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Preoccupied by the Dramatics of Experience:
Work Notes
“….willing to sacrifice all satisfaction
and vanity for its sake……what is it? Difficult
to say simply ….a book, architecturally sound and premeditated,
and not a collection of casual inspirations however wonderful
that might be…So there, dear friend, is the bare confession
of this vice which I’ve rejected a thousand times….but
it holds me in its sway and I may yet be able to succeed, not
in the completion of this work as a whole (one would have to
be God-knows-what for that!) but in showing a successful fragment….proving
through finished portions that this book does exist, and that
I was aware of what I wasn’t able to accomplish.”
Stephane Mallarme, letter to Paul Verlaine, November 16, 1869
Music creates….equivalencies….enhanced
equivalencies of experience….(RT and Barzun)
On Japanese Haiku.
(I have been sadly unable to locate the source of the
following pertinences.)
- “Shibui”
- Beauty reaching great subtlety.
- Restrained Elegance: consisting of
- Melancholy: the suggestion of impermanence.
- Serenity: Deep reserve and simplicity.
“….Moved and preoccupied by the
dramatics of experience….” (Ronnyt)
Axiomatic systems presuppose a deductive method;
they depend on that method but it is not found within it.
(The following: source unknown: Images from p. 24 from the
introduction of a book on Impressionism, possibly the one on
Impressionism in the music of various countries.)
Nature
Mists
Sunlight
Snow
Autumn leaves
Winter solitudes
Spring awakening
The fullness of summer
Raindrops
Rivers
Streams
The sea
Sunrise
Sunset
Night
Distance
The confused hubbub of far-away revelry
The murmurs of distant voices
Tolling bells
Clarion calls from ‘leagues beyond the sunset-bars, their
echoes and reverberation’
Dreams
Long forgotten memories rising to the surface
Visions
Fantasies
Mythological stirrings
Semi-somnolence
Postulates from which (consequentially) things flow.
Magister Ludi of Herman Hesse. The Shaman world of Carlos Castenada.
The Brave New World of Controller Mustafa Mond. Perhaps we should
say, “one set of postulates at a time” or perhaps
“parallel postulates? Multi dimensional layers of postulates?
Parallel and juxtaposed postulates? ( Magic Realism as a model
of reality?)
Leos Janacek’s advice to a composer.
“Cultivate the field that has been given to you”.
THREE CONTEXTS OF MAKING A PIECE
1) the context of the work at hand
2) the context of the composer
3) the context of the composer’s moment in history
I am not looking for a ”unified theory of all things”
whether musical, artistic, philosophical, theological, or otherwise….
A STRATEGY
- find something (“something that can be written down”
can be used as a determining feature for “what is found”….)
- ….write it down
- find something to follow it (something that does not spoil
what’s already there)
- write that down
At this point the piece has a form. It is something. From
now on, the choices may be determined (if need be) by the
options offered by the observable features of this form that
has come to pass in the 1-4 process.
“A fascination with things distant is
a marked characteristic of the impressionist period. The distant
is always more beautiful: in the urban landscapes of Monet or
Whistler, the industrial suburbs seem transformed into unreal
palaces, set against the setting sun or the night sky. Associating
the dream with a certain preference for the blurred and indefinite,
impressionist sensibility has a predisposition to give way to
this attraction of the distant.
Diffused silhouettes blurred on the horizon ... faint and
distant sounds
carried by the wind ... the fetes of Debussy are distant ...
the sound of bells reaches us muted by the thickness and murmur
of leaves ... nuance and subtle shading ... appetite for half-colors,
Voices, reflections weakened by distance, refracted in the
surrounding air.”
A rearrangement of remarks by Michael Fleury
(Translated by Keith Anderson) found in Liner notes to Charles
Koechlin’s Jean-Christophe
The Busoni Legacy: The best lasting antidote for the whole
of the reactionary old modern musicians, e.g. Bartok-Schoenberg-early
Stravinsky. Hence, WOLPE as the only alternative to these
old reactionaries (not to be meant in any political sense
but in the sense of their position as reacting to romanticism
and post romanticism in music)
Lourie, Stravinsky (in his repentant conversation with Busoni),
Wolpe, Sibelius, Britten, Varese…
The art work as a window to the meta-physical
(spiritual), not the only such window, but the one suited to
me. I stared captivated through it…..The window of art,
What I saw there trained my sensibilities to read life as if
it were literature, to look for the literary renderings in and
of the events…Fragments contains references to Looking
Into the Mirror of Literature, this should be changed to Window….
