Sam Rosenthal Interview from April 1999 Ink 19 -- Continued

Sam Rosenthal: As far as the music goes, no... there was no real alteration of my compositional method. I still began with a blank slate and collaged sounds and chords together. On the other hand, I would say that there was an alteration in the writing of the lyrics and the melodies. In the past, I would rely on journals of my own writing (stuff from my life). This time, I spent time in my journals rolling the concept of the album around, looking at it from different angles and seeing what I wanted this album to be about. There was definitely more thought involved in designing the concept... and when I created my electronics for the song, I would let the keyboard run in repeat mode, while I picked from the "task jar" for a song subject. I would then see how I could make it work with that music.

Often those songs came from my ideas about Duchamp... and then I would blend that with experiences and ideas of my own...

Ink19: In a lot of modern and postmodern art, process is at least as important, if not more so, than product -- both the process of creation and the process of viewing/interpreting. Certainly this seems to be true in many of Duchamp's works, which evolve over years of incredibly detailed composition (for The Large Glass) or decades (for Given), and which require the viewer to complete the process of creation in viewing/interpretation. Do you feel this applies to Aflame as well?

Sam Rosenthal: In a certain sense yes, that one hopefully thinks about the subject and completes ideas that are in fragment form within the words. It is music that can be thought about and serve to create new ideas and thoughts for the listener, yet it also functions as a complete auditory experience. I think that Duchamp's work suffers for viewers who have no idea what the work is about. I have gone to the Philadelphia Museum of Art many times, and noticed how people sorta breeze through the Duchamp room, once they pass the paintings... because then it "doesn't make sense" to them...

On a different note, Black Tape for a Blue Girl just got booked to play at the Philadelphia Museum (which houses the permanent Duchamp collection). I am very excited about that!!!

Ink19: What do you think of the following Duchamp quotes (the first taken from his lecture "The Creative Act" [1957], the second from an interview published in the spring of that year):

"[T]he creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

"It is the spectators who make the pictures."

Sam Rosenthal: I agree with him, at least in so far as modern art goes. You are supposed to sit there and think about it, and use your internal set of standards and emotions to derive a "meaning" from the piece. I find that to be something very exciting about art; but on the other hand, I often feel that postmodern art doesn't have the intellectual core it likes to pretend it has. I think it is often putting one over on the viewer, even though (of course) many people thought the same about Duchamp in his time.

Ink19: Although there are a fair number of works of poetry based on artworks in other media, there seem to be relatively few musical pieces devoted to art in other media. Do you think Duchamp's work is particularly conducive to musical "inspiration," and if so, why?

Sam Rosenthal: I don't think it is something that someone would have thought of doing, so probably it is not the most conducive oeuvre of artwork to write music about. I don't know if (without the words) you would think this music is about Duchamp -- such as if it were instrumental. That said, you are correct that there are not many musical pieces based on visual artists. Lou Reed/John Cale's Songs For Drella is an example that springs to mind... and one that I think is quite successful...

Ink19: Most of the songs on As one aflame have a relatively direct link to the works of Duchamp, or at least an inspirational link to his works. However, the masochistic (literally -- some of the lyrics are paraphrased from Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) scene portrayed in "Tell me you've taken another" seems to be an exception. Can you say a bit about how this song fits into the album as a whole?

Sam Rosenthal: Well, maybe it doesn't? It fits into the overall theme, in so far as it is a story about a character who is expounding upon his desire. However, it doesn't really have anything to do with Duchamp. On Remnants of a deeper purity, the song "For you will burn your wings upon the sun" was about a character who was destroyed by his lover's betrayal. People seemed to like the over-the-top nature of that piece, so I decided to write a companion piece. Somehow I decided to do a song that was the direct opposite, about someone who wants to be betrayed. Someone who enjoys that feeling. That is how the song evolved...

Ink19: Finally, can you recommend some books and Web sites to folks who would like to delve more deeply into the works of Duchamp?

Sam Rosenthal: The book that most directly reflects upon my album is The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp by Jerrold Seigel (University of California Press, 1995).

For WWW information about Duchamp, and photos of his works: http://www.freshwidow.com Fresh Widow. (nice images, including an animated "walk" up to and through Given, and a good chronology)

http://galaxy.cau.edu/tsmith/Duch.html (interesting discourse on The Large Glass, etc.)