Talking With Bob and MB

Last month, on the birth date of Arthur Jarvinen, I posted an article called An Antenna Repairmen Performance.   The members of the Repairmen were Jarvinen, M.B. Gordy and Robert Fernandez.  The post included a video of their magnificent joint composition Ghatam in live performance.  (Go.  Listen.  Watch.)

Yes, M.B. goes by his initials.  Everyone calls him M.B..  Most people don't know what the letters stand for.  I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to use periods.  Robert usually gets called Bob.  Everyone knows what 'Bob' stands for.

That post prompted the three of us to get together to talk about the Repairmen's history.  We met last Wednesday.  I recorded everything for use in future Mixed Meters posts.  This post is a quickie to say thank you.  Thanks, guys.

Here's an early picture of the trio - scanned from a xerox of a photograph.  Bob said it was taken in 1978 or 79 at CalArts where the Repairmen, all students of John Bergamo, met.

L to R: M.B. with hair and mustache, Art with hair and sideburns and Bob with hair and beard.  (I love the video camera on the left and the shadow of same on the right.)

You may well wonder what these guys are doing.  Certainly not conventional percussion music.  The tall cylindrical object is a resonant metal artillery shell to which long strips of masking tape have been affixed.  The shell was amplified.  The trio slowly pulled the strips of tape away from the shell creating sounds.  Neither M.B. nor Bob could remember a title.  We'll also have to imagine what it sounded like.

I asked about how the group got started.  Bob answered:

We gravitated towards each other.  We were in the new music ensemble together.  We had a lot of likes, our personalities.  Art could see that we had chops, we could play already.  We were getting better.  And he said 'You know, this might be something.'  It was his idea.  He said 'Let's do a trio.  Let's start writing.'  It was wide open.

M.B. added:

And it was going to be not just a percussion trio because it was pretty much going to be whatever it was.  Sort of a Performance-Art-for-Percussion trio because we did plenty of pieces where there wasn't a whole lot of percussion going on.

Back to Bob:

We started kind of sifting what was out there for trios.  Art started writing text, you know, just to push the boundaries.  We knew that text could be involved, that non percussion activities could be involved.  There was theater, how hard could [that] be?

In our discussion we covered the piece Ghatam in detail.  They gave me a lot of information about the history and structure of Ghatam.   Watch for that in some future Mixed Meters post.

After 3 hours of talk and laughter hunger overtook us.  Here's a picture of M.B. and Bob taken later that evening, before the food came.

THE DANCE CLASS COUNTING STORY

I'm not very good at telling jokes.  One joke I do tell, however, is about how dancers count to three or to seven.  Musicians often find this very amusing.

Unfortunately the joke cannot be conveyed through written language.  It must be told by someone out loud and in rhythm.  I've mentioned this before in the post Counting to Seven.  Back then I didn't try to tell the joke.

It turns out that this bit of humor is based on reality.  It actually happened to M.B.  Here's audio of the three of us discussing how it happened.  (Note: To protect the innocent I removed some personal details about the dancer from the clip.)

Listen right here:



(If that doesn't work try this page instead.)

BOMBED

Somewhere, back in history, I wrote a piece for the Antenna Repairmen.  It was called Bombed.  I've mentioned Bombed before here.  (That page has a story about how Frank Zappa reacted to Bombed.)

Bombed is in three movements.  Here are the program notes for each movement.

1. Into the Stone Age – Three young Americans, believing the sound-bites of their leaders, participate in the destruction of a less significant culture.
2. Pan Am 103 – Wrapped up in their own problems and fears, they have no conception of what is happening around them.
3. Out of Your Mind – Our heroes, trying to walk home after the bars close, cannot remember the music they heard that day.

Bombed came up in our three hour marathon Wednesday.  Here's Bob talking about it.

That was a fun piece.  That was a hard piece too.  We played it pretty damn well.  You know why I think we liked that piece so much?  Not because it was well written.  To me it epitomized the Repairmen, the kind of weird things that we did, the odd rhythms.  'You're playing seven?  I've got my six in that time.'  It was no problem for us, we got so used to doing that.

You can listen to Bombed here.  You can even download the score here.

A Tribute to John Bergamo

One year ago composer, percussionist and CalArts faculty member John Bergamo passed away. He was a talented and inspiring man. Back then I wrote about him in this post.

Last night CalArts held a tribute to John.  It took the form of a concert on which all the music was John's.  Most of the performers were John's students.  Many other alumni were in attendance.  It was a pleasure for me to see and talk to those people who shared the same formative experiences which shaped my own musical life.

Naturally, many pictures were taken.

The concert took place at the Wild Beast, an outdoor high-tech performance space.  (Click on pictures for enlargements.)

Percussionists play multiple instruments - mallets, drums, gongs.  In John Bergamo's world just about anything could become a percussion instrument.  For example, the intermission feature, called On the Edge, was performed on a large metal aircraft engine cowling set up in front of the stage.  Look for it in the first picture.

The caution sign in the next picture is really an instrument, a wobble board played with virtuoso bravura by Gregg Johnson.  (I don't think Gregg and David are related, in spite of both being percussionists and having a common surname.)

