NoiseGarden

new post at billsallak.com

2009-08-01T23:53:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-31T15:34:00.003-04:00

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...

2009-07-31T00:34:00.002-04:00

...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.

2009-04-20T19:15:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-16T18:01:00.000-04:00

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.)

grain of sand wrap-up/what's next/check this out

2009-04-05T21:51:00.000-04:00

The Kent Dance Ensemble shows wrapped up today, and it was a great weekend. Everyone from performers to directors to crew were really great. (It didn't hurt that, with everyone in KDE being a lady, I had my own dressing room.)

Upcoming things:
1) An intense weekend of Akros rehearsals coming up 4/10-12, in preparation for our concert on May 3.
2) My colleague Kim Karpanty's company, Travesty Dance Group, performs at Akron's Weathervane Playhouse next weekend, also 4/10-12.
3) My colleague Joan Meggitt's choreography will appear with VERB Ballets on April 16, and her Antaeus Dance Company's evening-length work Molt goes up at Cleveland Public Theatre from April 30-May 3.
4) Several events in the right-hand-margin "Upcoming Events" box are approaching as well. (KSU might be participating in the UA panel discussion via an Internet 2 hookup-- probably need to start teching that out this week.)

If you have a spare minute, please check out my friend Natalia Jaeger's chocolate/multimedia performance project. It looks awesome...er, delicious, er...just go check it out.

8am faculty meeting tomorrow...time for sleep...

The Approach of Sleep

2009-04-01T10:53:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-31T22:47:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-23T18:46:00.000-04:00

The new post at Rands in Repose is amazing.

1969

2009-03-22T14:55:00.001-04:00

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...

2009-03-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

...here.

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

Panel Discussion on Science and Art

2009-03-10T10:38:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-04T15:20:00.001-05:00

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

2009-03-03T23:49:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-18T08:33:00.001-05:00

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

The Next Steps

2009-02-17T17:22:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-15T17:40:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-11T10:11:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

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.

Small Updates

2009-01-22T21:37:00.000-05:00

The semester is off to a very good start, though at this point there's a significant amount of administrative/organizational work on the docket. In addition to me, there are five student accompanists working in the dance division this semester, and if the last two days are any indication, we're going to be making some righteously good noise. Just the requisite schedule-wrangling etc. etc...

News!

1) The recording session with Stuart and Sylvia Smith went off very well-- Stuart was able to give me some wonderful insight into his work in general and into Links No. 3 in particular, and we put the whole thing in the computer in about 2-1/2 hours. Stuart and Sylvia host an excellent three-day intensive program every summer for anyone who'd like to get a similar in-depth coaching from Stuart on his music (without the attendant pressures of a recording session)-- this year it runs June 2-4 in Baltimore. You may very well see me there.

2) My KSU colleague Joan Meggitt has a blog up for her Cleveland-based company, Antaeus Dance. You should go check it out-- both the blog and the company. Joan's work is excellent!

3) The new Gutbucket album was released last week or so, and it's really killer. You can order CDs or top-quality vinyl from their website. Check them out too!

4) My next performance is at the Akron Art Museum on February 8 at 2pm-- my first concert as a member of the Akros Percussion Collective. I'll be part of a quartet performing John Cage's Living Room Music, and I'll also be performing Stuart Smith's solo percussion/speech piece Family Portraits: Delbert. It's free, it's fun, and you're a very short drive away from Angel Falls Coffee Company for a beverage and snack afterwards. Couldn't think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon...

Thoughts on music, straight from Thelonious Monk...

2009-01-15T12:35:00.000-05:00

...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

2009-01-11T11:19:00.000-05:00

Sincerity + concision = pretty awesome stuff.

Betty Freeman (1922-2009)

2009-01-07T18:33:00.000-05:00

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.

Year-End List-Mania! With Hyphens!

2008-12-24T20:13:00.000-05:00

This being that time of year, I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring with two end-of-2008 lists. The first is the standard "My Favorite New Albums of 2008," while the second is a less-than-standard "Favorite Older Albums I Hadn't Heard Until 2008."

