udderblag

consolidation

2010-04-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

although the previous post is true, i actually did no blogging of this sort between then and now. fresh start at:

http://jacobbarton.net

update yer bookmarks.

Udderbot repertoire build

2009-11-07T00:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Free theatre coaching best can voice werther

2008-12-08T01:03:00.000-08:00

Strangest spam blog ever presents music-world spam poetry:

Because of this, president can, in essence, be monteverdi and members of the camerata or concert showcase, such as maryland.

http://www.snee.com/wiki/index.cgi?Voice-Performance-Vocal-Degree

Challenges for nesting language

2008-12-06T23:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

(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

2008-08-26T20:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-05T01:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-07-02T00:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Udderbot in NYC

2008-06-28T00:18:00.000-07:00

I am in NYC. The two primary previously-known purposes for this trip are twofold: (1) to learn the ins and outs of robot making as an intern with the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR), and (2) to assist the Garden Performance Project in its endeavor to make homegrown junkmusic.

So far, in those veins, I have learned how to slice threads into a metal rod, and have performed Elizabeth Adams' Trio for plastic, glass, and metal scraped on asphalt.

A Thirty One Tone Singin' Camp is taking shape, to happen in mid-July in NYC. This will be the second year that I attempt to share the skill of vocalizing (with little regard for tonal quality) the pitches of 31-edo, as well as thinking in this more robust system. I was fortunate enough last week to visit Joel Mandelbaum at Queens College, who has a Terpstra generalized keyboard; now I want a hexagonal microtonal keyboard of my very own (or collectively owned by a collective of which I am a member) more than ever.

Project Udderbot, as it were, is a project that I have neglected to treat seriously as a project, I fear. Coming to New York is invigorating it with the possibility of busking (I am looking for a busking partner) and the need for business cards and for revamping and professionalizing my website.

And with that, announcing: I will be playing a new composition loosely based on the murder rhyme Childe Owlet, for a Murder Cabaret Show next Saturday (July 5) at the Tank.

In other udderbot news: I have acquired a jeroboam (3 liter) sized champagne bottle that, once a suitable glove is attached, will make the first Bass Udderbot, a full octave lower than the Tenor! That's the B below the bass staff.

A dearth of visual documentation of the udderbot on the internet is the sad result of not having a camera. Perhaps I can associate myself soon with folks more technologically endowed. Also, I am tired of posting infrequently here and will try to correct that.

Short summary

2008-05-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

Hello. I feel like I can't continue to have an internet existence without filling in certain holes in this narrative, mundane and over as things may be. Much time has passed, and many things are new. My life has organized itself around the organizing of concerts:

House concerts have happened at the La Casa Co-op House (in Urbana) in February, March, and April. These have been working as venues for presenting performances of mostly original compositions in various performance media - song, spoken work, theatre, puppetry - made largely by the community of people constituting/surrounding the School for Designing a Society in Urbana. The next one will be either June 6th or 7th.
The As-If Ensemble of Urbana (A.I.E.O.U.) played a fundraiser concert for the Gesundheit! Institute on April Fools Day at the Iron Post (in Urbana).
The American Society for Cybernetics just had their annual conference in Urbana, and there was an evening of performances last Tuesday. I helped to organize, played udderbot on Five by Philip Schuessler, and put on an original puppet show with Braden Elliott entitled One Conversational Atlas. The program note read:

One Conversational Atlas will have been an attempt to apply some of the crucial distinctions made by Maturana (and others) in The Tree of Knowledge (and elsewhere) to the domain of the practice of languaging in everyday life. When the usual distinctions of everyday conversation are sufficiently useful to us, this can look like useless nitpicking. When they touch a root of howling undesirability, however, they can sometimes suggest a path to Save The World With A More Rigorous Logical Accounting. Usually our circularity reflexes prove too ticklish, spasming us into oblivion.

I spent two weeks in Houston. The primary reason was to put on the Seventeen Tone Piano Project Phase Four: Microtonal Song Showcase on May 1, though I also got to sing some rounds with An Exciting Event and play some udderbot at the Artery.

The near future is jam packed with similar projects, but, I hope, they will not burn me out in the way I am currently burnt out.

This winter/spring I read a lot of Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff, a lot of Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delany, and finished The Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana. I just picked up Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks.

I also began a project of exchanging poetry assignments with Andrew Heathwaite. Join in the fun!

