Gregory Taylor

Bob Ostertag is a music school dropout who has since performed all over the world and has collaborated with the likes of John Zorn, Fred Frith, drag diva Justin Bond, and the Kronos Quartet. In this interview he describes his creative process and what inspires him to design his technological instruments.

, which is a multimedia thing for video and audio and live performers that uses a combination of Max and MSP on one computer and Imagine on another computer. I'm preparing my second CD of solo improvisations which will all be done with Max and MSP and game controllers. I have two new quartets... one with Fred Frith, William Winant and Joan Jeanrenaud, and one with Joan Jeanrenaud, Theo Blechmann and Denman Maroney. I'm touring my trio 

 with Otomo Yoshihide and Justin Bond. Let's see, I know there are some other things in there... oh! I'm doing a project with Joan Jeanrenaud and Jim McGee, an artist in El Paso. Actually, that's the next thing on my plate, that Joan and I will go to El Paso to do this recording with Jim. Then I'm going to teach in Slovenia for a few weeks in September.

Where are you touring the Yugoslavian suite?

Well, I just came back from... we did it in Austria, at 

 in Amsterdam, the Nancy Festival in France, in Lyon, Victoriaville in Quebec, at the Futuresonic Festival in Manchester, at CNMAT, and in Winnipeg... so generally around.

You attempted to take it to Serbia first. You ended the comments in your diary with a discussion about the intentions you had, beginning with work whose content was so explicitly political and bringing it to the people where it was. You talked about the difficulty of finding the space in which the kind of interaction that you wanted could take place. How do you think that doing the work, or performing it, has changed as a result of your going there? Did that change the way that you organized what you did, or did it change your attitude about how you presented things?

Well, I was going to make a third movement to it that was going to be based on videotaped interviews with audience members after the piece was performed in different parts of the world, and I dropped that idea. So that's probably the biggest change. There were actually two challenges that really grabbed me about performing that piece in different places. One was that there was so little political space available in the former Yugoslavia. It's like people didn't even have the space to think about it. They would just have a sort of visceral reaction to it. But the other problem is the problem of working with images, as opposed to sound. This is the first piece I've ever done that uses images as a central element. Actually, that's not true... I don't typically use images.

But you often collaborate with people who emphasize stage performance or visual imagery.

Sure. But there's something about using documentary imagery. The way I think about it is this: we all hear sound differently. If I sing a note, or play a note on a trombone or whatever, you'll hear it slightly differently than I'll hear it. We're all different people, and we bring our own histories to how we perceive things. But we see images really differently, much more differently than we hear sound. If you took images like the images that I used in that piece, and you show them to people in former Yugoslavia, where they've been bombarded with those images for the last ten years, and they know them inside out, they probably are familiar with every image I use, and can identify the people in it. Not only can identify the people in it but the place it happened, and they probably know why that was an important moment, and why somebody would want to take a picture of that, and they've probably thought about that moment inside out for the last ten years... and then you show it to somebody from the United States, and they don't even know what country it's from. It's pretty hard to imagine that you're going to make a piece that will work in both places, and all the other places I've taken the piece. So, that's a hard one. Sure, I've done things that are sort of the sonic equivalent, where I've used documentary audio that was quite politically charged, but it's still different.

Found material, material whose content is explicitly identifiable with a given circumstance, seems to be at the center of much of your work. You're doing something with both visual and audio material now, and you're saying that the two are really different. I think many of us would see visual images as more public, in the sense that we can get them from someplace. Your point of view is that even though that's ostensibly the case, they're more immediate. They're public all right, because I can get them from forty places, but it's a given image at a given time at a given place, and when I go to Yugoslavia and show that image, something different happens.

It's true. I just think that people are primarily visual people.

That's a great thing to hear a composer say, isn't it?

In the department of redundancy department... I just did another piece called "Between Garbage and Science" that was a theatre piece, and that's the first time I've ever worked with an actor on stage. That was really a difficult experience. There was a filmmaker, Pierre Hebert, and an actor, Baltazar Lopez, and myself, and we were all onstage, and we really wanted to make a piece where the three elements of actor, film and sound were sort of equal. It was really hard. People perceive with their eyes first, I think, and if you give them something to look at, it's very hard for them not to perceive the sound as an accompaniment of what happens in front of their eyes.

Do you feel that that's a difficult thing to manage when you perform live? For a very long time you've been involved in the creation of the equivalent of your own instruments. When an audience goes to a concert hall and sees a grand piano, unless it's played in a very unusual way the audience brings a certain set of expectations… ways in which a piano player transduces small motor coordination into noise. Seeing a performance with a game controller means that the audience doesn't have those things. Does it ever concern you, for example, that they're distracted from the sound you're producing by trying to figure out how Bob does the trick?

That's one of the big problems of performing electronic music, of course. I'm sure everybody who would read this interview on the Max web site has thought about this stuff. Actually, the game controllers are very new for me. I'm actually new to writing my own software and so forth. For ten years I used an Ensoniq keyboard… I did all my stuff on a keyboard I bought at the rock and roll store. But I don't have any keyboard facility at all... for me it was just a bunch of buttons. I thought about that a lot. When I first started using it, it felt very disconcerting to be sitting on stage in front of a keyboard, and then an audience would come in and expect you to play this keyboard, and then you'd be using it as a bunch of switches, and display none of the facility that people would expect you to display when you sit down at a keyboard. For a while that really bugged me. Then I got so used to it that it stopped bothering me.

