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.

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.

Tune of the day

Agnus Dei

3½/4

As a milksop, I've been reticent to specify the true nature of some rhythms I use commonly, so I'd like to say here for those of you listening that when the pulse is basically quarters (say) and I write a time signature of 7/8 (say), what I really mean is 3½/4 or 3/4 + 1/8 or 3.5/4.  I've tried to explain this to a number of conductors in the past but they've scowled at me and tossed their hair and brushed me aside and explained that this is simply not possible, that they can't have a dangling ½ a beat andthen  proceed to conduct it as 2 2 3, which really is not the same, now is it? I mean, it's *really* goddang not the same! So why do I allow it? Well, see the definition of namby-pamby in your well-thumbed English-English dictionary.  

Looking back, I was clearly infected with such jumpy skittery rhythms by their common usage in the pop music of my youth, e.g., Led Zeppelin's Ocean, which features an ostinato alternating between 4/4 and 3½/4. My high school was a hotbed of wannabe progressive rock musicians and often featured such at the oral-sex-and-alcohol-fueled parties which I would have attended except for my aforementioned milksopish milquetoastishness, but sometimes, leaving the SQ-encoded recording of Petrushka playing on my quad hifi, I would sneak outside in my bunny footed yellow pajamas to peek in through the window, to hear them playing excerpts from such devil-besotted music, their long locks swaying to the beat, sweat dripping down their bare chests, a slide show of one of them dressed in their SCA finery projected on the walls while their girlfriends (ah, girlfriends!) waited for it all to stop so they could put on their singer-songwriter LPs and make out with their BFs, lost in a romantic fantasy, fingers and lips searching and probing the limits of their young love.

Ode to the Shy Monk

Review of the Missa came out today in the St. Gallen Tagblatt.  Google's automatic translator produces this, which is a bit poetic, viz "Major outbreaks searches in vain."  Listening to the recording from Sunday in the clear but jet-lagged light of day today, which I've put up here, I realize that they did do a beautiful job.  

Rhythms, Bells, St Gallus and the Bear

After four years hanging over my head, the Mass finally premiered last night, and hanging over my head was the above: St Gallus in the company of the bear with whom he traded sandwiches for firewood, and, to continue this trope past the point of enjoyment, I woke up hung over after the free-flowing alcohol-laced VIP reception, where, just like Scrappy and his friend, we decided in our stupor to ring the doorbells and wake up the bishop but succeeded in waking only his sister as he was out "on assignment." Thank God for Europe where they still seem to sell out houses - and a mighty big House o' God in this case - for brand spanking new music and where they seem to applaud and applaud and applaud to the point of embarrassment (although this discomfort is one with which my vanitas can well live). Kim Brockman was the soloist and stole the show with her effortless navigation of the 23rd Psalm which, I have to say, is really just more or less in a simple 3/4, but the accompaniment tends to confuse. 

Speaking of confusion, even though over in Kyle Gann's heaven of stratospheric beauty, present concerns are partial tuplets and non-power-of-two-denominator time signatures, down here wallowing in the mud of the temporal world, I would be just a little bit happier in my insignificant existence if I could be assured of accurate non-partial tuplets and power-of-two-denominator time signatures and reliable groupings of 8ths and 16ths at moderate tempi that don't quite hit the downbeats. But the performance was lovely, and the circle of communication from composer to performer to audience and back again was closed very nicely, and I was overjoyed just to experience it all in such an over-the-top goopy-rococo environment. 

The performance was in the choir - which you can see here - using one of the two mechanically connected baroque organs. The stiff action necessitated a simplification of the faster parts of the Credo. I wrote a quick Postlude as a bit of espresso or maybe dolce to wake up the audience after a long period of contemplation of our insignificance and the certain oncoming freight train of death, etc, but it turned out that even my delightful insouciance was a bit beyond the very limited rehearsal time for Willibald, so we had to cut the (as I call it) Terry Riley section, that with one meter for each limb (although really two are in the right hand and one is split between the feet), but as to the remainder, as Duncan put it, Willibald hit it.

