project status almighty-uh

Never fear! I am working on an essay about the "experimental" epithet I'll post here sometime soon, but for now, I'll regale you with some projects I'm working on in the actual-writing-music part of my existence.

gravity express for standard orchestra (3222-4231-Hp-Timp-2-Strings):
On my website, it says that the piece is already done. I call it: extrinsic motivation. At any rate, I haven't composed an orchestral piece in eight years, and I've never composed a good one.¹ I figured it was time. It's a train piece, alright, with some requisite effects and train-y sounds, but it veers a little more closely into tonal-reference category and is more likely than not to be seen as a "crowd-pleaser" type of piece. (I don't have many of those, either.) I estimate the finished product will probably be around 11 to 12 minutes long, which should be safe territory for a lot of contests and hopefully a few performances. To wit: I'm writing it in a less-challenging style and leaving out some of my rhythmic idiosyncrasies that seem to damn a lot of my pieces to a one-performance-and-done existence. I project that the work should be done within two weeks.

deep cover for pre-recorded electroacoustic sounds
Some time back, I posted here about a fixed-media piece I wanted to write based on the numbers station phenomena, and it actually came to fruition. I'm in the last stages of work on that piece and it ended up taking quite a different path (duh) from what I originally anticipated. It became, in the words of a colleague and friend, a "musical short story" with a number of narratives threading through the work. The piece is currently 14 minutes long - which makes it quite iffy when it comes to unsolicited performances and conferences - and while I'm typically fine about writing long pieces, this one actually feels somewhat long for what I want in the piece. I imagine there will be some editing, some remixing, and some fussing with Vegas to make it glitch-free before 2033.² I also expect it to be done within two weeks or so since it, more than anything else, is in the final stages of birth.

resemblematics for wind quintet
"But, Tom!" you cry, "You've already written this!" I can explain.
Back in 2004, I, a little bassoonist-composer, decided I needed to write a wind quintet. I did. It has sat on a shelf. Deemed too hard by a lot of undergrad performers, I decided that I wouldn't revise the existing movements but, by fiat of necessity, instead add two more. I laid out sketches for movements 4 and 5 some years ago but never finished them. I could never figure out if the piece was strong enough as a three-movement work, and I finally decided: no. I'm balancing out the long-scale form of the work, extending some idioms I was toying with while composing it initially, and wrapping up what I see as thematic loose ends. I don't have a firm end date on this, but I'll try to get this done by the middle of October. I don't realistically have much to add to the sketches, other than decide among the material.

seven selected points of reference for a lingering spectre for violin and piano
I dug out an old sketch, from 2006, of a violin-piano piece I wanted to write. Multi-movement, short movements, reduced materials and rather simple approaches. I had one movement written already: for some reason, I called it the 5th movement, and in its previous form, it clocked in at just around 22 seconds long. I plan to add about 8 seconds of music to it and I finally got around to sketching some things for the other six (!) movements. It follows an arch form (cf: Brahms Requiem) and has a rather minimal approach to pitch material. The vicissitude of the lone written movement is a guiding principle for the rest of the work - none of them can be more than a minute long, except for the 4th movement (the keystone), all must have very simple forms, and use the same kinds of pitch material. I get around this by excising certain pitch classes for certain movements and toying with my interval sequence structure.³ I want to get this one done by the end of October; seems like it could be a strong festival entry, or at least feasibly performable by good performers - and by that, I mean, if a seven-movement piece is only 9 or 10 minutes long, it stands a much better performance chance. It's also been years since my last piano-and-instrument work -- I'm guessing around seven or eight.

Oh! Before I forget, the violin/piano work (should it get performed) will be curiouser in that the movement titles are the program notes. Observe!

i. she appeared at my door wrapped in snakes
ii. a capricious spirit she seemed to have
iii. i could barely hear her whisper
iv. she held her glass up to my visage
v. and then the ghost descended lengthwise
vi. and proceeded to flash a tender iris
vii. before it shuttered and hissed away

On deck:
violin/clarinet/piano (mid-late Novemeber 2010)
wind ensemble (mid-late November 2010)
saxophone orchestra/sextet (no, really, it can be both) (mid-late December 2010)
solo piano work (finally) (mid-late December 2010)

I've also been tempted to dig out some of my older, underperformed chamber pieces and arrange them for wind ensemble and/or orchestra. I see potential in at least a few of them.

