A Comforter (text by Charles Thomas Asplund). Performed by FunCoffin @Avant GaRawge.
THE AVANT GARAWGE
THE AVANT GARAWGE
Some thoughts on spaces,
spirits, and sabbaths
By Christian Asplund
Introduction
Recently
a very dear friend and mentor shared with me (I think because he has been so
supportive of (not to mention influential on) my work over the years, and
wanted to assure me that he wasn't aesthetically snubbing me) his reasons for
not attending my Avant GaRawge series.
He shared a moving account of an early decision in his career and life
as an artist and scholar, which made it necessary for him to refrain from participating
(as a performer or listener) in certain Sunday musical events. The Avant GaRawge (AG) is on Sunday
nights. This account, in the
context of my deep regard for this friend as well as my deep (some would say
fanatical) commitment to my religion and more specifically sabbath observance,
has led me to ponder my relationship with this day of the week, and with my
life as an artist/scholar/teacher etc., and more particularly my activities as
a curator of musical/poetic events.
I have very specific reasons for doing these events Sunday nights.
I
miss the evening firesides of my youth (many of which were musical) and the
profound feeling that Sunday night has.
I love the Sunday evening musical services of other religions, such as
Compline. AG is partially to capture
this spirit and to be an aesthetic/musical/spiritual/poetic meditation before
diving into the more workaday week that follows. AG is free and no money is exchanged or involved. I, and the participants (and especially
my wonderful wife), offer their time, talents, and resources freely in an act
of consecration. Most leave
uplifted, positive, renewed, happy, and optimistic about their community. There is something transcendent about
sounds and words that are created and shared for reasons other than money, or
fame, or the building of a career, etc.
When these worldly concerns aren't present, it opens the way for more
profoundly spiritual experience to occur.
Music
Let
me say at the outset that I believe that music is a gift from deity. Every time I make a musical sound, I
believe that I am, among other things:
-praising
God
-expressing
joy in my existence and that of others
-retuning
and improving the world and its inhabitants through vibrations
Spirit
I
have a very deep conviction of the Mormon cosmology, which, as I understand it,
asserts that people are dual beings, with mortal bodies in the image of deity,
each of which is animated by an eternal spirit, which is the source of
consciousness, will, creativity, etc.
Moreover, all organisms are animated by spirits and all of creation has
a spiritual essence, including sound.
Sabbath
In
most religious traditions that I know of, one day a week is set aside for rest
and worship. I believe that a
weekly sabbath is a profound human need, even for people who don't engage in religious
activity or belief. I am a
Christian and a Mormon and among the teachings in my tradition regarding the
sabbath are:
-the
sabbath should be a day in which commerce and gainful employment should be
avoided if possible
-activities
that would require others to do gainful work should be avoided if possible
-spiritual
observances such as prayer and scripture study should occur daily, but there
should be much more of this on the sabbath, including attendance at certain
community religious gatherings
Mormonism
has left most other questions
about the sabbath up to individual and family interpretation. This discretion
is inspired, in part by the teachings and example of Jesus who was impatient
with overly prescriptive sabbath guidelines. I have made a personal choice not to do recording sessions
or play or attend gigs at places that sell things on the sabbath. However, I have always felt good about
attending concerts at churches, universities, homes, and other places that are
non-commercial in nature. In these
contexts, music is a sacred activity to my mind, and thus most appropriate to
the spirit of a sabbath. I also attend art museums on the sabbath for the same
reasons. As another example, I
don't believe in playing or watching sports on the sabbath, but I do hike on
the sabbath because I feel that it is likewise a sacred act to experience
nature. But these are purely
personal decisions, not necessarily reflective of the views of anyone
else. My friends and family are
mostly a bit more relaxed about the sabbath in some ways, and some are a bit
more rigorous. But this reflects
another part of my faith that is important and wonderful. Mormonism has at its root the concept
of personal revelation. I think
issues of this sort are deliberately left open so that each person can have an
experience with the divine, making personal decisions and consulting God in
making those decisions. And
learning from and taking responsibility for the consequences of those
decisions.
