All I Know³
Information, transmission, modulation, and noise - 3rd Edition

This week’s MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS transmission features selections from a new release on Bridge Records of music by Tania León.

Click on the “Listen Again” link on the MFOM website.

Friends of Luc Ferrari now have an official website: www.lucferrari.org.

“The Association PRESQUE RIEN assembles the friends of the late French composer, Luc Ferrari, to make his music better known and performed, and to diffuse his writings, his films, his music theater and radio art.

The general task of PRESQUE RIEN is to encourage music creation as well by coordinating individual actions by its members.”

You can join PRESQUE RIEN at the new LucFerrari.org website.

This week you can hear the music of Dutch composer Peter Adriaansz on the current Music from Other Minds program stream, at http://rchrd.com/mfom/mfom.m3u

Yikes! I’ve been busy.

Many projects running simultaneously.  So both this and the photo blog have suffered neglect.

Things should get better next week.

In the meantime, did you catch Oresteïa by Xenakis on the latest Music from Other Minds? You can still hear it for a week. Just click on the “Listen Again” link on the MFOM website.

I note that there will be a performance of Stockhausen’s STIMMUNG in Santa Monica on Saturday (April 12th).

Details here.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Olivier Messiaen’s birth, December 1908. So maybe it’s more like the anniversary of his conception as well.

Son of an English teacher father who translated Shakespeare, and a symbolist poet mother, Messiaen, who died in 1992, is still perhaps the most unique and exotic of 20th century composers.

There is an excellent one-page appreciation of Messiaen’s music and role in 20c music in today’s New York Times by Anthony Tommasini.

And, it looks like there will be many concerts honoring Messiaen in New York City and Europe this year. Here is a partial list of events.

So, I wonder what San Francisco events are being planned. I haven’t heard of any. Many years ago MTT and the SF Symphony did perform the massive Turangalila Symphony (it was spectacular!). And just as many years ago the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano did a preview of sections from his opera, St Francis, with the SF Opera staging a complete performance just a couple of years ago (it was also spectacular!).

We can only hope to hear more Messiaen locally.

One of Messiaen’s great interests was bird song. Many of his pieces feature his own transcriptions and interpretations of the songs of birds, from the ordinary to the exotic.

The next MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS broadcast on KALW will feature two bird-song based pieces that are very rarely performed: Réveil des Oiseaux (Bird’s Awakening) for piano and orchestra, and La Fauvette des Jardins (The Garden Warbler) for piano solo.

And, there will be more Messiaen on MFOM/KALW in the coming months. Stay tuned.

You can hear TUNNEL-FUNNEL by Daniel Goode and a new release of The Webster Cycles by Steve Peters on this week’s MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS program, available for streaming all week.  rchrd.com/mfom for details and streaming link.

Cody’s Books in Berkeley has been reborn!!

Having gone thru some really rough times, this independent and venerable Berkeley landmark has relocated to downtown Berkeley. The official reopening, under new management, was this afternoon.

This new spot, on the corner of Allston Way and Shattuck Avenue, is equally historic. Once the site of Edy’s soda fountain, and then an Eddie Bauer store, the upstairs floors were the offices and studios of radio station KPFA for many decades. (A place where I spent some of my own decades.)

A bit smaller than their previous location on Fourth Street (which they had to give up when the landlord significantly raised the rent), this new space on the corner is full of light, clean, and congenial. And, there’s a great spot for author readings and other events in the rear of the store.

This is a difficult time for all independent bookstores, especially stores like Cody’s that feature new books. So we congratulate the staff and new management for the commitment, hard work, and determination to carry the flame forward.

Bookstores are the cultural and intellectual heart of a community. Cody’s has been in Berkeley for more than fifty years. We have a good feeling about the new store. May it live long and prosper.

Recently I was asked to recommend a list of books on new music. So here it is. These are, of course, in addition to Alex Ross’s excellent “The Rest Is Noise“.

Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (Paperback)
by Kyle Gann - University of California Press; 1 edition (February 13, 2006) ISBN-10: 0520229827

Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Paperback)
by Morton Feldman (Author), B. H. Friedman (Editor) - Exact Change (March 2, 2004) ISBN-10: 1878972316

Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Paperback)
by Robert Fink (Author) - University of California Press; 1 edition (September 13, 2005) ISBN-10: 0520245504

Modern Music and After - Directions Since 1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks) (Paperback)
by Paul Griffiths (Author) - Oxford University Press, USA; 2Rev Ed edition (December 3, 2007) ISBN-10: 0198165110

Winter Music: Composing the North (Hardcover)
by John Luther Adams (Author) - Wesleyan; Har/Com edition (January 1, 2004) ISBN-10: 0819567426

The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams (Eastman Studies in Music) (Author)by Steven Schick - University of Rochester Press; Har/Com edition (May 1, 2006) ISBN-10: 1580462146

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Paperback)
by Daniel J. Levitin - Plume; 1 Reprint edition (August 28, 2007) ISBN-10: 0452288525

The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer (Hardcover)
by Thomas May (Author) Amadeus Press (June 19, 2006) ISBN-10: 1574671324

