Tossing My B,a,b,b,it,t Tubes

Something strange happened in our house last week.  It was this: I cleaned out a closet.  If you could see the inside of our closets you might think we were hoarders.  Maybe we are.

Anyway, in this one, now clean, closet (there are many others that need cleaning and plenty of drawers to boot), I found the tubes I often used to perform a solo clarinet piece entitled B,a,b,b,it,t by composer Donald Martino.  Written as a birthday present for his teacher, Milton Babbit, it is as much performance art as it is tuneless pointillistic atonality.

B,a,b,b,it,t requires "tubes" - also called "extensions" - which are to be periodically stuck into the end of the clarinet, extending the length of the instrument and thus creating pitches below the normal range.  Once the tube has served its purpose it is pulled out of the clarinet and unceremoniously dropped on the floor.   

I made my set of tubes from rolled-up cardboard and masking tape when I was a graduate student sometime between 1974 and 1976.  I had enough extra cardboard to make a carrying tube for them.

I gave up playing the clarinet in the nineties.  I stuck these B,a,b,b,it,t tubes, case and all, into the very closet where I found them last week.  Years had not been kind to them.  The masking tape had become dry and cracked.  Some of the tubes had been crushed.  The case was falling apart.  Briefly I wondered whether I could bequeath the set to some weird young clarinetist somewhere.  Don't be silly, I told myself.  Their uselessness was obvious.

I knew what I must do.  I had to throw them away.

But hold on . . . before I did that . . . I decided to take a picture of them.  This would soften the blow of tossing a sentimental useless artifact of my long gone personal musical history into the trash.  And I continued, (trying to soften the blow even more) I could write about this on Mixed Meters and post the picture and maybe thereby repurpose my damned old blog for which my interest has been waning.  Mixed Meters could become an archive of discarded relics of interest only to myself.  (This is not a completely new idea.)

Here's the picture of my tubes.

But hold on . . . maybe I could take it one step farther . . . why not add a recording of myself playing B,a,b,b,it,t?  It took me a while to locate and then a second while to digitize.  In this day and age you probably expect a video.  Alas, I gave up performing long before videos were just one click away.

Here's my audio version:

Listen to  Donald Martino, B,a,b,b,it,t for clarinet with extensions, performed by David Ocker, clarinet - June 29, 1980 at I.D.E.A. Studio, Santa Monica CA - 241 seconds

This performance was part of a solo clarinet recital, something I did a handful of times throughout my 20-year clarinet "career".  While I was at it I digitized the whole concert.  Not nearly so wince-inducing as I feared, although I was having my problems that night.   Here's another piece from the same concert:

Listen to  J.S. Bach, Chromatic Fantasy, arranged for solo clarinet by Gustave Langenus, performed by David Ocker, clarinet - June 29, 1980 at I.D.E.A. Studio, Santa Monica, CA - 369 seconds

But hold on . . . there was still more . . . my recital was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.  Pretty damn amazing that the largest Southern California newspaper, back in the days when newspapers were actually important, would pay a music critic to visit a struggling second-floor dance studio above a Radio Shack to hear an unknown clarinetist play abstruse contemporary music without any accompaniment.  (Well, there was one piece where my friend Jimmy Hildebrandt played drums.)

And it was a good review overall.  So I modestly offer it, if you're curious.

Click on any picture to enlargen it.

But hold on . . . and this is the last time for holding on, I promise . . . there's an important personal issue to be dealt with here, one I'm having difficulty with.

What am I going to do with all this stuff?  Remember all those closets and drawers I mentioned?  There are a lot more memory laden items where those tubes came from.

There are my Mother's old family photo albums and piano music.  My 5-year old hand immortalized in chipped gold-painted plaster.  Tapes of my bar mitzvah, my high school band concerts, almost every one of my college recitals and a 24-hour environmental recording made outside my apartment just two blocks from the Hollywood freeway, starting at noon on December 31, 1979 (it was source material for a tape piece).   Pretty much every copy of every piece of music I've ever written and every recording ever made of them and every abstract drawing I've ever made and a sheaf of blackened manuscript paper with tens of thousands of random black scratches (from testing my ink pen before there were music notation programs).  There are boxes of old computer disks, programs plus useless data, together with the printed manuals along with the hard drives from every computer I've owned for over 20 years.  I'm guessing those drives have lots of important digital stuff I can't bear to part with on them as well.  There are old films (see below), videos, reel-to-reel tapes galore, and cassettes and CDs up the wazoo.  Old music programs, press releases, reviews (some of which only mention my name in passing) and printouts of downloaded articles I read once and thought I might want to return to.  Pretty much every book I've ever owned - many of which are still in boxes in the basement, unpacked since our last move 21 years ago.

