It Seems Idiotic

I have a few friends who just don't understand why I love the comic strip Mary Worth so intensely. Maybe they will understand after clicking here:

via The Comics Curmudgeon.

The Ojai Diaries: Part Four

V. The best of David Rakowski's four (out of how many?) Etudes on the Ojai program was "Schnozzage," which you'll recall from our earlier post on the subject as the ideal blend of solemn counterpoint and comic spectacle, and Amy Briggs certainly earned her laughs and applause. Andrew McCann and eighth blackbird's Matt Albert also earned a few chuckles with Stephen Hartke's violin duet, Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen. Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen is divided into four movements— I. Oh II. Them Rats III. Is Mean IV. In My Kitchen —which gives you some idea of the piece's sense of humor, but not much idea of how blasted good it is, so you can imagine my surprise at first hearing the piece, back in my college days, and discovering it to be a substantial musical achievement. It's an exploration of classic blues through classical music, but so was Tall P by Pete Rose, from the QNG set, and as we have established, that piece was kinda gay. The difference is that Hartke manages to go beyond those blues gestures composers keep reheating, and instead dug deep into some of those techniques that make historical blues recordings so weird and thrilling—the vivid, disorienting asynchrony, the elaborately ornamented heterophony. The fiddlers dug into the score and came out with a great show. A man sitting behind me said, "I've got to find out if this Stephen Hartke wrote any piano music." A pianist, evidently. Yes, he did! His first sonata came out on the CRI label back when there was a CRI label, on Vicki Ray's From the Left Edge, with one of the composers' names misspelled on the back. (QUALITY.) Now it's out on New World. I wonder if they fixed the typo. Sounder by Nathan Davis (who had played Cage's in Third Construction earlier in the day), composed for 8bb, percussion and Trimpin instrument, (TRIMPINSTRUMENT?), was actually a little of a disappointment. Libbey Park hosted a number of installations by Trimpin (TRIMPINSTALLATIONS?), the most dramatic of which was the Sheng High. An enormous water-organ, the Sheng High operated on sort of a player-piano or music-box (or barrel-organ) principle, only instead of using clockworks to read a rotating paper roll, it used electronic eyes to read a graphic score made out of strips of mirror on a giant revolving disc. In Sounder, Trimpin's Percussion Tree, literally a tree hung with cymbals, wooden shoes, and toy pianos, was less dazzling in action: I found myself wishing the Trimpster had wired everything with LEDs or something in addition to the mechanical beaters, so that the audience could make out which instrument was playing when from the other side of the theater. The instrument looked good, and it sounded good, but without that essential corporeal dimension connecting the image to the sound, I almost might as well have been listening to a sampler for much of the work. Davis's writing, though full of rhythmic interest, didn't quite sustain itself as much beyond a showpiece for the cybernetic ensemble. Okay I get to review one more piece and then I am FREE. Workers' Union by Louis Andriessen is probably one of his best-known works, for any number of loud instruments, written in rhythmic unison (occasionally divisi à 2) with only the contour of the "melody" notated—the exact pitches are left up to the performer. Now, "political" music is a funny thing—Andriessen's Marxist ideology paints him into a corner this article (by a Greg) articulates in a very interesting way. Andriessen's a Marxist, so he wants to cast off decadent bourgeois concert-hall culture in favor of brash, vernacular idioms, but on the other hand he doesn't want to embrace popular/commercial culture. So he troubles his clear forms and pulses with épater-le-bourgeois dissonance, intensity and duration (Worker's Unionis about a quarter-hour of loud, dissonant clusters, if you're doing it right):

At the risk of overstating the case, if Andriessen’s rigor saved minimalism from its experimental roots, his dissonance pulled minimalism back from the threat of popular accessibility. ...While Andriessen’s dissonance might lose him an 'easy listening' audience, it gains him a high-art cachet according to a value system hardly less puritanical.

