#but seriously to my knowledge All That is only really articulated in the 1960s and 70s onwards with the really revolutionary clergy

[umarthiels]

surprise surprise, les mis letters has got me Thinking about Catholicism again!

[redwine-house]

Golden Years Ch.9 (Negan x Reader)

Book Club

Stuck in your room, a mysterious stranger tosses a book at you for entertainment. Your relationship with Negan strengthens when he catches you in a moment of self-consciousness. 

(Ao3) (Wattdpad)

(Masterlist)

Words: 1,893

While Negan’s idea of confining you for an indefinite amount of time was an incredibly creative and sufficient way of torture, it wasn’t a good way to curb your heroin addiction. Your adult timeout left you with nothing but an endless amount of free time to brood, and when you brooded you became anxious and your thoughts raced. You found the most effective way to deal with stress was to stick a needle in your arm and ride the heroin high.

Dr. Carson said that Negan had liked you, that he saw you as a friend, but you seriously questioned that when he took you from the hospital wing and threw you in your room while you went through withdrawal. You didn’t sleep for days and often woke up in puddles of you own vomit; you had to make sure to sleep on your side just so that you didn’t pull a Hendrix and choke to death.

The shakes had been so bad that you had wondered if you were seizing. Normally people would go through withdrawal in rehab under a doctor’s supervision, but you had been left to the wolves.

It had been a month since you had been tossed away and you were finally clean, but what was almost as suffocating as withdrawal was the crippling boredom. At the beginning of your stay, you had a whole bookshelf full of books, but you had quickly poured through them in the month and a half you had lived in the Sanctuary. Being holed up in your room gave you nothing but free time and reading was the next best escape after hard drugs. You had a television, but the movie selection at the conversary was sparse. They were big ticket items and you didn’t have the seniority to get the good ones.

There was no man eating, great white shark in your future.

“Hey, are you alive in there?”

“Yes,” you answered Simon’s mocking question. It was the one he asked every day. As if your jail time wasn’t punishment enough, the only person you were allowed to talk to was Simon, and you were sure that Negan assigned him to you on purpose.

Simon sighed. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”

With a sudden surge of anger, you jumped up and smashed your palm against your door. To your delight, you heard a shuffle – you had made him jump.

“You’re walking on thin ice, girl. I don’t know what you did, but you really pissed Negan off and I don’t think he’d care if something ill accidently befell you.” He opened the door and handed you your lunch. “Just keep an eye out.” He smirked as you cautiously took the food.

“Can I have more books?”

Simon didn’t bother to answer before he shut the door.

Defeated, you sat on your bed and stared down at your food. You had been fed the same thing since your “quarantine,” and you still weren’t sure what you were eating. It was a large loaf made of…something. You definitely knew that there was cabbage and the binding agent had to have been flour. As far as you knew, the rest was a mix of vegetables and some kind of meat.

It was disgusting, but it had the basic nutrients you needed to stay healthy. With a grimace, you began to eat. You were able to choke down a third of the loaf until you had to set it aside. It was just when you had decided that sleep would be the best way to pass the day when your door opened a second time.

You cocked your head – no one was there. You opened your mouth, about to demand an explanation when something was tossed inside. The door was slammed closed before you could even process what happened.

“What in the blue blazes?” Standing up, you went to investigate what had been hurled into your room. Your hands wrapped around the soft spine of an old, worn book. On the front was a sketch of a jungle, although the lines were faded and parts of the cover was creased. Your eyes searched for the title.

The Lord of the Flies

A smile stretched across your face. How fitting. You opened the book and found the pages to be velvety soft from use. The book had been well loved. As you began to flip through the novel, your eyes widened; in the margins of every page were dozens of notes, questions, and analytics. Snippets of the text were underlined or highlighted, while others had exclamation or question marks written above them.

Flipping to a random page, you read an annotation;

By now they reflect a modern political society

‘littluns’ rep. common men

Older boys either kind/cruel = civilization/savagery theme

You hadn’t read The Lord of the Flies since middle school, so you were excited to start the classic, especially with such articulate annotations.

Flipping to the first page, your heart fell. Everything the Saviors had was either scavenged or taken. Whoever the pseudo scholar was, he or she was probably dead.

On the top of the first page was scrawled;

Civilization v. Barbarism: The Fight of the Century!

