Mixed Meters

Oil and Water Mix

2009-11-04T01:45:00.000-08:00

Click here to listen to Oil and Water Mix right now and avoid all the tedious reading.

Earlier this year I heard a radio broadcast of Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos, although the announcer called it Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. The Poulenc had been a favorite of mine in college days. I hadn't listened to it in a very long time. I enjoyed hearing it again.

Soon afterwards, inspired by the Poulenc, I decided to compose some simple, melodic music filled with lots of tonics and dominants. I wrote one little passage, then another and another, not bothering much with any sense of structure. I called the piece "Not Dissonant and Not Complex". Catchy, huh?

When "Not Dissonant and Not Complex" reached about four minutes I was forced to confront the fact that it wasn't very interesting. I hatched a new plan: I would interpolate bits of a completely different sort of music - random sounding notes - into what I had already written.

Thus the idea of "oil and water" was born: two radically different musical styles, each in turn ignoring the other, then cavorting with the other, then battling for supremacy. One type of music is "oil", the other is "water". You can decide which is which.

The word "mix" gets a lot of use in music. Mostly it refers to the result of audio manipulation of some already recorded tracks. I'm using the word "mix" in more of an active, verbal sense. Think of the sentence "Listen to me make oil and water mix."

The entire piece, both oil and water, is carefully composed. Certain sections sound random because I tried hard to make them that way. I adjusted each pitch, rhythm and dynamic to produce maximum variety. No Cageian chance methods were employed while composing Oil and Water Mix. None were needed.

It has already been remarked several times by people who have heard Oil and Water Mix that it seems to wander aimlessly, pointlessly. I do understand this reaction. But in fact the piece is divided into sections and certain melodies are repeated several times.

If you think that following this "formal structure" might be helpful as you listen I have added an analysis of Oil and Water Mix. You can find this on the playback page. Just click here and then scroll down a bit.

It's hardly a rigorous analysis, completely unworthy of a doctoral student in musicology. I had different choices about how to name things - for example - Section Two might actually be just a coda to Section One and Section Three might merely be a slow prelude to Section Four. You might want to listen for the short silence at 5'22" between sections two and three.

Mixed Meters' Three Readers may remember long ago, when I started posting my own short pieces, I lumped them together into a category called Thirty Second Spots. Later I started writing longer pieces for which I invented a new category, Three Minute Climaxes. Eventually I needed a third name for even longer pieces. I called these Ten Minute Breaks. (Think of the word "break" in the sense of a "coffee break".) The actual lengths vary above and below the stated time limits; please don't let that bother you.

Oil and Water Mix, at eleven minutes and six seconds, qualifies as a Ten Minute Break.

I now have composed five Ten Minute Breaks: They are

Thinking With Other People's Words (click here to listen, click here to read the related post)
Eating the Desiccant (never posted online because I like it too much)
Poof You're A Pimp (click here to listen, click here to read the post)
Formal Introduction (this one has been "nearly" finished for almost a year)
Oil and Water Mix (click here to listen, you are already reading the related post.)

Of course it should go without saying that I'm not now, nor have I ever been, a doctoral student in musicology.

Oil and Water Tags: Oil and Water Mix. . . David Ocker. . . Francis Poulenc. . . random music

Hidden Meanings

2009-10-30T21:32:00.001-07:00

These are carefully cropped pictures of various Pasadena signs. This process reveals secret messages.

And here are two in honor of Halloween.

The last is part of a church name. Sorry, no pictures of pumpkins this year. You can find some here. One of MM's earliest posts concerned Halloween movies.

Similar silly MM photo essays:
Crooked
Musical Merchants
Branches Before Blue
Gloves In the Wild
Fence Shadows
Graffiti Animals of California
Buckets for Babies in Pasadena
HALF GRASSED

This one, Taggers With Spellcheck, also deals with words.

Here's a bonus.

Partial Tags: partial signs. . . hidden meaning. . . Halloween

Hell Mouth

2009-10-28T23:04:00.000-07:00

John Adams, the most successful composer, has been my top client for decades. Hey John, thanks for all the work! (I mean, really.)

But he has shown very unusual lack of judgment recently by starting his own blog, Hell Mouth. I think the picture which begat this strange name must have been taken by John's wife, the photographer Deborah O'Grady.

Hell Mouth is starting at a furious pace: he's written five posts, extensive essays, in a little over a week. Here at MM I feel overworked if I do five short posts a month. But I've been at this for a while (4 years last month) and understandably my enthusiasm has waned.

John is a good writer. His skills have been honed recently by his biography Hallelujah Junction. I like his adjectives.

One of John's posts is entitled: On Surviving a First Rehearsal discussing the composition and premier of his most recent work City Noir (actually his third symphony). The public perception of how a piece of music travels from a composer's brain to a concert stage is a complete mystery to nearly everyone - even to some musicians. My job puts me right in the middle of one facet of that process. This explains why a lot of people have no clue about what I do for a living.

John devotes one paragraph to me.

City Noir is so densely layered that I need two full manuscript pages to embrace all the parts. Hell for the copyist, who is nonetheless unfazed, a total pro. David—started out playing clarinet with Frank Zappa. After 24 years knows my intentions nearly well enough to fill out a line that I’ve forgotten to write out.

Very cool.

Later John mentions the first rehearsal of City Noir led by boy wonder Gustavo Dudamel in Walt Disney Hall. I was one of very few people allowed to listen. The musicians had prepared for the rehearsal but none of them could have much of an inkling how John intended their parts to fit together. Loud things came out soft. Soft things loud. It came apart. It came back together again. Somehow Dudamel kept it all racing along - the entire piece. When he conducts, his hair subdivides the beat.

The composer, conductor and all the players were hard at work. Their job was to make City Noir sound correct; they had a very limited time for this. On the other hand, my job had been completed weeks before. I was just hanging out, listening in a manner none of them could afford, following the score as it whipped past.

And I was blown away. A roller coaster with breakneck twists and turns could never be that much fun. It was a simply amazing, mind-blowing thirty minutes of music, as if the spirit of Charles Mingus had somehow gotten into the souls of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was rough. It was raw. It rocked. Most likely I was the only one there enjoying this experience, it was indeed a great time which I shall not soon forget. At the end I just laughed.

Of course, you could never intentionally make an orchestra play like that. You do not tell a symphony orchestra to "Wail". By the second rehearsal the piece was taking its proper shape. Each rehearsal refined the music a bit more. I liked the finished piece as well. It's also a wild ride. But not as wild as that first reading.

Future orchestras, preparing City Noir, will have recordings to refer to so players will know when to project and when to hold back. The one-time unique experience I witnessed, nothing at all like the piece itself, is lost forever.

John also mentions how the players ask him questions - including about the B Double Sharp. I heard a lot about this note before and during the rehearsals. For you non-musicians, a B Double Sharp is a completely theoretical musical notation - it sounds the same as the familiar pitch C sharp. I can't think of a reason it would ever be used legitimately. Any suggestions?

This particular B Double Sharp is played by the Second Violins, Violas and Second Trumpet in measure 183 of movement one of City Noir. I just checked again. It really is in the manuscript - twice. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have just changed it to a C#. The music would have sounded identical and no one would have noticed. Even the composer himself.

