Re: [-empyre-] [extreme] voice root of 12-tone scale?

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Tobias, this sounds really exciting - a few things.

First, my roots - if there are any at all - lie in the new music jazz -
which bordered on noise music - of the 60s - Albert Ayler, Guiseppi Logan,
Sunny Murray, etc. etc. - which - like Cecil Taylor - emphasizes the play/
dance of the fingers - the imminence of sonic labor - exhaltation of the
body - etc. I had 2 lps released (not very good) with ESP which recorded a
lot of these people.

The instrument was/is an extention of the body. In 1967 or so a friend of
mine and myself built a large analog synthesize (after working with the
Moog) - later I got tired of the reliance on electricity, etc., and went
to a mix of everything where I am now.

I determined literally to play as fast as possible, past the 22 note per
second 'theoretical' limit mentioned in the books on musical acoustic.

At that speed, all sorts of things happen as you breath might give out too
fast and you find - just as in net searching - that you're shape-riding,
hoping for the best. And to crash any overly familiar riffs.

And at that speed, individual notes disappear as well.

The most intense effort in this direction is in dance; I've been working
on and off for years with Foofwa d'Imobilite, who was lead dancer with
Merce Cunningham, and we discuss labor constantly. We worked on a 'dance'
in which he moves/I work electric guitar - both as furiously as possible,
after a warmup. The longest we've been able to go is 10 minutes 20
seconds.

The labor in dance is excruciating, and most dancers give out after a
decade or so. There are all sorts of neurotic issues that appear, since a
dancer is almost always doomed.

I do laptop performance too by the way with video images/sound/real-time
text typing and processing - but the machine really does the work from
configurations.

If the body is central to the dance, to the rave, to music - only if, and
it's debatable - what role does it play in microsound?

As far as Led Zep Plant goes - yes and no. It's too easy to read
instrument as phallus. There are all sorts of processes, analytical,
psychological, physical, psychoanalytical, etc., going on - the phallic
aspects I think are the least important, although they sell and stabilize
a group with its public.

What might be taken up, the relation of black music to the body, say,
through the writings of Amiri Baraka (as Leroi Jones in his Applecores
series in Downbeat) or Taylor - at least in this country. They were
revelations, hot compared say to the old Hodier etc. analysis of jazz and
the European analytical tradition.

Hope this makes sense; I'm never sure - Alan

http://www.asondheim.org/ http://www.asondheim.org/portal/
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