Writing

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: how nefarious nonartists cleverly imitate music - An article for the music journal Leonardo that discusses projects including the Tangerine Awkestra, Thai Elephant Orchestra, the People's Choice, and more (pdf)

Notes from under the floorboard - A chapter on creating new operas from a new book Live Movies (2006) on multimedia performance edited by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White (pdf )

The Thai Elephant Orchestra, a chapter from the book, Kinship With Animals (pdf )

The "Y2K bug" was a proposal by Jaron Lanier, Lisa Haney, and me as a millenial time capsule to preserve an issue of the New York Times Magazine by mutating cockroach DNA and then setting the little rascals loose in Manhattan. It was displayed at the Museum of National History and won second prize from the Times: we're lucky it didn't win first prize or we would have had to produce it.

Links to Times article reproduction (art by Lisa) and the full text (by Jaron) including the sections the Times didn't print, and a "review" in Nature.

Liner notes for Phill Niblock's string quartet CD, Early Winter These discuss the aural hallucinations Phill likes to produce in his music.

Liner notes for Otto Luening's orchestral CD An appreciation of Otto at ninety-three years of age for his only orchestral CD on Newport Classic.

A blindfold test with Otto Luening, conducted with Mark Dery from Keyboard Magazine

Dave's bio for concert programs

Liner notes from Phill Niblock's String Quartet record

These notes are from Phill's 1994 CD, Early Winter, consisting of two long works performed by the Soldier String Quartet. His music uses loud drones with that produce notes and melodies that aren't actually played.

Exactly what are the unplayed pitches that you might hear in this music? The highest pitch played in the String Quartet is roughly a G-sharp resting on the top line of the treble staff. The lowest note is played by the cello, around a G-flat at the bottom of the bass clef. If you hear higher or lower pitches (or pitches in the middle that are not centered around G-natural) and are listening with a good, distortion-free speaker and amplification system, you are hearing genuine auditory hallucinations that are produced in your ear. These pitches, called sum, difference, or combination tones, are determined by the played (fundamental) tones. For instance, if a violin is playing a pitch close to a G-sharp, say 420 Hz (cycles per second), and a viola plays a flatter pitch an octave lower, say 200 Hz, the sum tone is f1 + f2 = 620 Hz, the difference tone f1-f2 = 220 Hz, and the combination tones derived from harmonic frequencies, for example 2f1-f2 = 640 Hz. These auditory hallucinations are audible at sound pressure levels from about 20 dB to 65 dB.

Some of the physiological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are understood. The fundamental pitches stimulate mechanoreceptive cells, the so called "hair bundles" in the cochlea of the ear, by deflecting a mechanically sensitive area on the cell. This mechanical force results in the opening of electrical ion channels. The changes in cellular voltage produces a vibration of the bundles. Stimulated at a single frequency, a hair bundle will normally vibrate only at that frequency and its first harmonic (the octave). However, since the ion channels jump back and forth from open to closed states and their conformation is one of the components that affects the hair bundle's movement, there is a nonlinear relationship between the auditory stimulus and the hair bundle's movement.  With the addition of a second frequency, the cells also vibrate at the frequencies of the sum, difference, and combination tones. This does not occur after a similar stimulation of an inert object such as a glass fiber; the extra pitch hallucinations are apparently the result of the opening and closing cellular ion channels. The hair bundle's vibrations are transmitted to the ear's basilar membrane and, eventually, to the cortex which appears to be responsible for pitch perception.

- Dave Soldier 's day job is as an assistant professor in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Liner notes for Otto Luening's orchestral CD

These notes are from Otto's (only) orchestral CD, Otto Luening: Orchestral Works Newport Classic, recorded by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Richard Auldon Clark conductor, in 1993. Otto was 93 at the time, and it was a chance to thank him for being a mentor. Incidentally, following Schoenberg's lead, he charged for composing lessons, which consisted mostly of his critiques of my scores.

