Artist all about music

By Carrie Porche Jones , On-Line Forty-Niner

Thursday, October 22, 1998

Clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn musically transported audience members to Western Africa with his original composition enititled "Walk the Dog" Tuesday in Multimedia, Room 100.

Ziporyn's lecture and performance, "Listen Globally: Compose Locally," was part of the Odyssey Project's theme of self-expression.

Ziporyn played the 24-minute composition accompanied by a tape of a virtual-world orchestra that, he said, takes the listener to all sorts of strange and unusual places. Sections sound like the rhythm string music of Western Africa and other sections sound like a studio session taking place in the western world.

Ziporyn said "Walk The Dog" is like a yo-yo trick, in which one starts at the top, rolls it out and ends at the bottom and the yo-yo just stays there. "Removing yourself from presumed identity and allowing yourself to be swept away by anything that strikes you as interesting and valid helps you to develop a distinctive voice," Ziporyn said.

"The way one constructs a musical voice is basically as simple and as difficult as following the ear," he said. "If you accept the slot for which you seem to be headed, you won't necessarily develop any kind of individuality or strong personal voice."

Ziporyn said he never wanted to play the clarinet. He said he wanted to play the trumpet but could never get any sound out of it, so he settled for the clarinet.

"It is a fortuitous circumstance that a few years later, it was recommended to me that I move to the bass clarinet because I was too loud," he said.

Ziporyn said people are generally brought up within a particular culture where they think of certain things as their own and certain things not as their own.

He said people tend to listen to music from outside of their own culture and think that it does not really have anything to do with them, so they just leave it where it is.

"But I was unwilling to do that. I have had the opportunity to go to many of the places where the music interested me," Ziporyn said. "I had a chance to sit down with the musicians and get a sense of what it is that human beings do to put music together when they are not staring at a conductor or a piece of paper."

He went to Bali, an island off Indonesia, to study the 25- to 30-piece metal orchestras that play virtuosi music by memory, using the drumming traditions of West Africa and the thumb piano traditions of Southern Africa. He said he began to wonder how to put these things together in music.

Ziporyn spent 16 years working with Balinese gamelan, which resembles a curved xylophone. He has written original works for gamelan and western instruments, two of which have been released as "American Music for Balinese Gamelan Orchestra."

He is currently director of the Boston Gamelan Galak Tika, which he founded in 1994. Ziporyn is also an associate professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting professor at the Yale School of Music.

A soloist at the first Bang On A Can Festival in 1987, Ziporyn is still associated with the festival as a composer and ensemble leader. He performs his own solo compositions at international festivals, and his performances are featured on Bang On a Can CDs.