The concert began with the CalArts Percussion Ensemble, i.e. current students.  They played John's early 1963 modernist piece entitled Interactions.  It has a modernist title to match.  Interestingly and positively, all the performers were women.  Percussion has been a traditionally male bastion.  I guess the future comes to CalArts first.

Two solo mallet works were on the program.  Three Pieces for the Winter Solstice for vibraphone (1963), performed by Jeff Brenner, is very coloristic and familiar to me.  Five Short Pieces for Marimba, played by Justin DeHart, was written in 2000 in a much more virtuostic manner.  First time I had heard it.

Here's an important fact about all-percussion concerts: it takes great amounts of energy and time to move and adjust the instruments.  Half way through the first half of this concert such a reorganization took place.  I made a video of this non-musical portion of the program.  Why I wonder.  The change was done very efficiently in a soothing blue light; it's like watching a cheap noir movie of avant-garde dance.

The voice you'll hear is that of David Rosenboom, a composer/performer who makes his living as Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts.  His job last night was to talk to the audience about John Bergamo during this particular transition.  David chose to take the very long view, putting John's career as a musician in the context of five millennia of human musical history.  He also talked about snare drum rolls and Christmas music albums.  Meanwhile, the stage is awash with moving performers and stage hands.  Or, if you will, imagine David Rosenboom is performing the part of John Cage, lecturing as a Merce Cunningham-like dance company performs randomly behind him.

I think David Rosenboom's assertion that the era of the imperial composer, one who writes but does not perform music, is coming to an end after 250 years is probably a bit premature.  John Bergamo was definitely a composer and performer, but then again so were Mozart and Beethoven.

Here's my favorite frame of the video.  This was a high tech concert, tastefully over amplified.

In the video they are setting up for a performance by The Repercussion Unit, an all-percussion rock band founded by John Bergamo and a bunch of other friends of mine way back in 1976.  The previous post about John has video from an R-Unit tour of Germany.

Among my pictures of the performance were several long sequences of nearly identical shots.  I was trying to get one where focus was right, the performers weren't moving too much and something interesting was going on.  As it turned out, these shots made for better animated gifs than for still pictures.  You'll have to imagine the music, but you can definitely get a feel for the energy of the performances.

First gif is the Repercussion Unit - left to right Chris Garcia (seated), Jimmy Hildebrant, David Johnson, Larry Stein, (you can see just the head of) Charles Levin, Gregg Johnson, Amy Knoles.  And way on the right is one brief flash of the arm of M.B. Gordy.  Sorry, M.B.

On the second half of the concert there was hand drumming, one of John Bergamo's specialities.  Another performing group, also founded by John, is called the Hands On'Semble.  The members are Randy Gloss, Andrew Grueschow and Austin Wrinkle - also John's students.  Since they went to CalArts during a different decade than I, I'm not sure which face goes with which name or what to call most of their instruments.  They played magnificently along with two colleagues of John's, Swapan Chaudhuri and Houman Poumehdi.  The piece is called Shradhanjali - a Hindustani word which means "thanks to the teachers".

The finale of the concert was John Bergamo's most well-known composition, Piru Bol.  You can hear many different versions of Piru Bole on YouTube.  (The program says "Bol", You Tube says "Bole".  You decide.)  In any case Piru is a city near CalArts where John lived for many years.  Last night it was performed by a large group of percussionists - I count 16 in this picture.

For a while I focused on taking pictures of one quartet - Amy, Larry, Gregg standing and David seated - who had posed themselves artfully together.  Everyone else on stage was putting out this much energy at the same time.

The hand drumming performances were, for me, one of those magical musical moments.  I could hear something great happening without knowing what it was exactly or how it was being done.  I was experiencing the power of music.  It is a strong primal power.  It is the reason music has a 5000 year history and the reason music appears in every culture.  It is the power that long ago made me want to become a musician and, somewhat later, want to study at CalArts.

What I learned by studying music, alas, is that knowing too much about it can make you lose touch with the magic.  Friends of mine have often heard me complain about my education at CalArts.  Although my entire career is based on what I learned at CalArts and the people I met there, I've never really felt satisfied with my education.

Last night, as this performance was coming to an end, I felt tears in my eyes and recognized a strange idea.  I actually thought to myself "Gee, I'm glad I went to CalArts".  There's a first time for everything.  And indeed I am glad I attended CalArts, at least on that certain metaphysical magical musical level that I only get to touch on rare occasions.  The people on the stage of the Wild Beast let me channel a wonderful musical energy one more time.  I hope it happens to me many more times.  I hope it happens to you too.

It was a tribute concert and so there were speeches.  Many of the speakers talked of how John Bergamo had touched their lives through music.  And I knew exactly what they were talking about because John had touched mine as well.  And last night he did it one more time.   The spirit of John Bergamo was on stage at the Wild Beast during this concert.  So was his picture.

And then the concert ended.  You know what they say - every high must have its low.  I walked into the CalArts building, looking for the reception, and confronted a typical CalArts hallway.

