David's Blogs

Oil and Water Mix

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:45 GMT

Click here to listen to Oil and Water Mix right now and avoid all the tedious reading.

Earlier this year I heard a radio broadcast of Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos, although the announcer called it Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. The Poulenc had been a favorite of mine in college days. I hadn't listened to it in a very long time. I enjoyed hearing it again.

Soon afterwards, inspired by the Poulenc, I decided to compose some simple, melodic music filled with lots of tonics and dominants. I wrote one little passage, then another and another, not bothering much with any sense of structure. I called the piece "Not Dissonant and Not Complex". Catchy, huh?

When "Not Dissonant and Not Complex" reached about four minutes I was forced to confront the fact that it wasn't very interesting. I hatched a new plan: I would interpolate bits of a completely different sort of music - random sounding notes - into what I had already written.

Thus the idea of "oil and water" was born: two radically different musical styles, each in turn ignoring the other, then cavorting with the other, then battling for supremacy. One type of music is "oil", the other is "water". You can decide which is which.

The word "mix" gets a lot of use in music. Mostly it refers to the result of audio manipulation of some already recorded tracks. I'm using the word "mix" in more of an active, verbal sense. Think of the sentence "Listen to me make oil and water mix."

The entire piece, both oil and water, is carefully composed. Certain sections sound random because I tried hard to make them that way. I adjusted each pitch, rhythm and dynamic to produce maximum variety. No Cageian chance methods were employed while composing Oil and Water Mix. None were needed.

It has already been remarked several times by people who have heard Oil and Water Mix that it seems to wander aimlessly, pointlessly. I do understand this reaction. But in fact the piece is divided into sections and certain melodies are repeated several times.

If you think that following this "formal structure" might be helpful as you listen I have added an analysis of Oil and Water Mix. You can find this on the playback page. Just click here and then scroll down a bit.

It's hardly a rigorous analysis, completely unworthy of a doctoral student in musicology. I had different choices about how to name things - for example - Section Two might actually be just a coda to Section One and Section Three might merely be a slow prelude to Section Four. You might want to listen for the short silence at 5'22" between sections two and three.

Mixed Meters' Three Readers may remember long ago, when I started posting my own short pieces, I lumped them together into a category called Thirty Second Spots. Later I started writing longer pieces for which I invented a new category, Three Minute Climaxes. Eventually I needed a third name for even longer pieces. I called these Ten Minute Breaks. (Think of the word "break" in the sense of a "coffee break".) The actual lengths vary above and below the stated time limits; please don't let that bother you.

Oil and Water Mix, at eleven minutes and six seconds, qualifies as a Ten Minute Break.

I now have composed five Ten Minute Breaks: They are

Thinking With Other People's Words (click here to listen, click here to read the related post)
Eating the Desiccant (never posted online because I like it too much)
Poof You're A Pimp (click here to listen, click here to read the post)
Formal Introduction (this one has been "nearly" finished for almost a year)
Oil and Water Mix (click here to listen, you are already reading the related post.)

“Mr. Price. Please don’t try to make things nice. All the wrong notes are...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:01 GMT

“Mr. Price. Please don’t try to make things nice. All the wrong notes are right.”

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Charles Ives memo to his copyist. Quoted in Peter Yates’ Twentieth Century Music, p.9

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Use...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:41 GMT

Use Crosswalk

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“And the good news is that Rock Band will soon be opening its format to classical...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:00 GMT

“And the good news is that Rock Band will soon be opening its format to classical music.”

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Michael Gordon in the NYTimes.

(Okay, and what’s the BAD news?)

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Hidden Meanings

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:32 GMT

These are carefully cropped pictures of various Pasadena signs. This process reveals secret messages.

And here are two in honor of Halloween.

The last is part of a church name. Sorry, no pictures of pumpkins this year. You can find some here. One of MM's earliest posts concerned Halloween movies.

Similar silly MM photo essays:
Crooked
Musical Merchants
Branches Before Blue
Gloves In the Wild
Fence Shadows
Graffiti Animals of California
Buckets for Babies in Pasadena
HALF GRASSED

This one, Taggers With Spellcheck, also deals with words.

Here's a bonus.

Partial Tags: partial signs. . . hidden meaning. . . Halloween

Hell Mouth

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:04 GMT

John Adams, the most successful composer, has been my top client for decades. Hey John, thanks for all the work! (I mean, really.)

But he has shown very unusual lack of judgment recently by starting his own blog, Hell Mouth. I think the picture which begat this strange name must have been taken by John's wife, the photographer Deborah O'Grady.

