The Great War

Now, at the 100th anniversary of that conflict, I find myself writing several pieces that connect to it: an opera of sorts on the sinking of the battleship Szent István for the wonderful Klagenfurter Ensemble, my favorite favorites; a longish solo piano work for the fabulously talented Slovenian pianist Davorin Mori that is a series of portraits of anti-war activists from the period; and a commissioned song for Heidi Moss as part of a multi-composer project of Lieder Alive!, in German, a setting of a war poem, Schlacht - Das Maß, a strange work which had even a stranger history after the first world war. So many people love war - absolutely love it - and that period of European and specifically German history at the beginning of the 20th century to the middle of it, seemed to be so much about that love, and it's very hard for me to understand. I'm trying to put that difficulty of understanding into the music somehow, probably too subtle but whatevs.

My mother, and the coming war against men

Marge Wold, with creatures

My mother died a few weeks ago, and, since then, stories of my life with her have come bubbling up. She, like me, wanted to do everything, to create everything. She was fiercely ambitious and trained me to be the same, with the good and bad attendant: all the achievements and all the dissatisfactions.  A few weeks before she died, she wheeled herself to her neighbor's, told him she wanted to talk, and announced: "I'm 95 and I haven't accomplished anything." This from a woman who wrote ten or so books, speechified throughout the world, was the goto troubleshooter for Lutheran churches, who founded day nurseries across the country for newly single working mothers, who raised five children, and who, when the family bought a silent 8mm camera, immediately wrote a wordless story and had me and my dog at the time act it out in the sprawling parsonage in Grand Forks ND. 

But one of my oldest and most favorite stories is of the time she sat me down, when I was about ten years old, and told me that, one day - and I suppose I assumed that that day was fast approaching - women would have to take up arms against men, this to right the many wrongs of the many millennia of the many oppressions. I knew that most wars are won by attrition, and that there are more women than men, so I resigned myself to being on the losing side, and would even now be willing to surrender if asked nicely, if we could once again find those Viking soldiers buried with their sword and shield so long mis-gender-identified, but no such battle has come, no such victory, and we see that, even today, women find themselves living in a world of shit. 

The Audience, and Nixon in China, and the Dissonance canard

I ran into fellow composer Michael Fiday at Lisa Moore's fabulous concert a few weeks ago and buttonholed him about one of his recent Facebook posts quoting Peter Gelb to the effect that composers were finally again writing music that audiences want to listen to. Michael's point was that this has been going on for a long time, but even better was one of the comments consisting of a link to an article in the San Diego Reader discussing the difficulties of the San Diego Opera which said:

It is doing John Adams’s Nixon in China next year. But this is risky. These works may be on contemporary themes, but they feature dissonant music.

And at the Opera Conference in Vancouver in 2013, a man in the back stood up and said that it was a mistake for opera companies to try to modernize by playing pieces like Nixon in China, since, like all modern operas, there was not one memorable or singable tune in the entire piece. I looked across the room and caught Kent Devereaux mouthing the words News news news news, matching exactly what I was thinking, along with the now-part-of-the-standard-aria-repertoire piece I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung, which consists almost entirely of simple triads and the outlinings of those same triads in the melodic line. 

Next story: when I was a graduate student, I was hanging at my research advisor Al Despain's home, a brilliant man with simple musical tastes, one who listens to what he likes, and he was at that moment playing some music he liked, some light jazz, some jazz with a touch of the electric, maybe a bit of rock fusion, music I thought simple and straightforward to listen to, and I attempted to join with him in the clear enjoyment of his simple musical pleasures. Whereupon, one of his other students entered and said What is this, John Cage? 

An even earlier story: when my college roommate and I were both taking various composition classes and raiding the local record stores for music that pushed the edges of the world we had known, I picked up a copy of Pierrot Lunaire, and that first time I listened it to I found it very strange and unappealing, mostly the vocal style, but really almost everything about it, and I thought to myself, when I eventually love this music, which I somehow knew I would, I will have to remember this moment, and remember how far my tastes have traveled, how distant they are from even those of other sophisticated listeners, as I was, having for many years listened to just about everything I could get my hands on. 

But all this, and the conclusions therefrom, are obvious. When the reviewer said 'dissonant' he just meant unfamiliar. Clearly any kind of semi-scientific Helmholtzian or musico-historical Tenney-ian Dissonance Meter's needle would remain during Nixon in China on the low end of the scale, most assuredly lower than Wagner and lots of popular others. And my fellow student meant by "John Cage" the whole incomprehensible world of music that lies outside of  the ten corporate-sponsored tunes of the moment. 

Is there really music that is inherently popular or elitist?  Or is it all just about what the populace is conversant with?  If the mass public hears something a hundred times, it can become - by that process alone - likable. If not, then why does each generation seem to love the music they grew up with and find the music of the succeeding generation unapproachable?  Why do those growing up in different cultures by and large love the music of their own culture and find the music of other cultures incomprehensible?  Clearly popularity is learned. 

So, when one is asked take the audience into account, one has to respond, which audience? Not me, obviously, as my tastes have long since departed this realm.  And if I am not the audience, then how can my tastes be relied upon to judge whether other audiences who are not me might respond?  Almost surely I'll get it wrong.  There is nothing sadder than the composer who gives up her own tastes and desires to attempt to connect to the audience and who fails in this attempt.  Oh to be a composer most fortunate - financially fortunate - whose musical tastes happen to coincide with that of the largest and most well-heeled audience. 

A couple new scores

A couple of new short simple pieces here and here, two that I played at the show with Laura Bohn last week. From the notes:

As I was just telling Beth Levin a few minutes ago, there are few dynamics and few indications of tempo, but they are flexible. I personally played the first piece moving the soft pedal very slowly, and in synchronization with my own small dynamic movements, giving the feel of an organ crescendo pedal. The third piece can be even slower than indicated, and quieter, and una corda. The last should have some frenzy, wide dynamics fine, a caesura before the change to the soft part.

