Finally the new piece has been performed and recorded.
The uploaded sample is a 3 minute excerpt, about 6 minutes into a 15 minute piece.
Instrumentation: Bass Clarinet/double Bflat Clarinet Baritone Sax Flute/double Piccolo
Hammond Organ (Leslie Speaker) Fender Rhodes (with Tremolo)
Violin I Violin II Bass
Male Voice Female Voice
Percussion I - timpani, talking drum, shakers, bongo Percussion II - drum kit, cymbals, shakers
I am fairly happy with the piece. The aesthetic is something I have had in mind for about a year now, but the opportunity to write didn't present itself until I committed to serious maneuvering. Best of all, it has inspired the creative urge to continue - - ideas are already brewing for the next one.
I've decided to include the piece in my upcoming grad school application. Time spent out of school has been great, but ultimately school is the most realistic method of living a lifestyle with the time to work on serious music again. I hope the application committee sympathizes with my work. The stressful part is feeling the pressure to contextualize this music in writing. I understand that distilling thoughts in writing is an essential aspect of academia, and I should hope to grow into it. But it has been an incredibly liberating experience not having to justify the sounds I want to listen to. Maybe it's time to come back around to the objectification side. We'll see how this plays out.
A nice day for some Russian animation. I just love the atmosphere of this piece - just soaked in fibers... sensual enough to elicit some dream memories. And once you hear it, the sound "crocodeele" will stick with you for all times.
I am nearly finished writing my newest composition. It's been something of a new direction - new orchestrations, new form... also the first composition to be demoed first with my own recording, then notated, then recorded with the studio's strengths in mind. Just bought the 2-inch tape. Anyway, there is a cutting room floor - which is basically about 25 minutes into the track where I cut away and drag pieces of music that didn't end up working. Eventually they line up based on their shape.
I happened to fall asleep listening to the demo, and sure enough the 25 minute mark rolled around. As the music played a dream came to me: David Lynch and I were in an elevator watching a documentary on his i-phone... some patriotic propaganda that tried to teach husbands to fix leaky faucets. May your dreams be so sweet.
As anyone who reads the small print of national newspapers would know, the Phillies have won the World Series! I had the enormously great fortune of being present in the stadium for Game 5 - and then walked an hour up Broad street from the stadiums to center city, where a spontaneous parade exploded as Philadelphians took to the streets and collectively went nuts. I heard there were some moments of vandalism somewhere, but of the thousands and thousands of people I saw, there was nothing but running, jumping, climbing, hugging, slapping five, and occasional disrobing. What a scene - glad to have been part of such a real spectacle.
Thought which is only thought, the work of art which is only conceived, the poem which is no more than a dream, as yet cost nothing in toil; it is the material realization of the poem in words, of the artistic conception in statue or picture, which demands effort. The effort is toilsome, but also it is precious, more precious even than the work which it produces, because, thanks to it, one has drawn out from the self more than it had already, we are raised above ourselves. This effort was impossible without matter. By resistance matter offers and by the docility with which we endow it, is at one and the same time obstacle, instrument and stimulus. It experiences our force, keeps the imprint of it, calls for its intensification.
Philosophers who have speculated on the meaning of life and on the destiny of man have failed to take sufficient notice of an indication which nature itself has given us. Nature warns us by a clear sign that our destination is attained. That sign is joy. I mean joy, not pleasure. Pleasure is only a contrivance devised by nature to obtain for the creature the preservation of its life, it does not indicate the direction in which life is thrusting. But joy always announces that life has succeeded, gained ground, conquered. All great joy has a triumphant note. Now, if we take this indication into account and follow this new line of facts, we find that wherever there is joy, there is creation; the richer the creation, the deeper the joy. The mother beholding her child is joyous, because she is conscious of having created it, physically and morally.
...Take exceptional joys,-- the joy of the artist who has realized his thought, the joy of the thinker who has made a discovery or invention. You may hear it said that these men work for glory and get their highest joy from the admiration they win. Profound error! We cling to praise and honours in the exact degree in which we are not sure of having succeeded. There is a touch of modesty in vanity. It is to reassure ourselves that we seek approbation; and just as we wrap the prematurely born child in cotton wool, so we gather round our work the warm admiration of mankind in case there should be insufficient vitality. But he who is sure, absolutely sure, of having produced a work which will endure and live, cares no more for praise and feels above glory, because he is a creator, because he knows it, because the joy he feels it the joy of a god. If, then, in every domain the triumph of life is creation, must we not suppose that human life has its goal in a creation which, unlike that of the artist and philosopher, can be pursued always by all men -- creation of self by self, the growing of the personality by an effort which draws much from little, something from nothing, and adds unceasingly to whatever wealth the world contains?
