Mordake at SFCCO

I've orchestrated some of my favorite bits from the Mordake work-in-progress and the SFCCO is presenting them next month, the 15th of September 2007, at Old First Concerts. It will be a primarily instrumental suite from the piece, but it does use a bit of a cylinder recording of the Prologo from Pagliacci by Antonio Scotti and also a manipulated recording of a snippet of the text by my friend Diana Pray. In the eventual production, it is believed that the Edvard Mordake character will listen to opera cylinder recordings from time to time, sometimes old and sometimes new. One thing nice about the old recordings is that the mix is so extreme in the direction of the voice that it's pretty easy to drown out the original orchestration and replace it with one's own.

My friend Trauma

Please may I be so bold as to call him my friend? He was the absolute best performer who could ever have taken on the starring role - and that is 'starring' as in the goldest star on the brightest reddest dressing room door - in Queer. He made the piece into something that was so much better than my little scribblings. From the opera:



and in a woefully too short snippet from a performance at bijou.

oh to be young again

Michael Fiday invited me up to the Headlands Art Center to see his Dharma Pops for violin duo last night. The music was absolutely gorgeous and the performance divinely captivating - as expected - as it featured the very talented stylings of Carla Kihlstedt and Graeme Jennings. I found myself enraptured, sweetly envying Michael's sure compositional hand. The tunes were very short and succinct, spiced with Charlie-Parkeresque bebop, interleaved with Jack Kerouac's haiku as read by Matthius Bossi. Each musical section commented on the haiku to come, sometimes word-painting or imitating the sounds evoked by the poem and sometimes being merely a beautiful perfect accompaniment. The last piece was a simple and sublime spiritual statement. Michael is planning to record the work in October with this group and I'm looking forward to hearing the result.

Both Carla and Matthius are in Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, an impressive arty rock and a bit industrial gothy and sometimes Art-Bearsy progressive band who coincidentally are starting their tour in Petaluma tonight. Carla says to wear earplugs. Which reminds me: I've noticed recently in bars that serve loud music a number of young hipsters stuffing their ears with shreds of bar napkins and toilet paper. This prophylactic tendency intrigues me. Is it now hip to protect yourself? Has there been a loss of the traditional youthful sense of immortality and invincibility? When I was young, there was a to hell with the lily-ears, a bravado and bold daring in exposing your malleus, incus and staples to the fearsome intensity of the onslaught of guitars and drums and noisy screaming distortion. I remember looking out over a sea of eager faces in my youth, happily entranced with the chaos of the seven guitars of Name, some wincing in pain, some holding their fingers in their ears to staunch the flow of blood, but all bravely withstanding the expected torments of their chosen entertainment. But maybe, like the misspent dissonance of my youth, those vibrations are calming now, losing their ecstatic grip, giving way to some possibly wiser, but slighter and waif-like feminine-in-music, Minerva replacing Ares in the aural pantheon.

Mordake visuals

We just finished a week and a half in the Paul Dresher studio working on the Mordake project with everyone. It's very very preliminary but we did come up with some interesting looks. Who knows if any of it will make it into the final piece, but below are a couple of videos, the first consisting of various clips of interest set to an instrumental version of some of the music, and the second consisting of the opening narration and music with a sketch of some visuals. Sorry for the noisy sound in the first half - it's just from the camera microphone. Melissa Weaver directed, John Duykers performed, visuals by Frieder Weiss, camera mostly by Matt Jones, the room sketch by Lynne Rutter (after Renzo Mongiardino) and music written by me. The gender changing of John's voice was performed by the Korporate Marionettes software, written in the spectral domain^† by yours truly with help from my dear colleague Thom Blum. It is always a treat to hear John sing and his voice is beautiful when left unencumbered by technology but, just like theatrical blood poured over the body of a beautiful woman, there is something quite excitingly creepy about the altered sound. And I do like the moment where the celesta comes in in a slowed-down stretto retrograde of the tune. Why yes ma'am, I am quite fond of them there irrational rhythms.




