Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
The Legend of 1900
Ratatouille
The Five Obstructions
Fitzcarraldo
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Varying Ends
In November 1995, "The Wire" published an article titled "Advice to Clever Children." In the process of producing the interview, a package of tapes containing music from several artists, including Aphex Twin, was sent to Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Stockhausen commented:
“I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [wasn't] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.”
Aphex Twin responded:
"I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: "Didgeridoo," then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to."
- Wikipedia
Stockhausen commented:
“I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [wasn't] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.”
Aphex Twin responded:
"I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: "Didgeridoo," then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to."
- Wikipedia
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The Swamp
The United States' New Music scene has, to its great credit, constructed itself principally on its own — a slow, brutal, Fabian advance, but an amazing and largely self-determined advance nonetheless.
A general lack of government support has forced unprotected activators in particular — e.g., those operating outside the armor of academia — to grow increasingly resourceful, to scrounge for new solutions, to consider and work outside of the projected and predictable boxes. [N.B — The token NEA funds that are available require so much bureaucratic application red tape that it’s often not worth the time or simply asks more resources than a small organization can reasonably manage.] Whether or not one believes that such government support is more help- or hurtful long-long-term for a scene like ours, the simple reality is that US composers and ensembles right now exist in a much more brutal world generally than, say, their French or German counterparts.
While it’s easy for those of us in the US New Music scene to jealously obsess over always-greener funding grasses, the general circumstance in which we find ourselves may also prove eventually to have been the compost heap out of which the next generation’s solutions were developed. A certain amount of discomfort is necessary for significant growth: not so much that the organism is crushed and defeated, but not so little that it forgets how to evolve beyond the world it knows. The ideal is just enough to force the maximum improvement.
This present US swamp of do-it-yourselfers and defiant music makers, this diasporitic congregation of hard-charging, problem-solving, imaginative, and willfully dedicated American minds all working and being and experimenting in this New Music project — this is the Factory of the Phoenix, this is our great, brilliant, and relentless wealth. This swamp army of passionate and hard-working mavericks owns the classic American recipe for our next evolution, and if we ever are to learn how to thrive in what the world is becoming — and not just panting to hungrily trail along — then this now will have been the laboratory for that victory.
I want to be careful to emphasize here that we are speaking strictly as to the question of how to thrive in a brutal economic and cultural environment while simultaneously maintaining the highest standards of artistic excellence. It is an old and easy trick to work at the lowest common denominator or mass produce under a standard of “high art,” providing the convenient content of popular culture with the warm feelings that come along with things that make us feel smart. However, a solution that compromises a fundamental value is simply not a solution, it is a distraction, and it does no one any good to conflate garbage and greatness. We are interested in looking for new mechanisms to create a better environment for the advancement of truly progressive artistic projects in the United States, and not for those works that simply make use of the label for marketing purposes.
This will continue to be a slow and dirty process, and when a solution emerges it won’t be a single item or cure, but a new network of evolved details — processes, ideas, mechanisms, partnerships, understandings, technologies, and so forth — and it will always require more work, more refinement, more improvement. However, if we ever are able to learn to do this, to thrive without government support, then this research will not only have been for us here, but for every composer in every country whose cultural support may have found itself desiccated in the face of mounting debts, less patient citizens, and generally more market-oriented mindsets. We have to keep pushing, to make sure that we don't find ourselves to be dinosaurs irritable and too slow to act regarding the onset of permanent winter.
A general lack of government support has forced unprotected activators in particular — e.g., those operating outside the armor of academia — to grow increasingly resourceful, to scrounge for new solutions, to consider and work outside of the projected and predictable boxes. [N.B — The token NEA funds that are available require so much bureaucratic application red tape that it’s often not worth the time or simply asks more resources than a small organization can reasonably manage.] Whether or not one believes that such government support is more help- or hurtful long-long-term for a scene like ours, the simple reality is that US composers and ensembles right now exist in a much more brutal world generally than, say, their French or German counterparts.
While it’s easy for those of us in the US New Music scene to jealously obsess over always-greener funding grasses, the general circumstance in which we find ourselves may also prove eventually to have been the compost heap out of which the next generation’s solutions were developed. A certain amount of discomfort is necessary for significant growth: not so much that the organism is crushed and defeated, but not so little that it forgets how to evolve beyond the world it knows. The ideal is just enough to force the maximum improvement.
This present US swamp of do-it-yourselfers and defiant music makers, this diasporitic congregation of hard-charging, problem-solving, imaginative, and willfully dedicated American minds all working and being and experimenting in this New Music project — this is the Factory of the Phoenix, this is our great, brilliant, and relentless wealth. This swamp army of passionate and hard-working mavericks owns the classic American recipe for our next evolution, and if we ever are to learn how to thrive in what the world is becoming — and not just panting to hungrily trail along — then this now will have been the laboratory for that victory.
I want to be careful to emphasize here that we are speaking strictly as to the question of how to thrive in a brutal economic and cultural environment while simultaneously maintaining the highest standards of artistic excellence. It is an old and easy trick to work at the lowest common denominator or mass produce under a standard of “high art,” providing the convenient content of popular culture with the warm feelings that come along with things that make us feel smart. However, a solution that compromises a fundamental value is simply not a solution, it is a distraction, and it does no one any good to conflate garbage and greatness. We are interested in looking for new mechanisms to create a better environment for the advancement of truly progressive artistic projects in the United States, and not for those works that simply make use of the label for marketing purposes.
This will continue to be a slow and dirty process, and when a solution emerges it won’t be a single item or cure, but a new network of evolved details — processes, ideas, mechanisms, partnerships, understandings, technologies, and so forth — and it will always require more work, more refinement, more improvement. However, if we ever are able to learn to do this, to thrive without government support, then this research will not only have been for us here, but for every composer in every country whose cultural support may have found itself desiccated in the face of mounting debts, less patient citizens, and generally more market-oriented mindsets. We have to keep pushing, to make sure that we don't find ourselves to be dinosaurs irritable and too slow to act regarding the onset of permanent winter.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Order
"Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system."
