Karen Power Interview

Below is the transcript of my interview with the Irish composer and field recordist Karen Power. The link button takes you to the podcast and video versions, along with the show notes with all the important links:

Karen Power:

There's constantly surprises, and that's why I do it. It's like being a little kid again, just being out in the world and I catch myself smiling or trying not to laugh so often while I feel record because something has happened that or I've heard a relational thing happening that has completely blown me away, or I've remembered something that I've heard earlier in the day that has now finally been answered by something else. So human sense of time is incredibly limited compared to an environment's time or any ecosystems time. And the more you do this, the more you realize we operate in a very confined sense of scale and time.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Karen Power is an Irish composer who uses environmental sounds and acoustic instruments in her intriguing work. She is a master field recordist who has recorded sounds in some of the worlds most isolated and challenging locations including The Arctic, Amazon, Namib Desert, Outback Australia, and Antarctica. She has shared clips of her work including The Bats of Namibia, Frogs of Angor Wat, fascinating bog sounds and arctic ice sounds in collaborations with the Quiet Music Ensemble and many brilliant collaboraters on her project human nature. She’s also shared with us a raw field recording from her recent trip to record a double cicada brood emergence. She certainly helped deepen my awareness to soundscapes that brought me back to my first encounter with this idea when I took a course on Soundscapes from R. Murray Shafer. Karen and I also talked about her projects working to explore listening, composing and improvising with young children and other related projects to provide inclusive music making with people living with disabiliities. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on your favourite platform, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!

Hey, Karen, thanks so much for joining me here today.

Karen Power:

Thank you very much for having me.

Leah Roseman:

I've so enjoyed listening to your work, and I'm curious to know more about how you got started with field recording and integrating nature with instruments.

Karen Power:

As with all stories, it's a long one. I'll try and shorten it a little bit. So yeah, I'm classically trained composer who I think just never fitted with a lot of, I guess the more normal ways one considers that field to work or the way music is created within that field. And so quite early on, I started integrating technology. So a lot of my studies would've been in electroacoustic composition if one wanted to put a label on it. So I was always kind of interested in using technology to bring out something in an instrument that maybe we can't do live. So in a live situation, maybe it would distract the listener. And so I studied a lot of different ways of doing this and started writing pieces where you would have a live cello and then the prerecorded cellist self almost competing against each other.

I guess that got me into the idea of searching for new sounds, and I started recording natural sounds kind of accidentally. I was actually on a Csound course, which for anybody who doesn't know is a very intense programming language that's kind of even more intense than MaxMSP. So it's really hardcore programming. And as a break for this, we went on a trip and the person teaching the course had some mics in the back, and we ended up dangling these microphones, easily known they weren't, my microphones down some cliffs over the sea, and I was hooked. I just immediately thought, oh my God, what have I been doing? What? It's all there. It's like everything. It's got everything. But it still took quite a long time before I found a way of integrating it into my practice. But the interest was immediate and just this, it really was one of those wow moments of there it is.

That's kind of why I'm pursuing this path or why I started writing music in the first place, or, yeah, it's a bit hard to describe, but that was what started it. It would've been, actually, it even predated before I started my PhD. And so I did a master's in composition, and then I actually stopped writing for a while because it was a little bit disillusioned, not really sure where my place was or where my language was, because quite clearly it wasn't where most other people's language found a home, and mine never did. It wasn't until I decided to go and do a PhD, which I did. I worked at the time, and that was really just to use an environment to start to explore again. So really towards the end of that, then I started focusing on environmental sound. And I would say, I always say that really it wasn't until 2012 that I kicked it up a notch and began to take it really seriously, I guess.

Yeah, 12 would've been the, I think the first piece that would've focused on cricket sounds pairing cricket sounds with a piano. And I also was lucky enough to spend a bit of time with Chris Watson that was a godsend. So Chris Watson is a phenomenal field recordist and just great guy. And actually I think for me, I think because obviously I work a lot with technology in technology, I'm very tech heavy, but for me, it's a tool that I'm not alone in thinking this, but for some reason, not a lot of us talk about it. And as a woman, it's also, it can be a little bit, I'm tired of being in a room with a whole lot of people and all they want to do is talk about the technology, and all I want to do is talk about the sound and the music.And Chris was exactly this. So I mean, with field recording, you can get very into your mics, you can get very into all the stuff, and that wasn't his interest either. He was very much about getting that sound and fine tuning how you can find that sound. And so that really having that kind of intense and high quality training at such a vital stage, I think really, really benefited where I would go after that and I set the right tone because I think in field recording, going in with the right tone is for me, very, very important tone as in, so as a practice for me, I've spent a number of years training myself to be less and less involved in the process of field recording. That means for me, it's not about, I'll still do the same amount of prep work. I'll still do all the things that one has to do.

I'll still carefully place my mics, but I will not try to direct an environment. I try to do enough and enough listening so that by the time I'm actually recording, I am not looking for something. I'm not dictating what the environment is telling me. I'm letting it have made the decisions about the mic placement have made the decisions about everything that's going to happen. And this sounds relatively simple, it sounds like something we might do with musicians or with, but it's actually quite difficult to untrain a lot of what as a classically trained composer I would do quite naturally. It sort of comes down to bias, which we all have in some way. You wouldn't get up in the morning if you weren't biased about something about how we, I think, acknowledge these biases and work to amend them. When it comes to field recording, my biases would be a pre assumption about what I'm going to find in that environment.

