February 09, 2010
Viewpoint: Animal Collective releases new film, 'ODDSAC' - BYU Newsnet
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Massive Attack's 'Heligoloand': Clarity cuts through the darkness on band's ... - New York Daily News
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Great Britten - The Herald Great Britten The Herald From then on it was music -making of the highest level, with Steve Reich's Duet showing these highly-talented string players having a real ball in music ...
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Not An Animal
Sound Clip: Not An Animal by Michael Peters
This is a slowed down recording of a thermos bottle of hot tea that released tiny amounts of steam from its not-completely-closed lid. There are addition al dubbed in recordings of birds. This recording was made in southern Germany in a quiet hotel room.
More on Michael Peters
Originally
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Internalizing Absurdity
My CD of
The Planets has arrived. One friend has already received the copy he ordered directly from
Meyer Media . You can hear some excerpts there, and I've left two movements up on my web site as teasers:
Venus and
Uranus . And I thought I'd brag a little about what I did in Uranus, one of my favorite movements.
Uranus, in astrology, is the planet of individuality and unexpected events. When Uranus hits your chart, strange and unpredicted things happen to you, indicating that your life has become so mired in habit that it no longer reflects who you are, and - uncomfortable as it may be - you're going to have to get out of your ruts. So I wrote a piece rippling with unexpected events, some sudden nonsequitur every few measures, except that these little fragments reappear so often that you start getting used to them. Finally, there's one of the
weirdest passages I've ever written (click to hear it in isolation), a collage of one-measure and half-measure fragments from all these ideas making, in itself, no sense whatever:
But by now, I hope, you've heard all these fragments so many times that they don't sound so strange anymore; you've internalized all this absurdity and are ready to live with it. The piece then breaks into the first passage I've written in decades in which the players improvise, a joyous moment of freedom (though over a B-flat sus chord).
You can hear the whole movement
here . If you think it's comical, I completely agree. I laughed my head off writing Uranus.
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February 08, 2010
Sounds Heard: Phyllis Chen—UnCaged Toy Piano
By Frank J. Oteri Phyllis Chen's debut CD,
Uncaged Toy Piano , mixes old and new solo pieces and works featuring toy piano in combination with a CD player, a toy boombox (cute), a music box, a frying pan, and bowls; not quite the kitchen sink, but close enough.
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Live review: These New Puritans - NME.com Live review: These New Puritans NME.com But it isn't until the gentle, lapping Steve Reich minimalism of '5' that the band depart, leaving the crowd to go nuts in a suitably primal bout of ...
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March Events Presented by the UAB Department of Music - UAB News
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Mahler as Straphanger Henry-Louis de La Grange, in the fourth volume of his epic Mahler biography, summarizes the recollections of one Otto Wantuch, a director of the Hotel Majestic , Mahler’s first home in New York:
One winter afternoon a young man managed to gain access to Mahler’s rooms and asked to play him his latest opera, a work peopled by “supermen.” With exemplary patience Mahler sat him down at the piano, but as the composer presented his score and characters he grew increasingly nervous. Finally, just as the principal leitmotif was about to repeat itself, Mahler touched him on the shoulder and said, “Such superhuman work demands superhuman ears.” He then left the room. Wantuch also recalls an example of Mahler’s absent-mindedness: once, he stayed on the subway until 140th Street instead of getting off at 72nd Street.
The stations in question no longer exist: the Ninth Avenue Elevated came down in 1940. Mahler probably realized that something was amiss when he went around Suicide Curve .
Originally
posted by Alex Ross
from Unquiet Thoughts ,
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Collective bargaining Reviewing the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. Boston
Globe , February 8, 2010.
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Music As Brain Food
In the last few years, it seems like there's been a surge of interest in music and the human brain. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks jump-started the conversation with his remarkable 2007 book,
Musicophilia , which was part scientific examination of how our brains process and react to music, and part deeply personal memoir of the author's own lifelong love of classical music.
Sacks also showed up on an episode of WNYC's radio show/podcast
Radiolab (which I can't recommend highly enough, by the way) to talk about a British man with "
the most severe case of amnesia ever documented ." Remarkably, while the man had forgotten nearly every detail of his life, down to the names of his children, and could barely speak coherently, he could remember how to read music, sing, and even conduct a choir!
I've been fascinated by the way the brain processes music since the summer when I was 15 years old. I was attending a summer music camp at which we were encouraged, on Sunday mornings, to walk down the hill into the tiny town the camp was in, and become the summer choir at the village church. I loved to sing, and loved the people who attended the church, so I never missed a Sunday, even though I had little interest in the actual service.
