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Christian Asplund
Composer performer
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Bio
Canadian-American composer-performer Christian Asplund’s interests include intersections of text/music, improvisation/composition, and modular textures/forms. He has received awards from Genesis Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Artistrust, King County, ASCAP, Alpert Foundation and Jack Straw Foundation. His teachers have included Thea Musgrave, Alvin Curran, Michael Hicks, David Sargent, Joel Durand, and John Rahn. He has performed with Stuart Dempster, Malcolm Goldstein, and Christian Wolff, John Butcher, Eyvind Kang, Amy Denio, Jessica Lurie, and many others. His music appears on Present Sounds, Tzadik, Sparkling Beatnik, and other labels, and his compositions have been performed and broadcast in many locations in Europe, North America and Australia. His scores are published by Frog Peak Music. He has written books and articles for Perspectives of New Music, American Music, University of Washington and University of Illinois Presses. His most recent project has been three marathon performances on piano of the complete works of Thelonious Monk in Utah, Seattle, and New York. Words used by the press to describe his music include: passion, panoramic power, pure pointillist, plaintive, painstaking, rhythmically toothy, rocking, remarkable, rollicking, searing, subdued, soothing, submersive, splendid, unique, ethereal, mesmerizing, mind-blowing, otherworldly, absorbing, intelligent, idiosyncratic, distinctive, captivating, bewitching. He lives in Provo, Utah where he teaches at Brigham Young University.
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Events
- 7 June 2014, 9:30 pm: Spectrum, NYC, performance with Ricksplund, and with Andrew Drury and Jessica Lurie.4 June 2014, 8 pm: Performance of Vviolla by Steven Ricks, New York City Electronic Music Festival, Playhouse, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, New York City15 May 2014, Soup and Sound Series, Brooklyn. Lalage, with Andrew Drury and Jessica Lurie.13 April 2014, 8:30 pm: Biweekly Musico-Poetic Fireside @Avant GaRawge (1182 Locust Circle, Provo, UT, rear garage entrance) hosted by FunCoffin, featuring The Home of Easy Credit and Lalage.9 April 2014, 7:30 pm: GEM (BYU Group for Experimental Music) @Madsen Recital Hall, Provo, UT30 March 2014, 8:30 pm: Biweekly Musico-Poetic Fireside @Avant GaRawge (1182 Locust Circle, Provo, UT, rear garage entrance)1 February 2013, 7:30 pm, Madsen Recital Hall, Provo, Utah: BYU Faculty Composers Concert featuring QNMA+Steve Rix and Kneel Thornoque, and Mikel Hix
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Posts
- Feb 11, 14A Comforter (text by Charles Thomas Asplund). Performed by FunCoffin @Avant GaRawge.
THE AVANT GARAWGESome thoughts on spaces, spirits, and sabbathsBy Christian AsplundIntroductionRecently a very dear friend and mentor shared with me (I think because he has been so supportive of (not to mention influential on) my work over the years, and wanted to assure me that he wasn't aesthetically snubbing me) his reasons for not attending my Avant GaRawge series. He shared a moving account of an early decision in his career and life as an artist and scholar, which made it necessary for him to refrain from participating (as a performer or listener) in certain Sunday musical events. The Avant GaRawge (AG) is on Sunday nights. This account, in the context of my deep regard for this friend as well as my deep (some would say fanatical) commitment to my religion and more specifically sabbath observance, has led me to ponder my relationship with this day of the week, and with my life as an artist/scholar/teacher etc., and more particularly my activities as a curator of musical/poetic events. I have very specific reasons for doing these events Sunday nights.I miss the evening firesides of my youth (many of which were musical) and the profound feeling that Sunday night has. I love the Sunday evening musical services of other religions, such as Compline. AG is partially to capture this spirit and to be an aesthetic/musical/spiritual/poetic meditation before diving into the more workaday week that follows. AG is free and no money is exchanged or involved. I, and the participants (and especially my wonderful wife), offer their time, talents, and resources freely in an act of consecration. Most leave uplifted, positive, renewed, happy, and optimistic about their community. There is something transcendent about sounds and words that are created and shared for reasons other than money, or fame, or the building of a career, etc. When these worldly concerns aren't present, it opens the way for more profoundly spiritual experience to occur.MusicLet me say at the outset that I believe that music is a gift from deity. Every time I make a musical sound, I believe that I am, among other things:-praising God-expressing joy in my existence and that of others-retuning and improving the world and its inhabitants through vibrationsSpiritI have a very deep conviction of the Mormon cosmology, which, as I understand it, asserts that people are dual beings, with mortal bodies in the image of deity, each of which is animated by an eternal spirit, which is the source of consciousness, will, creativity, etc. Moreover, all organisms are animated by spirits and all of creation has a spiritual essence, including sound.SabbathIn most religious traditions that I know of, one day a week is set aside for rest and worship. I believe that a weekly sabbath is a profound human need, even for people who don't engage in religious activity or belief. I am a Christian and a Mormon and among the teachings in my tradition regarding the sabbath are:-the sabbath should be a day in which commerce and gainful employment should be avoided if possible-activities that would require others to do gainful work should be avoided if possible-spiritual observances such as prayer and scripture study should occur daily, but there should be much more of this on the sabbath, including attendance at certain community religious gatheringsMormonism has left most other questions about the sabbath up to individual and family interpretation. This discretion is inspired, in part by the teachings and example of Jesus who was impatient with overly prescriptive sabbath guidelines. I have made a personal choice not to do recording sessions or play or attend gigs at places that sell things on the sabbath. However, I have always felt good about attending concerts at churches, universities, homes, and other places that are non-commercial in nature. In these contexts, music is a sacred activity to my mind, and thus most appropriate to the spirit of a sabbath. I also attend art museums on the sabbath for the same reasons. As another example, I don't believe in playing or watching sports on the sabbath, but I do hike on the sabbath because I feel that it is likewise a sacred act to experience nature. But these are purely personal decisions, not necessarily reflective of the views of anyone else. My friends and family are mostly a bit more relaxed about the sabbath in some ways, and some are a bit more rigorous. But this reflects another part of my faith that is important and wonderful. Mormonism has at its root the concept of personal revelation. I think issues of this sort are deliberately left open so that each person can have an experience with the divine, making personal decisions and consulting God in making those decisions. And learning from and taking responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.GenresI went to high school when cassette dubbing became somewhat of a craze. Suddenly it became possible to build up a library of borrowed music for very little money. I dubbed records from the library, radio broadcasts, and, of course, records of my friends and even my dad's friends. The eclecticism I engaged in would be nothing in this day in age, but it was a little unusual then. I had tapes of every possible genre including classical, jazz, reggae, rock, pop, new wave, Gregorian chant: whatever I could get my hands on. I aspired to be a composer and felt that listening to many musics, in addition to being incredibly enjoyable, was part of my education. I was very concerned about sifting through all of these musics and finding which were worthwhile and which not. The Book of Mormon has an interesting and powerfully simple formula for discerning value and truth in just about anything: "the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God…. Search diligently in the light of Christ that ye may know good from evil; and if ye will lay hold upon every good thing, and condemn it not, ye certainly will be a child of Christ."Using this formula (and acknowledging its subjectivity and dependence on faith and inspiration), I discovered that there was music that had this effect, music that was sincere, that had a spark of the divine in every genre. In fact, whether music was of value to me had little to do with the genre in which it existed and had more to do with the individual artist(s) who created it and their intrinsic yet indefinable qualities. It was also in high school that I consciously involved myself as a musician in as many genres as possible. Through the years I have evolved a hybrid practice that basically disregards boundaries of genre