Tag: music

Grumpy Update

Yes, I’m grumpy and this is what I’ve been doing:
Christi came home Tuesday night without her laptop. Wednesday morning, we had to go pick up Joe/Zeppie and take him to the OM Tape archives. Apparently, last time it was aproblem because we showed up at 9:02 instead of 9:00 and made the building owners late for something. So we have to be there absolutely by nine and Christi has left Zeppie’s address on her computer, which is in San Francisco. This story is not that exciting. We arrived at 9:00 and spent several hours cataloging stuff, including something called the World Ear Project. Back when KPFA was extra cool, they would just play any sonds that anybody recorded. Tape recorders were kind of expensive then, so they had a smaller number of potential folks sending stuff in, and people who had tape recorders generally knew how to use them, so these are pretty high quality recordings. None of the tapes had numbers, but they all have titles (and the shelfs are numbered). So we were typing things like, Cat eating cat food in a backyard on Regent Street. with the actual address. Part of the reason we’re figuring out what is in the archive is so that we know what’s there, but it’s also so we can go to potential doners and say, “Here’s a fabulous recording that needs to be digitized! Give us the $400 we need to do it!” I’m not sure that this 1971 cat is going to be a big money maker. Christi was joking that we could go knock on the door of that address and see if the persons living there now want to pay for restoring the tape. Charles Amirkhanian glanced at the tape and told us whose house it used to be and a bunch of background. He can look at any tape in the archive, no matter how minimally labelled, and tell you all sorts of things about how and when it was recorded, who was there, what happened, etc. Anyway, he found a tape of the premeire of Lou Harrison’s piece King David’s Lament and got very excited about doing it at the OM9 festival and decided he had to go right away to digitize the tape and left it behind.
So after lunch, we went by his home/studio with the tape and recorded it to protool. Charles did not clean his tape haed at first, until it was questioned about how dirty it might be. Zeppie wanted to photgraph it. There was actualyl a piece of tape stuck to the head. We had already played the Harrison tape a few times when this was noticed. I think the tape might have been degrading with every play…. We spent time trying to mix it there. Maybe and hour. Then I decided maybe it would be better to do it on my own computer.
So I went home with the Pro Tools project and spent an hour or so trying to get the super-optimal mix. Then Christi and I went to Spanish class. The teacher there is obviously spending his non-teaching hours writing a thesis on second language acquistition. He spent the first 45 minutes or one hour of the class talking about how language is acquired. Interesting. I can’t imagine he would beleive in Esperanto as it doesn’t jive with his theories. He told us that the most important conversations we would have with folks would be practical. “Where is the bathroom?” “What’s your phone number?” “What’s your name?” “What’s your passport number?” etc. So we learned some shape named and colors and then he gave us cut out squares, rectangles and circles and some phrases for locating things and had us play battle ship. Then he talked extremely briefly about shops and then gave us lists of clues for where the shops fit into a map that he gave us. He said, “There is only one correct solution as there is only one correct solution for all of my exercizes. . . We can talk about why this is some other time.” La tienda de X es entre A y B. or something. I’m not sure how much spanish I learned, but I feel good about second language acquistion. I think the exercizes would work really well for a lesson 5 in Esperanto. At lesson 5, you’d have some vocalubulary and kinds know how the language works and then you could learn more vocab, like shapes, colors and locations by doing exercizes and you’d probably feel a lot less lost than I did.
