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.)

Adult Party Games and Bad Poetry

After Arthur Jarvinen's death in 2010 I decided that I needed to commemorate his life and work here on Mixed Meters. Today would have been Art's 58th birthday. Mentioning him like this isn't much. It is something.

Last summer an adventurous group of composer performers called Varispeed played selections from Art's piece Adult Party Games from the Leisure Planet. They did this somewhere in New York State at a place called Mount Tremper Arts.  Here's a picture (which I found on Facebook, there are more):

Each of the suspended cards you see is one of the 'games'.   These are short text pieces which Art described as:

a growing collection of works which don't fit conveniently into any particular category.

I don't know exactly which games Varispeed chose to perform but it looks as though they found a beautiful place to play them.  Here's the list of some Adult Party Games:

Eskimo piece --
Illegal music --
White painting for Robert Rauschenberg --
The valedictorian squats and scurries --
First principles of aerodynamics --
Haed --
Schematic --
For Bill Mullane --
For Giovanna Caicco --
For Mark Cunningham --
Zone --
No --
For myself --
For Linda Tadic.

Of course  Varispeed blogged about their performance.   They included one game called Advice for Young Composers:

Click on any picture for an enlargement.  The text to "Advice for Young Composers"

Tonight, astrally-project to Aaron Kernis's work place and plagiarize the last three measures he wrote.  Repeat as often as necessary.

The first game on the list, Eskimo piece, is available for you to watch online.  It is performed by another of these endlessly mysterious New York composer/performer ensembles, this one called thingNY.  thingNY is probably from Brooklyn.  (I'm told that anybody who's anybody in the new music world these days comes from Brooklyn.)

Eskimo Piece by Art Jarvinen from thingNY on Vimeo.

An excerpt from a performance art piece from a 1970s collection called "Adult Party Games from the Leisure Planet". This work was part of a string of fluxus-like sound and performance works composed by the late CalArts composer Art Jarvinen.

Eskimo Piece calls for loads of "Eskimos" to run around on stage while floor mics pick up their footsteps, creating feedback. Art originally thought of this work as absurd and chaotic, but we decided to "premiere" it in a pulse-driven style, letting the feedback ring out a bit after each clash.

It remains absurd though. There are no real Eskimos in this piece. There are no Inuits. There are a few Canadians

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Closer to home and less musically, I discovered a small cache of "memorabilia" from the mid-nineties.  This was about the time Leslie and I moved into our current home. The cache, actually a basket, included a stack of old mail - things like birthday cards and invitations.

One invitation was to a party on January 27, 1996, at the home of Lynn Angebranndt and Arthur Jarvinen.  The occasion, although it doesn't say so on the card, was their shared birthday. Yes, Art and Lynn were a married couple both born on the same date.

First, here are quotes from the card:

O openers of the way, openers of the roads to bad poetry,

perfected in the house of Art and Lynn.

It's time once again

The event of the season:

THE BAD POETRY SOIREE

May the divine beings, who make men to stand fast, cause my poetry to stink.

May my mouth be opened and pour out really bad poetry.

But the best part of the card was that it was a pop-up.  I remember Art once telling me that he had gotten into pop-ups, so I assumed this card was his work.  Recently, however, Lynn told me that the pop-ups were actually her idea and her work.  A lot of work.  And very cool work, to be sure.  Of course the two faces on the card are those of Art and Lynn:

I don't remember whether I was able to attend this particular Bad Poetry Soiree.  I did attend some of them.  At one of them I read from the works of William McGonagall.  Here, in honor of the Bad Poetry Soirees, is some bad poetry by that poet.  This one is about the eternal war between rich and poor:

THE CHRISTMAS GOOSE

Mr. SMIGGS was a gentleman,
And he lived in London town;
His wife she was a good kind soul,
And seldom known to frown.

’Twas on Christmas eve,
And Smiggs and his wife lay cosy in bed,
When the thought of buying a goose
Came into his head.

