This was an interesting experiment in community building (something of a interest for me lately), but what I was most interested in was something that Anthony introduced for the first time: battle-plan modeling. Without getting into the specifics, he asked all of the core group members to model our activities using G.I. Joe action figures before we went out and actually commenced these activities in the real world performance space.

This quasi-militarized activity made me think about the different kinds of identities that artist’s perform as they seek to connect with occupations other than their own. Sol Lewitt is another artist whose work depends upon his role as a “general” of an army of assistants, as does Jeff Koons and any number of other contemporary artists (not to mention countless old masters who relied heavily on their students to complete their work).

Karlheinz Stockhausen

In addition to the “General” or “Organizer” occupation, “Scientist” was a performed identity made prevalent during the post-war avant garde, mostly acutely observed in Karlheinz Stockhausen and his cadre of musicians in black suits and lab coats as well as musique concrete innovator, Pierre Schafer. This occupational connection seemed to be both an aesthetic decision as well as a practical one. In as much as these artists were pursuing pure research into sound, they were also aligned with government-run “laboratories” funded in part by post-war reparations.

And then there are the artists who perform the identity of the “Aesthetic” or “Monk.” Into this category I might clump light artist, James Turrell, composer Morton Feldman, and earthwork pioneer Robert Smithson. For these artists, the performance of intuition and simplicity created an aura of impenetrability.

James Turrell's "Spread" (2003)

For these examples of performed identities and for other performances of “Businessman” (see Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol) and “Shaman” (see John Cage) among others, the artists assume the identity of other in order to accentuate the divide between the arts and other professional pursuits. I also think that these performances are in no way meant to be permanent. Instead, the individual might assume a series of occupational identities as they react to and comment on the zeitgeist.

This gets me wondering about what current occupations artists might perform as they seek to define their work in contrast to societal norms within the twenty-first century. Returning to the example of Anthony Braxton, one occupation that contrasts with the contemporary artist is the Military commander. Certainly Braxton’s performance directions says something about our militarized culture. Are there other occupational performances are out there that would mark similar trends?

When I first heard Laurie Anderson’s “O, Superman” I could hardly have been the intended audience. I was 12 years old and living in the kind of sheltered and homogenous suburbia that Ms. Anderson so sharply critiqued in both “O, Superman” and her epic “United States” touring show. I certainly had no real awareness of the kind of hip, downtown energies from which Ms. Anderson and her aesthetic emerged. And yet, the spare and haunting setting deeply affected me. Her deceptively soothing and controlled delivery infected my pre-teenage state and when she intoned “There’s Always Mom,” I did understand on some level that one could be loved too much.

I still enjoy listening to Ms. Anderson’s work and never really tire of her humor, regardless of the fact that it seems less potent in our irony-saturated world. But these days, when I hear her resigned slogan “There’s Always Mom,” I tend to think less of my agitated regard for authority than the cycles of memories, real or imagined, that grip my life and perhaps others, and that have the potential to paralyze us in a stasis that resembles both comfort and horror.

This work was commissioned by Iktus Percussion Quartet for their concert with the Cadillac Moon Ensemble. This performance was recorded at Saint Peter’s Church on Dec 5, 2009.

(Roy Campbell, Christopher Graham – marimba; Daniel Weinberg – vibraphone; Justin Wolf – glockenspiel; Evelyn Farny – cello; Roberta Michel – flute; Andie Springer – violin )

There’s Always Mom

JENA WALK (MEMORY FIELD) | 2006 by Janet Cardiff

Besides these analyses that highlight the iPods effects in terms of media and digital cultures, iPods may have also played a role in changing our relationships to live, non-mobile and decidedly acoustic music. I am speaking here in response to the number of articles about how the music business has been forced to rely more seriously on live performances as their main revenue stream since record sales are disastrously low. But I am also referring to the continuous buzz about venue-crossing, including how classical music is becoming cool again by playing to new audiences in (gasp) clubs around the country.

I have been privy first hand to these venue-crossing experiments and can say that they are indeed very exciting. But this is no new trend, either. Jazz and Improvising musicians have been bringing their experimental and avant garde music to cabaret spots and night clubs for decades and ever since the Beatles played Carnegie Hall rock bands with experimental tendencies have found their way onto stages otherwise graced only by those in tuxedos.