Then we went back to Charles’ house with a zip disk of the Harrison piece. He was super-excited because he was reading Lou’s biography and the piece was mentioned, but the biographer didn’t know it had ever been preimered. Apparently, it’s for four hands on the piano and the players interlock arms. The piece is beautiful and is a very moving lament. I wish we could have had it at my mom’s funeral, for example. It’s wonderful. Anyway, Christi was looking at the bio and discovered that a choal version had been recorded in the 80’s and was included with the CD that came with the book. We put on the CD and found a excellently recorded, well produced, much bigger and hiss-free version of the same song. Charles said, “wow! Adn we were wasting time with that rinky-dink piano version!” yes indeed. non-profit is just like for profit, but without the profit.
So I went home and couldn’t sleep and so woke up late for my thursday volunteer in the OM office day and we missed BART so drove in. I could not wake up until I had a double latte. I had one yesterday morning too. I think I’m addicted. Anyway, so they gave me a list of people whose addresses I was suppossed to locate. This list included Lilly Tomlin, Sharon Stone, etc. You always hear about cyber-stalkers. I think they are after people less well-known. I couldn’t even find Lilly Tomlim’s agent. Not that I had an idea of how to search besdies google. I tried searching for “Lilly Tomlin” AND agent, but apparently she is widely quoted in signatures, something on the order of, “I always wanted to be someone when I grew up. I guess I should have been more specific.” Nerds love this quote. So I found many lengthy usenet archives of discussions for AI groups on intellegent agents.
Another guy that I was suppossed to look for was named “Eric Smith.” Whoever suggested him for this list had gone home. Was he a famous photographer? Does he lives in Texas and do topiary as an avocation? Has he writted books on pharmocology? All-righty. So I got through a large chunk of my list. (You can actually find a name and address for a Sharon Stone agent on a geocities site. Is it real? Who knows.) and gave up on the rest and came home and spent 20 minutes eating a banana and petting my dog and went back to Charles’ house for a meeting on the MPR project. This was 7:00 PM.
Minnesota Public Radio wants to air a show on modern music that draws material from the KPFA tape archives. They would give us money to digitize the tapes and possibly pay the people working on it. I got on the list for the project as a sound engineer or producer or composer or something. This show would be broadcast on NPR-affiliates, so people all over the country could hear it, except in much of the Bar Area, cuz KQED doesn’t do music anymore.
So we show up at Charles’ house at 7:00. We assemble in his studio and he says, “why have we called this meeting? What is this about?”
We remind him and on the meeting goes. He set the tone, kind of, with the start. At some point, he told Christi and I took keep a diary, so years from now when we try to remember details of the music scene, or a particular composer, we can go look at our journals and remember stuff. My blog, especially today, is dedicated to that vision. He also said, during an interview that will air tomorrow at 4:00, that peple who wanted to reminis about Lou Harrison could go to the Other Minds website to do so, because there would be kind of a memorial message board. Such a board does not currently exist. Christi does not work on Fridays. Really.
I got home at around 9:45 – 10:00, had a plate of noodles with canned pasta sauce (actually, bottled pasta sauce) and then typed away in my blog. Mitch would be concerned about the pasta, but my lunch was very healthy. There is a wonderful vietnamese restaurant near the OM office. I had string beans with tons of garlic and mushrooms and it came with a salad and wonderful soup (pinapple and vinegar were in it, as well as tamaters and tofu and other vegetable matter) and rice (ok, it was white rice) and an Imperial roll (this is a new phrase for me. It’s a really long fried thing, similar to a spring roll, but bigger). It was great. Especially the soup and garlic beans. The thai place across the street from it also has excellent soup. The mission is a soup neighborhood. I just made that up. I’m tired. I’m grumpy. I want shepherd’s pie and asparagus and artichokes for dinner, but I’m suffering for art.
tiffany is asleep, so I can’t work on my symphony (this situation will persist until digidesign ships digi001 drivers for OSX). Phillip Glass only has time to write music in the mornings, so he would only write down musical ideas that came to him during morning hours and thus trained himself so that now he only has musical ideas in the mornings, or so he wrote in a book that I read. That’s discipline.

