Culture Sculpture

CULTURE SCULPTURE
By MARK APPLEBAUM

Only one person can be the best at something. Ralf Laue of Germany, for example, stacked 555 dominoes on a single supporting domino. According to the Guinness Book of World Records this accomplishment has never been equaled. Presuming that you are not Ralf Laue, it seems safe to say that you are not the best domino stacker. This isn’t a criticism; most people are not the best at any one thing. Likewise you shouldn’t get upset with yourself if you are not the worst person at something. This status seems to be less attractive, but it is an equally exclusive distinction. Guinness has not been particularly scrupulous in its record-keeping of worsts, but suffice it to say, you are probably not listed in its pages as the worst at something.

But that’s just you. I am the best and the worst at something. In fact, it is the very same thing. And does anyone care?

I have never been and never will be the world’s greatest or worst pianist. I started piano lessons when I was seven. Years later, and after about 8,000 agonizing hours of practice, I could play some moderately demanding classical music and I was reasonably adept as a jazz improviser. Audiences applauded at my concerts and some musicians even looked up to me. These affirmations conferred a respectable social standing within my local music milieu and implied that I was a good pianist. But despite this, I knew that there were just as many pieces that were well beyond my technical and interpretative abilities. And the more I compared myself with my favorite jazz pianists, the more I discovered my own inadequacies. Once, while living in Copenhagen during college, I attended an Oscar Peterson concert. The first half was inspiring; but by the end of the concert my awe had degenerated into a resolve to quit jazz piano. It seemed that I could never join the elite echelon of pros who constituted my musical superheroes and, to tell the truth, when the going got tough, I was uneasy being average.

Thankfully I did not abandon the piano and my skills improve every day. However, I continue to oscillate between euphoric confidence in my abilities at one moment and the despair of mediocrity in the next. In 1990 I chose to respond to this dilemma. More out of instinct than by design, I invented a new instrument: the mousetrap.

The mousetrap is an electro-acoustic percussion contraption, a musical Frankenstein built out of assorted junk and found objects—threaded rods, nails, wire strings stretched through pulleys and turnbuckles, plastic combs, bronze braising rod blow-torched and twisted, doorstops, shoehorns, ratchets, squeaky steel caster wheels, springs, lead and PVC pipe, corrugated copper gas tubing, toilet tank flotation bulbs, Astroturf, parts from a Volvo gearbox, a metal Schwinn bicycle logo, and mousetraps. These disparate elements are mounted on a soundboard and, assisted by contact pickups, amplified through speakers. To collect parts for the mousetrap I rummaged through junkyards, garages, surplus stores, and warehouses. Suspicious hardware store clerks eyed me nervously as I conducted investigations into the acoustical properties of their wares. It was a feeling of accomplishment when, weeks into my research, the same salesmen would excitedly welcome me into the store, giddy with their own epiphanies: “Mark, listen to how this thing sounds when you hit it with this!”. My project became an informal and unexpected arts outreach program.

The mousetrap turned out to be only the beginning of an obsession, the first in a series of original instruments that I’ve designed and constructed during more than a decade. Its progeny include the mini-mouse, the midi-mouse, the duplex mausphon, and six micro mice. I call these instruments sound-sculptures because I am just as concerned with their arresting visual impact as with their astounding sonic quality. The most recent sound-sculpture is the mouseketier, so-named for its multi-tier design. I play it with a number of different strikers and gadgets including Japanese chopsticks, knitting needles, combs, thimbles, plectrums, surgical tubing, a violin bow, brushes, various wind-up toys, corrugated Lego rail, and my hands.

Inventing a new instrument provides immediate gratification: one instantly becomes the world’s greatest player of that instrument. The problem is that one abruptly realizes that one is also the world’s worst player. So the satisfaction that comes from being novel is tempered by the fact that there is no communal standard by which to form a meaningful judgement, no cultural practice. The goal then is to envision—to invent—the skills that might constitute virtuosity on a unique instrument. Or, to think of it in historical terms, to develop a classic and then mannerist state of the art from a pre-classic antecedent. There is ample latitude to do this within a culture of one. But it is also a lonely and challenging undertaking in the absence of a community to inform and guide progress.