I played that thing for ten years, which was another deliberate choice of mine, because I think in electronic music people are in such a rush to get the latest thing, and to upgrade their system, and to get something faster and with more voices, that they never actually learn to play anything. I think particularly if you're going to perform, then you have to develop some kind of... not virtuosity, but you have to learn to play something. That takes a long time - you can't learn to play something in a few weeks or a few months. So I stuck with the same instrument for ten years even though there were much newer things that had more buttons and more whistles. I got to the point where I think people responded. They were sort of surprised that I wasn't playing a keyboard, but even though I was just hitting these buttons and scrolling through menus and stuff, I was comfortable enough that... I sort of had it in my bones.

You developed a virtuosity not in the keyboard end of it, but in the Bob Ostertag bank of switches.

Yeah. I think it's something very physical, and something that has very much to do with your body. I think you have to be comfortable putting your body into the performance. I got to the point where I could do that, and I think people responded to that. After a long time I finally relaxed about it. Now I've switched to a powerbook and a joystick...

Oh yes, absolutely. I’m going to have to work with this for quite a while...

Well, basically you've said that's why people have trouble with electronic music. You've actually done the upgrade, and you're now faced with the same problem that everybody who upgrades constantly faces all the time. The only difference is that you go a decade between re-inventions instead of six months.

Right. An interesting thing about game controllers is that almost everybody has used them at some point. Not everybody, but certainly many of the people who come to my concerts have used them.

Which is the same as a keyboard - most people at some point in their life have sat down at a keyboard or piano and doodled around, or have even taken a few piano lessons as a kid or something. So when you sit down in front of a keyboard, there's a resonance with the experience that you're having. It's similar with joysticks, actually... people know, well, you can move it this way and that way and twist it, and hit those buttons...

It seems like their familiarity might allow them to connect more immediately with what you're doing in terms of content, because there's less mystery about it. Probably a little more mystery than a piano, but in the same sense they sort of know that at some point it's not going to burst into flames, and you'll have to actually touch it for something to happen.

You know, it took me a while to get the bugs worked out of using the joystick, so while I was doing that I did some shows just sitting on stage with the laptop. I actually did two shows in proscenium stage theaters with full theatrical lights where I was just sitting on stage...

It felt really... clerical, like I should have been doing my taxes or something.

I had no problem with the music, I thought the music was just great, but it felt really strange.

Was it your sense that the audience responded that way too?

Well, I made a point to ask people, and people said that it was jarring at first, but then they just got into the music and stopped watching me.

I think there's a whole techno/post-techno scene where that's pretty much the rule. Four guys sitting at tables in front of a laptop while you're supposed to dance. It's pretty dislocating.

I thought about, well, what I should do is just walk out on stage and then when I start to play, turn the lights out, and then turn them back on when I'm done, because there really wasn't anything to look at all. I'm not satisfied with that either, because people want some kind of connection with you if it's actually a live performance. I've also been querying people after the concerts where I've used the joystick, and even though I don't feel like I'm really playing it in the way we talked about - I don't feel physically relaxed, I don't feel it as an extension of my body or anything - people responded very differently than when I was just sitting at a laptop.

I would imagine that, particularly with the Yugoslavia suite, there is a sense in which the identification of that particular tool with the kind of computer mediated game version of the tremendous violence of the visual images must pack some structural wallop. If you were interviewing people about death squads it would be different. The use of that particular tool would have a very different meaning.

Well, in that piece we actually put a video camera on my hand with the joystick, and we mix that image in with the other images. So, we actually try to use the full weight of that image. In the first half of the piece I'm essentially playing a computer game that we made... it's like I'm bombing Yugoslavia. That's actually how I initially got interested in using the joystick, because I wanted to have one to fly this plane in Yugoslavia Suite, and then once I had one and got it working, I thought I could use it for other things.

You've described your feelings about being physically present when you perform. I'm curious about how you came to using electronic means in the first place. At the time you started doing it, it was certainly much harder to do than it is now. What was it that led you to perform instead of writing pieces for Joan Jeanrenaud, say?

I didn't start out with this perspective. Actually, there was a time when I was so much younger where I actually wanted to remove my body from the performance, that was one of the appeals of electronic music.

Is that because you were shy or uneasy about being physically present?

No, I think it was more... I was really obsessed with sound, and I was really obsessed with listening. I mean, we could psycho-analyze me on many levels about the decisions I made at this particular point in my life...

[laughs] At one level anyway, I was really obsessed with sound.

Was that obsession with sound explicitly connected to the collection of its meanings in the world as your work is now?

Yeah. So, first I got obsessed with Jimi Hendrix, and then I got obsessed with electric Miles Davis, and then, you know, I went from there. Since I started out playing guitar in garage bands, I really wanted to move away from that into this... sort of what I imagined as a terrain of sound. I had this very naive and youthful idealistic view of what electronic music could be.

Do you think that the percentage of improvisation and open-endedness you do now is greater than when you were in your garage?

I've heard you say before that you feel that's a strong way to characterize your work - the improvisatory nature about it.

Well, some of it is and some of it isn't, you know? Yugoslavia Suite is about half and half. This thing I'm going to write for Joan is going to be completely notated. It's rare that I actually completely notate something. But then again, I think of my CDs as compositions, and those are entirely fixed. You know, it's recorded onto a CD and there it is, burned right into the [knocks on table]... whatever the stuff is that you burn it into on a CD.

The exciting high register philosophical term for that is a concrete particular. Isn't that a great phrase? So your CDs are concrete particulars.

[laughs] When I was in high school in the garage it was pretty much half improvised and half written. I had a nice band. I played guitar, and we had a drummer, percussionist, bass player, oboe, English horn, two trumpets, and a piano.

That's a pretty big band! You wrote all your own material?

Yeah, the oboe player and I wrote all the material.

