Bunnywhiskers Reducere

Appearing on Radio Valencia tomorrow at 10 am PDT as the "witty and wonderful Erling Wold" with my favorite radio host, the inimitable Bunnywhiskers (whom I happened to see on the street today) broadcasting from Chicken John's building. Listen on the web at radiovalencia.fm or live on an actual FM device at 87.7 in San Francisco. We'll be talking of many things: of the opening of the DieciGiorni collaborative opera next week, of the recent releases, of the events of the world and beyond.

Certainty and Doubt

I'm consistently fascinated by nonsense, drawn again and again to the brainsqueezings of my religious youth, to insanity, to speaking in tongues, to intuition run amok. I work in a world of certainties, where the integral around a closed path of a function holomorphic everywhere inside the area bounded by the closed path is always zero, but I reside in another place, where all things are possible, where I've taken to heart so many more than six impossible things before breakfast, where art comes unbidden from the gods, channeled through us mortals during the brief period of our existence, our last gasping breath exhaled onto those who will next receive their curse.

And, if you want to keep yourself together, please don't look too closely even at that certain world for it too is plagued by doubt. Underneath it all slumbers the Leviathan, who whispers her gentle words into your ear, whispers of the power sets of the infinite and the axiom of choice which, if listened to and her hot breath smelling of the coal furnace ignored, will pull you down like a millstone to a bad place, where you will begin to ponder the Jewish Question and the Book of Revelation and other oft-proscribed lunacies. Be careful navigating these treacherous shoals where so many have wrecked before, the publishers of so many "moderately-loopy-but-eerily-hard-to-disprove Voynich Manuscript theories."

As artists, we must float above all such things, certain and uncertain alike, silliness abounding.  Last night, at a noise show at the Golden Trapper Keeper Lodge, I listened to a litany of movie descriptions, all brutal movies, Russian and Korean, members of subgenres of popular torture porn, during which all those attending, including myself, laughed at the ridiculousness of it all, the reality not ridiculous for those who experience it, those pathetic and poor victims, but the art that comes from it risible and absurd. We can't avoid it, this separation of object and subject, so let us revel in it.

The Etymology of 'Nazi'

During a recent yet extended convalescence in my musty sanatorium supraspinatum, post chrurgia, in the prolonged traction of my UltraSling™II, my thoughts turned naturally to the black, and to those naturally redheaded, and the whispers coming from the dark bowels of this blackness. During that time, a time requisite of time while-awaying, hours were spent floundering through my favorite tomes: Bodyguard of Lies, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the books relating a time better than our own, a time of clarity, of good v. evil, of men that were men. I fantasize about being a man that is a man but I am so far from it: an effete milquetoast-ette, a mama's boy and a milksop.

But in this morning's epost a letter arrived from our foreign correspondent, a man who is a man, our dear ***redacted***, who was passing along some esludge from the net. May I quote a significant part of it?

Long before the rise of the NSDAP in the 1920s, people in at least southern Germany could be called Nazi if they were named Ignatz, or came from Austria or Bohemia (where they apparently had lots of Ignatzes); it was supposedly also used as a generic name for soldiers of Austria-Hungary, like the German Fritz or Russian Ivan. It had to be used with caution between friends, though, since it could also mean "idiot" or "clumsy oaf". That's how it found it's way into politics; the fact that Adolf came from Austria (not Bohemia, though) could have made the pun even better. The Nazis supposedly made attempts to include the N-word in their own vocabulary in order to make it less derogatory, but unsuccessfully; since such a maneuver requires a sense of humor as well as irony, it was probably doomed to fail.

Yes, this maneuver does require a sense of humor, but fortunately we have buckets of that here in San Francisco and thank G-d that all my friends, members of so many persecuted minority groups, have reclaimed all the names hurled at them and taken them to heart, formerly sensitive designations desensitized and reavailable for use by all.

more on The Ten Days

The Decameron opera project, Dieci Giorni, the ten days, a joint composition with some of my fellow SFCCO composers, The Mighty Coterie of the SF Bay Area, toodles along towards its eventual deflagration. It's been different than I expected, although I don't know exactly how I came to those expectations. It hasn't been as deep a collaboration as I would have hoped, each of us discussing every mark of the score, passing texts around, fistfights breaking out between us, resolved only by drunken tears. But in the end, each of us has trundled off to each of our mountain redoubts to scribble out separately our separate amusements, amusing ourselves but not each other, packing our cannon with the finished goods and blasting them in the general direction of the next stronghold over, whereupon it merely hits the fortifications and skids off into the valley below. It will be up to Jim Cave to assemble the puzzle and test its viability as a living entity, sending back runners to report the results. 

