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18th February 2016, 02:00 AM | #201 |
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I'd omitted some of the F or F+, perhaps nine items. This may still have some mistakes.
General microtonal note, unrelated to the list above. One possible pitfall is the effect of having a conventional tuning with only one note that is altered -- normal tonality with an out-of-tune note. There needs to be enough different quarter-tones each with enough structural importance, so that the listener knows that you mean it. This is probably partly acoustics, partly structure, partly sheer assertion, to put it briefly. |
18th February 2016, 02:53 AM | #202 |
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Quarter-tone alterations of a hexatonic "augmented" (1,3) scale:
A,Bb,C#,D,F,F# Code:
x x x x x x <--d- A Bb C#- D F F# Bb+ C# D+ f+---> F#+ c#+--> F#+. I've tried to show this with lower case and an arrow pointing right. Same with c#+ -- it only can occur with a d+. There can only be a d- if there's a C#-. I've tried to show this with lower-case and an arrow pointing left. A doesn't move. No F-, no F#- because 50¢ with F, No Bb-. Of course, all of these can be transposed to any of 24 starting-points. Using A as a starting-point is only a convenience. This, surprisingly, seems a little easier than the whole-tone list. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this problem. |
18th February 2016, 06:19 AM | #203 |
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8-note: Quarter-tone alterations of "diminished" or "octotonic"
scale, that is, starting with A,Bb,C,Db,Eb,E,F#,G and progressively altering pitches by a quarter-tone, with the no-50¢ rule, and the no-E- or E+ rule. Structure: Code:
A Bb C- <--db- Eb- E F#- <--g- Bb+ C Db Eb F# G c+--> Db+ f#+--> G+ List: (This time I left in the arrows.) This took me 20 minutes, tops. First list took 4 hours. A learning-curve. It reminds me of learning tape-splicing with the old analog tape. First splice took me half an hour. Eventually it took seconds. |
18th February 2016, 07:37 AM | #204 |
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I accidentally omitted a few possibilities not excluded by my provisional rules -- specifically, the possibility of Bb+ with C-, and those two with Db-. But I don't like the sound of these enough to include them. Bb+,C-, and Db- are an 012 in 12-tone terms, a combination of pitches that is too packed together, and too tense to interest me. Besides, the list of possibilities already included is too long to grok. Heh. Or: Why was Schillinger not the greatest theorist? Because he generated lists mechanically, without apparent regard for the musicality of the results. Because his transformations were too simpllistic to be useful. |
19th February 2016, 06:10 AM | #205 |
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The entire scale-practice list in one place (Rev. 1.0)
There's probably a scale or two below that I'll ultimately reject.
I'm holding off from listing the permutations of quarter-tone alterations of [A,B,C,D,Eb,F,F#,G#] and [A,Bb,C#,D,F,F#], until it seems it's necessary. This is because I suspect, without being sure, that it's redundant. Thanks, if thanks are due, to W. D. Clinger and the xenharmonic people. Contents: -Conventional Scales/Modes in 12EDO -No-Wolf 5-and-6-note pitch collections (computer-checked) -A sorted list of 65 quarter-tone scales, left-pack to right-pack These all satisfy restrictions for spacing and limits on lupine funkiness. -Saba, Nawa Athar and Athar Kurd: A few exceptions of interest. Accuracy of names unknown. (And it doesn't really matter for this project.) -Selected material from the xenharmonic list: 5-note 7-note -- with maqam names. 7-note with 1 alternate scale degree, with maqam names -Quarter-tone variations of Symmetrical Scales (or some "modes of limited transposition", to make things messier) 6-note, whole-tone 6-note, augmented or "hexatonic" or 1,3. 8-note equal (well, duh. but it didn't occur to me 'til I saw it.) Quarter-tone alterations of "diminished" or "octotonic" -Stubs for the other two modes of hex and oct symmetrical scales. |
19th February 2016, 03:06 PM | #206 |
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Referring to what was a few posts ago, the one about absolute vs. relative pitch perception.
This isn't that important, but I don't want to be misunderstood about what I'm going to say. It's about Alex Ross and his music reviews in The New Yorker. As far as I'm concerned, he's probably an ok guy, and smart enough. But the limitations on how technical and substantial one can be in a music review in the popular press must constrain his writing so much, that to me, it often reads like a parody of what someone would sound like if he had --simultaneously -- absolute pitch, and an incredibly superficial understanding of the inner mechanics of the music he's hearing. Every single review has mentions of, well, absolute pitches, unrelated much to anything else around them. Every. single. one. The latest:
Quote:
That something is an A major chord in isolation, to put it briefly, has almost no importance. To make a mental connection between all the pieces in A major is simply of no worth to making sense of music. In his reviews, these moments of pitch-identification without context, without significance, are the only analysis he can offer, either because of the limitations of the medium, or because of the limits of his own understanding. They function as a way to identify what he's pointing to -- and they accomplish that well enough -- but in every single case, they're meaningless. Relationships have meaning. Isolated things don't. If Michael Torke, because of synesthesia, hears some particular pitch as green, that is an entirely meaningless private association -- a neural quirk, like my delight in the word "hideous". What he's done with his gifts and quirks, however: That is something. |
20th February 2016, 05:22 AM | #207 |
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Joe Maneri -- bless him
Today it's the lowest tier. Writing the memoirs.
Quote:
I was a pretty lousy teacher overall, and it's a good thing that I resigned from NEC. Working as a composer of background music for science documentaries suited me much better. You worked insanely hard, you got paid, you slept and ate too much for a few days. You drank coffee, girded your loins, and did it all over again. I wrote over 1,500 cues that way. Maybe 500 still are listenable, briefly. You could sleep with the video people if they would sleep with you -- everybody was a grown-up, and there were no rules. Sure, people quarreled, but there was work to be done. Always something in the pipeline. Teaching was different. It seemed you never did any work, but it took all your time. The pay was pathetic -- unless you were one of the few. NEC had figured out that they could trick people into taking adjunct jobs, and those people were glad to have it. If you didn't do it, somebody else would. Let's see: I lost students work, sometimes. I often showed up half baked. I was rude to the dullards, biased in favor of old-school modernism. I was disorganized, but even when I was organized, it didn't improve the situation: NEC, in its archaic stupidity, seemed to think that one or two courses were all that was needed to cover all of music technology. I never curried favor with the administration, and I disliked the people in Building Ops. At NEC, the janitors had more power than the faculty. I expected to get some respect for my dozen years of music scoring, but no one at NEC seemed to have a clue what that was, so they treated me like some junior faculty member who has to learn the ropes. I was disappointed that there was no collegiality, and nothing like a real functioning composition department. (In retrospect, that was actually ok. It would have been worse if people were breathing down my neck.) There were students of such completely different caliber, of such completely different levels of skill and experience, that it was impossible to teach to the center. There was no center. You had a highly medicated student who could barely function sitting next to some kid who knew more than you did about synths and computers. You had a kid like David Fulmer sitting next to someone with no ear at all. And attitudes: You had a brilliant kid, like Jeremy Flower, who was a total sweetheart (even though he never kissed my ass, and often criticized my work, but well, and fairly.) You had a hack who really thought he was great. And every mixture of these qualities. NEC had a fair number of kids who thought they could get by on sheer personality. I hated that. In the world of music scoring that I knew, they didn't want your fascinating personality. They wanted you to get your work done, on time. It was said that after about four years, you hit the sweet spot. You knew what to do. But the opposite was also true. After four years, if you weren't that well suited to teaching -- if, say, you cared about the subject more than you enjoyed explaining it to beginners -- you were already bored. (David Foster Wallace speaks of this four-to-five-year effect.) I had trouble with discouragement, and began to envy some of the talented students. I taught, smoked weed, practiced microtones, and raced to pick up my kid every day from his possibly sinister day-care. I still remember the scent of sweat and sour milk coming from his snugli every day. He'd stop crying and fall asleep as I walked home with my bicycle. It seemed like some of the students were on the glamour train, and I was on the train for losers, going the other way. When it came to ear-training, it seemed there was some Inverse Law of Prestige in effect. The better the reputation of the school, the worse the ear-training. High school was better than Penn State. Penn State was better than Berklee. Berklee was better than NEC, when it came to ear-training. At NEC, they taught fixed-do solfege from Danhauser books from the early 19th century. The instructors (even the well-liked ones) spent most of the class lecturing about "focusing the sensation of pitch" and Project Zero. All a complete waste of time, except it employed a few teachers. This brings me to Joe Maneri. None of that stupidity for him. I encouraged my students in class to go find or record someone talking, or some sound from the outside world, to be used in a sound-collage. One of my better students -- a real fan of Maneri's -- came in with a tape of Joe just ranting. "Me, Me, Me, Doe, Doe, Doe," he sang, in a wicked parody of solfege class. While some of Maneri's ideas were just as misquided, I'm forever grateful for that moment of honesty. The idea of ear-training in Conservatory, it seems, is that it's a minor ordeal that talented students won't need anyway. And they can run a program by wasting the time of the less-talented students. And it gives the chattier faculty members some class-time to hold forth, instead of doing what they should be doing: drilling. It's the middling ones -- like me -- who can actually benefit from good ear-training. And, the benefits of it -- like physical conditioning -- are lasting, but you can get out of shape, rusty. I was very good at dictation, but I hated to sing, because I sounded like Kermit the Frog. |
20th February 2016, 09:19 AM | #208 |
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Oh, just hafta. It fits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ta7mkgrOU Thanks to Cain, and oddly, Squeegee. I do shoot up every day. I skin-pop 32 units of insulin glargine, (Rdna origin, whatever the hell that means). That old familiar sting. My father died this summer. Off the end of the conveyor belt. Everyone goes away, in the end. |
21st February 2016, 01:52 PM | #209 |
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First reconciliation of 65-list and xenharmonic maqams
I've done some work comparing the computer-generated (rule-based) list of 65 scales with the xenharmonic list of maqams.