I would have guessed that you grew up with piano lessons and then basically discovered that going to electronic stuff gave you some kind of control and input into things that traditional compositional practice didn't.

No, no, not at all, not at all. I wasn't really given any musical encouragement at all. My family wasn't interested in it. I started out playing guitar in bad rock and roll bands and then started writing my own stuff, and put together this band... the orchestra in my high school was good, so I went through the orchestra and asked the first year of every instrument if they wanted to play in a band. That's how I ended up with a band. Then we got these Heathkit fuzztone kits, so we had all these little electric gizmos for the trumpets and the oboe. I started adding more and more pedals to my guitar, and pretty soon I was more interested in the pedals than the guitar.

The devices for the horn... that sounds like a Miles Davis thing.

Yeah, that was the idea. I was really into Miles Davis. I still think Bitches Brew is one of the absolute seminal musical experiences.

So why and how did you come to embrace electronic technology? And how did you come to combine this interest with pretty passionate political engagements and questions of identity?

Why use electronics? Well, electronics are rare, and they're everywhere, and they're one of the most provocative things out there. If you're fourteen years old, and you're starting to play rock music, one of the first things that you encounter is electronics. If you're somebody like me who doesn’t have much natural ability or skill in the lot of the conventional parameters of music, like pitch and melody, and rhythm but have an affinity with sound, and you feel that your ears are good at grasping sound and manipulating it, then electronics is certainly where you go… particularly if you have an electric guitar, and you start buying fuzz pedals and wah wah pedals. You start wondering how those little gizmos work. You start thinking about how to record, and then all of a sudden you’re into mixers, and yeah… it’s a completely natural progression.

You know, I’ve never had any studies, so… [laughs] I’ve had a very, very limited amount of formal study, and fortunately the little bit I had was with people who encouraged me. I went to Oberlin for two years, though not as a conservatory student. Because I was only there for two years and because I wasn’t a conservatory student and was taking electronic music courses as a college student, I actually didn’t have any of the course requirements that the conservatory kids had. I actually completed their electronic music course the first year I was there, because that was all I took… which was a funny thing, because the guy who ran the electronic music department was criticized for that. I thought I should have been given a prize or something, but the Dean told him it made the program look bad if a student could do it in a year.

You’re probably one of their best failures, then.

That whole conservatory was just the embodiment of that… I really remember thinking that to me, if you were going to teach music, then the fundamental thing that you should be teaching people is that they have something unique to say through sound, and that they should trust that and go with that. The whole message of that conservatory was the exact opposite of that. The whole message was that you probably don’t have anything to say at all.

…and since you don’t, it’s best to learn how to reproduce the work of others who did have something to say.

Yeah, and they convince you of the Herculean task ahead of you. It’s just awful. So, yeah, I have very little training. I always sort of train myself for the project at hand. The things I know how to do are the things I’ve been required to do for the projects I wanted to do, and I don’t know how to do much else.

Do you find that your interests as a composer are directed by the tasks that you set for yourself given your ideological involvement, or are they tasks which come to you? In other words, has your understanding of the power structure of the world come from the investigation of making pieces?

You’ve brought those kind of passionate engagements to bear on the tools, or as you’d say it, the few things you do know?

Well, to explain better what I was trying to say… I just did this piece, Yugoslavia Suite, and it’s the first time I’ve used video. I didn’t study video, and I didn’t take any video classes, and I’ve never really been particularly interested in video… but then I had this project I wanted to do, and I thought, well, this needs video. So then, I got into video. When I did 

, which used a text by David Wojnarowicz, where he described his own dying process and used the metaphor of turning into glass, I wanted to play it on glass instruments. I’d never built instruments before, but I got into it because I wanted it for that specific project. When the 

 commissioned me to write a string quartet for them, I actually hadn’t written notes on paper since high school. So I thought, okay, I guess I better get back into writing notes on staff paper! So I really try and take it a project at a time.

Did that project come to you because of content? In the case of the Kronos project, did you choose the background and context for All the Rage, or did they approach you about something with that content, or was that something that you chose to do?

They heard my piece Sooner or Later, which is a pretty politically loaded piece, and they wanted me to do something like that. They wanted me to do something about rainforests, and I didn’t want to do that. First of all, it’s important for me to say that most of my work doesn’t have an explicitly political theme… it’s just a little subset of it that does. But when I do it, I try to choose themes that I have some sort of direct and personal connection and engagement with, and not just look out at the world and decide to make a comment about the hole in the ozone layer or something. So I didn’t want to do a rainforest piece. I actually had this idea to make a trilogy of pieces about grief, anger and joy, and Sooner or Later was the grief piece, so I wanted to do one about anger. Then there was this riot in San Francisco that I was a participant in, and took my tape recorder to and recorded… so then I proposed to them that I make a piece for them out of the riot. They liked that idea.

I haven’t gotten around to the joy piece yet. Joy is harder. I’m doing this series with documentary source audio, and I haven’t really found one that I would use for a joy piece that wouldn’t be cliché. The first two pieces, I think, use pretty exceptional audio source material. It’s not so easy to come by that stuff. I’ve got my eyes out for something to do the third piece, but I haven’t found it yet. I had a recording that I wanted to use… I went to a prayer meeting of a Christian sect in Silicon Valley… it’s quite remarkable what they do. They have these prayer meetings that are similar to prayer meetings where people would talk in tongues, except instead of talking in tongues, they laugh. They call it Holy Laughter, and they go up to the front, and the priest puts his hand on their forehead and they fall down giggling. I wanted to get a recording of that. I thought, you know, given the history of what Christians have done in the world, falling on the floor and laughing was really one of the better… [laughs] So I went and made a tape of it, but I ended up not using it. The tape wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, because I felt too intrusive making the recording at the meeting.

