Sunday, December 15, 2019

Deep Listening

The way Pauline Oliveros told the story, she and two of her colleagues and friends took an opportunity, more or less on a whim, to experiment with improvising in an immense underground cistern in northwest Washington state.  When the group listened back to the recording of it, made also essentially on a whim, they realized they had an album.  They settled on "Deep Listening" as a title for it because they liked the pun; their 1985 performance is now legendary.

That was the origin of the name Deep Listening, but the work it has come to be associated with represents the entire oeuvre of Maestra Oliveros.  From her teen years, PO, as she is known among her friends and followers, was committed to "listening to everything all the time" and this imperative led her to a richly holistic approach to life and art, one that was eventually developed into a series of trainings in her approach.  I was privileged this fall to participate in one of those trainings and it had a profound effect on me.  I want to talk here about some of the insights I had, not only by way of sharing but also as an enthusiastic endorsement of the work and invitation to readers to explore it.

Deep Listening as a practice encompasses three broad domains or modalities:  listening, in the sense of both an auditory and attentional function, movement, in the sense of somatic and kinesthetic awareness, and dreaming, as a receptive experience, a lucid engagement, and a domain for practice.  Each of these modalities leads naturally into the next; indeed, in retrospect, the path seems obvious, as such trails do once they are clearly blazed.

PO's approach to listening appears to have a great deal of overlap with meditation; indeed, she often discusses it in such terms.  Distinguishing it as a perceptual process, as opposed to the sensory process of hearing, she breaks it into several subprocesses:  inclusive, exclusive, external-distal, external-proximal, internal-somatic, and internal-intrapsychic (some of these are my terms, as I've heard different labels used for these various concepts).  Inclusive and exclusive map closely to attentional processes in mindful and concentrative meditation, respectively.  External and internal listening are straightforward, essentially the public vs private soundscapes, while the subcomponents of those break down thusly:  proximal external sounds might be the soft sounds of your breath through your nose or the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, while distal external sounds are those from the room you're in, other people, the world outside, etc.; somatic internal sounds might be the creaking of joints or saliva bubbles moving about in one's mouth, while intrapsychic sounds are entirely auralized -- music, self-talk, memory, etc.  In Deep Listening, then, listening is global perception across several dimensions, demanding and producing a level of mindful awareness richer than what had ever occurred to me in a life of exploring mindfulness.

By listening at this level, one's awareness of self as an embodied being naturally expands and intensifies, leading one to the next modality, movement.  Again, the theme of open perception pervades this aspect of the work and the training focuses on embodiment as an experience.  Practices take the above subprocesses of listening and bring them to bear on attending to inner experiences of movement, e.g., through solitary practice of T'ai Chi, yogic, and Taoist exercises, and to experiencing moving with others, e.g., group practices of improvisatory dance, vocalization, or other collective performative activities.  Participants observe their own reactions and others' and practice bringing acceptance to the creative kinesthetic process. 

The imperative to listen to everything all the time led PO to consider one form of consciousness not usually considered when listening:  dreaming.  What are the sounds of dreams?  What are our embodied and other experiences while dreaming?  What if we could practice listening intentionally in our dreams?  Deep Listening explores our dreams from contexts that were new to me, taking a dream at face value, an experience valid in its own right, rather than as a section of consciousness that only has meaning in relationship to waking.  I've spent my entire adult life exploring dreams, their interpretation, their neurological substrate, and practicing active and lucid dreaming, and never before had I thought to just be in my dreams, the way I might just be on a mountain or in my studio.  In Deep Listening, dreams are explored as valid realities, both receptively, i.e., practicing being open to the experience and to creative ideas, and proactively, i.e., lucidly, but lucidity not to produce virtual reality- or videogame-like experiences, but rather to make use of the dream space to practice mindfulness, yoga, or other consciousness-raising activities

