Your regular list of what’s caught my eye…
IPKat has news of the record(?) damages awarded to the BPI against CD WOW.
The new-look Festival Hall is unveiled.
Marc Weidenbaum at Networked Music Review gives us a brief history of laptop music.
Kyle Gann gives us chapter one of a history of postminimalist music.
del.icio.us/skills/obituary | About this list
This week we bid farewell to the following members of the musical community:
:: Ben Weisman Pianist and songwriter for Elvis
:: Rod Poole Guitarist
:: Bois Sec Ardoin Creole accordionist and singer
:: Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe Highlife musician
:: Bill Carson Guitarist
:: J. Robert Bradley Gospel singer
:: Edgar Evans Opera singer
:: Carey Bell Blues harmonica player
:: Alvin Batiste Jazz clarinetist
:: Zola Taylor Rock ‘n’ roll singer
:: Tommy Newsom ‘Tonight Show’ saxophonist
:: Wojciech Drabowicz Opera singer
Rest in Peace.
The freedom that the listener has to make choices. In Ashley, or Reich, there is a freedom in the music for the listener to make choices in their concretisation of the piece. How does this part relate to this? In later European composition, as much as I love listening to it, that freedom is sometimes lost to me, I feel that I have instead a responsibility to decode the correct (or one of a series of correct) meanings. How do you get from note to note? If, after all, it is just a way of generating material and form, then why be so careful about those notes? Why write them down in detail at all? (This isn’t a question of complexity, which has its own aesthetic dimensions; rather that large, carefully notated middle ground that is neither ‘complex’ nor ’simple’.)
Paradoxically, I feel quite free listening to Boulez’s Structures. I feel less free listening to Kreuzspiel, the rhythm of which is easier to come to grips with, but harder to pull away from. In Structures, it is enough to know – and it really doesn’t take the greatest pair of ears to hear it – that here there is a procedure being composed out. What that procedure is is, contrary to Reich, beside the point. It is enough to hear it and to trust it. This trust frees us to navigate our way around this crystalline world, to concretise its internal relationships in a form that we can make sense of. It is in this respect exactly the same as Cage’s Music of Changes, an old cliché that like all the best contains a great deal of truth. With this freedom the listener gains power; and as Spiderman knows, with great power comes great responsibility. With some later European music I find that I’ve lost some of that power, and only been left with the responsibility. Whether this is a consequence of composers being afraid to grant it to me, or me being afraid to use it, I don’t know, but it is an anxiety. Which is why I’ve been so pleased recently to discover the music of Peter Ablinger, in which there does seem to be a return to the mutual trust that is the only way the 50s avant garde made sense. In Ablinger’s music, the processes are to a degree transparent, and they’re engineered in such a way as to suggest the need for a response without ever determining what that response might be. It is strange, but liberating music. This CD on Kairos is where I’ve started, and seems as good a place as any to begin.
For this CD Utah-based composer Phillip Bimstein has collected recordings of assorted characters from the western US – a croupier, a baseball ground beer seller, a harmonica player – and combined them with appropriate concrete sounds (slot machines, baseball commentary, croaking frogs) and poppy chamber music arrangements. Bimstein interweaves these elements with a light touch, bouncing his sounds around a tonal, rhythmically straightforward musical space.
The disc opens with a three-part suite, Casino, which is representative of much of the rest of the CD. Its combination of cute wind quintet riffs, sampled dice throws and old-timer yarns at first seems simplistic and a little gauche. But Bimstein is cannier than this first impression grants. His arrangements, combining spoken word, sampled sounds and live instruments, don’t divide up into those three layers as easily as you might think. The interview texts are cut up to generate rhythmic patterns that mirror the instrumental backing; the instruments imitate the sounds of the sampled material; and the samples comfortably drift between the two, here providing close semantic support to the text, here entering the abstract instrumental realm.
So what we get is a multi-sided, continuous world that moves between speech, recognisable aural signifiers and abstract music, out of which emerge the characters Bimstein wants to show us. In some pieces – the Bushy Wushy Rag, or the three movements of Larkin Gifford’s Harmonica – the musical material itself is composed of quotations, notational samples, that join in the cut-up fun and games. All these ‘found’ materials are generally presented as repeating phrases within simple structures (although the actual details of construction are nifty enough to reward close listening), edging Bimstein’s compositional voice, and certainly any sense of artistic critique, out of the picture. What’s left are good-natured places where good guys like Larkin Gifford simply are. And this, Bimstein seems to be saying, is all enough.