It was a play on the title historians and sports writers had given to the boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, and it made you laugh for the first time in you didn’t know how long. You pressed the book to your chest and lay down on your bed, finally having something to look forward to.

Ever Since Negan had destroyed your doorknob, anyone could barge into your room. It was when you had flipped to the fifth chapter of your mysterious book that someone took advantage of your damaged property.

“Don’t read too much. I heard it makes you smart and I just don’t know if you can handle it.”

You let the book drop onto your face. “You’re already torturing me with solitary confinement. You don’t have to taunt me.” It was unbelievably stupid to insult the man who crushed skulls when he felt a little cranky.

“You know, I could make things a lot worse than they already are. So If I were you, I’d shut your mouth, and do what I say.”

You sat up and saw that Negan’s face was dark. His mouth was set in a firm line and his brow was creased from years of scowling. You sat up – Negan was not one to trifle with today.

He pointed Lucille at you. “You’re coming with me to the Hilltop. You’re back in, but only because the world doesn’t have free WiFi anymore and google doesn’t exist. Surprisingly, I know fuck all about harvesting opium, so you’ll answer my questions like a good girl and not shoot up the product. Do you think you can handle it?”

You nodded firmly. It was a rhetorical question and you weren’t going to poke the bear by questioning Negan’s plan.

“I just need to get dressed. It will take me five minutes.” As much as you wanted to go out in a sweater and sweatpants, the apocalypse had a very specific dress code.

When Negan didn’t move, you jabbed your finger down the hallway. “Go!”

With a suggestive smirk and a mischievous wink, Negan wordlessly slinked around the corner.

“Pig,” you muttered before stepping out of your comfy clothes. It was odd, not having to go out into the wastelands without your belt of liquor. You had been so used to fending for yourself – now you felt spoiled. This would be your first time going out since your first visit to the Hilltop.

Placing your guns in their holster and Charlie Hustle’s knife in its sheath, you were about to leave when you caught your reflection in the mirror. You stopped and slowly raised your hand to your burn; it was rough and leathery, and it disgusted you. With a small distressed cry, you grabbed your red scarf and wrapped it around your head.

“What the fuck?” Negan grimaced once you stepped out into the hallway. “Are you a 1960s housewife now?”

“Nope. Just have a good dose of low self-esteem and self-loathing,” you answered plainly, not bothering to turn as you walked by him. “Let’s go.” Unfortunately, the scarf was ripped from your head in one smooth yank. “Hey!”

“For the last goddamn time,” Negan began, twirling the scarf between his fingers, “that burn makes you look like you can kick some serious ass and it’s awesome. Covering it with this makes you look like a pussy and a jackass.” He held the cloth up and grinned. “And what do you know? Red is my color.” He tied the scarf around his neck.

It really was his color.

“They’re growing at the normal rate a papaver somniferum would,” Jesus explained as he led you and Negan to the plots. “The buds haven’t bloomed yet and it won’t happen for another 8-12 weeks.” You stopped in front of the seedlings. “As far as the heroin production goes, my knowledge ends.”

You looked to Negan. “Am I allowed to talk, or am I gonna get a kiss from Lucille?”

Negan looked to Jesus. “Did she just joke about getting bludgeoned to death or am I just having a really good dream?” He held up a finger. “No, I know it’s real because we all have our clothes on.”

Jesus tried to keep his look of disgust contained as he knelt down next to you.

“The petals will fall off about two days after they bloom,” you explained. “The seed capsule is what has the opium. We’ll harvest from that.” You straightened up. “They need another two months to grow and we still need to get the supplies for production. Have you started to get the materials you’re responsible for?”

Jesus didn’t even try to hide his look of reproach. “We’re hardly able to get you your standard supplies, much less for this…business venture.”

You shook your head. “Negan’s not going to like that.”

Jesus briefly looked over his shoulder before he leaned in. “Have you given our previous conversation any thought?”

It was your turn to look over your shoulder. Negan was happily chomping on an apple he had ripped away from an older gentlemen, the scarf you had been using to hide behind still wrapped securely around his neck.

“Yeah, I did,” you said. You looked back to Jesus and smiled softly.

“And?”

“And…fuck you, Jesus.”

You weren’t sure if you were still supposed to be confined to your room, but logic put you back on your bed. It was better safe than sorry, and you were really invested in your book and the person who had loved it.