The first list is common, in part because it lets people express their tastes in a way that projects them as a relentlessly up-to-date and with-it person. I haven't seen the second list anywhere else, perhaps in part because it tells more about what people haven't been following closely, with all the inherent small embarrassments. ("I think of Bach as a focus of my performance, but I haven't listened to the Milstein recordings until now? Could I be that lame?")

As far as 2009 goes: I'm looking forward to the new releases from U2, Saxon Shore, and Gutbucket, as well as everything coming from the Cold Blue label (including new discs from John Luther Adams and Peter Garland). And there's always the huge 365 Days Project, which yields up new and fun things every time I go back to it. Not to mention two projects with which I'm personally involved: Stuart Smith's Links I-XI project on New World Records, and a disc from Easy Worship Operator, which we'll be recording over the summer.

Any of you with your own suggestions or lists should just comment your hearts out. Have a great holiday season, stay warm, and eat the cookies. They're probably delicious, and you deserve it.

Top 21 Releases of 2008:

20. (tie) Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Bach: The Art of the Fugue; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Hommage a Messiaen (both on DG)
19. Brad Mehldau Trio, Live (Nonesuch)
18. Rhymefest, Man In the Mirror (independent release)
17. John Hollenbeck, Rainbow Jimmies (GPE)
16. Mogwai, The Hawk is Howling (Wall of Sound)
15. Bennie Maupin, Early Reflections (ECM)
14. Meredith Monk, Impermanence (ECM)
13. The Great Depression, Forever Altered (Fire)
12. Dave Holland Sextet, Pass It On (Dare2)
11. Peter Garland: Three Strange Angels (Sort of 2008-- TSA is a Tzadik re-release of the out-of-print Border Music album from 1989.)
10. Chromeo, Fancy Footwork (VICE)
9. Vijay Iyer, Tragicomic (Sunnyside)
8. Sigur Ros, Med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaust (XL)
7. Flying Lotus, Los Angeles (Warp)
6. Steve Reich and Musicians, Daniel Variations (Nonesuch)
5. Jean Geoffroy, Bach: Sonates, BWV 1001, 1003, 1005 (Skarbo)
4. Radiohead, In Rainbows (_Xurbia_Xendless Limited)
3. David Byrne and Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (TodoMundo)
2. Marek Konstantynowicz, Cikada Ensemble, Christian Eggen, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Feldman: The Viola in My Life I-IV (ECM)
1. Nik Bartsch's Ronin, Holon (ECM)

Top 15 I discovered in 2008:

15. Slow Six, Nor'easter (New Albion)
14. Christer Bothen Trio, Triolos (LJ) (Impulse buy at Square Records in Akron. Free jazz trio with bass clarinet and Renaissance string instruments. Awesome.)
13. Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker With Strings (Verve) (Took me long enough, huh? And I used to teach jazz history.)
12. Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mother Tongue (Pi)
11. Sigur Ros, Hvarf-Heim (XL)
10. RJD2, Deadringer (Rj's Electrical Connections) (The track that samples Reich's Electric Counterpoint was playing over the store PA at Zia Records in Tempe-- the rest of it's great too.)
9. The Wailin' Jennys, Firecracker (Red House) (Heard them sing "Prairie Town" on Garrison Keillor's show. Immediately fired up iTunes.)
8. Boomish, Clearance Sale (EFA Meiden) (Thanks Rachel.)
7. Tom Waits, a swath of albums beginning with Swordfishtrombones (Island/Def Jam) and ending with Bone Machine (UMG)
6. John Luther Adams, For Lou Harrison (New World)
5. Ralph Towner and Gary Burton, Matchbook (ECM)
4. From the Kitchen Archives, No. 2: Steve Reich and Musicians, Live 1977 (Orange Mountain)
3. Nathan Milstein, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas (DG) (Aaaarggh!)
2. Hammock, Raising Your Voice...Trying to Stop an Echo (Darla)
1. Elvis Costello/Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters (Warner Bros.)

Podcast Quote of the Day

2008-12-23T22:42:00.000-05:00

From Chicago Public Radio's podcast of the rock-and-roll talk show Sound Opinions, discussing the synthesizer sounds on a recent Roots album:

...German, but still somehow human...

Accidental ouch.

