The ever-adventurous violinist Sarah Plum has long been a champion of contemporary music. Her latest release, Personal Noise (BGR 619, rel. June 2022), features new music for violin and electronics by living composers, many of which were written especially for Ms. Plum. The collection includes works by Mari Takano, Mari Kimura, Kyong Mee Choi, Jeff Herriot, Charles Nichols, Eric Moe and Eric Lyon. We recently spoke to her about electro-acoustic music, improvisation in Classical music, the new album, and more.
When did you know you wanted to focus your performance career on contemporary music?
It wasn’t ever a conscious decision, but I have always been interested in contemporary music and modernism. After the release of my first solo CD Absconditus, the new music part of my life went into overdrive, with more concerts, residencies, commissions and collaborations. It was a lot of fun and I also felt a sense of a mission to get music created, played and heard.
And I think my background has contributed to this focus : I grew up with artist parents (my Dad was a painter and my Mom was a potter) in a contemporary house that was designed by a friend of theirs. So from an early age I was exposed to people creating contemporary art and collaborating on creative projects as a way of life. I never imagined a musical life without playing new music and working closely with living composers.
I moved to Europe after I completed my DMA at Stony Brook and had the good fortune to take part in historic concerts and premieres of new music, playing with groups like Ensemble Moderne, Musik Fabrik, Ensemble Contrechamps, Nieuw Ensemble Amsterdam, on tour and at prominent festivals and venues. I liked the people and the music and wanted to continue to be a part of this world, which felt very sympathetic to me.
Also in Germany I met Sidney Corbett. He asked me to premiere his solo sonata Archipel: Chagall at the Landesmuseum Mainz in a gallery full of Chagall’s prints. This was the start of a long and productive collaborative friendship that persists to this day. Most recently Sidney wrote me a solo sonata based on Bach’s Sonata No. 2 in a minor for solo violin (the first in a series of commissions for works based on each of Bach’s 6 solo Sonatas and Partitas). I played part of it in Mannheim, Germany before the pandemic but it hasn’t had its full premiere yet.
This collaboration also gave me a template for what I wanted to do: work closely with composers with lots of repeat performances of their works. I am an advocate for composers and their pieces. For the most part I am not going to add pieces to my repertoire that are played and recorded a lot already. All the composers I play are quite successful, they have good teaching jobs, get commissions, have gotten Guggenheims and Fulbrights and Barlows etc., but they are not household names. It is important to me to bring these works to a larger audience and give them many repeat performances.
Your new album, “Personal Noise” is entirely music for violin and electronics. Tell me about “electronics” as a “duo partner”. How is it to play along with, react to and interact with electronically-generated sounds?
It can be difficult with what we call “fixed media” - which is a multi layered recording created by the composer. It is fixed and unresponsive so I have to make sure I match and line up with this unyielding duo partner! On the positive side it is reliable and easier to do in the sense that it is always the same.
Live electronics is a much more fluid experience with flexibility, which opens up all sorts of possibilities. It is much more like working with a person as a partner, but it sometimes can be unreliable, and there is more set up and the sound check, and sometimes things malfunction. I love working with MAX and other live electronic programs and it has been exciting to play these pieces.
Tell us some of the different kinds of electronics used in the works on “Personal Noise.”
Eric Moe, Mari Takano and Kyong Mee Choi’s pieces are with fixed media. Each tape that the composers made is super rich, full of different recorded and electric sounds and quite gorgeous. I love playing these pieces in concert because it is like having an orchestra in your back pocket. Mari Kimura, Jeff Herriott and Charles Nichols’ piecesare with MAX msp. In Mari’s piece the electronics react to my and Yvonne’s pitches, so whatever we do, certain sounds come out of the electronics in a really lush and beautiful way. Jeff’s piece has a variety of things going on - loops and some chance elements, which I love. In concert it is different every time; for the CD we chose the versions we liked the most. Charles’ piece is, in many ways, the most ambitious. It is made of recorded sounds, and my playing is also recorded and processed in real time. So it is me recorded, me live and me processed - and affected by the motion sensor on my hand. Really cool!
How did you start playing electronic music?
For the release of my first solo CD Absconditus, I had a concert on a series at the Berlin main train station. Sidney Corbett introduced me to his friend Mari Takano, whom he met when they both studied with Gyorgy Ligeti in Hamburg in the 80’s. She sent me the piece and a CD of the audio track that I played with. I really liked the piece and liked the variety it gave me on programs of music for violin alone - I performed it over 50 times. Then I played a piece by Matthew Burtner (my first Max piece) and fell in love with live electronics, the freedom and the potential for unusual sounds. Next, Jeff Herriot wrote me the piece that is on “Personal Noise”. At each step I learned more about the technology and was continually challenged with new technology and techniques.
How much room is there, within the works on this album, for improvisation and/or variation between performances?
For the CD it is only Jeff Herriott’s piece that has some choice elements and improvisation. At the concert I gave at Constellation in Chicago in May 2022 ( on Youtube), Laurie Schwartz’ss work was improvisatory. The rest are all notated, or things happen in a chance way based on the program, but not related to what I am doing.
What do you hope listeners take away from the album; and/or the art and craft of performing a live instrument with electronics?
I hope listeners enjoy it and have their perspective expanded, perhaps even have their mind blown a bit. It’s an opportunity to learn about some composers new to them, and possibly inspired them to experience more of their music. I hope I can give them a sense of the breadth of what is out there and an openness to explore further.