Ralph’s participation in the hunt shows underlying bloodlust

Reenact of hunt = desire of power

Turning point

ALL are capable of savagery, no matter the strength of civil instinct or moral compass

“Fuck me,” you mumbled, setting the book down. The plot was getting all too familiar and it was becoming less of a story and more of a reflection of your life. You leaned back and closed your eyes – there was enough savagery in your day to day existence. Reading about barbaric kids was becoming too much. With a sigh, you placed the book on your nightstand and turned out the light.

[paulrennie]

What is Music?

The Wonderful Everyday…What is Music?

Music for All...

Cornelius Cardew was an English composer and marxist…the Scratch Orchestra was formed by Cardew at Morley College in London. Cardew was killed when he was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver.

The Morley group were dissatisfied with ‘established, serious music’; in other words, they were dissatisfied with the elitism of ‘serious’ music and its strong class image and with the repression of working musicians into the role of slavish hacks churning out the stock repertoire of concert hall and opera house.

The prevailing dry, limited, critical approach to music in the UK had for them killed spontaneity and simple enjoyment of music and reduced it to an academic and self-conscious ‘appreciation’ of form and technique.

In the Draft Constitution, the category of Popular Classics - where famous but now hackneyed classics were given unorthodox and irreverent interpretations - was a blow against the crippling orthodoxy of ‘musical taste’.

The attraction of a number non-reading musicians and actual non-musicians into the Orchestra through seeing the Draft Constitution was therefore welcomed. Here was a source of ideas and spontaneity less hampered by academic training and inhibitions.

Amongst the Scratch Orchestra members there was considerable support for the ideas of John Cage and Christian Wolff, etc.; that is, random music with a multiplicity of fragments without cohesion as opposed to serialism. Aleatory (chance) music seemed richer, unpredictable, free! But serialism, the tradition stemming from Schöenberg, was formal, abstract and authoritarian.

Most important was the social implication of Cage’s work — the idea that we are all musical, that anybody can play…

Cardew’s project was an attempt to articulate a music of ideas that was transcendent for both players and audience. For Cardew, this became an increasingly political project that he likened to a sort of political-consciousness-raising. In practical terms, the project was aligned with both the methodologies of skiffle and punk, but applied to the orchestral form.

I completely agree with this idea…as it developed out of the UK counter-cultural scene of the late 1960s. However, I can now understand that the high-minded intellectualism of Cardew’s efforts would have doomed it to fail…interestingly, all these ideas resurfaced in the Balearics during the 1990s and in relation to the sunshine, recreational drugs and high-energy dance scene.

I have been listening to an album of Billie Holliday remixed…(there’s a sister album of the same thing with Nina Simone). One of the songs is, I Hear Music (1940) by the US songwriter, Burton Lane, and with lyrics by Frank Loesser, for the Paramount Pictures movie, Dancing on a Dime.

Loesser is famous, these days, for writing the musical, Guys and Dolls (1950).

Here’s part of the song lyric for I Hear Music

I hear music Mighty fine music The murmur of a morning breeze up there The rattle of the milkman on the stair

Sure that’s music Mighty fine music The singing of a sparrow in the sky The perking of the coffee right near by

That’s my favorite melody You my angel, phoning me…

This was a really interesting idea for music in 1940…and is suggestive of John Cage’s musical experimentation from the 1950s and subsequently.

Since the Romantic period, composers have found inspiration in the sounds of nature. But this isn’t the same as saying that music is everywhere…In the old days, the music still had to be composed and transcribed for instruments.

Nowadays, you can record the sounds and assemble them in loops and structures that can go on, without repetition, almost for ever…everything can be sampled and re-mixed into something new…

The desire to find music, and art, in the wonderful everyday, is an important idea from design reform and the 20C avant-garde. The idea combines democratic and popular-front politics with aesthetics. Assuming that art, in all its forms, is elevating…wouldn’t be good if everyone could benefit from this moral elevation? That was an idea from Ruskin and Morris,  Brecht and Benjamin…The same idea re-surfaces, again, in the 1960s musical idealism of Cornelius Cardew  and provides the corner-stone for the transformation of culture through digital forms.

It’s amazing how this has been contested throughout…indeed, the dominant culture encourages various forms of instutionalised gate-keeping that try and keep art and the everyday in their different boxes…mostly, this is done by exclusion.