^†For those that care, gender change is typically done by shifting the formant structure of the voice independently of the pitch. In the KM software, the pitch change is accomplished through the use of a phase vocoder, but the smoothed spectral envelope is removed first and reapplied after. We've found that, in general, it's not enough to do the mathematical operation and it's most helpful to have the singer affect their voice just a bit. Women and men tend to sing a little differently stylistically and those cues need to be generated to aid in the suspension of disbelief.

Prettification

To Melpomene, as the muse of the tragic descent and the nightmare of addiction, I now give dominion over the adornment and engineering of drug paraphernalia; the detailing of the LSD blotter; the spidery small microcosmic worlds of the speed freak, lathering up a fever at four in the morning at All Star donuts, unable to eat but unable to move, pens laid out in neat rectangles; the shiny polished chrome of the espresso machine; the long lathed ivory cigarette holder and its companion death's head Zippo lighter; the carved meerschaum pipe direct from Turkey with resin screen but (if sold in California) please only for tobacco. But I reserve for the one of many hymns, the muse of the sacred song, the beautification of musical instruments, a sacred musical task if there ever were, sweet lovely but most serious Polyhymnia, a finger held to her mouth to keep us quiet as we look upon the adornment with awe.

Oft-blogged Amy Crehore's very beautiful and hopefully first-in-a-series Tickler ukelele is above. Ooooh I want it. I just discovered that my son Duncan can play most all of the Hank Williams catalog and proved it to me at my mother's home using the same plastic-necked department store uke on which I first learned to play Little Brown Jug. And my favorite of Adrian Card's harpsichords is below. I want that too. I can't play the harpsichord so well and they are surprisingly quiet for those of us raised on 'lectric guitars and synthesizers but lovely as a dream when played well.

Friedrich der Große

My old friend Frieder Weiss tootled over the cold Arctic wastelands on a barbarously early flight out of Nürnberg to come to the barren industrial wastelands of West Oakland to work on the Mordake opera. Or whatever we are calling it. There doesn't seem to be a good equivalent to the German word for musiktheater in English. It's either Opera, with all its connotational baggage of heavy breasted women caterwauling dying words of lament, lungs ravaged by tubercles, or it's the milksop of Musical Theater, prancing and skipping its way in to the listener's heartstrings by any means necessary.

Mordake threatens to be a radical departure for me in a number of ways, a primarily electronic piece with actual improvisational development, prying just the smallest iota of control from my cold dead fingers both socially and electronically. Plans call for visual and aural interactivity abounding throughout, controlled through John's movement and vocal pitch and spectrum and who knows what else. I'm feeling to be in my element this next week, parading with a cavalcade of the best and brightest, fingers on the keyboards, constructing something from nothing by the force of our will.

It is with such baubles that men are led

The powers that be, in their capricious omniscience, have bestowed an honor on my dear love Lynne Rutter, who has now joined the decorative painting ionosphere. Unfortunately it comes with no estate nor servant, but 'tis a joy nonetheless.

If love be the food of music

John Duykers and I were on the radio last Sunday on KRCB, the local NPR station near his home in Sebastopol. He's a farmer as well as an internationally renowned opera singer, so he was the one invited onto what was ostensibly a food show, to wit Mouthful. A direct link to the podcast is here but it's also on iTunes. John brought in a lovely dish consisting of multiple potato species, kale, collards, and a buttery spicy drizzle. I would say that, if one wants to work in opera, one should make sure that the artists with which one works should provide at least one of your other basic human needs besides artistic fulfillment, e.g. companionship, fresh organic produce, sex, laughter, knowledge, linguistics, and so on. Maybe in a future post I will present a bipartite graph where the one of the two disjoint sets consists of my artistic partners and the other my basic human needs and the readers will be invited to draw in their guesses as to the graph edges. But I was on the show to provide some musical interludes (the quite lovely numbers brightness 2 and Casus Tertius) But work on Mordake is heating up in preparation for Frieder Weiss to come and give the visuals the Frieder touch. Light, but persuasive.

