Nostalgia

Just back from Boston, where I started work on a project with Elizebeth Randall, a dance on love and loneliness, a scrap of music started while the snow drifted from the trees outside my nephew Ben's apartment in Somerville.  It's a treat to work with someone who is such a talented dancer, open to everything, who perceives the beauty in a shadow, a change of the light.


We're keeping a blog of our work plus bits and pieces as they develop.

per Margherita Eugenia

Notes for a variation on Torna a Surriento:

Although my father was capable of some puccaloistic whistling, most of my musical talent came through my mother, who played in a piano-laden ersatz orchestra in her youth, a not uncommon animal in those areas bereft of a bona fide heterogeneous ensemble, performing multi-piano arrangements of familiar melodies, such as her favorite, my countryman Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, whose inexorably testosteronic accelerando rubbed her and her fellow pianistes to the brink of ecstasy. But the LP most in rotation in my boyhood home featured the trademark cascading strings of the Mantovani arrangements of Italian melodies, including Come Back to Sorrento, a calorie-lacking fluffball that I still cannot hear without bawling like a little baby, and a few flavonoids of which I have stolen for my variation here for an ensemble sadly lacking the three thousand strings necessary.

I happened across Scott D. Strader's blog recently and, reading his comment on Prokofievization, realized that I often do a bit of the same, but especially so in this number, since it started with someone else's tune and harmonies, and I needed to make it my own. The process looked something like this:

1. scribbling the original tune into the score - may as well keep the original key;

2. sketching an orchestration of the tune and the chords, by which I more properly mean arranging, where some notes and rhythms exist and one has to scatter them about, but stealing a few ideas as mentioned above from the Mantovani, e.g., the tremoloed strings and guitar;

3. do more of the actual orchestration, i.e., the orchestra-as-an-instrument parts. Who was it that said, when looking at a workmanlike orchestral arrangement of a piece for piano, that it was now time to orchestrate the pedal? So, adding the pedal effects and swirls and swells, an iterative process;

4. at the same time as (3), listening to every YouTubed version of Return to Sorrento and Torna a Surriento and realizing that every single singer who sang the original in all its golden age of opera glory performed the rubati and ritenuti in exactly the same way, so deciding to notate that into the score, requiring some stretching of time signatures here and there;

5. at the same time as (3) and (4), getting bored with the whole thing and remembering the rhythmically unpinned viola in Berio's setting of Black is the colour..., and deciding to write some other, more typical music to start it and to interrupt it and shoehorning that into it, streamlining the harmonies to make them a little less ploddingly obvious, adding some seasoning of the carousel;

6. sleeping on it, revising, repeating;

For 90 seconds of music, it was more difficult than usual, probably because I was starting with something that didn't sound much like me, and, even though constraints can sometimes be liberating, feeling bowed by all the baggage carried by this particular melody. But, even when writing things of my own from scratch, it is rare that I trust the first draft. There is always a process that follows of both honing and embellishing, of adding to and stripping away.

Text setting

Clark Suprynowicz and I were talking opera libretti recently at a fundraiser for the John Duykers and Miguel Frasconi work-in-progress, Hand to Mouth: The Journey of the Seed from Soil to Plate, a opera-ette which draws on John's other career as organic farmer and nearly-organic beekeeper, and the fact of our divergent approaches made got me to thinking. I'm a prose man, and believe in the sanctity of the language, which is typically my entrée into a text-based piece. To reiterate, language is the key to an opera composition, the way in, containing something that strikes me as being musical, in whatever sense one takes that. I've been considering Queer again lately, as we are planning to remount that in the Spring of 2011 as the 10th anniversary of the premiere and the 25th anniversary of the book's publication. Burroughs's writing is very musical, its flow and lilt and repetitions and its connection straight to the gut, not poetic in the old-fashioned sense of meter and foot, but its music inspired my own. In comparison, Clark's cavalier attitude to what his librettists have written down, and the fact that he bends their words to fit his tunes, seem quite sinful. For me, tunes and music spring from the words, although I hope that the music isn't simply painting colors over the words and that the music that comes from this interaction can stand on its own. I remember being asked once by a singer during the development of an early piece which sections were recit and aria and I realized it hadn't even crossed my mind. I was presenting the text, and I suppose some sections fit one label or the other, that some were internal monologue, outside of the action, and some were more action oriented, but I didn't stop somewhere along the way to sing a song, a song with a melody upon which the words were hung.

When I first studied composition, way back when, the very first exercise we did was to set a text and I've realized this may have shaped my approach early on. We each chose a poem and analyzed it, reciting it several times, writing down the rhythmic result in sprechstimme form, trying to capture the prosody and also the pitch contour of our recitation. The teacher's idea was that this was necessary to understand simply where the musical stresses should fall, and what the melodic pitch contour should be to properly capture the sound of the poem. But I realized in a moment of youthful revelation that this scribbled down proto-setting was the nut of the piece to come, that I could distort this pitch function of time in a number of ways, stretching it and shrinking it uniformly or non-uniformly in either axis, translating it, a whole series of affine and even nonlinear transformations, but that this would really be the piece, what the audience heard, my translation of the poem to sound.

When a composer sets text, the composer is the actor, is the reciter, and no matter who performs the piece thereafter, even though they may emote and express, they are fundamentally locked into the actor-performance of the composer herself. The composer locks down the basic timing and puts the reaction of one actor to the other into the mouth of each. The funny thing is, very few composers are taught acting or reciting or anything remotely theatrical or dramatic. We could ask, why should their conception of the text become the one true path through it?

I noticed something in my first piece which had real actors, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. Professional actors, who had no problem memorizing long monologues from traditional plays, were suddenly thrown off balance when they had to say their piece over a fixed length of time - to fit with some music and arrive at some dramatic point at the right moment. They stumbled and forget their lines and couldn't remember their stage business or act natural. Their whole acting lives had been all about the fluidity of time and expression and reacting to the moment, reacting to other actors, working in a development process, sometimes over a long time, sometimes with a director, to figure out their best pacing and timing and then to improvise some of those things further during performance, like real life. But the simple request to fit that expression into a certain stretch of time, combined with fighting against the rhythms of the music behind them, broke them down. So what to say about opera singers for whom almost all of these actor-ly expectations are subverted? Does this explain why opera in its heyday, pre subtitles, fascinated by its golden age, almost ignored the text completely, concentrating on the beautiful line, the voice, all the actors standing on the edge of the stage singing to the audience and ignoring each other, the audience swooning and crying, only knowing what is going on from the fact that they had seen the piece over and over and over and had the story synopsis in their program?