But that summer, the church had just lost its pastor to a larger church in another part of the state, so an interim pastor had been appointed while a permanent replacement was sought. The fill-in was named Jed, as I recall, and he seemed like a wonderful and caring man, but he had a terrible stutter that nearly prevented him from being able to speak complete sentences. His condition was ameliorated by an electronic device, but it still made his sermons a challenge for everyone involved.
But the very first week I attended one of Jed's services, I was dumbstruck to see him open a hymnal and sing along with the choir, in full, unstuttering voice. So long as the words were married to a melody, he never missed a beat. A few weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him about it, and he explained that, because music is processed by a different part of the brain than language, people with his condition could frequently leave their stutter behind when singing. Remarkable.
Late last year, a new scientific paper was published that really gets into the nitty-gritty of how we hear various kinds of music, and why, evolutionarily, we even bother with the stuff at all. You can get the
full paper here , but unless you're actually a scientist, you may have better luck with
this excellent summary by science writer Jonah Lehrer. Here's the money graf:
"There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality. All of which could help explain why fans of one kind of music have trouble understanding or liking another, or why someone who listens to a lot of Stravinsky and Bartok might have an easier time deciphering Schoenberg than someone who listens to a lot of Mozart and Haydn. The real bottom line seems to be that our brains are designed to be exercised, and respond best when regularly challenged. And yes, I'm already trying to work out a way to insert this whole concept into next season's
ItC concerts...
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LACHSA GALA
From a school of 579 students in music, art, and dance, we heard a GALA concert (read: everyone plays) with 203 high school musicians. WOW!
We heard a jazz band, a gospel choir, an opera excerpt, three piano soloists interspersed, the concert choir, a very large orchestra (!!!), and saw inspired and gifted teachers and leaders. The performances, yes they are young, were on a very high level. I am thrilled that LA can have such a terrific institution, and I encourage all donors to consider making a donation.
Mark and I sat through the 3 and a half hour concert without ever getting bored. It was so fascinating to watch and focus on individual young musicians, seeing their energy and musicality, seeing who are the young Elvises or Madonnas, the Chet Bakers (yes! there was one) and the cool jazzers, already thick with attitude.
I felt I was witnessing the ur-Glee .
I was impressed that the audience listened in rapt attention to the three piano solos, all brilliantly played. I would have imagined that the parents would lean towards jazz and yawn at the classical: but no, these are parents who paid to have their kids go to an arts school. They LOVE the arts. Silly me.
This is a high school where ALL the students are in the arts. There is no Marching Band or football team. Sounds like a dream to those of us who didn’t have that luxury. They are all shapes and sizes and ethnicities. One of the most remarkable observations I made last night was that the students seemed really happy. Most just beamed a kind of happiness. After the curtain went down after the grand finale, we heard a huge WHOOOOOOO from behind the curtain of 203 deliriously happy students who just put on a great concert.
There was another level for me. Dr Dan Castro is the musical and organizational force behind this program. I was Dan’s Chair for his Masters and Doctoral degrees at UCLA. In front of a near sold out Luckman Theater on the Cal State LA campus, Dr Castro publicly thanked me for being a mentor and teacher. He also acknowledged Mark Carlson for whom he was a TA, and Jackie DjeDje, Chair of Ethnomusicology. UCLA got a warm applause from the appreciative audience, many obviously proud parents.
So, in a sense, I felt like a grandfather of the event, or better, a godfather. And to be thanked is always a nice thing.
Take a listen to what they do.
This is NOT indicative of what we heard last night, I found this reading of a student arrangement of “Turning Japanese” [do they KNOW what that means??] scored for full orchestra.
src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rogerbourlandcom/~4/E5KqyEA5xDU" height="1" width="1"/>
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His uke gently weeps, and that's just a start - San Diego Union Tribune
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Miller Theatre listens to Lou Reed's experimental soundtrack - CU Columbia Spectator
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Roman Maciejewski: Missa pro defunctis - Musical Criticism
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In an intimate space, an intricate performance fit for a king - Boston Globe
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HFM doctors take to the stage - Herald Times Reporter HFM doctors take to the stage Herald Times Reporter Pediatrician Dr. Amy Stockhausen starting singing when she was 3 years old and playing piano when she was 5. She has performed in musicals, was a member of ... and more »
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Goings on About Town: Art - New Yorker Goings on About Town: Art New Yorker In this exhibition, the first in this country to focus on Xenakis's graphic work, scores look like architectural plans, and musical compositions incorporate ...
