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aesthetics, art, composition, create, creation, culture, John Cage, music, performance, Uncategorized

Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic

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I’ve worked through John “Drumbo” French’s book “Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic”. 800 pages by perhaps the musician most responsible for Trout Mask Replica, and who Van Vliet didn’t even put in its credits. 

Robert Polidori and I discovered Beefheart and TMR in 1969, when it was released. At that time, after years of playing in a grade school garage rock band, I was listening to Cage, Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Reich, Roland Kirk, Ravi Shankar, Zappa, Coltrain, Varese, and others, including much music from other cultures. I was ravenous for new music. 

When I heard Beefheart, I heard: short single-measure phrases, often repeated for four measures. Each instrument had its own phrase, rhythm, and sometimes of different length, and similar to Steve Reich’s phrase shifting compositions, they were composed to play themselves out, and then all end together on the same beat. Played together they were cacophonous, so you had to listen to each phrase separately before you could understand the structure of a single moment. Similar to Indian music, all of the instruments were synched to the same beat and tempo, which was a major default for all the songs on the album.

The instrumental music didn’t keep to western scales, they were often polyphonic, and usually if they were mostly within a scale, jumped out randomly. However, the singing for any given song would usually stay within a single key and scale. I’m sure that this is because Beefheart grew up listening and singing to blues and R&B, and that was how he knew to sing. 

French’s book is fascinating to me for many reasons, and part of it is that he articulates exactly how TMR—as well as Beefheart’s earlier albums—were constructed. His earliest recording, Safe as Milk, was blues songs all the way, and French gives Ry Cooder credit for pulling the music together so it could be recorded. His next couple of albums were really blues jams, and sounded like it. A couple of songs from that period crept into TMR, such as Veteran’s Day Poppy, and while I always liked them, they were oddly conventional compared to the other music on the album.

Polidori, my friend David Swatling and I went to hear Beefheart in NYC in 1971, touring on their next album “Lick my Decals Off”. I had memorized the album before hearing them live. I was amazed by the band’s ability to play every note as it was on the album. Understand that the album—like TMR—sounded both structured and cacophonous, and that many if not most people just thought it was noise, with no structure at all. But hearing the guitar solo “One Red Rose That I Mean” live… and hearing that every note and hesitation was exactly as it had been played on the recording—was a confirmation (for me) of the musicality of the band. For myself, having survived the overplayed improvisations of Cream, Grateful Dead, and so much of the rock/blues of the late 1960s, I didn’t need to hear any improvise within a given scale. I wanted to hear new composition, which is what they delivered, bravely.

French details how, in 1968-1969, TMR was born. First of all, Beefheart couldn’t play any instruments other than a harmonica. 95% of harmonica playing requires zero knowledge of music theory. Beefheart would bang out a phrase on the piano, which French would either record or, later, transcribe onto notation paper. This would be repeated for every instrument’s part in a song (except for drums, which French usually provided himself). French would then teach each band member their part. As they practiced a piece together, French or the other musicians would revise their parts so that they would fit together, in the ways I explained above. The other musicians did know how to play their instruments, and like French, knew enough music theory (or at least, the logic of their instruments) to map the notes to their fretboards, and find a way to make non-fretboard generated riffs playable.

Beefheart, knowing no music theory or even how to explain the limitations of western musical practice, would lay down rough phases that were not generated from a western theory. So it is not surprising that his phrasing doesn’t sound as though it came from a Berkeley or Julliard. If you started from music theory in the late 1960s, you wouldn’t get to where he got. For instance, no one else did. 

Beefheart was able to do what he did because of what he didn’t know. 

What was also needed was someone to use standard construction tools to put the pieces Beefheart generated into a structure that would hold up, and that could be repeated. This is the role that French played in TMR. The third requirement was someone who could (and would) learn the music from French and French’s notation, and play it back from memory. That is what the other musicians in the band did. 

Van Vliet was several years older than the teenaged TMR musicians. French relates in detail how Van Vliet bullied them using cult-leader cruelty into staying in the band, and dedicating years of time to learning and performing this music. It breaks your heart to read the stories. But it was what was missing in each of the TMR musicians, and Van Vliet, that allowed the music to be constructed and recorded. If the musicians had been older and had more knowledge of both music, they would have left like Ry Cooder did. If Van Vliet had more musical training, he wouldn’t have approached composing like he did. 

French makes the good point that it isn’t enough to simply work from intuition without any musical background. Van Vliet couldn’t repeat what he banged out on piano, and he had a lot of trouble even coming in at the right point when performing on stage. What he supplied was something the musicians couldn’t, and what they supplied was something he couldn’t. Music was bigger than each of them.