Two themes run through all of the Deep Listening training, and, indeed, through PO's work:  community and acceptance.  Although almost all of my fellow trainees were professional artists in one domain or another, the practices are designed for lay persons; there is no expectation or requirement of special skill or background.  This is not to say that building skill is not encouraged -- far from it -- but the skills most encouraged are those associated with this kind of global listening and unconditional acceptance.  PO's commitment to community as a core of her work has its roots in the social upheavals she lived through and synergizes with the practice of acceptance to create art activities that are the-thing-in-itself, performances that are experiences that are art

Although I had been introduced to PO's work in the early 80s as part of my coursework in music school, she remained mostly in the background of my musical interests until the last several years, when I began to take a more healing, inward-facing orientation to music and music making.  It was two years ago that I discovered the first Deep Listening Band recording described in the first paragraph above and made my first foray into what Deep Listening might mean to me as a musician and composer.  In my initial reading of PO's book "Deep Listening:  A Composer's Sound Practice" I found it hard to get the gist of her, but something called me back to it and each time I read it, I gleaned something more and eventually realized that she was talking about music as a kind of mindfulness -- and this rung my heart like a temple bell.  PO had brought a quasi-Buddhist, present-focused awareness to music in a way that I had felt was possible but had failed to get my hands around on my own.  I had to pursue formal training in Deep Listening. 

Having completed the first round of training at the end of November, I have since been consolidating what I learned and building Deep Listening practices into my life.  I am endeavoring to make time daily to practice formally listening, moving, and dreaming.  Deep Listening clicked immediately into my efforts to take a more meditative approach to viola playing and renewed my interest in singing; too, it folds into my practice as a clinical psychologist in meaningful ways, helping me to be more thoughtful and grounded with patients.  My physical wellness has been a particular focus recently, as I approach my 60s, and bringing lessons from Deep Listening movement has supported several positive behavior changes as well as added to my general sense of groundedness.  The new perspective on dreaming has broadly rekindled my interest in and experience of dreaming, but, more importantly, shown me new possibilities I had not seen or had forgotten:  dreams -- along with hypnogogia and hypnopompia -- are incredibly creative spaces and practicing being open to that has already changed my creative process significantly.  It has also led me to make a critical connection with a concept I rely on clinically, the constructed nature of reality:  given the nature of our perception as entirely limited to physical sensory systems and the epiphenomena arising from their processing, waking and dreaming experiences have more in common with each other than they don't.  By purposefully blurring the boundaries between these realities, it is possible to bring the best of each to the other, awareness and agency to dreams and creativity and numinosity to waking. 

As a fundamentally communally-oriented person, PO did not create or develop her work alone.  Her wife and partner of decades, IONE, and Heloise Gold, both artists in their own rights, collaborated with her on the initial ideas underlaying Deep Listening and continue to teach in the wake of PO's death in late 2016.  Having taught Deep Listening workshops, retreats, certification programs, and even academic courses related to Deep Listening since the late 80s, PO and her collaborators have built an international community of artists and teachers dedicated to exploring, expanding, and sharing its insights and processes.  Participating in the first part of the certification training tapped me into a robust, active, and creative network of fellow travelers; I hope and intend to continue to engage with and learn from them. 

I am deeply grateful to have found this body of work and its community of practitioners.  My own work as a musician and a psychologist have been and will continue to be informed by Maestra Oliveros' insights and I feel great personal resonance with her ideas and goals.  I look forward to my ongoing exploration of the worlds she discovered, attempting to listen to everything, all the time. 

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Text Score: Sonic Map

Find a large, resonant space.  It should be more open than not and allow for movement in at least two dimensions.

Recruit a number of musicians, somewhere around six to ten, depending on the size of the space.  Each musician should have a phrase or motif that they repeat; more complex ones should be relatively short and simpler ones can be longer.  Each phrase or motif should make musical sense with all the others, as they are part of a single piece.

Musicians are arranged about the space roughly evenly.  They should be close enough together to hear each other and far enough apart so that each performer experiences the others through the resonance of the space.  Musicians remain in place for the duration of the performance.

An additional person, referred to here as the recorder, is equipped with an audio recording device and stereo microphone(s), ideally binaural.  The recorder should choose footwear and be prepared to walk such that their footsteps are quiet, but not silent, part of the performance, but not foreground.  The recorder starts and ends their walk in the center of the space.

