Topology

Robert Davidson: Your music would seem to indicate that you take Duke Ellington seriously when he says “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”

Steve Reich: Yes, I do.  That and Chuck Berry’s “Any old way you use it”.  I think those are very good guidelines.  I mean, you remember the days when everybody had to send out their tapes or scores with apology notes (laughs)?  It just has to work.  I mean, look, I’ve taken plenty of baths performance-wise.  Sometimes when I’ve had to be there to actually listen to it, and I’m sure that when I’m not there to listen to it . . . but that’s not the point.  The point is that the piece should have it within it to work, period.   That means it’s got to be written right for the instruments, it’s got to endure acoustic situations which may not be ideal.

I think a lot about groove when I listen to your music

The only thing that’s worth saying about that is when I was starting out in the early sixties, there was this third stream movement, with people like Gunther Schuller trying to self-consciously take jazz and put it in a twelve tone system and come up with some blend.  It failed.  I wrote a piece, my thesis piece at Mills College . . .

Oh yes, for your Masters.  I’ve seen the score.

It’s a terrible piece of trash.

Jon Gibson told me he didn’t mind it.  He played it didn’t he?

Oh yeah, he played it.  So did I, but that’s too bad for us.  It uses a twelve-tone-like system.  What I’m really saying is that most of us had grown up listening to jazz, rock & roll, world music, and that’s as it should be.  But people who try to be . . . “I’m going to do a jazz piece, I’m going to do an Indian piece, I’m going to do a Balinese piece” - I think generally speaking that’s always failed.  What seems to work is when you did what you did, you played jazz drums or whatever you did, you listened to what you listened to, and then you sit down and you write.  Then it all comes out.  You can’t avoid it coming out.  That way it’s believable and it’s been worked through whatever it has to be worked through to become yours.

You’ve really invented your own groove.

Yeah.  I wouldn’t have possibly done what I’ve done if I hadn’t heard Kenny Clark, if I hadn’t heard Miles Davis, if I hadn’t heard Balinese music.  All of those things made an indelible difference, especially if you learn how to play those musics.  Being a drummer, learning how to play Balinese and African music.  You may forget about it, but it still leaves a trace in the organism, along with everything else you do in your life and that’s the best way to deal with those things.

In interviews in the past you talked a lot about intuition.  Is that still the rock bottom of your approach to composition?

Yes, certainly.  What are the rules of four-part harmony based on?  Well when we hear things moving in octaves they kind of disappear, so contrapuntally it’s more like reinforcement than fully independent lines, so a rule arises to say “don’t write lines in parallel octaves”.  The rules are common human perceptions that people have; pretty soon we say that’s a rule of counterpoint.  All common musical practices and conventions are based on things that people commonly notice as working or not working. 

To take an individual case, it’s like I was saying before: you have all these influences; a lot of composers imitate.  When you’re a student you really should imitate; the job of a student is to imitate.  The more you imitate the better you are, because you learn about different styles.  And then at a certain point, when you’re no longer studying, you hopefully begin to follow some internal musical chemistry, which is fed by the influences you’ve got, the information you’ve learned as a student, but hopefully it reaches some point based on - I’ll call it musical intuition, because I certainly don’t know what it is, whereby you find your own voice. 

I must say that’s what I look for in another composer, that I admire in somebody.  You can easily tell that.  Glenn Branca’s Glenn Branca; you can love it, you can hate it, but that’s who he is.  Michael Gordon’s another one; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work, but that’s who he is.  That’s the bottom line for me, and I admire someone who has their own voice, even if I don’t particularly enjoy it.   David del Tredici’s found his own voice in a totally different world, a different set of techniques.

You certainly have a strongly established individual voice, and for me it’s difficult not to be curious about what led up to it.  I’ve read about but not heard such pieces as Music for Violin and Piano.

Oh boy, that’s early.  Those are student works, not worth performing; they’re mostly junk.  People biographically will dig up student works, but the pieces of that period say from ‘58-’63 - it sort of switches from pretty much straight imitations of Bartok’s middle period around his third and fourth quartets, to early Webern, early Schönberg pre-twelve-tone, which I call “free atonal music”, though it was neither free nor atonal. 

It was done in imitation of early Webern, pieces like the string quartet op. 5, Schönberg op. 19, the piano pieces of op. 11, the first two pieces.  I actually got into a lot of that stuff in those days.  And then of course, I had to take the big dive and start writing twelve tone music, which I did.  As I’ve said before, my solution was “just repeat it, man!”  That probably was the beginning of everything.

