Udderbot repertoire build

I should parenthetically state that this blog, udderbot.blogspot.com, will remain my main blog, even as I begin work on a composerly website and continue work on the La Casa blog, the Udderbot wiki, the Xenharmonic Wiki & Ning, the Polyproject wiki, the ODDMUSIC-UC blog, and so on. More redundancy between these may become desirable, lest they all starve.

2009 began with the launch of an Udderbot Repertoire Build, which has all but petered out. That's okay; these things need new life breathed into them every year or so anyway. The ambition looked like this: learn a new piece on udderbot every month. You can alternate newly composed pieces with arrangements of existing pieces.

Here's almost a year in review of udderbot performances.

• January: learned & performed that really slow cello movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time! watch on youtube
• February: learned & performed a piece by Snow Leopard for udderbot and piano.
• March: no udderbot features, but played udderbot (plus tubes & trombone) in JARband's 17-tone medley. "Trotsky was stabbed with an icepick in Mexico." another youtube
• April: composed & toured with "Hoprock" composed for solo udderbot, with the speaking of text & many extended techniques. Video.
• May: double-barrelled udderbot experiment! for La Casa House Band rendition of Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place". Takes a lot of breath!
• August: Kyle Gann's "Fractured Paradise" arranged for udderbot & synth accompaniment. Could use revisiting.
• October: In an improvising ensemble as part of Hallie Aldrich's site-specific dance piece "With Love and Vanish" at the University of Illinois Arboretum.

I'm probably forgetting something.

The point is, more music for udderbot! It's not dead yet! I want to re-approach composers with the idea of writing for udderbot, perhaps with an all-udderbot recital of new works sometime in 2010. I've been stuck at producing a "composer's guide to the udderbot" piece of writing with audio examples for some time now, but maybe I should put the ball in the composers' courts, let them ask the questions.

The ideas for arranging existing repertoire for udderbot(s) include:

• revisiting the Messiaen piece, arranged for all bottles
• Gyorgy Ligeti's Hungarian Rock, for all bottles
• Martinu's Fantasie for ondes martenot, oboe, string quartet, and piano. This one's been a long-standing to-do.

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Challenges for nesting language

How to articulate a problem and leave room for the solutions that others, but not you, know about.

How to notice something missing in meta-society*, without becoming (any more) blind to those societies in which the missing thing is actually not missing.

How to adopt a new name to refer to your new idea, in order to make it more possible to link your idea to compatible efforts in history and in present.

How to speak as if you are designing society, without people assuming that you prefer to be designing it without them.

How to avoid needlessly reducing variety in your designings.

How to condemn a present situation without instilling hopelessness (condemning all future situations).

How to create a nest with just enough uncertainty about what will go into it.

Meta-society: that which we call "global society" or "society" in some sort of objective way but really can't yet accurately do due to wrinkles and the slower-than-light speed of information.

MICRONEST

(Awful working title)

A festival of post-microtonal* music-making, nesting & nested by an exploration of nesting language.

In November of 2009 in Urbana, Illinois.

Presented by the embryonic and promising Midwest microtonal collective UnTwelve, and the under-construction instrument-construction and ensemble-construction efforts in Urbana, which I'm calling Xenharmonic Praxis, and perhaps even the School for Designing a Society.

I hope to work on bringing a this to fruition on a daily basis, and post about it here.

Right now, the structure & content is open to & hungry for suggestions.  It will probably happen over a single weekend, perhaps with an optional intensive of some sort (pick-up microtonal choir?) offered the previous week.

What I mean by "nesting" is a way of thinking that I want to promote.  I don't have it all figured out yet.  I would say that it stands at odds with "either-or" thinking and the creation and divisive use of dichotomies, except to say that it stands at odds with anything is to create a divisive dichotomy.  Nesting's approach is not (merely) to oppose, but to nest.  It is not (merely) a new way of thinking in this formulation, but has much in common with some previous thinking.  More on that later.

One more thing.  Building a nest is more work than building a wall.  That is not (merely) the reason I want to promote the practice.

More now on the festival.

I would like to see a convergence of homebuilt and one-of-a-kind instruments.

I would like to see issues of microtonality be linked with social problems & foster solidarity across power lines.

I would like that those interested in coming who have limited financial resources are not prevented from attending.  Especially those who perform and present at the festival.

Anyway.  More to come.

*Post-microtonal: another attempt at neologism, in order to distinguish:  not microtonal music, and not music after microtones, but music now that we have microtonality.  "post-" isn't really the right prefix;  something like "host-" or "ost-" might be instead.

Xenharmonic Praxis

Happy Academic New Year;  do you have any resolutions?

My main resolution is to maintain a superstitious suspicion towards volunteering, so that I don't take on too much.  I'm again involved with the School for Designing a Society in Urbana, and also working (probably as a substitute teacher, which is its own creative performance project(!)), and also maintaining & agitating long distance collaborations & mere communications with many.

I shall articulate a resolution implicit in the title, "Xenharmonic Praxis," which was a title I came up for a class proposed back in January and which I'm finding more and more to be the title of a larger scale project.

I ususally say, "I am interested in microtonal music,"  which often elicits the question, "What is microtonal music?"  The best answer I have found was written by Margo Schulter, and rather than paraphrase I'll refer you to it.  I realize now that I do prefer the term "xenharmonic," and, for someone so interested in getting the words right, surprise myself at my reluctance to use it.

