The Knife from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil

Mordake Finances

Since other composers and artists are often curious about the finances of my operas, let's please have a moment of silence here for all the dollars burned to a cinder in my many vanity productions. 

...

I watched Mr. Deeds goes to Town the other night, a Frank Capra feel-good illusory bit of fluff that seems to imply that good conquers evil and other loads of misinformed gobbledygook, in which there was a moment where Deeds as the newly minted chairman of the opera board is informed that oh my my of course the opera never makes money (see Tit. 1:11) at which point he states the unwelcome obvious: maybe the opera isn't performing things that people want to see. The rest of the stuffed shirts on the board are of course shocked but we as the audience know this to be the simple truth. Opera, and especially modern opera, is a niche of a niche of niche of niche and, if disappeared tomorrow, would sink below the surface of the culture with the barest ripple.

But we modern oddball opera types beg and borrow and sometimes steal and try to convince those with their hand on the spigot of some real money that what we do is important, good for you, like eating your broccoli, and that it makes perfect sense to subsidize us wastrels, bohemians and good-for-nothings to produce fashionable nonsense that will assuage their robber-baron guilt-ness.

And here's the bottom line: Mordake was in about the middle of the expense range of my past productions, not too hot nor too cold, just in the middle, and I was able to wheedle about $35K in grant-based funding (requiring about twenty-five actual filings) to help cover those costs. In addition, there was about $1K in box office earnings and, as usual, about $10K of my own money.  I have noticed that, hard as I try to contain things, and whether or not the production is at the high side or the low side of the expense compass, this last figure is always about the same, a small bit of hair shirt that penances me for my folly. 

I have been led to believe that there are some people who don't lose money on their productions.  I believe there are people whose artistic and theatrical works are actually sought out and remunerated generously, like the recently minted PhD in Astrophysics and erstwhile guitar hero Brian May.  But I seem to have failed quite miserably in this particular aspect of my musical career and mayhap I do need to accept the unwanted and unwelcome obvious.

Evening Prayer

Please, sniffle, please dear G-d, please, snuffle, don't let Ol' Gramps Stinky become Presidemptosaurus of America please.

Video of the day

Photo of the day

Kathleen's designer friend Chris from Project Runway last year has been visiting so here's a little something in the way of an obeisance, maybe an homage. Corset by Kathleen, photo by Kristine Adams.

More on Counting

Since my last brief discussion of herky-jerky rhythms and pondering Michael Kaulkin's comment on it, I've been wondering more about the assumption that we need to count in a regular fashion, that is, where every counted beat is the same temporal distance from the last counted beat. There seems to be an emphasis in classical music on the square simplicity of the mathematics involved in the way that rhythms are approached, that a rhythm of (say) a quarter and a dotted quarter and an eighth is really happening over a regular beat of 3 quarters, instead of just being a rhythm of this followed by that followed by so-and-so.  I'm sure, absolutely sure, that this is not the way of all music.  It's not the way I played music in my misspent youth in r&r bands for sure.  I remember trying to teach Henry Kaiser a 'lick' many years back, the rhythm of which was a standard rock something like 2+3+3 but I couldn't explain it in that way to him. The conversation went something like:

Erling: (playing the part as envisioned) Just like this.

Henry: (playing something so much more complicated, say 2.12 3.41 2.77) OK, got it.

Erling: (blinking, confused, playing it again) No, more like this, listen.

Henry: (now trying 2.21 3.03 3.44) Right, no problem.

Erling: (trying desperately to comprehend the higher mathematics involved, some continued fraction expansion or log base something or set of measure zero blah blah) Ha, well, that's close, but it's more like...

(process iterates for a bit)

Erling: (suddenly gaining insight) Um, Henry, the interval between the first two is just a little bit shorter and the interval between the next two is just a little longer.

Henry: (playing it, just a little better)

Erling: (emboldened) Right, now just a little longer between the second two and I think you cut in too much on the first...

