Philip Corner - Three Pieces for Gamelan Ensemble

Chronicling the life of the often mentioned but undercelebrated 71 year old American composer, best known for his connections to Fluxus and the Judson Dance Theater, presents an interesting challenge. Thanks to a recent programme of reissues by Italian label Alga Marghen and the rediscovery of Corner’s remarkable 1970s and 80s work with Gamelan Son Of Lion, we have a window into Corner’s extraordinarily diverse activities.

In 1972, Corner accepted a position in the music department at Livingston College, a part of Rutgers University that had been a Fluxus stronghold since the late 1950s. The College hired ethnomusicologist Barbara Benary in 1973, who, having studied gamelan on the West Coast with Lou Harrison, decided to build an Indonesian gamelan for students to practice on, using instructions supplied by Berkeley Gamelan founder Daniel Schmidt, a sheet of steel and a lot of old grapefruit tins. Benary herself was initially against the idea of mixing Eastern and Western traditions, but as Corner’s New Music Performing Group and composer Daniel Goode became increasingly involved, and Gamelan Son Of Lion (‘Ben Ari’ is ‘son of lion’ in Hebrew) came into being, the group started to develop in a way that, as Benary says, “had absolutely nothing to do with traditional music”.

Gamelan has a long, rich history as an object of inspiration and appropriation for Western composers, going back to Debussy, who heard a Javanese gamelan at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. Some composers working with gamelan, like Colin McPhee, lived in Bali for periods of time, while others, like Henry Cowell, studied and taught it as part of surveys of World Music. The measured, formal qualities of traditional gamelan at first appear to be highly resistant to the spontaneous singularities characteristic of Corner’s previous work. Surprisingly, an interest in numbers opened the gamelan up to him.

“I’d been totally into this intuitive, irrational Zen approach,” he acknowledges, “and that seemed like a great liberation because it permitted a complexity which numbers always seemed to inhibit (...) I wanted to add this idea of repetition, of measured relationships and extreme simplicity without renouncing anything that I had been doing, or which had been culturally achieved by irrational values, indeterminacy, silence, noise, improvisation. I never renounced long tones fading into silence, gonglike sounds floating in untuned space. With the gamelan you don’t necessarily hear that, but everything is tuned that way, and it still sounds like objects floating in pre-rational space.”

Just as chaos theory shows how mathematical formulae can themselves produce highly unpredictable and complex patterns, pieces like the marvellous Gamelan on Three Pieces For Gamelan, which begins with a slow deep gong sound fading into silence and gradually adds higher pitched instruments playing at increasingly rapid tempos, or the graphically scored Gamelan PC on Gamelan In The New World Volume 2, apply apparently simple principles of pitch and time measurement to each of the individual instruments in the gamelan, collectively producing a rich, highly complex permutating sound.

“I was really involved with resonant metal in a contemporary idiom,” Corner recalls, “and metal involves the possibility of noise as well as resonance, the oriental idea of sound dying away into silence, the use of silence, static sounds and all of that.” The gamelan provided a whole set of new possibilities for meditating on metal – and over the following 20 years, Corner produced more than 400 such pieces.

Corner himself finally visited Indonesia in 1986, ten years after he began composing for gamelan. In an interview with gamelan composer Jody Diamond made just before his trip, he argued that “you can’t run away from who you are. You can’t immerse yourself in another culture and pretend to be them. I think you have to go there knowing who you are, and then relate to them out of who you are and where you are.”

Corner was well received and collaborated with Javanese composers, such as Michael Asmara, with whom he remains in touch, but his involvement with gamelan ended when he left New York for Italy in 1992. However, Benary and Goode have continued to compose and perform with Gamelan Son Of Lion, and have issued a number of new recordings.

“The essential harmony is dissonant,” he declares. “Everything we call harmony is essentially counterpoint. Putting together single tones – the relationship between single tones. We use harmony as a kind of prejudice, against disharmony. Some relationships are acceptable, some aren’t. Some we call harmonious, some we don’t. But I see it all as essentially counterpoint. Whenever you take distinct pitches and put them together in combinations, it’s counterpoint.”

