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!

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:

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:

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.

2008 has started off with a bang, or a klang, or a …, well definitely not a thud or a boink. But you get the idea. Last week was my first rehearsal as a “regular” member of Gamelan Son of Lion since 1987. I did write a piece for them in 2006, but I attended only a few rehearsals. This year I have decided to join the group on a regular basis. Son of Lion is a “home-made” gamelan ensemble built by Barbara Benary back in the late ’70s. The metalophone, keyed, instruments are mostly made of iron, as opposed to the bronze instruments of Indonesia or the aluminum of most California new gamelans. When I was in the group in the ’80s (rehearsing in Phil Corner’s loft on Leonard St.) they also had a large array of car hubcaps used as gongs. But those seem to have been replaced by actual bronze gongs from Indonesia.

The 1980s was sort of my “gamelan decade.” Gamelan was the through line during my moves from Toronto to NYC to San Francisco. There was even a 5 month trip to Bali & Java in 1986 to study the different gamelans there. But over an eight year period I wrote 4 pieces for 3 different American gamelans and played in 5, coast to coast. I was a founding member Toronto’s Evergreen Club Gamelan in 1982, then worked with Son of Lion in NYC in ‘86/’87, then to California to play with Bay Area New Gamelan (BANG), The Berkeley Gamelan and one of Lou Harrison’s groups. But new gamelan in CA had sort of run it’s course by the time I got there, and I stopped playing in these ensembles by 1989. The 2 east coast groups I had been in, SoL and Evergreen, continue to this day, and I’m very glad to be back in Son of Lion.

Here is what SoL looks like these days. (Photos taken 8Jan08)

(left to right, Jody Kruskol, David Demnitz, Barbara Benary, Lisa Karrer, Laura Liben)

(left to right: David Simons, Denman Maroney, Patrick Grant, Jody Kruskol, David Demnitz. Not shown: me, John Morton and Dan Goode.)

Then a few days later, David Behrman came up to my apartment to rehearse for the gig we have this week. I’ve been a fan of his work since I was a teenager so it was wonderful to finally play his music. The sound of glass fits in beautifully with his sound world. Here is David in my apartment (10Jan08).

Then Keiko Uenishi (aka o.blaat) came by the next day to help on the mix of the upcoming release of our OBJECTS cd. Back in 2004 Keiko & I & Ricardo Arias (who plays balloons) did a trio concert at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City (across the east river from Manhattan). We managed to get a very good multi-track recording of it and a small label in the midwest want to put it out. It’s one of the favorite bands I’ve been in. Me playing my glass objects, Ricardo playing his balloon objects, and Keiko playing her virtual max-patch objects. Here is a photo of the 2004 concert.

I’ve been getting some interesting feedback from my Stockhausen/Ike Turner piece (the previous post). I sent it out in individual emails to (as Chris McIntyre would say) “my peeps.” Three of my favorite composers answered back right away. Jay Cloidt said he was going to forward it to a zillion people. John King thanked me for the “mash-up,” which got me wondering if there is a difference between “mash-up” and “plunderphonics.” David Behrman said it brought back memories of his first driving experience, in his mother’s 1952 Olds 88 with a Rocket engine.

Then there’s my brother, who asked if the title means I believe in heaven. I was actually referring to the Ives’ piece “General Booth Enters Into Heaven,” which, admittedly, is a pretty obscure reference. But, no, I don’t believe in heaven, except as a metaphor for whatever happens after we leave our corporeal existence. My initial idea was to create a piece representing the post-corporeal spirits of KS & IT as they gradually lost their individual identity and merged together to become part of what my Gurdjieff inspired bodywork teacher used to call “the field.” I don’t mean to get metaphysical on y’all, but that sort of process (body returns to the earth, spirit returns to the ether) does make the most sense to me. It does not, however, lend itself to representation in a 3 minute New Year’s greeting. So I kept the two musician’s identity intact, and found some very interesting nexuses. I made no changes to the pitch or tempo of either piece, yet there are some places where they really do compliment each other. I can only imagine that the young Karlheinz could very well have been influenced by the Ike Turner piece. “Rocket 88,” from 1951, is thought to be the “first” rock and roll song, so it might well have sparked KS’s 1952 ears as he made his first piece in the new “tape music” medium. Is that common and reoccurring Eb, and the equally common and reoccurring 160 bpm triplet really a coincidence? Hmmmm….

My Toronto friend Andrew Timar observed that my piece obviously placed “Etude” within the structure of “Rocket 88″ and wondered, referencing Jim Tenney, what it would sound like the other way; with the pop song placed within the structure of the Stockhausen. A very interesting idea. It is of course always easier to do this sort of creative editing within a clear rhythmic grid than a rhythmic splatter, but it would certainly be an interesting project. Any takers?

Oh, and if anyone might think this kind of work is new for me (there’s no glass!!), may I direct you here; some pre-digital work from 1982.

To all my readers (yeah, all 3 of you),
Have a great 2008!

Karlheinz and Ike entering into heaven.

Source material:
“Rocket 88″ (1951), Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm
& “Etude” (1952), Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I was just speaking to a friend who was saying how she finds everything interesting in that everything is an expression of the infinite combination of things. (Yes, she’s a poet.) I found that thought to be very refreshing.

To that end, here is what I found particularly interesting today, the 3rd to last day of 2007.