Christi says that I am making all the mistakes that new symphony composers make. Apparently, if you have the whole symphony playing at once, you’re kind of assaulting the audience. She says this is a bad thing. She says, “the symphony is the strings. It’s like if you have a dress, the other instruments are just the lace.” I said, ok, I’ll cut the strongs from my thirty second introduction. She said, “No, then it’s like you’re just warpping a person in nothing but lace and it’s all see-through…” The conversation sort of went astray around then…

Lou Harrison died last night. He was a wonderful world music and percussion composer. He had a tremendous impact on classical music. He was also, a warm, talkative and friendly person. This is very sad. I’m glad I got to meet him as the OM 8 driver last year. He talked about local architecture and the SF World’s Fair, for which the Palace of Fine Arts was built and how he first heard Eastern music there and it made him want to compose. He also spoke some Esperanto with me. He claimed to hardly remember it and then rapid-fired off several sentences. My old housemate was his sign language teacher. It used to be very exciting when he would call. World-famous composer calling for my housemate! Anyway, it’s very sad and a big loss for music. He never stopped composing.

turned in my mills application today. There was a box full of protfolios in the musc department office. it was a big box and it was full. there are something like 50 people applying for teh grad program. This is not a good year to apply. But it’s ok. If I don’t get in to a school this year, U of Washington is starting a very interesting looking program in the fall 2004.
Mitch gve me some printer advice. He told me to reinstall the printer driver and then run some callibrating utilities. this helped a lot. but my printer still sucks. more score is all pixelated and not beautiful, as it should be. i think this might be a pdf problem tho. anyway, they won’t pick it on printing looks alone, although it’s not terrible and i’m going to turn it in this way, it is not wonderful enough to display. no collector will say “This is the first copy ever of Aelita with rehersal letters drawn in by hand! I must have it to display upon my wall.”

Christi told me that it would be good to include the first 8 minutes of Virtual Memory. I think that she doesn’t want to move to Los Angeles. What was I thinking when I recorded that? Bad day? Wanted to assult my listeners? I used to rename the file to new_britney_spears.mp3 and log on to Napster with it. Then I’d get on the napster top 40 chat rooms and tell folks that I had some brand new pre-release or something and try to get them to download it. The plan was that they would and then they wouldn’t bother deleting it, even though the ID3 tags revealed it to be me (and a url pointed at my web page). Then someone else would see that they had some new Britney song and download it. I deliberately misspelled her name. Anyway, this plan might have worked, except that it wasn’t an exerpt, it was a twenty minute long file and I think that Macster, the macintosh client, was messed up since nobody ever downloaded anything from em at all. and sometimes people would IM me wondering why they couldn’t get things from me. Anyway, this plan is an example of what used to be called “Guerilla Marketting.” Remeber that? Dot coms would assualt you with advertising crap, like spray painting their logos on the sidewalk and hiring people to march down the street protest-like holding signs with the name of your product on it. Something I worked on hired a flatbed truck to drive around rush hour with a billboard on the back. At the time, I worried that extra traffic in rush hour would just piss people off. Now I wonder why all the computer companies weren’t burned to the ground by angry mobs. Sheesh, the things that seemed normal then! Anyway, I think maybe I should go with Headerless Data #1 or #2 instead of this exhausting, static, assaulting thing. Actually, I secretly suspect that playing it loudly may damage your speakers. Perhaps any volume. I have no data to back this up one way or the other. Actually, the mp3 has got to be safe. The original audio file that I just listened to tho, that’s questionable. I guess if I do use this, I should convert it to mp3 and then back. That would get the hard edges out of it, like playing guitar through a speaker or playing a recording of a guitar through a speaker. Anyway, if you have hated enemies, let me know and I’ll send you a CD of possibly speaker-unsafe audio and you can play it loudly through their stereo when they’re not home. (You may want to leave while you do this and evacuate any pets.)

Late night madness = late morning arising

I should go to bed earlier or else i will look silly in my blog
Just got news that Jack Straw in Seattle will be using my score in their Toy Piano Nonette jukebox. Christi’s too. The director of JS sent me email telling me to apply to University of Washington. I guess I can visit the school when I go visit the Trimpin instillation that I’m part of. The application deadline for UofW is April 1st, so I can worry about this later.
People like my music. That’s so weird.