I've also re-organized the xenharmonic list, into families, etc. My sense is that the xenharmonic list has better names than what might be available on the wiki and elsewhere, but I really have no idea -- other than that the probable contributor of the xenharmonic maqam-names has forgotten more about scales and tunings than I'll ever know. He knows his stuff, in a number of domains. The skinny: There were a small number of maqams that weren't part of the 65-note list. Here they are: The other maqams were part of my 65-scale list, and their names have been entered there. The 8-and-more-pitch maqams I've mostly defined out of existence, on the grounds that they are not the sort of building-blocks I'm after, but rather, the result of some complex traditional musical practice. re·duc·ti·o ad ab·sur·dum Here's my Maqam Saçma azalma: 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1, or, A,Bb-,Bb,B-,B,C-,C,Db-,Db,D-,D,Eb-,Eb,E-,E,F-,F,F#-,F#,G-,G,G#-,G#,G#+ and here is the complete-in-one-place Quarter-tone practice list, version 1.1 |
22nd February 2016, 05:16 PM | #210 |
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Today's modest bit of progress is more work on the list, plus realizing I was wrong about the reason for most of the exclusions -- it was the spacing rule, not the wolf rule. A number of these maqams have an 025 configuration, which in 50¢ increments is a little tense. They are mentioned in the 65-list, but with a note that explains how they are different. For most of these, I've worked out all the modes.
There is plenty of 025 in the 8-note list, toward the end. Again, the purpose is not to make dogmatic rules, but to find live possibilities with a range of sounds, tending toward the euphonious, but sorted into clear categories. You want something without wolves? You got it. You want something with 025's? You've got that, too. Just in a different place. A number of the maqams that were outside my definition sound quite good to me. But there really weren't that many in the xenharmonic list of maqams that didn't meet the definition. So I consider my 65-list to be a success, overall. It achieved exactly what I wanted it to. There's also a bit of whimsy whenever I find a mode that has a 650-cent or 750-cent "fifth" (or something too close and too far from a 3/2 frequency ratio). There are many ways to cry wolf. The purpose of excluding these has always been to find those modes that allow for a bass-to-melody relationship that is not, shall we say, horrible. The more serious I really am, sometimes, the more whimsical I get. A lot of microtonal music has no bass to speak of. It's all middle and upper register, or when there is bass, it isn't really making a solid relationship with an upper part. This is often a sign that it would sound crappy to have real bass, because of some structural issue. Some pieces in conventional tuning, like Le Marteau sans Maître, have little bass. Incidentally -- in an unrelated note -- Boulez hears* the relationship between the exposed top and bottom parts as more salient than the inner parts. I hear more like Schillinger -- in general, the more the separation, the less the audible harmonic relation, so the less important the exact relationship between the top and bottom parts. Or, the more the separation, the more some strange "dissonant" relationship becomes possible and fairly pleasant. Boulez hears absolutely and contrapuntally. I hear -- when I hear -- more harmonically. In a situation like a duo between guitar and bass -- especially when both are playing lines -- there isn't enough registral separation for this ameliorating effect to occur. The counterpoint has to be fairly concordant to sound ok. * He's dead, Jim. Version 1.2 -- "Frozen" eta: reminder to maybe write about: the academy and the perpetual apprentice, or: the problem with being a liar-to-children is that you start to care about and believe your own lies. The problem with being too schooled -- for some -- is that they continue to think of themselves as students, forever. (But not in a good way.) |
23rd February 2016, 02:23 PM | #211 |
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Version 1.3
-additions: relative-position, or relative-fingering list (rightmost) mostly done where it's important. -fixes: there were serious omissions in the whole-tone list. This baby is mostly done, in substance. Formatting isn't good. Oh well. |
24th February 2016, 05:23 AM | #212 |
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There are a number of people it could have been. There are many people who know this theory. Not so many who can bridge the gaps between different communities.
Might as well identify him explicitly, even if he had nothing to do with the xenharmonic list: http://www.ozanyarman.com/merhaba.html Anything by Margo Schulter (no relation to the local Schuller mafia) is also worth reading. She's very good, and she's coming from a different background and has a different goal than I do. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/...ns/topics/1005 |
24th February 2016, 05:58 AM | #213 |
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Dig:
Originally posted by Margo Schulter
Quote:
Everything I'm working on is worth trying with a 63+37-cent system of step-sizes, though I'm still trying it with 50+50 step-sizes. She really cares about the history. I really don't. (Don't get me wrong -- history is very important, just not for what I'm doing.) For one thing, I explicitly want to avoid sounding like any kind of traditional music. eta: This reminds me of a conversation with a woman I was dating in my cobb salad days. She was a real academic. For her, all meaningful thought was public, all real work was about communication, consensus building, the whole 9 yards. It was about talking about it. For me, all meaningful work -- almost -- is about trying to get myself to shut up, not talking about it. |
24th February 2016, 08:52 AM | #214 |
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Too late to edit.
As Miller Puckette used to say -- and I've been going around saying it ever since because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery -- "Now THERE'S a concept" -- in some kind of soft southern twang. Tennessee, maybe. Because: He was exceptionally brilliant, and had a great ear, and was oddly kind. Just way out of my league. What he meant: I hear a lot of technical babble around here, but that nugget might have some promise. Alternating 63 and 37-cent steps: Now there's a concept. Why Margo S. is always worth reading. |
25th February 2016, 11:44 AM | #215 |
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Version 1.4
-additions: last two sections mostly done -- second modes of hex and oct, with relative positions on right and a few interval cycles. -still to be done: some more relative positions, all interval cycles, then cross-referencing and reconciling different sections of entire list -- showing where sets are subsets of each other or identical (to some degree of completion: It's probably not important to show subsets too systematically). -also to do: a selection of chord/scales with the same number of even/odds, plus or minus maybe 2-ish. This is to try to address the "balance" issue between quarter-tone-inflected and "normal" pitches. (So it never sounds like a normal scale with 1 weird note.) |
25th February 2016, 05:06 PM | #216 |
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Balanced Structures from version 1.4
A selection of material from the lists above, all of which has chord/scales with at least 2 of either odd or even pitches, that is, quarter-tone inflected or not. In the case of an 8-note chord/scale, at least 3 must be either odd or even.
