Rake’s Progress video
I’m working on a set of videos for The Rake’s Progress. Here’s part one:
Doug Balliett – Valentine by Jacob Druckman
My dear friend Rene Pinnell shot video at our Casa Neverlandia show in January, and I finally got my hands on the footage. Here’s Doug performing Jacob Druckman’s terrific Valentine. More videos from Alcestis and Babinagar coming soon.
Alcestis / Babinagar Living-Room Tour
Doug, Alison and I (Mollie had the flu!) performed Alcestis and Babinagar in Houston, Austin and San Antonio. Over four days, we performed for over 180 people, including an unforgettable night at Kay and Talbot’s stunning Casa Neverlandia. We are planning our next tour for March 13-21; if you would like to host a house concert, please write me an email!
Alcestis
ALCESTIS
by Doug Balliett
Alison Fletcher, voice
Doug Balliett, bass and voice
Mollie Marcuson, harp
Elliot Cole, harmonium
Download, share and enjoy. Where are we performing next?
Night of the Giant
One of my projects this summer was writing a score for a new John Harvey play, Night of the Giant. I’m really proud of the result: about an hour of music in a wide variety of styles for oboe, cello, clarinet and harmonium.
I also got a bit of press! From the Houston Chronicle:
Elliot Cole’s original score proves an unqualified success — nicely played by Melody Yenn (cello), Amanda Witt (clarinet), Lauren Winterbottom (oboe) and the composer on harmonium. Moody and evocative, it draws on classical chamber music influences yet manages a sound of its own, suited to this play’s weird world.
There are three more performances of the play — more info here — but possibly also some house concerts in the works. Stay tuned!
Four (for Xenia)
I wrote this piece for the fantastic pianist Xenia Pestova:
Listen:
It was performed along with many other short pieces for piano or toy piano, all of which can be heard on her website.
Thanks so much to Xenia for the opportunity – and many happy returns.
Children of Herakles, Around Hear
- Image via Wikipedia
Two upcoming events:
The Children of Herakles opens tomorrow! Produced by the UH Center for Creative Work, this rarely staged Euripides drama features a new translation and poetic setting by John Harvey, Richard Armstrong, original music by Richard Power, and choreography/direction by Katelyn Halpern. I play Iolaos, aged guardian of Herakles’ exiled children. We seek refuge in Athens, hoping their idealism and piety will move them to defend us from Herakles’ nemesis, Eurystheus. It’s an unusual Greek play in that the typical tragic mechanisms, hamartia, hubris, fate, are mostly absent. Instead, the Athenian ideals are at stake – piety, hospitality, democracy, protections for the weak, due process. A war with pragmatic Mycenae, who equate justice with strength, raises the so-familiar question: how do we deal with brutes without becoming brutes ourselves?
Most chilling – both for its ambiguity and its uncanny understatement – is the ending. A last-minute oracular revelation reverses everything we understand about who is good and who is not.
No tickets remain.
The now-annual Around Hear concert in Mandell Park is this Saturday, April 18 at 2pm. I’m playing and singing three Beatles songs I’ve re-written. Last year was great – a real family neighborhood picnic feel, kids dancing to crazy modern music, awesome. In the Houston area? Come join us!
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Rake’s Progress Sketches
Brad Balliett and I have been talking about writing a Rake’s Progress together for almost a year. We want to further explore the space opened up by our last EP, The Oracle Hysterical. We’ll keep the ultra-dense, no hooks, bazookatooth delivery, keep the through-composed hip-hop format, but we want to shift our focus from all-samples to a more original and electronic palate.
Brad’s written a terrific libretto, and I’m beginning to produce some sketches. At first I was, stubbornly, going to try to build everything in MAX/MSP myself, but at Steve Nalepa’s Ableton workshop at Caroline, I caved. I wouldn’t use it for most things, but it’s just right for this project. As long as I’m smarter than it. So these sketches are also my self-tutorials as I learn to use new software.
And I’m going to share the sketches here. Whether they’re awesome or embarrassing isn’t really the point. I’m toying with establishing an iterative heuristic for the sketching process, some kind of genetic algorithm thing; stay tuned.
Some feedback would be great. Especially angry messages about how putting classical music to a beat is some kind of travesty — they’ll be perfect in my collection of Boring Ideas that Everyone Has.
Here’s the first one. Samples from Ravel Miroirs, and Berio Glosse.
Beatles Revisions – If I Fell Sketch
I’m writing a set of Beatles revisions for a band I’m hoping to put together (harp, flugelhorn, bass, violin, you?). I like the idea of covering the band that basically ended common-practice rock and roll. The Beatles made cover bands – until then, the norm (and in classical music, still the norm) – look cheap, uncreative. If you wanted to be a band, you had to write your own songs.
