|| default || § ¶2005 SF Electronic Music Festival
Time again for the (sixth) electronic music festival in San Francisco. August 18-21. Interesting cast of characters, many I've never heard of (but will). But this year it includes Mort Subotnick. I haven't seen Mort in quite a number of years since I was his young, naive and awestruck assistant during the days of Silver Apples of the Moon. But I did suggest the title. From Yeats.
I'll also be featuring his music on the Music from Other Minds program Friday, August 19, the night he appears at the festival.
Working with Mort back in 1966-68 was a lot of fun, and an amazing experience. We had a rather large (for its time) Buchla system available to us, and a couple of reel-to-reel Ampex machines. The studio was above the Bleeker Street Cinema. Unfortunately, I never took any photos. But Bernice Abbott did, back in the '30's, of the building.
The NYU InterMedia Electronic
Music Studio was on the second floor, and the rest of the floors were
painter and sculptor's studios. The Cinema was downstairs at street
level. The building, on the corner of Bleeker and La Guardia Place,
looked really in bad shape the last time I visited NYC a few years ago.
*Sigh*Update: The KALW Music from Other Minds program featuring Morton Subotnick's music will be Friday August 12 (11pm PT), presenting a new release of two of his string quartets with live electronics, Echoes, and A Fluttering of Wings.
|| default || § ¶Decasia
I finally got around to watching Decasia, a film by Bill Morrison with music by Michael Gordon. It arrived via Netflix a few weeks ago, but I haven't had the courage, or the frame of mind, to slip it into the DVD player and watch it. For one thing, Michael Gordon's music can at times be totally annoying, and at other times brilliant and powerful.
I'm glad I put off watching it until the moment was right. It IS a powerful experience.
It was created in 2001 and came out on video last year. The performances in Basel in 2001 and then screenings around the world have made it into quite a cult piece.
Decasia is very much in the mold of the Reggio/Glass film+music spectacles like Koyaanisqatsi.
The imagery is somewhat random, without narrative, and the music,
mostly heavy and agressive, pushes the imagery into another context.
The film is about decay ... film in decay, as an analog of all
natural things. The images are old black and white (and brown) footage
from the 1920's that has suffered the ravages of time. Images are
barely visable thru the decay of the film stock itself, pock marks,
mold, and chemical splotches.
Two five minute clips from the film are available here and here.
Gordon's score is both horrific and extraordinary. In an interview
on the DVD he says he worked hard at trying to make the music sound
like it was being played by instruments that were themselves undergoing
decay. It is extremely effective. I would have loved to have been at
one of the live performances in Basel. The on-stage arrangement soundd
fantastic: A three story scaffolding structure was built in the
shape of a large triangle. The musicians were positioned on the various
levels, with the conductor standing on a raised podium in the center.
Draping the three walls were large pieces of scrim, on which the film
and slides were projected from the opposite corners. Surrounding the
conductor on the floor was the audience, who looked up through the
projections to see the musicians illuminated from behind the scrim.
The music energizes the imagery. I've always been fascinated by how
music or just any set of sounds, can completely change our
interpretation of visual experience. It is hard to recall the images
from Koyaanisqatsi without also hearing Glass's music. This work
started out as a commission for Michael Gordon to write a symphony for
the Basel Sinfonietta, with staging. Gordon and Morrison worked
together and off each other's material as a total collaboration.
It's a very impressive one, too. I highly recommend it. But choose the time to watch it wisely.
|| default || § ¶Arnold Schönberg Web Radio
The Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna features a continuous stream of historic recordings and documentary radio programs. The stream is accessed from this webpage, which has a link to the mp3 stream playlist. It appears that the program is updated every week or so.
Update: I should point out too the Schönberg Jukebox page that links to various audio documentaries and lectures available on demand, inlcuding a very intriguing one by Pierre Boulez recorded in 1987.