This is to avoid the "lone wrong note" effect. It's still a lot of notes. |
26th February 2016, 04:17 AM | #217 |
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Yes. I'm already convinced that this is heading in the right direction.
1) -I can readily understand and jam with my little ad-hoc relative-position numbers. such as: 0,3,6,10,|2,5,8 Meaning, in mod 12 -- or a conventional keyboard setup -- you pick a key, any key. Starting there, you visualize 0,3,6,10 -- easy if you've studied atonal theory. and starting at the next octave, or next mod12 cycle, you visualize (0),2,5,8. Then Bob's yer uncle. Quickly looking around, you can see -- oh yes, there are other viable structures with these tones in common -- x,y,z, etc. 2) -Margo's idea -- which I have of course completely simplified into something slightly different -- gives me permission to try it. 63 & 37-cent steps sound better already, in a subtle way. The quality of the beating becomes a different color, so to speak. You now have two different types of tuning, depending on which keys you start on. But the difference is not great enough to change the general notion of packing. 3) -The reduced "balanced" list above. I strongly prefer these structures as building blocks. Much better to study or start with a somewhat restricted set, and really look at the connections. My "intuitions" are often crap -- I have to come close to brute force first, then I can edit down. There can't be anything like the naive engineer's notion of elegance or even worse, efficiency. I'm not making a steam-engine or a Ferrari. The goal is not to have a computer program that executes in a few milliseconds less. These three little things, very important. Like taking three steps and being able to see around a corner. |
26th February 2016, 07:14 AM | #218 |
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Why I love Oliver Sacks, part 118.
As Marplots once said, "That explains a lot." A pithy post. Dead on, in fact.
I come by my amateur, irresponsible interest in neurology very honestly. Being intuitively perceptive -- maybe even too suspicious -- was sort of a survival skill in my family, growing up. As a book about this style of being pointed out, maybe the perceptions of suspicious people like me are right, but, the conclusions and actions are often wrong. Forgive me, my brother: Contents: One uplifting, well-written true* story that I interpret differently than does the author. A good-hearted guy, especially if you explain what you mean, or he can triangulate between your words and your gestures. * First part is correct. Actual site of damage is left deliberately sketchy: First sign of dishonesty. Healing and uplifting conclusion is, well, not so clear. Reality isn't like that. |
27th February 2016, 06:49 AM | #219 |
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My dinner with Josh
In short.
Josh teaches jazz piano at Berklee. We've known each other for over 35 years. We've been talking about simply hanging out together for maybe the last 3 years. Of course, nothing happens. So, we finally did. By the end of the short evening, I was nearly crying with gratitude. Understand, though. In terms of personalities, it's a complete disaster. It's as if Trevor Noah and Ben Carson were to try to actually be friends and hang out with each other. Josh is Ben. But here's the thing: Josh does his old jazz master Ben Carson routine -- where you can't tell if anything at all is going on upstairs. Then, every single time, he and I arrive at the same perception, the same answer, and sometimes he gets there first. And once I explain the terminology, he grasps the important issue, in 2 words or less, and says something germane. Synchronized, like magic, you and me. from that great Nietzschian, Joni Mitchell, from one of her least-liked albums, Dog Eat Dog. (With its Fairlight weirdness, among other things.) |
28th February 2016, 08:31 AM | #220 |
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63/37 sounds better for many chords, worse if you don't know what you're doing. One reason: There's a big difference in the beating, or harmonic quality, depending if it's 63 cents or 50 cents or 37 cents. To my ear, chords with a 63-cent interval -- a wide quarter-tone, or narrow minor second, or call it a 26:25, 26/25 = 1.04 53/51 = 1.0392156862745099 79/76 = 1.0394736842105263 ...to my ear, these 63-cent-containing chords sound tense but acceptable. 63: gnarly 50: all too gnarly 37: hideous This means that in 63/37 I have to list some structures having a 1-step. It also means that you have to be more clear about your starting-point in 63/37 as opposed to 50/50, because chords will sound very different depending on whether you start with some 63/37 start, or some 37/63 start. I also sent a note to David Fiuczynski at Berklee, because he's got the chops with this stuff. |
28th February 2016, 11:27 AM | #221 |
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Reading this over after a nap, I want to apologize for using the same symbols in different ways.
Should have been "alternating steps of 63 and 37 cents" not to be confused with actual ratios or fractions, as in 26/25. The reason to go back and forth between multiple kinds of nomenclature is that there are different systems of numbering these things -- each with some advantage -- all of which a good theorist needs to draw upon. So, there's 13 ways of saying Do Re Mi. -- of which, Do Re Mi is sort of the most...retarded. |
29th February 2016, 06:33 AM | #222 |
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Rachel Z and the lameness of jazz culture
Memoirs again. I really should be practicing.
We all say thoughtless things. One I wish I could take back: I ran into Randy Roos -- if memory serves -- in the little corridor under the library at NEC where they used to keep the electronic music studio. http://www.amazon.com/Primalvision-R...owViewpoints=0 I'd heard a little of Primal Vision, and it somehow came up. "Oh, that New Age CD," I said, very knowingly, and watched, surprised, as a brief flicker of extreme annoyance went across Randy's face. (I have trouble with eye-contact, because people's presences are sort of too distracting for me) He didn't deserve that. I was accidentally-on-purpose dissing a much better guitarist and a more accomplished musician. Why? Because I could. We were standing, at that moment, in MY corridor, where I taught the class. Randy was an old pro, with multiple layers. He went on like almost nothing had happened, but I probably lost an opportunity to work with him that day. Flash forward (and later, backward) maybe 10 years, and I'm looking for a shrink. There -- amazing -- in the HMO list of psychiatrists is Rachel Nicolazzo's old boyfriend! At NEC, he was a mediocre folky or something who was trying to get into medical school -- and in fact did. Talked too much, puffed himself up too much, a little too fond of gab and cocaine. Always waffled, only sometimes got to the point. The four of us -- future child psychiatrist, serious careerist be-bopper, anthropology major, and genteel composer-wanker -- hung out a little, even had a weekend together in my sugar shack in Vermont, where Rachel hogged the piano. Which, in fact, was her right and prerogative as a jazz musician, and a more serious and better one than me. So, years later, I'm calling Rachel's old boyfriend I wanted him to suggest a shrink, he wanted to have lunch. He never really did get to the point about the shrink, and I begged off about the lunch, rather rudely and abruptly. He took that as a sign that something was seriously wrong with me. "People always go to a psychiatrist for a reason" he muttered darkly. So much for clinical objectivity. More years later, on this thread I'm talking about pitch perception and musicians I've known. Especially famous ones -- they make for better stories. So I thought I'd take a look at how Rachel was doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFnEUJps3YY And it came back -- that feeling I'd get when I'd try to have an intelligent conversation with a serious jazz player. Up at the sugar shack, we were walking by the pond, maybe under the bright stars: I'm just making up that detail so you think it's all sense-memory, and therefore more authentic. What's authentic is actually one little thing she said. I mentioned I was interested in microtones. But, I said, I had to understand what I was doing. Theory. Rachel would have none of it. "Can't you just hear it?" she said, a little scornfully. If anyone had seen my easily-readable face, they would have seen more than a quick flicker of annoyance. Probably my whole body did some little dance. I should have said: No, I can't. And neither can you. And neither can anybody. I hadn't met David Fulmer, yet, but he has to think, too. Maybe I thought of Kevin Gibbs. Neither could he. He went on, with the greatest talent in the world, to do mostly New Age records. What Rachel was doing: That macho bullcrap that jazz musicians do to psych each other out, but which they also believe themselves. Rachel Z's boyfriend liked me because I read books, and I didn't do as much of that strong silent hipster thing as you'd expect from a guitarist. A guitarist with fast hands and some sophistication, but with too many bad habits and too many holes in my technique. If I had dropped everything and practiced 10 hours a day, I could have been a third-rate Pat Metheny. Maybe even a second-rate Pat Metheny. So there's Rachel, on the tape, talking about her apprenticeship. It's all such a weird mixed bag for me. The ladder of professional skill that she talks about is real. She's really good. But her records -- her covers of Steely Dan -- and everything else I've heard -- have sucked. No other way to put it. She wanted to be an opera singer, first. That explains a lot. That, and the professional ladder, and the LA culture, and trying to be a star, and not really having a steel trap for a mind -- except she'll cut you if you think for a second she can't play. -c |
29th February 2016, 07:28 AM | #223 |
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Epistemology
When I was searching for Franco Garcia, my handler, Will, said something interesting about Franco's personal habits.
