By Judy Lochhead – IAWM Journal (2003)
Composers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries confront a different set of compositional choices than their predecessors in mid-century. Changes occurring in the spheres of philosophy, politics, economics and technology reverberate through the arts and, specific to my concerns here, through the nature of musical creation. Theorized most generally by concepts of postmodernism, these changes have impacted both how composers present their musical creations and the nature of the musical imagination itself. In the concert tradition, composer Anne LeBaron has been one of the defining musical voices in a generation of composers born in the 1950s and early 60s whose work has increasingly been situated by postmodernist thought.
In painting this sonic portrait of LeBaron, it will be helpful to start with Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges,” since it provides a way into LeBaron’s rich and diverse musical identity.1 Haraway, writing as a feminist and philosopher about the practices of science in the 20th century, articulated the now well-known concept of how knowledge, always situated by the various historical and cultural positions of a knowing person, must be understood as both partial and plural. Such a postmodern vision of knowledge as malleable, perspectival, and always provisional provides a foundation for understanding LeBaron’s musical output. Instead of looking for the “origins” of LeBaron’s musical creations, I explore here how her music gives voice to the many “situations” that shape her musical identity. These “situations” range across the various strands of history, ethnicity, gender, politics and technology that, when woven together, identify LeBaron’s creative persona. I will address several of LeBaron’s creations in some detail, allowing these works to help define her musical identities as well as that of the postmodern world that contextualizes them.
Traces of Mississippi, a work for chamber orchestra, mixed chorus with soloists, two narrators, and two rap artists, premiered in November of 2000. The American Composers Forum commissioned it for the Continental Harmony Project, with the goals of celebrating and fostering senses of community. The Composers Forum, working with mayors from four towns in Madison County, Mississippi, was interested in finding a composer who was connected with the issues of a Southern rural environment and who exhibited some interest in trains, which historically played a central role in defining the economic and cultural life of Madison County.
LeBaron’s personal history made her an obvious choice for the project. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she attended college at the University of Alabama in the early 1970s, where she nurtured aspects of both Southern culture and the European/American avant-garde in her emerging compositional style. While these two aesthetic strands are never fully disentangled in LeBaron’s music, the Southern aspect proved decisive for the commissioning project. From the earliest works in the 1970s, LeBaron’s music bears traces of her Southern heritage, including the humorous association with frogs in her Concerto for Active Frogs (1974), the evocation of songs associated with the South in Southern Ephemera (1993/94 for either a mix of Harry Partch and traditional instruments or orchestra), and the re-hearing of the blues in the E. & O. Line: An Electronic Blues Opera (1993, with libretto by Thulani Davis).
The E. & O. Line, a re-telling of the Eurydice and Orpheus myth, also involves a train as a mode of transport to the underworld, where Eurydice transforms herself into a fully realized person with her own dreams and aspirations. The train in this work plays a central role as a metaphor of personal realization through the idea of transport. In both the ME. & O. Line and Traces of Mississippi the train has a recurring musical presence, occurring as a kind of leitmotif in the latter. Inscribing the human and economic importance of trains to Madison County into the musical fabric of Traces of Mississippi, LeBaron designs the form of the work around the movement “And We Ride.” Of the 14 movements of this oratorio-like work, “And We Ride” occurs four times (as movements 2, 4, 8, and 13), and its music evokes the rhythmic regularity of a locomotive’s mechanical motion through a tuba ostinato and a battery of percussion.
