Boring Like A Drill.

The rather wonderful Other Minds Archive has put up a concert by Philip Glass in San Jose from 1978:

This program include [sic] a number of pieces for organ, written in Glass’ trademark minimalist style, as well as a piece for orchestra and electronics.

You may have noticed that the wording of that sentence is a little bit slippery. The information page for this recording is of no real help, listing an “unidentified piece for orchestra and electronics” by Philip Glass, followed by four “unidentified pieces” for organ, also by Glass.

I find it hard to believe that the first piece is by Glass at all – in that style, for those instruments – so both what it is and who wrote it are mysteries to me. The organ pieces are obviously Glass: Music In Contrary Motion, “Bed” and “Knee Play 4” from Einstein on the Beach, Fourth Series, Part 2 (aka Dance No.2), and, and….

What the hell is that second piece? None of the descriptions in the list of compositions on Glass’ website seem to fit. Is this a solo arrangement of a piece I’ve never heard, or some of his theatre music? It’s too cold to go out to the library, a few minutes’ googling was no help at all, and listening to free samples of likely candidates on Amazon drew a blank.

Here are excerpts from the two mystery pieces:

1. unknown piece probably not by Philip Glass, halfway through its 24-minute duration
2. unknown organ piece by Philip Glass, start of a 13-minute performance

I presume the organ is being played by Glass himself. Having grown up on his glossy studio productions from the 1980s, it’s sort of nice to hear him hitting all those bum notes here.

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I’d like to apologise for a fundamental error in my review of the Crumb Total Immersion day. I mistakenly referred to the composer as George Crumb throughout. George Crumb is, of course, the famous cartoonist. The composer’s name is Robert Crumb, as correctly identified by BBC Radio 3.

It’s good to see Radio 3 diligently pursuing its remit to “inform and educate the audience about music and culture”, although when you try to follow the BBC’s own link to its Radio 3 website it in fact takes to you BBC Three, a television station dedicated to programmes like Bashing Booze Birds and Britain’s Most Embarrassing Pets.

There seems to be a webmonkey at the Beeb who gets easily confused over names.

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George Crumb turned eighty in October, and so was dragged across the Atlantic for the BBC to make a fuss of him for one day of the year. Actually, he probably came willingly, as the night concluded with what must be a rare concert of his orchestral music. He seemed pretty cheerful, seated up in the stalls doing that Rat Pack style double-pointing to the performers at the end of each piece.

I wrote a bit about Crumb’s music earlier in the year after hearing the Nash Ensemble perform it at the Proms:

Crumb’s music really needs to be heard live to appreciate it, not only for the theatrical elements of its performance, or for the spatial placement of sounds (more than once the musicians had to relocate from the stage to one of the balconies to achieve an elusive, distant quality to their sound), but for the subtlety and complexity of the sounds he specifies.

The Proms gig included Claire Booth singing Ancient Voices of Children, also played here by the Guildhall ensemble, with the soprano Anna Patalong (and a real, live boy this time), in between Joanna MacGregor playing the piano works A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 and Volume 1 of Makrokosmos.

The last time I heard Makrokosmos it was part of an ill-judged mix of music and visuals by Michael Kieran Harvey. Witnessing it performed again reminded me the extent to which Crumb’s music seems to be held together almost by the sheer force of his personality, and how dependent it is on musicians to hold the greater purpose of its disparate elements in focus. MacGregor’s performance was much less theatrical (or histrionic) than Harvey’s, but found and sustained the drama in the music.

The evening gig was a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra of Crumb’s orchestral music – in fact the only three mature orchestral works he has written – culminating in the massive Star-Child. Pure logistical difficulties aside, it seems clear why Crumb tends to keep his music on a more intimate scale. The often episodic nature of his music can be difficult for such a large group of musicians to follow without losing momentum.