When I was in my early 20s I got really into politics. But in much the same way that I do these pieces, it was just a project at a time, and I certainly never studied anything, but I started volunteering for this and that, and of course, there’s a circle you get into when you’re in those kind of political groups. If you’re freelance, and everyone else is working for a 9-5 job, and they say "who can take the film to the developers tomorrow?" , you’re the one who can do it, and you get sucked right in. Pretty soon all I was doing was organizing, and the music had just disappeared. It disappeared for ten years.

But your entry into politics, was there any connection with your artistic work?

Yeah, actually I went to Nicaragua after the fall of Samosa with the intention of making a record of Nicaraguan music for this record label that Fred Frith and I were running at the time. I decided that music was not the most interesting thing that was happening there, and I stopped playing music for about ten years. Eventually I did study some stuff about politics, but that happened a little later. So I always just try to take things a project at a time, and trust your instinct and your intuition. I don’t know how else to do it, really. I never made a decision to stop playing music, for example. It was more that I made a decision to go back to it. At that point I was pretty far into politics, and I hadn’t played music for a long time.

What do you think brought you back to it?

The short answer is that after several years I discovered that there was not as much political space for somebody like me in the Central American left as I had imagined when I first got into it. I also discovered that my connection with American culture and with music was maybe deeper than I imagined when I got out of it.

In some respects, even though it took you a lot of time, that’s a fairly valuable insight. Most people spend much of their lives never being able to get more than the vaguest sense of what’s important to them.

Fred Frith was actually the only friend from my musical life that I’d stayed close to all through those years. I’d been telling him that I was thinking about playing music again. He called me up one day and said "are you serious about it?" I said yeah, and he said "can you be in New York for rehearsals in a couple of weeks?" I said "I guess!" Then all of a sudden, there I was in Fred’s band, and we were off on tour. I hadn’t thought about electronic music for almost ten years. I had never heard of midi. I had never heard of a sampler. I had to go to the rock and roll store and find an instrument to play, and buy it, and read the manual… [laughs]

It was really dislocating! It was an extreme Rip Van Winkle experience. The technology had completely changed, my friends had completely changed… when I left music, John Zorn was this totally unknown guy I did gigs with in his girlfriend’s apartment for audiences of four people. It was utterly a shock to discover that he was a star. All kinds of things.

The pieces that you’ve decided to do are connected to the tasks that you’ve set for yourself. The things that you know are the things that you need to do to do the thing that you want to do. Why on earth would you use Max?

Because I had been using the Ensoniq keyboard for ten years, and I felt like I had mined it. I felt like it was time for something new. It was funny, you know… I hadn’t kept up on new keyboards or anything, so I went shopping. I didn’t find anything interesting to buy. It’s funny… when I first started in, quote, electronic music, close quote, it was really a pretty obscure thing to get into. It was pretty much assumed that if you were into synthesizers, you were into experimental stuff. All the synthesizers that were made were made with that in mind. You could buy a Buchla, or you could buy a Serge, or you could buy an Arp, or you could buy a Moog, but they all lent themselves to doing pretty experimental things. Now it’s exploded to the point where if you ask someone who’s twenty years old what electronic music is, they think you’re talking about dance music. Nobody’s first idea, when confronted with the term electronic music, is experimental music, at least not with younger people. Now instead of four companies that make synthesizers, there are dozens.

Do you have the sense that the equipment that’s available to you is less open?

That’s exactly it. A corollary of this explosion is that the companies that make these things are under all this market pressure to manufacture for this market, which is a market of people that are interested in doing a pretty narrow range of activities with these boxes. Of course, you could make interesting boxes, but since the potential profit if you make something popular is much bigger than it was before, everybody wants to go for that.

We can blame the DX7 for ruining the world, in that sense.

No, I wouldn’t do that… It’s an ironic development that now we have machines that are much more powerful, and much faster, and much more sophisticated, but the things that people build them to do are much simpler than what people were building them to do in the late 1970s.

So I couldn’t find anything. I had been resisting getting into computer programming for all these years – I had no interest. People from the computer music world… I think for a long time they didn’t take my work seriously because I was playing instruments that I’d bought at the rock and roll store. Their idea was that, you know, if you were a serious computer musician, then you’d be writing your own code. My response to that was always to listen to the work that they made. If there’s something magical about writing your own code, then I don’t hear it. I was really convinced that engineering and music-making were pretty unrelated activities, and certainly that software programming and music making were really completely unrelated activities. In fact, the fact that many people tended to confuse them was one of the sources of a lot of the really bad music that was coming out of that part of the music world.

The kind of formalism that says here’s an algorithm, and here’s what it sounds like for forty-five minutes.

Yeah! They get interested in the code, and then they think because the code is interesting, the music is interesting… but those two things almost never go together.

You’re not a big systems art guy, then, are you?

[laughs] No. So my idea was always to position myself next to the engineer. So in the late 70s, when I was playing a Serge synthesizer, I got to know Serge Tcherepnin, and we’d talk about his modules. Then when I started using the Ensoniq I got to know the engineers of Ensoniq. We had a lot of interchange back and forth. So that was always my idea: that the right place for me as a composer was next to the engineer, in a real give and take with the engineer, but not being the engineer. But, when I couldn’t find a new instrument to buy that interested me… I had become friendly with David Wessel over at CNMAT, and he was really encouraging me to jump into Max… so I did it.

