Artists on the Verge

Welcome to another conversation from the high/low art divide between opera-singer-turned-experimental-performer Ema Katrovas and comedian-and-TV-writer-turned-novelist Nicholas Anthony. 

I was going to put the film the Sudbury Devil (whose creator I interviewed on this podcast) to rest - but then I stumbled across Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp” and I realised “camp” kind of explains EVERYTHING about how Nick and I (i.e. a comedian and an opera singer) had very different reactions to this film - namely why Nick HATED it and I didn't.

So what does “camp” have to do with certain corners of YouTube, the piece of outsider cinema called the Sudbury Devil, and how might it explain why two people might have different reactions to a particular work of art?

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:00:02 Conversation about why Nick didn’t like the Sudbury Devil 

00:34:44 Interlude and disclaimer to the creators of the film (“the opposite of love isn’t hatred, it’s indifference”) 

00:35:66 Understanding Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” 

00:53:58 Why camp MIGHT explain Nick’s dislike of the Sudbury Devil (disclaimer: this features Ema’s hot take on camp which she may revise) 

01:08:40 So what is camp? (and final thoughts on Sudbury Devil) 

01:12:59 Outro 

Welcome to another conversation from the high/low art divide between opera-singer-turned-experimental-performer Ema Katrovas and comedian-and-TV-writer-turned-novelist Nicholas Anthony.

For this end-of-the-year episode, Nick and Ema decided to talk about The Beatles and their influence on a few pieces of “high art”: new journalist Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” and avant garde singer Cathy Berberian’s covers of Beatles’ songs. They also briefly talk about American composer Ned Rorem’s essay “The Music of the Beatles”. Their starting point is a 2021 documentary by Peter Jackson, Get Back.

Nick and Ema circle around the question: Were the Beatles exceptional, lucky, or both? Does one need opportunity or even fame to create one’s best work? Is trying to tell a story about the Beatles, or any other iconic artist, that answers these questions even useful? 

Music excerpts from this episode: 

• Revolution 9 from the Beatles’ White Album (1968)
• Gavin Bryars' “Jesus’ Blood Never Found me Yet”(1971)
• Cathy Berberian’s cover of “She’s Got a Ticket to Ride” (1977) 
• Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody (1966) 

Things mentioned in the episode (in order of appearance):

Welcome to another conversation from the high/low art divide between opera-singer-turned-experimental-performer Ema Katrovas and comedian-and-TV-writer-turned-novelist Nicholas Anthony.

On Nick’s last night in Prague, Nick and Ema went to see the world-premiere of a contemporary opera by Richard Braxton, Trillium X, at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. They recorded this reaction that same night.

Some things mentioned or not remembered: 

• Anthony Braxton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Braxton
• Ostrava Days: https://www.newmusicostrava.cz/en/ostrava-days/about-festival/
• Petr Kotík’s composition I took Aderol to attend: Many Many Women 
• Patricia Barber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Barber
• The image of the opera house Ema mentions comes from the book The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera : https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gilded-stage-daniel-snowman/1020670873
• Leonard Bernstein’s Candide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide_(operetta)
• The librettist of Nixon in China (which premiered in 1987): Alice Goodman 

Links:

An Opera Singer and a Comedian Walk Into a Bar is a segment of the Artists on the Verge podcast which features conversations from the high/low art divide between comedian and TV writer Nicholas Anthony and your host Ema Katrovas.

In this episode Nick and Ema attempt to finish reading the chapter on the film industry from William Dereziewits’s Death of the Artist. They also talk about some real-life stories from trying to make it in the film and TV industry and quite a bit about YouTube and the small YouTube creator strategy, including a detour on the canceling of YouTuber Lindsey Ellis. They also talk a lot about technology and mind control, among other things.

Some things mentioned which merit citation: 

An Opera Singer and a Comedian Walk Into a Bar is a segment of the Artists on the Verge podcast which features conversations from the high/low art divide between comedian and TV writer Nicholas Anthony and your host Ema Katrovas.

In this episode, Nick and Ema start reading the chapter on the film and TV industry in Death of the Artist (a book they discussed in the last episode after meeting the author) - which sets them off on some controversial subjects, including women in the film industry, with mixed results (Ema gets something like feminist revenge when she expresses her oddly strong distaste for the movie The Social Network.)

