Leading up to Pique on Dec 4th, 2021, we are asking questions to participating artists to find out more about what they are working on for Pique and learn about their practice.
Stephen Eckert (b.1997) is a pianist-composer-sound artist from Kippens, Newfoundland, who holds an M.Mus. in Piano Performance from uOttawa where they studied with David Jalbert and a B.Mus. (Hons) in Piano Performance and Composition from Memorial University of Newfoundland where they studied with Dr. Kristina Szutor and Dr. Andrew Staniland. Currently they are pursuing a Graduate Diploma in Performance from uOttawa. Some of their career honours include winning the 2021 Nicole Senécal Emerging Artist Prize, lecturing and performing at 2018/19 Gros Morne Summer Music and the 2019 Wintertide Festival, acting as the music director and pianist for the 2019 MUN Opera Roadshow Tour, and co-founding the both the Nova Collective in Newfoundland in 2018 and Ottawa-based new music ensemble, Ensemble Allure (formerly Phase Ensemble), in 2020.
1. To someone who doesn’t know you, how would you describe your work?
I am a pianist-composer-sound artist, and I make a pretty wide range of works in terms of style, but I feel that the body of work I have right now is informed by an interest in connecting my compositional practice with a piece of wisdom, humanizing idea or something from my lived experience. Whether it’s a more traditional acoustic work or a piece of sound-performance art, I want the audience or viewer to feel compelled to feel, and ponder, and to be embodied in that act of feeling and pondering.
2. Who are some of your inspirations?
My inspirations draw from a mixed bag of styles. Artists like Arca, SOPHIE, Alice Longyu Gao, Cobrah, and Shygirl have all made an impact on how I approach my electronic compositional process. A queer-punk-edm sort of headspace is usually how I’m living day-to-day. I really admire the raw, unabashed emotion and intimate songwriting of Arlo Parks, Mitski and Björk, and lastly because of my classical music training I adore the music of Frederic Rzewski, George Crumb, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nicole Lizée, James O’Callaghan, and Bekah Simms.
3. What’s the general artistic process when you write music? Are you working on anything new at the moment?
I tend to stew on a concept for a long time before composing or fleshing out the sound of the piece. I’m usually thinking about every single angle of a concept that I can, every understanding of the idea or word that inspires me, and sharing the idea with colleagues to get their thoughts. I also tend to get a bit obsessive over writing when I finally do sit down to put it all down on paper or on my laptop, it seems to pour out all at once. Some of it great, some of it not so much, so after my initial release of all my ideas I approach it again after a short break and try to organize my thoughts so they’re as concise, direct and understandable as possible. Right now, I’m stewing on the idea of trans joy and how wonderfully sacred that is.
4. What do you want people to feel when they listen to your work? Why?
I want people to feel – period. I’m not that concerned that everyone gets the same message or feeling from a piece, my priorities lie more on the fact that they feeling something at all. In my life I have numbed out a lot of things, so music and performance has allowed me to access real, human, and healthy feelings; rage, grief, joy, jealousy, admiration, compassion. Things that I’ve been taught not to feel, to push down, or at the very least not to show publicly. I usually title my piece according to a narrative or central concept on which I explore my thoughts and feelings through sound, and it’s my hope that people allow themselves to join me in feeling and pondering. I do this because we have numbed ourselves to that visceral, human reality that we forget we are all living.
5. Can you describe what your performance for Pique Winter Edition will be like?
My performance will feature three pieces; the first is Confined Fae which I wrote in the summer of 2021 at the soundSCAPE festival. It uses acoustic piano, battery-powered oscillators, and an Arduino, which is a code-based chip that can be programmed to output different pitches. In this work I explore feelings of confinement and escape in traditional classical performance and composition as a nonbinary person.
I’ll then premiere my friend and colleague Robert Humber’s piece Murmurations which he wrote for me initially in 2020 and we’ve been workshopping ever since. It comprises 6 piano tracks that I recorded myself, and one live piano part. A murmuration is a flock of starlings, and the work is divided into 5 sections, each of which encompass a different form of immensity; just as a massive cloud of starlings do. Video was produced for the music by Luke Welsh who did an amazing job at capturing the essence of each section. The piece also includes elements of variability and improvisation which make it super fun to perform.
Finally, premiere my own work Self-Baptism, which has stewed for quite some time. The piece uses an autobiographical lens to examine blood, blood donation and my awareness of something “wrong”. I grew up with a keen awareness of my socially conservative and catholic surroundings before coming out first as gay and then as nonbinary. The oniony layers of heteronormativity peeled off for the past decade or so and I’ve never been so happy and healthy. In Self-Baptism I use sound to represent my existence through life as a queer child who erased themselves to be seen, a transitional phase of life (where simply gay didn’t make sense), and a new beginning. I reclaim my agency by using the ritual of baptism on myself to symbolise being born anew, washed of the intergenerational teachings that still restrict me. I will use blood to do so; both to honour our bodies, insides, and blood as life itself, as well as a way to say “You don’t want my blood, this life-giving blood? Okay, let me show you what you’re wasting.”
Visit thisispique.com to check out the program, buy a pay-what-you-can ticket, and learn more.
Follow Stephen Eckert on Instagram.
Check out our blog and Instagram reels for more interviews with artists participating in Pique on December 4th, 2021.