Please Mister Please

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, "Pour Piano" (1973). Carol Morgan, piano.
(5'17", 7.25 MB, mp3)

AudioMulch 2.0 Released

AudioMulch, a program I've used in a number of my compositions, live gigs, and installations, has now been upgraded to version 2. I'm pretty excited about this, particularly because the revisions to the interface and work flow are expected to make future upgrades and additional features quicker and easier. The program is intended for novices as well as specialists. Info and 60-day demo here.

Housekeeping in The Listening Room

As mentioned before, all 12 pieces from Real Characters and False Analogues can now be heard in The Listening Room. However, I've been having trouble with some of the mp3s: Redundens 4 and all of the Stained Melodies come out distorted when I try to play them.

I'm figuring out how to fix this, but in the meantime if you have the same trouble then try the player on my NetNewMusic page.

This Is The New Music! Real Characters and False Analogues

12 mp3s for download or streaming.

John Wilkins' An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, published in 1668, proposed the existence of a universal language, written and spoken, which could communicate experience without mediation. It was believed this language could reconstruct the order of nature that God had revealed to Adam, before confounding man's language at Babel.

Many people have claimed that music is the true universal language. (The first modern artificial language was Solresol, which can be transmitted musically as well as verbally.) Unforunately, this particular species of musical fundamentalist is most likely to insist that some types of music are more natural than others*, when in reality all music is, essentially, as arbitrary as any language.

Real Characters and False Analogues is a set of twelve pieces for microtonal piano I wrote in 2004, then revised extensively in 2009. It is a sequel to Stained Melodies, adapting the compositional premise of the earlier work, that of simultaneously performing isolated pitches from different, unrelated pieces of music. Real Characters develops this idea by imposing a series of transformations to the sources' rhythm, tempo, dynamics and pitch, producing a greater variety of harmonies and textures.

In keeping with the ultimately arbitrary nature of supposedly universal languages, all compositional choices were governed by a set of chance operations; and although the piano is tuned to a special 22-note scale, only 15 notes are decided by chance to appear in any given piece. Each of the twelve pieces is named after one of the myriad artificial languages invented over the past century.

The entire set, along with detailed composition notes, can be downloaded from its page on the music website, or heard in streaming audio at The Listening Room.

* According to Nicolas Slonimsky, "The American pedagogue Percy Goetschius used to play the C major scale for his students and ask them a rhetorical question. 'Who invented this scale?' and answer it himself. 'God!' Then he would play the whole-tone scale and ask again, 'Who invented this scale?' And he would announce disdainfully, 'Monsieur Debussy!'"

Everybody's I Ching

Forget random.org; if you want true chance operations à la John Cage, for years the go-to source has been ic, the little DOS program written by Cage's assistant Andrew Culver. It imitates the I Ching's method of producing random numbers without all the original's tedious poetry and oracular pontification.

Now that command-line programs are a dying breed for the general computer user, it's great to see that Culver is keeping the program alive by putting a beta of a new, user-friendly, web-based ic on his site. If it was good enough for Cage...

Please Mister Please

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Sue Egypt" (1980).
(2'58", 3.38 MB, mp3)

Street Art, Hackney

Bird And Person Dyning

An old man is walking slowly through the room. At one end of the room a bird is twittering. Not a real bird; it's an electronic bird call. The man walks slowly towards where the sound seems to be coming from. We can hear the bird, but we can also hear what the man hears: he's wearing microphones over his ears. The sounds he can hear are played through loudspeakers in the room, so that we can hear the bird from our position, and the bird from his position, as projected from a third position. The man can also hear what he hears relayed from those loudspeakers. Inevitably, feedback occurs.

The feedback produced is a high, whistling sound which complements the bird nicely. The man tilts his head a little to one side, or hunches down a fraction. The feedback shifts to a new note, the tone becomes reedier. The slightest adjustment to how the man listens can completely change the sound we hear. Even the bird's repeated call changes: its chirping amongst the feedback causes heterodyning, creating the illusion of other, differently voiced birds chirping in chorus.

