Reading Lichtenwanger

I am reading William Lichtenwanger’s “Henry Cowell, Composer of Music.” The first couple of pages concerns itself with Cowell’s native intelligence. (Apparently, he might have been a botanist if he’d had a solid academic foundation.) The opening epigraph features a Copland quote wherein he states that Cowell “discovered” tone clusters. Preposterous. Every toddler that ever reached up and banged a pudgy fist on a keyboard invented clusters. From what I can tell, however, Cowell did have the courage of his convictions. He wrote New Musical Resources very early (apparently “borrowing” some ideas about metrics) and wrote music accordingly. What I want to know about Cowell is why he is so important to the American music that followed him. (Of course, the answer to that question cannot be confined solely to an investigation of Cowell himself or his music. We must look at the composers to whom Cowell was important.)

Lichtenwanger leads off by reminding us that Cowell was more interested in sound variety than great originality:

[Cowell] would have argued that his desire to ‘live in the whole world of music’ led him to create patterns of sound in which great musical originality was less important than a variety of sounds and interesting results.

This quote appears to be out of sync with the story Cowell tells about himself. When he was young, he practiced hearing music in his head, even multiple lines. He noticed over time that music would appear in his mind not of his own construction, but unbidden. With effort, he found he could force these moments. This does not appear however to support the idea that Cowell was satisfied with “interesting results.” Anyone who labors to invite such inspiration is more than tinkering. Cowell himself voices his disappointment at finally writing down and playing these ideas. “Could it be,” Cowell asks, “that this rather uninteresting collection of sounds was the same as the theme that sounded so glorious in my mind?”

The foregoing is perhaps just quibbling, but Lichtenwanger does do something that is significant to our understanding of Cowell. He uses psychologist Howard Gardner’s “seven frames of mind” to present a picture of Cowell that attempts to treat this unique intelligence in a holistic way, one which sees an individual’s “scientific” tendencies and artistic tendencies as members of a spectrum.

Jazz in Public Places

As a blossoming musicologist specializing in American music, especially jazz, I am particularly sensitive to public performances of jazz. One thing that years of grad seminars have taught me is that the messages in our environment are almost always scripted. As I sit in a popular coffee and pastry establishment drinking coffee and listening to the jazz coming through the speakers above and behind me, I am thinking about the choices being made in the programming.

I notice something consistent: every track is a small group, anything from a trio to a quintet; it is all firmly in the bebop and hard bop mold, but usually toned down tracks; players on these tracks rarely exhibit the rasping tone that pushed jazz into an expression of culture and protest as it did in the 60's. The tempi do not stray far from a comfortable finger snap on the half note. It is the kind of jazz that is not threatening and allows casual listeners to identify "jazz in the background" but draws no more attention to itself than provide a patina of cool.

In my opinion, the appearance of jazz in this context is a kind of postmodernist repurposing of culture. In other words, jazz doesn't signify the meanings invested in the music by its creators; rather, the music provides an atmosphere, one that perhaps conjures romantic beat-inspired fantasies of hanging out in dark dens where jazz was once actually played.

This is further problematized by the realization that the appearance of jazz in coffee shops and bars had more to do with an economy of jazz in which players found themselves providing the soundtrack to the public's Friday night out, the only viable alternative when real concert venues were few and far between. Jazz's early repugnance to "respectable" classes arose from the economic exigency of employment. Early twentieth century bordellos, juke joints and roadhouses paid. Unfortunately, the associated stigma of those modes of employement kept musicians in low paying club scenes for years, more for the purpose of selling cocktails than expressing the artistic inclination of its musicians. And here, today, through recording, they sell not cocktails but coffee and paninis.

Form and Structure

I had a discussion the other today with a composer about form vs. structure in music. In the course of the conversation, I was forced to confront some formerly unexamined thoughts.

In the first place, are these terms synonymous or are they different degrees of a similar concept? I had been using them interchangeably in conversation until it was pointed out to me that I should clarify what I meant. After a moment, I realized that structure, for me, is a generic term for identifying a pattern in sound. It precedes the idea of form. Think of architecture: there are buildings, structures, but they take on different forms, usually as a result of their function. Similarly, a nineteenth century symphony and a baroque dance suite fulfill entirely different functions, and their forms are different, yet they both have structure.

