Twist It and Go Somewhere Else: A Conversation with Shelley Hirsch

“I'm pressing my memory to retrieve it through the body.”

—

Shelley Hirsch’s freewheeling vocals carry the spirit of the Downtown avant-garde of the 1980’s into the present. There are rough analogues for components of Hirsch’s music—the playfully eccentric techniques of Meredith Monk and Cathy Berberian, Laurie Anderson’s musical soliloquies, the lunar improvisations of Jeanne Lee, Linda Sharrock ululating—but her full ensemble is singular. Throughout a four-decade-long career, she’s appeared on hundreds of recordings, released dozens of her own compositions, and performed countless times, down in dingy DIY basements like Studio Henry and up in gleaming spots like Alice Tully Hall. Hirsch has collaborated widely, with the likes of John Zorn, Butch Morris, Christian Marclay, Jerry Hunt, Fred Frith, Steve McCall, and many more. She once staged a musical show “on a beach in the shadow of the World Trade Towers.”

Hirsch is a musical wunderkammer: she can shapeshift through an array of styles, deploying a multiplicity of voices, yet always sounding like herself. Her performances move fluidly between improvised abstraction and concrete impressionism, often during the same song. She also has a strong autobiographical strain, as with her tuneful radio play O Little Town of East New York, which colorfully dramatized her childhood in Brooklyn. Unifying her trills, hoots, stutters, monologues, and virtuosic cadenzas are an arch sense of humor, and the searching adventurousness that led her to drop out of high school and move across the country in hopes of studying Kabuki theater. (She failed in that endeavor, but began to find her way as a vocalist in the process.)

Now in her 70’s, Hirsch hasn’t lost her zeal to experiment. She continues to work with vital young musicians in New York, such as Ka Baird and Luke Stewart. Several will join her for And So it Was And Was and WaAAassSSssSss, a two-part show at Roulette on Tuesday. Before running off to rehearsal with the video artist Scott Kiernan, she spoke with me about her background in experimental theater, the musicality inherent in words, her memories of the late Phil Niblock, the No Wave scene, and the benefits of babbling like a baby. “I'm just doing that crazy, wild thing,” she says. “I want to hear that sound.”

—JwD

——

It’s my understanding that your upcoming Roulette performance is dedicated to the writer and director Cecile Pineda, who you studied under as a teenager at San Francisco's experimental Theater of Man.¹ Why did you choose to dedicate this show to her?

I'd like to say dedicated in part. The second set is really some techniques that I learned when I was 19 and touring with an experimental theater company, the Theater of Man. In that, we all used our body and our voices. We'd go to different environments to capture sound with our voices, and I kind of led those choral parts—the sound environments. We would often take abstract environmental sounds of birds and other things, and they would transform into words.

Can you say a little more about how sounds would translate into words with The Theater of Man?

If I would go, [makes an ascending series of “oohs” somewhere between monkey and bird calls] and then abstract sound would turn into these little phrases that we would say. We would collect dreams during the rehearsal, and play with those—with movement and sound. I was, as I said, 18 when I joined the group and 19 when we were touring. So I was by far the youngest woman in the group. I often move a lot when I'm performing, but in the second part of the Roulette performance, I will be trying to draw words, memories, sounds very visually from the body.

How do you see the relationship of movement and sound? Is it that a certain sound calls for translation into a specific kind of movement, the way you were saying an abstract sound might translate into a verbal phrase?

What happens now is that I move and sound together, so my movement is often drawing out the memory. So that's my current way of using it when I perform, I really use my arms a lot to perform in general. But for the second part, I won't be really behind a microphone, I'll have a headset so I can really move more freely and just let the memory come out. You know, I might say [entering sprechgesang] “luh luh luh, laying down on the floor” or  a sound might be [again, in sprechgesang] “fuh fuh ffffffff-fringe benefits,” so I'm taking sounds and syllables and allowing them to transform into words and sonic images.

What role does memory play there?

Oh, I mean memory is everything! I say this very often, but it has never lost its resonance. “The body is the biggest recorder possible and the storage house for memory.”

That’s a line in your song “So Tender”! 

Right—from the piece States. It's almost like I'm pressing my memory to retrieve it through the body, through memory, through experience, and it's just all stored out. And, you know, a lot of people talk about really working on the technique of their instrument. But what I often work on is keeping access to stream of consciousness. For the first set at Roulette, every piece that I'm doing was written while I was immersing myself in music, almost as a silent participant. I didn't know what would come out next at all.