On the weekend I got to see and hear Alvin Lucier perform his 1975 piece Bird and Person Dyning, as part of the Cut and Splice festival at Wilton's Hall. The above description gives some idea of how a simple setup can create a complex sonic environment. In a single, unified action it reveals how the subtleties of sound depend on how we listen, our position in space, the size and shape of the room. There were some good pieces on the weekend, and more poor pieces, but Lucier's music still stood out for having both a depth and a transparency that the others lacked.

(Video and audio of Bird and Person Dyning is on UbuWeb.)

The traditional summer solstice ritual of hiding in my bedroom all day with the curtains drawn

This blog doesn't get much mail, except for some crazy oboe-playing guy who writes in every six months or so to complain about a passing comment I made about a music critic several years ago. So I was quietly excited to discover that a lonely missive had dropped into my inbox today.

That thrill turned to disappointment when it turned out to be be from Web Sheriff, an apparently legitimate company that perversely tries to make their emails look like spam by putting "EXTREMELY URGENT" in the subject line and using an embarrassing, fakey old-west style sheriff's badge as their logo. Best of all, despite the company name and logo, they're British; and there's nothing funnier than the British pretending to be cowboys (except for Germans pretending to be American Indians.) I guess the old company logo of Robin Hood being persecuted by Lily Allen's dad didn't inspire as much confidence.

Anyway, this EXTREMELY URGENT email from Deborah Sykes was a "DMCA REQUEST" to "remove Infringed Title(s) from Infringing File Location(s)" I thought the DMCA was an American law, so I'm not sure why a British company is so keen on enforcing it. I haven't bothered to look this up because the file in question had already been taken down, so I guess their urgency wasn't extreme enough.

You're probably wondering what file on my website the sheriff (head office in Wiltshire, not Nottingham) was so exercised about. It was because I had briefly included a copy of that massive Van Morrison hit, "Thirty Two" - all sixty-one seconds of it - in Please Mister Please. Van's time here has come and gone, but you can recreate the magic of the song in your own homes by strumming any old chord on an acoustic guitar and reciting over the top these deathless lyrics:

I see, you see, we'll get a guitar,
yeah, we'll get a guitar
and, oh, we'll get, we'll get three guitars,
No!, No!!, we'll get four guitars
and we'll get Herbie Lovelle to play drums,
and we'll do, the
"Sha-la", sha...
We'll do the sha-, sha-la bit.
"Sha-la, sha-, sha-la, sha-la", we'll do it,
we'll get together, uunghh, we'll get
uunghh, ttcchh, uugnhh-uunghh-uunghh, like that,
and we'll do the sha-la bit and then,
then, then, and we'll get, we'll get sixteen guitars,
and then, then we'll play it,
and then we'll do that one, yeah.
Let me hear ya' do that again.
Over and over, Bert Berns song, over...
[clack, clack-clack, clack]

Update In C

As promised, video of the busked performance of Terry Riley's In C on the weekend.

Please Mister Please

Edgar Varèse, "Hyperprism" (1923). Ensemble Intercontemporain /Pierre Boulez.
(4'15", 3.52 MB, mp3)

Better Than Joshua Bell

Sorry for the last few days' silence. I spent a long weeked catching up on some drinking with an old friend who was in town. This means I missed the chance to see some quality busking on Southbank, where The Ramshackle Orchestra for Musequality gave a kerbside performance of Terry Riley's In C. To quote Petemaskreplica:

It's immensely satisfying to play. It's something to do with the autonomy. What you play, and how, and when, is up to you, and it's thrilling to find all sorts of unexpected combinations emerging as a result of your decisions. You get into the groove, and play around, reacting to what the other musicians are doing, they reacting to you in turn.... The whole 45 minutes or so was filmed, so I hope to add YouTube links soon!

Other Minds has the complete score of In C available online, in PDF format.