Three Romances with Nikola Printz

 

The film that Nika and I fabricated during the pandemic was accepted into Opera Philadelphia's Festival O22, a select few from 600 or so submissions, and we were tickled by that.  The venue - The Philadelphia Film Society - is a big old beautiful theater, and Nikola's profile against the moonlight SF Skyline was ever-present.  Our film was placed along with Alexa Deja's gorgeous Be A Doll and some other crazy and lovely pieces in the weirdo section of shorts aka Opera Boldy Goes. I believe our entry might have been the lowest budget and smallest crew of all. I remember when someone at Sundance asked Henry Rosenthal what the budget was for Sure Fire and his response was "including the trip here?" 

Philadelphia is a very intriguing city, a mix of old and new, where classes and races mix much more than in wanna-be-progressive but highly segregated San Francisco.  And people dressed for the opera, so nice to see, no comparison between the the decked-out crowd at Rossini's Otello at the festival and the dressed-down audience at the SF Opera's recent Tony & Cleo.  

My epic film begins

She Who Is Alive is in production! Laura Bohn jetted in from Amsterdam to shoot two of her scenes, one alone with Beethoven on the 25th and one with the inimitable Bradley Kynard on the 26th. I've been told it is insane to film 30+ minutes of film in two days, but needs must and therefore will be. Heath (Orchard) has been so allowing of my failings and idiocies in these early days. 

This whole world of real-ish-not-me-just-fucking-around filmmaking, new to me, has been inviting so far. DTC Lighting & Grip gave us a hazer and some equipment when we promised to hire some up-and-coming gaffers. Jim Cave, my long-time friend and director, has stepped up, as he always does, to be a little of everything: acting coach, set dresser, covid tester, etc.

After

Before

Those X-lets

Anyone who has played one of my little insouciances has experienced my fetishistic fascination with triplets and quintuplets and, to a smaller extent, septuplets and 21-lets and all the other n-lets. Although the notations are the same no matter what the underlying intent, my enchantment with them comes from a variety of sources. The first is just the usual old-modernist fascination with the joys of complication, combined with the constructed textural landscapes of the Impressionists, then to the Ligetis as well as the totalist post-modernists, who all love to break up rhythmic lockstep by floating the notes by each other on parallel tracks, waving at each other through the windows as they pass. And there is the simple mathematical interest, where many composers have thought that maybe bigger integer ratios ratios in rhythms lend a spiciness like those same ratios in pitches. 

The second is the way I was taught to set text, which has stuck with me, probably more literally than intended, calculated to capture something of natural speech rhythms, as no one speaks in quarters and eighths when not rapping.  It's still a musical approximation, allowing the vocal line to connect with the rhythm while still flowing a bit, and also notating something beyond just notation, something like performance, e.g. the way a crooner delays the entrance of every new phrase. 

But finally, and maybe this is the most important, it is that I grew up with those rhythms. When I was studying tabla, I would while away the time on walks to and from campus tapping out polyrhythms over and over, 3 against 4, 4 against 3, 5 against 3, 4 against 5, etc.  I was pretty facile up through the 9s, and proud of myself, but shamed when my teacher could so easily play 11s over 7s and beyond, and not just straight rhythms, but tabla patterns with all the details included. 

This is all to lead up to my curious experiences when other musicians confront my scored demands. One, I've had singers exclaim WTF is it with all those triplets, not to mention the 9:8s, where I simply shrug my shoulders, meaning well, that's what's there and that's what it is. 

But even more exciting is how these little landmines are interpreted by instrumentalists. Some cause immediate freakout, especially if across the bar lines or shifted by a little something, which is understandable - they freak me out as well - although nothing gives me greater pleasure listening nor playing than a beautifully performed series of triplet or dotted quarters running over a set of every-changing 5/4s, 7/8s, 4/4s - what delight!  However, problems arise even when an X-let stretches simply over a prevailing metric unit. Consistently the beginnings are stretched and the endings compressed. Triplet halves move toward two dotted quarters followed by a regular quarter, quintuplet eights are almost a triplet followed by a duplet.  I have decided that, if I ever start a music conservatory, I will walk with the students to and from school and do what I did, with the additions of skips and hops, all in three-quarter time.   

Cold early morning here in San Francisco while over the link to the orchestra, it is late in Skopje, snowing. 

