end of the year housecleaning
i was enjoying a little extra time over the break and was able to upload some recordings from our late summer concerts that we played with the LANME.
here are our performances of Terry Riley’s “In C” and my “Principle of Sufficient Irritation”at our performances at collumbia (recording) college and in san pedro.
enjoy!
Terry Riley: In C (PBE and LANME Live at Columbia College)
Terry Riley: In C (PBE and LANME Live In San Pedro)
Paul Bailey: Principle of Sufficient Irritation (PBE and LANME Live In San Pedro)
LANME:
christina giacona, clarinet
patrick colon, violin
kelly haley-sibler, flute
james miller, voice
audrey snyder, cello
daniel formidoni, sound design
PBE performers included:
paul bailey, trombone
scott mcintosh, clarinet
matt menaged, bass guitar
ryan nunes, vibes
nicholas white, piano
colon nancarrow on crack
MUSIC DADA (bara no kodoku) by ALONE TOGETHER
i found this track by the sound collage artist alone + together (yuki ota) on the soundcloud mp3 service/website. it made me think of colon nancarrow and what a time kyle gann would have trying to transcribe this.
i also want to point out that you can now “like” posts on this site. especially if you “like” what you hear please click away and i’m interested to see how it works as a feedback measurement tool (besides looking at page views)
i’m also going to be experimenting posting music on this site and others using the soundcloud service/website. right now most of their site is dance music, but there are some interesting groups like live improvisation, sound collage, and drone music.
if you are making music, for now i have created a few groups to post tracks;
an alt-classical group for DIY art music
and post-whatever group for all the music that doesn’t easily fit into either the art music or pop music continuum.
overall the site has a few hiccups (it can be pretty slow) and the search system is pretty rudimentary, but it seems like it could be a useful way to share music along a variety of similar interests and aesthetics.
if you check it out please let me know what you think at http://soundcloud.com/pbailey
and on a final note last week’s (oct 9-10) ImprovFriday+1 files are now up and shane cadman’s piece for the mighty noah bailey dowell was a very special standout this week. steve layton also made remix that afternoon of shane’s piece and the glitchy ostinato opening of my music for controllers III called chorale (the mighty)
check them all out at http://improvfriday.ning.com/
Mosaic (Music of Jon Brenner)
there have been some great online discussions over the break about the “big” issues over at the NetNewMusic site; the purpose of music as art? is music a commodity? what is the role of technology in music?
currently i’m interested in using technology should help us to augment the possibilities of our lives (some call it augmented reality). its been interesting discovering the many examples with musicians exploring live looping, controllerism, mashups etc…
along those lines i’m going to introduce you to my friend jon brenner’s obsessive take on technology. his approach is pretty simple in which he uses everyday items (bicycle and coffee machine) to “assemble” songs piece by piece and like the mosaic on the right using a field recorder and protools.
as you will hear his results are pretty amazing!
enjoy!
espresto
presta pesto
tour de forte
shifted cadence
spoken chorus
caffeine machine
latte
also as a bonus is jon’s modular mashup of my fearless leader, overcoming tourism and lloyd rodgers the little prince
leaderless fear
leaderless fear?
the pbe hiatus is finally over. in rehearsal tonight we realized that 3 months was the longest break we have ever taken since we started in 2002. i’m glad to be back to it preparing for a club show at mr. t’s bowl (our favorite venue) on feb 20th. we are very fortunate to have john mahr covering keyboards during eric hendrikson’s personal leave.
reh went well tonight, we started in on quite a bit of music that we haven’t performed that much and ended up with quite a bit more music then we can use. so far the setlist is starting to look something like this:
chaconne, john brenner (great modular piece)
bonedance, lloyd rodgers
fearless leader, pb
life’s too short, pb (tentative, 2 of 3 singers confirmed…)
national anthem, radiohead (cover)
this spring we are also working on adding doug hein’s orlando and john brenner’s leaderless fear to our repertoire. one thing that i have noticed about programming is that a concert of 5 or more pieces by most any composer can be a real drag (especially mine). i try and not program more than 2-3 of my own pieces, and when planning this show it became clear that when you pick the top 1-2 pieces from a variety of composers it quickly can become a pretty exceptional show.