It's a bit like waiting in line cinema, meeting some people who come out from a film that you're about to see, and they may not even say anything, but the moment you see the reaction and immediately part of your experience has now been closed because you know something. And for me as an artist, this has always been something that I've been aware of and kind of reacted against because I like to go into something and let my ears decide and focus, I guess it's come into my field recording, but you're trying to place different listening focuses. As you're in the space beginning with one of unbias or non-bias, then you have to acknowledge that the chances are that you are as a human listener, that you are only actually hearing part of what the space has to offer because of our limitations of our hearing, and also just because of the fact that there is life underneath the surface.

So there are all these things that we are not privy to immediately. Some of the mics can make us privy to them, but you have to sort of sense that they're there before you can be privy to them. So there's a lot of complexity that I like to bring to this practice so that I can genuinely say that, not even say it, but feel like I've paid attention to, I've respected that place. I have let that place speak in its languages, and then I've kind of captured some sense of that ecosystem or the things that have to exist for that ecosystem to be alive fully and watch maybe make people aware of how fragile that relationship is. So it was a really long answer.

Leah Roseman:

That's super interesting. And I was thinking certainly as an older musician, and my hearing isn't once what it was, but just as a person existing in the world, we don't hear all the details we could hear with these powerful mics. So when you first started doing this, there must have been surprises for you aurally to hear things.

Karen Power:

There's constantly surprises, and that's why I do it. I mean, really, it's like being a little kid again, just being out in the world and just being, I catch myself smiling or trying not to laugh so often while I feel record because something has happened that or I've heard a relational thing happening that has completely blown me away, or I've remembered something that I've heard earlier in the day that has now finally been answered by something else. So I mean, our human sense of time is incredibly limited compared to an environment's time or any ecosystem's time. And the more you do this, the more you realize that we operate in a very confined sense of scale and time. So sometimes when I am recording, I do like to be in a place for a while so that I can begin to hear these longer time patterns, or at least begin to understand that they exist. I can't always do that, but it is an ambition, but there are constantly surprised. So I do a lot of underwater recording and also some ultrasonic recordings. So ultrasonic is where it's happening in the frequency range above our hearing. So the most common of those would be bats. I

Leah Roseman:

Was wondering about the bat recordings.

Karen Power:

So when they echolocate, they're up there above what we can hear. So it's why when we usually see bats and you can't hear anything, so it's a bit odd, but they are making sound. It's just that it's not for us.

Leah Roseman:

Well, maybe that would be a good clip to begin with. You have the bats of Namibia in your album, human nature.

Karen Power:

Yeah. Great.

Leah Roseman:

Do you want to speak about that experience or that trip?

Karen Power:

So the Bats of Namibia, that's part of, actually in some ways a real highlight of an album for me because it was something I've been wanting to do for years. But you know how it is, we're all busy and other things take precedence. And so it's an album of what began as 18 solo works for a single musician and a single field recording unedited. So a lot of my work does actually process the recordings and shapes them. And whereas these, I wanted them to be, I chose field recordings from my banks where I distinctly remembered hearing something while making the recording that felt musical to me, that felt like it contained one of the key musical characteristics, that it could be easily mistaken for a melody or a rhythm or something that traditionally we would think of as being musical. And I wanted to test a theory that I had been playing with about this straightforward human and nature.

So each, basically, it was during COVID and I thought, well, there's a lot of musicians sitting around there twiddling their thumbs, wishing they could play. And maybe there's something, maybe this is the time I emailed a whole lot of people with whom I had worked before. So they were familiar with these kinds of new scores, which we can talk about in a minute, that I tend to create with field recordings. And I asked them if they would be interested in, if I send them a field recording and a kind of text score and this aural part in their ear, would they be willing to perform the piece in their homes and record it with whatever technology they had? And that I was going to release this self-released this album of these solos, which are open to any instrument at all. But I did choose the 18 musicians for this particular project, and it was such an incredible experience because everybody kind of just had all these really wonderful conversations with people in their homes and kind of finding creative solutions to what they wanted to do.

And it was just a very social project that had listening at its core, which for me is well, it's what it's all about. So yeah, so the piece that you're going to hear the Bats of Namibia are indeed bats that were recorded at a watering hole just outside of National Park in Namibia where I was twice to actually mostly record the living desert in Namibia. And the sands that move across that and the bats were extra. They weren't part of my planned trip, but you take what you can get. So yeah, and the performer in that piece actually is, my husband is John Godfrey, who is an electric guitarist, and I asked him to do that one because he had been in Namibia with me, and I felt that he had this kind of special connection to the live event as well. Yeah, so they're all really, really short, very, very specific, like these little drops in the ocean. So I think the longest piece is maybe four minutes. (Music)

Leah Roseman:

The scores, because that must have evolved over the years from graphic to text to actually aural scores. Maybe speak to that.

Karen Power:

Sure. So again, I suppose going hand in hand with the way I think my work was evolving anyway was I always, again, felt this separation between music on a page and then what we hear. So musically, I actually would be a lot more interested in this baroque and early music eras where improvisation and interpretation is a little looser, and the divides are less between the sort of composer performer. So I, very early on, I started looking for ways to maybe just reconsider the idea of score and bring it right back to its purpose, which is as a communicator, it's supposed to be the buffer between a composer's ideas disseminated through the score so that they can be best realized by the musician and where that works for huge amount of music and works very, very well. It doesn't work for field recordings because they don't have the same musical qualities or the same attributes or the same things that are necessary to be communicated.

