Wesley "Scoop" Nisker

Can you remember anything you did on June 13, 1964?  I can remember getting a lesson about life on that date - with an assist from my first cousin Wesley Nisker.  Wes passed away recently at age 80. 

Wesley "Scoop" Nisker (1942-2023)

Along with my parents and other family members, I was attending Wes's college graduation at the University of Minnesota Memorial Coliseum (seating 56,000).   We had driven nearly 300 miles to attend.  It was a big event in my young life.  I was 12 years old, Wes was 21.

Anyway, a group of family members were walking to the ceremony through a parking lot with the huge stadium looming above us.  I piped up enthusiastically, saying how excited I was that Wes was "finally completely finished."  

"No, David," someone explained, "Wes has just reached the beginning."  Then a pause before the punchline  "Why else would they call it a Commencement?"  

I was dumbstruck.  I had no answer to this.  The huge importance of a college degree had already been heavily impressed upon me of course.  Until that moment, I had never ever considered that I might have a life of some sort beyond the seemingly endless years of school which completely consumed my own future.  This new notion seemed both obvious and bizarre.  My mind was blown.  I've never forgotten that moment.  

Wesley and our Grandmother

Imagine, hypothetically, just then, back in 1964, that the sky had opened and a mysterious voice had revealed the future and told us all about Wes's life for his next 60 years after commencement.  We would have been confused.  Probably we would have understood phrases like "he'll move to San Francisco and get a job at a radio station".  On the other hand "he'll become a teacher of Buddhist meditation" wouldn't have meant anything to a group of Midwestern Jews during the mid-Sixties.  

"A what, now?" we'd ask.  
"A spiritual leader," the voice might explain.  
"You mean, like a Rabbi?"  

Years later, when adult Wes told his actual life history on stage or in books he would mention starting out as the only Jewish boy in a small otherwise all-Christian Nebraska city.  Despite the isolation, his parents (my Aunt and Uncle) still wanted him to be bar mitzvah (call it Jewish "commencement").  He would talk about how his parents hired a "circuit rabbi" who arrived by Greyhound each week to teach him the rituals.   This unique, solitary religious upbringing helped to spark his life-long search for spiritual meaning and identity.  It was the beginning of his origin story.  Here's how he wrote about it in his book "If You Don't Like the News, Go Out And Make Some of Your Own":

"My bar mitzvah lessons involved memorizing long passages of Hebraic script that made no sense to me, in preparation to join a Jewish community that, in my home town at least, did not exist. My entire rite of passage and spiritual initiation were thus almost completely devoid of meaning." (on page 3)

Wes Nisker and his father Jack

I grew up in a different midwestern town, a slightly bigger one with more Jews, one state over, only 75 miles from where Wes spent his childhood.  After high school I also escaped to higher education in Minnesota and eventually lost my use for Jewish faith.  Then, after college, we both left the Midwest  and happened to catch similar trade winds, washing ashore in California.   And that's where we both stayed.

Wesley offers a toast - Thanksgiving 1953
(that's me on the right)

When Wes and I lived in the Midwest, our mothers - who were sisters - kept their families in close touch.  They managed to get us together for holidays and birthdays multiple times per year.  If Wes and I had remained Midwesterners we might have stayed much closer.  I'm pretty sure that neither us would have been the slightest bit happy about living out our lives in the land of cows, corn and conformity to which our Grandparents had emigrated from the other side of the globe.  

Baby Wesley with his sister Jan

Other than the incredibly general similarities which brought us from the Midwest to the Left Coast, our lives were extremely different.  Wes landed in the Bay Area during the late 60s in time to become a hippie; I arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-70s to attend an institution founded by Walt Disney.  Wes got a job doing irreverent anti-establishment news broadcasts on an alternative rock station (which is where he earned his nickname "Scoop").  I got a job working for Frank Zappa.   Wes traveled to India and eventually became what I dubbed a "traveling rebbe", on the road teaching meditation seminars, although I doubt he traveled on buses.  I did different stuff.  

Wesley steadies his nerves
before getting married in 1966.

Wesley and I ended up with very different lives.  We were separated by nine years, although the difference in age seemed less important as we got older.  The Bay Area and L.A. are only about 500 miles apart, but Wes and I followed our life paths as part of very different social groups.  One might sometimes think that we lived on different planets.   

Even so, our early family ties kept us in contact, more or less.  This was a lot harder once our parents passed on.  We met up infrequently, mostly to remember the old days and share quick generalized catch-ups on the lives we had chosen.  He never stopped being my very hip older cousin.  There's a small part of me that never stopped wanting to be like him somehow or other.

