Performance Archive

Charlotte Hug, viola

Neuland, Newman Wine Vaults, July 9, 2006
Sound Symposium, St. John's, Newfoundland

Charlotte Hug's Neuland: how do we listen to experimental music?

by Ellen Waterman

To describe the Swiss musician Charlotte Hug as a violist is to provide only a limited idea of her range of artistic activities. For example, she has studied both classical music and scenic design, and sonic and visual elements are mutually constitutive in her work. Hug has explored the relationship between acoustic and electronic music in her viola playing, but also in sound installations and through research on ambisonic recording. She has also developed an array of bowing and vocal techniques that allow her to transcend the need for electronics in her viola performance (Interview). These include the "softbow", the "twistbow" and the "wetbow". Crossing freely between processes of improvisation and composition, Hug's work has a strongly performative dimension. She has collaborated with dancers, writers, actors, artists, and technicians as well as musicians, but she has also made a deep exploration of sonic and visual space in several solo projects.

In 2000, Charlotte Hug spent three months improvising in the dank, dark tunnels and cells of London's House of Detention, a former underground prison first built in the 16th century. Hug describes this "archetypal" space as both a "prison" and a "shelter" (Interview). The result of this sustained improvisational process is a multipart performance piece entitled Neuland (2000-2003). Hug sees Neuland as a constantly evolving work since each performance is a response to a new space and audience (Interview). See http://www.charlottehug.ch/english.html Projects/Solo/Neuland for photos. Neuland is also available on CD.

At the 2006 Sound Symposium in St. John's, Newfoundland I documented Hug's performance of Neuland in the gothic atmosphere of the 19th century Newman wine vaults. Hug was an incandescent presence in performance, her viola, bows, arms, and body kinetic. Like a dancer, she used her body to activate the performance environment, one moment playing high in the air, then against a wall, or crouched low to the ground, her back to the audience in a corporeal invocation of spatial acoustics. Hug's presentation was dramatic but efficacious, every movement serving to draw forth sound, helping us to "see" it.

One of the least understood aspects of musical performance is reception - the experiences of people in the audience. For Sounds Provocative: Experimental Music Performance in Canada we conducted several reception studies at festivals between 2003 and 2007, including at Hug's performance of Neuland.

Following the concert I conducted a participant intercept study, that is, a set of anonymous short "on-the-spot" interviews with audience members who were attending a post-concert reception. I set out to discover "how people experienced" Charlotte Hug's performance rather than "what they thought of it." To that end, I asked people to describe their aural, visual, imaginative, and emotional impressions. Here's a summary of their comments (they are indentified only by W = woman, M = man, and number):

Almost every respondent began by acknowledging Hug's "mastery" over her instrument, noting her "intensity" and expressing fascination with her particular bow and vocal techniques. Several people spoke about being swept away by the performance: "I'm still a little dazed" (W3); "When it's working for me I'm not aware of myself" (M2); "For me it's more of an in-the-moment sort of thing" (W2). Perhaps most tellingly, one respondent said: "I look for an experience and being told something, and I want to be taken somewhere, and I'm not very discriminative in terms of where, as long as there is a sense of mastery" (W1).

Others seemed to gain pleasure (and information) from watching and analysing:

One audience member empathised with Hug as a fellow violist:

As the variety in these comments suggests, audiences are not single, corporate entities, but rather collections of individuals who have distinct ways of experiencing and interpreting performance. Here we find aural and visual responses, empathic identification, and a divide between those who seek to be "swept away" by a concert, and those who like to maintain a bit of distance, to analyse the event as it occurs.

My thanks to Sound Symposium, Charlotte Hug, and participating audience members for contributing to this study.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Charlotte Hug for permission to document her show at Sound Symposium 2006 and to post an excerpt from it on the Sounds Provocative web site.

For an extended essay on Charlotte Hug’s work see the following: Waterman, Ellen. “Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation Vol 4.1(2009) http://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/csieci/article/view/845/1398”