Back on campus... and more "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration

I was back on campus at Surrey yesterday, for the first day of the rest of the second semester, and a busy day it was too.

I wrote a little while back about my recent adventures in art song, adapting three of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets for voice and guitar for submission to Surrey's annual Joyce Dixey composition competition. I'll be writing about how it all went shortly. In the meantime, yesterday I had to deliver a 15-minute talk as part of this semester's composition module and used my EBB work as a basis for this. This is the second presentation I've done on the course, and I have to say, I find it far from easy. I'm more than used to presenting in public, but always in, broadly speaking, a business context. The academic presentation is a very different beast, and I definitely have work to do in this area. I was struck in the Q&A session that I hadn't really fully closed the loop in various arguments. In particular, I opened the presentation with some comments on the controversies around setting poetry to music, but didn't really address this when discussing my own practice. In general, I think I need to be more mindful of tying theory and history to personal practice, especially if I want to take this whole practice-as-research business any further.

The afternoon involved a guitar lesson with the excellent Paul Thomas (working on some technical exercises to try to get my chops back up to scratch after a bit of workload-induced neglect of late) and a final bit of vocal recording with Yi.

L-R: Jeongyi, Yi, Chaoran

The afternoon closed with another session working with Yi, Jeongyi and Chaoran on our "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration, which I introduced a few posts back. I was initially a little nervous about this project, not least with some of the potential linguistic and cultural barriers it presents, but as it happens it's quickly turning into the most enjoyable part of the course so far. We actually all got together on campus over the Easter break to do some work and have been swapping ideas, scores and recordings over WhatsApp throughout. So far we've got a structure in place for the performance, have chosen the songs and decided on arrangements for each. I'm not going to lie (as my kids say), it's going to be an odd little piece, but I think it's going to work. Of course, I'd always like to push things in weirder directions, but I think we've arrived at a good series of compromises. And in any case there's still a few weeks to go.

I've dropped ever so slightly into project manager mode. Our course leader Tom Armstrong suggested I was the group's secretary, and I do sometimes feel like my allotted role in life is to be the guy with the whiteboard marker. 

Project wrangling aside, we mostly worked today on the song "Why Let Me Fall in Love with You", from an existing Chinese musical based on the Butterfly Lovers story. Here it is in all its West End-y glory (and yes, it does feel weird posting this on this blog, but discomfort is at least one of the drivers of this course module):

Here's the thing though, there's a point in this song (which is something of a classic musical theatre portmanteau) where a rather lovely pentatonic melody emerges (at about 3.30 in the YouTube clip above) which, when sung by Jeongyi and Yi, and stripped of all the orchestrational melodrama, was really quite captivating. I asked them if I could record them singing the passage a cappella, as it felt like there was some real magic here. I've ended up turning it into something resembling my usual work, and hopefully this is something we can use as an atmosphere in the final "show":

I'm not sure what my collaborators think of this kind of approach, given the lack of response on WhatsApp. Maybe they've got better things to do than respond to my nonsense, or maybe they hate it. Who knows? But in the meantime, Chaoran has sent me a recording of the piano part from this section of the song (and I should add: within about 15 minutes of me asking for it!) and I look forward to making some lovely weirdness from it.

Jeongyi and Yi in a cappella mode

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Atmosphere

The return of Platform, Brighton

Brighton-based guitarist and teacher Jon Rattenbury has been organising his "Platform" events down here for some years now. Billed as "an afternoon of guitar music by local amateur musicians", the events are a great opportunity for guitarists of all levels to perform for their peers. Most - but not all - of the performances are classical guitar-based, and range from solo pieces to duets and small ensembles. Jon's own Brighton Classical Guitar Group, comprising many of his own students, are often the centerpiece of the afternoon.

I've been playing at the event for some years now, doing my first one 18 months or so after taking up the instrument. I've played solo, in Jon's ensemble, in a duo with Tina Oberman, and in (if memory serves) four iterations of the Brighton Classical Guitar Quartet, directed by my own teacher Gregg Isaacson. 

What's so great about the event is how mutually supportive it is. Some of the less experienced players are clearly putting themselves through this as a bit of an ordeal (making their performances all the more impressive, to my mind), and they receive nothing by encouragement from the audience.

Anyway, the event has been on hold for a couple of years, for all too obvious reasons. Jon actually revived the event at the end of last year, but Omicron kept some of us away. So yesterday's event felt like the real return of something of an institution. 

