Kathy Acker

Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas were to write an opera together but Thomas drank himself to death before they could begin. Stravinsky wrote that this was "a terrible blow to me as well as to all those who knew Dylan Thomas's genius."  Stories of creations unmade, like this one, always seem so insufferably sad to me.  Even though we did receive In Memoriam Dylan Thomas out of the tragedy, what might have come? 

I have my own story along these lines, an opera unborn, hardly at the same culture-defining level and probably not even a real possibility, but important to me OK, goddamn it, and such a source of regret.  Unknown to me, Carla Harryman invited her buddy Kathy Acker to the original production of Little Girl back in '95.  I didn't see her until the end of the performance, at which point I ran up to her. Erling: Ms. Acker, I'm a huge fan of yours (quoting from Blood and Guts in High School) "Her father's touch is cold, he doesn't want to touch her mostly 'cause he's confused. Janey fucks him even though it hurts her like hell 'cause of her Pelvic Inflammatory Disease." I'm so happy you came. Kathy: (doe-eyed) I'm a big fan of yours too. 

Well, maybe the doe-eyed bit is an exaggeration, but I told her I wanted to work on something together and she said yes in the way people do when they are invited to go to Budapest for the May-December wedding of The Accordionist, the National Hero, and they say yes, sure, knowing that they aren't really going to go but, at that moment, really wanting to go, imagining it, thinking that it could actually happen.  For months after, the thought rattled around in my head without ceasing and, a number of times, I picked up the phone to get her number from Carla but then put it off, partially because my possessive mistress at the time didn't trust Ms Acker, saying she had stolen someone-or-other's husband or boyfriend or whatever but, all the time, not knowing that the cancer that would kill her was already growing in her breast - and then she died.  A terrible blow to me. What would have come from it?

RIP Lou Teicher

Last month and somehow I missed it.  The confluence of sentimentality and John Cage, kitsch and Henry Cowell.

Towards a Libretto for an Opera on St Cecilia

Early evening, an apartment in Bethnal Green, garishly decorated, St Cecilia in her early 30s, hair in curlers, slouched on a couch. She sleeps, lightly dozing and, touching her body, stirs. The television is on, turned very low, with music playing, and the blue TV light is on her, adding to the soft evening twilight filtering through an uncovered window.

She turns, then sleeps a bit longer, rolling over on her side, head on her arm, one foot crossed back on the other, hand under her chin. She wears a blue kimono with a crane pattern in gold. She turns again, now with her back to us, the crane pattern bold across it, the bottoms of her feet dirty, and then she sleeps again, her side rising and falling in rhythm with her breath and with the music.

Shortly, she wakes, turns partially back to us, brushes the hair from her face, and drags a finger across her eyes.  Still sitting on the couch, she stretches, cat-like, and begins to sing. When she sings, it is not with a human voice, but rather with a full ensemble of instruments, the sound issuing from her mouth but with a supernatural presence.

She rises from the couch, continuing to sing. As she walks to the stage left, each step she takes, each object she touches - the arm of the couch, a lamp, a chair - makes a beautiful sound in perfect counterpoint to the music. 

The romance of St Cecilia begins with Cecilia as a young girl, born into a noble Roman family, promising her virginity to God. Her family, against her wishes, arranges for her to be married to a Roman nobleman by the name of Valerian. During the wedding banquet she sings a song to God, quietly, to herself, and is provided an angel, a guardian to preserve her chastity. This very angel appears to her and her husband, hastening his conversion to the faith and his respect for her continence. Unfortunately for them, the husband's faith is an active and proselytizing faith, bringing him and his brother to the attention of the prefect, Turcius Almachius, who orders the two men to be executed. The power of their convictions converts the first executioner sent, but not the second, who dispatches all three. When Cecilia buries the three men, in a Christian manner, she herself is condemned, locked into a sealed sweat room, the fires stoked to maximum intensity, and is left to die. As we might expect knowing her exalted state, when the chamber is opened she is found quite alive, in aspect of prayer, with nary a bead of sweat to mark her brow. As is typical in these stories, such supernatural events serve only to anger the brutish prefect, who orders her head removed from her body. After three blows are attempted, the maximum the law allows, Cecilia, although bloodied, still lives, sending the executioner fleeing in fear in the consideration of his brazen act against the divine, and Cecilia is left, praying and teaching to her fellow Christians until her death three days later. Over the centuries, her relics are exhumed and reinterred on a great number of occasions, each time found to be incorrupt and with, on one hand, three fingers outstretched and, on the other, one finger, denoting her belief, even in death, of the mystery of the Trinity.

Tony Kushner, best known for his lovely play Angels in America, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera in the late 90s to write a libretto for an opera by Bobby McFerrin. He chose to adapt Heinrich von Kleist's St Cecilia.  When I first heard of the project, I was quite upset. I hadn't been asked to do this music for this project even though I was an actual opera composer, not merely a famous person brought in to boost ticket sales, and in fact had made copious notes for an opera on this subject.  Unfortunately, it put me off the whole deal, which is too bad since, in the end, Kushner finished the adaptation but McFerrin bailed on the project. 

