Bang on a Can

"Vinko Globokar was born in France of Yugoslovian parents and currently lives in Paris," says soloist Steven Schick. "His music almost always welds together political and musical concerns--politics with a small 'p,' that is.

Corporel means 'of the body' and was written in 1985. This piece is shocking on a fundamental level, because the body of the human performer is so often a nonentity component of classical music. When you go to an orchestra concert, for instance, you expect a cerebral or emotional or certainly a nonphysical experience. The bodies of the players themselves are disguised and neutralized by the very fact that they are in uniform. Everything is done in a way to neutralize the visual and theatrical components of the experience. You often feel invited to listen with your eyes closed. Corporel reverses that by insisting on the body and the idea that we ourselves make sounds and are by nature musical creatures.

The physical part of the piece is really tied to the emotional and musical part. You are not only invited to look, you must look. When I practiced, I experimented like I would on a drum, slapping myself in different ways to get the right sound. The instrument--me, in this case--carries with it an unprecedented complexity. As complex as a cymbal is acoustically, the human body is infinitely more complex. And when you consider the emotional ramifications of playing a piece without instruments and you yourself being the instrument, there's a very complex interaction that is not easy to quantify. I am both calculating the stroke and receiving it. It doesn't hurt especially, although, when I stop to think about it, it should, because I'm sometimes striking myself pretty hard.

People tend to think of percussion as a collection of exotic or junk or found instruments because we're so influenced by world music and by the Partch tradition. In my view, the definitive quality of percussion is the way in which the human body is used as an instrument or as an instigator of instrumental sounds. Corporel is the purist percussion piece I know because it is just the body."