Numinous The Music of Joseph C. Phillips Jr. |
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This post is the sixth in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. Previous posts in the series featured:
6. “Unlimited” “…we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.” 1 ![]() In January 2009 I stood freezing on the National Mall in Washington D.C. with two million others witnessing Barack Obama become President of the United States. Standing there with faces black, brown, and beige there was a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation that the truly unlimited opportunity the original “promise of America” represented, seemed finally reachable to not only someone like me, but seemly anyone and everyone with ability, a dream, temerity, perseverance, and luck. That day felt like a beginning, where the phrase “one nation” took on renewed resonance and meaning. And while the realities of governance since then have tempered the fires of hope, they have not extinguished them. No matter her ultimate direction America is forever changed, not only for the now but for the “unborn millions to come” in the long now. Producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff with their “Philly Sound”—an often energetic and richly orchestrated dance music—are sometimes credited with laying the foundations for disco in the 1970s. In my ancient early days growing up, before I had any idea of who Gamble and Huff were or exactly what disco was, the songs they produced—such as “Me and Mrs. Jones,” “Back Stabbers,” “Now that We Found Love,” “Love Train,” “For the Love of Money,” “When Will I See You Again,” and “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” (also known as the Soul Train theme song)—formed an indelible imprint on an impressionable little kid. Often I was less interested about what the singers actually sang about (was too young to understand much anyway). Rather, I enjoyed the mood, atmosphere, and energy those songs created; the sophisticated way they moved you or made you want to move, “it like put a bow tie on the funk. It made it elegant." 2 Echoes from “The Love I Lost” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring the incredible lead singing of Teddy Pendergrass and “Love’s Theme” by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra (an artist influenced by Gamble and Huff) can be heard throughout “Unlimited.”
(note: the YouTube video of the 1994 documentary Rock & Roll is from the BBC version, and NOT the version that aired on PBS and that I recorded on my VCR back then; among some slight, but noticeable differences between the two versions are the PBS version was narrated by Liev Schreiber and also featured some different musical acts shown. The opening part on the above video clip features the song "The Love I Lost" and is in both versions) Notes 1. From Barack Obama’s “Speech on Race” in Philadelphia, March 18, 2008. (Transcript, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0). 2. Quote from Fred Wesley, trombonist in James Brown Band. From "Making it Funky" episode of PBS/BBC documentary by David Espar Rock & Roll (1995). POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:00 AM
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This post is the fifth in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. Previous posts in the series featured:
5. “Alpha Man” "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. "1 I did not grow up in a ghetto, but that sentiment most definitely fit me in my younger years. Glasses, check; Comic books, check; computers, check. And while I was an outstanding athlete growing up, and had that to fall back on in the neighborhood social hierarchy, one of my younger pursuits was drawing my own comic books. One character I created was called Alpha Man: a lowly Earth physician who through a freakish accident (naturally) was imbued with the ‘cosmic force.’ Initially he was (ambivalently) on a team of evil, but after a nasty defeat he was banished to the far reaches of the galaxy, where he became a solitary exile wandering the universe; in the process he became a wise and sage protector. While one can detect hints of the Silver Surfer, the character of Alpha Man was more influenced by Carl Sagan. In his groundbreaking television series, Cosmos, which I watched as it premiered on PBS, a number of episodes imagined an interstellar space-ship, piloted by a single life form, traveling the mysteries of the universe collecting information for an ‘Encyclopædia Galactica’. This image continues to hold a particular fascination for me. Profane, beautiful, ebullient, and melancholy, it speaks of the eternal; not only of the infinity of the universe itself, but also the infinite capacity and imagination of the mind to explore the unknown (and the unknowable). About ninth grade Gustav Holst’s The Planets was the first cassette tape I remember asking my mom to buy me. The entire piece, which sounded little like anything I had ever heard to that point (well maybe John Williams’s Star Wars), had a deep impact on my beginning musical aspirations. The movements “Venus” and “Saturn” were not my favorites back then (“Mars” and “Jupiter” were) but since then have offered inspiration that found its way into “Alpha Man.” “Saturn” from Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, an album that was a tutor in my early musical schooling, was another appropriate addition to the development of “Alpha Man.” Ecstatic Music Festival with Imani Uzuri Saturday March 16th, 2013 7:30 pm Merkin Concert Hall 129 W. 67th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave) NYC Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the movements from Changing Same. Notes 1. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 22 (Riverhead Trade, 2008). POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 9:30 AM This post is the fourth in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. Previous posts in the series featured:
4. “The Most Beautiful Magic” I don't remember the first time I heard something from Prince and the Revolution's Purple Rain, but I definitely remember friends coming back to school raving about the tour in 1984 and it's sold-out two-week legendary run at my local arena (regretfully I didn't go and it would be another 10 years or so before I saw Prince live for the first time). Back in the day, before he started being more accessible to interviews and public appearances Prince was this decidedly enigmatic yet strangely compelling figure in my consciousness. Shortly after the album came out I was sitting in my cousin's room one day and listening to the LP (remember the time when one would actually stop the world spinning to sit down and spend time listening); now I'm sure it wasn't the first time I heard songs from the album, since almost everything was on rotation on the radio, but it was the most memorable: reading the LP liner notes, debating who was better, Michael Jackson or Prince, and constantly spinning the record backwards when it got to the end of "Purple Rain" and "Darling Nikki" trying to decode the messages from the ether. It would be another few years before I actually saw the movie, adding another layer of mystery behind Prince and the album. Looking back, this seminal 1984 album was a major influence on my personal musical development. As a young teenager listening to the then just released Purple Rain was revelatory. With its virtuosic and vertiginous mixture of rock, funk, R&B, pop, and electronica, Prince’s “Minneapolis sound” was a perspicacious vision of music as an integrated fusion of styles and genres that wholly resonated with my own nascent mixed music aesthetics, philosophies, and aspirations. “Purple Rain,” “Beautiful Ones,” and “Computer Blue,” three songs from Purple Rain, are the deep structures that help build “The Most Beautiful Magic,” with the emotional inspiration coming from Richard and Mildred Loving. The Lovings were the couple at the center of the landmark June 12, 1967 Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, effectively ending America’s miscegenation laws banning interracial marriages. “The Most Beautiful Magic” title is a quote from the movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where one character describes the singular beauty that comes from a basic and simple (magical) act. This seemed appropriate to describe the affirmative power and courage of the Lovings to marry despite unjust laws legally denying them the opportunity to do so. As Mildred Loving explained in a speech celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, their act of defiance “wasn't to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.”1 "The Most Beautiful Magic" is dedicated to my wife. Notes 1. This statement from Mildred Loving was prepared for the 40th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. See http://www.freedomtomarry.org/pdfs/mildred_loving-statement.pdf. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:00 AM This post is the third in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the movements of my composition Changing Samepremiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. The other parts of the series included:
I remember hearing and reading the buzz about mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's much-heralded 2003 Nonesuch recording of J.S. Bach's cantata Ich habe genug BWV 82 long before I was actually able to hear it (knowledge of the powerful Peter Sellars staging of the two Bach cantatas featured on the album came later still; and I must say I was not disappointed when my ears finally were able to hear Lieberson's exquisite voice on the recording). I first heard the song "Someday We'll All Be Free" when Aretha Franklin's version was featured in the 1992 film Malcolm X(an aside: if Daniel Day-Lewis was rightly lauded by the Oscars for his impressive channeling of the "Great Emancipator" in Lincoln, then Denzel Washington's equally compelling Malcolm, should have been also justly swaged by the Academy). It wasn't until almost a decade after seeing Spike Lee's film that I found my way to Donny Hathaway's original 1973 version on his last studio album, Extensions of a Man. Both the Lieberson version of Ich habe genug and the Hathaway version of "Someday We'll All Be Free" are the musical inspirations behind my "Miserere." Traditionally Miserere is a musical setting of the 51st Psalm (Miserere mei, Deus, secundum misericordiam tuam ("O God, have mercy upon me, according to thine heartfelt mercifulness") and has been set by composers such as Gregorio Allegri, Josquin des Pres, Henryk Gorecki, and Arvo Pärt. My “Miserere” however does not seek to reflect any kind of religious faith of salvation in the hereafter; rather it is a lamentation of more terrestrial pleadings. Taking inspiration from the Bach, whose title translates to “I have enough,” the original lyrics of “Miserere” begin with "I have had enough" and continue expressing weary frustration and doubt in the ability to come to terms with one’s many struggles and problems. The lyrics of “Miserere” convey a muted sense of earthly hope in the face of a seemingly increased hopelessness. And perhaps it is that hope in the face of hopelessness and doubt, one will "emerge from all the suffering that still binds [us] to the world."1
Ecstatic Music Festival with Imani Uzuri Saturday March 16th, 2013 7:30 pm Merkin Concert Hall 129 W. 67th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave) NYC Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the movements from Changing Same. NOTES: 1. “Da entkomm ich aller Not, Die mich noch auf der Welt gebunden.” J.S. Bach, Ich habe genug, translated by Pamela Dellal,http://www.emmanuelmusic.org/notes_translations/translations_cantata/t_bwv082.htm POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 7:56 PM This post is the second in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. 2. “Behold the Only Thing Greater than Yourself” I remember sitting down as a family to watch the mini-series Roots and ours were one of many families that did the same. Roots became a talked about topic in my neighborhood and in the backyard football and baseball field. Not that I was particularly interested in slavery but even the young elementary school kid I was recognized that Roots was an amazing achievement at that time: an entire high-profile TV series based on black characters that not only black people were interested in watching. It taught a very early lesson to me that stories involving black people and lives were also worth watching and telling. The title for the second movement of Changing Same comes from the scene in Roots when the family patriarch lifts his newborn child to the star-filled night sky and proclaims “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself.” Those words are a powerfully plangent call valuing one’s intrinsic self-worth and potential in spite of societal resistance often working in opposition to maintaining a positive self-evaluation. Throughout America’s history, blacks confronted this resistance, as James Baldwin wrote, by “groaning and moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting” with “some tremendous strength…nevertheless being forged, which is part of [black] legacy today.”1 And today it is often single mothers left to hold on to that legacy, presenting their children before the world with the gift of love, resiliency, resolve, and strength. This movement is dedicated to my mom, who struggled as a single parent to raise me and my siblings with that gift of love and strength, resolve, and resiliency so that we are able to not only survive but live and thrive; to have skills and fortitude to take advantage of any opportunity, adding a small contribution to that legacy. Ecstatic Music Festival with Imani Uzuri Saturday March 16th, 2013 7:30 pm Merkin Concert Hall 129 W. 67th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave) NYC Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the movements from Changing Same. NOTES: 1. James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis.” POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:00 AM This post is a first in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. 1. “19” “[W]e must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”1 Being a very young kid growing up in the 1970s I was still forming my thoughts about life. But some images from the media stuck out and left an indelible impression on me about the range and diversity in the black world: movies such as Car Wash and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings and other blaxploitation films (although I didn't know the term then), TV shows such as Soul Train, Good Times, Sanford and Sons, Fat Albert and The Jeffersons, Dr. J, Mohammed Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, the great multi-ethnic Big Red Machine, the Parliament Funkadelic LPs of my parents, and the black cultural movement featuring powerful political figures such as Shirley Chisholm, Harold Washington, and Angela Davis. Even though I was too young to understand exactly who or what she was or about, the image of a full Afro'd Angela Davis speaking was quite iconic to my young mind. “19” is partly inspired by a number of seemly disparate musical sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke opus 19 from 1911 (one of the first Schoenberg pieces I studied and liked, specifically the Maurizio Pollini DG recording--nineteen is also the age when I began studying music as an undergraduate, after two years working toward a biochem major), Curtis Mayfield’s “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” from his seminal score to the 1972 film Superfly, and a hint of the go-go music of Chuck Brown. The emotional timbre of “19” however, is inspired by the activist Angela Davis and her status in the black culture of my youth. Writer James Baldwin's November 19, 1970 “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis” is stirring in its description of Davis as a soldier in the on-going struggle for racial and social equality and a martyr in the “enormous revolution in black consciousness…[that] means the beginning or the end of America.”2 The letter, while condemning the false arrest of Angela Davis that summer, goes on to describe the contemporary state of racial dynamics in the United States in biting and incisive commentary. Ecstatic Music Festival with Imani Uzuri Saturday March 16th, 2013 7:30 pm Merkin Concert Hall 129 W. 67th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave) NYC Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the movements from Changing Same. NOTES: 1. James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis.” 2. Ibid. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 11:30 AM MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2013