[A somewhat less related but maybe informative story: Years later, when I was part of the Oakland East Bay Symphony's Words and Music project, Ishmael Reed came and told us a story about a similar event in the early 90s, where he was commissioned to write a libretto entitled Gethsemane to be the basis of an opera, as it turns out, to be completed by the same celebrity. In his story, the celebrity showed up in his stretch limo plus entourage, breezed into Mr. Reed's house, proceeded to demonstrate his lack of ability to carry this project through, and left, never to be seen again.]

fognozzle!

fognozzle and I are collaborating on a something-or-other to be premiered next June with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.  Too early now to say what it will be except of course fabulous and full of beauty.

Lynne's latest

Her recent absence from Society has been due to a number of majorly lovely projects, including the one above, with before and after pix on her blog.  I was involved in some of the measurements and higher mathematics of the project (but not her use of Sphenic Numbers) using various steam-powered approximates to what we probably could have achieved in an instant with the right laser interferometric sextant or astrolabe or whatever.  Suffice it to say that small errors in rise can lead to large errors in surface area, the basis of estimation in the decorative painting biz.

l'homme en flammes

Best things burning, as I recall them: trampoline, ice cold Budweiser (the American kind), dust storms, apples, gingerbread people!, pin-drop quiet for 20 minutes during the temple burn, the spectacle, big fire, handheld flamethrowers, showers, whipped cream makings, dressing up and then dressing up some more, ridicule of boot covers, underpants that advertise their sexiness, fresh food, trendspotting, Death Guild DJ, my campmate, the word scrot, stories around the campfire, escape from the tendrils of the day-to-day, jewelry massive and jewelry hand-made, sandwiches among the smoldering ruins, Coca-Cola, empathy, TB303 through a million dollar sound system from a mile away, the beautiful smart and bad girl Momo raiding and sniffing, running into Adam and Tara, the blood bags hanging from the ceiling of Spike's bar, the stripper pole, HOME, the sunrises, the sunsets, the mauve-orange-gold rain, Fuck Hippies, old and young hippies, Playa Love, uniform = radical self expression, shirtcocking, Tania spraypainting 'my mother should have swallowed' on the backs of unsuspecting thunderdome fighters, aromatic heterocyclic organic compounds of the monoamine alkaloid family, uninterrupted happiness, the hugs, oxidizers drunk from a beautiful golden chalice, cigarettes, blowing flames out the ends of cigarettes.

Lynne often tells me that, when she dumps me for her next boyfriend, she will be the pretty one, as she believes that I eclipse her with my sartorial elegance but, on the streets of Black Rock City, I was the one made plain, hardly visible in the shadow of the gorgeous Miss Erika, glowing without the need for chemo- or electro-luminescence.

My boy

My son Duncan, pictured above with the "Game Over" t-shirt & playing the part of Beausoleil, has hooked up with PianoFight to put on a series of scatological sketch comedy riots, viz., The Shit Show, starting this Friday and Saturday at Off-Market Theaters, tix here.  I am pleased and proud and I highly recommend it. Their description:

Premiering September 12-13 in the black box of Studio 250 at Off-Market, the ever-humble PianoFight proudly presents the first installment of the "Stop Hating Imagination Time" Show (which could very well be turned into an appropriate acronym). The S.H.I. Time Show was conceptualized by a few recent Berkeley grads / imaginative but immature man-childs (men-children?), whose overwhelming need for attention led to the creation of a somewhat offensive and vaguely illegal sketch comedy show. This fast paced comedy riot, and follow up to PianoFights smash hit ShortLived, is sure to enlighten and entertain. Come see why SF Weekly called PianoFight "Better than SNL"! The show is loosely tied together by a simple premise: a production company has lost a bunch of money in a "deal" and is running out of time to save their theater.  The theater boss has deftly trapped 4 writers in his basement, and forced them to come up with the best show they can. The resulting hilarity runs the gamut from coherent to absurd, and will be topped off with an amazing performance from the piano/vocalist tandem Toby Dick'. And, as always, brown bags encouraged ... NOTE: No-one under 16 years old will be admitted.

Polluting the Global Name Space

We, those suffering from the disease of ambition, whose names are almost Globally Unique IDentifiers, live with the fear that another of the same name will appear and displace us, rolling us down from the hilltop on which we reside. For this reason, I have enlisted a legion of friends 'round the world who keep one ear to the railroad tracks and one wet finger on the telegraph lines, and another legion, not so friendly, waiting to remove those that stray onto my appellative territory, politely at first, then with ever increasing prejudice. It is a rarely used but most important part of the infrastructure of my career, not covered by the average business consultant, but necessary nonetheless. 