Albrechts Flügel

The Globalization of She Who Is Alive

I've been recording the orchestral parts to She Who Is Alive with the North Macedonian fames orchestra the last few months. Many covid delays but so delightful to hear the music come to life. 

They are fabulous and fearless musicians, although not without complaints about the unending velocity of some of the parts or the Zeitmaße-like length of some of the held notes in the wind. And it seems that every time a 7/8 measure appears in the score, at least one member of the orchestra is unable to restrain themselves from playing Blue Rondo A La Turk during a pause. For me, it is unbridled joy, and getting up at three in the morning to meet with them on the other side of the world is part of the excitement, like waking up to catch a plane or head off on a fishing trip with dad.  Which I believe I did once. 

I'm still polishing here and there, but the writing is done, and the conductor's score clocks in at 814 A3 pages, about 3 1/2 hours of music, and 1737 pages of A4 parts.  I think I will add some electronic bits, as well as processing and editing and melodic fiddling but this is the bulk of it.  I've only just begun to think about casting, and whether the voices on Pro Tools will be those of the actors on screen, or if I should split them like Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Not that one has to be consistent. Filming it all seems daunting now, but somehow each piece will fall into place as it always does, and a castle on an icy lake will appear, as will the planes and tropical islands and the chorus of Young Virgins dressed alike in mustard-colored blouses. 

The Endless Études

To the left is the Pulcinella notebook. Note the rapidity of the creation: dear Monsieur Stravinsky writing in ink, although later some revisions in red ink and blue crayon. Given my fetishistic attraction to such objects, I think how sad it will be for my biographers that I have left so few scribblings behind. 

Before I was old enough to buy cigarettes at the 7-Eleven, I worked in pencil, sometimes on small sheets (9x12), often on much larger. Those large sheets of unusually-sized paper, spread over the piano and the floor nearby, always made me feel I was creating something special, a large canvas on which I could spill my soul. Those still remain, tucked inside a filing cabinet in our storage unit along with the other detritus of a life well-lived: corsets, costumes, flyers, religious paraphernalia, conspiracy theories. But in the last decades, working primarily on the computer, there is no history.  It is gone, bits erased and then erased again.

However, there are a few threads that these aforementioned biographers can follow, as my large works steal from my small. In fallow times, when I am not obsessed with the latest objects of textual affection, I will write my ideas in small piano works, études for the composer rather than the performer. And, when I do write the next opera, I liberally mine those little pieces for material. You know it's been proven again and again that all music fits with all dance or all film or all text, but the resultant effect is of course very different depending on the particular combination. 

Now that I say what I said, I realize that they often are études for the performer as well, and usually too difficult for me to play except in approximation. For example, the set I wrote in Florence in 2019 is scattered through She Who Is Alive, but in January at the Center for New Music, I am playing them, in approximation.  

A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, on its 25th anniversary

 

I had planned quite the coming out party last year: a new performance of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil for its 25th anniversary, a second production of Certitude and Joy in New York City, and another of which I wasn't quite sure, but boringly now the long SARS-CoV-2 winter descended. However, even in a cold dark winter, there are days when the sun appears and the snow glistens with a crystalline light. This is one of those days.

Clicking the image above will take you to the bandcamp page for a brand new release of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, featuring Laura Bohn and Nikola Printz as the little girl Marceline-Marie (whose double first name ...) Rotimi Agbabiaka as the narrator, and Bradley Kynard as the R.F., the Celestial Bridegroom, et al.  We worked and recorded remotely, from here to Amsterdam, and through the marvels of this internet age, transported all the recordings to Jay Cloidt's capable hands†, who has sculpted them into the wonder which is now placed before you.  My favorite bit, of which I at first was skeptical, is his beautiful manipulation of the first sleep, although maybe you will find more to your liking the second ("Among the highlights are a gorgeous woodwind nocturne as Spontanette settles back into sleep" said Joshua Kosman), or the more frenetic glories of the Hair or the Academy of Science. Something for everyone. 

†Jay has mixed everything of mine since the Mass, Laura I've known since she herself was almost a little girl, and Nikola has been appearing recently on this blog in several guises. 

