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11.26.2007 Thoughts on curating culled from an essay by Arthur C. Danto on "The Whitney Biennial, 1989." The job of the curator is to "probe ____________________________________________________________________________________________________
11.20.2007 The Ear to the Earth blog of the Electronic Music Foundation is up and running. I added a post here and will be posting something each week, give or take, on the intersection between sound and the environment. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 7.22.2007 Atrophy. I saw an outstanding installation last year at Flux Factory which I've been thinking about in light of some 20th century critiques of technology. The installation, called FluxBox, was a series of sound-producing kinetic sculptures which, when cranked into motion via a pickle battery at the entrance of the piece, constituted a giant walk-in music box. Each kinetic sculpture was comprised of ordinary objects, everything from bicycle wheels to bottle caps to old instruments; each component looked like it had been collected from a junkyard or culled from an attic or garage sale. Labyrinthine configurations of pulleys, magnets, balloons, wires, etc. connected the objects and produced the sound for each sculpture. In one corner a plunger rotated a wheel strung with keys over a metal bar, producing crystalline sounds as each key steadily struck its neighbor. A xylophone outlined a major chord with a single non-harmonic tone, creating a cheerful melody that sung out over an orchestra of percussive sounds made by the other sculptures. The installation artists made no attempt to hide these Goldbergian processes of sound-production; they didn't smooth it all under a sleek interface. Instead the intricate workings of every sculpture spilled from the seams, the unknown universe of mechanics peaking out in gleeful disarray. I found that there was something cathartic about watching the confusing interactions of pulleys, cranks, and circuitry, the profusions of bright wire. In music-box fashion, though, each cycle of the 16-bar melody began to slow down and get softer as one walked through the installation. As the dill pickle converted its last gasps of energy, the sculptures started to fail: the plunger didn't have quite enough force to turn the wheel, a plastic hand that had been lowered periodically to strike a key on a toy piano couldn't quite make it. One by one, the sculptures' sound producing mechanisms started to go awry, slow down...stop: the "center could not hold." The combination of child-like sounds (the clanky and unproblematic melody) and the slowing-down processes were a powerful reminder: everything decays. Things fall apart, machines age, stop working. Stuff happens. A lot of the Frankfurt School critiques of technology center around modern man's alienation from the world. Modern man can't keep up with "how things work"--many have only the slimmest notions about everyday occurrences, like the complex mechanisms of a car, etc. I'm not as sure as Marcuse et al. that this screws people up or makes them so intensely uncomforable. But I think there's enough truth to it to point to why FluxBox was such an astute and comforting work of art. It showed its viewer a bit of how it was working, and made the process seem nostalgic and moving...it's just one way of framing art and technology, but a likable one. _____________________________________________________________________ 6.12.2007 Sent to me by Darcy James Argue: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6.6.2007 The Swedish jazz trio e.s.t. (Esbjorn Svensson Trio) played an incredible set a few Saturdays ago as part of the "Listen Here: Art Music Now" series at Merkin Hall. The group's compositions thrive on innovative genre combinations, integrating acoustic jazz piano with elements of funk, drum n bass, electronica, and the sumptuous harmonic language of post-romantic music. The group uses extended techniques and live processing to create unusual colorations: at one point in the concert one of Svensson's prepared piano ostinati coupled with a lightly-brushed cymbal groove, the prepared piano producing occasional, unpredictable The thing I found most impressive, though, and hope to learn from, is how fluidly each performer transitioned from processed to acoustic sound, and in and out of extended techniques. An enormous amount of was going on, in terms of the sheer quantity and production of different sounds (Svensson plucking piano strings and processing the sound while the bassist played improbable strum/pizz combos, etc)....and yet, everything sounded seamless. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 6.2.2007 Just returned from a satisfying 16-hour stint at the Bang on a Can Marathon. The usual suspects of the contemporary music ensemble scene, from eighth blackbird to Ethel to the Now Ensemble to the Bang on a Can All-Stars, played alongside a staggering array of "other" new music---from bagpipers to indie-darlings The Books, to what I'm pretty sure was a guy spitting water through a conch shell. (That latter was at 9 am this morning, though, so as I drifted in and out of near-sleep it kind of seemed like a hallucination. The program says Mike Svoboda, conch shell, though, so I guess it happened.) It was goofy and sublime. Some kids from Grand Valley State University did a very nice rendition of Music for 18 Musicians; I got to hear Bang on a Can play with Kyaw Kyaw Naing and his magic drums for the first time. The Books' performance last night was captivating as always, and I got to see a few re-done pieces of video art, which had previously been the bane of Books performances for me. The subject of their videos is largely random snippets of American culture culled from Salvation Army and garage sale VHS tapes; Americana that operates on a sliding scale from quirky to freakish. The subject matter is amazing, capturing spontaneous and strange moments of the Everyday. I had, however, found their videos aesethically blunt on previous occasions. They offer interesting visuals but always seemed pieced together haphazardly. The re-done videos are much better, but I still think the band is largely about the quality of their music. ok, enough rambling. I would write something more comprehensive about the concert, but I'm pretty sure it would be incoherent. Check out my friend's live blogging epic of the concert, instead-- and one little side note. I remembered today that when all-night new music concerts became a tradition at Yale in the 80's (I think while the Bang on a Can composers were there, though I should check), they were referred to as "A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing." Like it. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 5.5.2007 "The idea of space is given...[to the artist] to change if he can." [DeKooning] For the composer it's the idea of silence. Was looking through an old notebook today and found a listing of Aristotle's categories from the Poetics. One of the six struck me for the first time: opsis, or spectacle. As a curator, this category is unusually important to me. Though the point of the concert is to provide the public with complimentary collisions of sounds, I think I've unconsciously sought after visual spectacle, as well. This was especially true in the concert I curated in washington square park, where the chief enjoyment was watching a really random group of people gather and react. If you create a spectacle, people will watch and listen. It's nice, too, that the park concert allows for a non-captive audience. No one is bound to a chair he or she paid $60 for, and no one is feeling pressure to enjoy. It either works, or it doesn't. ______________________________________________________________________________________________
4.10.2007 I've gotten out of the habit of making mix cds for people lately. I like the idea of them, though, and I've found that my main form of musical consumption is similar to the mix cd ethos. I load 10-20 songs onto an ipod shuffle and carry that around for the week. I plug in enormous headphones, and I'm good to go. I get occasional incredulous stares on the subway because of the slightly off headphone to ipod ratio, but that's ok... 1) Roads Become Rivers Rothko (Four Tet remix) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.20.2007 Everyone is someone’s infidel. I sat in on the first annual Ethel Fair at Symphony Space this week, a concert curated by the four inventive composer/musicians of the band Ethel. The program featured multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart, composer Thomas Dolby (of “She Blinded Me With Science” fame), the avant-rock ensemble Electric Kompany, Navajo singer/songwriter James Bilagody, clarinetist David Krakauer, and the kinetic sculpture/automated instrument P.A.M. Band. I had gone primarily to hear Electric Kompany, and so the scope and length of the program came as a bit of a surprise. Combining synth pop, new wave klezmer, Navajo poetry, and Nick Didkovsky (via Electric Kompany), in print, at least, had a “world’s fair” sensibility to it—a kind of cabinet of curiosities. I had a flashback to the Philip Glass Orion spectacle at BAM last year, where Philip Glass invited composers from various world music traditions to collaborate on a long work with him (originally for the Olympics celebrations in 2004). The Glass concert had a pop curatorial “join hands” air that I found incredibly corny. Once the concert was underway, though, I was won over by the program. The sound combinations were strange, but a lot of them worked. Ethel’s wholesome Americana formed a stark