"New music is never beautiful on the first acquaintance."
Very nice video of the revolutionary composer himself talking about how it happens, and what the surrounding forces were…
The "neo-classical" movement
“…simplification may be a necessity. The “neo-classical” movement had its inception in a reaction against over-complexity; but neo-classicists failed to see that the real necessity is to clarify the materials belonging to this age, not to attempt to return to the use of materials which not only have no specific relation to the present time, but were more perfectly handled by classical masters than is possible today. No renaissance in art has ever been entirely successful.”-
Henry Cowell-(New Musical Resources, 1930)
Great things at UNO
It has been hard over the couple decades or more, since arriving in New Orleans, to find much if any dialogue about what is new and most up to date in contemporary music thinking, let alone having that dialogue opened up to the freshest minds around town. It was invigorating this weekend to catch up on what Yotam Haber and Henry Griffin and others had been putting together for student composers at UNO.
Professor Yotam Haber is a very interesting composer who gets novel and beautiful compositions played all over the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcX1lfASmKc. It is a great thing that UNO has a fellow of this capacity in its music program- which, especially on the jazz side has been excellent- but Yotam Haber offers things for a whole other musical direction to be available to a city that has not often seen the possibility of training or even exposure to things in these directions. His enthusiasm and vitality for the subject is palpable, and clearly inspiring for the students whom he champions in a great way.
On Friday we played the film scores composed by Yotam Haber's students, live, along with silent movies selected by Henry Griffin and Laura Medina. Griffin is massively knowledgeable about film and had selected some of very wonderful key films from the silent era for the students to score. A great deal of effort went in to getting these pieces played with a good degree of finesse, and that is a great opportunity for young composers- and essential if they are to keep developing or gain confidence to keep writing. It was clear that they had been given exposure to a plethora of interesting techniques and had made their own choices about what to use and, some of the results were quite interesting.
Saturday evening there was a concert of pieces by the students and also by Yotam Haber and another faculty member from Tulane.
I was called in to play guitar with the Contemporaneous ensemble that Professor Haber had brought in from New York. I have little experience or comfort in playing in such ensembles so it was humbling to be treated so well despite my own short comings, and I must add that the young players in contemporaneous, including their conductor, David Bloom, were also extremely generous in giving me pointers to help the event go off smoothly. Not to mention larger picture issues from my old friend, bassist Doug Therrion. It was all very interesting especially because I am usually in the composer's seat having a piece played, not usually doing the playing. My strengths as a player are often in other directions, but it was nice to be given an opportunity try to find some way to contribute, given my limitations. Fresh challenges in music are a good thing.
It seems that with all this going on we might see a healthy crop of fine composers develop out of New Orleans which is something that has been in short supply here, and something that could make a fascinating musical town, even more so.
L'Ile De Goree
Xenakis wrote this about the horrific island prison off the coast of Senegal, a slave warehouse for the hideous Atlantic slave trade.
Milan Kundera on Xenakis
From Total Rejection of Inheritance or, Who is Iannis Xenakis?- Milan Kundera(1980)
“Can his experiments with sounds and noises that are beyond notes and scales signal a new period in the history of music? Will they remain in the memory of music lovers? No one can say for sure. But what will survive for sure is this gesture of immense rejection: for the first time ever, someone dared to tell European music that it is possible to abandon it. To forget it. (Is it a coincidence that during his youth, Xenakis lived through the massacres of a civil war, was condemned to death, his handsome face having been permanently marred by a wound, came to know human nature to a greater extent than any other composer?) And I think of the necessity, in the profound meaning of this necessity, which led Xenakis to choose the world’s objective sonority over the subjective one of a soul.”
The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving
I saw this performed a couple of months ago at Zipper Hall.
Absolutely blew me away on so many levels and I had never heard of Rick Burkhardt.
GREAT HYMN OF THANKSGIVING composed by Rick Burkhardt from H.P. Mendoza on Vimeo.
