Subtitled "Confessions of an Out-of-Town Composer," this essay explores the powerful influence of the physical and cultural geographies of the Far North on twenty years of Adams' work. Containing numerous musical illustrations, this is the complete version of a piece which has appeared in The North American Review, The Utne Reader and several other publications.
three item set including "Music, Your Child, and You," "So Many Questions About Music" and "Sonic Arts Curriculum." These newsletters detail theoretical and practical applications of experimental music in early childhood curriculum. Numerous examples of activities are described: sound mapping, sound imaging, curriculum which revolves around environmental sound, and listening activities. Though the material describes early childhood applications, it is by no means confined to these contexts. These newsletters are recommended for any people working in educational contexts.
"New Music Across America conveys the spirit of innovative American music in the 1990's and the unique role played by the NMA festivals, better than any other single volume I know. It is, like its subject, more than slightly schizophrenic - by turns breezy, serious, irreverent, scholarly, eclectic, perceptive, whimsical, and subversive. Anyone interested in the creative arts of the late twentieth century will want to read it." Elliot Schwartz Professor of Music, Bowdoin College, Co-author, Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials, Literature
A 21 page booklet with 30 black and white illustrations covering historical and contemporary urban sound parks. Includes guidelines for site evaluation and community involvement in sound park design.
Wendy Burch's collaborative work Traffic Prayers, formerly performed with her late husband, Joe Catalano, and which she now performs with musicians Marianne McDonald and Toyoji Tomita.
Book and CD
Edited by Dick Higgins
Preface by Kyle Gann
This volume presents for the first time a generous selection from the more than 200 essays and articles written by one of the most original American composers and musical theorists of the twentieth century. There are articles on harmony, melody, notation and music history; essays on vocal innovation, folk music, and the intersection of music with other arts; reviews of concerts and recordings by contemporaries; notes on several of his own works, and several pieces on his life and experiences as a composer.
352 pages, 6½ x 9½"
Photos, index, discography
CLOTHBOUND
0-929701-63-1
The book is based on the performance experience of the innovative New Zealand music/performance group From Scratch and presents a fresh new music method that uses a body-based approach to rhythm and sound, thus encouraging active group work and creative participation. Useful appendicies on instrument building, vocal warmups, glossary of rhythm terms, etc.
This "libretto for animals, people and machines," strings together elegant verbal structures mirroring chorale and canon. In The Toy Palace cats and humans suffer under u.s. ideology. A children's solo puts a slip-knot in the snare of all edifying discourse: "I'm to blame / I'm fire and name and / doggone / wonderful / yours / I'm mine / not yours or theirs / cereal surreal sir real for reel / dirt and dust and pain and birth and ash / I'm blamed" A permutation poem simulates led messages, a pervasive feature of any city--any toy palace. Charles Doria responds to urban architecture, suspending its patterns in language, "in a separate space entirely." He never loses sight of the chaos against which the patterns are conceived: "In space the imagination / where every toy lives / five little fingers / and their familiars play."
Selected Poems June 1988 opens an angle of vision just wide enough to prevent "words from betraying fact." The book is allusive, yet its allusiveness squares with its persistent hermetic quality, reinforcing it, keeping the angle open: "let's write upside down / nothing left unsaid for" Ritual and figure ally these poems to dance, constellate their silences as situations in space: "suppose I said / I wasn't there?" Their intimate, mindful details turn sites in physical space into intricate code, into a sequence without head or tail: "tempted to take it all off and see what's / underneath / fawn / cat / rest a blank / filled in at leisure / eye / an inch off earth"
A three-part collection of works (spanning the years 1973-1990) exploring various issues of sound, language and environmental interaction. Includes site-specific works, linguistic compositions, and experiments in inerspecies communication.
Deeply Listening Body is a compilation of movement practices,
improvisations, exercises and a detailed introduction to the beginning
movements of the Yang style T'ai Chi form. Included are step-by-step
instructions, guided suggestions for focusing one's attention, instructions
for group pieces and a glossary of terms from the Taoist tradition.
Heloise Gold is a performing artist, dancer and T'ai Chi/Qi Gong instructor.
