Tag: music

Tape Music

I like tape music. Here’s an easy definition: music composed for tape, CD or other recording medium. Wasn’t that easy? If I write music that only exists on a recording and it isn’t played live, that’s tape music. I write load of tape music. It’s easy and fun. Record some synthesizer sounds, tweak them in protools and viola! tape music.
but all the calls for scores these days want “electroacoustic” music. What does that mean? some folks say it means musique concrete. It’s always good to define jargon in terms of other jargon. I know it’s why folks love computers. Anyway, musique concrete is an extinct French school of tape music where sounds from real life were recorded and used to make tape music. No synthesizers allowed. Americans liked using synthesizers and not found sounds. After a while, the two nations put their differences aside and started using synth and found sounds together. We all ate French toast to celebrate.
But dark days are here again and once again the US and France are split. The high-art world, as always, is taking the French side. American mavericks like John Cage (and me of course) are being ignored! Why no calls for scores for tape music that’s electronic? I like electronic sounds. My dog never starts inexplicably barking on electronic recordings. Airplanes flying overhead do not interfere. No freeways, no computer fan, no refrigerator, no doorbells, no dishwasher, no fistfights between my cohabitants, nothing but the electronic sounds. And I don’t need to invest in good microphones or pre-amps.
I’m looking at a call fro atpes right now that wants “acousmatic” music. I don’t know what that word means either. Clearly, I’m ignorant. I blame the American education system. I don’t know the capital of Wyoming either. Although the devious, French pacifists behind these musical terms don’t know the capital of Wyoming either, so I’m only two points behind them. It’s very hard to google a definition for electroacoustic, but this one I’ve had more luck with. Clearly,

Acousmatic music is a particular kind of tape music. To quote Jonty: “Acousmatic music on the whole continues the traditions of musique concrete and has inherited many of its concerns. It admits any sound as potential compositional material, frequently refers to acoustic phenomena and situations from everyday life and, most fundamentally of all, relies on perceptual realities rather than conceptual speculation to unlock the potential for musical discourse and musical structure from the inherent properties of the sound objects themselves – and the arbiter of this process is the ear.”

An acousmatic piece, then, grows upwards from the sounds used in the piece, rather than downwards from an overall concept. Because acousmatic pieces grow upwards from the sounds, they represent a “qualitative” and “organic” approach to composition, according to Jonty, as opposed to the “quantitative” and “architectonic” thinking of much traditionally notated music, and also much electronic music.

Diffusion, in this context, is a electroacoustic performance art. It is the practice of taking a (typically) two-channel piece and playing it back on many more than two speakers, the performer manipulating the spatial distribution of sound in real time. Jonty considers that this approach represents an organic approach to space in opposition to an architectonic approach, where an 8-channel work (say) is played back over an 8-channel speaker system and all the spatial placing of sounds is worked out in advance.

(from http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/ACMA/AcousmaticExperience.htm) Well, that clears everything up. but wait, there’s more! http://www.electrocd.com/notice.e/9607-0002.html says, “An English neologism, which comes from the French acousmatique , has its origins with Pythagoras (6th century BC) who was (it is said) delivering his�uniquely oral�teaching behind a curtain to prevent his physical presence from distracting his disciples, allowing them to better concentrate exclusively on the content of his message. ” While my education was skipping Wyoming, it certainly wasn’t spending the saved time on the classics. That quote is from a paper (at the above link) about the definition of “acousmatic.” A whole paper. somebody else wrote a whole book about it! http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~muswlw/pubs/wlwthesis/wlwthesis_ToC.html A Perceptual Approach to the Description and Analysis of Acousmatic Music It’s a PhD thesis. which explains the recent spike in calls for scores for this kind of work. Clearly, they need to find out if their grad students are just making stuff up or if there’s actually folks making this kind of music. The internet defeats them. I got a call for scores. I saw a new term, I googled it, I got the paper, I read the paper and then I made music to conform to the paper’s thesis. It becomes real when it’s written down. It’s so post-modernist I could cry. this is like a monument to my generation.
the most popular definition seems to be “Acousmatic sound is sound one hears without seeing their originating cause – a invisible sound source. Radio, phonograph and telephone, all which transmit sounds without showing their emitter are acousmatic media.” (from http://www.filmsound.org/chion/acous.htm) How this is different from my good old fashioned tape music, I don’t know. sometimes you have to invent new terms to get rid of all the fakers and folks not keeping up with the lastest things. That might be me.
I still have no idea if any of my existing songs qualify as electroacoustic or acousmatic. What’s clear here is that I really do need a graduate education, because I don’t seem to know enough about tape music.

