The regular reader (singular! You know who you are!) of my blog has long since figured out that, in addition to my obsessing about the political horse race, I have this thing for really off-the-wall music. So, it's about that time again. I don't know why, but I find this track by the Montreal-based trio Les Georges Leningrad absolutely fascinating (much to the chagrin of my long-suffering family). Here's an excerpt from a track called "CaamckneNechn," from the album DeuxHot Dog Moutarde Chou (available here). Consider yourself warned.
Gavin Bryars is an English avant-garde composer and bassist who has moved in a number of jazz and experimental composition circles since the early 1970s. One of his most striking works, "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet," was composed in 1971. Bryars had worked on a film about homeless men in London, a number of whom would sing snatches of songs, usually while inebriated. He ended up with some unused material, including a 13-bar clip of a tramp singing a gospel song consisting only of the following refrain: "Jesus' blood never failed me yet / Never failed me yet / Jesus' blood never failed me yet. / That's one thing I know / for he loves me so." As the story goes, Bryars improvised a chordal accompaniment on the piano and, while working on the piece in a recording studio, created a loop which would play continuously. He slipped out for a while, and when he returned to the studio, the loop was still playing and everyone within earshot was listening intently or quietly sobbing. He composed a number of variations on the piece, including a 27-minute long orchestral version and numerous shorter versions, including one that features a vocal overdub by Tom Waits.
In an ideal world, I'd be able to post the entire 27-minute version, but you'll have to pick that one up for yourself. Here's some of the shorter version with Tom Waits, courtesy of imeem.com:
This is an odd and powerful work. One might expect the repetition of the 13-bar loop to become burdensome or oppressive. But it doesn't. The irony is palpable: a homeless man with nothing left to lose repeats again and again the line that Jesus hasn't failed him. But as the song wears on--and again, this is more evident on the long composition than on the short one I'm posting here--the listener comes to realize that the voice is not diminished in its repetition but rather becomes increasingly powerful, until it's clear that in a sense, the tramp's right: there is an element of grace in his voice and perhaps even his life that exceeds anything we could have imagined. I can think of few recent works more spiritually illuminating or deep.
Borges once said that the problem of beauty in our world is not that it's too rare but that it's too common. Bryars' magnificent piece shows Borges may well have been right.
My dad had a great record collection when I was a kid. Looking back at it, it was a weird collection. Some of it was kind of predictable given the day and the age: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Roger Williams, The Limeliters, Stan Getz and João Gilberto. I loved all that stuff and have a soft spot in my heart for some of those albums to this day (Getz/Gilberto was one of the first albums that Michelle and I bonded over, having discovered that both our fathers had had it in their collections). But there was a lot of unusual stuff as well for an American music collection back then: The Sounds of Paraguay, Los Tres Caballeros, albums by Amalia Rodrigues and The Soviet Army Chorus and Band.
I don't remember that when I was a young kid those albums were actually played much in our house. But I managed to finagle them all from my folks, and along with the albums, I acquired something of my dad's decidedly offbeat penchant for all things foreign and/or exotic. One of those albums, The Venezuela Joropo by Victor Feldman, became one of my all time favorites. Victor Feldman was a respected jazz pianist whose resumé included gigs with such luminaries as Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley. In the mid-60s, the bossa-nova craze was in full swing and American artists were looking to Latin America for musical inspiration. While most were turning to countries like Brazil and Cuba, Feldman ended up looking to Venezuela, of all places. Venezuela's musical history was different from its neighbors: it had been influenced less by African musical trends than other countries and its colonial Spanish roots were better preserved. It was, in short, an unlikely place to seek inspiration at a time when bossa nova and samba were all the rage.
But the album, a mix of original compositions and traditional folk tunes, makes me wonder why more jazz artists never picked up on the potential of Venezuelan folk music. Here's a composition by Feldman called "Caracas Nights:"
And here is "Pasión." Ethnomusicologist Robert Garfías wrote the liner notes for the album and said the following about this cut: "Certainly the most amazing piece on the entire record is Victor Feldman's composition "Pasión."Although it is an original composition by Feldman it captures as much of the true flavor of Venezuelan folk music as can be heard in "El Gavilán" [a traditional joropo that Feldman also recorded]. The performance retains the tight, synchronized rhythmic quality of Venezuelan music throughout, but it is the natural ease and the strong Venezuelan flavor of the tune itself which makes it practically impossible to distinguish from traditional Venezuelan music."
The Venezuela Joropo has long been out of print and has never been transferred to CD. So I was delighted a few years ago to get some software that allowed me to digitize my old albums. This was the first one I chose: not a moment too soon because I would have certainly worn the album out. Here's to you, Pop!