Updeit

2008-02-03T05:32:00.000-08:00

My yearlong PerformanceOfEverydayLife project, which doesn't yet have its own name, is far from abandoned. Starting this month I'm keeping a private journal, and when I have distilled something into a mobile concept, I'll post it here.
Some progress on using ChucK towards my musical ends. When that distills into mobile code I'll probably link to it here too.
Concert in Urbana on Leap Day (Feb. 29)! So far plans are laid to include musics tuned in 17-equal and 11-limit JI, Palestinian folk music, round singing, Klezmer, udderbots, and fretless guitar. Theater pieces might interlace with music pieces. I'm organizing.
Several projects for others - Super Mario Bros. arragement for ballroom dancing, saxophone quartet commission, Brün's Non Sequitur VI harp part transcription, rehearsal mockup of Stearns's Orpheus in the Frosted Field, oh, that reminds me -
Seventeen Tone Piano Project Phase Four singalong and concert in Houston April 26-27 announced a week ago. Focus on microtonal songs in any tuning.
For all your internet pleasure, I just shelled out sufficient $$ to resurrect udderbot.com! I want to keep adding things to it, but I'll only do that if people ask for certain things, probably.
Lots of unmentioned SDaS projects, which I'll mention here. The teaching-a-class is out for now, to be replaced with workshop mania. Sci Fi Radio Show, Living Labs, Germinars, AIEOU are premises for regularly irregular meetings.

Quick but structure-preserving

2008-01-05T13:50:00.000-08:00

Practice the gesture of rushing in this way:

Decide to do something. Then, do it considerably more quickly than you are used to. Play right up to, but not over, the edge of changing what-you're-doing and changing how-you're-doing-it.

Yes, this is a game of language and description naming. If you are "drinking some komboucha" so quickly that you end up actually "spilling komboucha all over your beard", you're over the line. But if you're "emptying a cup of komboucha", this is fine, though it may create the task "suck komboucha out of your shirt" moments later.

Don't worry too much about actual efficiency yet, just the gesture of rushing.

Clean your room this way!

meta-assignment: make punch cards

2008-01-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

Many possible assignments and challenges, including the first vocal stretch, require an interaction with another. It is maybe easier to interact anomalously with strangers who don't have your track record. These situations take time and pretense to create, and may not benefit from constraining to one day. Therefore:

Make activities for interactions with strangers into punch cards. Each time you perform within the constraints of the assignment, punch the card.

2007 composition review

2008-01-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

Compositionally I live in a land of many more possibilities than manifest themselves. I keep track of ideas on a personal wiki in my computer, which doesn't date the changes I make. So it's very strange to try and go back through the year and imagine what imaginative mindset I was in, when all I have left are the entrails

December 2006 was dominated by "onward", a 17-tone march for 17-tone pianos, eight hands. The result was not disastrous but I remember being embarrassed. I went home for weeks and schemed unsuccessfully for a winter concert of me and Tommy Scheurich - his bassoon-viola serial duo, my whatever I could pull together with my udderbot and laptop. I had brought home, for the second year in a row, a paper I hadn't finished--uggh. I asked for conduit tubing for Xmas, in hopes of making a 31-tone tubulon, and received about 100 feet of it which I still haven't done anything with!

Back at Rice mid January, I had a fancy new plan which included writing pieces for composition competitions, starting with a brass sextet, and a commission-like piece for the Attacca percussion trio (Rice graduates), both of which I started vigorously in my brand new staff paper book of 512 pages, and neither of which I got past the first page. Deadlines came and went...

February was eaten up by performances on my colleagues' master's recitals (much fun) and writing music for BakerShake's production of Much Ado Over Nothing, particularly a tango setting of John Donne's "Woman's Constancy." Getting that actually performed by the quasi-musical stage band was a daunting feat that included teaching accordion to a quasi-pianist.

Meanwhile I was excitedly preparing for a trip to London to go to their Microfest and also to meet with Musical Instrument Technology people about instrument building and the udderbot. That happened in the beginning of March, and that was wonderful. I met Donald Bousted and James Wyness and Chris Bryan and Stephen Altoft and Lee Ferguson, all of whom I hope to see again and collaborate with sometime. Stephen is collecting two-page pieces for 19-tone trumpet solo, and Donald continues to organize Microfests and Wild Dog microtonal multimedia extravaganzas.

When I got back, my recital was less than two months away and I was panicking. Two intended pieces to write that never even got started were the Hoogie Boogie for 16-tone player piano (which has been hanging over my head for years, and I think I'll complete this year), and a 5-bass-clarinet quintet (wow what a sound, I imagine). I began work on Udderbot Counterpoint for 9 recorded and 1 live udderbot, slotting it into a March 19 Composers Forum concert to move it along, but my self-agonizing procrastinatory process yielded a two-minute abortion that I performed anyway.

I successfully completed two pieces in time for my friday April 13 "Señor Recital": the 31-tone Orwellian Spiral Canon No. 1: Getting Started on a text by Annie Dillard (without permission, otherwise I'd be performing the heck out of it), and a spacious 17-tone 6-minute piano-and-voice setting of a text by Troy Suben:

the
sun
is
full
of
currency
wise
of
rays
that
fill
my
thinking
and
I
can't
think
any
more

...which I titled "fonala", which is what you get when you try to type "urbana" in a Dvorak keyboard layout but you're actually in Qwerty. fonala was about 2/3 as good as it could have been, which was good enough for bassoon professor Kamins, a longtime follower of my microtonal antics, to proclaim that I had finally made some successful microtonal music.

