well-weathered music

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.

I performed last night and friday night in Okkyung Lee & Andrew Lampert’s show at The Kitchen. The show was quite wonderful. Okkyung’s music was scored for a quartet of cello (Okkyung), violin (Cornelius Dufallo), string bass (Trevor Dunn), and me (glass, analog electronics, toy piano, & computer). Andrew Lampert’s contribution was a sort of performance filmmaking, with a number of 16 & super 8 projectors projecting on all 4 walls. Andy had 2 assistants, Emily Davis & Jared Abramson, moving projectors around, changing films & light filters, and splicing film loops on the spot. In one section Andy also projected directions and questions for us musicians. My 88 year old dad came to the show and said it reminded him of an event he saw at MoMA back in the mid ’60s. It sort of had that multi-media “happening” feel to it.

Okkyung’s compositions are wonderfully unique, with beautifully flowing, through-composed melodies and rhythmic cycles emerging in and out of group and solo improvisations. She chooses her musicians carefully. One must have the ability to go from the written page to a non-directed improvisation without it sounding like there’s been a sharp turn in the road. It’s nothing like having a “head” then 16 bars to blow. Nor is it anything like interpreting an aleatoric score. One must be a composer to play her music. One must know that when she says “just improvise,” she’s not giving you permission to use every trick you have, but to place your sounds in the context of the moment and to play exactly what you believe is needed, no more, no less.

Her music fits perfectly into the way I have been thinking about composition & improvisation for a long time now. I believe (as Cage did) that the act of creating is a series of questions and answers. The questions one asks oneself when creating any music, through-composed or improvised, are all subsets of the same basic question, “What happens now?” (High, low; fast, slow; sound, silence; etc…) The only difference between composing and improvising is the amount of time it takes to answer these questions. When composing, there is time to mull things over and even go back and change your mind. With improvisation one has to come up with an answer almost as soon as one gets a hint of what the question might actually be. The act of composing relies on the intelligence of one’s brain. The act of improvising relies on the intelligence of one’s entire body. One acts before the brain even has time to form the question.

I used to study bodywork with an old Kurdish rug merchant (in Oakland), and he used to say, “The brain likes to think it’s in charge. But the brain does not tell the heart to pump blood, or the lungs to take in air. All our organs have intelligence, and the brain is simply another organ.” This bodywork, called Breema, was taught technically yet practiced intuitively. The structure of the session is set (start at the feet, end with the head), but what one does in each session is improvised.

I always have a hard time calling myself a composer and improviser. I see them as essentially the same. It’s just that when one sits down to create something “through-composed,” one of our internal organs gets to spend more time with our questions than the others, and when we improvise, all of our organs get to listen & react. Perhaps that’s what makes Okkyung’s music so special; “improvisation” and “composition” end up just being words and every part of every one listens and creates.

I am now trying to write here at least once a week; aiming for every sunday, but monday will have to do. I’m playing in a wonderful concert at The Kitchen this coming friday & saturday. The sublime cellist/composer Okkyung Lee is presenting two evenings of her work with filmaker Andrew Lampert and a quartet with Okkyung, me, Cornelius Dufallo, and Trevor Dunn. I’m very much looking forward to that. I’m sure it will be a wonderful world.

I realized I don’t listen to much music (except when I’m playing) but I did yesterday. Here’s what I’ve been listening to:
The Shaggs. If you’ve never heard them, check ‘em out. They were a teenage sister pop trio in the ’70s. They don’t play in time or in tune and it’s wonderful. They were Zappa’s favorite band.

Terry Riley’s The Descending Moonshine Dervishes. One of Terry’s solo electric organ and tape delay concerts from 1975. I remember seeing him perform one of these pieces at the old Kitchen back around that time (part of a four day series with Lamonte Young, Jon Hassell, and David Rosenboom). Terry’s music is amazing, inspiring stuff. No one pulls off “minimalism,” improvisation, and sonic exploration like he does.

(By the way, that series at the Kitchen was amazing. I believe it was 1976, right about the time I started working with Jon Hassell. I must have the program or poster for it somewhere. I hear Jon just got a deal with ECM records, so maybe we’ll be hearing more from him. Check out his new site, it’s very interesting. For a while there, I thought LA had swallowed him up.)

And right now I’m listening to some old AMM recordings from the ’60s. An improvisation trio with Cornelius Cardew, Keith Rowe, & Eddie Prevost. I find this stuff to be very ear cleansing.

One more thing. I came across my (signed) copy of Lou Harrison’s Music Primer (Editions Peters) the other day. This and Cage’s Silence were my 2 music bibles when I was a young composer. Here is an excerpt that I seem to have taken to heart.

“Making an instrument is one of music’s greatest joys. Indeed, to make an instrument is in some strong sense to summon the future. It is, as Robert Duncan has said of composing, “A volition. To seize from the air its forms.” Almost no pleasure is to be compared with the first tones, tests & perfections of an instrument one has just made. Nor are all instruments invented & over with, so to speak. The world is rich with models - but innumerable forms, tones & powers await their summons from the mind & hand. Make an instrument - you will learn more in this way than you can imagine.”

