via SoundCloud
Category Archives: commentary
Free concerts every day
I’ve been doing yoga with a large group down on the ocean-front bluffs near the Long Beach Museum of Art. There is a lot more noise than one hears in a yoga studio. The teachers will often tell us to soften our muscles, to breathe into a cramped or stretched part of the body. They will also often invite us to take in the sounds going on, without judgment. Depending on the day of the week and the weather, the combination of sounds can vary a lot. Just as certain thoughts and certain yoga positions can induce a reaction, an unpleasantness perhaps, so can the sounds. When the Harley Davidson engines of weekend cruisers roar by and drown out everything else, it can elicit rage. When the foghorn and engine sounds on Ocean Blvd. merge to create a stable fundamental drone, it can soothe. By following the suggestion of the teachers, I’m finding a way into letting each sound be itself, without my aesthetic opinion.
It’s been a long time since I read John Cage’s Silence. The effect that the book had on my as a youngster was tied closely to a nascent interest in a sort of improvised Buddhist meditation. As Cage suggested a sound world all over that could be taken in with the interest of a devoted concertgoer, I would open my ears to this world as I was then opening them to the avant-garde music I was being exposed to (mostly via Pacifica Radio). The ‘opening’, then, was a connected experience, and the usual discomfort associated with hearing something that vexed would be replaced by a certain calm detachment and perhaps a curiosity. Hearing agreeable sounds that would normally be ignored or taken for granted could now be a source of calm delight.
Somewhere along the line, I lost this ability. I suspect that it’s about ego, the usual culprit in stealing serenity from any moment. For years I have been trying to hear that ‘music inside my head’ and get it in notation or digital audio. This inward-looking process has yielded some good surprises and a unyielding predilection for sublimity, but always with that judgement attached. Is this good? Does it sound like someone else? Am I becoming too antiquated?
Yoga’s got me back in a good place – listening to the variegated strands of noise and pitch and make up Long Beach’s waterfront. Listening with more interest than I have felt in the concert hall in years.
Music for the End Times
According to a Newsweek study, 40 percent of the people in the US think the world’s going to end in their lifetime. Their descendants are not a consideration, it would seem. The claim is that religious faith that motivates this view; I believe it to be guided more by ignorance and world-fatigue. I am world-fatigued, too, and that does not excuse me from concern over what the world might be like for my nephew’s children in 50 years in the event that the Book of Revelations is nothing more than the obscure rantings of a holy man suffering from a delusional mental condition.
The future of man, the outcome of his impact on this planet and it’s ecosystems, is very much on the mind of composer John Luther Adams, who has stated that composing is an act of faith, but faith in the future of mankind. This could sound all very Age of Aquarius, except that it’s not.
Thomas Mann’s ‘Doktor Faustus‘ develops this question about man’s simultaneous impulse for both creation and nihilism. I found in it’s pages a nostalgia for the notion that humanistic philosophy is the crucible where the future of man outweighs the decadence of the times one lives in. In the novel, the fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn creates a large work titled Apocalypsis cum figuris, intended as a final devastating blow to the An Die Freude (‘Ode to Joy’) in the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Leverkuhn had been a theology student prior to his career as a composer, and so knew of this contradictory impulse in man’s nature (here finely calibrated as a portrait of the ‘German’ soul. Mann wove this anti-humanism into a larger parable for the catastrophe in Central Europe in the first half of the 20th Century, but it’s core argument is applicable to modern life.
When I read that such a large part of the American electorate has such surety about the future of the planet, and that this is tied to an eschatology learnt in churches, it makes me less than optimistic about addressing long-term problems such as climate change and projected shortfalls in Social Security solvency. It seems that it is a sort of myopia, self-induced by laziness, indoctrinated by fundamentalism, uncaring in it’s desire to get easy answers and then consume resources and pollute with aplomb. To be so certain about the future of man therefore is the worst form of selfishness and self-justification. Why make hard ethical choices about consumption of resources and despoiling of the environment if God’s going to blow it all up and start again, anyhow?
This, then, is the crux of the matter facing composers now, at least the composers who write music is intended to be listened to, and not just heard. No one can fault the one who composes to raise a little cash, or raise one’s public profile a bit in order to secure some career aims. That’s part of the life. When one considers, however, how heavy the lifting is for making large works for perhaps one premiere opportunity and how many of these products of toil and Big Ideas now line the obscure corners of academic music libraries, it becomes incumbent on the artist to consider if the work, and mankind itself by extension, indeed has a future. The usual teeth-gnashing about the ‘future of classical music’ and so forth are merely a proxy for the larger question.
Why We Allow the Destruction of Our PlanetIt’s not enough to point out that our political system is saturated with money, including money from coal and oil and nukes and gas. Of course it is. And if we had direct democracy, polls suggest we would be investing in green energy.
via Thehumanist
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
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.’
being found
From the very beginning of UseNet and early internet resources, I always thought the attraction was the hunt and search for esoterica that connects me to world and it’s many hidden nuggets of interest. Why bother putting up yet another personal identity site that promotes but does not feature anything that compels.
This site is an experiment for me, does being ‘found’ (i.e. searchable, linkable, SEO-friendly content) mean anything at all? does the ability to be located by a search engine really rate in comparison to making a good find of your own? Is being the target of some online marketer rate next to having the Great Adventure of looking for the next satiation of accidental curiosity?
Today’s find: Dennis Parker. Porn Star in gay and straight 1970’s films, Disco singer ‘Like an Eagle’ and later role in ‘The Edge of Night’ soap opera.
via YouTube