contrast to the edgy, driven choices of Electric Kompany, whose renditions of a few of Marc Mellit’s compositions have been among my favorite performances of the past year. Thomas Dolby performed an incredible set, layering his grooves live, singing and accompanying himself on the piano, and all the while triggering sound samples, such as fragments of speeches, etc. The concert featured constantly changing collaborations among the performers, ending in a group jam finale. My favorite pairing was that of Krakauer and Bilagody, with the two performers’ cyclical approach to contour and improvisation forming a surprisingly complimentary set. The star of the concert was Mark Stewart, who not only played electric guitar, banjo, and a sampling of his invented instruments (including the shaladoo, a PVC saxophone), but also sang the immortal “Everyone is Someone’s Infidel,” a song that was a funny and appropriate tie-in to the concert’s theme of otherness. His spirit of invention and craftsmanship permeated the whole event. It was a spectacle, but unlike the Philip Glass Olympic carnival, it was fabulously entertaining. And best of all, the concert was accomplished without an ounce of pretention. The crowd was comprised of a wide sampling of the public, including families and some kids. A general sense of motion and ease prevailed in the crowded hall. Heads were bobbing; there were periodic bursts of laughter as Mark Stewart made weird faces or as Ethel cellist Dorothy Lawson stripped off her concert garb to reveal a short skirt and nurse costume for a Dolby song. Ethel’s choice of the word “fair” is ideal, with its connotations of public entertainment, informal gathering and ebullient atmosphere. So what if the sound pairings were based on the idea of genre-mixing rather than on cross-genre music that actually profits from side-by-side listening? It was a lot of fun, which is an underrated quality in curatorial work. ______________________________________________________________________ 2.6.2007 Composer Alex Temple recently sent me the performance recording of "3 Arms and 17 1/2 Legs" from Three Creatures from the Yale Composers Concert, which I write about, below. I'm going to post it here; I prefer it to the studio recording, which is a little studied. I like performances that border on the reckless; this performance is technically proficient but somehow maintains an impulsive quality that is particularly suited to the composition, with its strange grooves and use of kitsch. With Mark Dancigers on guitar: __________________________________________________________________________________________ 11.26.2006 Someone recently asked me to list the top live concerts I've heard over the past year or two. No easy task, but this is what I came up with... 1) Auktyon @ Joe's Pub 1.2006 2) The Bad Plus @ The Knitting Factory 4.2005 3) Cookie Mongoloid @ Tonic 6.2005 4) Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar @ Lincoln Center 3.2006 5) Dub Trio @ The Vogue, Indy 8.2006 6) Reich @ The Whitney 10.2006 (particularly Alarm Will Sound's Yo Shakespeare) I know I'll probably get some shit for putting Cookie Mongoloid on the list, but I just have to say that you can't really judge them until you've heard them live. _______________________________________________________________________________________ 11.02.2006 Every once and a while a composer comes along who, even in a youthful incarnation, writes a piece that perfectly synthesizes the elements I find most exciting and promising for contemporary music. A relatively rare phenomena (it happened to me twice in my post-graduate career: listening to a 20 second clip of the Freight Elevator Quartet online two years ago, when, ever an enthusiast, I rushed downstairs to announce the future of music to my unsuspecting parents, and again listening to Carla Kilhstedt’s piece at the Bang on a Can People’s Commissioning Fund concert in 2004.) After attending a concert featuring young Yale composers held at the Tenri last weekend, I can gratefully add the experience of listening to Alex Temple’s Three Creatures to my shortlist of listening epiphanies. This piece, scored for electric guitar and electronics, is a showstopper. I’ll start with the second movement, “3 Arms and 17 ½ Legs,” the obvious centerpiece of the three-movement work. Described by Temple as a “maniacally fast prog-industrial electronic piece for guitar,” it’s a striking concoction of impossibly strident guitar riffs and electronic kitsch. The composer has collected lo-fi sounds and then unleashed them into the groove-space of the composition, in a series of energetic collisions. What is most spectacular, though, is that Temple uses kitsch in precisely the way it should be used; his strange electronic tchotchkes invigorate the groove, offsetting its ethos of predictability. For this unlikely