I did complete a third piece, but I won't call it successful: Bonnie Brae at Midnight was a graphic/text score composition/improvisation for the 5 composers living at 1618 Bonnie Brae at that time; the score mostly specified which of the fifty-something instruments, sitting in a pile, we were to play in which order.

But no room to breathe there: on to an electronic music studio concert less than a week later, for another performance of Getting Started tacked on, as well as an utter technical disaster of a 31-autotuner I had built in Kyma. I hadn't had time to actually write any music, or ensure that the sounds produced by the violin and bass wouldn't be completely unlistenable. Yes, that might be the height of my personal embarrassment for 2007.

Oh, also Jan. and Feb. I was finishing up my string quartet from 2005 and titling it "stuck" and courting string quartets, which you really have to do more in advance than the entire length of my timetable allows. It was a week before my recital and I didn't have a violist. I guess I should send that to some quartets with ample time to rehearse sometime this year.

After that, organizing the 17-tone piano project phase Three concert in less than a month happened. What a glorious mess that process was!

Tons and tons of exciting thinking over the summer, with not much music pieces to show for it. For the first time I felt free from defining myself as strictly "composer."

"Noodles adorno foucault," an improvised sketch for autotuned voices, was recorded in a flash and well loved by everyone; I'm now considering an album or set of pieces that use that sound world.

Trying to write a 19-tone pianos and udderbot piece from a Minneapolis without any keyboard proved impossible, as did mustering up the guts to finish it once moved into Urbana. Still I attended the Chicago concert in October and deliciously met and listened to George Secor, Aaron K. Johnson, Chris Bailey, Easley Blackwood, Joel Mandelbaum, and that one student whose name and email I shouldn't have lost.

The fall was dominated by worrying about money and designing society. Unfortunately we're not at the point of having designed a society where these are the same thing. Many small compositions were made, sometimes in collaboration with others, for various assignments. I do intend to collect these from myself and others into an archive. I started thinking seriously about hocket, and more generally Interpoint, as a point of departure.

November at I-Park sparked a renewed set of hopeful projects, all begun but none completed there: microtonal utopian (false-statement) rounds, "vocal alternations", a bass clef 31-tone method book revisited, more composing and focusing on the udderbot, a ChucK MOS drum machine, interpoint duos, a radio drama about microtonality. What Were completed were PolyAnna and a Thanksgiving play (as noted in this blog).

December was frantically putting together Udderbot Xmas songs, ultimately an incomplete for now, save for the smooth hit single Kleismic Joy.

And here we are. What a strange journey for someone to make, even just considering the names of projects and pieces and not knowing their referents.

Vocal stretch for Jan 1

2008-01-01T01:43:00.000-08:00

A stretch, an experiment with a focus more personal than social.

Objective: remain conscious of performance of a 'normal speaking voice' and awareness of the amount of energy it takes merely to ensure

Do not mutter.

Speak all utterances with more-than-sufficient volume, with excellent 'diction and articulation', in a low, deep, booming resonant tone. Try to establish a range of expressivity comparable to that of your habitual performance, but within this new right.

Take note of obvious social consequences, if you see any.

the next sesquideciday

2007-12-08T03:50:00.000-08:00

back and forth, back and forth

finally decided, against the whim of many coin flips, to do as much on udderbot xmas album as possible before (and after) i leave. let's see what that means. in deciday increments...

7-9:24a sleep
-11:48a (kleismic joy - whip it up quick)
-2:12p (maoz tsur - clean it up good)
-4:36p (o holy night - record pond ice cracking)
-7:00p (obligatory) fancy dinner
-9:24p (good king wenceslas / wassailing)
-11:48p (more o holy night)
-2:12a (ukrainian)
-4:36a (more o holy)
-7a (sleep)
-9:24a (sleep?)
-11:48a (whatever else)
-2:12p frantically prepare for
-4:36 PRESENTATION

etc.

a small triumph

2007-12-03T21:51:00.001-08:00

I got ChucK to do exactly what I wanted it to, hooray. Details over on the techy blog. Sound over on the xen-wiki. A dippy udderbot SFX drum machine, still in need of much sculpting. Do I persist on Kleismic Joy to the World, until its completion? Or do I let it rest?

progress

2007-12-03T14:41:00.001-08:00

Inch of progress on the Udderbot Xmas set: Kleismic Joy to the World has a chordal ostinato recorded, plus a modulating-moment-of-symmetry drum machine, a variation of this one I made earlier this year.
The plan is, a 16-beat laid-back drum pattern is treated as if it's the result of a 3/16 generator, which then (smoothly) compresses down to 2/11 and then 3/17, ending with one more pulse than it started with. While it's in 11 land I might stick in a 6/8 tune...or somethin...

escalation makes paralysis

2007-12-01T22:51:00.000-08:00

The stakes get high, I get stuck.

