Updates, promos, and FREE STUFF!

Okay, okay – I’m not going commercial – or, well, hmmm…

First of all, here is a video concerning Nonsequitur, the organization that manages some of the concerts in the Chapel Performance Space (Good Shepherd Center) where the “StormSound” concert will be held. Actually the “StormSound” concert is under the “Wayward Music Series”, which is something of a spin-off from Nonsequitur, but here is the general idea. I only recently found the video…!

Now, on to the “StormSound” concert itself. One musician has cancelled (my fault -- I didn't give her the exact date of the concert... stupid, stupid!) but three more have signed on to the project, including all three of Hexafone. Their performance of SoundScrolls VI in the concert last month was amazing, so this should be too.












This is the first poster (there will be others) promoting the event. Readers, feel free to download it (click on it), print it, and pass it around or post it somewhere.




Also concerning promo for the concert: I’ll be playing around town (and out of town) here and there to drum up interest (or piano up interest, since I don’t play the drums…?). First of these will be at a new open mike at Woodland Park Presbyterian Church, this Friday (march 11) – sign up at 6:15, music starts at 7:00. I’ll be playing at a Composers’ Salon Concert too. More info on that later.

Now for the free stuff. I’ve posted a couple of tracks at Soundcloud.com. They are downloadable (is that a word?) for free. One is an excerpt from the “StormSound” Cycle itself; it was recorded at the Jack Straw Composer Spotlight. I edited it slightly, mixing the prerecorded sound with the piano for a more optimal ambience. The other is part of SoundScrolls V; not actually part of the “StormSound” Cycle but related to it in several ways (the use of field recordings and the stacks of fifths on the piano, among others). If the link doesn't work, go to www.soundcloud.com and type in “S. Eric Scribner” under “search” and it should take you to the right place. Hope you enjoy them!

(This posting is on 3/10/2011; 72 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Concert Review: David Paul Mesler and Friends; Broadway Performance Hall, Seattle, 3/1/2011

Been very busy lately, so this concert review will seem a few days late. But here it is anyway…

“It's daredevil jazz! It's extreme classical!
It's both! It's neither!
It's . . .
David Paul Mesler and Friends in a concert of free improvisation!"
--From the e-mail promo.

David Paul Mesler, piano
Tony Grasso, trumpet
Tony Rondolone, alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet, flute
Gary Shutes, trombone
Michael Nicolella, acoustic and electric guitar
Brad Hawkins, acoustic and electric cello
Ken French, drums

This concert did seem to be a blend of “daredevil jazz” and “extreme classical”. (Darestream jazzical? Exstrevil clazz??). The first half concentrated on the “classical” timbres, with acoustic guitar; the second half (for larger ensemble) brought in the drums and electric guitar – so it had more of a jazz (or rock) feel. However, David’s meticulous, often Bartokian piano chops rooted the entire concert in its (modernist) classical approach.

Not that some of the other instruments didn’t root the entire concert equally in the jazz idiom. Unusual for a concert of free improvisation, the “pieces” presented were all short, concise “compositions”, usually under three minutes. Each was part of a suite of related pieces, and each had two titles: a concept and a keyword.

The first suite of pieces was based around the idea of family members. I was walking in when I heard the first “Messiaenic” chords for “Father” (and I didn’t hear the keyword for this one); the rest consisted of a melodic conversation for piano and trumpet. “Mother” used the keyword “busy”, and the music was such; the clarinet etched a sharply delineated scherzo against a piano ostinato. Then, “We ended together! That was amazing!” The pieces unfolded quickly, one after the other: there was a vaguely bluesy “hard of hearing” (keyword) “Grandfather”, a militaristic (and later chaotic) “Son”, and a daughter that “starts out so sweet…” but didn’t remain that way as contrasting dissonant piano chords snuck in. Finally the entire ensemble played a kind of coda, “Family”; the keyword was “chaotic” but the music was basically rock with little bits of free-jazz squeals from the trumpet (and a long melody from the sax). It all ended on a long, luminous, major chord.

A second set of pieces was based on emotional states. Highlights of this suite included “Melancholy” for ‘cello and piano (comparisons with the Debussy ‘cello sonata and Takemitsu’s “Orion” are inevitable here); “Joy” for piano and guitar (this went suddenly into Stravinsky, and the guitar wanted to play but was cut off several times); and “Fear” for the whole ensemble. In the latter, dissonances built up against percussive piano; then everything went berserk and “resolved” on a loud sustained minor second – Art Ensemble of Chicago all the way! (Of course, the same happens in a dramatic moment in the Nielsen 6th symphony.)

After the intermission, all pieces were for the entire ensemble, and they were marginally longer. This was a suite of Celestial Bodies, beginning with the sun and ending at the outermost planet (excluding Pluto). “Moon” was a nocturnal dreamscape that had several waves of sound, as if influencing tides of notes. “Comet” had a “fragile long tail” but mostly was a trumpet solo – “fragile” muted notes interacted with more forceful brass bellowing; altogether in a style reminiscent (to me at least) of Dizzy Gillespie. “Venus” used romantic saxophone, with just enough dissonance and oddly placed accents to keep it from sliding into the banal. “Earth” was a kaleidoscope of sounds, moods, and “industrious ants” (that was the keyword – it probably metaphorically meant people as well). “Mars” had the expected warlike overtones, with the electric ‘cello playing frantic spasms of off-key notes and the guitar providing a screaming metal background. “Jupiter” (“heroic”) featured grand piano triads in what could have been an alternate version of Mussorgsky’s “Great Gate of Kiev”. The longest piece came at the end, “Neptune” (“Mystical”) – here there were microtones on strangely elastic open fifths, providing a mysterious texture; touches of Ives as all players pursued their own, unrelated, tonal paths for a minute or two; a ‘cello melody in harmonics with tranquil chords from the piano and guitar; a return to the beginning; and a coda with a bit of Spanish guitar and a crescendo to the final chord; fade.

After the concert I conversed with David briefly about the length of the pieces. He stated that he prefers a shorter format for free improvisation – especially when it sounds as if it were a composed piece. Medium-length improvisations, such as usually occur in free-improv concerts, tend to meander too much and lose their interest. He then added a footnote: the exception is, of course, when the improvisational music goes epic – if it’s gargantuan, as the “StormSound” Cycle, then it takes the listener into its own space and no longer seems to meander. He compared it to a Wagner opera – it takes twenty minutes or so to get into what’s going on, but then it just washes over the listener like a tide. Four hours seems short in such a context.

(This posting is on 3/7/2011; 75 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Concert Review (and graphics): Seattle Phonographers' Union; Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 2/17/2011

This was a hybrid between a traditional “concert” and a sound installation. The performance space was barely lit – and most of that light came from the laptops and other electronic equipment in corners and against the walls. The seats for the audience were in the middle, not in neat rows but scattered and clustered about randomly, facing different directions. The stage was treated as if it didn’t exist: one “phonographer” (Steve Barsotti) was playing his laptop up there, but there were also a couple of chairs there for the audience. Other members of the band played the aforementioned laptops or other recording equipment, and at least two were mobile, that is, having sound equipment strapped to them as they ambled around throughout the room.
Their sound textures consisted of unprocessed field recordings. There is a lot of variety and beauty in such a minimalist concept (as in all minimalist art, the minimum reveals an unexpected maximum); here, it seemed, the “empty” performance space became a vast canvas (much larger than its physical dimensions) on which they painted an endless diversity of subtle and sometimes surprising colors of sound. Part of the interest (and beauty) came from extraordinary juxtapositions: animal chattering (monkeys?) against wind and an unknown style of chanting; a church bell chiming against a quiet seashore and rain slowly dripping onto a hard surface; a muffled conversation (as if through a thick fabric, so the words and even the language were obscured) over distant traffic and very loud birds twittering; a weather report literally passing by over strange metallic scrapes and scratches.


















I made these graphics, inspired by this concert. As I sat in one chair, I doodled little pen-strokes on paper in the dim light without looking; each stroke or blot imitated one sound. I tried to imitate the direction of the sound as well, as if the center of the “picture” was where I was located in the performance space. Then, when I felt as if I’d finished, I went to an empty chair and repeated the process. After the concert I scanned the resulting abstracts, lightened their colors, and distorted the lines by computer in order to obliterate any references to specific sounds. The result looks like how the music sounded to me; lines of reverberation directed into a blank, open space. If they look like nothing, that’s possible – but remember that (as I have posted elsewhere in this blog) that I don’t really think of “nothing” as an actual possibility. (Click on them to enlarge them.)

Quiet traffic
Strange chanting
Branches scraping on windows
Wind
Drones from another time and place
Drip drip drip (steady slow beat)
Drip onto plastic surface (this is a sound that they’ve used in many of their performances – it has become almost their trademark).
“Today expect highs in the mid to upper 40’s, lows in the 30’s with a 40% chance of precipitation…” Weather report walks by.
Bicycle wheels clicking
An explosion of monkeys
Birds chirruping
Bells and gongs
Gongs and bells
Airplane goes by, does not move from place to place but merely fades
Distant sounds of machinery
Factory sounds fade into nature sounds
Diminuendo to silence
Audience adds final sound (applause)
End.