feat I’d like to salute Temple as an upcoming Jeff Koons of contemporary music (he was indignant at this comparison, but I think I’ll insist on it). Just as Koons incorporates elements of kitsch in his work in order to startle the ordinary into something extraordinary, so Temple is using kitsch to energize and enliven compositional space. It’s the apotheosis of electronic kitsch, and it creates an undeniable immediacy. Not all of the sounds Temple uses can be attributed to kitsch, though. Some of them are simply unusual. To borrow again from the visual arts for an example, think of the canvases of Cy Twombly, whose love for the unannotated, the marginalia in life, is his extraordinary sensibility. His paintings embrace what we forget: cast-away scribbles, the shapes of obscure things, like cracks in the cement, water stains, the countless mistakes and oblivions of the everyday. These he takes as his grand subject, layering them with ferocious persistence. Take this eclectic energy of the unnoticed in a Twombly canvas and you’ll approach the feeling that Temple evokes in his pieces. While his use of “marginal” sounds is at times hit or miss, the promise of his inventive powers is exhilarating. The third movement of Three Creatures is also worth comment; “Triggerfish” is a gorgeous delay piece reminiscent of Ingram Marshall’s Soepa. Two delays are set into motion, each in a different meter and with ample feedback. Temple’s delay piece is less atmospheric than Marshall’s digital and tape delay pieces, but it compensates by being more strident and vibrant—a little less foggy, if you will. It’s the Soepa that Stravinsky would have preferred. Check out the studio recording on Temple’s site:
____________________________________________________________________________________________ 10.12.2006 C r a z y I overheard Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” in every imaginable location over the summer: in stores of suburban shopping malls, in the street, distantly, as it drifted from apartment windows, in the car while driving late at night, and occasionally at restaurants and parties. I was at a school in Westchester where the construction staff looped the song over and over; it resounded down the hallways. One of my neighbors played “Crazy” so loudly that the well-familiar bass line came reverberating through the walls of my apartment. The song was inescapable. And surprisingly, I liked it. Inspired by the collaboration between DJ/producer Danger Mouse and the rapper Cee-Lo, the single was a hit in basically every country in North America, Europe and Oceania. Audaciously simple, the three essential elements (bass/drums, background vocals, lead vocals), are each executed perfectly, and the song comfortably inhabits several genres (soul, hip hop, spaghetti western soundtrack). Each time I heard it, though, I found myself trying to figure out why this song is so compulsively listenable. Not that it's anything that I think can or SHOULD be pinned down, but just as an exercise in listening... So, here’s the unsatisfying laundry list that I’ve come up with concerning “Crazy.” It has a tight, incessant beat. The drum and bass of the song have a Beethovenian “Es Muss Sein” quality; they’re unstoppable and unrelenting, like the ostinato in the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The beat occupies a different musical register from the shimmering background vocals; there’s a kind of awesome, almost disorienting physical space between them—an ultimate sense of expansiveness. The original spaghetti western song that the duo sampled (“Nel Cimitero Di Tucson” from Django, Prepare a Coffin, 1968) sounds sentimental; in “Crazy” they strip away the dirge-like trumpet and replace it with Cee-Lo’s stunning vocals, punctuating the existing bass line with an emphatic beat. What was corny becomes poignant. The lyrics of the song are a confessional conversation with an unknown Other: And when you’re out there, without care, They accomplish that best trick of lyrics; they are at once evocative and slightly enigmatic. You learn only a few essential scraps of information about the 'lyric I' and the unknown 'you,' just enough to pick up a suggestion of the interaction between two people. Wallace Stevens claims that a good poem must “almost successfully resist the intellect.” This has always been my litmus test for good lyrics, too: “Crazy” hits this perfectly; the lyrics are oracular yet provide enough substance so as to make them nearly universal. The song uses refrain and reiteration to ultimate effect: emphasizing issues of longing and persistence. You can’t let go, and why should you? ___________________________________________________________________________________ 7.02.2006 c a r t e r / p o r t e r
"The division...does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos."
