Just Intonation MP3 from Michael Harrison

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Composer-pianist Michael Harrison‘s new album on the Cantaloupe label, titled Revelation, is an extensive exercise in just intonation, the ancient tuning that applies whole number ratios to the spaces between notes, in contrast with the adjustments (compromises, some would say) that resulted in the tuning common in Western music today.

The album is a single piece for solo piano. It’s so sinuous and tonal, so fluid and approachable, that a listener might not even get the sense that it’s based on some system other than the familiar one. The closest symptom of the difference might be the occasional beading of proximate notes, which can take on the rusty, opaque vibrations of a hard old player piano.

Otherwise, the work, as evidenced by a nearly six-minute excerpt available for free download from the label’s website (MP3), is a lush, flowing composition that sounds far grander that the format (single player, single piano) might suggest. Harrison has his theories as to why this is: “Just intonation tuning frees the piano from these restraints,” he writes, “further revealing and maximizing its natural resonances.”

Harrison studied with perhaps America’s foremost proponent of just intonation, composer La Monte Young. It’s an experience he writes about at length on his site:

In 1980, seeking the guidance of the most innovative composer working with just intonation, I came to New York City to study with the minimalist pioneer, La Monte Young. Throughout the ensuing decade, I worked closely with Young executing all of the specialized tunings and transcribing the scores for his 6-1/2 hour magnum opus The Well-Tuned Piano. In 1987, I became the only other person besides Young to perform this work. The previous year I had created the “harmonic piano,”an extensively modified seven-foot grand piano with the ability to alternate between two different tunings, thus creating the possibility to play 24 notes per octave on a conventional keyboard. The unique features of my instrument evolved from Young’s custom designed Bösendorfer Imperial grand. My harmonic piano allowed me a range of tonal flexibility and precision of unprecedented scope.

More info at michaelharrison.com and cantaloupemusic.com. A record is due from Philip Glass’s Orange Mountain label later this year of electronically mediated solo cello works, composed by Harrison and performed by Wendy Sutter.

Tangents (Orb, Aphex, Scratch’d)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Art by Orb/KLF member James Cauty was removed by municipal workers in Brighton, England, when it was mistaken for graffiti (nytimes.com, ink-d.co.uk). … (2) The Guardian on noise abatement and urban soundscapes: “Visual aesthetics are a major part of the planning system with strong guidelines determining what is acceptable or unacceptable. A corresponding aesthetics of sound is missing” (guardian.co.uk). … (3) The exhibit until yesterday by Oliver Payne and Nick Relph at Gavin Brown‘s Enterprise gallery in Manhattan took “its rhythm from an abstraction that suggests a striding man, derived from the logo of the ambient musician Aphex Twin” (nytimes.com, gavinbrown.biz). … (4) A recent Kronos Quartet performance included “music by Amon Tobin, instrumental sound created by Trimpin and visual effects by Laurence Neff” (nytimes.com). … (5) The International Music Score Library Project (imslp.org) has a growing number of post-1945 scores, including work by Henry Cowell and Terry Riley (there’s a PDF of Riley’s In C).

(6) Rob Walker interviews Sam Valenti IV, head of the Ghostly International record label (Matthew Dear, Christopher Willits, Dabrye): “I’m aware most people don’t think about record labels, but it’s a road map for the people who do, and is important for those who want to dig deeper” (murketing.com). … (7) There’s a new social network for musicians — not myspace.com, which certainly helps promote music of its members, but kompoz.com, which is for musicians seeking feedback and collaborators. Judging by the relative size of genre tags, it’s currently weighted toward rock and “alternative,” but there are several “techno” subgenres, including “techno, ambient.” There’s also a healthy “easy listening” section. … (8) Those little Takara Tomy plastic turtles apparently have more moves than ever (engadget.com). … (9) The creator of the Wii loop machine, Yann Seznec, has posted a PDF of a paper he delivered at the recent Audio Mostly conference in Germany (theamazingrolo.net, audiomostly.com). … (10) I picked up a few Nintendo DS video games at a mall store recently. The clerk asked me what my favorites are, and I rattled off a few, closing on Electroplankton, which he’d never heard of and which the store had, apparently, never sold a copy of. … (11) “Who flipped it better?” The soul-sides.com hip-hop blog compares two uses of the same sample. Nice idea (soul-sides.com). … (12) Sadly, I only discovered the spliffhuxtable.com MP3 blog of hip-hop instrumentals after it went on hiatus, but I hope it’ll be live again soon. …

