One thing I forgot I wanted to talk about when mentioning Alvin Lucier last month was his starring role in George Manupelli’s Dr. Chicago trilogy*. I first heard about these films only last year, over at Renewable Music, where Daniel Wolf suggests that Lucier is the composer with the most prominent film career.
(Possible runner up, Erik Satie in Entr’acte. John Cage makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in Maya Deren’s At Land, and almost had a part in La Dolce Vita, but didn’t.)
The thing that reminded me was Kyle Gann has just posted about these films, and mentions that Robert Ashley made the soundtracks for them. That’s something else I didn’t know before but do now.
I’ve only seen short excerpts from each film, on YouTube and Manupelli’s website. They look like a mixture of cinéma vérité, awkward improvisation, and flights of deadpan absurdity. A lot of that last element comes from Lucier’s portrayal of the nefarious Dr. Chicago as he flees with his meagre entourage across the United States into Mexico. His Chicago combines the feckless insouciance of Nick Riviera with the calculating amorality of Burroughs’ Dr. Benway deprived of a budget.
* “There was also a fourth film, Dr. Chicago Goes to Sweden, but Manupelli got pissed off at a film festival in Toronto and drove around town with the only copy of the film unreeling out the window of his car.”
Filed under: Film, Music by Ben.H
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When Pianos Ruled The World
Thursday 16 July 2009
Now that I’m the proud custodian of a piano, I’m starting to notice more pianophernalia in my neighbourhood. Down the street a way is this fine old advertisement for Boyd Pianos, one of many defunct piano companies, from the days when piano merchants hawked their wares on walls and billboards.
The Ghost Signs blog has a more thorough analysis of this rather unusual sign, and comments:
In addition to their main piano business Boyd also had a sideline in theatre box office ticket sales. Perhaps this relates in some way to them supplying pianos to theatres and this being a natural bolt on service they could offer to the theatres and the public?
When I saw the phrase “Box office for all theatres”, I thought it was mid-century adspeak meaning that theatre owners could pack in the punters if they have a piano; but maybe that turn of phrase was too American to make sense to the English.
There’s another, less elaborate wall advertisement for a piano store in Willesden Green. This became the inspiration for my composition St Paul’s Pianos.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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All Kinds of Awesome: Ashley, Maxfield, Riley, and Young
Tuesday 14 July 2009
I’ve probably said it before somewhere, but the Other Minds Archive is an invaluable treasure trove of recordings of the musical avant-garde for the past 50 years or so; and it keeps on getting better. I was stoked when I checked the updates today to find they’ve just uploaded:
- Terry Riley performing his Two Piano Pieces (1958-59) – this is Riley before he became the hippieish minimalist of In C, A Rainbow in Curved Air etc.
- Three pieces by Richard Maxfield: Amazing Grace (1960), Structures for 10 wind instruments (1951), and Piano Sonata No.2 (1949). Maxfield was a brilliant composer who has fallen into obscurity since his early death. Best known for his electronic music, his body of work for conventional instruments has gone largely unheard.
- Early music by Robert Ashley: The Fourth of July (1960) and Heat (1961) for tape, and the piano sonata Christopher Columbus crosses to the New World in the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria using only dead reckoning and a crude astrolabe (1959-61). Ashley’s reputation rests on his extraordinary series of operas begun in the late 1960s, so this is a rare glimpse into his early work.
- La Monte Young’s B Flat Dorian Blues (1963) – a chunk of Young playing sopranino sax, backed by Tony Conrad, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Marian Zazeela. This program also includes one half each of the Black Record and Dream House albums. Somewhere in the Archive is a radio broadcast of the rest of the Black Record.
Young’s music is notoriously hard to find, and apart from Amazing Grace I don’t think any of the pieces by the other composers has been made available anywhere before. So yeah, I’m stoked.
