“Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it,” the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have told a cellist during a rehearsal. The quip is still played for laughs, dredged up by the likes of Classic FM (“The best conductor insults”) and, apparently, Sir Georg Solti, who repeated it during a Chicago Symphony Orchestra rehearsal in 1995. Dutch cellist Katinka Kleijn had just joined the orchestra and was, at the time, the only woman in its cello section. (She is now one of two.)
Thirty years later, the barb inspired “Scratching,” an hour-long “action and sound work” created by Kleijn and co-presented by EXPO Chicago and the Chicago Athletic Association, a onetime gentlemen’s club whose former pool—reconfigured as an event space—hosted the performance. Dressed in stilettos and a flesh-toned, sequined bodysuit, Kleijn performed using the cello, her body, and two HoneyTone mini amps; the sounds were amplified and transformed by a four-channel speaker system designed by Alex Inglizian of Experimental Sound Studio, a production and preservation hub for Chicago’s creative music community. Both Kleijn’s cello and her body were outfitted with two contact mics each—one fixed externally (on the bridge of her cello and between her legs), and one internally (inside the cello and inside her vagina or, as Kleijn puts it, “inside the body”). While Klaus Mäkelä, the Chicago Symphony’s music director designate, rehearsed with the CSO two blocks away, Kleijn explored the many colors of scratching: rubbing the sequins of her body suit, scraping her endpin against tile, and scrubbing her bow on the strings.
After the performance, VAN contributors Hannah Edgar and Julia Conrad headed upstairs to the Chicago Athletic Association’s Cherry Circle Room (ahem) to debrief over drinks.
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