Happy Christmas to all!

Pat Steir: After Hokusai, After Hiroshige

thru January 30, 2011
de Young Museum
San Francisco
     This exhibition shows the continued influence of the Japanese print on Western artists into the late twentieth century. American painter, printmaker, and conceptual artist Pat Steir (b. 1938) was the first artist selected by Kathan Brown in 1982 to travel to Japan to make a color woodcut for Crown Point Press’s groundbreaking printmaking program in Kyoto. There she had the opportunity to work closely with artisans trained in the traditional methods of Japanese woodblock printing. In 1984 and 1985 she turned to subjects derived from famous prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige in color etchings she produced at Crown Point Press in Oakland: The Tree after Hiroshige; The Wave—From the Sea after Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet; and Yellow Bridge in the Rain after Van Gogh after Hiroshige.

In her appropriation and quotation of other artists, Steir participates in a practice used widely by contemporary artists. In the titles of her works, Steir openly acknowledges her debt to artists—for example, Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet in The Wave—and she has described her particular choices of artists and artworks as having been drawn from a sameness of look and feel. Acknowledging the influence of earlier artists on her work, she comments, “When you find an artist you identify with, it’s like finding a father or a mother.”

The Dead in their Stone Boats Know

"The Truth the Dead Know" 

by Anne Sexton, from All My Pretty Ones

     For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
     and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,   

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,   

letting the dead tide alone in the hearse.   

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,   

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch   

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes   

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse   

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Her Awful Rowing

"Rowing"

by Anne Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Towards God

A story, a story!

(Let it go. Let it come.)

I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender

into this world.

First came the crib

with its glacial bars.

Then dolls

and the devotion to their plastic mouths.

Then there was school,

the little straight rows of chairs,

blotting my name over and over,

but undersea all the time,

a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.

Then there was life

with its cruel houses

and people who seldom touched -

though touch is all-

but I grew,

like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,

and then there were many strange apparitions,

the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison

and all of that, saws working through my heart,

but I grew, I grew,

and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,

still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked,

and I grew, I grew,

I wore rubies and bought tomatoes

and now, in my middle age,

about nineteen in the head I'd say,

I am rowing, I am rowing

though the oarlocks stick and are rusty

and the sea blinks and rolls

like a worried eyeball,

but I am rowing, I am rowing,

though the wind pushes me back

and I know that that island will not be perfect,

it will have the flaws of life,

the absurdities of the dinner table,

but there will be a door

and I will open it

and I will get rid of the rat inside of me,

the gnawing pestilential rat.

God will take it with his two hands

and embrace it.

As the African says:

This is my tale which I have told,

if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,

take somewhere else and let some return to me.

This story ends with me still rowing.

"TURF Dancers from Oakland, CA honoring Dreal's brother (the man in the white shirt is Dreal) who died on this same street corner the night before this rainy day. Dancers featured are from the TURF FEINZ crew. YAK FILMS is a company that works with dancers world wide, but which was started a few blocks away from that corner, in East Oakland, CA."  - DeEMaSsIvE  

Water Walk

German improviser and composer of experimental and new music, Andrea Neumann performs John Cage`s Water Walk.  

According her publisher, Sofa Music, Neumann has "reduced the piano to strings, resonance board and metal frame. With the help of electronics to manipulate and amplify the sounds (sometimes to make parts of the sound audible which are inaudible without amplification), she has developed numerous new playing techniques, sounds, and ways of preparing the dismantled instrument."

She performs here at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Bærum, Norway. The museum itself is quite a striking example of Norway's Neo-Expressionist architecture. It was designed more than forty years ago by then young Norwegian architects Jon Eikvar and Sven Erik Engebretsen and named for Sonja Henie, the famed figure skater from Oslo.

Compare Cage's own amused 1960 performance of Water Walk on What's My Line? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63HoYXUeUTA&feature=related

Motion graphics by Marta Topolska, Illinois Institute of Art-Chicago graduate.  Poem by Gloria Sarasin. Marta has also created a brief video of work by Boston area visual artist Marlena Bocian.

The Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge

Imagine our surprise innocently cruising down Rte. 17 in South Carolina on our first pilgrimage to the Holy City, when suddenly there before our parochial eyes rises what can only be a Boston landmark!

The Cooper River bridge connecting Charleston with Mount Pleasant uses the same cable-stayed construction as Boston’s Leonard P. Zakim Bridge across the Charles River. It was completed in 2005, two years after the Zakim. Driving across either bridge produces the same awe in the beholder; both are instantly the visual center of attention.

Proud members of the Andover Newton community

On a February night in New England divinity students from around the world gathered in the student lounge on the Andover Newton Theological School campus. They enjoyed food from around the world, talked about their homelands, and shared stories and song.

Justin & Peter hit the road again

It all starts again on Thursday in Lincoln Hall, Chicago.  They'll come whistlin' through Boston on the 18th.
But, then, it ends all too soon a couple of days later
and it's back to Scotland — The Great War is over
in record time.

You don’t really care for music, do you?