or medium, but certainly partakes of the harmonic and design elements of Euro-American classical music, the performance practice of jazz, and the rhythmic and expressive intensities of various vernacular musics. But it has been a very long time since I have thought about these distinctions in the act of composition, which remains an utterly mysterious process, one that would be seriously impaired by concerns about what box to put something in.Moreover, most musics I am aware of have some kind of spiritual origin. This includes, most notably, rock music, which originated in African-American Christian liturgy, but it also includes Euro-American classical music, Indian classical music, reggae, Indonesian gamelan, etc.Avant GaRawgeOn 29 September 2013 I held my first musical/poetic fireside in the "Avant GaRawge", essentially my garage tricked out as a performance space by Aaron McMurray, Logan Hone, and my father in law, Noel Candland. AG had been preceded by a series of salons and house concerts that I have curated going back to 1999. Curating events is as much a part of my activity as a composer as is writing little dots on a five-line staff. I'm particular that performances at AG be avant garde, in other words, original, creative, pushing boundaries, even oracular, yet competent/professional, even virtuosic; and that they be "Raw", in other words very new, not overly vetted at other venues, and possessing a great deal of intensity.Ostertag/ZornWhen I was at Mills College I attended a lecture by Bob Ostertag, who discussed, among other things, his musical collaborations with John Zorn in the 1970s. A couple of things struck me in his accounts. The first was that he said that for a couple of years he and Zorn and one or two others rehearsed/jammed every day for something like 6 hours per day during a period of about two years. This was also a period in which they had no conventional gigs or recording sessions. The other thing that stuck with me was that he said that, in the absence of venues and gigs, Zorn would do concerts of solo material, which I came to know later as two projects: The Theater of Musical Optics, and the solo saxophone+other noise makers collected on the Classic Guide to Strategy CD. Bob said that Zorn would distribute fliers to these performances but that the attendance was sketchy. Sometimes it would only be Zorn and his girlfriend. This story recalibrated my thinking about music and performance, success, and even life. It was a tremendously liberating thought, an approach to art that evinces a huge amount of faith.Seattle Composers SalonIn my last year in Seattle (1998-99) I taught at Cornish College of the Arts. I had such a wonderful experience there with some of the most interesting and sincere artists as colleagues and students. Someone approached me who had rented a classroom-sized room on capital hill near Cornish, one of the hippest areas of Seattle at the time. She wanted to know if I had any ideas for performances that could be done there. Everything about the room except its location was sub-optimal. But I had, at the time, a sort of rule that I would not turn down creative music gigs. What resulted was the Seattle Composers Salon. The concept was a monthly event with elements of a concert, a workshop, a party, and an open-mike. Invited composers, including composers who had expressed interest in participating and had been approved to do so (thus the distinction from an open-mic) would bring a piece and performers a half hour before the official starting time, and we would work out an order and I would act as MC. Audience members could ask questions and make comments after pieces. I think we had some light refreshments also. It was either free or by donation. My curatorship of the Seattle Composers Salon only lasted a few months because I moved to take a job at Oregon State University. My good friend Tom Baker took over the series and has turned it into a very exciting and durable part of the Seattle creative music landscape. The series is still going, now in its 15th year.Tricube SalonI lived and taught in Oklahoma 2000-2002. Our house was a modest modernist design consisting of three boxes. As the first house I had owned I wanted to name it, after the fashion of the British aristocracy. My oldest daughter (10 at the time) suggested Tricube, and it stuck. As a composition teacher, I had loved the strategy (originating, I think with Robert Ashley) at Mills College of fostering, or even requiring, many concerts of student compositions. The thinking was that you learned more from doing concerts and talking about them afterwards than you did from any other activity, so why not do more of them?There is kind of an answer to that question: coordination and bureaucracy. Booking and managing a concert hall can be very complex. Happily, Mills College had a very simple system. There was a big calendar for the two halls students had access to. You would find an open spot on the calendar, which was above the department secretary’s desk, and basically tell her you were putting your name down on a particular date for a concert. If she knew of some conflict not already on the calendar (rare), she would inform you and you’d pick another date. Then you’d make, write and rehearse music, make fliers, and play that music for the people that showed up.Tricube had few and small bedrooms, but did have an open plan for the living/dining/kitchen, so I realized that I could most easily put together concerts for my students, as well as myself and other willing “grownup” musicians and poets in my own living room with no bureaucratic hassle. Since Tricube, we’ve owned three houses: always with too few bedrooms, but large common spaces in which we can host performances. We only realized in retrospect that this has been the case.Locust SalonOn 8 June 2007, I had my first Locust Salon in the living room of my current house, Exoskeleto, on Locust Circle. The space is not quite as ideal as Tricube, but it has the advantage of a grand piano. The Locust Salon has been an intermittent series that featured myself and other local and touring musicians and poets, including Eyvind Kang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alex Caldiero, Craig Dworkin, Lance Larsen, Steve Tuttle, Alex Woods, Michael Hicks, Steve Ricks, Michelle Kesler, Scott Holden, Jeremy Grimshaw, Steve Call, Jarrad Powell, and many others. This series owes greatly to my wife, poet Lara Candland Asplund and her incredible cooking, poetry, and preparation of our home for guests.Our children also pitch in, preparing the house for guests and helping with food preparation. They love the salons and always ask when the next one will be. Our daughter Ingrid who is away at college always requests a salon when she is home on breaks. This series continues intermittently, but has averaged about four times a year.Avant GaRawgeOver the summer of 2013, I felt it was time to start a new series, one that would happen more often than the Salon and one that was a bit more raw, a bit less formal. I knew that it would be impractical to do this series in my living room. I was especially inspired by the energy and creativity of a group of BYU and Snow College music students who would form the core of the AG. At first AG was weekly, but, after a month hiatus in November/December, we cut back to biweekly, which seems to work really well. It is a small and sometimes chilly space, but we pack it consistently. This is very heartening to me, but not essential.My teacher Stuart Dempster liked to talk about Type A, Type B, and Type C concerts. Type A means there are more people on stage than in the audience. Type B means there are equal numbers. Type C means there are more people in the audience than on stage. This formula acknowledged that there’s nothing essentially wrong with doing concerts for small audiences. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” - Sep 10, 13The following is from a talk I gave in church yesterday:It's All RevelationChristian Asplund, September 2013In April, 1829, during the translation of the Book of Mormon, Olivery Cowdery, who was serving as scribe asked Joseph Smith if they could switch roles. In D&C 8, the Lord approved this experiment instructing Oliver, “I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart. Now, behod, this is the spirit of revelation.” After unsuccessful attempts at translating, Joseph Smith received a revelation directed at Oliver that became section 9 of the D&C, in which the Lord explains why Oliver was not able to translate: “You have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right. But if it be not right you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.”This scripture rightly has a very special place among the Latter-day Saints. I dare say it, and others like it, sets us clearly apart, certainly from our modern Euro-American culture. This is the culture that has described and harnessed the physical world in such spectacular ways but is equally distinguished in its inability to describe and harness the spiritual world or, indeed, even acknowledge its existence. This scripture goes far beyond attesting to the existence of a spiritual realm. It gives instructive and specific details as to how to access information from divine sources while living in the physical world.I don’t believe Oliver was being told that he should have figured it out all