But along the way I have had an opportunity to watch the Pasolini Version again, which is lovely, the image above taken from it. And I've been able to write some texts that I'm proud of, including the story of the five bachelorettes misplacing a box of whip-its, and to remember the ins and outs of the accordion, also lovely.

walking along the Embarcadero past pier 7 and the flowers

I told myself that I would wait to compose the new opera until we had done something with the words theatrically, that is in a theatrical setting, with the performers and the director, to get a sense of the performance and the direction that those words implied. This I have explained before here, a concept whereby the timings and the delivery of the words, usually fixed by the composer ab nihilo, would instead be approached more collaboratively, and that I would take the results of that process and use it to guide my setting of the words, a fixing in musical form. However, I didn't know what to do with my nervous musical energy, that fever that comes over the artist when the artist has something bubbling up, wanting to burst forth in a spray of brains and blood and to spill itself over the page or, in this brave new world, the computer keyboard. 

So I decided to let it out slowly, ever so slowly, and then to allow it to grow in a direction all its own. The result is the piece to the right, a piece for two pianos, a huge blocky dense work of frenetic activity, repetition, some rhythmic intensity. At the moment, I enjoy it, and so I present it here, in a synthetic form, a simulacrum, but one which I have molded carefully, hand carved out, a memory bittersweet of love lived and love lost, for your pleasure, an mp3 here, and a score here.

Wedded bliss

My wife, The Empress™, published a blog entry recently on her marriage to me and since I have felt a lack of care in not duplicating the effort. The wedding was a ceremony fraught with delight, featuring food and drink and promises and tears, plus performances by many of our friends. The beginning, a topless performance by Tara Jepson and Beth Lisick dressed in boy shorts, prompted my sister-in-law to consider the question: If it begins with a topless lesbian performance, where will it end? This was followed by a rendition of The Rainbow Connection by my now nephew Griffin Runnels, such a tune! and such a showman!  Duncan Wold and his shit-show colleague Roy Hobbs roasted me and Lynne, asking how many midlife crises it takes to write an opera and reminding the bride of her drug-soaked past, following it up with a number of drug-referencing songs. My boy! Igor Finger and Woody Woodman, interpreting Daniel Pinkwater's Devil in the Drain, were preceded by Wendy Marlatt's tribal movements and Sierra and Bronwyn & Ember's dance in stretch metallic latex bags. The whole shebang finishing with Pete von Petrin's remixing of the whole event at maximum volume, distorted and enhanced, a lovely noisy blessing. So many joys, interspersed with all-too-brief moments with so many of our dearest friends.


Both of us had been married before, so inevitably comparisons were made between our first weddings and this one. Lynne's was famous for achieving the highest bar private tab ever seen at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club. Mine featured Carl Ruggle's Exaltation, which we taught to the assembled masses, as well as a short and pretty tune by me entitled Marriage, played by my bandmates Bob Adams and Richard Crawford. I felt I had to do at least as much this time, so I precessed to the stage (above) to the finale of Stravinsky's Firebird, and I wrote the words and music to a tune, recorded here live during the ceremony, with laugh track, performed by Rachel Condry and Laura Bohn.

We find a soft place
of each other
it's just over there
so pretty
when you find it
a careful softness
just there  
each falls into
or, one becomes the other
the swapping of cares 
of life 
of happiness
on which each builds their life

Mordake CD released

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

If you love me, you will buy it.

The 10 days

And in this turn of the light from day to day, the days and the days following one to another, and in the darkness settling over us, we see a light. Into our rooms comes a soft suffusion of light, and we are happy, unseasonably happy, in the face of this, our certain death. We relax: a warming oil pouring in through that opening, that soft part of our skull, and we are an infant again, blissful and unaware, that soft part of our skull not yet complete, the vessels that are our bodies filled with a warming oil, these vessels that will pass away - no - shattering, and what we are, spilling out, cascading over the shards. A moment, this moment, of ecstasy, a loss of identity into greater whole, of the universe, of the void, an affirmation of life in the face of our death.

