Lynn Book has presented hybrid compositions for voice, body, electronics and objects since 1991 pushing the liminal space between music and performance. Some of her earlier performance theater work examined the ways in which the beliefs and behaviors of a dominant social system are inscribed in pop culture - more specifically in the pop song. It is this interest in pop song (including songs from 'folk' cultures) and her introduction

"Book's highly disciplined "music" suggests a poignant struggle to communicate from a position of isolation, by turns inchoate and eloquent, joyful and sad. Even while... she moves out to explore the subtleties of this relatively uncharted, yet oddly familiar, sonic terrain, Book... is also intent on looking inward at an especially private and sexual part of the body. This is dense, multilayered stuff hitting at many issues at once - and yet somehow it all sort of swings."  -Renaldo Migaldi, "Critic's Choice", Chicago Reader

to DaDa text works from the 20's and 30's that sparked the later concentration on discreet vocal/musical material. From a cacaphonic chorus of folk and children's songs (all different, all sung simultaneously by eight performers in "Because It's Round?" 1986) to recent investigations into the seductive power of the 'romantic' song (Peggy Lee's "Fever" ciphered in "Eelectric Lady" from "Gorgeous Fever" -- see video page) and "E Se / Felicita" (context and audio excerpt this page), Book finds the voice a portal to critical examination of culture and the liberative potential of becoming.

Book's current work explores notions of vocal migration, rupture and harmonic inversions through extended voice and text compositions and improvisations that revisit and subvert the impossible beauty of a Faure or Delibes, and pay homage to ecstatic images from Indian cosmology and the first photographic experiments by Daquerre. A CD of new material is being developed now with an early 2002 release slated.
 
 
 

Lynn Book in "Mercuria" photo: Sharon Couzin

E Se, Felicita (And If, Happiness) (2000) This composition was commissioned by the Italian label, Snowdonia in 2000 for a compilation CD featuring interpretations of songs sung by two of the most famous Italian singers from the 1960s and 70s, and the song E Se Domani, sung by Mina, was selected for me. I created a five minute composition that deconstructs the vessel of sound that music provides for any given lyric. I also presented a perspective of 'possible author' in spoken text that ventures in and out of the continually- disrupted, out-of-time 'music.' I later performed this as a live structured improvisation wih three musician/performers at the Emoson Festival in Bourges, France. Here I pillaged some lyrics from the original song and reconstituted them in the resulting collagist piece.  Notes from the working process: It occurs to me to ponder this 'lost happiness' and the permeation of 'happiness' in every pop song that has ever been written. The inscription of this idealized state of happiness/felicita -- the endless summer, the unsustainable moment, (or the lack thereof) -- underwrites most songs from pop to opera. This surplus of absence seeps into every lyric, burns into every ear, producing an unshakable yearning that stretches impossibly across an ever-yawning pit. And of course, the yearning (which we clamor for) barely conceals a jittery, itchy undercover of anxiety - the anxiety that seeks narcissistically produced happiness.

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