CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community) magazine, eContact!
Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner (University of North Texas) - December 2005
"Hear Me Now: the implication and significance of the female composer's voice as sound source in her electroacoustic music"
This lengthy, detailed, and interesting article discusses the music of the author, Christine Baczewska, Alice Shields, and Pamela Z as women composers using themselves as musical sound sources in their electroacoustic works. Click here to read the entire article.
newmusicbox, the Web Magazine from the American Music Center
Lisa Hirsch (San Francisco Classical Voice) - May 14, 2008
"Lend Me a Pick Ax: The Slow Dismantling of the Compositional Gender Divide"
Alice Shields was interviewed for this article on newmusicbox, which discusses the particular issues facing women composers. Click here to read the entire article.
SHENANDOAH (2002 — choreography, "In This Valley")
Montpelier: James Madison University Magazine
Ashley Day
"A Moving Journey: Dancers stage the immigrant experience"
"A unique opportunity arose when the JMU dance program received a $10,000 grant from Dance/USA — the national service organization for nonprofit professional dance — and the National Endowment for the Arts. Only one institution of higher learning in each of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., receives this honor each year.
"Thompson drafted the grant around project requirements that called for community involvement in post-performance discussions. "The dance faculty decided to go one step further and make this community the actual content of the project," recalls Thompson. She and the dance faculty enlisted guest choreographer Mark Taylor, whose work in contemporary dance has earned him international recognition, for the project.
"Guest composer Alice Shields describes her creative process. "I consider above all else the emotional impact of their testimonies and the physicality of their words. These are people rich in their souls."
"She named her score Shenandoah, borrowing her signature musical rhythms of India and the Middle East to form a strong percussion line. Creating a mystical sensation, the lingering chords of a lute-like tambura weave through somber and spirited tempos. Large-frame drums pronounce strong rhythmic beats, coaxing Thompson's dancers into each measure. In excerpts from cut-tape recordings, immigrants describe — in their own words — the fears and heartaches they have faced. At one point, a small boy sings a native lullaby, captivating listeners with his sweet, youthful pitch. As each performer fell easily into the trance-like rhythm, his innocent voice blended with the sounds of plucked strings and rattles in the music.
"Shields' goal to provide a true representation of experience remained a constant element during the process. "I ask myself, does the material keep the authenticity of the testimony?"
"The dance program has a history of encouraging students to make connections in the community," says [Cynthia] Thompson, who with colleague Kate Trammell directs the thomas & trammell dance co. "This project was a natural extension of that commitment."
"In groups and as individuals, we experience the same emotions at different times," says [JMU senior Pedro] Batista. As a member of the Harrisonburg community since 1992, a native Puerto Rican and a JMU student, he finds himself between both worlds. His goals, though, are universal. "We often journey on the same paths, headed toward the same unity and the same goal in living our lives — to live life to the fullest.""
The Breeze/Style: James Madison University's Student Newspaper
Joanie Clark
"Dance portrays life 'In the Valley'"
"Audiences will be exposed to a different perspective on Valley culture at the Contemporary Dance Ensemble concert this weekend. The performance will focus primarily on the 30-minute piece entitled In the Valley.
"For the past semester, the dancers have been working with nationally recognized guest artist Mark Taylor and composer Alice Shields. Together with JMU dance professor Cynthia Thompson, they have conducted interviews with 15 immigrants living in the Shenandoah area. These interviews were used as a basis for movement and composure of Shield's original score, Shenandoah, used throughout the piece.
"The incorporation of real stories and real people into the choreography required more time than usual, but all those involved claim that it will make the concert especially intriguing this year. "I think meeting and interviewing the people gave the students a lot to work with as performers," Thompson said. "They are intimately connected to the material."
"During the interviews, the performance's artistic directors recorded the immigrants' voices to incorporate into Shenandoah. Seven different languages demonstrate the valley's diversity and give the audience an auditory taste of valley culture. Taylor choreographed movement based on material from the interviews.
