Boring Like A Drill

Going Back to Riga

2009-07-10T02:04:00.000Z

I'm excited about making another visit to Riga; only this time it's not for a holiday. I've been chosen to perform in a new production of Hamlet that's going to tour there. The main reason I got the job is because of this jacket I have which has a papier-mâché puppet of Maxim Gorky sewn onto the left shoulder. He cuts a rather louche, melancholy figure with his Brylcreemed hair and waxed moustache. I'm not quite sure how my part fits into the play but they want me to appear onstage and engage in dialogues with Gorky, who will make sardonic comments on the action and the society depicted at Elsinore. I have to hunch over to the left to play this part because the puppet is sewn on crooked. We're going to be performing in an abandoned warehouse so at the moment we're rehearsing in an underground car park and it turns out I'm not going to Riga after all it's all a dream it's just another bloody dream.

Composing With The Radio On

2009-07-08T22:34:00.002Z

I'm beginning to doubt whether the new way of making music (computers, synthesisers, MIDI sequencers giving instant feedback of what you've just done) is such a great idea after all. Hearing every little thing go wrong, time and time again, has the effect of grinding down your confidence and your will to finish the thing you're working on. There's too much room for experimentation, tempting you to drift away from your original thoughts, leaving you lost in a maze of dead ends.

Perhaps it is much better to write and finish a piece in blissful ignorance and only then, upon hearing the first rehearsal, realise how badly it stinks. At least then you could identify and fix only what is broken, to justify all your efforts so far.

I try to have an idea of what I want to achieve before I begin, but lately I'm finding that these ideas are neither solid nor clear enough before I start working, and I lose my way.

Also, The Ashes have started so I can't give anything else my undivided attention.

And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

2009-07-07T01:40:00.000Z

Three quotes from Harry Halbreich's sleeve notes for the album Iannis Xenakis: Chamber Music 1955-1990:

Kottos for cello (1977)
Later, the music returns to extremely high registers, the toccata proceeds with double stops, but after a short recall of the opening sounds, the piece unexpectedly ends by dissolving into gossamer glissandi in the highest register.

Embellie for viola (1981)
And the work ends in the same manner, slipping away to the extreme high glissando harmonics on the edge of audibility.

Tetras for string quartet (1983)
The eighth section, a metrically complex tutti, leads to the ninth, which serves as a coda and which, after a display of strength in tremolos, dies away in a surprising manner with pianissimo glissandi.

The Boring Like A Drill Mailbag

2009-07-05T22:26:00.000Z

A mere two weeks after that friendly missive from Suzanne Somers, I've received another email from an admirer:

X-Mailer: YahooMailWebService/0.7.289.1
From: Stave Scout
Reply-To: stavescout@yahoo.com
Subject: ORDER
To: drills2001@aol.com
Dear sir/madam
My name is stave scout and urgenly need some DRILLS to order from your company.please email with the types of DRILLS you have in stock for sale now.and the price and i will like to know what type of credit card do you accept. I will be looking forward to hear from you soon.
Thanks
Regards,
stave

Always willing to assist, I immediately sent a reply.

Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you for your enquiry about DRILLS. I have a wide selection of reconditioned DRILLS and DRILLBITS for sale - from the most delicate surgical equipment to heavy machinery for vast construction projects (laparoscopy, shipping canals). Please inform me of what type of DRILLS you need and I'm sure I can arrange prompt delivery. I accept Mastercard.
Kind regards,
Ben.

I'll let you know when I receive a reply. I'm sure it won't take long.

Please Mister Please

2009-07-03T21:58:00.001Z

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, "Pour Piano" (1973). Carol Morgan, piano.
(5'17", 7.25 MB, mp3)

AudioMulch 2.0 Released

2009-07-01T17:35:00.002Z

AudioMulch, a program I've used in a number of my compositions, live gigs, and installations, has now been upgraded to version 2. I'm pretty excited about this, particularly because the revisions to the interface and work flow are expected to make future upgrades and additional features quicker and easier. The program is intended for novices as well as specialists. Info and 60-day demo here.

Housekeeping in The Listening Room

2009-07-01T17:19:00.002Z

As mentioned before, all 12 pieces from Real Characters and False Analogues can now be heard in The Listening Room. However, I've been having trouble with some of the mp3s: Redundens 4 and all of the Stained Melodies come out distorted when I try to play them.

I'm figuring out how to fix this, but in the meantime if you have the same trouble then try the player on my NetNewMusic page.