I've hoarded all of this (and more) with the vague plan that I'd do something with it someday.  Most of it has memories - my memories.  I labor under the delusion that holding onto my memories is important.  I want to remember these things and I know my memory isn't what it used to be.  My brain, you know.

I'm ambivalent about spending a big chunk of my present life dealing with all these things.  It wasn't that great of a past - although it was okay, I guess.  I'm old enough now to know that I don't have forever yet to go.  In my best moods I still hope for two decades yet, but one never knows.  Cataloging all this crap is probably not a good use of my energies or my time.  If I can't bring myself to toss all of it, at least I can apologize to whomever will have do the tossing when I'm gone.

I saved it all for a reason - it was once meaningful to me.  I wouldn't have taken the picture of the tubes if they still had absolutely no value.  And, as long as there's an Internet, I'll be able to refresh my memory of them and of how hard they were to toss out.

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Here's a short music video I did to an early home movie.  I was not quite 2 years old.

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And here's the Times' review, in text instead of picture, so Google will find it the next time someone searches for Dark as a Dungeon by Christian Wolff.

Ocker in Solo Clarinet Recital

by John Henken 

July 1, 1980 

Los Angeles Times

A solo clarinet recital would seem to promise a surfeit of unadorned tootling.  But Sunday evening at the I.D.E.A. Studio in Santa Monica raconteur and clarinetist David Ocker carried it off nicely: a loose, intriguing program done with wit, spirit and abundant technical glitter.

Ocker opened vigorously with Stravinsky's Three Pieces (1919). Succinct, jazzy and with ample interpretive leeway, they represented a prevailing current.  Donald Martino's "A Set for Clarinet" (1954) is certainly in much the same mold, though more dependent on literal jazz formulations.  It was Ocker's interpretive stance, however, that provided the most common ground.  Both brash and beguiling, he played with marvelous fluency and expressive nuance.

It was the performance also that pulled through Robert Jacobs' "Inner Light" (1979), a piece with all the potential of "Bolero" for popular abuse.  With percussionist James Hildebrandt, Ocker kept the relentless rhythmic drive purposeful, the bluesy theme passionate but not unduly primitive.

After watching a man hold a black stick in h is mouth for a while, a air of surrealism can grip the watcher.  In "Several Unrelated Events" (1976) by John Steinmetz, this musical Dada effect becomes tangible.  Fortunately, Ocker is an actor with a nice sense of timing and "Events" emerged with humor and sparkle.

Martino's "B,A,B,B,IT,T" (1966), a musical birthday card for composer Milton Babbitt, exploits some improbable sounds produced by inserting paper tubes into the bell-less bore of the instrument.  Martin probably had more in mind, but Sunday, funny noises sufficed.

Also on the program was an arrangement of Bach's "Chromatic" Fantasy (stunning) and Fugue (ho-hum, with multiple Ockers on tape), and Christian Wolff's "Dark as a Dungeon" (1977), a mild exercise in pitch manipulation, particularly octave displacement.  Ocker served both well.

This extraordinary clarinetist also provided verbal annotation for the program.  "Mo's Vacation" (1978) by Frank Zappa made a nice story, but the piece proved to be routine atonal wandering, punctuated by Casbah riffs.

The Meaning of a Clarinet

Here's a movie poster I snapped today at a bus stop.  (View a high-res photo.)  Can you guess why it interests me?

Mind you, I'm not planning to see this movie.  To be honest, I'm not planning on seeing any upcoming movies, even the Star Wars reboot.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are great comedians but this poster is not particularly funny.  It contains a collection of clues to their movie characters, carefully selected to separate us from our theater admission money.

Two grown women are taking a bubble bath together, presumably in the nude.  Strewn about are a series of artifacts from their lives.  Apparently the plot line revolves around selling the home where they grew up.  Am I interested in the bottle of wine?  The plastic Big Lots bag?  The pink bra?

The answer is . . . The Clarinet . . . that musical instrument I used to play.

You don't see ads with clarinets in them much any more.  Well, never.  This one must be there for a reason.  What exactly is this clarinet telling us about the movie character Maura as played by Amy Poehler?

First of all, clarinets aren't usually stuck in boxes quite that way.  That's a really bad way to store a clarinet.  You can also see the clarinet case peeking out of the box, behind a thick book.  So, this clarinet is not well cared for.  We can guess that Maura played in high school band for a while, then gave it up through a combination of lack of interest and lack of talent.  I'm guessing she does not much care for her old clarinet.  Or for any clarinet.

