Last Thursday.

sol lewitt | pattern | quilt | dance
weave | warp | weft | wail
hocket | count | draw | measure | spin
plaid | silk | velvet | burlap | chrome

four pieces, from 2009-2011, for eight singers
live recordings from mass moca & the ecstatic music festival
allemande | sarabande | courante | passacaglia
roomfulofteeth.org

hauschka and hildur guðnadóttir: “#283″ (2011)

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dan trueman and brittany haas: “fosclachtha” (2012)

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the caretaker: “a relationship with the sublime” (2011)

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françois couperin via anonymous youtuber:
“les baricades mistérieuses” (1717/2005)

I posted another recording of this by Violaine Cochard two years ago, and I’ve listened to a bajillion other covers (mostly on youtube) of the piece, which is maybe the most perfect little morsel of music in the entire world. I just really came to love this version above – for so many reasons – truly, sincerely. it combines my love of upright pianos, human beings being amazing, youtube covers, fun-colored shirts, and Couperin.

The syntax of this whole situation is delicious.
Not sure what’s going on. For keys?
On the wall in the greenroom at Stanford Lively Arts
Palo Alto – March 2012

Heading to England tomorrow night for Jeff Mangum’s ATP festival. (ACME quartet playing Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet and works by Ingram Marshall and Meredith Monk.)

We opened for Jeff in Boston last September, playing the Bryars. I made a few rapid sketches on the back of my music while he was sound checking in Jordan Hall. Plz excuse coffee stains.

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Recording session up in Hudson, NY.
With MONO and Wordless Music.
ANALOG.
Real tape. Real ribbon mics. Real strings.
These guys are committed.

Fun show last Saturday, with Roomful of Teeth + Glasser at the Ecstatic Music Festival (Kaufman Center, NYC). Works by Merrill Garbus (tUnE-yArDs), Sarah Kirkland Snider, Cameron Mesirow (Glasser), Rinde Eckert, Judd Greenstein, and Bill Brittelle. We also did three of my own tunes — Allemande and Sarabande (new from August) and Passacaglia (old hat from 2009). Great audience. And this group of singers is kind of mind-blowingly wonderful and nuts.

Listen to the whole concert, thanks to WQXR/Q2. The first song is my wacked-out homage to Sol LeWitt and square dance patterns – Allemande. Followed by Merrill’s fearless, soulful Ansa Ya.
Full set list at left (click to view).

Some photos of the performance, via David Andrako. And a short video of rehearsal with Glasser:

And a few more random phone shots:

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Is this the future of cookbooks? Oh my gosh oh my gosh. Of course. The key here is that no one speaks a word. It’s just music, image, and the occasional listing of an ingredient. It’s like a little recipe card come to life. Thanks to the folks at Tiger in a Jar.

P.S. If The Joy of Cooking comes to vimeo, I call dibs on scoring the chapter on “Griddle Cakes and Fritter Variations”.

This. (A promotion for Onitsuka/Asics.) I found the origami artist Sipho Mabona‘s beautiful, detailed work online last month while prepping for Chicago (see last post), and I emailed him about his technique for getting such smooth and precise stop-motion animation with paper (naturally, the title of this sequence below is “In the Pursuit of Perfection”). I won’t reveal his secret here, but I’ll say that it helped a TON during the meditative hours upon hours of shooting my little film still-by-still. Mine was a simple effort, inspired by this amazing feat:

And this (below) is a perfect small thing. (thanks Marie!)
Scanned film pictures taken with a Nikon F65 and expired neopan film || music: Ólafur Arnalds “Elra’s Walz” (2009)

Recently got back from Chicago, where I spent two weeks in the loft of High Concept Laboratories in an operaSHOP residency (with fellow composer Elliot Cole and Opera Cabal mastermind Majel Connery). Long story short, I made a something in 10 days — an 18-minute piece called Ritornello, with film projections (stop motion animation alternating with ambient aerial shots), music with viola and voice, and a whimsical non-sequitur dance sequence (courtesy of choreographer Katelyn Halpern). Could use a bit more trimming and baking (will do down the road), but it came out alright in the end (two performances, at HCL and at the U of Chicago).  Here is a brief program note from the workshop.

The trailer :

Some photos :
[more stills at LaraKastner.com]

This is one of the most beautiful things ever made. (Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro – finale) . Ragnar Kjartansson (Icelandic artist) transformed this moment into a rosary bead. Performa Festival 2011 – New York.