on his own. I don’t believe anyone has to figure anything out without any divine aid, and in fact, I don’t think it’s possible. Oliver’s situation, moreover, was an extreme one, as he was faced with the task of translating a language the knowledge of which had been completely lost to the world. Oliver couldn’t translate by himself. Nonetheless, the Lord gave the instruction to study “it” out in his mind. What exactly was Oliver to study out as he looked at an unfamiliar script? I believe that God was directing Oliver to a different, perhaps more subtle kind of revelation, the revelation that comes from reflection, listening, mental exertion applied to a problem or a paradox. I think it points to the idea that revelation comes in many forms, tailored to the needs at hand. I think it also illustrates a microcosm of our pursuit of truth, or really anything of value. We have to work, to apply ourselves actively. Certainly we need to apply the powers of our senses and of our brain’s ability to reason, to make associations, and to interpret sense data. In fact, scientists attempting to map it suggest that the human brain is by far the most complex thing in the universe, perhaps more complex than the universe itself. But ultimately everything we have, including our knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, is a gift. The Lord said at the end of this lesson to Oliver that “you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.” As Hugh Nibley said, “Work we must, but the lunch is free”.Through Oliver’s experience and instruction, the Lord is telling us that intelligence, or light and truth, is all around us and in us. It has already been placed in our minds, in fact, it’s been there eternally. It is also available to any person who is willing to study, to meditate, to ponder and to take advantage of the myriad means of accessing light and truth.We need a much more expansive view of revelation. We are divine beings. That part of us that is spiritual has existed for much longer than that part of us which is physical. Our physicality is a fairly new addition. We think of the spiritual realm as the anomaly, when, in fact, the physical is more new and anomalous, an add-on, an appendage, an accessory to our eternal spiritual existence.Brigham Young had a lot to say on this subject. For instance, he said, posing a question often addressed to him:Have you had revelations 7 " Yes, I have them all the time, I live constantly by the principle of revelation.To Brigham Young, revelation was a natural part of everyday thought and action. He also said that:The Spirit of the Lord enlightens every man that comes into the world.at another time he saidI do not believe for one moment that there has been a man or woman upon the face of the earth, from the days of Adam to this day, who has not been enlightened, instructed, and taught by the revelations of Jesus Christ.As a composer, I am lucky or unlucky depending on how you look at it, in that I depend on what I believe is divine inspiration to be able to compose. I believe that anybody involved in creation or discovery depends on divine inspiration, whether they are aware of it or not. To quote Brigham Young again:There are men [and women] of talent, of thought, of reflection, and knowledge in all cunning mechanism, they are expert…, though they do not know from whence they receive their intelligence… it reveals unto them, instructs them, teaches them, and guides them even in… how to construct rail-roads and all manner of machinery, they understand cun-ning workmanship, etc. ; but that is all revealed to them by the Spirit of the Lord, though they know it notThe flash of inspiration, the sense that something is right or whole, these are essential to mathematicians, scientists, scholars and artists. I believe they are also a kind of revelation and come from a divine source.President Young goes further by saying that:No person receives knowledge only upon the principle of revelationOPTIONAL MATERIAL:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::President Young goes yet a step further, stating that real, lasting knowledge is only obtainable through spiritual faculties:how do you know anything? Can you be deceived by the eye ? You can, you have proved this; you all know that there are men who can deceive the sight of the eye, no matter how closely you observe their movements. Can you be deceived in hearing ? Yes; you may hear sounds but not understand their import or whence they come. Can you be deceived by the touch of the finger ? You can The nervous system will not detect everything. What will? The revelations of the Lord Jesus Christ, the spirit of truth will detect everything, and enable all who possess it to understand truth from error, light from darkness, the things of God from the things not of God It is the only thing that will enable us to understand the Gospel of the Son of God, the will of God, and how we can be saved.He goes even further by saying:Instead of considering that there is nothing known and understood, only as we know and understand things naturally, I take the other side of the question, and believe positively that there is nothing known except by the rev- elation of the Lord Jesus Christ, whether in theology, science, or art. 12 :207.This is why Latter-day Saints, in a way that can be annoying to some, can bear testimony that they “know” certain things that are unprovable, or even preposterous according to conventional perceptions.:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::Returning to section 9, the process the Lord describes to Olievr integrates thought and feelings in a holistic way. The mental flash of inspiration, followed by the burning feeling of rightness are thus dual witnesses. The Lord then tells Oliver that there were two reasons for his failure. First that he was ignorant of this process. Second, that he feared. After this, he assures Oliver that he is not condemned in the least for his failure. There is so much that we can learn from this. We need not fear the pursuit of revelation. We are under no condemnation for seeking guidance, truth, or confirmation from the Lord. And we should learn from scripture and the examples of others how to obtain revelation and apply it persistently, to experiment, as Alma says. The search for revelation can become a creative act in which all of our faculties are brought to bear. Moreover, everything we do can become inspired or informed by revelation.
- Aug 28, 13The following is from a recent correspondence with a colleague:"I think I share with you a belief in the transcendence of art and beauty, that great art is inspired by divinity and that it glorifies God. There is precious little else to explain why any of us would sacrifice so much in these pursuits, and that includes the most "secular" or "postmodern" etc. among us. We are all drawn to what is divine in this world where we are inexplicably separated from what we once knew yet have a dim recollection of. I think it is a mistake to make straw men of any artists who are sincerely exploring and creating and sacrificing for their work, their vision, and their divinely gifted imagination. Where I do see a massive problem is in the commercialization of everything, particularly the arts, and in the academy's embrace of mass-produced drivel in place of art. This is where I think we are losing our students. I am not opposed to the existence of Hollywood, or Madison Avenue, or Nashville, etc. But I have watched in sadness the gradual philistinization of our culture as market values have all but extinguished the values of integrity, truth, beauty, and sharing for their own sake, not for commercial or competetive values."One of the reasons for this degradation in our culture has been the end of the cold war. The Cold War caused us to try to prove to the world that our system could produce the best and most ennobled society and culture. I think this applies to areas other than the arts, including journalism, education, politics, etc. Artists and institutions, whether they were aware of it or not, felt a sort of higher calling to create and produce things that would be examples of the product of our society and its values during the Cold War. When it ended, this impetus, this support for achievement, exploration, and even excellence was replaced by pure market values, what could be quantified with money. It seems that all of our institutions have moved in this direction. It's all about the bottom line."This is why the arts are more important than ever, and more especially arts that challenge and are not defined by/beholden to the marketplace. More important than their profoundly positive influence on people and groups of people is their fundamental value, i.e. their eternal value that is not defined by anything else but themselves. Like love, art is valuable in itself. I don't think it is accidental that the angels are always represented in scripture as singing or playing musical instruments. I think they probably do that a lot. I think we were made to sing and dance, as well as paint and write and speak, both to praise God and to simply revel in our existence."So I guess I'm less worried about some of these questions. Important questions and answers are most eloquently asked and answered in sincere, sustained, mindful, inspired, and skillful work that we engage in and foster in our students."