"How do you know that?" I said. "Because they all party together, or room together, or sleep together." Yup. That's why you can't be a fraud in music school. Not really, and not for long. I remember one young woman who was obviously a pathological liar. An absurd string of whoppers. But I only talked to her a few times. For the most part, the students in the dorm knew who could do what. They partied together, got high together, saw each other naked. My girlfriend with absolute pitch -- she alarmed me on our first date by walking around naked or with her bathrobe completely open, in front of both me and her roommate. Over time, you'd get to know someone. Her big fantasy: A hard ten hours of practicing. Followed by a long swim, maybe some scuba diving. Then take the stretch to a fancy restaurant -- one where they served only lobster that had been caught that very day. On the way, in the limo, bubbly and cocaine. It kills the appetite, sure. But she was almost anorectic anyway, and our dearest dreams, our sweetest fantasies, don't have to make sense. Later, some dancing and more cocaine at the club. I heard she'd gone to work for NASA, but I couldn't find her when I looked her up. She drank and dialed me once, years later. I was otherwise engaged. She came from Marathon, where their idea of classical piano is Liberace. (She told me that one, which I never forgot.) My father met her up at the sugar shack. "She seems like a simple girl", he said. Not untrue, but that was Dad. What he wanted from a woman was that she make him some nice dinner, to be served at exactly six o'clock. |
29th February 2016, 08:51 AM | #224 |
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Robert (Bob) Cogan and the Blank Slate
Robert Cogan -- absolute pitch (also his wife Pozzi has a.p., too I think.)
-- one of the best classroom teachers I've ever had -- An old structuralist, the last time I checked. Maybe you got a little taste of Saussure, or Claude Lévi-Strauss (no Google, not the jeans). But mostly it came out in class, in how he thought. -- An unremarkable academic composer, but better than his wife, thank goodness. -- Sort of indifferent taste. Berlioz? C'mon. -- His book, _Sonic Design_, is, imo, one of the best books on music theory ever written. Totally a product of the 70's and the Gunther Schuller era. -- A believer in the representation and understanding of music as a visual image -- sort of static, like architecture. This was back when you had to have specialized gear to make the pretty pictures (the sonograms) -- all of which looked just like The Prudential Center seen at night: Nice pretty lights, with little squares. -- He and some of his loyal students are -- to this day -- some of the last remaining believers in something like The Blank Slate. That is about open-mindedness, and believing that you always look only at the internal structural oppositions in the music. You could never say: Wow, that chord is just inherently dissonant. You could never say: That huge low chord in the brass was like being run over by a hippo. Because all of that was out of bounds. You were encouraged to think of every parameter of the musical experience in terms of binary oppositions with other parts of the same piece. This was louder than that. This was higher than that. This was more widely-spaced than that. Once that was accomplished, you could print up a pretty chart full of pluses and minuses. Then those got crunched down to oppositions of oppositions, and finally, you had arrived at a pristine and magisterial understanding of the piece: Code:
++ | ---- He said once: This moment in The Eroica by Beethoven to me is the most dissonant, but it's only a triad. Tell me, Mr. Closet Absolutist*: How is that possible? Mr. Closet Absolutist: Because either everything else is contributing to that "dissonance" which you just re-defined to mean "tension" -- orchestration, rhythm, pacing, silence, or That harmony is dissonant because if it were actually combined with what came before (the issue of larger context) -- if you simply splatted together the harmonies from before with this one -- it would be dissonant in exactly the old-fashioned sense. Because he was a guy who pitched from the absolute, because he was a structuralist, because he was an academic, and because he was a kind teacher who encouraged a kind of rigorous, intolerant open-mindedness, he missed some really obvious things, and had to tie himself in knots. And as a composer, he seemed to be happy to work on his "portfolio" forever. The idea was that music was to be seen but not heard, and that you built up a big pile of paper over time. (Which attitude used to win awards. Scores as pretty pictures. Not any more.) * Entirely different concept: Consonance and dissonance to some degree is absolute. It's about harmony. Chord of nature. Ratios. That kind of stuff. Not to be confused with absolute pitch, which is not about harmony. |
29th February 2016, 09:18 AM | #225 |
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Bob Ceely
Quote:
The two last times Ceely and I glowered at each other: The CVS on the corner of Cypress and Washington. I offered to fight him, but he said he had a heart condition. Same road, a passenger in the Volvo driven by his wife. (Probably a good thing.) He was probably going to one of his last doctor's appointments. I was walking with my son, who he'd never seen, and who was as tall as me, and...beautiful. He hadn't had children. Yikes, the mind boggles, thinking about the counterfactuals. |
1st March 2016, 01:01 AM | #226 |
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Malcolm Peyton
-Said to be maybe Dupont money? But not like Foxcatcher.