A healthy dose of stick, in other words, to go with that delicious carrot. Well if you know me, you know I love stick, so I was actually a little ruffled to see 8bb adapt Worker's Union with a pinch of dramatic license (I demand to be punished!): They started out with just the core sextet, and then introduced additional players one by one, until everyone who had played at the entire festival was onstage banging their instruments as hard as they could, down to ululating Lucy Shelton and kinnnnndof cute percussionist Ian Fry wailin' on electric bass. But the playing was insanely tight, and the performance conceit was the logical extension of the festival ethos one of the blackbirds articulated in an article I've suddenly forgotten (REMIND ME IN COMMENTS PLS)—that all the players could me imagined as making up a sort of hyper-eighth-blackbird, a fully modular group of groups, each one passionate and precise and fearless. Maybe I can't remember where I read this because I made it up, and they didn't say anything of the sort, but let's pretend. Did I say "tight" already? Or "precise"? How about "passionate," then. I did? Okay good, because all in all, this was an incredibly solid performance, noisy and raucous but with terrific ensemble. During one passage they all sang their parts WHILE playing them, and at various moments near the climax, you'd hear 'em go "YEAH!" or "UNGH!" like they were jamming. I just listened to the Bang on a Can recording of this piece again, and my heart broke a little with the realization that the 8bb All-Stars rendition was so much more perfect but I'll never get to re-listen. I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to anybody after—apologies, all—my flight was taking off at midnight, so it was straight to LAX (to stand in a long pointless security line) as soon as the applause died down. Redeye to La Guardia, then an afternoon with a friend in Harlem, then the train home. Returning finally from the station, I walked past Furio from The Sopranos, standing outside a charity event at Goodfellas, our neighborhood mafia theme restaurant! (I don't know what that means, other than that our neighborhood has a very high guido density.) And then joyful reunion with roommates and cat, and then THE END. Roll Credits.

The Ojai Diaries: Part Three

IV. Fact: Stephen Hartke won the marathon. I got to know his music when I was an undergrad and he a professor at the University of Southern California (FIGHT ON), and so my roommate Chris studied with him for a little while, and I was dazzled by his jagged, yet straightforward, yet stylish scores (Hartke's, that is. Chris's were not that jagged). I'll get to his other big piece, Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen, in just a bit; meanwhile, Meanwhile was a perfect, perfect exploitation of everything 8th Blackbird does well. Built around the Matt "the Duv" Duvall's brilliant percussion chops—it was, as a number of pieces on the marathon program seemed to be, substantially gamelan-inspired—it gave the players a chance to switch instruments, switch positions onstage, work out complex rhythms, and indulge in some nitty-gritty contrapuntal writing. There was no wasted business. I mentioned lunch with the Mac in a previous entry; over his vej-mex entree, he said something I thought was pretty interesting about 8bb's programming: their first priority, he said, is "craft." Which I guess seems obvious, because not many people when you ask that question are going to answer, "We're really interested in playing a lot of sloppy crap." But at Ojai at least, it seemed to be coded with a few surprisingly conservative connotations. Well, maybe not too surprising, since they're a "Pierrot Plus" ensemble, that the definition of "craft" isn't too far from something Schoenberg might have approved of: dense textures; complex, oft-dissonant harmonies; & when the cultural vernacular crept in, it tended to be the sort of rarified vernacular that informs Pierrot and Tin Hat both. And Steven Mackey! Speaking of rarified vernacular. I am predisposed to dislike the music of Steven Mackey for reasons I am not entirely able to justify. Maybe it's purely a generational thing—the way he heard electric guitars played when he was a teenager had deemed "pretentious" by the time I was a teenager, and so I'm doomed to have my enjoyment of his guitar-playing and -writing tainted by an irrational and faddish distaste. Or maybe it's something more substantial than that—maybe I wish he were bold enough to sever his guitar performance from the performance practices of its native vernacular, the NEARRR, NEARRR, NEARRR note-sculpting of the 70s rock guitar solo. (Is that, in fact, a more substantial complaint? Not sure.) All of this aside, Heavy Light, for solo Steven Mackey (guitarring and stomping pedals), is a thoughtfully constructed piece with a few really stirring moments—that crazy barred theme that kept recurring over the speeding ostinato!—composed with real, yes, craft, and performed, like everything at the festival, with real virtuosity. Tin Hat singer/fiddler Carla Kihlstedt's was the most grueling set. Not just grueling for her, who simultaneously played a gutsy violin part, sang her heart out, AND grew a human infant within her womb (LET'S SEE TODD REYNOLDS DO THAT)—the set also dragged a bit; there weren't any printed copies of the texts (by Kafka), so first Lisa Bielawa gave a spoken introduction to the piece, and then Kihlstedt gave a spoken introduction to the piece, and then she spoke the text to each song before she sang it, even though a combination of clear miking and amazing diction made it possible to hear each word pretty clearly (from where I was sitting). Just for sheer wows, it might have been the performance of the day, and the musical writing was idiomatic, complex AND true to the text, but all the talking, combined with the limited range of available colors (one violin, one voice), combined with the fact that the descending sun was, during this piece, shining DIRECTLY INTO MY EYES, made the cycle seem extremely long. I've never been a great fan of John Cage's Construction No. 3. It's just never come together for me as a musical experience the way my favorite Cage does. But it's the bread & butter, yea the rice & beans of the percussion quartet, and it is a lot of fun to hear. It is a FIESTA. And the drummers who presented it (Greg Beyer, Nathan Davis, Todd Meehan, Doug Perkins—you might remember the Meehan/Perkins duo as ex-So Percussionists) were first-rate chamber musicians, pleasin' the crowd with high-energy, absolutely synchronized playing. Copious applause. More soon.

