Latest vid: Think of One:
I have been
experimenting with alternative ways of making music for a few years now. The principal ways of music making that
I grew up with were live performance and recording. When downloading and streaming started to take over and I
moved to a place that had a paucity of venues and audience for live music, I
began searching for a third way.
Thus my “ViolaBlog”,
followed by my “PianoBlog”. These were simply web pages on my
WordPress site that had dated solo improvisations. I was very interested in exploiting the intimacy of the
medium, both of recording and of the personal computer and other devices. Thus I used, in the ViolaBlog, a
phalanx of very close microphones.
In the PianoBlog I placed the mics under the piano, almost touching the
soundboard. In both blogs, I set
the recording levels quite high.
This meant that I could clip very easily, so I kept the playing volume
low, and monitored my playing with headphones. I was thus able to explore the very wide range of dynamic
shadings that exists in lower volumes, but not so much at higher volumes. And this made possible the recording,
on both instruments, of some sounds that I don’t think are otherwise possible
with any medium. The ViolaBlog led
to the CD VIOLA, for which I
used a slightly different approach.
I used the same close miking with several mics, but instead of recording
to digital, I recorded to a high end cassette deck, which eliminated the threat
of clipping, and, instead, introduced the wonderful phenomenon of saturation
and even a bit of analog distortion.
I was able to raise the recording level, and, by careful headphone
monitoring, play with the unique properties of the analog medium. I haven’t done a lot of electronic
music per se, but I consider these projects to be a kind of electronic music.
These projects
occurred at a time when I was “between commissions” as a composer, and when I
had little composition studio time because of complex work and childcare
needs. I was also experiencing
some insomnia. I tried to
incorporate all this into this project.
There were some
problems with this project. I have
very little ability in the areas of web design, etc. These “blogs” are not particularly attractive or
inviting. I came up in a kind of
DIY ethic, where the concept was to get stuff out there. The idea is that there is a mysterious
virtue in simply making things available.
In the punk/new wave era, the main innovation to me was this idea that
you could make music without being part of the formidable rock establishment
that had arisen. You would find:
a) a place to play, b) people to play it, c) music for the people to play, and
d) simple ways to inform people of the existence of this music. That’s where fliers became a big thing
(obviously long before the internet).
You wanted to distribute as many fliers as possible, put them up on as
many telephone poles and bulletin boards as possible. But you didn’t want to try “sell” yourself. It was just to inform. The fliers themselves because a kind of
DIY art form, but again, this was to draw focus away from the fliers being
manipulative or commercial.
You see, there is a
fine line between the concept of DIY and the concept of the “Vanity Project.” I don’t know if I’m ready to dissect
these two concepts. It might take
several posts, but I’ll make a tentative start. Actually, maybe I’ll put some random musings on these
questions for your consideration:
The non-vanity
projects (we need a name for them) are really the anomaly. These are the projects where someone
else pays us a guaranteed amount of money to create or perform something. One can view this situation as a range
of things from a positive collaboration between two or more visionary people to
wage-slavism.
Perhaps we need to
query why it is we want to make and share things. Is it to obtain affirmation that we are talented? Is it to share objects or information
that we feel we have been privileged to obtain or create? I think it is both (and maybe a few
others). In both cases, I believe
we are enacting/demonstrating/tracing/proving an encounter with the Divine,
with spiritual realities, “higher energies”. This is especially important and compelling to the
secular-materialist Euro-American culture that approaches spiritual reality in
a very tentative and clumsy way.
We crave and naturally want to share non-explicit encounters and
accounts of encounters with the Divine.
There is a kind of Victorian cloak of shame surrounding spiritual
experience. I guess I kind of
revel in spiritual pornography, if this be the case. I don’t believe any culture or faith tradition has a
monopoly on spirituality or metaphysics.
But I do believe that we are eternal beings, and that we naturally are
drawn to the traces of what is eternal in this temporal realm. Of course, I privilege music in this
sense, as I believe it has the power to remove us from teleology. But that’s another post.
Anyhoo, the desire to
demonstrate talent, is, in part, a desire to share a miraculous gift from
divinity. The desire to share
created objects is, in part, the desire to share that which has been inspired
or revealed. It is the sharing of
a collaboration between entities from two different realms.
Is it vanity, then to
share created things, where no one has asked let alone paid for them? I think it depends on how one
approaches them.
I say Mindy Kaling on
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other night. He asked her when she slept since she appeared to be so
busy. She pointed out that she,
like Stewart had a show named after her, and life was so awesome because of it
that she barely wanted to sleep for fear of missing something. I was discussing this with Lara who
pointed out that Mindy also produces and writes for the show. Then she noticed that Mad Men, and a
whole bunch of movies and TV shows are produced by their stars. Are these vanity projects? Does getting paid make something not a
vanity project?
Maybe our fear of
vanity (projects) is a manifestation of our fear that our own existence is
itself a vanity project. Maybe we
feel sheepish about taking up space on the planet. One is reminded of the ill-fated OK Soda ad campaign, which
showed a photo of a hipstress with the copy “It’s OK if you think I’m not OK,
but I am.”
I’m working on
answers. I’ll get back to you when
I have them.
In the mean time, I
am starting another musical blog of sorts. The ViolaBlog and PianoBlog suffered from a few
problems. The aforementioned
drabness of their web interface.
Also, I never knew if anyone was listening and didn’t get any feedback
if anyone did. This is where
social media has some real advantages (and many disadvantages), mainly the
ability to see if anyone is listening.
This new blog, or perhaps sub-blog will consist of videos of solo piano
versions of Thelonious Monk compositions, recorded in no particular order. The day before yesterday I did Blue Monk. Today it’s Think of
One, which may have been the tune Thelonious was referring to when, asked
why his compositions were so “complicated” he responded, “Some of my pieces have melodies a nitwit can
understand. Like I've written one number staying on one note. A tone-deaf person could hum it."
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