You were in California at Mills College then, and Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley were on the scene.

Terry and I met, and Terry certainly had an influence on me, just as I had an influence on Glass and just as LaMonte had an influence on Terry.  I had heard African music, I had read the book by Jones, which really got my thing going.  But In C was a way of seeing all this stuff happening together, as I’ve talked about before.

A few years later you wrote your "Optimistic Predictions" about the future of music, and other manifesto-like statements in program notes.

Actually I got a pretty good batting average on those!

Yes, a lot of the predictions turned out to be right.  But one thing which stuck out to me was your statement from the 1969 Whitney Museum concert “obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy”.  Is that something you’d stand by today?

Oh yeah, either it’s happening or it’s not happening.  Like with the piece I’ve been working on this morning - what’s the way I judge it?  I ask “is it working”.  Well what does that mean?  That means you feel thrilled when you listen to it.  If you don’t, you try to figure out what’s missing.  That really doesn’t change; though the situation you find yourself in changes.  A lot more is going on musically in my pieces than used to go on.  There’s no such thing as progress, but there are changes.

Do you find that with experience you can predict better what will work?

As you have probably noticed, I’m not one of those composers (there are those we could name) who tend to keep certain techniques going over and over again.  I am contrapuntally oriented and I do use the canon, but the canon is such an open situation - it doesn’t really tell you that much, but it does orient me.  Orchestrationally, I’ve decided I’m not writing for the orchestra and generally I don’t do a great deal of brass.  So with certain things - you know, I can draw up the page at the beginning more clearly, but the hardest part is beginning.  The earlier pieces basically spun themselves out because there really was a strong “this is the technique only” going on, and therefore if I had a good module then I could have a fifteen minute piece.  Now you don’t find more than three or four repeats in any piece any more.  There’s a demand that I put on myself: “go and put in more musical material”.

Part of it’s also that you’re dealing (loosely) with narrative structure now, especially with the speech-melody pieces.

Yes, that’s part of it.   Actually in Bikini I’m interested in making it really non-narrative and more cyclical.  I think that instead of telling a story, we’ll say “there is a story there, what you’ve simply got to do is take slices of what went on there, and just roll them”.   We’ll keep coming back over and over them and let it all come out that way.  There’s been a tension.  When I decided in 1987 that I wasn’t going to write for the orchestra anymore, I also decided that I wanted to get back to the early tape pieces, and get the fire that was in that documentary material.  And Different Trains was very much the wedding of looking forward and looking back.  It’s led to a lot of things; it opened the door to opera (the way I do it).  In a lot of the pieces I feel the wisdom of the early pieces and I feel the wisdom of the later pieces, and there’s a tension of wanting more overt emotionality in the music and yet I don’t want to get soupy or sentimental, and so that tension is operating.  It was operating earlier today - a lot of it’s choice of notes.

As you’ve been  composing the new Triple Quartet?

Yeah.  The piece for Kronos.  It has to be a triple quartet, because I wouldn’t write a string quartet.

Similar to Different Trains, but without the documentary material?

Yeah, but once you take away that, you’ve got a different piece.

But it’s scored for multitracked string quartet in the same way.   The working title for Different Trains was Triple Quartet wasn’t it?

Yes.  For a while I didn’t know there was going to be any samples in it.  So yes, exactly.  This is the piece I was going to do before I did Different Trains.  It’s nice to have thought about it now.  You can do it in two ways: with all of the parts live, or obviously you can do it with Kronos playing with tape.  I started thinking about the rest of the opera - I could increase my string section by using prerecorded parts.  When people like Ensemble Modern (who are doing a concert of my music in Europe) want to do it with all live strings - great.  But from a working musician’s standpoint, with his own ensemble, I can use a string quartet, prerecord and go out with eight or ten string voices, which widens the palette considerably, especially if you’ve got all the percussion and keyboards.  So this piece is also “aha!  Band in a box!”, as a lot of us are becoming aware of - that you can do a lot through technology in terms of touring.  We’re living in the nineties, and there’s no clear view that things are going to turn back into the eighties anywhere in the near future, so how many people you take on the road and how many people you travel with really matters.

Stravinsky faced similar problems in the aftermath of World War One, and his solution was the scaled down scoring of L’Histoire du Soldat.

