Twelve Songs by Charles Ives
Theo Bleckmann and Kneebody

Theo Bleckmann could sing me to sleep anytime he likes, even if he doesn’t want to snuggle.  The German-born, New York-based singer and composer has got a warm and engaging voice and oodles of good taste and insight.  He’s given an imaginative yet intimate treatment to songs of Charles Ives in a new disc with the experimental quintet Kneebody. The CD on Winter & Winter is up for a Grammy Award this weekend in the classical category Best Crossover Album.

Tho Theo can do all kinds of wild and experimental things with his voice (why else would he be a regular collaborator with Meredith Monk?), he delivers the Ives tunes with straight ahead clarity.  It’s in the far-flung accompaniments that the disc really diverges into realms that Ives might never have imagined and yet might also appreciate.  Kneebody improvises around the original accompaniments and there are extended preludes and codas to some of the songs. In addition to Kneebody’s core instrumentation of saxophone, trumpet, piano and percussion, they throw in all kinds of unexpected sounds, electronic and otherwise.  Theo also contributes electronics into the mix.

The collection focuses on some of Ives’ lesser known songs. It opens with the tender “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” and gets gently rambunctious in “The Cage” and reaches its jazzy peak in “The New River.” Two Ives lieder are included, perhaps in homage to Theo’s roots as well as something for the Munich label’s home audience.  “Feldeinsamkeit” (In Summer Fields) is given a nightclub feel by brushes on a snare drum and in “Weil’ Auf Mir” (Eyes So Dark) the instrumental backdrop features restrained feedback from an electric guitar.

I’m always a sucker for a good hymn tune and “Serenity” (“Oh Sabbath rest of Galilee…) and “At The River” (“Shall we gather…”) are both set in a radiant haze of electronics.  During a recent cruise, my partner Richard and I enjoyed listening to “At The River” as we sat on the deck of the ship. Yes, it was the Caribbean we were looking at, not a river. But it’s still water that we were zoning out to and the song fit in nicely.  Another water-treatment comes in “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” which includes undulating crescendos from Ben Wendel’s saxophone.

The disc concludes with “Waltz” (an excerpt of Ives’ original text: Little Annie Rooney,/ (now Mrs. Mooney,) / Was as gay as birds in May, / s’her Wedding Day). As with most of the disc, the band jams with spirit but the spotlight remains on Theo.

What are you working on these days?
I have a new album “Someone Will Take Care of Me” coming out in the spring, so a lot of time lately has been devoted to recording-studio work. I’m also just starting to work on an opera — or something like an opera — with the ensemble Newspeak, novelist Andrew Sean Greer, and stage director Emma Griffin.  I’m not yet allowed to say what it’s based on, but religious delusion and schizophrenia play significant roles.  Also, Cornelius Dufallo (aka Neil) and I are starting a project performing songs for voice and violin with digital looping.  This might also include the Bliptronic 5000 that my brother just gave me for Christmas.

Do you keep up with technology?  What tools work for you and which ones have you found to be overrated?
I do keep up with it, especially now that I have my Bliptronic 5000.  I’m on Twitter and Facebook and I design and maintain my own website.  I also blogged about my last big piece, “Thirteen Near-Death Experiences,” while I was composing it.  I wouldn’t necessarily single out any technology as “overrated,” but I would say that the internet favors informational knowledge over procedural knowledge and is therefore potentially threatening to critical thinking.  As for music, I think many creative musicians make the mistake of using technology to generate ideas when they should be using ideas to generate technology.

Are you single or coupled?
I’m in a nine-year relationship with Yvan Greenberg, who is the director of Laboratory Theater and also a graphic designer.

Do you give PDAs? (public displays of affection)
Absolutely, with anyone and everyone who will accept them.

Are most of your friends from the music world or not?
Many of my friends are creative musicians — composers, songwriters, bandmembers.  I’m not friends with too many classical performing musicians.  They somehow always seem put-upon.

How does your sexuality and general background play out in your creativity?
I think growing up gay in a conservative Texas town and a religious family has taught me a lot about empathy, a theme that I almost always incorporate in my songs.  I believe our ability to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes is directly connected to our ability to think and act creatively in the world.

What’s the gayest musical thing you’ve ever done?
I wrote a custom-made love song for a gay couple from Cincinnati, Paul and Jack, based on interviews with them.  It’s called “The Men We Used to Be” and it’s on my album “Other People’s Love Songs.”

