sleepsong

Vale decade

2011-07-04T23:47:00.006-04:00

Vale and Vale decade bookend a sort of valle lacrimarum period in my life. The latter reprises the former more or less in its entirety, with some compositional enhancements.

Vale decade by mahboob

The original work comprises two short melodic patterns—one in each half of the piece—harmonized in three parts (originally on three kalimbas). The patterns are gradually layered then stripped down in such a way as to emphasize the different root notes suggested by each part, with a cyclical structure: tonic, sixth, third, fifth, second, fourth.

Each of the three lines is miniature hocket canon; that is, each is the sum of two identical four-note cells staggered/phased to sound on each other's rests. This is most audible right at the beginning. The two patterns/canons use the same two-bar rhythm but each starts on the other's second bar; thus, there is both horizontal symmetry in the piece as well as vertical.

In the mid 2000s, I put two mixes of the recording of Vale together DJ style, and experimented with creating a further layer of canon by playing the second mix a beat or two behind the first. The resulting density of six overlapping lines was interesting both sonically and for how it symbolized growth. The duration of the music increased once there were more details to explore.

Vale decade takes the "two copies" idea further by scoring it for a hyper-ensemble: six each of vibraphone, marimba and harp, tripling the parts. It could be performed by any combination thereof that includes the sustaining instruments, or as few as 2-3 players of each instrument type playing combined lines, or six kalimbas. Six separate sound sources is ideal for dynamic balance and spatial quality, however. The hazy texture suggests the peach pink glow after an evening rain.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2011

Zora (instrumental)

2011-03-30T23:33:00.086-04:00

Zora (instrumental) by mahboob

This is the backing track of "Zora (beautiful dreamer)," freshly loaded from the original 3.5 inch floppy disk onto the original workstation and recorded to digital this week. I flattened the velocity (dynamic) range of the notes very slightly, note by note, velocity step by velocity step (a lot of button presses).

Towards the end of the track there is now a subcontra B0 note in one of the pianos where there used to be a B1, and the correction of a score "typo" in the marimba part as I originally played it; other than this and a little waveform corruption, everything is the same as it sounded in 1994.

The song is titled after Zora Neale Hurston, writer and anthropologist of the Harlem Renaissance. The score is for two pianos and solo marimba. The time signatures switch between 9/8, 6/4 and 12/8.

The two pianos play an aggregate four-voice canon in E-flat minor, the root notes of which give rhythmic accents and a sense of chord progression. The marimba line results from the matrix of notes within the canon, and thus highlights melodies that are already there (a Reichian idea, of course).

This post is in honour of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day (March 8) and the 45th anniversary of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (March 21).

Created on a KORG 01Wfd ROMpler workstation August 1994

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2011

Zora (beautiful dreamer)

2011-03-08T20:13:00.011-05:00

Written in August 1994, this song is titled after Zora Neale Hurston, writer and anthropologist of the Harlem Renaissance. The lyrics are an abstract, capricious play on several signifiers and tropes of mixed race black identity, among other things. Words were generally chosen just as much for their vowel sounds as for their meaning or context.

Zora (beautiful dreamer) by mahboob

The recording was made guerrilla karaoke style, one of seven different songs I recorded both as first and final drafts in the same one day session. The score is for voice accompanied by two pianos and marimba. I had already played the instrumental parts into a sequencer before going to the studio. I then played the sequence back for the recording while singing along. This is one single, unedited take.

I went for a slightly more foofy sound during the quote of Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" (published posthumously in 1864). Both that song and parts of this one share a 9/8 time signature. The Foster melody is sung in 9/8 in augmentation – nine dotted quarter notes – with the bass sounding each of the three pitches of a minor triad at one per measure of normal 9/8, three times through. Thus, the number of eighth note pulses in the "chorus" of "Zora" is nine squared, or 81. The rest of the song is in 12/8=6/4.

The two pianos play an aggregate four-voice canon in E-flat minor, the root notes of which give rhythmic accents and a sense of chord progression. The vocal and marimba lines result from the matrix of notes within the canon, and thus highlight melodies that are already there (a Reichian idea, of course). Coincidentally, one of the results was a short quote of the Waltz from Swan Lake.

This post is in honour of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day (March 8) and the 45th anniversary of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (March 21).

Recorded off the floor to two-track DAT master September 1994
Originally released on Uhuru October 1995

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2011

Summer Blue

2011-01-23T23:23:00.124-05:00

Summer Blue (instrumental) by mahboob

As recorded on Canada Day, 2003, using a then 12-year-old KORG 01Wfd ROMpler workstation. I recently rediscovered the master backing track – including some high piano cues later left out of the first part – and enjoyed hearing how layered the ideas got before the vocal was added, to the point they were fine on their own, as ambience at least.

Though the tempo and feel changes from section to section and is sometimes ambiguous, the rhythm is based on a constant cycle of twelve fast pulses. The beat can be counted as a slow three (groups of four pulses), a fast six (groups of two), or a swinging four (groups of three). This kind of rhythmic ambiguity is found throughout African and Semitic musical diasporas.

The bassline in the fast sections consists of two hocketing (interlocking) lines which are slight variations of each other. Each part is clearly separated in the stereo field. Each of the two lines is assigned to one of a pair of interlocking thirds; fit together the two forming a fluid, running riff on a tetrachord.

The harmonic palette comprises the white key modes built on the six notes from C to A, with root movement in three pairs of fourths. Sometimes harmonies are voiced as stacked pairs of triads in inversion suggesting a modal identity, sometimes as simple sus chords.

Reich is an influence again; as is Erik Satie. The melody that introduces the song is a quote from his Gymnopédie No. 2.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2011

Early Piano

2010-12-31T12:31:00.010-05:00

Early Piano by mahboob

Composed in December 1985, played from memory and recorded in the early hours during the reading week break of February 1987. The first three chords form a palindrome with the last three, and otherwise the music largely hovers around the third/antepenultimate one – the dominant.

At the last minute, I placed the cheap cassette recorder I was using on top of the piano and played the whole piece in an upper register, in order to allow the family household to sleep (or at least as a gesture towards the idea). I liked the ambience of the aging, out of tune high piano notes with a noisy damper pedal. The cassette was 15 years old at the point of digital transfer.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

The Longing

2010-12-30T23:23:00.116-05:00

The Longing by mahboob

This brooding, hallucinatory, distorted music marks the end of a year of nearly constant, low level depression/awakening to adult reality. It begins with a rhythmically asymmetrical, question and answer phrase played on synth percussion, repeated via two tape loops at diverging speeds; this pattern shifting through states of agitation and towards a distant digital ocean. The piano seeks the sounds that came before – in the form of an LFO-damaged, warbling synth pad recorded in reverse, i.e. its first notes are those that end the whole piece. There are heavily scented traces, lushly chorded, neo-romantic obsessions of youth, and pre-echoes of the song that immediately follows in my recorded student output, "Self" from Circus (1988). It was my own journey into night, departing from the land of misfit (broken) toys.

4-track cassette recording first week November 1987
Originally released as part of Earththones
Stereo cassette mixdown August 1992
Transfer to digital 2007

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

Like It's 1990

2010-12-28T12:28:00.117-05:00

How I sounded then, aka demo album superstar imaginaire: it was a high point and a watershed. I would never be more confident than I was about a life in/music, nor as caught up in irony, pretentiousness and straight up cheese.

In that light, it might seem epicly narcissistic (even for blogging) to wax self-reflexively on juvenilia when you've never been "established" in the first place as an artist. My earliest pieces remain less a locus of nostalgia for me than a hint of foundation for ideas still being explored.

Herewith, a selection of recordings from 20 years ago – three songs and three abstract pieces. It's fair to say 1990 was more a summation of the 80s than a glance towards the millennium, but I'll let the listener decide.

A Story of Reason by mahboob

Written 1988, recorded 1989, mixed and released January 1990 as part of Nerve. The sound I chose for the bass line now has an unavoidable (and not entirely unwelcome) comedic reference that wasn't apparent at the time of recording. There is no programming – all of the music is played live to tape on a Roland S-50 sampling keyboard. The lyrics suggest a critique of rationalism.

A Small Sketch by mahboob

Composed as it was recorded, April 1990. Instrumentation: harmonica (with altered reeds), melodica, jaw harp, conga. The rhythmic cycle is twenty pulses, divided into equal groups of five and/or four beats. The idea was to express a single, multi-timbrally voiced tonality against multi-tempo rhythmic waves; minimalism with a hint of totalism.

Prepared Piano Piece No. 1 by mahboob

Recorded in a single take, July 1990. Really a semi-improvised piece, on a semi-prepared piano. Listen for Wagner's Fate motif from Der Ring des Nibelungen. I've always liked the acoustic in this room/instrument.

The Gardener by mahboob

Written and recorded July 1990 and featured on Eccentricities, released in August. An awkward comment on the environment by way of a funky tribute to urban gardeners. The verse and chorus employ chords of stacked fifths, a favourite keyboard voicing technique. A TR-808 drum machine provides the rhythm; it was very easy to program, and fun to watch for its beat-synced LEDs. This instrument is the only programmed element.

Gratisfaction by mahboob

Written and recorded August 1990. The song's title is a conflation of gratis/gratification and fact/satisfaction to suggest things like free information and excessive consumption, things that speak to an increasingly entitlement-oriented, get-it-now society. Here as well, I use the TR-808 for the beat in the verses, and notable samples of Sly & The Family Stone elsewhere. I had heard Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation", which uses one of the same samples, and originally thought of titling my song "Nation". Again, except for the 808, all of the music is keyed live.

zero g by mahboob

A study in layering looped samples, performed live using the S-50 sampler. The main body was recorded in one take in January 1990. An introduction and coda were added in April 1996, using the same keyboard and samples, and also performed live during the process of transferring the original take to digital. The source materials are a kalimba, an aluminum salad bowl, an iron rod sculpture, a penny whistle, a clarinet and a vinyl recording of a classic percussion work.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

March March

2010-12-19T00:19:00.047-05:00

March March (original cassette) by mahboob

This was a first draft, recorded in a day in November 1987 and mixed within the week for my primitive cassette album Earthtones. The tape was pretty damaged after 23 years and several cheap players along the way. Severely Euro art pop damaged as well.

Typically, I mumbled the lyrics onto the track right after sketching out. Generic, barely poetic, utilitarian, they were meant to evoke a hymn to the post apocalypse – as sung by a suddenly aware, perhaps semi-sentient, AI being who is experiencing dystopic conditions, under a massively globalized, monolithic/deific military-industrial entity, all in a time of extreme environmental collapse. Hence the sludgy one drop "march" idea.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

Suburbanite

2010-12-05T22:12:00.115-05:00

Suburbanite by mahboob

How new jack lost his swing. Title track from my 1988 DIY cassette album. The song was worked on during several walks through the large, then undeveloped natural areas adjoining York University. After I had the basic idea in mind, I anchored it with a funky left-hand line - sort of a rhythmic canon at the octave - for a homemade sound on the Yahama DX-27 (the nano to the DX-7's classic). The keyboard was the laid down as the pulse - without using either click track or metronome (which back then I resisted, quixotically). Everything else followed this instrumental line's sometimes wayward conductor.

As a result, the tempo of the song limps along as if heard on a warped record. While it was not entirely intentional, I found the unravelling rhythmic effect to be interesting, a metaphor for emo adolescent disintegration/disorientation around relationships/identity/social and geographical location at the time. The keyed drum samples also sought escape, forward facing, post genre apocalypse.

Original 4-track cassette recording November 1988
Second vocal take, mixed to stereo cassette master November 1989
Dubbed to CD 2003

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, 1933-2010

2010-11-12T08:49:00.003-05:00

‎"I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them."

Just got the news about Górecki. I can't count how many moments in my life have been soundtracked with his Third Symphony; not to mention rough nights survived; not to mention dull days in a decade of music retail made sublime.

I haven't listened to the Third, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs", in a few years. My most recent personal associations with it are still too strong. His choral works, the string quartets, the work at top as well as the ethereal Good Night and other pieces are still in rotation, reminding me that he was far from a one-hit wonder, though the millions of casual fans he won via the Third might have a hard time agreeing with their ears.

Often lumped in with the so-called "holy minimalists" like John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, as a composer he has more in common with Alfred Schnittke, for example. His music also reflects - as in the case of ...songs are sung (his third string quartet) - a broader, more cosmopolitan style that doesn't exclude pervasive influences from composers like Morton Feldman and Philip Glass. Not to mention the whole damn European canon from Haydn to Shostakovich.

Ultimately, his voice as a composer is one that sounds apart, transcending influence and fashion. You'll know it when you hear it.

The Fourth Symphony was due to be premiered this year before Górecki's health took a turn. I doubt that in it he would have returned to the style that allowed the Third (composed 34 years earlier) to be so broadly popular. Still, it's going to be big. I can't wait.

Thank you, Henryk. And good night.

Kalimba Canon

2010-11-01T22:11:00.008-04:00

For two Hugh Tracey alto kalimbas. The musical material comprises three short melodic patterns. Each uses the same seven notes, but in a different sequence and register. Each uses the same rhythm, but with a different starting point. Each is heard in a unison canon, with the melody sounding against itself two, three or seven beats out of phase in a twelve-beat rhythmic cycle.

Kalimba Canon by mahboob

Mercy

2010-10-25T22:25:00.037-04:00

Mercy is an instrumental version of For SLR, No. 3, composed in 1994 in memory of my father. The slow melody of the gong heard against dyads in the bowed vibraphone and synthesizer - forming a canon in augmentation with the middle notes of the two-piano accompaniment - matches the vocal line in the sung version; here a procession of paired single syllables.

Mercy by mahboob

The pianos play a three- and four-voice canon of nearly identical but rhythmically phased patterns (a sort of "manual" digital delay). The root notes of the patterns descend throughout the song, at first in fourths, then seconds.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

Madra (fast C major)

2010-10-16T23:06:00.000-04:00

Madra by mahboob
Another excerpt from the Madawaska String Quartet's recording of Madra, on their album prefab. For whatever it's worth, probably my favourite single moment, with special regard to performance and sonics.

More Human

2010-10-16T22:16:00.001-04:00

The title could refer to several things – for one, an earlier song, "More Excuses (A Human Voice)." The thought was to do a reedit of that song's outro as recorded in 1988, and since the result ventured into collage, so did the title.

More Human by mahboob

More Human sums up my year at 40 well enough. I was a very optimistic 18 when I wrote the song, and 20 when those 80s-vintage dance club electronics were first foisted upon my musical and social circles. House music and techno were new. Then, as now, I had little use for observing boundaries like: high/low, art/entertainment, professional/dilettante, intention/happenstance. The message is the same, one of celebrating self-expression.

The original recording process was entirely in the cassette realm – 4-track (with "bouncing") mixed to standard 2-channel. With the cassette being dubbed onto CD in this decade, there were already numerous layers of audio generations and signal degradation present, even before factoring in the advanced age of the cassette, which dimmed the soundscape. I decided to treat the recording as though it were dusty old vinyl, and used CD turntables – which allow for (mostly) fast, on the fly cueing – to re-envision it as a DJ mix for a distant dance floor.

In the 80s jam, I used no drum machines, sequencers or quantization, not even a click track: certainly no editing. The beat was a pianistic flourish on an early (low resolution) sampling keyboard, the hi-hat a trill in two fingers. The irregular tempo, exaggerated mixing and washed-out frequencies suggested a starting point for this reedit.

The track comprises several sections, each consisting of one straight take of "playing" using the cassette mix or an isolation of certain tracks. The cueing is performed live using up to three programmed points at a time, and no loops. I am hitting some kind of down- or offbeat at least once every measure of four on average.

The choppy cuts and audible glitches are by-products of the live process, and an outgrowth of my early rhythmic quirks. No desktop software was used, but some cropping and splicing was done to the master track. The instrumental sounds (especially the drum and choral samples) are now many generations removed from their source, with the analog DJ mixer adding further grain and shadow.

This process resulted in over half an hour of new material. A lot of editing was required.

Once I had completed a long piece (A Voice More Human) – a dozen times longer than the outro – I edited it down further to the present cut, as well as using a separate, single take to make an even shorter track (A Voice).

(Originally posted December 30, 2008.)

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

Rhythm So New

2010-09-19T23:09:00.061-04:00

"Rhythm So New" was the first song on my 1988 cassette demo/album suburbanite. I was 20, an ambivalent survivor of the 80s with great nostalgia for the 70s–and the earlier decade's musical expressions of blackness that had nourished me as a child. A reappraisal of 70s soul and funk was just beginning to happen via sampling, hip-hop, house and acid jazz. suburbanite was a renunciation, an arrival-at-self, and a dedication to a then new love.

Rhythm So New by mahboob

In December 2008, I took several different cassette mixdowns as well the original four-track cassette master of RSN and transferred them to digital. I then burned this source material to CD and re-edited the song live in the analog realm using CDJs–playing and layering the old tracks like a DJ at an experimental rave.

The source–in addition to being cheaply and naïvely produced–had degraded in quality over two decades. This pointed in a direction towards which I've always been intensely drawn: lo-fi sound. A little exaggerated EQing of the already grainy cassette recordings resulted in a kind of audio lomography.

As with More Human, A Voice (both 2008) and The Bridge (2009), this re-edit places a micro-focus on my fetish for the dominant (sus) 13th chord–and towards the end of this version–other chords that have a major seventh chord (falling to a 6-sharp4-3) as an upper subset.

The original length of the song–a little over five minutes–is more than quadrupled here, and would have taken up an entire side of the suburbanite cassette. This is the longest single track I've made since the early 90s.

At no point in the creation of the original or the re-edit has any programming, sequencing, audio software, timecode or metronome of any kind been used. It's all real-time touch, from the keyboard playing and electronic drum sounds to the cue points on the CDJs. Look ma, no laptop.

Where the tempo is stable, it's because I've used the loop function on one of the decks. I am interested in the jagged, stuttering rhythm and meter that otherwise pervades, and the offhand, chaotic quality of the performance. The melodic snippets, beats and voices are human and glitchy post-human; extremely fallible, full of laughter and self-discovery.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

prefab on iTunes and eMusic

2010-08-20T10:20:00.007-04:00

prefab is now available for download on iTunes and eMusic. The new CD by the Madawaska String Quartet features the premiere recording of my piece Madra.

You may still purchase the CD in person at the Canadian Music Centre, or order it through their online boutique.

Fast Marimbas (with Little Beats)

2010-08-06T20:06:00.179-04:00

Fast Marimbas (with Little Beats) by mahboob

Fast Marimbas (with Little Beats) is an acronym stand-in for "Fat Man" and "Little Boy", the only two nuclear weapons ever actively deployed in history. It was completed on August 6, 2000, the 55th anniversary of the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima. I'm posting it today to mark the 65th anniversary of the attack.

The piece is an electronica etude of pop proportions (style period reference intended). The sound source is an early 90s sequencer powered by late 90s notation software. There are four lines of music: two marimbas, electronic kick drum and rim shot. On this recording, the kick has a very subtle pitched element that is in tune with the music.

The marimba parts comprise some of the same material found in my string quartet Madra; specifically, short phase canons in a triple rhythm, which follow a simple root chord progression - here, V, IV, I, II in the key of G.

This progression is heard through a series of mirrored melodic patterns, each of which trace the outline of a symmetrical chord voicing that expands or contracts the register of notes relative to the chords to which it is adjacent. In other words, the lowest bass note is generally heard in a pattern that also includes the highest treble, and vice versa, etc. Thus, there is symmetry within symmetry.

The two marimba lines mirror one another at a rhythmic distance (phase) that varies pattern to pattern. The parts on this recording have a mechanical precision appropriate to the context, though in fact they should be playable by a virtuoso duo in a live setting.

The skeleton outline of a broken beat track - just rim and kick - accompanies the two marimbas, occupying the frequency registers above and below. "Little beats" refers to dynamics - the drums don't dominate, but rather accent, the marimba texture. The beat subdivides the pulse asymmetrically, sometimes with the suggestion of groups or two, three or four pulses, depending again on the pattern.

The rim and kick lines are performable by one player, thus Fast Marimbas could be done as a live percussion trio.

Other than the reference in the title, the music offers no particular comment on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - other than the simple irony that it is presented via electronic delivery systems that bookend the high tech era opposite the harnessing, at great cost, of nuclear power.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2010

Madra/Madawaska

2010-06-24T10:24:00.015-04:00

I'm extremely pleased to announce that my friends the Madawaska String Quartet have released their debut CD prefab, which includes the world premiere recording of my composition Madra.

Written in memory of my grandmother Madra Hall Martens, and though it certainly lays no claim to Africanness as the release note suggests, Madra is inspired by my studies of traditional African forms as well as medieval vocal music, modal jazz, minimalism and pop.

prefab was recorded at the Church of St. Andrew-by-the-Lake on Toronto Island in late 2008 and early 2009, a choice of location which required after hours sessions and resulted in some unique challenges. You'd never know that by hearing the end product, though. It's an acoustically gorgeous disc with wonderful music, if I may say so...

Also included on the program is a world premiere recording of the exquisite Three Short Seasons for String Quartet by my fellow York U alumni Mike Kane, as well as works by Anthony Gilbert, Henry Purcell, Alfred Schnittke and notable Spanish-Canadian composer José Evangelista. I'm honoured to be in such distinguished company.

prefab is available for purchase in person at the Canadian Music Centre, or online here. It's been a dream of mine for 20 years to have my work available in the CMC.

I'm grateful to the women of Madawaska and producer/engineer Garnet Willis for their support, wee-hours dedication and for such a wonderful recording. Congratulations all!

Ninth Planet at the Trane

2010-05-03T20:06:00.015-04:00

I'm playing an all-originals set with Ninth Planet as part of From Malaysia with Love, Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at The Trane Studio. Nadhira, an R&B singer from (you guessed it) Malaysia is headlining. Also on the bill are Zoé and Vandal.

NP's lineup for the night:

Prithi - vocals, bass

Sairupa - vocals

Ivana - violin

Bruce - keys

Alvaro - percussion

Should be a memorable time!

Georgia Anne

2010-04-27T10:27:00.005-04:00

"Roses" from Umsindo

I picked up Georgia Anne Muldrow's first long-player Olesi: Fragments of an Earth a little after it came out in 2006. She wasn't an instant love for me as a musical figure. Over time, I've collected a few of "Ms. One's" releases – most recently, Umsindo (2009), Early (2009, recorded in 2000) and Kings Ballad (2010) – and become more interested in her work as a whole. I do very little exploring these days when it comes to new popular music – it's hard enough to keep up with the unpopular! (not to mention the great wealth of existing repertoire) – and it takes a bit of prompting to focus on anyone in particular.

She actually gets her own playlist, and unusually for me, most of each album is intact for listening.

What I like about Muldrow is how she works with ambiguities, waves/dualities and the instinctual: rhythmic parts that don't sync up precisely in attack; vocal lines that are in control with a dash of chaos; long songs that segue into song fragments; albums that flow rather randomly; free-form vs. structured composition and performance; notation-oriented vs. "graphic" sound and text; varied approaches to harmony; well-worn instrumental timbres in new combinations; the self-serious and the silly; the abstract and the beat-wise.

At the end of the day, each track is the most raw, organic groove you've ever heard. Other people are doing this type of work, but there's a consistency, genuineness and sense of ownership present with Muldrow that I appreciate. You know she's not putting out a retro-Motown jam anytime soon.

