Women Take The Floor

Women Take The Floor is a recital curated, produced and performed by Stephanie Lamprea. It takes its name after Women Take The Floor, an art exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which highlights works of 20th century female artists. This recital features music by 20th/21st century female composers and words by 20th century female writers. PROGRAM NOTES BELOW.

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019 - 7:00PM - Sound Bites Series - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Program Notes (written by
​Stephanie Lamprea)

​12/11/2019

Before we dive into this program, I briefly want to talk about Georgia O’Keeffe. In the house I grew up, my mother hung several (copies of) paintings by O’Keeffe, as well as some landscapes and some Degas. I love O’Keeffe - especially as a child, I stared with wonder at her larger-than-life depictions of flowers, light, bones, and landscapes. The close ups of flowers may have played a hand in my developing queerdom, but overall, O’Keeffe’s bold, larger-than-life works filled me with awe and encouraged me to view and imagine the world with that kind of boldness. This, coupled with my Colombian heritage (cue “magical realism”), shaped me into an extremely bright-eyed woman with strange intensity.

So of course, the MFA’s current exhibition Women Take The Floor, featuring works of O’Keeffe and many fantastic artists of the 20th century, caught my attention. As a female artist, curator and audience member, female representation and the spirit of the female experience in art have been crucial parts of my overall development - in performing music and words by women, I feel more connected to my own womanhood. What I strive to curate and perform today is music by women of today and words by (mostly) women of the 20th century, all which explore the female perspective and bring out this larger-than-life feeling that many of us experience from women artists who truly, truly, take the floor.

List of works:
Kate Soper - "Only The Words Themselves Mean What They Say" (voice/flute)
Judith Bingham - "Cathedral of Trees (solo voice)
Marti Epstein - "Sheep in Fog" (voice/flute)
Chaya Czernowin - Adiantum Capillus-Veneris I (Maidenhair fern I) (voice / optional amplification)
​Stephanie Lamprea - Sonic Boom (voice / spring drum)
Stefanie Lubkowski - "Happiness in its Perfection" (solo voice)
Tiange Zhou - Si (voice / handheld percussive instruments)
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Kate Soper - Only The Words Themselves Mean What They Say
The musical work of composer-vocalist Kate Soper is unmistakable - her exploration of extended techniques for voice and instruments, curiosity for language and intellect, and unabashed quirkiness create such a unique sound-world which truly transports you to an undiscovered state of being. It makes a perfect pairing, then, for Soper’s compositional voice to set the equally inquisitive and raw words of Lydia Davis, a writer best known for her collections of short works. That brevity allowed her to describe such specific emotions and thoughts with a simplicity that hits you at your core. As one Amazon reviewer puts it, “She places her finger on the spot where our actions speak of our emotions, and reading her creates such a resonation, gives such weight to the simplest act, because when I read it, I know it. I recognize the act, and the paranoia, or the hurt, or the confused love that is behind it.” This paranoia, hurt and confusion read loudly in this voice and flute duo Only The Words, which narrates a scenario of being left by a loved one.

Judith Bingham - Cathedral of Trees
This next work features another but very different composer-vocalist, Judith Bingham. It’s quite difficult to create an unaccompanied work and have it feel complete, and Bingham has managed to do that and more with Cathedral of Trees. Upon first listen, I was struck by the song’s inert beauty and depth of lyricism which brings a sense of longing for the text it sets. Among soaring lines are contrasting textures and articulations which paint words like “fire” and “dragon tongues” with frightening ferocity! All in all, I admire most of all the way Bingham inverts melodic passages which add double meaning and shifts in perspective to David Lyon’s poem, which describes one’s desire and struggle to bring peace to a friend.

Marti Epstein - Sheep in Fog
We come back to voice and flute for this next work, Sheep in Fog, after the poem by Sylvia Plath. A 20th century poet, novelist and short story writer, Plath is credited for advancing the genre of confessional poetry, a postmodernist subset of poetry that focuses on the personal, “I”, and on extreme and vulnerable subject matter, including mental illness, sexuality and suicide. That being said, Sheep in Fog is a gorgeous, vulnerable lens into the world of Plath, who suffered from depression and took her own life at only 30 years old. The poem uses images of landscape, animals, and symbols to illustrate a dark state and urgency towards death. Marti Epstein, who feels the images immediately suggested sounds which informed the composition of this piece, captures the fragility of these images brilliantly by juxtaposing contrasting lines between voice and flute and tenderly placing moments of harmony among silent beats which mark the isolation felt in each word.

