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

Memory Theatre, Memory Theatre One, Pinterest

Pinterest Memory Theater Page

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Memory Theaters are models for how we process information in our environment. They provide a process, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that is the opposite of museum curation.

Here is a work in progress–a pinterest page dedicated to memory theaters.

http://pinterest.com/rbedgar/memory-theatres/

 

aesthetics, Frances Yates, Manifesto, Richard Foreman

Not What, But How

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Back in the 1970s I made my first trips to New York city as an art student, and one of the artists who attracted me most, and who has remained a major influence for me, was Richard Foreman. I bought a copy of his book Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos (NYU Press, 1976), and couldn’t help but notice that there on the cover of the book was an illustration of a theatre by Robert Fludd, one that I first saw in The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.

Now, the image on the cover would have been enough to sell me on the book, but Foreman’s texts were so focused on exactly where I wanted to focus, on that moment where one notices. It isn’t a scientific type of focus or noticing. It’s a noticing where one suddenly finds oneself aware that one had been carrying around a conceptual frame that was not synched with what one was confronting, and then one notices that frame shift so that one is suddenly resonant with that confrontation. What happens in this type of noticing, is that one is not so involved with WHAT something means, as one is with HOW something means.

After a lifetime of focusing on how things mean, it is a response that is always ready to erupt. If one continually had that as an initial reaction we would not survive–we’d get hit by cars while staring at the walk/don’t walk signs, instead of just waiting for the proper sign to blink on. But it is a response that occurs enough with me that it is my main source of humor, and I’m sure I annoy many people with my deliberate misinterpretations of statements. It’s not that I think I’m clever, my mind is just constantly looking for the pun, the parallel meaning, the unintended wordplay, and it goes there first. I live in an alternative universe.

Here is a note in one of Foreman’s “manifestos” from the book: “Write by thinking against the material. Since you don’t want to convince self of your vision, etc.–but to let it be informed by the disintegrating non-moment”.

For me his plays throw everything at each other so that all of us–and I believe Foreman himself as a viewer–is actively engaged in trying to find anything that makes sense. With no traditional story or narrative, objects are present as objects, and only on occasion, seemingly unconsciously, they collide with the right object and a symbol radiates from the crash. And as the symbol emerges from our suddenly noticing, from an otherwise noisy but meaningless stage, we are able to better notice elemental aspects of our “making sense”.

In October, Foreman premiered a new film “Once Every Day” at the New York Film Festival. He was interviewed by the critic Amy Taubin. Here it is:
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2012/blog/nyff-qa-once-every-day

Enjoy. 

aesthetics, art, Jack Burnham

Last Mistake -> Next Content

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Narratives are interesting because as we go through life, we’re always looking for navigational strategies… how do we move from what we’re doing to what to do next?

Narratives, and (with language) syntax, and (with painting) edges, and (with music) modal and rhythmic modulations–these are all models for how we can change our lives. They let us sample the feel of the change before we try them.
And so we look at the form and map it, and the map becomes the cognitive model–as well as the model in sensory memory–and we use the hints from those internalized maps to navigate the now time.
Of course, acting in the world isn’t entirely a matter of conscious choice. Even navigating using such models isn’t necessarily conscious, any more than a syntactical map is conscious, or our reaction to a sensory stimulus.
Art working provides an opportunity to consciously examine media for models of action that we can use outside of those media.
In his 1970’s book Beyond Modern Sculpture, Jack Burnham wrote about a goal of art being to make a model of what it is to be human. He noted that there had been a change in how that was handled, moving from an image/icon of a human, to a model that acted in the manner of a human. There was a shift, for a while at least, from picture of to art-as-process. This certainly extended to areas of robotics, and to algorithms.
I’d like to postulate an art-making  model derived in part from Burnham’s text. It’s this:
The artist models what it is to be human. The artist, through experiencing the piece and its reception in the world, finds a part of the model that didn’t work. That mistake becomes the subject of the next piece.

art, citizen, institute, music, performance, respectable

REVIEW: 2ND FRIDAYS AT CALIFORNIA ART INSTITUTE/SUNNYVALE SEPTEMBER 9TH 2011

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REVIEW: 2ND FRIDAYS AT CALIFORNIA ART INSTITUTE/SUNNYVALE
SEPTEMBER 9TH 2011
ROBERT EDGAR
Go to 2nd Fridays site: http://tinyurl.com/3c5rtp6

The music was fantastic last night.

