#Cliff Crego

[cliffcrego]

RECORDED THIS SUMMER, at a beautiful alpine lake in the North WALLOWAS

[artcompilations]

Das Lied des Blinden (The Blind Man’s Song) - Rainer Maria Rilke tr. Cliff Crego

Don’t Tell Anyone - Tony Hoagland

Martha Gellhorn’s letters

Red Riding Hood - Anne Sexton

Lady Oracle - Margaret Atwood 

Transcripts and original of Das Lied des Blinden below the cut. 

[1] Das Lied des Blinden:

In mir ist ein endloses Schrein, und ich weiss nicht, schreit mir mein Herz oder meine Gedärme.

In me is an endless scream,  and I can’t say, is it my  heart that screams or my bowels. 

[2] For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming  as they go through life, silently, 

[3] Quoting Nadezhda Mandelstam, who said that if there is nothing else to do one must scream, Martha wrote: ‘I long to scream. But where? But how? I am screaming all the time inside me and it will end by giving me severe stomach pains as it already gives me insomnia. 

[4] Meanwhile in my head I am undergoing open heart surgery. 

[5] But it always appealed to me: to be able to stand up there in front of everyone and shriek as loud as you could, about hatred and love and rage and despair, scream at the top of your lungs and have it come out music. That would be something.  

[cliffcrego]

GET POSTER PRINT OF text & Leopard Frog picturepoems.zenfolio.com/img/s/v-10/p…801997-4.jpg

As I’m sure regular listeners are aware, I use a number of teaching aphorisms or sutras that work in a rhetorical way to stop thought and our normal, habitual way of thinking about ourselves and the world dead in its tracks.

They are a bit confusing at first, but only for the first few years.

In music I say things like, “Pitch doesn’t exist,” with the implication that what DOES exist is a living movement of energy, of sound, which is beyond description.

I also say, “There is no conflict in nature.” Here, the underlying meaning is that life is a movement of relationship, and that thought unaware of itself has the unique distinction of generating endless war with itself and everything around it. It is the defining feature of our species, I think. The idea is that, through awareness, this destructive nature of thought is suspended. Perhaps even totally dissipated. This is when real relationship, real dialogue, real music or poetry begins.

In this spirit, this new DRSGON CURVE ENSEMBLE piece—always based on some sort of fractal mathematics (here the CANTOR SET); always the same 12 instruments: 2 grandpianos, 2 piccolos, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, and 2 tubas—showcases one of my more hopelessly difficult sayings, about the difference between CONTROL and LIMIT. But the difference becomes self-evident once we drop legacy and are welling to question everything, especially organized religion (ie., any religion that has a name, including not just Christianity, but also Buddhism.)

To get yourself started on this fascinating journey, just try thinking back when you were a child, and the difference of discipline being forced upon you—i.e.,control— and the movement of the energy we call insight or play which comes always from within. The violence of control arises evidently from FALSE DUALITY, the skier that forces the mere IDEA of a beautiful turn (like me) so there is always a CONTROLLER—God—and the CONTROLLED—us poor sinners who are about to fall. Or the pianist that plays through his or her eyes, and not via an inner vision of the sound. Or merely projecting the idea of PEACE (as all religions do), instead of the vastly more difficult timeless daily practice of NONVIOLENCE.

[cliffcrego]

GET POSTER PRINT OF text & Leopard Frog picturepoems.zenfolio.com/img/s/v-10/p…801997-4.jpg

As I’m sure regular listeners are aware, I use a number of teaching aphorisms or sutras that work in a rhetorical way to stop thought and our normal, habitual way of thinking about ourselves and the world dead in its tracks.

They are a bit confusing at first, but only for the first few years.

In music I say things like, “Pitch doesn’t exist,” with the implication that what DOES exist is a living movement of energy, of sound, which is beyond description.

I also say, “There is no conflict in nature.” Here, the underlying meaning is that life is a movement of relationship, and that thought unaware of itself has the unique distinction of generating endless war with itself and everything around it. It is the defining feature of our species, I think. The idea is that, through awareness, this destructive nature of thought is suspended. Perhaps even totally dissipated. This is when real relationship, real dialogue, real music or poetry begins.

In this spirit, this new DRSGON CURVE ENSEMBLE piece—always based on some sort of fractal mathematics (here the CANTOR SET); always the same 12 instruments: 2 grandpianos, 2 piccolos, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, and 2 tubas—showcases one of my more hopelessly difficult sayings, about the difference between CONTROL and LIMIT. But the difference becomes self-evident once we drop legacy and are welling to question everything, especially organized religion (ie., any religion that has a name, including not just Christianity, but also Buddhism.)