(This posting is on 2/20/2011; 93 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Comments from a Panel Discussion on Improvised Music

[I couldn’t attend any of the concerts in the Seattle Improvised Music Festival, but I did manage to go to the panel discussion on Saturday afternoon (the 12th). Gust Burns, John Teske, and Steve Peters were there, among others; but since I didn’t get everyone’s name and didn’t actually ask permission to quote anyone on this blog, these comments will be paraphrased and anonymous. I’m putting them here only because I found them interesting. I won’t identify people – only a < when a different person speaks.]

< There is a concert series (of improvised and other experimental music) called “Opensound” in Somerville, Massachusetts. It’s been running for many years now, and has become something of a cultural institution. They try to have 4 sets a night, 20 to 30 minutes each, which are as different as possible from each other.

< When artists move into an area, including sound artists, then others follow. Art isn’t commercially viable at first, but it becomes so as more people move in and the area becomes trendy.
< So how does it feel being part of the gentrification of a city?
[Resounding groan from others.]

< One of my ideas to make experimental music more “popular” (without changing it) is to open a place, say, a coffee shop, that has a room off to the side for concert performances.
< Except if you have an espresso machine…
< Well, the side room would be soundproofed. I read part of a book called “Fear of Music; why people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen” which had a lot of elaborate theories in it about why music like Stockhausen isn’t more popular. I thought most of the theories were simply masking the fact that people don’t “get” Stockhausen because people haven’t heard Stockhausen.
< That’s overly optimistic.
< Well, performing experimental music where people could hear it is one way to let them hear it and make up their own minds. The recording industry doesn’t let people think for themselves. A concert space in a coffee shop would be one way to do it.
< Actually I’ve heard Stockhausen a lot and I still don’t get it.
< I didn’t mean only Stockhausen, of course.
< There’s a long history of places like that, which run a side business that is sustainable in order to do the real business which is not sustainable. However, the problem is legal: there are lots of laws one has to take into consideration. If you do concerts in a coffee shop, for example, you need not only a food license but also a “cabaret” license, which costs a lot more. Besides, I don’t want to force my taste in music on others; those who like a certain type of music will seek it out.

< There was an installation where the composer put several hundred bees in a grand piano and closed the lid. Their buzzing caused the strings to vibrate sympathetically.
< What happened to the bees?
[Bemused expression from first speaker; no comment.]
< Poor bees…

< In the US., it’s easy to rent a room to perform your music. In Australia it’s difficult; it’s a cultural thing; they’d assume that you’re renting a room to do something illegal.
< It’s difficult in Vienna too, only for a different reason. I once played a series of concerts in a jazz club, though nobody came. I found out later that there were a lot of people who wanted to hear me play but would never set foot in a jazz club, while the people who went to the jazz club to hear jazz didn’t like my music and made sure others avoided going the nights when I was playing.

< I used to do conventional “classical” music, but I got too busy with family and career to keep doing it. I wrote a lot of manuscripts that piled up, and were never performed. It was kind of a hobby. Then one day, a well-known composer asked me to a concert of some of his music. I heard an amazing, a wonderful piece, that was exactly like the kind of music that I’d been writing. Later the composer told me that that particular piece had been improvised; it had never occurred to me that one can improvise “noise” music the same way one can improvise jazz or pop.

< I once heard that there was a 7-11 near a university, that had trouble with teenagers loitering outside. The managers of the 7-11 tried playing classical music over their loudspeakers, but it didn’t drive the teenagers away.
< They must have liked Mozart.
< The 7-11 tried country music too, but again with no result. But one time the grad students at the university asked if they could broadcast their experimental electronic music over the loudspeakers, as a kind of sound installation, for a week. They weren’t thinking about the teenagers, but that week was the only time when none of them hung out there.
[I don’t know where this was. Could be true, but it could also be an urban legend; it sounds like the kind of story that would circulate among musicians. I've heard other versions of it anyway: one, that the classical music did make them stop loitering there; and another, that it was Barry Manilow tunes that finally drove them away.]

< I like the idea of “risk” in music. I like to put myself out there, to do something that I haven’t done before, and am not sure that I really know how to do. I like to face the danger of failing. I remember that in the 1990’s a lot of experimental music was based on Feldman, Stiebler, and others who were doing very quiet, barely audible sounds. I decided that, in addition to that, I’d play with some established “free jazz” players, a very loud, strident kind of music. Some other experimental musicians asked me, “Why are you playing with them?” My answer: because I’m not supposed to. But also, there is a limit. Once I worked with a composer, who was interested that I could play the theremin, and he wanted me to use specific sounds in his piece. So much so good, except that at one point he asked me to do a “classic theremin sci-fi wooooo-eeeeeee-oooooo”. I told him absolutely not.
< I suppose that’s rather like asking a guitarist to play “Stairway to Heaven”.
< Worse.

Transcript of the Composers Spotlight Presentation on my "StormSound" Cycle

[The following is both the presentation that I had prepared for the Composers’ Spotlight, last night (2/9/11) and various questions and comments by audience members and by myself. The presentation part I give here as written; when actually presenting it, I changed a few words around here and there or elaborated, or gave examples. The audience member comments are paraphrased to be more understandable outside of the context of the presentation. Ss means “sound sample”, which I played (prerecorded) as an example of something in the piece. Also, the “stage directions” in brackets indicate when I showed something to the audience, or something else visual occurred. For another review of the evening's proceedings (from a member of the audience), read this blog entry by Keith Eisenbrey.]

Lúmu ro arn téilandumen, su trillórn máellorn s’ naghérum.
Dáestu ro arn téilandumen, su noshéi siinón s’ eténnum.
Átau ro arn téilandumen, su trillórn kullánd’ s’ naghérum.
Sámu ro arn téilandumen, su noshéi xám s’ eténnum.
Teilyándal’ arn téilandum dálei,
Mú arn Kálalyar na téilandum.
Ro Na arn Kálalyar na téilandumen.
Zhen Kálalyar arn zéyum, sulándu karn teilándas.

For those who couldn’t understand that, don’t worry. It’s a fictional language that I invented for a science-fiction book. What I recited was the following:

Light was not, nor sun nor moon to cast it.
Darkness was not, nor night nor cave to hold it.
Warmth was not, nor sun nor fire to cast it.
Cold was not, not night nor sea to hold it.
Teilyándal’ (meaning “That Person Who Is”) was only.
There was nothing before Him.
There was no before, before Him.
And He said, Let there be a Song.

Although in this made-up language the vocabulary is not gender-specific and therefore doesn't refer to God as "he", the Biblical paraphrase is obvious. This is indeed a creation story of the fictional Fyorian people. When I wrote it, I put in some of my concepts about music. Sulándu karn teilándas. Let there be a song. The universe is a song. It begins with sounds, vibrations (string theory), movement, energy.

What I’d like to talk about tonight are these ideas about music, specifically as they relate to a lengthy cycle of pieces, the “StormSound” pieces, which I’m working on presently. A shameless self-promotion here: On May 21st, this year, there will be a concert of my “StormSound” cycle: 21 pieces in all, for a total of about nine hours. These are pieces for various instruments and what used to be called “tape” – I don’t know what to call it now that it’s on CDs or MP3 players. The pieces range in length from about two minutes to over two hours. The concert will be at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, from noon to 9:00. Besides myself on piano and percussion, Neal Meyer will play guitar, Keith Eisenbrey and possibly David Paul Mesler will play piano, Jay Hamilton will play invented instruments, Beth Fleenor and Bruce Greeley will play clarinet, and there are several others who are in the process of confirming. During the nine hours, the audience (and the musicians!) may come and go as they please.

Stylistic aspects. (Ss 1). That type of music is familiar. I don’t need to say anything about it: neo-impressionist, “new acoustic”, “new age” if you will; you’ve all heard it. …It’s not part of the StormSound cycle anyway, though it is one of several styles of music that I like to do. I don’t agree that it need be considered differently than my more experimental music. (Ss 2) That is more “experimental”, if you will, at least in the way that it doesn’t use any particularly familiar melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic material; but of course “free improv” is probably familiar to you anyway. It’s not part of the StormSound cycle either. I bring up both of these because: 1.) I composed them and played the piano on both; they’re both on my CD called “PianoSphere”, and 2.) the distinction between what’s “experimental” and what’s “commercial” is, to me, an artificial one that should be scrapped. My approach on that CD was to put both styles together, which led to the fact that people who liked the first piece I played hated the other, and vice-versa. Can’t win them all I guess.

“PianoSphere” was an earlier experiment that has little to do with the “StormSound” pieces. Both use a lot of extended piano techniques; otherwise, there isn’t much similarity.

All of the “StormSound” pieces are graphic scores of one type or another, played over prerecorded sound. Much of the prerecorded material is derived from nature sounds, recorded either by me or my friend Randy, and then processed (or not) via computer. As I give some examples, the several “whys” of this will slowly become apparent.

