Today is the solstice, the longest day of the year in my half of the world.
Recently Mixed Meters has been celebrating solstices and equinoxes alike by posting sections of my piece entitled The Seasons in which I write one small bit of music every day and separate them all with long silences and then expect people to listen to these sections simultaneously with one another (or even with other people's music) so that these bits of music combine in unexpected and presumably more interesting ways, just as the segments of this long run-on sentence are probably doing in your brain at this very moment, and to that end, today I am posting the sixth segment of The Seasons, not unexpectedly entitled Spring 2013. which consists of about 90 segments each one of which corresponds to a particular day and most of which were composed on that very day.
Many of the seasons have some sort of musical idea which unifies all the segments. Spring 2013 has raised the unification standard considerably since each musical bit has exactly the same rhythm - a simple 17 beat pattern that is quite meaningful to me and which I'm not going to explain. Spring 2013 also has Garbage Day Periodicity - on Mondays only the rhythm is heard twice at double tempo.
This is a solargraph - a picture which I found on Wikipedia. It is a kind of time lapse photograph which shows the movement of the sun in the sky over half a year. The sun moves from right to left and the earliest days are at the top. Read all about this picture here.
Don't be fooled. This post is really about Mexican food. I have two reasons for writing it. These will be revealed.
Here's a picture of my Mother on the day in November 1948 when she married my Father.
Next is a headshot of "my worm" - Flabelliderma Ockeri. Well, it's an example of the species of worm which is named after me. Cute, huh? It even has its own Wikipedia listing (which is more than you can say about the human me.) Curiously, the listing is in Dutch.
As some of you may know I come by my scant biological knowledge solely through my marriage to a marine biologist Leslie Harris. To be more specific, Leslie is an invertebrate taxonomist. To be downright precise, she's a polychaetologist - a worm expert. She doesn't deal with just any worms - certainly not with earth worms. She only deals with worms found in the ocean. (Personally I had no idea that worms even lived in the ocean until I met Leslie.)
And there are, it seems, an awful lot of worms in the sea. Leslie works at one of the world's largest collections of polychaetes, housed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. People come from all over the world to study these worms and Leslie and I have offered our guest room to many of these worm people while they're in LA.
One such visitor has been Dr. Sergio Salazar-Vallejo, a polychaete expert and professor at Ecosur, an institute of biological studies in Chetumal, Mexico. He visited us enough that not only did he become our friend but we made him a member of our family. (We even gave him a certificate to prove it.) Sergio arranged for many of his worm students at Ecosur to study worms at NHMLAC. All of them stayed in our guest room. Not all at once of course.
Sergio apparently believed that I should be rewarded for allowing this steady stream of biologists into my home. That is where the idea of naming a worm after me got its start. In his scholarly paper cleverly entitled Revision of Flabelliderma Hartman, 1969 (Polychaeta: Flabelligeridae) published in the Journal of Natural History, he described Flabelliderma Ockeri. In that paper he explained why I deserved this honor
Etymology: This species is named after Mr. David Ocker, in recognition of his long-standing generous support to polychaete workers, most having come from Chetumal. Thanks to his support, many extremely productive research visits have been made to Los Angeles.
This happened over six years ago. You'd think I would have blogged about this long before now. One of the purposes of this post is to belatedly thank Sergio for this signal honor. Thanks, Sergio.
Here's another picture of "my worm".
If you have no idea what you're looking at in these pictures, don't feel bad. Neither do I. At my request Sergio provided an explanation. I felt it was too complex for Mixed Meters. He obligingly provided a second, simpler paragraph. I felt that was still too complicated. Here's his third revision.
Living specimen of Flabelliderma ockeri, anterior end, dorsal view. The thin filaments are branchiae and the thick ones are palps. The dark brown central area is the group of eyes. The family name, flabelligerids, indicates that their members carry a fan (L. flabellum). The fan is made up with fine chaetae, often included in a thin layer of a fibrous matrix, which can also include some sediment. The genus Flabelliderma was proposed because the body wall or skin (Gr. derm, skin) differs from other species belonging to Flabelligera.
I needed to look up some of the words:
anterior - front
dorsal - top
branchiae - organ of respiration (kind of like a gill on a fish)
palp - organ of sensation or feeding
chaetae - bristles, organ of locomotion ("polychaete" means "many bristles")
By the way, F. Ockeri is a Southern Californian. It has been discovered only in the area roughly from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Here are more pictures - including a full body shot - which were included with Sergio's paper:
This Spring Sergio and his wife, Emilia Gonzalez-Salazar (she studies molluscs) visited us again for several months.
