Mixed Meters

Trial and Error

2009-07-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

This is a test. This is only a test.

This test takes the form of a little 30 Second Spot I wrote last month. Leslie picked the name, Trial and Error. Back then I uploaded it to Facebook because I could. I didn't upload it here because MOG (where I've uploaded previous audio files) seems to have removed their embedded player feature which you might have noticed in previous MM posts - like this one..

I found another embedded player in the form of a Google Widget. And here it is. Can you play it? Can you hear it? Remember, you heard it here first - unless you heard it on Facebook already.

Comments on this widget are encouraged. Does it work well for you? Comments about the piece are possible too, if you care.

Google Audio Widgetgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Trial and Error Copyright (c) 2009 David Ocker 48 Seconds

What's a 30 Second Spot? (This is one of the earliest MM posts so be sure to read my update in the comments.)

What's a widget?

Trial and Error Tags: 30 Second Spots. . . Trial and Error. . . David Ocker

Mike Antonovich and the Ring Festival LA

2009-07-16T01:39:00.001-07:00

Here is a resolution to be voted on by the five Los Angeles County Supervisors next Tuesday. It is item 6 on the agenda. Read it here. Or read this:

6. Recommendation as submitted by Supervisor Antonovich: Direct the Chief Executive Officer to send a five-signature letter to Marc I. Stern, Chief Executive Officer of the LA Opera, and members of the Board of Directors requesting that the “Ring Festival LA” shift the focus from honoring composer Richard Wagner, to featuring other composers as headliners, to provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent. (09-1698)

The full actual proposed resolution looks like this:

Click the picture for an enlargement or download the pdf here. Or read this:

MOTION BY SUPERVISOR MICHAEL D. ANTONOVICH
JULY 21, 2009

Los Angeles Opera’s upcoming Ring Festival LA, which celebrates the work of composer Richard Wagner, a racist whose anti-Semitic writings were the inspiration for Hitler and the holocaust, is an affront to those who have suffered or have been impacted by the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialistic Worker Party.

To provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent, the LA Opera should reevaluate and rearrange the festival’s programming to delete the focus on Wagner and incorporate other composers as headliners including Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Schubert, Schumann, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and others.

I, THEREFORE, MOVE, that the Board of Supervisors direct the County’s Chief Executive Officer to send a five-signature letter to the Marc I. Stern, Chief Executive Officer of the LA Opera and members of the Board of Directors requesting that the Festival shift the focus from honoring Wagner to featuring other composers as headliners.

I've blogged at length about the proposed opera festival in this article: Ring Festival L.A. - Wrong Festival L.A. in which I make a number of suggestions on how the Los Angeles Opera might better represent the various opinions about Wagner held in our community.

I do not think Supevisor Antonovich's suggestion to replace Wagner with other composers is such a good idea. I do think that formally asking the opera company to consider these issues is an excellent idea.

My best idea in that blog post was that the Opera should promote their Recovered Voices program during the festival when visiting Ringnuts might hear operas suppressed by the Nazis.

My wildest idea was to create a fringe festival - celebrating not some dislikable dead German guy, but the creative arts right here in Los Angeles. I wanted to call the fringe festival Wrong Festival L.A. If such a thing actually happened I'd be the first to suggest that they find a better, more positive name.

Carie Delmar, a writer and opera critic, has posted an article (here at Opera Online) about why a Wagner festival is not a good idea for Los Angeles. (I cannot get her article to format properly in any browser, so I just select all the text and copy it to another program for reading.) That article seems to suggest where Mike Antonovich might have gotten his list of alternate composers.

And you might want to contact the Supevisors and tell them that it would be okay for them to write to the Los Angeles Opera with the suggestion that other viewpoints need to be heard during any Los Angeles Wagner festival.

GLORIA MOLINA: molina@bos.lacounty.gov
MARK RIDLEY-THOMAS MarkRidley-Thomas@bos.lacounty.gov
ZEV YAROSLAVSKY zev@bos.lacounty.gov
DON KNABE cpedersen@lacbos.org (his chief-of-staff)
MICHAEL D. ANTONOVICH fifthdistrict@lacbos.org

Ring Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . LA Opera. . . Mike Antonovich. . . Richard Wagner

Musical markings

2009-07-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

This post was inspired by amusing emails I received. But be warned: unless you are now or have ever been an orchestra musician you're probably not going to get it.

For some reason Gustav Mahler wrote instructions in his symphonies in the German language. Many American musicians need these translated into American. This is a letter to members of some orchestra with a list of Mahler's markings and equivalent English versions. (There's one really good viola joke. Here is an exhaustive compendium of every other viola joke.)

(Following the Mahler is sheet music to Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz (from "A Tribute to Zdenko G. Fibich") a famous opus by the mysterious John Stump, who sells authorized copies of his music here. Other stuff too, if you make it that far.)

MAHLER MARKINGS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH

Several weeks ago, we sent you a list of translations of the German markings in the Mahler. We now realize that this list contained many serious errors. These sheets contain the correct versions. So we don't waste valuable rehearsal time on this, copy these corrections into your part immediately.

