Having mentioned Paris Transatlantic the other day, I started looking through some older editions and found an interview with Phill Niblock. Niblock was the inspiration for my piece now showing at the Redrawing exhibition in Hobart (plug!).
Something Niblock said reminded me why I’ve never sought music-related employment as a day job to fund my musical activities: I worry about what might happen to me if I’m placed in regular contact with musicians. Here’s Niblock discussing the role of the performer in playing his music (remember that his music sounds kind of something like this):
There were two especially bad performances in my memory. One was in The Hague, actually. We were doing a concert and one guitar player had come to the rehearsal; and the other guy couldn’t come for a rehearsal at all – he’d never heard the piece nor had the CD or anything. So he came and got up on the stage and immediately started improvising over the drone. And the other guy was playing perfectly. I almost got up and said to him: please lay out. But I didn’t. And a similar thing happened very recently in the States. I had even sent the CDs to this woman who I knew, and who knew the music, and the same thing happened; I came very late, there was no chance to make a rehearsal or a soundcheck, and she just used it as an opportunity to make a really long improvisation for herself with a drone background. I was sort of shocked. I didn’t say anything to her because we were actually staying with her, so that made it difficult.
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Rueful Autopsy
Sunday 28 September 2008
“He reserves his respect mostly for the dead.” Why am I interested in so few composers under the age of 50? Is it simply because I’m getting old and stopped taking an interest in anything new? Or is it that I was never that interested in what’s comtemporary, and my interest is in a particular historical period, of which I happened to catch the tail end?
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This is starting to get depressing.
Friday 26 September 2008
It’s one thing when you realise that most of the generation of great composers born in the 1920s have now died – Xenakis, Ligeti, Berio, Stockhausen, Kagel, etc – but now The Rambler is reporting that Horaţiu Rădulescu (b. 1942) has died. No other reports yet, and Wikipedia is dithering on whether or not to put it on their ‘live’ page.
ANABlog has recently been posting a bunch of mp3s, with notes, of Rădulescu’s music – simultaneously sensual and austere, using a rich and distinctive palette of microtones, embracing the complete “acoustic spectrum”. If the ANABlog links are down, there are more compositions easily found on the Avant Garde Project site (large FLAC files and sleeve notes here, mp3 versions backed up here).
Also, Paris Transatlantic interviewed Rădulescu last year. It begins promisingly:
He can’t stand Shostakovitch (“de la merde!”), dismisses Schnittke (“tuttifrutti!”), cordially dislikes Boulez (but admits that “he opened up a new sound world for all of us and his management skills come out well in front of the orchestra”), listens to Algerian rai, and Nashville blues while he accelerates in the BMW, and unwinds to Monteverdi and Josquin des Prez when he de-accellerates at home.His own music is unclassifiable. Though frequently called spectral, it has diverged totally from the French academic spectralism which is so hot in institutional circles in Paris these days. Colleagues of his who have become well-known such as Dusapin (the tritones of whose cello concerto “set my teeth on edge”) annoy him through their business skills, and he refers to the music spectrale crowd in Paris with scorn (“they’re the mafiosi”). He reserves his respect mostly for the dead: Wagner, Bruckner (“not Mahler, his music is empty!”), Josquin des Pres, and Xenakis, whom he venerates, adores.
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Mauricio Kagel
Sunday 21 September 2008
I performed Kagel’s General Bass (for “unspecified bass instrument”—I used an accordion), a little piece of typical, mysterious wit consisting of sparse, disconnected phrases that hint at some absent, traditionally tonal grandeur. Kagel a) was mildly disappointed at the fact that my piano accordion was not a bandoneon, but took it in stride, and b) was very particular about staging—seated, not standing; very still, as if one player within a giant ensemble; and making sure to underemphasize any espressivo possibility in the fragments. It was a bit of master-class in how to play off of performance expectations, and in how magically you can up the stakes of humor the less you give away the joke.Kagel could be intellectually unforgiving, but even his criticism was cloaked in the graceful good manners of an old-school radical; if he thought I was young and stupid (which he probably did) he never let on, instead giving the generous illusion that the time he spent with me was time well spent.
Mauricio Kagel RIP. A composer I’m still learning how to listen to; although this might be because I keep confusing him with György Kurtág.
