VOTD 01/05/2025

 Iannis Xenakis: Music Today Album 2: Akrata - Achorripsis - Polla Ta Dhina - ST/10 (Angel)

Purchased used at the Record Graveyard in 1981

I don't think I'm someone especially touched strongly by nostalgia. I've been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University since 2005. Prior to that, I entered CMU as a freshman in 1981, and bombed out by the end of my second year.

Classes begin in a week and I've started prepping. My current classroom is in a building that wasn't part of the music department when I was a student. While on campus, I wandered the buildings where I took classes as a student. I tried to remember how I felt being in those places for the first time, but I couldn't remember specifically. I know I was initially excited and nervous. It's such a long time ago. I had a few specific memories, such as watching from a distance as George Romero directed part of Creepshow, but little about those very first days as a music student. 

Where did that 18 year old go?

The first guest speaker on campus my first year was Iannis Xenakis, in a series of speakers regarding computers and music. The CMU School of Music was (and to a lesser extent still is) a pretty conservative institution overall, in both faculty and student body. It took a joint effort of the music and computer science departments to get a "computers and music" lecture series happening. I think this was in part due to Roger Dannenberg's efforts, who was at CMU earning his doctorate at the time. (Roger recently went into retirement.)

I've shared this story many times, so forgive me if this is familiar territory, even on this blog. Xenakis spoke to the music school largely about his UPIC system, a device that looked like an electronic drafting table where you could draw images that the computer would translate into sound. Prior to that however, he gave a broader lecture about his music (and computer music in general) in the then new Science Building, now Wean Hall. I attended out of curiosity, coming in mid-way due to my class schedule. 

During this lecture, he spoke about his early orchestral works "Metastaseis" and "Pithoprakta". He projected images of the graphs on which the sounds were derived while playing recordings of the pieces. 

I've seen both works performed years later by the CMU Philharmonic, and they're surprisingly quiet pieces. Each instrument has a completely individual part with respect to all other players, so the strings aren't building sound through reinforcement. 

During the lecture in 1981, he played them loud. And I do mean LOUD, jarringly loud, headache inducing loud, and I was sitting in the back of the lecture hall.

What did my 18 year old self make of this? I hadn't heard anything like it before and it in some ways seemed like a bad joke. Nonetheless, some weeks later when I noticed this used Xenakis LP for $3, I bought it on sight. Despite a not-entirely-pleasant introduction to Xenakis' music, I guess I was intrigued.

The Record Graveyard was a block or so off campus, just shy of Craig St and diagonal from the Carnegie Museum. I think I had lunch with my parents on Craig my first day there and noticed the record store, because later that day or the next I walked there and bought Henry Cow's In Praise of Learning. That's another record I still have. 

The standout on this album to me is the opening piece, "Polla Ta Dhina", a work for children's chorus and orchestra. He pulls this off by having the chorus sing the text in a unison A-440 while the sort of rolling, controlled chaos you'd expect from a Xenakis piece happens in the orchestra. It gives the work an identity and focus I find to not be so true of the other works on this collection. 

The remaining three works find Xenakis in more formalist mode, working through various forms of higher mathematics to derive his musical ideas. They're drier works. "ST/10" (excuse me, full title "ST/10=1-080262") is one of his early computer-derived compositions. Unlike the current developments in generative AI, Xenakis isn't trying to get the computer to "create" a musical composition. It's an exercise in algorithmic composition. I generally find the three "ST" works to be more interesting in principle than execution. That said, the Jack Quartet staked their claim in the new music world by playing the "ST/4" by memory. I've heard a recording they made, and they breathed some life into the work.

I have a copy of the score for "Achorripsis". It came from the collection of Easley Blackwood, a composer who taught at the University of Chicago for many years. The university's library sold off his collection of scores when Easley went into a care facility, and my friend Rob Pleshar grabbed this in addition to many other interesting works. The price pencilled on the first page was $21- (yikes, how long ago?). Also pencilled in Easley's hand: "Incredible that this 'composer' was ever taken seriously." I guess there just isn't pleasing everyone. Here I am, more than forty years later, still trying to figure these things out.

VOTD 01/02/2025

 Ennio Morricone: 4 Mosche Di Velluto Grigio (Cinevox)

Purchased used at The Government Center, I think

Seeing as it's the new year, many people have been drawing up their best of/worst of 2024 lists and creating more online chatter. Some of those might be useful eventually, if I'm to hold up my resolution to check out new album releases.

I've hardly seen most of the films making top 10 lists, nor will I have seen most that will undoubtably be nominated for the top Oscar prize this year. I have a sense that it's been a weak year for films. The best film I saw in 2024 was Ennio, the documentary about Ennio Morricone. Imdb.com lists the date on the film as being 2021, I don't know the story of why it was playing at a local theater in 2024. At 2.5 hours, it's a film that amazingly felt too short. Not that there wasn't room for some trimming; of the many talking heads presented, I had no need to hear from Bruce Springsteen, the bassist for The Clash, the guy from Metallica nor the guy from Faith No More. Thankfully, the great majority of those interviewed were those who worked with Morricone directly. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it highly enough. 

