kimberlyyeo010198

A moment, on her birthday, to recognize the breadth of Pauline Oliveros's work and the seriousness of her challenges to the received practice of composition: from the early work in the studio, in particular that extraordinary series of works realized in real time to the life-long advocacy for the appropriate uses of technologies, both archaic and new, a composer as comfortable with the latest digital sound enhancers as with a conch shell; the theatre pieces, which range from the vaudevillian to the ritual (and often making no distinction between the two: usefully reminding us that many clowns are sacred and many rituals are, usefully, hilarious); the use of physical spaces as instruments and the exploration of those spaces as a composed task to performers ( In Memoriam Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer );  the ease of her negotiation between composition and improvisation, working with trained musicians and with heretofore non-musicians, as well as an ease with the format of a performan...

The new production of The Rake's Progress at the Frankfurt Opera is very good, the level of music-making superb.  The Rakewell/Shadow team of Paul Appleby and Simon Bailey just plain own s the wager scene in Act III, and the conductor, Constantinos Carydis, kept the pace just right, giving the evening a musical and dramatic shape that put the required focus to the two big arias that really count, Anne's (Brenda Rae) and Tom's, and that amazing wager scene, using an appropriately scaled-down orchestra that reflected well on the Frankfurter Opera and Museum orchestra's ease with both earlier and contemporary repertoire.  The decision to use the composer's authorized alternative of a piano instead of the preferred (mid-20th century "modern") harpsichord for the recitative accompaniment might be argued with, but with the aging of the HIP that's increasingly ambiguous territory.  The production was sharp, the sets modest, and presented a compellingly twis...

The "Open Goldberg Variations" project seems to have slipped under the professional music making and scholarship radar although it's quite possible that it is providing a substantial challenge to the traditional structure of producing and publishing performing editions and recordings of music in the public domain.  The project encompasses the production of a new edition, from source, using crowd editing, of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, in Musescore notation format, which produces a payback-able score with audio as well as independent notation and midi files and, for this particular project, a studio quality recording of the piece by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, all of which will be placed in the public domain with Creative Commons licenses and be available for free downloading and, as open source material, unrestricted further use. The Kickstarter page is here , the page at the Musescore site with the current version of the edition is here . The challenge that ...

Word Events : Perspectives on Verbal Notation , edited by the composers John Lely and James Saunders has just been published.  It's both an anthology of word/text/prose/verbal scores and a significant bit of thinking-through-writing about prose scores and the general nexus of composition-notation-performance, with writings both by anthologized composers and, in particular the substantial new introduction and essays by the editors.  The composers included encompass both the usual suspects (Cage, Wolff, Young, Brecht, Bryars, Corner, Oliveros, Johnson, Cardew, Stockhausen), many who have built upon their work (Beuger, Pisaro, Walshe, Werder, even a certain wayward Californian), and a few important composers whose works with prose scores have been unjustly neglected.  I'm particularly grateful that work of Kenneth Maue is here; so grateful, in fact, that I've decided to perform one of Maue's pieces and put my copy of Word Events in the kitchen freezer and leave it there. ...

YET MORE UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR YOUNGER COMPOSERS:  If it says "Composition Program" on the office door, turn right around and leave that building as fast as you possibly can.  It's been my experience that whenever the term "program" is used in connection with the academic study of composition, in a conservatory, or a college or university music department, it cannot lead to good things.  Programs are about reproduction, not creative production, and they belong in paths of learning that are not oriented to new discoveries but to fixed bodies of knowledge or technique.  Programs also smack of mass production and efficiency, which is very different from individual creation and the idiosyncratic forms of efficiency that composition — mostly a solo effort — requires. Craft not industry. One size does not fit all: composing's a craft that thrives on smart challenges to standards and practices, not to rigid standardization.  When you leave school, your music will ...

There is some confusion between the radical music's minimal impulse — the elimination of distractions — and austerity.  When the PR Department at Nonesuch records effectively recuperated and coopted the label "minimalism" (dropping La Monte Young out of the Young, Riley, Reich & Glass quartet and replacing Young with a more or less conventionally tonal composer from their own stable, John Adams) the notion of eliminating distractions in order to create a frame within which ever more layers of rich acoustical detail could be heard, a form of austerity —when not acoustical poverty — was promoted.  It is tempting to identify this with the current form of economic austerity — at the cost of diversity and growth — that is widely promoted these days, particularly (but not only) by the political right.

Since I spend a good part of my life notating music and I often use computers to do it, I pay some attention to developments in the computer notation world. It's a very good thing that the tools available for notation are far from limited to Sins and Fibs. (BTW: If you happen to teach music theory in an institution which presently requires the purchase of Finale or Sibelius*, why not do your cash-strapped and loan-burdened students a favor and encourage them to use an open source program like Musescore ? It's free and open source, can do everything that would be required in a university-level theory sequence or orchestration class, and it's constantly getting better.) The latest item to come across my desktop is INScore , an augmented and interactive program. "Augmented" means it allows all sorts of objects — among them score notation, graphics, text, signals or triggers or sensors of various sorts — to share space (and music-notational space-time) on page or scr...

In adding Les Troyens to my landmarks list, I forgot to note one other attraction of the opera, which is Berlioz's musical world building.  World building is usually thought-of as an element of fiction — fantasy and science fiction in particular, whether in literature, films, tv, or games — , through which just enough structure and details are presented as to make vivid the suggestion that the location of the fiction is within a larger and plausible (at least within the terms of its own logic) world  Les Troyens is set in Troy and Carthage and is peopled by Trojans in the first two acts (Greeks are only a background presence) and refugee Trojans and Carthaginians populate acts three through five. The historical status of Troy is, well, complicated, but the myth is vivid, in both Homer and Vergil while the historical Carthage (near modern Tunis)  is much more established, but it is also the myth here, of a thriving city established in only seven years by exiles from Phoe...