Respectable Citizen started playing about 7:15. Michael Zbysznski on saxophones and electronics, Bruce Bennett on keyboards and their downstream modulation, and Byron Diel laying down one of the most absorbing 45 minutes of trap set drumming I’ve heard.

Like Stockhausen’s improvisatory group, Respectable Citizen starts with traditional musical instruments, feeding their output into a set of software and hardware modules to modulate and shape the sound. Unlike Stockhausen’s group, the musical source for R.C. is improvisatory jazz. However, after laying out some modal Coltrane-like sax riffs that established a musical base for the music, Michael set off in any manner of directions. Of the three musicians in the trio, he was the most continually balanced between music and noise, melody and raw sound, allowing your ears to get into a scale and feel how it provides identify to the notes and rhythms, then electronically modifying the output outside of that established acoustic space so that one saw it, fleetingly, from the perspective of a new sound and rule-set. In this way Michael traveled from acoustic gravity to acoustic gravity, compressing the distance of each journey through his ability to play within a perceivable rule set and immediately jump to another rule set, related by those sonic attributes that defined the edge between them (scale, rhythm, pitch, timbre etc.).

Bruce Bennett played his keyboard and other hand-based interfaces as if he had an axe–carving out rich, full sounds, doing high-definition shaping of timbre and volume that created sound shapes of particular clarity and presence. These worked particularly well in juxtaposition with Michael’s musical riffing and Byron’s shifting percussion patterns. Since between sax and drums rhythms and polyrhythms were already established, Bruce provides sounds and shapes that masterfully moved between being objects set against those rhythms, and a dark acoustic backdrop that surrounded them. It seemed to me what what Bruce provided was a forceful and ever-modulating sound set that morphed between being foreground object and background, providing the spatial basis for the trio’s musical cyclorama.

Usually I don’t like electronic music that has a single percussion track that is sustained throughout a piece. It seems to me mindless, the sort of composition exemplified by paintings of Elvis or matadors on black velvet. It’s not that it doesn’t’ have an effect, it’s that the chief problem of establishing background from foreground is already solved. and set This is one reason why dance music is usually snubbed by non-dance music musicians; solving nothing, it becomes the sugar in our water that rots our teeth as our invested years run out.

However, Byron Diel’s playing avoided that. His trap set playing technique was such that he was constantly modulating between time signatures, length of measures, and polyrhythmic juxtapositions, so that what seemed to be firmament was actually a shifting ground beneath you. While Byron occasionally slowed and sped up tempos, most of his playing did work against a steady tempo, but a steady tempo suspended above a continually re-parsed phrasing.

So what Respectable Citizen presented last night was a set of three musicians, each exploring different musical compositional strategies in parallel, in such a way that each complemented the other, and never became muddied or repetitious. At the California Art Institute/Sunnyvale, the majority of students in the audience were there from a sound design class offered from their Digital Film major. I can’t think of a better presentation of profound and intricate sound design, and I applaud Digital Film Director Christina Ri and Sound Design Instructor Andy Puls for their foresight in having the class attend the performance.

Following Respectable Citizen was “Toaster”, otherwise known as composer/performer Todd Elliot. Todd played a trio of pieces, moving from an ambient droning piece triggered through a MIDI-based instrument called an eigenharp tau, through a sequenced pattern piece, to a very nicely cinematic piece using movie soundtrack and acoustic piano samples (with the note samples either recorded from a distance in a live room, or processed to seem so).

Todd’s performance was recorded and is available on this website, so I’ll recommend listening to it first hand, rather than reading a long description by me. But I’ll recommend the first, ambient piece, which provided a nice example of woven sound textures that move in and out of focus. What sounds static to the unobservant is a constantly modulating set of sounds without sudden attack or decay, but with a gentle undulation not unlike a flag in a breeze, or cross-patterns of ripples on a pond. Similar to early Eno or Riley, it provides a fine and subtle texture for close listening.