Well, let's see... I'm touring my Yugoslavia          Suite, which is a multimedia thing for video and audio and live performers          that uses a combination of Max and MSP on one computer and Imagine on          another computer. I'm preparing my second CD of solo improvisations which          will all be done with Max and MSP and game controllers. I have two new          quartets... one with Fred Frith, William Winant and Joan Jeanrenaud, and          one with Joan Jeanrenaud, Theo Blechmann and Denman Maroney. I'm touring          my trio Pantychrist with Otomo Yoshihide and Justin Bond. Let's see, I know there are some          other things in there... oh! I'm doing a project with Joan Jeanrenaud          and Jim McGee, an artist in El Paso. Actually, that's the next thing on          my plate, that Joan and I will go to El Paso to do this recording with          Jim. Then I'm going to teach in Slovenia for a few weeks in September.

Well, I just came back from... we did it in Austria, at Steim in Amsterdam, the Nancy Festival in France, in Lyon, Victoriaville in          Quebec, at the Futuresonic Festival in Manchester, at CNMAT, and in Winnipeg...          so generally around.

You attempted to take it to Serbia first. You ended the comments in          your diary with a discussion about the intentions you had, beginning with          work whose content was so explicitly political and bringing it to the          people where it was. You talked about the difficulty of finding the space          in which the kind of interaction that you wanted could take place. How          do you think that doing the work, or performing it, has changed as a result          of your going there? Did that change the way that you organized what you          did, or did it change your attitude about how you presented things?

Well, I was going to make a third movement to it that was going to be          based on videotaped interviews with audience members after the piece was          performed in different parts of the world, and I dropped that idea. So          that's probably the biggest change. There were actually two challenges          that really grabbed me about performing that piece in different places.          One was that there was so little political space available in the former          Yugoslavia. It's like people didn't even have the space to think about          it. They would just have a sort of visceral reaction to it. But the other          problem is the problem of working with images, as opposed to sound. This          is the first piece I've ever done that uses images as a central element.          Actually, that's not true... I don't typically use images.

But you often collaborate with people who emphasize stage performance          or visual imagery.

Sure. But there's something about using documentary imagery. The way          I think about it is this: we all hear sound differently. If I sing a note,          or play a note on a trombone or whatever, you'll hear it slightly differently          than I'll hear it. We're all different people, and we bring our own histories          to how we perceive things. But we see images really differently, much          more differently than we hear sound. If you took images like the images          that I used in that piece, and you show them to people in former Yugoslavia,          where they've been bombarded with those images for the last ten years,          and they know them inside out, they probably are familiar with every image          I use, and can identify the people in it. Not only can identify the people          in it but the place it happened, and they probably know why that was an          important moment, and why somebody would want to take a picture of that,          and they've probably thought about that moment inside out for the last          ten years... and then you show it to somebody from the United States,          and they don't even know what country it's from. It's pretty hard to imagine          that you're going to make a piece that will work in both places, and all          the other places I've taken the piece. So, that's a hard one. Sure, I've          done things that are sort of the sonic equivalent, where I've used documentary          audio that was quite politically charged, but it's still different.

Found material, material whose content is explicitly identifiable          with a given circumstance, seems to be at the center of much of your work.          You're doing something with both visual and audio material now, and you're          saying that the two are really different. I think many of us would see          visual images as more public, in the sense that we can get them from someplace.          Your point of view is that even though that's ostensibly the case, they're          more immediate. They're public all right, because I can get them from          forty places, but it's a given image at a given time at a given place,          and when I go to Yugoslavia and show that image, something different happens.

In the department of redundancy department... I just did another piece          called "Between Garbage and Science" that was a theatre piece,          and that's the first time I've ever worked with an actor on stage. That          was really a difficult experience. There was a filmmaker, Pierre Hebert,          and an actor, Baltazar Lopez, and myself, and we were all onstage, and          we really wanted to make a piece where the three elements of actor, film          and sound were sort of equal. It was really hard. People perceive with          their eyes first, I think, and if you give them something to look at,          it's very hard for them not to perceive the sound as an accompaniment          of what happens in front of their eyes.

Do you feel that that's a difficult thing to manage when you perform          live? For a very long time you've been involved in the creation of the          equivalent of your own instruments. When an audience goes to a concert          hall and sees a grand piano, unless it's played in a very unusual way          the audience brings a certain set of expectations… ways in which          a piano player transduces small motor coordination into noise. Seeing          a performance with a game controller means that the audience doesn't have          those things. Does it ever concern you, for example, that they're distracted          from the sound you're producing by trying to figure out how Bob does the          trick?

That's one of the big problems of performing electronic music, of course.          I'm sure everybody who would read this interview on the Max web site has          thought about this stuff. Actually, the game controllers are very new          for me. I'm actually new to writing my own software and so forth. For          ten years I used an Ensoniq keyboard… I did all my stuff on a keyboard          I bought at the rock and roll store. But I don't have any keyboard facility          at all... for me it was just a bunch of buttons. I thought about that          a lot. When I first started using it, it felt very disconcerting to be          sitting on stage in front of a keyboard, and then an audience would come          in and expect you to play this keyboard, and then you'd be using it as          a bunch of switches, and display none of the facility that people would          expect you to display when you sit down at a keyboard. For a while that          really bugged me. Then I got so used to it that it stopped bothering me.

I played that thing for ten years, which was another deliberate choice          of mine, because I think in electronic music people are in such a rush          to get the latest thing, and to upgrade their system, and to get something          faster and with more voices, that they never actually learn to play anything.          I think particularly if you're going to perform, then you have to develop          some kind of... not virtuosity, but you have to learn to play something.          That takes a long time - you can't learn to play something in a few weeks          or a few months. So I stuck with the same instrument for ten years even          though there were much newer things that had more buttons and more whistles.          I got to the point where I think people responded. They were sort of surprised          that I wasn't playing a keyboard, but even though I was just hitting these          buttons and scrolling through menus and stuff, I was comfortable enough          that... I sort of had it in my bones.