Speaking of which, I am in the middle of re-building (or re-arranging) my glass harp. Should get back to it.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to document the rather odd gigs I get every now and again. Tomorrow evening I’m playing at the 3,000 seat City Center as part of “Dance Rocks!” the gala fundraiser for Career Transition for Dancers. I have a prerecorded score for a dance by Ann Marie DeAngelo and then I’ll be performing live on my glass instruments as underscoring for a tribute to some successfully transitioned dancers. I thought I’d be playing much longer but it turns out to be quite short. Here are some of the rather polite, rather Satie-esque, notes I’ve put together:

And here is the Playbill blurb on the evening. I didn’t know I was a Broadway star.

I’m finally getting my ‘06 taxes done. I met with my accountant last week and, as he looked over my numbers, he said, “You didn’t buy much equipment last year.” I said, “Nope. I’m finally starting to use the stuff I already have.” It’s true. Now that I’m finally spending time in my apartment (being a bachelor will do that), I actually have the time and the room to set up all the audio equipment and musical instruments I’ve acquired over the years. Joan LaBarbara was up here a few weeks ago for a Ne(x)tworks rehearsal. The first thing she said when she walked in was “There’s a lot of glass in here.” And that’s just the beginning. I’m even pulling out all my old hardware midi modules that are basically antiques now, but still sound and still have all the various tunings I programmed into them over the years. Once everything is working and talking to one another I’ll decide what gets sent out to the eBay pasture.

In a way, that’s also what’s going on with my composer brain. Pulling out old ideas, getting them talking with new ideas, and throwing out what doesn’t fit anymore. That’s the thing about having had active careers in three very different locations (the third actually being in the present tense). There is no one other than myself who can see the thread that joins them. That’s one of the reasons for this website. I realized no one here in NY is familiar with my Toronto work (except for the early Glass Orchestra recordings). There are a few SF Bay Area ex-pats here who know of my work out there. But the majority of folks I work with here in NY don’t know my history. (My buddy Neil Dufallo was surprised to hear that I’ve written 2 operas.) But of course this is no one’s fault but my own, and perhaps not even a fault at all. It’s the risk one takes when one up and moves every 10-15 years. That seems to have been my M.O.; get a career going strong in one place then, poof!, move on out to someplace new. Perhaps it’s one way of returning to the “beginner’s mind” that zen buddhists talk about. (I’m sure there are more productive ways of achieving that state.) It’s been 5 years since I moved here (NYC) and it feels like I’m still just starting. Which is actually an exciting state to be in, as long as I don’t start thinking about Sisyphus.

Here, in a nutshell, are the places I’ve been.
CT & NYC (youth - high school): Skipping classes in high school to go hear new music concerts, up & down town. Studied electronic music (a huge moog). Put together my first glass instrument.
Toronto and NYC (York University and my 20s; ‘75-’86): Glass Orchestra. Helped start the downtown Toronto new music scene. Worked with Cage & Tenney.
San Francisco Bay Area (’88- ‘01): much music for dance; part of that whole “post-industrial urban primitive” movement. Performance Art stuff. Paul Dresher Ensemble. Bay Guardian calls me a “sampler guru.” (Oh yes, and wrote two operas.)
NYC: Here & now. (It’s not history yet, so can’t quite “nutshell” it.)

Actually, Camus thought Sisyphus was a happy guy. Perhaps he was right.

Haven’t written for a while. Will soon. I just uploaded some writing to my “About” page about the instruments I play and added this audio clip of a piece I recorded for my New Albion “Song + Distance” CD (2001). It didn’t make it to the final CD; I’m not sure why. But it is lovely and quite representative of the music I was writing/improvising at the time (ah, California!). The working title was “Glass Harp & Toy Piano,” which is what it is. I’m playing glass harp with my left hand and toy piano with my right. (There is no overdubbing.) Any ideas for a title would be appreciated.

As Cage knew well, time is the commonality in sound & silence. Taken a step further, it’s easy to see that temporal structure is the commonality in all music, no matter from which culture or even from which species. Generally speaking, it could be said that the ways of organizing pitch is what distinguishes each music tradition, while the ways of organizing time is what unifies them. All sound/silence exists in time and what turns it into “music” or “sound art” is the acknowledgment of some sort of temporal landmark. Mozart’s cadences, Indian music’s “sam,” gamelan’s gong structure are all ways of saying, “we have arrived here and now we’re off again.”

I’m thinking of this these days because I have a job transcribing some of Gerry Mulligan’s solos and have been struck not only by the beauty of his playing, but by the beauty of his compositional structures. One’s not really aware of these structures unless you sit there counting out the beats and the measures. That’s one of the reasons I love Indian music concerts; most of the audience is following the rhythmic cycle with hand gestures. But in most temporal art, structure is much more subliminal. A friend of mine once sped up The Rite of Spring to where the entire piece lasted about 5 minutes. You no longer heard pitches, rhythms and orchestration. You were able to listen to the structure of the piece as a you would a melody. Jim Tenney writes about these sort of perceptual “gestalts” in his Meta-Hodos.

