Erling Wold

Tickets on sale

2012-02-19T18:11:00.000-08:00

Concerns and Annotations

2012-01-27T20:30:00.000-08:00

Aspects of the libretto for the upcoming opera have raised some concerns among some of those who have read it or who have some knowledge of it. Those concerns come from the real event that it references, namely the death of the three children by their mother's hand. Does it represent the people, especially those people still alive, fairly or accurately? Might it hurt those people left behind, devastated by the tragedy?

I don't know. It's too great an event to capture in words or music. The reality is that I know nothing of the mother or her life, nothing of her inner world, nothing of her motivations or her communications with God, nothing of her relationship with her family or the events in their lives or the children or their father or anything. The libretto at most is just a fantasy, a concoction of my brain and its random associations of the few reported facts and some certainly misreported information with half-memories of my life and my prejudices and desires.

The writing was quick, a paroxysm of scribbling, multicolored, in a state, my breathing ragged and heavy, without editing. I can't really justify its point of view or claim it as my own, at least in a thoughtful sense. The writing of the libretto was the closest I have come in my artistic life to direct communication with the godhead, that divine stream that flows through us all. That direct link was a new experience for me, and I found it curious I could achieve this in writing words, when in writing music - my chosen art - it doesn't happen. For me, music has too much bookkeeping and too much intellect and too many details and decisions for it to flow freely out of my pen and spread itself across the page.

But, unthreading it all now, one can see where many of the words come from and, before one forgets, one should make note of these beginnings and directions and passes through one's neurological landscape. To follow along, one needs a copy of the libretto, which one can find here.

The opening line, as the footnote notes, is from Huxley, in particular the book pictured above. When I was a boy, I was believed to be gifted and I was placed in school programs designed for gifted and talented children. I basked in this appellation and believed in it or at least wanted it for myself. When I went to college, however, I discovered that there were people so far beyond me in intellect that I understood the reality of the quote. My geek friends said their clocks ran faster than ours, and I understood this to mean that there was no way to catch up to them, that their basic hardware was different than the rest of ours.

The second line is from Genesis 22. The Abraham and Isaac story looms large in the opera, a story that is bizarre and horrifying, as horrifying as the mother's tale, if one can get past one's Sunday School coloring book familiarity with it. There is no way to make sense of it, and even my 1950s copy of the 12 volume Interpreter's Bible begins its commentary pointing out that any man who thought of it, if his thoughts were detected, would be institutionalized, and any man who acted on it would be convicted and executed.

In reading the libretto, I see how much most of the story is me rather than the mother's: the tale of my sister's illness and the descriptions of my family, my take on Pascal and my high school friend's experiments, my reaction to hearing the story of the children, my reaction to reading the court documents, my thinking through it all while sitting at pier 7 as the day fades into evening. The libretto does not help the reader or the opera audience. It does not clearly label the edges of my story and the mother's, and they do mix frantically and fluidly. The character LaShaun, unlike the actual mother, is oftentimes saying or thinking things that I might say or think. Also, regardless of our command of the language, our thoughts are often profound, and because of this the LaShaun/Erling character sometimes slips into a highfalutin voice when representing his or her thoughts to us.

Some of the words do come directly from witness testimony, e.g., the child pleading 'no mommy' as he was thrown into the bay. But most of the words, like most of the text of the letter, and her prayer while killing the children, are my invention, except for a few bits cribbed from the Pascal Memorial. The death of the cat is the story of my cat, and the feeling of falseness in the world when the reality of death invades is something that I have felt and that many greater writers than me have related. Some bits after the murder are from the court documents, but even those are mixed up with my words and thoughts as well.

I notice, rereading the text, that are many threes, and I remember the use of threes in the score, in groupings and repeats and word painting, relating the deaths of Jesus and the two criminals on Calvary to the deaths of the three boys. Other biblical analogies appear: Jesus carried his wooden cross and Isaac carried the wood for his burning, so it is important that the boy carry something as well, but that's just a literary importance with no basis in fact.

I didn't know anything of the life that the mother had with the father, so the sex scene in the libretto has no relation to them, but is mine alone. I have felt what is described, the desire to merge with my partner but being stymied by the gap between us, and how we are all fundamentally alone, in life and especially in death. And, just to make sure it is clear, when she speaks of being left alone, and asking how He could leave her alone, this is an existential loneliness, and the pronoun He refers to God, the heavenly father of herself and her children, not the earthly father.

Society in general seems to have decided that the mother is crazy, and I've always wondered if one were crazy whether one would know. Would one have an inkling that something was wrong in one's thoughts? Would one reflect in one's own thoughts society's prejudices about craziness? I've heard something of the pain of insanity and this leads me to answer these questions in the affirmative. Thus the mother/Erling character in the libretto finds herself navigating the prejudices of craziness in herself. When her boy is sick he enters a delirium that describes a delirium I experienced when feverish with the measles as a child, and her desire to cool him in the water is my story, something I wanted.

The man with the Lorentz transformation tattoo is a friend of mine, a burning man campmate. The description of migraines is a combination of my experience, as I encountered the aura and still do; and the experience of my first wife Lynn, who had severe nauseating migraines throughout our entire marriage, each lasting several days, except during the period when she was pregnant. When vomiting forth this section, I remembered my mother telling me that Mormons believe that Mormon women will be eternally pregnant after death - a fancy interpretation of a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants - and thus the reference to pregnancy as a heavenly state.

The end of the story is me alone. When my current wife Lynne heard about the murder of the children, her immediate comment was that she hoped no one would ever cure the mother of her insanity, that the mother's bright, clear and sane knowledge of her actions would be too horrible a punishment. Those thoughts stayed with me throughout the piece, and especially the end.

The Rise of Sugary Snacks

2012-01-25T00:33:00.000-08:00

Many have pointed to the impossibility of a pure culture, a culture untainted by others, a myth like that of the Aryan Race, whereas we know that clashes of culture, taking place in those rough boundaries between worlds, are the most fecund: lush contretemps where new growth arises. Even those attempts made by Hollywood and the English Language Popular Music Industry to bring the world under a single Novus Ordo, chanted under a bright yet monocolored flag of cultural hegemony, while successful in spreading their equivalents of Coca-Cola and the Frosted Flake to all corners of the world, have not ended the process, the ebb and flow, the mixing, the finding of the center and the unrefinéd tossing of flotsam at the edges.

Even we, we who fancy ourselves members of an elite art music establishment, are in fact sullied by all we hear and see and touch, the music and the noise and the screens and speakers everywhere that carry it all, a spray of seed that oft finds a fertile womb. We try to impose our rules, our concepts, our ideas of the future of music, but we find ourselves changed by the process, more affected than affecting.

But I do wonder why the aforementioned agents of cultural imperialism have been as successful as they have? Maybe, like the Frosted Flake, dripping with sugar, a mouth feel unmistakeable, a quick and agile crunch between the teeth, they are addictive. Maybe, like the Coca-Cola, we find that, after drinking quarts at a time, every day followed by every day, there is an itch, almost a burning in the back of our throats that water will no longer satiate. In a taxi in Ghana, I am listening to Bob Marley, and when I mention I am from California the driver says "West Coast! Tupac!" and I think how strange this is, but then I remember that I am here because my son plays in a Ghanaian drumming ensemble back home, and that those concerts are so much better attended than anything I have ever done, and again I wonder who is stealthfully and insidiously penetrating whom?

But I've finished the score for the new opera and am looking at a stack of them waiting to be delivered to the performers. Now that I am done, and I go through it, it surprises me. Where is the avant-garde boy I used to be? It's all so sweet, chords that my grandmother would have recognized as chords, and even the rhythmic complexities subtler than usual: a hemiola here and there, a confusing accent, a few meters flowing into others. Somehow I have been tainted by the songs of my youth, the poor imitations of sophistication and what we know to be the true delight that one has in great and high art, those fluff balls offered by my friends, pushed forward by the relentless pressure of the unseen and amorphous but so sharply felt peer group, a spear through the heart. But, on the other hand, just maybe I am in fact standing at an edge looking out over uncharted territory, some new veldt whose short grass will soon be replaced by another amalgam of this and that, all stolen from somewhere and everywhere.

Pointing the way to the future of the medium

2011-12-31T02:30:00.000-08:00

The life of the opera composer is a tough life, a life fabricated from raw ambition, of the ruthless climbing of the musical ladder, of finding a dog that will eat the other dog, of game-theoretic cuttings of the cake, delicate in an atmosphere of distrust, where one must watch so that even one's closest friends, smiling across the dinner table, sipping the wine that you will soon be buying for them, might consider, in a moment of inadequate attention, to just slip a knuckle dagger a-rib-glancing into your heart. But even in that dark and Bergmanesque life, sometimes a ray of sunshine breaks through, where for example, we replay the phone call that arrived on my doorstep this morning, transcribed here for your amusement:

PHONE

ring!

ERLING

looking at the caller ID

Oh is this the San Francisco Opera, oh my oh my, I can't believe it, you're commissioning one of my operas, oh god, oh god, I can't breathe, just a moment, you've made me so happy, give me a moment, while I compose myself, now, oh I'd like to thank my teachers, all those people who made this possible, I am so happy, wait, what's that, what?, I oh you what

PHONE

and we want to thank you for your past support

ERLING

oh no, my god no, you just want my money, oh the shame of it all, sniffling, then breaking into sobs, huh huh, chest heaving, why am I such a fool, a stupid fool, a fucking stupid worthless fool, piece of shit, fuck fuck fuck, oh god, fucking shit, that's the last of it, the last, oh god

PHONE

and this year we plan to bring back Turandot in a new production where Puccini himself appears on stage as a giant ice swan

ERLING

sobbing uncontrollably, lifts a gun to his head

GUN

bang!

...