Alone in the endless whiteness of hallway hell, you easily can believe that Walt Disney really is buried somewhere under the building.  It's an ART school, a DESIGN school, a MUSIC school, but the architecture can be simply antiseptic.  A little interior decoration - some art on the walls - couldn't hurt, could it?  A sound environment?  Something.

Then at the reception, more pictures were taken.  I like taking pictures of pictures being taken.  Here's one more.

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Over the years I've written a number of posts that are tagged CalArts.  Click here to read them all. This is the third time I've ever mentioned David Rosenboom.

Forty Years In California

Here are two pictures of me taken by my mother in 1974.  The date is September 8, 1974, one month to the day since Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency.  The location is my hometown of Sioux City Iowa outside our family home (although our house is not shown in either picture).  I had just turned 23 years old.  The car is an infamous 1974 Chevy Vega purchased used earlier that summer.

My father is standing behind me in the first shot.  In the second you can clearly see bags hanging in the back of the car.  I was about to leave on a long trip.

I was going to California to attend graduate school in music.  At the moment these pictures were taken I thought that I would be attending the University of California at San Diego, although my first choice was the more exciting but less practical California Institute of the Arts.

If you figure three days driving from Iowa to Southern California, today is exactly the 40th anniversary of my arrival in Los Angeles.  Or maybe yesterday.   Anyway, I've been here ever since.  The longest I can remember leaving California is three weeks - and that only happened once.

During my undergraduate years in Minnesota, I remember telling my clarinet teacher that I would be continuing my education in California.  His response was that he had noticed musicians who go to California were never heard from again.  I thought that a little strange.  Turns out that he was right, because he never did hear from me again.

I still have two copies of the Cal Arts Admission Bulletin from that year.  In it composer Mel Powell, then the Provost, began his message so:

A scholar of the bizarre, having read the bulletin of several hundred American universities, colleges and conservatories, proclaimed the discovery of a curious new language of garniture.  He found that bulletin prose tends to vibrate with fervor as the distances that separate description from reality extend themselves and promote euphoric envisionings by students, parents, teachers, administrators and trustees.

Despite this oblique warning (written in a curiously common double talk I had never encountered before), I was strongly, yes, euphorically attracted to the California Institute of the Arts, especially to studies in electronic music.  I was also seduced by their lack of Eurocentrism which I understood at the time only with relief that foreign language proficiency was not required for graduation.

On my first day in California I drove directly to Valencia - home of CalArts - intending to retrieve my admissions deposit.  They had not offered me enough financial aid and I needed that deposit money back.  The original plan was to drive on to my second choice school the next day.  Apparently being present in the flesh makes bureaucracy move more quickly because a couple days later, with offers of sufficient money, I found myself enrolled at CalArts.

All my major career opportunities during four decades in California can be traced directly back to people I met at CalArts.  My time there was, for all its faults, a life-changing experience for me.

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If you had asked me in 1974 where I would be in 2014, I don't know what I might have said. I'd probably first wonder whether I'd even still be alive.

If you had told me that I would still be a musician whose only tool is a computer and who works exclusively with people I never see - some of whom I've never even met - using something called the Internet, you would of course have been correct.  I expect that I would have laughed at the absurdity of such a notion.  "Not likely.  That's science fiction."

Here's a video of Arthur C. Clarke being interviewed in that same year 1974 about the future of computers.  He was not far off in his predictions, although he suggests that only businessmen and executives will be able to live wherever they please thanks to computers.  Thankfully I've become neither of those things.

Arthur C. Clarke might have said some really dumb things in the rest of that interview.  This clip makes him sound prescient.

By attempting a career in music I was aware, even in 1974, that I wasn't likely to earn piles of money.  I admit that I had faint hopes of getting famous.  Getting rich seemed especially unlikely.  I do feel extremely lucky that 40 years later I'm able to spend my life involved in music and even still make some money at it.

Do you notice that money keeps coming up in this post.  My parents and I shared the uncertainty over whether I would be able to make a living as a musician.  There was no way to know whether graduate education in music, especially at such a strange institution, would just be a waste of resources.

Financially the United States has changed a lot since 1974 and it hasn't been getting better for most people.  In fact, according to this article, The 40-Year Slump by Harold Myerson, 1974 was a watershed year for the American economy:

        But no one could deny that Americans in 1974 lived lives of greater comfort and security than they had a quarter-century earlier. During that time, median family income more than doubled.
        Then, it all stopped. In 1974, wages fell by 2.1 percent and median household income shrunk by $1,500. To be sure, it was a year of mild recession, but the nation had experienced five previous downturns during its 25-year run of prosperity without seeing wages come down.
        What no one grasped at the time was that this wasn’t a one-year anomaly, that 1974 would mark a fundamental breakpoint in American economic history. In the years since, the tide has continued to rise, but a growing number of boats have been chained to the bottom. Productivity has increased by 80 percent, but median compensation (that’s wages plus benefits) has risen by just 11 percent during that time.

Driving off to start my adult life in 1974, I was really quite optimistic.  I was taking a big chance on my dream of being a musician.   Back then there was no way I could have predicted the details of what would happen to me.  Or to the people around me.

