6/14/04 -- Me and the Punk Rock Orchestra
Yesterday I attended a Punk Rock Orchestra rehearsal to deliver the parts for my arrangement of my song "Road Spiders". That's all I was planning to do, but when I got there the director, John Gluck, asked me if I'd brought my flute. Apparently their first flute player, Suzanne, wasn't going to be in for a couple of rehearsals and he asked me to sit in. It was a blast. The pieces we rehearsed were "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" by the Dead Kennedys, disturbingly morphed with Leo Delibes' Flower Duet; "Mosh of the Toreadors" arranged by John based on Carmen; and an arrangement of "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones" by Fear. It was a lot of fun.
We ran through "Road Spiders" too. I got to demonstrate the flute part. I took comments from the players who needed changes made to their parts (mostly to make them less long, not so many page turns, easier to read, etc.). Nobody was amplified so we couldn't hear the mezzo-soprano's rendering of the words, but I could read her lips, and I'm sure later on I'll hear them amplified. I know I did the right thing leaving the brasses out of the arrangement because the bass line was quite loud enough with just the low woodwinds and the strings. One brass player who was there said the piece sounded like Vulcan music. A violist gave me a big thumbs-up and Michael Mendelssohn, one of their singers, gave me a high five. John really seemed to like it. So it's a good start!
Will Grant, Jim Carr, and I are getting ready for our gig at the Luggage Store Gallery on July 1. We have sketched out a basic outline for our 30 minutes. I have written all-new words, and the music will be improvised. You should come hear it!
5/31/04 -- No rest for the wicked
That's what my mom used to say when I whined about my chores as a kid. I was a very literal-minded child and I was always concerned that the remark meant that I was wicked (in the traditional bad way) and that therefore I had to do lots of chores.
Nowadays I know better -- wicked is actually a good thing. :) The part about no rest has not changed. Yesterday's experience at the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival was really, really good. I had a great time improvising with my assigned cohorts. I think it went extremely well. The event is wonderfully peaceful, happy and convivial. It's great to be with so many of one's own kind, and make and renew contacts. The redwoods are beautiful, and the Henry Miller Library helps to create an atmosphere of freedom that feels so good held up against the usual city and suburban grind. This gig is a lot more like vacation than a gig, although I would hardly characterize gigs as "work", exactly; more like a soul's compulsion. It was pretty hot though.
Today I can't give myself a day off. There is a lot to do. There is a press package to send out, articles to write, practicing to do, contact info to be logged in and dealt with, and CDs to listen to. Ben McAllister from Seattle gave me a CD of his music, and Will Grant, who attended the festival and played too, gave me a CD of what he's done with the recordings we made earlier this month. It's all preparatory to our Luggage Store Gallery gig on July 1. Paul, in his role as official photographer, took about 150 pictures yesterday which will need to be developed and gone over. Soon there will be all new photos on this web site.
Celeste and her new girlfriend Nicole were there too. They are a cute couple! I got to say hi to Ken Lee (close friend of Michael Haumesser who engineered Taste the Wall -- who has a baby now, astonishingly) and Jonathon Grasse (my grad schoolmate, now teaching at UCLA). It was nice to see Ernesto Diaz-Infante again and to finally meet Matt Davignon after only emails up till now. I got to meet flutists Marjorie Sturm and Emily Hay. Ben McAllister seems pretty cool. I wonder if he's overflowing with positive energy all the time, or just at festivals. :) Max Valentino played a sensuous and warm bass guitar.
05/14/04 -- Album name change, again...
Wanted to let you all know that I've changed the name of my upcoming fourth album, AGAIN. It was going to be Exit Stage Wrong. Now, I've found one that is a better fit for the overall concept: Not Made of Stone.
In other news, Will Grant and I got together to do some recording last night at Celeste's Berkeley abode. I got my first look at the Long String Instrument, which is living there with its creator, Ellen Fullman, while Celeste is away at grad school. :) Will and I had to be very careful not to disturb it as we set up recording equipment nearby.