I tried to do something different in Mordake to alleviate this, playing with a technological solution, where John could sing a line freely - where he could act - and I would have fiddle with the knobs of the accompaniment, lengthening and shortening the music underneath to fit. I failed to achieve what I wanted, partially because I'm into dominance and control, but also because I think it would have required some more radical changes to my own compositional process. The fragment at the top of this post is typical for me, meters changing to fit the textual rhythm, and that has defined so much of who I am compositionally. I was recently reading an article by Kirke Mechem on choral setting, which is a different animal than opera, as the audience's understanding of the words being not so critical. In this piece, he talks about the importance of musical form, and once I got past my usual reaction in hearing the phrase "musical form," which is to release the safety on my Browning, I realized that I agreed with him, text setting shouldn't be, as he says, the musical equivalent of painting by numbers, but I also realized that all the text setting I have done has changed my notion of musical form. My later instrumental works sound to me like little operas, not that they actually have an underlying story, say Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, but they seem dramatic, wandering along and telling a tale, the music unfolding from what has come before, with asides and interjections, and me making the same kind of dramatic decisions: should there be a climax here, time for the intermission, or for the audience to relax and whisper and kiss their neighbor, am I going to go for the slam bang ending or the whimper, is it time for love interest to arrive? But Kirke did walk out in the middle of my opera Sub Pontio Pilato, brought there by his son and my good friend Ed, whose birthday was yesterday, and with whom I made out briefly for the amusement of his girlfriend and other guests on Sunday, me always willing to give a hand up to my friends, so maybe he didn't agree with my approach and thought my form was lacking, and who can see into the heart of another?

an UPDATE from Ed:

Just for the record, I believe (and I *was* sitting there with him) that he 'walked out', ahem, during intermission, because his back was hurting him. If you want to, ahem, add a little footnote to your post, detailing the dry boring reality (in contrast to the dramatic characterization!) -- feel free :)

OK, well, that is much drier and less colorful so not as interesting, but is the truth.

Requiring higher education to comprehend

I recently received a request for submissions for a contemporary music composition concert, which happens to be taking place in the city of Eagle Rock, California, where I once studied the craft. In it was this light bit of manifesto:

The theme of this concert is music, literature, and art that evoke in the listener some aspect of the human emotional experience (i.e., love/pain/sorrow/fear/madness/ laughter/faith/hope/etc.). The key is that this music needs to be emotionally expressive, relatable, and readily accessible to the average listener (this of course doesn’t mean that the music necessarily needs to be programmatic). Avant-garde, atonal, experimental music, or compositions that require higher education to comprehend it are simply not appropriate for the theme of this concert.

I was incensed of course, on finding myself transported to a mirror world where not only left was right but up was down, where all that I knew and loved and up with which I grew was no longer true or meet or right or salutary and that my previous notion, that the music I had listened to from my childhood and thought relatable, expressive and more was actually not so. I trashed the email in a huff, but then, later, I untrashed it, and read and read and dissected it, dwelling on it, working myself into a fit. I googled the composers, the venue, every major noun in it, and brought forth the firehose of data from the net, fascinated.

Was anything learned? Probably nothing of value, but I did stop at some intriguing waypoints. One of the composers had a link to bring up a UI where one could listen to his works, which were divided into categories and from there, subcategories, e.g.: Action/Adventure, Asian, Atmospheric, Ballet, Comedy, ... through the alphabet to Whimsical. In the Asian category: Into the Mists of Asia, where we find the subdescription: From the mists of Asian forest, a hero appears to reunite the Shaolin warriors. In another: Frost Fills the Enchanted Woods, where: Entering an enchanted grove, Aerlyn looks around at the frost that is draped across the wood. Listening, I found a sure hand at the synthesized orchestra tiller, and music which did indeed well match the bromidic descriptions, reminding me of when, working on a Henry Rosenthal production, he showed me the batch of nearly identical cassettes which had arrived through the post after the production was announced in Variety or the Hollywood Reporter or wherever, each bearing on the small label the composer's name and a listing of the contents: (1) action (2) romance (3) ...

to those who are of god's chosen

I've embarked on a new opera project, even though I was feeling like I was a bit fagged out after the difficulties of the last, but once again hath the candle singd the moath, and I find myself in familiar territory, exploring the viscous friction of sense and nonsense at the boundaries of religion. It all started when I ventured to see a bit of a new Deborah Slater piece at the Traveling Jewish Theater and watched some of my most favorite dancers move gorgeously across the stage. Later, outside, Lynne and Deborah and I were talking, the Medea story came up and Lynne asked if we remembered how, a few years back, a woman threw her three children in the bay. Of course we did and, for memory's sake, here is the news item:

A 23-year-old woman who said she was hearing voices stripped her three small children naked Wednesday and threw them off a San Francisco fishing pier into the bay, authorities said. - San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2005

In fact, I remembered it very well, because Lynne and I happened across the makeshift memorial a few days after it occurred: flowers, stuffed animals, notes, photos, candles; all left in a vain attempt to palliate the horror of the crime. The story rolled around in my head for many days after that discussion, and I ended up buying a small notebook and some pens on a visit to Lynne's family

and I started writing something and had some very clear images of the look of it and that my dancer friends would be acting out the parts, maybe singers off stage, don't know, but when I started writing, I immediately mixed together the mother's thoughts and mine so that, in the end, there is definitely more of me than of her in it, but I started from the point that God and the mother really were talking and, like Abraham and Isaac, God really did tell her to kill her children, and that there is something compelling about her certainty, a religious certainty that many people crave. The text consists mostly of her internal monologue, but God speaks, and the children appear as well. She speaks like me, the version of me that graces many of these blog entries: a bit supercilious, a few too many five dollar words, but of course it really is me, my religious upbringing (although the mother was quite religious herself), my fascination with the non-rational, the ecstatic, my fear of insanity, my fear of a lack of ability to discern what is real and what is not.

Sweet Encumbrance

Continuing with the treacly investigation of romance and its elations, its euphoric pleasures, begun with Two Orchestral Waltzes for Lynne, the current work, Sweet Encumbrance, makes manifest, in sound, the joyous warmth, the sweet iron fetters and the small panics which flow from hogtying oneself together with one's chosen helpmeet and companion. In this piece, it is demonstrated in some detail how much one can gain in life simply by giving up one's philandering, and, while still given license to strut and flirt and still authorized to play the dandy, one must now, for the foreseeable future, festoon one's costume with the leash and collar and electronic ankle bracelet, sometimes visible but most often invisible, like the line that one might be enticed to cross save for the memories of the previous attempts' resultant truncheoning and electric shocks. But let us not dwell on such past pains, but please to look to that bright future world illumined by the brightest and whitest of most pure light where, joined in glory and set upon one's throne just to the right of the Empress, in a new Sagrada Familia, happily holding court, happily holding the hand of the one most beloved.

Missa fictus Missa ficta

Jay Cloidt and I have been editing together the two nights' recordings of the Missa. It's tremendously thrilling to create such a fiction, something that never was, weaving the different performances, different microphones, different audiences together into one. We've added a few synthetic overlays where a few notes were missing, even recreating one whole section of the postlude. We've discovered once again the joy of reverb in absolving the recording of a great many sins confessed to us under the harsh scrutiny of his monitors, reverb that Jay had foresworn ever since hearing Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

One interesting set of audio interjections comes from a large belled clock in the sanctuary, which goes off from time to time during the recording, especially during the Sanctus, a highly synchronistic event, as the use of bells during the Sanctus goes back almost a millenium. Bells and the Bible go hand-in-hand, like love and glove, and the union produces such poetic gems as those found in Exodus 28:

And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:

A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about.

And it shall be upon Aaron to minister: and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD, and when he cometh out, that he die not.

