TH: In this essay, Matt Turner meditates on a couple of recent concerts he attended at Dream House and Task, both in New York.
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In late July this year, I attended a performance at Dream House in lower Manhattan; I went to another in early October. At the centre of each ensemble was La Monte Young and his disciple Jung Hee Choi; Marian Zazeela observed from the side, next to a framed photo of their guru, Pandit Pran Nath.[1] At each performance, the audience members quietly filed up the stairs and into the loft, where they sat on the floor. After the performers came out and settled in—again in near-silence—they began to play a blues-inflected composition for the next hour in traditional instrumentation,[2] informed by both Kiranic vocal technique and the extended minimalist techniques that Young pioneered. The music of the July performance (composed by Young) and the October one (composed by Choi) bore a family resemblance, and both floated over the room like an attention-getting hush. Reading through the literature provided at the door, it became clear how intentional, even ritualistic, all aspects of the performances were—down to the hertz—and that the performances were of music aimed at the “highest spiritual attainment.” At the end of each performance, the musicians left first, in silence, and then the audience quietly filed back down the stairs and out the door to an incongruous Tribeca street.
In late October, I attended a performance at another Tribeca loft, called Task, this time by the Chinese experimental musician and poet Yan Jun. He was on a busy extended tour and only the night before had taken part in a panel discussion for his book Berlin Reflections at the Jersey City Accent Sisters gallery.[3] I was curious to hear what he had described as “no music”—applying the term not only to his work but to the work of fellow musicians in Beijing. These musicians use a variety of instruments, both traditional and non-traditional, and some are not musicians in the usual sense (having no formal training, not aspiring to create compositions or even moments of aural cohesion, and seeming to focus on the performative rather than compositional aspect of sound units).
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Yan Jun and Charmaine Lee
That night, Yan Jun would play two sets. In the first, a duo with Richard Kamerman, the two performers sat facing each other, each with a small table. Yan Jun had what looked like a contact mic on it—which he rubbed, hit and otherwise manipulated—and he howled. The crowd was mostly standing in a semi-circle around the sitting performers; I had to suppress laughter when Yan Jun began to howl, though the faces of most the others there were a study in gravitas. For Yan Jun’s second set, a duo with Charmaine Lee, the two of them sat together at a long table with a chess clock between them. One would make noises—apparently gargling water with a contact mic in their mouth, for instance—while the other waited until they hit the clock and their turn began. Staccato electricity, the sound of a radio dialing, even chants from a protest march outside on Broadway filled the room during this performance of “no music.”
It’s hard to say if I enjoyed the show in the way I enjoyed the Dream House performances—then again, to say I “enjoyed” the Dream House performances is surely missing the point; the Yan Jun performances had no such liberatory aim, but nonetheless did in fact liberate music from any cohesive unit aside from the space of the time of their performance.
The two concerts were in downtown Manhattan, home to some of the priciest real estate on earth. Dream House has an impoverished integrity (and, as a recent New York Times article discussed, financials that reflect it[4])—and the shabby vibe reinforces the seriousness of the music. Task, the loft-venue-apartment where the Yan Jun concert took place, was very nice. It had a kitchen out of Architectural Digest, and I overheard several people asking whose apartment it was. Yan Jun has written about the prospect of simultaneity in music—not musicians playing in concert, but separate performances happening in the same spacetime—and whether we as listeners would elect to consider such simultaneity as unifying or alienating. This open question could also apply to the space of a performance, and the experience of a performance.
At Task, performance and setting were separate from each other in the sense that they did not form an apparent unity. Yet this mirrored “no music”, where the relationship of “musician” to “music” is also one of partial circumstance (i.e., aleatory improvisation compared with the protest chants outside contributing to the aural atmosphere). This is also like most musical performances, which only ironically make a kind of unit—much as Yan Jun’s proposed parallel performances might be considered together as a single set of sound. Where there is a palpable feeling of estrangement or alienation (as in my reaction, and the audience’s, to Yan Jun’s howling), what is impressed upon the eye or ear causes discomfort, and the inability to assimilate that experience of the real becomes a projection that takes on a double life inone’s imagination. Echoes: one of perceived misunderstanding and one of perceived identification.
Compare this to Dream House, which I returned to yesterday though there was no performance.[5] I buzzed up, and as soon as I opened the door was hit by a wall of sound—drones by La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi that were installed in the two connecting galleries. The live performances were cross-cultural explorations of sound that aspired to something that implied beyond-sound; the drones were loud, they were unceasing and had no easily discernible rhythm, and they enveloped the body in a way that no performance can. I walked up the stairs and paid my admission. I moved through the gallery, and the drones seemed to change with my movements. I paused, slightly shifted my head, and paced from end to end. It wasn’t only because the positioning of the speakers relative to my body created variables in sound—the speakers emitted differentiated, microscopically evolving multiphasic drones that, when combined from different angles and positions, created new sounds. This was in great contrast to the stationary setting of audience to performer—in part because of the (more or less) unidirectional nature of performed music, but also because the audience’s attention is on the performer and the performance; the performer’s attention is on their performance and, to a lesser degree, their audience. This is as true for a virtuosic Dream House performance as for an anti-virtuosic “no music” performance. In the responsive galleries of Dream House I was both touching and being touched, I was both the recipient and the instigator of an alien action.
In one gallery of Dream House a projection fell partially over a door. The door was slightly open (I quickly tried to sneak a look inside; was that a washing machine?). I went down the hall to the other gallery, at its end was a large light-point drawing by Jung Hee Choi.[6] In front of it, a girl seemed to be sleeping on the floor. I walked around to the other side of the drawing, curious to see where the light was coming from, but on the recto side was another light-point drawing. Something like a vaporous black vertical slab, punctuated by enough pinpricks that shapes like clouds emerged through it. And through those clouds came golden-hued light. That there were two sides to these clouds—and, the more I walked back and forth, from front to back, from back to front, the shapes and light seemed to shift, transforming into different shapes just as clouds do—demonstrated the dualism at the core of Dream House that was unified through this art object. Or “art”—whatever fits. The space became less gallery or performance venue than something resembling an ancient shrine.
Header image via the website of Dream House.
[1] Also present at both performances were Ben Neill (trumpet), Jon Catler (guitar) and Hansford Rowe (bass). Naren Budhkar played tabla at the October performance.
[2] Although, in addition to the live instruments, there was a drone playing over speakers in the background.
[3] The panel included Ou Ning and myself. Li Jiaoyang hosted.
[4] “The Man Who Brian Eno Called ‘the Daddy of Us All’”, M.H. Miller. The New York Times, July 22, 2020.
[5] For the exhibition in celebration of the 30th season of Dream House.
How to cite: Turner, Matt. “A Space for ‘Music’.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Dec. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/12/04/space-for-music/.
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Matt Turner is the author of the full poetry collections Slab Pases (BlazeVox, 2022), Wave 9: Collages (Flying Islands, 2020) and Not Moving (Broken Sleep, 2019), in addition to the prose chapbooks City/Anti-City (Vitamin, 2022) and Be Your Dog (Economy, 2022). He is co-translator, with Weng Haiying, of work by Yan Jun, Ou Ning, Hu Jiujiu and others. He lives in New York City, where he works as a translator and copy editor. [All contributions by Matt Turner.]