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February 07, 2010
Maciejewski's Requiem - The Guardian Maciejewski's Requiem The Guardian ... at the Warsaw Conservatory of Lutoslawski , Roman Maciejewski (1910-1998) is claimed by some as the forgotten genius of 20th-century Polish music , ... and more »
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Britten Sinfonia/Padmore at West Road Hall, Cambridge - Times Online
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E is for Echo Echo, the nymph, is a blank. We do not know her. In Ovid, she acts (speaks) but is not noticed, as Ovid gives her no personality other than unconditional love and timidity, only to give herself to an unconditionally conceited Narcissus. We know Narcissus too well; indeed there is nothing more empty in us than when we echo Narcissus.
But echo, the sound, need not be a blank. It carries additional information: the time and strength of the delay, the resonances of the intervening spaces. And that additional information is key to its musical utility, imitation being the basis of some of the most elementary techniques for creating musical complexity, with timing, strength, re-iteration and additional forms of transformation available to create a field of echo-based forms, from call and response and canon to the most elaborately and densely networked and transfigured forms of imitation.
In my electronic music youth, every manner of echo (from spring reverbs and echoing acoustical chambers and tape loops to the first commercial analog and digital delay systems) was useful and exciting. But eventually — and, not coincidentally, as everything got, technologically, much easier — some boredom set in. Echo had become too familiar and the imagined opposite of an echo — a system with prescience rather than memory — was impossible.
Originally
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Peterloo Massacre - Peterloo Massacre Peterloo Massacre’s self-titled debut album, I thought that this was a typical mix of ambient and electro-pop albeit a very good one. It wasn’t until the second track that the cracked but sensuous voice of KiN and the orchestral electronics of Paul Green really got to me. Add on bass, drums and KiN’s own sparse guitar work and you have a delicious mix of rock, electronica, and slightly dark trip-hop. Equal bits of Radiohead, Lamb, and Portishead mix with the unusual voice and electronic backing. I especially like KiN’s soulful meanderings on “Giving Feelings” and “Warmed Body” is a cinematic sauna of sounds. Highly recommended.
The album is available in MP320kbps MP3 from the Headphonica netlabel.
Download
Originally
posted by Marvin
from Free Albums Galore ,
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Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music - Bwog (blog) Bwog (blog) Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music Bwog (blog) A tidal wave of sound hit Miller Theater last night during Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music —an orchestral rendition of Reed's 1975 avant-garde album of the ...
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UMKC composer Zhou Long's opera, 'Madame White Snake,' premieres this month in ... - California Chronicle
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Merce's legacy - Columbus Dispatch Columbus Dispatch Merce's legacy Columbus Dispatch "He'd always been avant-garde , but by the 1980s, he was beginning to be accepted as a master." Cunningham, born in 1919 in Centralia, Wash., was the third ...
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Maciejewski's Requiem: the white elephant we all feared - Telegraph.co.uk (blog)
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Present Music mixes it up for party performance - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Seattle Chamber Players | On the Boards Seattle know that there are two organizations which have been dedicated to presenting new and interesting works from around the world for over 20-years: On the Boards Seattle Chamber Players
February 26-28: SCP will be performing five concerts in three days featuring new music from Italy, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Denmark, and Iceland. It is all part of their Icebreaker series and this set of concerts is subtitled “Love and War” – all the details can be found here .
And then…
March 4-6: SCP return to On the Boards for special collaboration with Pacific Musicworks Heiner Goebbels . More information about these performances can be found here .
There is no question that the Seattle Chamber Players founder and flutist, Paul Taub , has been one of the most influential figures in Seattle’s contemporary music scene for a long time. I was able to get Paul on the phone for a few minutes back in June and I’m happy to finally share it with all of you now. Like most of my interviews with musicians, we talked about composer-performer relationships, but it’s also interesting to hear him speak a little about the Seattle Chamber Players’ dedication to contemporary music from Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. You can download or listen to the audio here .