The 1967 piece Echoes of Time and the River (Echoes II) is a processional of varying sounds and textures produced by small, discrete groups within the orchestra, to the extent of moving some of the percussionists and brass players on, off, and across the stage in various configurations. In effect, Crumb was attempting to work with the orchestra to his usual scale, while taking advantage of the wider pallette of available sounds. The slow choreography of the musician’s movements added a theatrical, ritualistic aspect that was only slightly more awkward in reality than it doubtless was in the imagination.

A Haunted Landscape (1984) must be more successful in combining all the distinctive facets of Crumb’s music into a seamless whole, because I always remember it as being more conventional than it really is. On the other hand, Star-Child (1977) works hard to present a semblance of cohesiveness between its seven continuous sections. The piece is often referred to as Ivesian, and amongst the many parallels you could make out were the cosmic scope of the music, and its seemingly rough-hewn structure.

The entire 35 or so minutes is suspended from a repeated “music of the spheres” played by the string section throughout, oblivious to all the other goings-on; they form a separate orchestra, with their own conductor. The remaining sections of the orchestra, plus a truckload of extra percussion, half-a-dozen brass players in the balcony, a male speaking choir armed with handbells, and two children’s choirs, require between one and three conductors between them to keep everything together, depending on the music’s complexity. Oh, and there’s a Vox Clamans In Deserto recited antiphonally between a soprano and a trombonist.

Star-Child boldly reaches for profundity with its Latin texts and massed voices and bells, and for once Crumb uses the full force of the orchestra for emphatic, dramatic power. It’s an anomaly in Crumb’s canon, the way he uses brute force and awe to move his audience here, particularly in the apocalyptic middle sections. Thankfully his musical allusions never get too overt or too literary, but the piece is really left to stand or fall on the message Crumb wishes it to convey. The performance itself couldn’t be faulted, but in experiencing it I felt like I was witnessing an attempt to make manifest a grand vision best realised in the imagination, brought to life as best as one can.

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(Continued from Part 1)

I have to admit I’m not crazy about the music of Iancu Dumitrescu, Horaţiu Rădulescu, or any of the other Romanian spectralist composers (and I’m sure someone will berate me for lumping those two names together in the same movement). It all has a general tendency towards the shrill and self-important. But a lot of people think it’s Very Important and love it very much, and who am I to doubt them? The week of Spectrum XXI concerts brought together local musicians, the Hyperion Ensemble from Romania and the Talea Ensemble from New York, all extremely capable musicians. That’s part of what makes the amateurism of the whole enterprise almost endearing.

Some of the amateurism was pardonable. The first thing you saw when approaching a Spectrum XXI concert was a bunch of musicians huddled around a rental van with Romanian plates smoking like chimneys (Ana-Maria Avram borrowed my friend’s lighter, and never gave it back). Then there was the trombonist at the final concert, taking snapshots of the audience with his digital camera after the show. And between each piece. And during the music, when he didn’t have anything to do.

Other aspects were less so: the first ten minutes of the first concert was spent messing around with the lighting. Trying to set an appropriate mood, Dumitrescu and a couple of other musicians eventually managed to turn out all the lights in the hall, before turning them all on again, one by one. The fears raised by the large number of world premieres announced in the programme were largely founded. Across the concert series it seemed that the strongest pieces were usually the oldest ones. Works like Dumitrescu’s percussion trio Multiples (VII) from 1972 displayed a unique and innovative approach to sonority, compositional method and structure. Many, but not all, of the new pieces sounded like little more than undifferentiated dabbling with a particular instrumental effect, with a focus on timbre at the expense of all other considerations.

These weaknesses were most obvious in Dumitrescu’s world premiere Sound Sculpture (II) for solo piano. Prefaced with a short talk by Avram explaining how difficult the piece is to play, it sounded uncannily like the fabled Three Discontinuous Movements by Rose Bob, as performed at its world premiere by Madame Berthe Trépat (Gold Medal, Grenoble): a long, tedious series of unconnected chords and clusters separated by elaborate pedalling gambits to filter the piano’s resonant overtones.