In this picture you can see Dr. Luis Carerra-Parra (another polychaete person and one of Sergio's students), Emilia Gonzalez, Sergio Salazar and Alejandro Salazar (he's an offspring of Emilia and Sergio.) Notice that they are sitting at a dinner table.
When Emilia and Sergio stay with us they take over our kitchen. Leslie and I don't mind. We are not particularly familiar with their strange idea of preparing an evening meal and then gathering the entire family around the table to eat it together. Very curious.
Naturally, when gathered around the table in the presence of a freshly prepared meal, the discussion often turns to food. That's how it happened at one meal that I told a story about my Mother's Midwestern encounter with Mexican food sometime in the early '80s. (Remember my Mother? Check back to the beginning of this post.)
Here's a picture of me with her in Sioux City Iowa in June 1986. Sioux City is where I grew up and where she still lived. We're standing in front of the Green Gables Restaurant on the corner of Pierce and 18th Street. I wonder if they still serve kreplach soup one night per week.
Here's that story about my Mother and Mexican food that I told at dinner:
At that time I was living in California and periodically she came out from Iowa to visit me. Although Sioux City has an airport of its own, flying to California was cheaper if you first drove to Omaha Nebraska, about 100 miles south.
When I grew up there weren't many ethnicities in the Midwest. Beyond a few Jews (that was us), a few black people and a very few Native Americans (who mostly kept to themselves on reservations), there were only seemingly countless varieties of Northern Europeans.
Sometime after I moved to California apparently things began to diversify. Latinos began moving to the Midwest, many of them to take the difficult, dangerous jobs in meat processing plants. As their population increased, services geared to Latino customs followed. I remember the surprise while visiting of seeing not one but two Latino grocery stores in Sioux City.
And that's why my Mother could have the experience of eating at a Mexican restaurant in Omaha Nebraska before she flew to California: because there were Mexicans running restaurants there. Later I asked her what she had eaten. Her answer - she pronounced the unfamiliar polysyllabic word very carefully - she had eaten an entomatada.
I told her that she must have gotten the name wrong. I had been living in Southern California for nearly 10 years and thought I knew all about Mexican food. I rattled off a list of the possibilities for her. Could she have had an "Enchilada" or even a "Burrito" perhaps? "It had to be one of those other things," I told her. "Entomatadas don't exist."
Now, cut back to the present, a few weeks ago. Twenty-five years or so have gone by. Leslie, Sergio, Emilia and I are having dinner. I tell them this story.
Imagine my surprise, my astonishment, when Sergio replies that my Mother had indeed gotten the name correct, and that entomatadas are not some mythical culinary chupacabra. Entomatadas are a Mexican speciality made by dipping lightly-fried tortillas into tomato sauce and then filling them with cheese or meat or something. The word tomato is easy to find in "entomatada".
I asked Emilia and Sergio if they could make entomatadas for us some night. And they did.
Here's a plate of entomatadas ready for consumption in our kitchen. They were very good.
And so the second purpose of this blog post is to apologize to my Mother. Sorry, Mom. I should have believed what you told me.
For Further Reading:
My Mother, were she still alive, would turn 101 next month. Click here to see a genealogy which lists her. (It also lists Leslie and myself.)
Sevens, a MM post, has one story about my Mother's pregnancy with me and another about the massive pile of manure in Sioux City.
No one ever asks me where I get my ideas. Sometimes I have ideas I would be better off ignoring.
For example, listen to this little bit of piano music. Eleven seconds!
It's the end of a cadenza played by someone famous as part of a concerto written by someone even more famous. I happened to be listening to this on my iPod last week. When I heard the scale passage (the first half of this clip) I thought to myself "I could make a piece out of that."
But how would I make such a piece? Sure I had the initial idea. That's easy. Then I had to pay the penalty - I had to do it. That's what I didn't know how to do. My inspiration was followed by the punishment of following through.
As it turns out I used not just the scale passage but the trill after it. Inspiration and Punishment begins with an attempt at recreating the "inspirational" material. And I added some annoyingly mistuned and unstable bass notes as well. Throughout the piece there is a feeling of preparation for the big moment of recapitulation which inevitably follows a cadenza. Remember, that's just a feeling.
I don't write about how I earn my living very often. My three readers ought to be thankful for that.