I graduated from CalArts two years later and within a year I was working for Frank Zappa - starting salary was $410 per week.  (Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $1600 today.)  After putting over 100,000 miles on the Vega I traded it for a new Toyota.  In September 1984 I quit working for Frank and started freelancing.  I'm still a freelancer 30 years later.   It was a few years more before I shaved off my beard.  In 1991 I met Leslie Harris and we were married the next year.  She has done far more for the positive quality of my life than being a musician ever has.  We're living happily ever after as best we can.  Life is good for us.  I can only wish that were more universally true these days.

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In 1974 I was driving off into an unknown future and I had no idea of what would happen.  It's fair to ask what useful advice I would give my hopeful young self based on my 40 years of the California experience? A few things that come to mind:

• 1) When your father told you to save your money, listen to him.  
• 2) Be honest with yourself about what you really want.
• 3) No matter how much you weigh, you will always feel fat.

And where, I wonder, will I be forty years from now.   The odds are good that I will be merged one way or another with the ecosystem by then, well separated from consciousness, remembered only faintly by a few, mentioned infrequently in biographies of Frank Zappa.  Hopefully, if my life means anything, I will have proved that life really is too short to spend it listening to ugly music.

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Here are Mixed Meters posts about Cal Arts.
Here are Mixed Meters posts about Iowa.
Here are Mixed Meters posts about California.
Here are my expectations of what death is like.
My essay on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

John Bergamo

I note, with great sadness, the passing of John Bergamo. John was the percussion instructor at CalArts when I was a student. Here's a picture I took of him the last time I saw him (at the memorial service for Arthur Jarvinen in 2010).

If you're not familiar with John's musical abilities, I highly recommend that you read John Bergamo, Percussive Renaissance Man by B. Michael Williams, an article about his many interests, written when John was added to the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

Although I didn't study percussion I was in several ensembles that John conducted. One memorable piece was the Quartet for tenor sax, trumpet, piano and percussion by Stefan Wolpe.  Less memorable was  Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Ensemble (all brass and percussion) by Alvin Etler.  More memorable was spending the summer of 1976 in Newhall CA watching John and his fellow members of The Repercussion Unit rehearse.  (I just sat and listened.)

In a 1989 LA Times article about The Unit: One Man's Junk is Another's Music John is quoted on the subject of finding new musical instruments:

Members are on a never-ending search for new instruments. Sometimes they turn up during pilgrimages to junkyards ("I usually end up getting ripped off because I'm so excited they can tell I really want it," Bergamo said).

Sometimes they're simply lying in the street. Bergamo found his favorite "bell," a broken pipe fitting, on the ground. "I threw it down and heard it and knew I had to have it," he said, happily tapping it with a mallet.

"I'm so excited" and "Happily tapping it".  No one who knew John would be surprised by such expressions of enthusiasm for exploring the world of percussion.

Here's a 1991 video about The Unit going on tour to Germany.  Lots of shots showing John and also Lucky Mosko, who passed away in 2005.  The other members are Larry, Gregg, Ed and Jimmy.  Here's Part one:

and Part two:

Another music group which formed around John was the Hands On'semble, seen here playing John's own piece Piru Bole:

Here's a picture of John way back in March 1965 (second from the right), part of a group performing György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes.  That's when he was a member of Lukas Foss's Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I found this picture in the book by Renee Levine Parker, This Life of Sounds. Evenings for New Music in Buffalo. (available as a pdf)

I had a lot of teachers during my professional education as a musician.  Only two stand out for having consistent positive attitudes towards music and music making.  John was one of them.  John Bergamo will be missed by many but his memory will stick around because he had that rare ability to share his own positive attitude with so many others.

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One more thing about my personal relationship with John Bergamo.  After my graduation from CalArts John set the course of my entire career as a musician by recommending me, as a music copyist, to Frank Zappa. I told the story in my online interview with Alt.Fan.Frank-Zappa:

GETTING THE JOB
BL: How exactly did you hook up with [Zappa] in the first place?

DO: I was a student at Cal Arts in Valencia CA. Ed Mann was a student at the same time. His teacher was John Bergamo (who I also worked with). John had been hired for some session work with Frank (I think he's one of the nameless musicians on Greggary Peccary) and had gotten Ed the chance to get in the band and Frank hired Ed. Frank was looking for someone to be his "musical secretary" and both Ed and John recommended me to him. Then they both told me that I would be getting a call from Frank Zappa. "Sure" I thought "when pigs have wings."

Bergamo had played the Black Page and had lost a copy of the music which Frank had given him. So John hired me to copy the Black Page to give it to Frank. I figured they had showed that to Frank.

One Sunday afternoon (this was June 1977 - as I was eating a pancake breakfast with my roommate) the phone rang and it was Ed Mann saying "Frank Zappa wants you to work for him." so I called Frank and he told me to come right over. I thought it was a job like all my other work at the time (i.e. "come right now we have music that needs to be recorded at 8 o clock tomorrow morning"). When I got there he took me in the house and showed me piles of music. He started handing me things from the piles and giving me instructions to work on stuff. I asked him if he had seen the copy of the Black Page - he hadn't.

