new post at billsallak.com

Hey everyone-- just wanted to let you know that there's a new post at the blog's new location, with breaking news about the forthcoming Easy Worship Operator album. Head on over, and if you're a subscriber using RSS, the new feed is here. Cheers!

fully migrated

All of the content in NoiseGarden has now been moved to:

www.billsallak.com/blog

I'll leave the entries up here as well, but all new updates will be coming from the new site. If you're an RSS subscriber, the feed is here.

This blog will eventually be moving...

...to a blog page at billsallak.com. It might take a while to get the entries migrated, and I'll get it up and running ASAP.

In the meantime, feel free to check the site out and let me know what you think.

Stay dry-- in OH this summer, that's not referencing sweat, but rain. C'est la vie!

Steve Reich Wins 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

It's.

About.

(expletive)

Time.

It's a shame that he didn't win it for one of his landmark earlier works.  Music For 18 Musicians is probably the strongest work, and Different Trains, though not my favorite Reich piece, would have been a perfect candidate from a marketing standpoint alone (and it's a really good piece to boot).

Oh well.  We'll take the victories where we can.  Ornette Coleman, David Lang, and now Reich.  Anyone care to propose the next logical winner?  Philip Glass?  John Luther Adams?  Can they give a posthumous one to Feldman, or Cage, or Miles Davis, or John Coltrane, or...

Craftiness

One thing I find very helpful is having a resource where I can quickly go and get a small but pertinent piece of advice about art and creativity. While the advice is generally not as good as the advice I'd receive from a live human, this resource would be available 24/7, whereas people sometimes need to sleep.

My favorite is the aphorisms page at Guitar Craft. Guitar Craft was started in the mid-1980s by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and what started as a course in guitar technique broadened to become applicable in almost any way you choose to use it. The aphorisms touch on truth with speed and precision, and they've been very helpful to me. If you want another one, you can just refresh the page.

It's worth checking them out. (The one that came up just now was, "Sometimes no answer is an answer, especially when the answer is no." Not always sunshine and smiling bunnies, but useful.)

The Approach of Sleep

In anticipation of Sommeil, Tanner Menard is running a great series of interviews over at his blog this week. The first interview is with experimental media artist and Creative Commons mover-and-shaker Jon Phillips. Check it out!

Tech Rehearsal: grain of sand

Teched Alicia's piece tonight, and got to run it twice. Everything went great-- can't wait to perform it! (Performance info is over in the right-hand margin.)

My rig, all lit up and such (I'll have to clean up those cables for the show):



It's hard to see the kick drum behind the bongos, but it's not hard to hear it. Mwahahaha.

Come out to the show this weekend!

Go read it now

The new post at Rands in Repose is amazing.

1969

Last night, I went to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to see Alarm Will Sound's concert/multimedia presentation 1969.  It uses music, drama, and film to re-create/interrogate/investigate the interactions between experimental music, politics, and society in the titular year.  It particularly focuses on the music and activity of John Lennon (largely via Unfinished Music and Revolution 9), Leonard Bernstein (mostly via his Mass), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (mostly via Hymnen and Aus die Sieben Tagen).  The musical performances by the group were excellent, and Alan Pierson's conducting was awesome-- clear, concise, inspiring without flailing, and (perhaps because I came almost directly from a dance conference) engaging as movement in and of itself.  Further thoughts:

1) The members of Alarm Will Sound who also arranged the works for the ensemble did a wonderful job, especially the arrangements of Revolution 9 and Luciano Berio's O King.  It's one of the most engaging things about the group-- when I first heard their acoustic performances of Aphex Twin (!) on the album Acoustica, I had to keep checking that there weren't any electronics being used.  That having been said...

2) You had to arrange O King?!  It's a Pierrot-ensemble piece.  You've got the people onstage to do the original as it stands.  Why arrange?

3) I was surprised by how different the two halves of the program felt.  Both worked, but the first half felt a little expository and just shy of cheesy-- probably unavoidable, but at intermission I was thinking, "I hope that this all gets tied together somehow."  Happily, it did, and then some.