So I found very early on that this wasn't working. It was actually causing more confusion about and actually a hierarchy. It was where, for me as an artist, my interest is in lessening the divide between what we call music and all other sound, because I don't hear them as different. I hear it all as sound just about different degrees of construction and by whom. So I started working on series of kind of graphic scores to try and the musician to maybe respond differently. In 15, I spent a year in Berlin as an artist in residence there, which life is all about timing. This opportunity came at the best possible time and allowed me a year of being supported and without people asking for pieces, without the pressure of having to just keep producing. So I use that time to really try and develop this idea of an aural score, which is essentially for me, is the same as a paper score, except that it's for the ears.

So an aural score would work where it's like a tape part, so it would be, the audience will hear it, it'll be projected into the space, but there'll be elements written into it that are specifically for the performers to respond to. It usually would work in combination with a graphic score or some text, or even some, so depending on what the interest and what the background is of the musician who's playing the work. So I like to work with the musicians and sort of discover their way of working and then basically design a score around what works for them. So it's very collaborative, it's kind of a negotiation. And then the most important thing is though that right down to the premier performances and the performances beyond that, listening becomes the most important part rather than reading, if you know what I mean in this, because it translates the material in a more meaningful way for me.

So in 2015, there was a first piece, and then I discovered as I was going along, okay, this is great, but it needs more. We need, so over the next kind of, and I'm still expanding them, and this will never end because of course every ensemble is different and every field recording is different, every environment. So they need different things. So they've taken different forms. Sometimes I've written a piece that had video scores that use the color of water as part of the negotiation for what the musicians would be responding to. But maybe most importantly, I've expanded the aural score into aural parts, which again works the same as a paper score in that you have the main score, and then you have individual parts. So each musician would often get an individual part that they hear in one of their ears, the other ear being open, which might have very specific frequencies or might have a very specific bird call or might have a very specific rhythm that they're responding to. And there's a lot of instructions that go with these scores, and it's the process of playing. The first one is very much a collaborative process where we all go through something and then come out the other side. But I mean, for me, that's important. That opens more ears, and hopefully once you open them, they won't close again.

Leah Roseman:

We could go to you, your beautiful project, "we return to ground", which was a long collaborative process. I understand, with the Quiet Music Ensemble, really beautiful project. And you also were awarded the Coup de Coeur for Experimental Music prize.

Karen Power:

Yeah, that was a surprise. Yeah, I've been working with Quiet Music Ensemble actually since they were founded in 2008, and I wrote a piece for them actually for that opening festival. I'm just remembering that now, but I suppose really. So the first piece in 2015 that used this, our score was for them, I was lucky enough to be able to bring them to Germany, and so they're an Irish ensemble based in Cork. And that piece was called Instruments of Ice, which was based on possibly the most life altering trip of my career to date, which was my first trip to the Arctic to record below inside and above the ice. So the piece is like a 14 minute quadraphonic piece with five musicians inside responding to the Arctic ice and the sounds, the field recordings are not rolled, they're processed, they're shaped, and essentially it moves through journeys of depth within the ice formations and the glaciers and the icebergs.

Yeah, so that was in 2015. The musicians also use photographs in that piece. It was my first time thinking about, because the place was so multisensory, it felt odd to try to remove senses from musicians interpretation. So the musicians get a box of photographs. So the photographs are the same for each musician, but the texture is different. So there'll be some textural focus that's slightly different, and they're free to choose a photograph. And as they're responding, once they feel like their response has moved beyond the photograph, then they'll switch photographs. They also read some text of a sonic diary that I wrote while I was there. So yeah, that piece was very important in many, many ways. (Music)

And from there, then I wrote another piece for them, which was called Sonic Pollinators, which was a wonderful project where I got to basically hang out in awfully in Ireland and struck up relationships with beekeepers to explore the idea of whether there's a difference in sound between pollinators that are housed by humans and those that are wild in meadows. So I spent six to eight months recording pollinators and then composing them into a piece which is called Sonic Pollinators, where Quiet Music Ensemble in this piece, they are using aural parts and graphic scores, and they're inside of this absolutely luscious, luscious bee scape. That's just, yeah, I can say that because it's not my music, it's the bees.(Music)

And then they commissioned me to write a work, which is called we return to ground, which is the title of the CD, the double CD actually, because these are all like 40 minute pieces. And that was an extraordinary project where I decided that I wanted to work with a dancer whom I had worked with before, Mary Nunan and a videographer who was formerly a painter who felt that she could no longer communicate on canvas. And so she turned to videography, but she basically still paints on the film. So the color in her work is truly extraordinary. Atoosa Pour Hosseini is her name. And I wanted to focus on a bog life, the hidden sounds of in places where there should not be life, or in places where we would not think that there is life, but to show that not alone is their life, but there's very, very beautiful and intricate ecosystems that are just bursting with life.

