With deep gratitude to professors Verlezza and Meggitt for allowing me to film classes ("into the mirror") as I accompanied in 2007, and to the Reuter Center for allowing filming of our choral and cello-duo peformances there, in 2008 and 2009.
(all original music and text, composed or improvised by Kathleen Pierson)
clip 1: Modern Class, an across the floor phrase, piano accompaniment, strong duple phrased in 12 + 12 + 8 + 8.
Transcription of remarks: "My name is Kathleen Pierson. I've been a musician and a teacher all my life, specializing for forty years in music for academic dance classes, in some of America's finest college dance departments. I improvise, and here I've structured strong piano ideas to match the 12 12 8 8 phrasing of this early 20th Century May O'Donnell phrase, with its workman-like character so often encountered in Graham-based techniques."
clip 2: Modern Class, floor warm-up (first unison, and then with free-choice upper-body stregthening), drum accompaniment, strong duple phrased in steady fours.
Transcription of remarks: "My goal is to read the intent and character of each exercise and support it in whatever way I can, so that when unison is really important I try to drive a unison, and when students are asked to work on their own personal endeavors I just keep a beat that drives a focus that carries them forward to keep working. I alternate between piano, drumming, other percussion, sometimes guitar, sometimes textless vocals as melodic line on top. I try to make it like a collaborative musical work with the instructor, and in some cases when exercises are clearly counted and set..."
clip 3: Modern Class, set standing warm-up, drum accompaniment, shifting from broad phrases of fours (subdivision is triplets) with 2-count transitions to broad phrases of three (subdivision is still triplets) with accent on two (so the pattern of grouped triplets, counted broadly, is 4 + 4 + 2 + 4 + 4 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 3.
Transciption of continuing remarks: "...I try to exactly give the phrasing even as it shifts and as there are extra counts for transitions, even as it goes from fours to threes as this set of exercises does."
clip 4: Modern Class, floor warm-up (being "called" by the instructor, from pre-set segments, as the students follow along), piano/ drum/ voice accompaniment, duple with emphasis on "one," phrased in steady fours.
Transcription of remarks: "In some modern dance techniques - for example, this Hawkins-based class - it's really important to support the senses of weight and breath and flow. These are situations, I think, where the voice on tp is especially helpful, to remind the dancers to breathe. ...Sometimes the exercises are not really "set" ahead of time, as far as "counts" and "phrasing," and you just have to play something that allows the instructor to "call the changes" as they arrive, and just keep an eye out to see when the character or the thrust of the movement shifts."
clip 5: Ballet Class, barre, piano accompaniment, a waltz-like three.
Transcription of remarks: "I also play improvisationally for ballet - the standard barre exercises, and the adagio and petite allegro in the center, and the grande allegros across the floor..."
clip 6: Ballet Class, allegro across floor, piano accompaniment, a heartier three.
clip 7: With a student choreographer, mixing "loops" in the media lab.
Transcription of remarks: "And I love working with students, on music history or theory or composition or technology."
clip 8: With Aaron Coffin (cellist) in performance, Special Event "Composing Music: Premise, Process, Product" at Reuter Center on the UNC-Asheville campus March 29, 2009.
Transcription of remarks: "Even my compositions apart from dance are still infused with all that I've learned from working with dancers and choreographers across the decades." (the piece is "Stars," text and music © 2009, excerpt of text: "Should we believe in things we cannot see? or keep looking up for things like stars we can see, which for all we know might have burnt out long ago...")
clip 9: With cellist Aaron Coffin in that same performance.