Read about how I was reduced to tears by a performance of one of John's pieces.
Read any or all of the Mixed Meters posts tagged "John Adams".

Hell Mouth Tags: John Adams. . . Hell Mouth. . . City Noir

First Sign of the Holidays

2009-10-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, fresh from the land of cryptozoology, it's a Christmas Penguin.

This one was collected by Leslie in Armstrong's Pasadena Garden Center. She reports that they came in many sizes. This is a small specimen.

Read Stalking the Christmas Penguin
Read Stalking the Christmas Penguin 2
Read Christmas in October (it ends up discussing table grapes).

Penguin Tags: penguins. . . Christmas penguins

Million Dollar Sculpture

2009-10-10T01:43:00.000-07:00

Wandering around in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday I noticed some sculptures on a building at 307 South Broadway. You can see four of them in this corner shot.

I snapped close-up pictures of each one. Click them and they get bigger. I wonder why these particular subjects were chosen, although many of them are obviously arts related. The building was built in 1918.

Each of the above sculptures have their own buffalo head.

The building is called the Million Dollar Theater. Here's a Flickr photo-set with good pictures of the building itself. There's a Million Dollar Theater Homepage with some indoor shots. More indoor pictures here. And here's a Wikpedia page which reports the name of the sculptor: Jo Mora. Besides these figurative works there's a lot of very neat decorative sculpture as well.

Million Dollar Tags: Million Dollar Theater. . . sculpture. . . Jo Mora

It's California's Fault

2009-10-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I tagged along with Leslie as she tagged along with an excursion organized by the Natural History Museum of LA County. That's where she works. The outing was called "Living on the Fault Line; A Day Along the San Andreas." We followed the San Andreas Fault for about a hundred miles in a small caravan of vehicles.

Our guide was Lindsey Groves, a colleague of Leslie's at the Museum. This is Lindsey. When he talks he uses his hands a lot.

Behind him, on the opposite side of the Antelope Valley Freeway, just north of the San Andreas Fault, you can see the wall of a freeway cut. A cut is where they excavated a hill to avoid having to build the freeway over it. This one is just north of Avenue S near Palmdale. Notice the vertical lines called strata. These were formed horizontally and then pushed upward by earthquakes. All the pushing took a very long time.

The next picture shows Lindsey in the middle of nowhere at a place called Pallet Creek. He is showing us where layers of sediment in a former lake bed have been toyed with by earthquakes. With his hand he's marking the level of a dark layer of peat which was moved upward by a quake. Notice that the dark band to the left of his hand is lower. An earthquake once broke the earth exactly at this spot.

When asked exactly where the fault line is now Lindsey would only point out a several hundred foot span. The next time the earth moves on the fault it'll be somewhere within that swath - probably. He seemed to enjoy pointing out structures which just might be straddling the San Andreas Fault.

At one point on the road, not far from this Pallet Creek site and not far from the fault itself, a band of helpful Boy Scouts erected a San Andreas Fault sign. This served as an excellent photo-op. Here's Leslie near the sign.

The tour began at Devore where several earthquake faults, including the San Andreas, meet with several freeways and several major railroad lines. Recipe for disaster? Then we moved to Wrightwood a town in the mountains. It sits right on the fault, nestled in tall pine trees.

Near Wrightwood are Earthquake Trees. These trees had their tops snapped off long ago during the earthquake of 1812. They kept on growing afterwards but with two trunks instead of one.

We lunched in an idyllic place called Jackson Lake, thick with green reeds and noisy with ducks. We saw many small lakes on the tour. These bodies of water are the result of seismic movement. Geologists use them as clues to where the fault lines are.

Indeed, picking an earthquake fault out of a scenic vista is difficult, although the geologists have their little tricks. But identifying a fault zone precisely takes careful measurements with precision instruments. It may be hard to see but we know it could cause a lot of damage. Preparedness is important.

I thought this is similar to certain medical conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar. You only can tell you have these diseases because doctors use their machines to identify them. You can't feel the illness, but it could do you a lot of damage. It's a good idea not to ignore them.

We visited Devil's Punchbowl, just one of several fantastic rock formations caused by seismic shifts. Devil's Punchbowl had been in great danger from the recent Station Fire. A pyro-cumulus cloud was just poking out over the mountains when we visited. A new fire had started several hours earlier somewhere in the area we had just visited. As we watched the cloud kept getting bigger.

This new fire (still burning as I write this) is called the Sheep Fire. It has now burned a large area which we visited along the San Andreas Fault.

Yes, there are a lot of dangers to living in Southern California. Earthquakes and fires are just two of them. Neither is easy to predict. Both can be devastating to lives and property. The similarities end there.

On a lighter note, at Devil's Punchbowl some local wildlife was on display - including three owls. Here's Owl Number Three.

Several of the links above connect to Google maps. In these the fault generally moves from upper left to lower right. There are some clues visible from satellite pictures which can't be seen from the ground.

I also suggest you visit geology.com where you can see Google maps with the San Andreas fault indicated using geopositioning data. I couldn't find a way to link to particular locations on those maps, however, so you'll have to navigate manually.

Lindsey Groves works at the Malacology department of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. His interests also include geology and paleontology. He wrote a fantastic article about the San Andreas tour for the museum's magazine. Hopefully I will find an online link to that. Hopefully he'll forgive me for the liberties I've taken in describing his interesting field trip.

Fault Tags: San Andreas Fault. . . NHMLAC. . . Lindsey Groves. . . earthquake. . . forest fire. . . Southern California

Maywood Pasadena

2009-09-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of Vasily Radaschevsky. I snapped it by surprise at the Pasadena Farmer's Market. There were two other people in the picture but I made them disappear through the miracle of Photoshop.

Vasily is a polychaetologist, a worm expert, and a colleague of Leslie's. He is a native of Russia and lives in Vladivostok, across the pond. He visited us for several weeks this month, traveling to Pasadena from Rio de Janeiro Brazil where he spends a good deal of his time.

Vasily told us about a song entitled Pasadena. He described it as being one of the most popular pop tunes in Russia. Neither Leslie nor I had the foggiest idea of what he was talking about.

After his return to Rio he sent an mp3 of the tune with this description:

This is THE MOST popular song in whole Russia, including everfrozen Siberia!!!

Every Russian dreams to come to Pasadena, even has no any idea where it is and what's about this song! But it is so heart and soul taking that became EXTREMELY popular in my country!

Well, I am the happiest Siberian because I managed to get my feet in Pasadena!!!!

Of course, English is his second langauge (and Portuguese his third) but I think you can get his point.

Pasadena, as it turns out, is an 80's Europop tune by a Dutch group called Maywood, a kind of girl group, a duet. ABBA without the B's. Here's a video of the song Pasadena. Enjoy.

Maybe Pasadena should consider making this our city song.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for the group Maywood. Not too informative. Here's the Maywood "offical" website. More informative. You can find the lyrics to Pasadena with a couple of clicks.

Mixed Meters has had prior brushes with Europop music. Read One Goldberg Equals Twelve ABBAs. Also check out Boogie Woogie Worldwide - scroll down to the part about Cheezy-Euro-Disco and M.A.Numminen.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to one of Mixed Meters' Three Readers, Ben Harper, who sent this link to another unknown-to-me work of Pasadena-eponymous musical art. Enjoy.