anyhow, its great to be back in the game and with last night’s great rehearsal i can get up to the mountains for a few days in much better state of mind. school starts in a week and our budget has been slashed 10%, so i sure hope i still have some classes to teach. (remember life’s meant to be endured not enjoyed)
so while i’m away please help yourself to any or all the following;
its new, it fun, and free!****
and its an secular oratorio based on texts gertrude stein, guy debord and jenny bitner. while i was making it, i decided that it would be much more interesting and informative to have a graphic libretto instead of program notes. it was such an obvious idea and was surprised to find that nobody else seems to be doing this. so check it out and let me know what you think.
retrace our steps, act 1
retrace our steps, act 2
retrace our steps, act 3
retrace our steps, act 4
assorted live performances from fall 07
life’s too short (092507)
fearless leader, lacc, 100207
11/25/05 (with real quiet, 102507)
11/25/05 (with real quiet, 102507)
you can also support the pbe by purchasing our first album; music from summerland (2002)
download full album ($5) google checkout or paypal
(****at least for you early adopters. i’m trying something new and going to give this one away until CD#3 comes out (life’s too short, fall 08). i think giving away the new stuff and selling the back catalog isn’t a bad idea. so try it out and if you like it, i bet you might like my previous CD music from summerland)
principal of sufficient irritation
pbe with real quiet
meng hall
csuf
september, 25th 2007
download the mp3. (principal of sufficient irritation)
more coming soon…
monday morning quarterback
ref=”http://www.fullerton.edu/arts/music/Ensembles/diverse_instrument.htm”>d.i.e. had a pretty good show last wed night in which we premiered david toub’s piece this piece intentionally left blank. i thought it was a very effective composition and pretty good first performance. enjoy the mp3 mp3.
this performance represented the best of social networking and was made possible by david having a well designed website with scores and mp3’s. he also is very smart by having some pieces in open c score that are easily adapted to any instrumentation (most pbe music is written this way) which is the point of the diverse instrument ensemble.
anyway ,it was a challenging but fun piece to play and great example of the exchange of ideas by making your music public. i look forward to playing more of music like this and encourage others to follow.
Retrace Our Steps (2005), Background and Influences
i started assembling the librettro for retrace our steps at the end of my grad school experience sometime in spring of 03. i had never written any vocal music and was encouraged by vocalist nicole baker (who is on the faculty at csuf) to write her a piece.
background
i not really a “word” guy and have never been able to remember lyrics from any song, but writing for how the voice sounds was of course really appealing… duh.
influences
at the time i was writing retrace i was coming out of my grad school experience and had been studying major large scale works that represented composers at the top of their game. after studying monteverdi’s coronation of poppea, bach’s goldberg variations, and glass’s einstein on the beach i had been blown away by the amazing artistic and contemplative music that each had written. these pieces really make it for me as a listening experience, but to dissect them and understand how they are organized and the logic used to create them was very humbling. did i feel that my first vocal piece attain those goals? not really, but after writing large amounts of consumable music i really wanted to play in a different sandbox.
during this time i was also very taken with my friend and mental collaborator sean ferguson’s great piece society of the spectacle (2000?). watching its first performance was an electrifying experience and really motivated me to get off my ass and write. there are many similarities to both pieces (that should be discussed further) and we have had some great nights discussing my “plagiarism” of his work (the penultimate line in both of our pieces is plagiarism is necessary). the best thing of sean’s spectacle that i stole was the way he used levels of obliqueness to create meaning in his text . although i think philip glass’s non-narrative work einstein on the beach is the most important work written in the last 50 years, i do have one conceptual gripe with him and a few others. the non-narrative obliqueness of the text for three+ hours is a little much for my friends to endure. (i know… mtv generation) sean solved this problem beautifully by creating a non-narrative composition whose subject is vague and oblique (consumerism/alienation) and used levels of obliqueness to delay the first direct statement to the audience 3/4 of the way through his piece. he then retreats back into a more oblique setting of his libretto, leaving through the same rabbit hole he entered.
this was going to be my solution also… i could present a subject drama (oratorio) that contained a politically aggressive message by setting the text using various levels of obliqueness to obscure my “message”. as the piece unfolded it would i would come out of the rabbit hole and “get to my point” and then immediately retreat into the symbols and layers of the assembled text.
in short, i had a strong message to convey, but didn’t want to the performance to become “preachy” by dealing with the libretto in a direct fashion.