The performance begins when the recorder begins recording and the musicians begin performing.  The recorder then slowly walks through the space, passing close to each musician but not lingering.  They should choose a path that takes them through the entire space while minimizing crossing or retracing their steps.  The guiding intention of the walk is to produce a recording such that an imagined listener to the recording would be able to get a sense of the space, to map it and the locations of the musicians in their mind.  The performance ends when the recorder returns back to their starting position, the musicians stop, and the recording is ended.

Some considerations:  How to take advantage of layout, reflections, verticality, resonance, or other properties of the space so as to give the imagined listener sonic clues to its shape?  How to place musicians so as to optimize the relationship between the space and the quality of each instrument or voice (and what criteria define “optimize”)?  How might the strengths and weaknesses of the recording equipment, especially microphones, be employed by the recorder so as to maximize the imagined listener’s perception of the space?  How might the orientation of the microphone(s) within the space (e.g., standing in one place but rotating) at any given point affect the ability of the imagined listener to perceive the space and how might such effects be employed or accounted for?

Some options:  Keeping and sharing the recording vs destroying it.  Rehearsal vs no rehearsal.  Presence vs absence of a live audience.  Live streaming of the audio vs not.  Original vs established music.  Composed vs improvised music.  Predetermined vs impromptu walking path for the recorder.  Multiple performances vs a one-off.  Recorder monitors recording live (e.g., via headphones) vs no monitoring.

Keeping Score

A text score is a set of instructions for a performance, often of music, but not limited to that; I was first introduced to the idea of a text score when I was in music school.  The examples I recall from my time in college were ideas that could not actually be performed, such as "The performer comes to the edge of the stage and throws a live grenade into the audience."  (I'm uncertain of the composer of that, or even if I'm quoting it correctly, but it might be from Dick Higgins' Danger Music series.)  Text scores don't have to be impossible (or unethical) to perform; the format can be extremely flexible.  They can be pages-long instructions for execution of elaborate performances or brief, simple, single-sentence statements; there's even a Twitter account for them.

Use and composition of text scores has been part of my recent training in Deep Listening* and their role in Pauline Oliveros' work -- both DL and her broader oeuvre -- appears mainly designed to promote an experiential orientation to art, the communal production of art, and civic engagement.  Oliveros' scores also tend to give a fair bit of leeway to the performers in how they might execute them.  I also think that text scores also allow a composer to share an idea -- and, to my mind importantly, take credit for it -- when they may not want or be able to produce it themselves.

Recently, I had an idea for a work that I was excited by, but for which I do not currently have the resources or time to perform and it occurred to me that it would make a good text score, as it had a fair bit of built in uncertainty and would benefit from respecting that.  So, having written it up, I will be sharing it here.  I expect there may be others in the future, thus my introduction/explanation in this post.  In sharing them, it is my intent that others are free to perform them, provided that they credit the authorship appropriately.  I would be grateful for any notification of any performances.


*This is something I've been meaning to share about here; I plan on writing an in depth post on it once the course is complete at the end of this month.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

War of the Worlds(?)

My first exposure to what might arguably be H. G. Wells' most famous novel came when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, in comic book form, an adaptation from Classics Illustrated.  I remember devouring it and others from that series, images filling my head and populating my daydreams, reverberating even now, nearly half a century later. 

In particular, I was fascinated by the Martians' heat ray.  As the son of an engineer who worked on military applications for lasers, I talked at length with my father about how closely it resembles modern lasers, invented more than sixty years after Wells' vision.  One dissatisfying aspect, however, of real lasers at the time was that they were visible and the heat ray was not -- red, blue, green, probably other colors, as far as I knew, but colors you can see (given a typical amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, anyway). 

