During my months of working on my portfolio and getting ready for the Cooper Union interview process, my friend Eric and I discovered this contemporary vocal artist named Joan La Barbara. Eric actually knew about her years before but recently introduced me to her work during the time of anxiety with the school application. Of course, us being artists and art students, we search to find more of the bizarre and unusual music known to man that is out there in the world. It tickles our fancy. Why listen to pop music when you have an old woman whispering sweet nothings and making unforgettable moans in your ear? We enjoy it as much we enjoy making our own works of art. And maybe you might as well. You should totally check her out and see what you think about this artist!
Joan La Barbara is an American vocalist and composer associated with contemporary music. La Barbara, now 64 years of age, is currently at work composing a new opera.
She has her own official website with a very out of date picture of herself in the background. When you link into her website and you see the image of her, you may be experience the same feeling that you would feel if you saw a friend’s driver’s permit in their wallet and you discover that he/she still uses it to get alcohol or cigarettes. It’s a little ridiculous to use such identification. There’s something humorous but also serious about La Barbara that reflects with her work. When she speaks in her interviews, she is down right serious in the sense that she talks about her process as if she were Mozart or Beethoven if they were alive today. Whenever she’s on stage, there is a humor in which she stands and moves her body that is unforgettable. Since she is a female artist, there’s something that triggers the viewer. Viewers may focus on her differently on stage since she’s now old and still a female. There’s a strong dynamic about her. She has a strong resume in wowing people with her vocal talent. Therefore, she’s still around playing on stage. There’s something contagious about her as an artist that makes people want to come back and listen to her even though her work has no sense of meaning. There are many fans that cling to her and the majority that I know and love are the art kids who enjoy the adventure of finding new music out there that is not necessarily mainstream or popular. Since Joan La Barbara has been around for so long, her viewers are mostly be in the middle age realm. Her older viewers would be categorized as still working professionals that have eight more years until they can retire if they decide to.
Since she is a contemporary vocal artist, she speaks and sings at conventional settings where the viewers usually stand and watch her on the side or close to the middle of the hardwood flooring of a gallery or somewhat of an exhibition space.
I go back to her performances not only to try to dissect and mimic her body language but to also try and figure out how she uses her equipment. How does she use the microphone on stage? Like a harmonica player, does she use her hands to trap sound waves and manipulate them with the microphone? Does she cover that microphone when she grunts to illuminate it to be more ferocious? Most of the time, she has a single tech support person on stage with her that masters the echoes of her yelps and moans. The tech support on stage usually does a good job. I bet Joan La Barbara chooses very carefully in who she wants to work with for specific performances.
Throughout her career, she has worked with plenty of other well-known contemporary artists such as Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Phillip Glass, Peter Gordon, Kenneth Goldsmith, John Cage to name a few.
La Barbara’s early inspiration started with John Cage. During her early touring, she met John Cage at Berlin in the same concert hall when she was working with Steve Reich at the time. Joan La Barbara was about 23 or 24 of age at the time when this event was happening. At John Cage’s event, there were slides playing with images of the moon landing and harps being played and not being played, people standing around next to the harps. Everything was all over the place at his show and La Barbara came up to Cage and simply asked him this question,
“ With all the chaos in the world, why do you make more?” His agents surrounding Cage were all gasping with surprise. La Barbara walked away thinking she wouldn’t get an answer from him because the remark was down right disrespectful to say such a thing. Then later on, she felt a small tap on the shoulder by Mr. John Cage and he answered her question with,
“Perhaps when you go out in the world, it won’t seem so chaotic in the world anymore.”
To La Barbara’s surprise, it was a wonderful revelation and a life long lesson that she keeps in her heart and her career choices. After her small conversation with Cage, she continues to make chaos of sound in harmony and melody in sync to one another in her own way.
A buddy and I usually get our new music from the school’s library. I checked out one of Joan La Barbara’s albums after watching a video of her performing “Rothko” on ubu. The website of ubuweb.com was created as a simple virtual archive for sound art and performances. It is still simple but now the site is more complex with more artists to listen, see and research on. Some of the artists on the ubu do sound quite similar to La Barbara. It’s a good source to explore more artists like her.
LYRICS..
“Brother. Lover. Mother. Father. Smother. Another. Undercover. Dourly. Hourly. John Gotty. Sourly. Half-hourly. Dourly. Hourly. John Gotty. STOLEN. Sourly. Half-semi-hourly. Bruce. Bruce. Daaaaddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.Deh deh deh deh. Doouurly.
Exctascy. Hard copy e e e e ee Dee.
Cooinment. Oiintment. Oinment. Pounment. Disa copy. Gain weight. Jail bait. Soulmate. Hesitate. Penetrate. Watergate.
God it’s great. Going straight. Got a date. I can’t wait. Palpetate. Pearly gate. Welfare state. True hate. Half past eight. Police state. Cross pollinate. Helucenate. Welfare state. W.B. Yates. Clean nose. Fire hoes. No bows. Plain clothes. You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows. Deep throat. Right vote. Blatter bloat. Billy goat. Dead man float. Hall of oats. Quote unquote.”
The album that the lyrics above are from is called 73 poems. The album consists of mini tracks of La Barbara’s vocal noises and choices of words that rhyme but doesn’t at all make sense to anyone but herself. Nonetheless, there is a humor into the album that makes me all tickly inside. Other than the tracks from 73 Poems, most of her work also surprise you with odd and ambiguous vocal sounds that she explores with her own vocal abilities.
How does she come up with these sound pieces? La Barbara’s compositional technique starts out with writing and not writing music. She starts by writing a whole stream of consciousness and lists without editing. When she’s done with, in her words, “brain dump”, she later re-reads what she has written, edit it, and find out where the music is. She starts with words not general sound.