Maywood Pasadena Tags: Maywood. . . Pasadena. . . Europop. . . polychaete

Classical Music Isn't Dead, It Just Needs a Rest

2009-08-23T08:22:00.001-07:00

A Los Angeles Sunday Times "Arts and Culture" article gave me pause. It's called Alexy Steele, Classical Underground Impresario by Scott Timberg. In the print edition it's entitled "Mad for Classical".

Here's the story ...

An artist, Alexy Steele, a person who creates new art to earn his living, holds classical music concerts in his loft. He calls the series "Classical Underground". People flock to them. And these events are held up as a way to save classical music.

We are told ...

The Classical Underground series was inspired by Steele repeatedly being told that classical music was dead. "Whenever I get to this point," he exclaims, wheeling back on his chair as he pours more beer, "my ears would pop!"

What bothers me, of course, is that the music presented to these gatherings of creative people is all from the classical canon. Nothing mentioned in the article seems very current or adventurous. The article did refer to one piece by Prokofiev (d.1953) plus some improvisations on Bach.

I'm reminded that one principal reason people love classical music is that it helps them relax. And maybe they need to network at loft parties. All that is easier with familiar, comfortable classics; music which barely changes from one performance to the next. I conclude that in such situations the music is not meant to offer a contemporary perspective. They have other forms of art for that. I fear this music is more like a spa treatment for ones ears.

I remember a story told by Dorrance Stalvey, for many years director of the Monday Evening Concerts back when they were sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of (what else?) Art.

Dorrance programmed a concert of music which living artists played while they worked. He asked them "What do you listen to while you work?" and they told him. He was dismayed how the result was mostly from the baroque and classical periods.

Apparently these contemporary artists - some of them cutting edge - had no clue about contemporary music. I guess that they didn't find any inspiration in modern music. More charitably, maybe listening to something of actual relevance would distract their creative process. It's easier to ignore familiar things when you need to concentrate.

The fact that visually creative people, who I would have thought ought to have an interest in other forms of contemporary creativity, instead prefer a solidly unchanging body of old music, fills me with wonderment. How would they react to musicians who only cared to view paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries?

Thankfully, the world of creative music persists even without visual artists. Another article in the Times, just one day before, outlines local activities of creative music here in the LA area - all of it improvised. Read Finding Jazz in a Cool Place. (The title is "Jazz at a cool spot" in print.)

Alas, nothing in that article speaks about creative classical music either. The words "creative" and "classical" are ideas which aren't mutually supportive. Competing against the classical favorites is not easy.

Maybe we could have a moratorium on the classical warhorses - just stop playing them for ten or fifteen years. There are plenty of other classical-style pieces for people to listen to. Audiences need a chance to catch up.

Meanwhile the words "jazz" and "creative" certainly support one another these days. I wonder if there are visual artists who would like listening to cutting-edge improvisations in their lofts. There are plenty of creative musicians looking for places to perform.

=-=-=-=-

Alexy Steele's Website: High Art Forever

Other Mixed Meters attacks on artists:
Our Culture Overvalues the Wrong Things
What's on David Hockney's iPod?

Other Mixed Meters attacks on the classics:
Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably)
One Goldberg Equals Twelve Abbas
A Fine Line Between Classical and Parody
Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa
Combining Four Letter Words: Oboe + Blog

Underground Tags: Alexy Steele. . . loft concerts. . . underground music

Auto Destructive Rag

2009-08-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

To the everlasting shame of National Public Radio my interest in offbeat English humor began with their early 1970's broadcasts of the Goon Show. Lately I've been listening to the Goon-inspired I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, a BBC radio show starring John Cleese and no one else familiar to Americans.

One of the hallmarks of the avant-garde in music is the presence of parodies. This is a tradition extending from Punkt contrapunkt (1958) to Einstein on the Fritz (1989). But I'm drawing a blank for avant-garde music parodies in the last two decades. I guess the a.g. is really dead and gone this time.

I was amused by a song in one particular ISIRTA episode (Series 6/11, March 23, 1969) This was a time (as we are reminded recently by the nostalgia industry) of Abbey Road, Woodstock and the Moon Landing. All of those were fictitious events, of course, mere government hoaxes.

But in 1969 The Avant Garde was alive. This is proven by a song called "Auto Destructive Rag". Lavishly orchestrated and Tom Lehrer-esque, only the strangest among us would find it amusing. I liked it.

The singer and composer is uncredited - probably Bill Oddie. You can listen to this clip or read my transcription of the lyrics if you want an even duller, more avant-garde, experience.

Google Audio Widgetgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

And now, here is an urgent reptile joke. What changes color and goes "I say, I say, I say"?

I don't know. What does change color and goes "I say, I say, I say"?

A musical chameleon!

And now, an educational, meaningful song. Nowadays we have Auto Destructive Art - (Look it up.) - and twelve-tone music. Will these, in a few years time, be looked back on as the good old days. (Who cares?)

(Music)

[THE AUTO DESTRUCTIVE RAG]

Some like jazz
Some like swing
I don't like
Anything
Unless it's got the feeling of tomorrow.

Make it wild
Make it weird
Preferably
With a beard
If it's soft and sweet it went out long ago.

I like music pure and cold and hard
(Like it is)(?)
I'm a member of the avant ga-ga-garde

So......
Play me a tune that has nothing to do with a Melody.
Play me a tune that has nothing to do with a tune.

Give me a suite
with no rhythm or beat
and no harmony.

Open the thing
and dismember the strings
with a spoon.

Take a good old-fashioned geetar
And plug it in the mains.

Bash it
Beat it
Try to
Eat it
Play me a suite with the brains

Oh....
Play to me soon
and don't bother to tune
up your Instruments

Oh gimme, oh gimme
That Auto Destructive Rag.

Give me a tune
that has something
to do with
Reality

Play me some bump
[....]
on a stick
Ah ah - ohohoh

Twentieth century's
full of adventures
in Melody

I wanna dance
to the sound of a man
being sick.
Bwehh.

Bring it all back!

Everybody's hummin'
A catchy twelve-tone song
No bars
No key
Absolutely
Free.
Come on.
Sing along.

[imitates operatic soprano]
oh OH oh.
Ohoh oh.
Oh oh oh Oh oh.
Ah.

Come on, you're not singing.

Ohhhh
Don't you like
Doin' that
Come on
And do with that
Melody

Oh gimme, oh gimme
That Auto Destructive Rag.

[over break]
Oh, that's terrible.

Oh they're playing our tune.

The sounds are all around us
It's the music of today [Ahh!]
Scratch it
Scrape it
Wreck it
Rape it
Everybody can play.

[Break]

Ah...
Oh...
Play me a tune
that has
nothing to do
with a Melody.
Oh gimme, oh gimme
That Auto Destructive ...
Oh gimme, oh gimme
That Auto Destructive ...
Gimme!
Gimme
That Auto Destructive ...

Yoko. Oh! No!!!!!!!!!

Gimme that Auto Destructive Raaaaaaaag.
Da da daa dada dah...

[Applause]
[Announcer]
And now it's serial time.

[Fanfare]
Here's adventure. Here's romance.
Here's a paper and pencil
See if you can do any better.
Yes.