Ironically, the tendency of the avant-garde to over-intellectualise culture and turn it all into a form of capital has become one of the most effective gate-keeping mechanisms of exclusion…see, for example, Cardew writing about the tyranny of taste…or Crary on cultural capital and exclusion.

I’m not sure that the song lyric is actually about this strand of avant-garde thinking…it’s more likely about how love fills your heart with a feeling that is analogous with music…if your heart is singing, that is a kind of music too.

Actually, I don’t think this matters. The lyric is still expressing an important and sophisticated idea about the universality of music.

The late Sir George Martin understood this too…

All art aspires to the form of music; where form, content, and feeling, are each synthesised into a single coherent experience: the wonderful everyday…

Machine Noises (Kling-Klang)

There is a fabulous film by Jean Mitry called Pacific 231. It’s a film sequence of trains edited to the music of Arthur Honneger. The film is from 1949.

This film essay is in two main parts.

The introduction has scenes of make-ready with engines and rolling-stock being moved about against the background sounds of metal, steam and machine. The industrial noises of the machinery are a kind of music. There’s a wonderful sequence of images of the engine on a turntable.

The second part of the film is of the engine at speed and its journey. The train leaves from the Gare du Nord and is the northern express towards Lille. I’m guessing that, based on my knowledge of the shape of the train-shed canopy in the film.

The second part has the musical soundtrack by Honneger. Honneger’s music is an orchestral evocation of the power and speed of the train. It’s the music of industry and engineering and speed…

It turns out that Jean Mitry was one of the first people to write about film and cinema in a seriously academic way. His work covers aesthetics, psychology, semiotics and analysis. There’s a little about Mitry, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mitry

Honneger was not the only person to be thinking of the musical quality of industrial noise. The connection goes right back to the beginnings of the avant-garde and the willingness to interrogate the formal and structural qualities of art, music and literature.

The poetic experiments of the Italian Futurists kick it all off with Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1914). The experiments of concrete poetry and everything else followed from that…

It wasn’t long before the musical avant-garde adopted the Dada strategy of making art with whatever was to hand. That opened the door, so to speak, for a repertoire beyond the established instruments…

It’s amazing how difficult people find it to accept “noise,” or even silence, as music. In the end, it comes down to a kind of political tolerance.

The machine music of Johann Johannsson is amazing. It’s made up of layers of sound derived from the machine noise associated with heavy industry, along with passages of the organ music and brass band music traditionally associated with working communities. These three layers are held together by a sort of low hum of electronic sound…

It’s a kind of music that doesn’t really have a tune; but is full of feeling. It’s a big sound by Johann Johannsson.

In the UK, this approach gave us the experimental music movement of the 1960s and the “scratch orchestra.” This was a kind of musical “flash-mob.” In Germany, Kraftwerk recorded a piece of music called Kling-Klang (1972) and gave the name to their recording studio.

If you watch the Mitry film titles, you’ll see that the sound recording is by “Klang-Film.” So, “Klang” is a sound that’s loaded with meanings for the people who might recognise this term.

Last night, I was rocked to sleep by the noise of the dishwasher cycle…It was pretty amazing listening, in the dark, to the repetition of percussive noises and watery gargles…

I began to imagine a process of sampling those machine noises, synthesising the sounds and making loops…to create a Dishwasher Cycle of electronic machine noises. Sort of Johann Johannsson, in the kitchen.

I could begin to do that with my macbook and garageband software…I just wouldn’t be able to do it very well.

Remember that what you have in the machine changes the sounds it makes too, and so no two loads play the same. There’s plenty of variety in this plan and much scope for happy accidents.

Then I wondered why Kraftwerk hadn’t done this in the 1970s…That was easy, no one had dishwashers back then. Not in Germany anyway. And hardly anyone had computers or synthesisers or anything.

We did have cars though, and Kraftwerk made Autobahn (1974).

But why stop at dishwashers? Why not go the whole hog and include fridges and microwaves and whatever…it could be the internet of things, in song.

I also designed the LP sleeve in my head. If I had ever made a record, I would have loved being able to have a hand-in the sleeve design.

So, front has a lovely even stove enamelled finish like you get on high-end household machines. The back cover has a picture of fly-tipped white goods by the roadside…

This was a great idea in the middle of the night…but I also realised that this was a project that needed doing 40 years ago. Against the prevailing ethos of punk, back then, this project might have seemed a bit up-its-own-orifice.

Actually, the Art of Noise did do something a bit similar…

And it all merged into the eclectic and hybrid scene that we have now.