- May 24, 13An article from World Literature Today by esteemed musicologist speech artist, bassist, composer and humanitarian:
American Music as World Music
“World music” has become a prominent part of an advertising lexicon promising the buyer of CDs entrée into unfamiliar conventions. The operatic creations of husband and wife team Christian Asplund (composer) and Lara Candland (poet/librettist) promise listeners something similar.
Asplund and Candland helped create Seattle Experimental Opera, a guerilla arts organization formed in the 1990s that disbands and reorganizes like a fluid artistic insurrection. Resource starved, the group compensates with conviction. By always acting as though everything going on is perfectly normal, they foster the sense that unknown conventions are at play. The results are creations akin to opera transported on covered wagons by an under-funded kinship group so far from home that their efforts to recreate their abandoned culture produce fresh conventions.
Take their work Liquid: An Epistolary Opera, which premiered in Seattle in 2000 and can now be heard on a 2007 CD. The overture features the instrumental trio of electric guitar, electric bass and drums providing a music at once familiar for the pop scoring and defamiliarized by classicized guitar licks. Midway through the overture, Asplund reveals his make-due sensibility as one of the opera’s three singers wordlessly chimes in. Asplund had a singer available, so why not make better use of his limited resources by having her perform as a musical instrument during the overture?
Five letters from Eva Eve to two interlocutors comprise Liquid’s entire text. We join the correspondence at an advanced and intimate point. Eva Eve loves “Dearest Charles”, but careful listening reveals that Charles may be Eva Eve’s anthropomorphic fantasy of a misshapen duck residing on her walking path from home to Seattle’s Lake Washington. A love triangle, fitting for opera, emerges in the three middle letters as Eva Eve turns her attention to friend and potential rival, Catherine. In the finale, Eva Eve breaks off her romance with Charles in the aftermath of the duck’s death.
Three singers sing the letters. Their musical lines smack of operatic singing now and then, but also resemble incantation, speech and vocalizations defying description. Listeners will find Asplund’s heterophonic treatment of vocal lines fascinating as two singers present Candland’s vivid images simultaneously in a way that calls attention to the myriad subtle differences of each singer’s interpretation. Liquid challenges listeners for being calmly sure of its own normalcy, a normalcy common in a place no GPS can find, yet refreshingly American in its speech patterns.
Their next collaboration, Sunset with Pink Pastoral (2006), takes the conventions of a “road movie” to present audiences with likeable innocents abroad amidst the vast landscape of the American West. The visual ambition of Candland’s libretto meets the material poverty of experimental opera head on and without compromise. Milk, the opera’s male protagonist, has a chance encounter with a young Native American, and after hearing his prayer exclaims guilelessly “that’s cool, dude. I wish I had, like, a cultural heritage or whatever.” Such a naïve young man might invite meanness from another composer/writer team courting cruel laughter, but Asplund and Candland treat Milk and everyone else inhabiting their operas gently, effectively cutting themselves off from opera’s traditions of violent emotions.
Their most recent collaboration, Lalage, features Candland’s voice reading from her poetry manipulated and embellished by Asplund’s live, low-tech electronics. They might have called this collaboration an “opera” too, but they didn’t. “Opera” means something to them, but the conventions informing that meaning belong to them alone. - May 09, 13
MonkBlog
Latest vid: Think of One:
I have been experimenting with alternative ways of making music for a few years now. The principal ways of music making that I grew up with were live performance and recording. When downloading and streaming started to take over and I moved to a place that had a paucity of venues and audience for live music, I began searching for a third way. Thus my “ViolaBlog”, followed by my “PianoBlog”. These were simply web pages on my WordPress site that had dated solo improvisations. I was very interested in exploiting the intimacy of the medium, both of recording and of the personal computer and other devices. Thus I used, in the ViolaBlog, a phalanx of very close microphones. In the PianoBlog I placed the mics under the piano, almost touching the soundboard. In both blogs, I set the recording levels quite high. This meant that I could clip very easily, so I kept the playing volume low, and monitored my playing with headphones. I was thus able to explore the very wide range of dynamic shadings that exists in lower volumes, but not so much at higher volumes. And this made possible the recording, on both instruments, of some sounds that I don’t think are otherwise possible with any medium. The ViolaBlog led to the CD VIOLA, for which I used a slightly different approach. I used the same close miking with several mics, but instead of recording to digital, I recorded to a high end cassette deck, which eliminated the threat of clipping, and, instead, introduced the wonderful phenomenon of saturation and even a bit of analog distortion. I was able to raise the recording level, and, by careful headphone monitoring, play with the unique properties of the analog medium. I haven’t done a lot of electronic music per se, but I consider these projects to be a kind of electronic music.These projects occurred at a time when I was “between commissions” as a composer, and when I had little composition studio time because of complex work and childcare needs. I was also experiencing some insomnia. I tried to incorporate all this into this project.There were some problems with this project. I have very little ability in the areas of web design, etc. These “blogs” are not particularly attractive or inviting. I came up in a kind of DIY ethic, where the concept was to get stuff out there. The idea is that there is a mysterious virtue in simply making things available. In the punk/new wave era, the main innovation to me was this idea that you could make music without being part of the formidable rock establishment that had arisen. You would find: a) a place to play, b) people to play it, c) music for the people to play, and d) simple ways to inform people of the existence of this music. That’s where fliers became a big thing (obviously long before the internet). You wanted to distribute as many fliers as possible, put them up on as many telephone poles and bulletin boards as possible. But you didn’t want to try “sell” yourself. It was just to inform. The fliers themselves because a kind of DIY art form, but again, this was to draw focus away from the fliers being manipulative or commercial.You see, there is a fine line between the concept of DIY and the concept of the “Vanity Project.” I don’t know if I’m ready to dissect these two concepts. It might take several posts, but I’ll make a tentative start. Actually, maybe I’ll put some random musings on these questions for your consideration:The non-vanity projects (we need a name for them) are really the anomaly. These are the projects where someone else pays us a guaranteed amount of money to create or perform something. One can view this situation as a range of things from a positive collaboration between two or more visionary people to wage-slavism.Perhaps we need to query why it is we want to make and share things. Is it to obtain affirmation that we are talented? Is it to share objects or information that we feel we have been privileged to obtain or create? I think it is both (and maybe a few others). In both cases, I believe we are enacting/demonstrating/tracing/proving an encounter with the Divine, with spiritual realities, “higher energies”. This is especially important and compelling to the secular-materialist Euro-American culture that approaches spiritual reality in a very tentative and clumsy way. We crave and naturally