Steve Jobs on the creative process and roadblocks

2008-12-14T11:09:00.000-05:00

This is from a CNN Money/Fortune Magazine interview. It's really really good. It's also part 10 of a 15-part interview summary-- you should go read the whole thing if you get a moment or 15.

"At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.
"We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film. We don't stop production for five months. We've gotten a little smarter about it. But there always seems to come a moment where it's just not working, and it's so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn't.

"Well, you know what? It's been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too.... Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, 'I just don't love this. I can't convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we've ever done.'

"And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we'd made and ideas we'd had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, 'All this work you've [done] for the last year, we're going to have to throw it away and start over, and we're going to have to work twice as hard now because we don't have enough time.' And you know what everybody said? 'Sign us up.'

"That happens more than you think, because this is not just engineering and science. There is art, too. Sometimes when you're in the middle of one of these crises, you're not sure you're going to make it to the other end. But we've always made it, and so we have a certain degree of confidence, although sometimes you wonder. I think the key thing is that we're not all terrified at the same time. I mean, we do put our heart and soul into these things."

I love that Steve Jobs' overriding criterion is whether or not he can "convince [him]self to fall in love" with the work. Not a bad standard to set for yourself.

Awesome music/dance article in today's NY Times

2008-12-14T10:54:00.000-05:00

Here it is. It's a rich, fair, and timely examination of the benefits and costs of using live music vs. taped music in dance performances. A choice quote from Joan Acocella (and somewhat self-serving-- w/r/t me, not Ms. Acocella):

"Dance audiences, I believe, have now got used to taped music, and you can get used to it, the same way you can learn to eat Spam instead of ham, or breathe smog instead of air. Your life is just diminished, and you don’t realize it until you see concerts such as we saw last month..."

I'll be in Phoenix all next week, for business and pleasure. Enjoy the season!

We are all designers of some sort

2008-12-12T19:28:00.000-05:00

A proposed procedure for designing stuff, be it communications stuff or artsy stuff. Enjoy. It's a cool blog.

I'll probably be posting a bit less over the next few weeks as I travel for the holidays. Enjoy yours.

Parody Chains/Rampant Interdisciplinary Play/Just For Fun

2008-12-07T12:34:00.000-05:00

Peter Sellers doing Olivier doing Richard III doing the Beatles. Cheers, and stay warm.

KSU Modern I/Improv Open Thread

2008-12-05T11:10:00.000-05:00

For Alicia Diaz's Modern I Improv Class:

Please use this thread for any public comments you'd like to make regarding the class-- how well it worked for you, what things could be improved, etc.

You can also send your comments directly to Alicia by email; her address is adiaz3@kent.edu.

Quick note for KSU commenters

2008-12-04T16:00:00.000-05:00

Thanks so much for your input. I'll moderate whatever's left by midnight tonight so we can talk about all of your comments a bit tomorrow.

When you comment, please make sure you click on the "Name/URL" radio button and enter your name there. You can also type your name at the end of your post if you'd like, but my moderating job gets much simpler (especially when I'm keeping track of comments) if you also enter your name under the radio button. Thanks.

A/B/G postscript

2008-12-04T11:10:00.000-05:00

In university music programs, pretty much everyone gets a weekly one-on-one lesson on their instrument with their professor. If you're focusing on building technique, this is extremely helpful, because your weekly lesson will nip problems quickly and keep you from going too far down unproductive roads. Your weekly lesson is also your weekly meeting with the carrot and the stick, should you forget why you're doing what you do.

If you're working on repertoire, though, it's a different situation. It's an A/B/G progression toward some goal, and since your lesson involves SHOWING YOUR WORK TO SOMEONE, your lesson is automatically Beta time. So instead of progressing from Alpha to Beta to Gamma, you jump almost immediately to Beta, and stay there for almost all of the process. (It's possible to do Gamma in lessons as well, usually with the preamble, "Let's just run it.")

Is this resonating with any of you musicians out there? How many of you want about a month of Alpha time before you take a lesson on your stuff? How many of you teachers are afraid that if you gave a month to a student for Alpha work, they'd end up being lazy and doing nothing? At what point can you trust your students to navigate the A/B/G process on their own?

Is this thing ready?