Jack, Esther, Rose and Wesley Nisker

As the only child of Wes’s doting Aunt Edythe, I inherited a trove of family pictures.  The trove includes many photos of Wesley during his Nebraska and Minnesota periods.  The pictures run from Wes's early childhood into middle age when he had started his own family.  

Mudita Nisker, Edythe Ocker, Wesley Nisker
in Sioux City Iowa

If you know and love his commentaries about political life and about spiritual life and about just plain life, you might enjoy seeing these snaps of Wes.  But let's face it, I'm really writing about him for my own personal reasons.  He was someone who knew me for my entire life.  He seemed to be someone trying to come to terms with time and change and self-acceptance.  His death makes me think about my own eventual death and leaves me with an unresolved regret that we weren't closer.  I would have loved to have known him better.

David, Leslie and Wesley in 1992

I don't remember ever telling him my Commencement Revelation story in which he played the lead role.   Had I done that, I can easily imagine him responding with a story - or a joke -  possibly about how death was also commencement.   Here's a quote from his book Crazy Wisdom:

"If life is a joke, death is the punch line. If life is a tragedy, death means the show is over and we can leave for home. If we have many lives, as believed in the East, then we must also have many deaths, so we might as well get good at dying." (page 203)

Wes was extremely good at finding correlations between science and spirituality and then finding thought-provoking ways to share what he had found.  While the notion of rebirth never became part of my own beliefs, I figure it's important to try to keep an open mind about such matters - even though, to me, it's a notion from a whole different universe.  

Wesley Nisker - plays guitar, leaves for Europe

So, Wesley, if you're out there - and by some chance you're reading this post - why not get in touch.  Let us know how you’re getting along in the great beyond.  You could blow my mind again by sending a sign from whichever afterlife you've landed in - like a new book or a commentary or maybe a new radio show.  Possibly you'll call it “If you don’t like this heaven, go out and make one of your own.”

Wesley Links:

Wes's Website (with lots of video, audio and writings)

Wes's YouTube channel 

Wes's articles for Inquiring Mind (a journal he co-founded)

John Cage and the Music of Sound (one of those articles)

A Liberal Scoop of Wit and Sanity (an article about Wes which begins with the line "SCOOP NISKER once shot William F. Buckley with a water pistol.")

An obituary by Rod Meade Sperry

Terrence McKenna interviews Wes in a park:

Posts about Wes's and my mutual family on Mixed Meters:

My Mother, My Worm

Reagan Says Give Chesterfields for Christmas

Marion Shuman

Bernard Shuman

Also:

What Is It Like To Be Dead? (far and away the most read Mixed Meters post ever)

Young Wesley Nisker - high school musician (with his sister Jan)

Many of these pictures were colorized using the artificial intelligence at palette.fm 

Albert Marsh (1930-2017)

Leslie and I were very saddened to learn of the passing of our friend Albert Marsh.  We met Albert and his husband Johnnathan through an accident of real estate when they moved into the house next door.   That was nearly 25 years ago.  For a few years our lives met figuratively and literally over the back fence.  They became our adopted family, a relationship which has persisted in the years since we moved away from that street.

Albert grew up in a Texas border-town and, after college in the fifties, settled in New York City, then San Francisco and finally in Los Angeles which is where he met Johnnathan.  He worked as an architect and designer.  He was also an artist.  I really like his geometrical three-dimensional paintings - or maybe they should be called wall sculptures.  Later in life he became interested in shamanism, drumming and designing jewelry.  Some of his art and his necklaces can be seen in the pictures below.

Here's a caricature by the otherwise unidentified B.J. from Albert's time in San Francisco.  Then an apparently blissful moment I snapped over dinner one recent evening.

Here are two shots of Albert visiting our home.  In the first he is sitting with Leslie's Aunt Rose.  In the second he is investigating my new iPad, completely unaware that he is shooting selfie after selfie with his thumb.  Later I combined the shots into this animated gif.

A Halloween costume and striking a pose in his backyard.

Leslie and I send our profound condolences to Johnnathan Korver, Albert's husband.  Johnn wrote about Albert on Facebook and he kindly gave me permission to reproduce his thoughts here:

Dear Friends—It is with extreme heartbreak that I write this post today. My beloved husband, Albert Marsh passed away quietly and comfortably early yesterday morning. As I knew he was transitioning soon, I held his hand and played his favorite music with my IPad placed on his pillow. He was listening to some Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald and Karen Carpenter.

