well-weathered music

I played with four of my most favorite musicians last night; Carla Kihlstedt, Marika Hughes, and Shahzad Ismaily, who make up 2 Foot Yard, plus Zeena Parkins. It was just 2 songs in a 15 minute set, but it was an absolute joy to play with these master musicians again. Oddly enough, it was the first time I’ve actually played with Zeena. Odd in that I’ve heard her play so many times, it seemed natural to play together. And of course Carla never ceases to amaze me, even though we’ve known each other and have worked together for almost 15 years. It was kind of an odd but very interesting show; the opening night of this year’s Look & Listen Festival.

I am now three weeks away from the end of the busiest three months I’ve ever had. The Ne(x)tworks gig this Saturday, the Behrman gig monday night. On Tuesday I’m off to San Francisco to finish up a score for choreographer Alonzo King. Then back to do the Merce Cunningham gig at DIA-Beacon on May 17 & 18. After that things lighten up; only three projects to work on!

I wonder what it is that the thousand-named-oneness (aka God, the Fates, etc.) seems to frequently take masterful musicians of contrasting genres off this planet within just a few days of one another. Last year Stockhausen and Ike Turner died on either end of the same week. Now two other music treasures have moved on; and their musics could not have been expressed in more disparate forms, while still sharing a uniquely 20th century vision. On the one hand, we mourn the passing of Henry Brant, orchestrator extraordinaire and inventor of “spatial” instrumental music. While on the other hand the jazz world will never again have anyone quite like composer/clarinetist Jimmy Guiffre, whose music was structurally so scaled back it was almost invisible, yet amazingly soulful. Mr. Brant eloquently showed us that we exist in a multi-planed dimension where front and back is just as important as high-pitched and low. Mr. Guiffre eloquently showed us that we are our own multi-planed dimension where internal and external are practically non-existent. We are lucky they have left so many auditory impressions for us to visit again and again.

The Gamelan Son Of Lion concert at the Living Theater went very well the other night. The entire evening had a very nice feel to it. I can’t post audio for the entire program, but my piece, Telling Time #3 is at the end of this post. Here is the program:

Program:

1. She (Really) Had to Go – John Morton
the gamelan blends with an electronically processed music box and a familiar tune

2. Music Box – Jody Kruskal
the entire gamelan plays as a giant music box in ths fantasy for double suling (flute)

3. Piece in Harmony – Patrick Grant
a stately, neo-baroque harmonic trance with keyboard

4. Telling Time #3 – Miguel Frasconi
for gamelan and glass. A composition in unison tempo is then repeated in “telling time,” where each performer tells a story through use of shifting tempi

interval

5. Toy Symphony: Introduction and Non-Development Section – Daniel Goode
a romp of the gamelan through Toyland, including the softest sound you can imagine

6. Wauking – Barbara Benary
five Scottish working songs learned in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Wauking, or milling, is a preindustrial way to preshrink wool by pounding

7. Hard Rain – Bob Dylan/Lisa Karrer
a Dylan classic arranged for gamelan

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Here is how Telling Time #3 sounded:

I don’t know why it took me so long, but I finally checked out the American Music Center’s Counterstream Radio, and I haven’t turned it off since. It’s not just that Raz Mesinai used recordings of me and Joan LaBarbara to create their “audio logo,” or that within the first half hour of turning it on I heard some of my own music I haven’t heard for a while. Nope. I’m surprised it took me so long because they play some f#%king great music! Just in the last half hour I heard some Bill Frisell, Sun Ra, Paul Dresher, John Cage…, it’s like they looked in the “favorite composers” file in my brain and created their playlist. Then other times I’ve heard wonderful music by folks I don’t know, and also by people I’ve met but haven’t yet heard their music. Now I have. There are also “on demand” and special programs I’m looking forward to hearing, like their spotlight on pianist Jenny Lin and the conversation Sarah Cahill arranged between Elliot Carter & Phil Lesh (that’s Sarah for ya’). Thank you American Music Center!!