Reach For the Sky - Part Two (The link to listen to the Goon Show "First Albert Memorial to the Moon" should still work.)
Ice Cream Wishes (Mixed Meters meets the work of Yoko Ono while eating sweet, frozen dairy fat.)
The DOcker Award for Mainstream Avant Garde (BBC related video of nothing much.)

I think "Musical Chameleon" is a pun on "Music Hall Comedian" - but not being British I'm obviously not qualified to speculate.

Rag Tags: ISIRTA. . . Auto Destructive. . . BBC radio humor

Taggers With Spellcheck

2009-08-13T09:38:00.001-07:00

I've been noticing graffiti consisting of whole, correctly spelled English words. Unusual.

Click a picture if a larger font size will help you read the words.

Similar silly MM photo essays: Crooked and Musical Merchants and Branches Before Blue and Gloves In the Wild and Fence Shadows and Graffiti Animals of California and Buckets for Babies in Pasadena and HALF GRASSED.

For extra credit use all the words "pathos" "corpse" "zeal" "riot" and "ghost" in a sentence.

For even more credit, identify the word in this picture:

This is not a test.

Tags: graffiti. . . tagger. . . spell check

Schoenberg In Hell

2009-08-05T11:13:00.000-07:00

In my daily "spare moment" I've been reading "A Windfall of Musicians, Hitler's Emigres and Exiles in Southern California" by Dorothy Lamb Crawford. It's now $32.00 at Amazon. (When I purchased it 3 weeks ago, it sold for $25.20 - just enough to qualify for free shipping.)

The book chronicles an era that was completely finished by the time I, an exile from the Middle West, arrived in Southern California. Many things have changed here since Los Angeles received a host of Europe's greatest unwanted creative minds. Some things haven't. A fascinating book.

I just finished Chapter 6 entitled "Arnold Schoenberg". It deals specifically with Schoenberg's attempts to cope with life on the opposite side of the planet from his known world. I found the story of Schoenberg's exile extremely depressing, even tragic.

Schoenberg, of course, was a talented sincere artist of great psychological extremes. He had keen awareness of the history of music and his own contributions to it. He worked hard to explain the logic of what he did without ever denying the importance of inspiration. And he was an elitist called to point out that the future of all music would indeed reflect his influences.

Here in California he could squeeze out a living only by teaching. He found his American students woefully unprepared. The history of important European art music, like any other history, must have seemed terribly distant to them.

While on the faculty of UCLA he formulated giant plans for a conservatory-like program for all musicians, not just composers. There would even be a school for copyists! Of course his ideas were ignored. His greatest legacy today, unfortunately, seems to be the widespread image of the composer as professor.

Schoenberg's isolation on the West Coast is poignantly highlighted by a quote from his daughter about the regular Sunday afternoon salons he held in his home.

"After a while my father realized that these people were coming here to meet each other and not to talk with him.... Daddy would be sitting ... maybe completely alone, not talking to anyone, and so he decided one time that we weren't going to do this anymore. . . . For a long time on Sunday afternoons at two o'clock . . . we would get in the car and drive around the block . . . while these people came and found no one at home and went away." (p.129)

Schoenberg lived just long enough to see his teachings misinterpreted by composers back in Europe. He was hailed as the creator of a new movement called serialism, a musical reaction to the horrors of war based on very un-Schoenbergian mathematical theories. Crawford writes:

As Schoenberg found European interest in his compositions growing in the postwar period, he wrote, "There is nothing I long for more intensely . . . than that people should know my tunes and whistle them." What happened was the opposite. Leonard Stein commented "Schoenberg was not responsible for the twelve-tone concept taking over. People like [Rene] Leibowitz. . . would come in the late forties and explain his music to him!" (p.131)

All these and other aspects are detailed superbly in Dorothy Crawfords' chapter. To me they seem to describe a man condemned to both great and petty torments, incapable of overcoming either geographical or cultural isolation, unable to oppose the historical forces well beyond his control and unwilling to compromise his own devotion to principle. He found himself in a musical hell where the weather was very very nice. Wouldn't this story make a great novel? Maybe it already has.

These days significant serious music still is not native to Southern California. Talented local musicians go away to make classical careers while Southern California's musical institutions import their heroes from other places. Composers still flock here although not because of political exile. They hope for big industrial paychecks. Most of them probably have an unperformed opera, symphony or string quarter on an old external USB drive somewhere.

Remaining here, even in the age of Internet and discount airfare, means accepting a certain form of isolation. Southern California seems to be a unique place filled with talent and money - but creatively we live somewhere in the absolute elsewhere.

Reading the story of Schoenberg's later life resonated with my own feelings. In life, of course, one picks the best available choice and then lives happily ever after. Still, it is only natural to occasionally lament the lesser luminosity of the local grass. And it is revealing to discover that even the most influential musicians might have gazed across a similar fence.

The cover picture above shows (L to R) Otto Klemperer (very tall), Prinz Hubertus von Loewenstein, Arnold Schoenberg (very short) and Ernst Toch (holding a small dog).

Other more or less related Mixed Meters posts:

Los Angeles, New Music Backwater
Something I want to discuss with Arnold
In which David's ranting is imaginary
30 Second Spots - Oh, Was He Still Around
Schoenberg and Shostakovich for marching band
Mozart's Penis versus Schoenberg's Penis (alas, the "Schoenberg's Penis" entry in the Urban Dictionary has disappeared. I did not make it up.)
Kraft's Encounters (William Kraft, a successful composer whose entire career has been in Southern California)
The Rest Is Noise (especially the section about politics of music)
The New Yorker and the Hero Composer in Los Angeles

Exile Tags: A Windfall of Musicians. . . Dorothy Lamb Crawford. . . Arnold Schoenberg. . . Los Angeles Composers

Funny Piano (part 1)

2009-07-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

Here are some video links with one thing in common. All involve a piano and none of them involve a cat and all are kind of funny. Well, I thought so.

In the first my favorite pianist Glenn Gould introduces the "brilliant German reductionist" composer Karlheinz Klopweisser. In this short promo Karlheinz explains the difference between German silence and French silence. Watch it here or you can download the video from UbuWeb.

Next we have another larger-than-life fictional character, Andre Previn, conducting Grieg's Piano Concerto on a 1971 English television show while he was conductor of the London Symphony.

Finally we have a clip from a 1963 Jack Parr show on which then former Vice-President Richard Nixon performs a snippet of his own Piano Concerto. (Sadly the audio is missing at the end.) Tricky Dick seems very relaxed and even cracks a joke.

Funny Piano Tags: Glenn Gould. . . Andre Previn. . . Richard Nixon

Wagner with an asterisk

2009-07-21T23:25:00.001-07:00

I expect this will be my last Wagner(*)-LA Opera-Ring Festival related post. That's because Supervisor Antonovich's now failed resolution is, most likely, the high-water mark of the anti-Ring Festival movement. The Gettysburg of anti-Wagnerism in Southern California. Another failed rebellion. Mike A.'s totally impractical suggestions lost by a vote of 3 to 1. I'm pretty sure it would have been 4 to 1 if all five Supes had shown up.

I have one final suggestion for the opera company on how they can allay the fears and complaints of people like me, the unwashed non-fanatical normal people who don't care for opera, can't afford to buy tickets, wouldn't have the patience to sit through a whole performance if they were given tickets for free and who number well over 99% of LA County's population. (My calculation for that made-up statistic is in a footnote here.)