Toward the end of Todd’s performance came a couple minutes that were quite unlike the others. The sounds slipped out from the triggered lockstep of the second piece, and the individual sounds away from the sharp definition of the filmic soundtrack spoken word samples. The few sounds slipping by became something of an emulsion, for what was for me a very compelling musical environment. I don’t know how this holds up in the recorded version, but in the acoustics of the room last night, it was a great way to end the performance.

Our next 2nd Friday will be on October 14th. Bring your ears and your heart.

Robert Edgar
September 10, 2011
www.robertedgar.com

art, Manifesto, music, review

Beefheart’s Wake and the Cultural API

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Attended the Beefheart “symposium” last night. Enjoyed it. As one speaker said “This is really a wake”. Very few young people, mostly old men–except for Robin, who came along. Earlier in the week I’d asked my film students how many had gone to the SF Cinematheque, and no one knew what I was talking about. On the way home last night, out in the world, while passing bright new billboards for the Beatles, I had a sudden “Blade Runner” feeling. I had a kind of flash-backed premonition. Instead of buildings and physical infrastructure left in disrepair, there was a culture with so much of its vitality lost that the present couldn’t be understood, we are left with behavioral habits without knowledge of their cause. The Beatle billboards were the ads in Blade Runner, and Beefheart and Independent Cinema were the missing creators of the unmaintained architecture and infrastructure. Where are the counter-cultural inventors who construct truly new meaning from the new technologies? Who create art that is unsalable not because it is scatological, but because it is so radical in its form that it demands work from the viewer to perceive that it has an aesthetic source. There is absolutely no need for another Beefheart, or Beatles for that matter. But I look for more desperation to invent one’s self even at the cost of losing one’s self.

Or maybe invention maintains the same relation to the underlying culture as it ever did, and we just have less underlying movement to be reflected in new art. That seems hard for me to believe, with all the technological innovations present. And we can see those so clearly reflected in Egypt, as the people there are forced to reinvent themselves as free souls within a world community. Perhaps here we have too little need to reinvent the self as presently imagined by society.

Gary Lucas shared a Beefheart quote last night: “I think of music as primarily an irritant”. There is no understanding this unless you posit a disconnect between the form to which the society requires the artist to con-form, and the need by the artist to produce a form that differs from it. If the self-form that the artist/citizen requires matches the one enjoined by cultural infrastructure (the API calls work in both directions), you don’t get the desperation to reinvent the self. Note this isn’t at the social level (which is analogous to a digital “skin”), but at the cultural level (not directly available to the conscious, but sensed by the conscious as an emotional or physical/synaesthetic malaise). If that malaise isn’t present: no need to create a self reformed so that it can survive without the cultural API communications. The “irritant” is such not because the artist wants someone to feel badly, but because s/he is trying to invent his or her own albumin…one that because of its source and purpose is impermeable to the cultural API…and that creates a mirrored malaise between the albumin and the outside society.

So perhaps it is a good thing that it does not occur to youth to basically reinvent itself: as sign of alignment between the young individual and the surrounding culture. Either that, or there is no sensitivity left: no individual, no name, numb.

anthro-poetic, culture, Digital aesthetics, digital cinema, engine, film, installations, synaesthesia, video

Simultaneous Opposites and 21st Century Cinematicians

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This text is an introduction to the ideas behind the Simultaneous Opposites engine: what they are, and where they came from.

Formal cinema, as evidenced by structural filmmakers in the fourth quarter of the 20th century, was an expression of the mechanical tools that were available to them: the film camera, the optical printer, the splicer, the A/B rolls. Today’s formal practice recalibrates the practitioner as a cinematician: neither fixed as cinematographer or editor, special-effects artist or projectionist. The cinematician of today spans the entire cinema gestational process in a single gesture: digitizing, processing, analyzing, playing, editing, presenting, deconstructing, discovering and experimenting without the imposition of hardware and processing compartmentalization. In this developing environment, the experimental cinematician programs a cinema engine that defines a new relationship to post-mechanical cinema, and spirals into a truly experimental and developmental relationship where the medium and the self can no longer be differentiated. The cinematician develops both the sensible experience and the generative media with every new piece.