-Sunnyvale 2025

art, create, creation, culture, self, society, synaesthesia, video

The Artist Stripped Bare by Her Models, Experimentum (Art and Scientism)

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The Artist Stripped Bare by Her Models, Experimentum

(Art and Scientism)

Robert Edgar

There’s some old business that I feel needs attending. It’s the term “experimental”, as in “experimental film” or “experimental filmmaker”.

“It’s for this experimental film

Which nobody knows about and which

I’m still figuring out what’s going to go

In my experimental film

“Yeah!

You’re all gonna be in this experimental film

And even though I can’t explain it

I already know how great it is” 1

TMBG usually seems on target to me, and their song “Experimental Film” is not an exception.  If I have students who say they’re going to make “an experimental film” I feel that the words have been passed on without enough consideration.

And if some kids dying of youth try to play in the higher-than-thou wading pool of art film, and pick up the swagger along with the DSLR, well, they’re just beginning anthropologists, who aren’t yet able to distinguish the magic from the process. And they’re all swimming looking for funding along with those with polished 15-second storyline-movie elevator pitches. So they’d better go ahead, wag their asses and swim.
However, I feel that there are questions that are absolutely fair to ask of those who say they make experimental films. First of all, are there really experiments that experimental filmmakers perform? Is this a field of science? Is there a kind of knowledge that artists pass on to each other that they are examining and developing through some sort of shared process? What kind of gold are we making here?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a manuscript he left titled “Remarks on Color”, commented on Goethe’s book “Theory of Color”:
“Goethe’s theory of the constitution of the colors of the spectrum has not proved to be an unsatisfactory theory, rather it really isn’t a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted with it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline of the sort we find in James’s psychology. Nor is there any experimentum crucis (italics are Wittgenstein’s) which could decide for or against the theory.” 2
Wittgenstein, while not going on to devalue Goethe’s writings on color, makes that point that these  writings to do not describe an experiment that could be used to test a theory.  So, Do experimental films test theories? Is that what Hollis Frampton, or Stan Van Der Beek, or Mike Snow were doing? Is that what Frampton was writing about when he wrote that Eisenstein:

“”…was at once a gifted linguist and an artist haunted by the claims of language–and also, by training, an engineer. It seems possible to suggest that he glimpsed, however quickly, a project beyond the intellectual montage: the construction of a machine, very much like film, more efficient than language, that might, entering into direct competition with language, transcend its speed, abstraction, compactness, democracy, ambiguity, power–a project, moreover, whose ultimate promise was the constitution of an external critique of language itself.” 3

I love this paragraph by Frampton.  In it he is showing himself glimpsing that project, and sharing that glimpse with us as he does so. He seems to be laying out a foundation for something experimental: a structure (montage) that uses something outside of language to “critique” language.
What I see here is a practice, not a theory. Neither Eisenstein nor Frampton—both of whom both made films and wrote about the process—set up experiments that could be used to verify a theory. Without diminishing their importance at all, I’d say they were more involved in play than work.
When I think of art as a process, I prefer to think about what three- and four- year olds do when they are working through their scribbling phases. Do children make experimental art? There is a sense of conjuring in children’s art making. But that which is conjured is experiential to the child, not external and verifiable.  And if it could be verified, the process of that verification would not look like the child’s art making.
The artist becomes involved in the making, lost in the stuff and the moment, and often, at the end, has some object that has been produced. But an object in itself is not a proof, disproof, or verification. That still awaits an experimental—in the scientific sense—construct and procedure.
There’s a term for practices that imitate science but aren’t science: “scientism”. If art is bad science, then what has been called experimental film is probably exactly that. In the late 20thcentury, there were many practices that were thought to promise the eventual attainment of scientific method, including many anthropological, psychological and semiotic studies.  It was in the air.
The phrase “experimental film” is certainly part of that scientism. But that doesn’t mean that those filmmakers who were accused of being experimental were bad scientists. They should, instead, be approached simply as artists, who conjure experiences and in so doing, often leave art objects as the outcome.
There’s no shame in trying to do something you haven’t mastered. If only everyone believed that! If only our society supported that! Naked, without a need for the protection of scientism, without the need to be “right” when one makes art. It’s not that science—and the development of technology, or verification, or being right—isn’t important. It’s that art is also important, without the embarrassing armor of scientism. It’s not one of those, it’s one of these.

“The artist, when he encounters the present…is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task.  The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the present can give the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of.  He is more important than the scientist. 4”

Footnotes:
1. “Experimental Film”, They Might be Giants
2. “Remarks on Color”, Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1977

3. “Film in the House of the Word”, in October 17, p. 63-64, Hollis Frampton, Summer 1981, MIT Press.