Some things we mention which merit citation:

An Opera Singer and a Comedian Walk Into a Bar features opera-singer-turned-experimental-performer Ema Katrovas, talking to comedian-and-TV-writer-turned-novelist Nicholas Anthony. They have conversations from across the high/low art divide with the goal of being honest about what a life centring art - high or low - actually looks like. Nick and Ema recorded this episode directly after attending a talk by William Deresiewitz, author of Death of the Artist: How Creatives Struggle in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. Links to stuff we talk about:

• William Dereseiwitz - The Death of the Artist: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250125514/thedeathoftheartist
• Network effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
• Tangerine (movie shot on iPhones): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(film)
• Nebula (creator-led alternative to YouTube): https://nebula.tv/
• The installation Ema worked on for the Muzeum of Literature in Prague was called Abaceda. There is no link - you would have to go to the Muzeum of Literature of Prague: https://www.muzeumliteratury.cz/en/
• OpenSea: https://opensea.io/
• The American royalties-collecting institution: https://www.ascap.com/

An Opera Singer and a Comedian Walk Into a Bar is a new segment of the Artists ont he Verge podcast. It features your host, opera-singer-turned-experimental-performer Ema Katrovas, talking to comedian-and-TV-writer turned-novelist Nicholas Anthony. They'll be having conversations from across the high/low art divide with the goal of being honest about what a life centring art - high or low - actually looks like. In this first episode, Nick and Ema end up talking about an artist’s education and the different forms it takes on the high and low part of the spectrum. They also talk about the fertile soil which was the open mic at Acme, a Minneapolis-based club where Nick did stand up for the first time, do a little detour on the matriarchs in Ema's family and living under communism, and talk about how sometimes it’s necessary to totally reinvent yourself - as Nick and Ema have both done, on some level.

Credits:

Recorded in Prague, Czech Republic, in July 2023

Featuring: Nicholas Anthony and Ema Katrovas

Recorded and edited by Ema Katrovas

Theme song is "Stars" by Janis Ian (performed by Ema Katrovas and mixed to sound like a bar)

Links to stuff mentioned in the conversation:

That Shia la Beouf "just do it" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-sfG8BV8wU

Acme - the Minneapolis comedy club: https://acmecomedycompany.com/Steve Martin's band Steep Canyon Rangers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steep_Canyon_Rangers

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Standing_Up

Patricia Hampl (the writer who traveled to communist Czechoslovakia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Hampl

Patricia Hampl’s “monodrama” which Ema performed in: https://schubert.org/event/spotlight-on-patricia-hampl-writing-my-way-into-music/

"Socialism with a human face": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_a_human_face

The experimental Artist Diploma Ema is doing: https://www.cnsmd-lyon.fr/fr-2/les-formations/un-cycle-professionnalisant

Watch video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4O0W4A2l5ds

I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t until 2020 that the G20 held its first Cultural Ministerial Meeting to discuss the importance of the creative sector to the economy and it wasn’t until 2021 that they established the Cultural Working Group, the purpose of which is to address issues relating to the creative economy.

So, what I’m going to read to you today, is a report on the state of the creative industries which was written up for the first Cultural Working Group in 2021 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

I have not been able to find any documents on what the three years of G20 discussions on the cultural sector have actually yielded, but will keep an eye on that!

Link to the full report: https://www.oecd.org/cfe/leed/OECD-G20-Culture-July-2021.pdf

This is the second part of my reading “The Arts After Darwin: Does Art Have an Origin and Adaptive Function?”

In the first part of the essay, Ellen Dissanayake explained why she thinks it’s helpful to think of art as an adaptive function and lays out some of the existing hypotheses of how art may have helped us survive, in the Darwinian sense. However, she argues most of the existing hypothesis aren’t really general enough or are skewed by Western notions of what art is. In the second half of the paper, which I read to you in this episode, the author lays out her own hypothesis about the adaptive function of art, which she argues is more universal.

