Every Friday, we’ll be sharing a piece of music that resonates particularly strongly with one of our staffers. This week: Sophie Ewh on the magical complexity of Joan La Barbara.
Recording Information:
Composer: Joan La Barbara and John Cage
Album: Tapesongs
Joan La Barbara (Voice), Bruce Ditmas and Warren Smith (Timpani)
The second semester of my sophomore year, I took what I thought would be a throwaway course in NYU’s music department called “Special Topics Seminar: Sound Art.” The morning before it started, I listened to a few minimalists and planned a canned response to each piece of “sound art”: “Yes, this piece is very Glass-esque, with a hint of Brian Eno tossed in. It makes me wonder: What is music? What even is art???”
But then the professor explained that we’d be discovering new artists every day, each with a different perspective and motivation. She’d focus on women, people of color, LGBTQ artists, people with disabilities, and any otherwise marginalized artists, in an attempt to destroy the straight white male notion of creative exclusivity.
This resonated — some of us were LGBTQ; some of us were people of color; and one guy was even from Queens.
We started to love our professor, and in return for our love, she introduced us to every sound artist she respected. Among them were Christine Sun Kim, who had hearing disabilities and made silent sound art; Pauline Oliveros, an open lesbian who forged the Deep Listening Band and emphasized the importance of sonic meditation; and Miya Masaoka, who took the sounds of vaginas and amplified them to an audience.
Then she showed us composer / vocalist Joan La Barbara’s feature on Sesame Street, in which she sings above an animation of the ASL alphabet. La Barbara started as a classical singer, training with soprano Helen Boatwright at Syracuse and contralto Marion Freschl at Juilliard. When she began to make her own works, La Barbara used her training to test the limits of her voice, stretch the definition of singing, and introduce electronic processing to classical techniques.
I immediately fell in love with her voice, her camp, and her audacity. She leans into the complexity of the voice to mirror the complexity of the English language, giving us a spiraling yet calm descent into the notion of communication.
We listened to Tapesongs, La Barbara’s second album (after Voice is The Original Instrument). Comprising three tracks, each is a significant exploration of vocal, electronic, and percussive techniques. The recording’s second work, John Cage’s “Solo for Voice 45” (written for La Barbara), is quick, formless, and revels in silent moments like much of Cage’s work, but La Barbara brings the playfulness and levity that makes it such a springboard of emotion. The third piece, “Thunder,” includes fierce — yet completely improvised! — timpani solos and La Barbara’s voice floating above like a war call, vocals composed by La Barbara herself.
And then there’s “Cathing.”
According to the professor, this was La Barbara’s revenge after a catty fight started by Cathy Berberian, a singer who criticized La Barbara, among other “extended vocalists,” arguing she couldn’t really sing. It’s the opening track on Tapesongs, so the first thing you hear on the album is an interview with Berberian, recorded during the intermission of La Barbara’s June 1977 Holland Festival performance. Berberian says, “I don’t want to be offensive, because I don’t intend this. But really, they’re freaks, they’re phenomenons.” What follows is La Barbara’s composition for her own voice over a heavily processed and distorted Berberian. The title is not just a comment on Berberian’s cattiness, it’s also a confession: La Barbara has finally turned Berberian into a thing, a freak, just like her.
After I listened to “Cathing,” Joan La Barbara became an idol.
When “Cathing” ended, each of us in the class noted how cathartic it was to hear La Barbara win. La Barbara didn’t just take down Berberian — she took down the constructs, created by ancient men, that still control our decisions, our aesthetic, and our art. Tapesongs is an album for toppling the patriarchy.