As a Mixed Meters occasional feature we present pictures of musically named products and companies. Or maybe it's a bug. Either way, if you've been waiting for another episode, wait no longer.
This time we have
A famous Austrian composer at the mall selling valuable things.
A carbonated mixture of vodka and white wine which has become a simple and unconditional fusion melody.
Three vegetarian combinations of a melodic nature. (It's a medley of medleys.)
A work of art with Japanese raw fish and rice.
Another work of art in financial services. (This one must be complicated because it requires a conductor holding a baton.)
A studio where the conductor points to the performers just as they're supposed to start playing!!!
Can you use the human body as a percussion instrument? Sure - hit it and it will make a little sound. The body is just a big sack of meat and fluid plus a couple air chambers for resonance. Anyone (not just tenors as Anna Russell quipped) can have "resonance where their brains ought to be."
When it comes to slapping people it matters who you hit and how. The act of hitting another person, especially if you're hitting a woman, can lead to unintended results. You could end up looking like a jerk.
Chapter One: Hitting Yourself
Our story starts with hambone. That's where the performer slaps his own body, a musical style associated with black slaves in the Old South who, the story goes, were not allowed instruments lest they use them to secretly plan rebellion. (Their masters must have feared talking drums).
Here's a video introduction to hambone:
Here's another hambone video, this one from the famous American cultural institution Hee Haw. Here one-handed hambone is combined with an even more esoteric human-body percussion, rhythmic hand squeezing. (The marvelous vocals are called eefin.)
Chapter Two: Hitting Other People
Now watch this video:
Three formally dressed, but shoeless, musical sadists slap a resonant masochist. All in good fun, no doubt.
Although stylistically far removed from hambone, this video also shows the human body being used as a percussion instrument. With obvious differences...
Most importantly, these three performers are not hitting themselves. They are wailing on a fat man. Let's call him Drum Man. We know this is not their first take because Drum Man's drum head (i.e. his skin) is already quite red. And Drum Man starts the clip with a big sigh.
We can see his face the whole time. This gives us clues to his personality. Our hero seems to be taking his beat down with a sense of equanimity. Or maybe it's just detachment. "Okay," I imagine him saying "Let's get this over with."
Maybe he's got something to prove. "Do your worst," he might say, "I can take whatever you can give. I'm a real man." It's like watching the losing fighter being pummeled in a boxing match.
Drum Man's eyes are fixed on the camera, on us viewers. Maybe he's defying us. Is he saying "Who you lookin' at? You lookin' at me?"
Secondly, the players are getting a variety of musical sounds out of their "drum". Hitting his belly, his arms, his back and later his (facial) cheeks create different tones. There's enough timbral variety and humor to sustain interest for a quick minute.
I wonder if this video was made as a television commercial. I can't find the term "Equipo Elite Mundial" online. A sporting goods company perhaps?
Try imagining variations to this video:
Instead of three male percussionists, how about three sexy women hitting Drum Man?
Imagine the three sexy female drummers hitting a large, nearly naked woman who, like Drum Man, was just standing there, taking the hits with a blank expression on her face.
Imagine these three male percussionists hitting the large woman instead of Drum Man.
Finally, what if these guys were hitting on an extremely sexy woman? But only musically, of course. This post IS about music.
Chapter Three: Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman
Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's A Drum Is A Woman is a large scale work from the late fifties - a suite of pieces that tell a story. You could think of it as an oratorio or even a short opera. It was used as a soundtrack for a television show and released as an album.
When I was in my twenties I first heard two songs from A Drum Is A Woman played as musical interludes in certain episodes of the BBC's Goon Show, originally broadcast in the fifties. The singer was Ray Ellington, an English son of a Black American entertainer and a Russian Jew. Ellington was his stage name. He was not related to Duke.
These two songs, You Better Know It and What Else Can You Do With A Drum, stood out because they contain references to hitting women. This struck me as strange content for a pop song. At the time I had no idea who had written them or why. (Another tune Ray Ellington sang, Bloodshot Eyes by Wynonie Harris, fell into the same category.)
Here are recordings of these tunes, clipped from Goon Show airchecks, plus some of the lyrics.
It was only within the last 10 years or so that I finally heard the entire A Drum Is A Woman. To me it still seems like a strange metaphor on which to base an extended musical work, especially one which is essentially about the history of jazz. I suppose the Fifties were different times.
Madame Zajj is the main character ("zajj" = "jazz", get it?). She is created out of a drum. She changes back into a drum. She is the drum and the drum is her. I guess, really, she is the rhythm itself, the rhythm which drives men wild.
Her love interest in this story is named Caribee Joe.
Once there was a boy named Caribee Joe.
Spoke with the animals in their jungle slang.
His heartbeat was like bongos
And he sang every song they sang.
One day he found an elaborately fabricated drum
And when he touched it, it actually spoke to him, saying,
"I am not a drum, I am a woman.
Know me as Madame Zajj, African chantress.
I can make you rich and famous.
Together we can travel
and make beautiful rhythm for the world."
But Joe was in love with the jungle, the virgin jungle,
God-made and untouched,
and with the jungle he had to stay.
The drum beat up a storm, screeching,
"I am the one and only Madame Zajj.
But there are many Joes,
and one Joe can make rhythm as well as another."
So she hopped a trade wind
And away she went to Barbados
in search of another Joe.
