Author: Corey Smith

Gabriel Kahane is one of those musicians that I’ve been following for a while. I think I first found his existence through his song cycle, Craigslistleider. As just as ridiculous as it sounds, Craigslistleider is a cycle of songs for voice and piano that takes its text and inspiration from strange strange craigslist ads. The assless chaps for sale. The (possibly very ill) gentleman who can’t stop putting ice cubes down peoples shirts. You’ve got it all. Perhaps my favorite song is about a man begging for the name of a relish he found two years ago (he doesn’t know the name of the relish because, as the name of the song tells, “Some Dipshit Through [sic] My Bottle” of it. I think the “sic” is what kills me there). But enough talking. Listen to the man himself!

The whole song cycle is quite a gem- a great example of a composer taking an absurd text and making something really valuable out of it. I have a bit of a problem taking contemporary poetry and setting it to music, because it seems like the music isn’t really adding anything to the text. If anything, the music is forcing the music of spoken language into a constrained box of singing. But all of this is to say is that I think Gabe Kahane gets it very right here. He takes a moderately amusing text and turns it into a hilarious and very successful song cycle.

But Gabe Kahane is not one to be put in a box himself. In addition to his work in *ahem* contemporary classical music, he’s also a pop musician, and a damn good one at that.

But this is trying to put a label on something that he does, and I really don’t like that. When Kahane comes up in the media, he seems to be always billed as that guy who is stretching the boundaries of genre and bridges a gap between pop/rock music and classical music. I don’t find a lot of redeeming qualities in that argument, save the unlikely scenario that you are ever held at gunpoint and demanded to describe Gabriel Kahane’s work in a phrase or less.

That line of thinking seems reductive, it seems to put classical music as this thing that is diametrically opposed to popular music (and that just isn’t true), and it seems to put his music in a box of mixing genres (if you shake the box enough, all the classical dressing will get around to everything for the optimal music eating experience).

I think the really engaging thing about Kahane’s work is that it exists simply as very intelligent music. It is emotionally and intellectually satisfying, and that’s really all I need. The lyrics are some of the most resonant that I’ve encountered in a long time. It’s lyricism that is smart (“Modern’s a stillbirth/that was born before it died/in 1939/or was it ’45?”) and tragic (“Our hotel room was too small/For our luggage and our arguments/So we left them in the hall/And went to bed. Went Straight to bed.”), but above all, true. And that truth is what resonates the most with me, not the sense that he is referencing classical music, or that he uses traditionally “classical” instruments, or that he uses pop (or classical) rhythms in his classical (or pop) music. To misquote Gertrude Stein, An art is an art is an art is an art. Check out his music (two albums and a musical!) here.

And you should go see this man perform, it will be well worth it. UMS is bringing him here this Thursday and Friday at the Arthur Miller Oddslot Theatre. Grab tickets! Yours truly will be there Thursday night in the back live-tweeting the experience, so if you wanna jump on that, my twitter will be anxiously awaiting you. See you there!

The other day I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – take off all of the music on my iPhone and replace it all with christmas music.

I consider myself to be fairly fond of Christmas music. I am always excited for Thanksgiving to be over so that the music can start to come in and I can enjoy myself for the month of December. It’s part guilty pleasure, part fascination, and part nostalgia.

So needless to say I’ve been listening to a lot of Christmas music, particularly on my walks to and from class. It’s given me a lot of time to really think about what it is that I’m listening to, why I like it so much and why it has injected itself into our mass culture to the extent that it has.

Within the whole of Christmas music, I have a good deal of fuzzy memories. I remember the family gatherings during the holiday breaks, I remember a christmas tree and for some reason I remember being warm. Very warm. The warmth that is stifling and unbreathable, and yet at the same time entirely safe. I can’t breathe, but I don’t want to breathe.

