Originally broadcast on SYMBIOSIS radio, Tripe R FM, Australia.

SIMON HAMPSON: Whilst doing some preparation for this interview, I searched for you on Google. Have you ever searched for your own name?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Yes I have.

SIMON HAMPSON: You're not a motorbike racer are you, by any chance?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: A motivator?

SIMON HAMPSON: A motorbike race?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Oh, no. But I know that Scott Smallwood. There's the motorbike racer and then there's a guy who's from the chronicle of higher education. So those are the 3 Scott Smallwoods, I think. There's probably more.

SIMON HAMPSON: I find Google really interesting when you search your own name or even someone else's. Because you kind of reveal this parallel universe.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Exactly.

SIMON HAMPSON: Someone trading under your name. It's hilarious.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Well I've even... The funny thing about the chronicle-of-higher-education Scott Smallwood is that I actually found a site of his once that said "This is not the musician Scott Smallwood". So he's obviously had traffic misdirected.

SIMON HAMPSON: Well, at least you know people are searching for you on the Net.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Yeah, I guess, or searching for him.

SIMON HAMPSON: You actually set a very interesting boundary, Scott. Between academic, with investment in music as art. Or vice versa as a musician who has an investment in the academics of music. How do you perceive yourself?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: I perceive myself as someone who has a real love/hate relationship with academia, because on the one hand I'm really in love with the forum that it provides, for exchanging ideas. It keeps you honest and it keeps you learning, I like that about it, but I also have a lot of problems with the way it which it still seems, and has been for a long time, really couched within a very specific Western tradition of classicism. I think that for a number of years I felt as if I had to pay my dues by becoming a or trying to get into being a 'classicist', a western classical musician in the 20th Century and to try to understand what that meant and how important that was. And I finally figured out that I really didn't want to do that at all and I never wanted to do that, but I did it, and now I have that background, but I feel pretty critical and uncomfortable in that place because I think music needs to be talked about within a broader context. At the ground level, really. It's something I think a lot about, I don't have an answer for it, but I definitely don't think that most approaches, at least in this country [USA] are healthy ones, because I think there's a real sense of living in the past and feeling as if music has to come from a very specific, systematic place based on Western notation and theory. Being in academia really makes me think about those things and I've being trying to figure out how to place myself.

SIMON HAMPSON: It's that thought about music, that's really important isn't it?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Yeah, the history of that thought and that dialogue is a really important part and I'm hoping to see a change in the dialogue and I'm hoping to be part of that, somehow.

SIMON HAMPSON: Let's go back to your childhood and growing up in the Colorado Rockies.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: I grew up in a place in Colorado called Leadville, which is 10,000ft in elevation and is an old silver mining town. I was actually born in Dallas. My parents and all of my family are from Texas, but they left Texas when I was 3 years old. And so I grew up way up high, with mountains all around. It was a pretty small town and it was also a town that had gone into decline since the silver mining days. There was one mine left in town that employed a lot of people. Most of my friends' fathers worked there. My father was a pharmacist, not a miner. So I grew up spending my days, in the summer anyway, riding my bicycle. I lived on a dead end street, with forest all around me, that had a huge network of bike trails. So as a kid, I spent a lot of time on my bike in the summer, but we only about three months of summer and the rest of the time was pretty much winter. And so I was on a ski bus every weekend and went downhill skiing, that was a big part of my life.

SIMON HAMPSON: The other great tradition in Colorado is skiing, I guess.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: So I grew up a small town kid, in a high elevation town. And that was pretty much, snow was my life for a long time.

SIMON HAMPSON: Was music part of your family context?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD; yes, but not in a professional capacity. My mother is not a musician at all. My father was an amateur musician. He sang in a choir and played the flute and a little bit of guitar. He was involved in a choir in Leadville that did an annual production of Handel's Messiah. So I grew up hearing that piece live every year with an amateur choir, but no orchestra, usually just the piano. And my Dad loved music, he listened to Baroque music. He really liked Handel and Mozart and Bach, early classical. But he also loved pop music so I also grew up listening to a lot of seventies pop music especially Elton John and Boston and The Carpenters and Abba. So that stuff was really in my ear a lot. We didn't have much of a local radio station up there, so most of the music that I heard was either through my father or through whatever my friends could get a hold of. I had a couple of friends who had record collections and I'd go over and listen to Queen or whatever the latest records were that they'd gotten when they went to Denver. So it was pretty isolated, the school systems were not well funded so the music was pretty slim.
[...]
I think it was just a real eye-opening time for me, it was also a time when I had to say to myself – Okay, I'm in school and I'm a music student and I need to know counterpoint and I need to know about 18th century sonata allegro form, I need to know how to do all these things. So I was really very studious and I tried to find my way, but I think it wasn't until I finally was able to free myself from the conservatory environment that I found myself in Baltimore and discovered Art School.
[laughter]
I was never a student in Art School, but I worked in an Art School and taught in an Art School for a few years and that just changed everything for me. I began to realise not only – what it was I wanted to do, but how to reach a dialogue about that and how to place that within the context of what I'd learned.

