four-thirty-three

I’ve been geeking out on Coltrane a little bit this week… particularly “Giant Steps.” This post is basically a linkdump of any Coltrane site/video I may ever want to look at again, but hopefully someone else may like these.

If you’re passing through quickly and only have time to follow one of these links, I’d recommend this video which shows the sheet music for Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” solo passing by as he plays:

The motherfucker could play, huh?

The chord changes for “Giant Steps” are notoriously difficult to play, and nearly impossible to improvise over (notice the piano solo in “Giant Steps”; Tommy Flanagan, normally amazing, kind of stumbles through it as a result of not having played the song prior to the recording session). There’s a wikipedia article on Coltrane’s approach to harmony (warning: music theory wankery), and a lovely visualization of the chord progression can be found here.

I did a Metafilter post a while back about a second grade class in Queens, NY falling in love with Coltrane’s music, and raising money to restore the nearby house where he wrote A Love Supreme. I’m lazy and suffering from tendonitis so I’m not too keen on relinking all of the stuff I put in that post, but you’ll find links to news articles about the class project as well as a Youtube-ized A Love Supreme if you head over to MeFi.

Here’s “Giant Steps” as played by a robot… it’s both awesome and depressing.

And finally, an oldie-but goodie: an animation of “Giant Steps” that just might blow your mind.

Interesting fact: The last words attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the prominent German man of letters) are often said to be “More light!” This is usually taken to be a spiritual proclamation… but, alas, it’s ripped from the real context. According to J. A. Froude, this statement was not only made three days before Goethe’s death, but was actually part of a request to a servant: Macht die Fensterladen auf, damit ich mehr Licht bekomme (literally, “open the window shutters so that I can have more light”).

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Rabo Karabekian (fictional), "The Temptation of St. Anthony" (1973), attribution in comments

“The painting did not exist until I made it,” Karabekian went on. “Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

“I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

“I just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well - let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let that five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.”

Ecstasy bloomed on the barbaric face of Rabo Karabekian. “Citizens of Midland City, I salute you,” he said. “You have given a home to a masterpiece!”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions [1973]

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II.

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world.  The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals.  Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness.  But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.  Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness.  As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.  It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

– C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections [1962]

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“O Nata Lux” for a cappella chorus, by Morton Lauridsen (from the choral song cycle Lux Aeterna, 1997)

Photos via fhashemi, mousavi1388, and LAist.

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“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he [Kilgore Trout] said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.
“I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn’t matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don’t twinkle. they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites.”
I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was. For all I knew, it was Puke, Trout’s star the size of a BB.
“Do they twinkle?” he said.
“Yes they do,” I said.
“Promise?” he said.
“Cross my heart,” I said.
“Excellent! Ting-a-ling!” he said. “Now then: Whatever two bodies those two glints of light represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other”
“OK,” I said, “I did it.”
“It took a second, do you think?” he said.
“No more,” I said.
“Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.”
“What was it?” I said.
“Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.
All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it a soul.” He paused.
“Ting-a-ling?” he said.

–Kurt Vonnegut, from Timequake [1996]

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II.

Spruce Street, Berkeley
[by Naomi Shahib Nye, found here]

If a street is named for a tree,
it is right that flowers
bloom purple and feel like cats,
that people are leaves drifting
downhill in morning fog.

Everyone came outside to see
the moon setting like a perfect
orange mouth tipped up to heaven.

Now the cars sleep against curbs.
If I write a letter,
how will I make it long enough?

There is a place to stand
where you can see so many lights
you forget you are one of them.

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III.

A time-lapse video of the galactic center of the Milky Way, taken over several hours, as it passes over the Texas Star Party in May 2009.

Oh do I have a chance?
You’re such a pretty girl
I’ll stay till you’re convinced -
there’s evil in this world.

Eef Barzelay (of Clem Snide), “Fight Song Melodies,” from the Rocket Science soundtrack.

(These poems were written in January 2007.  The second part was published in 2008 by Meritage Press as part of The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II [available here].  Because it’s part of a set, I’m publishing the entire long poem here for the first time.  More below the cut.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Work is hectic, so blogging has been deprioritized for the moment.  I’m singing Mozart’s Requiem on Saturday and Sunday, preparing for a possible John Cage performance at CalARTS  in early June (!), and contending with the end of the school year.  A few posts are in the works (subjects include Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Bataille, Robert Schumann and some original work), so more frequent posts are coming this week.

In the meantime, here’s the third movement from Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations), a choral setting of a fragment from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

Explanations Come To An End Somewhere [Steve Reich, 2004]

My fave MeFi post from the past several days has got to be this one, about the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.  All of the following links have been lifted from that thread:

Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel lecture “The Poet and the World,” is wonderful, as are the columns she wrote for the Polish magazine Literary Life, in which she dispensed advice to aspiring poets.  But my very favorite thing in that thread was Szymborska’s poem “A Few Words on the Soul,” which I shall reproduce here.

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A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

Wislawa Szymborska
[translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh]

The first two tales are from John Cage’s book Silence (Cage was a practicing Zen Buddhist), and the third was spotted in a thread at MetaFilter.

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A young man in Japan arranged his circumstances so that he was able to travel to a distant island to study Zen with a certain Master for a three-year period. At the end of the three years, feeling no sense of accomplishment, he presented himself to the Master and announced his departure. The Master said, “You’ve been here three years. Why don’t you stay three months more?” The student agreed, but at the end of the three months he still felt that he had made no advance. When he told the Master again that he was leaving, the Master said, “Look now, you’ve been here three years and three months. Stay three weeks longer.” The student did, but with no success. When he told the Master that absolutely nothing had happened, the Master said, “You’ve been here three years, three months, and three weeks. Stay three more days, and if, at the end of that time, you have not attained enlightenment, commit suicide.” Towards the end of the second day, the student was enlightened.

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II.

After a long and arduous journey a young Japanese man arrived deep in a forest where the teacher of his choice was living in a small house he had made.  When the student arrived, the teacher was sweeping up fallen leaves.  Greeting his master, the young man received no greeting in return.  And to all of his questions, there were no replies.  Realizing there was nothing he could do to get the teacher’s attention., the student went to another part of the same forest and built himself a house.  Years later, when he was sweeping up fallen leaves, he was enlightened.  He then dropped everything, ran through the forest to his teacher, and said, “Thank you.”

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III.

One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”

And the student was enlightened.

This past Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the second and final recording session for Kind of Blue; Miles Davis et al. got together to put “Flamenco Sketches” and “All Blues” down on tape.

Here’s Davis’s legendary 60s band (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony WIlliams) playing “All Blues” live.

And, here’s a different and more traditionally bluesy version for solo piano by Richie Beirach, from the now out-of-print album Live at Mayfair Recital Hall (Amazon link). I love this recording.

All Blues by Miles Davis, as performed by Richie Beirach [1992] file deleted