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.