more on The Ten Days

The Decameron opera project, Dieci Giorni, the ten days, a joint composition with some of my fellow SFCCO composers, The Mighty Coterie of the SF Bay Area, toodles along towards its eventual deflagration. It's been different than I expected, although I don't know exactly how I came to those expectations. It hasn't been as deep a collaboration as I would have hoped, each of us discussing every mark of the score, passing texts around, fistfights breaking out between us, resolved only by drunken tears. But in the end, each of us has trundled off to each of our mountain redoubts to scribble out separately our separate amusements, amusing ourselves but not each other, packing our cannon with the finished goods and blasting them in the general direction of the next stronghold over, whereupon it merely hits the fortifications and skids off into the valley below. It will be up to Jim Cave to assemble the puzzle and test its viability as a living entity, sending back runners to report the results. 

But along the way I have had an opportunity to watch the Pasolini Version again, which is lovely, the image above taken from it. And I've been able to write some texts that I'm proud of, including the story of the five bachelorettes misplacing a box of whip-its, and to remember the ins and outs of the accordion, also lovely.

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.

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.

Just fucking figure it out already

In the olden days, artists had the ability to actually do something, to complete something, to present a work complete, like Athena born whole from the head of Zeus. This is no longer a possibility. Now it seems that artists must only explore, consider, collaborate, engage in dialog, but please to never actually conclude, to state, to stand firm. I, for one, have little interest in seeing an artist's process, or knowing from whencesoever they came. Rather, I would prefer for them to go away, to leave me alone while they scrive their small efforts, staving off that time of the reaping of their souls, and then, when they have finished exploring and considering and collaborating, to share their destination with me, Lake Victoria in all its glory, and to skip the slide show, the home movies of their long and difficult trip up the Nile.

But, before I go, let me share just a few examples of what is raising my pique. OK? Yes. Here we go:

... will explore the ambiguous and changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society, where personal electronic information ...

The play will explore the rise in America of new white male empowerment in relation to a diversifying American culture.

The overall intention of the work is to explore the nature of communion with the infinite, and the opening of--the soaring of--the human heart. ...

The work will explore architecture as a fundamental, subliminal force intervening in the human narrative, braiding artistic exigencies, topical dramas and ...

...will explore the historical origins and the complex identity issues faced by conversos while speaking to the larger question of ...

In our sex comedy, we have outlined the following scene:

Arts Commision: banker, bishop, duc and judge, done as a scene from 120 days of Sodom. Old whore reads from the proposals typing notes on a laptop while the work samples are played and the four discuss. The four on the jury take off on tangents about fucking boys in chambers, shitting on the host, stuffing cash up the cunt of a prostitute. The old whore tells a story inspired by at least one of these. My work sample could be a setting of jet of blood. Jim’s lyric poem on the first 15 seconds after a consecrated host (at what point does it transubstantiate?) enters a whore’s vagina (pushed in by the black priest’s cock (editor's note: black as in black mass, not black as in African American)). The latter is what triggers the cash in cunt of prostitute story. They don’t like our proposal. It is clear they do not understand it. The second proposal The SHEro of the Warsaw Ghetto is an uplifting story about the Jewish uprising told entirely by shadow puppets viz the Platonic shadows on the cave wall, stolen by Plato from an older matriarchal tale. Use the following words: depucelate, cuntishly, sapphotizings, friggeresses.

Amy Crehore

Let's take a moment to consider one of my favorite paintings. In the collection of the artist. I have a few of Amy's prints above my piano just below Vera where I meditate on them while I work. In a quid pro quo, she at times listens to The Bed You Sleep In in between the blues and the hokum when she is working. It makes me happy to think that, possibly, I've left a small impression. Maybe a brush stroke that took a small turn to reflect a particularly lovely note on the viola, maybe a color that ended up a slightly darker hue as a static sad sawmill loop sounded.

Mordake

I first read about Edward Mordake in Re/Search Magazine, which quoted the original story from Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, online here about halfway down the page. At the time, I assumed the story to be apocryphal, but over the years I've realized that it might be true, except for the voice (obviously), which no one else could hear. There are modern examples, as in this video of a Chinese man:



Our developing operatic version may be real or not real. It doesn't really matter. In Douglas Kearney's libretto, the other face is presented as an example of chimerism, a son that devours his sister in the womb, which is biologically unlikely. More probable is that Mordake was a variant of a conjoined twin, like the slave owners, stars and truly 'Siamese' twins Chang and Eng Bunker, whose commingled liver is on display at the Mütter Museum, a prime tourist spot for all those intrigued by the fringes of permutation of us, we featherless bipeds with broad, flat nails.

Composer-composer collaboration

When I was on the steering committee of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Composers Forum, I suggested that we have a composer-composer collaboration grant, similar to our composer-writer and composer-choreographer grants. This proposal was met by some skepticism if not derision by my fellow committee members. Most of them couldn't imagine that anyone would desire to apply for such a thing, but as a youth, I was very familiar with a few famous examples of such collaborations. One was John Cage and Lejaren Hiller's HPSCHD, released on a Nonesuch LP, each copy of which contained a unique set of instructions printed on a somewhat jittery high speed line printer of the day, that instructed the listener, at five second intervals, where to set the controls on their stereo for an added bit of liveliness, although it required a stereo with separate tone controls per channel and more that 2 hands to accomplish. The piece seemed to be a true collaboration, and may have worked well as Hiller and Cage both had an interest in chance and complexity. In an interview years later with Vincent Plush, Hiller discussed having first suggested the use of the famous Mozart-attributed dice game pieces and Cage using the I-Ching to make substitutions and that

"Although we were and have been different in many ways in the way we write, we find a big degree of overlap in terms of – of humor, personality, and also, rally our ideas are not that far different in many ways. It was a lucky coincidence, because it wouldn’t have worked otherwise."

Humor is always a good ingredient for collaboration, or at least a lack of self-important seriousness. In the interview, he mentions one of Cage's other collaborations, Double Music with Lou Harrison. When I was casting about for information on this piece, I happened across Robert Gable's aworks blog mention of the fact that Cage and Harrison composed their two parts separately, having agreed on the length of the piece beforehand. (And reading that reminded me of the 59th story from Indeterminacy - maybe this was a collaborative piece as well?) But the aworks article references Philip Glass / Ravi Shankar's Passages and there is The Juniper Tree by Philip Glass and Robert Moran as well. Both of these are not moment-by-moment collaborations, but rather have alternating sections written by each composer with some sharing and contrasting of themes and textures. I've worked on a few collaborative dance scores with Thom Blum for Deborah Slater, some where we took each other's works and manipulated them and some where we had overlapping and responsive sections and some where we took foreground and background. Since I'm a composer of note-oriented and pretty music for standard instruments by nature and he is a composer who tends to write noisy and sound-oriented works for electronics, and we don't take ourselves too seriously, the mix may have been easier to pull off, as we inhabited very different spaces in the composition. We're planning to do something together for my Mordake opera premiering next year.

photo of HPSCHD printout by cityofsound