Guest Artist Recital: Greg Stuart
Friday, October 14, 2022 at 7:30 p.m.
Guest Artist Recital

Greg Stuart, percussion

Friday, October 14, 2022 at 7:30 p.m.

Sandra G. Powell Recital Hall
Natalie L. Haslam Music Center

PROGRAM

Border Loss (2021)
Sarah Hennies
(b. 1979)

side by side (2021)
Michael Pisaro-Liu
(b. 1961)

  • Part I
  • Part II

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Greg Stuart is a percussionist whose work draws upon a mixture of music from the experimental tradition, Wandelweiser, improvisation, and electronics. His performances have been described as “a ghostly, gorgeous lesson in how close, concentrated listening can alter and enhance perception” (The New York Times). Since 2006, he has collaborated extensively with the composer Michael Pisaro-Liu, producing a large body of new music for percussion, often in combination with field recordings and/or electronic sound. In February of 2020—with La Jolla Symphony Orchestra conducted by Steven Schick—Stuart premiered Pisaro-Liu’s Umbra & Penumbra for amplified percussion and orchestra. Alongside fellow percussionists and soundmakers Tim Feeney and Sarah Hennies, Stuart is a member of the trio, Meridian, whose performances and recordings explore unstable acoustic and rhythmic phenomena.

Recent work by Stuart includes: a trio of recordings with violinist Erik Carlson, performing music by Jürg Frey (Edition Wandelweiser), Clara de Asís (Elsewhere) and Eva-Maria Houben (self-released); Sarah Hennies’ Reservoir 1: Preservation (Black Truffle) composed for Meridian and pianist Phillip Bush; Terra Incognita, an installation co-created with visual artist Naomi J. Falk presented at 701 Center for Contemporary Art comprised of 2x4s, textiles, and 6-channel sound; collaboration with the experimental hip-hop group clipping. for their album Visions of Bodies Being Burned (Sub Pop), which features Stuart’s distinctive approach to percussion on the track “Invocation (Interlude);” and Stuart’s installation, Swales & Sloughs, exhibited at the Harry Hampton Visitor Center at Congaree National Park as part of the traveling Smithsonian exhibit “Water/Ways,” which dynamically combines fifty location recordings with hundreds of photographs, all made/taken throughout the park by Stuart.

A committed performer, Stuart has appeared at numerous festivals and notable venues presenting experimental music including MaerzMusik (Berlin), the Melbourne Festival, Café Oto (London), Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts (Bristol), Cha’ak’ab Paaxil (Mérida), Issue Project Room (New York), REDCAT
and Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Big Ears (Knoxville), Elastic Arts Foundation (Chicago), New Music Co-Op (Austin), Philadelphia Sound Forum, and Non-Event (Boston). Stuart’s recorded work can be heard on Edition Wandelweiser, Gravity Wave, Erstwhile, Elsewhere, New World Records, Mode, New Focus Recordings, and Black Truffle, among many others.

An enthusiastic educator, Stuart has given lectures, workshops, and performances at the University of Huddersfield, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Victorian College of Arts, Hochschule für Künste Bern, Bard College, California Institute of the Arts, Oberlin Conservatory, Cornell University, New England Conservatory of Music, Smith College, Harvard University, ReVIEWING Black Mountain College, Georgia State University, and Tulane University.

Greg Stuart is currently Associate Professor of Experimental Music at the University of South Carolina School of Music in Columbia, SC where he teaches courses on sound studies, experimental music, and directs the Experimental Music Workshop, a student-musician ensemble that regularly presents new work by visiting artists.

 

PROGRAM NOTES

Greg Stuart’s work often asks the question: what is a percussionist? Subtractions represents one of the many answers he has uncovered during his long and ongoing collaborations with the composers Sarah Hennies and Michael Pisaro-Liu.