Her sound is rooted in the post hip-hop era, though with musical parents who've worked with Eddie Harris and Pharoah Sanders, you know (spiritual) jazz lineage is well-represented before hearing a note. She plays most of the instruments herself, and far from being bogged down in trying to sound slick or commercial, she creates a unique dislocation of existing styles; just on the verge of something truly new.

"Run Away" from Early

The Machine Stops, the Answer Begins (aka Imperfect Music)

2010-01-09T16:50:00.007-05:00

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

"I found the air."

This tune is a sweet spot. I'll explain.

Ask anyone who knew me in the mid to late 80s and they'll remember I was obsessed for a time with the band Level 42.

"The Machine Stops" is the last cut on their 1983 album Standing In The Light. Produced by Earth, Wind & Fire members Verdine White and Larry Dunn and recorded in LA (as opposed to the UK like everything else they've done), the album was the beginning of a journey towards pop crossover success from the band's jazz funk roots. It stands somewhat awkwardly in their catalogue because of this, although much of it captures a perfect essence of them before they became known for their later, chart-friendly hits.

As my own "42" approaches, I'm letting this song – an otherwise obscure piece in their repertoire – signify something. Jazz-funk is huge for me, and Level 42 were torch bearers for the style at a low point post-disco/boogie, pre-acid jazz/funk revival – even in their early pop hits like "The Sun Goes Down (Living It Up)" (embedded below, also from Standing).

In their classic lineup, they were a band of mixed-race membership that operated within white English culture. (Informal member and co-producer the great Wally Badarou is French Beninese, and keyboardist-singer Mike Lindup's roots are via Belize. Otherwise, the group was from the Isle of Wight.) Blue-eyed soul? I dunno. This represented something that little else in the 1980s (or after) could; it had a great impact on their sound, distribution and airplay; and it was accessible to me growing up racially othered in a small white community.

The name Level 42 is a tribute to Douglas Adams' classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – "42" being the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

"The Machine Stops" is E.M. Forster's incredibly prescient, now century-old science fiction short story, which I read in my tween years. It deals with the difficult cross-global relationship of a mother and son, who communicate via a kind of videophone in a dystopian future of sub-surface living. Technology has supplanted religion, humans exists in isolation from one another and nature, history is highly sanitized, and free thought is minimized. "Homelessness" is a threatened punishment for dissidents.

The line, "Beware of first-hand ideas!" was something that stuck with me for a long time in adolescence. And re-reading the story recently, this particular quote immediately reminded me of Facebook:

Vashti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.

42's lyrical tribute is written from the point of view of the son, lamenting to his mother about "all the love we'll never know." The song serves as a commentary on life in the dawning media era, while still representing the primacy of the bassline, the scifi, and as an obscure album track – the geek.

There's even a tritone in the chord progression (E to B-flat in the bass), the calling card of scifi clichés. Harmonically, there is a jazz complexity here that Level 42 eventually abandoned in later releases. This is perhaps the "imperfect music" that troubles Vashti at one point.

Hence the sweet spot in a happily imperfect life, moreso as the years go by.

Vidéo-clip Level 42 The sun goes down (livin' it up)
vidéo proposée par musicMe

music decade

2009-12-30T12:39:00.004-05:00

A random 25 beats I was into in the 00s (including a random 10 albums in italics), as of the end of the 00s. Longevity on my playlist, youtube hits, which version I first heard, that I liked this stuff substantially more than anything else I was listening to, and general mass cultural relevance were not factors. That the track was created or recreated in some fashion in this decade was.

I may have chosen a track arbitrarily if it was one of several decent ones on an album. This would have been a very different list weeks ago and will I'm sure seem curious to me years from now.

The most striking thing about the 00s was not so much developments in content - I think these were somewhat moderated by a focus on new delivery systems - as how we got to experience the content. It seems undeniably surreal that I can collect and enjoy this portable list (for the free life of Google/Blogger/YouTube, at least) just like a mixtape - because I can remember (groan) when that's all there was.

And I love that Dilla and Madlib converse in classical soul at bookends.

J Dilla - Love featuring Pharoahe Monch
The Shining, 2000

Jill Scott - A Long Walk
Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. 1, 2000

Koop - Summer Sun
Waltz for Koop, 2001

Sean Escoffery - Day Like This
Spinna & Ticklah Mix, 2001

New Sector Movements (IG Culture) - The Sun
Dwele's Motor City Remix, 2001

4hero - Hold It Down featuring Lady Alma
Creating Patterns/Osunlade's Yoruba Soul Version, 2001

Beautiful Six - Let's Do It Together
Beautiful Tomorrow, 2002

Erykah Badu - Back In The Day (Puff)
Worldwide Underground, 2003

Omar - It's So...
2003

Alison David - Dreams Come True
Afronaught Mix, 2003

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

DJ Mitsu the Beats - Right Here featuring Dwele
2003

Manzel - Midnight Theme
1975/Extended Remix, Kenny Dope, 2004 from Midnight Theme

Quantic - So Long featuring Alice Russell
Mishaps Happening, 2004

Oi Va Voi - Refugee
2004

Bugz In The Attic - Booty La La
2004

The Rebirth - Evil Vibrations
2005 (cover of The Mighty Ryeders via De La Soul)

Michael Jackson - Can't Help It
1980/Tangoterje remix, 2005

Dwight Trible & The Life Force Trio - Is Music
Love Is The Answer, 2005

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble - Balicky Bon
2006

Amp Fiddler - Funky Monday
Afro Strut, 2006

Joey Negro presents Akabu - I'm Not Afraid Of The Future
2006

Amerie - Hate 2 Love U
2007 (sample of Kool & The Gang's "Give It Up", 1970)

Earth, Wind & Fire - Brazilian Rhyme
1977/2008

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Nicola Conte - Like Leaves In The Wind featuring Jose James
2008

Madlib - Dillalade Ride (Contact High)
Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6: A Tribute to J Dilla, 2009

Phew. Happy 2010.

Call & Response: Manu to Michael

2009-10-31T18:31:00.006-04:00

Help me sing it by mahboob

help me sing it (aka I dance) came out of a session on the evening of July 8, 2009, nearly two weeks after the passing of Michael Jackson. It features reshaped elements from one of his songs (1982) and that song's cross-cultural precursor, an anthemic track by Manu Dibango (1972).

I wanted to make a tribute which acknowledged Jackson in a diasporic context and also commented on the surreal, collective artifacting of his life and death (ironic as that becomes). The mix subverts conditioned listening expectations, while exploring aspects of stasis and gradual change in the relationship of the two sources as they align around their common details.

It's an unpolished, loosely edited, vertical time meditation on the sounds themselves and the influences of African tradition, James Brown, minimalism, first-wave digital sampling in the 80s and filter house in the 90s; at times extreme, obvious and eccentric.

I was less interested in making a generic mashup, which I'm not equipped nor inclined to do anyway.

The equipment consisted of two CDJs running through a DJ mixer straight to hard disk; with EQ, filtering and rapid cue points the only playing techniques. Dibango was on the left deck, Jackson the right, suggesting the influence of a Western read as well as a pianistic ground-to-figure metaphor.

All repetitions are keyed live, with no programming, desktop software, or timecode – only the polyrhythmic information of the source grooves as a guide. All transitions and edits are human and destructive, i.e. done in a no-redo-possible context. I am attracted to the elements of uncertainty and imperfection.

Note: "makossa" means "(I) dance" in Duala, the Cameroonian language.

Notes copyright Bruce Russell 2009.

Call & Response: Killing Joke & Nirvana

2009-10-24T22:24:00.000-04:00

the fine art of sonic appropriation

About 1993, jamming in a basement – guitar, bass, drums. Started playing a riff in the bass that my friend heard as Nirvana's "Come As You Are" from Nevermind (1992). Had only a vague idea, maybe from brief exposure to the Unplugged version, what he was talking about.

Had come from the Killing Joke riff – "Eighties" (1984) from Night Time – the Nirvana's genetic twin, a half-step down. In the earlier song, Jaz Coleman sings of being "in love with the coming malaise", which seems to define the psycho-social realms of post-punk/grunge.

Killing Joke sued Nirvana, but dropped the suit after Cobain's death. Dave Grohl would go on, among other things, to play drums on Killing Joke (2003). Not everything falls apart.

Enough About Human Rights

2009-10-14T11:04:00.000-04:00

enough about human rights
what about whale rights
what about snail rights
what about seal rights
what about eel rights
what about 'coon rights
what about loon rights
what about ant rights

what about
what about
what about

what about moose rights
what about goose rights
what about lark rights
what about shark rights
what about fox rights
what about ox rights
what about hawk rights

what about
what about
what about

what goat rights
what about stoat rights
what about pike rights
what about shrike rights
what about hare rights
what about bear rights
what about plant rights

enough about human rights
what about hog rights
what about frog rights
what about kite rights
what about mite rights
what about bee rights
what about flea rights
what about stork rights

what about
what about
what about

what about bat rights
what about gnat rights
what about mouse rights
what about louse rights
what about cat rights
what about rat rights

what about
what about
what about

what about bug rights
what about slug rights
what about bass rights
what about ass rights
what about worm rights
what about germ rights

Moondog, 1978

Call & Response: E40 on Ramsey Lewis

2009-10-11T11:10:00.009-04:00

the fine art of sonic appropriation

E40's "I Hope I Don't Go Back", from the The Best of E-40: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (2004). Too much fun sonically, visually. Perhaps more a nod to fans than representative of his work in general; a fascinating celebration of success and flossing as sport and symbol. The song follows a classic rag to riches trope; looks back with exaggerated pride at the struggles met on the way up; seems as well to glance at the sun goddess in acknowledgement.

That is, Ramsey Lewis' "Sun Goddess" (1974), produced by Maurice White and featuring Earth, Wind & Fire. The chords and bass come from "Goddess" at 1:05, and form the basis for "Hope" from :43 on. The keyboard hook at 0:49 is taken from the top line in "Goddess" at :23.

E40's chorus hook "I hope I don't go back to slangin' yeyo [selling coke] to get my mail," is another (somewhat ironic) nod to Lewis, White, Philip Bailey & company, who took the early 70s instrumental into the charts with a scat line, "bop be-dop, bop bop bop ba, di ye-yo, bop bop bwe-yo, bwe-yo", etc., that the former quotes melodically and syllabically.

It would be interesting to explore the socioeconomic and political parallels/differences between artists, industries and eras. For example, might the use of the sample be meant merely to associate with prestige, or is it redefining EWF's intended message of spiritual elevation? There's part of a paper in that.

The Whole of the Moon

2009-10-09T22:09:00.000-04:00

What would the 80s be without Mike Scott, Karl Wallinger and company, and their Big (hair) Music?

Impressions of Dilla

2009-09-29T21:29:00.004-04:00

Something about music that's about music; that celebrate the joys of it; exults in the shifting facets and sustained tension in a penultimate chord that never goes ultimate.

divine influences

2009-09-27T18:29:00.005-04:00

In a Landscape was composed by John Cage in 1948 for choreographer Louise Lippold. The music appears to float aimlessly within a limited gamut of notes and patterns, though it's based on a strict, recurring rhythmic structure that follows the dance. Written in Cage's early period and two decades before minimalism, it employs gradual melodic variation and a subtle, ambiguous approach to tonality. These plus the extensive repetition gently thwart comparisons to easy listening and new age – neither of which existed as a genre at the time.

In the late 1940s, Cage was going through a personal and artistic crisis – this was before 4'33", the silence piece. The meditative, non-narrative, static aspect of Landscape hints at his growing interest in Zen Buddhism and Indian philosophy. Around this time, musician Gita Sarabhai explained to Cage that the goal of music was, "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences."

This composition is probably the most overtly sensuous and tonal that Cage wrote, and seems an unacknowledged homage to Erik Satie. Its balm-like lyricism suggests a kind of psychodrama/affirmation that resonates with our current era. The rest of his oeuvre is much more abstract and sounds nothing like. Still, there's a rigour to Landscape's construction which elevates it above the level of bonbon.

Delia's Day

2009-09-20T09:20:00.011-04:00

This astonishing groove was recorded in the late 60s by pioneering electronic maestra Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001). It remains ahead of its time: today's electronic dance music is still catching up.

A friend and film critic in Halifax reminded me of the ever increasing buzz around Derbyshire, whose claim to mainstream fame is the painstaking, groundbreaking realization of the original Doctor Who theme. The notes were composed by Ron Grainer, but upon the joy of first hearing her sonically surreal production he asked, Did I really write this?

Most of it, replied Derbyshire. An observation that was also ahead of its time, in terms of the relationship between composer and producer. Derbyshire was both, at a time when women were still discouraged from being either.

Earlier this year, Canadian filmmaker Kara Blake's The Delian Mode took the best short prize at Toronto's Hot Docs festival. (Unfortunately, my head was somewhere else when it screened.) After successes in Rio and Telluride, it's been well-received at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax and will soon premiere in Montreal.

Last year, the BBC unveiled a massive archive of Derbyshire's previously unheard recordings. She fought against sexist policy and culture to do her work, and the world is luckier for it.

Her website is here, and below is another sample of her great talent – decades before synths, samplers, music software, and the advent of the DJ as musician. And in beautiful analog. Rock the reel-to-reels, Delia, RIP.

On Willows and Birches

2009-09-14T22:23:00.017-04:00

It's a thrilling moment when a new composition is first shared in the air between composer and performer. When you perform your own music, you don't have the same rush as hearing someone else give it voice, identity and independent life.

A lot of people write John Williams off, lovingly or otherwise, as the Star Wars or Harry Potter guy. We can't conceive of hearing his music as anything but film music; even his pure concert works. We're too literate visually.

And we have a hard time separating ourselves from our media archetype baggage; hearing music as pure emotion and not also as theatre, sociocultural rhetoric, social glue or fashion statement. We become closed, or even opposed, to the idea that this pasty, uncool old guy might be the master in our midst, because politically, culturally and technologically we're so over him and symphonic music. Until his time is up, then we're all about him.

No doubt, Americana can get bloated and pompous real fast like microwave popcorn. Hard to avoid even on an unconscious level. Which is why I appreciate the abstract John Williams even more. It might seem counter-intuitive, but concert music often requires less insider knowledge to enjoy than pop. And you don't need to be some retro-colonialist to do so.

Some may write the harp off as a instrument, perhaps because of the same, somewhat clichéd imagery that inspired JW in writing a concerto for it. I absolutely love its tone, its decay. It's more difficult to write for and play than it might seem.

If I'm lucky, if I'm open, I hear instrumental music as pure waves, athletic grace, as connections with the eternal. It speaks to me whether the communication is textual, gestural or vibrational. I don't discriminate based on generation, nation, genre or medium. Not on cognition. Not even on quality of performance or so-called authenticity, but those do factor into it. And of course I'm always aware of the visual.

Here's video from a rehearsal of On Willows and Birches, which is a send-off for retiring BSO principal Ann Hobson Pilot. The composer, conductor and soloist are the only ones present. I'm looking forward to hearing it with orchestra, probably some time down the line when a recording comes out. Gorgeous colours in the solo part.

Call and Response: Al Hudson Meets Space 1999

2009-09-13T21:13:00.006-04:00

Call and Response: takes a look at the fine art of sonic appropriation. Whether through collage, soundalikes, obvious influence, replayed passages, embodied elements, quotation, borrowed riffs and/or lyrics, or outright audio sampling – it's the oldest play on the bandstand. As old as echoes, reflections in water, your mama calling you.

–

Up first is "Spread Love", a 1978 orchestral disco classic by Al Hudson & The Soul Partners – an outfit better known later on as One Way, for funky anthems like "Cutie Pie" (1982). It's a real charmer with its bougie, Philly-esque arrangement and mushy message, not to mention that great bassline and the syncopated hook in the beat (the 3rd and 4th notes from the opening).

But what's this? That repeating line heard in the instrumental; played by the synthesizer and embellished by the strings; ascending through part of the so-called melodic minor scale at its beginning: D, E, F-sharp, G, A, B-flat... So distinctive and jazzy. And familiar.

Hey, that's the second season theme of Space 1999! I grew up with the show in the 70s, but didn't hear the Soul Partners cut until the 90s old-school revival, at which point I immediately caught the connection.

Somehow I doubt that Al Hudson and company were biting Derek Wadsworth's 1976 cue, which uses the exact same melodic identity, up a step – E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A, B, C – at a much faster tempo, but you just never know with those clever Detroitians. Detroit was the musical soil that produced J Dilla.

There is some similarity in the underlying chords as well, but otherwise these harmonically sophisticated tracks are completely unlike one another.

You have to be a serious sci-fi nerd to catch this connection (he says modestly); if anybody remembers the music from Space 1999 they'll probably only remember the splashier acid-rock theme from the first season.

I tried doing a mash, but the tempos were just too far apart for both tracks to retain their geek-approved vibe.

My Ever Changing Moods

2009-09-10T21:10:00.002-04:00

(Paul Weller)
as recorded by The Style Council, 1984

daylight turns to moonlight
and I'm at my best
praising the way it all works
and gazing upon the rest, yeah
(the cool before the warm
the calm after the storm) x2
I wish to stay forever
letting this be my food
but I'm caught up in a whirlwind
and my ever changing moods, yeah

bitter turns to sugar
some call a passive tune
but the day things turn sweet
for me won't be too soon
(the hush before the silence
the winds after the blast) x2
I wish we'd move together
this time the bosses sued
oh, but we're caught up in the wilderness
and our ever changing moods, yeah

(ever turnin' now)

teardrops turn to children
who've never had the time
to commit the sins they pay for
through another's evil mind
(the love after the hate
the love we leave too late) x2
I wish we'd wake up one day
and everyone feel moved
oh, but we're caught up in the dailies
and an ever changing mood, yeah

evil turns to statues
and masses form a line
but I know which way I'd run to
if the choice was mine
the past is knowledge
the present our mistake
and the future we always leave too late
I wish we'd come to our senses
and see there is no truth
oh, in those who promote the confusion
for this ever changing mood, yeah

tacet

2009-09-06T18:10:00.014-04:00

The account I use to stream my music – drop.io – expired, without reminder notice. Unfortunately, my audio links are now inoperative and everything will have to be re-uploaded. My apologies, I will eventually attempt to restore at least some tracks, beginning with the most recent posts.

[UPDATE: all links are now restored.]

The Lion

2009-09-05T13:59:00.004-04:00

In a random act of acknowledgement, a friend sent a post – dated today with the pic above – to me. I'm not sure how he was aware of the blog it came from. There are so many great audio blogs out there. I tend not to search them out nor follow them in any but a casual way, but I love when an interesting one comes along.

"Mbube" (a Zulu word for lion) is a song that I knew as part of Miriam Makeba's incredible repertoire.

The song was written by Solomon Linda and first recorded by him 1939, and due to its popularity became the genre word for a style of a cappella music. Via Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and others later on, it exists in the West as "Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight." A documentary was made about this particular history.

When I created a handle for myself as a young person, it was an adaptation or homage to the Arabic word mahboob, beloved. Other occurrences of the sound-word shape, such as in Zulu, or the proper name Mehboob in Western and South Asian cultures, informed its concept, notional spelling and pronuciation - Mbu'ube.

Ratner MJ interview

2009-09-02T09:02:00.001-04:00

Talk about poignant. Love that Tchaikovsky and Debussy get shout-outs before anyone else. And the trucker hat. His comment about Ford nuances something about his own public's mocking attitude towards him. Remarkably intelligent and insightful, if sky high, and we never listened to him like this.

On The Trail

2009-08-30T15:08:00.008-04:00

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

This is the closing track from Colin Halyk's new CD Childish Things, and one of three on which I contributed instrumental colour. I like this recording in particular because of all the sounds that bubble up and comment on the humorous, self-affirming nature of the song.

I should stress that the album covers several genres, and leans towards uptempo rock and balladic pop. It's based primarily around acoustic guitar and voice, with some smooth style touches and a strong rhythmic foundation enhanced by the desktop era. But this cut is the only place where it really twangs, and it provides contrast and a light finish to the collection.

Recorded with basic contemporary tech and often in mobile settings, it's still "indistinguishable from magic," according to the production standards of the cassette 4-track recordings we were all making when I met Colin some two decades ago. There is warm ambience and a classic sound here. Having so much rich acoustic (and electroacoustic) instrumental content makes a difference.

Colin laid down vocals, guitars, bass and percussion, with the thought of having the members of a band we were all part of years ago – Ernie's Coffee Shop – reunite to fill out the arrangement.

Mark Kunsti plays some quality harmonica; I add the unlikely combo of melodica and toy balafon (some random quasi-yearning for Morricone or Esquivel?); and Steve Mitchell brings the country funk with resophonic and electric guitars.

This is close in spirit to things we used to play in, well, coffee shops and pubs around campus as well as at spots like Sneaky Dee's (the original), Lee's Palace and the now long gone Cabana Room in the old Spadina Hotel; generally having a lot of fun doing it.

We last shared a stage well over a decade ago. Colin was part of the "deluxe" lineup of the band and has been our historian as well. I enjoyed our virtual reunion in support of Colin's solo return – true to the times the tune was recorded in four locations.

"On The Trail" and Childish Things copyright 2009 by Colin Halyk. Music streamed with kind permission.

The Secret Music of Stevie Wonder

2009-08-15T22:58:00.003-04:00

A film very much of its time and far advanced in some ways. Lovers of the least known, most underrated Stevie album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (1979) will note there are brief passages and mixes in the film that didn't make it to the album and vice versa.

Also note that "Overjoyed", not released until 1985, was written for the film and never included. Hard to imagine that song not making the final selection, but then, listen to what did. Music all at once of a novelty, humour, lyrical richness, melodic inventiveness, formal intelligence, technical innovation, eclecticism and profoundness that come together to mark a unique, high-water achievement in a great career.

Lastly, note that the big trends towards "world" music, new age, all-digital soundscapes were still a few years away.

Talking cactus, anyone? Empathic ferns? Warning: graphic abuse of brine shrimp and cabbage. The inclusion of a complete, 70s Soviet-era science doc is worth a view alone, Wonder notwithstanding. And I don't care what anyone says, the interpretative dance at 1:02:40 is where I want to go when I pass on. I'm guessing somewhere in the po tolo system.

That's Syreeta singing over the end credits.

Below is the last song, also for the record my favourite of the man's. Unfortunately, the audio quality isn't great. It's time for a deluxe edition remaster of both film and complete soundtrack. Praises to Stevie.

2x5

2009-08-05T14:59:00.003-04:00

Reich finally writes for rock ensemble, of sorts. Inevitably, it sounds a little like the rock minimalists did when they were copying him in the late 70s, but with Reich's trademark abstraction and austerity, and no sonic posturing.

2x5 is for four guitars, two pianos, two basses, and two drum sets; with the option for the performance to consist of each instrument playing against its prerecorded, paired counterpart; hence the title. Reich was one of the first composers to use "backing tracks", coming out of his early period of working with tape loops in the 60s. He still has a bit of a lock on the idea of soloists or ensembles playing against their clones, as it were.

I'm looking forward to hearing the full work, which is about 20 minutes long. Just like a prog-rock album side, hmm. It was premiered by Bang On A Can at the Manchester International Festive in July, on a double bill with Kraftwerk.

I couldn't avoid mentioning that I was tempted to title this post "Reich 'n Roll", which has been used and likely will be even more now.

pastiche

2009-07-28T16:00:00.002-04:00

I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is
poetry
as I need it
.