Kyle Gann has spoken about this on his blog - the skepticism of the new music community at music they perceive to be understated.  I thank him his clarity on the issue.  And yes, I agree with him.  I'm happy if someone tries to control every aspect.  I myself used to do tape music, and that's a highly controlled medium, except for wires and speakers and amplifiers and the room in which one listens, but I also think that performers - including myself - should be able to mangle my pieces any way they wish.  They do anyway, so why not just acknowledge it?

Our love runneth over: a summer’s eve most dearly spent

The most excellent Laura Bohn is coming to town, and we've talked for years about doing something with just the two of us so now we are: songs and scenes from my operas and solo piano, August 9th at 8pm at the Center for New Music, 55 Taylor Street in San Francisco, a lovely space at the edge of the Tenderloin, near Pianofight's about-to-open theater. Tickets only at the door: $15 general / $10 members.

Included are the flashy Veracity; the "big and gorgeous monologue of Wagnerian intensity" aka the killing scene from Certitude and Joy; Brightness, on Dan Bellm's poem; the brand new solo work The Knife Thrower, inspired by Erin Langley's poem inspired by the Steven Millhauser book of the same name; and at least the First Prayer (the bandage hour) from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. There will be food and drink and time to hang out, and if there is any money left over it will go toward the upcoming US premiere of УКСУС (UKSUS (vinegar)).

There are no rules

There are no rules. Really, there are no rules. It's a hard thing to accept, but it's true, and the difficulty of accepting this simple truth is because most of us really do want there to be rules, and that maybe by following those rules we will insure that everything works out OK.

I'm sitting downstairs on the patio at the Empress's parents' home looking out over the harbor, a cool breeze blowing off the water, activated by the wind so that it sparkles in the sun, the slight tang of diesel, the planes rocketing off in their high-G noise abatement pattern while her father dies upstairs. When someone dies, there are always questions: how old is he, what did she die of, did they eat too much meat, did they drink too much, did they love the wrong person, attempts to look for answers that will give us the rules of life that will guarantee that we never ever die.  My mother believes it, that she won't really die. At 95, she believes she will see my father again, and I don't know what that would be like: an eternity where there is no hope for the future, no ambition, no pain, no fear of death.

When a beautiful piece is made, there are always questions about process, about the tools used, about how to analyze the sounds or the chords or the way the melody peaks or troughs. These questions are an attempt to understand what makes something good or bad or effective or full of longing.  We hope that knowing the answers will give us the rules that will help us create, but they don't.

The Empress says I would be a bad teacher because, being in close contact with a class full of fresh-faced and excitable young people I would surely be arrested for something. But I know I would be a bad instructor because I would stand at the front of the lecture hall and simply say "Hey, guess what, there are no rules" and then I would sit back down and wait for something to happen, and that's not what they are looking for.  They want someone to be their guide, to help them through, and I suppose I do know something: I can tell them if they want to sound exactly like someone else to study what that person does or did and to imitate it.  That works, and it's what harmony and counterpoint books assemble: simplistic and descriptivist rules developed after the creative act, that explain some small average aspect of the group behavior of a set of composers culled from a particular time and place, aspects that are actually unimportant, beside the point, at least when it comes to the Ineffable Wonder of Composition.

Really, I'm serious, there are no rules, say it to yourself 100 times each day.

The idiocy of 'finding your voice'

The delicious dogs and cakes by P. Amblard.

The Empress' friend and fellow peinture décorative Pascal Amblard and family were visiting the Palazzo Rutter-Wold née Valori in the waning days of our Firenze adventure, and at one point he said that he had listened to the works on my website and wondered at the fact that my music didn't seem to be of one style or another but rather wandered around like the doomed sinner who taunted Christ and was forced to potter about without rest or respite until the end of the world or sometime near that. I felt like I should respond, to defend myself against what I perceived as a jab of the hated ἐκλεκτός but the shock of it struck me dumb. Why, haven't all my friends ridiculed me for writing the same music again and again? And aren't we, in the modern art world, supposed to do exactly that, aren't we supposed to have a voice that is so obvious and so marketable and so succinctly expressible in a single sentence that everyone knows before they've heard the tune what it will sound like? 

But then, I thought, isn't even your voice not somehow the human voice, the voice of everyone? As many before me have said, we live in the eternal now and the everywhere, the world of fixed media where all things are available to all, and isn't it true that there are no distinct cultures anymore, and thus no cultural appropriations possible?  I think it was Henry Cowell who said - that I first noticed anyway - that there are no pure cultures and that was many years ago and now it's so much more true, as all artistic space and time is all there from the moment one appears on the Earth or at least the Internet.

But then I remembered that Donald Aird told me that we can't not write The Music of Our Time, since we are of our time, and formed and shaped by all that exists around us  Even this above-mentioned washing over us of all things is different than what has been before, and none of us now or before perceive it like any other, as even the frameworks through which we perceive and approach the universe are of our time and no other and it's hard for us to think past that. Which reminds me of the story where Wittgenstein asks why do we believe it was more natural to think that the sun went round the earth than the earth turned on its axis, whereupon his friend replies that it is because it looked as if the sun went round the earth and at this point Wittgenstein says "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?"†

And I wonder sometimes why it is that what I listen to is not what I write: Ligeti's Lontano or his Kyrie, Chiyoko Szlavnics' Gradients of Detail, John Luther Adams' Dark Waves. I feel a deeper personal connection to that music than my own, and, as wonderful as the latter may be, the former has a perceived ineffability - I can't touch it; it is just out of reach.

