the keyboard

so when tuning was developed, the solution to being able to play in all keys with ten fingers was to create fixed strings or pipes of 11 scale degrees, each one tuned to a pitch that was a compromise between all the various shades of pitch that scale degree could have. so for example the major third on the piano... E is a tolerable major third up from C and also a tolerable major second up from D, but not a beautiful third or second.

it would be annoying to add more strings or pipes for the other notes, since then you couldn't reach an octave with one hand using our tradition keyboard layout.

now that we have electronic keyboards, there is no reason to stick with the one-to-one key to pitch relationship. each degree (keyboard key) of the scale can have several tunings.

someone build it, dammit!

burningman is not

a retreat
a concert
a music festival
a showdown
a parking lot
christmas
catharsis
a museum
a conference
a horserace
woodstock
muscle beach
the moulin rouge
a scene
cannes
a seminar
a be/love/teach/die-in
vacation
any other religious festival or holiday, maybe holloween plus holi
easter
summercamp

burningman is

a camp meeting
a revival
the 4th of july
a panic
a renegade hollywood backlot/soundstage
a pickup game in an abandoned lot
labor day
a tailgate party
a rave
a monster truck rally
altamont
a carnival
Carnival
a release valve for capitalist accumulation (social and material)
charismatic religious transformation
ecstasy
a masked ball
a puppet show with stuff (what's that stuff thing from?)
the tireswing down by the creek
a temporary trailer park
the playground
a holding environment
the junkyard/the dump (for pickers) the freestore
a fertility right
irrigation farming
car camping
the county fair
an intermezzo
a family reunion
a parade
an imaginary garden with real toads
a gated community
the galleria
a work camp
an orgy
re-creation

hura geil

inspiration is a bitch mother to manage, this is the first time i've planned to practice and then not officially practiced. i just want to listen to this music my friend sent me and dance and try to see how well i can sing fiona apple songs.

directional

virginia woolf says "style emerges from what you are trying to say"

the story of a film emerges from its images
one singer said the character she portrays emerges from the notes of the music
love emerges from sex and sex appeal
david allen says career emerges from what you spend your time doing

american opus

so i wrote a song and it goes really fast, too fast to sing comfortably. so i'm singing it anyway, trying to find ways to meld the syllables so i can flow. i'd been listening to the way roxanne ashante raps so loose, she really blurs her words together beautifully. and what i found was that the easiest way to get all the syllables in was so really get down into my accent. i mean my own new hampshire/east los angeles/brooklyn way of speaking. the words were tasty.

i also sang from the pit of my stomach (a tense stomach) the way kurt cobain said he did, and the combination of these techniques made something i can be happy with. can't wait to do this to an aria!

so here's my thought: enough of this italian language fascism. all languages are important and tasty, but the route to that experience comes through one's own native language. there are so many accents in this country! ren woods singing "aquarius", or jollie holland singing "lakes of ponchartrain", and if you listen to mathieu chedid singing "belleville rendezvous" in english through his french, he makes the english words so interesting through his intimacy with them.

how are you going to dig into some verdi recit. without having done the same in your own vernacular?

some american operas make this possible, even if we don't take advantage of it. how many times have you heard an opera singer sing summertime as if it was french? i know i know, it's way up there, that's gershwin's fault. when mozart started writing singspiel, i'm sure his singers felt like they were singing an italian opera in german, which they were, but because of their persistence, wagner was eventually able to write something that took advantage of the german literary and song tradition and was still opera, and even extended the resources of opera. when tchaikovsky wrote evgenii onegin everyone called him an italian, but if you listen to galina vishnevskaya sing tatiana, she sounds like a contemporary russian, not someone singing in a foreign language.

i would say bernstein's candide is a european opera with english words, a good start. stephen sondheim, also good. hair and west side story... those don't take full advantage of our opera heritage, much less the developments of modernist orchestral writing, but they're authentic social commentary, which is completely necessary, and they also use many of our american musical resources - electric guitars, native uses of the voice, american dances... what could we do now with the resources that we have?! dj's and banjos!

back after breakup

i've been droning. i live in brooklyn in a room like a practice room. i found a mirror on the street and i lost my will to sing schoenberg so i match pitch with songs i used to hear on the schoolbus radio and i sing sa and pa and ni.

chris and i broke up. i've been crying for a long time.