Over on his weblog, composer Daniel Wolf wonders what if…

We all wake up one morning having forgotten music, what music is, and what music does to us. Three things can happen: (1) we re-invent music, more or less as it was before, or (2) we re-invent music, but it differs in substantial ways from what it had been, or (3) we get about with our lives but without any music. What have we lost and what have we gained in each scenario? What does this suggest about the nature and value of music? To what degree do these three possibilities reflect the working methods of a composer?

I lean towards #2. If fact, that is my modus operandi as a composer. I try to re-invent music with every new piece and every new improvisation. A daunting task, certainly, but there are, after all, infinite possibilities to be explored. Earlier this year I performed with John Duykers in a song festival at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (hear it here). At the post concert reception I found myself talking with 3 other composers. We were discussing how there is no longer any defined “school” to be a part of. It seems at one point you could either follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky, then Cage or Babbitt, but now it’s “every man for himself.” One fellow (a very academic composer) said his solution is to compose music similar to the music he likes to listen to. Being a bit of a rebel (and thinking of Xenakis), I said “Well, I prefer writing music that I can not imagine listening to.” The unimaginable is where I’m most comfortable.

Mr. Wolf’s premise can also be explored when a musical instrument that has been developed for a specific music tradition becomes part of a drastically different music tradition. Like the use of the western violin in Indian Carnatic music. Or, most strikingly, the use of the piano in traditional Burmese music. Just as it is fascinating to imagine what sort of new music human beings would come up with upon losing all known music, it’s amazing to hear how western instruments are played by folks who have zero knowledge of western music. Here is the incomparable U Ko Ko, Burmese pianist.

Okay. Not the world, but Toronto certainly is. And no major bridges; or at least not like the George Washington or Golden Gate. That was my first impression flying in over TO in my first visit back in 5 years. Toronto was the city of my 20s. It was the place where I learned to be an active performing composer. I was still spending time in the NYC/CT area, but TO was the place in which I paid rent for a good 9 years. But this is only the third time I’ve visited since 1986. I occasionally think that my attitude toward being a composer in society is still quite Canadian. I still hold on to the idea, despite much evidence to the contrary in the USA, that being a composer of new and unique music is a valued profession. When I lived up here, the Canadian gov’t was actively trying to find it’s own unique Canadian Culture and they poured $$ into the arts. It’s not quite like that now, but government support is still way more than any artist in the US is used to. I do believe Canada would still rather support it’s artists than build tanks and robot jets.

I think it’s also a question of education. As far as I know the arts are still a valued part of public education up here. I think the reason why there are so many people listening to music on their cell phones (at least in NYC) is because people are no longer taught how to listen to music. Sure, Cage said all sound is music, but that worked because at some point he was taught how to listen to music and could then appreciate those same qualities in all sound. Without some sort of guidance at a young age (or at least hearing live music at the community level) music gets reduced to a snappy rhythm, a melody with a hook, and a brand name. All things adequately conveyed over the dime sized speaker of a cellphone.

But I digress. Actually, not really. It seems, on the surface anyway, that the general aesthetic standards in this small but large country called Canada, or at least this city of Toronto, are of a higher standard than what I’m used to in the USA, or at least NYC. Maybe I’m just being a Toronto-phile, or seeing things through 20 year old memories, but things just feel quite different up here than they do in The States.

There are two dear composer friends I have stayed in touch with over these many years. One is the pluderphonicist & altered sax player John Oswald, and the other, bassoonist turned suling (Indonesian flute) master Andrew Timar. John takes every opportunity to do something new and absolutely unique (while still managing to coax strange and wonderful sounds from his plastic reeded saxophone as he did 30 years ago). Andrew has dedicated himself to Indonesian music, specifically the suling, even to the point where he no longer composes on a regular basis. But, damn, that guy can play suling, and is a wellspring of knowledge about most things Indonesian.

Here is a bit of Andrew Timar playing suling (with the gamelan I helped start 25 years ago, The Evergreen Club), in a piece by Lou Harrison (google readers see below):

And here is a video excerpt of John Oswald’s one-person “opera” (with the wonderful Susanna Hood performing).

What a couple of weeks it’s been! First there was Okkyung’s concert (see below). Then from Nov. 12-16 I was up at the Kaatsbaan Dance Center, near Bard College, working with choreographer Erica Essner on a new piece. It was wonderful spending 5 hours a day improvising with sound files (thanks to Ableton Live) and creating a score at the same time as the dance. I much prefer that to having one follow the other, which is usually the way it works. Here are some things I came up with.

and

I then came back and went right into rehearsal for a performance of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, which was performed at Here Theater Nov 19 & 20. I created the score, which was more than just incidental music, and performed it live, mostly on my glass instruments. DT’s language is quite musical and the actors did a great job. DT created it as a radio play and that is the way we performed it, with the actors sitting at a table with microphones. I was behind them with my glass menagerie.

Also on Tuesday, Nov 20, Neil Dufallo & Joan LaBarbara came by my apartment to do some recordings of our trio. All my glass was still at the theater so I ending up playing electronics and we sounded something like this.

Then Chris McIntyre came by and the four of us sketched out the rep for Ne(x)tworks spring series at the Chelsea Art Museum. Nothing is official yet, so I won’t give any details. But suffice it to say it’s going to be yet another wonderful season for NxW.

Then Thanksgiving rolled on by, which involved a few days of driving around eating too much. But a pleasant break.

Now, back to work.