Nick Millevoi - Streets of Philadelphia

By Scott Scholz

In the decades before Tiny Mix Tapes (both the recently-retired website and actual tiny mix tapes), and even further back into the mists of time, just before phonographs and radios found their way into most households, the center of household entertainment often was a piano. When new tunes came out, folks dusted off those keys and played ‘em for themselves right out of the freshly-minted sheet music. Of course, outside of the classical world (or occasionally jazz), very little music is published first nowadays to paper, save for the Beck Song Reader book project in 2012.

Philly-based guitarist Nick Millevoi is having none of that business. He’s the sort of fellow who has already played on 20-ish records and led his own killer jazz-inflected instrumental rock bands like the Desertion Trio and Many Arms. When the inspiration hit to write a series of songs that didn’t lend themselves neatly to his working bands, he gathered them into their own songbook. As you might expect based on the book’s title, “Streets of Philadelphia” contains a set of 25 short instrumental pieces written to celebrate the urban pathways around the City of Brotherly Love. He assembled them into an edition of 100 handcrafted, risograph-printed books that was published last September, so that you too can let your fingers do some walking on these fabled streets.

As a sheet music-reading person who happens to travel by bicycle, I felt connected to these pieces as soon as I started working through the book. I found myself looking up the streets associated with these pieces on Google Maps, putting myself in Street View, and imagining myself biking on them myself as I considered the music. Many are gentler, lower-traffic residential streets I’d look for as a cyclist to avoid the vehicular congestion (like Albion), or short little jogs of a block or two that save some trouble where the urban grid falls a little out of symmetry (like Clay or Mower). The songs capture the sounds and rhythms of moving around a city by bike, with lots of odd rhythmic cells huddled together as though you’re having to adjust your speed, chromaticism that feels like sneaking between cars or down alleys, and dissonant intervals that remind me of traffic noise and car horns. Millevoi intended the street names in the songbook to be a more general celebration of Philly streets past and present, and included some streets that no longer exist, like Point No Point. However, it’s notable that he’s a bike traveler as well, and a cycling pace and consideration of one’s surroundings flows naturally in these pieces. 

Because the songs are written for open instrumentation, you can play them on any instrument of your choice as solo pieces, or get a few friends together and whip up an arrangement or two. Are they “jazz” or “classical” or what? That all depends on how you decide to play them! They’re very flexible, like one needs to be maneuvering the Streets of Philadelphia. But just in case your music-playing abilities slow down when there’s a piece of sheet music in front of you, Millevoi has assembled a cast of first-rate Philly musicians who have realized a selection of ten tunes from the songbook, and the digital album drops on December 3rd at Nick’s Bandcamp:

Nick’s ensemble for Streets features himself on guitar, Veronica MJ on viola, Tom Kraines on cello, Dan Blacksberg on trombone, and Anthony Di Bartolo on marimba and percussion. Two pieces utilize the whole ensemble, while others feature solos, duets and trios broken out from the main quintet. The open-orchestration nature of these charts allows for lots of interpretive latitude, and the ensemble turned out a refreshingly diverse set of recordings, made in January of this year just before everything turned into lockdowns and social distancing. A few of my favorites from this set:

Gaskill: this is such a playful tune! You can feel a Beefheart influence on the songbook hiding in the shadows on this street. The trombone/marimba unisons are stellar, with perfectly matching phrasing. Di Bartolo deftly switches from marimba to percussion at the perfect moments to drive this tune forward. This is one of the full-ensemble takes, though the strings lay back to let the trombone and marimba drive the piece hardest. Everyone digs in hard on the last run through the form.

Markoe: A string trio arrangement of sorts, the theme is laid out mostly in octaves between viola and cello, with Millevoi adding ethereal accompaniment. The melody has a bit of an early 2nd Viennese School vibe on paper, and it takes on a cinematic quality in this recording.

Plover: This is one of the more playful tunes in the songbook, switching between a pointillistic melody and carnival music rhythms. Millevoi steps out for some warped lead work on this track, taking things pretty far out while the orchestral strings hold down an ostinato figure to keep things on the road. Then Blackberg takes a short turn. There’s an album’s worth of ideas in this song alone, and you can really hear how much fun everyone has with the piece.

Mower: This tune reminded me a little of if Horse Lords tried to write a Zappa tune when I first read through the sheet music, and this arrangement definitely carries that vibe to a fun place, with its stuttering major 7ths occasionally coalescing into bits of rock and roll dirtiness, but just as often soaring along with that kind of Vareseian all-tension, no-release vibe. This is probably my favorite recording in this set. While there’s not the space for improvisation that some of these arrangements have, it functions as a brilliantly balanced, powerful composition. Short street, incredible tune!

Silver: Tom Kraines closes out the album with a tender solo cello interpretation of “Silver.” While it’s a short take that adheres to the printed page, he brings out a gentle, undulating feel in the piece that I hadn’t picked up on looking through the sheet music initially. 

And that’s the beauty of this project: you can simply enjoy these great recorded takes on selections from the sheet music, but if you’re a musician yourself, you can also use them as inspiration. The songbook is full of memorable ideas, but as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of flexibility built into these tunes. Why not take a ride on the Streets of Philadelphia yourself? A .pdf of the songbook is included with purchase of the digital album, and you also can still order a beautiful hard copy of the songbook. The book was designed and printed in Philly by Erik Ruin. It features some fun color renderings of the charts in blues and reds and greens--a nice personal touch that doesn’t affect readability. You can find it on the Nick Millevoi Bandcamp page, where it can then be delivered to a street wherever you are. 

(And remember, Friday is "Bandcamp Day," where Bandcamp waives their fees so that artists can keep making it through the pandemic since performances are mostly halted around the world, so it's the perfect day to support the artist.)

Books on music: the Source Anthology

I wasn't planning for so many book reviews in a row, but last week I learned that there is a newly-published anthology of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, which was a short-lived publication in the late 60s/early 70s that has reached legendary status among New Music devotees.  I got my copy in the mail yesterday, and since I'm already intimately familiar with the original print run, I'm compelled to provide an online review that mentions an important detail left out of all of the other online mentions of this new book.

The new atop the old.