Albert and I have been together since March of 1989. We had a commitment ceremony in June of 1994 and were married in Pasadena, Ca in March of 2014, two days before our 25th Anniversary. 

As many of you know I always referred to him as My Sweet Albert. Although we were 19 years apart, our two generations were perfectly matched as we learned so much about each others experiences, and opinions. He was a spiritual being with so much to teach me. One of the first things he taught me was to not define myself by tragic experiences and take responsibility for being the only one to be able to change my circumstances should I not like them. I’m certainly one to bitch and moan about the same thing too many times. He said to me quite clearly, “if this is a new story or problem, I’d be glad to listen and perhaps give some advice…if it’s something I’ve heard before, and you haven’t done anything about it, I’m not interested in hearing it”. That’s great advice.

Thank you all for the wonderful and kind emails, messages and phone calls. I’m truly touched by them and I know he would be too. So take care of one another, listen to one another, and work together to solve problems and issues that put you both on the same page. Write your life screenplay together and Star in the Film of your lives. You will be rewarded with The Academy Award of your life.

Oh and one other thing, put the hammer, nails and other tools away after you’re done using them…..Trust me on this one.  I love you all.

Once same-sex marriage became legal, Albert and Johnnathan held their marriage ceremony in our living room.   To commemorate the event and to thank us, they gave us this work by Albert.  Everyday the beautiful piece reminds us of him and of the happiness he and Johnn shared.  On the back it says:

"Twin Flames" collage by Albert Marsh, circa 1985

Reframed February 29, 2014

to David and Leslie

From Johnnathan and Albert

On the occasion of our wedding day

March 1, 2014

One more picture because of the big smiles - Albert and Leslie making a ring around the tree.

Marion Shuman

Last month my Aunt Marion Shuman passed away in Jerusalem Israel.  She was 88.  Leslie and I send our profound condolences to her children, Ellis, Debby and Judy and their families.

I first met Aunt Marion nearly 60 years ago.  It was 1954.  I was three.  Engaged to marry my Uncle Ben, she visited Sioux City, Iowa, where I lived.  That would have been about a month before their wedding.

Don't imagine that I remember her visit.  I've refreshed my memory with old family albums.  Here are two pictures of Marion and Ben dated 1954 and 1955. (The boy in the second picture is me - age 4.)  Those are among the earliest pictures of Marion in the albums.

After they were married Ben and Marion made their home in Sioux City.  They had three children while Ben worked at the local newspaper.  In 1972 Ben and Marion moved the entire family to Israel, leaving the mid-West for the mid-East.  Their hope was to raise their children in a more Jewish environment.

Their departure was covered by that same local newspaper.  The article, Sioux City Family Leaving for New Home in Holy Land, quotes Marion:

I have a very religious feeling about this including the timing.  We were meant to go. The good Lord has been watching over us.  I know we will have hard times ahead, but we are prepared.

Here is a picture showing all five Shumans in 1972, soon after arriving in Israel.

Photo albums tell many stories.  Over time things change - cameras, fashions, people.  One story that the pictures tell about Marion is the strength of her marriage to Ben.  Most of her pictures show them together.  I had to look hard to find shots of her alone.  These are dated 1973, 1977 and 1983.

Once the Shumans were nearly half a world away, communication with friends and family back in the Old Country (i.e. Iowa) became much more difficult.  Many letters were written.  Along with the photo albums I have an envelope stuffed with letters from Israel - spanning more than 20 years - a collection saved and cherished by my Mother.

Early letters, written with a manual typewriter on light-weight Israeli Aerogrammes, were intended for many different State-side readers.  These might begin with a salutation like:

Shalom from Jerusalem to Mother, Edythe, Al, Esther, Jack, family and friends!

Gradually, as people passed on, the salutations shortened one by one.  Later letters are addressed only "Dear Edythe".  After my Mother's death this becomes "Dear David".  The trusty manual typewriter was replaced eventually by a spiffy electric which soon gave way to a mysterious computer with dot matrix printer.  And then the letters stop.  Email had arrived.

The letter writer-in-chief was, quite naturally, the journalist in the family, Uncle Ben.  Letters from Marion were few.  These letters focus on daily life in Jerusalem - schools, jobs (Ben worked for the local newspaper), military service, weddings, births, trips, visitors from America.

Here are a couple more pictures showing Ben with his arm around Marion.  (These are vintage 1974.)

