Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Tonya Lockyer. I'm an artist, writer and cultural producer. This podcast is a conversation with composer Stuart Dempster, on the occasion of Centrum's 50th anniversary. I was invited by Centrum to have a conversation with Stuart, my friend and mentor, as part of a greater look back at key moments in Centrum's residency program. As you'll soon hear, Stuart has played a role in many groundbreaking moments in American new music, including one that happened right here at Centrum and its home in Fort Worden, Washington.
How do you introduce someone like Stuart Dempster? He is a world-renowned trombonist, composer, and sound gatherer. He literally wrote the book on the modern trombone. And he's mentored and inspired countless of artists. His recording “In The Great Abbey of Clement VI” is considered a cult classic and inspired legendary choreographers like Merce Cunningham and William Forsythe. His collaborations with music pioneers like Terry Riley, John Cage, and composer Pauline Oliveros, with whom he cofounded The Deep Listening Band, have given new ears to generations. The New York Times has called Stuart “impeccable”. He's someone I love and admire.
Our conversation happened just as the world was beginning to open-up after the COVID-19 pandemic. So Stuart, now in his eighties, requested we meet in his home. So, you might hear subtle sounds in the background, like his beloved wife Renko walking in the hallway, which feels just right for a conversation about listening and a lifetime of sound gathering.
Our conversation is about deep listening and creative friendships and lost sounds, the intricacies of harmony and reverberation, how parks should protect their sounds as much as they protect their fauna, and what it's like to create seminal moments in music. We travel from the streetcars of San Francisco to Carnegie Hall, but it begins right here at Centrum in the sonic depths under Fort Worden, in The Cistern.
This music, by The Deep Listening Band, is called “7-Up”. It was recorded in The Cistern, which is part of a World War I decommissioned fort that is now the home of Centrum. A cistern, as you probably know, is an underground holding cell for water that is often used for drinking water or putting out fires. And that's where this music began, in this empty water cistern in the Pacific Northwest.
Because The Cistern is concrete and large, it's a very echoey place when it doesn't have water in it anymore. Stuart Dempster went into this cistern many times and was just amazed by the vast reverb there, and he started improvising. He soon started bringing other people to Centrum through the trap door that leads to a ladder down into this massive sonic space.He brought his students, a class of ten trombonists, to record in the cistern and his dear friend, the electronic music and deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros.
Stuart told me he rarely welcomes guests in conversations these days, so this conversation is a rare treat.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Stuart Dempster, thank you for this conversation. We've known each other for nearly three decades. You have a long and very interesting life. There's so much we could talk about. We could have a conversation about sound and listening, sound and healing, sound and the environment and place.
And I thought, because we're here to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Centrum, that we might actually start there, with Centrum and your first encounters with The Cistern, which is this 2 million gallon water tank that was then dried out and became this sonic wonder that lives under the ground of Centrum. So I was wondering if we could start with you walking us through your first encounters of Centrum and The Cistern.
[00:03:58] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, to begin with, it was seldom dry in 1 February. It was like, might as well be a rainstorm inside. It was all dripping down the walls and it was quite amazing. But backing up, David Mahler and I were going to teach a class from one of the youths. The cistern and parks somehow found out and cemented over the entrance.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: They cemented over the entrance.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Cemented over the entrance. They thought that would be enough.
At some point after that, the teenagers came and ripped off the top somehow and had continued to have their parties. That was pretty famous, starting probably from the 1930s. Anyway. Dan Harpole at the time was program manager, I think, at Centrum.
He was very willing to go to Olympia to make a case for getting the cistern to open. I have to really respect him as the one that really got it going.
And happened to be a time when Pauline Oliveros was coming to the West Coast and she was bringing along electronic assistant Panaiotis. About two weeks before they came, you know, I better get Al Swanson out here ust in case we get, you know, want to have a nice, good recording of our tests. He was a major recordist for Seattle Symphony for a time and had a lot of jobs, well earned location recordings, he called it, and he came out and set up his Nagra. We're going to make all these tests and if we got something good, we'll go back and record.