To get yourself started on this fascinating journey, just try thinking back when you were a child, and the difference of discipline being forced upon you—i.e.,control— and the movement of the energy we call insight or play which comes always from within. The violence of control arises evidently from FALSE DUALITY, the skier that forces the mere IDEA of a beautiful turn (like me) so there is always a CONTROLLER—God—and the CONTROLLED—us poor sinners who are about to fall. Or the pianist that plays through his or her eyes, and not via an inner vision of the sound. Or merely projecting the idea of PEACE (as all religions do), instead of the vastly more difficult timeless daily practice of NONVIOLENCE.

[cliffcrego]

Nonviolence. Metaphysics. Dialogue. Mathematics. Physics. Time. Space. Krishnamuti. Dialogue. Revolution. Education. Relationship.

[cliffcrego]

THINK OF A RIVER is through-composed set of 11 soundpoems, all but one of which is from 2018. There are about eight or nine different species of Poetry & Music, all of which emerge out of a concern for the confluence of movement, energy, and meaning, but also the music's resonance with the repertoire metaphysical urgencies of the present moment.

[cliffcrego]

A bright, unique ensemble sound, based on short metaphysical texts & the new spirit of fractal mathematics...

[cliffcrego]

IMAGE: The spiraling wood of a Whitebark pine snag, Eagle Cap Wilderness, OREGON. This tree was very likely already dead before Lewis & Clark passed by in 1805/06 not far north of here. Whitebarks, which can reach a thousand or more years of age, live in a much slower timespace, much like the musical movement of the piece featured here, THE SCOURGE OF DISINFORMATION.

The avian soloist which begins the piece is the Lark Sparrow(Chondestes grammacus). I call them the “One Man Band” of the sagebrush steppe because of the marvelously rich complexity of their music. Lark Sparrows are the less visible companion of the Western Meadowlark. They are a true joy of high country buckwheat biscuitroot desert spring. No disinformation here!

(Here's another LARK SPARROW field recording made around Summer Solstice in the South WALLOWAS: Cliff-crego – Zoom0114_mono-m4a

The YIDAKI (also called sometimes a DIDG or DIDGERIDOO or MAGO) ground is played by Australian new music trombone virtuoso, Simone de HAAN.

A KEY FEATURE of my NEW MUSIC, POETRY & DANCE PROJECT The Circle in the Square www.cs-music.com is its new philosophy of living sound. SEE soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sets/the-circle-in-the-square-a-new This is in an interesting way connected to THE SCOURGE OF DISINFORMATION.

The piece is dedicated to David JENSEN--our finest photographer in OREGON www.djensenphotography.com/ -- and his Australian/American wife, Cathy PATTERSON. Cathy is connected to this piece by way of a beautiful letter she sent to my Office a while back about TUNINGS in Western Music, especially about ideas around the meaning of lower standard reference frequencies like A 432 instead the currently dominant A 440.

Instead of talking about this here, I thought it might be better to demonstrate a much wider circle of of thinking about sound as flowing movement which features a slow turning from SIMPLE to COMPLEX and back, with sounds within sounds (some based on A 432, some based on Equal Temperament 12th root of 2 A 440, some Phythagorean and following the natural whole numbers of freely vibrating columns of air....). These all, it seems to me, can happily co-exist and both balance and complement each other.

Perhaps this is true even for our Lark Sparrow, a far better musician than any of us, I think, might agree!

[cliffcrego]

RECORDED at St.PAULS CHURCH, FREO, WA...with special heartfelt thanks...PHOTO, Simone de HAAN

[cliffcrego]

IMAGE: Whitebark pine snag, Eagle Cap Wilderness, OREGON.

The avian soloist featured here is the Lark Sparrow--I call him the “One Man Band” because of marvelously rich complexity of its music--the less visible companion of the Western Meadowlark of the OREGON sagebrush steppe.

The Yakida ground is played by Australian new music trombone virtuoso, Simone de HAAN.

[cliffcrego]

IMAGE: A V-2, designed by Wernher von BRAUN, test launch, Peenemünde, GERMANY III.2.1942 "V-2 rocket launching sites were set up by the Germans around The Hague in the Netherlands on the 6th of September 1944. The first was launched from here against London on 8 September 1944, and took an estimated 5 minutes to fly the 300 km from the Hague...[...] Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the V-2 rocket factory at Peenemünde, endorsed this idea [of slave labor] in April 1943 when a labor shortage developed. More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon." [SOURCE: Wikipedia]

FROM THE SOUNDPOEM'S webpage: "And yet, we remain in denial, and in some ways, we as of 2016 are lurching so violently backwards. That is why I feature here the long-line sonnet, BUNKERS ON THE BEACH. These bunkers are the insain artifacts of Hitler's Atlantikwall / Atlantic Wall, thousands of kilometers long, built with slave labor, and made of reinforced concrete so thick (<=3m), they in many places cannot be gotten rid of.