Traces of Mississippi incorporates several other historical and current strands of the South—addressing issues of slavery, farming, racial strife—through a mix of different kinds of music, including chorus with orchestral accompaniment, vocal recitation with orchestral accompaniment, gospel with piano, and two “rap” passages with orchestral “beats.” Traces of Mississippi speaks hopefully through and about the South in a musical tapestry that retains its unique present and past strands, and through the communal act of performance, it actively fosters and celebrates community. Another work premiering in 2000, the “dance opera” Pope Joan, situates LeBaron’s concern for gender issues as they have been articulated by feminist scholarship in the last 30 years. The growing presence of women in the ranks of composers in the latter half of the 20th century should not disguise the difficulties that women still face. Statistically, the numbers remain low, and women composers still face many hurdles that their male counterparts do not. Among them is the extent to which a composer who is a woman chooses to address issues of feminism either aesthetically and/or intellectually. Demonstrably subscribing to a constructionist notion of gender, LeBaron has chosen to engage issues of gender through the musical setting of verbal text, that is, not through a consciously adopted feminist aesthetic. In addition to Pope Joan, other works that explore issues of gender include Dish (1990), a setting of poetry of Jessica Hagedorn, and the aforementioned E. & O. Line. In all of these works, LeBaron uses texts that illuminate gender inequities as both historical and present-day phenomena. While Dish deals with the subjectivity of a contemporary woman who struggles against the male gaze and the dominance of male desire, Pope Joan deals with a historical subject of the 9th century. In each of these works, LeBaron uses diverse stylistic allusions as a means of text setting. In Dish, the music varies from a sultry vamp to a chaotic swirl of popular quotations to a kind of fiddle dance.
In Pope Joan, allusions to medieval music underscore the historical import of the topic, which retells the documented but not fully accepted story of Pope John VIII who, after giving birth to a child in a papal procession, was revealed as a woman and then stoned to death in 858. The piece, for soprano and instrumental ensemble in both a danced and concert version, gives voice to the feelings and situation of “Joan” through music employing both late 20th-century expressive techniques deriving primarily from the concert tradition and inflections of medieval chant. The music alluding to medieval chant provides a sonic token of the past, while the identifiably contemporary music and Enid Shomer’s poetry articulate the narrative from contemporary perspectives.
LeBaron’s musical setting of this story makes palpable the historical and emotional situation of a woman who, no matter whether legendary or actual, does not accept socially-mandated gender roles. The musical landscape of Pope Joan juxtaposes the sonic inscriptions of a medieval world with the expressive palette of the present day not as “collage” or “blank pastiche” (in Frederic Jameson’s sense) but rather as a manifestation of the continuous reality of gender struggles. The articulation of issues of gender as struggle for equal treatment is a recent phenomenon growing from feminist and queer theory, and as such, it is fitting that LeBaron chooses a contemporary expressive style for the character of Pope Joan to express her thoughts and emotions. Indeed, the confluence of these historical and expressive strands enunciates a postmodern perspective on the historicity of our present situation.
LeBaron’s music manifests a kind of performative ease that does not derive from simplicity but rather grows from the situation of a composer who is also active as a performer. In addition to her compositional voice, LeBaron has cultivated a two-faceted performance persona. One is as virtuoso performer of her own music, following the 19th-century tradition of composer-performers such as Liszt. Notable in this area are the several works for harp and tape, such as the Blue Harp Studies, and the Double Concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra, whose premiere featured LeBaron as soloist with the D.C. Youth Orchestra. The second facet grows quite consciously out of various improvisational practices in the 20th century.
As a harpist, LeBaron has played in several free improvisational ensembles, either as participant or as named leader. Performing with such well-known figures as Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey, LeBaron’s improvisational work spans the traditions of jazz and the artistic avant-garde. Her interest in improvisational practices may be traced to her college years at the University of Alabama where, with Tim Reed (aka “Rev. Fred Lane”), Craig Nutt, Nolan Hatcher, Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, LeBaron participated in a group named “Raudelunas.” Steeped in ideas from Surrealist and Absurdist art as well as from free jazz, the group launched several performances and eventually released a recording, “Raudelunas Pataphysical Revue” (1975), which was deemed in 1998 one of the “100 Records that Set the World on Fire” by Ed Baxter in Wire magazine. Since those heady days of the 1970s, LeBaron has remained active as an improviser, exploring various extended techniques and electronic manipulations of the harp. Important recording releases include “Phantom Orchestra” by the Anne LeBaron Quintet in 1991 and more recently, “Blackwater Bridge” with Gary Hassay.