Post-tonal Punk

So last night at band practice, I was a little inebriated and I was playing stacatto tritones in the bassline (and distinctly remembering Steve Steiberg, my highschool Jazz Band Teacher telling me to play legato and play the root or the fifth on downbeats) and I think I was in a different time signature than the rest of the band and possibly a different key and all of the sudden I thought,

“If I learned to play Tammy’s fretless bass, I wouldn’t even need to play in the same tuning system as everybody else.”

The only drawback would be if I got addicted to fretless and then Tammy wanted her bass back.

and now for my latest blog novel!

Ok, so i’ve been writing too much lately. but you know, i spent a lot of time thinking, so it seemed like a good idea.
Wednesday, the 19th was my work in the Other Minds tape archive day, and so I did and it was uneventful. Thursday was my work in the Other Minds office day and it was uneventful and long. We didn’t leave till after 7:00, but we didn’t get there very early. I finally exchanged my binaural mics for some omni directional ones and so i was secretly recording christi’s office! anyway, they had me print and stuff envelopes. sometime soon, i’ll use it to record the sounds of BART for the singapore thing we’re doing with Jenya.
CHristi is doing an arrangement of Lou Harrison’s King David’s Lament for the OtherMinds festival. She is compining the original version and the choral versions. It will be sung by a solo tenor and then the SF Opera Chorus and then the SF Gay Men’s Chorus. She says it’s really hard work, becuase it’s Lou and she is treating it with so much respect. She’s certainly spent many hours on it. And at the end of the OM office day, folks were looking at the program, making last minute changes before it went to the printers. There was an argument about whether to credit Christi as the arranger. You’ve seen credits in programs and movie credits. It says: “Some Song by Jow Blow arr. Jane Blew”. That “arr” is the arranger. That’s what credit looks like. I’ve been reading an orchestration book (“orchestration” is another word for “arranging” and it’s useful for composing, anyway) and one of the first things it says is how to credit an arranger, specifically yourself for your own work. It would be unheard of to not credit an arranger! good lord. so we’re talking about Seattle.
Our toy piano is gone. It’s being played in a concert tomorrow night. it’s very exciting.
And our clothes washer caused a small flood. Tiffany heroically and quick-thinkingly, took fast action and saved equipment and OM archive tapes from getting wet. But all of my formerly clean socks were impacted. Every one of them. We called some guys to come out and repair it. I should not have dropped my spanish class. Arg. Anyway, they took a bunch of pieces of it away again and said they could come back with new parts on tuesday. the thing ran ok, it just slowly fills up with water when not going. so it would have been possible to turn off the water when not in use and still be able to wash all of my formerly-clean socks. except that the repair guys took the parts. anyway.

don’t quit your day job

Indeed. It doesn’t matter if you’re so cool that somebody in holland wants to do a festival of your stuff (which is happening for Ellen Fullman. she’s in Europe right now talking about it.), you can’t quit your day job. So I’ve spent some time thinking of how to fix this problem. after all, an internationally recognized composer/performer should be past the career point where she has to make sacrifices for art. Those sacrfices should be paying off by now.

there is not enough money allocated for New Music in the USA.

Why not? Modern art museums are popular and enjoy civic support. But comparable music centers, like the opera, while they also get community support, don’t tend to perform new works very often. There are no civic music organizations that exist to showcase 20th and 21st century music. what organizations do exist, like Other Minds aren’t an institutional part of the region and rely very largely on private donations (although they do get NEA grants). Since they’re not “faith-based,” nor an offical piece of San Francisco or the region, this is unlikely to change. therefore, capitalism is to blame.
When the proletariat rise up, then artists will be able to persue their art. a person will be a stone mason in the morning, a poet in the afternoon, a composer in the evening and a garmet worker the next day! but in the mean time…
the Other Minds festival is really cool. (christi will be arranging one of the pieces in the festival! Really! It’s so cool!) But the Other Minds festival is expensive. so is the opera, which does get a chunk of public money. Classical music is therefore an elitist, burgeouis fetish!
Nope. Operas lose money. Every opera always loses money. When Phillip Glass did einstein on the Beach, he sold out every performance, got rave reviews, and tried t keep ticket prices affordable. IIRC, he ended up being over $100K in debt. Other Minds also loses money. They bleed red ink every year. Ticket sales and public moneys don’t come close to matching production costs. Which leads one to wonder why Metalica and The Three Tenors can fill up stadiums and be profitable. Firstly, there are a lot fewer people needed to make The Three Tenors happen than it takes to put ona whole opera. Less costume design. Less stage design. Also, they do it in a stadium, which has very poor acoustical properties (sounds terrible), but holds a whole lot of people who pay $25 and up to get in. Those ticket prices aren’t affordable either. Maybe The Three Tenors are a burgeouis fetish! (I think I will refer to them as such from this moment forward). Also, they are not only willing to compromise their art by playing in a stadium, they actually have the draw to fill it up. Metalica is in basically the same situation. Meanwhile, Other Minds won’t be able to completely fill the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre every night that they’re there. Also, because it’s only a single event, rather than a touring group, the travel costs are higher on a per-show sort of basis. One of the guys is coming from Down Under. If he were playing ten shows in an Other Minds tour, his travel expenses could be possibly recouped as the Other Minds tour bus crossed the West coast. But instead, one conert is suppossed to pay for everything.
So why do the Three Tenors and Metalica fill stadiums? why is their audience so much larger? It’s name recognition and especially radio play. Metallica gets played on the radio because listeners know their music, like it, want to hear more of it, and will listen to an ad for soda pop while waiting for the songs to come on. new Music doesn’t get radio play. Because listeners don’t know it. Because it doesn’t get radio play.

