in the wings

Hesitant Postscript

2008-12-16T20:52:00.001-08:00

Generally speaking, a composition is something to which I cannot make dinner. A composition cannot be an accompaniment to chopping, stirring, tossing, roasting, waiting, watching, plating.

Generally speaking, a composition can not murmur beneath the conversation between me and my dinner date.

A composition is not what I dance to when I step out of the shower and decide what to wear. A composition is not for the weary cyclist (post-thirty-forty-fifty-odd miles, thank you very much) with beer in hand. A composition fails me as I strip and remake my bed. And to frost this here realization cake: very few compositions reside in my iPod.

I love my dinner making music. I love my conversation music. I love my clothes folding, back rubbing, hamstring stretching music. Yet, if I contemplate this music, none of it strikes me as a composition. And none of the performer/composer/singer/players strike me as composers. Such roles and definitions are much too muddled. Composers are of no use to me. Composers tend to be "not useful." They require my sit still, do no other task, straight spine, ears perked skyward.

As of late, such posture does not become me. So what does? Well, the spoon in hand dance, sock fold wiggle-hip, or very simple 8 p.m. double-bed snow angel sprawl ... oo, accompanied by my dearest, most beloved "tunes" ... those are true moments musicaux. Lyric perfection. Elixir. Not compositions. No composers. Just uncompositions by noncomposers. An iPod full of balm.

This, of course, is just a near year of generally speaking.

The End

2008-01-27T22:58:00.000-08:00

I've sung this song, but I'll sing it again...

So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh.
This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home,
And I got to be driftin' along.

Making Crazy Beautiful Perfect

2008-01-22T23:00:00.000-08:00

Something struck me recently about people who are experts in their field: they make decisions immediately, without a second thought, and those decisions tend to be right on. I observe the smooth ease as they turn a question or problem into something satisfyingly perfect and beautiful, and I think, aha. That's why we all do what we do, why we follow our individual paths and hearts' desires, why we become specialists and know-it-alls. Knowledge, when delivered without labor or hesitancy, allows others to trust. It's a beautiful loop, like a platinum engagement band. Experts deliver knowledge effortlessly, and curious minds bow in trust.

I never studied how to compose. The closest I came, perhaps, was completing my theory assignments in the car on the way to my piano lesson. I didn't dislike theory--it's just that it came so easily to me that I put it off until those twenty minutes en route to my lesson. I was genuinely surprised when my piano teacher corrected the assignments and remarked that my "composed" antecedent or consequent phrases were quite lovely, correct and creative at the same time.

Now, decades later, I find myself creating music for dance. This music will be heard by a lot of people, and you can bet I'm giving it more than a commuter's casual attention! Composing "in my computer" is a far cry from writing Bach-like harmonic progressions and Mozartean question and answer phrases, yet I realize that I could not do the work at all if it weren't for the thorough classical training I've received. That training, as far removed as it seems from the "type" of music I'm making, allows me to make decisions instantly. I arrange snippets and samples in a GarageBand "score," give it a listen, and without thinking twice, begin to push things a few seconds to the left or right. My rhythmic sense is intuitive but rooted in a training of "counting aloud," "count while playing hands alone," "conduct while singing each voice of your fugue solo." And, of course, there were those love affairs with one metronome after another. Strict rhythmic study eventually becomes a habit that, to a listener, simply comes across as "good timing," and I like to think that I arrange my musical materials with a savvy or demented or sophisticated sense of timing. There's not a lot of melody in my digitally derived "music," but perhaps I create a melodic structure by timing things in a way that was once informed by original antecedent/consequent ditties.

I never really associated elegance with speed, but lately it seems all around me, from how city planners and building inspectors interact with the public to how certain moto-racers I know drive around town with more surety and calmness than some of my friends who drive every day to work. I observe how people's intellectual expertise allows them to make a split second decision and thus nourish the most crazy, imaginative, or spectacular idea. (Sometimes choosing to NOT drive on the freeway is a spectacular idea!) Randee, too, summed it up: I may make "crazy beautiful perfect sound for [her] dance," but it's only because the ideas are filtered through years of discipline, practice, curiosity and performance. That's what she's really placing her trust in, whether she knows it or not!

Hmm...a new theory anyway.

Mining the Minutiae

2008-01-15T07:19:00.000-08:00

"You can try to live your life on pirated 10 second audio clips...but it's hard turning a penny into a million dollars."

I like to pillage the internet for audio samples. Ducati has recently been most generous. Grazie mille. When composing music for dance, I have also used sounds of me playing various acoustic instruments, but I haven't had a recording session in a while and am reluctant to visit the old files yet again. The thing about recordings, and sound effect samples, is: they never change. (But then, neither does the pitch that results when my finger depresses a piano key...)

Whether ten seconds or ten minutes in length, I become familiar with an audio clip in a relatively short amount of time. I memorize the frozen sound and use the mistakes, go instantly to the spot where the timing was a bit rushed, or make play of the "perfect" arrangement of notes and melodies. Transforming and developing these clips is next to impossible, and it becomes clear to me why looping and surprising rhythmic designs have to become the compositional focus.

As frustrating as the work is, it is FUN, and so I keep at it. I spent much of the Christmas holidays in headphones, listening to my pennies and contemplating their someday existence in a secret Swiss bank. While mom and dad watched movies in the next room, I rocked out to my motorcycles, swingsets, and tinny tambourine. It was a scene fit for a modern day Norman Rockwell. My discipline, triggered by the important upcoming performance at Mondavi, has paid off! Music for Randee soars and clinks in my head all day long and, hand in hand with my new full-time job, occupies much of my time. There's change in my pocket. I can not complain.

See you at the performance!

Talking to Herself while Hanging Piano Shoes on a Far Peg in the Back of the Closet

2008-01-11T00:44:00.000-08:00

"You can try to live your life on pirated 10 second audio clips...but it's hard turning a penny into a million dollars."

"It may be an experiment, but it's also a personal expression. And I tend to crash hard. So if I'm experimenting? This wreck is going to be cacophonous."

"Remembers everything. Forgets nothing, she does. Cursed she is, or is she not, hmmm?"

"When the first frog turns out to be a prince, be glad you took chances kissing frogs."

"The poets hate it 'cause it's not poetry.' The writers hate it 'cause it's not a story.' That it's actually supposed to be 'music' makes matters even worse. It's not notated; it tends to be messy and scungy; it rarely uses a recognizable acoustic instrument...and yet I'm trained in notation and on an instrument; I'm literate and a gearhead. My work frustrates people because it contradicts the trained me."

"Motorcycles, heartbeats, children at the playground, MIDI tambourine...those are my cake ingredients! Eggs, butter, sugar, flour. It's just that the picture of the whole cake hasn't formed yet. Will it be devil's or angel's food...marbled, frosted, or studded with fruit?"

The Soundtrack 24

2008-01-04T07:18:00.000-08:00

Gustavo Santaolalla, Ronroco
Van Morrison, "Brown Eyed Girl"
Serge Gainsbourg, "Bonnie and Clyde"
various songs from George and Ira Gershwin in Hollywood
Piano Sonata in e minor Hob. XVI: 34, Franz Joseph Haydn
children at Christmas, ages 0, 2, 3, 5, 10 and 15, respectively

Wrapping the Year

2007-12-20T22:16:00.000-08:00

This was a bittersweet year...the year I recognized very clearly where my musical passions and ambitions lie, and the year in which I had to wave goodbye to a life I had trained, for so long, to lead. Ah, sigh, but melodramas aside, I thought I'd offer this year-end top-ten:

1. my first solo performance sans piano at The Field in April

2. hearing the roar of the motos in my studio apartment while watching Faster in May

3. playing Fauré artsongs at Notre Dame des Victoires in June

4. debuting The Children's Hour at the Chapel of the Chimes on June 21

5. the purr of Grenny's motor in July

6. every Sidecar performance June 21-August 24

7. accompanying Sven Olbash in concert at Old First Church in October

8. mixing video for the duration of Sidecar's set at Monkey Town in November

9. seeing Anne Carolyn (and dreamboat Bryn Terfel!) in The Marriage of Figaro at the Met in November

10. the silent music of an act so fast, furious, and perfectly designed: Felipe spinning his web on my porch in December

Curious? Me, too. I hope, in the new year, to share more on the bittersweet and the consequential transitions ahead.

Church Gossip!

2007-12-16T16:28:00.000-08:00

I got promoted! I'm now assistant to the conductor at Mission Dolores. Wow!

And someone donated a harpsichord to Mission Dolores, and it is beautiful! It makes me long for a sponsor, so that I might quit my life and tinker away on this instrument for a few months. Wouldn't it be amazing to give it a fair inaugural concert? I'll post pics as soon as I can!

Performing! (And Never Anxious)

2007-12-06T01:38:00.000-08:00

In the next few weeks, I intend to make music:

as if driving on country backroads without a map
as if never wearing a watch
as if knitting without a pattern
as if jumping out of a swing, age 32

Shouts & Echoes

2007-12-03T19:46:00.000-08:00

People who "talk loud" tend to bruise me. I associate their volume with anger or aggressiveness, impatience or insensitivity, and in response, I usually muster a smile and mime my fingers twisting to the left, as if at the volume knob of an invisible radio. But today I found myself chewing on a new mantra:

I want to be with someone for whom I am a shout.

and, conversely:

When I'm in love, I will shout loudly about it.

In other words, I want people (and that special person in particular) to think nothing of shouting or talking loudly about me, because of me, in response to me. True, these imagined shouts are of the joyous sort, but the volume...the volume must be (annoyingly) substantial, no? One must contrast the surrounding dynamic, and that (unless you live in the country) tends toward a strong mezzoforte. (Isn't a quiet shout an oxymoron anyway?)

And just like that, my perspective on "loud talkers" began to change.

The coin flipped.

I began thinking of echoes. For someone, recently, I was merely an echo. An echo of past loves. Intentions and actions and emotions were simply echos of some maybe, what might have been long ago, sometime-somewhere shout, a shout for someone or something else. I found mantra number two to chew:

I do not want to be an echo. Period.

In other words, I want to be the statement in a Bach fugue. I want to be the thematic motive of the whole symphony, the one that everyone walks away humming. If I were Beethoven, I'd be the fate rapping at the door motive. If I were Brahms, I'd be the descending minor thirds and ascending sixths of the 4th symphony. I'd be the announcement, never the echo. Who would be an echo, I found myself wondering? Who wants to be an echo? I never want to be an echo.

These musings likely seem silly, for they are musings of a heedlessly passionate and often heartbroken sot. Yet, the two ideas tugged at my sleeve all day. I thought of the pieces that I am right now preparing for concert: the word "echo" is written all over my music and in contrast, I do not believe I have ever written the word "shout" in my part. If today's mantras are truly important to me, then there must be a musical realization. I say that I want to be someone's shout. Does this mean I want my playing--even as an accompanist--to shout? Is the shout really just the intention? Perhaps there is such a thing as a shout at any dynamic level. And an echo. What of that? Echoing is fine; it is musically necessary and often so beautiful, but it relies on the initial shout, doesn't it? Listeners always swoon for the echo, but perhaps my approach to playing it needs a clear awareness and not an ounce of nostalgia or wistfulness.

I do not know if people who "talk loud" contemplate such absurd things. Probably...not. So I keep my mime chops sharp. Loud, soft. Echo, shout. It is quite astonishing living in this world as a musician, as a musician who hears everything and everyone as bits of music. Hmm...astonishing or psycho. You may decide.

Looking to the New Season

2007-12-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

The video projects and Ives songs are all folded and packed away after their travels, and life, especially my work on visual art, continues at a rather third-date pianissimo. It's the quiet time before everything changes. A season is soon to end. The duration of daylight shortens metrically now, like a bouncing ball, quickly, each day shorter and shorter and shorter. The rhythm will reverse, I muse, and situations, dynamics, will definitely change. But wait! Autumn has no intention of dribbling quietly away! The concert season is soon upon us! (How can I forget?) This year I am especially proud of VOCI's work on the Persichetti Winter Cantata (get out your gogo boots, oversized white plastic sunglasses, and favorite book of Japanese haiku--it's just so 1960s) and for the Basilica concert on the 16th I will give the recently donated harpsichord a test drive in Bach's Wachet auf. Please join us at one of these concerts!

VOCI Women's Vocal Ensemble presents--
Voices in Peace VII: Winter Stillness
Sunday Dec. 2, 7pm
Lake Merritt United Methodist Church
Oakland

Saturday Dec. 8, 8pm
St Mary Magdelen Parish
Berkeley

Saturday Dec. 15, 4pm
Old First Church
San Francisco

Mission Dolores Basilica Choir presents--
The 16th Annual Candlelight Christmas Concert
Saturday Dec. 8, 6pm
Our Lady of Guadalupe Church
Windsor, CA

Sunday Dec. 9, 4pm
St. Catherine of Siena Church
Burlingame, CA

Sunday Dec. 16, 5pm
Mission Dolores Basilica
San Francisco

Alter Egos

2007-11-30T00:12:00.000-08:00

Somehow it's reassuring...when art imitates life: Giselle portrays the tale of a young peasant girl who is driven to madness and an untimely death upon discovering that her true love has deceived her. In spite of the betrayal, Giselle, who transcends to an otherworldly forest of beguiled female spirits, protects her remorseful lover from the spirits' evil vengeance.

SFBallet performs Giselle as part of their 2008 Season. I shall definitely see you there.

A Child's Book of Image

2007-11-27T18:03:00.000-08:00

The light bulbs always go off when I'm swimming. Today [stroke, stroke, stroke] it dawned on me that each video piece I make is simply a children's storybook. Yes! They are little books to be read--that is, "looked at"--and read again and again or, maybe, not at all. It is an oddly impersonal relationship for the artist and creator. My voice or, what I actually think about the material end, is not necessarily the important thing.

