Keith Piper’s Viva Voce film is installed in the old members’ dining room, Tate Britain. In Viva Voce, Keith Piper stages an imagined conversation between artist Rex Whistler and a fictional academic, Professor Shepherd, who asks Whistler about his 1927 mural The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, challenging him on its racist narrative and imagery.
I was asked by Keith to provide some musical material for the film, Viva Voce. He and I then shared ideas about the music of the 1920s that could have been heard by the frequenters of the Gargoyle Club of which Rex Whistler was a member. The heyday of the US ragtime craze had passed by this time but left influences in the music of a number of touring bands one of which was the Plantation orchestra with American jazz singer and dancer, Florence Mills whose song I’m a Little Blackbird, Looking for a Bluebird was a hit, and has since been seen as a plea for racial equality.
A ragtime rhythm is suggested in the song which is upbeat in tempo and delivery. The voice seemed to represent for me the spirit of the centrally wronged figure in Rex Whistler’s contentious mural, the black woman forced to flee and depicted ignominiously naked, up a tree. It seemed that the extract chosen from the Little Blackbird song could perhaps carry some respect for this figure and act as a kind of leitmotif for her, this wronged, un-named figure, throughout the film.
The melody is consequently referenced throughout, played on the five-string electric violin, the tune changed from the major to the minor key, lowered by an octave and slowed right down, the line played alternately between pizzicato and being bowed. The session was recorded by Lukasz Soltysiak at Middlesex University and sound designed by Gary Stewart.