Twin Beams
Pedal Steel III – Susan Alcorn
Finally I get to finish off the pedal steel trilogy… well worth waiting for though. (Feedburner tells us there are 14 of you now… crikey, someone ring the lawyers!)
The third track ‘Twin Beams’ is by the Texas based pedal steel improvisor/composer Susan Alcorn whose gorgeous solo pedal steel pieces are really worth tracking down.
This piece was written as part of a collaboration that Alcorn had taken part in with Chris Cutler in 2002, accompanying poetry he had written about the Kosovan war. It is also included, as a solo piece, on the 2006 album ‘Curandera’ on Fleece Records, which I couldn’t find for sale online – but should be available by emailing the label I’d imagine. Go on – buy it.
I had a very pleasant and obliging round of emails with Susan – who sent me the track via email last week. After reading that she had previously collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, an artist with a deep understanding of live instrumentation and electrical and electronic processing, I asked particularly about the relationship with electricity and whether the amplification of the steel guitar bore any influence on how she composed. Below are excerpts from her reply.
Concerning Pauline. Yes, I have worked with her, and even more importantly, her outlook on music resonates with me. Pauline’s approach is to listen deeply. She calls this Deep Listening, and she’s built a whole theory of music around it. It’s a more feminine, more round and holistic, way of approaching notes and sounds – listening, reacting to and incorporating everything you hear.
I think Pauline thinks deeply about electricity and its relation to sound. I, on the other hand, don’t really think much about that on the conscious level (though at times I wish my instrument were acoustic – I have played slide guitars for almost my whole life, and I miss the pure and direct sound of the dobro. I do, however consider sound as an abstract quality, though I never really intellectualize it (nor anything else in music for the most part). I try to play my instrument as a partner with respect, listen to the instrument, listen to the sounds inside and outside my head, feel what it is I want to communicate. I’ve played the (electric) pedal steel guitar through amplifiers for over thirty years, much of that in bands at dance halls, so perhaps because of that, I take the electric and amplified aspect of it for granted.
Whatever subtleties come out of the notes I play, are for the most part not related, I don’t think, to electronics. They’re more related to the ways I approach the string and the instrument physically.
Actually (I’m contradicting myself and thinking as I type) amplification plays a big role because without amplification, the tiny little things which become so evident when you hear them on a recording or live are only audible due to amplification. I use a volume pedal and that’s an important part of it. I can use different manners of picking, etc. to help bring out different sounds.
I wrote the ‘Twin Beams’ piece at about 5 or 6 in the morning in Leipzig, Germany for a concert with the Chris Cutler Project. He had written a series of poems related to war, Kosovo, etc. (2002), and he encouraged us to write music for them. We were in rehearsal, and he still needed more material, so I wrote it before rehearsal the day before we were going to play. The piece – written for piano, percussion, three voices, cello, and pedal steel guitar – made use of quarter tones and chord voicings that combine very “consonant” sounding intervals with dissonance – so you have, on the one had a very physically pleasant sound like a major triad and then an extra note or two that is fairly outside that tonality are put in, which to my ears it makes it more interesting. When I play this piece solo, to accommodate the quarter tones, I bend my bar which gives it a more microtonal feel. The sounds that seem to arise from nowhere out of a note are done with harmonics and bar manipulation. This is the steel guitar and the different communities of sound coming out, and electronics plays a part in this being able to be heard, kind of like a microscope does visually, but I rarely think about this. I usually think (though that’s not a good word) about something I want to communicate and go from there. I try to listen and give room for space. So there, to make a short story long, is the answer to your question The short answer, I guess, would be, “very aware, though I rarely think of it consciously”.