Search Results for: november

Big changeover on Postclassic Radio today – more than a 30 percent change in content since yesterday. For one thing, Charlemagne Palestine month continues, and I’ve got some new tracks that will surprise you even if you know his work. Last week I went to Other Music in New York, the store where I go to find things so obscure even I don’t know about them, and I came across four new Palestine discs, of which I bought two. One I’m playing for you is a hauntingly strange little vocal performance, only four minutes, from a gig at Sonnabend Gallery (in 2001, I’m guessing, though there’s almost no info on the disc). The other is a very peculiar 1998 soundscape called Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn. Charlemagne made an environmental recording during the Jamaica Day parade in Brooklyn, then superimposed it beneath a multilayered drone texture. Very weird and beautiful, and I hope not too irritating for radio, because it’s 61 minutes.

Also, I’ve put up a choral festival. There’s very little Downtown choral music, but a few people have cultivated it. I’m playing three large works for chorus and orchestra:

Daniel Lentz’s Apologetica (50 minutes), a work in honor of the indigenous people wiped out by European colonization of the New World;

Janice Giteck’s Tikkun – Mending (42 minutes), a work on Jewish spiritual texts featuring tenor John Duykers (her former husband) (and unless you live in Seattle or California you haven’t heard this, because it’s unreleased); and

my own Transcendental Sonnets (35 minutes), based on poems by Emerson’s mad protege Jones Very, which will surprise you.

Around those I’ve interspersed four lovely a capella works by Mary Jane Leach, from her CDs Celestial Fires and Ariadne’s Lament. I’m not including Bill Duckworth’s Southern Harmony, because I played that in its entirety last November. But it’s already some three hours of choral music, all in a row. I hope you like choral music. I meant to ask, forgot to.

Plus, a major chamber work by political composer Jeffrey Schanzer, No More in Thrall, a tribute to an armed uprising of prisoners at the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp in 1945. If you’re as tuned in to the Left as you should be to be listening to this station (and a man of your age, after all), you’ll recognize the title as being a quote from “The Internationale.” New mbira music by Richard Crandall and music box music by John Morton, too. One nice thing about Postclassic Radio – if you’re not springing for the ad-free version, you’ll hear fewer ads here because I play a lot of pieces longer than half an hour.

From Salon.com:

Twenty-seven percent of online adults in the United States said in November they read blogs, compared with 17 percent in a February survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project….

Though blog readership jumped [in 2004], the percentage of online Americans who write blogs grew only slightly – to 7 percent in November, up from 5 percent early in the year. Blog creators tend to be male, affluent, well-educated and young [two out of four ain’t bad, I guess]; 70 percent of them have high-speed connections at home, and 82 percent have been online at least six years [but not blogging for six years, surely?].

Despite the attention to blogging, a large number of Americans remain clueless – only 38 percent of Internet users know what a blog is….

I think we found out November 2 exactly how clueless “a large number of Americans remain.” But what jarred me was the thought that for every million Americans on the Internet, 70,000 of them are writing blogs….

I finished my doctoral courses at Northwestern in spring of 1981. The summer found me lounging around in my apartment, drinking vodka tonics in the afternoon and taking down phone numbers from truck-driving schools and bartending schools, as advertised during Leave It to Beaver reruns. In the middle of this, the phone rang, and my composition teacher Peter Gena asked, “Do you want a job?” Peter had taken on the temporary directorship (with Alene Valkanas) of the New Music America festival, which moved from city to city. It had started in New York in 1979, then moved to San Francisco and Minneapolis, where I first attended it. Now, in Chicago, I would be the festival’s administrative assistant.

That means, if you submitted some music to NMA ‘82, I was the guy who opened your package, catalogued your vinyl records and cassettes, and first listened to them. My job wasn’t to filter stuff out, but I did advocate (without much success) for the music I really liked. Some of the recordings were submitted by composers, some brought by members of the advisory committee. I remember George Lewis brought along cassettes of two guys I’d never heard of: Rhys Chatham and John Zorn. Zorn’s Mauricio Kagelesque game improvisations struck me as old hat, but the Chatham excited me – combining minimalism and rock had never occurred to me. I sat at my desk absorbing the music of my generation: Beth Anderson, David Garland, Wayne Siegel, Carl Stone, Bruce Odlund, Michael Byron, Lois Vierk, Jeffrey Lohn, Peter Garland, Stephen Scott, Glenn Branca. Some of the names (Tom Cameron, Joseph Paul Taylor, Bill Seaman) have since disappeared, and I’ve never heard of them again. Others, once I moved east, eventually became close friends. Some of them have recently released CDs for which I wrote the liner notes. One of them, Bruce Odland, my son recently assisted in a musical production.

