(My) Field Day - 2
Well, I wasn’t as successful today as yesterday. Field Day started yesterday at 11am, and continued until 2pm today (2100 UTC). Unfortunately for my Field Day activities, it being a Sunday, I didn’t get out of bed until almost 10am. So by the time I packed up the van and made my way up to Sequoia arena in the Oakland hills, it was after noon. And very very hot.
But when I got there they were nearly done packing up. Missed the whole thing (even tho there were almost 2 hours left). But got to talk to some of the people at the Oakland radio club. They had had stations operating in every mode including some digital modes. Should have been there.
Still, it was too hot for me and I headed right over to the much cooler Bay shoreline at »Point Emery (at the foot of Ashby Avenue in Berkeley), and managed to make a few more 20m contacts before the event ended (and while watching some windsurfers in a stiff wind).
All said, AG6RF made 38 contacts over a total of maybe 4 hours. 5 were on 40m, the rest on 20m. That’s not too bad, considering I’m not into contesting. I’m just waiting for the sunspots to return so I can make some long distance (DX) contacts to Europe and Japan. It has been a couple of years now since I made a DX contact. They say we’re at the bottom of the 11-year cycle. So things SHOULD be getting better.
Still, it was a great geeky weekend.
By the way, THIS is what it’s all about
It was produced for last year’s Field Day.
Later I moved down towards the shoreline beach at North Beach, and switched to 40 meters. What surprised me was the number of stations that commented on the strength of my signal .. they were amazed I was running just a (stationary) mobile rig (Icom 706IIg and a hamstick). Just goes to show that when the ionosphere is with you, you can do very well.
This afternoon the renown Arditti Quartet from London performed to a full house at Mills College in Oakland as part of the »
The evening began with Chinary Ung’s SPIRAL XI: Mother and Child, for viola solo, performed by his wife, Susan Ung, who sang, chanted, spoke, and whistled while playing very expressive and dramatic music that at times reminded me of the Chinese Erhu. And except for some tricky harmonics and glissandi up and down the fingerboard, the viola was played “normally”, unlike so many of the pieces heard so far in this series. No bowing across the wood, or rapping the back of the instrument .. and this let the beautiful sound of the viola, the most under-appreciated instrument in the orchestra (my opinion), shine thru. Dark and soulful, the sound of the viola and vocalizations mystified and amazed. A wonderful performance, and a wonderful piece.
Guitarist John Schneider appeared next, along with an array of various guitars arranged at the front of the stage. The mood stayed firmly in the East with Schneider playing his Listening to Lu Tzu-Hsun Play the Ch’in on a Moonlight Night, while reciting the text of Li Po. With the guitar, one of Harry Partch’s Adapted Guitars, perched on his lap and using a lucite rod in one hand while plucking gently, he evoked the ancient Chinese seven-string zither, the ch’in. Then John went on to the Jahla section of his Tombeau for Lou Harrison, playing his adapted National Steel Guitar so closely assocated with Harrison’s Scenes from Nek Chand. This is a beautiful sounding (»
All thru these OM14 concerts, the ghost of Harry Partch has been apparent in the work of Ben Johnston, Schneider, and others. And here’s where John Schneider paid full homage to this “composer’s composer” by playing three of his works. The Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales from 1950 were written for Partch’s own Harmonic Canon, a 44-string bridged table zither. And while the tunings may have been to Ancient Greek scales, the delicious sound of this »
This nightclub atmosphere continued with a performance by Brazilian composer Chico Mello, beginning with his hilarious John Cage at the Beach, that used chance techniques (and silence) to cut up some very recognizable Brazilian pop songs. Mello, who studied with Dieter Schnebel and others in Germany and now lives mostly in Berlin, inserts a lot of Brazilian pop in his music “because it is home”, he said. And after two evenings of some very serious stuff, it was a real relief to finally have some humor injected into the proceedings. Which is not to say that this was light stuff .. because what sounded funny was actually the result of working out some true experiments between improvisation, composition, and theater. One of his songs, Samba Do Budista (the Buddhist Samba) sounded very much like an ordinary samba, except for the multiphonics and throat-singing that he added to extend every line, and the choreographed facial expressions that kept his ample eyebrows in constant motion. He concluded with a cut-up of 17 Bossas, where, or so I’m told, some of them were even sung backwards. The cuts between them sometimes occurring in mid word in a dizzying display that made him seem like his own sampling machine. Quite a performance. Afterwards I suggested that perhaps Mello and Schneider should take their stage show on the road, it was that good!