Bad poetry

Once again Jim Bisso and I found ourselves on DJ Bunnywhiskers, this time reading our favorite bad poetry, some badly written, some badly or baldly sentimental, some bad by its very nature. The show is here, good and bad mystical unicorn poetry is here, and some pro-war poetry of the Axis and the Central Powers and the Allies of both world wars is here.

Just fucking figure it out already

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amy Crehore

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

Not for dancing

Lynne Rutter had been asking me to write something for her, and I knew she was very fond of the Shostakovich Jazz Suite waltzes, so I wrote her a short waltz. It's a slow listening waltz more than a dancing waltz, and maybe could be orchestrated as an appropriate dirge for my New Orleans funeral. No recording, but the score is on my works page, direct link here. I did play it at our annual party/salon last Saturday and was later forced to play it again, the second time being a bit more difficult due to the ongoing drinking of the Nerve Center Punch, but probably a little more heartfelt too in a sad crying-in-your-punch kind of way. I've thought we should do a salon more often given that we seem to have a lot of "creative, smart, and funny friends" as one of the thank-you notes said. But maybe the rarity is a plus. Dresher was there and seemed to enjoy himself and we went to see his Tyrant opera last night. Duykers as usual did a great job. He seems to be talking a number of us West Coast composer types into writing him solo operas and paying him for the opportunity.

Just after posting this, I received a DVD from M. Mara-Ann, who unknown to me secreted a video recording device into the party and captured my drunken stumbling through the piece, so there is actually more to love than I thought there was. Lynne told me that, when her friend Rich Kraft once did an imitation of me playing the piano, he started with a bold flourish, stopped and grunted and then started over, and this truth about me is what we see here.

Tuning Troubles

When I first started playing in a Javanese gamelan, it was difficult for me to get past the tuning, the unfamiliarity of which got in the way of understanding the music. In fact, it was so difficult for me in those first few days that that I didn't even get that I wasn't understanding the music. This was a little unexpected for me, as I was already very familiar with tuning experiments in modern classical music. For example, I had listened to a lot of quarter tone music and, at that time, I was working on a somewhat ridiculous piece, a concerto for contrabass accompanied by a trombone quartet and choir, where each section of the ensemble used a different fixed-pitch equal-temperament, e.g., chromatic scales of 1/8th tones and 1/6th tones and so on. The chorus was used like an orchestra, singing various IPA-notated phonetic abstractions. But I was raised on the serial music of the world of the post second Viennese school, was intimately familiar with the sound of it, had an intuitive grasp of it and this just seemed like a logical way to go forward. But the gamelan was different.

My music at the time was not really harmonic, essentially percussion music with a pitch veneer slathered on top, disguising its true nature. I mean, it was harmonic in the sense that pitches were sounding at the same time as each other, and sometimes the harmonies were exciting and beautiful, but it wasn't really part of the overall architecture of the piece. So when I was confronted by music where the tuning was different but the music was straightforward - in the sense that it was not intended to be difficult to understand and was supposed to have an immediate emotional impact and leave you humming the tunes - the tuning was a wall that took a few days to get past. However, once I did, I fell in love with it, could sing along and could find the pitches easily and felt that they were, in fact, quite "correct." I wanted to comprehend this feeling and apply it in my own playground of pitches. I felt that I was missing something important and possibly following the wrong path.

The next surprise came, though, when I found that the gamelan pitches were not systematic. Each gamelan, while following some general guidelines about large and small intervals, was tuned quite differently. Bill Alves has a lovely set of graphs of tunings of some of the well-known gamelan from Central Java. The somewhat mythic story that was given to me by my teachers at the time was to the effect that, before a new gamelan was built, the builder would go sit on a mountaintop until the tuning came to them in an epiphanic moment, at which point they would build the first instrument and then copy the tuning of it for the others. I realized that my own experiments in tuning had been extremely constrained, in addition to having failed to arrive at any type of real "truth," whatever that might be. So my friends and I started building a lot of instruments with random tunings, cutting pieces of wood and metal to random shapes, laying them out in xylo/vibraphone-like arrangements in pitch-sorted order and then writing music using these pitches. It was amazed how quickly these random tunings sounded 'OK' and how they seemed intuitively to yield an appropriate music.

