We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matt LeVeque a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Matt, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
There are too many to pick just one, so I’ll talk about a few.
Last fall I premiered an intermedia piece titled “i am no longer afraid to run,” which I co-composed with my good friend M A Harms. The piece used video, text, recorded sound, and live percussion sounds, and it was essentially a discussion of our tumultuous experience of identifying with, through, and against the “percussionist” identity. We’d both had many negative experiences dealing with the consequences and communities surrounding the instrument, but we both nevertheless found it an endlessly liberating practice. It was a really special thing to share these thoughts and feelings so intimately with each other and with the audience.
I recently did a collaborative installation piece with the poet Justin Dela Cruz (who is also, coincidentally, my life partner) called “from the perspective of two.” The piece consisted solely of large text projected on the wall, chronicling our contrasting perspectives on specific memories from our relationship. It was interesting to note how our memories differed so much, and how one’s account of memories actively crafts the relationship in the past, present, and future. It was frightening to have such intimate details of our lives on public display, but I think it unlocked a new direction in my work that I hadn’t been aware of before.
And next month I’ll be premiering a new piece for snare drum and electronics here in LA called “glitch/fractal” by my friend Wong Foo Jeng. We met in New York last summer at a contemporary music festival where I played an improvisation for snare drum and electronics, and I suppose he was intrigued by it and wanted to expand that sound world into a full composition. When you go out into the world as a performer, it’s always a really warm feeling when somebody is moved enough by your practice that they want to work with you. This particular piece uses a a device called a transducer (which is a kind of speaker that works through conduction, amplifying sound through physical contact with another object), to play an electronic track through the snare drum, and the player alters and ‘interacts’ with the track by manipulating the drum head. I’ve done some of this kind of work before, but Foo Jeng’s piece in particular has a really beautiful way of exploring all that can be done with it. It is really quite a heartfelt gift.
Matt, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a percussionist, composer, and improviser residing and working in Los Angeles. I started by mostly studying classical percussion in college, and after I moved to LA for my Master’s degree I began to get interested in free improvisation, making my own music, and working with other non-sound materials (video, text, etc.).
My training as a percussionist was abnormal – I didn’t learn things in the order/methodology that has proven successful for a lot of people, and while I was in college I was the only undergrad in a studio of solely doctoral students. So I was a lot younger and less experienced than everyone else I was playing and interacting with all the time. It was slightly harrowing, but of course now I see this as a good thing. I think I developed really specific and discerning musical/aesthetic tastes during this time.
Because of that, and for other reasons, I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in the music communities I interact with. That feeling is common among my friends and colleagues in the community of artists and musicians and LA in which I’ve found myself. I think the outsider phenomena has granted me an important perspective, and I have to imagine it makes one’s artistic work more interesting, too. That’s why I was drawn to percussion – it is so large and ungainly as an instrument that it leads to a splintering of identity, since there’s no singular central instrument/object with which every player can identify. I’ve always felt that it was kind of an instrument for misfits in this way. Maybe that’s an elementary way of looking at it, but I still feel that it’s true, and that’s the part of ‘identifying’ as a percussionist that still excites me.
It’s this splintering that I find interesting in other areas, too. Over the past few years my creative practice has expanded significantly. A few years ago I really only considered myself a performer of other people’s music. I still do that today, of course (and it might still be my favorite thing to do), but I also perform my own music, compose music for ensembles, make electronic music, improvise by myself and with others, and make intermedia and installation pieces. It feels as though my instrument used to be the center of my practice, but now the center is myself, and the materials revolve around me. This kind of multi-hyphenate practice seems to be the way forward for me and for a lot of the people I work with. I think it feels very hopeful.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia recently; I find it an artistically rich tapestry of feelings, thoughts, and concepts, mostly because it’s so dangerous. Nostalgia, I think, has a way of poisoning the way we think about identity, history, relationships, personal responsibility – it’s a mythologizing force. I think, at least at the present moment, that’s the most pressing issue in my work: the resistance of cultural mythology by means of presenting pieces of granular, material reality. Specific information is always more helpful, generative, and constructive than fictionalized narratives.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect is that you get to live a life of mostly your own design. It’s not a glamorous one, but it’s one that I cultivated for myself. I do believe that being an artist is not just a vocation but a way of making sense of and responding to the world. Having the opportunity to share that perspective is significant.
Contact Info:
- Website: matthewleveque.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matt.leveque/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mleveque42/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd1Ykh4BSyhRWZL_pbnHpig
Image Credits
Kristof Lemp