2008-12-03T19:13:00.000-05:00

One of the blogs in the right-hand margin is about software development and management. I discovered Rands in Repose through a good friend of mine in Arizona who told me about the care and feeding of nerds. (Was she trying to tell me something?) That blog is here because a) Rands (not his real name) is a really good writer, and b) the creative process is similar enough to software development that you can cadge some really good ideas from sources like this.

Dancers, musicians, writers, artists, and programmers are all involved in the same process: transforming a concept into a thing. That thing might be a piece of movement or sound or code, but the process is basically the same, and the software folks have devised a process with clear, discrete stages, so you can quickly and concretely describe your current project state.

(Quick aside: the Rands post on these stages deals with how these stages are losing their original meanings in the software world, but knowing about the stages themselves is what's most germane here. What's not germane about the post, but *is* amusing, is reflecting on a time when the social-networking site competition was mainly between Friendster, Orkut, and Tribe. Four years is a long time.)

The stages (with cadged-from-Rands-and-paraphrased descriptions) are:

• Alpha: "From a distance, it looks like it could become something, but please don't touch it or it'll fall apart."

Alpha is your splashing/trolling/throwing-out phase. You've found one or two germinal things, but very little exists in terms of structure or connective material. As a choreographer, your piece is in Alpha if you've got a phrase or two that you like, but no idea how to utilize them compositionally and no music. Or maybe you've got music and a couple images, but very little is moving yet. Basically, your work is in Alpha if it's too early to show to anyone else, either because there's nothing to show or because your own mind is so cluttered with half-shaped ideas that other perspectives would just muddy things up. If you're a musician, any and all note-learning time is Alpha time-- don't kid yourself about being farther down the road than you are.

• Beta: "Take a look and let me know what you think, though I'm not entirely sure it won't explode. Wear goggles."

Unlike Alpha, Beta is where you NEED other people to see it. Beta is the most commonly-seen phase in software development, because releasing a program in Beta is the best way to find out what's wrong with it-- just throw it out there and wait for the complaint emails.

(I'm running one piece of software that's truly beta-- my Quicksilver launcher program-- and it does freeze and make me force-quite iTunes every few days. Big deal-- if it's beta, things like that are supposed to happen, and when it works, I can do almost anything [yes, anything] on my computer with 5-10 keystrokes. With Quicksilver running, I can open iTunes, Stickies, NewsFire, and my Gmail account, AND log in to Facebook in about 10 seconds. It rocks.)

Got two or three large sections of work done, but unconnected to each other? Beta. Got most of the movement done and need to decide on costumes and commission a score? Beta. Asking for teachers and peers to take a quick peek and give advice? You guessed it. Most of what's seen at dance showings is Beta stuff.

Your colleagues are vital parts of Beta-- every work needs some cold examination, and you've just spent all your Alpha time falling in love with your materials. Get fresh eyes-- your colleagues will see things you can't, whether those things are defects (get rid of them) or opportunities (check them out).

• Gamma: "Unless we find a heinous problem, it's ready to go."

Software companies have ship dates; artists have performances and gallery openings. Either way, there's a point where you STOP FIXING SMALL PROBLEMS. If you're fixing small problems, or tinkering in any way, you're in Beta. (And that's fine. Fix and tinker if you want-- just don't fool yourself into thinking that you're ready for curtain.) Big problems do get fixed in Gamma, but here, literal show-stoppers are the only big problems. Tech and dress rehearsals had better expletive-well be Gamma or you're way screwed.

Getting to Gamma early can be as tricky as getting there late-- Gamma a month before your show means you've got to maintain freshness while rehearsing the same thing over and over. Don't overwork and get burned out. Don't underwork and get sloppy.

Three stages-- neat, clean, and easy to remember. You've probably felt some of these stages yourself; internal statements like, "I wonder what so-and-so would have to say about this" and, "There's not enough time to change that phrase" are affirmations that you're at a certain A/B/G place. Sure, the terms don't catch all of the subtleties of the current moment, but if I told you that my piece is kind of messy right now but would be Beta in two weeks, you'd have a pretty clear idea where it's at.

Finding the Big Question

2008-11-27T22:29:00.000-05:00

What question are you really asking?

