Rhythm begins, you see. I hear.
First article in a new series. James Joyce, Caroline Shaw, and the creative process.
The most satisfying collaborations always contain elements of surprise and delight. During the process, the artists hear each other, allowing themselves to be influenced, and something changes. The least satisfying ones can be spotted very quickly: one or more of the artists (and it only takes one) want to do what they always do but in a slightly different format. Working in Sō Percussion, we consider every project to be the former kind, including when we commission new pieces from composers.
This article is about the endlessly surprising process of co-creating an album of music entitled “Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part” with Caroline Shaw. Our creative relationship goes all the way back to graduate school, when Caroline was a violin major who happened to write the best assignments in ear training class. Soon after, when she attended Princeton for a composition degree, Sō Percussion was conducting our first yearlong residency. We invented a course that gave composers ample time to experiment with percussion sounds, rather than rushing them through orchestration books.
Our first piece together came out of that year, entitled Taxidermy. It combines flowerpots, mallet instruments, and spoken text. My clearest memory of working together during that class was when the composers came to experiment with sounds for the pieces they were planning to write. Caroline asked if we would be ok setting up flowerpots with a variety of sticks and following her directions. She asked us to place the flowerpots on their side, roll, muffle, play slow long notes…she used her time in the class just to listen to each variation on how one could boink a flowerpot.
Years later, we were asked by the legendary soprano Dawn Upshaw if we would like to commission a new piece together through the Music Accord project. We quickly settled on Caroline and approached her about writing a new piece. The work that resulted, a song cycle called Narrow Sea, is a gorgeous meditation on themes of displacement, wandering, and returning home. It won the Grammy award in 2022 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
In that process as with Taxidermy, Caroline was comfortable leaving the process open for long stretches. For most of our early rehearsals – and even some of the later ones – she brought in provisional sketches, choose-your-own-adventure types of options. She would ask us to try them, and then listen and watch. Among her special gifts is a curiosity and careful attention to what animates other people. She listens very, very carefully, not only to the music you are making, but to how it aligns with your body and your soul.
During the process of recording Narrow Sea, we reserved an extra day at the stupendous Guilford Sound studios in Vermont to essentially goof around. Caroline brought in one page of music which contained a few chords and a rough outline of a form with lots of scribbles on it. Jason went into the drum booth, I sat at the piano, and together we laid down a pass that would become the skeleton of “Other Song,” now the second track on “Let the Soil.” We spent the rest of the day layering and supplementing as Caroline watched her one-page sketch blossom and change. We approached it as a kind of “yes, and…” exercise, constantly throwing new things on top of the base layer.
We took the creative fuel from that day and decided to come back for another full week of creating in the studio. We scheduled a few rehearsals and a small show in our Brooklyn studio. A few pieces, like “Other Song,” were wholly Caroline’s creation. For others, one of the members of So would bring in composed sketches of cycles and patterns, and Caroline would add lyrics, melody, and new harmonic structure.
There is a special kind of nervous energy when the clock is ticking and you have to create something new. When we were back in Vermont, I spent my down time on the studio couch with a new copy of the 1922 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I have a fondness for slow and deliberate literature. Many of these works, such as Infinite Jest, The Magic Mountain, In Search of Lost Time, or Don Quixote, have reputations for being formidable, which is true but also unfortunate.
Works like these often have a meta-layer where they ask you to change or revisit the way you read. You might race through an action-packed chapter in Infinite Jest, only to realize Wallace also wants to spend 50 pages explaining the rules of a made-up game on a tennis court. He also places events in a non-linear order which only makes real sense when you go back to the beginning after finishing the whole book (creating a potentially infinite reading loop). If you think reading is supposed to be a certain thing, done in a certain way, you’ll give up. He almost dares you to be bored, to allow your dopamine to recede for a while, but also the book is among other things a meditation on addiction and compulsive entertainment so…yeah, meta layers. I have developed my own techniques for reading this way, including switching between audio books and normal books, and reading ten pages a day in the morning with my coffee (this has been especially helpful for Proust. I take a 30 minute walk in the French countryside every morning and pull a few nuggets of wisdom out instead of trying to do it for hundreds of numbing pages at a time).
After many years of developing Sō Percussion’s social media presence, I think I also wanted to gauge how much my attention had atrophied. Although I watched oceans of TV and played video games growing up, there was no internet, and I think this this is an inescapable part of the way my brain formed. My seventeen-year-old son swims through the internet, brushing off the nonsense, and I just don’t.