There are many ways to measure the success of something, but to a considerable—and embarrassing—extent, I measure my success against that of others. As a pianist I look intuitively at the vast community of piano players who provide abundant measuring sticks. Experts can make particularly sensitive measurements, but even the layperson is qualified to make judgements. Most of us, at least those who have participated broadly in Western culture, can make a crude determination of whether a pianist is a beginning, intermediate, or advanced player. Furthermore, we have an approximate idea of what kind of effort and training might nurture the player’s progress. We can do this because we are familiar with the cultural practices associated with playing the piano. But what steps should I take to improve myself as a sound-sculpture artist? How do I assess my progress? What are the correct performance techniques? Do these questions even make sense in a culture of one?

When I started to invent instruments I found myself in a cultural vacuum. But I soon discovered compasses by which to navigate the new terrain. First, I certainly did not invent the idea of the sound-sculpture. While my instruments are unique, they might be thought of as contributions to an entire genus of sound-sculptures, some of which inspired mine. From this observation I realized that I was part of a community, that I was complementing a cultural discourse already in progress. It was small not large, marginal not mainstream, but it was a community nevertheless, one that provided ideas for my own development.

Second, I drew upon more generic aesthetic models from art and music. I considered samples of art that I admired, those paintings, sculptures, textiles, and architecture that seemed to teach me lessons about form, rhythm, symmetry, and texture. And I considered traditional orchestral and folk instruments and reflected on their timbral features, intonation, dynamic range, and articulation. These were all observations that informed my own approach to building instruments and playing them. As unconventional as my sound-sculptures are, they have a kinship with all musical instruments and this suggests that my work is part of a very expansive community indeed.

And third, having dedicated myself to the development of sound-sculptures for more than a decade I was able to apprehend the richness of my own history. With each new sound-sculpture I refined the ergonomics, better integrated the electronic components, and improved the soundboard design. With each successive concert I added to a personal but increasingly detailed legacy of performance practice, further broadened my technical facility, and defined an idiomatic method. Compositionally I found myself referring to recent and earlier aesthetic orientations. (In performance I will nostalgically think to myself “Ah, remember how I used to approach the doorstop in the mid-1990s?”) It is an autobiographical narrative, but it spans time and thereby provides historical perspective. By looking back, I see that I have come some distance and this distance urges me to look forward.

Some composers might disagree, but having the sound of a doorstop among the range of timbral possibility is, for me, a huge (and now indispensable) advantage. Being able to digitally reverberate that doorstop has its charms too. So in my recent research I have focused on modifying the sounds with a battery of electronic devices. These devices allow me to reverberate the tone, add distortion or echo, change the pitch, and warp the timbre in countless ways. I can accompany myself in performance by recording and playing back live multi-track loops, make them sweep to the left or right in the stereo field, speed them up, or slow them down. Perhaps just a trivial ornamentation at first, the electronics have become a fundamental part of what now might be called a hyper-instrument. There is a subtle performance technique in the use of my electronics, and their integration with the sound-sculptures requires deftness and practice. In my more delusional moments, I think of myself as a super-coordinated human, like a virtuoso hiphop deejay operating his or her playback equipment, or a NASA test pilot finessing complex flight controls.

My current problem is that it is impractical to carry all of my electronic gizmos to every performance. Even though I have developed a clever system by which non-essential, replaceable, and robust pieces fly in my suitcase (usually wrapped in pajamas or sweaters) while the more delicate pieces are crammed into my carry-on luggage, I still bump into the airlines’ baggage limits. Consequently, I have one behemoth set-up for local performances, a modest set-up for domestic performances that require travel by airplane, and an even smaller one for performances that necessitate international travel. I think it would be ludicrous to ask a pianist to perform one night on a piano with the customary 88 keys, the next night on a piano with no black notes, and the next night on a piano with no sustain pedal. Yet this is comparable to the musical challenges posed by the frequent changes in the ergonomics and functions of my set-up from performance to performance. As such, I have multiple hyper-instruments to master, not just one.

