Kolo ’sarawak’ Mee

By the time you read this I will be trekking into forest communities, where we commence work on the micro docs series, Sarawak Gone.

I should be back by Saturday at the latest to join the Rainforest Music Festival… a curious title given the ever decreasing rainforests in Sarawak!

And here, like so many places in the world, much work is still to be done… There is NO comprehension here of global warming let alone the dire food and energy crisis in the region. People are satisfied with their monstrous McMansions, 6 aircon units, 2 cars, plasma screens and Nestle diets. The few who care are few indeed and there are even less that work to make a smidgen of difference to the lives of those most affected by the plough-share mentality that has recently seen the destruction of a cave network nearby, barely explored. We are told these caves once provided natives with passage through the mountains, from one valley to the next… and all this on native title land that developers ignore because of the tight connections within government who will resort to courts and hit men when their idiot public relations campaigns fail.

In the few days I’ve been here the quality of the Kolo Mee hasn’t been as good as in previous trips. I’m told most vendors have stopped using pork fat as the base which has affected the taste significantly.

The one Laksa I’ve had was a little on the lame side, but the fern salad was, as always, sensational!

Licht Drift

Notes for a new structured improvisation in the Drift Theory series for the Terminal Quartet.

Licht Drift is the eighth collaborative composition in the Drift Theory series. Drift Theory is a structured improvisation, each performance entirely unique, each performance influencing the next, exerting notions of drift as it may occur in creative, social and psychological development, both of the performers and the piece itself.

Licht Drift, inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic operatic cycle, Licht, is based on four movements, each movement draws references from sacred music, sounds and text the world over.

All four movements, conceived independently by each performer, and in isolation from each other, must ensure that principles of drift influence the overall direction and outcomes of, for example, any cultural, political and astronomical contexts explored.

Drift is used to define a system having a distribution of events, objects, associations and intentions of individual velocities.

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The theme(s) of the piece would be based on music as a communal, cultural process that seeks to transmit that which separates and that which brings us together…

In effect, I’m talking about creating an electro acoustic work that expresses separation, longing and unification - a contemporary work that draws on the sacred, that communicates to audiences through the relentless pace of commerce, its unyielding drain on finite resources and the homogenisation that results from its opportunistic outreach.

For more details about Licht Drift, go to the Secession wiki.

Ozzie Commons

The Building an Australian Commons conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is hosted by Creative Commons Australia with the support of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and the State Library of Queensland. I will be performing at the ccSalon with the Terminal Quartet and present on a roundtable discussion exploring the possibilities for music under Creative Commons in Australia.

VIDEO SLAM 02: Remix Forum!

Thursday evening, 22 May, saw the culmination of the second OPEN CHANNEL VIDEO SLAM for Arts Law Week 2008. Some where in the vicinity of 70 - 80 people took themselves to the Horse Bazaar to view the four short videos our sixteen participants had made and to hear our panel’s assessment of them.

Setting up the venue took the best part of the day, particularly as another Arts Law Week forum on social networking was to be held there that afternoon. By the time they were done we had about two hours to have the stage set up, the tech in place, cameras and the wireless Video Unit running, the VJ rig installed… and our VIDEO SLAM teams had to have their shorts completed no later than 6pm!

Come 6:30 I was copying each of the completed videos onto my laptop and readying them for screening later in the evening. Everyone came in on time, one team finishing at 3 in fact!

The Remix Forum

At 8pm I opened the Remix Forum and we got under way. I explained that VIDEO SLAM is both a rights management and production workshop… and that in particular we’re working with Creative Commons licenses to ask the question, can we make films using legitimate samples and is there enough content out there that’s correctly licensed to help us make this happen?

The Remix Forum would look at both the legitimate and illegitimate use of appropriation in the arts.

The video artist Emile Zile was our first guest up with an entertaining overview of his arts practice. As Emile himself says, his work disregards copyright entirely. To give you an idea of what Emile had shared with us, here’s a selection of his videos.

Shiralee Saul followed with a brief talk on copyright issues associated with curatorial responsibilities. This was supported by a delightful presentation based on materials she had available in the only medium many artists worked with at the time, - the 35mm slide. Luckily, Shiralee had been able to scan a selection of works that day, works from a project that was to provide visuals that would be available within the public domain… a project from the late 70s / early 1980s, well before Creative Commons or any open rights management tools as we know them today.

With the VIDEO SLAM shorts next up, our legal team, Shaun Miller and Elliot Bledsoe took to the stage. The theme and the process was then revealed.

