celesteh – Page 53 – Les said, the better II

Movie Music Paper

Celeste Hutchins
Proseminar
Movie Paper

The only thing cohesive about the movie Laura is that there are only two musical themes in it. The other, narrative themes are much less clear. Lydecker, as Kathryn Kalinak points out in her article, is clearly meant to be read as gay. This is most clear in the opening scene, which, Kalinak notes, had a different director than most of the rest of the film. He also plays what The Celluloid Closet called “the sissy” in the scene where he finds out the Laura is not dead, when he passes out. After Lydecker regains consciousness, Carpenter insults Lydecker for his lack of masculinity. In his most forceful and perhaps wittiest lines, Carpenter suggests that Lydecker should get back “on all fours.” He might as well called him a fag.
If Lydecker is supposed to be gay, then what is his relationship with Laura supposed to be? As Kalinak points out, Lydecker’s characterization, like everything else in the movie was disputed by the committee that assembled the film. The entire movie is just as confused and unclear as Lydecker’s motivations and sexuality. The plot has holes in it. The characters never stop to ask important questions (Why isn’t Laura surprised that her fiance is not shocked by her reappearance?). The characters themselves are half formed and waver between different archetypes and stereotypes. The only consistent character in the film is the overwhelmingly stereotypical Betsy.
Given this mess of inconsistency, poor writing, and ambiguous plot, it’s no surprise that Raskin chose to limit the musical material. The music is the glue holding the disparate visions together as a semi-cohesive whole. Having additional themes might have simply highlighted the fragmentary nature of the narrative. Instead, by having one main theme repeating over and over, Raskin creates connections between scenes and reinforces his vision to Laura’s character. Ultimately, Raskin’s vision of Laura is the prevailing one, both because it’s repetition gives it more time “on screen” than the actress gets and because of it’s lack of ambiguity. Laura’s character was clearly not resolved by the time the movie was assembled and so in the final version, if judged by non-musical cues alone, she has no real character. Is she virtuous? Is she a victim? Does she deserve her fate? Is she a “good guy” or a “bad guy?” The visual images and the dialog present no clear answer to these questions. She is just a bystander in her own story.
The music, however, changes that. The main theme is clearly and obviously connected to her. Carpenter describes the theme as “not exactly classical, but sweet.” This characterization of the theme also accurately describes Laura’s character. In the end, she is sympathetic: an innocent victim of bad circumstances who deserves something better. This is entirely a result of the music.
Kalinak describes the secondary, darker theme as being connected to Lydecker. This is much less obvious than the main theme’s attachment to Laura. Kalinak notes that the theme often appear where Lydecker does not. She claims this foreshadows Lydecker’s guilt. The connection between the second theme and Lydecker was not obvious to me when I was watching the movie. I noted that there was a second, darker theme attached to foreboding events. As a modern viewer, it seemed as if the second theme is sometimes placed with Lydecker to foreshadow his guilt. In other words, I felt that the theme did not belong to an individual, but to a mood.
Attaching a dark mood to Lydecker, also, may not soley be intended to signify his guilt, but also his possible homosexuality. Kalinak notes that unusual instrumentation was used around Lydecker. She also notes that theme heard in Lydecker’s apartment is “heard in a predominantly woodwind ensemble.” (p 171) This woodwind ensemble may have been used to highlight his sexuality. Kalinak writes, “Certain stereotypes evolved as a shorthand for sexual experience . . .. [T]hese conventions included brass and woodwind instrumentation, unusual harmonies and bluesy rhythms.” (p 166) Here she is discussing sexual experience for women. It must also carry weight when these conventions are attached to male character. She goes on to state, “The classical score frequently encoded otherness through the common denominator of jazz. For white audiences of the era, jazz represented the urban, the sexual and the decadent . . .. [T]he classical score used jazz as a musical trope for otherness, whether sexual or racial.” (p 167) While the scoring in Lydecker’s apartment is not, jazz, it does use woodwinds. Also, the second theme, which may have been attached to him, has unusual harmonies. Clearly his scoring is intended to convey sexual otherness. Woodwinds, while not jazzy in this case, were associated with jazz. Homosexuality was associated with decadence. Thus the music in the apartment theme, in addition to the staging, the dialog and the blocking, also highlights Lydecker’s queerness.
The opening scene makes him overwhelmingly gay (as overwhelmingly gay as one could be during the era of movie codes). What then is his attachment to Laura? What is his motivation for killing her? In asking these questions, I am making the assumption that audiences of the time would have been unfamiliar with the idea of bisexuality. If it is the case, and Lydecker is gay, then what does this mean for Laura’s character? The implication seems to be that she was sleeping with him. But if he’s gay, then obviously, she wasn’t. Raskin’s concept of Laura was of a good guy and not a “whore,” as Preminger characterized her. ( Kalinak p 167) Raskin’s participation in the queering of Lydecker adds credence to his vision of Laura as innocent. If Lydecker is gay, then Laura is not sleeping with him and thus perhaps is not sleeping with her other suitors and thus may be a virgin with bad luck. She thus can be “not exactly classical, but sweet” and live happily ever after. Lydecker’s motivations are then utterly unclear, but he does die at the end, which is very often the fate of gay characters in older movies. The audience can then go home happy, knowing the manliest man got the girl. The girl is innocent and will live happily ever after without the homo, who got killed. Manliness, honesty (Laura is the only suspect in the movie who doesn’t lie constantly), heterosexuality, and virginity thus triumph. The movie ends with a reminder to buy war bonds. With our values, how can we lose?