= Henri Bergson, Mind Energy - Life and Consciousness
Reading up on all the vitalist theories of the early 20th century doesn't leave much time for blogging. That and I'm finally COMPOSING again.
A few friends have asked me why I bother with the Bergson, the "intuition" and "duration" and all of that non-quantifiable gibby gabby. "Well," i say, i say, "well, first and foremost, I find that in order to maintain a creative outlook in the world today, I needs me some inspiration. Best kinds'a inspiration comes from the kinds that just makes sense - ya know?"
What's all of this missing the forest for the trees? I like 'em both. So here's whatcha do. When I see a tree, I think of a forest. When I see a forest, I think of a tree. That simple.
So this brings me to the music. I've decided to take on an ambitious task: Write and record (with an excellent engineer using excellent equipment from both the analog and digital worlds) a piece that dips me into the undulating river of time, and then pulls me out slowly, without hardly enough trouble to notice it. In the meanwhile, a moment or two of full out recognition, recollection, and head nodding.
This little post comes on the heels of a comment about joining the ranks of qualitative charlatans of the next generation. Yeah, that's me too.
I've been writing for a month now. Scheduled to be recorded right before thanksgiving (crazy deadline). Whenever I think of the instruments I've chosen, I just wanna get right back to it. It's kinda secret, but here's a bit:
2 organs voices bass clarinet bari sax lots of percussion (including custom made awesomeness) and more...
what a seed to blossom. can't wait can't wait can't wait.
I decided a while back to re-read Creative Evolution with absolute concentration, pencil and notebook in hand, so that each sentence and long form logic was understood to the best of my ability. The process has been nearly transcendental. A friend of mine made a good point - reading philosophy is an experience like listening to music - in other words, the journey is the point. Getting the "gist" or reading second hand analysis is certainly no substitute.
So the process has been slow, but I enjoy it tremendously. I need to type out a passage that has hovered over my brain for the past week.
It must not be forgotten that the force which is evolving throughout the organized world is a limited force, which is always seeking to transcend itself and always remains inadequate to the work it would fain produce. The errors and puerilities of radical finalism are due to the misapprehension of this point. It has represented the whole of the living world as a construction, and a construction analogous to a human work. All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the best possible functioning of the machine. Each species has its reason for existence, its part to play, its allotted place; and all join together, as it were, in a musical concert, wherein the seeming discords are really meant to bring out a fundamental harmony. In short, all goes on in nature as in the works of human genius, where, though the result may be trifling, there is at least perfect adequacy between the object made and the work of making it.
Nothing of the kind in the evolution of life. There, the disproportion is striking between the work and the result. From the bottom to the top of the organized world we do indeed find one great effort; but most often this effort turns short, sometimes paralyzed by contrary forces, sometimes diverted from what it should do by what it does, absorbed b the form it is engaged in taking, hypnotized by it as by a mirror. Even in its most perfect works, though it seems to have triumphed over external resistances and also over its own, it is at the mercy of the materiality which it has had to assume. It is what each of us may experience in himself. Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. The most living thought becomes frigid in the formula that expresses it. The word turns against the idea.
The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt our own sincerity, deny goodness and love, if we did not know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living.
The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life in general is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is materialized before our eyes. We have the sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal love, so striking, and in most animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life's secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted.
=Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 126-128
Maybe it was my own state of mind, but this passage seemed to jump out at me as a fairly clear change of style and prose, particularly that bit about the "deny goodness and love if we did not know that the dead retain for a time the features of the living." Once he follows up with his ditty on the essence of what love is: life recognizing life - the whole thing starts to feel pretty good. I almost imagine Bergson sipping his scotch and really getting into these few pages (actually I get the impression that he didn't drink, especially when he talks about the effects of alcohol on the reproductive system, but I don't know for sure). It is really such a remarkable book, swirling together the mysteries and certainties of science, logic, and the ineffable.
I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. =Werner Herzog
I think the same thing is true of sounds. But the Herzog quote is pretty intense - and I tend to agree on the extreme side of it, that the symbolic arts should be considered an essential offering to humankind.
But on the subject of images, I post one of my favorite all-time movie images via YouTube - the great leveler of digital compression and quality.