Originally
posted by James Holt
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'Northern roots' musician begins stint at UI today - Urbana/Champaign News-Gazette
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More work on Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming Play it:
Originally
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Erasing the Timeline Thus spake Robert Ashley:
We have recently - about fifty years ago - come upon a new idea in thinking about music, but I think it is not even approached in theory. This new idea does not use the
timeline score.... reaction to the practice of non-timeline music, particularly in the form of "minimalism" and "postromanticism," came not more than ten years after a lot of composers started doing non-timeline music. In other words, non-timeline music was very important and, in the case of the reaction to it, something
perhaps to be feared. As if some composers were leading us in the wrong
direction and things had to be corrected. It's true, of
course, that "time" passes while music is being played and while it is being
listened to. But in non-timeline music (the drone) the time passing is not
"attached to" the playing or the hearing. Time passes in the consciousness of
the listener according to internal or external markers. The feeling of
timelessness can be created in a traditional timeline score using an extreme
version of the timeline technique. That is, by pushing the timeline technique
to an extreme of what can be written in a timeline score, I remember this,
without being able to cite examples, from certain Earle Brown scores. The one
example I can cite is Somei Satoh's Kyokoku . In this score for voice and orchestra
Satoh uses a very slow tempo (twenty beats per minute) and allows that in
certain sustained sections the conductor can slow the tempo even more, or can
stop the tempo entirely. In these sections the feeling of timelessness is
evoked.... Non-timeline makes
no attempt to keep the attention of the listener. It exists as if apart from
the attention of the listener. The listener is free to come and go. When the
listener attends to the music, there is only the "sound." The sound is
everything. When the listener is away, the music exists anyway. This is
certainly a new idea.... I have called this
new idea the "drone," because there is no better term that is not a neologism -
like non-timeline music. I have said that I use the term "drone" to mean any
music that seems not to change over time.
Or music that
changes so slowly that the changes are almost imperceptible. Many composers
make this kind of music. The best known to me, offhand, are Behrman, Lucier, Radigue,
Tone, Payne, Bischoff, Hamilton, along with others. Or music that has
so many repetitions of the same melodic-harmonic pattern that the pattern is
clearly secondary to another aspect of the form. Philip Glass's early music is
a good example. (Glass recently has more and more reverted to the timeline
style.) The non-timeline
concept has permeated my music, though because of my deep involvement with
speech rhythms and opera, I have not composed much music that is pure
non-tineline.
My early music -
prior to 1980 - is much more clearly exploring the non-timeline concept. After
1980, when opera became the most important fact of my work, I began using
certain aspects of the traditional score to coordinate many performers' actions
(musical events) at any moment in the linear time pattern. I am still trying to
escape from that constraint, but so far unsuccessfully.... What is in the
nature of non-timeline music in the operas is the technique of allowing the
harmony to continue for so long in a particular aria that harmony loses its
traditional meaning.... The purpose is to
create an intense self-consciousness in the listener, a kind of "meditative"
state of mind. Of course, as in meditation, as I understand it, the attention
in the listener will change constantly and is the responsibility of the
listener. The composition exists "apart from" the listener, a musical fact to
be observed and appreciated at the will of the listener.... In a simplistic
explanation of "non-timeline" music the composer's purpose is dedicated to the sound of the work. The sound is everything. The
sound has no temporal dimensions. It exists apart from the listener's
participation. In non-timeline music nothing happens. The sound is simply
there. [Variations on the "Drone," 2004; pp. 114-124]
The "drone" is one
of the special contributions to musical technique in the second half of the 20th century. I use the term "drone" - though most composers who will be named below
will resent the term - because I can't invent another term or phrase that is
not just musical jargon and that is not more understandable. The drone has two
pronounced characteristics. The first and most obvious is an unchanging, or
barely changing, pitch. This characteristic, notably, is also the rarest among
various composers' "signatures." Most composers moved away from the unchanging
pitch technique almost as soon as they got involved with the drone.... Fundamentally the
drone disregards pitch change. And so the musical time seems to stop. This lack
of eventfulness is a challenge to the listener that the composer of any form of
drone music must live with (and/or "solve" by some other technique).... A second
characteristic of the drone, but I think part of the same tendency, is a
quality of unchanging tonal "color"; that is, an unchanging instrumental sound,
regardless of what other elements of musical composition are employed. One
could name any number (a large number) of composers who work in this area.
These composers have abandoned the "narrative" or "dramatic" notion of the
orchestra as a collection of "characters".... The drone seems
peculiarly American. The reasons are probably many. No American
ensemble would play any living composer's music in the 1950s, and so any new
technique that deviated from the performer's conservatory training was
discouraged. One could call that situation a form of poverty (for the composer)
and a deciding factor in the invention of a new technique. But, of course,
historically poverty has produced a lot of changes in music. Another reason, I
believe, was the American composer's unusual interest in the music of other
cultures, particularly (because they were available on records) the various
musics of Southeast Asia, the various musics of Africa and the various musics
of the marginal black and marginal white isolated cultures in the United
States. And all of these musics seemed to have fewer "changes" and a simpler
"architecture" than the music we had inherited from the concert stages of
Europe. But most important,
I think, was the advent of electronic music. Prior to the use of electricity
the energy source for music was physical (human) and the limitations on that
energy source had to be accommodated in the music. The music had to rest, had
to be softer for awhile, had occasionally to be texturally less dense. With a
new source of energy coming from the local utility company all of that changed.