More details about these recordings, and access to other materials, can be found at radiOM.org.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Upside of Mediocrity
Saturday 11 July 2009
For those of you who asked if I was alright after Wednesday’s post: much better now, thanks. To summarise: the idea for a piece I was working on proved to be impossible. From working on that first idea a second, different but related idea for a piece came to mind. Work on this second idea progressed and expanded until it became thoroughly confused and unworkable.
In the last few days I’ve figured out an alternative way of going about realising the first idea, and have nearly finished it. Then I have the second idea to go back to. I’m trying to remember who said that every good idea is really three ideas – I usually think of it as the other way round, where I need at least three ideas put together to make one good idea. The last few days seem to have demonstrated a perverse corollary, that any half-assed idea can be broken down into multiple half-assed ideas.
Anyway, England are 2 wickets down and 219 runs behind Australia going into the last day at Cardiff, so I’d be feeling pretty good in any case.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Composing With The Radio On
Wednesday 8 July 2009
I’m beginning to doubt whether the new way of making music (computers, synthesisers, MIDI sequencers giving instant feedback of what you’ve just done) is such a great idea after all. Hearing every little thing go wrong, time and time again, has the effect of grinding down your confidence and your will to finish the thing you’re working on. There’s too much room for experimentation, tempting you to drift away from your original thoughts, leaving you lost in a maze of dead ends.
Perhaps it is much better to write and finish a piece in blissful ignorance and only then, upon hearing the first rehearsal, realise how badly it stinks. At least then you could identify and fix only what is broken, to justify all your efforts so far.
I try to have an idea of what I want to achieve before I begin, but lately I’m finding that these ideas are neither solid nor clear enough before I start working, and I lose my way.
Also, The Ashes have started so I can’t give anything else my undivided attention.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Three quotes from Harry Halbreich’s sleeve notes for the album Iannis Xenakis: Chamber Music 1955-1990:
Kottos for cello (1977)
Later, the music returns to extremely high registers, the toccata proceeds with double stops, but after a short recall of the opening sounds, the piece unexpectedly ends by dissolving into gossamer glissandi in the highest register.
Embellie for viola (1981)
And the work ends in the same manner, slipping away to the extreme high glissando harmonics on the edge of audibility.
Tetras for string quartet (1983)
The eighth section, a metrically complex tutti, leads to the ninth, which serves as a coda and which, after a display of strength in tremolos, dies away in a surprising manner with pianissimo glissandi.
Filed under: Journalism, Music by Ben.H
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AudioMulch 2.0 Released
Wednesday 1 July 2009
AudioMulch, a program I’ve used in a number of my compositions, live gigs, and installations, has now been upgraded to version 2. I’m pretty excited about this, particularly because the revisions to the interface and work flow are expected to make future upgrades and additional features quicker and easier. The program is intended for novices as well as specialists. Info and 60-day demo here.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Housekeeping in The Listening Room
Wednesday 1 July 2009
As mentioned before, all 12 pieces from Real Characters and False Analogues can now be heard in The Listening Room. However, I’ve been having trouble with some of the mp3s: Redundens 4 and all of the Stained Melodies come out distorted when I try to play them.
I’m figuring out how to fix this, but in the meantime if you have the same trouble then try the player on my NetNewMusic page.
Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H
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This Is The New Music! Real Characters and False Analogues
Monday 29 June 2009
12 mp3s for download or streaming.
John Wilkins’ An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, published in 1668, proposed the existence of a universal language, written and spoken, which could communicate experience without mediation. It was believed this language could reconstruct the order of nature that God had revealed to Adam, before confounding man’s language at Babel.
Many people have claimed that music is the true universal language. (The first modern artificial language was Solresol, which can be transmitted musically as well as verbally.) Unforunately, this particular species of musical fundamentalist is most likely to insist that some types of music are more natural than others*, when in reality all music is, essentially, as arbitrary as any language.