Otto Luening has a quality in greater abundance than any other working composer, and perhaps the best name for the quality is perspective. Through times of optimism and eras of social and personal tragedy, Luening continues on an astonishing path to rediscover himself. The orchestral works performed here range over seventy-five years from those by a Luening in his late teens under the spells of Richard Strauss and his mentor Ferruccio Busoni, to a Luening in his nineties with a tremendous formal and stylistic breadth. But more stunning than the length of this journey is the realization that this composer of incomparable experience chooses now not to write in some easily digested style for a mass audience, but to write some of the craggiest, most challenging work of his career. One suspects that Otto is telling us that the greatest gift an artist can bestow is not something smoothed over or simplified in an attempt to be universal, but to give one's own singular honest view of the world.

One of the perspectives from Luening's vantage has to do with the silliness of identifying oneself by ready-made labels, like "experimental" or "conservative" composer. During some periods, Luening has been portrayed as America's most experimental composer. For example, in collaboration with Vladimir Ussachevsky, he produced the first electronic pieces on this hemisphere, developed means to combine acoustic and electronic instruments, and helped form an audience for electronic music; he knew Benny Goodman, "Fatha" Hines, and other members of the Chicago jazz school in the early twenties and wrote a large scale concert jazz piece with Ernst Bacon, Coal Scuttle Blues, before Ellington or Gershwin; became immersed in Vedic philosophy nearly seventy years ago, and as a result wrote the Trio for Flute, Violin, & Soprano,  as Henry Cowell stated, the first aleatoric concert work; performed as a pianist/composer for the original Dada events with Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917; wrote some of the first music based directly on the overtone series as explored by the German polymath Helmholtz; studied Schonberg's Harmonielehre when he was twelve years old; and was a close confidant of Edgar Varese, Cowell, Carl Sandburg, Martha Graham, and Harry Partch - in fact, Partch thought that Luening, who arranged his first New York concert, first financial backing for his work, and critiqued his theoretical works, was his earliest major supporter in the musical world and asked him write the introduction for Genesis of a Music.

But Luening's music also comes from Wagner, with whom Otto's father closely collaborated, Richard Strauss, and his teachers Busoni and Philipp Jarnach. He says that he  became hooked on music by singing folk songs as a small child on the farm in Wisconsin. Like Bach, Brahms, and other musicians of the European "classical" tradition, he practiced music from different perspectives; as conductor, composer, a performer on flute, piano, organ, and percussion. His experience as a conductor alone is astounding; after working under the greats of the early part of the century (he maintains a particular fondness for Arthur Nikisch and Strauss), he conducted in Zurich, in vaudeville, on Broadway, for the first opera company devoted to American opera and opera orchestras formed by the W.P.A., premiered Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All and Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium, revived Paisiello's Barber of Seville, and led a Croatian folk choir based in a Chicago tavern. And in his seventies when he noticed he had begun to lose some of his amazing power of memory, he reversed the decline through daily memorization of a new movement from Haydn's piano sonatas. (Otto will read through your orchestra score and later quote to you what the French horns are doing on the two hundredth measure.)

All this makes Luening an uncomfortable subject for music writers and musicologists, who need to invent categories and hierarchies to try to make sense of a complex real world. Luening says that he has long felt justified in using any style to make a musical statement and that he will tailor the style to the temperament and specialties of a particular performer. Still, one of his favorite pieces of advice for the em-erging composer (Otto now refers to himself as a sub-merging composer, and feels a great kinship between the two) is "Don't let them tell you who you are. You tell them who you are."

Luening's perspective on the history of the culture can be a bracing tonic. Recently we discussed cocaine abuse in New York. He said, "This is the third cocaine epidemic I've experienced. The first was in Wisconsin, when some of my father's university students were addicted to cocaine sold as patent medicines in pharmacies. The second was in Zurich during World War I, when many of Jung's followers and the Dadaists developed a habit." Indeed, one can be quite intimidated knowing that the man to whom you are speaking followed Lenin and his entourage as they boarded the train on their return to Russia following the Bolshevik revolution, that he attempted to visit the Dachau concentration camp in 1936, that he investigated the musical foundations of Irish-spoken English with James Joyce during the period Joyce was writing Ulysses, that he knew the traditional culture of the Bavarian peasants as a participant. Whenever one demonstrates something one thinks is a new musical idea to Otto, he will say "Well, you know this direction was explored in detail by such and such fifty or several hundred years ago. You really should study the scores of Byrd, or Carpenter, or Debussy, or Ziehn, or Varese, and see how they did it." I find that Otto is always right about recommending these unexpected sources and suspect that the innumerable composers and performers he has supported over the years have found the same thing.