So I had showed up to my interview without the one piece of music that was sure to get me the gig.

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Thanks to Steve Layton for the link to Percussive Renaissance Man.

Buell Neidlinger, another member of Center for Creative and Performing Arts and close friend of John's, told me this little annecdote about the performance of the Ligeti:

At the Carnegie Rectal Hall performance, Don Ellis purposely wound his metronome ten extra turns, so the piece became interminable with a single clicking for about 4 mins. extra.

A Brief History of John Baldessari

John Baldessari is a famous artist.  He taught at Cal Arts while I was a student there in the seventies.  Of course I never met him.  Nor do I even remember seeing his works back then ... although I must have, of course.  He is now respected, super successful and much honored - so the works I can't remember must have been pretty damn good.

A couple days ago I encountered an LA Times webpage entitled Tom Waits talks up artist John Baldessari in six-minute video.  As I happened to have six extra minutes at that moment, I watched it.   Fun stuff. Here's the YouTube link:  A Brief History of John Baldessari .

Waits was apparently chosen because Baldessari likes his voice (and also possibly because the two came from the same hometown.)  More than the voice, it's Waits' dry, wry delivery style that contributes so much.  The video itself is a high energy assemblage: the artist as a talking head in his studio, pictures of the artist, his artworks, his stuff, places he's been and lots of moving text and graphic effects.

One quick bit of text (30 seconds in) says that Baldessari has been called "the Godfather of Conceptual Art" but with a telling, sophomoric, hysterical extra on-screen letter F which is conspicuously crossed out.  Guy humor.  Blink and you'll miss it.

(Go ahead, search Google for the phrase "Godfather of Conceptual Fart" to find out if anyone ever really said that about John Baldessari.)

The people who produced this video, no one I've heard of, are credited on the YouTube page.

directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (http://gosupermarche.com/)

edited by Max Joseph (http://www.maxjoseph.com/)

written by Gabriel Nussbaum (http://www.bankstreetfilms.com)

cinematography by Magdalena Gorka (http://magdalenagorka.com/) and Henry Joost

produced by Mandy Yaeger & Erin Wright

These people are really the reason I enjoyed it so much.  The bouncy pacing, witty writing and irreverant attitude combine to be lots more interesting than John Baldessari's art or Tom Waits' voice.   Rossini and Bizet don't hurt either.  I especially like a great new cadential chord in William Tell (at 1'50").

There's also an apparent reason for the Clint Eastwood reference: this video was produced for a LACMA gala where Baldessari and Eastwood were both feted by rich and famous people, possibly ones with short attention spans.

Later in the film we learn that "John Baldessari believes that every young artist should know three things":

1. Talent is cheap.
2. You have to be possessed which you can't will.
3. Being at the right place at the right time.

That sounds to me like damn good advice, although not great grammar.  All three points ring true in my ears today.  In fact, I wish I had heard that advice as a young composer, like, you know, back when I was studying at Cal Arts.

Of course, maybe I did hear it.  And I just can't remember now.

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A recent MM post about another LACMA art project: Floating Rocks.

If you prefer your art in the streets rather than in the museums by artists who don't allow their picture to be taken, here are two MM posts: Street Art Now and Then and Banksy Speaks.

Conceptual Fart Tags: John Baldessari. . . Tom Waits. . . video biography. . . LACMA

Arthur Jarvinen's Birthday

Art Jarvinen's birthday was January 27. He would have been 55 this year. I once mentioned to him that he shared his birthday with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a fact which impressed me more than it did him.  More interestingly, he shared his birthday with his wife, Lynn Angebranndt.

This is a three part post.  Each part is Jarvinen-related. The first is about a concert of Art's music given recently by students at Cal Arts. The second is about a radio show featuring Art's music. You can listen to that online. Finally, I have news of an upcoming live concert performance of While You Were Art, the infamous synthesizer track Frank Zappa named after Art Jarvinen.

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Arthur taught composition at Cal Arts for many years.  He was also an alumnus.  So it makes sense that Cal Arts would present one of the first concerts of his music after his death.  Last Sunday, January 23,  an ensemble of students lead by Amy Knoles performed a dozen works by Art Jarvinen.  They named their concert The Art of Art.

They framed the event with instrumental chamber music - opening with Egyptian Two-Step (which features antiphonal spray cans as part of the rhythm section) and ending with White Lights Lead to Red.   Solo pieces included The Door That Doesn't Open (for marimba and amplified heartbeat) and Carbon (for solo bass clarinet).

There was a tango setting of a poem by Charles Bukowski (Art wrote a number of tangos) plus selections from Arthur's album Edible Black Ink for guitar and bass.  And there were several of his performance pieces which Art called "physical poetry".  One of them was Pop Tarts in which the performer fires a dart gun at an airborne strawberry pop tart as it is expelled from a toaster. 