"R&B is about emotion, issues purely out of emotion. New Black Music is also about emotion, but from a different place, and finally, towards a different end. What these musicians feel is a more complete existence. That is, the digging of everything." -LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), “The Changing Same” (1966) Changing Same, my composition premiering on the Ecstatic Music Festival on March 16, 2013, is a philosophical and musical departure for me: it is a conscious acknowledgement of my early heritage in black popular music and culture. Previously my work was little interested in specifically or overtly reflecting this background in my musical language; my philosophy was (and still is) representative of a ‘post-black’ artistic freedom to explore any creative interest, unburdened with the obligation of only representing or being influenced by ‘the race.’ I am a composer, not just a ‘black’ composer. My journey ‘home’ began a few years ago when I was taken aback by something writer John Murph stated in an interview: “…there’s the whole idea of what is deemed more artistically valid… [with] artists incorporating contemporary pop music. I notice a certain disdain when some black…artists channel R&B, funk, and hip-hop, while their white contemporaries get kudos for giving makeovers to the likes of Radiohead, Nick Drake, and Bjork.”1 While my influences growing up (and now) are quite catholic—an inter-cultural fluency wherein James Brown and Yes, Eddie Van Halen and John Coltrane, go-go music and minimalism provide equal inspiration—I wondered if John Murph’s statement was really true and if so, why was it true? Regardless of the validity of the charge, this question provoked a challenge in me. Fueling a desire, like Duke Ellington in the 1940s with Black, Brown, and Beige or Wadada Leo Smith recently with Ten Freedom Summers, to create music that speaks to the “dichotomies of high and low, inside and outside, tradition and innovation”2 within black culture and explores the richness and complexity of being black in 21st century America; but also music that resonates a more universal artistic expression filtered through the changing sameness of an intimately autobiographical perspective. So-called indie classical/alt-classical is a reflection of alternative rock and other vernacular music as a palimpsest for the creation of new contemporary music of an expansive and open definition and vision. I wanted to express similar aesthetic ideas however using black vernacular music as the main source, testing John Murph’s assertion. From these musings the gestation of Changing Same began. Musically almost every movement is influenced by a fragment, motive, or chord progression from various black popular music influences I grew up with. I, however, wanted to recognize other sources of inspiration as well—a “digging of everything”—so almost all the movements are connected to various influential classical music and/or personal and cultural memories during my lifetime. This miscegenation is done not in a post-modern sense of ironic collage, but rather as a genuine search to create an organic fusion of artistic and cultural influences, to create a new personal artistic statement that is more than the sum of its parts. This is mixed music. Check back because in later posts I will be discussing the inspirations behind each movement for Changing Same and for the music nerds out there with a few movements I'll provide some detailed analysis. Hope you to see you in March. Ecstatic Music Festival with Imani Uzuri Saturday March 16th, 2013 7:30 pm Merkin Concert Hall 129 W. 67th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave) NYC NOTES: 1. Interview with John Murph on Open Sky Jazz “Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black jazz writers tell their story pt2,” http://www.openskyjazz.com/2009/06/aint-but-a-few-of-us-black-jazz-writers-tell-their-story-pt2/. 2. Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What it Means to Be Black Now, 32 (Atria Books, 2011). POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:30 AM ![]() The schedule for the 2012 BAM Next Wave Festival was just announced yesterday and this year the Festival will include Numinous! I have been commissioned by the Next Wave Festival to compose an original score to the newly restored silent film, The Loves of Pharaoh by director Ernst Lubitsch. Numinous will perform the score live with the film at the new Steinberg Screen at BAM's Harvey Theater. We are deeply honored to be apart of the one of the preeminent festivals in the country, especially in this its 30th year. This has been in the works for a while now so I'm happy to (finally!) share the news. Here's the info: October 18, 19, 20, 2012 7:30 pm The Harvey Theater 651 Fulton Street Brooklyn Academy of Music Tickets: $25, $35 Subway: 2, 3, Q, B, to Atlantic C to Lafayette N to Pacific Street Film runs about 100 minutes, with no intermission Tickets are available at www.bam.org/nextwavefestival. There will be an Artist Talk on Friday October 19 after the showing, featuring myself and Thomas Bakels of Alpha-Omega Digital GmbH, who did a wonderful job with the restoration (they also did the digital work on the 2001 and 2010 restorations of Fritz Lang's Metropolis). Released in 1922, this film was Lubitsch's last silent film in Germany before coming to Hollywood; in fact, this film was a calling card to Hollywood to show he could direct spectacle and "a cast of thousands" as well as D.W. Griffith in his infamous influential The Birth of a Nation (1915). Like that film, as well as later epic films such as Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur (1925) or Cecille B. Demille's The Ten Commandments (1923), The Loves of Pharaoh is grand in scope and ambition and shows a master director's skill even though it was a few years away from the famous musicals and comedies that cemented him and his "Lubitsch touch" in the pantheon of great Hollywood "Golden Age" directors from the 1930s and 1940s. (photo credits: top photo, scene from The Loves of Pharaoh from Alpha-Omega; bottom photo, German poster from IMDb) POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 3:47 PM Dreams of Wonders Undreamt
"...may your generation see wonders undreamt." -Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot Dreams of Wonders Undreamt is another part of my dance project, To Begin the World Over Again, based on the writings of Thomas Paine. For this new piece, I set some words of Paine from Common Sense ("...the sun never shined on a cause of greater worth") in counterpoint to a passage from John Wintrop's City upon a Hill sermon from 1630 (the famous "we shall be as a City upon a Hill" that Ronald Reagan made famous) and Nicholas Black Elk's On the Battle at Wounded Knee from Black Elk Speaks ("Now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop...", describing the terrible massacre in 1890, this last major battle in the "Indian Wars"). Dreams of Wonders Undreamt takes its title from the dedication Carl Sagan wrote to his son at the beginning of his book The Pale Blue Dot. Where he envisions for his son a more global hope of future wonders, I have translated the phrase to a more local level: the wonders and potential that the promise of America presages, and of which, by implication, has not fulfill. This might seem a critique on the state of America, and in many ways it is. However, Dreams of Wonders Undreamt does not come from a place of political polemics, where any critique or questioning is an apostasy. Rather, my composition is a love song to the promise of America, to that unbound potential and ideal that Thomas Paine wrote and spoke about so eloquently and which I believe all Americans would like to see it be even more worthy to. Numinous Monday March 21, 2011 9 PM to 11 PM $10 suggested donation Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Park Slope Take the M, R Train to Union Street Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the compositions we'll be performing. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 11:19 AM FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2011
