Preface
"So an activist doesn't transcend time, it invents a new time, in each new now. If each present is an expression of its past - of its histories - then opening-onto-future, as a radical reinscription of the past, is exactly what marks the end of history. Music, for Sun Ra, takes on a heuristic value here. My role as a music scholar as well: there is a great deal of research on Sun Ra, from the perspectives of literary theory, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and more, but little of it touches Sun Ra's music. Music theory and analysis, conversely, continue to privilege things like coherence and connection and what we might call 'hearing-as' as its disciplinary/disciplining projects. I'm interested in what can we learn specifically from Sun Ra's music; its materiality, its matter(ing) - or from the activist now of any improvised musical expression, or from the relations between musicking human subjects and post-or trans-human sonorous bodies - that can be of value beyond the hermetic world of music analysis. I'm interested, in short, in the ways that music theory - and the ways that it can imagine or reveal relationships between musicking human and sonorous bodies, relationships that, necessarily, transform those bodies through the very acts of relating - might matter."
Chris Stover "Sun Ra's Mystical Time" Open Space Magazine Issue 21 spring 2018
Texts
Recorded
August 11, 2018
royal triumphalism
utterly misses the insurrectionary tone implied by the list of and he shall be called
Serenata Notturna - Mozart - Capella Istropolitania, Wolfgang Sobotka
a certain amount of bombast must be necessary to wake them up
graciousness propped on sturdy stilts
playful sequence of tempi in the final
Aria "A un dotter della mia sorte" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), William Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]
the expression is always clearly drawn
the comic stance allows anything to get thrown into the stewpot
I'll Be Rested - Roosevelt Graves and Brother [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]
great recorded sound of tambourine for 1926
You Ain't Nothing But A Hound Dog - Elvis Presley [from First Live Recordings]
drumbreak biddabiddabiddabiddabidda
stops
returns in stripper tempo
twice
thrice
shrieks are loving it
lots of airspace
you could walk around in there
an actual stage sized sound
Summertime - Billy Stewart [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
extra syllables pile in through the rhythm section and Billy offers no resistance
ends with a lullaby holler
Pacific High Studio Mantras - Alan Ginsberg [from Holy Soul Jelly Roll]
to have been Ginsberg
having become Ginsberg
required playing Ginsberg
as Ginsberg
at all moments
The Quiet One - The Who [from Face Dances]
something in the engineering is off
heavy on the bass strangely thin everything else
they play energetically but some edge of it is blunted
Banned Rehearsal 80 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]
a session of Sudden Songs: This Time of Night (Kosály-Meyer), Hey Hey Hey (Eisenbrey) - robust guitar tunin' pretty lick - I Believe I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee Sir (Kosály-Meyer) - then playing with self narration of intention as subjunctive suggestions taunt - also the string's a might loose - mighty stirrin' sound though - This Here Tunin' Mechanism's All Busted (Eisenbrey), I Was Sittin' In The Car (Kosály-Meyer) - thoughts about strummy type rhythms and plucks 3 clear sounds steadying each other - Hollywood, here I come! - If I Were To Learn (Kosály-Meyer) - the reason BR never resolved in a rock & roll band or jazz band or ought other genre band that plays songs is because when we started to put together songs seriously, that is right away, we already had each one down in all its perfection of momenthood. There was nowhere further to go to resolve. Can't get better than perfect. Wild Thing (a cover of course), Amazing Grace to a Louie Louie beat (we had some discussion the other night about the difference between a cover and a performance - theory: one covers a recording, one performs a chart), Tell Me Lord (Eisenbrey), If You Find an Alligator In Your Bed Tonight (Kosály-Meyer), I Got Dust In My Nose (Meyer) - that is, Karen before we got hitched. This string's beginnin' to peel a bit here.
August 12, 2018
short feet face each other
across a break
a list of them with
bits that repeat
(intro and outro thingies are wrong)
Sonata in D Major - Bocherini - Philharmonia Virtuosi
violin and cello duetting demonstrating cooperation to demonstrate how pleasant a thing it is
domestic intimate for family public
not every household could afford Haydn so there was a market for fully realized home sized music
Sunshine Music - Love Princess (Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K-M [May 2006])
some question as to whether the personnel is listed correctly in my index
in which: the young'n age 6 is given an electric guitar to strum
we should get
a taiko drum
refrain boomboom boomboom boomboom BASH!
alto horn and trombone on one set of lips
Monday Boy - Shaprece [from Scatterbrain]
expensive sounding sound
haute couture construction
music as a kind of clothing self presentation
then there is another song after the song
Banned Rehearsal 909 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 2016]
we do the things that make the sounds
not expensive sounding at all
not expensive but occasionally puzzling in the sense of how are we making that sound?
what are we doing as we do those things that make those sounds?
drumming cooperative
low piano crossroads ahead
train whistle sucked into synthesizer
August 15, 2018
Hallelujah Chorus - Handel - Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Richard Condi, cond. [from Handel's Greatest Hits]
excessively beat-y
as a break from beating us over the head
more beating us over the head
dreary lackluster
he could churn out reams of this
statement answer
statement non seq
answer
though the moment between statement and non is lively
all about phrase balance
fails to get anywhere in the operatic way he can have
in short the balance between balanced and unbalanced is skewed too heavily toward the balanced
but overnight I had second thoughts
long static stretches of balanced thinking
come in anywhere leave any time
rewards attention without drama
very like high-toned background music
ambient music of another time long past
August 16, 2018
Act I Finale "Fredda ed immobile" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), William Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]
rolled R's answered by vocal rrrrruns
go!
farce allows a wide range of affectual granularity
effective piccolo use
triangle glitter to close
Le Vieux Soulard et sa Femme - Blind Lemon Jefferson [from Anthology of American Folk Music]
strumbox and squeezebox
free reeds now!
You'll Wonder Where the Yellow Went - The Jumpin' Jacks [a Rescued Record]
mustard in your chili pie
crazy man slang as many as can be got
like patter, man
Telemusik - Karlheinz Stockhausen
a poly-layered list
everything in its order
a study or chamber version of Hymnen
directionality metaphorized into leftrightness
doesn't come across as all that subtle in the end
though: in '66 stereo play was relatively a new face
tuple channels
the play of filters and presence is better
music for loudspeakers
In Session at the Tintinabulary
August 13, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 964 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt
Once again on the porch, features a new ukelele and an old autoharp
..... more....... cowbell..... maybe?
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