Hailing, Preamble, Syllabus, Projection

On the first and third Tuesdays of each month, I meet with a local arts group. We share our own work and discuss it. We also discuss the age-old difficulties of the life creative, but, to my relief, not too much so. Occasionally, if a participant does not have anything of their own to present, he or she may talk about an artist, a specific piece, or even a discipline that has had a significant impact of his or her own work. In the past -- and we have only been meeting regularly since March of this year -- the group has had the opportunity to see / hear / study Ellsworth Kelly, Li-Young Lee, Hiroshi Sugimoto (I keep promising myself I will write a Bagatellen. entry on his work and its relationship, as I see it, to the music of the other Sugimoto), Andrei Tarkovsky, Thelonious Monk, The Rg Veda, Joseph McElroy's Hind's Kidnap, and the lithographic process.

Tonight, rather than reading from one of several "things" I have in progress, I am going to talk a bit about contemporary improvised music and "eai". The reasons are several: there has been little discussion in our group so far of music; we have discussed improvisation in the abstract once or twice; in making casual mention of "avant-garde" music (Cage, Feldman, Lachenmann, Cardew, etc.) to some of my colleagues, I have noted a certain resistance to the very idea of it; most significantly, whenever talks in our group turns to the notion of the transcendent, the religious, and the sacred in art, I find my mind and my own comments sending me back to this music.

I'll be making some off-the-cuff remarks, dropping some names, and referring folks to places on the web such as Paris Transatlantic and the Erstwhile site (they already know about this place). I'll also be reading a few of the notes I have scribbled here at Bagatellen, as the questions Dan, Alan, Brian and others have posed here have helped me considerably in firming up my own sense of what this music is, how it operates, and what it does. (I, for one, think it does do something.) Finally, I plan to run the Keith Rowe / Toshimaru Nakamura footage from balance beams.

Ours is a diverse group. I am only one of two writers who regularly attend. Several photographers, musicians (a classically-trained vocalist), painters, filmmakers, digital animators, and those involved in the theater arts (acting, design, etc.) are also usually on hand. I am curious to see what happens once I engage them on the subject of these sounds. I hope to be able to report the results shortly.