The youth

from Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, late '57:

I have all around me the spectacle of composers who, after their generation has had its decade of influence and fashion, seal themselves off from further development and from the next generation. Of course, it requires greater effort to learn from one's juniors, and their manners are not invariably good. ... The very people who have done the breaking through are themselves often the first to try to put a scab on their achievement. What fear tells them to cry halt? What security do they seek, and how can it be secure if it is limited? How can they forget that they once fought against what they have become?

I have to admit that it is v. difficult for me to learn from my juniors. My typical reaction to the artistic successes of freshly minted composers is envy and jealousy tempered only by rage, depression and frustration, and although, in my case, I really have very little that I am fighting for, except my own self-aggrandizement, as I am an eclectic and polyamorous lover of styles and ideas and threads of artistic development, it's hard for me to get past the pettiness that so pervades my soul. But in deference to the idol of my youth, I resolve to try.

And I was intrigued to recently discover the brief affair between the young Igor and Coco Chanel, now a motion picture, see above.

Duncan Wold's score for In Residence

My son, showing that he is a child of the same Adam, has constructed a heavenly collection of musical fragments, a Soundscape for a Nonexistent Motion Picture, but which, by its synopsis, makes one strongly wish for its actual production:

This haunting film is not for the faint of heart — or the claustrophobic. We are presented with Jane, an artist who begins a residency at a strange home filled with junk. Her goal is to fashion the detritus into a piece of artwork speaking to the theme of recycling and ‘green’ building practices. But things get twisted when the junk compels her to construct an elaborate and, at times, beautiful trap for herself, which she slowly begins to realize is locking her in, pressing her downward into infinite, interlocking chambers. Even as she becomes more entangled in the web of the house, it begins to provide her with sustenance necessary to continue her work.

— Dina Bloomberg, Down the Rabbit Hole Zine

Tuning in the radio station here, at about eleven and half megaHertz on the dial, we are transported into Jane's world, fading into an imagined natural ambiance, shifting, drawing us into a composition where an ebowed guitar caresses a set of melancholy changes. Of course I'm proud of him, and I tear up a bit when I think of my polymath heir, creator of so many beautiful things, another being Shit Show V, soon to be revealed.

Teddy

I have been fortunate enough in my career to have a few people get very excited about a few works of mine, an heartwarming occurrence. Although, two people that I respect awfully have chosen atypical and offhand works of mine from the mid 80s as their favorites. One was a theatrical work based on a game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos during the Joe Montana glory years, written with Everett Shock, and featuring a recitation of a declaration, aided by an overheard projector on which the declaimer laid out an Xs and Os play-by-play, in the style of the Declaration of Independence (a memory fitting this day of all days), but commencing with the line "when, in the course of a football game, it becomes necessary for one team" and so on.

But the other venture, which has been favorited by more than one of my erstwhile fans, was a small piece done in a small venue in Oakland, where I performed a duet with a Teddy Ruxpin® which centered on themes of objectophilia and robot sex in the modern world. In fact, the exact animatronic doll sitting on my desk today in the photo above being prepared for a comeback tour of sorts next month. You can see the blue pulse timing modulation box I built back in my 'maker' days to control its servos and to allow me to make my own, more sophisticated control tapes. My son, who was about 2 at the time, loved it, although it's possible that some of the themes may have gone over his head. He giggled all through the preceding performance that evening, in which a topless and somewhat buxom young butoh dancer, powdered in white, completed, in about ten minutes, a short walk down an incline.

Since the script was quite short, I reproduce it here for your amusement. As my wife was the voice actor for the bear, I performed a small transgendering of Teddy to Trary, and put a bit of ribbon in his hair.

TRARY(Sings) Come dream with me tonight. (Speaks) Hi, my name is Trary Razkovky. Can you and I be friends? I really enjoy talking to people. In fact, some people have told me I have a problem that way, but I don't count these people among my friends. And I do have many many friends.
I would very much like you to meet one of my very good friends. Say hello to everyone, Erling.

ERLINGHello.

TRARYWhat do you have there with you, Erling?

ERLINGIt's an accordion, Trary.

TRARYIt is a very fine looking instrument, Erling. (Pauses) Can you come a little closer, my friend?

ERLINGSure. (moves closer)

TRARY(After a while) I'd like to talk to you about something, Erling, if that's all right.

ERLINGFine.

TRARYI read a story in the newspaper.

ERLINGWhat was it about?

TRARYA very fine car dealership in St. Louis, Missouri had a contest. The dealership was to give to the winner a brand new Toyota. The single rule of this contest and the objective of those who participated was to kiss the car longer than anyone else. Of course, I was concerned for these people. How would they go to the bathroom? How would they eat or drink? People need companionship too, but I guess they were kissing the car, after all. Luckily, the very wise people at the car dealership had thought of this. They gave each person a few minutes off every hour to take care of the things that they had to.

ERLINGSo who won, Trary?

TRARYA woman won. Her name was Ellen J. Twaddle. She won by kissing the car for 110 hours, longer than anyone else who tried.

ERLINGThat's an amazing story, Trary.

Um, why did you bring it up?

TRARYWell, I began to wonder. How does she feel about the car she has won by kissing it for so long?

ERLINGI don't know.

TRARYWell, wouldn't she be more attracted to it?

ERLINGMaybe.

TRARYMaybe it would seem a little more animate? Wouldn't there be, well, a cognitive dissonance in kissing something for so long that one saw as inanimate?

ERLINGYes, I think you're right, Trary. If she had seen it as inanimate, she would be repulsed, not attracted.

TRARYThat's right, Erling. But she stayed. She even lost her job. Her company was upset with her when they found out why she had been calling in sick for five days.

ERLINGThat's quite a sacrifice.
(pause)

TRARYWould you kiss me, Erling?

ERLINGSure. (Erling kisses Trary for a long time)

TRARY(mumbling through the kiss) I hope you see me in a new light.

ERLING(drawing back) What was that?

TRARYI said, "That was nice."

I think I am in the mood to sing a song for all the people here. Could you accompany me on the accordion, Erling?

ERLINGSure. (Trary and Erling perform The Second Prayer from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil.)

Denisova-Kornienko Duo

I met Elena and Alexei when they performed in the 2001 Austrian production of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, Alexei on the podium and Elena covering the viola, my favorite bit of which is the brief and registrally displaced but oh so beautiful solo here:

I had promised them a piece in their roles as the members of a violin-piano duo, and this for many years, giving them only one small number that was a simply bit of program music, an old man dies, a vision of my own death as an old man, gasping for breath but all the while still dreaming of a breast, the iconic breast of a woman. However, I finally forced myself to sit down and write something, not asking them if they still cared or wanted the heavy responsibility of another piece dedicated to them, this one not quite so simple. This spicy opus, The Secret of Success, a reference to a blog entry here by the same name, is subtitled a chaconne, because it is, at least a bit, and in the modern meaning as a set of variations on a repeating harmonic progression, in this case a series of chords rooted on Bb, a combinatorial set that treads between major and minor, similar to those I have used before: once in The Bed You Sleep In and once in the Cotter episode in Queer. The piano plays incessantly, often verbosely, and typically the harmonic changes happen right on the measure line, one per measure, violin and piano almost always changing together, something that Kyle Gann would probably find crazy making. From a recent post of his that was on my mind while I was scribbling:

When I see a kid composing in units of measure, measure, measure, with a new impetus, new phrase, new harmony on every downbeat, I start in with my wheedling tone (every experienced composition student will recognize the sound): "How about a triple upbeat to start that melody off a little more gracefully?" "How about we vary the harmonic rhythm here?" "You think the audience can't hear where your bar-lines are if you don't accent every one?"

