[-empyre-] Music: temporal structures vs. signs, traces, emanations
Steve Potter
estevepotter at gmail.com
Wed Oct 27 23:19:03 EST 2010
0'00" IF I May Demonstrate (sort of)...
SECTION 1 (closed piano lid):
fingers at full speed on lid,
nearly silent,
10" synchronized with speaker’s words (words not included here)
20"
30"
40"
50"
1'00" open lid
"The Glory of Song"-
Stevie Wonder,
‘Wandering Around for No Real Reason’,
10" Binchois, Mozart
20"
30"
40"
"Birth of the Muses"
50" Polyhymnia…
Urania… etc.
2'00" Does history move in a line? Does it move circularly?
Does it move
both circularly and linearly,
either in a spiral
10" or in some other such way?
Does it leap around quantumly?
No.
20"
30" [I apologize in advance that this posting is long. 16 minutes
long. Of course it may be ignored or skimmed. It will not be
offended if it is ignored or skimmed. It is easy to skim blank
space. Or is it impossible? Anyway, I do hope not to take
your time without giving you something in return. I will try
40" my best. I hope it is good enough.]
New technology often bores me, but I often try to pretend it doesn’t,
in order not to offend my friends. Some new technology appalls me…
50" well, maybe that’s incorrect – is the nuclear bomb still new? I dunno.
65 years-old is new in some contexts. It depends on your frame of
reference. (Not everything depends on your frame of reference.)
[pause] “The piano is an old instrument.” …
3'00" If the piano is an old instrument, so what?
“The piano is a bourgeois instrument.”
Ah, that’s more interesting. Computers do not tend to be as
interesting on concert stages as a piano.
10" Except when they malfunction, which is sometimes interesting.
But they cannot even be relied upon to be interesting when they
malfunction. Why is that? Can one write an algorithm that
could answer this question? Of course.
20"
30"
40"
50" SECTION 2: BIRTHS
TOPIC 1. When the only comfortable reaction is to mock.
TOPIC 2. Two clusters of associations with technology: 1)
boring, work, oppressive, obligations; 2) violent, war,
weapons, Nagasaki, forgetfulness
4'00" [aside: “Denmark, peanuts, Manson… It All Connects!”]
TOPIC 3. At the Making Sense Colloquium, Kélina Gotman
and I presented a piece of bourgeois art involving piano and
voice. True or false? (N.B. This question may be ignored.)
P.S. “I don’t know if it was actually a colloquium, or if anything
10" was made, or if there was any sense.” – Kevin Smithenglish
P.P.S. I thought the colloquium was going to be a response
to Talking Heads album ‘Stop Making Sense’.
P.S.S.P.P.S. No, I’m not serious. And Kevin Smithenglish is
20" not a real person. At least not that I know of.
[p, crescendo…]
This reminds me of a question I have (here I am serious):
30" when David Byrne (of Talking Heads)
interviews himself
in several different costumes
(as interviewee he keeps the same costume,
40" the boxy ‘big suit’ that makes his head look small,
whereas as interviewer he changes costume and character),
is he demonstrating that he is one infinitely variable person,
or two people (one of which is variable, infinitely or finitely,
depending on whether we take the performance as suggestive
50" of a process that could continue forever), or seven people, or
infinitely many people, […f] or none of the above?
[subito mp, slower]
Corny Mustache and Cigar Silly–1
5'00" Corny Gesticulation–1 Black–1
Drag Wig and dress Silly–2
Drag Body language–1 White–1
Intellectual Grey suit and glasses Serious–1
10" Solemn Immobile–1 Black–2
Pimp Yellow Suit, Chest Hair Silly–3
Goofy Gesticulation–2 White–2
Cool Bandana and Leather Serious–3
20" Keyed-up Head-bobbing–1 White–3
Old Grey beard and sweater Serious–2
Tired Nodding off–1 White–4
30" I’m sorry, I’ve been terribly impolite. I forgot to offer you
something to eat. Are you hungry? Would you like an apple,
a cookie, perhaps a theory, to bite your teeth into? Let me
go to the kitchen and I’ll see what I can offer you.
40" Oh dear, I’m sorry, I think I’ve just made things worse.
Isn’t that always the way?
No.
