This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.
What’s your name? My name is Marjorie Van Halteren, which I seem to use in its entirety most of the time.
Where are you located? I am based in Lille, France. I was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, went to college in Ann Arbor, then landed in New York City for my first 20 years after college. In 1992 I moved to.
What is your musical activity? I am currently a member of a collective in Lille called Muzzix (muzzix.info). The collective has been around for around 25 years, incorporating 30 improvisational and experimental musicians. I was invited to join about 5 years ago. My so-called musical evolution is very atypical. The others come largely from conservatory backgrounds, free jazz, or DIY branching off from their relationships to their instruments (percussions, saxes, guitars, horns, keyboards, voice, various electronics, etc.). My background was theater, studying performance at NYU, where I also taught, and a radio career in New York City and nationally. I was a successful spoken word producer when I up and moved to France.
I made a lot of radio dramas (commissioned writers), hybrid documentaries, etc. in the US as well as a handful for the BBC. I won a lot of awards, including three Peabodys. I became frustrated with radio, it felt too formatted, a little “on the nose.” I began to create more experimentally, and it became clear that music had more to offer me than literature or playwriting. I was at WNYC in the 80’s during the brief period when the station broadcast only living composers, and I heard and met a number of them, including John Cage, when I made my first audio art piece for WDR Cologne. It was much later that I began to understand what any of them were actually doing.
In the last decade my actual musical life experience has come into play, from my childhood piano lessons, my fantastic choral teacher in junior high, my love of jazz, and my awareness and understanding of the music of my generation. The French love American music, and my singing is actually appreciated. I have always written sound poetry, and although it was hard to leave my accomplishments and reputation behind and start over (the French could have cared less), I have begun to write and perform in French a bit. Who would have thought it?
My current projects include: a composition with and for an excellent pianist who plays prepared piano, with field recording and voice; a solo project with midi controller, electronics and voice that I plan to play in Germany in April called “Can’t Draw, Can’t Paint,” and a folk duo with a great guitarist of songs of the 50’s and 60’s that I have unearthed from my youth, called “Spring Chickens.” The collective tries to do Grand Orchestra projects with everyone once a year, and this year I played voice and electronics with 25 other musicians for a piece by and with Ingrid Laubrouck. Fantastic.
What is one good musical habit? I put myself in challenging situations. For example, a few years ago I did a jazz singing master class which was pretty terrifying, I participated in scat improv evenings, I perform my sound poetry in poetry evenings, and I do the monthly improv session with the collective, with voice and monosynth (which I don’t really play that well — yet). Now I’ve booked my solo. Ah ha. When I first got here decades ago, I had this idea that people should know what I can do, and just ask me to do things. They do not. And when I can I do the Junto! I realize that I am only as good as what I am working on now, and although I am well past the age when many people retire, I need to keep learning. I also learn as many new tools as possible.
What are your online locations? I’m still on Facebook and Instagram, but I just joined Blue Sky at @marjorievh.bsky.social. And mastodon mastodon.social/@vanwindmill. Let’s make that work!! And at electroacousticalpoeticalsociety.com. This summer I updated it to show my whole story so that I no longer feel compelled to constantly explain myself, which is a really bad habit.
What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? I think I enjoyed this one in particular, because it used favorite existing drop-in recordings — I keep absolutely everything — some of them are really old — and it gave me the opportunity to try effects that I was curious about, like granular delays. My Junto projects are a bit simple — I don’t do a lot of rhythm or evolving repetition. I need to try that.
Did all those years working in radio train your ear, given the particular focus on the human voice? Can you say how all that attention to the voice has informed your music-making, not just in terms of singing, but in other ways? During my life as a radio producer in the United States, I became obsessed with natural performances. It might have come from working in these hybrid forms where we incorporated documentary, from exposure to performers like Joe Frank who was all about voice, then during my time on the Radio Stage at WNYC when I had the chance to work with some really great actors — but even today I think of my pursuit to reinvent American radio dramas in the 1980’s as finally quixotic. At that time everyone doing it was still stuck in the 1940’s, and in some ways they still are. Americans didn’t see radio drama performance like film acting, whereas the Brits can move around a studio like a voice film. It’s uncanny.
I am still involved in a kind of radio project which you can see on my site. I work with five other sound poets to compose a project around a theme. They are geographically spread about (Indiana, Northern California, Massachusetts, Italy). Two of them I have never met. They all send me their pieces, I make one, too, then we all hear the result together for the first time. The resonances are fantastic. Everyone brings their A game even though it does not get heard that much — Radiophrenia Glasgow has been broadcasting them up to now in their project. I am really happy to include Gregory Whitehead in this, because he is a seminal practitioner of radiophonic art — and did not get as discouraged by radio as I did. He’s had a whole career. (More https://eaps.mixlr.com.)
So yes, I’m interested in language, and I consider a voice, a field recording, or an instrument a sound like any other. In my “musical” work, I like to use the melodies and rhythms of voice — and have probably overused that feature in Ableton where you can convert a phrase into notes, then edit it. I keep wondering what kind of hip-hoppy feature I am appropriating in a clumsy way. I also like to sing.
In addition to language fluency, were there other ways you had to adjust to cultural life as a participant once you moved to France from the U.S.? Ho, ho — I was so American when I arrived. (I was already 40.) It took me ages to give in to French. Cultural life sucks everywhere right now. France is cutting funding right and left. I think the hardest thing for me was not understanding that without an organizational reference, you don’t get anywhere — plus if people don’t know you or know someone that does, you also can’t do anything. I remember when a guy who ran a big sound festival in Belgium said, “but I don’t know your work.” I had sent it to him more than once. And he seemed mixed up between running the festival, commandeering all the funding and programming himself a lot. That seemed wrong to me. “It’s who you know” has a special meaning here.
Also when I left New York I made the decision to not try to earn my living doing my art. (I taught in upper education here for 25 years.) I wanted to be able to experiment, and I didn’t want to have to fit into funding boxes. I guess that made people think I was some kind of amateur at first.
But all this forced me into the basements, into the avant garde. As soon as people see you around, and you know people they know, everything changes. In my former life, I got some status for the quality of my work. Now it seems like it’s mostly because I’m around. Long live the basements! It’s where people know how to really listen.