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (Book & CD) (Hardcover)
by Alan Licht (Author) Rizzoli; Har/Com edition (November 6, 2007) ISBN-10: 0847829693

Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (Hardcover)
by Carolyn Brown Knopf (March 20, 2007) ISBN-10: 0394401913

Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987 (New Series) (Paperback) by Chris Villars (Editor) Hyphen Press (May 1, 2006) - ISBN-10: 0907259316

Silence: Lectures and Writings (Paperback)
by John Cage (Author) Wesleyan; 1st edition (June 15, 1961) ISBN-10: 0819560286

Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Paperback)
by Robin Maconie (Author) - The Scarecrow Press, Inc. (April 2005) ISBN-10: 0810853566

Messiaen (Hardcover)
by Peter Hill (Author), Nigel Simeone (Author) Yale University Press (October 11, 2005) ISBN-10: 0300109075

Certainly not a complete list, but you should be able to find most of these books still in print or reprint. I’m going to compile a secondary list soon.

Gerhard Samuel, conductor of the Oakland Symphony from 1959 to 1971, passed away in Seattle on March 25. He was 83.

He will be remembered as being the one of the most adventurous conductors the Bay Area has ever had. Those were the golden years of the Oakland Symphony.

There are memorials by Charles Shere, and Joshua Kosman.

Tonight’s broadcast on PBS FRONTLINE of part one of “Bush’s War” is an epic tragedy on the scale of a le Carré thriller, or maybe Shakespeare. Unfortunately it’s not fiction, and it’s about a sitting president.

The whole four hour program is viewable on line and it’s not a pretty picture.

Much of the material was gathered from previous FRONTLINE programs about the run up to the Iraq War. The broadcast is timely as we start the 6th year of this unneeded war with now 4000 soldiers and untold Iraqi citizens murdered.

Hopefully, all this will serve as evidence in the eventual war crimes trials that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld , and Wolfowitz should face.

 Morton Subotnick  -  Spring (from Until Spring, 1975; signed 2008).  Pencil and blue, red and green crayon on vellum, 17” x 14”.  -  $500

This score and others from composers featured at Other Minds 13 are now on sale on the Other Minds website. This web sale is a benefit for Other Minds.

Some new programs and many more at radiOM.org.

+ A Visit with John Zorn (1987)

John Zorn and Larry Ochs join Charles Amirkhanian to discuss and play a selection of Zorn’s compositions. Among the pieces heard is an excerpt from “Spillane” in which Zorn tries to capture some of the film noir sensibility that imbues the Mickey Spillane novels, based in Zorn’s hometown New York City. This is followed by excerpts from Zorn’s collaborative improvisational work “Cobra” for which he created a number of general rules which are then used by a group of talented musicians to create a kaleidoscope of sound events. Also included in this program is a portion of “Hu-Die,” a piece named for and inspired by the great Cantonese actress from the 1930s, and a recording of tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain.

+ Ode to Gravity Desert Equations: The Music of Richard Horowitz and Sussan Deyhim (1987)

Composer Richard Horowitz and Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim combined the sounds of new wave electronica, percussion, and Middle Eastern modal music in their 1987 album, “Desert Equation: Azax Attra.” Charles Amirkhanian plays selections from the album and interviews Horowitz about how he and Deyhim constructed these enchanting blends of modern technology and ancient sounds. The music is scored for voice, nay flute, percussion, and electronic keyboards and has been described by some as an “electronic oasis”; give it a listen to see why. (from the KPFA Folio)

+ A Concert by the New Music Ensemble (1972)

A concert mixing classical piano works and new music for instrumental ensemble, sponsored by the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble, and given on March 10, 1972, at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. The concert features works by Robert Erickson, Richard Felciano, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Loren Rush, all performed by the Ensemble. Also included are piano works by Robert Schumann, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Franz Liszt, and Frederic Chopin, performed by Robert Helps.

+ Interview with Terry Riley (1983)

Charles Amirkhanian interviews composer Terry Riley at his home in Northern California on June 11, 1983. Riley describes his early childhood experiences with music, his life as a student in San Francisco, and his first experimentation with serial and then minimal composition. He goes into great detail about the processes that led to his seminal work “In C.” Riley also describes his early collaborations with other composers, and his later tendency to work alone. Both Amirkhanian and Riley lament the fact that growing up in rural California there was little chance to be exposed to classical music. Riley also discusses his exploration of musical traditions from around the world including Asian and Indian music, his affinity for Eastern spiritual philosophies, and the influence of Pandit Pran Nath.

Listen free at radiom.org

Took two days of hacking with WordPress, but all three blogs are now running in their new editions:

Had to learn a bit about mySQL, PHP, CSS, and more. I also came across some limitations, but we can live with them for now. Still some tinkering needed. I’ll link the oldest entries “previous” link to the last entry of the previous edition. That should make the transition seamless.   Lets just see how it goes.

Friday night’s MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS program will feature, among other things, the world radio premiere (as far as I’m aware) of John Cage’s 28-minute work for wind instruments, Twenty-Eight, from 1991.