I don't know much about Ruth White. She was a synth pioneer back in the 60s when electronics were just beginning to be exploited by serious composers. She released just two albums, I think: "Flowers of Evil" and "Seven Trumps from the Tarot Cards." Both vinyls are hard to find these days: a copy of "Flowers of Evil" just went for $50 on eBay. But it's not hard to see why connoisseurs and historians of electronica are rediscovering White's work. "Flowers of Evil" is a tour-de-force of late 60s electronics: Baudelaire's poems provide a perfect backdrop for White's experiments. Be warned: these are not the happy-go-lucky synth stylings of Perry and Kingsley, with their assorted space-age whooshes, bleeps, and farting sounds. While there's still a bit of cheese here (at least to the 21st century listener), some of this stuff is genuinely creepy. And of course Baudelaire lends himself beautifully to this kind of thing. Here's "The Clock."
(I guess I have a thing for musical interpretations of Baudelaire. During my first year at BYU, a roommate got me into French artist Mylène Farmer's album Ainsi soit je. Here's her version of "L'horloge." Somehow it hasn't aged nearly as well as White's version, which came out nearly 20 years earlier).
It's easy enough to imagine how a composer might aim for the sublime within a cultural and music framework that allows for a full, lush exploitation of familiar melodic devices. But what do you do when you're a composer writing in the latter half of the twentieth century and those same devices--indeed, familiar notions of tonality--have become problematized (to use an ungainly word from literary theory)? How does one evoke from the human voice something approximating a (postmodern) sublime?
Heaven knows I'm no connoisseur of contemporary works for vocal ensembles. But a couple of tracks have been figuring prominently in my music rotation these last few days and they certainly seem germane to such questions. Oddly enough, they are both from movie soundtracks. The first is from Jürgen Kneiper's soundtrack to Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders in 1989] and the second is a piece by György Ligeti's featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968].
Here's a 30-second clip from the piece by Knieper:
[It seems that the poetry well has dried up for now (I can almost hear a sigh of relief!) so I'm introducing another semi-regular feature: my desert island discs column. Each entry will discuss one of my favorite albums. Of course, I'm aware that in doing so I'm certainly not helping to temper the blogging world's collective narcissism (as if that weren't the general raison d'etre for blogs, after all). But if it's fruitless to try to counter aesthetic narcissism per se at least I can hope to improve in some minor way the general level of taste and discernment out there (so, I'll save my discussion of Iron Maiden for another day)].
Album #1: Moving Pictures (Rush, 1981)
We all have a soft spot in our heart for those albums that came along at a crucial time in our musical development. Most of the time this happens in the teenage years, when we are learning what we like and what we don't and suddenly music comes to appear terribly important, often for reasons totally unrelated to the music itself: our own little (often semi-rebellious) identities are being formed; our friends come to exercise greater influence over our taste and preferences; we become dimly aware of social issues, and so on. Most of the music we discover at such a time will later come to seem shallow or uninteresting or irrelevant once the collateral issues have changed. And we tend to listen to that music later with a bit of nostalgia and vague embarrassment.
Nothing could be farther from the truth with Rush's eighth studio album, Moving Pictures, which I still find absolutely exhilarating to listen to. I still vividly recall hearing it for the first time. I was not quite fourteen and a group of us scouts were headed up to the mountains for a week-long camping trip. One of my friends had brought a cassette player (the old, bulky rectangular kind used for dictation) and a homemade copy of the album, which he played over and over again in the car. I'd never heard anything like it: the music was grating and loud and the singer didn't so much sing as shriek in a shrill falsetto. Coming as I did from a world in which ELO and Styx were pushing the musical envelope, this was like some kind of musical meteor falling from the sky and landing by chance on my (mostly empty) head. I hated it.
Fast forward a month or two and another of my good friends who had also been on the trip subscribes to one of those mail-order record clubs, where you get ten albums for a penny and commit to buying six more in the next two years. Unsure of what to get, he orders Moving Pictures. The records come and we play them incessantly as we play--you guessed it--Dungeons and Dragons. And when I join the same record club a few weeks later, I order it as well. And thus am I initiated into a world which I haven't really left. To be continued...
Walter Ruttmann was an important German filmmaker whose best known work was Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927). He also dabbled in avant-garde composition. Here's a sound collage called "Week End." It's definitely dated in some ways, but I find it strangely appealing.