As I wrote out the structure of Mulligan’s K-4 Pacific in numbers of measures (8,1 // 8,4,1 // 8,4,8,4, etc), it reminded me of some of Cage’s pre-1950 rhythmic structures as well as that of some flute music from Borneo I analyzed years ago. Perhaps this says more about my analytic process than it does about these musics. But I do believe that if we expand our perceptual gestalt and eliminate those pesky (and subjective) issues like “emotion” and “content,” we are left with some fundamental truths about perception and communication.

Am I being too simplistic here? What do you think? (You can write comments if you’d like.)

I realized that since this blog is filled with memories from, and references to, my 30+ years in the “new music biz” (”biz?” yeah, right), that “well-weathered” could perhaps be seen as a description as the present state of my music making. Not so. I have been using the term “Well-Weathered Music” as my “business” name since the mid-80s. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1987 (uh-oh, more memories) I stopped by the SF Art Institute to see the amazing Diego Rivera mural they have there. During that visit, I noticed there was a somewhat beat up old upright piano sitting _outside_ in the courtyard overlooking SF. I started playing and found its sound to be quite wonderful and quirky.

I then started returning there once a week to improvised a 45 minute site- and instrument-specific piece. I titled this series of guerrilla performances The Well-Weathered Piano. Unfortunately I was not so into documenting my activities at that point so I have no record of it except for a few fliers I passed around to friends. I did, however, enjoy the thought of music being well-weathered. If something could be well-tempered, it could certainly be well-weathered. From that point on I started placing my music under the Well-Weathered Music moniker.

It also, for me, has a reference to the constantly evolving material of glass, whose musical use I’ve devoted myself to. Although not literally “weathered” by the outside elements, many of my instruments are weathered by performance, constantly evolving into new instruments (I believe you non glass-ites call them “broken glass”). Of course, violins & wine also improve with age. But their evolution is not caused by anything quite as drastic as being left outside in the rain (or pummeled with mallets and marbles). Come to think of it, it might just be time to add my compositional processes and improvisational strategies to that list of “things that are well-weathered.” With an emphasis on well, of course.

Last night I went to the opening of the graphic score exhibition at The Kitchen. There’s nothing like starting the season with a gathering of one’s clan. I was there only for the last half hour but it definitely felt like a NY new music “everyone who’s anyone” kind of thing. I won’t mention everyone I talked to (you know who you are), but I do wish I had more than just a brief greeting with Alison Knowles. I find her work and history fascinating. She has recently been making these wonderful handmade-paper musical instruments that sound great and look beautiful. I first met her years ago during one of Phil Corner’s all too infrequent visits to NY and I tagged along for dinner at her place. I must add Alison to my “must call” list. I’d love to find a way to work with her sometime. Paper & glass would be a great combination.

At any rate, The Kitchen exhibit is wonderful! Check it out if you can. It’s difficult to pick out any specific work to write about; everything there is very cool. Although the two video works (by Michael J. Schumacher and Marina Rosenfeld, respectively) stand out, if only for their built in temporal aspects. Scores on paper can certainly represent time in some very exact ways, but now with video, time can not only be shared by sound & silence but also by graphics. And speaking of sound & silence, I was surprised there wasn’t even a page of any Cage scores. It would have been nice to have seen an actual manuscript page of his. But there were some other older pieces I was unaware of; the Lucier and Ashley for example. And there were a few pages from Cardew’s Treatise. Overall, a very well curated show.

I’m very much looking forward to playing many of these pieces (including Michael’s video work) in the upcoming Ne(x)tworks concert. We’ll be playing select scores from this exhibit on October 10th at The Kitchen. Part of the concert series associated with this exhibition.

Speaking of graphic scores. I just rediscovered the 2 copies of the old Source Magazine I picked up on eBay last year. Amazing. One has the entire score to Cardew’s The Great Learning and the other an actual page from Dick Higgin’s The Thousand Symphonies. More on these later.

In my post about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (I just added a video, below), I mentioned they could well be the offspring of Glenn Branca. I think I misspoke. The more appropriate connection is with the honorable Captain Beefheart. I think it’s a “mass of sound” vs. “rhythmic complexity” issue. CB & SGM seem to work with those two aspects equally, while GB works more with the former. (Then of course there’s the whole singing thing.)

I found a bunch of the good captain’s old videos on youtube the other day. Genius. I’ve included a relatively recent one (1980). I also found a solo Branca video from ‘78. He is of course known for his huge amplified ensembles, not quite right for youtube viewing, but this solo comes across well.

But, man, that Captain B! I just can’t get enough of him. It’s like It is beautifully complex chamber music.

Ashtray Heart from 1980.

Glenn Branca solo 1978

(Check out the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum video, a few posts down.)