My suggestion is simple. It will cost nothing. It will reach everyone who ever sees Ring Festival advertising, promotion or propaganda. It will be understood by all Americans because it is copied from baseball - which was America's pastime before Nascar. This idea will provoke the unitiated to ask the right questions. It will repeatedly remind the fanatics about the downside of their addiction. Not one program or event need be altered or canceled. Any event, no matter how relevant or tangential to the subject of Richard Wagner, be it academic seminar, hip-hop concert or country western musical, can easily be accommodated. This suggestion will in no way impede efforts by our local oligarchy to get Los Angeles recognized as a great European city by producing their very own Ring.

And it will get me to shut up.

To see how overwhelmingly simple this idea is, check out my version of the LA Opera Ring poster. My apologies to the company for modifying what is obviously their property. This is, in my opinion, a great graphic - simple and to the point. I took a very small, postage-stamp size Gif from their website, enlarged and sharpened it by hand so the text was kinda readable. I added only one small element. Can you spot it?

Yep, there's a little asterisk (*) after the composer's name. The asterisk means that some special circumstance of which everyone should be aware affects the name to which it is attached.

An asterisk, just like in the baseball record books. Everyone, at least everyone here in the U.S., understands that when some guy breaks the hallowed home-run record by hitting 756 of them in one season but does it by taking performance enhancing steroids, he gets an asterisk in the record books. And he also doesn't get into the Hall of Fame. Here's the LA tie-in.

I propose that the LA Opera should add the asterisk to the name Richard Wagner each and every time it appears in their publicity, program books, public displays -- everything!! Even on Festival letterheads. .

Put the asterisk on the COVER of the programs, on the huge banners hanging in front of the Chandler Pavilion, on the flags hanging from the lightpoles on Grand Avenue. Put the asterisk everywhere that the word "Wagner(*)" appears. Make absolutely certain that it appears on the expensive souvenir tomes that the Ringnuts and Wagnerds will treasure for years and decades to come.

Think of it as changing the name "Richard Wagner" to "Richard Wagner(*)" You can just edit your word-processor spelling dictionary to make the asterisk omnipresent. I think that the asterisk is sufficient. No footnotes are required if the asterisk really is everywhere. Sure, a footnote would be nice. It could read "Richard Wagner's name is forever stained because of its evil use by the German National Socialist party."

If my suggestion is followed every person who comes into contact with the Ring, with the LA Opera and with their Ring Festival will be forced to think about why that asterisk is there. Remember, it's Their Festival not My Festival because, if I had been there, I would not have attended. When the Simple Child asks "Why is that asterisk there?" you can reply "Because Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer."

It's as easy as that.

Of course, like all do-gooder suggestions, this will be ignored. It will be ignored by the Ring fans even if the Opera does add the asterisk exactly as I have suggested.

Come on. Allow me my fantasy. In reality LA Opera will only add asterisks if they are forced to - like the cigarette companies are forced by the government to add a notice about smoking being hazardous to your health. And they'll position them graphically in out of the way places. No smoker really pays attention to those notices - at least not consciously. And no true Wagner fan will see the asterisk. At least not consciously.

We at Mixed Meters like to mix things up. Combining things no one ever expects to see combined is our thing. Along that line, here's a picture of the back of a Brazilian Marlboro pack. This one belonged to our houseguest, Joao. He's a worm-guy from Sao Paulo.

I assume everyone, anyone will get the connection of this picture to my suggestion about the Wagner asterisk. The asterisk is a very simple, subtle idea not in your, er, face like this cigarette ad. Both are warnings that certain actions can have bad results.

The asterisk would show us that the LA Opera has a real understanding of the opposing point of view. Sadly, Supervisor Antonovich has shown that no one can force them to change their plans. And they won't do it just to prove how nice they are.

Or will they?

Want to read more of my blather?

Worm-related posts on Mixed Meters: here, here and here.

Wagner-related posts on Mixed Meters: here, here, and here.

Opera-related posts on Mixed Meters: here, here, here and here. (A couple of these have to do with both Sex and Opera!)

Ring Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . LA Opera. . . Mike Antonovich. . . Richard Wagner

Trial and Error

2009-07-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

This is a test. This is only a test.

This test takes the form of a little 30 Second Spot I wrote last month. Leslie picked the name, Trial and Error. Back then I uploaded it to Facebook because I could. I didn't upload it here because MOG (where I've uploaded previous audio files) seems to have removed their embedded player feature which you might have noticed in previous MM posts - like this one..

I found another embedded player in the form of a Google Widget. And here it is. Can you play it? Can you hear it? Remember, you heard it here first - unless you heard it on Facebook already.

Comments on this widget are encouraged. Does it work well for you? Comments about the piece are possible too, if you care.

Google Audio Widgetgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Trial and Error Copyright (c) 2009 David Ocker 48 Seconds

What's a 30 Second Spot? (This is one of the earliest MM posts so be sure to read my update in the comments.)

What's a widget?

Trial and Error Tags: 30 Second Spots. . . Trial and Error. . . David Ocker

Mike Antonovich and the Ring Festival LA

2009-07-16T01:39:00.001-07:00

Here is a resolution to be voted on by the five Los Angeles County Supervisors next Tuesday. It is item 6 on the agenda. Read it here. Or read this:

6. Recommendation as submitted by Supervisor Antonovich: Direct the Chief Executive Officer to send a five-signature letter to Marc I. Stern, Chief Executive Officer of the LA Opera, and members of the Board of Directors requesting that the “Ring Festival LA” shift the focus from honoring composer Richard Wagner, to featuring other composers as headliners, to provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent. (09-1698)

The full actual proposed resolution looks like this:

Click the picture for an enlargement or download the pdf here. Or read this:

MOTION BY SUPERVISOR MICHAEL D. ANTONOVICH
JULY 21, 2009

Los Angeles Opera’s upcoming Ring Festival LA, which celebrates the work of composer Richard Wagner, a racist whose anti-Semitic writings were the inspiration for Hitler and the holocaust, is an affront to those who have suffered or have been impacted by the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialistic Worker Party.

To provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent, the LA Opera should reevaluate and rearrange the festival’s programming to delete the focus on Wagner and incorporate other composers as headliners including Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Schubert, Schumann, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and others.

I, THEREFORE, MOVE, that the Board of Supervisors direct the County’s Chief Executive Officer to send a five-signature letter to the Marc I. Stern, Chief Executive Officer of the LA Opera and members of the Board of Directors requesting that the Festival shift the focus from honoring Wagner to featuring other composers as headliners.

I've blogged at length about the proposed opera festival in this article: Ring Festival L.A. - Wrong Festival L.A. in which I make a number of suggestions on how the Los Angeles Opera might better represent the various opinions about Wagner held in our community.

I do not think Supevisor Antonovich's suggestion to replace Wagner with other composers is such a good idea. I do think that formally asking the opera company to consider these issues is an excellent idea.

My best idea in that blog post was that the Opera should promote their Recovered Voices program during the festival when visiting Ringnuts might hear operas suppressed by the Nazis.

