Percussionist Tim Feeney chats about his influences and his vision
It’s rare to encounter a musician with such diverse skills as percussionist Tim Feeney—a challenging composer and improviser, a creator of immersive sound installations, and a trained performer of Ewe dance-drumming from Ghana and Balinese gamelan, to name a few.
He can navigate the serious realms of academia (formerly a professor at Cornell University and currently at the University of Alabama) and classical music (in the Tuscaloosa and Alabama Symphony Orchestras) while also making amusing and light-hearted “Miniature Musical Masterworks” videos using toy percussion instruments.
Feeney answered some questions for The Pulse in advance of his January 22 concert at Wayne-O-Rama, including a solo percussion set and an improvised set with local collaborators.
Before attending college with an aim of being an orchestra musician, as a kid in rural New York state, Feeney played in school bands, and his first trio “played bad jazz and funk covers.”
“We played one wedding reception and a crash-and-burn set for an after-prom party before we got laughed off stage,” said Feeney.
However, Feeney expressed gratitude for his teachers who exposed him as a teenager to performers such as John Coltrane, Frank Zappa and the Meters.
“The sort of pressure these odder musics put on the sort of formality and conformity and technical rigor of that training stuck, and I got into stranger things,” said Feeney.
Prompted by Feeney’s unconventional cover of John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison,” this interviewer asked him about his tastes or influences that might be surprising.
“Lately I’ve been on a kick for English and Irish and Scots singers—Andy Irvine, Dick Gaughan, Anne Briggs, Nic Jones,” said Feeney. “The depth and humor and grain-alcohol bite of these 200-year-old songs is wonderful, and often speaks unexpectedly clearly to the current moment.”
“I’ve talked a lot with my bandmate Sarah Hennies about folk singers...I think there’s a strong connection in spirit between our thread of improvised sound and ‘three-chords-and-the-truth,’” said Feeney. “There’s an honesty, hopefully, in the message any of us try to bring, and an absence of nonsense—like we are making this music for its own sake.”
In his artist statement, Feeney said he “seeks to explore and examine the possibilities inherent in unstable sound and duration,” and he elaborated on the role of the environment and time regarding his own approaches with compositions and performances.
“I’m interested in letting something unfold over time, almost like weather systems: there is an interaction between slow-moving factors that are larger and longer than human scale, but that produce results like rain or heat or hail that become tangible with respect to a given place,” said Feeney. “These are things you can experience when you listen closely to the inside of a sound.”
“In 2007 I moved to Ithaca, New York to take my first teaching job, and I lived in a little farmhouse about twenty minutes outside the city in the middle of nowhere,” said Feeney. “During the last Ice Age, glaciers carved out the Finger Lakes region of the state, resulting in deep gorges and intense topography. Rock and snow and wind were physical facts of existence there—it made the air solid somehow. It felt important and revelatory to slow down in my imagination and in my sounds, in trying to make things that felt real and true to that sort of place.”
One example is Feeney’s ongoing “Resonant Spaces” series of installations that explore the acoustics of locations—indoor or outdoor—using snare drums fitted with transducers, creating irregular droning textures that cause overtones to “collide, reinforce and interfere with one another.”
“I try not to impose a narrative or a goal with my work,” said Feeney. “When I play concerts or improvised shows that work with these materials I’m interested in listeners having singular experiences, rather than anyone taking away a specific bullet point or concept.”
One prominent collaboration for Feeney has been with the acclaimed composer/saxophonist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Anthony Braxton, which grew from a residency at the University of Alabama in 2015.
To Feeney, Braxton’s career is extraordinary, demonstrating that “you can slug it out for fifty years, stay true to your ethic and art against any and all possible obstacles, and still retain wonder and joy and positivity and openness to new people and ideas.”
In line with Feeney’s own philosophy to not impose a narrative, he concisely articulates one thing about Braxton that is noteworthy—the ability to make “things that surprise you, that you love while you cannot understand.”
Photo courtesy Greg Randall