"Compared to the normal time length of five to 10 minutes, In the Valley, is much longer. "It demonstrates the time and struggle that the immigrants felt in coming to the U.S.," senior dancer Beth Bradford said. In fact, almost every element, from the props to the music, is intended to portray the experience of the immigrants uprooting from their homeland and coming to the United States.
""It will be very moving and compelling, especially for the interviewees to hear their story told back to them through both their own words and our own movement," senior dancer Casey Blake said.
""Some people may be fascinated and others may be confused," [Senior dancer Keira] Hart said. "I think it's important just to listen and not to try and find meaning. The sound isn't organized in a coherent story line or narrative, but more a collection of thoughts and memories.""
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DUST
www.narthaki.com
"Mark Taylor talks to Lalitha Venkat about creating Dust with Anita Ratnam"
"In April 2001, Indian dancer/choreographer Anita Ratnam and American choreographer Mark Taylor combined members of their companies to create Dust, a 30-minute work with original music by composer Alice Shields. Dust was the culmination of a three-year period of dialogue and experimentation between Ratnam and Taylor focusing on the kinetic and esthetic potentials of mixing traditional Bharatanatyam and contemporary post-modern movement forms.
"How did you work out the choreography process?
""I worked with composer Alice Shields who was a wonderful choice for this piece She's not only a very experienced composer of electronic music, she has also studied Indian music forms, like jathis and thillanas. We wanted to look at the form of the thillana, essentially not to create a thillana as in Bharatanatyam, but look at parts of it, the devotional part, to look and see how we can go to the root of what it means, look at it from our perspective as westerners. We proposed this to Anita and she thought it was a good idea."
""I had a sense of structure, lot of music and sound was established. When the dancers arrived without Anita, we started work with the dancers contributing their own ideas and movement material. So when Anita arrived, we had the rudimentary structure, which we then refined. This is the first version we performed in May 2001. There were subsequent versions with more refinement, answering questions that cropped up. What we will perform now is the second draft post September 11."
"It is important to emphasize the collaborative nature of the project. Anita and I are certainly the people who guided the project. Alice Shields contributed to the structure of the project, the dancers to the physicality. Costume designer Myra Bullington looked at photos of Tibetan monks and peasants and based on that came the colour palette and patterns. The original lighting design is by Barbara Thompson. It emphasised a 10' square area of space, which becomes alternately an altar, a plain space, a kitchen, a porch, a sacred space. The lighting definitely contributed a sense of mystery.""
THE MUD ORATORIO (Choreographic title, "Stirrings")
The Heinz Endowments Winter '03 magazine
Download the article as a PDF
Presenting: News for PA Presenters — Volume 14, Issue 2
Download the article as a PDF
Frostburg State University — Statelines, March 17, 2003
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ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Columbia Magazine — The Alumni Magazine of Columbia University
Click here to read the entire article.
Columbia Composers
Experiments in electroacoustic music
"In 1959 [Otto] Luening and his former student Vladimir Ussachevsky founded the Columbia Experimental Music Studio (which evolved into today's Computer Music Center). One of the world's major studios for electronic music, the center gave many eletroacoustic music pioneers their start, including Alice Shields '65GS '67GSAS '75SOA, one of the first women in the field. Shields, currently at work on a biography of Ussachevsky with Isabelle Emerson '56BAR '77GSAS, wrote some of the first electronic operas, including Apocalypse, Shaman, and Mass for the Dead, premiered by the American Chamber Opera Company in 1993. Last year she premiered a computer piece, Dust, composed in ragas with rhythmic patterns from traditional Indian dance-drama."
New Music Box
The Web Mag from the American Music Center covering American New Music
Click here to read the entire article.
"NewMusicBox asks Anne LeBaron: What do you feel should be the requirements for a composer to be included in the Grove?"
"When I was invited to comment on what criteria should be met for a composer to gain entry into the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and to reflect upon whether American composers are adequately represented in the current edition, I initially balked. How could I adequately address such a broad question in the course of a few days? What about the increasingly broad definition of "composer," not to mention the complication of "American" composer? My solution was to bypass such roadblocks, and go to the heart of the matter.