No Such Thing as Silence

I just finished Kyle Gann's recent book on Cage's 4'33", a book which does a lovely job contextualizing this seminal work, detailing its appearance at an inflection point in the history of western art music, its place in Cage's personal journey as an artist, the philosophical backdrop which Cage (mis)interpreted, and Kyle's own experiences with the piece. It's lovely and highly recommended, especially for those who may not know Cage's work so well, have heard the jokes but want to get past them. Much of the material of the book I knew already quite intimately since I, like Kyle, composers of a certain age, grew up in the world that was framed by this work, in the world where one ran into Mr. Cage, his smile and his soft voice, here and there. We listened to his works, we read Silence and his other books, we wore out our Folkways vinyl of Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, memorizing the stories and wishing our lives would someday produce stories as intriguing, and hoping that, when the time came where it was needed, we would find the strength to face down the world and hold to our convictions. (By the way, one of my favorites is the one about the customs officer and the cigarettes.)

It's interesting that, even though so much came out of the work - its legacy is well detailed in the book - that very little of the long sound-filled-silences that appeared in his pieces and culminated in the 4'33" are found in the works of others after it.  I remember sneaking off and playing Experiences No. 1 with Robert Erickson (this Robert) in my college days, over and over, counting out those seemingly long measures, thinking that this was something important, the pregnant expectation of where the next sound would occur. I guess that silence, like the prepared piano, seemed so Cagean that no one else could take it on without feeling plagiaristic, or maybe that four-thirty-three had put paid to it. Since we can all play the piece anytime, I'll end with another of Cage's prettier works, Sonta V:

The Apollonian Clockwork

Kyle Gann has discussed this book previously, but I finally got around to buying a copy, and, even though I'm only about a third of an inch in (plus a bit of skipping about), I have found in the book all the delights he and his commenters promised. I am an unrepentant disciple of Stravinsky, and I have always felt a kinship with the Dutch minimalists, but the book is loaded with insights, aphorisms and stories which should thrill anyone from any corner of the contentious N-gon which is the new music arena. The two authors are wonderful writers as well. In a section on the improvisational nature of Stravinsky's music, they liken it to a series of anecdotes linked together by a quick-witted speaker, and they in fact make an aside to tell an anecdote, parenthetically expounded:

In 1921 Diaghilev decided to make his contribution to the socializing of the arts. He rented the Gaieté Lyrique, a small theatre in the workers' district of Paris and managed - through publicity in the neighborhood - to attract the local residents into a theatre which put on mostly operettas. That succeeded nicely. After a few performances, the hall was filled with an entirely different audience from the mundane, chic people who usually attended the Ballets Russes. One evening the wealthy Misia Sert came to a performance. When she arrived at her box, she directed her binoculars into the crowded hall, saw no one well known - only unshaven faces - and said, surprised: `There's nobody here!'

But of more interest to us composers are the composerly essays, for the book is really a collection of such, which bring us to desire that more books about composers be written by more composers. Yes, Kyle, your new book is on my to-be-read shelf, unfortunately a linear foot or two in, so be patient.  It is such a joy to  see the compositional and life knowledge the two authors have accumulated brought to bear on the subject, and the fact that they themselves have had to deal with so many of the same issues, and were influenced in their own compositions and the way they perceive the music that preceded them by the choices that Igor made, adds so much to the cross-generational discussion between composers living and dead.

An example is their brilliant clarification of the prescient nature of the Stravinsky's work, the change-without-change that presages minimalism, the form that follows from the music, the collage cutting back and forth. I've always been aware of the things in some way, ever since hearing Petrushka as a teen, and it's clear that it has informed everything I do, but why was not until this that I really got it?

A thirteen-year-old is capable, while lying in bed ready for sleep, of playing the Schumann Piano Concerto (in A minor) on the record-player of his memory. During the second movement, he will probably fall asleep. If, ten years later, in another bedroom, he tries the same thing with the Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Wind (`in A minor'), he will, at the very most, if he even gets that far, get stuck at the cadenza of the first movement; or worse, get trapped in a vicious circle of dove-tailing rhythms and snake-like motifs biting at their own tails.