Last Monday, I was testing out some technology stuff in one of the dance studios on campus. A couple students helped me, and they were very generous with their time (thanks, BTW).

I'm working on using the Wii Fit Balance Board as a music controller. The Balance Board is a little bit bigger than a bathroom scale and made of a similar white plastic. Each of its corners has a pressure sensor, and those four sensors send pressure information over a Bluetooth connection to whatever it's paired with. When it's paired with a Wii console, it lets you know what your body mass index is, or if you're holding a particular yoga posture correctly. If you pair it with a computer running the OSCulator program, you can change the pressure information to Open Source Control or MIDI messages, and that information can affect parameters of music programs running on the same computer. Cool.

The question that I asked at the beginning of that process was, "Can I make the Balance Board control sound in predictable, reliable, and useful ways?"

While OSCulator converts the raw data into MIDI messages, it can only send messages along five channels (four individual sensors, and their sum), so if I want to control more than five parameters in any given setup, I need something else. Max/MSP, here I come. Max also lets me adjust the "sensitivity" of the board (I can decide whether light or heavy pressure maxes out the MIDI control value) and route the incoming data channels to any controller numbers I like. Cool. Ableton Live can house the sounds and synths, and will accept MIDI control for tons of parameters. Cool cool.

The answer to the first question is yes. But it's not a very interesting or useful question. What question am I really asking?

YOU WILL SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF YOUR TIME ANSWERING QUESTIONS THAT ARE CONTINGENT, SITUATIONAL, AND LIMITED IN SCOPE AND USEFULNESS. These questions are necessary to answer-- we wouldn't spend our time on them if they were not. But every one of these little questions is connected, like branch to trunk, to a Big Question. You need the know the Big Question from which your question sprouts.

Big Questions have the following traits:

• They breed many little questions.

• They have many answers.

• Thinking about them generates little sparks in your head.

Interrogating the little question points you toward the Big Question. Why the Balance Board? The world is full of boxes that spit out numbers. Why this box?

It's a box that's perfectly suited not for musicians, but dancers. Put a couple of those boards on stage, and choreography will generate data streams that can be used to influence the sound environment. No wires. This is not cool. This is COOL.

The Big Question here is: "What interesting things would happen if dancers were able to directly affect their sound environment in performance?"

• It generates little questions. (What other tools could I use to gather data from movement? Piezo-amplified objects? Photoresistors? Theremin-style capacitive antennas? Do dancers want this responsibility on top of all their other performance obligations? How am I going to avoid a Mickey-Mouse relationship between the sound and movement? Has anyone else done this? Etc.)

• It has many answers. (I would have an new layer of technology to assemble and debug. I would be able to compose accompaniments that didn't require me or the dancers to synchronize events by rote. I would become much more deeply involved in the creation of the choreography. Many things I haven't thought of yet.)

•It generated sparks. I want to explore this.

Knowing your Big Question(s), and interrogating them effectively, will generate new material. Knowing your Big Questions will also help you remember why you do what you do when you get tired of dealing with piles of little questions.

What question are you really asking?

KSU Dance 08 Open Thread

2008-11-21T22:21:00.000-05:00

Please consider this an open thread for comments about the Dance 08 performances.

(Modern I/Improv students: comments to this thread do not count as your comment requirement.)

A little more Cory

2008-11-20T11:13:00.001-05:00

Cory Doctorow (a portion of whose speech appeared in the last post) has a new article up at Locus Magazine, entitled "Why I Copyfight." The main thrust of the article is a bit tangent to recent posts, but it's a good jumping-off point for a discussion on the nature of culture.

Failure is now cheaper...

2008-11-18T22:04:00.000-05:00

...and that is excellent news.

The more I listen to creative people discuss their work, one common thread that emerges is that you have to do lots and lots of work before the quality of the work begins to approach the quality of your taste, i.e., a lot of the stuff you do at the beginning will not be so good, and you'll know it's not so good, and you have two options: you can stop working (as many people do), or you can push through and keep working, pushing each piece of work closer and closer to excellence, closing the quality/taste gap more and more. In an earlier post, Ira Glass discussed this at length.

