Hildegard Westerkamp: Transformations

Navel-Gazers #58 is an interview with Hildegard Westerkamp who is going to talk to us about Transformations. In the Navel-Gazers-sphere there are certain artists whose names come up again and again. Hildegard is one of those artists, and it’s usually on the topic of sound walks, an approach which she has pioneered since way back in the 70s. In my case it was upon encountering this collection ’Transformations’ that I really became fixated upon her work. What I love about these compositions is that while Hildegard is not shy about processing and reconstituting source recordings, there’s always something tethering it all to experiential reality in a way which seems distinctly alive. And that’s a topic we touched upon leading up to this interview, when we were deciding between an email chain or a spoken conversation. At the outset, it was something either of us could have gone either way on, but when Hildegard described the spoken format as seeming more “alive”, I knew that was the way to go. There are so many questions to ask Hildegard. These pieces, which span a period from the late 70s to the early 90s, have had a profound impact on my thinking in recent years. So where did they come from? How were they made? Why were they made? And who is Hildegard Westerkamp?

AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers. Since you’re one of those artists whose name has come up in several of my previous interviews, this discussion seems momentous! Why don’t you first tell us about your background, it seems you emigrated from Germany to Canada at… 22? When did you get started as an artist, was it prior to that or after?

Hildegard Westerkamp: Yes I emigrated when I was 22, because I was in love, and not for any other reason really, and I had no clue what I was doing. I had studied some music in South Germany, in Freiburg, and was learning piano which was not really what I wanted to do. I wanted to study music but I didn’t really understand at the time what that meant.

I ended up training on the piano, and I was not someone who wanted to perform or anything so I actually had a difficult experience with that. It was with one of those incredible pianists, she was a harpsichord player, Edith Picht-Axenfeld was her name. She was quite famous at the time, a good teacher but unbelievably strict and I could not handle that well at all. So I had these two very difficult years in Freiburg studying piano and flute, and some history… which was all interesting and fine but the whole piano lesson thing was a bit of torture.

When I came to Canada in 1968, I was determined not to study music again. But the university had a music department here which at that time had no entrance exams. So then I thought, well… I do want to study music, I’m just going to go anyway. I studied for a Bachelor of Music for four years at UBC and I had a lot of fun.

What I realised in hindsight was that I really just wanted to listen to music, that maybe I was more interested in musicology or theory. I loved music analysis and I was constantly just listening. I learned a lot. I always loved classical music, I grew up in a family where there was classical music around all the time, so it was actually really good for me to study it, to dig my teeth into how pieces were done. I never studied composition however.

So no, I was not an artist and I certainly never thought I would be one. It was the furthest thing from my mind. It wasn’t until I met Murray Schafer who gave a guest lecture at UBC when I was a student, who just blew my mind and blew out my ears. The result of that was that I ended up working for him a few years later in the World Soundscape Project.

What was absolutely amazing for me at that time was that I was allowed to use my ears beyond music studies, I could apply them to the whole world. That was new, and it inspired me a lot. Because of the difficulty that I’d had, and this feeling that I wasn’t really musical, I had a lot of insecurities. And that sort of got blown out the window because now I could listen to the world and no one asked me to know anything about it, in the sense of what intervals sounded like, or what harmonies were, all that kind of stuff. It was just a huge relief to expand my ears into the world, and I don’t think I realised how much I’d done that all my life. At that point it became clear: that was my relationship to the world, I was a listener.

When I was working with the World Soundscape Project, I was working with people who were all ear-minded as well, and we researched sound on every possible level. We tried to get to know the knowledge from people in other disciplines of sound - such as sound engineers, psychoacousticians etc. We were studying it all in the context of Murray Schafer writing his book “The Tuning Of The World”, or “Soundscape” as it’s called now.

AC: I like your term, “ear-minded”. I’ll start using that!

Hildegard Westerkamp: Yes sure! It’s not my term really, some of my colleagues in the World Forum For Acoustic Ecology have been using it.