Here is an astonishing bit of artistry from Russian pianist Peter Aidu. Steve Reich is a minimalist who composed a number of pieces using tape loops that were played at slightly different speeds, which resulted in each track weaving in and out of phase with the other(s). The effect is uniquely dissonant and vertiginous. Much the same effect is produced in this piece, which was originally composed for two pianos (and, it goes without saying, two pianists). I'm not aware of anyone else that has played it simultaneously on two pianos. The recording is from www.archive.org. Just in case you don't believe that's one pianist without any special effects, here's a video of another performance of the work, courtesy of http://www.top-40.org/top09/top09.html (I prefer the audio-only version, but it's interesting to see Aidu actually playing. Come to think of it, if you're a really adventurous soul, you could play the audio clip and the video clip at [almost!] the same time and double your phase-shifting pleasure!).
Double bonus day today at school: Simon's 2nd grade class put on a play about Harriet Tubman and Alex's 5th grade orchestra had a concert. As for the herky-jerky footage, well, I meant to do that. You see, I wanted to employ a cinematographic style that would complement the delightfully unvarnished and spartan acting performances. And I think you'll agree that I succeeded.
Maybe it was premature of me to mention a few posts ago that I already got my mid-life crisis out of the way. Well, I haven't gone out and bought a red sports car or anything, but I did buy a guitar effects pedal. Matt, a friend from the ward, had been pressing me to come over to jam in his basement studio ever since he found out I used to play the guitar (emphasis on "used to"). Well, I thought about perhaps supplementing my modest bag of tricks with some new effects and asked the guy in the music store if he had any pedal that could make a crap guitarist sound like a good one. Turns out they haven't quite perfected the "Crap --> Chops" formula yet, but I still walked out of the store with the DigiTech RP250. It's been fun to play with. And it gives me the chance to not so much call attention to what I'm playing but rather to elicit responses like, "Hey, THAT'S a weird sound!" That works in my favor.
We had our friends Ana and Andy and their kids over for dinner on Saturday. We had a great time with them. It's rare that I can have someone over to our house for three hours and then regret that it's time for them to go. Ana had lent me some music from the Mirando do Douro region of Portugal where her family is from and Andy and I had just gotten going on the subject of world music--and the "have you ever heard?" game--when it was time to close up shop. As the saying goes, "we'll have to do this again sometime."
Perhaps this is yet another sign of my lack of musical sophistication: my favorite pianist is Glenn Gould. I know, I know: lots of aficionados think Gould is all mannerisms and quirks. But watch the following clip--Gould playing Bach's Piano Concerto #1 in D minor with Leonard Bernstein and the NBC Orchestra--and tell me that this is not sublime:
(The clip is from The Art of Piano. The video, which I highly recommend, can be purchased here.)
I don't doubt that some of Gould's eccentricities were deliberately cultivated (but not a lot of them!). But I can't think of many better examples of a performer being utterly possessed by the music. The final little flourish--Gould himself dispatching the orchestra with his left hand--is, it has to be, utterly unselfconscious. Sure, there's a sense in which all Gould's tics are on full display, and he is an easy target. But it is profoundly moving to witness such complete absorption in the music. Gould is not playing Bach, Gould IS Bach, in the way that Borges argued that anyone reading Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare.
Sometimes my kids think I'm kidding when I talk about my friends. "Dad, you're too old to have friends." And the truth is I don't do much socializing these days. So it was nice to catch up with Gerry and Brent this past week (uh, no, those are not the guys pictured here). Gerry was in town for a couple of days and Brent called out of the blue. It sounds like Brent is doing well: his company was sold from Apple to another multinational that has its fingers in all sorts of pies in the publishing world. Their headquarters are in the UK and it looks like they want him to move out there: it kind of sounds like his family is pretty interested in the possibility although he is still carefully weighing his options. But we'll have to encourage Brent to think about it, at least for a while. We've never been to Britain and it would give us a great pretext to visit. And if you can't manipulate your friends into doing the things you want them to do, what's the point of having friends in the first place? (wait... maybe that's the reason my kids think I don't have any friends ...)
It had been nearly a year since I had seen Gerry. He's been keeping busy as the creator and organizer of the PLUG awards (the latest award show featured Nick Cave along with up and comers like Jose Gonzalez, with Patton Oswalt hosting and folks like SNL's Fred Armisen giving out awards). It's always fascinating to catch up with Gerry. Like me, he's long since abandoned the dream of making it big as a musician, but he's really been drawn to the business side of the music industry. I can't say that I envy his hectic pace of life and constant travel, but there's something undeniably appealing about staying closer to the world of art and music than I am. Fortunately he's coming out for a few weeks this summer with Shana and the kids. The stupid dreamer part of me thinks it would be fun to get our guitars out and record something. But, realistically, it would just be nice to hang out a little. And maybe I can persuade him to hook me up with his high-flying friends, which, by the transitive property, are now my buddies as well.