Luckily we live in an artistic world where there is no wrong or right, where we each do what we like, even though it might drive our colleagues to distraction. The whole score is on my website, but here's a bit of it:

Intuitionism

Bath-time this morning was facilitated by an iPhone 3G® in a Ziploc® bag - thanks to my friend Nicole for enlightening me of this wonderful invention - and a circuitous path through those intoxicating days early in the last century where Hilbert and Brouwer led the fight over the non-finitary law of the excluded middle (see photo) and other such issues.

As a boy, I was so interested in all of this. The issues seemed so important and, later, as I became a composer, I faced them again, feeling a pressure from above to maintain an intellectually rigorous Germanic methodology in all my musical decision making, a certain belief promulgated by my betters that there was a notion of music that existed in a Platonist reality where deep truths live separate from the dirty business of breath and bows and spit and turntables and stylish hairdos, and that compositional progress was in the furtherance of passage toward this Utopian Ideal.

But I was, deep down, more tolerant, and shall we say more Dutch, and believed that music really was purely an act committed by people for their own amusement, that it existed in this world and not the other, and that it had benefits beyond an explication of existence, namely (0) transcendental beauty here on earth (1) encouraging teen pregnancy through passionate embrace (2) a devil-may-care use of drugs (3) hearing impairment in the elderly (4) separation of fools from their money (5) penis casting (6) nonpareil spirituality and mystical joy (7) creative jouissance (8) and so on, and that music was concerned with the grit and chaos and noise of sound, and that it was, at its core, an inexplicable and impenetrable pursuit, evading all attempts to capture it, drop it in the killing jar, and to pin its beautiful wings to the setting board. The theories I learned as a student did not attempt to cover anything except what I found to be the most superficial aspects of music, the voices and pitches and rhythms, and I was left to find the rest myself.

One of the reasons I started writing - English rather than notes - was to try to explain what I did day-by-day during the compositional process, thinking that in so doing I might capture the uncapturable. But I've failed every time that I have tried. I can't really say easily what I do. There is no process to speak of, and the moments spent in the compositional state sneak by unseen to end up in a piece that I no longer feel my own.

Score Directions

The score is done, the parts have been shipped away once again, and, while usually one for absolute control - a chimera at best - I have abrogated my responsibility as a Komponist to allow the so-called performers a bit of leeway, one arm unbound from the straightjacket, a rest from the hamster wheel, the industrialist lightening for the moment the blows on the backs of the restive workers, but this philosophical change of heart, like most, has come from expediency rather than deep thought, as my compositional laziness seems to increase year upon year. I remember a day in the not so distant past where, to begin the simplest of tunes, I first had to build the instruments, sawing and sanding into the wee-est hours to the ire of my roommates, decide on a tuning, and, locked in my slattering studio, learn to play the aforementioned devices or at the least to coax a sound. But now my compositional life has settled into a pattern: (1) agree to a deadline (2) wait until the last possible moment (3) use every shortcut, trick, careless theft and accident to produce something as quick as possible. I had lunch with my friend and co-producer Paul Dresher the other day and had to hide my head in shame after listening to him describe the months of preparation on Shick Machine, building the instruments, learning to ... yes, you get the idea, everything I had been, and revealing to all the shadow I have become.

In the Stomachs of Fleas

We, that is, fognozzle and Erling Wold, present for you a tale of fear, horror, xenophobia, political posturing and denial, all contained within a musical program piece of sorts, a savage delight for the senses and an allegory for today, this and that and the other thrown into the pot of narrative and boiled up into a scenario as follows:

The Australia steamed into San Francisco in 1899, carrying corpses and rats infected with the plague. Between 1900 and 1904, one hundred twenty-six people contracted the disease in San Francisco and environs. One hundred twenty-two of them died while the governor denied the very existence of the plague and the press blamed the Chinese for spreading it.

The plague was brought under control in 1904, only to resurface in 1906 as the great earthquake displaced the human and rat population. The response to this second outbreak was dealt with more efficiently as the causes were better understood, but one hundred eighty people died of the plague in San Francisco between 1906 and 1909.

Fortunately, Xenopsylla cheopis (the Oriental rat flea) never secured a foothold in San Francisco, and our dominant flea remained Ceratophyllus fasciatus, which lacked the deep stomach required for effective plague transmission. Many more people would have died if the reverse had been true.

Unfortunately, the rat-eradication efforts during the San Francisco plague outbreaks did not extend to the squirrels of the East Bay. Through them, the bubonic plague established a permanent foothold in the Pacific Northwest, where it lives on today - in the stomachs of fleas.

SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

and Old First Concerts Present:
DREAMS OF THE RESTLESS
Saturday June 13th, 2009 at 8 pm
Old First Presbyterian Church
1751 Sacramento Street/Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94109
$15 General, $12 Seniors (65 and older), $12 Full Time Students

My Sister, My Love

Alamo!

A habit I picked up years ago from Ed Toomey, formerly of Neef, who picked up every playing card he saw on the ground - a surprisingly common find - compels me to scan the terrain for interesting bits of detritus. I no longer carry them home to fill filing cabinets and adorn the walls; I merely scrutinize and inspect and leave undisturbed. But recently I came across one of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries' screeds on a New York city street, and was reminded of my colleague Barry Drogin's opera named after the selfsame amusing and intolerant religious leader.

In the current missive, Alamo is persecuted, like all good Xtian martyrs, but in his case again by the anti-Christ, who has taken the form of the US government, now accusing him transporting minors across state lines for immoral purposes. In Barry's opera, Alamo's persecutor du jour is the Cult Awareness Network, and a particularly poignant moment occurs when Alamo's polemical rant against the Catholic Church suddenly becomes personal, and we suddenly see through a window to his soul, consumed by a deep and pervasive sadness, a frantic desperation of a man trapped and scared and alone, wondering why God has forsaken him. Barry has put up a section of the score and recording, linked to above and here below, respectively.

Update: Barry has informed me that, and I have apologized for:

As per its full title, "Alamo! a scena for a cappella voice and Bible (King James version)," calling "Alamo!" an "opera" is an error in scale - kind of like calling a one-act play a full-length play, or, say, any orchestral piece in one movement a symphony.

Irving Fine

A longstanding jest of mine was to answer, when asked about my career goals, that I wanted to be at least as famous as Irving Fine, he being (in my mind) a perfect example of a composer of some talent who is known by other composers but not well known among the general populace, unlike some of his fellows in the Boston Six, e.g. Lenny Bernstein and Aaron Copland and also due to the rhythmic-rhyming connection between our monikers. Unfortunately this particular goal will most likely not be achieved, but recently I found the late composer and I have some interests in common. From the bio by Phillip Ramey:

Although Irving's sisters frequently used the word "normal" to describe their brother, his first sexual experience was anything but that. He told Verna, who confided it to her daughters many years later, that at age six he had been molested by a twelve-year-old neighborhood girl who was acting as his babysitter. He was sexually active early on, and in his teens sometimes frequented whorehouses in Boston with a friend named Stanley. He also liked to write smutty limericks.