Several years after my first introduction to WotW, Viking 1 landed on Mars, the vanguard of an invading army of Earthly probes.  While we've sent no tripods (so far), a handful of the probes are mobile, including the most recent, Curiosity, arriving in 2012.  I have, along with all of the Martian landers since the Vikings, followed its wending way with wonder and excitement.  I've long known of a particular feature of its geological laboratories, but it was only today that I made the connection:  Curiosity is equipped with an infrared laser -- that is, an invisible heat ray. 

Wells' Martians arrived on Earth nakedly hostile, an invading army with the goal of extermination or enslavement of all Terran life forms and Areforming their newly possessed planet; humanity's intentions on Mars appear, in our own narrative, more noble (although that may only be enabled by the apparent absence of sentient culture on Mars).  Our probes are hexapedal rather than tripedal and we claim to be seeking knowledge of our own origins, along with some distant and possibly pie-in-the-sky aspirations for full-scale invasion and Terraforming. 

But we sent an actual heat-ray. 

Sunday, October 13, 2019

The Nature of Evolution

There's a new lcrp collaboration/collection that I'm on:



I was privileged to have my idea for the project -- punctuated equilibrium -- selected by the group and to help with the cover design as well (ideas, not actual art, which was done by another Lines Community artist).  If you're interested in how I imagined PE as a musical idea, my original prompt (and the full collaboration thread) can be found here.  Technical notes are near the bottom of that thread, but can be accessed directly here

This is likely to be my last effort with the lcrp for a while, as I have several musical projects of my own that I want to focus on.  As mentioned in my last post, I hope to consolidate my non-professional creative efforts under Circling Crows, including porting this blog to a host offering better owner's rights.  As part of that process, I plan to revisit my old musical works here and on Soundcloud and collect the ones I like the most into a Bandcamp album, a process I intend to use as a demarcation between what feels like much more formative works and my more recent ones which have felt more authentic and meaningful to me.  I'm also working on a series of pieces for viola, which I plan to organize into an album for Bandcamp.

I do intend to keep an ear cocked to the lcrp; they are an amazing community and much of my new self-confidence as a musician was fostered there.  I doubt PE will be the last thing I do with them, even as I orient myself in other directions.

Thursday, October 3, 2019

Twenty Years In

Circling Crows, as an idea, an inspiration, a name, has been part of my life, in various manifestations, since about this time in 1999.  The idea came to me in a hypnopompic vision I had, an image of crows wheeling in a desert sky, revolving black brushmarks against the pale ochre hues of a dusty, cloudless dome.  That image has come to be associated with a series of activities related to art, creativity, music, and the nouminous.

The name Circling Crows was first attached to what I had planned to be a company that would produce a creativity workshop series I designed in late '99 and delivered once in early '00 in New York City.  Together with a handful of graduates of that project, my co-leader and I made a valiant attempt to build a sustainable and scaleable business plan for a training company based on that course, called the 10,000-Fold Path, but could not find a structure that met our resource parameters at the time.  It is in my initial notes for the 10KFP that I first wrote the words Circling Crows.

The steadiest manifestation of Circling Crows has been as a blog, of which there have been two.  The Internet tells me that Blogger started August 23, of 1999, so the first Circling Crows blog seems likely to have existed from about spring of '00, probably as an outcome of the 10KFP.  I believe its content was a largely unthemed mix of stream-of-consciousness, commentary, essays, and poetry.  I maintained it spottily for a few years, perhaps through the mid-aughts, when my irregular posts waxed to full-on neglect and, probably sometime in '06, blog was taken down by its host.  Later, I think in late 2010, for reasons I don't now recall, I was inspired to seek access to the old posts and perhaps to restart the blog and so began negotiations with Blogger to do so.  Although those efforts were ultimately successful in regaining rights to the name, I was unable to retrieve any content; with the exception of a few notes in my journals, those writings have returned to the cyber-ashes of random 0s and 1s scattered across the terra incognita of endless server warehouses.  I've been archiving this iteration.

