360. HiTEC "Systems Management"
- New Hazlett Theater, Pittsburgh, us@
- Friday, January 9, 2009
- Whew! One of the main reasons why I've all-but-stopped writing these descriptions is b/c these events have gotten so complicated that I just don't feel like putting the time & energy into explaining them anymore! BUT, if I don't, who will?
I founded HiTEC (initially called "Sonic Aughts Union") in mid-2008. Our 1st rehearsal was on July 14, 2008. By the time of this gig, we'd had 49 or 50 rehearsals. 16mm footage of the beginning of one of these rehearsals as shot by Tony Balko can be witnessed at: HiTEC021-16mm <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0thj_1lWlA>. It started out intended as a 4-person group to consist of: myself (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE), Rick Gribenas, Steve Boyle, & Margaret Cox. Steve & Margaret never participated; Rick dropped out immediately due to health problems. Instead, the 1st rehearsal consisted of myself, Rick, & Johan Nystrom - someone I contacted b/c I'd gotten a copy of a CD-R of his & knew him to be a Pittsburgher.
When the Sonic Aughts Union didn't come into being, I decided to try to form an even more ambitious group: an orchestra. Hence HiTEC was born. HiTEC stands for Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative. I proceeded to try to recruit something like 53 members - many of whom I didn't know. By the time of this gig there were 22 actual participants - 2 of whom cdn't actually play the gig b/c of schedule conflicts.
HiTEC 'performs' a piece, primarily of my creation, entitled "Systems Management". Other people who've contributed to this are Ben Opie, Johan Nystrom, Kerrith Livengood, Kenny Haney, & Stuart Anderson. The members of the group are called "Systems Managers" & I prefer to say that we "Manage the Systems" (instead of saying, eg, that we "play music"). The language used is deliberately dry & non-'poetic'.
Instead of necessarily 'performing' specified physical actions in unison w/ each other in accordance w/ a specified time-frame, the Systems Managers are given numbered thought experiments to conduct simultaneously - w/ the realization of these being highly open to interpretation. A Wheel-of-Fortune is spun to land on a number from 01-32. That choice is then the indicator to the Thought Experiment to be conducted.
HOWEVER, it's not that simple. In some instances, the Systems Managers can vote for 1 of 2 choices other than the one that the WoF lands on OR various ways of BYPASSING or being a DICTATOR contrary to the main body of Systems, etc..
For this presentation at the New Hazlett, the following 20 Managers were present:
Clockwise w/ the Wheel of Fortune @ 12 O'Clock:
048tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: piano, SysMan, electronics, percussion, spinner
012Tony Balko: camcorder
013Ben Opie - reeds, electronics
016Kenny Haney: clarinets
013Spat Cannon: upright acoustic bass
013Dani Simmonds: banjo-uke
013Roger Dannenberg: trumpet, flugelhorn, piccolo trumpet
010Missi St Pierre: toy piano w/ effects
013Julian Krishnamurti: electric bass
020Johan Nystrom: extended percussion
010Kerrith Livengood: alto flute
011Ben Harris: violin
016Jonathan Brodsky: monome with mabalhabla software
007Mike Tamburo: hammered dulcimer
014Unfinished Symphonies: electronic keyboard
012Joy: electric guitar w/ nylon strings
013William Wedler: Experiment 1
011Erok: trombone
010Stuart Anderson: laptop
012James Gyre: drums
How many times they had participated in this Systems Management process is indicated by the number preceding their name. Unfortunately, David Bernabo (acoustic guitar, electronics, melodica, percussion, etc) had just had surgery & cdn't attend. Also missing was Hyla Willis (erhu & percussion) who was attending an activist conference in Chicago.
The Systems Managers were arranged in a horse-shoe shape & divided into 4 Affinity Groups. #1 was to the audience's left, followed by #2, followed by James of AG3, followed by the Wheel-of-Fortune in the middle, followed on the audience's right by the rest of Affinity Group 3: tENT + Tony's projection + Ben Opie + Kenny, followed by #4. There was a large screen above the back of the stage area that showed the Systems Management instructions made available by the WoF spin & the voting possibilities (when there were any). To enable this projection, Roger Dannenberg developed "SysMan" software. A screen behind James showed a c/u of the Wheel's number.
(V)Audience members rc'vd a program wch listed the Systems Managers, etc, & provided the following explanation written by me [slightly corrected here]:
"HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) is an independent experimental orchestra founded in July of 2008EV by MAD SCIENTIST / BOOED USICIAN / JACK-OFF-OF-ALL-TRADES / HEADITOR & EARCHIVIST / PROPONENT OF CLASSIFICATION-RESISTANT WHAT-HAVE-YOUS / SPLEENIUS: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE as an attempt to create a Low Classical alternative to those who worship at the temple of the fictitious & propagandistic "Golden Age" that's often used to justify the "Divine Rights" of cash-flow.