But to dig deeper than pure nostalgia, the music fascinates me because it is so ingrained in our cultural consciousness. Pop music does this to an extent, too, but not with the width of Christmas Music. Where else in our culture do so many people share a knowledge of such an extensive songbook? People who don’t celebrate Christmas, people who do, the old, the young, the different. We all know these songs. And (I’m sure) some people don’t want to know the songs. But you can’t avoid them. They are everywhere. Christmas has invaded our culture so much that Sava’s has a huge Christmas tree up and doesn’t stop playing Christmas music and I don’t think twice about it. Christmas is an institution, a huge monolith of power and cultural presence. Christmas is about values and about togetherness but Christmas is also about the pressure of culture. It is about commercialization and capitalism and faux-values preached by public figures and about this ambiguous large man in a red suit who invades your home, steals your food, leaves gifts, and runs away with magical flying deer. It’s an absurd institution that is entirely and brazenly secular, despite its intense religious connotation for many, many people. Christmas is an institution born of religion, but that has now gone to college and rejected its parents and got a moehawk because it thought it was edgy.

Of course, Christmas means something different for everyone and everything. But. You know.

And then there is the music. An emblem of the season but also an institution within itself. An exclusive group of accepted holiday songs that are covered and repeated and sung and caroled and mutilated and ripped and sewn back together. It is music, it is the man, it is false nostalgia and it is real nostalgia. It is an immovable obelisk of money and fame and real passion and fake passion. Christmas music is the victim and the perpetrator of its own bastardization. And that makes me love it.

I think of the new Sufjan Stevens Christas box set and its epitome – the magical song “The Christmas Unicorn.”

I’m a Christmas unicorn
In a uniform made of gold
With a billy goat beard
And a sorceror’s shield
And mistletoe on my nose

Oh I’m a Christian holiday
I’m a symbol of original sin
I’ve a pagan tree and magical wreath
And a bowtie on my chin

Oh I’m a pagan heresy
I’m a tragic-al Catholic shrine
I’m a little bit shy with a lazy eye
And a penchant for sublime

For you’re a Christmas unicorn
I have seen you on the beat
You may dress in the human uniform, child
But I know you’re just like me
I’m a Christmas Unicorn! (Find the Christmas Unicorn!)
You’re a Christmas Unicorn too!

It’s all right. I love you.

And to all, a good night.

Inspired by my fellow blogger, Mark Bruckner’s fascinating last post on internet poetry, I’m going to take a moment and plug for one of my favorite 21st century poetic movements – flarf.

Flarf poetry…is…well it’s a….well why don’t I show you a flarf poem real quick.

This is “Why do I hate flarf so much” by Drew Gardner

She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried “but that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” What have you gotten yourself to do? Did it ever occur to you that you may in fact hate yourself? I know I do . . . I’m not nearly high enough yet—and you’re not helping. My group got invited to join the Flarfist Collective, set up some hibachis and do what we do best, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this writing if it were a library and I checked out the entire world as if it were a single book. Strike “helpful” off your list. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it’s speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything. Why do I need an enemy to feel okay about what I’m doing? Observe yourself as you browse with sophistication through the topic of Authorship & Credibility. Why do I hate the surface of the world so much that I want to poison it? Why do I hate this so much? Well . . . you Hate Your Fucking Dad! Why is the screen so damn small? And why does the car turn so sharply? And why is the only sound I hear the sound of a raft of marmosets? BECAUSE I’m fucking ANXIOUS AS HELL about EVERYTHING.AAAAAAAAARGH. It’s even worse: “I’ll tell you later.” The medium is literally made of thousands of beautiful, living, breathing wolves. Why do I hate the moon so much? Unpublish your ideas in reverse. People hate any new way of writing. My girlfriend really hates it. There is not so much daytime left. Life is like spring snow tossing off mercurial Creeley-like escapes from life-threatening health problems. In summer we love winter in winter we love summer—all poetry is written in social mercurochrome. Since I hate the abridgement of life, a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents is more what this is about. Hate and love—if those are the options I just want to love and hate lobsters. The oddity is not so much that Blake held these eccentric views for most of his life, but that in modern civilization they not only extend the hand, so that it could not complain about complaining about something it hadn’t even bothered to read, and instead formed a halfway decent indie rock band. I’m actually starting to get much more interested in white people than I used to be. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because it is against everything good this country once espoused. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because of the awful conflict it places the law-abiding or police-fearing poets under.

