possible galleries/museums
conner contemporary art 1730 connecticut

touchstone gallery 406 7th st ... (are we willing to pay to show this thing?)

corcoran
- posted by ...lg... @ 16:37

 
radio
documentaries sunday nights (8 - 10) on weta

wcpr - 'the local low-down' thursdays at 6; 'neighborhood power hour' sundays at 7

soundprint 'the aural equivalent of photojournalism' seeking 'documentaries of substance'

metro connection on wamu

this american life

studio 360

weekend america

the infinite mind

listen:
'if i get out alive' - kids in jail, 1-hour doc

'lost in america': Four people living on the edge--drug addicts, a prostitute and a blind woman--recount their journeys to a new life, revealing the connections between home and homelessness along the way

soundportraits.org

guidelines:
vocal technique
- posted by ...lg... @ 21:29

 
Pioneer. Composer. Psychoacoustician?
May 8, 2005
Pioneer. Composer. Psychoacoustician?
By ANNE MIDGETTE
JAMES TENNEY IN NEW YORK
Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Project Room, 619 East Sixth Street, East Village.

A PORTRAIT OF JAMES TENNEY
Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, 120 Park Avenue, at 42nd Street.

JAMES TENNEY is the Zelig of American composition. He has been there for a lot of the big moments. He has known most of the big names. He has been, so to speak, in all the pictures. Yet few people have even heard of him.

This week, two concerts - Sunday and Wednesday - may help change that by offering a cross-section of Mr. Tenney's widely varied work of the last five decades. The sampling includes a tape collage piece made up of tiny fragments of Elvis Presley's "Blue Suede Shoes." It includes "Postal Pieces," written as graphic scores that fit on the backs of postcards. And lest you think Mr. Tenney is purely avant-garde, it includes piano rags. Tonal rags.

Mr. Tenney, you see, resists characterization. You can't define what kind of musician he is. He is called a pioneer of computer music, having created some of the earliest computer pieces during a tenure as resident composer at Bell Laboratories in the early 1960's. At the same time, he is grouped with the Minimalists, having hobnobbed - and performed - with Steve Reich and Philip Glass during the same period.

He is associated with the Fluxus movement, and his first wife was the artist Carolee Schneeman. He was a friend and student of John Cage's and Edgard Varèse's. Yet this "downtown" composer is also a long-time academic and a respected theorist with a couple of important treatises on music to his name. His main musical concern today? Harmony.

In fact, most of the things Mr. Tenney is known for aren't supposed to be able to be done in the same room, let alone by the same person.

Take the two-piano piece "Chromatic Canon," which Mr. Tenney dedicated to Mr. Reich in 1983. The ultimate juxtaposition of opposing elements, it fuses Minimalism with the 12-tone system, starting with a single repeated interval and gradually building it into a tone row.

"Reich went to the concert with me," Mr. Tenney said. "Afterwards he looked at me with a mock glare and said, 'You've put me in bed with Schoenberg.' I said that was the whole point."

Of his desire to reconcile opposing forces, he joked, "It's a personal characteristic that derives from the fact that my parents fought all the time, and I was always trying to bring them together."

Mr. Tenney was speaking by phone from Dartmouth College, where he was visiting last month during the Festival of New Musics. But home is California, where he is in his second stint at California Institute of the Arts (having taught there in the 1970's, he took a post at York University in Toronto and returned after reaching York's mandatory retirement age). He is also in his fourth marriage (to Lauren Pratt, who manages a number of new-music artists, including her husband) and his third or fourth compositional focus.

"The things I was concerned with early on involved timbre, dissonance and complex texture," he said. "Then the focus shifted to form. And after that it shifted to harmony. There's an evolutionary process of harmony in Western music that came to a dead end around 1910. The harmonic resources of equal temperament had really been exhausted." Mr. Tenney's ideas of how to reanimate it involve things like alternative tunings (touching, incidentally, on principles he encountered when he worked with a guru of alternative tuning, Harry Partch).

Even in this area, he has achieved some unlikely reconciliations. He recounted a phone call he got in 1988 from Cage, who, after hearing Mr. Tenney's "Critical Band" at a conference in Miami, told him: "If that's harmony, I take back everything I ever said. I'm all for it."

Mr. Tenney didn't set out to be a composer. Born in Silver City, N.M., in 1934, he went to Juilliard to study piano with Eduard Steuermann, a student of Schoenberg's. He met composers through his roommate, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who let him tag along to meetings with Cage and Varèse. After a year, Mr. Tenney dropped out to study composition with a student of Varèse's, Chou Wen-Chung. A meeting with the pianist and composer Lionel Nowak led to his entering Bennington, where he also worked with Henry Brant and Carl Ruggles. Somehow it makes sense that a guy as eclectic as Mr. Tenney should graduate from an institution that was, at the time, a women's college.

When he saw an advertisement announcing the first class in electronic music, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he and Ms. Schneemann drove there, and Mr. Tenney ended up working with another scientist-composer, Lejaren Hiller. It was there that he also worked briefly for Partch, but Partch fired him, Mr. Tenney said, because he was more interested in provocative conversations than serving as a disciple.

At Bell Labs, Mr. Tenney, though working as a composer, was technically hired to do research in psychoacoustics, which involves sound perception. It wasn't altogether a front; he has a scientific bent. After he left Bell, he was able to support himself by doing technical research at places like the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Indeed, he approaches many of his pieces as if they were scientific experiments. In "Ain't I a Woman?" (1992), he tries to mimic, with stringed instruments, the speech patterns of a text by Sojourner Truth.

"It involves analysis of the acoustic of speech," Mr. Tenney said, "and an attempt to work with the format of the vowel sounds. It's a process I have tried three times so far in my career. It never works completely. You can't actually understand the speech. But it sounds different from anything else you've ever heard."

Each of his computer pieces in the 1960's was an experiment of sorts. They culminated in 1969 in "For Ann (rising)," which explores something called a Shepard tone, a sound creating the illusion that it is continually getting higher. And with that, Mr. Tenney left computer music altogether. After the birth of his first daughter, he took his first teaching job at CalArts, where the computer equipment ran to Moog synthesizers.

"I'm not a knob-twirler," Mr. Tenney said emphatically. Rather than work with equipment that couldn't do what he wanted, he returned to acoustic instruments - with, it seems, no regrets.

"For the previous decade, there had been ideas for instrumental music that I didn't have time to work on because I was doing so much for computers," he said. "Once that got loose, the floodgates were open. And it's still going."

A scientific approach is evident in other aspects of Mr. Tenney's music, like his desire to remove emotion from the equation. He views music as an object of perception rather than a dramatic narrative. Instead of allowing themes to unfold and develop in the conventional Western sense, he lays out all the elements of a piece clearly at the start, leaving the listener to contemplate their permutations.

"Ergodic music," he calls it, borrowing a term from thermodynamics: music that simply exists as an object. It's like focusing on the sounds of leaves in the forest or waves on the seashore.

"His music is quite delicate," said Jenny Lin, the pianist who organized the two New York concerts. Ms. Lin herself discovered it a year or so ago. While preparing a recording devoted to the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, she encountered a piece Mr. Tenney had dedicated to Crawford Seeger. (Most of his pieces bear dedications, often to other composers. It's one way he establishes that despite being labeled a maverick, he sees himself as solidly inscribed in musical traditions of the past.)

"It wasn't like something incredible hit me," Ms. Lin said. But as she began to learn more, she added, "it started to grow on me."

"I came to the conclusion that he was totally brilliant," she said, "and it dawned on me I had to do something in New York."

Still, Ms. Lin, a musically omnivorous pianist with a taste for the contemporary, had to knock on a lot of doors to find a presenter. Many of the people she talked to hadn't heard of Mr. Tenney, either. Finally she found Boo Froebel and Limor Tomer, past and present curators of performing arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, who both loved the project - and after the Whitney signed on, Ms. Lin had no trouble attracting more interest .

Interest, in fact, is growing everywhere. Mr. Tenney's music has been performed from Aspen, Colo., to New York, from Los Angeles to Donaueschingen, Germany, and he is increasingly well known in Europe. In fact, he is just finishing a commission from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. "He stands for an all-encompassing thing," Ms. Lin said. "A complete artist. He's someone who remains truthful to tradition, which isn't obvious at first. And he's so curious."

She added: "People give me a hard time: 'How can you play at Tonic one night and the next day do Chopin and Bach?' I say, I don't see a difference. Today, everything is coming together and crossing over. That's what hit me hard about Tenney. He's playing Ives and doing electronic music and film music: there's always something to discover."
- posted by ...lg... @ 13:25

 
a new direction
May 8, 2005
Wake Up. Wash Face. Do Routine. Now Paint.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

CHRIS OFILI'S watercolors at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the spring art season's rapturous sleeper, are of imaginary heads. There are 181 of them, all the same size, of men and women in bright African garb, deliriously colored and intricately detailed. Mr. Ofili is, obviously, the British artist (lately transplanted to Trinidad) whose "Holy Virgin Mary," with elephant dung, caused a ruckus a few years back when the "Sensation" show was at the Brooklyn Museum. He is also adept at rather lovely, clever and not at all inflammatory art, including these silhouettes and straight-on portraits, which are titled "Afro-Muses."

Mr. Ofili, it turns out, has been painting his watercolor heads nearly every day for 10 years - for himself, mostly, although some of them have made their way into the world. Watercoloring is his daily ritual. A few years ago he added the occasional bird or flower, to stop the routine from becoming a rut.

Everyone has routines. What works for one person may not for someone else. Routines can be comforting. They may be our jobs. They define our limits and we try to make something constructive out of them.

The myth is that artists are somehow different. That they leap from one peak of inspiration to another. That they reject limits - that this is precisely what makes them artists. But of course that's not true. Most artists work as the rest of us do, incrementally, day by day, according to their own habits. That most art does not rise above the level of routine has nothing necessarily to do with the value of having a ritual.

Twyla Tharp wakes up every day at 5:30 and takes a cab to the gym. Chopin played Bach. Beethoven strolled around Vienna with a sketch pad first thing in the morning. Giorgio Morandi spent decades painting the same dusty bunch of small bottles, bowls and biscuit tins. Chuck Close paints and draws and makes prints of nearly identical dots or marks, which, depending on how they're arranged, turn into different faces. "Having a routine, knowing what to do," he has said, "gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It's calming." He calls his method Zenlike, "like raking gravel in a monastery."

There are routines and there are routines. On Kawara, the Japanese-born artist, paints the date. Since the 1960's, he has made thousands of "Today" paintings. His routine entails at least four or five coats of the same brand of paint, the letters white and hand-drawn, always in roughly the same proportion to the size of the canvas.

Out of routine comes inspiration. That's the idea, anyway. To grasp what's exceptional, you first have to know what's routine. I once spent several months watching the American realist painter Philip Pearlstein paint a picture of two nudes. He has followed the same routine for years. One of the models, Desirée Alvarez, who is also an artist, said that the value of watching someone else's studio routine was "in terms of discipline and day-to-dayness and commitment to work even when it isn't going well."

"I know Philip is interested in Zen monks," she continued. "They have their routines, because they think that within routine, and only within routine, enlightenment comes."

Mr. Ofili said, "That's exactly it," when we spoke the other day about his daily routine. He arrives in his studio at 9 or 10 in the morning, he explained. He sets aside a corner for watercolors and drawings "away from center stage," meaning where he paints his big, collaged oil paintings. "I consider that corner of the studio to be my comfort zone," he said. First, he tears a large sheet of paper, always the same size, into eight pieces, all about 6 by 9 inches. Then he loosens up with some pencil marks, "nothing statements, which have no function."

"They're not a guide," he went on, they're just a way to say something and nothing with a physical mark that is nothing except a start."

Watercolor goes on top. He estimated that each head takes 5 to 15 minutes. Occasionally he'll paint while on the phone. He may finish one watercolor or 10 in the course of a day.

"There have been days I have not made them," he added. "Sometimes it felt absolutely necessary to do pencil drawings instead. It was cleansing. There's a beautiful sound that pencil makes when it's scratching on paper. Very soothing. Watercolor is like waving a conductor's baton. It's very quick. I almost don't even have to think."

"Sometimes," he added, "I will return to the watercolors in the evening. And that's a completely different atmosphere. If things haven't gone well during the day, I can calm down. The big paintings are like a performance - me looking at me. It's self-conscious. There's a lot of getting up close to the canvas, then stepping back, reflecting on decisions, thinking about gestures. I try to take on all sorts of issues and ideas. So my mind is busy. With watercolor, it's just about the colors and the faces. They're free to go any way they want to go. I may tell myself, 'This will be the last one I do.' Then I'll do another. That's liberating."

No two heads are quite alike. There are ballooning Afros and pointy beards, ponytails and hairdos that resemble butterfly wings, earrings that look like fishhooks or like raindrops, necklaces in gold, turquoise or emerald. The heads are as modest and charming as the work that made Mr. Ofili famous is outsize and occasionally over the top. It is wrong to make too much of them. But if they can become repetitive, they convey - like the passing of days, each day akin to the previous one but also a little different - something about the nature of variety in life, which can be subtle.

Despite the care he has taken to attend to this daily ritual, Mr. Ofili said he had never really stopped to think about it so explicitly until someone happened to ask. "I never realized I was so set in my ways until now," he said, thinking it over during our conversation. "But I guess I have tons of rules. They say Morandi mixed and mixed color until he felt there was no color left and then he would begin to paint. He painted his little objects, but I think he was trying to paint what you might call the spaces between the objects. Philip Guston is another example. He had his own routine. He was heavily into political subject matter, into issues in his own life, but he was looking to get beyond those issues, to find the zone. He talked about the process of painting as an emptying out: he said everyone was in the studio with him when he started and gradually they all left until finally he left, too, and then there was only the work."

"In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint," Mr. Ofili concluded. "It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people. Someone else's routine would seem restrictive to me. But rules and limits are something to push against. It's like doing your morning exercise. Things don't kick in until you push at your limits."

After we spoke, I came across the composer Eric Satie's "Memoirs of an Amnesiac." It's an irreverent gem, like his music. "The artist must regulate his life," Satie wrote, then listed his daily activities:

Up at 7:18. From 10:23 to 11:47: inspiration. Lunch at 12:11. Leave the table by 12:14. Only white foods, including boiled chicken and camphorized sausage. More inspiration: 3:12 to 4:07. Bed at 10:37. "Once a week I wake up with a start at 3:19," he wrote. That's on Tuesday.

"I sleep with one eye open. My sleep is very deep. My bed is round, with a hole in the middle for my head."

Hey, whatever works.
- posted by ...lg... @ 10:25