Web posted Thursday, August 15, 2002 Web posted Thursday, August 15, 2002 
People hear with their eyes, guitarist Les Paul once said. Paul, who invented the electric guitar in the late 1940s, found people were far more receptive to his music when his newfangled guitars looked conventional rather than experimental. Like Paul, the organizers of the annual CrossSound music festival are well aware that live musichas a powerful visual component, and this year's event features a 16-foot movie screen as prominently as the performance stage.
Friday night in Centennial Hall five musical groups will provide live accompaniment as five silent movies are screened. The composers and visual artists worked together to create the music and the movies, but not in the conventional fashion.
"Usually, one is always dominant - the movie is shot, then the soundtrack is added and the composer has to match it," said Theo Lipfert, a visual artist who created one of the videos and helped organize the video portion of the program. "The rule was that each one is equally important. No one said, 'Here I have this romantic part so make the music quiet.' So it makes for a complex viewing experience."
CrossSound began in 1999, the brainchild of Jocelyn Clark and her husband, composer StefanHakenberg. Inventive and experimental, CrossSound brings composers and musicians from around the world to debut new compositions in Southeast Alaska. This year's event was two years in the making, Clark said.
Hakenberg and Lipfert are old friends and collaborated on "The Displacement Map." As with all the pieces, the music and video share the same title. Hakenberg is German and now lives in Juneau, and Lipfert is of German descent. That became an element of their collaboration, which also explores the idea of being displaced. Lipfert called the 18-minute work a documentary without words. Much of it centers on the relocation of the Aleut people at the start of World War II.
"There were German POWs in Excursion Inlet (near Juneau), and the Aleuts had been forcibly relocated," Lipfert said. "That is not common knowledge outside Alaska. There's an overlap, because the Germans were treated so much better than the Aleuts."
Lipfert drew upon a variety of sources for images, including archival photographs from the Aleutian-Priboloff Islands Association. He also accessed the National Archives for vintage Army newsreels.
"Some are in color and the cinematography is just gorgeous," he said. "There's gun turret camera footage, and footage of the Japanese bombing Dutch Harbor."
Lipfert also created scenes to illustrate events such as the Aleuts returning to their villages to find their homes looted by some of the occupying U.S. soldiers.
Hakenberg composed a musical interpretation that calls on an 11-piece ensemble that includes guitar, koto, horns and strings.
Lipfert said "Southeast Singing Pictures" is familiar and accessible, but very different. Each piece is distinct.
"It ranges in styles from 'Lint,' which was shot on film and is very narrative, on one extreme, through our documentary without words, to Harald's dream-like work with Webcam footage to Claudia and Yuni's abstract work," Lipfert said. "Matt (Marello) sticks himself in to B-movies and film noir. It's funny and scary at the same time."
"The music ranges all over the place," said guest oboist Greg Steinke. "Some is conventional and some is very difficult. Very difficult."
The dream-like work Lipfert refers to is a piece by Harald Klemm of Germany. Klemm is the only videographer who worked with existing music, a composition Toshiro Saruya of Japan created for CrossSound two years ago. Klemm said he did not deliberately try to synchronize the music to the video, but created it as a complement to the music, and it matches surprisingly well.
That's true of many of the pieces, said Clark. Because the intent of the project always was to have live music performed while the videos were screened, no one ever expected the video and music would be perfectly aligned.
"It works in unexpected ways," Klemm said. "Sometimes (in rehearsals) the music has gotten really off track from the video and other, unanticipated parts synch up.
A total of 32 people are involved - musicians, composers, video artists and a recording engineer. Four of the works are being prepared and rehearsed in Juneau and Korean conductor and composer Changwon Park will conduct. "Lint" is being put together in Sitka, with Sitka-based and guest musicians.
Each ensemble is different, and many of the configurations include unusual instruments such as the Asian stringed kayagum and koto, and the oboe d'amore, a cross between the oboe and the English horn.
Among the instrumentation for "Eternal Return" is a tape player, turned on and off at the cue of the conductor.
"The boom box will be played like an instrument," said Lipfert.
"There's nowhere else in the world where you will find something like this," said Klemm. "CrossSound is really unique. I can think of no one trying to combine video and music in this way - not performed live."
After the Juneau concert Friday, the entire CrossSound group will travel to Sitka and Ketchikan for performances. After the Alaska premiers, the works will be performed again in Chicago.
Riley Woodford can be reached at rileyw@juneauempire.com.
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Web posted Thursday, August 15, 2002
"The Eternal Return"
Music by C. P. First
Video by Matt Marello of New York
Instrumentation includes boom box tape player, violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, French
horn, trumpet, euphonium, drums, vibraphone, guitar. 10 minutes.
Marello's video is comprised of video loops created from existing Hollywood films, but with a twist.
Marello has inserted himself as a character in the drama - the protagonist has been digitally
replaced by the video artist. Each loop intends to project a sense of foreboding, although with an
element of humor, illustrating the German philosopher Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return -
the idea that mankind is condemned to repeat past mistakes over and over again, never
achieving the elevated status of being he called the Übermensch.
"Texture Mapping"
Music by Yunkyung Lee of Korea
Video by Claudia Esslinger of Ohio
Instrumentation includes violin, viola, cello, kayagum. 10 minutes.
Dream-like and abstract, "Texture Mapping" is inspired by Southeast Alaska and temperate rain
forests. The composer and artist worked independently, but agreed upon a simple mathematical
formula to help synchronize the visual and musical components. There are 10 surprises in the
piece and work is paced at a tempo of one beat per second, 60 quarter notes per minute.