Genres
I
went to high school when cassette dubbing became somewhat of a craze. Suddenly it became possible to build up
a library of borrowed music for very little money. I dubbed records from the library, radio broadcasts, and, of
course, records of my friends and even my dad's friends. The eclecticism I engaged in would be nothing
in this day in age, but it was a little unusual then. I had tapes of every possible genre including classical,
jazz, reggae, rock, pop, new wave, Gregorian chant: whatever I could get my
hands on. I aspired to be a
composer and felt that listening to many musics, in addition to being
incredibly enjoyable, was part of my education. I was very concerned about sifting through all of these
musics and finding which were worthwhile and which not. The Book of Mormon has an interesting and powerfully simple formula
for discerning value and truth in just about anything: "the Spirit of
Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to
judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in
Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know
with a perfect knowledge it is of God….
Search diligently in the light of Christ that ye may know good from evil; and if ye will lay
hold upon every good thing, and condemn it not, ye certainly will be a child of Christ."
Using
this formula (and acknowledging its subjectivity and dependence on faith and
inspiration), I discovered that there was music that had this effect, music
that was sincere, that had a spark of the divine in every genre. In fact, whether music was of value to
me had little to do with the genre in which it existed and had more to do with
the individual artist(s) who created it and their intrinsic yet indefinable
qualities. It was also in high
school that I consciously involved myself as a musician in as many genres as
possible. Through the years I have
evolved a hybrid practice that basically disregards boundaries of genre or
medium, but certainly partakes of the harmonic and design elements of
Euro-American classical music, the performance practice of jazz, and the
rhythmic and expressive intensities of various vernacular musics. But it has been a very long time since
I have thought about these distinctions in the act of composition, which
remains an utterly mysterious process, one that would be seriously impaired by
concerns about what box to put something in.
Moreover,
most musics I am aware of have some kind of spiritual origin. This includes, most notably, rock
music, which originated in African-American Christian liturgy, but it also
includes Euro-American classical music, Indian classical music, reggae,
Indonesian gamelan, etc.
Avant
GaRawge
On 29 September 2013 I held my first
musical/poetic fireside in the "Avant GaRawge", essentially my garage
tricked out as a performance space by Aaron McMurray, Logan Hone, and my father
in law, Noel Candland. AG had been
preceded by a series of salons and house concerts that I have curated going
back to 1999. Curating events is
as much a part of my activity as a composer as is writing little dots on a
five-line staff. I'm particular
that performances at AG be avant garde, in other words, original, creative,
pushing boundaries, even oracular, yet competent/professional, even virtuosic;
and that they be "Raw", in other words very new, not overly vetted at
other venues, and possessing a great deal of intensity.
Ostertag/Zorn
When I was
at Mills College I attended a lecture by Bob Ostertag, who discussed, among
other things, his musical collaborations with John Zorn in the 1970s. A couple of things struck me in his
accounts. The first was that he
said that for a couple of years he and Zorn and one or two others
rehearsed/jammed every day for something like 6 hours per day during a period
of about two years. This was also
a period in which they had no conventional gigs or recording sessions. The other thing that stuck with me was
that he said that, in the absence of venues and gigs, Zorn would do concerts of
solo material, which I came to know later as two projects: The Theater of
Musical Optics, and the solo saxophone+other noise makers collected on the
Classic Guide to Strategy CD. Bob
said that Zorn would distribute fliers to these performances but that the
attendance was sketchy. Sometimes
it would only be Zorn and his girlfriend.
This story recalibrated my thinking about music and performance,
success, and even life. It was a
tremendously liberating thought, an approach to art that evinces a huge amount
of faith.
Seattle
Composers Salon
In my last
year in Seattle (1998-99) I taught at Cornish College of the Arts. I had such a wonderful experience there
with some of the most interesting and sincere artists as colleagues and
students. Someone approached me
who had rented a classroom-sized room on capital hill near Cornish, one of the
hippest areas of Seattle at the time.
She wanted to know if I had any ideas for performances that could be
done there. Everything about the
room except its location was sub-optimal.
