April 29, 2022
With My Back to the World, my original score for Mary Lance's documentary about the iconic abstract painter Agnes Martin, is available today as a digital-only release to stream or download on BandCamp.
Born in Canada, Agnes Martin (1912-2004) was one of the most renowned Modernist artists to settle in New Mexico. Unlike Georgia O'Keefe, whose subject matter was predominantly the landscape and physical objects within it, Martin sought to portray the subtleties of her interior emotional life using a reductive vocabulary of horizontal lines and grids and a limited color palette. While she is often considered a Minimalist, Martin adamantly regarded herself as an Abstract Expressionist in the lineage of Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt.
I first encountered her work in late 1980, when a friend took me to see an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park. At first glance these twelve large paintings, all made in 1979, seemed to be blank white canvases, but deeper immersion revealed a subtle aura of color quietly glowing beneath the surface. Martin had painted over her usual horizontal bands of color with layers of white gesso, creating a remarkable optical effect.
Those paintings were a revelation and made a lasting impression on me. They felt like the visual equivalent of making music entirely from overtones without hearing their fundamental pitches. I didn't know how to do that, but the idea stayed in the back of my mind for a long time, and Agnes became part of my personal pantheon.
Eighteen years later I was living in Albuquerque and finally made something that felt similar to my memory of Martin's "white" paintings. Emanations was composed to accompany a series of white paintings by my friend Claire Giovanniello. They were quite different from Martin's work but very much in that lineage. The sound was made entirely from audio feedback generated in the gallery space, and was played at very low volume so that it hovered on the edge of inaudibility. This became my first solo CD release.
I knew Martin had moved to Taos from her long-time home in Galisteo. I asked a mutual acquaintance for her mailing address and sent her a CD with a note expressing my appreciation for her work and inspiration. A few weeks later the phone rang and it was Agnes, calling to thank me for the CD. She said she enjoyed it, even though she didn't listen to much music anymore, and invited me to come visit her in her studio if I was ever in Taos.
That summer I did a little solo tour and stopped in Taos to visit Agnes on my way to Colorado. She was reserved but friendly, and I was of course thrilled to spend some time with her and to look through the stack of recent paintings that had yet to be seen outside of her studio. Agnes was then 86 years old and living in a retirement home, but still came to the little studio to paint every day. Eventually another friend of hers dropped by and we went to lunch, where Agnes held court at a large table of friends and admirers. It seemed like this was a regular occurrence. She was surprisingly gregarious considering her reputation for being a recluse, and I was happy to see her basking in all the attention.
Shortly after that visit, I was elated when my friend Mary Lance asked me to compose music for a documentary she was making about Martin. I knew that something like Emanations would be far too subtle for this project, so I would need to come up with some new material. My hope was to not only evoke the feeling of Martin's work but also the landscape of northern New Mexico, with a nod to the region's musical traditions. A balance of the sublime and the rustic, merging the minimal and folky. Simple beauty with rough edges.
There were a few older pieces of mine that Mary liked and was using as placeholders, so I began by pulling out tracks from those and remixing them. I also recorded a series of simple, short sketches on acoustic and electric guitars. Mary's partner Ben Daitz then gamely improvised over them on viola, and that material was edited and rearranged and layered in various ways. In some cases I ended up using only the viola tracks without the underlying guitar parts.
The documentary was released in 2002. (Agnes saw it before she died and was pleased with it.) Twenty years later, I've finally gotten around to assembling the various cues into a proper soundtrack album. A few pieces appeared on my album Occasional Music (2007), but the rest have never been available before. The longer pieces are presented in their entirety rather than the short excerpts used on the soundtrack, and five were never used in the film and are heard here for the first time. This work was originally made without a computer, so I was glad to have this opportunity to clean it up properly, remix everything, and give it a new life. As a result, much of it now sounds quite different (and hopefully better) than it did in the film.