Catch-22?

It may be more complicated than that. In the Bay Area, some college music stations play Noise and some “high art” New Music. Also, until ten or fifteen years ago, KPFA played quite a bit of New Music. so in some radio markets, listeners can and do listen to noise and New Music. Two of the best stations for this, KALX (UC Berkeley) and KFJC (Foothill Community College) often win awards for being the most popular eclectic stations in the area. Since they often give Noise prominent time slots, it seems likely that playing it contributes to their popularity. So if it’s popular, it follows that people would be willing to listen to soda pop ads in between songs, which means it would be commercially viable for profit-driven stations to play it. but they don’t. why not?

Homogeny is not a term for “lesbian,” but homogyny would be.

there are no commercial, eclectic stations in the Bay Area. This is one of the top ten radio markets in the USA. Very few stations are locally owned, if any are. they are owned by Disney, Clear Channel, etc. Gigantic corporations own our airwaves. There used to be rules about how many stations in a market could be owned by one company. Clinton got rid of those. As stations like Live-105 got purchased by corporate giants, their local programming decreased and their coverage of smaller acts also decreased. Now, their playlist is set by folks who may not live here and is the same playlist used by many other stations across the country. the DJs may not live here. things are centralized. The radio stations are paid thousands of dollars by record companies when they pick up a Major-label song and start playing it (this commission is funnelled through folks called “indies” so as to skirt payola laws. But clear channel owns the indies now too, so they get to keep all the money, sicne the indies used to keep half the cash. anyway, it’s payola and if it’s legal, it’s on the barest of technicalities.). It’s cheaper to do things centrally and you get to pocket all of that major label money. this creates obstacles for Noise Mucisians and folks into New Music. Very few New Music composers are out on major labels. Also, while noise plays well out in the Bay Area, it might not play so well in other parts of the country and it might not be able to sustain an audience if it plays on a station all day, every day. an eclectic format weakens brand identity. A rock station is a rock station is a rock station. Consistency of product means no surprises for consumers and it’s easier for corps to advertise.
there are “high art” classical stations, but they don’t play new music either. they play nothing newer than the Romanic period. the local classical station, KDFC (rumored to be Mormon-owned) advertises that it’s relaxing. then they play ads for Lexus. They’re better than many classical stations in the country, because they play minor-key movements. Many classical stations play only happy, major key movements, so you never hear more than one movement of a work when you listen. Christian groups call this “light classical” and highly endorse it as free from the influence of Satan.

Pablum for the Masses

Almost every commercial station plays music that’s soothing or relaxing. Ok, maybe Metallica isn’t exactly soothing, but it’s certainly not challenging. And KDFC practically brags that their music could put you to sleep! Why is commercial music auditory soma? There’s two possible answers that I can think of.

Work Ethic

Americans work more house than anyother country on Earth. We’ve outpaced the stereo-typically work-a-holic Japanese. (I like the term “work-a-holic.” It’s rediculous. Like people acually want to work insanely long hours or two jobs and it’s not just so they can get by. hahahaha! It’s by choise! right! anyway). People work super-long hours, possibly two jobs and they have to commute to these jobs. sice public transit system might inhibit the sales of SUVs, the few areas that have decent public transit often underfund it, so most folks have to commute by car. The news they listen to while they spend maybe two hours a day coming and going from their ten to twelve hours of employment (possibly with unpaid overtime, for “exempt” non-union workers), tells them that terrorists are going to blow up the bridge they’re on (while stuck in traffic) and the traffic reports suggest that maybe they should have just stayed at work an extra couple of hours rather than go out in this mess. Injury accidents have killed 15 workers and, well, you get the point. then they need to find food, try to spend time with their families, do chores, clean the house, run errands, etc. At the end of a day like that, do you want to listen to new and challenging music? Or the three tenors?