Henry: (playing it even better)

(process iterates etc)

Not wanting to press the point here, but just to be clear: the insight is that there was absolutely no underlying time base at all, simply intervals in succession.  There was no abstraction of rhythm, this was it, events in time laid bare. I wondered at the time if this might have been one of those interesting neurological 'deficits' that Oliver Sacks is so fond of popularizing, but since then I've thought not. Henry once tried to teach us a Captain Beefheart tune, Alice in Blunderland, explaining it in the fashion above. We had a very difficult time of it until we realized it was just in 11 or 13 or some other easily approachable prime numerated time signature and then it fell into place, and we congratulated ourselves on one more case where the old fashioned model worked la di da.  But Henry was proud of his model of the musical world and clearly believe it to be meet right and salutary, and his level of non-abstraction really went quite deep, I mean what do we mean when we say this is the same rhythm at a different tempo, I mean we know what this is, a simple affine transform applied to the time-interval-sequence, but why do we think that is the same? In another amazing display, I once realized during a concert that Henry was playing the tune quite correctly, in that it was internally consistent (re: the affine transform above), but just a little teeny bit faster than the rest of us and he continued doing that until he reached the end - quite a few seconds before us. Have you ever tried this, e.g., in the phase pieces of early minimalism? It's really quite difficult to do on purpose, but the performance matched his model. We simply weren't playing the events at the right time offsets relatively to the onset of the piece and he was.

Over the years I've realized that I am just a bit like Henry, a bit more comfortable thinking of music as a chain of intervals, not quite as irrationally related, but still, not regular at all. I've often approached the music I've written this way.  When Guy Garnett and I worked for Yamaha and bought the first copy of Finale hot off the presses - the one that came with the videotaped testimonial of the importance of Jesus Christ in the development of Computer Notation Systems - we were surprised by its measure-centricity, which still remains in the program to this day. We didn't get it. Weren't bar lines merely added after one wrote the music simply to aid the performer in her perceptual chunking?  I don't pay much attention to my bar lines when I'm playing my own music and I really have to contort my perception of my own music when I'm playing them under the yoke of a conductor, doing what so many musicians do, breaking out the pencil and painstakingly marking the regular pulses above the irregular timeline of the score so I can map their notions onto mine.  I was taught in composing school to aid this process, to make sure that my (at that time highly) irregular and polyrhythms were broken up with gazillions of ties and whatnots to fit into groups based on the denominator of the time signature in order to make this mapping of the irregular to the regular as easy as possible for the poor performer, handcuffed to the regular beat, the incessant and regular beat, like the beating of the heart under the floorboards, the drip drip drip late at night of the leaky faucet, the tap tap tap of the tree against the window, like the invention of Hippolytus de Marsiliis, slowly but inexorably driving us insane.

But why can't we 'count' in a natural way, an irregular beat that wafts and waves with the tune, with the rhythm?  This is the way we are supposed to play the Dance of Fury for the Seven Trumpets, yes?  And those added dots sprinkled here and there in the Concord Sonata?  And the tempo changes cum polyrhythms of Klavierstücke I-IV? And Michael Gordon's Trance (pardon, stolen from Kyle Gann's blog):

And speaking of the aforementioned reverend Mr Gann, the Zuni Buffalo Dance that seeded his totalist interest? Are we supposed to tap our toes in some regular fashion through this minefield of events in time?  Right, I didn't think so.

Finally, from Dave Stewart's book Inside the Music, a book written, I might point out, for the popular musician, to wit:

By Popular Demand, the Gloria

The Way I Will Die

Sneezing.

Agnus Dei, Jona Switzerland

Sousa Variation Video

Vanilla

Duncan and I were on the Mission bus for Father's day listening to Guillermo Gomez-Pena comment on the vanilla hetero hipsters that displaced all the lesbians on Valencia street during the dot-com boomlet whilst Violeta Luna explicatively mimed the important points of his disquisition, the highest point being when she ascended the treads of the stairs to Mission Dolores on her knees, concomitantly scourging her back with a bouquet of roses. But his use of the word 'vanilla' reminded me of a story which I shall relate presently. This story tells of a time when Leslie Isaac accompanied me to one of the early Pink parties put on by the Mission Control people where we sat, untouched, observing the natives in their natural habitat. One of these locals, let's call him Mr A___, was sitting a few feet from us on the couch mounted by his wife in the reverse cowgirl position, her face planted in the uncovered and copious bosom of the host, wholeheartedly thrusting herself in a simple and straightforward but somehow agreeable rhythm. A few items of context: (1) I had just been on TV with Mr A___ taking about an upcoming performance and was intrigued to see him in this quite different scene, and (2) given the attractive and youthfully exuberant nature of the exhibition, the triad in question was subject to the gaze of about 10 other people all sitting quietly but intently about the room. After a few minutes of watching with the others, Leslie sighed quite loudly and whispered "this is so vanilla." Yes, dear Scarlett, we is powerfully jaded down here in the deepest darkest and most southerly parts of Frisco. 

