tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69930458268565446972024-03-17T14:34:05.390+00:00streams of expression/// david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.comBlogger282125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-2792237740650006032024-03-17T14:31:00.001+00:002024-03-17T14:33:32.024+00:00"The holes in history": Tyrone Williams<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcGqjBjURIXxKF9Opiokmb4-nhsOMGcv-o4EXn9tbv3sFw5uLfj3qzp0fygj5eqiq69yOc3Hxn_kRxfrD_Ot2fZeepVDNWSRza7uqPqm1gI34FO37XOLpcKt-rpma8RPUQnNYJvWXAYKlgHs-CTaunVUdSOtcFzyAbzbOSqma5KLLK84M9GzX2Z8ii/s400/DRAP99-BrookTankle.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="284" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcGqjBjURIXxKF9Opiokmb4-nhsOMGcv-o4EXn9tbv3sFw5uLfj3qzp0fygj5eqiq69yOc3Hxn_kRxfrD_Ot2fZeepVDNWSRza7uqPqm1gI34FO37XOLpcKt-rpma8RPUQnNYJvWXAYKlgHs-CTaunVUdSOtcFzyAbzbOSqma5KLLK84M9GzX2Z8ii/w284-h400/DRAP99-BrookTankle.jpeg" width="284" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The poet and scholar Tyrone Williams passed away this March: a bitter blow indeed. Williams had recently taken up a post at SUNY Buffalo after decades at Xavier University; throughout this time, he exemplified the model of the poet-critic or poet-scholar, writing longer and shorter pieces on the work of the past and present that must have numbered in the hundreds, keeping abreast of the teeming world of small press poetry with enthusiasm, warmth and rigour, teaching, appearing regularly at conferences and on panels (we shared a Zoom stage at ALA just a few weeks before he passed, in a panel on Calvin Hernton, organised by Lauri Scheyer). Williams’ strengths would require pages to enumerate in full: the laconic precision of his verse, its apt negotiation of vernacular and vehicular, of the mendacities of US politics and the tenacity of the lives that survive despite it; the wealth of his critical eye and his critical imagination. As noted when Williams’ work was discussed on Jacket 2's <i><a href="https://jacket2.org/podcasts/signature-public-poemtalk-86" target="_blank">Poem Talk</a></i> (a show he also frequented as guest), “these densely allusive poems” contain “layers of referentiality; yet the layers overlap, are torqued, punned, entendred, homophoned, and doubly and triply and quadrupally historicized — sometimes in one word or phrase, conjuring social, geographical, historical, juridical, psychological, musical, poetic, theoretical registers.” And perhaps that allusiveness--which is not the same as elusiveness--manifests that same generosity, that movement <i>outward--</i>toward others, toward the world--as well as inward--toward the close detail of the text, towards having one's head in a book--that characterised his way of being, in writing, in the world.</p><p>Of all of his many pieces, I’ve perhaps most often returned to a short essay published a couple of years ago at <i>Big Other</i>, ‘<a href="https://bigother.com/2019/04/11/reviewing-reviewing-ethos-and-praxis-by-tyrone-williams/" target="_blank">Reviewing: Ethos and Praxis</a>’, in which he wrote on the role he saw criticism as playing. Williams writes of “thinking beyond the limits of the profession, thinking, that is, of one’s avocation above and beyond one’s vocation, beyond the ever-expanding market and public relations overload, beyond even the end of one’s life.” As he notes, this is a sentiment “espoused often enough by poets, usually in the form of a cliché (I’m writing for my future audience of readers).” But in his case, it took a deeply-felt practical dimension, a contribution to the development and sustenance of poetry community, of the mutual support of poets for other poets, and of an expansion beyond the small world of the small press and the small scene towards a genuinely expanded sense of a readership--even if that expanded sense can sometimes, for better or worse, be more wishful than real. “Having chosen a profession that allows me time to read and write,” Williams observes, “I’ve tried to balance my own reading and writing ambitions with some semblance of a commitment to a larger reading and writing community. It isn’t the best of all possible worlds—that would have been earning a living as a songwriting lyricist while reading and writing poetry in my “spare” time—but it has been a pretty good one.”</p><p>Commenting on Williams’ poetry for Poem Talk, Herman Beavers remarked that Williams “sings the holes in history”. Williams’ generosity, his sense of the relation of poetry and community, poetry and history, is something we all could learn from. And I hope that some of his body of critical writing might be collected in book form sooner or later. For now, his diligently-maintained website, <i><a href="https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/" target="_blank">Heretofore</a></i>, contains a wealth of information. And there are short obituaries at <i>Big Other</i> <a href="https://bigother.com/2024/03/11/r-i-p-tyrone-williams/" target="_blank">here</a> and from Xavier University <a href="https://www.xavier.edu/now/2024/in-remembrance-tyrone-williams" target="_blank">here</a>. </p><p style="text-align: center;">***</p><p>--I have a short track track on a Bandcamp release, edited by Will Montgomery, of sound works by poets responding to lines from Tom Raworth’s <i>Ace. </i>Available here: <a href="https://selvageflame.bandcamp.com/album/attention-moves">https://selvageflame.bandcamp.com/album/attention-moves</a></p><p>--And an interview conducted a couple of year ago with Aaron Shurin is out in the latest issue of <i><a href="https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/newsletter/275-winter-2024/making-the-world-an-interview-with-aaron-shurin" target="_blank">The Poetry Project Newsletter</a>,</i> focusing on his recently republished<i> <a href="https://nightboat.org/book/unbound/" target="_blank">Ubound</a></i>, but traversing his whole career from <i>Fag Rag</i> through to the Poetry Wars and to the poetics of today. (A New and Selected Poems is forthcoming next year.)</p>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-31343824804767719722024-01-01T11:17:00.001+00:002024-01-17T14:24:15.405+00:00Blog Posts in 2023<div><i><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-true-account.html" target="_blank">A True Account</a></i> (November 2023: Update Post)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/02/myths-and-dreams-rolling-calfpat-thomas.html" target="_blank">“</a><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/#:~:text=23%20OCTOBER%202023-,%22Moral%20Clarity%22,-A%20friend%20points" target="_blank">Moral Clarity</a><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/02/myths-and-dreams-rolling-calfpat-thomas.html" target="_blank">”</a> (October 2023: On Gaza)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/09/news-of-news-of-news-of-news.html" target="_blank">News of News of News of News</a> (September 2023: Update Post)</div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/07/news-of-news-of-news.html" target="_blank">News of News of News</a> (July 2023: Update Post)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/06/kaija-saariaho-1952-2023.html" target="_blank">Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023)</a> (June 2023)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/05/may.html" target="_blank">News of News</a> (May 2023: Update Post)</div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/02/myths-and-dreams-rolling-calfpat-thomas.html" target="_blank">“</a><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-subject-of-emancipation-trilce.html" target="_blank">The Subject of Emancipation</a><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/02/myths-and-dreams-rolling-calfpat-thomas.html" target="_blank">”</a><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-subject-of-emancipation-trilce.html" target="_blank">: <i>Trilce</i> Translation Launch</a> (May 2023)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/04/selected-poems-of-calvin-c-hernton.html" target="_blank">Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton: Preview</a> (April 2023: Update Post)</div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/04/latest.html" target="_blank">Latest</a> (April 2023: Update Post)</div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/04/in-other-news.html" target="_blank">In other news... </a>(April 2023: Update Post, Lorenzo Thomas, Karen Brodine...)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/03/gaia-two-orchestral-works-by-wayne.html" target="_blank">Gaia: Two Orchestral Works by Wayne Shorter</a> (March 2023)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/02/news-and-views.html" target="_blank">News and Views</a> (February 2023: Update Post)</div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/02/myths-and-dreams-rolling-calfpat-thomas.html" target="_blank">“Myths and Dreams”: The Rolling Calf/Pat Thomas</a> (February 2023)<div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-goldfish-bowl-romantic-englishwoman.html" target="_blank">The Goldfish Bowl: <i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i> (1975. dir. Joseph Losey)</a> (February 2023)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/01/iklectik-gigs.html">IKLECTIK Gigs</a> (January 2023: Update Post)</div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/01/new-from-materials.html" target="_blank">New from Materials </a>(January 2023: Update Post)</div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2023/01/jackie-mcleans-cry.html " target="_blank">Jackie McLean’s Cry </a>(January 2023)</div><div><br /></div><div>(Not so many posts this year, the writing mostly elsewhere. I’ll try to come back to/keep this up this blog though. A hidden corner somewhere, a pile of notes.)</div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-81186199679608337462023-11-02T11:15:00.011+00:002023-11-06T14:06:32.678+00:00A True Account<div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFvGGMVdk2LWYDVc_VELDZ1GOxJKd2vdcdycCa7xiyNp_-8LM9hpd5US_mhsNWF2sWFSDRrunI3d2Rxg48ls2WUMk6yVYtoplMryXel6le5BoS8EFrzerapyfjXKbg7AZjclXsUupEHrbKuq-x_MdHHKLh67pFQgKfrH73M6sMs2ZrDgMUUXdjUMAH/s1749/H3GFqAD5UOp+%25283%2529.jpeg" style="clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1749" data-original-width="1312" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFvGGMVdk2LWYDVc_VELDZ1GOxJKd2vdcdycCa7xiyNp_-8LM9hpd5US_mhsNWF2sWFSDRrunI3d2Rxg48ls2WUMk6yVYtoplMryXel6le5BoS8EFrzerapyfjXKbg7AZjclXsUupEHrbKuq-x_MdHHKLh67pFQgKfrH73M6sMs2ZrDgMUUXdjUMAH/w480-h640/H3GFqAD5UOp+%25283%2529.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><div><div><i>A True Account</i>, a book of poems, recently came out from The 87 Press, with cover art by the great <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candace_Hill-Montgomery">Candace Hill-Montgomery</a>. Here's the write-up:</div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>A True Account </i>collects works written between 2013 and 2020, published by a variety of small presses in the UK and the US. Here are variously refracted the student movement, austerity, general election, referendum, the crisis of 2020 or 2019 or any year you care to name; the Massacre of the Innocents, the housing question, the October Revolution in November; Sappho, Mingus, Storm Ophelia; Rukeyser, Rilke, Rodefer; the aesthetics of resistance, the insistence of history: luxury and voluptuousness, peace and pleasure, beauty and order, the questions that still remain unanswered and the problems that remain unsolved. “Wanting poetry to save my life, to shame my life, as LONG as the WORLD is WIDE, and as WIDE as the WORLD is LONG.”<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>“Lyrically gorgeous and real poetry. This book is a bright spot in a bleak time.” - Peter Gizzi </div></blockquote><div></div><div>You can get the book <a href="https://www.the87press.co.uk/shop/p/a-true-account-by-david-grundy" target="_blank">here</a>, and I'll be launching the book in person in London at <a href="https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/the87press-present-mushaira" target="_blank">Cafe Oto on December 8th</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8zu-LLTN3ynezMvjIzpsahEsoM2EQoVBlp0hh6k9mbe7uuH04E_6fqgVWWfw3dGRn01aJVjwesNVx1Omy_1kr2m231iPrkVg7v4BJ0nRsgnpsVy3ZkJYRAPOb6ffBB0yT3NaEc1jmUFClULNcBUhldwXJU4tFs1lajlTyn6FHBqzGuthsuNOFMt33/s785/Screen%20Shot%202023-10-25%20at%2016.47.02.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="785" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8zu-LLTN3ynezMvjIzpsahEsoM2EQoVBlp0hh6k9mbe7uuH04E_6fqgVWWfw3dGRn01aJVjwesNVx1Omy_1kr2m231iPrkVg7v4BJ0nRsgnpsVy3ZkJYRAPOb6ffBB0yT3NaEc1jmUFClULNcBUhldwXJU4tFs1lajlTyn6FHBqzGuthsuNOFMt33/w400-h220/Screen%20Shot%202023-10-25%20at%2016.47.02.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--Also out, a cassette release of me reading my 2014 long poem T<i>he Problem, The Questions, The Poem </i>on Ben Hall's cassette label Ornette Coleman Fiend Club--available <a href="https://ornettecolemanfiendclubb.bandcamp.com/album/the-problem-the-questions-the-poem" target="_blank">here</a>. <div><br /></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3zYydIeVtLW8m8peA4qG2RGH_Jvwy1piAcFtzpjp7sn-bVUWZXzKUq4YNnVM6ne3VlJP8YU-_YQEDq8vFKDnQHcYFasw8hFBPDpjBtyKkYmxhz6fFmlzVQDVIKhKqsQnfz5KHGcEjMy6ambTbgz9k9bCuylBZoL9JBONLW6BzVZRFC67JZlS8QrAo/s2048/387780982_713329120837044_8828518661227017052_n.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3zYydIeVtLW8m8peA4qG2RGH_Jvwy1piAcFtzpjp7sn-bVUWZXzKUq4YNnVM6ne3VlJP8YU-_YQEDq8vFKDnQHcYFasw8hFBPDpjBtyKkYmxhz6fFmlzVQDVIKhKqsQnfz5KHGcEjMy6ambTbgz9k9bCuylBZoL9JBONLW6BzVZRFC67JZlS8QrAo/w400-h400/387780982_713329120837044_8828518661227017052_n.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--Jazz poetry primer in <i><a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/477" target="_blank">The Wire</a></i>.</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCTG1KTjxHWTT-ERfkRRY6IUznDlj1WIqkMVCrcpo1ij0Rovp3k5YIVd9oJ0B19lfY3JdvpGJrUV4XBH4xE-7dpEg1qbmzG5h9F98Iz_phQf268AhRO1g-RwV9sooTH7ND0GdwLdkhPWYAn0WiuaZDZ1GBKknSeq2l02Kjc4Cg1WTBchQ22NWabWqq/s353/Screen%20Shot%202023-11-02%20at%2012.14.03.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="353" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCTG1KTjxHWTT-ERfkRRY6IUznDlj1WIqkMVCrcpo1ij0Rovp3k5YIVd9oJ0B19lfY3JdvpGJrUV4XBH4xE-7dpEg1qbmzG5h9F98Iz_phQf268AhRO1g-RwV9sooTH7ND0GdwLdkhPWYAn0WiuaZDZ1GBKknSeq2l02Kjc4Cg1WTBchQ22NWabWqq/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-11-02%20at%2012.14.03.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--On Christian Wolff in <i><a href="https://www.artforum.com/columns/quiet-metamorphoses-christian-wolff-518106/" target="_blank">Artforum</a></i>. This piece came out just days before the disgraceful <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/arts/design/artforum-boycott-goldin-eisenman.html" target="_blank">firing of AF's editor David Velasco</a> over the publication of the '<a href="https://www.artforum.com/columns/open-letter-art-community-cultural-organizations-518019/" target="_blank">Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations</a>' against the ongoing mass murder in Gaza, and the subsequent resignation of Zack Hatfield and Chloe Wyma, whose editorial guidance over the pieces I've published in <i>Artforum</i> over the past few years has been exemplary. An open letter of October 27th, criticizing the actions of AF's owners, Penske Media Corporation, can be found and signed <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/15VS0P4Io4IKX3C0gX3__otazDhnxDitFwwPzS3UENEM/mobilebasic?pli=1" target="_blank">here</a>.</div></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">***</div><div><br /></div>
Meanwhile, in person, for those of you in or around Berlin, I'll be giving two talks in December, both at the Freie Universität: on Monday, December 4th I'll be giving a lecture on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5RAvDZZyCI&pp=ygUdYW1pcmkgYmFyYWthIGFkdmFuY2VkIHdvcmtlcnM%3D">Amiri Baraka and the Advanced Workers</a> (details <a href="https://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/faculty/literature/dates/RVL_WiSe23/RVL_Grundy.html">here</a>), and then the following Tuesday, 12th December, I'll be giving a seminar on my current project on free jazz, <i>Survival Music </i>(Room 319, John F Kennedy Institut for American Studies, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, 2pm-4pm). And this month, at the kind invitation of Dimitra Ioannou, I'll be giving a talk at the A Glimpse of Festival, critical institute for Arts and Politics, Politechniou 8, 104 33 Athens, Greece, on the weekend of November 25th/26th.david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-43754200958730635912023-10-23T10:55:00.002+01:002023-10-23T10:55:31.834+01:00"Moral Clarity"A friend points out that there’s been a lot of talk going round in the past few weeks about “<a href="https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/williams-biden-shows-remarkable-moral-clarity-on-israel" target="_blank">moral clarity</a>”. We all know, or should, where <a href="https://aijac.org.au/australia-israel-review/essay-the-case-for-moral-clarity/" target="_blank">that</a> phrase <a href="https://books.google.de/books/about/Why_We_Fight.html?id=YvMwiH5rOUoC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">comes from</a>, and that in reality it’s part of a vast and ongoing campaign of distortion, dissimulation, disinformation and the defense of the wholesale murder of the Palestinian people. Ethnic cleansing is <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-warns-new-instance-mass-ethnic-cleansing-palestinians-calls" target="_blank">ethnic cleansing</a>. To say that, to know that, <i>that’s</i> moral clarity.david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-50203341989815539942023-09-06T14:47:00.013+01:002023-09-06T14:58:27.867+01:00News of News of News of News<div>Some recent writing:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv1TlHs5ASBSuV45YxUo7wnna_I_FLGgVl3EmDssdV4LA3maAt4tPS1giBdYkHFNCmp9iBpx412dJOYIucEWC8A7Wp2u3IjN1BArcv0Y99YilcwD8O4M4u56mKvnrmJS9rhv9Z0BJSEbwJHrnu3n9z0xTNlW5NQBo_V89_yndRPn7UEx6xOpy3rhge/s549/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.32.06.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="530" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv1TlHs5ASBSuV45YxUo7wnna_I_FLGgVl3EmDssdV4LA3maAt4tPS1giBdYkHFNCmp9iBpx412dJOYIucEWC8A7Wp2u3IjN1BArcv0Y99YilcwD8O4M4u56mKvnrmJS9rhv9Z0BJSEbwJHrnu3n9z0xTNlW5NQBo_V89_yndRPn7UEx6xOpy3rhge/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.32.06.png" width="309" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--<a href="https://bachtrack.com/feature-weight-of-memory-music-of-krzysztof-penderecki-july-2023" target="_blank">On Krzysztof Penderecki</a> for Bachtrack.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh67y4JdPCpUb2_9D8GY7nIWq8bNoRz5bTudOI1QPkSEM2sO0A3Xr5fuQQPKWS9q2VP9rfoFDn6tGjyhEHEfTXnuKwntK7cLMkXpTraof57QzlgwvPOFLer8KkT6S8As3L08FhQygCJlKJg2M550_Eaz3A1jqRVM_-0sjh8EQvuosuNXAK5I-Eb4lFl/s727/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.44.00.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="727" data-original-width="704" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh67y4JdPCpUb2_9D8GY7nIWq8bNoRz5bTudOI1QPkSEM2sO0A3Xr5fuQQPKWS9q2VP9rfoFDn6tGjyhEHEfTXnuKwntK7cLMkXpTraof57QzlgwvPOFLer8KkT6S8As3L08FhQygCJlKJg2M550_Eaz3A1jqRVM_-0sjh8EQvuosuNXAK5I-Eb4lFl/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.44.00.png" width="310" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--On Don Cherry and Peter Brötzmann's work with children for the Don Cherry special in <i><a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/476" target="_blank">The Wire</a></i><a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/475" target="_blank">'s September issue</a>. (The issue also has reviews of a live performance by Edith Steyer's John Carter project, of the latest instalment in Wild Up's Julius Eastman project, and of Angel Bat Dawid's <i>Requiem for Jazz</i> and the latest in the <i>Red Hot </i>series, themed around Sun Ra's 'Nuclear War'; more reviews, of the A L'Arme Festival and of Klangraum Dusseldorf, in the <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/476" target="_blank">October issue</a>).</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih2H4SbvrVlyCK0f9O1DsYMPIEK9MxX_94-25VIHW4YWlpMifhoj1-IpraqFHgANAusIFod4DGmn33Ca9UnJUz8slgerNSSEWiecK5CcDLoQufXYf5kvWsHE2Mc8LGV2mc67pUehu8-Df5bjEnSdzmiJ7IxI2QDu7g-a1m2E76tHHh8ffZGdQnLYcC/s279/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.57.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="270" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih2H4SbvrVlyCK0f9O1DsYMPIEK9MxX_94-25VIHW4YWlpMifhoj1-IpraqFHgANAusIFod4DGmn33Ca9UnJUz8slgerNSSEWiecK5CcDLoQufXYf5kvWsHE2Mc8LGV2mc67pUehu8-Df5bjEnSdzmiJ7IxI2QDu7g-a1m2E76tHHh8ffZGdQnLYcC/s1600/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.57.54.png" width="270" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--Liner notes for <i>The Art of Noticing</i>, one of the CD releases recorded at Eddie Prevost's <i>Bright Nowhere</i> concerts last year.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ZO9qHyaEXZiK-ga6aXKXC8zUfRgTMunXf5PvSe4UT_Y0cDslWdoPECcj-hxGGHpCAN5G0kHDY8KT0S6_QfQHCps-45QN5Zb3rq7t0FpIkiLGuNMb1iUXF4IL_UJu6F7Rh3q37G8oqqLMklhFj3K75Wh5se05YGoprX28CiBCAQpMihPsyiv5uFbY/s1000/81nXy0t6icL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="667" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ZO9qHyaEXZiK-ga6aXKXC8zUfRgTMunXf5PvSe4UT_Y0cDslWdoPECcj-hxGGHpCAN5G0kHDY8KT0S6_QfQHCps-45QN5Zb3rq7t0FpIkiLGuNMb1iUXF4IL_UJu6F7Rh3q37G8oqqLMklhFj3K75Wh5se05YGoprX28CiBCAQpMihPsyiv5uFbY/s320/81nXy0t6icL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>--The Calvin Hernton <a href="https://www.weslpress.org/9780819500366/selected-poems-of-calvin-c-hernton/" target="_blank"><i>Selected Poems</i> </a>is now in the world from Wesleyan UP, with the first review in from Publishers Weekly <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780819500366" target="_blank">here</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Details of in-person and on-line launches to follow...</div><div><br /></div><div>--Finally, I've updated my Soundcloud page for the first time in around a decade with some recordings from the past few years: <a href="https://soundcloud.com/david-grundy">https://soundcloud.com/david-grundy</a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRYZcvVZiJzRh528WvKZ3HyemyslkoK9QzxXt6c56na3yl_CsVLGs6Wfg46dMQt7ejPYc5ZpzFpMJyGOmkibZklwq13wJ4VNp_F04aRdo6-vY31OMnDBPH6vIhJ5BrSBozEVuif2cDdkn7qAg46DhJVcCMQR-IzMq347DeyMPbS9g1U4fMThVq53VJ/s446/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.34.53.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="446" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRYZcvVZiJzRh528WvKZ3HyemyslkoK9QzxXt6c56na3yl_CsVLGs6Wfg46dMQt7ejPYc5ZpzFpMJyGOmkibZklwq13wJ4VNp_F04aRdo6-vY31OMnDBPH6vIhJ5BrSBozEVuif2cDdkn7qAg46DhJVcCMQR-IzMq347DeyMPbS9g1U4fMThVq53VJ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-06%20at%2015.34.53.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-38440325439732617302023-07-02T13:25:00.002+01:002023-07-02T13:57:07.497+01:00News of News of News<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV_dNJZO5Oi4HqPP-__-6fufo2Zm86Ddl7gz927vzpjBwsTlu4K1vrXe6o6vggK8Th5RD7RLocemIe4NMXlC9wqTr0J-eCj-KVmDhsIN5iLjWemvMHBU5a_RF0En2Ff5IvbFtNgh-sDF6LjQgEMT0uA3VtJ887DeJ-1sQ-GOjAFGwq6lTnP5drKg/s1016/Screen%20Shot%202023-06-07%20at%2010.13.34.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="707" data-original-width="1016" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV_dNJZO5Oi4HqPP-__-6fufo2Zm86Ddl7gz927vzpjBwsTlu4K1vrXe6o6vggK8Th5RD7RLocemIe4NMXlC9wqTr0J-eCj-KVmDhsIN5iLjWemvMHBU5a_RF0En2Ff5IvbFtNgh-sDF6LjQgEMT0uA3VtJ887DeJ-1sQ-GOjAFGwq6lTnP5drKg/w400-h279/Screen%20Shot%202023-06-07%20at%2010.13.34.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />A short essay called <a href="https://post45.org/2023/06/key-to-a-savage-sideshow-the-magazines-of-the-occult-school-of-boston/" target="_blank">‘ “Key to a Savage Sideshow”: The Magazines of the Occult School of Boston’</a> up at <i>Post-45</i> in a <i>Little Magazines</i> feature edited by Nick Sturm, focusing mainly on the one-shot <i>Boston Newsletter </i>assembled by Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, John Wieners, Stephen Jonas and Joe Dunn one Boston summer. The issue also contains some fantastic pieces including <a href="https://post45.org/2023/06/hardbound-idiom-convergences-in-umbra-vol-i-no-i-1963/" target="_blank">Iris Cushing's piece</a> on the first issue of <i>Umbra</i> magazine. Great to see Umbra scholarship continuing to develop and Iris’s piece will be very useful for those who haven't managed to see a copy of the magazine itself.<p>Also Umbra-related, my review of the <a href="https://www.weslpress.org/9780819578983/the-collected-poems-of-lorenzo-thomas/" target="_blank">Lorenzo Thomas Collected</a> edited by Aldon Nielsen and Laura Vrana is out from <i><a href="https://tripwirejournal.com/2023/06/10/review/" target="_blank">Tripwire</a></i>--online and it will also be out in the next print edition. I wrote this a few years ago--pre-Covid--so it’s nice for it to finally be out, with many thanks to David and Caleb.</p><p>A longer essay, ‘ “The Arc of Struggle”: Poetry and Defeat in the Work of Sean Bonney’, is out in‘<a href="https://www.klincksieck.com/livre/9782252047101/etudes-anglaises-n12023" target="_blank">No Future: Poetry of the Current British Crisis</a>’, a special issue of <i>Études anglaises</i> edited by Dan Katz.</p><p>And the Multiple Melodicas set from Cafe Oto earlier last month is up at Douglas Benford's Soundcloud page: Douglas, myself, Georgina Brett and Steve Beresford all playing multiple melodicas, multiply. Recording thanks to Billy Steiger.</p>
<iframe allow="autoplay" frameborder="no" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1545282769&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe><div style="color: #cccccc; font-family: Interstate, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Garuda, Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: 100; line-break: anywhere; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; word-break: normal;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/douglasbenfordlive" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="DouglasbenfordLive">DouglasbenfordLive</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/douglasbenfordlive/multiple-melodicas-at-cafe-oto-june-2023" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Multiple Melodicas at Cafe Oto, June 2023">Multiple Melodicas at Cafe Oto, June 2023</a></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-22292725884717460952023-06-05T10:42:00.000+01:002023-06-05T10:42:59.237+01:00Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaCw4MKUQ72267EsSQXjemGbvTxMJnc2DmRPMAaH2-FJemihNSXMysU4CoetNaySOxFD2v5538_Jcgyt7sngNPA1TxQp6WceWJ8nYwQErGY4jpt3Zbb_V3kN9yqd-JLQDhLGDj7g_mQeVT4coo9rToZJ4Y1W4JOOIUhDrrBTXJj27dPPbTBvjeBg/s1232/01%20KAIJA%20SAARHIO_1920x1080_NO%20LOGO2.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="696" data-original-width="1232" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaCw4MKUQ72267EsSQXjemGbvTxMJnc2DmRPMAaH2-FJemihNSXMysU4CoetNaySOxFD2v5538_Jcgyt7sngNPA1TxQp6WceWJ8nYwQErGY4jpt3Zbb_V3kN9yqd-JLQDhLGDj7g_mQeVT4coo9rToZJ4Y1W4JOOIUhDrrBTXJj27dPPbTBvjeBg/w400-h226/01%20KAIJA%20SAARHIO_1920x1080_NO%20LOGO2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Kaija Saariaho has passed away at the age of 70. Saariaho passed at the crest of a wave of public attention. Last month her work was celebrated in a BBC ‘<a href="https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2023/event/bbc-so-total-immersion-oramo-conducts-kaija-saariaho" target="_blank">Total Immersion</a>’ weekend at the Barbican Centre, while not far away at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, her opera <i>Innocence </i>received its long-delayed UK premiere. (The 2021 Aix performance can be viewed in its entirety on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsrzrSJmcOA" target="_blank">Youtube</a>). </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Innocence</i>, on which I’ve been writing a separate piece, is an extraordinary work, exploring multi-lingual experience, the legacy of violence, and the seething contradictions of present-day Europe, in a music that never feels forced in its treatment of contemporary themes, a music of dramatic power and aural luminosity that consistently resists dramatic cliché. And perhaps it’s her operas that will stand out in the tributes to come: certainly, they brought her the kinds of attention rare for composers of new music, particularly ones who choose not to restrain or compromise their musical language. <i>L’</i><i>Amour de loin, Adriana Mater, </i>the oratorio <i>La Passion de Simone </i>and <i>Innocence </i>are extraordinary works by any standard, condensing the lessons of her prior work, with its exploration of the varieties of orchestral electronic and instrumental colour, and adding the architectural question of music’s relation to the word. </div><div><br /></div><div>That question--the relation of music to word--is, perhaps, both the abiding formal question and the great theme of these works, as they ask how to bear witness, to give testimony, to express what corrodes or exceeds the bounds of expression, whether that’s through the lens of courtly love, in <i>L’</i><i>Amour</i>, war, in <i>Adriana</i> and <i>Simone, </i>or the contemporary spectre of acts of mass violence<i> Innocence.</i> The way these works go about the process is far from grandiose: instead, Saariaho has invariably favoured smaller ensembles, chamber dramas of one or two--a trend bucked in fascinating and complex ways by the social webs and layerings of past and presence in <i>Innocence</i>--from which these bigger canvases can be woven. Again, both a formal and a thematic analogy suggests itself, as throughout her career, particularly in her orchestral music, small-scale relationships and details build up to huge, sprawling masses of sound, the parts darting back and forth between each other and between the whole. </div><div><br /></div><div>In any case, the Saariaho family’s decision not to reveal the details of the illness until after her passing has admirably kept the focus on her work, freed from the sometimes distorting traces of valedictory regard. For what’s clear is that the work she was producing almost until her death was not so-called ‘late work’. It was, to be sure, mature, achieved, contemplative, and all the other aspects one might aspect from late style, but so was <i>all </i>her music, from the beginning. This was not, in other words, a work of ruminative looking-backwards, of retrospective rumination or reckoning; or it was so only inasmuch as Saariaho was always concerned with the multiple valences of time, her music looking in all directions simultaneously, dissolving and suspending time while immersing us in its midst. Below is a review of the Total Immersion concert I wrote last month, posted here in tribute.</div><div><br /></div><b>Kaija Saariaho ‘Total Immersion</b><b>’ Concert<br />
Barbican Centre, Sunday 7th May 2023<br />
Anu Komsi, Anssi Karttunen, BCC SO/Sakari Oramo</b><br /><br />
For the final concert in a day of performances of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s work, the BBC Symphony Orchestra came together to play four orchestra pieces spanning three decades, offering readings of rare radiance and clarity. From 1989, <i>Du Cristal,</i> the earliest work on the programme, is one long sustained, not-quite climax: an extraordinary array of textures shimmering and hovering on a brink of controlled delirium. With notes piled up on top of one another to create dense layers, the orchestral sound is massive, sometimes overwhelming, yet at the same time it feels as if something is being contained: a seething mass, a great, explosive force constantly on the edge. This effect of suspended movement is emphasized by five percussionists on an array of overlapping tuned metal—glockenspiel, crotales, triangles, tubular bells, xylophone, vibraphone—and multiple, booming kettle drums, with a synthesizer, harp and piano acting as a kind of additional rhythm section. Yet, particularly when witnessed live, what stands out if Saariaho’s care for individual detail: the fortissimo trill of a piccolo sounding out over the whole orchestra, a miniature choir wailing clarinets, the whole work ending, magically, on held harmonics from a single cello. <div><br /></div><div>Twenty years on, the cello concerto <i>Notes on Light </i>is more conventional in its format, yet its effect still imparts a magical strangeness. With Anssi Karttunen the redoubtable soloist, over the five, run-on movements, the feel of the piece is pensively ecstatic or ecstatically pensive, the orchestra sympathetically twitching with or in alternation with the soloist who alternates motivic lines and ethereal harmonics. From a brief silence emerge held building chords gradually layered, gentle dissonances, underscored by repeating plangent piano chords and whispering cymbal washes. At times the characteristics of the cello writing seem to extend to the entire ensemble, the effect of downward turning pitch slides and bends, giving the effect of something winding down: a slackening pulse, a slowing heart rate, the gentle exhaling of breath. A work of gentle fluctuation, as opposed to the translucent massiveness of <i>Du Cristal</i>, the piece is once again alive with morphing organic colour and constantly shifting refracting texture, beams and waves and swells, a whole other world.