Verna recalled that Irving appreciated women with large breasts, theorizing that this might be because his mother and sisters were thus endowed. One summer in the late 1940s, while sitting on the lawn with his wife and Aaron Copland, Irving gave a quiet wolf whistle as an extremely busty female in a revealing halter passed by. Verna, who had average-sized breasts and was used to his ways, said, "Oh, Irving, act your age." Copland, puzzled, asked: "Can you explain to us why you like those ghastly things?" Irving just smiled. All his life he was a bit of a flirt, charming both sexes, although Verna insisted that he had no homosexual inclinations, even in adolescence.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide what features of the above we share.

The secret of success in New Music

Lou Harrison's Music Primer was one of many very influential and important books in my musical development.  At the time I read it, I was rediscovering a certain melodic simplicity in my own work. His ideas shaped some of mine, but I was especially taken with one particular passage, somewhat outside of the world of music composition per se, but dealing with that which is most important to a career in the arts, namely that a pure career in the arts is an essential impossibility:

If you really have to be a composer and are attractive and uninhibited, then try and get yourself “kept” – whether by woman or man.  This might be easier than undertaking a whole second career in order to be able to afford composing, and you might get a little restorative affection as well.

Unfortunately, I was stupid enough, and probably too inhibited at the time - my late teens, not to follow his advice, to try to make a go of the 'second career' path, to give up sleep, and not to take the high road: to flatback and think of England, to become a good wife, flipping my hair and asking on my knees for a bit more pin money from my loving husband.

But later in life I did figure out that the judicious - or injudicious - placement of my unit in a number of compromising positions could in fact be helpful to the bit of musical career that I eked out on the side.  In the late-mid 80s I started working with choreographer and dancer Miss W_ on an extended series of pieces. The first and maybe the best was Crash, an hallucination on the already hallucinatory J.G. Ballard novel.  My pal Henry Kaiser had recently purchased a Synclavier and a few of the local classical avant types were thrusting their bowls in his face and asking for a bit of the corn gruel drippings off its gleaming steel and black plastic but I had a key, haha!, since Hank and I were working on Secrets and Mysteries (aka Secrets of the Unknown) with Edward Mulhare, using the early sampler to write as much music as quickly as possible. I stole into his beautiful little studio and worked all night every night coaxing as many floating microtonal lushnesses as I could for Crash and Hagalaz and the others. And why, may one inquire, would I work my little ears to the ossicles to find the perfect romantic musical moment, the perfect twist of pitch ratios adding a glint of a knife to a pretty harmony? Because I was in love. And, when Miss W_ came to hear it for the first time, sitting in the dark of the studio late at night, the fullness of my gift fell upon her, parting her lips, spreading her legs ever so slightly. Later, at a restaurant far away, she looked into my eyes and told me of her most favored venereal pleasure, something so near and dear to my heart that my pulse quickened at the thought, and I flipped through a number of scenarios and possibly near-term advantages and pleasures, but, like everyone else who desires and desires so strongly, I hadn't quite thought through the rest of the story: the pain, the recriminations, the crying and the destruction and the loss, but, before that all came to pass, we spent ourselves through a burst of creativity that produced some of my still favorite works, and some of my still favorite memories: risky sweaty writhings under soft sheets, towels put down to catch the blood; hot tubs overfilled of naked lissome dancers, their supple fingers probing under the foaming jets; furtive quasi-couplings in cars, backstage before a performance, in the corner of a darkened gay bar; sweet shared conspiracies.

And at one of our performances at the Lab in San Francisco was a young choreographer named Robert Wechsler, just beginning to develop a new language of sinuous dances based on groups, canons and symmetries, where the dancers moved quickly through each other in seemingly impossible ways, who took a liking to me (and I'm sure Miss W_), and he kept in touch, asking me from time to time to contribute short soundtracks to dances, e.g. Modules and Loops. Not long after, Robert developed some financial complexities in the US, and moved to Nürnberg to allow things to cool. By the mid 90s I had forgotten all the lessons learned with Miss W_ and was embarking on another long walk off a short pier with Ms. A_. Once again, I enjoyed a burst of creativity, my pen pouring out one inspired score after another, intending to woo and succeeding again beyond my expectations and beyond my ability to deal with it. Once again, I found myself pressed against a lithe body, this time straddling me, allowing my hands to wander over her prepubescently boyish frame, a suggestion of immodest nature whispered to me, hot breath on my ear, kisses on my face. Once again, I was caught up in clandestine plans, this time of a global nature, a vast intrigue tapping into a worldwide network of co-conspirators. I accepted an offer from Robert to come to Europe to work with his company, Palindrome, on an evening of dance and music using a set of interactive technologies: a MIDI controlled pipe organ, dancer-tracking software, heartbeat monitors, the very new and pre-browser Internet. And surprise, it so happened that Ms. A_ was working on a project in Prague, a short train ride away, and so came to visit, pleasantly insinuating herself in the company and, after I left, performing on tour with them through Austria.

While performing with Palindrome in Klagenfurt in the south of the Austrian republic, Ms. A_ left a tape with the theater of my first chamber opera, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. Although they didn't care much for the production, a reflection I believe on the cultural divide between the Old and New World, they found themselves drawn back to the music a number of years later and asked me if would be willing to have them perform it and, if possible, to develop a version in German. Although, by the time this came about, my life had plummeted into chaos and into an even more complex sexual by-now-quadrangle including another Ms. A_, a young woman of great vigor and blondness who evinced in me a before unknown tendency for obsessive stalking behavior, one of the high points of my life came while descending into the Klagenfurt airport, a Tyrolean Air flight attendant in an absurdly sexy dirndl leaning over me, noticing a photograph of a woman's mouth covered in blood in the newspaper of the passenger in front of me, seeing my name in the caption of that gory image, landing a few moments later and being greeted as Maestro by the theater director, sweeping me into the dress rehearsal and a magical otherworld, jetlagged and fagged and fashed. The first Ms. A_, who was again performing in the Easter bloc, once again came to meet me, but this scene quickly descended into the by now familiar recrimination, tears, anger, drama and worse and worse. As Ali Tabatabai once told me, we theater folk know not where the stage ends. But, just possibly, do the means justify the terrible endings?  

And this now reminds me: a dream-like trip to Amsterdam with a friend to live out one of her fantasies: that of having two young Dutch boys simultaneously. We tripped and traipsed and shagged our way through the red-light district looking for connections to these ultimate striplings, the perfect combination of enthusiasm and ability and fresh-faced boyishness. In one of these fact-finding encounters of flat-backing fieldwork, the two of us were huffing and puffing and panting over a quite amazingly beautiful and busty Dutch fille de joie who, hearing of our desires, gave us her mobile number and invited her to her wedding in Rotterdam the next week, assuring us that her soon-to-be husband and one of his friends would without doubt fill the bill and that having some other artistic & libertine types there would surely be of benefit to all.