And so a lot of the material is quite hypnotic. And because that's the nature of the sounds below the water in these tiny little bog areas. And musicians in this case are also following their aural score, graphic paintings that I made, which they then are displayed against white light boxes to give them a kind of texture. And then this runs along with these intermittent videos and this dancer, it gets under your skin. It's a pretty intense experience, even though obviously the CD, because it's a CD, it's purely the sonic result of that work. So we couldn't represent the dance material or the video material, which of course you can get live, but not in the CD.

Leah Roseman:

So listening to that one, I was really mystified as to what I was hearing. So where are these mics below the water of the wetland?

Karen Power:

Yeah, so underwater mics are called hydrophones, and they basically, they record from sound all around, so they're not directioned. But what's extraordinary is that a lot of the pools where I was recording these, one of them is here in Ireland. It's actually an area that got deliberately flooded in order to supply electricity to another part, the country. So it's in itself, it's tragic, and the piece of water was filthy and was just, it's about this deep. So you're thinking, there's no way, I'll try, but there's no way there's something in there.

Leah Roseman:

So just to say it's shallow for people who can't see.

Karen Power:

Sure. Okay. So incredibly shallow, but the moment, yeah, you put in the mics, let them settle for a while because you need things to settle back to not being, can you imagine if you were the size of a pea, and then this thing, the size of a microphone head comes into your space, it's going to take you a while to adjust your environment again. And so these creatures that are these creatures, they all tend to have very close patterns. So they'll start something and then they'll do it for a while, and then they'll stop, and then something else might start and it'll do it for a while and it'll stop. But they're very closed patterns. So in some sense, they dictate the kind of work. The thing about these kinds of sounds, a musician might think that when I present them with a piece like this that I can just do anything.

I mean, she hasn't written it down, so I can just do anything. But I'm really happy to say that in most cases when I'm working with musicians, that by the time we've reached about halfway through the process, they've realized that, okay, there is very, very little that I'm actually free to do here. These are incredibly directed, but just in a different way, in a way that requires me to reach out and to listen before I respond. And for me, that's what it is about. It's not about trying to be awkward or trying to introduce something abstract to someone's life. It's just about kind of negotiating a space for the possibility that there might be a different way of doing things, and there might be an advantage to opening ourselves up to that different experience.(Music)

But in the piece that you've just heard, it's important to say as well, the musicians also, the work opens with these kind of sonic sculptures that are made, which are these water bowls that have these little electronic contraptions on them that they use to induct the bowls, which themselves have hydrophones in them, so they're recording them live as well. So the musicians are kind of trying to place themselves in a situation that was similar to the way the field recordings would be made in the first place to try and kind of connect and communicate. A lot of these works tend to be, I mean, if there's a message in them, it tends to be this kind of reaching out to between human and nature where the work is asking the question, is it possible to, even though we don't speak the same language, is it possible for us to find a way to better understand or to communicate? And if not, then maybe if we just change your angle a little bit and maybe there is a different way to do it. So they're kind of experiments just quite simply about that with being driven by someone with an obsession with sound.

Leah Roseman:

Just thinking what you said about the division between humans and nature, of course, we're part of nature. Has anyone done work with the sounds of the human body?

Karen Power:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Karen Power:

Yeah. There've been a number of vocalist performers who would've been known for people to swallow like microphones and capture inner sounds.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, withLawrence English,Ceara Conway,Jesse Stewart,Philip Griffin,Verna Gillis, and Ellen Waterman. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend? Thanks.

Karen Power:

And actually, the vocalist, Ute Wasserman, who specializes with in a lot of birdlike sounds and nature sounds extraordinary, and vocalist, she would do a lot of very interesting things with using different parts of her body as well, and sometimes amplifying different parts of the throat. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Leah Roseman:

Well, let's talk about, well, actually, in speaking of vocalists, Loré Lixenburg, you've worked with,

Karen Power:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So you have this piece, Language, Land and Sea?

Karen Power:

Yes. Which actually we're about to get together in a couple of days to hopefully record that work, which is really exciting. Yeah, that's a piece that's very, very dear to me and to Loré, I think we've been threatening to get together for a very long time, and I'm a big believer in timings, and you can have a great idea, but sometimes it's just not, its time. It needs to maybe be in the world a little longer or needs to. And so we've known each other for quite a long time and had worked together on smaller bits and pieces. So she commissioned this work. After a few conversations with me, I had been talking about a piece, and funnily enough, for the first time in my life, the title was already there, which was Language Land Sea, because I was very interested and had written a number of works where it was all about the sadness of the loss of communication, despite the fact that as humans, we've spent so long fine tuning and opening up the possible ways that we have to communicate, it began to feel like we were actually communicating less or maybe wasting the avenues or just so much was getting lost.

And so I was interested in this connection between maybe our loss of communication and our movement away and away in a way from nature and from language that, and languages that potentially began in nature and with animals and the communication when it was maybe less complicated. So I began to explore works, what would happen if we listened to the world and kind of reconnected in this way and thought about rethought about the way we communicate. I mean, I pose these things as an artist, not as, I'm not looking for answers, but I find the questions make me behave differently in the world, which is never a bad thing. So yeah. So I mentioned to Loré that I've been thinking about this kind of almost like a one woman opera, a one woman nonverbal opera. And I knew that Loré had spent quite a long time as well focused on birdsong and communication mannerisms between species of birds. And so it just seemed like the perfect, a combination

Leah Roseman:

Species of birds. I didn't know they communicated together.

