Jeff Abell, performance artist extraordinaire, has a secret to tell.
“Lots of people know me from the many hats I’ve worn in this city over the years — as a performance artist, as a writer and critic, as the guy who coordinated Day Without Art for several years, as an arts activist,” he says, warming up to his confession. “But relatively few people — other than my students at Columbia College — know that music was my first love, and (that) in fact, (my) whole involvement with performance art stemmed from directions that my musical composition took in the late ’70s.”
Abell’s coming out as a musician is a rather big deal. Few people — even those he’s worked with for years — have been aware that Abell holds two degrees in music composition and also studied Balinese and Chinese music at the Center for World Music in Berkeley, Calif.
He’s just recorded “Natural Acts,” a series of improvisations with Barbara Steg, a classically trained musician who has long championed the music of contemporary and women composers. A concert and CD release party will be held Sunday afternoon at Links Hall, long an Abell showcase.
“This CD represents a homecoming for me,” Abell continues, “and a kind of `outing’ of myself as a composer and improvising musician.”
The recording — nine improvised compositions that range from the whimsical to the sublime — features Abell and Steg playing harmonicas, musical saws, sound toys, vacuum cleaner tubes, watches, viola, bells, didgeridoo, bowed piano, kazoo and accordion, among other things.
“It’s funny that, in a city where I’ve never been secretive about my sexual orientation . . . it’s the musical stuff that’s the secret,” says Abell. “It’s especially funny because `musical’ is an old euphemism for being gay, as in the sentence, `Gee, he’s awfully cute . . . do you think he’s musical?’ Some people use `sings in the choir’ as another version of this metaphor.”
Part of the reason Abell left music and began to focus on performance was that he thought performance was a better vehicle to discuss the issues that were suddenly compelling to him, especially sexuality and gender. Performance, with its no-holds-barred, no-rules approach, provided an open intellectual space to investigate matters big and small, personal and universal. For Abell, this seemed worlds away from formal music composition — until he read Susan McClary’s “Feminine Endings,” which gave a feminist slant to musicology, and an anthology called “Queering the Pitch,” which examined how sexuality and gender affected how music is made, heard and received.
“I’m now interested in seeing how many gender-related buttons can be pushed with music,” says Abell. “Even the title of the CD is a takeoff on the idea of gays engaging in `unnatural acts,’ when in point of fact, such things come naturally to me. And the fact that several of the pieces seem to imitate natural sounds — birds, insects, whales — means that we’re acting like nature.”
But how gay — or straight, for that matter — can music really be?
“Well, the text in the piece called `What’s the Rush?’ came out of problems I was having with my boyfriend in the summer of ’94, though Barb’s voice complicates the reading of the text now,” says Abell. “I also think that `Lieb Slide’ is a good example. It’s a takeoff on Fritz Kreisler’s `Liebesleid,’ or `Love’s Sorrows,’ and the working title of our version was `Love’s Joy and Love’s Sorrow Sure Look the Same to Me.’ “
Abell’s emphasis, however, doesn’t include Steg, who founded the Chimera Players, SHE and Mosaic, among other collaborative musical units, and is the widow of composer and teacher Paul Steg.
“There’s still a curious number of stigmas in our culture about what kinds of activities are appropriate for a woman to engage in — especially one entering her eighth decade,” says Abell. “Romping about in a studio with some crazy queer boy is probably not one of them. (But) Barb’s willingness to constantly explore and experiment and try new ideas is a source of constant inspiration.”
It’s also what they’ll do at the Sunday afternoon show. Because the CD is a series of improvised works, the audience won’t hear much of anything resembling those songs. Instead, Abell and Steg will improvise around many of the same themes, exploring new ways of expressing them, and creating new compositions in the process.
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the facts
Sunday, 3 p.m., Jeff Abell and Barbara Steg, Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield Ave. $5. Call 312-344-7270.