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Alfred North Whitehead
Thursday, June 3, 2010
First Hearing
Someone once told me they saw a sign in a bookstore that proclaimed: “Read the good books first. You won’t have time to read them all.” It’s true. Resources are limited. Time is limited. And as much as I may hate to admit it, to spend time with one thing is to take time that could be invested in attention to another. We all have these choices to make, to the degree we have choices to make, and to the degree we realize the choices we have.
I am the harshest critic of contemporary music. I am suspicious of marketing and the avant-garde being so easily conflated and confused as it is, and beyond this I think "art" composers are too often allowed to get away with far too much sloppiness, inconsideration, and generally laziness, all in the name of modern artistic license (what Philistine can challenge them/us, after all?). To be fair, it’s somewhat hard to blame them when the system in place, in the US at least, strongly incentivizes this general behavior - quantity over quality, clever but baseless marketing tactics, and an obsession with recreating pretty formulas long since discovered safe enough to continue wringing out ovations. (E.g., not a whole lot different then some of your typical market economy behavior.) But still, it’s not why I got involved in all this, it turns my stomach, and even more to the point, I don’t completely understand how a new music “artist” could live with so much compromise. But then, I have heard it takes all kinds.
I’ve listened to a fair bit of new music by now. I know a bunch of people who’ve heard a lot more than me, indeed, but nonetheless I’m not a spring chicken. We all listen for different things and we all need different things. However, when I listen to a new work of contemporary art music now, I know what I’m after and I’m unapologetic in my brutality. Life is just too short and there is just too much great stuff out there and I have a lot of looking left to do.
To begin with, a work needs to reach in some way viscerally during the first hearing. This way can be small or atypical, but during this first listening there must be something that I feel physically or emotionally or somehow experientially beyond simply the math in my head. If I don’t experience anything during this first time, it’s likely I will never listen to the piece again. I am alive and I need life in my music. No, very little is impossible – a friend may push me to give it another listen, it may be by a composer I already admire, and so forth, yes, yes. However, I know that I have had amazing experiences with music, I know what these are like, and I really don’t have a lot of time for much other than the extraordinary. People say “it was nice.” Ugh, what a bore. This music that I love pushes edges, challenges, creates new sound experiences. Give me love or give me hate: “Nice” feels like an anathema.
But that’s only part of it. There is, obviously, a great deal of music that accomplishes the aforementioned in spades, but that we still just don’t care that much about, that won’t make a significant impact, and that we wouldn't be able to develop a developing relationship with over time. What I want is to become curious through listening, to feel something, and then to investigate and discover beyond this the work’s depth, the artist’s meticulous consideration. This is the great balance: seeing the "Pietà " and then reading "The Agony and the Ecstasy." There is something so satisfying, so holistically fulfilling artistically to experience a work like this, a work that is for me complete. And this rare thing is what I begin to look for when I first listen to a new work of contemporary art music, and all I feel I really have time for within the space that this precious, pregnant music occupies in my life.
I am the harshest critic of contemporary music. I am suspicious of marketing and the avant-garde being so easily conflated and confused as it is, and beyond this I think "art" composers are too often allowed to get away with far too much sloppiness, inconsideration, and generally laziness, all in the name of modern artistic license (what Philistine can challenge them/us, after all?). To be fair, it’s somewhat hard to blame them when the system in place, in the US at least, strongly incentivizes this general behavior - quantity over quality, clever but baseless marketing tactics, and an obsession with recreating pretty formulas long since discovered safe enough to continue wringing out ovations. (E.g., not a whole lot different then some of your typical market economy behavior.) But still, it’s not why I got involved in all this, it turns my stomach, and even more to the point, I don’t completely understand how a new music “artist” could live with so much compromise. But then, I have heard it takes all kinds.
I’ve listened to a fair bit of new music by now. I know a bunch of people who’ve heard a lot more than me, indeed, but nonetheless I’m not a spring chicken. We all listen for different things and we all need different things. However, when I listen to a new work of contemporary art music now, I know what I’m after and I’m unapologetic in my brutality. Life is just too short and there is just too much great stuff out there and I have a lot of looking left to do.
To begin with, a work needs to reach in some way viscerally during the first hearing. This way can be small or atypical, but during this first listening there must be something that I feel physically or emotionally or somehow experientially beyond simply the math in my head. If I don’t experience anything during this first time, it’s likely I will never listen to the piece again. I am alive and I need life in my music. No, very little is impossible – a friend may push me to give it another listen, it may be by a composer I already admire, and so forth, yes, yes. However, I know that I have had amazing experiences with music, I know what these are like, and I really don’t have a lot of time for much other than the extraordinary. People say “it was nice.” Ugh, what a bore. This music that I love pushes edges, challenges, creates new sound experiences. Give me love or give me hate: “Nice” feels like an anathema.
But that’s only part of it. There is, obviously, a great deal of music that accomplishes the aforementioned in spades, but that we still just don’t care that much about, that won’t make a significant impact, and that we wouldn't be able to develop a developing relationship with over time. What I want is to become curious through listening, to feel something, and then to investigate and discover beyond this the work’s depth, the artist’s meticulous consideration. This is the great balance: seeing the "Pietà " and then reading "The Agony and the Ecstasy." There is something so satisfying, so holistically fulfilling artistically to experience a work like this, a work that is for me complete. And this rare thing is what I begin to look for when I first listen to a new work of contemporary art music, and all I feel I really have time for within the space that this precious, pregnant music occupies in my life.
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