Caleb Burhans' Election Night Requiem

I just found this video while I was doing my myspace schmoozing for the new celestial hip-hop page. My friend Caleb Burhans was performing onstage with Newspeak on Election Night, November 4th, his composition "Requiem for a General Motors in Janesville, WI" when the former president-elect took the stage, but they finished playing the somber piece before going back in the audience to watch the speech.

Also, if you missed the post three below, there's a new MC Pseudo-Dionysius MySpace Music page, be our friend.

Music Review: Alarm Will Sound Live!

It was a hot day in Berkeley yesterday, the hottest day so far of 2007. I left work early to walk for forty-five minutes up to the Alarm Will Sound Concert in Hertz Hall at the University, & I was sweating in a thin shirt & white pants. (For those who think the Bay Area is summer year round, I must report that February was fricking freezing, & yesterday came as a sudden shock wave of college girls in floral skirts.) A friend of mine from high school, Mr Caleb Burhans, plays violin, viola, electric guitar, & sings countertenor for Alarm Will Sound, a contemporary classical music ensemble based in New York City. They were doing a “Composer Portrait” of Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who disappeared to Mexico after fighting for the communists in the Spanish Civil War, & for forty years wrote exclusively for the player-piano. He had been frustrated by live musicians who couldn’t play his mathematical rhythms, & punching his own player-piano rolls liberated him to explore without the burdens of human-playability. (Think about how many educated classical musicians have problems with counting syncopations in 5/4 time, &c.) He frequently writes for two or more tempos simultaneously, & I believe he’s written music in meters like Square-Root-of-Two over Two.

The concert was well-received, altho attended by more older people than students. Possibly because of the $32 price tag. Their Nancarrow repertoire is far less cool than their previous projects. Their recording of acoustic versions of Aphex Twin songs was highlighted by the New York Times as a must-hear; their live concerts of it involved a whole slew of crazy instruments to imitate the electronic sounds. As trendy as it is to arrange Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano for chamber musicians, & as exciting as it can be to perform the crazy rhythms & dual-tempos live & well, these arrangements seemed very muddy. Two of them, Study for Player Piano No. 3A “Boogie-Woogie Suite” (arranged by Derek Bermel of Bang On A Can) & No. 2A (arr. by Gavin Chuck) are heavy on the jazz & rag influence, which is fun but a little cheesy in performance. It is a chaotic-big-band sound which results, in comparison to the recordings of the piano rolls, in which the rag-timey ones sound like Silvestre Revueltes put a Gershwin roll thru a textile machine. I guess what I’m trying to say is: that you’d think orchestrating the music would bring more of what’s going on out of the thick texture, but the opposite is the result. Alarm Will Sound had much of this music memorized, & they often stand & walk around the stage while playing it, which to me seems maddeningly difficult – but the successful effect is that you’re watching a cohesive band that knows its stuff & enjoys what they do (sometimes a rarity in the performance of 20^th Century Classics.) I guess they have no plans to record this music, & are putting it to rest pretty soon. I actually liked the performances of Nancarrow's pre-player-piano music much better, especially the meaty string quartet.

Coincidentally, last week, I finally got in the mail the CD/DVD of Alarm Will Sound performing Steve Reich Live at the Roxy in New York. I attended the taped-performance three years ago, & a perk of the ticket was they would send you a free copy. Apparently, there were some serious issues getting Sweet Spot DVD to release it, which are a little boring & businessy, but it didn’t get out by the time of all the Steve Reich 70^th Birthday Celebrations last year. I have to say, I think these performances of these three pieces – Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ; Sextet, & three songs from The Cave – are really first rate. It’s in the clarity, & fusion of the ensemble, & the youthful energy – for some reason, I think people in my generation, in their 20s & 30s, bring an essential something to Reich’s music that grey-haired old percussionists, like Reich’s own ensemble, lack. Alarm Will Sound has also provided the world with the best recordings of Tehilim & The Desert Music. Mr Burhans plays the rock star in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, bouncing around with a microphone, picking out melodies from the texture & phasing them in & out with his sweet falsetto. And you can see me sitting there, next to four of my college friends, right behind him.