And this is October of 1988.
And we got a few little tests, but we also got four usable tracks to make a CD. And that's how deep listening got started.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: So that album was The Deep Listening Band. And I didn't realize that was the first time The Deep Listening band ever played together.
[00:06:35] Speaker C: Yeah, that was before we knew we were a band.
We just called the recording Deep Listening. Didn't offer any other information except biographies and a little bit about the pieces and instrumentation and so on. And the talk about the reverberation, which is, I always felt was around 45 seconds, which is a lot when you make your first mistake. And the mistakes usually have the decency to go away, but not when you have reverberations. You have to be a clever composer to take care of whatever insult you gave to The Cistern.
I say, well, Pauline, I know we never talk ahead of time when we're going to do as an improv.It just gets in the way. But I said, I do have to settle in on a couple of didgeridoo links because they're noisy to fuss around with. I had this abs pipe set up to have various pitches and she had her accordion that was a five limit and a seven limit that I can't really explain. But anyway, it's special tuning that was more like just intonation of some kind. Trombone can adapt pretty easily to that, more than other instruments. And that was part of the thing. Trombone player and didgeridoo and. And then there was the garden hose and shells and other oddments. So, we recorded that first time, I think it was October 8, 1988, released the subsequent May 1989.
He was a hit.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Can you talk to me about why it's a seminal album? Why you think that album made such waves? And for those of us who maybe will never get to experience The Cistern, why is it described as being astonishing? Why were you so compelled that you just had to get in there and make sound?
[00:09:09] Speaker C: Why? Yai yai.
You don't really appreciate the reverberation until you make your first instant noise of broken glass. Because you get a little piece of crunch of a small piece of glass, and suddenly you have it going on for 30 seconds. It's 45 seconds, maybe usable, 35. And I learned to play into the cistern what my perception of what the cistern would like to hear, and one of the things that I could make quite playful is that when I play into the cistern, I have an amplitude that keeps increasing. And then I do it in such a way that I can stop playing and the amplitude will increase for a few seconds before it starts to Diminuendo. So, you can't really tell when I quit playing. And so, there's probably 30 seconds worth of a single thing. And then I choose a time to add more information. And that's how it builds over time. It took me a while to figure it out, but I thought our first try was pretty good. We paced ourselves, didn't overwhelm the cistern, which if you put too much information there, the cistern puts it right back out, and then you have too much information, you get a lot of garbage. But we got four really good tracks out of there. That first so called experimental day.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: And what creates the reverb? Is it the pillars? Is it the shape of the cistern?
[00:11:01] Speaker C: Yeah, the answer there would be, yes, it's circular. The walls of the thing are circular. And there are 89 columns that I counted. Don't ask me why. I even checked twice, because I applied to do something for the centennial of the state of Washington, which was 1989. So, the columns were kind of square. So, they did move sound a little differently than the circular cistern.
And that was good because it mixed.
It was more of a mix of how things worked and connected and massaged each other, I guess you could say, in the reverberation.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: You talk about The Cistern almost like it's a living entity. And it seems like you're playing instruments inside of another instrument. Is that what it feels like?
[00:12:00] Speaker C: It's an instrument that one learns to play. And you find out in 10 seconds that you really have to allow time to just open up and you leave space for stuff to happen for the cistern to have its say. And it's lovely.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: So how did playing in the cistern inform the work that you did after that? Because The Deep Listening Band has its first recording. You call it Deep Listening. Later, Pauline does workshops in deep listening. I think they might have even trademarked deep listening. Did that really start there in The Cistern?
[00:12:40] Speaker C: It did start in that sense, because she said something about deep listening. And I said, I think you've got the title. What do you mean, the title? I say, well, we're in the deep and we're listening. And then she was able to take that further to where she had it as her calling card for practically everything she did afterward. Yeah, but we still weren't a band. We knew we were going to do more stuff.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: How would you describe Pauline Oliveros to someone who did not know her work? You had this really deep creative friendship for how many years?