Weeks after that aforementioned dinner conversation, my good artistic friend and competitor S. Kraft and I spent a pleasant evening in conversation, on display in a privacy booth at the 5M something-or-other-seasonal party. The atmosphere, thickened by the sweat of milling drunken youth, was redolent with sex, and our talk turned naturally to the topic. I told her of my previous as-yet-unrequited attempts to bring sex more strongly into my work, primarily through the vehicle of the long-suffering second Bisso-Wold collaboration 24x7, which, like Sub Pontio Pilato before it, had turned into a sprawling epic, caroming from Jack the Ripper to 120 Days of Sodom and points between. We talked of our shared admiration for San Francisco, a city of wantonness and hedonistic delight, where the fulfilling of one's lightest-felt caprices is the occupation of all. We spoke of the Armory, a beauteous Moorish Revival castle now run as a showcase to hogtying, a former boxing stadium now featuring girl-on-girl wrestling whose prize is the prising domination of the loser and confessed of our friends who had worked there and throughout the sexual strata of the city.

I hoped, I said, to connect more with that institution, and maybe to perform something in its labyrinth of reconstructed motel rooms and gynecologist offices. I had considered scoring one of their works with a lush and voluptuous and eager composition, but recordings are not experience, and the fourth wall of film is too thick for such profound acts. Sex, I said, should be experienced live, either in the comfort in one's own homes, with one's own partners, or in public where that fourth wall cannot exist, where the distance of an audience member is difficult to maintain. Sex, performed live, is like a music that "sneaks past one's defenses and whose delicate beauty glides in just below the listener's critical consciousness," an act piercing direct to the emotional center, past the intellect, deep down and down and then down a little more.

So, soon, something will come of all this. In the meantime, there are two operas to finish, and one is the commission from the Austrians, appealing to my cupidity as well as my soul. And a commission from someone else, about which I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, an agreement so tight that I had to agree that if approached by the media, I could in fact say nothing at all, not even "no comment" or "any other non-substantive answer." I list those possibilities now, again, for your enjoyment:

Mathematics, as it is

2011-11-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

Whenever I am asked whether I make a living as a composer and I have to reveal that no, like so many, I have a day job, and then I'm asked what pray tell might that be, and I say I'm a mathematician or whatever category into which I'm dropping my job as Chief Scientist that day, I brace myself for the inevitable insight that well, Music is Mathematics, isn't it now. Being a Very Nice Fellow, I smile wanly and nod and then try patiently to explain that no, it is nothing like Mathematics, any more than Cooking is Mathematics, Writing is Mathematics, Painting is Mathematics.

But then, they might say, even those Things are in fact Mathematics. Remember the words to the children's song by Tom Lehrer:

Counting sheep
When you're trying to sleep,
Being fair
When there's something to share,
Being neat
When you're folding a sheet,
That's mathematics!

Like most children's songs, there is a great Truth here, which I capitalize to distinguish it from actual truth. Mathematics is a study of abstract objects, and most would understand that in the sense of modern Platonism: points, lines, ideals, manifolds, rings, lattices, graphs, numbers, cardinals, propositions, sets, symbols. Those abstract objects are fun to study in their own right, but the Truths of Mathematics come into their own and touch our lives when they find a life as models of Real Objects, some of which they model well and some of which they don't. Sometimes we work to arrive at those models, but oftentimes our conceptions of real objects are greatly simplified to match a mathematical theory that we happen to have lying about.

So, let's be more precise. What one might say is that those Fields of Study above have attributes that can be modeled more or less accurately by Mathematical Objects and that one might be able to glean certain knowledge of those Fields of Study by manipulating those Mathematical Objects, assuming all of one's assumptions are more or less correct, that the initial mapping is OK, and that those mappings still remain OK even under the effect of whatever manipulations one might make in the abstract realm.

What is really really hard about applying Mathematics to the Arts, is that manipulation of anything in the Arts might yield something interesting artistically, since there is no absolute arbiter of anything, as Good and Dad and Judgement are of the past, and one can find an audience for any jumble of phonons or photons or smell-ons. This makes the final judgement as to whether one's model is Right or Wrong well nigh impossible.

But still, limiting ourselves to the artistic area in question, one might ask: how well can available mathematical models map to something in Music that will help us compositionally or analytically? And, like all fields of study, there are some things that work OK: in my other life, the fields of acoustics and signal processing are based on this. In that day job, I may assume that a sound is modeled by a continuous curve and that I can differentiate and integrate and take limits to infinity. This assumption is far from a Truth, but it's OK, it works OK, I can manipulate all day long and at the end of the day discover something in my Platonist Plane of Existence that I can transcribe into software and drop into an iPad app and voila!, it sells to the masses who want Groupon coupons generated by listening to the ads on the TV. And, in my musical life, I may model a musical event as a note, and further reduce that to some parameters, like a pitch, which is then further reduced to a frequency, and that to a number which, in a ratio with other numbers, can inform me as to how to tune my guitar.

We all saw many attempts in the heady days of the post war academy to model musically related parameters like crazy, to manipulate them like crazy, and to come up with maps that we hoped we might follow to some Heavenly Abode where - well, I'm not exactly sure what. Where we might find the Perfect Music? Or the next Perfect Musical Publication? The serialists' attempts to construct a set-theoretic world based on a small set of discrete parameters is in my opinion a model-of-a-model far removed from the world of a sound, where it's hard enough to pin down music into discrete anythings, e.g. where a musical event starts and stops, or what its please-pick-one pitch is. If notes had single pitches, Auto-tune wouldn't exist. The funny thing is that there is a lot of fabulous serialist music, but, in my opinion, I don't think the models were helpful in getting there any more than any other kick in the pants.

Of course I know the models, and I use them, in a crafty way, to solve problems that I hit here and there, just like the Painter knows the models and may compute the Golden Ratio from time to time, not knowing whether it really is Good or Bad but whatever. And, if my inquisitor by this point hasn't run for the table with the potato chips, I would then set my hand on her shoulder and explain further that the joy of Music Composition, for me, is the impossible-to-quantify or at least the uninteresting-to-quantify ineffable aspects that I don't really even want to understand: how one writes when one has stayed up all night; how one allows God and his Angels, dark or light or their familiars, to speak through us; how it is that there is that one passage of Boulez's Le soleil des eaux that gives me chills; how I can find my way to a piece of music that, when listened to later, I don't understand in the slightest. There is an aspect of the endless, of eternity here, and I might remind my partner in conversation of the end of the B section of the tune above:

If you could count for a year, would you get to infinity,
Or somewhere in that vicinity?

The answer is no, as Wittgenstein said in his Philosophical Remarks:

Where the nonsense starts is with our habit of thinking of a large number as closer to infinity than a small one. ... The infinite is that whose essence is to exclude nothing finite.

A model, no matter how finely developed, is, like the runner in Zeno's paradox, no closer to reality than the model before it. Music is not Mathematics, no how and no way.

A Celebration of Rejection; or the beautiful Miss Candy Candykins

2011-10-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Paris to meet Lynne, check that her paintings match the city, and spread the ashes of our dear beloved friend Evelyn. A bit in the Seine, a bit at Les Deux Magots (sprinkled over the crème de menthe), a little buried outside her favorite pizza place, a little tucked in next to Napoleon in Les Invalides.

After that, heading to Amsterdam to catch up with Laura Bohn, who is performing in a Monteverdi / Hip-Hop mashup performance, then to Berlin to perform the Shitstorm of Asshattery letter with the lovely and talented Candy (which may not be her real name). The highlight will almost certainly be my tearful love song to Simon Stockhausen, longing for the tête-à-tête we will now never have, which goes something like:

Dear Simon
How it thrills me
When you sneer
Just a little
Compel me to do
What you want me to do
I want to be
A forward thinker
Like you
My Simon
My Simon
My Simon

So why I am traveling all the way to Berlin? I am making a big deal of a rejection, something we have to deal with daily, but, Oh what a rejection! A rejection of epic proportions!

On that topic, one of my peeviest peeves is as follows. One spends a lot of time working on a proposal asking some foundation for its cash, which, as far as I am concerned they owe you for chrissakes, or similarly on the preparations for a competition or reading, which again takes quite a bit of time and energy and a Benjamin or two for all the copying and postage and whatnot and then in the end, more often than not, you receive a form letter - well, just an email nowadays, akin to being dumped by SMS - which tells you very little, e.g.:

Dear Erling,

I am writing on behalf of Music Director Joana Carneiro to let you know that we have completed the selection for next year’s composers as part of Berkeley Symphony’s Under Construction new music reading series and, unfortunately, we are unable to offer you a position this year. We very much appreciate the strong quality of this year’s applicants and regret that there are but three positions available in the program. Thanks again for your interest in our program and we hope you’ll consider reapplying in a future season.

Yours sincerely,

--- so and so ---

Director of Operations

Berkeley Symphony

So should one really reapply? Or do they think your music sucks so bad that next time it will go into the shredder in its entirety once your return address's postal code is noticed? Would it be so hard to simply send you a transcript of their discussion so one knows something at least of whether it is worth your time? One applauds their love for all your fellow applicants and their work, at least their love for the average applicant's work, but it's unclear what they thought of one's own work, which one might think is the more important question at hand.

Work in progress

2011-10-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

Working on the new opera, whose title has morphed into Certitude and Joy with various longish subtitles, and which is not to be confused with the orchestral piece of the same name, but which shares some of the same themes, especially the opening. In playing it for the wife and the director, the favorite section seems to be that whose accompaniment is an arithmetical average between two pieces: Regard du Père (Messiaen) and the introduction to the opera Irma (Gavin Bryars). It's a sentimental tune, sung by God to us the audience, describing his relationship to his prophets here on Earth.

Some of the words - especially the section about how one wishes to have it all explained at the end - is from my mother. She wants this, she hopes she will get it, but she is absolutely sure that she will meet my father after her death. On his deathbed, my father told me that his greatest wish was that his children had a personal relationship with Christ, a desire he didn't achieve. My mother wishes the same, but has accepted the loss.

