What If They Gave a Show At The Elbow Room and Nobody Came?
You can find out at:
http://www.existentialista.com/~uforika/2oo41212a.mp3
Now wait! Before you click, this is an entire performance, lasting 56:50, in the form of an mp3
file of music that is of an EXTREME avant-garde nature. Not only will it take a long time to load,
you might hate it.
But it is the performance
given by Will Soderburg, Adam Mokan and myself on Sunday night at
The Elbow Room in Ypsilanti. Will and Adam were playing tabletop electronics. My parents were
visiting from Cincinnati this weekend, and in the rush to make the house clean I ended up stashing the
box of cables in a place where I couldn't get at them. So I arrived with my guitar, a screwdriver, two
small drums and no cable. They had one and plugged me in, and I was given a mike for the drums,
and occasionally injected a word or two as a sort of comment. The early part of the show was give
and take, less and more, but the last bit of it was getting to be about "more," so I just sort of retired
to the sidelines and let Adam and Will whang away at their tabletops for the last ten minutes or so.
Will ended it nicely, as he slowly subtracted from the texture to make it less again till nothing.
We will be appearing in more or less the same configuration on Thursday at Detroit Art Space which
is said to be the last "noise" event this particular venue will be hosting. I don't know of the kickoff time
though, and I do think I will bring more stuff this time. We only have 20 minutes to play, and I'd like
to play a little of the "Moonlight Sonata" - the 16th, as always, is Beethoven's birthday, a great day to
play or listen to Beethoven, or to play anything yourself.
But back to Sunday, we were supposed to play between two other bands. Aviette from Minneapolis
and Islero from Wisconsin. Neither showed up, so we played the show alone. Only Keith Larsen, who
had given me a ride out there in the driving snow, was present as "audience." And he didn't drink, as he
had to return me home, so the bartender didn't make much more than the dollar I gave her for an empty
glass - all I had, incidentally. Even if the beer you're getting is complimentary, I've always felt you need
to give the bartender something.
Wylkynson (ca. 1450-1515 or after)
As I told duo-pianist Tomoko Mack when we met, I discover for myself a new classical composer
every day. This is not an exaggeration, and today's composer was a particularly intriguing one, Robert
Wylkynson. He was a director of music at Eton College between 1500 and 1515 after serving as a clerk there from about 1494. Three compositions, and part of a fourth, survive by him. His piece "Jesus Autemtransiens/
Credo in Deum" is a single, long line of music set to the Latin version of the Apostles Creed. In the music he indicates 13 seperate entrance points for 13 singers, thus it is a 13-part canon - as you can imagine it operates just like a tape loop, though one started in a variety of different places.
The amazing thing is that, even though there are lots of old canons, this one isn't particularly "musical."It gets incredibly thick and textural and approaches a really thorny, post-modern kind of "holy minimalist" vein. Wylkynson's concept is theatrical in that the 13 voices are supposed to represent Christ and his 12 Apostles - Christ recites the Apostles Creed, and each Apostle joins in with him one by one, in different places, much as they do in the Gospels.
The vast majority of the Latin church music of pre-Reformation England was destroyed under the Authority of Henry VII during his vengeful and sadistic "dissolution of the monasteries" in the1530s. The music of Wylkynson survived because he added his pieces to the Eton Choirbook, an already compiled manuscript volume containing 46 complete pieces that is the only comprehensive source extant for late fifteenth-century English Catholic church music. This book was either missed by or hidden from the Tudor authorities who destroyed practically everything else like it.
You'll find it on an album called "The Pillar of Eternity" by The Sixteen on the Coro label.
Homer Finished!
On Saturday morning I finished the inventory for the Reneker Museum collection of Homer Rodeheaver recordings. Along with that I have developed discographies for both Rainbow labels, a "sessionography" for the first label and a complete discography for Homer himself. I may be slow, but I ain't lazy.
Numbers Conundrum
There are several books which are referred to in the Bible of which actual copies do not exist. There are several points in the Old Testament where the scribe says "we could go on with the account of such and such a king's achievements, but is that not written in the Book of something or other?" And there is no trace of that book to be read, unless some shred of it is reproduced in the biblical text itself.
Incidentally, for those of you who insist that the whole Bible is the uncontestable word of God, I submit this as proof to the contrary: God would not feel compelled, in writing a book, to make bibliographical references to books written by humans, especially works which he/she did not see fit to preserve so people could read them.
In Numbers 21:14-15 there is a reference to "The Book of the Wars of Yahweh," and there is a baffling passage quoted therefrom:
King James has it as:
What he did in the Red sea, and in the brooks of Arnon, and at the streem of the brooks that goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth upon the border of Moab.
NIV is even worse:
Wahed in Suphah and the ravines,
the Arnon and the slopes of the ravines
that lead to the site of Ar
and along the border of Moab.
Both translations are pure gobbledygook, and that's becuase they are quoted from a book which was in all likelihood a pre-Masoretic text with an archiac system of vowels. Ancient Hebrew is consonantal, and so these screwy vowels were taken out by leter scholars. Put them back, and you get this solution, arrived at only a couple of years ago by a Baptist (!) scholar:
The Benefactor came in a storm
Yea, He came to the wasis of the Arnon
He caused the wadis to rush forth
He marched in an earthquake to destroy Ar.
Then we easily entered the very borders of Moab!
The context of the passage in Numbers is events during the long journey of the Israelites through the desert to the promised land, said to have ten forty years. If you and I were to make this same trip on foot, provided we could make it past all the checkpoints (which one couldn't) you could make the same journey in a couple of weeks. But the Nation of Israel had to get there in a very roundabout way, and there were many thousands of them.
They found that they had to go around the land of Edom, as they weren't permitted to pass through. The Moabites were a real concern, as they were the decendents of Lot by his younger daughter, and thus very closley related to the Isrealites, and chosen people or no, their deadly enemies. What the passage tells us is that as the Isrealites reached the shore of Arnon, which was the river on the shore of Moab itself. Yahweh kicked up a big storm, and the border settlement of Ar went down in an Earthquake (listen up, archeologists!) There was so much confusion and struggle in the face of these sudden natural disasters that the Moabites didn't have time to turn the Isrealites back.
Some time when I'm not so tired I will tell you about the Moabite stone.
Uncle Dave Lewis