Was coming out tough or a pleasure?  Sudden or gradual?
Coming out was tough and gradual.  It didn’t really happen until I was 19 years old.  I had internalized a lot of the so-called “Christian” morals that had been taught to me as a child in South Texas.  I thought maybe I was ill and could be cured.  I moved away from Texas to attend Interlochen Arts Academy, where there were (as I hoped there would be) out and proud gay people.  Believe me, at that time there were no out and proud gay people in South Texas, and this was before the internet worked well enough to be a resource for me!  Unfortunately, my first gay relationship was with a Catholic boy who promptly switched sides and blamed me for trying to turn him gay and called me an agent of the Devil.

Fortunately, my parents have come a long way in the last ten years.  I have my very supportive (straight and recently married) brother, Aaron, to thank for that.  I’m not sure about the rest of my family, and I’m not inclined to bring up the subject with them.  I’ve also basically left behind most, if not all, of my friends from growing up in South Texas, although they might be more accepting now.  Only Facebook will tell.

Photo credits:
With flowers: Samatha West
Album cover: Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler of New Catalogue.
In performance (with Kathleen Spove): Jim Baldassare.

“It is now ‘okay’ to come out as gay or lesbian,” writes Coulombe, in a statement about how the project was conceived. “But what about bisexuals, intersexed or transgendered folks, queers or members of the BDSM community?  (This) is a moment to assess what coming out means almost 40 years after Stonewall, to give some historic perspective to those far younger…  We have a perspective not shared by many, and bringing together artistic work around that perspective — done with an eye toward who we have become — seems highly beneficial.”

A review of the DVD will be forthcoming in this space.

I caught a screening of “Wild Combination” on November 11 as part of the quirky little iEAR series at RPI, here in Troy. The filmmaker Matt Wolf was on hand and took a few questions.  During his final comments he revealed that he’s currently making a documentary about Jerome Robbins who he’s not liking (news flash: nobody did). But Wolf says that he probably would have liked Arthur Russell, even if they might not have been close friends.  Based on Wolf’s beautiful film, I feel much the same way and am also reminded of how tricky it is be very friendly with an artist when you don’t grove to his work.

Russell died of AIDS in 1992 at age 40.  As with so many other gay men of his generation who passed on way before their time, it’s hard to know what more he might have accomplished and whether he’d ultimately find a mature musical voice. Judging from this distant vantage point, Russell’s challenge was to bring together his disparate interests in folk music, the avant garde and disco.

Wolf’s film is a loving tribute that made me root for Arthur and be touched by the tragedy of his life and the still palpable grief of those loved ones left behind, namely his parents and his partner Tom Lee.  It’s based primarily on archival footage and Wolf said that every scrap of film that exists of Russell is in the movie. Admirable work, for sure.  We see Russell singing as he plays cello, also playing guitar and generally hanging out at venues like The Kitchen and Experimental Intermedia.  There’s footage of Ginsberg speaking at Russell’s memorial, and the dozen or so talking heads who were interviewed include Philip Glass. There’s also plenty of colorful original footage and enough keen editing to show the hand of a smart and promising filmmaker.

What’s not present is much of an understanding of the gay experience. The memories of Arthur’s slightly trouble childhood in Iowa — being too smart, picked on at school, etc. — are set up to suggest the youthful presence of a great artistic persona. But what it really sounded like was just another fag child suffering on the playground.  Painful but very familiar.  Wolf also includes two comments from interviewees that simply aren’t believable.  There’s Arthur’s mother saying she did a double take when she heard, second hand, that her son was gay. As if every mother doesn’t always have more than an inkling.  And then Arthur’s companion tells of how he spotted (cruised) Arthur three times in the East Village before finally approaching him. But then he adds something like, “whether or not we might both be gay never crossed my mind.” Hello?  You were chasing him around your neighborhood hoping for what? An evening of watching the Yankees.

Anyway.

After setting up his subject as a mighty innovator and iconoclast for the first two-thirds or so of the 71 minute film, Wolf does let his interviewees talk about Russell’s difficult personality (he could lead a band, but not be a member of one) and his jealousy and paranoia (at one point he was convinced the Rolling Stones were stealing his ideas).  Besides the friendship with Glass and Ginsberg (who admits to a crush), there’s documentation of two brief collaborations of interest:  he played with the Talking Heads a few times and he wrote music for a Robert Wilson creation, “Medea,” though Wilson pulled Russell’s music after only one performance.