The combination of image and sound is meant to evoke memories and associations in the
audience. "Texture Mapping" weaves visual and musical themes together to create a metaphorical
"map" of water.
"Dawn Pink"
Music by Toshiro Saruya of Japan
Video by Harald Klemm of Germany
Instrumentation includesviolin, viola, flute, French horn and euphonium.10 minutes.
Saruya's composition debuted at Cross Sound in 1999, and Klemm is the only visual artist working
with music he was familiar with. Saruya approached his music by imagining Alaska from a
Japanese point of view, and Klemm took a similar tack.
"I had no idea about Alaska," Klemm said. "So I tried to make something like a dream
sequence."
He used footage from old eight-millimeter home movies his father made on an Alaska vacation.
He also drew heavily on images he took from Web cameras around Alaska. He took stills from the
Webcams, including the one posted on top of the downtown Juneau Public Library.
"It has the look of stop-motion photography," said video curator Theo Lipfert, an artist and
co-organizer of the show. "The sun comes up and goes down, quickly, the tide comes in and
changes."
"There are 19,750 single frames, and most of them I worked on individually, cutting still images
or manipulating them," said Klemm.
The title comes from composer Saruya. He wrote that Alaska was colored pink on his childhood
globe of the world. He learned later the color was called dawn pink, which suggested the
mythological Roman goddess of dawn named Aurora.
Saruya wrote: "In Japanese, as in English, we use the word aurora for the Northern Lights. When
particles enter the atmosphere along the lines of the earth's magnetic field, they radiate light
across the whole spectrum, as if they admire the grandeur of Aurora. I hope this piece conveys
something of this mystical idea, and that the spectrum of the musical sounds expresses my
longing for Aurora and appreciation for the natural beauty of Alaska."
"The Displacement Map"
Music by Stefan Hakenberg of Juneau
Video by Theo Lipfert of Montana
Instrumentation includes violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, French horn, flugel horn, euphonium,
koto, guitar. 18 minutes.
This is the third collaboration between Hakenberg and Lipfert, who met 10 years ago.
The documentary without words wrestles with the issue of the world as an interdependent place -
looking at how events in remote Alaska relate to a distant shopkeeper. The piece uses visual and
musical means to narrate a story of war and displacement, focusing on the Aleut relocation from
the Aleutians and Pribilofs to Southeast Alaska during World War II. In a second, more abstract
section of the piece, the composer and videographer share how their personal discoveries of the
little-known history of the Aleut relocation affected their collaborative vision.
"Lint"
Music by Paul Cox of Cleveland, Ohio
Film by Roald Simonson of Seattle
Instrumentation includes flute, baritone saxophone, trombone, viola, cello and percussion. 15
minutes.
"Lint" is a linear narrative and of all the videos it is the most like a conventional film. It was shot
on film and made with actors, locations and lighting in traditional filmmaking style.
Filmmaker Roald Simonson said the idea came from an experience he had years ago when he
worked at a coat company, fielding questions over the Internet from all over the world.
"A woman had a question about a new black coat, she was concerned about lint and wanted to
know about eliminating lint," he said. "It touched me. She sounded alone. There was some sort of
poignancy and yearning, wanting to make her new coat, a special coat, lint free."
She became the central character of the film. Simonson enlisted Meegan Murphy, an actor he'd
worked with in a previous film, to play the woman. He wanted to have a second character, an older
woman, going through a similar experience at the same time. He found the perfect person to play
that character, Murphy's mother Jeanette.
Simonson wrote and directed the film and did all the camera work.
Cox is conducting the music himself and has been in Sitka the past few weeks rehearsing with the
musicians. The music does not follow the images exactly but is based on the structure of the
narrative as it emotionally unfolds.
"The music does line up with scenes pretty close," Cox said. "My job will be to stretch the music to
fit, compress and decompress."
Kathryn Kurtz of Juneau, a symphony musician and former CrossSound participant, is a friend of
the filmmaker and plays a supporting role. The film was shot in Vancouver, B.C., and Walla Walla,
Wash.
"The film is very pictorial, the shots are like paintings, carefully framed," said composer Cox, a
curator of music at the Cleveland Museum of Art. "The film is very focused and personal about
these two women, it's so moving and melancholic and then there's this humor.
"I went into it thinking, 'How can I bring out the emotional quality within the film?'" he said. "I was
more reacting to it, wanting the music to emphasize the nuances and moods, but to be subtle."
Riley Woodford can be reached at rileyw@juneauempire.com.
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Web posted Thursday, August 15, 2002
By RILEY WOODFORD
THE JUNEAU EMPIRE © 2002
Movies and music, separate and together, are among the highlights for the coming week.
I have enjoyed the CrossSound performances more and more each year. Last year the music, experimental and adventurous as always, was presented with a playful spirit that helped make it accessible.
This weekend the organizers will present a performance that combines silent video with live music. Four visual artists and one filmmaker have collaborated with five composers to create five short movies that will be shown as the music is performed. The music is not a soundtrack but a complement to the movie. The conductor has the job of watching the score, the musicians and the movies all at the time, not to precisely synchronize the two, but to coordinate them.
The pieces range from 10 to 18 minutes in length and offer a range of styles. Five ensembles will perform, offering different instrumentation. The five movies also range from conventional linear storytelling to the experimental presentation of images. "CrossSound 2002: Southeast Singing Pictures" starts at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Centennial Hall.
[ . . . ]
Riley Woodford can be reached at rileyw@juneauempire.com.