NB I should point out that I have absolutely no practical musical skill and could never have realised this project, then or now. The bits of noise would still have to be made into something bigger…

There is a picture by Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic artist…it’s called The Sea of Ice, and dates from the 1820s. It shows the landscape ripped apart and splintered by the forces of nature…it must have seemed like a picture of chaos…and would have been understood, by people looking at it, as both beautiful and terrifying, and all at the same time.

This sense of a terrible beauty is what Edmund Burke was thinking of when he described the sublime as one of the founding sensibilities of the Romantic movement. Burke probably didn’t know about the frozen wastes…but he new about the alpine massif and the ocean.

You get the same terrible beauty from these black-and-white images from the expeditions to the Arctic and the Antarctic. Captain Scott’s photographer was Herbert Ponting…a sort of English proto Dziga-Vertov.

The frozen wastes were so vast that almost all the explorers made use if the latest tachnologies - balloons, airships, and motor-powered tracked vehicles. Keeping the machines going was a big challenge…and if they stopped, you died.

I was thrilled to find a piece of music by Thomas Koner, called Daikan. Apparently, it’s from a genre called ambient drone…it’s music expressed as an abstract kind of machine noise or tone.

That’s a different kind of terrible beauty…

Music All Around…

Charles Ives (1874-1954) was a pioneer American modernist in orchestral music, at a time when US musical culture was still pretty under-developed.

America has always done popular music really well…but it took a long time for its serious orchestral music to become something that could stand alongside the German, French, and Italian, traditions in Europe.

The Juilliard School, America’s first conservatory school, was only established in 1905! The school was first set up as the Institute of Musical Art, before being endowed by Augustus Juilliard, and others, during the 1920s.

Ives was the son of a military band instructor and he spent much of his childhood watching parades and listening to marching bands. That’s not so bad. Don’t forget that American marching bands have tunes by JP Souza (1854-1932), the March King.

Ives was not really a professional composer. He worked as an insurance saleman…and was quite successful. Academic research has revealed that Ives invented himself a little…

Anyone who has watched a marching band will understand that, as the band marches up-and-down, it has to turn on itself…that means that, briefly, there is music coming from two directions, at least…that’s a new and exciting noise.

Listen to

Country Band March (c1907?)

and also, the four part

New England Holidays (1919)

This fragmentation is the same kind if insight as cubism and as understanding that the straight-on view of the the theatre stage is a bit limited…we don’t hear the world symphonically, we here it as fragments that we assemble into a coherent gestalt.

Ives was one of the first people to try and describe this fragmented perception of life, and sound, through music. You get the same thing in the European later Romantics, especially Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)…but the Europeans tended to do it with bits of folk song and traditional tunes.

I was reminded of this as I found a contemporary interpretation and recording of Luigi Boccherini‘s (1743-1805), Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid from 1780.

In its original form, the music is quite formal and stately…it is music to promenade by…In Luciano Berio’s new interpretation, the street becomes much more dynamic and messy…that’s great; with bits of tune coming from everywhere.

The original Boccherini is familiar from the film version of Master and Commander (2003). I have been thinking about this as I listen to Gavin Bryars, a contemporary British composer who uses sampled fragments…hip hop, anyone?

The contemporary American composer, John Adams, has revisited Charles Ives in the autobiographical, My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003). Here are the notes on this piece from the John Admas, Earbox, site…

The march tempo announces itself and the familiar cadences kick in. Not to worry about the snatches of melody. They are as fictive as the title itself. As with the gaudy “ur-melody” in Grand Pianola Music, you’re certain you’ve heard this music before, but you are damned if you can identify it. Only a smirk from trumpets playing “Reveille” and, in the coda, a hint of Ives’s beloved “Nearer My God to Thee” are the genuine article.

I just discovered the fact, from Alex Ross, that the Hollywood film music composer, Lalo Schifrin (Bullitt ,1968, for example) studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen! I love those sorts of connections…

People listen to incredibly complex and beautiful music in the context of film; but they don’t go to the concert hall (that much)…it’s all just music for advertising…

Unless you are familiar with modern British orchestral music, you probably won’t have heard of the British composer, and player Gavin Bryars.

Bryars was part of the avant-garde musical scene that more-or-less invented ambient. In the context of Britain, the 1960s counter-culture was formed from a lifestyle of youthful fashion and music. It was much less about politics than, say, the counterculture of the US, or France, or Italy.