LeBaron’s improvisational practices are primarily motivated by her interest in Surrealism and related artistic practices. Her extensive knowledge of the issues and goals of Surrealist art has recently been published in an article, “Reflections of Surrealism in Postmodern Music,”2 where she traces the role of music in early 20th-century Surrealist art and its implications for more recent practices that have been embraced by the concept of postmodernism. LeBaron weaves a rich historical context not only for the practices of Raudelunas but also for such musicians as Davey Williams, LaDonna Smith, John Zorn, John Oswald, Mark Steven Brooks, Shelley Hirsch, Hal Freedman and Eugene Chadbourne. Linking these improvisational artists to early century concepts and actions by the Surrealists, LeBaron considers how these practices have been recycled in a postmodern context.
I began this profile with the observation that changes in the spheres of philosophy, politics, economics and technology have a correlate in the aesthetic domain. In particular, the prevalence of sound and image reproduction technologies and the emergence of postmodern philosophical perspectives on the nature of history and knowledge have had significant ramifications on the nature of creative imagination. Within the domain of musical composition, the embrace of diverse styles for expressive purposes is understood as one of the defining markers of this aesthetic transformation. Such an aesthetic of expressive inclusion has been evident in the stylistic diversity within particular works of LeBaron discussed here already, and one may also observe it across her creative output—from the avant-garde sounds of the free improvisational works to the more populist sounds of blues-influenced music.
This aesthetic of expressive inclusion plays a defining role in LeBaron’s music that is most firmly rooted in the concert tradition. Two works focus the issue of postmodern inclusion: the orchestral work, American Icons of 1996, and the chamber work, Telluris Theoria Sacra of 1990. American Icons, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra, takes up a number of gestures that may be construed as emblematic of several strands of mid-20th-century American music. It mixes allusions to a wide range of music under the general rubric of popular—Rock, R&B, music theater (e.g., I hear a strong allusion to Bernstein’s Westside Story), jazz, and so forth—with new “binding” music in the concert tradition, and weaves them all into a musical tapestry tinted with the myriad sonic hues of 20th-century America. Such a conjuring of associations through a mix of the recognizable and the new occurs also in Telluris Theoria Sacra but in a way that is more historically and stylistically diverse. For an ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano and two percussionists, Telluris Theoria Sacra follows a narrative of the world history articulated by Thomas Burnet. His 1681 treatise, Telluris Theoria Sacra or Sacred Theory of the Earth, articulated a pre-modern view of chaos as creative potential and a several stage view of world history, encompassing a trajectory from chaos, through order, flood and implosion. Such pre-modern worldviews have been revived within the last 25 years by those exploring both the intellectual ramifications of chaos theory in the sciences and the grip of reason on Modern philosophy. LeBaron’s work provides a sonic image of Burnet’s history of the world, inviting listeners to ponder the pre-modern world with respect to the contemporary, post-modern moment.
Telluris Theoria Sacra’s four movements juxtapose various types of music and musical forms, all from the vantage of a contemporary, concert-music perspective. The first movement, “Sea Horse Tails,” progresses from a representation of chaos to a fully articulated order, the latter in a passacaglia. The second movement, “Strange Attractors,” a title referring to a concept from chaos theory arising in the early 1970s that captured the presence of embedded recurrence within a large-scale non-ordered phenomenon, sets Burnet’s flood stage as a waltz, juxtaposing the gestures of physical ease through the dance with more introspective moments of expressive reflection. Another term from contemporary science, “The Devil’s Polymer,” serves as the title of the third movement and as the central metaphor for the music. This movement, depicting the earth as we now know it, combines through allusive gesture several musical types—jazz, dance music, blues and so forth—with music in a contemporary concert idiom to create a network of associations analogous to the intricate web of mutually dependent life forms represented on the earth. The concluding movement, setting Burnet’s final stage of implosion, begins with a tarantella (titled “Vortex Trains”), which then gives way to a lauda, a form alluding to a medieval song, and finally into the epilogue (titled “Gravothermal Collapse”), which, through a series of swirls and swoops, spins the movement into conclusion. In both Telluris Theoria Sacra and American Icons, as well as in much of LeBaron’s music, the conjuring of associations through a mix of the recognizable and the new—of the past and of the moment—is one of the defining strategies of the postmodern situation.
