Observations-Engagements

I spent most of the day sorting through the papers, publications, and files that have piled up this winter, perhaps in wishful thinking that spring and spring cleaning are on the way. It’s tax time and financial aid day, and I filled out the FAFSA and PROFILE forms online to put in our financial aid requests for another year.

As I went through a stack, I found a program from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert that Lilli and I attended over her Winter break. On Thursday Jan. 14, we went to hear Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” The program included Alban Berg’s “Violin Concerto,” with soloist Kyoko Takezawa.

I had not ear the Berg piece and looked forward to it. Now six weeks later I still remember Miss Takezawa moving, almost contorting her body, throughout the entire piece. There is little if any break for the soloist during the XX minutes of this remarkable piece.

What I remember most–and what Lilli and I both remembered vividly after leaving Symphony Hall, was the last note. One note. I saw Miss Takezawa run the bow down the high string for what seemed to be minutes, without wavering the tone at all, and I wondered in my amazement and awe if she would bow back. She did, without a break.

One high pure exquisite note.

A memory jogged by finding a saved program and making the sorting worth the effort.

Tags: Chicago Symphony Orchestra

American composer Harry Partch wrote marvelously strange soundscapes, compositions that are a surge of percussive rhythms, subtle washes of stringed strums, and a bodily sense of motion and movement. The tones all sound right but not quite, as indeed they are not to Western ears, given that Partch divided the octave we normally hear in 8 tones into many more smaller divisions, generally on instruments of his own design and making.

I have not heard Partch’s music in many years and likely would not have for many more, but I came across him today from what seemed to be a most unlikely source. I have been listening to Beck’s latest album, Modern Guilt, over and over for months now.

I love the drums and the slightly psychedelic guitar and the overall flow of the CD. I decided to look at the Beck website, and there in the news, I ran into . . . Harry Partch.

Beck has an excerpt of a 1968 TV documentary on Partch and his instruments, and he has his  new song, “Harry Partch” (bottom of the page), described as a “tribute to California bred composer Harry Partch’s concept of ‘Corporeality’—the integration of the body with all art forms.” In Partchian fashion, it uses a 43 tone scale, and it’s interesting.

But not nearly as interesting, fascinating, and breathtaking as the posted recordings from Partch himself, clips from one of his last compositions, Delusion of the Fury. You have heard nothing like it, and you should.

Tags: Beck, Harry Partch

I am announcing the first musical composition performed through Twitter, with me as the composer and first performer. The composition is called “John Cage Meets Social Media,” and here’s how it goes:

John Cage meets social media. Click link, then click each of the first four videos in turn, in 2 second intervals: http://bit.ly/7OsFXg.

I wrote this and posted it to my Twitter account on December 22, 2009. I was quite amused by the sounds made when the video answers to four questions on social media play at the same time, how the words go in and out of phase and the ending of the fourth question almost sounds like it belongs with the answer to the first question. I felt like I had much too much time on my hands that evening, even though I did not.

It isn’t yet a famous composition. Bitly recorded 15 clicks on the link, and my friend Andrew Ettenhofer, Sales Director at fig media, told me he actually played it. I can say it’s been performed at least twice.

I am not a big John Cage fan, but I love the idea of indeterminancy in his compositions. When I was in high school music theory class, and George Hattendorf, our instructor and assistant band director, told us about Cage’s composition, 4′33″, I was captivated. It was one of those moments, a flash of pure understanding: that music was all around us, and all we had to do was listen closely.

For a full and complete treatment of 4′33″ as well as  Cage’s philosophy and aesthetic, read “The Sounds of Silence,” by Larry J. Solomon.

Tags: John Cage, Twitter

I hung around artists and musicians in school. I listened to concerts and records, and Indiana University is was wonderful place to listen to concerts because there’s generally several excellent recitals a night. Here are profiles I wrote of some of the artists I was privileged to have as friends and neighbors.

Jane Fox. Jane was the old lady who lived in the apartment on the second floor of our building when I moved off campus as a sophomore. I got to talking to her and found that she had been a modern dance instructor at the university for more than 50 years. It was also my first page-one feature.

Philip French. Mr. French was a classmate of my dad’s when he was at Indiana University in the 1950s. I met him several times when he came to the States from London. I remember his visit when I was a sophomore, and I asked him about the British view of the American Revolution. In his refined London accent he said, “Well, you know the British Army never lost a war. The Revolution was just one we happened not to win.” I reviewed his book of on three critics, and wrote a profile for the paper.

Paul Sturm. When I first saw him, Paul was the crazy looking guy turning the electronic dials and playing with tapes. I reviewed a “happening” he and some of his artist friends put on, and then interviewed him. He was engineer for a late night radio station, and I’d visit and talk about music and help with tape experiments. We had broad tastes, not like the narrowly focused, in his words, “jazz Nazi’s and classical fascists.”

David Baker. Professor Baker is a pioneering jazz educator and composer. He was flamboyant and mischievous, especially in a music school of symphony musicians. He was my next door neighbor and would invite me to his student parties. He called me one of the best music writers he had seen at the school.