For twelve hours (a couple weeks ago — Nov19) this scene (up to 2’31″) was performed thoroughly staged with a small orchestra (I played violin). (for more, gaggle something like “performa festival ragnar 2011″) Over and over, and over, and o v e r a n d o v e r and o v e r a n d o v e r a n d over a n d over a n d o v e r and again, and again, resetting each time with a lush, petitional D dominant chord. And every so often, stagehands dressed in 18C garb stopped by the pit to offer grapes and brussels sprouts and brrbon and all manner of lovely things. I know it hasn’t been nearly long enough for me to realize the effect of that experience on my general personhood. But. For the [short-term record]. It was, and still is, a beautiful thing. I am forever changed. I’ll leave it there.

Cut to one week later. I got to spend Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s in eastern North Carolina, and that weekend my family canoed (through some tangly muck) to a hidden lake. b l i s s . . . but cold . . . We camped out (with mosquitoes at 5pm and frost on the tent at 5am) and then rowed back to civilization the next day via the Albemarle Sound. We docked at a makeshift peninsula, near some fields –unfortunately, also a place some people dump their trash and furniture. But — some of those people have GREAT VINYL COLLECTIONS. My sister and I (and our dog) rummaged through some of this stuff and found a bag containing a nice collection of classical albums. Including a vintage Deutches Grammaphon record set of The Marriage of Figaro (Fischer-Dieskau/Vogel/Mathis). Yes. The world is an absurd and magical situation.

Aw… That happened. Filmed out the window of a black Mercedes tour van, driving from Minneapolis to Seattle. A ladybug came along for the ride, just keeping slow time while the highway whipped past. His own little winged victory.

Just got back from a little tour this past month. Thirteen shows in thirteen cities, with A Winged Victory for the Sullen & ACME. And — I totally ridiculously enjoyed every show. Pulling the right sound, feeling the grain of the bow, chewing on salty F-sharps for a long, long time… Love this music. I’ve been following the kranky records catalogue since 2007, when I found myself at a Dead Texan show in Brussels after reading a blurb in La Libre.  Pretty random actually.  But somehow that music just hit me in the right way at the right time.

Some drawings and photos from the voyage:

Someone’s bootleg of the last thing we played at our last show, at the Satellite in LA. (A special rendition of Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus Blood”):

A beautiful short docu film featuring Adam Wiltzie and Montgomery Knott:

And the whole tour was blessed by the presence of Ken Camden and Tom Meluch (Benoît Pioulard), who opened every show. Here’s some live audio of Ken’s set from our Lincoln Hall show in Chicago; and Tom’s moment of respite during our day off in Portland:

It’s open!  The ground is singing up in Massachusetts.  Forever and ever.  Take a weekend and visit sometime…

{ by the way >  Apologies for recent neglect in posting.  It’s been a bit crazy all summer, and especially the last month.  Many rich things with wonderful people.  (Big hugs to all.) }

The most recent event in my little world was the opening of Jane Philbrick’s “The Expanded Field” — an industrial garden project at Mass MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, for short). The piece takes its name from this essay by Rosalind Krauss. Jane is a brilliant, lovely, fearless artist and human being, and it was a total pleasure to work with her on this project.  We collaborated to create an acoustic path that will invite visitors exiting the [planned] Anselm Kiefer exhibit hall to amble through the grasses and experience the new growth among the remnants of an industrial past.  With Jane’s vision in mind, I designed musical fragments which were then recorded by Roomful of Teeth in August and later shaped into a 12-channel piece that is now a permanent installation outside the museum.  { The Acoustic Path by Caroline Shaw & Jane Philbrick, featuring Roomful of Teeth }

Bob Bielecki engineered the burial of nine speakers, about an inch underground, and three embedded in a stone wall.  Below are a few photos from the installation process and from the opening last Saturday.  (I unfortunately was unable to attend but will be taking a quiet trip up there by myself very soon…)

This has been the summer of late Beethoven 4tets. They’re a staple year-round, and they really are the most amazing creatures ever designed. But there was just something about driving through the hills last month to the sound of Op. 132′s “Heilige dankgesang” (mixed with the hum of my VW jetta)… I’ve been living in 132, 130, and 131 (and an occasional throwback to 74 – mostly for that mindblowing finish to the first mvt) for weeks.

Last week Alicia Doudna and her fiancé Andrew were in a very serious car accident in Michigan. Alicia is a beautiful violinist. She and I played chamber music at Kneisel Hall a while back, and I remember her contagiously fun spirit, addiction to chapstick, and love of the third movement of opus 132. They’re both still unconscious, but music has been played in the intensive care unit every day (including live Bach cello suites — go Mary Ann!). For the past week many of us who know Alicia have been playing and listening to music that reminds us of her.