Lots of high school kids try playing the clarinet.  Marching bands need lots of clarinetists.  I wonder how many of them think back on the experience with any sort of fondness.  Probably very few.  In America, a lot of clarinets end up gathering dust in closets.  Still, for this movie, it was important enough to be included in a box marked "Maura's Special Memories".  Maybe she aspired to be a great clarinetist -- a sure way of becoming an unhappy adult.   I'd have to see the movie to find out if the clarinet really is important to the plot.  I'm not that interested.

Could the licorice stick be a kind of phallic reference?  After all, clarinets are longer than they are wide.  I found another picture of a scantily clad woman with clarinet, a magazine cover from 1937.  The clarinet was actually an important instrument in pop music then.  And this picture also shows a brassiere.  I wouldn't want to over-interpret this, but the girl certainly has a provocative way of holding her instrument.  The clarinet was sexy then.  Now, not so much.  (Her purple shadow however is the weirdest part of this painting - kind of like a jellyfish.)

Another idea might be that the clarinet in the movie poster is like countless bags of movie groceries
with a long French bread sticking out of them.  Just one item tells you immediately what is in the bag.  Here's actress Anne Hathaway carrying such a bag in real life.  It doesn't take much imagination or even a line of dialog to guess where she's been or what else she has in that bag.

In just the same way, a clarinet sticking out of a box, even if it weren't marked "Special Memories", quickly tells us that the box is filled with old, unfulfilled childhood dreams.  On the other side of the tub, Tina Fey's box is marked "Kate's Shit".  (Of course in America you can only show the "sh" and not the "it".)   Can you imagine what kind of shit we are supposed to be reminded of by that box?

And what have we learned about the semiotics of clarinets in popular advertising?  Has the clarinet become the go-to icon of abandoned, forgotten childhood fantasies and aspirations?  The advertising industry doesn't have much use for it otherwise.  Actually, you never see clarinets in advertising at all, so they must not have any use for it.

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Here's a movie poster from a movie called Solo für Klarinette.  I suspect the instrument here is actually phallic and not musical.  Go ahead, read the plot description.

Here's a woman who actually played the clarinet.  (source)

Here's a Mixed Meters post about women in ads with tubas.

Some other MM clarinet posts:
What To Do With a Clarinet
Worst Clarinet Playing Ever

Worst Sounding Clarinet Playing Ever

Long ago, SO long ago that I don't remember when or where it happened, someone told me that the most important thing about getting my music or performances reviewed was not whether the comments were good or bad, but whether my name was spelled correctly.

For twenty years I was a freelance clarinetist around Los Angeles, mostly playing chamber music and creative music gigs (meaning my own recitals and improvisations.)  Contractors in Los Angeles all seemed to agree that I was not the sort of player they wanted in their orchestras or studio sessions.  Their logic was sound.  I was more interested in the creative aspects of my instrument than in the re-creative.  The reviews I did get were usually positive and my name was always spelled properly.

The highpoint of my career as a clarinetist, as many readers of Mixed Meters will know, was playing Frank Zappa's Mo 'n Herb's Vacation with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Early in the 1990s it dawned on me that I wasn't getting much pleasure from the keyed beast any longer and it certainly wasn't contributing to my income.  I decided to give up playing the clarinet.  I've never regretted the decision.

The last time I played the clarinet in public was nineteen years ago today - April 15, 1994. when Xtet, the flexible chamber ensemble which I helped found, performed a South Bay Chamber Music Society concert at Harbor College.  The last piece on the program, hence the last piece I ever performed, was Aaron Copland's Sextet.  (Full program is here, scroll down.)

In spite of nearly two decades of being a "former" clarinetist, it's not uncommon for me to meet people who think I still play.  It's happened twice this month already.  Last fall a well-known musician of my acquaintance reminded me of a concert he had conducted in the early 80s for which I was NOT hired to play the bass clarinet although I apparently had been requested.  He told me that the performance back then would have been better had I been performing.  I scratched my head wondering why anyone would remember a detail like that after half a lifetime.

Anyway, this post is really about Mo 'n Herb's Vacation.  It's not Frank's greatest piece of music by far.  It isn't really a clarinet concerto and has never been advertised as one.  It simply has several sections of blindingly difficult music for the first clarinetist.  And there is also blindingly difficult music for the other three clarinetists - just not quite so much.   Frank was never terribly happy with the LSO recordings and he spent lots of time trying to fix them.  I doubt he improved them much.

Here's a recording which someone posted to YouTube, not of a performance but of a test recording done in Frank's studio before the London concert and recordings.  All four clarinets are me.  The bassoons are performed by John Steinmetz and Chad Wackerman is the drummer.

It was my impression that I was the only clarinetist who had ever performed this music.  But yesterday I learned that there had been another performance in 2005 in Venice Italy.  I'm anxious to hear that recording.

