elegy for George (remix)

In 1984, I was the featured performing artist on the radio program Studio Live on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. (Disclosure: I was a longtime volunteer programmer on CBN, and had a couple of regular shows. This was a special event, a live performance show that I was invited to be on.) I just found the cassette master recording of that broadcast, which also includes the tape music piece I made from part of that broadcast in the WCBN Production studio later.

It was during the live broadcast, when we were playing a tape piece of mine, that a phone call came in informing me of the death of my George Cacioppo: good friend, mentor in music composition, founding member of the ONCE Group of experimental music composers in Ann Arbor in the 1960s, and philosophical gadfly. I then made the rest of the live show into a memorial elegy for George.

The piece I made from that evening, "elegy for George," was later broadcast on WCBN, and also played as a tape piece at a memorial concert in George's memory, at the Unitarian church in Ann Arbor. William Albright, my advisor as a composition student, and one of the most important mentors in my life, organized the event, and when he heard I had a piece, he had it included. So my music was performed alongside the music of some of my heroes in modern, experimental, avant-garde music: Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, George's own music, and other members of the ONCE Group and Fluxus.

Last night I digitized the cassette without difficulty into my studio computer. Tonight I spent an hour cleaning up the digital version, then making a new piece of music out of it, a remix. Consider the musical category to be trance, drone, ambient, meditation. But the piece itself is a very emotional piece of music, and it can get under your skin.

This version is digitally edited and remixed. It is stretched to three time its original length, then heavily processed in Sony Vegas using heavy-duty reverbs and processors like Lexicon Pantheon and Waves Enigma. Essentially this is an extended, blurred remix. I can also hear maybe adding Tibetan bell sounds to this piece, in another version. Fodder for another ambient/meditation album, an idea I've been working on for a few months.

elegy for George (enigma blur remix)    


George Cacioppo


"Cassiopeia," by George Cacioppo
A marvelously sensual and beautiful piece of aleatoric music that I have performed a number of times.

Heartlands: Some Publicity Before the Premiere

Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus Artistic Director Ken Forney was interviewed about "Heartlands" on WORT-FM Madison, WI, the community radio station in Madison. Mr. Forney was interviewed on the program "Queery," Madison's first community radio show on local and regional QLGBT issues.

You can go to the WORT-FM archives to listen to the show here, or download the show as an MP3 podcast here.

(Full disclosure: I was a volunteer radio programmer on WORT-FM myself for 7 or 8 years, in the 1990s. I did the Sunday night avant-garde new music show, 11pm till 2am. I had a major market share for that show while ran it; happily a version of the show is still on the air. Consequently I'm pleased that my community radio alma mater is taking an interest in my music.)

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Also, the Wisconsin Gazette online magazine, which provides monthly coverage of Wisconsin's LGBT community, has interviewed myself and Ken Forney, and produced an article about the premiere of "Heartlands."

You can view or download the May 31, 2012, issue of the Wisconsin Gazette here. See page 23 for the article on "Heartlands," and page 53 for an advertisement for the concert premieres.

Digitizing Vinyl

The past few days, I finally got started on a long-intended project: recording some of my old vinyl LP records into digital audio files on one of my computers. I connected a turntable up to my previous laptop (retired when I got the new one, but still useful for this), wiped a lot of data off the old drive to make room, and started recording. I've transcribed about a half dozen favorite old LPs that I have not listened to for at least ten years, and haven't really had the physical means to listen to for half that time. The past few years when I've been on the road a lot, carrying heavy stereo equipment has been abandoned in favor of portable gear like an iPod, a laptop computer, a case of CDs, and a set of computer speakers.