the Children are our Future

Teenagers still have some free time, though. I keep reading that they have more homework than ever and more scheduled events than ever before, but I’d like to hold out some hope that they still have time to listen to music. MTV still exists, so they must. Also, it seems to me that a lot of folks form musical tastes that will last a lifetime when they’re young. If you like the Beattles when you’re 15, chances seem to be that you’ll like them for the rest of your life. so all we have to do is get teenagers listening to Noise, New Music and Contemporary Classical.
It’s a curious thing, though. When I was young and impressionable, advertisements used to tell me that Classical Music was totally uncool. Unhip. I always thought this was an aside as advertisers vainly tried to figure out how to appeal to us young-uns. And this is probably true to a certain extent. If millions of teenagers decided they loved Micheal Nyman and Phillip Glass, the corporate media would bend over backwards to give it to them. The composers would be approached to hawk tennis-shoes and soda pop. and if they were too principled to do it, some now-quite-as-edgy ripoff band would be happy to do it.
Most music is put together by record executives. once in a while, something new emerges from College radio, like Nirvana did, but I think most songs are from established acts. and may of these acts were assembled b industry insiders who know what’s popular and how to put together a sure-thing. So as soon as something new comes out, folks are copying it. and those folks sound a bit more mainstream and formulaic. And eventually a formula is developed and a producer can quickly put togther an album by following the formula. this isn’t challenging, but it’s a garunteed way to make a buck.

More sinister plans?

It’s possible that the giant corporations that control the media don’t want kids to think challenging thoughts. I mean, our crazy work schedules and lame corporate art doesn’t prevent people from going to Modern Art Museums. The MOMAs are popular. People clearly have an interest in seeing new things. If they want to see new things, it’s entirely possible that they want to hear new things too. Classical music, even classical music that’s 300 years old is complicated. Old music is still challenging if you’ve never been exposed to it before. Advertisers, in their quest to sell breakfast cerial, tell kids to stay away from challenging music. It’s possible that they don’t want kids to expect music to be challenging. Maybe kids that were used to inspired performances of complicated music would lose their patience from corporate schlock-rock and preformulated pop songs. Maybe they would expect more from music. Maybe their tastes would change even more unpredictably. Maybe they would start thinking more about media.
you can argue that it’s elitist to say that classical music requires more thinking than other forms. So substitute new jazz for new classical. It’s still more thought-provoking than Britney Spears and more visceral and more inspired (when performed well). In any case, classical and new jazz are more complicated than pop tunes. Just like chess is more complicated than connect-4. And chess builds brain-power and critical thinking, and you don’t see advertisements for chess sets either. Also, coincidentally, they’s not enough money for schools or school art programs and corporations aren’t exactly upset about that. but they seem to have definite opinions about whther blowing up Iraq is a good idea.

Critical thinking might make you think critically and critical thinkers aren’t as good at being canon fodder

Cutting money from education is an investment in the future. the future of prisons. Seriously, folks in college classes study about social planning and they learn that when you cut money from education, you know that you will have to spend more money on prisons later on. Look at California. the modern prison-boom started 20 years after Regan. and prisons are profitable. You get money for construction. You can get cheap prison labor. The prisoners are captive audince, so you can charge them more than $3/minute to use pay phones (which phone companies do in California prisons). There’s corporate profits all the way around!
Would chess and new Music keep kids from eventually going to jail? Um. I have no idea. but you wouldn’t want to establish a pattern would you.

We must overthrow the capitalist system!

In the ols days, the government paid for tthe arts. In these old days, the government were feudal lords. the patronage system finaced the composition of New Music. Sicne the patrons were the government, this was a government function. when Alan Smith proposed switchng to a capitalist syetm to do everything, he specifically said that the arts should be exempted from this change because the arts were valuable and might not survive if viewed as just another commodity. This bit of advice apparently didn’t make it into the USA edition of The Wealth of Nations or we chose to ignore it. either way, governments are suppossed to support art and ours isn’t.
In the thirties, we had the WPA and tons of art was created. Those days are gone. the NEA gets smaller every year because conservatives hate art. Why? Maybe because art isn’t conservative by nature. Laura bush cancelled her little poetry thing becuase she suddenly discovered that most good poets are pacafists. (Does being good at persuits like poetry, art and music make you more likely to be leftist? it seems to. why?) Art is challenging! art asks questions! Art makes people think. Conservatives, or rather, reactionaries, don’t appeal to people’s higher natures. they appeal to gut emotions and unthinking, simplistic responces to complex problems. Well, this is true of all politicians. So we can see where our arts funding went. (Remember too, that corporations, including those that own radio stations and record companies have a tendency towards conservativism.)

