A Broadening Conversation with Brett Sroka

Courtesy of artist

Brett Sroka is an American composer, interdisciplinary artist, and curator traversing the spheres of contemporary music, art, and technology. He has released six records of original music, with his electro-acoustic jazz trio, Ergo, and melodronoise duo Cherubim on labels such as Fresh Sound, Zeromoon, and Cuneiform Records. His installations and collaborations have been presented at Roulette in Brooklyn, Alfred University's Institute of Electronic Arts, The New Museum in Lower Manhattan, La Risonanze in Venice, Italy, and the Galway Jazz Festival in Ireland. As Cultural Program Curator at Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York City, he programs aesthetic dialogues between the performing and visual arts for their regular series of exhibition events.

UZOMAH: How is selecting chords and creating musical compositions similar and different from creating visual arts? 

BRETT: I guess broadly I would say they can be very similar or very different depending on the way in which you approach them. Many visual artists have been inspired by music, notably Paul Klee, Sol Lewitt, and Romare Bearden, or made music themselves like Jean Michel Basquiat and Yves Klein, and correlated musical aspects of color, form, and style in their work. Similarly, many composers have made graphic scores, some, like Lucia Dlugoslwewski or Walter Smetnak made sculptures to be played.

A lot of people think about music in synesthetic visual ways, including myself. I’m not a textbook synaesthete at all, but I do often think about music and sound in terms of shapes, and sometimes colors. Certainly, everything has rhythm to it, not only music and art but your own body, nature, and the city. I suppose this is because I come from a musical background, and I wonder if some visual artists think inversely.

U: Is your creative process different when making music than making art? Are there any similarities?

B: Most of my visual work, including video, sculpture, and conceptual works are directly or indirectly related to music and sound. The technical process is of course different in many ways, and because I am not trained as a visual artist I approach the process with a degree of naiveté. Creatively though, I do often think about them in the same ways as structuring a composition or an improvisation, using color, shape, texture, density, simplicity for narrative and/or dramaturgy.

U: How does sound add to the experience and make it different from a traditional art exhibit? How do you use sound to make exhibits a different artistic experience from traditional art exhibits?

B: I’ve shown very little of my visual work thus far, it’s something I’m still developing, so the installations I’ve put on in galleries have been comprised entirely of sound. That in itself makes for a much different experience from most art goers’ expectations. I think sound as an element in a work or an exhibition adds another layer, but usually a secondary one, as typical to the senses. A work of sound on its own can be something quite challenging for many people, without having reference to words or symbols that are familiar to grasp. Indeed, it is a sense that is always filtered and tempered throughout our daily lives, so focusing on it can be a real shift, but sound, and listening, can engender something both mystifying as well as moving.

U: What do you find unique about jazz improvisation that makes it stand out from solos in other musical genres?

B: I don't feel I can speak authoritatively on other genres, but jazz improvisation encompasses and synthesizes so much, musically and extra musically, not the least of which is the musician's own life experience and personality. There are no limits (in my opinion), except perhaps the improvisor's obligation to communicate with their fellow musicians.

U: What preparation would you suggest to a young artist/musician who wants to follow the career path you are on?

B: Joseph Campbell, drawing from eastern philosophies, used to say “follow your bliss.” While that may seem simplistic, it’s never quite that easy. It’s hard to do anything well, and it’s hard to make a living and find the time to make your work, but I think if you keep pointing yourself in the direction of your ‘bliss’ you’ll continue to progress towards it.

Some more specific things which I think have helped me a lot up to this point:

Surround yourself with teachers, colleagues, and friends at a higher level than yourself, who challenge you and inspire you.

I took a professional development workshop with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council years ago where I gained some very useful skills for the practical and professional side of a creative career, including setting goals (a year, five years, ten-year plan, etc.), time management, finance.

After his passing last year, I heard a student of Milford Graves quote some of his advice, which was to learn a skill/trade in which you can earn a living for the times when the gigs don’t come. I was a carpenter for many years and those skills not only sustained me but had many practical applications beyond that.

As I write this I’ve recently learned that the son of a childhood friend of mine has died of cancer. This news is just so heartbreaking and unfathomable. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Do the thing you want to do today.

U: Can you explain your role as Cultural Program Curator at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York City?

B: To their credit, the founders of Levy Gorvy Gallery (now LGDR - Levy Gorvy Dayan Rohaytn) value the context that their exhibitions come from and subsequently contribute to. So much in the history of art has been inspired by music and other mediums. Culture evolves like that in tandem. In that spirit they’ve tasked me with curating concerts and events in conversation with the exhibitions in some way - historically, aesthetically, conceptually.

Some examples include pianist Jason Moran performing his collaborative composition with Adrian Piper; the Burnt Sugar Arkestra riffing on Terry Adkins's work ‘Black Beethoven’; a concert finding a connection between Willem DeKooning and Zao Wou-ki through the unlikely meeting of 20th-century musical geniuses Edgard Varese and Charlie Parker.

U: How do you select certain sounds to go with the visuals that you create or are given?

B: Sounds and visuals work in conversation. Sometimes one leads, and sometimes they have a dialogue and inform one another. Of course, it very much depends on the context. If it’s a work with a narrative, it can be relatively straightforward, though also very delicate (if you’ve ever seen a film scene put together with different music, you know how drastically music can change the character of what’s on-screen). Often I’ve collaborated with filmmakers or video or installation artists, so in that context, what I made musically was directly informed by what they were making or even beholden to it. If it’s something more abstract, the process is more one of divining, often simply by working through it over time.

U: How do you hope people will think differently about how art and music are viewed and heard after seeing one of your exhibits?

B: As the composer Lucia Djugoszewski put it, I hope to “shatter the indifference of hearing.” Hearing is a sense that is filtered biologically and neurally in order to only receive the most relevant information in a constant stream of information. So the aural sense is something that is quite often overlooked in our quotidian experience. Pauline Oliveros differentiates ‘listening’ from ‘hearing’, as the act of “giving attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”

In my work, I hope to refocus the sense of hearing to consider the idea of sound, where it comes from, its physiological purpose, its phenomenological material; and then to reconsider what music is, where it comes from, how its structures have been tempered by history, what is the metaphysical essence of it that moves us so much. I would ideally hope to push beyond that “indifference of hearing” to a transcendent experience through sound.

U: What are you working on post-pandemic?

B:   Most recently, this past November, I was invited to Interface, an arts center in Connemara, Western Ireland, to partake in a two-week residency program called the Woodland Symposium. Five artists of different mediums or focuses were invited to create work responding to the reforestation/rewilding project they are undertaking there. We met with a local ecologist and an archaeologist. We learned quite a lot about the native and non-native ecology and its environmental effects in the local context and a broader one. Though we will return to continue this project as the landscape changes, my initial work there was merely to observe the mindfulness and listening vein of influences like Pauline Oliveros and John Muir. I took daily listening journals and video and audio documentation, which I began transforming into an audio/video journal. However, I expect the project to evolve and change in unforeseen ways.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to answer these questions. It has been personally illuminating to think about many aspects of my practice that I don’t normally commit to words or concretize in thought.

For more information about Brett’s musical and artistic works, please visit his site and give a listen on Soundcloud to his various music projects and follow him on Instagram.