want to share non-explicit encounters and accounts of encounters with the Divine. There is a kind of Victorian cloak of shame surrounding spiritual experience. I guess I kind of revel in spiritual pornography, if this be the case. I don’t believe any culture or faith tradition has a monopoly on spirituality or metaphysics. But I do believe that we are eternal beings, and that we naturally are drawn to the traces of what is eternal in this temporal realm. Of course, I privilege music in this sense, as I believe it has the power to remove us from teleology. But that’s another post.Anyhoo, the desire to demonstrate talent, is, in part, a desire to share a miraculous gift from divinity. The desire to share created objects is, in part, the desire to share that which has been inspired or revealed. It is the sharing of a collaboration between entities from two different realms.Is it vanity, then to share created things, where no one has asked let alone paid for them? I think it depends on how one approaches them.I say Mindy Kaling on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other night. He asked her when she slept since she appeared to be so busy. She pointed out that she, like Stewart had a show named after her, and life was so awesome because of it that she barely wanted to sleep for fear of missing something. I was discussing this with Lara who pointed out that Mindy also produces and writes for the show. Then she noticed that Mad Men, and a whole bunch of movies and TV shows are produced by their stars. Are these vanity projects? Does getting paid make something not a vanity project?Maybe our fear of vanity (projects) is a manifestation of our fear that our own existence is itself a vanity project. Maybe we feel sheepish about taking up space on the planet. One is reminded of the ill-fated OK Soda ad campaign, which showed a photo of a hipstress with the copy “It’s OK if you think I’m not OK, but I am.”I’m working on answers. I’ll get back to you when I have them.In the mean time, I am starting another musical blog of sorts. The ViolaBlog and PianoBlog suffered from a few problems. The aforementioned drabness of their web interface. Also, I never knew if anyone was listening and didn’t get any feedback if anyone did. This is where social media has some real advantages (and many disadvantages), mainly the ability to see if anyone is listening. This new blog, or perhaps sub-blog will consist of videos of solo piano versions of Thelonious Monk compositions, recorded in no particular order. The day before yesterday I did Blue Monk. Today it’s Think of One, which may have been the tune Thelonious was referring to when, asked why his compositions were so “complicated” he responded, “Some of my pieces have melodies a nitwit can understand. Like I've written one number staying on one note. A tone-deaf person could hum it."The MonkBlog is sort of a continuation of a much longer term Monk project that I have been engaged in for many years, that includes the Monk Marathons I did in Provo, Seattle and New York last year. Hope you enjoy. Oh, but it’s OK if you don’t - Feb 01, 13
Any idiot knows that the NRA is just a lobbying arm of the gun industry. Why anyone listens to them to make any kind of policy is bizarre. Guns in homes are many times more likely to kill the people who live in them than any "intruder". I don't know. It's all so insane. We already have gun control. RPG's are illegal. I am opposed to fundamentalism of any kind. Gundamentalism (this frightening obsession with the 2nd amendment and imagined threats), fundamentalist economics (i.e. libertarianism), fundamentalists Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, fundamentalist secularism.
- Nov 17, 12Dear TTBOOK,I listen to at least part of your show each Saturday and enjoy especially the challenging subjects you tackle and the eminent guests you talk to.I would like to share a couple of thoughts, particularly on listening to your interviews with Daniel Levitin and Michael Gazzaniga.Mr. Levitin's account of some of the most complex human experiences, those having to do with music, seemed a bit lightweight. I don’t know if he was going for concision or brevity or dumbing things down a bit. The brain science he described seemed reductive. But more unsatisfying was his attempt to account for musical experience, one of the most profound and ineffable phenomena we know of, in terms of physiology, and more broadly from a purely materialist perspective. His discussion of “Superstition” was so superficial that I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. (Not to mention the thwacks in “Tell Me Something Good” are from a clavinet, not a guitar.)Mr. Gazzaniga failed to answer the basic questions posed by the host and by his book’s title. This is part of a broader difficulty. The topics each week on TTBOOK are tantalizing as are the introductions and questions posed by the hosts. The question of what consciousness is, where it comes from etc., seems to come up a fair bit, but we always seem to hear the same non-answers. There is a preponderance of guests on TTBOOK that are really sold on the materialist fallacy. They sometimes seem like caricatures of the arrogant scientists of yore, the ones who brought us phrenology, DDT, the atom bomb, and the promise of food in pill form. I’m very ok with hearing from materialists, but I hardly ever hear perspectives from people who at least acknowledge mystery and the problems with materialism, let alone that accept or describe a spiritual reality.A vast majority of our species have explained consciousness as proceeding from a spirit or soul that animates the body, and departs with death, leaving the body lifeless. This concept has never been convincingly challenged. Other concepts of metaphysics vary greatly from culture to culture and from era to era, but this seems to be almost a universal.I fear arrogance of any kind. I also fear purely mechanistic explanations of human individuals or groups. Obviously the material world is the sphere of science, but I think scientizing such things as consciousness, free will, and aesthetic experience, without at least acknowledging limitations is problematic.Sincerely,Christian AsplundComposerAssociate ProfessorSchool of MusicBrigham Young University
- Aug 15, 12The reason I am interested in the Christian Left is because everyone assumes that Christians are all on the right, but I happen to know that's not true. I'm a lefty partially because of my adherence to the moral and social teachings of thesermon on the mount, which I think are excellent, challenging and transformative principles, whether or not you think Jesus was divine. And I also know that the evangelical brand of christianity that dominates conservative politics here has a very narrow definition of what a Christian is. My definition is pretty broad. I will confess to some negativity, I suppose because I have watched my adopted home, for which I have a great love, descend into greed, dysfunction, and philistinism in the short few decades that I've lived here. I have also been inspired by the incredible resourcefulness and intelligence of people working from the ground up making the world better and speaking truth to power when they can.
- Jul 23, 12I love Alan Grayson's emails. He's one of the only people that's telling it straight on the national scene. Here's one I got today:
Last week, one of my opponents put out an ad saying that if I'm elected, then next year, I will triple gas prices, prohibit guns and ammunition, and close down children's lemonade stands.
I assured him that I would not do any of those things. Nor would I remove the tin foil from his skull.
That made me think of some more things that I probably won't do next year:
(1) Institute universal healthcare.
(2) Provide jobs to 20+ million underemployed Americans.
(3) Make pensions and sick leave and paid vacations the norm.
(4) End corporate welfare.
(5) Re-institute progressive taxation.
(6) Provide higher education to every student who wants it.
(7) Take corporate money out of politics.
(8) Purge us of discrimination against minorities, women and gays.
(9) Reduce the brutal, pervasive inequality.
(10) Bring the troops home.