My wildest idea was to create a fringe festival - celebrating not some dislikable dead German guy, but the creative arts right here in Los Angeles. I wanted to call the fringe festival Wrong Festival L.A. If such a thing actually happened I'd be the first to suggest that they find a better, more positive name.

Carie Delmar, a writer and opera critic, has posted an article (here at Opera Online) about why a Wagner festival is not a good idea for Los Angeles. (I cannot get her article to format properly in any browser, so I just select all the text and copy it to another program for reading.) That article seems to suggest where Mike Antonovich might have gotten his list of alternate composers.

And you might want to contact the Supevisors and tell them that it would be okay for them to write to the Los Angeles Opera with the suggestion that other viewpoints need to be heard during any Los Angeles Wagner festival.

GLORIA MOLINA: molina@bos.lacounty.gov
MARK RIDLEY-THOMAS MarkRidley-Thomas@bos.lacounty.gov
ZEV YAROSLAVSKY zev@bos.lacounty.gov
DON KNABE cpedersen@lacbos.org (his chief-of-staff)
MICHAEL D. ANTONOVICH fifthdistrict@lacbos.org

POSTSCRIPT: Wanna find out what I wrote after this resolution failed at the July 21 Supervisors meeting? Read Wagner With An Asterisk.

Ring Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . LA Opera. . . Mike Antonovich. . . Richard Wagner

Musical markings

2009-07-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

This post was inspired by amusing emails I received. But be warned: unless you are now or have ever been an orchestra musician you're probably not going to get it.

For some reason Gustav Mahler wrote instructions in his symphonies in the German language. Many American musicians need these translated into American. This is a letter to members of some orchestra with a list of Mahler's markings and equivalent English versions. (There's one really good viola joke. Here is an exhaustive compendium of every other viola joke.)

(Following the Mahler is sheet music to Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz (from "A Tribute to Zdenko G. Fibich") a famous opus by the mysterious John Stump, who sells authorized copies of his music here. Other stuff too, if you make it that far.)

MAHLER MARKINGS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH

Several weeks ago, we sent you a list of translations of the German markings in the Mahler. We now realize that this list contained many serious errors. These sheets contain the correct versions. So we don't waste valuable rehearsal time on this, copy these corrections into your part immediately.

German in bold type (English translation in parentheses)

Langsam (Slowly)
Schleppend (Slowly)
Dampfer auf (Slowly)
Mit Dampfer (Slowly)
Allmahlich in das Hauptzeitmass uebergehen (do not look at the conductor)
Im Anfang sehr gemaechlich (in intense inner torment)
Alle Betonungen sehr zart (with more intense inner torment)
Getheilt [geth.] (out of tune)
Von hier an in sehr allmaehlicher aber stetiger Steigerung bis zum Zeichen (From this point on, the spit valves should be emptied with ever-increasing emotion)
Hier ist ein frisches belebtes Zeitmass eingetreten (Slowly)
Haupttempo (Slowly)
Noch ein wenig beschleunigend (slowing down but with a sense of speeding up)
immer noch zurueckhaltend (with steadily decreasing competence)
sehr gemaechlich (with indescribably horrific inner torment)
Etwas bewegter, aber immer noch sehr ruhig (Somewhat louder, though still inaudible as before)
Alle Betonungen sehr zart (with smallish quantities of fairly mild inner torment)
Gemaechlich (Intermission)
Ganz unmerklich etwas zurueckhaltend (Slowly)
Etwas gemaechlicher als zuvor (Slowly)
Zurueckhaltend (Gesundheit)
Von hier ab unmerklich breiter werden (as if wild animals were gnawing on your liver)
Ohne cresc. (without toothpaste)
immer noch etwas zurueckhaltend (Slowly)
vorwaerts draengend (Slowly)
Hauptzeitmass (Slowly)
Allmaehlich etwas lebhafter (screaming in agony)
Ohne Nachschl[age] (without milk [sugar])
Kraeftig bewegt (Slowly)
Alle (second violins tacet)
mit dem Holze zu streichen (like a hole in the head)
mit Parodie (viola solo)
sehr einfach und schlicht, wie eine Volksweise (Slowly)
daempfer ab (eyes closed)
ploetzlich viel schneller (even more ploddingly)
Den ersten Ton scharf herausgehoben (Do not play until the buzzer sounds)
Am Griffbrett (as if in tune)
aeusserst zart, aber ausdrucksvoll. (radiantly joyful, despite the itching)
wieder zurueckhaltend (increasingly decreasing)
noch breiter als vorher (better late than never)
Nicht eilen (no eels)
Allmaehlich [unmerklich] etwas zurueckhaltend (much faster [slower] than conductor)
Lang gestrichen (heads up)
Lang gezogen (heads back down)
Die werden allmaehlich staerker und staerker bis zum (fp) (In the event of a waterlanding, your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device)
Am Steg (Slowly)

Want to know what the German really means? Copy a phrase and click here.

FAERIE'S AIRE and DEATH WALTZ
Click on the picture to see all the spiffy little details.

Fairie's Aire and other similar notational nightmares (some of them intended seriously by the most important and impressive of important, impressive composers) may be found here, at a blog called Dark Roasted Blend.

MODERATO NON TROPPO by David Ocker
(I guess this is my Tribute to Fairie's Aire and Death Waltz)

I probably created this in the eighties when my work was still done with cheap, reliable pens, ink and straightedges instead of with expensive, bug-ridden computers. Judy Green, proprietor of Judy Green Music, had changed vellum suppliers (that's the translucent paper onto which music was copied). She wanted me to test the new paper.

So I sat down one day with the sample sheet of vellum and proceeded to write this, er, piece of music. There's no real title so I'm calling it by the first tempo indication Moderato non troppo ("not too moderately"). My principal consideration as a composer was whether the paper held the ink well. I wanted to know if it would smear and other similar musical things. (As always, click the pic for enlargement.) Notice Judy's logo and address in the lower left.

The original of Moderato non troppo hangs in my office to this day - attached to the side of a bookcase with a piece of scotch tape.

DOCTOR SCHMUTZIG??

Has anyone ever heard of the Doctor Schmutzig Method for Holzblasinstrumente?

I remember a small, comedic musical-instruction pamphlet which I probably saw in college. The woodwind instrument it teaches looked suspiciously like a vacuum cleaner. I cannot find any reference to this online. It's possible that I remember it imprecisely.

Once, after I mentioned the pamphlet to Leslie, she started calling me "Doctor Schmutzig". Not because I know how to play a vacuum cleaner but because I'm so good at making a mess.

I'd like to reacquaint myself with this little "gem". And I'd like to prove to her that I didn't just make it up. (Maybe I did.) Any help in this quest will be gratefully received.

Read Mixed Meters' rant about Mahler Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa.

Notations 21 is a website which has many examples of "innovative notations".

Thanks to David Avshalomov and John Steinmetz for sending the inspirational emails.

Music Marking Tags: Gustav Mahler. . . music notation. . . Fairie's Aire. . . John Stumpe. . . moderato non troppo. . . Doctor Schmutzig. . . Method for Holzblasinstrumente

Squawk!

2009-07-06T01:45:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, while Leslie shopped for bizarre flesh-eating plants at the Los Angeles County Arboretum (located in Arcadia which shares a common, unarmed border with Pasadena), I made video of the peafowl for which the park is quite well known. The results were just too cute not to use in a piece.