***

1. I don't count the viola concerto in this. The viola concerto, while an orchestra piece, is totally soloist-driven. It's also 40 minutes long. It's a good piece, but, damn, I retrospectively got a little too Mahler - or Feldman - on that ass.
2. I run Win7 on my primary soundmaking machine, and for years my multitracker of choice has been Cubase. Steinberg, Cubase's parent company, has been extremely, painfully slow about releasing Win7 compatible upgrades; I fear Steinberg will, if they haven't already, just dump their old platforms, scrap upgrades, and make a new, expensive version of Cubase for Win7. So, I've been stuck running Vegas - a good program for what it is - in compatibility mode, and I get inexplicable glitches here and there in complex renders. No fun. It leads to lots of swearing and panic and surgery.
3. Don't make me explain it. It's a homegrown algorithm based on fairly simple probabilistic math.

In the year 2000...

Future blog posts may include but are not limited to the following:

- Why I may never write an opera
- My (semantic) quibbles with the moniker "experimental music"
- A screed about the concept of regret and why it's good for us
- Corporate Empire Building vs Academia vs The Great Recession
- A screed about composition prizes and why they mean little to nothing
- and more!

Grunt.

Longer Questions That May Never Be Answered

If we were to put a moratorium on creative arts – that is, if we were to actively stop the creation of “new” artworks across disciplines – for a full generation, 25 to 30 years, what would be the result? How would the creative spirit thrive during that interstice? Would people create works subversively? Would the populace that survived the silence awaken with a deeper appreciation and understanding of dance, or art music, or poetry, or sculpture? Would we forget how to create? Would we forget our techniques? What of the children born during the silence – how would they cope? How would they be able to reinsert themselves into the world of artistic creation? Would they be startled or appalled at the idea of people freely expressing themselves through scores or canvases? Would we subsist on previously-created works for a full generation? If so, how is that truly different from the mainstream artistic world as it is now? What would happen to pop music? Would we enter a new Renaissance period where years of ideas accumulated creates a driving push into The Next Phase of creation? Or would we go backward?

Is there such a thing as a musical avant-garde anymore? Have we succeeded in shocking everyone into complacence, or is cultural literacy that advanced and uniform – that is, has a critical mass of understanding been met? I find it difficult to believe that either is true, but this creates a dangerous cosmic interplay of relativistic thought. A soybean farmer in Arkansas may never have heard of Xenakis or Lady Gaga – would either matter to him or her? Do we enter the dark chambers of "it’s new to you but not to me, and that’s acceptable"? Gravely seriously, though, what constitutes the New in music – other than having been just composed?

Is the term “experimental music” anymore just a marketing gimmick or a way to appeal to an already self-selected audience of cognoscenti, the pretentious, and/or gallery-hoppers? When we parse the semantics of "experimental," do we end up with the unified pluralism that all new music is in some way experimental and we need some degree of musical literacy to label something truly Experimental or more in line with Conventional models? Should we rather just make way for history and deem Experimental Music its own subgenre from the mid 1950s until the early 1980s when “experimental” veered into (or was concretized as) Performance Art?

They never taught me how to focus

Throughout graduate school -- the part of it where I had direct, weekly, and human contact with my mentors -- I was encouraged to have one main project on my docket at any given time but to dabble and keep working on sketches and other works-in-progress. One composition instructor actively challenged me to write as much as possible and find ways to write material quite different from the primary endeavor for the month / term. Retrospectively, this was to force me into modes of thinking to divorce my first responsibilities from any other ideas or brainstorms and to collect a back-catalog of sketches I could use for other, later projects without being tempted to work on too many things at once.⁰

If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,¹ a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.

How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.

Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.² I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.

At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.³ I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.

But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.

And too crippling.⁴

And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...

A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.

So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.

I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.

All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.⁵


0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.

Slowing the Phenomenon Down

I come quietly out of the still and silence of the shadows to ask the eternal question:
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?

The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?

The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).

My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.

The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.

Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.

This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.

Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.

John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.

Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.

Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!

first sample
second sample

As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.

*****

[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011

I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.

Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."

Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.

Oh, hello. I didn't see you sitting over there, poor neglected blogorino.

My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.

Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.

Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.

Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?

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Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...

EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.

a few small, important questions

Music criticism is a baffling thing. Having written reviews, the questions of objectivity and taste are always paramount. As it approaches lay audiences, what else can be said beyond an opinion? How can there be equal measures of education and elucidation about the music? At what point does criticism stop and theoretical analysis begin? Must criticism defend itself by means of observing musical works in a radically lucid analysis to justify whether a work is “good,” “bad,” or “neither?”

espionage (the multichannel way)

I have finally started the "numbers station" project, though it's likelier than not that "numbers station" will not be the final title of the work resulting from the efforts.

I've been scouring the AM and Public Service Broadcasting bands on a 1970 model Panasonic analog radio (that doubles, with a plug-in mike and a squelch controller, as a one-man public address and/or singalong machine) since around 10 PM trying to find suitably weird material to add into the piece -- primarily, obscure broadcasts or static patterns that seem out of place, which is the very essence of a numbers station shout-out.

Of course, I would probably have to explain what a numbers station is. From the end of WWII up until the late 1980s, there were a great many broadcasts in the extrema of AM broadcast bands in various countries, and moreso on shortwave radios, that are completely unexplainable or at least easily explained, Occam-style, as too weird to be part of the aural standard. Occasionally, things like "ATENCION!" or "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would interrupt the music or dead air or sideband-rich static and be followed by - in mundane cases - a string of numbers read aloud by a nondescript voice or left-field sonic signals - chimes, gongs, shouts of "ACHTUNG!", and repetitive patterns of numbers that are all, apparently, unbreakable. One extreme example is a three-minute long music-box rendition of a 1930s German pop-tune called "Swedish Rhapsodie" that is followed by the voice of a small child, possibly a young girl, reading an immensely long string of numbers in German. Yet another is a twelve-minute long rapid-fire statement of numbers in Romanian. As you could probably guess, much of these were set up, broadcast from nondescript locations -- brutalist office blocks controlled by the Stasi or KGB or someone's house with a HAM radio -- and the messages relayed at exact times, and only once, on a particular frequency, so that the listener (or "operative") could get the message, translate it, and carry out the instructions. Much like the MacGuffin in The Lady Vanishes, but far more sinister in nature, especially given such messages have occurred just before such pivotal moments as the coup attempt against the Soviet Union in the early '90s or within days of the Berlin Wall falling.

It stands to reason that this might just be an Eastern European trend, but this is not at all the case. Radio Havana has regularly been intercepted as broadcasting secret messages to assumed operatives in the US, and Numbers Stations are in fact more prevalent now than they were 40 years ago. Recordings have been made in the past ten years of numbers station broadcasts in multiple countries throughout the world, far afield from the Eastern Bloc epicenter. (This may explain why the FCC keeps narrowing the available "airwaves" the American people can use and why HAM radio operations is all but illegal now in the United States.) Nonetheless, these eerie, cryptic messages keep getting repeated, and for persons alive during the height of the Cold War and during the nadir-pinnacle of 1960s Soviet control in Eastern Europe, these broadcasts are chilling reminders of quiet, unseen, and ramification-unknown governmental operations existing just below the surface of society, just below the surface of ethical legitimacy, all just below the radar of the everyday people. They're prescient reminders today, too, that worldwide alliances, governmental and idealistic transparency, and communal trust are at the very least in the realm of fantasy, and even more sinister, reminders that as our society continues a push into making every citizen a form of technocrat glued to a computer, there is still plenty of technology out there being used for purposes of ambiguous morality, technology once in every household, technology now slowly being forgotten and relegated away from the control of the citizenry. Think about it - when was the last time, especially if you are under 40, you turned on a radio (never mind an analog radio) in your house that was not a live-stream website -- or at the very least, not on the FM dial?

So, I scanned the ends of the dials for probable signs of covert operations but all I ended up encountering were gospel stations, low-power talk radio stations from Alabama, Louisiana, and Maryland, a few religious stations, Art Bell, and a whole hell of a lot of static. I would sit on a frequency or band for roughly ten to fifteen minutes before trying my luck. Being a Friday night, and a clear one, I thought I'd be able to luck out and get at least Radio Havana or something from Fort Bragg or Camp Lejeune, but alas, I was thwarted. I remember staying up late at night with this same radio when I was in my early teens, focusing on the weather broadcast band on PSB, and then trying to listen "between the cracks" of station bands to see if I could hear the various "ghosts in the broadcasts" -- modulated voices just below the threshold of cognition -- and try to figure out if these were friends or foes...and all the while being creeped out of my mind, fascinated, as though I was hearing a code I couldn't decipher that could have been anything from "Spy: check your mail" to "go commit [atrocious deed here]."