Conceptually, the music could go on at any level of intensity forever....
I hope that by
excerpting from much longer articles I haven't created a false impression of
any of Bob's ideas. Those inclined to criticize might want to consult the
complete originals before so doing. We have a paucity of narratives for what's happened in music in the last 60 years, and this one, from one of the era's major
players, is particularly valuable. I've written my own narrative, of course,
which Bob's conflicts with at several points. Of particular interest is that,
having come from the revolutionary, score-rejecting ONCE festival scene of the
'60s, he lumps much minimalist music into the conservative reaction against that scene. Coming along myself in
the '70s, I think of the '60s, '70s, and early '80s as the great liberal era in
music's history, whereas for Bob the '70s were already a turning back towards
comforting convention. Not having been there, I can only honor his perspective.
Of particular
importance is his concept of the drone , which does indeed draw a sharp line through the group of
composers lumped into the generic term minimalism, separating traditional
timeline composers like Andriessen and Adams off from the more radical
composers like Niblock and Behrman (and Charlemagne Palestine? though Bob never
mentions him) who compose unchanging (or slowly changing) sounds. This division
is one the Society for Minimalist Music will want to confront at some point. I
hope to bring this Ashleyan critique to bear in my contribution to our 2011
conference in Leuven. Whenever someone tells me that someone they know in
academia is "sympathetic to minimalism," I always wonder: you mean simply that
they've learned to re-accept diatonicism in timeline music? or have they fully
realized that the drone is an important new listening model? If only the first, I'm not impressed.
(Of course, my own
music is less radical than the music Bob champions in these descriptions.
After some early forays into Riley-like free repetition, I became rather
addicted to the timeline. I've always been more interested in refining our
perception of pitch and rhythm within a conventional format than in larger
exploration of form and modes of listening. And yet I sometimes - I could cite
my pieces Solitaire , Kierkegaard Walking , Implausible Sketches , Time Does Not
Exist , Cosmic Boogie-Woogie - use the timeline to create what I think of as a drone-like effect, in
which the continuing sound
of a melodic complex changes internally but not externally, and the linear
succession of sound complexes, if any, is almost arbitrary, as in the old joke "Time is
God's way of keeping everything from happening all at once." Bob's
categories are different from mine but compelling, and give me a lot of food
for thought. I hope they do for you too.)
Originally
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Akram Khan dance masterpiece 'GNOSIS' in Abu Dhabi - Middle East Online
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Glare in Rear-View Finished Lunar Glare rushed ), so there is a seam or two that I ‘let out’ just slightly.ish , anyway . . . my first action (adding a new measure, in which I planned to create a 3/4 measure to replace two 2/4 measures, and thus lose a quarter-note’s worth of the overlong rest) did something weird with two ossia bars on the same line, but I found a work-around without undue mental taxation. [ click for larger image ]
Afterwards, I went for an hour’s walk. The air was invigoratingly fresh, but it was sunny and there was not much wind.
Originally
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Listening Post /Brief reviews of select releases - Buffalo News
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from lutoslawski OR xenakis OR boulez OR Dutilleux OR ligeti OR "elliott carter" OR stockhausen OR "steve reich" OR "tristan murail" AND music - Google News ,
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FINE ARTS: 'Our Town' now opera at BW - The Morning Journal FINE ARTS: 'Our Town' now opera at BW The Morning Journal Cast members will also perform the music between and during acting chores. “Intimate Apparel,” which had a successful, highly acclaimed run at Cleveland ...
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Pacifica Quartet enjoys varied styles - Deseret News Pacifica Quartet enjoys varied styles Deseret News Up to now they've done cycles of Elliott Carter , Felix Mendelssohn and Ludwig van Beethoven, and they're about to do Dmitri Shostakovich's complete quartet ...
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Hymn Transformations - Lo How a Rose Play it:
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D is for Drift Lesson of a late January snowstorm: you can't shovel the same snowdrift twice . La Monte Young: Drift Study : analog oscillators slowly, naturally drift out of phase from one another, calling attention to the emergence of complexity and detail in the most reduced Phasing in early Steve Reich, first in the analog tape works, then in gradual, player-controlled phasing. A move (drift, even) from informal to formal methods, from continuous to striated time; a piece like Piano Phase emulates aspects of drift, but is too controlled and directional to be drift. There's still plenty of good music to be made in the continuum between accidental and intentional drift.