When we moved to Pasadena there was a peacock living on our new property. We named him Mister P. He lasted about a year. This piece celebrates one of the several annoyances associated with living near peacocks.

Copyright (c) 2009 David Ocker - 244 seconds

The next time I make a video, remind me to bring a tripod and take more framing shots.

Another picture of Mister P is here. He used to present his full display to the front grille of the Volvos.

You could watch an earlier Mixed Meters Movie Moment about birds: Birds Who Don't Know The Words

Tail Feather Tags: peacocks. . . Squawk. . . David Ocker. . . Arcadia CA . . LA County Arboretum

Mommy, who is Michael Jackson?

2009-06-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

One afternoon last week, judging by the special coverage on every local Los Angeles television station, you'd have thought someone had flown an airliner into a skyscraper. The actual news, of course, was that Michael Jackson had died suddenly, mysteriously, before the world could even learn if his comeback would be a success.

The concerts next month could never have generated as much money as the act of dying will. The extra positive media exposure and public forgiveness are incalculably large. What a great, if unintentional, career move.

However high his psychic apogees as the "King of Pop" his low points must have been frightening. His parents rode him hard and put him away emotionally wet. He spent his adult life searching for lost youth, questioning his fading talent, explaining his bizarre behavior and hiding his face from cameras - a living hell like that could be no worse than the imaginary fiery afterlife everyone seems to believe in..

But everything is different now. (I heard someone say exactly that on a TV news program.) Amidst the OJ-like media excitement over the as-yet unannounced upcoming Jackson funeral plus expectations of lawsuits, box sets, tribute productions, interviews of his children (once they turn 21), documentaries, made for TV biopics and, eventually, enough tell-all books to fill an elementary school library, America wants to know right this minute how the future will remember Michael Jackson.

Many people think Mike will end up at the top of the dead media legend tree next to Elvis. Hardly likely. My guess is that he'll end up several branches lower as the biggest name from the second-most relentlessly conformist and trivial era of popular culture ever. But the post-baby boom generation finally has its own John Lennon. Or is he their Tupac Shakur.

The important issue is whether Michael's fan base will replicate itself over time. When the current five-year olds who are listening to their parent's Michael Jackson albums grow up, they'll reproduce. Here's an imaginary conversation around the year 2040 between one of those kids and her tweener daughter.

Daughter "Mommy, who is Michael Jackson?"

Mom "He was a singer your Grandmother used to like when she was your age."

Daughter "Why does he look so funny."

Mom "Because he had plastic surgery to make him look younger."

Daughter "His eyes are sad. Why was he sad?"

Mom "Because he was so talented and so rich and so famous that he became unhappy."

Daughter "I thought famous people were always happy. Where is he now?"

Mom "He died a long time ago when he was fifty."

Daughter "No wonder he was sad. Fifty is REALLY OLD."

Mom "Don't tell your Grandmother. Now finish your bowl of Mr. Fizzy Mango Flavored Enviro-flax Sugar Treats and then you can watch that new show that you like on the 3-D Disney channel. Won't that be fun?"

Daughter "Oh boy!" Long pause. "Mommy, who is Miley Cyrus?"

The Michael Jackson Through The Year 2022 graphic came from here. Gessner Allee is, apparently, a theater in Zurich. The graphic is at least 3 years old.

Big Eye Tags: Michael Jackson. . . King of Pop. . . Death of Michael Jackson

Stop Needless Noise - Help America Keep Calm

2009-06-25T03:27:00.000-07:00

I found these pictures reblogged on This Isn't Happiness. See if you can identify their common theme.

These pictures can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here or there. These links might help you find the original source blogs. Some of the pictures will enlarge if you click them. Ah ha.

Vinyl Tags: vinyl. . . records. . . photographs

Renewing My Blogging License

2009-06-18T03:23:00.000-07:00

Ask any blogger. They'll tell you that keeping a valid blogging license means periodically posting pictures of your pets. Cute pictures are best. This humanizes us a little bit. We don't want you to think we're all cranky loners with strange ideas and unsupportable opinions who constantly misspell words while stealing copyrighted material from other websites.

This years parade begins with our dog Chowderhead. Not his best angle.

Here is Crackle. He's shy.

This is Spackle, twin sister to Crackle.

Finally, a serious portrait of Miss Ivy Turnstiles Smith-Perkette. She can be really annoying.

You'll have to ask for an explanation of Ivy's full name. Click any picture for enlargement.

Here's the previous Blog License preserving post (Jan. 08).

Here's another one - which includes a piece of my music entitled In A Pissy Mood - dedicated to our cats. (April 07)

Here are pictures of The Ackles (that's Crackle & Spackle) as kittens. They were cute kittens. They're now 3 years old.

Dog Tags: cat pictures. . . dog pictures. . . Chowderhead

Rain Random

2009-06-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

Rain Random is a two-minute music composition with video images. The images are of rain. The piece is very cold and wet. Very empty. Like waiting for a bus on a street corner where there is no bus shelter without a raincoat during a huge rainstorm and everything around you just gets more blurred and dismal. More wet. More soaked. Please enjoy Rain Random.

Rain Random copyright (c) 2009 by David Ocker - 122 seconds.

If you have trouble with the embedded player, try here.

My other pieces of music with video:
Flag Day
The Chowder Jump - Fur or Red or Ball
Birds Who Don't Know the Words

Rain Tags: Rain. . . Random. . . David Ocker

John Roasts Roger

2009-06-01T03:42:00.000-07:00

My buddy Roger Lebow has a strange malady - every ten years, when the second digit of his age number turns to zero, he throws himself a big birthday party. Like yesterday afternoon.

My buddy John Steinmetz roasted Roger. I made a video with the point'n'shoot in my pocket. In an era of instant picture posting this is available the morning after - just like those old-fashioned newspaper things.

As always, my apologies for the sound (I was far away in a boomy room) and for the occasional camera jerk (I laughed sometimes too). If you go to the YouTube page you can annotate the video with your own comments.

Other Mixed Meters videos in a similar vein which you may enjoy: Vinny Introduces Anne and Vinny Introduces Me.

Click here to see John Steinmetz's many Mixed Meters appearances, most recently about the Push Poke Prod Press. This is Roger's first feature appearance but he has been thanked previously.

And before I forget: Happy Birthday, Roger. I was gonna get you a card - but this will have to do.

Roast Tags: Roger Lebow. . . John Steinmetz. . . comedy roast

Che's Brand

2009-05-25T00:53:00.000-07:00

I read this review of Michael Casey's book Che's Afterlife, the Legacy of an Image. Here's the image in question. It shows revolutionary leader Che Guevara. This is apparently the most reproduced picture in history:

I decided to read the whole book because of a bit of fluffy advertising copy quoted in the review. It's for an Australian ice cream flavor called Cherry Guevara:

The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!

Silly! But together with a picture of a violent long-dead Communist these words apparently have the power to sell sweet frozen dairy fat to hungry Aussies. Maybe that's because this picture is an icon, an icon that can be called to the service of either socialism or capitalism.