4) There really isn't any good way to handle the Berio character, is there?  He needs to be there because of O King and Sinfonia, but many of his interjections felt extraneous or interruptive.  You could cut out his pieces, but the whole show suffers badly without O King, and if the piece stays in, then we need to find out about the person who wrote it.  Basically, it's the least awkward solution, and not-awkward might be as good as it gets.

5) Percussionist Payton MacDonald (as stuffy NY Times music critic Harold Schonberg) was hilarious, and played an awesome show.

6) I got to see the show with my good friend and fellow Banglewood alum Laura Sinclair, who's wrapping up her MM at the Cleveland Institute of Music-- it was great to see her and catch up on the last couple years.

I'm in Phoenix all week for spring break, and the coffee (at Cartel Coffee Lab) and weather are wonderful.  Cheers.

If you don't know about Kutiman, you need to check him out...

...here.

Resourceful.  Well-executed.  Smile-inducing.  Killin'.

Panel Discussion on Science and Art

Very cool news-- I've just been invited to be a member of a panel discussion entitled Structure, Experience, Context, Beauty: Common Grounds Between Science and Art on Friday, April 17, at the University of Akron, as part of the events surrounding the UA Dance Company's spring concert at EJ Thomas Hall. The other panel members include Bruno Louchouarn, a composer from LA who composed the score for Cydney Spohn's new multimedia work for UADC, and Dr. Larry Snider, Professor of Percussion at UA. It should be a great deal of fun, with ideas flying everywhere.

Other upcoming stuff:

• The KSU Student Dance Festival opens Friday 3/13 and runs throughout this weekend. It's in Wright-Curtis Theatre on KSU's Kent campus. There's some really wonderful student choreography on this show-- don't miss it! KSU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication has put together a broadcast feature about the show here.

• The Kent Dance Ensemble's annual concert runs from 4/3-4/5 in Stump Theatre at KSU. The show will include the premiere of my new work Pasir, written for Alicia Diaz, Matthew Thornton, and KDE.

Keep dodging raindrops!

Coattails

There's a really good piece on author Ian McEwan in the February 23 edition of the New Yorker magazine. It's an excellent read on its own, but there's one passage in particular that set off some sparks re the creative process...

In that passage, McEwan and fellow British author Martin Amis each offer their own comparisons and contrasts of each other's work, and the language the use can be applied to so many other things: McEwan describes Amis' writing as more "expansive and musically performative [their italics]," but that he himself is much more concerned with "the pulse of the sentence" and writing "chamber music [as opposed to] orchestral music." Amis proclaims a greater allegiance to "surface" as opposed to McEwan's interest in "undercurrent," and he thinks McEwan is "more interested than [he, Amis] has ever been in very subtle gradations."

I think it only hit me so hard because my recent work on Pasir has been on the same level of gradation-- the piece as it stands now (mid-evolution) is very much centered around the beans-in-flowerpot sound object, and the fact that it vacillates between being a granular, noisy object and a harmonic, pitch-y sort of object. Almost everything that's grown up around that sound plays off of one of those two aspects.

It's also nice to read about wildly successful artists who have processes that are similar to yours. The film execs should be calling any minute now...

So: any of you folks McEwans out there? Any Amises? Hybrids?

Pasir Update

Had the first rehearsal with Alicia, dancers, and the piece. Almost all of it works, and the parts that might not be kept are for a part of the piece where the movement isn't entirely set either. So far, it's a success...an evolving, flux-y kind of success...

For all you bit-heads, here's a screenshot of the Max/MSP patch that's controlling Ableton Live. (Click on it to see a full-size, properly-scaled version.)


Off to sleep.

Recent Losses

After Lukas Foss, George Perle, and Max Neuhaus, now Blossom Dearie and Louis Bellson have passed away. Very sad.