So the next morning,
Just as the sun rose,
He jump’d out of bed,
And he donn’d his clothes,

Saying, “Peggy, my dear.
You need not frown,
For I’ll buy you the best goose
In all London town.”

So away to the poultry shop he goes,
And bought the goose, as he did propose,
And for it he paid one crown,
The finest, he thought, in London town.

When Smiggs bought the goose
He suspected no harm,
But a naughty boy stole it
From under his arm.

Then Smiggs he cried, “Stop, thief!
Come back with my goose!”
But the naughty boy laugh’d at him,
And gave him much abuse.

But a policeman captur’d the naughty boy,
And gave the goose to Smiggs,
And said he was greatly bother’d
By a set of juvenile prigs.

So the naughty boy was put in prison
For stealing the goose.,
And got ten days’ confinement
Before he got loose.

So Smiggs ran home to his dear Peggy,
Saying, “Hurry, and get this fat goose ready,
That I have bought for one crown;
So, my darling, you need not frown.”

“Dear Mr Smiggs, I will not frown:
I’m sure ’tis cheap for one crown,
Especially at Christmas time –
Oh! Mr Smiggs, it’s really fine.”

“Peggy. it is Christmas time,
So let us drive dull care away,
For we have got a Christmas goose,
So cook it well, I pray.

“No matter how the poor are clothed,
Or if they starve at home,
We’ll drink our wine, and eat our goose,
Aye, and pick it to the bone.”

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Mixed Meters has many posts about the life and music of Arthur Jarvinen. All of them can be found by clicking this link.

Last year I wrote at length about Art's massive solo piano piece Serious Immobilities.  This has become one of Mixed Meters' most popular posts.

Art's anonymous blog Mister Composerhead is still online.  (Art told me that Aaron Kernis, referenced above in Advice for Young Composers, was the original model for "Mister Composerhead")

Art's lavishly annotated surf-music opera was called The Invisible Guy.   Listen.

The Bald Soprano

I was a junior in high school when I discovered absurdity. I understood absurdity immediately because it reflected my life so perfectly.  Absurdity kicked me down the road of being a creative artsy type and it continues to have a strong pull on me to this day.  Thanks, absurdity, old buddy.

My first encounter with absurdity took the form of The Bald Soprano, the play by Eugene Ionesco, presented as a particularly arresting picture book.  Today, I guess we'd call it a graphic novel.  Here's the cover:

That's Ionesco himself substituting both tragically and comically for the O's in his name.  The full cast can be seen as well, left to right: Mrs. Martin, Mr. Smith, Mary the maid, the Fire Chief, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Martin.  The whole book is rendered in black and white.  Each couple's lines are rendered in a different type face, the women in italic.  Pictures, stark high contrast black and white, show who is speaking and give a sense of the action.  Here's the back cover:

I'm pretty sure I liked this play before I even opened the book the first time.  Here's the text of the cover:

ionesco THE BALD SOPRANO followed by an unpublished scene.  Translated by Donald M. Allen.  Typographical interpretations by Massin and photographic interpretations by Henry Cohen.  Based on the Niccolas Bataille Paris production. Grove Press, Inc.  New York

I found The Bald Soprano in the library - I don't remember now whether that would have been my high school library or the public library.  A couple of years later, in college, when I had an extra ten bucks, I ordered my own copy which I still have today.  When it arrived I signed and dated it: October 3, 1970.  This play, in this particular format, became one of my artistic touchstones.  Eventually I saw a live performance - which disappointed me greatly.

The scene is a middle-class English interior.  The plot is pretty simple, I guess.  Mr. and Mrs. Smith tell some stories.  Mr. and Mrs. Martin arrive and reintroduce themselves to each other.  The Smiths and Martins tell more stories, occasionally interrupted by the Maid and the Fireman who, unsurprisingly, tell stories.  Everything devolves into a screaming frenzy.  And then it ends by beginning again at the beginning - except that the Martins and Smiths have switched places.