The author, Ellen Dissanayake, is best known for three books on art anthropology: What Is Art For? (1988), Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why (1992) and Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000). I chose to read “Arts After Darwin”, which was published in 2008 as a chapter in a book called World Art Studies, not just because it’s a shorter, stand-alone, piece but also because it is general enough to serve as an introduction for someone, like me, who isn’t an anthropologist. It was also published after Dissanayake’s three main books on art anthropology, which means she had completed the bulk of her research into this subject by the time she wrote this – not to mention that recency is very important when considering academic writing, especially when there’s a scientific aspect to it.  

You can read "Art After Darwin" yourself here: http://mail.ellendissanayake.com/publications/pdf/EllenDissanayake_ArtsAfterDarwinWAS08.pdf

This is the first part of my reading “The Arts After Darwin: Does Art Have an Origin and Adaptive Function?”

The author, Ellen Dissanayake, is best known for three books on art anthropology: What Is Art For? (1988), Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why (1992) and Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000). I chose to read “Arts After Darwin”, which was published in 2008 as a chapter in a book called World Art Studies, not just because it’s a shorter, stand-alone, piece but also because it is general enough to serve as an introduction for someone, like me, who isn’t an anthropologist. It was also published after Dissanayake’s three main books on art anthropology, which means she had completed the bulk of her research into this subject by the time she wrote this – not to mention that recency is very important when considering academic writing, especially when there’s a scientific aspect to it.  

You can read "Art After Darwin" yourself here: http://mail.ellendissanayake.com/publications/pdf/EllenDissanayake_ArtsAfterDarwinWAS08.pdf

*I accidently called the paper an “essay” on the recording, which isn’t the right term for this kind of paper.

An under-3-minute summary of the three-part essay "Another Artworld" which examines the fraught legacy of "high" art. Also - my take.

This is my honest review of the colossal undertaking that was the TV opera Everything for Dawn by Experiments in Opera. The review was “commissioned by” Theorema Review, a recently-started multi-lingual journal in which artists review other artist.

We're finally here - at the third installment of reading "Another Art World" by Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber. Even if you're a new listener, you can start here because in the last segment, the author's promised to finally get to the heart of the matter: What might "another art world" look like?

But – something happened between the last instalment of the essay, published in November 2019, and this installment from November 2020: the pandemic and the anti policing protests of the summer of 2020. Understandably, the authors felt they had to switch gears – so this installment of the essay spends quite some time drawing a parallel between the police state and the art world.

Link to the third installment of "Another Art World" in eFlux magazine: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/113/360192/another-art-world-part-3-policing-and-symbolic-order/

My interview with co-author Nika Dubrovsky: https://youtu.be/j9TyYRo0OQQ

Music: Dieter van der Westen: The Balkan Night Train

In this conversation with director Vivian Säde and producer Eve Tisler we talk about a short film we’ve been working on (named Echo and created around the monodrama Sentiment by Juliana Hall and Caitlin Vincent) in order to talk openly about all the work that goes into any creative project, even when things never actually "click" to make the project to happen. We also talk about "women filmmakers," budgets, artists and mental health and how opera on film is gatekept, among other things.

This is my reading an article I wrote for a newly-launched publication called Theorema Review (https://theorem-a.org/). I'm mainly reading it to draw attention to the idea behind the publication, launched a couple months ago by a friend, that of artists reviewing other artists (though I also used my review as an excuse to ponder experimental vocal music history and experimentation vs. communication in art.) Lots of John Cage and Cathy Berberian in the this one! 

Link to the article (including footnotes and sources): https://theorem-a.org/2022/12/08/anaphora-by-michael-edward-edgerton/

This is the audio from the anniversary livestream I did on January 13th, 2023. I fixed some of the audio issues from the livestream so it's a bit easier to listen to. 

This is a Snippet in which I ask myself why it seems so hard to be original in the field of contemporary art/theater/music and possibly introduce you to the term “flameout,” coined by anthropologist David Graeber.

Deyiş Görgülü was 9 years old when she swore off music. She was 30 when she decided to take it up again. So, what makes someone refuse music for 20 years?