Anthony Braxton at the Teatro Metastasio, Prato, Italy

There is an argument to be made, though, that as the iPod has made it easier to listen to whatever we like, where ever we like, our understanding of the relationship between music/sound and site has been shifted dramatically. We no longer associate a specific genre of music or artist with a specific performance environment, because we don’t look for the physical space to dictate sounds. Instead, we look to ourselves and our own personal tastes for curatorial decisions. These decisions may be ironic, or simply novel, but they are always our own.

With this shift in mind, it is straightforward to see how venue curators, or artistic directors are really just giving their audiences what they want – some of the same surprising juxtapositions they are accustomed to as iPod listeners. This practice raises the question of what will happen after the novelty of this trend wears off? Will listeners yearn for the authentic experience of chamber music in concert halls and indie-rock in grimy basements?

More interesting, though, is the question of the role this trend will play in the creation of the next generation of works to be consumed by the concert-going public. Already we have seen composers and musicians altering their work to fit in with the assumed identity of a given performance space. Will the new, novel space become the new “site” of their work, or will artists look to maintain the tension between work and site and continue to offer up odd and genre-defying perspectives?

Are You My Community?

Tuesday December 15th
8:00 PM

featuring Joe Bergen, Al Cerulo, Levy Lorenzo,
Russell Greenberg, Sam Sowyrda, Mike McCurdy,
Justin Wolf and Mike Pride

Issue Project Room
At the Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY

Hope you can make it!!

Last week, I polled my friends about what their flying dreams were like. I got a range of different answers including:

The thing is…. I do fly

In my flying dreams, I always fly well in the beginning, and then I loose the ability

my flying dreams are more that my legs can, if i want, be held above the ground indefinitely.

If I try to abandon the rivers or train tracks I am no longer able to fly at all.

I did some research and came up with this description of flying from a letter that Wilbur Wright sent to the Smithsonian Institute in 1899 as he began his research on flight with his brother, Orville (it should be no wonder that these two men met with success in their lives–their names are exquisite!)

Birds are the most perfectly trained gymnasts in the world and are specially well fitted for their work, and it may be that man will never equal them, but no one who has watched a bird chasing an insect or another bird can doubt that feats are preformed which require three or four times the effort required in ordinary flight.

I am struck by the sheer audacity of Wilbur’s tone as he belittles the people who idolize “ordinary flight.” There is something kind of disturbing about someone who writes to a scientific agency (the Smithsonian) to request literature on aeronautics and then precedes to infer his own intellectual superiority.

Gets me thinking about human flight and the connections to attitude that generally characterize the quest to “take off.” There is the age-old story of Icarus whose hubris seals his fate. And there is a new movie out about Amelia Earhart and her dynamic aviatrix persona (spoiler alert: she gets lost, see Icarus). But there are also more fantastic stories like those associated with superheroes-Superman’s ability to fly comes at the cost of loneliness.

My personal preference, or at least the scenario that regularly appears in my dreams, is that flight is unexpected. Just when I need to outrun the home invaders who are chasing me with rubber belts (!), I gently levitate off the ground, rounding my back and dangling my limbs in uncertain attempts to balance myself. This may be due to some Freudian-inspired insecurities, or maybe a remembrance of a time when flight (or any desire to reach great heights) was not bold and haughty, but clumsy and awkward. This image of “The Greatest American Hero” a campy, Pink Panther-inspired romp from the 80’s might capture best of all this childlike attitude of wonder. Which leads me to question “Is solving problems good for the imagination?”

Despite this appreciation, though, I also am old enough to remember when email first emerged as a means of communication, and a time when google wasn’t the defacto search engine (whatever happened to excite?). This means that I have also been privvy to the skepticism about all things internet: Instant messaging will kill conversation; email will kill snail mail; mp3 trading will kill high fidelity audio. The gist of this perspective has always been that technology is some kind of mass murderer, stalking the territory of the traditional arts with a bloodied kitchen knife.

Of course, this has turned out to be untrue, but for different reasons than I would have thought.

Take for instance the discovery I made recently when I mistakenly entered my childhood address into google maps. I haven’t lived in my childhood house for 15 years, and my father moved out 12 years ago, but there I was staring at a satellite image of the japanese maple that my dad, brother and I transplanted from the backyard to the front on a long and hot Sunday afternoon….