This is in fact what I love in the music that I love. I now see that the piece I'm currently tidying up, my Walking along the Embarcadero past pier 7 and the flowers, owes much to my youthful inoculation with Stravinsky's music, which I didn't see so clearly before. And more revelations lie ahead.

More on Chosen

A 23-year-old woman who said she was hearing voices stripped her three small children naked Wednesday and threw them off a San Francisco fishing pier into the bay, authorities said.  - San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2005

I grew up in a religious family and, in my youth, longed for the kind of religious experience that would give me the certainty of faith that held my parents. They told me stories: once, when my sister was very ill and a blizzard raged outside, and they were sitting late at night in the living room, not knowing whether to brave the dangerous storm to drive to a doctor and risk all their lives in the process, the room was suffused with a warm and reassuring light, a presence that informed them clearly that all would be well, that they didn't have to worry. They both saw it, they both felt it, they both were sure that their daughter was safe and, as the morning came, my sister's fever broke and all was well. My mother, otherwise a very learned woman who knew Hebrew and Greek, who wrote books and plays, and who would talk to me of philosophy and her passion for feminism, also spoke in tongues, a charismatic babbling of nonsense syllables, an ecstatic experience, one of the gifts given to the apostles in Acts. As a young boy interested in mathematics, a world which I was beginning to look for certitude and intellectual comfort, I also knew of the work of Pascal who, even though a proponent of the Age of Reason, had sewn into his coat a detailed, irrational description of a moment in his life when he was absolutely certain of the truth of the Christian Faith. I couldn't shake the idea that this might be something necessary to survive in this world, an otherwise frightening place of chaos, illness, genocide, war, death, hunger and pain. But at the same time that I lusted after such an episode, I began also to fear it, seeing it as madness, a profound loss of my rational mind which was becoming more and more important to me. My friends in high school, who all sought their own quasi-religious experiences in hallucinogens and the attendant loss of identity, offered them to me, but by then, I could not let go. I felt I was already on the razor's edge between the bright light of sanity and the dark night of lunacy. Neither the faith of my parents or the home-grown sacred rites of my friends were able to convince me to take such a risk and I remained on the side of lucidity and reason, of sound and careful thinking. 

In 2005, a young woman in San Francisco was told by God to throw her three children into the Bay, which she did, undressing them and killing them all in a brief ritual after a day spent in San Francisco, sightseeing and eating hot dogs. I had seen the story in the paper, but had forgotten it among all the other news equally shocking. A few days after, I was riding my bicycle on the Embarcadero and came across an enormous pile of flowers and stuffed animals and notes and candles, damp from a soft evening mist off the water. I stopped and looked at it, not remembering why it was there until I looked up and saw the lamplights of pier 7 receding from where I stood into the dusk over the bay, a corridor of light to another world, and I remembered that this is where she sent her children through that corridor to the other world. I remembered that she had told the police that the children were with their Father, meaning not her boyfriend, their earthly father, but with their Father in Heaven. Later, as I read more about the case, I discovered her clear and childlike faith, e.g, her poignant request to the police psychologist that he take a letter up in a plane to her children in Heaven. Of course she was schizophrenic, with all the clinical signs of the disease appearing in her young adulthood, a typical time of onset. But, when someone reminded me of the story just last year during a discussion of Medea, the images of the pier and the lights and the unspeakable terror of the three young boys being killed by the mother came back to me and I began to wonder. How could she be so certain of God's voice? I had wanted that certainty of faith, I had been afraid of the consequences, like these. I knew of the Abraham and Isaac story too of course, which Christians happily accept as a instructive tale, how we should blindly accept the commandments of God, following His voice without question. We all know that we now live in a world where we focus daily on the terrible actions inspired by religious certitude. 

In writing the libretto, I have mixed her story and mine, accepting that she was in communication with God, that he told her to kill her children, that there is something compelling about her certainty. The piece is an opera, but not in any way a traditional one. The main characters are played by two dancers who dominate the action on stage. A singer is present who mostly takes her place in the orchestra, an ensemble centered around two pianos, who thunder out a music that ranges from dark and dense to the beautiful and serene. There is one actor as well, who moves through the dancers and presents much of the story plainly to the audience. There is no technology in this piece unlike many of my others. It is presented starkly and without adornment, a series of choices made and their consequences, great faith surrounded by our doubt.