† An introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe

Everything

Three months is hard to summarize, but if I don't try I will forget what has happened, and Firenze will fade further into a dream, a dream of Donatello's TransDavid, named by Shaunna, at the Bargello just around the corner from our palace, and the cat Lorenzo, who visited us on his rounds from roof to roof, who might also have been a girl, and so much more drinking than I do in my normal life. When we came to Florence, the Empress had a clear mission - to write her book on ornament and to photograph every square centimeter of Tuscany that had been touched by a painter's brush - but I had no plan except to drink it in and to cry for all those who had died there before me. And this I did each night, on the roof terrace, the wind and rain and sun and clouds riding over the city laid gloriously before me, the Duomo so close I would find myself reaching toward it, reaching with the hand that didn't hold the glass of honey grappa bought from the Badìa just around the corner from our palace, the same place we went for vespers, thick with incense and with the pure voices of those who, one wishes to believe, have no doubts about this world and the next.

While the empress pursued her course, I drifted about, washing ashore in Klagenfurt to record the UKSUS band, the Talltones Extended, for example the third of the Boeuf Bub interludes:



and the Divan Song:



While in Carinthia, I started on another project, a commission from the Klagenfurter Ensemble, to do a piece around the sinking of the Szent István, with Peter Truschner as the librettist. I've taken it on faith - I really have no idea how the subject will be handled, but I love the KE, and I trust that I can take whatever is given to me and turn it into something wonderful, and starting an opera in the birthplace of opera - well, isn't that a portent?

But the best part of the trip were the visits from many lovely people: my son Duncan and his girlfriend Bill, who mostly slept through the Florence days, venturing out only at night; Bunnywhiskers, with whom we and our friend Alison went to see Silvia Colasanti's beautiful opera of La metamorfosi; our more-or-less daughter and collaborator Laura, who connected us with the tenor Gregory Warren, who snuck us into a rehearsal of Tristan, and who lent his voice to the videos I was making with the beautiful dancers pictured up top, Elizebeth and Shaunna - I'm pretty sure more will be seen here about what we all are working on - with whom I went on a tremendously drunken trip to Panicale and stayed in an almost-as-ridiculously-beautiful-as-our-palace villa that overlooked everything, from the lake to Assisi and across the farms of Umbria; and meeting up with some San Francisco costume friends in Venice for Carnivale; and more and more I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Oh well. The end has come more quickly than I thought it would, and I knew before we left that the time would disappear. As always, one has only memories and hope for more to come.

Arrivederci Firenze

Goddamn you Florence, feckless lover, not able to manage even a drizzle, this morning dampened by crocodile tears you bring to your beautiful eyes while already turning away, already welcoming to your bed: the Dutch ladies; the next boatload of earbud linked tourists from China or the US or Germany following an unopened umbrella; the American students; the pilgrims and gelato eaters. You take them all, your beautiful eyes sparkling with each union, no matter how hurried, your bright light impinging on a hundred thousand silicon slabs each most sensitive to light, each made by light themselves in the hot foundries of Korea and Taiwan.

In my jealousy, while you sleep, I kiss your cheek and, pulling the covers down, expose your skin of cool marble, shot through with veins, blue and white, and take my unconsented pleasure, and then, childishly, pilfering from your nightstand into my carryon bag: a bust of Papa Francesco, two pairs of stockings, inhaled dove rocket smoke, all the truffled pizzas I could ever eat, a cake, much chocolate, an injured leg, music and - what I will miss most - the unbridled joy of our guests, who, seeing you from the terrace crowning our palace said what and what and what and laughed in your pleasure.

Oh please, bring back the hail and the rain and the lightning and the thunder, ground all the planes and let the busses and trains have a strike day where they can join us in your bed of stone and mortar and frescoes for one last love making, to smell your sweat and let my tears fall upon you my dear fickle love, la mia vita.

Beauty and light

Half my life is gone, and I have let the years slip from me and have not fulfilled the aspiration of my youth, to build some tower of song with lofty parapet.

Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret of restless passions that would not be stilled, but sorrow, and a care that almost killed, kept me from what I may accomplish yet;

Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,-- a city in the twilight dim and vast, 

With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,-- and hear above me on the autumnal blast the cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The empress had quite a different take on the day...

Black Mass

In this picture, we see an effigy of the late Adolf Hitler about to be decapitated, or maybe just before the nails were driven into his heart, all in the dark days of January 22, 1941, just a few days before my negative 17th birthday, a picture sent to me by way of a link to a Life magazine article written contemporaneously to the event, a black mass against the well-known embodiment of evil, by one of my foreign correspondents, the regal Bunnywhiskers, AcA, ABe, TEP, DDC, ordine dell'anatra d'oro, and too many other honors to mention.

Unfortunately Satan, or whoever they were calling to action, wasn't as receptive as s/he was hoped to have been, and the war dragged on, Adolf very much alive for the next few years, leaving those at the end of the conflict to wonder what the fuck that was all about. Maybe if the Germans had just gotten all those occult magic weapons built in those secret mountain redoubts under Peenemünde.

But back when I wrote the Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi, I thought I should write a black mass to somehow counterbalance the white one, to keep in the universe in order, and to hedge my bets in the afterlife. The thought  process went something like so:

"Hey Erling, weren't you into all that Aleister Crowley and OTO and Psychic TV and Re/Search stuff?" "No, I think that was Mark Dippé, even though I would look over his shoulder and sometimes we would dress the same and then there was that ritual branding stuff." "But I'm sure I saw all those books on your bookshelf the last time I was over at your house." "Well, I've always believed in being well-rounded."

But my favorite of the Black Mass stories was that which came to light during the trial for the Affair of the Poisons, held for the mistress of Louis the XIV, where she, as the testimony went, laid down on the altar in a space made up as a simulacrum of a regular old Catholic church, but usually seen without the naked mistress of the king as the focal point, in this particular instance balancing the chalice on her naked belly. When my Mass toured to Jona (Switzerland), I remember being tempted to pick up a few consecrated hosts, wondering if they would ever come in useful-like, although I don't really know whether Timmy the Customs Wonder Pup would actually have allowed them back into the USA, and then finding the cabinet behind the altar locked tight, and thinking that, oh yes, right, they probably do that so really awful people like yours truly aren't tempted to do something really so awfully bad as stealing some consecrated hosts and possibly putting their immortal soul in mortal danger, like super 9th circle of hell danger, where the demons have really big cocks and don't think twice about using them. Anyway, so the mistress of the king, Madame de Montespan, talked her friend Catherine Monvoisin and the local not-totally-against-the-black-mass padre Guibourg into doing this thing, something they both came later to regret, he tortured and dying in prison and she burned to death in the place formerly known as Place de Grève, a pretty spot on the river, but a place to be watchful of your wallet and not to get too distracted by the young girls who need help translating a letter.