[00:13:26] Speaker C: Over 60 years.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: And how would you describe what your creative friendship was?
[00:13:31] Speaker C: Yeah, well, it was one of those. . .the way we first met was at San Francisco State.
My first semester there was in the fall, but I didn't meet her till the second semester, February of 1955.
And I thought it was the band, but she says it was the orchestra we were both in.
And we met literally with our bells facing each other. She had her French horn, and I was right behind her. And so, not that I realized it at the time, but it was so symbolic of what her life would be with the French horn bell right there and my bell horn right here. We were playing, doing what we do, and that's how we met.
And then I would visit the composer lab that Wendell Otey had for the students there. And when it would come time for Pauline's music to be played, a lot of the students would leave.
And I didn't know any better. I left with this friend. I wasn't in the class; I was just visiting.
And I thought, well, that's weird. So, the next week I went again, but I said, ‘Joe,’ (who's Joe Weber) ‘I'm going to stay. You can go.’
And so, I went there, and that's how I met Terry Riley and Loren Rush. And we became kind of a troika of support for her activity at that time.
And rest is history in a sense, in a way. I wasn't what I would call the biggest or the busiest collaborator with her. And yet we have this thread running through 25 years of deep listening band. It's just kind of an undercurrent.
So, our second CD, Troglodyte's Delight, it was seven players, or six players and one dancer in a cave near Woodstock, New York.
And that was in a cave. So, it was kind of the reverse of the cistern. It was no reverb, hardly at all. Plenty of mosquitoes. I had a concert there and I wanted a lot of cans.
The guy that worked at the hotel nearby, they brought garbage can, waste baskets. I had a lot of tin cans and stuff because the water was dripping all the time. So, we had a lot of dripping water.
So that was Troglodyte's Delight. A pretty, pretty nice recording.
And then coming to 1992 was the third recording, The Ready Made Boomerang. That was the February when it was just water coming down everywhere. And it was kind of a joke because they talk about wet and dry sound.
And the dry cistern makes for a much more reverberant thing than the wet sound. So, it probably lost about ten to 15 seconds reverberation because of the water, because in audio, they talk
about it in the reverse, which is kind of humorous to me. Anyway, we had the balloon pop that starts it.
That was a balloon pop. We also had an audio person come and fire a blank pistol, and it sounded just like the balloon pop. A big pop like that in a balloon. And you hear it for a good, I don't know, 35, 40 seconds. The pureness of the sound was what I so appreciated of the cistern. It's just even as could be in all ranges. I mean, I've been in other reverberate places, but just really, really something.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: A decade before you recorded deep listening at the Cistern, you recorded, in 1978, an album In The Great Abbey that has a reverb that's much shorter than in the Cistern.
[00:18:46] Speaker C: The Great Abbey of Clement VI.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: The six people have also written about and compared it to the Taj Mahal for being this amazing sonic space. And yet we can't access the Cistern anymore. It's like this secret sonic wonder underneath Centrum. Should we be protecting the cistern?
[00:19:06] Speaker C: If I can actually write all the notes I have for a book for all this would be cisterns and simulations. There's been two simulations.
The one that I first encountered that was really pure was Jonas Braash, saxophone player. He took a lot of measurements of the cistern. Lo and behold, got a simulation that really, really matches the original. First used it at EMPAC. Yeah.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: EMPAC in Upstate New York
[00:19:44] Speaker C: And that worked really well. I found out there's another one that was in Seattle at Digital Arts/UW.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: I appreciate that you mentioned that in the cave there was also a movement artist. That's a connection you and I have, an improvisational collaboration with movement and sound. Ten years before I met you, I was working and collaborating with Pauline, and we would travel and tour, and I also did a lot of her workshops. When Pauline passed away recently, I was struck by what a huge impact she had had. People seem to be resonating with deep listening.