As for the genre, I feel like this is the first real live concert of Reich’s music that isn’t blabbed over by “interviews” (i.e., people saying boring things that aren’t as interesting as the music they’re blocking.) I know of several films or movies of Philip Glass’s music where the editors, operating under the assumption that the music is too dull to stand by itself, casually mix the interviews over it. Last week, I was watching that documentary about John Adams, Hail Bop, & they rarely let us hear more than twenty uninterrupted seconds of his music. A crucial element of this style is letting the audience get into the grooves & repetitions. Anyway, this is a live concert not a documentary, but especially with this kind of minimalism, it benefits from being performed well on video & uninterrupted. Also, did I mention you can see me sitting in the audience?

E-mails: Conversations with Ben Ricker about the latest books by J.K. Rowling & Jonathan Safran Foer [Warning: this discusses the end of both novels!]

Date:	Thu, 29 Jun 2006 17:12:13 -0400
From:	"Benjamin Ricker" <_______@gmail.com>
To:	<_________@yahoo.com
Subject:

james,

i started reading a book by th white. wait, i started reading it when we were neighbors, but i put it down in order to read harry potter 6. i have made a more commited effort into the Once and Future King. its hysterical. i have a feeling you'd really enjoy his sense of humor. i was looking for a little information about the author. his other books sound irresistable. one entitled Goshawk is about his "ill-fated" attempts to become a falconer.

harry potter 6: are they really dropping out of school to chase down death eaters? what?

and snape? how could that be? dumbledore trusted him. how did he manage to fool dumbledore for all those years? i liked snape as the anti-hero. kind of mean and sinister, but in the end could be counted on to do the right thing. i find that, and i think we have talked about this, death in the harry potter books is kind of perplexing. the aveda-kadavera curse is just so abrupt. cedric's death took me a while to grasp. sirius just sort of slipped into an abyss. its so vague. so much of the magic in the books is reversable. plus albus was so sort of all-knowing. i sort of wish that that suprise hadnt been ruined. but its like luke skywalker and darth vader. you cant keep that underwraps for very long.

it took about 300 pages before i found myself enjoying the 6th book. the 1st hundred pages of all the books are about how bored and miserable harry is at privet drive and then being collected to go off to hogwarts. i guess i noticed it more because i had just finished the previous book. the pensieve flashbacks of tom riddle's young life were exciting. the 7th book has a lot of ground to cover if it indeed is the final installment.

extremely loud & incredible close: the first pages cracked me up and last pages had me fighting back tears. oscar schell was totally convincing. i can think of a few books that try and succeed at building a believable perspective of a child narrator. he's over smart and a lot like a miniature adult, but the frustration and helpless feeling that comes from being little, i think, is what makes him seem real. i didnt very much enjoy the sections written by his grandparents. their language was overly poetic and flowery. it could be unfair of me, but it just doesnt seem like old people to write like that. it seemed more like young people's writing. i liked the inclusion of photographs and blank pages. i caused me to read it slowly which i think is what safran-foer wants. its a pretty emotional story that should be read slowly and carefully.

[...]

are you still in the mountains? i really miss the mountains. i was feeling heavy nostalgic about them recently. about camp and stuff. but i soon realized that the things i miss about camp are no longer there. [...] but i miss you and jenny being my neighbors and our porch and drinking butterbeer. matty's idea to hold down the point was a smart one that we should have taken more seriously.

love,

ben

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Date:	Thu, 29 Jun 2006 17:01:32 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"James Welsch" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Cocteau & Cluseau
To:	"Benjamin Ricker" <________@gmail.com>

Dear Ben,

Did you read the stuff about R.A.B.? In the end, I think the Snape issue has to do with the morality of children's literature. If he's a bad guy, then the moral is, you can't trust anyone, not even Dumbledore. If he's a good guy, then there is strong moral of trust in friendship, obviously one of the things she's been going for all along. Also, Harry's pretty dumb to want to go at it solo. Hasn't he learned anything? If he has to destroy four or five horcruxes in the next book, each one like a mini Voldemort, it's a lot to do by himself. Trust & Friendship. & Ginny & Hermoine are some pretty powerful witches.

