Baseball season opens shortly. Here in Philadelphia,we Phillies fans are incredibly optimistic about the Season. There is talk that the Phil's pitching rotation will be the best to ever take the mound. I suppose that is an arguable point and baseball fans love to argue about such topics. Nevertheless, with Lee, Halladay,Hamels and Oswalt...opposing batsmen are facing a pitching staff that is formidable. In anticipation of baseball season,I feature another vintage photo of my Grandfather.....this time with his Stroudsburg High 1923 Baseball team (Second row far right.) Apparently, Grandad was a damn fine pitcher and had good "stuff" as they say. He had a slider and heater, a curve and a change-up.. It was the curve that derailed his career. According to family lore some scouts had checked him out. However, too many games and too many curves really messed up his elbow resulting in an abbreviated career on the mound and the evaporation of any professional interest in his talents. He always loved the game and it was great to watch or listen to a game with him.
Back in the mid 90's I was at a convention and lurking around a hospitality suite where the Rum and Bourbon were of good quality and generous pour. I was talking with some colleagues when I overheard a tall older gent in another cluster of drinkers talking about a recent fight involving boxer Arturo Gatti. I was fairly lubricated at the time so I felt no compunction about injecting myself into the conversation to advise the fellow aficianado, Charlie, that I had been at the fight he was discussing. A two hour conversation ensued and from that evening on, Charlie and I have been friends, colleagues and hunting buddies. Charlie and I learned during that conversation that we both liked boxing, hunting, fishing and horse racing.Charlie is a member of Lost Creek Rod & Gun Club, a renowned hunting camp in upstate PA, and I was lucky enough to be invited by him on several trips to hunt deer and upland game. Pictured above are Charlie and I with my hunting dog sitting by the woodstove having beers and talking long into the night. The next photo is this writer schooling Charlie on the finer points of Poker. Charlie had previously enjoyed a successful career in banking and after retirement got into marketing, which is what led him to be at the convention where we met. Charlie is an accomplished and semi-famous Turkey caller, a serious and highly skilled fly-fisherman, an excellent shot with a shotgun, a great friend and simply one of the most decent and affable humans I have ever had the pleasure and honor of hunting with and calling my friend.He loves a good cigar and a good joke, dotes on his Grandsons shamelessly,and has matched me beer for beer sitting on the tailgate of my pick-up out in a field after a hunt when we felt it our duty to attack a icy cold case of Yeungling Lager. We have hunted Upland game, waterfowl and deer together over the years and shared many a fine meal, poker game and the occasiional horse race. Charlie is getting up there in years now and slowing down a bit but we still take to the field and the goose pit whenever we can. I still look back on that fortuitous meeting and am thankful our paths crossed.
More gems have been made available through my Mother's efforts in the attic. I promised JMW, the sweet Kentucky lass from " A Place to Dwell", that there would be more old photographs and here is one. In this pose, my Grandfather (mentioned in the recent post), is shown with his posse of anglers after a successful deep sea fishing excursion. This trip was probably in early Summer of 1931 or 32. Grandad is kneeling 3rd from the right. Grandad loved fishing for Tuna and this was a great trip as the catch hanging behind confirms. I love this photo for several details. One is the fact that the Capt. and one of the fisherman are wearing ties. These days down at the Jersey shore you are lucky if guys are wearing pants...let alone a tie. I also love the Pith helmet held by one guy...nothing keeps the harsh Summer sun off one's neck like a Safari lid. My Grandfather loved to Sport-fish...as do I. He always said there was nothing like eating Tuna steaks that you had reeled in yourself just a few hours before. If you have never spent an afternoon at Sea with your buddies catching Tuna and drinking ice cold beer..then you are missing a lot.
