About Place (2019)
SATB chorus with movements, 6’
Composed and directed by Nathan Hall for Mattress Factory Museum’s ‘Factory Installed 2019’ artist in residence program. Opened Sept 20, 2019, Pittsburgh, PA.
This work for choir creates site-specific music, and is a tribute to the Mattress Factory's late founder Barbara Luderowski and the creative spaces she has made possible. All the words in the piece are taken from interviews with Barbara. It is my first vocal work to explore singers moving in formations outdoors, in shapes no unlike a drum corps. The choir's "shapes" correspond to moments in the music and text, and are placed over the grid of the museum's parking lot, anchoring the music into a specific place and time. Singers come from Pittsburgh's Bach Choir and Carnegie Mellon's School of Music. Rehearsals and recording directed by Thomas Douglas.
ABOUT PLACE
It eats you up is what it does
It’s a joyous thing to do,
to see other people have opportunities
But you lose your own
It’s not something you say,
“There’s a fork in the road
and I’m going down this one”
You just do it.
I don’t feel you can
divide your creative life and your life-life
it’s all one flowing thing
You are what you are.
You do with it what you do with it,
or don’t do with it,
but basically that’s it.
My feeling about places
Is that they are what you make them
I love solving problems,
I like stirring the pot.
Because out of that comes something.
I fell in love with it here.
I fell in love with the architecture
and the challenge
There are little pieces that fit together
Things that go on hills and curves
topography
I know where I was, looking over the furnaces
along the river.
I watched them pour steel into vats.
And what I remember
Is the flame and the fire and sparks, spectacularly
And it was rainy.
what the hell am I doing here?
The idea, the concept,
the output of energy
increases the input of energy
nothing is impossible
You have people coming through who are interesting to talk to,
be with,
work with,
Some endure as friends.
Some pass through your life
then come back through another time.
Anyway. Life moves on.
I have to watch out for myself
when I swear something off.
I’m never going to do that again.
But I do it anyway.
-Texts from Barbara Luderowski
"About Place", a work for choir, is a tribute to the Mattress Factory's late visionary Barbara Luderowski, and the creative spaces she and her partner, Michael Olijnyk have made possible. The lines in the piece, taken from interviews with Barbara, have the economical flow of minimalist poetry. Nathan's composition evinces the inherent musicality lingering in the residue of her thoughts. Barbara had once told him "if and when you come back to be an exhibiting artist, I want you to do a piece in our parking lot." Nathan wanted to create a tribute to her and respect that wish. The piece became about her and her sense of place, how she felt about Pittsburgh and why she and Michael started the museum together. By moving in formations outdoors, the choir's "shapes" correspond to moments in the music, and are placed over the grid of the museum's parking lot, anchoring the music in a specific place and time. Also being a jewelry maker, Nathan designed a big red necklace for one of the singers to wear during the recorded performance as an homage to Barbara's love of dramatic "statement jewelry". The presentation's video documentation with audio plays on a monitor atop the fireplace mantle in the intimate, domestic space of Allan Wexler's bed-sitting room in the Monterrey Annex, accompanied by a wall installation of its printed musical score and libretto. The audio portion alone plays inside the museum's elevator, with its text displayed. As soaring voices carry Barbara's words through the elevator's descent and ascent, the work subliminally communicates that Nathan remembers her with admiration and affection and feels her presence here, in this place she called home, where she and Michael allowed so many, including himself, to feel at home, too.
-Alice Winn, Pittsburgh