Luening's perspective also provides the foundation for an amazing iconoclasm in taste. For instance, during my last visit he was rhapsodic in praise for the contemporary composer/flutist Robert Dick and the singer/composer Mary Jane Leach. These opinions are startling not because Luening has more than fifty years of experience over these musicians, but because he doesn't feel any need to be cautious and wait until their work has been established into some hierarchy. One comment he made was "People say that Leach's music is hard to listen to. Well, Beethoven's music is hard to listen to - at first." He has also expressed enthusiasm to me for works by the Bulgarian Woman's Choir, Gil Evans, Gyorgi Ligeti, and Frank Zappa.

Luening's interest in creating a climate for others to make music led him to cofound artist's cooperatives including the American Music Center and CRI Records. This selfless support of those who would be creative musicians continues, and he is currently coaching a composer just out of college, Dan Cooper. Dan joins a list of such stylistic breadth that only Otto could understand it, including Harvey Sollberger, Gil Goldstein, Partch, John Corigliano, Ezra Laderman, Nicholas Russakis, Malcolm Goldstein, William Hellerman, Charles Wuorinen, Alice Shields, William Kraft, and Wendy Carlos. Yet despite the fact that these people and the many others may feel as if they have nothing in common, they seem unified in following some of the specific lessons that Luening teaches. Among these are 1) Pay attention to register, since counterpoint changes according to the audibility of overtones, a point he thinks neglected in musical education. He also feels that careful study of counterpoint is important no matter what one's style, and that even if one's writing is not contrapuntal, all good composers are united with a foundation in contrapuntal hearing. 2) Pay attention to dynamics and phrase markings, parts of the language of written music that also feels are usually insufficiently addressed. 3) Acquire real life experience as a performer, whether as an instrumentalist or conductor. 4) Study cultural history, because "what is old is new". He also repeats Busoni's maxim that every experiment needs to result in a piece with a beginning, middle, and end. 5) There is no handed-down path for a composer, and everyone must try to figure it out as an individual. This point seems to grow out of Luening's lifelong personal motto and koan, "Know thyself, physician heal thyself."

Beyond his concern for the artistic development of others, Luening continues his own musical odyssey. For the latest addition to his canon of over fifty orchestral works, we thank the wonderful young conductor Richard Auldon Clark and his Manhattan Chamber Orchestra. Luening tells me that he would like to continue in this direction, particularly in writing shorter orchestra pieces, but is somewhat concerned about the costs of copying parts. Frankly, this country should not allow such a situation and one hopes that the evidence on this recording will generate support for Luening's continued orchestral compositions. Still, just as he would advise emerging composers, he is currently writing for smaller forces, setting poems from James Joyce's Chamber Music for voice and piano. Although others can set these poems to music, only Luening was a member of Joyce's theater troupe, The English Players, in Zurich during the second decade of the century, and only Luening was coached by Joyce in his approach to words and diction. This return to a singular personal history tempered by a tremendous journey of development in discipline, achievement, and reflection, results in the individual perspective that makes the work of artists like Joyce and Luening so important for the wide world.

Blindfold test with Otto Luening

Conducted by Dave Soldier and Mark Dery

Published January 1991 in Keyboard Magazine

Even at 90 years and counting, Otto Luening hasn’t quite had the time to hear every new work that’s come down the pike. So we thought we’ borrowed an idea from Leonard Feather’s classic down beat Blindfold Tests, choose a few provocative pieces, and play them for Luening. His responses offer insight into both his own compositional aesthetic and the material on our selected recordings.