Karen Power:

No. Well, so more what would happen if one species was, and how it's kind of more about how they get out of each other's way, I think, than trying to communicate with each other. But there are in, I'll digress. I've been reading that book. It's about how Australian birds are some of the most aggressive in the world and where that was coming from. Anyway, really, really interesting stuff. So Loré is a fully trained operatic singer, which I find really, that for me is that's a big challenge. And yet I've heard her do just seamlessly move between this sort of hyper musical state to this bird state, which again, for mere, they're saying they're just different states, but I don't think that's this case. For a lot of people, they don't hear it that way. So I knew that we were meant to do this. So yeah, so that piece is, let me see, it's like 50 minutes, I think it's kind of a multimedia work, but sound is at the center.

So there are three video screens, and the pieces written in, actually, the largest format it's done in is eight channels. So the audience sits in the middle, the eight channels are around them. There's a screen somewhere in front, there's a screen somewhere to the side, and there's a screen somewhere to the other side. So the idea being that there's no real front and back, it's an environment that we all enter into, essentially. Yeah, Laurie is communicating. Sometimes she's in with the audience, sometimes she's beside them and she's negotiating between human, and it's not just birds. I mean, it's all non-human entities from wind to glacial carving to birds. And we worked very closely together on this piece at very early stages because the videos are real places, all of which I have visited, some of which Loré would've come with me, but most of which she hadn't been before.

So it does involve a lot of green screen elements where she's placed in these different environments. So yeah, it's kind of about what does it feel to feel connected to a place, and the audience kind of moves through these sensory states of having this live person and this live environment that's been taken out of its live context. And then seeing Loré in the middle of the Namib desert responding to a glacial shift or, so it's a bit like in a language sense, how much of a sentence do you need to hear before you get the rough meaning of what someone's trying to say to you? But before it closes it down to there only being one meaning, which is essentially what a lot of my work does or tries to do, it's to sort of offer that space of, yes, there's a path here, but there's also an invitation for you to find your own path, and which you can do with when you're working with materials that are alive and means something to everyone. It means something different to everyone because we all have our own memory and relationship with these sounds, which maybe we don't have with more conventional music. So it's a different thing that's maybe accessible to everyone equally rather than in a sort of sliding scale.

Leah Roseman:

So this hasn't been recorded yet?

Karen Power:

No, no. It's been performed three or four times. And yeah, no, we will work over the weekend and see, yeah, we're going to just see if it's going to work. I mean, in some sense it'll be relatively easy to record. It's one singer, but we want to think carefully about how we might disseminate it to make sure that it still, it's an important part of the process, not to just rush in and say, oh, let's record it and let's release it. And if that's not the right format for it. So we just need to think about those things.

Leah Roseman:

If we could just jump back to human nature. I was thinking you collaborated with a vocalist, the underwater Frogs of an Angkor Wat

Karen Power:

That is the wonderful Tom Buckner, Thomas Buckner, who is an extraordinary improviser and based in New York. Tom would've sung some really worked with some amazing composers over the years, and he commissioned a piece from me in maybe 2014 maybe. And the piece is called Quack Moo Sigh, and it's all about onomatopoeia, and the fact that we have so many different spellings of the word, pronunciations of the word and the very fact of what the word is, I just found kind of interesting, and it's maybe a more slightly more electroacoustic piece that uses his prerecorded self of him pronouncing the syllabic makeups of the word, and then kind of fighting against himself in a live performance situation to move through a performance of it. So we had worked on that together, and I'm just a big fan of him. He really is an extraordinary performer. And so when I was doing this human nature project, I of course reached out to him and said, what do you think? And was really surprised that he was happy to do it. And we had some very funny conversations around the tech. Texts, because he's based in New York, and I would get texts that would arrive to me in the middle of the night saying, okay, so it's on my wife's phone now. How do I, yeah, but well, you've heard the piece, right? His interpretation is extraordinary.

Leah Roseman:

So if we could play part of that for people to hear?

Karen Power:

Great. Yeah.(Music)

And although you mostly record the natural world on this album, you have the Sirens of New York, for example. The few times I've been to New York, I just found that soundscape kind of hellish, just constant.

Yeah, yeah. I guess I always remember Pauline Oliveros had a really great little, I mean, she had many great little secrets, but one was, I remember her telling me around if you find a sound annoying, like how to tackle that rather than just shutting your ears off to it. And I think specifically she was talking about kind of background music, if there was something annoying, or maybe if you live next to a train line or something. So she would've said that maybe you try and participate in the sound and try to add to it, or, so you become invested, right? And your ears become invested. So if it was like a pop tune that was annoying you, maybe you try and make up a different ending for it. And so the act in itself changes your relationship with the annoyance, and so it becomes something else.

And I thought it was a great idea, but I also just really loved the positive approach rather than sort of just saying, oh, that sound really annoys me that she was interested in, well, no, actually taking that on board. So I do find myself doing things because as a field recordist, it's very easy to get very, very annoyed with the world because it never shuts up. There are people everywhere, human conversations or somebody, you're listening to something and suddenly you hear, "Oy, Phil", I dunno why I chose Phil. But there are all kinds of moments in life that we're not part of. We can't control. And one would go gray very early if you tried to control them. I think a lot of the training that I do around field recording is also about hearing the potential and the sonic connectivity of every single sound and the natural sonic bleed.

