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

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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:

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.

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!

Here is a picture of Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley I took backstage at Zankel Hall the other night. Mort & I went to hear the American Composers Orchestra perform Terry’s Remember This O Mind, for string orchestra and Terry’s own singing and synth playing. The only (nice) thing I can say about the evening was that Terry’s piece was a breath a fresh air. It was beautiful in the purest sense of the word. The tuning issues between Terry’s live playing/singing and the orchestra were handled very sensitively.

I’m trying hard to not write about what I thought of the other pieces on the program. I was basically left with this question: if one likes noise, what does one call sound one doesn’t like? Let’s just say I was looking for that word most of the evening. (Although, Uri Caine’s piece was quite fun. Man, can that guy play piano!)

Well, back to M&T. It was great to see these two old friends together. They were each so happy to see each other. I’m sure neither of them thought, back in the early San Francisco Tape Music Center days (the early/mid 1960s), that they would each go on to have such a profound, and different, influence on modern music. Lately, Terry has been gracious enough to tell people that Mort actually commissioned him to write In C. Mort is grateful for the accolade but has said “commission” might be too strong a word, since there was no money involved. But he does remember asking Terry to write a piece for a Tape Center concert, and that piece was In C. Mort has a very funny story about the premiere evening, but I could not do it justice here. Although he does remember it as being “anything but minimalist.”

Here are the two gray-bearded wonders.

I’m working on two rather involved posts at the moment (and some music, always), but don’t have time to finish either of them. In the meantime, let me just list some of the really great concerts I’ve seen in the last week. (And, of course, no time to link all these names.)

A wonderful quartet with John King, George Lewis, Zeena Parkins, and Fast Forward. Also joined by the amazing pianist Jenny Lin and the beautiful voice of soprano Charlotte Dobbs. This was part of the “Experiments in the Studio” music series (in which I’ll be performing in May) at the Cunningham Dance Studios. If you know any of these players, you know how good they can be, and they were all in top form this night.

Composer, soprano, accordionist Kamala Sankaram presented a short excerpt of a one-woman music theater piece she is working on, accompanied by her band Squeezebox. At the Here Art Center in SoHo. Too good to be so short. I look forward to seeing more.

My buddy Miya Masaoka had a busy weekend but I was only able to see one of her events. This night she presented “For Birds, Planes and Cello.” A beautifully constructed ambient score with the always superb cellist, Alex Waterman. At the White Box gallery in Chelsea.

Then if that wasn’t enough, Anthony Coleman presented an evening of his very complex, mostly string ensemble, recent pieces topped off with a very eloquent solo piano improvisation. Part of a new music series at the Brecht Forum.

Ya’ gotta love NY.

I was sent this nice photo of me playing last month at City Center, at the Gala for Career Transition for Dancers. (I don’t know the photographer.)

These (below) were sent to me by Sheila Bunin, taken at a gig in Pomona, NY, a few months ago:

(By the way, the turkey baster is used for tuning.)

I spent last weekend up mid-state NY, visiting Foster Reed and his family. Foster runs New Albion Records, the venerable new music label that put out my only commercial CD, Song + Distance, back in 2001. He is yet another ex-pat from the Bay area. He asked me up to play in his storefront in Hudson during the town’s annual, festive Winter Walk. He’s only had the storefront since this summer so this was a first for him. It worked out quite well. “The public” (oh, them) is always fascinated by music on glass. I’m always encouraged by the fact they stay around in these non-concert settings. They come for the glass but stay for the music. And the kids! They are always mesmerized by it. It was yet another in my long line of odd gigs. It turned out quite well for Foster as well. He sold a bunch of my CDs (probably more than he’s sold all year) and increased awareness of his presence in the Hudson community.

I find it so funny that a new music label has an actual (as opposed to virtual) storefront. Especially given the direction music distribution is going. It’s of course mainly his business office and it just happens to be a storefront. Foster and his wife, Trisha, are right there on the cutting edge of digital distribution. The day I was there, they had just committed their entire catalogue to be part of Naxos’ subscription service, and had also just signed on with a national library streaming service. They seem to be focusing on streaming sites, at the moment, by way of avoiding having to deal with mechanical rights. (Foster mentioned what a drag it is to have to calculate multiple percentage of single cents twice a year). He also had some suggestions for direct artists’ pay sites, but that will have to wait for a future visit. They had to leave early the next morning to go pick up their new baby in Guatemala (!). But he & I will be continuing our conversation soon. He’s interested in releasing a volume 2 of my music. (Perfect timing! I have lots to say!)

One more thing, totally out of the blue. But over on Neil Dufallo’s blog, he writes of an overheard conversation. Someone said: “Once you’re a pickle, you’re a f***ing pickle — you can’t go back to cucumber, knuckle-head.”

NYC folk philosophy.

Oh, one more thing. You folks who read my blog through google reader missed a couple of audio files in my last post. They took only one of the three and put it at the end. They must still be working out the kinks. So head on over to my site for the real thing. Wouldn’t you much prefer to be reading this on faux wrinkled paper?