The notorious false starts were present and correct. The ensemble would begin, only to be halted by an aggrieved Dumitrescu a minute later, then try again. This behaviour wasn’t limited to his own music. His disrupted Avram’s world premiere of Telesma VII for percussion and electronics because he wasn’t happy with the sound mix, and wasted several minutes of everyone’s time futzing around with the faders, producing various distorted noises until he was satisfied.

The world premiere of Dumitrescu’s Infinity (II) for bass clarinet and ensemble lasted right up to the entrance of the bass clarinet itself, whereupon Dumitrescu broke off from conducting to engage clarinettist Tim Hodgkinson in a brief but vehement argument on stage, before storming out past the audience announcing that the performance was cancelled. The expression on the ring-in cellist’s face was priceless. A little while later Dumitrescu returned, then excused himself again to pace the courtyard for a few minutes more, finally coming back inside to conduct the next item on the programme.

At one point between pieces he gave an impassioned speech to the audience about the importance of creating new forms of expression, and that despite their limited funding he and his fellow musicians were forging the music of the future. This is the most pernicious aspect of Dumitrescu’s amateurism: the confusion of isolation with supremacy. Judging from the music and the attitude on display, his increasing exposure to the world has only entrenched his insularity within a growing circle of acolytes. Such insularity leaves an artist vulnerable to their greatest weaknesses, to which Dumitrescu is evidently succumbing and which he must address, unless he is content to remain nothing more than the figurehead of his own cult.

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It was hard to shake off the feeling that I was in the midst of a cult when attending last month’s Spectrum XXI series of concerts. Before and during the gigs, which were essentially a vehicle for the composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram, little things kept niggling at my consciousness.

Dumitrescu’s scrappy, free-hosted website welcoming you to “the great experimental composer’s home page” conjures up memories of Madame Berthe Trépat (Gold Medal, Grenoble) from Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch. The programme announcement – on a different free-hosted website – makes the rather suprising promise of “World and UK premières by Dumitrescu, Avram, Diaz de Leon, Hodgkinson, Pape, Tsuda, Scelsi, Xenakis”, but in a bait-and-switch move favoured by many cults the actual gigs featured nothing by the last four composers. That’s OK though, because the link to the London programme from the main page doesn’t work.

If you look on the web for reviews of Dumitrescu’s work, you’ll probably first find panegyrics from Harry Halbreich and/or Ben Watson; two critics whose tastes tend to the cultish and whose praise tends to the fulsome. Watson himself was in the audience for a couple of the gigs, and occasionally stepped up front in his green suit and tennis shoes to recite some sound poetry to the faithful. This did not help to elucidate the music much.

More frequently, Ana-Maria Avram would introduce each piece in an attempt to convey to the punters just how important the music was, that they were about to hear. This well-intentioned but misplaced advocacy also brought back memories of Madame Berthe Trépat (Gold Medal, Grenoble), and her introduction to the stage by Valentin (“it represented for contemporary music one of the most profound innovations to which the composer, Madame Trépat, had given the name “prophetic syncretism.”)

As in Madame Trépat’s recital, there was a high proportion of world premieres: I count a whopping seventeen across the four London gigs in the programme, from a tour which had already been to Brussells and Paris. This doesn’t inspire confidence, not in either Dumitrescu’s or Avram’s quality control nor that all the performances will be as polished as they could be. In this and other ways, their enthusiasm would sometimes undermine their strengths as musicians.

(Continued in Part 2.)

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After the ceremony there’s a dinner hosted by the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose name is Rocco. He wears handcrafted alligator cowboy boots with his black tuxedo. Marcel [Proost] asks him about the boots, which are, of course, a major conversation piece.

“You wrassle that ‘gator yourself?”

