The first of a series of “Shop Talks” from on the road about poetry and music and music and poetry.
Here are the two pages by David Meltzer from Ann Charter’s book
Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? (Penguin)
(click each page separately to enlarge)
Dear Mike, Here are some thoughts on collaboration for “Shop Talk”.
Collaborations between poets and composers, conductors and musicians can evolve in several ways, of course. And while each route is of interest, depending on the performance, I have tended to work in a dramatic and theatrical context with ensembles, large and small. Since the early 1980s I have also worked mostly with one composer-conductor, Butch Morris, whose “Conduction” involves the rigor of interpretation and the freedom of improvisation; the conductor creating with his ensemble a composition in real time, with or without written music via conducting gestures that the ensemble learns in workshop or rehearsal. Yes, I have read with Mr. Morris at the helm of Conduction ensembles — and it is something to read with 8 or 18 or 20 plus musicians — but, as drama and theater compel me, I prefer using actors or a chorus of vocalist/readers, which generally eschews singing for text interpretation.
In drama and theater, of course, I give my language, the language I create and that creates me, over to others, trained in their art. This “giving over” is important for me, as I wish for others to inhabit and express the sensibility of the text I write for them, both in space and time.
With Modette, our grand music theater work — others would use the word “opera” but that is too constraining here — there is a cast, a choreography, a set, a story and a large ensemble. Certainly we have performed Modette in different ways, for example, with a pianist and two actors, or a pianist, one actor and a vocalist, but it remains a large piece in two acts and requires a stage, definitive rehearsal periods, technical support and so on. That it has sustained in performance through several decades is amazing to me, but there it is. In one form or another, it lives.
With the Chorus of Poets, which I worked with three times in 2009, each with an octet or nontet of strings, “collaboration” takes on another meaning. For here, I was drawn into the Conduction by having to write specifically for it. Not only did I give to the chorus a new text, Erotic Eulogy, last seen in June at the Visions Festival in NY, but I wrote, again, for the total performance. This meant not only “giving over” the text to the chorus but “giving over” the text to Mr. Morris, which he used as an element of the total ensemble: musicians and chorus, each conducted within the overarching Conduction. Construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning and music occur here by the moment and as various movements within the performance. It is an exceptional field of play that engages me more than ever. – Allan Graubard
from Jim Feast:
Dear Riders on the Rock Pile coach,
I guess I’m the opposite of an ideal blogger responder since I saw this discussion in a moving van a week ago and had to mull it over a bit as well as free associate. What struck me most forcefully was Michael’s comment on who some people might think it was a waste of time combining poetry and music. Such a person would rather just sit home with a book, reading unaccompanied by sound.
Then, in another posting, David talks about the cookie cutter sameness of so much of the small town landscape, overpopulated with franchise stores.
This made me think the following. There’s a notorious incident in Adorno’s life in which he was commissioned, when he was living in New York, by NBC or another radio station to study their classical music broadcasts. He concluded these broadcasts desensitivized listeners and made them incapable of appreciating music.
What’s the bearing. The hidden point Michael is voicing (I believe) is that he fears the general run of people may have been so programmed by mass media to look down on poetry and disassociate it from joyful music that they may not be able to open their ears to the exceptional power, as attested to the videos of the LA concert just posted, this type of collaboration represents. However, judging by the reaction so far, his fears are unfounded and people have not been desenstized in the way the mass media would like. Rock Pile thus brings people back to an unmediated form of joyful listening.”
JIm
Michael,
I am trying to register and enter the utube. Until then, here is my response to the shop talk between David and you:
Talking about “collaboration” we must be clear about what we are talking about. There are certain forms in which music and words are perfectly integrated, for instance, in a Bob Dylan song or better quality rap music or blues. In these instances, words and music can not be conceived independent from each other. That’s I think what David is talking about when he refers to Amiri Baraka or Jane Cortez. Baraka connects his poetry directly to the blues form. Jane’s work also derives from an oratorical tradition which has its roots in churches where music and prayer combine.
When we talk about “collaboration and music” in this case, what are we really talking about? There is no doubt a pretense of something “new” and “experimental” which, I think rightly, Mike you find finally “boring” and David calls a “fad.” Are we talking about a collaboration which is utterly secular -or “religious” in the sense that the “avant-garde” has become the religion of the few- or something has has pre-existence as poetry before music is “grafted” on it as something “extra” or “alien” or as mood music, as in a movie, to sustain the action. I do not believe in that kind of collaboration at all, which I think takes away from both in its arty mannerisms.
Mike, as you say, our language often uses the work “music” to describe poetry; but here again, what we mean by it? If it means “beautiful sounds,” I am utterly against it also, workfare may be the death knell of poetry than anything else. Of course, a piece of poetry me be like music structurally; in other words, it is contracted like a piece of music, different movements, different themes, etc. That is totally true, but in no way does it constitute a collaboration. It also has to be created, theoretically at least, by one person.
I can see collaboration between words and music in one sense only: if they exist within a work in agonistic relation to each other, in conflict or in dialect, pointing to a dialectic essence, dialectic movement. In that way can they be said to collaborate – a synthesis out of a dialectic relation. I think such relation -vital, dynamic- may have myriad, infinite possibilities.
Ciao,
Murat
Will definitely upload more video of the landscape! We’re driving up to Santa Fe today for a little party and will give you footage of Torquoise Trail.
Harris, I am not sure what you mean by this. Lv. Michael
get your tech guys to work on the “reCAPTCHA response stuff to make it easier please
Thanks
Rock on!
Harris
Fun riding around Albuquerque with you guys. Yes It Oughtta be possible.\n
Great camera work, digitization Terri
Cool to be in touch with you all this way
Would have liked to have seen more of I-25
As far as analyzing the thing, well, well done David. From my own experience doing poetry with Jazz well
there’s obviously gotta be hyperawareness among/between musicians and the poet(s) everyone has got to be listening and picking up on the modulations, doubly challenging because of the modulations of the words and of course if you are sticking strictly to a text, well that will limit you POET, so maybe you have to improvise and well in fact definitely might want to improvise and is it possible, well of course it is possible and you guys will expand he possible as you make the turns onto and off of the interstates.
Please send more video and please let this lonesome traveler see what is out those windows as you are discussing your adventures and theories
Thanks
Rock on!
Harris
Within the context of a humorous aside, I see that your camera person is the local Al B. Quirky. I thought I recognized the shaky handiwork. Also, brilliant idea to fill the van with hot air, thereby making the vehicle lighter and reducing the road friction and saving on gas. Both economical and “green.”