John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, 1950

(not original layout)

Let Me Show Ya

2009-07-24T23:38:00.007-04:00

(Paul Randolph, Stefan Leisering)

As recorded by Jazzanova featuring Paul Randolph,
on the album Of All the Things (2008)

(Late 1960s Stevie Wonder/Funk Brothers Motown, mid-tempo pop soul)

If you're through with love
Let me show ya
At least a thousand reasons why
You should take your time
Before you fall again

If you're through with love
Now's a good time
To wish upon a starry sky
And take your time
Trust that you will win

So you got that look again
Like you lost your best friend
Said he didn't get to know ya
Didn't get to see ya
For all the beauty in you

You chose to set aside
You chose to compromise
Every time you saw
The dangerous signs come crashing in

Oh, we're so hard on ourselves
We're only human
There's lessons we all should learn

If you're through with love, etc...

Oh, it's so hard to be alone
It feels so good to have a kindred soul
But it's better when it's on equal ground
That's the kind of love that stays around

(drum break)

So he charms you, wines and dines
Picks you up right on time
But he never seems to wonder
Never shows an interest
In anything about you

You chose to set aside, etc...

If you're through with love, etc...

Oh, it's so hard to be alone, etc...

(Early 70s blaxploitation riff with vibes, flute trills, brass/reeds, guitar/bass doubling strings)

Listen, girl

Dry your eyes don't fret
You know better than that
Till you learn how special you are
You'll put up with smack like that
(repeat)

Dry your eyes don't fret
You're special
I'm just schoolin' you
Ooh, ooh, ooh

Dry your eyes, etc...

Oh, it's so hard to be alone
It feels so good to have a kindred soul

Oh, it's so hard, it's so hard, yeah, ahhh
It feels so good, it feels so good
It feels so good
To have that, to have that kindred soul
Ooh, ooh

Quantic at Turning Point

2009-07-14T12:14:00.006-04:00

Notes from a dance floor peak. Sample of second DJ set by Quantic (aka Will Holland) at Turning Point, Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning, July 12:

Afro-disco tune with laser pistol keyboard riff. There was mostly confusion and mayhem on the floor at this point, but by the end of the song, applause.

Bongos of Bollywood. Air goes blue with electric arcs. Lots of bad hand dancing clichés.

Massive, massive samba cut. The best I've ever heard a sound system perform in there. Surdos from heaven. Nice and trippy psychedelic bridge you could catch your breath to and notice the party again, thinking the feverishness had passed, before the beat exploded once more and the crowd cheered. The tune was the room was the tune.

Kickass steelpan band rendition of “Hot Pants Road”, originally by James Brown's backing orchestra The JBs, who recorded many popular funk anthems without his singing. Think of steelpans replacing all the horn, guitar and bass parts, and think again of electricity, but this time a whole generator station.

Tito Puente-style mambo groove, in full Mad Professor dub-out mode. Have you ever heard mambo dub? Have you even heard of it? The record we kept talking about later that night, and the next day, and...

Rocksteady cover version of Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing”. Suddenly made it impossible to find space to move on the dance floor. Fun to watch, though I took advantage of the lull at the bar to avoid the hippie hipster hip shaking contests.

Big Youth's "Hit the Road Jack"(featuring "What the World Needs Now is Love"). A recording I actually knew, but suprising and vibe-increasing no less.

After having spent four hours in the sun at Afrofest the afternoon just before, at this point I needed to go home. It was freezing for a night in July but I didn't mind the walk at all.

Will appeared for an unannounced, impromptu set at TP back in July 2005. It was also Afrofest weekend, plus the night of the Quantic Soul Orchestra's stellar performance at Harbourfront for Beats, Breaks & Culture. That night I gave my compliments to Will and singer Alice Russell (who also dug through the crates and spun). We danced together for a little bit. Great folks.

Last weekend's properly billed appearance was a pleasant parallel to the earlier occasion, though I did without the Red Bull and dancing barefoot on talcum powder this time. Watch for the new Quantic album and a related feature film coming soon.

Tradition in Transition: A Postcard from Cali (TRAILER) from Quantic on Vimeo.

MJ

2009-07-07T11:57:00.004-04:00

I may have grown up in smalltown Canada at the edge of America; I may be a Gen Xer not an MTVer; and I didn't have black brothers, sisters or friends. [UPDATE: This last phrase sounds like a pathetic corollary to "some of my best friends are...," but there you go.]

But as much as 1983 was Michael Jackson's year it was mine. My birth father was an American of African descent and like him I am a musician. We are all somebodies.

I can tell you something about coming up a black man in a white man's world, and learning to perform whiteness to keep up. Learning to perform blackness to survive; learning to suppress it to stay relevant whenever blackness is no longer haute. The experience of being othered. And the feeling of grace when one can feel dualities and negations slipping away.

I can't tell you anything I know first hand about fame, but lots about crises of existence. About learning to let your voice sound even when no one is listening or hearing it the way you do.

I celebrate Jackson's music, even his later work that meant so much to others and nothing to me. I celebrate who Jackson was and the best of what he represents. He was a symbol of raceless harmony and a global culture, and damning evidence that the former doesn't yet exist while the latter perhaps does through corporate imperialism for the time being. The same culture that left him as a troubled balance sheet.

I don't need to lament what he became but to continue to recognize how a single human being can be exploited to suit the moment, the agenda. As we speak, Iran is still in crisis (though the media blinks), AIDS is still consuming Africa (though the media shrugs) and peak oil is on its way (huh?). We need our moment of grief for people and things that have passed. Let the mythology be what it will. It will be time to move on and focus again.

Off the Wall and Thriller represent canon for me. I bought my vinyl copy of the latter for two dollars in 1983. After a hundred-odd plays I sold it to my mother's friend for five dollars, so she could do aerobics and I could temporarily revise my canon. Short term gain, long term pain.

After 1987, I failed to recognize the man in his mirror, and maybe in a small way lost sight of the one in mine.

Today is the first last rite of passage for the MTV generation.

Today I'll remember Michael Jackson, who meant more to me than I can ever explain or essentialize, and also James Brown who passed 2.5 years ago. Rick James, five years ago. Curtis Mayfield, ten years. Minnie Riperton, thirty. And so on.

Today I am wearing black and my heart is in Gary.

The Bridge

2009-06-09T21:00:00.014-04:00

The sonics here, though directed more towards a jam than an abstract audio piece, never quite resolve into a conventional pop or dance music soundscape. This is partly intentional and mostly a result of allowing the limitations of mid-tech and lo-fi material to remain. Glitches, inexact loop points and distorted EQ/signal balance are artifacts. Sepia sound is something I've spent years working with, often by accident.

Along with those (not new) ideas, I focus on: harmonic stasis (or in the same way, oscillation); phasing of two identical loops; rigorous (some might say studious, others tedious) sweeps through frequency ranges; additive structure in quoting the source material, and; general funkiness.

The Bridge (ending) by mahboob

Random, formerly unique, non-repeating details now become texture. Time becomes vertical. Working with extremely limited material naturally encourages large scale form.

The Bridge was created over several evenings in May 2009. I began by selecting 20-odd seconds of instrumental from the bridge section of my 1989 song "Discipline". It gave a good snapshot of my style at the time: spacey, custom-made keyboard sounds, sampled drum sounds played live via keyboard, and left-of-centre chord progressions. (My lyrics and singing didn't survive the selection process in this case.)

Playing back the 20-year-old, 4-track cassette the song was recorded onto, I burned various mixes of the instrumental or solo tracks from it onto two identical CDs. I looped those two CDs against each other DJ-style, sometimes playing the same loop against itself in and out phase to create echoes, sometimes using the drums as a static loop over which I could slowly adjust the pitched sounds, and sometimes manipulating both CDs simultaneously.

I recorded about 30 minutes worth of live improvisations on this "break" material, pausing the recording at points to tweak EQ and adjust which timeframes I was triggering, keeping the key, metre and tempo constant, and then edited it down to about half that length. Though it opens up to a groove vaguely in A-flat Dorian minor, most of this version is about an obsession with two other chords, often just one of them at a time.

There is a chromatically descending minor triad within the harmony, which is ambiguous with echoes of sci-fi. The respective bass root notes are a tritone (sharp fourth) apart, spelling: A-flat dominant 13 and D9 sharp 11. For me, this chordal shift as it occurred at the end of the bridge in "Discipline" once suggested the image of an ellipsis; an uneasy crossing of this particular bridge; an enigmatic signal, golden era nerd style.

The beats are always the loudest element in the mix, though the journey of the chords is the A (flat) story. For what it's worth, in terms of harmonic analysis the chords are merely what might be called tonic substitutions – different versions of the same thing.

Perhaps not unconsciously, I chose to reexamine a song whose text commented on parenthood – twenty years before I had any experience at it. Which is why the words remain at a lower level of personal trivia.

This was a live performance in each of the two eras of its creation: there was no programming or sequencing used on the 1989 recording, nor did I employ any desktop software or metronomes (other than some A-B looping of my 80s "finger" drums) in 2009.

The rhythmic timing is all human. The mix was real time; there was no mixdown. Editing was 'live' as well (i.e. destructive), done right onto the hard disc master.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2009.

uhuru

2009-05-03T17:39:00.008-04:00

uhuru is written for four male voices a cappella. Not considering myself a singer per se, I nevertheless wrote for the vocal range I could cover comfortably.

I worked very quickly, composing text and music simultaneously; the latter being something I rarely do. I recorded a mock-up version on cassette four-track, and then a proper demo on eight-track reel-to-reel a day later. I doubled each part by recording it twice, which adds a chorus effect to the sound. The result is the sound of eight voices.

The style is similar to a chorale, in the sense of four lines moving in rhythmic unison with some counterpoint. This echoes my own early roots in the church.

With an economy of text, uhuru touches on themes of loss, in layers: the loss of a lover; the loss of family; loss of cultural identity; and more generally, the loss of human dignity through racism and of lives through racist violence.

uhuru by mahboob

"Uhuru" is the Swahili word for 'freedom', here symbolizing political, cultural and artistic freedoms, and release from self-oppression. I take some liberties with the pronunciation of the word (deliberately, to make a reference I don't disclose here). In retrospect, some of the text feels awkward culturally and otherwise, though the process of writing the song felt essential.

I explored these themes of uhuru further in other pieces on my cassette album of which this was the title track.

It's worth noting as well that the date of composition was December 6, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the École Polytechnique Massacre and now the annual Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

The text is below.

--

my loved (lovely) one dreams
the shape of things…
so far from our
birthplace
return to peace
green when red
blood is lost
silent world is not real
in morte
uhuru
I will keen for you
O void ovoid
the heartbeat of mother
is weakened by violence
who feels it, still can give
strong rhythms through darkness
so we, so we
Soweto, you have felt
the winter wind blow

Text, music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2009

Steve Reich wins Pulitzer Prize in Music

2009-04-27T20:47:00.001-04:00

By Tom Huizenga

NPR.org, April 20, 2009 - New York-based composer Steve Reich has won the Pulitzer Prize for music with his piece Double Sextet. Reich composed the work for two identical sextets of instruments, each made up of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano.

Hear an excerpt of Double Sextet.

"I'm very glad that this particular piece got it, because I do think it's one of the better pieces I've done in the past few years," Reich tells NPR's Tom Cole, who broke the news to the composer over the phone at his home in New York.

"The piece can be played in two ways," Reich says. "Either with 12 musicians or with six playing against a recording of themselves." That's exactly how the Double Sextet was premiered, in May 2008, by the ensemble eighth blackbird.

The concept of musicians playing against taped recordings of themselves is not a new idea for Reich. He used it in his "Counterpoint" series and Different Trains in the 1980s, and as far back as 1967's Violin Phase.

"It's the idea of writing basically unison canons," Reich says. "The same timbre playing against itself, so that when they intertwine, you don't hear the individual voice; you hear the composite. Now, if you have several composites going on at the same time, you really get to an interesting situation, and that's what's going on in Double Sextet."

It's About Time

Tim Page, professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California and himself a former Pulitzer winner for music criticism, says he was overjoyed to hear the news about Reich.

"It's about time the first generation of minimalist composers were honored," Page says, "because they changed American music. It could be argued they changed world music."

Page points to the generation of composers before Reich, with their penchant for an atonal, serialist style of music that left many listeners cold.

"And here comes Reich, and he's tonal and rhythmic," Page says. "He helped teach the world to listen to music in a new way. Also, it's music that has touched every other kind of music, from rock and jazz to hip-hop. He is a universal composer."

Anne Midgette, chief classical music critic of the Washington Post, agrees.

"This is a richly deserved award to a man who may be America's greatest living composer," Midgette says. "Double Sextet combines the probing intellectual rigor that's a Reich hallmark and the live-against-recorded-playing that he's returned to again and again throughout his career, with an autumnal richness of tone and timbre that makes it meditative — and even, in places, outright melodic."

Double Sextet was commissioned by eighth blackbird, an adventurous ensemble of young musicians who grew up listening to Reich's music.

"Thankfully, a lot of young musicians have not only played all kinds of my pieces, but have played them well," Reich says. "It's because they heard them when they were younger. This is the case in all music history. Composers have a real difficulty in that first generation when they are writing these works. But the following generations grow up with it as part of the furniture in the room. So eighth blackbird, and many other groups I'm happy to say, can not only play it, but play it convincingly and enjoy themselves."

photo by Jeffrey Herman

Steve Reich's Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, Double Sextet, is designed for six musicians to play against a recording of themselves.

An eighth blackbird Commission

Composition: Double Sextet

Composer: Steve Reich

Premiere: Modlin Center, University of Richmond, March 26, 2008

Performers: eighth blackbird

[The performance in the link near the top was recorded November 11, 2008 in Oberlin, Ohio. Performers: eighth blackbird, with students at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music: Leah Asher, violin; Eleanor Bors, cello; Esther Fredrickson, flute; Mark Cramer, clarinet; Thomas Fosnocht, piano; Jennifer Torrence, percussion.]

cold milk, cookies and a microphone

2009-03-17T15:17:00.009-04:00

I reconnected over the weekend with Colin Halyk, an old friend and musical associate. Colin and I played together in years past, and his band Another 1000 Miles gave a cover of my song "A Story of Reason" a special place on their tours and on their 2003 CD Detach:

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

(Posted with permission. Copyright Another 1000 Miles and Bruce Russell 2009.)

Colin is working at a furious pace on a new solo CD – to be titled Childish Things. He will have recorded 17 songs for it in only a couple of months! He diarized our meeting for his album blog:

The weekend's main event was Sunday's session at Bruce Russell's airy, meditatively calm digs in Toronto. Over milk and delicious cookies baked by Bruce and his daughter the day before, he learned, crafted and then laid down multiple parts for 3 different songs in under 6 hours of working time. Bruce also did some keyboard work on two of the a1000m albums and it is always a pleasure and surprise to see what he will bring to songs. He's also at work with the band he plays with at the moment on stuff, and I was very impressed by the DJ rig he has in his living room, and, of course, his usual amazing work.

Bruce was also a member of a band called Ernie's Coffee Shop, whom many of my friends will recall from the day, and I'm happy to say it looks like all three guys from that band may get to gather (albeit in separate times and places) under the appropriate roof of one of my album's songs with a barnyard animal in the lyrics, "On The Trail." I had a lot of fun hearing Bruce add melodica and balafon (kind of like a xylophone in sound, but with what seemed like resonating gourds underneath) to that tune. Mark Kuntsi will add his stuff next weekend, and Steve Mitchell will hopefully get a chance to ship his in...

As always, it was a great pleasure hanging out and collaborating with Colin. Can't wait to hear the results!

Sophistiphunk

2009-03-14T00:48:00.003-04:00

You will believe a podcast can fly – the rebirth of the rebirth of the mixtape.

Somebody's Watching You

2009-02-25T09:25:00.004-05:00

(S. Stewart)

as performed by Little Sister, produced by Sly Stone, and released on Stone Flower/Atlantic, 1970(#8, R&B chart)

vocals: whispered/hissed, with gospel-like chordal interjections (in italics)

instruments: organ haze, bass spasms, wah guitar dashes, distant guitar pulses

groove: slow, percolating, low-lying creep, fuzzy beat box – the first use of a drum machine (the Rhythm Ace) on a pop song

--

pretty, pretty, pretty as a picture
witty, witty, witty as you can be
blind 'cos your eyes see only glitter
closed to the things that make you free

ever stop to think about a downfall
happens at the end of every line
just when you think you've pulled a fast one
happens to the foolish all the time

somebody's watching you (4'xs)

games are to played with toys, et cetera
love is to be made when you're for real
ups and downs are caused by life in general
some are yours no matter how you feel

shady as a lady in a mustache
feelings camouflaged by groans and grins
secrets have a special way about them
moving to and fro among your friends

somebody's watching you (4'xs)

live it up today if you want to
live it down tomorrow afternoon
sunday school don't make you cool forever
neither does the silver of your spoon

the nicer the nice, the higher the price
this is what you pay for what you need
the higher the price, the nicer the nice
jealous people like to see you bleed

somebody's watching you (4x's and fade out)

Technical issues

2009-02-17T19:30:00.005-05:00

Over the past few days, a bug has emerged in the software I use to embed music tracks on this blog. All the tracks viewable on a single page automatically play together when the page is loaded. This bug is a new discovery to the provider, and is being looked into.

In the meantime, you can pause the tracks you don't want to hear manually. Sorry for the inconvenience... or enjoy it if you're feeling experimental.

UPDATE: The autoplay bug has been worked out. Thanks for your patience.

Obama likes classical music (and so can you)

2009-01-24T13:24:00.005-05:00

What did I think of John Williams' Air and Simple Gifts, when it was performed just before the president's swearing in? It had its moments. It was solemn, not surprisingly staid, and well performed. Nice start and finish, not sure about the middle. I'm probably the only one of all my friends and family that actually cared what it sounded like.

I suspect, though, that we were mostly hearing a backing track -- quartet-syncing? Don't know about you, but my fingers don't work so well after a few minutes of sub-zero exposure. The tuning and acoustics were suspiciously perfect.

Air was a tribute to revered American composer Aaron Copland, who made the Shaker tune "The Gift to Be Simple" famous, only to have his music banned from Eisenhower's inaugural concert because of his own liberal politics. The banned piece (pulled just before the occasion) was Lincoln Portrait, which Obama -- a fan of Copland -- has performed in before as a speaker. John Williams is a kind of successor to Copland. It didn't take much for him to compose an homage that suited the moment while making some slightly esoteric connections (as opposed to the obviousness of having Aretha sing).

I don't know that I would enjoy Williams' piece as pure music too often -- he writes much better for the concert hall than for ceremonies. If his film scores can have a life beyond the cinema (and they certainly do now), then these few pages could. But despite being played for his largest audience ever, they're merely a drop in the very full bucket of his work.

When Barry met Johnny

2009-01-19T13:19:00.003-05:00

John Williams has composed a new work for Barack Obama, to be played immediately before the swearing-in tomorrow morning. Itzhak Perlman will cover the violin line in the piece, while Yo-Yo Ma holds down the 'cello. Truly, we live in an age of giants.

The work is scored for the same ensemble as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time: clarinet, piano, violin and cello. Tomorrow's premiere is of course about auspicious beginnings, but as with the Messiaen, could there be a theme of transcendence?

This will be a serenade of historical proportions, and -- though he asked Ma and Perlman to play who in turn called on Williams -- I'm sure BHO knows the deal: he would have been 13 when the Jaws theme first freaked out moviegoers everywhere, 15 when the Star Wars theme had them cheering. And he would have been four when the Lost In Space theme first became a weekly soundbyte in American homes. And on and on. I don't think anyone is expecting these kinds of musical signals tomorrow, but I chuckle at the thought.

As I mentioned in my long Williams post, the composer laureate is no stranger to commissions for solemn occasions. Ma made his presidential debut performing for JFK in 1962, at the age of seven. He talks a bit about that here, reveals what popular bit of Americana will make a cameo in the Williams piece.

More on the quartet here.

Aretha Franklin is also singing. How could she not? George Clinton envisioned her as the First Lady in Parliament's song "Chocolate City" in 1975. In poetic units of measurement, George hit a bullseye.

Happy MLK Day, America.

retrorockets

2009-01-18T09:18:00.003-05:00

we all live with our illusions
some terrible, some terrifying
it’s good to know
that the dream is not dead
in a race that’s dying

now it’s time to take off your mask
embrace the light
now it’s time to reach out for other love
know your need to fight

prayers for those who have gone
we have burned you
oh eh oh
oh eh oh eh

eons have passed through us
oh eh
oh eh oh eh

Mbu'ube, from the cassette nation album oo (1991)

copyright Bruce Russell 2009

Call and Response: Ben Westbeech Meets Linda Williams

2008-12-14T14:40:00.005-05:00

Music with buzz, and the music it was

A look at the fine art of sonic appropriation. Whether through collage, soundalikes, obvious influence, replayed passages, embodied elements, quotation, borrowed riffs and/or lyrics, or outright audio sampling – it's the oldest play on the bandstand. As old as echoes, reflections in water, your mama calling you.

–

Ben Westbeech, a talented singer, DJ and creator of electronic club sounds (neo-soul, nu-jazz, broken beat, drum & bass) has a phoncky tune called "Get Closer". It's soulful, danceable and classic in its use of a single audio loop to build up a mellow but infectious D&B track. He's got a terrific voice. His source for the piano line (and it sounds like either a sample or a very well-lifted digital recreation) is none other than Linda Williams, one of the many unsung women of R&B in the 1970s. That salsa-boogie piano part – and who can't listen to it over and over like this? - comes from her jazz-funk nugget "Elevate Our Minds", from 1979. It's almost impossible to do anything but pay tribute to a song as great sonically and textually as hers, but Ben's got a nice groove here.

If you hit play on both tracks at once (once the beat kicks in on "Get Closer"), you can beat match for a few seconds at a time. Also, notice the exact pitch match.

Maestra

2008-12-09T12:19:00.009-05:00

Old news - perhaps breadcrumbs on the trail towards the "year of change"... this year of change, anyway.

--

Marin Alsop leads the Baltimore Symphony

by Alex Ross

January 7, 2008

Alsop is an intensely physical conductor. Photograph by Steve Pyke.

“DON’T LET HISTORY PASS YOU BY!” proclaims a banner hanging outside Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, in Baltimore. The history in question belongs to Marin Alsop, who took over as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony last September, thereby becoming the first woman ever to lead a major American orchestra. Or so some say. A recent front-page story in the Buffalo News declared that the Buffalo Philharmonic — a seasoned, skilled, and not exactly minor group—made this history back in 1998, when it hired the conductor JoAnn Falletta. The League of American Orchestras, asked to adjudicate the dispute, noted that orchestra insiders use the word “major” to indicate an ensemble that plays year round: Baltimore does, Buffalo does not. Whatever the outcome of that controversy, female conductors remain embarrassingly rare. The problem isn’t that misogyny runs rampant in the music world; it’s that the classical business is temperamentally resistant to novelty, whether in the form of female conductors, American conductors, younger conductors, new music, post-1900 concert dress, or concert-hall color schemes that aren’t corporate beige.

The Baltimore Symphony, along with several other orchestras based in troubled American downtowns, has struggled in recent years, its finances periodically in crisis and attendance falling perilously low. The previous music director, Yuri Temirkanov, was a maestro in the traditional mold, a fervent interpreter of familiar repertory. Alsop, a fifty-one-year-old New York native, is quite different, and not just because of her gender. She is a forceful advocate for new music, and has said that she wishes she had been a composer — that conducting is for her a vicarious way of entering into the creative process. All non-composing conductors probably feel the same, but most find it convenient to confine their attentions to the safely deceased. Dead composers don’t speak up and ask for more felt on the bass drum; they don’t annoy orchestra players reluctant to learn a brand-new score that they might never play again; and they generally don’t send listeners running for the exits. Alsop, in previous appointments at the Colorado Symphony and at the Bournemouth Symphony, has shown a knack for charming both players and audiences into enjoying music that they think they won’t like. She has become a star, in part, by making composers the stars. She is on her way to accomplishing the same feat in Baltimore —or so it seemed at two concerts this fall.