Theme and process

Of our four VIDEO SLAM teams two were to produce 2 minute videos using entirely legitimate content. The remaining two teams could use what ever they liked from where ever they liked. Both teams had to ensure, at the very least, that they didn’t breach and Australian defamation law. Their theme subject matter was the Melbourne Lord Mayor, John So.

Teams #1 and #2 created the free reign videos john so arbitary and So Hard. Teams #3 and #4 came up with My Bro and The John S(h)o(w). They had to ensure their videos were entirely compliant with copyright law and in doing so had to log every sound, every photo and every video they found on the web onto a networked, Google spreadsheet.

Each sample was then individually checked to ensure no copyright breaches were made and that the correct mix of Creative Commons licenses were employed. Thanks to Elliot for his sterling efforts on that spreadsheet! A project like this really can’t work without someone of his expertise on hand.

The verdict

It was curious! Shaun Miller was pretty much convinced that Teams #3 and #4’s were clearly in breach of copyright, but gave Teams #1 and #2 the all clear, stating that they fell neatly into Australia’s new parody exception to the Australian Copyright Act (1 January 2007).

The audience’s verdict for all four videos was clearly heard… All four had received hearty and enthusiastic applause! All four teams deserved it… not only had they achieved the task of producing these videos in under 20 hours, they’d all created entertaining works that are, to the best of our knowledge, and that of our legal panel, entirely compliant with Creative Commons licenses, and Australian Copyright and defamation law.

As an Arts Law Week Project, I believe it was another outstanding success with a fair compliment of lessons learnt and tangible outcomes…

Acknowledgements

Thanks to OPEN CHANNEL and a particularly vast, open armed and bellowing shower of graciousness to everyone at Horse Bazaar for their unyielding support. We couldn’t have pulled it off with their venue, their expertise, equipment and facilities.

Thanks also to Jonty Burton for a stunning live re-appropriated remix of the Forum.

Thanks to the Victoria Law Foundation and Arts Victoria for funding support of Arts Law Week.

VIDEO SLAMMIN!

It’s another Arts Law Week, the 3rd I’ve worked on now and the first with apc.au under contract to OPEN CHANNEL to deliver VIDEO SLAM 02.

It’s a smaller team of slammers and we have fewer resources, but we’re a tight unit, making it all the more wholesome given a couple of familiar faces from last years VIDEO SLAM.

Horse Bazaar are once again pulling more than their fair share of bullock trains and milkcarts! Can’t wait to see the famed wireless Video Unit in action.

This years SLAM will culminate in a Remix Forum… an actual Arts Law Week forum dealing with appropriation in the arts which itself will be re-appropriated as we screen the results of our two day workshop. Bring it on!!!

MSO2008 Concert 3

It was another fortuitous free ticket that got Justina and I into the third concert of MSO’s Metropolis series, Music of Amber, featuring works by two of my all time favourites of contemporary music, Toru Takemitsu and György Ligetti. I was also looking forward to hearing, in keeping with my present enquiries into traditional Turkish music, Dances for String Quartet by Turkish born composer, Sidika Özdil.

I’ve not been to the Malthouse Theatre for some 10 years or more. Quite a disgrace given theatre has such a rich history in Melbourne and there’s a lot to see. So being at the Malthouse twice in two weeks was quite unique and becoming rather familiar… it’s one of many Melbourne cultural institutions that I had hoped to inhabit with my own works over a good many years.

The opening piece was Takemitsu’s Towards the Sea III, a work that would be as comfortable in the clouds as it would in a slow moving sea, the first couple of minutes perhaps the most thrilling for my ears. The moment at which the harp opened up in harmony with the flute, Takemitsu’s signature harmonies enveloped me whole, comforting me, so much so that for the remainder of the performance I drifted from sleep to that half-awake feeling one has in public spaces, careful not to drop one’s head too steeply.

Having spent much of the piece fighting sleep, being as I was still to overcome jet lag, it was the applause at the end of it that brought me back to the Malthouse and alert for Marcello Panni’s composition, Short.

Introduced by one of the two percussionists, Short fell short of interest for me. It did capture well the concept it had set out to attend, that of movements representing an imaginary film, and it was certainly brilliantly performed, but it was to be Ligeti’s Trio for violin, horn and piano, that would be the land-mark performance of the evening.

French horn player, Geoff Lierse, took the floor and led the audience into a light hearted introduction to what was to be a most exacting, strenuous work out for this brave trio.