“Tre Nel 5000” by John Zorn, from The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone [Nonesuch/Icon].

Luening: The first reaction I have is that the various sections of the piece, where things are coming in and out, project all right in terms of sound. He’s got a pretty good sense of balance, but the shifts, the changes, are pretty fast. Whether the piece is successful depends on who’s supposed to listen to it and how well they’re supposed to listen. An untrained listener who hadn’t listened to much might listen to this and think it was a very exciting thing. A more experienced listener, I think, would begin by saying, “Well, I get the confusion, but the details don’t stay in my mind. I come away with feeling of nostalgia about these genres, a feeling of ‘The good old days were so beautiful, but my God, all you get now are the terrors.’ It’s a daily newspaper reconstituted as music ….. If that’s what the composer wants to project, well then, he’s succeeded. It’s not exactly what I would do myself, because I get that sort of information from television; I don’t need it in music.

“Svabata,” from Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares [Elektra/Nonesuch].

Luening: Whoever wrote this piece has a pretty good sense of vocal writing, and he’s also very sensitive to speech. He employs a scale formation which he uses sufficiently to sketch in a harmonic idea so that the general sound sinks in. This means that he’s able, as a result, to do a great deal with speech rhythms. He gets counter-rhythms and other things going. He also knows the value of repetition, even in a short piece, but also the value of not doing it too long. In other words, he has a sense of proportion, even in a piece of this length. I’m prejudiced toward short pieces; I like the condensed statement. The harmonic concept here is very interesting. He’s got a kind of contrapuntal movement, mostly around this certain scale formation. It isn’t tonal and it isn’t chromatic; it’s a modal adaptation, a scale that he’s picked up somewhere or made up himself. But he sticks with the scale sufficiently for the harmonic structure to come through.

“Young Once” by Scott Johnson, from Patty Hearst: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [Eleketra/Nonesuch].

Luening: The composer sounds as if he was trained in this country; he doesn’t sound like a European. On first hearing, I would say that he knows something about harmony, about the overtone series; in certain spots, the music gets polytonal. He has a lyric quality, that’s his main drive, but he must have composed a fair amount because he also has enough sense to know that can’t go on with the lyric thing forever. So he shakes his lyric things up and has contrapuntal devices going, some imitations and some figuration, to keep things from sagging. Where I feel he’s lacking a little is in the articulation of the phrasing to bring out his thoughts; he gives it to us in a big pudding–a pudding with some very nice ingredients, but it’s a pudding nonetheless. Another thing I’d say about it, technically speaking, is that he ought to get his instruments moving a little more. He sits on them on pedal points that don’t help much: instead they detract from listening to some of the nice things that are going on in the higher registers. You can’t hear them because you’ve got that glue down there, gumming things up.

Fourth Etude (“Fanfares”), by Gyorgi Ligeti, from Gorgy Ligeti: etudes pur piano {Wergo].

Luening: I’ve heard some playing along these lines, most of it done by that guy in Buffalo, Yvar Mikashoff. This piece is very funny because it’s hard to tell whether it’s a live piano or a mechanical one. It’s a live piano playing very mechanically, but nice mechanical. It sounds very much like Nancarrow. It’s probably by a pianist, or if not a pianist by somebody who is associated with pianists like Ursula Oppens and that bunch, who are very good at this sort of thing. Stockhausen could do something like this. People like him and Cage want to astonish you, and they’ll come up with something entirely different that they’ve never touched before. It’s a skillful piece of music, very well constructed. Within the virtuosity, it’s terrific. I’ll tell you what my criticism of the piece is: the overdoing of the scale. It’s like the overdoing of the beat, or overdoing of anything. I don’t need it, I get the point, and I’d like to be able to hear the other things he’s doing, which interest me more. I like the crashing chord at the end; he has to do that to over the mechanical thing and come to some sort of a conclusion…. It reminds me of a friend of Beethoven’s, Czerny, an excellent composer who wrote some concert etudes that sound like this, where he’s doing everything under the sun. It’s not the same things as Liszt where when he does an etude, he does all sort of other things besides virtuoso display or Chopin, which is a whole different ball game….At any rate, this piece could be by Elliott Carter, who sometimes does stuff like this. And it could easily have been figured out by Milton Babbitt. Will, I give up.