I felt very strongly about the Extremely Loud book after I finished it last year, like it was a contemporary classic destined to become a classic proper. Since then I've been more defensive & confused about it. Also, I daydream about teaching it to a high-school literature class, bringing out elements of 21st century literature in a fairly accessible book. I didn't like the grandparent's chapters the first time either (because mostly you're wanting to get back to Oskar's chapters), but when I read it out loud to Jenny, those choked me up the most. Stylistically, I think there's some important things going on: 1) hipster authors have been using pictures & graphs for awhile, but this time it seems more tasteful, less gimicky. 2) Existentialists turning into aburdists & postmodernists always had an athiestist meaninglessness-of-life disconnection of symbols. I mean, if there was a detective-trope looking for the solution to a mystery, things might be connected in a meaningless way (like Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49), & things might spiral out into a despair, or a "find your own meaning in life". What's cool about this book is that it seems to be building on that genre, but absolutely everything is interconnected. He's on a totally quixotic search (to find the lock to a key in Manhatten), but almost every detail in the novel stems somehow from the central theme - losing a loved one during a major, unneccesary civilian massacre. Love & War. Also, the idea of collecting things, & writing letters to people you love. Did you figure out why he always wore white? Becuase, in the the hiroshima bombs, the black lettering on white paper was burnt out, saving the white. & he was vegan because he didn't want to eat anything that could have been someone's father.

Well, we spent the day on the beach. I swam around in Tahoe for awhile, which was totally quenching. Now I'm drinking Sierra Nevada, wondering how I'm ever going to get this place cleaned before my father drives up tomorrow. We want to move to the Pacific Ocean. I miss the Point, too, dearly, but it was a season of complex, subtle emotions. I still have nightmares about [...].

[...]

Keep in touch. I want to hear post-camp gossip. Israel Potter [by Herman Melville] is a fast-paced adventure, which I'm reading very slowly - full of ironic patriotism, hubris, sea battles, parodys of figures like Ben Franklin, & innocents abroad.

Peace,
James

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Date:	Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:16:10 -0400
From:	"Benjamin Ricker" <________@gmail.com>
To:	"James Welsch" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Re: Cocteau & Clusea

james,

before this gets too out of hand: because dumbledore is sort of all knowing, you think it might be possible that he knew what snape was going to do and allowed it to happen? that it was planned between the two of them? then why not prepare harry for it somehow? perhaps i have missed your point. how is it possible that snape is still a good guy? its amazing to me how much study goes into learning the identity of R.A.B.. i was sort of content to wait for the next book. i'd recommend that harry stay in school. death eaters are always killing experienced aurors. what makes harry think he stands a chance?

back to Extremely Loud:

yeah, i didnt see the photos as a gimick either. it crossed my mind at first. the pages that were meant to be from thomas schell senior's communicating pad carried the same weight. i thought they were important. i may have mentioned this in the previous email, but those pages slowed me down. in a good way. they served to set a relaxed and patient pace for reading the book. its been a while since i have read a book with as much gravity. by the end i was sort of blazing through it at top speed and feeling guilty for doing so.

ok, the part of the book where bombs are imagined in reverse. bombs collecting fire and destruction then jumping back into the bellies of planes which fly backwards etc etc. i have encountered that image a handful of times recently. i know joseph heller uses it in catch 22. thomas pynchon uses it in gravity's rainbow. why is that so common?

i like the pacific ocean. rather, i am pretty much captivated by it. its funny, the atlantic ocean doesnt really effect me very much. the pacific ocean has a much different power. i lived at the pacific ocean in san francisco. its really too bad that i didnt take to that city because i really enjoyed having the ocean near by. i think i'd like to live in oregon or washington state sometime soon.

post camp gossip? man, i knew little of what was going on even when it was happening around me.

[...]

please let me know about music events. oh, i played some "acoustica" for a friend-exgirlfriend. she studied at eastman and claims also to know some of the composers on that compilation. what a small world.

love,

ben

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Date:	Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:38:39 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Alarms
To:	"Benjamin Ricker" <__________@gmail.com>

Ben,

I'm watching Germany-Argentina play in the World Cup Quarterfinals.

A lot of people I went to high school with went the Eastman route. My friends are Caleb Burhans & his wife Martha who play strings & sing for Alarm Will Sound. They're also on that Steve Reich Tehilim I gave you on the mix. Caleb arranged the "Cliffs" one, which I think is really beautiful.