One letter from Aunt Marion stands out.  When my Mother passed away in 1986, Uncle Ben traveled from Israel to Iowa for the funeral.  Marion had to remain in Jerusalem but sent a personal letter of condolence.

Here are two short excerpts in Marion's own words on the subject of the loss of a mother.
Hopefully her children, her children's children and (someday) her children's children's children (when they learn to read) will take some comfort from them, as I repurpose them to reflect back on the woman who actually wrote them.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I really share your loss - but in my way.  A mother can never be replaced and you will remember how much she loved you and took pride in all that you have accomplished.  You surely must know that she shared this pride with us, and we loved hearing about it.

I hope you have been warmed by the respect and love many people had for your Mom, she was vital all her years, never showed her age, and was interested in people - a very important interest!  Keep her wonderful image in front of you always.

Judaism was important to my Aunt Marion.  Family was important to her.  Those two things infused everything she did.  She had purpose and determination, good qualities to have when moving a family with three teenagers half a world away.  Such a move must have posed one new challenge after another.  

Marion knew instinctively that Israel was a better place than Iowa to raise a Jewish family.  Looking back on her life and on the family she raised, it's pretty clear that her instincts were right.

Here's a picture of Marion and Ben dated 2006, 52 years after the first picture in this post.  It's not surprising that Ben still had his arm around Marion.

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Ellis Shuman has inherited the mantle of Shuman family writer-in-chief from his father.  He has published a novel and a collection of short stories.  Check out his Amazon page.  Ellis also writes a blog called Ellis Shuman Writes.  

He wrote a blog post called The Comfort of Jewish Mourning Customs which describes Marion's final days and the Jewish traditions her family fulfilled to mark her death and remember her life.  She would have been proud to know these traditions continued after her.  Of course she did a lot to make sure that happened.

Blog posts about the recently departed are not traditional Jewish customs.  However Mixed Meters has been around long enough to make a few of its own traditions.  You can read my 2007 post remembering Marion's husband of over 52 years, my Uncle Ben Shuman, here.  Plenty more pictures of the two of them together.

One more memory ...  in 1992 I married Leslie Harris.  Since both of my parents had already passed away, Ben and Marion graciously traveled from Israel to California to serve as my honorary parents.  Here's a picture of the three of us, taken 37 years after the snap above (the one which shows the three of us slouching on a couch, just about the time of their first wedding anniversary.)

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.

David Raksin Centenary

(If you read this entire article you'll learn how I once broke into David Raksin's house and why I can never think of that event without also thinking of bad cheesecake.  Now read on...)

David Raksin was born on August 4, 1912.  That makes today his centenary.  Although the year 2012 includes the 100th birth anniversary of composers more famous than David (e.g. John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow or Stan Kenton), here in Los Angeles, where he was a fixture in the music community, there are many who remember him with great fondness.

And our memories are based not just on his musical accomplishments - although writing at least one big hit tune and scoring a flotilla of movies is clearly enough to get him into the music history books.   We remember that David was a jovial guy with a keen intelligence and a ready wit.  He always had a story about someone famous that he had known (and he seemed to have known just about everyone).  Or he told a joke (often of his own creation).  Or he made a pun.  Or two puns.  Or a whole passel of puns.  David loved word play.

To prove the point about knowing famous people, here's a photograph of David in his mid twenties.  He's the guy on the right.  On the left is Charlie Chaplin, with whom David worked on the music of the movie Modern Times.  Working for Chaplin was David's big break.  In the center are Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Schoenberg.  David studied with Schoenberg.  (David wasn't really all that tall.  Those others were just short.)

David belongs to a very small number of musicians who easily bridged the gap between the classical music and film music communities in Los Angeles.  He was a walking history of music in Southern California.  When he died it was announced that he had written an autobiography.  I remember him talking about it and showing me a decades-old kitchen calendar which he was using as a memory aid.  That's a book I'd love to read.

David Raksin had long since become a fixture in the music community of Los Angeles when I arrived here in the seventies.   He seemed to be at every concert I attended.  I don't remember specifically when I was introduced to him but it most certainly was by composer William Kraft, who was an extremely close friend of David's from the 1950s until David's death in 2004.

David made fastidious musical manuscripts.  Often in many colors.  Each year David was in the habit of sending some clever hand-made birthday greeting to Bill.  One such encomium took the form of short choral piece which David entitled A Posy From Woolworths For Bill On His Birthday.  Bill framed this and hung it in his studio, but after many years it had faded well past easy readability.