In the spirit of good fun, I present a clip of "sound design" from my most recent theater collaboration. The show "Kid Simple" made use of foley sounds and called for comedic sound collages based on some brief descriptions. I used some samples here and there, wrote some of my own sounds, and had friends use their favorite made-up character voices to finish the job.
Instructions in the play:
5 seconds each of: 1. News report during a New York City blackout 2. New England matron explaining how to dismember a lobster 3. Commercial promo for Extreeeeme sports 4. Rousing rendition of "There's a Hole in my Bucket Dear Liza" 5. A line from Dante's Inferno 6. The echo of the echo of someone saying echo
I think there is an r&b album of folk songs in the works...
It was a mistake, as the Hebrews tried, to conceive of God as creating the world from the outside, at one go. An all-foreseeing Creator, who could have made the world as we find it now -- what could we think of such a being? Foreseeing everything and yet putting into it all sorts of imperfections to redeem which it was necessary to send his only son into the world to suffer torture and hideous death; outrageous ideas. The Hellenic religion was a better approach ; the Greeks conceived of creation as going on everywhere all the time within the universe; and I also think that they were happier in their conception of supernatural beings impersonating . . . various forces, some good, others bad; for both sorts of forces are present, whether we assign personality to them or not. There is a general tendency in the universe to produce worth-while things, and moments come when we can work with it and it can work through us. But that tendency in the universe to produce worth-while things is by no means omnipotent. Other forces work against it. God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But this creation is a continuing process, and 'the process is itself the actuality', since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey. In so far as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to an estate of irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.
= Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, recorded by Lucien Price, 1954, pp. 296-7.
...and the sun literally drying up to become a piled circle of mud crusted gray rocks floating in air - along with the beautiful sounds of a slippery, creaking transition from life-giving radiance to a pale, pulsing luminosity.
Gérard Grisey - Partiels from La Espaces Acoustiques
Only an excerpt, and the YouTube fidelity leaves something to be desired. But it stimulates the imagination. I heard a (maybe false) story that Stravinsky kept a muted and out-of-tune piano in his studio where he composed. It was kept in this condition so as not to impede on his own imagined sounds.
I have to admit that I love the "tree of knowledge" image at the beginning of this fractal music video. Add in some imagined vibrancy to the colors and it is pretty beautiful.
Q: If zebra finches learn their song by imitation, shouldn't there be very little song diversity? And if so, how can the females judge the males' songs if they all sound the same? Anonymous
A: Wow-that's an excellent question! It seems that zebra finches do not like to have a song that is too similar to that of other males. For example, if five male siblings are tutored by their father, only one or two of them will accurately imitate his song-the rest of the siblings diverge and sing different songs. There is an interesting parallel to this effect in population genetics. It is called evolutionary stable polymorphism: For example, different people have different hair color, and this diversity persists over many generations. If most people find one hair color (e.g., blond) more attractive, how come blond people are not becoming more common in each generation? One mechanism that can preserve polymorphism is called "frequency dependent selection," for example, blond hair is not considered as attractive in Scandinavia, where it is very common. Back to songs, polymorphism of songs in a group might be a result of frequency dependent imitation (young birds selecting some rare sounds from their tutors) or frequency dependent sexual selection (females preferring songs with some rare qualities, while some juveniles prefer to imitate their fathers).
What can I say? I argue for truth, and the same day I argue for relativism. Yes, yes, particles and waves - parts or continuity - we've heard it all many times. Any great debate ultimately comes down to this: where does one draw the limits?
Is point of view all that there is? Does a point of view tend to adapt over time? Can a point of view remain the same? To what extent is it possible for a point of view to expand to incorporate other points of view?
Alan Watts, one of my favorite folk philosophers entertains me tonight.
Weekly gym goings-on have led to a few Kung Fu lessons. I've learned two things right off the bat. 1. Kung Fu requires serious core strength and lots of kicking ability. (I haven't kicked since I was 12 years old). 2. Kung Fu technique will, if executed properly, end a confrontation in about 2 seconds.
I don't think anyone between the age of 24 and 30 can deny the overwhelming influence of Karate Kid on our lives, but I wonder how many of us followed through. You'd wonder why anyone in their right mind wouldn't follow through. I mean, just look at this comparison - Kung Fu derived fighting techniques vs. brute try, try again as exhibited by NASA hero Captain Kirk.
Bruce Lee is superman. The Jeet Kun Do story is pretty awesome. And its nice to see Tao being put to use in the world of one-finger push-ups.
