From Yultchieva to McComb

While googling for the frustratingly scarce information available about Monâjât Yultchieva, the Uzbekistani vocalist who very well might rank as my top pick for female voice outside of the untouchable Dagmar Krause (though the aesthetic gap is so severe it's useless to compare them!), this afternoon I discovered a resource that demands to be immediately broadcast here in the Bagodrome. Billed as Medieval Music & Arts Foundation, it's a well-organized set of reference materials on not only the West and Central Asian music I yearn for commentary on, but also personalized mini-guides to a glistening swath of other geo-traditional music, with a burgeoning emphasis on the well-trodden territory of West European post-religious and academic musical traditions. The overriding specialization is a general concept of classical music, a nebulous and mostly sociologically determined narrowing of traditional music. While not nearly as comprehensive, the site shares the spirit of the Improvised Music from Japan and European Free Improvisation sites that most Baggers frequent. It's all the work of a single eminently knowledgeable individual, though, one Todd Michel McComb, and that's where things get really interesting.

McComb has invested himself in far more than a reference work based around his personal musical journey. As a fully separate part of the site, between the years of 1997 and 2003 he generated a regular series of op-ed essays—some 150 or so in total—filled with far-ranging philosophical musings on music. Skimming what amounts to a book-sized lode of inspired text analogous to Edwin Prévost's No Sound is Innocent, I'm struck by two things. One, the essays are densely hyperlinked to each other, truly capitalizing on the potential of the internet for novel forms of textual organization, and ideally framing the speculative, tangential, openly searching nature of the content. I find myself reading bits and pieces of the essays in a whimsical path of clicks on the tantalizing hyperlinked phrases, often reading in fruitful circles. Second, McComb's frame of reference and worldview is by and large bizarrely bereft of intersection with mine despite tackling topic after topic that has long equally sustained my own comas of contemplation. He dwells on a conceptualization of "art music", but appears quite innocent of recent art music (which is mostly improv), the meat-and-potatoes of Bagocentric discourse. Medieval European music and Indian classical music appear to be his most favored sources of grounding in musical particulars. While I suspect I would vigorously disagree with McComb on most points were our paradigms even commensurable, this is fascinating reading I'll be clicking my way through in plenty of future sessions. McComb is a maverick of internet music commentary worthy of comparison to Bagatellen's own (temporarily inactive) Joe Milazzo.

To give a flavor of these self-described editorials, in his ruminations on the general concept of musical fusion in Fusion II: Inevitability & chaos, McComb asks "Other than the chronological precedence of medieval music as a basis for unifying styles, another obvious creative pole presents itself: Totally unbounded sound complexes, the "noise" phenomenon, a reinvention of form from outside any traditional constraints. The mind finds order in randomness, by its nature, and moreover, such "free" forms usually stabilize on some sort of order (the scale forms of Xenakis come to mind). If subsequently perceived elements are retroactively identified with various world traditions, is such a thing fusion?".

Curiously, the editorial section of the site requires registration to access. McComb explains himself thusly: "I like to keep this section of the site a little more private. Search engines cannot get into it, and people are not jumping randomly into the middle of a complicated series of thoughts. It also helps me keep track of some of these ideas. There is no fee, so I hope that you do not see it as a big hassle." It only took me a few seconds and it really isn't a hassle at all, but I tend to think this maneuver violates the spirit of the internet in unnecessarily secluding these texts from the emergent pond of discourse we can learn new ways to swim in. Besides, after accessing this archive, "jumping randomly into the middle of a complicated series of thoughts" is precisely what I did!

I'm delighted to see McComb shares my intense fascination with Giacinto Scelsi's music, and his Scelsi page is a treasure of extensive commentary and even offers a thorough discography for this woefully underdocumented body of work! Bravo!

By the way, Monâjât Yultchieva's Ocora release Ouzbekistan: Ferghana Maqam is probably my all-time favorite recording of traditional music in any style, though there's some Mingus albums that run neck-and-neck. I'll limit myself to this simple statement because I don't know how to even begin talking about her singing on this album, which I've played dozens of times over the past nine years in a state of stillness and rapture.

~Michael Anton Parker