As I perused the web for information about this other Mo 'n Herb, I came across a 2007 discussion of the piece on Sherman Friedland's Clarinet Corner blog.  I had never heard of Sherman Friedland.  Apparently he was a clarinetist and pedagogue and professor at Concordia College in Canada, now retired to a life of blogging.

Sherman starts by saying some negative things about Frank and his music.  But at the end of the post he gets around to me.  Wow!

Of the work for solo clarinet and orchestra, called “MOE [sic] n Herbs Vacation” and played by David Ocker, solo clarinet, I can only say that is is the worst sounding clarinet playing I have ever witnessed, not being able to say “heard”.

So, to the young person who wrote and asked me what I think, I can only reply “very sadly”.

I wonder what an English teacher would think of Sherman's syntax.  How does one "witness" a piece of music without hearing it?  Fuzzy grammar or not, it's clear what he thinks.

This guy has a lifetime of clarinet experience.  For him to say that my playing is "the worst sounding clarinet playing" he ever heard is certainly intended as a major put down.  Since I played Frank's music accurately, we can assume that Sherman's complaints are about something else, my tone or my style or my enthusiasm or about some other subjective issue of how he thinks the clarinet is supposed to sound.

On that level I can take some pride in Sherm's defamation.  At a certain point in my clarinet studies I made the conscious decision that I would not imitate conventional clarinet playing, meaning the standard, omnipresent, wimpy, unadventurous, never-use-vibrato playing style produced by so many classical clarinetists.  Colleges and clarinet teachers, such as Sherman, must still be turning those clones out in exceedingly large numbers.  All of them hoping, no doubt, to score an orchestra job.  Any of them interchangeable with the others.  None of them the slightest bit distinguishable by their sound.

I listened to samples of Sherman's own playing on the web.  He seems to fit the mold himself.  I also found a short New York Times review of his recital at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1986.

Mr. Friedland is a competent player and seemed sincerely in love with his material. Still, one could have wished for a sharper technical edge in the Bernstein and the fulsome tone that might have invested Berg and Reger with more vivid colors.

Sherman would have gotten more notoriety from his performance if the reviewer had said "this is the worst clarinet playing I've ever heard".  People remember when something is described as the "worst ever".  "Competent"?  Could that be another word for tepid?

When I played I tried to make the clarinet something more than mono-timbral, to play with a variety of tone colors and styles and attitudes, the very thing, the fulsome tone, which the New York Times found lacking in Sherman's recital.  I wasn't always successful in my goal of aural variety but always I gave it my best shot.  Sherman, apparently, doesn't think along those lines and disparages those who do.

Sherman's comment makes me wonder if he often blogs his mouth off without thinking, like some sort of online jerk.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  More likely he's just someone with an exceptionally well-defined unchangeable set of musical assumptions which he has trouble stretching to account for the myriad varieties of other music in this world.

All in all, I would rather not have had my playing, even a 30-year old performance, called "the worst sounding clarinet playing I have ever witnessed" by anyone.  But, considering the ivory tower source of the remark, I'm happy to wear this comment proudly.

Plus, I do thank him for spelling my name right.

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Here's a picture of Sherman Friedland in March 1965, part of a group performing György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, 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 in the book by Renee Levine Parker, This Life of Sounds. Evenings for New Music in Buffalo. (available as a pdf)

Other reading: Two Marks of Good Music Criticism  - a 2007 Mixed Meters article about music critics, including a full review of my New Music America recital by Mark Swed.  Here's a quote:

Ocker, as both a performer and composer, brings to music the kind of personal quality that most professional musicians have had trained out of them.

A number of my historical clarinet performances are available for listening here.

Here's a photo taken in Zappa's studio the same day the overdub recordings were made - plus discussion about whether it's a real photo or not.  (It is.)  I'm the one with both beard and clarinet, on the right.

In the Clarinet Corner blog posting, the "young person who wrote and asked me what I think" named Martin, is this person.

If you click the Xtet flyer picture, it should enlarge enough for you to read the press quotes which the ensemble received.  Xpect Xpuns.

Yeah, I'm living in the past. I can think of worse places to be.

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ADDENDUM: I thank everyone for their comments.  More discussion of this topic happened on Facebook.

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Worst Ever Tags: music reviews. . . nasty blog comments. . . David Ocker clarinetist

Arthur Jarvinen - Carbon for Bass Clarinet Solo

(You can read about the Arthur Jarvinen Memorial held October 30, 2010.  Or read my initial post called Arthur Jarvinen 1956-2010.)

In 1982 Art Jarvinen wrote a solo piece for bass clarinet entitled Carbon.  I performed that piece a lot.  (For me "a lot" was still less than a dozen times.)  One of those performances was at the New Music America Festival held here in Los Angeles in 1985.  I did a solo clarinet recital at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, then located at USC.   (You can read about that recital in the MM post Two Marks of Good Music Criticism.)