In the last year or so, I've been increasingly active in reconnecting with the creative parts of myself, especially memories and states that buoyed so much of my childhood and youth.  The latest project to bear the Circling Crows moniker is a consequence of those efforts:  I am now publishing the sonic works I create under that name.  In retrospect, it seems a long time coming; as the image of crows circling in the sky represents a foundational part of me, the vision in which they first appeared is an apt context for the artistic explorations I engage in.  I am already working on the next collections to be shared as Circling Crows.

Going forward, I expect the projects under Circling Crows to expand in number and in kind.  This year I finally splurged and purchased the domain names circlingcrows.com and circlingcrows.org and I hope before too long to point them at something(s) useful and artful, including a porting and consolidation of this blog.  Other projects I hope to fold into what may become Circling Crows Productions would overlap with my clinical practice and some would be new but long-dreamt of directions, such as musical instrument making and collecting.  Time will tell what I have the capacity for, but whatever I accomplish, I will always be tripped to reconnect to my childhood, to wonder, to magic, and to music when I look up and see crows circling in the sky.


Sunday, September 29, 2019

Getting on the Band(camp)wagon

My first album!  It's field recordings; I'm fairly pleased with it.  I learned a lot and look forward to sharing more of my output on Bandcamp.



Below are the notes I originally had on the Bandcamp site, but decided they were more personal than I wanted there. 

In the summer of 2019, I moved into a house in suburban Baltimore County and rediscovered some forgotten parts of myself.  As a child, I had lived on a series of Air Force bases, which mostly were pretenders to suburbia, but military culture prevented their full absolution.  We finally moved “off base” when I was 12, settling into an archetypally suburban development on what was then the outskirts of Albuquerque; I lived in that house for nine years and it became my template for home.  The first house I bought, after living in a series of increasingly urban environments, was technically in the suburbs of New York City, but the fact was that our little oasis in the metropole was exactly that:  the exception to the norm.  My second house was in a much more typically suburban neighborhood, a lovely Levittown clone northwest of DC.  I lived there for a brief and tumultuous five years before abandoning it in a divorce; it would be another seven before, rather unexpectedly, I found myself reconnecting in a healthy and welcome way with my suburban roots in the north of Baltimore.  In these field recordings, I hope to convey the nostalgia, the relief, and the reconnection that I have discovered here.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Night Out

Lavender twilight eyeshadow
Strings of headlight pearls
Pinstriped macadam dress
Saturday night date with I-95

Friday, September 20, 2019

As Darkness Comes Once Again

The sun setting
on the autumnal equinox
is the eye of a wild mare
buoyantly galloping over horizonless verdant plains
under endless lapis skies
as she steps in a gopher hole
and feels the snap of her metacarpal
and goes down
chin first
onto the earth
into which her soon to be
scavenger cleansed and broken frame
will lingeringly
disintegrate
to dust.

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

All Sounds Come from Heaven

Lately I've been noticing that I have a strong judgmental response to sounds in my environment:  while some sounds are genuinely neutral to me, for many, I tend quickly to decide I enjoy or abhor them.  For example, on my commute to my office this morning, I decided to seek the solace of a quiet country road that was out of the way, but very pleasant and rejuvenating.  Just as I turned off the noisy urban street and onto a tranquil residential path, a huge diesel tow truck pulled in behind me:  I was immediately angry and put upon.  The engine was loud enough and the driver stayed close enough (this took some doing on his part, as I drive a zippy, nimble sports car) that it actually hurt my ears.  I felt violated, entitled to my peace, and angry that I had to tolerate this horror behind me.  We played cat-and-mouse for a while, me trying to get away from him and him catching me up; it turned out we had the same destination.  Once I realized that, I dejectedly gave up on my rural-soundscape-seeking and just drove to work.

This episode really brought forward awareness of my automatic judgment of what I hear.  Apart from the appropriate rejection of physically harmful sound, it seems important to explore the fullness of our aural experience.  As I get older and make more music of my own, I’m increasingly aware of my taste in what I want to hear.  This seems appropriate, in the sense that any artist identifies a comparatively narrow band of all possible expression within which to work.  That said, as I often guide my patients to do on the path to self-understanding, it seems a worthy effort to expose oneself to as wide a variety of experiences as possible in order to determine which of them one wishes to have more of and which one does not.  The more I experience the universe of sound, the more I may understand of the music I wish to make.