Recently, The Trad discussed Vuarnet sunglasses in a post. He stated, in his Tradistic view, that these particular Vuarnets looked best on women. I must concur and as evidence offer this picture of my lovely wife sporting a pair of said Vuarnets. This picture was taken in the base lodge at the Middlebury Snowbowl. We had taken the kids to Vermont over president's day weekend a few years back and after dealing with the crowds and lift-lines at Killington we elected to head over to Middlebury. This mountain is owned and operated by the College and is low-key and less crowded. We all thoroughly enjoyed the day at the Snowbowl and looking at this photo brings back great memories of skiing with the family. Coincidentally, The Daily Prep did a post on sunglasses and I chimed in with my comment about quality sunglasses and the superior UV protection afforded by same.Turning from the clinical to the asthetic brought this photo to mind.
My Mom gave me this photo several months ago. This is the Varsity Football team from Stroudsburg High School in Stroudsburg PA,circa 1923. The tall lanky Gent in the back row center is my maternal Grandfather. Grandad used to tell me stories about High School football in those days: No face masks, padded leather helmets,flimsy shoulder pads,and guys playing both offense and defense the whole game. This was hard-nosed, bloody knuckle and cracked rib football. When Grandad and I would watch a game in the mid-70's he would almost always make a comment that these modern players were candy-asses given the amount of protection they enjoyed from the modern equipment. Grandad was a tough old bastard who suffered thru the loss of his Father at an early age and was just out of College when the Depression hit. He made spare money as a teenager by trapping muskrat and beaver in the marshes and ponds of the Poconos and selling the pelts, he hunted deer and grouse to supplement the food for the table and still managed to finish Penn State. He liked Bourbon, shooting craps and Lucky Strikes. He listened to baseball on the radio and read voraciously, he liked hiking and woodcraft and collecting American Indian artifacts. Grandad passed some of these traditions and skills down to me I suppose. He taught me gun safety and the lore of Field and Stream. I consider myself lucky to have had such a mentor....particularly glad that he lived through 4 seasons of Football clad only in the stuff we see in this picture.
Too many Blogs to mention have posted too many posts to list about Fashion Week in Manhattan. Those of us who lean more toward outdoor pursuits have our own version. To wit: The Sporting Show. This weekend featured The Greater Philadelphia Outdoor Sportshow. Yesterday we attended the event. This is a madhouse stuffed to the ceiling with everything from Bass Boats to Guide Service offering trips to hunt Elk in Manitoba or fish for Steelhead in Ontario. There was a great fly fishing demo by Lefty Kreh (See my earlier post on this master of the fly-rod) and a grizzly bear on display.. There were taxidermists and gear purveyors and discount equipment booths. I picked up a new goose call, a snow goose call and some other odds and ends. We ate some aligator jerky and some delicious crabcakes. Dealers had campers and ATV's, duck hunting boats and fishing gear, waders and boots and binoculars. It was all there. The show runs thru this evening.
Several nights ago I was over at my Mom's house delivering some Beef Stew. Since my Father's passing, Mom lives alone and cooking for one can be a hassle. My Wife and I enjoy cooking and often make extra in order to do a little "Meals on Wheels" action for my Mom. She still lives in the house I grew up in about 3 1/2 miles from where I live now. After stowing the stew in the Fridge, I hung around to chat and watch an old movie on AMC. During our conversation my Mom said she was going thru some boxes of photos and found some Lacrosse pictures from my High School career. The pictures above are from a Tournament my High School played against 2 teams from Long Island: Northport and East Islip. The Long Island kids stayed at our teams homes and we played the Tournament at Penn's Franklin Field. This is circa 1980, my Junior Year. The bottom photo is me during warm-ups behind the bench. The "turf" at Franklin Filed was like outdoor carpet stretched over concrete and it was hard as rock. The ball bounced like mad on this surface and if you took a spill you lost flesh and bruised bone. It was a cold day...but now a very warm memory of a great day of Lacrosse. We Harriton "Rams" beat the NY teams in both games and we were proud as Hell to prevail over teams from Long Island..well known as a hot bed of Lacrosse ( Along with Baltimore and the Main Line.) In these photos I am wearing # 12...not my usual number in those days but it was so early in the Season we did not have our fresh Jerseys yet so we wore varsity jerseys as the year before. One of the photos show me laying out an attackman from our opponent and the others show some fairly good Man-Down and man to man coverage. Some of the other guys in the photos are still in the area and I see them once in a while...I cannot wait to show them these pictures.