Exactly, exactly!  He went from the ballets, World War One came along and there was a recession, and Histoire was something you could tour on the back of a truck.  It was also expandable and contractable - you could have a narrator, you could have dancers.The result was a masterpiece, as great in its way as any of the ballets.  It’s a reasonable problem to face and it’s one that doesn’t cripple you at all.

I’m interested in pursuing the ideas you mentioned a little earlier, about tension between narrative and non-narrative structures - or could we talk about linearity versus non-linearity?

Narrative structure to me means telling a story.  Hindenburg is quasi-narrative, and I think in Bikini it will be different, and in Dolly, well I don’t know.  Dolly’s the big one, it’s going to be the longest in Three Tales.  It’s not just about cloning, it’s about the entire situation of genetic engineering, mapping of the genome, and all the computers underlying it - the technological situation we’re in now.  But in the instrumental pieces . . .   One of the most successful pieces I’ve written in a long time is Proverb.  Proverb is cyclical; the key to Proverb is that the text is short.

It couldn’t be much shorter.

That’s why the piece can work the way it does - I can say “I’m really going to get into this thing, and open it up”.  It’s the first time I really did augmentation canon, just thinking about it, knowing about it from the medieval period, and thinking “just do it”.  The first and the last scenes of Hindenburg are augmentation canons with the three tenors.  The increase in duration also serves to heighten the emotion.

It’s a similar process to that which forms the basis of Four Organs.

Yes, but I’m talking about things happening melodically.  But yeah.  Augmentation is. well, I’m surprised more people don’t take it seriously.  It’s a new way of lengthening something that’s pre-existing, and you can take it to great lengths.  Also in Hindenburg, I finally stretch out the voice. . .

You’re doing Slow Motion Sound at last?

Exactly!  It really is there, and it really works.  It’s the voice of the famous announcer who saw the Hindenburg go down: “it’s crashing, it’s crashing, oh!”  becomes “o-o-o-h!”.  You really feel it in your gut as you see this thing in slow motion going down.

So Slow Motion Sound has come full circle.

Yes, partly because it’s actually possible now, and here it has a purpose.  It also the desire people have had for microtonality - you have this tonal thing happening, and over the top is this sliding voice, because every vowel is a glissando.  It’s something I’m definitely going to go further with in Three Tales.

To me digital time stretching is still slightly unsatisfactory because of the discreet steps in the resulting glissandi.

Yeah, but what I’m using now is a part of the new Digital Performer program, which is becoming a whole audio recording software as well as sequencer.  I usually use Finale, but when I’m working with Beryl I need something to keep me in sync with the images, and it slaves beautifully - Hollywood uses it a lot.  In that program is this time stretching, and it started out as just a time stretcher where you keep the pitch the same, but then they refined it whereby the formants are treated separately from the actual pitch.  That means that when you stretch a male voice, not only do you keep the pitch the same, but you get the formants staying the same, and that’s really what is characteristic of the voice.  It’s so good that if you move something within a third, possibly even a fourth of where they were, you do not hear the difference.  They themselves would think it’s the same.  So when you begin to elongate, there’s still a little artifacting happens, but that’s kind of nice.  (imitates sound of noise buildup).  I’m not against grain and funk -  I’m an old 35 mm film buff!  Grainy pictures and grainy recordings - I mean the Different Trains recordings!  We’ve had people play the piece and say “how do expect us to use this terrible recording?”  These recordings are historical recordings - being bad is part of what they are.  We’ve cleaned them up as best we can, but that’s the way it is.  I didn’t make the recordings - they were made with some Radio Shack piece of junk in 1972.

I’ve long been interested in the concept of ambiguity in relation to your work, and in relation to music of long duration, especially in regard to harmony.  It was important in the formation of pieces such as The Desert Music and Sextet.  Is it something you still think about?

Yes.  Right now, the piece I’m working on for Kronos is structured very much like the third movement of The Desert Music.  It’s a series of dominants in minor, the dominant of E minor.  First of all the dominants have added tones - they’re not voiced 1, 3,5, 7 at all - and second of all, as they move from section to section, they move in minor thirds, which are outlined as a diminished seventh chord.  Which means you don’t really know where you’re going, because you’re not going anywhere - you’re always just moving ahead.  I have at times gone V-I, such as at the end of The Four Sections, and I’m not really happy with that.  I think that the ambiguity that I talked about many years ago in rhythm, with various subdivisions of twelve such as you find in African music inherent in the meter, because it can be either a triple or a duple meter, has its analogy in unresolved dominants, which of course Debussy was keenly aware of.  Indeed, a lot of what I’ve done, a lot of what other people have done which is called minimalist owes a lot more to the French than to the German tradition.  That’s why someone like John Adams really left the fold (which is fine, he is who he is) - John really cares about Schönberg, he really cares about Mahler and Sibelius.  I can’t listen to any of that stuff.