From Peter Eben “Fifty Years of Plus and minus”
1996 “I start with one tone and ask myself, what
can I do with this?”
The Multiple or Juxtaposed Moods of Rachmaninov’s
Third; the allegro and adagio found in the same passage,
another quality I would like to introduce into my music before
I am finished with composition. This Elliot Carter-like effect
(supposedly modernistic) is mentioned nowhere to my knowledge
in the Rachmaninov literature.
An essential quality of my '70s music is missing
from characteristic works of the '90s, the contrapuntal tensions
properly associated with good harmony. This effect is worked
to good effect in the Tryptch Ballade-Violin, Cello, Piano Trio-Impromptu
of 1974-1976 but missing from the Elegy the Epitathalamion,
Music for Bar Sax, Vn Piano, etc. I should like to explore this
aspect again, if I write again…
The library like a used bookstore is a place to wander
and learn. The used bookstore is also a mind, a person,
a set of propositions, as the books leave and come in they are
like the propositions in a person also leaving and coming in….
Similarly, the design of a Japanese garden. Surprises in events,
space, turning a corner, Takemitsu using this model as a design
for his through-composed pieces…. The used bookstore is
also a metaphor for the Bible. The Bible is a collection of
books, so is the bookstore. (Although the bible is fixed). If
the bookstore is also a model of the mind as well as it is of
the Bible, then could a Bible be a model of mind, and mind a
model of God (?). From Frye comes the word “Bricolage”
as used by Levi-Strauss: the putting together of bits and pieces…isn’t
the Bible, the Mind, the person, the used bookstore ----the
putting together/ coexistence/adjacency of bits and pieces,
more or less fixed?
- Borges’ pantheism. A metaphor for “God’s
mind, in from and by which all things exist?
- “Pascal’s Sphere”: as a musical work and
an essay. What is the musical equivalent?
- The metaphor of metaphor
- Frye simulates Borges theme of the unity of the books transcending
identity of the authors.
- From Quevedo….”Metaphor is the momentary contact
of two images not the methodical likening of two things.”
P.39 of Other Inquisitions
- From the program notes for the Wolpe String Quartet: noted
by Bill Karlins as exactly portraying the primary lesson he
(Bill) had learned from his studies with Stefan.
- “The saturated balance of twelve tones is partly
very mechanistic and neutral in quality….no amount
of transposition, permutation, and the various modes of
projection and exposure of an all twelve-tone set, no
amount of dislocation or multiplication of sets in motion
can relieve the ear from hyperstrophic abundance of a
pitch-tonality that, in this exclusive form, must stagnate.”
(Wolpe)
and:
- So Wolpe worked with row segments, or even with rows
greater than twelve in length that contain repeated notes.
He used these incomplete or over-complete note arrays
rather analogously to the way a composer of tonal music
uses complex chords to create anticipatory tension during
the building up of a tonal cadence. Thus, he said, ‘Every
pitch constellation smaller than the all-chromatic is
either a delay in completing the whole or is an autonomous
fragment outside of the whole.’” From the
notes….
2/20/02 from____________
WOW. That is all I can say from that musical adventure! I am
left speechless after witnessing that unbelievable concert....You
certainly have found it. I mean it was like listening to Shoenberg,
Stravinsky, Debussy, Miles and Herbie (and maybe some keith...haha)
all wrapped into a delightful package...you could almost taste
the intensity! Well, I had one of those experiences that WILL
change me forever tonight and I just wanted to thank you for
that and I am again so lucky to have a such a great mentor and
friend like yourself! Talk to ya soon,
Jason
PS I might have to steal some of those charts....haha
2/21/02 response from me
I seem to be getting close to what I immediately wanted to achieve
as a jazz musician when I first encountered it in1965. The nature
of what I wanted (that synthesis you mentioned, Stravinsky,
Herbie, etc.) couldn't possible happen in just a few years apparently.
