Pamela Z

Today, composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z is a cultural fixture of San Francisco, a bustling coastal city in northern California in the United States. In her young adulthood, she was enticed by the vibrant experimental artistic scene there, and so relocated from Colorado after college. Z’s adopted home proved to be a nurturing space for her category-defying musical work, which centers voice and live electronics with performance and multimedia art; even so, she is a cosmopolitan artist, having presented her own work and many collaborations in concert halls, festivals, and art museums around the world, in venues ranging from Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, La Biennale di Venezia, the Interlink Festival in Japan, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Dak’Art in Dakar, Senegal. Since the beginning of her career, Z has consistently drawn the attention of academics and popular critics alike, and her style is at once experimental and uniquely accessible, drawing on the words and sounds of the everyday, and infusing them with her experimental technology and virtuosic musicality. She has earned numerous accolades for her work, including: the Rome Prize Fellowship, the Doris Duke Impact Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Walter Hinrichsen Award in Music.

Z was born in Buffalo, New York in 1956, but spent most of her childhood living in Denver, Colorado. Part of a family of talented amateur musicians, she was composing and performing music from an early age. While a student at the University of Colorado, she studied classical bel canto vocal technique and music education, although her tastes as a listener and performer often fell outside the classical realm in which she was being trained. Even before she graduated, Z was regularly performing at local clubs and coffee houses; her setlist was a mixture of folk and pop covers and her own compositions in a similar style.

Although she briefly taught in public schools following her college graduation, her living was better furnished through her budding performance career. During these post-graduate years, Z became more acquainted with the avant-garde art music scene by hosting a weekly show at a local radio station. Suddenly, a new tension emerged in Z’s musical life, this time between the experimental art music she found herself drawn to as a listener, and the folk-pop style in which she performed. Gradually, her exposure to artists like Edgard Varèse, Pauline Oliveros and Ned Rothenberg led her to think more deeply about her own artistic voice, and how it might fit into this experimental aesthetic.

In the early 1980’s, new technologies were exploding into the world of electronic music. A watershed moment in Z’s early career, and one which formed the basis of much of her compositional style, was her adoption of digital looping. Her discovery of this technique, which she first heard when listening to a solo set by bassist Jaco Pastorius during a concert by jazz fusion band Weather Report, is now somewhat mythologised among her fanbase. The technology of loop pedals, whereby a performer records and plays back that recording in real time, often using the recording as a kind of duet partner or accompaniment, was just starting to emerge more regularly in experimental, jazz and popular music circles. She describes the moment where she recognised her aesthetic alignment with this technology as, “abrupt as the flip of a light switch.” Z went shopping to purchase digital delay hardware for herself the very day after the Weather Report concert, and immediately became immersed in a new kind of musical experimentation: “I never went to bed that night,” she claims. It was amidst this artistic coming-of-age that Z moved to San Francisco, her artistic home to this day. 

New compositions and solo performances using voice and live electronics then began in earnest. Two of her solo albums, “Echolocation” (1988) and “A Delay is Better” (released in 2004, but featuring pieces composed between 1986 and 1997), showcase the many ways that the discovery of live looping manifested in her early compositions. In those years, Z used delay hardware to record and layer her voice for solo performance, although now she primarily uses Max/MSP software on an Apple laptop. These early pieces embraced the abstract; in her solo compositions, Z often prioritises the sonic potentials of language and the melodic nature of speech over literal communication. “I’m trying to get across that unexplainable thing that art can communicate that language can’t.” She often relies on found text, or even just phonemes, to craft a song that invites the listener to derive their own meanings from its abstractions. 

While Z’s voice is central to all her compositions, she has also pioneered the use of several innovative electronic tools that rely heavily on physical gesture. Her work is not, then, simply voice with electronic accompaniment, but a complex meshing of visual and sonic media. “For me, the digital processors were not ‘effects’; rather, they were components of a more complex instrument, which included my voice and my physical presence as well.” She was among the first users of the BodySynth, a wearable, wireless muscle-activated MIDI controller created in the early 1990’s, and has since made regular use of bespoke, gesture-controlled MIDI devices in many of her solo performances. Her performances, then, rely on a complex interaction of movement, voice and technology. She conjures sampled sounds with the flick of her wrist, while simultaneously captivating the audience with a lyrically sung phrase. Her large-scale solo works, such as 2010’s “Baggage Allowance” or 2015’s “Memory Trace,” feature multiple channels of projected video, light cues, choreography and staging. They are mono-operas, requiring all the collaborative efforts of production, stage design and musical performance. 

Although Z tours regularly as solo artist, and has premiered many large-scale solo works, her oeuvre includes a variety of multidisciplinary commissions and collaborations with visual artists, dance companies, classical musicians and video artists. Even as a composer, she is often heavily involved in the premiere of her own commissions, as a performer or by providing pre-recorded tracks. She’s been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theater, film and chamber ensembles such as the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Kronos Quartet. Collaborations have ranged from performances with other prominent performer-composers of experimental vocal works, such as Joan La Barbara, to large-scale pieces like “Carbon Song Cycle,” co-created with video artist Christina McPhee and a chamber orchestra. 

Despite her prolific output, Z’s artistic practice continues to evolve and grow as she actively and consistently engages with new tools, technologies and collaborators. Her technical skill and virtuosity as an artist, performer and composer, however, is the common thread that unites all her work. In her own words, “a good artist knows how to coax great work out of his or her tools of choice, whether by using lack of familiarity with the tool as an advantage or by perfecting virtuosity with the tool through years of diligent practice. After all, whether the instrument is acoustic, electronic, analog, digital, flesh and blood, or some combination, a tool is a tool is a tool.”