Private Patronage

Ever since somebody decided that taxes were a tool of Satan and could only be levied to pay for bombs, private charities ahev assumed responcibility for many public works. Before you know it, your city will be hosting a telethon to pave the roads. In the mean time, we rely on private donors to aid those in pverty and to fund the arts. both of these things are the responcibility of the government by rights. but our government has switched over to supporting corporations only. and corporations are basically feudal and anti-democratic. therefore, the haeds of corporations are functioning as our feudal government. you can see this is true by looking at the white house right now. Anyway, it means those guys should be acting personally as patrons and keeping artists and composers in their employ. And really, since we’ve decided to run our government through private donations, the middle class should be giving money to arts foundations. and they are, but it’s not enough. Too much money is being diverted to build bombs.

Low budjet Patronage

Want to comission me to write a song for you? I’ll work for pretty cheap. You’re only turnging 50 once, so why not celbrate witha song written especially for the occasion? Your marraige is the begining of a new life for you. It deserves a new song to accompany it. Comissioning music can be surprisingly affordable. come to our website and you can browse through composers in a variety of price ranges and styles. then, we’ll help you find performers in your area. What better way to show off your equisite taste than by commissioning a piece of new music.
This is one solution. the down side is that we wouldn’t be lapdogs to the rich, we would be lapdogs to the upper-middle class. It seems worse somehow, but maybe that’s classism on my part.
I don’t have a better solution aside from socialist revolution. some smart arts advocacy group is putting up billboards that say “Art” Ask for More” and “Art: Are you getting your fair share?” This seems like a good idea, but I don’t know how it can compete with the likes of Clear Channel. And since the billboards are often owned by Clear Channel, well, it’s putting money in the enemy’s pocket.

Three Paths to Art

In the end, I was only able to figure out three methods for musicians to be able to quit their day jobs.

  • Inherit Money It worked for Thomas Buckner and me! Maybe it can work for you!
  • Leave the country Most first-world countries have money for art. Maybe you can get some.

I forgot number three! ack. I should have made notes before wiriting this!
This is not as important as poverty or agressive, imperialist warfare, but it’s still important. and these issues may be linked. something must be done about this.

and then what happened?

Well, then, on the morning of February 14th. christi and I took the train back to Portland. the train was nice and had miles of leg room. We went bowling that night with Renne on account of it being her birthday. All of her Portland dyke friends are kind of good bowlers, which is something to consider when considering the Pacfic Northwest. After bowling, we got fondue. the next day, christi and i went to Powells and got too many books. I still haven’t read all the books I got from the visit before that. the music section is too much temptation, but they had no Esperanto books, except one mighty expensive one.
we sat in front of the fireplace and I started writing a symphony. then Matthew returned to Portland, after being expelled from the South Bay. Despite this occurance, he seemed well. Happy, friendly, at ease, (balanced if you will) and otherwise, also balanced. Looking good. It’s always good to see Matthew doing well. He’s a nifty guy. Also, he seems not to bear a grudge as far as I can tell, and that’s also a very good thing. since he’s family and all. anyway, I was glad to see him.
And then we came back on Sunday. Yesturday, I started one of the tape and Cello pieces, at least the tape part. I found an old recording I made in March of 2001. I had just gotten a new toy microphone and for some reason, I spent half an hour recording myself talking about my mom. So I’m pulling samples out of it, right now, I’m grabbing out very time I said, “my mom” and am going to loop them, but I’ll pull out more stuff too. At some point I was talking about how my family was dying off and how my missed all her dead relatives. (Basically, everyone she remebered from her childhood except her brother died. I can relate to this because, like her, I’m also experiencing a shortage of family members. I thin it might be related.) anyway, there’s prolly good samples about that. Also, my grandma was still alive when it was recorded, so there’s a section about taking my mom and grandma to see a symphony for mothers day and the kind of music that my mom likes. Christi will write a slurpy, lamenting cello line to go over the tape. I think the human condition is fundamentally sad, because one day everyone you love will die or leave you or you will die or leave them. why people want to increase misery through violence (and pverty, which is also violence), I do not understand. Anyway, it would be cool to do a series of lamentations, drawing a connection between the inevitability of death and the needlessness of war. those things are strongly connected in my mind. Why kill people? They’ll all die on their own eventually. The trick is to avoid cliches and lameness. Pauline Oliveros and the Kronos Quartet have both recorded excellent anti-war pieces incorporating sobbing, gunshots, screaming, etc. the trick is to do it well, it would be terrible to take sounds of mourning and put them ina cheap, poorly constructed context. so this project is definitely adequately challenging.