Nothing Is Free

I've just been alerted, by loyal reader Aaron, that iTunes is offering the first movement of John Cage's most celebrated piece for download, free of charge. I'm not really in the market for a new recording of 4'33"—in fact, I just bought a spindle of 50 such recordings last week—but hey, if the first taste is free... Download here. Ummmm, and check out the comments section. I can't even pick a favorite. Hey so, other than 4'33", what's the greatest silence in music, in y'alls humble opinion? There are some really spectacular silences in Mahler, but probably my sentimental fave is the series of 18 thirty-second silences that ends the Roger & Brian Eno recording of 18 Keyboard Studies by Hans Friedrich Micheelsen. You're supposed to put the record on shuffle, see, so that the tracks are not only in random order, but they're spaced apart randomly as well, for that like wind-chimes feeling—avant-garde form generated live in your living room. Why don't more people do stuff like that? I'd give you a direct link to the webpage where you can buy this CD, but apparently Mr. Electronic Visionary has not figured out how to make individual products linkable at the Enoshop, and that's the only place he sells it, so fuck him. Still, do order (or download) a copy, and then take a picture of yourself holding it, so that everyone knows how much you love Brian Eno.

Moment of Silence

Kyle Gann's ongoing John Cage project has resulted in the best "desperately seeking disc"-type post I've ever seen:

One thing I could sure use before finishing this book on 4'33" is an obscure recording on the Korm Plastics label called 45'18" (Forty-five Minutes, Eighteen Seconds). It's a CD of nine versions of 4'33" by Thurston Moore, Keith Rowe, the Deep Listening Band, Voice Crack, and others. It doesn't seem to be available anywhere at the moment. Is there someone out there who could dupe me a copy, with program info? I'd gladly pay a reasonable price for a CDR. (I mean, I am paying basically for silence, but it's really important silence.)

Please, people, if you have that disc, or know someone who does, help a brother out. And Jesus, don't make him pay for it! Who does that??

(Photo of Jim Altieri, also from Gann's blog.) UPDATE: Found, before this post even left my queue. Hooray!