So Bill asked me to decipher the page and reproduce it on a computer.  I used the Sibelius hand-written music font.  It doesn't look much like David's own writing (and it's monochrome to boot) but it gives the same feel.  The layout of the page is identical to the original.

Here's the text:

Love and fortune wax and wane

We are entangled in their webbing,

More or lesser men may flow down the drain,

But Billy Kraft will never ebbing.

David's nickname for Bill was "Krafty Bill".  Notice that in the tenor part he changes the last line slightly in order to work the nickname in.  I doubt the reference to Krafft-Ebing is accidental.

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I once did some music preparation work for David.  I made the parts for a chamber music work entitled Oedipus Memnitai, which had been commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation at the Library of Congress.  That was a great honor for David.  He never called me for another job.  After his death I learned that it was the last piece he ever wrote. (The Speaking of Music interview - see below - concludes with a description and an excerpt of this piece.)

I also helped him prepare, at the last minute after he suffered a heart attack, for a concert of music by composer Alex North.  David was to conduct it in Spain.  When he arrived there some of the music - a piece I hadn't worked on - was missing.   David called and asked me to look for it in his studio.  David's ex-wife produced a key to his house but no one knew the code for the security system.  After some discussion, we unlocked his door and set off the alarm.  Fortunately the police were not alerted automatically.  We just waited, enduring the sound of a fortissimo trill on a solo bell, an opus annoyicus.  It continued until the alarm battery wore itself down.  Those were long minutes.   Once inside we could not find the missing music.

That night, on our way home from David's house, Leslie (who had been waiting in the car) and I stopped at the California Pizza Kitchen to sooth my alarm-wrenched nerves with dessert.  We chose a piece of New York cheesecake.  They served us the worst piece of cheesecake we had ever eaten or have eaten since: cardboard in a cardboard crust.  Ever since then, I have never thought about David Raksin without also thinking about bad cheesecake.  Or thought about CPK without thinking of David.  Aside from that one awful pastry, however, which certainly wasn't his fault, David earned an absolutely stellar place in my memory.  He deserves nothing less.   It was a honor to have known him.

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If you don't know about David's accomplishments or want some idea of what it was like to be around him, I recommend that you listen to this Speaking of Music event, in which David is interviewed by Charles Amhirkhanian.  It's as close as you can get to experiencing David Raksin, the raconteur, wit and name dropper.  You'll enjoy the story about David meeting Frank Lloyd Wright.

Here are some quotes I culled from this 90-minute interview:

"I can write thematic material faster than most people can make wrong chess moves."

"I would love to be able to say that I tried out for several porno films and didn't make it, but it wouldn't be true."

"You have no idea how music benefits from audibility."

"I could not see the Eastern university mafia permitting a guy who makes most of his living in films to get one." (i.e. the commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge foundation.)

The picture of David, Gertrud, Arnie and Charlie came from here.  The two pictures of the older David Raksin were posted on Facebook by Marilee Bradford.

Raksin Tags: David Raksin. . . film composers. . . centenary

Arthur Jarvinen Memorial

On October 30, 2010, a memorial was held for my friend Arthur Jarvinen.  The well-attended service was led by Martin Mosko, a Zen abbot and elder brother of Art's composition teacher Lucky Mosko.  Before his death Art had been studying with Martin with the intention of becoming a Zen Buddhist himself.

At the service Art's music was played, rituals were performed and people had the opportunity to share their memories of Art.  Art's Mother and older brother were among those who talked, along with a number of Art's friends.

In this post you'll find the eulogies given by Jim Rohrig and myself.  Jim at various times was a classmate, a housemate and a bandmate of Art Jarvinen. Jim and his wife Dee McMillan were among those who helped Art's wife Lynn through this difficult time.

You can view a pdf of the program from the service.  It details the pieces, the performers and the chant used in the memorial.  The program also included this excerpt from Art's own writing:

A teacher of mine once said to me "You don't ask enough questions."  Ever since then, I have been trying to come up with the question worth asking.  Most of what I was taught were "answers" to "questions" that I didn't have.  Giving up the answer was hard.  Finding the question worth asking is even harder.  The answers are all pretty much there.  You just have to ask the right question.  What is the right question? You tell me! I just know it has to be MY question, or all the answers are wrong.  (from Arthur's last notebook).

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My name is Jim Rohrig, and I’ve known Art since my first semester at CalArts. That was a while ago.

