#touch.30

Show last at Our Lady of Lebanon presented by Issue Project Room. Church shows are the best! This was not the proper lens to bring, but I have no lens cap for my wide angle and I'd rather not risk scratching it...going back tonight for ELEH and I may just have to take that risk in order to get some shots of the architecture. 

The Bee Symphony is a project conceived by Chris Watson and Marcus Davidson in 2009 to explore the vocal harmonies between humans and honey bees in a unique choral collaboration around and within the hives of an English country garden.  ISSUE Project Room is excited to host the US premiere of this seminal work, as well as the world premiere of, an as of yet unnamed piece.  American entomologist, performance artist, musician, playwright, actor, and filmmaker, Irene Moon, talks with Marcus Davidson about bees, field recordings and Schoenberg’s theory of resonances in anticipation of the September 15th performance.   IM: Hi Marcus. So this interview is particular for promoting the September 15th show, part of the Touch.30 Festival that’s going to be held here in New York from the 13th to the 16th, primarily at ISSUE Project Room, and on the 15th you’re going to be performing The Bee Symphony, your collaboration with Chris Watson, again for the third time, is that correct? MD: Fourth. Recently just done it at the Bergen International Festival in the Bergen Cathedral. That was only a couple of weeks ago. It was an old ancient stone cathedral that was very large and the acoustics– you could hear a pin drop from the back. So it just lent itself very well to an occasion where you needed to hear specific things; it lent itself very well to a piece which had a lot to it aurally so you had to hear stuff basically, if that makes any sense. IM: The minutiae of sound. And, you know, it’s also interesting from a historical perspective because monks were some of the original beekeepers. They devised a lot of the methodology that we use very much today for beekeeping, so it kind of makes sense to start in the cathedral environment to do the symphony. But on the 15th you’re going to be doing two pieces, is that correct? The symphony and then a piece that’s still untitled that’s a new thing? MD: People keep on asking us to come up with a title. IM: People want a name, don’t they? MD: People do actually and I would really like to give one but it’s still in its developmental stage. We know what it’s going to sound like, but we have a sense that the name will appear of its own volition at the right time, so we’re just kind of sitting on it and letting it happen on the roots of programming people. That’s probably quite annoying, but there’s very much a sense of the thing evolving at the moment so we don’t really want to put a title which won’t be appropriate at the end. IM: So with The Bee Symphony, you come into a place and you work with a number of people as a chorus to sing along with the bees or communicate in a way with the sounds of the bees. Is it going to be the same for the new piece? MD: Essentially yes. What I found working with the bee sounds is that It’s actually something which is now influencing everything I do now because what actually astounded me about the bees was how musical they were. Number one, all the notes they sing are easily in the human range, which is surprising for such a small animal. It was quite easy to notate what they sang. So as their mood changed, the chord would change and they’d sing these little tunes. Bee time is a bit longer than ours and so I actually literally notated what they sang in real time and then got humans to sing it. It sounds strikingly effective. To me, it almost sounded like aboriginal music. Also the bees sang perfectly in tune the whole time in A just below 440. They didn’t deviate from that note at all. That note, that bass note, only dropped when they were asleep, and it dropped by a semitone. And, so, I lifted all these notes and arranged it myself so that every note in The Bee Symphony is a note sung by a bee. And so I felt that literally humans were singing with bees.

I’ve been doing the same thing with the sea sounds - again I’m starting to go through them and when you listen, it’s very very musical. Now my ears are attuned to it. I can hear the notes and I’m just basically notating the music in these sounds. I’m drawing the music from there so when the humans sing it, they’re hopefully literally singing with this sound from nature. It’s kind of led me on a little exploratory journey really. One of the things I’m really interested in is the sounds of space. I’ve also been doing a lot of recordings of satellites, planets and the earth. And again notes of the whole planet are so tuneful it’s, again, it’s shocking. So I mean, the thing I’ve been discovering is that everywhere I’ve been looking in nature—it’s musical.