Sylvan Delta weaves together meditations on the life of plants and on the arrangements humans make around that life, a history moving off in two directions at once. In one respect, the way we imagine nature is determined by the history of projections made on it, an apotropaic magic still at work in keeping us separated and alienated. A rival history records the impressions humans leave in nature, sites of intimacy and contact coming into being where the human species exerts an authentic, gentle pressure on the natural (non-human) to release its power to shape the human world: "As man slides down the spearhead of the angle of sight, he becomes not man, but both his destination, the twin points at the end of the line and the fragments of his stretched identity."
A collection of assembled articles and reviews that includes I.M.I. Y.R.U?, Committee to Limit Applause, Sound is Health, interviews and performance reviews.
A full listing of scores and recordings, including many chamber, choral, and theater works, songs, articles and multimedia works.
Listening in Dreams; A Compendium of Sound Dreams, Meditations And Rituals for Deep Dreamers
Plus This is a Dream! A Handbook for Deep Dreamers
Listening in Dreams is a Journey through the fascinating world of sound related dreams. It contains a fine selection of dreams and ways of working with dreams that will be helpful to all those interested in phenomena of the night. This double edition also contains an updated version of the popular This is a Dream! A Handbook for Deep Dreamers.
Dreams are available to all of us. Dreams are not only free, but they represent the most palpable proof that we ourselves are free. They help us to unfold the stories and feelings that are important to our well being in the world. We find when we share dreams with friends, family, lovers, even without knowing at the outset what they "mean," that the intimacy we long for is suddenly available to us. We have but to ay attention to our dreams, to listen deeply to what they have to tell us, to reveal ourselves to ourselves by becoming Deep Dreamers we are put in contact with what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche calls our own basic goodness. When we explore the "Dream of Reality and the Reality of the Dream" we begin to experience ourselves as an integral part of the dreaming universe." - Ione
An earlier and smaller version of the Symmetries for piano four-hands published in 1990. The 1981 version includes only the compositional drawings, without the specific instructions as to how to play them.
Pictographs mixes different types of picture-writing with fragments of prose-writings in a formal arrangement linked to West African visual traditions. Keith's constructions employ designs intended to be scanned metrically, a visual counterpart to the off-beat phrasing of melodic accents in African and Afro-American music. Keith's 'writing' seems to be suspended between two othernesses: painting and music. The staggered siting of glyphs and signs marks the subtle crossover from picture language to picture theory. Text runs in strips against a black background, not so much as arguments to follow as seams joining master and slave narratives. In Keith's discourse on his situation as a poet in a late capitalist society, a picture emerges of an artist who in mastering his art becomes a slave to it. His condition mirrors one analyzed by Sartre in Notebook for an Ethics: "Naturally, there most often follows some form of alienation, that is, that the goal, as soon as it is collective, becomes what is essential and the person becomes what is inessential. Their true relationship is not disentangled until one has put an end to the spirit of seriousness and seen that the person is his goal in the form of an ec-stasis and a gift."
Sound engineer, recordist and production consultant, CONNIE KIELTYKA (NY) has worked with an impressive number of radio producers and new music composers. Her credits include work for Tom Lopez, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Steve Reich as well as live remote broadcasts for WNYC-FM (New York) and the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. In 1986 she joined the Godfrey Reggio/Phillp Glass film team as a sound location recordist for a six month worldwide film shoot of Powaqqatsi.
A selection of Alison Knowles' performance scores spanning thirty years - interactive texts inviting readers to explore and experiment by performing these works themselves.
A book of poetry and prose
Open up new avenues of expression through a pain-free, healthy, fluid approach to music-making. "This work is an invaluable vehicle for musicians who want to learn to use their bodies and minds more intelligently while practicing and performing." Lukas Foss, composer and conductor
Dennis Lucas' poems are portrait-parables, his connect-the-dots, vernacular style outlining his crazy subjects, his pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Each poem forms a kind of event-horizon: "I saw three crows / standing in tall grass / hiding from the highway / as if it were / a wanted poster of them." Lucas projects himself into these poems as an everyman who can see around corners. Each person he meets seems like an actor on the verge of stepping out of his role: "I pulled up / and parked in / the employee of the month / parking space / but a guard / came out / and immediately told me to / get the hell out / before there / was any trouble." Conflict haunts these poems, but the reader adjusts to it as to a familiar song played in a strange key: "The river is moving. / The black-bird must by flying." "The kite is stealing groceries. The crow must be at the movies."