“Wild Combination” (the title comes from a Russell song, by the way) also puts forth the facts of Russell’s death from AIDS with admirable clarity and matter of factness. I liked how one friend said that Arthur was always rather spacey and dissasociative and that AIDS ultimately made him more so.  And my eyes got moist when Russell’s dad recalls a brief final conversation with his son in the hospital (“You’re a good sport.” “Really?” “Yeah, really.”)

The recent revival  – or new but long overdue? –  in Russell’s music serves as a kind of coda to the film. This section runs a little long, but is still heartening.  Russell was a finicky dabbler and made numerous takes, edits and mixes of his music, so there’s thousands of tapes that might be fodder for still more releases to come.

Hearing his mumbly but soulful voice, jumping between registers and heavily laden with echo, I thought of Antony and the Johnsons.  Bridging avant garde and disco, or serious and pop (or whatever the latest terms are) is a never ending effort and apparently younger generations are seeing something prophetic in Arthur Russell.  If not for AIDS, he might have been right there with them.

Her journey began in August at the river’s headwaters in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. With a car, a kayak, and a bike, plus the company of various fellow travelers (friends who sign on for a few days or weeks at a time), Beglarian is following the water’s southern flow and getting to know the sights and sounds of the river and the land, the cities and towns and their people.

“I am interested in how our relationship to the nature, geography, and ecology of the river is manifested in music, literature, and all the arts. Just as the Mississippi River is one of the defining natural features of the North American continent, so it has also been one of the defining features in the development of American culture, and of music in particular,” wrote Beglarian, 51, in a grant proposal last spring.  Some money from a Minnesota foundation came through in July and was the impetus to set sail, so to speak.

Eve at Lover's Leap in Hannibal, Missouri.

Beglarian expects to make it to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the year, then spend January through March at an arts colony in California. While there, she’ll decompress and see what her own creative instincts want to say about the experience. She’ll hit the water and the roads again in spring 2010 and retrace her route northward, from Louisiana to Minnesota.

Beglarian is recording sounds along the way, which will be fodder for future musical creations.  And she’s blogging extensively at www.evbvd.com/riverblog.

So far her entries are no sublime paean to nature.  She talks a lot about logistical hassles.  For example, her kayak floated away one night and more than once her bike has nearly been stole.

Another running theme is the relationship between the river and industry, old and new.  Here’s an excerpt about biking past a rock quarry near Davenport, Iowa:

“The road was muddy with accidental cement made from the combination of limestone dust and the morning’s rain. It coated the underside of my bike, my legs, the tires… I get to thinking how everything has its price. You want cement, you have to tear holes in the bluffs to get limestone… You want to use the Mississippi to move goods, you have to constantly dredge a nine-foot channel and build dams and locks… I realize that even my relatively green, relatively low-impact life is unthinkable without cement plants and dams and brutal quarries hidden in out-of-the-way places.”

While she did drop in on a Baptist church one Sunday morning in Fort Madison Iowa, Beglarian mostly encounters people of similar political leanings.

“In nearly two months of traveling, I have yet to meet anyone who even watches TV, let alone supports the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or doesn’t want to reform health care in this country. I’m out here in the heartland of America, but I am fully aware that I’m not in fact meeting an authentic cross-section of Americans. Is that because I’m biking and kayaking, so generally meeting people who exercise, which skews against TV watchers? Is it because I’m so obviously a scary artsy-dykey type that only NPR-listening newspaper-reading locavores will even talk to me?! Or is the country so divided that Red Staters and Blue Staters are simply invisible to one another, living parallel but completely separate lives in the same places? I really wonder about this.”

Another question is where Beglarian’s musical path will lead after her river journey concludes.  As a composer, she’s a prolific but has never been easy to pin down stylistically, though an adept hand with technology shows up regularly in her pieces.

Beglarian’s most recent CD release is a collaborative theater work, “Electric Ordo Virtutum,” which was created and performed with three other women composers at Lincoln Center about ten years ago.  With the collective name Hildegurls, they created a post-modern tribute to Hildegard of Bengin, the medieval abbess and composer.  Beglarian sings throughout the piece but her contribution as a composer is Act III. It’s a kind of dark night of the soul. A woman’s voice struggles to maintain a wondering chant tune as it’s bombarded with a barrage of electronics that bring to mind a sonic representation of the Transformers.