When I would be in Pauline's workshops or warming up for an improvisation with her, or even just walking around a monastery in Russia collecting sounds, she often talked about her work as being humanitarian and this idea that listening can expand consciousness and can be healing. And I'm wondering if you share that, and if you could talk a bit about sound and healing, because I also remember once when we were working together, I was healing from a broken foot, and you sounded into the bones of my foot, and it was profoundly healing. I don't know. It's the vibration or that kind of attention and care. I wonder if you can speak to this idea of sound and healing and what that means for you.
[00:21:14] Speaker C: It's a vibration, but it's also an intention to share your positive energy, as it were, or enhance someone else's positive energy that may not be available easily at a certain time. That’s something I learned working with Doctor John Diamond, who is a behavioral kinesiologist. He told me that I already had a good sense of that before I knew it. And that got me back to thinking: When I was a kid, six years old, it was World War II, and my family, we go for an outing, and the idea of the outing was to make a picnic and go down to Berkeley Station and watch the trains.
And it was all steam trains in that time. And as a listener, I was already a listener even then, although I didn't know it.
And the way I listened. I mean, I'd learn how to hear the tracks sing and how in the streetcars, also in Berkeley, how the overhead wires sing, and the rails would sing. And I'd go estimate without knowing where the streetcar was, I could estimate time to where it would show up at the end of the line, where I spent a lot of my time as a kid, just hanging out where the streetcar met the end of the line.
And so, all that subtle listening came with me early on. And I blame my mother for most of that because the highways in those days are by the train tracks. And she'd say train. She'd yell out and unroll the windows and listen. So, we did that driving along wherever we were going to Bryce Canyon or Yosemite or who knows?
We did a lot of travel as a kid.
You learn a lot from that. And of course, the trains were so available because they were parallel to the highway practically everywhere at that time. No interstate. That wasn't going to happen for another 10 to 15 years. So, it was a very interesting time for me.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: And what got you interested in then playing places for sounds? One of the things I learned in preparing for this conversation is that before The Deep Listening Band performed in the cistern at Centrum, you were a professor at the University of Washington, and you brought many, many students to Centrum and to the cistern.
And I found this quote by Nat Evans, who said, about the ethos (he was talking about experimental music and the Pacific Northwest in particular) he said, “The ethos of silence, listening, and the spirit of guided improvisation has taken many roads. But in the Pacific Northwest, these ideas have played out in particular site-specific ways, thanks especially to the enormous cistern at Centrum and its epic reverb and singular sound.” But it seems a lot of that might be thanks, especially, to Stuart Dempster bringing generations of students out to Centrum. Is that true? Can you speak a little bit about your role as an educator in introducing people to Centrum and to listening to space?
[00:25:01] Speaker C: Yeah, there was some of that, like in ‘78 when we couldn't use the cistern.
We did finally have a small chance later on to do what we were doing there as kind of a teaching thing. But the happy accident that came that provided the recording Underground Overlays from The Cistern Chapel, which became the source for a commission from Merce Cunningham, we were just on there on a lark, and there again, ‘Maybe I should have Al Swanson come with his recorder? You never know what's going to happen.’
I knew we'd get some good sounds.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: When you say you were there, you mean you and, like, nine students, right? With trombones? Nine trombone students, yeah?
[00:26:03] Speaker C: Ten altogether.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Ten altogether.
[00:26:06] Speaker C: And we did these takes and got a really good CD. That has meant a lot to a lot of people. Certainly meant a lot to me.
There was one person in particular who she wanted to use, have the doctors play Underground Overlays when she was having surgery.
And I was impressed with that, and also understood why she asked me if it would be all right. And I said, I think you'll be just fine. You know, I think it'll help you rather than hurt. It evens out the energy.
