David Lynch Elevator Music

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.

Philadelphia Pride

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 and the joy of toil

What can I say? I like this stuff.

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

Vita vita

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.

Bergson for Fun Part 2

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.

Images to Save Mankind Part 1

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.

Scene from Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky

There's a Hole in my Bucket

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...

Alfred's last words

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.

Stage Directions

For a theatrical music piece that is yet to be:

...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.

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.