*****
Paul Chihara: Driftwood (for string quartet with two violas): not a related process, but still a useful image.
*****
I heard quite a good performance of Morton Feldman's Why Patterns? Friday evening, a piece that shocked a generation ago with its asynchronous barlines (read more about them here ), the players inevitably, yes, drifting apart, but is now just sweet music with as variegated and eventful a landscape as Feldman ever produced. (Whenever things approached familiarity, i.e. the patterns approached articulation at the surface, some surprising move would be made, usually involving a sudden change in registration or speed of articulation.) One concern: the glockenspiel used was a very fine, state-of-the-art instrument, in-tune and well-balanced in tone throughout the entire range of the instrument, never displaying the typical mechanical clunk produced by standard glockenspiels; the poor little glock has drifted into high quality. Feldman wrote with that not-quite-in-tune, awkward, and clunky instrument in mind; does that make performances like this one — as beautiful as it was — unidiomatic?
*****
The best conversations drift. Conversations don't have the formal burdens of interviews or essays, of having direction, sustained themes and dialectical movement and all that. Dale Pendell's Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown is a nice record of the best conversationalist (and finest teacher) that I have known.
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February 06, 2010
Healthy discord - National Healthy discord National But in a world that has seen such raw experimenters as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen – not to mention the everyday onslaught of electronic dance music ...
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Massage Chair Groove
Sound Clip: Massage Chair by Matthias Ebbinghaus
Recording made in the year 2000 and sped up by 100% into an octave higher.
More on Matthias Ebbinghaus
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from Sound is Art ,
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On tour with Ensemble Ilusis Tomorrow I fly to Baton Rouge to start the inaugural tour of Ensemble Ilusis. Three composer/performers will go to four universities in Louisiana/Mississippi over the next week. It should be a lot of fun. And it will be a lot like any tour of a garage band: we’re losing a bunch of money on the deal but it is All About the Music! If you are anywhere in the area, I’d love to see you there. I’m pretty sure all the concerts are free admission, too.
I’ll be pimpin’ scores and CDs: free to anyone who asks. I don’t want to come home with all the stuff I’m taking.
RE: RPG Challenge, check out my first completed track titled Menifee. I’ll put up more when I have more.
d.com/jaybatzner/menifee">Menifee by jaybatzner
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New Piece - Par-Delà des Eaux Profondes for Baritone Sax and Electronics I've just finished a new piece for baritone saxophone and electronics called Par-Delà des Eaux Profondes. It's totally nuts psycho-classicism, quartertones galore and harsh Led Zep/prog-rock climaxes. The piece was written for the Czech sax player, Kateřina Pavlíková and she plans on touring with it in a video/interactive graphics setting created by her visual artist husband. I'm definitely going to be cutting a bit here and there and polishing up the mix but this is pretty much how it's going to sound.
Par-Delà des Eaux Profondes for Baritone Sax and Electronics - Realization
I recently contributed a track and helped promote a great project to help the folks of Haiti in their time of crisis, New Music Haitian Relief . The short electronic piece I created was called For Erzulie Dantor and you can preview it here. It's a great project and we've already raised close to a thousand dollars so please consider picking it up if you like the track(s).
Composer and Pianist Aron Kallay has informed me he'll be premiering my 3rd Piano Prelude in 19-ET at MicroFest 2010 in Los Angeles on April 24th. This will be the first time one of my microtonal compositions has ever been played live!
Piano Prelude #3 in 19-ET Piano Prelude #3 in 19-ET - Score
I'm currently in the process of writing a big new septet for the Brazilian group, Sphaera and it's conductor, Alexey Kurkdijan. It'll be scored for flute, clarinet, strinq quartet and bass and will likely be premiered at Festival Musica Nova 2010 (New Music Festival 2010) in Sao Paolo!
Also, new piano nocturnes are on their way and I've been proofing the scores of the first 5. I'll be uploading final scores for these works shortly. Duo Ahlert & Schwab are in the process of preparing for the premiere and recording of Bidon Cinque for Mandolin and Guitar . We're looking into the possibility of a CD of all 4 of the pieces I've written for this outstanding ensemble, Erg , Cassotis , Indigo Trails and Bidon Cinque .