(Personal moment #1: my father is a very bright and honest man with a quiver of aphorisms which he takes up when a teachable moment arrives. A favorite was:

A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

Saddish news #1: the gap will always be there-- all of us are working to shrinkshrinkshrink it as best we can.)

So, to get where you want to go, you're going to have to generate a certain amount of material that's not up to your own snuff. (Saddish news #2: for a while, most of what you generate will fall into this category. If you immediately begin pleasing yourself greatly, you'll want to investigate the possibility that a) you are gifted on the level of a Daniel Tammet or Willie Mosconi, or b) your means of self-evaluation are not sufficiently incisive.)

(Personal moment #2: my father spent (and continues to spend) most of his working time in finance. The fact that I knew what EBITDA* stood for when I was TWELVE YEARS OLD may have some impact on the following analysis of the situation.)

You should minimize the cost of this failure, because you're about to buy a lot of it. You're spending your time and energy, which are finite resources, to get this failure. Get it as cheap as you can.

Happy news: here are two helpful things that will radically lower the cost of your failure, and they're both within reach.

Aid to Cheap Failure #1: The Internet. The cheapest collaboration/
publication/research tool ever invented by human beings. Say you wrote an article. Want to publish it?

1a) Reproduce that article on paper many times over (hello Kinko's), mail it to as many appropriate magazines/journals/periodicals you can think of, wait around for a while, and receive tons of rejections. (high financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio) = pretty darn high.

1b) Register a domain on Blogger.com or similar service, start typing, tell all your friends and colleagues, and see what happens. (very low financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio [same as before]) = much much lower. I'm still buying about as much failure (I'm still not selling books at Borders), and it's still not much fun, but I can afford to keep buying it long enough for it to start paying off in terms of better-quality work. (I picked this option, as you can tell.)

The transaction cost works the same from the research side-- you can hope that the article you're looking for appears somewhere in a $6 magazine or $45 journal, or you can hope it's at your local library, or wait for inter-library loan-- or you can search for the topics that interest you online. Neither is perfect, but one is way cheaper.

Cory Doctorow talks about this at length in a lecture he gave at Cambridge. The whole thing is worth a read, but YouTube has a pertinent excerpt up:

Aid to Cheap Failure #2: Higher education (of whatever flavor: community college, junior college, university, grad school, etc.)

I don't know about you, but if I'm going to spend most of my beginning creative time failing, I'd really like to do it somewhere where I'm not also relying on my creative work to pay the rent. Not that higher education is necessarily inexpensive (I'm not done with my doctorate yet, so we can wax rhapsodic about college costs together sometime), but it provides you with an environment where you don't *need* to nail it the first time. It also provides you with a small army of people (aka faculty) who will give you information that will save you from having to learn some things by trial and error. TRIAL AND ERROR IS AN EFFECTIVE BUT PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE WAY TO LEARN.

College can't come close to teaching you everything you need to know. But it does allow you to work out the kinks/fall on your face/make your mistakes so that when failure becomes expensive, you'll need to buy only small amounts of it to get your success. I wonder if this could be expanded into...

A Theory on the Macroeconomics of Creativity

In the beginning phases of the learning process, large amounts of my time/energy/intelligence/resources are used to purchase large amounts of failure as cheaply as possible. My failure is then used to purchase creative success. Like any monetary system, large supplies of currency (here, failure) create inflationary pressures, i.e., rising prices. Hence, lots of failure in the equation means that the price of success per unit of failure is quite high, and I need to acquire and spend large amounts of failure to get a decent amount of success.

Later on (say, after graduating), I'm still pouring in large amounts of t/e/i/r, but I'm getting less failure for my efforts. This is because failure is more expensive and I can afford less of it-- if I fail now, instead of just being frustrated, I get frustrated AND lose money from low ticket sales AND renting the hall AND paying the musicians, say. But, because the supply of failure currency has tightened up, the price of success per unit failure has gone way down. Same t/e/i/r input with less failure and more success. This is good because a) I'm learning and improving, and b) who wants a lot of failure hanging around? I'm going to buy it all up ASAP so I can sell it all off as soon as I can. (Incidentally, this is also why starting new careers or new large projects in adulthood can be as scary as it is-- you're going back to purchasing large amounts of failure in your new venture at a point in life when failure is very expensive. Lots of adults make it cheaper by...you guessed it...going back to school.)