Somewhat like distant cousins to the lineage of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Aus den Sieben Tagen" intuitive music compositions, FLUXUS prose scores, & the work in general of composer Franz Kamin, HiTEC currently navigates a CONCEPTUAL OBSTACLE COURSE called "Systems Management". Parts of this have been generated by cONVENIENCE, Opie, Nystrom, Livengood, & Haney - all, of course, fleshed out by the considerable talents & quick-wittedness of all the Systems Managers during our COPIOUS REHEARSALS.
Unlike most (M)USICAL projects, the playing of this group revolves around THINKING about particular things while playing in a very open-ended way RATHER THAN necessarily playing specified physical actions.
For example:
30. "Brain-In-A-Vat" (Descartes / tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE): Decide that you're a brain-in-a-vat instead of a brain-in-a-skull & that yr perceptions of what's happening in the current Systems Management session are programmed perceptions rather than 'real' ones. Adapt yr Management to what you then think is the most likely 'reality'.
A Wheel of Fortune is spun, a number is landed on, the number indicates which Thought Experiment is to be conducted by the Systems Managers. The (v)audience sees the experiment instructions projected & is confronted with trying to decipher the puzzle of how the Systems Manager's behavior(s) realize(s) the challenges of the experiment(s).
Why? Imagine that we live in a world where well 'nigh constant pressure is on to close one's mind. While such a closure can make life 'simpler' by disguising limited possibilities as infinite 'freedom of choice' (just don't look behind that Door of Perception!), the 'comfort' that's achieved has psychic virile vines lurking beneath its surface ever-ready to crack the facade wide-open w/ Cognitive Dissonance. As a COGNITIVE DISSIDENT, I embrace the rupture of over-simplification as an ally.
For me, HiTEC & "Systems Management" accomplishes what so many things I love do: it challenges the mind to make quick decisions, to be alert, to REMEMBER - & to KEEP THOSE NEURAL PATHWAYS OPEN. In the meantime, it can be an enormous amt of fun. AND it's deeply rooted in a history of (M)USICAL innovation that I have a heartfelt respect for: everything from Change Ringing to Toy Symphonies to Aleatoric Structured Improvising to Stochastics to the Scratch Orchestra to the Portsmouth Sinfonia to Ensemble Musica Negativa. Finally, it's hoped that if little more than the GREAT CONFUSION results at least there's the hope of thwarting the enemy: Stereotype Projecting.
- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - Who Unit?, Pittsburgh, us@ - December, 2008EV"
At the suggestion of New Hazlett Executive Director Sara Radelet, the program also contained a sheet w/ pictures of the Systems Managers + a partial list of their instrumentation on one side w/ 22 "Personality Type" paragraphs on the verso. Sara had proposed that this pre-exisiting material be organized as a game like something that might be on a placemat. Hence the "Match the Systems Managers to their Personality Types" game began.
These Personality Types were created, at my suggestion, by having the Managers pick 4 sentences from any of the abbreviated 16 Meyers-Briggs Personality Types that I'd provided them w/ & by having them add 2 sentences of their own. The results also factor into the Management of a System called "Personality Types (v2)".
Need I say? This brief description barely touchs upon WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
For the beginning of my documentary made from the 8 different camera shots
we had of the gig go to: HiTEC
051 pt 1 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpa9VMyWmU>. For a high-definition
(but soft-focus) excerpt from about 1/3rd of the way thru go to: HiTEC 051 premier @ the New
Hazlett Theater <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo2apKl_CCY>.
361. Rhythms Lecture
- Rich Pell's "Time & Space" Concept Studio, CMU, Pittsburgh, us@
- Wednesday, February 25, 2009
- Rich Pell invited me to lecture about rhythm to his Carnegie-Mellon University class so I prepared a 6pp script & a DVD-R for the occasion & brought various percussion instruments from my personal collection. I began w/ an explanation of Stockhausen's experiments w/ speeding up rhythms to create pitches - wch lead into my own observations:
"What I get from this is that we have a continuum w/ sound that entails more than just a progression from, say, the inaudible frequencies below 20 cycles per second to the audible ones between 20 & 20,000 cps to inaudible again faster than that. Can an analogy be made between the trio of solids, liquids, & gases & the duo of rhythms & pitch? If so, shd there be a 3rd analogous category of sound? Timbre, perhaps?"
