Avant-Garde Music Etc.

My roots as a composer are with the mid-Twentieth-Century avant-garde. I studied directly with some of its leading lights, and more often with some of its secondary influences. So I have a direct lineage to the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, to the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and to other branches of sound exploration, tape music, and so forth. I studied with George Cacioppo, and knew many of the other composers involved with the mid-century avant-garde. I still default to this music, at least in attitude, when time and opportunity allow. In many ways it's my "home plate" as a composer, even though a lot of the music I compose these days is far more "inside the box." Well, if you write to commission, you don't always get the chance to be adventurous.

it's bitterly cold right now, well below freezing. I am wrapped up in blankets, still feeling the chill, trying to stay warm. I've been listening to music by Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and others. I've been editing sounds and music tracks on my laptop as I sit curled up on the couch in layers of blankets.

I am rambling through my memories of the avant-garde musical soundscape. This is a random walk, with no purpose, and far from complete.

This was all brought back to me by recent readings in the history of mid-20th-C. music, and some related topics. And from memories that have been surfacing, of the time I first lived in Madison, WI.

I've been involved in community radio since 1980, when I first got my FCC license. I've had my own Road Journal podcast since 2004, which I tend to view as akin to radio programming. Granted, the podcast veers all over the map, there's a lot of musical and sound experiments on it, as well as readings from my Road Journal; still, it had a pretty substantial listenership when it was mostly spoken word, those first two or three early years. My late-night radio show on WORT-FM in Madison, WI, which I had for 7 years, featured the most difficult avant-garde and challenging music available on record, and had a Nielsen rating of 11 percent of the total local market. I also regularly broadcast live improvised music, made in the production studio, and live mixes of pre-recorded sources.

I broadcast a lot of quality literary and radio drama recordings on my show, ranging from Samuel Beckett plays for radio to John Cage's ROARATORIO and William S. Burroughs reading Naked Lunch on CD, and these always received a lot of positive calls from the listeners. (The only time I ever got in trouble was when a housewife complained about my playing Allen Ginsberg's reading of Howl on the air; I mixed it with live music, namely my Stick set up in the in production studio, leaning against the speaker, and "howling" with continuous feedback; I used that as the background to Ginsberg reading several other poems along with Howl. I gathered later that the complaint was because the housewife was surprised, although I was in truth broadcasting during the FCC "safe harbor" night hours. Nothing ever came of the incident.) And my show always exceeded its goal during pledge drives. I also regularly played syndicated radio spoken-word programs like Ken Nordine's Word Jazz (which now has its own podcast) and the series New American Radio, which included a fair bit of avant-garde radio drama (and which I see one can now listen to again online).

Today I am also thinking of a performance I saw in Madison of the full-length dance piece choreographed by Bill T. Jones, Still/Here. The dancers in the ensemble for this piece were mostly ordinary folks, not professional dancers. There were lots of "non-dancer" bodies onstage. One of the dancers onstage had a body type like me own: tall and blocky and large around the middle; he moved with grace and power, often serving as the fulcrum or center around which other dancers moved. I found this dance concert incredibly empowering, something I will never forget. I had been studying for some time by then modern dance, with Ellen Moore, contact improvisation, and the martial arts Tai Chi Chuan and Ki Aikido.

It was a fertile time in Madison for me: also a time of much self-exploration. I met lots of established thinkers and avant-garde artists, people who had moved and shaken the creative world. I was involved in the local music scene as a musician, a photographer, and a writer of concert, music, album, and dance reviews. I was a music journalist, who also played music. I got to see a lot of amazing concerts; and I got to participate in some, too.

To be continued.

Still/Here Sutra

Still/Here Sutra (Pranayana)

(for Bill T. Jones)


i.

It begins with a circle:
turning on the Wheel of living,
walking out spirals on the floor:

I know I’m going to see so many die
before I die:
    Why don’t I feel: “Why me?”
What are these gates
    we all dance through?
This is an initiation: into what?
    Where?
Who will receive me? Into death?
All the others who have gone before,
and I alone remain: remain. Alone.
Who will catch me? As I fall?
Alone: together: let me be—alone.
To learn: how not to be afraid:
    of losing all control.
Of losing myself.
Who do you love: if not yourself?
The world is full of light and blues:

the inspiration to get up, to quit this job
that is wasting my time: and live.
Every moment left: is precious.

What am I guilty of? Why
do I even feel this guilt?:
    survivor’s guilt.
Why did they all die:
    and not me?
What do I fear? Dying alone:
    being alone
when I die, surrounded by beloved ghosts.
What do I love? The light, the air,
the land, this body:
    this incarnated world,
inhabited by such wonders, and every kind
of aliveness, even the ones we can’t know.

Still I am here.
Here I am . . . still.
Still here—and laughing.
Here I am: still: being still,
here—in this place.
Still being. Here.
Being here. Still.
    At peace with stillness.
Here. Here, now:
    be still.
    Be here.
    Be.
    Here.

    Still.


ii.

It goes on, another circle,
a tangent arced from the life of this boy,
still being with what he strives for:

What I hate most in myself
is my willingness to give away my strength.
My time: my life.
As if it meant so little to me.
I hate my lazy willingness to believe
I have all the time left in the world:
I don’t.
When you know you’re going to die,
you can do anything.
    Why can’t I?

Why must I see them all die first?
Why must I be the last one?—
    I’ve seen it: I know it:
    Either the last one on the battlements,
    fighting the alien horde
    to give my family time to escape;
    or, alone in bed, the last one,
    surrounded by the ghosts
    of everyone I’ve ever loved.

I have Seen it. I Know it.

I thought many times that I must break
under this burden: but I have not.
It would so much easier to break.
Maybe—just maybe: I cannot be broken.
Maybe that is:
    enough.

I’m still here.
Here I am, still being: still.

A witness: a tether.
The one whose task and sorrow and joy it is
to put up the chairs, and turn out the lights,
and close the door behind him:
there:
    at the end of the world.