That all seems fairly straightforward, but here is a complication: is there such a thing as non-structured? IS structure everywhere but only as a matter of degree? A building, in order to be a building, requires structure, but what of a piece of music? It seems to me that anything trotted out by the wildest experimentalist still has structure. That is, the space between sounds implies a relationship, and the sounds themselves become interstices of the silences.

Now, in that bears familiar forms, i.e. rondos, sonatas, etc. phrase units, motifs, and melodies are repeated or otherwise referred to in different configurations. However, much modern music eschews such regularity, and still, to my mind does bear structure. Such music is like obsidian, a volcanic glass that is burped up hot and rapidly cooled. Its outer form is irregular, and no two pieces are likely to be the same. Furthermore, unlike crystals whose outer manifestation is the expression of atomic level strict regularity, glasses are frozen geological fluid. At the atomic level we find not a regular lattice, yet, the 3-space is filled with irregularly arranged atoms which find themselves in relationships the atomic tendencies would like to organize, but the temperature is too low to move to more energetically efficient configurations.

It seems to me that the crystal/glass analogy has some insight for us here. What is important to note is that crystals arrange themselves according to principles that only obtain at high temperatures. It takes sustained temperatures and pressures to precipitate crystal, whereas obsidian (volcanic glass) is too quickly cooled for the regular crystal patterns to emerge. I have belabored the point somewhat, but it drives home the point that regularity and contents are not concomitant. The contents of quartz and obsidian are very similar, just as a Mozart rondo and Cage’s Concert for Piano are both sound events. In the first case, groups of notes are regularly organized, and in the second, the structure of the piece is the content taken as an aggregate and undifferentiated into regularly repeating phrases.

Simulacra and Simulation

I have started reading Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Follow me as I puzzle this out in the examples to follow. First, a definition: essentially, a simulacrum is a copy of something, the original of which does not exist. He uses several examples to get the point across that modern culture is itself a simulacrum.

Further clarification: dissimulation is the pretending that you don’t have what you do have. Simulation is pretending to have something you don’t. Dissimulation is better in that there is at least something real that is being covered up. Simulation requires no such reality to account for the act of simulation. (Incidentally, he moves back and forth between simulacra/simulacrum and simulation. I think they refer to the same concept. I will have to reread to see if there are subtle nuances in meaning for each. There doesn’t seem to be any quibbling over definitions.)

He uses several examples, one of which is Watergate. The simulation is that what happened was a scandal. But it was not a scandal, it was business as usual in politics. What it was good for was for simulating that the system corrects itself, which Baudrillard believes, is not true.

Disneyland is another example. He says that Disneyland is created to make us believe that everything not Disneyland is real. Yet, Disneyland (with its gadgetry and manipulation) is the real, and what we believe to be true, the world outside, is actually the simulation (because the signifiers of the real have already been usurped by the simulation.) In this his room of mirrors Disneyland comprises what he calls a third-order simulation.

In another example, he hypothesizes a fake hold-up. Of course, real law enforcement steps in, and if no one actually gets hurt, you still might get charged with involving the cops “for no reason.” In other words, either you get charged with the real crime, or a crime a crime against the judicial system, but “never as a simulation.” He believes that the function of the real is to cast physical activity into real categories, and has no ability to deal with real signifiers used in artificial ways. Hence, simulacra, which have usurped signifiers of the real, cannot be perceived by reality’s blind spot.

My iPhone is My Friend

Please enjoy this slideshow of my growing gallery of iPhone art. If you like it, let me know.

Waiting for BART

I shot this (iPhone 4) waiting for my transfer. I used iMajiCam Pro "kaleidoscope" setting to shoot part of the floor and rubber matting to get the four-fold symmetry creating the "frame." I used SlowShutter to get the motion effects, Photo Toaster (I think) to create color effects and to sharpen, and Photo Wizard to layer.

Never without a camera anymore!

Ahh...the companionship of coffee and books!