"Gaiety, diligence, and freedom, a freedom from old constraints of perspective and subject matter, a freedom to embrace and memorialize the world anew, a fearless freedom drenched in light: this was what I took away, each time..." I was a little offended by the characterization, though I immediately recognized that there was nothing original about it. Certainly Porter and Carter are strikingly different composers, and a critic should have no problem with labeling them differently. What stuck with me, though, was that the pro-Carter composer argued that this division is still in place today and extends through all of the contemporary arts. I was left a little uneasy: what did the overly obvious outline of this composer’s argument have to do with the exhilarating plurality of art today? When I listen to contemporary music, I don’t hear “art music” vs. “popular music,” but rather the “freedom from old constraints” that Updike enthuses over above in his inspired early encounters with modern art. Contemporary artists dip into an ever-expanding circle of choices; it’s the good (if somewhat daunting) news for young artists of today. The chief problem with the art music/popular music model is that one often fences in (or protects) art that is uninteresting because it is created under a cultural profile that marks it as "art" (knowledge, technique, continuation of tradition, etc.), while simultaneously refusing to recognize popular works of art even when they are incredibly good. While there’s undoubtedly an economic distinction between art music and popular music, the cultural and aesthetic implications of this composer’s argument caricature the art scene today. An increasingly large cross-section of contemporary music (and contemporary art in general) leans towards a powerful synthesis of “popular” and “art” elements. Luckily for us the history of aesthetics is packed with artists and taste-makers with like-minded objections. I've always been particularly drawn to Poulenc's music; his compositional godfather, Satie (the leader of a movement inspired by Jean Cocteau's Le Coq et L'Arlequin, 1918) had strong objections to the artificial elevation of "serious" music. Instead, impurity was valued; boundaries were crossed. Jazz and popular idioms provided an infusion of fresh compositional materials. This is not to argue that great art doesn’t owe to tradition. It does; but not, I think, to the pure tradition that defenders of art music presume to champion. The great excitement for an artist today is the impurity of our tradition. Willem de Kooning's Woman I of 1952 owes as much to the American playboy as to the curves of Ingres; his sense of line is derived as much from commercial signage as from the Dutch academy where he studied. His outrageous siren has now been appropriated by the art world, but its impact relies on influences outside of that world’s narrowly defined “tradition.” The painting violates high art, and yet, with its blurred boundaries and ambiguities, it is great art. A work of art’s place in the continuation of “tradition,” then, is not sufficient grounds for calling it art. I thought back to Carter v. Porter. The pro-Carter guy’s distinction was clear: too clear. Most critics attempt to define “art” of the moment in terms of a narrowly channeled tradition. The most acute thinkers (predominately in the field of aesthetic philosophy) have more correctly reasoned that the means of making art are never sufficient for explaining what is or is not art. I think of this as the “who cares?” strain of aesthetic criticism. My favorite example is T.S. Eliot’s protest over the difference between free verse and metric verse. Eliot's "Reflections on Vers Libre" fumes over the tendency of poets to give free verse privileged status as art simply because it shakes off all trace of meter and rhyme, objecting to the prevailing notion that free verse is the only acceptable choice for a "modern" poet. Eliot argues that it is impossible to escape from meter in language: even when language is less highly formalized, the tension between the presence and absence of metric elements defines great poetry. In other words, there is no such thing as entirely free verse. Eliot's point is significant because his method of observation is easily applicable to all of the arts: even when an artist defies normative approaches it is in deformation that aesthetic experience clicks into place. Artists trade in patterns: any slash on the canvas is a something in lieu of nothing, any sound is pattern displacing silence. The point then, for Eliot, was not whether poetry was "free verse" or not, but whether it was "good verse" or not. This, I think, is the most useful reply to the debate on the separation between art music and popular music. Who cares whether music is popular or not? Is it good or not? In the case of Porter v. Carter, I'd argue that both artists have created good art, and popularity is beside the point. In many respects this conversation about art music and popular music is not all-important. Young composers will continue to dip into the plurality of means available. I'm not worried about composers, then, but I think the cause for discussion lies in how we program our concerts. For those who would define the "scene" of contemporary music: why not borrow a little from the ingenious synthesis of a contemporary artist? Why not be open to shifting, unpredictable results and unusual collisions? Why not program with less specific attention to genre? With less attention to art music v. popular music? I can see two possible advantages. First, programming music that is to some extent popular bestows an undeniable economic advantage on the "art music" concert. One need only remember the price of tickets hawked on ebay for the Meredith Monk concert at Carnegie Hall, a concert that featured Bjork and DJ Spooky (as well as the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, though ordinarily a classical music ensemble wouldn't account for the inflated ticket costs). More importantly, though, programming complimentary music from either side of the divide helps to develop the public's sense of aesthetics. Some "serious" music requires more than a passive introduction; would the uninitiated enjoy a Cage prepared piano sonata if hearing it for the first time in conjunction with Four Tet? I'd like to think so.
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