1. The story--the actual detail of grammar, structure, word choice and style--is not all that important, either. [gasp!] Children's stories are NOT like high poetry, where each word, each line break, is painstakingly chosen. These stories are essentially generalized and, even in printed book form, more a general reference than an instruction manual.

2. The story takes second place to the image, to the illustration.

3. Children's storybooks are easily abandoned. How many have been tossed in the sandbox or left to crisp and warp in the sun? One can look at a pretty picture, read a little bit, but wander away. This is not because the end is so predictable, but because it's familiar enough to allow one (guilt free!) to run off to another game.

4. The stories, in this 'go ahead, abandon me' way, invite the reader to invent. Some children might play out the "real" end, while others tweak the tale: she kisses the frog and the frog explodes! Millions of frog fragments, and the spattered slimy rest of him, begin to look like some Jackson Pollack painting...and she, gathering specimens to look at under her microscope, is delighted by this turn of events. Heh, heh, heh.

5. The important voice, in fairy tale or bedtime story, belongs to the reader or listener at that given moment. This is not like reading Hemingway, or Joyce, or Eggers, where one mulls over the meaning and intention of the material, wondering about the author's point of view or objective. Children's stories, timeless as they are, exist most vividly in fleeting instances.

6. The story takes second place to imagination.

Hmm...if my videos are little "image stories," what then, of the music? There are times when I think of the videos as silent music, as silent studies in rhythm. Their "music" is just another layer to the storytelling. Hmm, the plot grows complicated...

Note

2007-11-27T17:47:00.001-08:00

...USE the correlatives between what you do as a musician/performance artist and acting. Acting is a very practical, dirty, messy sort of art, unlike the structure and notation of music and musical performance. Be aware that it is very difficult, through [physical] expression, to tell what one is doing or thinking.

--Stephen B Turner, instructor of Berkeley Rep's workshop for actors and directors

Pouring Harmony

2007-11-20T19:48:00.000-08:00

"Does anyone know a bit of music terminology that we use when a minor-key piece ends with--whoa!--a brilliant major chord?"

(These are the thinkiest of students. Brows furrowed and lips were bit, but an answer failed to surface.)

"It's some kind of 'third' ... named after a town in France ..."

"Oh! Oh! The Bordeaux third!"

These are the moments--sitting quietly (a bit bored) at the piano, with one leg over the other's knee, and with my mind occupied in equal parts by grocery lists, measure numbers and key signatures, some recent New Yorker article, a dream of a car--for which I live. The Bordeaux third. It elicited a definite giggle.

Flashbulbs (not) Going Off

2007-11-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

This photo series sums up and explains things precisely. Joe, I often adore thee, and these pics allow me to understand why the solid hour that I spent at the Kara Walker exhibit at the Whitney was a solid hour completely, emotionally unmoved. I want to love her work--the nostalgia, the new use of a quaint old form, the animations and videos, some projections--but, sorely, and even viewing it in a splendid full-floor meander, I did not love anything. What Walker seems trying to say seems ALL that she is trying to say. Joe, on the other hand, yields giggles and contemplative pauses and double takes and solemn reflections on social-political absurdity, not to mention content, form and color. The immediate impression engages, and then it lingers around in the mind in various permutations.

Perhaps I'll articulate a more deliberate thesis when my sniffles are gone away; for now I must be concise. Ah, ah achoo!

XXV

2007-11-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

now is a ship
which captain am
sails out of sleep
steering for dream

--e.e. cummings

XXIV

2007-11-16T22:21:00.000-08:00

Gentle lady, do not sing
Sad songs about the end of love;
Lay aside sadness and sing
How love that passes is enough.

Sing about the long deep sleep
Of lovers that are dead, and how
In the grave all love shall sleep:
Love is aweary now.

--James Joyce, from Chamber Music

New York Top 5

2007-11-14T17:26:00.000-08:00

Surrounded on all four sides by my new "string" video at Monkey Town. Indulging in the tastiest bites and in more glasses of wine than one should have (when one is on her own) at Veloce. Standing room (in assigned place #34) Saturday afternoon at the Met. Driving from Princeton to New York in an autumn sunlight infusion for the final performance of The Children's Hour. Eating perfectly cooked and truffled risotto (a slipper-worthy ruby color, courtesy of the lowly beet) at Public.

Awarding Prizes for Art

2007-11-12T08:43:00.000-08:00

I saw some great art during my trip to New York. In fact, New York being such an art city, I feel rewarded in full. Rewarded for an afternoon given away to diligent practice in a collegiate practice room. And rewarded for the reminder that great art need not be housed in a famous building, on a famous avenue, for a famous fee. I spent midweek in Princeton, working with Anne and, on a whim, I walked over to the Princeton University Art Museum. I skipped over a Warhol Brillo box and slipped past the stares of "historical people" in their awful gilded frames, making a beeline for Fazal Sheikh's exhibit of photographs. I am a weeper for the stark emotional yell of a beautiful black and white photo, whether scenic or a portrait. And here I was rewarded. The portraits are stunning and arranged in ways that make you think; the juxtaposition of images is sometimes fluid and sometimes thought provoking. But I also liked the still scenes, a tiny monkey on a stone wall, and also the hands. Sheikh studies hands as if they are birds (which, of course, you know they are) and birds as if they are the souls and reincarnations of women. The work is political, too, and yet that is simply a layer to, and not the reason for, the emotional impact of the exhibit.

So I award my New York prize for best art to Sheikh and the exhibit at Princeton. Kind of funny, eh?

Sidecar at Gallerie Icosahedron

2007-11-09T05:28:00.000-08:00

Sidecar presented the final performance of The Children's Hour last night at Gallerie Icosahedron in New York.

How did such a nice big piano end up in an art gallery?! (Don't be fooled by the photos: I really did play piano.)

Anne sings "To the Little Radio"

Heather at the helm. And now that the gig is over, I have two and a half days to have fun in the city! So off I go!

On Listening to Art Tatum for a First Time

2007-11-07T06:55:00.001-08:00

Um. Yeah. I gotta go practice. Now.

Not Liking John Cage All That Much

2007-11-03T20:22:00.001-07:00

Silence is deafening. (Even more than motos.) It's true, and I've decided that I do not like it, not one bit. Silence avoids sense. Silence avoids meaning. Music creates meaning. Music separates the sense from the nonsense. Silence drives me to craziness, sometimes, to impulsive, foolish behaviors. I blame Cage. I blame him for allowing the modern ear to think silence is music, to think silence speaks, to think silence is beauty and truth. Oh, John...did you not hear enough Bach as a child, did you not?

The Soundtrack 23

2007-11-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

The Smiths, "William It Was Really Nothing"
"Leavin' on a Jet Plane"
creaking swing sets in Central Park
Coleman Hawkins, "Wherever There's a Will, Baby"
the roar of the motos at MotoGP, Valencia

With All the Souls

2007-10-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

Halloween's ok, I guess, but November 1st reigns as one of my favorite days of the year. It is All Souls' Day--I hush saying the three words--and this year, I am pleased to announce that I will be playing mass in the Old Mission for what is, indeed, a holy day of obligation. (What!? You forgot? You're glad I reminded you, right?) Mission Dolores is dear to me not just because I work there but also because it features significantly in one of my favorite movies of all time. Maybe I love Vertigo because it is so San Francisco; maybe I love it for its odd quirks, scenic details, and on-the-money Wagnerian score. Or maybe I love it because Kim Novak's character visits a gravesite in the cemetary that is, yes, what I sometimes refer to as "my back yard." And this Thursday, at 7pm, I get to create the soundtrack for all the lost souls. Oooo! All souls are welcome. See you there!

Acting a New Age

2007-10-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthtag to moi! Did anyone else notice that In the Wings turned three yesterday!? To celebrate, I spontaneously composed a bumbling moment musicaux for myself. Haven't had one of those in a while...

Let us begin by setting things straight: I do not talk to people at the gym. (Yes, I go to the gym. I go to enter my "zone." Sometimes I cry. Occasionally I fall on my butt while trying to do nifty things with deceptively weighted balls. On Wednesdays, in particular, I like to wave my legs wildly about.) But yesterday I could not help myself. I spoke. As the cute young boy walked past me in his "I HEART IPA" t-shirt, I exclaimed, out loud, "Oh! Are you a singer!?" He stared at me. And thus I began back-pedalling. "IPA. I thought...well, IPA, it's a singer thing. Their way with diction, you know, how they pronounce the words they sing. And if you were a singer, then I thought you must be wearing the coolest, geekiest t-shirt ever..."

At this point, it was beginning to make sense to the young man. He actually said, "Oh yeah...IPA...I think I've heard of that.

But no. It's just beer. You know: I...P...A."

Cheers. So now I'm three.

Saying Yes to the Mistake

2007-10-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

I have clocked far too many three and four and two in the mornings recently. (Four is really the worst.) The upcoming performances in New York generate excitement and nervousness, and so I've been back to work on this summer's video patches. I really do want the images to look as clean as possible, but high fidelity comes with a price, as yesterday I wrote to A--

Now that I'm looking at this new version, I'm starting to worry that it is "too correct." Seeing the videomix without so many dropped frames...I don't know? I'm starting to feel that the "big mistake" (the dropped frames, the lurching and jerking playback rate, the slightly frayed edges) was somehow much better, closer to the aesthetic of the actual content. We lived with the flaws for so long--for this whole summer--and now that I've "fixed" things, well...I have an eerie feeling we are going to miss the way it looked, even if that was imperfect, even if I expressed frustration with the picture clarity on numerous occasions, even if it was technically a "mistake." Does this happen to you in the audio world? You think you're working towards correcting a mistake, and then when you "fix" it, you decide the mistake was a whole lot more interesting?

There are two video projects in question: my dear butterflies, of course, and then a new mix, all shadowy and brilliantly lit, of Miss Hannah making string figures. Hannah looks great (thanks to some sage advice) but fails to run at a smooth, continuous rate, while the butterflies (in this new version) flip and flutter around the screen with seamless speed but look fuzzy, ragged, and pixellated. The mistake was so much better! What am I doing trying to make things "right?" I like my butterflies when they look great, even if they "fly" in completely stunted, artificial spurts. The dropped frames give a stop motion effect to this project, and the scissors are definitely more ominous when they look about to snip but then (drop frame, drop frame, drop frame) falter and halt and leap ahead. The deed gets done (snip snip!) but you never actually see the completed motion of the act... (Hmm, and does anyone else notice how the butterflies like to be fed at four in the morning?)

The problem is...I feel the exact opposite for Hannah, though I should admit that she never existed as a midsummer's mistake, and so I never grew used to her in an "imperfect" or mistaken version. She was on my drafting board, of course, but her time is now, or at least, very soon, and I turn my intentions on her with a firm and deliberate idea about the relationship between thematic content and visual clarity. I am willing to sacrifice pristine image quality if she would only "play" at a rate that compares to the original video footage! Play fair, honey! Play with rhythm and grace! Play well! None of these dropped frames, dammit! (See what wee hours of the morning can do to a person?) So it's back to the drawing board for the next few days, except for tonight. Tonight, I sleep.

What We Did on Our Summer Vacation

2007-10-25T05:58:00.000-07:00

Or, more accurately, how Sidecar ended this summer's "vacation." We built transmitters with the folks of Neighborhood Public Radio out at the Headlands Center for the Arts! And gave a little performance, which you can hear! (If you scroll through the NPR posts you will also see a lovely photo of me and Anni!)

Wanted

2007-10-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

[cue: ominous whistling]

Energetic, eccentric, engaging Pianist/Vocalist or Solo Pianist to work part time nights in a modern, upscale, N.W. Portland, OR restaurant. We are looking for somebody to play an eclectic mix of music during dinner service, including covers as well as original songs.

Examples of "covers" range from classical to opera to Tom Waits ... Radio Head, Magnetic Fields, John Cage, John Cale, Talking Heads, & Leonard Cohen.

We are not looking for soft rock or hard rock.

Does anyone else think this is just amazing, interesting, hysterical, absurd, and brilliant? A sign that the future for working musicians is ripe with possibility? The day where you are asked to "cover" a John Cage song? Hmm, should I say tune? It's a true ad--you can scour the Craigslist for yourself! --Ed.

The Story (part III)

2007-10-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

People just want stories. I am convinced of it.

Thursday night: "I just want a really good story."

Friday night: "It's an amazing story. You have these amazing stories."

Saturday morning's story is silent. For now.

Sidecar's Last Stand

2007-10-16T19:32:00.001-07:00

[cue music: steel guitar and harmonica square off in grande duet, two characters from some old spaghetti western...]

Side car presents The Child ren's Hour on the east coast.

Monday November 5th
Monkeytown
58 N 3rd St (btw Kent & Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
one show! 8:30pm

Tuesday November 6th
Princeton University's "ffmup"
(the graduate music students' avant-guerre performance event)
62 Washington Rd, Princeton NJ, 9pm

Thursday November 8th
VIM music series, curated by Judd Greenstein
Gallerie Icosahedron
27 N Moore St
New York City
7pm!
(there's an art opening after...oolala!)

In Tears, Again

2007-10-16T19:25:00.001-07:00

There is something else...regarding music that makes me cry. Maybe it's really the imagery that accompanies the music that gets a person all teared up. Case in point: spaghetti westerns.

So the Postscript to Soundtrack 22 is as follows:

Once Upon A Time in the West, by Ennio Morricone

Yes, Yes, Yes

2007-10-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a question is so apropos that it really doesn't need an answer.