Right back to Stephen A. Emery

As someone in the Patent-Producing and brainstorming biz, I've always been intrigued by processes which purport to amplify the production of big ideas, e.g. the Kage Roi brainstorming room, which unfortunately seems to have gone to ground. This morning I re-stumbled across a New Yorker article on Intellectual Ventures, a patent mill that has recently been in the news for some smartphone-related lawsuits and came across this quote:


You know how musicians will say, ‘My teacher was So-and-So, and his teacher was So-and-So,’ right back to Beethoven?”


Actually, I have never heard a musician say this, and assuming he may have meant "composer," I'm not sure most composers can actually make the claim of "right back to Beethoven" anyway, although maybe a lot of pianists, since Beethoven taught Czerny who taught Liszt who then taught everybody.  But, curiosity having been raised, I decided to follow my teachers back a few generations where I could, limited this morning to the resources of the Internet, having lost personal access to Grove's in the divorce, and by means of so doing, arrived at the genealogy below, where the dots signify a depletion of precedence in my simple search. Some more famous nodes could be seen if I had included cousin or sibling relationships, as Horatio Parker is best know as a teacher of Charles Ives, and Dukas and Debussy were classmates.



richard grayson
 henri pousseur •
robert arthur gross •
andrew imbrie
 nadia boulanger
  gabriel fauré
   camille saint-saëns
    fromental halévy
     luigi cherubini •
  charles-marie widor
   françois-joseph fétis
    françois-adrien boieldieu •
 roger sessions
  horatio parker
   george whitefield chadwick
    stephen a. emery •
   josef rheinberger •
  ernest bloch
   iwan knorr •
john chowning
 nadia boulanger (above)
gerard grisey
 olivier messiaen
  maurice emmanuel
   léo delibes
    cesar franck
     anton reicha
      josef reicha •
      antonio salieri
       florian leopold gassmann
        johann woborschil •
      johann georg albrechtsberger •
  marcel dupré
   louis diémer
     ambrose thomas
      jean-françois le sueur •
  charles-marie widor (above)
  paul dukas
   théodore dubois
    louis fanart •
   ernest guiraud
    fromental halévy (above)
 györgy ligeti
  pál kadosa
   zoltán székely •
   zoltán kodály
    charles-marie widor (above)
  ferenc farkas
   leo weiner
    hans von koessler •
   albert siklós •
   ottorino respighi
    giuseppe martucci
     paolo serrao •
    nikolai rimsky-korsakov
     mily balakirev
      mikhail glinka
       charles meyer •
  zoltán kodály (above)
  sándor veress •
 karlheinz stockhausen
  olivier messiaen (above)
 iannis xenakis
  olivier messiaen (above)

Abide with me dear Abe

My Mother

I went to the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary yesterday to experience the laudation of my mother, who served back in the 80s as the chairman of the board of directors, the first and only woman to hold the position as evidenced by the photo panel to the left. It was an overflowing of love for her, mostly by women, mostly - of course - Lutheran women of faith. My mother was an ardent and sometimes radical Feminist, radicalized by crashing into the walls of the prison into which women had been placed (and to a fortunately less extent still are) by the American Culture and the Church, which lagged even further behind the culture and was a majorly patriarchal institution. My favorite story was that she was told she couldn't teach the Bible, as that was reserved for men, although she could be a missionary and teach the Bible to third-worlders, a statement that masterfully wraps together the worst of sexism and racism into one big lump. But, coming from inside that world, she fought for equal representation for women, for the ordination of women, and, even more shockingly for the time, the same for women of all sexual orientations.

I had to tell a story or two, and one was the story about the time she told me that women "might have to take up arms against men" which made a strong impression on my tween brain, especially as I was a member of the male species at the time. We used to have theological discussions late into the night, where she would point out the particular Hebrew word for the divine with a feminine ending, and the fact that maybe one of Paul's letters was written by a female disciple, and ask me whether the resurrected Christ first showed himself to a man or a woman. But she was very practical in the real world, starting day nurseries in all the churches she served, a place for working women to leave their children, at a time when people spoke out against the idea of a working woman, using the same arguments we hear today against the latest movements towards equality: that it would destroy the family, destroy traditions, destroy the nation. Traditions, we should always remember, are just things that happened in the past, and just having happened in the past carries no weight.