So the listening and the discussions about what we heard in the world and the interpretation of that was fascinating, because then you reach into all aspects of life, into the political, the social, the environmental. But even though the basis of the work really was ecological and environmental in that we were concerned about noise pollution at the time, the fact that we were applying our ears to all sounds, including noisy sounds, was the revolutionary thing.

The people who were anti-noise activists were not doing that. That was more of a fighting-noise kind of activism, and it was interesting, but what expanded that activism and made the work with Schafer inspirational was listening to the noise. Let’s hear what’s actually going on in the society - and what we are actually doing to our environment - through listening. That appealed to me.

So the context of learning all that, and being around other musicians and composers and ear-minded people, led me also to be curious about sound recording. I watched my colleagues doing field recordings, and listened back to what they recorded. Plus we had the Sonic Research Studio which Murray Schafer had gotten funding for. My colleague Barry Truax was the one who introduced me to the traditional analog tape techniques in that studio, mostly those that were developed in the context of musique concrète and Pierre Schaeffer’s work in Paris. Barry was the one who opened that up for me and once I started to work in the studio, I was in heaven. I loved working in that kind of privacy and isolated environment.

It took for me to complete almost two pieces before I realised I was a composer. It was basically Barry who made me aware of it. The first piece which I called Whisper Study I considered to be an exercise, and he said: well, I think that’s a bit more than an exercise. Then when I composed Fantasie For Horns I, he encouraged me to send it to a competition in Bourges. It received an Honourable Mention there and suddenly I was called a composer. The whole thing was one big surprise to me. I hadn’t realised or acknowledged that there was an artistic vein in me.

The time in Vancouver was really interesting in ‘68 and into the early 70s. There was a lot going on with all sorts of new cultural organisations starting up - there was Vancouver Cooperative Radio, there were new parallel galleries, there were experimental video artists, and there were beginning to be sound artists and radio artists. Norbert Ruebsaat who was my husband then, for whom I’d come over, was a writer. We developed together into creative people. We influenced each other with our interests.

So the atmosphere among students, young people, hippies - which was a big scene here - it was vibrant and exciting, and very new to me from a conservative background in Germany. It was quite amazing for a young person.

AC: The liner notes for ‘Transformations’ provide some insight into your thinking and a basis for my questions. So are these five pieces thematically linked or is this more of a general roundup of your work from the period?

Hildegard Westerkamp: I reread those liner notes yesterday, I haven’t read them for years! The interesting thing to me is that they’re very similar to how I speak about things now. My thinking was already there.

The pieces are more of a general roundup, but they are linked on some level. In the 80s I had put out a cassette series called Inside The Soundscape, of five cassettes, and that was where I started to put out my work and make it more public. Some of this was already in that series - A Walk Through The City, and I think ‘Fantasie For Horns I’, which became the electroacoustic soundscape for the solo french horn in ‘Fantasie for Horns II’ on the Transformations CD.

I think because I had published those along with some other pieces - which are less known - I wanted to release what I considered to be the most significant pieces at the time, that I related to strongly and that were exciting to me. Four of those - except for Cricket Voice - are really about Vancouver and the west coast. They’re based on recordings from here.

Then there’s that span between electroacoustic only - or fixed media, as one says now - and Kits Beach Soundwalk which in concert situations, I used to perform live with my spoken voice - as if on radio. And there’s that spread of pieces without any poetry or spoken language, and pieces with. To me they balanced in an interesting way and on many of those levels. What links them thematically is simply my approach of how I work with environmental sound and what I want to say about it.

AC: When were the pieces recorded?

Hildegard Westerkamp: Fantasie For Horns II was 1978 or 1979, ‘A Walk Through The City’ was 1982. And ‘A Walk Through The City’ was the result of my getting an honourable mention for ‘Fantasie For Horns I’ in France - it was a commission from the CBC which was very exciting for me. A bit nerve-racking - my first-ever commission - but at the end of it I had the big studio in the CBC to do the final mix.

‘Cricket Voice’ was composed in 1987 and Beneath The Forest Floor in 1992.