The best part of performing in the Dom Kathedral is that, every fifteen minutes, there is a small but very clear bell part added to the piece, almost always in just the perfect place, so much better than the added ambulance sirens of my mostly urban performances, and in fact I herewith formally add the instruction to the score: play a clock chime or two or maybe even a few more every fifteen minutes starting at a random time offset (well, actually at five minutes before the quarter hour marks as we need to give the brothers time to dust off the knees of their robes and get themselves to tend the radish garden or whatever) and please don't be stopped by the fact that the soprano is just now putting herself in the proper mood for her emotive solo or the fact that the music is really really really quiet, OK?

(photo by Lynne)

Me in a funny hat

How I am perceived by the Swiss press.

Ruth's Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant

We had several great meals in Florence. First was a traditional Bistecca alla Fiorentina and the second was just around the corner from the synagogue (above) at Ruth's Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant.  The former because of the enormity both in mass and taste and the second because the owner regaled us with stories of his days in Prague in the bad old days of the Soviet repression: how he hung out with Vaclav Havel (he had a book of photos of the two of them and various other hippie types), about the Plastic People of the Universe (including where they all are now), about the Velvet Underground (and how the Velvet Revolution was named after them), about the importance of Frank Zappa to their culture, about how they carried copies of the White Album with a label peeled off a Smetana LP, and how the best Milos Forman film is Taking Off.  

Luigi Dallapiccola

My son said yesterday that it would be expedient for me career-wise to spend a bit of time in prison, especially for a political crime.  Maybe that's more likely currently, here in the land of Mussolini and Berlusconi than back in the sun soaked bliss of whatever San Francisco. In Roma my thoughts have turned to the various Italians I have known and loved: Nono and Berio and Dallapiccola. The budding latter young Luigi did spend some career enhancing time with his family in a camp for subversives in Graz, the hometown of our own favorite California National Socialist and Führer, but the connection today is a mention of myself in a discussion here on whether Dallapiccola may have wanted to have his music played in JI or some other non-equal tuning system. I felt compelled to correct a small error. A statement on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: I often need to correct others' mistakes, answer yes.  JI and tuning history in general is still so misunderstood, and the recentness of the God given nature of 12 equal so little known,  that I do feel I need to say something from time to time just to rail against the darkness etc.  Once again I feel the need to retune my life and music a bit.

Desire Line

Thom Blum had a beautiful installation at the Cowell Theater last night, comprising a long hallway, a collection of friends' ipods and an assortment of speakers donated by Boston Acoustics.  I've been hearing him talk about the piece as it developed, but it was far more striking and far more intense than I imagined.  Having experienced it, I don't know why he hasn't done installations like this before, because it so perfectly connects to his oeuvre. A number of his concrète pieces are travelogues: recordings made from captured sonic landscapes of far away places. Years ago he wanted to build a Walkman/iPod-like device that would process the sound around you and feed it into your earbuds.  The new work is a travelogue of sorts, a collaboration between Thom and one's perambulation through it, glimpses of sound and music past and present near and far, including a modified bit of The Comfort of Solitude from The Bed You Sleep In. Oh, let's listen for a moment to that old chestnut, shall we?

The hallway led to a performance of Deborah Slater's Desire Line, one of her best works, featuring a number of my favorite dancers and social-networking site friends: Kerry Mehling, Travis Rowland, Shaunna Vella; and based on the paintings of Alan Feltus (see example above).  Travis and Kerry dance as one person, both amazingly fluid and strong, with spectacular moves following in unanticipated succession.  And the all-important-and-possibly-my-reason-for-being-in-the-arts cast party was a religious ecstasy of salmon and flan incroiable and broken glass and Absolut and lithe inked flesh in 104° water. Some parts of it seem to be missing after the fifth tumbler but even though Lynne had to leave early, driving off in her rented Mercedes, I'm relatively sure I was nothing if not the perfect gentleman in the aftermath.

Poultice o' my heart

Concert of the SFCCO last night playing Mordake Suite Number 2, the darker one. Edward Mordake hisself was there to see it, as he enjoys a variety of methods of instantiation, in this case in Jennybird's doll form. Here's a recording of it hot off the press:

Also, the San Francisco International Arts Festival 2008 site went live today. The direct link to tickets for the Mordake premiere is here and I've been told there is a significant early bird discount.