If you don't know what I do, I work as a freelancer in the exciting world of music preparation, toiling away at home, keeping my own bizarre hours, occasionally meeting terrifying deadlines, just as occasionally wondering if I'll ever get another gig. I've been doing this for nearly 30 years. I make the joke "It looks like this job is going to work out." (The rest of my work history is better known: before going freelance I worked for Frank Zappa for seven years, also doing music preparation. I can honestly say that working for Frank Zappa is as close as I've ever come to having a real job.)
These days my biggest client is composer John Adams. John has produced a steady stream of orchestra pieces, concertos, chamber works and operas over the years. His music gets played lots. I really appreciate all the jobs he's sent my way. Thanks, John.
Occasionally John writes something which appeals particularly to my own individual musical taste. It should not be surprising that I don't like all his music equally. I don't like all of any composers' music equally. Domenico Scarlatti gets the closest, I think, but even he wrote a few things I'm not too keen on. Yes, there are a few composers who never wrote a single piece I enjoy. And of course, as the decades pass, my opinions are subject to change.
Anyway, a few years ago John composed an orchestra showpiece which I think is perfectly fantastic. It's called Absolute Jest. It's a sinfonia concertante, a cross between a concerto and a symphony. Instead of one solo instrument there is a small ensemble of soloists, in this case a string quartet.
This work was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 2012. I wanted to hear it played live bck then. That didn't happen because my life was just too busy (see above under "terrifying deadlines"). Later John made changes to Absolute Jest. He didn't simply alter a few harmonies and fix a transition or two the way he (and every other composer who ever lived) usually does after new works are premiered. This time he completely junked the entire first ten minutes and composed all new music. Ten minutes is enough to have created a whole new piece. I liked the original version and I like the new version too. I've given up trying to understand why he needed to make such massive changes. I guess that's why he's the composer and I'm the copyist.
Earlier this month I flew up to San Francisco to hear the revised Absolute Jest at Davies Symphony Hall, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. They recorded the concerts and promise to eventually release an album which includes this piece. Watch for it.
Absolute Jest is a fun listen. And it has an epic, travelogue feel to it. Other Adams orchestra pieces with similar qualities include Slonimsky's Earbox, Guide to Strange Places and My Father Knew Charles Ives, all favorites of mine. Absolute Jest has a certain humorous, good-timey wild joy-ride in the countryside, I wonder what's waiting around the next curve, hang on or you might miss something feel to it, which (you may have already guessed) I really like. This side of John's music goes at least as far back as Short Ride in a Fast Machine
The composer demurs when it is suggested that the word "jest" in the title might imply some kind of musical "joke". The piece was originally subtitled "a scherzo", the musical word for joke, but he took that out. I agree that Absolute Jest is not a musical stand-up routine, ala Hoffnung or PDQ Bach or even Mozart's Musical Joke. When asked what "jest" really means in his title the composer points to the word's archaic meaning.
Okay, if this work is more of a "narrative of exploits" then it's an enjoyable tale, a bucket-of-popcorn summer blockbuster or an extended personal anecdote or maybe a humorous short story. There are no one-liners or punch lines. Once it's over you know you've been somewhere fun and had a good time. Throughout the piece you're never called upon even once to consider the eternal verities, like god or love or death, those inescapable banes of serious classical music.
There is one musical eternal verity, however, you need to know about to understand Absolute Jest properly. That would be Beethoven.
John has taken bits of Beethoven's themes and woven them throughout the fabric of Absolute Jest. The essential culture of classical music is saturated by our imaginings of who Beethoven was and what his music means. If you think of classical music as a kind of religion (as I often do), then Beethoven has become one of its most revered graven images.
John Adams has added Beethoven themes to his music without the heavy sense of cultural gravity Ludwig usually gets. One of the bits he chose (from Ludwig's late quartets) becomes a spritely musical hook which bounces around throughout the piece and stays in my head long after listening. Like an ear worm.
As a result of all these references, the story which Absolute Jest tells is inescapably about Beethoven. The most performed living composer of classical music wants his audience to consider Beethoven. And how does he do this? By telling us a story! A narrative. A "jest".
(As an aside, here's a story about Beethoven told by Charles Bukowski:)
Now, at this point in my story I desperately want to tell you that Beethoven is funny. The problem is that he's not, not at all, at least not very often and not intentionally. Beethoven is the epitome of serious, the ur angst-ridden artist, the ultimate example of creativity beset by a cruel cosmos.