But, at the same time, I was discovering that the American gamelan builders were basically all using Just Intonation. Why exactly, given that the intuitive tunings of the Southeast Asian gamelan seemed like a possibly critical aspect of the whole music? Didn't this miss the point? I wasn't sure, but JI scratched my analytical mind's itch, that which was demanding some sort of organizational scheme for all the possible pitches. I had a little familiarity with it already. I had heard Harry Partch's music in my youth and I knew from my history of mathematics that solving the "problems" of JI had been a major preoccupation among the intellectual elite for a long time. I read Partch's book and I hooked up with the Just Intonation Network and this did help me get a handle on my pitch universe, or maybe I should say my interval universe. But, being an old dissonance guy and a sensation slut in general, I didn't get caught up in the pseudo-mystical nervousness about purity of intervals and the monotony of beatlessness. I liked the wolf tones, the odd intervals, the sweet edges of schismas and commas. And it didn't really deal with all my pitch issues anyway, e.g., glissandi and vibrato and the three strings on each key of the piano. (My JI friends' response to these issues? Don't use vibrato, don't use glissandi, don't etc etc.) (My noise music friends' response to everything I've been talking about? Who cares about pitches?)

The funny thing that happened on the way to this perfect universe of pitch complexity is that I started writing more and more tonal music. Thinking about intervals has a poisoning effect that way. It makes one think about roots and centers of intervallic grids. And then, in the end, I dropped the tunings and just found myself back in the usual world of more-or-less equal temperament. In the end, tunings were too socially isolating, too difficult given limited rehearsal times, too off-putting to the casual listener. My new opera, Mordake, is an all electronic piece and I could use any pitches I want, but I'm still shying away, fearing the impediment to the listener. It's hard enough to get people to listen; I don't want to make it more difficult for them. But then, maybe I should.

Musique Arabo-Andalouse

A friend of mine gave me the album above just as I was beginning to write the music for The Islamic Republic of Las Vegas. I imitated the style in The Dance of the Testifiers, an early microtonal piece of mine which can be heard here and is also on my Music of Love CD. I was especially enamored of the fact that one of the musicians was playing a jet d'eau, and I imitated that as well. The tune was interesting in the way it handled the use of Just Intonation, as it modulated through a series of key centers and a series of corresponding tunings. However, when I later repurposed the music for the Celestial Bridegroom section of Little Girl, I gave up on the tuning and let the musicians fall back on their familiar quasi-equal-temperament training. I wrote a few new melodies and purloined one in the Arabo-Andalusian style for that piece as well, my favorite being one in The Knife, in the section that sounds a bit like Rimsky-Korsakov.

Thinking of the jet of water reminded me of an aborted project to write an opera based on Artaud's Jet of Blood, causing me to stumble across this lovely Australian production of this unproduceable piece.

The Flag of Appenzell

Faithful readers know that my Mass is premiering this fall in St Gallen, Switzerland. But they may not know that to the south of the city is the canton of Appenzell, represented by the flag above. In heraldry-speak: Argent, a bear rampant sable, armed langued and priapic in his virility gules. Translated: on a silvery white field, a bear is represented standing on one hind foot with its forefeet in the air, in profile, facing the dexter side, with right hind foot raised, in black, with red claws and erect penis of red tincture.


The bear on the flag is in fact that same bear previously discussed, shown in the above bas-relief befriending Gallus. Appenzell was a vassal state of the Abbot of St Gallen until 1403 when it threw off the yoke of the bear-loving abbey, retaining however a fondness for the bear, putting it in their flag but adding the bold red erection as a touch of defiance. The story goes that, in 1579, a printer in St Gallen removed the bear's hard-on from a collectible calendar, almost plunging the two sides into war until he toadied to the Appenzellers and the city agreed to destroy every copy it could find.