Let's start with the positive: if you're a fan of avant-garde music from the 60s to the present, a music student, a music librarian, or a composer yourself, this book is beyond essential.  You should find a copy immediately and read it cover to cover at first opportunity.  This anthology presents interviews, profiles, discussions, images, and examples of graphic notation and text scores representing the wide range of new music efforts from the 60s and 70s.  Most of this material is unavailable anywhere else, and all of it is truly potent work that has lost no relevance in its 35+ years of hiding in rare book collections.  If anything, these resources emerge from the shadows of obscurity as essentially contemporary work.  It's remarkable how fresh this stuff remains.  Present-day efforts in minimalism, electroacoustic music, free improvisation, process composition, brutal prog, avant-garde concert music and the like seem at times to be practically regressive compared to the stuff one finds in Source.  It's as though the materials in the original periodicals were internalized and used among the small number of people who came into contact with the tiny original print run, while for others they've become a tragic secret of almost mythological importance to those who care about these kinds of music.  Or as Douglas Kahn puts it in the anthology's preface, issues of Source "have moved from limited circulation to even more limited circulation, all the while becoming increasingly relevant to contemporary activities, in musical and artistic practice and in historical study by students, teachers and scholars of the period."

But let us address that detail I have yet to see in other reviews or promotional material for the book, because I think it's extremely important: this anthology doesn't reprint the scores.  While I think the anthology remains critically important as a document of at least some Source content, this deeply undermines the value of this project in my opinion.  The introduction explains that this was an economic decision: the original publications were essentially handmade, large-format affairs that would be prohibitively expensive to reproduce given the anticipated demand.  Douglas Kahn states the case in the preface like this: "It made no sense to replace one collector's item with another."

Personally, I find this terribly disappointing.  While I can sympathize with the effort/money concerns that would surely make full or almost-full reprints very expensive, I think there is a market for more comprehensive reissues.  More importantly, I believe there is a great need for the scores.  Looking through original issues of the publication, it's clear that publishing scores was the focal point of the whole project, and interviews/discussions and other material were intended as supplementary to the scores themselves.  And Source explicitly declared its priority on scores, too.  Consider the opening lines of its inaugural issue, ironically reprinted in the scoreless anthology:

"Next to actual performance--recorded or live--the score remains to date the most reliable means of circulating and evaluating new music.  Source, a chronicle of the most recent and often the most controversial scores, serves as a medium of communication for the composer, the performer, and the student of the avant garde.  A magazine that is free from the inherent restrictions of foundations and universities (however enlightened), uncommitted to the inevitable factional interests of societies and composers' groups, can probe and be provocative--our first issue contains five new scores. "

At the time of its publication, very little of the music covered by Source was being recorded--in fact some of it doesn't lend itself to full representation through recording--and little was being picked up for print publication, either.  To read the scores, or have them available to try yourself or with a group of your friends, was perhaps the most important thing facilitated by its circulation.  Decades later, few of the pieces in its pages were ever subsequently recorded or published outside of their appearance in Source.  Without including them in this new anthology, those pieces remain lost in the rarity of the original issues.

Some pieces are represented with a few example pages in the anthology, but in a sense I find this practice even more irritating than simply excluding them altogether.  Keep in mind that most of these scores used unorthodox notational systems, from totally abstract sorts of representational/graphic scores to more personal modifications of relatively-traditional notation.  Most also included opening pages explaining their specialized notational systems.  In the anthology, scores that are represented feature a page of the how-to-play information and a page or two of the music itself.  And they're reprinted in a very, very small format in which it's frequently difficult to make out actual notes or details.

For students of this music, I can see how reprinting the instructional pages of the scores might help explain the "how" aspects of playing the music.  But without the full scores, it's impossible to experience the music by either fully reading it or attempting to play it, which would answer what I consider to be much more fundamental musical questions related to "why."  In fact, there is potential for actually blurring the distinctions of "why" in this music by printing only a few example pages of it: the focus shifts from the music itself to the superficial aspects of its unique presentation on paper.  Both then and now, the kinds of music represented in Source had to battle a reputation as crazy, random nonsense, weirdness for its own sake.  Where the original publications helped to clarify those impressions by sharing the scores in full, running only a couple of the most visually provocative sample pages for those in the anthology only serves to reinforce the stereotypes of novelty and technical/extramusical obsession this music needs to transcend.  There is much to say and emote through this music, but I'm afraid that point isn't easily made by talking around the music instead of letting it represent itself.

Again, I truly appreciate the effort that did go into the anthology, and I don't mean to be harsh, but it's a very significant problem in my opinion.  What can be done?  There are some truly unusual elements painstakingly added into the original publications that couldn't be reproduced (I'll put some pictures below).  But the majority of each issue could be reproduced in original format/size with color where appropriate.  Perhaps they could be reissued as individual volumes like the originals over time.  What would each issue have to cost as a mostly complete reproduction--$100?  $150?  It would be expensive, but I don't agree that such a price would be "replacing one collector's item for another."  It would be making them uncompromisingly available again to a much wider audience who would absolutely get value for their high dollar commitment.  Practically speaking, it would make them available to college/university libraries all over the world again, and those are places that already pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for books or journal subscriptions when those materials are important for students.  I can't help but notice using WorldCat that very few libraries, academic or otherwise, have Source.  Imagine how many more students would be exposed to Source if all of those places had the opportunity to order a set.  Many non-academic folks in the U.S. would potentially have access to reprinted volumes, too, as land grant university libraries are open to the public.

For what it's worth, if the materials still exist for the unpublished 12th volume of Source, I'd be elated to see that published by itself, too.

It's also worth mentioning here that three issues of Source contained 10'' records of music from the publication.  These have been lovingly reissued as a 3 CD set by Pogus.  This set is an excellent supplement to either a purchase of the new anthology or a browse through any original issues of Source. You can also listen on UbuWeb, which is itself easily the best avant-garde art reference on the internet.

The editorial team of Source also produced a few radio programs for KPFA in the late 60s, a couple of which can be found here and here via archive.org.

Here are a few photos of Source materials:

Some notational innovations via
Barney Childs' "Jack's New Bag."

