Mark Carlson, composer, rugged individualist, and fearless vacationer, has been touring Maui while I’ved holed up in this time share in Kihue finishing a new choral piece. He slathers himself in SPF50 sunblock, puts on his LL Bean hat, and with maps in hand takes off to explore, hike, and take pictures. Here is a picture from one of his hikes on the North shore. In 1964, a tsunami wiped out everything on the Northeast part of the island with the exception of this little church, built in the late 19th century, and still standing.
Hearing about the tsunami didn’t really help my time here. They have evacuation signs everywhere, so assuming we all had enough time to get in our cars and peacefully climb up the ["not extinct"] volcano, everyone would be fine. Having finished said choral piece, yesterday I got to join Mark and we went up that mountain, er, volcano. On the way we saw the only remaining sugar mill on the island, belching hot steam into the muggy sky. (I’m dying to come back and do a photo essay in black and white on this place.)
We [Mark] drove up a long, well paved road up, up, up and up, and omigod we climbed 10,000 feet until we saw an observatory. We were above the clouds. As you may have experienced with gorgeous natural places, it’s hard to get it all in a photo, but the views were absolutely stunning. We looked down into the Haleakala Crater, out at the ocean, out into the sea, off at other islands in the distance, and there we were above the clouds.
It was bone chilling considering we dumb Californians were wearing T-shirts and shorts, but we braved the cold, tromped around taking pictures and seeing the endangered Silversword plant which “attached itself to a California bird millions of years ago” and has managed to survive atop this volcano that looks more like the surface of Mars than it does Hawaii.
Parched and tired, we finally got back down around 7:30 and went to Moose McGilicutty’s for dinner. We stopped in a wine store and met the owners –– two gay guys, lovers, who had left San Francisco in the mid-80s: “we lost all our friends to AIDS. It was still called ‘grid’ at that time.” We realized that Maui doesn’t seem to be much of a gay island, which was fine: it wasn’t what we were looking for anyway. My partner has been sending me love notes and love calls from LA saying come home soon, your family misses you. And I miss them too. Mark begins teaching at Santa Monica College on Monday. He has successfully done quite a few of the Sunday NY Times crossword puzzles, and “rumi-nated” over his selection of Rumi poems which he will be setting this fall. I jump back into finishing the music to the film Cages (which has now been sold and distribution assured), and then another wedding next weekend (Damon and Jane) in Santa Rosa. We had hoped to do a syllabus for the music theory courses that we are both teaching at UCLA this fall, but the books remained untouched.
Today we are off to the western shore where all the big resorts are. I guess the sugar factories closed at some point and decided to reinvest in resorts instead: good call.
Cuando más triste y solo me sentía
Queriendo llorar en el salón
La niña sentada al lado mío
De pronto la mano me tomó
Y con los ojos más negros y tristes
Que he visto jamás
Me dijo sin palabras
“No te apures, no estás solo”
“Guardian Angel”
When I felt so sad and all alone
Wanting to cry in the classroom
The girl sitting next to me
Suddenly held my hand
And with the darkest and most tender eyes
I’ve ever seen
Told me without a word
“Don’t worry, you are not alone.”
Meet the man who has written the poetry I have posted here over the past week and whose marvelously inspired words I have been setting to music. I was thrilled to find this little cache of interviews on Color In Colorado, a website that deals with bilingual children’s literature (FXA has 5 books of poetry for children). There is a full transcription of all the interviews there for those of you who prefer to read and not watch.
I spoke to Francisco yesterday to alert him to all that’s going on and he gave me his blessing, and told me he has a new collection of poetry coming out soon. Yippee!
Despite my preference for gin martinis, my mind is open to a wide variety of alternatives: for you, not me. Here’s one guaranteed to stimulate the carnivorous appetite: the Weenie-Tini. Andrew Fenton offers an extensive guide to mastering this culinary infusion on EG Forums. For the record, in that this cocktail uses Hebrew National beef franks, this is a Kosher concoction.
Here is an early sampler called the Mellotron. Each sound was made by lengths of prerecorded tape on a loop, activated when a key is pressed. You’ll see the innards of the thing later in the video. The Moody Blues used one in “Nights in White Satin,” but they only used string sounds. Here you hear prerecorded bits of trombone solo, percussion loops, and well, anything you can record could be put on one of these babies. I assume that pressing the stops, changes the tape loops. I didn’t find the date on this, but I assume it’s mid-1960s.
I have always preferred to write songs and choral pieces in my own language. Being an American, that means English, American English. As of this point, most of my performances are in English speaking countries and musically communicating in the home language just makes sense. I’m not convinced that anyone knows what is really being said when the text is in Latin, or German, or French, or Italian. OK, if you have superscript titles during the opera, or a flashlight to see the translation during the performance can help. Otherwise the human voice becomes stripped of its content and is just another instrument.