Well, maybe the title is overstating it just a tad. A few months back I discovered an intriguing piece by Alvin Lucier entitled "I am Sitting in a Room" (okay, I know that to any serious musicologist I'm showing up a little late to the party since Lucier's piece was composed and originally performed in 1969). Lucier is an interesting figure. He is an experimental composer whose work tends to explore the line between music and resonant sound. "I am Sitting in a Room" is his best known piece and in its original avatar (it has been recorded several times) it consisted of the composer uttering the following words:
I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rthym is destroyed. What you will hear then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
The same passage, now recorded, is in fact played back in that same room, and recorded again, thus capturing--as Lucier points out--the resonant frequencies of the room itself. The entire process is repeated again and again, for some fifteen minutes or so, until any recognizably human qualities of his voice have been supplanted by a kind of ringing, tinny resonance that follows in only the most general contours the original inflections of his voice. By the time the recording / playback cycle has reached its final iteration, it has become a sample of pure resonance, a kind of aural snapshot of the acoustic properties of the room itself.
One of the things that makes this composition so striking is that Lucier himself is a chronic stutterer (hence the allusion to the "irregularities" of his speech) and there is something touchingly human and vulnerable about his own voice. Its gradual transformation into something wholly other--a pure acoustic effect generated by the physical properties of the room itself--is uncanny. It seems to accentuate the fact that what is most distinctively "our own" in our voice is inseparable from the spaces in which that voice is given utterance. While it's not a piece that is likely to reward repeated listenings, it is definitely a haunting work that invites reflection.
With the coming of spring and the winding down of the school year, it's time for some of the end-of-the-school-year activities. A couple of days ago the winners of the "Inspirations" art contest were announced (see earlier post); last night Alex participated in a concert by the 5th grade orchestra. Well, it wasn't just his class: three other orchestras from the school performed as well. Alex's group performed four pieces, culminating in "Ode to Joy," which has been the tune of preference for all three kids these days (Alex figured out how to play it on the piano and showed Simon and Eva, so they end up banging it out with some regularity). Alex is playing the cello and really enjoying it. Of course in addition to learning such chestnuts as "Ode to Joy," he's also figuring out how to play "Smoke on the Water" and other such classics. If you think those four chords rock on the electric guitar, wait 'til you hear them on the cello!
... about living in a cultural desert in Utah. Not that my expectations are especially high, mind you. I'm from Idaho after all. But it's difficult to live in Utah without complaining about the provincialism of local culture. It's almost a pastime here. But that's usually not quite fair. Case in point: last week Michelle and I caught Brad Mehldau and his trio in concert in Salt Lake City and this week we went to a poetry reading by Billy Collins at BYU.
We've been Mehldau fans for five or six years now, ever since my colleague Greg Stallings (a pretty good jazz pianist in his own right) lent me some of his albums. Suffice it to say that anyone who can create both an achingly beautiful interpretation of "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" and an amazing version of Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)" back to back on the same album has got to be okay. We saw him in Madrid in November of 2004 and were able to see him in Salt Lake City last week. His trio was top-notch: Larry Grenadier, his long-time bassist, accompanied him, along with Jeff Ballard on drums. He played some new tunes, "so new they don't have names yet" as he explained, along with a Thelonius Monk tune (can't remember which), "Countdown" from his first album, and covers of "Baby Plays Around" by Elvis Costello and "Holland" by Sufjan Stevens. Not only are his chops impeccable, Mehldau is always interesting for mining the alt-indie pop world for great songs.
The Billy Collins visit was quite unexpected: on Monday I received an e-mail noting that not only would he be doing a public reading of his poetry on Friday at noon but that he would also be available to meet with faculty and answer questions. Collins was the US Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and may well be the most widely read American poet since Robert Frost (for a fun animation accompanying his reading of one of his poems, "The Dead," see below). Michelle and I have been big fans of his for quite a while and, given that Michelle is organizing some activities at the kids' school for National Poetry Month in April, we were both thrilled to participate. We both attended the Faculty Q&A (where Michelle could ask him about his views regarding the memorization of poetry, a topic she's been interested in lately) and then the reading itself, which had to have been the biggest such event I've ever seen--I would estimate that somewhere around 1000 people attended and I doubt that anyone was disappointed (see local press here). His poems are always punchy, humorous, and "hospitable" (he doesn't like the word "accessible," which he thinks suggests images of wheelchairs going up ramps). He read a number of poems that we know well, along with some newer ones that haven't yet been published. The line to get signed copies of his work was so long we finally gave up. It's a wonderful problem to have, especially in a "culture desert." Then again, maybe we were just thirsty.