Previously, Stuart has been drawn to recording projects that involve the careful mixing and layering of many different sounds into subtle, complex assemblages. These projects also largely eschewed virtuosity and traditional percussion techniques, and instead explored experimental approaches that not only enable but actually require what Stuart calls “a certain anonymity to the sonic production” that sits squarely at odds with virtuosity as it has traditionally been conceived. In part, these political-artistic choices have been shaped by his experience with focal dystonia, a condition in which his left hand’s action is unpredictable and sometimes uncontrollable. For the past 15 years, his answer to the question “what is a percussionist” has involved, in no small measure, a deliberate, self-conscious refusal of soloistic display as well as traditional technique.

On Subtractions, we experience something new from Stuart. Both pieces are for a solo percussionist and each is technically challenging, often virtuosically so. Perhaps refusing virtuosity is not the problem. Virtuosity—the breath-taking display of ability—can be beautiful and even profound. Perhaps the problem is instead the overly-narrow cultural assumptions about what virtuosity should look and sound like that circulate in institutional music culture. What is “virtuosic” should depend more on the player than on a generally expected set of skills that all players ought equally to possess. Rather than rejecting virtuosity itself, then, the two pieces comprising Subtractions require a different, more mature, and certainly more vulnerable attitude. Here, Stuart and his composer-collaborators no longer provide the sonic anonymity that has allowed him to create expansive percussive soundscapes while remaining individually un-glimpsable. He must be willing to be heard, as himself, the blurred motor cortex mapping of his left hand and all.

This vulnerability is extremely moving, as is the core ethos of collaboration that guides the compositions on display. Each of these composers has worked with Stuart many times over the years and each knows his performer-body intimately. Thus, Hennies and Pisaro-Liu create sets of problems uniquely suited for Stuart alone to solve given his own particular array of abilities and approach to his craft. At the same time each composer also responds to his request for a solo percussion piece that is technically difficult to play.

Sarah Hennies’ Border Loss was developed in close dialogue with Stuart, departing from a place of mutual trust, understanding, and friendship. Hennies writes that her project was “to write a ‘normal’ percussion piece - one that focuses primarily on rhythm and striking objects with mallets,” that Stuart “would be happy with and that [he] could physically perform.” Through this process of imaginatively engaging with Stuart’s uniqueness as a performer, Hennies ultimately developed the idea of “totally free rhythm through instructions that still cause rhythm,” which we can hear in Border Loss. Political implications resonate from the title and content of the piece—Stuart moves through the work’s ten clearly-defined “states” that also bleed into one another. As in real political life, there are borders, and yet to some extent there also aren’t borders; borders are real yet fictive, material yet ideal, and difficult to pin down. Where exactly does one “state” end and the next begin? How does one negotiate the messiness of the world and its constructed yet very real divisions? In Border Loss Stuart navigates a rhythmic thicket: from drums to cymbals played with the feet, from cardboard boxes to hanging metal objects, from shakers to friction sounds. We hear pitches and not-quite-pitches, chaotic ever-changing rhythms and long-duration sustained sounds. Sometimes a new state emerges so slowly that we are not aware of it until much later; at others, we feel as if we are stuck within a particular state unable to get out; and at yet others, a new state explodes, shockingly, with a burst of seemingly senseless violence. What will the stateless world feel and sound like? What, and who, will emerge when the particularities and quirks of irregular rhythms disappear into sustained noise? Who will we be, collectively, and as individuals, once we can move freely in this contested world? Border Loss explores such questions as it moves through its series of discrete, yet linked, sonic spaces.

