HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP'S MOMENTS OF LAUGHTER: RECORDING CHILDHOOD, PERFORMING MOTHERHOOD, REFUSING TO SHUT UP, AND LAUGHING.

It has been a learning process for us to enjoy life, to get past that seriousness, and the older we get, the easier we find it to laugh. And we did laugh quite a bit during these interviews, like when Gislean protested our rigid upbringing. "Little German girls are raised to be little good girls. It took a long time to stop being a good girl, and I resent that. One misses a lot in life by being a little good girl. Cinderella was a wimp." With others it was a different kind of laughter, a soft laughter as, together, we tried to fill in the first lines of a song or poem that we half-remembered from childhood....

What serious children we used to be... Raised within the silence, we lived in communities where the adults were always right, where obedience and loyalty were valued above all. (Hegi 1997, 300)

THE THEME OF CHILDHOOD soundmaking has always been an important one for Hildegard Westerkamp, an issue that was evident from her Master's thesis, which uses her own childhood experience of Christmas music as a case study; to her autobiographical Breathing Room III, which includes a song that she used to sing as a child; to an article in Musicworks magazine ("A Child's Ritual," Summer 1987 issue); to many references to the importance and freedom of childhood soundmaking in her oral presentations. She explores this theme most fully in her work for tape and female voice, Moments of Laughter (1988). I think this piece, of all of Westerkamp's work, transgresses the most borders in relation to compositional choices and the thinking behind them, cultural expectations regarding the distinctions between public and private domains, the roles of children and women, and the importance of children's nonverbal communication.

My thinking about the transgressive power of this piece began when I included it in a pilot project about listener responses to Canadian electroacoustic works. Initially, I was surprised by some of the very visceral, and in some cases quite hostile, responses I received in relation to this work. This led me to single it out and continue my analysis, expanding the range of listeners, with the aim of learning more about what was behind these strong reactions.

My own response to the work was at first quite ambivalent. Having undergone a very difficult divorce and custody battle that raised all kinds of questions for me about what standards exist for motherhood and fatherhood in our culture, I am particularly sensitive to stereotyping in musical constructions of motherhood. When I first heard the work, I heard the performer's reading of a poem in the middle of the piece as too sweet. When Westerkamp gave me the score, I realized that this reading tone was not required by the piece, but had been chosen by that particular performer. In addition, I noted that although the piece had been performed only by professional vocalists with ample knowledge of extended vocal techniques (Meg Sheppard, Elise Bedard, and DB Boyko), Westerkamp's instructions in the score made the work accessible to a wider range of performers: for instance, when she asked for a particularly difficult vocal technique, she also included alternatives for less developed performers.

Aware that the work had been performed several times when it was first composed in 1988, but not since, I decided to perform it myself. Even though I had only attended short workshops in extended vocal techniques, I had lots of experience singing with groups and vocalizing with young children. I had enjoyed this interaction with my own children, and continue to enjoy vocal play, particularly with babies and toddlers discovering their vocal range and abilities. I performed the work on radio in Toronto, at a festival of sound art by women in Chicago, and at the Modern Fuel art gallery in Kingston, Ontario. Learning to perform the piece, and practicing it, gave me a much deeper knowledge of it than I would have had otherwise. By the end of the rehearsal period, my response was no longer ambivalent: I am convinced that this work is deeply fascinating and worthy of much more attention than it has received so far.

In this article, I discuss my changing relationship to Moments of Laughter, using several methods of analysis simultaneously: a discussion of the background and context of the piece in terms of feminist psychoanalytic and aesthetic writings; an analysis of the sounds of the piece, inspired by James Tenney's gestalt approach as elaborated in his book Meta+Hodos (1992) as well as by my understanding of the piece as I rehearsed to perform it; and a discussion of listener responses to this piece, based on sessions conducted with high-school and university students as well as at concerts where I performed the work.