Intuitionism

Bath-time this morning was facilitated by an iPhone 3G® in a Ziploc® bag - thanks to my friend Nicole for enlightening me of this wonderful invention - and a circuitous path through those intoxicating days early in the last century where Hilbert and Brouwer led the fight over the non-finitary law of the excluded middle (see photo) and other such issues.

As a boy, I was so interested in all of this. The issues seemed so important and, later, as I became a composer, I faced them again, feeling a pressure from above to maintain an intellectually rigorous Germanic methodology in all my musical decision making, a certain belief promulgated by my betters that there was a notion of music that existed in a Platonist reality where deep truths live separate from the dirty business of breath and bows and spit and turntables and stylish hairdos, and that compositional progress was in the furtherance of passage toward this Utopian Ideal.

But I was, deep down, more tolerant, and shall we say more Dutch, and believed that music really was purely an act committed by people for their own amusement, that it existed in this world and not the other, and that it had benefits beyond an explication of existence, namely (0) transcendental beauty here on earth (1) encouraging teen pregnancy through passionate embrace (2) a devil-may-care use of drugs (3) hearing impairment in the elderly (4) separation of fools from their money (5) penis casting (6) nonpareil spirituality and mystical joy (7) creative jouissance (8) and so on, and that music was concerned with the grit and chaos and noise of sound, and that it was, at its core, an inexplicable and impenetrable pursuit, evading all attempts to capture it, drop it in the killing jar, and to pin its beautiful wings to the setting board. The theories I learned as a student did not attempt to cover anything except what I found to be the most superficial aspects of music, the voices and pitches and rhythms, and I was left to find the rest myself.

One of the reasons I started writing - English rather than notes - was to try to explain what I did day-by-day during the compositional process, thinking that in so doing I might capture the uncapturable. But I've failed every time that I have tried. I can't really say easily what I do. There is no process to speak of, and the moments spent in the compositional state sneak by unseen to end up in a piece that I no longer feel my own.

"But at least they dressed well"

As a young boy on the Great Plains, gorged on a constant diet of WWII war movies and television, my friends and I would get together with our BB guns and cherry-bombs to be mini-reënactors, and, in our innocence, who would we vie to be? The sloppy GI with perpetual cigarette hanging out of his mouth, unshaven? Hardly! No, we fought for the right to click our heels, to salute, to wear the smartly trimmed Hugo Boss designed and built SS uniforms, to carry an imaginary Feldmarschall's baton, and to speak in a clipped Germanesque pidgin, the hint of a saber cut on our cheek, the monocle, the goose-step.

As children, we could be forgiven, having no idea of the signification of our choice. But many elect to continue this into adulthood, as its very taboo nature titillates and appeals, from the Korean ad above (video here), to Nazi themed restaurants, to the Nazi Chic, to those too interested in the paraphernalia of the Reich. What to make of these fallen and so foolish fellow humans? Have they forgotten or merely never learned that the fascist path, while seeming to wander along an alpine meadow, dotted here and there with some wildflowers, leads to the cliff or to the bear or to both?

Score Directions

The score is done, the parts have been shipped away once again, and, while usually one for absolute control - a chimera at best - I have abrogated my responsibility as a Komponist to allow the so-called performers a bit of leeway, one arm unbound from the straightjacket, a rest from the hamster wheel, the industrialist lightening for the moment the blows on the backs of the restive workers, but this philosophical change of heart, like most, has come from expediency rather than deep thought, as my compositional laziness seems to increase year upon year. I remember a day in the not so distant past where, to begin the simplest of tunes, I first had to build the instruments, sawing and sanding into the wee-est hours to the ire of my roommates, decide on a tuning, and, locked in my slattering studio, learn to play the aforementioned devices or at the least to coax a sound. But now my compositional life has settled into a pattern: (1) agree to a deadline (2) wait until the last possible moment (3) use every shortcut, trick, careless theft and accident to produce something as quick as possible. I had lunch with my friend and co-producer Paul Dresher the other day and had to hide my head in shame after listening to him describe the months of preparation on Shick Machine, building the instruments, learning to ... yes, you get the idea, everything I had been, and revealing to all the shadow I have become.

In the Stomachs of Fleas

We, that is, fognozzle and Erling Wold, present for you a tale of fear, horror, xenophobia, political posturing and denial, all contained within a musical program piece of sorts, a savage delight for the senses and an allegory for today, this and that and the other thrown into the pot of narrative and boiled up into a scenario as follows:

The Australia steamed into San Francisco in 1899, carrying corpses and rats infected with the plague. Between 1900 and 1904, one hundred twenty-six people contracted the disease in San Francisco and environs. One hundred twenty-two of them died while the governor denied the very existence of the plague and the press blamed the Chinese for spreading it.

The plague was brought under control in 1904, only to resurface in 1906 as the great earthquake displaced the human and rat population. The response to this second outbreak was dealt with more efficiently as the causes were better understood, but one hundred eighty people died of the plague in San Francisco between 1906 and 1909.

Fortunately, Xenopsylla cheopis (the Oriental rat flea) never secured a foothold in San Francisco, and our dominant flea remained Ceratophyllus fasciatus, which lacked the deep stomach required for effective plague transmission. Many more people would have died if the reverse had been true.

Unfortunately, the rat-eradication efforts during the San Francisco plague outbreaks did not extend to the squirrels of the East Bay. Through them, the bubonic plague established a permanent foothold in the Pacific Northwest, where it lives on today - in the stomachs of fleas.

SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

and Old First Concerts Present:
DREAMS OF THE RESTLESS
Saturday June 13th, 2009 at 8 pm
Old First Presbyterian Church
1751 Sacramento Street/Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94109
$15 General, $12 Seniors (65 and older), $12 Full Time Students

Hitler fascination

Our roving correspondent Milky recently sent to your faithful editor this well-crafted portrait of an idealized and supah sexy Hitler. As I pondered it, daydreaming of a personal yet elusive fame that would cause someone somewhere and at sometime to render me, even in a fleeting imaginative fancy, with such a magnetic physique, I was reminded of the mystical allure that HH held over his people. Thousands of love letters received during his brief time as the duly elected leader of his fawning people are full of amusing quotes:

I would like to make you my little puppy my dear, my eternal, my lovely Adolf.