Deyiş grew up in Turkey as part of the Alevi Bektashi community. In fact, her name, Deyiş, is the name for a type of Alevi spiritual music. But, in the mid-90s, as a child, she lived through one of the flareups of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict. The tension surrounding this conflict, which started way back in the early 70s, meant that her father, a trumpetist for the Turkish army, forbid her from singing Alevi songs, since Alevi culture is fundamentally pacifist and therefore anti-military. It wasn’t until she moved to France, as an adult, that she felt she could sing again and, eventually, founded an ensemble called Evden with viola d’amore player Isabelle Eder and flautist Marie Ploquin. They perform a kind of fusion between European classical music and Ottoman music – and just to give you an idea of the vastness of Ottoman music, Deyiş sings in Ladino, Turkish, Greek, Assyrian, Armenian, and Arabic among other languages.

Deyiş and I talk about Alevi culture and the cem gathering, which Deyiş likens a to jam session, about the vast world of Ottoman music, about the meaning of the word Evden, the name of her ensemble, about a song Deyiş is writing for the women of Iran, and about one problem shared by music and baklava, among other things.

Madness. It’s a popular literary and operatic themes, but seldom would you get to talk to an artist who is trained to cure madness.

Helena Mamich leads a double life: she is both a doctor at a psychiatric ward in Berlin and a soprano spatializing in classical contemporary music. As a singer, Helena has achieved enough even for someone who doesn’t have a parallel life as a doctor– she has premiered numerous works by contemporary composers, recently debuted in a new opera at the Bethanien Theater in Berlin, collaborated with the German band Black Needle noise on a crossover track, and in the year 2019 she won the Večernjakova Domovnica prize awarded annually by the Večerjni list daily newspaper for the most successful musician of the Croatian diaspora and as if that wasn’t enough, Helena has recently published a book of political haikus in her native Croatian. One of Helena’s big missions is to educate the public about psychiatry and one of the ways she would like to do that is through a short opera based on her experiences as a psychiatrist (she’s already written the libretto.)

Helena and I talk about how psychiatry and classical contemporary music complement each other, how important understanding someone’s culture is in determining whether they have a psychiatric condition, how every discharge letter from a psychiatric ward could be a libretto, as well as one thing Helena says should be taught in conservatories but isn’t.

Helena’s website and blog: https://helenamamic.com/

Helena’s Instagram: @helenamamich

Music (all music on this episode is interpreted by Helena Mamich):

Meet Felicita Brusoni, Italian singer and voice researcher. Felicita is pursuing a doctorate at Malmö Academy of Music is Sweden (part of Lund University) where she is working on a project called “A Voice Beyond the Edge.” One of her main mentors is composer Michael Edgerton, author of The 21st Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional Extra Normal Voice which is a catalog of vocal sounds that often comes up in conversations about extended vocal techniques.

As the name of Felicita’s artistic research project implies, this is definitely going to be an episode for voice geeks but also for those who like the bizarre. Felicita and I talk about the inaccuracy of the term “extended vocal techniques,” about the somewhat hard-to-define but increasingly popular discipline of “artistic research,” about the difference between extended techniques in the mid-20th century and today, about Felicita’s fresh discovery that humans can produce ultrasounds, but also about singers Cathy Berberian and even Maria Callas and, at the end, Felicita even tries to teach me an extended technique I hadn’t done before – to mixed results.

Felicita’s website: https://www.felicitabrusoni.com/

Felicita’s Instagram: @felicitabrusoni_soprano 

🎵 Music:

Whenever I pitch the Artists on the Verge podcast, I’m forced to use the term “indie artist” because I can’t seem to find another shorthand for the kinds of artists I’m speaking to. It's a term which isn't perfect and does have some baggage, so here I explain what I mean by it and why I think it's particularly important to talk about this kind of artist, now. 

Vivian Säde is a twenty-four-year-old Estonian/intercontinental filmmaker in the very beginning of her career. I was connected with her by another guest to this podcast, Malena Dayen (whom you can hear in episode 4), when I was looking for someone to work with on a short film. I found that Vivian’s sensibility, unpretentiously influenced by pop culture, is a perfect counterbalance to a potentially overly-serious short musical film written around a monodrama for unaccompanied soprano by contemporary American composer Juliana Hall and text by Caitlin Vincent. 

Vivian and I talk about the difficulty of breaking into filmmaking, about walking the line between popular entertainment and high art, about the Americanization of storytelling, and about our joint film project and how it ties into issues of feminine identity in the public eye, among other things.  