Real Characters and False Analogues is a set of twelve pieces for microtonal piano I wrote in 2004, then revised extensively in 2009. It is a sequel to Stained Melodies, adapting the compositional premise of the earlier work, that of simultaneously performing isolated pitches from different, unrelated pieces of music. Real Characters develops this idea by imposing a series of transformations to the sources’ rhythm, tempo, dynamics and pitch, producing a greater variety of harmonies and textures.
In keeping with the ultimately arbitrary nature of supposedly universal languages, all compositional choices were governed by a set of chance operations; and although the piano is tuned to a special 22-note scale, only 15 notes are decided by chance to appear in any given piece. Each of the twelve pieces is named after one of the myriad artificial languages invented over the past century.
The entire set, along with detailed composition notes, can be downloaded from its page on the music website, or heard in streaming audio at The Listening Room.
* According to Nicolas Slonimsky, “The American pedagogue Percy Goetschius used to play the C major scale for his students and ask them a rhetorical question. ‘Who invented this scale?’ and answer it himself. ‘God!’ Then he would play the whole-tone scale and ask again, ‘Who invented this scale?’ And he would announce disdainfully, ‘Monsieur Debussy!'”
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Everybody’s I Ching
Friday 26 June 2009
Forget random.org; if you want true chance operations à la John Cage, for years the go-to source has been ic, the little DOS program written by Cage’s assistant Andrew Culver. It imitates the I Ching‘s method of producing random numbers without all the original’s tedious poetry and oracular pontification.
Now that command-line programs are a dying breed for the general computer user, it’s great to see that Culver is keeping the program alive by putting a beta of a new, user-friendly, web-based ic on his site. If it was good enough for Cage…
Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
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Bird And Person Dyning
Wednesday 24 June 2009
An old man is walking slowly through the room. At one end of the room a bird is twittering. Not a real bird; it’s an electronic bird call. The man walks slowly towards where the sound seems to be coming from. We can hear the bird, but we can also hear what the man hears: he’s wearing microphones over his ears. The sounds he can hear are played through loudspeakers in the room, so that we can hear the bird from our position, and the bird from his position, as projected from a third position. You realise that everybody in the room is hearing something different, depending on their position. The man can also hear what he hears relayed from those loudspeakers. Inevitably, feedback occurs.
The feedback produced is a high, whistling sound which complements the bird nicely. The man tilts his head a little to one side, or hunches down a fraction. The feedback shifts to a new note, the tone becomes reedier. The slightest adjustment to how the man listens can completely change the sound we hear. With each step, the feedback hum swells or fades, depending on how close he is to a node or antinode in the resonant frequency created by the room’s shape and size. Even the bird’s repeated call changes: its chirping amongst the feedback causes heterodyning, creating the illusion of other, differently voiced birds chirping in chorus.
On the weekend I got to see and hear Alvin Lucier perform his 1975 piece Bird and Person Dyning, as part of the Cut and Splice festival at Wilton’s Hall. The above description gives some idea of how a simple setup can create a complex sonic environment. In a single, unified action it reveals how the subtleties of sound depend on how we listen, our position in space, the size and shape of the room. There were some good pieces on the weekend, and more poor pieces, but Lucier’s music still stood out for having both a depth and a transparency that the others lacked.
(Video and audio of Bird and Person Dyning is on UbuWeb.)
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alvin Lucier
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The traditional summer solstice ritual of hiding in my bedroom all day with the curtains drawn
Saturday 20 June 2009
This blog doesn’t get much mail, except for some crazy oboe-playing guy who writes in every six months or so to complain about a passing comment I made about a music critic several years ago. So I was quietly excited to discover that a lonely missive had dropped into my inbox today.
That thrill turned to disappointment when it turned out to be be from Web Sheriff, an apparently legitimate company that perversely tries to make their emails look like spam by putting “EXTREMELY URGENT” in the subject line and using an embarrassing, fakey old-west style sheriff’s badge as their logo. Best of all, despite the company name and logo, they’re British; and there’s nothing funnier than the British pretending to be cowboys (except for Germans pretending to be American Indians.) I guess the old company logo of Robin Hood being persecuted by Lily Allen’s dad didn’t inspire as much confidence.