This lead to quoting from David Rothenberg's bk "Thousand Mile Song - Whale Music in a Sea of Sound" & to the idea of the variety of perceptual continuums amongst different creatures. From that I segued into playing a piece by my former collaborator Neil Feather called "Off-Beat-Off" as performed by the Official, April 29, 1992EV, Band That Does Accept Money From Institutions [see entry 159]. Following this vaudeo clip, in my script I had this note to myself:
"ASK QUESTIONS TRYING TO GET THE STUDENTS TO DESCRIBE WHAT THEY JUST WITNESSED - PERHAPS "RHYTHMIC" WILL BE USED - BUT MORE LIKELY "NOISE" WILL BE"
This lead into my discussing the notion of 'dance music' & into one of my favorite subjects: dancing to the sound of a refrigerator - involving the projection of an image of the tape cover of my friend the sound artist Gen Ken Montgomery's "egnekn's fridge" - quoting overtop this from my essay "& the Deadbeat Goes On & On & On..". This talk of 'dance music' introduced a clip from Wes Craven's film "The Serpent and the Rainbow" in wch the dangers of Pavlovian conditioning from entrancement were somewhat addressed. Eventually, the students were given the percussion & were instructed in how to attempt to play the "Off-Beat-Off" - hopefully having a new appreciation for what they may've previously thought of as "random" - now, perhaps, recognizing that skill, discipline, & high levels of organization were actually involved.
362. Ben Harris & Kerrith Livengood's graphic scores
- Johan Nystrom's "why are music series", Monk's, Pittsburgh, us@
- Saturday, March 21, 2009
- Johan Nystrom organized a 4 Saturdays in March series at Monk's called "why are music series - adventures in post-structural pointlessness and olfactory oblivion brought to you by the letters YR". I participated in this, the 3rd, & in the next, the 4th & last. In some ways, this series was an outgrowth of, & side-project in support of, HiTEC (see entry 360). The evening began w/ Kerrith Livengood's "Small Easter Egg Game". The performers (Johan, myself, Missi St Pierre, & Ben Harris) entered from the outside & began searching for small graphic scores that Kerrith had hidden. A text score independent of the graphics specified 3 different ways of playing. We followed #1:
"1. Hide all cards around the room. All players search for them, instrument in hand. When you find a card, stop and play it where you are. Then bring it to the table or stand at the front, placing them in a row in the order they are found. Return to search for other cards. Do not be concerned if there are long silences, or if two or more people find cards and play them at the same time. When all 19 cards are found, all players come together to play the piece from beginning to end, in the order the cards were found."
Further instructions specified:
"All cards represent between 5 - 10 seconds of time. Pitch, rhtyhm, and timbre are all suggested by the shapes, but no paramters are set in stone and colors, shapes, etc. are open to interpretation."
There were something like 18 or 19 cards. The drawings on them were in color. If they were interpreted as if all the separate & parallel lines, eg, were to be followed as suggestive of harmonies then they wd've mostly been beyond the ranges of the recommended "smallest instruments possible". However, given to the openness of interpretation, this wasn't a problem. All of the cards were found & the score was followed accurately enuf. The "Easter Egg" aspect of this was particularly fun & I liked the cleverness of transforming Easter Egg designs into scores.
This was followed by 5 graphic scores of Ben's. Kerrith joined in the above-listed performers (she sat out her own piece - perhaps for the pleasure of witnessing its performance w/o having to otherwise participate). These scores were 8&1/2X11", landscape orientation, black & white. The scores didn't have to be performed in any particular order so we perfoemd them in the order that they'd been emailed to us in. They were, however, created in a specific order. The 1st drawing Ben did was a dense conglomerate of roughly horizontal squiggly lines that overlapped.
The other 4 drawings were generated by finding other drawings w/in this one's dense field of lines. Each drawing had a significantly different look. As is the convention in graphic notation, the vertical denoted pitch & the horizontal duration. In the score that we performed 1st, there were 5 different horizontally parallel progressions that we interpreted as 5 parts. "Blotches indicate clusters or inharmonic sounds." "medium length" The dense 2nd score was even more open to interpretation. "longer" The 3rd score was basically a horizontally narrower segment of the dense origin score. "Players should oscillate around a specific narrow pitch range." The 4th (again, as performed) was sideways funnel shaped w/ the wide part to the left. "Players should converge on a specific pitch." "shorter" & the last had 5 graphically different clusters.
