Adrian Freed
is the Research Director at CNMAT. His web page has a whole pile of
links to research papers, mostly about the architecture of computer
music systems.
Amy X Neuberg & Men
is a self-proclaimed avant-cabaret band.
Bay Improviser
is an excellent resource for and about improvising musicians in the Bay area.
Most importantly, it has a tremendous
online calendar of
Bay Area new music events.
Bill Hsu is a computer scientist,
an improvising musician and an organizer of the former
Beanbender's
concert series.
Captain Beefheart has fans. Several of them.
Carl builds
Tubas and
contrabass trumpets.
He also has a lot of
good information for builders of brass instruments.
If you're seriously interested in adventurous music,
you probably already know about
CDeMusic,
who publishes new music CDs and books.
They have a
download
page full of interesting mp3 excerpts.
| CMIX
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td Mon Jan 1 11:23:22 2007
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CMIX
is a fairly useful package of routines for editing,
processing, and creating soundfiles. It also includes a
library of routines designed to make it easier to write C
programs to manipulate soundfiles. Paul Lansky wrote the
first version and uses it for most of his compositions.
David Cope
is a composer and faculty member at UC Santa Cruz, known
widely for his Experiments in Musical Intelligence,
computer programs that can analyze a corpus of music,
identify signature features of the corpus and generate
new music exhibiting the same signatures. The effect
of digesting a composer's style and producing new works
mimicking that style can be eerie. While the programs
don't produce masterworks, even making middling Mozart
pastiches is a good trick. But Cope's real advance is
a better understanding of where style comes from, a
first step to effing the ineffible.
Yoko Ono's book Grapefruit, a collection of Fluxus-style instructions for music and art, has been reissued after 30 years out of print.
Raymond Scott was a band-leader and popular composer in the 1930's and '40s.
He's best known today because his often off-beat tunes were primary source
material for many of Carl Stalling's scores for Warner Brothers'
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. Scott was also a techno-buff
and musical instrument designer. The work of his musical R&D company,
Manhattan Research,
is documented in a 144 page book and a pair of CDs. (Also available
in Vinyl.)
Last Saturday (December 7, 2002) ACME
Observatory presented a concert of early FLUXUS
works, curated by Gino Robair.
I performed George Brecht's Three
Aqueous Events, by frying ice cubes on an amplified (contact microphone
taped to the bottom) electric griddle, and Dick Higgins's
Danger
Music Number Fourteen, both of which appeared to go over very well.
But the real excitement happened off-stage. Morgan
Guberman planned to perform
Ken Friedman's Stamp Act,
which involves rubber stamps and a nude model.
So he put out a query for a model on
craigslist, and got two replies.
The first one sent him a second message the next day saying "what
was I thinking, I just broke up with my boyfriend and wasn't in my
right mind and I'm sorry I led you on", but the second said her
name was Bibiana Padilla Maltos, she
was a big FLUXUS fan, had performed Stamp Act before and would fly up
from Calexico, CA (or Mexicali, MX, I'm not quite clear on that detail)
for the show. As show time approached, she hadn't
shown up and Morgan spent a lot of time pacing anxiously. Several of
us suspected that someone was pulling Morgan's chain, but he kept saying
"she called me a few minutes ago, she just got off the plane, she'll
be right here". Then a couple of people showed up claiming to be her
friends, adding to the suspense. Finally, just as we were getting started,
she appeared! It turns out she's for real, confirmed by a
google search.
She and Morgan did a great job of Stamp Act.
Side note: one of the unwritten rules of performance art is you don't
want to follow
the naked lady, so of course, my two pieces were scheduled right
after Stamp Act. (Fortunately, the naked lady effect was diluted by
an intermission.)
Also on the program were a couple of La Monte Young compositions
(Composition 1960 #7 and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1.) Saturday
morning, we received the following email:
Dear Tom Duff and Gino Robair,
It has come to our attention that you have programmed one or more works
by La Monte Young on a concert to be hosted by Gino on Saturday, December
7 at 8:15 PM, at TUVA Space, 3192 Adeline at Martin Luther King Jr. Way,
Berkeley, CA, presented by the ACME Observatory.
We would have appreciated being contacted by you in advance of this
presentation. La Monte prefers to work with musicians who are going to
perform his work, which is obviously not now possible in this case.
La Monte Young's works are copyrighted and it is necessary to obtain a
performance license from us. According to the announcement in the Bay
Area NEWMUS-EVENTS digest 1131, you plan to perform "Piano Piece for
David Tudor #1," from 1960, which was announced as: "Feeding hay to the
TUVA piano!"
Please provide us with the titles of any other works of La Monte's on the
program so we can issue a performance license. A licensing fee of $100
is usually required for performances of each of La Monte's compositions
of this type, depending on the circumstances. As Acme Observatory
Contemporary Music Series is supported by grants from the Berkeley Civic
Arts Commission and anonymous donors, we assume this concert has some
funding.
We realize this request is reaching you very late in your planning and we
are willing to work with you toward a positive resolution, but we
received the information extremely late also.
With best regards,
La Monte Young Marian Zazeela
MELA Foundation, Inc.
275 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
Of course, we can't afford fees like this at all.
Our grant from Berkeley is $2500, with which we do
about 30 concerts a year, we took in $61 at the door,
and we rent TUVA for $100 a night,
so if we gave Young $200 we'd
be about $150 short on the night, which the aforementioned
"anonymous donors" would have to pick up.
("Anonymous donors" is a euphemism for "you
can't make money doing what we do. On the other hand, you
can't lose that much either, so rather than not do it, we cover
the difference out of our own pockets.")
So probably we should have contacted him (it never occurred to me --
most experimental composers get little enough attention that they're
happy about any sort of performance), and maybe we could have negotiated
an agreeable rate, but there was no time,
so we dropped his pieces from the program. Tough for us (I
blew a couple of weekends programming my laptop, trying to make
an idiomatic, compelling interactive version of Composition 1960 #7), but tougher for La Monte.
He missed out on a performance at what turned out to be a
very good show, and there's not much chance we'll
ever program him again. But I guess he needs us as much as
we need him.
Tim thinks I should make a piece about the sounds
that telephones make when they ring.
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