Evelyn Ficarra [featuring voices and poetry of Jackson Mac Low and Stacy Doris]: Light Conference [2015]

The Poetry Center in 2015 commissioned Evelyn Ficarra, California-born, UK-based composer and sound-artist, to create a sound-work, an 'audio chapbook' as she notes below, using original recordings from The Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives collection. The intent at the time was for this to be the first of a series of sound-works by commissioned artists for a project to be titled "Artists in the Archive." The project didn't, however, go beyond this initial work, after failed attempts to secure funding for the series of commissions. The base materials for Ficarra's work, Light Conference, are the audio documents from two readings: by Jackson Mac Low: November 5, 1975 (recorded in Knuth Hall, the music performance theater in San Francisco State University's Creative Arts Building), and by Stacy Doris: September 26, 2002 (recorded in The Poetry Center Reading Room, Humanities 512, on a program shared with Chet Wiener, to mark Doris's first semester teaching at SF State). 

Evelyn Ficarra's composer's note follows: 

Light Conference

The voices of these two poets, Jackson Mac Low and Stacy Doris, swim towards, through and past us from where they no longer are, to where we imagine ourselves to be, borne by their words. "I make these marks with my hand" says Mac Low, but it is the voice we hear here, the voice with all its warmth and fragility. In a world in which materiality is dissolving into the digital soak, these voices seem to physically touch us, the vibrations moving us through a journey of image and thought. The poets speak and we feel as if we know them, are with them, in all their nuance, passion and humor — graceful, mischievous, bold, playful, uncompromising.

As a composer I have always been drawn to the material of voice and words, so the chance to make an 'audio chapbook' using recordings of readings by poets was one I embraced. All the better that these two poets (selected for me by Elise Ficarra, the Asssociate Director of The Poetry Center who is incidentally my sister), were both intensely musical. Music is integral to both their performances. Doris, at times, sings. Mac Low has backing musicians and a chorus of other readers. Both have poems with strongly rhythmic and/or repetitive passages, to the extent that the sound and rhythm of speech takes over. For example, note Doris' frenetic phonetic Arabic refrains ["(Flight 990)"], and Mac Low's percussively agile "Phoneme Dance for and from John Cage".

These poets had a long association. Mac Low was initially a mentor figure to Doris, and they were friends for many years. There are many cross currents in their work in terms of both image and approach; shared themes of light and loss; a delight in wordplay; an idea of multi-voiced utterances. Mac Low calls these 'simultaneities' and actually has poems which are spoken by several readers at once, in a polyphonic musical composition. Doris too — though giving a monophonic reading — has many voices in her work, and expresses her desire to have them speaking together. This pleased me no end, as it gave integral motivation for layering the poets' voices both against each other and among themselves, creating both audio textures and multi-voiced conversations across and within the poems.

Under the terms of this commission I was asked to make a 20 minute piece, using the recordings of the two Poetry Center readings (Jackson Mac Low [November 5] 1975 and Stacy Doris [September 26] 2002). The combined recordings came to well over two hours, so this would necessitate a considerable compression / editing of material.  I developed the following strategies:

  1. In selecting material, I would search out themes / ideas / phrases / images common to both poets, attempting to make a more cohesive whole out of something that would, inevitably, be stitched together from fragments.
  1. Although I would be doing a lot of cutting, I would ensure that there would be one full poem, or at least a 'stand alone' subsection of a longer poem, from each poet, uninterrupted. For Mac Low, this is his "32nd Light Poem: In Memoriam Paul Blackburn". For Doris it is the "Whooping Woman and Bird" stanzas from Conference. This was partly to let each poet speak for a time without interference from me, and partly to honor the 'real time' duration of the reading and to give the listener at least a partial experience of that.
  1. I would limit myself to using sounds and voices in the recordings themselves, and not introduce any extraneous material.

I was very aware, while working, that both poets were no longer living, and that what we have in these recordings is an acoustic echo — vibrant but disembodied — of their living presence, a presence known and deeply missed by many. I did not, therefore, want to 'mess with' their voices too much. The usual tropes of the electroacoustic composer, in which material is electronically transformed beyond recognition, while a powerful compositional technique, did not feel appropriate to this project. No need here, to have the beloved voice morph into something too unrecognizably 'other'.

I therefore did not do any major processing on the recordings.  I did not introduce any speed changes or transpositions, but limited myself to some modest filtering and reverberation effects. These allowed me to, at times, place the voices in the same imaginary 'space', or put them in a foreground / background relation to each other, allowing them to speak simultaneously and still be heard. My main technique was simply splicing — sometimes very free form, radical cuts, extractions that allowed me to fragment and juxtapose materials across the two readings. At times it would seem as if the poets were riffing off one another, in a quick-fire dialogue, or at other times, each providing layers of textural support to the other's solo. I hope and trust they might have liked this. It was tremendously energizing to engage with their work in this way.

Within all of this, I also wanted to keep a trace of time and place, as evidenced in the recordings, which document live readings in front of an audience. You can hear the background of the space and the people in it. A sense of the moment of performance comes through the hesitations, fluffs, the rustling of paper, the pauses as a poet turns the page. The recordings speak poignantly of their technologies also. Mac Low was recorded analogue, using — such is my deduction at least, from what I hear — a recorder with automated settings, that would, if the signal went quiet, search for sound, raising its record levels, so that a muted ambient roar would gradually crescendo until the reader spoke again. (The machine searches for the voice of the poet). It also sometimes produced abrupt bursts of static, which I have used as punctuation and to construct rhythmic edit points. The Doris recording, undoubtedly digital, has at times a slightly distorted 'hot' edge to it, and some kind of high pitched ringing alarm in the background, which I’ve made no attempt to remove. Let the document be raw, it is what it is. 

The good fairy grants only three wishes, but I have five.

The first is that the families, friends and former students of these poets will warm to what I have done. I love these voices and have tried to treat them as living entities in a shared, multi-voiced conversation.

The second, is that this work will tempt the web audience to listen to the full original readings, which are magnificent.

The third is that listeners will then be inspired to explore the archive as a whole further, as it is an incomparable resource.

The fourth is that other sound artists will get the chance to do as I have done, and create new works from this rich archive of recordings.

My final wish can never be granted, but must remain speculation. I wish that the poets themselves would have liked what I have done with their words and voices. I found the process intensely moving, and I thank them posthumously for allowing me to enter into the conversation.

Evelyn Ficarra July 2015

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
Date
2015-07-XX
Event Run Time
00:21:27
Contributors
Jackson Mac Low
Stacy Doris
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Evelyn Ficarra, Light Conference (00:21:07)

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