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Written in 2020, <i>Saarikoski Songs </i>was the most recent work on the programme: it was here given its UK premiere by its commissioner, the extraordinary soprano Anu Komsi. The texts by Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski—Communist, bohemian, translator of both Joyce’s and Homer’s Ulysses—offer nature poetry shadowed by pantheistic assurance and the threat of destruction. It’s hard not to read their words as dire warnings of the ecological catastrophe or the threats of war in the contested borders of and beyond Europe (as a Finnish war child, Saarikoski was evacuated to Sweden). “The forest is an academy obliterated by barbarians”, writes Saarikoski in the first text, ‘The Face of Nature’, reversing the cliché of “nature red in tooth and claw” by which human governments project social destruction onto nature, thus justifying their own actions. Across the world the Amazon rainforest burns: wordless melismatic syllables reach for high vibrating notes, twittering, rhapsodizing or lamenting, the orchestra aswirl on sustained tremolo or a doubled motif, a woodblock tap or rustle of bells, low, sliding strings, an unexpectedly lush string chord, as the soprano momentarily becomes “the song of birds lost in the extinction”. The subsequent settings are sardonic (‘Everyone from now on will have their own’), tenuously rhapsodic (‘All of This’), bitingly tensile (‘Bird and Sanke in Me’), and finally raptly mysterious (‘Through the Mist’), closing out on a final series of wordless held soprano notes and a final glockenspiel note which seems to condense the entire work into a single, miniature chime.
<br /><br />
For me, it’s the closing piece <i>Circle Map</i>, that, along with <i>Du Cristal, </i>is the real highlight here. Written for the largest ensemble configuration of the night, this 2012 work sets poems by Rumi in their Persian originals. It is not, however, a conventional song cycle in the manner of the Saariskoski songs. Rather, recordings of the poems by Arshia Cont were electronically treated by Saariaho and her husband, composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière: broadcast on speakers surrounding the audience, they are both integrated into the orchestral texture and stand outside like a kind of radiant alien object (think the monolith in Kubrick’s <i>2001</i>). Once more we hear swirling harp, tuned percussion, motifs that rise and fall into hushed held chords stretched like thin wires; plangent brass underscored by low piano rumbles, the orchestra as a swooning, swooping, shimmering entity full of rich inward song. The treated voice is a <i>deus ex machina,</i> not the meditative swooping soloist of the previous works but instead coming as if from the outside with the thrill of the integrated unknown, as the orchestra accompanies the echoing pitch cadences of speech translated to simultaneous monody. A film is projected over the stage, showing a hand tracing out script overlaid with superimpositions of computer-generated abstracted calligraphy along with the subtitled text. Close one’s eyes, however and far richer inner worlds emerge, attesting to music’s capacity to alway be more than the visual, more than speech. As one of the poems puts it, “whatever circles comes from the centre”. And that could be a principle for Saariaho’s music as a whole, its swirling still points, animated suspensions, its glittering clarity and mesmeric power.</div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-47050651098065042402023-05-22T21:45:00.011+01:002023-05-25T14:35:55.141+01:00News of News<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzHp0ysBlEvRutrp8AD6l7u_tVlxGfvU9G8PetEzQsu1jcjbzCDk6G20SMbWzJvmpvnNzma8mRif-5CC2ORPrB3kxU6BBxxcq0TSIgtHfkE7WLu2hTOle4haawqYAPIoVdqlgEC7JmbJ-j38vC6LLwMViwpAOE-2Yij5XkNJoT4WTsBdEKiJQYsQ/s652/Screen%20Shot%202023-05-22%20at%2017.40.34.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="601" data-original-width="652" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzHp0ysBlEvRutrp8AD6l7u_tVlxGfvU9G8PetEzQsu1jcjbzCDk6G20SMbWzJvmpvnNzma8mRif-5CC2ORPrB3kxU6BBxxcq0TSIgtHfkE7WLu2hTOle4haawqYAPIoVdqlgEC7JmbJ-j38vC6LLwMViwpAOE-2Yij5XkNJoT4WTsBdEKiJQYsQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-05-22%20at%2017.40.34.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Some recent writing:</p><p>--On <i>So Much for Life, </i>the new Mark Hyatt Selected Poems edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, for <i><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/160368/shadows-out-of-color" target="_blank">The Poetry Foundation</a></i>.</p><p>--On Elaine Mitchener's forthcoming performance of Peter Maxwell-Davies's <i>Eight Songs for a Mad King </i>for <i>The Wire</i> <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/eight-songs-for-a-mad-king" target="_blank">here</a>. A longer piece on <i>Eight Songs</i> and its contexts is brewing somewhere along the line.</p><p>And some upcoming gigs:</p><p>--Following a gig at waterintobeer last month, a second outing for Multiple Melodicas (me, Douglas Benford, Steve Beresford, Georgina Brett, Martin Hackett) at Cafe Oto on the afternoon of Sunday 4th June, along with a solo piano set by Steve Beresford and a duo set by me on piano and Tansy Spinks on violin. Details <a href="https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/multiple-melodicas" target="_blank">here</a>. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFoSXHKl6nGROJ5oM6YMDuloiZdbRm4EMHeofkR1cf0yHq156uVOTIQ-l3u7Ff2P7PEtdopHNpyF9I3UZSQrHWUsHM1rmSVYwRvEulf1rAqsdT5CMCjJNBUAre-wKN599rQuMBSz28du_ALk2nvKGH0MANrSeuiszdMbgUnKto69d-NQrOcTC-UQ/s358/Screen%20Shot%202023-05-16%20at%2009.47.43.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="358" data-original-width="289" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFoSXHKl6nGROJ5oM6YMDuloiZdbRm4EMHeofkR1cf0yHq156uVOTIQ-l3u7Ff2P7PEtdopHNpyF9I3UZSQrHWUsHM1rmSVYwRvEulf1rAqsdT5CMCjJNBUAre-wKN599rQuMBSz28du_ALk2nvKGH0MANrSeuiszdMbgUnKto69d-NQrOcTC-UQ/w323-h400/Screen%20Shot%202023-05-16%20at%2009.47.43.png" width="323" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>--Also planning another gig by G.U.E. (me, Jacken Elswyth, Laurel Uziell) on a bill with <a href="https://tombetteridge.bandcamp.com/">Tom Betteridge</a> making what I believe is a live solo debut and <a href="https://reganbowering.com/" target="_blank">Regan Bowering</a> on electronics/objects/snare drum. This one will be at waterintobeer in Brockley on Tuesday 13th June, doors at 18:30. Tickets <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gue-regan-bowering-tom-betteridge-tickets-642953630617">here.</a></p><p>We've been going through hours' worth of GUE recordings made over the past year or so so a release of some sort will be on the cards at some point soon.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMUpYyJpyEe61paI6Acldttbr1n-XOh59--lJrSknbWxsM80w7jM9hCjkF6NGE0LMb2fmdMEZImgdYQCksqgC5ePeSVbwcMbpBc3tJEb0YaewU3iYA8rq25BsUKNPzBCg2HN00020rdvMSQ37yZJrNViCYbUq-hb03fDHqWML5NuHMeDtZmQxzQ/s643/GUE-Poster-June-23.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="643" data-original-width="457" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMUpYyJpyEe61paI6Acldttbr1n-XOh59--lJrSknbWxsM80w7jM9hCjkF6NGE0LMb2fmdMEZImgdYQCksqgC5ePeSVbwcMbpBc3tJEb0YaewU3iYA8rq25BsUKNPzBCg2HN00020rdvMSQ37yZJrNViCYbUq-hb03fDHqWML5NuHMeDtZmQxzQ/w284-h400/GUE-Poster-June-23.png" width="284" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And in other news...</p><p>--Following the launch reading with James Goodwin and Candace Hill last month, Howard Slater's review of Candace's <i>Short Leash Kept On</i> at <i>Northern Review of Books</i> <a href="http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/NRB/leash.htm">here</a>. (The book is available at the <a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2023/01/candace-hill-short-leash-kept-on.html" target="_blank">Materials website</a>.)</p><p>--And there's also a nice review from Tom Allen of<i> <a href="https://www.pamenarpress.com/product-page/david-grundy-l-present-continuous" target="_blank">Present Continuous</a></i> at <i><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-image-of-itself-on-david-grundys-present-continuous/" target="_blank">LA Review of Books</a></i>.</p><p>Finally, Materials will be relocating to Berlin in July, joining <a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/p/materialien-m.html" style="color: #1155cc;">Materialien</a> in Germany, which may involve some logistical shuffling and slower processing for orders. But expect more news the other side of the move...</p>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-69550657251677958402023-05-19T09:53:00.003+01:002023-06-01T12:06:19.579+01:00"The Subject of Emancipation": Trilce Translation Launch<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR3gzYKD14S9Z7Atzg4ufpQP5M6xU0y1fx9fQWLWZOklp4bTVp9q0aH3NE7B9-UWN__a39YHrzPjAtxU8GPaAEyBV2gzjtfnYkiPGzT0BA6nOGirs7bVkidJRs4Tb-i9gZBet72PtcxeWL6V1o6Wa9M6tIYKD7g3HAHGcRXt6sPAfW7SC6AI78RQ/s2226/Veer-100---Front---Back-Cover_2226.png" style="clear: left; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1244" data-original-width="2226" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR3gzYKD14S9Z7Atzg4ufpQP5M6xU0y1fx9fQWLWZOklp4bTVp9q0aH3NE7B9-UWN__a39YHrzPjAtxU8GPaAEyBV2gzjtfnYkiPGzT0BA6nOGirs7bVkidJRs4Tb-i9gZBet72PtcxeWL6V1o6Wa9M6tIYKD7g3HAHGcRXt6sPAfW7SC6AI78RQ/w640-h358/Veer-100---Front---Back-Cover_2226.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGRo5CDx2qv-VPHxu8vZ6GChYy5fupAHgm696QtIt3RW1nLlDn34u1YgcxSQhK3a2yHJZzDytkR82c1GIyi4rRUkBtvV_1szzcS4XlMY4HaE4Umj1fT20_gAwXCPGDW7eZeerk59RIQje5aMYAek_Xfo-e0JV5-eWw4tTFiYnefs4zbpGTsinfLg/s4032/6A1DBE61-6867-463F-B684-6061372E43F2.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGRo5CDx2qv-VPHxu8vZ6GChYy5fupAHgm696QtIt3RW1nLlDn34u1YgcxSQhK3a2yHJZzDytkR82c1GIyi4rRUkBtvV_1szzcS4XlMY4HaE4Umj1fT20_gAwXCPGDW7eZeerk59RIQje5aMYAek_Xfo-e0JV5-eWw4tTFiYnefs4zbpGTsinfLg/w480-h640/6A1DBE61-6867-463F-B684-6061372E43F2.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>May 6th 2023 was the day of the Coronation of Charles III, the latest frenzied manifestation of what Tom Nairn in <i>The Enchanted Glass </i>called Britain’s “national backwardnesss”. It also saw the launch of Will Rowe and Helen Dimos’s <a href="https://www.veerbooks.com/Cesar-Vallejo-Trilce-translated-with-glosses-by-William-Rowe-and">new translation (with glosses)</a> of Cesar Vallejo’s <i>Trilce</i>, a work that in every resists the kinds of cultural spectacles which imagine that identity might cohere around fictions, figureheads, all the bathetic spectacle of nationalistic power. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Trilce </i>was written a hundred years ago last year, and Rowes’ and Dimos’ translation has been more than a decade in the making. In the basement of the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, they, along with poet-translators Cristina Viti, Stephen Watts and Sacha Kahir alternated readings of the originals (in Spanish), the translations and glosses (in English), John Manson’s Scots translation, and poems by Amelia Rosselli, Elsa Morante and others in dialogue with the spirit and letter of Vallejo’s attempt, in Rowe’s words, to “crack Spanish open from the inside”. </div><div><br /></div><div>As this collective reading emphasized, Rowe and Dimos considered this translation of an already frequently-translated work a collective front, and the translation not as a definitive or fixed version, but in turn as something in some was unfinished and unfinishable. Dimos spoke at some length about the process of making the book. The project began as Rowe’s; after working on the project together for a few years, the two decided to formalize the co-writing and at that point everything was re-worked from the start, and most of the glosses were written fresh. The processes of rewriting and rebuilding are thus central to the work. In turn, the decision to include glosses emerged from the sense that translation in itself was not enough: that the investigation into the meanings and nuances and multiple possibilities of the original, and their sometimes-uneasy conversion into another language, created a kind of runoff or excess with a polyphonic relationship to the text. The large-format book thus prints the text in four columns: Vallejo’s Spanish and Rowe and Dimos’ English on one page, the glosses facing on the right-hand side, with space in a further, blank column, for the reader’s own annotations and notes. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this spirit, the collective discussion that followed went in multiple directions, that combination of “wildness and rigour” that Viti—whose translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s extraordinary film script-cum essay-cum poem <i>La Rabbia </i>recently appeared from <a href="https://tenementpress.com/La-rabbia">Tenement Press</a>—argued is essential to the project of translation. Vallejo wants to split Spanish open from within, commented Stephen Watts. Picking up on this point, Rowe noted the motivation for such a split: the realization of imperial dominance contained within the dominant language and its classed and erased exclusion and erasure of indigenous cultures. The relation of Scots to English in Manson’s translations suggests—a language that relates but that also parodies, distorts, twists. In turn, there’s a classed element—as Sacha Kahir suggested, the “language of the poor” always has to change, to hide or disguise itself in relation to the surveillance of dominant culture, to keep on the move. Language changes, is something built upon or built over—what Kahir called a “burial mound”. </div><div><br /></div><div>For Vallejo, it’s not just a case of cracking Spanish open, Rowe continued. Rather, it’s also about including within that South American Spanish a European modernism or late Romanticism, such as the work of Verlaine, which is in turn cracked open. In parodying, mocking and tearing apart from the European-aspiration characteristic of the colonial regimes who spread out of Europe with imperial zeal centuries before, Vallejo manifests a resistance to European aspiration on the part of the colonial bourgeoisies, their spectacles of gaudy cod-European magnificence, cathedrals, opera houses, music and language, growing up literally alongside the genocidal labour of mines and other extractivist sites as Eduardo Galeano so brilliantly dissected in <i>Open Veins of Latin America</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Neither the language of bureaucrats nor bourgeois and petty-bourgeois faux-European sophisticates, Vallejo’s is the voices of Spanish children and adolescents, of vernacular or neologistic linguistic practices of everyday resistance and survival. At the same time, it also lays claim to the cultural superiority generally associated with Europe. It’s also the language of philosophy, of Feuerbach and Hegel, so often associated with Europe, but here reclaimed for those outside Europe. Moving from a provincial university to the capital city, Vallejo was aware of these conditions of imbalance and dominance, where, in Rowe’s words, “the people who do philosophy are European”. Yet in the second poem of <i>Trilce</i>, Rowe suggested, Vallejo seeks to prove that one can do philosophy in poetry just as well as in analytic philosophy, out-doing Wittgenstein. </div><div><br /></div><div>And as well as fission, of splitting and rupture, there are moments of fusion or synthesis—or a struggle towards such movements, even if they often and perhaps of necessity fail. It’s not enough, as some of Vallejo’s contemporaneous, Dada-influenced South American modernist peers had, to break things apart and leave them in fragments. Rather, one has to struggle with the experience of synthesis, of forging new forms to replace the old. This is a destruction that attempts to engender synthesis, one often expressed in the work in the figure of numbers. In some of the poems read on the night, that could be heard in the figure of the ticking of a clock or tolling of time on a bell, as in the third poem. </div><div><br /></div><div>In more complex fashion, it came through too in the twenty-third, Vallejo’s great elegy for his mother and her role as bread-giver, as breadwinner, handing her children time, in the form of food--that which enables one to live, and thus, to inhabit time. Here, the figure of a crumb stuck in the throat gestures towards the impossible reclamation or reparation with a gendered legacy built into the very structure of language, into the very act of opening or closing the thought to expel language or to take in food. Such moments challenge the parcelling out of experience into the “common sense” of language and number that, Vallejo suggests, reinforces the order of things. Vallejo wrote a number of the poems from prison: prison, write Rowe and Dimos in their gloss on the second poem (“<i>Tiempo Tiempo</i>”)--the poem where, Rowe claimed, Vallejo out-does Wittgenstein--</div><div></div><blockquote><div>punctuates time with its physical order; it creates a time
that’s equally subdivided and empty. Language administers it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Whether one is in actual prison or not, prison-time is a static
present, an empty time excised from the continuity of time’s
movement. But the time it takes to say the word time continues.
The juxtaposition of these two times, sun-glare of nausea, is
beat out by the poem’s metronomic repetition of words in twos
and fours. Vallejo was imprisoned on remand for 112 days.</div></blockquote><div></div><div>As Rowe’s and Dimos’ glosses suggest, in <i>Trilce,</i> with its fractured scenes of the taking in of food, of hunger, of the parcelling out of time in church bells or prison-hours,<i> </i>it’s precisely what<i> </i>doesn’t add up or balance that constitutes possibility, perhaps even revolutionary possibility. Broken words, language stretched beyond itself; the crumb in the throat, sums that don’t add up: all these exceeds the bureaucratic-book balancing of completed sums, balanced fractions or equations. In that excess, that remainder, lies both the unassimilable and unspeakable process of trauma and the resistance to totalizing incorporation—linguistic, numerical, national, imperial—where resistance resides, where, as Rowe writes in his essay ‘<a href="https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/8652/" target="_blank">The Political in <i>Trilce</i></a>’, “the intimate formation of the subject of emancipation is fought out.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Picking up on Rowe’s mention of Wittgenstein, Viti suggested that Vallejo’s use of numbers, a crucial element of this work in particular, had to do with a relation of mathematics and indeterminacy closer to that of pure maths. A number of big name thinkers have tried to construct a political philosophy from some form of maths in the past few decades, with results that may or may not be of import, but this line of argument, it feels, is one of a different sort: an argument made by poets about and from and in poetry. But it’s precisely here where lies its materialism, its resistance to abstraction, one which can stretch across time and be activated at different moments in time, not so much as an index of changing times but as the ringing Benjamian alarm clock that refutes the onward logic of a mendacious “progress” that is nothing of the sort. What’s tried out in experimental language emerges from the social world but is worked out outside it: yet from it, it reveals the faults in that social world and provides another basis that still maintains possibility today. As Rowe put it, Vallejo’s Spanish is a horizon to which we may still look. </div><div><br /></div><div>What of the famously neologistic title, came a question from the audience? Is this a manifestation of this new form of Spanish? Running through some of the theses—a fusion of “triste” and “dolce”, a joke about the vernacular phrase for the cost of the book—Rowe suggested that the word was between a synthesis, a splitting, and something else entirely. Or, as Dimos put it, “Trilce” is not so much a word with a defined meaning or unmeaning. Rather, she noted, “Trilce is this book”: at once object and process, something standing <i>outside.</i> Cracking open the fiction of language as monoculture, Dimos continues, the book layers up a multiplicity of voices, a layered chorus, in which the speech of kids and adolescents is not separable from that of adults, of modernism and philosophy from the street and from politics: they are all heard at once. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the movement from Vallejo’s Spanish to the Englishes of Dimos and Rowe’s translation—or, indeed, the Englishes found in the translations of the tri-lingual Amelia Rosselli, Viti’s translations of Elsa Morante, and the other texts heard tonight—as Viti put it, the task is to create “fault-lines”. As Vallejo disrupted Spanish in 1922, in 2023, translation and poetry today might and must seek to “disrupt our English from within”—a task all the more vital in the face of renewed nationalist spectacles and a border-focused racism dissected in a poem of his own that Kahir read near the start of the evening, organised around the refrain “no, but where are you <i>really</i> from?” </div><div><br /></div><div>No homeland but language. (Miłosz) No homeland in language. Glosses, glossolalia, exegesis. Ghosts, grammar, a language that explodes the fiction and function of borders, that brings the citadel down from within.