Tiffany is here!

Ok, so the moo -music thing is down. I had a power outage and that’s what made me finally pull the plug, but also, it kept getting kicked off for being idle. it only works well if somebody logs in once a day and i haven’t had time lately. also, my supercollider client thing has been crashing a LOT recently. i dunno why. it worked fine before (and thank god during) my presentation.

Ron now thinks that I should write a version of TF in supercollider, so it can play stuff directly.
Programming on the moo is really a horrible experience, btw. I mean, I want everyone to start logging on again (it’s a good way to chat w/ me while i do homework), but writing serious apps in moo code is world of pain. the deleting of biglist (#13) in past years has hosed many of the set and list utils. or something has. I recently broke the property editor. I was logged in as a wiz and tried to @dig from @notedit. I’m hoping I can find out how to fix it, you know, when I have time. but the user experience is really great. really. it’ll be even better after i finish this (blackbox) tf client.

Oh yeah, and tiffany is here!

she came all the way here to see me! I wish I didn’t have to spend so much time reading and coding and going insane.

More Moo junk

My advisor was not particularly thrilled with my midterm project. he said it was more of a technical demonstration than a piece of music. he had many many many suggestions for insanely complicated revisions. for some reason, instead of doing important homework, I implemented one of these.

He said that setting up mp3 streaming (something i intend to do soon) would not build community, it would just sort of be out there on the internet. The way to get users excited it to allow them to run their own copies of supercollider on their own machines.

so are you excited? you can now download a copy of supercollider and use it to play the same sounds that you would hear via mp3 streaming but as somewhat higher quality. Instructions are located here: http://www.xkey.com/~celesteh/computers/moosong.html
For those of you who have no experience with the technology: you will require mac osx. download the software and then download my program. Start the software. Use it to open my program. At the stop of the program, you will see a single open parenthesis. double click to the right of the parenthesis. The block of code encased by that set of parents with be highlighted. Hit the enter key while the text is highlighted. NOT return. enter. Ok, something should happen. after it settles down again, go to the next open parenthesis below it. It’s around a synthdef statement. double click to the right of that open paren and hit enter. the window that has text messages sometimes printing in it will say something like “a synthdef.” Ok, now go to the next open paren and do the same thing to send the next synthdef to the server.
Now you are ready to run the program. highlight all the text in the entire file below the closed parenthesis of the second synthdef. hit enter. my program is now running. now log into the moo and register your ip address. (instructions for this are in the link above)
Isn’t this much better than mp3 streaming?

World Music Assignment

Listen to “composed world music CD” and report back

Celeste Hutchins

Proseminar

World Music Paper

For
my World Music listening, I chose La Koro Sutro by Lou Harrison. I picked this piece because I thought
it was obviously an example of "composed world music" and because I’m
quite fond of it. Now that I’m
examining it more critically, however, I’m not as certain that it is an example
of world music.

La
Koro Sutro is
composed for 100 voice chorus, harp, organ and the "American
Gamelan." The American
Gamelan is not actually a gamelan, but rather a metalphone percussion
instrument built out of old oxygen tanks and other scrap metal by Bill
Colvig. It has its name only
because it sounds like a gamelan, but otherwise has little connection to the
real thing. This may be
problematic if this piece is to be classified as world music, since the
instrumentation is domestic.