I read an actor’s account of working with Cecile Pineda, describing improvising through the experimental theater innovator Jerzy Grotowski’s sound and movement exercises. I wanted to read you a bit from one of Grotowski program notes:

“The means of verbal expression have been considerably enlarged because all means of vocal expression are used, starting from the confused babbling of the very small child and including the most sophisticated oratorical recitation. Inarticulate groans, animal roars, tender folksongs, liturgical chants, dialects, declamation of poetry: everything is there. The sounds are interwoven in a complex score which brings back fleetingly the memory of all forms of language.”

Since you utilize a wide array of extended vocal techniques, I wonder if you could talk about whether Grotowski’s exercises and perspective may have influenced your work and helped you understand the many possibilities of the voice.

I was always exploring sound, even as a very young child living in an apartment building with resonant halls. I guess I was always interested in transformation. I would listen to music in the living room, in our ‘four kids in a two bedroom’ apartment, and then go into the hall and realize, “oh, I have to take more space to sing the song because of the echo in the hallway.” I would take little fragments, and try that out to understand how the body felt when I sang slower, in a much more resonant space. I did little performances with the kids in the building: processions down the hallways to a little courtyard. Every space was a kind of acoustic container.

Even then, I was putting on performances, where I just loved songs from different cultures. One minute I would be [singing] “You Ever Hear of Sweet Betsy From Pike,” and then there would be a little Japanese song that I learned. And I was really embodying all of those things and feeling how it felt to sing in different ways, in different styles that all had their own ways of enunciating—sometimes in languages that I didn’t understand. So I was stringing together and collaging, even way back then. A friend of mine said to me once, “you're a soft collage-engine.”

So you feel that because you were interested in diverse cultural modes of singing and music making—maybe including sounds that would have been considered non-musical in the traditional repertoire of Western pop music—you were more open to different ways of using your voice?

Yeah, but this was before I left that building at 11. My parents had the Reader's Digest collection of music from the world. And I think I first heard Rachmaninoff in that context. Of course, they listened to Carmen the opera, and “Rhapsody in Blue.” But we were working class and my parents were both high school dropouts, as I was. In school, I remember, I met this Russian woman, and they were listening to Stravinsky at home. I was listening to the sound of trucks going by [she vocalizes the chugging sound of trucks going by], singing over the drone of that and vacuum cleaners and whatever! Everything kind of gave a musical impulse. It's still like that.

That reminds me of an interview with John Cage where he's like talking about how he doesn't discriminate between sounds, and as he’s speaking, there are the sounds of traffic coming through his window. And he seems to be saying, basically, that traffic, too, is music to him.

Absolutely. When Ben Gambuzza interviewed me, he asked me “What do you consider the difference between sound and music?” And actually, I don't! I think of them the same way. The way that I process them and think about it and hear all the little incremental bits, as it's put together, and is moving over time. It’s part of my process of listening.

I was fascinated by the acoustics in different parts of the apartment building, how something would feel good, and suddenly, you move into a new space, and it's echoing and that always had—well, I was gonna say resonance, but obviously, that's ridiculous. But it's always had this sense of transformation, look at how that sound changes: The voice is different, what I speak is different, and what I think is different. And so with the Theater of Man, we would go underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and hear the birds above, and recreate the sound back in the rehearsal space. Somehow, I seemed to be the one at 18 to really lead the other actors in that. I was always listening, so it came naturally to me.

The Jerzy Grotowski bit that I read had a part about incorporating the “babbling of the very small child.” When I saw you perform at the dancer Susan Hefner's home in the fall, there was this sublime moment where a baby in the audience began loudly screeching with glee during your set. You began making similar infant-esque noises in response, seeming to communicate with the baby and parody its vocalizations. It seemed like such a direct illustration of the Grotowski point about the enlargement of communicative possibilities when we move beyond usual spoken language. Do you remember that?

Of course, how could I forget! That little red haired little baby has become one of the most—I just love that child. She's always at performances and really hearing it: you'll see her move differently, depending on what the music is. I don't feel like I parody it as much as when a little child hears their own kind of sound coming back to them. It's very special for them. And I don't like talking “baby talk” to a baby. But these were, [screech-sings like a jubilant infant]—you know, sounds! I think she was fascinated when I could make her voice, a voice that she feels in herself, and somehow relates to.

This is probably a pop-science understanding of the way language development works, but I have the idea that as you get older—like no longer a baby—your neural pathways begin to be closed off. You learn that this sound is not a word, but that one is. Whereas babies are still open to a much wider array of possibilities. Anything could have meaning.