The experience didn’t make me a composer, for I had been that since I was 13. The piece of my own that was performed at that NMA festival, in fact, is coming out on a Cold Blue CD in a couple of months. But it was my first immersion in the music of my peers across the country, people who were reacting to the same music I had been consuming in college. I found out whom I stood with and whom against in the great aesthetic battles that would come later. And, looking back from an otherwise indistinguishable New Year’s Eve, it’s astonishing to reflect how much of my future life was forecast in my contact with those cassettes and records in the basement of the Museum of Contemporary Art in October and November of 1981. As PR person for the festival I got to know the superb Chicago jazz critic Neil Tesser, and it was he who helped me get started as a critic myself in the Reader. The rest you know.

Many of those cassettes are in a cabinet a few feet away from me right now. I kept the ones I could, and taped all the ones I couldn’t. I was probably, as administrative assistant, supposed to mail them all back to the composers. I didn’t. But now I’m transferring them onto CD, making mp3s of them, and playing them on Postclassic Radio. Sorry for any inconvenience. I hope, after 23 years, you don’t mind that I held on to them. They’ve meant a lot to me, and I knew someday I’d get a chance to release them back into the world.

Having just had performances in San Francisco and Berkeley, I then had one in Seattle, and have one coming up in Pasadena on November 19. I meant to tell you about the one in Seattle, but I thought it was on Nov. 17 and I just noticed that it was Nov. 12. Anyway, the Seattle Chamber Players played a one-minute quartet that they asked me to write, in a series of such brief works to celebrate their 15th anniversary. So I decided the piece should be in four movements, and called it Minute Symphony. I haven’t heard how it went. Anyone hear it?

The Pasadena performance is this Friday. The ensembleGREEN kindly asked me for an instrumental arrangement of my sampler piece So Many Little Dyings, based on a Kenneth Patchen poem. The result will be performed Friday night at 8 PM, at the Neighborhood Church Chapel, 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena, CA. Here’s the program:

Arthur Jarvinen: DLL Canon (1993)

Mary Lou Newmark: Identity Matrix (2003)

Arthur Jarvinen: Brahms (1979)

Bruno Louchouarn: Flux (1999)

Henry Rasof: Witchita Falls 1

Frederick Rzewski: The Waves (1988)

Tom Johnson: Swena Lena (1976)

Philip Glass: “KneePlay2” from Einstein on the Beach (1975)

Tom Johnson: WoloYolo (1976)

Kyle Gann: So Many Little Dyings (1994)

I won’t be there, but let me know if you are. It all reinforces my feeling that I’m a West Coast composer trapped in the body of an East Coast composer.

Young composer Keith Corbin has written a rather nice Elegy for America, inspired by what he correctly calls the horrible catastrophe of November 2, 2004: “59,459,765 Americans said that they favor a policy of Violence over Peace, Intolerance over Justice, Large Corporations over Economic Sanity, and Fear over Freedom and Liberty.” You can hear an mp3 of the MIDI version of Corbin’s piece, based on a funereal variation of our national anthem. One thinks of Charles Ives’s song “An Election: Nov. 2, 1920,” lamenting the country’s similarly cynical and ill-motivated election of another nobody, Warren G. Harding. Is November 2 a particularly inauspicious day to hold elections?

On November 3, the day after the election, 250 Bard College students staged a peaceful protest in the neighboring village of Red Hook. They sat down in the street in the town’s sole intersection, delayed traffic, attracted curious onlookers and a few insults, and left. That was it. Somehow the event came to the attention of the Kingston police force in neighboring Ulster county, across the river. Thirty Kingston police came to escort the students away. Twelve students were walking back to campus together, when one stepped over the white line on the curb. That was the signal for the 30 cops to jump out of their cars and begin beating the 12 defenseless students. One girl, upset by the violence, fell to the ground and a cop put his boot on her neck. Three students were charged with resisting arrest – one for putting his hand on the arm of a cop who was beating another student. One student ended up in the hospital with a concussion, others were bloodied and bruised. The local press claims that the students provoked the police, in direct contradiction to descriptions by adult witnesses present who are connected with the college. And this is in the relatively liberal enclave of Red Hook, NY. The coming police state has begun, and the only thing that keeps me from anticipating another Kent State is the fact that riot police use rubber bullets these days – I think.