First, there are the nature sounds unchanged. Two examples of this should be enough. This one is a birdcall, with other sounds behind it. (Ss 3). This next one is thunder, rain, and branches breaking under a heavy snow. The drones are, obviously, not nature sounds, but a instrumental and vocal samples. (Ss 4).

Audience member: What’s the background sound? It doesn’t sound natural.
Me: Yes, there are some instrumental sounds. That one was sampled off of a CD of early music, which I’m not sure is quite legal, so I distorted it and made sure that it was no longer anything like the original sound. The distorted sound was what I was looking for anyway there.

Unaltered nature sounds do not occur frequently in the Cycle. Usually they are processed in one way or another. The simplest type of processing is to simply slow them down. Here are some birdcalls and the sound of a stream, slowed to half-speed. They are still very recognizable, but maybe their slightly altered time frame causes the listener to linger a bit longer; to pay closer attention than otherwise. (Ss 5). In that example, the flute was played by Ginny Landgraf, sampled, and the percussion was a woodpecker. I will talk later about their peculiar timing.

Continuing to slow down, birdcalls in particular can get more and more interesting. Here they are again (the same birdcalls), slowed to ten and one percent of their original speed. Mary Kantor plays clarinet, from a graphic score. [Show example.] This is what I call a “melodicy”, from the words “melody” and “dicey”, because it sometimes can get a little dangerous when playing… (Ss 6).

Audience member: …So you make up the melody based off of the pitches here.
Answer: Yes, though not exactly what you see there because the clarinet is a transposing instrument.
Audience member: Yeah, that’s the first thing I though of when you mentioned clarinet.
Audience member: This is kind of off the specific topic, do you know if anyone has done what you have just done, slowing down those birdcalls as much –
(Me: Probably…)
Audience member continues: …and then, taking them out into the wild, and playing them for the specific birds, to see if they would recognize it or how they would react.
Me: Interesting idea. They might think they sound kind of eerie or disquieting, in the way that a human voice sounds to us when it’s slowed down.

Slowing down even further, the sounds can become unworldly, strange and new: in this next excerpt, there are two sets of pulsing vibrations: the faster, higher one is the same birdcall again, slowed 1000 times. One can hear what appear to be the individual vibrations made by the bird’s syrinx (counterpart of the human larynx). The other sounds are a pipe organ, played by me. (Ss 7).

One more example will suffice for this section. The following is the sound of crickets, followed by another birdcall – but neither are recognizable because they are slowed hundreds of times and with massive reverb. The effect is cosmic; somehow to me it always suggested floating in space somewhere near Jupiter. (I should say that I don’t really know why; I’ve never been floating in space anywhere near Jupiter!) Bruce Greeley and Beth Fleenor play clarinets here, as well as me on piano and percussion. (Ss 8).

Audience member: …Not Saturn, but Jupiter. [scattered laughter]

All the foregoing were attempts to make the listener slow down, to notice the sound that was already there, even if that sound has been changed into something unrecognizable. In that sense, it’s rather like a style of abstract art that I’ve done a few examples of: where the natural lines and contours of the grain in the wood are colored in, making a pattern, attempting to have the viewer stop and take a look at what was already there.

But nature sounds, slowed down or not, can also be of great compositional interest. Here is a birdcall, the same you just heard, though here only slowed ten times, looped, multitracked, and phased. Stuart Dempster plays trombone and Neal Meyer plays guitar, from a graphic score. (Ss 9).

Another example is the following: here, I took a clue from the rather sinister forest music in the Carl Nielsen 5th symphony, to create this nocturnal dreamscape. There are the sounds of owls, two different birdcalls, and piano chords. All occur according to their own pulse, though all are slowed down; creating a polyrhythm on a grand scale. Dean Moore plays percussion. (Ss 10)

Audience member: That last piece almost had the sound of whales. I was wondering if that was your intention for that part.
Me: Not whales, specifically, but nature in general. Actually those were owls, that you were hearing.
Another audience member: I thought they were almost recognizable as owls, now that you’ve told us in advance.
Me: Oh. I shouldn’t have said so then.
Audience member: Well no, they’re more interesting when we know what they are first.
Me: They’re slowed down to about one third their original speed.

As the last two examples hinted, nature sounds can also be unpleasant (or at least eerie). Here is one of the points of the Cycle: Nature Lives in Motion – all nature is in motion, making sound (though some of that sound is not vibrations of air molecules and thus not audible to humans). As I said when I started, it all begins with sound, vibrations, energy. One could say that the universe is a song. The ultimate purpose of all of this sound, behind all of its secondary meanings and means of production, is aimed at God – whom, I believe, is separate from, and not part of, nature and the universe (He permeates the universe, but is not part of it, nor is He the same as it). But, at least here on planet earth, there is something wrong in nature. Of course we humans are doing our share to make it worse – pollution, leading to global warming, is only one example of our destructive tendencies. But even before us, evolution seems to have run amok, resulting in parasites, diseases, and a tooth and claw struggle for survival. In the sci-fi classic “Perelandra”, C.S. Lewis gives us an imaginary alternative, a vision of non-Darwinian evolution.

“…the song. Now high in the air above him, now welling up as if form glens and valleys far below, it floated through his sleep and was the first sound at every waking. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird’s voice. As a bird’s voice is to a flute, so this was to a cello: low and ripe and tender, full-bellied, rich and golden-brown; passionate too, but not with the passions of men.
…“The singing beast? I would gladly hear more of this.”
“The beasts of that kind have no milk and always what they bring forth is suckled by the she-beast of another kind. …Until the singing beast is weaned is is among her whelps and is subject to her. But when it is grown it becomes the most delicate and glorious of all beasts, and goes from her. And she wonders at its song.”

But that is fiction, and here on earth, things are different. Such a parasitic creature would either rob its host of its nest or kill it. Nature is not all pleasant here. Part of the “StormSound” Cycle is about this possibly inherent aggression and vengefulness. Again, the processed nature sounds show this. The following sounds like warfare or even traffic, but it was made simply by slowing down the sounds of a stream, crickets, and elk several times. There will be a flute, piano, and drums with this during the performance. (Ss 12).

And in the final example of this type, nature sounds can be changed so that they are no longer “natural” – here, I used a MIDI plug-in and rendered birdcalls as synthesized bleeps and scratches. I used the same idea in my piece “SoundScrolls VI”, played here by Bruce Greeley, bass clarinet; Mike Sentkewitz, acoustic bass; and Ryan Burt, drums. These mechanized nature sounds represent humans’ tendency to spoil nature by, in this case, attempting to control it with machines. (Ss 13).

Audience member: In the previous piece, there were a lot of high and low water sounds.
Me: Yes, there was quite a range of high and low sounds. I tried to make it really thick and dissonant-sounding.

Saying that certain sounds represent pleasant things in nature, and certain others represent unpleasant things, begs a question. What is it about certain sounds that makes them more suitable to stand for other sounds? The answer to this may at first seem simple: we’ve all been brainwashed to a certain extent by Hollywood to think that dissonant chords are unpleasant. Every time something nasty or scary is about to happen in a movie, the background music gets dissonant or even microtonal and we know that the killer is just around the corner. But such is not the case in all cultures: in Balinese gamelan music, for example, there is a piece traditionally played when the bad guy shows up in a shadow play – and to the American ear it’s not dissonant at all, it’s relaxingly modal and vaguely bluesy. …And don’t forget that a lot of jazz music is extremely dissonant, yet we often listen to it to relax.

Dissonance merely means complex interaction of resonances. There is nothing intrinsically unpleasant about it. Rather, I believe, it is individual sounds that are in themselves pleasant or unpleasant, beautiful or ugly. This depends on a number of aspects of their attack, timbre, volume, and decay, and the way all of these work on the design of the human nervous system. I won’t describe all of it here; I don’t even have (nor am I looking for) a comprehensive theory to describe it. However, I have used the idea of the inherent aesthetics in sounds in some of my compositions.

One of the earlier ways to achieve this was to have an instrument that was in some way uncontrollable. As the musician played it, he decided moment by moment which sounds were intrinsically beautiful and which were ugly, and (depending on the piece) chose either the beautiful or ugly sounds to continue. In a piece called “Winter”, I chose the beautiful sounds to continue, and asked the performer to produce random harmonics on the piano. [Demonstrate.] If I had chosen the ugly sounds, I would have played it like this. [Demonstrate.]

Audience member: As a musician who plays the piano in the “normal” way, i.e., on the keys, and who has just a little bit of understanding of the overtone series, how were you able to, in that very small area of the strings, to get higher and higher overtones, when, in my concept, you would have to move quite a ways? Or is my concept incorrect?
Me: The piano string has a different harmonic every millimeter, practically.
Another audience member: Is that because it’s wound?
Me: I don’t really know. Some other instruments don’t have as many that are obvious. [I demonstrated, moving my finger a very short distance to damp the string to produce different overtones.]
First audience member: Oh, right. You almost get a scale there.
Me: Yeah, almost; but in that piece I was doing them at random, because I didn’t mark where they were.

The same works for the crywire, a piano modification of my own invention, which is even less predictable. [Demonstrate.] (I’ll disconnect that later before I play a piano piece; it makes buzzing noises that I don’t really want.)