Alright! That was a bit long, but hopefully you hung in there and it was worth it. That is flarf. Flarf is an umbrella term. It encompasses a group of poets who use the internet and new technologies to generate poetry. It’s really more of a found poetry than the traditional “sitting on a beach late at night looking at the stars being emotional” kind of poetry. The most famous flarf technique is to google something and use the results (and the text on those pages) to generate poems. Other techniques might be something akin to using google translate on a poem to transform it into a mass of confusing word structures and interesting double speak.

The creators of flarf initially had a listserv and created these monstrous poems only for each other’s enjoyment. But somewhere along the line something really interesting and maybe even beautiful(?) came out of it. Flarf is profane, disgusting, devoid of poetic gesture, inane, heartless, and sometimes total nonsense. But it’s also fascinating because of those very reasons. Comparisons are often drawn to the artistic movement know as Dada, for both the similarities in the nonsensical name and also the anarchist and joyous artwork that was produced. And I think that’s why I love flarf. It is anarchy at its best. A love and a disregard for everything.

Whether you love flarf or hate it, it certainly has character and offers a really interesting take on this weird post-modern world we are a part of. Check out some more flarf here. Make your own flarf poem! Recite some for friends! Family! There is no better gift for a loved one than a flarf. And may yours days be filled with rewarding and confusing google searches.

Before I ever wrote a single drop of music I thought that the job of a composer must be impossibly difficult. I knew enough about music to know that there were seven notes in a scale and that these scales built melodies which were music. I wondered why computers hadn’t started writing music and just combining all of those different notes into every possible melody. I mean, seven notes. There are a lot of different combinations of those seven notes. But there are only seven upon which to work! The periodic table gives us 118(+?) elements which make up the world and you are telling me that only seven elements make up the world that is music?
Admittedly that comparison is a bit crude. The elements which comprise the known world are very, very complicated and have an intense amount of complexity and variety within themselves. And the elements which comprise the known world of music are a bit simpler, relying on (sometimes very complex!) acoustic phenomenon and organizing them into a series of twelve discrete pitches.
Of course, that was my first mistake – thinking that the world was divided up into 7 notes. I know now that
1) Seven notes comprise a traditional scale, but we are definitely beyond that as a musical culture (in fact we never were really there at all) so the contemporary composer, in fact, has twelve notes at his disposal – a not insignificant increase in the number of useable pitches.
And 2) That our western way of tuning things is not the only way. The octave can be divided into any number of partitions and often is, not only by musicians across the world (see indian classical music) but also within our very own western culture (See Harry Partch’s 43-tone monster). To say that the traditional western system of music is the only way is not only completely euro-centric but also completely wrong (also considering that musicians often use alternate tuning within all kinds of music).

Anyway, this comes up because I watched this video on YouTube the other day.

It poses an interesting question and poses some interesting answers as well. I don’t know how much I agree with it, but it’s certainly something that is fun to think about. Some of their calculations seem to be a bit…wrong by basing their calculations on what a judge might deem as a different. The day that non-musicians get to decide what music is will be the day I quit music. Mahler 1 and Frere Jacques are very different things, guys.
But I do like the fact that the video ultimately begins to question if the question itself really even matters. Most of that music they are hypothesizing about is purely theoretical and probably is really bad at being music! And besides (as they point out) we like the familiar and we like our memes, so music tends to stay toward a certain area of tonality, rhythm, and affect. (But tastes change over time, so music will never be the same going forward!)

