The Sound Between the Notes • Interview w/ Joanna Brouk
Here's Brouk in 2017, the year she died, on how she started making music: "I found one note that I loved and I played that note again and again and again. And I just listened. Put the sustain pedal down and just listened to the overtones. And I just played that note til I heard the next note, and the next note, and then eventually I would hear a melody. So I taught myself to play, and it wasn't just the notes. It was the space between notes."
Joanna Brouk was a composer who wrote scores with geometric shapes, a poet who became a pioneer of early electronic music. Joanna Brouk's little-known body of work exists at the nexus between ambient, new age, drone, and classical minimalism—stark in its simplicity, lush in its expanse.
I still see shapes when I hear music
It was never my desire to be “out there”
It was just my joy to do it
I hear music still
I write every day.
The writing and the music come from the same place.
There’s a lot of stuff coming through still
Last night I was awoken by Goddess dreams
And that happens a lot.
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