Meditation on Jon

Composing music is a strange ephemeral artform, constructing something from the almost nothingness of sound, pressure-wave vibrations of the air.  But this strange ephemera is somehow able to touch deep inside the listener, bringing up emotions and reactions pleasant and unpleasant but impossible to ignore. In the films of the Hollywood mainstream, the emotional power of music and its ability to pass by the viewer's defenses is often used to manipulate, to subliminally broadcast to the listener how they are supposed to feel. But music in Jon's films is different. Although it carries a large part of the emotional weight of his films, it is not a hidden wedge into the viewer's heart.  In fact, it is usually banished from those scenes which are the most directly narrative and kept to those long minimal moments of repose that are so dear to Jon.  It is given an equal billing, with narrative, with the landscape, with the characters, part of a set of parallel threads that each relate to the viewer a different aspect of the story.

I first met Jon at a screening of All the Vermeers in New York at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley California. The producer, Henry Rosenthal, whom I had known through the Just Intonation Network years before, called me and told me I had to come, that it had been a labor of love and that he was quite proud of it. When I saw it, I was enraptured.  I loved the look of it, the pace of it, the feel of it, and especially the music by Jon English.  It was such a musical film, both indirectly, with a feel for rhythms on the short and long and architectural scale and directly, leaving space for musical development that Jon English filled so beautifully, especially in the long tracking shot dancing among the columns of the lobby of some Wall Street location.  

A few years later, as Jon Jost's Sure Fire needed to be finished for its debut at Sundance, Henry called me while I was staying in a room in a businessman's hotel in Japan that was the size of a smallish shoebox and told me that Jon English was too ill to finish the music, in fact that he had written only a short melody for pedal steel; that the music had to be done in a couple of weeks; that it needed to be in a country style and that it also had to be in just intonation.  I jumped at the opportunity.  When I returned from Japan, I got a videotape of the film in its almost-finished state and wrote the music very quickly, sketching out a primarily synthesized score, starting from the melody that Jon English had written, and bringing in his pedal steel player to improvise with me. There were some brief meetings with Henry and Jon Jost, where they pointed at large problematic sections and told me to fix them, but mainly I was left alone to do what I wanted inside the constraints of no budget and no time. Jon did tell me there were some important numerological features of the film centering around the number 13, which I worked into various rhythms and various pitch ratios.

As Sure Fire was completed and as Jon and I spent more time together, we had an opportunity to work in a more relaxed fashion. He started to tell me of his plans for the next film, The Bed You Sleep In.  Jon had written bits of a script and said that he wanted some music done before production so that he could play it for the actors while they were working.  He also told me one of his recurring ideas, that he had always wanted music that naturally came from the location sound, sometimes imperceptibly.  But he also wanted real music, not just sound, and I suggested a mixture of classical and folk and electronic instruments, and a mix of classical and popular styles.  

From the notes to the CD: 

During the production of the film, John Murphy, who was doing the location recording, took me into the sawmill featured in the film.  Walking through the mill was like listening to a great industrial/futurist composition, the sound wonderfully dense and richly spatialized.  The sounds and smells of the local mills, especially the Georgia Pacific plant, were present throughout the town of Toledo.  The sound of the GP plant was audible in all the location recordings, whether inside or out.  The plant sat at the side of a tremendous chemical lake, a dirty brown pool with fountains spraying noxious liquid in large plumes up from the surface.  Its presence so overwhelmed me that, at one point, I had decided to do all the music using the sounds of the mill and the GP plant.  In the end, I used a variety of sound sources.  Some of the music, notably that which frames the letter scene, is generated almost entirely from sampled and processed recordings of the mill made by John Murphy during the production.  Some of these samples are used as instruments in other pieces and are mixed with the acoustic instrumental ensemble. [...]

After the production, Jon and Mark Redpath started editing and I began to see the film that didn't exist in the screenplay.  There were many long, static shots where Jon wanted the music to firmly imprint the film's bleak emotional state.  There was an extensive use of split screens.  There were a number of musical dichotomies I intended to be analogues of this, but the most successful [were in two scenes].  The first was a spare statement, where a single tone split into two diverging tones.  In the second, where the screen collapses in on itself, a similar divergence occurred in a rich instrumental texture, causing the harmonies to quaver and shift in a continuous manner.  