“Hallelujah” is not, as [contestant Lee]DeWyze conceived it on American Idol, a shout of praise. It is too confused to shout, too self-concerned to praise. Cohen’s song is disturbing stuff. The Buckley version always leaves me reflective and bothered, if aesthetically uplifted. “Hallelujah” manages to be a psalm, a lament, and a paean to romantic ecstasy all at once. And like Psalms, Lamentations, and Song of Songs, it manages to do so while drawing on the rich and messy personal histories of the Bible’s most notables. That’s the hard-fought lyrical production that has sustained the song, and that will—of course—make it outlast Idol. 

 —Patton Dodd, writing in the blog

Killing the Budda

To Touch the Stars

From To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration from Prometheus Music in partnership with the Mars Society and the National Space Society.  Inspired by the BBC documentary "If We had No Moon".  Music is by the New York singer/songwriter Christine Lavin; video by the Vietnamese artist Vu Trong Thu.

Nico Muhly

We travel through strange hair-worlds with geometrical birds and foam-sky created by Icelandic animator, Una Lorenzen, for 'It Goes Without Saying' from the album Speaks Volumes (2007) by New York based composer, Nico Muhly. Produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson at his home studio in Reykjavík. Be sure to see it full screen, if you can.

Muhly was born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. In 2004 he received a Masters in Music from the Juilliard School.

His orchestral works have been premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony.

His film credits include scores for Joshua (2007), Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008), and the Argentine drama Felicitas, and he has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects.

Muhly has also lent his skills as performer, arranger, and conductor to other musicians, including Antony and the Johnsons, Sam Amidon, Björk, and Jónsi from Sigur Rós.

Many of his most frequent collaborators are colleagues at Bedroom Community, an artist-run label headed by Icelandic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson and inaugurated by the release of Speaks Volumes.

Eruption of Fimmfördurhals volcano

Eyjafjallajökull - Fimmförduháls Eruption on Iceland from Marc Szeglat on Vimeo.
- Fimmförduháls Eruption on Iceland from Marc Szeglat on Vimeo.

Spotlight Floodlight

Keyboardist Peter Adams has been writing, recording and performing music since grade five, but for much of that time he has stayed in the background supporting other musicians - often pretty great musicians. Now, from Intelligent Noise, comes his first fully produced personal album, "Polarized". But still modesty reigns, collegial collaboration abounds behind the scenes, and it is the mysterious doppelganger, 'Spotlight, Floodlight', who steps up to take the bows, while the phenom artist, Peter Adams, slips away back to the studio, already deeply into creating ACT II.

Since his 2003 move to Los Angeles, Peter has played keyboards, guitar, and vocals with great local artists - Michael Penn, Josh Groban, Greg Dulli, Five For Fighting, Lex Land, The Submarines, even while his old friends from Boston keep on callin' - Juliana Hatfield, Tracy Bonham, and Kay Hanley. And - look here! - now he's playing with some of the very British artists that influenced his early musical development - Rob Dickinson (The Catherine Wheel), Tears For Fears, and, most recently, Justin Currie (Del Amitri).

 

In Honor of the Bohlen-Pierce Symposium, March 7-9, Boston

Rick Sacks' improvisation based on a original theme created by Peter Hannon using the Bohlen-Pierce 13-interval scale. According to others claiming (with good reason) to understand better than I, Bohlen-Pierce is an harmonic, non-octave scale. Its 13 tone steps fill the framework of the twelfth (3:1 ratio). The scale has a step size of approximately a three-quarter tone (146 cent), the middle-Eastern second degree. Help!

Zoe Keating cellist escape artist

Avant-garde cellist Zoe Keating operates at the "fusion of information architecture and classical music". In this version of her composition, Escape Artist, she demonstrates her intricately layered meta-data composition style. Using her MacBook Pro, Ableton Live, SuperLooper, some 'janky Apple code', a cello and her imagination, the San Francisco based musician shapes her music into something you won't hear at Symphony Hall.

Stomp it out

We Are the World All Over Again

In our church young people are selling baked goods and cat sitting to raise relief funds for Haiti. Adults have answered the call of a local Haitian church to help them send rice & beans & bucks. Nine year old Robine Koerts and her classmates raised about €200 in donations for Haitian disaster relief singing 1985's We Are the World during Music Night at their Netherlands school.

Chickens in Love

A whole lot of 826LA students with a whole hen house full of volunteers and The Submarines, perform Chickens in Love, a song they wrote at "Songwriting with The Submarines"— a workshop sponsored by 826LA where children learn about music and how lyrics are created by working with professional Los Angeles musicians. Two workshops were held this December. Musicians Michael (Frankel), Heather (Kissing Cousins), Sean (Nico Stai), Blake and John (The Submarines), Eli (The Monolators), Ken (Hexham Heads) and 826LA volunteers worked with 24 kids to help them create their own songs.