And then there is Star Trek. Was the fighting choreographer drunk?
I think what I mean by the "elephant in the room" is that while our consciousness seems to operate by defining "parts", there is both an intuitive sense, as well as a logical progression, to those parts belonging to a "whole." If true reality is actually not parts at all, but a whole, then the pursuit of absolute philosophy is one where humans become "conscious" of this whole. Bergson ultimately takes a practical viewpoint, in that he recognizes, as the Zen masters recognize, that to be consious of a whole, of which consciousness is actually a part, is an impossible paradox. In that case, intuition may be used as a tool that only "hints" at the whole (through symbolism? art? dreams?) in order to enrich whatever consciousness is and what it is becoming. Perhaps this process is the very definition of "becoming" - an exchange between the unconscious and the conscious.
With all my fascination in birds and their sounds, I can only match about 3 different species of bird to their calls. Last night while I was riding my bike home at about 11:30pm, I heard a single bird blocks away. When the city is relatively quiet, it is surprising to hear a bird, of all things, carrying over such a long distance. (I've heard that city birds may be adapting to sing at night so to avoid competition with hustle and bustle). By the time I passed by the tree where it perched, I had already heard an incredible spectrum of sounds and phrases. I grabbed my recently purchased field recorder and made it back in time to hear the last few minutes of calling out - before flying away to another tree further away (I think the sound of my velcro pack scared him).
It sounds to me that this bird is one that mimics the sounds of its environment. He manages to sing some distinct calls I'm familiar with, but many of the others I think sound more like car alarms and locking/unlocking tweets. During the last third of the recording he sings a first inversion major chord, repeated about 3 times in perfect tuning. After all the complex timbres, it sounds out of place - a little too human.
After spending so much time living with fantastic opera singers, I would often dream of singing great tenor lines. Of course in real life I have, in the words of Messiaen a "composers voice." But in my dreaming, I felt the unique physical sensations of a singing that resonates through my whole body and head. Somehow, I can also imagine on some level the sensation of making some of those bird calls - tight vibrations of air passing through stretched vocal muscles...
Anyway, this is an awesome bird. I named him Fitzwater Thrushraillien - after the street I found him on, Fitzwater St., Philadelphia.
It is difficult to categorize Henri Bergson’s role in philosophic history. On one hand his enormous presence included profound intellectual relationships with the 20th centuries greatest minds: Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russel, T.S. Eliot, William James, Gilles Deleuze, to name only a few. On the other hand, his work resembles a western re-articulation of much older ideas found in Zen Buddhism among other eastern intellectual and spiritual philosophies/practices.
Bergson's theories of time, consciousness, and evolution were celebrated by the masses for their life-affirming nature yet condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for recognition of the impenetrable continuity of reality - they called Bergson a pantheist. His political influence was hardly indirect - meetings with Woodrow Wilson helped to sculpt the League of Nations which was later replaced by the United Nations. His publications garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 (recognized by some as the only philosopher to win in Literature). And perhaps most amazingly, despite the complexity of his philosophies, his prose and lecturing style resonated with the public at large throughout all of Europe and even America; he was a true populist icon. Amidst the folklore is the story where his 1913 lecture at Columbia University generated enough popularity to cause the first traffic jam in the history of Broadway.
Some view Bergson as anti-scientific, despite his academically recognized mathematical and biological accomplishments. Although his once highly publicized critiques of Einstein’s General Relativity and his elaborate contextualizing of Darwin's Theory of Evolution have more or less faded into the collective forget, even today they offer more than enough stimulation to ponder wild new possibilities to accepted notions.
Perhaps the most basic distillation of Bergson's philosophy deals with intuition and its elusive yet very real role in the pursuit of any conscious thing to truly "know" anything at all. All science and reason - human understanding at large - seems to sense an elephant in the room. Yet, as Bergson explains, our very survival largely depends on ignoring this elephant. This elephant has no name, and even if it had a name it would be a nameless one. Enter the world of Zen Buddhism - name that nameless elephant:
All things are one and have no life apart from it; the One is all things and is incomplete without the least of them. Yet the parts are parts within the whole, not merged in it; they are interfused with Reality while retaining the full identity of the part, and the One is no less One for the fact that it is a million-million parts.
= JIJIMUGE doctrine of the Kegon School of Japanese Buddhism.
OOOOOOMMMMMMMM. It would almost seem that human consciousness is designed to ignore the completeness of things, yet derive it all the same. Hmmm.