Zajj appears in scene after scene. She dances seductively at Mardi Gras. She's a snappy dresser. She drives a big car (one with 88 cylinders that goes 440 miles per hour - but she gets a ticket for stopping at a green light). Later she makes an entrance from inside one of those flying saucers.
Duke's narration is sly and well modulated. His prose often turns flowery and surreal.
And we know it is about time now for the Mississippi River
To look like a puddle of pecan blue pudding,
Pistachio and indigo, and the sun and the neon-rose lollipop
Is being drawn up over the horizon into a fizzy bunch of grape colored clouds.
Zajj turns out to be too much woman - or too much rhythm - for Joe. After travelling to New York, where he learns about be-bop in the jazz clubs, he seems happy to return to his jungle. There he teaches other drums to tell this story.
Ahhh Hah! Madame Zajj.
She's from way back, as far back as way back goes.
She's been way out, as far out as far out goes.
Enjoyed triumph on triumph, as the fanciest and the most famous.
Wealth and good looks. She has everything but Joe.
She draws on all the resources of sorcery,
Trying to steal Joe from the jungle.
Joe too has had a fair amount of success giving drums lessons.
And in the evening he sits by the fire
With his fabulous collection of drums around him.
And Joe likes to tell them about his trip to New York
And Madame Zajj's dream.
When Joe gets sleepy he takes his favorite
New shiny drum on his knee and says
"Now you tell me a story."
And the new drum clears her throat and starts to recite
"Once there was a boy named Caribee Joe.
One day he found an elaborately fabricated drum.
And when he touched it, it actually spoke to him,
Saying 'I am not a drum. I am a woman'."
A Drum Is A Woman is really a story in which love of musical rhythm is metaphorically compared to the love for a woman. An allegory. Madame Zajj represents the essential rhythmic feel of jazz.
Duke makes his essential analogy at the top. Here are the very first lines of A Drum Is A Woman:
A drum is a woman
Who won't stay out of your blood.
A drum is a woman
It's beat is like the quickening of a heart in love.
Metaphor or not, regardless of the quality of his music, we suspect that Ellington understood that he might be misunderstood - even back in the Fifties. I suppose that's why he feels the need to tell us "it isn't civilized to beat women".
If Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman is a delicate dance metaphorically combining love of music with love of women, then Jorge Perez Gonzalez's recent video Bottom Percussion PATAX shows just how low the art of metaphor has fallen.
Perez lines up four pairs of hairless naked be-thonged butt cheeks, arranges them so that's all we can see and then he spanks them with his hands, synching with a (prerecorded) instrumental track. He occasionally hits a suspended cymbal.
He tells us that this is music. I think he needs to be told that it isn't civilized to beat women. Or anyone. After all, it's not the Fifties any more.
Previously JPG's most watched video had about 30,000 hits in ten months. Bottom Percussion got hit over seven million times in just two weeks. Since Bottom Percussion is no more interesting musically than those other tracks (actually less interesting), it's not hard to figure that this popularity results from the particular "instrument" he uses and how he plays it.
People (meaning, in this case, mostly males, according to YouTube statistics) must want to see musicians hit women. With such a large viewership, Perez has almost certainly opened up a new You Tube revenue stream for himself. Sequels and copycats can't be far behind.
In an attempt to excuse himself from well-deserved accusations of musical misogyny, after two weeks Perez revealed that only two of the butts were female. The others were not female, they just appeared to be. He released another video showing these four people standing up afterwards with blurred faces. I guess the Butt Cheek People don't want their identities known. Maybe they are afraid that their mothers would find out.
At least Drum Man looked us straight in the eyes. And he only got hit above the waist.
When struck, the Butt Cheek People all make pretty much the same sound. Perez seems to carefully choose which cheek he will hit. But maybe he's just hitting randomly. There seems little musical point for changing cheeks. It's easy to imagine him thinking "I enjoy spanking one butt. Four butts will be four times more fun."
If Perez had chosen a wide variety of body sizes to beat on presumably there would be aural distinctions between them. A butt of a morbidly obese person might serve as the "bass butt". A little girl or boy butt might serve as the "soprano butt" (that's a disgusting thought because Perez ought to know that it isn't civilized to hit children. He could use a petite adult instead).
Maybe Perez only knows beautiful, hairless, tight-assed people with insufficient bodily resonance. I think it's more likely that he just likes to hit on butts.
Because Perez has posed his instruments so the camera can only see one section of their bodies and because he chose to portray them as identical and interchangeable, he can be validly accused of sexual objectification. Male or female, he has turned people into things. Thank goodness he only used his hands to hit them.
Watching videos of spanking turns some people on sexually. Some like to spank, others like being spanked. As long as the relationship is consensual there's no problem. Bottom Percussion really should be labelled as soft porn. Keeping music and porn as two separate categories would be the civilized thing to do.
Seven million hits can't all be wrong, can they? Everyone is free to draw the line between music and porn where they see fit. There are more than ten likes for every dislike.
You might want to compare Bottom Percussion with this definitely NSFW video which shows a man "performing" on a young girl's behind. Like Bottom Percussion you can't see the spankee's face. Unlike Bottom Percussion there is no pretense of musicality. It really is soft porn.
Others have called for Bottom Percussion to be removed from You Tube. That's never gonna happen.
Instead, I hope that Jorge Perez Gonzalez does many more videos and lives an extra long life - long enough to someday understand what is so objectionable about this performance. He has sunk to great depths without even knowing he's in a hole. Getting out of his hole is going to require an awful lot of time and effort.