This is my review of a very prescient book which aligns with the concerns of this podcast: William Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020). I share one central insight of the book and also some notes I have as a European-based artist with a theater background. If I get just one person to read this book, I'll be happy! Here's a link: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250125514/thedeathoftheartist

Richard Katrovas (a.k.a. my father) is the luckiest person I know: He grew up in cars, the eldest son of a criminal who bounced checks while lugging his family of seven across the United States. They lived from motel to motel and car to car, fleeing from the police, which meant my father and his four younger siblings missed much of elementary school. The two times his father was in prison, the rest of the family lived with his mother on welfare in public housing. Long story short (and I describe his circuitous life path more in the intro) he became a poet, later an "ex-poet," and a creative writing professor, as well as co-founder of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, which sprouted from the 1990s American expat community in Prague, Czech Republic. 

I interviewed my father more or less on a whim, a day before he left to return from Prague to the US, after visiting my sisters and me for the holidays this past December. I didn’t necessarily plan to edit our conversation into an episode of this podcast, because I wasn’t sure If my father really fits what I would think of as an “indie” artist but what I realized is that our conversation is one about myths – personal myths, historical myths, cultural myths. My father’s story can be framed as a manifestation of the American dream or it can be understood, as my father has come to understand it, as a story of how lucky it was to be white in 1950s and 60s America. The format of this podcast, in which I ask artists to “sing a song of themselves,” to paraphrase Walt Whitman, really emerges from my growing up with my father's storytelling and self-mythologizing, and so his voice really does belong in the Artists on the Verge series.

I should also add that I was editing our conversation after Russia invaded Ukraine this February, and this loomed over our conversation, in retrospect, in the sense of how much we talk about the way history plays out in the lives of individuals. 

Miro Tóth is a Prague-based Slovak composer, improvisor, and saxophonist who effortlessly moves between genres. He recently premiered his composition Black Angels Songs, Book 1, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, inspired by the famous George Crumb piece. He created (among other music theater works) a series of operas called Trilogy of the Rod in which a rod – an actual stick - becomes a kind of monolith vested with the absurd power of public officials. He’s also known as a film composer. On the other hand, he stood at the founding of an improvisation scene in Slovakia some fifteen years ago and has performed as a saxophone and vocal improvisor, in genres from jazz to free improvisation, across Central Europe. He is a tireless ensemble-founder – from our conversation I counted about five different ensembles he founded, focused on a range of different genres.

Miro was nice enough to speak English for most of the interview but we switch to Czech and Slovak in the last third of the interview, which is also when the most interesting conversation happens. I try dub over this to convey our conversation - for anglophone people it’s a kind of peek into a foreign culture and language.

Miro and I talk about how you must think of yourself as “nobody” in order to do your best work, the absurd power of public officials, the Czech new music scene, the Ostrava New Music Days festival without which the Czech New Music Scene wouldn’t be what it is, the cultural differences between Czechs and Slovaks, and the permeability of music genres, among other things.

Kate Gale is a poet, prose writer, librettist, president of the American Composers Forum, and founder of Red Hen Press, a Los Angeles-based independent literary publishing house, one of the foremost of its  kind in the US. Her story is both all-American and quite unusual: It involves escaping a cult, going to college just to spite a conservative boyfriend, and becoming a divorced mom who decided to transform Los Angeles into a literary city. The result was Red Hen Press, named after the American fable about the Little Red Hen who sowed her own wheat to make her own bread.    

Kate and I talk about the healing power of storytelling, how a manuscript goes from being one of thousands submissions to being published, how stories aren’t always enough, the taboos around money, the insight manuscript submissions give into the collective psyche, and why e-Books aren’t replacing print books any time soon, among other things.

Olivia Fuchs is an opera director with roots in indie theater. Her story involves founding her own experimental theater company in London, a burned down performance space, and the UK tradition of performing above pubs. Recently, Olivia has been working on environmental activism, which she hopes to incorporate into her work in theater. Olivia and I spoke about techniques to approaching theater directing, how almost any story can be feminist,  the advantages of growing up bicultural, Margaret Thatcher’s unexpected help in starting a small theater company, and, of course, finding ways to make ecologically-conscious, sustainable theater.