Boring Like A Drill.

Brown is an influential but overlooked composer, who’s guaranteed at least a footnote in history for his association with John Cage and his radical experiments in music notation. He’s one of those composers you might hear about a lot, without ever actually hearing them.

The Earle Brown Music Foundation has thoughtfully been uploading sound files of a number of his compositions, in addition to program notes and samples of his manuscripts, so now you can hear them for yourself. Available Forms I is a concise introduction to his open form style, Module I and Module II (performed simultaneously) are a contrasting study in austerity.

His status as The Originator served as much to constrict his reputation as it did to celebrate it. I’ve only got into his stuff since his death, and discovered that not only did he rock hard, he was an out-and-out loon with a boundless capacity to surprise. The Probe has put up a nifty little selection of eclectic cuts as a tribute.

Muzak has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

After a failed merger with one of its major creditors, the “sensory branding” company DMX last year, the firm which began life as Wired Radio Inc in the 1930s has been teetering on the brink of financial collapse.

There’s a history of the company at The Independent as well:

Visit the headquarters of Muzak Holdings LLC, the spiritual home of Muzak, and you will hear its eponymous product in every room, pumped in from the giant Well database containing 2.6 million tracks. Every room, that is, except for the elevator…. Employees of Muzak say the absence of sound in the company’s own lifts is maintained for “deeply felt symbolic reasons”.

Like Dick Without A Hole, The Cure For Headaches was made at about the same time, and adopts the same types of source material: 1980s Adelaide talk radio and beloved TV stars.

In this piece, an intruder has disrupted the cosy little world of Adelaide chit-chat. The traditional Sunday night religious program was always a slightly tense affair, with a scarcity of earnest callers and, thanks to a reliance on importing extra content from wherever they could find it, the chance for lunacy to spring up either side of the microphone.

Much of the imported material came from the USA (of course), in the forms of both pre-recorded material and real-life talking from evangelists who had been flown in, usually by the Paradise Assembly of God (Paradise being the name of the suburb in north-east Adelaide). The regular host, a soft-spoken pastor in one of the more wishy-washy Protestant sects which thrived in that city, never seemed fully at ease with the fire-and-brimstone Yanks who confronted him from across the studio console.

The Cure For Headaches originally set an edited speech by one of these Americans to a slightly bemused host, against a backdrop sampled from a record sung by sometime Adelaide media titan Ernie Sigley. The juxtaposition of the two had always seemed a little arbitrary, so recently I began to think of possible ways to re-set the speech, without success… until Microsoft released Songsmith.

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

The full glory of Songsmith can be appreciated in this promotional video, made by Microsoft.

It was quickly discovered that Sonsgmith has the power to add new, improved accompaniments to pre-existing songs too. This seemed like the ideal software to try out on my evangelical friend. Unfortunately, Songsmith doesn’t have a randomise function, but it does load up a different default genre every time the program starts, so deciding on the new music for the piece was a breeze. I think it’s worked, don’t you?

The lingering question is: after three concerts on Saturday, after the week of gigs in November and the two Proms shows, have I had enough of Karlheinz Stockhausen yet? Not at all.

My long-suffering girlfriend agrees, on the whole; although she disagreed with me about Inori, one of the two major performances of the weekend. This piece was written in the early 1970s and, being a 75-minute work for large orchestra and two mimes, is sometimes pointed to a sign of Stockhausen’s encroaching, messianic loopiness that mars his later reputation.

Inori develops ideas from Stockhausen’s earlier, equally monumental but better-known works – the ritualistic experience of Stimmung and the use of formula composition in Mantra – and so points the way to the Licht operas, which exploit both aspects to the fullest possible extent. Inori‘s formula is a 15-note melody from which all attributes of the piece are derived. It’s interesting that for all of Stockhausen’s arcane impulses, he still wants to communicate with his audience. The ‘melody’ is heard first as rhythm alone, with the orchestra articulating and colouring a single, repeated G. The formula slowly reveals itself, section by section, adding dynamics to the rhythm, then harmony – all derived from the formula itself. In the latter half of the piece the melody itself is finally heard, before being elaborated in a formula-derived polyphony.

This is some of Stockhausen’s most powerful music; its static blocks of orchestral colour, processional qualities, and air of spiritual devotion rather than personal aggrandisement make it feel more Messiaenic than messianic. The spiritual and ritualistic element of the piece is made clear by the presence of the two mimes, who perform in unison a choreography of prayer gestures, whose increasing complexity further reflects and elucidates the underlying formula, expanding it into another dimension.

The girlfriend was put off by the mimes. She thought they were a distraction, and stranded the work as a relic of the times in which it was written. She also disliked the way the two of them (Alain Louafi and Stockhausen initiate Kathinka Pasveer) performed in slightly different styles, not exactly in synch. I thought this helped the performance, as it emphasised each individual’s devotional communion, over the need for a perfect surface appearance – but I may be arguing from ignorance.