The enthusiasm and talent of the ensemble was impressive.  Some of the music is fiendishly difficult.  The less technical pieces made me reflect on how Art's own persona contributed to his music.  He was direct, focused and unwaveringly intent as a performer.  Time and again I can remember him performing his musical rituals, riveted to the task.  And, for a few moments, he could share this mental concentration with his audience.  New performers of his music have the task of finding that same concentration in future performances.

 
(You can read a remembrance of Art by Zona Hostetler, the mother of a colleague of Art's, Randy Hostetler, who passed away at a very young age here.  She describes a performance of Pop Tarts by Arthur himself.)

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Jack Vees was a close friend of Art. They met as students at CalArts.  Last December Jack visited radio station WRIU at the University of Rhode Island and played several hours of Arthur's music on a show called Music For Internets.  Better yet, the show is archived online if you want to listen.  Here's a direct link to the audio file.  (The show begins at about three and a half minutes.)

Throughout the show Jack paints a portrait of Arthur through his personal reminiscences and by choosing two different kinds of Art's music. 

On one hand he picks chamber music - Murphy Nights,  The Vulture's Garden and  Goldbeaters Skin. He also plays selections from Art's string quartet 100 Cadences which was written in memory of Art's teacher Lucky Mosko.  There are also excerpts of keyboard works including Queen of Spain (based on music by Domenico Scarlatti) and Serious Immobilities (yes, it's a 24 hour solo piano piece based on Vexations by Erik Satie).

On the other hand there are pieces by several of Art's more (or less) popular music-influenced groups.  Two hysterical tunes by The Mope (“Five Ugly Guys With No Record Interest”)  are Agent Jerry (a spy surf tune like Art's Invisible Guy series) and Drunk Poets Die Young.  Another group, Some Over History is represented Erase the Fake and Cheap Suit Tango.  And there's a cut from Art's Beatles parody: Sgt. Pekker.

Jack also throws in two cuts by Captain Beefheart whose music was a strong influence on Art.  Of course Art had far more influences than you can grasp from just a few minutes of Beefheart.  All together, the show makes a fine introduction to the music of Arthur Jarvinen.

("Blue" Gene Tyranny's review of the album Erase the Fake by Art's group Some Over History can be found here.)

---

Another oft-mentioned influence on Arthur Jarvinen was Frank Zappa.  Art was employed by Frank for a few years doing work similar to that which I did.  The best known moment of Art's time with Frank was the infamous While You Were Art "performance". 

That was when the California EAR Unit, including Art on marimba, pantomimed to a recorded synthesizer performance of a transcription of a live Zappa guitar solo called While You Were Out.  It was renamed While You Were Art for that occasion. The Unit did this at the "prestigious" Monday Evening Concerts and no one in the audience noticed that they hadn't actually played the piece.  An awful lot of bad feelings were generated afterwards.  Art himself, after investing much hard work to get Zappa to write a piece for the EAR Unit, keenly regretted the results.

You can read my own telling of what happened and why it was important to me personally in the While You Were Art section of Bill Lantz's monumental David Ocker Internet Interview.  Be sure to click on the white buttons marked Art's Comment! to read the amendations which Arthur added later.  Since Art didn't like talking about this episode during his lifetime, these comments are all the more valuable now.

This coming February 5th (that's a Saturday), at Pomona College there will be a live performance of While You Were Out/Art.  The electric guitarist will be Pomona music professor Joti Rockwell who will play the original guitar transcription (While You Were Out) to the accompaniment of Zappa's later commercial release of the synthesizer tracks (While You Were Art).  The version of the piece played at the Monday Evening event was later suppressed by Zappa.

Here's information about the concert.  It's part of a yearly concert series of electronic music called the Ussachevsky Memorial Festival organized by yet another Pomona prof. Tom Flaherty.  There's a flyer to download here.  (In the 1960s the ersatz college student Frank Zappa briefly studied composition with music professor Karl Kohn at Pomona College.  Kohn is still professor emeritus there.)

Joti Rockwell kindly shared his notes for the concert with me.  He discusses why this piece and the event associated with it is important for academic study.  Here's an exerpt:

By musically comparing the two versions at the historical edges (1981 and 1986), one cannot help but imagine what might have resulted had the collaboration for the 1984 concert gone more smoothly.  Reflection and examination of this sort was the hope of Art Jarvinen, the piece’s namesake, and it will perhaps lead to a better understanding of Frank Zappa, electronic music, the history of music in Los Angeles, and the meanings of contemporary music.

---

Art's Music Tags: Arthur Jarvinen. . . Jack Vees. . . Joti Rockwell. . . While You Were Art

In Partial Fulfillment of Something Or Other

My friend Scott Fessler has been scanning and publishing his collection of posters from his student days at CalArts Those were the days we called "the seventies". (I wonder why.)

One poster he scanned was for my own clarinet recital on Febrary 19, 1976. Thanks for scanning it, Scott. Now I can share it with my other two readers.

It's about 10 inches wide and four feet long. It can be viewed either horizontally or vertically. I designed and executed the beast myself using dry transfer letters and my newly acquired set of rapidograph pens. These graphic techniques turned out to be far more important to my career as a musician than the clarinet ever would. It was reproduced on the now obsolete ozalid machine.