I have a strong emotional, visceral, connection to all this.

As a young composer/conductor, I used to bike on weekends to the spectacular Dutch coast from Amsterdam. I would see these to an American so surreal bunkers littered, as it were, like helter-skelter playthings in the charmin surrounding dunes. So, with time, I learned the history of the "Bunker Builders," Dutch who collaborated all-too-eagerly with the NAZIS.

I have also rehearsed frequently right next door to the famous Anne Frank House on the Prinzengracht in AMSTERDAM. I know the same sound of the C MAJOR bells of the Westerkerk Anne writes about so beautifully in her now much-loved diary.

And I have known intimately family members of the notorious "Brown Shirts," local Dutch Fascists who handed over--with only days left in the war--Anne and the entire FRANK family to the GERMAN authorities.

Some poems, it is true, take a long time to gestate. This one did. Please forgive the Dutch and German phrases, like "If you couldn't pronounce, "Scheveningen," you were not/ One of them." (Scheveningen, a seaside tourist town very close to where the V-2's were launched, was the Dutch word used to test German infiltrators by the Dutch underground. If they were indeed German, they could not pronounce it properly and were shot on the spot.) These polyglot words HAD to be there somehow. For as angels know, living sound--the sound of these words still fully resonant with the unspeakable terror of the time--is much more than merely a mechanical movement of air.

Finally, the poem is dedicated also to the great German-French resistance fighter, writer, diplomat, and extraordinary performer of poetry--one of the finest perhaps of all time, Stéphane HESSEL (1917-2013). The reference in the poem is from his remarkable and wonderful, Indignez-vous! / TIME FOR OUTRAGE!

NOTE: #KlimaStreik & #Klimaatmars protesters only have to say this when asked how they will realize their dreams: We only need a massive "and the plowshares are beat into swords," taking this misguided energy of total war, of death and destruction, and turning it simply to follow the sun.

BUNKERS ON THE BEACH—a long-line sonnet, for Stéphane HESSEL, in memory of Anne FRANK

If you couldn't pronounce, "Scheveningen," you were not One of them. Resistance? "Resistance is Creativity; Creativity, Resistance." True, it was far easier to surrender, to learn the fascist salute, be a Bunker Builder in the driftsands of Total War....

THE TEXT is at: picture-poems.com/photoweek/from_l…glacier)_bw.html

[cliffcrego]

After a six-week pilgrimage by bike & foot in OWYHEE COUNTRY, this piece brings together a confluence of feelings, views, and visions, visions of a new, simpler, and more pure relationship with the land as sacred space.

IMAGE: THE OWYHEE DAM, great sin against Nature, was completed in 1932; It was a dress-rehearsal for the HOVER DAM. It was also an upbeat to the great acceleration of everything, especially the irre-philosophy of CONTROL, and especially especially, the control of the waters of the world.

[cliffcrego]

The four metaphysical miniatures featured here are: (1) NOTHING; (2) VIVA LA WEB; (3) WEALTH; (4) RELIGION. The basic raw sound is generated with four different iterations of the DRAGON FRACTAL, and then shaped to fit and resonate with the texts, and the two grandpianos and eight brass players.

Using the descriptive language of my new music, poetry & dance performance project, THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE, the primary complementarities features are: (1) DENSITY, high to low & back; (2)SIMPLE / COMPLEX; (3)SMOOTH / ROUGH; (4) SYNCH / ASYNCH.

SEE a collection of sound essays on UNDERSTANDING THE SHAPE OF CHANGE at: soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sets/the-circle-in-the-square-a-new

[cliffcrego]

PART I

(1) IN HOC SIGNO VINCES / IN THIS SIGN YOU CONQUER “Secular Christian” #nonviolence #timesup #philosophy (2) BEWARE & CAUGHT IN THOUGHT, featuring the percussive sound of a campside Western Yellow-throated Sapsucker (3) SUNSHINE & KITTENS, Simone de HAAN, trombone #neveragain (4) LET’S GO CAMPING, a prosepoem, with Simone de HAAN, trombone (5) TRINITY, a soundpoem, featuring John DONNE “Batter my heart three-person'd God....” Where I place my Golden Spike, marking the catastrophic first nuclear test VII.15.1945 and the beginning of the #ANTHROPOCENE (6) BEGGING BOWL, a soundpoem on the bright & dark sides of #Art & #Science (7) ICE MOUNTAIN, a sketch, for David LANDRUM...center of the double-CD collection of pieces, and the only one "muted," or without words, without text