Working on setting of the words, I'm reminded of a question put to me by Charles Shere once on stage, during a meet-the-composer moment after a performance of the opening of Sub Pontio Pilato in a two-piano reduction, viz Did you write the words before or after the music? I fumbled the answer, feeling there was something wrong with the question, that the right answer was something like Oh, they both came to me at the same instant or Oh, they both were developed together, walking hand in hand down the aisle to the perfect consummation of text and sound. I've realized since then that, as with everything else, there are no rules, every process is OK. I often work in all possible ways: music first, words second, vice versa, both together, each running ahead and waiting for the other to catch up, revisions and sketches and quick outlines and everything else.

Please remember this: there are no rules. There is good and bad, but there are no rules as to how to get there.

Tonight's concert

2011-10-15T16:28:00.000-07:00

In the first work, a plague-infested chipmunk, a cute little thing, as tiny as can be, with foam at the mouth, was hung in chains from the lighting grid, swinging slowly from side to side which, according to the program notes, was a reference to Reich's Pendulum Music. A small patch of hair on its chest had been shaved away, normally quite difficult to see, except that a small video camera was attached to the chain and the image from the camera was being wirelessly beamed to a large screen overhead. This allowed the audience and the humane society volunteers to monitor the condition of the expiring animal, both emotionally and physically. On the shaved portion of the skin, a small piezo microphone attached, and a long thin wire hung down, looping through some sort of magnetic amplification system, with the resultant enhanced bioacoustic signals - heartbeat, respiration et al - driving a solenoid which, in Rube Goldberg fashion, and, at the end of its extension, struck a percussionist quite hard just below the rib cage. At each bruising blow, the percussionist moved to the next event in the score, which was merely a list, viz:

Hard mallet ff on bass drum, 4 cm from the edge, damped with a cupped hand.
Medium triangle p rolled with beaters.etc

Later, after the show, I went into the lobby to ask John Luther Adams to autograph my copy of the orchestral score to Dark Waves. Skeptical at first, but then happy to find that I had actually purchased the score, rather than stealing from some music library, he sat down and began to work. Asking me whether there was an "H" in my name, I said yes, as there is: Erling Henry Wold, but unfortunately I misunderstood, and the very lovely dedication is now capped off by the name Ehrling Wold, bookending my J.S.G. Boggs Considerate States of America Banknote, whose signed REGISTER reads Earling H. Wold.

Shitstorm of Asshattery

2011-08-23T23:11:00.000-07:00

I recently labored over an opera proposal with a fellow artist, a proposal submitted to a seemingly reputable operatic organization somewhere in a Central European country in response to their call for submissions. The theme of the call was The New Deal. We asked them if they meant by this the American New Deal, and they said yes. Our proposal made it through the first round of cuts and we were invited to give a full presentation, an invitation which we treated with all due diligence. We plotted and prepared for that day and, when it came, sent my colleague off to the wars armed with the sheafs of parchment upon which all was carefully lettered. We now join my colleague in her description of what transpired. As she prefers to remain anonymous, we will give her an appropriate pseudonym, say 'Candy', in the sequel.

Dearest Erling.

You got the short version earlier, which I wrote while I was doing that girl thing where some of us get so angry we have to either start ripping out throats or crying. Now I have perspective. Here is what happened:

About a week ago I started putting together my presentation, in the form of slides. They'd called a few times to ask whether I had any particular technological needs, or would require a piano, or whatever, and to tell me about the hardcore schedule they'd created for a full weekend extravaganza of meal tickets, free seats to see their very hyperactive rock musical with strong accidental homoerotic overtones about a group of lonely people and their relationships to their self-aware online avatars, group presentations, and so on. I'll send you a link to the presentation I eventually used, but it was basically images I found online and sound files and video clips (Chess Game and The Academy of Science) that would help me tell the story of what you do, what the project might be like, and what sort of vision we might be stumbling towards, with a bunch of text that I more or less stuck to. I thought about how to lead them through the thought process, how we interpreted New Deal and so on.

Yesterday we all met for an uncomfortable breakfast of soup bowls filled with coffee in the cafe downstairs from the theater, after which we all filed, 3 people at a time and standing very close together (the German stare, incidentally, is not lessened by proximity, in case you were wondering about that) via elevator up to the strange cluttered attic space upstairs where we would be presenting. We learned there had been 44 submissions this year. I also learned accidentally that at least one group... well, one guy... had been invited just a few days prior, to travel all expenses paid from Czechoslovakia. In fact I was the only local artist, everyone else of the 7 groups in the second round seemed to have come from a variety of exotic places.

1. The first group was 2: a very confident young lady fresh out of German theater school and her Spanish composer friend. Using nothing but mouth words and confidence, they proposed a work which explores the topic of how auditioning is hard, because casting directors have specific ideas and isn't that outrageous?? They proposed to explore this very serious topic onstage in the form of interpretive dance, and the singing (this is an opera, after all) should be done by people who are not only untrained but unsuitable for professional singing. The instrumentation was irrelevant, because the dancer-singers should ideally also play an instrument, which they would bring perhaps if they felt moved to do so, and play using each others notes which are written for other instruments. They therefore don't have a libretto per se, but they have gotten together a few times to see how it feels and they think it feels pretty good, at least the dancing part.

2. The second group was three very shy little boys wearing cardigans, who seemed to basically present the idea that it is possible today to play any midi piece whatsoever in alternate tunings. 12 Tone! 14 Tone! 24 Tone! We heard it all. A Gavotte by someone important, which sounded positively un-Gavotte-like! Asked how this would translate to the stage, they concurred this would need to be discussed. Also staging, and story, and that sort of thing. However, they were certain that singers would absolutely not be involved, because singers already earn far, far too much money singing La Boheme.

3. I was third. I opened with a clip of The Bed You Sleep In before introducing myself, because I thought it was a nice way to get their attention slowly, give them time to look at the key visual I developed for the proposal, and get in the mood. And I thought it would be a great idea to go after two really shitty presentations since, at that time, I still assumed the other ones would probably be better. And the music reminded me a little of the Depression-era thing I'd reference later. It worked. People definitely were rapt, and the presentation went very well. I introduced myself as a singer and played a variety of clips and apologized that I'd be speaking a little on your behalf, but that I'd do my best and give everyone an idea of what we were thinking and what we might do together. People were with me, they laughed and Hmm'd at the right points. I felt them come along. I talked about the other people who we might like to involve, and why, and what we made of the New Deal theme. What the characters might be, how the story might progress.

But the room was a weird read. I felt a big wave of positivity, but then I received the following questions:

- "So, wait, is there singing in this opera?"
- "Wow, that's really ambitious. Singers, set, music, ideas..."
- "Where is the composer from again?"

I sat back down.

4. Fourth was the Czech guy, a writer who works in a design agency who was presenting on behalf of a composer he'd never met. He opened by playing a couple very bad techno-lite files while he walked over to the piano and stripped, then redressed in a wig, heels, mini skirt, fishnets, and push-up bra. The jury adored it. He presented a list of characters, voice parts, and a description of each act/aria/scene. The music was to take place 40% on mobile phones in the form of ringtones from a variety of well-known pop and classical artists, because, as we all now know, whores all have three mobile phones, one for friends, one for clients, and one for their pimp. The New Deal was the special price the newest whore offers her clientele.

5. Then after the break, we were assaulted by a fascinating monologue by a girl whose grandmother was chinese, so therefore she, too, is chinese, though her face is too pointy, and thus she is a counterfeit chinese person. The notion of which was surprisingly interesting. She would love to get a tattoo of a red star above her heart. She was dressed in a wig and fan (that she confessed later to have picked up on her lunch break) and proclaimed herself an excellent singer but refused to sing for us, even when repeatedly asked by the jury. Instead, she made use of her fan and dramatically recited the lyrics of a popular chinese karaoke song which she'd run through google translator. I liked her boots. She hadn't really thought about what the music in her opera proposal might be like, but, put on the spot, she mused that perhaps she could find some Chinese people to play some traditional chinese instruments. The set would have red couches, though. The jury loved her. I began to be confused.

6. After the non-Chinese monologue, we heard from 2 extremely earnest women who had spent several months or years interviewing people in several countries, and asking them about their earliest recollections of experiences with prayer, and what that meant to them. I have to admit, the project, in a museum, would be very moving. The interviews were all done in the native tongue of the interviewee, and the earnest women translated these to us. One of the two women squinted her right eye extremely tightly when she was stressed, and never stopped smiling with all her teeth. They proposed an opera which consisted of the sound of these interviews being played all at once, while one of the women sings (not the squinting one) in her earnest folk singer way, her repetitive vowel song about prayer, which was something like this: ooo. EEEEE. oooo. eeee. EEEEEEOOOOOO. ooo. EEEE. ooooo. And so on. And this gets layered and repeated in infinite ways. Words are not important to them. Also, audience members would be encouraged to bring their own instruments and join in. It should be a communion, but not about communion, or religion, or ritual, or giving, or taking. The set should not matter, it's not about set, or voice, but it's everything about voice, and what we say, but words are not even needed. So yes and... no. Not at all. Also, the audience should be provided with a half of a piece of clothing, which they must wear during the presentation. Not ritualistic or somehow in any way religious articles of clothing, rather along the lines of a shoulder of a dress, the hip of a skirt. They were not sure how these things could be made to stay in place. It would need to be discussed.

7. The last presenter was a handsome Italian dancer, very nervous and unprepared even by the standards of this group of absolute asshats, who wore his hair an in inexplicably small ponytail at the very top of his head, and whose dance troupe would like to do a piece based on a book about survivors of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This is because it is very much like Italy, not in that Italy is being invaded by Soviets, or has a desert, but nevertheless the story really spoke to him and this is New Deal. Absolutely. He did not know what sort of music might be involved, and the set was totally unclear. Singing would be done by the dancers, because they don't have singers, they are dancers. But if the dancers sing, that could be interesting. Anyway, they don't think of opera as singing. They think of it as dancing and art, and, naturally, Afghanistan.