SIMON HAMPSON: It was probably a good path to take, because at the conservatory you have that historical lineage of music and you go to Art School and you have very much the passionate, the time is now, sort of passion, you know? And probably to go through that line of study, was probably a good way to go, because it gave you that really strong grounding. And I guess it takes me to my next question which is – can you look back and see that line of change and maturation in your sound work?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Definitely. A lot of it started for me in this weird kind of way, when I got my undergraduate degree I went to a pretty small college and I ended up moving to Ohio to get a Masters Degree and a place called Miami University. This was in 1992. So I was there, in a pretty big state school with a fairly sizeable music department, but not much of a composition department, but I got an assistantship so I got funding to take care of the electronic music studio and to teach electronic music there, and I was really excited about this. The problem was that I didn't realise at the time that the studio was completely taped-based. It was a reel-to-reel based studio with a modular analogue synthesiser. As an undergrad I was working with Pro-Tools already, I was working with Pro-Tools version 1.0. When I was an undergrad I got an interesting opportunity to build a studio and so I learned digital editing and I learned how to do a lot of that stuff there and I learned about midi and I was kind of on the cutting edge of things. And all of a sudden I find myself in Ohio, with a studio that's all tape-based. And I had to not only learn how to use that equipment, but also learn how to teach it. And the class was a Humanities course that counted for core credit and we ended up having mostly students who were not music majors take that course. It was crazy, all of a sudden I was thinking – I've used analogue recorders before when I was a kid, I should be able to do this. I had to go back and really learn about Musique Concrete in a real practical kind of way and it changed everything for me. And I was able to reflect that in my teaching and be really excited about and give people projects to do that were about making recordings and manipulating those recordings and it started to effect the instrumental work that I was doing. On a real practical level, that changed me and later when I went to the Peabody conservatory in Baltimore, I continued on that path in computer music and I started hanging around at the Art School, MICA, Maryland Institute College of Art. Everything started to change for me. I stopped worrying about writing the next symphony and writing string quartets. I was still writing instrumental music, but it was becoming more textural, it was becoming closer to what I was doing in the studio. So I'm giving you a range of years, but I'd say 1992, 1993 that was a big year of change for me. And that change never stopped and it eventually evolved into what it became in around 1998 when I was teaching in an Art School and I didn't have access to any musicians who were classically trained performers and I was doing a lot of improvising at that point and a lot more recording. So those years, 1992 to 1997, a big journey for me, that brought me close to where I am now.

SIMON HAMPSON: You got a small gift of a tape recorder around the time you were 10?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: My father was an audiophile and he made his own mix tapes. He used an 8 track recorder. He worked at a drug store where they sold 45s and he would bring home the hits that he liked and he'd make mix tapes out of them, so I got into being a bit of an audiophile through that. He gave me a reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was 9 or 10. It was one of those portable ones that uses little 3 inch reels and quarter inch tape, I think it was a mono deck. So I used to take that and initially I used it to record songs that I liked, by just pointing the microphone at my Dad's speaker. Then I started recording sounds and noises – doors closing, vacuum cleaners and my cats purring. I fell in love with doing that as a hobby and I didn't know at the time that this could be an art form, it was just something I liked doing. I ended up getting a cassette recorder which made things a bit easier. I was also involved for a while with puppetry and I used to make these elaborate puppet shows, with soundtracks that I made with my own recorder. That was one of those things that I did in parallel with taking piano lessons which was, quote 'the real music'.

