December 12, 2024
Atlanta Contemporary Arts Gallery
Atlanta, GA – USA
“WATTage”
Ken Ueno, composer and performer; Jan Berry Baker, saxophone; Stuart Gerber, percussion .
Ken UENO: Never Having Written a Piece for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Gallery
Ken UENO: WATTage
Group Improvization based on Ken UENO: Timbre Studies
Jon Ciliberto | 7 JAN 2025
Bent Frequency performed works by and with Ken Ueno at the Atlanta Contemporary on December 12, 2024, “a collaboration that promises to challenge the boundaries of sound, form, and artistic expression.”
Bent Frequency’s Co-Artistic Directors Jan Berry Baker (saxophone) and Stuart Gerber (percussion) performed Ueno’s WATTage (2024), written for the pair and a distant follow-up to his WATT (2000) for the same instrumentation.[1]
Ueno describes his goal for WATTage: “to step closer to the sound world of my heroes, like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and reconcile that wild, fantastic visceral quality with a structure inspired by my love for Ligeti and Birtwistle’s music.” WATTage “looks back at what I did all those years ago, trying to recapture some of the visceral energy of WATT while moving forward by adding new dimensions — such as microtonal harmonies and the counterpoint of multiple harmonic layers that ring and decay at different rates.”
The program consisted of a solo piece by Ueno, a duet by Bent Frequency (WATTage), and a closing (largely improvised) performance by all three.
Of the three works on the program, WATTage struck me as less dependent on a theoretical understanding of its basis than the two framing works. It was a strenuous and energetic excursion, very motif-driven, and colorful. Via email, Baker described the work as “explor[ing] extended techniques and at times wildly virtuosic passages in both instruments […] moments of beautiful microtonal melodies and shimmering harmonies allows us to really explore the full extent and range of sounds possible with these two dynamic instruments.” Bent Frequency was really engaged, and coherently conveyed Ueno’s musical ideas in this world premier.
The opening performance, Never Having Written a Piece for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Gallery, is described via email as integrat[ing] bespoke vocal techniques (e.g. circular breathing on difference tones) with Beckettian movement that leans towards performance art.” Before unpacking this, one first notes that the title appears to refer to James Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (thanks to Gerber for that reference). That work, one of Tenney’s minimal pieces written on the backs of postcards, has a very simple instruction: “that the performer must roll a single note from quadruple pianissimo through to quadruple fortissimo and that it should be ‘very long’.”[2]
I tend not to be the sort of listener (or viewer, or reader) who derives much aesthetic delight from theory. I imagine that there must be others who do, or else why would art that is so reliant on theory have so many fans? Despite this, I try hard not to let theory, when it is there, affect negatively my actual experience (and enjoyment). Sometimes, even, it is helpful.
Ueno’s piece came across as similarly open in format, giving the performer wide latitude to determine its performance, but without the twee conceptual quality of Tenney’s. The program’s notes provide practical and theoretical explanations of the work’s intention, particular regarding the performers vocal technique. Ueno, as a performer, frequently uses a megaphone. Here its purpose was to “direct [his] sound in different directions, at different structural materials and angles.” His amplified, directed voice was a “reading” of the space, revealing echoes, reverberations, and resonant frequencies unique to the physical space. For Ueno, this “means that architecture, too, can be read as harmonic structure,” and some have seen this as similar to the sacred architecture in Christianity — whose design is in part toward aesthetic qualities revealed in choral and musical performance.
Having not been to the Contemporary previously (and this appears to be the meaning of the title, less than to Tenney’s largely conceptual composition), Ueno explored the space in real time, using a megaphone as an amplifier of the sonar-like plumbing of the surfaces, angles, and physical parameters of the space. The sound itself ranged from horn-like tooting to a high-pitched keening, almost like whistling, with occasional second voicing (the throat singing), and one certainly could discern very subtle variations as his amplified voice pinged off the walls and ceilings and their meeting places. The often extremely loud, piercing, even painful sounds led some in the audience to plug their ears, while others (my wife included — she suffers tinnitus), fled the room entirely.
