Tanya
Kalmanovitch - John Cage, Her New Album, A New Book and Much More
Tanya
Kalmanovitch - John Cage, Her New Album, A New Book and Much More
Recently,
Jazz and Classical composer, educator, violist and violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch
who makes her home in New York City, returned from Istanbul, Turkey where she
and New England Conservatory colleague Anthony Coleman led a workshop concerning
music improvisation.
“We did a production of John Cage’s song books, with a
pretty diverse cast of Turkish musicians. There were Jazz musicians, free
improvisers, a character actor from film and television, a folk singer who
specializes in music of the Black Sea region and a Rock musician. It was a
diverse group of people interpreting the songs in pretty different ways.
In terms of the Cage songbook
production, there were definitely some things that we altered with the Turkish
audience in mind, but we did that within the parameters that John Cage offers.
At one point with the instructions for one song, he instructs people that
whenever possible the lyrics should be translated into the language of the
audience. I took that as license to play with
language
a little bit.
I think the very deliberate use of Turkish music and Turkish musicians in a
context where it wouldn’t normally be heard was a way of re-imagining or
re-textualizing those works and for teaching there wasn’t anything particularly
different. The population of musicians is so good. They are such great
musicians, with such a great sense of interest, engagement and involvement, so
we just went for it,” says Kalmanvovitch and it is obvious from the tone of her
voice that she enjoyed the experience.
The brilliant twentieth century composer, music theorist, writer and artist John
Cage has often been referred to as avant-garde and an innovator of
indeterminacy in
music, that is to say where a portion of the music is not precisely defined, as
to the manner in which it is to be performed. He also explored the use of
instruments in non-standard ways.
“I had the experience of working with him when I was twenty-one years old or so
and although, I didn’t realize it at the time that really affected me and it
changed in a sense my musical path. I had been asked to participate in a
performance of a piece of his called
Atlas Eclipticalis
and it can be pretty sprawling. The performances can take many, many hours and
the one that we were doing was abridged for a four hour performance. One of the
instructions that we had received was we could take long breaks if we needed to
and we could wait as long as we wanted to from one note to the next. Coming from
a very structured background in Classical music where you have no discretion or
very little discretion over matters of fidelity to the score and then having
been given a score that was quite precise, but also it had written into it a
good deal of chance and variability was compelling to me. I was twenty-one, so I
was being provocative and I took a very long break in the performance and I went
outside (she laughs lightly).
When we did the recording, it was the same thing. Some of the dots were very
small and some of them were very big and those were supposed to help you to
determine things like volume and attack and so forth. At some point in the
recording John Cage was there and I don’t remember why he did this, but he
smiled at me and he beamed at me. He gave me a kiss on the lips and he told me
that I was his favorite violist. This delighted me, even though I didn’t know
what I had done to deserve this and now twenty years later, I think I can
understand what happened at that moment. His music really gave me an option for
a radically different way for thinking about the role of performers and texts.
For really radically examining the question of what counts as music, I felt
pretty chaffed or constrained as a student in a very conservative Classical
music school, as I was at the time. I was searching for other ways to imagine a
relationship between music and sound. It was through him that I started to amass
a vocabulary for thinking and dealing with those sorts of things,” she says.
Like her mentor, Tanya Kalmanovitch is also an innovator and her students are
the beneficiaries. At the New England Conservatory she teaches a course called
Entrepreneurial
Musician.
Three years ago the New England Conservatory gave birth to the Entrepreneurial
Musicianship department and Ms. Kalmanovitch was invited to teach one of the
mandatory undergraduate sections. All of the juniors at the Conservatory are
required to take the course.
“Right away I thought it was a great honor to have that kind of a voice in the
school and to be able to speak to such a broad swath of students from the school
and not just speak to the students in my own department. I could speak to the
students in the Opera department or the Classical music department and so on.
What we talk about in a nutshell is everything other than music that goes into
making a life in music. I think the thing that makes my approach a little bit
distinctive is a lot of people when they talk about these kinds of things will
talk about social media, marketing, grants and networking and I start from a
pretty inward focus. I try to model a process of self- knowledge and
self-discovery. This type of success is so individual and what one of us might
consider to be success another one of us might not, and so the first thing that
I start with is inaugurating a conversation with ourselves. That is something
that I hope the students will keep up in their whole lives. Not a lot of us do
that. We don’t usually know what we are thinking or feeling or experiencing.