SIMON HAMPSON: So you did do some formal music training?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Yes I took piano lessons at a pretty early age and my piano teacher, oddly enough, actually taught me a little bit of theory. We had a theory work books, so a got a lot out of that. But I didn't really like it very much. I never liked playing piano until I was older and I started playing my own made up things. I never had much of a passion for playing the piano.

SIMON HAMPSON: When did that process start for you of making your own music and wanting to perform live?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: probably when I was in seventh or eighth grade. I started noodling around on the piano and writing these little pieces. I wasn't too serious about it, and I think I had some ambitions to play keyboards in a rock and roll band. And I played in a couple of home grown bands in my town. But I didn't find a voice until later in my life, when I realised that what I really liked doing was making recordings. And started to realise that that could be something that I could do as an artist. And it didn't have to be about the note. One of things I should mention, I don't remember exactly how old I was, I guess I was in the fourth grade. We had a new music teacher in school and she was only there for two years, but she transformed the music during that time. She started a hand bell choir. She got some money, somehow. I played in the hand bell choir and she would bring in interesting things for us to listen to. And I just remember one day, she brought in Henry Cowell's The Banshee. Keep in mind I didn't know anything about composers, the kind of stuff she usually brought in was like Kenny Rogers and then one day she brings in The Banshee. And I just remember being totally transfixed by the piece. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Most of the kids in the class hated it, but I loved it and I couldn't.. I went home and I tried to explain to my parents how cool it was and explain what was going on, and I had dreams about it and it was just one of those things that planted a seed or something. I don't know.

SIMON HAMPSON: It's one of the most difficult things, explaining your passion when you're that age.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: I didn't know how to do that other than saying, he was rubbing the strings up and down in a mechanical way. But it was the sound that struck me, it was just... I never stopped thinking about that piece for a long time. That and the experimentation of playing with the tape recorder was what, eventually, when I left Colorado and went to college, and decided I wanted to study music and I also wanted to study computers. I didn't realise at the time that I wanted to do both, together, but it wan't until college that I began to realise that there was something else going on, there was something called sound art, that you could be an artist and sound could be your medium.

[...]

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: The first commercial release on a commercial label was Desert Winds in 2000. It was the first recording that I put out that was edited field recordings. The CDs previous to that were all more home grown sorts of things, that we just sort of did one offs.

SIMON HAMPSON: I wanted to ask, how the practice of listening informs your work? In your CV you say that your music deals with real and abstracted sound textures, but it's based on the practice of listening. And I'm interested to
know how that art of listening is something you try to cultivate in your recorded work and also your live performances.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: At this point in my life I'm comfortable with the practice that I maintain, which is really just spending a lot of time listening to things and then either making recordings of those things or making notes about the sounds that I'm hearing or just getting them in my head as textural spaces, where those noises become fundamental building blocks for something that might become a piece. An example of that might be if I talk about the oil well pieces. I really just had this idea about recording the oil wells in Texas, that was mostly based on a nostalgic and romantic notion that I had. I had always been intrigued by oil wells ever since I was a kid, because they look so delicate, from the road, when you're driving. We used to drive to Texas to see relatives all the time and I'd see these gentle undulating machines that looked like animals that were feeding, moving slowly up and down. But I was in a car on the road and I could never hear what they sounded like. I always wanted to go up to one of these things and listen to it, and get a sense of how large it was compared to my body. So I just decided to travel down there and make a bunch of recordings. I recorded about six of them and also made some recordings of an oil refinery in New Mexico and West Texas. I was astounded by the wonderful sounds these things make, the sheer massiveness and the effort they take to draw that oil out of the ground. I came home with all these recordings and I didn't know exactly what I was going to do with them, but I knew I was going to continue to listen to them carefully and try to get inside them and try to understand what the component sounds were and how to extract those and turn them into something else. I ended up making some sonic photographs out of them and thinking these are just beautifully framed as they are and trying to edit out portions of them. And then I started sculpting pieces out of them in the studio and I made some files that I could use in a live and improvisational context. Then I got an opportunity to write for ensemble SurPlus in Germany and I decided that I was heavily into the sounds of oil wells and I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I scored the piece based on these sounds I was hearing and listening to everyday, turning the ensemble into a group of organic speakers with very specific resonant qualities. I really wanted to make the group become the field recording as well as turning it into to something else. So after I created the basic vocabulary from the recordings to the instruments, I thought – Wow, I'm composing again! But I was thinking about things completely differently now. I wasn't thinking about counterpoint or specific pitches or relating them to a harmonic progression or even a series of notes or a series of intervals. I was thinking about this machine and the effort, the pulling and pushing and the way the tempo is constantly slowly down and speeding up when the armature comes back up. Trying to score that into the composition and make that part of the piece.
[...]
Sometimes the textural ideas come out of specific projects like that and other times they are more abstracted, they come out of my imagination based on my experience of sitting around listening to things, the memories that I have of that, juxtaposed with something else.