Alicia, this is for you! (excerpt of Beethoven op132/III — the best part) Rest well, and recover soon.

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On my way to rehearsal this afternoon (singing Gavin Bryars at the Guggenheim tomorrow night), I walked past these daffodils. I’m strangely drawn to bright yellow objects. It’s like salt and vinegar, or the sound of a delicately EQ’d Rhodes… Something sensorily awesome about the color yellow.

While black-eyed susans are my all-time favorite flowers, daffodils are somewhere in my top ten. One of the most amazing things about them is their spooky heliophilia, how they all turn one direction for maximum sunlight. Seeing that on the sidewalk in New York seems particularly poignant. There was just something about this scene of daffodils all turned in the same direction, glancing over the iron fence at the traffic on 10th avenue. Like cows in a Gary Larson cartoon, gazing at the country road with a posture and attitude that’s uncannily human.

Also, I know one shouldn’t read during rehearsal… But given the ample tacet time in Bryars’ ambient “Sinking of the Titanic”, I continued my little journey through Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” — suggested by a friend for consideration for an upcoming (tbd!) music/theater project. Reading that with a live surround-sound soundtrack is pretty spectacular…

Just a few bits from LA BLOGOTHEQUE’s wonderful series of CONCERTS À EMPORTER (capitalization is theirs). I love these short films (by Vincent Moon/Mathieu Saura) and have been following them for a little while. Basic premise is to take a cool musician/band outside or in somebody’s apartment (or cathedral) and see what happens. And just notice things with the camera… Also, here’s Esperanza Spalding’s take on William Blake’s “The Fly” (not filmed by Moon). Blogotheque, please contact Ms. Spalding’s people. I want to see that happen in a chrome-wrapped diner (with a fly or two) somewhere on route 1, or maybe in Paris.

[clockwise from top-left: Annie Clark, Moriarty, Esperanza Spalding, Kong Nay] Click the little “expand” icon on each one to view full-screen.

It’s over a month ago, which in interweb news is an eonothem. But today’s release of the mind-blowingly maquillé’d musick video from Tune-Yards (below) was a good reminder to post some photos and the Brooklyn Vegan review from the Roomful of Teeth concert [with Caleb Burhans, Bill Brittelle, and said wildly inspiring yard of Tunes, on Feb 19 in Merkin, as part of Ecstatic].

Some photos here (click for full-size)

and a full album of David Andrako’s beautiful photography from the concert

Merrill (tUnE-yArDs) [apostrophe S] video of “Bizness”:
dance. pyramid. yes.
and butoh?

Brooklyn Vegan review and a bootleggy video of “Hatari” from the show:

Nice project for Neon Lighthouse productions last month — music for their PSA video for the Bailey House, an organization providing stable living situations for people living with HIV and AIDS in New York. I wrote and mixed some bits of musick for the Franklin Quartet:

This is what it looks like to record Music for 18. Last week, from my “Voice 2″ chair behind the clarinets.  Focused fun.  with Signal — Troy, NY — March 2011

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And this is what it sounds like (er, rehearsal via iphone recorder):

Thanks to all involved in Signal for a rich week with this epic piece of music. I’ll never forget the performance at EMPAC Saturday night — something very special. Then we did two shows at LPR on Sunday, with Steve himself sliding things up and down at the soundboard. Here he is, saying a few words about the work:

A little peek into what’s in store on Feb 19 in New York. Nab those tickets now… It’s gonna be a fun show. I feel very lucky to make musick with these folks.

I just got back from a short trip to St. Louis, where Roomful of Teeth performed new works by Bill, Caleb, and Merrill (along with a few “olde” things by Rinde, Judd, and me), on the beautiful campus of Principia College. We’ll be up at Williams College next week, working with some students there and prepping for the Merkin Hall show on February 19. For those of you wondering what this whole Teeth thing is about — come on by. We won’t bite. (ohhhh, groannnn, was that too much?)

On a break from finishing a piece before an approaching deadline.  This video/site is making the rounds today. Is it hypnotic, or am I just tired?
Note from Alexander Chen »  Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.
Hilarious that he ripped the cello pizz from freesound.org!

I’ve been an absolute hermit the last three days, seeing almost no one, enjoying the stunning double blizzard from inside my cozy Princeton gradpad by the lake — and trying to muster up the courage to finish a paper on modern Gesualdo covers and a piece (Daguerreotype II?) for the Brentano Quartet. Finally this morning, after eating my second meal of roasted potatoes (with rosemary) and soy sauce — because that’s about all that’s left in the cupboard — it became clear that I’d need to find a shovel, find my car, and seek more nutritious rations… Two hours to dig this baby out… Later this afternoon my quartet (the Franklins) came down from the big city to rehearse Bartok 4, which still blows my mind in its demand for folksy lilt, guttural oration, and an expressive interpretation of equal temperament — all while not falling off the effing ridiculous 4/4 wagon!!