"Oh ... [pause] ... so you played with passion and integrity?"

All I could do was look hard at him for a moment. He claims that he "doesn't get" what I do. And so what could he ask but, "what do you mean, to 'play beautifully?'" "What do you mean, it was a kick ass recital?" And yet, by question three, he asks just the right thing. Awww. I heart people.

Waiting, Patiently

2007-10-12T10:53:00.000-07:00

Patience brings one to an ending. Or, rather, patience hinges the end--tightly--to a new beginning. And finally, patience sets one free on a new path. What a nice tripartite structure!

Patience brings me to tonight's recital, which I began preparing for in earnest after the Fauré concert back in June. Four months of practice and expectancy, occasional carelessness and consequent recommitment ... whew, it's been an interesting ride. This idea of the hinge, though, of the drawing out of time, of waiting patiently (sometimes pained, and with great longing, let me tell you) and then swinging on the hinge [wheeee!!!] and starting something new... These are going to be my mental images, my visual preparation, for tonight. The musically etherized moments in between songs--particularly, in between the songs of a self-contained set--are so fragile. For the performer, this (non)playing is almost more difficult than the actual playing of notes on the page. The in between time demands patience before it can swing free into the next piece. Patience. The hinge. Swing. The new. My mantra.

Patience soon brings me to the end of another trial, one that either sees the writing of an opéra tragique or un chant d'amour. Or both. Should I find great inspiration...I shall write both.

And finally: Patience has brought my two dearest friends in the whole world something new as well. In the Wings welcomes Calliope Alexandra, born October 12, 2007.

And the Next Morning...

2007-10-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Friday. 8pm. Old First Church. You are all going to be there, right? My promised program notes might not appear until post-program, but this will allow you to try out my method of reading concert programs the morning after, over tea, with some toast and jam. It's sometimes revelatory, isn't it, to listen to the concert with open ears, then sleep on the lingering impressions or wild inspirations, and later read what the professional(s) have to say?

Here's a teaser, though, in proper GRE analogy style:
Virgil Thomson : Marianne Moore = dental floss : teeth

Be there! I have a pretty new shirt! (Not as pretty as the last concert, but very classical, very black.) You just have to come!

How to Write It

2007-10-10T11:47:00.000-07:00

I walked into class Monday night and found this scrawled on the board:

Once upon a time there was...
and everyday...
until one day...
and because of that...
and because of that...
until finally...
and ever since that day...
(and the moral of the story is...)

I immediately started writing my life post-ellipses. It works. And I felt better. And then I rewrote the story. And felt sad. There is great beauty in the simplicity and circuitousness of this structure, and perhaps I'll play around with the form, musically speaking.

Not Before Noon, Dear

2007-10-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

I stared at her and wondered if she was speaking Klingon:

Heather, let me tell you. When I got a job teaching music in the schools, all I could think was: hooray! No more late nights! A day job! I'm a musician with a day job! Yes, finally!

Hmm. I have one job, and one job only, for which I do not mind getting up early, and that is Sunday's service at Mission Dolores. Sunday mornings are special, so much more still and quiet than weekday mornings, and even if I am ... recuperating ... from a late Saturday night, I drive across the bridge feeling as if I own the whole of the bay. There is something extra-beautiful about everything on Sunday morning, and that is enough to make me not mind that my fingers are at work at 9am.

As for the rest of it, well, I recently decided that there should be no piano playing before noon. At least, not for anyone besides myself. It's not that I hate mornings. I'll get up and swim for an hour, I'll do laundry, I'll squeeze in a couple hours of practice. But I do not want to deal with anyone else before noon. After noon? Great! Conductors, I'm awake and limber and thinking. Let's teach these kids their do re mis! Singers, I've put the teakettle on and can pepper a four hour marathon rehearsal with lots of silly gossip. (A good vocal coach must also be an entertaining storyteller.) Finally, I arrive at the very best time of the day: the 7-10pm rehearsal. This is when all the best work gets done! And after rehearsal? I need my unwind time, a glass of wine at my favorite bar, and maybe some funny conversation before finding my pillow at some blurred hour after midnight.

Unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out how to make a living as a "p.m." pianist. I still must take what work I can get, and that usually means a school job and a classroom full of boisterous teenagers. At 8am.

But someday. Someday, between the day musicians and the night musicians, we'll get this all worked out. I'm sure of it.

The Soundtrack 22

2007-10-06T23:12:00.000-07:00

Featuring (drumroll!) music that makes me cry: out of joy, out of great loss and heartbreak, out of the beauty that is (I'm not ashamed to admit) nostalgia.

Henryk Górecki, Third Symphony
Brahms, second movement of the Trio Op. 114
Sherman & Sherman, "Feed the Birds" from Mary Poppins
Sondheim, "Johanna" from Sweeney Todd
Happy Birthday, when sung to me by true loves
and even, grrr...by cavalier lovers

Knowing How Gold Feels

2007-10-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
--Whose soul is sense--cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

--John Donne, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

Pegged

2007-10-02T20:21:00.001-07:00

Amazon's got me all categorized:

Arts & Photography -- Ballet -- Ballet & Dance -- Chamber Music -- Composition -- Contemporary -- Electronica -- France -- French History & Criticism -- International -- Italian -- Literature & Fiction -- Media Studies -- Nonfiction -- Orchestral -- Pop Rock -- Rock -- Science Fiction & Fantasy -- Symphonies -- United States -- Violin -- Wine & Winemaking

I don't know if I'm more embarrassed about "United States" or the absence of category, "Piano."

The Story (part II)

2007-10-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

The scars from love affairs that fail to take flight are similar to the ones from childhood piano lessons: they run pretty deep, no one else can see them, and they never fade. Such scars are not at all like the stripe running down my left ring finger which, after two decades, is now barely visible. But those other scars, the internal ones...ah, I am sympathetic to both examples. I meet many adults who speak of "the trauma" of piano lessons. These are usually people with an amazing appreciation for art or music; who aspired to pianistic greatness but perhaps lacked coordination or innate musicality; and whose memories include the spectre of Dixon Ticonderoga. (The pencil is every mean piano teacher's weapon, you know, so useful for rapping knuckles or keeping time in metronomic jolts against the music rack.) Adults who carry around this trauma often speak wistfully of studying piano again, but then they look at me warily, as if trying to determine what scare tactics I might use if a student fails to play scales "hands together."

Scars, whether from lost love, broken bones, or studying piano, do make good stories. Piano lessons (until I turned nineteen) were never a source of psychological drama, but I do have a musical scar. Oddly, it is actually because of story, because of my constant love for and pursuit of it...in music as well as life, and because of my passionate desire to create myths and tales and abstractly designed narratives out of anything audio/visual that I compose and/or perform.

I have always created stories when I play music. Haydn or Mozart? I invent stories set in clock shops or architectural design firms, where automata become animated, where all the gears and wheels and precise wooden technologies and AutoCAD files suddenly develop a consciousness of their own. Brahms or Schumann? That is too easy. Alone in the collegiate practice room (or, even growing up, practicing in the dining room where I still managed to feel quite the solitary spirit) I place myself in the starring role: the lost, confused, but heart-in-the-right-pace hero. Ruinous in love affairs, but only because I pursue my art with such intensity. Ruinous in art, but only because I can not let go of the thought of the love affairs I've left behind. I am a perfect Romantic (this was resoundly confirmed even as recently as September the 3rd, although the genre is not the music I play best). Schoenberg or Fred Frith? Oo, more complicated. Now the stories tend to revolve around pitch (the pitch as character) or "episodes of pitches" or a certain chord (a chord!?). A particular "episode of pitches" might return, then return varied, then return...in what I can only call an "it's the same because it's the polar opposite" form, and finally return again, and I turn that activity--departures and flights of fancy and returns home--into its own little story. The story may differ for every listener, but I have a story. I do. I commit to a story. And I'm the performer, so there.

When I went to Mills College for graduate studies, I very quickly realized that talking about stories was a very, very, very bad thing. People were not into narrative. They were not into semiotics. They did not consider music a language. They did not wish to communicate anything about themselves, about outside imaginings, about time, place, circumstance, or desire. These were people--astonishing and engaging performers--who very much wanted to talk about music for its own sake. John Cage reigned as a hero (in fact, he is one of mine) and yet I thought the influence was taken too literally. Even Cage had a story to tell. He was a masterful, masterful storyteller. You just go read.

Side car was a product of my years as a graduate student, and at first it felt somewhat illicit. We were concerned with creating an over-arching "story" for the listener. Although we did not actually want to tell the story, to bash you over the head with who the characters were, or what the setting was, we did at least want to suggest, in our through-composed performance, that our settings of various songs had a complete and "storied" intent. At one point, I described Sidecar's work as a "suggested narrative." I give you scissors, butterflies, and the fleeting reference to a nursery rhyme...and you--viewer, listener--put something together in your head that resembles or approaches a story, for you, in 2007. There have been moments when this works gloriously. The highest compliment I received this summer was from someone who viewed one of Sidecar's performances and remarked, "I felt that there was a story...I can't quite tell you what it was...but I didn't really care either." That was exactly my intent!

After two years at Mills, I shied away from talking about story for a very long time, in the way that those of us who have loved openly and wildly are afraid to love again, in the way that adults who had bad experiences studying piano as children are afraid to take it up again. This summer, however, between Sidecar and The Children's Hour and a secret inspiration, I returned to story with unashamed commitment. The old scar runs deep, much deeper than that one on my finger, but the story is worth it, worth every reminder.

XXIII

2007-10-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

Even when the bird is walking we know that it has wings.
--Victor Hugo

The Story (part I)

2007-09-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

Three years ago I gave birth to a blog. Maybe I haven't been a blue ribbon parent, particularly in recent months, but I do try my best. Having a blog is a revelatory experience when measured against public reaction and response: there are people who think I am aiming to be a professional music critic, and people who think I am just flaunting my private life and thoughts (but couching it, of course, in "serious" musical analyses). There are people who think the blog is a matter of professional publicity and a source for my own artistic management, and people who think it is a "cute" or "quaint" hobby. In truth, it is all of these things, and none of these things. At first I did attempt to seriously review concerts, or give thoughtful, somewhat academic perspectives on music, performance, repertoire, blah, blah, blah. But as time passed, and as I became invested in new creative projects, the blog became more of a ... frog pond. Personal interests (food, wine, video) began to creep in. I sometimes think of the blog as my composer's notebook, in the spirit of J.S. Bach or Béla Bartók. I plant ideas here. I turn my life into musical or performative "episodes" ... though what emerges in creative or performed forms is neither a true nor accurate depiction of my life. I love that about blogging. The writing is a truth, but it is a fancy, a blur. I stand by what I write 100%, and yet I am the first to admit it is sometimes fictitious.

Sometimes, I think that I (and others) have somehow discovered a 21st century model analagous to the "notebook" for Anna Magdalena Bach. It is a variation on the theme, of course, with more room for whimsy and less intention directed at a concrete piece of "art," and I do not know what it means other than that it feels important to me, whether I am reviewing the Philharmonia Baroque or showing off my piano or tentatively sharing ideas for what someday might become my very strange, creepy opéra. The blog is indeed like a child in that I do not really know when it is going to speak its first word, or when it is going to show me something that I never ever learned before, or when it might suddenly need me more than I need it. Three is just a month away, and tonight I hold the blog very close and very tight, anxious but excited at where it might lead me.

In the Box

2007-09-27T04:42:00.000-07:00

I was beside myself. I just wanted to know: where the hell are we? Not hell, Heather. "We're in Venusburg," my opera-going companion stage-whispered, and he would have patted me on the head reassuringly if he hadn't been so intent on mimicking Venus à la Jack the Ripper. Her toga vs. his sport coat? I have to say that the sport coat striptease, particularly in the opera house's marbled hall, packs a terrifying and hilarious punch! But, I digress. We now return to Venusburg. Right. The tree, the mounds of dirt and patches of weeds, and that ring of fire? (Does anyone else hear Johnny Cash?) Ok, sure, these details all seem quite Edenesque to me. I'll even buy the enormous French doors; we could be in a fancy courtyard, after all. But what's up with the obvious ceiling, a ceiling so structurally delineated by arching wooden crossbeams that I had to wonder, are we inside a ship's hull? (No, that would be Tristan.) Why do I feel like I'm in a third grade diorama? Why does the stage seem so small when the musical vision is so huge? And why are we still here in Acts 2 and 3 when the scene has so obviously changed?

he design of San Francisco Opera's new production of Tannhäuser raises too many questions. I mean, I should be telling you all about the impressive vocal performances (like gymnasts with a marathoner's stamina and a diver's fearless grace) or about Wagner's beautiful music (sure, you hear everything before the curtain rises on Act I, but who isn't a sucker for that horn writing?) But I can't tell you about all that, because I'm hung up on the set design. Are we going medieval, or are we going modern? There were a few moments of choreography and staging that I read as purely 2007, but the overall feeling (costumes, big men with manes of hair, wild animals trussed for the spit) was of medieval Germany. The set favored neither time period, though the singular lighting trick--stark, shadow-casting spots streaming sideways through the French doors (the French doors!)--seemed a weak gesture towards mod.

Where am I? Where am I? Maybe SF Opera is cultivating a theme this year. On Friday I plan to be on hand at opera at the ballpark. Gaza or Giants? Barbershop or baseball field? We'll see if I'm able to feel transported outside the box this time...