The notion that literally any combination of tones is harmonic flies in the face of the equal temperament tuning system that has dominated Western classical music since Bach, but it’s equally foreign to those who favour alternative tuning systems, such as Just Intonation, grounded in particular mathematical or physical principles of sound. For Corner, harmony is about relationship, and relationship is a good thing, the more sonically complex the better"

Marcus Boon, A Long Life, Endless as the Sky



1. Gamelan (1975)
played by members of Son of Lion on the instruments of the Javanese gamelan Kyai Muntjar
Connecticut, Feb 28, 1981.

2. The Barcelona Cathedral, 1st
played by members of Son of Lion on the instruments created by Barbara Benary
NYC, 1978.

3. Belum (1991)
Third version for Son of Lion with added Western instruments
Performed at Corner's Farewell to New York concert, Experimental Intermedia Foundation
NYC, Feb 29, 1992.

Released by Alga Marghen in 1999.


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180 D'Gs to the Future: The Music of Negativland (2007)

This is an absolutely jaw-dropping collection of Negativland songs covered by a 5-or-6 piece a cappella group. Every sample is sung, every um and er is included. And it's mindblowing, even if you're not familiar with Negativland.

Formerly the Singing Minnicks, David and his brothers Chris, Don, Mark, Peter and Dick Minnick started out singing in their church and at neighborhood concerts. In 2001, however, their direction changed when David found a copy of Negativland's LP Points in their pastor, Rev. Al "Sugar" Sweet's trailer. Rev. Sweet helped the group to become what we now know as the 180 Gs. After selling out concerts all over their hometown of Detroit, they went to The Closet studios run by Sophocles Jones and recorded their first singles.

Negativland heard these recordings and contacted the Gs to put out their first full-length record on their own Seeland label.

And remember, every number is 180; every letter is G.

Have the 180 Gs ever attempted a Negativland song that you just couldn't get to work?
David Minnick: Yeah, we had a few of those. We could have gotten them to work (in my opinion) but everyone just got impatient. For example: I had written out a transcription of "Potty Air" from Points, but while recording it, a few of the guys felt too silly reading through 5 minutes of fart noises to continue. I had to scrap it to keep a few of the guys from walking off the project (even though it took me over 100 hours of tedious work to transcribe it accurately)... I HOPE YOU'RE READING THIS DON AND PETER!! IT WOULD HAVE BEEN COOL!!!
There were a few other songs ("Oven Noises", "The Playboy Channel") that we nearly gave up on. Whenever we were close to giving up, we'd remember Dad's last words to us, as he walked out the front door for the last time: "Don't give up." We'd collect ourselves, and get back to work. Dad also told me: "If ya get lost, you might have taken a wrong turn a few miles back. Just walk backwards a few miles and then walk forwards down another path and you might not be lost anymore." I had no idea what he meant by all of that, until we had to scrap our first recording of "Oven Noises" and start over. The final result was much better, but it was painful to just throw away 2 months of work. It took a long time, but we eventually got arrangements that we were satisfied with for the songs we wanted.

Do you find that Negativland songs from a particular era (the earlier, more experimental based stuff versus the more song-based stuff of the later records) work better in an 180 Gs arrangement?
David Minnick: That's really impossible to say because the entire concept of turning Negativland pieces into a cappella vocal arrangements doesn't (or shouldn't) work. Each song on 180 d'Gs to the Future was as difficult as the next. The more experimental, or speech-based pieces demanded that we make up our own melodies/harmonies while still being faithful to the original. In addition, the absence of regular rhythmic patterns in the original pieces meant that we had sing a lot of complicated, irrational rhythms AND not get lost. Our job, however, was to give these pieces a natural, funky "flow". The more song-like pieces demanded that we come up with arrangements that went BEYOND the original so that we weren't just doing straight cover versions. There was really no easy way to do this record and make it hold together.