Jack Straw Productions has a call for scores out for a sort of a nine toy piano jukebox. People coming around put in a quarter and pick out a score and it gets played over nine MIDI-ified toy painos. My thing for this is written but it needs a name. It seems to me like a cute name could make a big difference for how often it gets played. Untiled #47 might not be as enticing as Bongo Slugs or something. As you can tell from that example, I’m terrible with titling things. The thing I wrote started out as a normal, boring, four part choral, but then I started adding 16th notes and then got modified for nine toy panos. It sounds sort of fanfarish to me, but that might be because I’m using a Quicktime MIDI trumpet to listen to it. (that means crappy computer synth trumpet.)
Some of you might wonder what a toy paino is. Well, some of you maye have seen the very baby grand paino in the living room of my abode. It’s the kind of piano Linus plays in the Peanuts specials. A lot of people want to call it a “Linus Piano.” But it doesn’t sound like a real piano either. It’s plinky, high-pitched and out of tune. I’ve just looked at toypiano.com and it’s not a porn site, so I’ll send you over there for more information. somewhere near the bottom there’s a link to pictures and another to sounds.
Sibelius, otherwise the best music notation software ever seen, does not have support for toy pianos built in! How can this be? They have Odnes Martenot built in. How much more obscure is that? Everyone who has seen Peanuts at least has an idea of what a toy piano is. But few people except Messian fans and antique electronic instrument enthusiasts know what an Odnes is. There weren’t very many Messian fans around here until the SF Opera put on Messian’s opera about St. Francis of Assisi. Then there were tons of Messian concerts. People got very excited about the opera. It got rave reviews. I had tickets to go see it, and I kept putting it off, because my mom was sick, so finally I went to see it on the closing night. She died that night, apparently right as I was getting home. The opera wasn’t very good either.

Christi told me a few days ago that people would be coming over to jam today. “Fine.” I said. “You’re playing too.” she said. I whined. she said, “It’ll be fun.” Meanwhile, Tiffany was campainging to get me to jam with her friend Ed. “I’m not really a jamming person.” I explained. He same over thursday anyway. I made synth noises and he ran them through a groovy little fx box. It was awesome. But I still whined at Christi. She said, “I need to find out how well Ed plays cello.”
So today Chand, Mitch and Ed came over. Chand played drums. Mitch got his guitar. Ed got out his cello, but it took a long time to figure out mic placement and Ed seemed timid improvising, so he started singing. He’s excellent. Chand’s a good drummer. Mitch has always been a good guitarist. Then Ed played bass and I sat out. (He was good, but all I play is bass, so I’m not in favor of this setup.) The he picked up the guitar that Chand brought. He’s a good guitarist too. Mitch is also a good guitarist. So I guess I’m in a band now. Christi’s trying to schedule the next practice. I think we should be called The IHOP Conspiracy, but I haven’t run it by Ed or Chand. Mitch thinks it’s funny.
So I guess Christi decided to be a band manager, or that I should be in a band. When my old band broke up, I kind of felt releived about it, but Christi kept saying, “You guys were really good.” But we were going nowhere. I’d like to be more serious. Mitch says no more being half-assed. Christi wants to schedule us recording time at Expression New Media (they do free recording for bands). We don’t even have any songs yet. She says, “Who cares, you sounded great jamming. Just go in and play for half an hour.”
This being pushed into music by other people thing seems to be ok. I finished my last piece of music in June. I’ve got a score for a call for scores put out by Jack Straw Productions in Seattle (no relation to the British leader), but it’s not done. Almost all the music grad school applications are due January 15th, except for Berkeley and Stanford, which are due monday and are not going to happen for me. But I don’t really want to go away. I want to build big cabinets downstairs and have a super-usable work area. But then what will I do with myself if I don’t go to school? I think I probably need a masters degree to be a serious composer. (What will I do with myself when I’m a serious composer?) Maybe I could just go to Cal Arts and keep Tiffany living at my current house and come home frequently. Maybe I could somehow complete the Berkeley application by Monday. I don’t really want to go to Berkeley. Actually, I don’t really want to do antything. Maybe somone will push me into something.