But the big event of the evening was the performance of Michael Harrison’s Tone Clouds, derived from his recent solo piano CD release Revelation. For this performance, Harrison added a string quartet score, performed by Del Sol. (You can hear some of the piano solo verison of Revelation on a recent »
The top outer crust last night was provided by 28-year-old Dobromila Jaskot, who started the evening with a work for solo cello with electronic/computer support played in real-time by the composer and her Macbook laptop. This imaginative piece, titled Hannah, short for Ophiphagus Hannah, the Latin name for a royal variety of cobra snakes, uses the snake as “the main character, creating her own images, as if surrounded by fun-house mirrors, which deform and at times obscure the limits of reality.” Here the cellist, Hannah Addario-Berry from the Del Sol Quartet and no relation to the aforementioned cobra that gives the work its title, deploys every possible way to attack the instrument to produce a spectrum of sounds, at times violent and gruff to soft whispers and shakes, while the electronic sounds from speakers surrounding the audience comment and riff on the cello sounds and add some new ones. This sort of extreme cello playing, like so much of the music by followers of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, attempts to make musique concrete out of traditional acoustic instruments. These antics, like bowing on the parts of the instrument that are usually never touched by fingers or bow, produce odd sounds that go by so fast the result seems like a sound catalog on fast foward. I will admit, I have a very hard time with this approach and aesthetic, and found the computer generated sounds and the field recordings of a real cobra hiss much more interesting than those emitting acoustically from the poor cello. But that’s just me, perhaps, and my peculiar history with this sort of music.
Things went quite differently as we bit futher into the evening’s sandwich. Dilations, by Catherine Lamb, for three male voices, three bass clarinets, and three cellos (the festival seems to be a riot of cellos!), was a very quiet, static piece of long tones and very slowly shifting colors that, at 40 minutes, was a bit of an endurance test for the audience. Lamb, a spectralist who paints with a very small and narrow brush, is interested in the inner life of sounds, and the way pitches and harmonics from different and similar instruments interact to produce new sounds — sort of the way you can mix basic colors to create new ones. The problem here is that the audience is not able to perceive much from a position so far from the instruments on stage. An unfortunate thing about live concerts in the standard arrangement of the audience in fixed chairs facing the performers at a distance on stage is that by the time these delicate and subtle sounds reach the listener, all their energy is spent and the listener hears only a faint shadow of what was intended. (And then there’s the psycho/physical issue of being in the midst of 300 or so breathing, fidgeting, and restless beings that makes it hard to stay personally centered enough to focus on the sound you can hear.) The best place to appreciate this piece might have been where the conductor sat, in this case Ms Lamb, surrounded by the instruments. This seemed to be an extremely personal piece for the composer. I think the rest of us in the audience were left out in the cold, unfortunately.
The second half began with …das árvores… (”out of the trees”) by Chico Mello, for percussion, piano, two clarinets, double bass, and tuba. Broken into sections lasting 25 or so seconds, quiet chords alternate with material drawn from Brazilian and other sources. This cut up becomes slapstick in some sections where Mello has the players moving their shoulders, facial expressions, and arms in exaggerated and comical ways, while making those exotic bird sounds we often hear in Brazilian pop music. A strange piece, I found myself wanting to hear more of the Brazilian material, and the way Mello distributed them to unlikely instruments (e.g. tuba).
Feldman, John Cage, and even Debussy in some truly deep and introspective ways. But I think that by the time her Through The Low Hills, and her new String Quartet #4 were played, the audience was beyond recovery, the magic lost, and concentration difficult. Through The Low Hills, for piano and cello, is an embarrassingly beautiful piece, and it was wonderfully played by the extraordinary Gianna Abondolo, with the composer on piano. But something was wrong in the house, and it sounded nothing like the studio recording I have and was expecting to hear. The recording is closely miked, so you are hearing it from the position of the performers. In the hall it sounded thin and distant, and the restlessness of the audience (at least where I was sitting) impaired the real appreciation of this wonderful work. (I played it on a recent »
After a very brief intermission, the second half began with a premiere of a work begun in 1998 by the now nearly 82 year-old Ben Johnston, and finally realized last year. The Tavern, for voice and adapted guitar, used the Coleman Barks translation of texts by Jalaluddin Rumi, and was performed by John Schneider, guitar, and Paul Berkolds, baritone.
antiphons and works them without words. Recognizable as true Pärt, with its closely spaced Eastern-sounding chords and voice-like phrasing, it served as a spiritual sendoff for an exceptionally well paced concert. I don’t know if I could actually sit thru a full concert of just cello octet music (even tho the range of sound and timbre is quite wide from this ensemble), the exposure here was just right and stirring. I think it left everyone feeling good, and wondering what’s in store for us tonight at the second OM14 evening.
I learned yesterday that one of my mentors has passed.
I’m off to the Djerassi Artists Program (
The full title is “Desert Ambulance - A vehicle of mercy sent into the wasteland of (academic) modern music“, by Ramon Sender and Tony Martin, and featured Pauline Oliveros performing accordion. It was first conceived and performed at the S.F. Tape Music Center in 1964. It is also a very early experiment combining live performance, tape music, electronics, and film. It is the piece from which everything since evolved. The mother of all mixed-media performances.
