Yesterday�s Guardian had some good reviews of some Laura Nyro re-issues which didn�t mention Christmas and the Beads of Sweat for some reason.

Meanwhile - back to the Little Piano Pieces - some comments by Malcolm Macdonald:

�the pieces illustrate the stubborn self sufficiency of the material S was trying to work with in his larger compositions; the pregnancy of each phrase, the hyper emotional concern with the passing moment. This was what Webern turned into such a virtue in his own music. But S�s struggle at this period was to wrest larger forms from intense fragments. In his preface to the 1924 publication of Webern�s Bagatelles he writes: Think of what self denial is necessary to cut a long story so short�. To convey a novel in a single gesture.�

The word �gesture� makes an easy passage to Feldman. - who wrote the incidental music to the famous film about Jackson Pollock made in the 1950-51. The film included Pollock painting gesturally onto glass with the camera underneath - to examine his modus operandi. The making of the film paralysed Pollock.

But should we think of a valid artistic gesture as necessarily being a novel in disguise?

When you enter the �masterpieces� room at MOMA and see Sch�s friend Kandinsky fighting it out with Pollock across the room - are we comparing biographies? Or when we look at the Schoenberg self-portraits that he did at the time of the Little Piano Pieces (and which Kandinsky liked) - do we say to ourselves - I think he tells the story better in the Op19 number 6?

I have been thinking about a remark in the Philosophical Investigations - 213/4. � If an intuition is an inner voice - how do I know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn�t mislead me? For if it can guide me right it can guide me wrong. If you have an intuition in order to develop the series 1,2,3,4�.. you must also have one in order to develop the series 2 2 2 2 2 2 ��

Would this indicate that W is a founding father of repetition and seriality? The series 2 2 2 2 2 2 2�.. looks like a gesture to me - especially in a philosophy text hinting at the foundations of mathematics. When Kandinsky writes to the Schoenbergs thanking them for their hospitality some Sunday during these years he goes out of his way to mention how nice Mrs S�s home baked cakes were. This has to be a Viennese gesture. Probably Wittgenstein leaves Vienna at this time to go England to study aeronautics to escape such gestures.

Talking of planes and gestures there is a good paragraph in Radical Philosophy this months which explores the ploy of regarding the collision of an aircraft and a tall building as an artistic gesture. The author points out that both Futurism and Surrealism could easily have taken this stance. It doesn�t mention that Stockhausen tried this interpretation and suffered accordingly - a kind of marginalisation. We are forced into a kind of objectivity as a consequence. The artists who break out of this objectivity as Plath did with the Holocaust on the one hand look silly and selfish and on the other exhibit a certain heroism. I think this is probably an aspect of what Baudrillard calls pataphysics - the interaction between the mediated presentation of the world and the brute fact with its dynamic power.

Perhaps Pollock practices pataphysics - his gestures are violent and intrusive - but become mediated through the words of Clement Greenberg and the film and its colouring by the music of Feldman. Pollock finds the confrontation with the apparatus of mediation, the camera lens staring blankly up at him insupportable. Llater that evening he acts up - he throws all the food off the table in front of the guests. There�s a trope which drafts say de Kooning�s polite thank you letter to Lee Krasner saying that her cake was delicious and looked very expressive smashed on the floor. It was Krasner�s idea to engage Feldman

The mediation of the artistic gesture plus the interaction between the interpretive context and the gesture itself as an intrusive brute fact - this is what Richard Wollheim discovers when he discovers the word/concept Minimalism and goes on to write Art and Its Objects - you might say that he applies the theory of Intention that W�s executor Miss Anscombe developed.

I can still remember one of her gestures in a lecture about intention. She acted out a piece of behaviour - you are going upstairs in the dark and you misremember how many stairs there are to the top in your house. She did the gesture one�s leg might make as it tried to find the non-existent higher step. Her point was one about �belief�. She was in fact famous for her Catholic beliefs. She wanted to know whether we believed that there was an extra step. Something like - what are our beliefs when we write the next �2� in the series. Some people might think this is just logical behaviourism.

According to the Wire, Earle Brown was friends with Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman. I have been trying to work out where the recordings I have of EB come in the chronolgy. In 1994 EB writes:

�After writing three very precisley notated and controlled serial works in 1951 and 1952 I began a series of experiments in notation and performance process in the fall of 1952. Having enjoyed jazz and admired its spontaneity and the collaborative natuure of that kind of music-making�I wanted to find a more flexible, transformable and direct relationship in the process of concept, composing, performing and listening to the new music�

Folio (1952-53) and Four Systems (1954) result. The CD has reproductions of 4 Systems dated 1954 and Folio II dated 1993 - the first is very systematic and the latter is very gestural. I will try to get them up into my other diary via the scanner. So 25 Pages is just before Four Systems but after the first Folio - if indeed there are two. Maybe its on the way to 4 Systems.