Gyorgi Ligeti.

Luening: Ligeti? I’ll be damned! I admire him enormously as a composer, but I would never have figured he’d write something like this! But this is another example of what you get with the basic training: A guy can turn around and, if he has to, write a virtuosos piece for piano. And he’s done it so beautifully. He’s really managed to capture the character of Nancarrow on a real piano, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Dave Soldier bio for concert programs

Dave Soldier played violin in Western swing bands and guitar in rhythm and blues groups, including Bo Diddley, and studied composition with Roscoe Mitchell before moving to New York City in the early 80’s, where he studied with Otto Luening. In 1985, he founded a seminal punk chamber group, the Soldier String Quartet, followed bythe punk Delta blues band, the Kropotkins, the first orchestra for animals, the Thai Elephant Orchestra, of Lampang , and the Andalusian band, the Spinozas and Da Hiphop Raskalz, in which 6-8 year olds in East Harlem write and play their own compositions.

In addition to the repertoire for the above performing groups, Soldier’s compositions include The People’s Choice Music: the most wanted and unwanted songs, following poll results of likes and dislikes of the American population, a collaboration with artists Komar & Melamid; collaborations with Kurt Vonnegut; repertoire for musically naïve children or performed on specially designed instruments by songbirds and pygmy chimpanzees; music performed by brainwave activity with EEGs: arrangements for John Cale, David Byrne, and Guided by Vocies, and various song cycles /oratorios/ operas and TV and film soundtracks including I Shot Andy Warhol and Sesame Street, and has played on many pop, jazz, experimental, and classical recordings. Many of his recordings are available through Mulatta Records (www.mulatta.org).

He received a Ph.D in neuroscience at Columbia University, where he is a professor in the Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience departments. Soldier’s Symphony #1 was recently recorded by the Thai Elephant Orchestra.

jotting & manifestos

Overview of Dave Soldier's compositions

When I was a kid in the midwest in the 70’s (St. Paul MN and Carbondale IL), and later living in East Lansing MI, Gainesville FL, Boston and Boulder, and touring in bar bands, I played classical viola, some piano, country fiddle and bluegrass banjo, and rock and R&B guitar. In Gainesville, for instance, I might  play guitar with Bo Diddley one night, jazz guitar in the Gainesville Jazz All Stars the next, violin in the U of Florida orchestra the next, bluegrass at an outdoor auction the next, and then a Prince cover band at a backwoods R&B joint. I don't see why I have to forget any of that music as a composer.

After a year and a half on the road with a western swing band in the Colorado area and in New England, I moved to NYC in '81 . In NYC, I still performed with a wide range of musicians- sometimes surreal like Peter Seeger and Richard Hell the same day.

My problem in NYC, and now with the classical world, is it seemed that the composers and visual artists chose a style and followed it for their entire productive lives. I decided to make the music I want to, regardless of the economic pressure to present an identity - my identity is what I do and love, only. I follow whatever ideas I find interesting and think that stylistic labels should arrive after the music is made.

I never attended a conservatory or music department, received a prize, fellowship, residency, or paid commission. I am an outsider in the classical and jazz worlds, and I take some pride in being an outsider who listens both in and out. I know that I am part of an ongoing tradition, and many of my heros, including Harry Partch, Roscoe Mitchell, Miles and Conlon Nancarrow might feel the same way.

My partner in Mulatta, Ayo Osinibi, and I started our own label for my work and others that fall between the cracks. I put groups together to perform my compositions, like the Soldier String Quartet (1985), the Kropotkins (1994 or so), the Spinozas (2004), the Thai Elephant Orchestra (2000).

