One of the most solemn PSAs in the public sphere is the often unheeded request at the start of cultural events for members of the audience to turn off their cellphones. The most effective method I’ve witnessed is also the most buzz-killing, except when it can be pulled off with exactly the correct mixture of humor and admonition: when the performers themselves pull out a cellphone from a pocket, raise it high, invite the audience to do the same, and then instruct them to turn it off. As entreaties go, this works pretty well.
Just before the start of the San Francisco Symphony concert I attended this week, a loud voice reminded people to turn off their phones. This is the common approach — a disembodied, non-accusatorial encouragement to do what’s right. As everyone from the CDC to the Fire Marshall to a school teacher can tell you, it generally isn’t the most effective approach.
What was interesting at the symphony was specifically who was making the request. The disembodied voice identified herself as one of the symphony’s cellists. This struck me as smart: It’s one thing for an anonymous administrator or voice actor to remind people. It’s another for a member of the orchestra to do so. It felt personal. It felt like what’s called a “nudge” these days, a gentle prodding toward better behavior. It’s one thing to ignore an anonymous speaker. It’s another to hear the message from the very same person you’re supposedly about to pay a lot of attention to for two hours straight (not counting intermission).
I mention the following at the risk of diminishing what I’ve described thus far: Still, at least two phones buzzed and one rang near me during the concert.
I went to the symphony this week — my third concert in six days. That’s after, first, the Audium, and second, a four-group ambient/noise/drone show at the Luggage Store Gallery. I have to say, concertos often aren’t my thing — too much emphasis on bag-of-tricks technique showboating. Often I end up thinking what I’m listening to is kinetic schmaltz. At the end of the first movement of one piece at the concert, there was a lot of mistaken applause from the audience. I think the soloist deserves some of the responsibility, because it was quite easy, based on the “Olympic gymnast who just landed on both feet after a quadruple whatever” stance, to misconstrue that the piece was, in fact, over — which it wasn’t. (Reminder: In jazz, we clap after each solo. In classical music, we don’t clap between movements. Also in classical, if you refuse to stand for the apparently now mandatory ovation, you will be cast out from society.)
Anyhow, a remarkable sequence of events occurred during the Dvořák “New World” Symphony. At one point, the first cellist shook his left hand in what appeared to be confusion. It seemed that one of his strings broke and it hurt his palm or one of his fingers, or perhaps something else went haywire. He promptly traded his cello with that of the cellist seated to his right. Then that guy carried — while the orchestra was still playing — the first cellist’s cello up to the third row of cellists, where he exchanged it with another cellist, a woman. She then carried the first cellist’s cello offstage. This is, again, all while the orchestra was still playing, full force. The guy to the right of the first cellist promptly returned to his seat and proceeded to play on the cello belonging to the woman from the third row. After the movement ended, the woman returned from offstage with the first cellist’s cello (this retelling has become the sort of thing you have to say six times fast in a bar bet). The guy next to the first cellist walked up two rows with her cello to reverse the exchange. He then walked back to the first row, returning the first cellist’s repaired cello and reclaiming his own — thus completing the brigade cycle. The first cellist then used his bow to, graciously, acknowledge his colleague from the third row who’d carried his cello offstage for it to be fixed. Everyone applauded (caveat: sometimes it is OK to applaud between movements). The conductor made a comment that, yes, this is live music. The camaraderie-in-action was pretty great.
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment, and, yes, Threads (threads.net/@dsqt). Today’s Scratch Pad entry went out at the end of the day, because I drove to Stockton and back to attend a comic book convention.
▰ When I was in high school I worked for the school newspaper. One day, a kid said he was gonna start an “underground” school paper. I went to that meeting. It was the same people. This is what every new social media app feels like.