So in that track, in the sirens of New York, what I was listening to was the unique way that the rain and the sirens interplay and interact. And I found that very, very beautiful. So sometimes it's about possibly presenting something that maybe isn't so immediately beautiful or immediately non-no, because that's another issue, how we relegate things to being sound and noise. And once it goes into the noise category, then we tend to get annoyed by it more readily. And isn't that just bias mean? So yeah, again, I do this artistically, not obviously, there's a reason that the ambulances are going and it's got a lot of very serious consequences, but I'm an artist, and sometimes you have to maybe just know your limitations.(Music)

Leah Roseman:

Well, I did want to talk about your Natural Creators Program for young children.

Karen Power:

Sure. Yeah. It's funny. I think on paper I maybe look like a bit of one of those spiders with all the little legs. There's running around in different places, but it is all connected. It just took a while. I'm a slow burner. So Natural Creators started because I used to work in a third level institution that was training primary school teachers. And I began to look around at what was being taught in primary schools and the different categorizations of what music is and what music isn't. And I found gaps, and I thought, okay, maybe there's something I can do to draw attention to this. So I started doing some workshops in primary schools, but I found that I was already too late. The categories had already been determined, or the paths had already been drawn at that point. So I found that when I was trying to introduce sort of listening in a non-biased way, I was having to undo things first.

And so it meant that the workshops potentially started in a negative place. This is not, this is not this not. And I wasn't interested in that and thought, okay, no, that's not going to work. So I thought, okay, I need to go younger. And around that time started was I did some work with extraordinary organization in Cork as well. The program is called, which in Irish Means Small, and it's a multidisciplinary program in early years. And basically there was a team of us from different disciplines, and we would design these kind of performance based activities and then go into crêches and then kind of roll 'em out. And so I started introducing different listening and different ways of listening within that program and trying to also integrate some research into how that was working, because that was possible. And during that time, I did a lot of research projects around the development of children, how language was developing, and recognized that there was the potential for and for the arts and specifically for sound, to be a way of offering alternative avenues to children who might be considered to be developing differently or slowly or less conventionally than other children, but were maybe actually just hindered by a language barrier or by some other barrier that was not being considered.

And so I thought, okay, there's something here that can help. And so I created Natural Creators, and the program focuses on early years. It can go as early as six months up to about five. It can go beyond that too, but it does tend to kind of change the nature of it changes as it moves up along. And essentially it's a program again that tries to keep things open for as long as possible, keep the natural curiosity, keep the right and wrongs, keep the color in everything creative. So to not put the theory first, to put the doing first, put the listening first, put the improvisation first, put a response first, and then you can do other things after that. But just try and move the experience of creating to the fore through simple acts of listening and doing. It also works with natural materials to try and take away the monetary biases that can sometimes be in these programs just because, and there's room for everything.

I mean, it's not offering this as in competition with more standard music education. I'm just saying that there could be other ways of experiencing music and sound. So the monetary thing is just because everybody can make sound, and you don't need to be in violin lessons in order to participate. And so it opens things up for everybody. Obviously it puts listening at its core. So it hopefully has environmental impacts where there's a better relationship with environments. One is learning how to listen to them and develop from there. So yeah, I find it really inspiring. The work is really inspiring. I don't do it all of the time. I kind of go into intense Natural Creators mode for a little while, and then I have to move out it again because it is exhausting work because you're holding a very, very delicate space with little beings who themselves cannot tell you if what you're doing is harmful or not.

And so you have to be very, very aware of the environment that you're in. And just, so a lot of my workshops would consider the space that we occupy as being as non-biased as possible as well. So where we might form a circle together, we're usually on the floor. There would also be objects placed around corners of the room so that, again, there are no assumptions made about the way one might interact with this kind of experience, that everybody can do it on their own time in their own way. So it, it's a music sound program, but as with a child of that age, the senses, they're not separated. So a lot of the materials that I use deliberately have texture, they have color. There's much about feeling something and having a relationship with it in that way as about making the sound. And the other beauty about not using conventional musical instruments is that there is no correct way to play two stones.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah,

Karen Power:

Beautiful.

Leah Roseman:

And had you done some work with differently abled adults as well? I seen a post about that,

Karen Power:

Yes. So yeah, I work on devising inclusive practices and inclusive ensembles, and this was something that, well, I started doing this kind of work through Natural Creators, just I found myself wanting to do everything and just go, well, why am I only focusing on this? There's something in this that could be of use. And for me, that's the main thing, is if I can spot something where I feel, actually maybe there's a way for this to be adapted, to be used in some other way, then let's see if that can work. But the Natural Creators Program, I found out about an extraordinary organization in Sweden, which is called ShareMusic and Performing Arts. And they do amazing work, amazing work with music and dance and story. And I was in touch with them about a different project and eventually, anyway, so they asked to commission me for a short work with a mixed ensemble.

So they were devising their own ensemble with people living with disabilities, and were going to pair it then with a professional music ensemble. And they wanted a work for me that would work with this ensemble. I had had a number of very interesting conversations with the director, and we decided that rather than me just creating a work that why wouldn't we try and look at this as a process? Because as you'll have gathered from talking to me in this duration process is very important for me, and often actually can be more important than just the product. But opening up a process and actually offering people an opportunity to learn and develop through that process so that by the time the product is there, it's just part of something that will live a longer life. So I started working with them and try to devise this process whereby we could look at score and look at ways where one could create more inclusive ensembles and a framework for how that might work after the piece.

