born in Tehran in 1940, Alireza Mashayekhi is nobody's sweetheart. I mean I imagine they don't baby him, somehow. he comes at music from a powerfully personal direction, & it's hard to put his work into a context (by which I really mean you wouldn't know what aisle at Korvette's to scour). out of place in his own home town &c. but he has expressed (& everywhere in his work is audible) a deep feeling for persian classical music, & he doesn't seem out of place in the context of xxth-century classical muic (he studied under Jelinek, not J, but H).
here is a recording of his Chahargah #1, a partly aleatoric composition for computers based, among other things, on traditional persian modes. eh? eh? he's in there. Mashayekhi describes his work this way: "I believe that we can discover truth through multilogical structures of artistic thought, this being the only way that we can encompass the contradictions that 'truth' carries in itself. I argue that by abandoning sequential problem-solving that has indisputably dominated 'logic,' especially since Newton,' we are able to pursue simultaneously a number of X's. I therefore call my own way of structuring music the 'quest for meta X.'"besides being a marvelous unmade robot movie of the 50s, quest for meta x gives me thought of work like Mallarmé's, Twombly's, maybe even Robert Irwin's -- work that privileges a sense of unity thru overlay, & of the redundancy of category. (or categorization.) & I think that the modesty of his music (his theoretical writing being, by contrast, anything but modest) offers a smartly other way of doing things than, say, Zukofsky's -- there's no symmetry at the crux of Mashayekhi's music, no absoluteness of intention or orientation, but a well-watered meander thru certain unforeclosing possibilities of sound.
anyhow, tell me what you think!
a completely other way in is Conlon Nancarrow's. born in texarkana in 1912, Nancarrow became one of the century's more celebrated composers -- enough so that there's no real sense in my saying much of him here. (14-year-olds the world over have been laboring hard to make information & school sucks available to you.) what interests me most about the comparison, tho, betwen AM & CN, is the way in which AM encodes random chance into what he's asking of the machines, while CN's turn to the cybertronic owes more to the flat inability of any human being alive to follow thru on the almost impossible rhythmic subtlety of his richly-ordered piano music. here is his study for player piano #24, a bottomless-sounding piece of haywire that is in fact a tonal, three-part canon.lastly, for nowski, here is a wonderful piece of music by the wonderful czechoslovakian band manželé. manželé means something like the spouses. the title of the song is radostná událost se stala / mnoha radist stala, which means something like there was a happy occasion / a lot of happiness remained. (anyone know czech?) it was recorded in 1983 in somebody's house in praha, it is the best record in the universe, & that is absolutely all I know about it.
also, please to enjoy soviet advertising? wonderful looxoories (light switch, magnet tape) can be yours:
4 comentaris:
Hey Ian, I'm listening to "Charagh" now, and it's blowing my mind. I'm really excited to listen to the rest of the stuff in this post, and really happy that you're doing this. The commentary, too, is v. enlightening.
Wow. Cool. I too am glad you are doing this. V. enlightening so V.
Say there, did your gaze ever hit the side of a cat named "Ata Ebrekar?" There was a comp from Sub Roso awhile back that I more or less heard the entirety of back when, in an effort to dream of the perfect chess game, I was sleeping with my headphones plugged into wfmu's late night-whale-sounds-bonanza-versus-glockenspiel (Dear JW, please do not be ashamed of your failure to spell glockenspiel; many have faltered and merely said "gong" where you stoutly saunter, sincerely, the Alphabet) extravaganza, and I seem to recall a bunch of Persian electronica that namechecked this guy along with Alireza Mashayekhi. Just wondering. By the way, I did finally have the dream: it was "New York Tendaberry" by Laura Nyro what did it.
PS: I have determined that, in responding to your learned posts, I shall constantly use the terms, "bonanza" and "extravaganza," often for no reason, frequently plopped into a hyphenated phrase, and interchangably. Please grok no disrespect from my strange, strange ways.
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