It's restful. It can help you heal.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: I read that one of the ways you made the park in Fort Worden at Centrum agree to open up the cistern is you said parks should pay as much attention to its sounds as parks give attention to their sights.
I just thought that. . . Can you say more about that?
[00:27:39] Speaker C: That is so rare for that to happen anywhere.
And it's rare enough now at The Cistern, which is presumably still closed. And I look back at John Muir's book, who talks a lot about all his hiking and walking and extensive things that he did in his early and later years. He was a deep listener from the get-go. He'd talk about the sounds, and he’d write about it so well that you could feel it.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: So, you actually created a book which is titled The State of Washington as a Musical Instrument, and it's full of locations around the state which have sounds that you invite people to pay attention to, you feel should be given care, like you told the park service.
But you tell me that a lot of those places are lost or not still around. Some of them are also at Centrum—the pond at Centrum, the church organ, and the town of Port Townsend.
[00:28:49] Speaker C: Well, the pond is there, as far as I know, but all the frogs are gone.
Used to be incredible frogs. Thing I'm thinking of in eastern Washington. . .
[00:29:03] Speaker B: . . . Palouse?
[00:29:04] Speaker C: Palouse. Palouse Falls. Palouse Falls is a wonderful place because you get there or somewhere and you have to walk after a certain point and you hear something, but you don't know what exactly, because it sounds like it might be wind, but, well, there's no wind, particularly in Yakima. Oh, I don't know, maybe 300 yards, not all that far. And then the falls themselves come into view, and you can appreciate the source of the sound, but it's so different how you walk around in that area. And, of course, it depends on what the wind's doing and stuff like that.
Be cautious of rattlesnakes if you suddenly decide to go over there.
That was one of my favorites.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: I have been thinking about how we are ancestors. You know, the world, the climate, the environment is changing quickly.
We've done little things like remove our lawn and put in clover for bees, for the future. I've thought about breeding butterflies. I want to make sure my niece and nephews and their children have butterflies. And you have grandchildren. I'm wondering if you have favorite sounds that you would really hope that your grandchildren, your grandchildren's grandchildren, get to hear?
[00:30:40] Speaker C: Well, there's gonna be sound. There's gonna be sounds, whether we like it or not, just a spectrum of what they are is gonna change over time. And we don't know what that is. We get a taste of it with all these tornadoes and things that are going on.
There's plenty of favorites.
Music may still be going, one can hope. And the natural sounds.
One Square Inch of Silence is a wonderful book by Gordon Hempton that'll be instructive. That should be required reading, not that it ever will be. I guess it's too important.
In my backyard, when I was really little, I was just listening to bees and bugs and yellow jackets or whatever was around. Yellowjackets, enjoying the plum tree and gushy plumes.
There was a lot of sound at that time that you don't hear often enough. There was this ice truck that would come up Arlington Avenue in Kensington when I was a little kid, and then the guy would come by, “Rags, bottles, cans!” Early recycling, I realize now. And that was a wagon, horse drawn wagon, like the ice truck.
So, a lot of sounds that are kind of lost like that—you see a movie or something where that is relevant and maybe you can pick up a little bit, but hearing it in real-time and the movement, how it moved, what the horse steps were doing . . . that was all just lovely for me to enjoy.
Not as much car travel at the time. And the streetcars were still relevant before the buses replaced it, so I miss the streetcars.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: You collaborated with Terry Riley, Lou Harrison. You were part of some really amazing collaborations. You were part of a moment where in American experimental music people really opened their ears. Didn't you say John Cage asked you before you gave him The Ready Made Boomerang, “When do I get my new ears?” People were getting new ears.
[00:33:32] Speaker C: Really wonderful. I said, oh, yeah, I'll have it tomorrow. Hopefully it was going to arrive, which it did next day.
“When do I get my new ears?” And I thought that was such a wonderful thing to say to me. I really appreciated that because it was different than thinking of it some other way. When do I get the new CD? Or when do I get this? When do I get in my new ears? I think that was prompted by the thing he wrote, the mesostic that goes with The Ready Made Boomerang.
