I will be playing a show at Cafe Orwell in Bushwick on Friday, December 11, at 7:30pm.

The show will feature 3 pieces from the past couple years, performanced by Jessica Schmitz, James Moore, and Eleonore Oppenheim, and a laptop duet with one of my favorite electronic composers, Jennifer Stock.  Here’s the program:

Slipstream, for flute and tape
Jessica Schmitz, flute

Duet for two laptops
Jennifer Stock and Aleksei Stevens, laptops

Cirrus, for flute and live electronics
Jessica Schmitz, flute; Aleksei Stevens, laptop

Pop., for flute, electric guitar, contrabass, and live elecctronics
Jessica Schmitz, flute; James Moore, electric guitar; Eleonore Oppenheim, contrabass; Aleksei Stevens, laptop

I’m very thankful to be given this opportunity by friend and colleague, and owner of Cafe Orwell, Inhyun Kim.  I saw a concert there a couple weeks ago, and it’s a really cool space.  Great coffee, too!

Here’s all the info in short form:

Electronic Music at Cafe Orwell
Aleksei Stevens, Jessica Schmitz, Jennifer Stock, James Moore, and Eleonore Oppenheim
Cafe Orwell, 247 Varet Street (between White and Bogart), Bushwick, NY
7:30 pm
$10 General Admission

Kathy Supove has put together a wonderful lineup of shows at The Stone this month.

Happily, she saw fit to ask me to put something together as well.  I’ll be performing with cellist Jessie Marino and flutist Jessica Schmitz on Tuesday, October 27th at 10pm.

It’s been an interesting experience preparing for this show, my first real performance gig since Ben was born.  That’s not really true.  I’ve had a few pieces here and there, and did manage to complete one major project back in February, but returning to The Stone (this will be my third appearance there) feels like reintroducing myself to the scene in many respects.  Thinking of it this way, it turns out, adds a certain amount of undue pressure.  There are a lot of different aspects to my musical personality.  Which one am I going to go with?  People haven’t heard much from me in a little while, so which me do I want to reconnect?  There’s this, but then there’s also this.  The upshot is that I’ve been writing for 10 weeks or so, I’ve taken many of my musical inclinations for a good walk around the block, and I have a number of new pieces I’m excited to present at some point in the future.  Just not at this show.

About a month ago, I went to Canada Gallery to check out a new piece by video artist (and my aunt) Cecilia Dougherty. Entitled The Third Space, the piece is in four sections, each a vignette on a different quotidian activity or experience, juxtaposed with unrelated borrowed text from authors writing on diverse subjects.  They’re spacious (no pun intended), reflective, and somehow very provocative, and I just fell in love with them.  Click on her name (above) to link to her site.  One of the four sections, shot in the Swiss Alps, is on her home page.  Another is here.

Reflecting on them on the train ride home, the thought occurred to me to try using the videos as the focal point of an extended improvisation.  Jessica, Jessie, and I finally got together to try it out, tease out some of the challenges and strong points, and we’ve now got an idea for how to use them that I’m really excited about.  The show will run about forty minutes and feature sections of video with structured improv accompaniment, with musical interludes between the sections.

Here’s all the info in short form:

Jessica Schmitz, Jessie Marino, and Aleksei Stevens
featuring video by Cecilia Dougherty
Tuesday, October 27, 10pm
The Stone (E 2nd St & Ave C)
$10 General Admission

Hope to see you there.  Bring your friends.

Love,

Alek

Something I’ve always been interested in is the emergence of signal from noise.  Once upon a time, I took a purely descriptive approach to this idea, but lately I’ve been interested in process-driven approaches to achieving this end.

Last year I wrote a piece called Pop for my erstwhile ensemble, Rusty Limited Company, in which I gave the players (Jess Schmitz on flute, James Moore on electric guitar, and Eleonore Oppenheim on double bass) a score which comprised essentially a roadmap of musical gestures and behaviors for them to each navigate independently, and I wrote a patch that sampled their playing and wove a web of loops in real-time, over which I had some very high-level control (mixing, essentially).  The piece got a nice reception the couple times we played it, but I was never entirely satisfied with it.  In classic composer-wanting-to-have-his-cake-and-eat-it-to0 form, I felt I needed a level of narrative control in addition to having engineered an autonomous system (likely because I had a certain result in mind and should have just written the damn thing out), and I ended up superimposing a rather jury-rigged linearity onto the process, both in the score and in the patch.

this new piece i’m working on for the stone concert (10/27 @ 10pm!), though, i think fixes a lot of those problems.  the idea is to mimic (in a self-consciously unsophisticated way) the process of evolution by natural selection.  as in Pop, the players improvise and their playing is sampled at random intervals.  also similar to Pop, the samples are looped automatically.  the difference, though, is that rather than just mixing the output of the patch, in the new piece i play the role of natural selection. there is no superimposed linearity or unfolding to which i need try to bend the machine’s output.  it’s simple, and very in-the-moment: the loops that please me thrive, and those that don’t die out to make room for new loops to have a go at life.  those that survive for a good little while eventually have the opportunity to “mutate” (randomized pitch and tempo changes, etc), and the natural selection model acts on these mutations as well.  i’m even  programming the patch so that the “fittest” loops end up biasing the evolution of newly developing lines so that they work well with them.  meanwhile, the players will be free to  work with or against the electronics as they see fit, which i think will be very interesting.  their “raw genetic material” as it were, will necessarily have less and less room to spawn new lines, though, as there will no longer exist a level playing field.

perhaps one day i’ll get around to programming the selection process into the patch and just stepping back and listening to the results unfold.  something to work towards…

There was an agreement among journalists after about 1970, when America took a sharp turn to the right, to call all music that did not use traditional instruments – the orchestra or combinations of orchestral instruments – “experimental.” This was a greater disappointment to me than most things that journalists do, because it showed a deep misunderstanding of the way things were. There were noble aspirations among a few younger conductors to revive the relationship between the composer and the orchestra, but there were no orchestras to speak of… there were no commissions of the sort that might be valuable to the composer, in the sense that a commission involves some sort of discussion between the composer and the orchestra; and most important of all, there was never any rehearsal time, in case an idea did not work. Orchestra commissions of the time always sounded like they were being sight-read, which in fact they were. I am sorry to say that this is still largely the case….

I think that even for the best composer (better than I am), ideas don’t always work. That is why the orchestra pece without lots of rehearsal is in some way doomed. And dreaded by the composer…

[A] friend told me that a distinguished violinist told him that in his youth he had played La Mer with Ernest Ansermet’s Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and had remarked to Ansermet that the violin part was not the same that he had known with other orchestras. Ansermet replied that Debussy said that he had always regretted the published violin part, and so with Ansermet’s approval had written a new violin part. (Which one do we hear now?)

So, in this situation it is actually the American orchestra music that is truly “experimental.” When you have thought about other kinds of musical ideas, and worked with, say, electronic music for most of your composing life, the composition is anything but experimental. It is the epitome of expertise. It may be aleatoric or purposefully unpredictable in its specific sounds, or purposefully exploratory of a sound, but experimental is the wrong word, and its use has more or less divided composers among themselves….

It is a problem to write orchestra pieces that can be played after one or two rehearsals. I can’t even learn my own compositions in a six-hour rehearsal. (Recently I was listening to a performance of La Mer on the radio and remarking to myself on its difficulty and it occurred to me that is a composer wrote La Mer today, no orchestra could play it. Not enough rehearsal time.) If it were not for this drastic restriction, orchestras and orchestra literature would not be in such dire straits. And there would probably be a very different idea about electronic music, and so probably a different kind of electronic music….
- Robert Ashley, liner notes to Superior Seven, 1995

In 1997 the American Composers Orchestra, urged by board member Tom Buckner and with evident reluctance, commissioned Bob to write When Famous Last Words Fail You, for singers and orchestra. The orchestra members in the piece are cued by the lead singer’s words, so the conductor merely adjusts volumes, as at a mixing board. Dennis Russell Davies ran through the piece Thursday morning before a Saturday performance. The parts had just been handed out, so everyone was clearly sight-reading. There was a planned meeting afterward to discuss the technique of the piece; that was canceled. There was a scheduled dress rehearsal; that was canceled. The performance was the second run-through of a piece that had never been rehearsed, and sounded awful, not at all the way Bob imagined it.

A classical music world that treats great composers that way deserves the worst that can possibly happen to it.

Went tonight to see the Asphalt Orchestra at Lincoln Center Out Of Doors. Asphalt is a 12-piece marching band (piccolo, soprano, alto, and tenor saxes, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, sousaphone, and 3 drummers) whose repertoire includes arrangements of everything from bjork to Zappa to nancarrow.   The music is interesting, challenging, and incredibly fun.  The first two of those I could say about a lot of new music concerts I have been to. The third, way less so.

I am aware among my peers of a general desire to find new ways to engage an audience, to get out of the  you sit-we play-you-clap mold.  For some this has meant writing more pop-influenced music, for others it’s meant playing in more relaxed venues where people can drink and chat and move around, for still others it’s meant using technology to make their music interactive.  For the asphalt orchestra, the plan is one of elegant beauty: move from place to place and play music so great that people want to follow you in order to hear it. Walk away from the audience, around them, right into them, parting them with a trombone slide like Moses did to the red sea with his staff. Seriously, I wish I had a bird’s eye view of this concert I just saw, throngs of people clumsily getting out of the way of a charging tuba player, rearranging themselves as they try to predict what the best vantage point for hearing the music will be when the players come to a halt. People were involved!

But don’t get me wrong. This was no novelty act. These were 12 trendous musicians playing intricate, gorgeous arrangements of unusual music.  Their rendition of conlon nancarrow’s study no. 20, composed for player piano because the composer deemed it too rhythmically complex for human fingers, was a rare musical moment, at once tender and delightfully off-kilter.  I’m looking forward to hearing more from them, including more newly commissioned stuff (Goran Bregovic’s Champagne was aptly named – a celebration!)

Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention the outfits.  A picture’s worth a thousand words:

HAUSCHKA – Eltern // live in the Berger Kirche from realiction on Vimeo.

(cross posted at cog and sprocket and is it luck?)

My wife does a lot of work with data visualization, in which she extracts patterns and stories from large data sets and represents them visually through graphic design or animation. It’s a really interesting and elucidating way of making sense out of huge amounts of information; in a sense, figuring out what stories the data tell on their own, rather than using data to support a preconceived idea. Data visualizations can be pragmatic, or artistic, and are often both.

I was thinking recently, though, about all the patterns that must exist in data that we don’t even know to look for, and what kinds of interesting stories they might tell us. I am not a computer programmer, but it seems it must be possible to develop some kind of algorithmic pattern-seeker. The human mind is constantly on the lookout for patterns, but has a pretty low fidelity, which is why we see Jesus in tree stumps and burnt toast and water stains, and why we think more weird stuff happens during a full moon than at other times, and all kinds of other very human logical fallacies. A machine, on the other hand, would not be susceptible to confirmation bias and other such pitfalls.

I wonder whether the next big development in data visualization is going to come when we can just feed enormous amounts of data into a system that will make its own sense out of it rather than requiring some kind of human intervention telling it what to look for. This would be a boon both to artists and to scientists – to everyone concerned with parsing data and finding the larger truths they represent. (If you know of a project like this that already exists or is in the works, please let me know in the comments!)

Data auralization doesn’t quite have the same ring to it (no pun intended), but it is something people do. Sound artist and kinetic sculptor Trimpin, for example, created an installation in which sounds and musical robots are controlled by a live incoming stream of seismic data. Another sound artist, Andrea Polli, created a piece that maps climate data to different sonic parameters in an algorithmic composition. I myself have done interactive performance works where aspects of a player’s improvisation (eg pitch, loudness, tempo, number of attacks, etc) control an algorithmically generated electronic counterpoint.

But in all these cases, the computer is programmed to look at the incoming data stream (or the input data set) in a very particular way. What might we end up hearing or seeing if the computer is allowed to look using its own logic? What might we learn that we never would have zeroed in on left to our own devices?

Anyone who’s gotten an e-mail from me in the past couple years has seen, down at the bottom, beneath the, “All best, Aleksei”,  my favorite Morton Feldman quote: “Down with the masterpiece, up with art.”

Composer Brad Lubman devotes a few minutes to the idea of the masterpiece as it relates to music in our time in a recent Sequenza 21 podcast. It’s a short interview with some nice ideas – well worth a listen.

The way I’ve come to understand Feldman’s remark, he’s not saying “down with incredible music”.  When he says, “Down with the masterpiece,” it seems to me he’s saying down with the institution of the masterpiece, the piece that fits a certain mold in its scale or its scope, or its reach, or its presentation; the piece that becomes part of The Canon, or that every student plays and studies.  Recent classical music is so multifarious – one man’s “Partch!” is another man’s “Partch…” (eyes rolling) – the scene doesn’t lend itself very well to a contemporary Messiah.  Not to mention that Messiah wasn’t even Messiah until the 20th century.  The Masterpiece may in fact be a relatively recent idea, one that supported the monolithic institutions of classical music presentation that themselves only came to dominance in the last 150 years.

PS: a note on this post’s title, and totally irrelevant to its content, I learned recently that “death to [blank]“, in Farsi, is often used very casually, or simply to mean “down with [blank]“.  So, while “death to America” might sound scary, keep in mind the same crowd might later be heard saying “death to potatoes“.

in my last post i discussed my favorite piece from the younger than jesus exhibit at the new museum for contemporary art.  i snapped some shots of other pieces at the show that struck me.  a few of these are below.  enjoy!

on wednesday i finally got around to checking out the younger than jesus show at the new museum for contemporary art.  i’d like to go again, as it’s a big show and i can only really take in so much at once, but it’s not to be as i’m away next week and the show goes down the day after i get back. some really wonderful pieces, though.  if you have time, it’s worth the $12 admission price (less for students).

my favorite piece was a video piece up on the fifth floor by james richards called active negative programme.  i looked for a few minutes to see if any clips were uploaded anywhere, and came up empty, which is a shame because i think it would still be very communicative without the whole installation (basically a small stage with 12 chairs, a large tv, and headphones playing noise).

the video cuts together clips of people listening.  imagine your typical televised interview.  they often cut away to the subject of the interview a few seconds before the questioner finishes up his question.  there’s a look of anticipation as they mentally prepare their answer.  you often see the same look on the faces of people who are listening intently to someone speak, even if it’s not a situation where they will have the opportunity to respond, such as members of studio audiences for talk shows, etc.  active negative programme is a string of these moments from television, shots of people listening, either about to speak, or at least in the act of formulating a response were they given the opportunity to speak.  all sound is removed, and if you want the full experience, go to the show and put on the headphones with the noise, to block out even ambient sound.  i was quite on the edge of my seat, anticipating what all these people were about to say.  the piece puts the viewer in a very – and i mean this in the best sense – uncomfortable position.  it’s very provocative, actually.  an relentless series of inhalations.

it reminds me of a performance of 4′33″ that a friend described to me (i didn’t see this performance myself).  the performers took the approach of standing for the duration of each of the three movements, with their hands, mouths, etc positioned as though they were about to play the loudest note they could.  i’m not sure that adding that level of theater to the piece is really in keeping with cage’s intentions (the mental energy expended on anticipation probably distracts from one’s attention to the silence, which was cage’s real interest), but taken on its own merits, it sounds like a very interesting audience experience.

more than that, though, the piece was a reminder of what a creative activity listening is.  we tend to think of the consumption of information, whether heard, watched, or read (or even remembered) as, if not passive, at least receptive:  we are not making anything, but rather absorbing something that’s been made.  check out richards’s piece, though, and see if you don’t think the faces of the people listening betray minds engaged in creation, formulation, filtering, relating.  listening – real listening – is in a very real sense speaking.

i’ve always felt i did my best composing while seated at other people’s concerts.