Who knows - this video might make his career, lead him to fame and fortune, the way Kim Kardashian's sex tape benefitted her.
To "honor" Jorge Perez Gonzalez's musical travesty and maybe give hs career a little extra boost I've decided to dust off the long dormant Mixed Meters awards program called The Dockers. After all, this is awards season; the Oscars are this weekend.
The envelope please.
And the Docker For Setting A New All Time Artistic Low By Pretending That A Soft Porn Video Is Really Music goes to ... Jorge Perez Gonzalez for his video Bottom Percussion. Take a bow, Jorge.
Chapter Five: Jayne Cortez's If The Drum Is A Woman
I was happy to discover other, more civilized opinions which employ the metaphor of women and drums.
Jayne Cortez, who passed away recently, was a poet. She performed her work with a band called The Firespitters. Beyond her own successful career, she came of a high jazz pedigree as the mother of Denardo Coleman. She was once married to Ornette.
Her poem If the Drum Is A Woman speaks to the issue of domestic violence against women. The poem uses Duke's woman/drum metaphor. This seems like an appropriate way to conclude this post.
Here's a video of Jayne Cortez reciting If the Drum Is A Woman with accompaniment by The Firespitters. Appropriately they play a lot of drums in the background. Read the whole poem here. I include a short excerpt below.
If the drum is a woman
then understand your drum
your drum is not docile
your drum is not invisible
your drum is not inferior to you
your drum is a woman
so don't reject your drum
don't try to dominate your drum
It has been almost three years since I awarded the last Docker. This is a link to all the awards.
Mixed Meters has never discussed spanking before. But the subject of penises has come up a few times. Some of those posts even have musical connections.
American culture is just chock full of fun holidays which combine the celebration of competition with crass consumerism.
For example there are the Oscars (and Grammies and a slough of other pointless entertainment award shows) in which Americans are encouraged to pay their money to enjoy a blockbuster movie (or pop album or whatever) because it is on the list of industrial in-crowd-chosen nominees heavily advertised as this years "can't miss" entertainment.
Another good example of an American holday devoted to competitive consumption is Black Friday. That's when patriotic Americans wait in line all night for the chance to elbow their fellow Americans in the gut (or pepper spray them) while sprinting through the aisles of Wal Mart (or Best Buy or K-Mart or whatever) seeking yet another deal of a lifetime on cheap mass-produced merchandise which carry generous 90-day warranties.
Super Sunday celebrates competition in the form of metaphorical warfare between two football teams from cities you don't much care about who fight over symbolic territory with a weird leather ball but periodically wait around doing nothing while elaborate advertisements are shown to people on big screen TVs as they consume mass quantities of chicken wings (or pizza or beer or chips or guacamole or whatever).
Here's a helpful video for people mystified by the game of professional football.
In the past Mixed Meters has explored the Super Bowl tradition. Most recently there was a largely unsatisfying effort to find a connection between Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl.
Long before that, way back in the darkest Dark Age of Mixed Meters (about 2006 or so), there was the Super Bowl Baby, a trilogy of 30 Second Spots.
In those early days I was composing on a laptop at Starbucks. You may think that a crowded noisy Starbucks was not conducive to musical composition (you'd be right) although mostly I found it easy to ignore the distractions.
But one day (January 29, 2006, a Sunday, to be precise) my local Starbucks was afflicted by a small baby, wailing with all its might, no doubt after imbibing one-too-many cups of bitter Starbucks coffee - or maybe just not happy with post-partum living. I still managed to finish my piece (a half-minute march, inspired by John Phillip Sousa, including a trio section in the subdominant).
I decided to immortalize that damn baby in the title of my piece.
The next day, Monday, I returned to the same Starbucks where I transformed The Crying Baby Halftime March into another, very different sort of music. The baby still gets the title role:
You can see that the trilogy was not composed in sequential order. This doesn't matter much. Heck, it doesn't matter at all. Listen to the three spots in whatever order you want.
I'm reposting now because I've uploaded the files to a different location and added a new playback option (which uses a new computer hell called HTML5 that allows playback on my mobile Apple device). (If you have trouble listening on your device, please let me know.)
And besides, according to Google's records, the original post has gotten only one hit in over five years. I'm hoping to double that within the week
On the fifty-seventh anniversary of his birth, I'd like to write about Arthur Jarvinen's longest piece of music. Possibly anyone's longest piece of non-repetitive music. It lasts one day. The score takes up 301 pages.
The piece is entitled Serious Immobilities. It is a huge set of variations. It has different layers. It has different versions. A piece this large requires two separate posts. Find the second one here.
To understand Serious Immobilities you must first know the work on which it is based, Vexations by Erik Satie.Vexations is a short twisted piano solo for which its composer provided this (capricious, in my opinion) instruction:
"In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities."
Vexations was resurrected from obscurity and elevated to high art by composer John Cage. It is now widely known. Satie's instruction is interpreted to mean that the music must be repeated exactly 840 times in order to finish one entire live performance.
the cover of Serious Immobilities, 840 variations on Satie's VEXATIONS for piano solo by Arthur Jarvinen
Here's a bit of Art's own introductory program notes to Serious Immobilities:
Late in 1996 the Paris New Music Review sponsored a competition for piano solos of no more than one minute in duration. I responded with a variation on the longest piano piece I could think of - Vexations, by Erik Satie. ... No sooner had I written my first variation than I realized the implication; I had to write 839 more.