Sometime today, just a few miles from here, probably this morning while I was knee-deep in snow, Milton Babbitt passed away. I never got a chance to meet him, although I’m now adrift somewhere in his broad legacy. I’m not sure we would have been best friends, but I really wish I could have talked to him sometime.

Mr. Ross beat me to it, but I’ll post this anyway. Some MMDG folks rocking out to Ethan Iverson’s take on Babbitt’s Semi-Simple Variations (here’s the original).
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Oh — P.S.! (Or Pre-S.!) Happy birthday, Mozart! (Er, technically that was a few hours ago — Jan 27.) Here’s a luscious bit of K.387, recently recorded by the Franklin Quartet.

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The first opera I ever saw was a traveling company’s production of La Traviata, in Wright Auditorium in Greenville, North Carolina, when I was about ten. At intermission, my dad (a pulmonologist), told me what was wrong with Violetta (tuberculosis probably) and hinted that she wouldn’t make it through the end of the evening (indeed she didn’t). It was the saddest show I’d ever seen. And some of the most beautiful music. For about a year after that, I would every night program the same eight or nine tracks of my parents’ Traviata album (DG, Kleiber with Cotrubas/Domingo/Milnes) into a little cd boombox, volume down low. I still remember part of that series: 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 (I always programmed the same set: overture, a couple rollicking party numbers, and then skip the soggy stuff to get to the tragic duets in the second act). There’s just something about that music and story that got to me, and still does. Last week I got to see Willy Decker’s new “lone red dress” production at the Met (and, of course, I cried right around track 16). This show is gorgeous. It’s great to have a set and staging that are assertive without being overbearing. Like a strong, solid frame, without the tacky embroidered genre scene. I’ll leave it there. Sob. Joy.

[Here's an ambient clip from the 66th St subway platform last week, featuring Germont's "De Provenza il mar" and Violetta's "Sempre libera".]

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Every night at the 66th Street Lincoln Center subway stop, there’s a musician who plays the themes of that evening’s shows — usually opera tunes, but I think he covers the Avery Fisher fare as well (does anyone remember hearing Ligeti’s Grand Macabre last spring?). It’s really impressive that he adjusts his set list every day, and I often wonder if anyone notices, or if concertgoers remembered the music they’d just heard well enough to recognize it played on a sax or flute. (I did this a couple evenings outside Covent Garden back in 2005, but only a couple of people recognized my awkward solo violin renditions of Ariadne auf Naxos. …Danny Boy raked in way more cash.)

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A snapshot of the beginnings of an early summer evening in Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2009 — one of the first days of the Teeth.  He’s up on the steps, taking a moment amid the Everything.  We’ll miss you, Steve. 
[ Williams College memorial page here ]

Home in North Carolina — hanging out with the fam, catching up on some reading for stuff coming up (Aeneid Book VI, a bunch of Irish poets, William Carlos Williams, and essays from a Cartier-Bresson retrospective), and watching all the Seinfeld episodes that have accumulated in that great estuary that is TiVo.

But maybe the most amazing thing discovered over vacation: VIRTUAL YULE LOGS ON YOUTUBE.  This is insane. I love it. I’ve watched most of the volunteered fireplace pieces available on youtube/vimeo now, and I’ve temporarily adopted “Fireplace on a rainy day HD 1280×720” as my ambient soundtrack. There are a lot of pleasant videos, but few really achieve that close-mic’d authentic sound quality of a real fireplace (note to yule log genre directors: reverb expands virtual space, defies intimacy, and is therefore not cozy).  And many videos include the unthinkable — non-diegetic music (e.g. Pachelbel, or diatonic Casio arpeggiations). But below is my favorite youtube fireplace — it’s consistent, clear, and comforting. And yes, I realize how ridiculous this is. But kind of amazing, right?

Without further adooo, Happy Yuleness to all…

Also worth checking out: “Yule Log” (Directors Commentary) and of course the 1966 original Yule Log for television.
Avoid: “Kaminfeuer von OfenBernd” (it starts out simply, but then Meditation from Thais makes its appearance) and “Video Fireplace (The Original)” (this is a LOOP! inauthentic! an embarrassment to the entire yule log video industry)

© CAS 2012