Music with unconventional collaborators

I discovered the work by the painters Komar and Melamid in the late 80's and was a fan before collaborating with them. There was that same honesty of interest that I felt with Miles Davis. If you love something in art, it’s yours, even to make fun of. K&M collaborated with chimps, elephants, and with The People's Choice project, The Will of The People. The other inspiration was composer Butch Morris – around ’85, Jason Kao Hwang, Billy Bang, and me were a small string section for Butch and tried to figure out what his hand gestures meant as he was working them out. Butch showed me how you can whip a bunch of musicians into shape, and so I've kind of melded Butch’s approach with K&M’s.

First I worked with kids from West Harlem on the piece Matarile (1991-3), which was also inspired by Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge – I thought we’d try one that reflected where and how we lived in the late 80's and early 90’s, back when you could hear gun shots every night in their neighborhood. You’ll have to believe me that these extremely sweet little kids could identify different guns by sound and imitate them. The kids made ALMOST all the sounds, and Rory Young and I just mixed a lot.

Later I met the avant garde flutist and Brooklyn school teacher Katie Down, and we coached her class in making an Avant Garde group,  which they named the Tangerine Awkestra (2000). Here the kids made ALL the sounds and I hardly mixed at all. I think they slam dunk lots of grown up recordings.
All of the humans blow up
The Aliens blow up Antarctica
Everything is soft

Nowadays (2004-present), I’m working with 5-10 year olds in Spanish Harlem after school. I thought they would want to play meringue or bachata, but they all want to play hiphop, so we’re in the process of making a fantastic CD. I coach, the kids play all the instruments, write all the lyrics, but usually I mix alone, though sometimes they do it with me. They name each band, and named the whole project Da Hiphop Raskalz.
Do the Lollipop
I Want Candy

In 2007 I coached composing and performing with Mayan Indian kids in San Mateo Guatemala, and this music ought to come out soon.

My first connection with Komar & Melamid was because they let me use a painting for the cover of my CD Smut (1992), and over the years we developed ideas about a neo-Socialist Realist opera based on visions in their paintings which we titled Naked Revolution (1997).

They were in the midst of designing paintings determined by national surveys of likes and dislikes, and so I suggested that we try it with music as well, which became The People's Choice: Music (1997). I wrote the survey, and with lyricist Nina Makin, wrote The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Music. These pieces ought to be accompanied by answers to the survey, which you can read on the Mulatta website, or better yet, buy the CD and see them all displayed.

K&M had also been collaborating with animals for years, starting with a dog in the 70’s in Russia. They started painting with elephants at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, which suggested to me and Richard Lair, one of the Center’s directors, to see if elephants could play music, particularly as elephants often like to listen to music. We started the Thai Elephant Orchestra in 2000 and it's still going strong - I'm in the midst of working on a third CD.
Thung Kwian Sunrise
Ganesha Triumphant (4th movement of Symphony #1, The Ganesha),
Little Elephant Saddle (traditional Northern Thai song played by the orchestra with me on violin)

Turns out songbirds will also play instruments if they are provided with something ergonomic to trigger and if they like the sound - they like brass instruments and hate distorted rock guitar. The late Gordon Shaw and I started to coach pygmy chimps, and I am pretty sure that they would enjoy playing instruments given the opportunity and plenty of human coaching.
Zebra finches playing brass samples (2004) playing bigband samples and gamelan samples.

Not a collaboration, as the performers don't know they are participating, but here is a "fugue" I made from crickets, fish, frogs, and nightbirds in the swamp. It's the last track of "Inspect for Damaged Gods", which I purposely left unmentioned in the cover notes.
Marsh Fugue (2004)

The Song

"Song" structure pervades our culture so much that it's what most people think of when they think of "music". I've tried to figure out where that came from, and am now sure it's from the confluence of cultures in medieval Spain. It long predates any kind of division of music between "pop" and "classical" music. My new group, The Spinozas (2004-present), explores the very beginning of song form, that is with verse and chorus, from Andalusia.
Bima