When I closed down my parents' home after they died, I kept my father's old stereo equipment, which at one point in time had been very high-end. My father and my uncle were both audiophiles. They both were willing to invest a lot of time and money into their sound equipment. For example, a Nakamichi 700 cassette tape deck; a Phase Linear 4000 receiver; really good AR speakers, etc. I grew up around high-end audio gear, and also reading my father's monthly audiophile magazines, like High Fidelity. I learned a great deal about recording and reproduction technology before I was in college; later in life, I've spent a lot of time in the recording studio, both as an engineer and as a recording artist. In high school, I got involved with the audio-visual department. I made videos with the other students, and recorded tapes for radio. I was part of the team that read the daily announcements on the school's PA system, a daily five-minute "radio" broadcast of sorts. Not long after I graduated from high school and started college, I got my FCC Radiooperator's License, which I still have, and got involved with programming and hosting community radio. I viewed radio as another means of performance, and with a collaborator or two made several experimental radiopieces that ranged from very avant-grade live performances to mixups of LPs and cassettes and reel to reel tapes that were composed for radio. I have most of that material on cassette, recorded live off the broadcast feed. And I have a high-end cassette player also hooked up to the studio computer, and am digitizing those cassettes, as well.

One of these radiopieces was Bottle Music, made with my regular music partner Stuart Hinds. (Follow the link for a couple of excerpts to listen to.)

Another was a piece I made entirely in the radio station production rooms, and in the University of Michigan's Electronic Music Studio, a stone flute. This piece consisted of poetic texts with soundscape, inspired in part by my reading of Jerome Rothenberg's seminal anthologies of what came to be called ethnopoetics, Shaking the Pumpkin and These anthologies for the first time ever treated the oral poetries and songs of indigenous peoples from many cultures as legitimate poetic traditions, equal artistically and literarily to our own Euro-American fine art literature. Rothenberg has continued this interest over the years, and remains one of our most important editors of large poetry anthologies.

Here is a stone flute in its entirety (about half an hour long), if you care to listen:

a stone flute    

Stuart Hinds, reader; AD, soundscapes, processing, production

Some of the vinyl LPs I am digitizing first are ones I want to listen to again, after not having heard them for many years. Others are more abstract music, and avant-garde music, that likewise I hadn't heard for awhile, but also were sources I used as elements for some of those radiopieces. It's been fun to listen to them, again, as I record them into the old laptop. It brings back memories of the live on-air mixing we sometimes had to do in complex ways, in order to combine sources into our live-broadcast radiopieces.

A lot of my favorite LPs have never been re-released on CD. This is true of much of the avant-garde music I acquired over the years on LP. But it's also true of some classical performances (although these are more likely to be reissued than are other genres), some jazz, some folk music, and a lot of rare recordings of ethnic music. Smithsonian/Folkways has reissued on CD a number of the old Nonesuch Explorer series of recordings of folk music from around the world—recordings I treasured all through college and grad school—but not all of them. Some are only reissued in excerpts, some not at all.

So digitizing a lot of my rare and unusual vinyl is a project that will be ongoing for some time. I will be digging into it all winter, as I will be sorting and organizing other materials, for a proposed major garage sale next spring. After I've digitized many of these old LPs, I will be letting go of the actual physical LP; there are antiquarian collectors and enthusiasts who no doubt will be interested in some of these.

But in digitizing some of those favorite LPs over the past few days I realized as well that I do want to keep some of them. The most important to me; the most rare and unusual. This will be a small minority of the overall collection, maybe only one or two racks. But these few LPs remain valuable to me, personally, as works of music, of unusual sounds, of rare recordings. Once digitized, I might not listen to the LP directly any more, but the liner notes, the included booklets, the multi-media materials that some artists explored in the 70s and 80s: those will be worth keeping, to consult for notes, and to continue to use for future inspiration.

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(Further examples of my own original music can be listened to via the Music page of my website.)

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.

Bottle Music

For several years, during and after finishing music school in Ann Arbor, I had regular radio shows on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor, the University-owned, student-run community FM radio station. It was truly great radio, because it was largely volunteer programming, and the format was that vanishing format called freeform. In other words, you had a slot of time, and the programming was up to you.