Recently, my friend Nicole, perusing the Norse business pages, found this shocking reference.  Immediately, a call was made (not by me, as my manicured hands must float above such earthly deeds), resources were inventoried, strings were pulled, and after a deliberate but immediate decision, certain highly placed members of the Kriminalpolitisentralen were called upon, reminded of their duties, and this usurper, this moniker-expropriator, was (1) found to be in possession of certain strategic government documents, (2) outed as an egregious pederast who used chloroform, toluene and other disabling agents to render his victims insensate and (3) a victim of a ghastly failure of the banking system which left him penniless. To some, these sanctions may appear harsh, but I have learned to harden my heart in such matters, those concerns that transcend weak and typical morality. 

Misogyny

I've been reading the freshest and most au courant tome of misogynist literature, the newest perambulation of Alexander Theroux, namely Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual. It's a bit slow going only because it is such a mammoth object that it hurts my arms to hold it up in bed: the only place I seem to get a chance to read these days due to my Interweb addiction. While the current literary apple of or twinkle in my eye is naturally intriguing in itself, what is more enchanting is the synchronism between Monsieur Theroux and My Dear Friend Ms. Bunnywhiskers. (In the beautiful Violet Carson photo on the left, she is the bunny hunted by the merciless trapper.)

But first, we need to take a flashback here to my youth, where I first happened across one of the author's other books, D'Arconville's Cat.  I loved this book just so so much that I scoured used bookstores across the country for years to find a second copy just in case something happened to the first. I was completely enraptured during my first read of it, gasping with delight, my heart racing as I burned through the pages.  In my second and more leisurely read, I laughed out loud at the main character's Yankee chauvinism, his marvelous ingenuousness as his heart is ripped out and stomped on.  And I see my error: I thought the misogynist Dr Crucifer was intended as funny, a ridiculous straw persona. It slowly dawned on me over the years that, no, he was not only meant to be a mentor to D'Arconville, but to me the reader as well, and that his hatred of women was intended by the author to be the correct point of view. This has caused a bit of cognitive dissonance in an old skool feminist like myself, having been raised through Simone de Beauvoir & Germaine Greer, the gender neutralization of the Lutheran Church, a mother who told me at the tender age of ten that women "might have to take up arms against men," and who was caught in the middle of the feminist controversies between those of the somewhat inaccurately named sex-negative (e.g. Andrea Dworkin) and sex-positive (e.g. Susie Bright) persuasions due to his love for porn and suchlike.

However, even with my proclivity to label the book evil, its language - the beautiful busty overweening rush of language - still captivated me. I considered an opera around it, but it seemed too massive and the author too alive and, from his output, to be someone who held on to resentment, especially with regard to women and since I am, well, a bit foppish, even effeminate (see: Lake of Fire), maybe gentle, as in the opposite of those butch and virile, motorcycle-riding, selfish and domineering, rakes and assholes that my women friends seem to adore so much, I thought that maybe I should be careul. Through Bunnywhiskers's personal stories about women in His life, from the erudite anger of Theroux Metaphrastes, and from my favorite book itself, I've come to realize the danger of getting His dander up, of His irascibility, and have decided - for once in my life - to avoid the possible drama. Yes, I've tried to develop a bit of wisdom over the years and have come to prefer my drama in the confines of the theater and the picture frame. 

We close with a pleasantry from Giordano Bruno, a bon mot, whose statue I sat below, inebriated, eating some of the best gelato of my life. Was that the same warm evening I cried with Lynne in a 10th century chapel and then we stumbled outside, drunk-dialing our various crushes back in the States? Maybe it was.

... for that bosom, for that white, for that crimson, for that tongue, for that tooth, for that lip, for that hair, that dress, that mantle, that glove, that slipper, that high heel, that avarice, that giggle, that scorn, that empty window, that eclipse of the sun, that throbbing, that disgust, that stench, that sepulcher, that cesspit, that menstruation, that carrion, that malaria, that uttermost insult and lapse of nature? *

* here

Favorite mentions of mentions

Kathleen posted one of my tainted angel photos but the above is even more so. The dear late lamented boyish boy.  And I like the work of Majena Mafe, who seems to have tangentially linked to me by her copying of Alex Ross's longish enumeration; and isn't that a lovely bit of psychosis-engendering at the top of her blog?

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.

Laura Bohn

My friend Laura (pictured) and Lynne and I went to The North Beach Restaurant tonight where she reprised her unrestrained performance of a few years ago, singing some aria chestnuts and bringing all the wait & kitchen staff out from their hideaways to enjoy her lovely maturing voice.  La Bohème mixed with Andrea Bocelli singing Return to Sorrento et al, a poor South Asian tourist family pressed into their seats, made somewhat uncomfortable at the absolute operatic decibel firepower aimed in their general direction. A delightful mix that reduced the headwaiter to sweats, chills and tears. As it should have!