Today, some planning for O Holy Night (now it's not a viral infection, but a primitivist fairytale) and Joy to the World (in Kleismic 7 out of 19 equal), some sketches for a vocal "alternation" in 31-equal, for which I wrote some nice words last night, some quibbling about neologisms within a collaborative conlang, some more stabs at lyrics for a second vocal alternation, an hour and a half of 16-tone piano sequencing lost due to computer crash and forgetting to save.

An hour was similarly lost a week ago when I was trying to build a Shepherd tone generator in ChucK. Save Often was one of my first lessons in composition.

Yesterday I read with renewed excitement some craftsperson in time notes, and it made me want to finish things. It should be easy, with roughly 60 miniatures (and growing) in about 12 intersecting categories that I am still allowing myself to spend my attentions on. But "Aggh, only a week left" is fighting back my renewed vigor with renewed vigor.

And, having given up on anything resembling polyphasic sleep, only to sleep back into notions of normalcy, I only have one day per day; one big unmanageable chunk. Increased pressure, increased paralysis.

In light of all of that, I'm not surprised that what I have insisted upon is yet undelivered. Right now, I newly insist that the next thing I work on I finish before switching to something else. I don't care what it is.

Goal, and keep goaling until it's a noun

2007-11-30T08:44:00.000-08:00

Ten days to go. Insist on

Udderbot Xmas recording. Begin by simulating O Holy Night with a viral infection, by tomorrow night.
Udderbot Counterpoint, an abortion of a piece that I want to flesh out. Push through it in a rough form by Monday.

I must remember that I mustn't forget that compositional verve comes from interest in the thing that you must do, not in the interest of the consequences. I insist on these projects for their consequences, but they won't get finished by dreaming all day about consequences.

saturating the riverbed

2007-11-28T23:13:00.000-08:00

an insufficient, unfinished offering, but an offering nonetheless

Saturating the riverbed

a simple melody becomes fodder for a round with entries in all twelve keys. in this version, entries every 5 bars travel round the circle of fifths, eventually revealing that magic property of modulo-12 land, 1*1 = 5*5.

text by Troy Suben, telephone poet extraordinaire:

saturating the riverbed of unconsciousness
she delivers an unhorizontal smile
in the pizza commercial
of a ballroom dream

that is not a false statement,
or is it?

Udderbot success!

2007-11-28T23:04:00.000-08:00

For a week, I was separated from my udderbots. Fed up with the unrelenting leaking of foil-mastic taping, I separated the udders from their bots and left them.

Now, all is repaired, both the udderbots and my relationship to them, thanks to Gorilla Glue! I highly recommend it for udderbot making; dries in two hours, expands to seal holes, and does not require you to dry all the water off the gluing area beforehand, no, it actually requires some moisture.

I have discovered the altissimo register anew, enabling me to soar to great heights -- off the piano, in fact! -- on the tenor and alto 'bots. I can play a 4-octave G major scale on the alto, and a 5-octave, if less steadfast, B-flat major scale on the tenor. What woodwind could claim as much?

In the meantime my udder technique and ear are out of practice, baffled by such a simple melody as Maoz Tsur. More practice is needed, and less leaking makes me look forward to it.

see the labels

2007-11-28T16:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I made an attempt to encapsulate a cybernetic disctinction into a new word and syntax. It was in the context of a community-created language where each participant gets sole sovereignty over one word.

On a related note, I want soon to

Katherine Staelin right next to me has pointed me to the work of douglas irving repetto and a related An enclave for "transmission arts" in upstate NY. Transmission arts. Of course!

led me to Matthew Otrowski who offered some words I hadn't heard:

atopia: the nonexistence of place

levigation: the smoothing and reduction of difference

apophenia: the perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena

I don't know what I would do with them. He used them on the internet: deconstruct its placeness, interpret all data as raw audio, ...apophenia.

"multiverse" round

2007-11-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

I have more than one tongue, so do you
Isn't it absurd?
Not very. Do you really think that one could be enough?
For what?
For us to speak in this resplendent multiverse!
Oh, what crazy talk!

So goes the round in 4 parts, called "Multiverse". Revised from an original version penned exactly two weeks ago. Seeded with Kyra's false statement:

Everyone speaks more than one language.

Listen, in 17 tones per octave, at the soundclick page. This tempo is Largo Didactico. You must learn by rote for now because I don't have a notation program with me. I have, in addition, for learning the intervals of 17-equal, an exercise which I will upload as well.

Further directions to go in:

Seek friends' help in translating into other languages, including conlangs
Just intonation version, other tuning versions
A whole book of utopian rounds, maybe each in a different tuning
Faster version recording
Suitable for composed rehearsal?

data unblocked

2007-11-26T15:47:00.000-08:00

It just got much easier to move data from my work computer to the world wide internets; I got a USB flash drive.