But in her naked perfection, stretched out on a long piece of black velvet over the altar, she, as the story goes, listened while the padre, dressed in a pretty fancy outfit with magical silver characters embroidered in, chanted some blasphemously altered version of the Latin Mass, and, as was mentioned above, set the paten and chalice on her naked belly and, in the hope of keeping the King's love - ok, this is where one might wonder exactly why this particular ritual was deemed the proper ritual for stoking the possibly fading embers of the King's love, but - a woman assistant to the priest held out an infant whose throat was then slit, dripping blood into the chalice and onto the aforementioned naked and most likely quite fetching body of the mistress of the King.

You know, this is so like scenes from those really cheeseball English dubbed but probably made in Italy or Spain horror movies I used to see as a child, when as son of the local Lutheran pastor I was able to get into the theater for free to get pretty titillated at the naked breasts with theatrical blood washing across them from the vampire bites or knife slashes or other general mayhem, but, according to Catherine Monvoisin's daughter, who testified at trial, "The corpse was handed to la Voisin, who flung it callously into an oven fashioned for that purpose which glowed white-hot in its fierceness" which sounds a little like it was written for her, the whole mess being political in the best sense of the word, meaning who knows what really happened.

But I never did write the other mass, and the texts that I could find were pretty stupid anyway, and I doubt it would have worked for much except maybe remembering those heady days with the branding ceremonies and public piercings. Which wouldn't have been all that bad.

The Easy Life

I'm sitting in our apartment in Firenze in the former Palazzo Baccio Valori looking out the window at the Duomo. The lights on the monuments have just come on as the sun has set, the last of the bells are dying out, and the mosquitos are now let loose in the city.  In the days of the Medici, the mosquitos were fierce and malarial, but in the modern age they move slowly, engorged on drunken tourists.  We sometimes find the opportunity to dissect them, not with scalpel but with shoe or paperback or oven mitt, and this is ok, the way of things, and with some touch-up paint we can remove their little lives from history, much as we ourselves will disappear one day, when our great-great or great-great-great grandchildren, cleaning the urns on the mantel, no longer remember which urn is which and whether this one is great granduncle Teddy and maybe they need to make some room for more hyper-photos of people they do remember, at which point one hopes that enough life force has endured in those remains to give them just the slightest jolt as they toss you out into the mulched hyper-roses causing them to trip and fall into the pond.

Like so many of those who wish not to be tossed into the hyper-roses, I have vainly attempted to leave a mark on the world. My CV goes on a bit, and although we are constantly reminded of those who have accomplished so very much more, I do take it out of the old box of clippings and read it from time to time, along with all the fading notices of my time on the stage, the limelight and the girls on shoulders of boys and the applause. I was doing this just the other day in fact, and came across Joshua Kosman's article on me from a few years back and found this bit:

At 50, he has the amiable demeanor of a practiced collaborator and the buzzing nervous energy of someone with a long history of getting twice as much done in a day as the rest of us.

Is that true?  I've always thought of myself as fundamentally lazy and fundamentally not so bright. When I was an underage boy at Caltech, freshly deflowered and still wet behind the ears, I met people whose brains seemed to be running at a speed I could not imagine, and I spent most of my time drinking and sleeping all day and skipping class, but I remember that my friend Billy B. was envious about how much I got done even with all the drinking and sleeping through class, so maybe he felt the same. And in my later years - in graduate school and in the working world - I've been pretty sure that I am in fact a fraud, just clever enough to hide my inadequacies and hoodwink everyone around me, the snake oil salesman in their midst, somehow able to knock something together that works, and as long as no one looks too closely for the shoddiness (and don't even talk to me about my doctoral thesis) one might miss it, but luckily I've been able to find jobs where such slipshod work is enough to get by, and fortunately I'm not building airplanes or pacemakers or nuclear bombs.

Of course I know of the inverse Dunning-Kruger effect, but just knowing that that effect doesn't help you - you yourself can't tell if you are an actually competent person who downplays their abilities or if you are simply mediocre.

But there is the other side, the looming shadow-side of the self-thought-to-be-incompetent Wold boy, the one who secretly thinks that he is smarter than everyone else, who wants everyone to know, who carries intellectual books about with covers displayed so that others can see, who does look through the aforementioned box and remembers that he did fight long and hard for those Scholar of the Year awards, printed on fake parchment, remembering too that when he was called up to the podium to receive the first one, his name was proceeded by "and now for the Freshman girls" and although he wasn't quite yet the cross dresser he would later become, his hair was well down his back and that did earn him some cheek-reddening catcalls from construction workers on his way to school. And then there are those moments when, expecting that well of course everyone knows this or understands that, he discovers with mind-splitting incredulity that people he assumed were as competent as he is actually don't understand some bit of mathematics so totally obvious and straightforward, or find Ulysses "too hard," or haven't read the vi or emacs manual and learned all the arcane details, or whatever else he can hold over everyone's head, even though some of accomplishments actually were kind of hard back when he faced them himself but seem so easy now in retrospect.  And all of this happens in both aspects of his life, the science-y math-y engineering-y bits and the art-y music-y literature-y bits.

But even writing this now brings the fear on for the Wold boy, the fear that he is one of those people to whom Dunning-Kruger really does apply, who worries above everything, even that maybe he is worse than stupid, maybe he is actually delusional, as in delusions-of-grandeur delusional. So we'll set that aside for a time when the room isn't so dark and the candles aren't guttering.