My Father

23rd Psalm

In the very glorious baroque Cathedral of St Gallen. 

Oscar Aszer Zelig Leneman

Even time has passed such that we, the belowmentioned, have gone on to our final remuneration or, as it were, our final judgement and, sitting at the hopefully rightmost hand of our omniscient and omnipresent maker, we will have to explain and make right to the throngéd celestial multitudes. Let us further note that the following is absolutely a work of fiction and that any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental, etc.

Anywho, back in graduate school I fell in love (and let us be absolutely clear that this was a higher love - a chaste and perfect love) with a young man who, for want of a better sobriquet, we shall call Mark and who, one day many years later called me to attend the opening of Spawn, whereupon I waited in front of the Kabuki theater with the other unwashed until his limo arrived, spilling him, an assemblage of beautiful young things and a quantity of white powder onto the sidewalk, at which I, his heartbroken friend, was pushed into the gutter by his handlers and so onwards.

But, in my nervous and naive youth, Mark was a dream lover (platonic) and, while he was surely an harbinger of the many evil things to come, I drank deeply, ferociously, from the cup he offered.  We were inseparable, sharing everything, making plans for our life together. 

Mark was writing a thesis on antialiasing in computer graphics, at the time a fledgling field of study. He came to me one day after reading a paper by Yellot on the Poisson disk distribution of receptors in the eye and wondered if this seemingly haphazard array might have something to do with the lack of aliasing in the human visual system.  We thought about it a bit; it made sense, since spectral aliases come from convolution in the frequency domain of the regularly spaced delta functions which are the transform of a regular sampling function. An irregular sampling function would clearly do something quite different, but what exactly?  We fretted and suggested and made some mathematical attempts but Mark came across a paper by our savior, our Messiah, the Alpha and Omega man whose name fills the title of this entry: Oscar Aszer Zelig Leneman. Ah, what words, what ideas. We let them flow across us like new buttered honey over a sweet biscuit.  In this paper, he laid it all out, a clear approach to determining the spectral noise of a wide variety of stochastic sampling patterns, including the Poisson disk but also many others. We saw how, by engineering the density function, one could improve the results, to spread the noise optimally to areas of minimal sensitivity of the eye, a clear indication of the Gnostic program, the mediocrity of the flawed Demiurgical God of the Old Testament compared to the higher consciousness of man. We found that a simple uniform jitter of the sampling point process by 50% of the mean sampling interval did extremely well. We thereupon danced an ecstatic gambol and wrote our first paper, Antialiasing through Stochastic Sampling, to be published and presented in SIGGRAPH '85 and Mark, in honor and gratitude, changed his middle name to that of our god.

However, as it turned out, another group at Pixar led by Rob Cook had been working on something similar and, as it also turned out, predated us but also, as it happened, had been in communication with Brian Barsky, Mark's ostensible research advisor who had advised them not to publish in SIGGRAPH '85 but rather in his journal, the Association for Computer Machinery's Transactions on Graphics which, he hoped, would replace SIGGRAPH as the Journal Of Record for the field, possibly detracting a bit from the brio and vivacity of the rough and tumble conference scene but lending the field a bit more of the staid orderliness that comes with a proper science. Unfortunately, the staid orderliness of TOG (as it was known to its friends) was chastened by the fact that its production was about a year behind schedule, meaning that their paper would come out so much later than ours as to be embarrassing. When the Pixar folks discovered our paper's imminent arrival - maybe because they were asked to referee, they 'smelled a rat' and assumed that Dr Barsky was 'fucking them over' to favor the advancement of his own soon-to-be newly minted PhD, a possibly not totally unreasonable position given the well-known dog-eat-dog nature of the academy, and they called him and may-or-may-not have explicitly accused him of said conspiracy.  Mark and I, obviously, were delighted by the turn of events.  A scrap, a brawl, a rumble between our society of distinguished scholars and the korporate brutes outside its containment shield.  Hop la!  And they were so concerned with it all! While we just saw it as a pleasant diversion. A bit of fun mathematics, a bit of fun programming, a chance to put little animal heads with exposed Brains into the text of our paper and our usual fantastic acknowledgement section with occult holocaust references and fake bibliography (e.g., Crash by J. G. Ballard), tickling the powers above.

And, oh my oh my, those powers above censored one of the brains!  To wit, the most beautiful cat brain on page 77 of the proceedings, our coup de théâtre, that which would launch us into the Pantheon of the great minds of our generation.  Happy to have our own reason to be incensed, we prepared a volley and launched it against the ACM's so-called Special Interest Group.  We printed up a great number of errata sheets, like so:

and passed them out amongst the multitudes of attendees, who dutifully took them and, ah joy of joys, dutifully looked up page 77 and placed them carefully inside, like the great Stalin's replacement of Beria in the Soviet encyclopedias with extended articles on the Bering Sea. We presented our paper to great acclaim, took our bows, and soon the Cook paper, Stochastic sampling in computer graphics, arrived in due course in the January '86 issue of TOG, his feathers having been smoothed by a contrite and ignorance-claiming (the simple truth) Dr "Brain" Barsky.