Alsop’s inaugural season is startlingly ambitious. Eleven living composers — John Adams, Tan Dun, HK Gruber, Aaron Jay Kernis, Mark O’Connor, Steven Mackey, Christopher Rouse, James MacMillan, John Corigliano, Thomas Adès, and Joan Tower — make appearances, and they are represented by more than the seven- or eight-minute aural hors d’oeuvre that too often passes for new-music programming. Five of them occupy the entire first half of a program, with a Beethoven symphony after intermission. Composers in Conversation events allow the visitors to explain their visions. To encourage newcomers, the orchestra slashed prices on regular subscription series to twenty-five dollars a night, making up the financial difference with a million-dollar grant. Students are offered a package of five concerts for twenty-five dollars. Whatever excuses Baltimoreans may supply for skipping classical concerts, high ticket prices can’t be one of them.

Now halfway through the first season, the orchestra has reported an upward bump in attendance. A healthy crowd showed up for a concert that paired two works by Kernis — “Newly Drawn Sky” and “Lament and Prayer” — with Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony. John Adams drew a sizable house for his concerts; Tan Dun’s sold poorly. Alsop recognizes that, for the moment, she is more of an audience draw than the composers for whom she has such obvious affection. She’s facing a familiar dilemma: on the one hand, she must convince traditional concertgoers of the value of Adams and Adès; on the other, she must convince younger listeners of the relevance of Beethoven. “I don’t think I’m being naïve, but I try not to even think about it,” she told me, when I stopped by her dressing room after her public conversation with Kernis. “I simply try to treat all music the same.”

A protégée of Leonard Bernstein, Alsop takes an intensely physical approach to conducting, leading as much with her upper body as with her forearms and hands. Spontaneous in spirit, she often changes tempi and details of phrasing from performance to performance. Musicians can find that kind of unpredictability frustrating; during one rehearsal, a player tried to get her to commit to a consistent pacing of a ritardando in the “Pastorale,” whereupon she jokingly said, “I have an issue with commitment.” (When Alsop’s appointment was announced, in 2005, much of the orchestra rose up in protest, telling the press that she was glib and imprecise. This rebellion, it turned out, had more to do with player-management tensions than with Alsop herself. A new C.E.O., Paul Meecham, has established a more convivial atmosphere.) The “Pastorale” was given a vigorous, warmly expressive performance, although a slight fuzziness kept intruding on the ensemble. More striking was a version of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony that I heard back in September; it showed off not only the conductor’s exuberance but also her command of structure. The orchestra, a perennially underrated group, sounds in fine shape; as before, it values burnished textures over virtuoso bite.

Alsop has championed Kernis’s music for years, notably in her capacity as the director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, in Santa Cruz, California. The composer made his name in the nineteen-eighties, as a leader of the New Romanticism — a lavish musical revolt against the disciplined neoclassical and modernist languages that had long dominated American music. For a time in the early nineties, Kernis’s work grew intimidatingly fraught, as he addressed themes of war and terror. Lately, he has taken on a more spacious, lyrical tone, and it suits him beautifully. “Newly Drawn Sky,” from 2005, portrays a day the composer spent at the beach with his young children, watching them in their first encounter with the sea. Deep, rich, largely tonal harmonies evoke the ocean’s breadth; flurrying patterns in the upper registers suggest a rapidly changing sky. Alsop brought out the longer line connecting the episodes, so that the music unfolded in one sweeping motion.

“Lament and Prayer,” for solo violin, strings, percussion, and offstage oboe, had its première in 1995, at the close of Kernis’s doom-and-gloom period. It commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In the first part, the soloist struggles to be heard above a catastrophic texture of seething glissandos, clashing rhythms, and savage unisons. Later comes an ecstatic breakthrough, as the violin sings a plangent modal melody in the manner of a synagogue cantor leading a congregation, the oboe answering like a voice from the other side. In the coda, the violin climbs into its highest register, achieving complex, unsentimental repose; the string ensemble comes to rest where it began, on the note A, in a haunting reminiscence of the opening of Mahler’s First Symphony. In Baltimore, the soloist was the formidable young virtuoso Timothy Fain, who swayed balletically as he dug into the score. (Not long afterward, Fain played in an abridged performance of Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach,” at Carnegie Hall; his Romantic flair almost broke the spell of Glass’s steady-state cool.) Kernis won a passionate ovation. Beethoven was almost an afterthought.

Lists of forward-thinking American orchestras — the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony are the de-facto industry leaders, with the ensembles of Baltimore, Atlanta, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Boston, and Chicago not far behind —seldom include the New York Philharmonic. For years, America’s oldest orchestra has epitomized the stick-to-the-classics, no-surprises school of orchestra programming. Not long ago, the critic Peter G. Davis hailed the Philharmonic as “the most boring major orchestra in the world.” Seemingly intent on proving the point, the orchestra kicked off the current season with a festival entitled the Tchaikovsky Experience; last year, the spotlight fell on Brahms. Lorin Maazel, now in his sixth season as music director, has the orchestra playing fiendishly well, but he has left no discernible mark on the cultural life of the city. His interpretations remain, for me and others, a closed book. His “Pathétique,” at the beginning of the season, was technically seamless but emotionally vague. I heard Tchaikovsky but didn’t quite experience him.

All the same, there are signs of life at the Philharmonic. New and twentieth-century works are proliferating. Three notable younger conductors have made débuts this season: Philippe Jordan joined the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard in a meaty rendition of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto; Gustavo Dudamel let loose his visceral energy on the Prokofiev Fifth; and Andrey Boreyko led a furiously disciplined version of the Shostakovich Fourth. That last performance took place in conjunction with a new series called Inside the Music, in which a major work is first discussed at length and then played in full. The analyst for Shostakovich was the mellifluous composer-scholar Gerard McBurney, who, with the aid of photographs, film footage, and dramatic recitations by the actor F. Murray Abraham, transformed Shostakovich’s most sublimely chaotic work into the soundtrack for a documentary about life under Stalin. In the end, it didn’t tell you too much about the music, but it was a riveting presentation, blessed with a touch of high-class show biz that had been missing from the orchestra since the Leonard Bernstein days. More changes are on the way: a celebrity composer-in-residence, a contemporary series, and, in 2009, a new chief conductor, the musically assured, intellectually questing Alan Gilbert. Critics may not have the old Philharmonic to kick around for much longer.

Infinitely Slow

2008-12-07T20:07:00.010-05:00

Wednesday marks the centennial of the birth of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), the "great" figure of French concert music in the 20th century. (Pierre Boulez, with his own legendary profile as a conductor, theorist, educator and groundbreaking composer, can't seem to touch his former teacher. Still being alive, well and working doesn't help.)

Messiaen, who experienced mild synaesthesia, devised a complex, symmetric system of harmony that was analyzable but that also invoked colour schemes (e.g. "blue-orange chords"), at a time when composers had rejected harmony altogether. He used Hindustani taals (cycles of beats), symmetrical and additive rhythmic structures, and sometimes incredibly slow tempos to change up the perception of time in his music. Most famously, he catalogued birdsongs and incorporated their transcriptions in all of his compositions from the early 1950s onwards.

During the long, stormy, snowed-in winter of 1992-93, I listened repeatedly to a recording of le Maître playing his own pieces for solo organ on the instrument they were composed on - the Cavaillé-Coll at Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where he was the organist for over sixty years. I was a student living in a third-floor bachelor apartment with a turret, a little nook that looked south on St. George St., the road directly in line with the CN Tower. Captured with the limited technology of the 1930s, the recording had a claustrophobic yet ethereal ambience that was somehow appropriate to that setting.

His colours were hypnotic. There was hardly much rhythm to these droning pieces in the way one generally thinks of rhythm. But there was powerful harmonic rhythm and movement. Melody seemed to be only an outgrowth of the harmonies. (This recording was made before his use of birdsongs - the ultimate melodies.) Just the way the music continually and gracefully returned to the tonic - the chord of rest - while still having all the way-out trappings of modernism, seemed daring, alien, abstract. There were a million other chords happening, but he always came back to the fundamental.

More than any other figure within the Western canon, Messiaen - a devout Roman Catholic throughout his life, which points up the irony in his name and the word canon - held the torch of spirituality high in the 20th century, when religion had all but vanished from "serious" music. By the time of his death, there had been a renewed interest in the sacred, as evidenced in works by Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, John Tavener, Steve Reich and others, and by new music audiences craving something richer than pure intellectuality.

In quiet moments over the years I have often turned to one of several recordings of I own of Quatuor pour la fin du Temps ("Quartet for the end of Time"), composed for violin, cello, clarinet, and piano while Messiaen was a POW at Görlitz. The premiere was given on broken down instruments (the cello was missing a string) in a freezing stalag, with the composer at the piano in clogs. No one will ever top this premiere for poignancy or pluck - or, period.

Note that "the end of Time" is not only an overt religious reference, but a metaphor for Messiaen transforming the use of time in music. The tempo of the Quartet's fifth movement is marked infiniment lent. Chords linger and change almost without notice, sometimes pungent, then full of light.

The final movement is among the most transcendent music that I know. I am not a religious person, but Messiaen's work succeeds in bringing a sense of the eternal to the moment.

sleepsong

2008-11-30T11:30:00.007-05:00

sleepsong by mahboob

This was the first music I wrote for my daughter, on a beautiful, relatively young piano. What I've posted is a performance on an electronic piano, with nowhere near the required sustain. The title – which lent itself to this blog – reflects my interest in the dream world and its relation to waking life.

At close to twelve minutes long, the piece begins as a lullaby but passes frequently through different moods, energy states and types of motion (sound familiar, parents?). It consists of sixteen short modules which flow together – the ordering of these modules was part of the compositional process.

sleepsong employs some musical ideas and material that I have been working with for a few years. In that sense it's a sort of piano miniature compendium. The complexity of design is offset by an aesthetic of audible simplicity. The piece remains in rhythmically regular 3/4 time and uses only the notes of the G major scale throughout. The opening six notes are the basic generative cell for everything that follows.

Music and composer's notes copyright Bruce Russell 2008

John Williams is in the water: Lineage, Eclecticism, and Anonymous Celebrity

2008-11-23T20:23:00.007-05:00

Not many people sit and muse on the fact that a single human being wrote the musical scores for all of the following TV shows, films, and franchises: Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space, NBC News, the Irwin Allen-produced disaster flicks The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, Star Wars (all six films), Raiders of Lost Ark (and its three sequels), Harry Potter (three of the films and the themes heard in all of them), Superman (the first Christopher Reeve film as well as music heard in the rest and in the 2006 reboot), The Witches of Eastwick, three Oliver Stone films (Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon), two Robert Altman films (Images, The Long Goodbye), an early Brian De Palma (The Fury), the first two Home Alone movies, Angela's Ashes, Memoirs of a Geisha, Hitchcock's last film (Family Plot)... and – including Jaws, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, E.T., the aforementioned Indiana Jones series, Empire of the Sun, two Jurassic Parks, Schindler's List, Amistad, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can and Munich – all of the films of Steven Spielberg except one (The Color Purple)... and many, many more. I do.

You can read the rest at his Wiki entry if you like, including the fact he's also written fanfares for four Olympic games, and has been scoring movies since 1958. Half a century. 110 films. 5 Oscars. 45 nominations; other than Walt Disney, he's the most nominated person in Oscar history. And that's interesting because, while we acknowledge the complete permeation of Walt Disney throughout our culture, we are always aware of the brand. By comparison, would you think John Williams a household name?

He is firmly behind the scenes, and works best there. Sure, he conducted the Boston Pops for almost 15 years, I watched him on TV as a kid. He still has a busy conducting schedule, while his compositional output has slowed... since he scored four films in 2005. He writes two minutes of music every day. He doesn't go to movies or listen to other people's music, including his own massive oeuvre, unless he's conducting it.

Still, fans don't call him a craftsman - he's the maestro. For them, he writes timeless melodies. For others, timeless is a synonym for tasteless. He's nowhere near as much a contemporary legend as say, Madonna. But I'm betting her music and much of our popular tuneage today will, in 150 years, be like Stephen Foster songs are to us now. "Oh! Susanna" anyone? Composers of abstract instrumental music tend to fare better over the years, as trends become irrelevant. (Bob Dylan might prevail on the strength of his poetry.)

It's hard to say exactly where film music will fit in, as that too can date horribly. Williams has never suffered from the need to be relevant or contemporary per se. He simply does his job.

He brought forward the symphonic tradition at a time when new wave filmmaking, the decline of the studio system in Hollywood, rock 'n roll, atonality, the synthesizer and other postwar musical revolutions had all just about ended it. For a while, the orchestra was not only uncool, it was not heard much in Hollywood. Eventually, symphonic, tonal music was revived in cinema as well as the concert hall, as composers began to feel it was safe, ahem, to go back in the water. Williams was a big part of this return.

I wonder if the relative economic and social conservatism of the late 1970s – which disco, punk and hip hop were reactions against – also resulted in the unlikely return of a giant symbol of European colonialism, turned somewhat on itself. Star Wars was just Saturday morning fluff when Williams was writing it; he had no pretensions to seriousness, at least for that gig. So he felt free to tear it up like some badass club DJ, but instead of using turntables and old funky vinyl, he had sheet music and a pencil (he still uses these), a baton and 150 years of orchestral repertoire at his disposal. He helped make pastiche not only popular (again), but a formidable, legitimate form in its own right. In that respect, he is a post-modernist. In most others, he's never left tradition behind.

I also wonder what our current economic times will mean for new orchestral works – for orchestras in general?

Although they are a generation apart and on opposite sides of the imaginary high-low cultural fence, maximal minimalist composer John Adams began his rise to fame in the concert music world soon after Williams finished his so-called golden decade (1975-1984, Jaws to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). Williams has mentioned Adams as a composer that interests him now, and anyone who is familiar with the younger artist's Americana could hardly refute its similarities, if unintentional, to the elder's work.

In turn, one can hear the influence of new voices like Adams' and minimalist pioneer Steve Reich in more recent Williams scores like A.I. But Williams has often been a sort of proto-minimalist himself (or post-minimalist depending on which end of his career) via one of his mentors, the great Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann's propulsive and obsessively repetitive patterns were the sound of signature Alfred Hitchcock films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, as well as early sci-fi classics The Day The Earth Stood Still and Fahrenheit 451. (Herrmann's last score, for Taxi Driver, concluded with a motif from his most famous, Psycho, almost as if he knew it was the end of his life. Williams snuck the same motif into his own score for the first Star Wars in 1977, perhaps as a tribute.)

His repetitions are of course, in passing – meant to accompany battles, chases, shark hunts, adventures archeological and alien alike. They are not the main dish for one's senses as with concert music of similarly dense construction. Many listeners though – including me – have found frequent reward in hearing the logic of the music on its own, separate from its film imagery or narrative. In this type of music, there is always a narrative; it can remain implied, or forgotten.

His sense of orchestration – the composer's equivalent of a painter's palette, whether the scale is orchestral or solo piano – is unparalleled, and to hear it properly his scores have to be heard stripped of film sound effects. Though the speed of production always requires one or two orchestrators to finalize his ideas, Williams always writes out the instrumental assignments on a short score beforehand, and the end sound is unmistakably his. Frequently these instrumental combinations are the most striking aspect of a passage, whether bold or subtle.

Williams has written many pieces purely for the concert hall, in a more modern, abstract vein than his film music. I especially enjoy the cello concerto written for Yo-Yo Ma, his second violin concerto TreeSong written for Gil Shaham, and Soundings, a Messiaen-inspired, part sound installation, part orchestral fanfare for the opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

In these works, melodies are complex, virtuosic; harmony is free – sometimes tonal but either static or ever-shifting, unresolved; dynamics and tonal colour are of a range far greater than anything he could create for the more confined space of a film soundtrack. You can't hum along or tap your toes as with The Raiders March. And yet the film composer never stays out of the mix for long, especially when it comes to climaxes.

His greatest score for me (and the one rumoured to be his favourite) is 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film retains its power over thirty years later in part due to Williams' iconic, five-note "signal" theme which serves as both score and source music (music the characters in the film can hear). The score makes a vast stylistic journey, from atonal and noise-based experimentalism through military fanfares, Herrmann-esque road music and mystical echoes of Scriabin through to electronics and the ecstatic, late-Romantic, Golden Era Hollywood flourish of the film's finale. More than a few films have sampled from this musical template since.

The score serves as the voice of CE3K's otherworldly visitors, suggesting – with some understandable simplification – that music is indeed a universal language.

Not everyone today can place the Close Encounters theme, but almost everyone can identify Jaws or Star Wars (either the main fanfare – Luke Skywalker's theme – or Darth Vader's); and most children and teens (and many parents) know Hedwig's theme from Potter. Williams manages to be instantly recognizable and just about anonymous simultaneously, like no other living figure in music history, or any cultural history for that matter.

Williams is known generally for a neo-Romantic sweep which stations him at the Hollywood rear-guard. There is something fascinating about the idea that he is actually part of a tradition of rearguards redefining that boundary. Before there were digital samplers (or even turntablism), he was actually biting old school and reworking it. He has been highly criticized as being derivative, but I think he's just doing what musicians having been doing for centuries, and doing it very well. Sometimes uncannily, often mercilessly. Appropriation.

Listen to the theme from Kings Row (1942) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, one of the last of the late Romantic period composers, an early film music great and another rear-guard figure who was snubbed by critics during his lifetime.

If you've never heard it before, but are of the "Star Wars generation", you might be surprised.

Here are the raw musical materials of the Star Wars saga, 35 years early – the orchestration; the "star" music; the main theme (Luke's) in the first melody; a second melody that gave birth to musical twins (the Rebel fanfare from SW and the Superman theme) while sounding like a sort of morphed precursor to Luke and Leia's theme. The tail end of the first melody also pre-echoes the theme for Lando Calrissian. Mix with two other more well-known precedents – The Planets by Gustav Holst and Le Sacre du Printemps by Igor Stravinsky – and you have one ridiculously famous space opera.

Those who know me well, know I've been nearly obsessed with John Williams since I saw both Star Wars and Close Encounters that summer at age nine, like thousands of other kids who responded as much to the music as the visuals. I already knew the Jaws theme, even though I was still too young to view the movie. I spent the early part of my teens listening to every soundtrack of his that I could find, devoted to his music the way my peers were to their rock and punk idols.

In my college years, mention of his name was a foolish move if you wanted to be taken seriously as a budding composer. And I honestly wasn't interested in him at that time. As I started to write my own music, and to compose music to accompany dance and theatre, I began to appreciate again what the maestro had given us, without attempting cheesy imitation, and without cynicism. And yes, he's on my iPod. The truth is out.

In 1993, he chanced to walk into the CD shop I was working in (while in town sussing out Toronto's Mendelssohn Choir to potentially employ them on the Schindler's List soundtrack, which another choir sang on). I had a good chance to speak with him during what was a slow midweek afternoon, and I realized that he was still one of my idols. He probably had what was for him an increasingly common experience (even before the internet) of meeting a fan who, as he put it, "knows more about my work than I do. Hardly anyone ever talks about The Accidental Tourist!"

He was shopping for the music of a favourite English composer. Most surreal was him walking into the empty store; me seeing John Williams the great composer-conductor; and him asking, "Where is Vaughan Williams?"

medium roast, medium tempo

2008-11-12T11:12:00.002-05:00

I am always in paradigm-shift shock everytime when - over the past few years - I have stepped into a coffee chain and they are playing a ripper rare R&B/funk tune by a band that nobody had ever heard from since their album went into the discount bins 30 years ago.

Now the band's recorded catalogue is in mass reissue and on regular rotation via some ubiquitous satellite network. Maybe it's still not being heard per se; it just got gobbled up by the media licensing machine as filler feed. I hope at least the surviving members of said band are getting paid.

I will wanna shake it and tell the patrons in line, "Hey everybody! Catch a groove, huh?" But I know no one came for the jam, they came for the java. Truth be told, if it weren't a fav genre of mine being played I'd still be in pre-caffeinated, funkless mode, too.

(Truth be told, who ain't gettin' any younger?)

Another Word for Chord

2008-11-02T12:08:00.005-05:00

This comes courtesy of the well-tuned hair cells at Faery Log. As Faery writes, a mathematician has "deconstructed the opening chord of The Beatles' song 'A Hard Day's Night.'"

It's terribly interesting. I know that mathematicians need love. I was in the math club. I know they need to put food on the table like everyone else and are only a small part of a society where everyone wants to be a rock star, because that perhaps might put food on your children's and grandchildren's tables as well, Darwinistically speaking.

I know, almost without needing to let you know, that people are still wildly obsessed with The Beatles after five decades, and not just because of their fantastic, nearly universally loved and still relevant output. Beyond that, it is arguable that they are the only pop group to have won general acceptance into the canon of so-called Western Art Music (WAM, poetically enough), at least by implication. Granted, that has become a somewhat devalued honour since the 1960s.

My point: sonic mystery? This is merely a mathematical search for what has been lost in Western musical culture - our ability to use our ears to receive and recreate music. It's as though the chord in question were a mummified tusk sample from a friggin' woolly mammoth. I'm writing about music and sound here, but we are losing our ability to trust any of our senses with increasing speed; losing our ability to instinctively perceive the nature of things and their relationship to another. G major. C major. F major. Three-chord rock unbound, unprogrammed.

Actually, "Hard Day's Night" has six basic chords (including D major, B minor and E minor). The intro is sort of an amalgam of two or three of them, with some notes left out. Notably, B and E, the root notes of the first two chords in the bridge ("When I'm home") are not present in the chord under discussion. Chalk it up to the Beatles' innate collective sense of form and contrast. It was likely the "fifth" Beatle, George Martin, whose piano filled out the sound of rock's most famous intro.

Here's a link to an extended discussion around the chord. Simply put, it has five pitches, bottom to top: D, F, A, C, G. The whole song uses nine pitches in all. Some mystery.

There was a nary a Beatles' record to be found in my house growing up, yet through radio exposure I knew the famed chord by ear and memory early on. It's a suspended minor dominant chord in the key of G. I realize that it's only adding to the elephant-in-the-dark mystique to say so in music theory jargon; nevertheless, the chord and its function are pretty simple. After the fact of the recording, the only technology required to understand this is human. The octave doublings and instrumentation are key to the chord's sound colour but not its identity. Still, my youthful ear heard the piano behind the guitars.

I don't know any rock players who wouldn't know this chord, and who wouldn't have learned it by ear. You can't play the song without getting this chord right, as the notes of the chord are part of the rest of the song - of the song's musical DNA - especially at the end of the song.

But hey, I'm not a math professor at Dalhousie with a good reputation and what I'm sure is a fine collection of guitars. I confess, my impatience with using extramusical systems to analyze music (as opposed to music perception) in a scientific way is part of why I dropped out of academia. I cringe somewhat that the realization there was a piano present on the recording came to the professor mid-calculation, and how said piano "accounted for the problematic frequencies." Don't get me started on guitar colonialism.