I went with Jon and Henry to the premiere of The Bed You Sleep In at the Berlin film festival where, unfortunately, Jon and Henry had a falling out over disagreements about control and ownership of the films they had done together. By the time Frame Up was completed, for which Jon English wrote the music and I did some sound work, the two of them were completely separated.  But, in late 1994, Jon asked me to come to Vienna to begin work on Albrechts Flügel, a film about a second violinist in the Wiener Symphoniker, a person who, like so many of us, comes close to greatness, almost achieving it, but who is painfully aware that they will never succeed.  It is so sad to me that this movie never came to fruition.  The music was to have been an integral part of the film, part of the narrative and a lens through which the characters saw the world.  Jon and I talked many times about the music and the ideas in the film.  I worked with one of the actors, an amateur violinist, and I started to work on some music, including what became the Albrechts Flügel suite of piano pieces.  This, I thought, would be the next step in our artistic relationship, a close partnership from the beginning of the film, hinted at in Bed, but taken even further.  But the film fell apart when Jon discovered some irregularities in the handling of the financing for the film.  I was never clear exactly what happened, but he left Austria and settled in Rome, where he finished Uno a me, uno a te e uno a Raffaele.  

Soon after, Jon turned away from narrative films, playing with the flexibility and affordability of cheap digital cinema, first with Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa, a beautiful meditation on a fishing village in Portugal, and later London Brief.  I worked with Jon on the latter film, but only from a distance.  I wrote a number of pieces, all electronic works, based on what I saw in his early drafts. I gave him a free hand in using those excerpts, placing them where he wanted, cutting and adjusting them.  I know he liked the intimacy and control of the new medium, that he could sit and work and recut and change everything at his computer by himself without having to worry about cutting room rental costs, sound engineers, and so on.  I think, in his heart, Jon wishes he could do it all himself.  He wrote the music for some of his early films and has a strong musical sensibility and, finally, is a person with a strong overall vision.

Since that time, I have contributed music for a couple of his films after his return to narrative filmmaking: Homecoming and La Lunga Ombra. I'm sure that, sooner or later and his recent cancer scare notwithstanding, I'll do more.  But because of our separation - Jon is in Korea these days - and the lack of money available for Jon's work and therefore for my time, there hasn't been quite the same level of connection as when we did Bed and Sure Fire, when we used to play table tennis together (Jon and I are both very competitive) and talk in detail about the films and how the music should act in them.  Maybe it can happen again.  I hope it does.

photo by mica scalin

Mordake Suite Number Two

Dearest friends, folks and loved ones,

I know you are waiting with bated breath, on the edge of your seat, knuckles white in anticipation for the curtains to rise, the lights to come up, the orchestra to begin, and the full throated roar of the singer to announce the premiere of the latest work from the pen of Der Wold but, please, hold, calm down, be patient; all your desires will be sated so very soon, but first, you must endure one more gol-durned Mordake pre-pre-preview concert. Once again, Mark Alburger takes up the baton and conducts the SFCCO in a suite from Mordake, although this time not the prettiest sections, but those parts most dark and most evil, a stain on the very heart of music itself, a stain that will not wash off no matter how much we scrub and scrub with the latest detergents, oxidizers and antimicrobial agents.

San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra
and Old First Concerts Present:
"MARCH MADNESS"
Saturday March 8, 2007 at 8 pm
Old First Concerts
1751 Sacramento Street/Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94109
$15 General, $12 Seniors (65 and older), $12 Full Time Students

Tickets are available through the Old First Concerts Box Office at (415) 474-1608, online at oldfirstconcerts.org and at the door. For more information, please call
Old First Concerts box office or visit SFCCO at http://www.sfcco.org.

Lunacy. Spaciness. Taking 20 years to write a piece. Thinking that music will save the planet. Having a face in the back of one's head. Suicidal thoughts. Why do we do what we do? Because we can't do otherwise? One thing's for sure: it's a crazy world. So come celebrate the craziness with Alexis Alrich, Michael Cooke, Philip Freihofner, Dan Reiter, Martha Stoddard, Erling Wold, and the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra as they present "March Madness"!

Michael Cooke's Sun & Moon is a dizzying take on time and place, with members of the orchestra performing spacilly and spatially at the point-and-click discretion of Music Director Mark Alburger. Martha Stoddard, as Guest Conductor, will take the ensemble even farther out in A Little Trip to Outer Space where reality has lost its bearings. The entire orchestra will evaporate in the clangor of metal as Philip Freihofner re-invents sanity in The Bell Field, while Dan Reiter's Toccata and Fugue will send minds reeling under the direction of Associate Conductor John Kendall Bailey toward a reckoning with Johann Sebastian Bach. Farthest afield on earth will be Alexis Alrich's Fragile Forests: II Cambodia, where East and West consciousnesses collide in the loveliest possible manner. And, as a final coup-de-grace Erling Wold will evoke the diabolical in Mordake Suite No. 2, in hint of his mad opera to be premiered later in the year.