Unfortunately, at 92, half-blind and crippled with Parkinson's, she couldn't make it, so her most atheist son was sent as a representative, a sheep or wolf among the group of older, smart, attractive and somewhat maternal-to-me women.  I did sing the hymns heartily and even took communion for the first time in decades, as I believe in religion-as-performance & religion as one of the biggest collaborative artworks ever. Yes, it is the opiate of the people, but it stands there along with all other entertainment, no worse, with TV and video games and the perils of the Interweb.

Dieci Giorni

Jim Cave has talked me into contributing to a project on the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio along with some of the other SFCCO composers. Looks like it will take place in September 2010 at Thick House just down the hill here in the southeasternmost of the seven hills of the Eternal City of San Francisco. More information about it will be showing up on the Dieci Giorni web site. Even though some of the stories are quite enticing to me, mixing the anti-clerical with the sexually promiscuous with the bisexual, all near to my general locus of literary interest, I've decided to take on the frame, and have been penning some lyrics of mine own to mix in with Giovanni's:

In our lives, we fear for death and disease to take us and to take those we love but, during our lives, we wall those fears away, we entertain ourselves with distractions and projects, and the accumulation of pleasures and recognitions and technologies that do not keep us safe from death, a rude and uninvited guest to our reality, that which we have ourselves constructed, a seeming solid, yet fragile to its core.

From time to time, even here in the countryside on a beautifully crisp and sunny day, we hear quiet sobbing of those left behind, embarrassed by what they have done, a husband who has stepped out, promising a doctor for his sickened wife, but in truth fleeing the city, condemning her and her children to a lonely and frightful death. Even here in the countryside, something hides among the flowers. A sweet smell that slowly grows more disagreeable as the days pass. Where is the doctor? He needs his beak, filled with aromatic herbs, to keep out the miasma, the poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes wafting into the bodies of the inhabitants of the city, the stench of their rotting bodies. Where is the priest and his bishop? They need to pray, to ask God to mitigate his anger, to tell us what is the cause. Should we practice to mortify our flesh? Should we burn the Jews, our neighbors? But soon the physicians and the priests and the flagellants are also dead and there is no one else to ask.

We, here, who attend this diverse entertainment are ourselves diverting ourselves from the pestilence that rages outside, that we shut away in hospice and hospital room, here in this theater, keeping the contagion of death at bay, just outside these walls, that it may not infect us. We will laugh and sing and tell each other stories. And how does this entertainment end? With death, which soon visits us all.

Turing

Susie Bright, a facebook neighbor of mine, passed along a link to a recent article on David Cope, pictured dashingly in the photo to the left.  I like the two snips of sound, the first one a bit like something I might have written, the second something I wish I could write, as I have little talent for unaccompanied melodies.

I for one am happy to be replaced by an algorithm. This would allow me more time to follow my alternate paths to bliss, e.g., drinking myself into an early grave. Regarding such, my colleague Thom Blum once rhapsodized on the movie Leaving Las Vegas, as it represented the story of one who sets a goal for himself and achieves it. Other paths include watching a lot more television, gaining a lot of weight, lying in my own filth, and so on.

I have tried several times to enlist the aid of the computers that have surrounded me since my days at North Star, when I had the energy to solder and code just to achieve some polymetrically imagined wonderland, usually worked at the notelist level, but later at the sound stratum, as the latter has been the source of my bread and water for the last twenty-plus years. I still do from time to time, when I, like Mr. Cope, have been blocked and need a bit of inspiration.  But isn't random inspiration just about as good? Remember the Oblique Strategies, now available on the iPhone? Not sure why Cope spent so much effort at the expense of all else just to produce a score. Scores are one thing, but it's easy to confuse the map for the territory. We remember the works of Cage and others derived from star charts and I Ching and we realize those pieces can actually be pretty good. Why? Because composers are just one teeny part of the process that passes through the skill of the performer and sometimes the mixing engineer. And does anyone else worry about his destruction of his databases?  Was all of this music really generated just by his algorithms?  Hard for someone else to really test that now.

Nostalgia

Just back from Boston, where I started work on a project with Elizebeth Randall, a dance on love and loneliness, a scrap of music started while the snow drifted from the trees outside my nephew Ben's apartment in Somerville.  It's a treat to work with someone who is such a talented dancer, open to everything, who perceives the beauty in a shadow, a change of the light.