I am making you keys to my front door and my room. We have to be very careful. So come early, ring my landlady's bell and ask if I'm at home. If everything works out, my parents (they could be your in-laws) say you can come any time, so we can spend the night together at my parents' house!

They eroticize the relationship we have to power and fame, of the mystical love we shower on iconic figures, our kings and queens du jour, finding ourselves wishing for a Daniel Day-Lewis or a Mary Kate-Olsen to pin us to the floor, us dressed in nothing but a little leather cap and some latex underpants, bringing upon us an orgasmic religious ecstasy quite like that experienced at full tilt towards a passionate Christ-as-not-only-spiritual-husband by St Theresa of the Little Flowers. Although the photo above shows the young sex-kitten-version of the conquering collective cultural hero cum super-ego, we wonder if, as he aged, he took on the immediate character of the father figure, more directly replacing the father- and husband-protectors lost in the seething tides of the harsh and endless war. And, once satiated, bitten, spanked and altogether sexed-up, we might warmly turn over, spooning, and, our minds drifting, light upon the kitler meme and thereupon sleep the blissful and ne'er to be interrupted sleep of those just and unstained.

Geburtstag

My follower Milky chided me last evening at the Throbbing Gristle event here in San Francisco for somehow not paying proper obeisance to the event of A.H.'s birthday last Monday, but it's actually quite important for me that this set of notes on a particular cultural preoccupation doesn't become what it purports to analyze, a fetishistic love-fest of a brutal regime, ending in a place I can only just imagine: where the cleaning lady finds me one day, swinging by the neck, raised aloft by an elaborate pulley system, cold to the touch, wearing only a pair of vinyl briefs and a gas mask, surrounded by pornographic magazines open to their most German images. We'll leave that end to those who really do enjoy such things, the likes of Motor Racing Bosses and Princes of the Realm.

But, while on the topic, we find here:

A report by Ofsted, which expressed concern that secondary pupils were repeatedly studying Hitler is part of a wider debate about the nature of Britain's enduring obsession. Those concerned at the ubiquity of the Third Reich in the history classroom and beyond to the nation's bookshops and living rooms fear it stunts understanding of other periods and leads to an unhealthy personality cult.

On the opposite side of the argument there are those who point to the monstrosity of the Nazi regime and its leader, arguing that it is difficult to run out of important issues relating to Hitler to highlight to the wider population.

And to which I can add only that it is difficult to run out of unimportant issues as well.

JG Ballard, dead today

Crash, a dance written under his influence, the score for the last section above, a recording of the entirety below.

from the book:

I stood with my feet apart, hands on my breast bone, inhaling the floodlit air. I could feel my wounds again, cutting through my chest and knees. I searched for my scars, those tender lesions that now gave off an exquisite and warming pain. My body glowed from these points, like a resurrected man basking in the healed injuries that had brought about his first death.

My Sister, My Love

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet

Lynne Sachs showed one of her latest films, Georgic for a Forgotten Planet, last night at ATA, a cultural icon here in San Francisco. The film, like Vergil's Georgic, is a lovely and meditatively poetic paean to agriculture, although, unlike Vergil, the film's focus is on the separation of our citified culture from the husbandry of the earth as well as the separation of our own persons from what surrounds us. I was struck in particular by a number of plaintive shots of the Moon over the city, hardly visible against the streetlights, ignored by those below, a forgotten deity.

Many of her films center on ecology and our damage of the same and we saw a number of those as well. Also included on the program were the films of her partner Mark Street, including one of his more abstract works titled Winter Wheat, a beautiful bubbling hand-manipulated piece of 16mm art, which took on an environmental urgency in the context of the other films.

But the reason that Georgic is the cynosure of this bit is its use of my first CD in the soundtrack, most noticeably my manipulated music boxes. If memory serves, this is the one that begins the film.

Some of the others from Music of Love are used as well, and some moments of Hagalaz. I'm flattered of course, and happy these sounds have a new life. The actual box, holding the last few guitar picks of a previous life, sits on the piano behind me as I write.

Alamo!

A habit I picked up years ago from Ed Toomey, formerly of Neef, who picked up every playing card he saw on the ground - a surprisingly common find - compels me to scan the terrain for interesting bits of detritus. I no longer carry them home to fill filing cabinets and adorn the walls; I merely scrutinize and inspect and leave undisturbed. But recently I came across one of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries' screeds on a New York city street, and was reminded of my colleague Barry Drogin's opera named after the selfsame amusing and intolerant religious leader.

In the current missive, Alamo is persecuted, like all good Xtian martyrs, but in his case again by the anti-Christ, who has taken the form of the US government, now accusing him transporting minors across state lines for immoral purposes. In Barry's opera, Alamo's persecutor du jour is the Cult Awareness Network, and a particularly poignant moment occurs when Alamo's polemical rant against the Catholic Church suddenly becomes personal, and we suddenly see through a window to his soul, consumed by a deep and pervasive sadness, a frantic desperation of a man trapped and scared and alone, wondering why God has forsaken him. Barry has put up a section of the score and recording, linked to above and here below, respectively.

Update: Barry has informed me that, and I have apologized for:

As per its full title, "Alamo! a scena for a cappella voice and Bible (King James version)," calling "Alamo!" an "opera" is an error in scale - kind of like calling a one-act play a full-length play, or, say, any orchestral piece in one movement a symphony.

Henry Ford

Stephen Ambrose, in his Citizen Soldiers, tells of how upset the GIs were to see the enemy coming toward them riding Ford trucks (and Opel trucks and planes, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GM). Henry Ford has a number of troubling connections with the Nazis, many of which have been well publicized, from the inclusion of excerpts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the glove compartments of new cars to his outspoken admiration for Hitler to his acceptance of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in July 1938, four months after the Austrian Anschluss.