Alexis Alrich Fragile Forests: II Cambodia
Michael Cooke Sun & Moon
Philip Freihofner The Bell Field
Lisa Prosek Chain Saw
Dan Reiter Toccata and Fugue
Martha Stoddard A Little Trip to Outer Space
Erling Wold Mordake Suite Number 2

Torture of the damned

Mother Jones published an interesting object, seen below.  It purports to be the music of the twist and the  screw: our tax dollars payed out for the most genteel of purposes. It reminded me of Gavin Bryars explanation for self-publishing, to keep control over his works so they wouldn't be performed in the then-pariah state of apartheid South Africa.  I can't imagine Rage Against the Machine - especially - being too happy about their inclusion on this list. Music, like any other form of torture, should be applied only to those who request it of you. Even though I, like most right-minded™ folks, believe that information wants to be free, I do think it is a somewhat naive misunderstanding of the value of author's rights, even moral rights, to think that it is all about BitTorrent-ing the latest episode of Project Runway. In fact, the greatest threat could be your government or the big bad corporations stealing your artistic handiwork to use for nefarious purposes, from the selling to unthinking consumers the means of their own destruction to the hired scourgers of our various Ministries of Justice, Peace and Defense using it to destroy some poor schmuck who happened to piss off the wrong tribal elder when the company fellows started doling out greenbacks for information. And I have some fear for my friend Frieder, whose performance previous to my opera this spring will be in Pakistan. Will his Pakistani visa's presence on his Old Europe passport land him a lengthy stay in a Navy brig, with cold iron manacles and cold iron door that even his most earnest magic cannot pass through, listening to the Barney Theme Song until he confesses to a host of misdeeds?

Advice to young composers

if no orchestra will play your music, don't complain; start your own orchestra
if no one will review your music, don't complain; start your own journal
if no one will publish your music, don't complain; start your own publishing company
if no opera house will produce your music, don't complain; start your own opera house
if no one will fund your music, don't complain; fund your music yourself
if no one will publicize your music, don't complain; publicize your music yourself
if no one will buy your music, don't complain; buy your music yourself
if no one will listen to your music, don't complain; listen to your music yourself

Tune of the day

Brightness 2

Death as happiness, death as sadness

My friend and myself at the Edwardian ball in a photo taken by Lynne last weekend, similar in our stiff and wooden disposition. More here. The crowd was a bit gothic, although not as much as the Meat vs. Death Guild romp at DNA lounge a few weeks ago, celebrating death's warm embrace at least in choice of fashion and desaturated makeup.

But is Death is now a welcome guest? Heading off to hear Carla Kihlstedt play the premiere of Jorge Liderman's Furthermore... tonight on a somber note after his decision to place himself in front of an oncoming train yesterday. Although still "under investigation" it seems that he was sadder than his music. Hopefully he will now find some peace. My wife once told me that the fact that there was an exit available to her when she needed it kept her going through parts of her youth. I've thought about that many times over the years. Life is hard for all of us, but the life of a modern composer is that of a misfit, unloved and unwanted by most, if in fact 'most' even are aware that such an animal exists.

Tune of the day

Albrechts Flügel Number 2

Stockhausen my Stockhausen

Tomorrow, Thursday at 6 pm PST on Bunnywhiskers, Thom Blum and Jim Bisso and I will be saluting the passing of the gun carriage carrying the mortal remains.

Update: here's the show podcast. The show itself should reach Sirius in 8.6 ± 0.04 years.

Once there was a boy

Theological, phrenological, surgical

John Duykers performing I'm no murderer from Mordake at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, 10th of January 2008. Libretto by Douglas Kearney, directed by Melissa Weaver, production by matt:matt, costume by Kathleen Crowley, with some buzzy extra sounds from Thom Blum, filming by James Bisso, with a backdrop of an altered photo taken by Lynne of a bedroom of the Reutlinger House.