Brilliant inner-score page flips put a new spin on the repetition
common to many classical forms in Stanley Lunetta's "Piano Music."

One needs a slide projector to view this "score-map" from Jocy de Oliveira
in full detail, part of the multimedia "Probabilistic Theater I."

My favorite photo of Harry Partch at the bottom center:
Father of Captain Beefheart, Granddad to Tom Waits?

A page from my favorite score in the run of Source, "Blues and Screamer"
by David Reck.  Something about the approach to notation in this chart
continues to influence my approach to music on paper.  Efficient, clear,
and emotive/visually evocative all at once.

The graphic scores reproduced in color for the original run are amazing.
This one is from "A Piano: Piece" by Daniel Lentz.

The brown square for Jon Hassell's "Map2" is both an instrument and part
of its own score.  It's 3 layers of pre-recorded magnetic tape.  Add a playback
head/amp, follow the directions, and you're playing the most interactively
demanding recording you'll probably ever see.

I know I just complained above about the anthology including scores
just for their visual interest.  Forgive me, and blame Joel Gutsche for his
beautiful "Overture to the Iceberg Sonata."

Books on music: implications of recording

Recordings have always been my medium of choice for experiencing music: a little rough math tells me that I've heard roughly one new (at least to me) album every single day for the last 20 years.  When you grow up in a small Midwestern town and become obsessed with music, recordings are largely your only option for musical experiences--not many folks stopped even remotely close to my hometown on tours.  Lack of population density affected my own musical efforts as well.  In my early days of wanting to start bands, I never found enough like-minded musicians to start proper bands.  Instead, I wrote music myself, and recorded it either alone or with two or three friends.  Though we found the means to perform a few times, most of our efforts were purely recordings, which my dear friend Stu & I would often drive around and listen to in his car for hours on end.


In college and beyond, I've had many more opportunities to play music with others, and I've had the chance to see lots of my favorite composers/bands perform in the flesh.  But old habits die hard, or never die, probably, and I still prefer experiencing music through recordings.  I can listen repeatedly, create my own conditions for listening, make quick references to other recordings, no long lines, etc etc etc.


As a person who grew up in a world of recordings, I never thought much of the cultural or philosophical implications of recordings versus other forms of sharing music, from live performance to "amateur" home performances, sheet music, player pianos, and so on.  Intellectually, I was aware of some of the cultural implications, but I didn't "feel" them myself and didn't care to give the issue much thought.  I imagine this is how the youngest generation today will feel about how the internet is integrated into our society.  I'm just old enough to have lived a touch of grown-up time on both sides of that line, and I think I've given that issue more thought simply because I've personally experienced the positives and negatives on both sides.


I remember reading David Byrne's mini-review of Capturing Sound a few years ago, and I remember finding the notion that post-recording-era classical performances became a lot more vibrato oriented kind of interesting.  But the rest of the book sounded kind of obvious, and I never checked it out.  For some reason, though, I've read two books on the general topic of recordings lately, and noticed that there are another dozen or so on the market.  Here's a little mini-review of the two I read, along with some of my own brief thoughts on the matter(s).

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner is a fairly large and comprehensive tome that seems to cover most of the same issues Byrne mentions from the earlier Capturing Sound by Mark Katz.  And honestly, I wouldn't recommend it.  Read Byrne's blog post linked above, and I think he gets into enough depth about the issues involved to satisfy most folks' need for information in this area.  You'll find discussion of acoustic versus electric recording, analog versus digital, the implications of various media formats for the marketplace (different cylinder and record speeds holding different durations of sound, etc), sampling, the implications of early multitrack recording, the implications of non-linear digital recording and editing, and so on.  Maybe this stuff would be interesting to somebody who hasn't used a lot of these devices firsthand, but the philosophical implications show up at a very practical level when you're problem-solving during a recording session yourself.


Even for people who haven't used recording devices and might find these issues new and interesting, I'd still have reservations recommending this book, because I found what I'd consider to be too many factual errors for a book of this size and scope.  I don't want to turn this into a detailed scholarly critique of the book, but here's a few things off the top of my head that I'm pretty sure are inaccurate in this book:


--p. 64 Stokowski and sticking a mic in the bell of a french horn: I doubt Stokowski specifically ever did this.  He may have been manipulating his mixes, but the horn is by design a distant-sounding instrument whose bell points away from the audience.  It's a bad analogy, in my opinion.  Mentioning literally any other instrument except the horn would have made the point without heading into sketchy unmusical territory.


--p. 106 the idea that there is no physical contact between a recording head and the tape: I've used many tape-based devices in my life, and I still work with recording/duplicating cassettes on a daily basis, and I can guarantee you that there is plenty of physical contact between recording heads and tape.


--pp. 134-135 lots of mentions of the creation of the 33 1/3 RPM format for records: in all of this talk, I couldn't help but notice that there was no mention of the actual origin of the 33 1/3 format.  RCA may have marketed the Vitaphone in 1931, but the American Foundation for the Blind and the Braille Institute of America had been working on the 33 1/3 format in the late 20s.  Coincidentally, Columbia finally started successfully marketing LPs of that speed in the mid 40s, and in the late 60s talking book records had gone all the way down to 8 1/3 RPM for maximum data on each record.


--p. 151 Sun Studios slap-back echo: Having heard a lot of those Sun records, I can't imagine that they were splitting a signal between consoles to get that sound.  It's just tape echo, which DOES require tape in the 2nd machine contrary to what this passage details.


--p. 238 phase rotation: I don't think phase rotation is used to "smooth out" the signal.  My understanding is that radio stations were simply using it to make things louder.  Phase rotation is used on television commercials for the same reason, and that's why it often seems that the sound on a TV gets louder during commercial breaks.  But on recordings that are already compressed/limited to the max, the phase rotation just makes things get quieter via "inversion" as he later details on p. 283.


--p. 297 Reason: To my way of thinking, Reason isn't really a true DAW.  It's a softsynth/sequencer that isn't able to track "real" instruments by itself.  Some of the definitions in this section get a little sketchy, but to my mind the ability to sample tiny passages of real audio doesn't make a device into a true DAW that can act as a normal recording device in addition to various nonlinear editing possibilities.