The two mimes performed on a platform constructed above the conductor – a rather ungainly and rickety-looking affair, painted hospital blue. It’s apparently very old, dating back possibly to the first performance thirty-odd years ago. Stockhausen’s acolytes were insistent that the platform be reassembled exactly the way it had been done every time before, much to the annoyance of many in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, to say nothing of the health and safety reps. This incongruous juxtaposition of the dilapidated platform with such finely-crafted music became a feature of Stockhausen’s music theatre.

In any case, we all had a better time of it than the BBC Singers earlier in the day. The afternoon concert ended with Stockhausen’s late choral work Litanei 97, a piece which like so much later Stockhausen demands extra-musical skills from the performers. It suffered from some uncertainty amongst the singers as they were required to circle around the hall, and the conductor struggling with an errant temple gong that made a break for it across the floor about halfway through.

The evening ended with an airing of Stockhausen’s 2-hour electronic work from the late 1960s, Hymnen. It’s one of his most famous and celebrated pieces, yet it’s also curiously inaccessible these days, both to actually get hold of and hear, and to understand.

The basic premise and material are well-known: recordings of national anthems from around the world are electronically deconstructed. The philosophical implications can easily be imagined, and Stockhausen pursues the utopian ideal with all the simplistic confidence particular to his generation. What is particularly notable, and disturbing, is the emphasis on destruction throughout the work, as familiar sounds are repeatedly pulverised beyond recognition.

The result often feels more like some new kind of anti-music. Stockhausen’s compositional methods of the time created an apparently free-form narrative that drifts and digresses from one moment to the next, including large negative spaces of near-static and metafictional comments on the compositional process itself.

Sitting in the dark for such a long time, contemplating the strange mix of familiar and unfamiliar sounds as they moved around the four speakers in the hall, was a perculiarly compelling concert experience. The white spotlight from the November gigs was back, but sitting with eyes closed or nursing a plastic cup of rioja removed this distraction. Hymnen works in a way that Stockhausen would not have intended, especially now that its Cold War politics have dissipated. It is an ambiguous, elusive essay on entropy – of social structures, of music, of the world and sound itself – and on the vanity of human wishes, whether to achieve power or to remove it.

Also: Hymnen streaming online!
Excerpts from Lecture on HU (video) and Inori (audio) on the Stockhausen website.

Right after Die Hard, A Christmas Story and Lethal Weapon, It’s A Wonderful Life is my fourth-favourite christmas movie. Last year I linked to Gilbert Sorrentino’s remarkable interpretation of Capra’s movie as an essay in digust with modern American life. This year’s heartwarming message of cheer comes from Soho the Dog: Strauss and Mahler re-enact It’s A Wonderful Life.

I. On An Overgrown Path:

“Later that year Zuckermann abandoned his harpsichord business and America in disgust at the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.”

It’s a good story about how a search to find Olivier Messiaen’s birthplace in Avignon leads to a conversation with the man who used to provide harpsichords for John Cage, but that sentence belongs in an old Woody Allen story.

II. She Sees Red:

Once upon a time, Banksy visited Melbourne and left a piece of street art. Culture-conscious locals preserved the ephemera with a sheet of perspex. Unknown vandal/artist restores the natural order of things by tipping paint down the back of the perspex. The obliterated artwork is tagged “Banksy Woz Ere”.

Two centenaries on successive days: Olivier Messiaen (d. 1992) on Wednesday, Elliott Carter (still alive and composing) on Thursday. On each night, Pierre Boulez conducted the Ensemble Intercontemporain in a commemorative concert in London.

I went to only the first gig. There have been Messiaen concerts going on in London all year, and I’ve missed all of them up until now. My main motivation for going was that Boulez is one of the few remaining survivors of the 1920s generation, so I thought I’d better take this chance to see him in action, particularly as he was conducting his former teacher, and his own music as well. I’d been to some concerts of Carter’s music before, and had heard most of the pieces on the Thursday programme before, so I gave that a miss.

The two Messiaen works were from the early 1960s, both premiered by Boulez: Couleurs de la cité céleste and Sept haïkaï. Both works put Messiaen’s taste for the hieratic and the ritualised to the forefront. The former is a static processional for winds, brass, piano and percussion, creating sounds suitably imposing, rather than seductive. The latter’s short movements show the influence of Messiaen’s visit to Japan; less, thankfully, in musical exoticism and more in an affinity with the sense of eternal time expressed in traditional gagaku court music. It’s a suprising piece for Messiaen, particularly in the dense passaages of unusually thorny textures.