Hell Mouth is starting at a furious pace: he's written five posts, extensive essays, in a little over a week. Here at MM I feel overworked if I do five short posts a month. But I've been at this for a while (4 years last month) and understandably my enthusiasm has waned.

John is a good writer. His skills have been honed recently by his biography Hallelujah Junction. I like his adjectives.

One of John's posts is entitled: On Surviving a First Rehearsal discussing the composition and premier of his most recent work City Noir (actually his third symphony). The public perception of how a piece of music travels from a composer's brain to a concert stage is a complete mystery to nearly everyone - even to some musicians. My job puts me right in the middle of one facet of that process. This explains why a lot of people have no clue about what I do for a living.

John devotes one paragraph to me.

City Noir is so densely layered that I need two full manuscript pages to embrace all the parts. Hell for the copyist, who is nonetheless unfazed, a total pro. David—started out playing clarinet with Frank Zappa. After 24 years knows my intentions nearly well enough to fill out a line that I’ve forgotten to write out.

Very cool.

Later John mentions the first rehearsal of City Noir led by boy wonder Gustavo Dudamel in Walt Disney Hall. I was one of very few people allowed to listen. The musicians had prepared for the rehearsal but none of them could have much of an inkling how John intended their parts to fit together. Loud things came out soft. Soft things loud. It came apart. It came back together again. Somehow Dudamel kept it all racing along - the entire piece. When he conducts, his hair subdivides the beat.

The composer, conductor and all the players were hard at work. Their job was to make City Noir sound correct; they had a very limited time for this. On the other hand, my job had been completed weeks before. I was just hanging out, listening in a manner none of them could afford, following the score as it whipped past.

And I was blown away. A roller coaster with breakneck twists and turns could never be that much fun. It was a simply amazing, mind-blowing thirty minutes of music, as if the spirit of Charles Mingus had somehow gotten into the souls of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was rough. It was raw. It rocked. Most likely I was the only one there enjoying this experience, it was indeed a great time which I shall not soon forget. At the end I just laughed.

Of course, you could never intentionally make an orchestra play like that. You do not tell a symphony orchestra to "Wail". By the second rehearsal the piece was taking its proper shape. Each rehearsal refined the music a bit more. I liked the finished piece as well. It's also a wild ride. But not as wild as that first reading.

Future orchestras, preparing City Noir, will have recordings to refer to so players will know when to project and when to hold back. The one-time unique experience I witnessed, nothing at all like the piece itself, is lost forever.

John also mentions how the players ask him questions - including about the B Double Sharp. I heard a lot about this note before and during the rehearsals. For you non-musicians, a B Double Sharp is a completely theoretical musical notation - it sounds the same as the familiar pitch C sharp. I can't think of a reason it would ever be used legitimately. Any suggestions?

This particular B Double Sharp is played by the Second Violins, Violas and Second Trumpet in measure 183 of movement one of City Noir. I just checked again. It really is in the manuscript - twice. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have just changed it to a C#. The music would have sounded identical and no one would have noticed. Even the composer himself.

Read about how I was reduced to tears by a performance of one of John's pieces.
Read any or all of the Mixed Meters posts tagged "John Adams".

Hell Mouth Tags: John Adams. . . Hell Mouth. . . City Noir

“Orchestras are notoriously dysfunctional...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:21 GMT

“Orchestras are notoriously dysfunctional places”

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Anne Midgette in the Washington Post on the subject of conductors who hire themselves out as motivational speakers.

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Sidewalk...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:22 GMT

Sidewalk Octopus

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Strained ...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:33 GMT

Strained

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First Sign of the Holidays

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:41 GMT

Yes, fresh from the land of cryptozoology, it's a Christmas Penguin.

This one was collected by Leslie in Armstrong's Pasadena Garden Center. She reports that they came in many sizes. This is a small specimen.

Read Stalking the Christmas Penguin
Read Stalking the Christmas Penguin 2
Read Christmas in October (it ends up discussing table grapes).

Penguin Tags: penguins. . . Christmas penguins

Talisman ...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

Talisman

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“It reminded me of a Disney movie. I was waiting for the bad guy to come out. It was kind of...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

“It reminded me of a Disney movie. I was waiting for the bad guy to come out. It was kind of like Fantasia.”

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Ariselda Herrera speaking about watching Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural concert outdoors on a big screen television. In this LA Times article

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Camo ________________________________________________________...