19 “…we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” James Baldwin, from An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis 19 is inspired by two, seemly disparate sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke Op. 19 from 1911 and Angela Davis. The initial musical impetus was with the Schoenberg, specifically it was one of my "what if" questions, where I challenge myself with a compositional quandary. In this case, can I make Schoenberg funky? But the emotional timber of 19 is inspired by the activist Angela Davis, specifically her iconic status in Black culture of the 1970s. Particularly I was moved by James Baldwin's An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis from November 19, 1970, which while condemning the arrest of Angela Davis a few months before the letter, also goes on to describe, in biting and incisive commentary, the state of racial dynamics in the United States and paints Davis as a soldier in that on-going struggle for racial and social equality. 19 is one part of a larger, as of now untitled, mixed music composition that will be recorded next year. Numinous Monday March 21, 2011 9 PM to 11 PM $10 suggested donation Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Park Slope Take the M, R Train to Union Street Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the compositions we'll be performing. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 9:07 AM Miserere
I first heard J.S. Bach's cantata Ich habe genug BWV 82 in the hauntingly beautiful version sung by mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson on her much praised 2003 Nonesuch recording. The German title, which translates as "I have enough," is a sublime spiritual expression about fulfillment and acceptance of the life waiting beyond the living. I first heard Donny Hathaway's "Someday We'll All Be Free" sung by Aretha Franklin on the end credits of the great Spike Lee movie Malcolm X and later found the original on Hathaway's last studio album, Extensions of a Man. Whereas the words and music of the Bach and Hathaway reflect a faith in salvation in the hereafter, my Miserere does not seek any kind of religious statement or connotations. While most Miserere's in music come as a setting of the 51st (or 50th) Psalm ("Miserere mei, Deus", translated as "Have mercy on me, O God"), I am using miserere in one of its other non-religious meanings: as a vocal lament. In ancient Greek drama and later in operas, the lament was a moment of focused expressive intensity in the overall formal structure of the drama or opera. Taking inspiration from the Bach, my original lyrics open with "I have had enough" and continue to expresses a weary frustration and doubt in the ability to solve or come to terms with the many struggles and problems facing us. Although like the Hathaway song, with its optimism that someday will come, I do convey a muted sense of earthly hope in the face of a seemingly increased hopelessness; and perhaps it is by that hope in hopelessness and doubt, that we will "emerge from all the suffering that still binds [us] to the world." Miserere is one part of a larger, as of now untitled, mixed music composition that will be recorded next year. Numinous Monday March 21, 2011 9 PM to 11 PM $10 suggested donation Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Park Slope Take the M, R Train to Union Street Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the compositions we'll be performing. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 11:10 AM Memory of Red Orange Laid Out in Still Waves Memory of Red Orange Laid Out in Still Waves was originally commissioned last year by Dave Douglas and the 2010 Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT). It premiered featuring Lew Soloff and Taylor Ho Bynum as trumpet soloists. For the Numinous concert, I've recast the trumpets as alto saxophones as well as expanded the ensemble from the original version. The title comes from a line in the opening of the sobering book by Edward P. Jones, The Known World which, while a work of fiction, was based upon the true incidents of African-Americans owning slaves during the 19th century. The book's subject, as well as the beautiful Kathelin Gray from the Ornette Coleman/Pat Metheny 1986 album Song X, are refracted and transmuted into an original composition that hopes to express the truism of James Baldwin's words about African-American culture (in An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis from 1970, which actually more directly inspired another composition for the 21st gig): There is always, of course, more to any picture than can speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some tremendous strength was nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. Memory of Red Orange Laid Out in Still Waves will also be one movement of a larger, as of now untitled, mixed music composition that will be recorded next year. Numinous Monday March 21, 2011 9 PM to 11 PM $10 suggested donation Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Park Slope Take the M, R Train to Union Street Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the compositions we'll be performing. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 11:14 AM ![]() Like many people I am thinking of Japan after the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and on-going nuclear danger. I am wishing the best not only for my friends, former students and their families, but for all of the people affected. To Kyoto Ando Hiroshige Station 48: Sakanoshita-juku, Mie PrefectureIn anticipation of the upcoming Numinous concert on March 21st, in the spirit of my Inside Vipassana series, I started a Numinous Crib Notes series to profile the compositions for the show. First up To Kyoto, a composition from our first CD and my homage of sorts to Steve Reich. I wrote the piece back in 2000 after my first trip to Japan, which did include a trip down from Tokyo to Kyoto. Here's my original program note for the piece: Tokaido Road was feudal Japan’s most traveled route. From Edo (old Tokyo) to the ancient capital Kyoto, it was used by nobles and peasants alike. Tokaido Road’s scenic landscapes of distant mountain views, open sea, and quaint towns and villages along the route, inspired Ando Hiroshige’s (1797-1858) famous painting series, Views from the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido. Today, the scenery is still inspiring, as seen from the Shinkansen (bullet train), which follows the old Tokaido route to Kyoto. Numinous Monday March 21, 2011 9 PM to 11 PM $10 suggested donation Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Park Slope Take the M, R Train to Union Street Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the compositions we'll be performing. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:14 AM ![]() A few years ago my wife and I took a trip to Malaysia. It was a 14-hour flight from JFK to Hong Kong, a wonderful layover in Hong Kong where we spent some time in town and then another 4 hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. We only spent our first and last day in KL, with the remainder of our time going around to different states on the peninsula. It was a wonderful time with many lovely adventures including tropical islands and beaches, tea plantations, wild monkeys, exotic culture, food, and people. When we came back to the USA, those adventures proved fruitful inspiration, for it spawned two compositions. The first was a piece called Rihla written for our Pulse project, Sihr Hilal. The second composition was Kelip-Kelip. Kelip-kelip is a Bahasa Malay word meaning "twinkle" and is used to describe fireflies. One of the Malaysian states we visited was Kuala Selangor and the village of Kuantan, where we took a late night ride on the Selangor River in a small boat called a sampan. Along the banks of the river were millions of fireflies lighting the "quiet darkness." However these were not the lightning bugs I grew up with, but rather fireflies that twinkle not in a greenish-yellow light but rather in a blue-ish LCD-like soft glow. And what was more amazing was that these fireflies did not flicker with a lazy stochasticity but rather in a beautiful synchronicity. When we came around a river bend in the pitch blackness and silence of the night to see the trees lit up and flashing together like Christmas trees lights was a moving and magical experience. Kelip-Kelip was written for a Numinous performance at Roulette's Children's Concert back in 2007 and I had the kids simulate the flashing of the kelip-kelip. Here is a video of the performance: Numinous
