(voices)

composers

Joseph Zitt

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Carved with Breath

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jzitt@humansystems.com

In college, in the late '70s, I majored in electronic and ethnic music (dropping out when I discovered I learned better by doing things than by hearing lectures about them). I ended up as a programmer and technical writer, leaving me free to work in various areas of the arts as they interested me. My ears were filled with new music in the '80s, when I lived in New York and hung out in record stores in Downtown Manhattan.

Over the years, I got into composing for theatre, creating recorded scores for local theatre companies, and then, in Austin, TX, developing my own works with my own group, the Human Systems Performance Group. My interests gradually moved from more technological sources to the human voice, working with processed and sampled voices in creating the scores. I also got involved in poetry, writing and publishing two books (excerpts from which are on my Web page, and performing my work in various places around Texas and at the Austin International Poetry Festival, which I helped coordinate for several years.

When I moved to Dallas, TX, in 1994, I became interested in putting together an all-vocal group, combining the flexibity and portability of a poetry reading with the ensemble interactions of a band. Together with six other local poets, we formed Question Authority, the, and performed in a wide variety of contexts for a year, until I returned to Austin, where I briefly formed another similar ensemble, Empty Words.

In 1993, wanting to know more about John Cage than I could find through usual sources, and to meet people who were interested in his work, I formed Silence, the Internet John Cage mailing list. I met Tom on this list, and he invited me to the New Music Meetings at Diversity University, where I met Matt. I also followed them to ArtsWire, where I held the Henry Cowell Fellowship as NewMusNet Guest Composer.

A few months ago, I had an opportunity to move to Maryland, where I am now programming at Hughes Network Systems. Knowing that Tom and Matt were out here, and encouraged by the activity on the Philadelphia-Baltimore Improvisors list, I leapt at the chance. With the help of friends from the list and elsewhere, Tom, Matt, and I quickly put together AtlantiCage, a concert of John Cage's music (a daunting task: within five weeks we organized a concert with over a dozen performers playing to an audience of around 200 people). We first performed together there, doing Cage's Four^6 along with Douglas Cohen from NYC, and each simultaneously performing other Cage works toward the end of the show.

We ended up as a trio, naming ourselves Comma. Another angle of the name, besides punctuation, is the meaning of the term "comma" as the slight and interesting difference in tones that you get when various tunings and ways of arriving at pitches meet at a common note. While we're all coming at the music from different areas (Matt from the avant-jazz and opera studies, Tom from early musics and contemporary disciplines of listening, and me from Cage, sound poetry, and performance art), we're meeting in voicing our music together, with the differences and commonalities leading to the richness of the result. (How's that for off the cuff retro-justification?)

I find my composing getting simpler as I go along. I've always had an interest in creating work that just about anyone could perform, and (as have Tom and, I think, Matt) have had some success in leading workshops in vocal improvisation. For the first time now, I'm working with people who can sing well and who are familiar with similar areas of music and performance, so the sky's the limit! I'm learning a lot from Tom and Matt (running to catch up in some ways, which is a wonderful experience) and enjoying the chance to share in creating our new work.

Was that way more than anyone wanted to know ?-)"