Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-11-27 - 9:04 a.m.

I bought a holdall for my forthcoming trek � so I had to wait for the shops to open before leaving for work.

With the extra time I plugged the Danelectro into the Vamp and recorded an open fourth into Wavelab and then shifted it across into the new demo version adding another fourth a minor third up � well actually two cents off. The two cents takes the frequency ratio to 1.1878341 ie 0.028% off the Pythogrean ratio of 19 to 16 � which as close as you can get with cents

I time stretched the sample to find the most interesting episodes and expanded those further. Finally with high pass and low pass notch filters a little fragment of theme emerged � possibly an analogue overtone effect or maybe a bit of digital granularity. Something you could harmonise or develop. There must be a lot of thematic material buried away there in the WAV chord to be brought to light in this way. Science often works with just discernible effects at the limits of measurement . Not that I am doing science of course - maybe I am not doing art either.

The latest copy of the Wire adds more to the Blue Gene Tyranny story. When he was in Michigan playing with the Prime Movers � the band where Iggy was christened � he also seems to have played with Bill Dixon � who was a free jazz pioneer who played with Archie Shepp just as he was emerging as a major new wave figure circa 1965. I think Dixon may also have been on Ascension. The Wire repeats the quote about BGT sounding now like a mix of Charles Ives and Keith Jarret.

There is a tantalisingly short article on South Michigan noise bands which followed in the wake of the Stooges and Destroy All Monsters � at least that brings the story almost up to the present and its reassuring the utopian weirdness didn�t end with either punk of the fall of the White Panthers. Anyway more threads to pull which always helps keep me out of trouble,

There is a review of the People�s Music under a large black and white ND photo � overcoat on the beach and also one of Bridget St John playing at a Festival in Minnesota where Tony Conrad also appeared. Her arranger, Ron Geeson also has a review � of his new retrospective album and a complete works of the Art Bears is also promised.

I listened to some Luigi Nono as I drove to work � some solo piano and some electro acoustic stuff from the 60s which makes more sense in the light of Cage hanging out with Berio and his wife at the end of the 50s. This stuff is eminently samplable. There is also a potential Michigan link through the Sonic Arts Union which grew out of the ONCE Festival (apparently there is a BGT track on the new ONCE archive CD set). The Sonic Arts Union had a European offshoot which ended up in Italy in 1968. It seems unlikely that the radical Marxist Nono and the radical US experimenters who both into electroacoustic music would have missed each other. They may have disagreed wildly but ignorance hardly a possibility.

Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea, I should also mention that I read a good Productivity Review on www.dti.gov.uk which reviews the latest evidence on the UK�s relative competitiveness in the Treasury�s 5 factors.

Piccadilly and Dagenham were as totally different as you might expect. Dagenham was worth the effort except a �bridge too far� factor kicked in just as I was getting to Euston. Fortunately Frances Evans turned up to help me out but it all rather disrupted my sleep. I listened to the first side of the Island John Martyn retrospective and thought just how good it is beyond the greatest hits.

Then to try and force myself to sleep, I picked up Schoenberg�s Structural Functions of Harmony which is much shorter than I thought and read the final chapter about serialism and an early chapter about regions. The thought seems to be that if you commit yourself to a central key then all conventional space is structured round you � over and above the relations which make up the cycle of fifths.

If the tonic major is at the centre and the dominant above and the subdominant below, then there are two groups of three chords each side � the relative minors are to the left and the tonic minors are to the right and beyond the tonic minors are their relative majors. The system is extended further out beyond that. I think the claim may be that classic structure is expressed through spatial relations on this chart. If I can get clear about his view of classic structure then this will illuminate how he sees the serial system. The introduction is by Leonard Stein who taught Lamont Young.

The table of distances is strangely like some devices the Cage used. The deeper one studies his methods, the more interesting they become. For example at the time of Music of Changes he was involved with trying to get Boulez 2nd Piano Sonata performed in New York. To help one of the pianists he approached to perform the work he read around Boulez and in particular he got into Artaud who had influenced PB. Artaud has a grand theory of the theatre and of language in the theatre which features discontinuity. What I say on stage now has its own unique value which is based on the fact that I am acting now and not strongly linked to what I have just said.

So artistic reality for Artaud is a series of discontinuous meaningful instants. David Tudor (who eventually played this sonata) seems to have found the same approach helpful in doing Music of Changes.

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