Composer Lawrence Dillon, grad and former faculty of Juilliard but now living and teaching in North Carolina, cries out for the 25 million red-staters who voted for Kerry and sanity:

Don’t you think we’ve been depressed enough this week without taking all the blame for Bush’s resounding victory? And how do you feel about the 2.8 million New Yorkers who voted for Bush — more than in North Carolina and Arizona combined? What exactly is their excuse for being so stupid?

On the night of November 3rd [with my North Carolina colleagues] all anyone could talk about was how depressed they were, how hard they had worked in support of a losing cause, how completely stunned they were by the results. We had no idea that the next few days would bring about a situation in which every Dem in a state that scored 50% or more for Kerry would call us arrogant assholes for living in states where we represent something less than that magic 50% figure….

Kerry got 52% of New Jersey, 44% of North Carolina. That’s the difference between a majority and a minority, but it sure as hell isn’t the difference between enlightenment and ignorance.

Granted, and if it weren’t for the dumb electoral college, we wouldn’t be talking that way. I understand the logic of the electoral college, but more and more it seems like a relic of the day when state’s rights were an important political issue, when the people of Virginia had more in common with each other than Richmond did with Philadelphia, which is no longer the case. I’ve got cousins in Waco, Texas, medical doctors, who are just as horrified by Bush as I am. As for those 2.8 million New Yorkers, I suspect a lot of those are not so much stupid, just the fabulously wealthy voting their… short-term, perhaps,,, economic interests.

So here’s some sympathy and gratitude to the 25 million out there trying to talk sense into the bigoted and uneducated. I do too easily appreciate living in a precinct that voted for Kerry more than 6-to-1, where I can say anything I want about Bush and get only smiles and nods in return, and if my performance this past weekend had been any place less liberal than Berkeley, I would have cancelled. If I lived in a red state right now, I’d be in the hospital recovering from all the fist fights I’d started. I’m so pissed off at the religious right that I’m ready to marry another man, and I’m not even gay.

I’m writing about politics now not because I believe I know more about it than anyone else, but because after November 2 – an even darker day for America than September 11* (better 3000 Americans killed than 59,000,000 voting their approval to genocide and sexual torture) – I couldn’t find anything on the internet to make me feel better. For many hours there was just nothing, then the articles started rolling in, predictably, by Democrats blaming themselves. The Repugs eat this up, that every time they cream us we act like it’s our own fault. I refuse to play into it. We can discuss strategy and what to do next time, but before we take the slightest iota of blame on ourselves, let’s be very clear about one thing: anyone who thinks it’s a bigger crime for two men to get married than to invade a country and kill 100,000 of its citizens to get its oil is just SICK. Sick, sick, sick. We can later get really cynical and figure out how to attract sick voters, but bewail how we failed to reach high enough moral ground? Puhleeeeeeeeeeeze.

So I’m trying to throw out some tidbits to comfort the sane and thoroughly depressed. Including a couple of poems, the first by Mikhail Horowitz of Bard College’s publications office, cleverly based on the all-too-familiar letters of its subject:

Bush

Betrayal! United States has

Been usurped, stolen, hustled

By ugly shrub! He

Bamboozles us, sets his

Battalions upon Saddam Hussein

But undermines social health

By unhappily sanctifying Homeland

(Bullshittin’ us?) Security. His

Bromidic, unintelligible speech hides,

Barely, undiluted slyness; he’d

Bomb Utopia, serving his

Beastly, ultrafascistic Satan. He’s

Bellicose, unbalanced, shameless; he’s

Breaking Uncle Sam’s heart.

Brothers, unite! Sisters, help!

Band up! Stop him!

– Mikhail Horowitz

And on a calmer, more thoughtful note, one sent to me for consolation by composer John Luther Adams, from the poet John Haines, who wrote it before the 2000 election:

The Last Election

Suppose there are no returns,

and the candidates, one

by one, drop off in the polls,

as the voters turn away,

each to his inner persuasion.

The frontrunners, the dark horses,

begin to look elsewhere,

and even the President admits

he has nothing new to say;

it is best to be silent now.

No more conventions, no donors,

no more hats in the ring;

no ghost-written speeches,

no promises we always knew

were never meant to be kept.

And something like the truth,

or what we knew by that name-

that for which no corporate

sponsor was ever offered –

takes hold in the public mind.

Each subdued and thoughtful

citizen closes his door, turns

off the news. He opens a book,

speaks quietly to his children,

begins to live once more.

