Dancing about Architecture

This is a piece for an indeterminate number and type of instruments. It’s at a moderate tempo and the dynamics are fairly constant throughout.

I like this work a lot. It’s mesmerizing. I’ve listened to it quite few times already, and am listening to it again, while I type these thoughts, but it’s hard, because the piece keeps drawing me in.

A weird thing about this piece is that it sounds like there are some improvised bits in the middle. Of course, there aren’t any improvised notes—the notes are written out, even though when to switch from pattern to pattern is improvised—but there is something that sounds like a recorder in the middle that seems to have made a break for it and gone over the wall. I wonder whether this sort of thing surprised Riley. Riley could have recorded this as a one-man band (by multitracking), but maybe this is the sort of (what to me sounds unexpected) thing that made him record it with other musicians.

This piece is really a sort of ‘cloud’ of possibilities that only ‘settles down’ or becomes well defined in a particular performance. It’s too bad that the CD captures just one realization of this piece. Even the same band, on the same afternoon, I’m sure, would have recorded a much different version of it. I wonder whether this (the fact that there is one ‘definitive’ version of this piece) disappoints Riley sometimes. The ideal ‘recording’ of this piece (in my opinion) would be a computer program that generates different interpretations.

In fact, Riley is sort of a computer programmer, as much as a composer, in the writing of this piece. . (IBM pays me good money, thank you, to write computer programs, so I hope (for IBM’s sake, at least) that I’m not being completely naïve in these observations.) In computer programming, you have to think carefully about every possible sequence of events (permitted by your program) that a user might come up with. This is not easy. The first thought that comes to mind when a programmer looks at many bugs is, “I never thought anyone would do that.” Now, what Riley is doing here is something much more complicated than your run-of-the-mill computer programming. What he is doing here is what is known in the industry as “multi-threaded programming”. In multi-threaded programming, there are several paths of execution happening simultaneously. One thread might be responding to the user’s input through the graphical user interface (for example, dealing with button clicks and so on), while another thread might be doing some background processing (such as checking spelling in a document). And this only is a simple example. But, believe me, even simple multi-threaded programming can be hard. It can be very hard. One of the main difficulties is with conflicts between different threads (which I guess corresponds to dissonance or something in this perhaps tenuous analogy). “In C” is a multi-threaded program—each musician is an independent thread. However, Riley has managed to walk a very thin line in writing this multithreaded program. Not only do all the threads interact harmoniously (this would be easy—simply have each of the musicians play either a C, E, or G at their discretion), but also the music that results is interesting, not discordant. That is, it walks the fine line between homogeneity (or simple repetition) and chaos. (“It’s a fine line between chaos and creation,” as the Man said.)

Also, with this work, I would say that Riley pretty much invented the idea of loops. [I found out later that they were in use in the late ’40s and ’50s in classical electronic music.] The idea of tape loops had been around for a while. For example, the Beatles had used them as far back as 1966 in “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and even they had gotten the idea from Stockhausen. But, the short musical phrases that make up “In C” are more like the loops used in musical software programs (such as Apple Computer’s GarageBand). That is, each is an atomic musical phrase, whereas tape loops tend to be a bit more free form and not necessarily atomic.

“Barstow” is composed for string quartet, a male narrator/singer, and a percussionist. The singer/narrator speaks and then sings each of the eight inscriptions in turn. The piece is in just intonation, with many notes that are between the 12 conventional notes used in equal-tempered tuning.

I somehow got interested in just intonation (I like the abstract purity of it), and so I was particularly interested in hearing pieces by Harry Partch (the only time I’ve heard him before was as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s American Mavericks project). The tuning in this piece takes some getting used to—at first, it just sounds like there a lot of out-of-tune notes being played—but after you get used to it, it’s very interesting (in a good way). I’ve been to Barstow (my sister and I stopped there for gas and to get something to eat once, while driving through), and somehow this piece does evoke that American West, desert, weird, edge-of-the-civilized-world, hopeless atmosphere. It’s lonely and sad, like an Edward Hopper painting.

“Poème èlectronique” consists of electronic sounds (blips, bleeps, etc.) and conventional instruments or sounds (a church bell, drumming, and the human voice) that are electronically altered.