There are many sound artists and musicians who incorporate into their art sounds I dislike.  Cage famously built his career in part on the assertion that there is no sound which cannot be music.  I get this premise and do not refute it; it does not contradict that I can still explore and choose which sounds are meaningful and expressive to me and which are not, independent of their meaning and expressivity for others.  However, I am discovering in new ways my biases against what I think of as "noise":  I feel entitled to live only with sounds I enjoy and not with sounds I don't.

That's a problem.  (I am confident, dear reader, that you grasped that already.)  I am, of course, aware that I do not have any say in other people's or in the world's sounding, let alone control over it.  So, how did this entitlement come about?  Marc Weidenbaum* recently suggested that it comes from the auditory control our technology affords us:  pop in our earbuds and our aural universe is (nearly) at our command.  I think this is true in part for me -- or at least generalizable:  in my home growing up (long before earbuds), my parents played music almost constantly and I enjoyed most all of what they selected, even during my teen years.  I think my first experience of feeling affronted at being forced to listen to something other than what I wanted came when my younger brother hit adolescence and began developing his own, different, taste (which, to be honest, I have come in recent decades to appreciate as brilliant).  "Somebody else's favorite songs" has been a bane for me since about that time.

But there are other sonic affronts I suffer:  sirens and jackhammers while walking, television in the next room, the hiss of nearby traffic, the distant hum of the city -- none of these are especially unusual to be annoyed by.  What I'm appreciating, however, is that the word doing the most work at the beginning of this paragraph is "suffer."  It's my own subjectivity, not anything inherent in the sound, that makes a thing an affront.  Indeed, it's not even necessarily anything innate to me that causes that; yes, there are evolutionary predispositions, like toward hissing or growling or loudness, but my responses even to those can be malleable.  (This, in turn, arises from the fact that sound cannot exist without a listener -- vibrations, yes, but sound is by definition a perceptual phenomenon.)

Which raises the question, how might my experience of the world, of others' art, of my own music, change by practicing greater acceptance of all parts of my soundscape?  An interesting inquiry; I'll let you know.



*I couldn't find the link to the blog post in which he touched on this, but here's a short post in keeping with the spirit of it, so you can see his work.

Monday, September 2, 2019

Nailing It

"Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose..."  -- James Taylor

British Racing Green was actually the thing I most had in mind when it sunk in that I was serious about painting my nails.  A paean to the dreams of my late childhood and early adolescence, it is the color of the cars that my father -- and therefore, I -- loved the most:  those legendary (and legendarily finicky, pain-in-the-ass, labour-of-love) tiny British two seater convertible coupes, MGs, Austin-Healeys, and, of course, Triumphs.  At this point in my life, I'll never own one (at least short of becoming Jay Leno-rich), but to this day these cars and their streaks of countryside copse verde growl dustily through the backroads of my dreams.  Five little crescents of BRG on my left hand seem to honor some small but critical voice in myself in ways I never expected when my daughter asked me if she could do my nails.

It was her idea, but something in me perked up when she asked, the Saturday night of the local Pride Weekend last June.  "Why not?" I said and suggested an abbreviated rainbow on my left hand (five fingers couldn't hold the whole of ROY G BIV).  When she asked, looking quizzical, why just my left, I wasn't yet sure, but it felt important.  In any case, I figured, come Monday night, I'd acetone it all off in anticipation of returning to work.

But I quickly realized that I liked it.  And others seemed to share that opinion, which felt good.  I ended up wearing the rainbow for nearly two weeks, during which time I had begun to collect a baseline of nailcare paraphernalia such that I could do my own.  And BRG was the first thing I wanted -- but I couldn't find it, so my first on-my-own manicure was bright red with sparkles.  I felt like I was channeling my inner grade school girl.  Eventually, an old friend sent me a green that I found nearly impossible to distinguish from BRG and, even though it was not named that, that is what I called it when anyone commented on my nails.  Other colors -- mostly, like JT says, greens and blues -- attract me, too, and I'm excited to explore.