I often introduced the pieces I performed directly from the stage.  That was a lucky thing at this event because the programs didn't arrive until the concert was nearly finished. 

Listen to my introduction of Carbon by Arthur Jarvinen on New Music America 1985  (142 seconds)

Here is a transcription of Art's program notes and biography as I read them to the audience.  My other verbal interpolations are only available if you listen.

Arthur Jarvinen provided the following notes for Carbon: This work was through-composed on a purely intuitive basis at a time when I was infatuated with Antarctica. I imagine Antarctica to be the place on the planet with the most nothing or the least of everything. The work is now dedicated to David Ocker for repeatedly bringing his considerable talents to bear on an odd and difficult piece.

Art also provided the following biography and noted that some people thought it uninformative. Arthur Jarvinen was raised in Finnish communities in the midwestern United States and Canada, the son of a Lutheran clergyman. A boy scout for three years he once snowshoed twenty miles in one day. Mr. Jarvinen has been a student of Thai cooking for several years and enjoys entertaining his friends. In 1983 he made dinner for Drumbo. His favorite footwear is a pair of jump boots he got in 1975.

Listen to Carbon by Arthur Jarvinen (482 seconds)

Here's an email which I received from Arthur.  It's dated March 17, 2007, at 3:10PM:

As a composer, I have really valued my relationships with people like you, Marty Walker and others who chose to play the bass clarinet, and focus on it, and do it so well. God's gift to me was the ability to easily play the vibraphone, the most boring instrument on earth. I would have asked for bass clarinet chops, were that an option.

I always wondered why he called the piece Carbon.  I can't remember ever asking him directly.  Possibly he chose the title because there's so little of the element carbon in the Antarctic.  That would mean it is music about things which are not present.  The music is filled with a great deal of emptiness. 

After an opening section of about 90 seconds, Art abruptly discards most of the material he has set forth, choosing to keep only a few simple musical phrases characterized by long steady tones.  These are unpredictably repeated over and over, contrasting loud and soft.

At each successive performance I remember trying to make those long tones even steadier and even longer.  And to make the silences between them longer as well.  Art eventually noticed this and told me that's not what he intended.  He didn't specifically say 'don't do it'. I remember ignoring his comment.

Today, based on this performance, I don't feel that the piece is too long.  But Carbon does feel like it speaks about things which are missing.  Foremost among them now, of course, is Art himself.  I suspect that the meaning of all of his music will change for those of us who knew him, now that we must live in a world without him. It's a poorer world now - one without the one-of-a-kind creativity of Art.

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A note on this recording.  My 25-year old archive tape was afflicted with horrible print-through, a condition where the magnetism of one loop of recording tape magnetizes the next loop.  This results in little echos of things which are about to happen.  Needless to say, the listening experience is ruined - especially for Carbon.  

Through the miracle of digital audio editing and because of the reptitive nature of this music,  I've been able to remove the print-through artifacts and restore the music experience.  Audiophiles who listen critically at high volumes will be scandalized.  The rest of us, who listen at normal volume, should have no problem in contemplating the musical events as Art himself intended them.

Carbon Dating Tags: Arthur Jarvinen. . . Carbon. . . bass clarinet. . . New Music America 1985

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

Two Marks of Good Music Criticism

I have two confessions. One -- I used to play the bass clarinet. Two -- I occasionally ego surf (er, I search the web for my own name.)

My mind was completely blown last year when I surfed upon this July 2006 article by music critic Mark Saleski, someone I had never heard of. Obviously Mark is a very good critic. He opens his review of an album by bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin (another person with whom I'm not familiar) talking about me. There are several positive paragraphs reminiscing about an otherwise completely forgotten solo bass clarinet composition of mine. He lamented misplacing his recording of it. Saleski writes:

"My cassette recording of that performance has a lot of miles on it—the bass clarinet (so full of character!) being put through those winding passages was something that just made my ears light up."

This particular piece (I'll tell you the title in a minute) was written for a recital I gave in 1985 at New Music America. It may be hard to believe now, but for more than a decade mostly in the 80s there was a major festival of composers and performers of contemporary music, established and wannabes alike. It was held in a different US city every year. It was actually a big deal.

In 1985 NMA happened in Los Angeles, actively supported by the city's Cultural Affairs Department. LA had had a vast international arts festival the year before, in the shadow of the Olympic Games, and festivals became all the vogue for a while.

My NMA recital was one of four held at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute (then located at USC in a building I think is designed to look like a piano). The other three new musicians were David Burge, piano, Bert Turetzky, bass, and William Winant, percussion.