What I really wanted to talk about here - and the reason for the photo of the totally gorgeous telescopes in the Galileo Museum above - is the epiphany I had the other day while walking through this beautiful city, which is that, even though I've come out in some ways, although in the article above there is this bit:

Wold is a little reticent about his sexual autobiography, despite the fact that his Web site identifies him as a composer, producer of operas, and "libertine." He volunteers only that after his divorce, he moved across the bay in part out of an attraction to San Francisco's gay scene - despite the fact that he is, by his own description, "queer but not gay."

and finding this bit the other day made me wonder if I'd ever actually read the whole interview, as I didn't remember it at all, but as I was saying, even though I've come out in some ways, I tend to avoid coming out as an engineer/math guy to the art world and as an art/lit guy to the engineering world, thinking that somehow there is a stigma of un-seriousness about being one to the other, but my epiphany the other day was that there is of course no stigma, not the slightest at all. The Galileo Museum is filled with objects that are both gorgeously scientific and gorgeously artistic, and being here in goddamned Firenze makes one remember that we intellectual types used to gather to make decisions about all aspects of the world and that article one on the agendum list that afternoon might be do mathematical objects exist in a Platonic reality of their own and article two might be be shouldn't we create a whole new art form? Leonardo was given a commission one day to paint the adoration of the magi or whatever and then the next day hired to figure out better methods to slaughter the good citizens of Pisa and it didn't seem to matter to either commissioner about the other. So where did that change? Or is this perceived stigma just my own problem? Hey, that reminds me that I did in fact work on a weapons system once, a parallel-pipeline FFT processor inside the F-16 or maybe it was the -15 radar, being built by Westinghouse Electric Corp, and I had published a paper on fast parallel-pipeline FFT construction, so was the go to guy, and I needed some money because I was a poor graduate student and like everyone else whose hands are bloodied for some bit of money, I just had to wash them with a little bit stiffer brush when I got home in the evenings, and I wonder now if they still would have hired me if I had told them about the other stuff, the settings of the Antonin Artaud poems and the readings of the Kathy Acker books and suchlike.

Oh wait, that reminds me of the other bit that gnaws at me - the piece of paper that says whether you are capable of doing a job - a notion that is so obviously crazy that one wonders how it even got started. I remember years ago reading some nonsense by Charles Wuorinen (note I may be misremembering this and maybe it was someone else but whatever, it's my memory so there) about how Charles Ives couldn't be that good a composer because he didn't really have that much schooling.  Hey, I have a PhD but the only reason I have it is because 1) one of my first girlfriends basically dared me to do it and 2) I didn't really like having a real job. Smart people can do smart things regardless of the particulars, and having the piece of paper doesn't even say that much anyway. I'll tell you the simple way to figure out whether someone is capable of doing something - ready? - have them actually do it. The best engineering/math work I did in graduate school wasn't even for my thesis, and almost none of what I do now was what I studied then - in art or the other.

And finally there is the last part of the engineering/art equation or should I say minuet, and the basis of the title of this essay: money. It's the weird and strange specter of the art world, a world in which no one has enough unless they inherited it from someone or they happened to be one of the lucky few that connected with the mass market, or they have a day job. Engineering gives me the easy life, and pays for this trip to Firenze, and gives me the support to do my art, and asks only that I work all the fucking time, day and night, never to see the beauty of summer, never knowing the joy of a day wasted without care.

walking along the embarcadero past pier 7 and the flowers (II)

ZOFO duet, photo by Lynne Rutter

I've been mixing down the recording of the Certitude and Joy opera, soon to be released in some digital form, and I realized that there were sections of the piano that were played just so beautifully by the ZOFO duet that they really should be heard on their own, and it makes sense, really, as much of the piano was written before the opera even existed, and thus I mixed down a version which is really similar to the original piano duet score, but not quite exactly the same, and have uploaded it to soundcloud. For your listening pleasure, then, so please enjoy. Oh my, they are just so delightful.

trenta sei vedute del duomo

Recently garlands of roses

adorned this temple of magnificent structure

sweet parent, and daughter of your Son, virgin, flower of virgins,
your devoted people of Florence

will deserve to receive the merits of your Son in the flesh

Viaggio a Firenze

The Empress and her consort are about to travel to Florence, the Beloved Jeweled Clasp on the Laces of the Boot of Italy, for a few months, with the simple goal to revolutionize several moribund artistic industries, including Drama, Music and Painting, whose terminal decline has long been discussed. Our headquarters is situated on the via dei Pandolfini, a stone's throw from where another such revolution was launched under our forebear, the late Count Giovanni de' Bardi. Here, together, we shall guide, with a firm but gentle hand on the reins, the way forward into a successful and prosperous future for all, at least for all those who agree to be led by us to this artist's paradise. The others, those too foolish or ignorant, those poor who disagree, who refuse to give us dominion, will be ignored or, if need be, exterminated.

Although bringing shape to the above-mentioned revolution is our prime objective, it is very thirsty work - as we used to say in the heady days of the OSS. After all, we are only human, and humans, like all living beings, from the lowly computer virus to the All-Encompassing Universal Gaia-Form of All Creation, do have human needs: to consume, to consummate, to respire, to eliminate, to reproduce, to float in the air, to achieve congress, which, as I think of Italy, brings to mind those calendars full of cute and kind of homoerotic priest photos they sell down the road from the Vatican, or that very attractive woman who made me a hot chocolate and who laughed and looked into my eyes and who, happening to run into me in the luggage store just a few minutes later, helped me so very very much in buying a new strap, the perfect strap, one that is tight and just long enough and from which it would be very difficult to escape.

Notes on Prototype / New Works Forum: New York 2014

I came to the New Works Forum conference as a composer, as a producer of my own works, and as someone who is just beginning to help others get their works done. I didn’t know what to expect, but was very pleasantly surprised. I suppose it makes sense that those that come to a New Works Forum are those who are interested in new works, but the level of excitement, the feeling that this is the future, the search for new solutions to funding and production and presentation and development of new opera was striking, as well as everyone’s interest in the wide range of what is going on.