Unfortunately, the BGQ couldn't play, but two of Gregg's other quartets did - and were in great form. My buddy from the BGQ, Olivier Thereux played two lovely pieces: Katharina Sydney Pratten's "Forgotten" and Julian Arcas' "Bolero". As for me, I was feeling a little reluctant to perform, to be honest, especially after my "shaky" performance (thanks, James) in the Springboard competition a couple of months back; a broken boiler incident on the morning of the event, with its attendant momentary breakdown in marital bliss rather shook me up as well. In the end, ST insisted I took part and I'm glad I did. I rolled out Turina's "Hommage À Tarrega" again and was reasonably happy with the results. Of course, adrenalin was there in spades, but for once it didn't completely wreck my right hand, which was just as well given the very fast triplets in the piece's second half.

So, huge thanks to Jon for organising and to everyone else for throwing themselves into the proceedings so wholeheartedly. Here's to the next one.

Oh, and here are some pics from the event:

The Brighton Classical Guitar Group

Gregg's guitar quartet 1

Olivier

Gregg's guitar quartet 2

The view from the stage

Your correspondent

 

 

More art song struggles

As I reported a couple of blog posts back, I'm having a crack at writing art songs, and my God it's hard. I'm arranging three of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's early sonnets for guitar and voice; my fellow student Yi Zhang has agreed to sing them, although her reaction to the first of them, "Perplexed Music" was, well, appropriately perplexed. Tricky intervals, apparently. Oh, and it turns out that singers need to breathe. I clearly have work to do - and the deadline for the competition into which I'm hoping to enter these - fully scored and recorded - is just two weeks ago. Great. 

I thought I might be cutting myself some slack by setting sonnets - after all, "sonetto" is Italian for "little song". Turns out I should have dug a little deeper. As Stephanie Burt and David Mikics note in the introduction to The Art of the Sonnet, their excellent 2010 collection of 100 sonnets in English from the last five centuries: "The Sonnet, however, was no song. It was asymmetrical, suited to meditative logic rather than music." Not that that's stopped composers setting sonnets to music, of course - especially Shakespeare's. Mike Ingham cites Parry, Stravinsky, Britten, Dankworth and Rufus Wainwright in a 2013 analytical essay on musical settings of Shakespeare's sonnets*, which is all well and good, but my compositional chops aren't quite at that level. No, really, they're not. 

With both of the adaptations I've attempted so far, I've started with rhythm. The sonnet adheres to a strict iambic pentameter, so getting a poem to fit musical meter should be straightforward, right? Well, not so much. The lines of course do strictly come out as di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum, which initially suggests something like a 12/8 rhythm starting on an anacrusis. But that becomes boring very quickly. Like, within half a line. Instead, with both poems, I've started out writing a rhythmic outline (without melody or harmony) that feels as though it makes both rhythmic and syntactical sense, and at least has the potential to be musically interesting. Here's the first page of my initial rhythmic sketch for "The Seraph and the Poet":

 

 

To be totally honest, there's no real logic at work here - this bit is done pretty much intuitively.

But you might also have noticed a couple of other things in there: "guitar interlude" and "volta". Without wishing to go completely EngLit 101 on this, the sonnet is as formally fixed as it is rhythmically. As far as I understand it - and admittedly that might not be too far - the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet divides into eight lines (the "octave") and six (the "sestet"). The English, or Shakespearean sonnet, by contrast, divides into three quatrains of four lines and a final couplet. Importantly, both forms have a "volta" around the ninth and eleventh lines respectively: a response, a rebuttal, a change in tone, or a simple, "yeah, whatever".

And this is a Godsend musically, as it suggests a clear structural template. After all, a friend once described me as a "map head" (and he didn't mean this as a compliment): I really do think in shapes. So before writing a note, I've got not only a rhythmic outline but an overall structure. Next then, get that down into Sibelius:

 

 

Next up: harmony. Honestly, I'd love to tell you it was the melody. "For me, melody is the most important factor in music," argues Smith Brindle convincingly in his 1986 Musical Composition. I'm sure he's right, but I can imagine a drum sound more clearly than imagine a new melody. So you work with the meagre talents the Universe has given you. In the case of this piece, I recycled some elements of a sketch I'd done earlier this semester in response to a lecture on Neo Riemannian Theory. The post-"volta" section is an entirely Lydian passage, which was suggested by the poem's tone at that point, at least to me. I have no idea whether seraphs harbour a fondness for the Lydian mode, and I hope not to find out any time soon. 

Anyway, the melody comes last and it was both a. implied by the harmony and b. a total slog to write. I can only hope that it's vaguely singable. 

Here's the first draft of the score (I stress first draft - there's a lot to be done on dynamics, phrasing and so on):

 

And, finally, if you've made it this far, here's what it sounds like rendered as very, very, hokey midi:

 

Simon Hopkins · The Seraph And The Poet

* "The true concord of well-tuned sounds: Musical adaptations of Shakespeare's sonnets" 

 

Musical theatre, kinda...

Tom suggested recently that I should point my collaborators at some alternative approaches to "musical theatre". Not really my area, but a few things immediately sprang to mind*.

First up, Philip Glass has become the great contemporary opera composer. But while his chops as a composer have become ever more refined, his approach to opera has arguably become ever so slightly more conventional. It wasn't always thus. His breakthrough "opera" Einstein on the Beach, conceived and composed while he was still driving the night shift as a cab driver in New York, not only defied categories but arguably defined several. Here's the "hit" from the shoe, "Knee Play 1:Train":

Glass's contemporary Steve Reich has pretty much eschewed opera, but works such as his 1993 collaboration with Beryl Korot, The Cave, are certainly some kind of music theatre:

Robert Ashley's career is, er, orthogonal to the Mininalists'. Actually, everything about Robert Ashley is kind of orthogonal to, well, pretty much everything. Here's the first act of his 1983 magnum opus, Private Lives, a "television opera". (And can you believe that this was premiered in its entirety by Channel 4?  Different times, people.)

Another difficult-to-pin-down polymath, albeit a rather more famous one, is Laurie Anderson, whose live shows combine video, songs, soundscapes, and gnomic storytelling. So much to choose from, but I've gone for her deeply moving 2015 film Heart of a Dog (which her own website describes as a "documentary"!)

In 1990, singer-songwriter Tom Waits collaborated with Beat author William Burroughs and designer Robert Wilson (one of Glass' key collaborators on Einstein on the Beach) on the stage production The Black Rider. It seemed like a huge deal at the time, although looking at this (admittedly terrible VHS transfer-quality) recording now, it feels like perhaps the most dated and least successful of the pieces here. But still: Waits, Burroughs, Wilson!

Finally, Pina Bausch. Now, Bausch's work generally gets categorised as "dance", but that's about as helpful a label as, say, "jazz" is for John Zorn**. As in: doesn't quite capture things. Bausch's productions are all essentially "music theatre", or they're nothing. They're also fiendishly difficult to track down on the interwebs, at least in full. This clip from 1978's Kontatkthof (from a Fassbinder documentary) barely does justice to the multilayered storytelling of her work, but anyway, it's huge fun (and a bit saucy in parts, with apologies):

 

* For the record, I've pretty much avoided "conventional" modern opera here; that may or may not form the basis of another (and probably much longer) post.

** Tom, if you're reading, I know wang on about Zorn a lot, but honestly, you should have known me thirty years ago... you'd have heard little else from me...

Brighton, we have a problem

Apollo 13 safely home

Ok, so it's hardly stranded in space stuff, but my heart did sink a tad* when I got this message from Yi on our Butterfly Lovers WhatsApp group last week: "HI SIMON we have a long practice time today. And we have lot of problem. Can we have a zoom meeting Tomorrow". Uh oh, what had happened? And more importantly, what could we do about it?

Earlier in the week, Yi, Chaoran, and Yeongji had got together on campus to rehearse our arrangement of "Who is he Actually?" which I've discussed previously. I knew that they were apprehensive about making my strings & synth backing work with live piano and voice, so assumed that our upcoming Zoom meeting was going to be all about that, and perhaps involve a little pushing back against the arrangement. In the event, I was really quite wrong. 

Not that my arrangement isn't causing some issues, and we did cover that in Friday's zoom. I think the widdly-diddly early 80s sequencer is a bit tricky to play and sing along with, and I may have to re-think that at least in part. But there were wider concerns to cover. As it turned out, in my absence the group had worked not just on "Who is he", but also played back my "overture", and discussed some of the other songs they'd already shortlisted. And the chief concern was around coherence. The group are worried that the pieces we're considering don't really hang together that well. The key word was "messy", which Chaoran checked was the right word using some translation technology. I've no doubt it was. 

So I tried my best to be reassuring, not my set point, as my wife will tell you (I'm generally the one needing reassurance... ) The gist of what I had to say was: yeah, I get that, but I think at this stage "messy" is fine. Actually, my take is that "messy" is fine as an outcome full-stop, but I realise that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for creative chaos (an odd tendency given my fanatical tidiness generally, but there you go). 

I think I did manage to be reassuring in end. At least it felt that way: bear in mind, this was a Zoom "meeting" with a lot of the conversation going on in Chinese and mediated via the aforementioned translation tech. In any case, I left the conversation mostly thinking "Christ, I need a drink" (oh come on, it was late on a Friday afternoon) and happy that we've got plenty of time to figure things out. And then things got both interesting and seriously impressive. 

By 7pm the same day, this came through from Jeongyi:

So... not just an outline of the little show we're planning, but a work plan too! Oh, and for good measure, the message included links to YouTube clips of the new suggested songs and scores too. Let me be blunt (and probably lose some more friends): I have rarely experienced such responsiveness, clarity and, well, professionalism from the many, many musicians with whom I've worked over the years (you know who are). I'm genuinely blown away, and not a little humbled. 

Now, a couple of caveats. Firstly, we're not out of the woods yet: there are clearly going to be sticking points ahead. Secondly, I don't want us to get too "set" on things just yet. Indeed, to the first point, I'm rather relishing some of the sticking points. But still, this is a great start, and I'm really grateful to my collaborators for their conscientiousness. As I said: impressive. 

 

* It reminded me of those moments, when, back in my days of being a boss, a team member would ask, out of the blue, "Simon, could we grab a coffee and have a quick chat?" At which I could only sigh, if inwardly...

 

My Butterfly Lovers collaboration continues... with enforced virtuality

So, the collaboration project on which I've embarked at Surrey already had some trickiness: issues around language, culture, artistic/musical references and, well, age, perhaps chief among them. All surmountable, of course, and we're getting there, but I could have done without another hurdle, in this case not being able to do today's session in person, thanks to omicron. (Actually, I'm testing negative, but a sandpapered throat and prodigious quantities of snot suggest otherwise.)

Our group is actually making reasonable progress, I think. We've settled on a format for our "Butterly Lovers" adaptation: a four-song mini-music theatre piece, with live singing and piano, and backing tracks supplied by me. And we've already begun work on the first song of the set, "Who is he Actually?" Here's the original, from a Shan Guan's musical "Butterflies"*:

So, one of the key aims of the project is to get us to work outside our comfort zones. Regular readers (you know who you are) will recognise that this is certainly some way outside mine, aesthetically speaking. But, well, in for a penny etc... I thought I'd have a go at writing a string arrangement for our rendition, and my god it's hard to make it convincing. As I said to our module leader Tom Armstrong earlier today, it's all very well to take the mick out of schmaltzy strings, but just try writing some. It certainly put my fairly shonky grasp of voice-leading to the test. In the end, I've added a bit of sequencer/synth stuff, aiming to give it an Angelo Badalamenti/Laurie Anderson vibe (although my son Frank reports back that he thinks it sounds like Floating Points, which I'll take**). Here's a rough mix:

Simon Hopkins · Who Is He Actually? (Backing track)

So... on the collaboration issues today. On the logistics front, my being about 30-odd miles away certainly didn't help things. Yi, Chaoran and Jingyi were rehearsing the song in a room on campus, playing back my initial attempts at the backing track over a laptop and relaying the results to me over WhatsApp audio. In terms of the-future-ain't-all-it-was cracked-up-to-be, this was up there with the fact that I'm still waiting for a jet pack, or at the very least a flight on Concorde. For one thing, Our language issues were definitely exacerbated by the situation (trying to explain what rubato is and why it's not a cakewalk in Ableton Live was a particular challenge), but mostly it's just the lack of immediacy that's a real problem. That said, my fellow collaborators were able to ask for changes, and I was able to supply them, if not in real-time, at least without too much delay. But I would dearly love to have been in the room to hear how it all really sounded.

On the "softer" issues, well it's interesting. In his feedback last week, Tom suggested that I'd taken on a facilitator role, which I think is fair (better than "bossy" at any rate). By this week, however, I seem to have become an arranger for hire. A bargain basement Van Dyke Parks, maybe? I'm more than happy with that, to be frank: it's pushing me to work in ways I wouldn't, ordinarily, and on material I wouldn't normally go near. But I would like to see the others make themselves a little bit more uncomfortable. The funny thing is, I think they feel that what I'm putting forward is a bit on the weird side! I'll keep pushing, gently...

Oh and I've done a re-cut of the "overture" to the show, with an added narration of the story - in Chinese - by Jingyi. Here it is:

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Overture

* I can tell you no more about either the composer or the piece, I'm afraid; my Googling and my Chinese have somewhat let me down.

** He's also asked for the stems, of course... 

I'm writing "art song"... and really have no idea what I'm doing

I've decided to enter Surrey University's Joyce Dixey composition competition which has run annually since the 80s. Given that it's rather early days in my formal composition "journey" (as we must now apparently term any personal learning process), this is probably a tad ambitious, but what the hell, it's what I've signed up to with this Master's course, after all. 

I'm going to have a crack at writing "art song". As per the title of this post, I think I might have bitten off quite a chunk. For one thing, I've never written any kind of song at all. The whole process is genuinely more baffling to me than, say, writing a symphony. OK, that's an over-claim, but what I mean here is that I can at least grasp how someone can write a piece for full orchestra, albeit after years of study and training, but songwriting seems to me a dark art that involves some kind of divinely inspired channeling. (Of course, I know that's bollocks, too. Case in point... One of the most revelatory listens of all my hundreds of hours of lockdown listening was the 5CD Joni Mitchell Archive Vol 1, which collates dozens and dozens of her earliest non-commercial recordings made between 1963 and 1967, and makes clear that her debut album Song to a Seagull wasn't a bolt from the heavens but the result of half a decade of working on others' songs, of constant experiment, trial and error and, well, sheer grind. Anyway, I digress... )

Furthermore, I'm a relative latecomer to art song. Having grown up surrounded by 60s and 70s pop music, "classical" singing was always a tough listen for me: somehow too artificial, too forced. I came round somewhat with a conversion to opera in my early 40s, but chamber song, not so much. It didn't help that a great body of the form's work is essentially 19th century Romantic music, another blind spot for me for so long. Ian Bostridge was my gateway drug. Both his recording of Schubert's Winterreise and the engrossing, poly-mathematical book he wrote about song cycle were ear-opening for me. (Sarah and I also saw Bostridge in concert at the Wigmore Hall with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau around the same time, and that pretty much sealed the deal.)

The choice of art song for this competition was at least in part pragmatic, and based on available resources (something that's actually informed most of my compositional choices on the programme so far). I'm delighted that my fellow student Yi Zhang, a fine mezzo-soprano, has accepted my invitation to record what I write, and perform it in the unlikelihood that I win. The accompaniment, needless to say, will be guitar, and on that front I'll be forced to write something that I can actually play. I'm using two, or possibly three of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's early sonnets as source material. I'd originally considered Emily Dickinson, but her poems have been set to music a lot, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to read a poet I barely know at all*.

As ever when approaching this kind of challenge, I've thrown myself into a bit of a frenzy of listening and score-reading. I'm studying two pieces in particular detail: Britten's Songs from the Chinese and Leo Brouwer's Canciones Amatorias. Here's the aforementioned Bostridge and the astounding Xuefei Yang performing "The Big Chariot", which opens the Britten cycle:

And here's the Meninas Duo perfoming one of the Brouwer songs (also stunning stuff):

OK, that's a high bar, clearly, but learn (ie. pilfer) from the best and all that. 

The first real challenge (well, apart from, you know, actually having any musical ideas) is scansion. Even given the sonnet's fairly strict syllabic structure, finding a rhythmic pattern that both makes some kind of musical sense and actually meets the words at least halfway is bloody hard. Or at least it is for me. I've started with the 1844 sonnet "Perplexed Music":

 

Experience, like a pale musician, holds

A dulcimer of patience in his hand,

Whence harmonies, we cannot understand

Of God’s will in his worlds, the strain unfolds

In sad-perplexed minors: deathly colds

Fall on us while we hear, and countermand

Our sanguine heart back from the fancyland

With nightingale in visionary wolds.

We murmur ‘Where is any certain tune

Or measured music in such notes as these?’

But angels, leaning from the golden seat,

Are not so minded; their fine ear hath won

The issue of completed cadences,

And, smiling down the stars, they whisper – SWEET

 

It's a good place to start: the musical allusions ("sad perplexed minors", "completed cadences") give me at least something to hold on to. And the clear tonal change at "But angels..." suggests a musical change of gears. The trick will be to avoid obviousness, I think. One thing the process is forcing me to do is start with melody, as opposed with harmonic structure, which is my usual jumping-off point. Let's see where it goes. The most I can say at this point is that my initial work on the piece hasn't been too discouraging. 

One last thing, I only discovered after deciding to enter the competition that this year's adjudicator is going to be Gary Ryan. This whole thing was already daunting. Putting my efforts under the nose of one of the greatest living composers for the instrument has hardly made it less so. Oy veh. More soon.

 

* For other Barrett Browning newbies out there, check out this illuminating British Library talk by poet Fiona Sampson, who's written an acclaimed biography of EBB, Two Way Mirror:

The " Butterfly Lovers" collaboration kicks off

A makeshift voice-over recording studio

I've already touched on the collaboration project I'm involved with as part of this semester's Research Techniques for Practitioners module at Surrey. To recap (for the last time, honestly) our group - pianist Chaoran and singers Yi and Jingyi, and your slightly bemused correspondent - will be working on, well, something, based on the traditional Chinese boy-meets-girl-boy-dies story, The Butterfly Lovers. I say "something" as that's kind of as far as we've got so far, and it's meant to be so at this stage. 

That being said, we've already jumped in. Even though we've not entirely (scrub that, not even vaguely) decided on a format (live performance? film short? concept album?) I thought it might be useful to at least start with an approximation of a sound world. What can we achieve, musically/sonically with the tools to hand? I asked the others to chuck me over something, anything - scales, chords, melody fragments - and only asked that they were at 120 bpm and in Am (yeah, original, I realise... ) and I'd do something with it. Given that everyone responded within hours, dammit, I thought I'd better come up with my end of the bargain. Here then is a possible, might-or-might-not-be overture to our whatever-the-hell-we-decide-to-make Butterfly Lovers, er, thingy:

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Overture (Rough Mix)

So, some initial thoughts/issues/concerns.

We're meant to be pushing ourselves in new directions with this project, so let's lay out what I ascertain to be our positions. I hardly know the others very well, but I think I can roughly outline their musical tastes/inclinations, having talked to them but also, more importantly, having heard them all rehearse for their end-of-semester recitals in January (which was pretty humbling, I have to say). Jingyi Zhang and Yi Zhang are both fabulous singers, and clearly highly trained, but with interests in very different areas: Jingyi is a pop singer with an evident love of musical theatre; Yi's repertoire is more typically "classical". Chaoran, meanwhile, is a fine pianist who is drawn, I think, to 19th Century late Classical and Romantic work. And then there's me; regular readers will know what I'm drawn to, and will question how I'm still married.

So an easy way for at least some of us to be outside of our comfort zones would be for me to push everyone else to make something, well, confrontational. But that would be problematic on at least two counts. Firstly, that "pushing" thing wouldn't really be in the spirit of collaboration (more on this below). And, from my point of view, it would hardly be getting me to step into new territory, would it? With the sketch above, I tried to meet everyone half-way, as it were. For sure, it's probably not something towards which the others would naturally incline, but on the other, it's not the kind of thing I'd normally turn out: to my ears it's kinda sweet and perhaps even a little bit obvious.

And here's the thing: it was actually really hard. No, not technologically; although I'm still an Ableton novice (and a recovering Logic user), the mechanics of making music like this is fairly straightforward to me. (The vocoder part, for the record, is me reciting the story.) But making something even vaguely convincing in this realm is pretty alien for me. As ever when I try to do something that people might actually like, I realise how hard it is to do it well. Not hard in a 7-against-6-in-Lydian-dominant way. Hard as in doing it well. (I last had this realisation with the all too short-lived alt-cabaret act LaTina Roxx, surely one of the hardest gigs I've ever played - and the only time you're ever likely to hear me play Shania Twain, but we'll let that one slide... ) As it stands, I've tried to make something that channels both Laurie Anderson and Fourtet (perhaps via my son Frank); I think it works, although it needs a lot more finesse. As for whether it's useful to our project, well, that brings me to my next concern.

Earlier in the semester, Tom walked us through various levels of collaboration:

Currently, I'm worried about all too easily slipping into "Svengali" mode. Honestly, I really, really don't want this to happen, but it's a real concern. Partly it's just an issue of experience: I've been listening to music seriously for longer than my fellow collaborators have been alive. This doesn't make my judgment any better (it actually might impede it), but it does mean that I've simply got more reference points on which to draw. Case in point: as a group, we're thinking about musical theatre, and yes, that encapsulates a spectrum from Carousel to Hamilton via West Side Story. But it might also mean Brecht & Weill's Mahagonny or Brooks' Mahabharata or Glass/Wilson's Einstein on the Beach or Ashley's Celestial Excursions or Reich & Korot's The Cave. I'm not playing reference bingo here (although I guess I am doing that too), I'm just saying that I've got a set of listening experiences to draw on that the others don't. And I really don't want to be a know-all.

The other thing here, if I'm being totally honest (notwithstanding Nick Reynolds' very kind comments in response to my previous posts on this issue): I do have a tendency to take over. It's not a wanting-things-my-own-way thing (or at least not just that). I just really like kicking things off, and so often in collaborative projects I'm the "let's try this" guy. There's an upside to this: I can get things going. There's a downside, too: my ideas can get baked in early, and they're not always that great, as ideas go. There's a word for this, not that it's necessarily in the technical literature: bossiness. I don't like this side of my personality, but it's there, and now as ever I'm going to have to keep it in check.

Lastly (and more pragmatically), the time issue. The final presentation of whatever we decide on is in May. Yes, that's a month away or so, but in terms of time we can actually spend together on this, well, not so much. I reckon we can maybe grab 15 hours together in person tops, and not helped by the fact that I'm mostly in a different town. And I think that "in-person" thing is going to be crucial, not least our language issues. (Although I should caveat that and say that in some ways, remote working ameliorates the language issues, given some of the translation tech on hand. )

So, let's see where it all goes...

My response... to my response to Naked City in London, 1988

Writing last week about the personal epiphany that was the Naked City gig in London in 1988 brought up a whole series of secondary thoughts and memories. I thought I might as well share them. So, in no particular order:

• Regarding the date and place: I don't have some kind of savant memory, nor have kept a lifelong gig diary. I wish. But I triangulated the date from certain other things going on in my life at that time and had a vague memory of the venue and Google did the rest. I got the details here: I couldn't find any mention of the Naked City setlist, by the way.
• The Royalty Theatre in Holborn later became the Peacock Theatre, apparently, although the interwebs are almost as hazy as my memory on this.
• I kick off the post with Zorn's memorable Marsalis/jazz snob eat shit line (which I'm perfectly prepared to admit I misremembered). Another key moment was Zorn introducing "Surfer Girl" as being written by "one of the great composers of the 20th century, Brian Wilson". A couple of years later, at a talk at the Royal Festival Hall, Zorn complained, not unreasonably, that the audience had laughed at this, as though he was being ironic. As he pointed out, it wasn't like he was talking about Ted Nugent.
• Another random memory: Zorn announces Ornette Coleman's classic "Lonely Woman". Cue Fred Frith playing the bassline line from "Pretty Woman". It worked beautifully of course, and to this day it kinda sounds like Henry Mancini to these ears. Check it out here.
• By way of coincidence, this "epiphany" writing task was set by my lecturer Tom Armstrong, who earlier in the day had discussed Kevin Volans' string quartet "Hunting Gathering", which it turns out Kronos played that night. I really would love to say that I remembered that, but my only recollection of their performance that evening was them whipping the air with their bows during one sequence in Zorn's "Cat O' Nine Tails". What can I say? I wasn't really a sophisticate.
• I do remember that I sat near Muriel Gray. I'd adored her as the intelligent presenter of "The Tube", an iconic 80s TV music show, for those that weren't there. There were probably other great-and-good audience members in the audience, but I was far too jejune to have recognised them. I do remember thinking "wow - I've made it!"
• I said that in the early 80s "I was behaving like I wanted it to be 1970". Actually, these days I probably pine for the 70s more than I did then, for all that decade's evident problems. I simply yearn for the seriousness of that time. As I bore Sarah to death saying, my central problem with our current culture is that people are angry about everything - and serious about nothing. But as I wrote that post, I realised that the late 80s were pretty special, too (and yes, now the 90s are being celebrated, but even at the time they left me cold). "The Face" magazine stands out for me from that period as a particular landmark, truly capturing the zeitgeist. It was a bit of a cultural bible for me at the time - I literally took notes from it. Imagine a fashion magazine that included reviews of Frank Miller's "The Killing Joke" graphic novel alongside set shots from the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" film, and David Toop covering, well, John Zorn. I haven't looked at the re-launched version of the magazine, but I would hazard that it's not quite so culturally adventurous.
• I referred to Bill Frisell in passing as someone, "with whose playing I was totally besotted at the time". This rather sounds, as I read it, that I no longer am. Not at all - I remain a huge fan. I'm very much looking forward to reading Philip Watson's recently published Frisell biography "Beautiful Dreamer", by the way. Here's a nice London Jazz News interview with Watson about writing the book. 
• I don't say it explicitly in the post, but it's clear that in my early 20s I was a bit, well, embarrassed by my tastes. Funnily enough,  the great American music historian Ted Gioia very recently published this video all about the shame some of us feel about some of the music we like. As ever with Gioia, it's very insightful. But he looks at how the masculine/feminine breakdown of music often underpins our embarrassment. He has nothing to say about the 70s/80s musical culture war I mentioned in my post - or how that relates to having "unacceptable" tastes, and maybe he's right. Maybe that culture war has passed and I should just let it go.
• My oldest son is kind of named after Naked City's drummer Joey Baron, whose performances are as infectious as they are virtuosic.
• Finally, I say in passing in the post that I've contributed to the "reams" written about Zorn. My principal contribution - alluded to in the post - was the Zorn "primer" in the February 1997 issue of "The Wire". Unfortunately, I don't have a record of what I wrote, and short of buying a back issue (which kind of irks), that will have to remain the case (there's certainly no evidence of it online, beyond metadata, as it were). I suspect that it wasn't very good. A little while later the then "Wire" editor Tony Herrington told me that his predecessor Richard Cook thought I was an "idiot". A little harsh perhaps, given that my pre-frontal cortex had only just come fully online, but nonetheless probably fair. I frankly had no business to be writing alongside such luminaries as Biba Kopf, David Toop, Simon Reynolds, Mark Sinker, and Ian Penman. Needless to say, I didn't last long.

An Epiphany: Naked City in London, 1988

As part of the Research Training for Practitioners module on my Master's at Surrey I've been asked to write about an "epiphany" I've had at some point in my life. The last decade or so has actually seen many of 'em, surprisingly coming in at ever greater frequency. But I thought I'd talk about a real life changer from much earlier...

The time: November 1988. The place: The Royalty Theatre, London. John Zorn's Naked City are on stage; at some point in the show, Zorn snarls into the microphone: "This one goes out to Wynton Marsalis: it's called Jazz Snob Eat Shit", and a sub-one minute mash-up of funk and screaming free jazz ensues. I am a jazz snob, I am eating shit, and I'm grinning from ear to ear. This is one of the greatest nights of my life.

Let's rewind a tad. I started listening to music in earnest at around the age of nine, and for reasons that still elude me, my tastes were from that point onwards deeply uncool. The first records I owned (and pretty much wore down - these were post-Oil Shock days of very poor vinyl quality, after all) were the Hallé's recording of the Planets Suite and a Tangerine Dream Live album. And in terms of coolness, it was downhill from an already shaky start.

I'm not sure there was a strict linearity to how my tastes developed over the following years, but all through the years of punk, post-punk and New Romantic I was on a very different path: prog and psych rock, the NWOBHM, blues, jazz (even worse: the fusion end of it, truth be told), and increasingly, classical. I honestly wasn't trying to be different; I was just following my nose musically, and my nose led me to places that were broadly considered utterly risible. This was the early 80s, after all, and essentially I was behaving like I wanted it to be 1970. (In many ways I still do, of course, but that's the subject of another post.)

(An aside for younger readers who might be confused by why this was such a big deal. Every generation has its culture wars, I guess, and in many ways, I'm glad those of my youth were more strictly, well, "cultural". Pretty much exclusively about music, actually. The cool kids read NME and listened to John Peel and derided any music that came in supra-3 minute form. Most of the "songs" I liked seem to take up the entire side of an LP. Honestly, to young people who wear Ramones t-shirts and are yet happy to listen to Genesis, I have to tell you: these were different times. At the time I felt on the wrong side of history. As it turns out I wasn't, much to the chagrin and/or consternation of my old punk mates down here in Brighton.)

Then the confusion set in. In 1987 I started working in a warehouse run by G, who seemed unbelievably old to me at the time but in retrospect was probably in his late 20s. G was, I realised immediately, the epitome of cool: cropped hair, black 501s, DMs. I had back-length, Peter Frampton golden locks, and wore stonewashed jeans and white trainers, at least two fashion cycles too soon. G espoused leftist politics, smoked weed seemingly every minute of the working day, and, crucially, played the ugliest music I'd ever heard. Seriously, if I think back now, it's like a roll call of late 80s hardcore and noise music: Swans, Butthole Surfers, Einstürzende Neubauten, Big Black, Sonic Youth, Slint, The Minutemen. With a bit of dub reggae thrown in for good measure. I hated it.

And then, I sort of didn't. And then I almost liked it. I mean, I'd still go home and listen to Pat Metheny or Jan Garbarek, but this apparently artless, noisy crap was beginning to work its charm on me. So by the time I was at the Naked City Show, I was a very confused young man (although true to the rest of my life, not even my confusion was a fashionable or even very interesting one). I was captured by my own internal culture war: I couldn't allow myself to like Miles Davis and Sonic Youth, which as I write it now seems scarcely believable.

I was at that night in Holborn for two reasons. I was beginning to listen to more contemporary classical music, and the Kronos Quartet already had a massive rep in that area. But mostly I was keen to see Naked City's guitarist Bill Frisell, with whose playing I was totally besotted at the time. I'd heard about Zorn, but didn't know any of his work. In the event, I can remember little about the Kronos show. If memory serves they came on first despite being the headliners. Wise decision. Of course, I've seen them many times since and they are always stunning. But, but... the Zorn show stole the night.

I think it's safe to say now that Zorn is generally recognised as having changed the face of experimental music, but at the time even "cult status" would have been pushing it, at least in the UK. To this day I swear that most people in the audience were there for Kronos. But it was immediately apparent that something incredible was afoot here. I won't add to the reams that have been written about Zorn's genre-melding, his virtuosity, his relentless, often confrontational vision (indeed I've contributed to said reams). The point of these reminiscences is that the performance that night, as it crashed through barrier after barrier (between improvisation and composition, between genres, between noise and music even) made total sense to me and brought an end to my inner culture war. Of course I liked hardcore punk as well as free jazz, noir soundtracks as well as country music, the Beach Boys and Albert Ayler. It all made total sense; I had been given licence to enjoy whatever music I wanted to.

I had been to many great gigs before that night (I was lucky to have started early), and certainly many since. Some of them might even have been, well, "better". But no single musical perfromance I've ever seen has changed me so profoundly. Now, that's what I call an epiphany...

(To close out, here's a video of them on what I can only assume was the same tour. Watching it I am genuinely as excited now as as I was then.)