This doesn’t work with all instruments; most don’t have “random” timbres in this manner. So, I have to leave it to the interactions of the sounds, and this leads to various types of improvisation and random juxtaposition.

Random juxtaposition. At this point I defer to John Cage, the great American composer, who beautifully and eloquently disproved his own theory. Cage was working from the idea that there is no meaningful distinction between sound and noise; that there really is no such thing as a bad performance, and in the end none of this really mattered anyway. The impulse behind this was nihilism, at first; later, as he embraced zen, he came to see it as a positive that none of it mattered anyway – because we are simply here to joyously participate in moment to moment beauty and creativity before it, and we, and everything, returns to the great cosmic nothing from whence it came. He composed silence into his music, saying of some other busier compositions, that “there is too much there, there; there isn’t enough of nothing in it.” He composed randomly, by throwing dice or dropping stones on music paper and tracing around them, or using radios as instruments, in order to show that, in the end, all is really chance anyway.

But, working from a different philosophical and religious perspective, I have come to realize that in the end it does matter; and that “nothing” really doesn’t exist. When we listen to Cage’s silent music, we hear silence – and there is really no logical or intuitive way to say that silence equals nothing. We also feel either tranquility, or expectation (waiting for something to happen); and again, there is no real way to say that these subjective states are equal to nothing. There is always something to fill a void. Even the vacuum of space is full of dark matter, energy, and a thick broth of quantum particles that are said to continuously pop in and out of existence.

What of random chance? It would seem that everything is random; I drive by another car, and there is no way for me to determine beforehand how many people are in it, or what they look like, or where they are going. Even at a subatomic level, quantum mechanics tells us that we can never know the exact speed or position of, say, a photon. But is this really random? If I drive by another car, I know beforehand that there is at least one person in it (and probably less than five), that the driver is of driving age, is probably not doing gymnastics while driving, and that, say, there are no giraffes or mountains in the car. Concerning to photon: I can’t know exactly where it is and how fast it is going at the same time, but I do know that it’s not going to suddenly stop, split in two, turn into a gazebo, and then run away in a different direction. I can’t do entirely random things either: for example, I can’t suddenly hover four feet in the air, sprout leaves, and then eat the planet Neptune. You say, of course not, that’s absurd! But we say that because we recognize absurdity; our minds realize that there are constraints on randomness. The laws of physics prevent me from hovering or eating Neptune (besides, it would give me indigestion) and genetics prevents me from growing leaves, even if I had a choice in the matter.

I may posit that these constraints on randomness also apply to music, though we don’t know exactly how this works. Cage’s music proves this. Paradoxically, very little of his “random” pieces actually sound random. What Cage discovered was exactly the opposite – there is no such thing as random. Every time we think something has happened completely by chance we find that it is the result of everything else that has already happened. The universe, or the physical laws, or both, seem to act as a kind of brake on the possibilities of what can actually happen.

I have tried to show some of this concept in the “StormSound” pieces, as well as in a couple of other large-scale compositions: the “SoundScrolls” cycle, and “From the Oceans; From the Stars”. There are a lot of events within the music that seem to happen at random; yet they occur within a fixed framework – and the musicians are always instructed to interact with each other (in various ways), so careful listening reveals that all “random” events are connected to all others. The simplest way to do this is with graphic scores [show some examples]; since the “StormSound” cycle is music about nature, I often use what I call “soundscrolls” or representations of nature or landscapes drawn or copied onto music paper. In some of these, the musicians read actual musical notes [give example]; in others, the notes of the staff merely indicated higher and lower, relative to other sounds.

Audience member: You could also vary it by changing the size of the staves.
Me: I’ve done it that way sometimes.

Other graphic scores are abstracts [show examples] – follow along a line; play louder where it’s thicker, higher when it’s higher on the page, etc. Other times, I felt that some sense of modality was needed, so I provided “melodicies” that are to be filled out as modal melodies during the performance [show example] – here is one with me on piano, Stuart Dempster, on trombone, and Neal Meyer on guitar (Ss 14).
The chord in the background of that one is an example of what I will talk about in the last part of this presentation. I will talk about it later – it’s very significant in the work as a whole – but first, the organization and structure of the prerecorded sounds that I’ve used in the “StormSound” Cycle.

The sounds are not random, though, as you probably realize by now, many have been put together by random means. Listen to this, for example. (Ss 15) What are the sounds here? Silence in a mountain meadow. Some fragments of instruments: a flute, a clanging bell. A spate of notes on a piano, processed to sound low and unclear. Then, thunder. But notice how they overlap. The piano sounds anticipate, and lead directly into, the thunder. I did not plan that. I took a recording of a thunderstorm, and an altered recording of another one of my pieces, and tracked them together. That was the result.

Audience member: Could you explain that process a little more? You say you didn’t plan it, but you put them together. What do you mean by ‘put them together’, which to me sounds planned?
Me: Okay, I planned them in that I put them together. But I didn’t plan when they would do what. I took a track of altered piano sounds, and a track of thunder that was the same length, and multi-tracked them without looking at what was going to happen, and that’s what happened.
Another audience member: So, did that happen often in these pieces, that sounds became one another, or mirrored one another is a really surprising way? Did that happen a lot, when you take one sound, to slow it down and alter it, and it sounds very similar to something that is unrelated?
Me: It did happen a lot, all the way through this piece, all nine hours of it. …There were some things of course, here and there, that didn’t work very well, so I threw them out. But in most of it, this kind of thing happened, often. That’s my point; maybe there really isn’t such a thing as random. You just put things together, and often, that’s the result. Of course some of it doesn’t come out like that, so you have to pick and choose.
Another audience member: And it’s hard to get a handle on it.
Me: What do you mean?
Audience member: It keeps weaving into itself, as it were.
Me: That’s partially what I’m talking about; partially what I’m doing!
Audience member: Yup.
Another audience member: Another question. On one of the pieces earlier, there was a sound that was very similar to the chanting of Tibetan monks.
Me: The background chord… I’m going to talk about that in a minute…
Audience member: …And I was wondering if you’ve discovered the meditative quality of certain monastic types of music. There’s a certain resonance, and I was wondering if you were working from that.
Me: [demonstrate the overtone series on the piano.] It’s basically the harmonic series. It happens in monastic music; Gregorian chant harmonized the same way. It began as plainsong, just one note, but later they harmonized in octaves, then fifths, then fourths, and so on. The Tibetan monks use a different technique; they crack the voice so it splits into three parts – but they are the same three notes. Actually the lower one is an octave lower.
Another audience member: It sounded very three dimensional, the one before this.
Me: That was recorded in a concert, so the prerecorded sound is behind the performers. It was very three-dimensional.

The same goes for the flute and woodpecker I played earlier. Remember this? (Ss 16). I could not have timed that woodpecker more perfectly, yet again, I didn’t time it. (Actually, technically, that’s how it came out the first time. There were some things I didn’t like about the piece, so I remixed it and it didn’t work that way the second time. I had to copy and paste it there. But that is how it worked the first time; usually the first time is better.)

Audience member: Before that [back in the one with the chanting in it], there were some instrumental parts that weren’t random. How were they made?
Me: That was one of the “melodicies”, filled-in note heads without meter. The musicians make up their parts based on those notes. It’s a way to have the performers interact in a way that is sort of random but also sort of planned.

Other than simply tracking sounds together, there are more complex ways to produce “randomness” that is not at all random. Here are two examples of what I’ve called “phase canons” – phasing, but not on a loop, with one voice following the other at a slightly different speed. The first is with nature sounds alone. (Ss 17). The second is of a piano – the same piano part as in that thunder example above – here, some of the notes are distorted a little to sound stylistically similar to the nature sounds in other parts of the Cycle. (Ss 18) Notice how the piano parts overlap and seem to be in synch with one another – yet again, that was not planned. Also, there is something I call “time stratification” – the timing of the piece is divided up by recurring sounds, a sort of polyrhythm on a geological scale. I can’t give any clear examples during our time here, since some of these sounds recur as far apart as fifteen minutes – but in this excerpt, the high drone, birdcall, piano harmonic, and elk call have all appeared at varying time intervals. Neal Meyer plays guitar and Dean Moore plays percussion. (Ss 19)

Lastly, there is the overall structure of the entire “StormSound” Cycle, all nine hours of it. Listeners may not perceive it because of its large scale; just as we can’t perceive the structure of the universe itself because of its large scale. But it is there nonetheless. The first piece and the last three pieces form a frame, so to speak, the two halves of which are exactly the same length. Throughout, there are sets of three pieces; three of these sets are related to one another. On a less academic level, there is what I call the Mystical Chord. Here it is again. (Ss 20) It appears in no less than nine of the twenty-one pieces; at first it is barely noticeable, but it gradually subsumes itself into the texture of the music itself, and transforms it into something new. Remember how I was talking about the inherent meanness in nature? This chord represents a form of hope; it comes from elsewhere, enters into the music, and releases the sounds of nature from their unpleasantness. By the end, it has spread to five octaves and become the music; and the music exists, beautifully, transcendently, in it. (Ss 21). I will leave it to the listener to decide exactly what the chord represents, though I will say that its source, musically, is from processed sounds of waves on a lake. The sounds split into those of the harmonic series that I was talking about earlier, though there is also a sixth that gets in there too, and I don’t really know how that happens.