The
language of the piece and the text is very definitely international. It is an Esperanto (La Internacia
Lingvo)
translation of the Buddhist text, the Heart Sutra. The CD helpfully comes with the
words in Esperanto and a side-by-side English translation. It was also premiered to an international
audience. The notes with the CD
explain, "La Koro Sutro was first performed for an international gathering of
Esperantists in San Francisco on August 11, 1972." The Harrison biography notes that this
performance took place shortly after a Universala Kongreso in Portland, Oregon. While certainly not every piece of Esperanta
music ever
written is automatically world music, this one, because of the nature of the
translation, should be counted as a world music text.

The
sound of the piece also sounds like world music. The tuning is very obviously not 12-toned equally
tempered. This is especially
evident in the American Gamelan sections.
The other percussion also has a "world music" feel to it. The singing also sounds somewhat non-western. It is reminiscent of some chant music,
especially when it has longish melismas on a single vowel. This may be because Harrison studied
and found inspiration from early music.
It may also be an imitation of a singing style found along the Pacific
Rim. Based on the sounds alone, I
would certainly consider this piece to be world music.

The
packaging of the CD, however, does not convey world music. The cover graphic pictures some grass
and a large anthropomorphized flower with a goatee. It is smiling at an insect that also has a goatee and three
hearts float between them. Eight
notes in various orientations dot the background. It says, in large text La Koro Sutro on the right hand side. Around the edges are names of people
involved in the project. Also on
the same disk are Varied Trio, performed by the Abel, Steinberg, Winant Trio and Suite
for Violin and American Gamelan, featuring David Abel on violin. The disk is published by New Albion
Records.

All
of the performers, packaging, Pacific Rim aesthetics and even the record label
are so very California San Francisco Bay Area, that they make me homesick. Of course, while I lived in California,
I did not think of this as purely California music, I thought of it as world
music. Lou Harrison was known not
only as a California composer, but more so as a world music composer. I did not think of his music and especially
this piece, as indigenous, but looking at it now, it very obviously was.

In
conclusion, while this CD is very obviously a California phenomenon, I still
would count it as an example of composed world music. The international Esperanto community is eager to embrace it
– the best Esperanto vocal work ever written – as coming from Esperantio, and the music synthesizes so
many ideas and cultures that I would count it as a world phenomenon.

(Esperantio is the name of a fictional
Esperanto homeland. It is
essentially international in nature.)

Sleep is a new religion

Those of you who have talked to me lately may have noticed that i sound kind of . . um . . . angsty. Those who have not talked to me may have noticed that I haven’t posted much to my blog. So I got somewhat behind on school work and decided that I should spend more time being social, because I like to be social and at the same time I decided that coffee was the Best Thing Ever. Yeah, so I didn’t sleep very much the last week or two. I’m not sure.

Yesturday I slept 12 hours. I feel mellow again. I’m quitting coffee as it is EVIL, since it temporarily allows one to go without sleep, when one should not go with out sleep.
So I think I’m more or less up to date on my school work. Everyone is still talking to me. I have memories of angst that don’t make sense, but that’s ok I guess; I think I didn’t fling too much drama around, or not everyone would be talking to me. Um, and I have a purple mohawk. Well, it’s clairol burgundy color, which is like a subtle brownish purple. I woke up from a strange dream and my pillow was missing. No, my hair was changed.
My advisor says that first year grads push themselves to the edge of a nervous break down and then become apathetic and stay that way for the remainder of their program. Maybe apathy is like a form of composer student nirvana? I don’t actually care. Sleeping makes me feel so much better that I’m considering taking a nap.
Sorry if I dumped angst on you. Next time (godess help me if there is a next time), just tell me to sleep it off.

Writing MOO themes

Ok, so my moo theme playing thingee works. it’s not mp3 streaming yet, but it will be very soon. (i hope. depending on how hard it is.) why not prepare for the web radio launch by writing your themes now?

Notes

Notes look like “4c#3”. the first number is the length of the note. ‘4’ indicates a quarter note. ‘8’ and eighth note. you can use any number at all that you want for the duration. bigger numbers are shorter than smaller numbers.
the ‘c#’ is the pitch. The ‘#’ can go before or after the letter. You can’t currently specify a flat, so use a sharp if you want an accidental. using sharps, is, of course, optional. note names go from a-g.
The ‘3’ is the octave. the lowest octave is ‘0’. the highest octave is as high as you want to make it, but if you get too high, you won’t be able to hear it. Octaves start with c, so the note below 4c3, is 4b2.
What notes to use? Just make some up. Or you could have your theme say something about your player or object in SolReSol. AOL_USER’s theme is SolReSol for “girl, I want your body.” seriously. Also, astute cell phone users will note that this is the same format for notes used by nokia, so you could go to a ring tones web site and copy some notes from a pop song or something

Adding the notes

you’ve got yer notes all picked out, now you want to add them.