Angel Cake & Buttercream

2007-09-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

Mozart woos with cake and conversation. Nicholas McGegan, music director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, definitely understands the conversational aspect. His conducting of Il re pastore on Sunday evening conveyed the gossip and declaration, as well as all the queries, statements and murmured asides inherent in Mozart's classical style. McGegan sometimes conducts (er, shoots) from the hip, then delicately flips and wiggles his wrists high, as if poking fun at the violists, and during recitatives he takes command at the continuo. He is never merely keeping time (the orchestra, of course, doesn't need that) but rather, he articulates the musical dialogue with whatever gestures seem appropriate. The orchestra responds to his nuanced movements, performing with such a range of contrasts that I initially wondered if this was overdone Mozart. But the extreme accents and tremendous dynamic contrasts, particularly in the opening "overture," purposefully served the rest of the piece: the listener was prepared (ah! "set up") for the musical contrast between the conversations (recitative) and the pure emotions (aria) used to tell the sweet story.

(But what about the cake?!?)

Il re pastore is youthful Mozart, and for a seasoned listener like myself, the structure of the work can almost grow tiresome. Recit, recit, recit. Aria! More recit. Recit. Oo, another aria! With each aria, I fixated on the individual singers' voices, and here is the list of adjectives that sprung to mind: silky, rich, smooth, greasy, flexible and lyric. (The soloists were marvelous.) The arias tend not to move action or dialogue ahead; rather, they allow the character to turn the spotlight on their emotional state. On return to the recitative style, or to a purely instrumental moment, the stratifications of the music become more obvious. Aria = emotion = fat and silky. Recitative = let's do it, let's make something happen = light and structural. But the two need each other: the recit provides structure for the arias, and the arias satisfy our musical sweet tooth. The performers have to "get" this, too, (and indeed they did on Sunday) otherwise the whole becomes nothing more than a singing contest between superstar soloists with some instrumental scrabble thrown in between.

Thinking of the eighteenth century and watching McGegan at the podium... hearing the elegance that the Philharmonia brought to the music and witnessing the delight and whimsy shared among the performing soloists, well... I couldn't stop thinking about cake.* You know the perfect kind of cake, right? The cake mustn't be sweet. It barely suggests sweetness, and its texture should be light but strong, as if spun by spiders, or gathered from the clouds. Holding those layers together, fiercely and certainly, is the richest ganache. You cry over the ganache, but you don't really want to eat it without a bite of cake. It's thick, intense stuff, but you can make it even more so by tempering it with a bite of angel fluff. You see? This is all pure Mozart. The contrasts are exquisitely measured against each other, but the whole is really nothing more than cake! You might expect that proportions of extreme ingredients would yield an extreme whole, but that is the beauty of the classical style: the extremes result in an overall perfect simplicity.

Mmm. Hand me a fork.

None of this would be so apparent, however, if it weren't for the performers so expertly realizing the concept that McGegan teases out of this music. Sloppy Mozart could be as tasteless and as saccharine as a bad box cake. The Philharmonia Baroque delivers the style and design of the music with absolute certainty, and the whole experience is well, outrageously yummy! I love being able to say this about music that is two hundred and fifty years old. Sigh.

*For the record: I'm not really a cake girl. If you want to woo me, you do it with seasonal tarts and galettes, of the sort found--sublimely--here. Huckleberries, plum, rhubarb, or apple, or peaches and blackberry in a fine sliver of pastry...this is not quite Mozart. I'm not sure who it could be...I'll muse on it.

The Pierrot Project

2007-09-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

I do bad things. I count. And I remember. I remember and count that fifty days ago I awoke, surprised, to birdsong, and that three weeks and one day later I was wildly elated by the promise of love. I remember and count that twenty days ago my giddy elation was effectively put on hold, and that a fortnight ago it was completely and insensitively demolished, and that it has not and will not likely be ...addressed ...again. Tick, tock, tick. A fortnight. Two weeks. Fourteen days. I count and keep counting.

Surely there are other people like me, people who count madly... who remember the weeks since the first shared bottle of wine, since the first "sign" of something serendipitous, since the first hint of disinterest, since the last kiss? What does one do to remedy this behavior? What does one do to prevent the mind from knotting and unknotting time in such measured doses? Some people take drugs. I turn to Schoenberg. Schoenberg, I decided, is maybe the only (fanatical) thing that can cure me of my bad habit(s), especially the counting and remembering one.

But then I got really mad at Schoenberg today. Really mad. For a few months now, I have entertained ideas about "remixing" a few songs from Pierrot Lunaire. I am absolutely entranced (er, obsessed) by the poetry, and I am haunted by some of the musical lines as well, but I want to make the piece my very own, and not Schoenberg's, and so a "remix" seems the best solution. Today I toted my copy of the score to a little coffeeshop and settled into "Der Kranke Monde." The words, the words! Oh, how these dizzying, intoxicating words overwhelm me. I love all this characterizing of the moon, how it has a personality, and how it weighs in as a contrasting figure to Pierrot (and to other lovestruck fools). But then I read Schoenberg's preface:

It is never the task of performers to recreate the mood and character of the individual pieces on the basis of the meaning of the words, but rather solely on the basis of the music. The ... tone-painting-like rendering of the events and emotions of the text ... is already found in the music. The performer ... should abstain from presenting something that was not intended by the author. He would not be adding, but rather detracting.

Oh. No emotions or moods as wrung from the text, eh? Hmm, what to do? Because the text is all I want to do! I guess I must eliminate Schoenberg from the project. I'll just go straight to the source and work with Giraud's poems. (His Three Times Seven Poems, no less! My counting mind is so happy.) But wait! The original poems are in French, and I'm working from the German. How ridiculous. After all, I'd like to perform my versions of the songs in English! The business of translating is never about literal words for words. No. Particularly since I'll be performing them in "song," the translation must also be poetic and musical. Here is my first take at "Der Kranke Monde." It is highly influenced by the English translation of the German in my Dover score, and will likely change over the next few weeks once I get my hands on Giraud's original poems. (But hey! I needed something for tomorrow night!) I plan to accompany my musical recitation with the accordion.

The Sick Moon

O moon. Sick to death and full of gloom
there on the black edge of the sky
Your eye stares: feverish, wide,
casting a spell over me like some strange melody.

Inconsolable. When love is stillborn
You are dying. Dying of longing, totally suffocated.
O moon. Sick to death and full of gloom
there on the black edge of the sky.

The lover, in ecstasy
Is skipping, carefree, to his sweetheart
Amused by the play of your beams--
Amused by your pale, bleeding torment
O moon. Sick to death. Full of gloom.

On Balance

2007-09-18T15:56:00.001-07:00

I do not necessarily want to live a balanced life. I like the idea of my tensions and my slack being all askew, all illogically different lengths. I am shocked but still kind of love it when my sleepy and mundane life is pierced by exhilarations so ferocious that I wonder what bit me. I like the idea of being so out of balance that sometimes I topple over.

And if it means that all too often I have to sit alone and lick my own skinned knees, so be it. So be it.

The Soundtrack 21

2007-09-17T18:27:00.000-07:00

Tom Waits, "Tom Traubert's Blues"
Mahler, Kindertotenlieder
American folksong, Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens
Dvořák, "Songs My Mother Taught Me"

XXII

2007-09-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

The probable and the marvelous are the two pivots... Comedy revolves entirely around the probable and does not at all admit the marvelous. Tragedy blends the marvelous and probable. As dramatic poetry is entirely confined to the probable, is it not necessary that there must be another opposite kind--opera--confined to the marvelous, while tragedy holds the middle between the two, a blend of the marvelous and the probable? You will find proof of this in that whatever makes a comedy beautiful is a fault in an opera, and what charms in an opera would be ludicrous in a comedy.

--Charles Perrault, Paralelle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde la poesie

The Story

2007-09-17T18:14:00.000-07:00

(or, just what the hell is going on with this here blog? We'll get to that! I promise. But in the meantime...go listen to some Purcell.)

I. Heart. Purcell.
(His stories of love are absolute: true, permanent and worthy of ripping one's corset.)

Opéra Tragique

2007-09-17T03:15:00.000-07:00

this may seem a bit gruesome, but it has been the occupation of my days of late...

Between the 1880s and 1960s, thousands of patients at California's state hospitals and developmental centers died and were buried in mass graves or unmarked burial plots. Their remains lie, for the most part, in meadows and fields, among weeds and rocks, where numbers and markers disappeared long ago. Ceremonies are held on the third Monday of September every year to remember and honor those who died ... anonymously. The ceremonies are part of the California Memorial Project which seeks to restore those cemeteries that have fallen into disrepair.

further "newsy" info may be found here and here.

Acts IV and V: Curtain

2007-09-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Edna St. Vincent Millay studied to be a concert pianist? ACB has long posted the final stanza of "The Concert" at the front of her fabulous blog, and yet I had never thought to read the entire poem until today...until it seemed that it was the poem for me, for my situation, for my new beginning:

No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?--
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.

If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice my own,
Will mark with icy mirth
The wise advance and retreat
Of armies without a country,
Storming a nameless gate,
Hurling terrible javelins down
From the shouting walls of a singing town

Where no women wait!
Armies clean of love and hate,
Marching lines of pitiless sound
Climbing hills to the sun and hurling
Golden spears to the ground!
Up the lines a silver runner
Bearing a banner whereon is scored
The milk and steel of a bloodless wound
Healed at length by the sword!

You and I have nothing to do with music.
We may not make of music a filigree frame,
Within which you and I,
Tenderly glad we came,
Sit smiling, hand in hand.

Come now, be content.
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

With Eyes to Heaven

2007-09-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

March 6, 2006 - September...
and then October, and then November... 2007
Rest now, my dear sweet bird.

Music, Thou Soul of Heaven

2007-09-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

This is the next big thing.

I am just now taking a break from practicing Sven's music, and have decided that these art songs by Barber, Rorem, Pinkham, Thomson, and Honegger should be the focus of my writings in the next few weeks. The concert will be quite a rarefied performance, and I'd like to demystify it, or at least make the music a little more accessible, by writing about it in some surprising (non-bookish?) ways. Please save the recital date: Friday, October 12th! And stay tuned for my version of "program notes."

Remembering Septembers

2007-09-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

to what always seems like a new beginning, with as yet no mistakes
to my little brother, today turning 30!
to dreams and dreams and dreams

accompanied by Schubert, Fantasy for piano four-hands, D.940

Duerme, Duerme

2007-08-31T19:21:00.000-07:00

I plan to use this text for a new song! Isn't it lovely? And mystical, and mythic? I may compose "just a song," or perhaps a visual song, or even a three minute opera. We shall see. The new song is due on November's full moon.

The bird built her nest from the skins of green walnuts
And at night she counted, counted the feline stars
Then flew, she flew, above the green dawn

How does a bird drink?
No one thought to ask

And in the absence of rain,
a lion served her flutes of bittered, salted dew

The skins of green walnuts seduced the lion--
some turned Moorish brown, others aged more pale--
A mottled confusion, but with scents of home

The lion ate the nest.
Tears dessicated the bird.

Now the bird sleeps, sleeps
Duerme, duerme, for a century (or five hundred, or two)

One green dawn, you will see her
Perched again on a stalk, and counting
Counting the pride's last feeble stars

Hanging the Shingle

2007-08-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe the time has come to build a small but stellar private studio. I'm still a little nervous about posting too much personal contact info on the blog, but I've included the majority of my ad below... Lessons, anyone?

Piano Lessons for adults, including beginners

offered by...
Classically trained pianist (San Francisco Conservatory of Music; MFA Mills College) with extensive knowledge of traditional repertoire (Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, etc.)

Aesthetic interest in eclectic and experimental repertoire (Ives, Cage, Britten, Schoenberg, Bartok, Satie) and in performing with new media

Over ten years’ performing and teaching experience, serving as accompanist for dance, private voice studios, and numerous bay area choral organizations

lessons incorporate elements of the following...
• fundamentals of musicianship and music theory
• repertoire of student’s own interest
• scales, arpeggios, and individually designed technical exercises
• progressive study through Bartok’s Mikrokosmos

The Soundtrack 20

2007-08-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

Joe Jones, "You Talk Too Much"
Schumann, Kennst du Das Land?
Wolf, Kennst du Das Land?
another splash of 2005 St-Joseph, Domaine Coursodon (w)
Teddy Thompson, "Don't Ask Me to Be Friends"

He Said No

2007-08-27T01:04:00.000-07:00

For fifteen years, piano was pretty much a "yes, yes, yes" affair for me. I made friends not with other kids in my classes at school but with each new piano piece my teacher assigned to me. I progressed easily from simple songs with playground titles to the Sonatinas and Ländler of the times tables years and then (wow! so austere and self-important sounding!) to Inventions, Sonatas and Fugues. The winter and spring seasons culminated in recitals, and I took such pride in showing off my friends, friends whom I'd been polishing and forming relationships with over the course of months. Memory came easily. A confidence and flair for performing complemented my otherwise bookish life.

Then I met Brahms Op. 117.

I fell in love with the Three Intermezzi at a time when all other pianists my age were playing Op. 118, No. 2. I fell in love with the folk simplicity of No. 1 and with how that gave way to something far more awful and knowing and yearning. (I tend to fall for overwrought developments!) I fell in love with the ornate filigree of No. 2 and considered myself cultured and sophisticated when I played it. (Now I hear it as pure "old Vienna," permeated by the casual lilt of a waltz, but not really itself a waltz, and as gilded and decorated as Freud's favorite cafe.) I fell in love with the ominous intensity and--though I had yet to acquire a very strong knowledge of chromatic harmony--with the gorgeous mercurial cadences of No. 3. These twelve pages contained it all, every emotion and attribute, and I could see aspects of myself in there, but in new and unusual ways! The deal was done. I was in love. We would be friends, lovers, for life.

It was the second intermezzo who broke my heart.