How Snape still might be a good guy:

He was under contractual obligation (unbreakable curse) to protect Draco, plus he was surrounded by death eaters, & killing Dumbledore was what it came down to to protect himself, despite his allegances. It is very possible that Dumbledore would have previously discussed with Snape this eventuality, & in his humility, would have considered Snape more important to remain alive than himself.

Is it possible that he is a true double agent, too deep now in both sides to have preferences?

Slaughterhouse Five has the backwards bombs things also. I guess it occured to a lot of those guys who witnessed so much bombing.

Go Germany? Argentina?

James

____________________________________________________________________________

Date:	Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:40:20 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"James Welsch" <_______@yahoo.com>
Subject:	P.S.
To:	"Benjamin Ricker" <_______@gmail.com>

Jenny finished HP6 last night, & she was crying & tossing & turning all night. She says she so mad at J.K.

Plus, didn't it seem like Snape was still trying to teach & protect Harry during their last confrontation. Jenny's pissed at Snape & doesn't believe me that he still could be on our side.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Date:	Fri, 30 Jun 2006 16:23:50 -0400
From:	"Benjamin Ricker" <_______@gmail.com>
To:	"James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Re: P.S.

she's pissed at rowling? i was pissed at snape. is that the same thing?

[...]

listen, i have always really liked snape. its hard for me to believe.

i cant really see how snape can still be on our side, but it would fit in jkrowling-nothing-is-what-it-seems-wait-n-see kind of way. it would take lots of explaining. are there any clues that snape knew harry was there watching? dumbledore put his undieing faith in snape. i guess that should be good enough for all of us. not just harry, but us readers too. you know what? i think i just convinced myself. i'm standing by snape on this one. tell jenny.

also, they'll hang a talking portrait of dumbledore in the headmaster's office. he's not gone like sirius is gone.

List

1) Girls who think Sandinistra is the best Clash album.
2) Snow in May.
3) The 1976 elections.
4) Neil Diamond’s "Soulimon".
5) What Hawthorne thought of Melville.
6) A googly during a Sticky Wicket.
7) The deleted ending of Dr. Strangelove.
8) Popcorn cooked over a fire.
9) When, during the last Calvin & Hobbes anthology, Rosalyn (the babysitter) beats Calvin at Calvinball.
10) David Byrne dancing with a lamp.
11) White tea with steamed rice milk.
12) Turquoise found in the hills of the Nevada desert.
13) New York hipster drone music played at deafening volumes on the Hurdy-Gurdy.
14) Good flan.
15) Lily Langtree.
16) The names of Al Franken’s books.
17) Half Moon Lake in Desolation Wilderness.
18) Petzl Headlamps worn at inappropriate times.
19) J.D. Salinger’s longevity.
20) People who smile to themselves at you.
21) Joan Baez singing both parts of conversational songs.
22) Jokes about Sven & Ollie.
23) People who are humble about having read all of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen.
24) Sexagenarians who think The Man Who Wasn't There is the best Cohen Brothers movie.
25) Poor students who would prefer to spend more than $50 on a bottle of good tequila.
26) Mimosa’s Witnesses.
27) My friend who said she saw Wagner’s Siegfried on acid with her father.
28) John Denver’s Greatest Hits, Volume Three.
29) Children who use the word “obtuse.”
30) Life-long vegetarians.
31) Tan M&Ms in a wine glass.
32) Toughannock Falls.
33) The first few chapters of First Chronicles.
34) Houris.
35) When Elizabeth Bishop interrupts & corrects herself in her own poem.
36) Seeing an old friend in a new light.
37) Having a large number of dimes.
38) Jokes about what’s black, white, and/or red.
39) Corn Lily.
40) Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida.
41) Butterbeer & Firewhiskey.
42) Caleb Burhans.
43) Merlot drinkers.
44) People who take black & white photos on digital cameras.
45) Jimmy Buffet’s Jamaica Mistaica.
46) Reading Robert Burns out loud with an American accent.
47) Christmas caroling on Halloween.
48) The one who gets to play 4’33” during a John Cage Music Circus.
49) David Bowie as Andy Warhol in Basquiat.
50) Eskimo women chanting.