Elizabeth Baker
BY J.A. JONES, Staff Writer
ST. PETERSBURG – This Saturday, July 28, the city will experience a performance so rare that even Berlin’s International Sound Art Festival would be jealous.
Not one, but three experimental world-renown sound artists, composers and mixed media arts performers will share the bill at the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Sonic Abstraction”–an evening of sound conceived to accompany the “Magnetic Fields” exhibition of African-American experimental woman artists (currently on view until Aug. 5 in the Hazel Hough Galleries).
St. Petersburg native Elizabeth A. Baker, youngest on the bill at 29 years old, proposed the idea of a show featuring black female sound artists to curator Katherine Pill after learning about Magnetic Fields.
“I was like, ‘Well if you were representing visual artists, maybe you can do some work on the sonic medium.’ Immediately she [Pill] was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a great idea…I didn’t even know that that was a thing,’” Baker recalled.
Elizabeth Baker is a classically trained Spanish guitarist and concert pianist whose experimental sound work often involves moody soundscapes that combine snatches of historical references, layered voices and distorted instrumentation along with digital technology.
Her awards include a grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance and the City of St. Pete to produce an original sound installation “In Our Own Words: A Sonic Memory Quilt,” presenting the stories of various African Americans in a fresh avant-garde manner.
She has also performed throughout the U.S. and in Canada, and recently released her first solo album worldwide in May to rave reviews.
While she stated that people either “love or hate” her work, she’s OK with that. She wants audiences to be moved to ask questions of themselves while listening to and watching her performances.
“My work is a place of Zen and openness,” said Elizabeth Baker. “It is a safe place for me and others to enter and continually question the very fabric of our universe –not necessarily on the quest for concrete answers, but through deepening our understanding.”
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Pamela Z
Pamela Z, a composer/performer and media artist who works with voice, live electronics, samples and video, acknowledged that Saturday’s event is a novelty.
“It’s rare because until pretty recently, the field has been pretty white male-dominated.”
The San Francisco-based artist remembered often being the only female–and only artist of color– when she attended experimental music festivals.
“I feel like that’s changed a lot in recent years, but it’s still unusual to have three women of color doing experimental music and sound in one event.”
Pamela Z’s work ranges from solo performance, to film scores and creating chamber pieces for other musicians. She’s performed throughout the U.S. and at international festivals including La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), the Interlink Festival (Japan) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater’s 25 Jahre Fest (Germany).
She noted that experimental music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but encouraged open-mindedness.
“The word ‘music’ itself has a lot of emotional baggage for people–so sometimes you’ll hear somebody who’s listening to something that they don’t understand or like say, ‘That’s not music, that’s just noise,’” she shared.
“I know a lot of artists who do not like to call their work music; instead they’ll call it sound art. I think that the reason for that is because people are definitely conditioned to have these very specific expectations about what the word music means,” she averred, adding that to most people includes catchy melodies to sing along with, a rhythm one can dance to or a certain kind of harmonic structure.
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Renee Baker
