Month: April 2023

’40 Ways of Being (a Woman)’ is an electro-acoustic piece for soprano, cello, organ, and electronic soundscape, composed by myself (Wilma Pistorius) and Andrea Guterres in 2022.

Is is performed by Viola Blache (soprano), Lisi Hubmann (organ), and Wilma Pistorius (cello).

The instrumentation of the piece (organ, cello, soprano, electronic soundscape) combines the historical colours of the organ with the modern sounds of electronics. The cello forms a link between old and new, and connects the more spacious sounds of organ and electronics to the soprano.

Musically, the piece is written in a layered way, with melodies weaving through a background soundscape. The large form of the piece is based on a succession of different moods, each connected to the storyline: contemplative/vulnerable, ritualistic/dark, raw/powerful, uncertain, depressed, afraid but brave, playful/flirtatious, sassy, magical/wondrous, joyful/sophisticated. In non-musical terms, I would describe the piece as atmospheric, dark, and playful.

’40 Ways of Being (a Woman)’ is a piece about real-life things, based on personal experience: the vulnerability and curiosity of exploring your identity, being powerful and owning your space, the pain and anger of being pathologised for being free, threats of sexual violence and wanting to not be afraid of those, the joy of having a body, the fun of being sexual, the excitement of expanding one’s sexual orientation, and finally, being unapologetic and uncomproposingly authentic, and embracing your personal power.

’40 Ways’ is a piece about identity: discovering and inventing myself as a woman, reconnecting with important aspects of myself that were lost because of negative experiences.

I wanted to make something that reflects what a woman is really like, as opposed to the unrealistic images sketched by our culture. In representations of women, there are mostly two types: the suffering woman who is beautiful and gets in trouble because of it; who isn’t sexual of herself but has sexuality inflicted on her. And there is the woman who is independent and powerful, maybe even sexual, and depicted as unnatural, unfeminine, and monstrous. This is not a realistic representation. The human experience is so much more varied! I wanted to show what being a woman is really like, from my own experience, in the hope of offering a voice of sanity and woman-positivity.

As such, ’40 Ways’ definitely as an activist undertone to it. It feels a bit subversive in that it contradicts the cultural message of what being a woman is about, and offers something more personal and authentic. I think it is very important to do this. We need to show people what being a woman is really like, so that others can have the freedom to simply be themselves.

Female empowerment is important to me in the work I make. It is of central importance to me in my life, and this is reflected in my work. But I don’t always have the opportunity of expressing this in a piece: sometimes I just have to make a piece about something else. I enjoy that too. But the works that really feel close to the bone, that I enjoy making most, always contain some aspect of feminism.

I hope that this piece will give audiences some positivity, and the idea that being a woman is something joyful, something to celebrate, instead of something oppressive or burdensome (as we are often led to believe). I would also like to invite my audiece to reflect on their ideas about gender and what those are based on, and perhaps arrive at a fresh perspective. The title has a tongue-in-the-cheek irony to it: there is not one way of being a woman, and many more than 40!

‘Play/Space’ is a new piece (ca 30′) for recorders and panflutes, performed by Juho Myllylä and Mariana Preda. It combines composed material with improvisations, and involves the audience in an interactive performance.

For me, writing music is a way of sharing positivity and inspiration with others, of communicating something from one human being to another. I would describe my music as “serious, but with a wink”. Serious, because it comes from a personal and authentic place and reflects larger philosophical questions. At the same time, I want to present these things in a playful way, and invite the audience to relate to my music in a personal way, hence the “wink”.

With ‘Play/Space’, I want to create space for creativity and spontaneity. I want to create a situation in which the musicians can interact with my (composed) material. This meant including free parts and improvisation. I also want to involve the audience by giving them a more active role in the performance. I’ve noticed that audiences don’t always know how to listen to contemporary music, and sometimes experience it as impenetrable. By making the concert interactive and literally enabling them to influence the music (or watch others do so), I want to give my audience a more concrete and hands-on experience of contemporary music, and make it something they can relate to. As a cello teacher, I enjoy taking a didactic approach to musical challenges, and involving the audience in ‘Play/Space’ is exactly this: a way of showing people how they can listen to new music.

In order to get a better idea of how I could incorporate improvisation into a composed piece, I had a closer look at some of Frank Zappa’s work. Zappa said that his solos were all about making a composition in “real-time”, where the structure is determined in advance, so he could let himself be surprised by his inspiration in the moment of performance. He would record improvised solos during live performances, and use these on composed studio albums. By analysing some of the transcriptions of Zappa’s solos (made by Steve Vai in ‘The Frank Zappa Guitar Book’), I got an idea of how Zappa built up his solos, and how he combined composed and improvised material.

Medieval music was another source of information and inspiration for the more freely notated parts of ‘Play/Space’. In Medieval music, playing together is approached in a more horizontal and less precise way than in our music today. Studying some examples of Medieval music notation gave me ideas for how I could structure and notate more aleatoric parts of the piece.

‘Play/Space’ has different kinds of sections: composed, aleatoric, and improvised. The composed parts are written and performed in the traditional way, where the musicians simply play my notes. In other parts the notation is freer, and I give the musicians some material to play around with. The piece climaxes in a large improvised section, where I sketch the outlines and provide minimal material for the musicians to interact with. The piece concludes with composed material, where I tie all the differently coloured strings together and weave them into an ending.

Besides improvisations, the ‘Play/Space’ also has interactive parts where the audience can influence the music. Listeners can affect three different parameters: the character, the tempo, and the instrumentation. By holding up signs, audience members can determine whether the mood is mischievous, sensual, or contemplative. Others can determine who’s playing: only the recorder, only the panflute, or both. A third group can set the tempo on an old-fashioned mechanical metronome. In the beginning of the piece, one kind of influence is active at a time, and later on these are layered on top of each other, creating a climax of surprises. We are also doing a livestream, in which the online audience can influence the music through a chatbox.

Although I have used audience participation in previous pieces, this extensive set-up is new for me. I enjoy working with such adventurous musicians as Juho Myllylä and Mariana Preda, who were eager to experiment with me from an early stage in my creative process. The première was a lot of fun, and I was pleased to notice that there was a more informal atmosphere in the audience, and audience members who were simply watching and listening also seemed to feel more involved in the music. Of course, a free and experimental set-up like this requires tight playing, and Preda and Myllylä do a fantastic job of reacting to the audience, and of playing the virtuoso passages I wrote them.

To contrast with the wild and exciting ride of an interactive performance, I decided to publish a selection of solos from ‘Play/Space’, to give the purely musical material the attention it deserves. These are notated in the traditional way, and require no external input: simply a musician and an instrument. These will appear under the title ‘Spectrum’ as Open Score solos, playable by any instrument.

Throughout the rehearsal period, I’ve been making short video’s about the creative process behind ‘Play/Space’ and my collaboration with the musicians. You can check these out on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wilma_pistorius/?hl=en