I was deeply affected by the site of my old house from above. I suddenly wanted to explore my backyard again and squeeze through the fence to the alleyway, school and field behind it.

And then I noticed the creek where my brother and I used to look for crayfish under algae-slickened rocks. We would take turns leaping from rock to rock in the shallower areas, so that when we invariably fell in, we got only our pant cuffs wet.

I was so moved by the memories of these places that I felt compelled to visit this area on a recent trip home and take some photos. I didn’t see my house so much as I visited the dark and decrepit alleyway behind it (It was clear that the original wood is still holding up the alley wall because someone had erected a fence to prevent the walls from caving in). I also when to the creek, where a pvc pipe now links one bank to the other, probably as a means to drain the still swampy field.

So, as I track the serial killer instincts of the internet, I am also keeping my eye on its Proustian cousin, dangling collections of memories and unsuspecting views in front of my eyes at every turn. If I am urged to action in the physical world because of a chance encounter online, I count my computer not as a taker of life, but as a giver of one.

If you are free, come check out this concert featuring selections from “Book of Notions” which I will be performing with pianist, Emily Manzo. Click here for a preview of some of the music from a concert last spring.

When I sifted through my composition journal over the weekend, I came upon this loose thread of an idea that still resonates with me. As is often the case, this piece began with an image that I translated into the above collage:

Just as the rush hour crowds have safely made their trains, and the terminal creaks towards the evening, schools of people walk together and then away, gently sensing their proximity to each other. They shift with the shuffling stragglers, altering their paths as they hear the possibility of a unity, each one of them sounding …

The idea I had was to have individuals walking around Grand Central terminal with handheld devices that sensed their proximity to other people with similar devices and reacted sonically to the degree of proximity. (In consultation with some engineers, I figured this could be done with iPhones, though I am still not thrilled with the idea that participation would be solely based on ones entry into the trendy tech world.)

As I continue to think about this piece I have rediscovered a piece called Vespers by Alvin Lucier that has performers moving around a dark room with echo-locators, modeled after the behavior of bats. I also have given some thoughts to something Anthony Braxton calls the friendly experiencer, where the listener actually controls his/her own experience of the music by adjusting their own position in a listening environment.

These are both fluid and interesting approaches to the possibilities of walking and sounding, and I know from my interactions with these two artists that they are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential impact.

I would like to contribute the possibility that walking and sounding also be considered from the vantage point of choreography. The above image of Grand Central raises the question of whether movement of people in a given space might be dictated by their sound, both in isolation (with headphones) and as a group in relation to one another. I am not necessarily thinking of something like the soundwalks of Janet Cardiff , nor of the derive of the Situationalists. No, the urge to organize movement through sound comes from a more base desire to create group formations, not unlike those of the brilliant Hollywood choregrapher, Busby Berkeley.

Having now gone down this road, perhaps this approach seems slightly manipulative, but I am hoping this is a necessary step on the way to something more subtle. Stay tuned…

The culmination of this technique was a scene in which Sidney, the groom in the film (TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe), sings to his bride the first verse and chorus to Neil Young’s stirring “Unknown Legend.” (Here is a link to the scene). The first reading of this scene would have Sidney singing lovingly to his bride as they share their affection for each other with their guests. Throughout the scene, though, as the camera pans to the faces of the family members in the room, namely Kym (Anne Hathaway), it became clear to me that rather than a rousing anthem of the groom’s love for his bride, the song had another deeply sad meaning. The lyrics of “Unknown Legend,” paint a picture of a woman “somewhere on a desert highway” riding a Harley Davidson. Sound like a bride to you? How about a love song? Not exactly. Which left me with a profoundly conflicted sense: On one hand, what a touching song, and on the other, Rachel is alone, and her family cannot help her.

This kind of conflict, as expressed by the music in this scene, is not only rare for a hollywood film, it’s also kind of operatic. This scene plays like an aria from Wagner’s “The Ring,” I am thinking particularly of the stunning aria at the end of “Valkryie” when Wotan puts his daughter to sleep for eternity in response to her misbehavior. The crystalline shimmer of the orchestra as Brunhilde falls asleep belies the deep sadness of the father who is left alone without his favorite daughter.