without hearing the piece and then having an ensemble play it, and those experiments usually went terribly because I would then get married to this idea in my head of what the piece is supposed to sound like. I found that I was never satisfied in the interpretations. And this created a lot of hardship for not only me, but my players, since I tended to write (and still do) very difficult or hard to play music. Some people can be satisfied working this way; I like the idea of musically proposing a question and then having it answered. I’m generally a lot happier in life working this way. In my current work, the act of making something important by bringing it to people’s attention is my “composition.” This continues the ongoing and very famous discussion started by the Italian Futurists (but also touched upon earlier by a lot of progressive thinkers and composers such as Charles Ives) of what noise is, what music is, what good is, what bad is, what an instrument is, what makes a musician? In my very small contributions, I like being included in that musical tradition and taking part of that long, important discussion. Claudia Meza, Plan for Water. 2012.
Do you think sound can be a sculpture, or have physical properties, objectness, thingness? Yes, most definitely. Sound technically does have physical properties though they are not visible to the human eye. And have you ever been stuck in a room with a loud band that is playing something you don’t like? That to me is as physical as running into brick wall.
27