Featuring Michael Fowler on piano, who added balls to an already pounding performance, each movement had me on the edge, alert, being surprised, charged, enlightened… brilliant!

I’m going to by pass Joseph Schwantner’s Music of Amber and discuss Dances for String Quartet by Sidika Özdil. But before I do, I must commend the violin and whistling parts, both performed by the violinists, which came across as eerie at times and enlivening at others. Certainly a unique technique that made Joseph’s work some how more linked to the traditional motifs I was expecting from Sidika’s composition.

Sidika was introduced to the audience by violinist, Isin Camakçioglu, who was clearly proud of not only being in her company, being of Turkish origin himself, I felt he was particularly wrapped to be performing in this piece.

Describing herself as a composer that stands between two cultures, adored by avant garde heavy weights, Sidika went on to describe each movement of Dances, pointing to a traditional fishing song from the Black Sea coast and how the 3rd movement, Dervish Dance, unpacked through a circular arrangement. However, I found her work entirely Western in harmony and form. I couldn’t make out any Turkish influences in any of the four movements. In that sense, she perhaps represents the Turkey, as Kudsi Erguner details in his autobiography, Journeys of a Sufi Musician, that denied its traditional roots in it’s quest for modernity.

I was entertained by Sidika’s composition and did want to talk to her about it and what it is she meant by standing in the middle of two cultures and how she sees this reflected in her music. But alas it was not to be… Maybe it was the second wine, or that I’d talked myself through all my questions and concerns about her work with Justina and just wanted to get back in front of a sound system and listen to the likes of the Taksim Trio or Selim Sesler, immerse myself again and again in the music that is carrying me to where I know not where yet…

On Sacred Rights

Have some thoughts on the Terminal Quartet performance commissioned for the Growing the Australian Commons Conference, some of which I’d like to incorporate acoustic instruments that are appropriated in real time, in that what each participant contributes is not only a theme as such, but a process for integration of the acoustic qualities of the instruments at hand… and the instruments would be of a traditional nature, tuned to accommodate a pre-defined markam (or marquam). These are essentially Turkish scales used for improvisation that display unique intervalic characteristics.

So, that’s roughly the theory side of things. In practical terms, everything the quartet performs, from the individual movements created by each performer to the final work would be CC licensed for re-use and catalogued online within freesound, etc. Each participant would also be encouraged to utilise CC licensed samples and soundscapes…

The theme(s) of the piece would be based on creativity, specifically music as a communal, cultural process that seeks to transmit that which separates and that which brings us together… in affect, I’m are talking about creating an electro acoustic work that expresses separation, longing and unification - a contemporary work that draws on the sacred that communicates to audiences through the relentless pace of commerce and homogenisation, the excessive drain on finite resources to sustain modernity and every other mind numbing global crisis.

We may call the piece, Licht Drift and dedicate the work to Stockhausen.

MSO2008 Concert 2

I’ve returned to Melbourne’s winter season of music and what an astounding few weeks there will be ahead of me. It’s already begun with Saturday evening’s performance of three works by French composers performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Reibert De Leeuw.

This was the second of four concerts in their Metropolis series, Descent and Ascension at the Malt House Theatre.

The evening opened with the awe inspiring, delicate and yet powerful composition, Color, by Marc-Andre Dalbavie. The piece commenced with a such a restrained, barely perceptible chord of strings punctuated by single harp notes accentuated by light percussion and gradual introduction of piano strings being tapped by a small metal rod.

The piece swelled into a dense roar of brass chords shifting atonally against strings and reeds. The program notes refer to one critic describing Color as “monumental music, full of big chords and metronomic, obsessive repeated notes on a marimba and piano. Some of those chords shimmer in the air, only to be wiped away with a cloth of scatter shot string figures.”

It was terrifically inspiring to hear an orchestra perform such a work, certainly giving me a kick up the arse to work on those pieces I’d begun in the mid-1990’s (eg. Sensorium Connect) that would have such an score further underscored by a generative sound scape, largely shaped by a live re-sampling of the performance in situ…

The second piece, Henri Dutelleux’s Correspondences, was one of those heady avant garde pieces that was, in part, interesting to listen to, but hard to sustain ones focus on. It’s most redeeming moment was the final 24 bars or so which had the vocalist, Merlyn Quaife, near draw tears from my weary eyes as she hit a sublime note that drew the piece to a close… Supurb.