Music from Summerland, part 1
this is the first in the series of blogs about pieces we are currently performing. think of this of a more friendly style of program notes for our next show at the cerritos center for the performing arts on wed, jan 19th.
music from summerland-2002
this piece was started in the fall of 2001 and was completed summer 2002. it was the first piece written specifically for my group (pbe) and is heavily influenced by movie scores, pop/rock music, and the composers michael nyman/steve reich/philip glass. i wanted to create music that combined simple rock/pop harmonies with one- and two-part forms. all of the movements in music for summerland are monogestural (they all express one thing, and in a way each piece is its own self-contained universe). the process for creating these was pretty much the same: work out a few chord progressions and musical gestures, decide where i wanted to take the piece (mostly through form and overall length of each movement), and orchestrate it based on the instruments i had available.
as the piece was completed, rehearsals and the recording session were scheduled, and the pbe was formed. the first recording was completed with eight hours of rehearsal and two recording sessions in which the strings were recorded separately from the rest of the ensemble (electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard, vibes, trombone and bari sax) because of time limitations.
the pieces were originally not named. naming things is a strange thing for me. i originally wanted listeners to project their own values onto the music. for a while i thought about giving them very generic names and i originally assigned them roman numerals I-VII. after too many questions about the numbers, i caved into requests and gave them “proper” names.
the title “summerland” comes from a set of writings by peter lamborn wilson, an anarchist/situationist writer who writes under the pseudonym hakim bey. after reading some of his writings, the term summerland came to have a new meaning, especially regarding the creation of this ensemble. wilson talks a lot about a TAZ, or tong. he describes the TAZ (temporary autonomous zone) as a place where people come together outside of society to create and share without engaging in commerce. he feels that this is the first step to living outside consumer culture. creating summerland was like starting a temporary anarchist training camp. the idea of getting nine musicians together and rehearsing and recording outside of the commercial music world (with limited or no pay) is very uncommon, and this was my first step at both writing a large composition and bringing together a collective of musicians to make music without commercial constraints.
next post:
summerland mvts 1-3, overcoming tourism, the palimpsest, boundary violations.
social networking in music
one of the best things about having a ipod is the ability to manage and track the music you listen to. now you can share your listening habits and discover new music.
music mobs is a true social networking sight where you upload your itunes library and then it will give you the names and playlists of other people who you share musical tastes with. so far i am really impressed with some of the new music i have found, and seeing the variety of tastes many people have. i always have thought that i would find people listening to radiohead, bach, michael nyman, richard james all on the same playlist. now i know it really happens.
the internet itunes registry is also a great site. it is setup to document your playlist and give you graphs and tools to give you more info about your listening habits.
here is the breakdown of the tools:
last import
tracks
artists
genres
diversity of tracks
total time
total listening hours
average track length
average rating
number of ratings
both of these are just the tip of the iceberg. it looks like social networking is just another tool that connects us to useful information.
cheers!!
Retrace Our Steps, Jenny Bitner/Guy Debord
The second movement of my latest piece, Retrace Our Steps, is a combination of texts by Jenny Bitner and Guy Debord. These texts represent a juxtaposition between consumerism, apathy and idealism. The final libretto is a small part of both works; here are links to the original texts. The Pamphleteer starts out as almost a nonfiction essay but takes a wonderful fantasy turn near the end. The Society of the Spectacle is a large essay/manifesto on the nature of man and society.
Enjoy
the pamphleteer-The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002
Society of the Spectacle