Structurally the work unfolds as a sort of convoluted palindrome. The first two hundred and ten variations form the core of the work, and can in fact be performed as a separate piece - Serious Immobilities, Part One. Variations 211 through 420 are variations on the first two hundred ten in reverse order. Then the entire piece retrogrades (though not very literally.)
Besides a piano and pianists, Serious Immobilities requires other equipment on occastion: an old-fashioned metronome (associated with references to composer Randy Hostetler, found in variations 33, 388, 453 and 808), a typewriter (as a rhythm instrument in variations 192, 229, 612 and 649) and a small portable cassette tape recorder (for the playback of parenthetical text in variations 686 and 704).
A number of variations have text which are spoken or sung by the performer. Many texts were written by Erik Satie and others by Andrea Loselle, a professor of French, and by Arthur himself. Variation 816 is entitled "A Mason Hymn" with text by H. Adamson (Perth, 1638), whoever that is. Art tells us that these texts undergo variation much as the music does.
For variations employing my own texts I decided to treat the sentences as "language objects" for manipulation. I tried to find the exact opposite of each individual word, and if that was too difficult, the smallest possible group of words. This accounts for the somewhat bizarre, though still completely sensible, aspect of some of the later texts.
Some variations involve musical styles and theatrical presentation. A lounge act with a performer who talks to the audience, a waltz to be played with Straussian feeling and a jazz pianist all appear periodically. Improvisation, carefully restricted by the composer, is required of the pianist in spots. Variation 19 Shadow Play carries this instruction:
This variation is to be "played" silently. Finger the notes, but do not depress the keys.
(click any sample for a closer look)
Variation 1, that one he wrote for the one-minute music competition, is entitled Hexations. It consists of a very slow variation of Satie's music (the tempo marking is quarter equals 13) plus a Composer's Note to be read simultaneously by the performer.
Variation 840, the final one, entitled Transvexions, has tempo indication of quarter note equals approximately six and one half beats per minute. Art adds "Way Damn Slow!" to drive home the point.
Here's the text to Hexations:
I have thought a lot about the subject of the lengths of musical pieces, long ones in particular.
The late works of Feldman, for example, seem to me to be arbitrarily long.
As much as I admire and enjoy them, I remain unconvinced of any real reason for their extreme lengths, beyond the composer's desire to make them long.
To specify that a work for solo piano be no more than one minute in length seems equally arbitrary, especially since it can be as short as one second and still qualify.
In approaching this project I decided to base my work on the longest solo piano piece I could think of, Vexations by Erik Satie. This is the quintessential arbitrarily long piece, requiring 840 literal repetitions of the basic material.
Vexations is composed entirely of three-note chords. I have retained the original rhythms, but combined adjacent sonorities into hexachords, thus Hexations. I also eliminated the repeats.
(The text from Variation 840, Transvexions, in it's linguistic palindrome, is included in the second post.)
Half of Hexations can be heard in this video:
Variation 420 (one of those in Art's palindromic structure which corresponds to Hexations) is entitled Hexplanation. In it he reveals more about the Paris New Music Review competition.
The competition judges chose fifty winning works. Hexations was not among them.
In an article like this it's tempting to discuss only the variations which stand out, to emphasise those that grab our attention with theatricality or other means. It is important to remember that those moments which use text or sound effects or musical style references are really a small minority of Art's 840 variations.
The overwhelming majority of Serious Immobilities is music clearly in the spirit of its source material - simple, slow, spacey piano music. Static music that is somehow always moving. Variation after variation washes over us one after another - like waves, each one is slightly different, some are very different, but most are the same as the last, the same as the next.
Art takes the puzzling Vexations harmonies as a starting point for his own concerns as a composer. He deals with pitch, tonality, consonance, dissonance, tension and release. His compositional "games" - that's a word he himself would use - are at work throughout Serious Immobilities. Although these processes are hard to unravel afterwards, through them we sense Art's own spirit.
Finally, after a while, it starts to dawn on us that hearing this music could be compared to the mythical act of nailing jello to a wall. Under the assault of analysis, it will always morph in messy, unpredictable ways. A work of this scope naturally avoids easy description. By combining Satie with Jarvinen this effect increases exponentially. Its very elusiveness is the attraction. Serious Immobilities is never going to explain the conundrum which is Vexations. I suspect Art may never have expected such an outcome. I wonder if he himself claimed to understand the Satie better once he had finished.
What Serious Immobilities does is to take up residence inside the sound world of Vexations. From there it takes its own sweet time to explore the strange Vexations countryside. We can hear many unusual musical "sights" filled with exotic audio "flora" and unconventional acoustic "fauna".
Arthur Jarvinen has shown us this landscape where Satie's vision is mixed with his own. Knowing the sources, it should come as no surprise that the final result is just as puzzling as the original. Whereas Vexations made us scratch our heads, Serious Immobilities also makes us scratch our heads.
Jarvinen may give us a more animated and colorized experience than Satie but we are none the wiser because of it.
I'm pretty certain that was never the point.
There is more about Serious Immobilities in the second post. You'll read about various versions and layers (e.g. Spineless Dog). There will be audio samples and a history of the several performances of Serious Immobilities. Also watch for information about the 77 minute long compact disc, performed by Bryan Pezzone, available on Los Angeles River Records. If you want that disc there's even a special Mixed Meters discount offer. So read on ...