The exact technological circumstances I live in have major effects on my compositional choices. This change will surely resound in ways unseen.

The last change was getting VoodooPad working (thanks to Kyra for serial number transferage). VoodooPad is some personal wiki software (mac only) that I've been using for a year and a half to organize my thoughts into an interlinked hypertext. I highly recommend it (although that recommendation comes not having explored any alternatives).

Before that started working here I was writing ideas on looseleaf pages and in spiral notecard-notebooks, and that got out of hand quickly; all addition and no substitution (even writing in pencil, I don't formulate, I just take ideas and run with them) makes for a clutter problem I still haven't sorted through a week later. I look to the wiki for sanity.

I don't know yet how I feel about wikis as a collaborative tool; it's been over a year for this xenharmonic wiki and this post-SDAS wiki and neither has a population of eager participants to make it self-sustaining. I go back and forth between blaming myself for insufficient seduction strategies and blaming people for their (apparent) apathy and busyness.

the theater of desiring

2007-11-22T08:29:00.000-08:00

http://polyproject.wikispaces.com/thanks+siblings

I maintain that students of the School for D-ing an S- need a whole genre of pieces or compositions that approach that difficult moment when someone asks what the heck it's all about anyway.

My first contribution the the genre is what I've been working on for the past 3 days, and it's an 8-minute theater piece written for my three siblings to deliver at Thanksgiving dinner in my absence.

It evolves from sibling rivalry into a theater of desiring, which I think is very fruitful territory for much more theater writing. I think that the shift from external to internal accountability that happens when you get a "what do you want?" goblin sitting on your shoulder that you listen to instead of a "conscience" is a very big shift. It was when I first encountered it, and I expect it is very different from a lot of status-quo-agreeing perspectives out there. I should like to know where it first came from (I don't expect the School originated it), and I think theater can be useful to examine the conversations that begin to happen when people speak what they want, without shoulds and rights and wrongs and victim-reality.

[Alternately, I wonder if others can manage a shift of the language of morality (right wrong should) ONTO a priority of desiring. "Should" and "right" translate to "I want", "wrong" to "I don't want." Don't let this devolve into relativity: if someone is doing what they want, don't call it "right" unless you want what they're doing, too.]

[[The above paragraph begs a closer look at the proper use of neologism, reclaiming words, sneaky double definitions, etc. For a different day.]]

sleep schedule update

2007-11-20T15:13:00.000-08:00

The original goal was to take 25 minute naps every 4 hours. I had a good setup coming in here last Wednesday with some sleep deprivation and airline napping, and I think the first nap was successful. After that, several intended naps turned into 5 and 10 hour snoozes. First the desk alarm clock failed hard, then the dinky phone alarm.

(The dinky phone alarm sounds just like someone is calling; in fact, it is very easy for me to wake up when someone is calling. Also, the dinky phone can store 4 alarm times which can recur, and I would need six to implement the regularity of this polyphasic schedule.)

I find in myself a distinct lack of the subconscious-to-conscious discipline necessary to, well, get up when I know I'm sleeping, which is all you have to do. My intents have gone somewhere below the surface - my 5- and 10-hour snoozes are punctuated by looking at the clock every hour or so - but not deep enough to change the lifelong preference for staying in bed.

Also, I don't know the best way to ease into it. Start with 40 minutes, then cut down by 5 minutes when that settles in? And what about when I can't fall asleep??? Ten minutes go by, and I'm thinking I should set the alarm to 10 minutes later. I'd need an alarm clock that can tell *right* when I fall asleep!

So I've taken a step back, tried just to go nocturnal, or keep inconsistent, or to go to a 1 or 2 hour nap every 12 hours, eventually to the alternate (Buckminster Fuller) schedule of 30-minute naps every 6 hours.

Part of the sluggishness is making too much of the signal of darkness - it gets dark before 5, of course. Today I sort of slept 4-5PM (after 5-8 a.m. last night) and that puts me into good high-energy-mode right when darkness starts sucking the life out of everything. Can I sustain it for 6 or 12 hours? Probably depends on what I have myself doing.

Food is also a factor, of course; I'm into a pattern of snacking, mostly. Probably not ideal. School for Designing a Diet.

technolology

2007-11-17T20:21:00.001-08:00

Most things in the music stoodio are up and runnin:

G4 Mac with OS X Tiger
Digital Performer 4.5, which I've never used
Korg Triton Workstation, which must hold the prize for "most documentation for a keyboard"
Scala 2.2d running on XWindows, able to detwelvulate the Korg, hooray
MOTU 828
headphones with the right adapter
crappy yamaha monitor speakers with the hum minimized; I never knew shielded audio cables made such a difference
bassoon and flute in working order
newly constructed alto and pico udderbots join the tenor, whose major leaks are repaired for the time being

VoiceTweaker is working as a VST on VSTi Host, but as an AU it is causing DP to crash. This is a major problem. Also, forgot Sibelius at home and wish I had it now. Also need VoodooPad registration from home computer. Melanie, the dear child, said she would help me.