The conference was held at the same time as the Prototype festival, which was great.  I had time to see a few things: Paul's Case, which was quite delicate and sublime, Thumbprint, which captured the culture in which it took place and had some very nice chamber writing, and my favorite piece of the festival, Angel's Bone, which is one of those few pieces where the text is so strong that it can stand on its own but where the text and the intensely gorgeous music combined with it to produce something incredible. Let me quote a bit from Royce Vavrek's libretto:

Brick J. can't get enough;

Mounts me, holding me

by my empty wings.

Sucks every drop

Of my inner-most marrow

Moans as he rolls

My tissue on his tongue:

A carnivorous act. 

I was somewhat aware of the pain felt by the larger opera companies, but it was illuminating to hear it directly from them. One can see how they worked themselves into a situation that is very difficult to get out of – a funding structure that is based on very large productions of traditional repertoire – where it is hard to make a move in any direction without losing something. When David Devan talked about the costs of producing, even in his small hall, it’s clear that nimbleness for him is difficult to achieve. 

I did see that some of the aesthetic choices of the big companies (although not all) were towards more conservative works. And maybe saying they are “conservative” is a lazy choice of words – more that some of the works presented in the forum were very play-like, or even musical-theater-like, with lots of dialog, with even a certain cuteness of the dialog. I wondered if this was because it is believed that this is what will align with the tastes of their current audience. I shared a long taxi ride with Ben Krywosz (Nautilus Music Theater) and he stated my concern very succinctly: why are we singing?  It’s a really good question and worth looking at for new works. I do think opera is a very different medium than plays or musical theater, that there’s a certain depth that is possible because of the richness and development of the music over a single work – that it can be an equal partner in the drama, adding another line of emotion and character and narrative development, not just as underscoring or underlining the text. I liked when someone at the conference said that singing is unnatural, so why try to be natural? Yes, right.

There were also some very good discussions about a growing awareness of the audience’s tastes and about developing pieces that do make a connection, and statements that younger composers seemed aware that we have to do things that connect to an audience for the art form to survive. But I do worry that this seems to be taken by some to imply a retrenchment or a – dare I say it again – conservatism.  I believe that there do have to be some uncompromising artists that push the form forward. Those don’t necessarily have to have 1.8 million dollar productions, but a piece that was mentioned a few times at the conference – Einstein on the Beach – is way outside of the style – or even the meta-style – the approach – of pieces people were talking about producing. It’s a perfect example of something I talked about above – a piece that could not be a play or a movie – a piece that relied on the power of its music. I know many composers and artists and directors who were inspired and brought into the then dusty world of opera because of that work, which was so striking and so different and so compelling. I’m one of those people. We tend to forget that Opera itself was a product of the Florentine renaissance, that the concept of a richly sung line over an rich accompaniment was an artistic revolution that displaced the sung monody of the church. It’s good to be reminded that one should not be afraid.

Debaucheries of dissatisfaction

A month or so ago, the artist and filmmaker and genetic composer Tim Perkis stopped by for lunch and afterwards we got to talking about the unknown forces that move the world, and he told me of a friend of his who was featured in Time Magazine and thought well now I've made it and proceeded to sit by the phone waiting for the calls to come in only to find that he was slowly starving to death. 

I too have had those moments, and in fact keep, close to my heart, a short catalog of embarrassments that I pause to extract from time to time, fondling and kissing them to remind me of my hopes and dreams and idiocies: that first concert; that first award, polished daily; that first radio interview that brought Fred and Henry over to our filthy house; that first recording released on vinyl and disc; that first opera and the first time performing in Europe; and first commissions for dance and film and orchestra; and all those reviews; and the first publications; and who could forget the first fan mail from those people on the other side of the Iron Curtain, looking for copies of CDs from the perceived American underground?  And through all this one waits for the phone to ring in the growing dark and quiet.  

But any of the how-to-be-an-artist self-help books will tell you the same, something like how rien ne vient à qui sait attendre (pardon my French) but only to those who trust in the Lord or reach for the stars or maybe it is the moon, but really in most cases not much comes at all, and even she who I have paraphrased ended her poem with something about how maybe it all will come but just too late. 

So here I sit, drinking my Sazerac laced with sugar, sugar from a pewter bowl, just a hint of sugar of lead, thinking of Pope Clement II who hoped for a better life after this one, reading a recent blog entry by the fabulous Kyle Gann - did I ever mention his very great talent for coming up with the most beautiful harmonies previously unheard?  Please please listen to this one, my favorite.

I'll wait here while you do. 

Anyway, in the previously mentioned entry, Kyle writes:

I’m trying to teach the class that the canon is an artificial construct, and that it is indeed created by people in power making decisions. Musical academia has its collective narrative, critics tend toward a different narrative, the classical-music performance world has yet another narrative, and the corporate world makes decisions on a different set of criteria. All of these narratives are contaminated by self-serving premises, and none should be misunderstood as resembling any kind of pure meritocracy. And thus every student needs to judge every piece on its own merits as they appear to him or her, and such decisions should not be made on the first listening, or necessarily the second or third.

I envy the clarity of his writing as well as his harmonies, and I believe what he is saying is true, but it's so hard for me to really have faith in it. I keep waiting for that anointing, that Légion d'honneur or OBE that will never come, foolishly regretting all the avenues that have held such promise, forgetting that true happiness lies only in a slow warm remembering of past wantonness, those moments of ecstasy and after, improprieties, mistresses, secrets shared of boyfriends whose tastes in movies are so different from theirs. 

Opera in Translation

Some might find it surprising that one who has only a cursory and confused comprehension of the German language would have written three German operas, but as is typical for one who possesses little and thus dangerous knowledge and who is ignorant of his own foolishness, that person has recently found that he must push himself past any modicum of decency and sense of propriety and fire his translators and take it all on himself as he is sure he knows more than anyone else and anyway he's been a bit angry and isolated in spirit lately so itching for a fight. 