This Is The New Music! Real Characters and False Analogues

2009-06-29T21:09:00.003Z

12 mp3s for download or streaming.

John Wilkins' An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, published in 1668, proposed the existence of a universal language, written and spoken, which could communicate experience without mediation. It was believed this language could reconstruct the order of nature that God had revealed to Adam, before confounding man's language at Babel.

Many people have claimed that music is the true universal language. (The first modern artificial language was Solresol, which can be transmitted musically as well as verbally.) Unforunately, this particular species of musical fundamentalist is most likely to insist that some types of music are more natural than others*, when in reality all music is, essentially, as arbitrary as any language.

Real Characters and False Analogues is a set of twelve pieces for microtonal piano I wrote in 2004, then revised extensively in 2009. It is a sequel to Stained Melodies, adapting the compositional premise of the earlier work, that of simultaneously performing isolated pitches from different, unrelated pieces of music. Real Characters develops this idea by imposing a series of transformations to the sources' rhythm, tempo, dynamics and pitch, producing a greater variety of harmonies and textures.

In keeping with the ultimately arbitrary nature of supposedly universal languages, all compositional choices were governed by a set of chance operations; and although the piano is tuned to a special 22-note scale, only 15 notes are decided by chance to appear in any given piece. Each of the twelve pieces is named after one of the myriad artificial languages invented over the past century.

The entire set, along with detailed composition notes, can be downloaded from its page on the music website, or heard in streaming audio at The Listening Room.

* According to Nicolas Slonimsky, "The American pedagogue Percy Goetschius used to play the C major scale for his students and ask them a rhetorical question. 'Who invented this scale?' and answer it himself. 'God!' Then he would play the whole-tone scale and ask again, 'Who invented this scale?' And he would announce disdainfully, 'Monsieur Debussy!'"

Everybody's I Ching

2009-06-27T01:28:00.000Z

Forget random.org; if you want true chance operations à la John Cage, for years the go-to source has been ic, the little DOS program written by Cage's assistant Andrew Culver. It imitates the I Ching's method of producing random numbers without all the original's tedious poetry and oracular pontification.

Now that command-line programs are a dying breed for the general computer user, it's great to see that Culver is keeping the program alive by putting a beta of a new, user-friendly, web-based ic on his site. If it was good enough for Cage...

Please Mister Please

2009-06-25T22:51:00.001Z

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Sue Egypt" (1980).
(2'58", 3.38 MB, mp3)

Street Art, Hackney

2009-06-25T22:28:00.001Z

Bird And Person Dyning

2009-06-24T15:45:00.007Z

An old man is walking slowly through the room. At one end of the room a bird is twittering. Not a real bird; it's an electronic bird call. The man walks slowly towards where the sound seems to be coming from. We can hear the bird, but we can also hear what the man hears: he's wearing microphones over his ears. The sounds he can hear are played through loudspeakers in the room, so that we can hear the bird from our position, and the bird from his position, as projected from a third position. The man can also hear what he hears relayed from those loudspeakers. Inevitably, feedback occurs.

The feedback produced is a high, whistling sound which complements the bird nicely. The man tilts his head a little to one side, or hunches down a fraction. The feedback shifts to a new note, the tone becomes reedier. The slightest adjustment to how the man listens can completely change the sound we hear. Even the bird's repeated call changes: its chirping amongst the feedback causes heterodyning, creating the illusion of other, differently voiced birds chirping in chorus.

On the weekend I got to see and hear Alvin Lucier perform his 1975 piece Bird and Person Dyning, as part of the Cut and Splice festival at Wilton's Hall. The above description gives some idea of how a simple setup can create a complex sonic environment. In a single, unified action it reveals how the subtleties of sound depend on how we listen, our position in space, the size and shape of the room. There were some good pieces on the weekend, and more poor pieces, but Lucier's music still stood out for having both a depth and a transparency that the others lacked.

(Video and audio of Bird and Person Dyning is on UbuWeb.)

The traditional summer solstice ritual of hiding in my bedroom all day with the curtains drawn

2009-06-21T02:04:00.002Z

This blog doesn't get much mail, except for some crazy oboe-playing guy who writes in every six months or so to complain about a passing comment I made about a music critic several years ago. So I was quietly excited to discover that a lonely missive had dropped into my inbox today.