Mixed Meters could not have produced these posts without the help of Lynn Angebranndt. She gave me permission to post excerpts of the piece. Thanks, Lynn. Also major thanks to Daniel Rothman of Los Angeles River Records.
In this segment I'll document as much as possible the performances and recording of Serious Immobilities. There are audio samples ahead. And later on there'll be a special offer for Mixed Meters readers who want to purchase the Los Angeles River Records compact disc. So read on.
Spineless Dog
Spineless Dog is a composition by Randall Woolf. On Randall's website he describes Spineless Dog:
Spineless Dog 24 hours (A 24-hour set of variations of Erik Satie's 24-hour long Vexations. To be played with Art Jarvinen Serious Immobilities (another set of 24-hour variations on Erik Satie's Vexations)) or alone) elec kybd setup (PC88, casiotone, fx processor, sampler)
The composer added a bit more information privately: "It was sort of a guided improv, using a keyboard set up with samples on certain notes, and elec. fx."
In the piano score of Serious Immobilities Arthur Jarvinen offered this explanation:
SERIOUS IMMOBILITIES in its fully-realized form consists of two "layers" of music performed simultaneously. These are:
1) Serious Immobilities - 840 variations on Erik Satie's Vexations, for piano solo, by Arthur Jarvinen, and
2) Spineless Dog - variations on Satie's Vexations, for MIDI keyboard controller, MacIntosh computer, and electronics, by Randall Woolf.
The performance notes go on to say that if Jarvinen's 840 variations are played without Spineless Dog it is properly entitled Serious Immobilities sans Spineless Dog. The two pieces can also be played simultaneously with Vexations, Satie's original piece. (I've tried listening to Serious Immobilities and Vexations simultaneously. The combination works quite well.)
In the previous post we learned that the first 210 variations can be performed for six hours by a single pianist under the title Serious Immobilities, Part One. Later in this post we'll learn about Serious Immobilities, Petit.
There's a level of confusion about the title Serious Immobilities. Satie, I expect, would have been proud.
Performances of Serious Immobilities The piano score to Serious Immobilities also details a performance history of the work.
While still a work in progress, Serious Immobilities was performed on March 22, 1997, at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C. This concert was a memorial for composer Randy Hostetler, a close friend of Art's, who died at an insanely young age. Four variations in Serious Immobilities are labeled "for Randy". All of them involve the use (or misuse) of an old wind-up metronone.
The first performance of all 840 variations was at the Kitchen in New York City, "simultaneous with an incomplete version of Randall Woolf's Spineless Dog." on January 17 and 18, 1997. Art adds:
This performance could be considered a preview, but not an official premiere, since the staging was not as intended. The piano and electronic keyboard were adjacent [to] one another in a single small room, besides which there was other music happening all around.
Finally, on June 4 and 5, 1998, from 5 p.m. to 5 p.m., Serious Immobilities was officially premiered by nine pianists in Los Angeles CA. It was part of a festival called Resistance Fluctuations, with the two layers of Serious Immobilities properly positioned in separate but adjacent galleries.
It was a different story down the street at neighboring galleries. At 5 p.m. in Works on Paper Inc., Arthur Jarvinen unleashed "Serious Immobilities," a 24-hour piece in which a relay team of pianists play Jarvinen's 840 variations on a one-page score by Erik Satie, "Vexations." A hundred years ago, Satie had written the instruction on his piece that it be repeated 840 times, but no one took him seriously until John Cage arranged a marathon performance of it in 1963, and it became the avant-garde rage.
Next door, at Dan Bernier Gallery, was Randall Woolf's companion piece, "Spineless Dog." Along with piped-in Jarvinen, a relay team of pianists performs a more conceptual work on an electric keyboard, set up with all kinds of unpredictable samples, taking Satie very far afield.
Well, there's not much actual music criticism there. Mostly just reportage.
Los Angeles River Records recording
There's another version of Serious Immobilities: entitled Serious Immobilities, Petit, whch (by no coincidence at all) is exactly the length of one compact disc, 77'42" to be exact.) It was recorded on Los Angeles River Records by the fine pianist Bryan Pezzone. He also took part in the Los Angeles premier. The album was released in 2003.
The complete version of Serious Immobilities, for piano solo, consists of 840 variations on Erik Satie's Vexations and takes twenty-four hours to play. For practical reasons, and because the music easily lends itself to such treatment, I have published shorter alternative versions of the piece. Serious Immobilities, Petit is a recital-length version (ca. 78 min.). It was recently recorded by Bryan Pezzone on a beautiful Fazioli 9' concert grand, in Zipper Hall at the Colburn School of the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. The recording was funded by a grant from the Los Angeles chapter of the American Composers Forum and will soon be released by Los Angeles River Records.
Ennui In the Martini Lounge is the title I have recently appended to one variation from Serious Immobilities which occurs in all of the various versions. Deliberately evocative of cocktail lounge jazz, it is one of the few "stylistic variations" in the piece. Astute listeners will notice that Satie's original chords are there, but with notes added so as to give them a jazzy flavor, and his "theme of the bass" still occupies the left hand, but dressed up. Of course, all the rhythms have been changed, and extra ornamental flourishes added. But I must confess I was actually a bit surprised at how little it took to turn Vexations into a cheesy lounge piece. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Satie was himself a cabaret musician; bar music was always a part of his oeuvre. In any case, I like to think he would find this particular take on Vexations amusing.
