Three hours a week, I speak to a group of ninety-nine people and explain how to make choices. I talk loudly, to the back of the room, then I lower my voice to engage them more intimately. I pause and let the room grow silent. Near the end of the twice-weekly performance, I review my main points. Like a bell, this signals to my audience that they will leave soon; they begin to rustle in their chairs. I say, “Hey, I’m not done! You can’t go yet!” And they laugh. And they stay.

Album Cover: Andreas Pape's The Big Hit

I am an economist and a musician. In both of my chosen fields, performance is a necessary component. As an economist, I teach and I present papers; as a musician, I put on shows. Performance is the willful construction of a series of events using the body—hands, voice, gesture—and the instruments the body can manipulate to create a particular mental state for the witnesses. In the days leading up to my next show on October 16th at The Beef in Binghamton, NY, I have pondered the intimate ways in which listening structures the corporeal nature of performance. As an economist, I understand that performance is strategic, in that I imagine a listener for my music and choose my actions to influence that listener. As a musician, I recall moments that I listened.

“Rhythm to Organize Silence”

In Chronicles, Bob Dylan describes a listening experience built around a singer who constructs her own way to view the rhythm of a song. “I’d seen [Martha Reeves] in New York … where she’d been playing with the Motown Revue. Her band couldn’t keep up with her, had no idea what she was doing and just plodded along. She beat a tambourine in triplet form, up close to her ear and she phrased the song as if the tambourine was her entire band” (160). This phrasing that is out-of-phase with the band (or the audience) reminds me of Odetta.

Odetta might be best known for her performance of “I’ve been driving on Bald Mountain/Water Boy.” She rebuilt those two traditional 4/4 folk songs swung onto a three-beat triplet, so what emerges is a swinging triplet where beats two and three are rushed in after a lethargic one: ONE… two three; ONE… two three; ONE… two three. After several times though the verses, she stops the guitar entirely and carries a long vocal note, setting up a moment of unnaturally long silence. The guitar and grunt that end the silence seem arrhythmic to my ear, but Odetta can sing by her own time that swings in and out of phase with the rest of us. We’re not meant to know when resolution comes, and it’s that uncertainty that Odetta wants us to experience.

Seeking to recreate a combination of those listening experiences in my audience, I wrote “Something This Easy,” a song about confusing interactions with an ex. The song is forty percent silence: nineteen beats of melody followed by thirteen beats of silence. I don’t tap my foot or keep time during the silence, save for holding my breath, and I bring back the sound when I (have to) exhale. I try to keep the audience slightly and repeatedly startled by resisting any precise expectation of sound that they may hold. After a beat, the audience will break the silence when I make them laugh with the line: “I know your body like a Swedish furniture map.” With the eruption of laughter in an otherwise silent room, my audience becomes the instrument creating the music that they are listening to at that moment. That is, they are the only instrument I’m playing.

As a musician, this is the listening experience I designed: the laughter rings after I’ve triggered it like a overtone ring on a string long after having been plucked and left. As an economist, I see how I used the imagined listener successfully: I forecasted how these real listeners would react, and was able to use that forecast to design not only this moment, but potentially many others as well.

Downloadable Pape Mix of Wilco, Odetta, and his own “Something this Easy”:

Rhythm to Organize Silence (Misunderstood_Tweedy_ Bald Mtn_Odetta_ SmthThisEasy_Pape)

View Andreas Duus Pape’s latest album The Big Hit here