Yes. Look at their bodies, how flexible—the little baby is holding their foot up in the air. Who can do that besides real dancers? I used to incorporate a lot of language, and try to speak differently in various accents, because it would make me actually think different. The language slows down as you speak it in another language. That also affects what I say. [Adopting a German accent] “If I talk like this, some other words might come out.” Changing the sound also changes how I embody it, and the character and cadence of the sound.

A lot of your work incorporates spoken word components. Is there a difference in how you think about incorporating speech versus singing and other vocal techniques?

My “Sext Tongs,” were made while I was immersing myself in music: listening to Éliane Radigue or Morton Feldman, or watching Ka Baird perform. The images that came up were related to the rhythms and the energy I felt while listening to certain music. I said, oh, let it unfold; just feel the energy and the rhythm of what you're listening to rather than illustrating it or describing it. The words and the rhythm of what I wrote are inherently musical. The writing implies the way that I'm going to speak it. It already has its own rhythms and sounds.

Your “Sext Tongs”—automatic writings generated when you were listening to music—reminded me of a passage from Brent Hayes Edwards’ Epistrophes, which is about the connections between jazz music and literature. At one point, he writes that “Something hovering ‘at the very edge of semantic availability’ can be captured in sound (even if not necessarily made explicit or communicated). And the resulting music in turn can provoke or compel an attempt to stretch or expand the capacity of literary language to make meaning on the page.” I almost feel like your “Sext Tongs” are doing the opposite! What’s the relationship of words and music for you, especially with respect to your creative process?

What can I say? I just kind of described how I was feeling. Being very connected to what I was hearing brought out this stream of consciousness and these particular words, which I didn't really edit. The music I'm listening to presses the words out of me, which I actually say in one of these pieces. They just come out as I'm writing, or typing. Even the act of writing, and what happens when you're writing and slowing it down or speeding it up? It changes what you say. My typing is very slow. So the way that the words are forming, might be slower in that way. And there's so there's a little bit of time for an actual sonic image to emerge.

So it feels like the words are being created through the act of writing, rather than writing down what’s already in your mind.

Absolutely. Another of the musicians that I wrote to for this, was dearly, most beloved—oh my God, I'll cry if I think of him—Phil Niblock.² He was a universe. He was a unifier, and he connected people from so many different countries, of so many different ages. 20 year olds to 90 year olds. And he did it so effortlessly. There was never any pretension about. People just gathered around him. He was an extraordinary artist and an extraordinary human being. I've never met anyone else like that. It’s still really hard thinking about him. God. Zorn³ had a different thing in the Downtown scene. He started that record label, and got so many people involved in his projects. With Zorn it was pretty phenomenal, but Phil would just kind of be there and people orbited around him and were inspired. I can't imagine anyone ever filling his shoes.

Many of your songs—or moments in them—are very funny or seem to have an arch, ironic perspective. What role does humor play in your creativity?

Definitely. I guess that's really me. I love to put a humorous slant without trying to. It's just very organic in that sense. I don't try to write humor, but even in the cadence of things like even in “Desdemona,” where I say, “they were slathered, not with whipped cream as you might think.” I mean, where the hell? [Laughing] It's so kooky, but yeah, why not?

You’ve said you hope to tap into family history during the Roulette performance, and past works like O Little Town of East New York and “My Father Piece II” make use of what sound like real interviews. Do you ever think about your music as documentary work? 

“My Father Piece” did incorporate real interviews, yes. As did “The Vidzer Family,” which is kind of about the subjective nature of memory, because I sang about my best friend in O Little Town of East New York. And then we got together, and I recorded an interview with her, and things that she said really contradicted what I had said, so I was very interested in the subjective nature of memory. And I wove her voice in, throughout my piece.

There's like a popular idea now, I don't know if you've heard this phrase, it's sort of become a meme: “The Body Keeps the Score.” It’s a controversial theory in psychiatry, that trauma is stored in the body in a physical way distinct from other memories. It reminds me a little bit of your line about how “the body is the biggest recorder possible, and the storage house of memory.” Do you ever feel like you’re working through difficult experiences or traumas with your music—historical, familial, or personal?

Trauma, maybe that's where humor also comes in. I'm somebody that feels very deeply and has a lot of empathy. And sometimes, humor can lift you into a joy state or another way of looking at things—another perspective. So it's not like I'm blocking off the trauma. But there's a lot of other memories to draw from in making the work. Sometimes I cry, like, there's a piece that I will sing at the end of this [upcoming Roulette] performance about my mother and father, and I had to stop myself several times, because I started crying in the middle of it. So I really try to really feel it. But then what do you do if you start crying when you're singing?