No, says the Chairman. He bought them in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had not known that they had alligators in Jackson Hole, but it could be they’ve migrated there to work in the hotel or food service business.

The Chairman is reputed to be a very wealthy man and a fan of theater, baseball, horse racing and country music, in other words our indigenous American beaux arts, our native Kunstwerke. Someone there tells me he contemplated buying the Cincinnati Reds but thought the asking price of one billion too high. Perhaps he could just buy the NEA for half that amount and not have to deal with the flamers in Congress. That would be an exemplary form of the great American tradition of privatizing.

That’s an excerpt from a recent entry in John Adams‘ blog, Hell Mouth. Yes. John “Nixon In China, Short Ride In A Fast Machine” Adams. (Note to self: check out some music he’s written in the past fifteen years or so.)

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Please Mister Please is up and running again, with your old favourites and a welcome return by Mister Buddy Greco. Beats me why there’s a blank space above this paragraph, so let’s just say I was trying to build up suspense.

Also re-uploaded, Real Characters and False Analogues: twelve pieces for microtonal piano, all available for streaming or download. Blogging is ready to recommence, and the rest of the music will be up again shortly. Everything else seems pretty much intact, but there should (hopefully) be some improvements coming soon. This includes the long-promised writeup of the Dumitrescu gigs from, oh, a month ago now.

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Regular update-type stuff is on hold while I change servers. It seems like several million Chinese punters made a common mistake and have eaten up just about all of my bandwidth. Enjoy the piano music, guys!

Also, RIP Maryanne Amacher – the link’s worth it for the photo of what I always imagined was a typical audience reaction. I mentioned this on Twitter but haven’t had a chance to write anything substantial. (Also haven’t had chance to put Twitter link on my website.)

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In the early days of the internet, I used to get email every now and then from deluded fanboys who had mistaken me for a different Ben Harper. Of course, I always replied. That hasn’t happened for years, but last week I got fan mail from none other than the King of the Delta Blues, Robert Johnson. Apparently the afterlife now has email, but not Google.

Mr Johnson’s remarks were apposite, albeit misdirected:

Who did you have to blow to get to the level of semi-fame you have been handed? In your entire career there has not been one original moment. Your vocals and guitar playing, not to mention your lyrics, are dull, and the worst thing is your deep sense of self-importance. You seem humorless and totally self-involved. And you are just generally so AVERAGE. If it weren’t for your connections,you would be playing in a bar somewhere in the Inland Empire on a Sunday Jam night.

I know that your career was handed to you, so that’s nice for you. Since you have a soapbox on which to stand and pontificate, why not take just a minute and write something catchy? Be a pop star and a star-fucker (you already are), and stop with the fake social consciousness.

PS congratulations on those tattoos. They are about as original as your music.

Rolling over in my grave,
Robert Johnson

PS please stop playing my music. It’s embarassing.

As I said, I always reply to fan mail, regardless of whether it’s meant for me or not:

Dear Mr Johnson,

Thank you for your email. In reply to your question, I had to blow an old gypsy at the age of 12 to attain my present day success. Funnily enough, it took place at a crossroads. Ain’t that a kick in the pants? Thought you might find it amusing.

I know I got a pretty sweet deal going here so I have no intention of shitting where I eat and showing up my lack of talent by trying and failing to write something fun and tuneful. As for the fake social consciousness, well as you are aware I have next to no mojo so it’s the next best way to get laid. Sure, they’re those liberal arts student chicks who don’t shave in the right places but they’re hella uninhibited and besides when you’re almost drowning in pussy you don’t want to make waves, you get me? Same goes for the tattoos, they’re a real leg-spreader for the sheltered neurotic type that tend to hang out at my gigs.

To be honest, I have been working on some new material, its uploaded on my new website at http://www.cookylamoo.com/music/. I call it Klezska, its like a combination of klezmer, ska, and polka all wrapped up into one. I hardly need to keep typing cos I know you’re already downloading it, who can resist such an amazing blend of rockin styles. It’s pretty fucking awesome, though I say so myself.