May 24, 2010 9pm Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Brooklyn, NY 11215-1308 (718) 789-2762 Donations (please be generous!) featuring: Ben Kono, Dan Willis, Ed Xiques (woodwinds); Stephanie Richards (trumpet); Ernest Stuart (trombone); Tom Beckham (vibraphone); Andrew Green (guitar); Megan Levin (harp); Jared Soldiviero (percussion); Ana Milosavljevic, Scott Tixier (violins); Will Martina, Lauren Riley-Rigby (cellos); Shawn Conley (bass) Be prepared, check back later for more... (Photo credit: Kelip-Kelip from visit-to-kl.com) POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:29 PM Thousands of years ago on the plains of Africa, one of our human ancestors gazed upward toward the night sky and began to wonder what those flickering lights were and how they came to be. Such thoughts on the origin of the universe (and humans’ place in it) have enraptured philosophers, theologians, and scientists since that first ancestor’s gaze skyward. Every society and culture has a creation story to explain how they and their world began. From the creation chants of the Maori people of New Zealand, to Hindi and Buddhist texts, to the Christian Bible, thoughts on the origin of the universe are usually sacred in nature. Elegant and sublime, these religious thoughts were the prevailing doctrine of the West until the rise of the scientific method in the seventeenth century. The twentieth century saw science develop its’ own elegant, sublime, and often exotic, thoughts on the origins of the universe.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, quantum theory was developed: a by-product of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. While the general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity on a large scale, quantum theory describes the universe on an extremely small scale. Neither theory, however, completely and accurately describes the observable universe, so today physicists search for a complete unified theory, one that weds the general theory of relativity with quantum theory. Quantum theory is a foundation of cosmology, the study of the origins of the universe. In 1926, Werner Heisenberg unveiled his uncertainty principle: “the more accurately you measure the position of a particle (of matter), the less accurately can you measure its speed” and vice versa. An observer can never really know the 'true' position of a particle. A particle can be in no place, all places, or even in two places at once! Thus 'empty space' can never be called empty. Subatomic particles can come in and out of existence by borrowing energy from energy fields. This quantum fluctuation takes place in a cloud or 'foam' of probability, which may have lead to an inflation of space and resulted in the big bang and the beginning of the universe. My Quantum Fluctuations opens with the percussion and bass laying down a high energy drum and bass type groove with Ernest Stuart's trombone soloing over top (the bass line here comes from Miles Davis' "Helen Butte" from the album On the Corner). Soon various 'quanta' bleep and blip in and out of the texture, while the solo continues. Eventually a melodic figure enters, is repeated, and built to a 'big bang' moment. Coming out of this event horizon another slower groove begins to emerge eventually surrounded by various clouds of intervalic structures leading to Ben Kono's non-chordal based alto saxophone solo. The alto solo is joined at the end with the trombone and Jared Soldiviero's percussion until climaxing with a unison melodic figure. Numinous May 24, 2010 9pm Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Brooklyn, NY 11215-1308 (718) 789-2762 Donations (please be generous!) featuring: Ben Kono, Dan Willis, Ed Xiques (woodwinds); Stephanie Richards (trumpet); Ernest Stuart (trombone); Tom Beckham (vibraphone); Andrew Green (guitar); Megan Levin (harp); Jared Soldiviero (percussion); Ana Milosavljevic, Scott Tixier (violins); Will Martina, Lauren Riley-Rigby (cellos); Shawn Conley (bass) Be prepared, check back later for more... (Photo credits: talklikeaphysicist.com; map.gsfc.nasa.gov; NASA from firstgalaxies.ucolick.org) POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 2:50 PM Next up in the Numinous Crib Notes series: Race Race was originally written for the Pulse project, The Eloquent Light back in 2006. If you don't know, Pulse is the composer 'federation' I lead and it also features composers Darcy James Argue, Jamie Begian, JC Sanford, Joshua Shneider, and Yumiko Sunami. The original version of Race was for a 10-person chamber ensemble, in addition to the soloists John McNeil on trumpet and Pete McCann on guitar. The composition takes its' name from my researching and viewing historical photos of Olympic runners going all the way back to the 1920 Olympics. It was wonderful to learn about and see photos of the great runners of the past such as Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses, Jesse Owens, Michael Johnson, Flo-Jo (Florence Griffith Joyner), Kip Keino, Paavo Nurmi, and Joan Beniot, all whose photos and more were used in a slide show that accompanied the original performances of Race. There were two photos that initially captivated me (above): one was a photo of Wilma Rudolph from the 1960 Olympics in Rome (I love the joy she has on her face as she crosses the line and without knowing her painful childhood and of course the oppressive racial environment at the time, one can imagine that she never knew of such hardship and disappointment); the other photo was a shot of Marion Jones from the 2000 Olympics in Australia (No matter what you think of Marion Jones, I just found the photo shares with the Wilma Rudolph one, an accurate depiction of the happiness running (and winning) can bring out in someone and that is one feeling I wanted Race to give to the listener). At the opening of Race, the guitar plays only three pitches (Bb-Eb-F) in an arpeggio pattern shifting between groups of three and four. This beginning is both harmonically (is it the key of Eb? F? Bb? or any number of other possibilities) and rhythmically ambiguous (the shifting pattern floats over the 3/2 metric stresses) and leads to the entrance of the harp playing (F-C-Bb), also in an arpeggio leading into the trumpet and trombone melody a few bars later. At this point I can imagine the stretching and preparation before the start of an early morning run or runners milling around before the start of a race. As the composition progresses there are various overlapping or "chasing" patterns between instruments of differing rhythmic groupings, with the trombone more melodic, often foreshadowing various intervallic permutations that are heard later in other instruments. The trumpet solo enters playing on top of various "streams" of melody, moving at different rhythmic rates until the tuba and cello enter with a more "funky" bass line. A brief interlude (I call it a "second wind") picks up some of the previous material heard in the trombone and, much like the final lap of a race, pushes it into a slightly different gear leading into the guitar solo. The end of the guitar solo smoothly leads into the last section which harmonically starts like the beginning, however now more rooted in various modal configurations of Eb (although there is never an Eb in the bass); the trombone and trumpet, again melodically dance around each other one last time before finally fading out, leaving the harp and violin as the last statements