After this final presentation, we were fed a dinner of toast, and we could choose to see a production of the aforementioned massively energetic rock musical with accidental homoerotic overtones, which I did. It was absorbing! Major props to the excellent cast. Major. And the band. Each one a total superstar.

Before I crawled to bed last night, and my dog was in overnight sleepaway dog camp by the way so my feet were cold and I was nervous, I thought back over the day's events. There seemed a good chance we'd not advance, based on my gut feeling, and also some other feelings.

***

Part 2

Today was the day for private meetings with the jury with each presenting team. It was supposed to be a discussion to clarify anything, or explain things we didn't feel we had clearly communicated the day before. But before I had taken off my jacket, they informed me that it was a definite "no" by unanimous discussion last night. I wasn't totally phased by this, but expressed my disappointment and admitted I was very curious as to who they would pick and why, based on their reactions to the presentations the day before. Well, they said. The thing is, the presentation I gave was very good. VERY good. It was very professional, and very clear, and I communicated everything about the concept really well. But that's just it, Candy. It was simply TOO professional, and TOO developed. It was too good.

Well. I replied, trying to spin it, still. "Well, that is truly a pity. Hm. I had planned to start off our discussion today by reminding you that this was still just a concept, and a starting point for discussion. Since the parameters were so vague, we thought it was better to do something, as opposed to doing nothing, which is what most of the other presenters offered."

They replied that the parameters were spontaneous, and were developed over the course of the presentations.

**Here, Erling, I'll inform you that several people approached me after the presentations to pass their compliments on to you for the stunningly beautiful music. They were spellbound. And not for nothing, I got a lot of unsolicited compliments on the concept and my presentation in general.**

Back to the discussion with the jury: at this point the composer on the jury, S___, who specializes, incidentally, in a kind of electronic elevator music and who I am 100% sure was really jealous of your work, informed me that the music was boring, too classical, and not at all edgy, and CERTAINLY not the kind of music that they are looking for. I wrote that down as a note so that I would not actually spit at him, but my face was sufficiently rude as I gazed at him and said "what a fascinating comment." He could not look me in the eye after that. I am quite certain he has problems maintaining erections. He lamely went on to say, as his penis retracted obediently underneath the table, that the concept is too much like Robert Wilson. I really did not know what to say to that, so I chose to be pleased. I actually like Robert Wilson, even though I hear he's an insufferable asshole. But for the constructive value of this feedback, S___ may as well have told me monkeys can't bake banana bread all on their own. I stared.

And so, after an uncomfortable pause, the music critic jumped in and asked, incredibly, whether there was to be any singing, because she really did not understand that yesterday. I could only fix may gaze on her and mildly ask "is there any singing... in the opera?... presented to you by a soprano?... hmm... yes." Within my bosom, murder arose. I stabbed her in the eye repeatedly.

She then asked me whether I had misunderstood the 20 minute length of the proposals. I pointed out that the rules said 20 *TO* 30 minutes, that the difference between 20 and 30 minutes is immense, and that if I had mistaken anything, it was that we would actually be clarifying that sort of thing right then and there, as I'd been told we would be doing. She apologized and admitted that was true, the rules did say 20 to 30 minutes. I snorted and wondered whether they had all done drugs together recently.

Another jury member then expressed frustration that I wanted a tractor onstage during the production. This seemed a point of great interest among the entire jury, so I found myself incredulously explaining to them that this was clearly a concept presentation, and I was showing them images that would just give them a mood, a feeling, based on a few images I googled this week, for what we were or I was thinking of as inspiration, not that I was actually proposing that a 20-member chorus silently brings a tractor onstage in the middle of the piece. Someone said well, if you make a really good presentation, which you did, we are going to take it at exact face value. I replied that I at no point whatsoever had even intimated that an actual tractor might have any place whatsoever onstage during this show, and that I had in fact been quite clear when I showed it that the tractor image was simply a visual meant to evoke a mood. I reminded them that if they had wanted to see *exactly* what the work would look like onstage, they would have to pay me first. They did not seem to grasp what I meant by this.

They accused me of having too much information about the New Deal, to which I apologized for having chosen to do something to show my thought process about the theme they themselves had proposed and which I'd taken seriously, rather than having done nothing, which most of the teams opted for. I said this, and they asked me what I meant. I wondered whether I had taken drugs, and forgotten.

They asked why on earth I would have assembled a whole team for the production, "not that there's anything wrong with that." I said that I had been under the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that they were looking for clues that we could actually organize what we set out to do, in case that would be needed. I repeated for the thousandth time that nothing had been set in stone, and that I thought that had been made abundantly obvious. If they had wanted something specific, they could have told me. Oh no, no, they said. We don't want specifics.

Then they told me they had specifically wanted more information about the characters we'd proposed. Why didn't I spend more time on that instead of the concept and theme and music and set and team?

Then they said it would be much too ambitious to include Roosevelt and Sarah Palin in the show. At this point I began to lose my temper, really. I reiterated my sadness at having been so grossly misunderstood, and at not having had an opportunity to correct these rather astounding misunderstandings. They apologized for having made it seem that I would actually need to inform them of the connections between New Deal and our proposals. I said, thank you, I would know next time to bring absolutely nothing to the table, so that I would not have to defend having actually given any thought to the matter. Before death or weeping, someone made let's-end-this-shitstorm-for-the-love-of-god gestures, which I spoke over loudly and emphatically and flounced out of the room. The three little boys waiting their turn outside the room looked at me sadly and totally bewildered as I rushed past. Then they looked scared.

***

Epilogue:

I've already prepared my submission for next year. It goes like this: 20 blank pages, bound, and a DVD of myself sitting on the floor facing a wall, eating candy and farting light bulbs, for 20 minutes. I'll invite my friend Anya to contribute a thought-dance, which is more a process about doing nothing, and of non-physicality, than of actual dance.

Erling. We failed miserably. Rather, I did. I apologize. I dearly wanted to work with you, and to bring your work to them, because I think it is simply gorgeous, gorgeous, beautiful art. The process was interesting, but I should have known, maybe, that it was bound to be a ridiculous clusterfuck of incompetence, idiocy and clownery. I'm glad I tried, though. I hope there will be another chance sometime.

With love,
Candy

Bedtime Stories

2011-07-31T16:13:00.000-07:00

While spending the morning in bed duly reading, to be followed by an afternoon duly avoiding duty, followed by an evening spent again in the avoidance of the aforementioned duties, I am filled with guilt, but then I remember Ned Rorem's maxim "Nothing is waste that makes a memory" and I think, from what of this will memories come? And this question leads me to a reverie, where I remember how, in part of this morning's reading, I came across Madhu Kaza's Here Is Where We Meet. I wonder, how is Kaza's service different from my own, that Bedtime Story Reading Service which I have offered for so many years to all who would stop to listen, pressing my sweaty calling card into their palm as they giggled, nervous but excited at the possibilities of such an intimate event? Or the services, offered by upscale hotels, for those who would not wish to be labeled literary callboys?

In fact, the differences are subtle, yet simple, and separate what one might think of as an interesting diversion from those same actions labeled as Art.

The first is that her version comes with a far more detailed set of rules than mine, in six categories, spelling out times and locked doors and who is OK and not OK. My service has had no such rules. I have always been willing to show up whenever and wherever the client wanted me, regardless of their schedule or lack thereof, regardless of geographical location, allowing them to define bedtime in their own way, acceding to all their demands, no matter how far outside my normal experience, my comfort zone. If they wanted me to choose, I was willing to pick the story or the book, and, if I did, I would work to find a literary portrait appropriate for them, or at least as close as I could come given my experiences of them, or if they wished, they could choose the text, and I had no problem with 'bedmates' or children or adults or personal safety or demands violating my chastity.

Let's take an example: just yesterday, Lynne mentioned my services to a friend of hers, Ms. C__, a friend who is worried about the troubles that might arise - and this is speculation on her part - as her sixteen year old daughter comes of age and meets headlong that world we know is full of dangers, some which threaten to take that which can never be regained, an innocence, and, this friend, who, although purportedly a wild child during her own coming of age, wishes her daughter would wait to discover the world of romance and the aforementioned loss of innocence until the arrival of a more settled adulthood, say approximately thirty years of age, matching the lengthened adolescence of Cicero's Pro Caelio, from which we remember he said, and taking the trouble to swap some boy words for more neutral language:

By general consent we concede a youth a few wild oats. Nature showers adolescence with a veritable spate of desires. If the dam bursts without endangering anyone's life or breaking up anyone's home, we put up with it easily and cheerfully.

Although this quote seems to have punctured my argument, as it advocates a boys/girls will be boys/girls attitude, the exact question at debate to which Lynne's friend was unwilling to accede, my point is that the youth that Cicero was defending was 29 at the time of the incident, and Cicero seemed quite happy to stretch his forgiveness of youthful vigor to whatever age necessary to make the legal argument forgiving the defendant for whatever. C__'s desire to bring me into this mêlée was in the role of a highbrow truant officer, a teenage curfew enforcer, there to make sure the lass was actually in bed, going to sleep, not slipping out the window after plumping up the bed with pillows stuffed under the coverlet, shaped into the shape of a young woman's body. Although it was clear to me that there could be no other person more right, meet and suitable for such a job, that of reading the blossoming young girl to a most restful sleep, night after night, and guaranteeing her virtue against all dangers, Lynne demurred, fearing nothing save that which has felled so many Georgian literary heroines, handkerchiefs unable to catch the tears, clutching poisoned letters to their Empire waists: the appearance of impropriety.

The second difference is the presence of the Artistic Statement. Here I have to say: if I were a religious man, I would pray every day that this scourge, that of the Artistic Statement, would one day be banished from this Earth. I've discussed before the hives that break out spontaneously, covering my skin, the shortness of breath, the coughing up, all of the above at the presence of the word 'explore' in the description of a piece of art. And here we find it again, along with the other terror, that of the 'series', as no artwork can stand on its own in the current world, but must exist only in context, a context of the artist's own making, part of his or her own path through the world, giving all utmost importance:

This project is part of the artist’s ongoing Hospitality series, which includes projects that explore social conventions, rituals of domestic and daily life, relations between strangers, hosts and guests, and boundaries of public and intimate space. Here is Where We Meet is particularly concerned with the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep (including the drift from the world of stories to the world of dreams), a re-engagement of voice in our experience of texts, and the possibility of trust.

