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JOSEPH CLAYTON MILLS «THE WIDOW» |
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Structured around revisitation
and remembrance, The Widow is
distilled from multiple recordings made in and around the Lincoln Tomb,
located in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. The tomb serves as
the final resting place of Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, and three of
their four sons. Crowned with an enormous obelisk and elaborate
statuary groups honoring the four branches of the Union military, the tomb
can be entered through a heavy steel door to the south. Visitors enter into a
rotunda, from which hallways—finished in highly polished and resonant marble,
trimmed with bronze—lead off to the burial chamber. President Lincoln's
remains are interred in a concrete vault ten feet below the marble floor of
the burial chamber and marked with a massive granite cenotaph. Crypts in the
south wall of the burial chamber hold the remains of Mary, Edward, Willie,
and Tad Lincoln. Recordings were made during multiple
visits to the tomb and the surrounding cemetery over the course of several
years. These recordings were played back and rerecorded in situ during later
visits and subsequently woven together with additional recordings made
elsewhere, including in Batavia, Illinois, where Mary Todd Lincoln was
briefly confined to an asylum in the years following her husband's
assassination. In accordance with the score, each of the four tracks explores
a different season of the year, documenting the passage of time and the
changing environment both within the tomb and in the encompassing
landscape—visited by families of tourists in the summer, empty and near
silent in the winter. As a whole, the work attempts to evoke the overlapping
resonances—private, public, and political—that gather around the site. Each copy of The Widow includes a glass-mastered compact disc, a copy of the
text score, and a card containing additional
information on the recording. . 1. Summer
[6:49] 2. Autumn
[9:30] 3. Winter
[10:55] 4. Spring
[14:49] Bell, birdcall, cassette tape, cellular
telephone, coins, contact microphone, doors, field recordings, footfalls, gravel,
hearing aid, portable cassette player, piano, tuning fork, violin, voice,
walking stick, whistle Performed and recorded in and around the
Lincoln Tomb, Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois 2015-2017; Batavia,
Illinois, 2015; and Shiloh, Tennessee, 2016. “Old Rosin the Beau” recorded by Michael
Burns, San Francisco, California, August 2015 This is Suppedaneum
no. 17 |
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Joseph
Clayton Mills Is an artist, composer, and
performer working at the intersection of language, composition, and archival
practice. A former Chicagoan, he remains an active participant in the
improvised and experimental music community there, where his collaborators
have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as
Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar (as Partial), Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, and Olivia Block, among many others. His
recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS,
and Entr’acte. In 2013, in collaboration with Noé Cuéllar, he launched the label Suppedaneum
to focus on releasing scores and their realizations. He has received
commissions and grants from the Chicago Film Archive, Black Cinema House
(Rebuild Foundation), the Illinois Arts Council, the Experimental Sound
Studio, and, in 2016, was artist in residence at the Sonic Arts Research Unit
at Oxford Brookes University, UK. |
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