in the piece. At a Pulse rehearsal a couple of years ago, I told the musicians this section was like running through the finish line and finally beginning to catch your breathe as you wind down. Overall, like John Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine or Micheal Torke's Javelin or Run, I wanted Race to be a portrait of motion; a linear progression of movement to the end, much like an actual race. However there were no images of runners in my mind as I was composing the piece. Only after looking back on Race, and this sense of movement was I able to explore running as a metaphor. Here's what I said about Race in the program notes: Running is one of the oldest and most basic of human impulses. It can be a utilitarian exercise or save you from immediate danger. Also, as demonstrated by ‘Dan’ in World Record from the film Animatrix, running can be a vehicle to enlightenment as well as a delightful endeavor in and of itself, as any young kid in a playground would illustrate. My composition, Race, is inspired by that child-like joy of movement: of testing your body and spirit against others and against yourself. For inspiration, I used various historic images of runners from the Olympic Games that I felt were avatars of this drama, but also representative of the beauty and exultation of the race. Numinous May 24, 2010 9pm Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Brooklyn, NY 11215-1308 (718) 789-2762 Donations (please be generous!) featuring: Ben Kono, Dan Willis, Ed Xiques (woodwinds); Stephanie Richards (trumpet); Ernest Stuart (trombone); Tom Beckham (vibraphone); Andrew Green (guitar); Megan Levin (harp); Jared Soldiviero (percussion); Ana Milosavljevic, Scott Tixier (violins); Will Martina, Lauren Riley-Rigby (cellos); Shawn Conley (bass) Be prepared, check back later for more... POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:46 PM ![]() crib notes (from Urban Dictionary): a small instrument used to aid in the art of cheating. It is generally small pieces of paper with answers to a test, or just notes on a specific topic; notes for cheating on exams written on small and easily concealable pieces of paper with stealth in mind. Called "crib" notes because of the manner in which you hold the notes under your left hand/arm while writing with your right arm, keeping them concealed from teachers/professors with wondering eyes; notes written on the hand, arm, or leg to assist in cheating on quizzes and exams. In anticipation of the upcoming Numinous concert on May 24th, in the spirit of my Inside Vipassana series I did last fall, over the next week leading up to the concert (as time allows with all of the preparations) I thought I'd give you some brief insight to some of the compositions we'll be throwing down at the Brooklyn's Tea Lounge... First up, Madame Press Never Had to Holler at Morty Morton Feldman is one of my inspirations. In college, I remember vividly studying a number of his works in 20th century Music Theory and was astonished at how his music and approach was so distinct and beautiful with compositions such as deKooning, Rothko Chapel, For Franz Kline, Coptic Light, For Samuel Beckett, Only, among many, that I loved (and still love). Even at that time I made a connection between Feldman's evanescent ethereal clouds of sounds and bare sonorities with Claude Debussy's sonic liberation of harmony and quest for Symbolistic understatement. After many years of listening to their music and reading about their respective musical philosophies, they continue to hold a particularly special place for me. So when I started the writing of Madame Press Never Had to Holler at Morty, I treated it as a mash-up experiment: a 'what if?' project in the great Marvel comic tradition. This was my first attempt at fusing Feldmantonian elements with more funky, jazzy grooves (a few years later, my Quantum Fluctuations would be the second). Here's what I said about the piece in the program notes on its premiere in May 2001: American composer, Morton Feldman (1926-1987) wrote a piece for his former piano teacher entitled Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety (1970). In that piece, which I first heard on John Adams’ 1991 recording American Elegies (Nonesuch 79249-2), Morton Feldman’s typically soft and subtle shifts of sonorities and colors are there, but the piece also features, atypically for Feldman, a recurring motive (a downward major third)-one of the first of his pieces to feature repetition. In my composition, as a starting point, I took Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety and a quote from Feldman’s Essays (1985) speaking about how Madame Press was not a disciplinarian. Then asking myself what would happen if Morton Feldman listened to too much 70’s funk and soul (by way of 1996’s "Makes Me Wanna Holler"" by Me’shell Ndegéocello) and brought that to his lessons with Madame Press: would she still not be a disciplinarian? So you have this bass line from "Makes Me Wanna Holler" (transposed): coexisting with Feldman's falling third motif: with me adding my own take, combining to form (transposed): To get your ears ringing for the 24th, here's a video of a stripped down and edited version I did for a Numinous performance at a Roulette Children's concert in 2007 with Dan Willis (tenor sax), Amanda Monaco (guitar), and Deanna Witkowski (piano): Now for the Children's concert I took out a few elements from the original which allowed me to shorten the length of the piece while still keeping the general sense of the piece. However on the 24th, we'll be doing the original version.
Numinous May 24, 2010 9pm Tea Lounge 837 Union Street Brooklyn, NY 11215-1308 (718) 789-2762 Donations (please be generous!) featuring: Ben Kono, Dan Willis, Ed Xiques (woodwinds); Stephanie Richards (trumpet); Ernest Stuart (trombone); Tom Beckham (vibraphone); Andrew Green (guitar); Megan Levin (harp); Jared Soldiviero (percussion); Ana Milosavljevic, Scott Tixier (violins); Will Martina, Lauren Riley-Rigby(cellos); Shawn Conley (bass) Check back later for more Crib Notes... (Photo credit: Morton Feldman with John Adams by Betty Freeman from www.newmusicbox.org) POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 6:16 PM Next Thursday is the premiere of my composition, Liquid Timepieces, commissioned by pianist Simone Dinnerstein for her Neighborhood Concert Series. It was written for and will be performed by the wonderful student group Face the Music on April 15th 7p.m. at the P.S. 321 auditorium. The years 2010 and 2011 are the anniversaries of Gustav Mahler’s birth (1850) and death (1911). I wanted to celebrate these so-called ‘Jubilee Years’ by writing a work that honors the profound influence Mahler’s music has exerted on my own musical development and thinking. Liquid Timepieces is my own musical encomium to him and despite some subtle references to musical moments from Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, No. 3, and No. 9, Liquid Timepieces is not meant to sound like Mahler. Rather, I hoped, through my own distinct musical expression and language, to create a similar resonance to the protean spirit of life and the world that permeates his works. The evocative phrase, "liquid timepieces," comes from a line in the poem "Designer Kisses" by Major Jackson. I heard Major Jackson recite the poem himself last summer at the 2009 River to River Festival Poets House tribute to Meredith Monk. I didn't remember much from the poem at the time except this one phrase that stuck out and I wrote down: By morning, We’re laid out like liquid timepieces, each other’s exercise In perpetual enchantment, for there is that beach in us that is untranslatable Liquid Timepieces, scored for Flute, Bb Clarinet, Alto Saxophone, Electric Guitar, 2 Electric Keyboards, and a small string section (violins, violas, cellos, bass), opens with a declarative concert G# played in various octaves by all of the instruments (see above photo of the first page to the score). This iteration of the G# becomes a recurring character throughout the piece: sometimes as a waylayer, sometimes as an interrupter, and other times as a something that just needs to be heard amongst other things. A 'steady state' eighth note