The cello is made out of
ice. There are no strings, just a solid block of frozen water, cut to
the exact specifications of Joan Jeanrenaud's 1750 Venice-born Deconet.
"That solid ice version of my acoustic cello," Jeanrenaud
says, "it's always so amazing. A cello made of solid ice is really
the most beautiful object."
Jeanrenaud, formerly of
Kronos Quartet, is describing her various post-Kronos musical adventures,
one of which is a four-hour performance piece titled, appropriately
enough, Ice Cello. It is a remounting of Ice Music for London, a bit
of early-'70s performance art by the late avant-garde musician Charlotte
Moorman and pioneering conceptual artist Jim McWilliams. Jeanrenaud
has performed her own higher-tech version of the piece four times since
departing Kronos to launch an even more adventurous solo career.
The ice cello, Jeanrenaud
explains, is played using a series of bows fashioned out of saws and
barbed wire and sandpaper, accelerating the melting of the ice, which
begins to come apart in drips and pieces. Five microphones capture the
sound of the water as it hits a surface beneath the cello. A sound technician
electronically manipulates the watery "music" and four speakers
positioned around the room create a sonic environment of merging splashes
and splattering H2O.
"That's one of the
beautiful things about that piece," says Jeanrenaud. "The
whole thing about ice is that it changes. It starts out as water and
changes into ice, and then it changes back again as it melts. Ice is
all about change, it's all about the process of being transformed from
one thing into another."
The same could be said of
Jeanrenaud. She ended her 20-year stint with the world-famous Kronos
in 1999, eager for something new, but uncertain what it might look like.
Clearly, change is a force that keenly interests the accomplished performer
and virtuoso cellist. It's no coincidence that her first major post-Kronos
performance piece—an evening-length theatrical event featuring
compositions by Philip Glass, Karen Tanaka, and others, and released
last year on CD by New Albion—was entitled Metamorphosis.
"Leaving Kronos was
a huge change," Jeanrenaud says. "And a lot of what I'm doing
is not necessarily what I had expected to be doing, but it's so exciting
to discover where my path is leading me."
For one thing, Jeanrenaud,
who still lives in San Francisco, has been working with such fearless
composers as Fred Frith and Annie Gosfield. The latter, a young New
York composer who taught at Mills College in Oakland, California for
a semester in 2003, spent a year composing a piece for solo cello and
recorded machine sounds, tailor-made to Jeanrenaud's abilities and daring-do
tastes.
"It's beautiful,"
says Jeanrenaud of the 13-minute piece, which premiered in November
at Mills. "It's a whole soundscape. You can identify certain sounds
and machines—you know it's a saw when the saw sounds happen—but
it's more than that. It's all used very effectively."
While Jeanrenaud has always
been interested in electronics, performance art, and multimedia, she
knew she wanted to expand her experience with improvisation. That said,
she's been more than surprised at where those explorations have taken
her.
"I'm actually composing
now," she says with a laugh, "and that's something I never
thought I'd do." With the encouragement of such heavy-hitters as
Larry Ochs of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Nubian oud master Hamza El
Din, and the great experimentalist Terry Riley, Jeanrenaud has taken
gradual steps toward trusting her own compositional instincts. Metamorphosis,
fittingly enough, contains one of Jeanrenaud's first compositions, a
nine-minute piece for cello and "looped" cellos called "Altar
Piece."
As her metamorphosis continues,
Jeanrenaud is finding more and more opportunities to write music. San
Francisco's edgy Other Minds Music Festival has invited her to create
a new piece, which she'll be performing in March. Around the same time,
she will be appearing with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under conductor
Kent Nagano for the premiere of a new concerto by Karen Tanaka during
BSO's 21st Century Cellos program.
As for what's next, Jeanrenaud
hints that there might be another Charlotte Moorman revival in the near
future. "I've been thinking of doing 'Flying Cello,'" she
says, referring to another Jim McWilliams collaboration, which featured
Moorman suspended in the air on a harness, with bow in hand, and her
cello suspended from a separate rigging.
"As they passed each
other in the air," Jeanrenaud says, "Charlotte would take
a swipe at the cello. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?"