XENAKIS
X: There you have pinpointed, and I congratulate you on it, a subject which has never been penetrated, that of the very essence of music; what is its role, its aim in present day society? One might say "it's to pass the time", or "it's for pleasure", or "it's a spiritual diversion" when evaluating the nobility of classical works. For contemporary ones "free intellectualism, exploration of the unknown etc." The Pop song brings large rewards because it is consumed by the masses, it enters their souls, their lives, and stops there; one can very well do witout the musical questings of the avant-garde, one already has the musical past of Europe, which is not so bad; people keep discovering old bits of nonsense, mummies that they've dug up, and to hear all that could last a lifetime so what's the point of taking the prickly risks of a sortie into the contemporary world? Musical exploration today is in the same state that mathematics was 80 years ago, when they were considered a crazy fantasy. When Riemann started non-Euclidean geometry, people said it was a freak. Now the result of these scientific researches is tangible enough today, and spectacular in the cosmic field.
MB: What consequences could musical research such as yours have in the distant future?
X: There are two answers to that. First of all, if one approaches music in the same way that I approach mine, it marches with and intermingles with mathematics. Mathematicians are beginning to appreciate this interaction and to react to it, making new propositions most beneficial on the purely material plane. It is the widening of the horizons of the pioneers which gives birth to applications which are profitable to all. The second answer concerns the importance that music can play in the achievement of man through his creative faculties. If one allows these faculties the opportunity to develop, the whole of society is affected, and this will give to humanity an even richer knowledge, and therefore an ever greater mastery.
MB: Teilhard de Chardin expressed the hope that "the age would come when man will be more pre-occupied with knowing than having."
X: Music is certainly a basic tool for helping to fulfil this hope. Pythagorism was born of music. Pythagoras built arithmetic, the cult of numbers on musical foundations. This is splendid; it is Orphic. In Orphism music fulfills the function of the redeemer of souls in their escape from the infernal cycle of reincarnations. If one wishes to be reborn on a higher plane one must look after one's soul. This is to be found also in Homer; it is the Orphic thesis. It is for religious reasons therefore that Pythagoras discovers the processes by which music is made, and then the relation between length of string and a note, and following that the association between sounds and numbers; moreover, as geometry was being born at the same period, Pythagoras interested himself in it. By adding arithmetic to it he laid the foundations of modern mathematics; thus he was able to invade the realm of astronomy, invent the theory of the spheres, the theory of the music of the spheres, of the harmony of the spheres, which survived right up to Kepler; the Keplerian discoveries could never have been made but for the contribution of Pythagoras. In the old days music therefore became, quite simply a branch of mathematics. Euclid wrote an entire book called "Harmonics," in which he treated music on a theoretical level. This was the position in the West right up to the middle ages: up to the end of the 9th century, when Hucbald, in his Musica Enchiriadis was analyzing plainchant and speaking of music in ancient classical terminology. With the appearance of polyphony, there occured a divorce.. Today there are fewer reasons for upholding this divorce then for suppressing it.
MB: Isn't this to go against the stream in a reactionary way, which would be rather odd for a composer of the avant-garde, to hold that the mathematical theories of Pythagoras were engendered from a music that preceded them, and then today, 25 centuries later, to maintain that music should go back to mathematics?
X: Not at all. Music is by definition an art of montage, a combinatory art, a "harmonic" art, and there is plenty to discover and to formulate in this domain. I think I have defined two basic structures, one which belongs to a temporal category in musical thought, the other is independent of time, and its power of abstraction is enormous: ancient music was based on the extra-temporal, which allowed to be conjoined to mathematics; present-day music, since it is polyphonic, has almost dispensed with the extra-temporal factor in music, to the advantage of the temporal...the combination of voices, of modulations, melody, all this is made in time. This music has lost, for example, all that it possessed of modal structure, which was based on tetrachords and "systems" and not on the octave scale; it has lost all that to the advantage of the temporal, that is to say of time-structures.
It is urgent now to forge new ways of thinking, so that the ancient structures (Greek and Byzantine) as well as the actual ones of the music of western countries, and also the musical traditions of other continents, such as Asia and Africa, should be included into an overall theoretic vision essentially based on extra-temporal structures.
MB: Since music gave birth to mathematics, ought it now to seek refuge in a return to mathematics?