Pisaro-Liu writes that side by side was made “with Greg Stuart providing detailed feedback on the ideas every step of the way.” Accordingly, the piece changed significantly from first draft to final version. There are significant political implications in this collaborative practice. The idea of neither party knowing what the end result will sound like until they arrive at it together is a sonic analogue of radically-democratic consensus decision-making. This type of process seeks to avoid top-down, elitist forms of management, which start from pre-envisioned assumptions about what is “best” for others, and then try to cram all the particularities of real life into that prefabbed container. Real democratic process, by contrast, starts from the other end. If the goal is to make some aspect of the world better for the people who live in it, the process should begin with what the people themselves want, and should proceed via collaborative experimentation with ideas for how to get there. Here, for example, the composer suggests something; the performer explains why it won’t work, or suggests some version of it that would work better; this process continues until both are happy with the result. Pisaro-Liu’s side by side proceeds in two sections that are sonically distinct: Part I, for bass drum and cymbals, suggests “sensations on the skin,” in the composer’s words, through its use of friction and struck sonorities, while Part II, for vibraphone and glockenspiel, explores ringing chords and brief melodic fragments, not unlike “two people walking together.” In side by side, as in radical democracy, the goal is not to simply “include,” “accommodate,” or “serve” a performer with different abilities than whatever is ideologically held to be the “norm.” Rather, the process of “walking together” toward a goal departs from the belief that if each participant helps to shape the process itself “every step of the way,” the end result will actually be better—more effective, more aesthetically pleasing, more interesting and good, more useful and meaningful to everyone involved—than anything the lone composer/political actor could have designed on their own.

The two pieces on Subtractions are not about a musician finding ways to be a percussionist “despite” his abilities; rather, his abilities are part of what a percussionist is and should be. These recordings allow us to hear a world in which percussion has been detached from institutionalized assumptions about particular techniques and repertoires. Here, by contrast, we might begin to understand percussion itself as, in Stuart’s words, “a kind of everything else,” a realm full of all that remains, and all that can happen, when borders dissolve.

– Marianna Ritchey

Notes taken from the liner notes of Subtractions (New Focus Recordings, 2022)

We hope you enjoyed this performance. Private support from music enthusiasts enables us to improve educational opportunities and develop our student artists’ skills to their full potential. To learn more about how you can support the School of Music, contact Chris Cox, Director of Development, 865-974-2365 or ccox@utfi.org.

Guest Artist Recital: Greg Stuart
Friday, October 14, 2022 at 7:30 p.m.
Guest Artist Recital

Greg Stuart, percussion

Friday, October 14, 2022 at 7:30 p.m.

Sandra G. Powell Recital Hall
Natalie L. Haslam Music Center

PROGRAM

Border Loss (2021)
Sarah Hennies
(b. 1979)

side by side (2021)
Michael Pisaro-Liu
(b. 1961)

  • Part I
  • Part II

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Greg Stuart is a percussionist whose work draws upon a mixture of music from the experimental tradition, Wandelweiser, improvisation, and electronics. His performances have been described as “a ghostly, gorgeous lesson in how close, concentrated listening can alter and enhance perception” (The New York Times). Since 2006, he has collaborated extensively with the composer Michael Pisaro-Liu, producing a large body of new music for percussion, often in combination with field recordings and/or electronic sound. In February of 2020—with La Jolla Symphony Orchestra conducted by Steven Schick—Stuart premiered Pisaro-Liu’s Umbra & Penumbra for amplified percussion and orchestra. Alongside fellow percussionists and soundmakers Tim Feeney and Sarah Hennies, Stuart is a member of the trio, Meridian, whose performances and recordings explore unstable acoustic and rhythmic phenomena.

Recent work by Stuart includes: a trio of recordings with violinist Erik Carlson, performing music by Jürg Frey (Edition Wandelweiser), Clara de Asís (Elsewhere) and Eva-Maria Houben (self-released); Sarah Hennies’ Reservoir 1: Preservation (Black Truffle) composed for Meridian and pianist Phillip Bush; Terra Incognita, an installation co-created with visual artist Naomi J. Falk presented at 701 Center for Contemporary Art comprised of 2x4s, textiles, and 6-channel sound; collaboration with the experimental hip-hop group clipping. for their album Visions of Bodies Being Burned (Sub Pop), which features Stuart’s distinctive approach to percussion on the track “Invocation (Interlude);” and Stuart’s installation, Swales & Sloughs, exhibited at the Harry Hampton Visitor Center at Congaree National Park as part of the traveling Smithsonian exhibit “Water/Ways,” which dynamically combines fifty location recordings with hundreds of photographs, all made/taken throughout the park by Stuart.

