Prairiesteppes

One Laptop per Child

We received our new laptop on Monday. It was bought as part of the (now discontinued) “give one, receive one” event before Christmas. [The company promised that it would be delivered to Canada by late-March - the 31st to be exact].

Nope. Just listening….
more soon

Two musically important people have died over the last two weeks - Karlheinz Stockhausen and Oscar Peterson. What a contrast between the two of them and yet how important are they?
The first time I heard Stockhausen’s music, or very close to the first time, was on the Australian film Walkabout. In the credits, it mentioned that the Stockhausen piece was called Hymnen. I really enjoyed what I heard and, wonders of wonders, the record album was in my High School Music Library. (Side note: Not only did the library have Hymnen, and Kontake, but it also had many full scores of Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium. I think the days of finding a government school with this sort of library has long gone. There is a blog entry about my old school coming….)
So, I “borrowed” Hymnen (2 album set), Kontake, Gesange de Jünglinge [more side notes: I have just spent 10 mins searching the ‘net trying to find out how to enter umlauts in Wordpress- FAIL! 2nd note - I pasted from windows the character and it seems to work, but this is lamz0r!] and listened and listened and listened to them. To my horror, I couldn’t find in the recording the part of the music that I liked from the film. One of my friendly teachers borrowed the score from the Conservatorium’s library, so I got to score read and listen several times. This was the first time I had score read for real - the start of a life long passion. On subsequent watching of the film I have discovered that the bit I like is some other piece overlaid with the sound of desert insects! (I used quotations mark at the start of the paragraph as the record is still in my possession 32 years later [technically in storage, but what-evah!] and I returned the score only when I became a student at the Conservatorium 7 years later )
So, an obsession with Stockhausen started very early with me (about the same time, I was introduced to 12 note music and Schoenberg. What a progressive school I went to!). I got as many recordings as possible when I started Tertiary study and played through the Klavierstücke (Please don’t think I could play them - there is a huge difference between getting a score, banging through it and understanding certain compositional and performance techniques, to actually performing the things!). As I worked through his music to the mid-70s (I am looking at his verlag site for memory prompting, I think it was around Trans) each piece was interesting and immersive.
And then……
It all started to sound stale.
My tastes were starting to mature and go in different directions (less Debussy and more Ravel, the start of my love for French music around 1900, Webern over Berg, Bill Evans over Dave Brubeck…..) and Stockhausen was just doing different things. I still admired greatly the earlier works - and Gesange is technically brilliant for the equipment that he was using, but the lustre and worn thin. I read more technical papers about Stockhausen and by Stockhausen, and he started to become a theoretical entity for me - someone to admire the thoughts/process/belief rather than the music in of itself. I have a list of musicians a mile long that I admire, think are important, or really hate because I should like them, but I don’t listen to them. The list includes:

• Mozart (Really can’t stand the music. I am going through some of the Sonatas now trying to get them ready for recording, but I am not really digging them!
• Charlie Parker and John Coltrane (Tried and tried and tried, but just don’t like them)
• Peter Maxwell Davies
• Romantic music in general, other than Brahms

and many others. I know that these musicians are important, and many people really love the music and find it important, but I don’t. This is the domain of personal aesthetics. If we all liked the same music, nothing new would be created.
My love for Stockhausen’s music dwindled, and I didn’t keep up with all the newer works as I should have. He became just another composer that I knew about (a lot about, actually!) but that wasn’t in the fore-front of my brain.
And now he is dead, and I feel that I had forgotten why he is important. He was such a strong composer with really strong convictions about his music. Although he has a public feud with Boulez, they both admired each other a lot - they just approached dodecaphony in different ways. The Helicopter Quartet is funny damn it! For those of you that don’t know this piece, it is written for String Quartet with each performer being flown around in a helicopter, with cameras and microphones used for the performance and synchronisation. In some ways it is a big wanky theatre piece, musical somewhat weak, but… the strength of character to conceive of this, let alone getting it performed (and videoed and telecast) is amazing.
It is Christmas Eve and I need to finish wrapping the presents. More tomorrow about Stockhausen and Oscar Peterson