A more wide ranging and pleasant collection of Beglarian’s own music is “Tell the Birds,” released on New World Records three years ago.  It includes a couple of perky chamber works, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and “FlamingO,” and a ravishing and seamless duet for pipe organ and electronics, “Wonder Counselor.”

For many years Beglarian was a producer of audio books and the spoken word plays a part in several pieces on “Tell the Birds.” British actor Roger Rees narrates the ecstatic, microcosmic explosions and mutations in “Creating the World.”  And Beglarian herself narrates “Landscaping for Privacy,” a monologue to one’s lover as they drive out of the city and into the quasi-pastoral settings of suburbia.  The gently drumming music and sense of wonder in the narration combine beautifully and speak well of Beglarian’s capacity for exploration and discovery – traits she’s calling in for sustained periods in her Mississippi voyage.

The words “sound” and “art” taken together make a pretty good definition for music itself, but “sound art,” as a composite term, actually refers to a particular strain of creativity. Rather than the stringing together of notes on a printed score, as in traditional musical composition, sound art is more the shaping of sonic elements, usually with very high-tech tools or in some rather low-tech primitive manner. It’s something like sculpture made for the ears rather than the eyes. Lesbian composer Annea Lockwood is one of its most eloquent practitioners.

Lockwood’s signature work is probably “A Sound Map of the Hudson River.” Twenty years ago she took a journey starting at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the upper Adirondacks all the way down to Staten Island where the Hudson meets the Atlantic. Her companion along the way was a tape recorder. But where Bartok went into the mountains of Hungary, recorded the peasants singing and used the melodic material as points of departure for wholly new compositions, Lockwood used the actual recordings of the churning, gurgling, and flowing waters of the Hudson to form a 70-minute soundscape. Released in 1989 by Lovely Music, the CD of “Sound Map of the Hudson River” has its tracking points laid out on a small map. Track 12, for instance, is the sound of the river at Garrison. After six or so minutes it flows seamlessly into the sound of the marsh at Iona Island.

A native of New Zealand, Lockwood, who turns 70 this year, has long lived at Crompond, New York near Peekskill. Her companion is the electronic music composer Ruth Anderson, 80. The pair met in 1973 when Pauline Oliveros suggested Lockwood as a sabbatical replacement for Anderson, who was then on the faculty of Hunter College in Manhattan. In 1982 Lockwood joined the faculty of Vassar College, where she is now a professor emeritus.

A few years ago Lockwood returned to the idea of a sound map and went to Europe, digital tools in hand, to record another illustrious channel. “A Sound Map of the Danube” has just been released on Lovely Music and at 167-minutes in length (spread over three CDs), it may be Lockwood’s largest and most ambitious undertaking to date. Certainly the piece bares no resemblance to Johann Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz,” but it’s also quiet different from Lockwood’s tribute to the Hudson.

It’s a tacky comparison, but “Sound Map of the Hudson” has taken on some resemblance to the meditative environmental New Age discs, popular of late.  That’s because it’s almost purely the sound water, beautifully mixed, with only an occasional distant strain of a passing train or some migrating birds.  (If only the Hudson itself was so clean.)

In her cartography of the Danube, Lockwood focused not just on the sound of the water, which she recorded at the shores and under the surface, but she also interviewed people who inhabit its banks.  Europe’s second longest river, the Danube stretches 1,785 miles and passes through Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, all of which Lockwood visited over the span of three years.

Part of the mix in this new sound map are the voices of 13 people – fishermen, boat makers, inn keepers, artists, merchants and the like  who speak in their native tongues about their relationship to the river. Along with a foldout color map, the beautiful CD packaging includes translations of the folks’ remarks, which are amusing and insightful. Yet the reading is superfluous, since the emphasis is on the sonic.

Lockwood’s inclusion of the voices, foreign and abstract yet so thick with knowing accents and inflections, adds much to her focus on the sound of the Danube. Also part of the mix are many other life forms, birds and insects mainly. Though there’s no indication of the time of day of the various field recordings, the whole thing has a nocturnal, dreamlike feeling that’s captivating and engaging. Dipping into the recording at any point, one is easily swept along its channels, like a raft on a current.