The Next Steps

More info on the piece:

1) The quartet idea is out-- there's not a lot of time left before the show, and I'd rather have this project be slightly smaller and totally solid rather than too big and under-rehearsed.  So it's me and Laura, or just me.

2) The piece has a title: Pasir.  Needed it because programs were due today.  The end of the piece is most likely going to draw on gamelan, so if this is music for the dance work Grain of Sand, why not go with the Indonesian word for sand?  Good?  Done.

3) Right now, the acoustic raw materials of the piece are...

... a flowerpot with some beans, and a vibraphone.  (And a computer.  You know me.)

While there are some lovely pieces for flowerpots-as-they-are (Rzewski's To The Earth, etc.), the flowerpot idea here comes from English composer James Wood via my friend Matt Apanius.  But whereas Wood asks performers to hunt down a series of flowerpots tuned to precise pitches, I'm dumping this into a sampler and mangling it in any number of ways.  Seems like an efficient and flexible way to bring sand-like sounds into the work.  (The netting keeps the beans in the flowerpot as it swirls-- otherwise, messy.)

4) Meeting with the choreographers tonight for beginning-stage idea-bouncing.  Hope they like it so far!

The Start of the Process

Last week I received and accepted a commission from my colleague Alicia Diaz to compose music for her new piece Grain of Sand, which she's choreographing with her husband Matthew Thornton.  Even though the concert is coming up fast (the first weekend in April, with Jane Eyre, the Student Dance Festival, and spring break intervening between now and then), here's why I'm excited and optimistic about this opportunity:

1) Alicia gave me a ton of very useful info right at the outset.  Basic info like the duration of the piece, info about structure/sections, basic adjectives about the movement, the music she and Matthew have been using in rehearsal...in about 15 minutes I had a pretty clear picture of the work, enough to generate sparks.

2) Alicia has also been very receptive to my early-stage mode of working, which is to think quietly until questions burst out at times that make sense inside my head, but which probably appear to other people to be pretty random and sudden.  (Joan Meggitt experienced this last Wednesday evening when I was doing some writing, and was equally gracious...)  Tomorrow I'll be giving her some samples of stuff to see if she's receptive to what I've got going on in my head. (Observation: the beginning of the process is more about throwing out what doesn't work than sculpting what does.  I need to find my materials and get to beta as fast as I can because this thing has to work for Alicia, Matthew, and me, and it has to work soon enough so that the dancers and musicians all get comfortable with something resembling a finished product before we tech.)

3) Hopefully, I'll get to work with violist, fellow Bang-On-A-Can-Summer-Institute-alum, and current-northeastern-Ohio-dweller Laura Sinclair.  Laura is currently wrapping up her master's in viola at CIM, and is heading for other places come summer.  We had some fun vibes/viola improv moments and some great conversations at BoaC, and this could generate some more good work and talk.

4) The other two members of the quartet would hopefully be dance students, playing some easy percussion parts.  They'll get a chance to see the music-dance relationship from the other side, and pending faculty approval, they'll get production hour credit for it.

5) Ring modulators, granular synthesis, Wii remotes on stage...mwahahaha...

There are also some things I need to watch out for:

1) How many mics?  How much live processing?  Feedback from monitors?  How much of an increased tech headache?  It's got to be solid enough that I'll have time to actually play the piece without worrying about tech stuff.  (Specific concern: sounds from the stage-- dancers' feet, etc.-- getting into the mics and being processed along with the music...)

2) What's going to replace stuff that gets thrown out?  Right now, I have an entire piece in my head, but very little new material ready to go as a backup.  I really hope Alicia doesn't hate gamelan...I'll find out tomorrow.

All in all, much more on the upside than the downside.  Can't wait for the next step.

UPDATE: And sometimes, you start composing and an hour later you see an entire new direction or two open up in front of you.  I meant to start writing one piece this evening; I think I accidentally ended up starting three.

Cory Doctorow sums it up

On his Twitter feed, Cory Doctorow sums up my entire post on investing in failure:

"To double your successes, triple your failures."

