December 2009
1 post
9 tags
11.29.09 Piano Spheres
California has always attracted cranks, daydreamers, cultists, misfits, and various other types of riffraff from the rest of country. It is something about Manifest Destiny maybe, or perhaps the willful abandonment of family and history to move west, to recreate oneself in the once empty stretches of desert around Los Angeles, or in Sir Francis Drake’s idyllic Nova Albion upstate. Once over the...
November 2009
4 posts
11.19.09 The Steve Allen Theater, ResBox
The Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood has a surrealistic appeal about it. It houses the Center for Inquiry, a haven for skeptics and rationalists in an otherwise fantasist city. It suits the place, however; Arthur Conan Doyle’s beautifully hand-written investigations into séances line the walls, as do some of Houdini’s writings, and names such as Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno (mystics...
11.12.09 The Ruskin Art Club
Ensemble Green’s Thursday concert at the Ruskin Art Club presented what I would call an American Gebrauchsmusik, the latest model of Hindemith’s “music for use” begun in 1920s Germany. Like Hindemith’s music, it is above all things a functional art, solid, written with respect for the composer’s craft and the agility of the performers. In its American version, it can most easily be described as...
11.07.09 The Wulf
Somewhere in Bern, Idaho there is a humming step down transformer that changed the course of American classical music. The humming sound is called “lamination rattle” among the electrically inclined – a 60-cycle buzz that in some cases sounds like a particularly insistent Tuvan throat singing. The story goes that La Monte Young, enfant terrible of the 60’s musical avant-garde, was entranced by...
11.01.09 The Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock
At some point in 40s America, improvisation was beatified, and Charlie Parker became something of a patron saint to the new bohemians. In Jack Kerouac’s words, he was a Buddha-like figure proclaiming “…All Is Well” in brittle notes coming out of a plastic saxophone (e.g., Jazz at Massey Hall). It wasn’t simply Parker’s novel bop sound that mattered, but Parker himself as an emblem for free...