I have no interest in writing a piece that just invents on one word, like “alleluia” or “Kyrie eleison.” When I set text, I have something to communicate in addition to the musical content. I want the listener to pay attention to what is being said. When a singer or chorus gets behind what is being said in the text, they in turn sell it to the audience, making it a more enriching experience.
In my Alarcón pieces I’m working on this week, quite a few of them have erotic texts. I saw how the chorus (Vox Femina/LA, Iris Levine, director) responded to an erotic text in the last set I wrote for them. It transformed the experience: they threw themselves into the piece with a passion they knew first hand. There was nothing prurient about it. This new set will be done on their Carmina Burana concert, another highly erotic work, and it seems appropriate that some of the texts be erotic.
I mentioned the amusing reception of Iris’s choice for a reading session involving 600 Mormon girls where the text for my piece was “not appropriate.” I’m composing a highly erotic piece now where the second and fourth verses are quite hot (not prurient, erotic). In that Francisco has presented these poems both in English and Spanish, it occurs to me that I’ll set them in Spanish: a) Spanish SOUNDS more erotic than English to me, and b) only those who speak Spanish will have any idea of what’s being said. So in the future, the religious taste police will likely just gloss over it, praising the flow of the English and Spanish languages. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating naughty lyrics for K – 12 choruses, but once high school is reached, why can’t tasteful and appropriated erotic texts be incorporated into their repertoire? Think of them as “love songs PLUS.”
Regular RBW blog commenter Danny McMahon (aka Fairyboy69) translated an article that appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (Aug. 18, 2006) and posted it on rutopia, one of the Rufus Wainwright bulletin boards. The article gives us a peak into Rufus’s new album, as yet untitled, it is NOT the Judy Garland show, and Neil Tennant, of the Pet Shop Boys, is helping out with this session (Rufus will evidently be producing this album himself –– about time). The song discussed upfront is one that is scored for string quartet, piano (covered with a heavy drape to “keep it soft”) and Rufus’s voice. The author describes it stylistically somewhere between Mahler, Bernstein, and Debussy. Sounds good. Also sounds like Rufus may need another lesson in orchestration from Prof. Berlioz. The picture (above) was evidently taken while RW was frustrated with the session.
Should it sound like a live recording, Tennant asks, because it does. No, says Wainwright, actually it should sound like Fauré. Hm. Finally they agree to add a little echo to the microphone during the next take – which does indeed sound a lot better.
Perhaps he’s realized that writing for strings is not as easy as one might think. We’ll see. I, for one, am thrilled. I had the impression the next album might be full of sleepy cowboy songs for solo guitar and voice [yawn] but it looks as thought I am wrong.
The songs are as nonchalant as they are beautiful, there are very cheerful and very sad lyrics and Berlin features in several of them. One song is called “Sanssouci,” another “Tiergarten,” which sounds like “Tear garden” to American ears, and in “Going to a town” Wainwright sings, accompanied by changes in harmony that take you to ever more beautiful places, about a city that was once destroyed. It sounds prettier than ever.
For a hardcore fan, as I am, this looks to be an exciting project. Now we’ll hear what was going on compositionally while Rufus was preparing for his Judy show. GO RUFUS!
While I take breaks from composing, I like to do Sudoku puzzles, the 9 by 9 number placement puzzle invented by the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler (1707 – 83) and named by someone in Japan, meaning “single number.” I haven’t had this much fun since I made 12-tone matrices back when I tried to be a 12-tone composer. Together with trying to pronounce these odd Hawaiian names, my Hawaiian vacation seems to be about inventing with limited numbers, or letters, or notes.
rss feed
We [Mark] drove up a long, well paved road up, up, up and up, and omigod we climbed 10,000 feet until we saw an observatory. We were above the clouds. As you may have experienced with gorgeous natural places, it’s hard to get it all in a photo, but the views were absolutely stunning. We looked down into the Haleakala Crater, out at the ocean, out into the sea, off at other islands in the distance, and there we were above the clouds.
It was bone chilling considering we dumb Californians were wearing T-shirts and shorts, but we braved the cold, tromped around taking pictures and seeing the endangered Silversword plant which “attached itself to a California bird millions of years ago” and has managed to survive atop this volcano that looks more like the surface of Mars than it does Hawaii.
Those that know, know.
“Anything following the word ’should’ is usually bullshit.”
While I take breaks from composing, I like to do Sudoku puzzles, the 9 by 9 number placement puzzle invented by the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler (1707 – 83) and named by someone in Japan, meaning “single number.” I haven’t had this much fun since I made 12-tone matrices back when I tried to be a 12-tone composer. Together with trying to pronounce these odd Hawaiian names, my Hawaiian vacation seems to be about inventing with limited numbers, or letters, or notes.