We took stabs at recording the flute part I've written for his piece, Dreams. We also recorded me doing a range of different flute sounds -- multiphonics,key percussion, different percussive tongued and air sounds, etc. -- and some spoken words, for him to process and use as laptop music in the gig we are going to do together on July 1st at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco.
I'm almost done with the orchestral score for Road Spiders. I have until Thursday to get it finished and printed so I can deliver it to John Gluck after the Punk Rock Orchestra show.
05/13/04 -- We interrupt our regular innocuous journal postings...
Ahem.
Can I just step up here for a minute and say I'm ashamed to be an American? Being an American means that atrocities are being committed in my name right this minute. Not only that -- my parents had atrocities committed in their name also. The Phoenix Project, the heinous thing upon which the current program of abuse in Iraq is based, was implemented during the Viet Nam war.
Here's a link where you can
read all about it, and hopefully weep:
http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/
Here is a link to the official
Army investigative documents about the prison abuses in Iraq:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4894001/
So if anybody tries to wring their hands and tell you that what's going on in Iraq is "unprecedented", that's just not true. It is what happens under any colonial regime when the invader sets about oppressing the native inhabitants of its new colony.
04/13/04 -- A Trekker's lament
I've been a fan of Star Trek since I saw my first episode of classic Trek, which was "Plato's Stepchildren". (I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, at a young age. Star Trek was not on the TV menu at home when I was a child.) There has been so much Trek since then. I've watched and been a fan of NextGen, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager...to varying degrees. But it was all Trek. I'm not having such a good time with Enterprise.
Recently it's seemed as though they are belaboring the point that in the pre-classic Trek historical period, humans were not (or won't be) nearly as highly evolved. This point is coming across very well, but I'm not sure how intentional it is. I just saw the rerun the other night where Lt. Reed and the Marine commando major had to batter each other like crazed 11-year-olds up and down the halls of the Enterprise. It was awful.
Paul made an interesting point recently which was that in Stargate SG-1, you can believe Col. O'Neill being a ruthless SOB on occasion because his background is in special ops. Capt. Archer being as cold-blooded as that, which he has been a LOT lately, is hardly believeable because he was a test pilot before becoming a starship captain. The Xindi-inflicted Sept. 11th notwithstanding.
The Enterprise episode featuring Sim, the copy of Trip that was made so that Dr. Phlox could harvest his cloned neural tissue to save the real Trip, was really disappointing in the cold-bloodedness of Capt. Archer and the Tale of Two Cities ending. It would have been so much more interesting if Trip had died and Sim went on to assume his role on the ship.
Besides which...and this seems to be the "early Trek humans are more primitive" thing again...Captain Picard would never have sacrificed Sim for his neural tissue once it became clear that Sim was distinct from Trip, especially after he saved the Enterprise. Both Picard and Capt. Janeway would have said something like, "This man is a member of my crew. Phlox, you're just going to have to keep Trip on ice and find some other way to save him." That could have taken half a dozen episodes and been hella interesting.
Sometimes I wonder if the current writers of Enterprise have ever actually watched any other Trek series, or if they were just hired with resumes full of The Commish and Lifetime movies. Or, perhaps there are just way too many executives from Paramount lurking around the set. I have no idea. I am just a disgruntled fan.
04/04/04 -- Define "self-indulgent"
I heard a really invigorating concert at Davies Hall Friday night. Esa-Pekka Salonen was the San Francisco Symphony's guest conductor that night, and the whole program was high-energy. They played A Night on Bald Mountain, the Mussorgsky chestnut I remember improvising to as a kid in ballet class; a piece that the conductor himself composed, called Insomnia; Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat (with Yefim Bronfman playing the solo); and Bartok's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin. Not even the guy sitting next to me, who clearly didn't want to be there and kept looking at his watch, could have fallen asleep during that gig.
I'm kind of cynical by nature about certain things and I wondered, when I saw the piece Insomnia on the program, whether it would be substantive or just self-indulgent. When the time came, I actually really liked it. Parts of it were really good sonic reproductions of late-night motorhead. Other parts of it were very loud and aggressive and not what I'd automatically think of when I would look back on my own late-night experiences, but I guess they were evocative of severe inner torment. Self-indulgent, though, it was not.
