The Music of Ellen C. Covito: An Interview with You Nakai

THE MUSIC OF ELLEN C. COVITO: AN INTERVIEW WITH YOU NAKAI ELIZABETH HOFFMAN O COLLECTIVE AND Panoply Performance Laboratory (NYC) presented a concert, “The Music of Ellen C. Covito,” on May 24, 2012 at Vaudeville Park (an indoor performance space in Brooklyn). This interview, with You Nakai, organizer of No Collective (NYC), focuses on the May 24 performance event, but it also includes discussion of No Collective itself. The interview took place on June 25, 2012. Ellen C. Covito (1974) has lived in Buenos Aires throughout her life. Her scores are available on these sites: http://uploaddownloadperform.net/EllenCCovito/Index http://ellenccovito.com N 6 Perspectives of New Music As she writes, it is interesting to note, in the third person (http://ellenccovito.com/biography.html): Covito realized that the fundamental issues of music were formally no different from those of ecology (or of feminism, for that matter): the endless process of setting and erasing dichotomies, of differentiating what belongs to one side (“us”) and not to the other (“them”), and of effacing even that difference so that “we” could have more and more. A mechanism that obviously resonates with the political violence that surrounded her childhood. In the recent years, her focus has become clearer, and her tactics more lucid. Her works now specifically attack the problematic (too easily dismissed but actually not so easily dismissible) dichotomy between composition and improvisation. She does this by introducing distance between the performer and what is performed, while removing the distance between the act of composition and performance. *** Covito’s concept of ecology, arising early in the interview, is idiosyncratic. Her compositions are indisputably disruptive to the fixed conceptual structures of how we make music. But Covito is an absolute structuralist according to her own statements. She views the composition/improvisation pair as a dichotomy to start with. After attending the performance described above, I had a vague impression of Covito as a mildly provocative musical version of Maria Abramovic. In Covito’s compositions, there were tests, dares, and limits to be transcended. But there was also a lot happening musically. The sounds themselves were actually freed of their normal constraints. For me, this was one of the strongest aspects of the event. SPACES AND SCORES ELIZABETH HOFFMAN: Can you tell me something about the nature of Covito’s scores? YOU NAKAI: All of her scores are instructions on how to compose scores as well as how to set up the actual performance situation within which those scores are read and performed. The Music of Ellen C. Covito 7 HOFFMAN: So you hadn’t seen any video of these performances? NAKAI: Covito has a web site but she doesn’t record her concerts in any way. We had an exchange because first we were going to do the performance at the Issue Project Room. The curators were interested, but they wanted some kind of document from previous concerts. So I contacted her, but she wrote to me saying, “I always thought recording doesn’t do justice to my music. None of my ‘compositions’ result in the same sound because they are, at the same time, always ‘improvised’ in performance. A recording, then, can only emphasize the ‘composed’ aspect of my works, which is a false representation.” HOFFMAN: Let’s move to a question I have about the space itself. How particular are the performance space demands made by Covito’s works? One of the things that impacted me at Vaudeville Park was a feeling of being so immersed in what was happening. NAKAI: We ended up doing most of her works in one single concert, but they were written separately and of course can be performed separately on different programs. So the answer to this question depends on the piece. For example, there is a piece, “Composed Improvisation G,” which we did on the second half of the concert, where there is a score whose pages are glued together, and it has to be ripped open by the performers during the performance. And that piece can be performed on a stage, in a regular concert setting. But, one piece that does necessitate a space without a separate stage is the floorscore piece...