German in bold type (English translation in parentheses)

Langsam (Slowly)
Schleppend (Slowly)
Dampfer auf (Slowly)
Mit Dampfer (Slowly)
Allmahlich in das Hauptzeitmass uebergehen (do not look at the conductor)
Im Anfang sehr gemaechlich (in intense inner torment)
Alle Betonungen sehr zart (with more intense inner torment)
Getheilt [geth.] (out of tune)
Von hier an in sehr allmaehlicher aber stetiger Steigerung bis zum Zeichen (From this point on, the spit valves should be emptied with ever-increasing emotion)
Hier ist ein frisches belebtes Zeitmass eingetreten (Slowly)
Haupttempo (Slowly)
Noch ein wenig beschleunigend (slowing down but with a sense of speeding up)
immer noch zurueckhaltend (with steadily decreasing competence)
sehr gemaechlich (with indescribably horrific inner torment)
Etwas bewegter, aber immer noch sehr ruhig (Somewhat louder, though still inaudible as before)
Alle Betonungen sehr zart (with smallish quantities of fairly mild inner torment)
Gemaechlich (Intermission)
Ganz unmerklich etwas zurueckhaltend (Slowly)
Etwas gemaechlicher als zuvor (Slowly)
Zurueckhaltend (Gesundheit)
Von hier ab unmerklich breiter werden (as if wild animals were gnawing on your liver)
Ohne cresc. (without toothpaste)
immer noch etwas zurueckhaltend (Slowly)
vorwaerts draengend (Slowly)
Hauptzeitmass (Slowly)
Allmaehlich etwas lebhafter (screaming in agony)
Ohne Nachschl[age] (without milk [sugar])
Kraeftig bewegt (Slowly)
Alle (second violins tacet)
mit dem Holze zu streichen (like a hole in the head)
mit Parodie (viola solo)
sehr einfach und schlicht, wie eine Volksweise (Slowly)
daempfer ab (eyes closed)
ploetzlich viel schneller (even more ploddingly)
Den ersten Ton scharf herausgehoben (Do not play until the buzzer sounds)
Am Griffbrett (as if in tune)
aeusserst zart, aber ausdrucksvoll. (radiantly joyful, despite the itching)
wieder zurueckhaltend (increasingly decreasing)
noch breiter als vorher (better late than never)
Nicht eilen (no eels)
Allmaehlich [unmerklich] etwas zurueckhaltend (much faster [slower] than conductor)
Lang gestrichen (heads up)
Lang gezogen (heads back down)
Die werden allmaehlich staerker und staerker bis zum (fp) (In the event of a waterlanding, your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device)
Am Steg (Slowly)

Want to know what the German really means? Copy a phrase and click here.

FAERIE'S AIRE and DEATH WALTZ
Click on the picture to see all the spiffy little details.

Fairie's Aire and other similar notational nightmares (some of them intended seriously by the most important and impressive of important, impressive composers) may be found here, at a blog called Dark Roasted Blend.

MODERATO NON TROPPO by David Ocker
(I guess this is my Tribute to Fairie's Aire and Death Waltz)

I probably created this in the eighties when my work was still done with cheap, reliable pens, ink and straightedges instead of with expensive, bug-ridden computers. Judy Green, proprietor of Judy Green Music, had changed vellum suppliers (that's the translucent paper onto which music was copied). She wanted me to test the new paper.

So I sat down one day with the sample sheet of vellum and proceeded to write this, er, piece of music. There's no real title so I'm calling it by the first tempo indication Moderato non troppo ("not too moderately"). My principal consideration as a composer was whether the paper held the ink well. I wanted to know if it would smear and other similar musical things. (As always, click the pic for enlargement.) Notice Judy's logo and address in the lower left.

The original of Moderato non troppo hangs in my office to this day - attached to the side of a bookcase with a piece of scotch tape.

DOCTOR SCHMUTZIG??

Has anyone ever heard of the Doctor Schmutzig Method for Holzblasinstrumente?

I remember a small, comedic musical-instruction pamphlet which I probably saw in college. The woodwind instrument it teaches looked suspiciously like a vacuum cleaner. I cannot find any reference to this online. It's possible that I remember it imprecisely.

Once, after I mentioned the pamphlet to Leslie, she started calling me "Doctor Schmutzig". Not because I know how to play a vacuum cleaner but because I'm so good at making a mess.

I'd like to reacquaint myself with this little "gem". And I'd like to prove to her that I didn't just make it up. (Maybe I did.) Any help in this quest will be gratefully received.

Read Mixed Meters' rant about Mahler Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa.

Notations 21 is a website which has many examples of "innovative notations".

Thanks to David Avshalomov and John Steinmetz for sending the inspirational emails.

Music Marking Tags: Gustav Mahler. . . music notation. . . Fairie's Aire. . . John Stumpe. . . moderato non troppo. . . Doctor Schmutzig. . . Method for Holzblasinstrumente

Squawk!

2009-07-06T01:45:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, while Leslie shopped for bizarre flesh-eating plants at the Los Angeles County Arboretum (located in Arcadia which shares a common, unarmed border with Pasadena), I made video of the peafowl for which the park is quite well known. The results were just too cute not to use in a piece.

When we moved to Pasadena there was a peacock living on our new property. We named him Mister P. He lasted about a year. This piece celebrates one of the several annoyances associated with living near peacocks.

Copyright (c) 2009 David Ocker - 244 seconds

The next time I make a video, remind me to bring a tripod and take more framing shots.

Another picture of Mister P is here. He used to present his full display to the front grille of the Volvos.

You could watch an earlier Mixed Meters Movie Moment about birds: Birds Who Don't Know The Words

Tail Feather Tags: peacocks. . . Squawk. . . David Ocker. . . Arcadia CA . . LA County Arboretum

Mommy, who is Michael Jackson?

2009-06-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

One afternoon last week, judging by the special coverage on every local Los Angeles television station, you'd have thought someone had flown an airliner into a skyscraper. The actual news, of course, was that Michael Jackson had died suddenly, mysteriously, before the world could even learn if his comeback would be a success.