No, I don't think that I'm going to accomplish any of those things next year. But if I'm elected, I'm going to try. I'm sure going to try. - Jul 23, 12USA: Collective imbecility: Too many screens and vehicles: Inability to see the most obvious causes and effects = Lack of realization that these many massacres, and other killings that don’t make it into the national news are the result of:Easy access to weapons that destroy life with the press of a buttonandyes, a culture of violence mainly propagated by mass/immersive media
- Jul 12, 12I’m getting a lot of desperate emails from the Democratic Party, democratic candidates and progressive groups requesting money and reporting some scary data about outspending by republicans. It does scare me that they are so scared. It does seem like the supreme court’s ironically titled “Citizens United” decision has opened the way for a Putin-style power grab by a somewhat unpopular and quite destructive and nasty republican party. I have probably been dwelling on this theme too much over the past few years. I love America so much and it is so sad to see everything that is good here squandered in such a sad way. But here are a few thoughts:1. The emails I get from the aforementioned liberal voices feel like too little too late. Democratic politicians have been so consistently weak, even in the face of great advantage and victory, that it is hard to really want to dash to their aid. I’m just not sure what they are going to do with my money. Furthermore, I can’t figure out how they can’t defeat a party that blatantly and openly voted to eliminate Medicare two years in a row, not to mention many other things that would seem to be great political gifts. And once they get elected, they behave even more weakly. They don’t seem to realize that they do have an effect on the discourse. If they assent to the whole libertarian hogwash, then all they are to us is pale republicans who have only vestigial concern for the wellbeing of the non-rich, but no will to do anything about it. “Sure government doesn’t create jobs, but could we use it to create just a few jobs, please? No, ok, well, could we do a few less bad things, please?”2. I’m not sure I get the whole republican thing. What is the end game? Can anyone tell me? Is democracy really that loathsome to them? I don’t see a dictator or strongman behind this whole thing; so it just seems like mass hysteria in the direction of how jerky can we get away with. But oh how many people are hurt by their policies. I guess because they’ve set themselves mainly as opposed to anything from the democrats, and the democrats cave so much that the republicans have to be ever nastier and meaner to find anything to decry about the democrats.It’s all kind of like watching a very slow rockslide or something. I’ve watched this decline (of both parties, public discourse, the well-being of most Americans) happen for almost 20 years, and I kind of knew what was happening, but at each turn I think the next thing isn’t going to happen.
- Jul 02, 12
Hung out with piano virtuoso Keith Kirchoff last week who completely rocked most of my piano pieces last summer in an epic recital and even more epic recording sessions. Here we are up Rock Canyon
After church today I went on a solo hike up said Canyon, further than I think I've been thus far. I finally got to some stream.
Last summer the stream went all the way down to the parking lot and lasted through July, because of the massive snows, rains and cool spring and early summer temperatures. We went a lot and played in the stream, which is, to me, sublime. I just love streams for some reason. Today I found some stream above where I think it gets piped. I think when there is stream below this; it is overflow from the pipe. There was hardly anyone around. It was quite hot, a Sunday, and the air is really bad from the many wild fires. I was so taken by the quiet, and the beauty of the whole canyon, the rock formations, the vegetation, the fauna. I found a rock to sit on in the stream and watched a small colony of millipedes, and then watched various spiders with webs just above the water. The affinity I felt with the arthropods going about their business in this beautiful, gentle setting. I think it is a human need to connect with our fellow living things in their natural habitat, and to nature in general. Rock Canyon is characterized by many rocks of various sizes. Geological processes, especially folding are very evident. Even the rock seems to have a life force. Today I discussed with a friend who works for FARMS the Liahona, as he had a plastic one like the Arnold Freiburg. I asked him why replicas always look the same. He said that Freiburg set the mold. But then I pointed out that Minerva Teichert has one that's more elegant, that just looks like a large gold ball. Seems more like the stone mentioned in Revelation and D&C (speaking of living rocks). - Jun 30, 12
I just got an email from Mr. Moore about the recent Supreme Court decision on the healthcare bill. Why has it taken so long for liberals to realize and articulate this? It's really pathetic because our society and our planet have suffered so much for at least 20 years because of what he is describing, with very little resistance from the left. He describes what he calls the real divide in America: "On that first side are the people who've been fed a diet of fear and lies and hate. And who is feeding them? The 1%. The richest people in the country, the ones who aren't done with us yet because they still don't have enough wealth, have done their best to dumb down the population through destroying our educational system and using media to provide them with a vastly distorted sense of reality. The rich's only obstacle is that they only hold 1% of the votes in the country. So they have to try to get a slim majority of Americans to vote their way. And fear, plus keeping them stupid, usually works."
- Jun 22, 12
Conservative is a misnomer for the current movement in American politics that dates back to 1994 contract with America. Ironically what most characterizes the movement is an embrace of economic libertarianism (which I loathe because it's both stupid and evil, but that's another discussion). It's a fundamentalist version of "liberal" economic policy, i.e. laissez-faire, that we're familiar with from Dickens novels etc. The current version is not conservative at all as it has tried to make big changes in the social contract, getting rid of or privatizing many or most of the public sector. Us hapless liberals are cast as the conservatives, desperately and not very successfully trying to save the institutions (social security, medicare, national parks, public education, foster care, etc.) that the "greatest" and earlier generations built for us. The words liberal and conservative could both be very positive, but political consultants have done a very good job injecting them with venom. I remember reading a survey from around 1960 where a large majority of Americans (including republicans) considered themselves liberal. The same survey was performed a few years ago, and hardly anyone wanted to identify themselves as that.
- Oct 20, 11
14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
- Oct 11, 11
I watched part of a familiar movie yesterday, “The Absent-Minded Professor”, an old B&W Disney affair. You may know the plot. Fred McMurray plays the title character, Prof. Brainard, a science professor at a small college that is in danger of folding who has invented an anti-gravity substance. The villain, Alonzo P. Hawk, played by Keenan Wynn, is a tycoon that sees dollar signs in this invention, flubber. When Hawk discovers the invention, he implores Brainard to partner with him to make millions as contractors to the government. Hawk essentially steals the invention to prevent the patriotic Brainard giving it gratis to the Pentagon. There are a few other angles in the movie, including a love triangle with a woman, Brainard, and an extroverted English professor from the competing and not struggling college. I distinctly remember the Hawk character recurring in Herbie the Love Bug movies. He is always a rapacious capitalist, threatening to destroy whatever is good and, essentially public sector. I pondered at how this movie could not be made now. I think it would be seen as “socialist”, unkind to the “job-creators”, etc. Moreover, this was a G-rated family movie. It just shows how things have changed. We have embraced the Hawks of the world, and now the professors are the villains. That was another really neat thing about the movie. Everybody knew who the professors were and they had a place of respect in the community. Um, not s’much anymore, I think.
- Sep 29, 11
I've got to get to the music and religion a little more, but here's something I wrote to a friend this morning:
I have to say that I am feeling deeply disillusioned about the democratic party right now. I have been for a long time, but I felt pretty hopeful in '08. I have never seen such an opportunity squandered as I have with the Obama administration and the dems control of the executive and legislative branches at the beginning of his presidency. I guess I'm pretty far to the left of the spectrum right now, but the federal dems seem to be doing not much more than saying we're not quite as bad as the republicans, rather than denouncing the palpable evil that seems to be possessing that party, and their plans to destroy all of the civic and cultural institutions that we have built over the last century. But, as we found in 2000, our system does not accomodate 3rd parties very well. So I'm a reluctant supporter, with hopes and prayers that a new day will dawn... - Aug 16, 11
This civic nihilism that we call libertarianism is like a parasitic vine that we have allowed to creep up and eventually cover and kill the tree. Rather than robustly respond and destroy it, we have, in a sense, nurtured it.