As the Washington Post points out in a detailed article, worth reading, on the deep connections between the two, when one thinks of Ford, the image is of baseball and apple pie and not that Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich, which he did. Company documents found when the German Ford slave-labor factories were liberated spoke of the "genius of the Führer." The final insult, most amazing to consider, came after the war, when both GM and Ford petitioned the US Government for reparations for their German facilities due to Allied bombing. And, although one might simply think to laugh off such a ludicrous proposal, GM was in fact paid $32 million, a cool $380 million inflation adjusted.

Irving Fine

A longstanding jest of mine was to answer, when asked about my career goals, that I wanted to be at least as famous as Irving Fine, he being (in my mind) a perfect example of a composer of some talent who is known by other composers but not well known among the general populace, unlike some of his fellows in the Boston Six, e.g. Lenny Bernstein and Aaron Copland and also due to the rhythmic-rhyming connection between our monikers. Unfortunately this particular goal will most likely not be achieved, but recently I found the late composer and I have some interests in common. From the bio by Phillip Ramey:

Although Irving's sisters frequently used the word "normal" to describe their brother, his first sexual experience was anything but that. He told Verna, who confided it to her daughters many years later, that at age six he had been molested by a twelve-year-old neighborhood girl who was acting as his babysitter. He was sexually active early on, and in his teens sometimes frequented whorehouses in Boston with a friend named Stanley. He also liked to write smutty limericks.

Verna recalled that Irving appreciated women with large breasts, theorizing that this might be because his mother and sisters were thus endowed. One summer in the late 1940s, while sitting on the lawn with his wife and Aaron Copland, Irving gave a quiet wolf whistle as an extremely busty female in a revealing halter passed by. Verna, who had average-sized breasts and was used to his ways, said, "Oh, Irving, act your age." Copland, puzzled, asked: "Can you explain to us why you like those ghastly things?" Irving just smiled. All his life he was a bit of a flirt, charming both sexes, although Verna insisted that he had no homosexual inclinations, even in adolescence.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide what features of the above we share.

Third Reich in Ruins

I came across a cornucopiæc website of photos then and now, comparing locations in Nazi Germany at the end of the war - the abovementioned 'in ruins' - to the same locations in our current and fully de-Nazified Germany. It reminded me of my first trip to Nürnberg in '95 at the 50th anniversary of VE day, when the city had placed billboard-sized photos of the urban landscape from early 1945, smoke still rising from the rubble, sited so as to duplicate the view I had standing in front of each: one view mere piles of debris, one the beautifully reconstructed Disneyland of the old city.

Soon after, I headed out to the Zeppelinfeld, site of many a Party rally, where my friend and sometime colleague Jon Jost had, standing near the dais, watched as an elderly German gentleman walked by, looked quickly from side to side, then made a small, furtive, but definite salute. Old habits die hard.

Richard Grayson

Discovered today to my joy that there exists on YouTube a cornucopia of videos of my first harmony teacher, whose much-more-than-a-parlor-trick is to take suggestions as to themes and composers from the audience and to then improvise a setting of the first in the style of the second. Playing examples in class, he would often wander off a bit in various directions, and was quickly able to show how, say a Bach chorale would progress through historical harmonic developments.

Two Orchestral Waltzes for Lynne

Vanity Press

I remember, as a wet-behind-the-ears naif, being surprised to discover how much of the art world was based on self-aggrandizement, trust funds, vanity press, self-written bios, press-releases and the like. I had so foolishly assumed that there was a way to actually succeed in the arts by doing art, that there was an arbiter in the world that chose the best, that knighted those that deserved it, and that the cream would rise to the top, that you would get the phone call or the letter that said you had made it, that you were now allowed to join the pantheon, loved and fêted by your peers as well as the adulating multitudes.

But soon I discovered the fallacious nature of this belief, that when the ballet or the opera or the symphony or the local new music promoter called you or sent you a letter, it was always merely to ask you for money, to ask you to support their own self-aggrandizement, their own vanity press and their own tenuous careers in the arts.

For example, I recently received an oleaginous letter from a record company, flattering me with silken tongue. Let's take a look-see, some details redacted and some annotations added:

Hi Erling,

The informal introduction catches me off guard.

My name is [French female name here] and I am writing from the Boston-based production company [whatever].

The pretty name opens the heart, allow the knife to enter.

I’ve familiarized myself with your music and career, very impressive. I listened to your "On the Death of David Blakely" and loved it - emotionally moving piece, full of intrigue and mystery.

But here we see already the seeds planted of the doubt to come, a glimpse of the future: the fighting, the recrimination, the tears and blood and shame and hurt.

We have a vibrant release schedule and sessions lined up through 2009 - just this November we produced music for clarinet and piano with Richard Stoltzman in our Boston Studio (I have attached a picture that was taken during the session).

I have also attached an article featuring [whatever] and the press release for our formalized agreement with Microsoft to include [whatever] music in Windows. We're in close touch with Microsoft’s Lead Music Supervisors about providing more content in the coming months. Exciting all around!

At this point it is simply embarrassing and we really need to look away. Needless to say, our ensuing conversations, although light and airy and of some social interest, lead in the direction we have foreseen: the deal offered akin to that of prostitute and john, that where she looks away at the moment of penetration, separating herself from her body to avoid feeling the revulsion that is welling inside, and he feels a vague discontent, knowing that it is not what he had hoped.