I wrote the gender changing software used at the end - a phase vocoder with formant shifting - for Korporate Marionettes. In this aria, Edvard Mordake tries to shuffle off responsibility for beating his man onto The Other, his shadow, his sister. The text setting in this opera is turning out to be a bit different for me, less driven by the prosody and with more common meters instead of the different-meter-on-every-bar or melodies floating in their own rhythmic world above more regular but still less common meters. Maybe this is because Douglas's words are more poetic and less prose-like than my usual texts. One unintended but happy result is that there is much less need for a conductor.

akin to that of Antinous

Since the diminution of the Jesuit educational system, we artists can no longer count on the average audience understanding many Western cultural references that used to be taken for granted: the Classical, Mythological, Biblical, Shakespearean former pillars of cultural literacy. However, our librettist, in his bull-headedness, has chosen to ignore this fact, to eschew the requisite references to pop song lyrics and celebrity couplings and instead to rely on some of those very allusions, those facts unavailable to all of us whose education consisted merely of smoking dope in the girl's restroom and leaving thumbtacks on the teacher's chair until that sad day when social promotions pushed us out into the real world, woefully unprepared for highbrow operas. So, to remedy that, I will give a brief rundown of one that appears in the abridgement of Mordake which we are about to witness.

In the introduction, in reference to Edward Mordake himself, we find that "his face was that of Antinous." We ask: who is this Antinous? I say to you that he was a beautiful boy who, around about age 11, become the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, in the fashion of the day, following the Greek tradition of the eromenos, to wit, the idealized pederastic relationship between an adolescent boy and an adult man, both best friends forever and pure lovers, seen to be part of aristocratic moral and educational development, military training, and, of course, Intercrural Sex, which you can look up for yourself in any accurate biography of Honest Abe Lincoln. At around age 18, possibly in an attempt to save his beloved emperor, Antinous drowned in the Nile. Hadrian's grief was unbounded and, following in the footsteps of the great Alexander, had Antinous proclaimed a god. Worship was widespread throughout the empire. There were cities named after him, temples built for his worship, festivals in his honor, a constellation named after him (until the regularization of the constellations by the International Astronomical Union in the 1930s), and many many statues and coins and busts and gems bearing his likeness, all recording his famous pouting lips, considered his most distinctive feature.

My favorite quote about Antinous (although unrelated to the story at hand) is this homophobic number from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The deification of Antinous, his medals, statues, city, oracles, and constellation, are well known, and still dishonor the memory of Hadrian. Yet we may remark, that of the first fifteen emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.

Mordake Appears

Our teaser presentation of the Mordake opera took place Thursday night to hoots and hollers from a pretty friendly audience. Note: I can recommend such an audience to all budding theater folk. Plus we got the audience good and liquored up beforehand (which I also endorse). The production came together well and it looked good in the Intersection space. John moved me to tears in one spot; he can work it when he needs to. The technology all functioned, from the formant-shifting gender changing to the video to the wireless speakers and everything. I'll be putting up a video or two but for now I've included a short clip from the Making of where I prompt John for the courage to go forward.

Finally Stockhausen

I had dinner with Bunnywhiskers last Friday and she has asked me to do a Stockhausen tribute on her radio show sometime in the next few weeks. I'll talk about finding a brand spanking new and pristine copy of Klavierstück X in a sheet music store (now long gone as so many are) in downtown Los Angeles in the heady froth of the late 70s and immediately dashing home and cutting the fingers off some gloves to work my way through it, slowly, page by page, chordal glissando by painful chordal glissando, joyously drawing blood along the way. I'll tell her about the post-fire sale at the Tower Records at Berkeley in the early 80s where I was able to buy almost the entire DG Stockhausen catalog in white disco LP jackets (but I envied Everett Shock's copy of Sirius with the naked picture of the dear alien himself). And then the Tierkreis melodies - the music-box versions primarily - which sent me along the route of my own music box manipulations. And Momente, the LP I played every day while reading The Golden Bough, although isn't there something odd about listening to a fixed recording of a polyvalent piece of music, getting to know that particular performance so well that hearing the modules in a different order seemed wrong?

Which, since we are starting on a wander, reminds me of my sophomoric and adolescent pseudo-intellectualism where, having been force-fed the Wittgensteinian bologna about the lack of meaning of a private language, I took my recently purchased but yet unlistened-to copy of Daphnis and Chloe and played it for months at 45 RPM so when I finally heard the piece played normal-like, I would have a true private experience. Yes?