In performance the piece became elusive, evasive, surprisingly out of my grasp. It was the most simpatico lover in the world: my fingers seem made for this piece, the main motive--spun as if by a tiny frightened spider--fits right under my hands, and my shoulders and spine work supply, effortlessly, at the constant chase up, down, and around all the registers of the keyboard. And yet, the next day...whatever I had begun to develop and confidently understand about this piece...it was gone. Vanished. Poof. Blue moon lover. Practicing seemed for nought as I wrestled for the first time with major memory issues. I couldn't pin this piece down! Now, looking at the score and the markings I made over ten years ago, I wonder if my muddled understanding of its harmonic structure did us in. The hesitant pencil scratches ("kind of a sequence????") over three bars of music reveal my insecurities, even though the analysis is correct: V7 of V, V, V7 of IV, IV, V7 of III, III. But in three bars? This was just not enough time for me to hear the progression as dominant/tonic, new dominant/tonic, newer dominant/tonic. I comprehended the harmony, but I didn't really understand how to hear it!

Is this a thinking versus feeling dilemma?

Now--now that I too have a few grey hairs--I recognize Brahms' genius. One can fill the page with roman numerals, one after another, new harmony, new harmony, new harmony--it's almost frightening how fast he drives through the hairpins!--but parsing and labeling is not really what one should be doing, or hearing. There is a greater scope to the piece, a scope that is broadly, melodically, derived, and it is Calm and Certain if you can hear it that way. The interior is still a wild combustion of chromaticism, but the exterior is suave and pulled presentably together. This duality was too much for me to comprehend when I was twenty. I loved it, but I couldn't reconcile it. And so the piece slipped away, slipped away from my memory in more than one performance, and perhaps caused the first doubts about pursuing a solo career.

(Today I am, primarily--and totally passionate in my devotion to being--an accompanist.)

Hmm. I am not through with Op. 117, No. 2. We had a sublime rekindling of things last weekend. The piece is on the piano right now, and I understand it better than before; I understand how I must yield and make accommodations to fitting its unique design. (It's all in my thinking and understanding of motive vs. harmony vs. melody.) At the same time, I can bring and utilize all my strengths--musically, technically, pianistically--and challenge them to new levels. I must not overthink. Brahms would advise this; otherwise, he will say no. I guess I can forgive him for breaking my heart once. I am still in love. The beautiful thing about my friends and lovers is that we can be in love again.

To the bench I go!

Friday's Program Note

2007-08-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

August 24 at The Giorgi Gallery, Berkeley
Heather Heise and Anne Hege present

The Children’s Hour (2007)

Opening ragtime music by James Tenney. I remember talking with Jim at a friend’s birthday party: we rhapsodized about Felix Mendelssohn, and at one point exclaimed simultaneously, “unappreciated genius!” (The irony?) I admire someone who can rewire a telephone and discuss the Variations Sérieuse. Jim died one year ago today.

Inspired by the eponymous song by Charles Ives and featuring pieces from William Walton's Façade (an "entertainment" for reciter and instruments) The Children's Hour is Sidecar's third major collaboration. The work sets art songs and piano pieces by Ives, Hanns Eisler, Jim Tenney, and Arnold Schoenberg within a completely original audio and visual design by Anne Hege and Heather Heise, and invades all the corners--past, present and future--of restless imagination. The Children's Hour is that magical, unmeasured span of time "between the dark and the daylight" where curiosity and investigation, dreams and nightmare, sense and nonsense are all to be found.

Eisler’s To the Little Radio will likely linger hauntingly in ear and in mind, and in fact, its sweet melancholy is the heart of the show. Butterfly collections and clapping games and twinkling music boxes, so pretty and nostalgic, are fairly standard evocations of childhood. The radio, on the other hand, is a technological object that elicits quirky and playful behavior, particularly when we are young. In what other context is one able to wield such magical power, "tuning in" and giving clarity and life--life!--to voices in foreign languages, music of various styles, news reports from unknown countries? Don't all of us, at some time or another, feel that the radio speaks "just for me, just to me," "because I tuned it in!" The game ends when we grow up: we figure the radio out, we learn how its circuits work, and rather than thinking we're a medium between here and myriad etherworlds, we simply (mindlessly) flip and skip through the channels.

To the Little Radio, and our performed play with radios, runs not only as a poignant thematic element throughout The Children's Hour, but as a counterpoint to the more classical moments of opera, art song and sing-a-long.

--hh

The Back Page

2007-08-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

Program

James Tenney (1934-2006)
"Raggedy Ann" and "Milk & Honey" from Three Rags for Pianoforte (1969)

Charles Ives (1874-1954)
"The Children's Hour," "Two Little Flowers," and "The Side Show" from 114 Songs

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962)
"To the Little Radio" and "The Little Wind" with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht

William Walton
"Daphne," "Through Gilded Trellises," and "Old Sir Faulk" from Façade (c.1920s)
with text by Dame Edith Sitwell
plus...historic 1922 recording of Sitwell performing "Old Sir Faulk"

Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951)
Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19, No. 2

Heather Heise
"Ladybugs" and "Butterflies" (video & audio) (2007)

Anne Hege
Maybe the Monolith will Just Calm Down (2007) with poetry by Colleen Plimier
Grey and Spectral (2007) with text by William Burroughs
original Children's Hour soundtrack compositions

*******************************************

Sidecar's newly added performances!
Sunday Sept 2nd 12-5pm
on “NPR” in The Project Space
Marin Headlands Center for the Arts
3rd floor, Building 944

Saturday September 22nd 7pm
The Woodstockhausen Festival
Glen Alba Gardens--12250 Alba Road
Ben Lomond, CA 95005

Nov 4th - 11th
dates and times tba
Princeton, NJ and New York City

Sidecar is Anne Hege & Heather Heise. We perform art songs for the modern day audience. Our cabaret is for those who love Charles Ives.

Finding Solace

2007-08-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

in Paper Birds
in Building things
in song
and in song.

And in very oversized, very dark sunglasses.

XXI

2007-08-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

Art thou troubled?
Music will calm thee,
Art thou weary?
Rest shall be thine, rest shall be thine.

Music, source of all gladness,
Heals thy sadness
At her shrine,
Music, music, ever divine,

Music, music...calleth
With voice divine.

--G.F. Händel, air from Rodelinda
(I chose the link for its non-commercial cleanness. I dunno if it's the be all end all performance. Aficionados can weigh in on that one. I just wanted you to hear this beautiful piece...here in the Italian.)

Sidecar Wrap-up

2007-08-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

Four performances of "The Children's Hour" this month!

Monday August 20th, 8pm
The Monday Night Marsh Series
1062 Valencia Street, SF
Sidecar shares the bill with three other artists and thus will present only an excerpt of "The Children's Hour." Located across the street from Aquarius Records and just down the block from Ritual, the tiny black box theatre has a certain musty charm. I even found a dead mouse under the piano last time we played there! That's so in keeping with this summer's show--I can't even tell you...

Friday August 24th, 8pm
Giorgi Gallery
2911 Claremont Ave, Berkeley
Sidecar presents "The Children's Hour" in its entirety. This will be the grand culmination of our work this summer: all the songs, as much time as we need, and an audience comprised of dear friends, loved ones, and hopefully more than a few curious strangers. I love the space, although acoustically it's quite bright. We may dress up. We are undecided about video. I may put out the brandy snifter (er, tip jar) and play ragtime prelude music. You just never know...with a Sidecar show!

Monday August 27th, 8pm
The Monday Night Marsh Series
1062 Valencia Street, SF
Part of the deal of doing the Monday Night Series is that you perform your piece on two consecutive Mondays. This gives budding artists a week to tweak things and then run the performance again.

Thursday August 30th, 8pm-ish
The Jennifer Justice Show
San Francisco Comedy Club
50 Mason Street, SF
Jennifer has long been an enthusiastic supporter of Sidecar's work, and this year she turns the tables on us a bit. We appear on a portion of her program...but in an interview format. Sidecar will bookend the Q & A with brief performed excerpts of "The Children's Hour" and will also likely run some video or soundtrack throughout and around it. Anne and I hope that this will capture the mood and repertory of our show even as we sit there dissecting and discussing our artistic methods, choices, and processes. It should be surprising and interesting!

Divine Encouragement

2007-08-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

Maybe *this job thing* is the Universe saying you should just work on your Art.

*The job thing* would be my lack of one. And a summer of many, many, many rejections and dead ends...even from very silly 'just something to pay the rent' type of jobs. Friends and family have all sorts of supportive solutions for me, of course, solutions that sound good in theory but ... they somehow don't translate for me. Maybe I'm bizarre, or too fussy, or just never satisfied with the common and practical answers. I think circuitously and have to make everything difficult. This sometimes makes me a bit blue. But then a note like this makes me wildly happy. Just Art. Just me. Forget the rent.

Jim's Ragtime

2007-08-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

I don't care what the fables say, the country mouse can live contentedly in the city. She will never forget the country, of course, and she will, on occasion, have to see the stars; she will have to skip around barefoot; she will have to hear her western meadowlark in the mornings. (In these times you will--lest you risk a melancholic mouse--return her to the country. Pronto. Do not worry: after five days, she will long for her high heels, a glass of wine, and her urban nest, and back you both will go--to the city.) Such is the dichotomous life of one citified country mouse that I know.

And it is precisely the sort of duality that I want to convey in two piano rags that I am practicing. Written by James Tenney in 1969, Raggedy Ann and Milk & Honey are surprisingly traditional in terms of form and harmony. Surprising? Tenney, recognized as a pioneer in the field of computer music, also contributed to 20th century music theory with his writings on form and tuning and acoustics, and he worked for a number of years as a research electroacoustician at Bell Telephone Labs. (I have always liked to imagine Jim surreptitiously creating electronic music compositions when he was supposed to be solving telecommunications conundrums.) With his musical interests equally balanced between synthesized sounds and live performance, one might expect Tenney to deliver some new-fangled interpretation of ragtime, but the Three Rags for Pianoforte sound quite Joplin (or quite Confrey!) and that got me--Little Miss Classical Piano--to thinking...

What sensibility do I bring to these rags? Who am I when I perform them? Ragtime is casual music; in one sense, I am just the pianist in the corner keeping a roomful of tarts and gamblers happy. I am the background music, the wallpaper, the playlist of the day. But tarts and gamblers are so 1897, and this is 2007. And I am a classical pianist. I do not want to over-concertize these works, but I would like to bring a clean, polished approach to my playing of them, and this desire (for the best of both musical worlds) has led to me having fun with the pieces in country mouse/city mouse fashion.

Can I play ragtime as concert music but not sound too "concert"? Can I shape phrases casually, drunkenly, but with an articulated clarity and a direct (forward motion! forward motion!) intention? Could the bass lines bounce along barefoot but--on the repeat--sound oh-so-well-heeled? Could the melodies gaze up at the stars and the Milky Way but enjoy cocktails at the hippest metropolitan bar until midnight? These things are all contradictions, things that are not wholly possible (the Milky Way is definitely not visible from the little patio of my favorite watering hole, not even on a clear night). And yet I want it both ways, and I think ragtime wants it both ways...there is elegance even in a silly piano rag. Tenney seems to call for a refined mode, too: at the head of each piece he indicates "not fast," "not too fast." Pianists do tend to play ragtime too fast and, because of that tempo choice, the music or performance can sound sloppy. A more draggy tempo suggests ... well, it suggests a city mouse who maybe grew up in the country. Refined and totally on top of things, but down to earth, never rushed.

It is an approach that might apply to all music, not just ragtime. Let's cross pollinate! Maybe Beethoven needs to bump clumsily along. Can't you hear parts of the Hammerklavier driving--oomph, ugh, boomp--down a single-lane, ragged gravel road? Then again, there are country mice who just cannot adapt to the city, and city mice who find nothing of any great appeal in wide open skies. They will want their classical, cosmopolitan classical--and they will want their ragtime...as dirty as the ol' saloon.

Me? I'm a country mouse. I mean, city mouse. No! Country mouse...

At Choir Camp

2007-08-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

Your day consists of waking up (no time for leisurely coffee) and teaching theory and/or rehearsing until noon. THEN, IF YOU ARE AN ACCOMPANIST: You might play "O del mio amato ben" (Stefano Donaudy) for FOUR HOURS STRAIGHT. 4 Hours. In two different keys. (Of course, because we have sopranos and altos here. Two sections of each...that's what adds up to four hours.) If you're not heartbroken by then...well, you have NO HEART. And even I, who can see through the syrup and sap, who shouldn't become heartbroken by this competely schizophrenic, completely type-A 'I will control your every nuance' type of musical notation ... well, even I become a little weepy. The Italians, not surprisingly, are so good at musical heartbreak.

Then, at the before-dinner, recital half-hour, I played “Tu, che di gel sei cinta.”

I found this somehow fitting. Someone hand me a knife.

Instead I took a hike.

A nice, long weepy hike.

Who knew choir camp could be so emotional?

New York City Redux

2007-08-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

Tickets purchased. The Children's Hour shall hit the east coast!

November 4-11, specific dates TBA.

Let's hear it one more time--New York City!--I'll sing, you sing. Then we'll dance. La la-la, la la...

XX

2007-07-30T20:46:00.000-07:00

For me, living the art life meant a dedication to painting--a complete dedication to it, making everything else secondary. [It] is the only way you're going to get in deep and discover things. So anything that distracts from that path of discovery is not part of the art life ... It seems, I think, a hair selfish...it means that you need time.

You don't just start painting. You have to sit for a while and get some kind of mental idea in order to go and make the right moves. And you need a whole bunch of materials at the ready. For example, you need to build framework stretchers for the canvas. It can take a long time just to prepare something to paint on. And then you go to work. The idea just needs to be enough to get you started ... then it's a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it and studying it; and suddenly, you find you're leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That's action and reaction.