are bad, mmmkay? I played in Airdrie on Saturday night (regional city, but it is almost a suburb of Calgary) for the Airdrie Festival of Lights Idol “competition”. This mirrored what I expect goes on for the [insert your own country here] Idol shows on Television. There were a couple of preliminary rounds early in the week, where the judges selected a small number of the entrants into the next round, and then a semi-final round and then the final round live with a real band. The band was:
1. Me
2. Robin on Drums
3. that is it
4. no more people
We rehearsed for most of Saturday afternoon with the singers, each for 15 mins or so. The disappointing thing was that only 1 of them had a chart, and that was the sheet music. They all just gave us a CD track and then expected us to re-create what was there. This is the reality of what people expect, but it is wrong.
Although all the contestants were young, and were supposed to be amateur as part of the conditions of entry, there was no encouragement for them to bring their own style or ideas into the music. And I think the worse part of it all is that they have no idea that this should be a consideration - the only idea is to re-create the original recording. To give the singers credit, most of them did a good to credible job but it was still somewhat…. unsatisfying. There was talk about a full concert for the finalists where they would get to sing more than one song. Perhaps things will be different then…..

has finished. I have greatly enjoyed working with the kids/people/young adults/people who sms me too much, and the staff - especially Hodge! He and I are very similar in attitude with enough difference to make life interesting. All in all a good show…
but…
it could have been better.
I don’t think I am ever totally happy with a production/concert. There is always things that can be done better, stronger, faster etc. I hope the actors realise that my comments were always supportive and yet, striving for better.
The next few weeks are full with gigs (I have no idea what a gig is anymore) - it is Xmas time and there is plenty of work for everyone. We shall just have to see if I make it through the next few days

goes on this week. It has been good to be doing something regular again, and I have greatly enjoyed working with the kids (young adults, whatevah… )The process has not be all plain sailing, however, and I hope that, if I get a chance to work at this school again in the musical program, that we can adjust some things. The biggest thing would have been for me to have been involved from the start! But that had little to do with the school, and more to do with the system. I am still not “officially” employed as all my documents from Australia haven’t arrived yet to prove I am who I am.

One of the students asked me about what music I listened to. I asked him exactly what he meant, and he replied: “When you are relaxing, what do you listen to?”
I said that I don’t relax when I listen to music (Still! and that is a good thing, yes?) I think this is still a weird stumbling block for a lot of people when they talk to musicians, or at least what I define as such. We don’t turn off, even in my current totally confused state, and that can be a problem talking to someone who is not full-time and who doesn’t understand why you don’t like (insert name here) because they are (funky/hot/danceable/melodic….) [pause to update iPod software]. The problem for me is that they are still not: harmonically interesting enough/too loud/not enough dynamics/german etc. I shall not turn that off.

[oh that is a good sign. The iPod now just shows the black screen with the Apple icon on it ]

I am still trying to get over an enormous writer’s (composer’s) block. I have come up with several ideas of how to try and overcome this, but it still is painful staring at the computer screen and not hearing what is there and then realising it is all pretty craptaculous, anyway. One thread that might start to work is re-reading the Richard Steinitz book on Ligeti (Amazon link coming). The idea of micropolyphony is grabbing whatever ideas I have and then tossing them through a massive symmetric harmonic sieve.
Does that makes sense??

[The iPod is working again, and I am transferring to it, a Steve Reich CD that I haven’t listened to in ages]

Now… I am employed by the Calgary Board of Education (CBE to the knowledgeable). I am working at Central Memorial High School for their PVA program (Performance and Visual Arts). I have 2 functions:

1. Accompanying Ballet Classes
2. Be the Musical Director for Seussical (the musical)

Other than it took weeks to go through the confirmation of employment step, this is now fun, again. The kids are great (and I am not just writing this because some of them happened on to this blog last week) and it is nice to be working collaboratively again.
The production of a musical should be collaborative; no one really knows enough about directing/acting/music/conducting/lighting/producing etc etc to do the whole thing by themselves. And yet…. how many times have I had to work in a non-collaborative environment? Many.. too many. The worst example was an amateur show sometime in the past, where the lighting guy (I am not even going to dignify him with the designer epitaph) was so insistent that his lighting was the most important part, that the show consisted of all the actors and musicians staring out in a very un-focussed way at the audience and bumping into each other, the set and off the stage.
I have attempted to sit down in front of the computer and compose - but it still isn’t there. I think that I have felt the muse moving more and more but there seems to be a block. I wonder how to get over that???

or whatever you want to call it. I have no idea if I am a tabula rasa or not. It is not that there are no (musical) experiences in my mind, just that most of them have disappeared. I have, as mentioned here before, been listening to a lot of music on my iPod trying to recover some of the memories and trying to get tunes into my head again. What I have discovered is:
I really really really hate Pop music and this now includes jazz.
I am professional enough to recognise that there are persons of quality producing this stuff (Kate Bush, Sigur Ros, Paul Simon, BT, The Cure, Dave Holland, Miles Davis, Pet Shop Boys to name a few that are on the iPod) but it all bores me. I hadn’t forgotten a love of my classical music and I think that that is going to be my listening from now on. I can not fully describe the joy of listening to Francis Dhomont’s Foret Profonde [I don’t know how to put the caret on the e, my apologies to the French readers among us] while walking to the wine shop this evening, or finding hidden pleasure in Copland’s Lincoln Portrait walking to school to pick up my daughter, or never being able to get through Michael Finnissy’s English Country-Tunes because the violence in the work overwhelms me.
There have been times in the past where people have accused me of being elitist. Too bad, I am. I care deeply about quality, and I care about nuance and I care about being challenged all of the time. I understand that this music is not for everyone, but if no one cares about these works and these composers, the whole culture dies.
and that is sad.

Ok. So I have “lost” my jazz aural memory, or a lot of my aural memory for some reason. I don’t know for how long this is going to happen, so I am trying to recapture, relearn, re-something or other the pieces I am “suppose” to know. In truth, my CD collection is lacking a lot of jazz - in fact, if your name is not Bill Evans or Brad Mehldau, you are not in my collection (This is not totally true. I have 2 CDs of Oscar Peterson, 2 of Dave Holland, 1 of someone else…). Thank someone for iTunes and other such sites. I have loaded my iPod with lots of pieces from different people and set the playback to shuffle and while I am walking around the place, I listen and try and guess what the piece is.

The other day, I heard something that was really really good. It was in 3, and I liked what was going on. I pressed rewind and listened to the thing 3 times just before picking up my daughter from school. I could not remember what the piece was, but I really wanted to see who it was, what it was and listen to more.

The answer: it was me. It was a demo recording I had done with a trio a couple of years ago trying to get some Christmas work. I really don’t know who else is on the recording, but I find this all rather pathetic

to a musician that doesn’t hear music anymore? I don’t mean a deaf musician (Beethoven and Evelyn Glennie) but someone who has heard music in his head for 20 years, and now, suddenly, it is not there anymore.
I am terrified about what has happened. I was called this morning to do an emergency gig with a Trumpet player with whom I don’t recall if we have played together before or not. (An emergency gig is one where the real pianist has double-booked themselves. The fact that this has happened to me several times this year, substituting for the same person, is interesting). The thought that I may have to lug a tune scares me. (To lug, means to play a tune from memory, and usually not perfectly but professionally). I can not hear the jazz standards that I am supposed to know, and can only play them if I have music in front of me. The physical memory of performance: how to put my fingers down, how to sit at the piano, even how to recognize chord symbols, are all still present. My theoretical knowledge (historical, music theory, composers etc etc) is still there but:
I can not hear it in my head.
I won’t talk about why this has happened - I think the answer lies here on the blog somewhere. What I am trying to face is this as a reality. Music does not calm me anymore, it does not centre me, it does not make me happy. I am still a musician, because that is what I am.
What happens next is going to be an interesting adventure