After the interval (where we witnessed at the bar a distinguished lady of advanced years scull a large rioja, either to recuperate from the first half or to fortify herself for the second) Boulez conducted his own work from the late 90s, Sur incises. The piece is an expansion of his piano piece Incises into a work for a hyper-instrument consisting of three identical groups of piano, harp, and percussion. It’s all very nice, but it’s a little too typical of much of Boulez’s later music, and its obsession with the doubling (or tripling) and shadowing of instruments, from Répons onwards. Long, agile phrases of melody contrast with sustained moments of stillness, impeccably put together but always feeling a little to mellow. The intellectual and emotional punches of his earlier music are all being pulled here.

On stage Boulez, combover intact, was a model of self-effacement, even taking a detour round the back of the piano each time he walked to his podium. My lovely companion F, who has suffered under conductors of varying degrees of waywardness, admired the undemonstrative directness and lucidity of his conducting.

Months ago I posted a spectrogram of a passage from my composition Hentai-Oto-Ma, and completely forgot to upload the sound file of the same section for comparison. So here it is.

Hentai-Oto-Ma was made using Coagula Light, a shareware “colour-organ” that interprets digital images as sound spectra (height=frequency, width=time). The image source for this piece was a pornographic Japanese manga comic: each digitally scanned frame of the comic was interpreted with five different, variable time-frames and pitch ranges. The five sequences of frames are played simultaneously, each subjected to different filtering and panning processes. In effect, the piece is a type of timbral canon, with the same series of tone structures transposed into different frequencies and durations – this can be heard most clearly at the end of the piece.

The left half of the picture above shows selected frames from the original comic. On the right is a spectrographic analysis of right channel of Hentai-Oto-Ma (0’28” to 0’39”) showing the images transformed across time and frequency.

Click here to hear an mp3 of the above excerpt; or listen to the whole thing (11 minutes, 17 MB mp3.) If that’s not enough, you can read more about this and related pieces for cheapo digital synthesis (and get another mp3).

Got a tune stuck in your head and you just have to get rid of it? The Girl From Ipanema. It wipes the music part of your brain and then fades away. Works every time.

I recommend track 21 on that linked page.

Oh
Yma Sumac died
it’s
the first time
I
noticed it

I haven’t been getting out as much as I’d like to lately, but I did make it to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s (free!) performance of Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil on Sunday evening. Frankly, it’s mind-boggling that we didn’t have to pay to hear something as extraordinary as this music.

The cycle of songs was Grisey’s last completed work, before his sudden death in 1998. Over ten years after the completion of his remarkable Les espaces acoustiques, his abilities in creating and balancing new sounds had deepened in skill and sensitivity. My reservations about his reliance on dramatic gestures in his earlier work did not apply: this meditation on death hovered like a final breath, both frail and terrible, suspending time and revealing the profound emotional depths of which music is capable.

Nothing felt forced, everything felt natural yet utterly strange; every development in the music was unexpected yet inevitable.

By a fortunate coincidence, Inconstant Sol has recently posted a recording of the complete work, taken from a performance in Paris earlier this year – having earlier given us a complete Les espaces acoustiques. The Quatre chants are well worth a punt on your bandwidth.

Dick Without A Hole (Red Detachment Of Women Mix) (2’11”, 2.85 MB, mp3).
It is recommended that this track is played on a continuous loop.

Bob the late-night talkback radio host is taking your calls on the open line about the issues of the day that matter to you, and our next caller is Gene. Gene wants to ask Bob a riddle. Bob doesn’t get it. Moving right along: Peter is next on the line. Peter also wants to ask Bob a riddle. Bob doesn’t know the answer, but Peter won’t tell him! Perplexed, Bob takes Phyllis’ call and asks her Peter’s riddle, but Phyllis just wants to hear Gene’s riddle again…

Dick Without A Hole was inspired by my love for the genteel stupidity of talk radio in Adelaide in the 1980s. The hosts craved the urgency and confrontation of shock jocks in other parts of the world but everyone in Adelaide, announcers and callers alike, were just too nice to carry it off. I still have a few cassettes of some of the better sessions, particularly the 9pm to midnight shift when the demographic got drunk and doddery.

This playful little dance of fumbled verbal exchanges and missed punchlines comes from one of those surviving tapes. Set to a cheerful, semi-funky shuffle, our four protagonists juggle the two dud gags back and forth, never grasping them yet never quite letting them drop. I find that their shared confusion in joke-telling gives a satisfying sense of mystery to this simple yet intractable form of social interaction. Their ritual is consecrated by the hallowed incantation of Messrs Kennedy and Gray, the two Magi of mid-seventies Australian comedy.

Dick Without A Hole made its public debut at John Beagles’ and Graham Ramsay’s Museum Magogo in Glasgow, 1999. After that it toured to PB Gallery in Melbourne, and was revived in 2002 for the Piped Music series at The Physics Room in Christchurch – more specifically, in the toilets of The Physics Room.