(13) Liz McLean Knight (aka Quantazelle) interviews Gustavo Bravetti about DJing and playing music with alternate interfaces, such as interactive gloves (createdigitalmusic.com). … (14) The skreemr.com search site locates free gray-market and otherwise free MP3s on the web. (Thanks, Evan.) … (15) It just occurred to me how much the cover of the collection Audiotion : A Sonic Tribute to Takashi Miike (featuring KK Null, Shinjuku Thief and Jazkamer; below, right) looks like a hyperreal detail from the cover of King Crimson‘s In the Court of the Crimson King (below, left). …

(16) Tamara Albaitis was the first person to graduate with a Master’s Degree in sound art, according to her bio in the descriptive materials for the exhibit Don’t Try This at Home: A Group Exhibition Obsessively Reshaping the Ordinary that closed yesterday at the Gallery at Intersection in San Francisco (theintersection.org, burnthebox.org). … (17) There’s a remix contest going on for Floratone, the new album-length collaboration between Matt Chamberlain, Bill Frisell, Tucker Martine and Lee Townsend. Check out the original track and the remixes at acidplanet.com/contests/floratone; contest ends November 20.

Let’s Get Video: (1) An Aphex Twin song was used as the backing track for this parodic Saturday Night Live skit (youtube.com). … (2) Gavin Bryars reportedly composed the music for this little art film shot by Stephen Dwoskin (ubu.com). … (3) Footage from the documentary Here Is What Is about producer Daniel Lanois, opening with him talking with frequent collaborator Brian Eno (u2france.com). … (4) Musical crutches (createdigitalmusic.com). … (5) Music critic Anthony Tommasini gives a video tutorial on 12-tone music (nytimes.com, via therestisnoise.com).

Score Keeper: (1) Clint Eastwood has occasionally written the scores for his own films, such as Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. James Strouse‘s forthcoming Grace Is Gone appears to be the first film Eastwood has scored that he hasn’t directed himself. Unfortunately, his contribution comes at the cost of a previous Grace Is Gone score by Max Richter (nypost.com). … (2) Though Eddie Vedder‘s songs for Sean Penn‘s film Into the Wild are getting a lot of attention, the score is by Michael Brook. … (3) Raz Mesinai has reportedly scored the documentary Burning the Future: Coal in America. … (4) Clint Mansell‘s old clintatthecontrols.com website now redirects to the site of his band Pop Will Eat Itself (pweination.co.uk). Mansell makes his web-home at clintmansell.com.

R.I.P.: (1) Sri Chinmoy, spiritual leader, guru and peace advocate who, among other things, is said to have provided the Mahavishnu Orchestra with its name, died on October 11 (indiatimes.com, nytimes.com). … (2) Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge of Psychic TV passed away on October 9 (genesisp-orridge.com). … (3) Marcel Marceau, who made the world laugh in silence, passed away on September 22 (nytimes.com). … (4) Record producer Rob Deacon of Trance Europe Express fame died on September 8 (guardian.co.uk). … (5) My favorite print music magazine of the last few years, Scratch, has folded (scratchmagazine.com). If a magazine can’t survive with 50 Cent and Timbaland on the cover together (as Scratch had for its final issue, November/December 2007), then the producer-as-musician category still has a long way to go. Scratch was the only major print hip-hop magazine to focus on producers rather than rappers.

Quote of the Week: Cornell’s Song

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The following is attributed to artist Joseph Cornell:

“the song of nature, the breezes, the fragrances of the grasses — like a great breathing, deep, harmonious, elemental, cosmic.”

It appears on one of the walls in a sizable exhibit of Cornell’s work currently on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is titled Navigating the Imagination and runs through January 6, 2008. More info at sfmoma.org.

Stream Alert / Global Headphone Festival (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The room isn’t quite at capacity, but there’s a sizable audience. The band is mid-song, a young female vocalist on bass plus two men on keyboards facing each other. I remove my headphones for a moment. We’re all wearing headphones, the audience and the band, because this is a “headphone concert.” Without my headphones, the band appears to be in partial pantomime: the bass is heard only as occasionally thrummed strings, and what little singing there is sounds soft and naked, free of any effects. And as for the keyboardists, the only sounds they’re emitting are percussive: fingers hard against mute keys and feet tapping a beat against the gallery floor. So I pop my headphones back on and listen. The band, called Pistols Will Air, reveals itself to be a dreamy shoegazer trio.