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from The Music of Jeff Harrington ,
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Martin Scorsese: Cue the director's adrenaline - Houma Courier
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Zoe Lang suggests that “just as the… Zoe Lang suggests that “just as the concept of software is changing from a one-size-fits-all to a customized approach, the musicological toolbox should do the same.” ping.fm/Rrwvh
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How to Read Being of an age, and begging the indulgence of my seniors among my readers, I'm going to step into professorial mode for a moment and give a little lecture on reading comprehension. I suppressed a few negative responses I received to the recent excerpt I posted from Bob Ashley's new book , both out of respect for Ashley and because they didn't really engage what he said. Perhaps the fact that it was his writing being reacted to and not my own gave me an opportunity for a little more objective view into the reflexes of blog reading.
Two major things struck me about Ashley's passage that I quoted. One was his scathing critique of the attenuated place of art in western society, as seen from an experience of other cultures. Certain Asian and African cultures are more pervaded by music, art, and dance than ours, more informed by frequent social rituals involving entire communities. This phenomenon has been expounded upon for decades now by ethnologists and historians of Third-World art from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy to Ellen Dissanayake and beyond. I myself have written about it repeatedly from my slim experience of Native American performances: at powwows at Hopi, Taos, and elsewhere, every single inhabitant down to the smallest toddler strong enough to lift a drumstick is engaged as a singer, dancer, even composer, only the Whites are mere spectators, yada yada yada. Ashley's point, that the entertainer/consumer paradigm of American society deprives us of this intense social art experience, is hardly unusual or controversial, though it is presented here with striking vividness and in terms that musicians can easily identify with.
The astonishing thing about the passage I quoted was that Ashley offers this critique, not from the enthomusicologist's conventional standpoint of immersion in Indonesian or Ghanaian culture - but from the standpoint of the ONCE festivals! The rhetorical trick of the passage is that it focuses on widespread contemporary practice and seems to mention the ONCE festivals only in passing: "The reproach to what had gradually come to be the feeling that music was everywhere, that you were part of it and you were actually in it in your daily life was enforced for some cultural reason I cannot understand." But in reality, the ONCE festivals are the focus. Ashley is telling us that the ONCE festivals in Ann Arbor in the '60s created the same sense of art pervading a community that one gets from living in Bali or Tehran or Lagos, that once you had your worldview conditioned by the ONCE festivals, coming back down into the relative superficiality of American so-called culture was a tremendous let-down. It's an extraordinary claim, and made with disarming rhetorical cleverness. You read someone describing the innocent platitudes with which we are all familiar in such contrarian terms, and you wonder, from what experience did he come that he can afford to take such a jaundiced view of our daily lives? And that leads back to the question: Gosh, what must the ONCE festivals have been like, that afterward one would ever after resent what to the rest of us is mere normality?
Now: did Ashley say recitals were awful, and he never goes to them? No. He says, "Recitals are a curse," and it's an admirably exact formulation. They are a curse because we artists are forced to try to project the potential effects of art through this unequal entertainer/consumer relation, with one hand tied behind our backs, so to speak. Doesn't everyone feel this? I certainly do. Since Ashley disparages entertainment, isn't he just another elitist saying that composers shouldn't be required to entertain? Quite the opposite: he is saying that music should entertain and do much more than entertain, that it should grip and transform us and its effect should last long after the actual experience has ended. Isn't he making fun of world music, which has so enriched American culture? I think he's saying that the reduction of gamelan to a recital performance creates a facile and dangerous false impression, and threatens to destroy something special in other cultures that our music lacks. Isn't he just bitter? Well, I've yet to meet a composer who doesn't have his or her bitter moments, but Ashley's one of the least bitter composers I've ever met, and I read no bitterness in this passage. I see it as an enormous public service to remind us all from time to time that art can have a much higher and more potent role in a society than it currently does in ours. No one, no one is really satisfied with the status of contemporary music in today's world. Shouldn't those who've seen first-hand how things could be better do us the honor of showing us a potential goal toward which we could pragmatically strive?
I can imagine someone reasonably disputing Ashley's argument. For instance: "I was at the ONCE festivals, and they weren't as transformative for the community as Bob thinks." Or maybe, "I've lived in Bali for 30 years, and among locals there's more of a spectator aspect to gamelan performances than Mr. Ashley imagines." Those might be true, might not be true, but at least they would engage the accumulated meaning of the entire passage. I'd even like to see a broad, well thought-out defense of the Western concept of art that took the ethnological critique into sympathetic account. But the negative comments that came in were reactions to isolated sentences, and I hardly have time to defend every writer I quote (though I'm doing it for Bob now), or my own writings, from potential implications of particular sentences when those implications are nuanced and limited and even subverted by the meaning of the passage taken as a whole.