--p. 330ish DAWs: This information is generally good and interesting, but I noticed the lack of coverage of the many small workstation DAWs that were marketed to the home recording community in the late 90s and early 00s.  Most of the old analog recording device manufacturers made these things as the evolutionary step between cassette multitracks and computers, and some still do: Fostex, Tascam, Roland, Yamaha, Kawai, and so on.  It might not have been a long period in recording history, but I know a LOT of records that started life on devices like the Yamaha AW4416 or the Roland VS2480.


--p. 344 Synclavier: Mike Thorne is not "the first--and only--musician to buy the Synclavier I." Frank Zappa purchased and made extensive use of the Synclavier I throughout the 80s, using it in both his "pop" and "serious" compositions including his final magnum opus, "Civilization Phaze III."


All minor quibbles, perhaps, but a few of them like the slapback echo (mis)information make me pretty skeptical that this book was thoroughly researched and/or edited.  To mention something positive, I do like the writing style.  Milner makes the timeline of "recorded history" read like a series of fun challenges.  It's not a dry, technical book.  And maybe some of those debatable technical points could be forgiven in light of that.


I had no technical issues whatsoever with Evan Eisenberg's The Recording Angel, and I would happily recommend this book.  Originally published in 1987, it's primarily about the various philosophical and social implications of consuming recorded music.  It's not media-specific, and it's written at the end of the vinyl era--CDs are barely mentioned.  The focus is on people listening to records, collecting them, building elaborate hi-fi systems, etc, and how these folks relate to recordings.  It's also worth noting that there is a heavy emphasis on classical recordings--jazz is mentioned infrequently, and pop music is hardly mentioned at all.  If you're looking for someone to analyze your obsessions over Phil Collins records, this won't be the place to look (but trust me, it's the hair).  That limitation aside, though, this book is a collection of great conversations among music (and recording) lovers, all of whom have insightful things to say about music-as-object through recordings.  The last few chapters of the book expand the scope to more general philosophical issues related to the connections between humanity and music, recorded or otherwise.  At times it's dense, but I found every bit of the density to be worth reading.


A few observations of my own about recordings and our culture:


I suppose it's understandable that this issue doesn't come up directly in books about recordings, but I think it's useful to look at the history of the player piano and how it developed around roughly the same time as commercial recordings.  One of my favorite novelists, William Gaddis, was at times consumed with documenting how the player piano's rise and fall heralded the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction, the beginning of information coding (the punched piano rolls match the way early computers worked), and a sort of end of the artist as the focal point of art, replaced by either physical consumables of art works or programmatic dissemination of art via radio and later technologies.  You can look into his ideas yourself either via his final novel(la) Agape Agape, or through several essays related to the matter in his Rush for Second Place.


Concerning both the player piano and making recordings, many of my favorite composers/musicians are folks who found ways to use aspects of evolving technology to make entirely new kinds of music that wouldn't have been possible before.  Conlon Nancarrow's player piano music is absolutely stunning and couldn't exist without the player piano.  And I wouldn't know where to begin counting the many people whose musical ideas grew along with evolving recording technologies.  A few of them were mentioned in these books, like Les Paul's "sound on sound" approach and various early "phonography" works made of multitrack-based compositions assembled in recording studios.  And sampling-based music is everywhere now, in almost every idiom of popular music and also in classical/academic music.  As I mentioned above, growing up in a world already full of recordings, many of which already took advantage of these possibilities, makes some of these implications fairly obvious, the epiphanies of the past becoming the presuppositions of today.


When I read about the effects of recording on society, either in these books or through other essays or online discussions, I've noticed that folks tend to focus on the perceived negative aspects.  There is much more to it, though. The "isolation aspect" of these new-ish technologies waxes and wanes.  CD sales are plunging as the x/y gen folks begin to age out of the music-artifact buying, and the millenials "appropriate" the music they want online for free. 

Are some isolated with their iPods? Perhaps at times. But another part of the equation is that "the kids" and some of us older folks are listening to more music than previous generations by volume, a more diverse selection of music in terms of variety, have begun to usurp the entertainment industries' marketing attempts toward them by simply communicating directly with one another about things they find and like, and seem to be attending live performance events at every opportunity. As music-artifact sales plummet, concert attendance seems to be going in the opposite direction (or at least I remember reading a lot to that effect just before our recent recession took hold). 

Maybe the kids don't understand what's going on viscerally, but I have a suspicion: as their forms of communication become more heavily mediated, they are on some level biologically compelled to split the difference, making up for the isolation of the media at hand by taking the chance to see the artists they've discovered in person (which is, of course, the least-mediated way to consume art). Ditto for live theatre, meetups, flash mobs, etc. 16 to 30-year-olds are back in the streets. Forgive them the ear buds.


You can use technology to improve your life or to hinder it. The choice is mostly your own. I have an iPod full of longer-form music that I listen to on my lunches as I walk around a downtown area. It's an important part of my day, and it leaves my evenings open to compose and perform, instead of feeling as though I'm disconnected from the musical world around me and need to take time out for more listening.  But sometimes I go though phases where I stop using it, or I don't listen to many recordings at all, and that's okay in its time, too.

Standardized media formats don't necessarily lead to standardized consumption.  The youngest generations are intuitively more media-literate than older generations, and they often see through marketing hype and find and share things they want much more smoothly amongst themselves in person or through social media interactions. The unique change that seems to be most dominant in the millenials is that they don't consider intellectual property to be so fiercely an independently-owned asset as generations before. They share the work of others freely, which may irritate some artists, but consider too that they modify/edit/mashup/build upon and innovate, too, with great fluidity.  The implications of this are beyond wildest dreams for the arts: Lautréamont/Ducasse may one day get their wish in "poetry should be made by all." If art can be consumed by all more or less equally, poetry might indeed follow. I find this exhilarating!

Host your own Surrealist Game Parties

I used to host these frequently, but I've fallen out of the habit.  Perhaps talking about the idea will rekindle my own parties and inspire yours, dear readers...

When most folks think of Surrealism, people like Salvador Dali or maybe Andre Breton probably come to mind.  But there is so much more to enjoy from the Surrealist movement as a creative force, a cultural force, a sociopolitial voice, an integration of art and psychology, and my favorite: Surrealist games.