Recorded excerpts from these concerts (and other NMA LA events) were made available to a national public radio network. I seem to remember that the number of stations which actually broadcast these programs was firmly in the single digits. But obviously Mark Saleski listened to one of them. More than 20 years later his comments mark the first time I was aware of anyone who had actually listened.

If you do a web search for "New Music America" you'll find that it lives on mostly as entries in the biographies of countless composers and performers - myself included. I found only this one small Wikipedia entry describing the whole endeavor.

Anyway, after reading Mark Saleski's review, I resolved to provide him with a replacement recording. And also, naturally, to blog about the whole thing for my two regular readers. I've uploaded three audio excerpts from that recital, all are of me playing bass clarinet.


The piece Mark Saleski wrote about is titled "The Allegro Fourth Movement from the Symphony Number 3 in F Opus 90 by Johannes Brahms by David Ocker." (yes, I put my own name right at the end of the title.) Fully describing the history and the process and the point of the piece would triple the length of this post - so I'll just say that I made a lead sheet of a Brahms symphonic movement and then changed the notes so I could claim it as my own.

click here to hear The Allegro Fourth Movement from the Symphony Number 3 in F Opus 90 by Johannes Brahms by David Ocker

Copyright (c) (p) 1985 and 2007 by David Ocker - 8 minutes 51 seconds

I opened the recital with a solo improvisation. Although I often improvised in public back then (as part of a trio with Vinny Golia and Anne La Berge) it was rare for me to improvise alone. This piece, my only named, marginally repeatable improv, is entitled "At Sixes and Sevens". The title refers to a rhythmic element that's difficult to hear. Mostly it was an opportunity to show off some of the strange bass clarinet noises I could make.

click here to hear At Sixes and Sevens

Copyright (c) (p) 1985 and 2007 by David Ocker - 4 minutes 22 seconds

I played an encore which was Non-new and Non-American: my arrangement for solo bass clarinet of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. Surreal, huh? I suppose I imagined back then that I could do just about anything on the bass clarinet. Even imitate a celesta.

click here to hear Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, arranged and performed by David Ocker, bass clarinet

Copyright (c) (p) 1985 and 2007 by David Ocker - 2 minutes 26 seconds


This Sugar Plum Fairy picture came from here. The two shots of me with my bass clarinet are from the 80s, taken by John Livzey in Frank Zappa's UMRK studio. If you look at my beard carefully you can see my very first gray hairs. I've always particularly liked the picture with the clarinet pushing my nose out of joint.

I'm including the full program, the blurb text (also in the picture) and Mark Swed's complete LA Herald Examiner review. In a prior review Mark Swed had referred to me as a "super-clarinetist" and I, of course, used that term in my promotional materials as often as I could. Obviously Mark is a very good music critic. In this particular review he tries to define more precisely exactly what he meant by "super-clarinetist."



In 1985 Mark Swed and I didn't yet know that we were distant cousins by marriage. And I most certainly did not know that in 1992 I would marry Leslie Harris, Mark Swed's first cousin once removed. It's entirely possible that I'm related to Mark Saleski somehow as well. I just don't know quite how yet.

THE PROMOTIONAL BLURB

In Recital:
DAVID OCKER

Benny Goodman Never Sounded Like This! The composer/clarinetist performs music by Dolphy, Jarvinen, Martino, Ocker, Smith, Steinmetz, and Tenney.

"Super clarinetist" - Mark Swed, L.A. Herald Examiner

Sponsored by the ICA.

Arnold Schoenberg Institute, USC Campus Tickets: $5 advance, $7 after 10/15 and at the door ($4 students with ID, seniors and ICA members). For tickets after 10/15 call (213) 741-7111.

Info call: (213) 743-5362

THE PROGRAM

David Ocker At Sixes and Sevens solo bass clarinet   [listen]

Arthur Jarvinen Carbon solo bass clarinet  [listen]

Donald Martino B,a,b,b,it,t clarinet with extensions  [listen]

James Tenney Monody solo clarinet

William O. Smith Variants solo clarinet

Eric Dolphy, transcribed Ocker God Bless the Child solo bass clarinet [listen]

John Steinmetz DATACOMP Atari 800 computer and bass clarinet

David Ocker The Allegro Fourth Movement from Symphony Number 3 in F opus 90 by Johannes Brahms by David Ocker solo bass clarinet  [listen]

Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky arr. Ocker Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies solo bass clarinet  [listen]

Sheet music to Carbon and Allegro Fourth Movement etc etc can no longer be purchased from Leisure Planet music.