This was yesterday, Saturday, October 13, the first day of San Francisco’s Third Annual Global Headphone Festival. The lineup on Saturday included two dozen performances, one every half hour from 1pm to 1am. When I arrived, shortly after 1:30pm, Patrice Scanlon was performing blistery little beats with gently plucked tones and occasional jittery vocal samples. Then came Pistols Will Air, who included in their set some sampled dialog from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Later acts would include Forms of Things Unknown and Conrad Lewbel.

The Lab is an art gallery, so there was plenty to look at besides the performers, some of it unintentionally suitable to the two-day concert. The current Lab exhibit, titled Look Forward to Seeing It: The Discipline of Anticipation, includes Donna Anderson Kam‘s large-scale pastel “From Below” (2006), which shows a woman crouching over a manhole cover (likely a visual pun), wearing nothing but a pair of headphones, the cable winding off the canvas like an umbilical cord. (Other works in Kam’s crouching-woman series are viewable at donnaandersonkam.30art.com.) And Bradley Hyppa‘s “Seen from a Window: Haight/Ashbury” (2007) is an audio-visual piece, the audio playing through a pair of available headphones (field recordings of street noise) while the small, wall-mounted screen shows what looks like an early computer paint program filling in random quadrants to form a rudimentary cityscape. (The video is also available for viewing at bradleyhyppa.com.)

Now as I type this it’s a little after 2pm on Sunday, October 14, so the second and final day of the two-day festival is getting underway. Down in the Mission District at the Lab, on 16th Street between Valencia and Mission, dozens of people will have plugged their headphones into about 40 available sockets. Right now, on Sunday, according to the schedule, Troy Byker is plying his trade. LX Rudis opened the day’s proceedings, and later Transponderfish, Matt Davignon, Cypod, and others will perform. I’m listening from home, thanks to a stream at

giss.tv:8000/plug3.mp3.m3u

The signal’s been going in and out, perhaps due to issues at the Lab, or perhaps it’s something to do with my DSL and wifi connections here at home. According to the Lab’s website (thelab.org), this third annual event here in San Francisco marks the International Headphone Festival’s 10th anniversary, the series having been launched in 1998 by Parisian musician Erik Minkkinen, who maintains the festival’s website at leplacard.org.

Joseph Cornell’s Music Boxes (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a substantial exhibit of boxes, prints, photographs, short films and other work by Joseph Cornell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is titled Navigating the Imagination and a number of the featured items touch on musical themes:

  • “Bel Echo Gruyère” (ca. 1940) is a “Box construction with inoperative toy bellows.” The bellows is the sort of mooing contraption that makes a cow noise when it’s turned upside down. This one is wrapped in foil and placed inside a circular box.
  • “Beehive” (1940-48) is another circular box, walled with mirrors and containing five metal thimbles that, when viewed through a small side-hole, seem larger than life: “Like a true beehive, the box also incorporates sound: the thimbles fixed inside tinkle when they move.”
  • “Untitled (Rattle and Music Box)” (ca. 1955) includes “inoperative toy xylophone.”
  • “Webern’s Room: Mathematics and Music” (ca. 1964-67) shows a hand-numbered grid superimposed over an image of a chickadee, reportedly Cornell’s favorite songbird. The grid is said to suggest “the Schoenbergian system’s basis in a tone row, an ordered arrangement of the chromatic scale’s twelve notes.”
  • “Pantry Ballet (For Jacques Offenbach)” (1943) is a box featuring a chorus line of plastic lobsters, and was constructed in honor of the composer.
  • “Monsieur Phot (Seen Through the Stereoscope), no. 5” (1933) is a folio of images and text that describe an imagined film scenario, with particular attention paid to sound: “The rippling music of the harp,” Cornell writes, “sounds like a fountain playing into water.”

The exhibit opened on October 6 and runs through Sunday, January 6, 2008. More info at sfmoma.org. There’s an interactive website, developed by the Peabody Essex Museum, at pem.org/cornell.