You developed a virtuosity not in the keyboard end of it, but in the          Bob Ostertag bank of switches. 

Yeah. I think it's something very physical, and something that has very          much to do with your body. I think you have to be comfortable putting          your body into the performance. I got to the point where I could do that,          and I think people responded to that. After a long time I finally relaxed          about it. Now I've switched to a powerbook and a joystick...

Oh yes, absolutely. I’m going to have to work with this for quite          a while...

Well, basically you've said that's why people have trouble with electronic          music. You've actually done the upgrade, and you're now faced with the          same problem that everybody who upgrades constantly faces all the time.          The only difference is that you go a decade between re-inventions instead          of six months.

Right. An interesting thing about game controllers is that almost everybody          has used them at some point. Not everybody, but certainly many of the          people who come to my concerts have used them.

Which is the same as a keyboard - most people at some point in their          life have sat down at a keyboard or piano and doodled around, or have          even taken a few piano lessons as a kid or something. So when you sit          down in front of a keyboard, there's a resonance with the experience that          you're having. It's similar with joysticks, actually... people know, well,          you can move it this way and that way and twist it, and hit those buttons...

It seems like their familiarity might allow them to connect more immediately          with what you're doing in terms of content, because there's less mystery          about it. Probably a little more mystery than a piano, but in the same          sense they sort of know that at some point it's not going to burst into          flames, and you'll have to actually touch it for something to happen.

You know, it took me a while to get the bugs worked out of using the          joystick, so while I was doing that I did some shows just sitting on stage          with the laptop. I actually did two shows in proscenium stage theaters          with full theatrical lights where I was just sitting on stage...

It felt really... clerical, like I should have been doing my taxes or          something.

I had no problem with the music, I thought the music was just great,          but it felt really strange.

Well, I made a point to ask people, and people said that it was jarring          at first, but then they just got into the music and stopped watching me.

I think there's a whole techno/post-techno scene where that's pretty          much the rule. Four guys sitting at tables in front of a laptop while          you're supposed to dance. It's pretty dislocating.

I thought about, well, what I should do is just walk out on stage and          then when I start to play, turn the lights out, and then turn them back          on when I'm done, because there really wasn't anything to look at all.          I'm not satisfied with that either, because people want some kind of connection          with you if it's actually a live performance. I've also been querying          people after the concerts where I've used the joystick, and even though          I don't feel like I'm really playing it in the way we talked about - I          don't feel physically relaxed, I don't feel it as an extension of my body          or anything - people responded very differently than when I was just sitting          at a laptop.

I would imagine that, particularly with the Yugoslavia suite, there          is a sense in which the identification of that particular tool with the          kind of computer mediated game version of the tremendous violence of the          visual images must pack some structural wallop. If you were interviewing          people about death squads it would be different. The use of that particular          tool would have a very different meaning.

Well, in that piece we actually put a video camera on my hand with the          joystick, and we mix that image in with the other images. So, we actually          try to use the full weight of that image. In the first half of the piece          I'm essentially playing a computer game that we made... it's like I'm          bombing Yugoslavia. That's actually how I initially got interested in          using the joystick, because I wanted to have one to fly this plane in          Yugoslavia Suite, and then once I had one and got it working, I thought          I could use it for other things.

You've described your feelings about being physically present when          you perform. I'm curious about how you came to using electronic means          in the first place. At the time you started doing it, it was certainly          much harder to do than it is now. What was it that led you to perform          instead of writing pieces for Joan Jeanrenaud, say? 

I didn't start out with this perspective. Actually, there was a time          when I was so much younger where I actually wanted to remove my body from          the performance, that was one of the appeals of electronic music.

No, I think it was more... I was really obsessed with sound, and I was          really obsessed with listening. I mean, we could psycho-analyze me on          many levels about the decisions I made at this particular point in my          life...

Was that obsession with sound explicitly connected to the collection          of its meanings in the world as your work is now?

Yeah. So, first I got obsessed with Jimi Hendrix, and then I got obsessed          with electric Miles Davis, and then, you know, I went from there. Since          I started out playing guitar in garage bands, I really wanted to move          away from that into this... sort of what I imagined as a terrain of sound.          I had this very naive and youthful idealistic view of what electronic          music could be.

Do you think that the percentage of improvisation and open-endedness          you do now is greater than when you were in your garage?

I've heard you say before that you feel that's a strong way to characterize          your work - the improvisatory nature about it.

Well, some of it is and some of it isn't, you know? Yugoslavia Suite          is about half and half. This thing I'm going to write for Joan is going          to be completely notated. It's rare that I actually completely notate          something. But then again, I think of my CDs as compositions, and those          are entirely fixed. You know, it's recorded onto a CD and there it is,          burned right into the [knocks on table]... whatever the stuff is that          you burn it into on a CD.

The exciting high register philosophical term for that is a concrete          particular. Isn't that a great phrase? So your CDs are concrete particulars. 

[laughs] When I was in high school in the garage it was pretty much half          improvised and half written. I had a nice band. I played guitar, and we          had a drummer, percussionist, bass player, oboe, English horn, two trumpets,          and a piano.

I would have guessed that you grew up with piano lessons and then          basically discovered that going to electronic stuff gave you some kind          of control and input into things that traditional compositional practice          didn't.