That made me wonder what exactly constitutes self-indulgence. I have discarded or rewritten a lot of lyrics over the years in an effort NOT to be self-indulgent. The standard I've worked with is, if it's likely nobody else but you knows what you're talking about, you'd better rewrite it. I know a lot of lyricists don't bother to do this but I feel it's important. One reason is, if you reveal too many specifics about what's informing your work, the listener may (a) find nothing in it to relate to, or (b) be embarrassed by your revelation, because s/he doesn't know you, and why should you be so familiar with your communication?
I have a very strong feeling that not all journal entries should be set to music. (Especially not this one.;) ) Yet, what the Muse offers you in times of your greatest torment or greatest joy may be the most original, or the most universal, statement you have to offer. On Diogenes I let my tunes be informed by very specific trauma, but I edited the lyrics so that they would be more obscure, less embarrassing, etc. (If you find them over-specific and/or embarrassing now, imagine how bad it was before I edited them!!!) For my lyrics to sound like something written by Staind, would be really wrong, I think.
Chrissie Hynde once said, "Ray Douglas Davies is the only songwriter who can write confessional lyrics without being embarrassing." I think "embarrassing" what I'm offering up as the definition of "self-indulgent". So does that mean "my heart on my sleeve" is also a synonym for "self-indulgent"? I think what I'm trying to say is, the music is more important than the self. I am trying to share my music, rather than just share my Self. It would be inappropriate to share my Self with many, many people I don't know.
04/01/04 -- Joel Krutt, DJ & now, musician
Joel Krutt is a longtime DJ at college radio station WHUS in Storrs, CT. He was one of the first to play my music on the air on his show, "Pushing the Envelope", back when all I had to give him was a demo cassette, and he still plays my tunes to this day. Now all his years of playing music has inevitably led him to make some of his own. His CD, What Next? arrived in the mail recently and it features lots of found sounds presented in classic ambient style. I was awfully flattered to find myself in the "special thanks" section of the liner notes. That is so cool. :) Thanks Joel!
In other news I'm busy with the beginning stages of arranging my song "Road Spiders" for the Punk Rock Orchestra. I've transcribed the Stewart Copeland-inspired drum track for real percussionists, and I'm making the bass line, which I improvised on a bass keyboard in 1995, into parts for contrabass, cello, and low winds. I'm really excited about this project. I can't wait to hear what the full orchestral assault will sound like.
Will Grant and I are busy trying to nail down a time to record that flute part for his piece Dreams in Berkeley. I haven't had much of a chance to work on the About.com piece yet (apologies to Margery), but I will get to it soon. I haven't forgotten.
03/07/04 -- Long live Other Minds!
Thursday night was opening night of OM 10, the 10th annual Other Minds music festival. I signed up to volunteer at the reception, which meant I got to open countless champagne, sparkling cider, and Pellegrino bottles. It was literally a case of "pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain", since that's where the ice buckets with all the bottles were, behind the bartenders. :) Despite this I still got to say hello to Mary Chun, Lisa Petrie, Amy X. Neuburg, Herb Heinz, Pamela Z, Ellen Fullman, and Nicole Paiement.
The Thursday night concert was preceded by a symposium featuring composers and performers from the concert. I sat with Ellen and Celeste's dad, Ed. Then came the concert itself. I had come particularly to hear Hanna Kulenty's Flute Concerto No. 1 performed by Anne La Berge and the Parallele Ensemble conducted by my former prof Nicole Paiement.
Anne La Berge played the quarter-tone flute and alto flute. The ensemble backing her up was all winds except for piano, marimba, and electric bass. Most of the winds were brasses, too, which made for an unusual sound. Sometimes they played muted, and sometimes not. The flute solo was amplified and treated with reverb. It was interesting to hear the solo with reverb with everyone else dry.
The piece had a lot of sequences in it. My favorite part was the cadenza, which was slow, haunting, and expressive on the alto flute.
In other news, it looks like I will get to record the flute part I wrote for Will Grant's piece, plus write an article for the About.com poetry site, and start working with the Punk Rock Orchestra as a composer-partner!