The Voyeur's Gratitude

I bought a long lens for my camera which the Empress refers to as "my penis", placing it in the category of muscle cars, assault weapons and other fashions in which we men in later life make up for a lost youth.  But it is a beautiful thing, and it allows me to dwell on the hummingbirds and wild parrots above our garden, and sometimes the moons of Jupiter in near conjunction.  But objects and people naturally far away suddenly brought near through the use of carefully shaped glass bring a sudden shiver, a frisson of voyeuristic fear. I tried to calm myself by searching for antidotes to my affliction, but instead came across the poems of Jeffrey Bean, including the one here now presented for your interest and anger and possible titillation.  

Crash

Crash performance, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA, 1986. (camera: Steve Felty)

Crash was written in the summer of 1986 as the musical accompaniment for a dance of the same name created by choreographer Gay White. Based in part on the J. G. Ballard novel, the work tells the story of the destruction of a car and the maiming of its occupant. The work is com-prised of three broad sections. The first is a garden scene, where a young woman sleeps. The landscape is cold and damp. She has a dream of surrender, of a woman in mourning and of a funeral. In the second section, the woman accelerates onto a freeway on-ramp, where she is awakened, seduced by speed and exposed to impact. In the third section, a new sense of beauty evolves from the changes to her anatomy. 

"I searched for my scars, those tender lesions that now gave off an exquisite and warming pain."

Performance of the dance at New Langton Arts, San Francisco, California, 1986, included the display of two videotapes prerecorded by Mark A. Z. Dippe. One provides a documentation of the dance, combining several camera angles. The second deconstructs the dance, illuminating small details that might otherwise be missed by the audience.

The score for the music of the third section is shown above. This recording was realized on an NED Synclavier II synthesizer. Digital control over the work allows the tuning of the pitches to be set precisely. Attention to tuning was something that was common to much of my music at the time. In this case, the static pitches are based on the simple scale shown at the top of the score. The moving pitches flirt with the tones of this scale and generate controlled beating effects. 

Except for the instrumental (drum and string) samples, all of the component sounds in the last section are modifications of recorded natural sounds. One is an extremely high vocal sound. It appears in the piece replayed both in a very low and a medium register. Sampling can introduce spectral aliases, which are typically filtered out in digital-to-analog conversion. For the very low sounds, the sampling rate and filter cut off were chosen so that the first spectral alias was not removed. This alias is very interesting, as it is a mirror image in frequency of the original image spectrum. The addition of this alias lends a high, rich timbral edge to the sound. Also, as the original sound moves up and down, the alias mirrors its movement. Another sound source is a small Godzilla toy. I like to think that the semantic content of this source unconsciously contributes to the scariness of the finale.

 

Verschwinde, Mond!

A quiet year

I'm still pushing through She Who Is Alive during this year of enforced stillness and isolation, an isolation broken by our visitor above. With it arrives the alien ship, and the following doxology is sung. 

This message is addressed to no one 

Who does not already possess it

As his own life or as a yearning

Of his heart.

Let us hurl ourselves

Into time's dynamic sweep

And hear age-old tales

As if they were new

That they may teach us to speak. 

Pharaoh foretold it in his day

And Sibyl the prophetess too

With neither fault nor error

That redemption would come to us 

For the greatest guilt.

At night the leaping fountains speak 

In a louder tone and make

The heart a leaping flame.

Into the nighttime is expelled

What once ruled during the day. 

Whence all this?

Not from this world.

From another world.

Showing off

If there's anything one doesn't want to do, it is letting The Empress know one is depressed because they aren't getting enough attention for their art.  There is no way to more reliably cause her to roll her eyes and maybe kick one down the stairs just on her say-so. 

So come with me into the little hidey-hole under the kitchen sink, yes, that's right, I know it's really not for two, but let's just squeeze in, and I'll whisper this: I had planned so much this year and nothing much at all is happening. And it's depressing. I miss it all: the audience's adulation of course, the glowing reviews, the hugs, but also the thrill of creative society, the first hearing of the orchestra, the smell of sweat and greasepaint. It's well-known that we are the most productive when we are busy and, when we are not, well, we are not much of anything at all. 

And, to be honest, I am a vain person of great puffery.  I remember when I was a little boy I carried around a copy of Ulysses, which I was in fact reading, but about which I also thought it important that people knew that it was a book I was reading. I fed off it: I loved when people said I was the smartest boy there, and I loved the awards and the pettings of the teachers.  