After writing the ordinary of the Mass, I decided to add an organ postlude. The Dom Cathedral has three organs, including two smaller baroque instruments in the choir, but the large organ is very beautiful, visually and aurally. It's a typical postlude, with a flamboyant opening, a memory from my youth listening to Norberto Guinaldo's florid improvisations, my own attempt a poor imitation. In the middle, it ventures into a more static territory, another poor imitation, this time reminiscent of Terry Riley's Shri Camel. Let's part with just a glimpse of it.

Mordake

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



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

Pianola

I ran into Dan Becker last night at a performance of David Conte's opera America Tropical, a tale of very comfortable liberalism set in Los Angeles across the 20th century, centering on the anti-imperalist Olvera street mural of the 30s by David Alfaro Siqueiros and the videotaping of the Rodney King beating. The quality of the performance itself was high and made an effective use of the space - Thick House on Potrero Hill - just down the street from where I'm sitting - and the theater at which my opera Mordake is intended to premiere next year, God willing.

Dan and I got to talking about Kyle Gann's discussion of his beautiful Disklavier works that were recently choreographed by Mark Morris. Having known Kyle's works for a long time I can't help but be very happy for him. Like so many of us, he's underappreciated, and the few that make it out to the wider world blaze a trail for us all and I'm thankful. Dan's been working with the instrument too for a while, and tells me that the new ones still can't play the densest of the Nancarrow studies without a bit of hiccoughing, fuse-blowing, and lights-dimming, and that's sad to me. I had just taken a job with Yamaha Music Technologies back in 1987 when the first models came out and, like a lot of composers, was filled with lust for this device. Unfortunately, that initial New-Relationship-Energy was tempered when I found that one couldn't play more than 16 notes at a time, that there was a sizable delay from input to output and, if even a 10 note chord was played too long, the power supply might blow. The robots have attained more facility over the years, but still haven't quite achieved the raw power of their pianola ancestors with their pneumatic action and rolls punched by the sure hands of Conlon, frail when I once met him over dinner at Shin Shin restaurant just across the bay. I'm afraid I was too in awe to converse with him with much confidence, but - as usual for me - ended up talking with his wife while letting Henry K. and Charles A. take up the slack.

Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi

My Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi will be performed at the beautiful Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland on the Day of Repentance and Prayer (15 September). The Abbey was the commissioner of the piece, and it is thus named after one of their most famous, the musician and poet Notker Balbulus, aka Notker the Stammerer (840-912, beatified 1512). He is known as the first ethnically German composer of music and for publishing the first collection of Sequences, mnemonic poems for remembering the series of pitches sung during a melisma in plainchant, many composed by him. The stammering little monk "was so much loved by the monks of his abbey that for a long time after his death, they could not speak of him without shedding tears."

Some selections from the Mass were performed last Summer by the SFCCO and Schola Cantorum San Francisco. Here's a bit of it.

Psychopathia Sexualis

As DJ Bunnywhiskers loved our last tête-à-tête, she has invited me back on her show this evening from 6-8 PDT where we, that is, James Bisso, Suzanna Shubeck, and other of my dear friends, will read our favorite episodes from the Krafft-Ebing classic. Listening to the show in realtime is theoretically possible, either at PirateCatRadio.com or at 87.9 FM in San Francisco. However, as sometimes the chewing gum and bailing wire holding the antenna fails, and sometimes the hamsters that power the generators that run the server get a wee bit dispirited by the meaninglessness of their lives and sulk in the corner of their damp and dark cage, it may be easiest to listen to the podcast here tomorrow.

update: here's the actual podcast link.

The Laundry Room

After a hard day scrivening my meager attempts to add to our shared culture, I've found there is no better way to relax than to take the servants' stair down to the laundry room and spend a lazy late afternoon in languorous contemplation of the lacy underthings scattered about like autumn leaves after a blustery day. Sometimes, a particularly lovely article will catch my eye, a red chemise, a black garter, a soft night-cap, and an intense impulse will rise in me, and I will find myself secreting it away, finding it later amid my tousled bedcovers, an evening lost.

photo by David Papas