Higher Ground

Holy crap, they did it - inspiration has truly entered politics during my lifetime.

While searching for some feel-good videos on google video, one search culminated in the combination of Stevie Wonder and Barack Obama...


Feel gooooood....



Then.... feel great.

Les Espaces Acoustiques

This music makes me so happy.

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.

Frenchy Froggy Froggy Frenchy Frenchy Frog

OK, I admit it. My two favorite sets of Chansons are Ravel's Chansons Madécasse and Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé.




That's it, I'm learning French.




I might change my mind to include Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi or Debussy's Trois poèmes de Mallarmé.

écrivez l'automne

Ask the Expert

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).

Keep asking questions,

Ofer

From NOVA's website

Woosh

I'm off...

Truth and Relativity

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.

Bruce Lee and Space Counterpart

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?

Reflecting on the Elephant

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.

Field Recording No.1

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.

Bergson for Fun - Part 1

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.

More later.

Kecak

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.

Watts Reflecting

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.

= Alan Watts, autobiography In My Own Way

loops so go

Out-take from one of this year's theater projects. Thawing of winter time into spring and the like.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

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.

Durata

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.

Daydream Quotes for Stationary Moments

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.

Dreaming Fodder

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.

Oh - and get well soon, Rupert.

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.