And I'm here to say "Well, screw that." My opinion is that it's healthy for the artform when the icons of classical music are brought a little closer to the human level, especially an icon which has been worked over and beaten up for seemingly ever. All those guys who wrote the great classics were human, after all, including Beethoven. We ought to be able to enjoy their music without getting all cosmic on it.
And please remember - I'm not implying that John Adams agrees with any of this. I'm just having my personal say about the matter. My thoughts prompted by his music.
In spite of my opinions, the use of Beethoven source material in a brand new concert work like Absolute Jest ought to help endear it to audiences. One piece is not likely to change the reverant opinions of Beethoven held by most serious classical music fans. If it doesn't do that, then I hope that the people who listen enjoy the ride anyway.
For no good reason, here are some appearances of Beethoven's music in our popular culture:
My least favorite Beethoven work accompanies the Harlem Shake:
Dudley Moore, a pianist, performs his classic Beethoven parody:
Rowlf, another pianist, plays Beethoven with a little coaching from Ludwig's bust:
Beethoven's music gets used in televisions commercials quite often. This might be the stupidest one of all.
Beethoven's own idea of a jest joke?
Eric Peterson offers this Beethoven-themed commercial as another candidate for stupidest ever:
Links from out of the past - other fun Mixed Meters articles about Beethoven:
Stories of Almost Everyone - an excerpt from Eduardo Galeano's book detailing how Beethoven's Ninth Symphony can mean just about whatever anyone wants it to mean.
Hell Mouth, the name of John's blog; I quote something he wrote there about me. (Also, see Ivy the late Six-Toed Cat next to a towering stack of Adams music).
Ivy's full name was Miss Ivy Turnstiles Smith-Perkette, a name which requires some explanation.
We named her after Ivy Smith a character in the Bernstein-Comden/Green musical On the Town. The town, of course, is New York City in 1944. During the musical Ivy Smith is crowned "Miss Turnstiles":
Miss Turnstiles for June!Every month, some lucky little New York miss is chosen Miss Turnstiles for the month. She's got to be beautiful, she's got to be just an average girl, and most important of all she's got to ride the subway. There are 5,683 women who ride the subway every day. And which fortunate lassie will be chosen for the signal honor this month? She's beautiful, brilliant, average, a typical New Yorker...
Perkette? We had another tuxedo cat just before we got Ivy in July 2005. His name was Perky. For a while we couldn't keep ourselves from calling Ivy by the name Perky because they looked so much alike. We figured that the two of them must have been married in some previous life, or something, and we added the feminine form of Perky to her handle. Don't worry, it doesn't need to make any sense. Once we changed her name, of course, we never accidentally called her Perky again.
While Ivy may not have been particularly beautiful or brilliant, she certainly wasn't average, especially in the medical sense. Outwardly you could tell she was different because of her extra toe on each forepaw. The term for this is polydactylic.
There was more unusual about her than just extra toes. Although Ivy had been spayed not once but twice, she never stopped going into heat. Fortunately the frequency of her noisy episodes asking for a mate became less as she got older. Since she obviously had some ovaries inside even after two attempts to remove them, we guessed that her other internal organs must be abnormal as well. The vet diagnosed her final disease as congestive heart failure.
Ivy had been a stray, living near the home of our friends Dan and Lynn, who asked us to take her in. I doubt she would have survived too long on the street fending for herself. Here's Leslie holding Ivy just after she came to live with us.
While we never solved some of her behavior problems that drove us up a wall, Miss Ivy was a sweet and friendly little critter with magnificent whiskers. She made a good bed cat. We are happy that we could give her a home for almost eight years. During that time she became an essential part of our menagerie. We will miss her.
This final picture was taken less than a month ago.
Click on the pictures for enlargements. There have been plenty of other Mixed Meters posts about our cats over the years. That's one of the essential reasons to have a blog.
Here are four things I guess you need to know about my piece entitled Not A Happy Camper. Or not.
1) The title is misleading. Any notion of sadness or self-pity or uncomfortable overnight woodland sleepovers, things you might rationally expect from music entitled Not A Happy Camper, are totally missing from the music. I chose the title the first time I saved the computer file. That was way back, last December. I must have had my reasons for calling it that - although I no longer can remember them. It's possible I was in fact not a happy camper for some reason. I certainly have been N.A.H.C. on occasion since, like when I lost all the hearing in my left ear (which is mostly back now).
Anyway - in December I wrote about three minutes of music and then I stopped. Recently I decided to finish the piece. No better title has suggested itself. Or maybe I didn't bother to think about it enough. And besides, there is a sort of tradition here at Mixed Meters of sticking with the original title/filename no matter what happens (although usually that trick only applies to much shorter pieces).