On the Death of David Blakely

One more week

My colleague Michael Kaulkin blogged about Mordake, as did Lynne and fellow collaborator Kathleen. And we musn't forget the Chronicle review and the sf360 review too.  These fragments which are to become the desiccated bits of yellow paper detaching from a once precious photo album, fragments crumbling onto my lap, mixing with drooled spittle, brushed away by liver spotted hands, the last forced movements of a dying soul, trying so very hard to remember the life that once was.

The Trappings of Conventionality

I received a reminder in the intertubish-mail of the weirdness of the Classical Music World.  A benefit for Dawn Upshaw, which is fine and dandy, as she has been a great supporter of new works, but the oddnesses are legion, the most noticeable being (1) the incredibly long list of famous people on the benefit committee, which I'm sure holds court every Tuesday afternoon at the local Round Table Pizza just after the SCA get-togethers to argue for hours about who sits where and by whom and the gauge of the needles used to knit the tablecloths and whether they will have those disposable cameras at every table for the candid tit-flashing shots of the guests as the drinking progresses, (2) The priciness of the tix [Ed: of course] and (3) the small font tag under "Click image to respond." to the effect of, and I quote: "Business Attire. " Enough said!?  Well, actually not enough at all.  Let us please remember fondly a few Tom Wolfe quotes, from The Painted Word, which my wife and I read to each other in the car one long drive from LA to SF while lost in the fog.

"...the [art mating] ritual has two phases: (1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown. (2) The Consummation, in which culterati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards -- and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity." 

"...here we have the classic demonstration of the artist who knows how to double-track his way from the Boho Dance to the Consummation as opposed to the artist who gets stuck forever in the Boho Dance. This is an ever-present hazard of the art mating ritual. Truly successful double-tracking requires the artist to be a sincere and committed performer in both roles. Many artists become so dedicated to bohemian values, internalize their antibourgeois feelings so profoundly, that they are unable to cut loose, let go ... and submit gracefully to good fortune; the sort of artist, and his name is Legion, who always comes to the black-tie openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner jacket and paint-spattered Levis's . . . I'm still a virgin!" 

Right. My paint-spattered Levi's are the corset and the frock coat and the riding crop and the bunny tail and other unwelcome non-business-attired choices couture. 

When Sub Pontio Pilato had its West Coast Premiere, I wrote a bio for the program that started with the phrase "Erling Wold has been called a pathological liar and a bisexual sex addict..."  After one of the performances, I oversaw and overheard a colleague point to the bio in the program and whisper to another colleague, "Well, he's not ready for prime time."

Now that I've reach my Grand Old Age I believe I am free to pontificate on all topics and so will drop this small pearl of wisdom: Make gol-durn sure that you always dress and speak and be the person you are and that you want to be or you will find in short order that you have gotten on the wrong train and you can't get off, that you will have to dress in business attire and hang about with people hardly like yourself and then your life will be over and will not have been lived but you will have a nice long list of achievements which can be repeated in the long loop on your video-enhanced tombstone until the servers are unplugged, the water shorts out the cables, and the acid rain washes away the last carved crying angel and all the rest.

Unsolicited testimony

Mordake opened last night.  Everything worked, John was great, Kathleen's costumes were great, Frieder's software and the video and Lynne's rooms meshed with the action and Missy's lights and all.  In the few days before, there were many catastrophes: laptop dying, software that had been working for years crashing horribly in many ways unimagined, but we prayed to as many gods and saints and ancestors that we could bring to mind just before and they led us through.  I hadn't really even experienced the gestalt of the piece until yesterday and it seems to work, following once again the path through hell and redemption that both our Lord and Jim Bisso and my Pontius Pilate followed.