I wonder sometimes if any of us actually ever live our lives, or have lived; or if it is necessary that a life, an event, a happening, truly exists only if there is such a communiqué presented alongside it.

Bulgarian Logbook

2011-07-07T23:16:00.000-07:00

In a manner inimitable, Lynne has covered the visual aspects of our Bulgarian adventure recently completed, striking to its heart, flaying the bleached skin from the stern flesh beneath. It is left to me, shivering here, exposed, these many days later, to relate matters aural, those phantom vibrations, ephemeral, barely remembered, and those matters left unspoken.

After a moderately long flight, by way of the City of Light, we arrived at the Sofia Airport on Bulgaria Air, the National Carrier, and cabbed it to the Hotel Arte on Alexander Dondukov, our bags following behind by a few days. In the morning, we darted between the speeding cars, finding safety in numbers, to arrive at the nondescript entrance of the Zala Bulgaria, locked up tight, the only way in through the servants' entrance, aka the musicians' or possibly the smokers' entrance, and wandered into the Sanctuary of the Hall itself, nervous with excitement. The first rehearsal began in a shaky and workmanlike fashion. I found my nervousness turning to dread, but gods be praised, in the end, through the remonstrations of Alexei Kornienko and the skill of the First Rate Classical Musicians, the performance was lovely. And after the dress rehearsal, the very talented Elena Denisova, who had been watching from above, pronounced the piece perfect; diamond perfect; which thrilled me to my toes.

I'm sure I have mentioned before how gorgeous the Ives' 4th Sympony is, and it was, even wearing its Bulgarian accent, and my piece was performed between it and the Bernstein Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (see poster above). "Sandwiched between two old dead white guys" says Jim Cave, with a twinkle in his eye.

The Bulgarian Radio was to have broadcast the concert, which fell through, but luckily I had secreted a few low-res recording devices (to wit, an iPad and an iPhone) about the place and was able to reconstruct with some fancy footwork a mix heard here.

The piece is scored for a large but not too large ensemble, heavy on the brass, heavy on the crescendi, and topped off with a pretty solo in the middle.

explaining a fine point to Alexei

I do have one regret from my time in Sofia: that I didn't visit the Union of Bulgarian Composers, lining up and elbowing up too many vodka shots. That dream of overdrinking would have to wait until the Austrian side trip, with my friend Gerhard Lehner who emailed me whilst we were traipsing about the Bulgarian countryside to say that the Daniil Kharms opera was finally on after 7 years of discussion, and could I please come talk about it. So yes, we hightailed it to land of the Lindwurm, where I met with the librettist Max Afchatz, Schauspieler und Regisseur, while drinking and drinking until the migraine set in and a day was lost at the door of death. We say we will do it, in Fall 2012, at the Klagenfurter Ensemble's new theater in the old Messe, a mix of Kharms' life and work, exact anything to be determined, but hopefully covering his starvation at the joined hand of the Soviets and Nazis together.

Waiting overnight for our plane in a quick revisit to Sofia we had dinner with Dimitar Moskovsky, the bass clarinetist for the orchestra, serenaded by the fast 2+2+3 rhythms of the restaurant band where, as Dimitar pointed out, the threes and the twos don't quite share a common denominator. This feel is explained some here, and is referred to as a metric time bend in the wikipedia article:

For example, the Bulgarian tune Eleno Mome is written as 7=2+2+1+2, 13=4+4+2+3, 12=3+4+2+3, but an actual performance (e.g., Smithsonian Eleno Mome) may be closer to 4+4+2+3.5.

The feel of Western Art Music is measured and gridded, formed of a steel that is difficult to bend, the swings of jazz and the quintuplet-y versions of the double-dotted funk of the 70s untaught in the conservatory.

But, before, inside the very small fourteenth century chapel dedicated to St Petka of the Saddlers, we were killing time, exuding a musical vibration that led us to a fellow tourist, the young American organist Michelle Horsley studying in Frieburg, fresh from performing John Cage, and with her came a sense of home, of the aspects of American that I love, there, in that faraway place.

But, before that, there was the visit to the Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak, notable for the beauty of the tomb itself, and notable for the three-way party that stumbled out of the broom closet when we rang the front doorbell, the middle-aged gothic transwoman unlocking the door as she fixed herself, while the other two giggled. I wanted so much to find the words required to ask exactly what had been going on in that closet, but the moment passed, and the ticket taker took her seat while the other two walked off arm in arm.

Winding down, winding up

2011-05-29T16:54:00.000-07:00

Lynne and I are off to Bulgaria to see the premiere of Certitude and Joy and to place wreathes of remembrance on the tombs of the Thracian kings and to investigate the painting techniques of their National Awakening. Queer is just about wrapped up, adjudicated most positively by the expectantly swollen audiences of the last weekend. It was lovely as always to see old friends come out, and lovely to make some new connections as well.

All the performers and crew were fantastic, Joe Wicht lighting up the stage even more brightly this time than last, the person on whose shoulders the piece rests, whose jersey number should be retired along with the show. Ken Berry flew in from Australia to reprise his roles, even more endearing and funny this time than last. And those who were new to cast – James Graham and the regally named pair of Diana Consuelo Hopping Rais and Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos Jr. – were riveting to watch as they threaded their way through the landscape. It was great to work with Bryan Nies from the Oakland East-Bay Symphony and all the other musicians – Jab and Marja Mutru and Michele Walther and David Sullivan – all the musicians yours truly, who seemed to think that he could play the guitar again after a 10 year hiatus, even though he used the same guitar and strings, lovingly preserved by Thom Blum in a special place, under glass in the crypt below the laundry room leading out to Franklin Street. And who can forget Jim Cave, my main man, who has helped make all of the operas he has touched into something real, making them into the thing that I remember them to be after the greasepaint has dried and the last playbill is swept up? Clyde Sheets once again has made some art, as he has done so often, and Laura Hazlett arrived at a costume design that I myself wish I could be transported into, flicking the ash from my Gitanes to the dusty street. Cid Pearlman, who fixed so many small motions, focusing in, adding beauty. I am the producer of this work, and not just the composer, the one who picks up the music stands and rolls the piano out of the way each night, and, as such, I can't tell you how important it is to have a crew on whom to rely: Catherine Reser the stage manager and gun handler, who, after a misfire one night, took it upon herself to check the load of each blank, to inspect the crimping, to check the smell of the black powder for its correct bouquet, and Will McCandless and Dylan McMillen. And thanks to Greg Kuhn, who didn't sleep for weeks before, during and after.

The work is OK. I've decided this now after seeing and hearing and playing it again. I originally thought that it was a quick bit of flummery knocked off while waiting for the funding to come through for Sub Pontio Pilato, but in playing it again, I hear things I didn't hear before, and once again I am shown that the quickly-written piece allows the channeling of the music-god-all-one-faith-spirit to guide one's hand, while the labored work suffers from too much from mere human frailties.

The details

2011-05-19T00:44:00.000-07:00

Queer opera opens this Friday
and continues May 20th through 29th at the Southside Theater, Building D, Fort Mason

The Opera Queer is happening, with Joe Wicht (a.k.a.Trauma Flintstone) in the narcotics-fueled role of William Lee, obsessed with the young Allerton in the expatriate-filled Mexico City of the 1940s. Based on William Burroughs' landmark autobiographical novella, Queer follows Lee and the object of his lust and love on a search through the jungle for the mystical and mythified Ayahuasca.

Tickets are available at Brown Paper Tickets. Shows are in the evenings - watch out for the varying times! - 20th through the 29th of May, 2011, at the Southside Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco.

There will be a panel discussion on Burroughs in the theater on Saturday May 21st from 3pm to 5pm, featuring Robert Glück, V. Vale and Kevin Killian, free to all.

QUEER
a chamber opera by Erling Wold
based on the book by William S. Burroughs
directed by Jim Cave
conducted by Bryan Nies
starring Joe Wicht, Ken Berry, James Graham, Jorge Rodolfo de Hoyos Jr, Diana Consuelo Hopping Rais
design Clyde Sheets
choreography Cid Pearlman
costumes Laura Hazlett
the orchestra JAB, Erling Wold, Marja Mutru, Michele Walther, Dave

Southside Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco

Friday May 20 9pm
Saturday May 21 9pm
Sunday May 22 7pm
Friday May 27 8pm
Saturday May 28 8pm
Sunday May 29 7pm

SAN FRANCISCO International ARTS Festival

Dead end. And Puyo can serve as a model for the Place of Dead Roads: a dead, meaningless conglomerate of tin-roofed houses under a continual downpour of rain. Shell has pulled out, leaving prefabricated bungalows and rusting machinery behind. And Lee has reached the end of his line, an end implicit in the beginning. He is left with the impact of unbridgeable distances, the defeat and weariness of a long, painful journey made for nothing, wrong turnings, the track lost, a bus waiting in the rain . . .

funded in part by the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

Queer queer queer

2011-05-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

There's something terrifying about doing an opera for the second time, especially one that was successful in its first incarnation: a weight of expectation, a fear of the pieces falling together not quite as expected. When the journey begins, this terror is all one has, but, as we approach our destination, traveling together, we notice the sights along the way, so pretty to the eyes, and the fates now seem to favor the risks we have taken. We settle back into the warm delights of artistic camaraderie and look forward to the joy of performance. The music is good, done by someone else, not me at all, someone whose ideas and expectations I can no longer remember. When Bryan Nies, our conductor, asks me how a passage should go, I don't know the answer. All I know is the way it was back then, the sounds and realizations that I love. He is angry that I can't make decisions, so I merely make them, saying yes, treat it like rock and roll, yes, I want every note of that very quick run individually bowed, slower, louder, faster, legato, conduct it like this, not that. But there are too many options and I like them all. Fortunately, Jim Cave, our leader and director, sees a clear path forward. I believe he has the map to get us to where we are going and so I merely sit to the side, leaping up to let someone in who is late, caught in the Muni catacombs, just as the line curves around the ossuary on the left, or rearranging the fruit I have bought to keep the performers happy, practicing the guitar quietly with ten year older fingers, sitting back, in the corner, just far enough back to not be seen, but to see enough to know it is beautiful. I can hear from here, thank you, and it all sounds beautiful. Maybe it should be a little louder or softer here.