Transcription of remarks: "Recently, I've stepped out of the academic dance world to pursue some compositional projects in Asheville NC, including performances of original music with cellist Aaron Coffin."
clip 10: Improvising in a public concert setting, with cellist Aaron Coffin, in that same performance. Using a white board to write down their ideas, we invited the audience to collectively make choices among various parameters (scale or mode, meter, tempo, emotional character, and so forth) for a potential 3-part 5-minute improvisation by the two of us without pre-planning of themes or phrasings ahead of time! This is an excerpt of the last of the three sections, which the audience had decided should be major and threes and of a "triumphant" character, following the very "contemplative" unmetered second section they had set up in a mixolydian mode. My pleasure in the freshness, and my trust in the potential for beautiful outcome, are certainly based on decades of improvising for dance. The audiences are always thrilled to hear their dictates realized, and it helps illustrate the basic compositional processes - which are of course quite similar to ANY creative process including choreography. One of my missions in life has been to encourage people everywhere to simply see themselves as "able to create," able to make creative choices and to have a hand in well-crafted and satisfying "artistic conversations" such as this. I have certainly used this process of DUO or even GROUP improvisations - with both vocal and instrumental ensembles - as accompaniments for choreography across the years, though I have no video of those pieces.
clip 11: In rehearsal at St Matthias (venue for one of Asheville's main chamber music series) with cellist Aaron Coffin, for our February 2009 performance there.
Transcription of remarks: "In addition to percussion and piano, I'm a guitarist and a vocalist, and so I have a wide range of musical colorations to draw on, in all my composition and performance, and in the academic dance classroom as well." (the piece is "You Be The Beautiful," text and music © 2005-09)
clips 12 and 13: Two brief excerpts from the 2008 premiere of "Homeland Suite" for SATB Chorus with piano, flute, clarinet, and horn, at the Reuter Center. Commissioned by Reuter Singers, Chuck Taft director, Nora Vetro accompanist.
Transcription of the remarks: "I've also been commissioned to compose for chorus, here in Asheville. ...These are two brief excerpts from a three-part fifteen-minute piece commissioned by Reuter Singers here in Asheville. I have composed for and conducted both vocal and instrumental ensembles for choreographic works in the past, but I have no videos of those pieces. ...So I've been active all my life as a composer AND an improvisor AND a teacher AND a performer AND an accompanist..."
clip 14: Modern Class, a set standing trance-like warm-up for subtle weight shifts, drum and vocal accompaniment, steady fours.
Transcription of remarks: "Meanwhile, back in the dance classroom, some exercises call for an almost meditative concentration, and they'll be repeated from class to class, week after week, and so part of my goal as an accompanist is to retain the meditative quality, but provide subtle variation from class to class, as they go through the same concentrated exercise."
clip 15: SAME EXERCISE, different day.
Transcription of the remarks: "So this may be perhaps the twentieth time that a class might have done this same exercise in a given semester, and so here's a little variation using what I called my "tingy thingy" of found objects, bells and kitchen pieces and so forth, gotten from Goodwill and hung on a garment rack, just to give a little different coloration to the same exercise."
clip 16: Modern Class, a walking pattern phrased as seven two's, piano and voice accompaniment.
Transcription of remarks: "Here's this perfectly lovely Hawkins walking pattern built on seven two's, nearly ruined by the loud rattling of the fan that had to be turned on, but the continuity of the voice helps to overcome the rattling of the fan, and sustain the continuity."
clip 17: Modern Class, across the floor phrased as five three's, piano accompaniment.
Transcription of remarks: "Using the piano percussively, like a drum, helps this class (which is not an advanced class) achieve a good unison on an unusual phrasing of five three's."
clip 18: Modern Class, "combination" being added on to, class by class, ever-expanding long string of three's (a total of 54 three's on this paticular day), piano accompaniment.
Transcription of remarks: "Even the lower-level classes generally culminate in a "combination" of some length, and it gets built up, generally, perhaps across several classes, and so both the accompaniment and the movement are fairly "set" at the beginning, and less so as it gets into the parts that have been more recently added. But it's great fun, to build something which has a shape, and a larger formal design, and more variation from phrase to phrase in its character."
Thank you for your interest in my work. Kathleen "Kasha" Pierson, May 4, 2009