Back from the Pacific Northwest

I got back Sunday night from the Pacific Northwest. I know you are all anxious to hear about my exciting adventures. Of course, Christi already chronicled them, probably better than me, but here goes anyway.

February 12, 2002

Flew into Portland last night and drove up to Seattle this morning with Christi and her parents. We went to Pike’s Market. It’s a famer’s market, a fish market and a bunch of shops, bot no chain stores. It was nifty and interesting. Also, it goes on every day, which is very cool (and must compete with grocery stores quite a bit). Christi wanted to buy a hat for Owen, but didn’t. Poor owen will have to wait until we go back in april.
then we went to Jack Straw Productions, where we heard our pieces on the toy piano nonette. It sounds much better on the toy pianos than it did in MIDI realizations. the room is small and very live (that’s sound engineer jargon for “echo-y”) so the pieces really fill up the space, but apparently it sounds good in dead (that’s sound engineer jargon for “not echo-y”) rooms too. Joan Rabinowitz, who I met at a confrence last spring and who is the director of Jack Straw, took us on a tour of the building. they have two nice studios and two control rooms. One big and one small of each. They’ve got macintoshes running protools, but also have other tape technology, including analog reel-to-reel. Everything is labelled in Braille, because blind kids come in and do production work. Apparently they really dig the reel-to-reel machine. there’s also a small room of KRAB radio archives. (KRAB was a community radio station, but is no more.) There are many fewer tapees in the archive than KPFA, but the tapes are worse organized and may be in worse shape. they have no production facilities like Fantasy in Seattle, so no professional service can do tape baking for them. (Tape baking: sometims, when tapes get old, the glue that holds the magnetic material to the plastic strip corrodes and the magnetic material falls off, taking all of the sound recording with it. If the tape is heated (I think it’s 200 degrees F for ten hours, but I don’t really know), the glue can temporarily rebind long enough for the tape to be played once, so it can be backed up to something else.)
We checked into our hotel and then went back to Jack Straw (the name has nothing to do with British politicians, btw, the director is a pacifist) to hear Trimpin speak. (Trimpin is the guy who thought up and built the nine toy piano juke box.) Ellen Fullman was there. She was a featured composer at the Other Minds festival last year, and I the driver for that festival. she asked Christi and I why we were in town. christi said, “we came up for this.” Ellen replied, “You did not!” Ellen is also in the Klavier Nonette but hadn’t noticed Christi’s and my names on the list.
Trimpin talked about sonic sculptures and building controllers for them. Before computers, he used player-piano-roll sort of technology. Now, he custom builds processors to control celenoids. His stuff is made out of a lot of scrap-yard pieces. The toy pianos were all broken. many were purchased from ebay and the shipping costs often exceeded the price.
We listened to Ellen’s peice. (Janice Gitech, who was a presenter at the same confrence when I met Joan was also hanging around. It’s the old-girls-network or something). Ellen’s piece uses 64th notes. One piano will start a phrase and another will start the same phrase one 64th note later. It sounds like an auto harp, the notes are definitely sperated, but a 64th note is a very short duration. Her piece has a nice use of spaces and silences. It’s interesting nd beautiful. It’s also her first traditionally notated piece. We went out to dinner with her. Christi’s parents thought that we had just met her that evening. they also thought we had just met Joan. they were confused as to why people kept hugging us if we had just met them. Maybe they’re just friendly. anyway, there’s going to be a festival of Ellen’s work in holland. A whole festival of her and folks collaborating with her. It sounds very exciting.

Consonance / dissonance

It’s a small step from equal temperment to total dissonance. Have you ever noticed how all the melodic composers are in to alternate tunings? This because equal temperment is just out of tune. It doesn’t sound that way to me and maybe you, because we’re used to it. But consonant folks can hear it. So they experiment with just intonation, new tunings, historical tunings, anything to fix the out-of-tuneness of the equally tempered system.
Tuning ought to be built on fractions. This note vibrates three times, during the time this other note vibrates two times. Equal temperment has no fractions. It’s based on the twelfth root of two. An octave, from any note, is excatly twice the frequency of the octave below. A chromatic step from a note whose frequency is N, the frequency of the next higher note is N+N*2^^(1/12). Got that? This is not a fraction.
So everyone used to equal temperment is used to tuning that is not fraction based. Every other tuning in the world, as far as I know, is fraction-based. Our tuning is weird and artifical. It always sounds somwhat out of tune, so as to avoid ever sounding completely out of tune. The charecter of older pieces of music suffers for this. But furthermore, we lose a reference point for consonance. A fifth should sound completely consonant. But in equal tempermant, it’s not because the fractions are off. It should be a fraction of 3/2, but it’s something different. If you graph the frequencies, they don’t cross at Y=0, even though they should. Since everything is out of tune, everything is in tune. You lose track of consonance completely. After a while, it sounds just dandy to put a tritone in the bass line. Can’t decide on a fourth or a fifth? Go in between! It does sound fine and dandy, because the tuning is encouraging it.
All notes are equally valid, you know, like 12-tone rows, because it’s just the obvious direction for equal temerment to go. Tritones are great. minor seconds are great. Sitting in the bass on a minor 6th in a major chord is just as good as anything else.
If you see my band-mates, please pass this along….