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

Camo

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“a swirling panoply of scurrying strings and winds, ominous brass chords, syncopated jazz...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

“a swirling panoply of scurrying strings and winds, ominous brass chords, syncopated jazz drumming, along with, typically in Adams, syncopated everything”

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Mark Swed reviews the first performance of John Adams’ City Noir in this review

Gala Party Bird ...

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

Gala Party Bird

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Notice the guy inside.

“There was no more need to argue with exaggerated details than to argue with delicious...

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

“There was no more need to argue with exaggerated details than to argue with delicious cake.”

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Mark Swed reviews Gus Dudamel’s performance of Mahler One in this review

Art from the Future ...

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

Art from the Future

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Million Dollar Sculpture

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:43 GMT

Wandering around in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday I noticed some sculptures on a building at 307 South Broadway. You can see four of them in this corner shot.

I snapped close-up pictures of each one. Click them and they get bigger. I wonder why these particular subjects were chosen, although many of them are obviously arts related. The building was built in 1918.

Each of the above sculptures have their own buffalo head.

The building is called the Million Dollar Theater. Here's a Flickr photo-set with good pictures of the building itself. There's a Million Dollar Theater Homepage with some indoor shots. More indoor pictures here. And here's a Wikpedia page which reports the name of the sculptor: Jo Mora. Besides these figurative works there's a lot of very neat decorative sculpture as well.

Million Dollar Tags: Million Dollar Theater. . . sculpture. . . Jo Mora

“one measure of his success will be whether the worldwide search for his replacement begins...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

“one measure of his success will be whether the worldwide search for his replacement begins at home.”

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From an LA Times editorial entitled Gustavo Dudamel strikes the right chord in L.A.

In print the editorial is called Music to our ears

Alto-Relief ...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

Alto-Relief

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“The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:29 GMT

“The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of a David Lynch film”

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John Adams describes the last movement of City Noir, quoted here.

It's California's Fault

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:14 GMT

Last Saturday I tagged along with Leslie as she tagged along with an excursion organized by the Natural History Museum of LA County. That's where she works. The outing was called "Living on the Fault Line; A Day Along the San Andreas." We followed the San Andreas Fault for about a hundred miles in a small caravan of vehicles.

Our guide was Lindsey Groves, a colleague of Leslie's at the Museum. This is Lindsey. When he talks he uses his hands a lot.

Behind him, on the opposite side of the Antelope Valley Freeway, just north of the San Andreas Fault, you can see the wall of a freeway cut. A cut is where they excavated a hill to avoid having to build the freeway over it. This one is just north of Avenue S near Palmdale. Notice the vertical lines called strata. These were formed horizontally and then pushed upward by earthquakes. All the pushing took a very long time.

The next picture shows Lindsey in the middle of nowhere at a place called Pallet Creek. He is showing us where layers of sediment in a former lake bed have been toyed with by earthquakes. With his hand he's marking the level of a dark layer of peat which was moved upward by a quake. Notice that the dark band to the left of his hand is lower. An earthquake once broke the earth exactly at this spot.

When asked exactly where the fault line is now Lindsey would only point out a several hundred foot span. The next time the earth moves on the fault it'll be somewhere within that swath - probably. He seemed to enjoy pointing out structures which just might be straddling the San Andreas Fault.

At one point on the road, not far from this Pallet Creek site and not far from the fault itself, a band of helpful Boy Scouts erected a San Andreas Fault sign. This served as an excellent photo-op. Here's Leslie near the sign.

The tour began at Devore where several earthquake faults, including the San Andreas, meet with several freeways and several major railroad lines. Recipe for disaster? Then we moved to Wrightwood a town in the mountains. It sits right on the fault, nestled in tall pine trees.

Near Wrightwood are Earthquake Trees. These trees had their tops snapped off long ago during the earthquake of 1812. They kept on growing afterwards but with two trunks instead of one.

We lunched in an idyllic place called Jackson Lake, thick with green reeds and noisy with ducks. We saw many small lakes on the tour. These bodies of water are the result of seismic movement. Geologists use them as clues to where the fault lines are.

Indeed, picking an earthquake fault out of a scenic vista is difficult, although the geologists have their little tricks. But identifying a fault zone precisely takes careful measurements with precision instruments. It may be hard to see but we know it could cause a lot of damage. Preparedness is important.

I thought this is similar to certain medical conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar. You only can tell you have these diseases because doctors use their machines to identify them. You can't feel the illness, but it could do you a lot of damage. It's a good idea not to ignore them.