Throw yourself in the deep end. Go out and fail. Interrogate the failure. Go out and fail again. Get a hug when you need one. Go out and fail again. Keep doing work. Enjoy the success. Go out and fail. Stay warm.

And thanks, Dad.

*EBITDA = Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization

Trolling for ideas

2008-11-17T18:03:00.000-05:00

Splashing works a lot of the time. However, splashing is pretty inefficient, especially if you think that the great idea you're looking for is one that someone else might have thought of already. In such instances, you'll want to put yourself in a place where there's a high probability of encountering an Already-Formed Awesome Idea. You'll be trolling instead of splashing. (Or trawling-- apparently, both spellings are acceptable.) Let's talk about some places to find AFAIs.

PostSecret is one place to go to get condensed, concentrated peeks into the emotional lives of other people. It's run by a guy in Germantown, Maryland, who started soliciting people to write their secrets on postcards and mail them to him (anonymously) for publication. Entries can be happy, confessional, tragic, elated, shy, and everything in between. The site updates every Sunday; previous installments aren't easily available because the postcards are also copied, compiled, and published in PostSecret books for purchase. If nothing else, it's a shining example of how a executing a simple idea can grow into wonderful complexity. There are also PostSecret tours and college campus events. Go check it out. (One small caution: some of this stuff gets pretty personal/intense; I have yet to see a PostSecret update that didn't contain a postcard that made me at least a little uncomfortable.)

UbuWeb contains a huge huge huge collection of avant-garde writings, recordings, images, video, you name it. A lot of it is centered around intensely experimental artists and projects like Fluxus and the like. UbuWeb is also the Internet home of one of my favorite AFAI-hunting spots: the 365 Days Project. One totally weird mp3 file for each day of the year, twice over. (Again, some of the stuff here isn't safe for little kids or net-surfing at work. On the other hand, it's also not a bad spot to go for a quick laugh. Or for unlikely cross-cultural hybrids. Or for stuff that's so badly conceived and executed that you'll immediately want to create something good to cancel it out.)

Links to these sites also live in the blogroll in the right-hand column of this page.

There are tons of places like these on the Internet; I'll occasionally re-post on this topic with new sites to check out (probably when I'm having trouble thinking of other topics to post about). Most friends I know have one or two favorites of their own-- if you know of a site like these, feel free to leave a comment about it.

These are nine important principles for the practice of craft

2008-11-16T18:32:00.000-05:00

Originally from Guitar Craft, found in an article about software development, applicable to just about everything, I put these up on my office door at Kent State on, like, day 2.

These are nine important principles for the practice of craft:

•Act from principle.
•Begin where you are.
•Define your aim simply, clearly, briefly.
•Establish the possible and move gradually towards the impossible.
•Exercise commitment, and all the rules change.
•Honor necessity. Honor sufficiency.
•Offer no violence.
•Suffer cheerfully.
•Take our work seriously, but not solemnly.

(Originally, there were ten; I removed the one that mentioned music specifically, partly because these aren't music-specific principles, and partly because I didn't like it nearly as much as the other nine.)

(Similar crafty nuggets of thought can be found here. Yeah, only one appears at a time, but keep clicking on "Aphorisms"and you'll get fresh ones.)

The Importance of Abandoning Crap/Clarification

2008-11-15T21:05:00.000-05:00

Ira Glass (host and producer of NPR's This American Life) has some excellent videos up on YouTube discussing what to do once you've been splashing around for a while, generating your raw material. He's discussing video/radio production, but it applies to any creative venture. The title of this post is taken from something he says in one of the videos; it's blunt, but he's pretty much right. Here they are:

Also, a clarification regarding the GAWRs: notions of "old" and "new" vary pretty dramatically by discipline. Perhaps the field of modern dance is by its nature skewed toward relatively recent developments, but it is worth noting that a piece such as Appalachian Spring might be a solidly-placed canonical milestone in one discipline (modern dance), while being thought of as more recent and outside-the-canon (though probably not terribly "edgy") in another discipline (music). I'm reminded of a dear friend from graduate school who proposed programming Arnold Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht on a contemporary music program. (The piece was composed in 1899; Schoenberg died in 1951.)

