V-2nd - Chapter 10: FLIP FLOP

[alice wellintown]

Trespassing Limits: Pynchon's Irony and the Law of the Excluded Middle
Fall, 1999
24 Okla. City U.L. Rev. 471
Francisco Collado-Rodriguez

This NY Town reminds me of Dylan's down and out flop house blues. And,
of course, it is, as Dylan sez ibout some gal in Desolation Row, about
Death Being Quite Romantic."

Reminds me most, not of Bleak House or Eliot's London, but of
Melville's Wall Streeter, Bartleby.

Composing a Symphony of the Streets
Two Musicians Combine the Noises of the City and a Traditional Mass
for a Modern Urban Soundscape
By STEVE DOLLAR
Historians of popular music talk about "the sound of the city" as a
way of describing forms of urban music. But when Bruce Odland and Sam
Auinger use the term, they mean exactly what they say.


Composer and sound artist Bruce Odland, foreground, directs singers
Geoffrey Silver, left, fellow composer Sam Auinger, center, and singer
Hai-Ting Chinn during a rehearsal for 'Requiem for Fossil Fuels.'
"I loved the old Williamsburg Bridge before it was paved," Mr. Odland
said, "when it had all those metal ribs in it." The composer paused to
demonstrate the sound of car wheels passing over them. "Bzzzzzzzttt!"

As the sound-art duo O+A, Mr. Odland, a New Yorker, and Mr. Auinger,
who is Berlin-based, have spent much of the last two decades recording
the sounds of automotive traffic and distressed civic infrastructures
in New York and other cities around the world, editing and adapting
them into commentaries on "the sound of the economy."

The pair's latest piece, to be staged Friday night at the Winter
Garden in the World Financial Center, may be its most ambitious to
date. "Requiem for Fossil Fuels" will combine a traditional memorial
mass sung by a world-class vocal quartet with the noises of
fossil-fuel powered cars, helicopters, airplanes, horns and alarms—all
echoing through the 10-story glass-windowed atrium as the composers
control a multi-channel sound system from their laptops.

Messrs. Odland, left, and Auinger, right, combine sounds and live music.
"It's an urban cathedral," said Debra Simon, the artistic director of
Arts World Financial Center, of the performance space. "It's very
fitting for a requiem."

"Requiem for Fossil Fuels" functions on several levels—at once an
exploration of sonic phenomena, an activist statement about exhausting
natural resources, and a philosophical investigation into how human
beings listen.

"People will remember they have ears when they hear this," said Mr.
Odland, who argues that urban denizens, in particular, are so visually
oriented that they suppress the various forms of racket that define
the city's soundscape. "We've been forced by the environment to become
professional non-listeners. We want to reclaim the thinking space of
the ears."

Messrs. Odland and Auinger previously installed the piece "Blue Moon"
at the World Financial Center in 2004, using three "tuning tubes"
placed in the North Cove Harbor to turn the city's ambient bustle into
harmonic resonances in different keys. Some of those recordings will
recur in "Requiem," along with sounds captured at Amsterdam Park, in
Grand Central Station, on a helipad near Wall Street, and on various
streets and bridges that the artists traversed in a Honda Civic rigged
with sensitive ribbon microphones—secured in protective casing but
still perilously suspended mere inches from the rear tires.

Sheet music for 'Requiem.'
"We were scratching the city's infrastructure, like a DJ, by driving
repeatedly over certain lanes," Mr. Odland said. The sounds are
selected in such a way that they serve musical functions—the opening
"Introitus" makes use of antiphonal truck horns—and only rarely
manipulated.

"[The 1920s German filmmaker] Walter Ruttmann talked about the city as
a symphony," Mr. Auinger said. "Nowadays the city is more like a
sequencer. The traffic lights are acting as a rhythmic device."

Much has changed in the city since many of the recordings were made,
adding another layer to the project's significance. In a sense, it's
an aural documentary of a city that no longer exists. But Mr. Odland
still has his favorites.

"The Queensboro Bridge in the upper breakdown lane. The sounds you get
are sensational."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703848204575608570457048984.html


By STUART ISACOFF
The soft, gripping harmonies of 16th-century composer Christóbal de
Morales emerge from a gaping silence and blossom slowly, their sounds
hollow and plaintive like a fragile plea. Sung by voices that are
pure, resolute and mournful, they seem to personify the human
condition. Suddenly, they are joined by a time traveler from the 20th
century—a wailing saxophone, whose unlikely presence only intensifies
the sense of wistful longing.