Back in the day, there was no extended period between childhood and adulthood. I recall that, at school, most people followed their father’s careers and went straight into the world of work.

The post-WW2 expansion of higher education provided a space, for the first time, where it was possible to become something different…The universities and art-schools of Britain became a sort of test-bed for change.

In the context of the social-scientific methodology of the counter-culture, musicians began to question the orthodox understanding of musical form and aesthetics. By asking, for example, whether music must always have a tune? And what exactly is quality in musical playing, and how might this institutionalised consideration discriminate against access to the pleasures of music?

Luckily, the answer to these questions was suggested by new kinds of music…based on recorded industrial noise, repeated loops, and by the natural playing of untutored amateur musicians. The apotheosis of this experimentation was provided by the art-school pop of Roxy Music and, subsequently, by the Punk movement…

Bryars was a member of the Portsmouth Sinfonia - a Scratch Orchestra, derived from the ideas of Cornelius Cardew and formed from untutored musicians. The Sinfonia famously played the Royal Festival hall in 1974. Bryars, an accomplished double-basist was obliged by house-rules to play another instrument…Brian Eno (Roxy Music) was also a member.

Ambient music emerged from attempts to disrupt the cultural norms generally associated with musical performance, whether of orchestral, jazz or pop genres…typically ambient experiments involved looping sounds into structures that transcended the forms of established orchestral norms.

More recently, Jem Finer (Pogues) has created an algorithmic looping musical piece, Longplayer, that won’t repeat itself in 1000 years…Since nearly all musical forms are based on a structure of repetition; that’s pretty disruptive!

Typically, this kind of music has been dismissed as prosaic, and described as muzak…for lifts, and airports, and shopping malls. Brian Eno’s Ambient series, launched in the late 1970s, ironised this critical position. In the end, electronic ambient became part of the pop mainstream during the 1990s by providing a form of recovery from high-energy and drug-fuelled rave culture…

Gavin Bryars has been part of this story since the late 1960s. 

The Ox on the Roof, or Le Boeuf sur le Toit, is a famous Parisian brasserie and jazz club founded in the 1920s. The restaurant was popular with the modern artists (dada and surrealists especially) and jazz musicians of the time…famously, a painting by Francis Picabia (now in the Beaubourg) used to hang above the bar of the restaurant…

The restaurant, opened during 1921, was named after the surrealist ballet by Darius Milhaud and Jean Cocteau (1920). Raoul Dufy designed the sets and costumes for the show…

Le Boeuf sur le Toit is second only to Stravinsky‘s, Rite of Spring (1913) in significance.

Jean Cocteau held court at the restaurant for many years.

Milhaud was originally inspired by the popular street music of Brazil…where he heard a traditional song about the ox on the roof…the full story of Milhaud’s discovery of Brazilian street rhythms has been told by Daniella Thompson.

Milhaud is a crucial figure in the history of modern music. At the beginning of WW2 he moved to America, where he took an academic position at Mills College in Oakland, Ca. Over the years Milhaud helped many young muscians and composers. The list includes Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but also Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach.

The French were quick to acknowledge American jazz as an important new form of musical expression for the 20C. Le Boeuf sur le Toit became a famous venue for visiting American musicians. The house band at Le Boeuf was led, from the front, by the piano duetists, Clement Doucet and Jean Wiener.

Doucet is famous, these days for having played for Edith Piaf and for having composed, Chopinata (1924). This is a jazzy interpretation of some piano themes from Chopin. Interestingly, I believe that the original was composed so as to be played on a pianola…and is an early example of machine-music.

Milhaud was a member of the musical group, Les Six…who had direct connections to Piucasso and Miro etc…so full circle again.

Minimalism (Repeat)

Charles Hazelwood is presenting a double-header about US Minimalism in music on BBC4TV.

We watched the first episode yesterday evening, and it was terrific. Hazelwood is looking at four composers, and contrasting the west-coat and New York versions of minimalism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hazelwood considers that these American composers; Riley, Lamonte Yoing, Reich, and Glass, provide the platform for the elaboration of 21C orchestral music. Part of this is the implied demise of the European tradition…that’s probably a tad over-stated, but never mind about that.