Demonstration that LeBaron’s music employs strategies of the postmodern situation provides only a convenient shorthand for understanding more specific details of musical practice. In particular, the concept of postmodernism helps to illuminate an aesthetic of inclusion operating across LeBaron’s creative output. Such an aesthetic is nourished by changes in late 20th-century concepts of time and space and the nature of knowledge. Significant increases in the mobility of people across national and regional boundaries and in the speed of communication through new image and sound technologies have resulted in an embrace not simply of the textual and visual emblems of the past and far away but also of their aural markers. Exactly how such aural markers generate musical meaning depends on the specific ways they are utilized, but the very idea of such an embrace depends on the listener’s apprehension of difference. This postmodern fascination with difference is always launched, however, from a home base, from an orienting identity. But our awareness of difference and its palpable presence in our daily lives due to increased mobility and communication across various types of temporal and spatial boundaries has fostered the recognition of multiple realities and of a perspectival notion of knowledge and truth. A postmodern aesthetic of inclusion builds upon this vantage of multiple realities, reflecting upon the lived realities of the contemporary world.
LeBaron’s aesthetic of inclusion operates both within individual pieces and throughout her complete works. Her music is firmly based in the practices of the concert tradition, reflecting her training with such monumental composers as Gyorgy Ligeti and Bulent Arel. Yet her music reaches beyond that tradition into the blues, jazz, popular and folk music as well as into music of the historical past in the concert tradition. Such inclusion not only serves as a marker of how diverse musics present themselves as equally available and viable but more significantly of an aesthetic realization of “situated knowledge.” And while the concert tradition plays a fundamental orienting role, LeBaron’s music relies on the operation of stylistic difference as a generator of musical meaning.
LeBaron’s 1993 work, Southern Ephemera, provides succinct demonstration of this aesthetics of inclusion. Commissioned by Newband, an ensemble that became stewards of the Harry Partch instruments in 1990, Southern Ephemera is scored for two microtonal instruments from the Partch Collection, the Harmonic Canon and the Surrogate Kithara, and two instruments, flute and cello, whose tuning basis is premised in diatonic principles.3 The work weaves together various references to diatonic songs of the South with the microtonal sounds of the Partch instruments. It is the inclusion of the latter that provides an additional dimension to the multiple perspectives of music within this aesthetics of inclusion. The Harmonic Canon and Surrogate Kithara employ complex tuning systems that grow out of Partch’s interest in the acoustic and tuning principles articulated by Helmholtz in On the Sensations of Tones. The sonorous presence of tuning systems, which destabilize the diatonic pitch spaces occupied by the flute and cello, reorient the audible world to a new sense of sonorous possibility. LeBaron’s particular pairing of a familiar with a defamiliarizing sonic order thrusts listeners into an immediate awareness of the malleable and perspectival nature of knowledge systems.
LeBaron’s creative output embraces a wide variety of differing sonic perspectives while retaining its base within the performative and creative framework of the avant-garde concert tradition. Her music should be understood neither as an instance of “cross-over” or of “ivory towerism”; rather, it is an instance of how the musical imagination is situated by a historically unique cultural context. Employing strategies of sonic design and textual themes that speak to the philosophical, political, economic and technological issues of our time, LeBaron’s music delves into those issues that matter to us now. Listening to her music helps us to reveal our own existence in this postmodern world.