This picture has been used on bottles of beer, condoms, bikinis, bubble bath and countless t-shirts. It has been part of Smirnoff vodka ads and fake Andy Warhol prints (which Andy claimed to be his own work anyway). The picture has been used by leftist politicians in Latin America and right-wing religious fundamentalists in the Middle East. In parts of Miami this is a picture of the devil himself.

Here's the original photo as taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda in 1960.

The facts of Guevara's life provide only a starting point for explaining the picture. After becoming famous in the Cuban revolution Che pretty much bounced from job to job failing to make good as a bank president, a prison commander or a guerrilla revolutionary. He tried the last gig both in Africa and South America finally getting martyred for his trouble. Today, in parts of Bolivia, he is known as "San Ernesto"

Casey quotes Jorge Castaneda:

If ever there was an illustration of the anguish evoked in sensitive and reasonable, but far from exceptional, individuals, at being affluent and comfortable islands in a sea of destitution, it was Guevara. He will endure as a symbol, not of revolution or guerrilla warfare, but of the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of indifference.

Che's Afterlife shows how the picture has avoided contradicting itself into meaninglessness. Explaining what it does mean is no easy task.

Casey writes:

We have invested so many competing ideas and meanings into the concept "Che Guevara" that we can't collectively conceive of what it actually represents with anything near homogeneity

Later he seems to contradict himself:

It functions as the universal symbol for the act of following one's convictions.

Until Cuba joined the international agreement on copyrights the image was public domain. Now Che himself is licensed commercially just like Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein or any living or dead celebrity.

Branding is a trendy buzzword right now. People are trying to apply this marketing concept everywhere and anywhere they can. Che's Afterlife wastes no effort discussing brand concepts.

Che Guevara has become a brand and Korda's picture is its logo. Nike is a brand with a swoosh as logo; McDonalds has golden arches. The guardians of these brands - Korda's and Che's descendants together with the Cuban government on one hand, corporate executives on the other - try to preserve its value and focus its meaning by controlling where their brand appears. They decide which contexts, products or events should be associated with their brand and which should not.

Here's a picture of Che Guevara bubble bath.

The very pose of Che in the Korda photograph - a somber man, looking slightly up and off into the distance, imagining a better future (or maybe dreaming of a soak in the tub) - is reminiscent of an important graphic from recent U.S. politics, Shepard Fairey's Hope poster. Here it is slightly modified.

With the recent change in the U.S. government many people are hoping for a change in the brand image of United States of America. There's no doubt that intelligent, thoughtful pedantic people are bending Barack Obama's ears with suggestions on how to portray America now that the dark ages are ending. You can read some suggestions for Re-Branding America here. This picture comes from that page.

I found the Obama-Guevara-Obama t-shirt picture and the Hasta la Victoria Siempre picture (the neon Che) at This Isn't Happiness.

The photo of the Cherry Guevara ice cream wrapper (and many other Che-ish graphics) can be seen here.

A Wikipedia entry which documents Che Guevara in Popular Culture

The Che beer picture came from here. The Che bubble bath picture came from here.

Here's a documentary about the life of Che Guevara..

Che Tags: Che Guevara. . . Alberto Korda. . . Guerrillero Heroico. . . branding. . . advertising. . . Che's Afterlife. . . Michael Casey

Our culture overvalues the wrong things.

2009-05-15T00:35:00.001-07:00

The first time I saw David Hockney's painting Beverly Hills Housewife I scratched my head. "That's not very well done." I thought.

I didn't say anything out loud, of course, because the picture was hung in the home of the late Betty Freeman, LA's one-of-a-kind music patron, who is supposed to be the person in the painting. She had asked me to her Musicales for the very first time and I wanted to be invited back.

Today I read this LA Times article that the painting has just been sold for $7,900,000. Seven point nine million dollars! I'm scratching my head again. If Hockney's intention in painting this picture was to keep me confused, he is indeed a very great artist.

He couldn't have been out to prove what a fine painter he was. Technique seems to be the least of his concerns. Maybe he was trying to point out the banality of Beverly Hills life, picking subjects that the wealthiest buyers of art could relate to.

Most likely he was focused on marketing himself as a painter. I guess he was developing his brand. Branding adds value to a low value object and, given this outrageous price for a not terribly decorative object, Hockney must be quite the master at adding value. His real art seems to be selling himself. Actual painting? Not so important.

And I wonder who is wealthy enough to spend nearly $8 million on a wall covering. Obviously someone with lots of income. Check out this New York Times report on the highest earning hedge fund managers in 2008. Go ahead, take a guess what the top salary was. (The sickeningly large answer is below.)

Do I sound bitter? I am. I sense that the value of art results more from the importance of the artist than from the artwork itself. And I sense that the a person's salary has more to do with manipulating the system than with creating a useful product.

Our culture can be such a great disappointment to me.

I've ragged on David Hockney before - on the subject of music.

Here's an Art Talk by Edward Goldman (a bit of borderline-pretentious KCRW filler) on the subject of Betty and this picture.

Read a note Betty Freeman sent me here. (Music critic Mark Swed questioned the authenticity of the letter because Betty said she enjoyed my piece based on the music of Johannes Brahms.)

Value Tags: David Hockney. . . Betty Freeman. . . Beverly Hills Housewife

[According to the NY Times article "John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year." That's Billion with a B. I wouldn't feel so bad if he had to pay about 90% of that in Federal income tax, but he doesn't. Sigh. That's a rant for another time.]

In Partial Fulfillment of Something Or Other

2009-05-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

My friend Scott Fessler has been scanning and publishing his collection of posters from his student days at CalArts Those were the days we called "the seventies". (I wonder why.)

One poster he scanned was for my own clarinet recital on Febrary 19, 1976. Thanks for scanning it, Scott. Now I can share it with my other two readers.

It's about 10 inches wide and four feet long. It can be viewed either horizontally or vertically. I designed and executed the beast myself using dry transfer letters and my newly acquired set of rapidograph pens. These graphic techniques turned out to be far more important to my career as a musician than the clarinet ever would. It was reproduced on the now obsolete ozalid machine.

Click the picture for enlargement. Better yet, download a copy here. I suggest that you look at it up close to see lots of little text items and musical visual jokes. Go here to read a searchable text file of the poster.

The music, which floats on twisting curvy staves, quotes the various pieces on the recital. (Read the full program.) The guy with a clarinet coming out of his nose was obviously traced from Hieronymus Bosch and the skull playing the piano came from somewhere, Dali maybe? Does the poster remind you of my doodles?

Peppered throughout, in tiny stenciled letters, are 20th century musical events which also happened on February 19. These are quotes from the massive Music Since 1900 by Nicolas Slonimsky, which I, bafflingly, found time to read from cover to cover while I was a graduate student simultaneously studying clarinet and composition.

The beauty of Music Since 1900 is that you can learn just how much music gets written and performed that no one evers hears again. This one revelation has enriched and clouded my entire adult life.

At the bottom of the poster, inside a large mannered half notehead, are the words Sesquipedelian Macropolysyllabification, a Slonimskian term. A link to Slonimsky's definition can be found here.

Yes, I really did call my graduate recital "In Partial Fulfillment of Something or Other". I didn't think much of my CalArts degree even before they gave it to me.

Partially Fulfilled Tags: CalArts. . . David Ocker. . . Nicolas Slonimsky. . . Scott Fessler. . . ozalid. . . rapidograph. . . doodle