Mixed Meters

Beyond Baroque, Art Jarvinen and Me

2012-01-26T06:50:00.000-08:00

This Friday the series Beyond Music will present a concert of the music of Arthur Jarvinen at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice California. I've already written about the music on that concert in this post.

Beyond Baroque has a long history of presenting music concerts. I performed there several times, including at least two solo clarinet recitals. On one of those I performed Art's piece Goldbeater's Skin, in the arrangement for clarinet and ratchet.

On another concert at Beyond Baroque, the percussion trio The Antenna Repairmen (Arthur Jarvinen, Robert Fernandez and M.B. Gordy) premiered my piece Bombed! which they had asked me to compose for them. More on that below.

My solo concert was given June 11, 1988. It was reviewed in the L.A. Times a few days later. I got a pretty good notice, although Terry McQuilken, the critic, liked Art's piece least of all. He still referred to its "droll humor." The ratchet, played by my friend David Johnson, elicited laughter from the audience. You can hear the laughter on the recording. Apparently I played the piece a month earlier on the Bang on a Can Festival marathon in New York.

Art's catalog lists the date of Goldbeater's Skin as 1987. It started as an ensemble piece for XTET. He had received some prestigious grant which allowed him to compose it. I was a member of XTET then and we played Goldbeater's Skin a lot. There's a commercial recording of a version for wind quintet. I do not remember how or why the solo clarinet version came to be. In fact, until I was looking through my trove of cassettes last year, I had completely forgotten that this version ever existed. Or that I had performed it.

Goldbeater's Skin consists of many repetitions of the same melody. The melody gradually changes with one selected pitched transposed down each time, until the melody reappears at the end in identical form, only lower. The appearance of each changed pitch is highlighted by the ratchet - a surprising sound in this context. The ratchet makes a raspy, grinding sound. Harsh. Ugly.

Like many of Art's serious chamber works, this one requires concentration from the listener. He used a certain process in the composition of Goldbeater's Skin. This process is remarkably easy to hear.

Listen to Goldbeater's Skin by Arthur Jarvinen.

version for solo clarinet with ratchet - © 1988 Leisure Planet Music - 535 seconds
David Ocker, clarinet
David Johnson, ratchet
performed June 11, 1988 at Beyond Baroque, Venice CA

If you want, you can listen to Carbon, Art's solo bass clarinet piece which I performed often and which he dedicated to me. I briefly used the melody of Goldbeater's Skin in my memorial tribute to Art, Solstice Lights. Art named this piece after goldbeater's skin. Here's a picture of some goldbeater's skin. (It came from here.)

My piece Bombed! was written in 1991 for the Antenna Repairmen. They premiered it at Beyond Baroque - although I don't remember the date. Or much else, for that matter. I do remember that at one point in the concert Bob, Art and M.B. sang Papa Oom Mow Mow.

Art played electric bass, M.B. played drum set and Bob played vibraphone. I dedicated Bombed! to Frank Zappa - this was years after I had ceased working for Frank. Bombed! contains a lot of Zappa-esque musical devices - metric modulations, mixed meters and the like. I played it for Frank once. He was underwhelmed. He tactfully reminded me that my future was not in rock and roll. In most instances Frank had always been very supportive of my activities as a composer.

Bombed! is in three movements which explore the idea of bombed-ness from different angles. The titles are "Into the Stone Age", "Pan Am 103" and "Out of Your Mind". Here are the program notes for each movement which I worked into a kind of a sort of a plot:

Into the Stone Age – Three young Americans, believing the sound-bites of their leaders, participate in the destruction of a less significant culture.
Pan Am 103 – Wrapped up in their own problems and fears, they have no conception of what is happening around them.
Out of Your Mind – Our heroes, trying to walk home after the bars close, cannot remember the music they heard that day.

This is not a delicate piece. Not even the very quiet middle movement - which is about bodies falling out of the sky.

I don't have a recording of the live performance. This particular recording was made in a studio after the concert. In the manner typical of my career as a composer the recording has gathered dust on a shelf for over twenty years. This is the first chance anyone other than myself has had to hear it.

Listen to Bombed! by David Ocker

© 1991, 2012 David Ocker - 515 seconds
Performed by The Antenna Repairmen
Robert Fernandez, vibraphone
M.B. Gordy, drums
Arthur Jarvinen, bass

Movement I: Into the Stone Age
Movement II: Pan-Am 103
Movement III: Out of Your Mind

On the playback page you can find a link to download pdfs of the score and parts to Bombed! A bit of the third movement "Out of Your Mind" is quoted in my own piece This Is Not The Title.

BB Tags: Beyond Baroque. . . Arthur Jarvinen. . . Antenna Repairmen. . . David Ocker

Star Wars Uncut

2012-01-22T03:32:00.000-08:00

Not a Star Wars fan? I suggest that you skip this post.

This is about Star Wars Uncut, Director's Cut. It's a remake of Star Wars, A New Hope, which (chronologically, at least) was the first Star Wars movie. Star Wars, of course, is the saga that made George Lucas into a billionaire, made Harrison Ford into such a big star he never had to learn another part, and ended the career of Mark Hamill.

This version was produced by crowdsourcing. Someone split the original movie into 15-second long segments. Then they let just anyone pick a segment and film it again, using any style, any technique, any actors, any props, any reference, anything they could think of. All the segments were then reassembled into the full movie. And you can watch it on the web.

The final result probably won't make a lick of sense if you aren't familiar with the original. But if you are a fan and you enjoy pop culture mashups which are so intensely mashed that they border on chaos, then you will love watching this. I did. I even burned it onto a DVD and inflicted it on Leslie. (Sadly, she was not impressed.)

In this era of SOPA and PIPA (along with other past and future attempts by a few big corporations to own all of popular culture for the purpose of maximizing their own profits), this movie is an object lesson of how the widely available inexpensive technologies (like video and Internet which have transformed our lives since Star Wars appeared in 1977) let people take their favorite stories and make them grow. Okay, maybe "grow" is not the right word. "Mutate" would a better description.

Lots of people spent a lot of time doing this because they love this story. Star Wars owes a large part of its popularity to the fact that it deals human-scale themes like adventure, honor, religion and love. It paints these onto a vast galaxy-sized canvas of space travel, alien cultures and high technology. Throw in revolution and politics, pitting a few good people against evil corporate governments. Like Lord of the Rings, it is a Ring Cycle of our times, one with actual inspiration for living humans.

John William's music is in evidence throughout this movie. In fact, it forms a familiar touchpoint that glues this mess together. Only few sections parody the music one way or another.

To give you a flavor of just how diverse the art direction of this movie is, I've assembled a few random screen grabs of the two droids - R2D2 and C3PO - into this photomontage. It's a small sampling of the vast visual variation to which every character is subjected.

(click the picture for an enlargement)

To reference another science fiction classic (that would be The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy) when watching this you should Expect the Unexpected. Check out variety of methods used to recreate Princess Leia's hair buns. Or Obiwon's beard.

Here's a picture of the initial entrance of Darth Vader with her four sexy storm troopers as they strut and pose high fashion style onto the captured rebel vessel. (Notice that their blasters are really hair dryers.)

(don't waste your time clicking this one)

That's enough movie review for now. Go ahead - watch it!

Or go to Vimeo or YouTube to watch.

If you have ever considered recreating the Star Wars movie using animated ASCII characters ... Sorry, someone has beaten you to it. Visit ASCIIMATION. (Only half the movie, but still an impressive waste of time.)

A previous MM article about Space Opera.

Uncut Tags: Star Wars Uncut. . . mashup. . . popular culture

Preparing to hear a concert of Art Jarvinen's music

2012-01-12T20:19:00.000-08:00

January 27 of this year would have been composer Arthur Jarvinen's 56th birthday. On that date there will be a concert celebrating his life and music: 9:00 P.M. at Beyond Baroque in Venice California. (You can find temporal, geographical and economic details for the event here.)

The concert is part of a critically acclaimed series entitled Beyond Music. It is programmed by composer Daniel Rothman, a close friend of Art's. Daniel has made performances from past concerts available on video at the Beyond Baroque Music YouTube Channel.

There will be two works on this concert. They are excellent examples of Art's chamber music and will serve as a fine introduction to his more serious endeavors. Of course Art wrote in many other styles and genres. No one should imagine that this concert, or any two pieces, could provide an overview of his complete body of music.

The two works are A Conspiracy of Crows for three oboes, which will be performed by Kathy Pisaro - two of the parts will be on tape - and 100 CADENCES with four melodies, a chorale, and a coda ("with bells on!") for string quartet, performed by the Formalist Quartet.

I have found two interviews in which Art discusses A Conspiracy of Crows. The first can be found in this fascinating 2007 online interview with musician John Trubee.

Then there's A Conspiracy Of Crows. It's a piece for three oboes in which I didn't consciously choose or compose any of the notes. I just used a series of numbers based on the years of the 20th Century - 1900 1901 1902...1999 - translated into fingering diagrams. I had no way of knowing what would come out, but I had a very good idea of what I thought the piece would "probably" sound like. I never heard a note of it until it was recorded here at my house last summer. It's one of the most beautiful things I've produced, and it fully matched my expectations. My wife is almost frightened by things like that, that I can intuit or anticipate these things. That's why I'm a composer, and some people aren't.

The second, longer, less edited quote comes from a radio interview with the duo Kalvos and Damien. Look for show #539 - it's a wide-ranging discussion with Art highlighting a variety of his music. There are plenty of recordings including a segment of A Conspiracy of Crows. (It's the last piece in the two-hour show.)

The piece is called A Conspiracy of Crows. To me, one of the intriguing things about this piece, is that, over the course of its twenty minutes, the three oboes are playing such a fascinating range of odd timbres, weird things that sound almost like they were meticulously composed, beautiful random textures, microtones, multiphonics. The complexity of the sound of the piece, and the kind of richness of texture and timbre and so forth -- I could never have composed. And literally, there is not one single sonority in the piece that was deliberately selected or chosen by me for any musical or compositional reasons.

All I did was come up with a mindlessly simple progression of numbers which is just the Twentieth Century - 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903 all the way up to 1999. And assigned each digit from zero through nine to one of the fingers that an oboe player uses to play the oboe. And it was a short step from there to just produce 400 fingering diagrams with absolutely no thought whatsoever to what comes out of the oboe when you blow into it with your fingers in that position.

It's my most Cagean piece in that it's using a kind of completely unpredictable, well organized - there is this progression of numbers so there are recurring motifs. Zero is always a reset, so as you go through 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903 there is a logic to the way the fingers are moving and the kinds of fingering diagrams that are being produced. But no intention or even no concern on my part as to what comes out of the oboe as a result. So it's very Cagean in that I couldn't predict the results.

I just think its one of my most successful pieces and kind of unique in that it does rely so heavily on non-intention on my part.

The second piece on the program is Art's string quartet entitled 100 CADENCES with four melodies, a chorale, and a coda ("with bells on!") The recording of this piece by the Formalist Quartet, who will also perform it on January 27, takes nearly 50 minutes. They recorded it in composer Lou Harrison's hay bale house near Joshua Tree, a place with which Art felt a strong spiritual connection.

Art dedicated 100 Cadences to Stephen "Lucky" Mosko, in memoriam. Lucky Mosko (1947-2005) was Art's composition teacher at CalArts and someone Art respected highly. Art felt a great loss at Lucky's death and I know that he felt great responsibility in the writing of a piece to honor and remember Lucky.

It seems quite reasonable to look for clues to 100 Cadences in Art's comments about Lucky's music. In 1995 Art wrote this biographical sketch of Lucky. Here's a quote:

When speaking about his own music and methods Mosko often refers to "games". Not the usual games we all know, but self-devised rules of procedure and methods of personal amusement.

Art's own description above about about his method in A Conspiracy of Crows seems like a similar "game" method. Presumbably such compositional activities went into 100 Cadences as well - although I have no clue what they are. (I find it interesting that both pieces on this concert involve the number 100 in their structure.)

Art also wrote about the perception of time in Lucky's music:

This moment-form is an outgrowth of Mosko's enduring fascination with music's ability to alter conciousness, especially our temporal perceptions. Ideally, for him, the listener will not be able to say with certainty whether a piece just heard was five minutes or five hours long.

Art must have approached a piece of such length with careful thought. Choosing to divide the work into 100 sections and to make each one a "cadence", a fundamental element of music theory which appears at the end of a musical phrase, reveals a good deal about how Art wanted a listener to experience musical time.

Wikipedia defines cadence as: "a melodic or harmonic configuration that creates a sense of repose or resolution [finality or pause]." A cadence has the essential quality of conclusion. Art made this idea the central focus of his piece.

Of course, Jarvinen's cadences are a far cry from the schoolbook dominant/tonic jobs you might have studied. They move slowly, avoid simple harmonies and mostly keep all the voices in restricted ranges. The slow progress of the cadences is broken by solo cadenzas for each player. These are the Four Melodies.

Midway through 100 Cadences is the Chorale, which Art subtitled "The Hymn of All Life Changing". The Formalist Quartet has shared their recording of the Chorale on their Bandcamp page. Here it is:

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://formalistquartet.bandcamp.com/track/chorale-the-hymn-of-all-life-changing"&amp;gt;Chorale: the hymn of all life changing by formalist quartet&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>

You can find several definitions of the idiom "with bells on!". Art appended this phrase to the title of his piece in both parentheses and quotation marks, sometimes even adding the exclamation point. All meanings of "with bells on!" point to excess enthusiasm or intensity of experience. While the coda to 100 Cadences does end with the players ringing small bells, it is not an ending of energy. Rather, it is a conclusion of sober reflection and great loss.

100 Cadences is discussed in this paper entitled Listening to Nothing in Particular: Boredom and Contemporary Experimental Music by Eldritch Priest. As you might guess from the title, the notion of time passing and how it is perceived comes up. Priest writes:

I heard a string quartet a while ago by Los Angeles composer Art Jarvinen titled 100 cadences with four melodies, a chorale, and coda ("with bells on!"). As the title suggests, the piece keeps ending, over and over again, each time promising to conclude a musical adventure that never was. Over forty-eight minutes, the consecution of endings, punctuated by solos and glimmering silences, draw out an irritatingly radiant array of mock-perorations. And I am always more or less aware of this: More aware when the sheer materiality of these several endings intrudes upon my sense of contemplation, and less aware when, like Swann listening to Vinteuil's sonata, I am taken away by time passed. I am alternately with the music, my attention buoyed by a procession of simulated extinctions and untimely non-events, and beside the music, dreaming counterfactuals, shifting backward, forward, side to side in fantasies of otherwise. Buoyed in the messy imminence of a perpetual conclusion, my attention floats on nothing in particular, nothing but a series of loose intensities that are now and again interesting, or boring, or both.

Priest provides a pdf score of the first dozen cadences of this piece together with an mp3 of the same. Here's the first system of the score (click to enlarge):

Priest's telling notion that "I am alternately with the music, ... and beside the music" speaks volumes about how to listen to and, ultimately, understand 100 Cadences.

Articles about Arthur Jarvinen have appeared often on Mixed Meters since the beginning. Click here to see all Art Articles on Mixed Meters.

Art briefly wrote articles for Mixed Meters under the pseudonym Mister ComposerHead. These, equally briefly, became the Mister ComposerHead blog.

Beyond Music Tags: Arthur Jarvinen. . . Beyond Baroque. . . Daniel Rothman. . . A Conspiracy of Crows. . . 100 Cadences. . . Eldritch Priest

"Not The Title" Pieces Available Again

2011-12-31T04:35:00.000-08:00

On a recent walk my iPod decided that I needed to hear my piece entitled This Is Not The Title EITHER. I hadn't listened to it in quite a while, probably more than a year. I enjoy hearing my own music after long periods of absence because it's as close as I can get to experiencing it with the ears of someone who hasn't composed my own music.

I enjoyed it. It's a wacky piece. Really wacky. I admit that as a composer - heck, as a person - I have a wacky streak. This music comes fright out of that streak. I only hope that music of this sort will infuriate dogmatic minimalists and doctrinaire, close-minded fans of classical music.

You might remember that This Is Not The Title EITHER is the sequel to another piece This Is Not The Title. I composed them in 2008. It's hard to say which piece is the wackier.

Links to the music site (which shall MOG remain nameless) where you once could hear these pieces have long since stopped working. So I have uploaded them both anew. I'm happy to report that they are available for listening once again - just in time for 2012.

I knew you'd be thrilled - especially if you are a dogmatic minimalist or a doctrinaire, close-minded fan of the classics.

Click here to to hear This Is Not The Title
Copyright (c) 2008 David Ocker - 337 seconds.
Read the original post here.

Click here to hear This Is Not The Title EITHER
Copyright (c) 2008 by David Ocker - 400 seconds
Read the original post here.

The sound quality is, as they say, medium crappy at best. Think of it as a feature, not a bug. It helps accentuate the wack.

Want to hear the piece which I think is my wackiest? Click here.

Wacky Tags: wacky titles. . . wacky music. . . wacky composers

Jingle Bells - The Long Version

2011-12-21T22:30:00.000-08:00

The most hallowed Mixed Meters' musical tradition is probably the yearly winter Solstice piece based on Jingle Bells. Theoretically these efforts of seasonal spirit should appear around the "Holidays". For the last couple of years, however, they have been woefully late.

The previous one, Solstice Lights, a video composition, was not posted until the summer Solstice, a full half-cycle of calendar behind. Had it been any later, I guess it would have become an early post for this year.

The 2009 Jingle Bells musical composition, entitled A Combination of Jingle Bells and the Internationale, was posted on May 22, 2010. (That post has links to even earlier Jingle pieces, if you're curious. It also has lots of pictures of Che Guevara.)

This year, for my 2012 New Year's Resolution, I resolved to be more timely about fulfilling this tradition. And so I have. But be warned: I have accomplished this feat by creating a work that is 85% total silence.

It's called Jingle Bells - The Long Version. It has origins in two different but equally geeky computer issues:

1) For a long time I have been wanting to create some original System Sounds. Those short beeps and zings that a computer uses to say things like "You can't click here" or "There is some sort of a problem." or "You have spam." were really starting to annoy me. The operating system provided few alternative options and those didn't have much variety. I figured a self-styled creative guy like myself ought to be able to make more interesting sounds himself.

2) I upgraded my copy of Sibelius, the program I use to compose music. About a dozen years ago I started with Sibelius 2 and each subsequent version since has been an evolutionary improvement. Much to my surprise, the latest version, Sibelius 7, introduced a completely new structure. Someone, no doubt looking out for my own good, took every single command (of which there are many) and tossed them like a salad. It is like a whole new program, nothing is where I expect it to be. Any long-time user facing the daunting re-learning curve might simply go back to the previous version and never upgrade again.

I sought a way to combine these issues. Could I re-learn this entirely new-but-still-old program by using it to create some original system sounds?

Such sounds need to be exceptionally short. They also must be interesting, complex musical events. I quickly came to think of them as little musical compositions, pieces no longer than two seconds. You'd think these super short works would be an easy task for a guy like me who has already spent lots of time writing short pieces, namely my series entitled Thirty Second Spots. You'd be wrong - writing a one second piece is a really different ball game.

I gave the idea a go. After creating maybe half a dozen such sounds, some of which have become my regular system sounds, I had another idea. Could I use this new stone to kill yet a third bird - my impending deadline for a Jingle Bells piece for 2011, the one I had resolved to post promptly this year?

And that's how the idea for Jingle Bells - The Long Version was born.

I would take one chorus and one verse of Jingle Bells, a tune familiar to anyone who lives in a Western, Christmas-dominated culture, divide it into short segments, embellish these segments into rich system-sound-like events and play them in proper order separated by long periods of absolute silence so that, when they do happen, they become interruptions to whatever other sounds might be happening at the moment. In other words, these interruptions would function just the way real system sounds do.

A normal playing of Jingle Bells ought to last less than a minute. I figured that if I stretched that out to six or seven minutes it would seem interminable. I was wrong. I kept making it longer by adding more silence until it was twenty-three and one half minutes long. This makes the melody pretty obscure but you can follow the tune if you concentrate.

It turns out that this 23-minute Jingle piece combines well with other music. I'm someone who often listens to two or even three Internet radio streams at the same time. Adding the system sound interruptions of Jingle Bells - The Long Version to such a mix often results in excellent musical synchronicity.

In other words, every so often one of the bongs or tweets from my piece blends exactly into the musical moment. This is especially true if the music is in G major or a similar key. I urge you to try it yourself: put Jingle Bells - The Long Version on continuous play, put on some other music and stay open to what might happen. Baroque music works very well. (Sorry, the online player I'm using doesn't seem to have a continuous play function. I guess you'll have to figure out how to download the mp3 file to try this trick.)

Click here to hear Jingle Bells - The Long Version - © 2011 David Ocker - 1409 seconds.

I pushed the idea one step farther. Once I had completed Jingle Bells - The Long Version, I imagined shortening it to a short version. Using the Truncate Silence feature of the fine, free audio editor Audacity, I removed all the silences. The new version is musically identical, except that it only lasts 3 minutes and 32 seconds. That's just 15% of the original. Only the silence has been changed.

I entitled this shortened version Jingle Bells - The Long Version (Short Version), a name which, after a few drinks, smoothly rolls off the tongue. It's online for you to hear, but the link is elsewhere. You'll have to hunt just a bit. Nothing too difficult.

We at Mixed Meters have become accustomed to observing "the Holidays" from the viewpoint of non-celebratory outsiders. It was pointed out to me recently that Christmas is the only Christian holiday which is also a U.S. national holiday. As a non-Christian American, I'm pleased that the Christian aspects of Christmas seem to have paled somewhat in recent years.