Nothing makes any real sense, of course.  The lines make sense in only the smallest bits.  Responses have tenuous relationship to what has preceded.  I guess that's what makes it Theater of the Absurd.  It's definitely that aspect which seemed to me to correspond exactly with what passed for conversation in my family - although for completely different reasons.  My family came to its absurd interactions through a combo of age disparity, English as second language and hardness of hearing.  None of that has anything to do with Ionesco.  The resulting effects, however, were strikingly similar in my mind.

Here's a sample from the awkward conversation as the two couples are settling down for their social evening together:

Mr. Smith: Hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: Hm, hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Hm, hm, hm. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Hm, hm, hm, hm. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Oh, but definitely. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: We all have colds. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: Nevertheless, it's not chilly. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: There's no draft. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Oh no, fortunately. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  [Silence]
Mr. Martin: Don't you feel well? [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: No, he's wet his pants [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: Oh, sir, at your age, you shouldn't. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: The heart is ageless [Silence]
Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence]
Mrs. Smith: So they say. [Silence]
Mrs. Martin: They also say the opposite. [Silence]
Mr. Smith: The truth lies somewhere between the two. [Silence]
Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence]

In the book each of those lines gets two facing pages.  All the space represents the long silences.  The particular line "The truth lies somewhere between the two." has given me comfort many times in many different situations over the 45 years since I first read it.

Here's a pair of pages showing the (much more lively) responses to Mrs. Martin's story about seeing a man on the street who had bent over to tie his shoe:

Notice that "fantastic" is divided up among three actors.  (Click on any picture for enlargements.)   Later in the play:

Mrs. Martin: Thanks to you, we have passed a truly Cartesian quarter of an hour.
Fire Chief: [moving towards the door, then stopping]: Speaking of that - the bald soprano? [General silence, embarrassment]
Mrs. Smith: She always wears her hair in the same style.

One more page for good measure.  Here the Fire Chief is encouraged to tell a story The Dog and the Cow - which I actually set to music sometime during my college years.  (That, along with the only other song I ever wrote, has since been lost.)

So why am I dragging this subject up now - beyond the need for basic blog padding, of course.  There's a story about that:

Leslie and I were having dinner in a local restaurant last month, one of those new-style buffets with the old-style trick of showing you the desserts while you're standing in line still hungry.  We didn't have much to talk about.  At the next table was a family - mother, father, grandmother and three tweens, two with smart phones.  They had a lot to talk about, most of which didn't seem too important.  There was an amusing lack of communication and several crises concerning the food.  Leslie and I found ourselves watching them as carefully as we could without being obvious.  They might have been somewhat embarrassed had they been able to watch themselves.  Maybe not.  On our way home, Leslie and I discussed various unresolved questions (like which parent was the child of the grandmother and the color of the mother's panties).  I was reminded of my encounter with The Bald Soprano and I explained to Leslie why this literature was important to me.  When I got home I re-read it for the first time in a very long time.  It felt good to experience The Bald Soprano again.  It brought back a lot of memories, although you can be very certain that none of them involved my mother letting anyone in a restaurant see the color of her panties.

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Used copies of The Bald Soprano are available on Amazon.

Images Without Meaning

I'm sure that you know what karaoke is ... pre-recorded music for which some talented or courageous or drunken person supplies the missing vocals.  Not being either courageous or talented, I would never try karaoke.

You might also know what Music Minus One is.  It's a company which provides "participatory" recordings.  Those have recorded with some important element omitted, like a solo part, so that a student or other instrumentalist who can't yet afford to hire her own orchestra can play along with the real thing.  When I was in college I had a MMO recording of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto.

I created a music video over the weekend.  Like karaoke and MMO, this piece lacks one important element which it needs to be a complete experience.  I'm leaving it up to the listener to provide that one element: the meaning.

Okay - music is by nature abstract and doesn't need meaning.  I've done my best not to give any external clues - like lyrics or program notes or a descriptive title.

I have provided, via video, some images to watch as the music plays.  Alas, these images were selected without regard for their meaning.  They also have nothing to do with one another.