I still hear weird buzzes when certain lights are turned on, or for no apparent reason at all. I think expensive 1/4" cables would fix it.

It gets dark so early here. Then the bunnies roam free.

I saw a waterfall today.

(I also saw The Virgin Suicides.)

I feel alone. I can handle it. Maybe without the internet if I had to. I checked my email and polyproject something like 4 times today, and was disappointed all but once. I'll try to get more isolated, more obsessed, more deep in the thick of things.

A Call For (maximal multiple meanings matrices)

2007-11-17T07:23:00.000-08:00

I have composed a simple, if boggling, study in simple, if boggling, polyrhythms. When I thought to add a text, I realized I was in need of:

Eight syllables, ordered initially (numbered 1-8) such that the following ordering "does something" to them:

The crucial syllables are 1 and 8 because they get placed next to all the middle ones at some point; 3 is less significant for example because it only needs to coordinate with 1, 2, 4, and 8.

So, I will try to write some text like this, and I want to see you attempt it too.

In the full piece, each line will be repeated five times, and there will be a second part doing the same thing but in a different rhythm.

Off you go, now! Off I go, now!

turn over new leaf and sit on it

2007-11-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

I am now at I-Park in East Haddam, Connecticut as I type. Isn't it ironic? (No, it isn't.) I've been in super busy mode for the past month, occupying myself with turning my time into money, moving, traveling, and worrying about relationships with other people.

I might make posts in the future that are retroactively about those times, but it will suffice for now to talk about now.

I-Park immediately has led me to remember my appreciation of spaces and what they do for people. The design of this space trumps just about everywhere else I've been in recent memory. I remember A Pattern Language and wish I had it with me. What I've noted so far:

The sheer quantity of space in this huge house housing six artists and the surrounding land: abundance! Space for everything makes me think I'll have time for everything. A separate private standalone music studio.
Art everywhere and everyhow: hangings on walls, landscaped paths with pointless electric candles, behemoth (8-ft.) wind chimes, sculpted benches, wacky jack-o-lanterns,
Every room has a color and a name.
Interior design slickness, especially with regard to light. As I walk around in the middle of the night, pools of light on the floor and behind sculptures put me at ease. Bright lights, low lights, and fun dimmer switches.

This last feature strikes me especially; I've been living at La Casa, where we turn off any light we're not immediately "using". The spaces I use have little variety of light, I admit responsibly.

At any rate, I will be writing here my self-assignments and self-descriptions and helpful observations I make while here for a month, and I may do so more frequently than before. Basically, I have a month to make what I want. I was accepted as a composer have been given the use of a music studio. I still have to work out a lot of technological kinks, but I have a pretty flexible and multi-faceted original proposal, which I will detail here. I made a list of components or inputs to composition, in which I am interested:

musical priorities

neo-xenharmonic, with an emphasis on 31-tones per octave
scale exploration, trans-scale transitions
the art of elegant glissandi
an exploration of hocket / interpoint (where two performers are needed to do the work of one)
composed rehearsals (a PWE trope)
miniature, portable pieces for miniature, portable instruments
rounds

portable and polyfunctional, for many modes of performance

pedagogical (a method book)
solo (udderbot tour, microtonal tour)
multiples of one instrument (realizable live or with pre-recorded augmentation)
ensembles (with open form)
studio (for CD release etc.)

instruments I will use

udderbots
voice
kalimba
flute
jar-top castanets (tee hee!)
VoiceTweaker microtonal auto-tuner and gender-bender
ChucK for making chiptune sounds
Supercollider

instruments I will not use but will also compose for

cello
trombone

ideas I begin with

false statements, etc.
cross section of a muddle
muddles of symmetry, dialetics, time, second-order
Jason Godesky's Thirty Theses
self-description

additional assignments

attempt to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule
write a script for my three siblings to perform at family Thanksgiving dinner that answers "What on earth has Jacob been doing?"

political economy

2007-11-05T20:13:00.000-08:00

This is a placeholder for a well-thought out post.

Alternatives to capitalism, alternatives to what we have now.

Participatory economics (parecon). Is not based on quid pro quo = reward-oriented hierarchy???

Make specific problem statements. "Poverty." <-- no, silly.

Touched a chord with Max by again equating morality with an alternative morality of desire. slippery, useless. Needs a pattern.

Amassing needs for patterns at a healthy pace!