</div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-43539022096685964242023-04-27T11:50:00.000+01:002023-04-27T11:50:01.877+01:00Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton: Preview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaEthIJOgqELee4EQVCjm7ofbzM9oPAHz9bt1leg9DL2qDtnpm_EibMMeQSb0wVaxfCHDw1n8mQw9ywCRgVXZP_yLNYgp7-pFbcxPT0Fle3oGtRYnXe3R1wdsk8q1hhGjfxvNsP_dH7SKuqAyNYQIxhmtceT-PtFyKJwpDP6axIQZ4ilZVk6J1qw/s4032/79F06F53-70AE-425A-BB72-1DB550F9DD9A.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaEthIJOgqELee4EQVCjm7ofbzM9oPAHz9bt1leg9DL2qDtnpm_EibMMeQSb0wVaxfCHDw1n8mQw9ywCRgVXZP_yLNYgp7-pFbcxPT0Fle3oGtRYnXe3R1wdsk8q1hhGjfxvNsP_dH7SKuqAyNYQIxhmtceT-PtFyKJwpDP6axIQZ4ilZVk6J1qw/w300-h400/79F06F53-70AE-425A-BB72-1DB550F9DD9A.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>A sneak peek at the pre-publication copy of <i>Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton</i>, <a href="https://www.weslpress.org/9780819500366/selected-poems-of-calvin-c-hernton/" target="_blank">forthcoming in August</a>, just received in the mail from Wesleyan UP. Four years in the making, and edited across a pandemic, with enormous gratitude to my co-editor Lauri Scheyer, an exemplary collaborator I've been privileged to work with, to Ishmael Reed for his foreword, and to the press for their amazing job with design, typesetting and proofing, and for helping make Hernton's work available to a new generation of readers. (Wesleyan are also putting out a <a href="https://www.weslpress.org/blog/2023/04/13/a-b-spellman-between-the-night-and-its-music/">New and Selected A.B. Spellman</a>, edited by Lauri, and a collection of material relating to Umbra edited by Tonya Foster, J-P Marcoux and myself.) </div><div><br /></div><div>More on Calvin Hernton in my book<i> A Black Arts Poetry Machine</i> (a phrase from Hernton gives the book its title) and on this blog--<a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2020/06/calvin-hernton-in-1966.html">here</a> and <a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-black-arts-poetry-machine.html" target="_blank">here</a>. Also highly recommended, Hernton's reading on the extremely rare LP <i>Destinations: Four American Poets</i>, which also features an astonishing reading from Hernton's Umbra comrade <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_4hbfXjnlA&pp=ygUbbi5oLiBwcml0Y2hhcmQgZGVzdGluYXRpb25z" target="_blank">N.H. Pritchard</a>. Both have been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL5msaOqkNM&pp=ygUOY2FsdmluIGhlcm50b24%3D">uploaded to YouTube</a>: I've embedded Hernton's reading below.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinL_kkVlMDwvBjsi5BpXJS-ILzO0RUP4eZpU_oNuD8bDLosTSOUbBVKWem3N7g5inv9wHWimkXv_fLCIEcyotf6y149B8OTzoMQa7onfcDZ3z7lqOvaEBxXmJIAKM2Y23wACkTBMJMo-RxINClvsxcyT83vDdWNXUqRq_yYb3rfabeLfNcXMwqrg/s991/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-27%20at%2011.32.30.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="991" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinL_kkVlMDwvBjsi5BpXJS-ILzO0RUP4eZpU_oNuD8bDLosTSOUbBVKWem3N7g5inv9wHWimkXv_fLCIEcyotf6y149B8OTzoMQa7onfcDZ3z7lqOvaEBxXmJIAKM2Y23wACkTBMJMo-RxINClvsxcyT83vDdWNXUqRq_yYb3rfabeLfNcXMwqrg/w640-h346/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-27%20at%2011.32.30.png" width="640" /></a></div><div><div><p></p></div></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RL5msaOqkNM" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-4133832792947613632023-04-20T13:32:00.006+01:002023-04-20T13:35:04.837+01:00Latest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My essay, 'Songs for the Future', on Askia Touré's <i>Songhai!</i> and the African American epic, is out now in <i>Paideuma,</i> Vol.48, as part of a special tribute to issue to Touré's book that also includes essays by Addison Gayle, Jim Smethurst, and Kathy Lou Schultz. Many thanks to Ben Friedlander and Betsy Rose.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2023/01/askia-toure-songhai.html" target="_blank">The UK reprint of <i>Songhai! </i></a>will be out soon from Materials.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB79Gn70hbcGLVQmLcFDS8s9r1xb8gOlH53Uga4mwXCcaSUL0sQhdCtJ2EIBf41CjbNupoQJrsnfzgSNc4SMf65w_M0ogPZ5gDOrwhizcC8FwOt_I3KYlGZ7IsWxvrNy602N4RDKQrGTcy2VFlAalIQaaub7AMmS8Csy6hZfH9A2Ds58byVYO7tw/s1052/Paideuma.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1052" data-original-width="906" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB79Gn70hbcGLVQmLcFDS8s9r1xb8gOlH53Uga4mwXCcaSUL0sQhdCtJ2EIBf41CjbNupoQJrsnfzgSNc4SMf65w_M0ogPZ5gDOrwhizcC8FwOt_I3KYlGZ7IsWxvrNy602N4RDKQrGTcy2VFlAalIQaaub7AMmS8Csy6hZfH9A2Ds58byVYO7tw/w345-h400/Paideuma.png" width="345" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhc-AY0ZiV-kMdjZ1HFa-QhXb98td4kbxLhheblyn1u1PjRFP62PUWEbATg1gz_5agPwOUG58Kg1Qm_Mri6ZsbPHgh9LcoROLujDVJgKttZCR7wIn0IkkUpU3BLpWrE4H0q-q5tWtQRh9YXeAWXsLbO3EiZo4zf6PyZ05tkmKsc1ggg8MNhQQ46A/s4032/contents.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhc-AY0ZiV-kMdjZ1HFa-QhXb98td4kbxLhheblyn1u1PjRFP62PUWEbATg1gz_5agPwOUG58Kg1Qm_Mri6ZsbPHgh9LcoROLujDVJgKttZCR7wIn0IkkUpU3BLpWrE4H0q-q5tWtQRh9YXeAWXsLbO3EiZo4zf6PyZ05tkmKsc1ggg8MNhQQ46A/w300-h400/contents.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtmuW8P7m8FTn8kk0DAQRCd0pCyMnUkuUlNOYcgernQFOcniwcwxsoXhxRpSzDrznVaXquIl4txjocNBAC4l4W9qW4JdFH4d3TZZxt7xmoyk84oJS_dcpCe4YcurI15caNVdqYVZ6jyowMoevTnpdpQ-EnnFLA0Mu1hLModl-GFPE1joyvhkb4cA/s4032/essay.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtmuW8P7m8FTn8kk0DAQRCd0pCyMnUkuUlNOYcgernQFOcniwcwxsoXhxRpSzDrznVaXquIl4txjocNBAC4l4W9qW4JdFH4d3TZZxt7xmoyk84oJS_dcpCe4YcurI15caNVdqYVZ6jyowMoevTnpdpQ-EnnFLA0Mu1hLModl-GFPE1joyvhkb4cA/w300-h400/essay.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiirhJkI39JnrMoqmlGysLSILEWHYXzTF3Wa7elOG65L6k9bN1EUWZZmMM-3ppr5aGLCvoi0__ytwaLY3sXGE7vMQoYrVVkQbxFTZ9aOugRkioYiSilMDfv4lPH-iTTL_-MiTBcPb4086flHk9q_vtuX7xp7WOh-Y5N3j5WbNlhvdmASrttSwp28Q/s1039/preface.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1039" data-original-width="897" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiirhJkI39JnrMoqmlGysLSILEWHYXzTF3Wa7elOG65L6k9bN1EUWZZmMM-3ppr5aGLCvoi0__ytwaLY3sXGE7vMQoYrVVkQbxFTZ9aOugRkioYiSilMDfv4lPH-iTTL_-MiTBcPb4086flHk9q_vtuX7xp7WOh-Y5N3j5WbNlhvdmASrttSwp28Q/w345-h400/preface.png" width="345" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1177" data-original-width="941" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHmB9s9snwWxRWxZD-uI7pOyOJ5vggSPYzxnNL7lyVrSUYFgXEDm5vm0L2PRKzcRzXWkDNPafmzAbDmELAILzsVqWTbvKZ9a_Qzkq5dYZjeizX03_H5JPh6ayyb-ZpKrZVl0SO3nCsP0S0YsPczgSgtAqeMrA3_F_5TdjSDEYx8wdY5wJ4IoXUQQ/w320-h400/checklist.png" width="320" /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">A review of the Fred Moten/Brandon López/ Gerald Cleaver show at Cafe Oto in <i>Artforum </i><a href="https://www.artforum.com/music/the-phonopoetics-of-fred-moten-brandon-lopez-and-gerald-cleaver-90412" target="_blank">here</a>, with some words on <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8365.12709" target="_blank">Candace Hill</a>'s phenomenal reading the same afternoon along the way.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdsobVSbt48z_oZ9Z6AGIRIHlPmZfBiWS8P8wRMXcVVhlNnfns4x9kMI8KPBGJ4dycGHafUdzam4lmp-SedDZlNJpirwNf0cV0v8ETsWty-x4Li1VE4vukLFZMH88iMpT2k8VPX2ChhlwWQT-9BettnTMeA6yW0PQxADN7GmLW0_OVZXfktMWHSA/s827/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-20%20at%2010.42.29.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="827" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdsobVSbt48z_oZ9Z6AGIRIHlPmZfBiWS8P8wRMXcVVhlNnfns4x9kMI8KPBGJ4dycGHafUdzam4lmp-SedDZlNJpirwNf0cV0v8ETsWty-x4Li1VE4vukLFZMH88iMpT2k8VPX2ChhlwWQT-9BettnTMeA6yW0PQxADN7GmLW0_OVZXfktMWHSA/w400-h310/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-20%20at%2010.42.29.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Review of Jason Moran's superb James Reece Europe tribute <i><a href="https://jasonmoran.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-dancehall-to-the-battlefield" target="_blank">From the Dancehall to the Battlefield</a></i> in <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/471" target="_blank"><i>The Wire </i>471</a>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkNo8uTcQi1EQVe0yLW_UObKeJ_1M3uPge5vKLt3c8d5ioWxWIvpgJzg-Je_Tn1K9uKbl56mUP7fI6u2X6L_HemEcvuoatiFnXxNxi-ffTkQeRCtq11wlrOnAwVdTbFB6E549uVHD__MoZzJpEUbcs8ozC1nBEXYtPmnxMKiXn_ZRGVbAPZE-Law/s4032/(2023%20Mar)%20Wire%20471%20Jason%20Moran.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkNo8uTcQi1EQVe0yLW_UObKeJ_1M3uPge5vKLt3c8d5ioWxWIvpgJzg-Je_Tn1K9uKbl56mUP7fI6u2X6L_HemEcvuoatiFnXxNxi-ffTkQeRCtq11wlrOnAwVdTbFB6E549uVHD__MoZzJpEUbcs8ozC1nBEXYtPmnxMKiXn_ZRGVbAPZE-Law/w480-h640/(2023%20Mar)%20Wire%20471%20Jason%20Moran.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>And soon forthcoming, a long piece on the new <a href="https://nightboat.org/book/so-much-for-life/" target="_blank">Selected Poems</a> of Mark Hyatt, a scholarly labour of love by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, at <i>The Poetry Foundation</i>.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-90254975360882298682023-04-02T13:05:00.004+01:002023-04-02T13:08:12.106+01:00In other news...<div><div><div>On Sunday April 8th (next weekend) we'll be launching the new Materials books by Candace Hill and James Goodwin at Cafe Oto in Dalston at a 2pm matinee reading. James will be reading from his new book <a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2023/01/james-goodwin-faux-ice.html" target="_blank"><i>Faux Ice</i> </a>and in conversation with Nisha Ramayya, and this will be a rare opportunity for UK audiences to hear from the astonishing Candace Hill--artist, poet, weaver, author of the 200 page epic <i><a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2023/01/candace-hill-short-leash-kept-on.html" target="_blank">Short Leash Kept On</a></i>--who'll be reading and in conversation via video link. Come for the afternoon and stay for the <a href="https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/fred-moten-brandon-lopez-gerald-cleaver-1/" target="_blank">Fred Moten reading</a> at the same venue in the evening! <a href="https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/matinee-james-goodwin-candace-hill/" target="_blank">Details and advance tickets here.</a></div><div>
<br />On Thursday April 13th I'll be playing with a new group, Multiple Melodicas, at <a href="https://waterintobeer.co.uk/" target="_blank">waterintobeer</a> in Brockley, South London: myself, <a href="http://www.georginabrett.co.uk/" target="_blank">Georgina Brett</a>, <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/wire-playlist-steve-beresford" target="_blank">Steve Beresford</a>, <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/wire-playlist-douglas-benford" target="_blank">Douglas Benford</a>, and <a href="https://soundcloud.com/martin-hackett-717490473" target="_blank">Martin Hackett</a> on melodicas, along with solos sets from <a href="https://matchlessrecordings.com/people/edwin-eddie-pr%C3%A9vost" target="_blank">Eddie Prévost</a> and <a href="https://www.15questions.net/interview/no-moore-about-improvisation/page-1/" target="_blank">N.O. Moore</a>. Unit 2, mantle court, 209-211 mantle road, brockley, se4 2ew. Doors: 6:30pm for a 7pm start. More details and advance tickets at the <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/multiple-melodicas-eddie-prevost-solo-no-moore-solo-tickets-606478111357" target="_blank">eventbrite page</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEPeJ7d27LjLlDMT-Z-EABC75lrkzCVvq-ZJCxSaTygW2f22Lt_PIFt7a9tvUHY3jVTqrnVuRVr8X15sMMW1NmPmPYAzbyTkGEJqOP0bBqcLll_kESoTRYx3t77l5jW1TC-IpXOTh4fPE2S-IEVSzUPvwiOekeH7f-QESH1gxvEYmb7OP0ShNivA/s707/Multiple-Melodicas-Poster-Apr-23.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="707" data-original-width="501" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEPeJ7d27LjLlDMT-Z-EABC75lrkzCVvq-ZJCxSaTygW2f22Lt_PIFt7a9tvUHY3jVTqrnVuRVr8X15sMMW1NmPmPYAzbyTkGEJqOP0bBqcLll_kESoTRYx3t77l5jW1TC-IpXOTh4fPE2S-IEVSzUPvwiOekeH7f-QESH1gxvEYmb7OP0ShNivA/w284-h400/Multiple-Melodicas-Poster-Apr-23.png" width="284" /></a></div><br />
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Then at 7:00pm on Wednesday April 19th I'll be reading from <i><a href="https://www.pamenarpress.com/product-page/david-grundy-l-present-continuous" target="_blank">Present Continuous</a></i> for a Pamenar Press spring reading at Thingy Café in Hackney Wick. Details <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/spring-continuous-tickets-598964738657?aff=erelexpmlt" target="_blank">here</a>.
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Finally, at 7:00pm on Wednesday April 26th I'll be taking part in a performance by members of the <a href="https://dice.fm/event/vgnpg-herehere-eddie-prvost-the-workshop-group-26th-apr-iklectik-london-tickets?lng=en" target="_blank">Eddie Prévost workshop</a> at IKLECTIK, Waterloo, as part of the here.here series, for which Eddie will also be in conversation with Emmanuelle Waeckerlé.
</div></div></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>And from a previous here.here, here's footage of my conversation with Eva-Maria Houben, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, and Artur Vidal as part of the concert <i><a href="https://www.thebookroom.net/here-here-social-virtuosity-with-eva-maria-houben/" target="_blank">Social Virtuosity with Eva-Maria Houben</a></i> curated by Emmanuelle at IKLECTIK in March. The video presents the whole concert: Artur's performance of <i>dreaming legends</i>, Artur's and Eva-Maria's performance of <i>loose ties</i>, and the string ensemble piece<i> the green that is almost a yellow</i>, performed by Lara Agar, Angharad Davies, Isidora Edwards, Finn Froome-Lewis, Dominic Lash, and Hannah Marshall, and the post-performance conversation. The performance of the string piece in particular was astonishing, its silence full and shared, its overlapping lines a perpetual making and unmaking of space as shelter; Eva-Maria's and Artur's performance with organist Huw Morgan the previous Friday was equally exceptional: I'm hoping to work up a longer piece on that (via Straub-Huillet's Cézanne) at some point in the not to distant future...</div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0LH4yHDzE74" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet, the Poetry Center has been digitzing some astonishing readings from the 1970s. Filmed in San Francisco State University's Creative Arts Building, Lorenzo Thomas reading 'Grandpa's Spells' (named for the Jelly Roll Morton piece) is nothing short of breathtaking. Musicked speech indeed...</div></div></div><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kWeblKt9KJs" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p><p>But, as well as music, this work is also conversation--<i>talking </i>(talking <i>to,</i> talking <i>about,</i> talking <i>with,</i> talking <i>back</i>). "I want to talk about the tears and sorrows of the people", he says in his introduction. And this concept of "the people" is a global one, Thomas reading his poem in memory of Neruda and translations of work by African poets--that internationalist, multi-lingual aspect running through his work: poems by Francisco José Tenreiro, Agostinho Neto, Marcelino Dos Santos, the latter then emerging from the victorious struggles against Portugal in Angola and Mozambique. Thomas' work of the 1970s, as he honed the finely-poised ironies of his earlier work through the lens of his experience in Vietnam and his reading in writers like Christopher Caudwell, is a contribution to a left populist poetry that has been virtually ignored: far too few notices of the <a href="https://www.weslpress.org/9780819578983/the-collected-poems-of-lorenzo-thomas/">Collected Poems</a> edited by Aldon Nielsen and Laura Vrana have made it into print. (I've so far been unable to place my own review.) But being able to watch this video, to hear Thomas' cadences, his sonorous rise and fall, helps to newly bring that work alive: a poetry that charges the space, crackles with fierce energy and moral compulsion. </p><p>Thomas read with David Henderson, fronting the nine-piece band Ghetto Violence--as singer...(in this harking back to his early career with vocal group the Star Steppers, as documented in Henderson's classic early poem 'Boston Road Blues' (for the poem, scroll down to page 41 <a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC32_scans/32.Various.BLM.Radical.America.July.August.1968.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.) In the U.S. Bicentennial Spring, Henderson and the band deliver "Hail to the Chief" ("agit-rock...dedicated to the next Presidential election". In the event, Jimmy Carter would replace Gerald Ford, who'd pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes, in the recurring cycle of putatively 'democratic' debasement. It continues.</p><p>(The full recording of Thomas' and Henderson's reading is <a href="https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/239305" target="_blank">here</a>.)</p><p>Also from the Poetry Centre's Digital Archives, another gem: Karen Brodine and Meridel LeSueur reading in 1981, two generations of Left feminist writing looking into the jaws of the 1980s with implacable courage. What's particularly valuable is to have this document of Brodine reading the entirety of the sequence <i><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Woman_Sitting_at_the_Machine_Thinking/PFnJ_m2AAw4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=woman+sitting+at+the+machine+thinking+radical+woman+1981&pg=PA99&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking</a></i>, written from her experience of workplace organising as a typesetter (and her <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/696681/pdf" target="_blank">reading of Engels</a>). I'm working on a chapter on Brodine, Merle Woo and Nellie Wong for a forthcoming book on queer poetry in Boston and San Francisco which hopefully will be fully drafted in the next few months. Last year, I spent a valuable week in<a href="https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c84j0mfj/entire_text/" target="_blank"> Brodine's archives </a>at the James C. Hormel Center on the top floor of the San Francisco Public Library, Tim Wilson and the other librarians patiently bringing me box after box and allowing me to see, in her unpublished notebooks, drafts, teaching preparations, and talks, how, for her, poetry articulated her sense of herself as woman, as lesbian, as worker, as socialist, the clarity of the way she theorizes language, the specific uses she sees poetry as fulfilling: conceptions well beyond the cliche of poetry as a kind of transparent vehicle for messages, on the one hand, or as 'neutral' abstraction on the other. For Brodine, poetry's form <i>is </i>its argument: which is to say that "form" is inseparable from, dialectically related to "content", the distinction between which she skewers in her unpublished pieces on aesthetics. We all know the rhythms of our days, shaped by labour or its absence, in our different ways, some feeling the pinch more than others, and spending time with 'Woman Sitting' in particular, going over it and again, still enables a reckoning with and refiguration with the violence of that time, the violence of Brodine's and our times: this poem which is so much about time, about the work week and the ways workers work within and resist capitalist time.</p><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">knowledge this power owned, nor shared<br />owned and hoarded<br />to white men [...]<br /> wrench it back</div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">knowledge is something we have </div></div></blockquote><p>Here's Brodine's reading: </p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"></div></div><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pEvudjLxeU4" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe> </p><p>And from the same reading it would be negligent not to mention Meridel Le Sueur's poems of fierce solidarity, reading the global and gendered division of labour in ways that, once again, are firmly internationalist, are about mapping the general and the particular in precise and specific ways that poetry--specifically--can be used as a tool to pry open, a compass for navigation. And Le Sueur's opening denunciation of Eliot's <i>The Waste Land </i>as nihilistic male modernism remains as hilarious and as provocative as it's meant to be...</p>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-31220047101536454102023-03-10T10:11:00.009+00:002023-03-12T16:05:13.678+00:00Gaia: Two Orchestral Works by Wayne Shorter<p>Two luminous orchestral works by the late, great Wayne Shorter: first, <i>Dramatis Personae</i>, a Lincoln Centre Commission from 1998 with Shorter on soprano, Jim Beard on piano, Christian McBride, bass, and Herlin Riley drums alongside orchestra conducted and arranged by Robert Sadin--the bridge between the monumental, and underrated, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbFiwH6ONng&list=PLNJ4CruoW6lMRTaPqxYb8648OLkRvTlzH" target="_blank">High Life</a> </i>(1995)<i> </i>and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJiZnv6ivA8&t=1777s" target="_blank">orchestral collaborations </a>of the Danilo Pérez/ John Patitucci/ Brian Blade <a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2007/03/wayne-shorter-and-magic-of-sound.html" target="_blank">acoustic quartet</a> to come.</p><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uJLU7x_6vzI" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><br /></p><p>A decade-and-a-half on, the massive LA Philharmonic commission <i>Gaia</i> (2013), described by Richard S. Ginell in <i><a href="https://variety.com/2013/music/reviews/wayne-shorter-quartet-with-esperanza-spalding-1117949220/" target="_blank">Variety </a></i>as a “murky, thick-set monster of a piece [...] massive, slow-moving, opaque textures, sometimes tracking Wayne’s distinctive long, snaking melodic lines on soprano; treating the sections of the orchestra as blocs”. Varying in performance from 25 to 30 minutes, this version from Gdansk in 2014 veers toward the latter, with Shorter on soprano forming part of a quartet with Leo Genovese (piano) and Terri Lynn Carrington (drums); the solo vocal part and libretto are by Esperanza Spalding, who also doubles on bass as part of the quartet. </p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZkgHGKHBT1I" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><p>Shorter first began work as a teenage student at NYU, and it’s to be hoped that Shorter’s Kennedy Center collaboration with Spalding on the opera <i><a href="https://www.iphigenia.live/about" target="_blank">Iphigenia</a></i>--his final piece after he retired from performing in 2019--might appear in the future. For now, the serene drama of these orchestral works represent the majestic, achieved late blossoming of the compositional impulse Shorter had been building throughout his entire life, from his early work on that teenage opera through to the unreleased orchestral pieces <i>Universe, Legend</i> and <i>Twin Dragon</i> he wrote for Miles Davis in the 1960s and ’80s (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO4hS5vn9c4" target="_blank">later realised by Wallace Roney</a>) and the misunderstood trilogy of post-Weather Report Afro-futurist epics <i>Atlantis</i> (1985)<i>, Phantom Navigator</i> (1986)<i>, and Joy Ryder</i> (1989)<i>,</i> along with the aforementioned <i>High Life</i>.</p><p>I have a longer piece on Shorter in <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/expanding-universe-wayne-shorter-25-august-1933-2-march-2023" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">The Wire</a>, with thanks to Meg Woof.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd7Fw-jmpWVUAKn_KlPO5Sq6YaHAjcL0OSlV0IeW-aGs1DsfcyGFM1q3XTpheiN3peyaOcczBn0apx0z1VcwkAlffqQfdN5xpcYAgEAHQFG3C40Jv6TRiw5Ds4A8jG4LKcNpwELlPBolgNULkNgehnBaJk2WYEQ9cpv7K41kMxPkNEQMhfXHyACQ/s656/Screen%20Shot%202023-03-12%20at%2015.54.12.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="656" data-original-width="513" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd7Fw-jmpWVUAKn_KlPO5Sq6YaHAjcL0OSlV0IeW-aGs1DsfcyGFM1q3XTpheiN3peyaOcczBn0apx0z1VcwkAlffqQfdN5xpcYAgEAHQFG3C40Jv6TRiw5Ds4A8jG4LKcNpwELlPBolgNULkNgehnBaJk2WYEQ9cpv7K41kMxPkNEQMhfXHyACQ/w313-h400/Screen%20Shot%202023-03-12%20at%2015.54.12.png" width="313" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>(Edited down from a 30,000 word draft--with plenty more to say on Shorter’s orchestral work, his status as composer, and the framing of ‘jazz’; more of that may see the light of day elsewhere.)</p><p>///</p><p>In other news:</p><p>My interview with composer Hannah Kendall is online at <i><a href="https://bachtrack.com/interview-hannah-kendall-plantation-machine-march-2023" target="_blank">Bachtrack</a></i>: Kendall is Composer-in-Residence at the Royal Academy of Music <a href="https://tickets.ram.ac.uk/sales/categories/composer-in-residence-hannah-k" target="_blank">this March,</a> and a couple of concerts are forthcoming the following week. Highly recommended if you’ve not heard her music in performance before.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKofWVrdCq-TKg1yY7EM3ySvx9h927ew1rjGnKi-2Blq1N4zy34uyQSr7X8GmXGZ1X8AQJJkCpazNllQ9hq84LyrH_a1ZPb2XfZby9byLssOxKHBdESWHT7xnFiqVUOmqILFo_nAve35u_VR0KRoDMBo3mlRC2WRXGHELSwUkga0Jm2FUF-De6Aw/s642/Screen%20Shot%202023-03-12%20at%2015.11.16.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="642" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKofWVrdCq-TKg1yY7EM3ySvx9h927ew1rjGnKi-2Blq1N4zy34uyQSr7X8GmXGZ1X8AQJJkCpazNllQ9hq84LyrH_a1ZPb2XfZby9byLssOxKHBdESWHT7xnFiqVUOmqILFo_nAve35u_VR0KRoDMBo3mlRC2WRXGHELSwUkga0Jm2FUF-De6Aw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-03-12%20at%2015.11.16.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
On March 22nd the trio GUE will be making its delayed debut at <a href="https://waterintobeer.co.uk/pages/find-us" target="_blank">waterintobeer</a> in Brockley, South London. <a href="https://www.jackenelswythmusic.com/" target="_blank">Jacken Elswyth </a>on banjo, <a href="https://alienjams.bandcamp.com/album/egg-meat" target="_blank">Laurel Uziell</a> on electronics and myself on electronics and melodica. We’ll be joined by a saxophone trio of Alex McKenzie, Nat Philipps and Nicholas Hann, plus <a href="https://earshots.bandcamp.com/album/material-structure" target="_blank">Tom Mills</a> on theremin. Tickets £5, doors 6:30, to be wrapped up by 9pm. Eventbrite page <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/two-solos-plus-a-trio-tickets-583787593407" target="_blank">here</a>.<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTq9Hz8AD3YorjmsiL0wKdFBHHHupjrevpQGkVBaQJ9IWwii0aPFxxe-YwoIF8WdccNvWs2qJC-4zlQT_e_fm0DblLaPzVmYVM5bipgWLSfxvEoi4cfgp2_TyLxNEchPDoB0U8A9Qp9AmbklU-i3wJWUxKAmUwu_xAMGxED1K5P3gqXqr2aP2ckw/s3508/GUE-Poster-March-23.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3508" data-original-width="2481" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTq9Hz8AD3YorjmsiL0wKdFBHHHupjrevpQGkVBaQJ9IWwii0aPFxxe-YwoIF8WdccNvWs2qJC-4zlQT_e_fm0DblLaPzVmYVM5bipgWLSfxvEoi4cfgp2_TyLxNEchPDoB0U8A9Qp9AmbklU-i3wJWUxKAmUwu_xAMGxED1K5P3gqXqr2aP2ckw/w283-h400/GUE-Poster-March-23.jpeg" width="283" /></a></div><br /><div><br /><div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, I’m delighted to reveal the cover for the <i>Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton</i>, co-edited by myself and Lauri Scheyer, and now <a href="https://www.weslpress.org/9780819500366/selected-poems-of-calvin-c-hernton/" target="_blank">available for pre-order from Wesleyan</a>. The book includes material from across his career--including the long out-of-print <i>The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong</i>--and a foreword from Hernton’s longtime friend, publisher and champion Ishmael Reed, along with notes, chronology, and index. It will be published this August.</div><div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOFnX5Zo88St-unDgP-BhpaXdh0jA7vKurkGSqqIzkmHuVCUVqpWkjwY09jbvLnv_Y0VlVdsbVV66HBB40xjKF7Z9nTiz82Udn_R2uyLiy-uhitY9QcsVnYqBa7JUf11Buf9Wb_AoAEOJQ_hapn3Bbs6QuI6JGM6x478CjKAYGThhJshQp4SuvRQ/s400/122774318.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="267" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOFnX5Zo88St-unDgP-BhpaXdh0jA7vKurkGSqqIzkmHuVCUVqpWkjwY09jbvLnv_Y0VlVdsbVV66HBB40xjKF7Z9nTiz82Udn_R2uyLiy-uhitY9QcsVnYqBa7JUf11Buf9Wb_AoAEOJQ_hapn3Bbs6QuI6JGM6x478CjKAYGThhJshQp4SuvRQ/w268-h400/122774318.jpeg" width="268" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-74801661592048553272023-02-25T14:32:00.002+00:002023-02-25T14:34:03.119+00:00News and Views<p>In February I was interviewed about <i>A Black Arts Poetry Machine by</i> João Paulo Guimarães (University of Porto) and Elina Siltanen (University of Turku) for the online Poets Talk Politics Series hosted by the University of Porto. Thanks to João and Elina for the questions and discussion, and to João for the invitation. The event was live-streamed and should be uploaded to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@institutodeliteraturacompa9632/videos" target="_blank">Youtube channel</a> of the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa in the next few weeks. For now, it's available on Facebook, as embedded below (no need for an account) or at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ilc.flup/videos/1784658591928993/?locale=el_GR">this link</a>.</p><p>