La la la. That could have been it, but we, suckled as we were on the sweet cream of de Sade, Survival Research Laboratories and the Kipper Kids dancing on broken glass, well, we couldn't just leave it alone, could we? And of course, we had in fact been asked, as the putative experts in the field, to referee the Cook paper, written before ours but oh so joyously presented for publication after, and maybe, just maybe, cleaned up a tiny tad. And we found problems with it. Hoo boy did we. It was hardly up to our fetishistic notions of proper academic-ness. How could it be? In our self-love and self-admiration, we had achieved the pinnacle and the rest of the world lay far below. While our phony bibliography was a work of the highest art, Cook's bibliography had the audacity to reference a Benjamin Franklin paper on magic squares, which they used as stochastic generators with no foundation, none of the mathematical underpinnings of our masterwork, only pictures which "looked good" (and they did look good at that.) We demanded that they reference our paper, being a seminal publication in the field, and we criticized and criticized and gave them low marks as we knew the paper would be published anyway. And wen it finally was a-borned, would we, could we, allow the dead horse to lie unbeaten? No, absolutely not, and we fired off an angry reply to the editor, a brilliantly worded rejoinder which led to a another rebuttal and the fun continued until we finally, our last bit of sperm spent across the face, fell back and slept, the deep and well-deserved sleep of the just and right and meek.

In the end, both papers have been cited quite a bit. We discovered quite happily that Oscar Leneman was a bit of a worldly fellow, having left the engineering profession after publishing the above pictured erotic illustrated fairy tale to deal in South Asian artifacts. Pixar got the patent on stochastic sampling, now expired, which we were once asked to help challenge in court, but declined, having gone on to better things: girls and drugs and Hollywood and the exciting world of The Opera and its ins and outs. Our math was used in textbooks as it was actually correct, but the weird Judeo-Islamo-Christian preoccupation with the one true God and the way He and His angels designed the eye in all its glory still seems to fascinate and lead people to the Poisson disk distribution even though it doesn't work so well and is in general harder to compute. Going up against God and His angels is of course difficult for mortal men, as hard as fighting City Hall, and doesn't really get one girls and drugs so in the end who cares?

The Knife from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil

Mordake Finances

Since other composers and artists are often curious about the finances of my operas, let's please have a moment of silence here for all the dollars burned to a cinder in my many vanity productions. 

...

I watched Mr. Deeds goes to Town the other night, a Frank Capra feel-good illusory bit of fluff that seems to imply that good conquers evil and other loads of misinformed gobbledygook, in which there was a moment where Deeds as the newly minted chairman of the opera board is informed that oh my my of course the opera never makes money (see Tit. 1:11) at which point he states the unwelcome obvious: maybe the opera isn't performing things that people want to see. The rest of the stuffed shirts on the board are of course shocked but we as the audience know this to be the simple truth. Opera, and especially modern opera, is a niche of a niche of niche of niche and, if disappeared tomorrow, would sink below the surface of the culture with the barest ripple.

But we modern oddball opera types beg and borrow and sometimes steal and try to convince those with their hand on the spigot of some real money that what we do is important, good for you, like eating your broccoli, and that it makes perfect sense to subsidize us wastrels, bohemians and good-for-nothings to produce fashionable nonsense that will assuage their robber-baron guilt-ness.

And here's the bottom line: Mordake was in about the middle of the expense range of my past productions, not too hot nor too cold, just in the middle, and I was able to wheedle about $35K in grant-based funding (requiring about twenty-five actual filings) to help cover those costs. In addition, there was about $1K in box office earnings and, as usual, about $10K of my own money.  I have noticed that, hard as I try to contain things, and whether or not the production is at the high side or the low side of the expense compass, this last figure is always about the same, a small bit of hair shirt that penances me for my folly. 

I have been led to believe that there are some people who don't lose money on their productions.  I believe there are people whose artistic and theatrical works are actually sought out and remunerated generously, like the recently minted PhD in Astrophysics and erstwhile guitar hero Brian May.  But I seem to have failed quite miserably in this particular aspect of my musical career and mayhap I do need to accept the unwanted and unwelcome obvious.

Evening Prayer

Please, sniffle, please dear G-d, please, snuffle, don't let Ol' Gramps Stinky become Presidemptosaurus of America please.

Video of the day

Photo of the day

Kathleen's designer friend Chris from Project Runway last year has been visiting so here's a little something in the way of an obeisance, maybe an homage. Corset by Kathleen, photo by Kristine Adams.