The recording for ‘Fantasie For Horns II’ with the french horn was made specially for the CD, and so was ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’.

AC: Ah so that’s why the studios for those two pieces were mentioned. I was trying to look up the one in Surrey, I guess that studio doesn’t exist anymore?

Hildegard Westerkamp: It was the studio of my colleague Sergio Barroso, and I don’t know whether he uses that name for the studio publicly much at all. At the time he made recordings in it himself. He’s a brilliant pianist and composer from Cuba, who sadly has just not gotten the recognition in Canada that he should.

In fact I haven’t been in touch with him for a long time, for no reason other than that we’re just in different realms, but we were quite close at the time. We were both creating CDs for empreintes DIGITALes - we decided to put our efforts together and record in his studio. He was very helpful with his fantastically discerning ears and helped to create good-quality recordings.

AC: What’s your relationship to that label, empreintes DIGITALes?

Hildegard Westerkamp: Jean-François Denis, who is the founder and runs Empreintes Digitales, is a colleague of mine from years ago in the electroacoustic community. He has really done a remarkable job over the years in publishing so many composers’ work. In a way it really helped to put Canadian electroacoustic composers on the map. Because of his Quebec French connection there’s a healthy connection with France as well. It’s fantastic what he’s been doing, and he really knows his stuff.

AC: And it’s all online, what a goldmine!

Hildegard Westerkamp: Yeah, he’s really managed that transition from the early stages of non-digital, to internet and streaming. He’s helped many composers as a result.

AC: You liken the microphone to a camera, which reminds me of the very first interview I ever did in this series (the artist said something similar). But then you compare your transformations to caricatures, which I also like, it’s a bit more fanciful! Could you elaborate on this topic? What’s the role of the artist with source recordings? Are there decision points on when to process the sounds vs leave them alone?

Hildegard Westerkamp: There I was trying to connect how I was working sonically to other ways of working artistically. To me the discovery of processing and transforming recorded sounds was miraculous. I was inspired by how the meaning of a sound was deepened once I had transformed it. When I then listened back to the original, I heard all the details that I heard in the transformed sounds. It increased my wonder about environmental sounds and their complexity.

So many of my colleagues were working with computer-generated electronic sounds, and I always wondered why I was not drawn to that. The reason was the fact that the environmental sounds came with context and meanings. Every environmental sound had a complexity that most computer-generated sounds did not have. And so there was a tendency at that time to try to introduce more complexity to electronic sounds, but the abstractness of that kind of work actually made me feel very lost. Even in listening to acousmatic music sometimes I feel I get lost.

That’s not to say these aren’t fantastic pieces and that there’s not something very magical happening there, but for me as a composer what was important was the concrete connection to the environmental sounds.

Processing sounds then meant that I was highlighting the characteristics of each individual recorded sound, in a way that you don’t necessarily hear upon first hearing. When you process a sound, when you slow it down or you filter it, you start to become aware of all the complexities inside the sound. That’s why I compare it to a caricaturist’s work. A face has a nose, then if a caricaturist just adds a little line to exaggerate its characteristics, then you really know that face well!

So that’s why I like processing sounds, not really for the sake of processing - which puts me in danger of getting lost, because it can go on forever or rather, send you down a rabbit hole. What kept me grounded was then to reconnect the transformed sound back to its original. So often in my pieces you hear them side by side, even though it may not be obvious. I like to bring them together to say hello to each other.

It has also to do with an ecological sensitivity of relationships, in that when you’re working with environmental sounds you’re in relationship with those sounds that you recorded. So then you want to be mindful of how you treat those sounds. Some care has to be taken, whether they are natural or urban sounds. Although with some of the urban sounds I was much more ruthless because they were ruthlessly noisy human-made sounds, so I felt I could use them more aggressively possibly. Whereas when you work with natural sounds, especially animal sounds, I feel that one wants to be rather careful.