As one would expect, there is a lot of archival information on the website. Most of it in German. Regardless of what composers today may think of Schönberg and his music, his impact during those volatile years before the second world war is significant. I find much of his music, even today, extremely powerful. But, it all has to be considered in the context in which it was created. And so much has been written about just that, that I'll pass trying to explain what I mean. But I can recommend a book: Arnold Schoenberg's Journey, by Allen Shawn. I found it quite informative and helpful.
The center just concluded in June an exhibit of Schönberg's paintings. Good thing he didn't give up composing to be a painter. But in both arts he was mainly self-taught. There are a few wildly striking paintings, but most seem amateurish today.
Other books on Schönberg include:
- A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a life by Joseph Auner
- Schoenberg And His World by Walter Frisch
- Arnold Schoenberg by Charles Rosen
|| default || § ¶Bob Moog
Just learned
that Bob Moog is seriously ill and bed-ridden with a brain tumor. A web site has been created for well-wishers.
Robert Moog is one of the original developers of analog music
synthesizers in the 1960's. This kind of news is very saddening. We
send our best wishes and thoughts for a speedy recovery.
Update: Sadly, Bob Moog passed away yesterday, August 21, 2005. Our thoughts go to his family and friends around the world.
|| default || § ¶Last Night's Preview of Chocolate Box
Last night was the preview performance of Revienta, the first section of Kate Mitchell's Chocolate Box.
It was presented at ODC Theater in San Francisco as part of their
SummerFest West Wave festival going on thru the end of the month.
The
performance of this 14 minute section was a spectacular success. The
theater was full (it holds about 180 people), which for a Tuesday night
of experimental dance is quite remarkable in itself! And Kate's piece
was really well received. This first section uses a short introduction
that I created before it goes into music by Hesperion XX and other
early music material. (I'm creating all the music for remaining 3
sections of Chocolate Box, to be premiered in October at ODC, and we're
about 3/4 done.)
Kate wrote in the program notes about Chocolate Box:
"Revienta, or bursting, alludes to the jolt of flavor on the tongue, as well as the collision of Old and New Worlds at the turn of the 16th century."Seeing the final choreography for this section was exciting. From the opening static tableau of dancers in fixed poses to the exuberance of the dancers spinning and moving towards the end, the effect was brilliant.
I've watched the development of Part Two in rehearsal. The music is all done. Work on Part Three has just begun and creating the music for has been a bit of a challenge, shall we say. But the first draft is ready. Part Four? No idea yet.
As with our work on Threads last year, this is truly a collaboration. We pass ideas back and forth about the music, and I'm able to make immediate changes to satisfy the choreographic demands. The amazing thing for me is to see elements that I think of entirely in musical terms converted into dance movements! Many choreographers merely take a piece of music they like and choreograph the dance to the CD recording. They have no way of fitting the music to the dance... it all goes in one direction -- fitting the dance to a fixed musical soundtrack. In this collaboration we are doing we are able to iterate the music and choreography together so that the music and the dance fit together inherently. It's an extremely creative and satifying experience.
Case in point, also on the program last night was Viktor Kabaniaev's choreography to the Largo from Henrik Gorecki's Third Symphony, "Sorrowful Songs". The music is from 1992 and became so popular it could even be heard on pop radio stations. It's probably the 1990's equivalent of the Pachelbel's Cannon. Or Ravel's Bolero. But Kabaniaev's choreography was also brilliant! 3 women identically dressed Soviet style moved in grotesque and then tender gestures. It was highly emotional and very successful. But a bit too long. Again, length was dictated by the music, which cannot be changed. And, I wonder how much of the emotionality/sentimentality of the music rubbed off on the dance. Would it have been as successful with other, less emotional, music? In other words, did the music carry the choreography? I wonder still.
|| default || § ¶Comments Still Disabled
A few months ago I had to disable comments on this weblog due to the asocial behavior of a few spammers. I really don't understand the motivation of these people. First, you really have to be technically saavy enough to figure out how to automatically generate spam in the form of comments in a blog. But then why go the next step and generate junk comments? One could get paranoid about it and worry that it's all a plot to prevent the open flow of ideas. But I'm sure it's a lot less lofty than that. The people who devise these spambots that attach blogs are probably cut from the same cloth as "o-fillers" (folks who fill in the letter "o" in library books), and the guys who think it's cool to carve their names into the doors on bathroom stalls.I've updated the underlying software that runs this blog (Pivot 1.24), but I still am not happy with the way they've implemented comments. So I have all comments turned off until I can figure out how to make it work the way I want.