It's taken me 37 years to get this close. One of the reasons
I am getting closer to this "dream" from so long ago
may very well be that I have had the blessing of obscurity.
Fame and recognition can be a terrible distraction for goals
like mine. Worse yet it can destroy some, like Jackson Pollock
for example who was constitutionally incapable of handling it.
Oh well, that's just my story. All the achievers in this high
art thing have their own stories to tell! My story (the details
of my particular history) is not meant to be a pattern to follow.
Perhaps some of the principles of artistic growth can be applied
by younger artists like yourself. That's what I try to present
in my teaching. The principles of growth supported by examples
from my own progress. The difference is important to note as
a student. You want to follow up on the principles, not imitate
the surface stuff. Here I go lecturing and pontificating again!
Forgive me.
I'm glad you were there, plus you got to meet my lovely Mary
Ann. Ain't she a winner?
Looking forward to some more good food times!!!
Ron
Morton Feldman on Jackson Pollock “…..and
oh how we watched you, El Matador, waiting for the slaughter
or the glory….”
- Reviving Musical Art: A-Historicism, Pantonality,
Analogical provocations.
The Basic Principles:
- The Berlioz Doctrine: Music as a ‘free art’---
a-historicism of Berlioz :the antidote to (of course) historicism.
- Rudolph Reti:The theoretical foundation of 20th century
post-tonal music
- Analogical provocations: Northrop Frye, Borges, Flaubert,
Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp….[wide reading]
- Harmony-Melody [vertical-horizontal] Matrix—the new
classicism—Bach and Busoni
- “Jazz”: as a subcategory of 20th century classical
music [just as “Stravinsky”is].
In 1980 I dreamt of a revival of music in our time and proposed
(to the College Music Society) a Paper (what a joke) on a
solution: restoration through reconciling the Stravinsky-Schoenberg
polar-opposite axis. (Of course the paper was rejected)!
- Some ten years and a lifetime later, A-historicism came
to replace reconciliation as the operative strategy and the
restoration began through a manner of instruction that began
in the early '90s….
Now for an obscurity of a different order.
From____, a current student having just read Fragments:
Glad you enjoyed it. I'm already starting to build on those
ideas in some new directions. Hopefully the essay will be provocative
since my aim is really to encourage original thinking in others.
We can certainly pick apart some of the items in there if you
are interested.
More later,
Ron
Excellent time for you to get away. We'll
be away ourselves in Virginia next week from Sunday to Wednesday
(the glorious Chincoteague Comfort Suites).
A-politicizing the experimental-music tradition is one of my
modest accomplishments. I think it is a useful concept. We did
a good job of covering it today, and the Miles Davis and Hector
Berlioz quotes from Fragments puts it very precisely.
The Impromptu (1976) which I played on the concert last week
belongs to a whole series of works written between 1972 and
1979, clearly a hearty response to my happiness at being FREE
from the Political-Historical-Avant-Garde into whose camp I
had by default landed due to my longstanding interest in what
I now see as simply the experimental tradition. From this point
of view the Impromptu is an extremely radical piece!
Always a pleasure to see you and work with you!
RT
That which makes drama “drama”,
I have made my music by musical elements be. Through what ?
Maybe, the convergence of harmonic melodic and rhythmic elements
creating a rich plurality of associative inference? The large
rhetorical gestures of e.g. _____’s Concerto leaves me
at every moment questioning “Why? Why this now? Why this
next?”. There is no reason for anything to happen in his
language because the music itself imitates the surface of the
“language” of the early moderns of the 20th century…..The
key to my modest accomplishment is that this drama-intention
in my music necessitated the adoption of the time-scale of Webern,
Varese, and late Stravinsky (and the early '60s Carter). What
Time Scale? The rhetoric of the miniature is what I have built
upon. I am not merely writing minatures. I am interested in
the shift of compositional rhetoric that occurred in this new
time scale of Webern etc.….not just its “smallness”
or brevity. (Schoenberg implied what I am struggling to suggest
with his oft quoted comment on Webern’s Six Bagatelles
for String Quartet, ”A Novel in a single sigh”).