So, Ulysses. One of my favorite things about recording is that there is a lot of down time, and at Guilford that means time to crash on the couch and to walk in the woods. As a musician, I was mesmerized by Joyce. His effusions of language were unlike anything I had yet encountered. And the musicality of his words create their own patterns that seem to float above and apart from the meaning of the text. I decided at first to just enjoy the rhythm and sounds of his language.
The third chapter-like thing of Ulysses begins with the cryptic and sonorous line “Ineluctable modality of the visible.” I had no idea what that meant, but I wanted to sit with it like a Zen koan to see if it would knock anything loose in my mind. The chapter only gets more confusing: dizzying word play, meandering stream-of-consciousness, something about a dog at one point – I was totally lost. I have since read a concordance for this chapter which explains the allusions, but my first uncomprehending reading allowed me to find stimulating jewels of musicality.
On that first page of this section, I noticed these two sentences:
“Rhythm begins, you see. I hear.”
I was fascinated by Joyce’s punctuation and how it determines both the meaning and the flow of these sentences. If Joyce had placed a period after “begins” instead of a comma, you would have three perfectly intact English sentences which would seem to form a chain of causation: something begins, then you see, then I hear. If there was a period after “begins,” but a comma after “see,” that same causality would still exist, more in the sense that you and I hear simultaneously (this is the way I still usually hear it in our song from the album). But instead, I read it as “you see” more in the sense of “now look here good sir,” which maybe means that the seeing is not active, potentially intensifying the fact that “I hear.”
That’s just one line in a 732-page book! It is followed straightaway by the archaic mouthful “A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching.” Which of course refers to meter and the rhythm of language as a chaser to the ambiguous first line. Another line from this chapter, drifting through Stephen Deadalus’ mind as he strolls along the Sandymount, is:
“The flood is following me.”
The previous line reads: “So in the moon’s midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood.” The refence to Elsinore and therefore to Hamlet (a major preoccupation of Joyce’s throughout this book) I took to mean that the “flood” is one of existential dread, melancholy, self-consciousness. But I was struck, one hundred years later, by the ominous literal overtones as well during our age of climate change.
Here is the track from “Let the Soil” that uses these lines.
During our free-form recording sessions, So Percussion brought many rhythms and musical structures in, but very few words (one exception was Josh’s phrase “cast the bells in the sand,” which became the motif for another song). Caroline was looking for more source texts, as well as furiously writing her own, sometimes in the vocal booth right before a take.
One of the songs from our album that has received the most attention is a cover she and I created of ABBA’s song “Lay All Your Love on Me,” which is a dramatically slowed down multi-layered motet fantasia on the chorus of the original song. When we were brainstorming what to do (each member of So created a duet with her for the album), she knew from my background and from our conversations that I had a long love of sacred choral music and classical music in general.
I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but she was curious about my reading of Ulysses and about whether there were words that might stimulate our creative process. I started sending her lists and lists, including the “rhythm begins” sentences.
Below is a scan from the first page of a chapter from Ulysses which Joyce models on the structure of a fugue. He was a great music lover and was fascinated at the way themes could wend themselves through a piece of music. In this chapter, he starts by stating this seemingly disconnected list of phrases, which turns out to be a catalog for the narrative. These fragments all appear in this order, but also recur frequently just like musical subjects. As I read the chapter, I went through and highlighted appearances of the themes to see how that structure holds together. This was comforting for me, because it turned into a music theory assignment and I felt right at home.
Two phrases are circled here:
“A veil awave upon the waves.”
“All is lost now.”
Caroline plucked these phrases from the list. She loves short, cryptic, modular bits of text, such as the T.S. Eliot fragment “the detail of the pattern is movement,” which appears in several of her pieces, including Taxidermy. These phrases provided flotsam for the heavy and moody song “a veil awave upon the waves,” with hints of despair right before the sacred resignation of “some bright morning,” her duet with Eric which combines the mournful resignation of “I’ll Fly Away” with the ancient incense-infused sound of the salve regina plainchant.
The title track, her duet with Josh Quillen, features her own poignant lyrics, written quickly during the recording session under the spell of Joyce’s text. As part of those duets, we gave ourselves the challenge that we had exactly one hour of studio time to get them down, from conception to final take, sort of like an “Iron Chef” challenge. The stunning version of this song on the album was Josh and Caroline’s first take.
In this newsletter, I’m going to be gathering the fragments of a creative life as they float by and describing them as best I can. It is a continuation of a blog I started in the 2010’s (it’s still up here). Check it out and let me know if you like anything you read.