▰ The life cycle of (solo effort) to-do list tools: single text/markdown doc → spreadsheet → wide range of apps → single text doc
▰ If only the annual San Francisco fog cover could muffle the sound of fireworks as effectively as it dims the rumored visuals
▰ Listening to a bootleg of a concert you attended in 1989 and wondering if that was your own voice you just heard amid the cheering
▰ Several people have uploaded their Disquiet Junto tracks this week to Bandcamp, and I thought, “Hey, since I can make a playlist on the mobile Bandcamp app, I’ll do so.” Then I realized I can’t share that playlist with anyone else
▰ Pretty sure that’s the most musicians we’ve ever had in a single Disquiet Junto project: 73. We had 67 on SoundCloud and 6 on Bandcamp.
▰ Strange New Worlds is already my favorite recent Star Trek. Spock getting a noise complaint for playing his Vulcan lute was icing on the cake.
▰ I memed, inspired by the recent episodes of Strange New Worlds:
▰ I remain convinced that most categories of online services are akin either to hair salons, to grocery stores, or to movie theaters. That is, either you choose one service and stick with it, or you have a main one but go to others, or you don’t really care but have some preferences. I think social media has mostly been a hair salon until recently. I don’t think it can persist in movie theater mode, which lately is how things feel. We’ll see what happens next.
▰ Interesting that this whole thing Meta built is built around the assumption you’ll wanna create threads — rather than standalone posts. Or perhaps “threads” is also meant to include conversations. I generally see threads on TUS* as a bonus not the point. But maybe that’s because I work in paragraphs for a living, and single-thought posts feel like a holiday.
*the unmentionable service
▰ The stairway at the Luggage Store Gallery is one of my favorite passageways in the entirety of San Francisco
▰ When you attend a drone noise improv performance, and your phone starts cosplaying like it’s the rogue AI from Person of Interest
▰ It’s weird. The concept of threads on Twitter originated as a user innovation, drawing from pre-Twitter online discussion platforms, and then Twitter built the ability to construct threads into its UX. As of this past week, Thread is now the name of a competing service. On this competing service, even a single post is called a “thread” though by the original definition — the definition at least until the day this competing service went live — a single post isn’t a thread.
Don’t mistake a piece of gear appearing prominently in a YouTube video as a sign that it’s a “gear” video. Think of it, instead, as a potential étude, a study of a particular approach in the form of a piece of music. In this case, it’s Andrew Tasselmyer reworking cello samples in a popular “performance sampler” — that is, a device, here the Octatrack, that can sample audio and that was designed to act on those samples during a live performance, such as this one. There’s always discussion about the “dehumanization” of music due to electronic instruments, processing, software, etc. This concern can be especially an issue in live settings, where the player inscrutably touches a few buttons and might as well, from the point of view of the audience, be doing their taxes. The beauty of a YouTube video is it flips the scenario. The player’s hands are shown close-up, even larger than life, allowing a clear alignment of action and effect, of gesture and sound. The resulting track is a magnificent exploration of held chords, of long tones layered, intertwined, and modulated. You can watch along — or just close your eyes and drift off. (Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Tasselmyer currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a member of Hotel Neon, Gray Acres, and Mordançage.)
The Assignment: Let a roll of the dice determine the relative prominence of various parts of a track.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, July 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 6, 2023.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0601: Hard Six The Assignment: Let a roll of the dice determine the relative prominence of various parts of a track.
The project was inspired in part by recent correspondence with Junto participant Robert Precht. More to come in that regard.
Step 1: Choose six brief segments of sound that you have recently recorded. Or record some new segments now. Either way, select six of them, and label them one through six.
Step 2: Roll a single die for each of the six segments chosen in Step 1.
Step 3: The result of each roll in Step 2 represents the relative presence of that given segment in a finished piece of music. Think about how the pieces might relate to each other. This idea of relative presence can mean whatever you want: frequency of appearance, relative volume, intelligibility etc.
Step 4: Record a piece of music in which the relative presence of the segments chosen in Step 1 correlate with the results from Step 2.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0601” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0601” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, July 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 6, 2023.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 601st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Hard Six (The Assignment: Let a roll of the dice determine the relative prominence of various parts of a track), at: https://disquiet.com/0601/
The project was inspired in part by recent correspondence with Junto participant Robert Precht. More to come in that regard.