50"
6'00"
10"
20" At this point in time Aphrodite is born from the foam that
arose when Heaven’s severed penis was cast into the sea
by his rebellious son Kronos. (Kélina and I determined the
durational structure of "Krono-Metre" by allowing each line
30" of text from Hesiod’s Theogony to equal 2 seconds of
performance time. During our performance each of us attended
to a stopwatch and a score with durational markings in order
to keep to this schedule. The text of our performance was
40" a collage that we palimpsested onto Hesiod.)
50"
3g. The bourgeois class is uncomfortable
with itself so it avoids its old forms of art
7'00" presentation in the hopes it will not be
recognized. But recognized by whom?
By itself?
10"
TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK… This format deprives the musician
of her/his medium, though as you can see I've tried to
20" reinstate it (7 minutes 20 seconds and counting). Words are fun
and flow easily - I can write 16 minutes worth of words a lot faster
than 16 minutes worth of piano music, but I still prefer music.
(feelings of abundance, energy, and richness may be generated
differently by different people at different times. duh.)
30"
i sat in a murky fog
but it wasn’t that
my french comprehension skills
were just embarrassingly limited.
40" questionable,
sometimes dense talks.
impenetrable to me,
50" (but no one to fault
but myself
for that)
8'00" so when listening to lectures in french last week
i noticed things other
than the content of the speech –
body language,
10" position of microphones,
distances between speaker and interlocutor,
number of posters announcing the event
20" from within the event,
angle of tables,
30" use of relatively new technology
to do things
more reliably done with relatively old technology,
patterns of audience seat-filling
40" and relation of seat choice to personality/mood.
in other words, in the absence
of meaningful words I searched actively
50" for something to mean something.
whence this compulsion I don’t know.
(perhaps one just needs to occupy one’s mind.)
9'00" 4B. DOES IT MAKE SENSE FOR A GOVERNMENT
TO CUT SPENDING DURING A RECESSION?
10"
It is aesthetically challenging to write in this format: no
sound, no pictures, no bold or italics (i'm guessing).
20" At least empty space is possible. Glad for that.
I hope the formatting;#@;<>;@% works out. @#^
30"
40"
50"
10'00" Hi Alex. Great to see your posts. I wasn’t sure how to find
you online because it didn’t occur to me that you spelled
Parabolik Guerilla with a ‘k’. So I’m glad you’ve appeared here.
Wherever here is. I found your posts really interesting, and
the ideas beautiful. I am especially intrigued by the idea of
10" mind-body as a ‘topological body’ akin to the Mobius Strip.
I haven’t thought of the mind-body in this way – I have tended
to think of mind and body as two modalities of the same entity
(a human individual), or the mind as epiphenomenon of the
body – but I think this idea of a continuous topological space is
20" wonderful. And I think it succeeds (at least for me) at doing
precisely what you discuss in terms of piercing structures of
habitual thought (what seems ‘true’ to me is just a hardened
metaphor, why not replace it with new poetry, etc.)
Very interesting, rich ideas, and engaging to read. Thank you!
30"
40"
4zzz. Frege’s 1892 paper ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ was long
translated ‘On Sense and Meaning’. Then some people decided
this was an error, and now it is more frequently
50" translated ‘On Sense and Reference’. Perhaps the early
translators meant by ‘meaning’ what recent translators mean by
‘reference’. Perhaps not. Since the issues at stake in the paper and
in following papers in this area of philosophy are the very
distinctions between sense, meaning, and reference, the question
11'00" of how to translate the title has often been controversial. I don’t
know how controversial it is these days, because I don’t follow de…
3rsYp40. HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS DEMONSTRATE BECAUSE
IT'S FUN TO DEMONSTRATE!!!
Some writers have translated ‘Sinn’ as ‘meaning’, creating the
confusing situation wherein each of the words in the title
10" has been translated as ‘meaning’.
1.1.1.1.1. (improv) Ways in which an artwork can fail, 55
seconds, 1-2-3-GO:
20" 1. unsophisticated / simplistic
2. derivative (e.g. is this text derivative of Cage?)
3. banal
30"
4. evidently unaware of contemporary techniques
5. shallow
40" 6. immoral
7. moralizing
8. poorly structured, too long, etc. (e.g. couldn’t I have
kept this to 3 minutes?)
