Harmonious Dialogue: Pamela Z’s Simultaneous

The composition itself is about the musicality of everyday speech. You have an ability to home in on the tone and melody of language, translating it for us– augmenting it, in a way– through your composition practice.

There’s something about the music of human speech that is so charming to me. I never tire of it. If you ask people about the difference between singing and talking, most of them will say that singing is pitched and talking is not. But in fact nothing is unpitched, because every sound has a frequency, and pitch is frequency. The thing about speech is that it’s generally so random that it doesn’t repeat itself. It doesn’t form patterns that we can latch onto quickly.

But the minute you take a sample of a short piece of speech and repeat it, you start to find the fundamental tone in each of those syllables. I just find a lot of joy in doing that. There’re a lot of composers who’ve done amazing things with that. A New York composer named Scott Johnson made a wonderful piece that was based entirely on a woman laughing. And he orchestrated it and built this big epic thing out of just her laugh and her saying one phrase. I think it’s something a lot of composers latch onto, but especially today, when we can so easily capture sound and immediately play it back.

I’d like to go back in time and talk about your trajectory as a composer and performer, from the solo work to these larger ensemble works. A lot of folks are familiar with your solo work for gesture-controlled instruments. How did you come to that technological aspect of your performance practice?

It all started with a digital delay. I had gotten out of music school and was making a living as a singer-songwriter, singing in clubs. I also had a shift on the air at a local NPR affiliate in Boulder, Colorado, called KGNU. I became enamored of experimental music and listening to all kinds of avant-garde artists from different genres.

I wanted my work to be more like that, but was having a hard time finding my way into it. I would try to write pieces that I thought were unusual, and they would just come out as quirky versions of the thing I was already doing. And then I ended up getting a hold of a digital delay. That was the biggest pivotal moment in my life as a musician. It just changed the way I thought about sound. I started playing with it and layering my voice. Literally overnight, I jettisoned everything else that I was doing, and I knew I needed to do more work like this.

We’ve spoken about your relationship with abstraction versus representation. I’m curious if you could say a little bit more about that in relation to your work.

There’s a real war going on in me between those things, because I love abstract work and always strive for that. When I start a project, I always think this is going to be completely abstract, but as soon as I start working on it I’m always pulled by things that have one foot in the representational world. So, in the end, I always end up with stuff that’s much more representational than I had intended.

I’ve never wanted to make work that is a message-delivery system. Even though my work has information and subject matter, it’s always more about exploring that subject matter and pondering it and playing with it than trying to hammer some idea home.

As I’ve been listening to the piece over the past few weeks, I have been feeling that there’s something political in the fact that you create a way of being together and sounding together in a space. You created a work that allows for a sense of community and an opportunity to create empathy—and also a vision of a world.

Even though I don’t go at this work with the intention of doing that, I feel like the work is doing its job if other people find that in it. Everything is political. We can’t escape that. And we can’t pretend that saying nothing is an act of some kind, and then try to craft something that achieves that. I’m picking something that tickles me in some way that I find interesting. Ultimately, for me, it’s just a playground.