Certitude and Joy, for orchestra

2011-04-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

The score is done, the parts are printing, soon all will be on the wing, fluttering into the hands of the Bulgarians who will instantiate my poor sonic mutterings.

The words of the title come from Blaise Pascal’s Memorial, his description of an irrational moment that shaped his life: a burst of insanity, an experience of love, an overwhelming affection. The piece is sentimental in terms of sentience, defining humanity’s intelligence in its capability to feel. As a mathematician, Pascal is famous for many things, not the least of which is his triangle, an arrangement of the binomial coefficients, some sequences of which are used as structural elements in the piece. This musical work is a companion piece to two others, the opera Chosen and the piano duet walking along the Embarcadero past pier 7 and the flowers, both of which dance along the razor’s edge between religious certainty and fanatical madness.

Berlin Diary (2011)

2011-03-19T18:42:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I returned from Berlin and environs with my newlywed wife visiting friends and touristing. Being who I am, it is difficult to cruise the area without thinking of those things that were, and, given the touristic elements of the city that cater to such thoughts, this difficulty must in fact be common among those of a certain age. The Reichstag, famous for the fire that helped to launch the Thousand Year Reich, Checkpoint Charlie, which, when I last saw it, was a junkpile, the checkpoint itself knocked over amidst a scatter of fragments of the wall and MIG fuselage.

Monday 28 February
Spent the day watching Irving Berlin videos, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the Star Trek TOS episode about the Nazis, rereading bits of Shirer's Rise and Fall and the Stasi Archives, plus studying the Werner Klemperer accent in Hogan's Heroes in preparation for the trip.

Tuesday 1 March
Spread chemtrails agents responsible for delusional parasitosis, matchbox sign, and increased boron concentrations over Northern Canada. Increased carbon footprint for the year severalfold. Rough flight over the North Atlantic. Fantasized about bombing runs coming in over Rotterdam, heading into the heart of Germany.

Wednesday 2 March
Cab driver accepted credit card driving us to Charlottenburg, arriving late at Ron Kuivila's sabbatical home, where, for 7 days and 7 nights, we are fed and pampered and entertained. An amazing meal by Bobbi Tsumagari, Ron's wife. Waddling after. Blog-o-media back home filled with old news, recently rediscovered due to John Galliano's pro-Hitler anti-Jew declarations, of Françoise Dior's Nazi sympathies.

Thursday 3 March
First tourist stop, Sans, Souci, in Potsdam. Why is there a comma between the two words? Pictures of decorative painting, much gilding. Golden Chinese house. Ron's calimari specialty in the evening.

Friday 4 March
Breakfast made by Bobbi. Charlottenburg, more photos of decorative painting. Fell in love with the little Ostalgie DDR car models in the gift shop. Seeing pictures of the dome blown to bits, fantasized again about bombsights and the poor civilians below. Met with the director Stefan of the Opera Video and the singer Jennifer Lindshield.

Saturday 5 March
Breakfast again by Bobbi, fried Turkish bread, man! Back to Charlottenburg castle for more photos, as it goes on and on. Bought postcards showing the bombed out Reichstag, the visit of JFK (Ich bin ein berliner), the East German guards. Wrote pithy comments on the back, began a long search for a post office. Multichoir walkthrough installation consisting of popsong fragments, just down the street from checkpoint Charlie, then dinner across the street at the Italian restaurant, another of the Axis powers.

Sunday 6 March
8 am call for the video shoot. Stefan speaks a different language to everyone there it seems, a mix of German, Swedish, English, maybe some others. I am confused as not an actor, but editing can work magic. Sometimes I am told to start walking, but to where and how far I am not sure. In the video, I give the attractive bathroom attendant a 100 euro tip and then offer another, for sex I assume, but she, being a chaste and virtuous lady, refuses. Puh. I am forced to go back to my table of sycophants and drink champagne. Although promised much making out, none occurs. I complain about this with Sirje Viise, one of the other singers and find that she was promised this as well, and was also left without. Considered offering her some making out right then and there but worried about the almost sure rejection to follow.

Monday 7 March
Bobbi breakfast. Lazy day. Lynne and Bobbi shopped while I worked and imagined myself as a citizen of the world, telecommuting from my garret. Dinner with Stephanie Kaiser, Frieder's helpmeet and housemate. Frieder unfortunately was in Long Beach working on the production of Akhnaten by the Long Beach Opera. See entry on 14 March.

Tuesday 8 March
Breakfast again. First, Sigmar Polke show at the Berliner Akademie der Künste, saw the machine to revolve a potato around another potato, great political posters. My favorite (see above): "Deutsche Arbeiter! Die SPD will euch eure Villen im Tessin wegnehmen" (German workers! The SPD wants to take you your villa in Ticino!) Wondering why we don't spend our family home evenings making political posters that we glue to banks and corporate headquarters so that we can be arrested and beaten and held in company-run underground jails for months and months, starved, kept from sleeping, cold water poured over us. Then, wandering through the embassies, the Brandenburg Gate, cleaned of its shrapnel and bullet marks, into the holocaust memorial, where Ron and I, fresh from the Polke, reminiscing on fluxus, came up with a horribly incorrect image of bathing beauties in bikinis, one each perched on each monolith of the memorial. Please shoot us so these thoughts do not infect our youth. Continuing on, to the symphony hall, remembering our favorite Nazi conductor, von Karajan, who gender integrated the orchestra only because he was fucking someone he wanted close by, or something like that anyway. In the evening, went to Radialsystem 5 to see Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop. Their artistic work did involve making out, with messy extra lipstick, see entry on 6 March. And they performed La Monte Young's Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc, reinforcing the fluxus thoughts earlier, along with Cage, the Bach Children, Purcell, others. They are very tight players, a joy to watch. The acting in between the pieces, although charming, needs more rehearsal or maybe will just never be as good as their playing.

Wednesday 9 March
Train to Dresden, rebuilt, thought of Slaughterhouse 5. The rebuilt sections are so new, beautiful, but like cartoons or matte paintings when seen in the distance against the portions of the city that still remain. Beautiful view of the city and the river as the sun is setting. Train to Prague. Next to our hotel, American style table dancing. Never went in although wanted to, as I am a whoremonger.

Thursday 10 March
Prague sightseeing. Stopped in to the tourist center of the chamber of deputies and was pounced on by the woman working there who clearly gets no tourists. Wanted to show us everything, kept asking why we were there. Backed out slowly, kept hands visible, ran up the hill to the Prague castle, got there too late, resolved to come back in the morning.

Friday 11 March
Taxi back up the hill as we are wimps, Prague castle very fine, clearly we need a larger house, and a chapel and pipe organ, and a family symbol / icon / crest - the whole branding package. Then, the Jewish synagogues. Lynne fuming over no-photography policy in the Spanish Synagogue, which was awe-inspiring. Back to Berlin, moved in with Tracy and Eric and Vigo.

Saturday 12 March
Vigo's birthday, so thrown out of the apartment, sat in the Пастерна́к cafe watching the lights change over the wasserturm across the street all afternoon, hot chocolates and then food and then more food and then more chocolate. While walking there, found several post-automats, but couldn't get them to work.

Sunday 13 March
Lynne helped Tracy and Eric priming the new apartment while I worked, then visiting Stefan for his birthday and Jennifer and all, watching the rushes of the video. Oh my. See entry 6 March re Erling not an actor. On the way, found a post office, but closed Sunday.

14 March
Neues Museum, Nefertiti in her beautiful room, Akhnaten. Remembering the end of the opera: the monotheist and his failed city (see entry 7 March) which Bisso and I emulated at the end of Sub Pontio Pilato. The painting on the bust of Nefertiti is really beautiful. So much painting lost: Egypt, Greece, the columns of cathedrals. Everyone thinks that the ancient world was devoid of decoration but in reality it was as loud and gaudy as a Peter Max poster. More walls riddled with holes. Not as many as '93. They've done a great job rebuilding the museum. It was fabulously painted from top to bottom, then blown up during The War, and the rebuilding treats it like an archeological site, preserving the bits that survived with minimal restoration, then filling in the holes with modern construction, keeping out the rain. Walked across the river to the Neue Wache war memorial, searching for the Tajikistan tearoom, then finding it only to discover that it had been reserved for a women businessperson's inspirational lecture or somesuch.

15 March
Worked during the day, as franticness increasing with approaching deadlines. Met all our hosts at Schlögls in the Mitte for one last German food blowout, Schnitzel's all around.

16 March
Up at 4 to catch flight to Heathrow, then on to SFO. Finally mailed postcards in the postbox around the corner.

An explanation of me

2011-03-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

This is the published abstract to a paper written by my analyst. I am the first analysand below, the one who fears death and seeks the sexual.

Failed Seduction/Optimum Seduction: Lost in Translation

Failures of seduction may be considered another translation of Freud’s first sexual theory associated with hysteria and trauma. Seduction was the controversy that introduced Freud to the discovery of the sexual unconscious and its expression in fantasy. Lost in translation, and confounded with actual sexual abuse, infant seduction is now being reinserted into psychoanalysis as a primary requisite for the initiation of desire.

Failures of seduction in the clinical cases presented are associated with a repudiation of the feminine, which is located within maternal desire. Thus, maternal desire is impregnated with horror linked to “the internal void, without space, place or time.” Horrors associated with seduction in an analysis act to dissociate or foreclose the necessary seduction for infant life to begin and go on being. What constitutes an ethical seduction that optimizes the potential to be?