Click the picture for enlargement. Better yet, download a copy here. I suggest that you look at it up close to see lots of little text items and musical visual jokes. Go here to read a searchable text file of the poster.

The music, which floats on twisting curvy staves, quotes the various pieces on the recital. (Read the full program.) The guy with a clarinet coming out of his nose was obviously traced from Hieronymus Bosch and the skull playing the piano came from somewhere, Dali maybe? Does the poster remind you of my doodles?

Peppered throughout, in tiny stenciled letters, are 20th century musical events which also happened on February 19. These are quotes from the massive Music Since 1900 by Nicolas Slonimsky, which I, bafflingly, found time to read from cover to cover while I was a graduate student simultaneously studying clarinet and composition.

The beauty of Music Since 1900 is that you can learn just how much music gets written and performed that no one evers hears again. This one revelation has enriched and clouded my entire adult life.

At the bottom of the poster, inside a large mannered half notehead, are the words Sesquipedelian Macropolysyllabification, a Slonimskian term. A link to Slonimsky's definition can be found here.

Yes, I really did call my graduate recital "In Partial Fulfillment of Something or Other". I didn't think much of my CalArts degree even before they gave it to me.

Partially Fulfilled Tags: CalArts. . . David Ocker. . . Nicolas Slonimsky. . . Scott Fessler. . . ozalid. . . rapidograph. . . doodle

Vinny Introduces Anne

Before you watch this video you might want to review Volume One of the trilogy as told in The Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio. In that post you can watch another video called Vinny Introduces Me (available directly here) and read about and listen to the Golia LaBerge Ocker trio, one of those eighties groups. There are pictures and historical artifacts.

Been there? Done that? Good. Now read on.

Anne LaBerge, composer, flutist extrordinaire and resident of a non-mountainous part of Europe, is currently touring the U.S. Last Friday she visited the same "Career Design" course at CalArts that I had also visited. I attended her presentation, sitting inconspicuously in the back. Just as I had done the first time, I recorded Vinny's introduction.



Anne will be performing as part of the 8th Annual New Music Festival at Cal State Fullerton from March 18 through 21. (Read about it here as well) She does amazing things with flutes and computers.

On Saturday, as part of that Festival, as I understand, Charles Sharp (who has been featured in Mixed Meters in the post A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles) will be presenting a scholarly paper about the Golia LaBerge Ocker trio. I'd really like to know what he says but it's scheduled way too early in the morning for me - 9 A.M.


This picture of Anne and me was taken last Saturday. We were happy to have finished a meal of Mexican food at Dona Rosa's in Pasadena.

About the audio of the video. There are two problems. One is the background music - from my iPod which was accidentally playing. It seems much louder on the recording than in real life. The second is that the little microphone on my pocket point-'n-shoot picks up some voices better than others (Anne's is good except when she's quoting Mel Powell; Vinny's not so good). And certain noises - like chairs being moved or laughter - are viciously loud. So I extracted the audio, normalized the levels as best I could and then re-attached it to the picture. Alas, I couldn't get it back in perfect sync. Please pretend like you don't notice.

30 Second Spot - Happy To Be In A Place Where They Still Wear Shoes (for Paul Bailey)

Years ago, after a lovely sushi dinner, I remember trailing Leslie as she shopped her way down State Street in Santa Barbara, California. At one point I amused myself by reading greeting cards. One card said:

The most important things in life are the things you do every day.

I put the card back in the rack.

Later I realized what a profoundly wise thing was being said by that card. And I have adopted it as one of the central principles of my life. I've made a short list of things which I try to do every day. There are four of them besides the obvious "eat and sleep". Each of the four is a one syllable word beginning with W.

The moral of this story is that life-changing wisdom can be found in unexpected places.


Much more recently I received the alumni magazine from my alma mater, The Herb Alpert School of Music. It's a slick book filled with double talk, hyperbole and more double talk, just what you'd expect from an organization experiencing a huge infusion of cash which it hasn't begun to spend.

Deep in an essay by David Rosenboom (he's dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music) is a quote from composer Luciano Berio, who I remember visited The Herb Alpert School of Music once. In David's article Sr. Berio is quoted thus:

The most meaningful analysis of a symphony is another symphony.

Like with the greeting card, after a while the utter unassailable wisdom of this sentence struck me. What an unexpected source for such intelligence. Wouldn't it be nice if every music theorist, professor of composition and music critic has this phrase posted, possibly in needlepoint, above their computer monitors.


Last week I met composer Paul Bailey in Old Pasadena for caffeine and conversation. I really enjoy talking to him. We know each other because we both blog. It was only our second meeting. There has yet to be an awkward silence. He told me about his ensemble's recent performance at Redcat. He let me try his Kaosillator (a few seconds of fun).

At one point he told me about a new member of the ensemble who was glad to be in a group where the music was still written down. He emphasized this point by saying (metaphorically) that she was "happy to be in a place where they still wear shoes." I immediately said "that would make a good title for a piece".

It may take me a bit of time to recognize actual wisdom, but I can identify a good title immediately.

