The Brooklyn Rail

There is a piece by the British land artist Richard Long known by the straightforward title A Line Made By Walking (1967). The artist walked a straight line through a field of grass, repetitively, and photographed the result, a very subtle rut where the grass had been tamped down by his feet. No doubt this disappeared within a few hours. The piece is more in the act of walking than the record, a gracious vestige that points the viewer toward the aesthetic possibilities of one’s own ambulatory presence.

First and foremost, Craig Shepard is a composer, but he’s also a habitual walker. Moving through space with intention and a pace defined by the body opens up vistas, soundscapes, and spatial perception impossible to detect from a car, train, or even a bike. It provides unique insight into living and understanding the world. Shepard’s music is in and of the world. Each of the varying threads of his varied practices involve activating public and outdoor space, often via walking at some stage of the process. If A Line Made By Walking is a precedent, Shepard expands the possibilities of walking-oriented practices to music and sonic space.

Shepard’s use of routine to frame activated mundanity is compelling. His body of work uses an embodied stillness to amplify the subtle edges of our perception. By keeping the body active and occupied with the simple task of walking, particularly a guided walk in which participants are freed from the responsibility of choice of route, Shepard opens up auditory perceptive possibilities. The edges of the frame created by these walks has an aura extending into the mundane lives of their participants.

Author Robert MacFarlane writes “landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating.” MacFarlane clearly negates the notion that the environment is a plastic medium to be manipulated or an inert object to be imposed upon. Shepard takes the author’s notion of landscape’s power to heart, his approach less to impose and more to create a space to allow landscape to project into us in the way that MacFarlane suggests. Melodies presented without harmony, spacious gestures allow the found acoustic environment to activate itself. Shepard is writing music that invites that illumination that MacFarlane suggests landscape is so capable of.

For a month during the summer of 2005, Shepard walked 250 miles across Switzerland, ending every day with a performance of a new solo trumpet work that he had composed earlier that day. Not exactly a movable residency, but rather an integrated creative practice. Shepard’s approach intersects with a long Swiss tradition of hiking and utilized the network of paths—Wanderwegen—that crisscross the country. Written and performed out of doors, the body of work shares a spaciousness with composers like Jürg Frey or Morton Feldman and an acceptance and appreciation of the untouched soundscape of Manfred Werder. Shepard writes melodies that don’t quite read as such but as interjections, occasionally repetitively insistent but never overbearing. Tempos are often specified to be various gradations of walking paces, centering an embodied rhythm that feels attuned to the charged environments the work is performed in. This work is uniquely mutable, site-specific by nature but adaptable to a plethora of environments and acoustic situations.

The composer describes the routine of walking, writing, thinking, not-thinking, and composing as a removal from the day-to-day mundane occupation of bills, chores, and other necessities, a process that the Dadaists termed “deambulation,” a kind of “automatic writing in real space.” The physical weariness of the backpacking life entered the equation, as did the rigors of composing so much so quickly. Shepard has devised a method that is narrow and wide at once. By strictly regimenting his routine during these composing intensives, and by encouraging embodied contemplation and not-thinking, he opens up an intuitive space that likely would remain inaccessible within the confines of a more static life.

Winter through spring 2012, Shepard walked everywhere he went, fully integrating his ambulatory creative practice into his daily life, not as a counter but as an addition. He drew chords out of the Pulaski Bridge’s traffic drone while walking to work in the morning and learned to focus more on the changing light of the morning and evening than the garish light of billboards and shop windows. Every Saturday, he composed a new piece from his sketches from the previous weekdays, and on Sunday he led a silent walk to a location in Brooklyn where he performed the new work. This adaption of the composer’s Swiss intensive activated a similar sense of embodied contemplation feathered into daily routine.

In recordings of these pieces, Shepard shuns the preciousness of the studio, opting to have performers record themselves at home and allow the domestic soundscape to subtly enter. The pieces welcome in the environment, permeable in a way that nearly completely denies the sterility of the concert hall. The soundscape buoys Shepard’s skeletal melodies so much that I struggle to imagine them holding together stripped of place. It is music that occupies the same world that we live in, music that points towards a place to live.

For a time, Shepard was living in New Jersey and working in an office in Midtown Manhattan. The commute necessitated travel on foot, by bus, and by train. Ever the walker, Shepard began to opt for various routes that wound through Hell’s Kitchen. It was slightly longer but he was drawn toward a drone emerging from a vent in the middle of Times Square. Soon he was habitually spending more and more time with the drone before beginning his workday. In 2008, fellow Wandelweiser composer Jürg Frey was visiting New York for a performance and Shepard took him to the vent that so captivated him. After the pair listened a while, Frey filled Shepard in: “I think this might be a sound installation by Max Neuhaus.”

Around the time that Richard Long was marking paths through fields, Max Neuhaus was leading sound walks through Manhattan’s industrial districts. He would stamp the word “LISTEN” on the back of participants’ hands in an effort to point towards an acoustic attunement with their noisy environments. In more recent years, Shepard has continued his series of walking works with silent walks through mostly urban environments with small groups of participants. These walks sometimes culminate in a focused listening session at a particular site he chooses. Following soundwalking progenitor Hildegard Westerkamp’s notion of a soundwalk as a “listening exercise that helps us become aware of our immediate acoustic environment,” Shepard’s silent walks are presented as a temporary reprieve, a directing of selves in space, an attempt at narrowing perspective on the particularities of the urban sonic environment.

Shepard has led two soundwalks down the entire length of Manhattan’s Broadway, the American urban artery, nearly fourteen miles long. These walks no doubt passed by Neuhaus’s installation that had wormed its way into Shepard’s environmental listening years before. Shepard’s walks move as a “bubble of stillness” through the urban landscape, an active engagement disguised as passivity, listening realizing the permeability of the soundscape.

Shepard’s body of work is one of full immersion. Routine and the mundane are counterweights to an approach that highlights sublime moments easily missed. Like his predecessors in Long, Hamish Fulton, and Neuhaus, Shepard’s work resists documentation. Text, photographs, field and studio recordings point toward the ideas but could never be the work itself. To find the work we have to join Shepard, allow ourselves to be guided or meet him at the end of a day’s walk. We have to be vulnerable and share space with each other, the music, the world—nothing less.

This effort to pin this work down feels lacking. Just like Shepard’s work points us towards a heightened experience of the world, this article points us towards an active experience of music by Craig Shepard. Music that occupies the same world that we live in.