I'm not the only one you know. Gravitation was published in 1973, the year before I arrived at CalTech, and at that time it was what Ulysses had been for me, a book one had on the shelf, or lying casually about one's room, making it clear that you were reading it and, by extension, where you were in the order of things. CalTech had a clear caste system with physicists way up on top (Feynman was there, Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking for a time, Kip Thorne (on book cover above)). After that I'm not even sure of the pecking order, but I was a math major when I got there, and mathematicians were seen as so far outside of the realms of Science that they were simply ignored. 

[You know the bit in The Hunt For Red October where Seaman Jonesie, teasing his underling who is failing to identify a whale sound or some such, says, "Beaumont, at CalTech we used to do this in our sleep." Right, we didn't do that or anything like that. It's just one of those Hollywood misunderstandings of any actual profession, at best poorly attempting to attend to their teen demographic.]

Eventually I wandered even more afield from the physics seminarians. I took philosophy classes - - which appealed to me. I always loved the philosophical arguments - can it simultaneously be raining and not raining? (don't ask this of a group of smug and too-smart kids at CalTech), the language-musings of Wittgenstein, and Quine and Hume. I loved the foundations of Mathematics, the paradoxes, the models and the axioms and Gödel and whether axioms were even the thing. I loved the foundations of Quantum Mechanics, the interpretations and Bell and Einstein vs. Bohr and Bohm and the squishiness of it all. Even   Gravitation had its kookiness, the "it from bit" of Wheeler, who also wandered through campus from time to time. But then I took Art classes - from the now-Chevalier Aimée Brown Price - and soon. with my roommate Robert Erickson, started to attend the composition classes at Occidental College nearby and fell hard in love. When Occidental gave me a composition award, well, that was it, I was betrothed to music for ever and until death. I did finish at CalTech, but in Electrical Engineering, doing electronic music, and seeing some kind of future there, which has all rolled out for me. 

She Who Is Alive, as it goes

The Pigeon Cooing

On nights when I cannot sleep, I think often of puzzles, like this: no matter how large the number, the no closer one is to infinity.  When we believed in heaven and hell and the sins that brought us to one or the other, we knew that, no matter how adamantly we strove toward perfection, we never approached it. It is in this light that I see my latest endeavor, to finish the opera on which I have been working these last several years - She Who Is Alive - fast approaching the three-hour mark with no end in sight. 

Two prayers from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil

Loss of process

It's a common question: Erling, how do you go about writing music, what's the process, and my standard pat answer has become just that, a well-rehearsed bit about how there is no process, how I do just about everything, sometimes sketching, sometimes improvising, direct-to-score, piano-vocal score thence arranged, on planes and trains and in the basement, hot and humid or cold and dry, oftentimes late at night, tired, during the drugged-out being of oh-so-tired, and oftentimes prodded by an external force, often a deadline, or a feeling to just to be done with it, sometimes a new sound, a new instrument.

All this is true, but what has become the most common in my golden age, is to improvise a bit, usually at the piano, often with the text - did I mention I write a lot of operas? - and scribble down something until I get tired of having to drag the heavy pencil across the page, and I realize that every mark I make on paper is one that has to be re-made in the computer, so I soon fire up the laptop and just start doing it all there.  Which is maybe a little bad, since the music I write depends so much on the tools I use, and the computer feeds my laziness.  The above are all the paper scribblings that exist for Chapter 6 of She Who Is Alive, about 15 minutes of music. The final score, in the version that Earplay and West Edge Opera presented, is about 100 pages.

Almost always I have to make the requisite piano-vocal score after the fact.  It's so tedious to do it, and one that feels so bad when death is rushing toward one so quickly, and which one feels could almost surely be automated once they get the mall robots to stop falling in the central water features and the automated cars to stop killing pedestrians and learning to drive in the snow. Even better would be for them to automate the whole process: the robots composing, playing, listening and then writing the review for us to scan the next morning bleary-eyed, up too late watching Roma Citta Aperta. 

Laura's day

Another voyeuristic dream: Laura Bohn enflamed, sodden of a sad care, too bright, too dark, to the strains of Brett Dean's One of a Kind,  

Faust, a fist

Happened across this recording of the Faust concert I played in back in 1994. I had no idea such a recording existed - it's an interesting trip back.