A committed performer, Stuart has appeared at numerous festivals and notable venues presenting experimental music including MaerzMusik (Berlin), the Melbourne Festival, Café Oto (London), Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts (Bristol), Cha’ak’ab Paaxil (Mérida), Issue Project Room (New York), REDCAT
and Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Big Ears (Knoxville), Elastic Arts Foundation (Chicago), New Music Co-Op (Austin), Philadelphia Sound Forum, and Non-Event (Boston). Stuart’s recorded work can be heard on Edition Wandelweiser, Gravity Wave, Erstwhile, Elsewhere, New World Records, Mode, New Focus Recordings, and Black Truffle, among many others.

An enthusiastic educator, Stuart has given lectures, workshops, and performances at the University of Huddersfield, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Victorian College of Arts, Hochschule für Künste Bern, Bard College, California Institute of the Arts, Oberlin Conservatory, Cornell University, New England Conservatory of Music, Smith College, Harvard University, ReVIEWING Black Mountain College, Georgia State University, and Tulane University.

Greg Stuart is currently Associate Professor of Experimental Music at the University of South Carolina School of Music in Columbia, SC where he teaches courses on sound studies, experimental music, and directs the Experimental Music Workshop, a student-musician ensemble that regularly presents new work by visiting artists.

 

PROGRAM NOTES

Greg Stuart’s work often asks the question: what is a percussionist? Subtractions represents one of the many answers he has uncovered during his long and ongoing collaborations with the composers Sarah Hennies and Michael Pisaro-Liu.

Previously, Stuart has been drawn to recording projects that involve the careful mixing and layering of many different sounds into subtle, complex assemblages. These projects also largely eschewed virtuosity and traditional percussion techniques, and instead explored experimental approaches that not only enable but actually require what Stuart calls “a certain anonymity to the sonic production” that sits squarely at odds with virtuosity as it has traditionally been conceived. In part, these political-artistic choices have been shaped by his experience with focal dystonia, a condition in which his left hand’s action is unpredictable and sometimes uncontrollable. For the past 15 years, his answer to the question “what is a percussionist” has involved, in no small measure, a deliberate, self-conscious refusal of soloistic display as well as traditional technique.

On Subtractions, we experience something new from Stuart. Both pieces are for a solo percussionist and each is technically challenging, often virtuosically so. Perhaps refusing virtuosity is not the problem. Virtuosity—the breath-taking display of ability—can be beautiful and even profound. Perhaps the problem is instead the overly-narrow cultural assumptions about what virtuosity should look and sound like that circulate in institutional music culture. What is “virtuosic” should depend more on the player than on a generally expected set of skills that all players ought equally to possess. Rather than rejecting virtuosity itself, then, the two pieces comprising Subtractions require a different, more mature, and certainly more vulnerable attitude. Here, Stuart and his composer-collaborators no longer provide the sonic anonymity that has allowed him to create expansive percussive soundscapes while remaining individually un-glimpsable. He must be willing to be heard, as himself, the blurred motor cortex mapping of his left hand and all.

This vulnerability is extremely moving, as is the core ethos of collaboration that guides the compositions on display. Each of these composers has worked with Stuart many times over the years and each knows his performer-body intimately. Thus, Hennies and Pisaro-Liu create sets of problems uniquely suited for Stuart alone to solve given his own particular array of abilities and approach to his craft. At the same time each composer also responds to his request for a solo percussion piece that is technically difficult to play.