Now with the mp3 player of your choice, you too can enjoy Dick Without A Hole in the comfort of your own toilet. For best results, leave it playing on a continuous loop.

The shiny new King’s Place in King’s Cross has been hosting a series of new music gigs of widely varied stripes every Tuesday evening. On the 25th the Elision (sorry, ELISION) Ensemble is playing works by Liza Lim, Salvatore Sciarrino, Franco Donatoni, and others. I’m pretty stoked about this because I saw Elision, oh, lots of times in Australia and it’ll be nice to hear what they’re up to now. It’s part of music publisher Ricordi‘s 200th anniversary.

More info and tickets here (warning: that “dynamic price” thing means that 9.50 ticket price keeps going up it’s about 12 quid on the door.)

Also in London, there’s some Romanian (and British) spectralism happening at Conway Hall this weekend: Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Maria Avram, Tim Hodgkinson, and more! After my encounter with Gérard Grisey’s music last month I should really check this out too. No ticket price mentioned; the friend who gave me the heads-up thinks this means it’s free. He may well be right.

Southbank’s Klang festival was a convincing refutation – with many more to come, I expect – of the lazy canard that in the last thirty years Karlheinz Stockhausen descended from his once-lofty heights to write music that was invariably banal, inane, and absurd. (Similar erroneous assessments were made of Cage in the after his death.)

After completing his monumental seven-opera cycle Licht (Light), Stockhausen began a new cycle of twenty-four pieces called Klang (Sound) – one for each hour of the day. Sadly, he died with only twenty-one of them written, thus thwarting his next proposed project: a cycle of sixty pieces, one for each minute of the hour.

The second hour of Klang, Freude (Joy), is a 45-minute work for two female harpists, who must sing a fragmented setting of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus while they play. The material and form of the piece, as with other parts of Klang, are distillations from works made earlier in Stockhausen’s life, transformed into something completely new. The material is a 24-note row derived from his mid-50s masterpiece Gruppen; the form is a return to moment form which Stockhausen used in the 1960s.

The frenetic activity and complexity of Stockhausen’s earlier music has yielded to clarity and serenity. Later Stockhausen shows greater attention to the innate quality of sounds, and less on constructing relationships between them. Far from inane, the best of the late works show an equal sophistication to the earlier ones, but in a sensual rather than an self-consciously intellectual way. The episodic form and sustained atmosphere of Freude recall his 1968 piece Stimmung, and created a poignant, suspended state of timelessness that recalled the late works of Morton Feldman.

The singing harpists Esther Kooi and Marianne Smit played damn near flawlessly. As is frequently the case with Stockhausen, they were required to play from memory. Such was the level of dedication he demanded from his interpreters. Earlier in the week we had seen a virtuosic display by percussionist Stuart Gerber performing the fourth hour of Klang, Himmels-Tür (Heaven’s Door). For the best part of half an hour he executed an intricately choreographed sequence of attacks on an immense door, specially constructed from panels of differing woods to create a subtle palette of sounds. (Movie excerpt here.) Again, the piece was an impressive melding of music and theatre.

The final concert performance of the festival was Luzifers Tanz, a scene from the opera Samstag aus Licht. Unfortunately we didn’t get the opera staging, with the eighty-odd winds, brass, and percussion suspended in air in the shape of a face(! – nor did we get the musicians’ strike); but the performance by the Royal Northern College of Music was exemplary. It’s a remarkable piece, at once highly diverse and elaborate in its details and defiantly monolithic in its overall presence, following Stockhausen’s bizarre but internally consistent logic as the various sections of the gigantic big-band submit to the will of a cocksure, dinner-jacketed Lucifer. It’s also quite likely the only piece of concert-hall repertoire where the bass singer gets to make devil-horns gesture at the audience.

Oliver Knussen (“I… came to the conclusion that, far from being a hodge-podge of separately-commissioned bits stuck together with mystical glue, as some would have us believe, within [Licht‘s] massive architecture can be found some of the most impressive and compelling hours of music Stockhausen ever composed” – from his programme introduction) conducted the London Sinfonietta for Stockhausen’s last work, completed the night before he died: an orchestral setting of the charming set of tunes he wrote in the seventies, collectively called Tierkreis (Zodiac). True to the end to his principle of questioning convention, the chamber orchestra is arse-about: winds and brass in the front, percussion to the side, strings at the back with the cellos on the left.

Despite being a relatively normal piece by his standards, Stockhausen still managed to fill it with surprising twists and moments of invention (some of which felt a little rough and may well have been revised during rehearsals had he lived). In the penultimate piece, Taurus, a tuba player strolls onto the stage and plays an insolent solo for the orchestra to follow (“quite humorous technician with strong lungs” Stockhausen wrote in an email to Knussen) before standing beside the conductor. He finishes his solo with a flourish and a bow, earning a round of applause from the audience as he strides off-stage while the orchestra plays on.