Also, Eric Clapton and I have been talking about issuing a sort of customer loyalty/credit account card with your picture on it. You know, as a tribute. Is that cool?

You’re my idol,
Ben.Harper

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I was uh downloading some mp3s the other day when I found that one of the files contained a bad CD rip. Like, really bad: the track stuck and skipped for minutes on end, like the grotty copy of “Best Beer Songs” on heavy rotation down the local. I sat through the whole thing, waiting to see if enough material had survived intact to salvage the track in editing. It hadn’t.

So instead I removed the good material and, with a bit of judicious editing and mixing, made a new piece out of the rubbish. The result sounds like a good old-fashioned mid-1990s skipping-CD glitch piece, because that’s what it is. Like folk music, its value lies in authenticity instead of originality, created by its circumstances.

Ben.Harper – The Past #3
(9’02”, 14.97 MB, mp3)

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How are you supposed to appreciate a work of art that is intended to fail? The possibilities boil down to “Congratulations, it sucks!” or “Too bad it’s good.” György Ligeti’s only opera Le Grand Macabre premiered in 1978, a little late for the 60s era of irreverent deconstruction. Appropriately, he tried to outwit the Zeitgeist by writing an “anti-anti-opera”.

La Fura dels Baus‘ production of Le Grand Macabre is now being staged in London, where it has played upon, and been played by, the modern-day Zeitgeist. Self-consciously provocative, this production’s central conceit is a coup de théâtre that the action takes place on, around, and especially inside a naked, corpulent woman suspended apparenty in extremis. During the first scenes the audience gently chuckled, even more self-consciously, in an attempt to show the Catalans that these English punters were down with all the sexual innuendo and in-jokes. By and large, the critics were at pains to demonstrate that the show failed to shock them and that the whole affair felt a bit dated, really.

By half-time I was starting to feel that the opera was a fine museum piece, at odds with itself over whether to provoke or deflate its own pretensions. The second half won me over. Ligeti’s score is incredibly detailed – it functions more as a chorus commenting on the characters’ behaviour than as a backdrop to their singing – and the latter half contains some of his most unusual, affecting music. I’ve read some reviews that thought the spectacular set dominated procedings. Well, it did, but the singers were a match for it. Besides attacking their parts with lustily grotesque abandon, they gave remarkably active, physical performances. Depsite Ligeti’s qualms about expecting his performers to be actors and singers, one of the greatest pleasures in this production was how seamlessly the singing and the stage acrobatics blended together.

What really makes the opera succeed is how it fails to fail. For Ligeti, failure is not to be denounced but accepted, even embraced. Having survived two of Europe’s most ruthless attempts to impose an all-encompassing system upon society, admissions of fallibility must come as something of a relief. Who can be disappointed by the opera’s ending, that Death’s “sacred mission” ends in failure? The autocratic prince and his secret police are rendered humourous and charming by their ineffectualness. The chief of police’s fevered babbling becomes a coloratura tour de force; the drunkards’ carousing ends in ringing harmonies. Dross is transformed to gold, and we end up feeling affection for these caricatures.

Ligeti talked about “overcoming fear with alienation“. In a world where we are harried to be more and more fearful about less and less, Ligeti’s comedy has found new ways to prod at our nicely settled discomfort.

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A short video of Warren Burt and Catherine Schieve playing the last of Percy Grainger’s free music instruments, the Electric Eye Tone Tool:

Between 1954 and 1961, Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross worked on a machine called the Electric Eye Tone Tool. Years later, I was looking at the diagram of the Electric Eye machine in the Grainger Museum and I said, “That should be fairly easy to rebuild.” Well, it turns out it’s not fairly easy to rebuild but it was rebuildable.

