By Popular Demand, the Gloria

More devils than birds in the sky

A great number of demons in the Vatican, some quite voluptuous, some rakish, some horrific, but all kinda appealing. While we all hope for an eternity spent in quiet contemplation of the Celestial Visage, the fires of Hell and the activities of its residents make a far more winsome subject for the visual arts.  

The Bed You Sleep In: A Warning

A favorite moment from The Bed You Sleep In, where Thomas Morris as the oracle has just hinted at Ray's impending doom. He recites a bit of Revelation 14 and we head off on one of Jon's landscape love-ins. Jon told me that the location of a story was as important to him as plot or character and deserved equal time. The music that starts about one minute into the clip is almost entirely derived from field recordings that Josh Rosen and I made of the local sawmill in Toledo, Oregon, now closed down because, as they discuss in the movie, you can't get any of the big trees anymore. (And why not, you ask? Because they really did clearcut the whole state and ship the uncut trees off to Japan.) But the sawmill was a beautiful aural environment. Walking through it was like listening to a futurist symphony and the raw recordings were beautiful, but of course I felt like I had to prettify it all a bit, and I think I was successful in that. I've bumped up the volume of the music in the clip so that it is a bit more intense, but you can hear the original music here or on the full soundtrack recording here.

soleil d'or

Since Jesus was assumed bodily into heaven, there aren't many bits of him available to venerate, but a lovely umbilical cord reliquary is just a block up from our Paris Apartment at the Cluny (see to the right: De Umbilico Domini Jesu Christi) and of course there are the many pretenders to the præputium scattered about Europe.

Yesterday's adventure was being allowed into the atelier and other sancta sanctorum of the Chateau de Versailles by Lynne's friend Laurent, a peintre décoratif who has the magical key that lets you through any door at the place. And, as a sign of special affection and respect, our friend Emily the gilder was given a large and faintly odorous piece of rabbit skin glue by one of the master gilders there, a two year supply for and a necessity for the lengthy but infinitely superior water gilding process. Whillikers, they use a ton of the stuff there to coat most every surface with gold and more gold, dogs of gold, arrows of gold, shields of gold, helmets of gold, and especially the golden rays of the sun to glorify the sainted King Louis, Le Roi Soleil.

And today, took a pilgrimage to IRCAM to visit Michael Fingerhut to talk about digital libraries and music information retrieval and life and death and get the ten dollar tour of the place, a place of my dreams for so many years, underneath the Place Igor Stravinsky, imagined as a place with stone steps worn by so many knees. Discovered today that Gérard Pape is director of CCMIX (Xenakis's UPIC) and have tried to get in touch but no luck yet. We corresponded a few years back when we found we had both written operas on Max Ernst's A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. I haven't heard it and I don't believe he has heard mine. Ah well. In trying to find Gérard's address, discovered that Matt Heckert had also considered an opera on the same book.

le baptème du sade

In Saint-Sulpice, where my dear friend and mentor Donatien Alphonse-François de Sade Marquis was christened on a balmy summer day early in the month of June (Prairial for my Republican readers) 1740 and where Marcel Dupré was the organist for many years. The Paris Meridian runs through the church and also through the gaggle of Dan Brown fans tapping the floor to find the secrets to the Sanct Grael hidden below. Went to ISMIR in Vienna last week. A lot of people using MFCCs for similarity just like the old Muscle Fish patent. Had dinner with my good friend Mariko Wakita who played the Marceline-Marie rôle in die Nacht wird kommen... in Klagenfurt and Brühl and the singing Jenny in Blinde Liebe. Richard Friedman is going to play the Mordake Suite #1 on Music from Other Minds on the weekend. Talked to Mrs. Childs about how "Freddy" Hundertwasser used to hang around her dining room window to see if they were eating so he could seem to be serendipitously stopping by and, oh, are you eating, why yes, I'll just have some bread with butter. Has anyone else noticed how most artists are poor during their life and are capitalized on after their death? Yes, of course, we all know.

The Flag of Appenzell

Faithful readers know that my Mass is premiering this fall in St Gallen, Switzerland. But they may not know that to the south of the city is the canton of Appenzell, represented by the flag above. In heraldry-speak: Argent, a bear rampant sable, armed langued and priapic in his virility gules. Translated: on a silvery white field, a bear is represented standing on one hind foot with its forefeet in the air, in profile, facing the dexter side, with right hind foot raised, in black, with red claws and erect penis of red tincture.


The bear on the flag is in fact that same bear previously discussed, shown in the above bas-relief befriending Gallus. Appenzell was a vassal state of the Abbot of St Gallen until 1403 when it threw off the yoke of the bear-loving abbey, retaining however a fondness for the bear, putting it in their flag but adding the bold red erection as a touch of defiance. The story goes that, in 1579, a printer in St Gallen removed the bear's hard-on from a collectible calendar, almost plunging the two sides into war until he toadied to the Appenzellers and the city agreed to destroy every copy it could find.

After writing the ordinary of the Mass, I decided to add an organ postlude. The Dom Cathedral has three organs, including two smaller baroque instruments in the choir, but the large organ is very beautiful, visually and aurally. It's a typical postlude, with a flamboyant opening, a memory from my youth listening to Norberto Guinaldo's florid improvisations, my own attempt a poor imitation. In the middle, it ventures into a more static territory, another poor imitation, this time reminiscent of Terry Riley's Shri Camel. Let's part with just a glimpse of it.

Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi

My Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi will be performed at the beautiful Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland on the Day of Repentance and Prayer (15 September). The Abbey was the commissioner of the piece, and it is thus named after one of their most famous, the musician and poet Notker Balbulus, aka Notker the Stammerer (840-912, beatified 1512). He is known as the first ethnically German composer of music and for publishing the first collection of Sequences, mnemonic poems for remembering the series of pitches sung during a melisma in plainchant, many composed by him. The stammering little monk "was so much loved by the monks of his abbey that for a long time after his death, they could not speak of him without shedding tears."

Some selections from the Mass were performed last Summer by the SFCCO and Schola Cantorum San Francisco. Here's a bit of it.

The Celestial Bridegroom

I was raised in a religious family and the iconography, the ritual, the warm embrace of Christianity are all felt strongly in me, but at a young age I was seduced by art, literature, even by seduction itself; in my dreams, the symbols of one and the other, its shadow, were mixed and confused, synthesizing a new self, more base, less seraphic, a fallen angel who shall never enter into paradise but, like Moses, will die while gazing upon the promised land, the celestial city, a place of joy where honey flows like water. The ecstasy of religion has been replaced by other ecstasies, those of the flesh, and those of the intellect, poor substitutes to be sure but, haven fallen so far and for so long, I have little else. The operas come from this place, mixing these worlds, the sounds formed by the slowly fading echoes of true religion, the cries of fleshly delight, the resonating in the hollowness of my soul.

I look now for salvation in many places. Rimbaud's life teaches me (O Lord, O Celestial Bridegroom, do not turn thy face from the confession of the most pitiful of thy handmaidens. I am lost. I'm drunk. I'm impure. What a life! ) and I find some comfort in Robert Glück's Margery Kempe, a beautiful juxtaposition of sexual obsession and religious obsession, where he and the earliest English autobiographer both seek sainthood through a union both sacred and profane, imagining their coupling with their own Celestial Bridegrooms and, finally, from my own work, the section of that title, der Himmlische Bräutigam, so wonderfully evoked by Josef Oberauer, wearing a pink thong and platform shoes, lifting him just that much more towards heaven.