Grumpy Update

Yes, I’m grumpy and this is what I’ve been doing:
Christi came home Tuesday night without her laptop. Wednesday morning, we had to go pick up Joe/Zeppie and take him to the OM Tape archives. Apparently, last time it was aproblem because we showed up at 9:02 instead of 9:00 and made the building owners late for something. So we have to be there absolutely by nine and Christi has left Zeppie’s address on her computer, which is in San Francisco. This story is not that exciting. We arrived at 9:00 and spent several hours cataloging stuff, including something called the World Ear Project. Back when KPFA was extra cool, they would just play any sonds that anybody recorded. Tape recorders were kind of expensive then, so they had a smaller number of potential folks sending stuff in, and people who had tape recorders generally knew how to use them, so these are pretty high quality recordings. None of the tapes had numbers, but they all have titles (and the shelfs are numbered). So we were typing things like, Cat eating cat food in a backyard on Regent Street. with the actual address. Part of the reason we’re figuring out what is in the archive is so that we know what’s there, but it’s also so we can go to potential doners and say, “Here’s a fabulous recording that needs to be digitized! Give us the $400 we need to do it!” I’m not sure that this 1971 cat is going to be a big money maker. Christi was joking that we could go knock on the door of that address and see if the persons living there now want to pay for restoring the tape. Charles Amirkhanian glanced at the tape and told us whose house it used to be and a bunch of background. He can look at any tape in the archive, no matter how minimally labelled, and tell you all sorts of things about how and when it was recorded, who was there, what happened, etc. Anyway, he found a tape of the premeire of Lou Harrison’s piece King David’s Lament and got very excited about doing it at the OM9 festival and decided he had to go right away to digitize the tape and left it behind.
So after lunch, we went by his home/studio with the tape and recorded it to protool. Charles did not clean his tape haed at first, until it was questioned about how dirty it might be. Zeppie wanted to photgraph it. There was actualyl a piece of tape stuck to the head. We had already played the Harrison tape a few times when this was noticed. I think the tape might have been degrading with every play…. We spent time trying to mix it there. Maybe and hour. Then I decided maybe it would be better to do it on my own computer.
So I went home with the Pro Tools project and spent an hour or so trying to get the super-optimal mix. Then Christi and I went to Spanish class. The teacher there is obviously spending his non-teaching hours writing a thesis on second language acquistition. He spent the first 45 minutes or one hour of the class talking about how language is acquired. Interesting. I can’t imagine he would beleive in Esperanto as it doesn’t jive with his theories. He told us that the most important conversations we would have with folks would be practical. “Where is the bathroom?” “What’s your phone number?” “What’s your name?” “What’s your passport number?” etc. So we learned some shape named and colors and then he gave us cut out squares, rectangles and circles and some phrases for locating things and had us play battle ship. Then he talked extremely briefly about shops and then gave us lists of clues for where the shops fit into a map that he gave us. He said, “There is only one correct solution as there is only one correct solution for all of my exercizes. . . We can talk about why this is some other time.” La tienda de X es entre A y B. or something. I’m not sure how much spanish I learned, but I feel good about second language acquistion. I think the exercizes would work really well for a lesson 5 in Esperanto. At lesson 5, you’d have some vocalubulary and kinds know how the language works and then you could learn more vocab, like shapes, colors and locations by doing exercizes and you’d probably feel a lot less lost than I did.
Then we went back to Charles’ house with a zip disk of the Harrison piece. He was super-excited because he was reading Lou’s biography and the piece was mentioned, but the biographer didn’t know it had ever been preimered. Apparently, it’s for four hands on the piano and the players interlock arms. The piece is beautiful and is a very moving lament. I wish we could have had it at my mom’s funeral, for example. It’s wonderful. Anyway, Christi was looking at the bio and discovered that a choal version had been recorded in the 80’s and was included with the CD that came with the book. We put on the CD and found a excellently recorded, well produced, much bigger and hiss-free version of the same song. Charles said, “wow! Adn we were wasting time with that rinky-dink piano version!” yes indeed. non-profit is just like for profit, but without the profit.