Meanwhile, December 25 continues to thrive as the high holy day of our real national religion, Capitalism. This is when we Americans are supposed to show our patriotic faith by over consuming. They tell us that all our spending is for our own good. And we believe them. We have faith.

But maybe this year, every American will take 23.5 minutes out of their hectic schedule of spending and eating, giving and taking to listen to my new version of Jingle Bells. The total relaxation time would amount to over 13,000 years. It would be a huge step towards national sanity. What a pipe dream.

Finally - a word about the pictures. Besides the annual Jingle Bells permutation, Mixed Meters has a Christmas zoology thread. In other words - we investigate which cute animals people use to personify their holidays.

It's commonly known that Christmas has forgone sheep and goats and camels in a manger in favor of reindeer, polar bears, igloos and snowmen. You just have to look around to prove how extensive this shift from "Birth of Jesus" holiday to "Winter Solstice" holiday has become. Even so, a few years ago, I was astonished to see that penguins were becoming regular Christmas animals.

Of course penguins are not mentioned in the bible. What bothered me was seeing them portrayed next to reindeer and polar bears and igloos. Penguins are found in the northern hemisphere only in zoos. Americans are famous for lack of geographical knowledge. I feared that if we saw penguins and polar bears cheek by jowl in "holiday" displays every year, we would start to believe that those animals actually lived together in the wild.

This year I found only a few penguins hanging out with northern hemisphere wildlife in front yards, stores displays and advertisements. But I did find a "Chris-mouse" (thankfully not a "Christ-mouse") and, for the first time ever, two different types of Hannukah bears - some white and some brown, both wearing yarmulke and tallis. Needless to say, I am unaware of any bears appearing in the Book of Maccabees, religious or otherwise.

Other penguin-centric Mixed Meters posts you might enjoy:
Stalking the Christmas Penguin
Stalking the Christmas Penguin 2
Christmas Zoology
Christmas in October (which also deals with Halloween and table grapes)

An early Mixed Meters post
In which tomorrow is probably the Solstice

War on Christmas Tags: Jingle Bells. . . system sounds. . . Sibelius 7. . . War on Christmas. . . Christmas penguins. . . hannukah bears. . . hanukkah bears. . . Chanukah bears

Stanley Zappa, Matthew Shipp and the Fazioli

2011-12-13T06:21:00.000-08:00

I don't remember what my first contact with Stanley Jason Zappa was, but I'm pretty sure it happened because we both write blogs. Stanley's blog is called It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack, Attack, Attack). I don't have the slightest idea exactly what that title means although when Mixed Meters had a blogroll it was listed there. He lives in the cold part of Canada. He must be a smart guy because he can write about Theodore Adorno.

And yes, S.J. Zappa shares some DNA with the much more famous F. V. Zappa. I'm pretty sure they were never close.

Stanley Zappa is into jazz, free jazz in particular. He plays saxophone and clarinet and maybe other things.

Here is a video of Stanley playing a very free tenor solo (and doing it very well) along with a Finnish Zappa tribute band. They introduce him by playing the one thing you always hear before out-there free tenor saxophone solos, the very famous, very un-free Finnish tango Satumaa. (Stanley's solo starts about 2'24".)

Stanley Zappa also writes quite articulately about jazz. And he promotes jazz things he likes.

That's why he recently sent me a link to a Kickstarter project promoting a proposed film project with filmmaker Barbara Januszkiewicz and pianist Matthew Shipp. Stanley asked me to pass it along to you. You can click the link and pledge money to the film. There's only a few days left and they have a lot of money left to raise. I think it's kind of like a down-to-the-wire NPR fundraiser.

The film will be called The Composer. In this case the composer is the pianist. The pianist is Matthew Shipp. But the important question is ... what kind of piano is it?

Stanley Zappa's essay promoting this project - entitled Fifty Note Cluster - finds particular significance in the specific brand of piano to be used. It's a Fazioli, a high-quality Italian job. He writes:

A contemporary piano like the Fazioli, designed and built in the late 20th century, deserves, nay, demands the music of our time. One has to wonder if Bach or Chopin would have written the same music if they had a Fazioli with which to work out their musical ideas.

With Shipp, unbound by century old harmonic conventions, the totality of the Fazioli's tonal are fair use. A piano as capable and "creative" as the Fazioli deserves a pianist capable of creative exploiting the unique qualities of the Fazioli as Shipp.

Faziolis are expensive. Watch this news clip to learn about one that was for sale for a half mil.

Mixed Meters has written about expensive pianos before. Read the MM post The Price of a (Lousy) Piano about the instrument in the film Casablanca. In 2006 it was valued at five times more than the top Fazioli is today and certainly sounded much, much, much worse.

Personally, I have less interest in what instrument a soloist is using or how it sounds than I have in the notes that are actually being played. That's why I think the real story here is not free sax solos in the middle of famous Finnish tangos nor fancy Italian fortepianos in underfunded Kickstarter movies. I think maybe Matthew Shipp is a man to watch. I mean a man to listen to.

Free jazz on the piano has a problem of wrong notes. When there are a lot of non-standard harmonies it is all too easy to criticize every dissonance as accidental. But Matthew Shipp plays cleanly and playing cleanly impresses me. In this (very underwatched) video he's obviously hitting the notes that he intends to hit (even if he is doing it on a Steinway). That means we're hearing the music he intends to make. That, my friends, is a great and all too rare art.

There's a lot more of Matthew Shipp on YouTube and Spotify. Probably other places as well.

Clean Tags: Stanley Zappa. . . Matthew Shipp. . . free jazz. . . expensive pianos

What Is It Like To Be Dead?

2011-12-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

People on the Internet are apparently interested in pictures of dead animals. Mixed Meters' most popular picture is of a dead squirrel. It's been copied several dozen times.

Death fascinates. And no death fascinates a human more than their own. Most everyone, I'm sure, wonders how they will die. They also wonder what life will be like after that.

Post mortem our physical processes stop completely. There will be no sensory perception. There will be no seeing or feeling or hearing or touching or tasting anything. No moving, no breathing, no thinking. All sense of time will stop (which is a good thing: who wants to be aware of their own body slowly decaying?)

But this question persists. People want to believe in "something more" - there must be something besides our daily comings and goings in the vast and varied world, overfilled as it is with endless wonder, intense beauty and incredible depths of mystery. We conclude that all that great stuff is not enough. There must be more. We humans demand more. The little self inside each of us - our consciousness - comes to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it will exist forever.

So we grasp any notion which makes it seem that "me" will survive "my death" regardless of what will actually happen to "my body". We really need to convince ourselves that part of us, the essential internal awareness part, won't just disappear because of small inconvenience like, say, passing away. Religions even have names for this everlasting body part: they call it the "soul" or the "spirit". Too bad it doesn't really exist, whatever it is.

I have found my own answer to the 'what is it like after death' question. I find it kind of comforting. My answer seems logical (to me). It's simple. It is rooted in a certain past experience which every single one of us has absolutely had already. But before I get to that, I need to blather on a bit.

People who prefer not to think about this question for themselves might chose to subscribe to a pre-formed answer. Predictably, such answers come from religions. There are a lot of religions available. Most of us got our religion, complete with beliefs about the afterlife, from our parents. It was chosen for us. Each religion has well-established dogma designed to comfort the living as they contemplate their own or their loved ones' "life" in the afterlife

If you subscribe to such dogma, hey, good for you. I believe everyone should be free to believe whatever they want - no matter how little effort they spent adopting those ideas in the first place. Someone else has thought this through for you already. Might as well take advantage.

Suppose you happen to be a Christian. Have you ever wondered why it is that you believe that you'll go to heaven after your death rather than be reincarnated into another body?

I came across an interesting anecdote about the origin of the Christian belief in heaven. It was in a book called Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino. On page 262 he discusses the Council of Nicaea which, I'm sure you remember, was called in the year 325 by the Christian Emperor Constantine to decide issues of faith:

Most Christians of A.D. 325 believed in the enlightenment of imperfect human souls through successive reincarnations. ...

To settle the reincarnation debate, two votes were held in Nicaea. In the first vote, the bishops were asked to choose between the afterlife taking place (a) in the kingdom of heaven or (b) right here on Earth, by cyclical rebirth.

The first vote weighed in against the earthly reincarnationists, whereupon Constantine ordered the immediate execution of those who had voted for a belief in an earthly kingdom of God.

He then held a second vote: (a) afterlife in the kingdom of heaven or (b) afterlife in an earthly kingdom of God?

The second vote was unanimous, of course.

... The reincarnationists ... were subsequently declared "heretics" and ... were purged from existence.

So, apparently, Christianity chose its deeply held vision of an afterlife (the belief that, if we're good, we go to a land of fluffy clouds where we sprout wings, wear white robes and practice the harp) through the dual processes of democracy and mass execution. I hope your faith is enhanced by knowing that other people voted and then died so you could believe in heaven.

Actually I encourage people to invent their own ideas about post-death. The world would be a better place if everyone did this for themselves. We're free to just make up answers. These days no one needs to die in order to create new notions about post-death life because there are no more Roman Emperors to off you if you choose wrongly. Well, maybe there are still a couple in theocratic countries.

Of course I don't expect you to agree with my ideas and I pretty certainly won't think much of yours. Curiously, all our answers can be correct. Yes, every single answer, no matter how much they contradict one another, could be absolutely correct. This is because there is no hard evidence to the contrary. The dead have been very lax about sending dispatches from beyond the grave. A few crackpots claim to have had near-death experiences, but they all seem to return with the same ideas they started out with.

My own ideas about afterlife focus on the origin of our consciousness, specifically how we came to be aware of the passage of long periods of time, especially lifetimes of time. For my little "me" (or, if you will, your little "me") to think it would exist forever it first has to have some awareness of the successive stages of its own life.

It might be useful to compare our self-awareness with that of other animals. As an example, take our dog, Chowderhead. He knows who he is and seems to realize that time is passing. He has a remarkably short attention span. Maybe he remembers what happened yesterday. I doubt that. Maybe he expects that there will be another day tomorrow, a day just like today, although I doubt that as well. Does he remember being a puppy? Does he know that he's getting older? Does he know that he will die? Not likely.

So it's easy to reject the notion that Chowderhead expects to have an afterlife. People may believe that "all dogs go to heaven" but this idea did not come from the dogs themselves. When Chowder encounters dead animals he thinks of them as things to eat. For example, dead squirrels.

Other animals are smarter than dogs. According to this webpage, there are four animals who live in close proximity to us here in suburbia who are brighter than Chowderhead: rats, pigeons, crows and, of course, our neighborhood squirrels. Squirrels must have some conception of longer periods of time because they store nuts to use as food during the hard Southern California winters.

We humans were apparently not classified as "animals" in that intelligence list. Chimps and dolphins came in first and second. I have no clue whether chimps or dolphins are smart enough to know that they will die. It would be interesting to know whether they have invented a conception of life after death. Possibly not, because dolphins and chimpanzees do not have the advantage of another essential tool in afterlife belief: culture.

Living chimps or dolphins cannot consult the wisdom of previous chimps or dolphins. Without autobiographies or biopics detailing the lives of accomplished members of their species (Flipper and Bonzo come to mind), they cannot contemplate the story of an entire dolphin or chimp life. Without constant statistical analysis of their activities, they have no way to know what their life expectancy is.

What's more, dolphins and chimps have no way to leave their own thoughts to future generations as yet unborn. Do they even know that millions of years have passed encompassing countless generations of creatures just like them? Do they realize that they will have descendants who will live through the same stages of life that they had?

Whatever the answers to those questions about other animals, we human animals definitely know all about this stuff. We realize that humans just like us existed in the past and others will exist in the future. We are acutely aware of famous ancestors, perfect beings in every way who are worthy of emulation, Buddha and Christ, Beethoven and L. Ron Hubbard, who seem to have survived death because their creative ideas have become important landmarks in our culture. If they can live on in our memories through those ideas, why can't we make up some as well?

It is through our culture, our books, cave paintings, our People magazines, that we humans are able to learn about the lives of other members of our species, either long dead or recently passed. Human history has been one increasing torrent of media - starting with a few storytellers whose work was eventually written down into various bibles and epics, all the way to actual torrents of files on the Internet. Maybe we modern men and women need an afterlife just to finish reading all the books and watching all the movies we won't have time for before we die.

Our cultural tools have made us acutely aware of the cycle of life: birth, growth, marriage, reproduction, retirement and, ultimately, the senior citizen discount at Denny's. In fact, my generation of Americans - I'm what you call a "baby boomer" - has intensified this notion through our shared life cycle. We are going through it together. We were all young at the same time, more or less. Now we're all turning Sweet Sixty together. In between, we obsessed about life stages - for example in this book which is subtitled Predictable Crises of Adult Life. I remember reading it in my twenties.

All this cultural memory and veneration has allowed us to develop our conception of human lifetime. We realize that each of us is born, lives a life, learns from his or her elders, accomplishes things great or small, possibly reproduces, eventually grows old and dies. We learn about this as children. It's easy to ignore at first; eventually we realize that it's happening to us.

As I have found out over the last few years, it becomes impossible to ignore. If I try to convince myself that my recent milestone birthday represents only half of my life, then I must somehow believe that I will eventually become the oldest living human on the planet. A lot of self-denial goes into growing old.

It's inevitable that the cycle will complete and each of us will die. To avoid thinking about it, we seek an escape clause, a way out. Why shouldn't we be the exception? Why shouldn't some part of us avoid death and live on? Why shouldn't believing make it so. Of course it should, because my little "me" feels so unique.

We know that time will continue after we die. Other people will live on. Civilization with continue, economies will rise and fall. Wars will never end. How, we ask, can all this possibly happen without us? It doesn't seem fair.

I'd like to point out that there is a segment of the life cycle which is often overlooked: one more stage in the sequence of birth, life, death and after death. That stage is the period before we are born. (Or if you're one of those people, before you were conceived. Either way works for me. I think I'll go with "born".)

Do you remember before you were born? Not likely. Once again, there are crackpots who claim memories of past lives, but I think their ranting is easy to ignore. Because it's a free country you can choose the crackpot you prefer to believe. I wonder why are you are still reading this.

Anyway, let me point out that each one of us was born once. Time existed before we were born. During that pre-born time events happened: other people were born, they did things and then they died. We have no direct experience of those people or of those events or of that time because ... well, because we weren't born yet.

During the time before our birth we did not experience the passage of time. Our embryos had to form and start to grow brains and nervous systems to make us capable of perceiving time. Our pre-birth is one pitch-black endless instant of nothing happening. It is an experience we all had - although none of us remember anything about it.

And if you can conceive of what is was like to be you before you were born, then you should have no trouble imagining what it will be like to be you when you are dead. Yes, that's my idea: being dead is exactly like not being born yet.

That's all I wanted to say. To me, it seems pretty obvious. I find it reassuring to know what to expect of being dead, because I've already had that same experience before I came into existence. The notion makes me feel much better about living and, eventually, dieing.

If my idea didn't instantly strike you as an excellent explanation of what is going to happen after you die, then I apologize for wasting your time. No matter how old you might be at this very moment, you have only a limited amount of time left to live. It's a really good idea not to waste any of it.

Here's a Mixed Meters post about a living squirrel - complete with video and music: The Squirrel In Mike and Lynn's Aviary

Birth and Death Tags: birth. . . death. . . afterlife. . . dead squirrel

How technology can improve concert enjoyment

2011-12-02T02:44:00.001-08:00

Last weekend I attended the same concert three times. Usually once is enough, of course, for even the most rabid fan of classical music. But I was there professionally. When you devote a month or six months or even more months to one piece of music, sitting alone in a cave in the same chair in front of the same computer screen fending off constant attacks by large soft felines, it can be very interesting/revealing/educational to hear that piece finally performed live by real musicians in front of a real audience. And of course, I might even enjoy that music - which, in this case, I did, pretty much.

But occasionally attention wanes. I mean, there really is a limit to how many times any one human needs to hear Beethoven's Leonore Overture Number Two on any given weekend.

And so, in those moments when I was not "simply transfixed" by the performance in front of me, I found myself consciously attending to the musical contributions of that real audience. As much as we might wish that audiences don't make noise, they do. They cough. Audiences cough because people cough. Audiences are just people. Coughing is a trait of human physiology, apparently, and asking a couple thousand people to sit quietly in an auditorium for twenty minutes or thirty minutes or even more minutes and not make any sound at all is simply an unreasonable request.

I like to think that the coughing is part of the music. Of course it's random coughing. It wasn't composed by anyone, no one used a random number generator or threw the I Ching to decide when each cough would happen. I think random noises are music, if only in a very antiquated sixties avant-garde sort of fashion. And I think that you should think that as well, but I know that there is very little chance that you do. You're probably glad that tonality has returned to music over the last few decades. Frankly, tonality in music is an even more antiquated concept that randomness. (More useful as well.)

Let's assume that most people would prefer their fellow audience members do not cough at all. To that end I discovered a sort of high-tech solution to the problem - much better than the cough suppressant candies which orchestras used to pass out to their audiences. Maybe they still do.

Apparently hunters use this little device, a cough silencer, to not frighten the geese.

Here is the marketing copy for Cabela's Cough Silencer:

Disassembles for quick cleaning
Nonglare matte-black or camouflage finish
Fits easily into a pocket or pack

Don’t let a cough scare game away. The Cough Silencer has a unique baffle system that quiets even the loudest coughs with no back pressure, and best of all, virtually no sound. Disassembles for quick cleaning. Nonglare matte-black or camouflage finish. Lightweight, durable and incredibly compact, it fits easily into a pocket or pack. Includes convenient lanyard.

And they're cheap. This one was marked down from $19.99 to 88 cents (but they're sold out). Concert attendees could buy their own and use them during performances. Better yet, orchestras could buy thousands of them and have the ushers hand them out free along with the program booklet. Better yet, they could be permanently installed on each seat in the concert hall, decorated by the celebrity architect so that they blend with the decor. The cleaning crew would have to disinfect them after each event, maybe adding a little paper cap printed with the words "Guaranteed Germ Free" over the mouthpiece. Like that strip of paper they put over the toilet seat in hotel rooms.

If all this seems like too much effort and expense, you might try my idea of redefining coughing as part of the music. But remember, that only works if you think about it.

The concerts which I attended last weekend were graced by several freakishly musically appropriate cell phone eruptions. They fit in perfectly. Unlike coughing, those should have been avoided completely.

You could listen to my piano piece Oil and Water Mix, which is actually about the conflict of tonal music versus random music.

Cough Tags: Cabela's Cough Silencer. . . concert audiences. . . classical music. . . random music. . . tonal music

Occupy New Music

2011-11-30T02:38:00.001-08:00

As I write this (just before 3 a.m.) about a thousand LAPD officers are removing Occupy Los Angeles from their camp surrounding City Hall. We knew the eviction would happen eventually. Occupy LA are people protesting that 1% of us have too much wealth, about 33% of it. The 1% want Los Angeles to open for business normally in the morning. I'm sure they will get what they want.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Meme has finally reached a point of absurdity with Occupy New Music. Apparently it comes in the form of a graphic from Eric Guinivan on Facebook. It was sent to me by one of Mixed Meters' three readers, Scott F. The graphic tells us

The top 1% of composers control 99% of orchestral concert programs.

Here's the image:

The composers shown are Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelsshon, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Ravel, Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky and Shostakovich.

It's a clever idea. There's no question that the symphonic repertoire favors a chosen few. A few composers are performed repeatedly and outsiders have a hard time getting heard in concert halls. Still, you've got to wonder about this 99% statistic. Can the real numbers truly be that lopsided? I decided to take an educated guess.

A website called Instant Encore posted a list of the top 150 composers, by frequency of performance, during 2010. They say the data represents over 42,000 concerts worldwide, including opera. This is a bit different in scope than the assertion of the Occupy New Music graphic which seems to exclude opera. What the heck - let's run with it.

All 150 composers get a total of 44,279 performances. Number one is Mozart, at over 3000, down to Luciano Berio in the coveted 150th spot with 43 performances. One percent of 150 composers is one and a half composers: Mozart (3035) plus half of Beethoven (2859/2 = 1430) is 4465 performances. That's a smidgen more than 10% - nowhere near 99%.

Let's extrapolate. The top 10 get 16,899 performances between them. That leaves the other 140 with 27,380 - for an average of 195 performances per composer. To compare the top 10 composers on Instant Encore's list, I'd need data for 850 more composers. That's because 10 is 1% of 1000.

I'm going to take a guess at the average number of performances for composers 151 through 1000. I guess 20 (about 1/10 of 195): 850 x 20 = 17,000. All 1000 composers thereby get 44,279 + 17,000 = 61,279 performances. This means that the top 1% of 1000 composers get 16,899/61,279 of the total. That's 27.6% - a far cry from 99%.

Further extrapolation: suppose the composers ranked from 1001 through 100,000 get an average of 2 performances each (one tenth of 20). That's 99,000 x 2 = 198,000 performances. Now the top 100,000 composers get a total of 259,279 performances. In this scenario the top 1% of them (1000 composers in this scenario) usurp only 23.6% of all performances.

If composers 1001 through 100,000 get an average of one performance each, the top 1% get 38.2%.
If composers 1001 through 100,000 get an average of one tenth of a performance - meaning that fewer than 1 in 10 gets performed at all (very unlikely) - the percentage finally approaches the realms of Occupy New Music: 86.1%.

While the notion that 1% of composers get 99% of the performances is extravagantly high in my opinion, in reality the distribution of composers is extremely lopsided, whatever the true number. The classical audience simply wants to hear their favorites over and over. That's what they will spend money on. They are really not interested in new musical ideas - they want proven masterpieces. (This is where, in an infinitely long blog post, I would suggest that symphonies are really more like museums - devoted to preserving historical artifacts.)