More info and ordering details are at Starkland’s website.
Thanks to Alex for the spot – here’s a list of some of the birds that appear in Messiaen’s Réveil des oiseaux, with handy compare-and-contrast recordings of the composer’s transcriptions and the original birdsong.
Of Sound Mind linked to an interview with John Cage – youtube user casinodc00 has a few more clips like this, as well as some interesting Arvo Pärt footage. (He also pointed me towards Björk’s 1997 BBC documentary on modern minimalists, uploaded in two parts by k2head).
Phil Ford’s recent posts (here’s the most recent) on ‘radical parallelism’, especially as it applies to current modes of Cold War studies, makes provocative reading; I only wish I had more time today to think about them properly. A link and a bookmark will have to do for now. Be sure also to read Barnet Bound’s follow-up – I like to imagine that if I did have more time, I’d have come up with his succinct counter-argument for myself:
I don’t think there is something inherently wrong with a speculative approach to history, as sticking to just bare bones facts is exactly how certain historical narratives get reified. It’s that old archive/repertoire distinction in performance studies: if you just stick to the written record, you’re going to miss out on layer after layer of historical knowledge that is often dissenting from and resistant to normative historical narratives. Looking for connections between disparate events is one possible way to attack history from a different angle.
And finally – number 25 with a bullet!
This Onion story just stopped being funny, because now it’s true…
With CD sales tumbling, record companies and musicians are looking at a new potential pot of money: royalties from broadcast radio stations.
For years, stations have paid royalties to composers and publishers when they played their songs. But they enjoy a federal exemption when paying the performers and record labels because, they argue, the airplay sells music.
Now, the Recording Industry Assn. of America and several artists’ groups are getting ready to push Congress to repeal the exemption, a move that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually in new royalties.
Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills.
Versus:
The Recording Industry Association of America filed a $7.1 billion lawsuit against the nation’s radio stations Monday, accusing them of freely distributing copyrighted music.
“It’s criminal,” RIAA president Hilary Rosen said. “Anyone at any time can simply turn on a radio and hear a copyrighted song. Making matters worse, these radio stations often play the best, catchiest song off the album over and over until people get sick of it. Where is the incentive for people to go out and buy the album?”
For those visitors who are new to the site on the back of the last Blogariddims thing, this ‘new music on a shoestring’ is something I do most months. I’ve been a bit slack about it recently, but the amount of great new music coming round in June is too much to ignore. What follows are just the highlights:
3 June
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, noon, £6/£4 conc.
Melvyn Poore (tuba) and Anton Lukaszevieze (cello) play works by Poore, Lucier, Stockhausen, Duchamp and John White. This sounds great – if you’re in Cambridge you should go. More info.
4 June
Great Hall, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, 7pm, free
The Goldsmiths Contemporary Music Ensemble play Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura and Barry Guy’s WGG. Mark your diaries, because you have no good reason not to see this. More info.
7 June
Council Chamber, Deptford Town Hall, New Cross, 1.05pm, free
Another Goldsmiths thing, for which I make no apology – this concert features string quartets by Michael Parsons, John Lely, Tim Parkinson, Jerry Wigens and John White. More info.
9 June
The Space, 269 West Ferry Road, London, 2-5pm, £5/£2 conc.
The Wild Dog Summer Party, a lengthened summer programme with lots of new music; film; dance and live art, featuring Matt Wright (turntables), Christopher Redgate and Paul Archibold (oboes), William Raajiman (sax), Kat Vipers (piano/voice), Stephen Altoft, trumpet, Jerry Wigens, clarinet, Stefano Tedesco, electronics/percussion and Oli Mayne, vibraphone. More info.
13-15, 20-22 June
Shunt Vaults, Joiner Street, London Bridge, 6pm
Six nights of mprovised music and sound installations, variously featuring Evan Parker, Icarus, Slub and Goldsmiths EMS musicians. Shunt is a member’s bar, so day membership is required for non-members (£5). More info.
13 and 14 June
Royal Northern College of Music, and BBC Studio 7, Manchester
Three concerts as a part of the RNCM’s focus on Australian composer Brett Dean. Two of the concerts (at 1.15pm and 7.30pm on the 14th) are free, the concert on the 13th is just a fiver. Looks good – more details here.