The concerts next month could never have generated as much money as the act of dying will. The extra positive media exposure and public forgiveness are incalculably large. What a great, if unintentional, career move.

However high his psychic apogees as the "King of Pop" his low points must have been frightening. His parents rode him hard and put him away emotionally wet. He spent his adult life searching for lost youth, questioning his fading talent, explaining his bizarre behavior and hiding his face from cameras - a living hell like that could be no worse than the imaginary fiery afterlife everyone seems to believe in..

But everything is different now. (I heard someone say exactly that on a TV news program.) Amidst the OJ-like media excitement over the as-yet unannounced upcoming Jackson funeral plus expectations of lawsuits, box sets, tribute productions, interviews of his children (once they turn 21), documentaries, made for TV biopics and, eventually, enough tell-all books to fill an elementary school library, America wants to know right this minute how the future will remember Michael Jackson.

Many people think Mike will end up at the top of the dead media legend tree next to Elvis. Hardly likely. My guess is that he'll end up several branches lower as the biggest name from the second-most relentlessly conformist and trivial era of popular culture ever. But the post-baby boom generation finally has its own John Lennon. Or is he their Tupac Shakur.

The important issue is whether Michael's fan base will replicate itself over time. When the current five-year olds who are listening to their parent's Michael Jackson albums grow up, they'll reproduce. Here's an imaginary conversation around the year 2040 between one of those kids and her tweener daughter.

Daughter "Mommy, who is Michael Jackson?"

Mom "He was a singer your Grandmother used to like when she was your age."

Daughter "Why does he look so funny."

Mom "Because he had plastic surgery to make him look younger."

Daughter "His eyes are sad. Why was he sad?"

Mom "Because he was so talented and so rich and so famous that he became unhappy."

Daughter "I thought famous people were always happy. Where is he now?"

Mom "He died a long time ago when he was fifty."

Daughter "No wonder he was sad. Fifty is REALLY OLD."

Mom "Don't tell your Grandmother. Now finish your bowl of Mr. Fizzy Mango Flavored Enviro-flax Sugar Treats and then you can watch that new show that you like on the 3-D Disney channel. Won't that be fun?"

Daughter "Oh boy!" Long pause. "Mommy, who is Miley Cyrus?"

The Michael Jackson Through The Year 2022 graphic came from here. Gessner Allee is, apparently, a theater in Zurich. The graphic is at least 3 years old.

Big Eye Tags: Michael Jackson. . . King of Pop. . . Death of Michael Jackson

Stop Needless Noise - Help America Keep Calm

2009-06-25T03:27:00.000-07:00

I found these pictures reblogged on This Isn't Happiness. See if you can identify their common theme.

These pictures can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here or there. These links might help you find the original source blogs. Some of the pictures will enlarge if you click them. Ah ha.

Vinyl Tags: vinyl. . . records. . . photographs

Renewing My Blogging License

2009-06-18T03:23:00.000-07:00

Ask any blogger. They'll tell you that keeping a valid blogging license means periodically posting pictures of your pets. Cute pictures are best. This humanizes us a little bit. We don't want you to think we're all cranky loners with strange ideas and unsupportable opinions who constantly misspell words while stealing copyrighted material from other websites.

This years parade begins with our dog Chowderhead. Not his best angle.

Here is Crackle. He's shy.

This is Spackle, twin sister to Crackle.

Finally, a serious portrait of Miss Ivy Turnstiles Smith-Perkette. She can be really annoying.

You'll have to ask for an explanation of Ivy's full name. Click any picture for enlargement.

Here's the previous Blog License preserving post (Jan. 08).

Here's another one - which includes a piece of my music entitled In A Pissy Mood - dedicated to our cats. (April 07)

Here are pictures of The Ackles (that's Crackle & Spackle) as kittens. They were cute kittens. They're now 3 years old.

Dog Tags: cat pictures. . . dog pictures. . . Chowderhead

Rain Random

2009-06-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

Rain Random is a two-minute music composition with video images. The images are of rain. The piece is very cold and wet. Very empty. Like waiting for a bus on a street corner where there is no bus shelter without a raincoat during a huge rainstorm and everything around you just gets more blurred and dismal. More wet. More soaked. Please enjoy Rain Random.

Rain Random copyright (c) 2009 by David Ocker - 122 seconds.

If you have trouble with the embedded player, try here.

My other pieces of music with video:
Flag Day
The Chowder Jump - Fur or Red or Ball
Birds Who Don't Know the Words

Rain Tags: Rain. . . Random. . . David Ocker

John Roasts Roger

2009-06-01T03:42:00.000-07:00

My buddy Roger Lebow has a strange malady - every ten years, when the second digit of his age number turns to zero, he throws himself a big birthday party. Like yesterday afternoon.

My buddy John Steinmetz roasted Roger. I made a video with the point'n'shoot in my pocket. In an era of instant picture posting this is available the morning after - just like those old-fashioned newspaper things.

As always, my apologies for the sound (I was far away in a boomy room) and for the occasional camera jerk (I laughed sometimes too). If you go to the YouTube page you can annotate the video with your own comments.

Other Mixed Meters videos in a similar vein which you may enjoy: Vinny Introduces Anne and Vinny Introduces Me.

Click here to see John Steinmetz's many Mixed Meters appearances, most recently about the Push Poke Prod Press. This is Roger's first feature appearance but he has been thanked previously.

And before I forget: Happy Birthday, Roger. I was gonna get you a card - but this will have to do.