No, no, not at all, not at all. I wasn't really given any musical encouragement          at all. My family wasn't interested in it. I started out playing guitar          in bad rock and roll bands and then started writing my own stuff, and          put together this band... the orchestra in my high school was good, so          I went through the orchestra and asked the first year of every instrument          if they wanted to play in a band. That's how I ended up with a band. Then          we got these Heathkit fuzztone kits, so we had all these little electric          gizmos for the trumpets and the oboe. I started adding more and more pedals          to my guitar, and pretty soon I was more interested in the pedals than          the guitar.

Yeah, that was the idea. I was really into Miles Davis. I still think          Bitches Brew is one of the absolute seminal musical experiences.

So why and how did you come to embrace electronic technology? And          how did you come to combine this interest with pretty passionate political          engagements and questions of identity? 

Why use electronics? Well, electronics are rare, and they're everywhere,          and they're one of the most provocative things out there. If you're fourteen          years old, and you're starting to play rock music, one of the first things          that you encounter is electronics. If you're somebody like me who doesn’t          have much natural ability or skill in the lot of the conventional parameters          of music, like pitch and melody, and rhythm but have an affinity with          sound, and you feel that your ears are good at grasping sound and manipulating          it, then electronics is certainly where you go… particularly if you          have an electric guitar, and you start buying fuzz pedals and wah wah          pedals. You start wondering how those little gizmos work. You start thinking          about how to record, and then all of a sudden you’re into mixers,          and yeah… it’s a completely natural progression.

You know, I’ve never had any studies, so… [laughs] I’ve          had a very, very limited amount of formal study, and fortunately the little          bit I had was with people who encouraged me. I went to Oberlin for two          years, though not as a conservatory student. Because I was only there          for two years and because I wasn’t a conservatory student and was          taking electronic music courses as a college student, I actually didn’t          have any of the course requirements that the conservatory kids had. I          actually completed their electronic music course the first year I was          there, because that was all I took… which was a funny thing, because          the guy who ran the electronic music department was criticized for that.          I thought I should have been given a prize or something, but the Dean          told him it made the program look bad if a student could do it in a year.

That whole conservatory was just the embodiment of that… I really          remember thinking that to me, if you were going to teach music, then the          fundamental thing that you should be teaching people is that they have          something unique to say through sound, and that they should trust that          and go with that. The whole message of that conservatory was the exact          opposite of that. The whole message was that you probably don’t have          anything to say at all.

…and since you don’t, it’s best to learn how to reproduce          the work of others who did have something to say.

Yeah, and they convince you of the Herculean task ahead of you. It’s          just awful. So, yeah, I have very little training. I always sort of train          myself for the project at hand. The things I know how to do are the things          I’ve been required to do for the projects I wanted to do, and I don’t          know how to do much else.

Do you find that your interests as a composer are directed by the          tasks that you set for yourself given your ideological involvement, or          are they tasks which come to you? In other words, has your understanding          of the power structure of the world come from the investigation of making          pieces?

You’ve brought those kind of passionate engagements to bear on          the tools, or as you’d say it, the few things you do know?

Well, to explain better what I was trying to say… I just did this          piece, Yugoslavia Suite, and it’s the first time I’ve used video.          I didn’t study video, and I didn’t take any video classes, and          I’ve never really been particularly interested in video… but          then I had this project I wanted to do, and I thought, well, this needs          video. So then, I got into video. When I did Spiral,          which used a text by David Wojnarowicz, where he described his own dying          process and used the metaphor of turning into glass, I wanted to play          it on glass instruments. I’d never built instruments before, but          I got into it because I wanted it for that specific project. When the          Kronos commissioned me to          write a string quartet for them, I actually hadn’t written notes          on paper since high school. So I thought, okay, I guess I better get back          into writing notes on staff paper! So I really try and take it a project          at a time.

Did that project come to you because of content? In the case of the          Kronos project, did you choose the background and context for All the          Rage, or did they approach you about something with that content, or was          that something that you chose to do?

They heard my piece Sooner or Later, which is a pretty politically loaded          piece, and they wanted me to do something like that. They wanted me to          do something about rainforests, and I didn’t want to do that. First          of all, it’s important for me to say that most of my work doesn’t          have an explicitly political theme… it’s just a little subset          of it that does. But when I do it, I try to choose themes that I have          some sort of direct and personal connection and engagement with, and not          just look out at the world and decide to make a comment about the hole          in the ozone layer or something. So I didn’t want to do a rainforest          piece. I actually had this idea to make a trilogy of pieces about grief,          anger and joy, and Sooner or Later was the grief piece, so I wanted to          do one about anger. Then there was this riot in San Francisco that I was          a participant in, and took my tape recorder to and recorded… so then          I proposed to them that I make a piece for them out of the riot. They          liked that idea.

I haven’t gotten around to the joy piece yet. Joy is harder. I’m          doing this series with documentary source audio, and I haven’t really          found one that I would use for a joy piece that wouldn’t be cliché.          The first two pieces, I think, use pretty exceptional audio source material.          It’s not so easy to come by that stuff. I’ve got my eyes out          for something to do the third piece, but I haven’t found it yet.          I had a recording that I wanted to use… I went to a prayer meeting          of a Christian sect in Silicon Valley… it’s quite remarkable          what they do. They have these prayer meetings that are similar to prayer          meetings where people would talk in tongues, except instead of talking          in tongues, they laugh. They call it Holy Laughter, and they go up to          the front, and the priest puts his hand on their forehead and they fall          down giggling. I wanted to get a recording of that. I thought, you know,          given the history of what Christians have done in the world, falling on          the floor and laughing was really one of the better… [laughs] So          I went and made a tape of it, but I ended up not using it. The tape wasn’t          as good as I wanted it to be, because I felt too intrusive making the          recording at the meeting.