“Be aware of what we say in the name of the mother” (Bollas) because we are and are not aware of all that we have ascribed to the mother, the maternal order, her figure and functions in the beginning of life. Bollas as well as Green alert us to the significance of the erotized absence and the absence of erotics in the maternal/infant emotional experience not currently addressed in the analytic encounter. Two clinical cases will be elaborated to re-consider the sexual address within the analytic exchange at primitive levels of emotional experience. If death or dying is part of sexuality, it is not surprising to find both analysands are as obsessed in fantasy with sexuality as with death: one fears death and seeks the sexual, the other fears sexuality and seeks death.

Permission

2011-02-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

As with many composers of my generation, the first sentence of Vincent Persichetti's Twentieth Century Harmony has stuck with me over the years:

ANY TONE can succeed any other tone, any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones, and any group of tones can be followed by any other group of tones, just as any degree of tension or nuance can occur in any medium under any kind of stress or duration.

'Tone' is itself a limiting term. I think it means some sort of pitched musical event, even a relatively stable pitched musical event with a more-or-less clearly demarcated beginning and ending. Such a limitation might be reasonable in a book on harmony, 'harmony' itself a charming notion, something to the effect that such overlapping tone-events cleave and become something greater than themselves, like a damp shirt clinging to a freshly minted bosom, something that propels the drama forward, that functions in a non-Aristotelian manner, in a musical context, rather than pitches that happen to pass by each other, maybe or maybe not interacting, maybe functioning or maybe not, maybe carrying an emotional weight, but maybe an emotional weight that exists only in ironic reference to some past meeting, some subconsciously remembered sentimental moment from some tearjerking potboiler.

When I was young, I thought that the above should be rewritten in terms of 'sound' rather than 'tone,' but, as with infinities, adding sound to sound results merely in sound, gestalts accreting other gestalts to become bigger gestalts, and at some point aren't we simply saying 'do what thou wilt is the whole of the law' which is to say, nothing at all?

But the sentence that follows clears up this particular difficulty:

Successful projection will depend upon the contextual and formal conditions that prevail, and upon the skill and the soul of the composer.

to which I might add the requirement of a having a good public relations firm, who can develop a clear and easily presented summarizing pitch, plus a level of attractiveness, physical and spiritual.

Music Boxes

2011-01-13T01:54:00.001-08:00

From my deathbed

2010-12-26T20:32:00.000-08:00

Out to lunch with the boys, I posed the following question: As some fields of endeavor, such as Spelling, are arbitrary and make no bones about it, and other fields of endeavor, such as Science, hope to be non-arbitrary and even verifiably so, then where does the judgment of rightness and wrongness in music lie?

I was surprised to hear both of them answer, immediately and in chorus, that musical judgment is completely arbitrary.

To set the stage, the conversation had begun with my prediction that "you're" was quickly being replaced by "your", that this trend was clear to see in text messages and Facebook threads, for example the future president's daughters' friends' discussion here. I had also complained that my phone's automatic spell checker attempts always to change "its" to "it's" regardless of the change's grammatical correctness, and it was with these two prologues that the question was posed. To reiterate and expand: is there a way to judge whether a musical moment, an event, a pitch, a sound, a timing, a whatever, is correct in its context? Is there a way to judge the making of one musical choice over another?

Again, these two wise men say no.

As the 'boys' in question, let's call them 'Doug' and 'Thom', are current and past editors of the Computer Music Journal, and as one of them is a composer of Tape a.k.a. Fixed Media music - a species of composition where every detail of the final sound is chosen by the composer and there is no performer intermediary - and moreso is a composer who agonizes over each of these aforesaid details, I was quite surprised. And disappointed too, as in reality I was baiting them, as I knew that they would both inwardly bristle at the aforementioned changes to the language, as much as they know suchlike changes are inevitable, and I thought that the linguistic setup - the bristling - would force them into a conservative proscriptive stance, leading them to take a strong position against the arbitrariness of music and art. This would allow me to then spend the next hour getting the better of them, comfortably chipping away at their position, one which is in reality quite difficult to defend.

So I pressed the point. "But as a fellow electronic musician you must have had the experience where moving an event a few milliseconds made all the difference between a musical passage being successful and not, the musical equivalent of the 'For the want of a nail' proverb?" "Yes," he replied, "but it really is completely arbitrary. The importance of my choice may seem that way to me, but the next person could make the opposite choice and find that to be perfect."

I can't really make a rational argument against this. But I don't believe it passes the common-sense test. While all combinations of sounds may be interesting in some ways, some combinations do appeal, do have value beyond others. In my heart, I know there is a certain rightness to my musical decisions. Maybe I have to think that way. Maybe if I did not, it would call too much into question my whole choice of artistic career and lead me to tuck my head into the oven, a note left behind, upon which is scrawled a crying out against an Existence Too Evil.

But I do believe in the Composer's Hand which, like the Hand of God, touches those things that need to be touched, a Hand that is able to work in a world full of contradiction and pain and randomness but can craft something out of that muck that transcends it. We hear it in the work of performers, where the nuances that separate the merely great performance from the life-changing performance are very small to the oscilloscope, but are very large to the human heart.

A tangential point

When Everett and Brian and I lived together, we built many instruments. A number of these had arbitrary tunings. We scoured hardware stores and the like for scraps of sheet metal of varying thickness and size and arranged these in approximate pitch order - as the pitch of vibrating plates can sometimes lead fair women and men to disagree - placing their vibrational nodes carefully on felt supports. When one began to improvise on such an instrument, certain combinations of tones would quickly appear as meaningful, and sometimes one would feel drawn to a particular sequence, almost as if the allegedly arbitrary tuning would suggest a certain piece of music that was innate in it. Similar statements have been made about pieces arising from particular Indonesian gamelans, each of which feature a tuning that is consistent among the instruments of a single orchestra, but which is always distinct from that of the orchestra down the street.

The winds of history have blown in all of the givens with which we start any piece: the pre-existence of certain sound generators, the limitations of human hearing, the accidents of standards of notation, of performance practice, and maybe those are deeply arbitrary, but from those we must choose, and we must believe we can build.

Why I want to fuck John Adams†

2010-12-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

I moved to Berkeley in the Fall of '78 to go to graduate school, a letter of introduction to Andrew Imbrie in my pocket, two friends in tow: Everett Shock and Brian Woodbury, sharing dreams of the fires of fame with which we were sure we would soon be anointed. That first Fall, walking up College Avenue to campus from Brian's mother's basement, I saw two posters announcing events to come: (1) John Duykers performing George Coates' Duykers the First at Intersection for the Arts and (2) a performance of Shaker Loops at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, composed and conducted by John Adams.

I knew John Adams' name from the Brian Eno release of American Standard, a piece I admired a great deal, but knowing this did not prepare me for the experience. In my memory, as it stands today, the performance was electrifying. I had only recently become aware of the Reich/Riley/Glass consortium, and had only recently spent an evening listening to the Tomato Records Vinyl Release of Einstein on the Beach twice straight through, the too-short LP sides ordered, as vinyl box sets often were, so that the work could be played on a semi-continuous-play phonograph with center spindle with only one flip, i.e., 1-6-2-5-3-4. While it played, I could do nothing except listen, neither speaking nor seeing. So I had only the briefest preparation for the musical language of Shaker Loops, and I was entranced by it in, as I remember, a very small hall or, maybe, a very small world, very close to the players, looking up at John Adams conducting, listening closely as the harmonies unfolded. I came home to a darkened house and ran through the piece in my mind again and again, trying to capture it, this wonderful sound. I repeated the experience at the premiere of Phrygian Gates by Mack McCray, before which Adams came to speak to a class I was taking with Richard Felciano, and after which I retreated to the practice rooms in the basement of Morrison Hall, pounding out patterned scales against each other, holding crashing chords against fast pulses counted in my head. And again, years later when I first heard Nixon in China, I felt that thrill during the beginning, as the orchestra opens up after the chorus. I know now that hearing his operas and those by Glass began my journey back to the theater.

All these memories gained presence for me a couple of weeks ago as I listened, and while Lynne played solitaire on her iPhone, to that same string septet version of Shaker Loops, the piece again conducted by the composer, here at Davies Symphony Hall. My fascination has been tempered by time and my own jaded sensibilities and, in all honesty, by the fame of the composer. Yes, I do want to take him, the pensive and soft-faced artist, his bedroom eyes and his bed-tousled hair, but I want him in an angry and dominating way, where he is reduced to tears as I persist in forcing my attentions on him. I confess I am wholly small-minded when it comes to the fame of other composers. My vanity demands that they be destroyed and destroyed utterly, without humanity, yet I also desire with all my heart to be one with them, to follow them about, to lick the spoons they have left in their chili bowl at the diner. I crave their celebrity, and I spend untold hours making myself crazy, picking through the minutiae of their lives and scores as one would through an owl pellet, looking for a key, the secret to drawing their status onto myself.

† With apologies to the late J.G. Ballard, from which whose prescient piece I now quote:

Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects. ... In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

Il ritorno d'Queer in patria

2010-12-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

My opera on William Lee's quest for love in return will be remounted in May of 2011 at the Southside Theater at Fort Mason. Proposed dates and times (look carefully!) are:

First Weekend 20th May 9pm, 21st May 9pm, 22nd May 7pm
Second Weekend 27th May 8pm, 28th May 8pm, 29th May 7pm

The 25th anniversary edition of the book just came out - see the photo on the right, edited by Oliver Harris, who mentions my 'superb operatic adaptation,' in his informative foreword, p. xlii.

More to come of course, just making sure to scribble it down before I forget. From the reviews of the original production:

Wold crafts music whose delicate beauty glides in just below the listener's critical consciousness. ... At the heart of the production is a virtuosic, utterly hypnotic performance by a singer-actor with the improbable sobriquet of Trauma Flintstone. As the magnetic but pitiable Lee, Flintstone embodies all of the character's swirls of conflicting emotion -- and does it while singing superbly and commanding the stage for the entire evening. - San Francisco Chronicle.

