The sound around the sound, and beyond

Composers: Eleanor Hovda
Performers: Prism PlayersJeannine WagarLibby Van CleveJack VeesEleanor HovdaRelacheWilliam McGlaughlinCassatt String QuartetCalifornia EAR UnitJan WellerDavid GilbertElizabeth PanzerLee HumphriesDan CoodyCharlotte Lord

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I am interested in using sound to magnify silence, and in using silence to magnify sound. My solo and ensemble works excavate songs out of metal, strings, and wood focusing on the ‘sound around the sound’ and the juxtaposition of ‘breath’, ‘metric’, and ‘process’ time flow. Each piece is a kind of sonic choreography, using space/time, multidimensionality, and energy shape motion as important aspects of the composition.
– Eleanor Hovda

One of the first discussions I had with Eleanor Hovda, soon after we met in 1989, concerned existential questions that had bothered her since she first began to study music as a child. She continued to ponder these questions for years. First, she wondered why no one ever worried about whether the birds were singing in tune or not, and why no one was concerned about the cicadas being on the beat. She also didn’t understand why we had only twelve tones in the octave and why certain chords were supposed to follow others. These were pretty heady questions for a young child studying piano, but they stayed with her throughout her life and influenced the ways in which she thought about music and composed music.

Her studies in music composition began in a traditional trajectory, studying piano with Esther Williamson Ballou and then beginning music composition with Gordon Smith at American University in Washington DC. Smith, himself an under-recognized teacher, encouraged Eleanor not to worry about composing in any given style. She told me many times that his influence concerning the importance of finding her own voice and not worrying about current styles was the defining factor that freed her to follow her true vocation, music composition.

After graduating with a BA in Music from American University, she moved on to graduate school to work with Mel Powell at Yale University, Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and Stockhausen at the K’lner Kurse fur neue Musik. When she returned from Europe she moved, with her husband at the time, flutist/conductor, David Gilbert, to New York City. She began surrounding herself with composers and musicians of great stature and exposed herself to practically every musical ‘school’ of thought and position about the current new music: ‘Though I respected and was very influenced by my teachers and composers like George Crumb, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and others, I never got stuck in one point of view about what made good composition and what was bad.’

Another important factor in her development was her association with David Gilbert. David is a phenomenal flutist, composer, and conductor, and when they were married, Eleanor and he talked for hours about their shared musical aesthetics. She considers the piece for solo flute, Music from the Proclamation, written for him in 1966, to be her first professional work. When he won the esteemed Metropolis Conducting Competition, a few years later, he was given the opportunity to be Assistant Conductor to both Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez with the New York Philharmonic. Gilbert later became the Music Director of American Ballet Theater where Eleanor spent hundreds of hours watching rehearsals and concerts while socializing with Bernstein, Boulez and other major musical luminaries.

In spite, or because of, these privileged artistic circumstances, Eleanor began to blaze her own way through many diverse paths. Her intellectual curiosity and the ‘day jobs’ she took for financial support (or to ‘support her habit, music composition’ as she put it) led her to immerse herself in many different fields other than music. Since she was naturally an explorer and visionary, she began to incorporate concepts into her music from these jobs, friendships and other interests. For instance, while attending American University she got a top security clearance job at the ACF Electro-Physics in Maryland where she charted wavelengths of sound waves sent into the ionosphere to detect radioactivity in the atmosphere.

In New York, she started playing piano classes for serious modern dance companies such as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Nancy Meehan and The Laura Pawal Dance Company. That led her to discover Rudolph van Laban and his books Space Harmony and Effort/Shape in the art of choreography. She became so passionate about dance that she decided to get her MFA in choreography and dance at Sarah Lawrence instead of in music composition. She always claimed that dance was one of the main influences in her compositional style. She said that it gave her the freedom to investigate ideas other kinds of contemporary art music didn’t consider very often. Dance led her to explore breath-time, process-time, and effort as a musical artistic parameter. How long did it take a dancer to do a certain type of movement across the floor or how much effort/breath was necessary for that movement? She remained actively involved in composing music for dance her entire life. One of many high point was a commission from Mikhail Baryshinikov for his White Oaks Project founded in 2002. Her music for Baryshinikov’s company was performed internationally, hundreds of times.

Another interest was Japanese music and when she received an NEH scholarship to study Japanese Theater Music and Zen artistic aesthetics with Dr. William Malm at the University of Michigan, she discovered that many theories she had been working on by herself were already present in Japanese musical culture. She immersed herself in Japanese theater and music, and her compositional style began to boldly incorporate many of the concepts, though she was actually expanding on ideas she had used before intuitively.

At one point, Eleanor felt she needed a break from the intensity of New York and decided to take a position in Duluth, MN (her birth place) as Executive Director of the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council. To her surprise, she loved the job and ended up staying for 12 years. She continued to compose and perform internationally while making a major impact on arts funding that affected the entire state’s policies. When she moved to the Twin Cities in 1989, she became the Production Manager for the Minnesota [now American-] Composers Forum where she continued to influence the musical community with her programming and ideas for the Forum’s concert series at the Walker Art Center. For Eleanor, Minnesota, was always a healing place, filled with opportunities for artists because of the openness of the society, and the enormous philanthropic support for artists and art. In 1991, she moved back to New York, though she always spoke of her experiences in Minnesota and her position in Duluth as a seminal break-through in her personal view of herself as a composer.