And so, after Klagenfurt and the collapse of the entire quadrangle in flaming death, and as a period of even more intense sluttiness and my relationship with Lynne "die Zweite" began, the Max Ernst museum in Brühl and I planned to have the Little Girl opera performed as part of the dedication of an Ernst sculpture, newly installed. I showed up in town with my freshly blue hair, gathering some curious stares from the locals, overseeing the installation of an outdoor stage for the production, the arrival of the ensemble and all the rest. Also, at this time, Sub Pontio Pilato, also recently translated into German, was heading for its quirky premiere in Austria where a certain Miss B_ was starring, who wanted to come up to Brühl to meet me and see something of what I do. I was feeling my oats, as virility comes with success, and something happened which my gentlemanly upbringing does not allow me to divulge. Even though, with some familiarity, this led to some drama back home with the Empress, Miss B_ and I cemented a personal and artistic connection so that, after the Pilate premiere, she went back to St. Gallen and played the Credo from the opera for the musical director at the Abbey. After an Austrian review of Pilate claimed that the Credo must have come from a pre-existing Mass, I wanted to create such a thing: a crucifix of pieces overlaid, a pre-existing piece from an alternate youth, a time of innocence and faith, before the devil grabbed hold of my soul and I made that Faustian bargain, taking the path of sin, the path of success.

Kathy Acker

Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas were to write an opera together but Thomas drank himself to death before they could begin. Stravinsky wrote that this was "a terrible blow to me as well as to all those who knew Dylan Thomas's genius."  Stories of creations unmade, like this one, always seem so insufferably sad to me.  Even though we did receive In Memoriam Dylan Thomas out of the tragedy, what might have come? 

I have my own story along these lines, an opera unborn, hardly at the same culture-defining level and probably not even a real possibility, but important to me OK, goddamn it, and such a source of regret.  Unknown to me, Carla Harryman invited her buddy Kathy Acker to the original production of Little Girl back in '95.  I didn't see her until the end of the performance, at which point I ran up to her. Erling: Ms. Acker, I'm a huge fan of yours (quoting from Blood and Guts in High School) "Her father's touch is cold, he doesn't want to touch her mostly 'cause he's confused. Janey fucks him even though it hurts her like hell 'cause of her Pelvic Inflammatory Disease." I'm so happy you came. Kathy: (doe-eyed) I'm a big fan of yours too. 

Well, maybe the doe-eyed bit is an exaggeration, but I told her I wanted to work on something together and she said yes in the way people do when they are invited to go to Budapest for the May-December wedding of The Accordionist, the National Hero, and they say yes, sure, knowing that they aren't really going to go but, at that moment, really wanting to go, imagining it, thinking that it could actually happen.  For months after, the thought rattled around in my head without ceasing and, a number of times, I picked up the phone to get her number from Carla but then put it off, partially because my possessive mistress at the time didn't trust Ms Acker, saying she had stolen someone-or-other's husband or boyfriend or whatever but, all the time, not knowing that the cancer that would kill her was already growing in her breast - and then she died.  A terrible blow to me. What would have come from it?

Towards a Libretto for an Opera on St Cecilia

Early evening, an apartment in Bethnal Green, garishly decorated, St Cecilia in her early 30s, hair in curlers, slouched on a couch. She sleeps, lightly dozing and, touching her body, stirs. The television is on, turned very low, with music playing, and the blue TV light is on her, adding to the soft evening twilight filtering through an uncovered window.

She turns, then sleeps a bit longer, rolling over on her side, head on her arm, one foot crossed back on the other, hand under her chin. She wears a blue kimono with a crane pattern in gold. She turns again, now with her back to us, the crane pattern bold across it, the bottoms of her feet dirty, and then she sleeps again, her side rising and falling in rhythm with her breath and with the music.

Shortly, she wakes, turns partially back to us, brushes the hair from her face, and drags a finger across her eyes.  Still sitting on the couch, she stretches, cat-like, and begins to sing. When she sings, it is not with a human voice, but rather with a full ensemble of instruments, the sound issuing from her mouth but with a supernatural presence.

She rises from the couch, continuing to sing. As she walks to the stage left, each step she takes, each object she touches - the arm of the couch, a lamp, a chair - makes a beautiful sound in perfect counterpoint to the music. 

The romance of St Cecilia begins with Cecilia as a young girl, born into a noble Roman family, promising her virginity to God. Her family, against her wishes, arranges for her to be married to a Roman nobleman by the name of Valerian. During the wedding banquet she sings a song to God, quietly, to herself, and is provided an angel, a guardian to preserve her chastity. This very angel appears to her and her husband, hastening his conversion to the faith and his respect for her continence. Unfortunately for them, the husband's faith is an active and proselytizing faith, bringing him and his brother to the attention of the prefect, Turcius Almachius, who orders the two men to be executed. The power of their convictions converts the first executioner sent, but not the second, who dispatches all three. When Cecilia buries the three men, in a Christian manner, she herself is condemned, locked into a sealed sweat room, the fires stoked to maximum intensity, and is left to die. As we might expect knowing her exalted state, when the chamber is opened she is found quite alive, in aspect of prayer, with nary a bead of sweat to mark her brow. As is typical in these stories, such supernatural events serve only to anger the brutish prefect, who orders her head removed from her body. After three blows are attempted, the maximum the law allows, Cecilia, although bloodied, still lives, sending the executioner fleeing in fear in the consideration of his brazen act against the divine, and Cecilia is left, praying and teaching to her fellow Christians until her death three days later. Over the centuries, her relics are exhumed and reinterred on a great number of occasions, each time found to be incorrupt and with, on one hand, three fingers outstretched and, on the other, one finger, denoting her belief, even in death, of the mystery of the Trinity.

Tony Kushner, best known for his lovely play Angels in America, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera in the late 90s to write a libretto for an opera by Bobby McFerrin. He chose to adapt Heinrich von Kleist's St Cecilia.  When I first heard of the project, I was quite upset. I hadn't been asked to do this music for this project even though I was an actual opera composer, not merely a famous person brought in to boost ticket sales, and in fact had made copious notes for an opera on this subject.  Unfortunately, it put me off the whole deal, which is too bad since, in the end, Kushner finished the adaptation but McFerrin bailed on the project. 

[A somewhat less related but maybe informative story: Years later, when I was part of the Oakland East Bay Symphony's Words and Music project, Ishmael Reed came and told us a story about a similar event in the early 90s, where he was commissioned to write a libretto entitled Gethsemane to be the basis of an opera, as it turns out, to be completed by the same celebrity. In his story, the celebrity showed up in his stretch limo plus entourage, breezed into Mr. Reed's house, proceeded to demonstrate his lack of ability to carry this project through, and left, never to be seen again.]

fognozzle!

fognozzle and I are collaborating on a something-or-other to be premiered next June with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.  Too early now to say what it will be except of course fabulous and full of beauty.

The Dramatic Composer

The book-larnin' study of Composition and its even poorer cousins of Species Counterpoint and ostensible Harmony didn't teach me much of what I needed to know to actually succeed as a soi-disant composer.  Here is an almost surely abridged list of what skills were needed just for Mordake.  I publish this only in the interest of scaring off some young bucks and does and reducing the competition for various grants and whatnot.

First and most important: the skill of gladhanding, the character of the cocktail boy, the flirt, the teller of and listener to jokes, the slightly-too-long buss on the cheek of the executive or artistic director of this and that, the extra squeeze, the reach-around.