But harmonically speaking . . . well, a lot of it happened unconsciously.  First of all, when I was a kid, every movie was a reworking of Ravel or Debussy.  A lot of bebop was very sympathetic to French Impressionism.  Then there’s Gershwin - Gershwin and Ravel were like a mutual admiration society.  I don’t think it’s surprising that someone of my generation would sop that up.  Only later did I realise if you play something in the middle register, you change the bass and don’t change the middle - that’s the Afternoon of a Faun, or Mother Goose.

Another thing is the combination in simultaneity of functional chords traditionally placed in linear sequence, for example the stacking of a tonic and a dominant with the tonic on top in Four Organs, or often in Thelonius Monk’s music.

Right.  Well, that particular chord is the magic chord, that’s Scriabin’s dominant eleventh, with the tonic on top.  And you do find that in Thelonius Monk, and you can find it in Debussy’s Trio for viola, flute and harp.  There’s a communality: French Impressionism, bebop and me (laughs).  And a lot of other people.

It seems to work particularly well in a piece like Four Organs.

Four Organs needed something that would sustain twenty minutes of the same chord.  It’s playing with the V-I cadence in a really interesting way.

Instead of following each other, they are on top of each other.

Yeah, you just take away one - well, that’s resolved.  You put it back in, it’s not resolved (laughs).

That sort of thinking continued through a lot of your pieces.

A lot of pieces of mine, such as in The Desert Music, I take away the bass.  I usually end by going up.  I never want to affirm something in the bass at the end of a piece, as you find in eighteenth and nineteenth century music.  It sounds too gauche, too heavy handed - I mean how could you do such a thing?

It’s too obvious.

It’s too obvious.  We can’t do that anymore.  You can do it, but I don’t want to hear it!  But those are realities, they are musical realities, so how do you deal with them?  Well, if you just let it resolve in a register where there’s no bass, it hasn’t got that obviousness, and what’s more, other things happen.  At the end of The Desert Music, you get to a situation where you’re still on a dominant chord, but you could be in major or you could be in minor - that’s basically the three areas of traditional Western music.  Once you put the bass in, it’s over - then we know where we are, we’ve done it.  But if you begin removing it, then the ear, depending on how you set the situation up, will flit around assigning various values to it, depending on how it’s heard that chord before.  That is something that I feel was, albeit unconsious, a very important lesson.

In the early eighties I actually spent some time thinking about this ambiguity and where it came from; I concluded “this is Debussy”.  Historically that’s very important, because what happened at that time?  Debussy’s basically coming a little after Wagner, and Wagner is an issue to be dealt with.  Wagner is pointing to Schönberg - “if we keep going in this direction, we’re going to lose the whole thing, and good riddance, we’ve had enough of this.  You won’t know where you are - that’s freedom.”  Debussy’s basically saying “well. . . I don’t think I want to throw it away, I just want to make it extremely ambiguous.  I want to bring the modes back again.”  Because the modes had tonal centres.

And then, look at Bartok: at a certain point pretty early on, Bartok hears Debussy.  If Bartok had not heard Debussy and all he heard was Richard Strauss etcetera, he would have been a much less interesting composer, and I wonder if he would have been as free to become as Hungarian as he did.  This is one of the theories I have about him (it may be completely wrong, but it feels nice to me) that Debussy must have encouraged him to go “hey, folk music is where it’s at” because already this modal freedom had bubbled up somewhere.

It’s become a cliché, but it’s funny: Boulez loves Debussy but Debussy had it right, Schönberg and Wagner had it wrong in a sense.  It isn’t over; it’s just that now there’s a whole other way of skinning the cat - lots and lots of ways of skinning the cat.  Debussy’s a tremendous pat on the back, encouraging you: [in thick Brooklyn accent] “sure man, there’s all kinds of ways you can do it; you don’t have to throw it away.  You can almost throw it away, you can stretch it. . .”

It’s interesting that Boulez is almost embracing that attitude himself now.