Here are some excerpts from two of my recent ensemble pieces, both being performed soon.

This Friday, Gamelan Son of Lion will be premiering Telling Time #3, for glass and gamelan. This piece is a reworking of the piece I wrote for them in 2006. Here is an excerpt from the first Telling Time, where the performers are asked to relate a personal narrative about the experience of time through the use of shifting tempi:

A week later, on Saturday, May 3rd, Ne(x)tworks will be performing a concert of our “in house” composers, where we will be doing another performance of my music/theater piece, Tasks & Objects, from 2007. This piece is a suite of activities that allow musicians to explore their instruments and the performance environment in musical and extra-musical ways. Here is an excerpt from the first performance:

I had a dream the other night that a friend of mine was married to Pablo Picasso. Even though they had just been married a few months, they already had 6 teenage kids. I went to visit them in the south of France, which was a two hour drive from Manhattan. They lived on a very rocky shoreline and I had to walk the last mile or so to get to their house. Once there, I sat and talked with my friend for a long time. A while later Picasso came in and sat by the window. He didn’t join our conversation for a good long while. When he heard that I was a musician, he perked up and started asking me questions about music. He asked me what my favorite piece was and I said that it was, without a doubt, this one recording of Miles Davis that was made right before Bitches Brew, and I always carry it with me. (In reality “In a Silent Way” was Davis’ recording right before BB. But the recording in this dream was made in some other dimension between these two sessions.) Picasso & I listened to the entire piece together. When we finished, he got up right away and said he must go paint. My friend had gone out to do errands. I left and climbed across the rocky coastline back to my car and woke up.

The feeling of listening to this wonderful (imaginary) music with Pablo Picasso was what stayed with me after waking.

I remembered this dream later that day as I was packing my glass instruments for a short run of solo shows; a concert at Barbés in Park Slope that evening and one the next day here in Inwood (northern Manhattan). In both concerts I told the story of this dream and played a piece called “Listening to Miles Davis with Pablo Picasso.” I, of course, wasn’t trying to recreate the Davis piece from my dream, but the feeling of the dream itself.

This is the 2nd night’s version.

Here is something more melodic, a companion piece from the 1st night.

And if you’ve had enough high harmonics, here is something more mellow.

Because of some technical error, the program for yesterday’s Ne(x)twork’s show did not get printed correctly. Here it is:

EMF and CBD Music present

Ne(x)tworks: Dialogics 2
Chelsea Art Museum
Saturday April 5 2PM
$15

Music of Alvin Curran, Joan La Barbara, and Miguel Frasconi

Distancing #4 (1983/2008) Miguel Frasconi

Triadic Limbo (2007) (fragment) ** Alvin Curran

Words on Water (Shimmer) (2008) ** Joan La Barbara

Endangered Species (1994 – 1996) Alvin Curran

Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights (1992) Alvin Curran
Saltando in Padella (2005) ***

Al Forno Al Sugo Al Pesto Al Vino (2001) (fragment) Alvin Curran

** There will be no pause between Triadic Limbo and Words on Water (Shimmer)

*** Fragments of Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights and Saltando in Padella will be performed simultaneously.

Notes on the program

Alvin Curran
From The Alvin Curran Fake Book: Saltando In Padella Dal Quinto Piano Mentre Passing Notes In Triadic Limbo (2008)

Ne(x)tworks is pleased to feature the work of Alvin Curran, acclaimed composer, sound artist, and longtime member of the radical improvisation group MEV. The music on today’s program is selected from The Alvin Curran Fake Book, a compilation of compositions, sketches and improvisational modules created over the past 40 years. The arrangement, entitled Saltando In Padella Dal Quinto Piano Mentre Passing Notes In Triadic Limbo, has been created by the composer specifically for Ne(x)tworks. It consists of a string of recent pieces and fragments thereof that are to be presented in modular format. For this performance Ne(x)tworks draws upon material from Triadic Limbo (2007), Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights (1992), Saltando in Padella (2005), Al Forno Al Sugo Al Pesto Al Vino (2001), and Endangered Species (1994-1996). Ne(x)tworks presents this piece in celebration of Alvin Curran’s 70th year. The ensemble is also planning to release a CD of Curran’s music on the Mode label in the near future.
–Cornelius Dufallo