Roast Tags: Roger Lebow. . . John Steinmetz. . . comedy roast

Che's Brand

2009-05-25T00:53:00.000-07:00

I read this review of Michael Casey's book Che's Afterlife, the Legacy of an Image. Here's the image in question. It shows revolutionary leader Che Guevara. This is apparently the most reproduced picture in history:

I decided to read the whole book because of a bit of fluffy advertising copy quoted in the review. It's for an Australian ice cream flavor called Cherry Guevara:

The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!

Silly! But together with a picture of a violent long-dead Communist these words apparently have the power to sell sweet frozen dairy fat to hungry Aussies. Maybe that's because this picture is an icon, an icon that can be called to the service of either socialism or capitalism.

This picture has been used on bottles of beer, condoms, bikinis, bubble bath and countless t-shirts. It has been part of Smirnoff vodka ads and fake Andy Warhol prints (which Andy claimed to be his own work anyway). The picture has been used by leftist politicians in Latin America and right-wing religious fundamentalists in the Middle East. In parts of Miami this is a picture of the devil himself.

Here's the original photo as taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda in 1960.

The facts of Guevara's life provide only a starting point for explaining the picture. After becoming famous in the Cuban revolution Che pretty much bounced from job to job failing to make good as a bank president, a prison commander or a guerrilla revolutionary. He tried the last gig both in Africa and South America finally getting martyred for his trouble. Today, in parts of Bolivia, he is known as "San Ernesto"

Casey quotes Jorge Castaneda:

If ever there was an illustration of the anguish evoked in sensitive and reasonable, but far from exceptional, individuals, at being affluent and comfortable islands in a sea of destitution, it was Guevara. He will endure as a symbol, not of revolution or guerrilla warfare, but of the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of indifference.

Che's Afterlife shows how the picture has avoided contradicting itself into meaninglessness. Explaining what it does mean is no easy task.

Casey writes:

We have invested so many competing ideas and meanings into the concept "Che Guevara" that we can't collectively conceive of what it actually represents with anything near homogeneity

Later he seems to contradict himself:

It functions as the universal symbol for the act of following one's convictions.

Until Cuba joined the international agreement on copyrights the image was public domain. Now Che himself is licensed commercially just like Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein or any living or dead celebrity.

Branding is a trendy buzzword right now. People are trying to apply this marketing concept everywhere and anywhere they can. Che's Afterlife wastes no effort discussing brand concepts.

Che Guevara has become a brand and Korda's picture is its logo. Nike is a brand with a swoosh as logo; McDonalds has golden arches. The guardians of these brands - Korda's and Che's descendants together with the Cuban government on one hand, corporate executives on the other - try to preserve its value and focus its meaning by controlling where their brand appears. They decide which contexts, products or events should be associated with their brand and which should not.

Here's a picture of Che Guevara bubble bath.

The very pose of Che in the Korda photograph - a somber man, looking slightly up and off into the distance, imagining a better future (or maybe dreaming of a soak in the tub) - is reminiscent of an important graphic from recent U.S. politics, Shepard Fairey's Hope poster. Here it is slightly modified.

With the recent change in the U.S. government many people are hoping for a change in the brand image of United States of America. There's no doubt that intelligent, thoughtful pedantic people are bending Barack Obama's ears with suggestions on how to portray America now that the dark ages are ending. You can read some suggestions for Re-Branding America here. This picture comes from that page.

I found the Obama-Guevara-Obama t-shirt picture and the Hasta la Victoria Siempre picture (the neon Che) at This Isn't Happiness.

The photo of the Cherry Guevara ice cream wrapper (and many other Che-ish graphics) can be seen here.

A Wikipedia entry which documents Che Guevara in Popular Culture

The Che beer picture came from here. The Che bubble bath picture came from here.

Here's a documentary about the life of Che Guevara..

Che Tags: Che Guevara. . . Alberto Korda. . . Guerrillero Heroico. . . branding. . . advertising. . . Che's Afterlife. . . Michael Casey

Our culture overvalues the wrong things.

2009-05-15T00:35:00.001-07:00

The first time I saw David Hockney's painting Beverly Hills Housewife I scratched my head. "That's not very well done." I thought.

I didn't say anything out loud, of course, because the picture was hung in the home of the late Betty Freeman, LA's one-of-a-kind music patron, who is supposed to be the person in the painting. She had asked me to her Musicales for the very first time and I wanted to be invited back.

Today I read this LA Times article that the painting has just been sold for $7,900,000. Seven point nine million dollars! I'm scratching my head again. If Hockney's intention in painting this picture was to keep me confused, he is indeed a very great artist.

He couldn't have been out to prove what a fine painter he was. Technique seems to be the least of his concerns. Maybe he was trying to point out the banality of Beverly Hills life, picking subjects that the wealthiest buyers of art could relate to.

Most likely he was focused on marketing himself as a painter. I guess he was developing his brand. Branding adds value to a low value object and, given this outrageous price for a not terribly decorative object, Hockney must be quite the master at adding value. His real art seems to be selling himself. Actual painting? Not so important.

And I wonder who is wealthy enough to spend nearly $8 million on a wall covering. Obviously someone with lots of income. Check out this New York Times report on the highest earning hedge fund managers in 2008. Go ahead, take a guess what the top salary was. (The sickeningly large answer is below.)

Do I sound bitter? I am. I sense that the value of art results more from the importance of the artist than from the artwork itself. And I sense that the a person's salary has more to do with manipulating the system than with creating a useful product.

Our culture can be such a great disappointment to me.

I've ragged on David Hockney before - on the subject of music.