The images are:

• four slightly swaying roses against a blue sky somewhere in Pasadena
• part of a fiber optic art work at the Huntington Library
• steps of a moving escalator reflected in its shiny metal side panel 
• the shadow of a tree on the USC campus as it blows in the wind as seen through a venetian blind
• water droplets landing in a Monterey Park fountain to which someone had thoughtfully added soap 
• a tree reflected in the lake at the Chinese Garden, also at the Huntington.

My up-tempo music clearly has nothing to do with these images.  The music does manage to make transitions somewhat in sync with the changing images and it's as close to rock and roll as I'm likely to ever write.  Not very close.

Images Without Meaning  © 2014 by David Ocker 190 seconds

Let your imagination run wild.  If you're the sort of person who makes up stories to fit the music you hear, or if you create your own mental images of music, and if this piece produces such creativity in you, please feel free to share in the comments.  Leslie, who already heard the music, said that she was expecting MONSTERS.

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Before the Parade

The centerpiece of Pasadena's yearly Solstice celebration is a parade - the Rose Parade.  If you live in the U.S., I'm sure you know all about it.   We Americans assume you also know all about it even if you live in another country, so just nod your head and pretend that you understand what I'm talking about.  OK?

We, the staff of Mixed Meters, have an veritably un-American disinterest in the floats and bands and horses and fully-fertile nearly-adult young princesses that make up the parade, even though the route comes quite close to our central offices, high atop Mixed Meters Towers.

What we are interested in, however, is all the civic preparation which goes into such an event. Especially the clean up.  There's really a shit-load of cleaning up to do afterwards.

Click this link to see all of MM's Pasadena parade coverage over the years.

On Mixed Meters you'll have seen Rose parade trash, Rose parade religious fundamentalists and honking Rose parade tow trucks - but no floats, bands, horses or princesses.  This year we seem to have focused on heating devices used by the Rose revelers who spend the entire winter night outside waiting for the parade.

I spent New Years Eve with Leslie and friends in Old Pasadena, our trendient restaurant district.  At 11 p.m. I elected to walk home along the parade route, Colorado Boulevard.

The sidewalks had long since filled with people camping out overnight - preparing to sleep on the street just as homeless people do.  Except the authentic homeless don't sleep in plain view on major streets.  Nor do they build open fires nor buy over-priced luminescent trinkets and plastic noisemakers from wandering vendors nor make a mess by hurling eggs, tortillas and silly string at passing cars.  Those are privileges of upstanding citizenship.

I stopped occasionally during my walk to shoot video.  When I got home I quickly edited the clips and composed some music.  The music took longer, even though there's just a little over a minute of it.  Strange music.  Very strange.

Enjoy!

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A word about this music.  I downloaded a huge sample sample library from Samplephonics.  Sorry,  these freebies have since disappeared.  Largely intended for techno, pop or pretty much any form of music I don't do, I used this project Before the Parade as an opportunity to explore this huge collection of audio whatever.  It includes hundreds of samples.  I listened to only a couple dozen and used sixteen of them. I  think the result is kind of fun.  Also strange.  Very strange.

Here's the Mixed Meters' Rose Parade video from 2009. Honking tow trucks. Repent placards. You can see a gas station in the background - low test gasoline was $1.89 per gallon.

David's 2013 Year End List

Many news organizations save themselves work at the end of the year by publishing "best of" lists. Presumably the items are chosen because someone - either writers or readers - particularly liked those things.

Unfortunately, this scheme has never worked well for me at Mixed Meters.  I'm not good at liking things.  This year I decided to apply the Mixed Meters philosophy ("do the exact opposite") to the year-end list idea.

Here is the result:

Things I Hate

• I hate it when the weather is really hot (or really cold).
• I hate shredded coconut.
• I hate waking up early.
• I hate my ISP.
• I hate Internet flash mob videos where orchestras perform classical music in public places as if "by accident".

• I hate that the commercials are louder than the programs.
• I hate it when the news makes me feel that there is no hope.
• I hate that the average American watches 5 hours of television per day.
• I hate any television show or movie which features zombies.
• I hate discussions, movies, scientific theories and religions on the subject of how the world will end.