The piece was called Machine Chatter was the actual piece. And we had so much fun making that work. And then after that, they would call on me to work with different ensembles, and one of them was kind of pairing, let's say, a differently abled ensemble with the more conventional string orchestra. And so how that could work and how that could be positive for everybody and not insulting for anybody, which base it in respect. So a few years ago, then they published a book, which has a lot of my theories about how we can work this way and how one would create an inclusive ensemble. And then more recently, I mean, it was wonderful to do that work in Sweden, but I was also thinking, why are we not doing this at home and how can we should be in the middle of this? And so the head of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Deborah Kelleher contacted me a few, maybe two years ago now, and it felt like they were ready to, they had been doing some work with inclusive ensembles, but felt like they were missing the final piece of the puzzle.

And so we've just completed our first educational module around training people about how you would create an inclusive ensemble, mixed inclusive ensemble. So in this case, it was five members of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, so training to be professional musicians and five people living with disabilities who are interested in music. And so we created a piece together that they then performed together. But again, mostly it was about how this works, what way do you think about score? What technologies can we use to allow this to happen? And so I think it's really important work. Yeah, I get excited every time I think about it. I can't believe we haven't done it sooner, but we're hoping that this was our first, and we're hoping it's just going to go from strength to strength.

Leah Roseman:

I did some limited work in that field with two previous guests of this podcast, Ellen Waterman and Jesse Stewart here in Ottawa, so it's something I'm interested in. Both of them worked with Pauline Oliveres as well. Do you know them at all?

Karen Power:

The first name sounds very familiar.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Karen Power:

Second, not so much, but can you give them to me again?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I'll be linking these episodes for the listeners too, because I always try to do that connected a lot of the same topics.

Karen Power:

Brilliant. Yeah, that'd be great.

Leah Roseman:

Overlap. Yeah.

Karen Power:

Yeah, it sounds like, yeah, we should stay in touch about that because it is a, yeah, I think anybody who's trying to find ways to level the playing field that we all just need to know each other.

Leah Roseman:

You wrote an orchestra piece with Blackbirds, and the premier was with Jessica Cottis, who was also a previous guest of this series. I was curious about that as an orchestral musician myself

Karen Power:

That worked. Yeah, I was so excited when I heard that Jessica was going to be conducting that piece. We didn't know each other before that. I had heard of some great stuff she was doing. I was nervous about that piece, working the way I do, and pairing that with an orchestra isn't necessarily a smooth partnership, so it takes somebody like Jessica to make it work, even though, I mean, it's a very conventionally written work. So it's fully notated and deliberately so, because again, as I said to you earlier, I'm not interested in pulling the rug out from anybody or disrespecting any element of anybody's musical practice. It's more about recognizing what you have in the room with you and trying to understand that to create work that will allow them to be their best. And to do that. So obviously when working with an orchestra, you want to make sure that you're taking in the traditions, but at the same time, also trying to push, because it's an opportunity to widen the circle.

So yeah, so I decided on a blackbird. I thought, okay, well, that's a pretty accessible sound. And I had, as a younger composer, some not so wonderful experiences with orchestras, and it took me a while to get over those. So yeah, the piece is, it's like maybe seven or eight minutes. And I mean, Jessica's kind of entered into the room and just got the orchestra on my side straight off the bat, which had never happened before. For me, it is a piece of hardcore contemporary new music, and it can be tricky, but yeah, piece works really well. It's just for tape. So stereo tape, because again, with an orchestra, you've got to think about how it's going to work. The process of rehearsals by the second or third rehearsal, I had members in the orchestra wearing bird shirts and bringing in little videos that they had made of a blackbird who used to visit their smoking area. So they sound silly, but there were ways of indicating that the way they were listening to a blackbird was changing through their interaction with this piece. And for me, that's success that has opened something that might remain open.

And as I said, a lot of it was down to Jessica's attitude. And I think it was only the orchestra's second time having a woman conductor. So she had big had to step into something as well. So yeah, it was great.

Leah Roseman:

As a woman composer or the length of your career, do you feel things have changed for the good in terms of equity and representation?

Karen Power:

It's not a staircase, it's like a few steps and then it plateaus, and then maybe it goes back a couple of steps, and then maybe you get back up to the step that you were in. And I am not talking about composers or where we are. I'm talking more just about attitudes and a willingness to change or to, I think I'm constantly surprised where I think we've come so far, and then I get kind of catapulted back and I go, really, we we're there? It only takes one reaction to just undo a lot of things. But I think it depends on where you are in the world as well. We're not all in the same place when it comes to equal rights, full stop. We're part of this question is part of a bigger system, but in Ireland, certainly things have become better in contemporary music. I would say jazz, there's still a lot of work to be done. Yeah, I think it's better. But I think many people have said that before. Each generation tackles it for a while. And then if you think about all the times that this has been attempted to put things forward, has been attempted, and then maybe it falls back and then a couple of generations later, it gets pushed forward again. And why does it keep getting, why isn't it just there now? Sorry, it's a bit of a rambling answer because I am not sure.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I mean, I've had a lot of women on this series talk about, we talk about these issues, and as Katherine Needleman points out, it's not even like my orchestra. We're very good because every single program, we have a piece by a woman, but the percentage of music heard is still small because it is usually the short piece at the beginning. It's never a symphony of the sort of, never a concerto. I shouldn't say never, but rarely, more rarely. So in terms of my work as a symphony musician, and obviously there's all these different domains, I think there's definitely work to be done. And because there's more, I shouldn't just say women, but gender minorities writing now, and we just need more music of now.