But I had no qualms for example processing that really noisy ugly truck break in ‘A Walk Through The City’, and then to my big surprise it became one of the most beautiful, warm sounds for that piece. It’s rather ironic - as I slowed it down, those high frequencies became really beautiful, almost pure tone sounds. Then when I worked harmonically with them, in other words slowing down - pitch-shifting we call it now - my own compositional preferences in terms of harmonies came out at that point. So that created a more melancholic-sounding chordal environment which was helping me with something I wanted to express in that piece, some sort of human atmosphere.

AC: You describe ‘A Walk Through The City’ as heavily processed. It’s wonderfully surprising to witness you there - an artist so attuned to nature - confronting the urban soundscape with such gusto. What else can you tell us about how this piece was made?

Hildegard Westerkamp: My decision of using the poem by Norbert Ruebsaat was very conscious at the time. I was always feeling like a bit of an outsider in the new music scene, it was very early in the 80s that this piece was commissioned. I was also working at Co-Op Radio - I had a radio program called “Soundwalking” in the late 70s, and Norbert, myself and other friends were spending a lot of time at Co-Op Radio which was located in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver.

If you know this area of Vancouver, it’s the darkest side of the city, with opioid crises nowadays, then it was mostly alcoholism, some drugs, homelessness… which rather than ever getting better has gotten worse and worse. So it’s a very problematical part of the city. Everytime I went to Co-Op Radio, I had to cross a small square - Pidgeon Square - where many of these mostly men were sitting, and were just wasted.

It was a difficult and enlightening way of having to meet that part of the city, and Vancouver Cooperative Radio was socially and politically very left-leaning so we were always concerned with issues of that part of the city. But we were also trying to create radio that was artistically interesting. So there was this edge between the socio-political aspect of it and the cultural.

I had spent a lot of time down there by the time I got this commission, and Norbert had written this poem. I selected it thinking that this piece was going to be broadcast on the - at that time - main contemporary music radio program on the CBC, “Two New Hours”. I really wanted the audience to hear what’s going on in this part of the city. I was very clear that it may never be broadcast, it may not fit into that program but I wanted to challenge that particular format, the tone of that show.

It did get broadcast. At the time it felt really revolutionary to me to do this piece, which I perceived as grungy and loud. In hindsight it is actually a relatively soft piece, partially because of those truck breaks with that melancholical tone! The most difficult part for me was to create a piece that sounded attractive, despite the fact that the soundscape down there was not at all attractive. These people were living on the street in really noisy environments, with sirens, mostly traffic and just not a lot of interesting sounds. I was trying to find the music in this environment. It was a pretty tough task, but I did it.

In the whole first part of that piece - the first three minutes or so - I really composed myself into the city. There’s a lot of low frequency drones, throbs, distant city kind of sounds. To me that was a way to approach compositionally the actual poem and its message.

Having composed ‘Fantasie For Horns I’ before, where I was dealing with the horn sounds of the city and elongating those sounds, making them a little bit drone-like too, it felt like I was coming out of that piece and using similar techniques here with different sounds. Then getting into the concrete, difficult part of that city, with the ugly sounds and brakes and screams and all that kind of stuff, and the words that Norbert read, it took those three minutes to get there.

Once I was there, the poem of course helped me. It triggered a lot of the ideas.

AC: Who are the voices we hear along the way?

Hildegard Westerkamp: The poetic voice is Norbert’s voice. We recorded it in different ways - he was shouting, then he was reading quietly, then he was whispering.

The other voices are those of the men on that square. Some of them were recorded by my colleague Howard Broomfield and some of them I recorded myself. In fact what I should mention is that up to that point, I was still using a lot of sounds from the World Soundscape Project’s environmental sound library, not so much my own recordings yet. In ‘A Walk Through The City’, you begin to hear some of my own sounds.

AC: I’ve got a surprise for you now. Of all places, I spent the week before last in New Westminster outside Vancouver. (My partner is from there). So with your interview approaching I made a pilgrimage to Kits Beach. It was quite busy! What drew you to record in that location? Have you been back recently? If so, has it changed? And tell us about the piece, ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’.

