A condensed interview with John P. Hastings by Deena Denaro
One of the first cultural events I attended since moving back to New York was a musical performance piece produced and directed by composer John P. Hastings called Passages | Pasajes. Cryptic and curiously hypnotic, I decided to interview him about this recent project in order to better understand it.
DD: Hi John, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work and who you are?
JPH :I’m a composer & artist. I come from a musical background in the experimental music traditions starting with John Cage and then Fluxus artists in the 1960’s but in the last 5 years I’ve been stretching to using performance and multi media as well as sound in my projects. With the birth of my son, my time commitments changed so I got deeper into single projects and kind of excavating things with that so my output slowed and got deeper. Instead of having just one 10-30 minute work be a stand-alone thing, what if, like in a gallery show for visual arts, you have you have a show that includes many pieces that sort of fit a thematic idea,
DD: So like a one-man show? A sonic one-man show?
JPH: Right. Yeah creating like a suite of works.
DD: Tell me about your most recent work.
JPH: The piece was called Passages/Passajes. It was a community based project with a few facets to it. There was 16 people in 4 groups of 4 and there would be 4 performances and those consisted of three parts: the names of loved ones, a passage of text that was influential in peoples lives and the third part would be a song or a melody that was part of their personal histories. Each of the people leading the group would generate the ma- terial that was used in those sections. So I just created this frame work and then every- body would be filling in the micro bits of it.
DD: So would you say that is was sort of an open source music piece?
JPH: Ah (hesitation) kind of yeah.
DD: Is that a good way of characterizing it? In the term that designers create the frame work for open source jewellery or open source software?
JPH: I haven’t thought of it in that way. I’m thinking if it would translate... when I think about open source in those ways like in software or something, it’s like something you can, uhh, build upon.
DD: Yeah, endlessly; this is more finite...
JPH: Right. In the experimental music community this would be an open work, but it would be more like I’m providing the canvas and the paint but not the actual painting itself. That get’s done by everyone else.
DD: So tell me about the little boxes [used in the performance]
JPH: I found these small wooden boxes that record about 30 seconds and then play back infinitely. And the idea with this was that each performer would put the name of a loved one into the box and then they would pass them around the group and then the last per- son would put that into the park space and then that would become the sonic perimeter of the performance, so the names of all the people that we love become this entry way or kind of portal that we would work with.
DD: That’s very cool! So that’s where the name Passages comes in, because you’re creating a sonic passage or portal to...
JPH: Well yeah there’s that but then there’s passages of text, and then we’re passing between each other and then it was the (autumnal) equinox so there’s the passing of the seasons.
DD: Oh fantastic! I was only considering one.... So how did you get the inspiration for this?
JPH: So I got a grant for this and the original grant was for the subway tunnel at 191st street on the 1 train. It’s the longest pedestrian tunnel in New York and there’s all these colorful murals and stuff in it but it’s HUGE and what I wanted to do was put like, 50 people in there, and we would do some sort of performance in that passage. So that was the origi- nal, like “passages” and then as soon as I tried to get any sort of permitting done for that, it was just not gonna happen.
DD: Oh no!
JPH: So I changed it to where the location was [Dogan Field, Ft. Tryon Park] and I had to re-con- textualize the whole thing in a different way. Instead of being physical space I had to turn it into a metaphysical space I guess. I do want to do something there [in the 191st Street Tunnel] again but it can’t be under any kind of grant. It will have to be like a guerrilla style thing- some kind of intervention; I like doing those kinds of things but it has to be completely under the radar.