– John Haines

*A friend warns that I’ll be jumped on for this comment, but it’s based on a moral principle that I, an acknowledged liberal, believe in: that the evil a person does is more damaging to that person than the evil that is done to him. Terrorists can hit us and we can still hold our heads up high in the world, but if we perpetrate the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, I insist that we no longer can. In fact, I think that our national willingness to commit any crime, ignore any moral law, sweep aside any international treaty, rather than risk another 9-11 is an unparalleled example of national cowardice. If you disagree, then of course 9-11-01 will seem like a much worse day than 11-2-04, and maybe you sleep better than I do.

The November Composer-of-the-Month at Postclassic Radio is, logically enough, William Duckworth, whose elegant musical logic has been a tremendous influence on my own music. I’ve uploaded two major Duckworth works, The Time Curve Preludes (1978-79) for piano, played on Lovely Music by neely Bruce, and Southern Harmony (1980-81), a choral piece sung by the Gregg Smith Singers and the Rooke Chapel Choir of Bucknell University. The latter work is in 20 movements divided into four books, and I’ve separated the four books out among other works in the playlist. Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances (1986) is also being aired, performed by pianist Lois Svard. These are all classic works of the postminimalist movement. There’s no reason to upload performances from Duckworth’s vast internet work Cathedral, because it’s already on the web here, and you can hear it (and play it) yourself.

To upload a couple of pieces to Postclassic Radio every night is easy. What’s proved more daunting, in my mid-semester work overload, is keeping the playlist current. My apologies for lagging behind in that area. Corrections coming shortly.

I have two performances coming up in San Francisco and Berkeley next week – one I’ll be present for, the other I won’t. Red-headed pianists Sarah Cahill and Kathleen Supové – I call attention to their hair color because the title of the concert is “Two Redheads and 88 Solenoids,” although I think of Cahill as more of a strawberry blonde – are playing some music for piano and Disklavier plus piano, dotted with pieces for Disklavier alone. The premiere in my case is Private Dances, a set of dances of which I wrote two in 2000 and four more last summer, 25 minutes in all. Cahill is also playing pieces by Carl Stone and Tania Leon, while Supové is offering works by Dan Becker, John Adams, and Randall Woolf. During intermission some of Becker’s and my Disklavier pieces will be featured. (The Disklavier, by the way, is an acoust-, oh forget it.) Details for the two identical concerts are as follows:

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004

8 PM

The Slavonic Cultural Center

60 Onondaga Ave. (corner of Alemany Blvd; near Balboa Bart)

San Francisco

$12

and

Saturday, November 6th, 2004

8 PM

The Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery

2324 Shattuck Ave.

Berkeley

$12

To make the first concert I would have had to fly across the country on Election Day, and it occured to me that Dick Cheney might choose that day to order his Pentagon friends to shoot a couple more planes out of the sky and then claim he was mistaken again. So I’ll wait until President-Elect Kerry is securely ratified, and go out for the Saturday performance.

The “Sounds Like Now” festival coming up this week looks like old home week for the Downtown scene. Microtonalist David First and electronics maven Tom Hamilton curated the festival, and text composer Chris Mann is emceeing. The schedule, running from Thursday through Sunday, October 14 to 17, at La MaMa Etc., 74A East 4th St. in New York City, is as follows:

Thursday, Oct 14 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

Annea Lockwood

Petr Kotik

Alvin Lucier

Thomas Buckner

Friday, Oct 15 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny & Jon Gibson

Jin Hi Kim

David Behrman

Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell

Saturday Oct 16 2PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson & Peter Zummo

Robert Ashley

Jim Staley

David Rosenboom

Douglas Ewart

Saturday Oct 16 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo & Leroy Jenkins

Joshua Fried

Pauline Oliveros/Deep Listening Band

Phill Niblock

Downtown Ensemble (William Hellermann/Daniel Goode/Mary Jane Leach/Peter Zummo)

Sunday Oct 17 2PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo, Leroy Jenkins & Mark Dresser

William Duckworth/Cathedral Band

Fast Forward

Carl Stone

Nicolas Collins

Michael J. Schumacher

Sunday Oct 17 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo, Leroy Jenkins, Mark Dresser, & Roscoe Mitchell

David First & Tom Hamilton

Joan La Barbara

Kyle Gann

48nord & George Lewis

Morton Subotnick

That’s right, that’s yours truly in there on the final concert, and it’s my only New York performance this fall. (I have some San Francisco performances November 3 and 6 that I’ll tell you about later.) At “Sounds Like Now” I’m playing three of my Disklavier pieces, Bud Ran Back Out, Petty Larceny, and the world premiere of Unquiet Night – although if you’ve been listening to Postclassic Radio you may have already heard the last-named piece. [A Disklavier, since many people have no idea what one is, is an acoustic piano, with real strings struck by real felt hammers and vibrating in real air, played by a computer via MIDI cables. The sounds are not electronic, and do not play through loudspeakers.] So show up at La MaMa Etc., 74A East 4th St., and you’ll hear many of the stalwarts who inhabited the new-music scene of the 1980s and ‘90s with me.