The Electric Eye Tone Tool seems to be the first light-controlled synthesizer. Its oscillator circuits were transistorised (more stable than the old valve technology) and could be controlled graphically, simply by painting a score onto a transparent plastic sheet which could then be passed over the instrument’s array of photoelectric cells. Take that, UPIC.

Burt has written a brief study of the history of experimental music in Australia, reprinted at the Australian Music Centre website.

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Just the other day I was complaining about writing out conventional dots-on-lines music using notation software. “It needs a regular, steady beat, and needs to know how many beats will be in each bar before it begins to fill them with notes and silences.” I haven’t used notation software for years because it didn’t seem to want to let me do anything fun.

I generally don’t write for human beings anyway, so if I’m writing out musical instructions to be understood by a machine I’d rather use sequencer programs which can give you more direct control over your data. This means I end up punching in lots of numbers by hand* or writing scripts to generate the numbers for me. Now someone’s found out by accidentally hitting the tuplet key twice in Sibelius that you can create all sorts of groovy irrational rhythms and temporal illusions by building up stacks of multiple tuplets, like so (illustrations and sound samples follow).

* or by banging my head against the computer keyboard Don Music stylee.

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In case you don’t hear the music in your head when you read a score – and I sure don’t – I’ve made up a little electronic realisation of Redundens 1m for you to enjoy. It was written for melodica (and for Melodica!), but this recording uses an accordion soundfont because I couldn’t get a decent-sounding melodica soundfont for free anywhere on the internet, not even illegally. These particular accordion samples sound closer to a melodica than an accordion, anyway.

The series of works collectively titled Redundens was begun in 2001. All the pieces take Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano, Op.11 as their starting point: only the top line in Schoenberg’s pieces is retained as an unaccompanied melody (or as a list of pitch classes if you’re more technically-minded.) Each set of pieces uses a different method of encoding this melody; by pitch, register, timbre, duration, dynamics, or other means.

Redundens 1m keeps the same register and duration for each pitch class throughout the piece, determined by the nature of their initial appearances in the original. The range of the original has been compressed to suit a solo melodica with a range of two-and-a-half octaves. Certain notes have been selected by chance to be extended to four beats’ duration, so that they may overlap with following notes.

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(Part 1 is here.)

When I get to gigs at all, it’s because of what is being played rather than who is playing it. I’m not a huge Stravinsky fan but I had to go hear the Proms performance of Les noces, that fantastically eccentric piece for singers, chorus, four pianos and a load of percussion. My general lack of enthusiasm for Stravinsky comes partly from disappointment that he moved on to pursue other musical ideas after writing something as awesome as Les noces. It’s a sad, stupid blind spot I have which persuades me, when I hear this piece, not to listen to any of Stravinky’s other music for fear of spoiling it.

The real highlight for me for the Proms season was the late-night concert one Friday devoted to George Crumb. Crumb’s music really needs to be heard live to appreciate it, not only for the theatrical elements of its performance, or for the spatial placement of sounds (more than once the musicians had to relocate from the stage to one of the balconies to achieve an elusive, distant quality to their sound), but for the subtlety and complexity of the sounds he specifies.

These details can’t be fully captured on recordings. Just one example: the soprano begins and ends Ancient Voices of Children with her back to the audience, singing into the resonating strings of the amplified piano. The Nash Ensemble played these pieces superbly, keeping the technical details in focus without ever losing the dramatic and emotional impact of the music. Each piece ended with a long, reflective silence from the audience before breaking into applause. That’s another thing you don’t get to experience in recordings. Again, in the Royal Albert Hall the best place to appreciate all this was standing in the arena.

(Churlish footnote: Ancient Voices of Children has a part for a boy soprano. In the programme guide was the note, “Owing to the late hour of this concert it is not possible for a boy soprano to take part in tonight’s performance; the BBC is grateful to Amy Haworth for agreeing to take on this role at short notice.” Sounds like there was a late intervention from a Health’n’Safety officer, and one disappointed youth.)

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