november 19, 2017 is a generative composition based on microtonal permutations of a single 4.5-minute fragment from an earlier abandoned work. originally realized as an 8-channel sound installation, the piece is both indeterminate in composition and indefinite in duration. this 1-channel (mono) realization consists of two extended duration recordings totaling 24 hours in length. i haven't listened to the whole thing, and have no plans to do so; there are probably some nice moments in there, and some less than nice ones. let me know what you find!

KK, 2020

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conversation between kenneth kirschner and gil sanson

gs. over the years, i've been having this insistent thought about the logical consequences of the late pieces by feldman, like for philip guston or the second string quartet: namely, that you can only stretch musicians so far, and in the eventuality of needing longer durations, artists would eventually encounter the sound installation format as the logical way of pursuing this line of inquiry. was this notion a thing in your mind when devising this work?

kk. the big late feldman pieces are never far from my mind! i've struggled a lot with questions of extended duration, especially as someone who's essentially a maker of recordings, rather than a builder of performances. because it's one thing to go to a 6-hour performance, which can be a profound and intense experience. but to make someone sit there and listen to a 6-hour recording? that's a very different thing, and i have a lot of doubts about whether it's really a compelling approach. and so installations have become for me one possible solution to this problem, a way to work in more extended durations without getting tangled up in these doubts.

but duration is only one part of the picture. what i'd say more generally is that i'm interested in doing in installations what i can't do in recordings - and duration is a factor in that, but it's not the whole story. for example, i have no interest in doing an installation that runs on a loop, even if it's a 6-hour loop or a 24-hour loop. for me, the whole point of an installation is to build something that's going to keep changing, evolving, and growing indefinitely - that's going to keep giving you unexpected new results no matter how long it runs for. so for me installations actually become more about setting aside the question of duration entirely, letting the listener step in and out as they please, giving them the power to choose their own durations - and then building something that's always going to surprise them and keep taking them to unknown places. in other words, what draws me to installations is not so much duration, but indeterminacy.

gs. so, in that sense, does this line of inquiry place you in the realm of sound sculpture, or is it a dialogue between music and sound sculpture? or are these developments of an organic nature that arise from your musical imagination, since, as you say, you're more of a composer of recorded sounds than one whose music is to be performed by others?

kk. i don't think of myself as someone with a particularly interesting musical imagination - but i'm a builder of interesting musical situations, and i have a good ear. and that's what an indeterminate piece like this is really about: setting up an interesting musical situation and letting the consequences play out. even in my non-indeterminate work, which is the vast majority of what i do, there's a lot of chance and randomness that goes into constructing the music. but that's about capturing and using chance to build a fixed work - and any time you lock down and fix something like that, you close off possibilities, you limit that immense space of possibilities that an indeterminate piece moves through. the piece becomes what it is, a static, definite thing. which of course i love, and i love the process of perfecting and honing and carving out that final work. but i'm also intrigued by what happens when you leave those possibilities open - and for me installations have become one way of following where indeterminacy like that might lead. so your role as the composer becomes one of deciding axioms and setting parameters - building interesting musical situations - and then letting the piece live its life.

but to get back to your "sound sculpture" question, i have to say...i don't really know what that is! i've very slowly over a long period of time figured out what i think "sound art" is - and i think it's not what i do. and my reasoning behind this is that, even when i'm working in an installation format, building something for a gallery or museum or public space, the questions i'm asking, the concerns of the piece, are more traditionally "musical" ones - they're questions of harmony and rhythm, of abstract musical structure and form. the work isn't conceptual, and it isn't purely timbral or spatial - it's really a piece of music, but built in a certain way for a certain context.

gs. there is an artist i often think about in relation to your work: glenn gould. i remember, back in the early 00's, you giving concerts in which you deliberately avoided playing your own music, going instead for a dj set of sorts. i remember that on at least a few of the concerts you played glenn gould's recordings alongside very different artists. it seemed to me that the live concert situation was not your cup of tea and that you were much more at home avoiding the trappings of live performance. is this the case, back then or nowadays? you still seem the type of artist who wishes to remain more or less anonymous, with the emphasis being the work itself - an art without biography, so to speak. am i correct in this?

kk. absolutely. and as you know, i'm a big glenn gould fan. but of course, a key difference there is that he was one of the greatest performers of all time who then made a conscious choice to reject performance and embrace recording - whereas i never even became a decent performer in the first place! you've seen firsthand some of my strategies for undermining, or at least not taking seriously, my own performances - and to the djing example you mention (which, yes, was based on a somewhat pointless refusal to play my own music), i'd add multiple concerts in which i've insisted on only repeatedly pressing spacebar (to "perform" the silences between sounds, rather than the sounds themselves), concerts in which i've pressed play on a fixed recording and walked away, and, best of all, concerts in which i've had someone else press play for me and done nothing at all!

but my more serious point here is that i made a choice, early on, that my focus was always going to be on realizing my musical ideas, intrinsically, as recordings, rather than on developing myself as a performer. i had an interesting insight on this subject recently while talking with a friend who's a tremendous jazz pianist. he was listening to a piece of mine, focusing in on the reverb tails and the obsessively composed micro-silences between notes, when he suddenly said, "wow, i can tell you really spent a lot of time on this!" he seemed quite startled by the idea, and was very emphatic that he himself could never work this way, that he just couldn't imagine doing it - despite being this amazing improviser who in the moment, up on stage, out of nowhere can create music i could never possibly achieve. and it occurred to me that these really are just two different ways of being a musician, neither of them better or worse, right or wrong - just two parallel ways of thinking about how music can be put together. and so i felt like maybe it's ok for me to stay locked away in the studio for those endless hours toiling over millisecond silences that no one will ever notice. because, well, maybe someone actually will.