Münchausen

Reports have been arriving at our editor's desk here that the current Global Economic Collapse is causing a major uptick in movie theater ticket sales. Disaster seems to arrive hand-in-hand with a desire for fantastic escapism, and the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany in Stalingrad coincided with the release by Universum Film AG of the spectacular - and spectacularly expensive - fantasy Münchausen, Herr Goebbels' answer to Gone with the Wind. In the contradiction-laden Germany of 1943, the stage was filled with Afrodeutsch extras, some forcibly recruited from the concentration camps; the star of the movie, Hans Albers, was supporting his Jewish lover Hansi Burg in London; and the screenplay was written by Berthold Bürger, a pseudonym for the officially banned Jewish writer Erich Kästner, who was somehow able to give Albers the line "Nicht meine Uhr ist kaputt, die Zeit ist kaputt," a politically insensitive line to say the least. In addition, the movie is filled with sexual decadence, from a nymphomaniac Catherine the Great to topless harem girls (clipped out of the clip above), to the smolderingly hypnotic eyes of Albers, all while Hollywood labored under the Hayes code, but the end was near and none of this immoderation went far enough to salve the growing fear of the German populace.

Ruining it for everyone

The Nazis did a lot of really bad things, and tainting the swastika in the West forever and always was one of them, leading even to the current attempts in the EU to ban the symbol, although it's really unclear how one actually bans a simple figure that has been in use for at least three millennia, spans cultures, is currently seen around the world, is part of ornamental borders and floors and temple columns, included in books on tessellations and origami, the logo of charitable organizations, etc. Lynne Rutter saw the lovely example of a decorative manji at the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo a few days ago. However, even there, the Nazi stigma still is felt as, since the war, all the new Buddhist manji in Japan are of the left-handed variety, not the right-handed isomer favored by the historical evil. Below, from a Tokyo shrine near Shibuya:

Last day in Tokyo

Ended the last night in Tokyo drinking too much and watching my performing arts colleague Fiume Suzuki and her dance partner (see both above) perform in the difficult-to-find and members-only Sound Bar+ in Roppongi, an unmarked red door just down a small street. We met at TPAM, attracted to each other's similar hairdos, i.e., our current baldness:

Once there, I was able to compare corsets with a friend of hers, whose bound waist was as thick as a normal thigh, and who showed me some lovely photos on her cell phone of corset/kimono hybrids.

But first thing, Lynne and I went to see Shun-kin at the Setagaya Public Theater and it was everything I hoped it would be from the glimpse I caught through the tech booth window. The story was clear even without the English surtitles that were provided at the Barbican, and not understanding the details of the language allowed me to get lost in the beauty of the production. Birds represented by flapping paper, mixed with projections of birds, sometimes moving in sync with kimono catching those projections. The aging of the two main characters was handled in two appealing ways: a series of cast changes for the man and the morphing of a puppet to a real actress for Shun-kin herself, a blind shamisen player who takes her servant as a lover, a sadomasochistic relationship that is resolved only when the servant blinds himself. Ah, Japanese stories seem to always veer toward the heavily fucked up, at least those that make an impact in the west, but that is something that I too find very attractive.

In between, and quite a long train ride away, we went to see Akira Ishigura at the enormous GEISAI art show. He has some craft in his oil paintings of anime crossed with the old masters.

War Crime and Punishment

On the bullet train to Hamamatsu (pictured to the left), one quickly realizes how much was built or rebuilt after the war. Most of the country in fact. So much of it looks prefabbed and hastily constructed, temporary buildings reminiscent of West Berlin before the wall came down. General Curtis LeMay's firebombing strategy, the results of which were the impetus for this rebuilding, was not in fact that different from what had already been made acceptable throughout Europe by the blitz, the vengeance weapons, the carpet bombing of cities by masses of planes that blotted out the sun, the single-minded development of superweapons capable of wiping out a city in a flash of neutrons, heat and gamma rays. But the paper and wood houses that populated Japan at the time were more susceptible than the stone buildings of Europe and the resulting conflagrations reached temperatures that boiled their victims in the rivers into which they swam to escape. LeMay once famously remarked that it was a good thing we won or he and many other of the Allied commanders would have been prosecuted for war crimes.

And that is the nut of crimes of war: it's a prerequisite to commit them in order to be guilty of them, but one also has to lose the war.

In his autobiography, Chuck Yeager tells of receiving orders to fly to some particular grid coordinates in Germany and kill every living thing within a square mile. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something to the effect that he didn't feel good about it, but orders is orders: more or less the Nuremberg defense. The losers don't get a chance to raise the question.

TPAM day 4

The high point was performing in Rotozaza's Etiquette with Silvia Mercuriali, one of its two progenitors, a piece where two face each other across a small table, listening to instructions on headphones, following without question these instructions, acting simultaneously as audience, performers and godlike figures manipulating two small toy characters' frightening lives. It was a physical rush, intimate in the real interaction with this real stranger, embarrassing in the pressure to perform, and difficult restraining oneself from responding to the character being played, sticking to the script as it is revealed.

I wonder if there is a place for 'composition' in this little world.

After that, my agent-cum-dominatrix flogged me through a gauntlet of meetings with art centers and presenters and theaters, a blur of Japanese that I am finding difficult to retain. I handed out a lot of CDs and DVDs and I remember from back in the Yamaha days that the Japanese take these things seriously; once I gave a CD to Kuwabara-san, a member of the Board of Directors, a major position in a company that at that time numbered 14000, and, after a late night of drinking 'in the samurai style,' he buttonholed me first thing in the morning, me in a deep and photophobic hangover, asking insightful questions supported by multitudinous scrawled notes in a mixture of Japanese and English and Music Notation in which he had analyzed and transcribed in detail the microtonal scales and harmonies, asking why and why and why to which I had no good answer. But I accepted DVDs and CDs as well, and now I feel a certain responsibility to respond in kind, to study and peruse and comment and give due attention.

And then, the closing party - unfortunately so soon - in which an Aussie gentleman embraced me in the five points of fellowship (see above), applied the apprentice handshake, and, at the moment when the master and apprentice are mouth to ear, whispered that he is an 'esoteric sex worker,' that he has a special knowledge known only to a few.

TPAM day 3

Met with the Arion-Edo Foundation who put on the Tokyo Summer Music Festival, a group that puts paid to my previously held notion that the music scene here is only conservative. Also met with the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, very interested in doing new and odd work as well as drawing in the local community. Surprised to find that both were interested in my little operas, although interest and reality are two different things, separated by the gulf of funders' bureaucracies. Also surprised to find how many people knew of the work of William Burroughs, and how much interest there was in Queer, which was not true in Europe. There is something here that resonates in a fundamental way with the beats.