More on Counting

Since my last brief discussion of herky-jerky rhythms and pondering Michael Kaulkin's comment on it, I've been wondering more about the assumption that we need to count in a regular fashion, that is, where every counted beat is the same temporal distance from the last counted beat. There seems to be an emphasis in classical music on the square simplicity of the mathematics involved in the way that rhythms are approached, that a rhythm of (say) a quarter and a dotted quarter and an eighth is really happening over a regular beat of 3 quarters, instead of just being a rhythm of this followed by that followed by so-and-so.  I'm sure, absolutely sure, that this is not the way of all music.  It's not the way I played music in my misspent youth in r&r bands for sure.  I remember trying to teach Henry Kaiser a 'lick' many years back, the rhythm of which was a standard rock something like 2+3+3 but I couldn't explain it in that way to him. The conversation went something like:

Erling: (playing the part as envisioned) Just like this.

Henry: (playing something so much more complicated, say 2.12 3.41 2.77) OK, got it.

Erling: (blinking, confused, playing it again) No, more like this, listen.

Henry: (now trying 2.21 3.03 3.44) Right, no problem.

Erling: (trying desperately to comprehend the higher mathematics involved, some continued fraction expansion or log base something or set of measure zero blah blah) Ha, well, that's close, but it's more like...

(process iterates for a bit)

Erling: (suddenly gaining insight) Um, Henry, the interval between the first two is just a little bit shorter and the interval between the next two is just a little longer.

Henry: (playing it, just a little better)

Erling: (emboldened) Right, now just a little longer between the second two and I think you cut in too much on the first...

Henry: (playing it even better)

(process iterates etc)

Not wanting to press the point here, but just to be clear: the insight is that there was absolutely no underlying time base at all, simply intervals in succession.  There was no abstraction of rhythm, this was it, events in time laid bare. I wondered at the time if this might have been one of those interesting neurological 'deficits' that Oliver Sacks is so fond of popularizing, but since then I've thought not. Henry once tried to teach us a Captain Beefheart tune, Alice in Blunderland, explaining it in the fashion above. We had a very difficult time of it until we realized it was just in 11 or 13 or some other easily approachable prime numerated time signature and then it fell into place, and we congratulated ourselves on one more case where the old fashioned model worked la di da.  But Henry was proud of his model of the musical world and clearly believe it to be meet right and salutary, and his level of non-abstraction really went quite deep, I mean what do we mean when we say this is the same rhythm at a different tempo, I mean we know what this is, a simple affine transform applied to the time-interval-sequence, but why do we think that is the same? In another amazing display, I once realized during a concert that Henry was playing the tune quite correctly, in that it was internally consistent (re: the affine transform above), but just a little teeny bit faster than the rest of us and he continued doing that until he reached the end - quite a few seconds before us. Have you ever tried this, e.g., in the phase pieces of early minimalism? It's really quite difficult to do on purpose, but the performance matched his model. We simply weren't playing the events at the right time offsets relatively to the onset of the piece and he was.

Over the years I've realized that I am just a bit like Henry, a bit more comfortable thinking of music as a chain of intervals, not quite as irrationally related, but still, not regular at all. I've often approached the music I've written this way.  When Guy Garnett and I worked for Yamaha and bought the first copy of Finale hot off the presses - the one that came with the videotaped testimonial of the importance of Jesus Christ in the development of Computer Notation Systems - we were surprised by its measure-centricity, which still remains in the program to this day. We didn't get it. Weren't bar lines merely added after one wrote the music simply to aid the performer in her perceptual chunking?  I don't pay much attention to my bar lines when I'm playing my own music and I really have to contort my perception of my own music when I'm playing them under the yoke of a conductor, doing what so many musicians do, breaking out the pencil and painstakingly marking the regular pulses above the irregular timeline of the score so I can map their notions onto mine.  I was taught in composing school to aid this process, to make sure that my (at that time highly) irregular and polyrhythms were broken up with gazillions of ties and whatnots to fit into groups based on the denominator of the time signature in order to make this mapping of the irregular to the regular as easy as possible for the poor performer, handcuffed to the regular beat, the incessant and regular beat, like the beating of the heart under the floorboards, the drip drip drip late at night of the leaky faucet, the tap tap tap of the tree against the window, like the invention of Hippolytus de Marsiliis, slowly but inexorably driving us insane.

But why can't we 'count' in a natural way, an irregular beat that wafts and waves with the tune, with the rhythm?  This is the way we are supposed to play the Dance of Fury for the Seven Trumpets, yes?  And those added dots sprinkled here and there in the Concord Sonata?  And the tempo changes cum polyrhythms of Klavierstücke I-IV? And Michael Gordon's Trance (pardon, stolen from Kyle Gann's blog):

And speaking of the aforementioned reverend Mr Gann, the Zuni Buffalo Dance that seeded his totalist interest? Are we supposed to tap our toes in some regular fashion through this minefield of events in time?  Right, I didn't think so.

Finally, from Dave Stewart's book Inside the Music, a book written, I might point out, for the popular musician, to wit:

By Popular Demand, the Gloria

The Way I Will Die

Sneezing.