It's a mesostic, which is, you have The Ready Made Boomerang vertically presented in the middle of the poem. And if you have that CD, it's in there.
Anyway, he was basically talking about how harmony found him again. It was because of the Deep Listening album that he had found harmony again.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: What do you think Cage meant by he got harmony again from listening to—
[00:34:54] Speaker C: He was so into new music and whatever he was doing, I think he just sort of set harmony aside. And it was that. It was, in a sense, he’d done whatever he was doing, and this suddenly gave him a new life of approaching harmony again in a way different way than new music, so-called new music.
Of course, it was the just tuning, I think, that had a lot to do with it. I mean, it's fascinating because in playing in it, I played in a lot of orchestras, one in the military, of all things, and Oakland Symphony for four years. You learn to play in a section, in just intonation. Every section does. Because you have to have the resonance of those chords. But the orchestra as a whole plays in equal temperament. And you wonder why musicians are a little goofy in the head.
That's a really hard thing to reconcile. And they do it all their lives. I did it. I mean, it's a very goofy thing.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: From someone who doesn't play an instrument, you know, doesn't play music at that level as you do. Can you say more? Help us understand what you mean about why that is a goofy thing to have to reconcile.
[00:36:24] Speaker C: Yeah. Because when I would play, while I was a bass trombonist, sometimes in the army, I was the bass trombone.
You're the center of the. . . the bottom of the chord, let's say. And the first player, which I did when I was in Oakland, you resonate with the first player, the second trombone player, which I've done a lot of that.
Where do I go? You sit there. You got a position. You're trying to figure out it doesn't resonate because. So you have to choose. I mean, if it's a.
If it's a certain chord, you're going to be putting it up higher than if it was another chord in a different way or in an inversion or something like that, that would make the second player have to adjust for everything.
And I've done that. It's not, in some ways, it's the hardest chair to play, which I find intriguing.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: So I'm getting a sense that it was at San Francisco State that you met Pauline. Everybody was walking out, and you decided to stay. And, also staying in the room, was Terry Riley. Is that how you also met Loren Rush, and that's how you all met each other, because you all stayed in that room and decided there was something there, there? And what was that there that made you all stay and become friends?
[00:37:59] Speaker C: They weren't respecting her music, the people leaving, there was 20 or 25 people, people that fancied themselves being composers.
But over time, I really, I felt so, I guess, committed somehow to respect Pauline and Terry Riley.
Loren Rush, too. Loren Rush was a friend I had known in high school. He was at Richmond High, and I was at El Serum.
And they were both a year ahead of me, so. And they were, you know, became very good composers. And Terry Riley's had a real career, of course. And “In C” was one of the pieces that I got to play. And I was so taken by that piece that I made some efforts to make other performance of it happen.
And that went to when I was in Buffalo at the creative associate program at University of Buffalo.
And then from that, the first recording came, and I did the recital. I had three solo pieces, and then did “In C” pieces I had commissioned. And then “In C” was part of that first concert that year.
1967-68. So, I just brought it from the West Coast.
And we did the performance. We did the performance in Carnegie, the Carnegie Recital Hall, Weill Recital Hall. Now we so assumed that people would be leaving. We put see some of the. . . .I don't know who did it. Maybe it was the Columbia folks, put speakers in the hallway down out into the street figuring audiences would leave. But it turned out that some did, I'm sure. But there were other people that came up kind of front. It was like they were watching a Woody Herman band, you know, just digging it.
And I thought, wow, this is really impressive. And the recording just took off from that.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: I understand “In C” has a unique score. Can you say something about that? How your co-creating it, kind of.
[00:40:36] Speaker C: 53 cells of notes pitches and you start-out with one, playing that, and then pretty soon a few of you will move ahead to the next, two.
And the third cell, while the other two are still going.