@property me.theme "4c#3, 4c3, 3b2, 4c#3"
@chmod me.theme +r

That example puts a theme on your player object and marks it readable. you need to make it readable, or the program won’t be able to read it. If you want to add a theme to some other object, just replace “me” with the name of the object.
If you finally hear your theme and can’t stand it, you can change it.

@set smoothie.theme to "8a#2, 8#a2, 4c#3, 8a#2, 2d#3, 2f#3, 4c#3"

You could also write some verb to change your themes periodically. in the future, there will be support for a get_theme verb, so that you can modify your theme every time the verb is called.

Xtain Pacifists

So right before fall break, I happened upon a very small peace vigil in “downtown” Middletown. It was a few old guys with peace signs standing in front of the episcopal church. So I stood with them for a while, holding a sign with a pro-peace message on it and decided to come back the next monday after fall break. Being active is important. Maybe more so in tiny towns than in big cities where everyone expects you to be.

today I came back and it was raining, not hard but apparently enough to make the ink run on their signs, so they were standing in the church door, instead of down on the sidewalk. They were all fired up about the march on Washington, which they had gone to, but I did not. I stuck my bike in the vestibule and went to stand with them. Only one guy was holding a sign and it said “Jesus is the Prince of Peace.” I picked up some sign about the administration lying and we stood in the church door while they stood around and dissed the Green party. The Greens in CT are apparently less together than they are in CA and are apparently looking to get some of the peace crowd to join the party. These guys were tired of the Greens trying to convert them, especially since they’re so inneffective (because they have so few members) blah blah blah. Uh, yeah. I’m a Green. they’ve been tremendously successful in Germany. then the subject switched to SUVs. A woman there was talking about how tiny women drive SUVs. tiny women! They have no buisiness driving that kind of car! they get in accidents!
I switched the subject to SUVs as a symptom of class warfare, lest I start defending the right of tiny women to drive any car they damn well please. and it went around for a while until the Quaker woman standing next to me said that she was uncomfortable with the Jesus sign. I pointed out that it was impossible to tell whether the guy holding it was a pacifist or a bible thumper. He got adamant about how this was a religious peace group and he was not taking Jesus out of it. It was bad enough that they had to quit carrying the pro-Palestine signs because the local Rabbi had complained. and then the subject wended around to Jews.
It’s a small town. folks in a small town might not know the difference between Zionists and Jewish people as a group. The problem with Jews . . .. Oh but that one guy that spoke at the march was Jewish . . . blah blah blah. yikes. So I ran away.
As I was retrieving my bike, they seem to have come back to their religious (Christian) identity. “We’re a religious group!” the guy with the Jesus sign was saying. Quakers. Catholics. etc. “Actually, I’m an atheist.” I said as I snapped on my helmet. yes really. maybe, indeed I would turn to God on my deathbed, who can know the future?
they want me to come back next week, maybe so they can convert me back to being catholic, or maybe so I can convert them all to being Green.
I reported all of this to Aaron, my housemate, and he said, “wow. Greens. Women. Athesists. you’re lucky they didn’t start talking about gay people.”
indeed. I need a new peace group.

Research status

The manuscript of the play, La Misterie du Siege d’ Orleans, does not have any sheet music with it, nor any ornamentation of any kind. However, it does have many, many pauses that were intended to be filled with music. Many of these pauses contain instructions for orchestration. The most common instruments mentioned are trumpets, bugles and organ. No 15th century document even mentions the play. The librarian at the Joan of Arc center says that it has never been performed in it’s current form. some scholars believe that it is not really a play, but rather a collection of smaller action vignettes associated with the annual May 8th festivities commemorating the raising of the siege. This hypothesis seems logical, given the evidence above and also because no-one has really been able to date the manuscript. Parts of it seem to be written right after the siege and other parts appear to date from later years.

The play (or series of processional events) seems to have been written for the entire town to take part in. entire battles are re-acted out. It calls for thousands of actors. Part of the town is supposed to be set ablaze for it. It would take several days to stage it in it’s entirety. and it has over a hundred “major” characters.