<iframe allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="314" scrolling="no" src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?height=314&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Filc.flup%2Fvideos%2F1784658591928993%2F&show_text=false&width=560&t=0" style="border: none; overflow: hidden;" width="560"></iframe> </p><p>Also online is the video of the online launch for <i>Present Continuous </i>back in January, hosted by Malvika Jolly and with responses from Tyrone Williams, Linda Kemp, Ciarán Finlayson, and Ghazal Mosadeq, can be seen on the Pamenar Press Youtube channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPrGe-GwoHUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPrGe-GwoHU" target="_blank">here</a>, or in the video embedded below. Many thanks to Malvika for hosting and Ghazal and Hamed for publishing, designing and typesetting the book!</p><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fPrGe-GwoHU" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p><p>Some photos from the '<a href="https://iklectikartlab.com/electro-acoustic-responsiveness-improvised-trajectories/" target="_blank">Electro-Acoustic Responsiveness</a>' gig at IKLECTIK with Eddie Prévost (percussion), John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), N.O. Moore (guitar), Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (voice, objects), and Tony Hardie-Bick (electronics), courtesy of film-maker Stewart Morgan, whose <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-bright-nowhere-journeying-into-improvisation#/" target="_blank">film on Prévost</a> should soon be nearing completion. </p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0cS2_cXVVLxicVUIwYuPFSn68SZ-RdhGitqjRsTCGbxbuY4F6zA4EKxbZd3UaOqhNtg1a2ESggFfG0rIiMeD-KT4lz4eSpQJ-wE0brIBIjeyrZilLisxUy1GlJLE_LO_VIDTZqU5bLZ3IN_17sQOi4DnlEVGHdrr29ys2h5G8e6DlwyrHlfdyVw/s3599/Iklectik%2014%2002%2023%20a.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3322" data-original-width="3599" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0cS2_cXVVLxicVUIwYuPFSn68SZ-RdhGitqjRsTCGbxbuY4F6zA4EKxbZd3UaOqhNtg1a2ESggFfG0rIiMeD-KT4lz4eSpQJ-wE0brIBIjeyrZilLisxUy1GlJLE_LO_VIDTZqU5bLZ3IN_17sQOi4DnlEVGHdrr29ys2h5G8e6DlwyrHlfdyVw/s320/Iklectik%2014%2002%2023%20a.JPG" width="320" /></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3505" data-original-width="5374" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbw9j4VR4x3kkV9jaQf6Wz4Jkz_SfLyBBkOmS0MkXGTfEnzRLqpU_Q3RdGMj8Whjlvdx31OfGWG3Yzo2hifBJnrRfQ8MR4akJrGR_lDoHgORCTd7ZZm6V0-gjujganiz5JJ5H7xbXE51hKdOJoE-MyAwmVBEiZtmRBiNdgr6mSnnKUJjOiJnDy8A/s320/Iklectik%2014%2002%2023%20w.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Photo credit - Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz</i></div></div><p>And some photos from the Materials/Materialien reading at <a href="https://www.halle-fuer-kunst.de/public/de" target="_blank">Halle für Kunst Lüneburg</a>, with James Goodwin (launching the new collection <i><a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2023/01/james-goodwin-faux-ice.html" target="_blank">Faux Ice</a></i>), Lütfiye Güzel and Laurel Uziell: thanks to curators Ann-Kathrin Eickohf and Elisa R. Linn. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjenqDT5Xq3_2W5VUSeV1Q7X9LUXMmbJJ-ARVQdqyn1HJaOwNxDRM2DjZFo69bvCpjaB_ExgFt11-5_dAUCHMB-JyUh5ZJOWlUADHZIKZjCiEm-yWF9T6-xtONFTtyjg9Kbx6fQYSaW4nKEB3zTEOG0F5Z0TM3Rx4k99pCUmqamjhKmNI-jQsQThQ/s1600/4C1F131E-6484-489B-B085-7D43D22146E9.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjenqDT5Xq3_2W5VUSeV1Q7X9LUXMmbJJ-ARVQdqyn1HJaOwNxDRM2DjZFo69bvCpjaB_ExgFt11-5_dAUCHMB-JyUh5ZJOWlUADHZIKZjCiEm-yWF9T6-xtONFTtyjg9Kbx6fQYSaW4nKEB3zTEOG0F5Z0TM3Rx4k99pCUmqamjhKmNI-jQsQThQ/s320/4C1F131E-6484-489B-B085-7D43D22146E9.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi2T9uYtC37N4wud1qOsw2piWxOzcslfqZYPAHokSmLFv6txgghcEE2Huh8F4oJjcyOlan_CQb1F1LvSymVEIA4wgorDBOc1RkBeeZrJleP-D0BHBpl0vMNC_74U9CcfukJxVW4Zz7sWMZutUWzJ2RQvLL_gYdREaBwdDu7cT9cqleH5puap3WMg/s1600/3701D2D2-8995-479B-B09A-55599ADC26E6.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi2T9uYtC37N4wud1qOsw2piWxOzcslfqZYPAHokSmLFv6txgghcEE2Huh8F4oJjcyOlan_CQb1F1LvSymVEIA4wgorDBOc1RkBeeZrJleP-D0BHBpl0vMNC_74U9CcfukJxVW4Zz7sWMZutUWzJ2RQvLL_gYdREaBwdDu7cT9cqleH5puap3WMg/s320/3701D2D2-8995-479B-B09A-55599ADC26E6.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Ql4H6_0pRsNztejiDvvPydVkMfgXyv3-JB97pis0naEBDERZXI8A_dg6DEMVKhaNFa7VcrNTlNBXIBtSDUxrMs13wzGVPIpHQpaD0ac1xee-5LHKbiA7b66wm4S235f945gXi_UrtMnQTKJL9kLuynw8Sf3m5w6bb6IPTOiY6ZnjF2CN7nMWSQ/s2048/A847210F-7244-4109-B33C-F8807DE6056E.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Ql4H6_0pRsNztejiDvvPydVkMfgXyv3-JB97pis0naEBDERZXI8A_dg6DEMVKhaNFa7VcrNTlNBXIBtSDUxrMs13wzGVPIpHQpaD0ac1xee-5LHKbiA7b66wm4S235f945gXi_UrtMnQTKJL9kLuynw8Sf3m5w6bb6IPTOiY6ZnjF2CN7nMWSQ/s320/A847210F-7244-4109-B33C-F8807DE6056E.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisLpDHGQegpc0fJW5r4MkogOHWnrO8c4FEYW6L3XJZ67FFbi6_PLvA-TpsNM0vjvsyuMFUfa5eS7O8oiVgExrN-M0DytY2lYErHEVPHRSjdovwGtIS0WCPq7a9VUk-RFI91UAerjMkYMrr8wsInUrCfyzRD8_OEDkY5Nx6EuQIYSD7V4uJkTrJTg/s320/CE083581-534F-4AE7-AE79-68D0E024A388.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5D7cEQiY_LTxi-3uy8npFHIw3BYEFM52RIGD_FtOP54QeI4sgNo-Ideq1FWAE1CH_MEz2DtQ56ObgwHCQ2dCtLA7VnBRoSUP0AfttzRKvFAj0GtxTvKmEFubAut-RYX8gp33BNBceqL1raGZKlg7sNuuXe1TczINH8aH9cZBfx6XXjNNuAS-ugQ/s1599/D9C18917-73CF-4C1A-B06A-982B3F7BF30F.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1599" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5D7cEQiY_LTxi-3uy8npFHIw3BYEFM52RIGD_FtOP54QeI4sgNo-Ideq1FWAE1CH_MEz2DtQ56ObgwHCQ2dCtLA7VnBRoSUP0AfttzRKvFAj0GtxTvKmEFubAut-RYX8gp33BNBceqL1raGZKlg7sNuuXe1TczINH8aH9cZBfx6XXjNNuAS-ugQ/s320/D9C18917-73CF-4C1A-B06A-982B3F7BF30F.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>James will be doing a UK launch for his book at Café Oto in Dalston on <a href="https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/matinee-james-goodwin-candace-hill/">Sunday 9th April</a>; this will also be the launch for Candace Hill's astonishing book-length poem <i><a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2023/01/candace-hill-short-leash-kept-on.html" target="_blank">Short Leash Kept On</a></i>. James will be in conversation with Nisha Ramayya and I'll be in conversation with Candace via Zoom. (Fred Moten will be reading, in his trio with Brandon Lopez and Gerald Cleaver, later in the evening.) Tickets from the <a href="https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/matinee-james-goodwin-candace-hill/" target="_blank">Café Oto website</a>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QGujCY3Bq0sAZ1CexilyTGeToNWWTWuJOWhEoahFlhqBCeONnhNdPuYswd2PrkQPtI_RbxBoYu99QKz4o_ijkTs9spp1mxxL5sqPewsrBBi2aSNVcpF9yjAGnqRuGU8CCRwED68bHKCYnUjIX9wlfgtia8OHU3KacmF71Z00CA6uI9gp5cjt-A/s711/Launch-Image.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="711" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QGujCY3Bq0sAZ1CexilyTGeToNWWTWuJOWhEoahFlhqBCeONnhNdPuYswd2PrkQPtI_RbxBoYu99QKz4o_ijkTs9spp1mxxL5sqPewsrBBi2aSNVcpF9yjAGnqRuGU8CCRwED68bHKCYnUjIX9wlfgtia8OHU3KacmF71Z00CA6uI9gp5cjt-A/w400-h293/Launch-Image.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, in further Materials news, Anne Boyer's <i>Money City Sick as Fuck</i> and Lisa Jeschke's <i>The Athology of Poems by Drunk Women</i> are back in print and can be purchased from the Materials website at the following links: <a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2020/10/anne-boyer-money-city-sick-as-fuck.html" target="_blank">Boyer here</a> and <a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/2020/10/lisa-jeschke-anthology-of-poems-by.html" target="_blank">Jeschke here</a>.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuZr1Of42fM0w__vOQrdISkaCzx6I6ML2EAjVQcduhyhUXgqBfhch-I4MEwS55z0fPYxbe9mVnJORteCGhyoa4JXsSx95I3FLvkWM__8vLXvfQ2OZ-P26xxY682e7LaWqhvaHUuJE3n1x8a21tKrXf57AzmH1K2dYRA9DBHtjafPJwI0sO7NurOQ/s731/untitled.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="515" data-original-width="731" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuZr1Of42fM0w__vOQrdISkaCzx6I6ML2EAjVQcduhyhUXgqBfhch-I4MEwS55z0fPYxbe9mVnJORteCGhyoa4JXsSx95I3FLvkWM__8vLXvfQ2OZ-P26xxY682e7LaWqhvaHUuJE3n1x8a21tKrXf57AzmH1K2dYRA9DBHtjafPJwI0sO7NurOQ/w400-h281/untitled.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-23739239203250684802023-02-10T09:27:00.000+00:002023-02-10T09:27:56.374+00:00“Myths and Dreams”: The Rolling Calf/Pat Thomas <div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnJO-HtWIAIh-M7?format=jpg&name=large" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnJO-HtWIAIh-M7?format=jpg&name=large" width="400" /></a></div><div>(Photograph by Helen Wallace)</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The Rolling Calf/ Pat Thomas</b></div><div><b>Wigmore Hall, London, 22nd January 2023</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>[A shorter version of this piece appears in <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/469" target="_blank">this month</a></b><a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/469" target="_blank">’</a><b><a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/469" target="_blank">s issu</a>e of <i>The Wire</i>]</b></div><div><br /></div></div><div>
A few weeks into the new year, Elaine Mitchener continued her five-year artist-in-residency at the Wigmore Hall with a performance by her electroacoustic group the <a href="https://www.elainemitchener.com/the-rolling-calf">Rolling Calf Trio</a>, joined on this occasion by Pat Thomas. In a relatively short first half, first we heard a Thomas piano solo—a characteristic study in piano resonance, making full use of the concert grand the concert hall setting (was this Thomas’ first time at the Wigmore? What are the points of access for what music is or is not allowed to be heard in such places?), thick clusters and repeating figures that never quite coalesced into riff or melody but moved off elsewhere, pealing like wave upon wave, preludial and exploratory. Next, Mitchener came and stage and, with Thomas performed a kind of deconstructed skeleton of a standard, or standards, Thomas playing plangent chords and discrete bursts of blooping electronics, Mitchener at one moment repeating a vocal sound and a physical movement that at first seemed spontaneous—head inclining to the right, hand moving up in the air alongside—and then repeating it, over and over, like a gif or a loop, problematising the notions of immediacy, performance and the like present in the position of the singer of songs of love or lost love, of feminine presentation, of the standard as vehicle for emotions and notions always greater than its lyrics suggest. I was reminded of Fumi Okiji’s paper on Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday and gesture at the <a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2020/02/unit-structures-art-of-cecil-taylor.html">Taylor conference in New York</a> a few years ago, riffing off Taylor’s line “as gesture jazz became Billie’s right arm bent at breast moving as light touch”, accompanied in her rendition by a video loop of Holiday’s arm in an old TV clip. The model of singer and accompanist is here at once gestured at and moved beyond, in that Mitchener, who keeps words to a murmured or half-sung minimum, functions as much as instrumentalist as singer. Even more so than the versions of standards found on Mitchener’s <a href="https://alexanderhawkinsintakt.bandcamp.com/album/uproot">quartet with Alex Hawkins</a>, the model of song form is moved away from into a more open, capacious improvisational and questing and questioning approach to the spirit of the standards more so than their harmonic or melodic content. The duo don’t perform any particular single standard as such as one, fifty-to-twenty minute ur-standard, a net picking up ghostly traces of songs that float by: the word “lovely”, a wisp of melody, a line or two half-recognised from a song. The first comparison that comes to mind—not least for the depths of Mitchener’s contralto voice, here heard with generous reverb allowing it to swell into the hall with the magnified intimacy pioneered in the recording technology of mid-century that did so much to shape ideas of what jazz singing might be—would be the ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWSyzzHs__8" target="_blank">free standards</a>’ of Ran Blake and Mitchener’s long-standing inspiration Jeanne Lee, in which the melodic contour, the verse-chorus-verse structure of the song are adhered to but the harmonic and rhythmic contours moved away from; or any number of deconstructions of the standard, from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkrV06oueA" target="_blank">Taylor’s</a>—or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9jnHpVorvk" target="_blank">Sunny Murray’s</a>—‘This Nearly Was Mine’ to the quieter, chamber deconstructions put in play by the likes of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlllaNWfdtM" target="_blank">Paul Bley,</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crlEq3rdBpw" target="_blank">Andrew Hill</a>, or, more recently, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_bcZIa1iRU" target="_blank">Jason Moran</a>.<div> <br />Gesture and movement of another kind characterised the performance by the Rolling Calf, Mitchener’s ‘Black Power Trio’ with Neil Charles on bass and electronics and Jason Yarde on alto saxophone and an even wider range of electronics: synths, drum machines, digital manipulations and live sampling. Yarde—whose <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOSCsXOxZU0&t=5s" target="_blank">performance</a> with Louis Moholo-Moholo’s ‘Six Blokes’ band in a three-horn line-up alongside Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson one night, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xofs6VOqahE" target="_blank">Shabaka Hutchings</a> the other, the last time Moholo performed in the UK back in September 2019, was so vitally transforming and powerful—appeared miraculously recovered from the onstage stroke he suffered in October the previous year in France, his life saved thanks to the presence of two parademics in the audience who he insisted he go straight to the hospital, and to the treatment he was able to receive in France at a time when a government of millionaires is attempting to utterly destroy and deplete the British National Health Service in the spirit of a kind of nightmarish blend of Dickensian Victorian inequality and neoliberal ideology pushed to the max. Survival, literally, yes—that’s what this music has always been about.</div><div><br /></div><div>The musicians entered from the back of the hall, behind and through the audience, each playing hand-held “stirring xylophones”—tuned wooden percussion instruments struck with beaters—in the quietly tempestuous manner of early Art Ensemble of Chicago records, first sparsely echoing melodic patterns, then swirling cascades in glissando’ing stir and swell; one at a time, the three came on stage, Charles and Yarde moving into loops and figures on mini-synths, drum machines and samples, Mitchener’s voice totally commanding, moving from the deliberately constricted/restricted register of the first half to declarative, soaring notes, pronouncements and announcements.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgye6C66MpW5btQQQrJdIj-sopBTdfsm233R6KFZAl8EhbPALBL90zm3SqLkXQXw1ad_Pu7MaVgbknz575ZI6RXQ7Wn0HQp_cj8FVJWwaUjaKmYvCt7IfVR9CzaALDJsFi5Bu95SOkrKYoRIVCYpLLYVH33wuNDEM-W26FhbqNzG3Ra12kL1EHXDg/s667/xylo-rhs-1.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="558" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgye6C66MpW5btQQQrJdIj-sopBTdfsm233R6KFZAl8EhbPALBL90zm3SqLkXQXw1ad_Pu7MaVgbknz575ZI6RXQ7Wn0HQp_cj8FVJWwaUjaKmYvCt7IfVR9CzaALDJsFi5Bu95SOkrKYoRIVCYpLLYVH33wuNDEM-W26FhbqNzG3Ra12kL1EHXDg/w335-h400/xylo-rhs-1.jpeg" width="335" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> <br />As in many of her recent performances, Mitchener has developed an approach to form in—rather than compositions or ‘heads’, but not completely ‘free’ improvisation, a set will be organised around different texts, which Mitchener will work at, sing and speak until their possibilities have been temporarily used up, moving to the next fragment. These texts, generally poems, but sometimes incorporating statements from interviews, were on this occasion organised into a collection named on the programme as ‘Myths and Dreams’, that included Césaire, Brathwaite, Una Marson, Taylor, Sun Ra, and Jay Bernard. They form points of reference, clearly demarcated sections that function something like movements in a suite, helping to organise an often quite lengthy piece in ways that are not obvious or circumscribed. These are not ‘lyrics’, in the jazz or pop model, nor are they ‘settings’, in the classical or new music model, so much as elements of <i>musical</i> material; while words imply narrative, context, fixity, in Mitchener’s case are treated in ways that—as in the case of Jeanne Lee, whose approach in her <a href="vhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdct_niW39k&t=57s">work with Gunter Hampel</a> or on a record like ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4x7SbgB0KM&t=2436s">Conspiracy</a>’ is again perhaps the closest formal analogy—might differ each time, in minute or quite dramatic ways, always with an ear to what is happening in the musical texture of that moment, how it might go on from there.</div><div> <br />To me, the heart of this particular Rolling Calf performance was the rendition of a poem from young British poet Jay Bernard’s <i><a href="https://www.jaybernard.co.uk/portfolio-item/surge/" target="_blank">Surge</a></i>, an elegy in pats in which Bernard’s archival research into the 1981 New Cross Massacre—an event which happened eight years before Bernard’s birth—is set against the unfolding tragedy of Grenfell Tower fire, which happened as the sequence was being written. Constructed as homages to the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—particularly his own poem ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUMYAqAlAXA">New Crass Massahkah</a>’—the first of two poems entitled ‘Songbook’ establishes a space and a geometry at once of the dancefloor and of wider tactical manoeuvres, the territory of mourning and militancy that first, the <a href="https://www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/collections/new-cross-massacre-campaign-1980-1985">New Cross Massacre Action Committee</a> and later, <a href="https://justice4grenfell.org/">Justice 4 Grenfell </a>have to trace. In Johnson’s 1981 poem, released as the final track on the 1984 album <i><a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/607975-Linton-Kwesi-Johnson-Making-History">Making History</a></i>, words insistently inflect the music in dialogue, in contrast and tension: jaunty but haunted, the rhythms shift from the poem’s section, describing the celebratory sociality buoyed by the rhythms of the party before the fire—“di dubbing and did rubbing”, “di dancung and di skanking”—to the rhythm of the fire itself—“di crash and di bang”, “di heat and di smoke”—to the rhythm of activism, its persistence and resistance. “but wait / yu noh remembah”, “but stap / yu noh remembah”: the poem is a call to remembrance, of the need to tell and re-tell a story ignored or mis-told in official record. Like Johnson’s poem, written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Bernard’s later poem traces the rhythms of dance—the party before the fire—turned to violence—the fire itself and the second violence of bungled police investigation and racist media reportage—in turn turned to resistance through the work of the committee and the <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/black-peoples-day-action-1981-online-exhibition#:~:text=On%20January%2025th%2C%20a%20meeting,Black%20People's%20Day%20of%20Action.">Black Peoples’ Day of Action</a>. Over time, the mathematics Bernard’s ‘Songbook’ traces—“me seh ah one step fahwahd an ah two step back”—its manoeuvres of progress and defeat, of progress and defeat, of going round in circles or back to square one—becomes not just the immediate events of a particular movement, but of the seemingly infinite deferral of closure, as the quest for justice stretches into and beyond the space of a lifetime. Echoes fade away, generations build and develop; Johnson’s insistent call to remembrance fades and must be taken up and replayed, overlaid and overlayered like the laboratories of dub transformations that take up and distort the sounds of an original track. When performing, Bernard themself <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7810gU9pSm4">recites the poem without music</a>: the music-and-speech dynamics of Johnson’s dub poetry, with its low-key delivery given power and contrast by the accompaniment of Dennis Bovell and the Dub Band, internalised into the rhythms of the poem itself, as stripped-back, ghostly echo; a memory, of a social moment, a movement, something we can barely hear. “Me seh half de revalushun deh pun de attack / Only half a salushun to de tings dem we lack.” One step forward, two steps back, half a step, half the revolution, half a solution—the process is incomplete. There’s no closure, no justice. </div><div> </div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7810gU9pSm4" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /><div>Yet Bernard’s poem is also about togetherness and community. Playing with rhymes or assonance in words like “back”, “attack”, “tack”, Bernard’s poem , which, like Johnson’s work, refuses to be contained by standard English, is buoyed up and carried on by the pleasures of rhythm and the pleasure of sound, the excess of sound, sounds ability to contain and then explode, the poem as a kind of carrier, an unexploded charge, carrying its “secret cargo” into the present. And when Mitchener delivered the poem within the context of music once more, the poem attained a fresh power, a declarative insistence. In comparison to Bernard’s Johnson-esque understatement, Mitchener’s was loud, present, unnerving: she delivered the text half spoken, half sung, a singer’s voice, expansive and huge, used to projection, not the quiet dynamic of a poet’s voice; her delivery at once toasting and sprechstimme; combined with the abstracted patterns of Charles on bass and Yarde on electronics, drum machines and synths stuttered into loops and sampled patterns, giving way to blasts of Yarde’s alto squall, the music traced another kind of time again, one in which instrument associated with pop music are repurposed and abstracted and which, in turn, an avant-garde that has too often excluded the matter of black life, is repurposed for its energies.</div><div> <br />The music moves on again—picking up on the carefully poised ironies of a Sun Ra statement—“those who will not dance will have to be shot”—traversing language of ritual and apocalypse, Mitchener now playing with the ritual of calling out the band’s names—the celebratory incantation over music that signals celebration and closure in the Art Ensemble’s rendition of ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plDlCnb3Ets">Odwalla</a>’ at the end of almost every concert they gave over the years, or the ecstatic sung shout outs on Pharoah Sanders’ 1981 album <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtJqpEWekw">Live</a>.</i> “We are the Rolling Calf!” she proclaims, and as she picks up a phrase from a Cecil Taylor interview—“Hearing is playing. Music does not exist on paper”—turning it into an incantation, Pat Thomas makes his way to the stage, adding further electronic bloops and trademark thick chords and clusters on piano to the stuttering loops set up by Yarde and Charles. “Music does not exist on paper”. After a minute or so, the lights go out, the musicians playing in the dark, rendered illumination, focused on hearing, on the work that listening and playing can do, beyond visuality, beyond representation, beyond the page. The trappings of concert hall, of the performer/stage division, of the above-stage frieze, with its art deco image of music-making as a ritual idealized and frozen, already expanded by the trio’s entrance through the audience, by Mitchener’s dance round the stage, blowing a whistle, by Thomas’ entry onto the platform from the front-row seats; all these melt away, focus into the material and more-than-material presence of sound itself. Mitchener has long been an expert at making time melt, bend, twist in this way, all with an awareness of history, of music’s history and the histories beyond music that music sediments. Tonight was a particular resplendent example.<br /></div></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-51246268428182175992023-02-05T18:32:00.012+00:002023-02-05T22:40:48.336+00:00The Goldfish Bowl: 'The Romantic Englishwoman' (1975, dir. Joseph Losey)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkMA7QipaW39OdGGodyMAnW5vSsYW4iGDriLD1P_z4_tQek-Ms9BE3JQipi0VgsfoB0Kdxba5B9itSHZnZTLq4evJnzRN8yWpYbbFrmy0Sf_YULsCfC0LJJcis8ov3l-HNFcpXMrmfmfNhRFvbm4IUeTKK1IncrmXKuYZkgc7VNOd89ohRMQLXwQ/s1280/MV5BOWRhZGQ5ZTYtYWM2Zi00Y2E0LTljNTItMGQ2N2Q2MDNkMmE2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXRyYW5zY29kZS13b3JrZmxvdw@@._V1_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkMA7QipaW39OdGGodyMAnW5vSsYW4iGDriLD1P_z4_tQek-Ms9BE3JQipi0VgsfoB0Kdxba5B9itSHZnZTLq4evJnzRN8yWpYbbFrmy0Sf_YULsCfC0LJJcis8ov3l-HNFcpXMrmfmfNhRFvbm4IUeTKK1IncrmXKuYZkgc7VNOd89ohRMQLXwQ/w400-h225/MV5BOWRhZGQ5ZTYtYWM2Zi00Y2E0LTljNTItMGQ2N2Q2MDNkMmE2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXRyYW5zY29kZS13b3JrZmxvdw@@._V1_.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">What is it that's so unsatisfactory about this film? And what can that tell us? Before answering that question, a brief run-through of the plot. Glenda Jackson's frustrated bourgeois housewife, having gone to the spa town of Baden-Baden for unspecified reasons, maybe or maybe doesn't have a brief affair with Helmut Berger's young gigolo. In town on a botched drug deal, Berger operates through a combination of what we might term freelancing: as a car or drug smuggler but, it seems, principally as a gigolo whose opening line is that he's a "poet". (The role he plays here, as a class-ambiguous outsider who both manipulates and is manipulated by bourgeois families seething with tension, mirrors that of Visconti's then-recent <i>Conversation Piece</i>--or, indeed, Terence Stamp in Pasolini's<i> Teorema</i>, at once far more ambiguous and far more socially incisive than either film.) Meanwhile, back in British suburbia, Jackson's husband, writer Michael Caine abandons plans to work on a novel to begin a screenplay based on his jealous imaginings of his wife's Baden-Baden sojourn. When Berger telephones Caine to announce that he's an admirer of his work and turns up (literally) "for tea", the stakes are set for the triangle to play out, with the added drama in the final third of Berger's drug connections, among them the poker-faced Michael Lonsdale, turning up in a kind of lugubrious pursuit. </span></p><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">No spoilers here, though the film doesn't aim at resolution so much as a kind of blank termination. The title is bitterly ironic, a phrase spoken by Berger's gigolo about the various ways he's paid for his services: with the utmost discretion by European women; with a kind of throwaway vulgarity by American women--"here, go and buy yourself some shirts"; and with a kind of guilt passion by English women, who wish to invest, not simply their money, but their whole beings into what for the others is more clearly transactional. Hence "romantic". Social roles, the film's ending seems to suggest, are fixed: the characters know this, they analyse it, generally with bitter cynicism or contempt, sometimes with frustrated outbursts of drunkenness, rage, or desire, but their knowledge does nothing to change it; attempts to move beyond these constraints in the name of 'freedom' are in themselves played out according to similarly hierarchical and fixed positions; desire cannot escape these prohibitions. The film exacerbates this sense by focusing on a limited range of characters and settings. These are bourgeois characters within bourgeois spaces: the house and garden; the hotel and its surroundings; the occasional visit to a dismal restaurant or club. Even as these characters, given the narrative events, spend much of the time engaged in international travel, the journeys through a setting that would reveal a fuller social world--a town, an airport, a port--are reduced to a truncated snapshot of empty spaces, seen at their edges. They move within a confined world and take that world with them wherever they go, in a grim and claustrophobic myopia. When they look out of the window--as in the shots of Jackson aboard a train that play over the credits--they see a mirror. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUpBduZhTOBqkS6yak-vz6B34j_esWFhPyaPsEp9JcPuJki8guMhpx8Oq85OqJ3uG2YPpzfSeicj6GziblsBsaJuVzcLIfYPXgg9NIM3krHPmgufiLk-uSFGqShMyGO51-nEeSvmiK5jjhuQfWCKMdlH7MAuwY_tkQkAaSjXak7eXbX_z9WNm5QA/s635/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2017.30.10.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="289" data-original-width="635" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUpBduZhTOBqkS6yak-vz6B34j_esWFhPyaPsEp9JcPuJki8guMhpx8Oq85OqJ3uG2YPpzfSeicj6GziblsBsaJuVzcLIfYPXgg9NIM3krHPmgufiLk-uSFGqShMyGO51-nEeSvmiK5jjhuQfWCKMdlH7MAuwY_tkQkAaSjXak7eXbX_z9WNm5QA/w400-h183/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2017.30.10.