The Brooklyn Rail

Brian Harnetty is a composer based in Columbus, Ohio. Many of his works and projects begin from listening to audio—spoken word, field recordings, music—from sources as varied as small towns in Appalachian Ohio, the Sun Ra archives in Chicago, and the private tape recordings of the noted Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. Through a series of albums starting with American Winter (2007), and including Rawhead & Bloodybones (2015), and Shawnee, Ohio (2019)—all on Winesap Records—Harnetty fused these archival recordings with newly created musical accompaniments, opening portals between our contemporary world and the recent past. The music can be poignant sonic complements to the sampled voice, or sometimes dark, jazz-like, improvisations fittingly found on the album of folk tales, Rawhead & Bloodybones. His time spent creating music from these archives is detailed in his new book, Noisy Memory (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Noisy Memory is about the process of listening to and engaging with these found sounds. It is also a memoir of sorts, detailing Harnetty’s work in these communities and his own personal story.

John P. Hastings (Rail): What was the origin story of working with archives? I know you received a fellowship to work with the audio archive at Berea College in Kentucky in 2006.

Brian Harnetty: When I was doing my master’s degree one of my teachers was the British composer Michael Finnissy. He’s well known for musical borrowing but he does everything through notation. It wasn't until I moved back home to Ohio that I thought about sampling and how sampling was that same process. I took the lessons learned from Michael and then tried to apply them to sampling. But then it raised all kinds of ethical questions for me around appropriation in particular. When I was younger, I was thinking, oh, I can borrow from whatever I want. That quickly changed, and I began to question that. So working with Berea, when I saw that opportunity, I took it. I was already working with Appalachian materials, mostly from the John Lomax recordings, nothing with permission or officially; I was just making stuff. Berea became this opportunity to have an established relationship with the archivists, with historians.

When I moved there I got to meet community members and see how the recordings were being used in Berea and Appalachia more broadly. It got me to meet the people connected to the recordings and that's when it really hit me, the recordings themselves can supposedly contain everything, except for those human interactions. That's what meeting the ancestors or the relatives of the people on the recordings, meeting the people who took care of the recordings or collected them, meant. Taking account of all that history opened up this whole new way of interacting with the recordings.

Rail: How did you envision something to go with those recordings?

Harnetty: If I look back to the models that I was following, Finnissy’s work is about collaging many different layers on top of one another so that those things clash. If I looked at Steve Reich, he was following the metric patterns of speech and then allowing those things to repeat, again and again. I was interested in both of those things and trying to keep more of a documentary approach and having my own ensemble play along with it. I've focused more and more on the storytelling part and trying to leave the recordings alone as much as possible. It became a matter of getting out of the way. Can I make the right choices with what I'm listening to in the samples? Sometimes I'm alongside, sometimes I'm in the background or sometimes I'm covering it up, so it just depends on the recordings.

Rail: One of the parts of the process I found interesting was that you gave musical materials to performers to improvise with, they would record them and send them back, and then you would manipulate those recordings to create a final score. I hadn't heard of anyone doing that sort of thing.

Harnetty: It might come out of a personal deficit. [Laughs] I mean, there are a lot of composers out there who can just hear stuff. I can't work that way or I don't like what I make when I work that way. I thought, if I can have someone send me a bunch of recordings that they've improvised on, it would be like getting another archive and that sense of surprise and listening can happen all over again. What I started to do was I would transcribe bits of pieces that I really liked out of the archive. I would spin out small melodic fragments or harmonic fragments, and I would give those to the musicians. When they send it back, that gives me this chance to hear what they added and then collage everything together. Only after that do I make a score either to remember what I made or for performance.

Rail: There was a certain amount of sensitivity that you had to bring to the Sun Ra archive (The Star-Faced One [2013]), which was a completely different musical archive then the ones that you had been working with. How did you feel approaching that material?

Harnetty: Experimental Sound Studio, the caretakers of the Sun Ra archive in Chicago, finished digitizing everything in the archive in 2010. To celebrate, they commissioned musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, and writers to reinterpret the archive. I was part of that group; it was nice to be included in that. But what I really got out of it was that it was a formal relationship, with a contract with Sun's nephew, and he needed to approve whatever I made. I welcomed that because then, well it doesn't answer all of the appropriation questions but at least it's a step in the right direction to try to navigate how to use it. And I was also comfortable with multiple people all using the same material because then it takes away from seeming like I'm some authoritative voice of how to interpret Sun Ra.

Rail: In regards to the Shawnee, Ohio album (2019), you really wanted to include the community, the people there and the families, in the music creation process. You were concerned about how they would hear this music. There’s the idea of creating music to satisfy yourself, or the composer satisfying themselves. But you push back against that.

Harnetty: What I would say is that it's not the only thing. I know that I have thought in the past, and still do sometimes, that I'm just focused on what I'm thinking about for a piece. But the Shawnee project was six full years of ethnographic work and digitizing the whole town’s archive. I based my Ph.D. on that work, and I'm still involved with that community. I still volunteer for a nonprofit there. I did have this pressure on myself to get it right. I realized that they were helping me with choosing the recordings and so I saw it more as a collaborative project. This dips into the idea of socially engaged art, art that has much more of that social process embedded within it, and I thought that was really interesting to combine that with music composition. I knew that we were gonna play it in Shawnee, in the town. As I was writing, I was thinking about what it would be like for us to be in that room, with the community, and that definitely affected the way that I wrote.

Rail: Reading your book it’s hard not to see it, especially because you're working in Appalachian Ohio, as almost a reply to the JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy version of that part of the country. The way that you’ve worked within the communities there seems a much more inclusive vision; engagement versus indictment of the people there. I don't know if this was on your mind at all, but you say in the book, you’re not trying to create a rosy vision of the past, you are showing it for what it is. How did you see this process of engagement with people there, the histories there, and the politics of what is there now?

Harnetty: Part of it for me is trying to push back on various stereotypes, Appalachia more broadly and then within Ohio. Ohio is made fun of all the time and some of it rightly so, but I think it's much more subtle and rich than people often give it credit for. I always felt like that should be part of what I do, not to always despair about it, but to try to find the aspects of the social fabric of Ohio, and Appalachian Ohio, that push against those stereotypes. The more that I learned from the community, yes, it does have a lot of poverty issues, but there's much more resilience and hope there than I think gets covered in the news.

I had read Hillbilly Elegy and had sort of a visceral reaction; I thought of it as falling into those tropes of being excessively negative around aspects of Ohio in particular and Appalachia more broadly. And it was butting up against everything that I was seeing, which was completely community-based, everybody holding each other up, trying to figure out how to get to a little bit better for everybody. And so I always tried to emphasize that.