Questions and Answers
Q. Who’s Tessa Brinckman and what’s this page about?
A.
Greetings. You’ve come to the right place.
I’m a classical flutist, human being, and creative sort, in no particular order. I’m originally from New Zealand, living on the Upper Left Side of the United States. My official music bio can be found on the collaborators page. My unofficial bio creeps into in my music and other creative endeavours, and not always as an invited guest.
You’ll note this is not a blog. A blog sounds like a nefarious thing you deposit on someone’s doorstep, and then sprint away before anyone sees you. Nope, this is just a place where questions that I've been asked can have a place to hang.
Contact me with your illuminating questions.
Koto player Mitsuki Dazai with my cat Zephyr playing chamber music. Koto players (unless naturally endowed with claws) pluck the strings with the right thumb, index and middle finger, using ivory picks.
Q. Your CD has a koto. What is it, and how is it played?
A.
The koto is a Japanese member of the zither family (where the strings are parallel to the sounding board, unlike a harp where strings are perpendicular to sounding board).
It has 13 strings and is cradled by wooden supports on its back, over which the player plucks the strings, using movable bridges that make various tunings possible. Its range is B below middle C up to the 2nd octave C after Middle C (or, B3 up to C6).
Japanese music traditionally uses pentatonic scales, but since the koto bridges are movable, there is some flexibility, lending itself to contemporary modes.
The bass koto or jushichi-gen has 17 strings that are much thicker than those of the koto. Initially the bass koto was used only in ensemble music, but gradually solos and duos with shakuhachi were composed for it, and it's even been used in pop music (eg. the Japanese pop band Rin) .
Mitsuki Dazai and I have a concert program for western flutes (including baroque flute) and bass koto. The bass koto sounds remarkably like a lute when we play baroque music.
Q. How did you find out about the Owl House in Nieu Bethesda?
A.
I had a Let’s Go guidebook to South Africa that described a house of glass in the desert created by Outsider artist, Helen Martins. Glass and deserts are some of my favourite things, so I rented a car. It was the first time I had either rented a car or driven on the left, so I drove straight from Grahamstown to Nieu Bethesda in a pool of sweat. And fell in love.
Click here for links to great information about Outsider Artists and Helen Martins.
Q. What was your inspiration for your composition, Glass Sky?
A. I had been studying Indian raga music, and one raga in particular, Multani. This intense, majestic raga comes from the region of Multan, now Pakistan, where it is very hot and desert-dry. Given Helen Martins love of exoticism, and the landscape of the Karoo, Multani seemed like a natural fit. Not only because of the desert and Martin's numerous references to the East in her work, but also because of her emotional intensity, and her sense of isolation. I didn’t want to stereotype her life as just sad, or wretched, despite the tragedies she suffered. In fact I felt she celebrated life, wth her wry sense of humor, taking the lemons she had received and making lemonade.
The title “Glass Sky” comes from when I was traveling to the Owl House, and stopped at a desolate place. It was a rest stop, with one tree, a fence, and a few plastic bags blowing about in the wind. Then I noticed a swarm of small birds, far away, flying in graceful formation in the big sky. The sky has a distant glassy look to it, a winter sky in the Karoo. It was a perfect nexus of solitude, pathos and love.
The Owl House itself is full of glass objects and textures, from floor to ceiling, and in the yard. The title also refers to the feeling of compression and reflection that Martins experienced (as in “glass ceiling”) since she was not free, externally or internally.
Q. You talk in the Inner Landscapes film about creativity and Helen Martins - can you say more about that?
A. In the creative process you merge with what’s around you, good or bad. It’s all useful, even if the experience ends up being loathsome and not to be repeated. It seems to me that we are here to arrive, experience, enact our deepest selves, then disappear into the dust. Martins was an untraditional woman, trapped in an unforgiving country that marginalized most people. She didn’t fit the mould and she couldn’t if she tried. At the same time she wanted to connect, and making art made her feel loved and loveable. She merged herself with the natural world, the desert, the exotica that she found in everyday objects, and distilled what needed to be expressed. This is what great artists do. They hook into the collective unconscious, select what needs to be said at that moment, and realize it.
Q. Can you comment on Helen Martin's status as an artist?
A. I have my own definitions about this, distinguishing between being an artist or a maker of art.
Being an artist means you have a public. Having a public changes you, whether you like it or not. You might feed off of it, or resist it, but it still shapes who you are. Artists are responsible to their audiences, and good artists know how much to challenge and how much to nurture.
Being a maker of art means not having a public. You make art in private, in complete artistic freedom, and it’s not up for public scrutiny.
Helen Martins worked as a maker of art for a long time. That defines her as an Outsider Artist. Eventually when she had a public, she was an artist. Neither label comments on the quality of the work. You can be a bad artist and have a public. Or you can make art, with your work not being seen by anyone, and be brilliant.
I love Martins' work. Typical of many Outsider artists, she longed for the kind of recognition that formally trained artists feel is their due. She did have some recognition towards the end of her life, and she hoped that her house would become a museum. Helen Martins inspired Athol Fugard's play, "Road to Mecca".
Q. Whom did Helen Martins work with?
A.
The men who worked under Helen Martins' direction at various times - Koos Malgas, Jonas Adams and Piet Van Der Merwe - were not visible under the apartheid regime. They were coloured, and Martins was white.
We're never going to know the true depth of their relationship with her, apart from surviving anecdotes. There has been some controversy in recent years about the authorship, and therefore financial legacies, of the Owl House. Virtually all the work is identified as that of Helen Martins, which makes it sound like the traditional Western studio relationship of master artist to assistants.
Martins was prolific. Grinding glass, and working with concrete and wire is hard labour, so assistance was necessary. My own feeling is that it was more of a partnership than just employment. This is how collaboration is, often subtle and unspoken. You’ll never create the same thing by yourself. Something enters your group, a kind of spirit that is specific to a group's creativity, and goes away when that group changes.
We can't show any Miro images here because of copyright issues. But go to the links page to find most of these works by Miro.
Q. Which paintings by Miro did Mark Fish set to music on the CD Glass Sky?
A.
Mark Fish was commissioned to write Pictures of Miró, which we recorded on Glass Sky. It is a set of musical depictions of eleven paintings by the Catalan artist Joan Miró, ordered chronologically to lead listeners through the artist's surreal world of fantasy and imagination - which was also deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War. Thematically, the entire piece is structured around the self- portraits of Miró, each of which he painted in very different styles and at very different times in his life.
Dog, Barking at the Moon, 1926
The Lutanist (Dutch Interior I), 1928
Girl Practicing Gymnastics, 1932
Woman, 1934
Man and Woman in Front of Pile of Excrement - 1936
Self-Portrait, 1937
The Escape Ladder, 1939
The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain, 1940
The Red Sun Gnaws at the Spider, 1948
Self-Portrait, 1960