Barbara’s tracks from 73 Poems are in ubu.com under her name in the sound lab selection. You can listen to them here…
http://www.ubu.com/sound/lab.html
During Joan La Barbara’s live performances; she does do a lot of improvisations. Once you have the chance to direct yourself with her work, the songs are understood to be very liberated in a free spirit kind of way where she, the artist, can not do the exact same song or sound piece as what you would hear in one of her CD’s. La Barbara does not look at her work in musical terms when she performs her work. She is more interested in the idea of exploring where she can go with her vocal abilities on stage. She usually works with her raw voice and nothing else. Some of the time, she uses synthesizers and other sound equipment into the performances to have the ideal sound/vocal effects that she’s wanting. The voices that you hear in her work are all her and no one else’s. During her performances, she does record them as sample. Later in her process of making more sound works, she puts her work in a digital format on Pro Tools, layer those bad boys up, edit edit edit, and then distributes it.
Joan La Barbara’s understanding about the digital production aspect of it is that you can manipulate your piece in any way and everything can fall into place as long as you are true and honest to the sound. She uses that understanding that she learned from John Cage as a guideline for her work. Whenever she’s stuck, she layers random things together to see where she can go with something new.
Here are a few videos of La Barbara’s tracks from the Youtube.. Most of her works are very performative as you will see from these links below.
“Can you get someone else’s DNA from a bone marrow transplant?
Two blind people see in their dreams.”
I describe the first link below as a contemporary beat boxer named Joan La Barbara. She’s using this echoing equipment. In the end of the performance, it turns into an up beat African sound. Then, La Barbara gets more poetic about a Clint Eastwood film. The poetry about dissolving bodies comes out of nowhere!
http://youtu.be/-xOdSN8-xuU
This video shows La Barbara chant something to a “Manga Scroll”. This piece reminds me of a nonsense ritual. La Barbara is trying to be a Buddhist to the inked scroll. She’s trying to nurture the scroll with her voice instead of her hand or brush. She just gave the scroll special powers with her magic breath of sound.
http://youtu.be/YFtHUH1IMLM
The next link is a group of people sharing their essence with one another with onomonipias. Well, this is not the original Joan La Barbara that is performing with them. I know she wants to be. This Joan La Barbara con seems to be interested in entertaining oneself in a dancing studio with a group of people. When looking closely, the others are just looking at her and doing nothing. Her talent of making sounds from her voice influences of people’s curiosity of their own vocal abilities.
http://youtu.be/BuBj_8IGy7g
There are similar artists like Joan La Barbara that you should compare and contrast with her works such as Marianne Schuppe, Jaap Blonk, Mary Jane Leach, and Karl Rossman to name a few. They are all similar from the way they lengthen their sounds. They don’t all do works with their voices. Some use acoustic string and wind instruments and of course percussions as well. I’m sure most of the newer artists are somewhat Joan La Barbara’s disciples of her work.
There is an ambient feeling when you hear works of Joan La Barbara and others like her.
At 65 years old, you might think that your voice is done for. Singing may be a problem after making ferocious sounds of the sort on stage for the past decades of performing on stage. It’s time to retire, right? Joan La Barbara never quits until her lungs explode.
Because Joan La Barbara keeps on making works, how does she do it? How does she utter a strong note and then go back into a beautiful sultry melody without a crack during a performance?
She says that before she utters a note, she physically exercises her neck and shoulder area. She exclaims that people sing with their whole body. You don’t just sing with your throat or your breathing mechanism. You really have to draw from your feet all the way up. Her techniques, she doesn’t do anything that strains the voice. So when La Barbara decides to make a sound that could make her cough, she pays closer attention to the sound and dissect the way she can better execute the ferocious sound so she can go back into a light soulful melody afterward right away.
La Barbara sees sounds in a visceral and a tangible thing like a sculpture piece or a painting. It’s very physical to her and when she sings, she claims it feels like she is sculpting a piece on stage. She writes out different textures of the word and onomatopoeia choices in a journal and dissects it as if it’s a sketch in a sketchbook or a concept drawing for an architecture project.
I think I’d like to get to know her as an artist. Maybe have a cuppa with her one day.
The one thing I’m not into with her work is that I don’t feel that there are concepts or real emotion in her word and sentence selection. Her work is ore of an entertainment and amusement than a cause or an iteration of something important as of if her work were to reach out for a political issue or even a personal story that would hit home for some such as human experiences like abuse or love. Like the way she first creates her work, her process of seem to be meaningless. I feel that her work in general lack critical structure. It has a sound structure that can be enjoyed for artistic ears but it still lacks any story, idea or concept in each song. Joan La Barbara uses words and phrases that form into pure nothingness. It may be her intention to do so but it still does not intrigue me in a conceptual sense compared to other artists in popular culture. It is probably her real intention to escape from a true structure of a song or lyric. I mean, she’s been doing this kind of work for years so it may be her true intention to evaluate such dynamic.
If you are the kind of person that is in search for something more fluent in a storyline, universal emotions of love, hate, relationships, hard times, and beat, then Joan La Barbara is not for you. But if you are in a way a go-getter of new music in search for alternative genres, Joan La Barbara should be in your itunes playlist.
Joan La Barbara Resourses:
<http://www.joanlabarbara.com/>
<http://www.ubu.com/sound/lab.html>
<http://www.ubu.com/film/roulette_labarbara.html>
cd: Joan La Barbara, 73 Poems
book: The Norton/Grove dictionary of women composers
By Julie Anne Sadie, Rhian Samuel
Book: Contemporary anthology of music by women By James R. Briscoe pg. 98
