Blake Eckard, Coyotes Kill for Fun

Writing a film soundtrack is difficult for me. It's hard to get into someone else's world so intensely, and we know that music is in fact intense in film. The well-known exercise of repeatedly playing the same silent footage against wildly different musical selections demonstrating the point most clearly, viz., that sound enters at a lower layer in the human software than the visuals, arguing or supporting or twisting or even simply stating clearly here, this is what they are, take them. With such great power comes great anxiety over its misuse, and this anxiety for me has never been pleasant.

However, I have written some of my favorite music when asked to write for film. The Bed You Sleep In is still one of my best-self-loved works after all these years, in large part because I wanted to give Jon what he wanted, and in doing so an aspect of myself was revealed to me. But I still remember the chastening experience when the producer, Henry Rosenthal, shrugged his shoulders upon hearing the soundtrack and said "Well, Jon does like when the music doesn't really relate to the film." You know, while I was writing it I sure thought it did, and after he said it I realized he was right, but after now these many years, he is simply wrong, since the music and the film are just an old married couple, always seen together at their table at the diner on the corner, not necessarily talking, but still there day after day.

I've thought that, given the importance of choosing the right partners in sound and vision, what makes more sense, and what is way better for my apoplexic health, is when the filmmaker either (1) writes the music themselves, or (2) simply takes some music that has already flowed into the channels of their psyche and uses it. Like paper-clips, one might think there is enough shit-tons out there already that you don't need to make any more, but I suppose there's always one more bit of divine harmony left to be mined from the heavenly vein of sound as yet unheard.

And so, I just finished writing some music for another of Blake Eckard's movies, the first being the grim Bubba Moon Face and the current one, his newest even grimmer and more frightening Coyotes Kill for Fun. The fright in this movie is the fear we have when we face a world that doesn't care about us at all, that tells us whether we live nor die is no matter. The sociopathic lead blows through the action leaving many dead, and maybe it is just for fun, or maybe it's just because of nothing at all. And, best for me is that I had to only fill in a few parts, as Blake used mostly existing music of mine, in particular the Second Mordake Suite and In the Stomachs of Fleas (with Pete von Petrin), which both find their way to being a little scarier.

Mordake CD released

The Mordake CD is released, available in so many places large and small, hot and cold and lukewarm, in corporeal form and forme noncorporeable. Amazon, iTunes, Arkivmusic, emusic, 24-7 Entertainment 7Digital Amazon MP3 Bell Mobility Full Track eMusic Gracenote Guvera Hot Topic / Shockhound iSound iTunes Music Store Lala Limewire A La Carte Limewire Subscription LiveWire / Groove Mobile MediaNet Digital mTraks MySpace Music Napster Omnifone Rhapsody SecuryCast Sprint Starzik Thumbplay Full Track Verizon Wireless Zune etc. 

If you love me, you will buy it.

Two New Reviews

Of Mordake, not yet released:

The music is convoluted and tumultuous yet well ordered in its own fractal logics, the lyrics sung in English in Duykers' heroic exhortations ever attempting domination of the reedlike insinuations and madnesses of his sister, snakily evoked through Korporate Marionettes' devices to produce a mocking hectoring from Duykers' own vocal chords (remember, this is a solo opera!), the result effecting a personality split and schizophrenias effective on more than one level. On top, to the side, and underneath, Wold crafted a welter of environments leaping from harsh urgency to ambient tranquility shot through with muted echolalia—the bridge from Go Get Our Supper! to What Have You Done? being a great example.

This daring purveyor of far horizons favors nightmare and the disturbing undermatrix of consciousness in his work, and Mordake is his most impressive evocation of that since Taking the Veil, to my mind stunningly high art…

and the Missa, in the online review journal FAME:

The voices are largely female and angelic in the extreme, male counterpoints recessed, with the cathedral's echo providing an expansive golden warmth to the massed encantings, a palpable feel of heavenly dimensions ... There are effulgent passages of Godly sentimentality but also the turbulence of the states between [Him] and man, reminders of our fall from Grace.

My Sister, My Love

The Dramatic Composer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video of the day

One more week

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

Unsolicited testimony

Mordake opened last night.  Everything worked, John was great, Kathleen's costumes were great, Frieder's software and the video and Lynne's rooms meshed with the action and Missy's lights and all.  In the few days before, there were many catastrophes: laptop dying, software that had been working for years crashing horribly in many ways unimagined, but we prayed to as many gods and saints and ancestors that we could bring to mind just before and they led us through.  I hadn't really even experienced the gestalt of the piece until yesterday and it seems to work, following once again the path through hell and redemption that both our Lord and Jim Bisso and my Pontius Pilate followed.

Leslie Isaac was moved to testify on yelp.  And did I mention that I was on the front page of the Chronicle last Sunday?  Maybe I did, but did also mention that the phrase was "plus Erling Wold and Indiana Jones?" As in the top of the bill?

Freeloading gigolo

I'm quite smug and pleased with myself as seen above in Noah Berger's shot for the Chronicle. I am imagining myself as Erling and also seemingly as a person who has a rod jammed deep into his bowels. Joshua Kosman has written a lovely feature on me and the opera and I am allowing myself a bit of vain rodomantade and narcissism.  In fact, I am going to go outside into my backyard right now and lean over the pond where the Gambusia are leaping through clouds of mosquitos and just stare at my own reflection, possibly falling in love with it and, unlike the love featured in my typical but-I-just-have-so-much-love-to-give story, this love will be a love that excludes all others. In this quiet beautiful space I can't hear Lynne's remonstrations as to how it's her house in Potrero Hill and her Garden and her etc and how I am just a freeloading gigolo and so on and so forth.

Pirate Cat Tonight

Once again on Bunnywhisker's show on Pirate Cat Radio.  John was supposed to come with me to plug the opera, and I pestered him about it, feeding him prawns from my own hand and soaking his gut with alcohol to get him in the mood, but unfortunately this caused in him the opposite reaction, and he crashed bad, limping back to his hovel to sleep off the long hours of rehearsal day after day.  The show has been fun as usual, broadcast booth filled with interesting people, like the stage at a house music concert, or maybe more aptly like the gaggle of oddballs in the Howard Stern studio. 

We talked of Dante and Alexander Theroux and asked questionnaires of Proust and each other and I played a number of recordings featuring John, including Founders came first, then profiteers from Nixon in China, Pilatus Beatus Est from Sub Pontio Pilato, and I'm no murderer from Mordake. Note that I've been filled with regret since John turned down an offer to reprise his role as Mao in Opera Colorado's production of Nixon for some real money. We talked about the fear of fear and plumbing the depths of the psyche. And I couldn't resist playing the Epilogue from Queer featuring Trauma, who is looking utterly lovely in his photo as Honorary Grand Marshall in the Pride Parade, which I have snuck in above. 

John and I are both going to be on Sarah Cahill's show on KALW on Sunday evening. 

Name in Print

Theatre Bay Area Magazine is featuring Mordake on the cover as part of an article about the SF International Arts Festival.  The article quotes me quite a lot, even going so far as to extemporize a bit beyond what I may have actually said. But what the hey.  

SFIAF: Discount Tickets

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.

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.

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?

Once there was a boy

You great big beautiful doll

Jennybird's doll, based on the Mordake story.

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.