• I hate companies that use automatic dialing devices to spam my telephone.
• I hate mega-corporations, Walmart in particular.
• I hate it when someone says that corporations are people.
• I hate that businesses have become so big that they harm individual Americans.
• I hate that copyrights have become corporate assets.

• I hate that politics has become mostly lying.
• I hate noticing similarities between the actions of the US and those of the Empire in Star Wars.
• I hate that the election of the first black US president has caused a resurgence of overt racism.
• I hate neo-liberals.  Also neo-conservatives.
• I hate the way Republicans in Congress behave.  Other Republicans too.

• I hate that some rich people have become too rich and too powerful.
• I hate that separation between church and state is decreasing.
• I hate that so many people can't find a balance between god and science.
• I hate the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
• I hate the notion that a gun makes you safe.  Also that more guns make you safer.

• I hate it when the value of things is confused with their cost in money.
• I hate when people make belonging to (or rooting for) particular teams part of their identities.
• I hate it when someone acts like they know everything about anything.  (Double for radio announcers on classical music stations)
• I hate all the loopholes.
• I hate hate.

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The pictures above are some of my personal 2013 faves which I posted on my picture blog Mixed Messages.  Here's Mixed Meters' 2012 end-of-year "list":

The William Bell Overture (Jingle Tells)

Traditions are a bitch.

I've created some traditions while writing this blog and these have become my own little bitches.  I'm completely responsible for them.  No one else will celebrate them for me.  They're my personal sacred rituals.  Obsessive compulsions.  They demand fulfillment.  They will be served.  If I miss a year, these observances will haunt me for ignoring them.  I just know it.

One such Mixed Meters tradition is the yearly Jingle Bells piece.  These have taken various forms since 2006.  I take pride in making each new one as different and unexpected as possible.  As this autumn wore on, closer and closer to the winter solstice, I searched for a musical idea which would be both new, to me at least, and also include the trope known as Jingle Bells.

At one point I was driving while thinking on this issue.  The announcer of our local classical radio station introduced the overture to Gioachino Rossini's final opera William Tell.

If you had been with me in the car you might have seen the proverbial compact florescent bulb light up over my head.  I had had an idea: I could combine the music of the William Tell Overture with the melody of Jingle Bells.  I knew instantly that this idea would work.

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Ideas are a bitch.

At least the good ideas are.  I suspect that is how you know that an idea is a good one, by how it behaves.  Bitchy ideas, like bitchy traditions, will grab your brain with their soft little fingers and not let go.  Later, if your final product is not good, blame will not rest with the idea.  The culprit will obviously have been an insufficiently talented composer.  Good ideas, by definition, are blameless.

Here is a video about an artist who has been very successful in the art of having ideas (John Baldessari) narrated by a musician with the most gravel-toned voice (Tom Waits).  Why am I including it here?  Because much of the soundtrack is from the William Tell Overture.  Duh.  (Fun video.)

You might already know the William Tell Overture.  It is the epitome of a music appreciation course curriculum, a classical warhorse, a trite chestnut, a hackneyed tone painting that needs no description because it describes itself.  I bet it would be hard to find someone so musically illiterate, so tone deaf that they can't hear the musical depictions of a storm, birds singing or horses galloping.

The last section - the horse business - now apparently known to online music databases as "the finale from the William Tell Overture" - was for decades the theme of a radio and television show called The Lone Ranger.  That's how a bit of the opera William Tell, part and parcel of the European white-guy classical music canon, became an inextricable element of American culture.

The overwhelming majority of Americans have no interest in Italian operas written in 1829 about sharpshooter Swiss patriots.  Heck, most Americans have no interest in the first half of the overture, the part which doesn't sound like a horse.  Most Americans are not fans of classical music.

Classical audiences do seem to enjoy having a laugh at the expense of their favorite music.  People like Gerard Hoffnung, Victor Borge, Peter Schickele and Igudesman and Joo have given them the chance.  It's gotten to the point where making fun of classical music has its own long and hallowed tradition.