pulse begins in the keyboard (which you can also see above) and can be felt in various instruments throughout the first half of the composition, generally in the guise of little cells of rhythmic activity. This forward momentum continues until a longer lined melodic figure slowly becomes emergent; at first only in the cellos and bass, then more prominently in the violins and violas, and later the woodwinds join in as the sweeping melody builds to a higher yet softer place and as the rhythmic motion begins to lengthen, we arrive at a moment of slower repose. Earlier I mentioned some connections to Mahler's music buried within Liquid Timepieces. At this median point in the music I wanted to highlight one of those connections which is decidedly on the surface. The counterpoint in the above trio (in concert pitch and in 2/2 meter) between the flute, clarinet, and violin is consciously reminiscent of moments in Mahler's Ninth Symphony where the full orchestral texture is dropped for a more chamber music-like atmosphere. And the melody played by the clarinet above, comes directly from the wonderfully exalted horn melody in the last movement of Mahler's Ninth: This melody, shown above in concert pitch in its first appearance, is generally marked in the score "stark hervortretend" (in marked prominence). Heard slightly different the few times in the Mahler movement it comes up, this phrase slices through the symphonic background texture like a fiery prophet coming out of the wilderness heralding wisdom and insight at precisely the moment needed. However, in Liquid Timepieces I use the melody more as a wise sage that modestly offers insight clothed as advice in personal choice and direction: it functions either as a sort of cantus firmus, just one part of an egalitarian melodic scheme (see above trio) or as an effect much like a musical palimpsest, where 'ghosts' of the Mahler melody are layered on top of each other to create a texture of weaving melodies. In the below excerpt from my score you can see I'm asking the musicians to gradually improvise with either a version of the actual Mahler melody (Synth 1 and Cello; Violin 2) or a modified retrograde version of it (Synth 2 and Viola). Not improvisation in a 'jazz' sense where the soloist tries to create variations on an original melody often not actually stating the melody, but rather improvisation where the musicians keep the melodic shape and tones intact, but change their rhythmic and temporal approaches to playing it. The floating texture continues and builds as a simple bass melody enters, but gradually fades as rhythmic pulses, whiffs from the earlier steady state incarnation, begin to break through to the foreground from its background origin. Soon the eighth note pulses and a short, repeating musical cell that is a canon between the keyboard 1 and alto saxophone, clarinet, and keyboard 2, along with a spasmodic occurrence of that octave G# I spoke earlier about, all overlap each other and grow in intensity and excitement. This energy is dissipated somewhat by a final string melodic coda (a distance relative of the Mahler melody above) while insistent eighth note cells are heard in the woodwinds and keyboard 1. However, the melody and pulses soon escalate into a final resplendent flourish on G#.
I've been to a few of Face the Music's rehearsals of Liquid Timepieces, and while this is difficult music, the students are doing a wonderful job tackling not only the technical challenges but the musical and conceptual ones as well. I hope you can make it to next Thursday's premiere performance to hear for yourself. POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 7:00 AM One thing that I wanted to create with Vipassana was a composition that was integrated from the first piece to the last. My conception was more symphonic, with cross relationships and development between parts rather than suite-like. In fact Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9 was a structural inspiration, although it didn't work out exactly as I planned. Like Symphony No. 9, my initial thought for Vipassana was to have two large Adagios one at the beginning and one at the end, with two smaller works in the middle. I did end up with two larger movements, although "Of Climbing Heaven and Gazing on the Earth" (the first movement) happily did not want to become an Adagio. Also unlike the Mahler, my original intent was to link the individual works with small "transitions" featuring the different instrumental sections of the ensemble. But as I was writing the pieces that idea didn't seem to be what the whole needed or was saying either, although a vestige of this idea can still be found in the opening soli string sextet of last movement, "The Nothingness that is the Source of Everything". Each of the individual movements of Vipassana can stand on their own, but it is in the totality of the four parts together that more richness of details and commonality become apparent. One of these details is the relationship Vipassana has to two compositions by other composers I admire: New World by Björk and "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" by Gustav Mahler. Here's how I described the development of "The Nothingness that is the Source of Everything" in the program notes at the premiere: The last movement was the longest on my mind and the last I decided to tackle. Originally I entitled this movement, "Ich bin der neuen Welt abhanden gekommen" (“I am lost to the new world”). This was to reflect the dual inspirations of the piece: Gustav Mahler’s beautiful orchestral song "Ich bin der neuen Welt abhanden gekommen" (“I am lost to the world”) from Rückertlieder (1899-1903) and Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s haunting "New World" from Lars von Trier’s movie Dancer in the Dark (2000). I had Selmasongs (the title of the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack) long before I saw the movie. However, it wasn’t until after watching the movie on DVD, that I was really moved to arrange the final haunting song of the movie, sung by Selma (Björk) as she is waiting to be executed for a crime she didn’t commit. I transcribed "New World" with the hopes of arranging it for Numinous but over time I could not complete it to my satisfaction. Working on the arrangement intermittently for a year, it wasn’t until in the middle of a casual conversation with one of my musicians about the status of my 'arrangement', I suddenly thought of combining material from "New World" with "Ich bin der neuen Welt abhanden gekommen". Not in an arrangement per se, but by using those pieces as source material to inspire a newly composed piece. Now, this final movement of Vipassana began to take shape, at least in my mind. You might wonder why I would have thought that Björk and Mahler would have anything to do with each other? I know that they do kind of make strange musical bedfellows but it's interesting how the unconscious mind can see connections or other qualities that we might otherwise miss or not notice. It really was a 'moment' when the solution appeared to me seemly out of no where, when seconds before there was nothing to see. Thinking about it after the fact, the connections between the Mahler and Björk pieces seem obvious, at least on the surface. Here's the melody for "New World": And here is the Mahler: Both pieces share a few things: I didn't include the key signatures but both are in Eb, both share an octave range (from Bb3 to Bb4), and both have a similar melodic contour. How I used these two pieces as source material is by often utilizing, subverting, or refracting the intervallic relationships in the melodies. Sometimes this intervallic manipulation affected how I moved between harmonies, but more often than not, the subtle influence of the two pieces on what I created was more melodic. And while all of the melodic material is original in the four parts of Vipassana (except for one almost literal quote from Mahler), there is really only one place where the relationship between Mahler and Björk is in the foreground. This comes at the very end of "The Nothingness that is the Source of Everything" where a sort of Björk "New World"-like melody (played by a solo oboe, second