Hildegard Westerkamp: You’re not the first one who’s done this - come to Vancouver to visit Kits Beach - interviews have even happened there! The other serendipitous thing is that I was at Kits Beach just last week, leading a sound walk. It’s not far from where I live.

Nowadays in particular there is building going on nearby that is on returned indigenous land, and the indigenous people are building a huge area with high-rises for new housing. So this land - Sen̓áḵw, in the Squamish language - near False Creek, had a village until 1913, when they were removed and shipped across the inlet. The consciousness of what’s happened in Vancouver to the indigenous people is much more heightened now. So when I did the sound walk there, I was including that into our consciousness, knowing that this once was an indigenous village, only a little bit over 100 years ago.

At the end of that walk we ended up at a little field house in the park nearby, and I played them ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk”. We had a discussion about the indigenous past, and this piece.

I wasn’t so much drawn to record at Kits Beach initially. I was there one evening without a tape recorder, and I heard these barnacles. I had recently witnessed what barnacles look like when they feed, in another location, on one of the Gulf Islands. It was low tide and gently lapping water. I saw how the barnacles open and these strands come out and feed. In that context I first heard that clicking sound.

So then I was at Kits Beach in the dark - in the piece I say I’m there in the morning but the reality is that I was out in the dark at night, standing at one particular point that’s still there with rocks and barnacles, hearing these clicking sounds, and I was fascinated by the whole thing. So I just ran home - I didn’t live too far away - and got my tape recorder and recorded that.

Then, this piece really just came out of nowhere. It was in the 80s, I was a Master’s student at SFU at that time, doing a lot of research about sounds. For some reason, all the research and the experience with the barnacles came together in the narrative of this piece. I can’t remember the exact order of things, but I was beginning to work with the recording, zeroing in on the high frequencies of the barnacles, but also finding all sorts of other recordings of high frequencies that I had made by that time.

I began to make this mix, and at the same time this narrative developed, in parallel. Then I had written this text, and I had mixed this soundtrack, and I thought I should try to read the text along with the soundtrack. And it fit almost exactly.

AC: There’s a passage from ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’ which goes:

“I could shock you or fool you by saying that the soundscape is this loud…” (soundscape volume increases).

“…but it is more like this” (soundscape volume decreases).

“The view is beautiful, in fact it is spectacular, so the sound level sounds more like this” (soundscape volume decreases further).

“…it doesn’t seem that loud”.

I love this, I don’t know if it’s meant to be humorous but I always find myself chuckling because I get so disorientated! What is actually going on here in the construction of the piece?

Hildegard Westerkamp: That part is all about perception. How do we hear in relation to vision? How can sound become quieter as we see something very beautiful? The landscape in Vancouver from that beach is pretty spectacular. Perceptually the soundscape recedes, in my experience. It doesn’t matter if it’s all that noisy at that point when you see that environment.

I think traditionally with sightseeing and tourism, that’s exactly what happens. You travel in a noisy bus through the city and you don’t hear that bus motor, you just see the view. When you begin to really listen, that noise comes to the forefront again. If you wanted to listen more to the barnacles, then the sounds which could potentially mask them come to the forefront of your consciousness.

So that’s what I’m playing with there. It’s kind of cheeky and it was a lot of fun when I was doing it in the studio. Where I really had fun was when I turned off all the low frequencies.

AC: Right, that’s just after this section.

Hildegard Westerkamp: Yes, so that then led me into those high-frequencies and those dreams, which as it happens I did have all the time then. All these different aspects of my knowledge and my experience came together here. Even the quoting of the Xenakis piece.

AC: Yes… that part is so audacious!

Hildegard Westerkamp: Right and I never asked permission, I just did it!

So it was one of those miracle experiences because it wasn’t a commission, it wasn’t planned at all.

AC: At the end of this collection you whisk us off on a big adventure called ’Beneath The Forest Floor’. Tell us all about this one: what were the source sounds, and what did you do with them?