Communicate?  I want music that communicates in the same way a copper pot handle communicates heat.

A friend recently made the argument — and quite convincingly — that we're in a golden age of two media — the television serial and the comic book — that has come about entirely because of two related factors, (a) the establishment of non-mass production and distribution channels and (b) the aging into a kind of aesthetic consuming maturity of at least two generations of audience who are fully fluent with the literature, conventions, and terms of the particular art form.  This combination means that there is a critical mass of demand and appreciation for thematic, formal, and technical innovation (not the least of which is smart play with the conventions of the genre) while at the same time, the economy of the niche is adequate to sustain production, and, in the case of the US subscription television networks, Showtime and HBO and the like, provide added value, above and beyond not-quite current movies, that actually brings customers in and keeps them subscribed (yep, the weird stuf...

Some composers work on one piece at a time but I tend rather to have several pieces in progress at the same time, each in different stages of completion (or, as the case may well be, abandonment).  Some scores seem to write themselves, quickly without interruption, while others require a lot of pondering or re-working.  I have a few projects that have sat on a far corner of my desk and/or in the back of my mind for a long, long, time. Some could be finished in a snap, but are presently "waiting to be commissioned,"  others are troubled, perhaps hopelessly so, and still others are private projects, not ever intended for public use, but made rather just to satisfy some musical curiosity of my own, an indulgence I'm fortunate to grant myself. Some of these sketches for pieces, my lumber , are notated conventionally, others have prose scores (or "reports" as Henry Brant called them, prose instructions from the composer to the composer to reduce anxiety in going from...

A tower crane, perhaps 10 stories tall, recently assumed a large presence in my neighborhood's modest skyline with the view to the East now dominated by its yellow fixed mast and rotating jib that stand center and above the site of a apartment block and small shopping center under construction.   Always fascinated by large machinery and construction projects, I've made a point of following this site since the demolition of the old buildings and, in company with Mutt Lucky the composer's best friend , I've walked by at least twice daily since last summer. (I even tried to bribe the crane operator in letting me up into the cab, but no go, liability insurance and all that.)  The attraction and the action for me is in the construction — the structure, materials, processes, and logistics — with the final, finished building, something of an footnote.  As a composer, my engagement with music is very much of a piece with this, with my earliest compositional impulses probably th...

It's a frustrating imprecision in English that the word "vision" speaks directly to one sense, sight, and we don't really have the equivalent for sound (or other senses, for that matter), so when we talk about a particular kind of  imaginative experience in sound, we effectively talk through language that filters the experience through the terms of sight (and even that word "imaginative" is oriented towards vision.) Daniel Stearns's CD, Golden Town (2011 spectropol records) has been played with some intensity in my studio for a few months now.  People who know me or read this blog know that I don't take recordings lightly, sometimes taking great lengths to avoid the medium, but Golden Town is such a striking (at turns alien, challenging, then almost familiar, almost easy)  listening experience, and one made very much for the recorded media, that I've wanted to share some words about it, but it is precisely this knot of vision/sound/word problem...

Crooked Timber's John Quiggin asks about "the need for the left to offer a feasible utopian vision as an alternative to the irrationalist tribalism of the right."  And surprisingly, but convincingly, he focuses on the issue of house work. I recommend the read. For the moment, however, I'd like to skirt the "irrantional tribalism of the right" (and avoid another one of my rants about musical quietism) and back up to that notion of a "feasible utopian vision" by suggesting that this has been part of the experimental music project for a good long time. It's useful, for example, to contrast the high modernist utopia of Varese, who composed (or tried to compose) a number of visionary works that so challenged the contemporary standard of professional performance technique ( Ionisation was premiered by an ensemble which featured more non-percussionists than professional percussionists) or the available resources of electronic music, that his output ...

An observation: the traditional form or genre in which Cage was most innovative was not the sonata, quartet, or concerto — although he made genre-challenging examples of each — but the oratorio.  I take the word oratorio here liberally, but literally, as a musical vehicle for the elevation of a text with didactic and/or narrative character.  His own experiences as an orator began in High School, and certainly were associated his first career ambitions, to preach (his Los Angeles High School classmate, the poet Josephine Miles, told me that he had a good voice for public speaking because it was high-pitched and carried well (oh those days before universal electronic amplification)).  It followed through his own public lectures, which were very much the work of a composer, often sharing structures and methods with his musical scores, and really established itself with Lecture on the Weather , Empty Words , and Roaratorio , all works in which Cage's own performance as a publ...

Music and labor.  At one extreme, music can be a lot of work to composer, to play, or listen to, at the other extreme, it may appear to compose or play itself, and listening goes down easily as well.  But neither extreme necessarily implies anything about the pleasure and/or pain of the experience (and indeed, like the pleasure of some chili, peppers, ginger, horseradish, or wasabi, it's often sensual pain that actually seals the deal; Keats, of course: "branched thoughts new grown with pleasant pain")  and neither extreme represents a necessarily causal relationship.  I'm very fond of the idea of labor-intensive scores which yield sounding end-products which appear to the ear to be simplicity itself, and perhaps even fonder of score/piece combinations which do exactly the opposite.  Simple conditions can lead to catastrophic or chaotic results and, at the same time, there is always the possibility of music escaping an entropic arrow and allowing complex initial...