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-K5yI13YfF9yESb9SrsKbA4BbvfUTDoM5W7r87yTyjKt-CltTF5-Spw0s9qXQ2rG91Lxj6c7A3amP49UjoY8gi9s6egWCz7FY_8rwJZC6UzPQF3DEh68x8jOc9-qNw0-ARw15HL7274pvUDEvvyrJg5glo10fvC5IO5BRJDRqewrAGB-btnHfw/s558/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2017.50.30.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="558" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-K5yI13YfF9yESb9SrsKbA4BbvfUTDoM5W7r87yTyjKt-CltTF5-Spw0s9qXQ2rG91Lxj6c7A3amP49UjoY8gi9s6egWCz7FY_8rwJZC6UzPQF3DEh68x8jOc9-qNw0-ARw15HL7274pvUDEvvyrJg5glo10fvC5IO5BRJDRqewrAGB-btnHfw/w400-h239/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2017.50.30.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPiapy7QXgbql986X1NKkh2FSxN_H-zxMRHIgb6UeHt5VcGbPwf_TAyz9a9d64lx9_OcVZHwUuPKAR0tKIXF6BdXEKPkiqdOZz5ZUZXmYpSCCUFAMfT8wQOSFAyCPp-ShwRRWxqf0jcwBi_H-aCD0ynBPuLoH7YAW_t8ZeRrxKrgAPSh1qdBTc1w/s618/Mirrors.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="618" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPiapy7QXgbql986X1NKkh2FSxN_H-zxMRHIgb6UeHt5VcGbPwf_TAyz9a9d64lx9_OcVZHwUuPKAR0tKIXF6BdXEKPkiqdOZz5ZUZXmYpSCCUFAMfT8wQOSFAyCPp-ShwRRWxqf0jcwBi_H-aCD0ynBPuLoH7YAW_t8ZeRrxKrgAPSh1qdBTc1w/w400-h185/Mirrors.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this deliberate limitation to a confined social setting, the film echoes Losey's earlier <i>The Servant, The Go-Between</i>, or <i>Boom!</i> In </span><i>The Servant</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, principally the increasingly claustrophobic house; in <i>Boom!</i>, the luxurious island getaway, isolated from the mainland; in <i>The Go-Between</i>, the wide-open spaces of a lushly filmed Norfolk countryside whose empty flatness comes to stand for a kind of myopic claustrophobia characteristic of a particular class at a particular time. In </span><i>The Servant</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, desire is manipulated as part of an endless, circular game of power relations and hierarchies, negotiated across lines of sexuality, gender and class; in </span><i>Boom!</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, it's a Burton-Taylor <i>tete-a-tete</i> which is both a kind of "battle of the sexes" and an allegorical struggle with mortality; in </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, forbidden desire across class lines and the fetishised mediations of smuggled messages leads to a denouement in which the outsider protagonist represses all thought of desire as a founding trauma. Losey's films of the 1960s and 1970s--the period in which he reinvented himself from a filmmaker of social problem pictures and taut, gritty noirs, to an arthouse director--were often criticised for the essential vacuity of their gestures. Losey, it was said, took the formal innovations of Resnais-ian temporal ambiguity or self-conscious echoes of the history of art (as when</span> Jeanne Moureau's <i>Eve</i> <a href="https://dcairns.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/vlcsnap-83417.png" target="_blank">strikes a pose from Massacio's Explusion from Eden</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">) and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090619035801/http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49543" target="_blank">presented them for their own sake</a>: they became empty signifiers, somewhere between costume dramas and the arthouse, in which a self-evident critique of a decaying social class was presented with gimmickry and trickery; or at worst, in which the formal presentation nullified the critique that was being made. (Is </span><i>The Servant</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, for example, with its presentation of the usurpation of the power a member of one ineffectual, privileged class by another shown to be cynical and grasping, as Amy Sargeant suggests in her BFI Film Classics guide, ultimately <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Servant/Ter6DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=amy+sargeant+%22reactionary%27+the+servent&pg=PA108&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">a reactionary film</a>?)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Such criticism was neither entirely right nor entirely wrong. During the '60s and '70s, Losey made films that were various combinations of flawed, highly skilled, and near-disastrously misjudged. In </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, things come together with a tact and taste that has far more beneath its surface than the costume drama feel implies. (It's a film, in other words, that's easy to misread as simply nostalgic, <i>Downtown Abbey-</i>style, particularly given the lush Michel Legrand score all all those sweeping shots of green fields--as Serge Daney punningly put it, "the depth of field which is often the depth of the fields, very green, crossed diagonally and nervously.") In </span><i>Boom!</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, meanwhile the misjudgments are so far off that the film achieves the status of camp--quite brilliantly. (Not for nothing is it highly regarded by John Waters.) With Losey, quality--both the actual quality of cinema, or the pretentious trappings of a "cinema of quality"--was never absolute. 'Accident' was followed by the startling incoherence of <i>Secret Ceremony</i> and </span><i>Boom!</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> but in turn by </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. <i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i> and an indifferent <i>Galileo</i>--the literal return to Brecht--were followed by the incisive <i>Mr. Klein</i>, a film which actually felt to reckon with the weight of history, all framed through characteristic Losey-ian preoccupations. Tracing a through-line in Losey's work thus becomes both all too easy--given its auteurist excesses--and one that's frustrated by how unevenly it's executed. What we watch, at least from <i>Eve</i> onwards, is a set of variations on a theme, more or less successfully rendered. (And Losey's detailed breakdown of the making of his films in Michel Ciment's exemplary 1985 book <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/conversationswit0000lose/page/266/mode/1up?view=theater">Conversations with Losey</a> </i>gives a lovingly detailed sense of continuity between the more apparently diverse elements of his <i>ouevre.</i>) </span><i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> has all the features of Losey's Pinter collaborations (for this script, one playwright--Pinter--is replaced by another--Stoppard; Losey had of course worked with a perpetually stoned Tennessee Williams on <i>Boom!, </i>as per the waspish recollections in<i> Conversations with Losey</i>), but without the deceptively minimal clarity of analysis--particularly relating to social class--that Pinter's presence afforded those films. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Take the classic Losey-Pinter structure of flashbacks and flashforwards--longer or shorter inserts of scenes whose relation to the main narrative is not immediately revealed, which might later resolve into being seen as "earlier" or "later" than that action, or which might reveal themselves as a particular character's subjective fantasies, and which serve to offer an ambiguity of subject position and narrative temporality that, as Losey argued, was specific to the cinema, in what are at once intensely filmic and intensely literary adaptations of often dense source texts (novels by Nicholas Mosley--who, as the son of the British Fascist leader, knew all about power relation and masculinity--and L.P. Hartley, respectively). This device has been used to particularly good effect in the late '60s/early '70s Pinter collaborations <i>Accident</i> and </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. Its most obvious antecedent lies in Resnais--and indeed, Losey directed an <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078170/">obscure sequel </a>to Resnais's <i>La Guerre est Finie </i>which shared its original star, Yves Montand, ten years after the original. Its use by Losey is, however, perhaps closer in spirit to a lesser-known film which, like Losey's, shares a more ambiguous mainstream/arthouse cachet: the 1968 melodrama <i>Petulia</i>, directed by that other American abroad, Richard Lester (and sharing with </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> the presence of Julie Christie, radically different in both films). In Resnais, the most obvious forebear for this technique, the dense intercutting of multiple temporal levels furthers a political analysis, with--for example--narrative puzzle as analogy for the way that politics is subsumed or repressed vis-a-vis the Algerian war of independence and political torture in <i>Muriel,</i> or the workings of the political underground in <i>La Guerre est Finie</i>. In <i>Petulia</i>, they serve as a cynical demolition of the Californian 'summer of love' and its reverberations among the liberal (or not so-liberal) wings of the bourgeoisie--along with the presence of racism and intimate partner violence--and in Losey's Pinter collaborations, as a careful analysis of the ways that gender and class replay among networks of power--the ivory tower of Oxford University in <i>Accident</i>, on the one hand, and the English country house in </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, on the other.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7ddGTo3fr8bltI5KJlB00ParGJyDOtHxqMmf9QHHAL4XiwaEFNQYh6SZMU8NgoiA7HE5sZpKWGD_KKhdC2flukDcKYM1N-rDQ_VLi0oIX6RXmNIz2WtJvit-BPHWSdNYEtiCRhKMhhgVIuYF5KW5Za8iQ5jdvBd1vR9Kd-DI0nIum29qJCLBzyw/s1234/films.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="587" data-original-width="1234" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7ddGTo3fr8bltI5KJlB00ParGJyDOtHxqMmf9QHHAL4XiwaEFNQYh6SZMU8NgoiA7HE5sZpKWGD_KKhdC2flukDcKYM1N-rDQ_VLi0oIX6RXmNIz2WtJvit-BPHWSdNYEtiCRhKMhhgVIuYF5KW5Za8iQ5jdvBd1vR9Kd-DI0nIum29qJCLBzyw/w400-h190/films.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Most of these examples are films about the past: or, if about the present, about the inability to reckon with the legacies of the past that serve as the return of the repressed, particularly in a gendered violence, done by men to women, which assumes unspoken structural dimensions. In</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> the car crash and its aftermath that opens and closes </span><i>Accident</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, a particular moment reveals itself as made up of a mosaic of different perspectives, while Losey/Pinter through various methods also suggest that much of what's seen exists within the warped imagination of Dirk Bogarde's central character, the Oxford don whose repressed desire leads him to commit an unforgivable act. In </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, meanwhile, the traumatic repression of an incident seen only at the end of the film (the discovery of the illicit, cross-class lovers <i>in flagrante delicto</i>, leading to social exposure and suicide) is cinematically expressed through the insertion into a broadly chronological narrative of brief</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> flashforwards to its conclusion which function something like involuntary memories. While these might technically be experienced as flashforwards, they ultimately take place within what is essentially a flash<i>back </i>structure, in which the adult Leo is finally able to recall his suppressed childhood experiences, as signalled by </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">the famous Hartley line heard in voiceover at the start of the film: "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". In either case, from the perspective, both of its making in 1971 and the publication of the novel in 1953, the narrative is framed as a retrospective, deceptively nostalgic one, towards its clearly outmoded Edwardian setting (and one with an oblique nod to the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.38.4.147" target="_blank">colonial relations</a> that, in Resnais' <i>Muriel</i>, exist on the peripheries of the narrative, yet are central to its puzzle-like meaning.) These are films in which we see country houses, Oxbridge colleges, games of cricket: the signifiers of nation and history that exerted a particular fascination for an exile like Losey, driven by McCarthyism to the old colonial heartland.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR3_GtbuTOkKbIZSIqQ4a2lfBrbfpx5cIj-SkaU29RysWb1xcSNTYKK0Md2qyymyDjOP7e82WFmHoB6PEErXJ7IHhEDrlZW4e0qVOMj-sLU4dcTSC2WgVeT12bYFUG9jgFr3VnmZrVK-48kSONF5qIWdX_aTfco1brCLGiLnMseMr62a-_GT5xew/s575/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.17.03.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="575" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR3_GtbuTOkKbIZSIqQ4a2lfBrbfpx5cIj-SkaU29RysWb1xcSNTYKK0Md2qyymyDjOP7e82WFmHoB6PEErXJ7IHhEDrlZW4e0qVOMj-sLU4dcTSC2WgVeT12bYFUG9jgFr3VnmZrVK-48kSONF5qIWdX_aTfco1brCLGiLnMseMr62a-_GT5xew/w400-h219/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.17.03.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxwM_J7Y8Yg96tDR3x_kd7WoZ_u0vCG4eW_04dvCMzBycByPQY_hJdy0wHXlI0s-XxfIc0Cgy2TwDO40W3QCQwzJQjaeutlvipk-GFxr-v_scLZAa6ENvUY5bkBAmva28l-hJDp8v0K1I7ALF8H9o9TyOaQF9dHeK3ZPUPbwOSvo9yBiD6LKvyOw/s568/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.17.28.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="568" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxwM_J7Y8Yg96tDR3x_kd7WoZ_u0vCG4eW_04dvCMzBycByPQY_hJdy0wHXlI0s-XxfIc0Cgy2TwDO40W3QCQwzJQjaeutlvipk-GFxr-v_scLZAa6ENvUY5bkBAmva28l-hJDp8v0K1I7ALF8H9o9TyOaQF9dHeK3ZPUPbwOSvo9yBiD6LKvyOw/w400-h225/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.17.28.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUkptFsh93dQPUnBEYqoTENUhCgvBh9To65GxVOI0KINJ7WmbOalUv8mcXQZXuU8ICT9hjIZZ7o-_IKDbXmgc-3OOY_Oa6_GhH_jwAq8LY7HhwGNdI3gscFGfteHKkkxzMBs7RKA1K1B4VMGZPu1048bwW2Yk34e_MeDYCbC2r8os4eKcO4QwcxA/s552/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.18.20.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="552" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUkptFsh93dQPUnBEYqoTENUhCgvBh9To65GxVOI0KINJ7WmbOalUv8mcXQZXuU8ICT9hjIZZ7o-_IKDbXmgc-3OOY_Oa6_GhH_jwAq8LY7HhwGNdI3gscFGfteHKkkxzMBs7RKA1K1B4VMGZPu1048bwW2Yk34e_MeDYCbC2r8os4eKcO4QwcxA/w400-h238/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.18.20.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">More contemporary in its setting, </span><i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is less clearly oriented towards the past, and its flashbacks become something more like premonitions: memories of an event that may never have happened, whose presence causes that event to affect the course of future events. These flashes--whether forward or back--centre </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">on an incident that occurs, as in </span><i>Accident</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, near the start of the film: the moment Jackson and Berger take a lift together in their hotel and may or may not initiate a sexual relationship. Yet, whereas in Losey's other films, devices of literary narration were incorporated or subsumed into what were, as he notes in <i>Conversations</i>, fundamentally <i>cinematic</i> temporal structures, enabling the recurring snippets of a traumatic event to oscillate through the film like shards of glass or wisps of smoke, here, the literary, constructed nature of memory is turned into a kind of clunking, meta-fictional conceit, in which in life imitates arts as the paranoiac, jealous fantasies of Caine's novelist/screenwriter--the encounter in the lift, and, ultimately, the wife's decision to abandon her husband and the entry of gangsters as the story turns into a 'thriller' (a more contemporary--and cinematic--mode of storytelling than that of <i>The Go-Between</i>'s "costume drama")--come to life onscreen and in the narrative. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxR99OKUtHtZIypK-jv41hee1T8yffIv9WhCObTcCan0PY1ryTvaj076MjeNdfyeLRf1GReoQSoMzwtpdk7S5i0KaVMedEsEpYr18pKidd5CMb76EW141J_raBKW0A6s-VkxK0DSDMKXSBmYCpS-AX0doMFTXBZgx9uenQSv73tXp2CCsgdPv_Qw/s728/4461_4.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="728" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxR99OKUtHtZIypK-jv41hee1T8yffIv9WhCObTcCan0PY1ryTvaj076MjeNdfyeLRf1GReoQSoMzwtpdk7S5i0KaVMedEsEpYr18pKidd5CMb76EW141J_raBKW0A6s-VkxK0DSDMKXSBmYCpS-AX0doMFTXBZgx9uenQSv73tXp2CCsgdPv_Qw/w400-h225/4461_4.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi79Gth_dBQT7hbb9vStaISCzWy1Tv3JLKRUuR9F7IIhB4VgPWFJ5LIRMhLwz6-fUdRSiYSFyw8TVar2b3uSqf9tn8WR1DohWNSk9iwC8aKDqh3LMu-t6Qc9Kql0zm0bMaoQd69e4hF-ulV88SV5aFm7nnwssRx97k_DmqKsN-cbQTQq6xZO9eOlA/s1033/Elevator.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="655" data-original-width="1033" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi79Gth_dBQT7hbb9vStaISCzWy1Tv3JLKRUuR9F7IIhB4VgPWFJ5LIRMhLwz6-fUdRSiYSFyw8TVar2b3uSqf9tn8WR1DohWNSk9iwC8aKDqh3LMu-t6Qc9Kql0zm0bMaoQd69e4hF-ulV88SV5aFm7nnwssRx97k_DmqKsN-cbQTQq6xZO9eOlA/w400-h254/Elevator.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">In their initial appearance, these scenes are compelling enough. What happened in the lift in Baden-Baden? From whose perspective do we see this? What are the lines between desire--whose desire?--and action? In its opening third in particular, the incident in the lift serves as a central focus for the insinuation of various triangulations of a bourgeois marriage--a kind of infinite range of scenarios, generally operating according to the same pattern, on the various real or imaginary pairings of the heterosexual couple and a third partner: the frustrated wife and the younger gigolo; the frustrated husband and the young <i>au pair</i>; and so on. Yet as we see Caine type on screen and then see the fantasy come to life with Berger's arrival at the house, the film curls on in itself in a way that begins to shut off other possibilities. </span>(Losey himself later expressed discomfort with the way the scenes of Caine writing fitted into the texture of the film.)</div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like Fassbinder, Losey argued that the power dynamics so coldly dissected in his films are operations of sexuality in general, as opposed simply to those of heterosexuality: "With [the 1962 film <i>Eve</i>--perhaps the first of his 'arthouse' or <i>auteur</i> films] I wanted to make a picture - as I still and always do - about the particular destruction and anguish and waste of most sexual relations, whether heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or whatever". (Hence what is in effect a bisexual triangle, or quartet, or, at the film's end, a kind of expanding circle, in </span><i>The Servant</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">.) In </span><i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, they are particularly focused on the ways that such power dynamics play out within the context of heterosexual marriage. As with much of his work, the film couldn't easily be called either a feminist or an anti-feminist film: Caine's obnoxious outburst at Jackson's friend, a visiting gossip columnist, for repeating feminist statements about female homemaking roles, represents one pole; yet, in a film such as this, as, to a different extent, with Moureau's more liberated <i>Eve</i>, Jackson's dreams of liberation from marriage can occur only through another man, and no real possibility of sociability outside the heterosexual contract is offered. We simultaneously watch the playing out of male jealousy--<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109731/" target="_blank">Claude Chabrol-style</a>--though Caine's character, apart from this one outburst, never reaches heights of Chabrolian murderous rage; and of Jackson's "romantic" desire for escape--the doomed template of much melodrama. Too often, though, the film simply presents this double-bind as is, with little other perspective on what we already know. Truth becomes truism, even fatalism. Does the presence of the gangster subplot imply an equivalence between the workings of organized crime and those of bourgeois marriage and the affairs and transactional sexualities that exist alongside it--the one 'legitimate' and the other the necessary other to allow that structure its legitimacy? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSvqghlnqgrwvAZ-yHKlkYYUVslu88n7Pbbi0mRcd_Ul-RS2Hc0I62VKLypS703ReG2SOeCxqGjiIQJN9f935_0qQp5va2ZKAyz-R8i6lIGOONxCbV9S42eP8ENNeJvO9PRNXXX-UwMG2YowFJWpIw-8yCzYPpHg0sX6POni7kuDhyv2UcBsyu1A/s625/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.24.35.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="625" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSvqghlnqgrwvAZ-yHKlkYYUVslu88n7Pbbi0mRcd_Ul-RS2Hc0I62VKLypS703ReG2SOeCxqGjiIQJN9f935_0qQp5va2ZKAyz-R8i6lIGOONxCbV9S42eP8ENNeJvO9PRNXXX-UwMG2YowFJWpIw-8yCzYPpHg0sX6POni7kuDhyv2UcBsyu1A/w400-h238/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2019.24.35.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">If this were an early Fassbinder film, it might. Here, however, Losey is so preoccupied with formal exactitude that a more layered sense of meaning--allegorical, narrative, ideological--evades its grasp.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yes, the film allies form to content--as in Resnais, as in Lester, as in Losey's other films. The flashback-flashforward structure insists on the claustrophobic way in which its characters play out pre-ordained social roles--again and again. It insists on this at a formal level, at every stage. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">But to what end? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">***</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">As the <i>auteur </i>model hardened into a kind of doctrine, within both mainstream and arthouse cinema, its worst characteristics--the delineation of directorial vision through mannered stylistic over-emphasis and the obsessive replaying of certain themes or preoccupations from film to film--ossified. Often, this gets called "self-indulgence": there can be a pleasure to that, as in the obsessive zoom lenses and luxuriant sweeps of historical decor in '70s Visconti (especially <i>Ludwig</i>), a critique from within of its own decadence with some parallels to that of Losey. But it can also become excessively mannered--perhaps manner<i>ist</i>. In </span><i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, the flashback-flashforward device takes its place alongside other characteristic Losey features such as the obsession with shots which use mirrors to produce a kind of </span><i>mise-en-abyme</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> or double framing, incongruously languorous, lushly romantic orchestral scores, and bitterly ironic cut-aways. By now, however, it has become an example of a technique, a device, a tic used to more or less good effect in earlier films--the mirrors of </span><i>The Servant</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, the cutaways of <i>Accident</i>, the Michel Legrand score to </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">--that simply replays itself, as if one could part the parts together to put something that, while in perfect working order, seems to have been produced without any real necessity. Yes, style and form enact narrative content: and on top of this, the meta-scenario of the script, in which Caine's screenplay becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, renders narrative itself a <i>mise-en-abyme</i>. But form and content here are<i> too</i> perfectly tied: the parts fit so neatly that any social commentary is reduced to a bare-bones outline. </span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Writing of </span><i>The Go-Between</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, <a href="http://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2011/03/daney-on-losey.html">Serge Daney argued that </a></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><blockquote>Losey feels obliged to attract the attention in terms of social relations toward a visual mechanism which was always designed to conceal these relations.</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps this is the central issue. The cold distancing that such a style produces--one watches every shot, not so much as a moving, breathing thing, but as a kind of fastidious construction, like a well-made watch--superficially offers something approaching the analytic operations of early Resnais or the alienation effects of Losey's mentor, Bertolt Brecht, but without the content of thought and critical reflection on the mediations of the aesthetic medium that effect was intended to foster. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">As Jackson and Caine arrive back at the house where a party awaits them--the end of the affair, real or imagined, that disrupts the bonds of the couple form, the reiteration of the social bonds of bourgeois life-</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">-it's evident that there's no way out. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">We see this from the outside, looking in on the goldfish bowl--a bowl we may well ourselves have no access to, as the screen shows us yet more images of bourgeois life and tells us they are unhappy. The viewer is placed determinedly outside the frame, where they can stand with the arch-framemaker, Losey himself. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbOw_IrkghURnOCLZUDcZ5h_OSQOGtDPOoJdHVs6zHFywQcP7ECYtHQ41ceNcIaQCGTMsYVyPrDN5XEuzWARHmbb60nDgmzDSl2kWNsZppfZsxi8nXcyGC93-IPQH8cfFdhert_a3TlNlGL-8uBhFmZv_5waSeut4WhaafS_NOCQbHfK6bpmDCzA/s565/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2018.06.55.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="321" data-original-width="565" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbOw_IrkghURnOCLZUDcZ5h_OSQOGtDPOoJdHVs6zHFywQcP7ECYtHQ41ceNcIaQCGTMsYVyPrDN5XEuzWARHmbb60nDgmzDSl2kWNsZppfZsxi8nXcyGC93-IPQH8cfFdhert_a3TlNlGL-8uBhFmZv_5waSeut4WhaafS_NOCQbHfK6bpmDCzA/w400-h228/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-05%20at%2018.06.55.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet what kind of outside is this? In the Brechtian model, the artwork prompts a self-critical reflection on what is being shown and how it's being shown aimed to combat deception, smoke-and-mirrors, and the replaying of art as the endless perpetuation of a bourgeois perspective. And this is why Brecht's work--or the work of, say, Straub-Huillet--still feels so <i>alive</i>, however difficult. In a film like </span><i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, however, we seem to stand outside the characters for no particular purpose. Brechtian engagement is replaced by a kind of deadened admiration of craft for its own sake. Perhaps this is why the film feels so "cold", so dead, such an exercise in style. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div>In <i>Conversations</i>, Losey recalls the picture as one in which he had relatively little interest. "I don't like the characters", he remarks. </div><div><blockquote>And they're not likeable [...] Helmut's character [...] [is] the only one in the whole film who has an articulated, concrete philosophy. It's an anarchistic philosophy but at least it's there. The others are just kidding themselves one way or another. I've made that picture a thousand times, maybe not as well, but - you know, it's a remake essentially. It deals with an impossible situation in which a bourgeois life encases people and they don't get out of it and to that extent it's <i>The Prowler, Accident, Eve</i>. </blockquote></div><div>Yet, beyond Losey's own dismissal of the film as a begrudging rehash of the kind of story he'd told before, the fact that it exists perhaps tells us something else about the evolving nature of cinema as the reactionary years of the seventies settled across the Euro-American world. What does it mean that such a film was made? Who was it for? There's more thinking to be done on this question that I have the capacity for here, but suffice to say that, for all its faults--in fact, because of those faults--<i>The Romantic Englishwoman </i>has something to tell us about the peculiar status of a particular model of cinema--not quite arthouse and not quite not-arthouse--that had evolved out of the ruptures and eruptions of what <a href="https://ufsinfronteradotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/toward-a-third-cinema-getino-y-solanas-tricontinental-1969.pdf" target="_blank">Getino and Solanas</a> termed 'Second Cinema' and made a kind of uneasy <i>rapprochement</i> with Hollywood's 'First Cinema': a cinema within which, paradoxically, or so Daney argued, Losey had been able to make more socially subversive films than in the apparently more radical work of the <i>auteur </i>years--<i>The Boy with the Green Hair, The Dividing Line</i>, and so on. Losey's own comments on his film suggest that he had by this point himself become entrapped within the same world as his characters: a circular series of representations of a circular series of relations, the bourgeois life whose lovingly detailed exposure had become the <i>de facto</i> image of art cinema of a certain kind (Antonioni, Visconti, Losey...) </div><div><br /></div><div>In<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Losey's final film, </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">La Truite</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, released seven years down the line, Isabelle Huppert plays what is in effect an updated version of the Jeanne Moreau character in <i>Eve</i>, or, indeed, of the Helmut Berger character in </span><i>The Romantic Englishwoman</i>: a figure whose act of rebellion and survival within a bourgeois world are both entirely directed against it and entirely dependent on and circumscribed by it: "an anarchistic philosophy but at least it's there". Once more, though the characters spend a lot of time travelling within settings of various opulence, there's, really nowhere for them to go. As Daney writes<span style="font-family: inherit;">: </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><blockquote>Losey looks at this small world, this modern fish tank, with a slightly indifferent tenderness. He continues to pretend undoing the terribly tangled web of the plot, even though it is no more important than mishmash.