Chaya Czernowin - Adiandum Capillus-Veneris I (Maidenhair fern I)
This next piece takes us through a completely different relationship with landscape. The composition uses no words, and Chaya Czernowin captures the essence of this piece in her performance directions which read that “the voice and the breath play an equal role in executing the musical text, as the breath is (at times) independent form the voice and equal to it in an almost contrapuntal relationship. This is not an expressive piece in the more standard way in which a singer employs all of his personality in an attempt to express emotions or other expressions of the”self”. It is rather almost a sketch using the voice and the breath like a small brush painting a line. Even though it is only a line made out of water (breath) with some color (voice), this line is actually transmitting a whole landscape.” It feels particularly wonderful to perform this piece in an art museum, surrounded by hundreds of gorgeously drawn landscapes. When listening to this piece, you might even want to close your eyes (or not); the contrast between voice and breath can sometimes be jarring, as if going back and forth from gray-scale to full color, and it can induce an almost synesthetic experience.

Stephanie Lamprea - Sonic Boom
A few years ago, I read Max Porter’s novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (which I HIGHLY recommend), which is the story of a man who lost his wife, the mother of his two boys. Months after the tragic death, while everyone seems stuck at a standstill and unable to move forward with their grieving, the man and his boys are visited by a Crow, who claims he will stay for as long as he is needed. The novel goes back and forth between stories told from the perspectives of the man, the two boys, and even the Crow. This particular chapter I’ve set is from the minds of the boys, and I was struck by innocent and yet violent imagination behind the storytelling. Even then, I had no idea how this story sounded in my head until I was gifted a spring drum, a toy / instrument that seemed to strike a perfect balance in timbre and youth which I felt accompanied a child’s grief story in a unique way. Outside of this work, the Crow figure appears in many stories and myths, particularly in times when one is grieving. Ted Hughes actually wrote his literary work Crow shortly after and in memory of Sylvia Plath’s death.

Stefanie Lubkowski - Happiness in its Perfection
Happiness In Its Perfection is the final song in a 5 song cycle titled "Sapphire Sea." the texts come from the memoirs of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, two women who were engaged by 19th century New York publications to try and meet or beat Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days." In writing this song, Stefanie Lubkowski “was fascinated by the parallel journeys of two women from different classes who wrote for very different publications... interested in the depiction of two women making solo journeys at a time when upper class women did very little in their lives solo, without a companion or chaperone. Nellie Bly was a scrappier, working class journalist who made her mark with the sensational and wrote for Pulitzer's New York World World. Elisabeth Bisland had a genteel southern upbringing and wrote for Cosmopolitan. Each woman's memoir had its own distinct poetry, and yet their experiences of travel were very similar, from the long, unstimulating stays aboard ships and trains, to their all too brief excursions into locales that were exotic for Americans.” In this excerpt of her work, Bly takes pause from the documentation of her travels and describes the joy of being able to sail, explore and dream on one’s own; Stefanie’s soaring melodic lines, playfulness with word-setting, and sweet moments of soft contemplation, match this mood beautifully.
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Tiange Zhou - Si
I commissioned Tiange Zhou to write a work for me as a part of an ongoing commissioning project of mine to create works which challenge the use of linguistics in the performing voice. I have performed Tiange’s works since our studies together at Manhattan School of Music, and I’m so happy that we have remained great friends and collaborators since. I asked Tiange to write the final part of these program notes about her work: “In Ancient Chinese, 兮(Si) was a modal particle for expressing emotion and sigh, while in modern Chinese, it sounds similar to the word- death [死(Sǐh)] Therefore, I compose the work 兮（Si ）for lamenting the significant people in our lives who pass away. However, besides writing an elegy, in this piece, I aim to talk to the death and express the complex reality after one past away. Instead of repressing our inner feelings and pretending everything is fine, being real to the soul might be our highest respect, we shall express. During the piece, the singing voice and the percussion sound are in unity with duality characters with dialogues of life and death and fusions. For example, the singer could represent the life who talks to death but also represent the death who wants to express through life's embodiment. The theatrical scenarios will shift between the real world and the imagination. The lyrics adopt text from the ancient shamanism ceremony from 2000 years ago with the integration of contemporary vocal performance tradition.”