The Brooklyn Rail

Tendrils of connection, links, strings; when the pandemic created distance between musical artists, new modes of performance sprang up along with great losses (in a great many ways). Air molecules move differently when we experience sounds in person; headphones, or—god forbid—laptop speakers, can only approximate the experience of feeling vibrations in person. Musicians need to connect and perform with others in the same space, at the same time. Really, this is for everyone, but for a performer this is a visceral necessity.

Katie Porter has forged these connections over her whole career as a bass clarinetist, and now a composer. For her, the return from the pandemic renewed her sense of performance: she wanted and needed to play with as many people as she possibly could. With renewed vigor, she has sought more collaborators and more opportunities to perform, she has breathed life into all manner of places, from forest to gallery to club to Lincoln Center. She has performed with and premiered works from a wide range of artists: Phill Niblock, Lucie Vítková, Carolyn Chen, Jürg Frey, Sarah Hennies, Raven Chacon, and many, many more.

Born in Washington State, she moved to Salt Lake City when she was three. She gravitated toward the clarinet, but always wanted to play the bass clarinet, which she finally got to play at the University of Utah. Later, at CalArts in the early 2000s, the first long-term relationships and collaborations forged themselves. She and others from the CalArts milieu moved to New York after graduation and found their way into composing music for video games, as well as transcribing current pop hits into MIDI ringtones (what a time that was!). She would later partner in the creation of a company devoted to providing these services to major record labels. Porter often found herself as one of the few women in the room with the digital teams from these labels. She credits her time learning her instrument and becoming a self-directed musician as a great advantage at that uncertain era in the music industry (post-Napster, pre-streaming). The soft skills she had as a musician—being prepared, personable, and punctual—helped her in this terra nova.

All the time she spent running this new company (and overseeing more than a dozen employees) led her to create a performance venture, Listen/Space, in 2007. As she told me, “Even if I couldn’t play that much, at least I could organize a couple concerts every month.” These early Listen/Space shows were open to all; whoever wanted a show could perform, leading to the creation of a new network with artists throughout the US and Europe, all who came through those doors in NYC. Listen/Space would later move to Utah when Porter left the city and sold her business in 2010, morphing into a summer residency and eventually a music festival, the VU Symposium.

We are now fully post-pandemic. Porter has moved back to New York City and is an Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room (IPR) in Brooklyn. Her residency has her investigating different formulations and groupings from throughout her history and expanding into new collaborations. For her first performance as part of the IPR residency, she debuted a new quartet, MOONS, featuring Judith Berkson (accordion/voice), Laura Cetilia (cello), and Christine Tavolacci (flute). They performed 18 Flowers in a Row, an open score, but one that’s very deliberate. Petals of the flowers (as drawn in the score) correspond to pitched material that the performers then use. As they each complete the flower at their own pace, they pause and wait for the others before moving to the next. There is a layered delicacy to be observed and heard, not unlike stepping through a wild, yet well-tended, English garden. Each moment becomes a fractal, a smaller version of the whole, all anchored by the warm tones provided by Porter’s bass clarinet.

Porter’s second IPR performance in June (a third performance is scheduled for November 23rd) was a revelation in terms of her development in music creation, collaboration, and performance. The title, Collecting Rocks From The Places We’ve Been - Music In Time & Space, displayed her penchant for globetrotting and the deep time-informed playing that is part of her style on the bass clarinet. For the piece Conversation No. 1, featuring live video projections processed and manipulated by media artist Claudia Schmitz, Porter coaxed low frequency overtones, multi-tracked harmonies, and a wide array of slow-moving sonic richness from the instrument. The sounds were a perfect counterpoint to Schmitz’s imagery, a mesmerizing play of light and color. Sonically, Niblock’s work was evident in some of the overlaid sounds, per the multiphonics and use of extended techniques that approximated his tense stacking of microtonally tuned, pre-recorded tones. Porter and Niblock were in fact working together on a recording project (with another bass clarinetist, Lucio Capece) when Niblock passed away. That record will soon see the light of day. Niblock became a mentor of sorts, a music scene creator extraordinaire, who showed her how you can bring together musicians socially and artistically.

The second work that evening was Collecting Rocks, a showcase for a grouping of Experimental Listening and Music Sessions (ELMS) compatriots, including Nomi Epstein and Jennie Gottschalk. ELMS is a loose grouping of composers and performers that began meeting yearly in 2016 as a listening, performing, and critical discussion ensemble. Porter credits these sessions as helping her to see the influence she could provide to other musicians and to realize her own goals in creating compositions. Onstage those three were joined by another frequent collaborator, pianist Teodora Stepančić (who also runs the essential piano+ music series), in a quartet that Porter calls a kind of “system piece.” The work created a dialog between the group, “small talk” that refers to each of the performers’ individual stories. One of the great joys of this performance was the allowance given to each player: Gottschalk created sound out of the materials for a recipe. The beans, other ingredients, and utensils were the musical timbre of Gottschalk’s instrument. Stepančić and Epstein were at two grand pianos, activating them through various means, like quiet chords, plucked strings, knocked wood, all emblematic of the specific personalities involved.

There is a strong affinity to Land art, as site-specificity is a particular focus for Porter. Musically, utilizing field recordings and performing alongside them is akin to the site-specificity that developed in the visual and performance arts. In Porter’s case, we can trace this from a CalArts aesthetic filtered through teacher and composer Michael Pisaro-Liu and his connection to the Wandelweiser group. In many Wandelweiser works there is often a focus on using the sounds inherent in specific places, grown out of John Cage’s 4’33”. During her time in Utah, Porter came in close proximity to two notable pieces of land art: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), both about three hours apart from each other. Porter sees those places as harboring a resonance for music creation and performance. She has performed many times at both locations, curating and creating music for each site.

Nancy Holt has become a particular touchstone in much of Porter’s work. Her upcoming IPR performance includes several new collaborations that focus on Holt, including a duo (MUD) with the multidisciplinary artist Anne Penders that uses archival interviews with Holt from Penders’s original research. The work will weave all three of these artists into a discursive whole that centers on art, family, and the peripatetic life. New projects with video artist Katherine Liberovskaya and composer/sound artist Patricia Alessandrini both have DNA from Holt-centric experiences as well. As Porter continues to construct these new relationships, between current artists and those that have passed, more roots and rhizomes will foster and sprout in her music and that of others she comes in contact with, leading to evermore paths of sound.