But if you know that you've got to be somewhere in half an hour, there's no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There's not always a lot of time for other things.

***

The idea comes to you, you can see it, but to accomplish it you need what I call a "setup." For example, you may need a working shop or a working painting studio. You may need a working music studio. Or a computer room where you can write something. It's crucial to have a setup, so that, at any given moment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools to make it happen.

If you don't have a setup, there are many times when you get the inspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put it together. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will go away. You didn't fulfill it--and that's just a heartache.

--David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish
with italics by Heather

How to Make the Perfect Opera

2007-07-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

You start with the best eggs. Really quality. Really fresh.

Then we can argue about which pan to use.

Finally, choose the Champagne. Choose wisely, choose nobly, but every now and then, opt for fun. (It goes without saying, Champagne is the only thing to drink with the perfect omelette.)

Oh. Opera.

The perfect OPERA.

(my mistake)

So here's how to make the perfect opera: You start with a really great line. Really quality. The line encapsulates a story: it is a narrative gem, the idea behind everything, suggesting character(s), action and/or motive, other conversations, staging, movement, lighting. Like this:

I smoked my friends down to the filter.
--Tom Waits, from "A Little Drop of Poison"

Or this:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
--attributed to Hemingway

These are two operas I would choose to make. In each case, the brevity of "the great line" will consume me for the rest of my lifetime. (You see, of course, the paradox...)

Recently, feeling the need to be studious, to "bone up" on something, I've been reading Oxford on opera. I cheat and skip to the section I know I'll love, "1945 to the Present Day." But when I read the description of Maxwell Davies's 1972 opera Taverner, I finally lose it. I really get mad.

Concerning the early sixteenth-century English composer John Taverner ... [and] extending out from [his] music, though in a distinctly modernist colliding of Stravinsky with Schoenberg, Davies's music is a metaphor for the working of his central character's mind, in which alongside real figures--his father, his mistress, the churchmen for whom he composes--are his projections of the self-serving king and cardinal, and of a jester-death character by whom he is persuaded to sign away his artistic soul for the blind certainty that he will be fighting for the truth in persecuting the Old Church. But the meaning of Taverner is not only or even primarily religious. Taverner's dilemma is that of Davies, or of any composer in this age of artistic confusion: it is the problem of steering a course between mere repetition of tradition and the perhaps empty enticement of new forms, new languages.

I had to read the synopsis (and the caption to the accompanying photo) several times just to "get it." I can not imagine having to sit through such an overwrought, overly complicated, staged and sung version of ... well, what, exactly? There's certainly no line. Is there? This opera is not derived from a farm-fresh, superior quality, grade-triple-A, single line.

Admittedly, opera is not usually a succinct form. (Flash opera...new genre?) Tristan, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Le Grand Macabre, Dr. Atomic (via Faust)... These are fairly meaty (grisly and fatty) stories, and various narrative complications, inferences, and tangents can lead to overblown productions. It happens. I perceive, however, a kernel. I recognize and understand, even if subconsciously, a "great line" at the center of these works, regardless of the fat (oo, yum) I might have to cut through to get there. Reading about Taverner or Monkey: Journey to the West (in this week's New Yorker) just leaves me longing for simplicity. Longing, I tell you! (I haven't been this mad in ages!)

Arguing complicatedly over methods and pans is another matter. (David is so wry. Read her take on the omelette, p. 191.) Nuances of style and structure are worth baffling me when the source materials are good to begin with! Obviously, I'm an advocate for quality as an artistic point of departure.

The Champagne, of course, we can keep in all situations. Cheers!

A Shiny Thing

2007-07-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Sidecar is on YouTube! How about that? Twenty seconds in: that's Anne with the radio and me with the accordion! I feel like such a star! A shiny star!

Fighting Bulls

2007-07-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

What?! I've been fighting bulls for a living. You think I had time for this meme?

I am an expert bullfighter. Perhaps I became interested in bullfighting because the creature is so damn beautiful. Glossy, ink-black coat. A body so well-balanced between mass, steel and yielding joints. The best bulls are a study in this paradox. They are so sexy and glamorous and dangerous. The beast could kill me, though I have learned, over the years, the delicate attributes of its physique, the locations of its Achilles' heels. The learning developed through necessity and experience. The bullfighter is always surprised; every bull is unique.

You arrive in the ring, and here is a bull: broken and worn down, missing teeth, not able to walk a straight line because one horn is shorter than the other. But you've a show to present. An old bull may have more soul than you'd imagine. You tease that out of it. Other times, here is a bull: all shiny bells and whistles and 24 karat nose rings. So fast and new. (sigh...) It's too much bull for you. It may be too much bull for the ring! I deal with the latter situation frequently--as a bullfighter you are rarely given an ideal bull in an ideal ring. No. A variable is almost always wrong, whether the size of the venue, your technique that day, the flexibility of the bull's muscles, or even the size of the audience. Having no one to cheer you on? And you're in front of a thousand pound monster? You feel foolish...sometimes.

It is a serious dance, once you begin to (and of course you must) consider the audience. It can not--ever--just be you and the bull. Bullfighting is a play, a seduction, a polite, esoteric exchange of, "you, no you; you first, no I insist, you go first." But the courtship is a public one. You seem at odds with each other--you and the bull--yet you're working together for the entertainment of others. Every situation is different. Perhaps that is what attracted me to the very first bull I ever met. (r.i.p) I realized a relationship with this creature would be ever-changing. As intimate as the relationship needed to be--imagine the lonely hours in the practice arena, in the tack room, maintaining physique and technique, making phone calls to the doctors and specialists, visiting master bullfighters, etc.--the two of us would one day provoke public dialogue or command appreciative nods or cause a few heartattacks.

Not everyone can fight bulls. You must be so strong. You must comprehend and process so many variables at once but maintain grace and composure. Your audience must never know that you are scared of the bull, that the bull is a hopeless case, that it is a hard fight or an easy fight. As bullfighter, you create thrills, yet you do not want to create panic. Again, it is an equally delicate and weighty matter.

I am a passionate, committed, and expert bullfighter, but even I am no master. That is the final thing one must understand about the art, and also why not everyone can learn to fight bulls. There is no end to the relationship--to the project--of bullfighting. You will never say, "aha! I've mastered the bull ... and so, moving on..." Even as an expert, you must accept the shifting nature of the beast and work with that in both traditional and innovative ways. The relationship is, in its way, infinite.

In Ponytails

2007-07-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

Side car performs a very "techie" version of The Children's Hour tonight at 21Grand. I think it just may be quite beautiful. Here is what I learned this week while putting it all together with Miss A--

1. Hodge podge is a sand trap in the game of collage. One must assemble carefully and cleverly. Visual collage usually blots out all blank space, at least that's what I remember from fourth grade when the teacher told us to go at the stack of decades-old National Geographic magazines. With musical mixing and layering, I reach a point where I need space, I need the breathing room, I need a palate cleanser! Certain music (or video) moments are just so saturated with intent that a good dose of ambient "silence" seems so necessary.

2. If tech fails, be ok with laughing it off. I'm totally prepared for this one.

3. The idyllic can suddenly turn ominous. And what is fascinating to one may be gruesome to another. That's what makes art interesting!

4. Musicians, perhaps much more so than visual artists, are content to present a version that differs time and time again, that is new and unique with each performance. (I love this about my work with Anne! Every show can be different, even as we work around the same theme! Visual artists, before offering their work to the public, are more likely to--or do they have to--say, "this is done." I admire that decisiveness...and want to find ways to similarly determine various pieces of something as time-based as The Children's Hour. Can time's arrow be fixed? Even illusionally?)

5. Butterflies will have a mind of their own. Sigh...

Sidecar Performs The Children's Hour

2007-07-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

THIS Saturday July 21 9pm
21Grand
416 25th St., Oakland
$10-20
(no piano. lots of video & electronics. pray that projectors do not fall asleep.)

Thursday August 9 8pm
Opening for the fabulous Jen Baker!
1510 8th St Performance Space
1510 8th St., Oakland
$6-10
(a piano! a synthesis of classical and experimental.)

Monday August 20 and 27 8pm
Monday Night Marsh Series
1062 Valencia St., San Francisco
$7
(short excerpts of the program. Aug 20 multimedia-ish. Aug 27 somewhat more classical.)

Friday August 24 8pm
Giorgi Gallery
2911 Claremont Ave., Berkeley
$10-20
(the most classical concert. piano. lovely (though loud) room.)

Thursday August 30 8:30pm
The Jennifer Justice Show
San Francisco Comedy Club
50 Mason St., San Francisco
$10
(short excerpt. video focus for me, with performance by Anne. artist interview segment. !)

Discord

2007-07-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

Football in July. Ack!

Language Lessons (I)

2007-07-14T15:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if I slept through certain music history classes (or piano lessons, or chamber music rehearsals, or vocal coachings, or wherever it was that I was supposed to be learning music terminology). There are days, like earlier in the week, when I sit at the piano, completely stumped. German really does me in. Whatever happened to good ol' allegro moderato? Am I really supposed to know these terms? Just what are composers thinking?!

estompé

en s'épanousissant

à l'aise

a piena voce

afrettando

chiaro, soave
(Of course I knew chiaro, but I became libationally distracted by soave. I will not lie to you: my first thought was, mmm, where's my wine glass?)

etwas gedehnt

gut im Takt

äußerst kurz

Sounds of Love

2007-07-07T18:21:00.000-07:00

Scenes of Love come readily to mind. Stars flicker overhead. There is Champagne and sparklers, or chocolates and flowers and a killer bottle of Italian red wine. Feet wear fuzzy sox. The fireplace chews on a good blaze. Hmm... these props and scenarios are too pat, eh? They suggest love but so remotely...so superficially...which is perhaps precisely why they are also so easily rendered in visual terms, from classical dance and sappy television commercials to a photograph or piece of poster art. Quirky me entertains visions, too, and sometimes they're as predictable as what I've listed above, and sometimes they're a bit more peculiar:

[Scene 1]
At my favorite hangout in the whole entire world, the bartender will set a dish of olives in front of you as he asks, "what are you drinking tonight?" The olives are a mix, Arbequeñas and Picholines as well the ones I call Scaries (they are enormous bronze-green orbs) and your basic Kalamatas, and these olives spark conversations. Everyone has a favorite. The nutty Arbequeñas are delicious and charming, but I have, on more than one occasion, professed a predilection for Picholines, so my "love scenario," if you will, goes like this. Having been intentionally composed (behind the scenes and entirely without my knowledge, of course), the little dish appears and is 100% Picholines. 100% just for me. Someone Loves Me.

Now, I do not even really like olives all that much. But the scenario still says to me, however absurdly, Love. The strength of the scene lies in the visual impact of that dish of pale green olives. The image, so pow! potent in my mind, like some bit of Warhol iconography, trumps the intention that was necessary to create it. That is an interesting conundrum to me, whether speaking of love or... Hmm?

It's easy to visualize the scenarios of love, isn't it? They are so filmic. But what of the soundtrack? What of the complex co-mingling of audio and visual, ear and eye? What if you turn off the eye? Could audio provide something that the visual cannot? Maybe the soundtrack can assert--subtly, sneakily, pointedly--something else about love. Maybe the aural can focus [!] our attention on what is not usually (so obviously and visually) perceived as love. But what is the sound of love, of the intention of love? I am a musician for crying out loud! And I'm asking, what are the sounds of love?

The question caused my rather audible intake of breath a week or so ago when I met with my dear choreographer at my very favorite hangout in the whole entire world. Randee is putting together her graduate thesis program, and she has asked me to provide-design-create "sound." [Yippee!] Her general theme is Love, and she is bouncing around enough ideas for ten programs. [!] We discussed all the usual suspects: Romeo & Juliet, Tristan & Isolde, Orpheus & Eurydice, Plato's "lover" and "beloved." But then our discussion led to messy philosophizing. What do we "put on" for love? Randee asked. What do we "put on" the ones we love? This made me think of costumes and disguise and playing "dress-up," but I think Randee intends to investigate slightly less winsome ideas. She spoke so animatedly about visions, and of how she may choreograph or realize them in movement or staging, that I realized how we cling to visual representations of love. We refuse to give them up.

Randee's brainstorms, however, had not forgotten about love letters, about the writing down of sentiment, about our awkward scratching of a pencil or pen on paper and its forming these intimate loops and arcs and curves. Choreographic elements aside, talking about letters and writing led to the query: what is the grammar of love? I began to wonder if I could realize grammar in sound, and what of this very specific grammar...the grammar of love...what might its rhythms and cadences sound like? We contended, of course, with the contemporary analogy: email and [groan] online dating and the clicking of computer keys, all, equivalently, our modern professions of love. [sigh] As I contemplated writing/written love, including its context, grammar and (mis)comprehensions, I felt myself getting somewhat closer to the sound of it. Why was I so hung up on image? Why had I never really stopped to consider the sounds (idealized or realistic) of love? Again, what on earth are those sounds? I can paint you a hundred scenarios, but can I score love?

One could conjure up all the same clichés: Poets' rhymes trigger tears and laughter. Bossa nova beats consume the hips and feet. Steaks sizzle on the grill and wine corks pop when released from their (deathkiss!) necks. Pen nibs scratch on paper as fingers cause computer keys to clickety-clack. Cell phones ring and the bells of the ice cream truck--signaled from blocks and blocks and blocks away, just to intercept your beloved's path--chime merrily. Lovers breathe and coo and murmur, mimicking something in between birds' gossip and the bellows of a tuneless accordion, all with the intensity of an old car accelerating just a bit too rapidly. Leaves or gravel or plain old pavement is amplified underfoot when lovers' conversations fall into satisfying, Cageian silence. This all sort of sounds like love to me! There are more sounds, of course. But these might do, cliché or not.