That thrill turned to disappointment when it turned out to be be from Web Sheriff, an apparently legitimate company that perversely tries to make their emails look like spam by putting "EXTREMELY URGENT" in the subject line and using an embarrassing, fakey old-west style sheriff's badge as their logo. Best of all, despite the company name and logo, they're British; and there's nothing funnier than the British pretending to be cowboys (except for Germans pretending to be American Indians.) I guess the old company logo of Robin Hood being persecuted by Lily Allen's dad didn't inspire as much confidence.

Anyway, this EXTREMELY URGENT email from Deborah Sykes was a "DMCA REQUEST" to "remove Infringed Title(s) from Infringing File Location(s)" I thought the DMCA was an American law, so I'm not sure why a British company is so keen on enforcing it. I haven't bothered to look this up because the file in question had already been taken down, so I guess their urgency wasn't extreme enough.

You're probably wondering what file on my website the sheriff (head office in Wiltshire, not Nottingham) was so exercised about. It was because I had briefly included a copy of that massive Van Morrison hit, "Thirty Two" - all sixty-one seconds of it - in Please Mister Please. Van's time here has come and gone, but you can recreate the magic of the song in your own homes by strumming any old chord on an acoustic guitar and reciting over the top these deathless lyrics:

I see, you see, we'll get a guitar,
yeah, we'll get a guitar
and, oh, we'll get, we'll get three guitars,
No!, No!!, we'll get four guitars
and we'll get Herbie Lovelle to play drums,
and we'll do, the
"Sha-la", sha...
We'll do the sha-, sha-la bit.
"Sha-la, sha-, sha-la, sha-la", we'll do it,
we'll get together, uunghh, we'll get
uunghh, ttcchh, uugnhh-uunghh-uunghh, like that,
and we'll do the sha-la bit and then,
then, then, and we'll get, we'll get sixteen guitars,
and then, then we'll play it,
and then we'll do that one, yeah.
Let me hear ya' do that again.
Over and over, Bert Berns song, over...
[clack, clack-clack, clack]

Update In C

2009-06-18T18:23:00.001Z

As promised, video of the busked performance of Terry Riley's In C on the weekend.

Please Mister Please

2009-06-17T16:04:00.002Z

Edgar Varèse, "Hyperprism" (1923). Ensemble Intercontemporain /Pierre Boulez.
(4'15", 3.52 MB, mp3)

Better Than Joshua Bell

2009-06-16T21:22:00.001Z

Sorry for the last few days' silence. I spent a long weeked catching up on some drinking with an old friend who was in town. This means I missed the chance to see some quality busking on Southbank, where The Ramshackle Orchestra for Musequality gave a kerbside performance of Terry Riley's In C. To quote Petemaskreplica:

It's immensely satisfying to play. It's something to do with the autonomy. What you play, and how, and when, is up to you, and it's thrilling to find all sorts of unexpected combinations emerging as a result of your decisions. You get into the groove, and play around, reacting to what the other musicians are doing, they reacting to you in turn.... The whole 45 minutes or so was filmed, so I hope to add YouTube links soon!

Other Minds has the complete score of In C available online, in PDF format.

Why I'm glad I don't play piano

2009-06-12T23:08:00.003Z

I was warned before moving into my new house that I would be sharing my room; and so I am:

It's a Kemble spinet piano: a compact piano design developed during the Great Depression, and which pretty much died out by the end of last century as digital pianos became omnipresent. The landlady warned me that it's never been tuned, as if you couldn't tell from striking a few keys at random. I doubt that having one end up against the radiator (see left) has been helping it.

It's times like this I'm glad I don't play the piano. Never mind how out of tune it is; if I were any good at the piano this thing would also frustrate me with its short, clunky hammer action and other foibles peculiar to this design. They're also supposed to be real buggers to maintain and repair, because of the cramped and convoluted hammer mechanism packed inside. I'd resent it for taking up valuable space which could be used by a better piano.

Instead, I'm just happy to have a an acoustic instrument to mess around with. I've wedged down the damper pedal and am trying it out as a resonant sound chamber (note microphone lead). I'll have to have another dig around inside to find the serial number and see how old this thing is.

Incidentally, Kemble is the last piano manufacturer remaining in Britain, but not for much longer. They've just announced that their factory will close in October.

Joan La Barbara (In the Presence of Greatness? part 4)

2009-06-10T16:45:00.004Z

Like most things in life, it seems, I first came across Joan La Barbara's music unwittingly when watching Sesame Street as a kid. Apart from that, although I knew she was a composer I'd never (consciously) heard any of her own music. I suspect I wasn't the only one in that situation who went to hear her free recital at the ICA the other weekend.