If you love symphonic music enough to write your own music in that tradition, you need to accept the unfairness of reality. There's lots of other music worlds you could be living in rather than beating your head against an art form which pretty much defines the notion of "resistant to change." But the 150 composers did include, by my count, 18 names of living people - so you've still got a chance. Only 2 women. Just one black person (well, two if you think Beethoven was black).

You've got a small chance. Very small - but it's a better chance than you have of winning a lottery jackpot.

Instant Encore also listed the most frequently performed 225 classical works of 2010. The list includes just one piece by a living composer. You'll never guess, so I'll tell you: it's Jonathan Brielle's Nightmare Alley. Who?

Mixed Meters has a dour take on classical music. Deal with it in these posts:

The Lifespan of Classical Music "I think classical music is quite dead. It's easy to overlook this fact because many people still enjoy listening to it."

If Music Be The Food of Love "Hip Hop, as the magazine cover says, is not dead. However Hip Hop has recently discovered its own mortality."

A New Rhapsody in Blue "It occurred to me that if many (or even a few) performances of classical music had this level of creativity in them - of even a small fraction of the creativity in this performance - I would not think of it as such a dead art form."

Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably) "it is probable that 98% of all Americans these days don't know any contemporary composers at all, and if they did - unlike in Mencken's hypothesis - their reaction to finding out about them would be the shrugging of shoulders and the changing of channels."

Classical Music Isn't Dead, It Just Needs a Rest "I conclude that in such situations the music is not meant to offer a contemporary perspective. They have other forms of art for that. I fear this music is more like a spa treatment for ones ears."

Could Terry Riley's In C be Accepted As Classical Music? "Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a "minimalist classic" into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it."

Ten Most Influential Classical Composers "But the real burden of Mozart for modern composers is that he was so blasted young. The cult of the young genius lives on strongly. These days a 30-year old composer who hasn't made it yet, won't."

ADDENDUM:

Composer Philip Glass joins Occupy Lincoln Center protest (L.A. Times - Dec. 2, 2011)

Glass is likely in the nation’s highest tax bracket, but there was a time he drove a taxi cab to support his music career.

... and soon others took the mike to call out statements like: "Tickets are for the 1%," "Revolution for the arts" and "Opera belongs to the people!"

Occupy Tags: Occupy New Music. . . Occupy Los Angeles. . . Occupy Wall Street. . . #occupynewmusic

Mixed Meters Visits Occupy Los Angeles

2011-11-23T22:22:00.001-08:00

I was in downtown Los Angeles several times this week and I happened to walk past the Occupy Los Angeles encampment - our local version of Occupy Wall Street, still going strong after nearly two months.

Naturally I took a bunch of pictures. The first one shows a few forlorn tents up against the massive north edifice of Los Angeles City Hall. The main camp is on the south side.

The whole affair had the feel of a homeless tent city - but from the sixties. I saw guys playing hackie-sack. Men were drumming. Flyers were handed out - the one I got denounced the Fed. There was a meditation tent, an art school tent, a library. There seemed to be some sort of communal kitchen. I heard talk about drugs - and, once, I smelled marijuana.

But mostly I saw signs.

Some signs were organizational, like the one advertising a protest at the upcoming Rose Parade. Others signs (e.g. "Fuck the Lakers") had uncertain relevance.

The face of Anonymous (i.e. the Guy Fawkes mask) was in evidence. Remember people - this is a copyrighted image of Time Warner Inc. If you buy a mask, the corporation gets royalties. And copyrights are what big corporations use to control our culture.

There were many people, like myself, taking pictures. These people, like myself, were obviously not protesters. Some were newsmen. Others, like myself, may have sympathy for the causes of the Occupy movement - if for no other reason than these protests have managed to eclipse the Tea Party from our national news. And the Occupy movement has managed to get the message that corporations are not people into the corporate-controlled media. That's a huge success.

I do wonder why they set up shop in front of a government building instead of a bank headquarters. I do believe that their in-your-face protest will do more good for left wing values than anything else could do at this moment. The one percent will make concessions only when they become afraid the situation will get out of their control otherwise.

As I walked through the encampment I heard a man with a bullhorn telling a helicopter several blocks away to leave. He made some other cracks. He had been corrupted by his little bit of power: control of the P.A. system. Power had gone to his head. I took some pictures of him.

He called to me through the bull horn saying "How you doin' cameraman?" I responded. He kept questioning me about my motives, asking who I was working for and whether I had sworn an oath to the Constitution. After a while I started video recording. His compatriots begin chanting "Who the fuck are you?" apparently to him, not to me. A good time was had by all, I guess. Fortunately the other protesters of Occupy L.A. were not allowing absolute power to corrupt anyone absolutely, especially this guy.

Watch for yourself:

Today the Mayor of Los Angeles announced that protesters must be gone by Monday. Stay tuned to your local news media to find out if there will be pepper spray in the future of Occupy Los Angeles.

Here are some links:
Occupy Los Angeles
Occupy the Rose Parade

Mixed Meters covers past Rose Parades:
Burn in Hell at the Rose Parade
Left Behind after the Rose Parade
On the Beach at the Rose Parade

I don't make a habit of taking pictures of people and I post those very infrequently. This post is apparently an exception. Click any picture to see an enlargement.

Occupy Tags: Occupy Los Angeles. . . Occupy Rose Parade. . . Occupy Wall Street. . . protest signs

Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months

2011-11-07T01:43:00.000-08:00

I have excuses: I've had things to do. There were things that needed to get done first. I did them. They received priority status. I have other things which still need to be done, which also have priority, but I finally managed to carve out a little time to create some music. I really needed that. And I kick myself because carving out a few hours is not THAT difficult. Once I do it I think "I could have done this sooner." because I enjoy doing it. Then my inner nag says "You should do this more often." and I tell my inner nag that it "should" shut up.

Anyway, I wrote a 30 Second Spot. This one is 46 seconds long. Eventually, after about an hour of work when the piece was pretty much finished, I realized that I needed to save the file. This was a problem because I didn't have a title yet. I decided to call the music exactly what it was: my thoughts about starting to write music again after a long hiatus. I worked with the words. The title kept getting longer the more I tweaked it. The final title is not great.

My actual thoughts are not in the title; the title does not tell you how I feel. The music tells you how I feel. My thoughts come out though the music. Or maybe they don't. Maybe there are no thoughts, no ideas, in this music. Maybe there are no thoughts or ideas in any music. Maybe thoughts and ideas can only be expressed in words. That's a thought.

One of the funny things about a piece like this is that I can spend an hour writing it and then three or four times as long removing excess notes: decomposing (yes, it's the punchline of a bad joke). "Polishing" is a better word. I wait for a few hours or overnight, then listen carefully and focus on any spot which sounds "wrong" to me. Every piece, even a short one like this seems to feature a Problem Spot - a moment that simply doesn't feel right no matter how much I futz with it. "Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months" had such a conundrum measure - but I eventually found a happy solution.

The other thing about this piece is that I dreamed the opening. I occasionally dream short melodic fragments. I find myself singing them as I awake. Mostly they evaporate into the fog of regaining consciousness. Sometimes I can get them written down. I have a small "dream journal" of melodies which I'd like to use in a bigger piece someday. (Another plan that'll probably never happen.) "Twenty Balls In My Fingers And I'm Not Done Yet" was such a dreamed tune (one with lyrics as well) which did become a 30 Second Spot.

But this dream was different. Instead of waking up with a melody, I awoke to a sequence of single digit numbers, somehow knowing that they were supposed to be a tone row: 1 0 8 2 6 1. Zero? I used my little row to begin the piece, then I repeated it with some non-strict elaboration. Then I lost interest. And the piece wasn't even half finished.

I suspect that even the speediest readers, if you've gotten this far, have spent more time reading this than they will spend listening to Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months. And if you try to figure out from the music just what I did think about writing music again after two months of not writing music, you probably won't know what to say. It's impossible to express music in words. That's why it's music.

Click to hear Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months
Copyright © 2011 David Ocker - 46 seconds

Thought Tags: David Ocker. . . 30 Second Spots. . . reflections

Russian Bestiary

2011-11-03T01:27:00.000-07:00

This is the final post of the "Leslie's Russian Pictures" trilogy. Part one Leslie and Vostok or part two Leslie and Vladivostok are just one click away.

This chapter is devoted to animals. What better animal to begin with than a marine worm, Leslie's passion and ultimately the very reason she made her trip. This cute little Russian critter, named Hydroides ezoensis, is a fan worm. The big black eyes are all in your imagination.

In the first set you'll see Leslie making friends with a fluffy feline, a hungry horse hoping for handouts from inside the car (notice its nose reflected in the rear-view mirror) and a disinterested, unfenced bovine.

Here are two pictures of skeletons taken at the natural history museum of the Institute for Marine Biology in Vladivostok: a segment of whale spine and a whole seal.

This is another marine invertebrate collected by Leslie's colleagues: a live amphipod named Pleustes incarinatus. I think it looks like a football helmet.

Here are several more marine animals - two dried-up old stars, a picture of a crab advertising seafood for sale and a good looking octopus which, not long after the picture was taken, became dinner for a pack of hungry biologists.

Two terrestrial invertebrates: a cricket with front claws designed to dig in dirt and a corpulent green caterpillar.

And we end our pictorial visit to Russia with a ceramic peacock and a little orange pixie.

You may enjoy other Mixed Meters' articles about Russia (which have more words and fewer pictures than this one):

Ilf and Petrov "Someone needs to ask whether our incessant chase after the almighty dollar is really worth it."
Theremin's Bug "the next time you accidentally walk out of the store with an item you picked up, thank Leon Theremin for the alarm which reminds you to pay."
Sergey Kuryohkin, Pianist of Anarchy "when happenings were happening in the U.S. their creators weren't known for extreme musical stylistic variety in the way Kuryokhin seems to have embraced so naturally."
Testimony - memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich "if Shostakovich knew how to keep his mouth shut and only ventured to tell his stories when he knew death was near, who among us can blame him."

Don't forget, the pictures enlarge if you click on em.

Russian Fauna Tags: Russian Fauna. . . travel photos

Leslie and Vladivostok

2011-10-31T23:38:00.000-07:00

This is part two of the series showing Leslie's travel photos from Vladivostok, Russia, where she spent the last few days of her trip. Part one was pictures from the Vostok Marine Station. Part three is pictures of animals.

First off, a picture of Leslie and her fellow biologists, Vasily Radashevsky (on the left) and John Chapman. Vasily works at the A.V. Zhirmunsky Institute of Marine Biology, Far Eastern Branch, where Leslie and John both gave talks during their visit.

Leslie knows I like abstract and textural photos. Here are a few of those. The first two were taken at the Institute building, which is in the shape of a ring. The others include railway electrical insulators and some rusted metal.

Vladivostok is a bustling seaport, currently undergoing extreme renovations for an upcoming political summit. The building in the foreground of the next picture (with the sign) is a funicular railway. The second shot shows one of two large suspension bridges under construction.

Here's a street with some historical buildings. The sign on the green building reads "supermarket". Then a brilliant, golden onion dome on a church. The third picture shows a statue of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. That's something you don't see very often in the United States.

Vladivostok is the eastern terminus of the Transsiberian Railway, which, according to Wikipedia, is 9289 kilometers in length. Here's a picture of John and Leslie standing in front of what must be the penultimate kilometer marker - 9288. I believe the double-headed eagle is the standard of the Russian empire.

Remember, click the pictures to see them bigger.

Vladivostok Tags: Vladivostok. . . Russia. . . travel photos

Leslie and Vostok

2011-10-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

While I stayed home, Leslie recently traveled across the pond on a worm collecting expedition. (More pictures are here and here.)

By "pond" I mean the Pacific Ocean. She flew to Vladivostok in eastern Russia and then traveled by car to a little marine station called Vostok. There she and her colleagues spent three weeks collecting and identifying marine invertebrates

Here is a picture of the Vostok Marine Station taken from a small boat by John Chapman. John is an amphipod & invasive species expert from the University of Oregon. I think the picture looks like a model train set. Apparently some Russians take summer vacations in this area which is reminiscent of New England. (See a satellite view of Vostok Station in Google Maps. You can explore from there.)

Across the bay is this small village. (You can click any picture for an enlargement.)

In the foreground you can see John and two of his Russian colleagues digging for specimens.

Here are pictures of Vasily Radashevsky, the Russian polychaete expert in charge of the expedition, and of John Chapman, up to his knees in seawater.

And here is Leslie in her own natural habitat, behind a microscope, putting names to critters most of us never encounter.

The project was sponsored by the North Pacific Marine Sciences Organization (or PICES) a consortium of six countries around the northern Pacific, which also held their annual meeting about the same time in Vladivostok.

Here are a couple photos of life at the marine station. No, he's not doing what you think he is doing in the first picture. In the second picture, the bottle of clear liquid holds a Korean sweet potato vodka. Leslie brought me a bottle as a present - but I haven't tried it yet.

I had asked Leslie to take lots of pictures. She took well over a thousand. I will post another couple dozen in two more posts, one with pictures of Vladivostok itself and the other of various animals she encountered.

Here are pictures of two Russian monuments which she saw - their significance is unknown to me, but both clearly have marine themes. In the first one "Livadiya" is the name of a city not far from the station.

Vasily Radachevsky has appeared in Mixed Meters previously - in the post Maywood Pasadena (about a song called Pasadena which is very popular in Russia, sung by a group called Maywood) and in a video called Going Coastal. Also he discusses the vital issue of whether a polar bear will eat a penguin here.

Vostok Tags: Vostok Marine Station. . . Leslie Harris. . . Vasily Radashevsky. . . John Chapman. . . marine invertebrates. . . PICES

Pasadena Bestiary

2011-10-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

Today's pictures of Pasadena's urban bestiary include

pair-bonding parrots
a cat with a rat
some koi reflections
a mockingbird on a pole
a petrified mountain goat

Click on 'em and they should enlarge a bit

Previous Mixed Meters posts involving animal pictures
Pasadena Fauna
Graffiti Animals of California

Animal Picture Tags: parrots. . . koi. . . cat and rat. . . mountain goat. . . mockingbird

The Art Jarvinen Email Project

2011-10-19T14:07:00.000-07:00

The one-year anniversary of the passing of composer Arthur Jarvinen was earlier this month. To mark the event I have compiled a collection of his writings, specifically his half of available email correspondence. Where would I get such an idea? Why, from Art himself of course.

In October of 2008, he sent me this email message:

One of the potential projects that I am starting to compile data for would be a compilation of one-sided correspondence. We have the Cage/Boulez stuff, which is pretty dreadful reading - unless you're overly enamored of both of them.

Apropos blogs and comments, I do sometimes post comments. But I am finding myself more interested in personal dialogues, conversations between two individuals. It has struck me that it might be worthwhile reading, and an interesting creative endeavor, to pull together a slim volume of e-mails, but only from me, without the letter that triggered the reply. Might work, might not, but it's an idea I'm toying with.

With that in mind, I am sometimes now saving certain e-mails I compose, and even using my reply as a situation in which to address things that are on my mind.

I discovered that passage after his death in October 2010. I don't know whether he pursued the idea himself – it was never mentioned again. Nor, of course, do I have any idea what subjects he himself would have chosen. What I do know is that we can honor departed friends by doing those things which they themselves would have done.

This archive of Art's email begins in late 1997 and covers nearly 13 years. The final message was written the day before he died. He writes about day-to-day issues, about his work and about holiday celebrations. You'll find musical essays, story-telling, simple poetry and mass concert announcements. He talks about his music, about his emotions and about his challenges. I have occasionally edited very slightly in an effort to keep all the words Art's own. The subject matter is sometimes perfectly obvious. Other times the context will be completely obscure.

The following people, besides myself, have contributed Art's writing to this document: Gloria Cheng, Jim Rohrig, Christopher Garcia, Robert Jacobson and Zona Hostetler. If others care to contribute messages they once received from Arthur, this document can be expanded in the future. Please select passages of interest and submit them to me. Include the date of each to preserve chronology.

Although this may be an attempt to fulfill Art's own idea, this document can never be what Arthur himself would have made of it. In fact, it serves a completely different purpose. It is now our memorial to him.

And maybe, as time passes, these messages will serve to introduce Art to people whom he never met. Reading this collection might be a little like looking through a shoebox of someone else's unlabeled snapshots. If these small glimpses into the life and thoughts of one particularly creative, complex individual make you curious about the personality behind it, I urge you to seek out those other works of his in which he tried his hardest to communicate ideas to others … his music.

Download the Art Jarvinen Email Project. (pdf format, 32 pages)

Mixed Meters memorials to Art Jarvinen over the last year can be found here, here, here, here and here. All Jarvinen related Mixed Meters posts, past and future, will appear in this list.

Thanks to Robert Jacobson for the two pictures.

Email Tags: email. . . memorial. . . Arthur+Jarvinen

The Preserving Machine by Philip K. Dick

2011-09-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying a book of early short stories by Philip K. Dick, master science fiction author. These stories, from the early fifties, are filled with mind-bending ideas and less than stellar prose.

The Preserving Machine was published in June 1953. Besides a narrator, the main character is named Doc Labyrinth. The action takes place in Los Angeles. Dick opens with a description of suburban L.A.

I was standing by the barbecue pit, warming my hands. It was a clear cold day. The sunny Los Angeles sky was almost cloud-free. Beyond Labyrinth's modest house a gently undulating expanse of green stretched off until it reached the mountains - a small forest that gave the illusion of wilderness within the very limits of the city. "Well?" I said. "Then the Machine did work the way you expected?"

This Machine, the Preserving Machine, is pretty amazing. It preserves sheet music in a most remarkable manner. And not just any sheet music, but classical music in particular.

This is how he came to think of the Preserving Machine. One evening as he sat in his living room in his deep chair, the gramophone on low, a vision came to him. He perceived in his mind a strange sight, the last score of a Schubert trio, the last copy, dog-eared, well-thumbed, lying on the floor of some gutted place, probably a museum.

A bomber moved overhead. Bombs fell, bursting the museum to fragments, bringing the walls down in a roar of rubble and plaster. In the debris the last score disappeared, lost in the rubbish, to rot and mold.

And then, in Doc Labyrinth's vision, he saw the score come burrowing out, like some buried mole. Quick like a mole, in fact, with claws and sharp teeth and a furious energy.

If music had that faculty, the ordinary, everyday instinct of survival which every worm and mole has, how different it would be! If music could be transformed into living creatures, animals with claws and teeth, then music might survive. If only a Machine could be built, a Machine to process musical scores into living forms.

This being a Science Fiction story, you know that the machine gets built - and in due course music animals are created. The above quote might lead you to expect animals based on particular works, like a Schubert trio. Instead, Dick gives us composer animals. For example:

After that came the schubert animal. The schubert animal was silly, an adolescent sheep-creature that ran this way and that, foolish and wanting to play.

Once they become animals, their name is no longer capitalized. The mozart animal is a bird, beethoven a beetle, brahms an insect, stravinsky another bird.

The wagner animal was large and splashed with deep colors. It seemed to have quite a temper, and Doc Labyrinth was a little afraid of it, as were the bach bugs, the round ball-like creatures, a whole flock of them, some large, some small, that had been obtained for the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues.

Of course, all these critters escape into the nearby forest and begin to evolve and compete. Some survive, others succumb. The Doc feeds an evolved bach bug back into the machine, reconverting it into sheet music which he then performs at the piano.

I listened to the music. It was hideous. I have never heard anything like it. It was distorted, diabolical, without sense or meaning, except, perhaps, an alien, disconcerting meaning that should never have been there. I could believe only with the greatest effort that it had once been a Bach Fugue, part of a most orderly and respected work.

Had I been writing this story, instead of Philip K. Dick, the reconverted music would have been very strange but not hideous. Music as it grows and evolves should try new, unfamiliar ideas, some of which will survive, others not. Survival of the fittest? Eventually the musical unfamiliarity ought to fade in our ears, allowing new species to contribute to our enjoyment. Adaptation and evolution, either of music or animals, ought to be the real reason that they flourish and reproduce. Of course pieces of music which you never hear will not survive or procreate.

These days classical music already has a fully functional, well-oiled preserving machine - in the form of symphony orchestras and opera companies and classical radio stations only too happy to reproduce the same limited number of works over and over again for audiences eager to hear their favorites one more time. This machine discourages adaptation but it does a good job of preserving any piece which can claw its way into the repertory. A new work, which at first might sound hideous, diabolical or alien, will never find an audience if it has to compete against the well-entrenched, machine-preserved herds of beethoven, schubert and wagner animals roaming our cultural landscape.

Animal Tags: Philip K Dick. . . The Preserving Machine. . . science fiction. . . classical music

A Thousand and One RedHeaders

2011-09-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Today Mixed Meters begins its seventh year. Itchy. Here's a short post from that first day, September 16, 2005 (also a Friday), entitled In Which David Rewrites the Pledge of Allegiance. I was terse then.

You might have noticed that the layout of Mixed Meters has changed. The original version had gotten far too complex. This is much simpler. I will continue to tinker with the new look as time permits - until I'm bored.

Mixed Meters is proud to announce another, more important milestone: the number of possible RedHeaders has surpassed one thousand.

You ask "What are Redheaders?" They are the red random irrelevant phrases in the yellow box at the top of each Mixed Meters page, just under "Life Is Too Short To Listen To Ugly Music". A different one is chosen each time the page is loaded.

The script which picks the random phrase each time was purloined from here. Thanks to whoever wrote that.

