IKEA Bowls, Composition and Improvisation
School of Music faculty member Sivan Cohen Elias was recently awarded the prestigious McKnight Fellowship, an award given by the McKnight Foundation to support the work of Minnesota artists as they embark on their creative projects. In addition to composition, Professor Elias specializes in crafting music using unique objects instead of instruments, such as stainless-steel bowls from IKEA, often performing improvisationally. We caught up with her to discuss her new fellowship and her creative process.
Can you share your general background and how your interest in your specialty came to be?
I have been composing almost since I remember myself, pieces ranging from solo instruments, to chamber music, all the way to opera. In the last decade, I have developed three streams of works: one is acoustic and electroacoustic for any instrument combinations and sizes, the second is electronic improvisation performance, and the third is what I call unified media, or sound puppetry, which refers to pieces that fuse other art-forms such as puppetry/body theater, choreography, sculpting, and video processing – conceptualized as one stream of energy (instead of the layering method of having music that accompanies a visual art form). Through the latter pieces, I often explore social-political themes (or metaphors) such as failure, entanglement, and illusion. Those types of works are usually performed by musician-performance artists, and they often involve electronic manipulations in real-time, which assist the surreal theatrical atmosphere.
From age 5, everyday sounds fascinated me – car honks were the first sound source I tried to imitate on the piano (inspired by the Israeli soundscape, where I grew up). From age 6, I learned the piano, and later went to the Jerusalem Academy of Music High School and started to study composition alongside the piano. Throughout those years, I also practiced dance, as well as drawing, and sculpting guided by my visual artist mom. Radio, analog technology, and tape cassettes were the main devices at that time. Having an electrician dad, from whom I learned technical skills, helped me to gradually grasp on musical hardware and software.
My mother’s family were of European descent. My father at age 7, together with his family, ran away from Iraq and immigrated to Israel. Growing up with parents who came from very different backgrounds and who had many opposite world views, gave me the flexibility to carry, and make sense of many contradictions, which I have gradually turned into my art.
Tell us more about your McKnight Fellowship. How did you react when you found out that you were going to be selected as a 2024 Fellow?
The McKnight Fellowship is a generous award that is unrestricted, and artists can use it in whichever way they wish. This gives artistic freedom and genuine support that basically tells the artist that we believe in your art and want to support you so you can continue to do whatever you are doing. I was obviously extremely happy when I received the note of being one of the four selected composers of this year. I knew I had a few projects and developments I wanted to fulfill this year and that gave me a great boost of energy and encouragement to move forward with my plans. This, along with being selected to release my new electronic trio album, Melting Planets (which will be officially released on February 28, 2025), through Innova Recordings label, made me feel embraced by the Twin Cities artistic community and as a relatively new resident in the area, this additional support makes me feel at home here.
What projects are you currently working on for the fellowship? Can you briefly describe them? What inspired you to produce them?
I am currently finishing a multimedia solo piece for a soprano, commissioned by the UK-based singer/composer Laura Bowler, entitled Who-He-Huh. It is a Sound-Puppetry type piece, in which the singer acts as a social media influencer who teaches us how to build a real-life avatar and how to teach it human emotions, while, along the way, something goes wrong.
The more she tries to fix it, the more entangled it gets. The piece includes video projection of the singer with pre-recorded and real-time manipulated shots, all designed with the graphical programming environment MaxMSP and Jitter. The piece will be premiered in March 2025, during the Maerzmusik festival in Berlin.
My next piece is commissioned by UK-based ensemble Distractfold for electric guitar, cello, and electronics. This piece explores the sound potential of pointillistic multi-textured pulses, produced by various DIY and commercialized vibrating devices, applied on the musical instruments’ surfaces and strings, and multiplied in various electronic manipulations. Gradually, this soundscape transforms into a talking body, mimicking absurd, unintelligible slow speech intonation. The transitioning between the two perspectives of the sound reveals the existence of previously unseen dimensions when we turn our vision in a different direction.
The last piece, which will conclude my McKnight fellowship year in late spring 2025, is an acoustic study piece - miniature for an orchestra, which will reflect on the sound world I will have created in the second piece.
All my current pieces, just like my coming album Melting Planets (release date: February 28, 2025), design metaphors related to the current environmental and socio-political climate change we are witnessing. Some pieces I design with futuristic, apocalyptic, and Sci-Fi elements; some are simply surreal, merging tension, delicate grotesque images, and absurd humor in the flow of sound and visual events.
