Hanging Off the Edge: Revelations of a Modern Troubadour (review)

This book could be called a contemporary woman composer's version of Dr. Burney's diaries and travel accounts. It contains fascinating details about people and places throughout the world and also about the obstacles which twentieth-century performing artists encountered. The reader experiences many things with the McLeans: the equipment schlepping; battles with facial shingles; lack of insurance; cross-country travel; prices of food, cars, tuition; interactive performance pieces; composition competitions; MacDowell Colony resident fellowships; an Indonesian videographer; hiking in wildlife parks, rainforests, and mountains; even writing a review for Notes.

Priscilla McLean, an electronic music composer/performer and video artist, narrates her autobiography with scattered original poems, philosophical thoughts, and selected diary entries. On 19 September 1974 she and her husband Bart gave their first electronic performance as the McLean Mix at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana. After several years working at academic institutions, the couple decided to make their living solely as performers. They have received numerous awards, grants, commissions, fellowships, and residencies.

The book is organized into four chapters: "Beginnings and Endings" (family heritages of Priscilla Taylor and her husband Bart McLean, adolescent years); "Becoming" (college years, teaching, performing); "The Composing Life" (descriptions and genesis of the fourteen musical excerpts on the accompanying compact disc); and "Dangling Thoughts" (recollections of ten people who made significant impressions on her, reflections on her "troubadour" life).

"Beginnings and Endings" inserts recollections from the 1993 cross-country concert tour (when her father died) with McLean's adolescent years. "Becoming" relates college years in Indiana, teaching gigs (including one at the University of Texas at Austin), and diary entries from a 1981 trip to Europe—touring Brussels, attending the Gaudeamus Festival in Holland, visiting IRCAM, serving as Musical America correspondent to the eleventh Muzicki Biennale in Zagreb, and participating in a radio interview in Hilversum.

"The Composing Life" includes some entertaining stories, e.g., McLean did not seek copyright permission for her work Variations & Mosaics on a Theme of Stravinsky, until Alexander Broude published the work. This piece was recorded by Jorge Mester and the Louisville Orchestra and nominated for a 1979 Pulitzer Prize. In the same year, the McLeans received a $6,000 National Endowment for the Arts Media Grant to produce thirteen hour-long radio programs of new American music by living composers (from the American Society of University Composers). Their programs were placed directly on a satellite feed which was only broadcast once and shut down a year later because they were so expensive. In 1992 the NEA Composer Grants were cancelled. In "Dangling Thoughts," McLean relates her impressions of several composers: John Cage, Henry Brant, Henry Cowell, Pauline Oliveros, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Morton Subotnick, and Vivian Fine; CRI record producer Carter Harman; BMI executive Oliver Daniel; and Folkways Records producer Moses Asch.

McLean wrote this book after she found a minimal number of biographies about classical women composers while teaching a survey course on women in music at the University of Hawaii. She gives suggestions to other women composers on protocol for dressing and acting in the professional concert world. Lessons include one learned from her mother, "Always speak up for yourself" (p. 26), and one from grammar school, "never be too advanced or smart, because the world will resent you" (p. 27). Why does she compose and perform? "I compose to visit a sacred space inside me that opens into a special enchantment, that shares for a few flawed moments the feeling of the original Creation, of something beautiful culled from diffuseness" (p. 11).

Anyone wishing to read a firsthand account of electronic concerts will glean observations on various equipment and what can go wrong, experience the ups and downs of performing at various venues and festivals, learn which societies were hosting international conferences, discover the governmental support for artists in different countries and the fluctuating support from NEA grants in the United States...