Here are some memories Bryan Pezzone wrote about the recording session:
I was extremely honored that Art chose me to to record his CD of this, which was an hour long. He selected the material from his 24 hour version. Art was so cool at the recording. We did it at Zipper Hall in one take. It was a magical experience that I will never forget.
We got the sound dialed in first, then I played from beginning to end, unbroken performance, finished and Art goes ..' I'm happy with that'....it was incredible. The one and only take. I loved Art for appreciating that, not beating it up, slicing and dicing, and on my end, I had it pretty well prepared. As time has gone by, I treasure more and more how special an experience it was:)
Do you want to hear Serious Immobilities, Petit? Well, here's good news: Daniel Rothman, of Los Angeles River Records, has made this special offer to Mixed Meters' three readers:
you may give losanagelesriver[at]aol.com for direct sales — with a mixed meters reference I'll sell them at 10/CD plus S+H.
In other words, write to him at that address (substituting @ as appropriate) and mention Mixed Meters. He'll tell you how much "S+H" is. Send him that amount plus $10. Tell him your address. He'll send you the recording of Serious Immobilities by Arthur Jarvinen.
Such a deal.
Daniel has allowed me to extract an excerpt of the recording and post it here. I tried to limit myself to just a few minutes of music. My choice hinged on finding a passage that conveyed both the variety of the music and the sheer repetitiveness of it.
If you remember the text of the first variation in Serious Immobilities (which I included in the first post) and if you remember Art's description of manipulating "language objects" (also in that post), then you might be curious about the final variation, number 840, entitled Transvexions, the one with tempo of quarter equals 6.5. Here's that text which the pianist reads while playing "Way Damn Slow!"
You aren't likely to do much that's predicated on the depth of a literary fragment, and such a short one at that.
With your total lack of respect for it, and the extent to which you despise it, you were always certain there was ample justification for its moderate brevity, the audiences' not wanting to keep it short notwithstanding.
Denying the possibility of any motif occupying a full twenty-four hours is of course absolutely necessary, although falling even one second short would disqualify it anyway.
As you leave this performance perhaps you can't make up your mind whether or not to plagiarize several rather short works for mixed ensembles, none of which you can actually recall, such as any of those by this composer.
None of them are merely crude approximations of necessarily short motifs, with even one unique, fully-realized idea strictly prohibited.
Serious Immobilities is not deconstructed only from rests and single notes.
You obliterated any new sense of timelessness with widely separated silences; so why Vexations?
And you didn't introduce even one unique event.
Mixed Meters could not have produced these posts without the help of Lynn Angebranndt. She gave me permission to post excerpts of the piece. Thanks, Lynn. Also major thanks to Daniel Rothman of Los Angeles River Records.
The Internet provides me with lots of reading material; some of it is fascinating. Recently I've come across four absorbing articles with a common subject matter - the American system of slavery. These have all provided interesting viewpoints, new information or intriguing analysis. At least to me.
You should be warned that Mixed Meters does not have a fact checking department. Like so much of life, you are free to form your own beliefs.
These articles are good examples of why the past is never really past. There is much relevance here to contemporary issues. And we often need to be reminded that the explanations we are taught about why things happened are usually oversimplifications and possibly just plain wrong.
The four articles are:
The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery by Thom Hartmann at TruthOut. These days the phrase "well regulated militia" is an excuse for the NRA to turn our country into an armed camp. But back when they were agreeing to the Bill of Rights, one of the reasons for guaranteed gun ownership was the need for state militias to keep the slaves enslaved. And the South didn't trust the Federal government to do that chore for them.
10 Things You Need to Know About Slavery (That You Won't Learn from Django Unchained) by Imara Jones originally from Colorlines; I found it on AlterNet. Slavery was a source of skilled labor? The American Revolution was intended to preserve the slave economy? Southern anti-tax attitudes started as a way to maintain slavery? Wall Street firms made fortunes from slavery? Who knew?
The South's Shocking Hidden History: Thousands of Blacks Forced Into Slavery Until WW2by Douglas A. Blackmon in The Washington Monthly (again, I found this via AlterNet). A system of virtual slavery lasted nearly a century after the Civil War. The rehabilitated Southern states passed laws that could turn any Black person into a criminal who could be "leased" to plantation owners. Once released, he could still be forced to work, couldn't freely change jobs and probably owed his soul to the company store.
How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline by Dr. Craig McClain from The Deep Sea News. In short, ancient geology gave rise to the best farmland in the South, the so-called Black Belt, where the largest plantations had the most slaves. These areas now have high populations of Black people who are reliable Democratic voters. As a result there is an electoral Blue Belt inside certain Red States.
I recommend AlterNet as a good source of liberal, progressive information and opinion. I thank Leslie Harris and Jim Angus for alerting me to the other articles.
For the most part news is not a spectator sport. Only small groups of people directly witness major events. The rest of us must trust the media to find out what happened.
As time passes, people begin to agree that certain events were important. They observe the anniversaries, honor the heroes, slander the villains. Stories are told, songs sung. Books are written, movies made. Lessons are learned, courses organized. Eventually experts arise. Starting with petty disagreements these experts argue with one another. They form factions, wage verbal battles, assert opposite interpretations. They go to court. Their interpretations morph into articles of faith.
Beliefs have supplanted facts.
And then even more time passes. The important event is eclipsed by other important events. Direct witnesses die off, as do the rest of us. Generations disappear. The event loses relevance and becomes a dusty academic topic. Professors vainly try to explain to bored students what actually happened and how anyone could have thought it was so special in the first place.