So I went home and couldn’t sleep and so woke up late for my thursday volunteer in the OM office day and we missed BART so drove in. I could not wake up until I had a double latte. I had one yesterday morning too. I think I’m addicted. Anyway, so they gave me a list of people whose addresses I was suppossed to locate. This list included Lilly Tomlin, Sharon Stone, etc. You always hear about cyber-stalkers. I think they are after people less well-known. I couldn’t even find Lilly Tomlim’s agent. Not that I had an idea of how to search besdies google. I tried searching for “Lilly Tomlin” AND agent, but apparently she is widely quoted in signatures, something on the order of, “I always wanted to be someone when I grew up. I guess I should have been more specific.” Nerds love this quote. So I found many lengthy usenet archives of discussions for AI groups on intellegent agents.
Another guy that I was suppossed to look for was named “Eric Smith.” Whoever suggested him for this list had gone home. Was he a famous photographer? Does he lives in Texas and do topiary as an avocation? Has he writted books on pharmocology? All-righty. So I got through a large chunk of my list. (You can actually find a name and address for a Sharon Stone agent on a geocities site. Is it real? Who knows.) and gave up on the rest and came home and spent 20 minutes eating a banana and petting my dog and went back to Charles’ house for a meeting on the MPR project. This was 7:00 PM.
Minnesota Public Radio wants to air a show on modern music that draws material from the KPFA tape archives. They would give us money to digitize the tapes and possibly pay the people working on it. I got on the list for the project as a sound engineer or producer or composer or something. This show would be broadcast on NPR-affiliates, so people all over the country could hear it, except in much of the Bar Area, cuz KQED doesn’t do music anymore.
So we show up at Charles’ house at 7:00. We assemble in his studio and he says, “why have we called this meeting? What is this about?”
We remind him and on the meeting goes. He set the tone, kind of, with the start. At some point, he told Christi and I took keep a diary, so years from now when we try to remember details of the music scene, or a particular composer, we can go look at our journals and remember stuff. My blog, especially today, is dedicated to that vision. He also said, during an interview that will air tomorrow at 4:00, that peple who wanted to reminis about Lou Harrison could go to the Other Minds website to do so, because there would be kind of a memorial message board. Such a board does not currently exist. Christi does not work on Fridays. Really.
I got home at around 9:45 – 10:00, had a plate of noodles with canned pasta sauce (actually, bottled pasta sauce) and then typed away in my blog. Mitch would be concerned about the pasta, but my lunch was very healthy. There is a wonderful vietnamese restaurant near the OM office. I had string beans with tons of garlic and mushrooms and it came with a salad and wonderful soup (pinapple and vinegar were in it, as well as tamaters and tofu and other vegetable matter) and rice (ok, it was white rice) and an Imperial roll (this is a new phrase for me. It’s a really long fried thing, similar to a spring roll, but bigger). It was great. Especially the soup and garlic beans. The thai place across the street from it also has excellent soup. The mission is a soup neighborhood. I just made that up. I’m tired. I’m grumpy. I want shepherd’s pie and asparagus and artichokes for dinner, but I’m suffering for art.
tiffany is asleep, so I can’t work on my symphony (this situation will persist until digidesign ships digi001 drivers for OSX). Phillip Glass only has time to write music in the mornings, so he would only write down musical ideas that came to him during morning hours and thus trained himself so that now he only has musical ideas in the mornings, or so he wrote in a book that I read. That’s discipline.

Christi says that I am making all the mistakes that new symphony composers make. Apparently, if you have the whole symphony playing at once, you’re kind of assaulting the audience. She says this is a bad thing. She says, “the symphony is the strings. It’s like if you have a dress, the other instruments are just the lace.” I said, ok, I’ll cut the strongs from my thirty second introduction. She said, “No, then it’s like you’re just warpping a person in nothing but lace and it’s all see-through…” The conversation sort of went astray around then…

Lou Harrison died last night. He was a wonderful world music and percussion composer. He had a tremendous impact on classical music. He was also, a warm, talkative and friendly person. This is very sad. I’m glad I got to meet him as the OM 8 driver last year. He talked about local architecture and the SF World’s Fair, for which the Palace of Fine Arts was built and how he first heard Eastern music there and it made him want to compose. He also spoke some Esperanto with me. He claimed to hardly remember it and then rapid-fired off several sentences. My old housemate was his sign language teacher. It used to be very exciting when he would call. World-famous composer calling for my housemate! Anyway, it’s very sad and a big loss for music. He never stopped composing.