The cinematician is an adaptation of independent cinema to the speed and power of 21st century digital media.

I create and employ software engines to examine mediated artifacts forged at my zone of proximal development. My Simultaneous Opposites engine (2008-present) is a performance/navigation system for real-time traversal of existing video files, sorting through the audio and video a single frame at a time, in a arrhythmic spiraling motion. The center frame between the two ends of the spiral becomes a temporal focal plane, with the length of the jump a temporal depth of field. The navigational path is the result of a preprogrammed algorithm interrupted during traversal by triggering and modulation by computer keyboard, mouse, and MIDI guitar.

On my website (www.robertedgar.com) are over 50 examples of the output of the developing Simultaneous Opposites engine. Each sequential video file exemplifies a stage in the ongoing experiment I’ve undertaken. During early work at Synapse Video in the 1970s, I integrated strategies of experimental filmmakers with those of the newly developing medium of post-television video. In the early 1980s, I sold my 16mm Beaulieu camera and bought an Apple //e. Teaching myself programming, I produced Memory Theatre One, an early seminal work of interactive computer art. Supported by the positive reaction from the small but developing group of artists who programmed, I set about to develop systems for extending Eisenstein’s montage categories to include the attribute of real-time cinema generation.

The first of these was Living Cinema, which blended video footage collected diary-style on video discs, texts from musings, audio recordings, cells to create short animation loops, graphics etc, and programmed software supporting the selection and combination of all the elements in real time in performance. I was also able to save the performance decisions and cursor moves, and re-inject them into the system later during the same performance, for a spiraled revisitation. Living Cinema had performances throughout the United States.

After a stint as multimedia specialist with Commodore Business Systems working with the video-oriented Amiga, I programmed and integrated a new system, SAND. From my website:

“The central theme of SAND: OR HOW COMPUTERS DREAM OF TRUTH IN CINEMA comes from a well-known quote that Cinema is truth 24 times a second. I grabbed stills (and sometimes generated images using 3D animation programs) of a sequence 6 frames long. I changed things in front of the camera between the shots. I then took the separate images and allowed the computer to imagine what happened between the frames–I did this using a morph program. Usually morph programs are used to change one object into another, but in SAND I used it to create an explanation (a visual one) for the changes that happened between the information that the computer had (it had only the separate stills). Of course, it didn’t always guess right: things may move from left to right, when they actually were pulled apart, etc.

“The mistakes–the artifacts from the morph–create their own poems, from their difference between what actually happened and what it “guessed” happened. My goal in the piece was to invent a new poetic space, which I believe I succeeded in doing here. And of course, there are parallels among all the media channels in the piece, as rememberances, arguments, occurrences, repeating riffs appear and advance in time”.

Unfortunately, soon after a working system was completed, I had to sell the Amiga-based system in order to purchase a business-oriented computer for my new Silicon Valley-based company Iconceptual. Only a few examples of the SAND exist.

At that same time, my video camera was stolen. I used the next few years to focus on music and musical systems. My next compositional system—consisting of software, MIDI-guitar, looping pedal and computer—generated a single piece. My “Duchamp Examination” is a demonstration of how a composer can dissect, examine and re-produce a precomposed (but not prerecorded) piece through a combination of analog and digital mastication and redigestion, in real-time solo performance before an audience. The Duchamp Prelude is a kind of electronic alapana, in which I explore the chordal sequence of the source piece “If Duchamp Drew Beautifully” through an overdriven TM-2 bandpass filter. I performed The Duchamp Examinations live online for an international audience through Electro-Music.com, as well as performances in California and New York.