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The Good Old New Musical Resources
Sunday 7 September 2008
He provided a new and visionary basis for musical exploration based in the unalterable facts of acoustics, a basis so broad that it opened up room in the Western tradition not only for musics of the rest of the world, but for compositional systems that have not even been conceived yet. If Cowell failed to fulfill his own potentials, it was because those potentials were too ambitious to be realized except by a succession of future generations. As a prophet he pointed the way to a new world he was not destined to live in….
For nearly 70 years Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources has inspired composers to explore new territory in the worlds of harmony and rhythm, and to discover connections between the two. Barely a week after uploading a PDF of Notations, UbuWeb has made a scan of Cowell’s complete book available as a 56 MB PDF download.
For a practical demonstration of Cowell’s musical thinking, American Mavericks is still hosting the Virtual Rhythmicon, which lets you play with the instrument yourself, or hear other people’s compositions. The original rhythmicon was built by Leon Theremin in 1931, following Cowell’s instructions. The electronic instrument was configured to play notes in the same harmonic and rhythmic ratios as the frequencies of the harmonic series.
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Notations
Tuesday 26 August 2008
John Cage and Alison Knowles, eds. Notations (Something Else Press, 1969).
Three used copies available on Amazon. From $298.00.
Now available as a 75-megabyte PDF, downloadable from UbuWeb.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
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2000 Guitar Solos
Monday 25 August 2008
I love and hate the guitar. It’s the only instrument I more-or-less know how to play, and I’ve always wanted to write music for it. However, years of playing it left me jaded with its possibilities and feeling constrained by the limitations of my technique.
Attempts to apply other compositional techniques I’ve used on the instrument produced results I found too dull to pursue. Trying out my extended free improvisation chops seemed futile, given the plethora of far more talented and imaginative guitarists out there. For a while I gave up on the instrument, but found that the need to compose for guitar wouldn’t go away.
2000 Guitar Solos is an extensive series of compositions in progress, that aims to map comprehensively one section of the guitar fretboard: a kind of ‘Return To Zero’ before approaching the instrument once again with any creative intention. In writing these pieces I am learning to embrace the guitar’s inherent qualities while at the same time crushing its accumulated rhetoric and mystique.
The pieces’ conscious antecedents are the exhaustive permutational compositions of Tom Johnson, Tom Phillips‘ paintings of paint companies’ colour catalogues, and John Cage‘s act of making a detailed drawing of a tape recorder he was about to work with for the first time.
The series acquired the name 2000 Guitar Solos because it was begun in that portentous year, 2000, but as the compositional process became more systematised I decided to aim for a total of 2,000 pieces. In fact, I have now sketched 2,556 solos, and from time to time return to the series to write out another batch of neat, final versions.
The beginning of the series, some 120 solos, was exhibited at TCB Art Inc. in Melbourne in 2003. Their simple, linear, obsessive nature makes them as suitable for display as ‘visual music’ as they are unprepossessing for public performance.
In addition to the multiple sheets of music, two other elements made the exhibition. On the wall facing the solos was a large poster printed with The Obsolete Guitar manifesto. Also in the exhibition space was a chair and a guitar, ready for use.
To help promote the show I made up hundreds of small, photocopied flyers, which took advantage of some other joker called Ben Harper who happened to be touring through town at about the same time.
Whenever 2000 Guitar Solos, or any part from it, is exhibited there should always be a guitar and a chair present with the sheet music to reassure punters that these pieces can, nay, should be played.
Whenever possible, I would come into the gallery for an hour or so, pull the chair up to a random section of wall and start to play, as an adjunct to and extension of the visual display. These appearences were never announced in advance, so that it was a matter of chance whether or not visiting punters could hear as well as see the work.
Like I said, the music is unprepossessing, and these somewhat furtive performances reflected the internalised nature of the musical results.
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It resumes. Not normal, but service.
Sunday 24 August 2008
I’ve just joined NetNewMusic, the networking site for “the world of non-pop, contemporary classical/indy/avant-whatever musics”. My profile page is a bit daggy right now but give me a few quiet days at work and I’ll start getting amongst it. At least there’s a few streaming mp3s up there for now.
The slightly-revamped main website now has a page dedicated to writing, including a few of my articles available online.