I didn’t get into music to be in business, for me it was the opposite of that. I
didn’t want to be involved in something where the bottom line was profit. I
wanted the bottom line to be, maybe spiritual profit. I didn’t really see a
business approach with being compatible with music, but I was also fourteen or
something then. Thankfully we grow up and we develop brains and we have
experiences that teach us to be more flexible and capacious in our understanding
of the world. One of the things that happened to me with this class is coming to
terms with dissolving these binaries between music and business or the evil
corporate world or soul numbing work or day jobs and music jobs. I started to
ask my students what it means for us to act as musicians in every aspect of our
lives. What does it mean to be a musician when you are teaching a group of
beginning recorder players in elementary school if you are coming from a
position of being a very serious young performer who is oriented towards
orchestral performance or if you are a really serious Jazz musician who has a
vision of yourself as being an artist? A lot of the work that we do as musicians
can be disappointing. There can be a disappointment in the professional world
when you get out of school. You are involved in intensive study of artistic
practice, only to land in a world where there is an ever shrinking pool of
opportunities to express that. There are a couple of attitudes that you can take
towards that. There is a depressing one, there is nothing to do and so we might
as well just quit. Then there is the other attitude, which most professional
development manuals and most people who are addressing these problems tend to
take (which is) in the age of the internet there are more opportunities than
ever to have your voice heard, but there are also fewer opportunities to be paid
for it. I try to teach students to have a very robust and personal sense of what
their music is and what it means to them and who they are as musicians, so that
they can carry that into every situation in which they find themselves. That
ends up fueling you when you have a really strong sense of the meaning of music
and its purpose. When you have crystal clear language that you can use to
describe that, it is an incredible gift. I ask students to interrogate the
supposed binaries, the distinction between real artist music work and then the
things that you are doing for money or work as a musician and a day job and the
difference between art and business. I try to ask people what it might mean to
be a musician in every aspect of their lives. In some cases that means that
students end up exploring career paths that they might not have thought of,”
says Tanya Kalmanovitch.
This year Tanya Kalmanovitch stepped down from her position as Assistant Chair
of the Department of Contemporary Improvisation, a position she had occupied for
the past four years, so she can now focus on other areas such as developing more
as a writer, however she continues to teach at the New England Conservatory.
“I have a couple of book projects in the works and I like administrative work a
lot. I like that ability to take something and be able to operate in it from a
bigger picture perspective. I find that really satisfying and I think I want to
apply that more to the bigger picture of my own career,” she explains.
As for being a writer, “I am going to write a book that is a distillation of the
different kinds of conversations that we have in the Entrepreneurial Musician
classes. It will be targeted at professional musicians, young professional
performers and conservatory students. I am hoping that it will be equally
readable by anyone with an interest in music. Ultimately the book is going to be
about the meaning of music in society and what it is that being a musician can
teach us.
Most of the conversations that go on these days about the relevance of music are
either overly celebratory and thus don’t really zero in on some of the more
troubling questions that face those of us who continue to make our living as
musicians, because trust me, it is really a shrinking income pool. That is
happening all of the time and it has been happening all of the time. I think
being a professional musician is very much a historical kind of a concept that
had a time and a place and it did not always exist like this. There are shifting
forms of patronage. When I did my PhD work in musicology we looked at structures
a lot and you will see these stories repeated all over the world at various
points in history.”
Tanya Kalmanovitch also tells us, “I have a new
recording that will be coming out for the first time in eons, so that is
exciting. It is a trio with Anthony Coleman and Ted Reichman. They are musicians
that I know from New York, but they are also part of the faculty of NEC as well.
We do these themed concerts a couple of times per year in our department.
We will bring in the full program of music and we will comment or explore in
some way a body of repertoire or a genre or an idea. I found myself working with
them often to come up with an idea to respond to one of these concerts. Over the
course of a year or two we built up this little body of work and we realized
that we had something quite special. We recorded in this beautiful concert hall
in Boston, Jordan Hall and we are just about to mix it. Then we will send it out
into the world.”
Please visit the Tanya Kalmanovitch website
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