Practical considerations—mundane things like gravity, money, and air travel—really do have a puissant impact on the music. Even if I was artistically inclined, I can’t float around the stage during my performances; neither can I afford to build a sound-sculpture out of gold; and, as mentioned already, my baggage allowance presents another constraint. In fact, the mouseketier case was designed first on the basis of the maximum airline baggage dimensions; the instrument came second. In this regard, the culture of air travel, as distant from music as it may seem, has had a direct impact on the physical circumscription of my invention which, in turn, influences the music that I create.

I cannot say whether or not my sound-sculptures have had an important impact on the world. They have been seen and heard in concerts throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. And recordings of these instruments may have traveled further. I do know that they have engendered some fascinating intersections with other artists. Among these were opportunities to use my sound-sculptures in a collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; to compose a piece for the Paul Dresher Ensemble that coupled my instruments with traditional ones like violin and bassoon; and to realize my Concerto for Florist and Ensemble in a performance that was surely both the best and worst of its genre. The sound-sculptures seem to provoke interesting responses too. Children are particularly attracted to them and display none of the psychological encumbrances that make exploration tentative by adults. I am thrilled when, after a performance, I overhear a bunch of concertgoers—usually young persons—announce that they are headed straight to the garage to build their own sound-sculptures. And perhaps most gratifying, the sound-sculptures have challenged some of my students to build their own instruments and to think about what might constitute virtuosity in a new medium.

With all of this interest in my sound-sculptures, it is clear that one day conservatories of music will contain whole departments dedicated to the training of mouseketier players. College students will debate the merits of one mouseketier player over another. And the common person on the street will be able to distinguish between beginning, intermediate, and advanced mouseketier performers. Okay, I realize that this is probably just a fantasy. But before we dismiss this unlikely scenario entirely, we should keep in mind that all of our traditional instruments were, once upon a time, singular, new, and alien. At some point in our history it was unfathomable that a keyboard instrument such as the piano would enjoy such broad appeal, familiarity, and legitimacy. One need only turn to the percussion instruments of the orchestra to observe a more recent evolution of cultural cachet. The classical orchestra typically included only timpani. The exceptional use of the triangle in Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio was identified by European audiences, in its time, as a transparent reference to exotic Asia Minor. But in my generation, the triangle was simply one of many available percussion instruments in my kindergarten teacher’s box of musical tools—and I grew up in Chicago, not Turkey. Similarly, my great-grandparents might have apprehended the xylophone and the marimba as icons of Southeast Asian or Central American cultures; today, however, these are indeed among the prosaic instruments of focus in a Western music education. So goes the fusion, colonization, and evolution of culture.

If not a survival of the fittest instruments, there is a survival of the most popular ones. And if not a natural selection, there is a cultural selection that has bequeathed to us the rich and evolving musical traditions we enjoy today. Conversely, for better and worse, we have lost numerous instruments and instrumental practices, some of which we know of dimly through historical documents and others which we can only imagine. One of our pleasant myths is that the art which has survived throughout history has done so because of its intrinsic greatness. But perhaps its survival simply indicates that it was useful to those who had the agency to insure its longevity. If that is the case, then all of our actions—whether the invention of a new instrument, the writing of a poem, the reading of books and viewing of films, the tasting of food, the consumption of advertising, the practices we keep in business, law, dance, and sport, the ideas we debate in politics and philosophy, the ceremonies we undertake in our religions and in the rituals of our daily lives, the stories that we tell and the memories that we keep alive, the celebration or destruction of traditions, and the growth of new practices—are cultural votes, forces that shape the world that future generations will inherit.

©Mark Applebaum, 2003.