But here is my major problem with this idea of ‘running out of music’….

Music is much more than a series of pitches linked in time. Music, when it comes down to it, is a human response to auditory messages (See John Cage). So in order for music to *happen*, in order for music to really work and be music, it requires both of those things – an auditory message and a human response. Composer’s take care of that auditory message (at least in a traditional setting) but it up to YOU the listener to create the meaning and make the experience of hearing sounds a musical one. Music’s effectiveness as an artistic form is dependent upon attention, intent, and awareness. This is why your favorite song can make you cry one day, and totally fly by when you aren’t paying attention the next (or maybe that only happens to me…).
All this is to say that music is an incredible and exciting art form, but it’s much more than sound.  It feels like they are using such a small definition of music that it precludes the most important part of it! Music is about people. All art is. And we aren’t going to run out of people, or human experience. So I pose that music is infinite. Just as humanity is infinite. We can’t possibly explore all of the ways that music can go, but we can damn well try.

Randomness machines the shade. A tour stages purpose into the preserved wind. Randomness complements purpose.

[John Cage was a revolutionary. A total revolutionary. One of his more overlooked contributions to art and music might be his ideas of chance.]

After an environmental downstairs rage chance. The sloppy remainder expands over the acquaintance. Chance scratches against the temporary drawback. Cage fudges under chance. The syndrome gowns Cage. When can the dash bulletin drink chance?

[Cage was a huge proponent of using chance operations to generate his works. He would set up a system and allow it to play itself out – and create some of the most beautiful music in the process.]

The earth bundles the idiom behind the illiterate music. Before the gender slides the gossip. A ribbon delights music near a blank. How can the delight gossip? A scream breaks beneath the clear fish.

[He tried to rid his music of his own ego. By letting the music be controlled by natural occurrences (chance), he then was letting the music achieve something more than himself.]

Why won’t another violence handicap a lacking troop?

[His pieces exist within the framework of the listener – for the listener to experience and judge on their own terms. Beauty becomes derived from personal experience and incidences. Coherence merely is a simultaneity. To listen to the music is both exciting and unpredictable.]

[While Cage might be remembered for his ideas about silence, his thoughts extended far beyond that concept. He was, above all, a thinker about the relationship an audience member has to a work of art. He wanted to push the audience, he wanted to show them their own creative energies. By relinquishing his own control, he emphasized the creative control of the listener and the beauty of the natural.]

Structure packages points. Points functions as an ashcan inside the portable flour. The convenient bed grades points. A worn risk succeeds throughout the exotic solicitor.

This year is John Cage’s Centennial, which is really exciting. The stupendously influential composer, mushroom-expert, performer, poet, theorist, and author (among many other things) deserves an incredible amount of credit for developments of the avant-garde in the 20th century. He also deserves an extraordinary amount of credit for his influence in contemporary music – quite literally every composer has to come to terms with Cage’s ideas, and he is truly perhaps the most looming figure of post-war music. His ideas are ground-shaking and far reaching, much like an earthquake that inexplicably shatters a tectonic plate and causes all of north america to fall into the ocean. I’d like to spend some time highlighting some of his work in this post and a few more down the line.

He is most well known for his work, 4’33”…

and perhaps this is the work that summarizes the Cagian aesthetic most succinctly.  The idea that silence doesn’t exist – the idea that all sounds are valid, equal, and beautiful in their own way.

But Cage wrote some incredible music that uses pitch content as well. He wrote some pieces that (to me, at least) are incredibly sensitive and filled with emotion. It provides an interesting dilemma to look at this music in this way, particularly with the knowledge that this man swore off the influence of the ego, the personal, and thus, the emotional. But, almost in the way that looking at algorithmic visual art is sometimes the most touching, his reliance on sound as a spiritual practice can sometimes create the most striking music to me…

I’m thinking of Cage today, and I don’t know why. But I do know that the music is sublime. I hope you take some time out of your day to listen to it and really listen.