And there's one person who is popping out the C in a rhythmic way with each thing. And then when you get to about to the fourth one, then you start trying to keep it within four cells as you move through all 53 of them. And it's a beautiful piece. I still love it in its form. In that early form it was kind of wild when the recording, in some ways, it's almost frantic.
And it's partly because it was only ten of us. So we recorded it, played through it, and then you listen. Well, let's listen to it. Okay, we did that. And then a couple, 3 hours, later you do it again and listen to that. And then the next morning go back and play the next overlay. Listen to that, and you listen to all three of those together. Well, that was a pretty heavy thing over less than 48 hours. That's quite a dose of “In C”. And it was amazing how energized I was from that piece. I was amazed I could even play it. But that’s sort of another story, because that was the early days when they only used treble clef instruments.
Later on, Terry opened it up to orchestras and larger octaves involved, which to me, gave somewhat of a heavier feeling to the thing even though it was still a good piece. We played the 47th anniversary of the piece in Carnegie Hall in 2009 and that must have had 70 players.
Something like that. I don't know.
It was amazing. All kinds of different instruments. But that sparkle of the initial. I call it the sparkle of that initial treble. Only thing, I really think of that as the urtext, as it were. Robert Carl wrote a book called Terry Riley’s In C that talks about that piece and all the many funny and odd and just crazy recordings that people have done, you know, rock bands. It's just a bevy of people that have wanted to get into it. And you can see why because you just. It takes you. It takes you in.
It doesn't overwhelm you. It just takes you in and takes you on a journey.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: It's almost like a game. Like a game score that you can all play together.
[00:44:23] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
They added that punching piano because it was so easy to lose the pulse, which was really important.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: Yeah, so you were in the, in the room with Terry Riley. Did he, did Terry Riley come and say, ‘I have this idea’, or was it, ‘Let's try this out’? Because you just said the C was added because you lost the pulse.
[00:44:51] Speaker C: So, it was kind of an accident. He was on the bus, on the way home from work, and he kind of wrote the whole thing out overnight.
I’m trying to remember the name of the place where he played a lot of jazz piano in San Francisco . . . it just sort of came to him and it just took off. A lot of different audiences. Different audiences, types of audiences, are pretty up for listening to it. I just found that so interesting over time.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: That was 1964, and then you and Pauline became known for deep listening and The Deep Listening Band. Did that surprise you, that that took off? Didn't that take you around the world?
[00:45:49] Speaker C: 2013 was the 25th anniversary, almost. Almost to the day. So that was the biggest part of my life with Pauline. But I mean, there were so many other things that we did together, too, at the front end. The Tape Center stuff. I played concerts that she organized.
So. Yeah, about reverberation, I was going to mention something about that—When I played in Grace Cathedral, fairly often in the brass groups that they had for the church services, Easter and Christmas and occasionally some other larger event.
And it had this five-second reverberation that was really funky. This would have been around 1957 and ‘58, I guess. I played there often enough, and I didn't think much about it except that I didn't like it. And then I went into the army. I was drafted in 1960, went to Germany, and there was a 7th Army Symphony that I auditioned for and got into, if you can imagine, and did my time there.
And, I mean, I really had a pretty good time considering everything. When I think of what other soldiers have had to do, I find it so astonishing. But the German people really liked it because, especially in the smaller towns, a lot of dead musicians after World War II. So there were shortages in their own orchestras, and they had to build back, had to build buildings, or both.
So the orchestra was prized.
That was over in 1960, and I was back at Grace Cathedral the next year for concerts at Grace Cathedral. When I played the first one, and I was in there a little early, and I warmed-up and I said, Ooh, wait a minute. Something's different here. What's going on? And then I realized they built the other half of the cathedral during the time I was gone.
And whereas before the reverb just had this . . . . it would drop about a quarter tone. It was really funky. And then this ten-second reverb that we have in there had had a lift to it, as well as sounding wonderful. Just a little lift. And I thought, wow, okay, this is pretty cool.