Eleanor spoke of her music in ways that incorporate vocabulary and metaphors from the diverse disciplines she studied. One quote from a grant asking her to describe her music is the following:
I work from images of transparent, multidimensional structures within which energy shapes and weight, focus and time evolve sculpturally as well as linearly. Concepts from theories of space/time (Japanese ‘ma’)’., modern dance topology, chaos and fractal geometry influence my work. The work does not fall into any specific ‘school’ though I have been influenced by many disciplines. The craft of choreography has been integral to my work as well as some of the theories of Rudolph van Laban. Other spatial and energy theories, including those from visionary architecture, physics and mathematics, are currently important, as are the aesthetics and concepts embodied in Japanese Noh theater and the art of shakuhachi playing. I studied modern dance technique and composition to access conceptual areas that were not, at the time of my studies, dealt with very often, in music composition. These areas include the investigation of ‘process’ or ‘breath’ time as well as pulse and metric time; spatial considerations and movement. Quality concepts for music also include timbre, energy shapes, sonic weights, microtonal shadings and densities.
She spoke of the importance of what she called the sound around the sound. For Eleanor, sound around the sound, meant the harmonic overtone series that is produced by any fundamental pitch and how the series surrounded and affected other pitches in multidimensional ways. She had an innate sense of listening to these harmonics and gave them the space and time to emerge from her music. She forged her own brand of Spectralism that had its origins in electroacoustic techniques and in certain French composers. With the use of exotic, non-traditional performance practices she asked musicians to reach into extended regions of their instruments. New techniques produced harmonics that could be almost inaudible to deafening, emerging as the music progressed. Robert Carl from Fanfare magazine describes her music well. ‘Hovda seems able to listen very intently to the sounds she creates, to hear their long-term developmental implications the way another more traditional composer would hear the harmonic possibilities in a particular chord or short progressions. She has a true sense of how a series of sounds combines to create a harmonic entity whose whole is far more than the sum of its parts. In short, Hovda creates ‘resonant spaces’ in her music, which she then has the gift of animating. In Hovda, we have a wonderful example of that ‘X’ factor that makes certain artists transcendent and musical theorists sputter in frustration at the challenge of the evanescent perfection of art (much in the way that Debussy remains far more resistant to definitive musical analysis than many other 20th century composers).
Eleanor also used the analogy of excavating sound. This concept came to her when she was on a trip to Egypt and was standing by the great pyramids. She had this strong realization at the time: ‘Every type of sound and music has already been created. It’s up to me to excavate through all of this material to find my own voice’. The manner in which she ‘excavated’ was usually working one on one with a musician and his/her instrument. She talked about the similarity of a choreographer working with one dancer to develop a certain movement. By analogy, working alone with one musician at a time (her favorite way to work), Eleanor was able to ‘excavate’ the sounds she heard that might be possible on a musician’s instrument. Hovda also purchased student versions of the instruments she was working with so that she could play and experiment on them herself while working with the professional musicians that had been trained traditionally.

She used the word lemniscate frequently (a figure-eight pattern found in physics as well as a concept emphasized in Kenneth Gaburo’s teachings) as metaphor for many of her works. The following quote comes from a grant application for a musical composition IKIMA (two Japanese words combined, meaning ‘breath/space-time’):
This piece will contain excavations in sonorous space and ‘alternating currents’ which will use lemniscates as important metaphors in the piece. These figures-of-eight lemniscates articulate ‘inside out’ to ‘outside in’ energies on continua, as well as the essences of continually modulating and intersecting energies of time, space, size and dynamics. The shape of the work is multidimensional rather than linear.

Eleanor was very prolific and the works on these CD’s represent only a fraction of her compositions. Through a multitude of performances and reviews, combined with teaching positions at Princeton, Yale and Bard, she was beginning to be recognized at the top of her profession. The influence she had on her students, the dance world and on other composers was profound. Then sadly, she became very ill, though she continued to compose until six months before her death in 2009.

The following comes from a 1982 interview by Bob Ashenmacher taken in Duluth.
BA: Do you hope to be remembered?’
EH: I don’t care about when I’m dead and gone. I’m concerned with getting to make music while I’m alive.
BA: What do you think you might be remembered for?
EH: Well, if I am, it’ll be for exploring the qualities of sound, the different mixtures of plump and dry sounds, very brittle and very sonorous sounds. And I’ve looked into using natural time, breathing time, as opposed to metric time. It’s important especially in writing for dance. It’s like the opening of a flower. It can’t be measured in increments, but only in its totality. I’m trying to work in that totality, with that totality.

She looks out the window and smiles.

EH: ‘All I feel is that it’s a life priority.’

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