In the introduction to one of her pieces, La Barbara herself made a passing reference to her fame lying elsewhere, as a singer and interpreter of other people's music (cue the rollcall: John Cage Morton Feldman Morton Subotnick Philip Glass...). Presumably it was a mixture of admiration for her vocal talent and curiosity about her compositional talent that resulted in the little room being filled to capacity on a rare sunny Sunday afternoon, with a bunch of us having to stand. (Including myself: the last available seat was nabbed by my ex-girlfriend.)

Afterwards, I asked the ex what she thought of her comfy concert experience. At first she said it was "a bit hippyish" but then revised her opinion: it's not La Barbara's fault that her pioneering work in experimental vocal music has helped spawn a couple of generations of inferior imitators.

There's also the methodical approach to much of La Barbara's music that saves it from self-indulgence. She performed two of her earliest works, from the early 1970s, beginning with Circular Song. This piece requires her to sing sliding scales using circular breathing - a technique never really intended for singing - embodies two distinct approaches in her music, exploring new techniques while following a clearly defined process.

Performance Piece played most dramatically with these two tendencies. Essentially it's a improvisation, with one caveat: whenever La Barbara realised she was thinking consciously of the sounds she was making, she had to verbalise those thoughts. The performance then became a balancing act between sound and speech, one half of the brain holding the other at bay.

Only one piece required anything more than La Barbara's voice and a microphone. The more recent 73 Poems was a multitracked vocalisation of Kenneth Goldsmith's poetry, mimicking the overlaying of Goldsmith's texts. You can see and supposedly hear the collaboration here, but the sound doesn't seem to be working. Some functional sound examples are here.

Please Mister Please

2009-06-09T22:49:00.002Z

The Al Wood Orchestra, "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" (1979?).
(3'56", 3.60 MB, mp3)

Filler By Proxy LXX: Apology Accepted

2009-06-07T23:19:00.002Z

Kyle Gann has been reading the latest collection of Morton Feldman interviews, and discovers that Feldman is a gift to the musical world that keeps on giving. Now, I can listen to Feldman's music and opinions for hours on end (in the case of the music, it's kind of mandatory), but then Gann quotes the following passage where Feldman compares the composers Stefan Wolpe and Ernst Krenek:

Wolpe was in the midst of a musical revolution in New York. He was in the midst of the rising young, fabulously talented people coming up in Europe, and he knew it. Krenek never knew it. There's not an ounce in Krenek's music, in things that I've heard of his late style... But nothing existed, nothing happened. It's music where nothing happened. It's the kind of music somebody might write some place in Adelaide, Australia.

Speaking as a native I'd object to that comparison, except I left Adelaide many years ago and so my criticism might look a teensy bit hollow. I wonder why Feldman's mind alighted on my home town in particular?

Gann comments,

Fascinating and endearing stuff (apologies, though, to any composers in Adelaide).

Mr Gann, you have nothing to apologise for. Mr Feldman, on the other hand...

Filler By Proxy LXIX: This post has made me hungry

2009-06-06T14:06:00.001Z

It's been a bastard of a week, so no time for ~~love~~fun online. I'm firmly relocated back in East London, the world capital for dodgy chicken shops. It's good to see I'm not the only one with a fascination for these establishments. Now here's a musical tribute we can all sing along with! (Found via Floccinaucinihilipilification.)

The Labour Party vs the BFG9000

2009-06-02T23:42:00.002Z

The election for members of the European parliament is on this weekend, so I've been getting a motley assortment of pamphlets shoved into my letterbox. I've had one from the racist loonies in the BNP, the not-so-racist-but-still-pretty-loony Ukip (apparently that's how you spell their name), Christian loonies, and the authoritarian control-freak loonies in the Labour Party, who tried to disguise their pamphlet as a community newsletter.

Headlined "Action on Crime", the blurb boasts about Labour MEPs voting to "ban the import of replica weapons which can all too easily be converted into working firearms". The accompanying photo shows police posed next to one of the frighteningly realistic weapons which hoodlums have been concealing on their persons while terrorising London's streets.

Phill Niblock again (In the Presence of Greatness? part 3)

2009-06-01T16:55:00.001Z

Last weekend I went for the second time to see a Phill Niblock performance. The main reason this time was to have a clear hearing of his work performed live, without the chattering of the punters.

People who know anything about Niblock know that he does two things. First, he writes music which requires a solo musician to hold one note for as long as possible, over and over again, and then overdub that with more of the same, over and over again. A loud, dense drone, rich with shifting overtones, is produced.