X: It isn't a refuge that music asks of mathematics, it is an absorption that it can make of certain parts of mathematics. Music has to dominate mathematics, and without that it becomes either mathematics or nothing at all. One should remain in the realm of music, but music need mathematics for they are a part of its body. When Bach wrote the Art of the Fugue, he produced a combinatory technique which is mathematical. In this new kind of music which I am propounding, and which at present is no more than the first hesitant stammering, mathematical logic and the machine will give a formidable power in the context of an extremely wide generalization. Did you know that at the age of 16, in 1938, I tried to express Bach in a geometrical formulae?...but the war came...
MB: I want to come back to the public which is listening to you in the concert hall: there they all are, creasing up their foreheads over your programme-note where, in presenting your work you cite Poisson's Law which you follow up with several algebraic equations. Why do you bother to do all this? Aren't you being a bit of a tease?
X: If the listener doesn't understand any of it, it is first of all useful to show him to himself as ignorant. Because the laws which I cite are universal ones and treasures of humanity, real treasures of human thought. To be unwilling to know them is as uncivilized as to refuse to recognize Michelangelo or Baudelaire. Furthermore, these formulae, which 10 years ago were the property of only a specialist, are now the common property of the average student of elementary mathematics. in a few years time they will be in every schoolboy's satchel. The level of learning, this also evolves. There exists an inner beauty in mathematics, beyond the enormous enrichment it brings to those who possess it, even a part of it; pure mathematics approaches poetry.
Upcoming interview with New Orleans pianist, Tom McDermott
Tom McDermott talked in an interview the other day about his influences and current passions. They are interesting- Brazilian Choro, French Musette, Stride, Ragtime are just some of the sounds playing a large part in how he composes and plays piano.
Check it out on the music interviews page...
Collaboration, dictatorial ideology, Platonic philosophy hangovers, and other thoughts before starting work on an opera
In preparing to write larger, theatrically bound pieces of music, a voracious appetite for webs of information, culled from as many fields as possible seems to take hold. (I'm speaking as a "newbie" here because I've only written one opera previously, Bang The Law.) Perhaps, it is because things like opera involve so many different features: poetry, acting, producing, directing, music, stage design, costume, psychology, history. Reasearch into everything possible seems to be called for. There is also the perennial fear of accidentally creating something too narrow or trivial. I get into a kind of trawling, sometimes directed, sometimes not, that leads to the right sort of mental and emotional fullness and wonder that overcomes stagnation, procrastination, and distraction. Opera demands collaboration anyhow so mental flexibility derived from poring over related ideas seems paramount becuse there is a certain openness and general knowledge required in working well with others with specialized talents.
I'm involved in the writing of a semi-operatic work currently so this is the process that seems to be dominant again. A couple of months back I was handed a libretto by writer, Adam Falik and agreed to collaborate on his libretto about a couple of early twentieth century art behemoths and a fictional encounter that drags them both down. In perusing some of
Follow up Interview with Piety St. Studios founder/engineer/producer/musician/composer, Mark Bingham
Check out the concluding, second interview with Mr. Mark Bingham, a large contributor to the current face of New Orleans music. Sometimes how he contributes is less than obvious. Find out here, on the music interviews page, and get a lot of other juicy stories on music and the less-than-slick machine that keeps it "out there."
Conclusion of interview with composer, Dr. James P. Walsh
Composer/bassist-Dr. James "Jimbo" Walsh sat for a second interview to get further biographically and a little deeper into current ideas. Parts 1-5 are now up here...
(If you are a local New Orleanian you may also know him as Jimbo, bassist with Davis Rogan and Washboard Rodeo. Or as the the guitar player with The Other Planets. Or as the conductor of the Naked Orchestra. Or as director of the New Orleans New Music Ensemble.)
Putting it clearly...
"The confusion concerning music as a means of communication clearly arises from a lack of understanding of what music really signifies. If we try to qualify the meaning of a piece or a passage of music in terms of specific emotions, we immediately run in to difficulties of which I have already spoken. Not only do we find the music essentially indefinable, but the more we try to to define it, the more unsatisfactory the result. What we achieve fails to be convincing as a true description of the music; and it becomes clear immediately that the music does not rouse the same specific feelings in different individuals- in fact, it does not define feelings at all. Once more, music embodies the attitudes and gestures behind feelings- the movements, as I have said, of our inner being, which animate our emotions and give them their dynamic content. Each of us qualifies these attitudes and gestures according to the associations that our experience has provided."- Roger Sessions from The Musical Experience