Yes, he seems to be.  He’s much less doctrinaire.  I’d like to hear some of the recent pieces - I mean, the guy is fantastic.

I like to think of Debussian harmony as a way of playing with time.  As I was saying before, sonorities instead of being sequential and goal-oriented become reinforcements of sound.  This sits well with early minimalist ideas of the eternal present and of continuum.  Is that something you’ve thought about?

In Four Organs certainly, but in other pieces it’s different.  In Sextet it goes to A minor, and it really resolves as it goes up, and it’s a very, very effective cadence, and it is goal-oriented.  How it gets there is not how you would expect.

It’s goal-oriented but the goal is somewhat softened.

It’s like the end of Tehillim, which is that same dominant eleventh chord as in Four Organs.  It’s satisfying as an ending, but it’s actually still a dominant chord because it’s voiced that way.  “Hallelujah” - that last chord is saying “let’s go to D major” and you’re already in D major.

You’re already there, but you’re not - the tension and resolution are simultaneous.  But it’s also a very strong ending rhythmically.

But it’s not a tonic chord, and that’s what saves it.  It’s hammered out, but it’s hammered out the same way Four Organs is hammered out.  You accept it, but you also feel that it’s pushing you on - that’s why it’s such a great ending.

This not wanting to end is what makes me wonder about the concept of the continuum, popular in the sixties - the idea that the music is always there, and you’re just tapping into it for a little while.

Well, that’s LaMonte and Terry in a sense, that’s the Indian thing.  I was not part of that - my pieces have a beginning, they have a middle and they have an end.  I’ve always got that - Piano Phase has a beginning, a middle and an end.  I could point it out - the middle is eight beats long (laughs), and the beginning is twelve and the ending is four.  And it works that way - it’s a stretto too.  There’s a lot of old ideas, except that the timing is such that you can’t think of it that way, but it has that effect - getting more intense and shorter.

It also moves forward harmonically.

Yes, exactly.  You can see it as a II-V-I progression in minor (laughs), ending in A minor.

There’s a definite sense of arrival in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ when you reach the last section, with the bass ending on the dominant.

Exactly, yes.  The dominant is an engine - the fifth is present in all music.  The perfect intervals are always present.  Take Schönberg - you can disregard that, but then you cut yourself off from the rest of the world.  He’s a great composer, but he’s like somebody sitting in a little dark corner - and that’s okay, but life is such that you only go there once in a while.  And that’s what’s happened - the postman’s never going to listen to Schönberg.  He thought that eventually he was going to be like Tchaikovsky; that was absurd!  In a thousand years that’s not going to happen.  But he’s still a great composer.  It was a marginal concern that somehow got to dominate the entire intellectual musical world between the fifties and seventies.  If Igor Stravinsky can do it, well I mean. . .but that’s another story.

I’m interesting in talking about your endings, because they do tend to avoid finality.

I just don’t want to get into a V-I situation.  There are lots of ways of ending pieces without getting involved in that.  The earlier pieces were basically a process of “snip”.  In Music for Eighteen Musicians it doesn’t really cadence, it comes back to where it started; all of those chords are really ambiguous.  What’s really nice about an ending is when you get a feeling of “and” - the last word is “and”.  It’s got to be a satisfying end, and it’s got to be one that also makes you feel that there’s movement there, that it could go on, that it isn’t a stone wall.

Different Trains has quite an unusual ending with its stopping and starting.

That piece I’m obliged to, and I think I did a very good job of dealing with that ending.  There’s quite a story being told there in that section: “and when she stopped singing they said ‘more, more’ and they applauded” - that’s saying a lot about a lot of things, certainly about what I was doing in the piece, which was “it’s not going to change the world, it’s just a piece of music”.

The ending itself is a comment on that.

Absolutely.  [Sings] “There was one girl (’hallelujah’ - it’s the same notes) who had a beautiful voice, and they loved to listen to her singing.  And when they stopped singing, they said ‘more, more’ and they applauded”.  We know that, probably not even just in the officers club, but actually in the enlisted men, there were a lot of people who really knew music, they played and knew it themselves.

They enjoyed the singing of this Jewish prisoner and then probably gassed her.