Here are the first ten RedHeaders:

TagLine[0] = "Mixed Meters - now with 25% fewer Olympic Promos"
TagLine[1] = "Mixed Meters - produced in a facility that also processes peanuts."
TagLine[2] = "Mixed Meters - now with three rows of stadium seating."
TagLine[3] = "Mixed Meters - now a Party Of One."
TagLine[4] = "Mixed Meters - watching the world grasp for straws."
TagLine[5] = "Mixed Meters - you could get money back every time you visit."
TagLine[6] = "Mixed Meters - still trying to meet recruiting goals"
TagLine[7] = "We admit it - the weather girl*s sweaters are too tight."
TagLine[8] = "Only a few small animals were harmed producing this blog."
TagLine[9] = "Mixed Meters - Similar to the intersection of two country roads."

I've always liked the one about two country roads - not that I know what it means. Many of them make no sense. Some are downright embarrassing. Some refer to news items extremely far out of date. Many refer to television commercials. There are in-jokes for musicians. And pseudo-clever word play.

TagLine[214] = "Mixed Meters - not recommended if your life is like the Springer Show."
TagLine[215] = "Mixed Meters - Breaking the Endless Cycle of Boom and Chuck."
TagLine[216] = "Mixed Meters - Now With Calming Oatmeal."
TagLine[217] = "Mixed Meters - The Felt Hand of Dog."
TagLine[218] = "Mixed Meters urges you to be a pliant consumer."
TagLine[219] = "Mixed Meters - a Whack-a-Mole from Hell."

There's a joke:

TagLine[277] = "Two Muffins are baking. One says SURE IS HOT IN HERE. The other replies HOLY SHIT! A TALKING MUFFIN!"

There are quotes from famous musicians:

TagLine[447] = "Never Leave A Wet One On Your Neighbor's Doorknob (Joe Newman)"
TagLine[449] = "It*s Much Better Than The Prefabricated Concrete Coal Bunker (Bonzo Dog Band)"

TagLine[731] = "Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn (Alan Jay Lerner)"

And a short science fiction story:

TagLine[629] = "He had awakened screaming, clutching the transport controls in terror, for so many days in a row that hearing birds chirping and seeing sunlight streaming through the studio window caused him to wonder whether he had somehow transformed into a piano sonata by Beethoven or Brahms."

It just goes on and on.

TagLine[1000] = "Life is too short to read Mixed Meters"

Here's a picture of a dragon fly which I snapped this morning in our backyard. (It should enlarge if you click it.)

TagLine[102] = "Mixed Meters - because no one gives a fuck what I think."

ADDENDUM: Apparently Google's robots are starting to catalog the redheaders along with the actual Mixed Meters' posts. Here's a result from someone who searched for the terms "mixed meters in music"

The Lifespan of Classical Music | Mixed Meters
mixedmeters.com/2011/06/lifespan-of-classical-music.htmlJun 12, 2011 – Mixed Meters.
LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO LISTEN TO UGLY MUSIC.
Strange Blog Behavior May Be Caused By Elevated Hormone Levels ...

TagLine[471] = "Strange Blog Behavior May Be Caused By Elevated Hormone Levels"

RedHeader Tags: Mixed Meters. . . Red Headers. . . David Ocker

September Eleventh

2011-09-10T05:04:00.000-07:00

The fire fighters who died rushing into the burning towers trying to save the lives of other people will surely define the word heroism for a long time to come.

The other victims, both in New York and Washington, were killed doing what most of us Americans do everyday - they were going about their regular lives, mostly at their jobs. In that sense they were no different than any of the rest of us. An attack on one was an attack on all.

I cannot comprehend the horror of such an experience. I can only offer feeble condolences to the survivors and to the families and friends of those who died. Such offerings must seem very inadequate after the millionth repetition.

The September 11 attacks have been compared to Pearl Harbor. Ten years after Pearl Harbor, however, World War II had been over 6 years and America had moved on to a different fight (with global Communism). Pearl Harbor had become old news since that attack had been paid back in full. Today, ten years after 9/11, there is no sense of closure. We seem incapable of finding a way to reduce the fear of terrorism. The media is overflowing with every possible angle. People are still trying to figure this out.

Another thing I cannot comprehend is what would lead an ostensibly intelligent adult into becoming a suicide bomber. What manner of dark faith motivates such behavior?

I do regret some of the decisions made by the United States in reaction to the attacks. Foremost among these, of course, is the invasion of Iraq. Many of our country's worst moves were a result of the dark faith of our own leaders, people like Dick Cheney. A clear-headed United States should have recognized their lies. Courageous people, like Michael Moore, who spoke against those bad choices at the time were accused of treason and threatened with violence.

Of course once it became clear that there were no WMDs in Iraq, we needed new excuses. Popular ones were "promoting democracy" and "nation building". No one seems to talk much about fighting for God or controlling their oil reserves.

As a U.S. citizen, voter and taxpayer I regrettably must accept my share of responsibility for the bad decisions of my government. One three-hundred-and-twelve-millionth of the total, if the blame is to be parceled out equally - although in truth, some people are far more culpable than I.

And I must face the sad prospect that I will never see a solution to this conflict. The September eleventh attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did not start our war between cultures, between religions, between haves and have nots. The attacks merely brought the existing conflict to the attention of the United States populace and provided excuses for our leaders to intensify the battles.

Finding an end to the real conflicts - achieving something one might reasonably call "peace" - seems more unlikely to me now, ten years after 9/11, than it ever has. The sadness of this anniversary goes far beyond the death and destruction caused by four hijacked planes. This gloom shows every sign of becoming a permanent feature of the American experience.

I recommend an article entitled The Long War by Tom Hayden. Here's a couple paragraphs:

But 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage arising from a pre-existing blindness to the way much of the world sees us. That, in turn, led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — in all, a dozen “shadow wars,” according to The New York Times. In Bob Woodward’s crucial book, “Obama’s Wars,” there were already secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more than 60 countries as of 2009.

From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of “The Long War,” a counterinsurgency vision arising from the failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting US open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or 20 future presidential terms. The taxpayer costs of this Long War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending on The Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now squeezing our states, cities and most Americans.

The pictures came from here and here.

Sneak Attack Tags: 9-11 attacks. . . terrorism. . . endless war

On Labor Day, Think of the Problems of CEOs

2011-09-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

In 1894, when the U.S. government decided on a holiday to celebrate working people, they picked a date in September instead of May first, the existing International Workers Day. They did this to avoid negative associations with the Haymarket massacre which happened at a union rally on May 1, 1886.

Over the years, of course, Labor Day has come to mean the end of summer and the beginning of school. In the business world it's the best excuse for a retail sale between the Fourth of July and Halloween.

Meanwhile labor union membership has shrunk and unions have (again) been cast as the economic villains in our society. There's the recent fight in Wisconsin to rescind public worker union's right to bargain collectively. A few nights ago there was a noose left at the Orange County Labor Federation. (Someone is trying to send a message. But, hey, if they don't like unions, let them go to work on Monday.)

So, in the context of Labor Day, I'd like to present links to several recent interesting articles about our Captains of Industry, the chief executive officers of wealthy, powerful corporations. These people who get paid a king's ransom to not hire people for menial jobs. In fact, these are the people who most likely celebrate the high level of unemployment in the U.S. because, if they should decide to hire some workers, they can more easily find desperate unemployed people willing to work cheap.

The four articles are:

Beauty Justifies Wealth
One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds
Study: Some US firms paid more to CEOs than taxes
How Rich is Too Rich? and follow up: How to Lose Readers (Without Even Trying)

Beauty Justifies Wealth is an article in the Democracy in America blog of The Economist. It is credited only to W.W. (possibly someone named Will Wilkinson). The subject is Steve Jobs, recently retired CEO of Apple, who has been canonized and beatified for giving the world computerized fetish objects and getting really wealthy doing it. (He's number 42 on the last Forbes 400 list.)

W.W. writes:

It occurred to me that, as lovely as I find Apple's gizmos, Mr Jobs's wealth, like that of other billionaire barons of the information age, was built in no small part upon an intellectual-property regime that I and many others believe to retard progress while concentrating massive rewards upon a privileged few, generating unfair and unproductive inequality.

Most technical writers would never say such a thing. If they did, Apple probably wouldn't send them any neat drool-inducing free products to review. Here's a tweet which W.W. wrote:

Class-war fact: Ruthlessly competitive, patent-monopolist, multi-billionaire executives are worth fawning over, if they've got design sense.

One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds is an article in The Guardian. It details a psychological study which reports that some very successful people can hide their psychopathic behavior.

The survey suggests psychopaths are actually poor managerial performers but are adept at climbing the corporate ladder because they can cover up their weaknesses by subtly charming superiors and subordinates. This makes it almost impossible to distinguish between a genuinely talented team leader and a psychopath.

The study also reports that 1% of all Americans are psychopaths.

Here's a bonus article: Psychologists Explain Why Most Creative Executives Are Arrogant Jerks

Here's the definition of psychopathy from Wikipedia:

Psychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others, and are very disproportionately responsible for violent crime. Though lacking empathy and emotional depth, they often manage to pass themselves off as normal people by feigning emotions and lying about their pasts.

Study: Some US firms paid more to CEOs than taxes is a Reuters story. Here's the opening:

Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said Wednesday. It also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.

Remember that this is one out of 4 of highly paid executives. Only 1 out of 25 is a psychopath. But it stands to reason that there is at least one CEO in the top 100 who makes more salary than his company pays in taxes and is also a psychopath.

A Democratic representative wants to investigate. He wrote to the Republican chairman of his committee saying he wants

to examine the extent to which the problems in CEO compensation that led to the economic crisis continue to exist today.

Good luck with that. The chairman himself is a highly paid corporate executive. Notice that he doesn't want to investigate whether CEO compensation led to our crisis. That's a given. He just wonders whether the problem still exists. (Yes it does.)

Sam Harris is an author who presents a ray of sanity and reason discussing the subjects of religion and morality. His article How Rich Is Too Rich wondered whether the vast disparity of wealth in our country would be allowed to continue. This is the context of Warren Buffet, the world's third richest man, who keeps telling us that he pays less percentage in taxes than his secretary. (And we, collectively, keep ignoring him.)

Sam Harris asks:

How much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others. But there is nothing to prevent the ultra rich from cooking all their meals at home, using vegetables grown in their own gardens, and investing the majority of their assets in China

But the article which actually caught my eye was Harris' follow-up How to Lose Readers (Without Even Trying) in which he described some of the looney, knee-jerk responses that first post got.

In the discussion of whether taxes are theft, or not, Harris writes:

Many of my critics imagine that they have no stake in the well-being of others. How could they possibly benefit from other people getting first-rate educations? How could they be harmed if the next generation is hurled into poverty and despair? Why should anyone care about other people’s children? It amazes me that such questions require answers.

Would Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, rather have $10 billion in a country where the maximum number of people are prepared to do creative work? Or would he rather have $20 billion in a country with the wealth inequality of an African dictatorship and commensurate levels of crime? I’d wager he would pick door number #1. But if he wouldn’t, I maintain that it is only rational and decent for Uncle Sam to pick it for him.

Let me repeat the last sentence:

But if he wouldn’t, I maintain that it is only rational and decent for Uncle Sam to pick it for him.

I doubt that the richest people in America, even if they could agree on what should be done, could solve our problems with their money. I think that a large part of America's problems is their money, the disparity of wealth between richest and poorest.

The twenty richest American's together have about 385.5 billion dollars in wealth (I quickly added up the figures from the Forbes list.) Wouldn't it be better for the country to have 385.5 billionaires, each with only a single billion, than to leave all that wealth with twenty people? (Try a little mental arithmetic to figure out how much One Billion Bucks is. An awful lot. Enough to retire on.)

Trust me, these people are never going to give up their money. They are driven, possibly by dark psychological forces or maybe just by greed, to acquire more and more. That's why it's my opinion, and a humble opinion because I know how unlikely this is, that the U.S. government should take their money away. Not all of it. Leave them a mere billion each, enough to survive with just one yacht and two vacation homes.

The mechanics of this are complex of course - but I'm talking fantasy, not tax code. Our government really does have the power to redistribute wealth. After all whoever said “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session” spoke the truth.

Our government won't do anything like this unless the politicians realize that doing it is the only way to get reelected. In the era of unlimited political money that's never gonna happen.

Sorry to have bothered you with impossible ideas. Enjoy your day off. You get a lot less of them in the U.S. than in other rich countries. Go back to work tomorrow. Do your job. Don't complain.

Other MM rants on similar subjects:

House and Wooster and Income Disparity (It's not just a saying these days that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Today it's more like an actual law.)

Eli Broad, Masterpieces, Money and Monuments (The fact that these valuable objects of art might be culturally meaningful in some non-monetary sense, if indeed they are, doesn't seem terribly important to him.)

Price Tags: wealth disparity. . . income disparity. . . CEO salaries. . . psychopaths. . . taxes

The Peter Schmid Trio

2011-08-31T20:34:00.000-07:00

Here are two recordings made this summer by my buddies The Peter Schmid Trio.

The trio is:
Peter Schmid, piano
Cornel Reasoner, bass
Luis 'Pulpo' Jolla, drums

The Peter Schmid Trio Plays Work For Food (339 seconds)

The Peter Schmid Trio Plays Too Poor To Be A Whore (579 seconds)

Recorded at Aphrodita Japonica Studios, Pasadena, California
Produced by David Ocker
Copyright © 2011 - All Rights Reserved

Let us know what you think.

Trio Tags: jazz trio . . . Peter Schmid

Frustration Etude Number One

2011-08-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

Here's my guarantee: none of the words in this post will be the F-Word itself. However, you should be aware that The Word is essential to my subject. You'll have to think about The Word if you read more. Now is the time to quit reading if you're offended by even thinking about that particular profane taboo word. (Yeah. You know that I know that you know what it is.)

Be warned: the guarantee is limited to written words only. It does NOT cover the short musical composition, Frustration Etude Number One. You'll find the listening link below.

I've engaged in a form of f-ing self-censorship by not using The Word directly, only referring to it euphemistically, because I'm trying to be sensitive to the feelings of my readers. The Word has previously appeared casually elsewhere in Mixed Meters. (Click here to see where.) I'm sure it will again. I'm confident that those people who actually click through to hear my music are strong enough to withstand the onslaught of profanity to come.

I hear you asking, why did I compose a piece where the only lyric is ... The F-Word?

Because I too often find myself using That Word for a particular purpose and I would like to stop using it that way. The particular unwanted purpose is to scream F*** at the top of my voice as an expression of my frustration. I only do this in private - like while I'm driving. Sometimes in the shower.

However, there's a problem with this behavior: screaming F*** at the top of my voice doesn't really salve my frustrations.

So I attempted a very personal compositional experiment. I theorized that featuring "The Word" in a piece of music would help me give up using it. Writing music has to be good for something, right? Maybe it can help me deal with my frustrations.

So far the experiment seems to be a qualified success. Of course there is no way to test the theory scientifically. All the evidence is anecdotal. To be safe I added "Number One" to the title because I expect future doses of this musico-linguistic medication, in the form of other similar etudes, might be required. I have not composed a Frustration Etude Number Two ... yet. (Send in some recordings of you or your friends screaming/singing/saying The F-Word. Maybe that would inspire to compose a second etude.)

Frustration Etude Number One contains The F-Word over 30 times. This is one of those pieces which I've described as being "my finger in your eye". It also has a lot of microtonal disonances and untempered intervals. Whats more, this piece quotes in vain a certain famous American folk melody, one many people might consider sacred or spiritual. Consider yourself warned.

If you do decide to listen to this etude, you should be very concerned whether other people, for example co-workers or children or Republicans, can hear it. This is the essence of NSFW - Not Safe For Work.

Click this picture of the rusty thing on a telephone pole to hear Frustration Etude Number One
Copyright © 2011 by David Ocker - 100 seconds

Here's an interesting article on the history and legal aspects of saying THAT word in public. Some of the stories are pretty funny.

Take a Flying Duck Tags: F-word. . . profanity

Facelike - Part 2

2011-08-09T03:24:00.000-07:00

The previous post Facelike - Part 1 showed pictures of some faces I've noticed as they keep tabs on me.

Today, more faces. These pictures show which faces were produced either by non-human behavior or by human-caused random accident.

The tendency to see patterns (not just faces) in random data is discussed in an article Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise by Michael Shermer. It was published in Scientific American so you know it has to be good. Here's a quote:

Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.

We begin with a kindly tree-bark face, a face-on-Mars face on a sidewalk and an African mask leaf.

Now let's look at a Barney-ish dinosaur-head paint splatter, a conspiracy of sunglasses and a leaf in the grass and a tree trunk wearing lipstick.

Click the pictures. They get bigger.

Here are a couple more tree-bark faces: Sunburned Bamboo Face, Profile Tree and Scarface. A previous Mixed Meters "I see faces in trees" post (from way back in 2006) was Make Like A Tree and...

Here's a post from some other blog showing faces in bread.

Face Tags: facelike

Facelike - Part 1

2011-08-07T03:18:00.000-07:00

There's an old joke: Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not following me.

This post and the next will document some of the faces I've caught checking up on me. These faces may be cleverly disguised, but I'm smarter than they are. Yes.

Today we feature face-like objects which were clearly designed by nefarious humans. Next time I'll show you faces more cleverly hidden within supposedly natural objects.

I can offer no explanation as to why the 3-wheel 4-eye Predator motorcycle has an electric typewriter for a sidekick. I also get a Darth Vader vibe from this bike.

You can see some of my previous face-like pictures posted at Mixed Messages - a deflated soccer ball and a ventilation shaft with decaying hexagonal tiles.

But my favorite man-made face-like picture is this Happy Button Face:

If you click on the pictures they might enlarge. Try it.

Face Tags: facelike

Unity and Variety for Clarinet and Piano

2011-07-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

Recently I had to relearn a personal lesson about being a composer. Of course I'm not a composer any more - I gave up using that term. I prefer to call myself 'someone who makes up music'.

The lesson I had learned during my 'called myself a composer' days was: "Don't enter competitions."

With one exception, I never won any. (I'll get to the exception in a minute.) Every time I did enter, in spite of myself, I started to imagine the positive rewards of winning. Fantasizing like this inevitably made losing extra bitter for me. I was bitter enough already. I reasoned that if the only result of entering a competition was feeling bad then I shouldn't enter in the first place. Who needs that?

Earlier this year I became aware of a particular competition asking for works not unlike my video Solstice Lights which I was just then finishing. Of course I knew the moment I read the email that if I entered I would not be chosen. I also immediately knew that if I entered, in spite of my best efforts not to, I would let myself fantasize about the benefits of winning. And I knew that once I was informed of my loss I would feel like an idiot for entering in the first place.

In spite of all this prudent rationality, I somehow convinced myself to enter. (Yeah, I'm leaving out lots of details. You're welcome.) Turns out, I was right. Solstice Lights was not chosen and I feel like an idiot.

This experience reminded me of that exception, my one and only competition-winning piece. I wrote it nearly 40 years ago when I was in college. It was one of my first compositions. (Gosh, I've been writing music for nearly 40 years.) I was in my early twenties. What did I know?

I'm not even sure exactly who awarded the prize - some organization with a name like Minnesota Association of Music Teachers. I was chosen in a particular age group. I don't remember there being a prize, maybe I received a small check, maybe not. I do remember that there was an awards ceremony. I chose not to attend the ceremony. I guess I had a bad attitude even then.

The piece is for clarinet and piano. I called it Unity and Variety. There are two movements - the first one is entitled "Variety", the second is called "Unity". "Unity and variety" were concepts I had learned in my composition lessons - two opposing qualities which good composers were supposed to balance in their work. The music seems particularly enthusiastic to my older ears. Maybe I'm just projecting that onto the music because I remember how naive I was.

I'm posting a performance of Unity and Variety should you be curious about how an award-winning Ocker composition might sound. Be careful, the performance is strident, not terribly accurate or inspired. If you only have heard my music from the last few years it might come as a surprise - or maybe not. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Winning that award probably affected my career decisions right after college. Today, of course, it's totally insignificant, laughably so. I still think it's a pretty good piece - especially for a college kid who barely played the piano and who had virtually no experience writing music. I imagine that it would be fun for me if someone wanted to play this music again - except I'm not even sure where the music is.

Click the picture (that's me about 1978) to hear Unity and Variety (I. Variety, II. Unity) by David Ocker, © 1973 and 2011 - 571 seconds

Some previous Mixed Meters clarinet-related posts.

Award-winning Tags: Unity and Variety. . . clarinet and piano music. . . composition competitions

Music for a Horned Helmet

2011-07-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

Recently I was surprised to hear operatic singing from a television commercial. There was even a bass voice. You never hear basses sing on television. The ad was for a big financial firm which has figured out how to make money from people who can't wait to be paid. On YouTube I discovered three such opera-mercials - all with the same music but different voices.

The first commercial spoofs an actual opera on stage:

The second focuses on the uses of cash now - like home repair, car repair, newborn quintuplets:

And the third is everyone's favorite setting for opera music - a city bus:

Watching all three of these, I was struck by the recurring use of one particular image: the horned helmet - sometimes called a Viking Helmet. I guess nothing says "Opera" like a metal hat with horns on it.

If you really care whether the Vikings wore Viking helmets and how this particular headgear got to be associated with opera, this Straight Dope article Did Vikings Really Wear Horns On Their Helmets? is for you.

If you think there might be a better music/horned-helmet association, you'd be correct. Here's a picture of Moondog:

The Moondog picture came from here - where you'll find a link to some radio interviews on WBAI. For a while - a few years ago - certain of Moondog's compositions were being used in automobile advertisements. (Couldn't find those on YouTube.)

Do yourself a favor. Listen to some Moondog.

Previous MM posts about classical music in television commercials:
Selling With Vivaldi "These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit."

Advertising with Disney Hall "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."

In Which David Is Confused by The Second Coming "Does this, I wonder, sell shoes or religion?"

Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"

Horned Tags: horned helmet. . . Viking helmet. . . opera. . . J G Wentworth. . . Moondog

Selling with Vivaldi

2011-07-05T05:32:00.000-07:00

(If you have time to watch only one of these videos, definitely watch the last one, Beer Vivaldi.)

In the museum-like world of classical music one of the most revered and oft-displayed masterworks is a set of violin concertos, The Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi. These pieces easily evoke meteorological images in the minds of listeners who, after all, have come to believe that music is really just like a movie - but without anything to watch.

But these pieces are among the very few which have a life as part of contemporary pop culture. They aren't as well known as the Ode to Joy or the Ride of the Valkyries. One doesn't have to look too hard to hear them in unexpected places - for example, as a soundtrack to a television commercial.

This short advertisement, running currently on television, shows a fearless stunt every-man jumping out of his luxury car onto an auto carrier, in hopes of acquiring an even better luxury car. The exciting derring-do music is the end of the first movment of Vivaldi's Winter. Perfect images for baroque music, don't you think?

Lest you think Vivaldi can only be used to sell automobiles, here's an ad for Hewlett Packard computers. The music is from Vivaldi's Summer and the guy waving his hands, creating fantastical images in mid-air, is none other than Joshua Bell, a violinist most famous perhaps for his performances in the Washington Metro. If he really could make visuals like these, live on stage just by waving his hands, Bell could probably become a really big star.

Lest you think that Vivaldi can only be used to sell autos and computers, here's another ad, with the very same Joshua Bell performing the same movement from the same Vivaldi concerto. The only difference is that in this one he is selling perfume, not that you can tell until the very end. Listen for the horrible cut in the music, just before the voice over.

Lest you think that Vivaldi's Four Seasons can only be used to sell high cost, high tech or high prestige items, here's an example of it being used for a different type of product. We see a scruffy college student amidst piles of forbidding obscure tomes, apparently translating an oriental language. In his notebook he writes "The divine truth one must find lies within." This idea provokes him first to deep thought and then to begin a quest through the stacks of the library. What he finds is ... a package of noodles. (Actually it finds him.) The remainder of the saga involves fancy kitchen prep work - the kind performed nightly by inscrutable Japanese chefs at your local Benihaha.

If you're paying attention, however, this commercial should make you want to buy an Audi. Yes, this noodling music comes from the same Vivaldi movement so perfect for jumping out of your car on a busy freeway.

These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit. Our last example is much more interesting, vastly more creative, much more focused on Vivaldi's music - it's another performance of the same Winter movement which we've heard twice already. Alas, it is also much more forgiving of over consumption - in this case the item being promoted is beer. The image we see is a creative inebriate, an otherwise anonymous person called Pianobloke who must be a big fan of beer, creating pitches on a wide selection of beer in bottles, cans and glasses - the last of which he performs like a glass harmonica. These recorded snippets are assembled into Vivaldi using fancy video editing.

This video is chock full of visual imagery. There's no way to catch everything the first time. Go to YouTube and watch in high definition if you can. Notice that the first note is performed on a bottle of Duff, the beer of the Simpsons. After the music finishes each bottle of beer gets a cameo shot. Then our hero passes out. Congratulations, Pianobloke, a job well done. If you can turn out something like that I guess you weren't really that drunk. Why would you want us to think you were?

Other Mixed Meters pieces discussing classical music in advertising:
Advertising with Disney Hall "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."

In Which David Is Confused by The Second Coming "Does this, I wonder, sell shoes or religion?"

Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"

Violin Concerto Tags: Antonio Vivaldi. . . The Four Seasons. . . television advertising. . . beer. . . capitalist realism. . . Joshua Bell

Solstice Lights

2011-06-21T03:21:00.000-07:00

Today, precisely at 5:16 P.M., is the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer solstices are the kind with a long day and a short night. Elsewhere, somewhere far away to the south, today is the winter solstice: short day / long night.

In general, I like summer solstices better than winter. That's because I'm the kind of guy who works at night and sleeps during the day but still wants to be awake for at least a few daylight hours. During the depths of a Los Angeles winter the sun stays up just long enough for me to keep my nocturnal schedule but squeeze out an hour or two of waking daylight. That way I avoid SAD - Seasonal Affective Disorder.

There is one thing I don't like about the Summer Solstice: I know it means that the days will start getting shorter again bit by bit. I believe the familiar yearly cycle will repeat yet again because it has done that so many times before. I assume that eventually I will confront winter darkness one more time. Then, at the Winter Solstice, I will take heart in the notion that days will begin to lengthen bit by bit.

"So what else is new?" I hear you ask - because this is not a particularly new idea. Solstices and equinoxes were clearly known thousands of years ago to observant people who dragged huge stones forming massive structures so precisely positioned according to astronomical events that not even modern egos can deny that they must have known exactly what they were doing.

I wonder how many millennia before Stonehenge or Chichen Itza some human genius first consciously noticed the yearly cycle. That must have happened an unimaginably long time ago. That genius, whoever he or she was, probably also thought that lighting bonfires on the Winter Solstice was a good way to convince our friend the sun to return. Whatever rituals were performed, they always worked. The days always started getting longer. And religions were formed. Winter Solstice is a time of holidays in many different cultures.

Lights (like those bonfires) are an important aspect of the Winter Solstice celebrations and have gradually morphed in meaning through the ages. In our electrified times strings of colored bulbs (or LEDs recently) are displayed on many houses. These lights served as the first inspiration for my video piece, Solstice Lights.

The inspiration came indirectly from the Point'n'Shoot In My Pocket. While on my daily walk I tried to take video of my neighbors' blinking Christmas lights. Alas, Mister Point'n'shoot could not focus properly in the dark. When I saw the results on my computer screen I knew instantly that I would use these glowing abstract circles of color in a piece of some sort.

I first assumed that would be a Jingle Bells piece - my yearly compositional effort to claim some personal control over the seasonal onslaught of Christmas music. (Previous Jingle pieces are still available for listening. You can find all the links at the beginning of last years Jingle post A Combination of Jingle Bells and the Internationale. Lots of fun pictures of Che Guevara as well.)

Indeed, Solstice Lights does have one brief moment of Jingle Bells. But the work took on a different cast after the death of my friend Arthur Jarvinen in October 2010. Upon hearing the news I knew immediately that I would need to write a memorial piece for Art.

Arthur himself wrote several memorial pieces. His very affecting gong solo Out of the Blue, one of the pieces performed as his own memorial service, was a tribute to composer Randy Hostetler who died at a young age. Art wrote 100 Cadences, a string quartet, in memory of his teacher Stephen "Lucky" Mosko. That piece is very Feldman-esque in feel if not in length.

The most amazing example of Jarvinen memorial work is a beautiful set of pieces called Three Gymnopédies (which will be performed next month by the Pittsburg New Music Ensemble - along with another of Art's works Little Deaths.) Each of the Three Gymnopédies is dedicated to the memory of a person who died by gun violence.

While I didn't feel capable of writing a fourth Gymnopédie, I did want to create a piece with the feel of timelessness within some sort of cyclic structure. After a period of collecting musical ideas, mostly in my head, I began work by assembling the video. Then I composed the music. The cycles within Solstice Lights are marked by harmonic overtone arpeggios.

Eventually I realized that a fragment from Arthur's piece Goldbeater's Skin, one I performed many times in the past, would fit perfectly into what I was writing. The opening of the Goldbeater's Skin melody occurs twice, at 7'15" (simultaneous with Jingle Bells) and also at 8'16". Solstice Lights was finished almost three months ago. It was not until yesterday that I had the notion of posting it here to coincide with an actual solstice.

Solstices are about long cycles of time. They are markers of the behavior of natural phenomena like the spinning rock on which we live and the moving bright light in the heavens. Together these define the thing we call a "year". Years are real things, not an artificial division of time into segments. We humans use years to measure our lifetimes. We often celebrate these yearly cycles with lights of some sort.

Arthur Jarvinen was someone keenly aware of the limits of the human lifespan, not just his own. You can find references to death throughout his writing and his music. Some are obvious, come covert. He may not have known exactly how or when he would die, but I believe he knew all along, somehow, that he would not live into old age. These are the things I thought about while writing Solstice Lights. I hope my music communicates those ideas.

If I had to guess at his reaction, I would say that Art would not particularly have liked Solstice Lights, had he been able to hear it. Like me, he was someone with strong personal independent opinions about music. In writing it, however, I tried to remember something I heard him say several times, "You have to do your best work." That's what I tried to do. I'm certain Art would have understood that part.

Solstice Lights - music and video © 2011 David Ocker 640 seconds
I suggest playing this in high definition (480p) and full screen if possible.

A previous MM article about solstices.
Previous MM posts about Arthur Jarvinen.

Last fall Carson Cooman composed a piece entitled Journeybook: in memoriam Arthur Jarvinen for mixed sextet (bass clarinet, soprano sax, soprano voice (or trumpet), drums, violin and cello). It was performed by the ensemble thingNY

Solstice Tags: Solstice Lights. . . David Ocker. . . Arthur Jarvinen. . . music video

Designer Drug Jewelry by Susan Braig

2011-06-13T02:53:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon Leslie and I headed north from Pasadena to an event called Art on Millionaire's Row - an arts and crafts show at the Altadena Library. At one time Altadena, nestled into the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, was a gathering place for the wealthy, back when a million was real money.

We knew about the show because our friend Susan Braig, decked out in a white lab coat, was showing her jewelry designs. Susan makes decorative jewelry using discarded drugs. Here's her own description:

My jewelry was inspired after paying nearly $500 for my first chemo-therapy anti-nausea pills, which seemed more like precious gems!

My breast cancer is in remission (5 years), but my debts metastasized because my insurance policy did not cover many of my treatments. Now I have to peddle drugs to pay my medical bills.

The metaphor, "Health care in this country has become a luxury item" evolved into this collection of conceptual jewelry.

The picture is of Leslie and Susan. The small print on the sign reads:

I have to sell drugs to pay my medical bills! Health Care should not be a luxury item!

In fact, as Leslie was paying, Susan said "Now I can pay for my last office visit with my Internist."

Last March the L.A. Times ran an article about Susan. Better yet, they made a video about her. I recommend watching - you can see Susan at work while she tells her story and get a real sense of the joy she takes from this work.

Here are pictures of Susan's designs which Leslie purchased. The first earrings are Ducolax stool softener, the second are 10 mg. diazapam and the little green pill in the pendant is 2.5 mg. Coumadin. (Click on pictures for enlargements.)

The Lifespan of Classical Music

2011-06-12T04:12:00.000-07:00

Back when I had enough free time to take an active part in other peoples' blogs, I posted occasionally on Daniel Wolf's Renewable Music, a fine example of a composer's blog. Recently I rediscovered his Thanatophiles which he originally posted over four years ago. I responded to it at length but I never cross-posted my essay here. Now's as good a time as any. I added a bit of highlighting if you prefer to skim.

First, read Daniel's concluding two paragraphs (although I urge you to read his whole piece - considerably shorter than my response - here):

While it's clear that much of 20th century classical musical life can be characterized by the active rejection of new composition in favor of the interpretation of older work, we desperately need some smarter ideas about the ways in which repertoires integrate or reject innovation, and perhaps we can get some ideas from religious and literary scholarship about the ways in which communities for whom the canon has been closed still maintain a creative life.

We still understand very little about the impact of the various technologies for "fixing" a music -- from oral transmission, to notation, and onto sound recording in its changing modes of exchange. A bit of music may or may not have some platonic ideal behind it which these various technologies reproduce to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy, but these technologies raise all sorts of questions about both liveliness and morbidity and further questions about how to distinguish between these two states in an environment in which a parasitic attachment to past liveliness is -- for better or worse -- a substitute for getting on with real change.

Although I agree with some of your observations, I cannot agree with your conclusion. I think classical music is quite dead. It's easy to overlook this fact because many people still enjoy listening to it and there are many healthy organizations providing performances and recordings. I would argue that's not enough for the music itself to be "living".

Classical music has had defined, unchanging, largely immovable boundaries for many decades. Allowable performance practices have a small acceptable range. When you talk about "classical music" I, and everyone, know exactly what you are referring to. Since the advent of authentic baroque and renaissance performance decades ago not much has changed. Oh, there's more flash and more marketing these days. "Classical" music isn't changing. There's a lot of "new" music asking to be let in. The audiences are not terribly thrilled by it. Chilled would be a better description. Exceptions are so rare you cannot claim they are a revitalizing influence.

You point out that an active academia codifies the practice. Absolutely. Music schools are filled with people who have devoted their lives to finding newer and newer things about a fixed body of knowledge. They teach the "proper" way of playing. Teachers and students may know history but they are still being forced to repeat it.

You point out that other parts of the world have growing classical music "scenes". Doesn't this mean that people are still finding the meaning and elegance which the classics has always provided to anyone who cares to partake? More cynically, it also might mean that other societies are attempting to find some equality with the European musical homeland. There is still class distinction in classical music.

Of course composers continue to suggest paths for a possible future of classical music. They (we) attempt mostly to evolve from what was there before. The performing and recording companies promote a painfully small subsection of these possibilities, based, in my opinion, more on importance than on talent. But few pieces have been accepted by the general audience. Most of the audience prefer to pay to hear their old friends Beethoven or Schumann or Wagner or Brahms again and again. And it's not clear if any of the new "pledges" to the composer pantheon will be allowed to really join the "fraternity". Who since Bartok has really been awarded decades of repeated performances?

I suggest that we would be better off to accept that musics have lifespans - they come and go, they are born, they flower and then they die. We can still enjoy the dead ones, preserved for us in elegant museum-like concert halls. But the formative, creative, socially relevant periods of dead musics have passed. We can honor the fact that they've had a huge influence on our culture and provided great beauty and meaning and challenges to anyone who cares to take advantage of them. As a culture we have concluded that these musics should be preserved and that knowing them is an essential experience of our time. So is experiencing Shakespeare, but I hope no one would suggest Elizabethan theater is not dead.

We should all look to the future with the realization that something new is coming, something that will reflect our present without a restrictive obeisance to the past, something that will mirror the hopes and dreams and fears of a whole lot of living people, who will anxiously wait to find out if their most wonderful dreams or most horrible fears come to pass, who don't have much time to think about music but will know absolutely which organized sounds resonate with their thoughts and hopes and feelings. And which don't.

Those of us who appreciate and revere what came before may not like the new stuff. That's too bad, but there's nothing forcing us to listen to anything in particular. Everyone seems to listen to something. And everyone seems to know what they like.

Finally, the search for new metaphors to describe the death or life of this or that music is itself a living art. Newer and stranger comparisons and analogies are regularly found to prove the same points over and over. The problem is that any music - whether classical, jazz, rock, hip-hop, take your pick - encompasses a vast sweep of society, a long history and varied aspects of culture as to be indescribable as a whole in any simple manner. You could say classical music is an elephant beset by countless blind men and women, each trying to describe their small corner of the beast and each finding a unique descriptor. Yes, that's another metaphor. Oops, I did it again.

Other Mixed Meters attacks on Classical Music's mortality (plus teaser quotes):

If Music Be The Food of Love "Hip Hop, as the magazine cover says, is not dead. However Hip Hop has recently discovered its own mortality."

A New Rhapsody in Blue "It occurred to me that if many (or even a few) performances of classical music had this level of creativity in them - of even a small fraction of the creativity in this performance - I would not think of it as such a dead art form."

Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably) "it is probable that 98% of all Americans these days don't know any contemporary composers at all, and if they did - unlike in Mencken's hypothesis - their reaction to finding out about them would be the shrugging of shoulders and the changing of channels."

Classical Music Isn't Dead, It Just Needs a Rest "I conclude that in such situations the music is not meant to offer a contemporary perspective. They have other forms of art for that. I fear this music is more like a spa treatment for ones ears."

Could Terry Riley's In C be Accepted As Classical Music? "Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a "minimalist classic" into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it."

Lifespan Tags: classical music. . . death of classical music. . . concert halls are museums

Ilf and Petrov

2011-06-10T05:35:00.000-07:00

Can you name any Soviet humorists? I didn't think so. (Sorry, Yakov Smirnoff doesn't count.)

In Dmitri Shostakovich's memoir Testimony he repeatedly mentions a pair of authors, Ilf and Petrov. Here's a quote from page 142:

The dissatisfied group showered Stalin with declarations, signed personally and collectively. As Ilf and Petrov noted once, "Composers denounce each other on music paper." They overrated composers, they wrote denunciations on plain paper.

and one from page 202:

Of course, I know that an entire brigade of respected Russian dullards wrote a collective book praising that White Sea canal. If they have an excuse at all, it's that they were taken to the canal as tourists one day and the next day any one of them could have been shoveling dirt there. Then again, Ilf and Petrov got out of participating in that shameful "literary camp" anthology by saying that they "knew little" about the life of inmates. Ilf and Petrov were lucky, and they never did find out about that life, the way hundreds of other writers and poets did.

Shostakovich gives the impression that everyone will recognize the names Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, but of course I had no idea who they were. These two men co-wrote several comic novels in Soviet Russia during the 1920s and 1930s and are also known for an account of their 1935 auto trip across the United States. Their works have been made into movies several dozen times including once by Mel Brooks.

I was curious, so I ordered a DVD of Brooks' The Twelve Chairs and a new translation of Ilf and Petrov's other novel The Golden Calf.

Mel Brooks made The Twelve Chairs after The Producers but before Blazing Saddles. Since those are two of the funniest movies I've ever seen, I expected a lot from The Twelve Chairs. Yes, it's funny but not THAT funny. The leads are played by Ron Moody, Dom DeLuise and a very skinny Frank Langella as the petty criminal Ostap Bender. These characters compete to find a fortune hidden in one of twelve identical dining room chairs which had been taken from a nobleman's family by the Communists after the Revolution. The plot and the film itself remind me of a low-budget It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, if you can imagine that classic happening in 1920's Russia rather than 1960s California.

At the end of the novel version of The Twelve Chairs, Ostap Bender dies. In spite of that, Ilf and Petrov brought him back as the lead character in The Golden Calf. Bender, with a small group of friends of ill-repute, are out to con a lot of money from another Russian who has amassed a large illegal fortune. Although this may have been a tremendously popular and influential book in Russia (where there is even a statue of the lead characters and their junker automobile, a Lorraine Dietrich), I found it only mildly amusing. However, as a window into a time and place far away where there was a very different society, it's quite fascinating.

I think America could benefit from a wider familiarity with The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf. In a time when greed is still good and we make heroes of rich people, even those who have twisted the law to get ahead, and when 40% of Americans expect to be part of the wealthiest 10% someday, it couldn't hurt us to hear a few counter opinions about the meaning of money and the folly of getting rich quick. Someone needs to ask whether our incessant chase after the almighty dollar is really worth it.

And if that question happened to be couched in comedy and comes to the people of the United States via a pair of long dead Soviet journalists who have earned a permanent place in the collective memory of their own collectivist nation, one reviled here for its anti-Capitalist dogmas, so much the better.

A quote from Ilf and Petrov which I found here:

"The time, that we have, is the money, that we don’t have."

One final note: I've mentioned several times how hard I am on the books I read because I carry them back and forth on my daily walks to coffee shops. They are exposed to various elements, the foremost being sweat and coffee. After I have finished a book it definitely looks used. But my copy of The Golden Calf is a curious exception - it still looks great. It's a trade paperback and seems to have been printed on particularly high quality paper with a very resistant cover. The publisher, Open Letter at the University of Rochester, is to be commended for a quality product even in this era of e-readers.

The picture of the Golden Calf statue came from here. Both statues are located in Odessa which is now part of the Ukraine.

Ilf and Petrov Tags: Ilya Ilf. . . Evgeny Petrov. . . The Twelve Chairs. . . The Golden Calf. . . Mel Brooks. . . Dmitri Shostakovich. . . Soviet humor

LA Opera's Ring Festival LA - one year later

2011-05-30T04:32:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across an events list for the San Francisco Opera's Ring Festival and I was reminded that just one year ago Los Angeles was in the throes of a similar event.

Apparently San Francisco, much more savvy about the place of opera in our culture, has avoided some of LA's sillier Festival features:

In San Francisco there are apparently no marches to the ocean by helmeted, singing Wagner fans beginning on the same day (starting nearly at the same place) as marches by helmeted neo-Nazis waving swastikas.
By all accounts no San Francisco County Supervisor has introduced a resolution suggesting that Wagner does not deserve to be honored by a county-wide festival. Nor have the Supervisors there had to co-sign for a huge loan to keep the opera production afloat.
I am unaware of any demonstration by Lyndon LaRouche supporters outside the opera house in San Francisco.
And San Francisco has no lavish comic book-inspired production of Wagner's operas to sink it into $6,000,000 of debt. (Has LA Opera paid that off yet?)

I wonder if San Francisco Opera has opened a beer garden outside War Memorial Opera House like the one last year outside the Music Center? Endless operas can make a guy thirsty.

As better and better topics kept presenting themselves, I devoted nearly every Mixed Meters post for about three months to various aspects of Ring Festival LA and Wagner's legacy. (See the end of this post for a complete list.) Readership dropped as a result. Apparently opera fans are not interested in contrarian views about their sacred music. And non-opera fans are not interested in anything about opera.

But, as it says prominently on Mixed Meters, this is a blog about me, David Ocker. Even I wondered why I spent so much time obsessing about an event that was terribly easy to ignore. And, if nothing else has changed in Los Angeles because of the LA Opera Ring, at least I gained some insight into my own emotional responses. Unless you're my personal friend there's no reason you should care. Even then, it doesn't much matter.

My motivations for all that effort can be sorted into three categories: my musical background, my Jewish background and my Los Angeles background.