While doing a bit of research for this interview, I discovered that you can buy Mp3s of the 180 Gs album from Amazon using Pepsi Points -- what do you think about that?
David Minnick: Personally, I think that's just fine. I happen to like Pepsi a lot better than Coke anyway. However, I haven't gotten any Pepsi points yet. I guess it's a good thing I've got the master tapes of the 180 Gs album.

Why is Dick Minnick not pictured on the album sleeve? David Minnick: If we're talking about Dick, I'll have to back into history a little bit: Dick (aside from his incessant theremin playing and his occasional violent temper) was just like the rest of us. We'd sing, we'd play music, we'd joke around, we'd argue from time to time... he was just one of us. Other people had told us that there was something wrong with him (being the 4th Minnick triplet) but we didn't see it.

Read the full interview here.



1. Intro (Everything's Going Fine) (from "Negativland")
2. Christianity Is Stupid (from "Escape From Noise")
3. Helter Stupid (excerpt from "Helter Stupid")
4. Greatest Taste Around (from "Dispepsi")
5. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (from "U2")
6. Car Bomb (from "Escape From Noise")
7. A Nice Place to Live (from "Points")
8. Seat Bee Sate (from "Negativland")
9. The Playboy Channel (from "Escape From Noise")
10. I Am God (from "Free")
11. Roy Storey Sports Line (from OTE Vol. 4: "Dick Vaughn's Moribund Music of the 70's")
12. Oven Noises (from OTE Vol. 6 - "The Willsaphone Stupid Show")
13. Theme From a Big 10-8 Place (Live) (from "A Big 10-8 Place")

The 180 G's are:
Chris Minnick, Don Minnick, Mark Minnick, Peter Minnick, Dick Minnick, David Minnick
Produced by Leonardo De Vinci Knight & D'Andre Xavier Jones
Engineered by Sophocles Jones
Released by Seeland in 2007.

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Mystic Fugu Orchestra - Zohar (1995)

"From the inventive minds of John Zorn and Yamantaka Eye comes an intimate and highly original duo project inspired by historical recordings of ancient Judaica. The Mystic Fugu Orchestra masquerades as "newly discovered" recordings from the Mystical tradition of Kabbalah - paralleling 14th century author Moses de Leon's original presentation of of his Kabbalistic classic "The Zohar" or "Book of Splendors" as having been discovered by him and actually written by Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai centuries before. Humorous, touching, traditional, irreverent, perplexing, soulful. A sound that could only come about with years of friendship, empathy and collaboration, The Mystic Fugu Orchestra will surprise and delight you as yet another unusual direction in music from these two masters of the unexpected." Tzadik Press Release

1. Alef
2. Book of Splendors
3. Frog Doyna
4. The Dybbuk
5. 2000 Years
6. Goniff Dance
7. Rov Nova
8. Zayin

Rav Yechida - Voice
Rav Tzizit - Harmonium

link@320

Robert Crumb - The Complete Crumb Volume 10

Robert Crumb - The Complete Crumb #10
Crumb Advocates Violent Overthrow!

"The Complete Crumb #10 continues the multi-volume series comprising the complete works of the legendary cartoonist R. Crumb, one of America's most original, trenchant, and uncompromising satirists. The series includes the earliest, heretofore unpublished comic strips, as well as his underground, dramatic and autobiographical strips, and his classic creations. This volume features work from 1973 to 1975" (back-cover hype)

Featuring Mr. Natural, Big Asses, Charles Bukowski, Frosty The Snowman, Covers, Fellatio Art, Shlubb Mugubb, Bob, Gilbert Shelton, Valerie The Vegetarian, Bureaucrats, and many others.

Original material produced in 1973-75.
Collection published by Fantagraphics Books in 1994.