Another famous musical comedian, Spike Jones, didn't play to a classical audience the way the others did.  He played to a pop audience who actually were familiar with some of the classics.  I guess times have changed.  Here's his classic William Tell parody:

Apparently the tradition lives on elsewhere.  I discovered this on YouTube:

Here's a fun anecdote, found in the L.A. Times, about Arnold Schoenberg and the Lone Ranger:

Nonetheless, Schoenberg adapted to California life with surprising ease: He listened to UCLA football on the radio, wore wacky polka-dot ties and once made fun of a student's composition by galloping around the room and shouting "Hi-yo, Silver!"

And here's an article about a major orchestra performing live during a horse race.  Can you guess which piece they programmed?

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Meanwhile of course there's also Jingle Bells.  It is only a few decades younger than the William Tell Overture - but still pretty old and even more a part of our culture.

I was sitting in our backyard a few weeks ago reading.  We live on a corner so that there's a sidewalk on the other side of the hedge.  People walk up and down but can't see into our yard.  As I was reading I could hear a young girl's voice.  She was singing Jingle Bells to herself as she walked down the street.  She seemed very happy.

Her happiness now is the formative stage of her Christmas nostalgia later in life.  Nostalgia is powerful magic and seems like an essential part of both Christmas music and Classical music.  Here's the definition of nostalgia:

a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations

Nostalgia is what advertisers evoke when they use Christmas music to sell us stuff.  Someday that girl will wonder why she can be manipulated into spending money so easily when she hears Jingle Bells and other Christmas tunes.

Here is Jingle Bells being used to sell sexy underwear for men.  I'm guessing that this ad is designed to convince mostly women, not men, to buy these as gifts.

Here's a chart (from here) which encapsulates the interaction of the Christmas music industry with Baby Boomers' nostalgia for their childhoods.

The Baby Boomer part of the hypothesis is probably wrong simply because everyone, not just Boomers, has nostalgia.  These songs have been part of every subsequent generation's childhood.  Still, for all the harm we Boomers have actually done to our society over the last few decades, we might as well take responsibility for screwing up Christmas music too.

One thing to remember about these twenty songs is that they are all under copyright.  Someone - probably big corporations - owns them.  The corporations receive money each time they are played. It would not be surprising to learn that the same corporations own many of the radio stations surveyed for the data behind this chart.

The William Tell Overture and Jingle Bells are still in the public domain.  I expect Disney Corporation is probably busy trying to bribe congress into changing that.  Until they succeed, however, I am free to combine those tunes in any manner I want and even claim my own copyright over the result.

What I have actually done is to make an "arrangement".  My William Bell Overture (or you can call it Jingle Tells if that pleases you) is not really an original David Ocker composition.  Younger generations might prefer to call it some sort of old-fashioned classical music mash-up.  Science Fiction geeks might enjoy the image of creating a hideous musical mutant by splicing the melodic genes of Jingle Bells into the harmonic and formal structures of William Tell.

Whatever name you give the final piece, my original idea did in fact turn out to be a bitch.  And I have managed to celebrate another year of my personal, bitchy holiday tradition.  Also, please forgive the cheap synthetic orchestra sound.

Click here to hear The William Bell Overture (Jingle Tells) - © 2013 by David Ocker 390 seconds

I do sort of wish that I had waited a few more days before starting on this project.  I might have come up with a better idea.

P.S. There is no truth to the rumor that this piece was once entitled "I Saw the Lone Ranger Kissing Santa Claus".

Autumn 2013 from The Seasons

First, here's an opportunity to listen to my newest season Autumn 2013.

Next, if you need to catch up, some quick explanatory flashbacks about my series The Seasons:

1. I write one short bit of music for each day in the calendar.
2. I try to actually write these on the day itself.
3. I separate all the bits of music with long periods of silence.
4. I start a new "season" on every solstice or equinox.
5. As each season is completed I post it to Mixed Meters
6. Links to each season can be found on The Seasons page.
7. Many seasons have Garbage Day Periodicity, sometimes audibly, other times not.