-Had some possibly vague ideas about analyzing music like Sessions in terms of modal tonality. -Nice enough to me, and had some perceptive things to say about a piece of mine. But here's where my heart sank. Maybe 2 to 3 years into my modest tenure at NEC, Peyton actually comes down to the basement from the third floor, to see me. "Caleb, we want you to think BIG. Write an opera for large forces! Really try to challenge yourself!" (This after Lee Hyla told me -- accurately -- that the only way I'd make more than 9 grand a year, and the only way I'd ever have a chance of getting out of the adjunct rut, or even 1 more course: I'd have to win a Prix de Rome. His exact words. And at the time I still had the attitude of a willing boy scout.) I've never shown the slightest interest in opera. Not my thing. Such a night. If I don't do it, somebody else will. What you have to understand about me is that since approximately my junior year of NEC, my only goal was to compose recorded music made by computer. That was my only work. (Of course, they never listened to my music, to my knowledge.) Why would Peyton say that? There could be only one answer, besides the mild cognitive impairment: Peyton must have had me confused with a composer friend of mine, not working at NEC: Herschel Garfein. (!) That stunned me. It reminded me of my parents: Benign neglect. A real core of emotional caring and warmth, but complete ignorance of the details. That is, what the hell I was actually doing -- oh, besides growing, maturing, and interacting. Dear God, it's not easy to be a parent. Now I know. But you can at least show up. I think I asked Peyton once what they thought of my music. He said something about: "Really flashy." No idea. They just needed someone to fill the hole. ... Oh, me being shameless when I applied for the NEC gig: At some point, I said the Comp department should never give up its control of the Electronic Music Studio. I looked at Peyton and said: "Never give up real estate." And, in the background, I saw Lee Hyla's eyebrows going up and down, furiously. Was he laughing? I liked Lee. Straight shooter, as far as it went. It went for 5 minutes. Enough time to make one point and get out of there. Bless him. |
1st March 2016, 02:43 AM | #227 |
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Alan Fletcher
No settling of scores could be complete without a mention of Mr. Fletcher,
nicknamed Rain Man by the students, for his warmth, empathy, and generosity. What was funny about being hired by NEC is that they didn't tell me what my salary was going to be. Instead, Fletcher, the person I "negotiated" with, simply remained silent on the phone. Then the pay was expressed as x somethings per "teaching unit". I had no idea what that meant, still have no idea. It meant 9 grand with no hope of advancement. I pieced that much together after a few paychecks. One of the least friendly and maladapted persons I've ever met. But some people must have liked him. His lover worked in one of the admin offices, and you had to deal with him as well. He was also thoroughly weird to talk to. It still makes me laugh to remember Fletcher fixing me with his gaze, and saying sternly: .... something something something "but you report directly to ME!" as if it were essential to understand the chain of command. What a frickin' joke. |
1st March 2016, 06:11 AM | #228 |
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Notary Sojac and the house next door with Myron the Dog
http://www.amazon.com/At-Shellys-Man...ustomerReviews
I was just listening to the first cut, and, to my sleep-deprived ear, it sounds jagged and nervous, compared to the previous trio with Scott LaFaro at The Village Vanguard. That VV recording is a classic of group playing, and Evans is in excellent form, very poised, very relaxed. By contrast, this sounds a little... jerky. Not jaunty but jerky. That's by Bill Evans standards. He almost always plays near some kind of perfection. This is a little discontinuous, with more sudden contrasts of attack. Not as good as VV. I didn't hear that way when I was maybe 15, and my father had a little sabbatical or something working with some nice British man who did x-ray crystallography, in the town of Eugene, Oregon. The Watergate hearings were on, so it must have been the summer of 1973. A band called Notary Sojac* occupied one crappy little house across from the decrepit musician's union house, and next door to the Notary house was another little squalid flat with a drummer/busboy and his dog, Myron. Myron would get to licking himself, and my mentor, the drummer, would say: "Dick, Myron!". Ah, memories. When the weird hippie peyote-eating jazzers at Myron's house listened to jazz, they would always opine about what drugs someone was taking. Ooh, listen to that. I'm getting some coke energy there. I thought they might be insane -- it mostly sounded like the record was playing at the wrong speed, or when they played Coltrane Live in Seattle with Pharoah Sanders, it sounded like geese a honkin'. My ears were well-suited to The Allman Brothers, at the time. They introduced me to Pat Martino. This Bill Evans sounds a little coked up. Or maybe not. What he isn't is nervous. But he's not serene and poised like the VV. Could be anything. This review exemplifies everything that is wrong with criticism. One word will suffice: Geese. http://www.allmusic.com/album/live-i...e-mw0000120038 * Steve Koski was an absolute sweetheart, and his brother Bob Koski was just ********** up. Off he'd go to Portland for a little heroin. It was a healthy |
1st March 2016, 12:02 PM | #229 |
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After a nap: Warren.
Warren with the tinted glasses. I have terrible visual memory, but I can almost see him. Thank you, Warren, for not being a dick. And for yelling at me when I dropped beats. As important as a boy scout leader, in your own way. Hope you're still alive. Next posts, back to theory. On that front, I'm already starting to find modal rotations of the same scales with the string method. The two octotonic sections will be folded into each other, as will the hexatonic sections. So, they weren't strictly necessary, but they will help with practice. Oh, and hello, Faydra. (no?) |
1st March 2016, 09:14 PM | #230 |
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Before getting on to my real work -- compiling and correcting my quarter-tone practice list -- I've been reading over what I've written.
There are at least a few distinct strands overall, each of which needs to be understood in quite different ways. I'm slightly worried about whether anyone but a few old friends of mine -- the really smart ones -- will be able to easily figure out the basic thrust and basic good sense of each strand, but, I'm not worried enough to change course. I'm really deadly serious about some things, -- say, getting the practice list exactly right, and, getting both most of the piquant biographical details right, and the general thrust and theme right. However, there are things that, if read too literally, will be slightly off -- a sentence here and there has the time sequence a little muddled. I hope the writing is redundant enough there that you can figure out what I meant. What you can't do with the biographical stuff is subject it to a sort of paranoid legal scrutiny, where internal inconsistency means it's all worthless. No, it just has a certain amount of human slop. I'm bad with dates, because that's not how I think. I think, biographically, in terms of broad strokes. Everything I've said recently about people here is as true and as serious as I can make it, but allowing for humor -- especially the kind of music-school humor that I might have shared with a friend at the time. So, for example, some of my criticisms of Robert Cogan -- if read too literally -- are sort of outrageous, but, on the other hand, they're not. Generally, I've gone into more detail with ideas and people I admire, and he's one such person. The reason for the humor about Cogan is fundamentally serious. The reason is that things seem different if you're a student or a music-theory major, as opposed to an older composer. Broadly, you try different approaches when you're young, and then go with what works for you later on in life. In my opinion, the worth of Cogan's work lies in the grad-student phase -- you have enough knowledge to understand what he's doing, and you research some things in that phase that might be of real interest. But later, when you're actually trying to apply what you know as a composer, your approach might really be based on an entirely different philosophy and practice. It doesn't mean Cogan wasn't a useful course. It was. It doesn't mean modernist music is bad or worthless. Rather, most of that music really only can be understood by people with enough training or experience. Without such training, that music might not be bad, but it wouldn't be any more of a good experience to listen to it than any other kind of good music. As for the list of scales I'm working on here, it's intended to be -- when it's done -- what I understand to be the best and most useful kind of practice list if you're a pro, and if you have a lot of time, and, if, etc... But it's -- frankly -- both trivial as math or logic, and simultaneously over the heads of most musicians. That doesn't mean musicians are dumb. Far from it. They are, for the most part, practical about their own training, or they ought to be. So, the tone of my writing here is intended to be the right sort of tone if I were talking to one of my old music-school friends, such as Andy Fox or Herschel Garfein -- and anyone else who thinks a little bit the way they do. (Stress on a little bit.) Just because I don't consider any of what I've written exactly open for debate doesn't mean that it's perfect. It's just as I've said: I've tried pretty hard to get it right where I feel it's important. But nothing I've written would seem to stand up to a sort of rigorous and hostile legalistic scrutiny. Dates are confusing, sometimes, or a little off. When it comes to the broad strokes of whether someone was a kind person, I've tried to be fair from my own point of view. The people who I consider to be so flawed that they were almost villainous were unkind to me and to other people in the same way. But I'm not writing their biographies. Maybe they showed a different face to other people, and I just don't know about it. In short: My little portraits are as broadly true as I can make them, given the perspective of a young composer. Sort of Mozart in the Jungle, but really quite serious underneath. The scale list is going to be, in the end, as perfect as I can make it. |
1st March 2016, 09:37 PM | #231 |
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Quick explanation of what I don't like about this review. It seems to ignore a kind of obvious musical common sense.