Mind and matter are divergent tendencies; they point to an original and necessary dichotomy; they are opposite in direction; but they are mutually complementary and imply the unity of an original impulse. The new concept therefore is of a reality with which life and consciousness are identical, as distinct from the concept of a reality independent of life and conditioning it, and upon which it depends. This new concept in its turn suggests a new working principle in the biological and psychological sciences. The principle is that the great factor in evolution is a kind of unconsciousness. Such unconsciousness, however, is not a primitive self-sufficient principle. It is not an Absolute, as some metaphysicians have held. It is, on the contrary, a restriction of consciousness which life possesses in right, a restriction contrived by life in order to fashion the instrumentality of efficient action. So that while the philosophical problem of the past has been to define the nature of consciousness, explain its genesis, and determine its relation to the external reality inferred as conditioning it, the philosophical problem before us today, if we accept the new concept, is to explain the nature and genesis of unconsciousness.
= W. Wildon Carr in his Preface to Mind-Energy, H. Bergson.
This is Kecak or "the monkey chant" as captured by cinematographer Ron Fricke in his succulent cinematic film Baraka. My subconscious is erupting with Balinese dreams as I begin to prepare myself for the two month gamelan submersion in Ubud, Bali. People say that Bali is the Bayreuth for surfers - ok people don't say that but I just had some Wagner for dinner and it's on my mind. Anyway, I think I will give the surfing a shot between temple visits and practicing those incredible rhythmic palindromes on the gamelan. I just need to get out of my mind that my surfing sweat elicits the essence of fresh seal blood - yes I know I am more likely to be hit by a car than the mouth of a hammerhead shark, but I've always had a rich imagination for improbable disaster.
This Ron Fricke clip is pretty beautiful. The lead chanter has a spirit and presence on film that suddenly makes Clooney seem not quite the sexiest man alive.
I carry from childhood the vague but persistent impression of being exposed to hints of an archaic and underground culture whose values were lost to the Protestant religion and the industrial bourgeoisie, indeed to the modern West in general. This may be nothing but fantasy, but I seem to have been in touch with lingering links to a world both magical and mystical that was still understood among birds, trees, and flowers and was known - just a little - to my mother and perhaps to one or two of my nursemaids. Or was it just I who carried in my genes or in my "collective unconscious" the apprehension of whole worlds of experience which official culture repressed or ignored? the disciplinum arcanum of this culture, so easily mistaken in the child for idle reverie, was that intense contemplative watching of the eternal now, which is sometimes revived by the use of psychedelic drugs, but which came to me through flowers, jewels, reflected light in glass, and expanses of clear sky. I get it also from music that is not mechanical and does not march, as from the music of India which I loved at first hearing and which continues, like a lost name on the tip of the tongue, to put me in mind of a long-forgotten afternoon in a sunlit room where magicians were playing on the heartstrings of the universe.
gets down in her Sunday's best. Mmmm mmmm. And that's a fine lookin SG guitar she's playin.
I checked out a gospel convention here in Philadelphia for a minute about a month ago - not like the old days, that's fer sure. More american idol than glory hallelulian'.
There's a baptist church on my corner that sounds like all sorts of tambourine fun come Sunday mornin'. Think I might step in sometime soon - see what all the commotion's about.
Busy busy busy busy. But overcome with nostalgia in the past few days. Wrote my first Italian chamber opera the summer of 2005 (pictured above at Casa di Puccini). We spent all our money before anyone thought about recording it - so the only record I have are on these hissy tracks made with a laptop microphone. I don't mind, though - there is a certain Victor Victrola quality to the sound. Here is a short clip of my good friend Jason, the cellist taking a solo during the love scene between Florizel and Perdita. Uber romantic... despite all of the pressures not to write or live the romantic life. I'm glad I did - for at least one summer when I was 23. Wrote an opera, found a wonderful girl, took naps in the vineyard, learned to cook. If there was ever a time in my adult life that I managed to live intuitively, it was during that summer. Very glad.
Virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us; but once you grok it, it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of starflight and longevity extension, and so forth and so on, would also have a full VR toolkit under control. Well then, that means that when we go looking for the extraterrestrial, what will be the footprint? Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid-state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility.
=Terrence McKenna from Technopagans at The End of History
I happened to watch the Daily Show segment on the congressional hearings of virtual worlds - particularly Second Life.