I took his jazz history class as a junior, and during our exam on avant garde jazz, I kept turning my head and looking at him as he laughed in the back of the class. I was baffled. He’d play a piece, and we had to identify it by style. Nothing he played that day was jazz. He was joking with the symphony students, playing Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Conlon Nancarrow. I kept looking back confused because I wondered why he was playing composed music and not improvised jazz. I wanted to point that out. “You should have,” he told me later. “You were the only one in the room who knew what I was playing. I would have loved it, you dig?”

I last saw David for the first time in more than 25 years in September 2006, at the premier in Chicago of his Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra.

I was an art critic in college, writing for the Indiana Daily Student 1979-82. I loved music when I went to college and had dreamed of going to music school. As a freshman at Indiana University, I took about half of the freshman music program and studied trumpet privately with William Adam, one of the best trumpet teachers in the world at the time.

IU is a world-class music school, and I got to see first-hand the talent of future symphony and jazz musicians and top music educators. That was not who I was.

I realized how much I liked to research, read, and write. I combined my knowledge of and interest in music by writing for the school paper, the best student-run paper in the country at the time. I wrote for the arts section, where the real writers worked, not the news section. I was a snob, and at times I wrote like one.

I remember reading Ralph J. Gleason, a legendary journalist and Rolling Stone co-founder, on criticism. Here are some of the pieces I wrote.

Review of records by DNA and XTC.

Modern dance review by the Dancing Cigarettes.

Concert review and interview with the Ramones!

Concert review of fusion jazz band MX80.

Concert review of Toots and the Maytals written in stream of consciousness style and as much like Tom Wolfe as I could manage. More on that in the Features post.

Book review of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Curse of Lono. I wanted to write like Thompson, too. Again, more in Features.

I couldn’t resist. Went into Starbuck’s this afternoon for a coffee for me and a tea for my wife, and I saw Abbey Road on display in front of the cash register. The remastered version.

I bought it. I grew up listening to the Beatles. I vaguely remember Magical Mystery Tour arriving in the mail from the Columbia Record Club. I was seven. My brother and our friends played all the Beatles’s records over and over again.

Abbey Road was always my favorite Beatles album, a mix of new technology supporting nostalgic sounds, a clear ending that harkened back to the band’s beginning. We’d argue over which was better, Side 1 beginning with the whimsy of “Come Together” and ending in the hard rock blues of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Or Side 2 with the magnificence of “Here Comes the Sun” and the touching funny poignancy of the Beatles final, brilliant song cycle.

The sound quality of the remastered version is stunningly brilliant. The first thing that struck me was a new openness to the sound. I hear the driving funkiness of the organ on “I Want You (She’s so Heavy).” I don’t recall the organ being as prominent on the LP. The white noise and abrupt ending of the song, which I will always associate with the end of Side 1, is more startling and effective.

I was also struck by producer George Martin’s orchestrations and their balance and blend with the rock instruments and the strange and subtle buzzings of the synthesizer. The synthesizer is particularly eerie on “Because,” sounding moon-like, as synthesized tones often sounded in the 60s, but with a sharpness and distinction that comes out quite clearly on the new CD.

For track-by-track recording stories, read this interview of Geoff Emerick, the album’s recording engineer.

I’m interested, then, to read in the new liner notes on the incorporation of the Moog synthesizer into the album: “Remaining true to the spirit of musical adventure on their previous albums, The Beatles were one of the first pop acts to use a newly invented instrument. George Harrison had purchased one of only a few Moog synthesizers in existence and this large unwieldy contraption was transported to Abbey Road in August. ”

The Beatles use of electronic synthesizers–and especially their earlier use of tape composition techniques–earned them the respect of the original, university-based and classically trained electronic music computers. In 1975, Elliot Schwartz noted the influence of electronic composition on pop music, using the Beatles White Album and “Revolution No. 9″ as the prime example:

Here we have the splicing of unrelated scraps of tape, tape reversal, variable speed changes, sequential loops–in fact, just about all of the devices used by (electronic music pioneers) Schaeffer and Henry, Leuning and Ussachevsky (Electronic Music: A Listener’s Guide, p. 178).

The story of Abbey Road appears in numerous media and blog accounts these days, but I went back and read it in the book with inside-reporting credibility from the time, Philip Norman’s Shout. Additionally, Norman captures the essence of the album in the context of its time and place:

Something had stopped the elements diverging, and restored them to their old unsurpassable balance. Abbey Road was John Lennon at his best, and Paul McCartney at his best, and George Harrison suddenly reaching a best that no one had ever imagined. It was John’s anarchy, straight and honest. It was Paul’s sentimentality with the brake applied. It was George’s new, wholly surprising presence, drawing the best from both sources. It was a suite of new songs, not warring internally, as on the White Album, but rounded and unified and performed with taut simplicity. It was a moment, caught again and crystallized, even in the flux of an expiring decade. It was hot streets, soft porn and hippydom fading into a hard reality. It was London here and now, and Liverpool then, and the Beatles, dateless and timeless in a sudden, capricious illusion of perfect harmony” (Shout, Philip Norman).

The newly remastered Abbey Road shows just how dateless and timeless the Beatles sound was and is, even in the flux of another expiring decade 40 years later, as hard reality once again calls us to reach a best we never knew we had.

A story on the Beatles remastering project appears in Goldmine magazine and a review of the remastered Abbey Road in Pitchfork.

Tags: Beatles