Audience member: So, what’s the average of the number of tracks that you would lay on each other, and what’s the maximum and minimum number?
Me: The most is probably in the piece called “Sonic Nebula”, which has about… [count]… sixty tracks. Six-zero. The minimum is, exactly, one. There are some parts that have only one track. The average is somewhere between four and ten. And, none of the pieces have the same number of tracks throughout; it’s constantly changing. As far as live musicians go, the last piece has the most: flute, two pianos, marimba, and vibraphone: five. There are a lot of pieces for solo instrument, and several for two instruments; and three trios. There are no pieces for four instruments. Why, I can’t really say. So, it’s really chamber music, though it’s really… long… chamber music.
Another Audience member: How do you choose the musicians or the instruments?
Me: Ah – good question. Some I choose because of how the instruments blend in with the prerecorded sounds; the clarinet with the slowed-down birdcalls was an example. It almost sounds like another bird. Other times I want extreme contrast; the piece “Sonic Nebula” will have flute, piano, and jazz drums; none of which sound even remotely like the prerecorded sounds of the piece. So choosing is by timbre of the instrument, and it depends on the piece. They either blend in with the nature sounds, or stand out sharply against it, one or the other.

I’ll now play a seven-minute excerpt. Let me disconnect the crywire from the piano so it doesn’t buzz while I’m playing…

Audience member: Are you going to play an excerpt from the project, or something else?
Me: I’m going to play an excerpt.
Another Audience member: I see that you haven’t invented a case for the crywire yet.
Me: Yes – that’s the next thing I’ll have to come up with.

…This is the 13th piece in the “StormSound” Cycle, called “Soundform II”. [Plays]

Second of Two Upcoming Concerts: Feb. 9th (Wednesday) at Jack Straw Studios

What: Talk about the upcoming complete performance of the “StormSound” Cycle (with examples, performed both live and prerecorded)

When: 7:30 PM, Wednesday, February 9th

Where: Jack Straw Studios, 4261 Roosevelt Way N.E. Seattle, WA 98105.
FREE.

More info here.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email saying that I’d been “on the radar” for some time now, that I had been recommended (Thanx, Keith!), and asking if I’d like to give a presentation at the Seattle Composers’ Spotlight. I took them up on the offer.

This will not be a concert in the usual sense, but a lecture/presentation about my music – particularly the “StormSound” Cycle. I’ll post the complete text of my lecture here after the presentation. There will be examples of the music, both played live and prerecorded; and of course the “StormSound” pieces are a combination of both anyway. I will also show some examples of the graphic scores (and some of my other artwork), and talk about the theories behind the “StormSound” cycle and related music. John Cage fans, however, be very slightly afraid – although Cage is one of my major influences, at some point during the lecture I will give him a little snub, though not really – it appears to me that he beautifully and eloquently disproved his own theories and one of the ideas behind the “StormSound” pieces is to show how that is so.

Time providing, I will also play a complete piano version of one of the “StormSound” pieces.

Shameless self-promotion? Perhaps. But, musicians (like all artists) need to promote their work. This is a chance to talk about mine.

(This posting is on 2/7/2011; 106 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Reflections on the concert at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, WA, 2/3/2011

This was the first of my two concerts in February.

Jazz trio Hexafone opened, though as Mike Sentkewirz (bass) said to the audience beforehand, “We’re Hexafone, for now, but maybe not for long… I just found out that there’s another band by that name…” Whatever, their music was interesting and often beautiful. With the combination of bass clarinet (Bruce Greeley), drums (Ryan Burt), and the already-mentioned standup bass, theirs was a sparse, dark, bass-heavy sound. They seemed to take a few minutes to actually get started; the tempo dragged a bit at the beginning and the solos in the first piece failed to gather any momentum (and that floor creaked!) – but once into the second piece, their sound coalesced into a single entity, their “groove” started up, and they never looked back. They played several of their own compositions and a couple that they didn’t give a name for, so I’m assuming that they were free improvisations (though these pieces were somewhat more restrained and subtle than “free improv” sometimes implies). They also played a piece by “Johann Sebastian Strauss” – that being Johann Strauss Sr.; a bass solo evolved into a waltz and a vehicle for a series of improvised solos. Throughout the set, there was particularly interesting drum work (nice use of the toms, superball mallets, and brushes – swishing at one point in the air without actually touching the drums).

I then joined them for my graphic score “SoundScrolls VI”. Intended as something of rude interruption between “SoundScrolls V” (in a late-Cage/Feldmanesque style) and “SoundScrolls VII” (which consists almost entirely of field recordings), this is a free-jazz slam with a recorded interlude of phasing, off-key violins. Though we’d run through the first movement once before the show, our performance was essentially unrehearsed. I think it worked better that way. Again, Ryan showed some inventive drum work; Mike followed the cues from the other instruments and the prerecorded sound almost intuitively (does he have perfect pitch?) and Bruce’s clarinet wailings and buzzes were the icing on the cake. Afterwards, an audience member said it had reminded her of Varèse, particularly the electronic (prerecorded) parts. I hadn’t thought of Varèse especially. (A friend once commented that there are two artists whom he can never listen to while driving: one is Edgard Varèse; the other is Pink Floyd – both for obvious reasons.) At any rate, the prerecorded sounds in the last movement are intended to sound like the early “electronic music”, that strident, beeping, atonal style of the first synthesized music in the 1950’s (Milton Babbit, etc.) – and, since the sounds were ultimately derived from birdcalls (transformed via MIDI into clamorous bleeps and klaxons), they are a comment on human’s tendency to spoil nature by, in this case, attempting to control it with machines.

The second half was my solo, all pieces with prerecorded sound. I did two pieces from the “StormSound” Cycle, including an excerpt with an improvisation on found percussion. Included were seashells, and “This chair counts as a found object – I found it in the stairwell about an hour before the show.” The latter provided dull metallic thumps like a muffled gong. Throughout the piece, I had to resist the temptation to attempt to play the seashells and the chair in some type of steady, syncopated rhythm – a little Harry Partch would have been fun but completely out of style and not representing nature sounds (the point of the piece) at all. The same for the hammer dulcimer in one other “StormSound” piece, though here I just improvised the part over a piece that doesn’t actually include any “live” instruments.

I concluded with the meditative “SoundScrolls V”, the longest of the SoundScrolls pieces so far. Here the piano plays slowly and (usually) quietly against other piano sounds, hammer dulcimer, field recordings, and snippets of guitar played by Neal Meyer. Many of the piano sounds are processed to become microtonal – and here is a curious paradox. This is not academic microtonality or “just intonation”, but merely random detuning – and so it should sound off-key and discordant. But, as John Cage (and others) discovered, in the right context, this is not the case – these sounds can become “correct”; not tuned according to the standards imposed on the spectrum of sound by humans, but according to a wider field; the sounds of nature, the music of the spheres. Such is my intent; I am encouraged that three people in the audience came to me afterwards and reported much the same feeling when listening to the piece.

My compliments also to the soundman (Alan Burt, Ryans' brother), who expertly mixed the prerecorded sound with the “live” instruments – “SoundScrolls V” in particular needs a perfect balance, which he provided.

(This posting is on 2/5/2011; 108 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

First of Two Upcoming Concerts: Feb. 3rd (Thursday) at the Chapel

What: two of the “SoundScrolls” pieces (#5 and #6), three shorter works for guided improvisation over prerecorded sound, and a set by jazz/improv group Hexafone.

When: February 3rd (this coming Thursday), 8:00 to roughly 9:45.

Where: Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center, 50th and Sunnyside, in Wallingford (Seattle, WA).

Price: Sliding scale, $5.00 to $15.00.

About:

SoundScrolls V: A relatively long piece in three movements, for solo piano over prerecorded sound; more contemplative than many of the “SoundScrolls” pieces (its mood is close to that of many of the “StormSound” pieces). The first movement is for piano with two more pianos prerecorded and shifted slightly into microtones (I’m going into a studio tomorrow to put the finishing touches on this). All three play slow, chordal music based on a graphic score. The short second movement is for prerecorded sound alone; computerized zips and bleeps compete with field recordings and resonant drones. The third movement, the longest, is a revision of something I once played at a Seattle Composers’ Salon as “PianoSphere II” (it was a big hit then) – the piano becomes an environment of sounds, over a sound carpet of field recordings, silences, hammer dulcimer, and more piano sounds. It also uses two “extended” piano techniques of my own invention, including the crywire. The result should be a meditative work that seeks to create (metaphorical, maybe not) silence.

SoundScrolls VI: In complete contrast to #5, this is something of a rude interruption. The graphic score is, as for all the “SoundScrolls”, a landscape drawn or copied onto music paper; in this case, however, the instruments should squeal and honk in the “classic” free-jazz manner (Art Ensemble of Chicago, etc.) and the prerecorded part is an intense bit of microtonal phasing. Altogether it is about one third the length of #5.