This process is called History.
I recently finished reading a book, the story of a direct witness to important events of history. These particular events were monstrously inhuman, the systematic genocide of millions of people. Inside the Gas Chambers, Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz is an essential read because it is told by a direct witnesses to the Holocaust, one of the few who was made to work inside the Nazi crematoria and survived the war. This book deserves our attention because, these days, there are certain people (let's call them "experts") who deny that such events ever happened in the first place.
Shlomo Venezia was a Sephardic Jew living in Greece. In 1944 the Nazis deported him to a concentration camp where they systematically murdered in the gas chambers anyone who couldn't work. Venezia was selected for a special unit, the Sonderkommando, whose job it was to move the dead bodies and burn the corpses.
The book takes the form of an interview, with Venezia responding at length to short questions. His is not an overview of the huge ideology-driven Nazi murder enterprise. This is not a grand history. Instead Venezia tells his own tale very simply. He was one of many mice caught in a large trap.
(Question:) What did you see of the gas chamber when you arrived?
I wasn't one of those who had to take the corpses out of the gas chamber, but later on I frequently had to do it. Those given this task started by pulling the corpses out with their hands, but in a few minutes their hands were dirty and slippery. In order to avoid touching the bodies directly, they tried using a bit of cloth, but, of course, the cloth in turn became dirty and damp after a few moments. So people had to make do. Some tried to drag the bodies along with a belt, but this actually made the work even harder, since they had to keep tying and untying the belt. Finally, the simplest thing was to use a walking stick under the nape of the neck to pull the bodies along. You can see it very clearly in one of David Olère's drawings. There was no shortage of walking sticks, because of all the elderly people who were put to death. At least this meant we didn't have to drag the corpses with our hands. And this was hugely important for us. Not because it was a matter of corpses, though that was bad enough. . . . It was because their death had been anything but gentle. It was a foul, filthy death, difficult and experienced differently by each of them.
(David Olère was an artist who also survived the Sonderkommando and documented it after the war in drawings such as this one.)
I've never talked about this until now; it's such a weight, it's so heartrending, that I find it difficult to speak of those visions of the gas chamber. You could find people whose eyes hung out of their sockets because of the struggles the organism had undergone. Others were bleeding from everywhere, or were soiled by their own excrement, or that of other people. Because of the effect that their fear and the gas had on them, the victims often evacuated everything they had in their bodies. Some bodies were all red, others very pale, as everyone reacted differently. But they had all suffered in death. People often imagine that the gas was thrown in, and there you were, the victims died. But what death it was! . . . You found them gripping each other - everyone had desperately sought a little air. The gas was thrown onto the floor and gave off acid from underneath, so everyone tried to find some air even if each one needed to climb on top of another until the last one died. I personally think - I can't be sure but I think - that several people died even before the gas was thrown in. They were crammed in so tightly against one another that the smallest and weakest were inevitably suffocated. At a certain moment, under that pressure, that anguish, you become selfish and there's only one thing you can think of: how to save yourself. That was the effect the gas had. The sight that lay before us when we opened the door was terrible; nobody can even imagine what it was like.
Shlomo Venezia was an eye witness to history. In the many decades between the events and the interview I expect he forgot some small details. I would also expect that his overall story is true, corroborated as it is by so many other sources.
However, there are doubters. These are the "Holocaust Deniers", people who argue that no one died in the Nazi gas chambers. I didn't have to scour the Internet very long to unearth Bishop Richard Williamson as a good example. Williamson is a piece of work who spreads notions of hate and conspiracy with an aura of calm logical discourse..
The Bishop believes that no one died in Nazi gas chambers. He believes that they never existed. As you listen to him talk, notice his emphasis on his own belief. He has made this issue not about what actually happened but about what and who he believes. Religion does that to a guy, I guess.
He supports his beliefs with logical-sounding explanations given by experts. In the video below he argues that poison gas had to be vented by tall chimneys, but wartime reconnaissance photos show no chimney shadows, so therefore - his experts have concluded and he agrees - there could have been no gas chambers. This sort of argument, where a small inconsistency is used to undermine a large body of fact, seems very common in denial literature.
This small bit of feeble expertise is enough support for Williamson's beliefs. He doesn't need much support from facts or logic. I'm sure he'd find some contradiction in historical memoirs like Shlomo Venezia's. What this cleric is telling us are his beliefs. In his mind what he believes is more than sufficiently supported by his fundamentalist religious faith and his amply evident anti-Semitism.
Watch him in action.
I'm not here to debate the details of the Holocaust with people like the Bish. If you're a friend of his don't bother to leave comments. I won't publish them.
As time passes, each succeeding generation will have more difficulty distinguishing the facts of the Holocaust from the dogma and obfuscations of the deniers. The lessons of Nazi inhumanity might fade and the resolve to Never Forget could be slowly lost if the Bishop gets his way. Such a loss will pave the way for history to repeat itself. How slowly the loss happens depends on how well the deniers are countered right now.
Here's a quote by Robert McAfee Brown from the preface to Night, Ellie Wiesel's Holocaust survival memoir:
Having confronted the story, we would much prefer to disbelieve, treating it as the product of a diseased mind, perhaps. And there are those today who - feeding on that wish, and on the anti-Semitism that lurks near the surface of the lives of even cultured people - are trying to persuade the world that the story is not true, urging us to treat it as the product of diseased minds, indeed. They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. Perhaps there is is a greater indignity, it is committed by those who believe them.