i'm still trying to figure out the life/work thing. i reread Air Guitar by Dave Hickey, which makes me feel like capitalism, or at least mercantilism can be a field for... transgression? either that or living in new york is making me feel like maybe i could... play along?

then again, blasphemy! i guess i'm not suppose to say that i always hear more music coming out of the pj's than out of the conservatories when i bike by. just saying. it just seems like the people who have been creating american culture for the past 100 years have been only marginally associated with capitalism.

you know, tony conrad wrote some really beautiful little songs. so weird! tonyconrad.net/songs.htm

hibernating a website

sometimes you have a project, or a challenge, or a relationship, that has so many issues and unformulated problems that you just have to stay in your room for a whole week with alain badiou's recently translated _being and event_ and piles and piles of index cards that are the notes for your new book, and just sort and think and sort and think, until finally the project you're really thinking about, in this case niknaz's new website, figures itself out and floats to the surface. then you wake up in the morning, go for a long walk and imagine what cyberpunk looks like, and get to work!

hair combing

i find this helps when i'm warming up. relaxes the face? feels good? helps self image and presentation i.e. posture? i have no idea.

bob dylan saved my music

so,

angst and hope, it snowed last night, i read that french peasants used to practically hibernate for 7 months of the year, sleeping next to their pigs. etymonline.com says hibernate is like gheima or zima, winter, also hima, sanskrit for snow as in himalaya. i say there's a bear in there. berlin is suppose to be named for bears.

anyway, i finally found a pianist for the hanging gardens cycle. he's very sweet and only every so slightly condescending, but i can deal because he's in it for, get this, the greatness of the work. boy you academics are scarce outside the gates of eden, and it sure is good to meet one of you!

by the way in the real estate office in park slope where i work hangs a framed newsweek cover, from like, 1994 or something, showing these two figleaf beclothed people running over the brooklyn bridge beneath a stormy sky and a big hand pointing toward what must have been at the time cheaper real estate.

so i've been having more discussions with my friends in and out of universities about the role of the intellectual. i finished das kapital, volume I, i'm taking a class on it at cuny sponsored by the brecht forum. only $75. my one friend, j, current student of composition on the west coast, likes to argue that music is a totally viable career choice, and you can, if you try, make a decent living at it. for me the problem is what "trying" involves. it's not necessarily bad: getting your work written down and organized so it's available to people, forging relationships with potential performers, going to conferences, keeping up with the academic debates. okay. but there are strings attached to all those things. plus you have to represent western culture to the untutored masses of your undergraduates as this monolithic great benificent complicated system of rules and order, when really it was developed by a bunch of people who didn't always take it that seriously, who certainly do not represent all the musicians who ever played, even in europe, who borrowed tons of stuff from people we never talk about, like countless anonymous wedding singers, gypsies, jews, turks, folk musicians, and others, and who learned much of what they knew simply by playing, not by studying. i guess if anyone was to teach in a deeper way, it would be my friend.

i say music is not a viable career choice because everyone should have the time and opportunity to make music as well as they want, given our current level of prosperity. we should have none of these crap 9-5 jobs that are really 8-7 by the time you stay late and commute home. none of this insecurity about whether you're going to lose your place in the ladder of employment if you work part time. and there are plenty of resources to allow us all to play music together. there must be a lot more people who want to play music than who can under the current system. and there must be a lot of musicians who wouldn't mind doing something else part of the time but who have to be "professional" so they have to work 80 hours a week whether in grad school or out, making music into a "viable career".

i don't want to work 80 hours a week at anything. i want to spend some time digging holes with a shovel and changing lightbulbs, some time solving problems that don't have to do with music, a little time teaching, and some time practising and performing. and if our american system can give me that within the framework of capitalism, along with healthcare, then maybe i will reevaluate my current critique.

also i was feeling really depressed about singing opera because i was watching these women on youtube and thinking, there's no way i can care enough about opera to be able to do it "for real" with an orchestra and with other good singers. and then i was watching keyshia cole videos, thinking boy she's a great singer but why does she only get to sing about love, and why do all these singers have to be so pretty? i'm sure there are 10 singers who are unattractive for every attractive one. and then i looked up bob dylan's "a hard rain's gonna fall" the one where he's younger. and i thought you know, this is my vernacular. this touches me deep, i'm singing opera to help me with this. i've been writing songs for a few years and one day i hope they're like this. and this genre allows a level of social critique that i've never seen in opera or indian classical music or most pop music that gets on the radio. and damn he looks sincere.