Here's an Art Talk by Edward Goldman (a bit of borderline-pretentious KCRW filler) on the subject of Betty and this picture.

Read a note Betty Freeman sent me here. (Music critic Mark Swed questioned the authenticity of the letter because Betty said she enjoyed my piece based on the music of Johannes Brahms.)

Value Tags: David Hockney. . . Betty Freeman. . . Beverly Hills Housewife

[According to the NY Times article "John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year." That's Billion with a B. I wouldn't feel so bad if he had to pay about 90% of that in Federal income tax, but he doesn't. Sigh. That's a rant for another time.]

In Partial Fulfillment of Something Or Other

2009-05-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

My friend Scott Fessler has been scanning and publishing his collection of posters from his student days at CalArts Those were the days we called "the seventies". (I wonder why.)

One poster he scanned was for my own clarinet recital on Febrary 19, 1976. Thanks for scanning it, Scott. Now I can share it with my other two readers.

It's about 10 inches wide and four feet long. It can be viewed either horizontally or vertically. I designed and executed the beast myself using dry transfer letters and my newly acquired set of rapidograph pens. These graphic techniques turned out to be far more important to my career as a musician than the clarinet ever would. It was reproduced on the now obsolete ozalid machine.

Click the picture for enlargement. Better yet, download a copy here. I suggest that you look at it up close to see lots of little text items and musical visual jokes. Go here to read a searchable text file of the poster.

The music, which floats on twisting curvy staves, quotes the various pieces on the recital. (Read the full program.) The guy with a clarinet coming out of his nose was obviously traced from Hieronymus Bosch and the skull playing the piano came from somewhere, Dali maybe? Does the poster remind you of my doodles?

Peppered throughout, in tiny stenciled letters, are 20th century musical events which also happened on February 19. These are quotes from the massive Music Since 1900 by Nicolas Slonimsky, which I, bafflingly, found time to read from cover to cover while I was a graduate student simultaneously studying clarinet and composition.

The beauty of Music Since 1900 is that you can learn just how much music gets written and performed that no one evers hears again. This one revelation has enriched and clouded my entire adult life.

At the bottom of the poster, inside a large mannered half notehead, are the words Sesquipedelian Macropolysyllabification, a Slonimskian term. A link to Slonimsky's definition can be found here.

Yes, I really did call my graduate recital "In Partial Fulfillment of Something or Other". I didn't think much of my CalArts degree even before they gave it to me.

Partially Fulfilled Tags: CalArts. . . David Ocker. . . Nicolas Slonimsky. . . Scott Fessler. . . ozalid. . . rapidograph. . . doodle

Musical Merchandizing

2009-04-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

This is a sequel to Musical Merchants, seen earlier in Mixed Meters: pictures of products or businesses with names drawn from musical terminology.

Here are two bottles of wine "Koda" and "TriTono" (which both have appropriate musical notation on their labels) and a struggling downtown Los Angeles housing complex called "Concerto". Click pictures for enlargementation.

Meanwhile, my three regular readers may have noticed that Mixed Meters seems to have gone into hiatus. This is because I work for a living. In the last week or so I've been able to prioritize my free time for a little bit of composing and a daily update to Mixed Messages which is also available in the right-hand column here and on Networked Blogs on Facebook. Why not check that out?

Frank Zappa and Alcohol

2009-03-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

PART ONE: Zappa Beers

A brewing company called Lagunitas started a series of specialty seasonal beers named after early albums of Frank Zappa, each released on the 40th anniversary of the original album. Here's a list of the beers with bits of various reviews I found online:

Freak Out! Ale - "a bright copper color with a thick, soapy-foamy head and a very citric hoppy nose." (from brugru.com)
Absolutely Free (also called Kill Ugly Radio) - "Very fruity in its aroma, stinking pleasantly of apricot" (from beerdrinker.org)
We're Only In It For the Money - "sweet and yeasty with traces of spicy fruit, cinnamon, apples, grapes" (from beeradvocate.com)
Lumpy Gravy - "Very rich and robust flavor with hints of smoke. Nutty characteristics linger throughout and bring a nice sweetness" (from thefullpint.com)
Cruisin' With Rueben and the Jets - "Bitter, unsweetened coffee, roasted malt and a little bit of licorice and black pepper [taste]" (from thefullpint.com)

I never found Zappa beers in my neighborhood legal-drug emporium which is just as well because I don't much like beer. These reviews don't make the beers sound terribly appetizing.

But I did want at least one empty Zappa beer bottle as a souvenir. In this quest I was helped by Israel Arrieta, who is a musically-talented beer-brewing Starbucks-managing barrista. He gave me an empty. Here's what it looks like. (Click for closer view.)

Recently however, through the really fine blog Kill Ugly Radio, I learned that there will be no more Frank Zappa Beers. Supposedly the reason is that the brewing company, Lagunitas, had "a falling out with the family". Family as in "Frank's heirs." The smart money says that the issue was money, as in "only in it for".

PART TWO: Orchestral Alcohol

Another alcohol-related news story, about problem drinking in English orchestras, has a Zappa connection. The article in the Guardian is entitled "Drinking problems rife in the great orchestras"

Here's a quote:

Bill Kerr, the orchestral organiser of the Musicians' Union, recalled some "regrettable incidents" involving alcohol and musicians. One involved one of the UK's most celebrated opera and ballet orchestras "and its heavy brass section. They should have been sacked really but they would have been very hard to replace," he said.

This reminded me of a Zappa music/alcohol encounter that I witnessed directly in 1984.