14 June
Spitalfields Festival: Shoreditch Church, Shoreditch, 9pm, £5-£18
Loré Lixenberg (mezzo-soprano/violin), David Alberman (violin)
There are lots of concerts in the Spitalfields Festival, for which tickets start at £5. Many of them feature new music, but this is one of the stand-outs for me. Includes music by Aperghis, Cage, Kurtág (the not-often-performed S.K. Remembrance Noise), Nørgard, Sørensen, Holt and Burrell. Earlier in the same evening at the same venue, you can also see:
Royal Academy of Music Soloists, 6.30pm, £5-£18
Works by Schnittke (Concerto Grosso no.1), Osborne (Taw-Raw) and Xenakis (Aroura). More info.
16 June
Spitalfields Festival: Shoreditch Church, Shoreditch, 6pm, £5-£18
Another great-looking concert at Spitalfields (I think this is the best programme I remember for the festival in some years). Philip Mead (piano/electronics) plays music by Harvey, Knussen, Mann and Dench. More info.
20 June
Spitalfields Festival: Christ Church Spitalfields, 9pm, £5-£22
And it doesn’t stop there at Spitalfields, as Bengali ensemble Surtaal, along with Kutub Uddin (flute/bahshi) and Chris Brannick (percussion), play Stockhausen (Zyklus), Burnell (Pascal’s Carriage) and Rzewski (To the Earth), as well as traditional Bengali music and collaborative pieces. More info.
24 June
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, 6pm, free
The Philharmonia’s regular Music of Today series turns to George Benjamin. More info.
Inverlieth House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, all day, free
If you’re in Edinburgh this might be worth a look – the morning features percussion workshops for children, the afternoon includes several Cage pieces, including 4′33″, and a musicircus. More info.
25 June
Recital Hall, UCE Birmingham Conservatoire, 7pm, £5/£3 conc.
Alonso Mendoza (percussion) plays works by Xenakis, Alvarez, ter Veldhuis, Druckman and Liz Johnson. More info.
27 June
Adrian Boult Hall, UCE Birmingham Conservatoire, 7.30pm, £3
Billed as ‘Hootenanny with Moondog’, conservatoire students play music for brass by the hobo iconoclast, alongside Hootenanny by Martin Butler. More info.
We all remember how that scandal started out – well, look what happened when I put disc two of James Saunders’s # [unassigned] into iTunes…
What should we make of this, eh? Eh?
Here we go again. And again. The House of Commons’ culture, media and sport committee has come out in defence of performers’ rights to extended copyright terms, in defiance of the recent, extensive Gowers report into just this sort of issue. “We strongly believe that copyright represents a moral right of a creator to choose to retain ownership and control of their own intellectual property,” they splutter. They may be right, but what have timetables (50 years, 70 years) got to do with moral rights? And the argument that “[Session musicians] will also no longer benefit from sales just at a time when the long tail enabled by online retailing may be creating a market for their product once again,” is just cynical, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed ‘moral right’ of copyright. It’s just dumb luck, sorry. Make a new record if you want to benefit from the new market.
The money quote, however, is this:
Given the strength and importance of the creative industries in the UK, it seems extraordinary that the protection of intellectual property rights should be weaker here than in many other countries whose creative industries are less successful.
I think they’ve answered their own question. How about:
Given that the protection of intellectual property rights is weaker here than in many other countries whose creative industries are less successful, the strength and importance of the creative industries in the UK is not surprising.
Elsewhere, in the realm of the much more serious, Matthew Guerrieri has cast his planned musical on the lives and loves of the Second Viennese School; and Daniel Wolf continues to write some of my favourite blogging of the moment.
Big news on the Blogariddims front – Greg, of Beat Diaspora, is going to set aside one of his ‘orgy’ sessions on Harvard’s WHRB radio to play all 22 blogariddims sets back to back later this week. Seriously. That’s pretty much an entire day of the world’s most diverse mixtape series – Harvard, you lucky people. If it’s all done in order, I think my two efforts are going to be up with the larks at 5am on Thursday, and disturbing the milkman at 7am on Friday. Wakey wakey!
Here are the details you need:
BLOGARIDDIMS ORGY
11 hours (wed 5/16, 10 pm to thur 5/17, 9 am)
+ 12 hours (thur 5/17, 8 pm to fri 5/18, 8 am)
= 23 hours of the entire blogariddims podcast in order of appearance
A co-production of the Record Hospital (www.recordhospital.org) and The Darker Side (www.whrb.org/tds),
both programs of WHRB Cambridge
Broadcasting live across Boston on 95.3 FM / Streaming live on the web at www.whrb.org
Note – as well as broadcasting around Boston, the whole shebang’s gonna be streamed live too.
(Suspicious looking batons will not be required.)