Marty is a waterfowler's waterfowler. He has, as they say, forgotten more than most of us know about hunting ducks and geese in the Delaware-Maryland region. Marty is a member of our Hunting Club but did not have much chance to get out this season. His wife is battling a fairly serious illness and his attentions are thus required on the homefront. Marty is always ready to share the knowledge he has amassed hunting waterfowl for over 40 years. He can tell you what length of line to rig on your decoys for various water depths at various blinds. He can suggest where to place decoys, how many and what type. He knows what types of vegetation different species of ducks prefer and will tell you what to plant to bolster habitat in your hunting area. He will give you tips on the best boat ramps and what public blinds to try and get in the lottery and tips on what special gear to have in your boat. He will offer use of his extensive collection of decoys and even lend you his trailer to haul them. If all that is not enough, he is a top-flight dog trainer. He participates in hunt tests and field trials and train Labs for hunting. Like everything else, he is quick to offer welcome advice when guys are training their dogs. Marty's hunting buddies join in good thoughts and wishes for his wife's speedy recovery and hope we can share more time hunting with him next season.
Pitchers and Catcher's have reported for the Phillies in Clearwater Fla. The Volkswagen size mound of plowed snow in my driveway is starting to diminish. Nevertheless, here are shots of my 3 kids from our snowmobile trip in Vermont during our Christmas trip. It was in the single digits that afternoon, the day after Christmas, or Boxing Day for you Angliophiles. We rented snowmobiles and had a great 2 hour jaunt in a nearby State Park. The photos were snapped at the break at the 1/2 way point. Hot cider and rum for the adults and hot chocolate for the kids. It was a great afternoon and the kids really enjoyed the excursion. The woods and mountains were truly beautiful enrobed in snow. The snowmobiles had heated handles...a most welcome feature.
T he impetus for composing in specific musical forms may be partly extra-musical, connected with the function of the music in question. The fact that humans have two legs greatly influences the structure of dance, which in turn is responsible for the symmetrical forms of most dance music. The dialogue between priest and congregation in religious services is the functional background for the responsorial forms in Gregorian chant. [And by analogy, the random, desultory, and deleterious functional patterns of illness may have motivated the forms developed by Michael Gardiner in ‘Course of the Symptom’. DSM.]” — Finn Egeland Hansen, p. 312.
P revious generations of musical scholars attributed [phrase structure schemata and evolution] to a spiritual life-cycle. They held that artistic forms shared periods of birth, growth, flowering, aging, sickness, and death because all living things share these periods.” — Robert Gjerdingen, Northwestern Univ, 'Formation and Deformation of Classic/Romantic Phrase Schemata', Music Theory Spectrum x.
F inally, a deep, scholarly accounting of the aesthetics of failure. Props to Caleb Kelly for laying bare the various histories of ‘malfunction’ as a compositional device. This book should be required reading for anyone working in electronic music today.” — Kim Cascone, composer and writer, jacket blurb for Caleb Kelly’s book, ‘Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction’.
I am deeply touched by the new Michael Gardiner composition, a 9-movement piece entitled ‘Course of the Symptom’ (link to CD and MP3s below). Maybe the reason why this music hits me so hard has something to do with my training as a doctor, and with the experiences of trying to help people who are very sick or dying during the years when I was working in hospice.
T hen I think, no, the music’s effect does not depend on having been conditioned by those experiences or that training. Anybody who is ‘primed’ by reading the title and the liner notes and by even one first-hand experience of life-threatening illness involving a friend or family member can hardly help but be affected.
B ut in just such a case as this, I am grateful for the ‘set-up’—grateful for the composer’s cues as to the context and imagery that motivated the process of composing and performing (and recording and engineering/post-processing). The hints do not diminish or constrain the subsequent hearing; instead, the hints enrich it.