Anyway, this EXTREMELY URGENT email from Deborah Sykes was a “DMCA REQUEST” to “remove Infringed Title(s) from Infringing File Location(s)” I thought the DMCA was an American law, so I’m not sure why a British company is so keen on enforcing it. I haven’t bothered to look this up because the file in question had already been taken down, so I guess their urgency wasn’t extreme enough.
You’re probably wondering what file on my website the sheriff (head office in Wiltshire, not Nottingham) was so exercised about. It was because I had briefly included a copy of that massive Van Morrison hit, “Thirty Two” – all sixty-one seconds of it – in Please Mister Please. Van’s time here has come and gone, but you can recreate the magic of the song in your own homes by strumming any old chord on an acoustic guitar and reciting over the top these deathless lyrics:
I see, you see, we’ll get a guitar,
yeah, we’ll get a guitar
and, oh, we’ll get, we’ll get three guitars,
No!, No!!, we’ll get four guitars
and we’ll get Herbie Lovelle to play drums,
and we’ll do, the
“Sha-la”, sha…
We’ll do the sha-, sha-la bit.
“Sha-la, sha-, sha-la, sha-la”, we’ll do it,
we’ll get together, uunghh, we’ll get
uunghh, ttcchh, uugnhh-uunghh-uunghh, like that,
and we’ll do the sha-la bit and then,
then, then, and we’ll get, we’ll get sixteen guitars,
and then, then we’ll play it,
and then we’ll do that one, yeah.
Let me hear ya’ do that again.
Over and over, Bert Berns song, over…
[clack, clack-clack, clack]
Filed under: Music, Stupidity by Ben.H
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Update In C
Thursday 18 June 2009
As promised, video of the busked performance of Terry Riley’s In C on the weekend.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Better Than Joshua Bell
Tuesday 16 June 2009
Sorry for the last few days’ silence. I spent a long weeked catching up on some drinking with an old friend who was in town. This means I missed the chance to see some quality busking on Southbank, where The Ramshackle Orchestra for Musequality gave a kerbside performance of Terry Riley’s In C. To quote Petemaskreplica:
It’s immensely satisfying to play. It’s something to do with the autonomy. What you play, and how, and when, is up to you, and it’s thrilling to find all sorts of unexpected combinations emerging as a result of your decisions. You get into the groove, and play around, reacting to what the other musicians are doing, they reacting to you in turn…. The whole 45 minutes or so was filmed, so I hope to add YouTube links soon!
Other Minds has the complete score of In C available online, in PDF format.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Why I’m glad I don’t play piano
Friday 12 June 2009
I was warned before moving into my new house that I would be sharing my room; and so I am:
It’s a Kemble spinet piano: a compact piano design developed during the Great Depression, and which pretty much died out by the end of last century as digital pianos became omnipresent. The landlady warned me that it’s never been tuned, as if you couldn’t tell from striking a few keys at random. I doubt that having one end up against the radiator (see left) has been helping it.
It’s times like this I’m glad I don’t play the piano. Never mind how out of tune it is; if I were any good at the piano this thing would also frustrate me with its short, clunky hammer action and other foibles peculiar to this design. They’re also supposed to be real buggers to maintain and repair, because of the cramped and convoluted hammer mechanism packed inside. I’d resent it for taking up valuable space which could be used by a better piano.
Instead, I’m just happy to have a an acoustic instrument to mess around with. I’ve wedged down the damper pedal and am trying it out as a resonant sound chamber (note microphone lead). I’ll have to have another dig around inside to find the serial number and see how old this thing is.
Incidentally, Kemble is the last piano manufacturer remaining in Britain, but not for much longer. They’ve just announced that their factory will close in October.