</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the fishtank of formalism, aesthetics is divorced from pleasure: everything is a copy, nothing changes. Or, to adopt another metaphor, the picture that the puzzle portrays will always be the same, however the pieces are jumbled. Daney's "tenderness" might be read as "sympathy"--sympathy for Moureau and Berger and Huppert's acts of revolt, sympathy for the roles in which all the characters, without exception, are trapped--a sympathy so all-encompassing, and so low-level, that it can hardly be called "humanism", which protests, not with the anguish of Sirkian restraint or the caustic exaggeration of Fassbinderian satire, but with something colder, flatter, both closer in spirit to its bourgeois subjects and immeasurably further from any kind of transformative analysis of the situation in which it finds itself. And perhaps, after all, this is where certain aspects of Euro-American cinema, of Euro-American society, still find themselves, half a century on. </span></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-86792592942403696312023-01-26T16:36:00.001+00:002023-01-26T23:56:44.082+00:00IKLECTIK Gigs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-FTEv2sBGi5EQWjd5fKHI9ySkHFoTRInwcCKTDySeQ2gPTem6fDavnHGKSoiO3HdHn2P4ZnNNKYenF0PLZgUDFDv2WKuFiRF4Z3xKJLMvnJfskPkgqPk0QpjWBf07Y-YRneCyY8ffPAbIPqmaBsCmfCUy4CTn7YePM6WkMgkZOgdiOX7dO7ruA/s850/iklectik-art-lab-waterloo-creative-studio.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="565" data-original-width="850" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-FTEv2sBGi5EQWjd5fKHI9ySkHFoTRInwcCKTDySeQ2gPTem6fDavnHGKSoiO3HdHn2P4ZnNNKYenF0PLZgUDFDv2WKuFiRF4Z3xKJLMvnJfskPkgqPk0QpjWBf07Y-YRneCyY8ffPAbIPqmaBsCmfCUy4CTn7YePM6WkMgkZOgdiOX7dO7ruA/w400-h266/iklectik-art-lab-waterloo-creative-studio.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>I'll be playing at IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Ln, London SE1 7LG, with members of <b>Eddie Prévost's London Improvisation Workshop</b> (<b>Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Tony Hardie-Bick and N.O. Moore), Eddie Prévost, and John Butcher, </b>on <b>14th February.</b> Details here: <a href="https://iklectikartlab.com/electro-acoustic-responsiveness-improvised-trajectories/ " target="_blank">https://iklectikartlab.com/electro-acoustic-responsiveness-improvised-trajectories/ </a><div><br /></div><div>And a couple of weeks later, on <b>Sunday 26 February </b>2023, I'll be at IKLECTICK again for <i><b>here.here | Social Virtuosity with Eva-Maria Hoube</b><b>n</b></i>, as part of the here.here series curated by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Harry Whalley. Three new works by Eva-Maria Houben, written for Artur Vidal and Dominic Lash, will be performed, and there'll be a discussion with Eva-Maria led by myself and Emmanuelle. More details here: <a href="https://iklectikartlab.com/here-here-social-virtuosity-with-eva-maria-houben/">https://iklectikartlab.com/here-here-social-virtuosity-with-eva-maria-houben/</a> (Artur and Huw Morgan will also be performing more work by Eva-Maria on <b>Friday 24th Feb</b> at 7pm, St James Garlickhythe, Garlick Hill, London EC4V 2AF, UK. See: <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/all-good-things-come-in-threes-music-by-eva-maria-houben-tickets-518929260387">https://www.eventbrite.com/e/all-good-things-come-in-threes-music-by-eva-maria-houben-tickets-518929260387</a>) </div><div><br /></div><div>The performance of Eva-Maria's <i>Together on the Way</i> last year was truly one of the most astonishing things I've seen (I wrote about it <a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/04/houben-oliveros-mitchener-thomas.html" target="_blank">on this blog</a>): these works really live and breathe in live performance, and if you can, I'd encourage you to try to make one or other or both of these performances. </div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-4077326570934341852023-01-16T16:16:00.002+00:002023-01-16T16:53:24.397+00:00New from Materials<p>Announcing three new titles from Materials: <i>Faux Ice</i> by James Goodwin, <i>Short Leash Kept On</i> by <a href="https://www.easthamptonstar.com/201981/candace-montgomery-different-kind-political" target="_blank">Candace Hill</a>, and <i>Kruk Book: An Anthology of Frances Kruk</i>. All three can be purchased from the Materials website: <a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/">http://material-s.blogspot.com/</a></p><p>A long-awaited reprint of Askia Touré’s <i>Songhai</i> is also available for pre-order and will be printed in early 2023.</p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJiP84eXpABE0_SIhqROpC-2o_ZGLLuX4MXCBdK4eN37ZjXxHWmcAQanFlvvfI-gEpOvJNeIvX5_LGk6FeMjUuTr8D3xuva8XEeJLBGUNSVtgVj4UYrv-DwKiUs8Oi9HN3gX_YHFPKlQtoL1cHbigwiE2FT3btcK7hsEnahq7xGp_B9xtXsY2aRw/s4032/Three%20Books.jpeg" style="clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJiP84eXpABE0_SIhqROpC-2o_ZGLLuX4MXCBdK4eN37ZjXxHWmcAQanFlvvfI-gEpOvJNeIvX5_LGk6FeMjUuTr8D3xuva8XEeJLBGUNSVtgVj4UYrv-DwKiUs8Oi9HN3gX_YHFPKlQtoL1cHbigwiE2FT3btcK7hsEnahq7xGp_B9xtXsY2aRw/s320/Three%20Books.jpeg" width="320" /></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqtZylCH_ogXg53VppWkc9qAQJdOPK962d2tO5EXJYVhwk67YRjFUiU6p7csGv0aCPR9UGganJ1x45vAuVIaCPVB5er3ih2YhELjokxT1BtlXzB7mlzlYcHeUEBE_lx18PMFFcnSWA9WLLRHgA0RIjZ490GQ5ZjisnijkgcgP_125R8v6MOnIW2w/s4032/Three%20Books%20in%20Boxes.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqtZylCH_ogXg53VppWkc9qAQJdOPK962d2tO5EXJYVhwk67YRjFUiU6p7csGv0aCPR9UGganJ1x45vAuVIaCPVB5er3ih2YhELjokxT1BtlXzB7mlzlYcHeUEBE_lx18PMFFcnSWA9WLLRHgA0RIjZ490GQ5ZjisnijkgcgP_125R8v6MOnIW2w/s320/Three%20Books%20in%20Boxes.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3JoUGHkyi3zs0UwY2hRH7cc_Vbv3Ut9BsQTT7ysOaiuCPk7YVpTmdcLYJacv1m_POG2YBhxDedG6d46gg21j92yvjNiMKNb8H-hhD9pbEsgv5lbLhxkbZjYIqj1DGM679fKZL7AnKmUT-LXOMn-MvrQ9ahpRtpusPuBMOVF22y2k6CCeOoHDJyQ/s4032/Short%20Leash.jpeg" style="clear: left; 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text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6CkhTWTwGfyBCm6jpcJG_tP9ACnUnIWGrMU7XZ-JZVL2QrzOmpp3lpWoiAyTyrOB1uTzyoSEZqRxhg5dZ6yqiw7upzZF3zQxZ1zE2Qbt9eiVhGy9Jr_AH_AyZfuQ_4_YZ-z3U6WQL5r8F5VZZgvxx-6iUEZjcMsZaYSXSOJvgW8w1_SzGIvcjiQ/s4032/Faux%20Ice.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6CkhTWTwGfyBCm6jpcJG_tP9ACnUnIWGrMU7XZ-JZVL2QrzOmpp3lpWoiAyTyrOB1uTzyoSEZqRxhg5dZ6yqiw7upzZF3zQxZ1zE2Qbt9eiVhGy9Jr_AH_AyZfuQ_4_YZ-z3U6WQL5r8F5VZZgvxx-6iUEZjcMsZaYSXSOJvgW8w1_SzGIvcjiQ/s320/Faux%20Ice.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-89110758297312134582023-01-04T12:01:00.001+00:002023-01-04T12:01:01.974+00:00Updates for January<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsx1uVNzDTUtK8ZKLUD4kDl04RdKvfgHjYXE9wLh_KPNwZDWlogtI5GMifPViMrDAoAmQ9ADfl86CVbvEhVNEpe1AO4YvYMvFj6I4cqoSfUfVfl33W8D7e9EPZG4eK4zhQD6O2tbgYDmMGKvGQqDK_MdYDJhHScTeVY1cquzcJGXIdwky0BsQNYA/s609/Screen%20Shot%202023-01-02%20at%2022.21.09.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="503" data-original-width="609" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsx1uVNzDTUtK8ZKLUD4kDl04RdKvfgHjYXE9wLh_KPNwZDWlogtI5GMifPViMrDAoAmQ9ADfl86CVbvEhVNEpe1AO4YvYMvFj6I4cqoSfUfVfl33W8D7e9EPZG4eK4zhQD6O2tbgYDmMGKvGQqDK_MdYDJhHScTeVY1cquzcJGXIdwky0BsQNYA/w400-h330/Screen%20Shot%202023-01-02%20at%2022.21.09.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Pamenar Press will be hosting an online launch for <i>Present Continuous </i>on 15th January, with responses from Linda Kemp, Ciarán Finlayson, Tyrone Williams, and Ghazal Mosadeq. In-person launch hopefully to follow in the coming months... The link for the event is here: <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-of-present-continuous-by-david-grundy-tickets-501266961977?aff=erelpanelorg" target="_blank">https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-of-present-continuous-by-david-grundy-tickets-501266961977?aff=erelpanelorg</a></p><p>Also this month, Lisa Jeschke and I will be hosting a reading/discussion with Materials/Materialien at <a href="https://www.halle-fuer-kunst.de/public/en" target="_blank">Halle für Kunst Lüneburg</a>, Germany, on Sunday 28th, with readings by Laurel Uziell, James Goodwin (launching his new Materials book, <i>Faux Ice</i>), and Lütfiye Güzel, followed by a discussion about the first ten years of the press with Lisa and myself. A book table will also remain in place for the duration of the Halle's group exhibition, focused on the various stages of production of an artwork. Thanks to Elisa R. Linn and Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff for the invite.</p><p>News of four new books from <a href="http://material-s.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Materials</a> shortly to follow....</p>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-46467831521257142262023-01-02T17:13:00.016+00:002023-01-05T14:46:22.512+00:00Jackie McLean's Cry<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kg0oW-Ywvqk?start=130" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><div><i>Jackie McLean, ‘Hootnan’</i>(<i>Action! Action! Action! a.k.a. Action, rec. 1964)</i></div><div><i></i></div><div><br /><div>Towards the end of his solo on ‘Hootnan’, the final track on the album <i>Action! Action! Action!</i>, Jackie McLean unleashes an extreme upper-register cry at the climactic point of an otherwise conventionally swinging phrase. Rhythmically, it fits perfectly; in terms of harmony, it’s a transposition--albeit an extreme one--of the note that he might logically be expected to play next. Yet that sound seems to come out of nowhere, its timbre entirely startling, a miniature explosion that dies down almost as soon as it appears only to to explode once more as McLean unleashes further altissimo notes, each held longer than the last, before winding down the solo into some elegantly curlicuing bop licks that signal in the next soloist, trumpeter Charles Tolliver. No one one breaks a sweat. Blink and you could miss it; or explain it away as an aberration, an eccentricity, a tic. This was, after all, but one of many such moments in McLean’s solos once he began playing “out”--some variant of this type of cry occurs on virtually every check of <i>Let Freedom Ring,</i> for example (check the acerbic ‘Melody for Melonae’ and the devastating version of Bud Powell’s ‘<a href="https://youtu.be/Bla5film7jE?list=OLAK5uy_lXEwswxIotruwvrCK9QNOlhooIxUA2h6s&t=199" target="_blank">I</a>’<a href="https://youtu.be/Bla5film7jE?list=OLAK5uy_lXEwswxIotruwvrCK9QNOlhooIxUA2h6s&t=199" target="_blank">ll Keep Loving You</a>’ for examples). It’s a relatively simple musical manoeuvre--albeit one requiring technical chops. But it’s much harder to place in terms of its ‘meaning’. McLean’s altissimo cry--some writers call it a “squeal”--is not so much the explosion of emotion, not the idea of spontaneous overflow that characterises the idea of the cry or “scream” in the contemporaneous free jazz with which it shared space in New York--Albert Ayler, Frank Wright, Coltrane (<i>Action! Action! Action! </i>was recorded the year before, though not released until two years after, Coltrane’s <i>Ascension</i>). Neither was it the celebratory cry of the barwalking R&B “<a href="https://fromthevaults-boppinbob.blogspot.com/2021/09/lynn-hope-born-26-september-1926.html" target="_blank">screamers</a>” and “honkers” from whom the New Black Musicians of the sixties inherited their own cries, the line that links Coltrane to his former employer, Earl Bostic, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnXeRiXnV6c" target="_blank">up there in orbit</a>”: multiphonics, altissimo tones, turned from musical effects into the basis of a new vocabulary. McLean’s is, rather, an <i>analytical </i>cry, one which seems to offer a vantage point the music from which to observe it, a kind of shattering of a musical fourth wall. The McLean cry radically extends the principal of transposition, of the brief foray into another register, moving so far beyond the conventionally-charted octaves as to seem beyond transposition: a sudden entry from above, an alien sound, hard and metallic and material, bright and implacable, sour and sharp and firm. “Ecstasy”, <i>ex-stasis</i>, means to stand outside oneself, but to stand outside oneself, as McLean does here, need not be ecstatic: looking in on the music while being in it, stepping back while still soloing “out front”, examining the matter at hand from all sides, aslant or straight on. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this, McLean’s use of the “cry” has something in common with Sonny Rollins’ use of the altissimo register on another horn--the tenor--during the same period. Rollins uses the technique to perhaps its most startling effect in his superlative duet with Coleman Hawkins on ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_cKU_SZvJk" target="_blank">Lover Man</a>’ from <i>Sonny Meets Hawk</i>, recorded shortly after the release of McLean’s <i>Let Freedom Ring</i>, or a few years later, in the eerie conclusion to the title track of <i><a href="https://youtu.be/-hHXhnKEmpM?t=1125" target="_blank">East Broadway Run Down</a>. </i>Over a firm rhythmic base, and in tandem with other musicians playing in generally conventional register and key, in Rollin’s hands, this studied, practiced, concentrated, focused sound is too precise to be called ungainly, but could never be called conventionally elegant. It provides punctuation, atmosphere, a sharpening or blurring of edges like a smear in the middle of a precisely delineated painting, or a sharp line in the midst of a field of abstract colour. It clarifies and confuses at the same time. As with McLean, this is not a sound that signifies an excess, an emotional “hotness”, but something else altogether--something intellectual, cerebral, the sound of the working of thought, and that in turn encourages a self-conscious reflection on musical form. </div><div><br /></div><div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e_cKU_SZvJk?start=450" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe> </div><div><i>Sonny Rollins/Coleman Hawkins, ‘Lover Man’ (Sonny Meets Hawk, 1963)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Rollins’ legendary sabbatical from the cut-and-thrust business world of the jazz scene, his period of hermetic practice on the Williamsburg Bridge from 1959 to 1961, saw him playing alone, for fifteen to sixteen hours a day, developing his breathing through yoga, working through every possible sound, legitimate or illegitimate, he could wring from the tenor saxophone. In a <a href="https://www.saxontheweb.net/threads/sonny-rollins-practising-and-altissimo.63324/" target="_blank">2007 interview</a>, he remarked: </div><div><blockquote>[I’m] interested in the technique of playing in different registers. I’ve spent a long time working on getting a full sound and the proper accuracy on the notes you find above the so-called “normal” range of the instrument. I’ve been experimenting with it, really, since the 1950’s. I’ve got books on such things. What interests me is the accuracy and the security of getting each note right and full every time [...] The whole problem was in getting to feel secure about creating the notes as I wanted; in assimilating them entirely into my “normal” technique. I don’t want to have an artificial division between registers - it should be seamless in my playing. Only then can I incorporate it into my natural improvisational practises. I can do it privately, when I practise, but it is only recently that I’ve felt that I’ve reached the proper level of note production whereby I could play it on stage. I’m building up to it. I may try it soon.</blockquote></div><div>Rollins had, of course, been incorporating such notes in his playing from after his sabbatical--if not before--but his comments suggest an important way in which what he learned in the bridge, while providing the basis for everything he did since, could never be entirely assimilated. The note that is played in private, in practise, but not on stage cannot be given away easily: it is self-possession, the self’s possession, that which might, at times, be given away as sonic gift, air from another planet briefly wafting through. But care must be taken. Recall the ‘Afro-Horn’ of Henry Dumas’ short story ‘<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JDoDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA76&dq=Will+the+Circle+be+Unbroken?+dumas&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvhpfp5Kn8AhUIWcAKHXr0ALMQ6AF6BAgCEAI#v=onepage&q=Will%20the%20Circle%20be%20Unbroken%3F%20dumas&f=false" target="_blank">Will the Circle be Unbroken?</a>’: an instrument that, in unveiling the “the freedom of freedom”, produces vibrations that cause the hearts of white audience members to give out. “I’m building up to it. I may try it soon.” <a href="https://www.saxontheweb.net/threads/sonny-rollins-practising-and-altissimo.63324/" target="_blank">Another story</a> has Rollins backstage practicing the highest possible of registers, sounds almost too high for the human ear to hear, before going on stage and blowing the lowest possible note. </div><div><br /></div><div>What secret is being held here? Rollins’ return from the bridge and to public performance serves as an almost too-perfect allegory of between the public and the private dimensions of jazz: a triumphant public display by which the music is returned to circulation. Yet recall that this return was not only to the atmosphere of nourishing sociality in which the music could be created, but to its exploitation in the environment of uncertain labour conditions, police clampdowns and organised crime which, as Gerald Horne notes in his recent book <i><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/product/jazz-and-justice/" target="_blank">Jazz and Justice</a></i>, dogged jazz throughout its history. Rollins had <a href="https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/how-sonny-defeated-the-dragon/" target="_blank">conquered earlier addiction problems</a> in Chicago a few years earlier; McLean likewise suffered from addiction problems early on in his career, an experience he drew on <a href="https://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2020/10/jackie-mclean-and-connection-at.html" target="_blank">playing one of the junkies </a>in Jack Gelber’s play <i>The Connection </i>(1959-61), and in turn worked in community programmes such as the HAR-YOU initiative in Harlem. As A.B. Spellman notes in his profile of McLean for the classic <i><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Four_Jazz_Lives/i_ldXE_MGWkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">Four Lives in the Bebop Business</a></i>, heroin had been flooded into musicians’ communities by the Mafia as bebop was beginning and the young McLean was beginning as a musician. </div><div><div><blockquote>I have been told by several men who used heroin during the Forties that, looking back on their own experiences, there was a conscious attempt (most say by the Mafia) to create a market. [...] There was heroin in the jazz set before it was on the street. In [the jazz] set, which Jackie admired so much, heroin was one of the greatest symbols of hipness. It was in this era that the idea of hip developed, and Jackie is one of the last of the original hip musicians. They created a language, a dress, a music, and a high which were closed unto themselves and allowed them to one-up the rest of the world. The bebop era was the first time that the black ego was expressed in America with self-assurance, and heroin, because its effect blocks out all doubt, is a drug that facilitates the self-assurance. There was heroin all around the hip teen-age set that Jackie ran with, and many of the idols whose music, speech, dress, whose every mannerism they were endeavoring to copy, were heroin addicts.</blockquote></div><div>Interviewed for Spellman’s book, McLean suggests that heroin use provided a kind of internalised defense against the backdrop of the broader structural inequalities of which its use was symptom, rather than, as was stereotypically portrayed, cause. “McLean”, writes Spellman, “does not consider having to get his pennies together to meet the connection any more distasteful or self-destructive than choosing to live with dishonest record companies disrespectful nightclub owners, or a disinterested public that guaranteed only long periods of unemployment.” Users were, however, subject to what effectively amounted to a widespread barring of the labour force from its own market, enforced by the State. McLean lost his cabaret card in 1957 and was unable to regularly perform in New York clubs for the next decade. In Spellman’s words, “the law requiring cabaret cards issued by the police department for work in nightclubs selling liquor [wa]s a totally antiquated one which by now applie[d] almost exclusively to jazz musicians in a most discriminatory way”. McLean was instead forced to turn to the recording studio, recording numerous sessions for labels such as Blue Note: studio replacing club as space for experimentation or, more often, simply making ends meet. Ironically enough, it was his turn as a junkie in <i>The Connection</i> that guaranteed him a period of employment, travelling internationally with the play. McLean’s presence, both as a person with addiction issues, and as a performing musician, was acceptable when framed within the lens of a white playwright’s art; unacceptable when he tried to make his way in the regular labour market in which he was forced to frame his own art.</div><div><br /></div><div>But for Rollins, in his time on the bridge after kicking his habit in 1958, and for McLean after he’d kicked the habit in 1964, there was another way, one which took the attitude found in the closed, self-assured ego facilitated in the bebop ear by heroin--Spellman’s “a language, a dress, a music, and a high which were closed unto themselves and allowed them to one-up the rest of the world”--and turned it toward another model of inward strength. The stakes of survival--material, literal, physical, spiritual--all of it--were high. What Sonny Rollins learned on the bridge was not just technique, but a certain privacy, a secrecy, the reliance on inner resources, akin to the register of hermetic knowledge--figured as a kind of combination of street smarts, spiritual discipline, and aesthetic focus--that McLean’s bandmate <a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/06/some-other-stuff-grachan-moncur-iii.html" target="_blank">Grachan Moncur </a>talked about in relation to his own survival during this period, and which he termed “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJRcWW0R44Y" target="_blank">nomadic</a>” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BVglZ00cMU" target="_blank">gnostic</a>”. Such knowledge suggested an alternative to the reliance of the “hip” on the drug high; it might also be known by its more familiar name as <i>the cool,</i> in the politicized way Amiri Baraka <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Autobiography_of_LeRoi_Jones/Z-C4E3zdBxkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=amiri+baraka+%22cool%22autobiography&pg=PA87&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">talks about that term</a>. “Cool [...] before Lee Konitz and Chet Baker absorbed it” was, for Baraka, a knowing but defiant silence during a time of political reaction, the flipside to the “hot” he and his fellow Newarkers had absorbed from the R&B “screamers”, but a part of the same impulse of rooted defiance. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>And so we might understand the altissimo register that we hear in Rollins as, in part, the sound of that secret knowledge on the bridge: a little sampling of it, not to be used too often, because it can’t be integrated into the public traction of the music--tones that won’t easily, in Rollins’ words, “assimilate [...] into my ‘normal’ technique.” When Rollins plays those notes, the joins show: new layers are created, new levels, ghosts or alien sounds. That’s one side of it, at least. Hearing the <i>Sonny Meets Hawk </i>version of ‘Lover Man’ for the first time, one could parse his playing alongside Coleman Hawkins as disruptive, aiming to shock. But really, it’s about history: Hawkins himself had experimented early on with the altissimo register in pieces like ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbfJAQR4g9U" target="_blank">Queer Notions</a>’ or in his famed ‘Body and Soul’ solo--in the process essentially inventing bebop<i> avant la lettre</i>. In taking that technique somewhere else, Rollins was also showing it back to the older musician, returning a gift: here’s what you’ve given me, here’s where I’m taking it. In other words, Rollins’ altissimo is the sound of the social, of connections being passed on, as much as it’s the sound of publicly-displayed secret knowledge. And these are the twinned, doubled, dialectical aspects of the avant-garde of the fifties and sixties: the hot and the cool; the passing on of knowledge, and its transformation into something else that sometimes moves so far beyond its initial source of inspiration as to seem almost unrecognisable to it. </div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LCryzjns6GA?start=277" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><i>Steve Lacy, ‘Existence’ (Remains, 1991) </i></div><div><br />McLean on alto (his <a href="https://ethaniverson.com/interviews/interview-with-jackie-mclean-by-steve-lehman/" target="_blank">first instrument</a> having been soprano); Rollins on tenor (his first instrument having been alto); a third player to add to the purveyors of analytical cries is soprano player Steve Lacy, who would sometimes <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Saxophone_Colossus/E5dTEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22jackie+mclean%22+%22altissimo%22&pg=PP263&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">rehearse with Rollins on the bridge</a>, and who, thanks to the already-higher range of his instrument, would over time develop an extreme upper range on soprano, staying up there, sometimes at whistle pitch, with resolute, vibrato-less clarity (check the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifhy6fDCdfY" target="_blank">extraordinary opening </a>to the quintet version of his piece ‘Esteem’ from a 1975 Paris live date, or on <i><a href="https://youtu.be/qAljbheClN8?t=448" target="_blank">The Wire</a></i> from the same year). Lacy called the extreme upper register “going to the moon”. “When you go to the moon like that, it hurts, and you can’t do it often and it’s got to be controllable”. These questions of assimilation (Rollins) and control (Lacy) are practical ones--questions of technique, of physical capacity, of not damaging lip or teeth or lungs. In a <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780822388586-004/pdf" target="_blank">1961 article</a> that Lacy wrote for <i>Metronome </i>magazine on the potential of his instrument, he observed that “certain portions of the soprano’s range are intrinsically out of tune with the rest of the horn. All instruments have ‘bad’ notes but the soprano has whole segments of such notes.” The solution found in previous decades by Sidney Bechet--the only real precedent for the instrument’s use in jazz--had been to deploy wide vibrato. This approach was not one, however, for Lacy. “If one wants the power of, say, a Bechet without the vibrato”, he noted, “one must humor each note, bending it to the desired pitch. This requires long and assiduous practice with much frustration, or else a high natural sensitivity, coupled with extreme lip flexibility.” The ‘cry’, the extreme high note, is a technical problem, a battle as well as a collaboration with the instrument, a bending of its natural inclinations against itself: something that is artificial, the result of work and practice, far from the myth of spontaneous overflow.</div><div><br /></div><div>Music is <i>work</i>, insisted musicians, like McLean, like Lacy, like Rollins, for whom too often remuneration was in short supply, who had to work within damaging and degrading labour conditions is work. It is, of course, play too, but play in a serious sense: play as adaptation, improvisational, survival. Recall Thelonious Monk’s piece ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ0W7dIExGE" target="_blank">Work</a>’, recorded on an album with Rollins in 1956, and by Lacy on his own debut album <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeUDr556J94" target="_blank">Soprano Sax </a></i>two years later, a version marked by what reviewer Bob Rusch <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/album/soprano-sax-mw0000263600" target="_blank">calls </a>“a controlled tension [...] like everybody’s trying to play, carefully, to a common goal. It’s almost as if someone were present to make sure everybody stayed within obvious perimeters.” Lacy was, it’s true, still at a germinal stage of his playing, undergoing an apprenticeship with Cecil Taylor, who’d first taken him to see Monk, several years before his own six-month stint in Monk’s band. Be that as it may, there’s a quality to both Lacy’s smoother and Monk’s more jagged renderings that suggests something of the title’s doubled sense: laconic, gritted-teeth, a relaxed nervous tension, that which turns work to play, to playing, as serious as your life.