Why Play Surrealist Games?

Historically, the surrealist games were a set of text and visual art-based ideas that could be played among groups of artists.  They emphasized collaboration/social interaction along with ways of tapping into the subconscious mind to inspire new or unexpected directions in creativity.  Some of the games were variations on children's games like Consequences, and later, some of them morphed back into children's activities like MadLibs.  So why play these games with a group of adults today?

1. They're fun.
Here's a perfect opportunity to let your guard down and just have some fun.  The results of surrealist games are often hilarious.  You're in good company, hopefully surrounded by friends new and old.  Enjoy the party.  It just also happens to be good for the mind and soothing to the soul.

2. They stimulate the subconscious.
There is no "right" way to play surrealist games, but the original players and many since have suggested trying to write or draw, etc, very quickly and without thinking to the greatest extent possible.  Just let the ideas flow through you.  The surrealists referred to this notion as Automatic Writing or Automatic Drawing.  Not only does this keep the party moving, but the process brings your subconscious mind to the surface.  You can learn a lot about yourself and your friends by exposing the subconscious: things you find there are often stranger, more fantastic, more potent.  You suddenly realize how much we "civilize" ourselves into more subtle, ostensibly refined ways of thinking.

3. They stimulate creativity.
No matter how you play, one thing is certain: these games are a powerful tool for stimulating creativity.  How you decide to use the results is up to you, and of course it depends on what you get.  Even the surrealists used the results of these games in different ways.  Sometimes you get a great starting point for a larger work.  Sometimes you find a finished or nearly-finished short work.  And sometimes just the act of playing the games inspires you to try something completely new and different.  Even if you're not collaborating, I know folks who have played "solitaire" versions of the games in search of the unexpected.  Just keep an open mind and enjoy both your time with the games as well as any useful results or feelings of inspiration.

4. They create synergy.
I'm always amazed at how on-target the results of these seemingly random games can be.  I think the games often function as a catalyst for reaching really synergistic, group-mind/collective unconscious spaces that are difficult or impossible to achieve any other way.  It's hard to say if it's synchronicity in a Jungian sense, or simply human nature to look for patterns emerging in chaos, but regardless of the source, the results can be incredible.

5. They foster friendships.
If you invite some people you don't know very well to your surrealist game gathering, or old friends bring new friends along, this is a great way to quickly establish friendships.  The games themselves give everyone something to focus on collectively.  There can be a lot of humor in the results great for ice-breaking moments.  And the games themselves nurture an environment that can transcend the usual barriers of social graces, lowering the need for societal "manners" temporarily, which often speeds up the whole "getting to know you" process.

What you need to host your own surrealist game party:

Click this link to download a zip file of materials to host your own surrealist game party.  Once unzipped, this file contains a number of word documents.  Print them out so that each game can appear on its own page.  There is an itinerary to help divide the games by media, too.

The games in this batch fall into three categories: literary, visual, and musical.  To set up a party, I prepare three different "stations" in which participants can work on each of these sets of games, moving between stations as they wish.  You may even find a fourth station useful where games requiring scissors and tape or glue can happen, like the cut-up, fold-in, collage/montage ideas.  Sort the papers describing each game into appropriate stations for participants to read.  They're written to (hopefully) be easy to read and understand quickly, but you may need to help explain things to people on occasion during the party, so make sure you're familiar with everything, too.

You'll also need to have some office supply materials on hand.  Read through each of the games to see what kinds of materials you'll need to play them.  Generally, the literary and visual games just require blank paper and pencils/pens to get started.  You might want to branch into colored pencils, markers, or crayons in your visual game station for more interesting possibilities.  If you choose to do the musical variation on the "exquisite corpse," you'll need some blank staff paper, too.  You can buy it or print it out using a link like this onto regular printer paper.  If you do the cutup stuff or collage/montage art, you'll want to have a supply of old magazines and books on hand, along with scissors and tape or glue (and I'd suggest tape over glue if you're worried about party fouls).  I keep some magazines handy for that purpose, and I buy a pile of books on random, differing topics for cheap from a thrift store, or grab some books from those "free" piles you often find in front of used book stores after-hours.

Since music is my primary area of creativity, I've made musical variations of the games which might require more equipment.  Mine are designed around people manipulating a cassette 4-track, or a software-based sequencer/synth, etc, and playing instruments or singing.  If you're interested in those ideas but don't have the gear, ask your musical friends to help out, or get creative and adopt the ideas to work with what you have.  Also, props to Brandon Vaccaro for some--most, really--of the hand signals on the "Game Theory 101" page, which were developed and used during our undergrad music studies in a variety of musical contexts.  The idea of using those during one of these parties is to create some hand signal-guided improvisations among your group, which you could record or just do for the fun or it.  Musical skills or equipment not necessarily required--try working with people singing or clapping regardless of skill levels.  They aren't fully used in a "game theory" sense this way, but it's a good starting point to get some sounds in the air.

Additional resources

If you get into these games and want to try more at future parties, you're in luck.  There are dozens more.  This batch came together as a group after some trial and error with a wider range of the traditional Surrealist games.  While I picked a set that seemed to work best in my groups, you may have different/better results with others.  And of course once you start playing them, ideas for variations of the games, or moving them into different media formats, will probably come to you.  I haven't done anything with film, theater, or dance variations, for example, but I can imagine some great possibilities.

I only know of one source that attempts to collect a relatively wide range of these games in one place, and that is A Book of Surrealist Games.  This small-but-essential volume will introduce you to a large number of the "original" games, and it also includes a number of small works produced using them.  There is a small list of games toward the back of the book that aren't explored more deeply for various reasons, but you'll find enough information on them to start further research as desired.

There is a recent volume from University of Nebraska Press that I would highly recommend, too. The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism's Parlor Game is a collection of essays that explore the impact of the Exquisite Corpse game on art and culture from a wide variety of perspectives.  This won't add to your game repertoire per se, but it highlights the surprising breadth and depth of influence these games have had from "low" to "high" art in the last century.

For some online resources, check here for an online version of the literary exquisite corpse, and the drawing version is here.