Exactly.  Ethics and aesthetics have nothing to do with each other.  There’s a desire to think “I like composer X, so composer X has got to be a good guy” - no way!  Might be, but there’s just no connection.  It’s also the effectiveness of political art.  Guernica is a towering masterpiece protesting civilian bombing.  It’s survived as a painting but did it stop civilian bombing?  Come on!  Picasso’s not even a midget in the world of political action.  It would have been better if Wagner had been shot to death - he really blew it as a human being.  It might have averted a lot of bad things, because he did have a very powerful influence.  But Wagner is, in my own estimation and in the opinion of many others, is a genius.  His music is incredible.  (By the way, Hindenburg’s third scene is called Niebelung’s Emblem and it basically takes on the Niebelung’s theme and makes a really old-style repeating pattern piece out of it: (sings) dun-da-dun dun-dun-dun).  So I think those are things which are true and you just have to face that - it was possible for Nazis to be extremely cultured and extremely inhuman, and that is the nature of artistic excellence and moral excellence have no necessary connection whatsoever.

But then can’t a piece like Dolly at least raise awareness of the problems and lead to informed discussion?

Absolutely.  The point is, if I’m going to do an opera, if I’m going to do a theatre piece, I’ve got to be burning with interest in it, or I’m going to bore the pants off anybody if I’m not.  Wagner was really possessed with seeing the answer to what was wrong in all the Germans around him by finding their roots back in all their early Nordic mythological heritage.  How many people really care about that now?  Obviously some people do, but Wagner made you care about it because his music’s so great.  So basically, I’ve got to do something I care about: I live with technology, you live with technology, we all live with technology, and we’re about to go around a really big bend with it.  As I’m reading and looking into this genetic thing . . .

The changes could be huge.

Yeah, you could have beings walking around the streets which are not like you or I.  We’re now at the stage where we can make beings - we’re at the dawn of this, where we can have asexual reproduction en masse, where we can go to a baby boutique.  All kinds of very basic human phenomena could start suddenly slipping away.

Huxley stuff.

No, he didn’t see it.  It’s not so much that it’s going to be controlled by Big Brother.  Mary Shelley with Frankenstein had a brilliant insight, that there’s a desire to make things and to investigate them, and carried far enough this can lead you to the point when you become a kind of deity in your own eyes, because you can create. . . life.  Life forms anyway.  Whether we’re equipped. . .!  It’s adding a megadose of self-destruction on top of the already abundant means of self-destruction, and it also indicates certain possible religious blindnesses which have been accumulating for many years now.  We’re finally setting the stage for something that could be nightmarish.  On the other hand, I’m very interested in using my computer (so are you), I’m not a Luddite, I’ve got to say I’m guilty as charged - I’ve got my hands dirty in this stuff too.  So it’s a very, very seductive and puzzling situation we’re finding ourselves in.  It has to do with Faust, it has to do with the Garden of Eden and Knowledge, and it’s moving so fast I can barely keep up with it.

Have you heard about nanotechnology?

Yes I have, and it scares the pants off me.  We were interviewing Marvin Minsky - he’s a pretty scary guy when you really get him going on how there’s no soul and how we’re going to be able to . . .[imitates Minsky’s voice] “you’re not going to die, Robert, we’ll just download all your thoughts and emotions into a floppy disk, put the floppy disk into a drawer, and you can live forever.”  Really this is not just some harebrained scheme, this is MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, this is people with big research grants working to make this reality, and a lot of other things associated with it, and nanotechnology’s a big part of that.

Were you interviewing Minsky for possible inclusion in Three Tales?

Probably not.  We happened to up there doing other interviews - I sort of know him through mutual friends, we’ve got some contacts so I thought “let’s do this”.  I think he likes to be outrageous.  But there’s this whole reductionist school, and there are so few people against this.  There’s a lot of things brewing which are really very basic, but also cutting edge, and that’s what Dolly will be about.  Bikini is about the cold war.  I think Bikini will open up for us as artists the possibility of presenting the material without it being as narrative as The Cave was, or even as narrative as Hindenburg was, and that will transfer into Dolly.  Each section in the piece is going to be different formally, and Hindenburg really should be the most narrative.  In Bikini the narrative will begin to break down, and I hope it will break down further in Dolly.  Also the look of the piece will change - the first piece is all black and white, it’s all archival from 1934, and in the second piece you’ve got some colour and some very good black and white, and then the last piece will be today.  So they’re period pieces as they should be - they will look and feel like their period, because the documentary material reflects that.

Which is very appropriate for a piece about technology which changes so rapidly.

Yeah.  The medium is the message.
 

Interview conducted January 1999, New York City