We're keeping a blog of our work plus bits and pieces as they develop.

per Margherita Eugenia

Notes for a variation on Torna a Surriento:

Although my father was capable of some puccaloistic whistling, most of my musical talent came through my mother, who played in a piano-laden ersatz orchestra in her youth, a not uncommon animal in those areas bereft of a bona fide heterogeneous ensemble, performing multi-piano arrangements of familiar melodies, such as her favorite, my countryman Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, whose inexorably testosteronic accelerando rubbed her and her fellow pianistes to the brink of ecstasy. But the LP most in rotation in my boyhood home featured the trademark cascading strings of the Mantovani arrangements of Italian melodies, including Come Back to Sorrento, a calorie-lacking fluffball that I still cannot hear without bawling like a little baby, and a few flavonoids of which I have stolen for my variation here for an ensemble sadly lacking the three thousand strings necessary.

I happened across Scott D. Strader's blog recently and, reading his comment on Prokofievization, realized that I often do a bit of the same, but especially so in this number, since it started with someone else's tune and harmonies, and I needed to make it my own. The process looked something like this:

1. scribbling the original tune into the score - may as well keep the original key;

2. sketching an orchestration of the tune and the chords, by which I more properly mean arranging, where some notes and rhythms exist and one has to scatter them about, but stealing a few ideas as mentioned above from the Mantovani, e.g., the tremoloed strings and guitar;

3. do more of the actual orchestration, i.e., the orchestra-as-an-instrument parts. Who was it that said, when looking at a workmanlike orchestral arrangement of a piece for piano, that it was now time to orchestrate the pedal? So, adding the pedal effects and swirls and swells, an iterative process;

4. at the same time as (3), listening to every YouTubed version of Return to Sorrento and Torna a Surriento and realizing that every single singer who sang the original in all its golden age of opera glory performed the rubati and ritenuti in exactly the same way, so deciding to notate that into the score, requiring some stretching of time signatures here and there;

5. at the same time as (3) and (4), getting bored with the whole thing and remembering the rhythmically unpinned viola in Berio's setting of Black is the colour..., and deciding to write some other, more typical music to start it and to interrupt it and shoehorning that into it, streamlining the harmonies to make them a little less ploddingly obvious, adding some seasoning of the carousel;

6. sleeping on it, revising, repeating;

For 90 seconds of music, it was more difficult than usual, probably because I was starting with something that didn't sound much like me, and, even though constraints can sometimes be liberating, feeling bowed by all the baggage carried by this particular melody. But, even when writing things of my own from scratch, it is rare that I trust the first draft. There is always a process that follows of both honing and embellishing, of adding to and stripping away.

Two New Reviews

Of Mordake, not yet released:

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

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

and the Missa, in the online review journal FAME:

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

Text setting

Clark Suprynowicz and I were talking opera libretti recently at a fundraiser for the John Duykers and Miguel Frasconi work-in-progress, Hand to Mouth: The Journey of the Seed from Soil to Plate, a opera-ette which draws on John's other career as organic farmer and nearly-organic beekeeper, and the fact of our divergent approaches made got me to thinking. I'm a prose man, and believe in the sanctity of the language, which is typically my entrée into a text-based piece. To reiterate, language is the key to an opera composition, the way in, containing something that strikes me as being musical, in whatever sense one takes that. I've been considering Queer again lately, as we are planning to remount that in the Spring of 2011 as the 10th anniversary of the premiere and the 25th anniversary of the book's publication. Burroughs's writing is very musical, its flow and lilt and repetitions and its connection straight to the gut, not poetic in the old-fashioned sense of meter and foot, but its music inspired my own. In comparison, Clark's cavalier attitude to what his librettists have written down, and the fact that he bends their words to fit his tunes, seem quite sinful. For me, tunes and music spring from the words, although I hope that the music isn't simply painting colors over the words and that the music that comes from this interaction can stand on its own. I remember being asked once by a singer during the development of an early piece which sections were recit and aria and I realized it hadn't even crossed my mind. I was presenting the text, and I suppose some sections fit one label or the other, that some were internal monologue, outside of the action, and some were more action oriented, but I didn't stop somewhere along the way to sing a song, a song with a melody upon which the words were hung.