Hildegard Westerkamp: This was also a CBC commission for the “Two New Hours” radio program. They had given me this commission on the condition that I was bringing my field recordings into their new digital facility, without working on them in my own studio first. So it was: do whatever you are used to doing at home, in our digital facility. This was a bit scary to me, as I would also have to work with a technician. I was used to working by myself.

The specific instructions for this commission caused me to go to one of the quietest places I could think of, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the old growth forests. One of the areas is called the Carmanah Valley, and it was under some controversy at the time. Half of it had already been logged, and the other half had just been saved by an environmental organisation and made into a park. To me that was a perfect place to go to, because it had that edge of being endangered.

My thinking was that if I’m going to go to all-digital facilities, I’m going to go to a very quiet environment where I can record sounds in a quiet ambience, and when I go to the digital facilities there’s no danger of adding noise to it - which of course when you’ve worked for years in the analog studio, you know how any kind of dub or processing, any new generation of the sound will add hiss to it. So you have to work very carefully for compositions to stay clean and transparent. This would give me an opportunity to come with very quiet sounds and not lose that kind of sound quality, no matter how much I would process or dub.

So that was the logistical explanation behind my choice of recordings. I came to Toronto with those sounds. I had really no clue what I was going to do, and I also had no title yet. Often I do have a title very early on.

I was also struggling a bit because I was working with a technician who didn’t really understand my process. I was experimenting with taking some of the more prominent sounds and began to process them and see what happens to them. The technician at the time was rather puzzled because this was a lengthy and intricate process and took its dear time.

I ended up playing him ‘A Walk Through The City’ because I wanted him to hear something that had gone through a similar process, and hear the end result. And that helped - he then knew that I was onto something. It calmed me down too!

My process is really never that different. I listen to the recordings I have, and then I choose what I might want to use. Some of them I select for processing and figure something out, and then eventually things fall into place. Here it took a little longer. I noticed while I was doing it, processing different sounds, that they were all sounding rather dark. Slowing down the raven sounds, slowing down bird sounds, they sound dark and I kept thinking: underground, under the trees.

So eventually this title came about, which grounded me too - I knew a bit more then of what I was trying to do, trying to get into the atmosphere of the forest. Those old growth forests are unbelievably amazing. There’s a very deep mossy quiet. I was there in the late summer or fall. You’re in a kind of grandiose forest environment, with huge trees - indeed a bit cathedral-like.

There’s a power you get from that place - everything is quite soft and mossy and because there hasn’t been any logging, there will be animal trails and typically a relatively open undergrowth that is not chaotic and quite walkable. Then you hear the ravens and they have this resonance under the canopy, in this spacious environment. There is a kind of grandiose peace that is very hard to describe.

I was only in there for about three days.

AC: The forest or the studio?

Hildegard Westerkamp: The forest. In the studio, we didn’t get it finished at first because there was a technical glitch and so my time was over. I had to go home and half a year later I came back and completed it. So it took a little longer than I thought, but in the end it all worked out very much the way I had hoped. There was a lot of magic involved in the discovery of the sounds and the processed sounds, and how I wanted to speak about it.

AC: Yeah so if I understand your process as you’ve described it previously in this conversation, I suppose you’re saying the processing of this piece brought out this certain darkness, but that’s something that was inherent in the sounds which you pick apart and reveal through the processing.

Hildegard Westerkamp: Very much so. The processing reveals something about the sounds. And most of what I did at that time was simple: filtering and equalisation, speed change, maybe some reverb but mostly not. With environmental sounds, they have their own spatial acoustics, their own resonance of where they come from. So you want to retain that, or you want to exaggerate it a bit in that sense of caricature. But it’s a subtle thing, you don’t want to ever overdo it.

I remember having this discussion with the technician when at the end, where the piece is much more abstract - the slowed-down bird sounds really are all together there - I brought in another one of those bird sounds, the original. A very tiny peeping sound. I brought it back in over that mighty sound of that slowed-down bird, and it’s dry and very small, and the technician kept wanting to put reverb on it. And I said no no no!

AC: Right because you want them to “shake hands” like you described.