For those of you who may not have known Art, he was a complicated guy. He loved surf music, and he loved the music of John Cage. He loved camping out in the desert, and he enjoyed making Christmas gifts for his friends. He had a deep interest in mummies and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he always had a bunch of cats running around the house. He liked listening to Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, and he thought the Carpenters had written some great songs. And he loved composing music, making drawings, building model train layouts and creating Christmas villages full of miniature zombies. He was a complicated guy

Art and I and Toby Holmes and Miroslav Tadic and Leonice Shinneman used to play together in an “alternative rock” band called The Mope, “Five Ugly Guys With No Record Interest,” although it probably wasn’t “alternative” in quite the way you might think. It was five guys with Masters degrees in music rehearsing up in the office space Leonice used to live in in a business park out in Canyon Country. We used to call it the most over-educated rock band in history.

I remember how Art used to talk about the idea of “Serious Fun,” and just about everything I ever saw Art do or create had large helpings of both of those two things, fun and seriousness. The Invisible Guy, Sgt. Pekker, Egyptian Two-Step, the Physical Poetry. There always seemed to be some spirit of whimsy or maybe just a twinkle in the eye in serious projects. Chris Garcia was telling me recently about the time he and Art and M.B. Gordy were about to perform a piece of Art’s called "Zone" down at LACC.  It consisted entirely of slowly scraping large metal gongs, creating something akin to the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. Only louder. And when Chris asked Art how long he wanted the piece to last, Art said, “Until the audience can’t take it any more.” He was a complicated guy.

Now it was always my experience that Art wasn’t shy about telling you exactly what he thought. He had a gift for being “direct.” Some might call it “blunt.” A little bit of an “acid tongue.” Maybe some of you here today can recall being on the receiving end of that “directness.” In fact, I remember one time somebody told me that Art had “the manner of an automobile mechanic”…although those weren't the exact words that she used, and I always thought that was a little unfair to mechanics.

But Art also had a gift for engaging with people. Back when Dee worked at CalArts we used to have these big Thanksgiving dinners. And she would invite all the foreign students over who didn't have any place to go, and they'd get to be the "Indians" and the rest of us would get to be the "Pilgrims." One year we were joined by Dee's sister and brother-in-law and their eight year-old daughter Rachael, the only child there that day. And as it turned out, in a crowd of 20 or 25 people, this eight year-old girl ended up sitting at the table next to Art. Now you can probably imagine what it's like to be the only child at Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of grown-ups that you’ve never met. And on top of that, she ends up sitting next to Art for the entire meal. This just didn’t seem like it was going to go well. But actually it did.

Art spent much of his Thanksgiving dinner that year entertaining eight year-old Rachael. He started telling her a tongue-twister he’d come up with called "The Seven Swarmy Swamis," and he told it to her over and over again. It just fascinated her. He’d tell it to her, and she’d start to repeat it until she stumbled over some word. And then she’d laugh. And Art would correct her and then say the whole tongue-twister again. So Art sat there telling her “The Seven Swarmy Swamis” over and over until slowly Rachael finally got the hang of repeating it back to him word for word.

When I first moved in with Art into the house on the 8th Street back in 1982, I didn’t have a clue about cooking. So Art started teaching me. In those days Art pretty much exclusively ate Thai food, so that’s what he taught me to cook. Now those of you who used come over to the house for dinner in those days will remember that Art had a particularly high tolerance for spicy food. In fact, he could eat food that was so hot it was thermonuclear. He didn’t eat any kind of dessert or anything that tasted sweet. At all. But he was all about eating food so hot and spicy it would cauterize your throat on the way down. And he loved cooking with these little green pieces of napalm called serrano chilies. They’re so nasty that once you touch them, you have to be extremely careful about what parts of your body you touch.

Art once explained to me that his recipe for Garlic Chile Chicken was a simple matter of ratios. First you cut up your chicken into little pieces and put that all in one pile. Then you mince enough garlic to make a second pile the same size. Then you chop up enough serrano chilies to make a third pile the same size as each of the other two. So the ratio was one-to-one-to-one.

I worked on a couple of collaborative projects with Art: the performance group Le Momo that he and Dee and I formed, and typopera, a sound/text piece that we created with Eve Beglarian. And the way the process worked was that Art would announce what his parts of the show would be, and then it was up to the rest of us to do whatever it was that we were going to do. By the time Art told you about any of his ideas, they were already thought out. He didn’t “spitball” ideas or talk them to death. That just wasn’t the kind of guy Art was.

