HENRY IN MY KITCHEN: THE INGREDIENTS OF AN ARTIST COLLABORATION
Henry Brant with Radishes Photo by Michael Marton
In 1981 I worked on a documentary with Michael Marton on the not-yet Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Henry Brant. Marton’s approach to documentary filmmaking was to embed us with his subjects for a long period. This documentary coincided with when I was working on the drawings featured here, which ultimately led to a collaboration between Henry and me on a piece he did for the Holland Festival called Inside Track.
Here is a story I wrote at the time about just how embedded things could get.
HENRY IN MY KITCHEN
Henry’s in my kitchen. He and Amy, his companion and fellow composer, have been hanging out in my apartment. [This is pre-cell phone era, so staying at my place is the equivalent of going off the grid.] Let’s just say that it would not be a convenient time for Henry to be delayed by interruptions at his home. He will be leaving the country soon for the Holland Festival and needs to finish an important proposal for an opera before leaving, so it is important to him that he not be reached now.
Henry has removed almost every herb and spice from my shelves. He is pouring cumin, basil, thyme, cinnamon, and cardamom willy-nilly into a boiling pot of chicken chicken. He has just thrown in an unpeeled orange and is about to add an egg, shell and all. I scream STOP, and he stops.
In the dining room, I have stacks of slides of my work, a projector, and labels. I am determined to have them properly labeled before I leave for Germany the next morning with Michael and his daughter, Dunja. For years I tried to type out the labels carefully, but I have abandoned that system and now will be hand-labeling them. I project the slides on the wall in the only free space left.
Henry has covered the rest of the walls with purple typing paper that I purloined from the factory building that houses my studio. He has outlined an opera that he is writing for Leonard Slatkin, the Director of the Santa Fe Opera. It seems that something on Slatkin’s end may unravel this project, but for now, it is still a go.
So far, Henry has a rickshaw race between Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi. The orchestra, in Henry’s customary way, will be spread throughout the theater. He has made a model of the orchestra’s positions by gluing bits of pasta to cardboard, each piece representing a different musician. Each instrument has its own pasta — elbow macaroni for the violins, rigatoni for the bass, etc. The rest of the pasta will be added to the chicken.
Henry sets up the orchestra using pasta. Dunja conducts. Photo by Michael Marton
Henry scrambles back and forth in front of the pinned-up papers. He is wearing matching corduroy pants and shirt, and a visor to keep the light out of his eyes. Sometimes, he changes his glasses. He has seven pairs, each for a different focal length; one to read music, one to write music, one to conduct; I don’t know what the rest are for.
While I project my work on the wall, he suggests we collaborate. He wants hundreds of slides of my work. This will eventually result in a piece called Inside Track, performed at the Holland Festival the following year. As I run through my slides, Henry jumps hurriedly from the piano to the wall, already with the seeds for a new piece.
My projector will assume the role of a percussion instrument in the piece. Four projectors will be “played” by two percussionists. They will click through slides of my work to the beat on a music sheet.
But for tonight, everything exists together: the pasta orchestra, the purple stage notes, the baby Steinway piano, my projector, slides, and me.
Next morning, Michael, Dunja, and I will fly to Berlin, and a week later, we will meet up with Henry and Amy in Amsterdam for a week of concerts celebrating his music.
This is what it is like — you film with your subjects, follow them day and night with a video camera, and then they move in with you. They continue to create, and so do you. I used to think that I could keep my boundaries only by having my own space. And now we are all here — in my place. And I am leaving. How did that happen?