Second, Diplomacy, from the lonely-hearts and sex columnist to the divas and self-styled gods and goddesses of the art world, the theater folk who know not where the stage ends, aiding with boyfriend and girlfriend problems, sometimes both at the same time, guiding and cajoling and pandering and smoothing, crying with them, holding their hands, kissing away their tears.

Third, Budgeting, the dismal science, the counting and the recounting and the negotiations with artists and technicians and vendors and theater owners, including the begging, the "ask," the days and days and days frittered away crafting and re-crafting and re-re-crafting the tedious applications and work samples, this 2 minutes of this and this 2 minutes of the other, each of which asks for everything in its own way, assembling them into packages which, like lottery tickets, become so much worthless paper, convincing other organizations to write even more grant proposals and dealing the endless rejections and still doing it more, persuading those more important than me to write letters of recommendation and quid-pro-quo letters written for them, and begging and borrowing and stealing from other theaters and artists and on.

Wait, maybe this is more important: let us not forget all aspects of marketing: designing posters and programs and web sites, convincing the shop owner to allow one in with ink-stained hands and stickum, quickly plastering over another artist's labor of love, to please not forget all the coproducers and granting organizations with their required acknowledgements of sufficient point size, dealing with mailing houses and poster distribution services and printers a click away, and English Communication, writing copy for the posters and programs as well as blogs and web sites and spam.

Ah! The Technical! Extending from the necessity of computers for everything: buying and researching and communicating and making scores and parts and mixes and recording but down to the samples and frames and media files, angry to find other people who think they know more about anything and seem maybe to be more successful, but ignoring that and writing a program to shift the pitch of John's voice so he could play the female rôle, but oh god no not to move the formants quite so much thus guaranteeing that his true womanly nature arises rather than the feared chipmunk within.  And even more troubling, to write a program to deal with the terrible flashing in the documentation video, some aliasing problem between the $50K hidef camers and the DLP projectors that had to be suppressed pixel-by-pixel, replacing those flickering with their more stable and clearheaded temporal neighbors. And then on to the editing.

Finally, and only then, the writing of the music, the consideration of the art, the meaning, how it relates to thou and thine, the prettiness, the beauty, the modernist flair, the rhythms and the notes and the sounds and Thom's prepossessing noises, and plowing over the overestimated difficulties of Orchestration, parts and ranges and rehearsals and recording and the mixing in, days spent laughing over the libretto, shots of vodka and absinthe and tequila and better tequila, time in the hot tub overlooking the garden, grazing through the organic lettuces and cooking the shrimp with so much butter you can't fucking believe it. And this is what we all remember in the end, the joy of creation, the womanly long building climaxes, paroxysms and chills, the manly Vesuvian orgasm of performance, the slow burn & the long tail which follow until, one day, it ceases to be yours, seemingly written by another, becoming something that belongs to all humanity.

23rd Psalm

In the very glorious baroque Cathedral of St Gallen. 

The Knife from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil

Mordake Finances

Since other composers and artists are often curious about the finances of my operas, let's please have a moment of silence here for all the dollars burned to a cinder in my many vanity productions. 

...

I watched Mr. Deeds goes to Town the other night, a Frank Capra feel-good illusory bit of fluff that seems to imply that good conquers evil and other loads of misinformed gobbledygook, in which there was a moment where Deeds as the newly minted chairman of the opera board is informed that oh my my of course the opera never makes money (see Tit. 1:11) at which point he states the unwelcome obvious: maybe the opera isn't performing things that people want to see. The rest of the stuffed shirts on the board are of course shocked but we as the audience know this to be the simple truth. Opera, and especially modern opera, is a niche of a niche of niche of niche and, if disappeared tomorrow, would sink below the surface of the culture with the barest ripple.

But we modern oddball opera types beg and borrow and sometimes steal and try to convince those with their hand on the spigot of some real money that what we do is important, good for you, like eating your broccoli, and that it makes perfect sense to subsidize us wastrels, bohemians and good-for-nothings to produce fashionable nonsense that will assuage their robber-baron guilt-ness.

And here's the bottom line: Mordake was in about the middle of the expense range of my past productions, not too hot nor too cold, just in the middle, and I was able to wheedle about $35K in grant-based funding (requiring about twenty-five actual filings) to help cover those costs. In addition, there was about $1K in box office earnings and, as usual, about $10K of my own money.  I have noticed that, hard as I try to contain things, and whether or not the production is at the high side or the low side of the expense compass, this last figure is always about the same, a small bit of hair shirt that penances me for my folly. 

I have been led to believe that there are some people who don't lose money on their productions.  I believe there are people whose artistic and theatrical works are actually sought out and remunerated generously, like the recently minted PhD in Astrophysics and erstwhile guitar hero Brian May.  But I seem to have failed quite miserably in this particular aspect of my musical career and mayhap I do need to accept the unwanted and unwelcome obvious.

More on Counting

Since my last brief discussion of herky-jerky rhythms and pondering Michael Kaulkin's comment on it, I've been wondering more about the assumption that we need to count in a regular fashion, that is, where every counted beat is the same temporal distance from the last counted beat. There seems to be an emphasis in classical music on the square simplicity of the mathematics involved in the way that rhythms are approached, that a rhythm of (say) a quarter and a dotted quarter and an eighth is really happening over a regular beat of 3 quarters, instead of just being a rhythm of this followed by that followed by so-and-so.  I'm sure, absolutely sure, that this is not the way of all music.  It's not the way I played music in my misspent youth in r&r bands for sure.  I remember trying to teach Henry Kaiser a 'lick' many years back, the rhythm of which was a standard rock something like 2+3+3 but I couldn't explain it in that way to him. The conversation went something like:

Erling: (playing the part as envisioned) Just like this.

Henry: (playing something so much more complicated, say 2.12 3.41 2.77) OK, got it.

Erling: (blinking, confused, playing it again) No, more like this, listen.

Henry: (now trying 2.21 3.03 3.44) Right, no problem.

Erling: (trying desperately to comprehend the higher mathematics involved, some continued fraction expansion or log base something or set of measure zero blah blah) Ha, well, that's close, but it's more like...

(process iterates for a bit)

Erling: (suddenly gaining insight) Um, Henry, the interval between the first two is just a little bit shorter and the interval between the next two is just a little longer.

Henry: (playing it, just a little better)

Erling: (emboldened) Right, now just a little longer between the second two and I think you cut in too much on the first...

Henry: (playing it even better)

(process iterates etc)

Not wanting to press the point here, but just to be clear: the insight is that there was absolutely no underlying time base at all, simply intervals in succession.  There was no abstraction of rhythm, this was it, events in time laid bare. I wondered at the time if this might have been one of those interesting neurological 'deficits' that Oliver Sacks is so fond of popularizing, but since then I've thought not. Henry once tried to teach us a Captain Beefheart tune, Alice in Blunderland, explaining it in the fashion above. We had a very difficult time of it until we realized it was just in 11 or 13 or some other easily approachable prime numerated time signature and then it fell into place, and we congratulated ourselves on one more case where the old fashioned model worked la di da.  But Henry was proud of his model of the musical world and clearly believe it to be meet right and salutary, and his level of non-abstraction really went quite deep, I mean what do we mean when we say this is the same rhythm at a different tempo, I mean we know what this is, a simple affine transform applied to the time-interval-sequence, but why do we think that is the same? In another amazing display, I once realized during a concert that Henry was playing the tune quite correctly, in that it was internally consistent (re: the affine transform above), but just a little teeny bit faster than the rest of us and he continued doing that until he reached the end - quite a few seconds before us. Have you ever tried this, e.g., in the phase pieces of early minimalism? It's really quite difficult to do on purpose, but the performance matched his model. We simply weren't playing the events at the right time offsets relatively to the onset of the piece and he was.