I will admit, right here, I’m not a great fan of Cage’s late “numbered pieces”. I always have the feeling that they were intended to be played but not heard. (There - I said it.)

In these pieces, Cage gives sometimes vague instructions to the performers about what they can play between specific time markers (”time brackets”). A performance is directed by a video clock that is visible to all. The score indicates the times when to play and when to stop, and how to play. The performer chooses what to play in those time brackets depending on the instructions Cage gives in the score.

These pieces are all about process. What does it take to create a piece of music in real time? This can be really interesting for the performer. But from the point of view of the listener, I could be outside the concert hall listening to birds and find that more interesting. And yet, some of the pieces that I’ve heard are quite engaging, even tho that might not be due to the composer’s intentions.

Still, the fact that these pieces do get performed and even recorded is an achievement worth noting. And Glenn Freeman’s OgreOgress Productions has been championing Cage’s late work for years. So we’re really pleased to be able to be the first to broadcast this very new recording on the radio, anywhere.

The program Friday night will also sample another OgreOgress release of music by Alan Hovhaness (could anything be more different?!), with a performance of his Talin (1951) with Christina Fong, viola, and the strings of the Slovak Philharmonic.

And we’ll conclude the program with an improvisation on prepared piano by Kui Dong recorded on a recent Other Minds release.

Music from Other Minds, KALW 91.7 San Francisco Friday 11pm
Broadcast streaming in real time:

LIVE KALW STREAMING (RealAudio)
LIVE KALW STREAMING (Windows Media)

Programs are available for streaming on the Music From Other Minds website, http://rchrd.com/mfom for one week after broadcast

Just back from a brief vigil against the war in Iraq held in tony Piedmont’s city center organized by Move On. Some 50 or so people answered the email call to gather and remember those who have died and our dishonorable leaders who lied.

Piedmont, an East Bay surburb of San Francisco that borders on Berkeley and Oakland, is the Beverly Hills of the North. So it was reassuring to see that many people come together. However, too few young people came. It seemed we all were veterans of too many peace marches, peace vigils, teach-ins, sit-ins, and so on.

Was it four years ago we stood in a similar vigil holding our candles in Berkeley.

Cheney was interviewed on PBS earlier. He was asked to comment on the fact that 2/3 of Americans oppose the war. His response: “So?”. I’m afraid this democracy is lost. I’ve always felt that the governance model the Bush administration admired the most was the Chinese. See it now in action.

So what’s the difference between Movable Type and WordPress?

Well, after playing around with WordPress in an attempt to replace my no-longer-working Movable Type blogging installation, I’ve found out what the biggest design difference between them is.

MT generates static web pages while WP is totally dynamic, generating the pages in your browser as you call for them.

So?

Well, that means that should the database that runs a WP blog get corrupted you will never be able to view any of the pages on the site. But with MT, static web pages are regenerated only when you add a new entry to the blog. And these static pages can be saved even after the database goes south, as has happened with my MT blogs. The pages are all there for viewing. I just can’t add any new items.

Hmmm. What to do? Backing up a WP blog site means backing up the PHP software that generates the pages dynamically, as well as the mySQL database, and the templates and CSS files that define the look/feel of the site theme. But you can’t back up the web pages that WP generates on the fly. (Well, I guess you could do a Save As while viewing every page… not very efficient.) At least, I don’t think there’s a way to generate and save the pages WP generates statically. I need to investigate this further.

This may not be a problem for text blogs like this one. But it has stopped me trying to recreate my photo blog in WP.

So I may go back to MT for the photo blog by reinstalling the latest MT distro and creating a new mySQL database for it to use. I won’t be able to make the old photo blog come alive again because it’s database is hosed, apparently. But at least the static pages are all there still and the site is viewable. (All I’ve Seen). But I can start a “second edition” of the photo blog and link them together.

Stay tuned.

Julie Steinberg, William Winant, and Bryan Wolf gave an incredible performance of Kontakte (1959) at tonight’s San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concert!

The standing ovation from a nearly full house that followed was well justified. It was truly incredible.

I note that Winant has probably been playing this piece since the 70’s, and I believe there is even a recording he made with Jim Tenney in ‘78.

Julie Steinberg’s ferocious performance was startling. They both nailed it. What an experience!

Hard to believe that Kontakte is nearly 50 years old. But it put to shame the other two pieces by much younger composers on the first half of the program. They too mixed electronics with acoustic instruments, but not at all as successfully as Kontakte.

Every stroke, every gesture, every resource is carefully measured and justified in Kontakte, as in all of Stockhausen’s works that I am familiar with. Not so with so many works by much younger composers. The only justification for use of electronics, say, or a particular instrumentation seems to be the familiar “I do it because I can”.

Kudos to SFCMP, at least for the second half of the concert.

Now, would someone in San Francisco put on a performance of his STIMMUNG! The score says “San Francisco, 1967″, so you’d think that eventually the definitive performance would, someday, happen here where it was born.

I’m still waiting for that day.

We’re starting this blog over again, for the third time.

First it was Pivot, then Movable Type. Now it’s WordPress.

Take a look at the list of all we said in the first two editions