Reading books like Inside The Gas Chambers and other first hand accounts of the Holocaust are good ways to fight the ignorance and hatred of people like Richard Williamson and anyone who might believe him.
Williamson's manner and British accent reminded me of Alan Watts, a wise Episcopal priest who spread notions of Eastern religion to Americans during the fifties and sixties. The comparison ends there. Watts' lectures are still very relevant to modern life.
You see them a lot this time of year. End of Year Lists. Best Of Lists. Worst Of Lists. All Kinds of Yearly Lists.
I've always supposed that journalists, needing an easy column during the holidays, keep notebooks during the year, jotting down candidates for best or worst as they happen. Then in mid-December they review the list, make a few editorial decisions, add some literary polish, check their spelling and get on with more important things, like drinking.
At least that's what I imagined journalists did. I tried to come up with a personal Best Of List during recent Decembers but couldn't think of anything worthwhile. My memory isn't what it used to be, as you well know.
This year I tried to keep a running list during the year. Whenever something that generated a bit of my enthusiasm came up during 2012 I added it to a special file. Then, last week, thinking it was time to polish off my own Best Of List for 2012 so I could get on with my drinking, I looked at the list.
I probably would have added my new iPad as item number six. That's still four enthusiasms short of a minyan. People who know me know that enthusiasm is not one of my strong personality traits.
That's when I came up with Plan B. I'll tell you what Plan B is in a moment.
Plan B was this: write a 30 Second Spot entitled My Ten Favorite Things About 2012. In other words, compose music with a misleading title. That way I could avoid the problem entirely without having to even feign enthusiasm.
That's what I did. Once I'd finished writing the music I slapped on a bit of random video. Any correlation between this music or image and my actual ten favorite things from 2012 (assuming I even had ten favorite things, or even six) is totally in the mind of the beholder. The beholder is you, Mr. or Ms. Beholder.
Back in the early years of Mixed Meters there was a B.O.L. tradition. Try 2006 or 2007 or 2008. I'm happy to discover that all but a few of those items still merit quantums of my enthusiasm.
Today, three days later, it's safe to say that their predictions were off. But off by how much? As long as my personal life span is shorter than the earth's remaining time as a planet I don't much care when the world ends. I hope to stay around quite a while longer. Eventually, once I'm gone, you people are free to do whatever you want with the place.
Meanwhile, the cycles of existence are still spinning. Days, months and years just keep on coming, one after another. We call these phenomena "time" and we are all forced to lived through them at exactly the same rate. (Although I've discovered, quite subjectively, that listening to opera can slow time down quite a bit. And watching a televised presidential debate can stop it completely.)
One particular cycle of time which has become important to those of us here at Mixed Meters is the Season. There are four seasons in an Earth year. In most places on our planet seasons are marked by shifts in the patterns of daylight and weather. This is a result, I'm told, of the globe's precarious tilt to one side. Humans make big deals out of seasons. They vary their sports, their clothing and their religious celebrations to accommodate them.
Here at Mixed Meters we've been celebrating seasonal change with my ongoing musical composition The Seasons. Every day I compose a short bit of music - usually a few seconds, very rarely a whole minute. These bits are played sequentially separated by silences of approximately 45 seconds, more or less.
At the end of every climatic season I post the recently completed musical season here. Today's post marks number four in the series. It's called Autumn 2012. I started it the day after the last Equinox and completed in on this Winter Solstice, December 21, the day the world was supposed to end. The world didn't end but Autumn 2012 did.
Musically Autumn 2012 focuses on tonal harmony. There are lots of simple chords. Like some of its predecessors, there's also a new Garbage Day Periodicity (i.e. a weekly cycle). Each Monday, which is the day I take the garbage out, I chose a new pitch center at random from the twelve possibilities. I used that for one week of harmony. As a result, at the end of Autumn 2012 you'll hear a twelve-tone row, the musical distillation of the entire season.
Here's news. I've begun my fifth season. I've called it Winter 2012 and it begins with the tone row from Autumn 2012. I doubt Winter 2012 will be similar to the previous winter, Winter 2011. If you check back in about three months you can find out what it's like for yourself.
Regular MM readers (all three of you) will remember that my seasons are intended to be played simultaneously. They can also be combined with other music. Any music is fine. It's completely your decision how you use The Seasons.
However, because four seems to be a magic number of sorts for seasonal thinking and because seasons are cyclical (they repeat over and over and over again) one rather uninventive way of listening would be to start the four pieces of The Seasons simultaneously and let them each repeat over and over and over again.
Using a calculator and a list of prime numbers I calculated how long the four files would need before they completed one meta-cycle and returned to the identical synchronization with which they began. The answer I came up with is 4,693,633.7 years. Far less than that scientifically projected "end of time".
What about 4,693,633.7 years from now? Supposedly Africa and Europe will have merged so the Mediterranean will have disappeared, although Egypt's application to join the EU won't have been approved yet. New species will have evolved. I have serious doubts that human culture can last that long. I have no doubt that I won't be around to find out if it does.
Do you have an interest in extended works of music? In January the infuriatingly mis-spelled, pro-business Weird magazine published a list of long musical "songs", the longest of which lasts only 1.6 million years. Here, with frightening disregard for their corporate copyright, is the chart which accompanied that article.