My mother would say, if she was alive, because I remember I was going to get an award for being the best singer, the best actress in junior high school. And I said, “Mom, I think I'm gonna cry if I have to go up there.” And she said, “Oh, good, honey. That's nice.” I didn't like that. She thought it would look good. But it wasn't for others.

You’ve said that as a vocal improviser, some American musicians you worked with would discourage the use of words, arguing that it took too much focus away from tonal creativity. But in Europe, you were encouraged to improvise the words as well.

I love it. That's one of my strengths. If I'm improvising with musicians, of course I'm listening. There, thinking does come in, because I like to twist things. Maybe that’s in my writing too: if I see an image going in one direction, I might like to twist it a little to give a different poetic whatever. I can't really explain what I mean by that. But I do sometimes intentionally twist the direction on going, even with my own cliches. When I hear myself doing certain sounds that I've done too often, I try to twist it and go somewhere else. I love that. Because it's a constant process of growing and exploring things. I don't want to go to the same places every time in improvisation. It defeats the purpose of it. Whereas in a written song, I might sing that song many times and just let it get deeper.

I wanted to touch on your work with the No Wave band the Public Servants. What was your relationship to that scene?

There were so many things going on. I was singing with a jazz composer, mostly through composed pieces, and the leader of the Public Servants started playing soprano sax and alto in that jazz group. I remember coming from playing Joel Forrester’s songs at a wedding, and then we’d go to CBGB to open for the group DNA. I was always circulating between very different scenes. I loved that! It’s what I wanted as a kid, when I was putting together songs from different cultures and different time periods. The late 70’s, early 80’s was a fantastic period for doing that.

It seems like there was room for some pretty wild vocal techniques on stuff with the Public Servants, like on “Jungle Hotel.” 

That solo is one of the things that I like to listen to. I'm very critical of myself. But that's solo is right on. I like it a lot.

The sort of openness to a wide variety of contexts and sounds that you describe is something I associate with Downtown music at the time.

That’s very true. Yes.

Do you still identify with the label of “Downtown?” Is that a spirit that you still carry with you? Or is it more of a historical thing?

All these experiences shape you, and I was very involved with that world for several years. So, I don't just think of it as historical. I got a huge amount, playing all of the vocal parts in The Big Gundown at BAM with Zorn. It was amazing. Or there was Studio Henry,⁴ where many different bands would come and perform. It was a very rich time. And a lot of the people were actually visual artists that started making music, or they had been theater artists—like Glenn Branca was doing experimental theater, and then obviously made some amazing music. I lived in Tribeca, and we used to hang out in a little bar there in the 70’s, and so many collaborations were fostered in that Downtown scene. Then there was the East Village scene. There was a place called Environ, where someone like James Chance was also playing with a lot of black musicians. It was incredible.

Earlier, you mentioned that it's important for you to keep access to your imagination supple—maybe as important as something like vocal exercises. Can you elaborate on that idea?

I know some people are like “Oh, my throat is gonna hurt…” and they're [singing] “la la,” you know, really doing exercises to warm up their instruments. I warm up by sometimes having certain drone music that allows me to release a lot of memory and sound. Or I’ll be walking down the street and finding different rhythms in the walk, and that kind of momentum—what that’s bringing up. Those are still ways of listening and being open. I'm so grateful I have a lot of access to experiences and memories and things that I'm encountering just as I'm walking in the street and listening.

Do you feel like your voice has changed physically over the decades?

Oh yeah. It’s lower. I used to be a coloratura. I could go three notes over high C, and down really low. And actually, after this major sore throat problem I had [in December—the reason her Roulette performance was postponed], I can't sing as deep as I can. But, sometimes I'm so in the music that I just imagine the sound. I just get there.

1. Founded by Cecile Pineda in 1969, the Theater of Man was an experimental theater company in San Francisco “dedicated,” she wrote, “to re-defining the role and the expectations of a theater and to forging a new performance language.” The troupe developed original material through an improvisational rehearsal process in “which the actors [would] contact relevant felt and remembered experience.”

2. Phil Niblock died a week before Hirsch and I spoke.

3. John Zorn’s record label Tzadik put out several Shelley Hirsch albums.

4. Kramer, the producer and weirdo musician, on Studio Henry:  “We would play at a little place in the West Village called Studio Henry, which was six or seven steps down from [Morton] Street into what was clearly at one time some kind of storage basement for a deli on the main floor. You would navigate around these huge water beetles that were frightening as hell, then walk into this very low-ceilinged space with two or three dozen folding chairs and no sound system. I probably played 100 shows there with John [Zorn] between 1977 and 1982, and there were many times when there would be four people in the audience: two of them were John’s parents, and one of them would be Paul Simon.”