Winter Music, a book of the essays of John Luther Adams, has just appeared from Wesleyan University Press, with a foreword by yours truly. The title is from John Cage’s music, the publisher the same as Cage’s seminal tome Silence. Adams is the most geographically-identified of recent composers, the composer who writes from Alaska about Alaska, filling his scores with vast, white, sometimes featureless but luminous surfaces. A little reminiscent of Morton Feldman but less nettly, John writes like an artist, not analytically or even literally, but in evocative epigrams that give insight into his wonderful music:

We hear sounds in measurable space. And in physical terms, sound is audible time. But we perceive sounds as something qualitatively different, less like objects and more like forces. This dynamic quality of sound creates its own kind of space and place….

In visual space there’s a phenomenon called ganzfeld. Immersed in pure color, the viewer loses all sense of distance and direction. I long for a similar experience in music. I want to find that timeless place where we listen without memory or expectation, lost in the immeasurable space of tones.

He also writes as a concerned citizen of the world (and environmental activist by former profession) who can see things going on that we lower-48-ers can’t, and even here he writes with no journalist’s argument, but an artist’s eye:

Some say the world will end by fire. Others say by ice. Here in Alaska, the land of snow and ice, we’re beginning to feel the fire.

In the summer of 2000 the I̱upiaq community of Barrow Рthe farthest-north settlement on the mainland of North America Рhad its first thunderstorm in history. Tuna were sighted in the Arctic Ocean. No one had ever seen them this far north before.

The following winter Lake Illiamna on the Alaskan Peninsula didn’t freeze over. No one, not even the oldest Native elders, could remember this happening. In Fairbanks for the first time in memory the temperature never dropped to 40 below. Months of unseasonably warm temperatures, scant snowfall, and constantly changing winds were followed by an early spring. This was not the exhilarating explosion, the sudden violence of the sub-Arctic spring. It was the slow attrition of dripping eaves and rotting snow.

Once again this year, winter never really arrived. South central Alaska experienced a violent storm with the highest winds ever registered there. The Iditarod dogsled race had to be moved hundreds of miles north because there was not enough snow. Here in Fairbanks the mean temperature from September through February was the warmest on record. In November and again in February, we had freezing rain. As the small community of Salcha, the ice on the Tanana River broke free of the banks and jammed up, flooding nearby homes and roads. This is something that happens in April or May, not in the middle of winter.

What this all refers to, of course, is that global warming, of which we receive only vague intimations in lower latitudes (like multiple hurricanes?) is a fact of daily life nearer the poles. John’s article was completed a year ago and the news it brought depressed me then; more recently I’ve read similar descriptions in Salon and National Geographic. At a reading last night John said if he wrote the article over this year, the picture would be even darker. On the bright side, as temporary consolation while we prepare to bid farewell to our habitat planet, the book comes with a CD of three previously unreleased John Luther Adams works: Roar from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, Velocities Crossing in Phase-Space from Strange and Sacred Noise, and Red Arc/Blue Veil. This last will be up on Postclassic Radio very shortly.

Well, today’s the day – the one-year anniversary of my blog going public. When Doug McLennan asked me to do this, I promised myself to give it a big push for a year, and as this is my 187th entry (the software keeps track), I’ve averaged about a blog entry every other day. Whether I can continue at that rate I don’t know, and I’m not going to make any more promises. Of course, I also went to New York to work for the Village Voice in November of 1986 and told myself, “All right, I’ll keep this job for three years” – and I’m still there, sort of. For all my unwillingness to commit myself, I am a creature of great habit and inertia. It’s very difficult to get me moving, and once I’ve started something it’s just as difficult to get me to stop. So I’ll likely plow along as I have, but I refuse to feel as guilty as I used to if I don’t come up with a topic (or am simply too busy with other careers) for a few weeks at a time. Some months I’ve felt like I’m going to the trouble to put my views out there just for people to take pot shots at; other months I’ve been abashed at the expressed gratitude I’ve received for saying things no one else is saying. It averages out. Thank you all for reading, kindred spirits and contrarians alike, and for believing that new music is worth voluminous public discussion. Now, light the candle and everybody sing, each in his own key, of course….