Hildegard Westerkamp: Exactly. So the octaves-slowed down peeping sounded unbelievable. It had this ambient forest space around it that you couldn’t hear in the original recording. When you slow it down, it actually expands that space, which is what’s so magical. Then when you bring those two together, the contrast was too much to take for the technician. He didn’t quite understand why I wanted to do it that way so I had to explain it.

This is also because this kind of work was so rare at the time. Nobody was working with environmental sounds like that.

AC: I’ll be going back to listen for that little dry bird!

Who are some artists you’ve known and admired over the years? Are there any that you’ve thought have a very similar mindset and approach?

Hildegard Westerkamp: I could say there are three composers who were really guiding lights for me, although I never studied with any of them directly.

I worked with Murray Schafer and I admired his compositional work but I was more connected to him through the soundscape work, and that ear which he applied to the soundscape. Working with him basically created my life career, and he was an important influence because of it.

Pauline Oliveros, whom I encountered off and on over the years, was also a strong guiding light in that she gave me the context of deep listening, not so much the activist environmental listening that I got from the soundscape work, but the more meditative approach to listening. I’m aware of her compositional work and love a lot of it, but that doesn’t necessarily figure into my composition, again it was more the listening.

Then there’s John Cage, who also made our ears perk up to the environment by creating his piece ‘4.33’, through his writings about sound, and his attitude towards the environment.

I loved the variety of approaches that came from these three people and somehow, they were just always there in my consciousness.

I was probably influenced in my compositional approach much more by listening to classical music as a child. Not having studied music, I think I got a large lesson and sense of structure by knowing classical music really well by always hearing it from early childhood on. I seemed to have a sense of how I wanted to pace things in my pieces, which was not really ever taught to me consciously.

I probably would not have been a successful student in composition. I think I just really needed to work from very deep down with my own senses. When I compose, the recordings that I bring in come with their sense of place and time. They teach me something about how to compose because they have something inherent which inspires ideas about pacing and timing.

AC: Yes, the approaches we’ve been talking about here which you used in these pieces, it’s an elaborate system of composition. I like hearing someone arrive somewhere like that on such an unorthodox path. In your case, through listening.

Hildegard Westerkamp: In essence though, it’s what we always do, it’s just maybe not as conscious. The system of music education, for me, had more of a blocking effect than it has for others. I needed to get into that studio all by myself to discover that. It was rather radical, that need, and I was just lucky that studio existed and that I had all the time necessary. At the time, the students weren’t working in there yet, it was just us, so there was a lot of time available to experiment, make mistakes and get lost.

I think if I’d been a student later, like when I was teaching there and students had three hours a week in the studio, I would not have been able to work. It was lucky.

AC: What’s it like to revisit this material from 30 years ago? Does it sound any different now in retrospect?

Hildegard Westerkamp: Well, I’m accepting that all those pieces are complete and final and finished, and I never want to go back to change them. And I’m still doing the same thing on some level, except that the materials I use in every piece create a new context of how to work with sound.

I’ve never been a person who’s liked to work with technology, I’ve always had trouble in the studio. I would be the first person who crashed computers in the early days. So I’ve had this love/hate relationship to technology, was not someone who liked to explore it or learn more techniques, so I’ve often been grateful to colleagues who know my work and say: you should really use this and that, or this would be great for your work.

But I can’t say that my technological approach has changed all that much. It’s been the sounds themselves that made the work change and grow. It’s a bit like how we use language, but you use it differently at different times in your life. For me that’s what the sounds that I record are, they’re my language to speak with. And sometimes I don’t call myself a composer, I say I’m a writer of sound.

I still have a relationship to those pieces - sometimes I don’t listen for a long time and then I’m quite surprised.

AC: It’s good to leave something for quite a long time - say 10 years and revisit.

Hildegard Westerkamp: Yes, you say hello to another part of yourself.

AC: Exactly.

Are you still involved in the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective? What else are you up to nowadays? Do you have any final thoughts for our readers?

