"Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you." --A.A. Milne/Pooh

Robin and Andrew have been writing some fascinating stuff about the creative life. Andrew is talking about how he has taken on too much so that he feels to much pressure to complete what I guess to be more important deadlines. I am certainly no stranger to those feelings. The piano playing is a particular source of pressure but I wonder what that is going to do to his writing. Confronting all those pieces so directly is bound to have an impact. I am amazed at the way that he continues to produce material to specific commissions. I am not sure I could manage that at all.

Robin�s reflections on writing to a brief are fascinating too- are there always these constraints even when they are not made explicit? When I was working on advertising, the brief was so important in determining the quality of the result � setting limits but also specifying objectives or outcomes the required work is supposed to deliver.

Instructions suddenly loom even larger as Lamont Young gets to NYC and starts writing pieces which are instructions � or in his language �algorithms�. It takes him just a few weeks on arrival to get a gig in Yoko Ono�s loft. The set of Compositions are where the instruction pieces turn � up � written in 60-61. There is the straight line one and the one about feeding the piano. The straight line one was repeated as a further exercise as a composite piece � instructing the drawing of the line on 13 different dates � to make 13 different compositions

. Its interesting how Cage reacted to Young:

�Lamonte Young is doing something quite different from what I am doing, and it strikes me as being very important, Through the few pieces of his I�ve heard, I�ve had utterly different experiences of listening than I�ve had with other music�. Young thinks that his own originality at that point was being �the first to concentrate and delimit the work to be a single event or object in these less traditionally musical areas.�

Potter comments that Young was the first to investigate the conceptual with minimal means. A good exam question would be to evaluate that statement.

There�s an interview with Wayne Shorter in today�s Guardian by Adam Sweeting. Here�s a quote:

�Davis described Shorter as "the idea person, the conceptualiser of a whole lot of musical ideas we did. He understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your own satisfaction and taste."

Shorter tends to speak in philosophical riddles and doesn't wallow in nostalgia, but he suffers no false modesty about the significance of his time with Davis. "With Miles, I would say I experienced the joy of not rehearsing," he says. �In all those years with Miles we never had any rehearsals. Miles had a way of scanning the whole of something rather than measure for measure, and he could see the forest without looking at each tree. I remember years later, when we were all further along in our own things, Miles said to me: 'You know, that band we had - we covered a lot of ground, didn't we? It was something, wasn't it?' He liked that band."

This antipathy to rehearsal is something I have come across before -ts one of the big differences between jazz and rock. Anyway here�s something about Wynton Marsalis:

�I remember back in the 1970s, when people had been hearing about this new trumpet player, he showed up at my house by surprise. Wynton introduced himself and I said, 'Come on in.' He wanted to listen to a little bit of the Davis Plugged Nickel album [a 1965 live recording made by the Davis quintet featuring Shorter] and he said he wanted to watch me while he was listening to it. That means, to me, that he recognised at that time he was in a position to grasp the profundity of what was going on then at those Plugged Nickel dates. Some where after that, between when he left my house and now, that grasping process is on vacation - quite a long vacation." �

At least Wynton Marsalis stands for one very definite approach � a beacon in relation to which which everyone can navigate or take a position. John Zorn is someone else who people regard as occupying a very different part of the landscape. I think the Plugged Nickel recordings are astonishing � at one stage Miles looked back at them as if they were some kind of completed phase but I don�t think that�s quite right. I used to think they were the terminus in terms of what you could do with Broadway songs � they are more like a goal in terms of invention.

There level of input is very strong at the moment � not only is there Potter�s Four Minimalists, Gilbert�s CD arrived too. No chance of me getting to Leamington today then I started with Day-in Day-out which is currently at a pretty abstract stage � quite a broad cityscape - a lot of of free guitar playing in three separate locations on the sound stage . I am pretty pleased with this � I have mailed a mp3 to Gilbert � to see if he thinks I am going too far.