The tree becomes nothing more than food for the vine, and eventually dies and is subsumed by the vine.
We are now (and have been) to the point where, instead of working on how to improve and refine the elements of our society, as we did in the past, we are dismantling and destroying all that generations have built up. - Aug 13, 11
The existence of the soul to my mind is a universal idea throughout cultures societies and religions until modern European culture. Most still have a traditional belief in an inner person that is separate from the physical body. Moreover, the materialist impulse has a profoundly bad track record. Why not, then, have a guest that does believe in an actual soul? To those of us in the arts, materialism explains such a small subset of reality. In a way, the lack of a traditional perspective might feed into the idea that NPR represents a small band of thinking.
- Apr 21, 11
Note to Diane Rehm, 21 April 2011:
I have always admired your ability and courage to call people out and keep them honest, but I have to say I was really disappointed with the disconnect between the eloquent and heartfelt comments from listeners and the predictable, dismissive, tired, and ultimately connected and insider responses from the panelists (with a few exceptions). The impression one gets is of a group of people who are overly invested in the status quo and who marginalize anyone who challenges it, even if they are slightly different flavors of whatever the "center" happens to be at a particular moment. Those of us who are branded "liberal", or "far left" right now are part of the intelligentsia of this country that has been responsible for much of the change throughout history that has made a life of dignity and prosperity for the human species that we now enjoy. The establishment currently has found success in marginalizing us as fringe, or outright branding us as dangerous. Those who are less intellectual in inclination have been marginalized, manipulated and distracted into ineffectiveness.
I realize NPR is struggling for federal dollars with a hostile right wing, but if a call-in show is not open to ideas from its listeners, and if NPR in general is not representing truth and resisting phony binaries (left/right, fringe/center, etc.) it is giving up what makes it worth the federal dollars. - Apr 20, 11
I just got your message re: republicans voting to end medicare. The republicans have just handed you the '12 election on a silver platter. For heavens sake, don't blow this one. The republicans are fundamentally bullies and are pushing for very bad things. Please, please, stop giving in and conceding to them anything. The only way to get them to act for the public interest is to stand up to them. And at this point, it means defeating them soundly. If democrats don't do it, who will?
- Mar 11, 11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-zuckerman/why-evangelicals-hate-jes_b_830237.html
- Mar 11, 11
Wow. This is an amazing article, one that I've been waiting for for a *long* time. I honestly don't know how evangelicalism has done as well as it has, dominating politics, culture, etc. I wasn't long on my mission before I realized that evangelicalism was (in addition to being morbidly anti-mormon) to religion what professional wrestling is to sports. But the movement has taken such a profoundly dark turn since then. It really does seem at times to be the Church of the Devil (or the "Great and Abominable") described in the Book of Mormon. At various times we thought it was the catholic church, or soviet communism. These definitely had their moments. But the dominant force for evil right now in America has to be some weird combination of anti-sermon-on-the-mount evangelicalism and populist Nietzschism as embodied by the Grover Norquists/Newt Gingriches and their ilk. Inasmuch as peace is possible, it is being held back by these greedy rascals.
I happen to love Jesus. I can't get enough of Him. Of course I believe He is the Savior and that his atonement makes immortality and eternal life possible. I believe that through some miracle, meditation on his person brings joy and light, even though I have no recollection of meeting or seeing Him. But I also believe just as much in his challenging and transcendent teachings in the sermon on the mount. I am in no way better than anyone I know at living them. But I steadfastly believe that there is some efficacy in acknowledging how much I fall short and accepting the challenge of these teachings even if it takes an eternity to measure up to them. I don't quite understand what one gets out of twisting these pure teachings to justify one's hypocrisy. Why not just acknowledge that we have a ways to go?
Let's look at the basis of evangelicalism as it was explained to me by countless adherents on my mission:
People were created by God.
People are bad.
We need to be saved by "accepting" Jesus into our heart. By doing so, we get several things:
a. we become "Christians" (Mormons don't understand why they say we aren't Christians. The problem is, Mormons don't understand that evangelicals have a very specific definition as to what it means to be a Christian. It has nothing to do with adherence to an ethical formula or a belief in the divinity of the individual, Jesus).
b. we are forgiven of our sins (past, present and future)
c. we are guaranteed a place in heaven
d. we are not responsible for either our good works or our sins. Our good works are simply God working within us. Our sins are simply the leftover effects of our sinful nature and are already forgiven anyway. The worst thing we can do is to think that we can "work our way to heaven", i.e. that our good works have anything to do with our eternal reward. This is presumptive and arrogant. This is described by evangelicals as the main problem with Mormons. (I do think this is somewhat problematic to a lesser degree with my people).
This is an important ingredient to the understanding of why evangelicals hate Christianity (the ethical system Jesus taught).
On my mission evangelicals mocked our testimonies of the Book of Mormon. In mormonism, we derive our religious commitment from a transcendent experience, a spiritual witness of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and the miraculous manner in which it was brought forth. Millions of people will attest to this witness and will make great sacrifices based on it. Once you experience direct communication from the Holy Ghost, you realize that nothing else, including the 5 senses, can be as certain. The pioneers staked everything on it. When they left Missouri and Illinois, it was with the knowledge that at any time they could renounce their witness and they would be left alone. I was told by evangelicals that my spiritual witness was some kind of brainwashing, or some other such nonsense. It really put them in a difficult position vis-a-vis their own shaky faith grounds. I would then ask two questions, which would driven them berserk:
1. How do you know the Bible is true?
2. Why did God create us?
The second question is really problematic if you believe that we are naturally bad and can only have any value if we go through an empty ritual of assent to a completely weird and abstract concept. What kind of God would play such a cruel joke on his creations? Is He so desperate for praise that he made a bunch of beings who can't achieve anything on their own, and that the only thing they can do worth doing is "getting saved"? This God sounds a lot more like the Satan of my theology, the one that wants nothing more than naked and empty obeisance and hates nothing more than freedom and agency. And regarding question 1, if you don't believe in spiritual witnesses, then what hope do you have that the Bible isn't an empty collection of stories and traditions?
I'm sorry to be so hard on this religion. I have met some wonderful, and, yes, very Christian evangelicals, who serve others, who are kind, and who really do embody Jesus' teachings. But the movement has had such a baleful effect on our society as a whole since 1980 that I feel it needs to be called out. Part of me thinks that, in some diabolical irony, evangelicalism will bring out the very tribulation that it purports to be preparing for. - Mar 07, 11
The following is from a very interesting email discussion with LDS composers about funding, grants, etc. of new music:
I have to admit, this has been one of my least favorite subjects of late. I think our art form has become infected with a depressing careerism which has crowded out the things that got us into this in the first place, which I guess would be the love of sounds. Clearly the support for the arts, and all other superstructure, has been on the wane in this country steadily since 1980 and this trend shows no sign of changing. Clearly there has been a steady philistinization of our culture. There are fewer resources to go around so it is natural that the competition gets stiffer.
Moreover, the music "industry" has been in a freefall for a few years now.