But hearing covers – interpretations, variations, remixes – affords a cognitive experience that original songs don’t offer. We hear one piece of music through the prism of another. There’s a zone between faithful imitation (transparent, uninteresting) and perfect anti-imitation (opaque, uninteresting) where each sound can be loaded with commentary, relationships, surprises. We experience something similar, though less concretely, when we hear music stretch a style.
Here’s a rough sketch of my version of If I Fell:
BandCamp: How to Set Up Your Band Website with Wordpress
I gave a presentation at last weeks’ Bandcamp about how to set up your own band website with Wordpress. I put together this document for the bands in attendance; maybe it will be useful to you too, whoever you are.
Installing Wordpress
Automatic: Godaddy
(this presumes you already have a domain name and hosting account through godaddy.com)
Login to your account.
Hosting on the left.
Your account shows up in the middle: click “Manage Account” — opens new window
Your Applications
Blogs on the left.
Wordpress
Install Now
Choose Domain, Continue
Invent database passwords. You’ll probably never need them.
Fill out configuration form. You will need these passwords.
Wait a 15-30 minutes.
Go to yourdomain.com/wordpressdirectory/wp-admin/
and login using your username (probably admin) and the password you invented (in the configuration form)
Automatic: Other
Other hosting providers offer a similar solution.
By Hand: Not as Hard as it Looks
(this presumes you already have a domain and hosting account, and know how to FTP to your site to upload and download files)
(adapted from wordpress.org)
1. Download and unzip the WordPress package from wordpress.org.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it (usually available through your hosting provider’s control panel. Often the database and user are identical, and setting it up is a single step.)
3. Back in the wordpress database, rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
4. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details (the db name / username / password you just created in (2), as well as the db host address, which you should be able to find in your hosting provider’s control panel).
* Replace the sentences “put your unique sentence here” with different random strings of letters.
5. Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server:
* If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.
* If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. http://example.com/blog/), rename the directory wordpress to the name you’d like the subdirectory to have and move or upload it to your web server. For example if you want the WordPress installation in a subdirectory called “blog”, you should rename the directory called “wordpress” to “blog” and upload it to the root directory of your web server.
6. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser.
* If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php
* If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php
Setting Up Your Site
The wordpress back-end control panel (your-site.com/wordpress-directory/wp-admin/) is straightforward and easy to use. Poke around; you’ll learn fast.
A band site might be structured something like this:
Post Categories
Shows
News
Music
Pictures
Recommendations
Links
to friend’s bands
label
band members’ individual websites
etc
Pages
One with general info about the band
One for each member of the band
Settings: Reading
Front page displays: a static page (you might choose your General Info Page)
Appearance
Custom styling your wordpress site requires some knowledge of XHTML, CSS, and PHP.
Luckily there are hundreds of templates available at wordpress.org/extend/themes/
To install:
Download and unzip the template.
Upload the template directory to your-site/your-wordpress-directory/wp-content/themes/
Login to the back-end of your site.
Go to Appearance
Choose the theme you uploaded. A sample will open up; choose Activate on the top right corner.
Plugins for Bands:
Bands might find these plugins useful.
Get plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins
Installing plugins:
Download and unzip the plugin package.
Using your FTP client, upload the unzipped directory to yoursite/your-wordpress-directory/wp-content/plugins
Go into the back-end (/wp-admin/), go the Plugins on the LH side. Find the plugin you uploaded, and choose Activate.
GigPress
Manage all of your upcoming and past performances or events right from within WordPress, and display them using simple shortcodes or template tags on your WordPress-powered website.
Last.fm for Artists
Integrates your Last.fm account into your website.
Twitter Tools
Integrates your Twitter account into your website.
Podcasting
Gives you an inline music player and turns your whole page into a podcast (fans can subscribe via iTunes and whenever you post a new mp3, they’ll get it).
NextGen Gallery
Easy maintenance of photo galleries with some sleek browsing options.
ShareThis
Lets your readers easily share your posts via email, AIM, text message, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, Blogger, Reddit and many more social sites.
Social Homes
Adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all of your social homes including delicious, digg, facebook, flickr, last.fm, myspace, twitter, youtube, friendfeet etc.
Google Friend Connect Integration
Lets your fans join and create profiles and interact socially.
See an example here: http://www.socialarrow.com/
FeedBurner Feedsmith
Use FeedBurner.com to publish a subscribe-able feed of your site.
Flickr Thumbnails Photostream
Use flicker? This plug-in will let you show your flickr photos on your blog.
What do I write about?
Don’t know what to post on your blog? Let your fans work for you. Every bit of text, photo, video, audio that your fans generate is good press and good website content. Harnessing that content into your website will keep it fresh, and give visitors a sense of the enthusiasm you inspire.
1. Drop.io
Drop.io is a crazy-useful tool that can help you pool the media generated by your fanbase. With it, you can:
• Have your fans take pictures / shoot movies at shows and send them via email or upload through a drop box widget on your website.