2) After about two minutes the music is high-jacked by a famous 19th-Century French Spanish orchestral warhorse. Everything starts off innocently enough, a cheap minimalist run-on sixteenth note feel - the kind of thing computers do really well but human performers can't keep up with. Then all of a sudden, more or less, it veers into far left field with quote after quote from that famous piece, a wildly inappropriate sequitur to what I'd already written.
Some of you might recognize the high-jack music as a staple of symphonic pops concerts of your youth. For the rest of you, not knowing what it is won't really matter much. I will say that this: although most of 19th-century musical repertoire bores me to tears these days this particular piece still holds an ember of my interest. There's a certain mysterious aura thanks to metrical ambiguity and surprising interruptions of the melodic flow.
3) A wah-wah tuba often sounds like a bassoon. I've used the same effect in other recent pieces, such as this one or this other one. Basically, the sound of a tuba, as generated inside my computer (by a program called a sampler) is funneled through a band pass filter, which modifies the timbre of the sound. Technical terms. The filter is controlled directly from the music notation using MIDI commands.
Electric guitars are famous for having wah-wah sounds, often controlled by a foot pedal. Unlike an electric guitar you couldn't have an effective real-life wah-wah tuba because there's no way to suppress the actual acoustic sound of the instrument. With a computer such bizarre things become possible. You can decide for yourself if they're desirable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was fascinated recently by a radio interview with author Charles C. Mann who talked about his book 1493. It covers the social and ecological effects of the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere.
Before reading 1493 I decided it would be best to finally read Mann's earlier work 1491. 1491 is subtitled New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It turns out that the stories we were most likely taught in grade school describing how American Indians lived before Columbus "discovered" them weren't terribly accurate. 1491, published in 2005, covers a plethora of recent discoveries and theories.
Primary sources of information dating from before the first Europeans are scarce. Some cultures had developed complex writing, like the Mayan hieroglyphs. But most Mayan manuscripts were destroyed by the Spanish who no doubt congratulated themselves for the enlightenment of their actions. Other pre-1492 records have survived but cannot be fully understood by modern scholars, like the Incan knotted strings called Quipu.
Then there were the very first Europeans who wrote about what they saw in the New World. This is another source of information about conditions just before the Europeans came. Some of these stories differed greatly from what was seen by visitors several generations later and the early descriptions came to be regarded as inaccurate or even fanciful. At the very beginning of 1491 Mann stresses that we not make the error of assuming, because conditions are a certain way now, that they must have been just so for ever.
For example: how many people inhabited America before Columbus arrived? Some explorers discovered vast uninhabited areas and they concluded that no one had ever lived there. In fact the native population had changed radically because the immune Europeans unwittingly brought deadly smallpox with them.
When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, [anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns] argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person. Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record. The first whites therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated. (p.101)
Pre-Columbians left behind lots of archeological clues to their existence. Ruins of ancient citys, often including temples and pyramids, tools, pottery and trash. Massive earthworks in remote Bolivia that are only visible from the air. The ability of archeologists to decode these clues have improved over the years and the theories about what they mean have changed as well.
In fact, details concerning the ins and out of academic disputes over the archeological record was one of the most surprising facets of 1491. Mann tells these stories by introducing us to a lot of unfamiliar professorly types who, using rivers of ink, debated questions like
What percentage of the indigenous population were killed by smallpox?
When did the earliest humans arrive from Asia and did they use stone tools?
How many people lived in the Amazon basin?
The histories of these and other subjects, as detailed by Mann, all involve the overthrow of orthodox scholarly theories in favor of newer ones based on more recent evidence. The newer ones will, I betcha, eventually become orthodoxy themselves only to give way to improved interpretations as future generations of Indiana Joneses study the issues.
Finally, I found the information which Mann provides on the Native American's abilities to manipulate their environment the most interesting aspect of the book. Forest management using fire, changing the course of rivers, city planning and genetic manipulation are among the technologies which improved native lives in various locations. Here's just one example:
Using a different method, [botanists] concluded that Indians might have bred the modern peach palm by hybridizing palms from several areas, including the Peruvian Amazon. Whatever the origin, people domesticated the species thousands of years ago and then spread it rapidly, first through Amazonia and then up into the Caribbean and Central America. Bactris gasipaes was in Costa Rica 1,700 to 2,300 years ago and probably earlier. By the time of Columbus, one seventeenth-century observer wrote, Native Americans valued it so highly "that only their wives and children were held in higher regard."