Again, as with “Ionisation”, I can’t hear any real structure in this piece (although some parts sound like call-and-response between the left and right stereo speakers). It has a kind of nice “gee whiz” effect, and I’m sure it had even more of such an effect when it was originally composed. But I’m not sure I’d want to listen to this piece repeatedly (other than the 6 or 8 times I’ve listened to it already). If this is a “poème”, then it’s definitely in free verse and I’m not sure that it rhymes. This piece reminds me a little of Frank Zappa’s “Pedro’s Dowry” and maybe some of Zappa’s other stuff, but, frankly, I’d rather hear Zappa, because it’s more dense and often has a good beat. I hope I’m not being too critical, but I like “Poème èlectronique” in the same sense that I like the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”: I’m glad it was recorded and I enjoy listening to it when I’m in the mood for it, but I’m not in the mood for it all that often.

This is a piece for percussion ensemble.

It has a siren in it, and I like any piece with a good siren in it, whether it’s George Antheil’s Ballet Mècanique or Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61”. It starts out quite foreboding, quiets down, and then has loud bits interspersed with quiet bits (although not many of those). If the piece has some kind of structure, then I can’t discern it. I like it just for its sound and maybe that’s all that Varèse intended.

One weekend last fall I was visiting my nieces and nephew and we were recording some stuff for fun on an 8-track portable studio I had just bought. On one piece, which I called “The Crazy Song” (and it was just that), my 4-year old nephew wanted to overdub his toy drum machine on every single track. Of course, I didn’t let him do that, because we wanted to use most of the tracks for other weird, mostly vocal things that my nieces (6- and 8-years old) were thinking up. Anyway, I think maybe my nephew was feeling a close artistic kinship with Varèse last weekend, which I, with my more conservative views on music, thwarted. I felt kind of bad about that when I thought about it later and the next time I visit I’m going to let him do his own recording with 8 tracks of only drums.

TUESDAY SALON
Featuring works by BRYCE BEVERLIN II, BILL FRANK, STANLEY WOOLNER, and PAUL REINERS.

Tuesday, August 15 * 7:30 p.m.
Zeitgeist Studio
275 East Fourth Street, Suite 100 in St. Paul

This piece is for solo piano. It is mostly played ‘within’ the piano, by strumming the strings directly, rather than using the keyboard as is usually done. I think I’ve read that Cowell wrote this piece to be played completely within the piano on the strings directly, but there are little 3- and 4-note phrases that sound to me like they’re played using the keys.

The sound of the piano in this piece is ghostly and can sound eerily human at times. (The theremin can sound this way too; you could probably write a neat piece like this for both piano (strumming the strings) and theremin. Actually, I happen to own both a piano and a theremin, so maybe I should try this.)

I would like to see how the piece is notated. I listened to two different versions of this. The “notes” played don’t seem to be identical (even the few that seem to be played on the keyboard), so I imagine the notation is not exact and many details are left to the performer. (Though I suppose the piece could be notated exactly, if you were to do it as harp music is notated. Although, on the other hand, that might not work, since (I think) the way strings are arranged—the way they cross over each other and so on—might differ from piano to piano (it definitely differs between grand pianos and upright pianos)).

I can’t make up my mind which of these two versions is the spookiest (and, therefore, the best). Version 1 is louder and has one part that sounds like a goblin gibbering and parts that sound like a child crying. Version 2 is quieter (although it has quite a few loud bits, too) and I think this makes it more eerie than Version 1 by just a tad (maybe). Also, Version 2 has some weird sounds that sound like leather creaking. I can’t imagine what it is, whether it’s just an accidental artifact of the recording or was intentional. Version 2 also has a part that sounds like a bunch of demons laughing.

This work is composed for chorus with a male soloist and orchestral accompaniment. It is comprised of several sections, which are all tied together with the “Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” lyric. It’s mostly a march, but there is a slower, more tender lyric section in the middle. It ends quietly with military drums fading away into the distance (or into the heavens).

I’m not sure what to make of this piece. I like it—the “Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” melody runs through my head a lot. Some of the tunes sound vaguely familiar and based on what I’ve read about Ives (CD liner notes and the Jan Swafford biography, mainly), I would guess that parts of the melody are based on old New England, Protestant hymns.

I actually visited Danbury, Connecticut on Charles Ives’ birthday last year. I highly recommend making the pilgrimage. Nancy Sudik, exec. director of the Danbury Music Centre, was in charge of the celebration and all the people there were really great.