My last manicure looked better than my previous ones and I've learned a lot about nailcare in the last two months -- enough to know that I and nearly every other identifying male doesn't know shit.  My wife pointed out that I'm about the equivalent of a six or seven year old girl, since that's when a lot of folks start; that seems fair.  Hopefully, my adult motor coordination will save me from several years of preadolescent brushwork, but I'm fine even if it does.  Somehow, this just seems right.

In the last month or so, I have gotten a sense of why just my left hand:  it's the hand I attend to most when I play viola.  It seems meaningful to give it a little pride.  I'm right handed, so I engage with it all the time; my left, though, has a role that my right could never take -- making music in that one special way since I was 12.

And I like that it leaves people wondering; it's a little queer flag, it marks me as a violist (in my mind, anyway), and, even when I'm not actually wearing BRG, it keeps a little MG Midget alive in my heart.

Update

And on Labor Day, autumn falls like a wet blanket over the joyous bonfire of summer.

It is delightful to have the windows open to cool breezes and to listen to the outside noises, ironically evocative of summer:  busy birds, neighbors' A/C units, windchimes, cicadas, and distant traffic.  But it's difficult for me to get enough of summer.  A country drive south of the Mason Dixon Line, I'm safely in the blue territory of the BoNYWash megalopolis, but I think I'll always miss the token winters of Florida.

Marc Weidenbaum, whose creative output I follow at disquiet.com and through his newsletters, has recently been advocating for blogging (indeed, he claims to have been doing so uninterruptedly since before the word was born) and posted a link to a fellow blogger's shared argument that I found especially compelling:  that blogging did and does a better job of what social media has usurped, namely, sharing your life with friends and family.  That point clicked into my thoughts about social media like a critical missing tetromino.  Too, while I've understood for a long time the value of writing as a means for organizing one's thoughts, both Weidenbaum and Donaldson praise regular blogging as an ideal arena for that process.  These ideas and others have led me recently to determine that I need to spend more time writing here (and for my professional blog).

I briefly had a few blogs back in the late 90s and early 00's, including the original version of circlingcrows, but my motivation for posting was unsorted, so my use of it (and, consequently, my output, to the degree that that was a goal) was even more inconsistent than that of my current sites.  Of course, in the context suggested by Weidenbaum and Donaldson, consistency isn't a goal in and of itself, but an ancillary outcome, one way of scoring the time and effort I put into thinking.  And consistency arises out of my willingness to say yes, in any given moment, to sitting and writing when I have a thought that seems worth investigating.  One of the things I appreciate about Weidenbaum particularly is that he seems not to have a minimum length for his posts; sometimes they are a few sentences, but sentences worth engaging in (at least for him, but more often than not for the reader, too).  Take this in the context of social media's practical microblogging format and, to my mind, you've got no reason not to blog.

So, my plans are to take the occasional thoughts that I have specifically not posted on Facebook and explore them here.  In its most recent iteration (since 2011), my intention was that this blog be primarily about music, but, while I intend that it continues to be a place for my musical efforts, I'll be expanding the rubric to include pretty much anything that isn't better placed at DNLPS.

And now, time for breakfast.

Monday, February 11, 2019

Music for Days

Okay, a day and a half, but really, this is a breathtaking project: 



I'm very proud to have participated in a new collection through the Lines community.  The parameters were pretty loose:  compose a long-form (30-90 minutes) ambient piece.  As you can see on the album page, there were over 50 submissions, totaling about 34 hours of music; it's simply monumental.  (It takes me back to Music on a Long Thin Wire, a piece that was part of my first introduction to contemporary art music in my late teens.  It was arguably one of the first long-form ambient works, literally lasting for days.)  Put it on in the background and let it color your day (and a half!); mine is the fifth track, about 2 1/2 hours in.