My Musical Background

My musical education - formal and otherwise - was always focused on the future of music, music as a forward looking thing. I have always been intrigued by novelty, by the desire to know what happens next. Even in high school I was constantly looking for new and wild things to listen to. Eventually new music became my career - even if it wasn't my own music. While I agree that there is much classical music that is beautiful, I recoil at the notion that it is somehow intrinsically superior music.

Unsurprisingly, there's an awful lot of music which I don't like. I have strong opinions about music. In particular I dislike a host of 19th century music and an awful lot of opera. As such, Wagner is the quintessential music I would like to avoid. In the context of my musical background, Wagner, probably the most unavoidable historical composer ever, is the prototypical example of everything I hate about music - endlessly long, crude-oil thick, college-lecture boring, evangelically sermonistic, narcotizingly stupefyingly heavy and musically irrelevant to the future.

My Jewish Background

I'm not a religious Jew but I am Jewish both socially and culturally - my parents got that much through to me.   When I was a kid the Holocaust was not particularly a big deal in our family. Still, the incredible importance of the subject was somehow hammered home to me. It was something that we were supposed to remember, "never forget". "Who could forget?" I wondered. I concluded that forgetting during my lifetime was not possible.

While my parents strongly encouraged my musical interests, they pointedly didn't listen to Wagner. They told me that Jews didn't "do" Wagner. The one time in my life when I saw my parents protest anything politically was at a symphony performance. I was about 10 or 11. They got up, along with other Jewish people, and left the concert to avoid hearing a Wagner overture. Besides this one event I never once saw them attend a protest meeting, write a letter to the editor or get upset about politics.

Holocaust survivors in Israel didn't want to listen to Wagner. They had good reasons. Whatever those reasons were, they are the same reasons my parents taught me about Wagner's music. In my opinion a County-endorsed public Wagner festival starkly represents the very act of forgetting the things which should not be forgotten.

My Los Angeles Background

While I still regard graduate school advice that I should move to New York as misguided, it would have been useful for me to experience an actual, intense creative new music scene someplace while I was still young.   But I had the notion that such a community could be created right here in Los Angeles. After all, this town is big and has musical talent and media and patrons and foundations up the wazoo and it has had periods of intense creative activity in other fields - for example modern art or pop music. I spent a lot of my youthful energy trying to make new music in Los Angeles happen.

Over the decades I've concluded that I was wrong: a Los Angeles new music scene patterned after my own dreams just isn't possible.   Sorry, it won't happen in LA. (Please, prove me wrong before I die.) The serious new music that Los Angeles wants to focus its attention on is almost always created elsewhere. "Elsewhere" in this context mostly means Europe. This pattern began even before Stravinsky and Schoenberg and continues to this day. Sometimes audiences are happy with East coast music. "Elsewhere", "Europe" "East Coast" all begin with E. What does that mean?

The Los Angeles of 2010 Ring Festival did not turn out like the one I imagined in 1976 when I took up residence in Los Angeles.   In November 2008 I was surprised by just how badly things had turned out in this regard when I read Plácido Domingo's announcement that

"Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles."

Can you imagine my disappointment? Not only was a forward-looking music scene not going to happen here, but Domingo, an icon of music from Elsewhere, was announcing that we would henceforth define Los Angeles musical life around four boring operas based on medieval German mythology composed by a self-promoting anti-Semite who died more than 125 years ago. What has that got to do with the future of any thing? I can't think of anything less representative of Los Angeles.

Here's Plácido's quote in context:

More than a century ago, composer Richard Wagner conceived his epic four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen as a festival event that completely engaged the city of Bayreuth, Germany. In 2010, LA Opera will join forces with more than 50 cultural and educational institutions in Los Angeles to stage Ring Festival LA. “Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles,” said Plácido Domingo, LA Opera’s Eli and Edythe Broad General Director. “The presence of so many of LA’s cultural, educational and civic leaders clearly demonstrates that the city’s creative forces can be brought together through a cultural festival — in this case, a festival based on LA Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.”

Can Plácido really have thought that a festival centered on the Ring could define the cultural history of Los Angeles? Not even all of Los Angeles - could he have possibly thought that the Ring would define the history just of music in Los Angeles? Even just serious music? Apparently so. I am still infuriated by the thought.

Aside from my distaste for Wagner's music and Hitler's complicity in Wagner's legacy, the idea that music in Los Angeles - where I've lived well over half my life and don't expect ever to leave - could be defined by Wagner and his music is simply despicable. Domingo was talking long term - he used the word 'history' after all - not just for the few weeks of the festival itself.

Reading that quote was maddening, exasperating. I wondered how could they could have the gall to even think thoughts like that. While it's true that opera is relatively unimportant in Los Angeles, let me remind everyone that he was also suggesting that RFLA would be the biggest thing since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival - which was a massively big deal. Fortunately that part of his plan turned out to be purely hot air.

I assume that Plácido is paid an awful lot of money to guide Los Angeles Opera. Local opera fans seem to adore him. He draws extra paying customers when he sings. Moreover, the patrons of the opera must trust his judgement because they take his advice. Indeed, part of his job is to help define what serious music in Los Angeles will become over time. And the vision he brought us was "Bayreuth on the Pacific!" It's simply shameful.

Compare his vision of Los Angeles - supported by millions upon zillions of dollars - with the vision I thought I might have a chance of creating back in the Los Angeles of the 70s and 80s. Do you think that confronting the disparity of those images might still make me upset? Don't bother to answer, I'll just tell you ... yes, it did. A lot.

And, frankly, there was nothing I could do about it except bitch. So what did I do? I bitched.

As a final wrap-up of the subject, here's a list of the articles (plus teaser quotes) in which I bitched about Ring Festival LA:

November 21, 2008 Ring Festival L.A. - Wrong Festival L.A. "this festival, as it was announced, will be far from representative of the arts community as a whole. In fact it is elitist in the extreme."
July 16, 2009 Mike Antonovich and Ring Festival L.A. "requesting that the “Ring Festival LA” shift the focus from honoring composer Richard Wagner, to featuring other composers as headliners, to provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent."
July 21, 2009 Wagner with an Asterisk "This suggestion will in no way impede efforts by our local oligarchy to get Los Angeles recognized as a great European city by producing their very own Ring."
February 17, 2010 A Windfall of Musicians "The combination of some of Europe's greatest musicians with two local music enthusiasts, Peter Yates and Lawrence Morton, turned L.A. into the bloodiest cutting-edge music scene anywhere for many years."
March 24, 2010 Wolfgang Wagner (1919-2010) "'Once we have rid the world of the Bolshevik-Jewish conspirators, then you, Wieland, will run the theater of the West and you, Wolfgang, the theater of the East."
April 5, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Begins "If you really speak about the festival's significance to the culture of Los Angeles, I'm afraid Plácido's statement has The Big Lie feeling about it"
April 20, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Meets Hitler's Birthday "Has no one at Ring Festival LA noticed that this is one small step in the exculpation of Adolph Hitler? Maybe they don't care about this aspect as long as the event involves Wagner in some way. Maybe there's been drinking at RFLA as well. Maybe they're ROFL."
May 29, 2010 Listen to Wagner's Entire Ring Cycle In One Second "the work of one California composer who, almost 50 years ago, dealt conceptually with the problem of Wagner's Ring."
June 9, 2010 Composers of the Nazi Era "And if some music is good, I suppose it follows that some other music is bad, degenerate. This attitude is the beginning of a slippery slope. At the bottom of that slope you will find the story of how the Nazis used and abused music. "
June 16, 2010 Kenton Wagner "If there is a Hell (which I personally doubt) Richard Wagner is there being forced to hear this album over and over for all eternity."
June 17, 2010 Wagner Inspires Pop Music "Apparently, someone, somewhere thinks every popular musician in the whole world during the last 150 years somehow owes their musical style to Richard Wagner. What a sad world it would be if that were true."
June 20, 2010 Wagner Invades Poland "The comparison of Wagner's Ring to an opiate is apt."
June 26, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish "as Ring Festival LA "leader" Barry Sanders said "We're not putting lipstick on a pig in this thing.""
July 9, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi "Wagner fans do not want to talk about that elephant. The elephant is Adolf Hitler."
July 18, 2010 Hitlerdammerung "Hitler actually got to perform his part from a Wagnerian plot and recreate a bit of German mythology at the same time, spilling real blood and burning real cities."
August 15, 2010 A Modest Proposal For Replacing Placido Domingo at LA Opera "With the Ring in its rear view mirror Los Angeles Opera could decide to now set itself the goal of really creating a defining moment in Los Angeles culture. The first thing it would need to do is thank Plácido for his services and send him packing. "
April 8, 2011 Eli Broad: Masterpieces, Money and Monuments "Many Los Angeles arts institutions have gratefully endured the sting of Eli Broad's money."

A good deal of this post was reworked from private email correspondence with my friend John Steinmetz, who prompted me to explore the reasons for my emotional reaction to Ring Festival L.A. Thanks, John.

Still Angry One Year Later Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . Los Angeles Opera. . . Richard Wagner. . . Wagner's Ring

Testimony - Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

2011-05-25T03:39:00.000-07:00

I knew about the controversy when I started Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich - as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. This book, with an extra long title, was published in 1979, four years after the composer's death.

(Here's some music, Shostakovich's last string quartet, to listen to while you read.)

It wasn't until I finished reading that I did more research. Turns out that the controversy is a big one - but only for people in the dull-as-dust world of musicology. To them, deciding whether this book really is the memoirs of an important 20th century composer (or not) has become a humongous article of faith. For the rest of us, it should be no big deal.

My personal impression is that I was indeed reading the voice of a real composer. It reminded me of bitch sessions I myself have had with composers - although none nearly as famous as this one. After a drink or two, while sitting with trusted friends, out come stories about colorful but incompetent performers, dottering inscrutable professors, wonderful still unfinished pieces, unflattering unfair reviews and encounters with a sexy harpist or horny fellow composer or two -- successes, failures, life.

Unlike this book, however, most composers reminisce in small bits.

Testimony represents 276 pages of Shostakovich's first-person narrative. It is very much stream of consciousness. Improbably, Volkov claims to have created it from notes taken by hand during one-on-one conversations during Shostakovich's last years. He says the composer refused to allow tape recordings and insisted that it not be published until after his death. Volkov maintained that the manuscript had been approved by Shostakovich himself but provided no direct proof of that.

Yes, Volkov's story is a mite suspicious. Given the circumstances, he must have done an awful lot of "editing". But I'm okay with that. Shostakovich had good reason to be suspicious that people were looking over his shoulder. Telling the truth could have gotten him into trouble.

Testimony revealed Shostakovich as secretly opposed to certain political currents in the Soviet Union - most notably Stalinism. This upset Westerners who insisted that Shostakovich was a devoted Communist composer. This also upset Soviets who also insisted that Shostakovich was a devoted Communist composer. No one could agree on what sort of devoted Communist composer Shostakovich actually was. Did he really mean what he says in this book? Had he been hiding his true feelings all along? Are there secret messages composed into his music?

It's hard for us freedom-of-expression types to understand the times through which Shostakovich lived, when uppity creative artists could be taken away in the middle of the night and never be heard from again. Afterwards people were too afraid to ask what might have become of them or even mention their names. Shostakovich had good reason to fear this might happen to him. One of the reasons he gives for dictating his memoirs is to preserve some memory of people who did disappear.

Here are the first few paragraphs of Testimony:

These are not memoirs about myself. These are memoirs about other people. Others will write about us. And naturally they'll lie through their teeth - but that's their business.

One must speak the truth about the past or not at all. It's very hard to reminisce and it's worth doing only in the name of truth.

Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses. And I do not wish to build new Potemkin villages on these ruins.

Let's try to tell only the truth. It's difficult. I was an eyewitness to many events and they were important events. I knew many outstanding people. I'll try to tell what I know about them. I'll try not to color or falsify anything. This will be the testimony of an eyewitness.

Of course, we do have the saying "He lies like an eyewitness."

Here is a video showing Shostakovich in 1975 about the time of his interviews with Volkov. He talks at the beginning and again at 6'40". He was in poor health and seems nervous.

It's not unreasonable to assume that Dmitri Shostakovich harbored a certain ill will about some of the difficult conditions under which he lived. In order to survive, Shostakovich adapted his music to the political conditions and demands of his time, writing pieces celebrating the Russian revolution or adapting to "just criticism". He may have survived, while others did not, thanks to his name recognition outside the Soviet Union plus the fact that Stalin liked his film scores. If he harbored secret personal opinions, he also knew better than to speak them in public.

Of course the Soviet Union was not the only 20th century society in which artists knew which things they were supposed to say in public. I've written about the experiences of composers during the Nazi regime. Even in the United States, during certain periods, composers have been expected to toe the political-speak line. You can read Aaron Copland's 1953 testimony before Senator Joe McCarthy's Senate investigating committee. Copland denied being a Commie, of course, but his Lincoln Portrait was still removed from a concert celebrating the inauguration of President Eisenhower.

So, if Shostakovich knew how to keep his mouth shut and only ventured to tell his stories when he knew death was near, who among us can blame him. Some of his stories are pretty good - especially when he tells how Soviet musicians tied themselves in knots to please their musically unsophisticated dictator.

But, in the end, you can only feel sympathy for Dimitri Shostakovich. Here are some quotes from the last few pages:

No, I can't go on describing my unhappy life, and I'm sure that no one can doubt now that it is unhappy. There were no particularly happy moments in my life, no great joys. It was gray and dull and it makes me sad to think about it. It saddens me to admit it, but it's the truth, the unhappy truth. ...

No, every new day of my life brings me no joy. I thought I would find distraction reminiscing about my friends and acquaintances. Many of them were famous and talented people, who told me interesting things, instructive stories. I thought that telling about my outstanding contemporaries would also be interesting and instructive. Some of these people played an important role in my life and I felt it was my duty to tell what I still remembered about them.

But even this undertaking has turned out to be a sad one.

I have thought that my life was replete with sorrow and that it would be hard to find a more miserable man. But when I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances, I was horrified. Not one of them had an easy or a happy life. Some came to a terrible end, some died in terrible suffering, and the lives of many of them could easily be called more miserable than mine.

And that made me even sadder. I was remembering my friends and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses. I'm not exaggerating, I mean mountains. And the picture filled me with a horrible depression. I'm sad, I'm grieving all the time. I tried to drop this unhappy undertaking several times and stop remembering things from my past, since I saw nothing good in it. I didn't want to remember at all.

And so, in this book, I read that at the end of his life one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century could find nothing whatsoever to smile about. Should I believe this? I think so. The reason is simple: because Shostakovich makes the same point elsewhere - in his music. Here again is the link to his last string quartet, number 15, written the year before he died.

The website Shostakoviana includes an even-handed introduction to the Testimony controversy entitled A Manual for Beginners. There's a lot more beyond that. You're welcome to it. As controversies go, it's far less interesting than wondering who really shot Bobby Kennedy.

The Time Magazine cover is from July 1942. You can read the article about Shostakovich in that issue. This was that unique time when the Soviet Union and the United States were friends.

The photo of Shostakovich playing the piano while an obviously retouched Stalin looks over his shoulder comes from Testimony.

Other tangentially related Mixed Meters articles:
Aspics of Shostakovich - Dmitri Shostakovich, Johnny Green and things floating in jello
Schoenberg in Hell - Schoenberg's demeaning final years
Stravinsky, On the Cover - another Time magazine cover of a composer
Ten Most Influential Classical Composers - actually eleven, according to me
Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi

Testimony Tags: Dmitri Shostakovich. . . Solomon Volkov. . . Testimony

The Squirrel in Mike and Lynn's Aviary

2011-05-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Leslie and I traveled to the East Bay so Leslie could participate in BAYMAC. That stands for Bay Area Marine Aquarium Conference, a gathering of reefers - people whose hobby is salt-water aquarium keeping. In spite of what I might have thought at first, "reefers" refers to the ocean reefs where the many fascinating plants and animals originate.

Curious little marine beasties often hitch rides hidden inside corals and other things as they travel from those far-away reefs to their new homes in suburban aquaria. Eventually these animals grow larger and mystify the eager reefer. Experts must be called upon to identify the unknown critters. Leslie is such an expert.

And so it was last Saturday, in the cafeteria of Chabot College in Hayward California, that Leslie spent many hours seated below a sign reading (I kid you not) Spineless Marine Life Visual Identification Booth. Hundreds of people shuffled to and fro, looking at high-tech lights, glass tanks, small corals from which mighty reefs might grow, sea-water mix, jars of live copepods and who knows what all else. You can see pictures here. Some of these people brought Leslie crap from the bottom of their tanks and asked her "What is that little thing crawling around inside there?". Leslie is someone who knows the answer to that question. She knows because she's an expert. According to Leslie the word of the day was detritivore.

I made the trip with her so we could spend some time with our friends Mike Boom and Lynn Morton. Mike obligingly loaned Leslie the microscope, video camera and monitor for her presentation. I've known Mike since before he gave up playing the oboe to devote his life to being a mushroom-hunting, underwater-video-making computer technical writer. Lynn met Mike when she was a ballerina. Here's a picture of the two of them together. It clearly shows their relative distances above sea-level.

You can watch Mike's videos at Laughing Eel Underwater Video. Unlike some people (e.g. me) who carry all their video equipment around in one pocket, Mike travels the globe with hundreds of pounds of dive gear, video cameras and computers. The results he gets are pretty spectacular. Here's another picture of Mike taken while hunting for edible mushrooms near their home.

Lynn has turned the backyard of their house into a veritable outdoor aviary where dozens of wild bird feeders, many positioned right in front of windows, produced a constant flurry of colorful activity. This fascinating "bird television" impressed both Leslie and me a lot. The birds give Mike and Lynn's cat ample opportunities to stalk and the bird feeders give the local squirrels ample reason to hang about, waiting for a dropped seed or kernel. I made a short video of one patient squirrel. It proves that I do not carry a tripod in my pocket. Last night I composed some music to go with it. You can guess what comes next.

The Squirrel In Mike and Lynn's Aviary © 2011 David Ocker 138 seconds

Detritivore Tags: reefer. . . Laughing Eel. . . Mike Boom. . . Lynn Morton

Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute

2011-05-08T06:06:00.000-07:00

Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute is a piece of my music. You don't have to read about it. Just click here to listen to Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute right now.

Bernie Madoff might be the biggest crook in the history of the world. He created a ponzi scheme masquerading as a Wall Street brokerage house which stole as much as $20 Billion and might have been going on nearly 40 years. He was arrested in 2008 when the recent "George Bush" recession made it impossible for him to keep robbing Peter to pay Paul. Madoff realized that the jig was up and confessed to his sons. They turned him in. Six prior investigations by the SEC had failed to notice that anything was wrong.

A Golden Parachute is severance pay for corporate executives. When a CEO is fired they often receive such a payout. This is irrespective of how well they did their job. Here's a list of the largest-ever golden parachutes. It includes Angelo Mozilo (who was accused of insider trading during the recent mortgage bubble; he got $44 million), Michael Ovitz ($130 million for working just a few months) and Michael Eisner (who collected a $1 Billion bonus for making Disney strong enough to control U.S. copyright legislation.)

I don't know whether Bernie Madoff had a formal golden parachute agreement with his company. If he did it wasn't worth the paper it was written on because after his conviction he had to forfeit all his wealth. Since he knew full well that what he was doing was illegal it's doubtful that he expected to retire with the same level of comfort and splendor in which he lived.

Still, Bernie Madoff lived the good life while he could. I've seen estimates that his fortune was around $800 million. He lived in a New York penthouse. He created a philanthropic family foundation and gave money away to charities. After his conviction he was sent to prison in North Carolina. He'll be eligible for parole in 2139 (when he's 201 years old).

America likes its criminals. We often celebrate their stories with works of art - mostly movies and television shows these days. Jesse James, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde - the list of hero/crooks is a long one. Makers of such entertainment must cover their ass morally by making sure the bad guys die at the end (or at least go to prison). Of course to be popular these stories must have a great deal of action including chases, gunplay, daring heists and sanitized love-making.

In comparison, Bernie Madoff's story is a yawn. In this age, when the "greed is good" philosophy is no longer even slightly controversial, the tale of how one boring guy in a suit sat in an office and quietly stole a pile money beyond the dreams of even the most avaricious thief, might actually sell lots of movie tickets. Bernie Madoff Gets Rich could be just as popular as the movie about Facebook.

The plot of the Bernie Madoff story will seem familiar to opera fans. It's Faust by Charles Gounod. Bernie plays the part of Faust himself (although his victims might think of him more as the Devil). In the beginning Bernie/Faust, of his own free will, makes a deal with Mephistopheles and is rewarded with riches and other perqs. But the deal is good only for a limited time only. After that, the devil claims the hero's soul and sends him to Hell.

Being sent to Hell is Faust's own golden parachute. And Bernie's too. These days many of us don't believe in a actual physical post-death fire and brimstone eternal torment. Being sent to prison in North Carolina for the rest of our natural lives, however, is a pretty darn good substitute.

I wonder how many Americans would make the same deal with the Devil that Bernie made: trading a few years in prison for decades of wealth, influence and notoriety.

Listen to Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute © 2011 David Ocker - 149 seconds

Here's a WSJ article about what Bernie's life is like in prison. He is Inmate No. 61727-054 at Butner Federal Prison

There are many variations of the Faust legend - not just operas. Read more about them here.

Madoff Tags: Bernie Madoff. . . white collar crime. . . Faust

30 Second Spot - Tuesday's More Modern Than Monday

2011-04-24T04:53:00.000-07:00

Click here to listen Tuesday's More Modern Than Monday

© April 24, 2011 David Ocker - 45 Seconds

Modern Tuesday Tags: 30+Second+Spots. . . David Ocker. . . microtones

Skyping With Tom Brodhead

2011-04-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a short video with music which I created to celebrate my friend Tom Brodhead who has dodged a medical bullet.

