Joan La Barbara
Photo by Paula Court

I first worked with Joan La Barbara in 2001 during the inaugural season of Carnegie Hall's three year festival of New York School composers entitled "When Morty met John." At the time I was a member of the Flux Quartet and Joan, as curator of that festival, had invited us to perform. During our first rehearsal of Earle Brown's Folio and Four Systems, I realized I had never encountered a musician like this - I was struck by her totally original sound world, and her meticulous approach to graphic scores. A year later I asked her if she might be interested in starting up a "composing performer's collaborative," and that is (basically) how Ne(x)tworks began. Since that time we have worked closely, both on her music and the music of other composers.

Joan is a constant innovator in both vocal music and multi-media art. She continues to be a major source of inspiration to me, as a performer, composer, and musical thinker. This coming Thursday, April 29, Ne(x)tworks is thrilled to present excerpts of her opera-in-progress "Angels, Demons, and Other Muses" at Roulette as part of the Interpretations series.


Dufallo: Can you name some of your biggest musical influences?

La Barbara: My major musical influence is John Cage, of course for his philosophy that all sound can be considered music, but more importantly, for his attitude toward simultaneities. I find that whenever I feel "stuck" while working on a piece, I think of Cage's interest in layering several of his compositions in simultaneous performance. When I do this with individual sound modules or elements (the building blocks with which I compose), I always find something surprising and often useful in the new relationships of the materials I am layering. Cage also said that he always tried to say "yes" when asked to do something because he enjoyed the surprise of what might occur.

Morton Feldman was also a major influence in his attention to visual art and aspects of color, shape, organization, the picture plane, negative space and equality of elements. I find that my work is often influenced by visual art. I tend to "see" sound when I hear it and when I sing and so many of my scores include graphic representations of sound as well as of the energy required to make sounds, and the physical delivery of sounds.

I found Earle Brown's technique of choosing sonic elements or modules and then reordering and reconfiguring them during performance fascinating and very useful. I often will go back into some of the sonic atmospheres I have created and restructure them to create a new relationship between the elements.


Dufallo: Describe your creative process. What usually comes to you first (a motive, a concept, an emotion, a rhythm, etc.), and how do you develop that idea into a composition?

La Barbara: My compositional process often begins with stream-of-consciousness writing, generating a list or series of words and phrases about a selected topic or theme without editing or censoring the words or ideas. I then read through what I have written, finding the music that these words inspire in me, generating sketches and constructing the musical material and overall form of the work, setting my impressions of images, translating from words to sound in much the same manner that I have generated multi-layered ‘sound paintings’ inspired by visual art.


Dufallo: Please describe the concepts behind "Angels, Demons, and Other Muses." How do you bring these concepts to light sonically?

La Barbara: In the development of this opera, I began with inspiration drawn from the troubled life and brilliant work of Virginia Woolf, her exquisite word turnings and her psychological exploration of characters, viewing them from different vantage points. Recently I have also turned to the fragments of dreams from Joseph Cornell's journals, drawing inspiration from the images and ideas expressed in just a few words, which I find very rich and intense, often magical. I also returned to a writer whose work I explored as a child, Edgar Allen Poe, as I find that the macabre fixations, his inability to accept death as finite, the labyrinthian fantasies he allowed to inhabit his mental musings are as fascinating now as when I first encountered them. Ultimately, the opera is about the struggle each artist encounters in trying to bring what is clear and perfect in the mind to fruition in a state that can be experienced by others. It is an abstract work, externalizing the internal dialogue, and the genesis of the act of producing a work of art. In performance, I draw on the expertise and vast talents of the musicians of Ne(x)tworks for whom this work is crafted. I am attempting to integrate some of my signature extended vocal techniques into the score and transfer these sounds to other instruments. For the Interpretations performance at Roulette/Location One, the Ne(x)tworks musicians will be seated within the audience in a concept I am calling "immersion". Thus, the entire space will be the ‘stage’, and the musicians will from time to time deliver "personal performances" directly to a member of the audience seated in close proximity. I have long thought it would be fascinating to sit as an audience member in the midst of an orchestra, and experience the sound in such an all-encompassing way, not as a musician, but as a listener, completely surrounded by sound as it is being generated. In this performance, I am also integrating spatial movement between the live acoustic instruments with those in the sonic atmosphere, the soundscape environment which will surround and flow over the audience.


Dufallo: What's next for you, creatively?

La Barbara: I would like to do more work in theatre and to that end have begun studying the craft of acting for the stage.


Dufallo: Do you have any advice for young composers today?

La Barbara: Find your individual voice, find what fascinates you and follow that wherever it takes you.