How do you think your students will benefit from your fellowship?
Since the fellowship is unrestricted, alongside my ongoing creative projects, I also took some time during the fellowship year to learn a few new interactive, machine-learning, and sensor-based tools to map between body gestures and sound/video processing. I plan to incorporate those new tools in my Spring 2025 course, aimed for a combination of advanced composition students and creative students from other fields. Together, they will create collaborative works that merge video, movement, and other art forms in unified media works. I am very curious to see how students will utilize the technology and the concept through their art and esthetic.
Furthermore, I think that when students see that their professor follows her own passion and creates distinct works that can be perceived as living out of the convention, or the mainstream, it may seem unprofitable. A student may think, “how can I develop my own voice while making it in the real world?” – so, when a professor does get a substantial award as a result of developing her own voice, it is a recognition that assures them that with hard work and artistic courage, it can happen to each one of them.
Do you have a favorite object that you have performed with in the past? How did you come to discover the sound while working with your compositions?
One of my favorite objects I have worked with musically is a specific stainless-steel bowl from Ikea. I love its entire series, but first, I discovered the large one, the 14’’. The main characteristic of it is that the rim is straight, without a wing going out, which became an important factor for several sonic matters. The discovery happened during a stay at a house my family and I rented in Chicago for 3 months, which came entirely furnished. And while cooking dinner one day, I was looking for a salad bowl, and this is when I saw it. After the meal, when washing the bowl that was the moment, I discovered its sonic potential. The water inside the bowl revealed a satisfying “boing” sound every time it banged the sink or the tap. With the water inside and the circular movement, the “boing” varied in pitch in such a beautiful, irregular pattern. After that day, the bowl moved to my studio. Then I purchased the 11’’ size bowl of the series, and I recorded all the sounds I was able to produce from those bowls, each by itself or through interaction between them, with water, and other objects inside it and without. The straight rim allowed me to turn both bowls to face each other’s rims in parallel, and with a steady hand, slowly rotating the upper bowl against the bottom bowl to create friction between the two rims that gradually produces beautiful harmonic frequencies, which is a beautiful metaphor to the real harmony of the world. A metaphor about the order that is revealed through the chaos, the beauty that comes from noise, which is the core of what I examine at large, both in my music and through my observation of humanity and nature. Those bowls and other bowls have an extensive use in my piece How to Make a Monster.
How do you find your personal style and direction when crafting improvisational compositions in performances?
I have a long relationship with improvisation and a deep conversation between the two creative approaches in my work. When I compose a piece, it is often empirical research. The performer, choreographer, and builder sides in me are very involved simultaneously. I experiment with various objects or materials and musical instruments and toys, and when I find the sound phenomenon that interests me for a specific piece, I start to improvise, examining the characteristics of that sound and its potential, sonically and visually. When I perform an improvisation in front of an audience, it is almost like inviting the audience to my studio. I might come just with the specific instruments and machines that I want to use and then see what happens in real-time – completely free improvisation, or I create a sequence of events in advance, so I transition between the materials and moods with a planned structure, but without too much detail otherwise. My notated compositions are the end process of those experiments and improvisations, and the use of improvised moments within a composition themselves vary from one piece to another. Many of my crafted compositions have the tendency to gradually transform back and forth from extremely detailed, precise notation of what and how to produce the intended sounds and rhythms, to parts that only ask to improvise while using a specific gesture within a range of notes, or parts of the instrument, and all the way of asking to almost freely improvise while imagining geometrical shapes or other extra-musical gestures. In this way, the piece remains recognizable due to the detailed parts and yet elastic, and leaves space for creativity of the performers in other parts. The idea is to bring a specific energy out of the performers and in order to get that they need to fulfill tasks that I know what energy might resolve from it.
What is your favorite part about working at the University of Minnesota School of Music?
My favorite part at the UMN School of Music is working with my composition students and colleagues who have a common interest to build a collaborative and creative community together, and luckily, gradually, we see more and more people who join this mission. I love that many of our students have their individual musical interests and style yet are curious and open-minded to explore new paths within their artistic research. It lifts my heart when students have a revelation resulting from our brainstorms of various possible ways to solve a problem. Their revelation inspires me back, and that makes my day.