Finally, it is time to celebrate the considerable achievement that LeBaron has attained. As one of the premier composers of her generation, LeBaron has been the recipient of numerous prizes and commissions. Most notably these include the Alpert Award in the Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the American Composers Forum, and the National Endowment for the Arts. LeBaron currently teaches composition and related courses at the California Institute of the Arts and performs widely as harpist and as conductor of her own music. This is one busy woman from whom we will undoubtedly hear more!
1. Donna Haraway, Simian, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1981).
2. “Reflections of Surrealism in Postmodern Music,” Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, eds. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002).
3. Further information on Newband and the Harry Partch instruments may be obtained at: http://www.newband.org/.
Compiled by Judy Lochhead
LeBaron’s music is published by Golden Croak Music and Norruth Music
(title, medium, date)
Strange Attractors (1987)
Southern Ephemera (1994)
Double Concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra (2 harps, 1 player) 1995
Mambo (2 orch, brass qrt)
Lasting Impressions (chamber orch, narrator and/or actors) 1995
American Icons (+organ) 1996
Traces of Mississippi (+mixed cho with soloists, 2 narrators, 2 rap artists) 2000
The E. & O. Line (4 principals, 3-pt female cho, 12-pt mixed cho, 8 instru, tape) 1993
Blue Calls Set You Free (1 principal, 3-pt female cho, pno, tape) 1994
Croak (The Last Frog) (6 principals, 5-pt mixed cho, 10 piece chamber ens) 1996
Pope Joan (dance opera) (sop, 8 piece chamber ens) 2000
Concerto for Active Frogs (bass/bar principal, mixed cho, chamber ens, tape) 1974
Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines (chamber cho, 2 perc) 1977
Story of My Angel (female cho, sop solo, pno, live electronics) 1993
Sukey and the Mermaid (str qrt, narrator, children’s cho) 1998
Nightmare (TTBB, 10 solo, pno) 1999
Three Motion Atmospheres (brass qnt) 1974
Memnon (6 hps) 1976
Metamorphosis (picc/fl, ob, cl, hn, tbn, perc) 1977
Rite of the Black Sun (perc qrt) 1980
Noh Reflections (vln, va, vc) 1985
Telluris Theoria Sacra (fl, cl, vln, va, vc, pno, perc) 1989
Waltz for Quintet (fl, vln, va, vc, pno) 1989
Southern Ephemera (fl, vc, harmonic canon, surrogate kithara) 1993
Devil in the Belfry (vln, pno) 1993
Sukey (str qrt) 1994
Solar Music (fl, hp) 1997
In the Desert, text: Stephen Crane (sop, fl, marimba, tmpl blcks) 1973
The Sea and the Honeycomb, text: A. Machado (sop, picc/fl, cl/bs cl, pno, 2 perc) 1979
Lamentation/Invocation, text: Edwin Honig (bar, cl, vc, hp) 1984
Dish, text: Jessica Hagedorn (sop, elec vln, perc, elec bass, pno) 1990
Is Money Money (sop, cl, bs cl, vln, va, vc)
Quadratura Circuli (tape alone) 1978
Planxty Bowerbird (hp, tape) 1982
I am an American…My Government will Reward You (hp, tape) 1988
Blue Harp Study Nos. 1 and 2 (tape alone)1992
Sachamama (fl, tape) 1995
Sauger (trbn, tape) 2001
Inner Voice (contrabass, tape) 2003
After a Dammit to Hell (bassoon) 1982
Hsing (harp) 2002
Eurydice is Dead (tape alone) 1983
Bodice Ripper (cl/bs. cl, elec. hp, tape) 1999
“Sacred Theory of the Earth” CRI 865, 2000 (Solar Music; Telluris Theoria Sacra; Devil in the Belfry; Sachamama) “
Magical Railism of Anne LeBaron” Tellus/Mode 42, 1995 (Doggone Cat Act; The E. & O. Line (selections); Waltz for Quintet; The Sea and the Honeycomb; I am an American...My Government Will Reward You)
