Steve Reich – A New Musical Language (1987)
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This broadcast includes extensive interviews with Steve Reich as well as performance clips. It covers the period through The Desert Music.
Memorize Poetry
Memorizing poetry gives you a feel for the language, exercises the brain, entertains when your iPod is dead, and carries on a tradition that predates writing. If you just memorize two lines a day you will have a good collection in a month or two.
Kyle Gann on John Cage’s 4’33″
Kyle Gann is a composer and musicologist who has written extensively on new music. In the following clip he discusses Cage’s 4’33″ on location where it was premiered. Kyle Gann’s short book, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33″ (Icons of America)
Kyle Gann on John Cage’s 4’33″ from cambiz a. khosravi on Vimeo.
Film Stock
Pamela kept going along, going along, then hit on something, tore or cut it out of her notebook, and put it on the wall. A few days later she came back to see if it stuck. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t, and other times it needed a word added here, a word added there, a word moved from one place to another. Sometimes this applied to phrases and sentences. Sometimes too this didn’t stick, and she found it on the floor. She left it where it where it fell, letting it lie to collect boot prints and protect the industrial loft’s floor. Over time a carpet formed, ever changing as the open window or draft from the shaft way let in the breeze to shuffle things around, boot prints and stains forming ever changing patterns. She liked it this way. She photographed it, photographed the floor, noting the time and date on the back of each Polaroid print. This she continued to do until the Polaroid Corporation stopped manufacturing film stock for her camera and her supply was exhausted and the cost of acquiring what little stock remained became prohibitive. At this point she collected the prints, arranged them chronologically, and installed them on the wall. She called the installation The Floor, sent out fliers, bought some beer, wine, and cheese, and invited people to come and see.
On the day of the opening she thought of collecting the deleterious from the floor, some of which had decayed and become soil or very much like it. She examined the floor carefully to see if anything was growing there but nothing was. So she left it as it was.
The opening was a success. Critics raved, took photographs, called her a genius, asked her all sorts of questions about its making and many lucrative commissions followed. “Come and do my house, come and do mine.” Two collectors offered to buy her apartment lock, stock, and barrel and install it, Cloisters style, in their own homes. She found this amusing, then depressing, because they did not quite get the point, had missed the point all together. They would be better off making their own. And she decided to tell them this, nicely, politely, sending them notes, each one personalized with something she remembered about them, thanking them for coming and for the praise and interest and describing in detail how they could make a piece like hers of their own.
The only problem, she said, was the camera and film. They would need to buy or manufacture their own.
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Patti Smith on “Kids Are People Too”
A rather rare interview and performance of “You Light Up My Life.” “Kids Are People Too” was a news and variety show that aired between 1978 and 1982.
Annotation
It little matters that an idle king
by this still hearth
among these barren crags
where horses were toward eternity
if the Red-Slayer thinks he slays
in Xanadu where Kubla Kahn
depends upon the red wheel barrow.
–
Buffalo Bill’s defunct.
Just like that.
Yes.
Andrew Culver & John Cage
At one time, New York’s Museum of Modern Art displayed a print out from Andrew Culver’s I Ching program. The program was developed by him for John Cage, and the sheet displayed happened to be one used by John Cage. A copy of the program is available as shareware here.
One of bendofbay’s contributors also uses Andrew Culver’s program as a structural device, and so in the same spirit we display below the sheet our contributor is currently working from. In the sheet below, numbers are crossed off once used.
The Investigation Continues
The police discovered four bodies.
The remains were found.
The first body, described in a statement, was found on Saturday afternoon.
The officer was conducting a training exercise.
The police said they had been searching the area.
Three more bodies were found on Monday.
The bodies were spread over about a quarter mile, a spokesman for the police said.
The police said the investigation was continuing.
Water Flows
Each night water flows beneath our bed. We can hear it. It lulls us to sleep and keeps us there. Unless there is a great storm and the river rises. In which case the opposite happens. The water awakens us and carries us away. Each night water flows beneath our bed.