50" 9. boring
10. submissive to technology
12'00" 11. nothing to say
12. too many things to say, unfocused
13. incoherent, unintelligible gobbledygook
10"
4FX. “‘MUSIC IS NUMBER & DRAMA’, said Pythagoras”
Actually Pythagoras didn’t say that (at least there’s no
evidence that he did, since neither he nor his early
20" followers wrote anything down), but that didn't stop
Gérard Grisey, an influential late 20th century composer
(as far as late 20th century composers can be said to be
influential) from quoting the above in the Contemporary
30" Music Review (1987, 'Tempus ex Machina: A composer's
reflections on musical time', 274). It doesn’t matter. I
wanted to talk about a similar idea: that music is understood
in two competing ways, as language and as mathematics.
If you want me to flesh out this distinction,
40" I’ll tell you later.
ZEUS INTERLUDE (compel the audience to respond to three questions)
I’m not going to do a Zeus interlude,
50" instead I’ll just apologize again here for the lengthy post.
The materials I am accustomed to using to make meaning in my work
are density and duration. I could talk about them, rather than
demonstrating through them, but I would fear the meaning
13'00" would be lost. I fear the meaning is lost anyway.
How much of this text is relevant to my title?
10"
20"
HAPPy FaMILY (GReEn CLOWN noSE. FAST, mf)
2QpRx. One person brought up the question of what it meant
when I played on the closed piano lid. This brings me back to
30" music as language or number. Or perhaps it takes me on a
tangent. There are certain things that I would not do in a
public performance on a piano because pianists in the early
19th century did them so often that to do them now would signify
not what they originally signified, but would rather signify the 19th
40" century itself. If this is not done self-consciously it can be
embarrassing to an audience that is aware of living in the 21st
century. I do not know why this EMBARRASSMENT exists (you know
the reaction: the old 'crap, doesn't he realize…???’), but I experience
it acutely when I listen to contemporary music that is written in
50" the style of (for example) Chopin. However, there is one
contemporary composer whose Chopin imitations are so convincing
that I do not feel embarrassed: Emmy, A.K.A. EMI (Experiments in
Musical Intelligence), a computer program created by David Cope
at U.C. Santa Cruz. I do not feel embarrassed, but I do not feel
14'00" interested either. Chopin is a good composer, but I don’t sense
that I continue to learn from continuing to listen to his music.
It’s been probably twelve years since I
was engaged by listening to Chopin.
10" My reaction to Mozart and Beethoven
is similar.
But I digress.
20"
My point is that part of my mode of operating as a creative
musician is to avoid past ways of doing things. I am most
comfortable at the piano when it is prepared.
Q. Yet Cage did this 70 years ago, in a different age, so
why should I not wish to avoid it as well?
30" A. My feeling is that 19th century chord progressions and
voicings are worn out, but piano preparation is not yet worn
out. This is only my intuition. Others may feel differently.
Avoiding is a mode of meaning-making distinct from
referring. That is, playing on the closed piano lid did not
symbolize ‘x’ or ‘y’. From my perspective it was primarily a
40" way of dealing with an old instrument that did not feel worn
out, nor did it feel useless or meaningless. But as for how I
intuited the latter, I don’t know. Moreover, after about 30
seconds of such playing, I did feel it started to become
meaningless, so I proceeded to make noise in another way
(it was either rattling two razor cartridges against each other or
50" dragging a plastic card across the black keys of the piano, I
can’t remember which)
15'00"
SECTION 3: THE RISE OF ZEUS
10"
I’ll cut myself off here. Close the piano lid, shut up, etc.
I don’t even know whom I’m sending this to. It’s a little
nerve-wracking.
20" Can I TAKE EVERYTHING BACK later? I like palinode.
I also like odes that are not palinodic. (This has nothing
to do with anyone named Palin.)
30"
40"
50" Initially I thought Nietzsche was just being provocative when
he talked about philosophers being sick, failed humans, and
that music and dance were superior, etc. etc. I thought philosophy
and theory were really cool, and given that he was writing
philosophy (sort of?) I just ignored him when he said that. Later,
though, I started to take him more seriously. (END)
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