• Have your fans call a phone number and leave a voicemail — their message (or live recording of your show) will be turned into a streaming mp3.
• Leave voicemail messages for your fans via podcast.
• Distribute mp3s and videos.
• Sell mp3s with the Paywall feature.
And as people pool their pictures / movies / audio / comments through your drop, you can distribute it to your fans via the web, sms, Twitter, iTunes and more.
How to integrate into your website:
In your drop, under Add –> More, there is code that lets you put an uploader widget on your website, making it easy for your fans to contribute.
There is not yet a very easy way to embed the contents of your drop into your wordpress site. If you wanted to patch together a solution yourself, Feedburner’s BuzzBoost would a good place to start.
There IS, however, a drop.io app on Facebook that pumps your drop into a tab in your profile.
2. Flickr / Photobucket / etc.
Do your fans use these social photo sharing tools? If so, have them tag pictures of your shows with your band name. When you look at pictures with that tag on Flickr/etc., click the RSS feed button. This gives you a URL that you can use (in combination with an RSS WP plugin like Flickr Thumbnails Photostream) to share those pictures through your site.
3. Listening
A tool like FriendFeed can be used to search across many social-media sites for talk about your band. Find fans and good comments, and write about them on your website.
4. Promoting Others
You want people to talk about you? Be in the habit of talking about them.
Where to go for help
You’re going to have questions and run into problems as you build your own website. Luckily, any problem you have has probably been someone else’s problem before you — and somebody out there has probably blogged about it.
You can also contact me (Elliot Cole) for help with any of this.
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Round: Tabatha, You Have No Remorse
For some reason, my family has produced a lot of songs about cats. I can count five or six, I think, between my sister, father and I. Ava has a new cat named Tabatha, and we sing this round for her:
Tabatha, you have no remorse, and you’ve not a shred of compunction, do you? Do you?
Igor Ballereau, Frottola
In college I sought out the very dense: James Dillon’s quartets, seemingly shaped by some invisible, torrential rush — Harrison Birtwistle’s chattering parades — Ligeti’s maniacal machines — Schnittke’s overripe pomp and savagery — Messiaen’s overpowering electricity. Esthetically, I aspired to be devastated. Intellectually, I was imagining a viscous, physical music shaped by unseen turbulence, in which density was necessary to describe and reveal those forces in higher resolution.
But I am lately drawn toward what might be called music of abegnation. I tentatively include Feldman for his infinite patience and Scelsi for his holy focus, but the Webern-Kurtag line is more central. The Webern/Viennese Trinity narrative is pretty well cemented, so I won’t dwell on it. Webern’s example is the musical aphorism – brief, spare. Kurtag’s pieces tend to be even shorter and leaner, while pushing the expressive range to extremes; it is music written not with a pencil but a scalpel.
And I have just discovered Frottola by Igor Ballereau.
Frottola is a setting of a poem by Michelangelo, for string trio, voice, piano, chimes (and, I might add, microphone). Here, the aphoristic event — an utterance followed by a pause for reflection and reverberation — becomes the rhetorical unit of a larger language. Each event is scarcely longer than an exhalation, a tiny universe of perhaps only five or nine notes. The intervening pauses tend to be equally long, and equally significant. Sound, for Ballereau, is not the rebuttal of silence, but rather its preparation. And silence has never been so ravishing.
It is slow music. But the regularity of the sound/silence cycle does establish some inertia, even though the pulse is far too slow to feel metrically. Each moment is separated from the next, but not isolated. On multiple listens, large-scale phrasing can be discerned. There are also connections across the gap — a single interval repeated or a line suggested is, in this microphonic world, grammatically conjunctive, and an epiphany for the listener. Clear relationships between details make this music legible and compelling; instruments dovetail, echo, complement and continue each other. There is so little going on, and so much to notice.
Singer Jody Pou is perfect — the kind of performer that makes one want to compose. The strings and piano have almost super-human sensitivity; each note is cared for, and played as if fully understood. The recording itself is exquisite.
Ballereau has distilled the musical aphorism down to moments of intense detail and focus. But, more importantly, he has formed it into a language that can be meaningfully sustained over a long period of time. Frottola elevates the ‘pregnant pause’ from melodramatic cliche to its own modality, a clearing for deep and sumptuous communication.
Frottola by Igor Ballereau
Voice, Jody Pou
Piano, Emily Manzo
Chimes, Joe Bergen
Violin, Calvin Wiersma
Viola, Danielle Farina
Cello, Chris Gross
You can listen to Frottola and several other pieces by Ballereau at SHSK’H.
Metropolis Ensemble: Rake’s Progress
July 6, 2010Our hip-hop opera The Rake’s Progress has been picked up by the Metropolis Ensemble for a concert this December in NYC! Brad and I have retreated to the woods in NC to write the score. Date and details coming soon –