But I had, at the time, a sort of rule that I would not turn down
creative music gigs. What resulted
was the Seattle Composers Salon.
The concept was a monthly event with elements of a concert, a workshop,
a party, and an open-mike. Invited
composers, including composers who had expressed interest in participating and
had been approved to do so (thus the distinction from an open-mic) would bring
a piece and performers a half hour before the official starting time, and we
would work out an order and I would act as MC. Audience members could ask questions and make comments after
pieces. I think we had some light
refreshments also. It was either
free or by donation. My
curatorship of the Seattle Composers Salon only lasted a few months because I
moved to take a job at Oregon State University. My good friend Tom Baker took over the series and has turned
it into a very exciting and durable part of the Seattle creative music
landscape. The series is still going, now in its 15th year.
Tricube
Salon
I lived and
taught in Oklahoma 2000-2002. Our
house was a modest modernist design consisting of three boxes. As the first house I had owned I wanted
to name it, after the fashion of the British aristocracy. My oldest daughter (10 at the time)
suggested Tricube, and it stuck.
As a composition teacher, I had loved the strategy (originating, I think
with Robert Ashley) at Mills College of fostering, or even requiring, many
concerts of student compositions.
The thinking was that you learned more from doing concerts and talking
about them afterwards than you did from any other activity, so why not do more
of them?
There
is kind of an answer to that question: coordination and bureaucracy. Booking and managing a concert hall can
be very complex. Happily, Mills
College had a very simple system.
There was a big calendar for the two halls students had access to. You would find an open spot on the
calendar, which was above the department secretary’s desk, and basically tell
her you were putting your name down on a particular date for a concert. If she knew of some conflict not
already on the calendar (rare), she would inform you and you’d pick another
date. Then you’d make, write and
rehearse music, make fliers, and play that music for the people that showed up.
Tricube
had few and small bedrooms, but did have an open plan for the
living/dining/kitchen, so I realized that I could most easily put together
concerts for my students, as well as myself and other willing “grownup”
musicians and poets in my own living room with no bureaucratic hassle. Since Tricube, we’ve owned three
houses: always with too few
bedrooms, but large common spaces in which we can host performances. We only realized in retrospect that
this has been the case.
Locust
Salon
On 8 June 2007, I had my first Locust
Salon in the living room of my current house, Exoskeleto, on Locust
Circle. The space is not quite as
ideal as Tricube, but it has the advantage of a grand piano. The Locust Salon has been an
intermittent series that featured myself and other local and touring musicians
and poets, including Eyvind Kang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alex Caldiero, Craig Dworkin,
Lance Larsen, Steve Tuttle, Alex Woods, Michael Hicks, Steve Ricks, Michelle
Kesler, Scott Holden, Jeremy Grimshaw, Steve Call, Jarrad Powell, and many
others. This series owes greatly
to my wife, poet Lara Candland Asplund and her incredible cooking, poetry, and
preparation of our home for guests.
Our
children also pitch in, preparing the house for guests and helping with food
preparation. They love the salons
and always ask when the next one will be.
Our daughter Ingrid who is away at college always requests a salon when
she is home on breaks. This series continues intermittently, but has averaged
about four times a year.
Avant
GaRawge
Over the
summer of 2013, I felt it was time to start a new series, one that would happen
more often than the Salon and one that was a bit more raw, a bit less
formal. I knew that it would be
impractical to do this series in my living room. I was especially inspired by the energy and creativity of a
group of BYU and Snow College music students who would form the core of the
AG. At first AG was weekly, but,
after a month hiatus in November/December, we cut back to biweekly, which seems
to work really well. It is a small
and sometimes chilly space, but we pack it consistently. This is very heartening to me, but not
essential.
My
teacher Stuart Dempster liked to talk about Type A, Type B, and Type C
concerts. Type A means there are
more people on stage than in the audience. Type B means there are equal numbers. Type C means there are more people in
the audience than on stage. This
formula acknowledged that there’s nothing essentially wrong with doing concerts
for small audiences. “For where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
