Amble Skuse on her piece “We Ask These Questions Of Everybody”
Read my interview with Amble Skuse on her piece “We Ask These Questions Of Everybody”. It is a piece composed by Amble Skuse. It is a digital Opera that includes two sections which weave in and out of each other. One section is built on a verbatim interview of a disabled woman going to be interviewed to see if she can get disability support from the government. The other part consists of interviews with disabled people that look at lots of different aspects of disabled life: society, friendships, productivity, philosophy, death. Those two aspects were weaved together in a way that the disability interview is very kind of narrow by asking questions like: can you lift a box? Can you make a piece of toast? In the chorus parts there are huge expansive conversations about lots of aspects of disabled life and the character who is being interviewed finds support from the disabled community. The samples have been made from real life interviews that the composer did with disabled people. The text version was created by Armands Stefans Sargsuns.
What musicians did you include in the piece?
It’s completely a disabled cast and crew. There’s me doing the electronics, there is Steph West who is a harp player who’s disabled. She has limb difference, so one of her hands doesn’t work in the same way that the other does and she also has a fatigue condition. There’s Victoria Oruwari, the singer who plays Lynn who’s the interviewer and she’s blind. We worked with Sonia Allori who has multiple impairments and one of her parents has hearing loss, she’s also had multiple strokes, she’s a wheelchair user, she has fatigue conditions and mobility issues. We worked with Clarence Adoo who is paraplegic, so he has movement in one shoulder and in his head. He controls his computer using a tube that he puts in his mouth, he can move the tube around with his tongue and that controls his mouse cursor. When he blows into the tube that’s a click, so for that I built him a specific Max MSP based sampler. We put all the samples of the interviews into the sampler and then he could control the mix of the voices coming out by clicking on certain numbers and playing the sample going that way, layering up different samples, triggering them in different orders. He could also choose the volume of the samples and how often they repeated and looped over the top of each other, so those were the instrumentalists.
Steph, the harp player, also sings the part of Hannah who is the disabled person being interviewed and she plays the harp in the choruses, so she’s in both sections. Sonia plays the clarinet and she’s in the chorus sections. Clarence is on the sampler in the chorus sections and Victoria and Steph are the interviewers and the interviewee.
Watch full interview:
What were the main barriers you needed to overcome during the creation of the piece?
Yeah, it was quite complicated in that, because I have a severe fatigue based condition. We knew I couldn’t be in a rehearsal room for like eight hours, so the first thing was to think about how we can rehearse this with somebody who has to stay at home, so we decided we were going to rehearse it over the internet. This was just before the COVID-19 pandemic, so at the time it was like nobody rehearsed this via Zoom, this is crazy, but we’re going to try and make an opera over Zoom. Then, obviously, the pandemic hit just as we would start to rehearse, so it became normal for everybody, so that was like our first barrier. What we’d planned to do was rehearse via Zoom, but then all get together for the recording, but because of the pandemic, obviously, we couldn’t do that, so we had to send everybody the recording kit. They all had to learn how to use Ableton or Audacity, we had to send them focused scarletts, microphones, cables and teach them how to set everything up themselves so that they could record themselves. That’s not specific to disability because of the pandemic. If it hadn’t been for the pandemic, that would have been a specific disability thing which I think is quite interesting in itself. The pandemic just sort of shifted the window of what’s normal and put a lot of sort of inverted commas to “normal people” into a disabled state where they had to think and function like we do, so it was quite a weird experience that suddenly everybody was having to act like we were anyway.
Then we had to speak to each of the individuals. I basically use this principle where we build any project from the individuals up. Instead of deciding how we’re going to do it and then work out what we need to change for each disabled person we don’t think about how we’re going to do it we think about the people and then we work out what we can do given what the people can do.
Obviously, for Clarence we needed to build a complete piece of software that he could use, because there was no sampling software that was accessible with his head mouse. The main barrier for that is that he doesn’t have a double click function, so anything I built for him had to have single click, because he can’t double click, he can’t control click, because he doesn’t have use in his hands. You need to be able to run all of this software just with a mouse movement and a single click, so that meant I had to build something that specifically had those parameters for him.