line) is pitted in counterpoint against the sort of Mahler "abhanden gekommen"-like melody (played by a solo English Horn, top line): One could look at this proxy battle between Mahler and Björk as a choice between the hope of a 'new world' versus the despair of being 'lost' in the old one. In the end not only does hope and Björk 'win out', but the English Horn melody, which was playing the sort of Mahler, is transformed to the hope of the 'new world' and the sort of Björk. Now this kind of extra musical existential crisis was not what I had in mind as I was writing the piece. All I knew is I wanted the melodies to play against each other and I did not think about "fate knocking at the door" or anything like that. My analysis came when after performing the piece and thinking about it, I realized that one could 'interpret' the end in that way. Whether that interpretation is true or not for you is beside the point really. I love the six-part Leonard Bernstein Harvard University Norton Lectures from the early 1970's and in the last talk he postulates that Mahler's 9th Symphony (one of my all-time favorite works) is a harbinger of the horrors of the 20th century: world wars, genocide, poverty. Yet somehow Mahler, despite ultimately speaking to the hope for mankind, foreshadowed all of the terrors to come in his music. In a very quietly intense and gripping description of the symphony, Bernstein, with melodramatic earnestness heighten by a slowly tightening camera close-up which was common at the time (I think of some of the 'serious' TV shows such as All in the Family which used the device to emotional effect), is so compelling you COULD believe that is what the 9th Symphony is and what Mahler had in mind. But was Mahler really some kind of Nostradamus, seeing the future and trying to impart Cassandra-like warnings in his music? Doubtful. But the Mahler is nonetheless very moving, beautiful and hopeful in the end, extra-musical prophecies or no. And I wish at the end of Vipassana you are also similarly stirred and moved and hopeful. Check back soon for more insider info about Vipassana! Numinous performs Vipassana Wednesday October 28, 2009 8 PM (one set only) $10 Brooklyn Lyceum 227 4th Avenue Park Slope Take the M, R Train to Union Street POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 5:19 PM The first sixteen days of December 2003 saw me in the Netherlands for the Steve Reich Festival hosted by the Royal Conservatory of Music in Den Haag. For two weeks almost everything Steve Reich wrote up to that time was performed by various ensembles from the Conservatory as well as professional groups such as Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices, the Schoenberg Ensemble, Maya Beiser, and Anne De Keersmaeker. Also on the Festival were works by other composers who were his contemporaries, his influences, or influenced and inspired by him. The Jazz Ensemble wanted to be part of the Festival as well so the director asked Jim McNeely if there were any composers he knew of that were working with Steve Reich-ian influences in a more jazzy context. Hmm, that seems to sound a lot like me! So the director contacted me in the Fall and after some back and forth, settled on performing two of my compositions: To Kyoto and Into all the Valleys Evening Journeys. In addition I was to give two symposiums on composition during the Festival. Into all the Valleys in July 2003 was one of the finalist for the BMI Jazz Composer's Workshop Manny Albam Commission Prize (I didn't win...). By the time December and my trip rolled around I had already orchestrated Valleys for Numinous, almost finished Stillness Flows Ever Changing, and in the middle of sketches on what would turn out to be the first movement of my, as of then nameless, "large work." So I was ready and excited to be taking a little break from writing and heading to the land of windmills, tall women, and Heineken.
The Festival was very exciting because not only did I hear, sometimes for my first time live, much of the Reich canon (and looked at the scores at the school library!), but I also heard other compositions live for the first time as well. Pieces by Arvo Pärt (Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten), Michael Torke (Music on the Floor), Louie Andressian (Hout), and Michael Gordon (Yo, Shakespeare) were some that I especially remembered. Also, at intermission of the concert with Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices (where they performed Reich's Proverb), I actually talked at length with Steve Reich for about 20 minutes. This wasn't the first time I had met him (the first time was for less than 5 minutes at a concert at Miller Theater at Columbia University about a year earlier) but it was my first real conversation with him. I even gave him a copy of my first CD, which had come out that September, and we spoke warmly about various record labels and the state of jazz at the time. Now even though the Festival was thrilling and I was busy with the preparations for the two Jazz Ensemble concerts where my compositions would be performed, I was a bit overloaded after awhile. So one of the days where I didn't have any official duties, I took a train from The Hague north to Amsterdam. I didn't have a map or anything to guide me so I just walked around that first day. Of course not far from Central Station, if you walk in the right direction (which somehow, I seemed to be doing) you soon run into one of the infamous Red Light Districts. Now there was a smaller one in Den Haag not far from where I was staying and which was on the way in my walk to the Conservatory (also a fun, cheap local Turkish diner I ate at most evenings), so I already knew what to expect. Continuing my walk outside the District I soon came upon a giant map on the sidewalk. Looking up from the ground I saw many large photos on outdoor displays. Most of the photos were aerial shots of nature with captions detailing some societal or ecological danger in the area of the photograph. This was my first exposure to Earth From Above by the photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. I walked around and around the exhibition, often stopping by various photos only to circle back to them later and take another look. I was very moved and taken with the entire photo show. And because I really didn't have much money at the time, I didn't buy the Earth from Above book then, which I would have had I the euros, so I bought three postcards of some my favorites photos (about a year or so later, I finally bought the book). There was one photo by Arthus-Bertrand that I was particularly struck by and it was one I came back to at least five times while walking around the exhibit. The photo, of a flock of scarlet ibis flying over the Amacuro delta in Venezuela, was taken from a perspective high above the flock. The very striking juxtaposition of the deep red birds against the rich black soil evoked in me a sense of ‘soaringness’ and beauty. It was this feeling that solidified for me what I wanted to achieve with the stalled next movement of my "large work." So even though many of the musical ideas were already on paper (yes, I still sketch ideas on paper), and the final composition was still a few months away, that photograph helped lead me to discover my own composition, "Of Climbing Heaven and Gazing on the Earth". Check back soon for more insider tidbits about Vipassana! Numinous performs Vipassana Wednesday October 28, 2009 8 PM (one set only) $10 Brooklyn Lyceum 227 4th Avenue Park Slope Take the M, R Train to Union Street POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 9:00 AM |
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Thanks and credit to all the original photos on this website to: David Andrako, Concrete Temple Theatre, Marcy Begian, Mark Elzey, Ed Lefkowicz, Donald Martinez, Kimberly McCollum, Geoff Ogle, Joseph C. Phillips Jr., Daniel Wolf-courtesy of Roulette, Andrew Robertson, Viscena Photography, Jennifer Kang, Carolyn Wolf, Mark Elzey, Karen Wise, Numinosito. The Numinous Changing Same album design artwork by DM Stith. The Numinous The Grey Land album design and artwork by Brock Lefferts. Contact for photo credit and information on specific images.