The hyper beautiful musical event. Mallarme’s
ideals. A magical theatre of the mind in music. All
sensibility, no events, the effects of drama without the events….The
Debussy trail goes back to him again and again….magic-dream-theatre
of mind-effects-sensibility-mood-tone….Dream Music. And
of course Borges…. the perfect expression of this…..
My musical contribution is a modest one; to
expand on some possibilities deriving from Stravinsky’s
musical inventions. Just as Debussy (with whom I am not comparing
myself) on a larger and more influential scale did with Wagner.
As Robin Holloway argued, Debussy developed what could be done
after Wagner’s TIME not after Wagner’s MANNER. So
I have tried to do from Stravinsky. He is the key to the way
I do things.
The music of hard-working fellow composer David Thomas
has been casting a shadow over my own since 1997. It has been
a benevolent shadow first of all because Dave and I eat doughnuts
and drink strong coffee together to discuss musical and other
matters , and secondly, I always welcome the influence of excellence,
or, to borrow a biographers phrase about Rembrandt, I have always
been moved by the greatness of others. (We influence each other).
David is hungry for…let’s see, what did I call it
yesterday?…oh yes….a differentiated aesthetic. And,
to make it harder, he demands for his work both novelty and
perfection. A handful of such musicians have been drawn to me
in the past because I happily endure the same obsession and
so I understand. This path can be a nasty business because,
as like-minded artist Balanchine has noted: “.....music
also brings suffering and a sense of your own insignificance.
It’s not always comfortable to be one on one with it....”
Originality is illusory. If we have it, it is doubtful that
we would know it. And if others trumpeted it up for us on our
behalf, it is doubtful that we would believe it.
Few artisans take up such a particularly acute form of self-torment
for their daily work; Dave is one, and a solid majority of his
works show outstanding progress towards the kind of art we want
to make. It is understood that he won’t believe it….
as it should be, of course….
Flaubert’s art, from a letter
The most beautiful works are serene in aspect, unfathomable.
The means by which they act on us are various: they are
Motionless as cliffs,
Stormy as the ocean,
Leafy,
Green and murmurous as forests,
Forlorn as the desert,
Blue as the sky.
Rabelais, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare and Goethe seem to me pitiless.
They are bottomless, infinite, manifold.
Through small apertures we glimpse
Abysses whose somber depths turn us faint.
And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
It is like the brilliance of light,
The smile of the sun;
And it is calm, calm and strong.
Flaubert
I wanted to proceed with my studies unwatched
by any but chosen tutors and peers therefore I created a work-study
music master apprenticeship program that lasted forty years….There
are only five primary influences on my work 1) Buddy, my father,
Helen my mother, and Glenn, my brother 2) Marthe Motchane 3)
the Manhattan School of Music 4) Bill Karlins and 5) Jazz. Naturally
these five items can be expanded to a chapter each in a small
volume….
Wolpe talked once about an art that was all content and no
style. This derives, I think, from the Bauhaus and DeStijl movements
which were anti-ornamental, anti symbolic, anti-romantic, 'functional'.
Perhaps its best from our vantage point (and for our purposes)
to see the two (style no content and content no style) as essentially
the same. Wolpe was strongly influenced by his time at the Bauhaus
where he was actually a student. He drew much of his descriptive
language about music from this visual/architectural movement.
I think what Flaubert meant might also be understood by looking
again at the relationship between Poe and Baudelaire. Baudelaire
noted and passed on the following: Poe established that the
goal of poetry is identical to its own principle. That it has
within it nothing but itself. The artist (according to Mallarme
who learned to read and teach English in order to read Poe!)
knows that there is something superior to sentiment. It is the
expression of it. Also, according to symbolist theory, the artist
needs to give unity to multiplicity. The barrage of sentiment
and experience from which the artist searches for and perceives
beauty represents 'multiplicity'. The agent of the artist’s
craft distills this barrage into a 'unity' (the art work). What
gives unity to multiplicity? The expression (craft) of the impression
(the sentiments, etc.) This expression consists in the Symbols
appropriate to the artist’s vision. Maybe I'm wrong but
our art is still propelled by this essential feature of Modernism.