But do we all know Stockhausen's origin myth? I happened to see the original quote from the master of Darmstadt on Anablog, and here 'tis:

"I think that the culture of this planet has been mainly formed by visitors from Sirius, especially in the time between 9000 and 6000 B.C...I think that our main sources of present-day culture, as decadent as it may be in most parts of the planet, stem from visitors from Sirius whose main representatives were Isis and Osiris. Through a series of revelations which were at first quite nebulous, but have become more clear during the past few years, I know (as little as I know about details) that I have come from Sirius, myself."

My New Year's Resolution

is to survive from now till a week from Thursday: the Teaser showing of Mordake at the Intersection. It's a homecoming of sorts; I presented my very first chamber opera at the Intersection back in 1995. The Intersection is a beautiful intimate space and it's going to be great fun to put up a section of the piece there, also following the very important plan of getting everyone drunk enough beforehand to appreciate it all properly. But the survival issue comes from having a day job as well as a night job or maybe two lives in two parallel universes. Like Mordake, I can't seem to integrate both in healthy way. So far I've done it by stressing myself to the point of near death, working from morning until night on one and then from night to the week hours on the other, catching a bit of sleep and proceeding again.

The piece seems to be getting darker as we go further in. Maybe it's finding the horror tale it always was, that in our delight at working together we lost sight. I am seduced by the sounds and the music and the look and feel of it all, but it's been pulling me apart as well to face my dark self, waking up in a sweat in the night, just as children tremble and fear all
in the viewless dark.

One too many speedballs

Duykers and I have been sneaking coke and aspirin out from under the watchful eye of Melissa, our dear director. She seems to think it a symptom of unhealthfulness, and doth not accept our need of it for our creativological inventionity. But I say more and more and more and to follow it up with shots of icy cold Belvedere, poured down my open throat by a young lesbian, hand on my throat, an unseen assailant yanking back my hair. But this is the way we artists must move our world forward, innit?

The Mordake story has become more personal for me as we have proceeded. Mordake has a problem integrating a perceived feminine shadow-self; a typical Victorian who represses all his imperfections, his vices, sexuality, etc, and who wants his nature blocked off in neat gardens whose borders are at right angles. Is there a modern connection between us and him, that his faults come from this difference between who he really is and the image that he presents to the world? I know that I have struggled with integrating the so-called darker aspects of myself with those images carefully chosen, and as well integrating the masculine and feminine, qua engineer and artist (which is which is left as an exercise for the reader).

It's been great to see the piece come together. It's wonderful to hear Duykers sing it - so much better than hearing me sing it, even though I do like the sensation physique of the vibrations passing through my body, the Navier-Stokesian eddies forming about my glottis, like The Eternal Syllable of the Hindu. Matt Jones leaps up to satisfy each of our whims, cutting bits of paper dolls when we require it, tearing apart circuits and speakers, rigging floating gramophones and of course subversively continuing to prepare the way for our robot overlords.