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The Obsolete Guitar
Thursday 21 August 2008
It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing musician with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. Musicians’ survival parameters are very slim: they can survive only weeks without food, days without alcohol and minutes without nicotine. Technologies are better life-support systems for our image than for our guitars: IMAGES ARE IMMORTAL, GUITARS ARE EPHEMERAL. The guitar finds it increasingly difficult to match the expectations of its images. In the realm of images, the physical guitar’s impotence is apparent. THE GUITAR NOW PERFORMS BEST AS ITS IMAGE. The guitar becomes situated beyond its lacquer. The guitar is neither a very efficient nor very durable structure. It malfunctions often and fatigues quickly; its performance is determined by its age. It is susceptible to muzak and is doomed to a certain and early death. Musicians mostly operate with Absent Guitars: what it means to become-guitar is no longer the state of being immersed in musical memory but rather in being reconfigured IN THE REALM OF THE IMAGE. The musician’s absence is augmented by the fact that the guitar functions habitually and automatically. AWARENESS IS OFTEN THAT WHICH OCCURS WHEN THE GUITAR MALFUNCTIONS. It is only when the guitar becomes aware of its present position that it can map its post-evolutionary strategies. AS SUPPOSED FREE AGENTS, THE CAPABILITIES OF BEING A GUITAR ARE CONSTRAINED BY HAVING A GUITAR. THE GUITAR IS OBSOLETE.
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The Buddha died a natural death.
Tuesday 12 August 2008
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Stockhausen: The High Road
Monday 4 August 2008
Apologies for this post, which I don’t have time to revise or edit right now.
I went back to the Albert Hall for the Proms for the first time in years, because on Saturday night they promised damn near 4 hours of Karlheinz Stockhausen. This would have been the 80th birthday celebration bash, if not for the composer’s unexpected death in December.
Earlier this year I saw an improvised sort-of performance of Kontakte, Stockhausen’s 1960 electronic composition for tape, with optional parts for live pianist and percussionist. The Proms performance was the real deal – with the 4-track tape spatially projected around the hall, the full complement of microphones prescribed by Stockhausen to fully capture the sound of the live musicians – and to compare this high road performance favourably with the gig I heard in March would be fatuous.
As I said at the time, “This is music which needs curators, institutions – much the same way that many postwar visual artists are dependent upon controlled, neutral gallery space, constant maintenance, and supervision, to present and preserve their works.” In the Albert Hall the tape, nearly 50 years old, gained from having its details revealed, rather than having any flaws exposed. The abundant variety of sounds produced with such a small array of crude equipment was particularly striking. The percussionist and pianist (who is also given percussion parts to play at certain points) acted both as less and more than soloists over a backing tape; they amplified and drew into relief the sonic world and dramatic tension of the original tape part.
You wouldn’t think it possible to find a piece of music suited to the Royal Albert Hall, with its infamous echo and cavernous space that swallows up sounds. Even Stockhausen’s fearsome work Gruppen for three orchestras was tamed by the space. This landmark composition was played twice – to begin and end the first concert – the better for us to grasp its wealth of details and complex interplays between orchestras. However, the visceral impact of Gruppen was dulled by the architecture. As well as the wishy-washy acoustics, the floorplan of the hall forced two of the orchestras into close proximity at the centre of the space, meaning that the players were more surrounded by the punters, not the other, intended way around. To make matters worse, the punters holding standing room tickets were squashed into the reduced isthmus of space between the two orchestras, while the third was up and away on the stage.
The second performance of Gruppen benefited particularly from hearing Kontakte immediately before it, to better realise just how strongly Stockhausen’s writing for musicians had been influenced by his pioneering work with tape and electronics during the 1950s.
Amazingly, the Royal Albert felt like it had been constructed specially for the playing of Stockhausen’s very late (2007) electronic work Cosmic Pulses. Like much later Stockhausen, the piece’s material feels much simpler and less forbidding than the dense abstraction of his music from the 50s. Bell-like sounds, as might be heard on an old synthesiser, tolled and slowly rotated around the circular hall. For the next half-hour, these bells circled the space in ever higher registers at ever faster speeds, building up into a whirling mass of sound that was simultaneously rapturous and intimidating, beguiling and maddening.
You could intuit that there was a process behind the sound, of each strand of sounds obeying certain cyclical speeds and patterns, but that knowledge did nothing the music’s power or mystery. It had the sublime indifference of a natural phenomenon. Looking up into the hall’s dome, pinpricks of light from the evening sky could be seen through gaps in the roof, like a night sky strewn with the stars that figured so prominently in Stockhausen’s music.
The second concert of the night was given entirely to a performance of Stimmung, Stockhausen’s long work for six voices singing harmonic overtones of a low B-flat for over an hour. Early last year I heard a quasi-amateur performance of Stimmung, so again it would be fatuous to say that Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices performance for the Proms was superior. However, they shared a difference from the recording I’ve heard of the piece by Singcircle: a greater sense of drama and physicality than Singcircle’s uniform serenity.