gs. i wanted to ask you, because we have discussed it in private many times and i think it's a good thing to have "on the record": in what ways can the influence of gilles deleuze's ideas be found in your work? i ask this because for a while it was very common to hear artists quoting deleuze or claiming influence, but in your case i detect an engagement with his thinking that goes beyond the anecdotal, one that forces questioning of many basic aspects that most take for granted and that i perceive in your work ethos and practice. care to elaborate on this, if i'm not off the mark?

kk. you're perfectly on the mark - but i fear that all i can give you is yet another refinement of my typical non-answer answer! deleuze's influence on my work is both impossible to overstate and impossible to...state. it's a deep, fundamental connection that i struggle to put into words. and i think a certain amount of that comes from something you correctly identify in your question: the tendency for people to make cool-sounding references for the sake of sounding cool. and that's very much not what i'm about. so sure, i could rattle off a bunch of clever-sounding examples that map some concept from a thousand plateaus over to some aspect of my process; it would all sound very hip and smart (i.e., painfully pretentious), and it wouldn't even begin to touch what really matters here. and so i tend to say nothing, and avoid the subject, and only really bring it up in the quiet way i do with friends like you who already understand what we're talking about, so that there's no need to say anything at all.

but this latest non-answer does lead me, i think, to a perhaps more interesting question, which is: could someone - someone knowing nothing of me and my philosophical leanings - just listen to my work, just the music itself, and recognize it as deleuzian? and this i genuinely don't know. maybe they could, maybe it would be clear, and the underlying concepts would just pop right out at them. but it's just as possible, i think, that these principles are so deeply submerged in the music, as they are in my life, that while they animate it and articulate it, they can only do so silently. one might say imperceptibly. and so i continue, like john cage, to have nothing to say, and to keep saying it.

gs. would you say that you have eliminated the interpreter in your music, but not the role of sound carrier that interpreters provide? by which i mean the interpreter as the carrier of the sound written by the composer. in your case, it seems that the living interpreter, so to speak, has been replaced by a silicon-based interpreter - it could be software, a patch, an app, etc., or, in your case, a seemingly fluid relation between the creator (i assume the piano sounds were played by you) and the means, living or otherwise, of transmission of the sounds you have composed. my question would be: do you ponder these particularities? i think your work is a good example of a fluid relationship with what current technology can allow, not so much aligned with, say, mcluhan, but one that feels both inspired by contingency and playfulness.

kk. this question speaks to one of the real sources of angst in my work right now. as we talked about earlier, what i am is really a maker of recordings: i take the tools i have and work very hard to make the best possible recording i can, pushing things asymptotically toward what i envision the piece to be. and so the recording becomes the work itself, the thing, "the" piece. and if you want to hear it, you get a copy - a perfect digital copy, you can download it for free right off my site, and you have it, you have "the" work itself, right there, it's yours. and this was a nice and happy and comfortable life for me.

but now there's a problem. i started working with someone, my friend joe branciforte, who not only had the notational skills to take my chaotic, aleatoric recordings and translate them into a written score, but was actually willing to suffer through the painful process of doing so! and so now, for a couple pieces of mine, with probably more coming soon, you have a score, something somebody can actually sit down (again, with some suffering) and play on an actual instrument. and we've now taken one of those pieces - "april 20, 2015" - all the way through the process of starting with my recording ("the" piece!), translating it into a score, testing out a performance with acoustic musicians, developing and honing the score, rehearsing the piece, getting people into a recording studio, recording hundreds and hundreds of takes, splicing and compositing them all together in a daw, and ending up with...a recording. a recording of a pianist and two cellists playing a piece of mine that started life, perfectly happily, as a purely digital work i built on my laptop and released on my site. and thus the angst: which is "the" piece? is there a "the" piece? this is a good question, a healthy question, for me to grapple with after so many years of comfortably sculping my recordings exactly, precisely, as i want them to be. the recordings i make are always as perfect as i can make them - and the new acoustic version of "april 20, 2015" is overwhelmingly imperfect. and it's much, much better. so hopefully this will all make sense to me eventually.

gs. do you ever think in terms of the history of music and your perceived place within it? the piano, even in your "post piano" paradigm, is especially loaded with the history of western music. i often ask this question to composers who i think have a peculiar relationship to music history, and i think you are a good example of this. care to elaborate?

kk. the story i always tell is of one of my earliest musical memories: sitting at the piano, as a very small child, with my mother next to me, and her saying, "write something." and i remember having this sense of absolute certainty that it was impossible. because here was this instrument that had been around for hundreds of years, an instrument with an obviously finite number of keys, and it seemed to me that every possible combination of those keys had, at some point in that long history, already been played. that all possible music had already been written. of course, i recognize now that this isn't literally true - but there was an insight there, an early recognition of history's weight, its constraints and limitations. and it wasn't until i got into electronic music, years later, that i came to believe that writing music - new music - was something that was truly possible or worthwhile. and clearly that's something i do now quite strongly believe! the fundamental belief that i have as a composer is that there is still music to be written - and not just new rearrangements of the same old notes, the same old tunes, but new ways of writing, new ways of thinking about what music can be. i believe there is still music we haven't discovered yet, and that new technologies can offer us not just new ways of making sound, but new ways of thinking musically, of thinking compositionally - new tools to help us reach those undiscovered places in the vast space of possible musics. so i guess i'd say i don't think all that much about history, and try instead to spend my time looking in the other direction.