The music’s original, and the banner photo at the top was taken by my partner, Gregory Jeffers, in the Western Cape region of South Africa, using a landscape option built into his camera.
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Supersaturation
Although advocates, usually salaried employees of art organizations, will beg to differ, I declare here and now for all time that there is simply too much music in the world. At least, there is too much if the goal of the person laboring to make this music is to have a name, a personhood, an individuality created out their efforts. Stockhausen, in a talk to a Dutch arts organization about religion in music, maintained that this is natural impulse of a Western musician and that the Buddhist inclination to get rid of ego in not in keeping with the European mindset.
What may have been true to Stockhausen has been rendered incomprehensible by the fact of the internet, and the transient character of new musical careerism in our age. Try as one might to distinguish oneself as a unique voice, the sound will be subsumed into a crowded community of other experimenters, dabblers, free agents and DMAs looking for a day job. While my wish for those to find a way to make a bit of cash doing something they claim to love is sincere, I’ve come to believe that, for the majority, it’s truly Catch and Release. It’s the chase that one loves, the desire for expressing individuality, but musical End Times are here, and all that’s really left is overtonality, the resonant structure of the planet we live on the love we offer.
via SoundCloud
Radio Dynamics
I asked the Oskar Fischinger Trust to explain why his animated film, Radio Dynamics, was exempt from licensing for musical use. Here is the response I received:
‘Please watch the film again, and look at Fischinger’s titles: “Please! No Music!”
Your request seems to indicate a basic misunderstanding of this film and his intent; we will not grant an exception. No music is allowed with this film. Please also review again William Moritz’s text about the film, in Optical Poetry.
Please respect the filmmaker’s work and intent. Some films are intentionally silent and must be viewed ONLY that way. ‘
The Trust makes a good point. Respect the intent of the filmmaker’s intent. I wonder, however, if his intent was based on the limitations of music technology in 1942. This was 2 years after the release of Fantasia and I don’t doubt that experience (Fischinger contributed the animated abstractions to the Bach ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor’ section of the Disney film) might have given him pause about allowing his visual imagination to be constrained by commercial standards of film scoring. If he had been able to see the degree of sonic experimentation and post-production synchronization, he may not have been so inclined to forbid music.
I am posting the music with the title ‘Radio Dynamics’, which I do not believe is covered by the same licensing restrictions. With thanks to Herr Fischinger for giving my musical imagination something to connect to.
An example of the animation below the music:
via SoundCloud
via YouTube
Crossing North America
Starting from the East Coast, heading west, a I-IV-V progression, slowed to driving speed with the help of digital sound processing tools. The Pacific, the Native Americans believed, is the ocean of forgetfulness. So this one forgets to resolve to the tonic. And no one seemed to mind.
via SoundCloud
Vivier’s lover
Just read ‘Such Times’ by Christopher Coe, chiefly because Paul Griffiths identified the the satyr/composer Claude in the story as French-Canadian Claude Vivier. Since the author of the novel died in 1994, one year after the novel was published, we cannot ask him, but the story is so unusual and unique that it’s hard to read it any other way. For those of us who have been members in the International Monastic Society of Avant-Garde Composition for any length of time, Vivier’s biography is quite unlike most all of our fellows. Libertine, openly gay, murdered in Paris by rough trade – his like does not sound like the usual safe ground inhabited by fellows in our trade. Vivier went to the edge in his life and finally, over the edge, but not before he composed an unusual body of work. The portrait of him in ‘Such Times’ is of a man who’s astonished by affection, hapless in the ways of society and as unvarnished in the ways of a cultured man as could be thought possible as a gay man in his 30s living in Paris on government arts grant money.
It’s doubtful he would have been able to keep it up for long – by the year of his murder in 1983, AIDS was gaining ground in the big cities and fellows like Vivier were just massively exposed. Hence my fascination with him – it was only by living close to personal catastrophe that he was able to produce works that have the timelessness that practically none of his IRCAM-vetted contemporaries could muster. It’s more usual for a composer of this genre of music to be the epitome of bourgeois safe living. In America, most pass through a very brief period of bohemianism into a stolid academic life. Vivier would have had none of that. His story is part and parcel to the Dionysian Mysteries: ‘His cult is also a “cult of the souls”; his maenads feed the dead through blood-offerings, and he acts as a divine communicant between the living and the dead.’ (Xavier Riu, Dionysism and Comedy).
In a letter written in Paris near the end, Vivier wrote, “I don’t know why, it seems to me I want to conquer death on its own ground, make it the liberator of beings open to eternity, give humans such a music that their consciousness spills directly into eternity without passing through death, without paying tribute to the old Ferryman of Acheron!”
etranger
When I dream about a stranger in my dream, is that someone who I’ve yet to meet or is that a part of myself I’ve yet to shake hands with? Dreams about new people and unfamiliar places and experiences raises the question for me if that safer place of going ‘inside’ for creative material also includes new adventures concocted by the unconscious mind.
I notice that people who make music get less inclined towards acceptance of experimental sounds and odd discoveries the longer they go on making work. From what I understand about Jung’s idea of man’s development is that the first 40 years or so are spent looking ‘outward’ to the world. For most, this means career, family, etc., but for an artist this might mean looking at material, sound, images as something ‘out there’, a place to visit (many of us yearn for new and unusual places and experience and create that through art, music, literature).
The next part of life after 40, according to Jung, is spent ‘inside’ (perhaps going back to hunter/gatherering societies where the older hunters begin to spend more time in village past a certain age, sitting on haunches or caring for children). By going ‘inside’, the artist uses the repertoire of experiences already collected. It is process-driven, rather than purely experiential .
The only way out of stodgy rehash of old musical ideas for me is to pay attention to the strange, otherwordly, timeless content that emerges from dreams.
‘Hello, stranger you mean so much to me. I’m wide awake, gonna follow you home. You’re a shape changer, might have some other kind of life to live, so take a bit and swallow me whole. Open wide and swallow this all.’
retrospective
via SoundCloud
what 1992 sounded like – I thought it was an unserious effort at the time and left it on magnetic tape for 20 years. Played live with electric mandolin, delay, 4 track, drum machine, 2 1980’s synths still use today.