PART II

(8) CONIFER WEATHER, a love poem (9) COMPUTERS UP / COMPUTERS DOWN, a two-part meditation, featuring the famous #RecamanSequence...used in the first half — the BRIGHT half — to generate a playful LEFT / RIGHT grandpiano duo. [Special thanks to #NUMBERPHILE...] (10) John CAGE: 10 Rules for Students & Teachers, featuring prepared trombone (de HAAN) & prepared piano (CREGO) (11) SEARCH #GOOGLE, a soundpoem, featuring Blackcap Chickadees & Simone de HAAN, trombone #bigdata #ethics (12) SINE SOLE SILEO / WITHOUT SUN I AM SILENT, a soundpoem manifesto, for Patrick & Mindy HUND #ClimateCrisis (13) THE WAY OF NONVIOLENCE, a roadside meditation, featuring “When I survey the wondrous cross...” #MLK #Gandhi #THOREAU (14) NOW I KNOW, a "true-story" soundpoem, recorded on the spot, in the rain (15) THE SOUND OF DISAPPEARING GLACIERS, with Simone de HAAN, trombone #climate

CODA...

(16) FALL OF THE DICE, on the loss of Democracy (17) ETERNALLY FREE, a love song

ALL TRACKS composed, recorded & produced -- everything #SUN2SOUND -- in or around the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Northeast OREGON. Simone de HAAN recorded & produced his tacks in FREO, AUSTRALIA. Special thanks to St. Paul’s Church for allowing us to record in their wonderful space.

[cliffcrego]

The four metaphysical miniatures featured here are: (1) NOTHING; (2) VIVA LA WEB; (3) WEALTH; (4) RELIGION. The basic raw sound is generated with four different iterations of the DRAGON FRACTAL, and then shaped to fit and resonate with the texts, and the two grandpianos and eight brass players.

Using the descriptive language of my new music, poetry & dance performance project, THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE, the primary complementarities features are: (1) DENSITY, high to low & back; (2)SIMPLE / COMPLEX; (3)SMOOTH / ROUGH; (4) SYNCH / ASYNCH.

SEE a collection of sound essays on UNDERSTANDING THE SHAPE OF CHANGE at: soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sets/the-circle-in-the-square-a-new

[cliffcrego]

This is the 1st movement of a larger piece for my electronic, hand-played, e-percussion orchestra. The text of the poem is below, in English, together with the German original.

RILKE & MUSIC? I should say here, that I very much dislike hearing the amazingly sonorous, resonant verse of Rilke set to music. [I get requests all the time for my English translations, and I always, in a hopefully gentle way, try to discourage people.] This is because the music is already very powerfully THERE, in the music of the poem itself. So the original natural music of the poem is what is lost once the music is added. With this soundpoem cycle, however, I'm trying something else. I do the poems as I hear them as a poem, not as song, and then, I've composed a space--a kind of landscape, really--around them. This seems to complement the movement of meaning of the poems that leaves the spirit of the urtext intact.

Title Page

It's easy for the rich and fortunate to be silent, nobody wants to know who they are. That is why the destitute must show themselves, must say: I am blind, or: that is what I'm about to become, or: it's not going very well with me here on Earth, or: I have a sick child, or: this is where I'm kind of all stuck together . . .

And perhaps even that is not enough.

Despite everything, as if they were things, people walk right by, and so they must sing.

And one hears good music there.

Truly, people are strange; They'd rather hear castrati in boys' choirs.

But God himself comes and remains a long time when these disfigured ones begin to disturb him.

Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. CLIFF CREGO)

Titelblatt

Die Reichen und Glücklichen haben gut schweigen, niemand will wissen, was sie sind. Aber die Dürftigen müßen sich zeigen, müßen sagen: ich bin blind, oder: ich bin im Begriff es zu werden oder: es geht mir nicht gut auf Erden, oder: ich habe ein krankes Kind, oder: da bin ich zusammengefügt . . .

Und vielleicht, daß das gar nicht genügt.

Und weil alle sonst, wie an Dingen, an ihen vorbeigehen, müßen sie singen.

Und da hört man noch guten Gesang.

Freilich die Menchen sind seltsam; sie hören lieber Kastraten in Knabenchören.

Aber Gott selber kommt und bleibt lang, wenn ihn diese Beschnittenen stören.

DOWNLOAD: #FreeFriday RILKE IN THE WALLOWAS 80 new tr. & 120 photos, by CLIFF CREGO pdf 212 p/ 208 Mb bit.ly/mA3Ly7