I hadn�t realised that Cornelius Cardew was so into graphic scores. It seems that Cage�s ideas reach Darmstadt in the mid 1950s and transform Stockhausen�s approach and it is there that both CC and LmY first encounter Cage�s thought and practice. Yet when John Cale gets to Tanglewood in 1963 � meeting Earle Brown, M Feldman, Xenakis he quickly concludes that Lamont Young has taken over from Cage as the leading musical intelligence � an amazing ascent to leadership of the avant garde.

In summary Cage transforms Darmstadt (Stockhausen) - introducing the ideas that he, Feldman, Brown and Wolff have been developing - and as a result both Cardew and Young are taken over by these ideas. But Young quickly outgrows and develops them into something else - the thing which Jon Cale wants to be a part of as soon as he gets onto the American musical avant garde scene. Cale's route is pretty well known - CC's much less so, although he and Eno seem to have collaborated in the 1970s.

I suppose you could say the difference between the US and the UK amounts to two things - punk and Warhol. Punk rock in the USA is part of the broad development of art and culture and seems to flow naturally enough via Warhol and the Factory to Television and Patti Smith (who Cale produced). But in the UK we don't get a Warhol figure until much later when Damien Hurst emerges from Goldsmiths - the college Cale left to go to Tanglewood. The Brit-artists incorporate a punk attitude its true, but the 1976 explosion of punk utterly disrupts the culture. We look back at things like the Scratch Orchestra and see them as a bunch of old hippies with silly ideas.

*Turns to old hippy with silly ideas* Tell me Fred - Do you think you would have developed differently musically if you hadn't gone to New York when you did? What would you have done?

FF: God knows. I have no idea. All I know is that going to New York was a profoundly liberating experience for me; for the first time I felt that I could be myself and not try to live up to what I imagined people were thinking about me. This was definitely my problem-getting out of Britain helped me work this problem out; I no longer felt there was a weight pressing down on me. (Pause) I felt a lot of weight all the time in Britain. I still feel that a lot of musicians in Britain are stuck, partly because culturally Britain is incredibly stingy. Of course there's a very important music scene-in terms of commercial music it's fantastically vibrant, and because of that people tend not to notice that there are a whole lot of areas where it's not. As a vibrant pop music centre, Britain has obviously exported pop music all over the world, it's very successful-PRS is a very big organisation-and so if you say: "Music is not successfully promoted in Britain," it sounds a bit perverse. But in all other European countries, Canada, Australia, I see there's a level of support for other kinds of music that simply isn't there in Britain.

More mundanely:-

I nearly bought that Danelctro U2 today when I collected my Duosonic and delivered the Maya for a going over � its not at all a bad price.

After pruning the apple tree and some of the plants nearby, I had a go at �extending� the third of the Little Piano Pieces � by introducing repetition a degree of �normalisation� takes place.

I made a 12 track CD for Gilbert � some obvious stuff , some a bit chancier.

Less mundanely

E mail from Jon Cole who is amused that the second time I had a look at his Movies site I thought he had edited it. In fact it is unchanged � its just my perceptions that have shifted. On the second visit I couldn�t find Jon�s powerful Sandy Denny piece. But yesterday I tracked it down. It starts as follows:

�In recent years, there have been several accounts of the life and work of Sandy Denny, singer and songwriter of the Fairport Convention. Of these, Clinton Heylin's biography may be definitive. Others vary in their accuracy. It has been recorded that Jon Cole of The Movies played a minor role in the last hours of Sandy Denny, and that at least is true.

What follows is a statement by Jon Cole about those last hours, which he records here in the hope that he may be spared re-telling the story. It is painful, even at a distance of 20-odd years, to recall the loss of someone you admire.

Sandy was unique. From where she came, she could have gone somewhere else. She chose to make something special of her life, which was all too short, but whose record lives on.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was a fatal accident, but no great drama. Those who cannot accept that an extraordinary life should meet an ordinary end might wish it otherwise. But this was not a case of excess: no wild parties, no drugs; no-one drove into the swimming pool and no-one shot the sheriff. This was not what some might conceive as typical of fatalities in the music business of the period. Even now I cannot think that Sandy would be typical of anything. There is one minor mystery, but that can be put down to a lapse of memory.

It was unexpected. On the Friday before Sandy died, we were talking about new sounds. She liked the idea of slide guitar and accordion. She was looking ahead.

Sandy was Miranda's pal from way back. Miranda Ward lived in Castelnau, around the corner from me in Barnes, south-west London; and her knowledge of the music business was and is legendary. Being near-neighbours, we struck up a mutual assistance pact, one of whose results was the minor role I played in those last hours���������..�

There�s an ongoing debate about whether/how to put musical items on the News section of www.kwase-kwaza.org. Anyway we shall see what people think of posting this article there.