Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

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.

From the Vaults

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.

Great Moments in Classical Crossover

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.

Prologue to the End of Time

Gospel great Goldia Haynes performs Fire.

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?

Improvised Laughter

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.

Virtually Bergson

nature movie
eco resort
elephant god

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