 |
Also, I promised my good friend, Steve Koenig (who, along with another dear friend,
Robert Reigle, put out some of my early recordings) that I would announce the debut
of the Acoustic Levitation webzine. Please do check out the articles, reviews, and
interviews (including a brand new phone interview with Yoko Ono). Contact Steve
about submitting your own work.
more... | |
Liner notes for the new cd on Henceforth
Records:
unsettled
on an old sense of place
|
Xochicalco (for Julio)
In September 2005, my wife, Gaelyn, and I took a trip to Cuernavaca,
México so that I could work with Julio Estrada, the great Mexican
composer. During our visit, Julio and his wife, Velia, urged us to
visit the ruins of Xochicalco, one of Central México’s most important
pre-Hispanic commercial, cultural, and religious centers. Gaelyn and I
spent a better part of a day walking around the grounds, with few
companions other than the crows circling high atop the vast plateau,
and the apparitions of a once thriving civilization. A few months
later, back in the United States, I had a chance to take my ensemble,
soNu, into the recording studio with Anne LeBaron and Mary Oliver. My
experience at Xochicalco had left a deep impression on me, and I was
curious how that impression might filter through the histories of
others whose musicianship and sensitivity I respected. In preparation
for recording, I took each player aside, one-by-one, and revealed three
things to them, only one of which, a quote from William Carlos Williams
(“It is difficult to get the news from poems/But men die everyday with
the lack of what is found there”), was I consistent in repeating
exactly each time. The other two things? Random excerpts from
recordings of indigenous music from México; and random recollections of
my walk through Xochicalco. Gathered back in the studio, and with
headphones on, we listened one time through to a teponatzli (Aztec
drum) and flute song I had composed, recorded, and processed the night
before. After a minute of silence, I re-cued the pre-recorded material
and pressed Play/Record. Dedicated to Julio Estrada, Xochicalco joins
others in my series of Imaginative Reaction Compositions. |
Contrafactum for Scelsi
For some time now, I have been performing improvised pieces for guitar
played as a hand-percussion instrument. My good friend and
ethnomusicologist, Robert Reigle, once heard me playing such a piece,
and asked if I had ever heard Ko-tha by the great Italian composer,
Giacinto Scelsi. I hadn’t. But shortly after I did; and I have gone on
to perform Scelsi’s composition several times. My particular
present-composed work is a contrafactum on Ko-ta that also doubles as
an homage to my parents—a serenade song that draws its inspiration from
those nights when my father, feeling guilty about coming home late yet
again, would bring a cancionero (singer) to the house with him to
serenade my mother and help soften the blow. Accompanied by his own
guitar playing, the cancionero would plead my father's case, singing
songs that spoke of a man's passion and devotion to his mujer. Of
course, my mother never fell for these sweet songs, nor was ever fooled
by my father's gesture. Yet, seeing just how much my brothers and I
loved to listen to the cancionero, and seeing, ironically, just how
much these moments brought us together as a family, my mother would go
along with the charade, and invite the cancionero into our living room.
Love songs would turn into corridos, whose themes made us proud to be
of Mexican descent. |
RoKaMaYoHa
RoKa came to me in a waking dream, in anticipation of attending my
first live kabuki performance in Tokyo. Kabuki is often popularly
translated to mean “the art of singing and dancing.” Yet in tracing the
actual etymology of the characters to the verb kabuku (meaning “to
lean” or “to act out of the ordinary”), some suggest that a more
accurate translation would be “avant-garde” or “bizarre” theater.
Reaching for a sheet of letterhead from the hotel where I was staying,
I sketched out a loose structured improvisation, and presented it to
Keiko Hatanaka and Robert Reigle, with whom I was rehearsing for an
upcoming concert as the newly formed KYA Trio. The original version of
RoKa was debuted by KYA at Tokyo Hall in 2002. This re-worked version
with soNu includes just the right amount of live processing to make
manifest a frequent theme of kabuki—that of a sudden, dramatic
revelation or transformation.
A simple song
explodes with grandeur.
Saliva drips from my mouth.
|
Dirac’s Theory
The conceptual impulse for Dirac’s Theory was to compose a solo based
upon my exploration of the sound producing capabilities a brand new
snare drum. My first day in rehearsal with the snare, I took the drum
out of its box and began to woodshed; essentially going at it with all
kinds of beaters: spoons, chopsticks, barbeque skewers,
maracas—anything in sight that looked interesting but that would not
harm the instrument. With each of these beaters, I played all parts of
the snare—its head, its rim, its body. I experimented with using one
stick, then two sticks; matching different beaters, muffling the drum
with one hand; applying different degrees of pressure onto different
parts of the head. At night, I would reflect on what I had heard from
the drum that day. Over the course of two days, as I began to know the
drum's temperament, I began to conceive of my solo's starting point. In
listening to what the drum was trying to tell me about itself, I
noticed that it had a nice crisp, bright sound, and that soft, quiet
manipulations resonated with such clarity. My recent collaborations
with Earl Howard and other electronic musicians who do live processing
had me fascinated with what is called transience—those ephemeral,
living particles that momentarily co-exist with the predominant rhythms
and tones that we hear. Could I create a piece, I wondered, that
mimicked this kind of transience but with absolutely no electronic
manipulation to it? |
Suprachiasmatic Nuclei
Time was born of rhythm,
and periodicity is part of who we are.
—Roger G. Newton
Galileo’s Pendulum
The suprachiasmatic nuclei are the two
clusters of nerve-cell bodies located behind the retinae, and function
as the primary pacemakers of the many, though not all, biological
rhythms performing in our bodies. Suprachiasmatic Nuclei, conceived in
reaction to Steve Reich’s, Pendulum Music, addresses the interpolation
of these internal pacemakers, and the flow of time within just one
sound. This work was originally commissioned by Steven Schick as an
October 2004 premier with the SONAR Concert Series at the University of
California, San Diego.
|
Wendell’s History
One of my wife’s favorite poets is Wendell Berry, a man who left behind
a literary career in New York City in order to forge a deeper clarity
of purpose on a farm in Kentucky. I, too, have left behind careers in
search of deeper clarity, forging a trail from Texas to Ohio, South
Korea to California, and then back again by way of the Republic of
Macedonia. Yet time and time again, through Gaelyn, I return to one
Wendell Berry poem in particular, History, whose theme, ironically, is
about being rooted; the seasons of one’s flesh combining with the
seasons of the soil. I live in New York City now, where I continue to
practice “my art of being here.” |
| |
| |
|