Imagine the headline: Virtual Search for Bin Laden Discovers Extraterrestrial Life Instead
This just in: GlitteracticaCookie is in fact a pastry chef from the Glitteractica Galaxy.
Still working all day every day on the theater projects I've joined, but before I drift off to sleep, I've been watching these newly posted videos of Sheldrake working the thought experiments.
While I of course have some issues with certain Sheldrake-isms, particularly his fixated attention to lackluster results of some telepathy experiments, I nevertheless find him provocative, inspiring, and fun. He's the kind of guy who makes me think three times before I can agree or disagree with something he says.
It is true that Sheldrake has been shrouded in a bit of new-age populism, but he also shares a lot with Bergson and Jung - two philosophers I greatly admire.
I took a job as musical director for the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This means I generally work 14 hour days between the dayjob and rehearsals. But the cast is loads of fun, incredibly talented, and I spend most of my time laughing. The theater company hasn't hired an official diction coach to teach Hedwig his... her... German accent. The director overheard my Werner Herzog impression and ever since I have doubled as the diction coach.
"There is a harmony - a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. Even the stars in the sky are a mess."
Try saying it with the Herzog monotone and hard Rs.
A few months ago I had the incredible opportunity to see Herzog at the University of Pennsylvania. The small lecture hall could only accommodate 10% of the people who wanted to see him. Near riots ensued.
Going through the hard drive today, I came across a set of pieces written my second year in college as a composition student. After taking a course in digital recording, I became much more interested in the sculpting of pieces through the graphic interface of Pro Tools - and the sound quality of the recording itself. I would bring a solo instrumentalist into the studio, study the particular style of their playing, and compose a piece in the moment - quickly scribbling music down on the staff paper, or simply singing what I wanted them to play. It was very dynamic - and a relief from the long hours of solitude I spent at a piano composing my other pieces. It didn't take long to draw the obvious connection between this method of composing with the method that most studio rock bands practiced. Afterall, I was raised on the Beatles, not Beethoven.
This piece was one of my early attempts to compose with the inspiration of nature - particularly insects. I managed to escape the city that summer. After a few years living in the concrete jungle of Philadelphia where sounds of birds and insects were rare, my ears became suddenly sensitive to those strange frequencies of living animals.
Here is Krysta performing on her bassoon. I titled the piece Insects.
Freddy Mercury and famed opera diva Montserrat Cabelle perform the timeless Spanish anthem, Barthelona. Clearly Mercury has by this point mastered the physical act of identifying the downbeat with hip thrust, hands to fist, etc. Magicians everywhere look on with envy. Not sure where the orchestra is, perhaps inside an adjacent flaming oracle, but leave it to mad-scientist-inventor-conductor Brian May to find the best use yet for the once obsolete light saber.
It seems a bit surreal to end this song about The Book of Revelations with a piano flourish and applause, and it makes me think of the audience reception to pieces like the Quartet for the End of Time. Is it appropriate to clap, really? Did they clap after the premier in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany on January 15, 1941?
My compositional style has turned largely towards improvisation in the past 3 years or so. Along with the influence of my buddy Sean, improvisation has revealed more depth to the music I've always loved, as well as the music I've wished to create. I have a catalog of improvised recordings on my computer that have been kept relatively private. I suppose that their spiritual connotations have kept these pieces close, without any attachment to the ambition that a composing career demands. And although this blog is public, I also consider it something of a private space.
Sean and I have been playing as a duo under the name Mad Man's Laughter. We began playing in what was once a tool shed - later a very redroom just big enough for one pieced together drum set and a large theater organ. The sound of the organ pumping through a lopsided but virile leslie speaker was a powerful sound, no doubt. So much that we were convinced that this music would be "ecstatic gospel" if anything at all.
A year has passed since this recording was made. The house was sold, the shed emptied. Our organ was too big to move, so it was put to sleep. Piece by piece, we took it apart - hoping to salvage the leslie. I've never felt nostalgia for an instrument before, but my feelings for that organ are pretty close. I'm sad that it's gone. I have since bought an old hammond, an old rhodes, but it's not the same. One day I will be an old man searching the internet, willing to pay any price for that same organ.
This track is called Mad Man's Laughter. Clearly one of our ecstatic improvisations. There are some mild hoots and hollers to prove it. More to come.
Here is a musing on the nature of abstraction or virtual reality. I think the question is: as nature is abstracted more and more, and children are raised without directly contacting the non-man-made world, will they mistake abstraction for truth? Or will intuition thirst for the unknown experience of realization? Is intuition truly a human connection to the absolute continuum of reality? Will branches always break through concrete?