In the meantime, I've added a link to an external commenting service (haloscan) over in the left column. Give it a try.
|| default || § ¶Kyle Gann Interview
There's a great interview with composer/critic and general nice guy Kyle Gann over here.
It was recorded last week at WNYC on John Schaefer's program.
You can also read what Kyle has to say about what he didn't get to say in the interview
And you can hear Kyle's internet radio station on Live 365, which was the inspiration for Music From Other Minds.
|| default || § ¶Wikis, Collaborative Content, and Common Knowledge
I've been fascinated with this phenomenon of Wikis
- the collaborative development of content by a community of
enthusiasts. What if you provided the tools for anyone to create
content on any topic and add it to a communal "encyclopedia" of
knowledge? Well, that's what a "wiki" is. The term supposidly comes
from Hawaiian: wiki wiki means to do something fast. And the greatest collaborative experiment of all is the Wikipedia.
What makes this so interesting is that the wiki paradigm
actually encourages you to join in the project. Before you know it,
you're adding content about things you know, or editing articles and
items submitted by others.
This whole thing got started a few years ago by some bright
programmers in Europe, and now the effort to develop and distribute the
web-based wiki software is the responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Based in Florida, only because the founder, Jimmy Wales, lives there,
but with offices in France and Germany and active members all over the
world, the Foundation's goals are to:
"maintain and develop free-content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. In addition to managing the already developed multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, there is a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote and a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks. ... All projects work thanks to a wiki software package called MediaWiki."
The concept is interesting. Let people, enthusiasts, add content freely. Let them edit the content of others too. The software keeps track of the history of the updates, and you can always see how the content has changed. It also provides a discussion area for each article entry, and a "community portal" where everyone can discuss the wiki itself.
So far there are many sites using the MediaWiki software. These include the infamous Uncyclopedia, a parody on the Wikipedia, and a growing knowledge base on new music that I've been involved in at Sequenza 21.
The Wikimedia Foundation also hosts their own communities of open-content wikis, called Wikicities, where you can start a wiki on one of their servers. One such is the Mac Wiki.
Creating and editing entries or articles on a wiki is relatively
easy. You don't need to know HTML, but there is a simple tagging
method. And, as with most communal efforts, you learn from observing
others.
Some of the wiki projects are far reaching. And in August:
Wikimania 2005 - The First International Wikimedia Conference—a
conference for all users of Wikimedia projects—will be held in
Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005. See the
Wikimania pages.
What appeals to me in these efforts is the openness. Even tho before the web there were largescale collaborative efforts in the sciences, the web shrinks the time scale and opens the community to nearly anyone. It will be very interesting to see how it all turns out. I noticed that there are many specialized wikis and wikicities that are spare of content. It may be that the main topic for development is uninteresting or obscure. But it also may be that the people who should be in that community adding content don't know that the wiki exists. And the mechanics of content development and editing (what about fact checking in this post-modern age?) are unspecified. It can seem like one massive improv. But an interesting one.
|| default || § ¶The Cathy Berberian Interview
A fascinating interview from 1972 with Cathy Berberian, including musical examples, is now available on the RadioOM.org website. (If that link doesn't work, try the Internet Archive.)The interview was done in Milan, Italy, at Cathy Berberian's home, in November 1972 by Charles Amirkhanian. A very nervous Charles, by the way. La Berberian was quite an imposing figure in modern vocal music. The interview takes some interesting twists and turns.
I devoted a Music From Other Minds program on Berberian in March. It featured an excellent compilation of her work on from a 1993 Ermitage release of recordings Cathy made for the Italian radio, re-released on Aura Classics in 1999
Update: Jennifer Paull remembers Cathy Berberian, who would have been 80 this year, on the Music & Vision website.