Frank's music was once performed and recorded by the London Symphony. Afterwards he bitched a lot about how drinking by the orchestra meant that he had gotten performances of lower quality for his money. When this subject came up on a Usenet group I wrote about my memories. This was my very first online contribution ever. The year was 1994.

Even now you can read what I wrote back then. The piece is called The True Story of the LSO

PART THREE: An Alcohol-Free Interview

The final section is about Zappa but not about alcohol.

Joseph Diaz is a musician and Zappa fan in Barcelona. In the year 2000 he emailed me some questions about my work for Frank and I, having just gotten a laptop, wrote and wrote and wrote.

Although the answers were originally intended for a fanzine Joseph recently posted my verbiage to his MySpace page, called "J21". Read Part One and then Part Two. You can also read a fascinating interview with my buddy, percussionist Ed Mann and you can listen to some of Joseph's music as well.

If you can't be bothered reading the whole thing, the following is a list of Joseph's questions together with very short snippets of my answers (the purple prose) which would actually make some sense in context.

J21: What is Music Engraving?

DO: I called myself a “computer music engraver” to distinguish what I did from the plate engravers who were rapidly being replaced. I imagined the “real” engravers as little old gnomes sitting in caves that looked exactly like sets for Wagner operas.

J21: Steve Vai is one of my favorite guitar players, what are your memories about him?

DO: And so ends the story of my relationship with Steve Vai – there isn’t much real information here but I’ve fleshed it out with needless details and other digressions. I hope it held your interest.

J21: All the Zappa fans think that the Synclavier is the ultimate instrument, but I think that right now with 10.000$ you can get a digital workstation that does more. What do you think about it? (note: This question was asked 9 years ago)

DO: These days [in 2000] that basic 100K$ house costs more like 400.000$. Just imagine what you should be able to do NOW if you put a music system that costs as much as a house on your desk.

J21: Did you work on pieces of music for Frank on the Synclavier that are still unreleased? Do you think there’s still good stuff to be released?

DO: The conductor was given no discretion. The moral of this is, I guess, that Frank wanted to remain absolutely in control

J21: Is still good music in the vault to be released?

DO: He may have passed on way too soon, but he personally produced enough music for three lifetimes of mere mortal composers.

J21: “Civilization Phaze III” is a great record, but it’s hard to understand for uneducated ears. From a point of view of somebody musically trained like you what do you think are the most interesting thing in the album?

DO: I figured out, at least to my own satisfaction why the piano people are essential to the album. They are telling us not worry about understanding the music.

J21: What music do you listen to lately?

DO: Piazzolla, Karnak, Salsa, Hamza al Din, Don Byron, Raymond Scott, Spike Jones, Mike Keneally and Internet radio.

Vinny Introduces Anne

2009-03-12T22:50:00.000-07:00

Before you watch this video you might want to review Volume One of the trilogy as told in The Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio. In that post you can watch another video called Vinny Introduces Me (available directly here) and read about and listen to the Golia LaBerge Ocker trio, one of those eighties groups. There are pictures and historical artifacts.

Been there? Done that? Good. Now read on.

Anne LaBerge, composer, flutist extrordinaire and resident of a non-mountainous part of Europe, is currently touring the U.S. Last Friday she visited the same "Career Design" course at CalArts that I had also visited. I attended her presentation, sitting inconspicuously in the back. Just as I had done the first time, I recorded Vinny's introduction.

Anne will be performing as part of the 8th Annual New Music Festival at Cal State Fullerton from March 18 through 21. (Read about it here as well) She does amazing things with flutes and computers.

On Saturday, as part of that Festival, as I understand, Charles Sharp (who has been featured in Mixed Meters in the post A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles) will be presenting a scholarly paper about the Golia LaBerge Ocker trio. I'd really like to know what he says but it's scheduled way too early in the morning for me - 9 A.M.

This picture of Anne and me was taken last Saturday. We were happy to have finished a meal of Mexican food at Dona Rosa's in Pasadena.

About the audio of the video. There are two problems. One is the background music - from my iPod which was accidentally playing. It seems much louder on the recording than in real life. The second is that the little microphone on my pocket point-'n-shoot picks up some voices better than others (Anne's is good except when she's quoting Mel Powell; Vinny's not so good). And certain noises - like chairs being moved or laughter - are viciously loud. So I extracted the audio, normalized the levels as best I could and then re-attached it to the picture. Alas, I couldn't get it back in perfect sync. Please pretend like you don't notice.

Tubas and the Federal Reserve

2009-03-09T03:44:00.001-07:00

These three pictures are screen captures from a music video by a group called The Sursiks. The song is Little Paper Airplanes. See it here.

I'm not going to explain how little paper airplanes or the Federal Reserve and the money supply relate to these pictures. You can watch the video too.

Yes, these pictures have been photoshopped by someone. They're still funny.

Found via WFMU Beware the Blog.

Other pictures of tubas - well, Sousaphones actually - appear in this Mixed Meters post. A picture of a Wagner tuba (like the one held between the legs of the strong man in the last picture) which has been made into a lamp is here. (Scroll down.)

Slave to 'Time Is Money'

2009-02-28T17:10:00.000-08:00

Slave to 'Time Is Money' is a 130-second long 30 Second Spot.

It's not a terribly pleasant piece of music: it reminds me of the sounds made while sharpening a knife on a motorized whetstone. The title refers to our inevitable attachment to the unpleasant but familiar aphorism - an ordinary meaningless phrase holding an uncomfortable truth from which most of us can never escape.