We visited Devil's Punchbowl, just one of several fantastic rock formations caused by seismic shifts. Devil's Punchbowl had been in great danger from the recent Station Fire. A pyro-cumulus cloud was just poking out over the mountains when we visited. A new fire had started several hours earlier somewhere in the area we had just visited. As we watched the cloud kept getting bigger.

This new fire (still burning as I write this) is called the Sheep Fire. It has now burned a large area which we visited along the San Andreas Fault.

Yes, there are a lot of dangers to living in Southern California. Earthquakes and fires are just two of them. Neither is easy to predict. Both can be devastating to lives and property. The similarities end there.

On a lighter note, at Devil's Punchbowl some local wildlife was on display - including three owls. Here's Owl Number Three.

Several of the links above connect to Google maps. In these the fault generally moves from upper left to lower right. There are some clues visible from satellite pictures which can't be seen from the ground.

I also suggest you visit geology.com where you can see Google maps with the San Andreas fault indicated using geopositioning data. I couldn't find a way to link to particular locations on those maps, however, so you'll have to navigate manually.

Lindsey Groves works at the Malacology department of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. His interests also include geology and paleontology. He wrote a fantastic article about the San Andreas tour for the museum's magazine. Hopefully I will find an online link to that. Hopefully he'll forgive me for the liberties I've taken in describing his interesting field trip.

Fault Tags: San Andreas Fault. . . NHMLAC. . . Lindsey Groves. . . earthquake. . . forest fire. . . Southern California

“We couldn’t hear 20th century music. We couldn’t find the scores of Bartók and...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

“We couldn’t hear 20th century music. We couldn’t find the scores of Bartók and Stravinsky and Schubert.”

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From this LA Times article, Chinese composers’ great leap forward.

“We hypothesise that excessive confectionery consumption [in childhood] increases the...

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:15 GMT

“We hypothesise that excessive confectionery consumption [in childhood] increases the likelihood of violence in adulthood.”

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From a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, reported in this LA Times article.

“my pop colleagues have just mentioned the hurling of bottles of piss as an unpleasant...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:00 GMT

“my pop colleagues have just mentioned the hurling of bottles of piss as an unpleasant possibility – not that I want to give opera audiences any ideas”

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Charlotte Higgins discusses booing at the Royal Opera House in this Guardian article.

David's Blogs

Oil and Water Mix

“Mr. Price. Please don’t try to make things nice. All the wrong notes are...

“Mr. Price. Please don’t try to make things nice. All the wrong notes are right.”

Use...

Use Crosswalk

“And the good news is that Rock Band will soon be opening its format to classical...

“And the good news is that Rock Band will soon be opening its format to classical music.”

Hidden Meanings

Hell Mouth

“Orchestras are notoriously dysfunctional...

“Orchestras are notoriously dysfunctional places”

Sidewalk...

Sidewalk Octopus

Strained ...

Strained

First Sign of the Holidays

Talisman ...

Talisman

“It reminded me of a Disney movie. I was waiting for the bad guy to come out. It was kind of...

“It reminded me of a Disney movie. I was waiting for the bad guy to come out. It was kind of like Fantasia.”

Camo ________________________________________________________...

Camo

“a swirling panoply of scurrying strings and winds, ominous brass chords, syncopated jazz...

“a swirling panoply of scurrying strings and winds, ominous brass chords, syncopated jazz drumming, along with, typically in Adams, syncopated everything”

Gala Party Bird ...

Gala Party Bird

“There was no more need to argue with exaggerated details than to argue with delicious...

“There was no more need to argue with exaggerated details than to argue with delicious cake.”

Art from the Future ...

Art from the Future

Million Dollar Sculpture

“one measure of his success will be whether the worldwide search for his replacement begins...

“one measure of his success will be whether the worldwide search for his replacement begins at home.”

Alto-Relief ...

Alto-Relief

“The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled...

“The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of a David Lynch film”

It's California's Fault

“We couldn’t hear 20th century music. We couldn’t find the scores of Bartók and...

“We couldn’t hear 20th century music. We couldn’t find the scores of Bartók and Stravinsky and Schubert.”

“We hypothesise that excessive confectionery consumption [in childhood] increases the...

“We hypothesise that excessive confectionery consumption [in childhood] increases the likelihood of violence in adulthood.”

“my pop colleagues have just mentioned the hurling of bottles of piss as an unpleasant...

“my pop colleagues have just mentioned the hurling of bottles of piss as an unpleasant possibility – not that I want to give opera audiences any ideas”