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Artists to personify books with music by singing excerpts of books at the Hammer Museum’s “Sing Your Favorite Book” project

Los Angeles musician Jessica Basta sings excerpts of “Lolita” for the Hammer Museum’s “Sing Your Favorite Books” series. The series was created in conjunction with the “Ed Ruscha: On the Road” exhibition.

“Sing Your Favorite Book”
Aug. 4, 6, 11, 19, Oct. 1
Hammer Museum, FREE

By Shannon Cosgrove

Aug. 1, 2011 1:06 a.m.

Many people have read Karl Marx’s “Capital” ““ but few, if any, have heard it sung.

Visitors to the Hammer Museum will be able to hear this and other books translated into song at the museum’s “Sing Your Favorite Book” project this month.

The series was created in conjunction with the exhibition “Ed Ruscha: On the Road,” which features Ruscha’s paintings and drawings inspired by selected text from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

Jeremy Drake, who will be singing passages from “Capital,” cited parallel counter-cultural philosophies that rejected materialism in both Marx and Kerouac, who was part of the Beat movement.

“Marx’s analysis is supposed to empower the working class, so singing “˜Capital’ is like really old-fashioned folk music,” Drake said.

Drake said the different technical, philosophical and even playful tones in Marx’s work lend themselves well to musical manifestation.

“This is an interesting opportunity to enter into a critical discourse about capitalism and the massive, unequal redistribution of wealth in a novel medium,” Drake said.

Though he has never sung a book before, Drake said his degree in guitar performance from USC and self-training have prepared him for this event, which will be mainly improvised.

“Because of the different senses of timing, form and space in improvisation, it can be a lot like a story,” Drake said.

Jessica Catron, resident musician and sound curator for the Hammer this summer, said she will also be performing a spontaneous rendition of her chosen book, Wassily Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” which is more directly related to the setting of a museum.

“The feeling of the environment in the moment affects my performance: whether I sing at the top of my lungs or in a whisper,” Catron said. “When performing at a museum, you have to think of yourself as another picture on the wall who happens to be making sound rather than putting on your performance pose.”

Catron said that while she is sound-oriented and not always buried in books, she welcomes this opportunity to dive deeper into literature by engaging it with both sides of her brain.

Catron said the transformative experience of putting a book to music might be like her performance in the Insect Ensemble, in which she made music with objects like sticks, combs and marbles in the courtyard.

Hammer Curatorial Associate Elizabeth Cline, who worked on “Sing Your Favorite Book” with Catron, said that the Hammer’s Public Engagement program uses the museum as a way to experiment with space and sound.

“We wanted to utilize the acoustics of the hollow pathways and the Hammer’s specific architecture to fill it with sound,” Cline said. “You can hear something being played on the opposite end of the terrace in the lobby and bookstore. As sound carries, it opens up the imagination and curiosity.”

In addition to the architecture, Cline said the multimedia combination of art, literature and music also stimulates audience’s senses in new ways.

“When you look at art while listening to music, you activate a different sense and may look at it from another direction. You might linger a little longer at it ““ the feeling of the music can transform a painting you’ve seen a million times.”

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Shannon Cosgrove
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