I have found a repository of numbers stations recordings, gleaned from over 50 years of home radio listeners across the world plugging their radios into tape recorders or computers, and while a fair amount of what is there is rather mundane -- how many times can we reiterate the trope of heavy static and sidebands with a barely-audible voice repeating numbers in Spanish or Russian? -- some of what exists (in this library, anyhow) is damn near terrifying. Of course, there's the aforementioned, postmodern-foreboding music box with the child (!) repeating the secret code of numbers; one of a cool, collected woman's voice repeating, as close to a robotic fashion as I've ever heard, a short series of numbers in clear American English; heart-sinking messages following the "Lincolnshire Poacher" in what is clearly a voice owned only by an Iowan attempting to speak German; and, in probably the most bizarre example, a string of English numbers superimposed on a broadcast of German numbers superimposed on a broadcast of Russian numbers, all of which sound like they were cut and pasted on magnetic tape or primitive LPC technologies, which meant someone spent a lot of time creating this one-time use message and wanted to make damn sure it could never be broken except by the recipient, which says quite a bit about the importance of the message. And, of course, there are also the messages broadcast by NATO and the UN -- the "good guys" use the same methods.

A lot of these materials encapsulate a fair amount of, certainly, strong rhythmic material, from which I can hear numerous motivic and ostinato devices arising, and in a few cases, the static and sidebands in some of the material is so rich and dense that, given the proper treatment, I have a narrative and an underpinning in one fell swoop given the breadth and beauty of the resulting spectrum after some cleanup. It seems as though a lot of the elements for this piece are already germinal in the source materials, and all that needs to be done is let the materials' essences gestate so I can cull and pull and twist and lay this out and let it dry and see if needs any more work.

I plan to, at this point, record myself, in somewhat noisy environments, reading my own series of numbers -- in English (with a Kent accent, as much as possible), Spanish, and Swedish -- and I am trying to get recordings of numbers read in Russian and German (I welcome volunteers - for real, this time). I am also working on creating spectra and rhythmic patterns, largely based off of "radio-ish" sine chains and AM swoops, to bring out of the source material textures, and I'm wondering the feasibility of using some pre-recorded snippets of music here and there to simulate the workings of an old, analog radio. There are also sinister bits here and there: perhaps some guerilla field recording and some trick recording is in order, and it may be time to break out the "creepy" and really hammer down the ghost in the broadcast with my own forms of glossolalia-via-microphone. I have a general structure for the piece in place, but right now I'm simply sifting through all of the available alternatives and potentialities before I start layering things in the sequencer.

I'm looking forward to this project, honestly. onethousandwords is a decent piece, but pretty quickly wrought - and somewhere between musique concrete and a soundscape; there's no actual narrative structure to it. basking in the copper look was an experiment for another piece that I'll return to later. So, this will be my first "real" electroacoustic undertaking since contact clusters, or "the piece that got performed a lot in 2008-2009 and almost won Bourges but didn't" -- and it feels good to be working on something I really enjoy and am inspired by, and doubly good that it isn't "dissertation" -- which still needs to be fully completed before I can get too wrapped up in this piece.

I'll keep you posted.

we don't know each other (and we don't want to)

It's always baffling to me how quickly, once a plane lands, practically everyone reaches for their cell phones or gadgets and gizmos. It's the last thing I think about. There seems to be this desperate urge for authenticity: separated from terra firma by five or six miles of vertical lacunarity, separated from loved ones, friends, animals, flora, we reach for the very first thing that reconnects us to the world we know, our selected cocoon, the safety net and support system we hold close to ourselves, and, in some cases, guard and protect -- and maybe are even addicted to.