I had explored this interest earlier in very early Christian songs in Smut, mostly by monks in Latin, starting as early as the 400's AD. None had verse and chorus, though, until after the Spaniards. This came about both because I love Ars Nova (see below, contrapuntal explorations) but because in early 90’s members of Congress were saying that only modern art extolled homosexuality. We need to bring back a classical education in this country where you read Plato and Sappho! Here's my melody for some 12th century drinking and sex lyrics,
Dum Caupona Verterem
Ad Puerum Anglicum
Graffiti from a 10th century manuscript
Parisius Paridi

My favorite musician forever will I think be Bill Monroe, who made me want to play and write music. I heard and later visited Othar Turner, and that with Bill, Howlin’ Wolf 78’s I collected when a kid in Carbondale, a visit to hear unreleased north Mississippi tapes by Alan Lomax at the Smithsonian, and my impatience with vast rock sound systems while on tour with John Cale led to the inspiration for the Kropotkins (1992, and still going on occasions). With these old American instruments, everything can be played without electonics at a barbeque. I get to work with Lorette Velvette and some of my favorite American players.
Sissywawa
Everdream
Here'some Kropotkins material that can be played without sound systems and electroincs
Forever Motel (sung by Moe Tucker, lyrics from a poem by her brother James)
Truckstop Girls
Justice Down South in a style I associate with Bessie Smith

With my string quartet, I eventually felt a little frustrated in only communicating to bohemians and academics, and thought I’d incorporate our Tin Pan Alley and R&B traditions. I  think it helped bring in good ideas and new listners, but alienated contemporary music insiders. I still wonder how to solve this problem, which is way more about politics and power than art – the contemporary music establishment can justify the most tired self-congratulatory work and hates to be challenged from the outside, but controls whatever new work can be performed by orchestras and ensembles.
Michael Callen (1997) and N'Orleans (1993) sung by Jimmy Justice.

Rhythmic and contrapuntal explorations

I’ve always loved syncopation and counterpoint, first in the funk and rhythm and blues I grew up hearing, later in medieval and baroque music, salsa and flamenco. I've tried various ways to figure it out. I based my own system of overlapping different rhythms, based in part on studying the theorists Bernard Ziehn (suggested by my composition coach, Otto Luening) and Heinrich Schenker and then by figuring out how syncopations arise in R&B and salsa, and now in flamenco. I was really effected by Conlon Nancarrow and Gyorgi Ligeti's piano pieces, still am, and also try to find a different way than what they've done.

I realized that a lot of this was already in Ars Nova, and wrote a book of Hockets and Inventions (1987-1989) exploring how music could have turned out if that style continued. These get progressively more involved and are in two and three parts that could be played by any instruments, but all written to be playable by organ. They are performed by Walter Hilse.
Hocket I, Invention 1, Hocket II, Invention 2, Hocket III, Invention 3, Hocket IV, Invention 4, Hocket V, Invention 5, Hocket VI, Invention 6

Here’s an example of a Hocket Letter to Ausonius and a Quodlibet (1991), also made from overlapping themes, from Smut (1991).

The Soldier String Quartet really let me explore some of my favorite ways of deriving these new part juxtapositions, and I started it in part because in the early 80’s, the string quartet seemed so quaint… hard to believe now. Having virtuoso players helped with the otherwise impossible to execute rhythms (unless you use electronics) and, it seems that a small group of devoted players is the only way to do it. Maybe orchestras will one day…

Bo Diddley, obviously composed by Bo, but I've changed it to fun with his rhythms. Regina Carter solos and Jimmy Justice and Tiye' Giraud sing. Bo said he likes it.

Can you imply the counterpoint without stating it? Of course Bach did -- here’s  some other approaches in part from Utah Dances (1990), using baroque dance forms since it was 90th birthday present for Otto Luening who loved these forms. Performed on sax by Michael Schwartz.
Gigue, Fugue in one voice, Cortijo, Allemande, Forty-niner and double.

Virtuoso pieces

Duo Sonata (1989) played by Laura Seaton and Erik Friedlander on violin and cello.
Reverie
Lent:scordatura
Tribute Electric

East St Louis, 1968 (1999) as played by Richard Auldon Clark on viola with a CD. A little from found cassettes, but almost all made on synth and on mic - I am very proud of my harmonica playing at the end. Tell me if you recognize the preacher (so far only Leroy Jenkins has) or where one of the riffs came from (Ezster Balint so far the only one). I tried to make a portrait of some of my early life as a viola player exploring my home town.

From Sontag in Sarajevo (1994); the first of two movements, Fluor Phosphor Lumen and Candle for violin, accordion, electric guitar, and cello (Regina Carter, Anne de Maranis, me, and Dawn Buckholtz Avery).

A feature for clarinet rom Ice 9 Ballads, from an incident in the book that the piece is meant to accompany, Duo for Clarinet and Meade Lux Lewis.

A piece for balaphone (aka gyli) and chamber orchestra, performed by Valerie Naranjo, part of Ice-9 Ballads, Mona's Funeral Music.

To Spike Jones in Heaven (1989) for accordion and tape, performed by William Schimmel.

Older piano pieces (1986) from Romances from the second line, performed by Christopher O'Riley
Le Belvedere portrays Ravel's ghost wandering his home
Letter to Skip James
Easy Street

Sojourner Truth (1989) for string quartet

Telling stories with music

These pieces, which I've been doing since 1992, seem to get me in the most trouble – they are completely ignored by the media - there has been a single review of one of them one time (Soldier's Story by Time Out NY), and I think it’s because they are too simple and straightforward for critics. They really aren't meant to be in the world of "contemporary music" though, rather to magnify the stories and the emotions that are in them, like a mass. I think they are in a tradition that includes country and western story songs, like Hank Williams’ Luke the Drifter. There are a lot of unusual techniques and approaches that haven't been used in composed concert music, some from African or country western records and others I have made up.

I was encouraged by Richard Auldon Clark, conductor of the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, who is behind and understands this work, and also Kurt Vonnegut

Some of these pieces are pretty long for mp3 downloads, and the Apotheosis of John Brown with lyrics from Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain's War Prayer and Soldier's Story, a radio opera with lyrics by Kurt Vonnegut are each over 30 minutes.

Ice-9 Ballads (1995) featuring the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra is set asa series of songs, here are couple of selections.
Annihilation Life featuring Kurt's voiceover.
Dyot Meet Mat (God made mud), Kurt's prayer of extreme unction, featuring vocalist Jimmy Justice.

A story about an incarnation of God in Rhippdur India, Boogie on party people featuring Soldier String Quartet, Tiye' Giraud and Jimmy Justice singing, Jonathan Kane on drums, Vlaerie Naranjo on gyli, and Richard Bona on bass.

Transcriptions

I've long written careful transcriptions of thorny American unnotated music to make its own kind of piece, trying to keep and accentuate all of the odd and trick parts.

I tried to figure out what the blues rhythms were saying so naturally, and I love blues. So I did lots of these transcriptions, starting in a concert with big band at Giorigo Gomelski's in 1983 where I spread out a Robert Johnson guitar voicing for the whole group. I worked them out as well as I could hear them. They never sound “authentic” but they can make good music.

Preachin' Blues by Robert Johnson
Ugly by Robert Pete Williams, sung by Tiye' Giraud
Moanin' at Midnight by Howlin' Wolf sung by Bobby Radcliffe featuring Lenny Pickett on tenor sax.

I applied the same thing to other kinds of unnotated music.
Here Comes the King by Raymond Scott (who had a lead sheet I saw thanks to Irwin Chusid) for string quartet and percussion isn't challenging listening, but is fun. Regina Carter played an improvisedsolo.
Water Babies by Wayne Shorter from a Miles version, here featuring Robert Dick on flute with Richard Bona improvising on bass on Jazz Standards on Mars.
In Time by Sly Stone for string quartet.

These aren't really transcriptions, but the Kropotkins bring their own spirit to them
Parchman Farm by Bukka White
Shake 'em on down by Fred MacDowell

Here are arrangements where I take a lot of liberties with the originals
Gazzeloni by Eric Dolphy, featuring Robert Dick on flute
India by John Coltrane, also with Robert