to pieces of a similar instrumentation. Some of the composers I look to in this process are Ustvolskaya, Scelsi, and Varese, along with earlier composers whose orchestration I admire: Stravinsky, Beethoven, even Rimsky-Korsakov. John Zorn has been an influence, not only for his uncanny ability to sound like himself in so many different contexts, but for his fearless and uncompromising approach to music, and his no bulls**t approach to running a label and venue.

To be honest, I couldn’t come close to naming all of my musical influences; everything I listen to creeps into my grey matter. I’ve always listened to a lot of soul, blues, and rhythm and blues. My parents and older siblings raised me on many types of music: jazz, rock, blues, soul, funk, anything from New Orleans, and not much classical. It allowed me to grow up with an open mind, and let me approach classical music as something new.


Dufallo: Your work often explores unconventional sounds. Can you describe your process when working with these sources? Do you listen to the sounds until you hear music in them, or do you search for sounds that compliment pre-existing musical ideas? Both? Neither?

Gosfield: The other day I recorded the sound of a cement mixer in front of my apartment and built a piece around it. The racket was driving my boyfriend crazy - one person’s noise is another person’s music. I don’t employ a single compositional method. I’m always surprised by how different the process is with every new piece, which helps to keep it fresh, exciting, and occasionally frustrating. I usually think about the instrument or ensemble first. Then, if I’m using other sound sources, I think about what would work with those instruments. If I’m composing for myself, I normally start with less conventional sounds, since my main instrument is a keyboard sampler. Sometimes a wonderful idea leads to nothing, and a throwaway thought opens new doors. The process is still impractical, unpredictable, and inefficient, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Dufallo: Your violin piece Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites uses recordings of satellites, shortwaves, and radio transmissions. Can you describe what inspired you to write this piece and what images come to mind when you hear the music?

Gosfield: George Kentros, who originally commissioned the piece, asked me to write a piece for “violin and something” and brought over a now-defunct digital processing unit. It’s hard to build a piece around hardware - everything becomes archaic eventually - so I considered writing a piece for violin and tape instead. Up until that point, I had resisted writing “tape” pieces because a performer can’t have the same dynamic interaction with a recorded track that he or she can with another live musician. This was a good opportunity to finally tackle a piece for a solo instrument plus “tape” (now it’s on CD or a hard drive, but old terminology dies hard). I loved the idea of having two very portable sound sources. In its most low-tech version, a violinist with a portable CD player could perform this piece in a cornfield or a concert hall, yet the simple format still allowed me to of combine acoustic and electronic sources, and mix traditionally notated music with noise. Because it’s not dependent on a sampler, computer, or a specific piece of hardware, there have been a lot of interesting performance possibilities for this piece.

While researching Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites, I read about Sputnik, and how lone ham radio operators listened to the satellite’s transmissions using bulky radio equipment in remote, rural areas all over the world. I was taken by the image of a man or woman alone in an isolated field, lost in a night sky littered with satellite noise, listening rapt to the abstract blips and bleeps broadcast from the spinning basketball sized hunk of metal. It brought to mind each individual’s interpretation of this seemingly random noise, and how each radio operator might hear it differently. I hope that each violinist who performs Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites has a similar experience, hearing his or her own hidden rhythms and melodies in the noise, informed by past experiences, and finding their own dynamic interaction with a backdrop of bleeps, blips, and static, creating a new duet with this phantom collaborator.

Dufallo: You also have a fascinating career and history as a performer. Can you describe how, in your experience, performing influences composition, and vice-versa?

Gosfield: I started taking piano lessons as a kid. Then I studied composition. Then I went back to focusing on performance, since it was the most expedient way to get my own music played. Then groups started inviting me to compose for them, so there I was back at composition. I’ve always had to balance performing live with composing for others, which has been very healthy. Since I began my professional life as a musician performing my own work, a sense of physicality became an important part of the compositional process for me. When I was first starting out and writing for my own group, I could always feel it in my fingers, so the mechanical aspect of performance was always in the forefront. As a composer/performer, my ideas were based on my own musical interests, instincts, and technical abilities, rather than on a preconceived notion of what the music should sound like. Improvisation has always been an important part of my musical vocabulary as well. My experiences with improvisation have given me the freedom to explore unfamiliar musical territory, and to try to come up with unusual dialogues between musicians. The discipline of composing in traditionally notated forms has given me a certain degree of patience, and a great appreciation for the times that I can just get out there and play.

When I was working on my second CD, "Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery," I was editing the recording of EWA7, a concert-length piece composed for my band at a site-specific concert in a factory in Nuremberg. Soon after, I had to quickly shift gears to revise the score to Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery, a double quartet for strings and percussion influenced by factory environments. I was surprised at how similar the two processes were, and how similar the music was, even though the language used to communicate it to the musicians was very different. It was just a matter of sculpting sound, sometimes on paper, sometimes in audio, but the thought process was the same.

Having a varied career has led to a lot of interesting cross pollination. A live improv gig might inspire me to bring some noise into a notated piece, for example, or a slow, extended section of a string quartet might bring new harmonic ideas to a live improv. I have learned to accept the fact that all creative experiences have an impact on future work: usually it's positive, occasionally it's negative. It's important for me to strike a balance between avoiding past mistakes, while forging ahead, trying something different, and taking a chance on making some brand new mistakes along the way.