And even though he believes that it's pretty obvious that true translation is more or less impossible, he does have some claim to at least knowing English which, in this particular case, is the destination language, and he feels that intimate knowledge of the destination language is probably the more important of the two language knowledge areas in question, especially when the source is poetic and anyway he can do whatever he wants, and, in several of his recent transmissions he has said, and I quote: "[we have been] working hard to capture the feel of the language in its English translation, not word-for-word, but reproducing the feeling that must have been invoked when their audiences first arrived, unprepared for what was to come." 

Now this seems at least doable. If the true crusade is simply to make something that feels the same at the cruising altitude level, then he can pretty much wing it.  But let's look at one particular moment, in particular from the Alexander Vvedensky so-called "Rug/Hydrangea" epistle, first in the original Russian:

Я вижу искаженный мир,
я слышу шепот заглушенных лир,
и тут за кончик буквы взяв,
я поднимаю слово шкаф,
теперь я ставлю шкаф на место,
он вещества крутое тесто

which, in the Austrian German version, Yulia and Felix translated as 

Ich sehe die Welt – entstellte Gestalten,


ich höre das Flüstern der Lyren verhalten,


ich fasse den Rest eines Buchstabens an


und hebe ein Wort auf – der Schrank, 


ich rücke an seinen Platz den Schrank, 


Er ist der Dinglichkeit teigiger Dank.

I should stop here and point out one extra complication, or which we in the optimization biz might call a 'constraint,' is that there was already a setting done of this, the German version, which was quite beautiful, stunningly so in point of fact, and heartfelt, and such things are not three a penny, so that maybe one would want to keep at least the basic rhythmic structure and rhyme scheme (the latter of which we should note here matches the original Russian), and so, holding German-Russian-English dictionaries in hand, and processing this all along with what my friends explained it all to be, I came up with 

I see the world - distorted appearance,

I hear the whispers of the lyres performance,

I grasp at the tip of a character

and pick out a word from the cabinet,

I move the cabinet into its place,
Thanks to its doughy materiality

Is this correct? I dunno, really, but it does kind of fit the tune and has those rhymes that may be important, and actually we start to feel OK about even the meaning and, though I said we didn't care about correctness and suchlike, I do decide to drop my pen on the ground and, picking it up, glance surreptitiously at the answer sheet on the desk at the right, the smart girl in the class who has made it known that she will in fact write you that special A+ term paper for a good enough lick job and a baggie full of Molly, and I see that she has written:

I see the world askew
and hear the whispers of muffled lyres,
and having by their tips the letters grasped
I lift up the word wardrobe,
and now I put it in its place,
it is the thick dough of substance.

OK, well, it affirms something of the same drift of it all, so maybe we did all right.  Is "letter" better than "character?"  Maybe "character" is coming from my UTF-8-centric career outside of the art world, but both of those words mean other things too. "Word wardrobe" though - not so sure about that, but I know I like "doughy materiality" - mmmm - beautiful, lovely whatever-the-fuck-it-means.  Oh right, and I did try that one giant Machine Translation Engine that we all know and love and support with our advertising dollars, and, from the Russian, it says:

I see a distorted world ,
I hear a muffled whisper lira
and then the tip of the letter took,
I raise the floor cupboard,
Now I put the cabinet in place
He substances dough

which I suppose we learn something from - especially on that "letter" issue. But "floor cupboard" and "substances dough" - well, gosh, I don't know, they don't seem to me to be quite so pleasant. 

As we can see, this descent into the levels of hell can continue below where Judas is munched by the devil without coming to purgatory on the other side, so let's now take a little holiday back to an earlier, happier time, when Mr. Composer was first requested to take his first voyage into opera-in-translation, corralling his friend Angelika Mollenhauer into doing a translation of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil to German.  She's a native German speaker, but fluent in both English, the language of the original setting, the translation by Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst's wife, who gave me permission in a handwritten note; and French, the language of the original text by Mr. Ernst himself, even though he was German, but a determined expatriate German, from what I hear.  Much later I found the Werner Spies translation, but I liked Angelika's even after, but prolly because I just did, and she had told me that great story about the cleaning lady and the haunted owl statue.

Now, I remember the first time I saw that German translation and I said Fucking Jesus Fuck™ what the fuck am I going to do with all these syllables!?  Ah yes, German has lots and lots of syllables. And me with my one-note-per-text-syllable fixation, learned at the knee of the songwriter friends of my youth, which I supposed meant cramming lots more notes into a tongue-twisting Teutonic nightmare.  And then the problem that where things happen in German sentences is quite different from English, and sometimes the action isn't known until the end of the sentence instead of in the middle, which I knew from my rudimentary high school German, but until one tries to re-set such a thing to music formerly attached to English, it never really is in the gut what that means dramatically. Like, for example, the fact that the big important moment suddenly happens way later, so what to do? 

Well, the answer for me was to do everything possible - sometimes squeezing it in and sometimes rewriting the music, either changing the line so the important bit happened in a different place, or sometimes changing the metrical structure. For example, just for some fun:

The original, the English version, is on the top, and the first measure is in 13/8, following the meter of the text itself, or at least the way I spoke it to myself when setting it: "Crows and harpies, come with me under my white dress" (12 syllables) with the accompaniment following, one chord per measure, changing on the white dress with a shift to 5/4.  In the German version below, I just couldn't in good conscience bring myself to pour into that 13/8 the phrase "Ihr Krähen und Harpyien kommt mit mir unter mein weißes Gewand" (18 syllables) so I altered it to two measures of 4/4 + 1/8, the accompaniment spooling out just a little longer to cover it, and, in the intervening years, my opinion about how to label such time signatures changing I believe for the better. 


Listening now to the piece in its entirety, the German still seems a bit crammed in, and I'm so grateful to Mariko Wakita for performing my learning experience so effortlessly. By the time it came to do the same for Sub Pontio Pilato, I knew what to expect.  