Almost on impulse I sent Gilbert a couple of short flute tunes on the original CD � just solo lines of about a minute or so each. He has produced brilliant guitar parts for them. The lines have to be rerecorded to match the quality of the guitar part. I have just finished reconstructing the first line � I needed to go all the way through the piece by ear before I could remember how the lines were made! They are free atonal built around the dreaded Fifths hexachord � on other worlds each set of 6 notes on the line is pretty much the same � and mostly the line is constructed from the first group of six followed by the second � although there is a break point about two thirds of the way through which ushers in the final 12 notes. It took a lot effort remembering how on earth I�d put those notes together! The tuning is tricky so my first crack has been with Dhorn � while I learn especially the timings � then maybe I will have more scope for getting the pitch right.

It was beautiful on the hill with Jake this afternoon � you could see 30 or 40 miles in almost every direction. We delivered some revised publicity for Cleveland�s recital to Gillian Lloyd.

Things seem more silent than for a while in Frakctured diary � also in my inbox. I suppose everyone other me is seriously trying to earn a living.

A Mela Message came in this evening:

Awakening - call for participants

As many of you have probably heard, this coming Wednesday (October 2nd), there will be an all-night vigil for peace entitled Awakening. It runs from 10 PM October 2nd until 10 AM October 3rd. It is being organized by Pauline Oliveros of Deep Listening Space, composer/performer and iEAR graduate student Stephan Moore, and myself.

I am writing because we would like YOU to be a part of this event. We are looking for musicians, poets, performers, dancers - creative people in general that share a common interest in giving peace a chance.

If you are interested in performing, please contact Stephan Moore ([email protected]) and myself ([email protected]) and let us know WHAT you would be interested in doing and WHEN you would be interested in performing. Stephan and I will then take all the emails and assemble a loose running order, with an eye for avoiding dead air and keeping with a meditative peace vigil atmosphere (whatever that means).

This will be a very positive experience and hopefully will act as an effective counterpoint to the war rhetoric. At the very least, we hope to replace the drums of war with the art of

peace.

Please contact Stephan and I soon. We look forward to hearing from you...

(Oh, and if you have any friends you think that might be interested in performing, please forward this message to them - the more, the merrier!!)

And for those of you that don't know what Awakening is, here is the press release:

iEAR presents!

Awakening

an all-night vigil for piece

Troy, NY: Directly following the iEAR presents! performance by Kristin Norderval, there will be an all night vigil/performance for peace that begins on Wednesday, October 2, 2002, at 10 p.m. and runs until 10 a.m. Thursday, October 3. The vigil will take place at West Hall Auditorium on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York;

admission is FREE and open to the general public. For more information, please call

518.276.4829 or visit http://www.arts.rpi.edu/events.

Awakening is an all-night vigil happening simultaneously in Troy, New York and Nevada City, California. The Troy vigil is being organized by iEAR professor and world-renowned composer Pauline Oliveros as well as iEAR graduate student Stephan Moore and will feature artists such as iEAR professors Neil Rolnick, Scott Smallwood, and Seth Cluett plus many more artists from the iEAR Studios and the greater Capitol Region. Kristin

Norderval, Monique Buzzart�, and Barbara Barg, who will be performing from 8

to 10 PM as part of the iEAR presents! series, will also be participating. The event will feature a wide variety of music, performance, dance, spoken word, and much more.

Initially started by widely acclaimed composer Terry Riley as �as a daily practice to, in a small way, contribute to world peace,� Awakening has blossomed into a vigil where people from across the artistic and political spectrums come together in the name of peace and solidarity. To quote Utah Phillips (one of the performers at the Nevada City vigil) in reference to those that would promote war: �Yes, 12 hours is a long sit. But remember, they fight with money and we fight with time. And they�re going to run out of money before we run out of time� We can do it if we work together and STAY AWAKE.�

This event is being co-sponsored by the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, Inc., an organization committed to the support of all aspects of the creative process for a worldwide community of artists and was inspired by Pauline Oliveros' philosophy that "creativity is the vital spirit of public and personal growth." For more information on the Pauline Oliveros

Foundation, please visit http://www.pofinc.org.

--

jason steven murphy

production and publicity manager

iEAR studios and iEAR presents!

rensselaer polytechnic institute

107 west hall - arts department

110 8th street, troy, ny 12180

518.276.4829 (office phone)

518.276.3067 (fax)

http://www.arts.rpi.edu/events