Joan La Barbara
Words on Water (Shimmer) (2008)

Shimmer is heat rising from the desert floor, shimmer is light sparkling on water, shimmer is wraiths passing along the back walls, shimmer is the aurora borealis, shimmer is in ghostly conversations. “Words on Water (Shimmer)” (2008) is the latest scene from an opera in-progress, for multiple layers of voices, instruments and sonic “atmospheres”. Here, I am exploring sounds inside the mind, impossible sounds, fragile sounds, transparent, ghostly sounds, shimmering voices and modular fragments. A series of inhales with no exhale, separated by sonic blackness, silences of varying lengths are shattered by a sudden burst of underwater wails, as the work moves from interior to exterior space and back again.
- Joan La Barbara

Miguel Frasconi
Distancing #4 (1981/83, arr. 2008)

In 1981, while I was living in Toronto, my composer friend Jon Siddall returned from Mills College in CA, where he had been studying with Lou Harrison and Robert Ashley. Before leaving Mills, Jon asked Lou to buy him an eight-piece gamelan degung ensemble on his next trip to Java. Lou followed through on this promise, and all the bronze keys & pot-gongs were on their way. Toronto would soon have its very first gamelan. This was particularly exciting news for me as, at the time, I often visited the then newly formed homemade new music gamelan Son of Lion on my frequent trips to NYC. I was also in a group, The Glass Orchestra, that was a self described “free-improv glass gamelan.” Upon hearing Jon’s news I immediately wrote “Study in Slendro: Distancing.” This was an open-instrumentation, homophonic, steady-pulse piece exploring additive and subtractive cross rhythms expressed through permutations of a basic pentatonic scale. The first performance was solo violin. The second, a large, loud rock band. In 1983 I arranged it for the ensemble that inspired it, and “Distancing #3″ was performed in the very first concert of Toronto’s Evergreen Club Gamelan. Twenty-five years later, I’ve dusted off the score and have given it new life in an arrangement specifically for this concert.
-Miguel Frasconi

It was a wonderful concert, by the way.

There is an article on the front page of the NYTimes today about how professional bloggers are dying off at an alarming rate. About how blogging is so time consuming and sedentary, they are just asking for a heart attack. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been blogging much for quite a while. I am just way too busy, and to write what I want to write just takes too much time. I should probably do it more like my buddy Cornelius who is even busier than I but finds time to write a sentence or two twice a week. But he gets over a hundred hits a day, while I do it mainly for my own archival and entertainment purposes. (Which is what I tell myself in order to be fine with the 4 or 5 hits a day I get. Really, I’m fine with that. Really…yup….uhm….)

But now that things are starting to slow down… oh, wait, no they haven’t. Let’s try that again. But now that I have one premiere out of the way (Distancing #4 with Ne(x)tworks yesterday), perhaps I’ll have more time to write.

Just back from Toronto, playing a concert there for the first time in 23 years! I will soon post pictures and audio files.

Now getting ready for the Ne(x)tworks concert at the Chelsea Art Museum on Saturday.

Next week: Ireland!

A recent posting of mine here was about the sound of our Earth, sped up 10,000 times. The actual largest terrestrial sound possible. Well, this is a posting about the smallest terrestrial sound possible; the “sound” made by molecules. This post writes about this post from World Science magazine, which starts off by saying:

Phys­i­cists say they’ve rec­orded ti­ny vibra­t­ions of in­di­vid­ual mol­e­cules, that could be called sounds—de­pend­ing on how you de­fine sound—and put them in au­di­ble form.

You can hear the sound, here. But I doubt it actually “sounds” like that.