For the NRW annual magazine (edition 2024), I curated a booklet called Labyrinth with excerpts of my scores and a text, representing the music section of the foundation this year.
You can download the magazine and the booklet on the official website of Kunststiftung NRW by this link.
My conversation with Ruth Prieto about music, life, creative and introspective processes, inspiration and how to find it, future plans and many other things. The interview also features the pieces I composed in 2020.
In 2019, Luis Codera Puzo - artistic director of the concert series OUT・SIDE - commissioned me to write program notes for two concerts of an outstanding improviser Luis Tabuenca and an incredible butoh dancer Imre Thormann. Their concert already had a title, Enduring freedom. My writing eventually took shape of a set of poems, which now exist on their own.
A search for Freedom is one of the main engines that drives me in music and thinking about music, thinking about the world and about myself as a female artist, citizen, human. Some of these poems found their ways in my pieces. In some way, this little booklet could be considered as an alternative to an artist manifesto, but instead of being blatantly direct, my uttermost thoughts are encrypted in symbols and images that are meant to trigger imagination of a reader.
Once, my composition professor in Germany Johannes Schöllhorn, who I adore so much, sent me some texts by Yoko Ono, in reaction to my new score that I shared with him. The poems he chose to send me were one of her Tape pieces and one of her Map pieces. He sent them, saying: “Yoko Ono's way of thinking and humor seem to me in the same time far and close to yours. Nice coincidence."
Here are the poems:
MAP PIECE
Draw a map to get lost.
1964 spring
TAPE PIECE III
Take a tape of the sound of the snow
falling.
This should be done in the evening.
Do not listen to the tape.
Cut it and use it as strings to tie
gifts with.
Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using
the same process with a phonosheet.
1963 autumn
I loved these poems so much that I ordered the whole book straight away. The book is called Grapefruit, it is a tiny artist's book of poems, texts and event scores by Yoko. And in December 2017 I wrote a short essay on it.
Though I was working on it over the course of music analysis at Harvard University (Special Topics), my intent wasn't to write a highly analytical academic paper, because I don't believe in compatibility of my thinking and academic style of writing, I think they belong to completely different planets subordinate to natural laws opposite to each other. But I do believe in my ability to sense the core of the subject and to reveal and communicate it to the reader in my own way that will be inspiring and joyful to read.
When I read something myself, I appreciate most of all when I find the reading inspiring and exciting as it gives me the energy for my own creativity, that's why in my own writings or whatever else I make, I choose to pursue the same values.
I hope you'll enjoy traveling along the map of my thoughts.