well-weathered music

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.

Just because someone is paranoid doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong.

(Something I learned by living through Watergate.)

YIKES!

Okay. Now I’ve heard everything. Literally.

Our planet Earth is our “everything.” Every thing comes from it and every thing returns to it. Now, thanks to MIT seismologist John Bullitt, we can hear our home planet.

This is the sound of seismic waves traveling through the Earth’s crust from distant earthquakes over a three week period. Bullitt sped it up 10,000 times to bring it into the human auditory and temporal range.

And there’s more where that came from. Earth as the ultimate resonator. Hear more here, and buy his CD here.

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.

There is a wonderful post by Daniel Wolf over at his excellent weblog, Renewable Music, about the joys of private music-making. It made me realize how much I miss having a piano. Playing Satie at the end of a long day always cleared my head. Particularly the Gnossienne, especially #4. I can feel my body relaxing just thinking about it. Thanks Daniel.

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’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.

Ain’t the internets grand? I just came across some things from my distant past. Okay, not too distant, but significant. Actually, 2008 marks yet another 20th anniversary for me; 1988 was the first year I became active in the SF Bay Area’s new music scene (I moved there mid-’87). So it’s only fitting that I find youtube videos of my first major performance activity out there. Paul Dresher & Rinde Eckert’s opera Power Failure, from 1988-89. This was my first work as keyboardist in the Paul Dresher Ensemble. (I worked with Paul on another 4 or 5 of his projects through the late ’90s.)

Power Failure was a wonderful piece with an unfortunate title. From this I have learned to never put the word “failure,” or anything negative, in a title; it does not lend itself to success. But I had a great time working on this piece. This is where I first met Rinde, an amazing performer, and tenor John Duykers, who has gone on to be one of my most frequent and most treasured collaborators. This is also where I first met and played with wind player/composer Ned Rothenberg (Ned and I are finally talking of collaborating together; glass & shakuhachi).

So here are excerpts from Power Failure. I think they are too short, and you can’t see us on-stage musicians (Paul Dresher, electric guitar & keyboard; Gene Refkin, drums; Ned Rothenberg, winds; and me, keyboards). Rinde, John, and Stephanie Friedman are the wonderful singers.

Power Failure, part 1

Power Failure, part 2