Secondly, and this comes as a surprise to some more musically-oriented people when going to see a performance, he makes films of people around the world doing rigorous manual labour, and these are typically screened during his musical performances. A large projection screen was centre stage at Cafe Oto for the launch of Niblock's new CD, Touch Strings, showing work in East Asia related to the fishing industry, before switching to agricultural and building labour.

The films are open to political, social and economic interpretations, but these considerations are subsumed within the prosaic documentation of people performing practiced, necessary actions, devoid of aesthetic artifice. If the juxtaposition of sound and image comment on each other, it is through the musician's playing, stripped of expressive subjectivity, performing a disciplined series of tasks. The necessity of the work shown on film, however, is missing from the music. Largely, it appears that both appear together because they're the two things Niblock does. The incompatibly impersonal approaches to the two media make film and music oddly neutral accompaniments to each other.

The musicians sat to one side, in semi-darkness: Susan Stenger and Guy De Bievre on electric guitars for the first piece, Stosspeng, and Arne Deforce on cello for Poure. The final piece, One Large Rose, was for multitracked string ensemble and performed without live musicians. Stosspeng was an hour long and a bit different to other Niblock pieces I've heard. The two live guitars seemed to float above a mass of lower-piched drones, and showed a greater variety of timbres and textures instead of receding into the background. The scale of the piece allowed the audience's attention to drift from the video to the music and back again, and although it's a common experience to lose the sense of time in this type of music and just become caught in the moment, I found myself losing focus on the video as well, even though there was nothing abstract about it. In the latter half of the piece I realised I'd been watching the screen but couldn't remember what I had just seen.

Please Mister Please

2009-05-29T00:14:00.002Z

Charles Dodge, "He Destroyed Her Image" (1973).
(1'57", 4.47 MB, mp3)

In the Presence of Greatness? (Part 2 - Robert Ashley)

2009-05-28T15:29:00.003Z

I found out at the last minute that Robert Ashley was appearing at the ICA (a friend saw an article about him in the trashy free newspaper they hand out at train stations) and so I rushed out to see for myself a live performance of one of his operas. This time, my reason for going was clear to me: I needed to understand.

For years I'd been interested in Robert Ashley's work, heard recordings of some of his operas, and generally tried to avoid listening to his music until I had the ideal conditions for doing so, because I always felt that it was beyond me. What I'd heard was an unremitting treadmill of ideas - musical, linguistic, philosophical - presented in such an undifferentiated fashion that there was no way for the mind to latch on to any particular reference point to gain an overall perspective. It was an immersive experience, but in a way that made me feel like I didn't pay enough attention.

So a live performance of his 1994 opera Foreign Experiences (part of a tetralogy called Now Eleanor's Idea, itself part of a larger trilogy) seemed a perfect opportunity. This was a "chamber" adaptation, for two voices instead of seven against a backdrop of electronics, staging non-existent instead of minimal. Sam Ashley and Jacqueline Humbert performed outstandingly, creating a seamless patter of speak-singing, virtuosically incanting their texts in lock-step unison or call-and-response, casually slipping from one accent or speech pattern to another as they shifted between characters.

The texts of Ashely's operas have always felt like novels. In this case, the setting is a modern American suburbia like that of Don DeLillo's White Noise, or more particularly the Vineland of Thomas Pynchon's southern California. The opera's story revolves around similar themes of rootlessness, ignorance, paranoia, remoteness, mediated experiences, thwarted radicalism and spiritual quests - all trapped in the paradox of living a life of modern materialism within a legacy of religious fervour. The narrative approach often feels similar as well, switching from closely reasoned metaphysical arguments to the banal and the vulgar, revelling in the lucid inarticulateness of American vernacular ("Naw shit no.")

Why present all this as opera? There's the music, the voices, the thrill of the performances, of course; but so many details fly past without allowing the mind to linger over their portent. (Earlier pieces like 1968's Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon forced listeners to dwell upon the disturbing implications of what they were hearing - that same piece gets a fast-forward reprise in the middle of Foreign Experiences.) Then I remembered Perfect Lives, the instigating work in this opera cycle: it was conceived as an opera for television. This must not be confused with televised opera.

It seems that all of Ashley's operas are best approached as television: a constant barrage of information, presented indiscriminately and dispassionately. There are people, voices, background music, all telling different stories and exposing different anxieties to which one may tune in or tune out, but can never fully grasp. Not in one sitting, anyway.