"I discovered, in the course of a modicum of research, more than a few glaring omissions from the New Grove II, despite the much-touted expansion in size and the broader coverage (when compared to its predecessor, published in 1980). Indeed, in the introduction to New Grove II, the editors (Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell) point out that the "biggest single expansion has been in the coverage of 20th century composers."
"There are 5,000 entries for composers in the present volume, compared to 3,000 in the 1980 edition. According to the editors, these additional 2,000 entries reflect the representation of composers from more countries, of more popular types of music, and of more composer-performers. Certainly, such growth in numbers represents a kind of progress. Yet, in light of such a monumental improvement, how is it possible to omit composers such as Osvaldo Golijov, Mark Adamo, Derek Bermel, Maria Schneider, Thomas Oboe Lee, Nathan Currier, David Stock, Melinda Wagner, Lori Dobbins, Jane Brockman, Ran Blake, Sebastian Currier, Reza Vali, Nancy Galbraith, Don Byron, Toby Twining, Mary Ellen Childs, Julius Hemphill, John Musto, and Richard Einhorn? (I'll stop at twenty, but there are many more.) Within this admittedly random listing of noted composers, there are achievements galore that would presumably form the basis of criteria for representation in Grove's — visibly important performances, recordings, publications, awards, and prizes, including a Pulitzer. So, what gives?
"Three other individuals will form a nucleus for the core of my argument protesting the omission of American composers who deserve to be included in Grove II...
"The second composer I'll bring into this discussion, Alice Shields (featured in the July 2002 issue of NewMusicBox), was Associate Director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center for a number of years. Not surprisingly, she was also one of the very first American women to compose electronic music, with several "classic" electronic works available on recording (such as the evocative The Transformation of Ani). She has been widely commissioned, recorded, and performed, creating electronic operas — such as Mass for the Dead and Apocalypse (available on CRI) and large computer works for dance — such as Dust, currently touring in India. Her intensive study of Hindustani classical vocal music, and of South Indian rhythmic recitation, has charged her more recent works with a seductive exoticism. She continues to write and lecture about the psychology of music and about electronic music. This past summer, the Santa Fe Opera asked her to serve as a panel moderator for the topic "Electronic Media and the Voice" (with panelists Kaija Saariaho, Morton Subotnick and Gershon Kingsley). As a seminal figure on the American electronic music scene, and an active composer who continues to attract commissions, why isn't Shields represented in Grove II?"
"Paradoxically, Charles Rosen, in his brilliant and erudite review of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (predecessor to New Grove II), in The New York Review of Books (May 28, 1981), remarks that the dictionary is "largely dominated by the Americans." Of course, he's making reference to the scholars who write the entries. About fifteen years later, in an article describing the challenges she faced while writing an entry defining "feminism" for the New Grove II (see "Defining Feminism: Conundrums, Contexts, Communities," in Women and Music, Vol. 1, 1997), Ruth Solie expands upon that claim, noting the dominant presence of American reviewers in the avalanche of reviews in the wake of the 1980 edition. "Like me, reviewers are especially interested in the reflection of disciplinary change in the new edition. A strong American voice is almost universally noted." If this continues to be the case, American writers submitting entries for Grove, along with the phalanx of reviewers critiquing it, should be aware of the discrepancies among composer entries and make an effort to achieve more of a balance. I'm talking about nothing less than musicological activism aimed at leveling the playing field, which should in the long run raise the overall level of a magnificent encyclopedia."
A selected discography of the works of Alice Shields can be found at
http://people.unt.edu/~aeh0018/womtechdisc.html.
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Articles Written by Alice Shields
New Music Box
The Web Mag from the American Music Center covering American New Music
Click here to read the entire article.
NewMusicBox asks: Can music for dance stand alone?
"In response to the question of writing stand-alone music for dance, I would say first that yes, I compose my music for dance so that it will also work as an independent piece of music. In exploring my thoughts on how I do this while at the same time writing what I believe are effective works for dance, I find I have to first clarify for myself the issues in writing for dance in general.