The Burroughs/Gysin cut-up and fold-in methods are very much related to Surrealist Games (and Gysin was himself briefly affiliated with the Surrealists proper).  This link features a fantastic list of online word games related to those concepts.  Of course, there is even a pre-Surrealist antecedent to cut-ups via Tristan Tzara and the Dada movement, although he's a little more sarcastic and anti-art about the notion:

How to make a Dadaist Poem
(method of Tristan Tzara)

---

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
  
  -Tristan Tzara

For some more music-related games, Trevor Wishart has written 2 small books of group music-making ideas called Sounds Fun and Sounds Fun 2.  You can download the first volume from his site.

One of the best things about playing these games in a party setting is watching how they evolve within a group of people over the course of a few parties.  And they place very minimal demands on participants: you don't have to be a dedicated artist to participate, you can spike the punch or not, people of almost any age can join in, etc.  You can be productive, flexible, and have fun all at the same time.  Have fun with this stuff!

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Books on music: the Arcana series

I've been meaning to start some reviews of a few books I consider essential toward an understanding of modern music ("modern" being defined pretty loosely as 20th C. to now).  For me, the most essential books on music are the Arcana series, currently up to Volume V, edited by John Zorn.

In 2000, I was visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and just before leaving, I took a quick walk through the gift shop.  The first volume of Arcana had just been released, and it was published by Granary Books, a publisher that mostly handles artists' books that are sold through museum gift shops.  And this gift shop had a clever little display for Arcana that I happened to notice on my way out.  As a long time Zorn and NYC Downtown Scene fan, I couldn't believe my luck.  For me, 2000 was still a little on the "pre-internet" side of my life--maybe more accurately the "dialup connection occasionally at other peoples' houses" period of my life--and I doubt I would have heard about the book's availability through my old channels before it was sold out. 

I bought my copy and probably read it 10 times over the next few months.  Many of my favorite musicians and composers had their own essays: Mike Patton, Marc Ribot, David Shea, Bob Ostertag, Eyvind Kang, Bill Frisell, Anthony Coleman, Fred Frith, and many more.  And there were essays by lots of folks whom I knew by name only, or not at all, but the essays made me curious about all of their work: Scott Johnson, Z'EV, and John Oswald are three of my favorites whose work I investigated after reading the first Arcana.  Conveniently, the back of the book featured brief bios and recommended listening lists for each artist with an essay featured in the book.  Again, this being essentially a pre-internet period for me, there weren't yet opportunities to stream or sample any of this music online.  I started buying my way through the listening lists and loving every minute of it.  

As Zorn mentions in the first volume's introduction, the NYC downtown scene was incredibly under-represented in both popular and academic music journalism.  I became a big fan of Zorn's Naked City band in high school, but I don't ever remember reading anything about Zorn or the rest of the downtown folks back then.  As a sheltered Midwestern kid, I stumbled onto the whole scene via one little phrase that appeared in a Guitar World magazine in '90 or '91.  Bill Frisell was mentioned as being a creative, innovative guitarist who also played in "John Zorn's madcap band Naked City" or something to that effect.  I ordered a Naked City disc from my tiny local music store on the strength of that one phrase, and found myself totally hooked.  The only other connection to that scene I remember any friends finding at that time was that Zorn was listed as producer on the s/t Mr. Bungle album, and that record made it to small-town Nebraska probably only because it was marketed by Warner and because of the relative popularity of Faith No More around that time.

I spent the rest of high school and college trolling for more NYC downtown scene discs, both Zorn's work and other stuff that came out on the Avant label, and later the Tzadik label.  (I never told my parents this, but I saved my lunch money in high school to spend on music--I got a lot of popular cassettes that way, but I also ordered a fair share of those pricy Avant Japanese imports!)  To my ears, you can really hear the downtown scene of the 80s and 90s as both a source and a reinterpretation of all of the other music being played in those decades.  The classical/new-music world, jazz, pop, metal, world music, various electronica/sampler/turntablist approaches: everything is in that music.  Yet even in music school, I found that only a small handful of students and only one instructor had much familiarity with the scene.  I loved the music on its own, but as a student, I was craving the bigger context for the whole scene.  I sure wish Arcana would have been published five years sooner.

Since nobody else was stepping up to document this music, the scene tried to remedy the situation by documenting itself through the first volume of Arcana.  Though it's difficult to cover at least 2 decades of musical activity including hundreds of participants in only 30 essays, I think Arcana did a wonderful job.  The only thing lacking was...more of the same!  Seven years later, even that issue was addressed with the publication of Arcana II.  When Arcana III appeared a year after that in 2008, I was elated that such an essential document was expanding into a full series.

The Arcana series is up to five volumes now, and hopefully more are on the way--they've been annual since 2007, and hopefully we'll see a sixth volume before the end of this year.  It's difficult to "review" such a large body of essays, covering so much music, but here are at least a few highlights:

--not only are musicians of the "downtown scene" proper documented in the series, but other musicians from the West Coast and all over the world make appearances, too.  Most folks have worked with downtown scene people at some point in their careers, but the narrative arc of the series over volumes really serves to document how this music has both come from and spread to the rest of the world.

--while earlier volumes mostly documented the folks who were essentially the founders of the downtown scene in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, later volumes have included material from younger voices who continue to carry the torch for this music.  And of course there are also essays throughout the series from folks whose work in the 60s and 70s was foundational for the downtown scene.  Zorn's record label, Tzadik, also curates the scene from these multiple generational perspectives, and I find it comforting to know that both the music and ideas behind it are being preserved with so much care.

--each included essay is presented with the unique style and perspective of its author, so one can expect an incredibly wide variety of subjects and writing approaches throughout each volume.  Though some essays include relatively technical information and might be most interesting to musicians who read music or have fairly deep musical (and spiritual) backgrounds, there truly is something for almost ever music lover in every volume.  You can dig as deep as you'd like.

--a lot of anthology-format books like this tend to include a lot of academic/journalist essays.  In contrast, the Arcana series is primary source stuff.  You can read about the interests and obsessions behind this music directly from the people who make it.  No hidden academic agendas, stretched interpretations, or oversimplifications here.