It says that if you only like background music, or Coltrane's "sheets of sound" (early) period, you won't like this stuff. That's misleading. It ignores a long period of Coltrane's best music -- all of the tonal music he did with his classic quartet on Impulse -- the group with Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison. That's some of the world's greatest music, by almost any measure. There's a radical difference between that music and the stuff with Pharoah Sanders. I should be clear: That doesn't mean P.S. isn't a good musician. It just means that I believe all of the post-quartet music is more or less unlistenable junk. Coltrane didn't have the orientation as a composer to be able to make music that took off radically from where he was. This music is a pure leap into the event horizon of the formless, a leap into the zoidal void. A descent into pure insane squawking. Any critic who is careful enough to sound serious about the facts, but who ignores the obvious difference between the classic quartet Coltrane and what happened afterward, is being both disingenuous, and...they're doing that stupid professional critic thing. They value sounding sophisticated and impartial more than they value exercising something like sane taste. If you really think that the one music sounds like the other, you don't have an ear, and, unfortunately, I've rarely read a single mainstream press critic who seems to value their ear over politics or posturing. I wish it were otherwise. I don't know why more musicians of my sort of caliber -- pretty good but not great -- don't become critics. They almost all seem like they have no gift of discernment at all. So they sound like fans who are good at compiling information, or more interested in sociology or advocacy or politics or tribalism or selling magazines. Publications like Downbeat are or were more meaty, but often bland in terms of writing and too simple in terms of concepts. So take your pick. Seriously. |
1st March 2016, 09:53 PM | #232 |
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First impressions:
To Pimp a Butterfly really seems outstanding. I stake my entire career and experience as a musician on that quick take. It seems like one of the most remarkable albums I've heard in maybe 10, 20 years. I don't know anything about rap, and I don't really care if I do. I don't care if I don't know about the Arabic maqam tradition, either. By not caring, I just mean that a background knowledge here isn't necessary to be totally impressed. It's just sort of obvious. I'd try to explain why, but it seems so obvious to me that it's only worth going into detail with someone I love, such as my son. My son didn't think Dad would like TPaB. He doesn't understand the Impartial Ear, the ear of long training, yet, or felt its full magnificence. And now, |
2nd March 2016, 12:00 AM | #233 |
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note for future riff: on being usefully wrong as a listener -- shame, shame, shame, etc.
and: violating an implicit assumption in a friendship -- P.S. "that's not the deal we had, i've got to go..." are power relationships really what it's all about in some, most friendships? Is Tom Wolfe right that most of human motivation is about status? Well if so, **** human motivation and friendship. Proust was right that friendship is a waste of time. Or not. Contrast with high estimation of importance of friendship in Nietzsche, Plato, those other cats. Or not. |
2nd March 2016, 02:59 AM | #234 |
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Steve Prosser and the need to believe certain things
another stub for future work |
2nd March 2016, 06:33 AM | #235 |
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rough night, so:
more stubs: My Dinner with Josh, pts 2: The Roy reaction. ---------------------------------- weed: set this up with Merry Pranksters vs. Grateful Dead and their respective attitudes toward cannabis. weekend use vs. all the time. insight vs. eating salad. cannabis as an ambiguous thing: ambiguous things bring out the worst in people, witness the deplorable spectacle of Jodie and Blutoski. Jodie: nurses are just doing their jobs. jobs and the effect on thinking: say, Proust on the habitual tact of diplomats. Bertrand Russell quote to the effect that we feel passionate about things, even more strongly, when we have no evidence -- or was it that we care more about things that have little effect, because again there's no actual real-world issue? Find quote. Blutoski one of the best posters here except on the issues of psychiatric authority -- his loyalties get in the way. wife is shrink. he depends on her to some extent, but she is also extremely scattered and messy and absent minded: cause for additional anxiety? The foster child who benefited from an organized and caring society, the man who would be Kirk -- going to the Inuits to help the poor dears. One of the few here who actually cares about organized skepticism, bless him. One of the few here who can actually read a study, and understand stats. Medical workers as people who see the worst effects of things, not the average or usual effect of things. Screwdrivers up the bum, for example. I too, admired my girlfriend's brother, the shrink who had the highest board scores in the state of Pennsylvania. I loved his semi-cruel stories, his cutting humor. The idea of us sane ones vs. the crazies. The seductive aspect, or fantasy, of saving someone from himself -- insight of Quaker Case, my former therapist. Here, perserveration on the unlikely prospect of cannabis overdose: this intelligent man forgets to pick his battles. why? Myriad and picking your battles: but he's only being playful when he praises Abba and disses the Dan and Free Fallin'. Right? No, not right. Superior intelligence, superior playfulness with inferior knowledge base and musical ear, and probably he doesn't have a great sense of rhythm or sumpin'. but my wife, who is very musical, loved Dancing Queen. It used to make her cry. Go figure. note: check dancing queen to see if that's something you really want to bring up, or is it just bringing more pain and mediocrity into the world? Pick your examples cannabis as occasional drug: change of perspective, cessation of distant jackhammer of anxiety: lever of insight. my big insight about my own music a few weeks ago. I'm a very good third-rate composer of mechanical, decorative music -- and this is an honorable thing, not to be confused with mediocrity. Not even in the same universe as Beethoven, but better than R. Strauss and many an academic composer. A solid insight confirmed by multiple perspectives. But only experienced when the jackhammer stops. (jackhammer image from Gary Greenberg ) My best is not that great, my worst is not that bad. That's just fine. cannabis cessation and the manic rebound (Varwoche doesn't quite believe this.) chronic cannabis use as slightly foggy but anxiety and pain-free living: I could do without being intelligent and in pain all the time, but my wife likes me to be sharp. Meh. maybe, after luchog: CBD only? (nothing to do with longer days, increasing light) nah. feel the pain. the ecstasy of pleasure/pain, of happy-sad, of having it all come back to you too strongly. Fred? Sure. also Bill Evans Ramjets and the disappearance of Dessi. I don't take notes on people here. Sometimes I remember things, sometimes i don't, or I remember wrong. Ron's fear of broken bones, not blood, for example You can cry, Cornelius. monkety ghost and cannabis+brain-damage = intolerance of certain kinds of irony. (Fight club, for example) I sort of miss him, that wacky boy. -------------- cannabis as actually addicting, physically, but addiction lite. quite tolerable if nothing else is really bothering you. that's the key. emphasize this. that's too subtle for some people around here. the limits of adversarial political discussions. people attempting to support a pov. i, too, am a dancing queen. the strange latent homosexuality of calebprime. ok, not entirely latent. nor blatent. check that moment in waiting for godot where he just goes nuts. does this work? this is what i'm like when i'm sober. the resemblance of this kind of outline to Hans Kung's _Does God Exist?_ -- except screwdriver up the bum. not so much by kung about that. the catholic strategy of boring you to death with the entire outline of intellectual history up to Aquinas. It all peaked with Aquinas. The glory days. boring you into submission. why asydhouse and i both love myriad maybe hippies like combination of intelligence and kindness? -- caring for the intellectually challenged brother, the boyscout leader, the former respectability of, also randy roos and miller puckette randy roos -- when nice guys get a little mad (also myriad) still haven't quoted first stanza of la fadeaway yet on this forum -- the best one. the deflation of a grand image. haiku and the quick reversal. (?) time for my insulin on having nothing to lose, no promises to keep, on wanting to be dappled and drowsy and heavy with sleep, no such luck vs. the instinctive discretion of anyone with a social life and a job on the slightly wrong quote as sign of authenticity -- but this of course could be faked -- Hegel, for example the difference between caffeinated and sleep-deprived free association and actual word-salad, or my "sister's" mania. reason for scare-quotes there. then and now: my sister vs. dessi. don't go there, you don't have the chops. walter k and the ad-hom : what sort of person believes this? joe b and the instinct for solidarity in the form of group discipline, lining people up, shutting them down, the military mind whether this forum really has a mission bad dog. go lie down. go lie DOWN. free fallin' on love as mania -- writing her name in the sky -- not as manipulation but as a kind of boundless selflessness on dragonlady as someone i like very much but who thought a little piece of mine sounded like Greg. chant when it actually didn't. "All of this I saw, and part of this I was" -- heh, the absurd epigram on my grandm's memoirs. the self-importance of the rich, and of prot. do-gooders on why cain thinks memoirs are ridiculous -- same humor, or dif? practice. on camille's dislike of my manic tend. but also her superficiality. but also brilliance. on her unique comb. of good/bad smart/innocent on another great talent gone fallow? maybe not. on absolute ****in' disasters on free association as a guide to true feelings -- watch where it goes. Freud not entirely wrong. Mostly wrong. wish i could leave this world for a while, that's for sure. on asydhouse's comical misunderstandings of me on therap. free-assoc. vs. budd. med. pema chodrin. these are some of my thoughts on Alice Flahert. and people trying to look more sane than they are vs. artists trying to look more crazy than they are on artist types as not having a strong will-to-truth. will to app. wagner, ex. A on weird gratuitous free-floating shame. on being ashamed of crap, vs. people who aren't |
3rd March 2016, 02:14 AM | #236 |
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balanced, version 1.5 -- prior to big re-organization
This has errors, and many of those errors will be found when I re-organize. |
4th March 2016, 11:18 PM | #237 |
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Chasing the fag and The Cosmic Laugh
This explains a lot.