Inotherwords:
Although it doesn't seem theoretically possible to recreate nature in fully realized virtual form with any fewer elements than what make up its actual form, is it possible that human senses are limited and will at some point not recognize the shortcomings of virtual form?
I guess my fundamental belief says no. Does that make me a Bergsonian?
The demonstrations of the relativity of our knowledge are contaminated by an original fault: like the dogmatism they attack, they suppose that all knowledge must necessarily start from concepts with a rigid contour in order to reach flowing reality with them. But to tell the truth, our intelligence can follow the opposite process. It can lower itself into moving reality, assume its ever-changing direction, and, in short, grasp it by means of that intellectual sympathy called intuition. =Henri Bergson from Introduction a la Metaphysique
I have been moonlighting as a theater "sound designer" for the past year or so. I'm not sure what I think of the title "sound designer" since really I think a more accurate term is "mini-composer." I end up writing about 20-30 original pieces per show, each one between 30 seconds and 1.5 minutes. A sound designer can be mistaken for cuing doorbells, rain, and crickets. Ok, that's not true anyhow. The sound design to Stalker was one of the most brilliantly ticklish auditory experiences I've had in a long time.
Anyway, although it's not "serious" music, I try to bring compositional aesthetic to the table. Composing for theater can be a bit fun, particularly the bit of collaborating with non-musicians.* There are without a doubt countless obstacles and compromises in theatrical music, but I've found that I enjoy working within certain confines from time to time.
My first solo project was for The Wilma Theater's production of Brecht's Life of Galileo. The sets were bare wood and steel, evoking Galileo's story through the lens of an oppressed Eastern European 1940s society. Choosing the most obvious solution then, I decided to compose music using primarily percussive sounds on wood and steel. The result was interesting - a combination of Reich-like rhythmic effects with a certain rustic production quality. As an added bonus, the music was very well received. The production was reviewed by Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal but unfortunately there was no comment on music. Maybe next time an Alex Ross type should join the audience and offer a bit of perspective on the potential of a modern compositional element to today's live theater.
My second production was a US premier of Lisa Griffiths' Age of Arousal, also produced by the Wilma Theater. The play was inspired by George Gissing's progressive victorian novel The Odd Women. I read the set as a psychedelic Victorian parlor with its over-sized floral wallpaper and hints of eastern exoticism lining the lingerie. There was a sense of nature's urge for creation bubbling just below the surface as the modern women considered their intellectual, spiritual, and sexual roles in post-imperialist British society. Typewriters, commerce, and lesbianism abound, but the music was mostly inspired by a sensual undercurrent not least of which was highlighted visually by a giant floral arrangement that stretched over one-third of the stage.
Best of all was that Blanka, the director of both shows, decided to choreograph the scene transitions with intricate ballets of characters and sets moving. The transitions were always exciting and gave the music a chance to fulfill a worthwhile lifecycle without any fade-outs(!).
I've discovered a way to embed music files to this blog - so this is a test to see if it works. Track 1 is from The Life of Galileo, serving as a segue from the industrialist, socialist sensibilities of Brecht's Galileo to the aristocratic ball scene where the Grand Inquisitor is first introduced.
The second track from Age of Arousal is the introduction of victorian psychedelic beauty as walls open up to reveal a young bachelor courting a beautiful debutante on a stroll through some London park. I bought a 1972 Fender Rhodes and an out of tune piano at the used furniture store to create the atmosphere. The tape delay was also a favorite post production tool of mine.
The third track introduces Act II of Age of Arousal. The scene is entitled Impressionism - the characters are walking through the first exhibit of this new art form in a London gallery.
The fourth is the final scene of Age of Arousal, titled Garden, when the cycle of death and re-birth come to full realization in a beautifully lit (slightly psychedelic) garden. The internet provided the birds - I guess I modeled the short track on Messiaen and some freejazz solos. Enjoy!
*except when everything outside of classic tonality is considered "creepy" or "sinister"
As our folk culture expands throughout the interwebs, google video maintains its massing snowball presence. Unofficial music videos made by music fans show up from time to time with something real to contribute. I've posted a fan-made video to Leaf House, one of my favorite songs by Animal Collective - the psych folk pop mod prog downtown indie boy band of the year (s).
I played the guess the composer game while listening to the last few minutes of an orchestral piece on the radio driving home from the grocery store.
