Roger Clark Miller on his film “The Davis Square Symphony”

This is Part 2 of an interview with Miller about his BMAC installation Transmuting the Prosaic. You can read Part 1 here.

Roger Clark Miller is a co-founder of the art-punk band Mission of Burma and a member of Alloy Orchestra, a three-person ensemble that Roger Ebert called “the best in the world at accompanying silent films.” Roger Clark Miller: Transmuting the Prosaic is an installation featuring video, sound, and modified vinyl records mounted on the walls of BMAC’s Mary Sommer Room. While Miller’s drawings have been featured in several venues, “Transmuting the Prosaic” marks his first-ever solo museum installation of what he calls “the kind of conceptual art that really gets me going.”

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Still from “The Davis Square Symphony” by Roger Clark Miller

BMAC: This installation includes the first film you’ve made, “The Davis Square Symphony.” What was that process like?

Miller: I always swore that I would never make a film, because they take so long to make. And by god, it took a long time. I think it was 2012, and I was sitting outside in a pub. It was a beautiful May day in Davis Square. I saw a car go by and I went, oh my god, I could turn that into a string chord. And then I just started looking. I had a little camera that had movie capability, and I took a two-minute movie and took it home and realized that I could transform traffic into an orchestral score.

It took a while to really make sense out of it, but the way I set it up, the vehicles are all strings. The different colors of cars determine whether it’s a viola, violin, cello, or bass. I had to make some decisions about pedestrians, so pedestrians who appear to be on the male side are brass, and those who are on the female side are woodwinds. Bicycles are snare drums. Huge buses use timpani. And then each season has a different harmony. The spring season is the most melodious. In the winter, the intervals are more clustered together.

And for example, when a car goes by, I have the scale grid on the side of the screen on my computer, and whatever notes the top of the car and the bottom of the car hit on the grid, those are the two notes you hear. If the car is black, the note is cello; red is string bass, white is violin, gray is viola. If there’s just one car, you just hear this chord go by. If there’s nothing on the screen, it’s dead silence. When you get two cars or three, it starts to get nice, and when there’s a big intersection and the light turns, the sound is very dense. As the cars go by, it gets louder, and then that chord disappears and another one shows up.

The pedestrians are all walking at a walking tempo, which is a quarter note, 120, and they all have two notes, one for the left leg and one for the right leg. The top of the pedestrian and the bottom of the pedestrian choose which notes they play. In the summertime, the females are oboes and the males are trombones, if I’m remembering correctly. If they stay in one place and look in the window, it’s just one note that sits there and hangs until they start walking again.

I edited the film in a way that I thought would be musical. I did jettison one of the movements because it was too anarchistic in an unpleasant fashion. I mean, it’s all anarchistic, but out of chaos, all of a sudden this beautiful chord materializes, and then it just sits and simmers, and then a little French horn solo…

I didn’t make any decisions once I edited the film—I just followed the rules, which is a very John Cage kind of maneuver. If you think, “Well, now I can just do whatever I want,” that’s not right. If you set up the rules and you don't follow the rules, you may as well go back to piano lessons. It was really fun, but again, it was very tedious, and it took a long time.

Deb, who I live with, says I could do this like how Christo wraps buildings in different towns. I could do this anywhere. Someone could say, “Let’s do Hollywood and Vine.” I could assign different meaning to things. Maybe this time I could do the buildings.

I find the end result really beautiful, and it couldn’t have happened any other way. This project is very much like Cage’s star charts, or Ernst’s frottage drawings, or Messiaen using bird calls—I’m just using traffic patterns. To me, none of this is very different. Traffic patterns are part of nature. Humans are, disturbing as it may be, part of nature.

Items related to this exhibit are available in BMAC’s online gift shop.