Karen Power:

Yeah, and that's the thing. And not to be, I mean, everything has its place. And again, it's this, I think we just, were so quick to assume that when we talk about raising something up, that it's taking from something else that's already up, and it's such a negative and problematic way of thinking about things. It can all be up. But I mean, think, so one thing I was involved in Collective, which is called Sounding the Feminists, which was very much a group effort, but one of the main things that we were trying to do was to correlate some research. And the reason being that it was kind of foreseeing the future generations of this coming up again and again and again, and trying to put something, a piece of research in place that showed where we are and where we were, and so that we never go back at least.

So at least now there's a piece of research there that shows that things like, yes, there are. So it was the research focused on women composers being commissioned over a ten year period from using publicly funded funds in Ireland. And again, what it was showing was, so maybe for choral works, there were more women, but things like, yeah, but they were short works. And when it came to big orchestra pieces, it was a lot of men. But also, so looking at these forces and even the gender stereotypes that get locked in to these different forces and different mediums, and yeah, I think it's a very complicated world that's got all of these layers and relates very much to, even when we think about the canon, it's not that there were no women writing. If you need to write, you write. But it's about who gets written into history. And so the argument is flawed from the very beginning. And so we thought, okay, well let's try and make sure that there's a document somewhere that's putting it there. And then beyond that, just to partner with organizations to not point the finger, but to kind of go, okay, well, how can we make this better? How can we move forward? But all these things take a lot of energy and can cause burnout. I like to think we're somewhere new, but I'm also very aware of how quickly things can go back.

Leah Roseman:

Well to close this out, Karen, speaking of the cyclical nature of things, you have an upcoming project resulting from your field recordings of the double brood emergence of cicadas last year.

Karen Power:

That was such a wonderful trip. And actually my being aware of those, of that double broode and the cicadas is also thanks to Pauline. And I remember as a student hearing that she and David Rothenberg and that they had gone out and they had played with the cicada cicadas, and I thought, oh, what a great idea. That's really, really, so they were always in my mind, obviously we don't have cicadas in Ireland, so I was keeping an eye for when there might be a time that I could nip over and be part of some emergence, and then it snuck up on me. I almost missed it. Yeah. But I spent a week in Illinois, which is where this double broods, you have the 13 year and the 17 year, the biggest broods within those were emerging at the same time. And the last time this happened was 221 years ago, in a lifetime, no one will hear this.

Now, the broods and the crossover point was possibly Springfield, which is where I was based. But whether I actually heard the two broods is, I cannot definitely say, and I don't think anybody there could definitely say the chances of it were very slim, but it was incredible. I mean, absolutely, I love the sound, but I just love the fact that this happens, that these are one of the oldest species they've survived because they can't be food because they only come up 13 or 17 years. No species is going to wait around for a snack for that long length of time. And there are so many of them when they come up, the majority of them will survive, even though they're tasty snacks for a lot of things, and they live their lives underground. So they show us again that there are other ways of being in this world, and that's extraordinary.

So yeah, so I spent, I think 10 days out there recording and listening and just being completely overwhelmed by these magnificent, clumsy, beautiful creatures who just want to crawl up you like a tree. And yeah, it was extraordinary. So yeah, so I'm preparing some works around, but again, yeah, some strings is probably the, yeah, but a lot of the time when I make the field recording trips, it takes me quite a while afterwards to work with the materials, mostly because there's a lot of them. But also I really want to take the time to listen carefully and not force any duos together that don't belong together. And this one, even though it's only one species, the complexity of the sounds is extraordinary. So I'm not quite sure how I'm still listening. Let me put it that way.

Leah Roseman:

I live in an area with cicadas, so I'm well acquainted with the actually very loud sounds in the summer. Many people listening to this have never heard of cicada or seen one. Maybe could you share a short clip of just a raw feel recording for people to hear that?

Karen Power:

Yeah, sure.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah? (sound of cicadas)

Karen Power:

And I guess just to sort of make the difference between annual cicadas, which is likely what you're hearing, and then the periodic ones.

Leah Roseman:

Well, we have periodic as well.

Karen Power:

Okay. Yeah, they also look very different. And so I can send you a little picture of, because they're beautiful. The periodic ones have these, they're kind of orangey, translucent wings and big red eyes. And yeah, for me, well, they have additional sound. The mating sounds are, I've not heard annual cicadas make that sound. But again, I wouldn't know enough to say definitively. There's definitely some sounds that the periodic ones make that I've not heard annual ones make, but maybe I just haven't heard them at the right time. But

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Well, there's so much we could talk about, but I'm mindful of the time, so I think I'm going to say thank you so much for this today, Karen. It's really wonderful.

Karen Power:

It was an absolute pleasure to chat with you and I mean, yeah, I've been enjoying your podcasts and things, so it's great to just connect and have a chat, and I'm sure it would not be the last one.

Leah Roseman:

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support the series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster, and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.