summer simmer

Various functions related to the new job keep cropping up. When I'm not working or reading the summer reading list, I'm honestly putting time toward a few music-related projects--one a documentary that my friend is working on while I type this---the other a little less cohesive for the moment.

I love playing bass and I go to a weird place when I move from that and write music. Composing is not a natural activity for me and I'm generally goaded into it by some attainable project at hand.

That's it on the update for now--poems, summer reading and work, and bits of music.

Found Poem IV

(after Milton Babbit: Words about Music, p. 72)

The notion of a young composer
trying at any moment of his piece
to use any significant segment
both to recall and to predict,
to be retrospective and predictive,
to tell you where you’ve been
as well as where you’re going to be,
is, of course, to many composers,

crucial. And either you run the risk
of being too retrospective (which
means too obvious), or you run
the other risk of being too predictive
(and therefore being opaque or perhaps
losing a reasonable listener), I have to say
reasonable listener although you know
what kind of cop-out that has to be.

Stravinsky used the term the hypothetical other;
of course, the hypothetical other is Stravinsky.

Found Poem III

(after “Harry Potter’s Garden,” National Geographic, August 2007, p. 31)


( Y E W )

Voldemort’s wand

is crafted from

this evergreen,

a symbol of

D E A T H

in Renaissance literature

and a cancer fighter

in the medical world.

The drug

T A X O L

prescribed to treat

breastlungovariancancer,

was first synthesized

from a compound

in the tree’s

barkandneedles.

Found Poem II

(after Milton Babbit, Words About Music p. 122-3)

I’m given to making jokes,

but my gratitude to what has gone on in music theory is profound.
I was asked to write in a magazine called High Fidelity

(why do I ever do it?)

about the future of music. They asked, on their anniversary,
that various people suggest what was going to happen to music
in the next thousand years. I was the only composer asked
because I’m supposed to know about the future.

(I have a Ouija board!)

No, they asked me because
they thought I was going to talk about technology.

I refused to talk about technology.

I said whatever the new technology was, it wasn’t going to be
in the hands of the people anyhow; if we wouldn’t have access to it,
why talk about it? But I talked about the fact that what I most regretted
was that the people who demonstrated that they were concerned
to look at a piece of music and say intelligible things about it, from which

(if one wished to)

one could at least devolve reasonable and defensible evaluatives,
were never consulted. Instead you would still have the ubiquitous journalism
and still have the irresponsibles

(often performers)

determining what could be performed.
Asking a performer what should be performed is like
asking a printer what book should be published.

This is a serious question,

and I think that the trouble with music theorists at the moment
is they haven’t asserted their authority, which is also true
in so many other fields.

I mean that very seriously.

Found Poem

(after Milton Babbit in Words About Music, p. 181)

The other thing
that you must realize
is that out there
we’re Americans.

We’re American composers.

Now if the best thing
a composer can be
is dead, the next best
thing he can be is German.

The worst thing,
one of the worst things
he can possibly be, still,
is American.

5 or 6: Frank Sinatra : "Something Stupid"

A more likely Sinatra choice for perfect pop tune, though pure Nancy,would be "These Boots Are Made for Walkin.'" "Something Stupid" has one of my favorite melodies--at least that's why I assume it gets stuck in my head all the time. Also, if you don't play a wind instrument, you could do a lot worse than learn to play melodies how Sinatra sang them. Of course, horn players could go learn circular breathing and defeat the whole purpose of guitarists thinking they need to learn how to "breathe."

Don't know where I'm going with this one.

Lee Hazlewood, who wrote "These Boots...", also wrote some songs for Duane Eddy and Frank Sinatra. He died about a year ago, but made some very interesting albums of his own and was in amazingly great spirits during some of his last interviews before succumbing to cancer.

Try a little tenderness

If you get the chance to see Bill Frisell in any group, you should. His trio played here last night. Frisell plays masterfully and beautifully. The group was one of those "telepathic" units equally playing together and contrasting each other when necessary. A review I read of Frisell said something like he is a rare person nowadays in that he is willing to approach music with tenderness and he unashamedly does. A great night of music.

Highlights:

Frisell playing "Baba Drame" by Malian guitarist Boubacar Traore.

For an encore, they played two Hank, Sr. classics for the Alabama crowd: "Lovesick Blues" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."