My other point (and tangent): if you have small children, and you want them to learn music - teach them to memorize phone numbers without relying on call display. Teach them to listen to sound without having to have a video image in front of them. Teach them that air conditioners and refrigerators and echoing stairwells have chords, too. That speech has melody (hopefully you speak a language besides English, to better demonstrate this).

Don't buy them one of those horrible and horribly expensive "games" with plastic not-guitars and not-drums whose brand names I won't mention.

Send the kids to music lessons and at the same time, encourage them to play along with the recordings of their favourite bands (and yours) and learn music by ear. Encourage them to trust their ears. They will be able to play music with anyone, anytime.

There are many ways to learn to make music, especially by reading notation, grasping theory and/or imitating older musicians (DJs included). And sure, by understanding a bit about math. The most important way to learn is by letting the languages of music - and also its inexpressible aspects - come to one's ears, mind, hands, feet, hips and heart directly.

Thanks for the theme, Faery!

I Love Every Little Thing About You

2008-10-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

Though they say you're not my friend
You've been here through thick and thin
And for that little girl I love ya
And all I want to do is talk about ya.

I'm here to say
I love you more each day
And I just want to tell the world
That I love you so.

Though they put me down because
I love you as much as I do
They don't know what you've done for me
You've made such a happy man out of me.

And I'm here to say
Love you everyday, yea,
And I just want to tell the world
That I love you so.

Baby, I love, I love, I love, I love every little thing about you baby
Oh yea, I love, I love, I love, I love every little thing about you baby, yea

Though they say that I am wrong
'Cause my love is strong
There's only one that I place above you.
It's God that I place above you.

Girl I just want to say
Love you more each day, yea,
I just want to tell the world that
I love you so, yea

Some folks say that it's strange
But my whole life you have changed
You've saved all the pain the world's put on me
All I want to do is talk about you.

And I'm here to say
Love you every day,
Telling everybody that,
I love you so.

I love, I love, I love, I love every little thing about you baby
Oh yea, I love, I love, I love, I love every little thing about you baby.

S. Wonder

Give the Drummer Some

2008-10-01T22:01:00.002-04:00

12-year-old Isaiah Gibbons was introduced to a great lot of us on the dancefloor at a DJ night last Saturday - none other than the legendary Foot Prints, season seven - once more in the Rivoli back room; the original home for seasons one through four, first half. It was hitting old home week, walking through that swinging door - the crowd, which even if younger had the same artsy, freestylin' ethic; the bar - I caught a crush blush when a saw the same cutie pie who still remembered my drink; and the room! The exposed brick, the just-right sized dancefloor, the stage. Of course, the lovely Maya dispensing wisdom at the door.

On this night, up there beside the DJ table were a full-size drum kit, keyboards, congas, etc. The FP crew have slotted live shows between DJs several times to great success over the years, but there was just something about this performance, in the context of the trip back in time to the classic Footie years. Best. One. Ever.

Isaiah is a prodigy. I'm not using the word as a superlative. Alongside the Pangea Collective he played for probably half an hour, not sure - the only time that became important was the time this lad was keeping on stage. Impeccable time. He kept it with apparent ease and great stamina.

I lost track of the styles he tore through and mashed up: Afro-Latin hand percussion, full-bore swing jazz; neo-soul G-funk rims; house, broken-beat and techno (what what what!); flawless fusion, and of course - the funk. Not just funk funk - authentic DC go-go.

Isaiah represents a new generation of beat keepers - post DJ, post turntables and mixer, post drum machine, post mp3, post desktop audio, post web. He took all that tech gave and gave it back humanized. In addition to the hint of mash up at times, I witnessed metronomic time, smooth tempo accelerations and decelerations, cutting back and forth between styles; and felt solid, stomping grooves.

I suppose for his new generation it's not all such a big deal, but to my ears and feet, damn! kid was banging. Oh, a little cautious in spots - but understandable for a pre-teen playing his first gig at midnight in a room full of buzzed adults. Make no mistake, he sounded much more experienced a player than of his years.

Gotta say Pangea were also very soulful and funky - I especially liked Jeremyah Gibbons' Rhodes-and-bass keys and occasional jazz vocal. The group were wise to give Isaiah a good space to wow the absolutely floored crowd with an extended solo. What a thrill the whole thing was.

DJs Jason Palma and General Eclectic each kept the crowd turning it loose the remainder of the night; they're still at their peak with this party. Before the action got packed, I loved hearing the Jones Girls' boogie classic "Nights Over Egypt" nice and loud and teasing folks to step away from the walls. Missing from the proceedings was DJ Stuart Li, who just happened to be double-booked - with a gig in Tokyo.

Women of the Kalimba/Mbira

2008-09-22T19:26:00.005-04:00

(It bears mention that this kalimba is a western variation on its African cousins, and somewhat considered a toy - too clean and pure sounding; a western aesthetic. It would have been interesting to have an interaction or conversation set up between the two players interviewed below... apples to oranges.)

Guitars are so last millennium
Meet The Kalimba; Indie rockers embrace the thumb piano

Mike Doherty, National Post
Published: Thursday, September 18, 2008

The kalimba may be the world's first "digital" musical instrument, but if Laura Barrett has her way, it will also be "the instrument of the new millennium." The Toronto singer and songwriter first discovered the small, wooden box on eBay, where she bid for a used one on a whim while shopping for electronic music controllers. Despite the fact that the only digits involved are the thumbs that one uses to pluck a set of metal tines, she opted to try it out. The sound was so beautiful, she couldn't put it down.

Also known as the mbira or the likembe, depending on which African country a particular make hails from, the kalimba is operated much like a video-game controller. It even has a somewhat plinky sound, although its woody, warm resonance makes it much easier on the ear than any old Nintendo.

Although it has been integral to sub-Saharan cultural ceremonies since before Portuguese explorers first laid eyes on it in the 1400s, the kalimba has never taken hold in the West as more than an exotic curio. Barrett is determined that as many people as possible should learn about the instrument, and her unique way of encouraging this is to play what she calls "progfolk, dystopic-stage-musical, acoustic-glitch" songs with titles such as Robot Ponies and Escape to the Sun Dome. Her wryly skewed perspective has helped her become a darling of the Canadian indie-rock community, ever since she first played the kalimba publicly in 2005. The alternative media has dubbed her the "kalimba queen," and while the appellation makes her uncomfortable, she says, "it's an honour, so it's my responsibility to express that I'm not the only one playing this instrument."

Chiwoniso, for instance, could just as easily lay claim to the thumb harp's throne, but the title of her new CD, Rebel Woman, better suits her. Encouraged by her ethnomusicologist father, she took up the Zimbabwean mbira in her home town of Olympia, Wash., when she was four years old. Moving to Zimbabwe with her family a decade later, in 1990, she found herself among many mbira players, but nonetheless in a distinct minority: "Barely any of the young people" were playing the instrument, she recalls, and even fewer of them were women.

"Traditionally in Shona culture," she says, "women were deeply respected, but a lot changed when colonial forces came through the country: There was a huge emphasis placed on the separation of gender. Around the '60s, women started coming up into the forefront, but because the mbira was still regarded as a taboo instrument by the missionaries, it wasn't being played a lot in public."

In recent years, more and more young women have taken up the instrument, largely thanks to Chiwoniso's encouragement. Her upbeat blend of traditional Shona folk and Western pop has garnered her a wide audience, despite the censorship she faces on the radio for her outspoken lyrics, and the Zimbabwean government's intimidation tactics. In Harare, riot police even walked into one of her gigs, "looking for people of subversive behaviour," and friends of her have been arrested in the same venue.

Recently, she returned to live in the United States, as "from an economic point of view, it's really, really difficult" to be a musician in Zimbabwe. Nonetheless, she remains devoted to speaking out about injustice. "There's a misconception that African women are oppressed constantly by their men and are suffering," she says. "It's not true: African women are very powerful. This rebellion is more about being able to confront issues that are uncomfortable in society."

In Canada, Barrett says, "playing a quiet instrument like the kalimba is only falling in line with some stereotypes about women in music. I don't really see myself playing the instrument in that specific gendered way, but it's pure frustration to be on a bill stacked to the gills with dudes. All you can do is just work and empower women, and encourage the expression of everyone's soul."

Her debut album, Victory Garden, seems designed to shatter stereotypes in every way: It's inspired by Bollywood singing, Steve Reich's minimalism, Claude Debussy's impressionist counterpoint and kalimba patterns that find her tapping "more into the trance mode of the instrument."

Indeed, historically the trance-like states that the thumb harp can encourage have formed bridges between the past and the present. As Chiwoniso explains, in Zimbabwe the mbira is at the heart of the bira ceremony, in which musicians are said to open a connection to dead people so that their living relatives can communicate with them.

In her performances in cafes and concert halls from Harare to California, Chiwoniso aims to make the mbira's music "more funky," and to "dismantle the myth that it's a taboo instrument because it's so deeply spiritual. Mostly I try to get people up and dancing!"

-Chiwoniso plays the Lula Lounge in Toronto tonight (Sep. 18). Laura Barrett plays a CD release and serves brunch at noon at the Tranzac in Toronto on Saturday (Sep. 20).

Variations, Violas

2008-09-21T15:57:00.009-04:00

There are just two CDs which have soothed the musical savage this past spring and summer - and trust me he has needed soothing in these times. You may be a newcomer to post-classical, contemporary concert music; you may wonder what is comforting about textures which seem unfamiliar to your ears. Or perhaps you're attracted to how it fires the mind; engages all the senses with fresh sensations; throws out old cultural rhetoric and redecorates the rumpus room of your soul. Maybe you just find it confusing but want to jump in somewhere. Jump here.

Released in April and May 2008 respectively, Steve Reich Daniel Variations (Nonesuch) and Morton Feldman The Viola in My Life (ECM) really have only one thing in common: they both present definitive works by NYC-born, Jewish composers who came into prominence in the late 20th century and who have been massively influential throughout the arts as well as in various spheres of the music world. Beyond that, these two releases offer vastly different sonic experiences.

Daniel Variations was composed in 2006 as a tribute to slain journalist Daniel Pearl, written by the man (Steve Reich, b. 1936) who is the father of what most people would hear as minimalism, a style he has been both bringing forward and evolving out of since the 1970s. It is written for mixed voices, string quartet and two clarinets, along with the Reichian battery of percussion and pianos.

It is not so much a kind of post-minimalist requiem or musical saying of Kaddish as it is an exultant evocation of Pearl's outgoing personality and passion for playing the fiddle - as in the second and fourth movements; alternating with what sounds like Reich's delayed response to the horror of 9/11 (it ain't going away folks) - in the first and third movements.

This contrast of moods - a searing, episodic storm of sustained dark harmonies and textual images (from the Book of Daniel, appropriately enough) versus the bird-on-wing tempos and bright, almost poppy vocal and string melodies and canons (echoing parts) over settings of Pearl's own quotes - is compelling. The work has a transcendent, elegaic conclusion that suggests Reich the religious mystic, his signature rhythmic pulse along for the whole ride. It is more operatic by far than his two video/sampler "operas" The Cave and Three Tales.

Reich is never one to shy away from the self-referential especially when it results from coincidence. Pearl's opening words on the videotape made by his captors before his beheading were, "My name is Daniel Pearl." Reich sets these words in the second movement, resulting in a hard to miss reference to his vintage tape concept piece My Name Is (insert various audience members or musicians saying their names and loop). This says something about the composer's shift of focus from his early days to now; a shift from the experimental, detached and ironic to the traditional, overtly emotional and earnest; a shift that never loses the edge.

Like earlier vocal works Proverb and You Are (Variations), Reich sets a single phrase of text for each entire movement (again recalling his tape loop pieces of the 1960s). It is effective when the text undergoes a fair amount of variation in how it is sung; less so when, as in Daniel's third movement, the phrase repeats through harmonic shifts but with only minor variation in the voices, minor even for this composer (though that technique has worked well instrumentally, for example in Variations for Winds, Strings & Keyboards).

This movement suggests an anger chant or a warning: "Let the dream fall back on the dreaded." Still, Reich hasn't missed an opportunity to also suggest tempering rage, inserting the syncopated ostinatos he uses for the fast movements here in double-time over the other parts as a subtle backdrop to what is functioning as a slow movement. It would perhaps have been a good spot for a more reflective atmosphere, and that might have been too obvious.

That criticism aside, Daniel Variations is one of Reich's strongest pieces, perhaps only slightly less so than You Are (Variations). The companion piece on the disc is also a strong new one, Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings (2005). Closer to his Counterpoint series in terms of its modularity, uniformity of texture and rhythmic gear shifts, it was composed to accompany movement by dancer/choreographer Akram Khan.

In the opening fast movement of this Variations (the composer now has four titles that contain the word), the three string quartets in the ensemble are clearly separate. For example, one quartet plays a canon of disjointed accents (a sort of melody) along with the vibraphones, another plays pulses, and the third sustained chords. In the slow middle movement, the strings tend to combine into dense, fluid and luminous layers. The final movement is particularly agile and brightly coloured, recalling Reich in the 80s. Style-wise, neither work is all that new, but they but discover new possibilities in emotional resonance and tonal colour.

The sound on the disc is superb, and especially lustrous and reverberant on Variations for Vibes, etc. Daniel Variations features amplification in all the voices and instruments and must have been a tough mix to record. There is just a bit of boxiness in the voices and strings, but overall it still sounds like an "acoustic" recording as it should. Having heard the work live before this recording was released, I can well appreciate the achievement of Grant Gershon and the LA Master Chorale. I am more impressed with the London Sinfonietta under Alan Pierson on Vibes, performance wise. They might have had the edge in the sense of it being somewhat of a throwback piece, thus stylistically more familiar.

Morton Feldman (1926-1987) wrote the series of four works under the title The Viola in My Life in 1970-71 for violist Karen Phillips, with whom he was at the time in a relationship. The series comprises two pieces for viola and chamber ensemble, one for viola and piano, and one for viola and orchestra, and their chronological order also allows for a brief (by Feldman's later time requirements) but powerful listening arc.

The composer recorded the first three with Phillips in the 70s, but current technology and ECM's usual high standards with new music serve Viola much better. Violist Marek Konstantynowicz does very well in articulating a solo voice that begins only as single notes, progressing to longer but still fragmentary melodies. Just a hint of vibrato and expert dynamics keep us aware, not overly so, of his instrument's place of prominence but also of the context of the Feldman's generally flat, decaying sound world.

Feldman's viola is a lonely character, a sympathetic protagonist. When one listens to the Viola series followed by the next work he wrote involving Phillips - the famous Rothko Chapel (with chorus), the idea of a narrative, surely never intended, seems inevitable.

Percussion is the soloist's main partner in Viola I & II , always hushed and intense. Quiet rolls in the timpani, shuffling sandpaper, rattling castanets, percolating wood blocks, delicately chiming metal tones invite a state of almost primal alertness. Here is the signature Feldman claustrophobic stasis, and something sensual, dangerous as well.

Viola IV, essentially a short, one-movement viola concerto, is a revelation. In it, we hear the mannerist of those years at his peak, with exaggerated dynamics, emotive expression, a throwaway romantic climax and folk-like melodies and self-quotation (the cuckoo clock from his own Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety) in full evidence. We hear the rich colours and atypical foregrounding of soloist Feldman used in all his works during what was essentially his "concerto" period. I love the occasional open bass string notes that are allowed to ring - placed perfectly in the score, not to mention performed and recorded just so.

This is Feldman at a moment of pastiche in his creative life: at his most tonal, most melodic, most suggestive of drama. It also marked his return to fully conventionally notated scores, and the beginning of the end for conventional durations. The Viola in my Life I-IV is over in 40 minutes. Later Feldman would remark that he was just getting warmed up after writing the first 45 minutes of a piece, and would often write single movement works of up to several hours in length.

It seems to me that Daniel Variations and The Viola in my Life are in mood more seasonable to fall and winter respectively, but I've gotten a good head start on setting the mood.

Harmonious.p

2008-09-17T12:32:00.008-04:00

I have been getting back behind the keys of late, forging a new sound with a singing-songwriting duo and two other performers. It's been a fun experience, working on the fly in rehearsal to write chord changes for songs that had only basslines or nothing more than lyrics and a vocal melody; giving my arranger-composer hat a slightly different tilt. It's fascinating to me how melody can suggest a shift of harmony, or often several possible shifts. The point where everything is in flux and coming together is so exciting.

Our vibe - to get categorical for a moment - is sort of soulful downtempo folk, with jazz, Latin and Brazilian influences and a dash of acoustic percussion. India and Serbia are also represented in the cultural mix of players.

Our sounds: two women's voices, bass, Rhodes piano-style keys, violin, zabumba and pandeiro (the last two are Brazilian percussion instruments - our heartbeat).

We are debuting the new line-up of the group, currently named Harmonious.p - this Saturday night with a half-hour set of beautifully sung tunes.

Details:
Harmonious.p
Saturday, September 20
Concord Café
937 Bloor Street West (halfway between Dovercourt and Ossington)
doors 9 pm, our set time 9:30

Also playing on this night are the Dull-Eyed Llamas, Mark Weinstock and Dr. dFunkt.

Hope to see your face in the place!

The Madawaska String Quartet

2008-06-25T12:56:00.009-04:00

I will be appearing at the event listed above (click posters to enlarge) to introduce my quartet Madra, and give a short testimonial about the composer's workshop I participated in that helped bring this piece to life. The Madawaska plan to record a CD program that includes Madra, and as well continue their education and outreach activities in the community. Arts funding being what it is, the quartet depends in part upon the capital raised at events like this. If you know anyone who would be interested in attending or contributing towards living chamber music in Canada, please let me know or contact Rebecca van der Post as above.

There may also be an auction of a rare first edition of the Madra score, so reach if you can.

Riches rare for Canadian musicians

2008-06-10T10:16:00.004-04:00

Guy Dixon
Globe and Mail

"Toronto — The average Canadian musician earns only $16,500 a year from music after taxes, according to a study of the music industry by Rotman School of Management professor Douglas Hyatt and polling company Pollara. The survey of 684 Canadian musicians, songwriters and vocalists polled last December and January found that two-thirds also have a job outside music that earn them less than $21,000 in extra income, on average. And 43 per cent of musicians polled have become more reliant on income other than music in the past three years, as certain sectors of the music industry, especially CD retail sales, have suffered.

The study released yesterday comes out as proposed copyright legislation remains in limbo in Ottawa. Major groups representing the copyright holders, such as the Canadian Independent Record Production Association, which has been heavily involved in lobbying Ottawa, lent their names to the report."

--

I have three issues with the article above. First of all, when I was more active in professional music making than I am now, I rarely if ever reported my income; most of it was work for cash. On the odd occasion I got a T4 for a gig and I would report that on my tax return. I wonder if much of the data is skewed by this kind of situation, which is probably a reality for every musician not working entirely in the mainstream.

Second, what do most musicians working on the fringes earn from copyright? Not a whole lot -- but many certainly pay into it. There isn't any significant connection between the two paragraphs of the article, still in the minds of the general public, that's the way a musician gets rich. They write a hit song or jingle and earn lots of royalties. To my mind, the correlation of CD retail sales and the average musician's income is a vague one. Anyway, it's fairly safe to generalize that live performance is a bigger source of revenue than royalties, whether you're Paul McCartney or Nelly Furtado.

Third, a lot more detail is required about how the data was gathered -- which specific groups were surveyed (e.g. virtuosi, musicians of different genres and cultural styles, performer/teachers, teachers only, buskers, instrument builders, sound designers, experimental composers, DJs?, etc.); and what kinds of gigs and jobs they reported. "Musicians, songwriters and vocalists" suggests a pretty narrow sampling of the general music making community.

Back to my bill-paying job...

James Tenney Retrospective in Toronto

2007-11-19T15:58:00.001-05:00

The Music Gallery is the place to be this weekend. Arraymusic, NUMUS and Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan have gotten together to present a James Tenney Retrospective. Here are the links for each day:

Friday, November 23 - Arraymusic: Celebrating James Tenney
Saturday, November 24 - NUMUS - In Memoriam: James Tenney
Sunday, November 25 - Memorial Open House w/Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan

Each concert will offer something unique in the Tenney experience, especially the last day which will pay tribute to the informal, collegial environment of Tenney's living room salons. This promises to be a comprehensive retrospective and a fantastic event, though I would have loved to see the Harmonium series of compositions represented, not to mention some of his later works for large ensemble/orchestra that like the Harmonia employ an available pitch/time bracket structure... major funding challenges notwithstanding.

in tune, out of time

2007-10-12T16:27:00.000-04:00

Music as an escape from entropy? Somehow an old theme dressed up.

Myself I'm fascinated by entropy's approach, the breakdown -- when the kick, snare, hihat, handclap, etc. all land on the beat a microsecond apart. The fadeout -- the dying sustain of a piano chord. The flawed nuances in a rhythm, the fuzzy tuning of a choir of instruments (be it guitars, strings or winds) and the blur of their collective attacks. That's why I'll always prefer human players to even the best programmed sounds and beats. (Does anyone who programs worry about trying to make it sound human anymore?)

When writing music, I can't avoid somehow obliquely invoking the human condition -- no fanfares but elegies, things falling apart. Then again, I'm increasingly into traditional tonalities, or at least a tidy, ordered set of twentieth-century chord structures derived from pop, jazz and minimalism. There is an acoustic, mathematical reality in harmony and even that is subject to the imperfection of our hearing mechanism; not to mention culturally-bound, conditioned responses to certain sound patterns and/or cognition of verbal and textual symbols.

Meanwhile, entropy has taken firm hold over the harmonies of mass-produced pop. Noise (often pleasingly diverting noise) rules the texture, with vocal melodies locked in a lonely pairing with speaker-rattling bassline entities. That is, if you listen to commercial pop radio. It's just an indicator.

The metaphor of loss; the end of "progress" in music; the nostalgic fetishization of small, repeated samples of recycled riffs and misremembered poetry; running from the fascism of backbeat normalcy as sound becomes disassociated from its physical, muscular origins -- these are more often what I associate with our society's consumption of music than say with some celebration of existence and human togetherness. More epitaph than balm.

Really, one can project whatever narrative or theory one wants onto what music is or what it does for us. Its universality in anything but as a common phenomenon among world cultures breaks down too. More and more throughout streetcars and libraries of headphone clad strangers, the music is less in the air, less about a collective, body-based experience and more in our individual imaginations. Where will that take it next?

Born in the 80s

2007-07-31T16:11:00.000-04:00

A young co-worker, recently married: I danced with my father at my wedding to a John Denver song he used to sing to me when I was a child. "Sunshine on my shoulders..."
Me: "...looks so lovely."
Co-worker, surprised: How do you know John Denver?
Me: In the small town where I grew up long before you, radio was 50% rock/pop, 50% country. More or less.
Other young co-worker: What, no hip hop?
Me: Word was not yet born.
[Groans all around.]

Beats, Breaks & Culture

2007-07-08T23:14:00.000-04:00

Too many festivals this weekend: Afrofest; Beats, Breaks & Culture; the Outdoor art in Nathan Phillips Square; the Fringe theatre (the oldest of all of them)! And the Indy of course, how can you avoid that one since you hear it all weekend no matter where you live downtown? Nice planning City of Toronto. Nice planning in general on letting all of this happen at the same time...

Afrofest - always look forward to meeting up with friends, enjoying some fresh, culturally pertinent foods on a grassy spot and hearing the great music of so many different African traditions. Somewhat underwhelmed this year as we happened upon a stretch on Saturday when the schedule was pretty sparse and/or badly plotted. Also weren't allowed to enter the nearly empty beer garden not because we had a child with us, but because we had a stroller. A stroller. This didn't seem to be a problem at Drumfest a few weeks prior. I noted the organizers spent $20,000 on these security aces.

