tbray@mprvaxa.UUCP (Tim Bray) (03/26/86)
I recently saw these films, and recommend them. All four are by Peter Greenaway, best known for his film "The Draughtman's Contract", which is opaque, disturbing, well-photographed, and worth seeing. Anyhow - each of these films is one hour long. The composers are John Cage, Meredith Monk, Phil Glass, and Robert Ashley. General comments: Too often the films degenerate into fast cuts between composers rapping and their work being performed. This is often uncharitable to both the composer and the work. Sometimes though, the two enhance each other. Film by Film: Start with Robert Ashley - his work was a TV "opera", "Perfect Lives". It had moments, but there was too much vocalizing about the hidden structure beneath the surface of the work. Nice visual presentation - all the talking heads were echoed with multiple video images. Anyhow, I hadn't heard of him before, and am not a fan. Oh yes - the principal pianist was named "Blue" Gene Tyranny - good name, dynamic player too. Meredith Monk - For those who don't know, MM is a New York singer, dancer, composer, filmmaker. Her vocal work ranges from operatic to elevator to throat-wrenching screaming. All of her work lent itself to the movie medium very well. Much of the music is not pretty but almost all is beautiful. I was dazzled by her choreography, film work, and presentation. Her troupe of performers was very impressive in their musical virtuosity and commitment to the work. Unfortunately, they had a LOT of MM talking about her work. This was unfortunate. Anything I say about this will make me sound like a raving sexist bigot. But the music... any time you get a chance to see "Dolmen Music", run don't walk. Phil Glass - we all like Phil Glass now. He had not much interesting to say except about the kind of people, and the number of people, in his audiences over the years. I own and love "Glassworks", and it was nice to see a few shots of it being performed, but I still don't think I'd pay for a ticket to a concert. "Floe" from Glassworks was fun to watch. Most interesting were the discussions of the technical problems - Glass on the problems of notation for dense, repetitive music. His singer on the problems of voicing given the speed and range of the parts. The wind players on breathing difficulties. An enjoyable hour. John Cage - this film <watch out, cliche approaching> changed the way I think about music. I have long felt that John Cage is an entertaining charlatan, whose ideas, though provocative, are wrong (music, I think, is a place for minimizing entropy), and whose music is unlistenable didactic masturbation. I still think this - mostly. But some of the thoughts and music in this very dense hour have opened my eyes. To begin with, Cage's story of his experience in the echo chamber at MIT, that launched him on the road to aleatoric music - flawed but compelling. The work made up of many (27?) one minute stories, which were used to punctuate the film. His stern lecture on why he doesn't "use" records, as though they were a particularly noxious drug. His amusement at himself and the world. The film is true to the ideas of Cage. Among other things, it opens with an extended cinematic essay on the destruction of the interior of a church in preparation for a Cage concert - the noise of this destruction is, Cage would say, music. Two of the pieces presented in the film are real ear-openers. "Roarratorio" is Cage's tribute to Joyce, consisting of words selected randomly from "Finnegan's Wake", interspersed with Irish traditional music and aleatoric noise. It is unusually large and complex for Cage, and unforgettable. Finally, a work whose name I have lost, for electronics and three performers on a variety of conch shells filled with water. The shells are not blown, they are tipped back and forth in the immediate vicinity of a microphone. They make pretty bubbling sounds. The combination of conch bubbling and electronics was evocative and truly new. The internal structure of the shell is sufficiently complex that the performer cannot consciously control the timing or nature of the sounds - an instrument after Cage's heart. He was a performer, and the film of his 70 year old child's face bent in wonderment over his shell, continually surprised at the music for which he would deny authorship... Guess I have run on some. The movies should be seen. Tim Bray (ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray)
koko@uthub.UUCP (M. Kokodyniak) (03/26/86)
> I have long felt that John Cage is an entertaining > charlatan, whose ideas, though provocative, are wrong (music, I think, > is a place for minimizing entropy), and whose music is unlistenable > didactic masturbation. I still think this - mostly. > > Tim Bray (ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray) I like your reference to entropy in music. It seems that many modern composers (or at least the ones I have heard) maximize the entropy in their music. One piece that comes to mind is "Little Organ Concert" by some composer whose name eludes my memory. (This piece was first performed at the inaugural organ concert at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto.) I have never heard the Canadian Brass and the Elmer Eisler Singers make such pitiful and grotesque sounds. At times, one could hear the audience giggling and even laughing. I don't know what the composer's intentions were, but I certainly got a few laughs out of it. At certain seemingly random moments, various choir members made the sounds similar to cats in heat, hissing at a human intruder. However, at one point, it sounded as if the composer really got going with a musical idea. The choir and brass were going at full blast and full organ was engaged -- it started to sound like the majestic ending to a symphony. But within a few seconds, the organ stopped, the choir went flat and the brass fell off their notes and dwindled into a menagerie of random notes so typical of modern composition. In general, the entire piece seemed to be a disarray of detatched musical ideas, like islands in a sea of entropy. Listening to that piece is analogous to hearing a would-be philosopher utter some broken phrases, some of which superficially sound as if they were extracted from some great literary works. My reply would probably be "So what? What does it all mean?" But if it doesn't mean anything, then what is the point of expending the effort to say anything at all?