130 Seconds - Copyright (c) 2009 David Ocker

Once you've listened you could estimate the value (in your own local currency) of your time spent listening to Slave to 'Time Is Money' . Leave your estimate in a comment. If I get few enough comments I'll contribute the total to a charity of my choice.

Old Medical Catalog Scrap

2009-02-24T22:22:00.000-08:00

One reason for the dearth of recent Mixed Meters posts is the computer failure I recently endured - caused not by a hard drive crash but by a hard drive power supply crash. Everything seems back to normal now.

To test out the health of my system I scanned a small scrap of paper which I picked up while walking. It's very old. Could be a reprint. It's a medical catalog.

Click on this picture for a readable enlargement. The scan shows both front and back.

Here are some of the items offered for sale and their asking prices:

Rubber Male Urinal Bag -- $3.25
Rubber Female Urinal Bag -- $3.25
"Omega" Bulb Syringe -- 89¢
Special "Alpha" Syringe -- $1.49
Syringe Attachments -- 5¢ to $1.25
Oil and Water Metal Atomizer -- 77¢
Plant Sprinkler -- 65¢
Clinical Thermometer -- 50¢
Rectal Rubber Tubes -- 55¢
Stomach Pump -- $1.75
Stethoscope -- 95¢
Urinometers -- 35¢
Anti-Snoring Apparatus and Projecting Ear Device -- 40¢
Rubber Dust Protectors -- $1.00
Metal Dust Protector -- 75¢
Sounds and Catheters -- 20¢ to 75¢

A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles

2009-02-11T01:03:00.000-08:00

No musician admits it out loud and a few probably don't even admit it to themselves, but every musician wants to get into the history books. I've seen composers open a new book from the back just to look for their name in the index. I do that myself sometimes.

I'm very proud that I got mentioned even once in Frank Zappa's autobiography. (On page 175 in case you run across a copy because Frank didn't believe in indices.)

Recently I was contacted by Charles Sharp (also known as C. Sharp). He wanted to interview me for his doctoral dissertation. Here's how he described it:

[It is] ostensibly about avant-garde jazz in Los Angeles but it has become increasingly about the intersection of various different genres of experimental music in Los Angeles.

One of those intersections involved the ICA, the Independent Composers Association, a group in which I was active in the early 1980s. You can read several Mixed Meters articles about ICA. (MM is the only place on the Internet you can read anything about ICA, alas.)

I answered Charles' questions as best my memory would allow. A year passed. Charles finished his dissertation, charmingly entitled "Improvisation, identity, and tradition: Experimental music communities in Los Angeles". He has since defended it against all comers and earned some letters after his name which entitle him to a chance of being hired for menial college teaching positions.

The dissertation is 500 pages long! I immediately searched it for my name and found a gratifying number of mentions. Thankfully the quotes Charles picked didn't make me look like a complete idiot. It's not online at the moment but if you want to read it you should contact him. Charles created a blog to accept comments here which might be a good place to leave him a message.

The story Charles tells is important. It's about creative music right here in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, in experimental music, what happens in L.A. stays in L.A. This telling should help delineate a historical tradition few people know much about. Even those of us who witnessed parts of it don't know the whole story. People from elsewhere will be surprised.

After an academical introductory chapter (in which the word hermeneutics confused me repeatedly) it's a pretty easy read. Charles starts off with Ornette Coleman, not often thought of as an L.A. musician. He left here for New York in 1959 after recording The Shape of Jazz to Come. Three Los Angeles jazz musicians, pianist Horace Tapscott, cornetist Bobby Bradford and clarinetist John Carter are the backbone of the story.

I was acquainted with John Carter, heard him play a bunch of times and even got to play with him once, if only in private. He was a nice and genuine person. His cycle of 5 albums, Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, is the centerpiece of Charles' story. I could have learned a lot from John - had I thought to pay more attention.

Sharp discusses the music of Tapscott, Bradford and Carter :

...these musicians had preunderstandings, which were informed by bebop and also the developing music of free jazz. Their music suggested different realities and possibilities. If racism, which was a systemic part of urban planning, policing, and public policy, was a reminder that black people were not fully valued as individuals, the music was a reminder of the importance of individuals and the power of community. ... Their music was supposed to sound unique, different every time, and challenge the listeners; aspects that seldom result in broad mass appeal. ... As their music was understood, it expanded the horizons of the listeners and new communities would emerge. (p.126-7)

Charles writes a lot about communities - little groups of like-minded people within which music could take on some meaning. Telling how these groups arose and interacted with each other and eventually disappeared makes the story interesting.

For example, I found the early histories, starting in high school, of drummer Alex Cline, guitarist Nels Cline and synthesist Lee Kaplan (who ran an important concert series at a little dump pretentiously called the Century City Playhouse) fascinating. My buddy Vinny Golia gets a lot of space. (You can hear ancient recordings by an improv trio of myself, Vinny & flutist Anne LaBerge in this MM article.) Others (like Bill Roper, James Grigsby, Titus Levi, Kraig Grady, Lynn Johnston, Will Salmon) who I know or worked with get space as well.

Charles puts a lot of different things into his narrative. A chapter about punk rock. A chapter about the various Los Angeles city-wide arts festivals (which I alluded to in my recent post about opera.) Dr. Sharp takes the story right up to the present - long after I dropped out.

Having lived in Los Angeles for nearly 35 years, first as an active participant in the local experimental music scene and then an observer of same, I think this dissertation deserves to be widely read. Creative musicians, non-creative musicians, music fans of all kinds and even music critics will find it interesting. And they might just realize that Los Angeles is not quite the creative wasteland we pretend to be.