Now, new information:

1. Today, December 21, 2013, is yet another Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. 
2. Later today I will begin composing a new "season", Winter 2013.  
3. Before that, however, I'm posting the newly completed season Autumn 2013.  
4. Autumn 2013 is my eighth season, my second Autumn, the end of the second year.
5. I will post the short version of Autumn 2013 in a few weeks.  That's like real music.
6. Autumn 2013 uses piano sounds and hand drumming sounds (both with much stereo antiphony) plus lots of filter sweeping.

Suggestions for listening to The Seasons:

1. Listen to one season all by itself.  I find this good when I need to concentrate on something else.
2. Listen more than one season simultaneously.  Go here, quickly click on a few different "listen" links.
3. Listen to one or more seasons simultaneously with any other music.  Expect the unexpected.
4. Please leave a message if you know a good program which plays multiple audio streams at the same time.  

I have spared you from the following rants which might filled this space:

1. There are too many Winter Solstice Holidays.  A little consolidation would be nice.
2. There is no war on Christmas except the one started by the Christians themselves.
3. Sunlight at this time of year is precious for someone like me who stays awake all night.

Click here to hear Autumn 2013 from The Seasons
© 2013 by David Ocker, 3974 seconds

The Fan

The Fan is a short piece of music composed in NotateMe, "performed" in Sibelius and used as a soundtrack for a video of the ceiling fan in our sunroom taken in September 2009.  Like my previous video, Baby Elephant Seal Walk, the music was completely finished before I sought out any visuals.  I didn't select a title until I knew what the visuals were.

Astronomical scenes, flickering as if in an old movie.
Lunar landscape, vaguely changing focus.
Circumnavigating an unseen sun.

It must mean something.
Figure out what, exactly, by yourself.
Good luck with that.

Playing a C Major Scale with One Finger

Mixed Meters' readers with good memories will remember that I once composed all my music on a laptop PC while drinking coffee at Starbucks.  That era ended about four years ago when I acquired an iMac.  An iMac makes music making much simpler.  Alas, it's not very portable and I stopped composing at Starbucks.

A year ago I purchased an iPad Mini, my first ever tablet device.  I like it so much Leslie calls it "my precious".  I wanted it for two reasons: one was to waste copious amounts of time surfing the Internet and the other was to once again compose music away from my desktop.  The iPad instantly fulfilled my first goal, wasting time online.  That was simple.  Composing music, however, was a different story.  Finally, a couple weeks ago, I found an iPad app which seemed to meet my requirements for composing on the iPad.

Let me introduce you to NotateMe.  It lets you draw music using a finger, something you always have with you, or with a stylus, something you always forget to bring along.  It plays back whatever you write down.  It lets you keep changing things until you like the music.  When your magnum opus is finished NotateMe will export the piece so it can be imported into other music programs.

I've made two new videos for this post.  One of them shows me entering the simplest musical structure, a C major scale, into NotateMe using only my index finger.  The second one, a 30 Second Spot called Baby Elephant Seal Walk, has a musical score which I composed in NotateMe.  Let's do the second one first:

Once the music for Baby Elephant Seal Walk was as good as I could get it using only NotateMe I exported it to Sibelius using MusicXML (don't worry if you don't know what that is).  Using Sibelius I tweaked the sounds quite a bit because NotateMe sounds pretty tinny right off the iPad.  I changed a few pitches - not many - and adjusted a few tempi, but 98% (or maybe more) of the music you hear in that video is just as I composed it on my iPad

Once I had completely finished the music I decided to add it to a video.  I searched my recent videos for one of the correct length.  This one, showing a small elephant seal lurching across the beach, blowing sand out of its nose and settling down next to another seal (which I suppose to be its mother, although they all look identical to me), fit surprisingly well with the music.  Remember, I had absolutely no idea what the visuals would be while writing the music.

But enough about pinnipeds.  This post is about iPads.  Here's a video produced by Neuratron, the makers of NotateMe.  This is exactly what I watched before buying the app.  It will give you a good idea about the features of the app which seems to work perfectly in this video.

