At the beginning of 1974 I wrote a series of
poems based in brief sketches of my
companion's apartment/studio at night. Later,
I added several others so that the poems
moved back and forth between the rooms at
night and the rooms in daylight. Later, I added
some poems to friends, and then took both
them and the day poems out of the series,
making it a set of nocturnes once more. In
another session, I added some poems as
nocturnal mirrors of passages in Olivier
Messiaen's Quator por le fin du temps,
following, in part, the images in Messiaen's
annotations. (In the mid 60s, I listened to
Quator on a New Year's Day, partly
because I had a hangover and wanted to hear
something peaceful. The sense of peace in the
face of time and dire circumstances
[Messiaen's Quator was written in a Nazi
concentration camp] seemed an appropriate
way to start the year.) In addition to clarifying
some of the sound qualities of the work, this
brought a serene eschatology into a few of the
poems. Something about the set didn't work
right, so I put it aside again.
In the early 70s, I began fooling around
with book forms, the first primarily made up
of things found in a print shop where I
worked, and then in my own basement shop.
By the middle of the decade, I was making all
sorts of books out of unusual materials or
employing unusual techniques. I made books
out of hair, out of cinder blocks, out of
money, out of offset plates, out of bars of soap,
out of cigar boxes, out of mirrors, etc. Not
many people were working along similar lines
at that time, and some who were had a
different attitude toward the process. I think
we all shared the same giddy enthusiasm, but I
didn't see most of my books as anything but
propositions, not finished works of art or
tokens to bid with in arts markets.
In the process of making these
propositions, I found that I could make
acoustic books, books that could be played as
musical interments. By 1976, I saw the
potential for making true books out of
propositions of this sort. One of the first that
seemed successful was a book to use in
performances of Jackson Mac Low's
Stanzas for Iris Lezak. I made the pages
for this book out of wooden two by fours that
produced sounds by clapping the pages
together. The performance instructions for
Stanzas called for sounds of varying
loudness, which could be accomplished by the
force with which the pages were clapped. After
the first binding, I took the book apart and
bound each page into the spine with different
amounts of space between the pages so I could
get slightly different timbers by clapping
different pairs of pages or groups of pages, and
could further vary this by slipping a piece of
cloth or metal between the pages during
performance. The texts, written, stamped, and
painted on the pages of the book came from
Stanzas and from a work of my own
that followed similar systematic chance
procedures as those used by Jackson. The book
was made during rehearsals for performances
of Stanzas, and the book's acoustic
properties (and to some extent the talismanic
possibilities of the texts) were more important
to me than the book's appearance.
Putting the pieces of cloth between pages
naturally suggested covering pages with cloth
and other materials to produce different
volumes and different types of sound. The
sound properties of the first tests I made with
felt covered pages suggested the sequence of
nocturnes I had started several years before. I
began making models to see if I could work
out a means of performing the poems with the
book as accompaniment, marking the
patterns of lines and stanzas in the poems. It
then functioned well within poems, but not as
a complete work. Although the series was
meant to be sonically simple, the voice and
clapping were too uniform and monotonous.
Recordings of Japanese Gagaku Dance
ceremonies and Noh Plays for other projects
suggested what I needed. Adding sharp, hard
claps from the book I'd made for
Stanzas gave the work a completely
different character. The lady whose presence
informed the first poems clapped the
accompanying book in performance.