Ken Uemo performing at the Atlanta Contemporary. (credit Jon Ciliberto)
I listen to some extreme noise, and one finds that, with the proper willingness to submit to it, there is calmness and even beauty that is revealed.
That said, music that is physically difficult to listen to raises questions. While presenting something that is a challenge to endure (for performer, audience, or both) was a part of performance art from the beginning, one wonders about the performer’s expectations of the audience. Makers of difficult art are both asking the audience to question why something is or is not art, and also, strictly for themselves, staking out a purely autonomous value system. At base, that is really what art is, in my opinion: even when the aesthetic canon is well-established, if the composer or musician is not actually feeling the canonic value, the work is a failure, regardless of its adherence to the “rules”.
I asked Ueno via email about this aspect of the performance. In addition to a thoughtful reply, he provided documents and links. One part of Ueno’s broadest motivation as an artist is a general challenge to institutional artistic standards — i.e., “X is music because some false authority says it is.” Personally, Ueno described his own childhood experiences of being bullied on the playground, drawing a direct line between this unjust expression of authority to his experience, as a masters student at Yale, encountering colleagues dismissive of the ingressive vocal technique he used at a cocktail party to beat operative singers in a game of hitting the highest note (described in Ueno’s “Towards the Un-Corseting of Non-Western Bodies: Liberation Through the Search for Alternative Epistemological Frames”).
Ueno also generously provided a capsule autobiography: selection to West Point and completion of the first year, an injury requiring two years of convalescence during which Jimi Hendrix and the guitar led to a new direction: the Berklee College of Music and studying composition. Ueno also earned a doctorate in music composition from Harvard University, and is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. As for the intensely noisy, even painful sound of some of his vocal work, Ueno noted to me: “it’s a physical experience, like listening to Hendrix, a wash of feedback that works the body, which I interpreted in my youth affectively as a feeling that was something like empathy. Music saved my life. It was a physical trauma that led me here.”
Putting to the side any general criticism of institutional aesthetic norms, one sees how personal and particularized art-making, and thus, aesthetic standards, are. “I am not your Composer,” paraphrasing James Baldwin, but this position also exposes the risk in elevating “mere” art-making to a life and death standard.
While WATTage truly requires no theoretical grounding for appreciation, both the solo, megaphonic work, and the concluding improvised trio, to some degree, did. In the former, it served to overcome the physical challenge of listening and give insight into how to listen.
The latter was based on Ueno’s Timbre Studies[3] which Gerber described as “a text-based work as a way of coming up with a shared vocabulary for the improvisation.” I was glad to learn from Ueno’s email that he feels that “no improvisation is completely free.” (As I have written: “Free improvisation is not free.”)[4] It is not unfair to say that free improvisation is more for the improvisers, than the audience, and thus aligns with performance art’s motivation to reclaim control of art-making, taking it from anything external to the artist. For each artist, this brings different value. For Ueno: “At its best, it creates an intensified focus on being present in the now, which, if you get used to it, can help one embrace the essential ephemerality of life, and be less afraid of even death.”
The ephemerality of any strict (institutional) meaning of art itself is brought into focus by musical improvisation. As Vasari reported Botticelli advised Da Vinci: “by merely throwing a sponge full of diverse colors at a wall, it left a stain… where a fine landscape was seen.” ■
Bent Frequency with Ken Ueno. Notebook sketch by Jon Ciliberto.
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Bent Frequency: bentfrequency.com
- Ken Ueno: kenueno.com
- Atlanta Contemporary: atlantacontemporary.org
- [1] Kent Ueno: WATT | SoundCloud
- [2] Program notes for James Tenney’s Postal Piece No. 10: Having Never Written a Note for Percussion | Hollywood Bowl
- [3] Kent Ueno: Timbre Studies | YouTube
- [4] The Odd and Beautiful: Klimchak and Stagner collaborate in free improv, Ear Pollen concert at the Atlanta Contemporary | EarRelkevant, April 6, 2024
Read more by Jon Ciliberto.