Simultaneous Opposites, then, is itself the current evolution of a series of performance systems that I’ve programmed and integrated. A specific precursor is found in my 1972 16mm film of the same title. The 1972 Simultaneous Opposites was single-framed from a single tripod position. A second exploration incorporating this same approach, Intersticies, blended similar footage into video manipulation, and was produced at Synapse in 1975. Digital videos of these earlier works can be seen at www.robertedgar.com.

gaming

An Open Source Energy Game

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Chart #7 is interesting: note that over 55% of the energy produced in the US is wasted.
What do you think?
I’d love to see an open source Wikipedia type of dashboard of energy usage solutions. Something modularly developed, starting with low-detail objects that show energy sources, usage, and environmental impacts for the US. A group would have to manage the APIs, and expert groups could analyze proposed module algorithms for accuracy before an offered replacement would be allowed to go live. But a site like this would allow for a better public understanding of energy policies and better judgement for political action.

The link to the article and charts is here: http://www.scidacreview.org/1001/html/energy.html

Foucault, Specialist

May 1, 2010

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It’s Saturday morning, yellow light on green leaves. Morning NY TImes and coffee. Sigh. Trying again to make sense of the patchwork that is the news. The differences that lead us to our informed actions: between truth and meaning, between science and technology, between technology and sufficient care, between energy source and energy need, between belief and validation.

We have so much technology, and so many people. If we’d been through this life before we’d know how to use it correctly, but we don’t have that knowledge (apparently that data doesn’t transfer…). So we need to spend more time imagining the worst. Then, once we imagine these hells, we need to spend the money and time for both prevention and rescue.

The forethought before starting unnecessary wars. Before drilling a mile undersea. Before creating specialist systems for redirecting billions of dollars from the many to the one. Before moving the carbon from underground into the atmosphere.

The bigger the technology, the bigger the bang. Only the specialist technologists are near enough to the action to know or at least study how to build in the protection before the unintended fuse is lit. If they did this without the government, we wouldn’t need a government to protect the rest of us from the unimagined hells technology unleashes.

But how many times do we have to see it: the technologists don’t do it, they are too specialized and focused on the drill bit, and not on the asymmetrical accident.

And the businessmen funneling money into the technology company don’t do it, because the money spent in prevention reduces the profits, and the time spent in prevention means that someone else might get there first.

And so we are left with the government, whose trigger is the cataclysmic event. Without the government, there would be no prevention at all, only scars, the memory theaters of our surprise.

Foucault: “But if you ask me, does this new technology of power take its historical origin from an identifiable individual or group of individuals who decide to implement it so as to further their interest, or facilitate their utilization of the social body, then I would say no. These tactics were invented and organized from the starting points of local conditions and particular needs. They took place in piecemeal fashion prior to any class strategy designed to weld them into vast coherent ensembles”.

No gods in heaven, just this deep night.
Waves meet the island, or miss it.
Seasons strike the land, or kiss it.
Blind planets spinning in darkness and light.
-rbe

aesthetics, anthro-poetic, Michael Moore

Learning and Communing

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In reaction to Judith Warner’s good post:
The Shame Game – Judith Warner Blog – NYTimes.com

I absolutely support Michael Moore. But I see an addiction supported by people and media that forces statements into dichotomies. One should find a common ground because that is usually the first step to breaking apart a false dichotomy that is presented by ideologies, media, talk-show hosts and, yes, directors.

When I questioned her and openly told her that this was wrong, she replied that the lender told her that “everyone does it.” But the fact that everyone is breaking the law or acting out of greed does not justify a wrong action. Overgeneralized dichotomies are useful for focusing on a topic or problem. But if you stop your understanding there, you are stopping at the level of chiche. Once you have a topic in focus, go in closer and see the real landscape, the real texture and anthro-poetic STUFF that you don’t see from the conceptual distance. Use the dichotomy as a target that lets you destroy the myth.

People should be in school long enough to learn how to learn, and practiced enough at it to be addicted to it. Getting out after one only learns to cast or repeat cliches is a waste of time, and in my opinion, dangerous to the world culture.

Lastly: I believe that Michael Moore goes beyond his bravado–his films have matured greatly from his early work. I love his statement that communism isn’t the opposite of capitalism, democracy is. The statement reframes an old argument and dares you to come inside for the argument. That is honest filmmaking.

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