It's also kind of distressing that, at an event where so many black Canadians are gathered downtown (once we were "allowed" to do this when the Caribana parade was still on University Ave.), the cops just wait along the sidelines for folks to deal drugs or roll up in a blingy ride and park on the lawn like it's their cottage. And especially distressing that there are too many folks coming along fulfil the stereotypes.

Sunday afternoon at Harbourfront for Beats, Breaks & Culture was just right, despite the rain. We saw an old friend of my girlfriend's from Recife, Brazil - DJ Dolores - perform with his band and electronics. Lots of interesting and varied grooves and totally danceable.

Also caught the Pop, Lock & Load breakdance competition. Many of my generation still attach a stigma to this form because of its lamentable mainstream trendiness in the early 80s. But unlike most of the suburban bandwagon-jumpers back then, many of the practitioners today are very serious about it, and very, very good.

No real decent photos here, but we were busy balancing little Queen Peace and food; trying to stay out of the throng and away from the superloud speakers. Already pushed it too far at Pride. Queen Peace is a complete club crawler now.

The Return of Mbu'ube

2007-06-12T16:58:00.000-04:00

This Friday marks a rare visit to a club and onto the decks for this new baby daddy.

I will be DJing at Electric Love. Oooh, sounds slinky doesn't it?

Here’s the details --

Date: Friday, June 15th
Time: 10 pm – 3 am
Venue: White Orchid
Location: 812 Dundas Street West (two blocks west of Bathurst at Palmerston), Toronto
Cost: $5, FREE before 11 pm

It’s going to be a nice, nice party with 5 DJs including:

Shit La Merde
Egyptrixx
Lofi Hifi
Monkestra
Mbu'ube (aka yours truly)

...many styles of music including:

electro, post-punk, soul, krautrock, & Afrobeat

... and beautiful, dancing people.

I will likely be on early in the night. Hope to see you there!

Arvo Pärt

2007-04-13T17:14:00.001-04:00

We spent Good Friday evening on our first date without baby since her arrival. Dinner in a semi-decent chain resto, a concert in a church and back to grandma's to pick up baby by 9:30. Hello approaching midlife... Don't get me wrong, being a parent is awesome so far.

This was no ordinary concert. It was the Mendelsohn Choir performing Arvo Pärt's Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem, or the Passion of the Christ according to St. John, known simply as Passio. I would imagine it's probably been performed only a handful of times in these parts since its writing a quarter century ago, so this was a special occasion. It was the first time I've be able to hear it live, after about twenty years of listening to my beloved CD copy of the original recording.

At seventy minutes, all in a slow-moving A minor with no arias, it's not your average Easter oratorio. Powerful interjections from the choir at key points provide drama as a complement the stark solo writing for bass (Jesus) and tenor (Pontius Pilate), and the ethereal, smaller evangelist chorus. The music itself is classic early Arvo, his tintinnabuli style. Basically, this involves simple major/minor chord arpeggios, layered with non-chord tones adding a quasi-dissonant spice. The overall vibe here suggests the influence of Russian Orthodox musical traditions.

The Mendelsohn's performance was admirable, though the passages felt disconnected from each other. The work sounds best in a very resonant acoustic space where the sound reverberates for several seconds, which was not the case here -- then there was the furnace which kept kicking on below us, and the subway line below that. Still, a good time if you like this type of music, and clearly I do.

If you're into religious choral music (and if you're religious or not); if you're into minimalism (a very general label that doesn't always fit Pärt); or anything medieval or gothic then this is music for you. I believe there are several recordings of the work but the first recording by the Hilliard Ensemble on ECM will always be the best.

Perhaps my fav Pärt work is Kanon Pokajanen, a 80-minute acapella choral setting of the canon of repentance, a text integral to the Orthodox Church. Sung in Church Slavonic, this more than any of his works evokes an image of an Orthodox monastery. I was fortunate to hear the group who made the first recording, the Estonian Chamber Choir, perform it in its entirety several years ago, and it was surprising what full sound came from only a dozen or so singers. This CD plays best on a cold, late autumn or winter's night, preferably with warm company to stave off the bleakness... or alone if you want to pine over paradise kind of thing. I recommend just enjoying the music.

For a more bite-sized intro to Pärt's choral work, the disc Da Pacem, which won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance this year, is an excellent choice. It surveys his work across several decades and all the pieces are short.

The musical director here (and on the original recording of Passio) is Paul Hillier, biographer and early champion and biographer of Pärt, and a great performance figure in both early and modern music -- he's worth a blog post to himself at a later date. Hillier makes the observation that Pärt is one of the most popular composers in the secular world, has written mostly religious music that usually gets played for a paying, applauding, secular audience. (The audience for the concert I attended were a diverse group, and certainly not all Christian or religious, but hard to know especially on a religious holiday.)

Steve Reich considers Arvo Pärt the greatest living composer today, and Reich's own more recent music has shown some of Pärt's influence. He sums up this other deeply religious composer's place in the world nicely: "He's completely out of step with the zeitgeist and yet he's enormously popular, which is so inspiring. His music fulfills a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion."

If you're more an instrumental, secular kind of person, then Arvo's still got wonderful music to offer. Alina is a short CD of intimate, lullaby-like works for piano solo or with either violin or cello.

The disc at left came out on Deutsche Grammophon's 20/21 series, and is an excellent program featuring the early, moody classics Fratres and Tabula Rasa. I can remember the first time I heard Fratres. The first melancholy chords caught my ear, then I was blown away by the clever turn of harmony that suggests a sweet cadence in another key and returns suddenly to the bittersweet, all while the melody line flows without changing scales. It's perhaps just such a nuanced hook that has made this the most popular work of Pärt's, one which he has arranged for numerous groups of instruments over the years.

Both Fratres and Tabula Rasa are also on the next disc, along with the wrenching Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, with its giant, grieving wave of A-minor (again!) for strings and solo bell.

This is the one that started it all as far as exposure to a wider, global audience for Pärt. It includes a rare classical appearance by Keith Jarrett on piano for Fratres. I sometimes prefer the DG disc though, for a more balanced sound, and inclusion of Pärt's Symphony No. 3, which has an interesting, pre-tintinnabuli yet medieval sound.

There are several other very good Pärt CDs in my collection, and dozens if not hundreds of discs out there dedicated entirely to his music. The few that I've mentioned are the ones I find myself listening to most often.

The Motherlode

2007-03-30T15:05:00.000-04:00

Picked this up the other day. One thing about Ultimate Breaks & Beats, if you were stuck for something to drop (not that good DJs ever likely are but I have been in my limited experience), you can reach for one of the UBB volumes and an anthem of dancefloor-filling, hands-raising calibre is guaranteed to be at hand. Some deejays spin on a steady diet of Breaks & Beats -- nothing to sneeze at, if you have some nimble technique with this sometimes too-well-known repertoire.

So what this little set is, is the entire official series (minus two "unofficial" volumes) in sound file form. All 25 volumes, 174 tracks totalling 12 hours of ultra-classic grooves. My word yes.

Egads, THE essential music library in one go, for CDN $80. $80 more than freeloading all these tunes if you could find 'em all, but you're assured of clean sound, proper labelling and correct song versions... and you're done in one easy purchase and drag 'n' drop.

The set comprises three discs. The first two are CDRs featuring all the songs in .mp3 format at 192 kbps. This is a standard file size and sound quality, suitable for iPods (unless you use good headphones instead of the cheapie earbuds, then you'll notice otherwise). I suppose you could use 'em for iPod deejaying but they probably won't sound great.

The third disc is a DVD containing all the songs in .aiff format at 1411 kbps. Much better sound, equivalent or better to the "lossless" category. It may be harder to hear the improvement with some of the jams from the 1960s that are sourced from crunchy vinyl or rotted tape, but the bass will be punchier and the high end crispier with most of these files.

The DVD also includes cover images for all 25 LPs at 300 dpi. For my money, they could have just put out the DVD. However, portable CD/mp3 players and some older computers wouldn't be able to read it, plus the term "mp3" markets better than "aiff". Even if the latter sounds better -- though it also hogs more memory, and not everyone wants to load nearly 7 GB of files just for this many songs.

Oh, one thing is that of course UBB never listed artist names nor do they here, just track title and composer, I suppose to avoid lawsuits. However, the artists are easy to find online, including via the Wiki link above.

Now you're thinking, didn't this guy just say that he was totally unimpressed by the sound of the iPod? Yes I did, and I'm left cold by the sound of mp3s in general. But again, aiff sounds a lot better. For that matter, high bitrate mp3s sound fine on my iMac, which to my ears has a better sound card than the iPod. And even average bitrate (128, 192) mp3s sound better burned to audio CD and played on a good machine.

hardware wars

2007-03-27T17:13:00.000-04:00

So I bought a brand new portable CD player (yes a CD player), in my old brand and model. The Panasonic SL-CT810 is as flat as the video iPod and only slighter larger in diameter than a CD itself -- and sounds fantastic. It was a lot cheaper picking it up now in some little independent electronics shop (with a U.S., and thus, voided warranty) than it was three years ago at a well-known dealer. It also plays wma/mp3 discs but I only made a few of those in the days before iPod, awfully unwieldy.

It's officially for the days I don't have time to charge the iPod or the chance to import a new CD. Really though, it just sounds way better than the iPod, with a great EQ and warm (for CD) sound. Old player's not dead, just weary and cranky. Got stepped on one too many times while tucked in my coat that fell into the coat pile at the party/club.

Flip-Side

2007-03-08T10:49:00.000-05:00

Note: This Sunday at 2 am marks the new, earlier transition to Daylight Saving Time. Remember to set your clocks ahead one hour before you go out on Saturday night, so you don't sleep in on the best deals at Flip-Side!

iPoo'd

2007-03-07T16:22:00.000-05:00

The spirit of free-market society favours form over function, style over content. A vast generalization -- yet witness fast food, disposable everything, branding, the suburbs. Personal automobiles vs. mass transit. Bite-sized pop culture over more contemplated works and life-long bodies of work. Nowhere is there a better example of can-for-soup than the iPod, another subspecies in the de-evolution of music playback media, probably the most hyped of any.

After five years and five generations of 'em, I finally bought my first one -- the 80 gig video version. I was a hardcore critic, now a critic who's sold out. But high-end, portable CD players have become pretty scarce on the market so I don't think I could have held out much longer, if mine were to have gone kaput... which it pretty much has.

You know the white earphones went in a drawer right away. As someone who has been walking down the street usually with something in/over my ears for 25 years, I never saw any cache in those logo-like white cords. (Though my mom might have been an unlikely pioneer when years ago she hounded her local home entertainment dealer for a little white power cable for her little white TV.) A generation has gone from puberty to pub in this look, it's hard to remember it was briefly the coolest visual meme on the street (ca. '02). Moreover, they sound absolutely terrible, unless the music one listens to doesn't require very high highs nor any lows to speak of.

The sound of the player itself? Decent, yeah about as decent as my Sony Walkman from 1989 (which was also white). First of all, we're talking mp3s (or Apple Lossless in my case), the sonic equivalent of thumbnail-sized photographs in terms of audio quality. Red Book CD audio by comparison, is a quantified reduction and thus an inferior counterpart to analogue sound (a brand new vinyl LP to me sounds better than CD, before it gets all scratched and dirty). But CD is still far superior to digital music files. Not to say that can't be improved upon, but in five years, Apple appears mostly to have put their efforts elsewhere... into releasing a phone, and by keeping a edge on competitors by being the most fashion-damaged brand.

Bottom line on EQ: anemic bass, hollow mids, well-lit mid highs, soggy top end. And this is with a pair of Sennheiser PX-200s, which sound fantastic on a walk with a good CD player. The Sennheisers at least improve on earphones here. Classical, folk and treble-heavy pop, rock and electronic sounds fine; any music with bottom-heavy beats goes crackle if you try to turn up the bass... Apparently, iPods aren't properly designed for black music, despite the predominance of silhouettes of black people in the ads.

Is the mediocre sound an acceptable trade-off for being able to have as much of my music collection at hand wherever I go? Truthfully, I'm not really sure yet. I skip through tracks a lot, only partly due to the overabundance of choice. The music just doesn't have the same impact. There are probably brands of players with better audio quality, I don't even need to research this to know -- so why did I go with iPod? Because my iTunes has been set up for years now with my favs and downloads and was ready to go. It's a fine music manager, but again this is just the convenience of style.

Now the photo/video feature: I must admit, somewhat guiltily after the above rant, that it's a lot of fun -- especially for a new parent. You probably don't want to run into me now that I'm carrying around hundreds of baby pix.

[EDIT: I lessened the bass/beat distortion problem by turning up the volume limit beyond where I would normally comfortably listen, so that the device wouldn't clip stronger attacks as much. Obviously this will use up battery power faster and it doesn't totally clear the distortion. At least the sound quality isn't horrible anymore.]

Melody Makers

2007-02-09T14:12:00.000-05:00

Writer and friend Carsten Knox has begun a blog titled Melody Makers.

My link to it is my first “rock” link, though it looks like there is lots of folk, blues and other stuff on there. Knox writes passionately of the independent music scene in Halifax. It's clear he has a great talent for music journalism, that is rivalled by his supreme film geekness. He has been published in several newspapers on both subjects.

He also gives scoops on things like The Police reforming, for all of you “Born in the 50s”... or in the 80s culturally speaking.

James Brown's Foot Prints

2007-01-28T23:38:00.001-05:00

Tribute Night, January 20

We arrived at just ten to find the sound system still in pre-launch, the lights on, and security doing a sweep for door crashers. In most cases, this would not be a great start to a party, and there were lots of folks already there, drinks in hand. Given the occasion – a Foot Prints night dedicated almost entirely to musical selections of the late James Brown, his sidemen, sidewomen, protegés, and cover versions of their collective repertoire – the delay in gratification seemed appropriate.

DJ Stu finally got to set it off with JB's "Bring It Up (Hipster's Avenue)", one of the few pre-funk-era numbers to be heard that night. After more warm-up with some apparently unrelated modern beats, during which the PA needed further attention, the marathon began.

I won't even attempt to selectively list the tracks by James Brown himself that were played, rather to note that obvious and over-exposed cuts like "Sex Machine" and "I Feel Good", and gauche 80s tracks like "Living in America" were left out. Otherwise, it was a listening and dancing celebration of his work like I've never heard (aside from seeing him live) and likely never will hear again.

The Foot Prints collective have always been huge champions of the music of James Brown and associates for their parties, but they really outdid themselves that night. Jason Palma threw down a wicked Afrobeat set (the re-Africanized sound of JB's funk being a seminal influence on Fela Kuti, the progenitor of Afrobeat). General Eclectic then held things down for the next 90 minutes with a set that was 95% James Brown compositions. Much of it was by the JBs, the backing band whose instrumentals benefitted from superstar players like Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley.

A few examples of JB-inspired hip hop were played, such as Eric B & Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul", which samples JB-sideman Bobby Byrd's song of the same name. Don't remember much that wasn't JB stuff – one exception being Johnny Pate's "Shaft in Africa", which caused host Lybido to bust out his signatures moves to this very JBs-like track.

My happiest moment was hearing the Norman Cook (pre-Fatboy Slim days) 1986 remix of "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", with a drum break by the legendary Clyde Stubblefield that is harder, faster, more dynamic and thrilling than his generally more famous "Funky Drummer" beat. Then again, the latter beat never needed a remix, it became the most sampled loop ever in its original mix.

When the Roy Ayers track "Running Away" was heard, a well known local DJ in attendance asked me what the relation to James Brown could be. Ayers never played with Brown, but I find the question suggests the lack of awareness/appreciation audiences generally have about/for what Brown meant to music. There would be no Roy Ayers, no Sly & The Family Stone, Kool & The Gang, Average White Band, Tower of Power, Earth, Wind & Fire, Fatback, Chaka Khan & Rufus – no funk of any kind as we know it – and certainly no disco, hip hop, techno, house, acid jazz or downtempo as we know it.

Funk was an idea that was in the air in the 1960s. James Brown invented the first funk machine, with the help of his band members. James Brown IS the groove.

Sadly, I was on the way home by last call, with at least another 90 minutes of music still be heard. As a very soon to be parent, I was at the mercy of both my newly altered sleep cycle and my concern for my girlfriend, who retired when the club started to get tight (in both senses). She said the baby was dancing it up in the club though!

Big up to the Foot Prints crew for putting on this night. Another reason you guys are the best party in town.

Horns Hit Me

The week before Brown died, during the December holiday shopping rush when almost every music system around me was trying to winterize my mood (the industrially warmed weather notwithstanding), I listened to James Brown's music two days in a row. It was the soundtrack on the walk to work and back twice – two and a half hours in total. This is a normal thing for me to do. Brown's work, and the work of his band members, soloists, singing partners, arrangers and co-composers, has never left my thoughts since it entered them.

Brown's music in a way was all music for me. I've been thinking a bit more about him since his passing with some respectful sadness. His music could not be with me any more strongly than it always has been – perhaps not as constantly with me as when I was trying to find a funky style for my own music years ago. I advise one not to attempt this with Brown looking over your shoulder as it were.

Brown is one of those artists whose work you really have to separate from his image as a troubled celebrity figure, though not from his personal history and his historical context. He was a hero to so many during and after the civil rights era, even if he often got things horribly wrong for the people who were closest to him. His behaviour and his lyrical viewpoint could often present great problems, but his artistry changed music like that of few in the twentieth century.

For every "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" type of number he recorded, there was a "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud". For every "Hot Pants (A Woman Got to Use What She Got to Get Just What She Wants)", there was an "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I'll Get It Myself)". For every "Papa Don't Take No Mess", a "Funky President (People It's Bad)".

Not that one sort of message should ever excuse the other. A critical stance is needed towards any literary or lyrical text of this kind.

Brown re-Africanized soul music (Bowman, 1995) with an interlocking, poly-rhythmic, non-chord-based, groove that emphasized the down beats (1 and 3, instead of the up beats 2 and 4, as in rock); and griot-style, community-committed vocal delivery that was as much spoken/shouted as sung. The beat itself became the song. When a pop/rock musician today sits down today to compose a song, they are just as likely to start first with a funky groove as to play some chords on piano or guitar (that "old school" way of composing). The impact of JB's revolution has yet to be properly appreciated. But his stance as a watershed musical figure is guaranteed. And the energy and fun in his music is nearly universal.

Back to the Foot Prints JB tribute – by chance we happened to sit down beside the only other imminently expecting couple in the Rivoli upstairs that night – a lovely coincidence. We had a great conversation amid the volume and hustle of the party, and I loved it when the other mother to be told us that she listened to James Brown to wake up in the morning.

Loving James Tenney at Cinematheque

2007-01-19T11:37:00.001-05:00

Cinematheque Ontario will be paying tribute to the late James Tenney by screening the films of his friends Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann in which he appears, or for which he composed sound. The films will be shown in Jackman Hall at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, on Wednesday, January 24th. The entrance is on McCaul Street, just south of Dundas.

Start time is 6:30 pm. This event is free of charge.

The announcement with the full programme of films is here.

L to R: James Tenney, composer Carl Ruggles, multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann.

Now we're listening

2007-01-19T11:03:00.000-05:00

Here's an excellent video interview with Tenney, shot during the last year of his life. He was a man of unfailing constancy, in thought, manner, working method... and fashion. His look here - the blue denim shirt (sometimes with bolo tie signifying his southwestern origins); the black leather jacket; the deeply etched features set off by grisled hair and goatee - is the same look we saw in the classroom 20 years ago. Loved the guy.

Also check the review in the LA Times of the Tenney festival at CalArts last December.

Mark Swed mentions in his review that Tenney's music will be heard (but not, as Swed perhaps implies, for the first time) at the Salzburg Festival in August. And an august institution it is. The orchestra is the Ensemble Modern, who once wanted performances fees that Tenney, a composer supported by the beleaguered Canadian arts funding system, couldn't easily produce. Sad but typical how these kinds of problems are quickly solved just after a great artist's passing.

James Tenney Festival

2006-11-29T11:27:00.001-05:00

On December 8, 9 and 10, the California Institute of the Arts will be celebrating the life and music of James Tenney with performances (including recent and vintage, rare and celebrated works plus a world premiere), installations, and film screenings. Ah, to be in Valencia in December.

musique quotidienne

2006-11-17T15:53:00.000-05:00

I like making music with everyday objects. I like making it with specialized, high tech or high tradition instruments as well -- most often in fact -- but my first great adventures in sound as a young person were playing with items from around the kitchen and pantry.

This was something I later found that many of my friends also experimented with -- I really went to town with it. For example, using a giant plastic food storage tub (or the side of the oven) as a kick drum, cookie tins of various sizes for snare drums, rubber spatulas with wood handles as drum sticks or beaters, I made rhythm tracks for a kind of cave person rock we called Home Dub. I recorded with the most available equipment at hand, often cheap boogie boxes or dictaphones, used in pairs to layer the beats and fill out the texture with melodic/harmonic sounds from turntables, ukelele, kazoo, steel pan, metal junk... anything that made interesting sounds, even better if the sound source was organic and not laden with virtuoso professionalist baggage. A piano was OK if it was out of tune a bit.

Usually the result was just muddy sounding jams, but I found the most amusement in trying to incorporate traditional song structures in the process. Ramming the square peg of function into the round hole of form.

Lately, I've found the steel railings in the stairwell at work to be captivatingly tonal. A solo walk down the stairs at lunch time often involves a percussion session, using my hands to explore the sustained, bell-like sounds that seem to suggest melody, timing the rhythm to the pace of my steps. Each flight of stairs brings different pitches and depth of tone.

I think in the spirit of old-school home dubbing I should find a way to record this with my cell phone. Of course it's not the same when good quality portable recording tools are available so cheaply today.

The best thing about it though, is just having a way of making music (beyond one's voice) right at your disposal -- no technological mediation, no musico-cultural vocabulary to wrestle with -- just beautiful improvised sounds on the spot.

Soul Goddess

2006-11-08T18:11:00.000-05:00

Minnie Riperton was born on this day in 1947. Passing away at the tragically young age of 31, she was one of soul music's lesser known figures yet one of its greatest voices. Her two biggest connections with present day mainstream culture are 1. her enduring hit ballad, "Loving You", produced by Stevie Wonder, which inspired the career of Mariah Carey; and 2. the younger of her two children, Maya Rudolph of Saturday Night Live fame.

As far as underground music culture is concerned, Minnie's legacy is significantly vaster, anchored by the anthems, "I Am the Black Gold of the Sun", recorded when she sang with Rotary Connection and later covered by Nuyorican Soul; "Les Fleur" [sic], which was later covered by 4Hero; and the scorching "Baby, This Love I Have" which was sampled by A Tribe Called Quest for their song "Check the Rhime".

Classically trained and with a four- to five-octave range (many singers are attributed with this when in actuality the vast majority range within two octaves and might touch three), Minnie possessed a voice of great power which she demonstrated in a masterfully dynamic way. She also perfected a virtuoso technique of very high singing (in the whistle register) which was her unique signature, later to be emulated by Carey. What remains unique about Riperton's style is her consistently strong enunciation in any register or dynamic level.

Her songs were sometimes overly sentimental or touchy-feely in a typically 1970s manner, but she possessed the vocal charisma to convert the most banal of tracks into precious gems. More often than not she had choice, satiny smooth or funky jams in the jazzy soul vein to work with. The track "Can You Feel What I'm Saying?" verged on a kind of opera rare groove... which sounds much better than it reads.