Of course, there are as many different creative processes as there are creative people. When you look at Beethoven’s sketchbooks, for example, you see revisions piled upon revisions between initial concept and the finished composition, while Mozart’s scores show hardly any places where he’s crossed something out or changed his mind. By the time he put his music on paper, it was finished. So Art was a lot more like Mozart than Beethoven, although if you listen carefully to their music, you’ll be able to tell the difference.

I've celebrated just about every Christmas since 1982 with Art. Sometimes there were family obligations that caused Christmas to get postponed a little, but I think that's right around 28 Christmases we spent together, which is a pretty large percentage of all the Christmases I've been around for.

That first Christmas didn’t exactly get off to a great start, though. We were living together in Newhall, and I mentioned to Art that with Christmas coming up I was thinking about getting a tree for the living room. So Art responded that he would prefer that we not have any Christmas trees at all whatsoever in the house, although I don't think that was exactly the way he phrased it. But I went ahead and got a tree anyway. The next year I think we even had a few presents.

Between Dee & I and Art & Lynn and Miroslav, we didn't have much money for presents in those days. Usually we’d give each other things like silly glasses or plastic ears or simple toys or some kind of globby stuff that stuck to the wall when you threw it there. But to make up for it we had contests to see who could come up with the most creative wrapping. A lot of times the wrapping was a whole lot more interesting than what was inside. And of course, Art had some of the all time great packaging ideas. Now, his ideas tended more toward the "sculptural." And some times it was hard to tell whether the wrapping itself was the gift, or whether there might actually be something inside the sculpture. There were even times when the wrapping on his present was so soundly structural that he had to include tools for taking the wrapping apart.

I’ve got a lot of memories of Art. The time he started burning dried red chilies at my recital reception and released enough noxious gas to chase all the guests outside onto the lawn. The time we decided to have a beach party in February at our house up in Newhall, and Erika painted a huge picture of the ocean and some seagulls that we put on the wall just above the sand we spread out on the living room floor. Of rooming together on the road with the EAR Unit, and how we’d always be on the lookout for some good food when we were on tour. The Bad Poetry Soirees, and the Fourth of July pig roasts. Bruce the cat, and the big plans for the house in Vermont. All the fun we had living together on the 8th Street, and the time the S.W.A.T. team showed up in our driveway because the guy next door was running a meth lab in his garage.

One of my favorite memories of Art was from Christmas this past year. I’d bought a new DVD of a log burning in a fireplace to replace the old VHS tape that I’d somehow lost. So we had that playing on the TV while we opened presents. An old tradition of ours. I don’t remember if we made his mother’s Finn Pancake recipe—the one that Art liked so much—for breakfast, or not. But after we got done opening all the presents, we just sat in the living room and talked, Art and I and Dee and Lynn. We laughed about the Christmas that Susan and Harold were down, the time we had the bacon tasting. We talked about how many Christmases we’d celebrated together, the four of us. And about the year we’d all independently come up with a “food theme” for wrapping presents, and Miroslav had won the prize for wrapping something in a hollowed-out loaf of bread. We caught up on where Nate—the brother Art thought so much of—was spending his Christmas. And his mother. And the rest of the family. But mostly we just talked for hour after hour until it was late in the afternoon. I don’t even remember what it was that we talked about. I just remember that it was the best talk we’d had in a long, long time.

Art and I used to go out to the desert and stay with a friend of mine who had a cabin out near Joshua Tree. We’d play desert croquet and go hiking and sit up late at night. And I remember one time in particular when we went out hiking. It was the year that it snowed out in the monument, and the little pond behind Barker Dam had frozen over. It doesn’t snow very often out in the desert, and when it does, it’s magical. Having grown up in a number of little Midwestern towns, all of them really cold in the winter, Art was no stranger to snow. And so when we got out to Barker Dam, Art started making snowballs and heaving them out into the middle of the pond. Now since this was the desert and not the Midwest, the ice on the pond that day wasn't very thick. So the snowballs would actually break a little hole in the ice when they landed, and then the water underneath would make the ice above it "undulate" up and down in concentric circles slowly spreading out from where the snowball had landed. Art threw snowball after snowball out into the middle of that pond, each one making a small hole in the ice, and the ice slowly rippling outward. The rest of us just stood there watching. Art throwing snowball after snowball. And the rest of us watching. The ice rippling outward. I don’t know if they do this all the time back in the Midwest where Art grew up, or not. But it was pretty magical to us. So we decided to call it the "Jarvinen Effect."