Three more pieces: I’ll probably do “Chapel Creak”, which sounds like a pleasant location for a picnic – but notice the spelling. It’s a piece of found sound music, derived from a very creaky (and surprisingly musical) cabinet door in the back room of the Chapel where the piece is going to be performed. One of my new “Phase Canons” that use phasing in a less repetitive way than “standard” phase minimalism, it is a site-specific piece. Also, two short excerpts from the “StormSound” cycle: “Song from the Storms and the Winds”, over which I’ll improvise a hammer dulcimer part, and an edit from “Nature Lives in Motion”, with a graphic score realized from found objects. (At a meeting of the Pacific Northwest Shell Club, I mentioned Deep Listening Band playing conch shells as percussion instruments; they all said it was a fascinating idea. I’m going to try it myself with a turban shell, some scallop shells – which make a very strange, haunting and slightly dissonant chiming clink – and two abalones.)

Hexafone: This is a jazz trio, led by Bruce Greely on bass clarinet. Mike Sentkewitz plays acoustic bass and Ryan Burt plays drums and percussion. They said they’re going to do some free improv, a couple of standards, and their version of a piece by Strauss (I don’t know if it’s Johann, Johann Jr., or Richard). They’ll also join me for SoundScrolls VI.

Speaking of SoundScrolls, the jinx has resurfaced – also scheduled originally was SoundScrolls VII, which calls for two recordists (phonographers) as well as piano and found percussion. Logistical problems came about almost immediately; one by one they had to cancel (including the sound person!) so I replaced the piece with the three shorter ones.

Well, that’s about it. Should be a good concert – perhaps a little more stylistic variety than at some of my previous concerts (that’s neither good nor bad, just a fact), and I’m looking forward to it…

Again, the time and place: Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center, 50th and Sunnyside, in Wallingford (Seattle, WA). Time: 8:00 to about 9:45. Price: sliding scale: $5.00 to $15.00. More information at the Wayward Music Series blog.

(This posting is on 1/31/2011; 113 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Concert Review: Is that Jazz? Festival: Operation ID and Dana Reason; Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 1/22/2011

I couldn't make it to all of the Is That Jazz? Festival concerts, but this one at least had enough variety to be at least two concerts...









Operation ID - a photo from the Seattle Times.



“Glenn Branca meets Return to Forever with Mr. Bungle, Steve Reich, Rush, and Spock’s Beard commenting from the sidelines.” This is Operation ID – a jazz-rock fusion band of the old school, mixed with free jazz of the new school, with a lot of energy. “…Is it jazz?” The guitar player said that since the band’s inception they’ve been trying to answer than question; and when he asked Steve Peters if they could play in the “Is That Jazz?” festival, he asked, “Is it jazz?” The question gets repeated…

My answer: probably. My other answer: probably not. Neither answer affects the quality of the music.

They played eight pieces, mostly shorter than five minutes each. Most had an least one section of improvisation, either in the standard jazz sense of improvising over pre-set chords or rhythms, or in the free-improv sense of group spontaneity with nothing pre-planned. (A couple of pieces, though, were through-composed.) Most pieces started with some type of riff on one instrument, followed by the entire group exploding into action on a syncopated, heavily accented rhythm/melody; sometimes there was a little “follow the leader” session in the manner of 70’s rock, where one instrument played two or three measures and then the entire band hammered them back. Improvised sections ranged in style from chaotic free-for-all to hazy quasi-impressionism to frenetic rock; there were wailing saxophones and guitars, and moody clarinets and atmospheric hazes. The level of energy, though, never waned. In the end I would have liked the compositions to be more cyclical – in music of this sort, where everything is loud, angular, and intensely rhythmic, the listener may need some sort of home base (I know I usually write about music where this is neither needed nor provided!) but none of the pieces they played ended with the same material that they began with. Most of them sounded like two pieces that were broadly similar, stuck together with an improvisation in the middle. That’s a minor criticism though, and I expect a lot form this group in the future.











Dana Reason, a photo from the Nonsequitur blog




The second half was a piano solo, and it couldn’t have been more of a contrast. That (I think) was precisely the point. I’d heard Dana Reason play before, in California; she was a good and inventive pianist then, and now she has even more impressive technique, inventiveness, and nuance. Much of the music dealt with subtle disassociations in one way or another. There were little snow-flurries of notes that resolved into single-note trills (tremolos) that were not on the expected note but hung there in a kind of meta-harmony; there were unexpected resonances that appeared in the middle of a chord (she was using half-pedaling techniques that made the piano sound like a couple of different instruments); and little snippets (sometimes no more than two or three notes!) of classical and jazz standards. These musical disassociations had a visual element. I mentioned the pedal techniques; these were extremely visible as she bounced her foot up and down often in the “wrong” place(s) during a phrase, sometimes more than once for a single note. The trills were likewise “wrong”; her hands seemed to extend and bend in ways that aren’t used in piano music, and were almost dancelike. This visual element reached its climax in a piece called “Common Sense” – in what would seem like a mere gimmick until one thinks about it, she played the piano backwards by lying down on the piano bench and reaching up over her head. Thus the left hand was where the right should have been, and vice-versa – quite startling to watch, since the hands seem to be backwards and in the wrong place (they shouldn’t bend that way!). The reason behind this was not just a visual novelty (though it certainly was this) but a way to un- and re-learn the piano, approaching it as if it were something entirely new. The usual rules for playing simply aren’t there any more – the thumbs are in the wrong place, higher notes are now played by the right hand, backwards, and the keys are not even completely visible! Yet for all of this, the piece was intensely elegant in style and inflection.

Of course “Common Sense” was only one piece, and it was short. The other pieces were played in the conventional sitting position. She ended her set with a meditative piece by George Lewis (often pentatonic, hints of Lou Harrison, melodies based on 5ths, 6ths, and an occasional sharp-4th) and a classical “mash-up” that used the Beethoven Fifth as an idée fixe in much the same way as Ives used it in the “Concord” Sonata, though here it was underneath little bits of Chopin, Ravel, and Gershwin. Actually a fairly quiet piece, if still with those rapid flurries of notes, and it ended the program on a sense of quiet expectancy for other music.

Instrumania Part Two: Giant Windharps and Richard Lerman

A friend sent me this link a week or so ago: Harp Spectrum. This is of the same ilk as the “instrumania” (see my 1/11/2011 posting) but on a grand scale. I’ll have to check this out.














The Puget Sound Giant Windharp,
a picture from their website. There's also a "giant space harp".



I haven’t seen (or heard) anything quite like this, but I have heard some vaguely similar windharps on the CD “Within Earreach” by Richard Lerman. This CD features “field recordings” made with home-made micro-mikes that attach to objects (in the manner of pick-ups) and record not only the ambient sound but the response of the amplified object to those sounds. Fascinating, and actually quite relaxing once the listener gets past the “low tech” surface that it seems to have at first.

I’ve also seen Mr. Lerman in concert, some years ago. In one piece, he continued the idea of the mini-mikes, attaching them to sheets and slabs of metal that he suspended like gongs and “played” with a blowtorch. They made otherworldly, reverberant booms and yowls (the latter sounded as if there were tiny, spectral wolves howling within the metal). He also cut up amplified plastic drinking straws with scissors, producing a series of “plinks” that moved up a scale (or a rough overtone series) – each cut was successively shorter so the tone was higher. The whole performance was put onto a series of tape loops that echoed in surround sound. In both pieces, the whimsical visuals were in complete contrast to the apparent solemnity of the music (for the blowtorch piece he wore a hazmat suit and danced around as if trying to avoid radioactivity from the pieces of metal!). A study in contrast.

The idea of the small mikes was one inspiration behind my “Eco Slab Gong” piece. It only worked once and (in that form) is available on my CD “Abstracts” – and an excerpt from the same version is in part of the “StormSound” cycle. See my 6/17/2010 posting for the time it didn’t work, but led to the use of the slab gong as a percussion instrument – and indirectly, to the "StormSound" cycle itself.

(This posting is on 1/21/2011; 123 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Upcoming Concerts and the SoundScrolls Jinx

“New Music in the Library”: Sunday Afternoon, February 13th or 20th, Lynnwood Public Library:

I’d like to get the “New Music in the Library” concerts going again. Both of these dates have been approved by the library staff, but I’ll only do one of course. Depends how many musicians I hear from about which date. More on that later. As before, this will be a free improvisation concert, an “open mikeless” open to anyone who wants to bring an instrument – see the “rules” for participating in my 9/22/2010 posting.


Members of Seattle Phonographers' Union (and others) play compositions by S. Eric Scribner using field recordings: 7:30, Thursday, February 3rd, at the Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N, Seattle.






The cover for my “SoundScrolls” CD. I’m going to give a couple of these pieces a retry, if nothing else, to try to break the curse…

“SoundScrolls” is the name of a set of short(er) pieces (that’s relative – they’re certainly shorter than the “StormSound” cycle). I’ve been composing them since the 1980’s, though the idea actually goes back farther than that. Each of them uses one graphic score that resembles a landscape; the musicians play or improvise on the notes thus suggested. Some of them have other parts that are more traditionally notated (though still with room for improvisation); others have prerecorded parts. I’ve put out a CD or the first four of them (which are appropriately titled SoundScrolls I, SoundScrolls II, etc.).