Concert Review: Women’s Looping Festival

The concert started at 7:00, which is a sucky time, because you don’t really have time to eat before then on a weekday. So imagine my surprise when, after paying the $7 admission, I saw the buffet. The concert came with food. There was a lot of meat, but also salad and hummus, the vegan standby. It was pretty good. There was alos a bar where one could purchase alchoholic beverages (probably non alchoholic ones too) and bring them into the show.
So I got to the show on time, but got distracted by the food and missed part of the first act. The music was in a long skinny room, with the stage along a long wall. It’s an intimate setting, but there was a pretty good group of people there. The first woman was mostly doing stuff with prerecorded tracks and echo/delay fx. She was talking about her cats and then about Saddam Hussein (she was pro-peace). She had some peaking problems with the mic and hasn’t quite figured everything out yet. Later I heard her say that it was her first show. So it was great for a first show. I think she was called Audio Goddess.
The second woman did world music stuff. She sang some traditional folk songs, harmonizing with her own voice through looping. She’s still learning the technology, and was explaining about how she has slightly changed her vocal technique. She has not yet found her voice for looping, but is very promising. Her music was entertaining and good. She had slight timing problems, but they’ll smooth out as she figures out the technology more. And I doubt non-musicican types heard any timing problems or anytthing at all beyond a good set. She was Unity Nguyen.
The next act was into ambient. She had a ton of percussion equipment, but mostly used her voice. Since she was ambient, her work was very static and I foudn my mind wandering, so I don’t know if she used any of her equipment or not, except I saw her bowing a cymbal. I think she could have used some more resin on the bow. She was heavy into echo fx and apparently didn’t turn down her percussion mic when she was recording vocals, since she ended up with a recording of her voice making a snare drum hum. I was too far away to see, so there may not have been a snare drum, and it certainly could have been on purpose. She did two or three songs. They kind of sounded the same to me. She has a CD out. I was not super-impressed, but my companion thought she was great. Ambient is not my favorite genre to lsiten to, but I can be fun to create. Some of her stuff sounded like it was decaying as it looped (that’s a good thing) and making space for her new tracks. That’s a cool fx (is it effect or affect?). Her name was Dark Muse.
The next person did some very light elevator techno with electric guitar over it and spoken words, but I think her mic was turned off. This was either her fault or a poor sound check. She used a e-bow thing for the guitar. So did the person previous to her. It seems to be the thing for ambient people. She also did some straight guitar stuff. She was heavy into fx. One of her synths seemed to be a guitar synth, so it made it more difficult to tell exactly what she was playing when, although certainly the sound is the most important thing. She has some wacky controller that worked like a theramin. It was set up to play discreete notes (for instance, through the guuitar synth) instead of continiuosly varying a frequency, like a regular theremin. Her work was also very static, but the songs sounded different. She travelled from someplace far, like Boulder, to play in San Jose. I think she’s blind. Her name was CQ.
Finally, Amy X Neuburg, the headliner came on. Amy X is a master of the technology. Her timing is perfect, the knows how to use a microphone and her songs are all different from each other and entertaining. Also, she has a mastery of her voice and has a wide range of pitch and style. She has a lot of experince using her set up and has a lot of practice. Her songs were often funny. They were very multilayerd. They were also multi-parted, so she would start with one theme, leave it and then come back to it. She had one song about her Neuroses that listed things she forgot to do and included “Oh no, I forgot to have children.” She laos talked about going to the grocery store at 3:00 AM while stoned and how messy her apartment was. It was the best song of the set, although the others were good. At the end, she received a standing ovation, so she came back to end with a song called Finnish, which was in Finnish.
Amy X is really in a different league than the other artists, but I think it’s a good idea to have people of varrying success and ability play the same show. Punk rock shows do this all the time, where they put on inexperienced bands, who may need more practice but show promise, on first and close with a great act who plays with mastery. New music shows (or “festivals”) typically instead borrow from the classical tradition where people of equal talent are grouped together. So an artist’s first show might have only freinds and family present. With the punk rock/San Jose Museum model, the person playing her fiorst show had a crowd of 40 people or more. Also, people can trickle in through out the evening and know that the best is on last. More new music shows ought to be run this way. Also, maybe because it was in San Jose and culture there is sparse, it was a really well-attnded show. the same show in the City or the East Bay would have had far fewer people in attendance.
Anyway, I was wondering how to send a tape to the organizer when he came on stage and announced the next festival, which he would be performing at, playing day-glo green plastic. Everyone around me (who had been to Woodstockhausen) gasped. Woodstockhausen people are everywhere!
Media reference: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/entertainment/music/4198158.htm