Tag Archives: aesthetics

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

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Art and Film and Video and Synapse

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This was first published (May 18 2024) as a note to Tom Sherman, replying to a posting he made about Syracuse University’s VPA and Newhouse Schools.

Tom,

Well-thought, and well-written. This is a huge subject, one that has a long and important history at Syracuse, and one that is still developing at the speed of light.

I have a lot to relate about the subjects you bring up here. And even more in the doing, every stroke of the way. I will respectfully keep it as brief as I can, as your text already invokes so much. I’ll provide some teleological history, about the early cleaving between film and video at Syracuse University. It’s personal, as I’m describing what was happening while I was part of it.

I entered Syracuse in 1970, in liberal arts. Within a month I switched to VPA, as I couldn’t stand the huge lecture class format. I entered VPA with an Independent Study major… I was the only person I knew with that designation. I took a film class from Newhouse, as Newhouse had the only film equipment. In the class we used 16mm film and equipment. My learning was primarily through hitchhiking down to Manhattan, where Anthology Film Archives had just opened, and my high-school friend Robert Polidori worked, and would show me hours of films during my visits… augmented by the formal shows at night.

In a couple of years VPA hired Owen Shapiro and announced its own film major. We continued to use Newhouse’s 16mm equipment (and B&W processing). Owen showed us hours of Godard films, which we’d never see through Newhouse. While in New York I’d visit the Kitchen and hear early Steve Reich and Phil Glass performances, my Newhouse film teacher contemptuously referred to them as the “maniacal edge” of music. No one at Newhouse would know who Michael Snow or Paul Sharrits were.

Meanwhile, a handful of brilliant, late-1960s Syracuse alumni (Lance Wisniewski, Bob Burns, Carl Geiger, Gail Waldron) put together a project proposal to simultaneously offer the University a plan to build and manage a local cable system that would offer students, staff, and faculty their own access to video production and presentation; and an offer to the New York State Council of the Arts to provide access to video production facilities and services to artists in New York state who want to get involved in the new video medium. Note that up to that moment, video production required access to television studios and their procedures, which was prohibitively expensive, not open to outsiders, nor accommodating to experimentation with the equipment.

Thus Synapse Video was born within Syracuse University. Newhouse provided access to 2” tape facilities for broadcast-quality production, and the cable head end provided access to ½” portable and 1” studio-based equipment, along with both portable and studio cameras. Here’s a link to a post by Synapse editor Paul Daugherty about the Newhouse side: https://avideolife.wordpress.com/…/editing-area-used…/

and a link to an early announcement of the Synapse visiting artist program: https://www.vasulka.org/…/MediaPoli…/VisitingArtProg.pdf

At the beginning of the program, there were three of us who were both SU VPA students and part of Synapse: myself, Pam Shaw, and Bill Viola. For my part in this, I designed and taught two classes offered through VPA: a visiting artist class that trained and provided crew for the visiting artists, and a class in “Video Aesthetics” which was a hands-on class where we all experimented with the equipment and tried to understand what we were doing in relation to the history of art.

Film majors had very little to do with Synapse, which was purely video-based. I was really the only one with a foot in both. In 1972 VPA created a Film Major, and I switched from an Independent Study major to a Film major. However, my daily practice was in both: video art (or, as you say, art video) at Synapse, and film art through my major. Note that after graduating with the first VPA Film Majors in 1974, Synapse paid my tuition for the next two years, so I continued to teach the two video courses as I was then one of the first group of students who earned a Film graduate degree through VPA. Again: a foot in both worlds, but both were in VPA.

The thing is, this all happened so fast, and the media were developing so quickly, that the University gambled that it was doing the right thing. We all did the same thing—it’s easy to see that people involved at the time in film or video art were not looking at their long-term financial prospects. There wasn’t a business there to be learned. There were just lives to be invented.

One more historical note: all of us at that time were informed by the ever-present art education department, which insisted that art education focus on the first six years of life… before the child learned to read. And the title of that department was Synaesthetic Education. VPA put an end to that a few years after I left.

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.