In terms of working with Sonia because she has hearing loss we were doing improvised sections, but she couldn’t really respond to what the harp was playing, because she couldn’t really hear it very well, so we worked with Eluned Charnley. She is a captioner, creative captioner, and she was on the Zoom call, she would listen to what the harp was doing and in real time she would type it out so that Sonia could see it in words. The captioner would use words like harp is falling like a waterfall and sounds moody and dark, sudden slamming and so it was very descriptive. It wasn’t just C sharp F natural, it was really descriptive of the mood that the harp was creating and because Sonia wasn’t able to hear pictures so well for each improvisation we decided on a set of a mode where whatever she played would fit. She didn’t have to make audio decisions like, “Okay, now we’re in F minor or now we’re in D sharp major.” We had it like, “We are now playing in this mode and anything you do is going to be in tune, it’ll be fine.” She had a set of pictures she could use and then she had the moods coming in via text from Eluned so that she could respond to the harp without necessarily being able to hear it. We also did a number of takes for every recording, because she is hearing impaired the pitch of the clarinet depends on your mouth pressure. If you can’t hear the pitch very clearly, you might not have the mouth pressure quite right. We did a number of a number of takes so that if any of it was slightly pitchy I could pull those samples out and replace them with something that she’d done in another take, because obviously she didn’t want something that was kind of microtonal going into the show if that wasn’t kind of what she wanted. She said she would prefer it to be edited for pitch correctness, so that’s what we did with Sonia.
Steph has a lot of inbuilt coping strategies which means she basically doesn’t ask for very much. She works as a harp teacher and plays harp for weddings, so she interfaces with the non-disabled world a lot and she’s basically learned to cover up her disability. When she presents as a performer she doesn’t say, “Oh, I need this and this, and this,” she just goes, “I’ll be fine” which is a coping strategy that a lot of disabled people use. They just kind of internalise all the adjustments that need to be done and don’t ask anything of the rest of the ensemble. She’s a folk singer, so we sent her the music to learn by ear, because that’s what she asked for and she said “Don’t worry about a score, I will just learn it by ear if you send it over to me.” The hard parts we’d worked together before and she sort of told me that there are certain structures that she can’t do, certain chords that she can’t do because of the way her hand is built. But because we were working with improvisation actually that didn’t make any difference, because she was in charge of what she was doing, so there was never a point where I was like “I need you to play this chord.” It was always her choice what she was playing, so she could choose anything that was comfortable for her.
Then in the improvisations we had another rule or another sort of founding principle which was that on any given day however you feel that’s fine. We weren’t saying like: “This is a recording day, I need you to give it 100.” It was like, “Yes, it’s a recording day, but if you don’t feel well, if you feel tired, if your hands aren’t coordinating, if your ears are playing up today just do the minimum and we’ll still make a show from it, like that’s fine.” A lot of disabled people experience some kind of fluctuating conditions, so some days were terrible, some days were brilliant. As a professional musician that’s really difficult, because you need to be at like 80, 90, 100 percent during a performance or a rehearsal, or a recording. If your body isn’t there, then there’s nothing you can do to change that and it’s very difficult to say to somebody, “I might not be able to play that on Thursday. I might. I don’t know.” One of the principles we had is that you don’t have to worry about being your best, just bring us what you’ve got and whatever you do, even if you just lie on the floor and do nothing I can still make a show from that it’s not a problem like I will edit my way around what you give me. It was kind of about trying to disperse the power amongst the group and say like, “You bring what you want to bring, you play what you want to play, you tell me what you need, like do you need somebody to translate for you, do you need somebody to type for you, do you need somebody to like build a bit of equipment for you. We’ll put that in place, then you just be who you are, give us what you’ve got and that’s fine.” That kind of flips the idea of a rehearsal where it’s like, “here’s the music, they want you to play it, you must be able to play it by Tuesday,” which is like being the opposite of that basically.
What was the process of organising the creation of the piece?
As a composer… God, I’m trying to think back on how I did it. I worked with a librettist and a director called Toria Banks who’s also disabled. I interviewed about 20 disabled people and I asked them about everything: life in general, how society views disabled people and we just got onto lots of crazy topics. It was brilliant, it was so interesting, I recommend it. Just ask lots of questions. Then all of that text, plus the text from the interview went to Toria and she edited that into the script. After that I had to go through all the interviews, find the bits of text that she’d chosen and cut them all together. Then because we’d interview people over Skype and Zoom and mobile phone. I had to then audio EQ, mix, polish up every bit of that audio. Some of them I couldn’t do a good job on, it was just too bad. Then I had to make each one into a sample, a single sample like each sentence that she’d chosen and those sentences would be put aside for the sampler. I had to notate the entire interview so that the interview you hear is not the full interview which is about an hour and a half long. It’s edited, but it’s not edited in the sense that it changes the meaning. It’s just she’s cut it down to make it more punchy. Then I had to go through the audio recording of the interview and cut it all into the bits that she had cut it to, then I would listen to it and play it back on on the keyboard which made it into the laptop and turned it into midi data. The rhythm and the pictures of the interview are then turned into the melody and the pictures for the singers.
