In this interview, Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod sat down with Osnat Netzer to talk about her upcoming world premiere, I Won’t Be Outrun by a Cavalry of Snails. Dal Niente will premiere the piece online on June 26 as part of Party 2021: Once More, With Streaming.
A: Hi. We’re excited to put this piece together with you!
O: So am I! I was supposed to work with Dal Niente in 2013 and wasn’t able to, and I really regretted it. I’m glad it’s finally happening now!
A: Great! So what was the starting point for your piece?
O: I created a list of adjectives, like "bleaty," "rigid-ragged-square," "round," and asked Carrie and Amanda (our fabulous singers!) to improvise sounds inspired by each adjective. I then took the recordings of these sounds, slowed them down substantially, and transcribed the textures into the whole ensemble. Many of the weird textures and sounds in the piece are transcriptions of these slowed down vocal sounds, supporting the vocalists who are (sometimes) singing the original sounds.
I also took inspiration from pieces that challenge the idea of form, like Erin Gee’s Mouthpieces. I've had a tendency to create somewhat teleological forms in the past (where we're always moving towards a destination, like a musical climax), and I wanted to try and break away from that. We think about form as a container, something that you pour musical your material into, regardless of what that material is, but I don't like thinking of form in that way! For me there is no real difference between form and content, so I wanted to parody the idea of formal containers and take the metaphor much, much further. Containers have dimensions, but they can also have permeable walls, they can be set next to other containers and things can seep out or through in different ways. I tried to think about my musical material that way, and you can hear material from sections seeping into one another, or recontextualizing previously heard materials.
A: I like the idea that we’re working from those slowed down sounds. Can you talk a little more about how that worked?
O: Yes, I sent Amanda and Carrie this list of adjectives and asked them to send me sounds in the high, middle, and low range for each adjective. We also talked about the individuality of their voices, which Carrie described by telling me "I'm sort of a weird oboe, and Amanda is a violin that can talk.” I wanted to honor that individuality, and I paid close attention to it in the recordings. I usually blew the sound up by about 400%, sometimes 800%, and found a lot of nuance and texture that I was able to approach analytically and then use to create my own interpretation and decide how I wanted to use the voices inside of those instrumental textures. In the final piece, they don’t always sing what they did in the recordings, and sometimes they sing each other’s material.
A: Ha, I love that description of their voices! And it’s interesting to hear about how you came into this piece. Where did you go from there?
O: This was a somewhat unusual process for me. I usually have a pretty clear map/plan in place when I write a piece, and this time I was working solely from the sketches that I described before, without knowing anything about proportions or order of ideas. In many of my previous pieces, the piece tells a story of materials and their transformations over time. In this piece I worked and reworked the materials in the sketching stage, and often what you get in the piece itself is the final result of these sketch transformations. You don't get to hear the materials presented and transformed in a traditional way, and you don't get these "origin" materials. This is another way in which I try to break away from the teleological approach of my previous pieces.
A: Neat! What happened from there?
O: Well, even without a plan and a directional kind of approach, midway into writing the piece I felt the need to ask myself "where am I in the piece right now? beginning of something? middle? end?" It suddenly became apparent to me that there might still be things that we want to cling onto in a piece. If we're hearing a lot of these short musical containers, we might be able to sense that suddenly there are containers that are a bit longer, or that do have some direction (even if they never reach their destination). It was important for me to stop what I was doing and look at how these containers were clumped together, and perhaps tell a story: they do become longer as the piece progresses, but the longest one is still only 90 seconds.
A: That’s not very long!
O: It’s really not! But some containers do provide a kind of formal "service." In addition to the textures that I created from Carrie and Amanda's adjectives, I created a material that I call "bells," whose purpose is mostly to clean the palate and allow both performers and listeners to breathe and regroup. As I was constructing the piece it also became clear to me that the tempo of each adjective-material was used in a structural way, to denote almost a state of being. There are many tempi in the piece, often even simultaneously, and each tempo is associated with one of the main materials of the piece. Often materials seep from one container to the next by existing as a secondary material (with a secondary tempo, referential to the main tempo), and then becoming the main tempo in the next section, with their associated material becoming the primary material. This gives the piece a constant feeling of tug-o-war between identities and speeds. I love playing with time in weird ways!
A: So to get slightly away from the nuts and bolts, I do have to ask about the name. I was 100% delighted when I saw it. Where does “a cavalry of snails” come from?
O: It comes from a line I gave Carrie in the piece, although I don’t know if you’ll actually be able to hear it in the finished work. Most of the text in the piece was stream-of-consciousness in various languages (English, Hebrew, Italian, etc.). When I finished the piece I checked to see if maybe one of the texts could be used as a title, and I found "I won't be outrun by a cavalry of snails." There are other snail references in the piece! Like the word "shablulim," snails in Hebrew. So I came up with the term "cavalry of snails" entirely by accident, but when I looked up the term cavalry, I learned that “cavalry” initially referred specifically to soldiers on horses, but eventually it came to mean soldiers in any armed vehicles. I thought that it worked really well with snails because they carry their own “tank” on their back. The other reason I loved this title is because of how I enjoyed playing with time and tempi in the piece.
A: Well, I very much look forward to learning more about this cavalry of snails. Thanks for your time, and we can’t wait to bring this piece to life!