The kids broke out into 12 groups, each paired with a musician and/or volunteer. Each group came up with a subject and wrote a song with multiple verses and a chorus. The groups had an hour to get creative, write the lyrics, develop a melody, and then perform it for the other workshop participants.You can see/hear these songs as performed at http://www.826la.org/chickensinlove/pledge-now/. Vote for the one(s) you like best in a fund raiser for 826LA.

These 12 songs have been distributed among 12 LA based bands to cover the songs. Each artist is donating their time to create a project like no other. The artists involved are:
– Fiona Apple
– She & Him
– Cold War Kids
– Tim & Eric
– Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
– Dum Dum Girls
– Summer Darling
– The Growlers
– Crystal Antlers
– The Happy Hollows
– The Submarines
– The Pity Party

Each artist/band is allowed to get as creative with their version as they want so long as they don’t change the lyrics. These 12 songs will appear this Spring on a Limited Edition LP and CD as well as a digital download on iTunes. All proceeds from these sales will go right back into the program that provides these kinds of opportunities for children.

Hard Times Come Again No More

Once a year to our Unitarian Universalist community comes Music Sunday. The bluegrass band played Gillian Welch's heart wrenching "Orphan Girl" and the choir reached back for Stephen Foster's "Hard Times". How can an hour of hard times and a girl yearning for death's reunion be uplifting? I guess you'd have to be there. "Let the Mystery Be."

This wonderful rendition of "Hard Times" by Mavis Staples says it all for me. Buddy Miller, Steve Fishell and Matt Rollings back her up. The McGarrigle/Wainwright clan have a corner on the more traditional rendering that comes readily to mind, but our choristers gave it all they had and it was great in an arrangement by our own Bill Weber. Oh, you beautiful voices, how you break our hearts in joy.

Tracy Bonham plays "Josephine" - Live at Hotel Cafe

Tracy Bonham (w/ Butch Norton on drums, David Sutton on bass and Peter Adams on keys) - "Josephine" - Live at Hotel Cafe - Los Angeles, CA - January 22, 2010. Recorded by Joshua J. Smelser

The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra (Sinfónica Juvenil Teresa Carreño) is the national high school age youth orchestra of El Sistema, Venezuela's groundbreaking, life-changing musical education program. To put this ensemble's musicianship in context, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is the next step for many of these young musicians. That orchestra, containing musicians from 18 to 28 years old, has toured the world with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and has made a number of recordings on Deutsche Grammophon. The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra is the next level below, and will succeed the Simón Bolívar.

Their conductor in this TEDTalk is Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of the El Sistema. Dudamel conducted the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela for several years, and recently was named the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director. He also continues to conduct other orchestras around the world.
The orchestra's namesake, Teresa Carreño, was a legendary Venezuelan pianist after whom the main theater/concert hall complex in Caracas is also named.



The gulf between the rich and the poor in Venezuela is one of the worst in the world. Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist, musician, and reformer, founded El Sistema ("the system") in 1975 to help Venezuelan kids take part in classical music. After 30 years (and 10 political administrations), El Sistema is a nationwide organization of 102 youth orchestras, 55 children's orchestras, and 270 music centers -- and close to 250,000 young musicians.

El Sistema uses music education to help kids from impoverished circumstances achieve their full potential and learn values that favor their growth. The talented musicians have become a source of national pride. Several El Sistema students have gone on to major international careers, including Gustavo Dudamel, soon to be the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the bassist Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest musician ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic.

There is a simple concept behind Abreu's work: for him an orchestra is first and foremost about together­ness, a place where children learn to listen to each other and to respect one another.

"Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to express sublime feelings."      —José Antonio Abreu

156 Countries Sing Together

On December 7th, 2009 at 1:30pm musicians from all around the world came together and shared a song.  At that  moment musicians from 156 countries played "All You Need is Love" together.

Lend your own voice to http://StarbucksLoveProject.com  Watch streaming video from countries around the world and then join in by singing "All You Need is Love" yourself. For each video submitted, Starbucks will make a contribution to the Global Fund to help fight AIDS in Africa. You can also help increase the Starbucks contribution to the Global Fund by submitting a drawing to the Love Gallery.

The global sing-along is part of continuing efforts to help fight AIDS in Africa. In just one year in partnership with (RED)™, Starbucks has generated money equivalent to more than 7 million days of medicine to help those living with HIV in Africa. (RED), created by Bono and Bobby Shriver, is a brand designed to engage business and consumer power in the fight against AIDS in Africa. (RED) works with the world's biggest brands to make unique RED-branded products and direct up to 50% of their gross profits to the Global Fund to invest in African AIDS programs, with a focus on the health of women and children.

Playing for Change: Peace through Music

The Playing for Change band’s latest tour ended in November.  The recording of this performance took place in the Nokia Theater, Los Angeles. The song, "Felangaye", is a Titi Tsira original, and tells the story of a young woman who must overcome her fears and tell a young man that she loves him.

 Playing for Change is a project of Mark Johnson and Jonathan Walls. The idea is to film and record musicians from around the world sharing their music in the belief that we can all find peace through our music.


Mark Johnson, Jonathan Walls, Playing For Change Movie - Click here for another funny movie.