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lacy didn’t know addiction as McLean and Rollins had done, lived in conditions of privation, at one point in New York, sleeping in a tent inside an apartment he couldn’t afford to heat, at another, having decided to depart the States in search of musical opportunity, getting <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Steve_Lacy/poIr4OLF9ZQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22you+had+a+rather+difficult+stay%22+steve+lacy&pg=PA67&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">stuck in Argentina</a> in the aftermath of the right-wing coup of 1966, over the next nine months exploring free improvisation and recording the extraordinary <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kIFRYjTAfw&t=418s" target="_blank">The Forest and the Zoo</a></i> with Enrico Rava, Johnny Dyani, and Louis Moholo-Moholo and discovering what he later called “the <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Steve_Lacy/j2yel0bY6LYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=steve+lacy+%22a+misadventure+in+argentina%22&pg=PA188&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">hermetic free</a>”. “I made that [record] because I thought the music was too important to lose”, Lacy remarked. “It was what we’d call the ‘hermetic free’. The point of no return. Where the music had the maximum calories in it. There was nothing to say, no words necessary. Just: ‘play’. After that, the music went elsewhere.” In the seventies, Lacy moved away from purely free improvisation, finding the balance of inside and outside, composition and improvisation that would characterise the rest of his mature output: the aim to find a music that, as he said, would “try to get it to the bone”, a principle exemplified by Lacy’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIU8ucsqIkg" target="_blank">piece of the same name</a>, its one-word title typical of the dry brevity that characterised his aesthetic: “snips”, “stabs”, “the crust”, “the woe”, “the wire”.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lacy’s playing in such contexts, particularly the solo dates which he made a speciality, would often deploy altissimo as the high point of a working through of scalar figures, a logical and relentless reach up to a point necessitated by its context: an implacable and relentless push, necessitated by the contours of compositional frameworks in which figures would be repeated--sometimes obsessively--put through the permutations of transposition, as if pushing the identity of a musical phrase as far as it could go before it transforms into something else. Take, for instance, the closing portion of the 1991 version of his piece ‘Existence’, a video for which is embedded above: the first movement of his 1970’s solo suite <i>Tao</i>, “composed for six elements of Lao Tzu’s greater principle”. Lacy recorded the piece on on several occasions: in <a href="http://inconstantsol.blogspot.com/2013/07/steve-lacy-solo-at-mandara-alm-records.html" target="_blank">Tokyo</a> and <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/2880611-Steve-Lacy-Axieme" target="_blank">Como</a> in 1975, released as <i>Solo at Mandara </i>and <i>Axieme</i> on ALM and on Red Records respectively, in <a href="http://www.emanemdisc.com/E4042.html">Montreal </a>in 1979, released as <i>Hooky</i> by British free improvisation label Emanem, and on the 1991 album <i>Remains,</i> released on Hat ART. The titles to the individual movements--‘Existence’, ‘The Way’, ‘Bone’, ‘Name’, ‘The Breath’, and ‘Life on Its Way’--suggest an approach in which the spiritual is figured through the relentless material, through the negotiations of body and instrument. This is not a music of representation, though Lacy was always drawn to using words, and in time had become perhaps the finest exponent of a particular brand of art song he made his own, but of resolute and relentless <i>presence</i>, an existential music, devoid of sentiment, which left the listener to make up their own conclusions. Around four minutes into ‘Existence’, after a pause of a good few seconds, Lacy begins a figure that progressively cycles higher and higher, traversing the gamut from a throaty low note to a high-wire screech: the cry, taken higher and higher each time before things are taken back down and the piece ends at a point at once definitive and entirely open-ended: a multiphonic, two notes at once, two in one, dialectical clarity and potential. Lacy has already played some upper register notes in the opening section of the piece, running up and down the scale to some high, exposed places, but the high notes towards the end of the piece are something else. Perhaps “cry” is the wrong word, suggesting as it does an involuntary spontaneity or an apostrophic expressivity. These notes mark intensity, but not excitement: a tight, chill grip, a condensation, a focusing of attention, what Lacy in another piece termed “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RabEbO7OL48" target="_blank">the peak</a>”.</div><div><br /></div><div>These “peaks” occur at the end of the 1991 recording of ‘Existence’, serving a function akin to that of the musical climax. But, as Lacy’s former student Jorrit Dijkstra reveals in an <a href="https://www.jorritdijkstra.com/2021/02/01/essay-on-existence/" target="_blank">incisive essay</a> on learning this piece with the saxophonist, they also echo its introduction, “where one ‘warms up the saxophone’ or sets the atmosphere of the tune by slowly exploring the pitches of the first scale, much like the rubato ‘alap’ introduction to an Indian raga.” High notes are often something the saxophonist must build up to--think McLean’s cries towards the end of his solo, moments of focused climax which he followed his former bandleader Art Blakey’s lessons about the art and arc of constructing narrative and drama within a concise, hard-hitting statement, or Rollins’ unearthly altissimo during the final portion of ‘Lover Man’. They can, however, also be a jumping off point, straight from the diving board. Consider here the aforementioned opening of Lacy’s ‘Esteem’, a piece dating from around the same period as ‘Existence’, in which a preludial circling through transposed notes, from high to low, wavers and hovers before settling into a melancholic melody which emerges from it in a kind of exhausted release. That transition is suggested particularly well in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoPJvECAy7w" target="_blank">duo version</a> of the piece with Mal Waldron on their album<i> Communiqué</i>, a good twenty years after it was first recorded. Waldron’s sombre fatalism fits the atmosphere of the piece perfectly--an outgrowth of a certain trend in the music of the fifties, that David Rosenthal, in his <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Hard_Bop/apEkwJbpukUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22starker+and+more+tormented%22&pg=PT43&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">fine study of hard bop</a>, identifies in particular with his and Jackie McLean’s work: “More astringent, less popular musicians, whose work is starker and more tormented [...] The mood of their work [...] tended to be somber. They favored the minor mode, and their playing possessed a sinister—sometimes tragic—air not unlike the atmosphere of, say, Billie Holiday’s ‘You’re My Thrill’. ” Waldron, another survivor of the heroin years, last accompanist of Holidays last accompanist, who, like Rollins and Lacy, found salvation in exile--this time in Europe, where he was able to clean up and to move his playing into a territory closer to that of free playing--plays as if every note is his last, singular and to itself, yet completely focused as part of a musical chain, a process of scalar rising and falling, the stringing out of seemingly infinite patterns, the building of the biggest structures available from the smallest toolkit possible. Like an experiment with holding your breath as long as you can, Waldron’s and Lacy’s approach alike is a stripping back, a going without, that is at the same time an excess, a constant exceeding, “going to the moon”.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>As Dijkstra notes, many of the pieces Lacy would perform solo date from the early seventies--that period he identified as the move from the ‘hermetic free’ to what Lacy called the ‘post-free’, that music that cut down to the bone. Lacy <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Steve_Lacy/poIr4OLF9ZQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=steve+lacy+%22c+major%22&pg=PA189&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">comments</a> on the return of elements like the C major scale to his music, the embrace, rather than the abolition, of limits as a paradoxical means toward freedom of a different sort. In the pieces written during this period, can be found a deliberate and definite reliance on patterns and exercises, akin to those found in practice books, a foregrounding of technique, not for its own sake, but as a working-through of process, of the basics of music. Dijkstra comments of Lacy’s composition notebooks, now held by the Library of Congress:</div><div><blockquote>In the first few notebooks we find messy sketches from a very experimental early period (right after he moved from New York to Italy around 1967) where he delved into graphical scores, word combinations, conceptual free improv ideas, anti-Vietnam war protest music, and the first sketches for suites such as the Precipitation Suite and Tao Suite. The pieces in the early ’70s are studies in how one can write music about anything – from the weather to food, materials, animals, expressions, feelings, etc. <i>Cahier n°4</i> (1973) alone contains “The Wax,” “The Wake,” “The Wage,” “Weal,” “The Wool,” “The Woe,” “The Wow!,” “The Oil,” “Salts,” “Fruits,” “Laps,” “Nags,” “Flaps,” “Ladies,” “Scraps,” “Flops,” “Slabs,” “Worms,” “Lumps,” “Stumps,” “Moms,” “Snorts,” “Slats,” “Stabs,” “Hops,” “Snips,” “Chops,” “Tots,” “Tracks,” and “Revolutionary Suicide.” The vast majority of works from this period are interval patterns grouped into loops, repeated a number of times, followed by a free improvisation. After the mid ’70s his works become mostly texts set to music, and more melodic.</blockquote></div><div>Lacy, as this suggests, would move to art song, to an approach integrating the free forms of the late sixties (the ‘hermetic free’) and early seventies with the exercise-based disciplines of his early seventies pieces (the ‘post-free’)--what he called the ‘poly-free’. But, while one should avoid an over-schematic division of Lacy’s playing into different periods, it’s the moment before that integration that interests me here: that moment of the pare-down, of the scale, the practice book, the composition notebook, of the deliberate establishing of limits. Those looped interval patterns that we hear in ‘Existence’ and ‘Esteem’--loops that push the intervals higher and higher, are the sounds of exercises, of practice: like Rollins on the bridge, the endless <i>work </i>at sound, outside the circulation of music as labour environment, work of a different sort--preparation, practice, a private or even secret readying of “the way”. As his notebooks reveal, Lacy dedicated ‘Existence’ to John Coltrane, dating the piece “Rome 1969”, before revising it in 1975: “Bone”, the piece which gave Lacy’s new ethos its guiding metaphor, was composed in 1970 and dedicated to Lester Young. Lacy explained the dedication to Existence by its resemble to Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’, its scalar working-through at a high tempo--at least in initial versions, and the difficulties this presented for improvisation. Like ‘Giant Steps’, the piece is a rigorously arranged series of harmonic patterns based on large interval leaps. In that sense, it is thoroughly <i>composed</i>, yet, given that these patterns are fundamentally designed as the basis for improvisation, improvisationally demanding: the soloist must both negotiate technically-tricky passages while imparting their solo with the feel of more than a simple exercise. The relative success or failure of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2c1Xj-Ub-bsPwuSjy6I_zMxK5hJAstEZ" target="_blank">multiple versions</a> of Coltrane’s composition attempted by any number of saxophonists over the years, and the fact that Coltrane himself never played it live following the initial studio recording, suggest some of this difficulty. Teaching ‘Existence’ to Dijkstra, Lacy did not hand over a copy of a score. Instead, he played through eleven different pentatonic scales and recited the words of the relevant poem from the <i>Tao Te Ching:</i> the musician is intended to memorize and improvise on these scales, while reciting the words to the poem in their head. The pentatonic, a famously pan-global scale that turns up in numerous different musical cultures, is Dijkstra notes, “often considered more fundamental or rootsy than other scales.” But Lacy does not aim for something ‘natural’. Once again, this is <i>work.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The melodies in the Tao suite are composed to the (silent) words of the <i>Tao Te Ching. </i>“While playing the melody,” Dijkstra notes, “one should express the words and sing them in one’s head.” These words and the dedication to Coltrane alike are silent, messages for the player--think, perhaps, of the silent words from Hölderlin inscribed in the score to Luigi Nono’s <i>Fragmente-Stille</i>. They are a private, interior discipline, that interacts with, but does not necessarily translate over to, the social network of playing music to an audience. Dijkstra explains: “Lacy dedicated virtually all of his compositions to a specific artist, musician, writer, scientist, or other high-level practitioner), often a picture of the dedicatee, a date, sometimes a place where it was composed, and specific performance instructions. In many cases, these references connect in a way that makes artistic sense but is hard to describe.” Whether in the tight-knit quintet Lacy had with his wife Irene Aebi, pianist Bobby Few, and fellow saxophonist Steve Potts, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer Oliver Johnson, or in his solo recordings, such dedications were a way to emphasize music’s collective nature, even as it most apparently stripped-down, individual, existential, isolated. “Every piece I write”, Lacy observed, “has a reference to somebody as well as the things which have to do with the person.” Like that of Rollins, this is a music of silence and secrets and of public declaration and declamation at once. And, like that of Rollins, it is a music that, however new, <i>sui generis,</i> or unearthly it may sound, is always rooted in a negotiation with tradition, with history, with predecessors: that which has come before.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>In exploring the soprano at a time when the instrument had almost entirely disappeared from the jazz front-line, Lacy <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Steve_Lacy/j2yel0bY6LYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=steve+lacy+upper+register&pg=PA170&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">remarked</a>, he had drawn on the high notes both of Louis Armstrong and of operatic sopranos: </div><div><blockquote>Its register is quite vast, as big as for the right hand of the piano. There are a lot of territories to explore: the moon on high, the earth below. The tonality is very feminine—I’ve studied the voices of women singers a lot. Louis Armstrong also played very high, with a lot of excitement, like in the operas of Puccini.</blockquote></div>Queer notions: the upper register, the cry or squeal or scream, is that range of the instrument that at once affirms and blurs gendered signifiers--the stereotype of the phallic high trumpet analysed in Krin Gabbard’s ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225861">Signifyin(g) the Phallus</a>’, on the one hand, the blurring of the operatic high voice, of castrati and opera queens, that Wayne Koestenbaum sketches in <i><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Queen_s_Throat/T6aKjgEACAAJ?hl=en" target="_blank">The Queen’s Throat</a></i>, on the other; sound both utterly material and totally unearthly; those two sides that the new jazz of the fifties and the sixties always channelled, often at the same time. This is about work; it’s about play; it’s about survival; it’s about knowledge. Lacy, as Dijkstra notes, returned to music from the <i>Tao</i> suite while dying of cancer in 2004, new arrangements in jagged handwriting. Music, Lacy believed, exists outside the self. “We only follow it to the end of our life: then it goes on without us.” Ex-stasis, continuance, excess. The music, its cry, knows more than it lets on, and more than the person playing and creating it knows.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Lacy; McLean; Rollins. Three musicians, three instruments, three kinds of cry. Listening to these analytical cries, their similarities and differences, moves us beyond the binaries and dichotomies by which jazz and jazz-adjacent musics are still too often understood. Jackie McLean’s cry, like that of Rollins, like that of Lacy, is delight; is disturbance; is analysis; is that which defies analysis. It speaks and it sings. It knows more than we could ever know.</div></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-86546705199356212142022-12-30T15:26:00.002+00:002022-12-30T15:26:44.537+00:00Blog Posts in 2022<div><i><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/11/present-continuous.html" target="_blank">Present Continuous</a> </i>(Update Post) (November 2022)</div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/11/new-pamphlet.html" target="_blank">New Pamphlet</a> (Update Post) (November 2022)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/10/juliet-fraser-wave-songs.html" target="_blank">Juliet Fraser - Wave Songs</a> (October 2022) </div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/10/new.html" target="_blank">New</a> (Update Post) (October 2022)</div><div><br /></div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/09/sean-bonney-special-issue.html" target="_blank">Sean Bonney Special Issue</a> (September 2022) <div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/09/pharoah.html" target="_blank">Pharoah</a> (On the passing of Pharoah Sanders) (September 2022) <br /><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/09/betsy-jolas-btunes.html" target="_blank">Betsy Jolas’ <i>bTunes</i></a> (September 2022) <br /><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/09/up-to-date-from-attica-to-amm.html" target="_blank">Up-to-date (From Attica to AMM) (Update Post)</a> (September 2022) </div><div><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/09/songs-offerings-wastes-and-suites.html" target="_blank">Songs, Wastes, Soadies and Suites</a> (September 2022) </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/08/hip-hop-genre-and-history-pink-siifu.html" target="_blank">Hip-Hop, Genre and History: Pink Siifu Live</a> (August 2022)<br /><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/08/time-jumping-over-itself-roscoe.html" target="_blank">Time Jumping Over Itself: Roscoe Mitchell in London </a> (August 2022)<br />
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<a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/06/some-other-stuff-grachan-moncur-iii.html" target="_blank"><i>Some Other Stuff</i>: Grachan Moncur, III (1937-2022)</a> (June 2022)<br />
<a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/06/il-prigioniero-at-barbican.html" target="_blank"><i>Il Prigioniero</i> at the Barbican</a> (June 2022)<br />
<br /><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/05/recents-viviermcpheenodosusduras.html" target="_blank">Recents (Vivier/McPhee/Nodosus/Duras)</a> (May 2022)<br />
<br /><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/04/anna-mendelssohn-amiri-baraka-more.html" target="_blank">Anna Mendelssohn / Amiri Baraka (More Recent Writing)</a> (Update Post) (April 2022)<br /><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/04/houben-oliveros-mitchener-thomas.html" target="_blank">Houben / Oliveros / Mitchener / Thomas</a> (April 2022)<br />
<br /><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/03/writing.html" target="_blank">March News</a> (Update Post) (March 2022)<br />
<br /><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/01/fanfares-from-abyss-bill-dixons-late.html" target="_blank">
Fanfares from the Abyss: Bill Dixon</a><a href="http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/09/betsy-jolas-btunes.html" target="_blank">’</a>s Late Style (January 2022) <div><a href="https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/#:~:text=Dixon%27s%20Late%20Style-,To%20Start%20the%20Year,-%E2%96%BA%C2%A0%202021%20(17" target="_blank">To Start the Year</a> (Update Post) (January 2022)</div></div></div></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-50765867001247731142022-11-23T14:33:00.000+00:002022-11-23T14:33:50.581+00:00Present Continuous<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjphU1q6WSAousZqv1b2T2EO0Xc5ulp-C_UjGFm-nOAUwf-sDcMcSxFak3MN-u-WRBeJZbzrqe-a1sKmt9t3G-yBYjLOCd_1o16odI5qaqKP_VMX7ArN67pQRepJedhUWPh64zpoMBIKhTgkB1huz-g7vS0znBiOF2a0PrcvzDaJg5E5uH4TveBqA/s1742/77ec07_7eda97a99c15459abf64e4a278b3dfac_mv2.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="1742" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjphU1q6WSAousZqv1b2T2EO0Xc5ulp-C_UjGFm-nOAUwf-sDcMcSxFak3MN-u-WRBeJZbzrqe-a1sKmt9t3G-yBYjLOCd_1o16odI5qaqKP_VMX7ArN67pQRepJedhUWPh64zpoMBIKhTgkB1huz-g7vS0znBiOF2a0PrcvzDaJg5E5uH4TveBqA/w400-h265/77ec07_7eda97a99c15459abf64e4a278b3dfac_mv2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>The full version of <i>Present Continuous</i>, a book of lockdown essays/prose pieces, excerpts of which first appeared as a <a href="https://thelastbooks.org/product/five-essays/" target="_blank">pamphlet</a> with Phil Baber's The Last Books earlier this year, is now out from Ghazal Mosadeq's Pamenar Press, with grateful thanks to Ghazal and to Hamed Jaberha for his work in typesetting and design.</p><p>Copies available <a href="https://www.pamenarpress.com/product-page/david-grundy-l-present-continuous" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>Present Continuous </i>was written during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic between March 2020 and April 2021 in Lewisham, London. Part I was written between March 2020 and June 2020: the movement from spring to summer, from the first announcement of a national lockdown to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States and the death of Belly Mujinga in the UK. Part II was written during the autumn and winter of 2020 and 2021, during which time a “second wave”, peaking in December and January, prompted a second set of lockdown restrictions. Part III was written in Spring 2021, as restrictions eased and the issue of police violence raised its head once again with the murder of Sarah Everard and the early debates around the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill—as of April 2022, passed into law as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act—with its further criminalisation of protest by a government more viciously racist and repressive than any in recent memory. </p><p>Over two years since the first declaration of lockdown, and following a seemingly endless series of virus variants and subvariants, an apparent shift from ‘pandemic’ to ‘endemic’, and a kind of exhaustion of vocabulary and will, I hope these essays provide some kind of record, not only of a particular moment in time, but of the tendencies going into and moving out of that moment, as we move forward into a future more uncertain than ever; not just where ‘we’ were in 2020 and 2021, but where ‘we’ are—or might be—now.</p></blockquote>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-7823596444382532482022-11-16T14:28:00.004+00:002022-11-16T14:28:32.187+00:00New Pamphlet<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg66wjyRb-IaOXTBbmkq7gnjt4yjMMPqCDo5u84HqVGteyfpg8lQqFhi3ldA1Uava22Du04_jYny17GvBdQxXE0Rd_xThYtLcd_v0I6eBfWqVjlvBypVrTAGumc1QhVR7vrEEliigQTv_hNUPCk8DZznu0XEJDtXOTxjbqUGBmwHGyDFlbRDnROaw/s2016/img-20221108-wa0000-1.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg66wjyRb-IaOXTBbmkq7gnjt4yjMMPqCDo5u84HqVGteyfpg8lQqFhi3ldA1Uava22Du04_jYny17GvBdQxXE0Rd_xThYtLcd_v0I6eBfWqVjlvBypVrTAGumc1QhVR7vrEEliigQTv_hNUPCk8DZznu0XEJDtXOTxjbqUGBmwHGyDFlbRDnROaw/w300-h400/img-20221108-wa0000-1.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>...out from Andy Spragg and Jimmy Cummins' <a href="https://runamokpress.com/books/" target="_blank">Run Amok Press</a>.</p><p>Three sequences, including one after Lu Xun's <i>Wild Grass</i>.</p><p>Launching tonight at 7pm at Biddle Bros. in Clapton, for those in London--I'll be reading alongside Jimmy, Rachel Warriner, Vicky Sparrow, and Dorothy Lehane.</p>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-12851023848456460532022-10-15T15:42:00.012+01:002022-10-20T10:41:43.016+01:00Juliet Fraser - Wave Songs <div><div><b>Juliet Fraser - <i>Wave Songs</i></b></div><div><b>City University, Tuesday 11th October 2022 </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alvin Lucier, <i>Wave Songs</i></b></div><div><b>Newando Ebizie, <i>I birth the moon</i></b></div><div><b>Newton Armstrong, <i>The Book of the Sediments</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>[Note: A shorter version of this piece will appear in the forthcoming issue of <i>The Wire </i>magazine.]</b></div></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qjHE5Bft6EPF914_EdEKeGcsUi6QaKQ8ZekPvY47FkHQq8gZ8zMc9s2DzSzmEIbIlm3nYIbjcgoKPG77_rWXGKAYFSYIbvGnkD_kDBfLVFitfkcu0po0DbxualsZ4IgjaOuWqrSzODKFm1eAUjol6dZ5z8t1IXBUllsqydvF4GLj7GjflYOB0A/s613/Screen%20Shot%202022-10-12%20at%2017.40.43.png" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="613" data-original-width="268" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qjHE5Bft6EPF914_EdEKeGcsUi6QaKQ8ZekPvY47FkHQq8gZ8zMc9s2DzSzmEIbIlm3nYIbjcgoKPG77_rWXGKAYFSYIbvGnkD_kDBfLVFitfkcu0po0DbxualsZ4IgjaOuWqrSzODKFm1eAUjol6dZ5z8t1IXBUllsqydvF4GLj7GjflYOB0A/w280-h640/Screen%20Shot%202022-10-12%20at%2017.40.43.png" width="280" /></a></div><div>Image: Lee Lozano, from <i>Wave Paintings</i>.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>As part of City University’s laudable free concert series, soprano Juliet Fraser presented three works for voice and electronics in a condensed but focused programme lasting around an hour. This condensation was reflected in the evening’s visual presentation. At recent concerts at City’s basement performance space, I’ve seen percussion spilling over the limits of the stage (for the <a href="https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/2022/june/city-pierrot-ensemble" target="_blank">Pierrot Ensemble’s performance</a> of the late Harrison Birtwistle’s <i>The Axe Manual</i> alongside new music by Marc Yeats). On this occasion, however, the stage was bare apart from four speakers, a music stand, and Fraser herself. Onstage, the lights meant Fraser’s shadow was doubled, at times tripled, the darker shadow and its overlapping, progressively lighter ghosts: aura, umbra, penumbra. It was an appropriate figure for all three works’ play with liveness and pre-recording, various forms of doubling and recurrence—impersonally in Alvin Lucier’s <i>Wave Songs</i>, noisily, shatteringly in Nwando Ebizie’s <i>I birth the moon</i>, and with a kind of melancholic implacability in Newton Armstrong’s <i>The Book of the Sediments</i>, the latter two pieces world premieres forming part of Fraser’s cycle of commissions based on the work of Rachel Carson’s <i>Sea Trilogy</i>. (Previous instalments, by Laurence Crane and Lara Agar, were heard at John Lely’s and Tim Parkinson’s long-running series <i>Music We’d Like to Hear</i> late last year.)</div><div><div>