The play certainly grew out of the May 8th processions, whether or not it was just a collection of past processional events. It’s possible that musical sources for it were battle songs, hymns and some courtly processional music. the librarian at the Joan of Arc Center (whose name I wish I had gotten), says that all of these sources are lost. there is some evidence around the music at the cathedral, however.

For my paper, I intend to analyze the instrumentation in connection with the action. I’m going to read _Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama_ by Alan Knight and talk to Professor Alden to figure out what to do with this.

Kids say the darndest things

Alvin likes to tell folks about his undergrad seminar that he teaches on Esxperimental music. His goal is to inundate the kids with thousands of musical examples and not much discussion. he wants them to understand structure and not talk about emotional reactions to music.
this stance has led to speculation on the part of the grad student population as to what motivated him to limit discourse in this way. One of the vetran students said that the undergrads here will say bizarre things trying to describe their reaction to a pice. really, really strange, he said.
Today, in the class I TA, the students were playing their midterm projects and the class was discussing them a bit. One of the students played a really good project. Very nice. Very tonal (as in, it used them, verses being musique concrete), very thoughtful. It was lovely. Ron gave some feedback and then the class was asked if they had comments. they’re a quiet bunch. half the time, they won’t say anything. But this one kid, who was very impressed, started speaking, kind of slowly about it. “The beginning sounded like robots who were in love, but who were fighting, like, on top of a carribean restaurant . . .” [pause] “that was full of aliens.”

took the words right out of my mouth

Bartok Paper

I read the Bluebeard article with great interest. When I was at the Joan of Arc Centre in Orleans, one of the things I learned is that the real-life Bluebeard may have been the commissioner of the play, La Misterie du Siege d’Orleans, which I am researching. While the man who became famous for his misdeeds is a character in the play, none of his future misdeeds are mentioned and he is treated as a hero. Some suggest that this is evidence that he paid for the play to be written. Others believe that this is useful information for dating the year that the play was written. In either case, Bartok and the anonymous fifteen century playwright share a commonality for casting Bluebird, a real life serial killer of children and folk-tale murderer of wives, as a hero.
Frigyesi’s interesting research suggests that Balazs’ and Bartok’s heroic casting of Bluebird does not use stereotypical and harmful gender roles, but is almost a proto-feminist piece. Unlike the fairy-tale, where Judith is punished for her disobedience, here she just runs into the essentially solitary nature of the soul. Frigyesi acknowledges that other critics feel that the original fairy-tale interpretation is present in the opera and then unearths a mountain of evidence to support his own, contrary, claim. Some of this evidence, however, is underwhelming. For instance, when analyzing the Gulacsy painting The Magician’s Garden, Frigyesi suggests that female figure’s partial disrobement indicated openness and hence masculinity. While I’m not familiar with the the painting conventions of turn-of-the-century Budapest, I can say with certainty that more recent western images of partially unclothed women with fully clothed men have not intended to convey anything but femininity and submissiveness on the part of the pictured female. While certainly The Magician’s Garden is more complicated than a modern Budweiser ad, I require more context to be convinced of Frigyesi’s interpretation. Similarly, I am not fully convinced that the ending of the opera, like the folk-tale, is not a punishment Pandora-like for Judith being too curious.
That said, the context Frigyesi provides around the opera greatly increased my understanding of the piece. Otherwise, it would have been hard to know what to make of it other than a very strange retelling of the folk-tale. The nihilistic context is immediately familiar to anyone who was a pretentious highschool student during the time that I was in school. I used to frequent a cafe where all the young patrons wore black clothes and propped up their Nietzsche tomes so that others would be able to see the author’s name on the binding of the book. We drank lattes and talked about meaninglessness and how our words could never adequately convey our angst. Had I been aware of this opera during that time, I’m sure that I would have become a great devotee.
The angst, isolation and nihilism that this opera portrays, us teenagers experienced as a facet of modernity. The Kafka story, The Metamorphosis, which was also extremely popular around Coffee Society, takes place in an explicitly modern setting and our highschool english teachers instructed us about the modernist content. Kafka, of course, lived in Prague when he wrote that, but Frigyesi talks about nihilism as a social force throughout eastern and western Europe at the time.
Bluebeard’s Castle was also written around the time that the Esperanto movement was gaining steam. The language was invented in Poland and it’s “national library” is currently in Budapest. It became extremely popular in France and Germany, but it’s strongest staying-power has been in Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary. It’s ironic then, that Bartok and other members of the intelligentsia where fretting about the utter inability of words to convey meaning that the same time that others were trying to bridge gaps between people of different languages.

Tag: celesteh