--each volume has at least 30 essays, and you'll probably want to do some serious listening after diving into this material.  The Recommended Listening section at the back of each volume is a great place to begin your journey if you find any contributor's work particularly compelling.  Volume V doesn't include this list, but it's also a "special edition" that focuses on some of the mystical/spiritual drives behind this music.  The first four volumes go into those areas as contributors need, but the overall focus is on cultural/emotional/aesthetic/technical issues surrounding the music.

I really can't recommend the Arcana series highly enough.  With each volume, my understanding of and love for the downtown scene grows by leaps and bounds.  And there are always new or new-to-me contributors featured, which keep me happily ordering more life-changing music year after year.  If you want to start reading about uncompromising music directly from the people who make it, the Arcana series is the essential place to begin.

Gigantic books, part 2.

I have been finishing with some other reading commitments before the "big book" campaign will begin.  However, a few more books have been added to the pile.  "Women and Men" and "Under the Volcano" arrived a little after the rest of the stack from the first big-book post:




While I was especially exited about "Women and Men" and "The Recognitions," I recently found out about a brand-new megabook by a younger fellow from Chicago who is getting compared to David Foster Wallace.  I haven't started to read it yet, but it'll be the next book I start.  Check out the beautiful design work on "The Instructions" by Adam Levin:




Kudos to McSweeney's for this amazing design.  But I suppose I'd expect nothing less from any company associated with another great writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Dave Eggers.

Now that I'm determined to read big novels called Instructions and Recognitions, perhaps I should make sure to read another book I've meant to attack but haven't read yet, Franzen's "The Corrections."



So much reading to do...

On reading gigantic books

Will I lose these 10 pounds by springtime?

I bumped into my good buddy Cliff a couple of weeks ago, and he got me thinking about "giant books."  He said that he has a list of large-form novels he's wanted to read for years, but he's been intimidated by their size and scope.  But now he finished one and loved it, and he's hungry for more.

I don't know if the change of the seasons inspired me somehow, but I too am excited about giant novels since this conversation. I decided to read some giant novels I've missed over the years and re-read a few I haven't read since college.  So I've stocked up on giant books for winter, like some kind of alopecic indoor squirrel.

Here's my list for the season:

William Gaddis - The Recognitions.  Never read it.  If I end up liking it, I'll add JR to my list, too.
William Gass - The Tunnel.  Never read it, but I'm impressed with the 30-year backstory on its composition.
James Joyce - Ulysses.  Read it in college, but it's been a while.
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest.  Read in college, loved it, looking forward to entering that world again.
Joseph McElroy - Women and Men.  Never read.
Malcom Lowry - Under the Volcano.  Never read but heard it described as "a Mexican Ulysses."  Sounds great!
Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations.  Never read it, but I've read some other books by Powers that I really liked.

Along with some other reading I'm already doing, I imagine these will be more than enough for the season.  But if I finish those, I'll add:

Gilbert Sorrentino: Mulligan Stew.  Never read.
David Markson: Wittgenstein's Mistress.  Never read.

When I was talking with Cliff about huge books, I remarked how I would highly recommend reading them straight through, instead of feeling like you need to stop and look up every reference you don't already understand, keep track of every detail, etc.  Just get in the flow and read, and if you admire the overall work enough, you can always go back and read again to pull out more details.

I've heard lots of folks talk about how intimidating Ulysses and Infinite Jest are over the years, and I always got the impression they felt like they had to pull in every detail and layer as they read.  Indeed, that could make for an unpleasant and time consuming assignment.  But I guarantee you that if you like reading, simply reading the books straight through, staying with their internal pace and flow instead of hesitating, they're incredibly fun to read.

Huge books are like little universes all their own.  And no one expects you to "understand" a universe as a prerequsite to enjoyment or participation in it.  All of those details have to be there to create the universe, but just like getting through a typical day can be a complex barrage of sensory input, your brain can filter out the parts that aren't critical to your immediate experience.

But don't take my word for it.  Consider this great observation by William Gass from his introduction to Gaddis' Recognitions, which I think could apply to the reading of any large book:

"There's no need for haste, the pages which lie ahead of you will lie ahead of you for as long as you like them to; it is perfectly all right if some things are at first unclear, and if there are references you don't recognize; just go happily on; we don't stay in bed all day, do we? just because we've mislaid our appointment calendar.  No, we need to understand this book--enjoy its wit, its irony, its erudition, its sensuous embodiment--the way we understand a spouse we have lived with and listened to and loved for many years through al their nights.  Persons deserving such devotion and instinctual appreciation are rare; rarer still are the works which are worth it."

Or consider Mortimer Adler's perspective, co-author of the classic How to Read a Book:

"Dear Dr. Adler,

To tell you the truth, I find the so-called great books very difficult to read. I am willing to take your word for it that they are great. But how am I to appreciate the them if they are too hard for me to read? Can you give me some helpful hints on how to read a hard book?

---

THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE about reading is one that I have told my great books seminars again and again: In reading a difficult book for the first time, read the book through without stopping. Pay attention to what you can understand, and don't be stopped by what you can't immediately grasp on this way. Read the book through undeterred by the paragraphs, footnotes, arguments, and references that escape you. If you stop at any of these stumbling blocks, if you let yourself get stalled, you are lost. In most cases you won't be able to puzzle the thing out by sticking to it. You have better chance of understanding it on a second reading, but that requires you to read the book through for the first time.

This is the most practical method I know to break the crust of a book, to get the feel and general sense of it, and to come to terms with its structure as quickly and as easily as possible. The longer you delay in getting some sense of the over-all plan of a book, the longer you are in understanding it. You simply must have some grasp of the whole before you can see the parts in their true perspective -- or often in any perspective at all."

__________________________________________________________________________________

You can read the rest of Adler's commentary here.

My only concern now is keeping my bike upright as I transport these mammoths around while reading them!

