Story by Aaron Tate.
Top photo by Christian Hartman.
As many observers of the 21st century musical landscape have noted, a remarkable growth in micro-genres and niche communities has taken place in recent decades, one outcome of which has been the emergence of a dizzying array of methods and sonic possibilities. This proliferation has also given us musical visionaries who are able, through sheer mastery, depth, and musical range, to bridge gaps by taking specific insights from one domain in order to give back to the other.
Percussionist Tim Feeney, who joins Cornell’s Department of Music as a new faculty member this year, is one such musician. Though perhaps still a relative newcomer to contemporary classical audiences and the record-buying public, Feeney’s staggering breadth has been quietly making its mark for several years.
Whether interpreting the music of John Cage, Steve Reich, and David Lang in the concert hall, or performing the American premiere of a composition by Luciano Berio, Feeney has applied his fierce intelligence and gentle patience to a number of projects and pieces within the repertoire of twentieth century percussion music over the past spate of years.
His expertise does not end there, however, as he has extensive training in Balinese gamelan performance, and is a longtime participant in Boston’s internationally recognized community of electroacoustic improvisers.
When listening to Feeney play, one is just as likely to hear the distant evocations of Indonesian shadow play music or African ewe drumming as one is to experience Feeney’s brilliant timbral meditations on extended percussion technique and exposed electronic circuits routed through home-modified speakers.
His resume of teachers, collaborators, performances, and recordings reads like a veritable who’s who of contemporary music, and his itinerary has landed him in some of the finest concert halls, recording studios, and university classrooms in the United States and Europe.
After spending his undergraduate years training as an orchestral percussionist at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Feeney’s direction became clearer when he encountered world-class marimba player Robert Van Sice in a master class. “How does the statement go? When the student is ready, the teacher appears?” asks Feeney, by way of explaining the impact made upon him by Van Sice’s playing. Knowing that he had indeed found his teacher, Feeney enrolled at Yale, where he completed both his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Music Arts.
During his time at Yale, Feeney multiplied his musical participation across a wide variety of roles and spectra: as performer, ensemble founder, teacher, commissioner of new works for percussion, and recording artist.
In 1999, Feeney co-founded the ensemble So Percussion, which allowed him to spend many years involved in all aspects of the percussion world and its repertoire (Feeney left the group in 2002 in order to pursue other projects).
To take but one example of his commitment, when Feeney was awarded a Presser scholarship during this period, he used it to commission a new work by composer David Lang. The result was a 40 minute, three-movement piece, entitled “The So-Called Laws of Nature,” which So Percussion then premiered at the 2001 installment of the prestigious Bang On a Can All-Stars Marathon concert in New York City — an experience that introduced Feeney to a wider circle of musicians.
During the same period, Feeney’s interest in non-Western music was further piqued when he took a course with ethnomusicologist Michael Veal. “Veal introduced us to a gamelan player named Andy McGraw, who was at Wesleyan,” Feeney says. “I began going to Wesleyan to study with Andy. We learned the ’shadow play’ literature, wayang kulit. We did that on and off for a couple of years. I then decided to apply to the doctoral program at Yale.”
During the same period, Yale’s Center For the Study of Globalization awarded Feeney funding to study Indonesian music with Evan Ziporyn (of Bang On a Can All-Stars) and ultimately to study in Bali in the summer of 2002.
Upon his return from Indonesia, events brought Feeney to Boston, where his partner, violist Wendy Richman, was furthering her own musical education. It was in Boston that Feeney experienced his next musical epiphany, though on this occasion the encounter was to come from Boston’s community of electroacoustic improvisers.
Sometimes referred to as ‘lowercase’ or ‘reductionist’ (though most associated with the music resist such labels), the music pioneered by the likes of Bhob Rainey, Greg Kelley, Vic Rawlings, James Coleman, Liz Tonne, and Jason Lescalleet placed Boston alongside Tokyo and Berlin as one of the most potent and influential experimental music centers in the world.
When the history of experimental music is written decades from now, Boston’s lowercase community will rank as one of the most important anywhere at the turn of the 21st century. Feeney first encountered this approach when he attended a concert organized by pianist extraordinaire Stephen Drury.