Uksus, the latest endeavor, is a different animal, having been written originally in German and now being moved to English. The syllable problem is now occurring in its inverse: lots of music with not much text to fill in, but being the official composer of the thing I can of course do whatever I want, so rewriting and altering but sometimes just accepting that the feel will sometimes be different, and isn't that just part of the joy of the diversities of living? 

The Ontology of Recapitulation

Once again facing the final days of the attempt at Capturing, of Recording that which was never intended to be so. For those of you following along, see to the right what has become the Realization of Music in its Quintessential Reified Embodiment as Object.

Here before, trying to decide what is OK and what is not OK in this transition from performance to recording to mastering to releasing. Unlike pop musicians, who are faced with the odd difficulties of reproducing onstage their meretricious fabrications, those consumable objects brought into being using the gizmos available to the modern recording assemblist, we in the world of scribbled and unlovable scores are faced with the inverse problem, attempting to create a series of numerals that is something akin to the excitement of the live event, a will of a wisp of an ephemeral evanescence, skin and voice and membrane and eye and string and movement. 

Even the most basic capture, even after a long hunt with horses and trumpets and hounds baying, is weak and fraught with error, and performers are weak and fraught with error, and what really does one want anyway in the prey beheaded and stuffed and glass eyes put in and nailed to the wall with all the others undusted for so long: the excitement, the errors, the feeling, the greasepaint, the score, the threesomes and intrigues, or none of the above? Well, the score, who gives a shit? And as those much greater than me have pointed out long ago, the recording studio is an instrument in itself, and recordings are not and should not be performances, but something quite different. So maybe it isn't a capture at all, but rather a creation of its own, plucked ab nihilo from the bits of heaven that have floated too low and into our modest grasp. 

When I was young and foolish and wrote electronic music, the recording was all there was, and I would tinker and meddle with each small event and each change of parameter, longing for perfection but at the same time fearing a disinfected and insipid and infertile pulp. And now that we find that acoustically captured music is subject to the same endless tweaking of pitch and time and sound and place, we find ourself at the same crossroads. Looking at the guideposts up ahead we see one in particular: Classical Music, which brooks no error, which allows only the subtlest variations from the received wisdom of performances past, which has been extreme in its annulment of reality, which is filled with edits and cleaned of noise until little is left. And I worry: because of that expectation of perfection, mustn't I do the same if I wish to be valid? And I reply meekly: isn't there some power in mistakes, isn't there something there which makes us undeniably human?  But that meek voice is shouted down by others who, having done so, lead me back to the the flashing lights of the plug-ins and the lasso cursor.

So I adjust here and there, a few milliseconds added to a late entrance, a few Hertz raised on the flattened pitch, and during this tedium my mind drifts. I think: hey, what was wrong with Joyce Hatto anyway? When everyone is creating something false, why not go all the way and create something sincerely and truly false?  It's clear why no one noticed her falsehoods for some time, since all expected the next recording of the Messiaen or the Godowsky to be more-or-less like the last anyway, taking one step further Rob Haskin's interpretation of Cage's statement that he had no personal use for recordings:

... the implications of the remark are unclear. He possibly meant that the false objectification of music through recorded sound discouraged difference: the ideal state of societies comprising many individuals. A recording foreclosed a multiplicity of performance interpretations, since it was itself a finite object, and it effectively turned the act of audition into an essentially private action. Cage saw performances of music as a metaphor for social action: the audience who attended to the music as it occurred in acoustic space was just as necessary for the metaphor as the musicians who actually brought the music into existence.

Gracenote's CDDB tipped the scales on Ms. Hatto, but we see the loss of variation everywhere at my day job, the tunes from far-flung orchestras that match ever-so-closely, the live pop / rock / hip-hop recordings from Milan and New York City and Tokyo, that, sequenced and lip-synced on stage, vary only in the time placement of the internationally varied audiences' varied whooings.

And each step in that direction takes us one step further away from the days when musical experiences were real musical experiences of sight and sound and smell and parlor pianos, when we fell in love helping another reach a difficult chord, and then, laughing and falling against each other, we tumbled to the floor where real creation took place, that of love and life and music infinitely sweet.

The glistening perdition

Lynne Rutter, a woman of such great pulchritude that she outshines her utterly splendrous works and inspires envy in those who behold her, seems  so very bewilderingly happy with her lot, as much as I try to convince her that she is simply incorrect.

I know with certainty that life is and is intended to be a struggle against forces that overwhelm, an unbending fatigue coupled with an insomnia bred of fear and agitation, a hunger for successes and joys that slip through one's net no matter how well deployed nor tight the weave, an uncountably infinite unspooling résumé of failures failing comprehension or categorization, of hopes unfulfilled, of plans and intentions washed out in the face of sputtering walls of deficiency that strike in wave after inordinate wave, a sullied haberdashery selling bent needles, buttons unthreadable and ties pre-stained, whose tutelary spirit is condemned to a perpetuity of vain efforts and ripping frustration in payment for her hubris, a dream of fame and triumph that awakens to a dimly lit room smelling of must, a race unwon, a frenzy of pathetic ruttings sparking little heat and ending not in promised refulgence but in pain, sorrow and regret ending only when the curtain falls and the audience leaves and, each finding her or his car, turn on the radio, the slight amusement dispelling the memories of what once was.

But somehow one fails to learn the simple desperation of an existence beyond repair.  One dresses in the morning while scrutinizing the status updates of others seeming somehow less pathetic and is snookered in.  Oh, one says, maybe I really could do better if I just worked harder, maybe I could have a brighter future like everyone else, maybe I don't have to play Mr. Lamentable Worm dressed in these ill-fitting and not-quite-matching clothes. And with that, one begins again the process, putting in one's oar or, more appropriately, applying the shoulder and rolling, rolling, rolling the enchanted stone to its place up at the top of the hill.