Some notes on my contribution:  Back in October of last year, there was a discussion on Lines about ambient music theory and whether there was such a thing or not.  In the course of the conversation, several things happened:  a number of people made the points that a) music theory is retrospective, not prospective (Debussy's comment that theory does not make art was referenced a few times) and b) that the best resource for understanding how to make the music you want is to listen to and deconstruct that made by those who inspire you, and, lastly, Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie was mentioned (referring to it as a progenitor of ambient music), reminding me of a specific example of b) for me.  Additionally, this discussion happened at a time when I was already exploring (more than usual) how to guide myself compositionally, especially in terms of vertical and horizontal structure.

As a result of this, I was in the middle of taking apart La Cathédral Engloutie when the long-form ambient compilation suggestion arose and decided to run with it:  I selected some of my favorite chord progressions, leaving a few as is and reverting/inverting and reordering others, voiced them in various ways, and chopped them up into clips.  I don't normally use Ableton Live's clip-launching performance function (despite having and regularly using a Push 2), but decided that this would be a good opportunity to experiment with it -- building up a 30-minute-plus composition clip-by-clip seemed likely to produce something really boring.

I spent a lot of time playing with the clips, listening to how they interacted and experimenting with different overall structures; at a certain point it seemed like it needed a human voice, specifically men's choir, and even better would be chant (in keeping with Debussy's ecclesiastical reference).  I'm far from religious (nor even Christian), but I have always loved Kyries.  Simple, sweet, direct, the Greek is beautiful and the spiritual message of the text maps onto metta meditations and other mantras and prayers of compassion.  I found a recording of one that I especially liked and, realizing I would likely be violating copyrights if I simply dropped it into my piece, I transcribed it and built up a choir of my own voice.  I think this was the first time I have ever sung on a recording; it is, of course, a very long way from the heavenly tones of the Monks of Notre Dame, but I am ultimately satisfied with the effect.

Further inspiration came from Debussy's title, variously translated as the "sunken," "engulfed," or "drowned" cathedral; the phrase evokes in me a sadness, a lostness, a wonder of discovery of a great but forgotten past, but also an exploration, an inward-turning, a deep and surprising spiritual experience.  The piece is structured making the spirit of this into the following fantastic metaphor:  a bathyscaphe carefully wends its way through a deep oceanic canyon when its passengers detect distant echoes of music; following this, they come upon a grand and ancient cathedral and, entering, discover a prayerful choir.  The sonar "ping" is intended to evoke both a sense of depth and of exploration, a literal "sounding" of the numinous world into which the listener is invited.

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Unquiet Ice

Marc Weidenbaum runs a weekly composition project I've wanted to participate in for some time called the disquiet junto.  I've made several attempts to submit projects before the deadline, but have consistently failed -- until today.  I'm pleased finally to join the ranks of the musicians whose workflow is such that they can get a piece put together and posted in less than four days.  This week's project involved sampling ice cubes in a glass; here's my entry:



Adding some detail to my brief post on the Lines forum, I used the same piezo mics I used at Ringing Rocks -- in two cases the exact same -- except two of them I dipped in Plastidip to make simple hydrophones.  They were experiments and work well enough:  they are less sensitive generally and lose pretty much all response below about 100Hz, but for these purposes they were fine.  The un-dipped piezo's I taped to the outside of the glass, which worked better than I thought -- in fact, I discovered later that the mics and the glass together were sensitive enough to pick up ambient voices in the kitchen, where I was working, and adjacent dining room!

I poured soda into the glass at one point.  I didn't like the harshness of the dry cubes in the glass and wanted the squeak and thrum of the air leaking out of the cubes as they melted in the water, as well as the bubbles of CO2 condensing out and popping (have you ever listened to your soda?).  The final piece has a through-track that is a couple layered recordings of that sound.

This is the first use of a [buffer~]-based sample scrambler that took me essentially all of 2018 to design and build (it sat for a few months between mid-October and late December).  My intention was to use it for a viola piece, which I still plan on doing, but it also turned out to be perfect for what I wanted at the end of this.  That bit that sounds sort of like a delay is actually the scrambler:  listen closely and you can hear that the sound is played back both forward and backward at different pitches.