Another dance showcase, this time for the JCDN, which is the Japan equivalent of the National Performance Network in the US. I'm beginning to figure out some of the dance vocabulary that seems to suffuse the work here. One piece stood out for me, a violently sexual pas de deux, appealing for obvious reasons, by j.a.m. dance theatre, Osaka.

Tokyo moment of the day: being crushed onto a JR train car to the point where I wondered if one of the passengers might actually die. As the train moved forward, a young girl leaned her head against my back, quietly sobbing from the pain.

TPAM day 2

OK, after seeing Pappa Tarahumara's adaption of Chekov's Three Sisters in their little studio and after recently seeing Ship in a View in the City by the Bay, I've become a big fan. An incredible intensity and immediacy coupled with depth and polish and way-too-capable performers makes for a flawless piece. The sound/music score is tightly integrated into the dance. Asking Hiroshi Koike about this, he said that he gives his composers very detailed timelines - Lynne said storyboards - of the piece before they start to write, but that he also asks them to fill it in with many special sounds and gestures, which he then works into the movement language. Only once have I worked from a score given to me by a choreographer: Robert Wechsler's Modules/Loops, excerpt following, and I have to say that it was great fun. It's been noted by many people that having constraints is quite freeing, and I found that to be true:

Before this, we were treated to a series of showcase works that highlighted quite a different dance aesthetic from what I have seen in the US. A couple of the pieces were quite sparse, with some dangerous moves, e.g., climbing up a series of stacked tables and then rolling off the top to land on all fours like a cat; falling onto the top of the head from a kneeling position with an audible whack, then slowly un-scissoring to lie on the belly. The final piece was the most memorable and, even though it is quite impossible to capture in words, let me ask the reader to imagine a young woman afflicted with a mild case of St. Vitus' Dance or other neurological disorder, following the spoken instructions of a self-help meditation recording that has had a large number of silences edited in, no other music, in front of a small black wall, a very simple white spot with a diffuse edge lighting her as she slightly vibrates through the simple postures, and then, after a small adjustment of the furniture, changing her shirt from green to orange, taking her meds, then merely sitting on an ottoman-like object quietly while the tape, still filled with silences, plays again, the whole process using up the better part of 3/4 of an hour.

Besides that, more schmoozing, more meetings, lots of bits and pieces of dances too numerous to mention.

TPAM day 1

Met with the curator at the Setagaya Public Theater, a powerful institution doing major work with strong community connections, centered in a helpfully well-off suburb of Tokyo. Saw a bit of the piece to the left through the window of the control booth as they readied it for its premiere tomorrow and it was gorgeous. Hoping to get snuck in to see it before I leave, although it's been sold out for a while.

I was told that the nature of the 'classical' music community here is very conservative (is that different anywhere else?), and that they really aren't interested in doing new work (again, is that different anywhere else?). The curator told me of her husband's CD collection, exemplified by the three complete Beethoven sets, so I gave her a Little Girl CD to improve its balance, at least a bit. There is a Japanese translation of that opera's libretto, would love to reproduce the piece here in what would be its third vulgaris, had a native Japanese opera singer (the marvelous Mariko Wakita) starring in the German production so already halfway there. But was also told a funny story about how they deliberately made the acoustics in their theater unacceptable for music so as to not compete with the real music hall in the vicinity and possibly upset its major corporate sponsors.

The first major TPAM schmoozefest happened today. Met a variety of interesting and genuinely warm and interested people. This was followed by a showcase performance of two singer songwriters, one very calm with somewhat surreal lyrics and the other quite intense, an older Mikami Kan playing electric guitar with an idiosyncratic and quite rhythmically irregular and dynamically angular style. Enjoyed both, but noticed that only one had English translation supertitles. This turned out to be by design as the electric performer's somewhat severe music style was matched by his stories: (1) we are all going to die die die (2) old woman having sex with a much younger man, both kill each other (3) 60 year old man having sex with a young woman, dies at orgasm (4) rape victim goes back to be raped again and again until she drives the rapist away (5) well, that's all I remember. But I do remember him in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence as well.

In the evening, attended a ritual Buddhist performance, a long monodic line passed between a soloist, a choir of 20 and a smaller of 8, punctuated by repetitive hand movements, perfect moments of percussion, candle-lighting. Have just been reading Anthony Burgess's biography where he tells of giving up composing for writing and how the latter is so much simpler, being a single line instead of a complex counterpoint, but interesting to see and remember how rich and powerful a single line of music can be.

TPAM day 0

I had dinner with Yutaka Kuramochi-san last night, a playwright working at the Japan National Theater, winner of the Kishida Drama award and many other accolades, but let's take a quick look at just the beginning of the scenario of his latest:

The protagonist, Ayumu Aoi, is obsessed with sending in postcards to try to win sweepstakes prizes and is so absorbed in his mania that he can hardly find time to sleep. He fills out the postcards in detail, believing that adding information not even requested he increase his chances of winning. Eventually he begins borrowing the names of people around him to increase his number of applications, spending all day in his solitary room creating false hobbies, character traits and family members to fill in his imaginary applicants’ postcards with.

Just my kind of story, and my friend and agent Kyoko Yoshida is helping bring this play, One Man Show, to Minneapolis in translation for a reading this year.

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Here in Tokyo for a few weeks, capital of one of the signatories of the Tripartite Pact, meditating on the global nature of WWII and the support the Nazis had from a number of other militaristic and dangerously jingoist societies. Interesting to find that, even though the Japanese were similarly brutal to all their perceived-as-inferior neighbors, they didn't share the antisemitism of the Nazis, at least not in quite the same way. Although books repeating the canards of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sold millions of copies in Japan, they had funded their earlier war with Russia with money from the prominent Jewish financier Jacob Schiff, and also allowed a number of Jewish refugees from Europe to settle in Japan for a curiously mixed-up set of reasons under the Fugu Plan. I've never quite understood how the Germans, in their search for a world dominated by perfect Aryan-ness, could settle into a marriage with the most un-Aryan Japan, a country which had even fought against Germany in the Great War that rankled Hitler so much. But it was a relationship that lasted until the end for both short-lived empires, from the outside at least warm and congenial, with none of the obvious cracks that threatened the Nazi's other marriages of convenience.