I fell in love with Minnie's music as it began to be reissued on CD in the 90s, and it still is of special importance to me, bringing me up from my lowest points, and scoring the poignant moments of my life as only a departed 70s soul saint could do.

Thank you for your songs, Ms. Riperton.

One could be forgiven for thinking that all I do on this blog is post birthdays. (Did I mention it was Mozart's 250th this year? I think somebody did.) It can be a good way to prioritize which of my favourite artists gets the big up next, and not just the DWM (dead white men). Anyway, stay tuned for more and different types of pieces.

Morton Feldman is 80

2006-10-31T20:54:00.002-05:00

Morton Feldman is perhaps the single most influential composer of the late twentieth century. In the tradition of truly great American composers he was a maverick, with an idiosyncratic style. This year he would have celebrated his 80th birthday (he died in 1987). His sound -- impossibly quiet, slow, sustained, sparse, softly dissonant, obsessive -- is unmistakable. He wrote almost all of his 160-odd mature works in this mode, though Feldman's style evolved from pointillistic short pieces in the early 1950s to evening-long, single-movement works in the 1980s. String Quartet II of 1983 lasts an unbroken five hours plus. More often than not Feldman wrote for the piano, solo or as part of an ensemble.

In an era dominated by music of procedures -- chance, serialism, minimalism, electroacoustic, stochastic and computer-assisted composition -- Feldman reasserted the value of working from intuition. In no way was his instinct was to cling to traditional models of composing. His sound, though strongly influenced by Varèse and Webern (as regards texture not form), was all his own. He would have wanted to think, though, that his sounds were free to be themselves.

In 1950 Feldman met and befriended John Cage, who would inspire him to follow his own instincts in finding a distinct and innovative compositional voice. Composers Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff had a brief artistic association that year which resulted in a kind of musical revolution. Later, the four were dubbed the New York School. Ironically, Feldman once ridiculed that term in its being applied to Abstract Expressionist painters of the period.

Also in 1950, Feldman invented a style of graphic score that uses grids of boxes with numbers to indicate the relative (but unspecified) pitch and duration of sounds, leaving the exact realization to his players. Eventually he came to realize that the sounds he wanted were best achieved through traditional notation. Still, the pages of his scores retained a grid-like arrangement, and his indications of pitch and rhythm became eccentrically complex (though not in the information overload way of some late twentieth-century composers).

Feldman's music however, never belies its visual orientation (in my opinion and perhaps debatable) and seems to float without a sense of regular rhythm, which may have been Feldman's ultimate intention.

Feldman often said that he was inspired more by the painters of his generation than by other composers. He was friends with Philip Guston, and wrote music for a short film on Jackson Pollock. He also met Samuel Beckett, and collaborated with him on an opera, Neither, as well as composing music for Beckett's radio play Words and Music. He wrote the darkly dramatic work for chorus and ensemble, Rothko Chapel, for the building of the same name which houses paintings by Mark Rothko.

I have spent many hours listening to recordings (and not as many hours as I would prefer attending live performances) of Feldman's music. His sounds drift, hover, wheeze, sparkle, gently abrade, half remember themselves and persist. The experience of hearing them is an audio ritual like no other. With the later very long works where Feldman allows the fallibility of his own memory to affect the course of the music through paraphrasing. Thus, the music repeats/sounds recur often but never seem repetitive.

Only once have I listened straight through without distractions to the five-hour DVD of String Quartet II. Not so with the less massive, CD-length Piano and String Quartet of 1985, one of Feldman's most popular works and my favourite long work. In the last half hour of the piece, the strings weave a gentle meditation on two alternated chords in all their permutations, while the piano dreams on independently; exploring the same rolled chord over and over in different transpositions, sometimes blending with the strings, sometimes more exposed.

There are also plenty of bite-sized works from the earlier part of Feldman's career, my favourite of these being Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety. The title is an hommage to his piano teacher and the music itself suggests an echoing, apparitional cuckoo clock.

This year, concerts and festivals marking Feldman's 80th birthday are being held around the globe. A new book, Morton Feldman Says has been released... more on this once I get to reading it.

Happy birthday Uncle Morty!

Yes, I said Mozart

2006-10-30T18:46:00.000-05:00

Saturday night we trucked down to Roy Thomson Hall in the blowing rain to hear Helmuth Rilling conduct Robert Levin's new reconstruction/expansion of Mozart's Mass in C Minor, K. 427.

Rilling's interpretation was sharp and insightful, and I expected no less from hearing his much-lauded complete Bach recordings. The large forces of the University of Toronto MacMillan singers got the greatest ovation of the night and deserved it. The soloists were somewhat overpowered in the proceedings, save for first soprano Simona Šaturová who had a sweet tone, if a little easy on the attack.

I have to admit I have never quite understood how two or more solo singers can properly harmonize with each other in ensemble passages, when their vibrato is cranked up high enough that their pitches sit a little wide on the mark. My bias I guess.

The band was almost typical for the Classical period, solo winds and a bit light on the brass. The strings seemed a bit more numerous than would have been the case then, but given the size of the chorus this made sense in terms of balance. The ensemble overall was crisp.

Levin prefaced the concert with a talk, a long talk, a talk that required an intermission afterwards. He spoke in specialist terms peppered with folksy humour of his extensive research, sleuthing, and his near-forensic campaign to bring what he in his best professional opinion determined to be a complete Mass in C Minor -- based on reassembled sketches in the composer's hand. No detail was too fine for consideration -- right down to determining the dating of sketches by the colour of ink used.

It was entirely opaque to me whether completing the Mass involved any actual composing on Levin's part. The way he basked in the audience's blessing after the performance, one would have been forgiven for thinking he was the composer, though a seriously retro one.

Given this is not the first time Levin has done this kind of thing and done it quite successfully (Mozart's Requiem for example), I have to admit it was very hard to hear anything I thought was not authentic sounding throughout the whole work. Still, knowing that Mozart was not around to give editorial approval to a great deal of the music we heard gave me justification for my misgivings about the structural integrity of this shiny, refurbished vehicle.

On a emotional response level, I found the constant switching back and forth between sunny, major mode arias and blustery minor choral segments tiring after a while. This was an aspect of the original, incomplete mass that Levin managed only to amplify. It's a highly enjoyable work, but I don't know that I sensed the sweep of structural logic I normally associate with large-scale Mozart.

Levin's earlier presentation was humorously, if unintentionally, evangelical. He seemed at points to be on the verge of converting the audience, with hushed references to the holy imagery embedded in Mozart's musical architecture. He spoke of Mozart's sketches like they were sacred texts, like the shroud of Turin itself. And he joked that giving him a mic with a cord reined him in somewhat!

Most unclear to me was whether he felt humbled in the Mozartean aura, or elevated to a kind of virtual colleague status. I suppose if I could connect the pieces like Levin I would know which feeling it was.

Reich: Sound and Vision

2006-10-25T20:56:00.001-04:00

From the Guardian, September 30, 2006

As he approaches his 70th birthday, Steve Reich looks back at the bold predictions he made for music in 1970, and asks how much he got right.

Thirty-six years ago, I had the nerve to write a short essay entitled "Some Optimistic Predictions about the Future of Music". I would not write such an essay today. We really know very little about what is going on right under our nose - forget the future.

I began by forecasting that "electronic music as such will gradually die and be absorbed into the ongoing music of people singing and playing instruments". In the world of concert music, this has proved to be basically true. We almost never sit in a room in a concert hall and hear a recording or see someone twisting dials as the only musical activity. We certainly see electric guitars and basses, synthesizers, samplers and computers. But they are played by musicians, with other musicians playing more traditional instruments, and singing. On the other hand, in the electronica world, we often see and hear DJs with computers, turntables and other machines as their only instruments.

I continued: "Non-western music in general, and African, Indonesian and Indian music in particular, will serve as new structural models for western musicians. Not as new models of sound. (That's the old exoticism trip.) Those of us who love the sounds will hopefully just go and learn how to play these musics."

To this, I would have to say: "Wrong." But not because every band doesn't have a sitar or African drums in it. Rather, when someone gives me a CD of what is now called "world music", I find that, to my ears, it is basically African pop and rock, Indonesian pop and rock, South American pop and rock, and so on. The traditional indigenous music in Ghana, for example, seems to have largely disappeared; or, in the words of a Ghanaian musicologist I met recently, it has become "very rural music", a kind of "grandpa's music".

Given the international fame and fortune that await pop performers from anywhere on the face of the globe, this is hardly surprising, but I did not anticipate it. The Balinese seem particularly resistant to having their music changed into western pop. They are able to incorporate western music and even electronics, but keep metallic percussion at the heart of their gamelans intact. The fact remains that today I find very few younger composers who draw their techniques or inspiration from non-western music.

My next point, back in 1970, was to argue that "music schools will be resurrected through offering instruction in the practice and theory of all the world's music. Young composer/performers will form all sorts of new ensembles growing out of one or several of the world's musical traditions." Today, some conservatories do have a student gamelan, or African drum teachers, or some non-western musical instruction. Other music schools do not. As for dance, I thought then that "serious dancers who now perform with pulse-less music, or with no music at all, will be replaced by young musicians and dancers who will reunite rhythmic music and dance as a high art form". Here I was mostly correct.

Tonight at the Barbican in London, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Richard Alston and Akram Khan will be dancing to my music live and on recording, and there's no question of its being rhythmic. Nor am I the only composer, or these the only dancers, working with live or recorded rhythmic music. In the pop world, it has always been thus, and in modern dance it is once again the majority practice.

I concluded the essay by suggesting that "the pulse and the concept of clear tonal centre will re-emerge as basic sources of new music". Well, maybe not for everyone, but certainly for many composers, and for a majority of those in the English-speaking world. As I said, today I would not venture such predictions. But many things have changed since the 1970s.

First, composition students from the late 1950s through to the 1980s or later found they were presented with basically one way to compose - in the tradition of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio et al, or John Cage. Many articles of the day noted that while the Europeans used total or near-total organisation and Cage used chance, the results were remarkably similar: no pulse, no harmonic centre, no melodies one could hum.

Now, when I occasionally speak with student composers, I find that some are writing like late romantics and their teachers think it's just splendid; others are heavily influenced by rock'n'roll, and their teachers think it's just splendid; some are still sticking to their serial guns; still others are writing like myself. Some turn to me and say: "You helped liberate us!" Well, I'm not sure who was in a better position, them or me. In Poetics of Music, Stravinsky wrote: "In art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings ... Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength." I wish those young composers, now free to do whatever they like within the entire world history of classical and popular music, good luck.

Today, many orchestras are concerned about diminishing and ageing audiences. Some of them have tried film music to lure the young, but I'm not sure that will succeed.

Several people, including the late conductor Erich Leinsdorf, the former artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ernest Fleischmann, and some say Pierre Boulez, have suggested another possibility: a symphony orchestra, joined by an early music ensemble and a 20th/21st-century ensemble, each with its own conductor. These three groups would exist under one roof, or at least one management, tour widely, and offer a repertoire of 1,000 years of western music rather than the 150-200 years currently offered by orchestras. It suggests fewer orchestras but instead larger regional music centres offering musicians an opportunity to play, and audiences an opportunity to hear, a wider range of music than is possible today. A cellist who perhaps studied gamba would have an opportunity to play early music for a change, and a percussionist with the orchestra would have a chance to play in the percussion-heavy repertoire of the 20th/21st-century ensemble. Audiences unfamiliar with early music might find they really enjoy it. Recently, a record of Gregorian chants hit the pop charts.

The use of video and sampled sound in music theatre seems to be a natural outgrowth of living in a world where television and other technologies are omnipresent. If rock'n'roll and pop electronica are the folk music of our time, and I believe they are, then it is inevitable that folk sources of various sorts will influence classical composers in their compositions. This use of media in various forms of musical theatre can be seen not only in my collaborations with video artist Beryl Korot (The Cave and Three Tales), but also in the multi-media works of, among others, the Bang on a Can group in New York and the beautiful Writing to Vermeer opera of Louis Andriessen. The technique of sampling live sound to become part of a concert work has roots in electronic works dating back to the 1950s, and can be heard more recently in my Different Trains and City Life, and also in the works of Michael Gordon and other younger composers. Playing pre-recorded sound on a sampling keyboard or percussion pad can be understood as simply a new musical instrument to be added to all the others.

Passing through Amherst, Massachusetts, there is a public radio station with a fairly strong signal. On one trip, I tuned in to the station and an electronica piece was playing - and playing - for about 25 minutes, until the signal faded as I left the area. I never found out what it was or who made it. The music was interesting in that parts of it had a regular beat and others did not. Some of it obviously belonged in the pop world and other parts could be heard as "electronic concert music". I began thinking about who could have produced such a piece and envisaged someone with musical talent and training who wanted to be "out there" making a living as a composer, performer or producer. I began thinking that young people now, and in the future, might be moving in a direction where "new music" concert composers and "avant garde" pop musicians inhabited more or less the same world. Most likely this will be one of several developments. As usual, most music written will not be too good and, as usual, a few outstanding composers will emerge.

Falling in Love Again

2006-10-24T11:32:00.001-04:00

In this life
of happiness and sadness
when you've lost out on love
(I know)
and it all
ends up in madness

And you say
Love, please go away
don't torture me
night and day

Then something that's real
Someone you feel
comes in

chorus:
Now I'm falling in love again
I'm falling in love again
I'm falling in love all over
I'm falling in love again
I've found somebody who says she loves me
I'm falling in love again, falling in love again
falling in love
once again

Hey baby
She's pretty outside and in
She's so wonderful
I tried not to let my heart step in
But what to do, baby
what could I do
when somebody real comes in
someone you feel comes in

chorus + (boo bedoop, boop beep boop bedoop)

Aww, beautiful woman
She brings me love
I foooouuunnd

So pretty baby
So love me
as though there was no
tomorrow
(There is no tomorrow)
So let's have a toast
(see you later)
and whisper
I love you
(I love you, baby
da na na da na na na)

I_______
love____
you_____

let's live, not regret it (repeat)

Marvin Gaye, from the album Here, My Dear (1978)

Reich in his own words

2006-10-04T13:02:00.001-04:00

The following essay was written by Steve Reich in 1968, and is a seminal text from the so-called minimalist era. As Reich comments in his book Writings on Music (2002, Oxford University Press), the essay "was an excellent description of the way I wrote music up to 1968... 'Music as a Gradual Process' was not a manifesto for my, or anyone else's, musical future."

Music as a Gradual Process

I do not mean the process of composition but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.

The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)

I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.

To facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.

Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles:

pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest;
turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom;
placing your feet in the sand by the ocean's edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them.

Although I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself.

Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (content suggests form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them (form suggests content). If the shoe fits, wear it.

As to whether a musical process is realized through live human performance or through some electromechanical means is not finally the main issue. One of the most beautiful concerts I have ever heard consisted of four composers playing their tapes in a dark hall. (A tape is interesting when it's an interesting tape.)

It is quite natural to think about musical processes if one is frequently working with electromechanical sound equipment. All music turns out to be ethnic music.

Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control, and one doesn't always think of the impersonal and complete control as going together. By "a kind" of complete control, I mean that by running this material through this process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes.

John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the processes he used were compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed. The process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musical parameters can’t be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional processes and the sounding music have no audible connection. Similarly, in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible. (This is a basic difference between serial — basically European — music, and serial — basically American — art, where the perceived series is usually the focal point of the work.)

What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.

James Tenney said in conversation, “Then the composer isn’t privy to anything.” I don’t know any secrets of structure that you can’t hear. We all listen to the process together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons it’s quite audible is because it’s happening extremely gradually.

The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended processes. These might include submelodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, and so on.

Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends further than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to that musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.

I begin to perceive these minute details when I can sustain close attention and a gradual process invites my sustained attention. By “gradual” I mean extremely gradual; a process happening so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching a minute hand on a watch — you can perceive it moving after you stay with it a little while.

Several currently popular modal musics like Indian classical and drug-oriented rock and roll may make us aware of minute sound details because in being modal (constant key center, hypnotically droning and repetitious) they naturally focus on these details rather than on key modulation, counterpoint, and other peculiarly Western devices. Nevertheless, these modal musics remain more or less strict frameworks for improvisation. They are not processes.

The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note details and the overall form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a musical process — the concepts are mutually exclusive.

While performing and listening to gradual musical processes, one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outward toward it.

Steve Reich is 70

2006-10-03T14:29:00.002-04:00

America’s greatest living composer was born on this day in New York in 1936. 40 years ago Steve Reich invented what came to be called minimalism, and restored the faith of Western audiences in so-called serious new music.

Minimalism, an almost hypnotic, rhythmically repetitive style involving gradual, subtle changes over time, has long since grown out of the lofts, art galleries and avant-garde spaces it first thrived in. It has been taken up by rock and pop artists, Hollywood, TV news, DJs and electronic musicians (although Reich has written most of his major works for acoustic instruments, with the use of tape and samplers in key pieces). It provides the predominant basis for almost all modern music genres.

Significantly, minimalism is a kind of pigeon-hole term which Reich was never into, especially given the fact he moved on from it as a pure style 30 years ago. He continues to break new ground today; expanding the vocabulary of his music while tackling subjects such as nuclear war and the perils of new technology, the Holocaust, philosophy, Abraham/Ibrahim the patriarch and the conflict between Israel and Palestine; and by celebrating his own Jewish faith in a sonically radical way.

Reich’s work still and always will have an edge to it; a gorgeously complex surface; and a clarity and perfection of form that eludes other composers. There are so many processual and textual levels to engage with simultaneously inside the music. It is ultimately about the joy of pure, sensuous sound. It also makes for an awesome earphone soundtrack to the city.

Over the next few months, several festivals are being held internationally to observe Reich’s birthday year — in New York (with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music combining forces), London (Barbican Centre), Paris, Dublin, Budapest, Freiburg and Helsinki. It’s nice to see an artist who has stayed largely outside of mass culture being celebrated this way… in their lifetime!

I’m hoping to get to at least one of the concerts in New York; we shall see. In the meantime — happy birthday, Steve!

Hojotoho! Heiaha!

2006-09-25T18:25:00.000-04:00

My sleep is dreaming, my dreaming brooding, my brooding wisdom... My mind grows misty with the deeds of men.
- Erda, the eternal Earth mother

Wagner's Ring was the thing for us last week, in the Canadian Opera Company's beautiful brand new facility, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

While the name of the latter is typically awkward and forgettable (do sponsors ever let a building get named something interesting?), I do think it was about time we got an opera house. We certainly have our share of sports arenas, pop music venues, swanky clubs and condo ghettos; as well as cutting edge, grassroots spaces for small-scale artistic media and lots of summertime outdoor festivals.

This new centre increases the value of the whole T-dot package. I don't think opera is elitist any more than I think pop music is universal, so to speak. The ticket prices were crazy but no more than for the Leafs or Raptors or for platinum artists' concerts.

It gave me a smile to see people rocking sequined décolletage and various colours of bowties on Queen West, adding to the existing mix of hip hop, alt and indie fashions. The serious diehards - the international Ring chasers - don't get dressed up though. It would have been nice to have the opera house on the lake, but the harbourfront continues to be mired in development issues so here we are.

Der Ring Des Nibelungen is a massive body of work, taking old Reek-hard (i.e. Richard Wagner) 26 years to complete (with a decade off somewhere in there to write two other operas). It comprises four operas spanning 18 hours in performance. It can be challenging to sit for four to five hours per night and focus on live, full-on voices and orchestral sound while reading surtitles (my archaic German is kind of rusty). But the head-nodding, body-jerking threats of sleep pass after twenty minutes and the ritual becomes engrossing. Who wouldn't get caught up in the stories of gods and heroes gone bad; renouncing love out of greed; cheating, incest, in-breeding and other family secrets and lies; and not least of all magic spells?

The stagings tend toward gothic minimalism, and the vision and direction are especially strong in Atom Egoyan's and François Girard's instalments, parts two and three respectively. In Die Walküre, which has the famous Ride of the Valkyries sequence (think of the music accompanying the helicopters in Apocalypse Now), Egoyan has the Valkyries -- powerful Norse warrior goddesses -- throwing around body bags as they belt out their legendary cries. (How can one not think of contemporary events?)

In the first act of Siegfried, Girard suspends singers and props on wires in a huge tree shape, and does the same again in the second act where a sort of frozen explosion of horded treasure and architectural ruins surrounds a dragon's lair.

My favourite point in the drama comes during Siegfried (if any of the operas focus on male angst this is the one). After slaying said dragon, Siegfried tastes its magic blood on his sword and realizes he has been fed a diet of lies for years by his guardian since childhood. Again there is a contemporary resonance... as well as a personal one. That feeling of waking up to someone who's been playing you is a powerful moment.

The overall theme of the cycle really has to do with humanity's relationship with its god(s), and there is a related message about sacrificing the spiritual for the material (giving up on love in order to possess the Ring). At the very end of the last opera Götterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), after all the grandiosity and long developments, a drowning villain spits out "Keep away from the ring!", and that's almost all you need to know. (Do check out this Ring though.)

The action is often monolithic, requiring large sets with relatively few changes. The text and singing drives everything. Though the finale of Götterdammerung involves the world going up in the flames, you still have to imagine that particular visual. Some SFX are hard to pull off live, but the music serves the imagination very well. It's signalling the end of tonality (traditional harmony, our structural god in Western music) after all.

The singing was awesome, though I admit I'm not the biggest fan of operatic vibrato most days. It can't be easy to project above the large Wagner orchestra. The latter was a hundred-strong powerhouse with huge brass and percussion sections (featuring anvils and three harps!) all guided by the indefatigable Richard Bradshaw. The acoustics of the new hall worked perfectly, even for us in the near nosebleeds of the "Ring Four" seats.

As much as I might go on positively about the music, suffice for me to say it was revolutionary in its day, complex in design and staggering in its achievement. And it still sounds great. There's definitely something to be learned from it by anyone studying to be a composer, though sometimes the lesson is in what "way too much" sounds like.

The orchestral power of the Ring is the original source of bombast in Hollywood soundtracks. The Star Wars films in particular borrow many dramatic and character elements from the Ring, as well as using the leitmotif concept -- giving musical themes to all the characters and supernatural forces. And Wagner's Ring precedes Tolkien's by about a half century, by the way.

The lobby of the FSC is a fun place to hang out, with the liberal use of glass, natural light and light-coloured wood giving it an open feeling. You can sit on these people-sized steps and watch the kineticism of feet on transparent stairs above you. You can observe the crowd movements on all the levels from the highest one. Or you can peer into a box to see how the very privileged have it, which isn't all that much better than the hoi polloi... they still can't drink in their seats.

As much as I love the Ring (certain anti-Semitic characterizations in it aside), I hope COC can find a way to program operas beyond the usual perennial favs now that capital seems to be falling from the skies for them. It would be great to have more than just the occasional newly commissioned music drama by a living composer alongside the Bohemes, Traviatas, and Magic Flutes. Contrary to some old-school thinking, orchestras and opera houses generally fare better economically when they look ahead regularly towards the future, while continuing to look back at the past, beautiful as it is.