T he thing that Michael Gardiner’s new composition most reminds me of is the poetry of Donald Hall’s memoir of the illness and death of his wife, Jane Kenyon—the tedium of prolonged periods of sickness and dying; the upwellings of hope, sometimes triggered by the flimsiest of new evidence; the fulminations and the “witless” love that refuses to acknowledge imminent loss—all of these seared in the pages of ‘Without’, unbidden layers upon layers, through which Hall’s voice persists and copes; the metrical irregularities of it and the malady (cancer) that was her adversary. Pain in general, and cancer pain in particular, brings a special emphasis on time and meter.
S usan Sontag’s writing does not have the rhythmic or poetical musicality of Hall’s, but some of the ideas are the same.
G ardiner’s composition is direct, honest. It leverages algorithmic procedures—including stochastic, aleatoric procedures—to override determinations made by human voluntary structures and by algorithmic serial structures, such as Gardiner’s deterministic intervals. The declamatory narrative of the casual human is overtaken or overridden by ‘the symptom’—a virtual organism that possesses an independence or autonomy that is distinct from its host’s body, like an infection or a cancer or an inherited disease that emerges in adulthood—overriding even one’s ability or will to reason, subsequently falling prey to self-delusions and scamsters who address the symptom with potions or ‘fields’.
S ystemic overrides in ‘Course of the Symptom’ are manifested in duration material. If you notate rhythmic durations as fractional values, denominators represent the number of units that divide a quarter note, i.e., beat-divisions. An eighth-note dividing a quarter-note into halves has a denominator of 2; an eighth-note triplet has a denominator of 3; and so forth. Numerators are factors given by serial and stochastic systems, which beat-divisions then distort. For example, a duration factor 12 strongly bears the influence of the beat-division applied to it. With a beat-division of 3, the duration (12/3) has a duration equivalent to four quarter-notes. With a more finely-granular beat-division such as 4, the duration (12/4) gives a shorter length, equivalent to three quarter-notes only.
A large factor can be applied to a small beat-division (12/6, equivalent to two quarter notes) and cause a shorter duration than a small factor applied to a large beat-division (5/2, equivalent to two-and-a-half quarter notes). Beat-division distortions impart rhythmic diversity, which Gardiner utilizes to lend extra dramatic tension within whatever base-duration series prevails in the piece.
C ourse of the Symptom’ explores schemata of music on different temporal/gestural scales—large-scale idioms analogous to sonata form, rondo form, etc.; small-scale idioms like voice-leading rhythmic motives, cadences, rules of counterpoint, etc.; intermediate-scale schemata—hypermeter; sequences; phrasing and compound phrases or segments—these are more indeterminate or unpredictable. Download the MP3s or listen to the CD in WindowsMediaPlayer with the ‘BarsAndWaves’ visualization display plug-in ‘on’. In the low-frequency range, you will see cues that are associated with rumble and other hypermeter structures that are not obvious when listening unless the volume is cranked way up. There are rhythmic and phrase-frequency ambiti in here, as well as melodic ambitus.
T he composition of music has evolved into an interactive process of directly sculpting sound morphologies on multiple time scales... [Vaggione’s] durations were, in general, very short. Silences of different lengths were placed between events. The density (or speed of succession) was very high: more than 20 events per second. This rate exceeds the limit of applicability of the Poisson law, which is valid to control sound distributions whose density are lower than 10–20 events per second. Beyond 20 events per second, one is no longer dealing with sounds as individual entities. However, the goal in building this structure by combining high density of sounds with highly contrasted parametric values was to create a texture showing a kind of kaleidoscopic ‘internal’ behavior.” — Curtis Roads, 2005.
T his ‘Course of the Symptom’ would make excellent film soundtrack, evoking concepts of time, memory, tradition, and expectation in music listeners/viewers. The musical rhetoric is aggressive, riveting—very realistically embodying features of serious chronic illness... phrase structure; illocutionary acts.
T he distorted, noisy digital synth sound intrudes upon and overrides analog atonal piano sound ... each of these are gestural ‘signs’ that stand for other concepts, such as pain and the processes of illness and the body’s responses to it. Gardiner’s post-processing involves extensive timbre/palette filtering with EQ. The piano gets infected by the electronics; the disease progresses through multiple tissues and organ-systems... contagion; metastasis.
