The Toronto-based composer John Kameel Farah is equally at home in electronic and classical music. That’s especially the case with dance-leaning electronic music and the non-Western classical music, notably from Middle Eastern traditions. In a recent extended podcast at resonancefm.com, he showcased some of his current work, and did a welcome job of explaining it (MP3). One particularly inspired piece begins at 11:18 in the MP3 (the intro starts at 9:49), mixing his elegant piano with crabwalk electronic percussion. It’s a kind of chamber music parallel to the more orchestral efforts of Roni Size (circa Reprazent).
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“Hermes” is a track by Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, the prolific British musician and sound artist. It is an excerpt of one of his recent ballet scores, in this case a work he created with choreographer David Dawson of the Dutch National Ballet.
“Hermes” is an excerpt, an alternate mix, of what the Dutch National performed to. The full work is titled timelapse/(Mnemosyne), and for a glimpse at what these sounds are intended to align with, there is a short video on youtube.com:
Scanner retains a vestige of classical ballet by insinuating a violin section into the mix. It’s a natural connection, and brings to mind not only the scores of the core ballet repertoire, but, as the electronic percussion kicks in, precedent “crossover” work like Malcom McLaren’s “Madame Butterfly.” But where McLaren sought contrast between opera and dance music, Scanner has the benefit of working in two dance mediums at once: ballet and, for lack of a more nuanced term, techno. This isn’t merely a matter of correlative genre associations. It’s intrinsic in the music. The “Hermes” track works because while it opens in strict contrast (strings versus beats), in time the sense of contrast dissipates — those violins do not change much as the track proceeds, but as they meld with the electronic percussion they reveal themselves as a kind of percussion, a percussion of strings. The contrast doesn’t merely dissolve. It reveals itself as having been an illusion from the start.
A longtime friend passed away on July 18: Edith Eisler, whom I met two decades ago in my capacity as manager of the editorial coverage of classical and related music in the magazines published by Tower Records: Pulse!, Classical Pulse!, and epulse. I use the word “manager” instead of “editor” because my incredible array of freelance writers, most of who came to the magazines thanks to Bob Levine (with whom I co-founded Classical Pulse!), knew far more about the subject at hand than I did at the time, or ever will. Edith was key among them. Chamber music was her specialty.
Edith was a violin teacher and music critic who lived in Manhattan, and she was a constant presence in our pages. I worked at Pulse! from 1989 through 1996, and then continued in a freelance capacity through Pulse!‘s closure in 2002 and epulse’s in 2004. Throughout, Edith was a force of nature. Before her mother’s health began to decline, she attended concerts seemingly nightly, and had thoughtful, considered, often corrective reviews written and submitted before the musicians themselves had gotten a full night’s sleep.
Editing Edith was a remarkable experience for numerous reasons. To begin with, she was the fastest talker I have ever known — she spit syllables like the best rappers could only dream of — and on top of it had the most impeccable written English, the sort of English that perhaps only those for whom it is a second language could manage. (Edith and her mother were from Vienna originally but moved to the U.S. after living in London during World War II, where they witnessed the bombings. Edith’s mother, Sophie, would joke: “We lived in Vienna, Hitler came to Vienna. We went to Czechoslovakia, Hitler came to Czechoslovakia. We moved to London, Hitler’s bombs came to London. He followed us everywhere — he was crazy about us.” Sophie also told stories about seeing Mahler on the streets of their native Vienna in her youth.)
There were times when the only editing Edith’s text required was figuring out that she had meant a “1″ when she had typed a lowercase “L” — a habit that persisted long after her late transition from typewriter to computer. Edith wrote so much for the publications, it’s difficult to single out specific work, but I remember fondly working with her on a piece about performance competitions, whose very existence she questioned (I agreed with her on this, and learned much in the process of developing the piece).
Edith was forever intrigued by the editorial efforts amid which her writing was published. The Tower magazines mode was to consider all genres alongside each other, a kind of meta-purism that dispensed with genre purism in favor of a utopian approach that sometimes is termed “big-eared.” Even after classical music was removed from the aggressively eclectic Pulse! magazine and given its own publication, the coverage strove to both challenge longtime listeners and intrigue new ones. Edith was fascinated by the inclusion in the magazine of comics, which I edited, and was quite outspoken about her lack of comprehension of the contemporary music we featured. But there was never a sense of dismissal, just of intense curiosity. I learned enormous amounts from Edith and her writing, in particular how strong opinions can be expressed without the appearance of rudeness.
Edith and I did not speak often in the past decade, usually just once a year, when I would call on her birthday, which happens to be Valentine’s Day. Next Valentine’s Day will be a sad one for everyone who knew her or her work. Rest in peace, Edith — no doubt you are having a strong cup of coffee with Mahler and your dear mother.
