An evening of pieces by John Cage, performed simultaneously and independently. Works include In a Landscape, Music for Amplified Toy Piano, Cheap Imitation, Variations II, Solo for Sliding Trombone, Composed Improvsiation, 45′ for a Speaker, excerpts from Song Books, early songs and an ensemble performance of 4’33″ (not included in this excerpt).

Roland Auzet (snare drum), Richard Carrick & Chris Cochrane (guitars), Martha Cluver (soprano), Miguel Frasconi (toy pianos, electronics), Christopher McIntyre (trombone, voice), Jovita Zähl (piano).

Record stores were such a huge part of my music self-education. There was a local stationery store that had a great record dept. Sally, the record buyer, would always know when the next Zappa or Stevie Wonder album would be coming out. Then there was Sam Goodies just down the street. I picked up the early Columbia Records Conlon Nancarrow LP there when it first came out, only because the cover looked so cool, and of course was blown away when I got it home. I still kick myself for not picking up the Portsmouth Sinphonia album I saw there, only to later learn what a collectors item it was. They also had all those great Nonesuch world music albums. I then “graduated” to Discophile on 8th St, where I would pick up all the early Philip Glass Ensemble Chatham Square LPs as soon as they came out, as well as more unusual world music and classical albums, not to mention all those great Opus One Records releases (Rzewski, Garland, etc). Then later there was the Downtown Music Gallery when it was in Soho, back when John Zorn worked there.

There was something about record stores that made music buying exciting. In retrospect, it had a lot to do with the fact that music, and only music, came on those vinyl discs. No other kind of information was distributed that way. Vinyl = Music. Then CDs took over and for a short time CDs = Music. But for only a short time. My friend Foster Reed, who runs New Albion Records, said he knew the music business was in trouble when AOL started sending out all those free software CDs in the mid-’90s. For the first time ever, music started sharing it’s mode of distribution with other kinds of information. It was the beginning of the end for music as a purchasable object. Music listening is no longer associated with a specific physical object, and thus it no longer makes sense to buy it. What are we buying? Vibrating air! “I’m not paying for something I can’t touch,” is the way our brains work.

I’m really glad vinyl records are making a comeback, of sorts, even if it is now highly specialized. Vinyl will of course never again be the only way we listen to music, but at least we’re starting to have the choice. Although I guess we still have the choice to ride a horse into town, if we can find one.

(note: I can’t seem to add links to these posts anymore. Hmm.)

Having worked with MCDC in 2007, a year or so before Merce passed, I was honored to have been asked to participate in this event. In both concerts there was a quartet of musicians randomly chosen to play together. (I later noticed that the random process resulted in straight alphabetical groupings, yet another example that randomness is much more accepting of order than we human’s like to think.) I was asked to play in a group that included three of my favorite musicians: Ikue Mori, Marina Rosenfeld, and Alvin Curran (whom I had not seen for at least ten years!). The instructions for these groups were simple: come up with our own unique timeline using at most 12 minutes of the 15 minute time slot. In pure Cageian fashion, we were to perform our timeline without being influenced by what the other were doing. Our quartet started off the packed 8:30 show. In these sorts of situations I let my sub-conscious, lizard-brain, composer take over and, as such, don’t consciously remember much of what happens. But I do remember one particularly interesting moment. I had just picked up a glass rod-mallet in order to play a repeated rhythm on two glass half-globes filled with glass shards. As soon as I started playing, a drum rhythm started sounding, an audio clip from one of the laptops (I think it was Ikue). Not only did we unexpectedly start together, but we were almost exactly in the same tempo. Since I was the human, it was up to me to decide whether or not to adjust my tempo to match the recorded loop. The decision was a no-brainer, given the situation, and I hunkered down with my internal clock and let the two tempi go separate ways. (I did, after all, study with phasing-masters Bob Becker and Russ Hartenberger many years ago.)

There was so much amazing music in these two concerts, it’s hard to know what to write about. But there was something…, and it’s odd, because after all these ear-opening timbres and other-worldly structures, what was a real revelation for me were a set of simple piano solos. Of course they were composed and performed by one of the most masterful sound explorers and a true pioneer of live-electronic music, Gordon Mumma. These simple yet compelling compositions made equal-temperament make total sense! There was something about his choice of dissonances, and his combination of melodies and pitch clusters that made more sense and spoke more directly to me than any conventional use of harmony ever has. Here was a master musician who had emerged from the world of pure sound to give the supreme instrument of the industrial revolution a new and eloquent voice. I was totally blown away.

Then of course there was “Da Committee,” aka the MCDC Music Committee: David Behrman, John King, Christian Wolff, and Takehisa Kosugi. As a whole and in other groupings, they played music like no others. I’m sure Merce, Cage, and David Tudor were very happy that day, from whichever form or non-form they were experiencing it. I left that evening knowing their legacy is as strong and everlasting as pure vibration itself.

The evening was call “Back to Zero” and featured two works from the early ’90s and one solo from 1978. I first saw Foray Forêt (1990) in the mid-90s at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. I remember it well: the piece started off in total silence for quite a while. You then started hearing some music playing in the distance from outside the theater, and think ”hmm, there’s some unintended sound.” It continues getting louder and closer while the company continues their beautiful movements, and you realized there was a full college marching band playing outside the theater. You think, “why are they rehearsing now, don’t they know there’s a concert going on in here?” and try to focus only on the dance. The marching band fades off a bit in the distance… only to return with their sound coming from the other end of the hall. You think: “What a minute…” You then realize this full marching band is actually intensionally marching around the building and is in fact the score for the piece. A wonderful experience whose detail I remember to this day (as you can see).