Books on creativity

I've had the "writer's block" bug toward working on music for a while.  In my case, I think that most of the problem is simply angst about learning new software, but while I'm gearing up to enter a new phase of musical productivity, I've been revisiting some books about creativity and finding/maintaining inspiration.  Here are some mini-reviews of creativity-oriented books I've found useful at different times, loosely divided by angle of attack (art versus philosophy versus "pop"/business):

From the perspective of art

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.
Probably like many folks, I was required to read this book for a college class, but it's one of the best required books I've ever read.  Goldberg's advice is generally directed at stimulating creative writing, but I've found that the basic ideas apply to all kinds of creative pursuits.  As a young ruffian, I found her advice at writing in restaurants really useful for developing relationships with places that will let you linger a while: treat your time there tip-wise like a "booth rental" instead of leaving a tiny tip on a cup of coffee, for example.  And I was pleased to discover the work of Russell Edson in her chapter on his brand of strange literary transformations.

The only negative aspect of this book is that I think the ideas generally apply better to short forms of creativity: poems, short stories, song lyrics, etc.  And it's good for ideas to generate new creative material.  However, it doesn't spend much time addressing the different skill sets needed to organize these creative impressions into larger kinds of formats like novels.  To be fair, that really applies to most of the books in this post, though--it seems that books on creativity are largely designed to get you "in the zone," and you can consult more formal resources if you need helping making sense of these ideas in a more ambitious format.

The Art Spirit by Robert Henri

Nebraska's own painter, thinker, and leader of the Ashcan School of painting, Henri's book focuses mostly on the act of painting.  A good portion of the text gets somewhat technical in terms of visual art.  However, quite a bit applies to creativity in general.  The reader can pull what amount to aphorisms out of many sections of the work:

"Cherish your own emotions and never undervalue them."


"We are not here to do what has already been done."


"The study of art is the study of the relative value of things."


"No vacillating or uncertain interest can produce a unity."

Good stuff.  It's great to have such a heritage from nearby.

A Book of Surrealist Games, by Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding

The concepts in this book are absolutely essential for all artists to explore, in my opinion.  The surrealist games highlight various different modes of finding associations between seemingly disparate items in art, and in the world.  New relationships are discovered both between items in-the-world, and between different artists/people who might collaborate on the games.
I have played surrealist games since college in a variety of formats, and with people from many walks of life, and the results never fail to amaze me in the specific, or inspire me more generally.  I have played most of the games in this book, and also designed some games using music (recorded and performed) that are analogous to the original literary and visual art-based games.  I'll get into these in detail, including some resources to run your own surrealist game-based parties, in a later post.

From the perspective of psychology/spirituality

Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson's book generally explores various ways that our minds work, as well as the limits to relatively traditional interpretations of logic.  I could see this book as a valuable resource for the general public as well as those creatively inclined, as its contents help to put various kinds of "normal" suppositions into a larger context.  For creative folks, though, the "exercizes" following each chapter help make the concepts introduced throughout the book into concrete, useful experiences.  In particular, speaking in Korzybski's "E-prime" for a couple of weeks can truly transform your feeling of place in the world (though some of the language shortcuts you'll be compelled to use also have a habit of turning opinions into facts).

books by James Hollis: The Archetypal Imagination, Tracking the Gods, and Creating a Life: Finding Your Own Individual Path

I've only been reading Hollis for a few years, but I've been helped tremendously by his work, especially his "Tracking the Gods" book.  Hollis is a Jungian psychologist and instructor, and his books help to contextualize the power of myth in everyday life toward the formation and nurture of a "personal mythology."  Once you have a grip on some of the things most important to you every day, you have a powerful understanding of your creative priorities.  The books can be a little dry in places, but they're short, potent reads around 150 ass-kicking pages each.  Highly recommended not only for creative motivation, but for balance and context within everyday life.

The Principia Discordia

This book is essentially a religious document for a made up (?) religion, but like the Robert Anton Wilson book (who himself has ties to the Discordian movement), this text help to turn your preconceived notions on their many heads.  Banishing the Curse of Greyface from your life can't hurt in the quest for creativity and fun.  We Discordians, though, must stick apart.

Zen Without Zen Masters by Camden Benares

Benares is another member of the Discordian movement, and his book is formatted as a set of "Western-Zen" aphorisms/koans that help to cut through some of the artificial elements of modern consumer-culture life.  It's a great supplement to the Principia and the RAW book.

From the perspective of "pop" and business literature

Astonish Yourself!  101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit

This book disposes of the chapter-contents in Wilson's book and goes straight to "excercizes."  Each of it's "experiments" gives a setup describing the anticipated time, props, and effects related to the experiment, followed by instructions and general observations.  Many of the experiments take very little time and energy to attempt while providing some unique insights into our everyday behaviors and expectations for "reality."  These might be fun to incorporate into a surrealist game party...

A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink

This is another book I had to read for a class, but I honestly didn't find it very good.  While it's an interesting survey of how creative (Pink calls it "r-directed") thinking can be incorporated into everyday life and business endeavors, it's only skims the surface compared to many of the books listed below.  However, it does have some good ideas, and it's very easy to read, so if you find some of these other materials headache-inducing, this might be a useful book for you.  I did especially like the last section, dedicated to the notion of "meaning," which largely focuses on incorporating joy and happiness into your life.  In many cases, folks look at "serious" art as generally having a somewhat sad/morbid/depressed disposition, but it's important to remember that being happy doesn't have to equate to being shallow.

The Brain Workout Book by Snowdon Parlette

This book splits the difference between Daniel Pink's book and Roger-Pol Droit's book, containing some general information on modes of thinking and acting interspersed with exercises to try yourself.  Like the Pink book, it's a little on the light side for my tastes, but the contents are nutritious.  I like that it seems to have more of a pop psychology angle compared to Pink's book, which is clearly marketed more to business folks.

A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech

This book is probably the most well-known "classic" of the pop-creativity genre, but it's a good one.  Like Pink's book, it seems to be marketed toward business folks who want more creativity in their work and lives, but it does have some interesting observations.  I like the ways in which it takes seemingly "weird" ideas and puts them into contexts that might actually be useful to more straight-forward folks, and some of those basic ideas do apply to purely creative endeavors, too.  In particular, I think many artists could benefit on the "Avoid Ambiguity" section, which also might help toward the creation of a clear voice and discipline for longer forms of art.

Read on, and Create on!  If you have any more recommendations, I'd love to hear them in the comments...I left out some music-centric books I was thinking of, too, so maybe another creativity book post should happen in the future...