"Xenharmonic," as you'll soon know, was coined by Ivor Darreg, otherwise a "microtonalist", to use instead of the term "microtonal," which had overly nitpicking connotations, and besides, drew irrelevant distinctions, like how big or small the intervals are.  "Xenharmonic" comes from the greek xenos "strange/foreigner" AND ALSO xenia "hospitable," appended to the usual harmonikos "articulation/agreement/harmony".

In some interpretations even this term falls short, like when you take "strange" to mean "not normal" and end up with a negative definition:  "Xenharmonic music is all music except that music tuned in 12 tone equal."  Yet if we remember to be hospitable to the strangers, it is likely that the strangers will be hospitable to us, and that we can go on to inhabit, or at least visit, many a faraway (that is, unknowable from our current ear-locations and thus inevitably impactful) musical land.

I also notice how the musical concept of "harmony" shows its origin as a social metaphor, of articulated agreement.  To design new musical tunings is to design new systems of agreement, that is, to design society.  (Not to say that what-is-agreed-upon is all that defines a human society.)  And not merely a new society, but a new kind of society, whose newness is formed by the newnesses of its members, who are in new kinds of relationships with one another, inextricably linked with each one's new identity.  The metaphor runs deep.

Turn now to the word "praxis."  I understand praxis as a way of speaking wherein theory and practice need each other.  From Paolo Freire, I read that action without reflection makes dialogue impossible, and reflection without action reduces to idle chatter.  I hear from bell hooks about the act of theorizing as a legitimate and essential practice.  A criterion for languaging:  Name something in order to change it.  I am currently addicted to this way of speaking;  therefore, I consider it important.

What is a xenharmonic praxis, then?  I first think of a space or time for the construction and playing of xenharmonic instruments.  This happens to be an uncommon, or at least hiding, sort of space;  I know of only one public place in the world with such an aim.  So I'll begin with a space—the basement at La Casa—and a time—Thursday evenings, at least—in the hope that those constraints are enough for a praxis to emerge.

31 tone singing

For tonight, Childe Owlet proved itself too ambitious and has been placed on the back burner.  Instead is Orwellian Spiral Canon no. 2, a 31-tone news tragedy ballad about Saraj and Guudu Prakash.  Words:

As Guudo swept the yard one morn, a rain-worn concrete plank

Gave way and plunged her twelve feet down into a septic tank

Her mate, Suraj, had nothing long enough to fish her free

He saw no choice but jump himself into the noxious sea

It wasn't that they couldn't swim, or that the walls caved in

but lungs filled up with sewer gas, instead of oxygen

Shall we blame the neighbor who had built the tank amiss?

Shall we blame the Everyman who doesn't yet exist?

Shall we blame the neighborhood for being so illegal

that Delhi doesn't care to pipe away (carry out) such matters fecal?

To speak of blame just propogates a world already done?

Come up with something less obtuse to tell their teenage son.

But, anyway, Thirty-One Tone Singin' Camp officially hits NYC on July 15th!  Tell your music-nerdy friends in the region! 

busk one!

I have busked on udderbot for the very first time.

I had several qualms about just going out and doing it.  For starters, I don't yet have a solid solo repertoire. Also, I could use some more pointers on busking, especially how to choose a location, though the essentials I presume most people learn by just trying it.  The biggest thing preventing me was a new sort of "stage fright" which I have felt present ever since last year, when co-inventor Matt Gray and I thought about doing it together.  I have a voice that says "All these people around here, look how they're enjoying the environment without you as part of it?  How could you possibly be so cheeky as to presume that the place and the mood could be improved by you planting yourself in that particular spot and crooning on that bottle?"  This voice I attribute both to past self-esteem and paralysis issues and to seeing the seething mass of people that is New York -- so much variety taken altogether, how can lonely little I approach that?  (Ah, but the key to busking is in meeting eyes with individuals, with winning over individual brains...)

When you have an ensemble, you manifest a social bubble that can shield you (and the spectator) from the most direct and terrifyingly raw rays of human-to-human contact.

Anyway, I've been here for a week, enough is enough dillydallying.  Down to South Central Park I go, next to a tourist bus station.  I open my backpack, lean it against my legs.  Some test notes.  What to play?  Somewhere over the rainbow, for starters.  Oop, how does the B section go again?  Some fiddle tunes, some classical classics -- getting pretty hammy with William Tell Overture, but I guess there's some appeal in it.  Some improvising in a somewhere-over-the-rainbow mood?  Pretty fun.  A Klezmer tune? Why did the Jewish man & kid walk by at that exact moment?!

Thirty minutes pass with no notable interactions or transactions.  Someone takes my photo.  Several curious gazes.  I'm pleased that the udderbot is getting this much exposure, even if it's mostly inattentive.  (I guess equivalent to having a YouTube video.) One guy smoking and listening comes over, with some that's pretty good, I haven't seen that before, etc.  Drops in a dollar!  Hints that it has to be just right -- he's right, I'm pretty sloppy.  Later a lady sees how poorly I'm doing and says something to the effect of, at least you're out there trying it.  She's right, that is my most major accomplishment, but gosh, am I obviously that bad?  Or did she just judge my worth on the mereness of my booty?  Anyway, enough.

• I need a better hat than my bookbag, which doesn't stay open.
• I need a sign saying "THIS IS AN UDDERBOT.  OPEN SOURCE INSTRUMENT."
• I need some friggin tunes!  Suggestions?
• I need (optional) some schtick.
• I need a better spot.  One with an echo to biggen the sound.  I'll hit the subway next.