<br />The concert took its title from Lucier’s piece, “for female voice and pure wave oscillators” commissioned in response to Lee Lozano’s <i>Wave Paintings</i> in 1998 and first performed by Joan La Barbara, but so far, never officially recorded. “<i>Wave Songs</i>”<i>, </i>Lucier’s programme note remarks, “consists of eleven solos for female voice with two pure wave oscillators”, with tones fading in and out at the beginning and end of each song. </div><blockquote><div>“The singer stands between the two loudspeakers from which the pure waves flow. Throughout the course of the work she sings pure tones on the vowel ‘oo’ matching the sounds of the pure waves, in order to create the most vivid beating [...] As the oscillator tones get closer and closer together as the work progresses, it becomes virtually impossible for the singer to accurately tune her pitches”. </div></blockquote><div>This play with human error and with the ‘purity’ of electronically generated sound waves is not so much an animating tension as a flicker at the work’s edges, the drama of pitch regulating that governs much western music a kind of crackling undercurrent to a work that often sounds like an encapsulation of that very principle. Introducing the concert from the stage, Fraser remarked that Lucier’s piece, involving various complex mathematical complications, can seem like an intellectual exercise. Her advice was to “feel the piece rather than listen to it”. At the same time, that very distinction between feeling and listening is perhaps one the piece is also interested in collapsing. Expanding and exploding customary practices of listening, Lucier treats sound as material, vibration, solid yet evanescent, something both literally and metaphorically felt, a world of sonic illusion in which the distances between sine waves and the vocal line create ‘beating’ effects—as Lucier puts it, “bumps of sound produced as sound waves collide”. But this vocabulary of expansion, explosion, collapse and collision doesn’t really capture the still spirit of the piece, its moving stasis, its static movement.</div><div>
<br />As is well-known, Lozano effectively dropped out of the New York art world in the early ’70s, her early work, “comix”, sexualised paintings and drawings that drew with fresh and raging energy from the currents that also produced the often tamer works of pop art. Subsequently moving from these works into sexualised depictions of <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/96565?artist_id=3615&page=1&sov_referrer=artist" target="_blank">tools</a>—screws, pipes, wrenches—Lozano in turn embarked from 1967-1970 on the <i>Wave Paintings</i>, abstract canvases depicting multiplying wavelengths of light. Lozano had planned a follow-up series with each painting painted in a different state, including “stoned, drunk, horny”—the body and the changing passions of the body mixing with the ‘objective’ phenomena of light and object, tool and, questioning what abstraction is and means and how it interacts with the female body and perceptions of the female artist. As it stood, however, she instead made a series of dramatic gestures of refusal that aimed to resolve contradiction, first through <i><a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/96570" target="_blank">Dialogue Piece</a></i>--inviting “people [she] would rarely see [...] to [her] loft for a dialogue”--and then <i>Untitled (General Strike Piece, Feb. 8, 1969) </i>and <i>DECIDE TO BOYCOTT WOMEN</i> (1971), in which she cut off communication, first with the art world—instead, Lozano promised to work only towards “total personal and public revolution”—then with all women, before dropping out altogether.</div><div>
<br />Painted before this process of removal, Lozano’s <i>Wave Paintings </i>saw her painting accumulating waves on canvas, culminating in a total of ninety-six waves painted over three days, stopping only when she reached the physical limit of how many waves she could paint in a single session. As painter David Reed <a href="https://www.artforum.com/print/200108/making-waves-the-legacy-of-lee-lozano-1701" target="_blank">remarks</a> in an <i>Artforum </i>interview on Lozano’s work with Katy Siegel, “the series is infinite, it’s just her physical limitations that stopped it.” For Siegel, the work “seems to combine a rigorous scientific approach with some kind of personal statement.” Reed concurs: </div><blockquote><div>“Her interest in science is a way of connecting art to larger issues and keeping it from becoming merely formal [...] Lozano’s “Wave” paintings seem to offer proof of the difficulties of that transformation of the self, and reasons for the doubts. The series is meant to be endless, but she can’t make it endless. It ends physically, not conceptually. She desires more than she can achieve, not just physically, but in other ways as well. It’s like Kafka saying, “Oh, there’s infinite hope, just not for us.””</div></blockquote><div>As Reed remarks, in Lozano’s work, “you aren’t coerced into having emotions; you decide to have them.” Such work explores the nexus of perception, emotion, abstraction and the material presence of bodies. And Lucier’s own interest in the pure, potentially infinite sound of oscillators, activated by disturbances in environment, relates to his own position as a stutterer, explored most famously in <i>I am Sitting in a room</i> (1969), in which the imperfections in his speech contribute to and are then erased by the feedback created from repeatedly playing it back into a room. “I want audiences to open up their ears to their environments”, Lucier commented to his student <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Chambers/poU_M5mNUy0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=alvin+lucier+%22wave+songs%22&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">Douglas Simon</a>. In exploring “how space intrudes its personality on the sounds you produce”, Lucier continued, “I simply want to find out what these [different] environments do to sounds, not to make them but to take what I can find, and in that way each performance will teach me something.” Ideally, this process of learning sees both Lucier and his listeners alike as embarking on a process of finding out about sound, about themselves, about the world. </div><div>
<br />“Are you trying to tell the audience something beyond what they hear?” <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Chambers/poU_M5mNUy0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=alvin+lucier+%22wave+songs%22&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">asked Douglas Simon</a>. “Yes”, Lucier replies. </div><div></div><blockquote><div>“It’s just an extension of what you do when you’re a small child at the beach and put a shell up to your ear and hear the ocean. Then you stop. You don’t do that as you grow older. Your ear stops doing that because you’ve got to think about other things, how to make a living and how to speak to people, how to communicate verbally. I guess I’m trying to help people hold shells up to their ears and listen to the ocean again”. </div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGMqmH3rj1pNEFjDLKmTiOnFBJt7ZyK-aj4f_FAadURGHeYUh4A96J4A0v7KJaNey9SzRUEgzDZ7F9SoQUHz1jxIyJeViwkMB9e8T2Hm6L9gGJdyqUDFnk0iW04NVdlG_ybcvOR0gBbahVbxmHH_eGurUD2TOF8TZUL0FbbCw775rOLCoEdjFo8Q/s500/B00997YJDY.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SX500_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="344" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGMqmH3rj1pNEFjDLKmTiOnFBJt7ZyK-aj4f_FAadURGHeYUh4A96J4A0v7KJaNey9SzRUEgzDZ7F9SoQUHz1jxIyJeViwkMB9e8T2Hm6L9gGJdyqUDFnk0iW04NVdlG_ybcvOR0gBbahVbxmHH_eGurUD2TOF8TZUL0FbbCw775rOLCoEdjFo8Q/w275-h400/B00997YJDY.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SX500_.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Waves were a longstanding metaphor for Lucier: the generation of music from the performer’s brain waves in <i>Music for Solo Performer</i> (1965), the recreation of the sounds of the sea in <i>Chambers </i>(1969), for resonating objects. Lucier’s sound waves, Lozano’s light waves, and the oceanic framing of the concert come together
Lucier’s <i>Wave Songs</i> is in eleven short movements. The piece achieves the remarkable feat of generating a soundworld at once extremely quiet—it seems that every audience twitch can be heard—and one that totally fills the space of perception, huge and morphingly fixed, the soprano singing held notes over sine waves producing beats/difference tones against them. In a music that collapses the traditional divisions between melody, harmony and rhythm, the work operates on a principle of held tones and tone succession, the differences between which generate rhythm and harmony at once. The third song sees vocal leaps approaching Feldmanesque melody—specifically, the Feldman of <i>Three Voices</i>, like Lucier’s piece, premiered by Joan La Barbara, and likewise recorded by Fraser—as the sine waves chirrup like frozen, heavy birdsong or a muted car alarm. </div><div><br /></div><div>A work so rooted in physical phenomena becomes moving in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. As is so often the case with Lucier’s work, it opens up the environment, gives us a space to see ourselves or whatever we choose to see reflected and enabled there, getting to the roots of sound, what it does to us and what we make it do.
In the penultimate “song”, language enters the work for the first and only time, as the soprano sings words from Lozano’s writings describing the thinking behind the <i>Wave Paintings, </i>the shock of the entrance of language subdued by the rendition of the text as a single-note melody. Lozano’s text describes light waves—“the waves are really a reference to the electromagnetic spectrum”, Lucier ‘translating’ this to apply to sound waves: a description of waves heard on waves of sound. Here is a blurring of metaphor and sound, of waves in multiple senses as movement in time and space.</div><div>
<br />“I was trying”, Lozano writes, “to combine art and science and existence. It was a science idea transferred to an art idea.” In much of Lucier’s own work, if not Lozano’s, this becomes something like a general principle. But it’s not just about “objective phenomena”, which in Lucier’s explanations of his own work is so often described in technical, relentlessly material terms: in a work like this, they form the stage for weird dramas, audio tricks, suspensions of disbelief at once contained and expansive. “I imagine the work as a mini opera”, Lucier remarked, “with the singer taking the part of the artist, singing her paintings into existence or perhaps simply humming to herself as she worked on them.” Lozano, who’d been persuaded to allow retrospective shows such as the one for which the piece was commissioned, would die the following year; given Lucier’s own recent death, the piece assumes the status of a double memorial, the speakers both tombstones and openings to a world of other possibility, in which that which is prior emerges uncannily into the present: the voices of the dead, living still.</div><div>
<br />In the next and final movement, the vocals are a back of throat murmur, a sound click, murmuring on the edges of perception and of being recognisable as a singing voice, or for that matter, a human voice at all—those effects so effectively explored by the likes of <a href="http://www.japanimprov.com/ayoshida/index.html" target="_blank">Ami Yoshida’s ‘howling voice’ technique—</a>“a barely audible sound that is perceived as sound itself rather than as vocalization”—developed, coincidentally, around the same time on <i><a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/1136087-Ami-Spiritual-Voice" target="_blank">Spiritual Voice</a></i>, recorded between 1995 and 1997, and whose work with the sinewaves of Sachiko M as Cosmos on <i>Tears </i>(2002) the no-input mixing board of Toshimara Nakamura on <i>Soba to Bara</i> 2009) has notable similarities with Lucier’s work. Hearing the work in this space, over the course of Lucier’s <i>Wave Songs</i>, the acoustic voice, in proximity with the pre-recorded sine waves, paradoxically starts to sound more electronic and the electronics to sound more ‘voice-like’ or human. Or is that just a perceptual trick, the experience of one listener, with their own metaphorical and perceptual projections that they, like each listener, bring to the piece? The piece, it seems to me, asks us to interrogate the very basis of sound, of how and why we listen, while, at the same time, imposing nothing but itself. </div><div><br /></div><div>You could just listen. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifqCN-L7lvm_5WDN6100xR3SNkJA5RbGgEN4Wa0H47yfxAFr8VBMsj97CMih4pQGGp4Ndf7nAXMtyEyEhgzH57iobBiCN6rgj_PJRmBqF4zhj-mikjufdh33DsS4KYMlwYPuDseVHfRamaz1lntRbsrIXTGeLyvb4pYGOFcuVQaTCaZGWAyFQ7RA/s768/ladycrp.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifqCN-L7lvm_5WDN6100xR3SNkJA5RbGgEN4Wa0H47yfxAFr8VBMsj97CMih4pQGGp4Ndf7nAXMtyEyEhgzH57iobBiCN6rgj_PJRmBqF4zhj-mikjufdh33DsS4KYMlwYPuDseVHfRamaz1lntRbsrIXTGeLyvb4pYGOFcuVQaTCaZGWAyFQ7RA/w400-h266/ladycrp.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Image: Nwando Ebizie. Image from <a href="https://colorising.com/colorising-interview-with-lady-vendredi/" target="_blank">ColoRising</a>.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Before—and even, arguably, during—the production of the <i>Wave Paintings</i>, Lozano’s work was to do with the body, with all that was stigmatised as ‘unscientific’, feminine, hysterical—the altered states of being stoned, of drinking, of sex, of changing oneself by changing the environment around one and vice versa. Her move from physical works based in objects—culminating in the immense materiality of the wave paintings—leads to performance works based on renunciation—first a dialogue piece, then a dropout piece, then a boycott piece, art as a self-contained enterprise collapsing into life and its messiness. Lucier’s work might appear to do the opposite: to order, to regulate, to present. Yet there’s something here that deranges, de-arranges perception, something between contemplation and agitation, between ecstasy, <i>ex-stasis</i>, a being taken out of self, and a revelation of self and its limits, the limits of a body, of hearing, of being in a space. Then there’s the question, of course, of the position of male composer and female performer, of the way that the piece is or is not gendered, questions that, perhaps, go beyond what the work can hold. </div><div><br /></div><div>These questions of gender more directly inflect the next piece, the world premiere of Todmodern-based, British-Nigerian multimedia artist Nwando Ebizie’s <i>I birth the moon</i>. As her programme note suggests, Ebizie’s concern, like Lucier’s, is with embodiment and how it shapes perception, but from a perspective that, like Lozano’s, is oriented around the subjective rather than the ‘objective’ elements of sonic process: from its process of composition, constructed in collaboration with Fraser during “a day of walking in the Yorkshire moors, talking, eating and improvising”, and takes inspiration both from Rachel Carson and from “the experience of miscarriage, the hopes, the fears of birth, the absurdity of the body vs the strong will to create, the ‘I’ wanting to become we”. (We might call to mind here Ruth Anderson’s haunting 1968 tape work, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTB3YnzTQ_0" target="_blank">The Pregnant Dream</a></i>, with its swirling spoken voices concerning dreams within dreams, speaking and forgetting.) From a different angle, Ebizie raises similar questions to Lozano and Anderson alike: how does embodiment shape perception? What is time? Where are we positioned in relation to phenomena, to each other, to the world? These are questions that, as Lozano suggests, might be “science idea[s] transferred to art idea[s]”, but they are also, incessantly philosophical, social, political. Lucier’s work, like that of Newton Armstrong at the close of the concert, understands process as something like a grid, composition as the enacting of certain pre-arranged rules with margin for error and change creeping at the edges. Ebizie’s has the feel and sound of a more improvised approach, in which the clarity of successive movements and sections found in the other two pieces is replaced by a more amorphous world of live voice and electronic shifts, of clattering soundscapes that swirl into and out of ambiguous climaxes.</div><div>
<br />The piece begin with Fraser’s spoken voice matter-of-factly announcing the creation myth—“in the beginning”—alongside echoed, drawn-out, multiplying voices and clattering percussion, with live and recorded voices mirroring each other onstage and over the speakers. Fraser’s intonation is at times operatic, but the interaction with the electronic park constantly draws the music away from ready reference, as, in a burst of fractured rhythms on the speakers, a live soprano wail careens into an elongated electronic scream that in turn becomes a buzzing digital whirr. “What is...what is...what is?” Fraser repeats with increasing urgency, before a burst of laughter breaking down into back-of-throat gurgle, gargle, voice crack. “The constant trials and failures of creating life”: an uneasy chant over a heartbeat rhythm, dropping out—“a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space”. Ululation, shimmering echo and on the speakers, the sound of breath that becomes wind or wind that becomes breath. A long, high wordless melodic line over rising and falling voices on tape, melismatic incantation. It all suddenly stops with the sound on the tape of an inhalation, another breath, somewhere between beginning and ending, poised to speak again.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9AtYmCmXYoAcStuxW2yeQEo0oXPJtrGKrneWRmMdpxuidT9RJuPtsdS-B8x-UwT6BeiF5O5LslK9o5oXrur_nNVpG_xlTFunIERB_bc9XTkHY94P3J7x5jnHtAGnB1fXviogrOTVReg3TYzDc4SoIfnqYVP8EzbcD6sPe1SzZLKtpZGDVR8tlHg/s382/wp4a05a5da_05_06.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="382" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9AtYmCmXYoAcStuxW2yeQEo0oXPJtrGKrneWRmMdpxuidT9RJuPtsdS-B8x-UwT6BeiF5O5LslK9o5oXrur_nNVpG_xlTFunIERB_bc9XTkHY94P3J7x5jnHtAGnB1fXviogrOTVReg3TYzDc4SoIfnqYVP8EzbcD6sPe1SzZLKtpZGDVR8tlHg/w400-h400/wp4a05a5da_05_06.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The final piece on the bill, Australian-born City University lecturer Newton Armstrong’s <i>The Book of the Sediments</i>. Armstrong’s work has recently received the full-disc treatment on Simon Reynell’s Another Timbre label, in works that, <a href="http://www.anothertimbre.com/newtonarmstrong.html" target="_blank">as he puts it in an interview with Reynell</a>, “work on some new approaches to musical line, repetition, and layering.” “All of my recent instrumental music has included electronic sounds,” he continues, “and these are usually treated in an ‘instrumental’ way, with the loudspeakers integrated into the ensemble. And all of my work for the past twenty years has involved computer programming at some point in the process.” This manifests, for instance, in “deformed, non-strict canons [...] created by algorithms that I designed.” Armstrong defines a canon as “a line alongside itself”, and that sense of setting lines alongside one another likewise infused his new work.</div><div>
<br />The work opens with a down-toned drone reminiscent of Giacanto Scelsi--<i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5XMuXwZm3w&ab_channel=WDRKlassik" target="_blank">Anahit</a></i>, perhaps--Armstrong’s ‘instrumental’ treatment of the electronic lines pointing to their acousmatic uncanniness. Are those horns? Woodwinds? Strings? Purely electronic tones? Fraser’s live voice sings in countermelody, a descending two-note motif, a study in recurrent descent and descant, waves’ rise and fall. Now a second motif, silence between each iteration of the tape part, seeming at the end of held sounds to reveal itself, not as instrumental but as a treated voice. If Lucier’s sine wave appears as the index of ‘pure’, non-human sound, Armstrong even more blurs the distinction, ghostly timbres changing into something else then back into themselves, accumulating not so much as ‘progress’ but process.</div><div>
<br />Armstrong’s programme note suggests that he took his cue from Carson’s description of “the slow accumulation of sediments on the deep sea floor” which eventually form the matter of the earth—a process Carson calls an “epic poem”, in Armstrong’s words, “an inscription of all that has happened in the geologic and climatic history of our planet”. Here is another way to approach the relations of material, of time and space found in the preceding works: what Armstrong calls “the interactions between the momentary and the vast, and of endless process as a form of saying”.
But can this work’s methodology be called <i>accumulation</i>, as the sediment metaphor suggests, and as Lozano’s expanding wave paintings might also suggest, or is it instead a <i>winding down,</i> in the era of climate change anxiety, the echo chamber of covid, lockdown, of politically-fostered alienation, loneliness, and a sense of real and impending catastrophe? As motifs and layers build, accumulate, recede, white noise sounds—field recordings of oceanic waves?—enter on the tape. A hum, a slight chirrup, a sinewave, a wave, the literal and metaphorical intersecting in sounds and time and tide’s ambiguous embrace.</div><div>
<br />Wave sound to fade. Soprano sings high, Fraser’s hands held together in front in a resting gesture somewhere between benediction and protection, holding something up or holding onto something. Difference tones hum between the ears, ship-like clankings on the tape, surrounded in sound: this is at once a spectacle of control and of overwhelming, of being overwhelmed, lost at sea. Or is it that sound just a dripping tap in the bathroom sink—connected to the problems of world water supply, of declining and rising sea levels, of ice cap melt and of drought? Fraser stands silent onstage while the sines wind down and the water continues to splash, and it’s over. <i>The Book of the Sediments</i> is a work at once of connection and disconnection, alienation and a kind of melancholic peace. After Armstrong’s piece ended, the applause that followed sounded alien, strange, like rain gone wrong. Such music, at root, strives to alter the way we hear. This was a concert that altered the space in which it was placed; one might take us back out into the world with a different sense of how we walk through it, of where we go from here.</div></div></div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993045826856544697.post-61877799327398619672022-10-14T12:51:00.002+01:002022-10-14T16:05:16.245+01:00New<p>My introduction to the new Blank Forms republication of Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman and Larry Neal's classic Black Arts Movement music magazine <i>The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution</i> is out now, alongside facsimile reprints of all four issues and a preface by Spellman himself.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_iT6yYSsnOfFZmAV1SeR7PevYPWOY9bLk2G-L26rn6pIUbindV7p4yID_wU0gX2lDOP8LTw0_rA_zyB2Pgp1qviZMkm23yHyjxanWMVwpIR_YvnenHnHNrq8JrbmXxDotG7gh1ljZhsvFg26sVd4-EuHpFJ_ET4CSa4PPAkKxvWRWtN1f9RAtjA/s1035/Screen%20Shot%202022-10-14%20at%2012.19.21.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="727" data-original-width="1035" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_iT6yYSsnOfFZmAV1SeR7PevYPWOY9bLk2G-L26rn6pIUbindV7p4yID_wU0gX2lDOP8LTw0_rA_zyB2Pgp1qviZMkm23yHyjxanWMVwpIR_YvnenHnHNrq8JrbmXxDotG7gh1ljZhsvFg26sVd4-EuHpFJ_ET4CSa4PPAkKxvWRWtN1f9RAtjA/w400-h281/Screen%20Shot%202022-10-14%20at%2012.19.21.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Also out, a piece on the new Igor Levit recording of Hans Werner Henze's <i>Tristan </i>at <i><a href="https://www.artforum.com/music/a-tristan-und-isolde-for-our-time-89427" target="_blank">Artforum</a>.</i></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI5c03egFNaNzRYnUVu6dYoNnUANXpLtbXK9QoPX5a5zrrs5Z0MT4YOhfVUl9462J9hopi-67op1PV7S1y6bnB2uiasZ8Z5adsGP5Mb1ANQcD8eGX5vupq23D7LLpv7H1R80NtDgBNPXlDyuHiI7ICVKLqin5fTgELXuVkVplbxBHAYpoJqtqGLw/s709/Screen%20Shot%202022-10-14%20at%2012.17.10.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="709" data-original-width="684" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI5c03egFNaNzRYnUVu6dYoNnUANXpLtbXK9QoPX5a5zrrs5Z0MT4YOhfVUl9462J9hopi-67op1PV7S1y6bnB2uiasZ8Z5adsGP5Mb1ANQcD8eGX5vupq23D7LLpv7H1R80NtDgBNPXlDyuHiI7ICVKLqin5fTgELXuVkVplbxBHAYpoJqtqGLw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202022-10-14%20at%2012.17.10.png" width="309" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i><p></p><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>More to follow...for now, some recent listening...</div><div><br /></div><div><b>'China Fights'</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lgmOq-YmSv4" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>Karl Amadeus-Hartmann, an important figure for Henze, emerged from his period of "inner emigration" during the Nazi era to find himself at first championed as an un-tainted figure who might take up a position in the new, "Year Zero" Germany, and then, in the era of the Truman Doctrine and the Cold War positioning in West Germany, once more at risk of external or self-censorship for his socialist sympathies. I've been reading a thoroughly-researched and persuasive <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twentieth-century-music/article/semblance-of-freedom-karl-amadeus-hartmann-between-democratic-renewal-and-cold-war-19457/658DAEACE47D4241F60C3D5CCF0C1B82#access-block" target="_blank">article in <i>Twentieth-Century Music</i></a> by Ulrich J. Blomann And Jürgen Thym that demonstrates how Hartmann ended up either actively suppressing many of his Nazi-era socialist/anti-fascist works or incorporating the musical material into 'neutral', non-programmatic instrumental forms. Blomann and Thym's case study is <i>China kämpft / China Fights</i>, originally the opening movement in the <i>Sinfoniae Dramaticae</i> (1941–3), based on the Chinese revolutionary song ‘Meng Jiang-nuin, and dedicated to Soviet writer Sergei Tretyakov--himself killed in the pre-war purges--and to Tan Shih-hua, the hero of Tretyakov's novel <i>A Chinese Testament</i>. Eventually premiered at Darmstadt in 1947, US influence meant, according to Henze, that attendees were encouraged to boycott the premiere, and on subsequent performances, Munich newspaper <i>Das Steckenpferd</i> denounced Hartmann and Käthe Kollwitz as the "creator[s] of a socialist approach to art" for this "free reworking of a socialist song from the Chinese civil war". Hartmann revised the piece, denying that it was based on anything but a 'neutral' folk-song. Likewise, the final movement of the symphony, ‘<i>Vita nova</i>’, contained declamations from Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’ in Brecht’s translation: Hartmann wrote to his publisher suggesting that publication would be inadvisable, given the Cold War political climate, and the movement has since been lost. As a self-described "leftie without a country", unwilling to move to a socialist or Soviet country and mindful of the complex position faced by the likes of Shostakovich, but also aware that his socialist and anarchist sympathies rendered him at risk of losing his job in "the West", Hartmann, the authors argue, once more found himself in a period of "inner emigration" in which the politics of his works had to remain disguised between the 'neutrality' of symphonic form. Beyond Hartmann's specific case, there's much more to say about this conjuncture, and how it plays into the discourse of serialism, the legacy of Schoenberg and Webern--with whom Hartmann studied--and the [false] binaries between <i>Zhdanovshchina </i>and CIA-sponsored modernism with which Hartmann, Henze and others had to battle in the post-war period...</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Marion Brown in Paris</b></div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Bbk1CavCEuM" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>The extraordinary <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP-rm5i0Fqa1sSG_3G9FG2w" target="_blank"><i>Vintage Music Experience</i> channel </a>at Youtube continues to put out a wealth of extremely rare recordings on a daily basis, most recently a radio broadcast by a Marion Brown quartet featuring Gunter Hampel, recorded shortly before May '68. I'd need to double-check, but I don't believe any of these compositions made it onto an official record...</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Wayne Shorter's 'Universe'</b></div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PO4hS5vn9c4" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>The late Wallace Roney performing Wayne Shorter scores written for Miles Davis, full of the expansive majesty of Shorter's orchestral writing that has only been widely showcased in recent years. I've not found a way to hear Shorter's collaboration with Esperanza Spaulding on the opera <i>Iphigenia, </i>so if anyone reading this has any tips, do let me know...</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Mal Waldron in Amsterdam</b></div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a8ibJx7ZI9U" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>An excellent late Mal Waldron quartet with Sean Bergin on tenor driving things into 'out' territory on a few numbers--this group, as far as I know, never made it onto an official release. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Marion Bauer's 'Lament on an African Theme'</b></div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7o0n2x5tjxc" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, Marion Bauer's 'Lament on an African Theme': though Bauer had a reputation in the post-war period, she's little-known today, and is not a composer I know much about. Likewise, I can't find out much about the piece, but I believe it's an orchestration of a movement from her string quartet, with the "theme" in question subjected here to a series of austere yet stirring variations. Would love to know more about the source of the melody and how it relates to the history of white American composers' use engagement with African diasporic material...</div>david_grundyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09822972751622883772noreply@blogger.com2