What else did I do… So I had to build the sampler for Clarence. There was a lot of chat with Clarence about what he’d like to be able to do with the sampler. I built him something a year before for a different project and he’d come back saying, “I’d like more control over this, I’d like more control over that,” because I think on that sample it was literally press one now and it didn’t really feel like he had much creative control. He was just triggering a sample which is not a musical talent, you know, because he was a professional trumpet player before his accident, he has a huge amount of musical talent and musical sensibility, and pressing a button just doesn’t really cut it. We looked at how I could adapt to that sample and give him more musical control in the piece. I adapted that sample for him and then loaded all the samples into it and sent that over to him. He couldn’t open that on his laptop without it messing up his day-to-day software which he really needs to, you know, manage his life, so then I loaded it onto a laptop, put remote access on that laptop and posted the whole laptop to him. When he had it open at his end I could log into his laptop and edit the software remotely from my house if there were any problems, because, also, when you make a piece of software for somebody if it goes wrong you want to be able to go, “Oh, yeah, press this and then type this in here.” Of course, with Clarence that’s a really slow process, because he has to like scroll through his alphabet and find every button and it’s just incredibly hard for him to fix anything that’s not working at his end. Because of the pandemic we couldn’t meet up for me to test it with him, so I had this remote access where he would be like, “Oh, can I have this button here or can I move this here or this volume fader isn’t connected properly,” and then I could get into the laptop, control it remotely from my end, re-save it and reopen it and it would work at his end again. That’s what I was doing for Clarence.
Then I had to work out a kind of musical framework for it. We had the dramatic framework, the dramatic arc, we knew which sections were gonna be intense, which were joyful, which were going to be frightening. Because Victoria works as a dramaturg as well she had written this amazing emotional journey into the piece. Then I had to work out how to give that to the audience. That was mainly done through the interviews. I kept really super simple, so it just has like a harp continuum just playing a couple of notes here and there just to kind of root it in a pitch framework and when it goes into the choruses that’s where we got the kind of modal stuff with the improvisation, with the different vibes. When we were doing the improvisations with Steph and Sonia, and Clarence we could say, “Okay, we give them a more kind of major feel mode or a mode that’s a bit darker, or maybe it’s a little bit gritty,” or we’d add in a note to a mode to make it feel really awkward if it was a really awkward kind of section. We would give them verbal instructions where this is a scary improvisation or this is a reflective improvisation, or this is a joyful improvisation so that by doing that we would create the kind of shape of the piece I suppose.
Once all of that had kind of been decided on and and kind of conceptualised we went into a rehearsal period and we did that via Zoom. It was exceptionally hard, because I know everybody finds Zoom exhausting, but I think four of our team had a fatigue condition and we all were having fatigue crashes at different times. The major problem that we had was that we had a deadline coming up and we had not really anticipated we didn’t quite have enough time I think. On reflection we should have given ourselves like three months of rehearsing and recording time and we actually had about three weeks. It was really brutal in terms of the amount of hours we had to work together, much more than we would normally do safely in terms of our energy levels. We would do like two days with the singers and then two days with the improvisers, so for Steph and I we were in all four of those rehearsals. Then for me, also, at the end of that everyone else would get three days off, but I would get a mountain of home recorded audio sent to me by the musicians that I would then have to make sense of. I would have to edit it, I would have to EQ it, I’d have to like put it together, choose the right takes, talk to the director, work out which take has the right energy to it, which takes are more pitchy fine, find the takes that are going to tell the story the best, work out what they all are, put them together, save it, EQ and try to make it beautiful.
As soon as we kind of got that scratch we’d be back into another rehearsal and recording session with the singers on the Monday. Because the show was supposed to be live originally we had just planned to rehearse and then do the show live and we didn’t have any flex in the budget for recording, editing, mixing, mastering. There was nothing in the time frame for that, but because of Covid we had to fit that in between all the rehearsals and it going live on screen. It was just ridiculous like I was doing the composing, I was leading rehearsals, editing, I was mastering, I was eq’ing. It was just utterly exhausting, brain fryingly difficult.
How did the cooperation with other musicians shape the piece?
