Readers of critic-composer Kyle Gann‘s PostClassic blog at artsjournal.com/postclassic have been treated this year to occasional comments on his part about his various efforts in transcription — taking existing recordings, and converting them into staves on the page, and notes on the stave. (And, if not literally the page, then a computerized equivalent.) Gann describes the practice as a kind of fool-hearty obsession, and as an instructive tool: learning by diving deep into the work of composers he admires.
When he completed a transcription of the piano improvisation “Children on the Hill” by Harold Budd — heard on the Budd album The Serpent (In Quicksilver) — and showed the score to Budd, he says Budd replied, “I couldn’t play that in a thousand years.” Fortunately for us, the accomplished pianist Sarah Cahill accepted the challenge, and performed Gann’s version last month at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, which was hosting the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music.
In Cahill’s playing, this is an intricately minimalist work, simple patterns repeating to maximum and sustained effect. Gann’s source material is not the Serpent album version, but a live performance by Budd at New Music America in 1982. (The Serpent version is about five minutes long; this transcription is about five times that. He’s written about the differences in the versions at artsjournal.com/postclassic.)
Gann has posted a recording of the Cahill performance at artsjournal.com/postclassic (MP3).
Of course, Budd is as much an innovator in sound as he is in composition, as exemplified by his work with Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins. The resulting file from the Minimalist Music conference has something akin to the milky lushness that listeners have come to associate with a proper Budd recording — perhaps due to the relatively low fidelity of the recording and of MP3 compression.
The new novel by Jonathan Lethem takes place in a modern Manhattan slightly askew from our own. It’s the same Epcot for aesthetes that the borough has become in the years since Mayor Rudolph Giuliani bleached Times Square and tamed crime, but there are differences, like a giant, and likely mechanical, tiger raging through midtown, and the existence of pop-cultural artifacts with no equivalent in our world, such as films that don’t appear in the IMDB listings for Marlon Brando and Werner Herzog — at least not in our parallel universe. The novel is titled Chronic City, and true to its name, it’s a marijuana-infused story of cultural paranoia. Key among those paranoids is Perkus, a walking encyclopedia of film, pop music, and politics who spends his time weaving conspiracies from stray threads of coincidence. These insights also manifest themselves in the form of “cluster” headaches, which lead him, in the following scene, to visit an acupuncturist known as Strabo:
Much ambient and otherwise minimal electronic music bears the hallmarks of what’s known in classical music as “minimalism,” but few musicians accomplish this cross-pollination with the melodic alacrity of Segue. That’s the name under which Vancouver, Canada-born, Washington, DC-based Jordan Sauer records his pulsing, flowing, time-slowing wonders, like the three tracks that comprise his recent album, In with the Out, Old with the New. Released last month on the IOD netlabel, the record is rich with pieces that mix clockwork patterning with sinuous intent. Only one of the tracks is available for streaming, the rapid “Adventure” (