So when I talked about re-creating the works of masters as a primary mission of some academic arts pursuits, I was speaking from the vantage point of a university music department. Compared to a representative university music department, there is a markedly greater amount of new work created in a dance department, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total effort. Imagine a music program where each faculty member was charged with being a composer, and about three-quarters of each concert performance consisted of works less than five years old. It happens in a few places, but not many. In fact, the revival of an older work for dance is usually a noteworthy event-- I'm reminded of the special-occasion-ness of Sabatino and Barbara Verlezza's re-creations of May O'Donnell's Dance Energies (1959) and Suspension (1943) at Kent State.

Sources of Raw Material

2008-11-15T11:02:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's post about KSU's dance improvisation classes got me thinking more about creative processes, and about how I especially enjoy throwing several different things "in the pool" (so to speak) and just splashing around for a while. Obviously, the refinement process can begin once a pool has generated a piece of promising germinal material, but splashsplashsplash is VERY IMPORTANT. You've got to splash long enough so that you can momentarily forget what you're comfortable with and what you've done before, and that's when cool new things happen. SPLASHING IS YOUR BEST SOURCE OF NEW RAW MATERIAL.

Great artists who are "constantly reinventing themselves" (could we please never hear that phrase again?) are doing so via lots of behind-the-scenes splashing, throwing out 70-90% of what's generated, and keeping the awesome bits. They look like geniuses because we don't see them splashing and getting frustrated and wondering WHEN IS THE NEXT AWESOME BIT COMING FOR PETE'S SAKE. We see the result, and it's all awesome bits.

Studying the history of your discipline might lead you to believe that GREAT ARTISTS WORTH REMEMBERING generate nothing but awesome bits while TINY TINY YOU sits there splashing around (wasting time and resources that could be applied to re-creating the works of the aforementioned GAWRs). Don't believe it for a second.

Two really fun pools I've splashed around in: the one that generated Easy Worship Operator (that pool was in the spare room of a house in Tempe, AZ where Josh Carro was teaching me to use Ableton Live, and then Josh Bennett joined us because he was a cool guy), and the one with me, Jason Little, Tracy Pattison, Jenita McGowan, and Sabatino Verlezza. That pool lived in one of the Phys Ed buildings at the University of Akron in 2004, and it generated the movement piece Points on a Curve and my accompanying score Katharnae. It was the first time I was asked to perform movement onstage, with dancers, in a dancerly fashion (in foot-high platform boots, no less). Totally scared. Totally worth it.

Verlezza Dance continues to do wonderful work. I'll be going to see their winter concert in a few weeks.

Why This Is Here

2008-11-14T20:41:00.001-05:00

I like to think about art. Sometimes the discussion in my head can get a little circular, so sending the (filtered, somewhat refined) contents to something like this can help focus things a bit.

But that's not the bigger reason.

The bigger reason is that I like having conversations about art with people EVEN MORE. And this should be a good way to facilitate that.

Do you like contemplating art?

I recently moved to northeast Ohio from Tempe, AZ, accepting a position as the Dance Music Director at Kent State University. In that capacity, I accompany ballet and modern dance classes for dance majors and minors, and otherwise generally serve as the go-to person for musical questions, logistics, etc. etc., within the dance division.

On Friday mornings, the Modern I technique class becomes an improvisation class, and while I've only played two of these since coming back east, they're great fun and I want to do more of them NOW NOW NOW. While most of the music I play for dance classes is improvisatory in nature, the Friday morning sessions are closest to some of my favorite sound improvisation experiences (i.e. Easy Worship Operator, aka EWO) with the added bonus that I'm getting massive amounts of visual and kinesthetic information from the giant sea of movement happening in front of me. It's a big triple-channel sensory exchange, with decisions presented and made and flying by in a swift stream. It's easily one of my favorite parts of the week.

Now I miss Josh and Josh. Time to write a grant and get them up here.

So here it is

2008-11-13T21:34:00.000-05:00

Like blogging. Growing to hate MySpace. Here it is.