But these “SoundScrolls” pieces seem to by jinxed. (The following discussion is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, though the facts stack up oddly.)

SoundScrolls I has been performed a couple of times at open mikes, and once in at a concert in the Fukushima Ongakudo Concert Hall in Fukukshima, Japan (with Masahiro Kusaka on shakuhachi). It seems to be my most popular ensemble piece, and the jinx does not apply to it. The rest of them, though, have always been a problem. SoundScrolls II originally had a prerecorded sound part (I lost it years ago), and all performances of the piece have had at least one near-disaster. At one open mike (Freight and Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley, CA), I had some of the parts on tape but the soundman ignored my cues and never played the tape (he asked afterwards if my frantic hand-waving had in fact been his cue); at another concert, the gong had a dent in it so it didn’t resonate properly and (at the same performance) the mallet head fell off and rolled into the audience. During a recording session I accidentally dropped a mallet into a percussion bowl (ka-clank!) but in this case the resulting clatter went with the music so I didn’t edit it out. The piece has never been performed again.

SoundScrolls III? Never performed live; the second movement is a minimalist phase-piece that appears to be unplayable. Several musicians have tried it. All have failed. I faked it on the CD, in a way that makes the listener know that it is really not possible to play live.

SoundScrolls IV? Exists only on a recording (I invented it as a way to round out the CD of the first three), so there doesn’t seem to be a problem with it. However, the CD of the SoundScrolls pieces is, as far as I know, the only one of my CDs that has never sold well at my concerts – even though those who have heard it generally think it is one of my best. It’s just that few have actually heard it. Nobody buys it at my concerts (the others disappear regularly). Is the cover really that ugly?

SoundScrolls V and VI? I’ve composed several versions of these. The latest was for a well-known Seattle new music ensemble, for the upcoming February 3rd concert; but one or more of them decided that they didn't want to “participate” (my guess is that it would be too much of a bother to set up all their elaborate stage equipment for a set that’s less than a half-hour). Two previous versions have similarly led to non-performance; in one case, a flutist who was planning to play it suddenly cancelled and then ceased all e-mails and phone calls a day before the rehearsal. A mutual friend just said he’d decided not to play it. I’ve never heard from him again. Weird.

So with all that, why bother with SoundScrolls VII? Well, the prerecorded part is one of my favorites so far, and I’ve taken it in a different direction. I’ve decided that, since most of the prerecorded part is made from field recordings, that I should have some of the performers be “recordists” too, such as the members of the Phonographers’ Union (see my 11/22/2011 posting). I contacted one of them; he sent out a message to the others, and two have said they were interested. But, this being a SoundScrolls piece, problems have already surfaced. I’ll see what happens here.

I defy you, SoundScrolls hex!

(This posting is on 1/20/2011; 124 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Concert Review: Deep Listening Band, Town Hall, Seattle, 1/15/2011

Deep Listening Band, a picture from their website.


I got there thirty minutes late, due to traffic revisions, unavailability of parking, and a general snafu about Interstate 5 (plus I started from home late to begin with…). According to the man at the door, I got the last ticket… I made my way in quietly, and sat in the back. The surround sound of the multiple speakers all around the hall made it so that where I sat had virtually no effect on my listening experience.

What follows is not a conventional concert review. The improvisatory, stream of consciousness, ambient and environmental nature of the music makes that impossible. Instead, this will be a “nonsense” poem in the manner of Finnegan’s Wake. I’m no James Joyce, but I’ve attempted to write similar material before, including one of the texts in “Discarded Poems” (the “technique” for composing this word salad is rather like aleatory/improvisational music, involving random chance and intuition).

Pointillistic sputtering,trombone, voice and left, center left, edge of downtown. righaccorion is tunedt. Oscillating dr diverse music, arts one (likthe deep listeninge siren but slower). Voldifferent from preparedume grows. Drone resolvesfrozen imDownstairs at Townprovisation, said into harmonics, multiphonrepresented in deepics (buzz) on trombonics. Wlong revereration time busy schedule ofooshes are last vestiges of speach performer arspeutters. Drone only now, seven limit system very beautiful “environmenleft hand andtal” sound. Minor key, dramany more instrumentsone on tonic; trombone onwe improvise together 3rd, 4th, 5th, generous (outinner) spaces and flat 7th. Influential unifying presence. Bell sounds from… where? Adjustable didgeridoo made Tintinnabulation. Bird caarrived at Sea-Taclls, from… where? (Electrand found metalonic glissando upwards.) October (1998). After Bells, bass trombone, diwhistling that providedgeridoo effect, low regiwas very darkster on piano. Fade to s45 second reverberationilence. Wavesounds (trafThe recording enginesix two-story columnser, fic outside), audience coavailable at theno religious symbolismughs, then silence.

“We’re going to take a short 15-minute break, or maybe a long 15-minute break.”

Surround piano – one noearly up, andte, 7th on tromHousehomed in anombone, 2nd was very darkand major 3rd long blockbeautiful voicedmocracy and ise andof Steve Reichian soundcistern available for. Fades, trombone mutes, iWe stayed atntrodumany of Seattle's ces minor 2nds, disquiet and helpedsonance, microtones, vocarecording studio! al “doogah!” byon the cornerpianwere all sist. Dissolves into pogreat depth toints and sputters, randsimontaneously by allom notes and noises. Toy anianessential processmals (all thbusy schedule ofree players, pianispace, in effect, ist first) digital sounds (anfoot diameter spaced listening devicesqueaks) from these jointed PVC pipetoys produce humorous mishleft handculture center itandmash when processed right and scalisten intensely tottered, space sounds, ironically nrepresented in Deepo irony! Teletuon Eighth Avenuebbies. Bye bye! (riall three composerssing notintonation). Fracentral dome menbrought along althoughts of children’s songs. Nowin the Great Halstrident, algood suggestions for(four)most gagaku. Clicks and clatters, stAl todoock sci-fi “filk”, duck-calls, mothe nhood of distingext daynightkeys, vocalisms, howls. Blwell handles whistlingow through conch shover the last ll, use edge to performingconch shell as percussion (compcomposers. The instrumentstutter scatters sounelaborate window treatmentd, adds pitto one anotherches). Loud! Wave of white noisand attentiveness differente, recedes, leavinfor conversion intog didgeridoo onAs we improvilectures, meetings, andse trombone, tranquility – then (Messiaen) aphand. The voice,ocalyptic bass trombone snintermingle to make ort. Slowamphitheater-style seating of rhythm, movea collective music. s to behind audience (accordion tunacoustic resonance of organization and relies ed differently from intimate, curved, amphitheater-other instruments), betrying to seecomes free jazz. Pianist plays bell, comand off toputer scatters bell sound, acabfor dozens oflats for ecoround onec twodds threees, (shar)pitches, bell becommany more intenstrumentses maspace to manyny bells in different retransformative spatial modulations, gisters. Quiet! Tone clustarps, cleaning toolters indiverse music, artshighest registthe big dayer of piano again First Hill neighborhood, st chordrochanged by interactionne and bells, fades. Silence. End.

If anyone could read all of that, they’d realize that the music made by Pauline Oliveros (accordon), Stuart Dempster (trombone) and David Gamper (piano) – collectively called Deep Listening Band – is improvisational, and in this concert, augmented by live surround-sound computer processing. A single note (or effect) played by one player resulted in a refractive cavalcade of echoes from all directions, often changing in pitch. The result was alternately meditative or chaotic (sometimes both at the same time!). There was a humorous moment when they played toys as instruments: the squeaks, digital noises, bye-bye!s, and whistles from stuffed animals, teletubbies, etc., joined into the computerized soundscape. The concert was in Seattle’s historic Town Hall, a former church, which has distinctive architecture.

Matter-of-fact descriptions like that are okay, but the stream-of-consciousness “nonsense” fits the nature and ambiance of the music much better.

(This posting is on 1/19/2011; 125 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Instrumania with Jay Hamilton

At first the rounded metallic contour looked like a Tibetan bell. Then Jay pulled it out of the box, to show the rest of it – it was an adapter to fit different sizes of plumbing pipe together, and looked nothing like a Tibetan bell. “It is, though, a random thing made of metal,” he said, and struck it (klong!) with a mallet. The box, I could see, was full of random things made of metal – all potentially percussion instruments.

Jay was showing me his collection of mostly hand-made instruments, with the possibility of using one or more in the StormSound Cycle concert. Besides the random things made of metal, the majority were home-made zither-like instruments – the ones that I thought would work best in the concert and the ones I had originally intended to see.

First, there’s the Ycrix (ee-kree), a pseudo-French name for an 18-stringed box derived from the ancient Chinese cheng (not the more modern and more harplike jeng). It is good with the ringing harmonics and bending, almost bluesy bwayowng! sounds of its predecessor.




















The Qulp, originally designed for the Quixotic String Ensemble; maybe related to the Ycrix – though its sound is more metalic.

