4. Marshall McLuhan, in conversation with Normal Mailer, 1968

September, 2011
Sunnyvale, CA

art, create, music, Stockhausen

Watching and Listening to Stockhausen

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In the mail today received a DVD I’d ordered from Germany about a month ago, Stockhausen conducting Region III of Hymnen in 1986, my favorite section of my favorite piece of his. Great to see it performed live (which I otherwise haven’t); it was absolutely magical to hear the density of musical ideas in the piece, and hearing it l

ive after so many years of listening to the vinyl recording, it was like seeing something in 3D that had been a flat painting. I’m so glad it held up for me (or I for it?). So beautiful to have someone form the ideas of the tonal and overtonal elements of the notes themselves, and using such a balanced mix of acoustic orchestra and electronic sounds. 

For all my musical friends, I include these recommendations from the person in charge of the Stockhausen archive. It is difficult to purchase Stockhausen recordings except through the archive (I couldn’t find them in stores even in Berlin, however Amoeba in SF has a small collection of them). Of course some pieces are more involving than others, and some time spent composing electronic using electronic components can help one create a door into a music which is usually both arhythmic and aggressively non-ambient.

If you are a musician and have not sat down in the evening and listened in a darkened room to one of his recordings on a good sound system, you should not yet feel world-weary. There is more awaiting you. He composes inside sound like no other composer I’ve heard. Along with fellow student Pierre Boulez, he studied under Oliver Messiaen, whose incredible percussion work and composition with bird song is with me whenever I travel and hear new birdsongs announcing the new morning in far off places. Really, this is mothers’ milk. That said, when Meredith was growing up she used to refer to this as “Daddy music”.  -RBE

Dear Robert Edgar,

thank you so much for your wonderful e-mail!

If you are interested in orchestral works, I can highly recommend the CD 100 with JUBILEE and Stockhausens last work for orchestra, which he finished on December 4th 2005 (he died on December 5th), which is called FÜNF WEITERE STERNZEICHEN for orchestra.

My personal favorite is INORI for orchestra also.

Electronic works which are a “must” are on CD 3 (GESANG DER JÜNGLINGE, KONTAKTE etc.). Just yesterday we received a notice that finally GESANG DER JÜNGLINGE will be performed at the Cologne Cathedral on April 30th 2013. Stockhausen composed this electronic work to be performed in the Cathedral in 1956 but up to date (!) they refused to perform it because of the loudspeakers. So The world finally cathes up after more then 50 years…

Later electronic works like OKTOPHONIE (CD 41), MITTWOCHS-GRUSS (CD 66) and his last electronic work COSMIC PULSES (CD 91) show that he continued being experimental and searching for new worlds.

I just finished mixing MICHAELION (4th scene of WEDNESDAY from LIGHT) which I recorded this year in Birmingham with the London Voices. This recordings is also amazing and will hopefully ready by the end of the year.

But I could write on and on as I am of course Stockhausens biggest “Fan” 🙂

Have a wonderful 1st Advent!

Mit herzlichem Gruß

Kathinka Pasveer

für die Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik
51515 Kürten
www.stockhausen.org

—–
I note that his last work was “FÜNF WEITERE STERNZEICHEN” or “Five Additional Zodiac Signs”. I remember reading Giordano Bruno’s text “Spaccio della Bestia Trioufante” (“Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast”) where Bruno replaces the constellations with new sets. Great thing to do.http://pinterest.com/rbedgar/memory-theatres/   
-RBE

aging, art, create, culture, economy, film, learning, loss, school, self, society, video, web

The Rarified Art of the Individual

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Here’s the kick: those people who stole your money? Under cover of the culture of illusion, and through the products they sold you that delayed your own self-creation, they stole your lives.

-First in a series-

With the deflation of the consumer culture that is happening all over the world today, Americans have a chance at adapting for the resulting environment.

Americans (and certainly other cultures, but certainly Americans) have for years accepted the practice of delaying the construction of a self, by spending their money—and lives—purchasing distractions. Art has been capitalized and made into objects for purchase, created by a small and distinguished tribe of specialists.

With the loss of purchasing power—so people have less ability to purchase distractions—preceded by a surge in the availability of low-cost media production tools (video and audio production, post-production and that folk-art distribution system the web) we have a corresponding surge in art making (with a lower-case “a”).