THE REVIEW

Los Angeles Herald Examiner Saturday November 9, 1985

New Music America

by Mark Swed
Herald music critic

David Ocker's solo clarinet recital at the Schoenberg Institute at USC on Wednesday afternoon represented the finest aspects of the Los Angeles new-music spirit. Ocker is an original, both as clarinetist and composer. I've called him a superclarinetist before -- not because he is the top virtuoso in the business, but for his inspired way of transcending limitations.

Technically, Ocker is good enough: he can finger and tongue his way through difficult, abtuse music. Better yet, he is musical. He made Donald Martino's too rationally disjointed "B,a,b,b,it,t" sound like music; and he did the same with Arthur Jarvinen's irrationally disjointed "Carbon." But that isn't what makes Ocker special.

Ocker, as both a performer and composer, brings to music the kind of personal quality that most professional musicians have had trained out of them. Ocker introduced each work, mostly by telling what it meant to him, and did so with dry humor and without the slightest pretense. He is ever-so-slightly awkward on stage, in his playing and composing, but he turns that awkwardness into something playful and curiously touching

All of this was found in Ocker's own version, for solo clarinet, of the Finale to Brahms' Third Symphony, where he follows Brahms' form and rhythms, but to his own melodies. Ocker said the work was meant to show the epiphany he felt upon first hearing it. It conveys the feeling of singing along with a record, loudly and exuberantly, just for oneself. It turns the art of transcription into modern performance art in an entirely new way that dramatically and spiritually confronts the notion of performing in public.

Ocker is also a funny, self effacing performer, and another highlight of his program was a hilarious spoof on modern music done up as a computer game by John Steinmetz.

Solo Clarinet Recital Tags: David Ocker. . . clarinet. . . bass+clarinet. . . solo recital. . . music critics. . . Mark Saleski. . . Mark Swed. . . New Music America. . . Los Angeles

What to do with a clarinet

"Someone's been selling clarinets to the Indians." A Herman cartoon by Unger

This cartoon has been on all my refrigerator doors continuously since July 9, 1985 - that's the publication date marked on it. I figured I'd better digitize it before it crumbles.

I recently passed the tenth anniversary of my final performance as a clarinetist. This little panel always added a nice touch of absurdity to a part of my life sorely in need of same.

It's also an excellent suggestion for what to do with old clarinets. (Unlike good instruments, such as violins, clarinets deteriorate with age.)

This reminds me of the Goon Show episode entitled "The Call of the West" (first broadcast on the BBC January 20, 1959) in which Moriarty & Grytpype-Thynne travel to "the colonies" to sell saxophones to the natives. Here are a few select lines:

1) Lt. Hern-Hern: "Now we're looking for two men who've been selling contraband saxophones to the Red Injuns ... thereby causing unemployment among white musicians."

2) Grytpype-Thynne: "Yes, he plays lovely doesn't he? It could easily pass for music."

3) Moriarty (in crate with saxophones): "Is it night or day?" Grytpype-Thynne: "Fool ... that sort of thing is only for the rich."

(Did you say "What's a Goon Show?" A 50's British radio show written by Spike Milligan and starring Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe. I've collected several hundred taped episodes over the years. Often cited as an influence on Monty Python. For more info: The Goon Show Site or Dick Baker's Goon Show Preservation Society.)

Here's another old clarinet cartoon along the same lines - this one from July 1994 - not funny enough for 20 years on the fridge, but still funny.

"Jerry keeps his interest in the clarinet under wraps." Ballard Street by Jerry von Amerongen

Click on the cartoons for enlargement.

Other Mixed Meters musings involving the Clarinet

Clarinet Flashback (The Del-Rio Mini Sax Affair)

The Laptop in Live Performance (In which you can listen to my failed 30-year old piece for clarinet and electronics.)

VIDEO from before the clarinet became absurd:

Artie Shaw in 1940 (Dig the violin section tapping its foot.)

Eric Dolphy in 1961, God Bless the Child on bass clarinet

Hüsnü Şenlendiri, a Turkish clarinetist. Check out the red outfit on the trumpet player.

Yeghishé Gasparian, an Armenian clarinetist with dancers.

And finally, a 1945 super-excellent animated short of swing-dancing teen bobby-socksers with a Benny Goodman soundtrack. (Highly recommended.)


Music Video
Artifacts

30 Second Spots - The Laptop in Live Performance?

For about a week it seemed that every music review I read said "And s/he used a laptop." The repeated mentions of laptops in concert provided the inspiration for the title. The music itself is something else altogether.

click here to hear The Laptop in Live Performance?
Copyright © March 14, 2006 by David Ocker - 35 seconds

No doubt you can do a lot of different very musical things with a laptop in performance. But the mere presence of electronic equipment to process live sound seems totally unremarkable to me. Over thirty years ago, as a graduate composition student, I even took a formal course in using live electronics in performance.