Saxophonist Jan Garbarek, center, with the Hilliard Ensemble.
So begins the recording "Officium," produced in 1993 by the
four-voiced Hilliard Ensemble—a group revered for its renderings of
Medieval and Renaissance music, as well as for forays into the
contemporary classical repertoire—with Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan
Garbarek. The album was an instant best-seller for the ECM label. Now,
more than 15 years later, that company has issued a follow-up,
"Officium Novum." It is the third recorded collaboration between the
Hilliard Ensemble and Mr. Garbarek, and is based in large part on
Armenian and Eastern Orthodox music.

On Friday, the Hilliard Ensemble and Mr. Garbarek will be appearing
together at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue as part
of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival.

The partnership was the brainchild of ECM's founder, Manfred Eicher.
Hilliard countertenor David James recalled the day they first put the
concept to the test. "Manfred, who wanted to form collaborations
between his various artists, asked us to try it," he said. "So we all
got together in a chapel and took out the music by Morales. I can
still see it. We started to sing as usual, and after a while Jan, who
had been listening, began to find a way in. It is a moment that will
live in me forever.

"At the end, there was complete silence. Nobody moved. And Manfred
finally said, 'Guys, that was magical. We have to record it.'"

For singers who had been brought up in the cathedral choirs of London,
it was a rare experience. "Our group is named after Nicholas
Hilliard," Mr. James said, "partly because he lived in the middle
Renaissance and was British, and partly because he specialized in
miniatures—thumbnail sketches, incredibly precise and beautifully
crafted. And the music we did was also small scale." And, a listener
might add, meticulously rendered.

Thanks to the Hilliard Ensemble's experiences with a jazz performer,
Mr. James said, "We are probably freer now—more willing to experiment,
to change speed and mood. There is no perfect performance: Each one
has its own special qualities. This is what we learned from Jan,
because he never plays the same way twice. But each time you think,
'That's fantastic.'"

Nevertheless, one wonders what objections early-music purists might
have to such tampering with the legacy. Baritone Gordon Jones is
unconcerned. "It's very valuable to know the context in which the
music would have been performed," he acknowledged. "But think about
the time of Guillaume Dufay"—the 15th century—"when people got on
their horses and went from country to country. Once he brought his
manuscripts to Italy, they wouldn't have said, 'Oh, this comes from
the Low Countries—what kind of sound do they make?' I guarantee they
wouldn't have had the slightest interest. They would have sung it like
an Italian choir."

Or, as Mr. Garbarek put it: "The music was contaminated over the
centuries, in any case—it was always changing. Music cannot stand
still."

The saxophonist is in large part self-taught. Unlike the members of
the Hilliard Ensemble, who spent their childhoods engaged in the
choral arts, Mr. Garbarek's interest in music wasn't stirred until age
14, when he returned home from playing with friends to find a sound
coming through the radio that still haunts him today.

"I didn't know who the musician was," he said. "I immediately visited
a shop downtown and bought a jazz album, but it was Gene Krupa—nice in
its own way, but not what I had been searching for. Finally I found
the right album: John Coltrane's 'Giant Steps.' This music is
timeless—moving on a deep level. It has nothing to do with styles or
periods or genres or geographic location. It is something that any
human being can recognize. That's what caught my attention. And the
music I'm making with this group follows the same principles. My role
is listening, soaking up whatever happens around me, and trying to
find an adequate reaction as an improviser."

At the core of Mr. Garbarek's art is a sense of freedom, regardless of
the environment. But even for a veteran improviser, this musical
setting is exceptional. "The very particular sonority of these
Hilliard voices is unique," he said. "Just the fact that it is such a
wonderful sound makes every performance inspiring."

—Mr. Isacoff is on the faculties of the Purchase College
conservatories of music and dance (SUNY).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514904575602770409533984.html

Julia Blaut, guest curator of the exhibition Glorious Sky: Herbert
Katzman's New York, hosts this screening of the film The Naked City.
In 1947, The Naked City became the first feature film shot on location
in New York in two decades. The city itself became a character in the
film through a combination of aerial cinematography and street scenes,
but it was the renewal of the film's love affair with the look and
feel of Manhattan that made it a milestone in cinema history, one that
would impact the broader field of the visual arts. Ms. Blaut's opening
remarks will explore the film within this historic and artistic
context. Presented in conjunction with Glorious Sky: Herbert Katzman's
New York.