It wasn't all that long before I would be with the Cunningham Company in 1976, and accidentally, David Tudor and David Behrman both said, Stu, you gotta come here and look at this space. I said, yeah, okay, I'm setting up some stuff. I'll be up in a bit.
And so I go up there and there's this chapel with 13 seconds that was sandstone, so it really had a wonderful sound. The Great Abbey of Clement VI.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: And the sandstone gives it a special. . . [00:49:32] Speaker C: Something about the sandstone. It sort of
. . . It's bits of glass, you know? I mean, what's glass made of? It’s sand. That was a really beautiful sound.
One of my four happy accidents.
[00:49:53] Speaker B: Do you want to end with remunerating your four happy accidents? One is: Let me see. . .
[00:49:57] Speaker C: Well, that's the first one. The first one: Abbey of Clement VI.
And the second one was the Deep Listening album, 1988. And Underground Overlays in The Cistern Chapel, that was 1995, sources for music for the Cunningham dance Underground Overlays.
And then the last one is On the Boards. That was—I mean, it was four nights, 1983. Four nights.
[00:50:36] Speaker B: Is there anything else you want to share before we go?
[00:50:39] Speaker C: I started writing journal notes, started that. And I realized after about four years of deep listening, Ben, I got to write all this stuff down. I'll never remember.
And so I went back and reviewed everything and was able to reconstitute quite a bit of that. And then I thought, Well, heck, I'll do ROOM as well, because I'm not gonna remember any of this stuff. This is just too goofy for me to.
[00:51:09] Speaker B: ROOM was our collective. ROOM was our improvisation, which was you and myself, and Sheri Cohen, and John Dixon, and Sean Ryan sometimes came in.
[00:51:21] Speaker C: Yeah, he was around, too.
[00:51:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:24] Speaker C: And then eventually Renko Ishida Dempster got in there, which I loved. That worked for me.
That was one of the treasures of my life was that group.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: I feel the same way, Stuart. We all showed up. We said, let's not talk about it. So we really were having this ongoing conversation through movement and sound; that would sometimes be 8 hours, sometimes longer. And we did it in a lot of different spaces and sites. We did The Port Angeles Sculpture Park. We did an abandoned house.
[00:52:07] Speaker C: Quite astonishing.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: And Pauline and David joined us. [00:52:10] Speaker C: And then Pauline and David.
[00:52:12] Speaker B: At that point, can you say more about what was astonishing about it for you?
[00:52:18] Speaker C: It was just the commitment that everybody had and the willingness to trust what happened, and you just do what seemed right. That's the best I can do.
It was trust.
[00:52:35] Speaker B: We have maybe one recording of it from Port Angeles, which is available online. I think Sheri Cohen has put it up on Vimeo or YouTube.
And the videographer is Robert Campbell, who has used it in an exhibition he had. It captures . . . it can't actually capture what happened at the end, after this very long improvisation out of doors.
[00:53:02] Speaker C: It captures it surprisingly well, though.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Can you describe for our listeners what we're talking about? Try to capture the end.
[00:53:10] Speaker C: Because we all just sort of converged in that main area around the apple trees, and a little bit away from those.
And there was this wind that came up, this kind of . . .
And it was at a beautiful amplitude. And there were some crows that were kind of doing their thing.
And the wind was coming up and, of course, blowing around in the trees, fields. And we just listened.
Listened. There was nothing else to say or do or think about.
[00:53:54] Speaker B: Well, Stuart, thank you for this conversation. And thank you for everything we've shared.
It's been a profound pleasure and an honor.
[00:54:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
If you have something that survives editing, I'd like to have a copy of it.
[00:54:12] Speaker B: Of course. For sure.
[00:54:16] Speaker B: Let's end with Stuart Dempster in The Great Abbey.
- Transcript of recording of Stuart Dempster interviewed by Tonya Lockyer, Seattle, 2023.