Attali suggests that the economy of music-making is a harbinger of economic trends in the culture at large. Does that mean that our society is in for complete economic collapse in the future?
Well, maybe music should be modeling something better, more sustainable.
I lived in Seattle in the '90s during which time I had a chamber opera company that did some unusual and really interesting events. They were all completely funded by ticket prices except the last one. There were three composers, a writer and some singers that came together simply to create some musical works and present them to audiences. We discovered that it was quite easy to rent a small theater and to make a simple arrangement for percentage of ticket sales for each participant in the productions. We were all invested in the success of each other. We always managed, even with all the expenses, to pay everybody involved, albeit modestly.
For the last show I was involved in, we applied for and received a grant from King County, but that piece was the most difficult to produce and the most problematic (maybe partially as a result). I think it was quite good, but the funding had many strings attached and added a kind of weight to the whole thing. The previous shows were much more fun.
I went to a conference of university music professors recently where a well-known composer gave the keynote address. The gist of it was that, it doesn't matter how good your music is if you don't know how to "get it out there", or "sell it", and that this is what we should be conveying to our students. It was kind of a depressing talk. I thought, why not talk about music, or sound, or harmony, or timbre. That's what I'm interested in. If I have to spend more time thinking/talking/teaching about self-promotion than this transcendent art form, then I want out, and I don't want to recommend the activity to my students. It all has to start with the work. What I would like to call sharing of this work can only occur when there is something of value to share.
Excessive self-promotion and grantwriting can be harmful to the imagination and spirit in my experience because you are forced to focus so much on yourself. Plus you end up trying to second-guess other people, and thus begin to self-censor your work. I guess this is where I think collectives that are run by composers (like Salty Cricket, and, I think, Seattle Experimental Opera) are quite good. You minimize the red-tape and help/support/nurture other artists. It's so much better than competing, trying to beat other artists in zero-sum-gain situations. If you create a performance situation using the same level of creativity that you bring to your composing and promote fellow artists' work in the process, then you get away from the kind of self-centered thing that I think is so corrosive.
I'm not against grants or applying for them, but I think we need to get our values straight and put music-making first. If fighting tooth and nail for a few dollars and trying to beat out the other guy crowds out the time, energy, attention and joy of imagining, making and sharing sounds (not to mention family, religion and other pursuits), then maybe we need to find other ways of making music.
Choose or find some sounds to make
Find/choose a time and place to share these sounds
Find people to make and hear these sounds
Do this a lot. After doing your best, working hard and listening to inspiration, don't worry too much about:
1. If people like it
2. If you'll become rich and famous
3. If it will lead to more "opportunities"
4. If it's any good
These are all by-products of inspired, diligent and joyous work. The rewards should be in the work itself, not so much in the byproducts, because they are unpredictable.
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Scores
- All scores available at Frog Peak MusicSome at Scribd.
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Tweets
- The Angel (by Stuart Wheeler, text by Pushkin): http://t.co/1GHOdRzQJU via @YouTube
- American Exchange Hotel, Performed by Luke Williams: http://t.co/abutTvfUBO via @YouTube
- The Home of Easy Credit: http://t.co/muAfW7diF8 via @YouTube
- ‘Moments’ by Christian Asplund on #SoundCloud? https://t.co/rjsYgMrvEw
- Just uploaded Softer (2012) for piano http://t.co/PNEMRj0gxW #ScribdDocs
- Just uploaded Circuit (2011) for Percussion Soloist http://t.co/SkXk8YCz7R #ScribdDocs
- Melody: http://t.co/FQf9EOhFtx via @YouTube
- Alex Caldiero with FunCoffin: http://t.co/OhPmQ8Tvii via @YouTube
- Clappin': http://t.co/zmxU53kVox via @YouTube
- Miniature 1: http://t.co/JyqrYcHksH via @YouTube
- Send it Up: http://t.co/2HAA5ZHCVb via @YouTube
- StravinskyHone: http://t.co/MyRjimjsbF via @YouTube
- It'll All Grow Out: http://t.co/xivgKGtrsR via @YouTube
- Lalage 2 0: http://t.co/iR3YO7zYyG via @YouTube
- The Spirit is the Conscious Ear: http://t.co/WXlfWS10mf via @YouTube
- Just uploaded Ruach (for 2 flutes (doubling on piccolo and alto flute), transposed score) (2004) http://t.co/7ZCbjK1yrz #ScribdDocs
- Just uploaded Suite for Cello (2014) http://t.co/QJOn7ZLz8n #ScribdDocs
- ‘Reservation Rock (2005)’ by Christian Asplund on #SoundCloud? https://t.co/lnYNwviaX7
- Just uploaded Fla (2001) for Flute and Viola http://t.co/nmkD6jFJj5 #ScribdDocs
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- The Goat. No Weeds. (Oklahoma, May 2010):
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Status
- Listening/watching St. Matthew Passion. In the alto aria (#10) that starts Buflí und Reuí Knirscht das S¸ndenherz entzwei, Bach uses two flutes. I had always been curious at the unusual (especially for Bach) but wonderful effect of having the flutes begin in unison and then split into thirds. I finally noticed that the text says something like, guilt and pain cause my heart to split in two. Amazing.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEju8Hs4_nQ&feature=youtu.be Logan Hone and Stuart Wheeler, madmen and Robert Ballantyne Willes and Rev. Jesse Nicholas Quebbeman-Turley.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PvGbjnGFT8&feature=youtu.be Some Lalage, w the inimitable, luscious and lovely Lara Candland.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6tdlmx_GO4&list=ALBTKoXRg38BCLC3af4HZQBWAX25e3qYnM Best intro I know of. Both drum entrance and and bass entrance so viceral.
- http://kexp.org/playlist/2014/04/14/12AM/0000 Sonarchy/KEXP rebroadcast the live Lalage performance from a coupla years ago in the wee hours of Monday morn and it's available in live streat/podcast. When Sonarchy started in the 90s it was on at 11 pm on Saturday night. Then it was pushed to midnight. Then to midnight Monday morning. Ah the appetites of indy rock are insatiable. Can't spare a decent hour for creative music. That was one thing about the grunge era. The grunge musicians, and insiders were interested in the creative music scene and supported it for many reasons, not least of which that creative music is oracular, and ends up being the source for many of rock's best ideas.
- Lalage is back.
- http://bombmagazine.org/article/1000092/anthony-braxton Super inspireen.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZWmhulTiwY Makes me a bit teary. Is there something wrong with me?
- I feel very lucky to play with these gentlemen.
- https://www.facebook.com/events/524813914305379/ FunCoffin will be providing music for this event. Please join us.
- https://www.facebook.com/events/729600697073692/ Matthew Webb, Stuart Wheeler, Christopher Morrison, Dylan Findley, Steven Leon Ricks will all be participants! April 9, 7:30, Madsen Recital Hall, Free.
- Thanks to all and esp. Lara Candland who made this my coolest birthday of recollection.
- Ingrid Marie Asplund just got called to the Baltimore Maryland mission which encompasses the areas of West Virginia where she has done some wonderful activism.
- Here is another song from Sunset...
- Cecily as Karen Carpenter. She's got real drum and voice chops too.
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