However. We are able to distance ourselves from the Religion
of Art that this elevation of expression leads to. In that case
(once again) it can be shown that our whole aesthetic is in
fact purely technical.
SYMBOLISM
The everyday impression, sentiment, experience ----
Beauty ---- craftsmanship of symbols ---- the transcendant version
of The everyday impression ---- (M. Abrams is the best at showing
this) etc.
Analyzing Chopin e.g. will show something
of what I have discovered that I use in my composing and my
improvising and my teaching…..
Mediating among steps between extremes (KS)
can be applied to the range of tonal harmonic complexities (as
in the first movement of Hindemiths 3rd String 4tet).
Art should be terrible, disruptive, alarming,
like a lightning flash….what does it illuminate? The ordinary,
the real, the true….and yet somehow, the hoped-for….
“Art is what helps us live, with it
existence would be undendurable…..it has remained the
comfort of sensitive persons unwilling or ill equipped to wage
the battle of life.” Ibid.P 620 Art for Life’s sake.
What drew me to music was always and immediately
the literary properties I discerned in it….the musical
works I loved were enhanced -equivalent –experience (see
Barzun), the expression of the impression achieved through art
which I valued as highly as I did the reality that was its base….Once
upon a time a young boy took up the task of attaining an art
that achieved an intense enhancement of life’s experiences….for
this purpose he established a private “Institiution”,
a think-tank, a work study program of his own to achieve his
goal….I wanted to be a musician the way Debussy and Stravinsky
were and a jazz musician the way Miles Davis and Bill Evans
were….that type….I achieved a partial success at
both, more of the former than the ….The misfit between
my musical art and the music world/business (high art and low)derives
from my inability to understand music as other than a form of
drama. Even discerning and sophisticated listeners among my
supporters and colleagues often stumble at certain points in
my work where the dramatic emphasis predominates over more strictly
musical logic….
Once upon a time, the Dean of a prestigious
college of music at a large urban university called for advice
from the general community of jazz musicians in preparation
for the introduction of a jazz-curriculum into the music-offerings
of the institution. To be continued…….
Music structures, arranges and orchestrates EVENTS
that represent ways of being and ways of happening….
The Ghosts in the Weed Garden are the forgotten,
once discarded and now recusitated influences of the past…..The
Weed Garden: my own (no longer) overlooked, hidden away, musical
culture…..
Species Counterpoint and Traditional Harmony
= Right note Wrong Note, Good note Better note (MSM and Bill
Karlins)…….
Tone Rows (Bill Karlins = the Wolpe, Shapey
gestural version not the Babbitt combinatorial-mathematical
one) = A good Tonal use of chromaticism!
Jazz = All tonal materials return, and the
composing mind becomes very quick.
Compositions during the post-Jazz '70s = idiomatic
revivals and restorations, settling scores….with myself….
The '90s = Synthesis and Teaching System
Condensed version: THE FIVE SCHOOLS [Bud-Helen-Glenn,
Marthe Motchane-Manhattan School of Music-Bill Karlins-Jazz]
a poetic architecture of concentrated meaning
(in art feeling is meaning [Henry James], beauty is a physical
sensation [Jorges Borges])
I am astonished to note how long I failed
to notice that my actual musical work was anecdotal, a subterfuge
clearly designed as a cover for my true purpose: capricious
quasi-aimless ecstatic reading and listening (music)….a
cerebral insomniac….a miscellaniac-encyclopedic….
….fashioning music deliberately from
out of continuous immersion in musical experience and literary
materials…. to so possess the effect working in the music
that personality disappears completely from the scene….(never
far from Mallarme….) a music that thinks, music that is
itself a mind-thinking-music, the composite entirety of music
history and its contents as its grounding, the result of long
struggles with self imposed obstacles….roaming freely
from room to room in the mansion of music….
Good musical (or any art moving in time like,
e.g. cinema) Form, then, is always the result of the interplay
of Continuity and Digression.
8/26/03
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