Rough Idea

2006-09-09T16:03:00.001-04:00

From new music champion and avant concert producer Ron Gaskin:

--

From: roughidea
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006
To: Bruce Russell
Subject: James Tenney, 1934-2006

Dear dear Bruce,

Over the ether last Wednesday, at 10:10 in the morning CKLN aired a cross section of Tenney music incorporating segments from your interview with Jim which originally was aired while you hosted Radio Music Gallery (CIUT). I rediscovered a copy of the in-depth hour long interview (recorded May 3, 2000, 1:00 pm, Paul Hodge, Music Gallery Studio, Richmond Street) about the time that you hoped to revisit it recently. Along with a playlist which included Critical Band, Spectral Canon, Collage #1 ("Blue Suede"), For Ann (rising) and a great portion of James Tenney performing John Cage: Sonatas + Interludes (Music Gallery, St. George-the-Martyr, Oct. 24, 2002).

It was great to hear you two chatting with such intent and candor and to listen to Jim's music through the monitors in the new radio studios at 55 Gould Street. Much loving gratitude to Paul Hodge for his astute audio doc skills and to you for the sincere words blogcast in sleepdance.

Jim bravely moves on, noticeably influencing the spirit, movement and orbit of many minds.

all the best
ron

--

Blessings Ron...

Harmonium #7 - another thought or two about Tenney

2006-09-08T20:19:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I was listening to Harmonium #7, one of a series of so-called minimalist pieces James Tenney wrote for various instrumental ensembles, this one composed during his last years in Toronto. Yeah, miminalism is more a historical movement, a groundbreaking trend among the avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s (of which Tenney was a key player), that eventually got taken up by new wave and new age musicians before fading out in the early 80s (gradually fading out, of course). Minimalist house and techno, etc. of the 90s and 2000s are just louder, beat-heavy, derivatives of an earlier time.

Tenney, however, was not concerned with trends nor -isms; he was fascinated with process and a music of real ideas -- completely new ideas -- and he stayed true to his art throughout his life, whether it was commercially viable, cool or not (though he always made it cool in his pioneering way). Some of his music was minimal, some maximal and complex, most of it just gorgeous in its simplicity.

Like the other Harmonium pieces, #7 begins with a single droning note in the middle register, slowly adding new notes and expanding into great clouds of harmony based on the natural series (aka the harmonic or overtone series). The execution of the piece is quite simple, allowing performers to play their notes at roughly determined intervals, without too much concern for synchronization.

The structure which underlies the music is based on a kind of arithmetic pattern or formula for determining the notes, creating a rich music of invisible, sonically beautiful math. For any who think it strange, this the same way J.S. Bach wrote, just with a completely different result. Like JSB and other great composers, Tenney's voice leading (the relative smoothness with which notes in simultaneous lines change) is clever and superb.

Anyway, Harmonium #7 follows this particular design pattern like its predecessors, for about half of its 14-odd minutes. Then a second formula or pattern enters, and the music takes a different turn; the harmonies sounding darker, based on a more complex series of pitches or scale. The piece ends on a chord that in traditional (i.e. classical) terms of tonality would be considered "unresolved". Thus, it was a break with tradition of sorts for Jim, but he always accepted the outcome of whatever twists he tried in his music.

After the premiere, I complimented him on the work and especially the last part. He laughed, and made a self-deprecating joke in his usual, disarming way: "Yeah, but it sounds like Chopin!"

I wish I could call him up now and ask what that 2nd formula was. Sure I can play it on the piano and try to analyze the notes (with little success), but part of the excitement of his pieces was finding out how they were made, after the experience of enjoying how they sound.

Maybe there is no 2nd formula. Maybe it was Jim writing purely on instinct, just to mix things up. Any Tenney scholars out there care to fill me in?

(I know the bass ascends in fourths; through a series of flat-9 dominants; the pitches coming from higher harmonics in the series... something more specific than that?)

Tenney in his own words

2006-09-07T15:01:00.001-04:00

Some James Tenney quotes, from an essay by Peter Niklas Wilson on the the Hat Hut Records site.

I think my entire music can be called experimental, but in another sense of the word than the one John Cage uses. Rather, it is quite literally an experiment like a scientific work, and in science one experiment leads to another.

...

Curiosity is the strongest motivation of nearly everything I do. I am passionately interested in science. Science fascinates me, and I spend more time reading about scientific matters than about music. And the two are related for me in so far as they are two manifestations of the same curiosity. I often think that I write the pieces I am writing because I want to know what they are going to sound like.

...

My music is sound for the sake of perceptual insight - some kind of perceptual revelation. Somehow it seems to me that's we are all doing - searching to understand our own perceptual processes. In a way, science is about the same thing, but its enterprise seems to be to understand the nature of reality through thought and intellection. It seems to me art is about understanding reality to the same extent, and as singularly, but through a different modality - through perception.

...

I am not interested in expressing myself. I am not interested in communication, either. Of course I communicate with music - afterwards. I want other people to listen to it. I am happy when other people hear it again, but I am not communicating anything to them while I am writing a piece of music. This concept is irrelevant for me.

James Tenney, 1934-2006

2006-09-06T23:30:00.001-04:00

Some of us have lost a good friend and former mentor, and the world a great musician. As the New York Sun tells it, Jim Tenney was “the most renowned obscure composer in America” [and Canada]; and according to the LA Times, “to some extent, the ultimate Western composer.” As much as one should take these appraisals with a smile and a grain of salt, for me they hold absolutely true.

Another smile may come from the notion that he was the Zelig of modern music – having studied and worked with John Cage and Edgard Varèse; playing with the ensembles of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Harry Partch; championing the music of Charles Ives, Morton Feldman and Erik Satie before many others did; and being among the first to work with digital sampling in the 1960s – but Wiki and other sources will confirm this to be at least an apt metaphor.

Six years ago, mandatory retirement caused him to relocate from York University, where he had been named Distinguished Research Professor, to the California Institute of the Arts where he had taught in the early 1970s. So with exception he had recently been out of sight in Toronto but never out of mind. In a way, the return to America was simply an aspect of Jim continuously on his way upwards in reputation, like the mysteriously ever-climbing pitches in his piece For Ann (rising). Even so, he was the first to call himself a composer of “unpopular” music, with some irony.

I was a student of his during my undergrad and grad years at York, in theory, history and composition. His warmth and humour are remembered by all whose lives he touched; many of us young composers in the making who were positively transformed by the integrity of his ideas and teachings and the singular brilliance of his music.

Never one for emotional expressivity as a raison d'être in music, Jim was nonetheless passionate in person. His compositions, each successive one finding a different way to hold the listener’s curiosity, were thrilling to hear and remain so. His classroom performances of Ives' Concord Sonata (from memory) are legendary among followers of new music. I remember asking him after class one day about his own Chromatic Canon -- a work for two pianos -- which prompted him to launch into a solo version on the spot. I've never lost the sensation of that moment.

I was fortunate to get to know him and his wife Lauren Pratt and something of their lives outside of music. A summer assistantship working in his home confirmed for me his fondness for golf, beer and playing with his surprisingly young children; and revealed Lauren’s dry wit, deep knowledge of music and tireless work as a new music promoter. Lauren also played the consoling sage at the time I decided to drop out of grad school. (What I would miss most about it were the post-colloquium happy hours with Jim, where over wine you got the “real” lectures!)

Realizing back in 2000 that someone great was exiting our midst, I took the opportunity to interview Jim for a community radio broadcast just before he left Toronto for Valencia. In that interview he railed against small-minded, selfish politicians; spoke highly of his years in Canada; and by way of discussing his then recent commissions provided further insight into why he was such a successful teacher and composer as well as writer. On all fronts he was engaging and rarely didactic; acknowledging past influences while recognizing the need to move on. He offered his own strong mix of intellectual rigour, conceptual boldness and artistic pragmatism, with a dash of creative permissiveness.

Still whenever I sit down to write a piece of music, whether long or short, I think about the form of the piece, its shape, and what it is I am trying to explore. I think of Jim Tenney. And sometimes, often, I think that he wouldn’t like what I am writing; that the harmony is too Pythagorean; or that the music sounds perhaps like Arvo Pärt or some other composer he had no interest in. I’m OK with that thought because I know our dialogue continues in some way. I cherish these conversations as I did the real ones.

It might have struck me in a superstitious way that I had an impulse to revisit the radio interview in the days just after his death but before I had heard the news. This however was a last lesson in the unflaky by a man who didn't believe in the collective unconscious: he will always be a conscious presence in my life.

Good-bye, Jim. My thoughts go out to Lauren and the children.

--

James Carl Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico on August 10, 1934; he died of lung cancer in Valencia, California on August 24, 2006. He is survived by his wife and their three children, a daughter by a previous marriage and three grandchildren.

Note on the Paul Miller Interview

2006-04-27T18:40:00.000-04:00

So, I've posted as much of this interview as I thought the blog could handle. Had twice as much material already transcribed, but this is the blogosphere after all. Perhaps in future I'll find a way to post a link to the full version. What is present in the previous two posts however, covers the core themes of the conversation and showcases Miller's insightful observations about technology and culture and also his keen associative thinking.

The interview is almost three years old now, and was originally intended for a feature piece on DJ Spooky in Musicworks magazine. It was never published as scheduled for various reasons (pretty much mine...). But meeting the guy was nevertheless an invaluable experience in and of itself.

I spent the morning with Miller, talking and wrecking the hotel breakfast buffet. After that he gave a fascinating drop-the-needle lecture on DJ culture to an audience largely composed of experimental music types. We had a tasty lunch at a little Jamaican spot; record shopped; gallery hopped; then headed on to the venue for a concert he gave that night. The show wowed the kids and later provoked heated discussion in the pub among the more conservative concert music folks. Finally, in the wee hours, he dropped a wicked set (with someone else's minimal techno records) at an after hours dance party. Bananas, son.

Spooky Action at a Distance, Part 2

2006-04-26T19:16:00.000-04:00

Excerpts from an Interview with Paul Miller,
aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid

Open Ears Festival, Kitchener, Ontario
May 10, 2003

BR: One of your articles is titled "living through the past as a kind of reflection site for future permutations." As a composer/performer myself, I often get a sense of the dialectic between the need for history – cultural identities, traditions, patterns and memory forms, and the need to press forward and flip the script, innovate. Drilling down further there is also the dynamic exchange between European and African modalities and between those of contemporary pop music and experimental forms; and further down than that, the respective desires for a private music and a public one. Sometimes this may be a conscious negotiation between wanting to make simple, funky grooves and wanting to make something that's less metrical, less tonal, maybe more chaotic. Sometimes it might be in the way I hear a piece of music that engages strong linear and non-linear, or rational and irrational aspects, simultaneously. Do you perceive these dichotomies in your work, or do you take another approach to it?

PM: Yeah, I mean to me free jazz was the sound of asymmetric warfare in Vietnam, where you had guys in rice paddy hats taking on the most powerful military machine in human history. Even if it's unconscious, somehow the metaphors work and it fits into place. Like you have guys who are doing guerilla warfare and they're able to vanish and appear in the jungle and to communicate and manoeuvre very rapidly around these large scale, very structured and systematic blocks of troops and battalions. One is based on the idea of machine culture, having all of these of grids and structures; and the other tends to be nomadic and very fluid. So again, that asymmetric style of free jazz – Albert Ayler, John Coltrane at his most extreme…

BR: Interstellar Space [one of Coltrane's last recordings]…

PM: Yeah. I think they were responding to their environment. When you look at what's going on now, we have such a flattening sanitization of the global imagination. Not because of war mainly, but because of pop culture, and the ideology that I grew up with which is that of always buying your identity, never creating your own identity. But history is a fluid language, when we talk to ourselves and tell ourselves stories about what happened. And sampling is just a way of trying to make sense of the turbulence around you, and all the different versions and stories.

The basic sense of recording culture – even Thomas Edison – it's funny, he's the guy that invented the phonograph but his whole kick was that records would allow you to speak to the dead. He was into this sort of mysticism thing. So, these are all metaphors. It's nothing that's like, this is scientific fact, but it's when science is so real that it actually becomes surreal. In the middle ages, if you turned on a light for example in a room and like you went in a room and turned it on *flick*, and the light went on, they would think that's some angel or that there's some spirit possessing the candles. [laughs]

For us, we turn on a light, and it's an expected link between physics and everyday life. But most people don't know how it works, so the only thing holding it together is still faith. You go in the room; you turn on the light; and you expect it to go on.

BR: It's technology as a faith.

PM: Yeah. The way humans are always looking for something to give structure to our experiences is… perhaps our own prism, and that's why I think about like, The Matrix… or the Plato's Myth of the Cave from The Republic, where people are all living in shadows and reality is leading them away from their normal expectations. In the twenty-first century, I definitely think we are the first group of human beings to be so inundated with media in human history. When I see little kids all staring at TV screens, responding to video game culture, it's like they're writing their own history now. It's going to be a different psychology than the 60s and 70s... man, it's so inundated.

There's over 8,000 satellites in the sky at this point. Each one is dealing with different frequency patterns and streams of information, so you gotta think of it as [though] the planet's [been] put in parentheses at this point, y'know?

BR: [laughs] I like that.

PM: The sheer volume of information of cellular information, and wireless, it's just the beginning. I'm just glad to be alive to see it unfolding. These are very intriguing times.

BR: Well, if there were a global power outage what kind of music would you make?

[Did I call it or nearly, what! This interview was done in May and the northeastern power grid went down in August of that year. – Bruce]

PM: I think I would just listen to the sound of the crickets and the air and the wind and the water. Do you know Toru Takemitsu?

BR: Yes!

PM: He's my favourite Japanese composer.

BR: He's wonderful.

PM: He has this one piece called I Hear the Water Dreaming. If we had a power outage, I would just think about stuff like that. And just sit back and relax.

BR: What's your take, whether or not from your position as someone who works with "re-tasked" sounds, on issues of intellectual property and the ownership of music?

PM: I have no position because I don't feel like I belong to it – the basic sense of commerce in dealing with twenty-first century art and culture. Yeah, but I kind of bounce off it every once in a while.

The whole intellectual property and ownership of culture… Did you hear about Eldred vs. Ashcroft? Ashcroft is the Attorney General, he had a case against this guy named Eldred who had published some of the works of early public domain people…

BR: Oh, the copyright extension thing, taking certain works back out of the public domain?

PM: Yeah. And Mickey Mouse used to be a Central European myth about a mouse that would go in the corners of your cupboard. And Disney bought the myth. A lot of the myths that Disney uses were public domain, but as soon as they copyright it, they take away a bit of folk culture, issue it and make it become popular culture. Stuff like that is pretty grim.

Who owns culture and memory is such an important issue right now, especially for twenty-first century culture, where entertainment is such a core facet of life. So, I kind of feel neutral like the Swiss, so to speak. It's neutral but with a lot of hidden bank accounts and things involved in maintaining those accounts.

BR: [laughs]

PM: I don't know. Let me just wrap this one saying, I believe people generate and create culture, and I'm a big fan of the idea of shareware; and how the artist would feel equivalent to shareware.

BR: Do you see a difference between your music and that music which is composed entirely of "new" sounds as opposed to say with dub plates, remixes and samples? Have you composed much for acoustic or non-media based electronic instruments? Do you work with notation for example?

PM: No, I don't work with notation so much, most of my stuff is software based. I guess I'm more a fan of composing using software as an editing environment in general. But if it came down to something else, I could do anything. It's mainly a convenience.

BR: So, what of kind of ideas would be likely to come into your head first when you sit down to create a piece of music?

PM: It all depends on what mood I'm in.

BR: Who or what else currently influences or inspires you?

PM: I really like Xenakis' work. I'm a huge fan of his stuff. John Cage, Afrika Bambaataa.

BR: It's possible to say we're at a crossroads in terms of technology and the way music is created, propagated and accessed, and also in terms of the increased challenges of making a living as a creative artist. Any thoughts on where things are headed?

PM: It's all gonna go online, and everybody's going to be kind of noodling around and/or dealing with physical instrumentation, but I view wireless culture and ubiquitous computing as a future where most people will be kind of coming up with all these different angles on what's happening. But it'll be a kind of archival, wireless culture.

Spooky Action at a Distance, Part 1

2006-04-25T12:45:00.000-04:00

Excerpts from an Interview with Paul Miller,
aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid

Open Ears Festival, Kitchener, Ontario
May 10, 2003

BR: Can you tell me where the idea for your persona, DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, came from?

PM: Sure. In our day and age, so many of us are living through mediated environments. And I was fascinated with how that would effect the idea of spoken word culture and oral culture in general, in these kinds of closely condensed urban environments like New York. But also how they intermesh with the internet. I was fascinated with that, so I created this character/persona DJ Spooky and starting making these mixtapes like "Who Is DJ Spooky?" And I starting passing them out. They actually became popular in their own right.

This is before Spooky was existing really. So it was meant to be a sense of humour about how when you make up a character and people start saying, "Oh yeah, I heard this mix by this guy DJ Spooky." And DJ Spooky is a character in my novel. But it's also a sample of a William S. Burroughs' character and sort of a cross section of those. Because Sigmund Freud had this term, "unheimlich" which means "the uncanny." It's a great essay [which mentions writer] E.T.A. Hoffmann.

BR: A Williams S. Burroughs' character from which book?

PM: Nova Express.

BR: What about the origin of the style term “Illbient”?

PM: People want to mono-ize you; have just one view of you. It comes out of this sense of humour I have about etymologies.

BR: Your work seems to be informed a great deal by philosophy – which you have a degree in – is it French philosophy…?

PM: …Continental nineteenth- and twentieth-century.

BR: [and also informed by] …semiotics, visual art and film. But it's the influence of science fiction that comes across that I am curious about. Is this something going back to Sun Ra Space Is The Place or separate from that?

PM: [It's about] this whole idea of audio fiction and basically how we live in a world of constructs. The Bush administration is a great example of science fiction [laughs], and a sort of contemporary exercise in surrealism, but on a global scale. Everything they say is untrue, and pretty much everything they do is specifically out of some ideology that has nothing to do with reality. The only way you can look at it is as fiction.

If you think of the notion of a story, you have a protagonist, an antagonist, and a sort of narrative closure at the end of the story. "He [Bush] rides on an aircraft carrier," like in a movie script. In fact, they changed the position of the aircraft carrier so that it's facing the water rather than the shore so you couldn't see [if it was him] flying in. They used the excuse that it was too far out to see.

BR: Tonight, we're going to get to hear your remix of Pierre Boulez' Pli selon Pli. A few years back you got involved with performances of Xenakis' music through [controlling the pre-recorded audio portions] of Kraanerg and Analogiques A+B. As well, you've done “visual remixes" of Marcel Duchamp and of [D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film] Birth of a Nation. What is about these figures that attracted you to their work? Are there commonalities or disparities between the early- and mid-twentieth Century avant-garde and your work that factored into these collaborations?

PM: Mainly, I'm fascinated with the divisions in our culture: how we think of the idea of high and low culture; how we think of the idea of academic culture; or whatever. All just constructs. And the fascinating thing about Bush and his team is that they're so obvious. These divisions are very obvious too. To me, after the mid-twentieth century, everything is on the screen. And once it's on the screen, it doesn't matter if it's architecture, genetic engineering, music, literary fiction, whatever.

But those kinds of boundaries seem pretty obsolete in the twenty-first century. So I look back to artists whom I view as precedents to what I'm doing, and also ones that helped me deconstruct… [inaudible]. And it's also a very specific statement about the idea of codification in our culture. Classical music is viewed in one space; hip-hop and dance hall reggae and all these other musics… you ever read Theodor Adorno's stuff?

BR: Sort of… the idea of the culture industry breaking down critical consciousness?

PM: That whole critique of high vs. low… These are systems of exclusion and they're also systems [whereby] people are trying to build what they view as the notion of class structure based on music. That's why I like people like Ornette Coleman with his system of Harmolodics. That's why I like people like John Cage and his notion of chance operations. But at the end of the day, it's just being open to the reality that we live in a highly complex, interwoven society where all the boundaries seem ridiculous, if you really just take a step back.

BR: Growing up, what sounds did you hear that stayed with you?

PM: To me it was all go-go. [Go-go is a particular style of funk developed in the Washington, D.C. area in the mid 1970s that enjoyed cult popularity until the early 1980s.] I loved bands like Trouble Funk, EU (Experience Unlimited). It's funny to me that EU now stands for the European Union. So it's stuff like that – seeing kids playing on buckets in front of the White House.

BR: While interviewing Morton Feldman in around the early 1970's, Heinz-Klaus Metzger told him that his (Feldman's) music implied "the postulate that the world must change"; that the world must become a much quieter place in order for people to even begin to listen to his extremely hushed music. I mention this because you have stated an influence upon you (tangential as it may or may not be) by the so-called New York school into which Feldman, Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff have been grouped. I also want to put that sort of question to you, perhaps in another way. Do you feel that your music can be best appreciated in the current world in which we live, and if not, do you feel that your music is capable of changing the conditions of our listening experience?

PM: Wow. Well, I have a relatively cynical view of the human condition, especially after the Bush administration came in. I wonder… I mean, did you ever read 1984? Where you're looking at people with the psychology of a planet that's been conditioned by kinds of control structures, in the way that the United States' pop culture is so powerful. It doesn't matter if you have the biggest army, I think it matters if you have the biggest ideology.

BR: The only emotion allowed [in 1984] is sanctioned hate. They have these hate-ins.

PM: And it's pretty weird how resonant it all is with 1984, Brave New World, stuff like that. Did you ever see THX 1138? [George Lucas' first film]

BR: Oh yeah, massive.

PM: These are the beginning to feel like very totalitarian times, but subtle. And they're far more complicated. They're far more intrusive, and also far more insidious than anything the Soviets could have achieved, mainly because of the power of American media. Pop culture says, "Here's what you need to be – buy it. Here's your identity; it's a cookie cutter identity, but hey, every size fits all." Like that old Henry Ford adage when they were making the Model T Fords. He would say, "You can have any colour of car you want as long as it's black." They just roll it off a production line.

Music should evoke, can evoke and does evoke different ways of thinking. And that's why I think free-jazz was so important during the 1960s, and earlier in the McCarthy era of the 1950s – J. Edgar Hoover and all that. It's a soundtrack to a different way of thinking. That's what I hope my music does. But I also think that it's hard to say that music can be something that's going to all of a sudden come and take away all the pain of the reality of the world we're in. You know? So… It points the way, but people have to try and move themselves.

BR: So back towards the question, do you feel that your music is of this time, or do you think there's something required further down the line for the culture at large to really accept what you're doing? If you wanted that… and I'm not saying that it isn't accepted now, there are obviously a great number of people who are really into what you're doing.

PM: I wouldn't say that anything's required. I would say that my music is kind of trickster-ism with the reality we live in, and by pointing out to the world a sound world that doesn't exist, it leaves them sitting on the edge of the hypothetical. And that's what sampling does anyway. It takes sounds that you're familiar with, throws them out of their context, splices and dices them, and puts them back to you saying, "Well, what if? What if this happened and this became this and that?" My music's definitely a soundtrack for a sort of audio picture.

Again and as I keep pointing out – as above, so below. The Bush administration, and the idea of propaganda, ideological warfare – these are all issues that are being worked out in music as well.

There's a famous Ferrucio Busoni essay, "Towards the Music of the Future." [Is he referring to "Sketch of a New Esthethic of Music", 1907?] And then there's Luigi Russolo's book The Art of Noise. But both of them were thinking about this idea of sound as being completely immersed in a system of relations. And what I'm doing with hip-hop and electronic music is pointing out the fact that it's all interwoven.

And so all these names are arbitrary, and all the signs that we use to represent the sounds, and all the ways that people relate to sound, it's just a specific codification. At the end of the day, it is what you make of it. And that's what sampling says. It's like, look you can take a sort of public memory and make your own private version.