The final work, Peirre Boulez’s Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, was a piece that was made to be heard on site. Although broadcast live, one had to be in the theatre to fully experience this work. Thoroughly enjoyed hearing various parts, like strings and horns performed above and to the left and right of me…

What I didn’t enjoy was how some Western composers tend to treat the percussion instruments of other cultures. For instance, there were two tabla’s, a conga and a darbuka, all three being struck by sticks! I found it alarming that we have these fine instruments that take great skill to perform with and we hit them with sticks!

That’s it for now… am so looking forward to the Toru Takemitsu, Gyogy Ligetti and Sidika Ozdil works this coming Wednesday evening and the performance of Messian’s End of Time at St Patrick’s Cathedral on the 21st of May… and then there’s the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Audacious series of new composers works on the 8th of June! Sensational!

Thanks Justina and Lawrence for the tickets…

Bağlama is Saz

One of the delights of Istanbul is İstiklal Avenue, which leads through to the Galata district consumed mostly by music shops of every persuasion, literally a mecca for musicians! It comes with a deep and rich history, going back to the earliest bridge built to cross the Golden Horn in the 14th century with fortifications that lasted up to the 19th century.

Now you can walk down through these glorious shops towards the new bridge, and if you’re game, perhaps even strike up a conversation with many of the learned shop owners, some of who helped me on my quest for markams and their approximate guitar tunings… which eventually led me to purchase the bağlama, or saz you can see here in this photo.

I was originally interested in an oud, but given it has no frets and I’ve not a lot of time to spend finessing my fingering over a fretless instrument, and with the saz being such a popular instrument in both the Arabesque and Fasil styles, I was hooked.

Curiously, İstiklal Avenue morphs out of Taksim Square. Taksim, or Taqsim is the name given to a style of melodic improvisation that generally leads Arabic and Turkish music! Got to love that!

Getting to know you

Firstly, I’ve just got to say, I am totally and utterly smitten with the music of Turkey… from it’s Byzantine origins to it’s deeply ornamental “art” music, from the profoundly moving choral work of the Sufi composer Dede Efendi to the gorgeous lyricism of the much loved and missed singer, Zeki Muren. I was entirely overcome and moved at one point to tears during my brief listening trip to Istanbul, which, I must add, began during my first move to Melbourne in 1992 when I’d met the Kanun player, Ali Ozsoy and his sprightly, lovable daughter, Nilufer.

I’d not heard a Kuhnen before nor had I’d had any experience of traditional Turkish music, but I was transfixed and from there began a journey exploring the traditional music of various cultures, from Sarawak to Korea, China to Mongolia and of course more recently, Turkey.

Getting to know the music of Turkey is a long but joyful journey which, I hope, will become far more enlightening through the process of learning the saz.

Tune me please

And so it came to pass that I would have to learn to tune my saz… Not surprisingly it didn’t hold its tuning at all! So much so, I had no idea where to start. I started by sending an email to the lutherier. All the documents I’d read pointed to various tuning options, including the rather open ended “tune to the vocal range of the singer”!

As I’d purchased a chromatic tuner I was keen to get this puppy sounding as sweet as it did when I’d played it in Istanbul. The other thing I wanted to ensure was that it would tune to concert pitch as I don’t intend to play it in isolation, and given I’ve got a reasonably strong 4 octave range on my voice, I wanted both a tuning that would be acceptable for Turkish tunes and my own compositions.

The saz is strung in three sets of 7 strings called courses, commonly referred to as X, Y and X. The closest tuning I’ve found to that I’d walked out of the shop with is A on the X, G on the Y and D on the X. It seems to work, but does sound some what odd, particularly the G. I think it may have something to do with the wooden tuning pegs. I can’t seem to get an entirely accurate tuning on at least 2 of the 7 strings. But at least I can start work on how these intervals are managed across the neck and and get some scales and fingering technique down.

Epilogue

After a few hours with A-G-D and twists and grunts across the tuning pegs I’ve managed to get the saz in tune and the tunes are starting to make themselves present. My fingers are gradually gaining confidence and I’m already working on a couple of new pieces. I want to hear the saz with a chamber group, or as part of a violin and cello trio… But this is how it always happens with me. As soon as I start work on a new instrument, no sooner have I got it under my fingers than I’m writing with it already, often resulting in poor technique, but a constant flow of ideas.

Lebanese country jam

When there’s an abundance of rhubarb and an oversupply of recipes on the net, nothing like a good old jam to get one through a chilly Sunday afternoon.