SIMON HAMPSON: So your next performance is at the Phonographers meeting?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: I'm going down next week. The phonographers meetings concerts have been really wonderful for me. I don't know how interesting they are from the audiences perspective, because it is a concert, but as you can see if you've seen the announcement, Ben Owen is one of the principal organisers and he invites all the phonographers that he knows in the New York area to come and present mostly unaltered field recordings. So everyone shows up and it's a round robin, everyone plays for ten of fifteen minutes and the event can go on for hours and hours. I find it absolutely fantastic. It's a great way to hear what people are working on, and to try some things out. I'm not actually sure what I'm going to do, I have been trying to make recordings of bird fights or bird arguments I should say. I have a bird feeder that I put up on my porch and I've been trying to record the birds in the morning as they fight over it and trying to get their conversations. I might use those recordings, I don't know yet. The thing I really like when I make field recordings is trying to do microphone performances.

SIMON HAMPSON: It's something that I've talked a lot with Dallas Simpson about.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Absolutely, he was really influential when I met him the first time in the UK, I think it was in Sheffield. I'd never heard of him before and he walked up to me and he was dressed sort of like a bum and had plastic bags jangling full of tapes and started talking to me. Telling me about how he had just come out of the sewers of London and made these recordings and he gave me these copies and I took them home and I was completely astounded. It was then I started realising that the guy was becoming really well known and he also does audio restoration which I have a closet interest in, because of my job with Frank Lewin. Anyway, he was definitely influential on me and I really enjoy putting on the headphones and pointing the microphone and trying to follow the sound and perform with it.

SIMON HAMPSON: I think that's where the phonography part of field recording comes in, is planning out the recording before you take it. Obviously there's random occurrences and nice occurrences can happen, but ultimately the journey you take in the field recording is what phonography is. That's what you choose, that's what you plan.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Right, and the thing that I realised was that you can be standing in a place and just listening to something and then you can take a microphone and you can try and put it exactly where your head is and make a recording of that, but it's not going to sound the same. Everybody knows that, it's common knowledge, the microphone has certain frequency characteristics and there's just a lot of things that are going to make that recording sound different. But what I really started to realise was that if you can put yourself in that space at the moment and hear what it sounds like through that microphone, like how Toshiya Tsunoda does with these impossible locations. That's really exciting.

SIMON HAMPSON: I love Toshiya's interest in the physical characteristics of his sound recording, like the vibrations of matter and that kind of stuff. I reminds me of that quote from the nature recorders list, "Microphones are not ears, Loud speakers are not birds, A listening room is not nature." So what's coming up in terms of your art and academic life in the near future?

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Right now, I'm occupied doing a lot more instrumental writing, because I'm at Princeton and I have this unique opportunity to write for some interesting groups. So I'm having a nice time finding my way back into that and having it not be any discord with what I already do as an artist. I've finished a piece for a group called Tactus, which is the Manhattan School of Music's New Music Ensemble. I'm writing some chamber music this year. I'm also involved with the Princeton Laptop orchestra, which has been an interesting experience. At first I was reluctant to get involved because it just sounds like a silly idea when you say it. But I'm actually finding that it's an interesting palette to work with. Having hemispherical speakers spread out on the stage, each of which have six different drivers and can play six different sounds, having that many point sources on stage, there's a lot of interesting things you can do with that. So I'm trying to work with that group while I'm here. I think it sounds like a really beautiful idea.

SIMON HAMPSON: Absolutely. Scott, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you today.

SCOTT SMALLWOOD: Well, thanks a lot for talking with me and I'll look forward to hearing the show.

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Originally broadcast on Tripe R FM, Australia, 29th November 2006.
Transcribed for sijis.com 2008

Simon Hampson links:

http://overlap.org/
http://www.myspace.com/symbiosisradio

Scott Smallwood: 3 soundscapes [siji19] OUT NOW!

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