(Above images from allthingsstrings.com. The youthful one was, if memory serves, the photo that accompanied a newspaper review of a recital she played shortly after arriving in the United States.)
The drone is a form, not an instrument. And even if oscilators and synthesizers have helped popularize it as a technique by bringing sine waves to the general public, it predates those technologies. Heck, it predates electricity. Zachary James Watkins reminds us of this in his serrated-ethereal Suite for String Quartet. Not only does it milk the trepidation of all those string vibrating at once to achieve a rich drone, but it adds signal processing and an attention to the acoustic properties of the room in which it was recorded (MP3).
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It opens with car noise, water, and a thick industrial hum — not industrial like nihilist industrial music; it’s industrial like a heavy duty HVAC on its last legs. To hear that hum suddenly turn into, or reveal itself to be, a string section a little over a minute into the quartet is a wonderful thing, and reason enough to hang around for the nearly half hour it takes to cycle through the numerous brief movements that contribute to its suite structure. What’s remarkable about the digital processing is that the electronics are intended not to subdue the strings, but to draw a connection between their hum and the more common, contemporaneous hum of extended electric performance.
Watkins makes the most of those strings by altering their harmonic tendencies: “Each string of the quartet is retuned to an odd number partial of 60Hz,” he writes in a brief liner note that accompanies the MP3, and which may help explain the intense friction that at times occurs. The recording was made at the Second Annual May Day! New Music Marathon in Seattle on May 1 of this year. The performers are Brad Hawkins (cello), Eyvind Kang (viola), Paris Hurley (violin), and Brandon Vance (violin), with Watkins on unspecified electronics.
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:
Rewarding Rewording: The site Translation Telephone, at translation-telephone.com, pulls an Alvin Lucier / “I Am Sitting in a Room Listening” on words. In Lucier’s landmark work, the sound of a recording is heard to disintegrate as a phrase is read aloud in a room, and then a recording of that is played in the room, and then a recording of that recording is played, and so on. In Translation Telephone, you type in a phrase, and watch it cycle from one language to the next. For example, here’s a paragraph from a Disquiet post a few days ago:
The remix takes many forms. Music is remixed, but so too are videos, photographs, words, recipes, buildings, ideas. The remix is a means by which the past is made vibrant. It is the means by which the certitude of any form of documentation is probed and prodded until it loses its illusion of integrity.
And here is how it turned out, after going from English to Macedonian to Hebrew and back to English, with 18 additional languages at various stages in between:
Love is in many ways. The Sound of Music Mixer. But he added, video, photos, graphics, love the structure, how to live. This document is credibility
If a good mantra is a universal one, then Disquiet.com’s — “Just sitting here, listening” — holds up OK. After cycling through Bulgarian, Hindi, and 18 others languages, it came out “Just sit and listen,” which is, arguably, an improvement. Of course there are differences between Lucier’s piece and Translation Telephone, in particular that Lucier’s disintegration algorithm does double duty to provide a sense of the contours of the room in which it is recorded. If there were a parallel in Translation Telephone, what would it be? (Thanks to Paolo Salvagione for the tip. He called it an example of “rewording.”)
Bowl Alone: The intersection of physics and spirituality is a not uncommon one. This video accompanied a brief piece at io9.com that discussed how physicists were exploring the unique properties of Tibetan bowls, which are a popular tool for experimental musicians, especially those interested in the drone.
Max/R.I.P.: Belatedly, an excellent interview with famed computer-music legend Max Matthews done by Geeta Dayal just weeks before his death: frieze.com. Dayal is the author of the 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno‘s Another Green World. When she was prepping for the Matthews interview, she asked, via Twitter, if anyone had any questions for him. (Matthews is synonymous with electronic music, because his first name is part of the name of the popular software Max/MSP.) I’d seen him speak at CCRMA at Stanford several years ago, and had wanted to ask him about the multi-channel mixer he had reportedly built for John Cage‘s 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis with the New York Philharmonic, then under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. Dayal did indeed ask the question, for which I am eternally thankful. This is just an excerpt from her Frieze piece:
GD: Didn’t you build a 50-channel mixer in 1964, for the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein? For a performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis?
MM: [Laughs] Yes, it would have been in the 1960s, because Cage and Jim Tenney were the two conductors; they ran the mixer. The mixer did have roughly 50 input channels, one for each pair of musicians at a given music stand. It was an octopus of wires, and they all came into these two consoles with a lot of knobs to adjust the volumes, and to direct the sound to one or more of about a dozen loudspeakers which were positioned around Avery Fisher Hall. Cage wrote the music for the performers, and he and Tenney ran the mixer during the performance. Even by Cage’s fairly generous standards, it wasn’t what he had hoped for. He added a piano portion, and I forgot the name of his pianist to the piece [David Tudor], and my judgment was that Bernstein stayed as far away as he could get; he couldn’t stand it. And I was just as happy to have him stay away, to tell you the truth.