Leslie Isaac was moved to testify on yelp.  And did I mention that I was on the front page of the Chronicle last Sunday?  Maybe I did, but did also mention that the phrase was "plus Erling Wold and Indiana Jones?" As in the top of the bill?

Freeloading gigolo

I'm quite smug and pleased with myself as seen above in Noah Berger's shot for the Chronicle. I am imagining myself as Erling and also seemingly as a person who has a rod jammed deep into his bowels. Joshua Kosman has written a lovely feature on me and the opera and I am allowing myself a bit of vain rodomantade and narcissism.  In fact, I am going to go outside into my backyard right now and lean over the pond where the Gambusia are leaping through clouds of mosquitos and just stare at my own reflection, possibly falling in love with it and, unlike the love featured in my typical but-I-just-have-so-much-love-to-give story, this love will be a love that excludes all others. In this quiet beautiful space I can't hear Lynne's remonstrations as to how it's her house in Potrero Hill and her Garden and her etc and how I am just a freeloading gigolo and so on and so forth.

Pirate Cat Tonight

Once again on Bunnywhisker's show on Pirate Cat Radio.  John was supposed to come with me to plug the opera, and I pestered him about it, feeding him prawns from my own hand and soaking his gut with alcohol to get him in the mood, but unfortunately this caused in him the opposite reaction, and he crashed bad, limping back to his hovel to sleep off the long hours of rehearsal day after day.  The show has been fun as usual, broadcast booth filled with interesting people, like the stage at a house music concert, or maybe more aptly like the gaggle of oddballs in the Howard Stern studio. 

We talked of Dante and Alexander Theroux and asked questionnaires of Proust and each other and I played a number of recordings featuring John, including Founders came first, then profiteers from Nixon in China, Pilatus Beatus Est from Sub Pontio Pilato, and I'm no murderer from Mordake. Note that I've been filled with regret since John turned down an offer to reprise his role as Mao in Opera Colorado's production of Nixon for some real money. We talked about the fear of fear and plumbing the depths of the psyche. And I couldn't resist playing the Epilogue from Queer featuring Trauma, who is looking utterly lovely in his photo as Honorary Grand Marshall in the Pride Parade, which I have snuck in above. 

John and I are both going to be on Sarah Cahill's show on KALW on Sunday evening. 

Slow slow and slower

My friend George Zelenz, who once informed me that he seriously considered ending our friendship after I gave up on the true way of Just Intonation, wrote this after Lou Harrison's death a while back.  I remembered it as I needed to take this path myself.

In 1995, Lou and Bill came to visit me in Joshua Tree. I picked them up at the Palm Springs airport in my small truck, and Lou volunteered to sit in the back. On a thin cushion, al fresco. Upon arrival at my house, Bill promptly did his impersonation of a man with narcolepsy, and fell asleep in a chair by the kitchen table. Lou asked if I would drive him around, and show him Joshua Tree the town. "Bill can sleep the whole goddamn day for all I care" said Lou, with some exasperation. We jumped in the truck and took off driving, with no real goal or destination.

Driving around, we talked about all the usual stuff we always talked about. Pretty much everything except music. We rarely talked about music. About an hour into the drive, he did ask me how my composing went. I told him about this dancer I was writing for up in Berkeley. It paid very little, but I was doing my best I said. I told him about the structure being mostly whole notes, sung quietly, in a 3 voice part. He said, "I have a poorly compensated commission of my own right now, I think I as well will just write a lot of whole notes."

How I am perceived by the Slovak press

In the Hungarian-speaking community, that is.

Michael Kaulkin took a bit of steel wool to his rusty Hungarian and pried off a bit of the above:

Wold succeeds in achieving a surrealist atmosphere using a number of eclectic tools, but consistently reaches back to such naive ancient narrative forms as legend, miracle and parable.  It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Wold deals with post-Romantic American transcendental images with tragicomic overtones, such as one encounters in Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street, but at the same time his musical language strongly approaches the world of electronic pop and rock, as well as the minimalist tradition.

My boy

He's the one with the picture of the married couple captioned by GAME OVER T-shirt.