"The challenge in writing music for dance, as I see it, is to leave psychological and sensory 'space' in the music in which the dance can maintain its own power and presence. The establishment and maintenance of this psychological and sensory space requires the careful manipulation of density in several sound parameters, in particular the control of:
- vertical density (the presence or absence of chordal structures and the vertical distribution of their components)
- horizontal density (the presence or absence of contrapuntal melodic and rhythmic material)
- regularity of occurrence (the presence or absence of meter)
- frequency of occurrence (tempo)
- volume density
"High density in any of the above brings the music into more prominence; high density in all of the above means that all of the psychological and sensory space is being used by the music at that point, and that the dance at that moment will likely seem, at best, unrelated to the music, or at worst, will seem irrelevant, artistically impotent.
"The control over these parameters is even more important when it comes to electronic sounds, where the composer's almost too-easy access to overwhelming volume and timbre requires a developed sense of restraint in order to maintain musical structure alone, much less providing the psychological space to which I have been referring. For example, in one of my early electronic works for dance (Domino for the Mimi Garrard Dance Theatre in 1967) I did not resist the impulse to blast away on stage in huge sounds created from sampled thunder. Eventually Mimi Garrard, the intelligent and talented choreographer, simply lined the dancers up on the back wall of the stage and had them stand there while I indulged myself in these furious sounds on the tape. Although Mimi turned even this to good effect, I had left no 'space' for the dance.
"So now that I have explored what I think the issues are in composing effective music for dance, I can ask myself what the issues are in writing effective music for dance that is also a standalone, effective musical piece for the concert hall or CD recording. And here's my thought: it is overall form. In a moderately effective work on stage, either the music or the dance may bear the overall structuring function, creating the formal, sectional changes of the piece. In a truly effective work on stage, I believe the forming function is equally borne by the music and the choreography. In such a piece, the music can stand alone without the dance, for its formal structure is strong, just as that of the dance was. The creation of such a work requires, of course, a good aesthetic and working relationship between composer and choreographer.
"So it seems to me that an effective piece of music for dance which will also stand alone as a piece of music not only provides the necessary psychological and sensory space for interaction with the dancers (which makes it at least an effective accompaniment to the dance), but also has a highly developed formal musical structure as well.
"Although I was aware while working on my computer piece Dust that I was creating music which would be happening on a stage along with dancers, I deliberately composed the formal structure of the music so that it could later stand alone and be played by itself, either on concerts or on a commercial recording. Dust (2001) was commissioned by Dance Alloy of Pittsburgh and is a collaboration between me, choreographer Mark Taylor of Dance Alloy, and choreographer Anita Ratnam of the Arangham Dance Theatre of Madras, India. It is performed by two dancers from Dance Alloy and two traditional Bharata Natyam dancers from the Arangham Dance Theatre. The full 30:39 minute version of the music of Dust works on its own without the dance, but for practicality's sake I also created a 12-minute concert version.
"One of the pleasures for me of working on Dust with choreographer Mark Taylor was being able to use the difficult rhythms of Bharata Natyam with both Western and Indian dancers. After brief consultations at the beginning of my collaboration with choreographers Mark Taylor and Anita Ratnam, I suggested that the overall dramatic form of the work be based around the Tibetan Chöd ritual first described by the intrepid Victorian adventurer-scholar Alexandra David-Neel. Mark and Anita agreed, and I then created the musical structure by which this ritual would be expressed, basing the musical form on the Bharata Natyam dance form known as Tillana. I used two North Indian ragas — Madhuwanti raga and Todi raga — and four traditional Bharata Natyam jethi-s (South Indian rhythmic sequences). Created on ProTools with GRM plug-ins, I used as timbral sources Tibetan trumpets, Tibetan ritual conch shells, Indian drums and an Indian singing voice. I finshed the music and sent it to Mark on CD, so that he could begin choreographing the piece."
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