Morricone sounds like love to me. He is luscious and sentimental, and then in an instant twangy and rough and unshaven. A harmonica, some bizarre bird call, an unharmonized soprano melody. Those sound like love. Wagner? Prokofiev? Mahler? The infamous opening to Tristan does indeed sound like love! (The other two I do not, at the moment, wish to touch.) But Chopin does not sound like love. Brahms does not. Beethoven does not. (It is no wonder people raise eyebrows when I say I am a pianist.) So who else, what else sounds like love?

[cue audio: Schönberg, second piece from Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op.25]

I call this the "happy and irate car horns" piece; I hear a traffic jam with not one iota of road rage. (The intensity of musical design, while persistent, is not furious; and because of the piece's overall brevity, the persistence becomes something almost precious...something at which to giggle and not care who hears you.) The piece obsesses over its little motive, the major-sometimes-minor third, relentlessly, yet it is not an overdone sentiment. It is 100% focused, 100% intention. Paradoxically, it is as efficient as it is committed. You may remark, as I did about the olives, that you do not even like Schönberg all that much. But he can write Love music. He can!

Contemplating sounds and music, I am struck by how Love has been perhaps too long represented through vision/sight/looking, whether in a classical ballet or fanciful photo or some low-grade porno. Sure, we can identify gestures and physical manifestations of "love," but can we identify love by listening? Without any visual cues at all? Can we hear its grammar? Hmm. I'll think about it while working on this project. And you can come to the performances next February and contemplate my results!

The Soundtrack 19

2007-06-30T18:09:00.001-07:00

Leoš Janáček 's music, as used in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Rodgers and Hart, "Blue Moon"
American folksong, "Turn the Glasses Over"
(though I prefer Sue's brandywine to ginger ale)
1960 Porsche 356 convertible, "le grenouille" (a.k.a "Grenny")

vroom vroom, fortissimo vroom!

Upcoming Performance

2007-06-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Sidecar performs at the Oaktown Creativity Center
447 25th Street (near Broadway)
Thursday July 5th, 8pm
$10

The Oaktown Creativity Center is a new working studio and performance gallery created by artist Joell Jones. Anne composed music for Jones' Eight Emotions (an installation of paintings, lighting and soundtracks) in 2006, and Sidecar performed at the old studio space in 2005. Please come support all of us. There's no piano (except for the tiny toy) but you'll likely see some video by moi!

Sleepless Happenings

2007-06-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

With time based art--music or video--how does one dodge the "but what happens" question? People expect happenings. A piece begins, it unfolds over time, it ends. Something happens. We analyze its development, its harmonic changes, how motives transformed from this or that. But what if nothing really happens? I am beginning to realize with some of my own projects that I am quite content to reveal my ingredients--a sound, an image, a combination or plurality of the two--but I am less interested in making something happen with them. (I also have long arguments with myself about a certain very bad word: laziness.) I do insist upon time frames--three minutes here, eight minutes eight seconds there--and so in that sense I still feel very connected to the "time based art" forms. Given a slice of time, I like to pose something. And maybe it's such an intense, visceral, quirky, fanciful thing that I've posited, that maybe you--YOU--walk away and in your own head something happens. But I didn't need to make a "happening" in any certain way for you. In theory I like this idea (no, I love it!). What worries me is how to convince an audience that nothing needs to happen.

I want to tell people, "It's like adding a flutter to "still" art." Somehow that resonates more truly with me than thinking that I am stilling the ephemeral qualities of music and the moving image.

I think these things while not sleeping.

Washing the Ashes from Little Feet

2007-06-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

At one in the morning on June 22, we no longer sit on the cusp between spring and summer. The solstice day itself is magical and indeterminate, an end and a beginning--spring, summer, which is it--but by midnight it seems more officially a new season. At one in the morning on June 22, I was still trying to negotiate balance, albeit on the edge of my bathtub, washing dust and ashes from my feet. I had celebrated this year's precarious day of in-between barefoot, inside a mausoleum, playing toy piano and accordion, and cutting moths from natural history texts.

Side car performed at Oakland's Chapel of the Chimes and Columbarium on Thursday as part of the Garden of Memory walk-through concert/event. Our set consisted of electronic soundtracks, Anne's recent composition Monoliths (for live and processed voice and electronics), radio feedback play, songs by Charles Ives and Hanns Eisler, and clapping games. This was the first incarnation of The Children's Hour, the show we will be presenting throughout the remainder of the summer. The lighting in our little Chapel of Remembrance--one of hundreds inside Julia Morgan's maze of sacred nooks and crannies--provided the perfect ambiance for our dreamy reimaginings. Were these reimaginings of Ives' song, of our own youth, of eras and childhoods that we did not ever know? Maybe. Perhaps. Yes and no. No and yes.

between the dark and daylight...comes a pause in the day's occupations...flightless...cutting moths from natural history texts...dying moths...making radios squeal and shriek...what if little girls took apart radios instead of dressing and undressing their dollies three...friends or enemies...dying moths...flightless...two little flowers...Edith and Susanna...scissors and radio stations...the children's hour...

I hesitate to write much more about the program or its concept. It would be like saying I Love You too soon--too soon to a new season that only a few days ago was somewhere and something in between. But perhaps I have something to learn from the dirty feet. Kids sit on the cusp all the time, but they are not afraid to leap off with grand, shrieking I Love Yous. Seasons and cusps be damned. The sentiment is sincere. Hmm...

Breaking Crayons

2007-06-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

My second year in college I lived down the hall from a woman whose grandfather invented Jiminy Cricket. The fact that she was related to an original Disney animator only meant that she had some good stories to tell; she was otherwise fairly humble and modest about her family ties. Late at night, hers was the perfect room to stop by for spirit-reviving conversations (I'd always been too long cloistered in a practice room). The meandering chats sometimes kept us up until four in the morning, but they were oddly addictive, as profound as they were silly.

One time, she told a story about Ward teaching a beginning drawing class. The students--adults with the eager-to-please attitude of elementary schoolkids--arrived with their art supplies: proper paper, drawing pencils, paintbrushes, a box of pastel crayons. He began the very first class by asking the students to take the crayons from the box and break them. Unwrap them. Snap them in half. In thirds. Most students resisted the request; after all, who doesn't love a perfect, brand new crayon? Who wants to destroy their newly purchased supplies?

Kimball offered an explanation only after getting the students to perform some carnage on their precious instruments. He demonstrated how the broken crayons could yield all kinds of different shadings, textures, and widths of color. Simply picking up a new crayon and holding it "right" side up, with the narrow (or stubby--yes, I do realize that Kimball's "crayons" were likely not from the Crayola box) point poised over the paper, limited the tempo and the articulations of the act of drawing. And if the practice of drawing is thus inhibited, what could one hope to produce? How could one explore a range of dynamics? It is absolutely true, and yet, how many people think outside the box, tear the labels off their crayons, break them in half, roll them sideways or scratch the finest edge across the paper? Too often, we probably just pick it up like a basic pencil and draw as if we were penning someone a letter. We limit our creative visions because our idea of how to use the tool is limited.

I often sit at the piano and wonder how to break crayons. What am I doing out of lazy habit? Am I limiting myself? Ok, how? When am I just mindlessly pulling a new crayon from the box and putting its tip to paper? What do I do because I feel it is technically the "right way," the way I've been schooled and trained, and what way, however unorthodox, might actually lead to some stellar bit of piano playing, to a decidedly original interpretation? I often think of this story, of breaking crayons, and I feel myself right there on day one in a Disney animator's class. I may not have many answers on breaking crayons at the piano, but I "get" the concept, and it certainly keeps me at play.

How a Bird Sleeps

2007-06-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

(or, an explanation for a mute blog)

Exhilirated and exhausted from flying (from practicing my heart out and then performing Fauré beautifully!) -- from gathering bits of silver string (composing soundscapes with audio recordings of one creaking swingset and a pair of snipping scissors) -- from patiently deciding what branch to alight on next (sh, it must be kept a secret!) -- so now it is time for this bird to sigh...and, tucking beak under feathers, sleep.

The Soundtrack 18

2007-05-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

Edward Artemiev, soundtrack to Solaris*
Tom Waits, "Bottom of the World"
J.S. Bach, "Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ" BWV 639
"I'm Henery the Eighth I Am" (Herman's Hermits version, natch)

*for some of the most beautiful electronic drones I have ever heard...

Out of the Pits

2007-05-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

Side car is soon to announce details for the Summer 2007 concert season! We hope to cross-pollinate our audiences by presenting concerts at traditional and non-traditional venues, including the Oakland Columbarium on the summer solstice, the Midummer Day's Dream Festival and 21Grand sometime in July, and the Monday Night Marsh series in August. There may even be a tandem (two-part) performance event! The Children's Hour expands on our previous work and promises to stretch imaginations.

If They Were Pianists

2007-05-24T14:16:00.000-07:00

Lack of curiosity killed the cat.

The Slow Unwind

2007-05-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

Been listening to a lot of Tom Waits lately. Consequently, I do not have to drink whiskey. [thank god!]

Waits has an uncanny way with timing and tempo, and it's a musicality that feels unconscious and intuitive rather than like a worked out plan. I love it, even though it's sometimes disconcerting to my classical ear. Listening to his songs, my inner Heather--the one who lives and breathes by her DB60--is constantly screaming, 'Wait a minute! We're not halfway through the song and you are in a radically different tempo from the opening!' And thanks to modern technology [finger on the CD player's scan back button] I can check the opening against the end of the third verse, against the end of the fifth, and so on:

And if I have to go
will you remember me
or will you find someone else while I'm away

there's nothing for me
in this world full of strangers
it's all someone else's idea

I don't belong here
and you can't go with me
you'll only slow me down.

The instrumental opening of the song ("If I Have to Go" is on Waits' latest three disc collection Orphans) seems confident and sure of itself; the piano carves out a lilting rhythm, its last eighth note into the second full measure quite deliberately [soberly] placed. As soon as Waits begins singing, however, the accompaniment begins a long, slow stumble. Slackening the pace at the line, "you'll only slow me down," makes musical sense. ('Text painting! Text painting!' The inner Heather blurts out, always a measure ahead of a polite raised hand.) In the classical tradition, after such a ritardando, one would probably return to tempo primo, and in fact, if I (accompanist) were to NOT return to tempo, I'd likely be reprimanded for dragging, for not "picking it back up." For this reason, perhaps, I am acutely aware that Waits does NOT pick it back up. From the opening line to the last, in so many of his songs, it's a long slow unwind. I admire this. I want to embody it. Metronomes and perky conductors be damned. Waits continues:

until I send for you
don't wear your hair that way
and if you cannot be true, I'll understand

tell all the others
you hold in your arms
I said I'd come back for you

I'll leave my jacket to keep you warm
that's all that I can do

If these aren't pure Romantic (yes, capital R) art song lyrics, I don't know what is. The narrator of the song is the rugged individualist, a resigned adventurer at odds with the world, a hero with something to prove...to the strangers, to someone else, to himself...and so, without good reason, or for that very reason, he must go. Yet wanderlust is contradicted by expressions of love and sentimentality (aw, he notices how she wears her hair!) that ring true and steadfast. In just a few simple lines, Waits taps into that vein of overwrought, self-defeating angst--beautiful angst--that I associate with the fine art songs of Brahms, Schumann, Wolf and Schubert. Ah yes, Schubert. In fact, the first song on which I plan to take a Waitsian approach to tempo is Der Leiermann (The Hurdy Gurdy Man). One might argue that the accompaniment should never falter, that over its precise, metronomic insistency the voice, the weary traveller of memories, ought to manage the unwinding. [Eh, she shrugs.] If you've made it through twenty-three songs of Die Wintereisse, you--whether performer or listener, or, more aptly in both cases, survivor--deserve one more final torture, and so I'm curious about bringing both the vocal and piano parts, in tandem, to an unbearable halt. It will be very Tom Waits, that sort of tortured unbearableness, and it will still be very German Romantic lieder. Hmm...

and if I have to go
will you remember me
or will you find someone else while I'm away

Sing it, Tom. I'm overwrought. But you can always unwind me.

In the Mirror

2007-05-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

Ulysses. Santiago. Skywalker. Quixote. They were all looking... looking... looking.

Perhaps we turn to music, dance, art or film, because we, too, are looking. My short list of most memorable performances or exhibits is short because only the ones that show me something for which I am--consciously or unconciously--looking make the cut. When I find something familiar but that is altogether new, something recognizable against the grain of "an other" (the composer, choreographer, filmmaker or artist), then [cheering] I am satisfied or inspired or moved. But what is it? What exactly feels "known" to me? I have wondered this again and again.

I should have asked not "what" but "whom," for the answer is: a little piece of myself. I say this, not steeped in narcissism, but just simply so. I look at a piece of art (music, performance, dance) as I look in a mirror, knowing that it will not literally be my reflection but longing anyway for a certain resonance, that sureness, that comes from glimpsing oneself in the glass. Seeing--however tiny, however distorted--a reflection of me in a completely foreign landscape (the stage, the page, the canvas) is kind of magical, and it must be what transports me from opining, "it's ok," to ripping my corset off and telling everyone I know that I just saw the best show of my life. That's just how it...works. For me.

Looking makes life fun. It makes experiencing art an active engagement. Finding yourself in surprising places, around that least expected corner...yes, this is why we live, I think.