Off to Japan

The day after the waltz, I'm heading off to Japan for the Tokyo Performing Arts Market to hook up with some of my artist colleagues across the pond - the other pond in this instance. My agent Kyoko Yoshida has done a lovely job of translating up a brochure and writing some kind things about me along the way.

I'm also visiting my Japanese friends at Yamaha who have now risen to exalted heights: the Chairman of the Board, the Deputy General Manager of the Semiconductor Division, etc. Makes me feel that somehow I didn't quite reach my potential in the corporate world. But I have the music to keep me warm at night, so I suppose that's something.

name-dropping postscript: I'm still working with a group of the Yamaha Music Technology engineers: Thom Blum, a founder of the ICMC, Doug Keislar, now editor of the Computer Music Journal, Jim Wheaton. And some of the others have gone on to some greatness as well: Guy Garnett, Xavier Serra, Michael Czeiszperger, John Strawn.

Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning

A popular and oft-parodied line from the play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, where the soon-to-be-martyred and immortalized Albert Leo Schlageter is exhorted by his comrade Friedrich Thiemann to fight:

I know all about that garbage from 1918 ... brotherhood, equality, and freedom ... Beauty and worthiness! Then, right in the middle of it, they say Hands Up! You're disarmed ... you're the voting swine of the Republic! -- No to hell with this whole ideological smorgasboard ... I shoot with live ammo! When I hear the word culture ... I release the safety on my Browning!

The last line is a good one, and Herr Schlageter did derail some trains and was executed by the French Occupation Forces between the wars and was taken up as a hero by the Nazis, who built many memorials all over Germany including the one pictured, shown as part of a Hitler Youth field trip. Some were destroyed and some erased as part of the Allied Denazification of Germany after the war.

The International

Went to see the thriller The International a few days ago.  Caught a glimpse of my old friend Thomas Morris playing Chief Inspector Reinhard Schmidt. Here he is above as the fulcrum, the Angel of Death (or something to that effect) in Jon Jost's The Bed You Sleep In, stealing the scene, backed by my favorite music from the film.

der barney klingelt

I have been sent two important missives, in video form, from a deep-cover operative and thus, I present them here.

Episode 2? There’s another one of these out there?


And while we’re at it: Heil Honey I’m Home.

Die Welle

Once again Ron Jones's Third Wave experiment at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto has been dramatized, this time by the German director Dennis Gansel. There are some questions about the original story's veracity, as the main source is Ron Jones himself, but it is highly believable: that a few simple step-by-step manipulations of a group young people leads to their wholehearted acceptance of brutal authoritarianism: sitting in attention postures, starting all sentences with 'Mr. Jones,' answering all questions in three words or less, learning a simple salute. All the results included the usual harbingers of disaster: unquestioning adherence to the rules, xenophobia, the ratting out those who didn't measure up. But he also found improvements in academic skills and an excitement and motivation he had not seen before. Although some pro-fascists would focus on the latter as a justification of the former, I prefer to think that it's best to accept a little less perfection and a little more anarchy and more chaos and a little more joy.

They Are There

Kyle Gann has been blogging the Ives Vocal Marathon at Wesleyan. where I just was a month and a half ago, bad timing, but at least I have Kyle's inspiring and uplifting infectious excitement about the whole deal to thrill me from afar. Happened across the above and must share. Don't watch, just listen.

Searching for Fast (formerly notes on the tape music concert on my birthday)

First night of the SF Tape Music Festival tonight. My colleague Thom Blum premiered a fantastically beautiful and nuanced piece, a state of grace. Aaron Ximm, recent father and former director of my favorite concert series in San Francisco, presented a painfully lovely modification of recordings made of Southeast Asian orchestras.

Overall, a lovely mix of modern fixed media works and some of the more famous works from the early days of electronic music, many from the first concert of musique concrète - the Concert du Bruits of 1958, my birthyear (and here today is my birthday). Sadly all of the old guard seem to have died in recent years: Pierre Schaeffer, György Ligeti, Vladimir Ussachevsky, but it was surprising to me how similar the old and new pieces were. The rhythms and the range of the sonic variations were quite alike, more amazing given the painstaking methods available in those heady early days: the razors and the tape and the wires and the bouncing and the fiddling with the oscillators, compared with the whiz-bang point and click technologies available to the sound-composer of today.

But what struck me the most was that the aforementioned rhythms, like the rhythms of the classical-to-modern instrumental music that preceded, fell into the range of speech rhythms, nothing happening too slowly or too quickly developing, all of medium tempi. It reminded me of a discussion in Gérard Grisey's composition seminar. It had been noticed that the tempo dimension had been woefully unexplored. But why was it that the European modern music of that time - the mid-80s - was pushing only towards a slower tempo? The harmonic rhythm of his music, like all the spectralists, was by its nature very slow, examining the intra-harmony of all the pitches of a single tone under a time-microscope. Why was no modern music fast? I answered immediately: because that would require a pulse, and pulses had been rejected by the modern musical establishment at the time. It took the music of the minimalists and maximalists and totalists to go back to fast.

When I was writing Little Girl and using bits of pieces of the minimalist language, I noticed the fact - and I wasn't the first, ok? - that passages of eighths could seem much faster than passages of sixteenths, and that the pulse depended on the perceptual rhythmic groupings or perceptual chunks of time. How we perceive these chunks are under the control of any good composer, but these issues stand out very quickly in patterned music, e.g., the Alberti-like arpeggios that attract so many of us. The problem with fast say, totally serialized music, is that without pattern or regular repeated rhythms, even as the notes whiz by ever faster, the brain keeps chunking bigger groups of them to bring the perceived tempo down into familiar territory. It has to be led by the hand into very fast tempi by the use of lots of patterned cues. House music does it, easily hitting 180 bpm, the distinction of genre sometimes falling almost exclusively to the tempo range, but within the limitations of extreme repetition and audiences under the influence of very particular drugs.