I did a weekly world music program called Hemispheres, a weekly new music program called Horizons, and a regular if not always weekly late-night experimental program in which I composed pieces for radio, and performed them live. These were largely mixes, sometimes of original sources, but also of pre-recorded sources, including several mixes based on, say, Tibetan Buddhist chant, or experimental noise, or other even more exotic things.

My longtime partner in radio, and compositional collaborator, Stuart Hinds, and I put on regular radiopiece broadcasts that were basically composed mixes. But we also did completely original composed and improvised performances live on the air.

This was a regular thing on CBN, actually. I was involved with a group of fairly radical DJs on CBN, and we did several live shows of improvised and composed music. I also hosted live performances of Indian music, folk, and other genres, too. Once, I engineered and hosted a live performance by a favorite band of mine just as they were becoming nationally famous: Los Lobos. That was a fun evening, indeed.

One of the pieces that Stuart and I organized, composed, performed, recorded, manipulated live, and broadcast live was Bottle Music. This was live performance mixed with pre-recorded performance, then tapes of the live performance were manipulated and re-broadcast along with other live elements. We collected bottles for a month or so before doing the piece, a full carload to take down to the station. We set them as microtonally tuned sets in the performance studio beforehand, as the primary performance location, with other bottles in other setups around the building. We began by playing a composed pattern piece for tuned bottles, notated as patterns of relative pitch, which later became a free improv. There were mics set up in the secondary studio, tapes were recorded and manipulated in both production rooms, there were mics in the resonant spaces around the building—the studio was in the basement of one of the University buildings—including the bathrooms, stairwells, and lobby. The overall piece had both quiet and noisier sections, depending on what was going on at the time. By the end of the evening we were breaking the bottles, to finish the piece, along with the previously-performed and reprocessed elements. it was three hours of glorious cacaphony, live on the radio, in four sections circa 45 minutes duration apiece, and it was tremendous fun to do.

Three are several more of these pieces in my cassette archives, that I am gradually digitizing. Several large projects with SH/AD, and many more individual mixes. I also used the production studios at WBCN, in addition to the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Michigan, to create several tape pieces, several of my text-sound poetry pieces, and other works for electronic music and/or tape. I was a volunteer programmer at WCBN from 1980 through 1985; very fertile years for making new experimental music.

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Bottle Music (1984)

composed, produced, and performed by Stuart Hinds & Arthur Durkee

additional performers: Hairy Beanball, Case Krell, Jeff Sinclair, Ben Quada,
Jeff Wechter, Mark Murrell, March Wells, Steve Austin

engineered by Art Durkee, Hairy Beanball, and Mark Murrell;
assistant engineer: Case Krell

first broadcast live on

WCBN-FM Freeform
11pm till 2am
5-6 June 1984

excerpt from Part I

excerpt from Part 4

John Cage: Silence, Sound, Remix

John Cage / Wim Mertens: So that each person is in charge of himself from Ubuweb.



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Collections & Re-Collections Re: & Not-Re: John Cage by Arthur Durkee (2006 remix version).

This is a piece I first composed for radiobroadcast in the 1990s, when I was at WORT-FM Madison, WI. It was a birthday broadcast for Cage, which became an annual performance broadcast tradition, on or around his birth date in September. The piece uses Cage's techniques of chance operations to play back and mix multiple prepared and live sources that are all performances, recorded or live, of John Cage's compositions. This remix, which is a mix of three previous versions, heavily relies upon Cage's own voice, reading in studio and before a live audience. As his arthritis grew worse, later in life, Cage began to use writing and reading as his main means of performances, as it became too painful or difficult to play musical instruments or operate electronic devices. So he came to treat the lecture as a form of musical composition, in its own right. My piece is both a celebration of and homage to Cage, his ideas, and his audible work.

(If you listen closely, you'll hear some Marshall McLuhan in this mix. Cage and McLuhan mutually influenced one another.)

Poetry & the Microphone

On regular occasions I return to my art-experimental and radical roots and delve into readings about art and media by various avant-garde radical writers. Publishers such as Autonomedia are a gold mine of deep reading along these lines, and websites like Ubuweb contain vast archives of radical and avant-garde music, film, writing, and theorizing. Re-reading John Cage's books from year to year, I get even more insight into what art could be, if only we would get out of our mental traps that we have locked ourselves into whenever we think about art, or Art.