That about does it.

Small Updates, Round 2

Here we go...

1) Jane Eyre is getting off the ground-- we had our first two orchestra rehearsals this weekend, and the sitzprob all day this coming Saturday. Between now and then, installing new timpani heads.

2) We had the first round of showings for the KSU Student Dance Festival coming up in early March, and I'm really excited about the pieces I saw-- it's going to be great seeing these pieces grow and develop over the next month

3) I had my first performance with the Akros Percussion Collective this weekend at the Akron Art Museum, and we had a great time and a great crowd. If you came, thanks for coming out. The next Akros show is at 3pm on May 3-- it's part of the Kulas Concert Series at Guzzetta Hall on the University of Akron campus. There will be works by Gyorgy Ligeti, James Tenney, and two premieres.

4) My friend Tanner Menard deserves his own post, and when things slow down I'll be able to get to it. Tanner is a wonderful sound artist I met out in Arizona, and he's now in New Orleans. He's curating an all-night sleep concert modeled after the ones Robert Rich gave a couple decades ago, and he's commissioning audio for the 9-hour event. (Caveat: Tanner will probably end up modifying submissions to a certain degree. Also, submissions will be released under a Creative Commons license.) If you're a sound artist and would like to send him something, you can read more about the concert and Tanner's call for audio on his blog. (If you'd like to hear my first submission for the project, you can listen to it here.)

5) Three big deaths in the new-music community: George Perle, Lukas Foss, and Max Neuhaus. Perle's music is some of the most beautiful atonal music there is, and he was a very important counterbalance against the more systematized atonal music that gained prominence after World War II; Foss was the music director of my hometown home-team orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, when it was a new-music powerhouse several decades ago; Neuhaus' early LP recordings of pieces like Morton Feldman's King of Denmark introduced me to that very important body of experimental music for percussion. The music community is poorer without them.

6) We might top 60 degrees on Wednesday, and that would be welcome.

UPDATE: 5a) The NY Times remembrance of Max Neuhaus is here.

Thoughts on music, straight from Thelonious Monk...

...via Todd Reynolds. Ah, interconnectedness.

Enjoy. I'm off to Baltimore tomorrow for record Links No. 3 with Stuart and Sylvia Smith.  Cheers!

Some uplift, presented with a simple, clever concept

Sincerity + concision = pretty awesome stuff.

Betty Freeman (1922-2009)

Arts patron and new-music champion Betty Freeman passed away a couple days ago.  She had pancreatic cancer (as did Morton Feldman). She was 86.

Few people had the depth impact in the arts community that she did. She commissioned a huge variety of pieces, provided annual grants to several particularly important composers, and has had many works dedicated to her.  (A full list of those commissions/grants/dedications is available here, thanks to the American Music Center.)  Alan Rich, Norman Lebrecht, Joshua Kosman, and Mark Swed all have lovely and detailed remembrances of her; please go and read at least one of them, if not all.  (She was also quite a good photographer-- she took some classes with Ansel Adams-- and Norman Lebrecht has an extensive gallery of her photos of composers and artists at www.lebrecht.co.uk.  Search for "Betty Freeman" and you'll be richly rewarded.)

It's not just the magnitude of her support that's notable, but the manner in which she exercised it.  First, she followed her personal tastes above all else-- trendiness and groupthink didn't enter into her decisions regarding which composers and works to support.  (One could argue that her support actually directed new-music groupthink, but she supported such a wide range of composers and works that she opened up opportunities for large swaths of the field, rather than people working in a particular style or school.)  One of her earliest recipients was Harry Partch, who Freeman began supporting when he was practically destitute in the mid-1960s, and whose music and personal demeanor showed no concern for prevailing winds of fashion.  The salons that she gave in her home were often the means by which young composers were able to jumpstart their careers.  I could go on, but the links above lead to better writers with more first-hand information; please read their remembrances.

To say that they don't make them like her anymore is to imply that they made them like her before she existed.  She was unique, and will be sorely missed.