Unlike maize or manioc, peach palm can thrive with no human attention. Tragically, this quality has proven to be enormously useful. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what Balee calls "agricultural regression," these hunted peoples necessarily gave up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging. The "Stone Age tribespeople in the Amazon wilderness" that captured so many European imaginations were in large part a European creation and a historical novelty; they survived because the "wilderness" was largely composed of their ancestors' orchards. (p331)
While there are occasional dull passages in 1491 by Charles C. Mann, for the most part it is compellingly written. Although nominally it deals with an historical period which ended over 500 years ago, much of this information seems still relevant. Issues about our relationship with the descendants of the indigenous Americans and also preserving the native environment, which may not be what we think it is, are clearly affected by this information.
And it would be wonderful if some of these stories filtered down into grade school American History curricula - which I suspect hasn't kept up with modern discoveries since I was a grade school student some fifty years ago.
Milton Babbitt probably did care if you listened. He didn't choose the title of his famous article called "Who Cares If You Listen". (Read it here if you care.)
I actually don't care if you listen to my music. Go ahead listen. Or not. It's your choice entirely. The music is there if you want to play it.
Caring whether you listen or not tends to make me feel bad. I know this from experience.
It should not be surprising that feeling bad is something I try to avoid. I write music because it makes me feel good. Why should I do anything to turn a feel-good experience into a feel-bad one? That would be really dumb. Spending my time writing music is dumb enough.
Who Cares If You Listen is one of those perpetual motion pieces that sound good on a computer but are really hard to perform. There's lots of percussion. If you DO listen you could listen for the "Who Cares If You Listen" theme.
It happens several times in the middle section. Try singing along.
There's also a moment in Who Cares If You Listen when two mystery instruments enter very briefly. Extra credit for the first person to identify those sounds.
Yesterday seemed to be a day for doses of musical academia - first when I unscrambled anagrams using clues gleaned by skimming this post by Daniel Wolf. Later John Steinmetz sent me an article, Terminal Prestige by Susan McClary. I even started reading that. I'm sure it's a fascinating article.
But then I thought it would be a better use of my time to compose some of my own music rather than try to parse other people's ivory tower prose. So I set to work.
A couple hours later I had a new 30 Second Spot which I entitled Cuffus. It's apparently some sort of tailoring term, unfamiliar to me, but prominently displayed in the window of a local dry cleaner on a street I walk.
Cuffus is also the name of an online dating website. I assume, based only on their logo (handcuffs in the shape of hearts), that it is not my cup of turn-on.
Cuffus, my 30 Second Spot, is a jazzish little trio for piano, bass and drums. Nothing deep about it. Nothing restrictive like handcuffs. Nothing academic. Just a bit of enjoyable music creating for me. I hope you like it too - not that it matters.
I'd like to thank Peter Schmid, the pianist, and his compatriots Cornel Reasoner and Luis Jolla, for rushing right over to Aphrodite Japonica Studio to record it. Thanks guys.
I have completed and posted my fifth Season, entitled Winter 2012. This is the second Winter in the series. The entire series, unsurprisingly, is called The Seasons.
Winter 2012 uses a twelve-tone row as melodic source material. The row was generated in Autumn 2012, which uses a different pitch center for each of twelve weeks. Winter 2012 has no Garbage Day Periodicity, the way some of the other Seasons have.
You can read all the previous posts about each previous season. These are moderately interesting. They contain lengthy explanations on the twists and turns of equinoxes and solstices which are the days on which I begin composing each new seasonal piece. There are also some rants about how long time lasts.
Here's a quick explanation for the perplexed: I write one short musical bit everyday and separate them with unmusically long silences - 30 seconds or more. The idea is to combine two or more or even all of these pieces simultaneously.
Or you could play them concurrently with other music ... any other music. Possible results include happy happenstance, crazy coincidence and cuckoo cacophony - sometimes all at the same time.
Go ahead, try it yourself!
Click here, here, here, here and finally here (allowing time for the files to load) to get all five seasons going at once. They will cycle nearly for ever. Well, for a very long time - "very long" in the geological sense. It will last much longer than the Internet.
Technical note: I've changed the players on all the Seasons playback pages to Html5. This allows them to loop indefinitely. If your browser can't play Html5, there's an alternate player - but it doesn't loop - so you'll have to sit at your computer clicking and clicking and clicking for the rest of eternity.
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