Whither music #1: Ornette Coleman, Stuart Smith

2007-10-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

The original, ambitious, unfocused project was to ask everyone possible the questions "What does music do? What can music do?" So far, I have read two articles, one a NewMusicBox interview of Ornette Coleman, and another an interview with Stuart Smith, "On Quakerism, Trans-media and Democracy". (I am not familiar with either composer's music!) Here's what I gleaned for this line of inquiry, and the questions of designing society:

Coleman:

Composing is a way of keeping up with not repeating - making me aware of how much I'm repeating and not repeating - what I'm not repeating is better.

Sound as a way of expressing an emotion, especially coming from another human being, like talking.

Sound is sound. Sound is vibration. Although sound is one thing, music is another, emotion is another. Feeling is even more complex.

Music is an idea and everybody has an idea, including your kids.

I play music every day, but music cannot touch the things we are saying to each other. I could play my heart out and have you crying, but it's never going to be as close to you.

The sound is made from the instrument. The ideas are made from your brain. The ideas and sound actually meet. They don't necessarily meet to make love. Sometimes they're meeting to make war

Each idea you play tells you how to play a better idea.

I prefer the idea of sound to the idea of style.

Music to make people happy.

Smith:

How to shape differences is our task as composers. The sound material is stored (remembered) as differences. Differences create all languages. No differences—no languages. No language—no consciousness. No consciousness—no humans being human. The job of the composer is to facilitate the continuation of the uniqueness of the human entity.

Society has to leave each one room to be brave. A society that encourages essential individual bravery will never die, will never be poor, will never make wars, will never be short in vision. This is the society I work for in music.

For the moment I will substitute these quotations for original thought!

A grain of sand in my clamshell #1: Obvion management

2007-09-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

(Obvion: a piece of language claimed to be "obvious" to someone at some time.)

I'll report some progress on my project around the word "obvious." After co-authoring the pattern Department of the Obvious, which answers the word in one way, I have obsessed a little over the phenomenon of "obvious taboo," the discomfort in social exchanges towards mentioning something presumed "obvious," for fear of wasting everyone's time. Each person has eir own group of things e calls obvious, and will be thinking but never speaking for fear of wasting everyone's time. The obvious taboo, working separately in individuals' minds but combining socially to create great holes in understanding, has great steering power in conversations

What if this taboo could be temporarily ignored? I propose a hopeful experiment, "obvious-free speech zone": Get a group of people, while it is doing something together that it needs and wants to be doing, to speak in an atmosphere of safety for obvions.

One kind of "ah-ha!" moment is one where you have been withheld crucial information by someone who wasn't speaking it because e deemed it too obvious. This experiment exists to accelerate the arrival of these moments.

Another experiment is "Captain Obvious," a one-person obvious-free speech zone who does work in an obvious-taboo society. Usually a Captain Obvious will focus on uttering statements that, while obvious to him, are obviously NOT obvious to the people around em. Otherwise, e would face estrangement and lose eir efficacy.

I'm not very good at Captain Obvious yet. I do want to try the other one.

Make false statements

2007-09-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

Some descriptions of this design exercise:

Make statements which are false in your current society and true in the society you desire.

Make statements which, in order to become true, would require that society changes.

Make false statements that, themselves, want to be true.

Make statements that complete the sentence, "While it is not the case, I desire that..."

An oft-used provocation:
Go further than declaring what you don't want: "There is no war." has the same acoustic gesture as its opposite. Add something new! "Peace is a need, met by conflict"...

Another:
Ask of one false statement, "What additional statement could be made, for which this statement would arise as a consequence?" In this way, link your utopian future to a utopian present.

This is all happening in a big way in the design groups at SDAS. I have collected some desirable false statements over two years, but have not taken the next steps in making them true, which is where the real excitement lies. I have not (yet) coordinated my desires for society into a project with other people, other than the overall School for Designing a Society project. (But of course the School project does not equal the designing society project; the school has trouble directly designing a society because it remains so busy teaching and learning and maintaining, retarding the decay of "how to do it.")

Addition and/or Substitution?

2007-09-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

On the first day, the students were asked to consider the society-design-related offers posed to them in conversation as Additions, NOT Substitutions, to what has been done before. I continue to react to this in a few ways:

- If the present now is carving out a future (typical way of looking time), everything we do now is already both addition and substitution.

- What's the intent behind it? This invitation is actually an argument for a more creative environment of relating ideas: we need MORE ideas and we don't necessarily need them to fight and cancel each other out.

- To assert "Addition NOT Substitution" is an implementation of substitution! If we were to instead use addition we would be arguing for Addition as an Addition to Substitution, not Addition as a Substitution to Substitution. In other words, substitution is still in the mix, whether or not we acknowledge it.

What do you think? Is adding alternatives opposed to subtracting them? Do they actually snake back on one another? The paralysis of too much freedom - is that less freedom?

...always a play between what you are doing and how you do it...

Assignments from week 1

2007-09-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

Non-coerced Assignments: More than Mere invitations

1. Adopt an activist ~ do a report of sorts (bio sketch, analysis, anecdote) focused by the question: How did that activist treat time? (where elements of time include sequence, timing, duration, speed, tempo, coordination, emphasis, simultaneity.) possibly for a collaborative encyclopedia of craftspeople in time.