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My name is David Ocker. I don't remember exactly when I met Art Jarvinen, only that it was about 30 years ago. Most of our many interactions over the years have been about music. Art got a lot of sustenance from music. Music had great power for him.

He was a composer of great creativity. Of course, we expect all composers to be creative. He was also a unique composer. These days there are fewer unique composers than we might wish.

You could call Art a musical explorer. If you imagine all the music that has ever been heard by everyone - sort of the 'known world' of music - you could say that Art was more interested in the unknown music, beyond the edge.  Like 'terra incognita' on old maps, Art was interested in searching out 'musica incognita'.

Art Jarvinen was a multi-faceted musician. He had many musical influences and he wrote music in different styles. If you knew one of his pieces, you couldn't predict what another of his works might sound like. Even if you knew every piece he had ever written, the next one might be completely different.

And Art was a very talented performer. He could play music of the highest difficulty.  He did it very well.  And he knew how to write  challenging parts for other people to play.

But Art's greatest musical quality was enthusiasm.  He had so much enthusiasm that there was enough to share.  He gave away his excess enthusiasm. I'm sure there are others here today who, like me, were the recipients of Art's enthusiasm for our creative endeavors. I'll always be grateful to him for that.

Here's one example of how Art supported me. About 5 years ago I started a blog - and Art was an early regular reader, one of a very small handful. Often he would send comments about the things I wrote.  These comments always came by private email.  When I asked him why he didn't publish directly on the blog, he said that wasn't interested in a public discourse.

After a couple years of this, he sent me a very clever short comment about composing.  The first line was:

I like best the notes I could have written but didn't.

And at the end he added "And you can quote me."

I immediately asked him if I could post this message online and give him credit as "guest blogger".  He agreed as long as he remained anonymous.  He chose a pseudonym, his non de plume: Mister Composer Head.

Mister Composer Head started sending me more articles and for a while they came very quickly.  It's easy to start a new blog so I created one just for him.  It is called Mister Composer Head.  I listed myself as "Mister Composer Head's Amanuensis".  He would write the articles and I would post them.

After a few months Art stopped doing this.  But everything he wrote is still online and you can still read it.  It's easy to find with Google.  (Or click here.)

This month I went back to re-read what he wrote.  One story seemed appropriate to share today.

Here's the setup:  Art was writing about a party held in honor of his mother's 80th birthday.  At this party Art's wife Lynn and his niece, who he doesn't name, performed some spirituals.  They chose the music because it held particular meaning for Art's mother.    

Art first discusses his religious upbringing and his own level of belief.  I thought a lot about the right word to describe Art's belief.  The best I could come up with was "slight" -- but the fact is that Art reflected on the issue of belief quite a lot.  And he liked ritual.  He liked to create ritual.  He would have loved a service like this.

Art finishes the story like this:

So the cello and piano duo start up Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. One of my brothers, who does believe, just jumped up and went over by my wife and started singing. He was just moved by the spirit to burst out in song. I was so moved by how moved he was that I went and stood next to him, singing in full voice. Then my oldest brother came and joined us. Three brothers, not much faith among them, singing as one, a song that means a lot to one of them, maybe a bit more to the oldest, and very very precious little to me.

But it was the first and only time I have ever raised my voice in song with my two brothers. And you can't buy that kind of experience. Music that just happens, in a moment unplanned, for no real reason except I am not going to miss the chance to sing with my brothers! Hell, we didn't even harmonize. We just sang in unison. And we didn't really know the words, so we just recycled the first verse.

Then we sang Amazing Grace. I hate that song, and I hate what it means. But God, please give me one more chance to sing like that with my brothers. I still won't believe, but I will give thanks.

That was a blessing, and my mom was filled with joy. Not such a bad thing for music to do to a person, or family.

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Other Mixed Meters Memorials to Art Jarvinen:
Arthur Jarvinen 1956-2010
Arthur Jarvinen - Carbon for Bass Clarinet Solo

The needle and toothbrush drawing is by Art Jarvinen.  It was the cover of the memorial program.

Art's graphical score Duet For One was sent to me by Alan Zychek, who created the computer engraving from Art's hand manuscript.  It comes from Art's book Experimental Etudes.

Robert Jacobson, guitarist on Art's "real soundtrack for an imaginary spy film" The Invisible Guy, took the picture of Art at a USC ceramics class about two weeks before he died.

Click on pictures for enlargements.


Memorial Tags: Arthur Jarvinen