And, what is even more interesting about this speeded-up dance music is the concomitantly slow or even nonexistent harmonic rhythm. When writing my orchestral waltzes mentioned in recent posts, I realized that the harmonic rhythm of the famous old 19th century waltzes, e.g. those of the junior Strauss, was much slower than what I typically succumbed to in a waltz feel. Satie-influenced, I've tended to believe in the doctrine of one chord per measure, but that's clearly not the way the Kaiser liked it. But still, the Kaiser and I favor a harmonic rhythm that is within the normal range, that doesn't raise too many skirts up to allow us to see the brutish realities of nature beneath. I remember a composer friend being scolded back in college for too fast of a harmonic rhythm. That struck me strange back then and it still seems odd now. It's easy to make your harmonic rhythm slow - lots of music does that - but it's actually pretty hard to make it fast, and too fast? Well try it - it's not easy. At some point, the brain re-chunks the music to bring it back into the normal range. And, in the tape concert, you could hear an analogous timbral rhythm in all the pieces, old and new, again often falling into the same range.

One technology not so easily available to the old school concrète folks was the multi-speaker spatial diffusion on display, the performance aspect of the fixed media world that also gives us as the audience, sitting in the almost-dark, at least something to watch. The diffusion tended to coerce the primeval recordings into the same sonic world as those more recent. Sometimes, most noticeably for me in the Ussachevsky, it was a bit garish, pushing that piece in particular into a faster spatial rhythm that gave the whole thing a jazzed-up feel. But again, the spatial rhythms never seemed too fast. Even when there was a quick ping-pong-like panning, it was perceived as a gestalt, as a sound with a complex spatial quality, not leading us to tap our toes, not pulling us towards speed and all its dangers.

Birthday

M. Josh aka fognozzle sent me the following greeting today for my birthday. I have not yet today received quite this level of adulation, nor a shovel-salute from a bevy of topless and tow-haired boys, seen near the end of the video, just before the windows open on the bright and glorious future of the Fatherland.

Editor's aside: it seems to be impossible to use the word Fatherland, translated literally from Vaterland, without conjuring an image of the Nazis. The German word was used to innocuously mean homeland, although some in my country find an uncomfortable connotation in that word in the title of the US Department of suchsame Security. And there does seem to be a parent-gender-role association that colors Fatherland vs. Motherland: that of the stern dad who argues with his fists vs. the mom that coos and suckles at her teat. Although the Russian/Soviet use of Rodina-mat, translated to Motherland, still gives me a sense a hawkish xenophobia. I have to admit I come from a certain hippy-dippy-we-are-all-one background that bristles at the thought of God and the Kindly Ones choosing any particular people and/or country over any other and so may explain my overreaction. Homeland, motherland, fatherland, ancestral home and land of my birth. Creepy.

Well, the video seems long gone so whatever. 

The Wehrmacht Pope Speaks

There are several circumstances that help fuel my Nazi-interest addiction: (1) the fulsome record-keeping, film-making, accounting and cataloguing of the Dritte-Reichists themselves (2) the dumping into the public domain of the above by the Allied conquerors (3) the hundreds of thousands of post WWII memoirs by and interviews with and trials of combatants and non-combatants. So we do really know what happened, OK?

And yes, they, the National Socialists really did kill a whole heck of a lot of people, Jews and Romanis and Slavs and Gays and Jehovah's Witnesses and the Infirm and Intellectual and Freethinking, and they really did run the exhaust into the back of the transport trucks and they really did slaughter them wholesale in gas chambers and they did machine gun them while standing in their self-dug graves and they did work them to death to build weapons and vengeance weapons and did inject them with diseases and decompressed and pickled and chopped up and tortured and starved and killed in every way imaginable. And such behavior naturally upsets those who remember or are related to those who remember.

And thus, the denial of the same is a reasonable symptom of a certain type of mental illness, a lack of willingness to accept reality, the real reality that is, i.e., our consensus hallucination of the way things actually are. I personally think that one needs to suffer from this particular illness to accept the Catholic Church's teachings and behaviors through the centuries, from the Assumption of Mary to the Cadaver synod, so maybe it isn't hard to understand that a Catholic bishop might believe that "the historical evidence" was hugely against the Holocaust, but still, for a Church and a Pope that suffer from too close a connection to the above, one would think they would be sensitive to the unbelievable awfulness of the whole situation, bending over backward to salve and soothe the wounds so recent and so deep.

But no, today we see that Benedict XVI doesn't get it, reinstating Richard Williamson and other right-wing bishops. The story in the NY Times here. Yes, these are "declarations that we don't share in any way," well, except that we have brought these declarations back into the Church. Gott im Himmel.

UPDATE: Richard Williamson's un-excommunication has now been made contingent on his recanting of his no-gas-chamber belief. zmjezhd sent me a link to the bishop's blog where I'm sure we will all be able to follow his crisis of faith.

Natzweiler

From Hitler's Death Camps: the sanity of madness, by Konnilyn Feig:

Today the hotel has recovered its prewar fame. Its dining room is in demand for fancy wedding parties by the elite of Strasbourg and surrounding towns. A visitor sees wedding parties drive up to the hotel and park in front of the gas chamber. The wedding guests walk into the hotel dining rooms, sparing not a glance for the gas chamber, clearly marked only a few feet away. And they dine and celebrate a new marriage - so very close, so very, very close to that spot where many human beings lost their lives. Hotel guests during the war had perhaps a more unnerving experience, because the men and women to be gassed stood nude outside that plain building across from the restaurant, in full view of the luncheon patrons and the visiting professors. The victims' screams in the gas chamber were easily heard in the hotel and provided the background noise for the diners and sleepers.