Brilliance characterized every facet of Erling Wold's Queer on opening night at ODC Theater in the Mission. From conception through execution, the chamber opera based on the William Burroughs novel more than did justice to Burroughs' spirit. It rekindled that spirit vividly for the audience, a sophisticated crowd that paid rapt attention to every nuance of inflection and expression from orchestra and actors alike. - Bay Guardian

The Sounding Plunge

2010-11-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

As composers, we are supposed to construct worlds in sound, finding our own way through this evanescent art form, following no rules except the not-often-enough-written truth that [ahem] a sound may occur in any combination with any other sound preceded by and followed by any other sound or combination of sounds. As composers, we see ourselves primarily as architects, as sculptors, making objects not of clay and metal and wood, rather out of the ephemera of sound itself. But sometimes we see ourselves as writers and, like writers to the printed page, to the glue of the binding, to the musty smell of the reading room, we are attracted to the object of the score itself, a beautiful thing, expressed through a beautiful symbology. The making of a score is a private pleasure for me, one of the things that most attracted me to being a classical music composer, that music could exist as a quasi book, a book written especially for instruments played by performers who can actually read the instructions contained therein.

But composers are not writers. Our medium is not the word. We are artists who have chosen sound as our medium, and who revel in sound short-lived nature and, as such an artist, I had little patience for in my youth for words. I was angered by requests for words to explain what I did in words. I care not for words. I spit. The music is my art, the art is sound, the art is music, why should I have to translate my beautiful sets of sounds into the coarseness and baseness of language, convincing others of its goodness so? Language is about communication, and maybe music isn't even about communication. Someone who is interested in the possibility of giving money to composers should just listen to a piece or two, they should come to a performance and sit there and listen. Maybe a recording is acceptable as at least an ersatz facsimile of that experience, but words have no relation to it.

You have been to an art gallery, yes?, and you have noticed how the eager-to-learn supplicants attending the art spend more time reading the title cards that are placed next to the painting than looking at the painting itself? I find myself doing it, I find myself ensnared by those words. I understand that it makes me feel that I am learning something about the work, but that's not really true. I am merely learning something about the curator. I've seen many cards with descriptions that are outrageous, consisting of turgid, pompous nonsense. Unfortunately, the prostrated communion of the art goer to those descriptions, and the weight given to narrative expressed by them, is something that seduces artists themselves. Artists begin to create pieces of art that lend themselves to descriptions that will impress. Such seduction is rife in the new music world as well. Before I became a jaded old man, I would read the program notes and think: my, this is so interesting, I'm so looking forward to hearing this, and then I would once again be disappointed, left at the altar, wondering where that piece had disappeared to that was promised to me. Had it slipped past without my noticing? Had I missed the glorious audible representation of the lovely ideas which were so lovingly presented in the program notes?

So - can we simply take all the labels off the paintings? Giacinto Scelsi, that wonderful swindler and possible composer would send, when asked for program notes, a drawing of circle. I can't say that I really know what he meant by that circle, or whether it had a meaning at all, but I hope that it read as something to the effect of shut up and listen, shut up and write music, and stop describing.

* * * * *

That all being said, can I now say that I love words, that I love to read them and write them and feel the way they feel passing by my lips? A few days ago, I had a visceral reaction, literally deep in my guts, upon hearing Michael Krasny say the word confabulate, and this is a common experience for me. I love my friend Jim Bisso's blog on words and grammar and language, the wonderfully punctilious EPEA PTEROENTA. And I've wanted to be a writer since I was a precocious child, the one who carried around the complete works of James Joyce in his briefcase, letting himself be seen kissing them in public.

Given this, maybe it's not so strange that words have stolen away my heart from my chosen art form of the construction of sound. I am surrounded by English, and I myself am a carrier of it. It is one's duty as a speaker of a language to be part of the mix, to eject those bits that no longer express what you wish to express and to create new language that expresses what you do wish to express. Like a composer, this should come from the sound up. We should each be inventing new phones and phonemes, new words, new phrases and new architectures of speaking and writing and expressing. I am happy with misunderestimate. It's a great word that expresses something that can't be expressed without it. Although at first my fellow liberalists used it only to make fun of George and his malapropisms, I've noticed that, now that some time has past and it's not so funny anymore, it is still being used, a jestful usage that has become real usage as people realize the word really might have what it takes to join its fellows, journeying up the ladder from the Urban Dictionary to the OED. We artists know that mistakes are a great generative tool across all creative endeavors. [Ed: this particular verb may be a bad example, as according to wiktionary it can trace its lineage back:

1897 ...is almost sure to misunderstand and misunderestimate the significance of the question at hand. — The Outlook, American Diplomacy on the Bosphorous April 17, 1897]

Another malapropic and fellow target of my fellow liberals' ire, the late governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, tells us we should all invent words, and on this one point I agree. We overeducated folk are too nervous about our speech, we should allow for mistake. I know this is hard. It is hard for me personally. When I commit a verbal gaucherie, the embarrassment lingers. I wish I had the Oxford-or-equivalent background that is given to the Brits when they are born, allowing their even the most casual sentences to be constructed perfectly. My first wife once told me a story of how, in England, she saw two very young British Children standing outside a country house gazing across the grounds. As she watched, one said to the other: "Oh, what a marvelous garden, let us go get lost in it." If I could speak like that, I would die happy. But I fear that, when one hasn't learned a language when one is three years old, and I mean really learned it, one can never catch up, and real mastery shall always elude. But I soldier on anyway, doing my bit, correct and uncorrecting here and thre as I see fit.

Excerpts from DieciGiorni:10DAYS

2010-11-10T23:39:00.000-08:00

The opera was a collaborative piece and these are my bits, so don't hold them against my colleagues, they are my responsibility. We start with a section of Boccaccio's Proem, a difficult-to-stomach description of the terrors of the plague in Florence spoken by the master actor Robert Ernst. Interspersed between is my commentary, sung by the identical twins William Sauerland and Crystal Philippi.

And then, a contemporary description by Gabriele de' Mussi, in an edited translation by George Deaux.

With Roham Shaikhani looking on, it is followed by a short poem of mine about the finality of death.

An exact transcription of a dear friend's bachelorette party in Las Vegas is then somehow shoehorned into the opera, but a beautiful story it is, and look at those wigs.

The whole mess was directed by the fabulous Jim Cave and conducted by the master Martha Stoddard.

What we learned

2010-10-17T20:56:00.000-07:00

The most important decision of the morning, heading toward the bath or other consecrated ablutionary functions is to choose what to read. This forenoon, eschewing the usual potboiler or periodical, I peeled Ernst Toch's The Shaping Forces of Music from the bookshelf. Peeled, I say, as it was stuck to the plastic and fluid-repellent cover of Joan Sinclair's Pink Box. But, once extricated, and once I was myself floating in my quasi-womb, I cracked open the book, blew the moths from the pages and plunged.

First, the tragedy of his life: escaping from Nazi Europe, the loss of his friendly European audience, the fear that he had misspent his musical talents in Hollywood, the heart attack, his late rebirth as a true composer only to be felled by cancer of the stomach. Maybe not the ne plus ultra of the standard composer story, but a romantic tale nonetheless. Second, the published letter from Thomas Mann rejecting his request for a foreword but providing one through his rejection. Third, the book itself, starting with a long apologia for a naive modernism in music, a modernism of the immediate post-war, the acceptance of chromaticisms and pantonally or polytonally stretched harmonies in the harmonization of some standard chorale melodies, the now familiar explanations of how the standard harmonic rules did a pretty piss-poor job of explaining the triple pedal tones and atonalities of presumed common-practice music. I remember these arguments as so important in my youth, and the arguments, though true, are now just quaint, e.g.:

So far it may be concluded beyond any discussion that no sound, considered by itself and detached from any context, can under any circumstances be other than neutral and meaningless, just as no letter of the alphabet can be anything but neutral and meaningless. To divide any kind of sounds, be it tones, intervals or harmonies, into one category of consequences per se – white sheep – and another one of dissonances per se – black sheep – is as absurd as it would be to divide the letters of the alphabet into consonances and dissonances.

The sooner we discard these two coddled pets of theory, the sooner we will discard with them an unending source of confusion. The future will look back at this doctrine of consonances and dissonances with the same pitying smile which we bestow upon the once-upon-a-time belief in witches and evil demons living inside certain individuals.

One wishes that the belief in witches and evil demons really had been set aside, especially by likely voters, but luckily the coddled pets have been set aside, in large part, and now we live in a world where a puzzled Matt Ingalls can say to me during one of my digressions on intonation: "are we talking about pitch?" But back then, in my youth, such now quaint concerns were important. I remember also Jim Tenney's lovely book that considered the changing aspects of the terminology itself: A History of 'Consonance' and 'Dissonance'.

But I wonder: are they still teaching the harmony and counterpoint which, even before I was born, was already ridiculous and long discredited? Googling around for Musical Composition curricula at our popular universities, the search results returned oh-so-quickly seem to indicate that they are. Even Schenkerian Analysis, for the sake of Pete. One of my favorite quotes on this pseudo-scientific balderdash, which should have found its way to the rubbish heap along with water divination by crooked sticks, is by Fred Everett Maus who, in his article Sexual and Musical Categories said:

Schenker's creation of an elaborate tonal theory in response to post-tonal music resembles, to some extent, sexologists' back-formation of the concept of heterosexuality as a complement to their new concept of homosexuality. In both cases, a conceptualization of the normative or unmarked category follows awareness of an alternative. Schenker's attack on some music as unnatural recalls, of course, similar attacks on homosexuality.

Here, here. Let us please put an end to the teaching of rules created by wannabe prescriptivists who find themselves in a world now scarily unfamiliar, which would lead, if applied vigorously, to the creation of only the most normative (read bland) and uninteresting of musics, even for those who believe that music died in one or the other of those fin-de-siècle brothels or absinthe parlors.