Forgery League

Salon 21 is a wide-ranging series of informal talks by composers and musicians put on by new music org Soundstreams. Last night we heard an appreciation of the music of Arvo Pärt by composer, conductor and Laurier professor Glenn Buhr. Buhr’s enthusiasm made for an engaging introduction to the music, providing lots for a musicology geek like me to enjoy without getting too technical.

One particular aspect that interested me was Pärt’s use of process, following simple, deterministic procedures to generate stirring music from extremely limited material. It’s similar in some senses to Steve Reich‘s phase pieces, or Brian Eno‘s loop-based ambient works, but there are big differences.

Reich’s phase music uses short loops, whether that’s physical loops of recording tape, percussion or piano figures that are simply repeat throughout the piece. These fall in and out of phase with each other, shifting from unison to a subtle echo to cacophony to tightly interlocking patterns, and finally come back into phase again, bringing the piece back to where it began.

Eno’s ambient pieces, such as Music For Airports, were inspired by Reich’s work, but use loops of uneven length that will practically never repeat. Eno’s self-stated goal was to create pieces that were effectively infinite, something he was able to explore further once computer music technology allowed it—he coined the term “generative music” to describe it. It comes as no surprise, really, that Eno’s designing the chimes to be sounded by the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now.

But where Reich’s pieces are cyclic and Eno’s aspire to being infinite, Arvo Pärt’s music is more fatalistic. We heard a recording of his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which uses as its basic material a descending A-minor scale, with violins moving fastest and lower strings progressively more slowly, but all moving toward the tonic—their ultimate destination. The whole piece is relentless in its finality, moving inexorably downward until at last the high strings linger on their notes, waiting for the basses to catch up, and the long final chords boil with a kind of dread—fitting for a meditation on death.

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir close out their North American tour with a stop in Toronto tomorrow night, but sadly, I won’t be there. My consolation: we’ll be in the studio mixing the new Flickershow CD!

Sean and I are moving into a new place in Leslieville in less than a week, and we’re well into the exhausting task of tossing things we no longer need (the new house is rather smaller than the old) and boxing up everything else. This time around, I finally bit the bullet and got rid of all my CDs and vinyl, except for discs by friends’ bands and the occasional rarity. Since I listen to everything on my computer or iPod these days, my collection had been sitting in boxes in the basement for a couple of years already.

I’d been avoiding the issue for a long time, but today we had a truck rented to do a Goodwill run, and I made the decision to let them all go, pretty much on the spur of the moment. It was actually the first time I’ve been in a CD store in years, and aside from the occasional gift, I don’t imagine I’ll have any cause to do so again. I felt more than a little awkward walking in there with all my boxes — while I was giving them a lot of good stuff (several hundred dollars’ worth, in fact), I was essentially renouncing their services as well.

Aside: my first musical purchase, to my memory, bought at a little shopping mall music store: a cassette of 1000 Airplanes on the Roof by Philip Glass (having been mesmerized by a clip of Koyaanisqatsi on TV).

I don’t remember what the first vinyl I bought was. My mother and I used to park at Yorkdale and ride the subway down to Osgoode to shop at the book and music shops along Queen West, and I picked up lots of Eno, Tomita and Jean-Michel Jarre at Driftwood Music.

First CDs: Electric Cafe by Kraftwerk, The Shutov Assembly by Brian Eno and a 4-track sampler from Hi-Tech/No Crime, an album of YMO remixes by contemporary (ca. 1991) UK electronic acts. The last CD I bought for myself was Komeda’s Kokomemedada.

The hardest part: letting go of all the vinyl box sets of classics Sean’s late father collected and treasured, which we’d had for ages but never played. In the truck, we agreed we’ll have to download some of his dad’s favorites — he was fond of the Russians, especially Shostakovich, and loved opera too. Perhaps something to listen to as we unpack and settle in.