EPISODE RELEASE: "Bodies making music"
Composer Anne Hege on making music and listening as a full-body experience
Composer Anne Hege practices a profession so rare it’s likely most people don’t know it exists: she’s a composer of avant garde music for voice and laptops. Her laptoperas incorporate the traditional aspects of opera like singing and storytelling with a high tech musical approach that could be dry and distancing.
But Anne Hege’s music is anything from distancing. Unlike in a traditional opera, her musicians are onstage with their instruments. And unlike a lot of electronic music, her performers, both the musicians and the singers, interact physically with the instruments.
“Music for me is not about necessarily creating something beautiful, but asking questions and coming into these questions through sound:
What are the ways that we are together as people?
What does music model about the ways that people gather together?
What can we learn about our bodies and ourselves through sound and through making sound?”
In this episode, we explore through speech and music the world of Anne’s compositions. We also explore the idea of music in our lives. As conductor of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, Anne leads 60 women who produce sounds only with their bodies. In this time more than any other, the redemptive and grounding experience of making music is deeply important for our health and connections with others.
In case you missed it, last month’s episode:
Stephanie Jacobs had a long career in media, starting in community radio, spending years as a producer at CBS, then moving West and joining a tech incubator. Along the way, she’s learned a few things about elections, American culture, and gender politics. This interview is not an “election postmortem” of the sort you’re probably sick of. It’s an exploration of the American political and cultural landscape as Steph saw it unfolding across her career.
"However severe the next four years may be, however vertiginous and rocky they may be, threatening to large segments of communities, there will be a time in which the pendulum of politics will swing back to the center, that the essential character of Americans will turn out to be not misogynistic, not racist, not anti-trans."
There are a few options for listening to this episode:
The full episode: “This dysfunctional town square” with TV producer Stephanie Jacobs
Shortened Minibabble episode: “The California girl I needed to be”
Suki’s reflections: “The Transphoberization of America” and “The Town Square as Boxing Ring”
Syndication:
The Babblery’s short episode, “Minibabble: Brenda Laurel on Girls and Games,” will run on PRX Remix this month.
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