Find a free comics reader here (windows) or here (mac). Or you can simply unzip the file and read it as a PDF.

link

Elmer Bernstein - I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968)

Surprisingly produced my a major studio, but nevertheless ultimately conservative, I Love You Alice B. Toklas is a timely comedy that attempts to caricaturize the clash and continuities between the "American way of life" as it was known before the 60s and the hippie movement. Directed by Hy Averack in 1968, it tells the story of Harold Fine, an asthmatic Jewish lawyer who lives out this tension, slides between these two models and "evolves as a human being" in the process. The trigger for such a change is... a woman; or better yet: two women and a dozen marijuana brownies. By embracing the beautiful, sweet, libertarian hippie girl, and rejecting the exhaustive emotional parasite who wants to drag him into a colorless marriage, Harold engages with the Mondo Teeth universe, a world where gurus tell you parables and make riddles about flowers, where junkies bathe in your tub with their clothes on, where directors make extra-long movies about dental realities, and where "it is very unhip to say you're hip". The film is equally sympathetic to both parties, the hip and the square, and concludes by arguing that true freedom and humanity is to be found outside the chartered territories of hypocritical conservatorism and the oft-silly "counterculture" of the 60s.

Elmer Bernstein's soundtrack explores some of the sounds and instruments that were to become a trademark of the decade. It opens with the title theme, in which the Harpers Bizarre sing about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, the author of a recipe book that teaches you to cook hashish fudge. (This, however, is not the version included in the movie, which has mellower and, er, groovier vocals). Most of the remaining tracks are stop-and-go instrumental restatements of this and other two themes. with a generous use of sitar, bongos, horns and string orchestration, the small musical episodes that compose a soundtrack not being excluded and creating a satisfying succession of miniature approaches to the same basic phrases. The overall orientation of the record is, perhaps as implied in the movie plot, a merging of "psychedelic" grooves and more "traditional" Hollywood orchestral arrangements, and the soundtrack can be read as a mature and ironic document of the musical experiments and stereotypes of the decade as seen through the glasses of a sympathetic outsider. Whether you're hip or square, whether you're into Gertrude Stein and dope brownies or not, whether you're an asthmatic Jewish lawyer or a freewheeling hairy refusenik, it is likely that, like Harold Fine, you'll love Alice B. Toklas.

link@320 [vinyl rip]

This vinyl rip is a courtesy of Phil, whose Eastern Eye offers a sample track of this and other great records. Many thanks for this.

Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell - From Hell (1989-1996)

Subtitled "Being a Melodrama in 16 Parts," "From Hell" takes on the most notorious unsolved mystery in the annals of crime, the 1888 "Jack the Ripper" killings of five prostitutes in London's East End. But Alan Moore is more excited by history than he is by any horror show. In his introduction to the series, Moore wrote "It's my belief that if you cut into a thing deeply enough, if your incisions are precise and persistent and conducted methodically, then you may reveal not only that thing's inner workings, but also the meaning behind those workings ... 'From Hell' is a post-mortem of a historical occurrence, using fiction as a scalpel."

Open "From Hell" and you may involuntarily draw back -- it feels like the dark, sooty atmosphere of Moore and Campbell's Victorian London could seep into your own living room. Campbell renders "From Hell" in a scratchy, drippy black and white, with each panel seemingly drawn using a blend of London's chimney ash and tabloid ink. With no campy sound effect balloons, "From Hell" unfolds in an eerie silence, its pauses worthy of Harold Pinter. Although it's still a suspense-driven thriller, "From Hell" condemns the urban destitution and the maltreatment of women of the time in the starkest possible terms, with Moore and Campbell peering into the darkest corners of the victims' squalid lives.

Inspired by the Ripper's centennial, Moore found himself sucked into the lore of "Ripperology," where wild suppositions and fierce factions rival the theorists of the Kennedy assassination. "Watchmen" is replete with Pynchonesque paranoia, and "From Hell" posits a similarly complex conspiracy at the heart of the slayings. Inspired by "Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution" by the late Stephen Knight, "From Hell" suggests that Prince Albert "Eddy" Victor had fathered an illegitimate child, and when four Whitechapel prostitutes attempted to exploit this information, they were executed (the fifth victim was allegedly a case of mistaken identity). Complicit parties include Scotland Yard, the Freemasons and Victoria herself, while such London notables as Oscar Wilde and James "Elephant Man" Merrick make cameo appearances.