Hildegard Westerkamp: The collective is not that active at this point, we’ve taken a bit of a pause. We’ve done it now for 20 years, and the collective was always a loose group of people who were leading sound walks. But it really was Giorgio Magnanensi, director of Vancouver New Music who facilitated them, which gave us a useful context because when we tried to do sound walks beforehand, no one ever knew what it was. But once it was in the concert scene of Vancouver New Music, there was an audience that was interested.

Nowadays, since the pandemic, we’ve felt that we want to give it a rest in the format that we’d been doing it, and see what evolves. Frankly I haven’t led that many sound walks over the last years because there’s always young people who wanted to learn to lead them. I have been more of a facilitator, and that’s been fantastic and a wonderful learning experience. Now I find that many people in town here are beginning to use their own approaches and organize all manner of sound events, not necessarily in that format of the sound walk. So the collective itself is really not functioning anymore - I think we probably had the life we needed, but the work continues in different forms.

We just finished a film about one of my pieces called Klavierklang - “piano sound” in English - it’s a piece that was commissioned by the marvellous Vancouver pianist Rachel Iwaasa who wanted me to create a piano piece with a narrative. The narrative is all about piano education and about the positive and the nightmarish aspects of Western classical music education. That was premiered in 2017 and once we had performed it several times, she suggested we make a film. Vancouver filmmaker Nettie Wild is the director of the film. We just completed it and are trying to get it out there.

The original impetus was to create a film so that performers could see some of the techniques that are performed inside the piano. And then it expanded into something completely different. The challenge for the filmmaker was that the music - the soundtrack - was already composed, and the cinematography was to be built from that sonic base, which is the opposite of what usually happens in film. Nettie took that challenge and created a visual world for this film that made it quite a new piece. The visual world she composed - which is so different from the original aural composition - I’m very happy with.

So we finally completed it despite unexpected obstacles and I’m relieved! The film world is crazy in my opinion and it was exhausting, not something I would want to repeat as I get older. But at the same time, I am very glad about the results.

I’m at a point in my life where I really need to slow down. I have no project ahead of me other than that I want to write. My ears are not in such good shape, I’m wearing hearing aids. So I can’t actually trust my ears in the studio all that well anymore. Who knows, I might do a piece with that condition, or about it, something like that. But at this point no, I’m much more interested in writing.

AC: Well, I’m glad that you were also interested in talking!

Thank you very much for this discussion. It’s been a great one.

Hildegard can be found at her website https://hildegardwesterkamp.ca/.

Images

All images by Hildegard Westerkamp except where credited.

0) 'Transformations' cover image. (image by Andreas Kahre)

1) 'Transformations' reverse image: Banff, 1992. (image by Peter Grant)

2) Graffiti found in the Interior of BC, Slocan Lake.

3) The Zone of Silence, Mexico.

4) Hildegard. (image by Jaro Berbuesse)

5) Recording the sounds of dried-up palm leaves in the Zone of Silence, Mexico, Dec. 1984. Filmmakers Benjamin Medel (left) and Carlos Hahul (middle) documenting the recording process. (image by Norbert Ruebsaat)

6) "This was made through cut glass of mountains in the interior and I always associated it with Fantasie for Horns, the way horns echo on mountains. I used it as one of the cassette series covers that I mention."

7) The Zone of Silence, Mexico.

8) For A Walk through the City: "photos of an alleyway in the Downtown Eastside (DTES)".

9) For A Walk through the City: "totem pole, erected a few years ago on Pidgeon Square, which we had to cross to get to Coop Radio".

10) Kits Beach in 2024. (image by Andrew Ciccone)

11) "Kits Beach on a calm day".

12) Kits Beach in 2024. (image by Andrew Ciccone)

13) Carmanah Valley, Vancouver Island.

14) "Me recording, taken by my late partner Peter Grant". (image by Peter Grant)

15) Carmanah Valley, Vancouver Island.

16) HW tree.

17) "Ear pattern found in sand stone rock somewhere on the west coast".

18) Hildegard. (image by Jens Buss)