And yet, airplanes are completely silent, save the roar of the engines. People shunt themselves into seats, determined to survive the interceding hour or five between boarding and disembarquement, attached to everything around them, and always secretly disappointed each time they turn off their mobile device or gadget of whatever stripe. The roar of the body language says all: people hunched over a book, or busied with something business-related; arms folded, head down (or tilted far up, as though sneering from 35,000 feet would be assisted by tipping one's nose up a further few inches), legs crossed, compressing and hugging oneself, really, sheltering oneself from the audacious pursuit of human interaction and connection with perfect strangers, shuttering oneself and pretending the world around them is the only one they know, resigning themselves to ignore the potential richness or mundanity extant in the people surrounding them.

Yet we are so segmented, fragmented as a society. We have lost social graces and dignities and have become cool, reptilian, avoidant. We yearn for meaningful human connections, laud them when we think they arrive, and bemoan their absence or loss as though -- and perhaps rightly -- we have lost a family member. We do not know how to say hello, to be pleasant to each other. Is there a meaninglessness in saying hello or thank you to a complete stranger? Perhaps; there may be a naïveté here, true, but to persist in an environment where any sort of greeting or conversation -- even if it is wholly in passing and consists of nothing more than a word or two and therefore deprived of cerebral, academic, or deep spiritual or profoundly intellectual meaning -- is avoided, loathed, perhaps, or even feared (due in part to the righteous paranoia drilled into us for aeons) and is tantamount to slicing out our tongues, poking out our eyes, and treppanning our eardrums. In short, we exile ourselves to our personal Colonnus with greater sensory deprivation, and we furthermore lose the ability to find connections, find bonds, find the pleasance that is generally inherent in human beings. Everyone wants to fall in love; everyone wants to have friends and make friends. Yet we don't know how to talk to one another; we don't know how to explore the experiences of others in diplomatic fashions; we don't know how to be anything but guarded, isolated, against persons that are ostensibly strangers, all the while conveniently forgetting that at some point in the past all persons we know, love, desire, explore, and long for were all foreign to us, individual entities comprising part of a larger amorphous mass of humanity that we may or may not have sat next to on an airplane from Dallas to Chicago.

This morning, in friendly old Austin, I was procuring some coffee for myself at a coffee bar in the airport, bleary eyed and groggy. I ordered, and the relatively slowhanded barista staff took their time filling my paper vase with an artwork of jitters. On my left, a small-eyed white male in a suit and top coat, most likely a mid-level functionary for a company who at one time left his MBA program idealistic (in the Keynesian sense) that his service would become fruitful and his service would benefit the greater good of his company. About 35 to 40, closely-cropped hair. My mind wanders back briefly, thinking about a few people I love back home, thinking about the growing to-do list for the week. I see the barista put a tall cup of coffee on the counter; by this time, I'd traded places with the businessman. I reach for the cup, gently feel the scald potential as my fingers touch the paper. I hear a growly, surly "hey, that's mine!" in my right ear, and the fellow yanks up his cup, grasps his carry-on, a rotting American Tourister rollaway, and starts walking to the other side of the coffee bar for accoutrements. In a good humor, admitting I'd made a mistake, I say "sorry, guess I was too eager." Unaccustomed, perhaps, the guy wheels around and glowers at me momentarily with a half-angry, half-shocked look. It was bad enough I made an error and thought the coffee was mine; it was only worse when I admitted my fault and tried to establish a connection with him in order to simply apologise for making such a small, stupid error. How dare I break the perverse social contract that people aren't supposed to speak to one another in public if they don't already know each other! How dare I make a reversible error and attempt to make amends! This certainly does not fit into the schema of most people, and for me to doubly dissolve the bonds of this again perverse social contract is anathema to the lonely, isolating experiences so many people live daily, if not even look forward to. I wonder how many people who travel a lot for a living actually look forward to, seek out the pleasure in, checking into their hotel room for one, a room with the ability to be pitch black with the flip of a switch and flick of the wrist to close the drapes, a room with the ability to be silent -- sensory deprivation after being surrounded by persons for so many hours. I wonder how many people are physically repulsed by the thought of human contact simply by virtue of not knowing how to connect with others; I wonder how many people are loathsome of being surrounded by people simply because the isolation and fear of the other and Other deepens and becomes more pervasive and all-encompassing the more one is mired in it.