The Cannon: Music students insisted on calling this one a bazooka, but it’s not! It’s not! It’s an instrument of music, not of war, so it’s called a cannon. Musically it sounds rather like a banjo or even a dulcimer. There are longer versions of this, such as the klool, which is bowed (and has the strings of a viola da gamba).

















The dragon: tuned in just intonation, this can be guitarlike, or bowed, or played as a struck chordophone. Resembling instruments from the “stans”, it could be a central Asian addition to the Harry Partch instrumentarium.

















“Zither” is, of course, now a class of instruments, not any particular instrument. But, these last two aren’t “zithers” at all. This unnamed length of conduit with a saxophone mouthpiece sounds rather like a contrabass clarinet; I had expected it to sound like a sopranino didgeridoo (wow, was I wrong!).

















…And a resonant bass xylophone.

There were a lot of others, including a couple of other zithers, several types of percussion made from plumbing (and tuned to just intonation), and a small harp that does amazingly funky (twowng!) pitch-dives. All in all an interesting set of instruments, some of which I will definitely use in the “StormSound” – probably most would work best for the sounds of the “nocturnimals” (along with the recorders and/or bass clarinet) in the piece “Night Signals; Journey to the Sea”.

(This posting is on 1/11/2011; 133 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

Concert Review: Seattle Composers' Salon, Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 1/7/2011

The concert began and ended with ensemble pieces. The first of these was the cryptically titled “Gemtian Songs” by Christian Asplund, for tenor and various instruments (this performance was for acoustic guitar, French horn, clarinet, and string bass, though judging from what was said about the piece, it has been played by completely different ensembles in the past, and may actually be for any, unspecified, instruments). Whatever its intended instrumentation, the piece relied much on timbre for its overall effect and even its form. The fact that I could not hear the words distinctly (nor was I supposed to, I don’t think) only added to this. There were five songs (of a set of six) performed. In each, aleatory and improvisatory elements combined into textures: pointillistic sputters on a single pitch; drones with varying overtones; scatters of individual phonemes pronounced by the instrumentalists (and later the tenor soloist); and at one point a jazz/minimalist ostinato that fragmented and slowly disappeared into an evolving drone/chord. The overall feeling was meditative, particularly since the volume level was low throughout.

Afterwards, an audience member asked how they’d chosen to do the specific five songs from the set of six. The answer: “Well, the other one asks the instrumentalists to sing… No, actually, we had to cut one because of the time, so if we had to cut any, that was the one.” Another humorous moment: an audience member asked about the French horn player's unusual instrumental accessory. “What type of mute is that?” Answer: “An Opel.” (Meaning, of course, the Buick – it was a hubcap.)

The second piece was the shortest: an untitled “Prelude” by Michael Nicolella, who played it on the classic guitar. He first gave a short introduction, saying that he wanted to achieve a pianistic sound for the guitar. The piece did have some of the quality of keyboard writing, with an ostinato (what would be played in the left hand on a piano) and a melody that slowly revealed itself floating above it; however, to me it had the feel of Spanish classical guitar music (not Flamenco) more than a Chopin prelude.

Christopher DeLaurenti followed this with an electronic piece for negative soundspace. He took the sounds that were not originally intended in a performance of a string quartet by Luigi Nono (page turning, shifting positions of instruments, breathing by performers) and amplified these, leaving blank spaces where the notes of the string quartet originally were. The piece succeeded on two levels. In one way, it was a continuation of the “silent” music of Neal Meyer’s “Gradus” and Gust Burns (and ultimately of Cage) – serving as a vehicle to bring one’s mind to the silence and unintended sounds between and among sounds. But also, Chris gave a long spoken introduction, then had the lights doused, and he performed in near darkness with only his face visible, moonlike and expressionless in the pale gleam of a laptop – it was a startling visual performance piece that caused the audience members to focus on the small details of light and darkness that were dimly visible here and there (the glint off of a piece of jewelry, the shadows cast by the glow of the laptop) in the same manner as they focused on the sounds.

The last three pieces were all very short and for a very large ensemble: members of the Seattle Rock Orchestra (so called because they often do arrangements of rock and other types of popular songs). They are basically a full chamber orchestra, notably lacking percussion (probably to avoid any stereotype sound of “arranged pop music”) and heavy on the bass instruments – trombones, bass clarinet, and I counted five string bases. The three pieces were by brothers John and Scott Teske: two (from a set of six) untitled graphic scores by John, and a fully-notated post-Romantic piece by Scott. In the first of John’s graphics, low menacing microtonal drones gradually opened into larger sounds – very reminiscent of some of Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” pieces. The second started with a vast bang and a tumult – by far the loudest single ecstatic explosion I’ve ever heard at a Composers’ Salon – and then gradually fell apart, returning to the drones of the first piece (letting a didgeridoo give a primordial growl in the process). Scott’s piece finished up the set by beginning with a chord much like one of the drones in John’s pieces, then evolving melodically into a short symphonic slow movement with traces of Mahler and Richard Strauss. By itself this piece would have seemed too short (and even unfinished); but in this set it sounded like a finale that returned the listener to familiar territory after the two graphic pieces. One less string bass (the bass player was now a conductor) didn’t detract from it piece at all.

As Tom Baker (curator of the Salons and guitarist in “Gemtian Songs”) commented, something great about the Salons is the variety of pieces that could be presented. This concert was no exception.

(This posting is on 1/10/2011; 134 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)

The Last Post of 2010: Christmas, and Report on This Blog

This may (or not) be the last posting for 2010, so I just thought I’d stick in a couple of random musical thoughts (I don’t think I need to call them “neuron firings” again; I’ve said that too many times…)


1. “Experimental” Christmas Music

I thought that I’d do a posting on this, but didn’t get any time to write it. Here, at any rate, are a couple of ideas. I mentioned the Messiaen “20 Aspects of the Baby Jesus” in a previous posting; this is indeed “different” from the standard piano playing of Christmas standards (i.e. in hotel lobbies during this season). I’d like to hear this instead, sometime! There also exists a “Little Suite for Christmas” by George Crumb, in the same vein, but darker and using a number of Crumb’s inside piano techniques (I’ll concede that Christmas music probably shouldn’t be dark). It has a rendition of the “Coventry Carol” in the middle, mostly monophonic and plucked.

Another one is the interlude, “For the Birth of Christ”, from the African Sanctus by David Fanshawe. Predating music with digital samples, this uses Fanshawe’s own recordings of traditional African music but is mostly a large “classical” work for chorus, piano, and rock band. Some of it sounds oddly dated now (like a 1960’s rock opera that never quite got going) but this interlude is worth listening to. Both relaxing and tense, the piano adds an atonal accompaniment to a love song from Sudan. In the original vinyl release, the love song was panned too far to one direction and the piano too far to the other, and they switched sides in the middle (an unnecessary and unnerving special effect); but that was fixed on the CD reissue.

Some “pop” oddities: There’s a full-orchestral Christmas tune by Japanese folk-rocker Reimy (on her self-titled first album; her barely-controlled childlike voice stands out in sharp, weird contrast to that grand accompaniment), and Bob Dylan did a Christmas CD. I checked out the latter from the library, asking the question: What happens when everybody’s favorite non-singer and arguably the last of the beatnik poets decides to take on Christmas carols? Answer: not much. It just sounds like anybody’s cantankerous but loveable great-granddad wheezing Christmas songs in a karaoke bar. Charming in its way, but definitely not classic Dylan. (Maybe he meant it to be ironic; but ironically, the irony is lost.)

Last, and probably least, there's my own piece "Angelconcert" on my CD "PianoSphere".


2. Report on this blog:

The most-read postings, in order: Concert Review, Eye Music (Sept. 19, 2010); Sound Installation Review: Steve Peters (Sept. 14, 2010); and CD Reviews: Boretz, Lierman, Improvised Music Festival (Oct. 30, 2010).

Least-read postings: Max’d Out Cartoons (Dec. 17, 2010), and the Free Downloads (Sept. 1, 2010). I don’t know what this means. I thought the cartoons were funny, and the free downloads are in fact free (also they don’t contain viruses, and you can delete them if you don’t like them). Probably something about the way internet traffic is being routed to (or away from) these postings…

There are also these weird spikes in activity: sometimes I find that suddenly 97 or 102 people in Malaysia or Latvia or Mozambique looked at my blog all within two minutes of each other. It’s happened roughly four times a month (six in September). What gives? It’s too quick for one person to discover it and then e-mail a link to all of his/her friends. Maybe it’s just a glitch in the Blogger software…? Or does this blog rotate onto a “next blog” list in some places periodically?


3. What's Up Next Year?

Obviously, there's the concert (May 21) of the complete "StormSound" Cycle. Also, I have a concert scheduled for Thursday, February 4, at the Good Shepherd Center, but I haven't completely planned it out yet. I'm working on a new piece for it, one of the old "SoundScrolls" series. And, I'd like to get those "New Music in the Library" concerts going again.


Well, that’s it. Signing off for now. If I don’t post anything else before next year, Merry Christmas to anyone who’s reading this, and Happy New Year.

(This posting is Christmas Day, 2010; 150 days until the first performance of the complete "StormSound" Cycle.)