Queer Filler

Fred Dodsworth: Why "Queer"?
Erling Wold: I loved this book when I read it 15 years ago. I just
identified with the character. I identified with the unrequited love in
it.
I was really taken with the language and the feeling of it, the emotion of
it.
Q: Tell me about the emotion.
A: It's an autobiographical novel. The character William Lee is
Burroughs, and he falls for this younger guy named Eugene Allerton who
is...
it's a little unclear what he is. He's either closeted or indifferent or a
hustler or something. He responds to Lee but he doesn't... kind of...
(Nervous chuckle.) He responds but not completely. Basically it's a
sad, unrequited love story. This is probably the best description of that
I've ever read, either in gay or straight or whatever literature. This is
actually one of my favorite kinds of stories.
Q: Why?
A: I like that emotion, that feeling where you're really drawn to
somebody and you just can't have them. (Nervous laughter.) I'm very
attracted to that kind of story and that kind of feeling. It's a very
romantic story.
In fact, Queer, the character, is a hopeless romantic. That's a big
part of the way it's done. Lee sings. Allerton only speaks. It's very
much Lee's story. The whole story is told from Lee's point of view. All
the characters are only there in as much as they are a reflection of what
Lee is feeling for that person at that moment. They're never presented in
any kind of three-dimensional way. He's kind of a boorish guy in some
ways.
He's kind of racist. He's an ugly American in Mexico City...
Q: Isn't this when Burroughs "accidentally" killed his wife?
A: He killed his wife and then became a writer. Allen Ginsberg
thinks she was committing suicide. They were playing William Tell with a
shot glass. Who knows? They were both drunk. He was an excellent shot.
It's unclear what was going on. Burroughs and his wife had a very
interesting relationship. They were very close. They were like soulmates,
but he was a pretty gay guy. This is a time when people didn't tend to
identify themselves as being gay, but he does. He's very outspoken about
it. He's very open about it and, in fact, he's angry with the world
because
it interferes with all the things that are important to him -- being gay,
being a junkie. The world gets in the way of that.
Q: Gay? Married?
A: Early in his life he was a big ladies man. He also liked men
from early on. At this time he's living in Mexico City with his wife but
he's totally going after all the Mexican boys he sees, plus this Allerton
guy, and he has this little circle of queer friends that hang around in
this
ex-patriot [sic: expatriate] bar community. I don't know what that all
means. Later in life he became a misogynist. He decided that women were
evil.
Q: Do you assume any responsibility when you promote this work?
A: I don't know if I take responsibility for every single thing but
I do like certain things about his worldview. They do connect with me. I
understand this idea that the world is in your way... that there're a lot
of
people who disapprove of what you're doing. That's VERY annoying.
Q: What is the responsibility of an artist?
A: I've come to believe you do it as a philanthropic gesture to the
world. You're not in it for yourself -- not doing the kind of thing that I
do -- that's not commercial. The only kind of reason I can see that makes
sense is that you're driven to do it, but also, hopefully, you're giving
people some cultural experiences that will be important to them. I think
there's a certain amount of social responsibility, but I think that just
comes from yourself. You just do things that are true to what you believe,
and that's as much as you do.
Q: Are you trying to teach social lessons?
A: I'm not -- except in the fact that the things I pick are what I
believe in. "I believe in this, but you can take it or leave it."
(Laughter.) I don't know that I'm trying to convince people. I know that
if you "touch" people, you tend to convince them of something that you
believe. I like that.
I think there's a place for social art. Some people who do it
transcend it. You have to have something to get you started. For some
people that's a social concept and for some people it's a theoretical
concept.
Q: Is this show audience-specific?
A: No, it's not.
Q: Even with a title like "Queer"?
A: It's an interesting title. In a way his use of the word "queer"
is more like "odd." He's an odd person. He's outside of whatever. More
than being queer like it is now, which is a political word. This is all
before that. It's weird. Oddball guy. It obviously means gay or fag or
whatever but... I think there's a universal aspect to the story. It's a
love story. It's also a crazy Burroughs' story. He goes on these large
flights of fantasy. Those are enjoyable.
But this piece is the first time I've ever had someone send me a
nasty note back from an e-mail announcement, saying, "Take me off your
mailing list," and sending a Bible verse along with it. I've done things
that were loaded in the past, that were questionable, but this is still a
topic that people get upset about.
Q: Do you think our local community still is homophobic?
A: Obviously. I think it's very strong. We're lucky we live in a
part of the world that's much more reasonable about these things. Outside
of this geographical area it's... very intense. Everybody knows this.
Q: I don't think everybody knows this. Let's go back to unrequited
love, is that the natural state of love?
A: Noooooo. This is not every aspect of my life, this is one
aspect. I think what attracted me is the strength of that emotion.
Emotions like jealousy, unrequited love, desire, longing, in some ways
those
are even stronger than when you settle in. I think those emotions are
stronger. I think I feel them more strongly. Since I come from a very
emotional place when I write music, I think the stronger emotions even
drive
me more.
Q: Are you trying to shock?
A: There's a certain appeal to shocking people, to saying there's
this aspect of life outside of what you normally think about. There are
aspects of living that are not discussed a great deal. I do like pieces
that touch on those things. Sometimes it's fun to shock people, just to
shock people. That doesn't interest me so much, although sometimes it's
fun. I like those certain aspects of life that are on the edge and I've
always had things that interest me a lot -- sexuality, dreams, religion.
It probably has something to do with the way I was raised. I was
raised in a Lutheran family. My father was a minister and my mother worked
in the church. Sometimes when you say to people you were raised in a
Christian family that seems like some horrible thing. It was actually very
pleasant. My parents were very considerate. In some ways they were more