(...) Moore's larger point is that the Ripper murders were the fullest expression of 19th century injustices and hypocrisies (...) Moore and Campbell refuse to avert their eyes to even the most brutal or despairing content. Not only do we see the victims plying their trade in the least glamorous ways possible -- hurried couplings against filthy alley walls for a handful of pence -- but the murders are captured with ghastly precision. The book reaches its zenith (or nadir) in Chapter 10 with the last and grisliest of the killings, shown in such detail that it's all you can do to keep your eyes on the page. Still, the graphic novelists aren't in it for splatterpunk shock value. "From Hell" asserts that the Ripper killings provided a catalyst for the 20th century, both figuratively -- the murders and their coverage anticipated tabloid journalism and the modern fascination with serial killers -- and literally. As Gull goes about his dreadful business, he experiences increasingly vivid visions of London in the 1990s.

"From Hell" is as heavily researched as any scholarly work. Although the appendix is superfluous in the human body, here it's as crucial as the heart. Almost every page features end-notes in which Moore not only cites his historical sources but muses on everything from London's "dionysiac" architecture to streetwalking lingo like "thrupenny upright." (...)

To read "From Hell" is to temporarily become a Ripperologist yourself, jazzed by the case's facts, myths and weird coincidences. As you go, you realize that the hero isn't Abberline pursuing his investigation but Moore conducting his own. In "Appendix II: Dance of the Gull Catchers," Moore and Campbell use the comic form to recount, with tongue often in cheek, the strange history of Ripper theorizing. Ripperologists are shown as a mob of manic men with butterfly nets, and Moore himself eventually joins their ranks.

Curt Holman

link

To read this you can simply unzip the file and read it as a PDF document.
Alternatively, you can use a CBR reader. Find it here (windows) or here (mac).

Check comments for more Moore related material

Karlheinz Stockhausen - in memoriam: 22.08.1928 - 05.12.2007

"Mikrophonie I/II" (1964/65)

Mikrophonie I: 26'35''
[for tamtam, 2 microphones, 2 filters and controllers]

Mikrophonie II: 14'28''
[for choir, Hammond organ, and four ring modulators]


about Mikrophonie:

"Mikrophonie is the title given by Karlheinz Stockhausen to two of his compositions, written in 1964 and 1965, in which “normally inaudible vibrations . . . are made audible by an active process of sound detection (comparable to the auscultation of a body by a physician); the microphone is used actively as a musical instrument, in contrast to its former passive function of reproducing sounds as faithfully as possible.”

link@320

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We at Bravo Juju profoundly dread the lost of one of the most brilliant electronic music composers of the 20th century.
As our personal homage to his great genius and work we post this wonderful work "Mikrophonie I/II" and the official press release of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, about the passing of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Stockhausen will continue to influence generations of musicians to come, and remains alive within his extraordinary musical cosmos!!

_________________________________________________________

"Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer, who have performed many of his works and, together with him, have taken care of the scores, compact discs, books, films, flowers, shrubs, and trees will continue to disseminate his work throughout the world, as prescribed in the statutes of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, of which they are executive board members. Stockhausen always said that GOD gave birth to him and calls him home.
**** For Love is stronger than death. IN FRIENDSHIP and gratitude for everything that he has given to us personally and to humanity through his love and his music, we bid FAREWELL to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lived to bring celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings, so that Man may listen to GOD and GOD may hear His children.

On December 5th he ascended with JOY through HEAVEN'S DOOR, in order to continue to compose in PARADISE with COSMIC PULSES in eternal HARMONY, as he had always hoped to do: You, who summon me to Heaven, Eva, Mikael and Maria, let me eternally compose music for Heaven's Father-Mother, GOD creator of Cosmic Music. May Saint Michael, together with Heaven's musicians in ANGEL PROCESSIONS and INVISIBLE CHOIRS welcome him with a fitting musical GREETING. On behalf of him and following his example, we will endeavor to continue to protect the music."

by: Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer; in the name of the world-wide family of musicians who love him, together with everyone who loves his music.