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Wavelength
Magazine, December 2007: An interview with Benjamin
Mueller-Heaslip of
the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra:
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The Parkdale Revolutionary
Orchestra is something of an anomaly;
classical music that's inspired as much by David Byrne and Wire as
Schubert. Also: they hate classical music crowds and shows. Composer
Ben Mueller-Heaslip explained to Ryan McLaren why "high art" sucks and
playing it safe is bullshit:
Can you tell us a
little bit about your music? What makes it "revolutionary"?
That's
a tough question because there are so few points of reference to what
we do: I've haven't really listened to much music myself, so when I
started making music it was largely invention. I have an ongoing issue
with people telling me that I must've been influenced by this or that
band and being offended when I tell them I haven't ever heard of
them.
At a recent show, the editor of a major minor Canadian magazine told me
that I was "very confused" because I hadn't heard of any of the bands
that have shaped my life in music. It's very hard.
I
typically
describe our music as "aggressive minimalism," which I've found very
effective because it doesn't actually mean very much and so it can't be
wrong. The recent Now Magazine review of our new record described
us as
"a challenging brew of classical, art rock, opera and punk" - I
consider this pretty accurate. It definitely describes the members of
the band: we have a classically-trained string section, a punk drum and
bass section, an opera singer, and I suppose our sax player can be
slotted into the art rock slot without putting up too much fuss.
The
"revolutionary" nature of what we do is less difficult to describe.
Revolution, as a basic definition, is the redistribution of social and
economic factors. The music we make exists outside the division between
"high-art" and "low-art." This is an irrelevant and destructive
division which exists to ensure the stagnation of "high-art" music (a
process which has been a complete success in Toronto) and to encourage
the anti-intellectual limitations in "low-art" music (a process which
has been successfully been disrupted by the mass of groundbreaking work
done by to many Toronto artists over the past decade). By playing in
the most diverse range of circumstances possible -- as opposed to the
safety of venues where people's expectations are pre-established and
generally satisfied -- we demand that people respond to what we're
doing with autonomous opinions of what they've just experienced.
In
terms of social / economic revolution, it's been my intention to prove
the invalidity of the established "high-art" ensembles in Toronto by
doing much better work and establishing a broader audience for complex
music despite having absolutely no resources. By projecting this
music as far as
it can reach I try to provoke reaction against the artificial
constructs of the economic interests of pap culture: I consider this a
revolutionary pursuit.
Do you have a modus
operandi?
I
think your asking about my modus operandi as a composer?
I
work in an absolutely terrible way -- sporadically and intensely -- but
it seems to be the only way I've ever been able to function. Usually
this process begins by me saying to the band: "I'll give you a new song
for the next rehearsal -- today's Tuesday and we're rehearsing on the
following Monday and so I'll get you guys charts on Saturday."
But
at that point I have no idea what I'm going to do. Kristin writes the
lyrics -- well, she writes poetry and I go through it and cut lines and
take lines from different poems, and stitch them together into a form
that I can work with as lyrics. I usually do that right away because I
like try to fool myself into believing that I'll work steadily.
Then
on Wednesday Kristin will ask me "How's that new song coming along?"
and I say "Damn good! Going to be the best song we've ever done, for
sure." But I haven't written a note of it and I don't start writing
until Friday afternoon. When I start writing I stay awake until Sunday
morning, locked in my little office drinking coffee all night, beer all
day, smoking and singing off-key incessantly. On Sunday I bike around
to all my player's houses, sick and exhausted, to drop off their
charts. Then I go home, take a bath, and fall asleep for the rest of
the
day. I'm pretty sure this is how all the great composers throughout
history have operated and I'm coming to accept it as inevitable.
I
saw you play in an art space on Carlaw a couple months ago with some
performance artists. Are you a fan of alternative spaces? I ask because
it's not typical to see anything "orchestral" in a bar concert
environment, but I imagine you'd want to play to as wide an audience as
possible. Do you challenge yourselves to play with different groups and
different venues to different audiences? Are there places (or contexts)
you find you typically enjoy or prefer to play?
That
show was at Labspace Studio -- seems like it was years ago, but I think
it was in April.
I'm
definitely a fan of alternative spaces. We live in an extremely
conservative culture, and the associations between space and
expectations are really tight. People like to be comfortable and safe
-- they like to know that in Context A they can anticipate Stimulus B.
In a culture where individuals capable of making independent
value-judgments on their personal experiences are rare, people tend to
want to know in advance precisely what to expect so they can research
it and decide whether they ought to like it or not -- and thereby
avoiding the embarrassment of having to think for themselves and
potentially disagreeing with their friends.
Alternative
spaces,
where there isn't such a strong tie between context and expectation,
break people's defences down. Events like the Labspace Studio party
bring out people who share my contempt for boredom and who demand to be
shocked and challenged -- we like playing for those people.
As
for more specific performance scenarios we enjoy, we're still
exploring. For the coming year we've booked the usual set of monthly
shows and I'm concentrating our booking energy on finding more dramatic
settings -- that's always really worked for us. In February we're
playing The Box Salon at the Rivoli, which is as much of a literary as
it is a musical event... since the beginning I've found that our music
is really appreciated by non-musical artists, people who don't have the
investment in the standard genres and music history trivia that a lot
of purely musical people do. We're also looking to book some sporadic
small-scale tours, but it's complicated with a large band and no money.
How did you get
involved with the P.R.O.?
I
used to write concert music for some of the contemporary classical
groups around Toronto. Eventually I realized that the performers are
almost unanimously cynical and obscenely mercenary, the ensembles were
culturally and artistically stagnant, the concerts boring, and that the
fifteen tweed-wearing droolers who'd show up to them weren't the ideal
audience for my music. So I gave that up and formed the Parkdale
Revolutionary Orchestra.
What's your musical
background?
When
I was very young, my family moved to the Middle East, to Saudi Arabia -
which is a very quiet place. I had no contact with or interest in music
until several years after moving back to Canada when I injured my knee
quite
badly and -- being unable to walk -- took up the piano too obsessively.
This in turn led me to injure my right hand very badly which redirected
my creativity to composition. I've had some formal training -- I
studied composition at Queen's and U of T, but was not a very
successful student and dropped out when I began to explore the
possibility of having my music performed outside of the University.
As
I assume you know, bar crowds are notorious for talking over performers
(something people were careful not to do during the art space
performance of yours I saw). Is that ever a problem for you guys? What
are your feelings about it?
We've
played in a huge range of
circumstances -- we're constantly playing venues where the audience is
mostly people who listen to rock or folk or hip hop: generally,
anything but what they're about to see. We don't ask our audience to
indulge us with their polite attention -- if we had to ask, what we're
doing would be a waste of time.
I'm
not saying that everyone who
sees the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra perform loves us: we make
music that's unlike anything they've heard and some people aren't
comfortable with that. But as imaginatively-dulled as our society is,
it hasn't quite reached the point where talent, commitment, and genius
can trumped by stupidity. People recognize a unique experience when it
happens to them and whether they like it or not there's no choice but
to digest it.
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