What do we have to lose? What are we so afraid of? Is it territoriality of some sort -- somehow asserting a yell of "hey, that's mine" in terms of space (which is shared, anyhow, and even private space is not "private"), or "hey, that's mine" in terms of somehow insuring and ensuring the continued integrity of our personhood? Does speaking to a perfect stranger somehow devalue us because it acknowledges the existence of another person and therefore increases their value? Are we that territorial over who we are that we are simultaneously petrified of invading someone else's personhood space by speaking to them, addressing them, acknowledging that they exist? Or are we afraid of divesting ourselves of what makes us fundamentally ourselves -- are we afraid that by initiating contact and perhaps engaging in conversation, perhaps even sharing life experiences to some degree, we lose control over ourselves? AH. That must be it. Certainly, there's more to it and no one answer (except in simple arithmetic) is ever fully correct, but this age-old, rather obvious conceptualisation of control and power. Foucault and Bauman write a lot about societal fragmentation, segmentation, and the concepts and praxis of control and power and how they are lorded over populations, loved and feared and needed by groups, shunned and hated by persons on the individual level while existing within the paradox of the social construct of total obedience and conformity to the societal order. "Society must be defended," indeed. But what is a society that doesn't speak? What is a society that validates, celebrates, even expects, a form of control where its individuals are forbidden from even making contact with each other, even for slight seconds? What is a civilization that refuses to acknowledge itself?

No civilization at all, or, the American marketplace of terrified loneliness and solipsism that is the early 21st Century.

on struggles

It occurs to me that the general consensus of the world is that the inhabitants of this Earth enjoy the conceptualization and the actualization of the struggle. So much so, that this enjoyment of the struggle precludes (and would ultimately negate) any sort of true, total resolution of that struggle.

Were the world citizenry to spontaneously achieve a Utopian idyll overnight, would not there be a nigh-instantaneous Hegelian return to something to fill the absence, a return to a grand-mal dialectic for some/any/all arbitrary reason[s]? If the human-wrought phenomena of the world met some sort of singularity, would human physics interfere and re-demand some sort of overarching jihad in some other avenue of lived experience? While there can be no darkness without light, and vice versa, there cannot not exist the inbetween realm: dawn, dusk. Tepid. Fluid yet solid. This is the murk the human race seems to be caught in, the quagmire in which we seem all too happy to occupy. Some repetitive, circular, perpetual twilight or dawn of our ideas and ideals as gods to be worshiped, striven for, fetishized. We obviously see no limit on the number of, and scope of, our perennial (or self-created, self-designated perennial) struggles, so why stop reifying the Big War of Ideas? Why stop being a sycophantic tribe blindly dancing about the ceremonial fire? Why not be phallocentric in the sheer quantity of struggles? Bigger is better. More is more. We will always find opposition, even in the face of a singular homogeneity - by virtue of the fact that it is, indeed, a unified One that leaves no room for any sort of Other. Pluralism is unattainable so long the collective end-result ideal is a hegemony of Many, a homogeneity of Heterogeny. Any struggle met with resolution can only be resolved by struggling against the resolution, can only be met with the construction of the Differance and the reshaping and re-placing of a power structure.

Any decision made by human minds/hands immediately casts out into the world its opposite effect. This creates a vapor which crystallizes and solidifies as The Struggle. By making a decision, formulating a singularity, we immediately and (im)perceptibly create a new opposition. We create the opposition against people, ideas, the world itself. By eating meat, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of environmental damage, increased world poverty and hunger, spiritual and ethical injustices. By being vegetarian, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of economic negligence or callousness, a complex of perceived (be it real or arbitrary) moral superiority, creation of the opposition to the opposition, other forms of environmental damage not shared by meat-eating...

Struggles group together. They seem to flock together, as birds, as coordinated sounds. Each one cause, struggle, jihad, seems to boost and beget any number, perhaps infinite, of closely-related phenomena, and the chain of relations created from association of struggles to one another ends up dragging the discourse of disparate ideas - say, the relatedness of carbon cap-and-trade in Montreal to women's rights in Saudi Arabia to evangelical movements in Sumatra - into a sort of loosely-woven, yet coherent, net, a net that catches all things buried/open at the hypo/epi/hypercenter which on one hand polarizes and radicalizes the root opposition movements yet on the other hand becomes a Klein bottle net, catching all yet nothing, allowing the arguments to sluice through since the collective effect of this net is to catch only itself and the entire chain of ideological discourse of present day Earth.

Crossroads or a standstill.