Younger generations who have grown up with computers create media easily, without a clumsy “always learn before you do” approach that was so helpful to the mechanical universe. Those at ease with computers jump right in and probe, trying one thing, learning its effect, and then trying another, burrowing into the web to find what it has to offer, or the software to find what they can produce. Alan Kay has rightly despaired of the loss of pre-planning, of an architectural approach to problem solving, in this dive-right-in approach. But the computer environment is one that rewards digital spelunking.

Instead of simply watching television for hours at a time like their parents and grandparents, a larger group is able to make their own and share it in online society. The online sites for displaying one’s own videos, or the thousands of sites for distributing one’s own musical tracks—these are the real killers of the music companies and movie theaters. That which had been the creative domain of Artists now have the floodgates open and the artists pouring their creations into them.

It is important to note that once someone has a minimal set of equipment and software, one can create for only the cost of one’s time. While every audio and video professional will argue that the quality that consumer and prosumer products can’t match that of the truly professional (and hugely expensive) equipment and software, it is absolutely the case that with today’s prosumer equipment one can produce media of higher resolution and lower noise levels than could be professionally delivered in the 1960s. Compare a HD video on Vimeo.com with a playback of Bonanza on any CRT.

What is more important than the resolution of the new technology is the ability to produce in media iteratively. As a film student in the mid 1970s with a disabled father and a mother who was an art teacher in a public school, I didn’t have money for multiple answer prints. Filmmaking was a process of trying something, then trying something ELSE. Even editing in video, which could be done for free where I was studying, was a long and painful process involving grease pencils, two reel-to-reel decks and multiple reels of video tape that had to be wound and rewound to start points for each edit. I worked in film and video with every moment of my free time (and still do), but today the ability to revise as one goes is incredibly supportive of quick learning and quality improvement, especially when combined with a distribution and social review system that allows the creator to obtain informal and instant feedback on work in progress. And all work is work in progress.

What happened, though, was the domination of the culture of the specialist, the pouring of money into huge Hollywood projects where, by concentrating the work of hundreds of people into the production of stories of individuals, we have a slight-of-hand that further supports the unobtainable hero. Hundreds of minds and specialists are not one mind, and we addict society to watching the magical existence of screen stars to appear to make their own decisions, and overcome their own problems.

It’s not that I don’t like Benjamin Button or even Hollywood films in general. But the illusion that it has always used as its attraction has created the illusory economy and culture that is now, for a moment, shown its real structure. Here’s the kick: those people who stole your money? Under cover of the culture of illusion, and through the products they sold you that delayed your own self-creation, they stole your lives.

The aging generations who now have time but no money will logically experience mostly their loss. But a child who doesn’t have paints will scribble in the dirt. And before aboriginals were taught to paint on canvas, they painted on sand.

The desperate need this culture has, as we head into this darkest of times, is for art (small “a”) education.

aesthetics, art, create, creation

Collect Edit Project

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When I regularly made films and videos, I saw a three-part sequence to most compositional strategies:

1. Collecting the elements to use

2. Editing/modulating the elements

3. Projecting/presenting the piece.

The problem I saw was to make each stage creative, so that none was assumed or just mechanical. So collection for me was to always have a camera with me, shooting what appeared between me and the world, and the real finds were exposures that had an existence and received meaning only as it was captured through a set f-stop, shutter speed and lens length.

The edit was a juxtapositioning of elements, so the collection of stuff could be staged for the presentation, but not necessarily fixed for that presentation.

The projection could involve many aspects: what you projected onto, the relationship between projection speed and previous collection speed, image against image and sounds, words against image, and all those Eisensteinian montage strategies.

The music I was making offered itself in the same way: capture or generate sounds, modulate and mix them through electronic modules, and when presenting again do a live mix through electronic modules. Today the heightened interest in electronic/acoustic performances underlines the power of creative integration of these three steps during performance.

Today, working with Premiere, with Sonar, and with The Mister Edgars, questions of strategy come up again for me. How each step of the creative process can be kept from being mechanized, and instead can speak to us as we engage it. And again: to have the engagement reveal the possibilities of beauty that we have always previously missed, so that we’re more aware of it as we kick through the world.

After the parabola of a lifetime, I now reinterpret Duchamp and Cage for the central importance that beauty has in their work and writing. They needed to get away from using the word, Duchamp hated the concept of taste because, I believe, it represented how enculturation stopped perception. But now I understand beauty to be positioned as a pair of lights at the edge of what one understands, registering action at the present position of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. It is that cliche’d culture only if one doesn’t attend to it, try to make it speak, smear yourself in its sensuality so that you can through experience come to perception, and through perception bump those lights and the zone outside as you claim your site. Like a baby that laughs when it learns, we’re charged with beauty when we perceive. Nothing to be ashamed of here, nothing to hide from. And the question’s not “Why bother?”.