Once again we come fact to face with the great question: how were so many so easily inured to the sufferings of others? And well we might ask it of ourselves.

February 28th 2009, Van Ness & Sacramento, SF 8pm

Two Orchestral Waltzes for Lynne

1. Ludmilla Waltz

2. Empress Waltz

"The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper - the art of tone turned bawdy. I venture to say that the compositions of one man alone, Johann Strauss II, have lured more fair young creatures to lamentable complaisance than all the hypodermic syringes of all the white slave scouts since the fall of the Western Empire. There is something about a waltz that is simply irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy kiss behind the door - nay, she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her husband misunderstands her, and drinks too much, and cannot appreciate Maeterlinck, and is going to Cleveland, 0., on business to-morrow..."  from H.L. Mencken, Prejudices, Second Series.

The two waltzes here are written for my inamorata, and reflect two of her most beguiling facets, the first: as the fallen Russian aristocrat, the woman of a certain expectation lacking the allowance that would sanction it; the second: as the haughty and dominating sovereign, unwilling to brook any usurpation of her ultimate and crushing authority. Popularly, waltzes are thought of as dances in 3/4 time, but the word waltz merely means a revolving dance, as both words come from the same root, and many dances named waltzes over the last few centuries have been in a variety of meters: 2/4, 3/4, 6/8, 5/4.  But in the end, composers get to call their works whatever they want, so, while the first soi-disant waltz is in 3/4, it is hardly a dance at all, more a concert statement of unbridled passion, discords and all, and the second, while primarily in a fast 3/4 with shifts to 2/4, carries us away in a whirl, a flash of ankle as the ball gown spins up, bodies pressed against each other, a fevered head falling to a shoulder in a swoon of sweet and utter surrender.

Seven of Nine

My enviably witty friend Dave Ginocchio of the Russian River Wine Co (highly recommended), upon hearing of all this during this last Xmas season, replied "Feliz Nazi Blog," a saying I wish I had invented, but also made me promise to, at some point, connect Seven of Nine to the Nazis, not actually that difficult since the Star Trek franchise is such a sprawling monstrosity that it has touched on just about everything, and the reference is already there, ripe for the picking, from the Voyager series (VOY to those in the know):

TUVOK

I don't recognize this program.

TOM PARIS

I do. He's wearing a Nazi uniform. We're on Earth, during the Second World War.

SEVEN OF NINE

Nazi?

TOM PARIS

Totalitarian fanatics bent on world conquest. The Borg of their day ... no offense.

SEVEN OF NINE

None taken.

All this being only one of many Nazi references throughout the various incarnations. The picture above being from the visit of Adolf in an alternate 1944 (one many alternate WWIIs where the Nazis prevail) to the occupied US of A, this from ENT, Storm Front Part II (again, to those in the know).

But, in both cases, 7 of 9 and the NS, the uniform is the thing.

Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein

Flash: Miss Erika, one of our remote correspondents, has sent along this communiqué.

re: Nazi Blog

Are you aware of the nazi sweetheart march "Erika" ,1939, by composer Herms Neil (was the marching song of the Waffen SS)? I feel it needs a place in your blog as it has such a forceful & catchy refrain.

here are video links (montages, etc):

www.youtube.com/watch

www.truveo.com/Erika/id/2182569962

www.youtube.com/watch

German Military Composer Herms Neil blurb:

www.pzg.biz/herms_neil.htm

www.tomahawkfilms.com/herms.htm

Lyrics in English:

1. On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

A hundred thousand little bees

Swarm around Erika

Because her heart is full of sweetness,

Her flowery dress gives off a tender scent

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

2. In the homeland lives a little farm maid

And her name is Erika

This girl is my true treasure

And my luck, Erika

When the flower on the heath blooms lilac red,

I sing her this song in greeting.

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

3. Another little flower blooms in my small room

And its name is Erika

In the first rays of the morning and in the twilight

It looks at me, Erika

And it seems to me it speaks aloud:

Are you still thinking of your little bride?

Back home a farm maid weeps for you

And her name is Erika

Name "Erika" had been derived from the heather plant (German: Heide, Erika; Latin: Erica). Vast heather-yards are one of the proud symbols of German natural heritage.

Just thought I'd bring this to your attention.

The small room of the third verse no doubt a prescient image of the small room his corpse will inhabit soon. It is in fact a fine example of the excessively sentimental and jingoistic Soldier Marching Song, like so many others, e.g., Just Before the Battle Mother ("Farewell, mother, you may never / Press me to your heart again"), with a tune that, although needing to be carried along with the heavy rucksack, lightens the load, and reminds the bit of cannon fodder why they are fighting and dying, romanticizing the blown apart bits of body and blood mixing with the bittersweet tears of the girl and/or mother left behind. Once heard, these tunes are hard to forget, and I have found myself since Erika Deer's dispatch humming the chorus as I have gone about my day-to-day.

And I find myself hoping that, in the new coed & don't-don't-ask-don't-tell army of the US of A, there will be both gender-neutral and gender-preference-neutral marching songs as stirring as this, sung by legions of men and women and all points in between, marching to their deaths filled with a heady and passionate joy.

Waltzes

After a weekend's nose-grindstoning, I dashed off a second waltz and an OK orchestration of both: the Ludmilla Waltz and the Empress Waltz, named after two of the formal natures of the most lovely and admirable Lynne R. It was easier to orchestrate the new one since it was conceived from the start as an orchestral being, whereas the older one had gotten into my head a bit too much as a piano work with its piano sensibilities and pianistic tendencies. But the two together are a good match. Once again, I had a grand plan to write of every moment of the great creation, but that again proved elusive. I'm in a difficult-to-verbalize place when I work, and each decision seems either too small, too arbitrary, or too suddenly insightful.  And it's hard to glean something that is good enough to pass down to the younger generation. But I have discovered one thing: the more I write these chamber orchestra pieces, the more I yearn for the subtler timbres of a larger orchestra, a much larger orchestra.