There's some mention of the three soundtracks Morricone did for early films of Dario Argento, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, and this, translated to Four flies on Grey Velvet. (The Italians have a way with interesting and evocative titles, no?) Being from 1971, this work falls several years after Morricone's immense success with his Sergio Leone soundtracks, most famously The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (Another great title, but let's be honest: none of the characters are especially good, all are levels of bad, and varying degrees of ugly.) There was a comment mentioned in documentary, I think made by Dario's father, that Morricone's music sounded alike in all three films. The composer himself insisted he was trying new ideas in each. Did this end the relationship between Ennio and Dario? I don't know. (Assuming I'm recalling all of those details correctly to begin with.) Ennio certainly didn't slow down after this work, and Dario would soon go on to work with his most famous musical collaborators, Goblin/Claudio Simonetti. 

There's a lot of what you'd expect from a 1971 Morricone Giallo score: some sweet Italian pop with wordless vocals by Edda dell'Orso, some instrumental blues-rock, some string tone clusters. The second particularly features some frantic free-jazz drumming. It's not as funky as my favorite, Lizard in a Woman's Skin, but it's still an interesting work. 

I think the only thing you can expect from a Morricone soundtrack of this era is that you don't know what the next thing coming will be, even if many of the tracks and the overall form seem familiar. But then he didn't compose it as a discreet listening experience, but to serve the purposes of the film.

VOTD 01/01/2025

 Fats Waller: Young Fats at the Organ 1926-1927 - Volume 1 (RCA)

Purchased decades ago at a yard sale for possibly 50¢

A new year, a blog post. The concept of New Year's Day as a holiday seems strange to me, disconnected from any religious or cultural meaning besides the changing of a number on the calendar. It's a time to consider renewal and the future, as we're approaching the bleakest point of the year for weather. That and partying, for some people. 

So too the future is on my mind. There are things I anticipate happening in the next year that I'm not yet prepared to express publicly. As for resolutions, I've decided that I should probably spring for a new album more often, in whatever format that might be. Most of the new releases I've bought in recent years are reissues (such as the Ralph Records retrospective mentioned in an earlier post) or things like newly issued live recordings of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. I'll still snoop for interesting old used vinyl, but I'm reminding myself just how much I already have. Make use of that. 

I am again posting here again as much out of an act of self-discipline as anything else, a continuing resolution. Creating and maintaining disciplined routines outside of my job are becoming increasingly important to me. Maybe somebody reading will find what I have to say interesting, I don't know. I suppose today I'm in autobiographical mode more than musical analysis. 

For the first day of the new year, I suppose I wanted to put on something that would calm my mind. So much of what I like in music has to do with energy, intensity, contrasts, brisk motion. It's not easy to find something in my personal library that is more laid back and relaxed. I considered putting on some Morton Feldman again, even though that music can have a quiet but firm intensity to it. But no, something else. I have a stack of recently purchased LPs I continue to intend to get to, but nothing in that stack. Perusing through my collected vinyl, somehow I came to the decision that Fats Waller on organ was what I wanted.

On the surface, this music might sound cute. It can't help but evoke a sense of the past and nostalgia, through no fault of its own. Listening to the opening track, "Soothin' Syrup Stomp" (maybe my favorite track on this collection), I've almost certainly heard this recording used as a bed for online streams of silent movies. It's also impossible for me to disconnect these recordings with their appearance in the film Eraserhead. What was David Lynch's purpose in using them? Nothing in the film was done by accident. The hotel lobby, the small studio apartment with its radiator, seems to come out of the past, as does this music.

As I write this, my wife is upstairs catching more news about the horrible mass murder in New Orleans while I'm downstairs quietly listening to Fats. Escapism? Psychic self-defense? I don't know. I think I've always identified with Henry from Eraserhead to some extent*, and maybe his choice of listening is the right call.

It seems silly and redundant to state how great Fats' playing is. You either know, or you don't know his music at all.  There's an added bit of a novelty to hearing him on a pipe organ rather than his more native piano (I assume that, at least). Most jazz organ playing is done on something like a Hammond B3, an instrument that wouldn't be invented for about a decade after these recordings. The pipe organ, and probably the early recording technology, give these sessions a very different character than later jazz organ albums. Again, it sounds like it's from that past, reaching out for renewed attention. 

Alberta Hunter joins in, singing two songs including the old standard "Sugar" (not the Stanley Turrentine tune familiar to Pittsburgh jazz audiences). She sounds on mark but, me being me, I prefer Fats by himself. 

If you've read this far (and even if you haven't), I wish you a good, healthy, positive year to come. I think we all deserve it. 

* I had an Eraserhead t-shirt at one time, and somebody once asked me if it was me in the image. It wasn't a photo image of Henry, but come on, my hair isn't like that.