This new volume of collected writings by Pauline Oliveros is presented in an unique polytextural format includes essays and scores along with a CD. Introduction by Jackson Mac Low. Excerpt. Publication of this book by Drogue Press has been made possible with the assistance of The Institute for Electronic Arts, School of Art and Design at Alfred University with generous support from Pamela Joseph.
Softcover, includes CD
A vivid dream of passage narrated by experimental composer Oliveros and realized through photographs by Becky Cohen. Very limited quantity.
An exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, meditators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be affected by profound attention to the sonic environment. Written by Pauline Oliveros.
In Mount Soledad Harry Polkinhorn uses his ill-fated romance with a Cuban-American woman to illuminate the themes of love and money, employing in the opening pages the conceits associated with the language of love before shifting these rhetorical tropes into a kind of vacillating syntax. Lines paraphrasing the poetry of medieval troubadours circulate like undead currency in a whirlwind of non sequiturs: "fading away perhaps into an explosion of resemblances her voice disconnected by winds of a disappearing language unhooked into fog, into people's eyes that have seen water and love going away bird wings incautious negatives" In his introduction, Karl Young writes that this type of collage "is structured along the money routes of the contemporary world. As such, it becomes a sort of witches' sabbath rampaging through endless and meaningless channels of credit, collateral, advances, futures, cash flow deficits, claims, arbitrations, liens, waivers, affidavits, and all the other financial and legal mechanisms that constantly, though often imperceptibly, surround every aspect of daily life at the present time:" "an inventory of what we're made of, that penetrating sadness of isolated people who would have mattered but you spoke your mind 'that's reality' by which you meant something ugly or grim then went your way into resignation and eventual money check your budget projections before your children complete the annihilation a door slams deep in my bones"
This book mixes creation myth with trickster lore, recycled loony tunes: "His pliant wand flashes into speech. The path / runs off to become the path. Alloy / surpasses metal's prime. Its luster turns / waiting into a dance: the little god's ring / never did fit; now it's yours!" These thirteen poems are like wilier versions of Blake's Songs of Innocence, hymn fragments to a "big bad planet": "The sun takes a wild, prehistoric snapshot. / You can shoot back, but don't fool with the props. / The hare's hand-to-mouth-illusion; coyote's baby / pictures, cuteness gone awry. A high-speed pose is all" In Finders Keepers reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible: "Each design, if separate, proves / intractable; when combined / will yield the coyote's fine line, And quatrains' blur a solid wand. / Your crinkly ear emblem's fealty / to cipher's yammer, hip-hop 'signifire.'"
An Exchange of Quivers derives from a Navaho chant, lying somewhere between masque and ritual. Synchronicity, not cause and effect, holds sway, illuminating a no-man's land between thunder and speech, earth and understanding. A condor wakes from extinction as from a confused siesta: "The Babe the Babe is Born." In place of identifiable content the reader finds his own desperate poise, that instant which is paradise: "And the good man, so called, / has fixed the lightning rod / to his abode to divert / justice's divine wrathful power / and convert its fierce bolt / to a shield with the soul's / catastrophy embossed on it / as warning to the bad man / who, despised by men, / manifests the god's playful energy. / Anyway, he didn't buy-- / he's just renting the cottage'" And you, reader? You'll just have to use your illusion.
The Pueblo Indians and other Southwest tribes believe that the coyote can occur as a multiple of himself. Public Enemy stages this belief as a model for writing new texts from existing ones. A narrative-collage, Public Enemy frames the primordial myth of the cattle theft committed by the trickster-god Hermes within the 16th century Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes. Public Enemy portrays the wannabe cowherd and the downtrodden Lazarillo as coyotes. As it jumps from archaic to modern frames of reference, it appropriates The Public Enemy, the 1930 Warner Brothers film directed by William Wellman. The intercut film-text parodies the notion that the coyote is unkillable. The synergy between the different texts generates a cartoon-like, polyphonic effect.
The coyote may suffer bad luck / or just retribution in the form of starvation // "It's a fact that if I hadn't used all my cunning / and the tricks I knew, / I would have died of hunger more than once." // poisoning // "The real McCoy is hard to get." //dismemberment // "Who killed him?" //ingestion by monsters // "What's eating you?" //incineration // "Aw, nothing, I just got burned up that's all." //drowning // "I can drink it as long as you can pour it." // and fatal falls // "You always did get all the breaks."