For that course I wrote a piece called "Voluntary Solitude" for clarinet (me) and live electronics. It involved large panels of Buchla synthesizers which modified the clarinet sound via envelope followers and modulation. The clarinet was the only sound source. I performed it from the center of a large tape loop. It uses a melody inexpertly stolen from Stravinsky.

Voluntary Solitude had only one attempted performance in front of an audience, on a recital I gave as a graduate clarinet student. The performance was a total, complete abject failure. The electronics just didn't work - I never found out why. No sound came out. I started it twice or three times while the audience fidgeted - and finally went on to the next piece. (The complete program is reproduced below.)

A few days later I recorded Voluntary Solitude in a studio and I thought it was completely forgotten. But when I was discussing laptops in performance with my friend John Steinmetz, he still remembered it. And now the recording of Voluntary Solitude is available here for you to hear.

But first ask yourself, "How many composers do you know who would post recordings of their worst student compositional failures on the Internet for just anyone to hear?" I'd be surprised if this becomes a trend.

click here to hear Voluntary Solitude
Copyright © 1975 & 2006 by David Ocker - 784 seconds

Here's a picture of PLOrk "the Princeton Laptop Orchestra" just after nap time. (I'm glad they didn't call it PLO.) Read about and listen to them here.

Here's an academic article about Laptops in Live Performance that I didn't have the patience to read. Would anyone who reads this blog use the word "Performativity"? Not me.

Here's a video of a woman, apparently a respected academic, giving vocal commands to her blender in its native language.

If you're looking for a better piece of music with a question mark in the title, one that involves no live electronics, I recommend Naval Aviation in Art? by Frank Zappa. You can download it here for one thin dime.

Frank wrote that Naval Aviation in Art? "shows a sailor-artist, standing before his easel, squinting through a porthole for inspiration, while wiser men sleep in hammocks all around him"

Yes, to be a great artist you have to go without sleep. And avoid the word performativity.

Here's the program of my 1975 Clarinet recital:

Capriccio (1946) clarinet solo by H. Sutermeister
Madrigal I pour clarinette seule (1958) by Henri Pousseur
Discourses (1968) for solo clarinet by Harold Oliver
In Delius' Sleep (1974) clarinet & piano by Hal Budd
B,A,B,B,IT,T (5/16/66) clarinet with extensions by Donald Martino
Voluntary Solitude (1975) clarinet and electronics by David Ocker
Suite from L'Histoire du Soldat (1918) for clarinet, violin, piano and percussion by Igor Stravinsky
with Cody Gillette, pianist, Eeda Shenkman, violinist, Paul Anceau, percussionist, Leonid Hambro, pianist - "and the spirit of Donald Buchla"
UPDATE!!! - Here's a BBC video news clip showing a more popular form of live electronic music from 1975.

Explanation of 30 second spots

30 Second Spots
Stories
Music Reviews
Cat Pictures

30 Second Spots - Mozart & Microsoft - Early Death?

click here to hear Mozart and Microsoft - Early Death? The title is descriptive of my day today - I spent hours trying to get Microsoft Word to do what it has always done before. Simple stuff supposedly. And I failed. I wondered how long before Microsoft goes out of business.

Then, while I was writing this piece, two guys were talking about clarinets - Mitchell Lurie reeds, C Clarinets and Mozart. My past come back to haunt me.

This 30 Second Spot is a Work Song for a Gang of Convict Frogs.

Copyright © February 16, 2006 by David Ocker - 30 seconds


Explanation of 30 second spots

30 Second Spots

In which David has a Clarinet Flashback

The back-story: I played the clarinet for many years, got pretty good, did some interesting things. Didn't teach much because I wasn't a good teacher. About 10 years ago I gave up playing completely. Never looked back.

Cut to the present: we have three houseguests, marine biologists from Mexico, here to study worms. One day they visited Venice Beach.

This is a picture of Guillermo. He purchased this Del Rio Mini-Sax at the beach. A black tube with eight large holes, sax mouthpiece and reed. (Technical nit pick: it's cylindrical so it's really a Clarinet not a Saxophone.)

I played and sounded just awful. Ask anyone who was there. I wonder if it could ever sound good..

Of course Guillermo wanted to play. Suddenly I was giving him an introductory clarinet lesson. I explained how the sound was produced, how to attach the reed with the ligature, the embouchure. In ten minutes he improved a thousand percent.

For decades playing the clarinet was a HUGE part of my life and a lot of people knew me only as a clarinet player. Once I decided to stop, quitting was easy. People still ask "Do you still play?" I don't miss it at all - and playing this little travesty of a clarinet made me not miss it even more.

Good luck, Guillermo. Like my Father told me, half an hour practice a day!

Stories
Music Reviews