Using NotateMe takes some practice, both for the user and the iPad.  There is a "learning" feature that the program uses to recognize the handwriting of its master.  The help file warns that loaning your tablet to someone else will cause NotateMe to adjust gradually to their hand and forget about you.  As they used to say "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."  Or something.

Needless to say, even after several weeks of regular use, my usage is not nearly as reliable as that shown in the Neuratron video.  That's why I decided to make my own video: more "real world".

I chose to enter a C major scale.  Just one octave.  Nothing else.  What musical structure could be more basic than that?  This task turned out to be a small adventure - both in using NotateMe (as you'll see, although in a previous take I did the scale without errors) and also in editing the video.  I photographed myself simultaneously from two angles and then tried to combine the videos.  I've never tried that before.    The video editing results are pretty basic: C major scale basic.

NotateMe may not be perfect but it works pretty darn well.  In fact, it works much better than I expected.  It already has potential for considerably more musical complexity than just a major scale.  For sure it can do more complexity than you can hear in Baby Elephant Seal Walk.  I wonder how far I can push it.

I am using it to write small pieces of music while drinking coffee in Starbucks (and elsewhere) and then exporting the music back to my desktop for finishing.  That's what I wanted all along and I am happy to have that much.  Since the current NotateMe version is listed as a "public beta" I trust there will be many improvements in features and reliability as time goes on.  

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Neuratron is on Facebook too.

I shot the beach video at Piedras Blancas beach near San Simeon in Central California.  Here's another elephant seal link.

Here are two of my videos with music which involve coastal scenes: Going Coastal and Going Coastal 2.  The second one has a few quick shots of elephant seals in the waves at the very beginning.  You could also watch Flap which has a couple quick glimpses of sea lions amongst all the birds, but you've got to be alert to see them.

Carnivorous Plants

A few years ago Leslie acquired some strange little plants which get their nourishment by eating insects. She purchased these from a vendor at a local plant show. I was skeptical about them at first until I noticed that the number of flying insects in our yard had decreased noticeably.

The vendor is Don Elkins and he calls his company Mesa Exotics. Last weekend we visited his greenhouse in Arroyo Grande, near San Luis Obispo. While Don and Leslie talked exitedly about the care and feeding of these little meateaters, I amused myself by snapping a lot of pictures.

(Click on any picture for an enlargement. Hover over them for a bit of description)

Leslie was kind of like a kid in a candy shop.  We returned with a car full of bits of unusual and unfamiliar vegetation, all of it designed to make an insect's life a short one.

Outside, next to empty farmland, was a field of pitcher plants.  These plants have a long tube into which unsuspecting insects are attracted by some sort of smell.  Once inside, the little fly can't escape and it gets digested.  How does that work exactly?  I haven't a clue.

Leslie refers to carnivorous plants as CPs.  CPs come with a wide range of techniques for snaring their prey.  Here are some examples beginning with a Pygmy Sundew.

I thought the little droplets on this plant were actually water.  I was informed that it is slime made by the plant.  Somehow this attracts small insects.

This plant is called a Butterwort.  The leaves are very smooth to the touch because they're covered with tiny, slimy hairs which trap small insects.  This particular plant has been dining well lately.

The next two are from the genus Nepenthes.  These produce colorful pitchers suspended on long elegant vines.  The first picture shows a living pitcher, the second shows one which has died.

This is an extreme closeup of the flower of a Bladderwort.  The flower is very tiny.  It's called the Angry Bunny.

The most famous CP is the Venus Fly Trap.  Don had a lot of them in his greenhouse but I didn't snap any decent pictures of them.  Here's one of Leslie's plants which had captured a large scrumptious moth that couldn't get away quite fast enough.

Leslie had clearly found a kindred spirit in meeting Don.  They both have considerable enthusiasm and excitement for these curious species.  We'd like to thank him profusely for sharing his time and expertise and passion for these little carnivores.  Also, thanks for the cool plants.

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There's been a recent spate of news about Sheep-Eating Plants. Here's an article which details these and other, even stranger, carnivorous plants.