Haleh Abghari, in memory of; Ben Boretz @ 90; Frank Brickle @ 70

Musicans: please send your proposals for this event and help nail down a time. I propose Loft393 in Tribeca, some evening Between November and April.

Haleh was one of Frank Brickle’s dear, dear singers –

And Haleh did a lot of my recordings –

Frank is a pioneering postmaximalist on that island of stranded assets, an island of lost toys – the island of mellowing pre-spectral modernisms. (See Terry Eagleton’s *The Ilusions of Postmodernism*)

And Frank was one of Ben Boretz’ greatest fans, helping to explain his significance to the uninitiated. Frank’s *The Creation, a Towneley Mystery Play* is deeply connected to Boretz’ discussion of Petroushka, within his Metavariations.

Ben Boretz is an achiever in many areas outside the meta space. He is an inspiration for those who celebrate open space, for those trying to overcome splenetic ideologies.

ON GOING ON

Then and now

Artistic idealism isn’t like political idealism because it doesn’t imagine itself as a path to a destination. It explicitly eschews knowing where it’s going, but fantasizes that its engagement will lead to states of consciousness precisely imagined from any point of entry into the space of the work. Because it is essential to its nature that it doesn’t know where it’s going.

Stalker - Tarkovsky’s oddly shambooic fantasy - renders palpable some of this state of perpetual indeterminacy simultaneous with continuous revelation through evolving consciousness…..

[“On Going On” is below, in its entirety, with ben’s permission.]

ON GOING ON

Then and now

Artistic idealism isn’t like political idealism because it doesn’t imagine itself as a path to a destination. It explicitly eschews knowing where it’s going, but fantasizes that its engagement will lead to states of consciousness precisely unable being imagined from any pint of entry into the space of the work. Because it is essential to its nature that it doesn’t know where it’s going.

Stalker - Tarkovsky’s oddly shambooic fantasy - renders palpable some of this state of perpetual indeterminacy simultaneous with continuous revelation through evolving consciousness…..

So, Meta-Variations:1969: Did I even realize how my heart was blazing on my sleeve…as much as I knew that every word had been emblazed on my consciousness by the insistent assault on my inner ear by the accumulating voice of this text, beginning at the beginning of Parr1 (the introduction came at the end) and insisting through on every word of its unstoppable torrential word-inundation until, having evidently exhausted itself, it deigned to subside. But it was jim who called me out in 1971 as a dreamer of transcendent but unpredictable consciousness-states, when I pretended to myself I was just telling it like it was.

It was Compose Yourself that told us not who we night want to be but who we inexorably already were by virtue of what we had chosen to do with our lives.

This was our commitment, even if we didn’t know it explicitly and couldn’t quite have articulated it before Jim Randall told us what we were really all about, refocused our way-of-life consciousness through the inlet of a quote from the composer Al Damiels, on the first page of Compose Yourself: a manual for the young:

Concerning extramusical behavior, the composer Al Damiels once asked me an interesting rhetorical question:”What code could I need, or even have any use for, that didn’t arise directly from the activity of composing?”

He made it clear to me how he ontologized what I was about in his characterization of Meta-Variations in Compose Youraelf:

A diminished seventh chord which can be heard as

[that’s right, gramps: the one that delisvered the mustache ™, back there when flicks really flicked, {yes. Ma’am, and successfully impersonated Death (4) in over two hundred cantatas of J. S, Bach,right before Albert Schweitzer saved Africa [right on, brother-sister, the one that Ben Boretz generated the Tristan Metaprelude out of (- generating cycles, cycles of cycles,cycles of cyclecycles, layers

can be heard

…within metalayers; burying an Old Warhorse and resurrecting

a new world,

can be heard as

a new way of constricting, of imagining – a New Soicing

of Space & Time, brothersister; the Old Slicings not merely

Can Be Heard As A Just Previously

not merely around sisterbrother, but dissovedmetavaried, and the New rig-}

… .

]APPENDIX

-orously imagined, lovingly defined,(–not
postures, but reconstruction within, sisterbrothers;

–not slogans, but reconstruction without

(–metavariations,

Brithersostered,

(sotherbrtisters)

Our way of life, resorted and reflected back to us by Jim’s visionary re-visioning, his outside-insight. It was from Compose Yourself that I came to understand that Meta-Variations – supposedly the foundational studies of where our musical cognitions were located, was actually a pologemena to a sub-study, its epistemological investigations now seeming without ontological grounding, an awareness which impelled Of This and That and Mirages I, II, Iand III. And then the real life-altering flash: that all of this was a description of acts of attribution, that our thinking around and about music was inexorably creative of that music, and of music generally, that its ultimate virility was ontological,that it was the ultimate creator of that nwhich was being experienced, and that this ontological creativity was implicit in everyepisode of music reception (“…as music enters me…”). So it was not merely that Compose Yourself taught us that what we were doing was not so much a way of llife as a definitive determinant of what life was experienced as – in any sense that matters, what it is. These, Ji’s and mine, were epiphanies lurking within all the work we had been doing , composing and writing, why we always looked for the inmost particularity of every thought and configuration,and pursued musical thought as a means to discern and experience how each musical entity and event was unique and ultimately sui generis – we were, frankly, pretty uninterested in how anything insyantiated what cold be reified as the class of things to which in the gross public world it tended to be assigned. What Meta-Variations and then Compose Yourself did for us (that’s who they were for; and it will always be so) was smash the glass floor limiting our depth consciousness and our capacity to maximize the specificities of individual experiences. What they were publicly were invitations to our community and whoever else fo do likewise, find their own “deep listening” mindset, make their ownmusic/life relevance and liberation (as I more or less wrote in the text of that name in 1987).We didn’t get there b way of John Cage, but we were in that sense undoubtedly his brothersisters (how we got there by way of Milton Babbitt is a more interesting story, and as to do with somethong about how people learn from their parents and what happens with that eventually).

And it was only by the strength of the epistemic/ontological instights of MV/CY, the liberation of our convictions as to the anatomy of musical sense-making – along with a strengthening and deepening set of critical real-world social affinities and allergies – that we were able to convceive the unprogrammed conversational sound-making sessions – our “deep listening” without an attitude – as acompelling musical way of life – a way which we both lived almost exclusively for about ten years, from 1980 to 1990, and which revolutionized our modes of interaction with our student and collegial communities, our living and creative environments.

The way in which all this counts as “idealism” can be simply located in the transcendent conviction that what we could envisage we could try to effectuate; and that the inhibitions we might have used to impede ourselves were probably not that formdable (but you have to really not want what your practices will make counteravailable).

In the end, of course, what you’re left with is the music, and the texts. But they are in no way what it is that you’re left with.

Likely related, with thanks to musicologist Alejandro Barcelo:

“Prior to all theory the world is given. All opinions, warranted or not, popular, superstitious, and scientific ones — they all refer to the world already given in advance. How does the world give itself to me, what can I immediately articulate about it, how can I immediately and generally describe that for what it gives itself, what it is according to its original sense, as this sense gives itself as the sense of the world itself in “immediate” perception and experience?…

…All theory refers to this immediate givenness, and theory can have a justified sense only when it forms thoughts that do not run counter to the general sense of the immediate givenness. No theorizing can contradict this sense. What is the world? It is what I find through describing and theorizing, and theorizing is only the continuation of describing, being a more broadly encompassing describing. To seek for more has no meaning.”

Edmund Husserl

“The Basic Problems of Phenomenology”, Appendix III