In California, the form emerged from the avant-garde and experimental, San Fransisco Tape Music Center…and from the first performance of Terry Riley’s, In C (1964). La Monte Young was the other major figure presented from the west-coast. From the first, technology has been instrumental in the deveopment of the form through repetitions and loops.

As always, the cultural geography of California played a crucial part in how the form evolved on the west-coast. Firstly, the Californians look across the Pacific and were open to the unfamiliar forms of Asian music, especially when linked to the transcendental potential of meditative repetitions…The link with emotional values, through transcendentalism, was important in keeping the avant-gardist forms of the music accessible…and in cementing the status of California as a kind of large-form utopian experiment.

Riley’s In C, is constructed from a selection of small parts played in sequence. The music is effectively made by the players and reject the usual top-down imposition of order upon the work. In practice, every performance of the work is completely original. The exact duration of the work is defined by the number of players and the process…

Riley’s work, is often performed in the US by school bands, and can seem a little unconvincing…my preferred version is by Africa Express, and is available on youtube…and reviewed, below (from Pitchfork)

The basic structure of In C is simple: Someone plays a simple, droning pulse on the note C, usually on a piano or marimba, and the other performers, whose number and instrumentation Riley did not specify, have 53 melodic phrases from which to choose. The musicians select the phrases they want to play and decide how long to play them. The effect is that the phrases overlap in unpredictable ways, creating shifts in harmony, evolving polyrhythms, tonal and timbral changes and the sense that nothing is constant, even though the same note repeats insistently under the whole performance at the exact same tempo.

There are dozens of recordings, starting with Riley’s own from 1968. Some are kinetic and exciting, others never seem to come together, but the piece is so dramatically different from performance to performance that it never grows old. Damon Albarn’s Africa Express project, which over the years has fostered collaborations between a huge number of Western and West African musicians puts a decidedly unique spin on In C. With an ensemble of 17 musicians—including Albarn on melodica, Brian Eno, Bijou and Olugbenga on vocals, Jeff Wootton and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner on guitar, Cheick Diallo on flute, Badou Mbaye, Alou Coulibaly and Mouse on Mars’ Andi Toma on percussion, Modibo Diawara and Defily Sako on kora, Guindo Sala on imzad, Kalifa Koné and Mémé Koné on balafon, Adama Koita on kamel n’goni, and André de Ridder on several instruments and conducting—they have an earthy collective sound, and their dynamic interplay is quite distinct from any other version of In C.

For one thing, the non-tonal percussion included in the ensemble layers a dance vibe under the piece’s usual trance vibe. Diallo’s flute in particular is so dissimilar from every other sound on the recording that he stands out and shifts the emphasis briefly to melody, while the three voices lend it an ethereal quality. The mellow tone of the koras, kalimbas, and balafons, meanwhile, have a strange effect during the period cool downs over the course of the piece; they lend it an odd, cool darkness that I usually don’t hear in In C. These passages lend it a suite-like feel where the piece most often is structured as a giant crescendo followed by a long diminuendo. The most bold decision here comes just past the halfway mark, though, when the ensemble goes nearly silent, including the pulse, leaving just guitars and koras playing the slowest melodic phrases in a strange kind of canon, and then we’re treated to a brief spoken word passage (not in English) before the larger ensemble dives back in with even more rhythmic insistence than before.

This willingness to play with the form and shape of an iconic piece of music is one of the things that most fully sets this recording of In C apart from most others. It’s unexpected and enlivens the music just as much as the djembe that lends the evolving beat its weight. The overall form of the piece may be more premeditated than Riley originally intended, rather than the independently reached and unforeshadowed consensus of a large group of musicians, but this mostly serves to make it an engaging performance and worthy interpretation of a piece of music that’s so eternal it could literally be played eternally if someone was able to get musicians to keep showing up to play it. Africa Express keeps it to a bite-sized 41 minutes, and every one of them includes something to savor.

This structural process of elaborating the work was a cross-over from fine-art’s formal experiments of the early 1960s…that sought to combine process and practice; into praxis.

John Cage, Charles Ives and John Adams were all mentioned as parts of the bigger story…as was the link to more recent pop music and the work of Brian Eno, Mike Oldfield, and Portishead…

The programme about minimalism was followed by an equally interesting documentary about British synth pop from the 1970s. Basically, all these ideas came together in Ibiza 30 years later…and played very loud!

The history of the musical avant-garde in the 20C has been written by British composer, Michael Nyman. You can find the text, online, as a pdf.