Composer-composer collaboration

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

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

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

photo of HPSCHD printout by cityofsound

The Celestial Bridegroom

I was raised in a religious family and the iconography, the ritual, the warm embrace of Christianity are all felt strongly in me, but at a young age I was seduced by art, literature, even by seduction itself; in my dreams, the symbols of one and the other, its shadow, were mixed and confused, synthesizing a new self, more base, less seraphic, a fallen angel who shall never enter into paradise but, like Moses, will die while gazing upon the promised land, the celestial city, a place of joy where honey flows like water. The ecstasy of religion has been replaced by other ecstasies, those of the flesh, and those of the intellect, poor substitutes to be sure but, haven fallen so far and for so long, I have little else. The operas come from this place, mixing these worlds, the sounds formed by the slowly fading echoes of true religion, the cries of fleshly delight, the resonating in the hollowness of my soul.

I look now for salvation in many places. Rimbaud's life teaches me (O Lord, O Celestial Bridegroom, do not turn thy face from the confession of the most pitiful of thy handmaidens. I am lost. I'm drunk. I'm impure. What a life! ) and I find some comfort in Robert Glück's Margery Kempe, a beautiful juxtaposition of sexual obsession and religious obsession, where he and the earliest English autobiographer both seek sainthood through a union both sacred and profane, imagining their coupling with their own Celestial Bridegrooms and, finally, from my own work, the section of that title, der Himmlische Bräutigam, so wonderfully evoked by Josef Oberauer, wearing a pink thong and platform shoes, lifting him just that much more towards heaven.

Noisy People

Former League of Automatic Music Composers and Hub member and friend and sometimes Muscle Fish colleague Tim Perkis has just released his labor-of-love documentary Noisy People. It features eight people in the San Francisco improvised music community, covering as much or more of the way they live their life and who they are as it does their music. It includes such notables as my ex-neighbor and band-führer Dan Plonsey (Daniel Popsicle), the great Greg Goodman who once, when I was experiencing the worst art career depression and angst, simply took a small scrap of paper and wrote Do Better, a cameo appearance by the late bassist Matthew Sperry, who played in the Seattle Creative Orchestra's performance of Sub Pontio Pilato, and many others. My son Duncan and I went to see the premiere at the Pacific Film Archive and you should see it too. Very beautiful and also very entertaining, very funny. A portrait of uncompromising creativity in life and art.

DJ Bunnywhiskers

Was on DJ Bunnywhiskers show on Pirate Cat Radio on the 26th of last month, April that is, aka the cruellest month. Pirate Cat is a pirate FM station broadcasting from the netherworld of San Francisco, a secret location just down the hill from my home. It was an extensive interview with a lot of musical examples covering my history, from the deepest darkest artrock past to the present. The podcast of it is available on the Bunnywhiskers page. Sometimes the Pirate Cat site is a bit unreliable, so I've put a copy of the podcast on my website here. The interview began with the host setting down in front of me a bottle of Smirnoff and some fancy vitamin water as a mixer. I didn't have my Gray Kangaroo or Brita 'optimizer' with me so I was forced - in the spirit of good fellowship and art and fun and so on - to take unrefined shots of the headache inducing swill, but I retaliated with a ball gag and 50 feet of nylon rope and modified ducks and wrist cuffs. On the 17th Jim Bisso and I will be together on the show to join in a mass reading from Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, a book that features prominently in our upcoming opera, a chronicle of my dissipation.

note: photo by Violet Carson