Sounds of Now: Elaine Mitchener and Apartment House
Elaine Mitchener is a singer, performance artist and composer who works in areas of experimental music that often call on a multidisciplinary approach. She specialises in championing marginalised composers, and not only who are currently active, but also those from earlier decades whose music and ideas feels so relevant to today.
Read more: www.elainemitchener.com
Music in the Round’s Sheffield Programme Manager and curator of the Sounds of Now series Tom McKinney recently sat down with Elaine to ask about her plans in Sheffield and her wider work. He began by asking whether she sees her practice as chamber music.
Elaine has been at the forefront of a small number of artists working in experimental music, pushing for institutions, venues and fellow performers to tackle the inequalities and biases within western classical music. She’s not only confronted this in her own music, but also explained her ideas and aspirations in this article from 2021.
With Tom, she discussed how programming is changing, and the work that remains to be done.
Apartment House takes its name from a work by John Cage, a composer whose influence still looms large over so much of today’s new music, despite having died in 1992. The ensemble was formed by cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, and as artistic director he’s commissioned over 100 new works for Apartment House, as well as constantly unearthing the works of overlooked composers.
Read more: www.apartmenthouse.co.uk
As they were preparing to perform together in Sheffield, Tom asked about themes in the programme that Elaine and Apartment House were presenting.
As part of their collaborations, Elaine and Apartment House often perform works by the Fluxus artists, a group of composers, poets and artists who staged wildly subversive, often anarchic, events in the 1960s and 70s. Musicians associated with the movement included John Cage, who was perhaps the biggest influence, as well as Ben Patterson, Jeanne Lee, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, James Tenney and Jackson Mac Low. Apartment House’s Anton Lukoszevieze wrote recently in The Wire about Patterson’s work and the role of chance as well as his wider musical legacy.
Tom asked Elaine about the influence of this group of composers and other artists.
Despite existing on the fringes of the music world, over half a century later, the legacy of Fluxus is being re-examined and informing the work of many of the current younger generation of experimental composers. You can see the range of work they undertook in this online catalogue of Fluxus films.
The music they perform together also includes that of jazz singer and Fluxus associate Jeanne Lee.
In an earlier piece for The Wire, Anton explores the first string quartet from Charles Mingus: a fully notated piece from a famous jazz improvisor. Drawing on jazz as well as other musical traditions, there are a huge varieties of approaches to notating music in the work that Elaine and Apartment House perform.
Explore the Insomnia Drawings by artist Louise Bourgeois which Apartment House and Elaine treat as graphic scores.
Elaine has been a significant force in the resurgence of the reputation of composer-performer Julius Eastman. She told Tom how she discovered him, performing Peter Maxwell Davies’ ‘Eight Songs for a Mad King’.
And the music of Christian Wolff is a regular feature in their programmes.
Tom and Elaine concluded by discussing the state of experimental and new music today – everything that is changing for the better and the work that remains to be done.
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