Jeff Hunt's very hip Table of the Elements label had released my soundtrack of The Bed You Sleep In the year previous, had given a copy to Faust who for some reason loved it, and when he set up their tour, he pulled me in. They showed me a few luckily-simple keyboard bits and along the way secured a piano. It seems that they asked around for an old piano and one of the locals involved in the show had a roommate out of town who owned such a piano, so they manhandled it out of the apartment and onto the stage at the Great American Music Hall, but not before Jean-Herve cut through most of the important structural bits with a chain saw.

If I had thought about this in detail at the time, I should have been more concerned about the release of the no-longer-potential energy that the eighteen or so tons of tension had bottled up - had the piano decided, in its weakened state, to so release it. But at the time I was more immediately concerned about him hitting my hands with the sledgehammer he was using on the keys while I played. For many years I kept some of the broken bits: keys, hammers.  It's interesting to see the complexity of the piano mechanism as it flies past.

The next day we recorded Rien. That's me at the piano - not the same piano - and I'm pretty sure nothing I played that day ended up in the final release. Which is somehow appropriate given the title.

Faust – San Francisco, May 1994 from Tyler Hubby on Vimeo.

New York

We feel a watchful eye attending and protecting us. We place ourselves hopefully in the hands of an unseen yet benevolent power, a power who cares about each road crossed, each passing cloud, the safety of the vessels that carry us.

But sometimes, during the night, we dream that we lose our way, and that the eye is looking elsewhere, allowing those beings less compassionate to interfere with us unhindered.  We awaken troubled, our heart racing, a headache thudding dully. 

She’s all states, and all princes, I, Nothing else is.

Lutosławski follows the Empress through the Callètte Veneziane, sounding footsteps into the dark. Don't look behind you!  Into the 12mm of fish's eye growing out of this stony path, the straps that clutch. But then the sun rises over the Basilica of St Mark, whose palindromic architecture was reflected in dear Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum, whose grave bears my tears. And, waking me from my dream, I am comforted by the Pulcinelle, crowned by flashes of the cameras of the paparazzi.

Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world’s contracted thus. Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that’s done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

The Klagenfurter Ensemble

I'm thinking now of a most unforgettable moment in 2001, descending into Klagenfurt airport, a Tyrolean Air flight attendant in a dirndl leaning over, me noticing a photograph in the newspaper held by the passenger in the next row forward - a woman's mouth covered in blood! I'm fascinated, what could this be? But then I look at the caption, and it is my name. Soon we descend, and down the stairs to the tarmac, with the beautiful mountains of Carinthia all around, I meet Gerhard. "Maestro!", he says, and sweeps me into the Liegl-Garge, where I meet for the first time so many who have remained my friends over the years: Alexei Kornienko and Elena Denisova, Thomas Woschitz, Mariko Wakita, Josef "Pepi" Oberauer.

The performances of that opera - die Nacht wird kommen - was the first time I ever experienced eleven curtain calls with standing ovations, and when I realized there was something very special about Gerhard, and the Klagenfurter Ensemble and the audience it had developed who seek theatrical adventure.  When Gerhard asked me to write something again, I said yes without hesitation, and then yes again after that: YKCYC with the crazy wonderful VADA-ettes, and Rattensturm with the brilliant Peter Wagner, and more standing ovations, and in between many pilgrimages to the Lindwurm with the Empress, and Schnitzels, and hiking with the Lehners in the aforementioned beautiful mountains, where we stopped for a little wine, and driving through Slovenia and Italy for even more wine - oh, and that migraine!

I'm thinking now about how the Talltones Extended were so nervous that the great Maestro Erling Wold would be angry with them for changing the perfect jewel-like music I had written for YKCYC and of course I was not, but rather was so delighted in the way they played it that it kept me warm and happy as I walked back home through the cold and snow and the Christkindlmarkt. And the Rats! - who soldiered through the rhythms and made something so powerful that I saw many reduced to tears when the lights went down, crying over the agonies of the long-ago and almost forgotten war.

Writing this, I too find my eyes wet, remembering much that has come into my life through KE, how it opened up many opportunities - as I'm sure it has for others. There are many people I have met and worked with at KE that I have gone on to do art with all over, and who have become important to me. The operas I have done at KE have had a continuing life, getting better and better, and finding their way out to all parts of the world. It's very special, this place you have created: a beacon lighting the way to artistic delight and power and glory.