I must have always had passionate, strongly-held views about music. Age 5 or 6, they had this xylophone ensemble in Lincoln where they took away everything but the black keys, a pentatonic scale. Everyone but me bashed away happily. At some point I became enraged at what the girl next to me was playing, and -- I seem to recall -- I attacked her viciously. Living in Lincoln, we had Shetland ponies in a padock in the back. Some nice scrubby woods, with the Freuds next door. Down the hill, a pond that my father and his MIT engineer friends had built. Down the street, a red-haired kid with polio we used to play baseball with. I guess he later committed suicide at Harvard. A few houses over, a family of bohemians who lived in the cinder-block house that they never completed. I learned to imitate the sound of crows, and there was this metal tube that, filled with water, made the sound of the overtone series when you blew into it. I'd still love to hear that again, some day. https://www.google.com/maps/place/La...7242c8ef8d908a Right at the end of Moccasin Hill Rd. there was a sort of pit that I once fell into learning to ride my bike. My Dad, actually, was a really good Dad at stuff like that -- the standard Dad stuff. In fact, better at that than I was. When I tried to take my kid out to throw the old ball around -- at Lili's insistence -- he just burst into tears. It wasn't what he wanted, so I gave up on that. You can still find Valley Pond, the pond my father built with his friends, on the map. I hadn't been back there for maybe thirty years or more, when Steph and I went out there on a cold winter day, just on the verge of thawing. I stupidly let Winnie, the English setter that Barb had foisted on me, off the leash, because that's what Winnie loved to do. Run around. Soon, there was Winnie struggling to get out of the water hole in the ice she'd made flailing around. Around 20 feet out. There are some things you just can't let happen. I took off my coat and my shoes, and yelled at Steph to run to the farmhouse to get some rope. She went maybe 10 feet, and then watched me. Watched as I waded into the water so cold I was screaming -- a high-pitched scream. I felt something sharp go into the sole of my foot, but I was more surprised by how the ice cut you. Like glass. I gathered up Winnie, probably still screaming, I think, and waded back to shore. I could do stuff like that then, without dying. Speeing on the way back, on Comm. Ave, I was stopped by an Irish cop. A classic Boston moment: He looks at my bleeding arms. He looks at the wet dog shivering in the back. "What happened to your arms?" "My dog fell into the pond, and I went in." "You're a hero! I'll let you go this time." Later, with that hole in my foot, I got a tetanus shot from some doctor who was convinced I was seeking drugs, even though I didn't really ask for any. I wasn't very happy about State College when we moved there when I was nine. No more Shetland ponies and hand-made pond. And my teachers thought I was a little rough. I had to learn not to do this move on the playground where you tripped someone when they were running by sticking your leg in there. But there was Little League. I was pretty good, very passionate. Matt Suey was on the All Star team with me, and we got four or five rounds before we were beat, out in the sticks somewhere. I couldn't believe how the parents yelled at me for having long hair. Hicks screaming at you -- "Get out of here you long-haired hippie!" Stuff like that. I remember crying on the bus home. They thought it was because we'd lost. So I joined a rock band. I was maybe 10 or 11. Funny, I first played in a band, and smoked weed the very same day. Mostly we played at Rabb's house. I loved The Who, but The Stooges I wanna Be Your Dog just seemed offensive to me. Also, I was disturbed by melodic minor scales and anything but 8-bar structures. I remember saying that they "offended my principles". Heh. Even then. The first thing we ever tried to play was Volunteers of America. Rabb's brother somehow got hash from Israel. First they called me Mogey-Yogey, then later I was called The Boy Wonder and Mr. Liquid by Terry Beard. Already, there was the ladder of chops. First we left bass-player Greg Farson behind, Greg the nearly retarded guy in his late 20's with the big sideburns. When we'd play Lover of the Bayou, he'd sing: "Catshit and Mouseturds on a Frugalburger, I'm a lover of the bayou!" Later, when we met Buzz and his buddy the sax player, it was only a matter of time before Greg was replaced with ----- who later slept with Leda -- although he was said to have a small penis, somehow he made her orgasm. He went on to write for Gourmet magazine. When we added Mike Sincovich on vocals, we actually had a pretty good rock-soul band. My father became concerned and made me take a decibel meter to The Brewery, where we had a weekly gig. Somewhere around 120 decibels, consistently. Actually we started off around 90, then got louder and louder. I had a nice red SG custom hooked up to a couple of Fender twins, and I could do Dicky Betts licks with the best of them. Well, maybe not. Thankfully, no tapes survive. I started wearing earplugs. State College was a college town surrounded by farms. So there was always a certain tension between the college kids, the townies, and the hicks. Sometimes if a hick wanted to fight, it was because he wanted to be your friend. Sometimes he actually wanted to hurt you. One point, I remember I'm flying down Garner St. We lived on Nimitz Ave. Garner St. was just steep enough, I'd discovered, that if I got into the right rhythm and took really long strides, it would feel like I was flying. Coming down Garner with Rabb and Dale, we spot this strange creature disappearing down one of the side streets. What was that? We began pursuit. Soon this male/female androgenous person was running too, and we were laughing and trying to catch him, before he disappeared, in terror, into his house. What were we trying to catch? I think we were just fascinated, especially Dale Hartsook. http://www.whitepages.com/name/Dale-...ege-PA/6z4uj4m Hey, Dale. Dale had already gone through his acid phase and was more interested in drinking and taking ludes. We used to go out to the scrubs behind the golf course, and drink beer and smoke weed. I probably learned more from Dale about music than from any other single person. We used to talk about responsible drug-abuse, though, sitting around in the playground. Chuck Detweiler, after making fun of me for crossing my legs like a girl, said that your grades would fall if you took acid every week. They always insisted that you had someone who was sober, so that when you were high you wouldn't jump off a bridge or something. And, you were never supposed to make that rookie mistake: This acid isn't working, let me take some more. It's not like booze. I remember the orange barrel seemed so small, that it just made sense to take 2, even though they told me not to. Soon, we were out by the golf course, and they were a little annoyed and worried about me. Because I was around 11 or 12, and lying on my back, and looking up at the sky and laughing. For maybe a half hour. Then we went to Burger King, and everyone's faces looked like insects, with the long probosces. I was still laughing. I've laughed like that maybe four times. That time. The time when we were in the pizza place and John told that story. A man wanted his wife to not leave him, to love him again. So he lay down in the driveway in front of the car, so she'd see him and stop. But she saw him and kept backing up anyway, killing him. I laughed for a good hour, when I heard that one. Parallel universes, by Roz Chast. My ribs hurt so much, after that 2-hour laugh binge. A cartoon I'm trying to track down: In The New Yorker. I sent a note to Shanahan. There's a crumpled body in the foreground with his head nearly stove in. An older guy, maybe holding a trumpet. A kid next to him. Smiling: "No billy, I don't play the horn any more. I just take it out now and then to give a friend a great big tallywack on the head!" "That's your right, grandpa. Your right and prerogative as a jazz musician." No corrections allowed. Heh: For Herschel: Andrew Nadelson, influenced by McKinley: "This piece (Tapestries) was composed in one continous draft on vellum." Yep. Sounded like ca-ca, too. As you'd expect, except maybe if McKinley did it. Then the odds were about 50-50. eta: I thought Helpless done by K. D. Lang was about right for this, even though it didn't exist at the time. Sometimes this sounds really good to me, sometimes just ok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMQ2ajXbnbE Weird glitch in the tempo of the muted piano D2 notes. With my weak imperfect pitch I guessed Eb2. That's typical -- always a half-step off either way. |
5th March 2016, 05:28 AM | #238 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 13,001
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Dutilleux
Dutilleux -- The composer himself came to NEC at Lee Hyla's behest, I think. I remember stammering out a question from the audience during the Q & A.
