SONGS WITH (AND WITHOUT) WORDS Clogs
Mar 04, 2010
Indie supergroup alert! Modern classical-pop ensemble overlaps with The National, My Brightest Diamond and Sufjan Stevens! Headed to Big Ears Festival soon!
BY JENNIFER KELLY
The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton (Brassland), the fifth full-length for classically-influenced quartet Clogs, begins two voices, at first staccato and spare, a little later lush with madrigal harmonies and finally oddly birdlike, the main melodic line twittering and fluttering over complicated counterpoints. This is "Cocodrillo," and the singers are Clogs composer Padma Newsome and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden. It is the first of eight songs to feature vocals. That's a departure in some ways for this guitar, strings, bassoon and percussion ensemble which shares members with indie rock's The National, and yet, says guitarist Bryce Dessner, also a continuation.
"As we've been working as Clogs there have been songs," said Dessner, in a recent phone interview. "You can hear some of the instrumental pieces as songs, and actually, some of them maybe were songs where we removed the singing, so it's been there. We write songs."
Clogs began in the late 1990s at Yale School of Music, as Dessner, Newsome, Thomas Kozumplik and Rachel Elliott decided to explore their shared love for 20th century classical music. "When we started the band we were all interested in improvising," said Dessner. "To a certain extent, we kind of improvised our earliest stuff. We were kind of creating music, all sitting in a room and kind of jamming for a while. I think for like a year or two, we even defined what kind of sound we could make together."
The first four albums contained one song each with vocals. In the majority of tracks, the instruments switched off between rhythmic interplay and melody, with the bassoon or violin most often taking the song-like lead. Yet at the same time, the band's principals were working with vocalists on other projects - Newsome with community choirs in his native Australia and Dessner and his brother Aaron composing an opera called "The Long Count" for Shara Worden.
"We had made four records, primarily just the four of us playing our instruments, and at a certain point, we felt like a record with songs would be really interesting," said Dessner. "It's also a collaborative record, where those songs were really written for those singers."
Newsome composed the songs for The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton literally in the garden of Lady Walton, after winning a Fromm Commission and a residency at La Mortella, an estate on the island of Ischia, a remarkable setting. "The garden was an endless source of life for me," wrote Newsome in his notes to the album. "I swam in a pool, did yoga by the pool looking out to the sea, but from some height, ate salami, grapes, olives, fruit and bread, and looked at the gaudy clothes of the holiday makers."
Yet while the surroundings may have been hedonistic and the resulting songs disarmingly beautiful, the composing process was rigorous. "It's difficult for me to explain, but I don't use different writing techniques for my rock arranging, composing, song writing, or more acoustic settings, concert halls," said Newsome, via email. "Even when I write for a rock environment, I always try to write music and not fluff."
"My theory and practice is that if you put intention in the music, whether obvious or not, there is a sense of music being held or made, music with an inside life," he added. "There is a song on Lullaby for Sue, for example, the title song, where the devices used were quite Modernist and complex, but it doesn't necessarily sound like it. It just sounds like a fun romp. But I think if you sculpt something, it doesn't matter what role the music has, then some feeling comes through."
Part of the sensuality on this album comes from the addition of vocalists. Four singers contribute to The Creatures in the Garden. Shara Worden is the main vocalist, but the National's Matt Berninger also makes an appearance, on the haunting "Last Song," as does Sufjan Stevens as part of a choir on "We Were Here. Padma Newsome sings as well, and is particularly affecting on "Red Seas."
Worden has been a friend and admirer of Clogs for years, and jumped at the chance to collaborate with them on The Creatures in the Garden. She first came into contact with Newsome, she said, through a friend from university who performed his song "These Walls Thy Heaven." "When I heard it, I was completely entranced. I wrote to Steve to ask for an introduction to Padma and then asked Padma if he would give me composition lessons. I studied with him on and off for a few years and only more recently have we performed as collaborators," she said.