“Rana, Ritual and Revelations: The Music of Anne LeBaron” Mode 30, 1992 (Lamentation/ Invocation; Rite of the Black Sun; Planxty Bowerbird; Noh Reflections; Concerto for Active Frogs)
“Phantom Orchestra: The Anne LeBaron Quintet” Ear-Rational ECD 1035, 1991 (Bouquet of a Phantom Orchestra; Human Vapor; Superstrings and Curved Space; Bottom Wash; Top Hat on a Locomotive; Loaded Shark)
“Newband” Music & Arts 931, 1996 (Southern Ephemera)
“Urban Diva: Dora Ohrenstein” CRI 654, 1993 (Dish)
“Jewel Box” Tellus 26, 1992 (Blue Harp Studies Nos. 1 & 2)
“Raudelunas” Say Day-Bew 1, 1975 (Concerto for Active Frogs)
“Blackwater Bridge,” with Gary Hassay, Drimala DR 02-347-02, 2002
“One Line Two Views,” with Muhal Richard Abrams, New World Records, 80469-2, 1995
“Anthony Braxton Ensemble,” Black Saint, 1994
“Chamber Works 1990-92,” with George Graewe, Random Acoustics CD 003
“...Uber Ursache und Wirkung der Meinungsverschiedenheiten beim Turmbau zu Babel,” with Sven ake Johansson and Alexander von Schlippenbach, FMP 20/21, 1987
“Duos Europa, America, Japan,” with Peter Kowald, FMP 1270, 1989
“Epiphany,” with Derek Bailey’s “Company,” Incus 45/46, 1983
“Doggone Catact,” “A Little Left of Center,” “Euphorbia” Opus One 58, 1983
“Jewels,” with LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams, Trans Museq 3, 1979
American Composers Forum for the Continental Harmony Project; Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and Dance Alloy; Fromm Foundation; Meet the Composer Residency Commissions; National Symphony Orchestra; National Endowment for the Arts; McKim Fund Commission; Newband; Dora Ohrenstein; Mary Flagler Cary Trust; Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra.
Prizes/Awards: Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts; Alumna in the Arts Award, University of Alabama; McCollin Prize; New Music Consort Composition Prize GEDOK International Prize; BMI Composition Award, Bearns Prize, Salop Prize
Fellowships/Grants: Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; Hewlett International Grant; New York Foundation for the Arts; NEA; New York Council for the Arts; NEA Composer Fellowship; Astral Foundation Grants
“Reflections of Surrealism in Postmodern Musics,” Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, eds. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner. New York: Routledge, 2002.
“ ‘Je crois entendre encore,’ by Georges Bizet: An Analysis of the Original Aria and the Arrangement for Grover Washington, Jr.,” International Jazz Archives 2/2, 1999.
“Darmstadt 1980,” co-authored with Denys Bouliane, Perspectives of New Music 19/1-2, 1980-81.
Ammer, Christine, ed. Unsung: A History of Women in American Music, 2nd. ed. Amadeus Press, 2000.
Burns, Kristine, ed. Women and Music in America Since 1900. The Oryx Press, 2000.
Edwards, J. Michele, “Anne LeBaron,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. L. Macy. http://www.grovemusic.com
Edwards, J. Michele, “North America since 1920,” Women and Music: a History, ed. K. Pendle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Gagne, Cole. Soundpieces 2: Interview with American Composers. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
Judy Lochhead is professor and chair of the Music Department at Stony Brook University. She is co-editor with Joseph Auner of Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, and is working on Reconceiving Structure: Recent Music/Music Analysis, which will include analyses of LeBaron’s Southern Ephemera, McInturff’s By Heart, Hovda’s Lemniscates (1988), and Saariaho’s Lonh.