When I was in my early 20s I got really into politics. But in much the          same way that I do these pieces, it was just a project at a time, and          I certainly never studied anything, but I started volunteering for this          and that, and of course, there’s a circle you get into when you’re          in those kind of political groups. If you’re freelance, and everyone          else is working for a 9-5 job, and they say "who can take the film          to the developers tomorrow?" , you’re the one who can do it,          and you get sucked right in. Pretty soon all I was doing was organizing,          and the music had just disappeared. It disappeared for ten years.

But your entry into politics, was there any connection with your artistic          work? 

Yeah, actually I went to Nicaragua after the fall of Samosa with the          intention of making a record of Nicaraguan music for this record label          that Fred Frith and I were running at the time. I decided that music was          not the most interesting thing that was happening there, and I stopped          playing music for about ten years. Eventually I did study some stuff about          politics, but that happened a little later. So I always just try to take          things a project at a time, and trust your instinct and your intuition.          I don’t know how else to do it, really. I never made a decision to          stop playing music, for example. It was more that I made a decision to          go back to it. At that point I was pretty far into politics, and I hadn’t          played music for a long time.

The short answer is that after several years I discovered that there          was not as much political space for somebody like me in the Central American          left as I had imagined when I first got into it. I also discovered that          my connection with American culture and with music was maybe deeper than          I imagined when I got out of it.

In some respects, even though it took you a lot of time, that’s          a fairly valuable insight. Most people spend much of their lives never          being able to get more than the vaguest sense of what’s important          to them.

Fred Frith was actually the only friend from my musical life that I’d          stayed close to all through those years. I’d been telling him that          I was thinking about playing music again. He called me up one day and          said "are you serious about it?" I said yeah, and he said "can          you be in New York for rehearsals in a couple of weeks?" I said "I          guess!" Then all of a sudden, there I was in Fred’s band, and          we were off on tour. I hadn’t thought about electronic music for          almost ten years. I had never heard of midi. I had never heard of a sampler.          I had to go to the rock and roll store and find an instrument to play,          and buy it, and read the manual… [laughs]

It was really dislocating! It was an extreme Rip Van Winkle experience.          The technology had completely changed, my friends had completely changed…          when I left music, John Zorn was this totally unknown guy I did gigs with          in his girlfriend’s apartment for audiences of four people. It was          utterly a shock to discover that he was a star. All kinds of things.

The pieces that you’ve decided to do are connected to the tasks          that you’ve set for yourself. The things that you know are the things          that you need to do to do the thing that you want to do. Why on earth          would you use Max? 

Because I had been using the Ensoniq keyboard for ten years, and I felt          like I had mined it. I felt like it was time for something new. It was          funny, you know… I hadn’t kept up on new keyboards or anything,          so I went shopping. I didn’t find anything interesting to buy. It’s          funny… when I first started in, quote, electronic music, close quote,          it was really a pretty obscure thing to get into. It was pretty much assumed          that if you were into synthesizers, you were into experimental stuff.          All the synthesizers that were made were made with that in mind. You could          buy a Buchla, or you could buy a Serge, or you could buy an Arp, or you          could buy a Moog, but they all lent themselves to doing pretty experimental          things. Now it’s exploded to the point where if you ask someone who’s          twenty years old what electronic music is, they think you’re talking          about dance music. Nobody’s first idea, when confronted with the          term electronic music, is experimental music, at least not with younger          people. Now instead of four companies that make synthesizers, there are          dozens.

Do you have the sense that the equipment that’s available to          you is less open? 

That’s exactly it. A corollary of this explosion is that the companies          that make these things are under all this market pressure to manufacture          for this market, which is a market of people that are interested in doing          a pretty narrow range of activities with these boxes. Of course, you could          make interesting boxes, but since the potential profit if you make something          popular is much bigger than it was before, everybody wants to go for that.

No, I wouldn’t do that… It’s an ironic development that          now we have machines that are much more powerful, and much faster, and          much more sophisticated, but the things that people build them to do are          much simpler than what people were building them to do in the late 1970s.

So I couldn’t find anything. I had been resisting getting into computer          programming for all these years – I had no interest. People from          the computer music world… I think for a long time they didn’t          take my work seriously because I was playing instruments that I’d          bought at the rock and roll store. Their idea was that, you know, if you          were a serious computer musician, then you’d be writing your own          code. My response to that was always to listen to the work that they made.          If there’s something magical about writing your own code, then I          don’t hear it. I was really convinced that engineering and music-making          were pretty unrelated activities, and certainly that software programming          and music making were really completely unrelated activities. In fact,          the fact that many people tended to confuse them was one of the sources          of a lot of the really bad music that was coming out of that part of the          music world.

The kind of formalism that says here’s an algorithm, and here’s          what it sounds like for forty-five minutes.

Yeah! They get interested in the code, and then they think because the          code is interesting, the music is interesting… but those two things          almost never go together.

[laughs] No. So my idea was always to position myself next to the engineer.          So in the late 70s, when I was playing a Serge synthesizer, I got to know          Serge Tcherepnin, and we’d talk about his modules. Then when I started          using the Ensoniq I got to know the engineers of Ensoniq. We had a lot          of interchange back and forth. So that was always my idea: that the right          place for me as a composer was next to the engineer, in a real give and          take with the engineer, but not being the engineer. But, when I couldn’t          find a new instrument to buy that interested me… I had become friendly          with David Wessel over at CNMAT, and he was really encouraging me to jump          into Max… so I did it.

Bob Ostertag is a music school dropout who has since performed all over the world and has collaborated with the likes of John Zorn, Fred Frith, drag diva Justin Bond, and the Kronos Quartet. In this interview he describes his creative process and what inspires him to design his technological instruments. 

An Interview With Bob Ostertag