Sarah Hennies’ Border Loss was developed in close dialogue with Stuart, departing from a place of mutual trust, understanding, and friendship. Hennies writes that her project was “to write a ‘normal’ percussion piece - one that focuses primarily on rhythm and striking objects with mallets,” that Stuart “would be happy with and that [he] could physically perform.” Through this process of imaginatively engaging with Stuart’s uniqueness as a performer, Hennies ultimately developed the idea of “totally free rhythm through instructions that still cause rhythm,” which we can hear in Border Loss. Political implications resonate from the title and content of the piece—Stuart moves through the work’s ten clearly-defined “states” that also bleed into one another. As in real political life, there are borders, and yet to some extent there also aren’t borders; borders are real yet fictive, material yet ideal, and difficult to pin down. Where exactly does one “state” end and the next begin? How does one negotiate the messiness of the world and its constructed yet very real divisions? In Border Loss Stuart navigates a rhythmic thicket: from drums to cymbals played with the feet, from cardboard boxes to hanging metal objects, from shakers to friction sounds. We hear pitches and not-quite-pitches, chaotic ever-changing rhythms and long-duration sustained sounds. Sometimes a new state emerges so slowly that we are not aware of it until much later; at others, we feel as if we are stuck within a particular state unable to get out; and at yet others, a new state explodes, shockingly, with a burst of seemingly senseless violence. What will the stateless world feel and sound like? What, and who, will emerge when the particularities and quirks of irregular rhythms disappear into sustained noise? Who will we be, collectively, and as individuals, once we can move freely in this contested world? Border Loss explores such questions as it moves through its series of discrete, yet linked, sonic spaces.

Pisaro-Liu writes that side by side was made “with Greg Stuart providing detailed feedback on the ideas every step of the way.” Accordingly, the piece changed significantly from first draft to final version. There are significant political implications in this collaborative practice. The idea of neither party knowing what the end result will sound like until they arrive at it together is a sonic analogue of radically-democratic consensus decision-making. This type of process seeks to avoid top-down, elitist forms of management, which start from pre-envisioned assumptions about what is “best” for others, and then try to cram all the particularities of real life into that prefabbed container. Real democratic process, by contrast, starts from the other end. If the goal is to make some aspect of the world better for the people who live in it, the process should begin with what the people themselves want, and should proceed via collaborative experimentation with ideas for how to get there. Here, for example, the composer suggests something; the performer explains why it won’t work, or suggests some version of it that would work better; this process continues until both are happy with the result. Pisaro-Liu’s side by side proceeds in two sections that are sonically distinct: Part I, for bass drum and cymbals, suggests “sensations on the skin,” in the composer’s words, through its use of friction and struck sonorities, while Part II, for vibraphone and glockenspiel, explores ringing chords and brief melodic fragments, not unlike “two people walking together.” In side by side, as in radical democracy, the goal is not to simply “include,” “accommodate,” or “serve” a performer with different abilities than whatever is ideologically held to be the “norm.” Rather, the process of “walking together” toward a goal departs from the belief that if each participant helps to shape the process itself “every step of the way,” the end result will actually be better—more effective, more aesthetically pleasing, more interesting and good, more useful and meaningful to everyone involved—than anything the lone composer/political actor could have designed on their own.

The two pieces on Subtractions are not about a musician finding ways to be a percussionist “despite” his abilities; rather, his abilities are part of what a percussionist is and should be. These recordings allow us to hear a world in which percussion has been detached from institutionalized assumptions about particular techniques and repertoires. Here, by contrast, we might begin to understand percussion itself as, in Stuart’s words, “a kind of everything else,” a realm full of all that remains, and all that can happen, when borders dissolve.

– Marianna Ritchey

Notes taken from the liner notes of Subtractions (New Focus Recordings, 2022)

We hope you enjoyed this performance. Private support from music enthusiasts enables us to improve educational opportunities and develop our student artists’ skills to their full potential. To learn more about how you can support the School of Music, contact Chris Cox, Director of Development, 865-974-2365 or ccox@utfi.org.