This brings to light, perhaps, an important difference in modality between blog reading and book reading. I'm reading the book; if I run into a passage, a sentence, that seems shocking or questionable, I don't put down the book and phone Bob to dispute him; instead, I keep reading. As I do so, further paragraphs put former ones into perspective. The accumulation of new ideas begins changing my mind in ways that make the previous stumbling blocks seem more logical. On a blog, however, I'm beginning to suspect that the tempting proximity of that comment button works against the cohesion of entire passages, as readers scan for sentences that touch on some subject they have a pre-formed experience with or opinion about. The eagerness everyone exhibits to be an active part of an intellectual community is a touching aspect of what the internet has brought out in us all. But I could almost wish there were a function that could sense whether a comment was positive, neutral, or negative, and in the last case, flash a warning question: "Have you reread the entire blog entry to make sure you understand its full argument? Y/N." This is why blogs, and electronic print in general, will never replace books. The stolid unmalleability of a printed book forces you to live for a while with the ideas therein, and give them a chance to transform you.
This semester for the first time in ten years I'm again sitting in a classroom on the students' side: I'm taking a course called "Kierkegaard: A Writer's Identity" taught by my brilliant friend Nancy Leonard. God bless me, I'm rereading Either/Or for the first time since the 1970s, and having a blast. So I finished "Diary of a Seducer" and, far more mature than I was last time I read it, I accumulate a million objections to Kierkegaard's fevered fantasy - and then I turn to the Or volume, "The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage," and, bing, bing, bing, bing, - Kierkegaard has anticipated my every objection and then some, and then I start to form reservations against that argument as well. Imagine Kierkagaard as a blogger, indulging in wild psychological flights only to contradict them later after his readers had already been fooled into commenting: impossible. And yet he wrote one of the most voluminous journals that's ever been published, and I've been thinking a lot about the extent to which a blog is a public journal. I kept a journal when I was in my 20s, which got replaced by my newspaper writing in my 30s, whose impulse has been transferred to this blog in the last several years. Kierkagaard's journals, of course, weren't published until long after his death. Had his writing of them been conditioned by a consciousness that each one would immediately gather a string of comments, we would doubtless have lost one of the world's great psychological treasures.
We don't yet know where this blog thing is going, or what new kind of reading modality it's going to lead to. Despite my grumpy resentment of selected new gizmos, I'm really no Luddite at heart, and I have an instinctive faith in mankind's ability to adapt healthfully to new technologies. It would be ridiculous to have a 30-minute timer on the comment button to force each reader into half an hour's reflection before objecting - but it would certainly have a salutary effect in numerous cases. Perhaps I simply create problems by forcing book-style content into a blog format where it doesn't belong. But I think I'm too addicted to book-style content (and too little attracted to the links-of-the-week mode of most blogs) to do otherwise.
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Ice Breaker One aspect to having thrown enough copies of the organ Toccata — that brutal piece — around, is that after a couple of years, you hear fresh news about one of the organists to whom you've slung it. (If I were Sir Paul McCartney, I had written to whom you've slung it to .) You then spring a refresher e-mail greeting at him . . . and monitor his reactions closely . Had a delightful musical moment yesterday. Completely disoriented my dear mom-in-law in the next room by playing John Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano (whose liner notes include the line Margaret Leng Tan plays a Steinway piano and a Schoenhut toy piano .) Wonderful moment of puzzlement on her dear face, as she asked, “Is that you ?” Good to know I can surprise a near & dear one even after all these years . . . . It’s been a long slow recovery (though happily from nothing grave ) and I’ve had to conserve energies for the essentials (including work on Lunar Glare I can’t fight that good feeling anymore . . . .) A couple of nights where sleep is a little bit wanting: you know it isn’t a big deal, and then, you get your first night of good sleep back, and you feel perfectly refreshed, there is an overwhelming sense that the world is a peach for your plucking. (Getting word of this year’s incentive pay for the day job doesn’t hurt, either.) Suffused with a sense that a string of steady instances of great musical success awaits me this year. It may be illusory, but I am grateful even for the illusion. Anything could still happen (up to and including outright cancellation), I know . . . but the De Profundis subcompact) group, but (a) if they can master the music (and there is the time so to master), a ‘chamber choir’ reading of the piece is well within the span of the composer’s vision for the music, and (b) the organ in question can be registered in such wise that the smaller vocal forces are supported rather than swamped.
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