I nitially, the abnormalities are intermittent, and intense anticipation through the silences and pianississimos predominates in the epoch surrounding the onset of the symptom... the patient (and family) hold doubts as to whether the abnormality is real, whether it will persist, etc. Everyone hopes that it will subside and go away. But it does not. The disease and its large-scale generators of noise and music persist. Gardiner’s digital audio workstation editing reveals itself as fundamental to composition and to performance...
I n ‘Location of the Symptom’, small-scale linear progressions draw attention to position and sequence. More locally, descending motions might be contra-structural to a deeper level ascending line. This would usually exclude melodic activity “in service of the fundamental line”, such as initial ascent or motion out of an inner voice; Schenkerians would have a field-day with this... A contra-structural directionality deflects Gardiner’s Urlinie away from the obligatory register (usually upwards in the electronics tracks). But ascending impulses turn out to be frequently misleading, adding dramatic tension as to what the next phase or the ultimate outcome of this insidious illness might be.
O r if you prefer, Leonard Meyer’s notions of implication/deflection could be applied to Gardiner’s complex noise/atonal/tonally-inflected musical language—the forms built up by the accretion of fragmentary utterances by the synth and by the piano, the personae of the movements’ two ‘characters’—the patient and the symptom-producing disease.
I f you utter “Is it time for my Actiq yet?” in your sick bed, the illocutionary force is that you are having breakthrough pain and desire pain relief, as distinct from your explicit locutionary act (a question about the existence of opiates in the nursing station medicine cabinet) and the perlocutionary act (causing somebody to administer you the pain med). The suffering piano does this beautifully, and we fear for its life. Gardiner’s EQ post-processed synth samples are themselves capable of illocutionary acts. The human pianist continues on his/her way, programmatically, deterministically, while, by contrast, the symptom machine becomes the dominant character...
A bout 30 minutes length, combining text, ambient sound of various sorts, sampled quotations from composed electro-acoustic music and possibly Schoenberg’s 6 Kleine Klavierstücke Op. 19? The piece embodies a dialectical balance between a number of polarities: speech/music, gesture/texture (e.g., Denis Smalley), linear time/multiply-directed time (e.g, Jonathan Kramer), and sick/well and male/female representations, a rich interplay of polarities with regard to timbral content and instrumentation.
T his is one brutal illness—a malady that gives no quarter to tenderness or recovery. A complex ‘patchwork’ of collocated elements and repetitions, the ‘Course of the Symptom’ invites a variety of listener-imagined meanings. Very convincing and more than a little ‘too close to home’ for clinicians and caregivers who tend to the needs of those with life-threatening illness. But clinicians and caregivers are the very ones who may benefit most from hearing this work. So, too, the participants and faculty in courses in Medical Humanities (see links below), for whom this recording may become an iconic element of the syllabus in years to come.
W e are reassured that the composition is not autobiographical, and we sincerely hope that Gardiner’s family members are all okay. At least at times of future health problems, from this music they know they can count on Michael’s empathetic and effective support...
[30-sec clip, Michael Gardiner, Course of the Symptom, ‘Character of the Symptom’, track4, 1.1MB MP3]
[30-sec clip, Michael Gardiner, Course of the Symptom, ‘Radiation of the Symptom’, track7, 1.1MB MP3]
[30-sec clip, Michael Gardiner, Course of the Symptom, ‘Course of the Symptom’, track9, 1.1MB MP3]
N ono’s work with electronic media revolved around spatial considerations and their acoustical effects. For instance, a sound approaching a listener rises in dynamics and fades as it passes. Its pitch level also rises and falls. By imitating the acoustic effects produced when a sound moves in relation to the perceiver, electronic instruments could simulate spatial motion. Actual spatial motion could also be achieved by having a signal travel across several acoustic sources. More importantly, a single electronic source could project several simultaneous movements quite clearly; multidimensionality required a large number of performers in comparison and created motion in several simultaneous dimensions much less audibly. Nono would refer to the spatially rendered music yielded by his electronic experiments as ‘il suono mobile’.” — Jeannie Ma. Guerrero, MTO, 2006, commenting on Luigi Nono’s ‘Il canto sospeso’ and later works.