This past weekend I found me. All of me. The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) is a Spanish film from the 1970s, and it is me. It sounds like me (the out of tune piano, the pocketwatch that plays like a carillon, an operatic wind, a reedy Hammond organ), it smells like me (the fallow Spanish fields, smoke, bees' honey), and it feels like me (girls jumping through a fire, a fidgety haircombing). But it is not necessarily me at all.

Ana, a little girl haunted by a screening of Frankenstein, is the focus of the film. Set in the contexts of school, play, home and, especially, family (a beekeeper/writer father, a mother seemingly plagued by ennui, a stern and sassy older-than-you-by-a-year sister), we watch Ana translate the fiction and the monster into her everyday reality. Her imagination allows her to be at once completely vulnerable and boldly independent. The style of the film and the way it tells a story is similarly evocative: it is a narrative that just opens and circles round and folds back up, and it presents a way of thinking that I imagine most adults have packed away with their sturdy old lunchboxes and dried-out first lipsticks. Ana is a child but she speaks to and for the adult, whether the year is 1940, 1974 or 2007.

Thus, the film succeeds in tapping into personal and universal truths, and that is a quality about art that makes me want to run screaming in the streets. It's about me! It's about the world! It's me...in the world! Ah hah!

You begin to see. You wonder if this, too, is a mirror...

This was all on my mind when I went to Zellerbach on Sunday to see Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan's Sacred Monsters. Guillem and Khan are dance superstars (she of Paris Opera Ballet fame, and he the hot modern choreographer with a thorough training in Indian classical dance), and I was prepared for a little bit of celebrity hype, but I was not prepared to so actively dislike how it was manifesting onstage. Sacred Monsters allows the audience "in" to the performer's life (choreographed dances are punctuated by moments of onstage informality) and it raises questions and makes statements about the artists' life in general, from practice to performance. The virtuoso pursues perfection but not without sacrifice and inner conflict. Once tradition is mastered, is it ok to experiment? Is it "ok" to ask questions? Is it "ok" to do what you love and love what you do? Is doing that--oh wonderful guilty pleasure--a worthy endeavor in the scope of ... things? I can relate. (Do I not write about such things?) Yet as their questions and perspectives were given meaning in movement, Sacred Monsters didn't seem to become anything more than Sylvie and Akram. I could not find a "universal." I saw no glimpse of myself in any mirror. I was just me, just a body, sitting in Zellerbach Hall, and onstage, dancing beautifully, were two wonderful superstars.

I particularly liked moments of true duet, when they clasped hands and refused to let go for example, and so under and over and around a series of arching arms their bodies twisted and moved as if one. And later, with Guillem's legs clasped about Khan's waist, their arms reflected each other as if separated by water. I found this quite poetic.

But overall [she opines]: "It's ok."

After the performance (it was an early show) I drove up to Grizzly Peak to watch the sunset. From Tilden one can see almost all the bay's bridges, and in the finest performance of the weekend (special kudos to the subtle and unwavering hand on the day's dimmer switch) the lights of the cities--from San Francisco and Marin to Berkeley and San Mateo--all began to sparkle a little more determinedly, and the urban nervous system, thus illuminated, began to hum. I finally felt that sense of recognition--artistic recognition--that I felt when I had watched The Spirit of the Beehive. Here, on Grizzly Peak, against a soundtrack of enthusiastic crickets, watching the hive of my environs simultaneously go to sleep and come to life, I got that "aha" of artistic satisfaction. The "piece"--this sunset--was a personal reflection, beautiful and humming and visceral and imperfect, but I also knew that a hundred other people could experience it and find satisfaction, too.

And so I add "Sunset May 6th, 2007" to the short list with Bill Viola (and a few secret others). And so I continue looking...for truths in a universal mirror.

XIX

2007-05-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

for Sean

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

--Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Butterflies

2007-05-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

I am working on a piece of visual/audio that uses butterflies as the subject. The audio is a subtle and sometimes shocking imagining: "if butterflies could talk, and if we could hear their wings." Little beeps and snippies. Nothing revolutionary here. The piece does not pretend to have the grandeur of a 9th symphony. It's purely fun and play for me.

I think about it constantly, however, and woke at four this morning wanting to work on the piece. So I did. Then, at nine, I switched to practicing piano. And in the midst of trying to disentangle my fingers as they played an endless trill, I thought, "just pretend it's a butterfly!" And it worked. Trills have always been a thorn in my side; I never seem to access the right muscle for the fast, limp shake that they require, particularly when they go on and on for several measures. But imagining my fingers as colorful little wings, and hearing the sound take fluttering flight...it worked!

So maybe a little fun and play (at four in the morning) never hurts! That's my tutorial for the day. Happy May Day!

Listen. See. (Taste.)

2007-04-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

Maybe the reason I didn't hear you say, "I just don't love you," is because you wrote it in an email.

I can be a good listener, but do you really expect full comprehension when you play one sense against the other? When signals are crossed--eyes for ears, sight for taste, ears for touching--one tends to misconstrue. I, for one, will have to infer and recreate meanings to the best of my imagination. And my imagination is pretty fanciful. Accuracy? Understanding? My eye, when asked to be an ear, is less than reliable.

Maybe the reason I flubbed so many notes in the Vivaldi is because I was using my eyes to listen.

If you asked me later, I would have said, "But I thought I was listening! I thought it was ready to go!" I saw the music, clearly, in front of me--I am literate, I can read--and I saw the conductor's fluid and articulate beat. But what a wreck of notes coming from the piano! You'd have thought the piece was in D not G. Or, at one point, you might have wondered if my fingers had meandered to c eff!ng minor--oh god.

The thing is: it's easy to listen. When you use your ears.

(It's easy to taste. When you use your tongue and not your head filled with facts and vocabulary and preconceptions.)

I am making May Day resolutions:

1. to listen with my ears
2. to taste with my tongue

These are the two senses that tend to piggyback off their stronger sibling, sight, and so the third resolution--

3. to see, really see--observe & look--with my eyes

--is also the resolution that I want to make the least...virtuosic. In the coming months, I am looking forward to wrestling and romancing Fauré, Rorem, Walton and Barber, not to mention a slough of electronic samples, put through banks upon banks of filters, and now I vow to HEAR them all. Without sight. Without all sorts of intertwined thoughts. Without misunderstanding. From the beginning--the learning and practicing--to the end--the performing.

(Meanwhile, the tongue must make do exploring Austria and Germany and Alsace without the aid of ear or eye.)

The most sure and certain way to assess, realize and, consequently, experience something is not just to use 100% sensory engagement, but to use the "right" sense in the most virtuosic way.

And as for sentiments of (not) love expressed via email, I have to wonder. Would he play the piano with his lungs? The technique is mixed up; it fails to serve the music. And so I have no sympathy, just as I have no sympathy for my oodles of wrong notes yesterday in the Vivaldi. I used the wrong sense. Or, more truthfully, I lazily allowed one sense (eye) to dominate the weaker sense (ear) that needed to be employed. Of course things went awry.

Find your instrument. Play it well.

(Taste what you drink.)

And yes, you just know that someday soon I am likely to write rhapsodically about, "Playing the Piano with Your Lungs" as well as about how to intentionally use the wrong sense in order to create something that confounds your audience or viewer's senses. Yep, I'll probably advocate mixing the senses all up in the search for delightful and playful effects. I can be my own devil's advocate, too.

How Fauré Brought Me Back to Life

2007-04-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

Finally he came to the old tower where she was lying asleep. He was so amazed at her beauty that he bent over and kissed her. At that moment--after so long--she awoke, and with her the king and the queen, and all the attendants, and the horses and the dogs, and the pigeons on the roof, and the flies on the walls. The fire stood up and flickered, and then finished cooking the food (the roast sizzled away). And she and the composer lived long and happily until they died.

--adapted from Perrault

(the truth? soon...)

The Soundtrack 17

2007-04-28T15:43:00.000-07:00

Veljo Tormis, The Singer's Childhood
The Beatles, "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" (for A)
Gabriel Fauré, Les roses d'Ispahan (for B)
Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No.3
that damn truck, every Thursday between 3 - 4 a.m.

And finally. Because there are pieces that will bite you in the ass when you least expect it, no matter how many times you've played them.

Vivaldi, Laudamus Te (sorry girls--I owe you one)

A Time for Silence

2007-04-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

Now this has me thinking.

I feel like I "put up" with music when I eat out, although I'm surprisingly capable of tuning it out when I dine solo. But dining not-solo is another matter. Maybe the best soundtrack to a superlative dining experience is nothing more than conversation--and I'm not fussy about the topic; it could be a brilliant counterpoint about the food and wine, your laundry, and that sensational young pianist who just performed with the symphony. But music? It distracts...from the food and wine (if that's what I want to pay attention to) and from the conversation (if that's what I want to pay attention to) and makes me wonder: does this dining experience merit the challenge of this aural distraction? Usually the answer is no. But as I say, I "put up" with it, from the tasteful jazz at two beloved haunts to the dj'd electronic sets at the chicest place I know of to drink infinite glasses of exceptional Riesling. Sigh... I have, however, boycotted a certain coffeehouse because the music is just TOO LOUD.

And to eat my own words: I absolutely adore a particular grocery store at Shattuck and Vine where they play classical music. Yes. Grocery shopping with Beethoven. I'm down with that. Maybe I should break down and buy an iPod.

Spilling Secrets

2007-04-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

In the end...

I wore a skirt.

And heels. (Maybe someday I will wear a fabulous vintage piece from La Rosa... to complement the perfect retro desk and chair. But this was version 1.0 and my Gap couture and simple Ikea table served well enough.)

I nixed the coffee cup prop but kept the steno notebook. I even consulted it (though in a much more obvious manner than if I were playing a piano piece from the score). Hint, hint.

Thanks to Jen who said it was "whimsical." (This is the response for which I most hoped. Oops. Am I supposed to say that?) Thanks to ---- who said my hands give away the fact that I'm really a pianist. And thanks to Carolyn Hauck for taking pics!

Alonzo's Moths

2007-04-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

The moths drive fast cars, cling to impossible curves, hairpin when you least expect it, throw arcs of shadow and bright left and right. Their wake is sometimes illuminated--jumping bits of dust, a cobweb's graceful bow, another insect's inadvertent entrance--and sometimes imperceptible, and so their trajectories, thus observed, seem very nervously navigated. The moths' flirtation with death is constant yet halting, at times aggressive, eager and athletic but then bashful and uncertain. The onlooker wonders: will they live? will they die? which this time? Why do some drive straight into the light while others cruise in aimless circles around it? Vroom vroom vroom, go the moths. Then, suddenly--gasp--they've all fled...the slipper-footed noise of their wingbeats a fading Doppler cry.

I spend a lot of time lately with moths and butterflies. They live in a Bourbon box and eat the watercolour pencils and paper flowers that I feed them. They are a scattered bunch, my new friends, and they certainly influenced my experience at Lines Ballet last Friday.

The Lines dancers do not go to the floor (period) and under the stark stage lights, in pale gold and straw colored costumes, they reminded me of my moths. Their fast fluttering movements (port de bras and extensions derived from classical ballet but then slightly exaggerated) were perfectly and convincingly executed, but after a while, the choreography wanted for structure. Comprised of nineteen sections, Long River High Sky (Alonzo King's collaboration with the Shaolin monks) presented an ordered disorder reminiscent of moths in the lamplight. First two, then one, then a whole flurry of passionate fighters. Partnerships heatedly made, then broken up or nonchalantly abandoned. As when watching moths, one could construe endless stories about the transcendent dancers, but it's too easy, after further watching, to give up and just walk away without care. King's strengths lie in punctuation (cartwheeling, backflipping children in counterpoint against the sinewy, oh-how-I-envy-their-spines Lines dancers) and dynamic range (a "break-it-down" section by the full company followed by one monk's meditative seated pose) but in Long River High Sky those captivating moments do not coess into an--aha!--big picture. This aesthetic usually works for me, and it has certainly worked for King in the past, but this time I felt that they--winged creatures, tumbling monks, gifted dancers--were trying so hard to convey une grande impression. And I just couldn't see it.

The moths elicit strong feelings. You get caught up in their dervishes, in how they drive their fast cars, in their racing and graceful dancing, and maybe you pray over the ones who extinguish or cheer the ones who fly away. But [shrugging] then you go about your own business. They are, after all, just moths. What they do is instinctual, not choreographed. I'm ok feeling this way for my Bourbon box dwellers, but I'm not sure if I'm ok feeling it about Alonzo King's company this spring. Hmm.

read Ms. Howard's dance review here...

TypeMusic 1.0

2007-04-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

Performance This Coming Sunday!

Fieldwork presents
New Performance Works
Sunday April 22, 2007
6:30 - 8:30pm
Shawl Anderson Dance Center, Berkeley
This FREE event is part of Bay Area National Dance Week

I will perform TypeMusic, the piece I began building last summer as a beginning student in Max/MSP. Yes, I "play" the computer. (Is that my true love, the piano, faintly protesting?) What I'm wearing is a surprise. There is rumor of champagne and strawberries after the performances. See you there!

Sometimes Doing Next to Nothing

2007-04-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

wisdom from the barstool...

"It [the video footage] is almost too beautiful. I don't want to touch it. I can't imagine editing it."

"So don't."

XVIII

2007-04-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

Butterfly, butterfly
born in a bower
christened in a teapot
died in half an hour

--The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes

XVII

2007-04-13T15:57:00.000-07:00

'It is considered that time, per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence of old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age they give the name, saba, which literally means "rust". Saba, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. [--or patina--A.T.]

'Saba, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.'

In a sense [we are] trying to master time as the stuff of art.

--Andrey Tarkovsky (quoting & commenting on Soviet journalist Ovchinnikov's account of Japan) in Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema