NOIShanghai 2nd Anniversary show this Saturday

by Ben

NOIShanghai XIII will take place this Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008, 2:30 pm, at Live Bar in Shanghai, 721 Kunming Rd., near Tongbei Rd., way up in Yangpu District.

The program includes Torturing Nurse, Wang Changcun, and Runar Magnusson from Iceland, now living in Denmark. Runar was also in China a year ago and played some gigs with Dickson Dee in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Looks like they’re playing again in Shenzhen tomorrow.

Thirteen concerts organized in two years (see list) is not a bad track record!




Li Jianhong’s Japan Diaries, Day Seven

by Ben

December 15, 2006
We got out of bed at noon to go have lunch with Little Snow. Today she wanted to invite us to eat an Osaka specialty, okonomiyaki, at a little place called Cherry Blossoms. This dish is a little bit like teppanyaki; looks, smells, taste—got them all.

Afterwards, Little Snow took us to nearby Kobe to check out a famous street for second-hand goods. This market sprang up under one of Kobe’s light rail lines. It must stretch past several stations, certainly more than a kilometer in length. We entered from 7th St. and went straight in, successively passing 6th St., 5th St….I can’t remember clearly. I liked the part where we started our stroll, which had mostly old stuff like second-hand clothes, digital equipment, antiques, musical instruments, toys, albums, furniture, adult videotapes, a lot of adult manga, used books, and all sorts of other stuff, good quality at a cheap price. The shop owners were mostly middle-aged and elderly people. The things we saw the most of were shoes: old and new, leather and cloth, they had it all, since Kobe is the center of Japan’s shoe production. There was one store that specialized in second-hand Converse shoes; inside and out, the place was crammed full of Converse shoes of every size and shape, style and color. They were distinguished by their place of manufacture: Made in USA, Made in China…. The American ones were naturally more expensive, the Chinese ones were naturally much cheaper, and there were also shoes produced elsewhere at varying prices.

It really was a feast for the eyes, especially all of the toys and figurines, including lots of Japanese cartoon characters, all kinds of toy monsters, and small-sized Japanese antiques—really easy to “waste” time on. In the end, Marqido and itta bought several toy instruments, and my harvest was a pile of monsters to take back. The only one whose name I knew was Godzilla. Little Snow told me several of the other models were also famous Japanese monsters. I was wondering if some might be from Kairyu Daikessen 怪龙大决战 (Battle of the Dragons, 1966), but I couldn’t remember for sure.

As we continued pressing forward, the items on sale got newer. 1st St. and 2nd St. were basically a young person’s world, the majority of the products being fashionable clothes. Nothing there to really turn my head.

When we were done shopping, Little Snow went back, while Marqido, itta, and I continued strolling around Kobe until we were ready for dinner.

When we got back to Osaka, Iida and some of our new friends were all having dinner at his place. His parents had made several dishes, of which one dried, pickled radish dish was especially good, and I ate quite a bit. The Japanese word for “radish” is “daikon” (literally “big root” in Chinese)…such an exciting name! It kept reminding me of the virile male genital organ.




Stockhausen and Videogames

by Ben

I already had Karlheinz Stockhausen on my mind prior to his death last month. For probably a good twelve years now I’ve had my eye out for a recording of Gesang der Jünglinge, which I think was originally issued on Deutsche Grammophon back in the 60’s, but for a long time was out of print. In the early 90’s Stockhausen regained the rights to his early works and started releasing them on his own imprint (before Radiohead or even Prince!), but as I recall it was originally only available on an expensive three-disc set that had to be specially ordered from Germany, a pricy proposition. Twice I came close to finding it: once at Tower Records in Shibuya, Tokyo, and again last summer at Amoeba Records in Los Angeles; both stores had almost the complete set of Stockhausen-Verlag recordings, but no Gesang der Jünglinge.

I mentioned this fact in passing maybe two or three times to my girlfriend, who happened to grow up just down the road from Stockhausen in the suburbs of Cologne, and she astounded me with the gift of this long-sought recording for my birthday last October. So it was gratifying to be already engaged in his music when I got news of his death, to avoid feeling that little twinge of regret at not having paid enough attention to someone’s work while that person is still alive, the way I did with Ligeti.

Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), which portrays the Old Testament story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, was as spectacular as I remembered it, all the more amazing considering that it was realized in 1956. I guess it’s generally considered to be the first composition (or at least first significant composition) to mix pure, electronically generated sound with musique concrète, in this case, a recording of a boy singing a Psalm (evidently an apocryphal addition to the book of Daniel) from the Catholic mass in German. It’s backed with Kontakte plus three early studies for electronic sound. The package contains a thick booklet of Stockhausen’s voluminous notes, numerous excerpts from the detailed scores, and more charts and tables than you can shake a stick at. Indicative of the painstaking attention to detail is a photograph depicting a reenactment of an elaborate, home-rigged tape splicing technique he developed, so that he could perform his more tedious tasks at home and make the most of his precious studio time.

It’s also been fascinating to get reacquainted with Kontakte. This piece from 1960 exists in two versions; I already have a recording of the version for tape with piano and percussion (on the Wergo label), but this CD features the version for tape alone. The work has 16 sections (Struktur), several of which are further subdivided, and unlike the Wergo recording, each section of the piece is indexed as a separate track. For a work of this scale (thirty-five and a half minutes), this indexing underlines the fine attention to every minute detail of the piece. As an example, and in the spirit of evangelism, I hope that Stockhausen-Verlag will not begrudge my posting the gorgeous “Struktur XV” in its entirety. No event passed too quickly to escape Stockhausen’s scrutiny; he is in complete command of these 43.8 seconds.

I don’t know much about his recent work, though I’ve been boning up a bit lately. Around the time I first encountered Gesang der Jünglinge in 1993 or 1994, I asked a professor what Stockhausen was up to these days, and he replied something like, “He used to write such great music, but now he’s just trying to talk to aliens!” In one of Stockhausen’s obituaries, I read that he actually started off as a fairly devout Catholic (like his professor Messiaen, illuminating his choice of subject matter for Gesang der Jünglinge), who seems to have gradually developed his own unique strain of cosmic mysticism, as suggested by this prayer posted on his website.

The only recent work I know is the Helikopter-Quartett from 1993, which I consider a fascinating, audacious, curiously flawed, but ultimately inspiring piece. Like most of his music from 1977 until 2003, it figures into his gargantuan, 29-hour opera cycle Licht (Helikopter-Quartett is the third scene from Mittwoch). It’s a string quartet that also requires four helicopters, a huge audio-visual relay system, and a stadium in which to perform it. Helicopters have a complex sound with multiple components (I know, because part of my job is putting helicopter sounds into videogames), and it’s interesting to think of using this sound for musical purposes. But parts of the score require the musicians to count out numbers in German, which seems oddly superfluous, like they suddenly stumbled into a George Crumb piece.

Nonetheless, especially in the early days of my career, when I was doing a lot of work-for-hire music, and my creative impulses would occasionally clash with the producers’ commercial instincts, I used to listen to Helikopter-Quartett as the ultimate statement of artistic confidence and integrity. He doesn’t doubt for an instant that the quality of his music deserves anything less than these ridiculous logistics. And every aspect of the spectacle is spelled out in the score, including the post-performance discussion; Stockhausen composes everything. The kicker is that after the premiere and all the expense and negotiation and coordination it entailed, he had the audacity to revise the work, which necessitated a new recording!

But ultimately more relevant to my work in the non-linear medium of videogames is Stockhausen’s investigation of form.

In 1956, he wrote the mobile-like Klavierstück XI, which is structurally similar to some Earle Brown’s pieces. I checked out the score for this piece at the University of Washington music library a few years ago. It comes rolled up in a big tube, with a little stand that you unfold and to which you affix the printed score before placing it on the piano (not that I attempted to play it; it’s way, way beyond my capabilities). It was in the rare books section, so the librarian gave me white gloves to wear while handling the score. Several short phrases are spaced about the page, and the pianist may move from phrase to phrase arbitrarily. When any phrase is played for a third time, the piece is over. The most unique application of this mobile structure is that the end of each phrase dictates the manner in which the subsequent phrase, whichever it may be, should be played, so that the same material may be subjected to real-time variations.

This mobile-like structure is handy enough, but even more useful is Stockhausen’s notion of “moment form,” which permeates every element of the music, not just a few branching forks in the road. He elaborates on this idea in the liner notes to my earlier Wergo recording of Kontakte (comments reproduced from a 1961 interview):

During the last years, there have been forms composed in music which are far removed from the form of the dramatic finale; they lead up to no climax, nor do they have prepared, and thus expected, climaxes, nor the usual introductory, intensifying, transitional, and cadential stages which are related to the curve of development in a whole work; they are…forms in which at any moment one may expect a maximum or a minimum, and in which one is unable to predict with certainty the direction from any given point.

The idea is that the music can exist in stasis, not moving towards any dramatic climax, but just doing its own thing indefinitely, until, for whatever reason, it does something else. Kontakte is an accretion of small structures, not a big structure that’s been broken down into smaller subdivisions. The form is additive, which is to say, it’s the opposite of a traditional Western symphony that is divided into movements, sections, phrases, measures, beats, subdivisions of beats, etc., all working towards a big final cadence.

(This is the same revelation Philip Glass had much later when transcribing Indian music for Western musicians, and he points out that most non-Western music also shares this conception of music as being a behavior that can evolve. I’d also point out that many composers have found this type of music well-suited to spiritual expressions like Stockhausen’s, including Olivier Messiaen and Steve Reich, not to mention a great number of composers operating way back when church music was the norm, such as Perotin or Allegri.)

You could call it non-teleological (thanks to Bret Battey for introducing me to this word), or non-goal-oriented music. And when music isn’t moving towards a specific goal, it’s free to go anywhere at any time. And that’s an exact prescription for music that must accompany an indeterminate, real-time process, in which the goal may not be forseeable. And that’s one way to describe a videogame.

I’ve often been tempted to make yet another analogy between film and videogames (there have been many), in regard to the influence of classical music on new media. I think you can say that Debussy, for example, is a very cinematic composer. A lot of his transitions sound like camera cuts. He encountered in some capacity this new technology and thought about what it meant for the world of ideas, and it was reflected (innately, and along with lots of other ideas) in his music, at a time when film was still finding its aesthetic legs and real film music basically consisted of borrowed ballet scores.

(Note that this is not the same as talking about how composers of horror film scores have looted the music of the Second Viennese School; while it’s true that audience’s ears have grown to accept sounds that were once considered cacophonous, that’s a different discussion, which is more about content, or what Morton Feldman might call the surface of the music. It’s not about grappling with the fundamental expressive or structural capacities of a new medium.)

In the same way, as the notion of modern computers seeped into the public consciousness, composers in the middle of the last century began to think through the aesthetic ramifications of the new medium, even though, in the majority of cases, they were not actually writing music for computers. John Cage didn’t use a computer to generate his random numbers until the very end of his life, but the idea of this possibility was surely there much earlier. It’s only now that everyone’s got a computer and videogames are truly mass media entertainment that these ideas can be linked back up to the technology that may have sparked them in the first place. This is true of Stockhausen’s moment form. What may once have been considered irrelevant intellectual conjecture is finding increasing application in the consoles of legions of videogame players.

This underscores the necessity of contemporary music; it structures ideas about who we are and the world around us. The media we use influences the way we think, and Klavierstück XI is basically a web page. To pick an arbitrary example, Beethoven’s music, as great as it is, can never fully address the experience of someone living today, because Beethoven never had a cell phone.

Around the time I first encountered Kontakte in the late 90’s, I read a quotation by Stockhausen that I think I’d go so far as to say I’ve adopted as a life principle, though I’ve probably stretched it a bit beyond its original context (which I have now forgotten). He said, as I recall, “In everything, I am trying to integrate more and more.” That’s already a noble enough goal for a piece of music: to think through every aspect of an artwork, accepting no tradition or convention untested, making sure every element has a reason to be there.

But I think this maxim can apply equally to a whole life, relating what one writes to what one eats, one’s grooming habits, how one conducts one’s relationships, etc. This attitude reminds me of how Laurie Anderson says she used to go to other artists’ homes early in her career to see what was in their refrigerators, or how my former composition professor Peter Hamlin used to invite students to his house for his homemade chili. It seems to me the most integrated and satisfying music results from truly living one’s art.

Such a mantra doesn’t seem like such a bad legacy.




Stockhausen Serves Imperialism

by Ben

I’d recommend the British composer Cornelius Cardew to anyone who’s following new music and China. For a long time he was on my list of composers I ought to know more about, but it took moving to Shanghai to provide the necessary impetus to dig in.

I had been curious to read some Confucius, so about two years ago I ordered Ezra Pound’s version of The Great Digest. I also picked up excerpts of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, a gargantuan piece of several hours based on the same work (”The Great Learning” and “The Great Digest” both being renderings of the Chinese “大学 Da Xue”), as well as the piano piece We Sing for the Future! I also started reading his book, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and in light of Stockhausen’s death, this seems as good a time as any to mention it here. In the introduction he rails against the capitalist notion of copyright, so I don’t think he’d object to my posting it.

Cardew was an assistant to Stockhausen from 1956 to 1960, and later an associate of John Cage’s. Cardew converted to communism in the 1970’s, and a significant chunk of the book is devoted to lambasting both of them as bourgeois idealists. Here’s a taste:

The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first, to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing “geniuses.” The bourgeois ideologist today can only earn the title “genius” by going to extreme lengths of intellectual corruption and dishonesty, and this is just what Cage and Stockhausen have done. Inevitably, they try and lead their “schools” along the same path. These are ample grounds for attacking them; it is quite wrong to think that such artists with their elite audiences are “not doing anyone any harm.”

There’s all kinds of interesting stuff that makes this book worth reading. He provides a fascinating overview of the history of the Scratch Orchestra, a kind of pick-up avant-garde collective he founded to perform The Great Learning. He also does a thorough self-criticism of his own works, including The Great Learning and Treatise, referencing Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. It’s valuable as a glimpse of how China was perceived in the West in the 1970’s, and it raises all kinds of questions about the role of composer in society, the relationships between composer and performer and audience, the value of abstract intellectual inquiry, allegations of elitism, etc.

The Great Learning may be a flawed piece, but it actually contains a lot of unique solutions to the question of how to coordinate the indeterminate actions of multiple performers, reminding me in some ways of Christian Wolff. And I’m not completely convinced that a big piano piece like We Sing for the Future!, written after Cardew’s avant-garde reformation, is necessarily demonstrably more “useful.” But his comments about how “derivative” pop music “will serve for the ideological subjugation of the working class…through encouraging degenerate tendencies, drugs, mass hypnosis, sentimentality” do bring to mind Howard W. French’s recent article, “The Sound, Not of Music, but of Control.”




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