GD: Did you and Bernstein not get along?
MM: We didn’t get close enough to not get along. But if we had gotten any closer, I would have quit the project.
The instruments did not have contact microphones on them, and of course you don’t want to put a contact microphone on a Stradivarius. I’d encouraged the musicians to bring their second violins, or any old violin, instead of their best violins. I arranged the contact mics to be on parts of the instrument that aren’t permanent, like the bridge, and had gone through quite a bit of trouble to be sure that the contact microphones could be put on the instruments without damaging the instruments. I think most of the instrumentalists didn’t have any trouble with that. So I was really mad at Bernstein when he came in one morning and told the instrumentalists that if they didn’t want to use the mics, they didn’t have to. I think most of them went ahead and used the mics. And Bernstein didn’t come back again. It was a concert series, about four or five nights of this piece, that it was played. Anyhow, it was fun to work with Cage, and it was fun to work with the orchestra, and it was fun to build this rather large mixer.
Board Game: There is something really beautiful about motion frozen, like fast-frame stills of bats in flight and of water drops hitting solid surfaces. And then there are Jeff Cook‘s wood sculptures based on cellular automata, like those in John Conway‘s influential “Game of Life” (via boingboing.net‘s David Pescovitz):
They’re on display at the gallery Chalk (chalkla.com) in Los Angeles through July. More photos from the opening at the gallery’s facebook.com account.
Kick It? Yes You Can: Two worthy musical Kickstarter campaigns, both from New Orleans: There’s the new Chef Menteur album, and a musical house. On the latter: “A growing group of local and national sound artists are working towards interactive instruments that can be built into its walls and floorboards so that visitors can bring the house to life through their touch.”
The Sound of Pixels: During dinner with a friend recently, talk turned, as it occasionally does, to the process of taking one’s physical audio recordings and converting them to MP3s. We discussed various subjects: the reasonable legal right to download files of albums you have already purchased, those scary stickers on old promotional LPs you bought used that say they remain the property of the record company, and, inevitably, the proper bitrate. Certainly not 128kbps, but 192? 320? And should it be MP3? OGG? FLAC? I said I usually rip mine at 320, but I have this lingering fear that a decade from now standard audio equipment will be upgraded in a manner that will make our 320kbps MP3s sound the way that our old VHS cassettes look on fancy new HD TVs. The momentary look of anxiety on his face was straight out of a John Carpenter movie.
Navel Browsing: I need to do a better job of tracking comments I make on other people’s sites. Here are two from excellent newmusicbox.org: A piece by Colin Holter takes apart a quote widely attributed to Duke Ellington (that there are only two types of music: good and bad), and while Ellington did say it, he didn’t mean by it what Holter says it means, and I tried to correct the record. Also, in a separate piece, Frank J. Otieri asks, “What is the sound of music-less music?” and I suggest that the answer is held in a study of phonography, or the art of field recordings.
App Swap: The remarkable app Reactable appears to be the first major port of a general-interest (i.e., not framed as a next-gen instrument) generative-sound app from iOS to Android: reactable.com.
Playing Defense: Reports on “sonic warfare” generally discuss snazzy new weaponry, but there is recent news of an “acoustic ‘cloaking device’”: bbc.co.uk.
Truly Representing:Diego Bernal is the new City Council member representing District 1 in San Antonio, Texas. This is, indeed, the same Diego Bernal who remixed the Atlanta-based Fourth Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra‘s “Ose Shalom” last December for the tabletmag.com Hanukkah remix compilation I produced. Major congrats, man. Do your city proud.
A longtime friend passed away on July 18: Edith Eisler, whom I met two decades ago in my capacity as manager of the editorial coverage of classical and related music in the magazines published by Tower Records: Pulse!, Classical Pulse!, and epulse. I use the word “manager” instead of “editor” because my incredible array of freelance writers, most of who came to the magazines thanks to Bob Levine (with whom I co-founded Classical Pulse!), knew far more about the subject at hand than I did at the time, or ever will. Edith was key among them. Chamber music was her specialty.
Edith was forever intrigued by the editorial efforts amid which her writing was published. The Tower magazines mode was to consider all genres alongside each other, a kind of meta-purism that dispensed with genre purism in favor of a utopian approach that sometimes is termed “big-eared.” Even after classical music was removed from the aggressively eclectic Pulse! magazine and given its own publication, the coverage strove to both challenge longtime listeners and intrigue new ones. Edith was fascinated by the inclusion in the magazine of comics, which I edited, and was quite outspoken about her lack of comprehension of the contemporary music we featured. But there was never a sense of dismissal, just of intense curiosity. I learned enormous amounts from Edith and her writing, in particular how strong opinions can be expressed without the appearance of rudeness.