“I saw a trio with James Coleman, Liz Tonne, and Tatsuya Nakatani, and it was if the skies had parted, and I said to myself, ‘Okay, here is where the next direction is going to be.’ I gave James Coleman a CD that night and we began meeting to play in his living room soon after. Through James I met the rest of the players associated with this music.”
To the uninitiated, lowercase or electroacoustic improvisation can be a disorienting, perhaps even alienating, aural experience.
This is a musical approach where the notion of “extended technique” — which amounts to using conventional instruments in non-traditional ways, such as exploring the sounds of breath through a wind instrument or the processing of acoustic sounds with contact microphones, electronic devices, and homemade circuitry — is merely the starting point.
Players may choose to focus on the sound of a bare sine tone vibrating in air for many minutes at a time, or may explore the sonic properties of dowel rods, violin bows, glass, and metal pieces in contact with drum heads and cymbals, while microphones are processed through effects pedals in any number of surprising ways.
Often these performances occur at low volumes, in order to heighten focus and to underscore the gravity of each sound’s entry and exit within the sonic flow of the moment, but also for the reason that volume itself is yet another parameter for exploring sound and improvisational possibilities.
For Feeney, however, this music is a natural outgrowth, or perhaps yet another branch, within the lineage of experimentation and creative searching that has characterized the role of percussion in the canon of classical music during the past century.
In conversation, while Feeney is careful not to blur the boundaries between the various histories and traditions within which he works, he is also eloquent in articulating the similarities, challenges, and possibilities that bind them — he is equally comfortable discussing the role of John Cage in the history of classical music or the aesthetics of homemade speakers, electronic circuits, tinfoil, and chain-scraped cymbals.
Feeney’s departure from the Boston musical community is being felt by many there. One of its leading lights, Howard Stelzer, who is also an accomplished tape-manipulation artist and record label owner (Intransitive Recordings), toured and recorded with Feeney last year.
“Boston’s loss will be Ithaca’s gain,” Stelzer told us recently. “Tim’s participation in the Boston scene was a big deal, and it was very good for all of us. His playing really injected something special into our community.” Stelzer continues, “As a duo, we just got it right away, it made so much sense. Tim is such an interesting player.”
Recordings made during the tour appeared as a CD-R entitled Never Happened on Audiobot Records, and when summarizing the experience, Stelzer told us, “The music that Tim and I made together was not something that I would have thought to make on my own, because he pushes me to an interesting, new, and different place. I’d play again with Tim in a heartbeat.”
Feeney has also worked closely with other Boston musicians, including Vic Rawlings, one of the more austere and uncompromising artists in that community. Over the course of a year and a half, Feeney and Rawlings honed an approach that became very much their own. The results will soon be made available to the public on the record label Sedimental Recordings, on Sept. 1, when the Rawlings-Feeney collaboration, In Six Parts, is released.
“Tim plays in structures that we might discuss beforehand or that might emerge naturally in the course of an improvisation,” Rawlings says. “As an improviser, Tim is very structural, his playing never comes off as contrived. He never searches nervously through musical gestures in order to find something that sticks, as do lesser players. Tim is a very, very natural player.” Both Stelzer’s and Rawlings’ affection for Feeney and his playing came through loud and clear in our conversations.
As a member of Cornell’s Music Department, Feeney will lead the Cornell Percussion Ensemble, the steel drum bands, and the World Drum & Dance Ensemble. He will also be teaching percussion lessons.
Feeney says that he very much looks forward to working with Cornell’s students, whom he is already getting to know. “One really nice thing about Cornell is that I have the chance to work with students who are clearly very sharp but who also seem to be interested in all aspects of music,” Feeney says. “They’ve got a wide palette to choose from here at Cornell, and I hope I that I might be able to help them think about the ways in which music can be meaningful to them in their own context … though the idioms may vary, there is an element that is the same in all of the music that I will be teaching: perhaps the idea of storytelling, or at least an attention to the arrangement of sounds and events in time.”
Tim Feeney will be performing on Oct. 19 with violist Wendy Richman and in the Ensemble X concert on Oct. 28.