Later our conversation continued fitfully as we walked on Colorado Boulevard looking for a bank teller machine. Among the topics I would have liked to discuss further with Paul were contrapuntal harmony, inexact repetition and the way a composer's music is affected by choice of software.


Instead I decided to follow Berio's suggestion that the best way to discuss music is by writing more music.

I have composed a short piece entitled "Happy To Be In A Place Where They Still Wear Shoes (for Paul Bailey)" He'll know what it's about, I think.

When I got home that afternoon I wrote his quote on a post-it note. I also wrote down the flute melody of the piece which I had just learned from a passing flock of parrots.

65 seconds Copyright (c) 2008 David Ocker

Having trouble with the little embedded player? Then click here.

I took all the pictures in this post in Old Pasadena on the day I met Paul. It is near the Summer Solstice and details on the north side of buildings are actually getting sunlight. Unfortunately I chose a time a bit too late in the afternoon. Click the pictures for enlargements.

The last picture shows a wall with missing plaster revealing an old painted sign. I've enhanced the letters a bit with Photoshop. It seems to say "The Bargain". The Bargain What, I wonder.


The most recent Herb Alpert School of Music Alumni Magazine doesn't seem to be online yet. Someday it might appear here. (Update: I found the Dean's article here. It won't last at that url I betcha. Updated Update: the article is now here.)

Mixed Meters has mentioned The Herb Alpert School of Music previously in this post and this post. Be sure to read all the comments to the second "this post".

Paul blogs here. He twitters here. His ensemble PBE is playing in Whittier this Saturday on a concert called RealNewMusic2008 (can't find a link).

Shoe Tags: Herb Alpert School of Music. . . Paul Bailey. . . David Rosenboom. . . Luciano Berio. . . David Ocker. . . 30 Second Spot

The Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio

Skip to the video of Vinny Introducing Me
Skip to recordings of the Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio
Skip to a new 30 Second Spot The Nurkle (for Vinny)

The renaming of the CalArts School of Music, as discussed in this previous MM post, has progressed to the Temporary Sign Stage. Here's proof photographic.



I made another trip to the beautiful Santa Clarita Valley (read about the first trip in this other previous MM post.) Trip one was at the request of my friend Art Jarvinen. Trip two was at the request of my friend Vinny Golia. Here's a picture of Vinny.


This time I was asked to speak to a class in "Career Design". Don't ask me what that is because I don't know. Apparently students who know what I have done during my so-called career will be able to avoid my obvious mistakes. Good luck with that.

I made the following video of Vinny as he introduced me to the class. I've added a few text comments of my own to the video.



At the end of the introduction Vinny mentions a wind-instrument improvisation trio which consisted of Anne LaBerge on flutes, myself on clarinets, and Vinny on clarinets, flutes and small saxophones. This happened during the eighties.


I asked Anne and Vinny for permission to post some recordings of the three of us. They agreed (although Anne wanted me to mention that she is still alive. She has a home in a place called Holland and maintains a homepage in a place called the Internet.)

I've posted three studio improvisations which we recorded in February 1986. We never did anything with the tapes except culling these three takes onto a separate reel for radio interviews. The box is marked "No electronic sound processing" because, apparently, there had been some confusion about how we made the sounds.

This is completely spontaneous unplanned music. It was like a conversation between people with different views on common interests. We are all composers. Vinny and Anne are still explorers of the outer realms of woodwind performance. So was I, back then. We were a good match. I look back on this group with great fondness.

The three improvisations are Copyright (c) 1986 and 2008 by Vinny Golia, Anne LaBerge and David Ocker. Timings #3 - 6'43" #11 4'20" #12 1'48"

Listen to Improvisation #3
Listen to Improvisation #11
Listen to Improvisation #12

Our only available pictures as a group come from a photo session proof sheet. These were taken by photographer Joel Mark. I did not ask permission of Vinny or Anne or Joel to post these. I'm the one hiding behind a mostly-not-yet-gray beard and photo-gray glasses. Click any picture for a bit of enlargement. Don't expect much.





This third improv is actually a duet between Anne and myself. If it sounds like we had been listening to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, that's because we had. She and I had recently played Pierrot together in a group called The Thirteenth Floor.




Here's a flyer for a trio concert at a place called BeBop Records. The drawing of the sea lion wearing a pirate hat on which sits a parrot is one of my doodles. If I remember this concert correctly Anne couldn't make it for some reason so it ended up being a duo concert, just Vinny and myself. Anyway, I like the doodle.


And finally while I was at CalArts - er, I mean at the Herb Alpert School of Music - for the final time, Vinny had to tell me how to close a piano lid. "You have to retract the nurkle" he explained.

I liked the word "nurkle" although I have no idea what he meant.

I decided that "nurkle" needed to be part of a musical title.

Listen to The Nurkle (for Vinny)

The Nurkle (for Vinny) - (c) Copyright 2008 by David Ocker - 34 seconds




Nurkle Tags: Anne LaBerge. . . Vinny Golia. . . David Ocker. . . woodwind trio. . . musical improvisation. . . CalArts. . . Herb Alpert. . . school of music. . . The Nurkle. . . 30+Second+spots. . . Career Design