It was something incomprehensible about scales, since I heard such a rich use of modality, of sophisticated harmonies in his music. It was something about how he thought about it, what made a good scale? Three days ago we had our little encounter. I'd seen him, maybe last year, buying a pint of hard liquor and tucking it into his coat before work while I was getting some cigarette lighters. Almost every day when he was working behind the front desk, he looked invisible and surly. His skin grayish. Wiry enough for a man in his 60's. Never rude, never shows any pleasure. A functioning alcoholic who feels worst in the morning. The checkout machine was displaying two checkouts when there should have been only one. I didn't want to talk to the beautiful Iranian librarian, because in her peasant fervor and moral certitude, she thought I was some kind of thief. Not exactly. I'm just insatiable about my CD collection. When I was 8 it was baseball cards. Then when I was 13 it was jazz LPs. Same thing, now. We've learned to pretend to ignore each other. When I was in Virginia's though, recently I timed turning around just right, and caught her staring, hard, at me. It had just dawned on her that I had money, and she was trying to figure it out. She's just a peasant, and she has what my mother once called "that Syrian beauty" -- meaning Leda. The checkout machine did it again. I called the little gray man over. You could see a little tic and a little impatient twitch, he didn't want to believe me, it was hard for him to take something like this in. Indeed, the machine was malfunctioning a little. He looked down at the tablet where I was checking out a Dutilleux CD. He sort of smiled a little -- as in the wrong muscles pulled up the edges of his lips. He got a little too close to me and I looked him directly in the face. -Ah, Dutilleux, he said. I've heard some of his music. -Doing my slightly courtly manic thing: Sir, I'm seeing you in a new way! Have you studied? Watch his eyes look for the memory, not too out of it. -No, there's this subcription service called Naxos, have you heard of it? I was getting ill looking at his face. I touched his arm. I've been up all night and I feel like crap. His face does all these little spasms of overraction, as if this is just the most difficult thing, but he's coping, politely. Gotta get out of there, away from him. |
6th March 2016, 01:25 AM | #239 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 13,001
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A little about the lyrics to three songs
1) Donald Fagen -- I'm not the Same without You
2) Steely Dan -- Through with Buzz 3) G. Dead -- West L.A. Fadeaway notice that last stanza is included, but it's different, here. further research is needed (the music to 1 and 2 is actually illustrative. 3 is atmospheric but not illustrative. (except for that stupid sound effect) Main points: 1 and 2 are about quitting weed. 1 is dead-on nearly clinical description. 1 -- combines this clinical description with humor, then music that is melodically very sad***, but rhythmically very energetic, but also sort of hopeful in this insane manic way: If that isn't some kind of achievement, I don't know what is. melodically sad, and as BigRed might say, his voice is shot -- or as I would say -- it's weathered, and that makes the song even more amazing. plus awesome horn hocketing at end. just draw-dropping. they should teach this in medical school. *** case in point: no, no, no: both blues and cry of despair. Doctors --- why do I have to explain everything to those people? Don't feel bad -- William Borroughs had a few solid insights that he tried to get across, and wrote these sort of stiff, formal letters. (Sort of vaguely like how Gumboot sounded when he wrote that very stiff and proper thing about 9/11 conspiracy thinking -- his biggest effort, but not his best work.) but i digress. 2 is a funny song, with again, this sort of adolescent's music -- film scoring -- mock-classical 3 has nothing to do with that. I like 3 because of its, um, clever strategies. It's about both deflating grandiosity, a junkie's grandiosity, and coming to a kind of humanity, a kind of normal view of things, but all this within a very restrictive blues form. moving from a sort of empty social boasting -- what we see of each other, to something more honest -- sex -- to finally just a sort of honest, ordinary-life truth. but that last stanza was left off. sure, Belushi and chateau marmont, but that's just the starting point. not at all interesting, that reference. Looking for a Chateau --- very impressive! Looking for a Chateau with 21 Rooms -- even more impressive, and some possibly mystical reference -- Looking for a Chateau with 21 Rooms but One will do -- the moment of ambiguity: is this just a way of sounding humble, folksy? Don't want to Buy it -- Both pithy exclamation, how you'd sound in ordinary speech when quickly denying something, possible ref. to Death (buying the farm) Just want to rent it for an hour or two (first it's an hour or two, then finally the sordid minute or two) buy it-->rent for an hour or two ---> use it for a minute or two what do you use for a minute or two? A toilet, or a place to shoot up. Deflation. Note, that in Bayesian fashion, if not Persian****, expectations are being continually updated as the message, both continuous and in discrete chunks, spins to completion. The missing final stanza: Here's what Ginger says, she talks like she ain't nobody's fool Here's what Ginger says, she tries to live by the golden rule She says you treat people all right, other people will probably treat you cool This should have been left in. Coming down to ordinary, garden-variety wisdom, a kind of acceptance of the ordinary. tight blues form, with reversals progression of ideas over each stanza Rich Junkie: I've got a zillion dollars, and all I want to do really is to hole up and shoot up or put it up my nose, etc. Hey Myriad: Some of these songs are high craft. And no b.s. about the subjectivity of interpretation, or something. There's internet stupid: Belushi, etc. And, there's the cliche about the dead -- just a bunch of stoners. Uh, uh. and now, back to it. eta, 2 notes: 1--cheesiness of California architecture -- chateau 2--return of body functions and sexual desire in opiate addicts in particular (Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me) and addicts in general further note to 2: Danger of lumping addictions and drugs together: AA, Alice Flaherty, etc. **** clever reference to Persian, Garcia's preferred name for junk. Word-games, hiding reality. General Semantics and what's his name, the guy with the robes who has the guy looking through the slats. Korbiski? |
6th March 2016, 03:37 AM | #240 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 13,001
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Why I got so mad at Squeegee that one time
This is actually pretty important to me, and I've been thinking about it vaguely, off and on, for a long time/
He's got the musical knowledge base He's got the technical chops with electronics, computer software He's got a good sense of humor He's got a good logical mind He can double down, dig in, argue reponsively, chop wood logically with the best of them. He could debate with Paul de Man, should he have to. He's got his own weird, charming, perverted tastes Maybe he's very, very small, or very, very short He's even pretty wise about how he presents his own work. Surprising how good some of it is. (Nothing too exact intended there: He's done some good stuff.) ------------------- So, what's not to like? It's this forum, perhaps, solution to, and cause of, all of our woes. It's some kind of English school-boy debate training about which I know almost nothing. It's something about not wanting to take any crap. It's something about shifting frames of perception and response -- when do you sense threat, when do you go nuclear, when do you get pissy. What's not to like: His worst comes out when he digs in, like a small dog who starts barking at a minor threat, then bites tenaciously. That's also one of his better qualities, though. But his best? The creative, fun stuff. But I've seen a progression a few times, into pointless bickering. Before that, the crisp logical stuff, in semi-good faith. Downhill from there. -c |
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