To accompany this post I've gone through the chaos of my archives and selected some flyers, newspaper clippings and concert programs which relate one way or another to Charles' subject matter. All of them mention my name somewhere - why else would I have kept them? But most are more interesting because of the others involved.

The material is in two formats. One is a 16 meg. PDF of scans of each item - get it here. The other is the same material only converted to searchable text. Read that one here.

Here's a list of the items included:

Musical Merchants

2009-02-07T21:28:00.000-08:00

Which of these musical terms:

Allegro
Aria
Arpeggio
Cornet
Forte
Trio

would you name

your coffee
your bridal shop
your apartment building
your building
your beauty shop
your other apartment building?

All the pictures were taken in Pasadena or South Pasadena and will enlarge if you click on them.

Who Says I'm Never Interested In Opera?

2009-02-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

Other opera related videos posted to Mixed Meters are here and here (Both of them are the Queen of the Night aria.)

Space Opera?

O.J. - 1993-2009

2009-01-25T01:47:00.000-08:00

In the spring of 1994 Leslie befriended a young orange tabby cat living in the parking lot of her museum. When she heard rumors that animal control had been called Leslie used her Volvo "spaceship" to abduct the cat and transport him to an alien laboratory where he underwent orchidectomy. She then brought him home and he ended his space journey on our bed, something we were pretty sure he had never seen before.

He settled down on the bed and made himself quite comfortable. "I like this bed thing." he seemed to say. From then until yesterday he lived with us, sleeping with us in that same bed every night. A good cat.

Last month OJ stopped coming upstairs and climbing into bed. That change marked te beginning of the end. The process had its ups and downs and we tried to give him as much dignity as we could. We buried him where flowers will fall on his grave. We will miss him.

I've finally updated the Animals We Live With page at my pre-Mixed Meters website, A Complete Waste of Time. It shows pictures of all our living pets and all our departed ones plus as many neighborhood wild species as I've been able to photograph. I will try to add even more cat pictures there in the near future, including some which show a much younger David and Leslie.

To read all previous Mixed Meters cat entries click here. In one entry, The Good Cat which is about the death of our black cat Batty two and half years ago, a process I called "euphemizing" a pet, I said that because of her passing:

A great void has been created, filled only by a vacuum of sadness.

OJ's death feels exactly the same. Here's the last good picture of OJ before he became sick.

The pictures enlarge if you click them.

Sea Creature Calendar

2009-01-21T19:55:00.000-08:00

This picture is the head of a tiny sea worm. It comes from the 2009 SCAMIT calendar which was designed by Leslie Harris. Get yours today.

Click the worm for a better view.

Mixed Meters is interested in worms because I'm married to Leslie. She studies them and she takes a lot of great pictures of them. She discovered this one while on a voyage in the middle of nowhere.

(See a picture of her in mid-ocean here. Some pictures of the ship she was on are here.)

This particular worm is Miss September and is called "Nereididae epitoke". That name would mean something specific to a marine invertebrate taxonomist like Leslie; rather less to a musician like me.

Here in Southern California marine invertebrate taxonomists started their own group - the Southern California Association of Marine Invertebrate Taxonomists. Or SCAMIT for short. I love that name. They study more than just worms. Any spineless animal that lives in the sea is fair game for SCAMIT. (The SCAMIT website is here.)

The calendar Leslie designed - and which includes a number of her own shots - is offered for sale to support SCAMIT. You can view thumbnails of all the months and purchase the calendar here. Other SCAMIT-supporting merchandise (like a BBQ apron, a T-shirt for your dog or a beer stein) is here. I think the t-shirt would be too small for Chowderhead.

Click here to see all the Mixed Meters posts which mention Leslie.

Click here to visit the worm section of the website of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County where Leslie works and where you can see more of Leslie's cool pictures.

Doo Dah Parade - Pictures Were Taken

2009-01-19T03:42:00.000-08:00

Through bad planning I managed to watch most of Pasadena's Doo Dah Parade on Sunday. The Doo Dah Parade is Pasadena's answer to Pasadena's Rose Parade. It is many things which the Rose Parade is not - like silly and chaotic. I was bored.

It works like this: some people dress up in strange costumes and ambulate in strange manners or are conveyed on strange vehicles down the center of a major public thoroughfare and they do strange things while lots of other normally dressed people stand on sidewalks and take pictures of them.

I took pictures too. Mixed Meters prides myself on finding a different angle. So here are my pictures of other people taking pictures of the Doo Dah Parade. Boring.

I wanted to get a picture which showed someone else's camera's LCD. This last shot is the best I could do - and I had to enhance the lcd section using Photoshop.

Clicking a picture enlarges it.

The Ocker Scale

2009-01-16T01:17:00.000-08:00

This piece is nearly 2 years old. I remember, back then, that I still wanted to change some things about it. So I flagged it in my mind as "unfinished".

Now, however, I can't remember what I wanted to change. And since it was written in an earlier version of Sibelius I imagine that working on it again would require more remedial effort than I'm willing to expend.

So, here it is, just as it was when I left it.

The text of The Ocker Scale defines the steps of the Ocker Scale, a subjective measurement tool for music listeners. It can be used to succinctly express personal reactions to new works of music directly to the composer or to other listeners. It would be perfect backstage after a concert. Or you can use it in a comment to a blog post. Only a number need be given. Lower is better.

Copyright (c) (p) 2007 2009 by David Ocker 258 seconds
Leslie Harris, in her Mixed Meters debut, is the narrator.
If you have trouble with the Flash music player, you might have better luck here.

Please leave your Ocker Scale number in a comment. Be honest. I can take it.