2a. Write a short dialogue for two characters. Then, divide up the dialogue among two actors, who might change character mid-sentence or even mid-word. (Rehearse.)

2b. Write a scene, with an entrance followed by an exit so that there are 2 actors, then 3 actors, then 2 actors, with the same treatment of speech as before. Make pokes at the implementation.

3. After writing a formulation of a problem you see in the world (mine was something like: Schools teach submission and obedience and hierarchy more loudly than they teach learning and thinking), add something to it that doesn't (yet) belong there. (It is actually harder to make something sturdily not fit!)

4. Compose (and perform) an answer to "How would I like to present myself [to these people]?" (Medium unspecified)

5. Insert a long pause into an otherwise normal, everyday activity.

6. Make false statements.

one Personal Assignment: Present Primitivism to the Ecological Design class, perhaps in the form of several serial 10-15 minute segments. The Primitivism I will probably be presenting is Jason Godesky's version, which I have read most of.

Day Two! What's on the table

2007-09-05T23:02:00.000-07:00

Today was Day Two at the School, which followed Day One and a Labor Day Open House. Great excitement is in the air with about twenty students participating.

To give the smallest idea of the resource that is the students, I asked for a list of mad skillz to be made - things that we could teach each other. The mad skills of only about half the students that we made on Sunday:

demanding fun in the face of dumb situations; hanging out with kids; advocacy for/ alliances with/ delivery to... people in jail; giving hugs; cooking; writing; radio broadcasting (some); craftiness with old maps and cookbooks; silliness; conflict resolution/ mediation; costumes/ playing dress up; listmaking; macramé; needlepoint; embroidery; sewing; knitting; crochet; bracelet making; hair wraps; storytelling; tree climbing; fashioning; singing; acting; observing; chanting; yoga; consent; hair coloring; make up; crisis de-escalation; French; sign language; listening; music theory (basic and weirdo); cleaning; getting lost; organizing; organization; garden; question making; cyclery; hustling; caretaking; acoustics; simplification; silliness; waiting; laughter; cooking; opposite day; instrument making; affection; baking; dreadlocks; puppets; swimming; filibustering; navigating civic processes and projects; circus (poi, clowning, stilts, unicycle, juggling, etc.); black and white photo development; project management; writing poetry/spoken word; wandering; basic sound engineering

This might not be unusual for a randomly selected, demographically similar group of people...but this list is declaring that we know we have these resources, and that might make meeting one another's needs much more direct.

Add to this the offers of the city of Urbana (and Champaign and U of I), most notably so far the astoundingly inviting Independent Media Center, the Bike Co-op, and the Food Co-op...and some things I haven't checked out yet - the library and this alternative art space... well, you can get a pretty overwhelmed schedule. Especially not even considering how you are going to pay the rent. Which I haven't fully figured out yet. Perhaps one of those Jaerbs I keep hearing about.

Meanwhile, the School is offering courses in Fundamentals, as in the basic language you need to have to have a conversation about designing a society, Craftsperson in Time, which lies in the meeting of composition and activism, a (possibly utopian) Movement Theater Lab, an Ecological Design seminar thingy, an Art-Everywhere workshop in creating Acoustic Portraits, and a Political Economy class. (Well, I might as well link to the schedule!)

I have been taking notes, which I will be dumping into here in digestible form, but I will be separating them out into separate posts, each centering around one idea, so that discussions could form in a more manageable way. Ideas are flying by at a lightning pace, as I anticipated, and it remains to be seen whether this blog can retard the amnesia.

why am I here?

2007-08-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

I am here. I am Jacob, I am in Urbana from now until mid-November, and probably for the first half of 2008 as well. what will I be Doing?

I am here in Urbana for the School for Designing a Society; the School is here and nowhere else, and I'm here for that: the sitting patiently and learning about language, systems, design, cybernetics, permaculture, utopia, theater, economics, teaching, care, and spiny discourse. (The spiny discourse I hope to actively participate in.)

I am here in a physical location to notice my immediate physical surroundings and interact with them, in ways experimental and non-. More on that later! I am here to be with friends and to be friendly.

I am here on this blog to explain what I'm doing here to myself and to people who care about me. On the Internet, only the tip of the School's Iceberg is visible, and I'm here to make it a little more visible. I am here to draw connections which are needed by the things I am connecting, which may include yous, disparate ideas in your singular head, webpages, or tags or labels.

I am here Hi!

Meanwhile, my musical "career" marches on with great hope. Project Udderbot will continue with great intensity, and the one-man-microtonal-show may not be far behind! I may or may not blog in a more musical direction over at scalesmith.blogspot.com. (I may also continue to blog in a more vulnerable way at diefungi.livejournal.com.)