This same piece at DTW: same amazing movement (different amazing young dancers). However… well, in fairness to the rather awful small band that did their best to circle around the theater on W 19th St…. Let’s just say they were no UC Berkeley marching band, and leave it at that. Thankfully, I was so in awe of the dancers and choreography that this sound was not too much of a distraction.

The final piece on this program was For M.G.: The Movie (1991), with a live + pre-recorded score by Alvin Curran. Alvin sat at the grand piano, upstage right, and played magnificently along with recordings he made of: himself playing the same piano piece at a slightly different tempo, Rome street scenes, Italians shouting to one another, and a piano being tuned, amongst other interesting sounds. This combination of the real piano and the piano tuning was wonderful and pure Curran. Showing a combination of humor and a deep knowledge of music that only Alvin can come up with.

After the show, over drinks, Alvin was saying he had visited his old teaching and friend Elliot Carter earlier that day, and told some poignant stories of his visit. Knowing the dance score he had just performed was basically a structured improvisation, I couldn’t help but think that some of the deeper points of the score were somehow informed by this possibly final visit with his dear old friend. At any rate, it almost goes without saying that Trisha’s dance and Alvin’s music worked beautifully and effortlessly together.

It’s been an awesome week for performance here in NYC. Two days ago I went to City Opera to see MONODRAMAS (http://www.nycopera.com/calendar/view.aspx?id=12524). Three exceptional “solo” pieces presented in one well-constructed evening. First was John Zorn’s La Machine de l’être, based on Antonin Artaud’s final work which was simply a drawing of an imagined production. No text, no direction, some color, rich images. I think Zorn did an excellent job of interpreting this drawing. As with all three pieces, the orchestration was excellent and the orchestra performed beautifully. I found John’s music surprisingly conservative, almost sounding like the music that drove me to (what’s now called) minimalism in the mid ’70s. But of course, it’s Zorn, so there were humorous and unexpected twists and turns throughout the relatively short piece.

Then came Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung, one of his first atonal, but pre-serial, works. The music was rich with emotions and the orchestral writing was downright sensual. Perhaps it was because to the performance, but I never realized what an amazing orchestrator Arnie was. The final multi-flute trill, the last sound of the piece, was pure heaven. But this piece also showed what, for me, was the one fault of the evening: the staging could be quite overbearing. The power of this particular piece lies in the fact that it’s a solo. I get that all those other women on stage were supposed to be multiples of the protagonist, but they were simply unnecessary. And while I did enjoyed watching the flying hat land, that enjoyment was actually more of a distraction from the music than anything else. Still, the composition and the music performances were so strong, they stood up to these diversions.

Ahh, Morton Feldman’s and Samuel Beckett’s Neither. Pardon my choice of words here, but it was fucking amazing. Incredible work. Incredible performance. (Mostly) incredible staging. Perhaps it was because of where I was sitting (middle front of the top balcony) but it was the first time I ever experienced a successful attempt at faux-holography, even more successful than some of the actual holography I’ve seen. The upstage groups of people actually looked like they were suspended in mid-air, far above the stage. Then to have the lights of the conductor’s music-stand along with his arm movements reflected off the back wall added an amazing and appropriate contrast. As always, Feldman’s ear for orchestration never ceases to amaze, while his vocal writing was a revelation.

If you are reading this before April 8, 2011 and are in NYC, GO SEE THIS!

Every other semester I teach a class at Bard College called “Workshop in Software for Composition and Performance.” It’s basically a class in the music software Ableton Live. The final project at the end of each semester is to put on a concert where all the students play all their assignments all at the same time, with me mixing all the audio, live. Each person also play a laptop solo.

Ever wonder what 22 laptops sound like all playing at once? Here ya go!

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

This is a piece for toy piano and glassharp that never got on my New Albion cd Song + Distance. It was recorded back in 2000 in Oakland by Myles Boisen. I am playing glass harp with my left hand and toy piano with my right. (There is no overdubbing.)

The timing of finding this facebook group is auspicious in that I just had a rehearsal with toy pianist Phyllis Chen for our concert together in two weeks. April 11 @ Barbés, 7pm.

Here’s a video of my present keyboard collection (toy pianos, analog synths, small keyboards).

Last year John was nice enough to ask me to contribute something to this installment. After wracking my brain for a while, I decide to write an essay called Why Glass?. I attempt to answer the question of why I have devoted myself to glass as the prime physical material in my acoustic work, as well as the main sound source for much of my electronic work.

Here is an excerpt from my essay:

As we all know, glass does indeed break. That in itself is part of its charm and part of the adventure. It’s also one reason glass is particularly well suited to improvised and otherwise aleatoric music. It does break, but you cannot count on it doing so (unless a hammer is used, of course). The few times I have tried to break things on cue, they have stubbornly refused to do so. That is why after all this time I am still always surprised when something does break. The material seems to have a mind of its own. One of the benefits of using glass in the less regulated kinds of music is that when one instrument does break, there are then two or more new instruments. Instrumental mitosis! All the way until the smallest shards are used for glass maracas.

This volume also contains wonderful writings by Derek Bailey, Paul Dresher, Shelley Hirsch, James Fei, and many others. Hopefully you can find it in your local bookstore. If not, go here, or here.

But there is still plenty to see/hear here. Please click around  to the various pages and to my previous posts. There are plenty of audio files, pictures, and some video of which to avail yourself.

I’ll be back blogging eventually. Thanks for checking in.