© 2011 David Ocker - 141 seconds

Last month Leslie and I had a conversation with Tom via Skype. Tom introduced us to his new cat Charlie and we talked about his upcoming medical tests. The talk lasted nearly an hour. For 8 minutes or so I used the point'n'shoot in my pocket to take some still pictures of Tom's image on the screen. Charlie made himself scarce while I was taking the pictures.

People who know Tom will recognize that his personality is a combination of high intelligence and high intensity, sometimes perilously so. He uses his hands when he talks and has an expressive face. All of this means that he makes a good photo subject. I thought the pictures were pretty interesting - if not always in good focus.

Then, last week, Tom sent out an email announcing the positive results of his tests. He said that he was ecstatic not to be metastatic. When the email arrived I was sitting at my computer renaming the Skype pictures and wondering what to do with them. Then I read a hint which makes it easy to import a group of still shots into my video editing software.

Suddenly, an idea was born: I would create a video honoring the occasion of Tom's good news using these pictures. I assembled the video, composed the music and entitled it Skyping with Tom Brodhead because that's what we were doing. Each still is accompanied by music in a different tempo. The result is wacky - but not that wacky. It's hard to tap your foot to it.

Tom appeared in a previous Mixed Meters post: The Best Thing About Led Zeppelin. The Best Thing About Led Zeppelin is another piece of mine. Tom suggested the title accidentally.

My desk has appeared in this previous video: Desktop Stilllife

Skyping Tags: Tom Brodhead. . . video. . . desktop

Oily Sheen

2011-04-12T03:21:00.000-07:00

Some of the video shots which I make with the "point-n-shoot in my pocket" just demand to have music added to them. This is one of those.

It was a rainy day in Pasadena. I was walking along Lake Avenue where I encountered a large puddle at the entrance to a super market parking lot. The puddle had formed because of a stopped-up drain. On the water's surface there was a little oil from which light reflected.

As I filmed, a car passed through the puddle and then someone walked right in front of my camera. The car created waves which are what the piece is really about, I guess. I edited the person's legs out completely.

Oily Sheen © 2011 David Ocker - 139 seconds

One of my previous video pieces was filmed on the same block, across the street. Here's that one as well:

(Sometimes I Feel Like A) Newspaper In Traffic © 2010 David Ocker - 99 seconds (click the title to see the original post)

Another Mixed Meters "oil and water" reference is my "piano" piece entitled Oil and Water Mix. No video there, just music. That piece is 666 seconds long.

Oily Tags: Oily Sheen. . . water video. . . oil and water

Eli Broad: Masterpieces, Money and Monuments

2011-04-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a quote I read a long time ago in a musician's union newspaper. To me it seemed obviously true.

Play for the masses, eat with the classes. Play for the classes, eat with the masses.

In other words, a musician who creates for an elite audience (the classes) should not expect to get rich. But a musician with millions of listeners (the masses) could earn a lot of money. Here's a list of the 10 richest musicians. (Number one was a Beatle once, number two is a Country and Western star.)

These days even the richest musician doesn't have a Billion Dollars. Few creative types accumulate that much wealth - J.K. Rowling just barely makes the billionaire list. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg qualify. (Here's a list of ALL the world's billionaires.)

A fundamental tenant of capitalism is that the people with the talent and passion for making money are allowed to gather as much of it as they can. Once they have it, they're free to do anything they want with it. Some choose to support arts institutions. Museums (a category which includes orchestras and opera companies), even the ones nominally supported by public money, would perish without big chunks of private cash from people with money to burn. Nothing new here. This has been going on since the invention of rich people. Top down funding of the arts is a fact of life.

Here in Los Angeles, one name dominates art philanthropy - Eli Broad. In his career he has made not one but two piles of money, first in real estate and then in finance. He's number 173 on that list of the world's richest humans. These days Eli spends his time giving his money away in the realms of science and education as well as art.

Many Los Angeles arts institutions have gratefully endured the sting of Eli Broad's money. Here's a New York Times interactive map showing locations of his munificence in L.A.

He gave millions to rescue MOCA.
He was instrumental in getting Disney Hall built.
His dollars seeded the now largely forgotten L.A. Opera Ring cycle and festival.
He donated money for a building at LACMA which is named after him.
He funded a performance space in Santa Monica which is also named after him.
The ultimate Broad art museum is planned for Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.

Last year the New York Times described Eli Broad:

Every American city has its power brokers, but only Los Angeles has an Eli Broad. Mr. Broad dominates the arts here with a force that has no parallel in any major city. Los Angeles would literally not look the same had Mr. Broad not chosen it as his home 40 years ago, and his business-focused method of managing his giving has earned him a reputation as both a genius and a despot.

Recently the Los Angeles Times published an interview with Eli Broad in which he discussed his art patronage. Here's the opening paragraph:

Eli Broad is not known for being effusive, not even when talking about one of his greatest passions: collecting contemporary art. The billionaire philanthropist generally seems more comfortable talking about museum buildings than about the artworks that go inside them.

Since the arts community in Los Angeles will undoubtedly feel the effect of Eli Broad's money for generations to come, I feel like it's a good idea to pay some heed to what he talks about. (Remember, at Mixed Meters quotes are always in purple. All the following quotes in this post are directly from Eli Broad.)

His stated motivations for collecting art and building museums surprise me. I guess I expected him to mouth nostrums about the transformative power of art or pablum about making great art accessible to everyone. I couldn't find anything like that, although it's doubtful he would actually disagree with such common wisdom. Instead he talks a lot about hanging out with artists. Here's a quote from an interview with Charlie Rose:

I enjoy contemporary art because it's the art of our times. I love the artists. I find it invigorating to spend time with artists. They have a different view of society than most business people do.

The next three quotes are from the Times article.

My first career was in public accounting, ... so if I look at a spreadsheet I understand it quickly. Numbers are hard and fast. But it's a very different process looking at a work of art or visiting with an artist. It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

The reliance on numbers makes me wonder why Eli doesn't seem to have much interest in contemporary music - which, of course, is also "the art of our times". Music is constructed largely out of numbers - rhythms, intervals, scales are all reducible to numbers. But understanding a spreadsheet (i.e. money) and understanding a symphony (i.e. art) require different forms of perception. I also wonder whether he finds it invigorating to hang out with composers.

He's clearly a practical man. When asked how much he has spent on his art collection, he replied:

I don't know the exact number, whether it's $200 or $400 million, but it's probably closer to the latter. If you ask me what it's worth, I've heard numbers that approach $2 billion, which blows my mind because I'm seeing all that happens then is that our insurance costs go up.

By any measure, he's a great success. Here's how he described what it means to be a "successful" collector:

If I had to do it over again, I would buy some of the great work that I saw people like David Geffen buy several years ago for what I thought was an awful lot of money - like the Johns 'Target' he had. I was too disciplined then. I didn't have the money. ... Well, I had the money, but I wasn't prepared to spend $10 million for a great painting. ... To be a successful bidder means you're willing to pay more than anyone else in the world. I don't know if I would call that a success.

This L.A. Times article gave impressions of what Eli Broad's vision for art in Los Angeles really is. Clearly it involves two things: the actual monetary value of the objects which he has acquired combined with placing those objects on display for others to envy and enjoy. The fact that these valuable objects of art might be culturally meaningful in some non-monetary sense, if indeed they are, doesn't seem terribly important to him.

Eli Broad has used his money to serve the community of Los Angeles according to this vision. Los Angeles ought to honor him in some way for that service. In olden days great men, generally war heroes, were honored with statues astride a horse. These days government doesn't have money to commission statues - even if there were artists who could recognizably execute such a piece. Instead of art, governments have resorted to renaming streets or intersections after deserving gentlemen. Los Angeles could honor Eli Broad by renaming Broadway, all twenty-some miles of it, after him. It wouldn't cost a penny. We would just start pronouncing the street name differently.

But great men of contemporary Los Angeles, those with sinful quantities of money, want more than a street name. They want art museums with their names attached. These days hardly anyone would remember Norton Simon, Armand Hammer, J. Paul Getty or Henry Huntington were it not for their eponymous galleries. Decades hence who will remember Eli Broad except as just another one of those old rich guys who could afford to buy himself an art museum?

Here's an article listing other living billionaires who own their own art museums.

Here's an L.A.Times article about similarities between Norton Simon and Eli Broad.

Here's a timeline of art history - mostly museums - in Los Angeles, 1927-1999. It contains this fascinating tidbit:

1951 The Los Angeles City Council decrees that modern art is Communist propaganda and bans its public display, but the ordinance has little effect.

A related MM post about art collecting: Our Culture Overvalues the Wrong Things

Related MM posts about rich people:

The one previous MM reference to Eli Broad which also mentions monuments.

Here's a tribute to Eli Broad which I found on YouTube. It's a music video which features a singing Eli Broad lookalike. There are no credits or any indication of exactly what the reasons for this particular encomium for Mr. Broad might be. The tune is hackneyed and repetitive but still somewhat Randy Newman-esque. Watch for yourself.

Here's a Flickr page with still shots from this production.

There are other related videos: an invite to Eli's birthday party and a behind the scenes video from same:

Enjoy.

Broad Tags: Eli Broad. . . art collectors. . . art museums. . . monuments

Aspics of Shostakovich

2011-03-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

I was in my early thirties when I first encountered anything served in aspic.

I had gotten a job doing revisions to a large symphonic piece for orchestra and jazz ensemble by the composer John Green. He was better known as Johnny Green. Every day for about a month I'd trudge over to Beverly Hills to work in his music library housed in a backyard outbuilding. Occasionally I was invited to the main house for formal lunch, usually prepared by the composer himself.

One day lunch included a salad with some sort of vegetable floating in jello. I had no idea what it was. John's secretary helpfully informed me that this was "aspic". I was not impressed with my first encounter with aspic - although I tried hard to sound like I was.

Today, while reading Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov), I read a passage about aspic (on page 30). Given my mental association of composers with aspic I could not help but have a desire to share Shostakovich's comments. I'm pretty sure they have lost something in translation.

A man dies and they want to serve him up to posterity. Serve him, so to speak, trussed up for our dear descendants at the table. So that they, napkin tucked under chin and armed with knife and fork, can dig in to the freshly deceased.

The deceased, as you know, have the inconvenient habit of cooling off too slowly; they're burning hot. So they are turned into aspics by pouring memories over them - the best form of gelatin.

And since deceased greats are also too large, they are cut down. The nose, say, is served separately, or the tongue. You need less gelatin that way. And that's how you get yesterday's classic as freshly cooked tongue in aspic. With a side dish of hoofs, from the horse he used to ride.

I'm trying to remember the people I knew without the gelatin. I don't pour aspic over them, I'm not trying to turn them into a tasty dish. I know that a tasty dish is easier to swallow and easier to digest. You know where it ends up.

A page later this paragraph seems to better explain what Shostakovich means:

It's so unfair. People suffered, worked, thought. So much wisdom, so much talent. And they're forgotten as soon as they die. We must do everything possible to keep their memories alive, because we will be treated in the same way ourselves. How we treat the memory of others is how our memory will be treated. We must remember, no matter how hard it is.

In light of some of the historical events of Shostakovich's life (notably the Great War and the Stalinist Purges), the need to remember those who were killed or simply disappeared would have been a duty of the highest importance.

Here's an interesting article about Johnny Green where I found the picture of Johnny's Oscar ceremony badge which identifies him as "Musical Director and Shmuck". He was a super-talented, super-loquacious, super-egotistical fellow who always wore a carnation and most likely would have enjoyed wearing a badge marking him as a shmuck. He once told me that if he had been Italian his name would have been Giovanni Verdi.

The book Testimony suffers from a certain controversy about the authenticity of the great composer's memoirs. I won't know for sure until I finish the book, but I don't think the dispute will do anything to challenge the book's overall insight into what life was like for a world-class Soviet composer.

The L.A. Philharmonic is producing a series of concerts devoted to composer Thomas Adès called Aspects of Adès which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Aspics of Shostakovich.

Tags in Aspic: aspic. . . Johnny Green. . . Dimitri Shostakovich. . . Testimony

House and Wooster and Income Disparity

2011-03-23T03:26:00.000-07:00

House is a soap opera. Of course it's not really an "opera" in the musical sense nor is it sponsored by a soap company. It is an episodic weekly television drama which details the continuing experiences of a group of characters as their lives constantly evolve and revolve. Each episode hangs on some inexplicable medical mystery which, inevitably, gets explicated.

The title character, the drug-addled miscreant genius Dr. House, is played by Hugh Laurie. Dr. House the character is an American but Hugh Laurie the actor is English. You'd never know it from watching the show. Laurie's ability to imitate American speech is, at least for me, the most interesting aspect of the show. (Okay, you figured it out - I don't particularly like House.)

Over the last few months, several times a week, Leslie and I have spent some of our quality time watching the series Jeeves and Wooster, an English television production from the early 90s based on the characters and stories of P.G. Wodehouse. Jeeves, the talented, discreet Gentleman's Gentleman, is played by actor Stephen Fry. (When I first saw Fry as Jeeves I thought he was too young. Now I'm 15 years older and he seems just the right age.) Bertie Wooster, the young, carefree, rich, puffin-headed bachelor, is played by Doctor House, I mean by Hugh Laurie, using his own genuine English accent.

Leslie and I both adore Jeeves and Wooster. We regret they only made 23 episodes. The action happens in the 1930's, mostly in England, occasionally in New York City. There's a steady stream of gorgeous architecture, lavish apartments and hotel-size estates. There's another steady stream of gorgeous vintage automobiles. The costumes, especially the men who run around about half the time in tuxedos, are also, well, gorgeous. Nice theme music too.

As adapted by Clive Exton, P.G. Wodehouse's plots are no less predictable than contemporary television, but they are much funnier. Most revolve around someone wanting to or not wanting to get married, pretending to be someone else, breaking and entering in order to steal some insignificant object, or attempting a hare-brained scheme for getting rich or out of debt. All of them involve Bertie bumbling his way into embarrassing social difficulties from which he is, in the end, coolly extricated by Jeeves.

Wodehouse's characters fall into clear categories. The upper-class women include Bertie's domineering Aunts and domineering marriageable women friends and even a few school girls in training to be domineering. The upper-class men include a host of Bertie's ineffectual neer-do-well friends (who repeatedly say things like "Isn't she the most beautiful woman you've ever seen, Bertie?"), a few crusty older men who repeatedly threaten Bertie with bodily harm and even a few schoolboys who repeatedly cause mischief. The lower class characters include waitresses, constables, butlers and other valets, con artists and rich American businessmen.

These parts are brought to life by some fine English actors. It's disconcerting when certain continuing roles are played by different actors in different seasons. And not one of them comes close to the quality of the American speaking accent which Hugh Laurie does in House. Probably English television audiences don't notice the difference.

Of course, the real weight of every episode is carried by the two principal actors, Fry and Laurie. Their marvelous performances consistently convey the ridiculous in the most sublime fashion. Here's a great example of the two of them together. In this clip Bertie tries to sing a current popular tune (which you'll recognize) but typically must rely on the help of his ever-so-tactful valet to finish the job.

Did the world of Jeeves and Wooster ever really exist? Most doubtful. I think Wodehouse was doing a fine job of writing parody. These days it's impossible to judge what bits of this television series might fairly represent those historical times. Two things come through from the scripts, however. First, there were distinct differences between English social classes. There was also a great inequality in the distribution of wealth; certain people were fantastically wealthy. According to this, in 1936 53% of the total wealth of England was held by just 1% of the population.

Today, in the U.S. during the time of House, we strenuously deny that class differences exist. We're told that anyone can get filthy rich if they're talented and driven and lucky enough. To prove this, the media shows us a handful of super-wealthy people (think Oprah) who serve as inspirations to the hundreds of millions who will, most likely, never get rich. However, like Bertie's England, America does have an incredible inequality in the distribution of wealth. According to this, in 2007, 43% of total wealth in the United States was held by just 1% of the population. (For more on America's financial inequalities check this out. Or this.)

While the upper-class wealth of Bertie Wooster's time would eventually decline over much of the 20th century, the wealth of the American elite today is climbing steadily. Maybe that's why we perceive the English wealthy as idle slackers and the American wealthy as greedy over achievers. It's not just a saying these days that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Today it's more like an actual law.

I think that the U.S. of 2011 needs our own P.G. Wodehouse. We need an author or television producer who can parody the amusing day to day lives of super-rich people. Why shouldn't there be a television show to make it clear how people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett who have billions of dollars aren't close to being capable of muddling through their own lives, or even to mixing their own martinis, without the help of a faithful, discrete, patient, intelligent servant such as Reginald Jeeves? I propose that such a show would make many less-than-wealthy Americans more accepting of the obscene disparities of wealth in our country and of their own place in the financial hierarchy.

You know, if we can't do anything else about the problem of the ultra-wealthy, at least we should be able to have a good laugh at their expense.

Wealthy Tags: Jeeves and Wooster. . . Hugh Laurie. . . House television show. . . P.G. Wodehouse. . . income disparity

Ghosts of Vesuvius

2011-03-11T04:22:00.000-08:00

Last fall I attended an LA Philharmonic performance of a large work for chorus and orchestra - Graffiti by composer Magnus Lindberg. The interesting text was created from inscriptions discovered on walls of the buried Roman city of Pompeii. These have remained unchanged since molten lava engulfed the city way back in A.D.79.

Later I saw Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino on a stack of Leslie's books. I thought this might be a good way to learn more about the graffiti of Pompeii. I just finished the book. I was wrong.

I should have paid more attention to the subtitle of Ghosts of Vesuvius:

A new look at the last days of Pompeii, how towers fall, and other strange connections.

Ghosts of Vesuvius did tell me just a wee bit more about graffiti in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Plus there was a lot of other fascinating information about Roman life, history, customs and technology. I learned, for example, that in Rome there were eight-story apartment buildings with plate glass windows and sprinkler systems. Roman inventors were working on steam-powered ships. And sunken Roman galleys have been found in places like Brazil and Venezuela - but scientists have not been allowed to study them closely because some people don't want Christopher Columbus challenged as discoverer of the New World. Lots of stuff like that.

Clearly Mr. Pellegrino knows a good deal about many subjects. Among the more surprising discourses I found in this book were:

how volcanos may have fostered the first life on earth,
the history of the universe, starting now and working backwards to the very beginning,
how the catastrophic Vesuvian explosion affected early (and probably current) Christian thinking about eschatology and the apocalypse,
the sinking of the Titanic, which the author had previously studied up close in a deep-sea submarine and then written a book about.

The last relates to one of the celebrity endorsements on the back cover:

"Very interesting and compelling reading. A killer. Makes me want to do a movie about Pompeii." -- James Cameron, award-winning producer and director who has optioned screen rights to Ghosts of Vesuvius.

No, James Cameron is not crazy. Ghosts of Vesuvius would make a great blockbuster movie very much in the mold of his movie Titanic. That's because of two riveting sections of storytelling in which Pellegrino relates, in minute by minute detail, two horrendous events of sudden human immolation.

One, of course, was the explosion of Vesuvius, where humans caught in the hot lava were completely vaporized in a fraction of a second. But he also finds personal stories. Using scrolls encased in lava - on which the burnt ink can now be distinguished from burnt parchment through the miracle of Photoshop - we learn the story of a freed Roman slave girl named Justa who was trying to avoid being returned to slavery by conniving lawyers.

The other was the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. Pellegrino was one of the scientists who, in the months after the attack, studied how the towers fell. He has documented some of the surprising twists of horror and luck endured by the victims of that attack.

In both stories there are moments where complete destruction is found side by side with items that have barely been touched. Tables set for upcoming meals remain just as they were while only a few feet away walls crumbled and fell. People inexplicably survive the massive explosions, comparable in strength to nuclear bombs, by accidentally finding themselves inside "shock cocoons": spots where some trick of the crumbling architecture and explosive physics offers a shell of protection from certain death. Had these individuals been standing a few feet away, death would have been certain.

Ultimately, Ghosts of Vesuvius is about sudden destruction: a huge asteroid carving out the Yucatan in the Gulf of Mexico destroying the dinosaurs; a volcano in 1628 B.C. obliterating the Minoan civilization and giving us our legend of Atlantis; the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; an earthquake and its tsunami. In each of these and many other cases, there was some morning, probably a beautiful morning, when life simply came completely to a halt. There was no warning whatsoever.

And when such catastrophe does happen again there will probably be no way to prevent it. A few lucky people might survive. The rest of us need to enjoy each beautiful morning as it happens.

You can visit the ruins of Pompeii via Google Street View.

Here's an Italian website devoted to the excavations and another at the Field Museum.

Immolation Tags: Ghosts of Vesuvius. . . Charles Pellegrino. . . World Trade Center

Theremin's Bug

2011-03-07T05:44:00.000-08:00

Certain instruments, a violin, say, or a guitar, have specialized varieties which become associated with particular people, usually a performer or maker. Think of a Stradivarius, say, or a Les Paul. It is less common for a whole family of instruments to be named after a person. The saxophone was named for its inventor Adophe Sax. Less memorable is the sarrusophone, named for Pierre-Auguste Sarrus.

Another instrument which bears the name of its creator is the theremin. The theremin was invented in the 1920s by the Russian Léon Theremin. A theremin, of course, is a type of electronic music synthesizer. A thereminist never touches the instrument during performance. Instead there are two antennas which can sense changing distance of the performer's hands. One hand controls pitch, the other controls volume. Judging by a host of YouTube videos, achieving precise intonation on a theremin is not easy. Vibrato and portamento cover many sins.