When I first studied composition, way back when, the very first exercise we did was to set a text and I've realized this may have shaped my approach early on. We each chose a poem and analyzed it, reciting it several times, writing down the rhythmic result in sprechstimme form, trying to capture the prosody and also the pitch contour of our recitation. The teacher's idea was that this was necessary to understand simply where the musical stresses should fall, and what the melodic pitch contour should be to properly capture the sound of the poem. But I realized in a moment of youthful revelation that this scribbled down proto-setting was the nut of the piece to come, that I could distort this pitch function of time in a number of ways, stretching it and shrinking it uniformly or non-uniformly in either axis, translating it, a whole series of affine and even nonlinear transformations, but that this would really be the piece, what the audience heard, my translation of the poem to sound.

When a composer sets text, the composer is the actor, is the reciter, and no matter who performs the piece thereafter, even though they may emote and express, they are fundamentally locked into the actor-performance of the composer herself. The composer locks down the basic timing and puts the reaction of one actor to the other into the mouth of each. The funny thing is, very few composers are taught acting or reciting or anything remotely theatrical or dramatic. We could ask, why should their conception of the text become the one true path through it?

I noticed something in my first piece which had real actors, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. Professional actors, who had no problem memorizing long monologues from traditional plays, were suddenly thrown off balance when they had to say their piece over a fixed length of time - to fit with some music and arrive at some dramatic point at the right moment. They stumbled and forget their lines and couldn't remember their stage business or act natural. Their whole acting lives had been all about the fluidity of time and expression and reacting to the moment, reacting to other actors, working in a development process, sometimes over a long time, sometimes with a director, to figure out their best pacing and timing and then to improvise some of those things further during performance, like real life. But the simple request to fit that expression into a certain stretch of time, combined with fighting against the rhythms of the music behind them, broke them down. So what to say about opera singers for whom almost all of these actor-ly expectations are subverted? Does this explain why opera in its heyday, pre subtitles, fascinated by its golden age, almost ignored the text completely, concentrating on the beautiful line, the voice, all the actors standing on the edge of the stage singing to the audience and ignoring each other, the audience swooning and crying, only knowing what is going on from the fact that they had seen the piece over and over and over and had the story synopsis in their program?

I tried to do something different in Mordake to alleviate this, playing with a technological solution, where John could sing a line freely - where he could act - and I would have fiddle with the knobs of the accompaniment, lengthening and shortening the music underneath to fit. I failed to achieve what I wanted, partially because I'm into dominance and control, but also because I think it would have required some more radical changes to my own compositional process. The fragment at the top of this post is typical for me, meters changing to fit the textual rhythm, and that has defined so much of who I am compositionally. I was recently reading an article by Kirke Mechem on choral setting, which is a different animal than opera, as the audience's understanding of the words being not so critical. In this piece, he talks about the importance of musical form, and once I got past my usual reaction in hearing the phrase "musical form," which is to release the safety on my Browning, I realized that I agreed with him, text setting shouldn't be, as he says, the musical equivalent of painting by numbers, but I also realized that all the text setting I have done has changed my notion of musical form. My later instrumental works sound to me like little operas, not that they actually have an underlying story, say Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, but they seem dramatic, wandering along and telling a tale, the music unfolding from what has come before, with asides and interjections, and me making the same kind of dramatic decisions: should there be a climax here, time for the intermission, or for the audience to relax and whisper and kiss their neighbor, am I going to go for the slam bang ending or the whimper, is it time for love interest to arrive? But Kirke did walk out in the middle of my opera Sub Pontio Pilato, brought there by his son and my good friend Ed, whose birthday was yesterday, and with whom I made out briefly for the amusement of his girlfriend and other guests on Sunday, me always willing to give a hand up to my friends, so maybe he didn't agree with my approach and thought my form was lacking, and who can see into the heart of another?

an UPDATE from Ed:

Just for the record, I believe (and I *was* sitting there with him) that he 'walked out', ahem, during intermission, because his back was hurting him. If you want to, ahem, add a little footnote to your post, detailing the dry boring reality (in contrast to the dramatic characterization!) -- feel free :)

OK, well, that is much drier and less colorful so not as interesting, but is the truth.