I have equally strong roots in community radio, beginning with my years of broadcasting live sound compositions on WCBN-FM in Ann Arbor, MI, which at the time was sometimes known as "Radio Free Ann Arbor." We programme a kind of freeform radio that is almost unheard anymore, except on the rare community radio station or certain channels of XM Digital Radio. You never knew where you were going next, which was half the fun. One night we played live recordings of the spring peeper tree frogs in the marshes north of town. Another night it was five performers doing composed and improvised music using bottles tuned to various pitches by partially filling them with water. Another time, it was our six-hour radio version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. When I moved to Madison, WI, I continued with this sort of programming for several more years on WORT-FM in Madison.

So it's with pleasure that I've been reading Radiotext(e), published by Autonomedia as part of their book and magazine series Semiotext(e). One essay in Radiotext(e) is a reprint of an essay George Orwell wrote in 1945, called Poetry and the Microphone, an essay which seems more prophetic and relevant than ever today.

Even in 1945, the problem of poetry's diminishing and increasingly elitist audience was being worried about; if anything, things are even worse now. So, it's with deja vu that one reads the following paragraphs from the middle of Orwell's essay:

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of one. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience has no power over you. It is just here that a broadcast differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known as “personality”. If you don’t do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid embarrassment. That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty—the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one—that makes it impossible to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do not exist. The poet feels that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as sound rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the ether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end. . . .

On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as it could be. But on second thoughts, this has to be qualified in a rather peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an appreciable amount of folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc) which is universally known and quoted and forms part of the background of everyone’s mind. There is also a handful of ancient songs and ballads which have never gone out of favour. In addition there is the popularity, or at least the toleration, of “good bad” poetry, generally of a patriotic or sentimental kind. This might seem beside the point if it were not that “good bad” poetry has all the characteristics which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike true poetry. It is in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and unusual language—all this to a very marked degree, for it is almost axiomatic that bad poetry is more “poetical” than good poetry. Yet if not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just before writing this I have been listening to a couple of B.B.C. comedians doing their usual turn before the 9 o’clock news. In the last three minutes one of the two comedians suddenly announces that he “wants to be serious for a moment” and proceeds to recite a piece of patriotic balderdash entitled “A Fine Old English Gentleman”, in praise of His Majesty the King. Now, what is the reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse into the worst sort of rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently negative, or there would be a sufficient volume of indignant letters to stop the B.B.C. doing this kind of thing. One must conclude that though the big public is hostile to poetry, it is not strongly hostile to verse. After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes, neither songs nor dirty limericks could be popular. Poetry is disliked because it is associated with untelligibility, intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name creates in advance the same sort of bad impression as the word “God”, or a parson’s dog-collar. To a certain extent, popularising poetry is a question of breaking down an acquired inhibition. It is a question of getting people to listen instead of uttering a mechanical raspberry. If true poetry could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it seem normal, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to presumably seemed normal, then part of the prejudice against it might be overcome.

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again without some deliberate effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge. T.S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been completely explored. “Sweeney Agonistes” was perhaps written with some such idea in mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The reason why such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is that few people are able to imagine the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the stuff that does actually dribble from the loud-speakers of the world, and conclude that it is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed the very word “wireless” calls up a picture either of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three of our aircraft have failed to return. Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers. Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is something inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole apparatus of microphone and transmitter, but because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under the control of governments or great monopoly companies which are actively interested in maintaining the status quo and therefore in preventing the common man from becoming too intelligent. Something of the same kind has happened to the cinema, which, like the radio, made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is similar. More and more the channels of production are under the control of bureaucrats, whose aim is to destroy the artist or at least to castrate him.

These are strong words, but they're worth thinking about deeply. Do yourself a favor and read the entire essay. We'll be coming back to this topic soon.