Over the years I've realized that I am just a bit like Henry, a bit more comfortable thinking of music as a chain of intervals, not quite as irrationally related, but still, not regular at all. I've often approached the music I've written this way.  When Guy Garnett and I worked for Yamaha and bought the first copy of Finale hot off the presses - the one that came with the videotaped testimonial of the importance of Jesus Christ in the development of Computer Notation Systems - we were surprised by its measure-centricity, which still remains in the program to this day. We didn't get it. Weren't bar lines merely added after one wrote the music simply to aid the performer in her perceptual chunking?  I don't pay much attention to my bar lines when I'm playing my own music and I really have to contort my perception of my own music when I'm playing them under the yoke of a conductor, doing what so many musicians do, breaking out the pencil and painstakingly marking the regular pulses above the irregular timeline of the score so I can map their notions onto mine.  I was taught in composing school to aid this process, to make sure that my (at that time highly) irregular and polyrhythms were broken up with gazillions of ties and whatnots to fit into groups based on the denominator of the time signature in order to make this mapping of the irregular to the regular as easy as possible for the poor performer, handcuffed to the regular beat, the incessant and regular beat, like the beating of the heart under the floorboards, the drip drip drip late at night of the leaky faucet, the tap tap tap of the tree against the window, like the invention of Hippolytus de Marsiliis, slowly but inexorably driving us insane.

But why can't we 'count' in a natural way, an irregular beat that wafts and waves with the tune, with the rhythm?  This is the way we are supposed to play the Dance of Fury for the Seven Trumpets, yes?  And those added dots sprinkled here and there in the Concord Sonata?  And the tempo changes cum polyrhythms of Klavierstücke I-IV? And Michael Gordon's Trance (pardon, stolen from Kyle Gann's blog):

And speaking of the aforementioned reverend Mr Gann, the Zuni Buffalo Dance that seeded his totalist interest? Are we supposed to tap our toes in some regular fashion through this minefield of events in time?  Right, I didn't think so.

Finally, from Dave Stewart's book Inside the Music, a book written, I might point out, for the popular musician, to wit:

By Popular Demand, the Gloria

Agnus Dei, Jona Switzerland

Sousa Variation Video

On the Death of David Blakely

One more week

My colleague Michael Kaulkin blogged about Mordake, as did Lynne and fellow collaborator Kathleen. And we musn't forget the Chronicle review and the sf360 review too.  These fragments which are to become the desiccated bits of yellow paper detaching from a once precious photo album, fragments crumbling onto my lap, mixing with drooled spittle, brushed away by liver spotted hands, the last forced movements of a dying soul, trying so very hard to remember the life that once was.

Slow slow and slower

My friend George Zelenz, who once informed me that he seriously considered ending our friendship after I gave up on the true way of Just Intonation, wrote this after Lou Harrison's death a while back.  I remembered it as I needed to take this path myself.

In 1995, Lou and Bill came to visit me in Joshua Tree. I picked them up at the Palm Springs airport in my small truck, and Lou volunteered to sit in the back. On a thin cushion, al fresco. Upon arrival at my house, Bill promptly did his impersonation of a man with narcolepsy, and fell asleep in a chair by the kitchen table. Lou asked if I would drive him around, and show him Joshua Tree the town. "Bill can sleep the whole goddamn day for all I care" said Lou, with some exasperation. We jumped in the truck and took off driving, with no real goal or destination.

Driving around, we talked about all the usual stuff we always talked about. Pretty much everything except music. We rarely talked about music. About an hour into the drive, he did ask me how my composing went. I told him about this dancer I was writing for up in Berkeley. It paid very little, but I was doing my best I said. I told him about the structure being mostly whole notes, sung quietly, in a 3 voice part. He said, "I have a poorly compensated commission of my own right now, I think I as well will just write a lot of whole notes."

The Sousa Variations

The SFCCO commissioned a number of us to write a set of variations on Stars and Stripes Forever, the one that goes as follows (yes, I get them all confused, the tapestry of Sousa marches, each cut from the same cloth, but what a fine cloth it is, akin to the cloth of the Strauss waltzes, so please sing along): be kind to your web footed friends etc. It was due last week but I am late, very very late, but I do have the program notes done, which I suppose is something, so here they are:

DAVID BLAKELY IS DEAD.; Manager of Sousa's Band Stricken with Apoplexy.

NOV 8TH, 1896, WEDNESDAY

David Blakely, manager of Sousa's Band, died suddenly yesterday afternoon in the Carnegie Building, Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, from an attack of apoplexy. Mr. Blakely was in the best of health until stricken. At about 4 o'clock his typewriter went out on an errand. When she returned, she found Mr. Blakely lying on his face on the floor of his office.

Dying in the Saddle

from the wikipedia article on Louis Vierne:

Vierne suffered a heart attack while giving his 1750th organ recital at Notre-Dame de Paris on the evening of June 2, 1937. He had completed the main concert, which members of the audience said showed him at his full powers - "as well as he has ever played." After the main concert, the closing section was to be two improvisations on submitted themes. He read the first theme in Braille, then selected the stops he would use for the improvisation. He suddenly leaned forward, clutching his chest, and fell off the bench as he hit the low "E" pedal of the organ. He lost consciousness as the single note echoed throughout the church. He had thus fulfilled his oft-stated lifelong dream - to die at the console of the great organ of Notre-Dame.

I've fantasized about two modes of death: one rather like the above, but peacefully in my sleep, the completed but not-yet-fully orchestrated manuscript of my own Requiem Mass slowly spilling off my night table; the other more akin to the death of Nelson Rockefeller.  

Mordake Visuals, Construction, Music et al

I was informed by electronic post late last night that Lynne has been blogging her work for Mordake. As of yesterday morning I finally finished setting the last of Douglas's text, almost just barely too late as we really are in the middle of rehearsals, and Herr Weiß is here only for another week or so, and M. Duykers is back in Florida performing final excruciations on his students. Several would-be assistants had other projects interfere with their participation, but luckily our friend Diana showed up direct from Amersfoort NL, firmly gripped the handle of our construction problems, caused the Jack in the Box to pop out, and has left us all deeply satisfied with her work. 

Mary Ellen Hunt dropped by to interview Frieder and me for a mention in the Chronicle's article about the SFIAF, but we've been corresponding a bit about those people who, like Mordake are double-faced.  She referenced the young Indian girl who is believed by some to be a reincarnation of Ganesh, I countered with Chang Tzu Ping (with a nod to the recent alleged Lakshmi reincarnation), and then on to various other facial tumors and skin ailments and so on. These photos disturb me a bit even though I wish I could just accept them as part of the continuum of human styles and substances.  Like the murder victim we happened across today draped with a cloth and surrounded by police tape and squad cars, they seem to remind me too much of my own fragile physical nature, one step away from worm dirt.