"Padma's music has something of the earth in it to me," she explained. "I don't know how to pin point that exactly, but it sounds like there is some dirt in the music, like it comes from a really organic and grounded place. It is as once brilliant and full of feeling, harmonically gorgeous and transparent."
That admiration is mutual. Dessner, asked about how adding Worden's vocals to Clogs' sound changed it, said, "Shara has such incredible range, and also stylistically, she can kind of do anything. You can hear that on the record, for instance in ‘Cocodrillo,' which is kind of a choral piece, a more medieval kind of sound, whereas something like ‘On the Edge' is veering more towards classical soprano. And ‘We Were Here' is more sort of folk style. There aren't many limitations with working with her, actually. She can make anything sound really great."
For many of the songs on The Creatures, Worden had to draw on her classical training, rather than pop or folk traditions. "It would be impossible for me to sing the required high G in a Clogs song, if I approached the music like a pop singer," she said. "The singing must be more connected, more ‘on the breath', and with a lighter quality than I usually use in pop. Pop or rock or folk music is based on speech tones, and therefore the range is more limited and the shape inside of the mouth is also smaller. But as you get higher in the vocal register, you have to accommodate for those higher notes in order for them to be in tune and resonant, and how you approach a note is just as important as the note itself."
The songs are difficult enough that Worden had some butterflies at a debut performance at the Music Now festival in Cincinnati in 2007. "I was so nervous about singing ‘Adages of Cleansing' that during the performance I got confused about what song was next and walked off the stage just as ‘Adages' was about to start," she remembered. "Rachael [Elliott] came side stage to get me and I of course panicked and then she taught me a very important lesson and that is after you have made a mistake like that, take a moment and a very big breath before you walk back on stage."
Yet despite the difficulty, it's the transparent beauty of these songs that won Worden over. Asked if she had a favorite, she said, "Of course I love all of them, but I find ‘The Owl of Love' a delight to sing and so meaningful in this time of history. The owl, the observer of the world, is breathing in all of the bad air that we have produced and he converts it, cleanses it and renews the world each night."
The main effect of working with singers was that Clogs songs had to be more composed on The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton than on previous albums. In general, said Newsome, "I write a lot of music that has improvisational potentials or improvisatory behavior in performance. This means to me, that there might be some guidance as well as written notes, open spaces in them, a bunch of melodic motifs that you might or might not use or imagine as you improvise, and then with Clogs since timbre is such an important component, there are the beautiful combinations to work/play with."
"We often open up places in the compositions where they fall apart or where there's some improvisation," said Dessner. "But because we were working with singers who had to kind of follow, we maybe had to be a little more premeditated about it. That said, there are definitely parts in the album where stuff opens out and changes."
Newsome says that he preferred the term "development" rather than "improvisation" to describe Clogs creative process. "The pieces are developed in rehearsal and on stage. ‘On the Edge' was pretty much all composed, written down, but I know that piece didn't really come into its own for me until Clogs had opened up a window of freedom inside," he said.
Clogs' latest album will be difficult to perform, given the many time commitments of its core members and guest artists. The full ensemble, including all the guest vocalists, will be performing it at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville March 26-28, as well as shows in Brooklyn and Minneapolis (and possibly others, still to be confirmed). Meanwhile, the artists who contributed are balancing full schedules. Dessner is working on a piece with minimalist composer Steve Reich. Newsome has a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra in the works as well as collaborations with cellist Zachary Miskin and composer Daniel Helin. And then, there is the elephant in the room. Dessner was reached by phone at a studio where the National was finishing up its next album, slated for release on 4AD early in May.
Is it hard to find time for Clogs, in the shadow of a much bigger, more commercial undertaking like The National? Newsome replied, "You can't fight a brontosaurus! Yes, time is an issue for Clogs, which is one of the reasons why we don't gig so much, but the up side of this for me is seeing/hearing playing with these people who have gone on and changed developed other worlds of music and then I have the luxury of finding time on stage with them.
"I do think that the various worlds share and mutate each other in subtle and obvious ways, and I strongly believe in bringing forth new music from any of these worlds."
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