Re Ives, Cowell, and Varese, were you reading the "American Pioneers" book by Alan Rich? It's been a while since I picked it up, probably a bit after you gave me a copy back in '98. Man, I really like Charles Ives - that idea of taking stuff you've heard so much it's practically part of your marrow & blasting it with with his own eccentricities, like the lifleong fascination with the cacophonous marching-band duels he'd heard as a kid. I've long speculated my own facination w/ noise has something to do with hearing a tornado up close when I was 11.
Anyway, in the cases of all three of these guys there was some violent form-stretching. Funny, I'm so conditioned by years of freedom=free jazz/free improv that it's almost a physical strain to think of composed work as freedom. I know better, really.
In non-music news, I watched Jodorowsky's "Fando and Lis" last weekend and heartily recommend it to the whole planet. The protagonists go through enough semblance of a journey to maybe trick you into rooting for 'em or something, but overall the film nails dream-logic like nothing else, certainly nothing else of feature length that I can name. I've arranged play dates with bootleg copies of "El Topo" and "Holy Mountain" to see if they maybe top "Fando." I dug out an old "Forced Exposure" w/ a Jodorowsky interview & noted that "Fando and Lis" was thought at the time ('89?) to be a lost film. Glad it turned up. The DVD includes a documentary about Jodorowsky that's quite good, despite some now-pathetic "high-tech" scenes w/ house-music backgrounds. Speaking of music and Jodorowsky, the documentary included footage from some really unhinged happenings he was doing in Paris in the mid-60s. I'd kill to see more - lots of nude dancers, wild rock music in sort of a Velvets vein, fluids poured all over everyone, etc., sort of like a less violent Actionist event.
- posted by Chris @ 10:48 PM

 
Was reading some of the old posts below. I mainly posted my Pioneers thing to have a new post go up so this thing wouldn't be dead.

I've been reading about Ives, Varese and Cowell in 20th C. Classical music and think there's something going on here concerning Selvig's initial post about freedom vis a vis this music. I guess leaving Wagner out of the equation for now, and even Bruckner, Mahler and Debussy, we can look at Ives, Varese and Cowell as the start of people wanting sounds that transcend the sonic palette of the orchestra. Not in the service of God or Nature (Bruckner or Debussy) and not a pure sound like Mahler, though he is closest in spirit, but something new and unheard of. In the case of Ives and Cowell the noises they created were eclectic mixes of hymns, folk songs and tropical music but not appropriated in the European sense of adding tonal color to the extent tradition (Bartok though he was heading down the path) but blasted out with a new energy and a love for noise. With Varese he wanted something even purer than that, his love for percussion and sirens, looking for a pure tone, seemed to be someone ready for the electronic music revolution that he predated. All three expressed the hectic noise of the urban environment and you could say that the roots of Industrial music are here.

What does this have to do about freedom?
More later.....hopefully not a year later........
- posted by letch @ 9:58 PM