The piece is designed so that the power is given away by the composer. One of the principles of disabled theory that I work with is about dispersal of power. What you would identify in disability studies in terms of barriers is that what tends to happen is one person who’s at the top of a structure decides how things are going to be and everyone else has to fit into that structure. What we would say under my framework of disabled studies that I use is that actually that is what causes barriers for disabled people, because a person making the decisions doesn’t anticipate what the disabled person is going to need. Even if they ask them, the design of the project is still probably not going to work for them. What I do both in the production of the piece and in the composing of the piece is to give away as much power as possible and to say to the musicians, “You make this yours now. I want you to just bring what you can, sing it how you want to sing it, if it feels right it is right, if you want to to give 100 or 20, if you want to take it somewhere in the improvisations that’s I want you to bring what you want to bring to the piece.” We had talks about what we were trying to achieve with the piece, we had talks about the general mood that it flowed.
A lot of my other work is a little bit more anarchist in that I don’t even have that dramaturgical structure, but because this was an opera it had to have that kind of dramaturgical linear structure. We had a sense of where each section would go and how it would land what it goes into. But it’s very much like once I give those samples to Clarence he decides what order those samples are played in, Steph decides how she responds to it musically, Eluned decides what she writes about it for Sonia. In that sense it’s not really my composition. It’s something that I created a framework for that then everyone else gave what they wanted to give.
What did you learn during the creation of this piece?
Oh, so much. So much, so much, so much. I think up until that point being a disabled composer I had just worked on my own, because every time I tried to interface with an ensemble I would just get battered by the structure of how to function as a classical composer and I couldn’t do it because of my health situation. I can’t do rehearsals, I can’t do back-to-back days, I can’t do long days, I can’t edit or reflect on things overnight and bring you back anything the next day for a rehearsal. I’m just not well enough to do that. Learning to do things in this way it was like, “Okay, if I were to do things in the way that I would like to do them what would happen?” It was about kind of having that same question to all the disabled people like, “If you could do things the way you want to do them what would it look like? Can we get all of those realities to interface with each other?” Sometimes we totally couldn’t. Sometimes somebody had to be pushed beyond where they were comfortable with and I think a lot of the time it was me purely because we didn’t plan it properly and that’s on me, so it’s not anybody else’s fault. There is always a point I think where we can’t say that access is access and we have one way of doing things and it works, and that’s how you do it, because some people’s needs will clash with others.
On another piece that I worked with one of the people needed absolute clarity about what was going on, when it was going on, what it was for. The other person needed a lot of freedom and was like, “If you tell me that, I’m just going to stress out.” It’s like, “If I’m a director, how can I give you both what you need? I can’t.” Specifically we had somebody with this need for precision and somebody with an anxiety disorder who just wanted to be able to come and go as they please and I can’t give both of those people what they need in the same rehearsal. There’s always a clash. Well, not always, but, you know, we have to be prepared for the fact that what one person’s needs might then be a problem for somebody else. Then there needs to be another conversation about resolving this without one of them feeling like they’ve been ignored or one of them feeling like their needs don’t matter as much.
I think, also, with disability we often think of access as getting into the room, but there’s also an equality of experience. It’s like, “Did you get into the room with dignity or did you get wheeled in past the bins? Did you come into that room and experience the same level of respect and integrity, and support as everybody else or did you feel like a problem? Did you feel like a piece of meat? Did you feel like a bit of cargo being put up in the cargo list?” It is about the equality of experience and it’s incredibly hard. I mean, I definitely didn’t always succeed with this, it really was a struggle and I’m sure that other musicians would tell you that there were points where it was incredibly difficult. They were brilliant and they were so professional, and they just held it, and they did it. The other nice thing about having this non-hierarchical balance is that when one of us couldn’t, another one stepped in and held it for a moment. It was like I got to a point where I just couldn’t continue doing it, I think someone really needed something and I just couldn’t provide it. I had no capacity, but I knew that they really needed it. At that point Toria was like, “Okay, I can step in, tell me what to do.” She’s not a musician, but she has some musical skills and she was like, “I will start this and you can just oversee it, because I could see you can’t.” It’s about that flexibility and that care.
What are the things that you would suggest to a composer that wants to work with people who have special needs?
The first thing is to start with your musicians. Get to know them, ask them how they prefer to work, what do I need to know about how they work, about their instrument, if there are any barriers. The second thing is to be prepared to be flexible, so think about how you can provide options for that player. If you give them a massive solo, maybe give them an easy version, a middle version and a difficult version, so on the day if they’re not feeling well they can flick between, so give people options and flexibility in the piece. Then the third one: just keep checking in with people. Don’t assume that you can write something, send it to them and they’ll play it. It has to be a dialogue, it has to be a collaboration, it has to be a group endeavour and it’s about hearing. Yeah, just keep checking in with people and make it a dialogue.
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