Robert Rauschenberg

There is in Rauschenberg, between him and what he picks up to use, the quality of an encounter. For the first time.

Having made the empty canvases (A canvas is never empty.), Rauschenberg became the giver of gifts. Gifts, unexpected and unnecessary, are ways of saying Yes to how it is, a holiday. The gifts he gives are not picked up in distant lands but are things we already have... and so we are converted to the enjoyment of our possessions. Converted from what? From wanting what we don't have, art as a pained struggle.

To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.

- John Cage, "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, And His Work" (1961).

Countdown to Eurovision: Could be worse, could be Des Mangan

The Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, Bjorn Erichsen, came this close to catching a clue when he complained to the BBC this week that their choice of host is a "problem" which is undermining the contest's reputation:

Terry Wogan is a problem because he makes it ridiculous. I know he is very popular, and maybe that is the reason why a lot of people watch... The BBC gets a very large audience but it chooses to represent the Contest in a certain way. They take it far more seriously in Sweden. They have a genuine love and respect for it.

Ah yes, it's all Wogan's fault that people think Eurovision is ridiculous. Apparently viewers in Sweden will be taking that singing Irish turkey puppet very seriously this year.

How dare Wogan make Eurovision a popular, high-rating show, and retain a huge viewing audience in Britain while ratings across the rest of western Europe have nosedived? What we really need is sober, introspective chin-stroking over "Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley".

Short, Stupid Sunday Science

The most popular story currently on BBC News' Science and Nature website? Great tits cope well with warming.

Hey, goth kids! Wanna know what the mysterious, mind-expanding "green fairy" of absinthe really is? Booze!

Have you heard, it's in the stars

I there some momentous astronomical event happening that I'm not aware of? Mission to Mars is on telly right now. RMIT Project Space in Melbourne has just opened a show called The Mars Project ("Tapping into primordial hopes and fears, the dream to make Mars a life-sustaining planet possibly connects us to our past more than it does to our future"), followed by - hey!

Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, the 55th Carnegie International has just opened, the theme: Life on Mars ("The question, "Is there life on Mars?" is a rhetorical one, posed in the face of a world in which increasingly accelerating global events...")

The Barbican Art Gallery in London is showing the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art ("...presents contemporary art works under the fictional guise of a museum collection conceived by and designed for extraterrestrials.") Well did you ever?

Otherwise, you can go read Opera Chic

I was going to finish my rave about Harrison Birtwistle's new opera The Minotaur, which I took my girlfriend to see at the Royal Opera House last weekend. (Warning: we've been together for a few years - this is not a good date opera!) However, I got distracted by finally working out how to make the header on the archive pages clickable to get you back to the front page of the blog. It's a good day.

The last opera I saw was Satyagraha, over a year ago; and this weekend I'll be at Southbank for Luigi Nono's Prometeo. For all the musical and dramatic power of Birtwistle's opera, thinking of it in retrospect makes it seem almost quaintly conventional compared to these two other works; but that's hardly a fair assessment.

I'm still trying to figure out what to play for my gig at Horse Bazaar (Wednesday 11 June!), so The Minotaur review may come out before or after I've seen Prometeo. If the latter, I'll try to resist making comparisons.

Countdown to Eurovision: Just when you thought Cliff Richard couldn't possibly get any sadder...

His faith may have guaranteed him an eternal reward in heaven, but that hasn't stopped an unrealised desire from gnawing away at Cliff Richard for the past forty years. He's still bellyaching over coming second in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest.

But now, the hope of salvation is on the horizon*: the winning song, Spain's imaginatively titled "La La La", is accused of having won through vote rigging by Franco himself.

According to Montse Fernandez Vila, the director of the film called 1968: I lived the Spanish May, Franco was determined to claim Eurovision glory for his own country. The investigation, which is due to be broadcast shortly, details how El Generalísimo was so keen to improve Spain's international image that he sent corrupt TV executives across Europe to buy goodwill in the run-up to the contest.

The two funniest moments in this report come when the 1968 Richard is referred to as a "starlet" (that can't be right, can it?) , and that reference to "corrupt TV executives". Apparently, duchessing is corrupt only when it is performed by TV executives, not by other businessmen, politicians, or Olympics officials.

* I know that phrase sounds meaningless, but it's no worse than Sir Cliff saying, "I'd be quite happy to be able to say I won Eurovision '68. It's an impressive date in the calendar these days." It's a cheesy song contest Cliff, not one of your cheap, Portuguese wines.

Please Mister Please

Dave Graney 'n' The Coral Snakes, "Rock'n'Roll Is Where I Hide" (1995).

(5'51", 5.46 MB, mp3)

The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.

Clear Space

The general idea is to get some more content onto the webpage over the next few weeks before doing the show in Melbourne. So far, the music page has been rejigged a little in preparation for some new stuff, and the blog's template is being dicked around with as of now. Name and subject indices have been updated to the end of April.

Magnificent Bastards

23 November 2003: I decide to make some music as quickly as possible. I open Scala, a program which generates and analyses musical scales, and ic, an I Ching simulator Andrew Culver wrote for John Cage.

In imitation of Warren Burt's 39 Dissonant Etudes, I decide to make eight one-minute pieces, each using different microtonal equal temperament scales. Equal temperament scales, including today's standard Western 12-tone scale, have a sort of left-side-of-the-brain organisational logic to them, but otherwise have no harmonic sense. I like the idea of using the sophisticated algorithms of Scala to make obtuse, inelegant scales.

Scala has an on-screen virtual keyboard, which lets you play directly with the scale you've just created. Rather than impose any compositional system, I go against my usual musical tendencies and improvise on the virtual keyboard, using the computer keyboard and mouse. The unfamiliar user interface, tuning, and piano keyboard layouts mitigate any musical facility I may have acquired over the years.

I record 24 improvisations, each one exactly one minute long. Each improvisation is recorded in a single take, without rehearsal or revision. Each improvisation is played in a different scale, ranging from 6 tones per octave to 29 tones per octave.

For my instruments, I use Gort's Midget, a bank of synthesiser patches which take up a total of just 2 kilobytes of memory. Midget has 12 patches, so I can use each one for two different scales. The choice of which patch to play which sale is decided by ic.

I also use ic to select which improvisations should be overdubbed, to create composite pieces. The result is a suite of eight one-minute pieces for one to six instruments, in various clashing tonalities…

Each mp3 is about half a megabyte of memory.
1. Lento. | 2. Semplice. | 3. Allegro giocoso.| 4. Andante mystico.| 5. Grave, mesto.| 6. Leggiero.| 7. Tranquillo.| 8. Intensivo.

New Show! Redrawing

Next month I'm presenting my piece String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) in a new version, as an installation in the group exhibition Redrawing, at RMIT's Project Space in Melbourne. With works by Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Fiona Macdonald, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, and Spiros Panigirakis. Curated by Fiona Macdonald.

The show runs from Friday 6 June to Friday 27 June 2008; opening night is Thursday 5 June, 5 - 7 pm. Hope you can make it. There will also be a floor talk by me and some (all?) of the other artists on Thursday 12 June 12 - 1 pm, followed by a thrilling live performance of the String Quartet.

As you might have guessed from the above blurb, my piece will fit in very nicely with the show's premise of redrawing, of imitation as a creative practice. More to come about the show over the next few weeks.

Also also, while I'm in Melbourne it looks like I'll be playing another live gig, at Horse Bazaar on Wednesday 11 June. More about that one soon, too.

Please Mister Please

And, "A Bigger Dim Sim" (2002?).

(2'58", 2.67 MB, mp3)