Chops and charm for Present Music
Amy X Neuburg, photo courtesy of Present Music.
Amy X Neuburg had been up for 48 hours straight, frantically finishing the scoring of the music she will perform with Present Music Saturday, when I caught up with her at rehearsal Tuesday evening. That was shortly after she landed in Milwaukee from San Francisco, after her first flight had been canceled. She hadn’t even checked into her hotel; her battered, floral-patterned suitcase was in a corner of the band room at Cardinal Stritch University.
Neuburg, 49, had every reason to be grumpy. But she wasn’t. An irresistible sweetness of character emanates from this composer-performer, and she charmed the half-dozen musicians utterly. They didn’t even show pique at the copying errors in their parts.
Her unique music and extraordinary skill helped to win them over, too. Neuburg occupies a musical space unique to her. It’s somewhere between rock, pop, Minimalism, Romantic opera, techno and musical comedy, and might touch on all these genres in the space of 32 bars. Neuburg is also a genius with live electronics.She creates wonderlands of looped, overdubbed sound. She writes her own lyrics, mostly on mundane subjects that turn out to have outsized comic, tragic and intellectual implications.
“Let’s do it again, to get the parts interlocked,” she said, more than once during the two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal. The moving orchestral parts turn like gears. The drive shaft is her voice.
Despite her fatigue and with no warm-up, Neuburg sang flat-out and brilliantly through most of the rehearsal, quieting down only to focus on the musicians and help sort out their parts. And do note that as she sings, Neuburg controls electronics and bangs out rhythms via drum pad.
“I have four octaves, and I don’t want any of it to go to waste,” she joked, over a post-rehearsal glass of wine and antipasto late Wednesday.
She really does have a four-octave range, and a lot of power. She could have been an opera diva. Instead, she’s… what, exactly?
“I never thought of myself as a composer until a few years ago,” Neuburg said. “I thought of myself as a songwriter. I wrote things for me to sing. I was a singer-songwriter, but doing this other kind of music.”
Neuburg studied voice at Oberlin College, not composition. But she hung out with the composers, not the opera singers.
“I was the one who dared to scream or would be willing to break an egg in one hand while I sang,” she said. “It was so much fun to bring these things to life. It became mine, in a way that [standard repertoire] can’t.”
After performing other students’ music for a while, she began to think: I can do that.
“Electronics really got me going,” she said. “Electronics enabled a single person to make an enormous amount of sound. We still used tape then. I liked the craft of it. It’s something you do with your hands. I liked physically sculpting something that became sound. I was making the weirdest possible sounds with my voice. With electronics, I could make the weirdest possible sounds.”
And so she got in the habit of taping and manipulating her own singing. Neuburg no longer cuts and splices tape, but she tends to use older, more hands-on equipment in an age when almost anything can be programmed and preset.
“Everything is a product of the hand,” she said. “It’s fun, like one of those Fischer-Price activity boards with the bells and horns and steering wheel. That’s why I still schlep around this old equipment.”
In the late 1980s, when Neuburg was in school, the avant-garde still thought of itself as the avant-garde. Neuburg didn’t buy into outsider status completely. She’d sung the lead roles in all her high school musicals, at a “hippy” Quaker school in Maryland. They put on a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta there every year, and she loved it. Still does.
“At Oberlin, I did my serious music during the day,” she said. “I went into the studio at night and wrote pop tunes. My first CD was Pop pop. My response to high art was to make low art.”
When she graduated and got to the Bay Area — she’s lived in Oakland, CA, for 20 years — she formed a band, Amy X Neuburg and Men.
“I had a lot of fun with a lot of rather awkward men,” she said. “They were geeky and wore suits. I had to write for them, and I made up a little choreography. We ended up with something like an art-rock cabaret.”
The band needed rhythm, and Neuburg discovered the electronic drum pad. Then she realized she could use the drum pad to control all sorts of electronic sound, including loops of her own voice live, and she was off and running.
“I developed a solo act, and had such a response that I kept at it,” she said. “The audience told me I was onto something.”
Neuburg’s first instrument was the piano; she and Present Music’s Cory Smythe will premiere a piano duet Saturday. But the drum pad and the flying sticks give her act a strong visual element and special rhythmic vigor. She looks very cool banging away and singing her head off. Everything came together in that solo act, and Neuburg has become something of a roundabout, underground diva.
“The singer has the words,” she said. “The singer’s important, and she knows it. She’s the only one who looks at the audience. I like the responsibility of communicating. If you’re on stage and they’re looking at you, how can you not put on a show?”
Until recently, Neuburg wrote exclusively for herself or herself and some supporting players. And since exactly no one can do what she does, except for the recordings the music would disappear when she does. Legacy issues never really occurred to her until other groups started asking her to write music for them.
“I just had a friend cover one of my songs on a CD,” she said. “I just wrote a choral piece, just for other voices and with no electronics at all. A friend at Juilliard asked me to write something for him, and told me it’s not fair that I have to be in everything. These are unusual experiences for me, but important ones. And just today, I learned that cellists don’t like to read in alto clef.”
Neuberg is becoming a composer, but she will always remain a songwriter, too. The short, intimate form with text suits her as a person.
“I love to have an artistic way of being in the world,” she said. “There’s a lot of cleaning in my songs. For a while, I was leading this, bi-coastal, complicated life. I was always moving and sweeping out apartments. It was kind of sad. I wrote a song about it, Shrapnel. Cleaning is banal. But you can clean someone from your mind.
“A song can start with a feeling, just a little phrase. It can stay with you for years. Then you build a structure around it, and everything has to fit. Sometimes you don’t know what a song will be about. Maybe I just need a choppy word at a particular point. I add a choppy word, but then I think, well, it has to have some meaning. And that might change the whole meaning of the song.”
Neuberg is the aware sort who is always ready to be charmed by the moment and ready to turn that charm into music. When the music charms us all, the circle is complete.
Despite the long day and sleepless nights spent rescoring music for the Milwaukee crew to play, Neuburg was happy.
“I was inspired to play with those musicians,” she said. “It’s a joy to hear the music come to life, to hear real, 3D instrumental sound and the way it fills the body, in that therapeutic way.
“My mom played the piano and my dad played the violin. They played duets and we all sang together. I thought this was normal. Only later did I realize that music wasn’t woven into everyone’s life that way. Music can do all kinds of things, but it should bring pleasure to life.”
Concert Info: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 18, Turner Hall Ballroom, 6:30 p.m. pre-concert talk. Tickets are $30 and $25, $5 for students. Buy online at the Present Music website or call 414 271-0711. Two important string quartets are on the program: Hellbound Highway, by Wynton Marsalis and the premiere of Kamran Ince’s Far Variations.