In addition to the strongest overtone singing I’ve heard in a performance of the piece (some punters afterward believed they were electronic effects), Theatre of Voices invested their performance with the solemn informality of a true ritual, unifying the spiritual and corporeal aspects of Stockhausen’s vision as embodied in the text’s inclusion of the names of gods and self-penned erotic poetry (which, in true British fashion, were printed in the programme but not translated).
Stimmung is both so direct and so elusive – another punter has described Stockhausen’s staging instructions, observing that part of his appeal is his disarming sincerity and the “home-made feel” of much of his music and theatre – it seems impossible to define. It is often described as “meditative” but it has an equally stimulating effect, as observed amongst the standing room punters. Many of them were sitting on the floor for the performance, and more and more began lying down as the piece progressed. Then, about three-quarters of the way through, a number of them suddenly felt compelled to stand and take a step or to forward, actively attentive for the rest of the piece.
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Stained Melodies: Expanded Special Edition Director’s Cut Redux 3D
Monday 28 July 2008
Stained Melodies, a set of 24 short piano pieces I wrote back in 2000, has been hanging around on the website for a while now. I just noticed that I don’t have any copies of the CD left, so I’ve uploaded the lot of them as mp3s. If you’ve listened to them before, you might be interested to know that I’ve replaced the old files with better quality versions.
Each melody is, in structure and in effect, a collaboration between numerous ghost pianists, none of whom can hear each other, all playing different music in different keys and tempos. However, most of the music is then erased, so that only a small fragment of each pianist can be heard simultaneously.
Also, the piano has been retuned into just intonation. To keep things interesting.
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Now with its own web page
Saturday 26 July 2008
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The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School
Monday 21 July 2008
MP3s for download:1. The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School
(take 1, 21 July 2008. 7’53”, 13.53 MB)
2. The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School
(take 2, 21 July 2008. 8’21”, 13.93 MB)
My old laptop is dying, but I managed to coax another performance out of it while I was in Melbourne. I was asked to play at Stutter, which happens every Wednesday night at the fine Horse Bazaar.
I decided to make a new piece for digitally-emulated feedback, a bit like last year’s The One Who Was Neither Or Nor, but with some refinements. Again, The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School was made using AudioMulch, with nested loops of sound processing contraptions which generate self-modulating feedback signals that can either be sent to the speakers, fed back into themselves, or into one of the other loops.
This time around, the new piece was designed to have a more elegant performance interface. Instead of furrowing my brow glaring at a computer screen, fussing with a mouse making adjustments and changing connections, I constructed a simple set of control points which had distinctive, but indirect, effects on the sounds produced. These control points could then be manipulated through AudioMulch’s Metasurface interface.
The resulting sounds were more complex than Neither/Nor: with greater variety in timbres and in phrasing. I particularly liked the way the loops would cancel each other out from time to time, suddenly introducing silences of unpredictable lengths. It’s not really relaxing listening, but it keeps you guessing.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make a recording of the gig. My computer was already being taken to its limits by this piece, and attempting to capture the sound data to hard drive at the same time would send the laptop into seizures. The two mp3 files above were recorded at home earlier today, each take lasting until the computer overloaded and I lost the thread of what was happening.
A new page for this piece, with more info, will be up on the music page shortly. Hopefully, I might have a few pics of the gig, too. In the meantime, here’s a woozy snap of the fine trio that played after me: Natasha Anderson, Ben Byrne, and Sean Baxter, making a scrupulously detailed racket with improvised analog electronics, percussion, computer manipulation and the world’s biggest recorder. Sorry the pic’s so bad: blame it on the bar’s subdued lighting and too much Cooper’s Pale.
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More about Carl Stone
Tuesday 15 July 2008
After yesterday’s addition to Please Mister Please, I would like to direct you to Carl Stone’s website, sukothai.com. The site features plenty of examples and discussions of his more recent work, in addition to a number of movies about barbecues.
The composer has graciously allowed me to keep a “quaint” example of his earlier work on my site, mid-80s MIDI and all, if only for a few weeks as usual.
- Note to self: Get more composers’ websites on the sidebar ->
- Additional note to self: I’m old enough to have written stuff I must now find a teensy bit embarrassing. In fairness, I should dig it out and upload some of it for public exposure.