IM: Were you always interested in nature? As a young boy were you the kind of person that would sit outside and look in the grass or turn over logs or was it something that sort of came to you through the music itself, through the composition, that you start becoming more and more in tune with the natural environment? MD: I suppose I was reasonably. I grew up in the north states in the countryside, so I mean I didn’t exactly grow up in a kind of alienated, urban environment or anything. But I must say that this thing has suddenly tuned me in to something, which has been latently lurking within. Holistic things and vibrations, you know. Just one look at this I found out so many ways where human beings are literally tuned to the planet. You know about the Schoenberg resonances? If you imagine the surface of the Earth to the edge of the atmosphere—it’s like a soundbox, almost like an organ pipe and each pipe, for example flute, has its own resonance frequencies that you blow, and so does the earth’s atmosphere. IM: That’s amazing. MD: I just thought to me it’s strangely aboriginal music. It’s like perhaps this is where these aboriginals got their sense of music from, from listening to nature. And the bees sing notes and, why not? IM: Why not? That seems like a very reasonable hypothesis. Just listening outside at night and you listen to the whirling sounds of cicadas along with the field crickets along with the frogs singing and there’s an order to all of that. Some of it is just a section selection order—one frog sings and then another frog responds and it’s sort of this call-and-response thing but, the whole ecosystem is singing and it does create sort of an orchestral sound. MD: And I very much felt that it was also communication. I had a sense that after listening to hours of bees that they communicated also very strongly through sound. One of the things which put me on to this was that when we were doing the recording I was standing a while back and Mike Harding was sticking microphones. Just before the recording he was stung and the whole beehive sound changed and from diaphanous singing sound they all sang very strongly this one A, perfect pitch, monotone. IM: Well, here’s an interesting thing; so honey bees’, or the honey-producing bees’, biggest threats in this world are mammals. So if you imagine who’s after honey: bears are after honey, people are after honey, there’s other mammals that are after honey. Evolutionarily-speaking it’s always been the mammals that are the biggest devastators to bees. So it kind of makes sense then that bees would give threat signal to their potential threat in a tune that they would know, in a way that a human would understand, and human is one of the biggest predators of wild bees. MD: I must say when this all kicked off and the bees were on to the attack I was standing a while back and some of the bees would come out of the hive and pass me and I was aware of this tiny thing emitting incredible anger and I wanted to get out just one of them going past. It was so violent, just the energy of this thing going past. IM: You had like an innate fear. MD: You could feel how angry this thing was. It was amazing; they were really, really angry. The beekeeper said she’s never known the bees this angry before. IM: So, the other thing that strikes me about the two pieces– they’re both about communication with nature and not just a one-way communication necessarily but almost a two-way communication. The Bee Symphony is dealing with one species. It’s a journey, a very intimate journey with one organism, and one species and getting to know that species in a sense really, really well where the other piece – it’s more of a journey of biodiversity along a pathway, along a climb, a climate change where there are very rich areas of biodiversity in sort of a warmer climate in Norway all the way to some of the most extreme regions in the world where the biodiversity, at least the macrobiodiversity drops heavily. But it’s another way of viewing the richness of nature. MD: Oh, certainly. IM: How did you choose the recordings that you did of the animals as you moved along? How did that happen, did you take a boat trip or did you go to specific locations along the way? MD: Well, these are all recordings that Chris Watson has made. So this piece would be a different sound collage completely and we’re quite taken with the journey aspect of it. It appears to us—it’s almost like a sound map of a particular part of the world, that’s kind of the area we’re going in. We’re still analyzing the different tracks to find their musicality. We have kind of an outline and so the musicality and the sounds of the tracks will eventually form our piece because it’s still evolving in its shape and it’s taken us on a journey and we actually don’t know where it will lead to. IM: Or what part of the world it will lead to. MD: As a piece of music it’s going to take us somewhere different like The Bee Symphony did actually. So it’s quite an exciting journey, it’s definitely a jump over the cliff and we’ll end up somewhere. We know what we want, we know it’s a journey, it’s a specific shape, but that will also take you to another place as well. It’s quite exciting really. Like I said the diversity of Chris’ recordings, the quality is stunning, and we’ve got ice, kelp, and seashore. IM: It seems bees are very familiar to people. Even here in New York we have honeybees on the sea. I think the challenge from the other piece is going to be bringing people in touch with organisms that they may never see or that they have impressions of perhaps but only from television shows but they don’t have any very personal memories with where most people can have a personal memory or a personal experience with bees, or honey, or products of bees. MD: Hopefully everyone will join in with our feeling that this piece is like a journey. Like I said, a journey sound map or however you want to call it and that’s going to differentiate this one particularly from the bees, which is just like one environment and one species so it’s a departure literally and metaphorically. IM: Right, right. But you know it could also be a reminder in some ways that the tonal notes of the seal and how almost human voice it is already that we are all part of the same organism or earth. MD: Oh, absolutely, we’re all codependent on each other and we all need the earth to survive. I think also what is very interesting to me at the moment this will also be a journey from the shore and then underwater as well, so both sides of the surface. IM: So, the other thing from the very short description that you sent me about the journey, that the journey is going from a place that is very loud in many ways, the warmer parts of the world where there’s a lot of diversity to a place that’s fairly silent, or one of the more at least industrial silent parts of the world where there’s less air traffic. I mean just trying to set up my apartment for this interview and trying to cut out the street noises, the car sirens, the alarms, the guy working downstairs—all of this sort of ambient, industrial noise all the time. Do you find when closing for or listening to the silence, or the silent areas that you keep finding more and more songs or sounds in all those silent spaces? MD: Absolutely. This is the thing, which again has really shocked me throughout nature, if you sit down and listen for the music. I live in Norway now and the family has a cabin, as a lot of Nordic families do, up in the mountains and there’s a fantastic, strong stream just by the cabin and as a kind of test for all this I’ve sat down and just kind of meditated next to the stream and within minutes you can hear notes and chords and sound movements and everything. So this is the exciting thing for me—it’s never dull. And if you listen to it you can find the music in it; new notes, new shapes, and you start working with it. It’s probably an inexhaustible supply of music, inspiration for you really. And, like I said before, it’s taken me all over the place at the moment and it’s been a great surprise for me I must say. IM: Have you gotten into recording natural sounds yourself? MD: I’ve started to a bit actually, yes. I’m learning having the right technique and the right instrumentation and gear is actually very important. That’s why Chis Watson is so successful in what he does, because he knows how to do it properly. There’s a big difference between having a go and doing it really, really well. One of the things with which I’ve been thrilled is, when you listen to Chris’ recordings, they’re brilliant. They’re so well recorded and so clear. You can actually feel and visualize the places where these things are recorded. They have their own life; they’re so good you can listen to them on their own if you want to and be fully satisfied by the listening experience.