A symphonic work Sounds like the last movement of 4 movement form Well, definitely a romantic - german sounds like But i don't know it... kinda familiar. No, don't know it - could this be a neo-romantic? It's way too indulgent - how dare a neo-romantic demand this much empathy from me? Oh man I'm pissed - this is ridiculous If this is a Juilliard teacher... What a sentimental asshole. The academic scene is such bs. Ok, that part was good - surprisingly - What form is this anyway? It's like the transcendentalists. What does this guy know about transcendentalism? I am pissed off! Ok that part was kind of interesting. But it's mostly bad! This is total shit and I'm tired of it. Who is it?
Really - how awesome are the handheld camera single shot-sequences in this Parsifal clip!? The lighting is pretty badass too. Alfonso Cuarón eat your heart out.
And is that The Seventh Seal mysteriously slipped in at the 7:07 mark?
The video includes a lecture by Alan Watts on a number of wonderful subjects - but the subject that inspired me to post this video is not one he addresses (at least not directly). I was jogging when I first listened to this lecture as a podcast. The first minute went by and I had to stop running to catch my breath - I was laughing too much. Why was I laughing? Alan Watts wasn't making jokes, or ironic references, or anything "funny." But nevertheless, something was humorous.
Watts asks a simple question. Is existence serious? He also can't help but laugh after asking this question - as you hear in the video. What is so funny about this??
Henri Bergson wrote an interesting treatise called Laughter. Anyway, enjoy Mr. Watts - and I highly recommend downloading the Watts podcasts on itunes - They're Free!
David Attenborough narrates a phenomenal documentation of traditional Kalahari hunting.
Considered one of the most ancient hunting techniques, this "persistence hunt" originated before weapons were invented. The hunter uses tracking skills and trance induced intuition to simply run down the animal until exhaustion finally forces the animal to surrender after 8 hours in the African heat. Once the animal has collapsed, the hunter begins a killing ritual which includes staying close and comforting the animal until it dies. This ritual ensures that the spirit returns safely to the desert so the cycle of reincarnation is properly maintained.
An old woman throws her crutches to the ground - "Change made me walk again!"
A billionaire swims in his pool of golden coins - "Change made me rich!"
A small child clutches her kitten to her chest - "Change brought Buttons down from the tree!"
Our contemporary political slogans have yet to achieve the true universality of phrases like "Uh huh" but at least campaigns of the future give us something to look forward to...
... is a Balinese word that roughly translates to "the process of flowering." What a wonderful concept; certainly a word to be used by a particularly creative civilization. Since my student days "the process of flowering" has been one of my favorite sounds in all music - so much so that I began to listen to flowering motifs as functional elements in their own rite.
Of course in Balinese music, Kebyar is one of the most popular styles of playing. Sudden flashes of metallophones begin and end with buzzings of nature oozing through cracks of the gamelan’s silence. I imagine the act of creation on a chemical level, full of explosions and violence and mystery. Organic compounds and pollen and fertilization and zygotes and sun and soil and overwhelming growth... I think I need to post Herzog’s jungle fever after this one…
I watched this BBC Adam Curtis series last year (along with his other tantalizing documentaries) and have since had much more sophisticated conspiracy fodder for those slow days at the office.
Basically Curtis identifies the history of what has become an outright science of commercialized psychology led by Freud's nephew - the handsome, charming Eddie Bernays. My favorite citations are Betty Crocker's egg scheme, and the "freedom sticks" otherwise known as ciggies. Sit back, grab yourself a box of Kix, and enjoy the show.
P.S. this is part 1 of 4. Check out the others on gvid
Sheldrake goes off on some homing pidgeons. If you have time, its not a bad Sunday afternoon spent watching the whole Glorious Accident posted on blip.tv.
SO who do we have here?
Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennet, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Toulmin, and Rupert Sheldrake have a fine conversation over a meal and some hookah.
Check out the hilarious laughs of Dyson and Sacks. Oh man great time.
insipid beguiling protest in case of fire repeatedly languishing selfish form over style having it sewn on is seen to be trying rather informally time's underlying lesson in taking our rhythms back home with you listen to eating, aging, and dying
Remember the time Groucho had a husband and wife along with their 27 children as guests on his show? Keep in mind that this man had fathered, and this lady had given birth to all of them. Groucho asked the man "Sir why did you have so many children?" The man replied,"Because I love my wife." Groucho's eyebrows shot up,"I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally!"