Unlike the saxophone, which has found useful employment in many different styles of music, the theremin is burdened with musical cliché. Do you need background sounds for something otherworldly or ghostly? Call for a theremin. The theremin is sufficently established in our culture that it was enshrined by a Simpson's episode, The Ziff Who Came to Dinner. (The family thinks there's a ghost in the attic, but it turns out to be disgraced tycoon Artie Ziff, Marge's high school suitor, playing Homer's old theremin.)

I discovered, via the biography Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky, that the life and other inventions of Leon Theremin were far more interesting than the music created on his namesake. The young Theremin, after studying both music and engineering, sided with the Bolsheviks in 1917.

As a Bolshevik engineer, Theremin bombarded Lenin with ideas. In the collected works of Lenin there is a letter to Trotsky dated April 4, 1922: "Discuss the possibility of reducing guard duties of Kremlin Kadets by introducing electric signal system. An engineer called Theremin showed us his experiments in the Kremlin." Theremin had invented his electrical "Radio Sentry." It was immediately put on the secret list and installed in the State Bank.

Lenin himself played a tune on a theremin after it was introduced in 1921. The instrument was a hit and the inventor became a rich, international star. In the thirties Theremin also invented an electronic cello and drum machine.

People called [Theremin] a "second Trotsky" because he threatened to carry out a "world revolution in music" with his instrument. Next, [Soviet Intelligence Director] Yagoda dispatched him in the full blaze of his glory to America, where he was to cooperate with the GPU [the Secret Police], and regularly pass on interesting information to the embassy.

So Leon Theremin was a Soviet spy. But in 1938 Theremin was recalled to Russia and arrested. People assumed that he had been executed. Instead he was given a sentence of eight years.

He was quickly transferred from a normal prison camp to a sharashka. This was one of [Stalin's] most impressive inventions: a closed research institute in which imprisoned scientists could continue their work. Theremin helped the great Korolev and the famous Tupolev, both prisoners, to develop a radio-controlled, pilotless plane. Then he was taken to another sharashka, where he developed a unique system of remote eavesdropping. This system was called the "Snowstorm," and it earned its incarcerated inventor a Stalin Prize.

This eavesdropping invention is the most interesting of all. It was a passive radio-controlled listening device. The Soviets secretly installed it in a large replica of the Great Seal of the United States which had been carved by some Soviet boy scouts. In 1945 this was presented to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as a symbol of friendship. The naive Americans hung it in the ambassador's study. It was only discovered by accident seven years later.

The trick of Theremin's invention was that the "bug" didn't need a battery or wires. It was completely inert until activated by precisely tuned microwaves beamed from outside. Then it served as a radio transmitter. Had it not been discovered it might still be working to this day. Read more at Wikipedia about The Thing. More interesting is this article, The Great-Seal Bug.

Theremin's technology of snooping should be plenty familiar to all of us today. It became the basis of RFID - Radio Frequency Identification, a common tool of modern capitalism, used for asset management, product tracking and electronic article surveillance. Yep, the next time you accidentally walk out of the store with an item you picked up, thank Leon Theremin for the alarm which reminds you to pay.

Of course spying at U.S. Embassies in Moscow did not stop in 1952. Here's a 1987 N.Y. Times article New U.S. Embassy in Moscow Is Said To Have Wiretaps.

There's a movie Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey, which you can watch here.

Here's a fascinating, mysterious page of Theremin info (translated from Hungarian by Mr. Google.)

Here's video of a Russian photo scanner and photo-editing software, 3 years before Photoshop 1.0 was released.

RFID Tags: Leon Theremin. . . Soviet spying. . . Radio Frequency Identification

More Musical Signs

2011-02-28T23:11:00.000-08:00

Mixed Meters has had several on-going photo series. For example, there was Fallen Avocados, Blank Wall and Bunnies and Balloons. No, these don't make much sense. Why would you expect this blog to make sense?

Another series involves pictures of business or product signs which use musical terminology. Apparently many musical words hold some mysterious fascination for the non-musical. Maybe musical words increase sales.

This post is the fourth in a series. In part one we learned the words trio, forte, cornet, arpeggio, aria and allegro. In part two there was koda, tritono and concerto. Part three included melody, allegro, opera, counterpoint, cantata and Amadeus.

Today's word list includes several musical forms: aria, sonata and symphony plus one which contains only an opening movement. There's a score, one on which it is forbidden to walk, plus parts. I think these parts are for the sonata in the previous picture. And finally there's a musical apartment building moving at a speed related to its latitude.

Do you wonder what The 1st Movement or Vizual Symphony do?
Yes, you can click on any picture to embiggen it.
All of the pictures were taken in Pasadena, CA.

Tags North: Musical Terminology

Street Art Now and Then

2011-02-24T05:32:00.000-08:00

On the corner of Hill Avenue and Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena there used to be a Ford dealership. It was called Pasadena Ford. When it closed in August 2008 someone carefully painted out the word "Ford" on every sign. Nothing else, just the one name wherever it appeared.

The lot is empty now. For a while, students from Pasadena City College could park there cheap. One day a year it's a prime spot to park huge RVs directly on the Rose Parade route.

Yesterday I noticed a new bit of "street art" on the wall just north of the main lot. I figured it must be a Banksy since that secretive street artist is getting such a lot of publicity by being nominated for an Oscar. A little research seems to indicate that this was done by a different anonymous street artist who uses the handle "¢ommon ¢ents".

The image has been printed on some large format printer and attached to the wall with glue. At the bottom, where the artist signed his "name", the paper is ripped. Here's a closeup of Lady Liberty's tablet - the same text repeats and repeats until finally it turns to plain old gibberish.

WAR! DEATH! CORRUPTION! MONEY! RAPE! MURDER! LIES! THEFT! VIOLENCE! FASCISM!

I wonder why ¢ommon ¢ents singled out the L.A. Times. It's not the behind-the-scenes power broker of the General Otis or Chandler family days. The poor paper is lucky to still be in business.

This art, in my opinion, is not terribly moving. More interesting is the piece of graffiti which lived in this same spot previously, one actually drawn on the wall by someone. That one appeared after the dealership closed. After a while someone painted it out. Here are pictures which I took on March 19, 2009.

A young boy in a Little League uniform is about to catch a small missile in his baseball glove. We may imagine that the result will not be pleasant for the boy. The artwork and the anti-war message is more subtle than ¢ommon ¢ents' Statue of Liberty by several orders of magnitude.

In April 2009 there was discussion of this painting at Pasadena Daily Photo.

By clicking the photos, especially the previous one, you will see an enlargement.

The real Banksy has a photo of a Statue of Liberty-themed piece on his website. Here it is:

If you want, you could read my Oscar rant from last year. Or you could look at these two Mixed Meters graffiti-related posts: Graffiti Animals of California and Taggers With Spellcheck

Yesterday Pasadena Adjacent had a graffiti-related post.

Street Tags: common cents. . . banksy. . . street art. . . Pasadena Ford

The Future From A Car Commercial

2011-02-20T04:12:00.000-08:00

Last night I came across the nine-minute 1956 movie Design for Dreaming. This particular bit of Fifties Futurism is a big-budget General Motors industrial musical - an almost-modern ballet with lots of costume changes danced to almost-modern music with sung rhymed couplets.

Girls don't go to motoramas,
dressed in a pair of pink pajamas!

The Cars of the Future are the real stars, of course. The movie ends with the "fabulous turbine-powered Firebird 2" which is "designed for the electronic highway of the future."

Firebird 2 to the control tower.
We are about to take off on the Highway of Tomorrow.
Stand by.

Tomorrow, tomorrow.
Our dreams will come true.
Together, together.
We'll make the world new.

The Kitchen of the Future from Frigidaire, a subsidiary of GM, also makes an appearance. That's where the lady of the house will bake a cake, decorate it and even put candles on top, all quite unattended. The kitchen does this inside of some sort of glass dome and then phones her when the cake is ready.

Aside from any marketing or corporate branding aspects, this movie struck me as a great example of how we saw the future during the fifties. And the future was good, all filled with gleaming chrome. Here, watch the future for yourself:

I immediately associated this advertisement with a current one for a different automobile with a different view about the future, a much darker outlook. Elaborate music, dance and poetry, gleaming chrome, formal costumes are all missing. Instead we have a car in a dark tunnel accompanied by a sober, threatening male voice listing the evils of the future as predicted by competing automobiles.

Here's his text. It's kind of free verse:

Hands-free driving.
Cars that park themselves.
An unmanned car
Driven by a search engine company.
We've seen that movie.
It ends with robots
Harvesting our bodiess for energy.
(motor sounds)
This is the all new 2011 Dodge Charger.
Leader of the human resistance.

Apparently, in 2011, Fear of the Future can sell cars. As cars become more and more computerized it looks like the "electronic highway of the future" from Design for Dreaming might just happen. But if that future is frightening, you can forestall it by purchasing a noisy, muscle car - one that wouldn't have looked or sounded out of place on the highways of the nineteen fifties.

The tunnel in this (and many other) television commercials is Second Street in downtown Los Angeles. Here's a shot from the end of the commercial showing the car driving out of the tunnel. I've added the same shot from Google Street View. Google, of course, is the search engine company developing a "self-driving" car. In spite of what the Dodge ad says, the Google car isn't yet "unmanned".

Here's an ad from the August 1964 Readers Digest (page 200). I xeroxed this myself sometime after the Three Mile Island Accident in 1979 and saved it ever since because it touts cheap electricity from atomic power. The picture shows a well-manicured woman holding the household control device of the future and therefore it fits into this post quite well.

She's monitoring her baby in the crib via the "Video Scan". The other rotary knobs are marked "R/C Clean", "Lawn Care", "Disposal", "Floor Care", "Food Prep." (Click the picture for enlargement.)

Here's the text in a format Mrs. Google's robot can read.

easy does it

someday you may be able to run your all-electric home by fingertip control

Whatever electrical wonders come your way in the future, there'll be plenty of low-priced electricity to help you enjoy them.

America's more than 300 investor-owned electric light and power companies are seeing to that right now. For example, they are investing about a billion dollars to develop atomic power as another source of cheap electricity.

And they have more than 1800 other research and development projects in progress or recently completed. All are pointed toward keeping you and all Americans amply supplied with dependable, low-priced electric service, now and in the wonderful new world of your electric future.

Investor-Owned Electric Light and Power Companies

People you can depend on to power America's porgress

Sponsors' names on request through this magazine.

Here's a collection of articles about how the 50s viewed the future, from a blog called Paleofuture.

Fifties Tags: Design for Dreaming. . . motoramas. . . Dodge Charger. . . the future. . . household automation

Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl

2011-02-15T04:17:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago, in the middle of the night, I flipped on the kitchen television to one of those overnight news shows. I found no news. Instead the anchors were picking their personal favorites in the Super Bowl.

At that moment I heard a little voice in my head. "You should write a blog post about Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl." Babbitt had passed away only a few days earlier.

"But," I replied, "Babbitt has nothing whatsoever to do with professional football."

"Not my problem," it countered. I called it several unpleasant names - but the voice had already left my head.

That's how I got stuck trying to compare America's premier professor of serial music composition and America's premier professional football championship holiday. It's my brain's fault. Such an essay is uphill work because the intersection of the sets of properties of Babbitt's music and Super Bowl games is null. (Babbitt would understand. He was a brainy guy.)

I reread "Who Cares If You Listen", Babbitt's 1958 editor-titled essay in High Fidelity Magazine. He lamented the lack of contextual background which listeners brought to serious contemporary music:

The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.

To Babbitt, writing music was highly technical and highly theoretical. He thought that such research would lead to future musical benefits for all. Theory and composition-wise that certainly never happened, although the miniature descendants of the room-sized synthesizer which Babbitt used in the fifties have since turned music on its head.

Babbitt concludes his essay with a reference to the "is classical music dead?" debate:

Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live. (italics added)

Here's some of Milton Babbitt's music to listen to as you read about the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is a battle in abstract. Two teams of armored warriors engage in ritual medieval combat while attempting to adjust the geo-position of an oviform leather ball to their own advantage. There are many ways in which the Super Bowl is different than Milton Babbitt's music.

Milton Babbitt's music does not need a half time show. Nor is there a cuisine (e.g. pizza, wings, chips and guacamole) associated with it.
Babbitt's music receives little, if any, attention. Super Bowl Sunday has become an important all-American celebration of capitalist sports.
Babbitt's music is not widely known. The Super Bowl has millions of fans.
Babbitt's music is highly intellectual. The brainiest aspect to the Super Bowl is probably chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That's the progressive damage done to the brains of players who are constantly bashing into one another with great force. This very violence is one of the reasons people like football.
Babbitt used higher mathematics in the composition of his music. Mathematically, a Super Bowl fan must be able to add four numbers and decide whether the total is greater than ten. Extra credit is given to fans who can remember the rules for Roman numerals. This year was Super Bowl XLV.
Listening to Babbitt's music requires intense concentration. Watching football does not require much attention span at all. The plays are short and there is plenty of time in between for commentators to explain what happened - just in case you missed something.
Babbitt's music has little commercial value. Corporations spend millions of dollars for a few seconds of Super Bowl air time to sell their products.

Here's a television ad extolling four men who have attended every Super Bowl. These men are no less the heroes of Super Bowl than the players on the field. They are the conspicuous consumers of Super Bowl culture. Other people are envious of them. The ad announces a contest for a lifetime of free Super Bowl tickets given to one lucky winner. I must have missed the competition to win free tickets to Milton Babbitt concerts for life.

Naturally I listened to some of Milton Babbitt's music before writing this. I was struck by a certain nineteen fifties feeling of his pieces, sort of like giant audible Jackson Pollock paintings. Overall, his abstraction is pure and his attention to technique is overarching. On a micro level each event, each note, each drip becomes its own world, like a tiny atom whizzing through vast emptiness.   I strained (and failed) to hear connections. What's more, his notes never combine to create emotion or excitement or drama, the very things I feel music is good at. Maybe someone with better ears or more nimble brain can fathom Babbitt's music.

I also watched some of the Super Bowl broadcast. Football, like any sport, is goal oriented activity. The goal is winning and the drive towards that goal represents great drama.   We can pick a side to cheer for and personally share in outcome. The competition and violence become easy metaphors for much of real life. These are amplified by the media until the whole event is larger than life. The Super Bowl is geared to producing emotion, excitement and drama - and little else.

Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl are opposites on any spectrum. I guess the one thing they have in common is my personal failure to understand either one. I find them both empty experiences. I scratch my head because I see that other people seem to get pleasure from them. I bet there are even certain people who love both Babbitt and the Super Bowl. Why didn't the voice in my head visit them instead?   Those people should have written this article.

Here's a one-hour movie entitled Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer by Robert Hilferty, completed by Laura Karpman. If you're interested in the life and personality of this highly intelligent, academic, uncompromising artist, I highly recommend watching. This was more fascinating for me than listening to Babbitt's music directly.

It also reminded me of the one time I met Milton Babbitt. In the very early seventies I was an undergraduate at Carleton who had only recently decided to take a chance at a career in composition. He and I had a brief private discussion during which he was not particularly discouraging. He gave a lecture to the assembled music students and faculty - many of whom attended out of politeness more than interest.

I remember suggesting that he was a professor at Columbia (rather than Princeton) because I knew of him mostly through recordings from the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center. He seemed a bit annoyed at my confusion between the two schools. This movie also reminded me just how quickly he could talk.

About 52 minutes into the movie a young woman makes this comment:

My brain is stimulated by Milton Babbitt's music and my heart is touched by the freeing of my mind, which is a different way to have one's heart touched than usual. And in that way I find his music extraordinary and unique.

What a beautiful sentiment. I wonder what she'd have to say about the Super Bowl.

ADDENDUM: okay, here's one way in which serial music composition and professional football are alike: they're both activities of interest principally to men.

Milton Bowl Tags: Milton Babbitt. . . Super Bowl. . . serial composition. . . professional football

Arthur Jarvinen's Birthday

2011-01-27T22:55:00.000-08:00

Art Jarvinen's birthday was January 27. He would have been 55 this year. I once mentioned to him that he shared his birthday with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a fact which impressed me more than it did him. More interestingly, he shared his birthday with his wife, Lynn Angebranndt.

This is a three part post. Each part is Jarvinen-related. The first is about a concert of Art's music given recently by students at Cal Arts. The second is about a radio show featuring Art's music. You can listen to that online. Finally, I have news of an upcoming live concert performance of While You Were Art, the infamous synthesizer track Frank Zappa named after Art Jarvinen.

Arthur taught composition at Cal Arts for many years. He was also an alumnus. So it makes sense that Cal Arts would present one of the first concerts of his music after his death. Last Sunday, January 23, an ensemble of students lead by Amy Knoles performed a dozen works by Art Jarvinen. They named their concert The Art of Art.

They framed the event with instrumental chamber music - opening with Egyptian Two-Step (which features antiphonal spray cans as part of the rhythm section) and ending with White Lights Lead to Red. Solo pieces included The Door That Doesn't Open (for marimba and amplified heartbeat) and Carbon (for solo bass clarinet).

There was a tango setting of a poem by Charles Bukowski (Art wrote a number of tangos) plus selections from Arthur's album Edible Black Ink for guitar and bass. And there were several of his performance pieces which Art called "physical poetry". One of them was Pop Tarts in which the performer fires a dart gun at an airborne strawberry pop tart as it is expelled from a toaster.

The enthusiasm and talent of the ensemble was impressive. Some of the music is fiendishly difficult. The less technical pieces made me reflect on how Art's own persona contributed to his music. He was direct, focused and unwaveringly intent as a performer. Time and again I can remember him performing his musical rituals, riveted to the task. And, for a few moments, he could share this mental concentration with his audience. New performers of his music have the task of finding that same concentration in future performances.

(You can read a remembrance of Art by Zona Hostetler, the mother of a colleague of Art's, Randy Hostetler, who passed away at a very young age here. She describes a performance of Pop Tarts by Arthur himself.)

Jack Vees was a close friend of Art. They met as students at CalArts. Last December Jack visited radio station WRIU at the University of Rhode Island and played several hours of Arthur's music on a show called Music For Internets. Better yet, the show is archived online if you want to listen. Here's a direct link to the audio file. (The show begins at about three and a half minutes.)

Throughout the show Jack paints a portrait of Arthur through his personal reminiscences and by choosing two different kinds of Art's music.

On one hand he picks chamber music - Murphy Nights, The Vulture's Garden and Goldbeaters Skin. He also plays selections from Art's string quartet 100 Cadences which was written in memory of Art's teacher Lucky Mosko. There are also excerpts of keyboard works including Queen of Spain (based on music by Domenico Scarlatti) and Serious Immobilities (yes, it's a 24 hour solo piano piece based on Vexations by Erik Satie).

On the other hand there are pieces by several of Art's more (or less) popular music-influenced groups. Two hysterical tunes by The Mope (“Five Ugly Guys With No Record Interest”) are Agent Jerry (a spy surf tune like Art's Invisible Guy series) and Drunk Poets Die Young. Another group, Some Over History is represented Erase the Fake and Cheap Suit Tango. And there's a cut from Art's Beatles parody: Sgt. Pekker.

Jack also throws in two cuts by Captain Beefheart whose music was a strong influence on Art. Of course Art had far more influences than you can grasp from just a few minutes of Beefheart. All together, the show makes a fine introduction to the music of Arthur Jarvinen.

("Blue" Gene Tyranny's review of the album Erase the Fake by Art's group Some Over History can be found here.)

Another oft-mentioned influence on Arthur Jarvinen was Frank Zappa. Art was employed by Frank for a few years doing work similar to that which I did. The best known moment of Art's time with Frank was the infamous While You Were Art "performance".

That was when the California EAR Unit, including Art on marimba, pantomimed to a recorded synthesizer performance of a transcription of a live Zappa guitar solo called While You Were Out. It was renamed While You Were Art for that occasion. The Unit did this at the "prestigious" Monday Evening Concerts and no one in the audience noticed that they hadn't actually played the piece. An awful lot of bad feelings were generated afterwards. Art himself, after investing much hard work to get Zappa to write a piece for the EAR Unit, keenly regretted the results.

You can read my own telling of what happened and why it was important to me personally in the While You Were Art section of Bill Lantz's monumental David Ocker Internet Interview. Be sure to click on the white buttons marked Art's Comment! to read the amendations which Arthur added later. Since Art didn't like talking about this episode during his lifetime, these comments are all the more valuable now.

This coming February 5th (that's a Saturday), at Pomona College there will be a live performance of While You Were Out/Art. The electric guitarist will be Pomona music professor Joti Rockwell who will play the original guitar transcription (While You Were Out) to the accompaniment of Zappa's later commercial release of the synthesizer tracks (While You Were Art). The version of the piece played at the Monday Evening event was later suppressed by Zappa.

Here's information about the concert. It's part of a yearly concert series of electronic music called the Ussachevsky Memorial Festival organized by yet another Pomona prof. Tom Flaherty. There's a flyer to download here. (In the 1960s the ersatz college student Frank Zappa briefly studied composition with music professor Karl Kohn at Pomona College. Kohn is still professor emeritus there.)

Joti Rockwell kindly shared his notes for the concert with me. He discusses why this piece and the event associated with it is important for academic study. Here's an exerpt:

By musically comparing the two versions at the historical edges (1981 and 1986), one cannot help but imagine what might have resulted had the collaboration for the 1984 concert gone more smoothly. Reflection and examination of this sort was the hope of Art Jarvinen, the piece’s namesake, and it will perhaps lead to a better understanding of Frank Zappa, electronic music, the history of music in Los Angeles, and the meanings of contemporary music.

Art's Music Tags: Arthur Jarvinen. . . Jack Vees. . . Joti Rockwell. . . While You Were Art