Agnus Dei, Jona Switzerland

Sousa Variation Video

Vanilla

Duncan and I were on the Mission bus for Father's day listening to Guillermo Gomez-Pena comment on the vanilla hetero hipsters that displaced all the lesbians on Valencia street during the dot-com boomlet whilst Violeta Luna explicatively mimed the important points of his disquisition, the highest point being when she ascended the treads of the stairs to Mission Dolores on her knees, concomitantly scourging her back with a bouquet of roses. But his use of the word 'vanilla' reminded me of a story which I shall relate presently. This story tells of a time when Leslie Isaac accompanied me to one of the early Pink parties put on by the Mission Control people where we sat, untouched, observing the natives in their natural habitat. One of these locals, let's call him Mr A___, was sitting a few feet from us on the couch mounted by his wife in the reverse cowgirl position, her face planted in the uncovered and copious bosom of the host, wholeheartedly thrusting herself in a simple and straightforward but somehow agreeable rhythm. A few items of context: (1) I had just been on TV with Mr A___ taking about an upcoming performance and was intrigued to see him in this quite different scene, and (2) given the attractive and youthfully exuberant nature of the exhibition, the triad in question was subject to the gaze of about 10 other people all sitting quietly but intently about the room. After a few minutes of watching with the others, Leslie sighed quite loudly and whispered "this is so vanilla." Yes, dear Scarlett, we is powerfully jaded down here in the deepest darkest and most southerly parts of Frisco. 

On the Death of David Blakely

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.

The Trappings of Conventionality

I received a reminder in the intertubish-mail of the weirdness of the Classical Music World.  A benefit for Dawn Upshaw, which is fine and dandy, as she has been a great supporter of new works, but the oddnesses are legion, the most noticeable being (1) the incredibly long list of famous people on the benefit committee, which I'm sure holds court every Tuesday afternoon at the local Round Table Pizza just after the SCA get-togethers to argue for hours about who sits where and by whom and the gauge of the needles used to knit the tablecloths and whether they will have those disposable cameras at every table for the candid tit-flashing shots of the guests as the drinking progresses, (2) The priciness of the tix [Ed: of course] and (3) the small font tag under "Click image to respond." to the effect of, and I quote: "Business Attire. " Enough said!?  Well, actually not enough at all.  Let us please remember fondly a few Tom Wolfe quotes, from The Painted Word, which my wife and I read to each other in the car one long drive from LA to SF while lost in the fog.

"...the [art mating] ritual has two phases: (1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown. (2) The Consummation, in which culterati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards -- and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity." 

"...here we have the classic demonstration of the artist who knows how to double-track his way from the Boho Dance to the Consummation as opposed to the artist who gets stuck forever in the Boho Dance. This is an ever-present hazard of the art mating ritual. Truly successful double-tracking requires the artist to be a sincere and committed performer in both roles. Many artists become so dedicated to bohemian values, internalize their antibourgeois feelings so profoundly, that they are unable to cut loose, let go ... and submit gracefully to good fortune; the sort of artist, and his name is Legion, who always comes to the black-tie openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner jacket and paint-spattered Levis's . . . I'm still a virgin!" 

Right. My paint-spattered Levi's are the corset and the frock coat and the riding crop and the bunny tail and other unwelcome non-business-attired choices couture. 

When Sub Pontio Pilato had its West Coast Premiere, I wrote a bio for the program that started with the phrase "Erling Wold has been called a pathological liar and a bisexual sex addict..."  After one of the performances, I oversaw and overheard a colleague point to the bio in the program and whisper to another colleague, "Well, he's not ready for prime time."

Now that I've reach my Grand Old Age I believe I am free to pontificate on all topics and so will drop this small pearl of wisdom: Make gol-durn sure that you always dress and speak and be the person you are and that you want to be or you will find in short order that you have gotten on the wrong train and you can't get off, that you will have to dress in business attire and hang about with people hardly like yourself and then your life will be over and will not have been lived but you will have a nice long list of achievements which can be repeated in the long loop on your video-enhanced tombstone until the servers are unplugged, the water shorts out the cables, and the acid rain washes away the last carved crying angel and all the rest.

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. 

Slow slow and slower

My friend George Zelenz, who once informed me that he seriously considered ending our friendship after I gave up on the true way of Just Intonation, wrote this after Lou Harrison's death a while back.  I remembered it as I needed to take this path myself.

In 1995, Lou and Bill came to visit me in Joshua Tree. I picked them up at the Palm Springs airport in my small truck, and Lou volunteered to sit in the back. On a thin cushion, al fresco. Upon arrival at my house, Bill promptly did his impersonation of a man with narcolepsy, and fell asleep in a chair by the kitchen table. Lou asked if I would drive him around, and show him Joshua Tree the town. "Bill can sleep the whole goddamn day for all I care" said Lou, with some exasperation. We jumped in the truck and took off driving, with no real goal or destination.