For both of these I played small instruments such as siren whistle, rattles, & zydeco tie; & vocalized. The vocalizing was the most fun & the most challenging for me since I tried for the 1st time publically to use throat singing technique - wch I felt I pulled off considerably more successfully than I expected to (albeit a little more poorly than I had while rehearsing!). Additionally, I used gestures to represent parts of the notation that I was unable to realize fully w/ sound alone. Kerrith played flute, Missi played toy piano, Ben played violin, & Johan played friction percussion.
From there, a small group of us paraded making mostly quiet sounds to
the nearby Casa del Missi & Rich where Missi performed 2 sets of short
compositions of hers involving prepared piano & delays.
363. "Triple-S Variety Show" reenactment
- Johan Nystrom's "why are music series", Monk's, Pittsburgh, us@
- Saturday, March 28, 2009
- On January 12, 1995, I had given my 1st performance in Pittsburgh - at the invitation of Orgone Cinema (see entry 194). This had been a "Triple-S Variety Show" concrete mixing event in wch I played 3 synthesizers, one sampler, & one sequencer live at the same time that I mixed together VHS tapes of my movies (mostly ones made for this purpose) while they were being projected. Sometimes the soundtracks of these were also mixed into the overall sound. This gig was a bit overambitious in the sense that I didn't have enuf time to devote myself to either the visuals or the sound individually as much as I'd've like. As such, the live mixing of the visuals, in particular, weren't as strong as I wanted them to be. All of this was originally mixed to VHS tape. In early 2009, I edited this 2 hr VHS document down to a 26 minute DVD-R & decided to 'reenact' the original presentation using samples taken from the materials developed for these "Triple-S Variety Shows" (of wch there were others). I presented it in this context partially so that people who hadn't lived in Pittsburgh in 1995 or who hadn't known me then cd experience that original performance (albeit compacted). I played sampler, sampling mixer, & wave-table synthesizer - structuring my playing largely around traying to make certain types of changes in rough sync w/ edit changes in the vaudeo & allowing specific parts of the prerecorded soundtrack to peep thru from time-to-time.
Following me on the bill was a duet set w/ David Bernabo playing accordian
& Mike Tamburo playing a harp-like instrument of his invention called
"Crowned Eternal" (or "Crown Eternal"?); then Michael
Johnsen played a solo set on his home-made electronics; the evening ended
w/ "A Collaboration": 3 guitarists: Mike Tamburo, Josh Beyer,
& Tusk Lord).
364. HiTE Club Premier w/ "Guitarists Anonymous Withdrawal Aids #7"
- HiTE Club, New Hazlett Theater lobby, Pittsburgh, us@
- Sunday, April 26, 2009
- After the moderate 'success' of the 1st gig of my chamber orchestra, HiTEC, at the New Hazlett Theater on January 9, 2009 (see entry 360), I was invited to host a monthly (M)Usic series in the lobby there. I decided to name this series "HiTE Club - for Histrionic Thought Experimenters & their fellow travelers. This name plays off of HiTEC, Night Club (Nite Club), Hite Report, etc, & has an even more ambiguous branding banner that I hodgepodged rebus-style together very hastily using images found on the net.
The evening began with joy toujours playing "You are beautiful-core" on ukelele & violin (both looped from time to time) & vocals. Self-described as "Music you can play while your four year old is sleeping". I then passed the sombrero "(This is a donation event (no nation but the donation [or is it doughnation?]) & we'll be passing the sombrero around to make sure the hat's big enuf to accommodate the 1st-born & gold bricks.)" Then "Tony Blowad" (David Bernabo: guitar & percussion, Matt Griffin: percussion, Brandon Masterman: baritone & soprano saxes, flute) played a set consisting of responses to fanciful sentences created by them pulled from a jar.
I finished off the nite with the 7th "Guitarists Anonymous Withdrawal
Aids" (see entries 313-316, 321, 326, 327,
331) although it cd also be called the 9th one because 2 of
the entries referenced parenthetically here were radio shows that I don't
include as full-blown "GAWA"s. For this presentation I had joy
be the projectionist of the slides (forward only, 1 every 24 seconds please)
& David be the projectionist of the filmstrip (much more freeform).
This was their therapy. Ok, joy surpirsed me by NOT playing guitar for his
thing but he DOES usually play guitar so he still 'needed' the therapy anyway.
I was so stressed from the lack of (v)audience (9, c'mon people!, 9!) that
I forgot to put on the Guitarists Anonymous 'costume' until after the therapy
session started. That was ok even though it was accidental. This was triple
projection: filmstrip: left, vaudeo: middle, slides: right. I asked how
many people in the audience were guitarists, many raised their hands. I
pointed out that if I'd asked how people in the audience were child molestors
probably no-one would've raised their hands. This could be used as evidence
that guitarists are an even more serious problem because there are so many
of them.