Driving around, we talked about all the usual stuff we always talked about. Pretty much everything except music. We rarely talked about music. About an hour into the drive, he did ask me how my composing went. I told him about this dancer I was writing for up in Berkeley. It paid very little, but I was doing my best I said. I told him about the structure being mostly whole notes, sung quietly, in a 3 voice part. He said, "I have a poorly compensated commission of my own right now, I think I as well will just write a lot of whole notes."

How I am perceived by the Slovak press

In the Hungarian-speaking community, that is.

Michael Kaulkin took a bit of steel wool to his rusty Hungarian and pried off a bit of the above:

Wold succeeds in achieving a surrealist atmosphere using a number of eclectic tools, but consistently reaches back to such naive ancient narrative forms as legend, miracle and parable.  It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Wold deals with post-Romantic American transcendental images with tragicomic overtones, such as one encounters in Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street, but at the same time his musical language strongly approaches the world of electronic pop and rock, as well as the minimalist tradition.

My boy

He's the one with the picture of the married couple captioned by GAME OVER T-shirt.

Two faces turned away from each other

My longtime friends Carola and Henry and Lou Lou and George are featured in the local weekly this week. Online here and worth a look-see.  They are a high-achieving family, lives of epic proportions with fingers in many many pies, here, there and around the world. The kids are the latest stars.

I met them all (well, those of them who actually had been born) back in the heady early days of the Just Intonation Network. Years later, Henry asked me to write the music for one of Jon Jost's films - the history of which has been covered here. After the fallout cleared from the death of that movie-making marriage and my actual marriage, I ended up as Henry's tenant in a cute little cottage south of Market, hanging out with him and his wife at many an event, the details of most of which will have to wait until the deaths of all the participants, or at least until the statute of limitations has run its course.

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.

Loss of my virginity

I had taken to the affectation of a cane lately, a rather lovely golden cobra-headed number which actually did aid my stride, ameliorating a small foot injury I suffered in Barcelona in 'ought-3 at the hands of the green muse and its cousins.  Using the cane of course brought to mind the riddle of the sphinx, asked before she strangled and devoured those who failed to answer correctly, to wit: which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?  Greek grammarians tried to make the connection between sphingein (to bind tight) and sphinx, but according to my old Britannica, the etymology is dubious. But drawn into this associational vortex is the recent clamoring of a number of my women friends to serve a fantasy of mine in the leading of a public deflowering, to be bound tight inside my body (ahem, as it were), much like the Vugusu who required the bridegroom to deflower the virgin bride in public, until the poison of modernity left too few virgin brides available for this ritual‡, but Lynne has maintained that this right of possession is hers and hers alone. So this fantasy, like so many of my tired life, has disappeared, as the cane also has gone the way of all things, broken and left under the glaring eyes of the oh-so-watchful Swiss TSA-equivalents.

‡ African Marriage and Social Change, Lucy Philip Mair, p. 50 and Black Hearts, The Development of Black Sexuality in America, Nick J Myers III, p. 3.

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.  

Dying in the Saddle

from the wikipedia article on Louis Vierne:

Vierne suffered a heart attack while giving his 1750th organ recital at Notre-Dame de Paris on the evening of June 2, 1937. He had completed the main concert, which members of the audience said showed him at his full powers - "as well as he has ever played." After the main concert, the closing section was to be two improvisations on submitted themes. He read the first theme in Braille, then selected the stops he would use for the improvisation. He suddenly leaned forward, clutching his chest, and fell off the bench as he hit the low "E" pedal of the organ. He lost consciousness as the single note echoed throughout the church. He had thus fulfilled his oft-stated lifelong dream - to die at the console of the great organ of Notre-Dame.

I've fantasized about two modes of death: one rather like the above, but peacefully in my sleep, the completed but not-yet-fully orchestrated manuscript of my own Requiem Mass slowly spilling off my night table; the other more akin to the death of Nelson Rockefeller.  

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.

Tune of the day

Angus 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.  

Worlds in Collision

Was reading my copy of IEEE Spectrum this morning at 5 am and found a description of my friend Frieder's work. Very beautiful.  Looking forward to working with him again in just a few days.

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.

Lake Como

Looking over Lake Como from our room at the Bellavista in Valmedrera at the town of Lecco in the distance, where my filmmaker friend Ilaria lives. Lynne says the bell tower is typical Lombardy.  Bellagio, the real one, is just north of here, famous in my circles for the Rockefeller study center. Ron Kuivila told us that his residency there consisted of one unbroken cocktail hour. The hoteliers speak Western Lombard, not sure which dialect.

Tomorrow we take the trip over the alps in the opposite direction of Hannibal, sans war elephants, but with pillaging, conquest and victory on my mind at least, into the land of Schweizerdeutsch.

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.  

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.  

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.