The... BlueDawe Blog

Lyotard and the Art of Welson Repair

2012-01-01T12:15:00.003+11:00

A friend recently called me 'a reclusive sausage'. Well, yes. But I have work to do, and it is consuming work. Consuming of time and space, and of myself. For this, I need much solitude, and it is true that over the years I have gradually made myself less and less available for socialising, and more amenable to alone-ness.

"Solitude", wrote Dorothy Parker, quoting she does not say whom, "is the safeguard of mediocrity and the stern companion of genius"; a disturbing thought. If there be only two states of self-companionship, and only two outcomes from such - brilliance or banality - then one's work is already doomed. My own capacities lie somewhere in between these antipodes, and surely there is room for what Steinbeck called "this necessary selfishness", meaning his withdrawal from human intercourse to write his novels.

Steinbeck kept a journal while writing 'East of Eden' in a handsome fat ledger-style book given him by his publisher, Pascal Covici. (How wonderful to have someone of importance so interested in oneself, and in one's future work). He used the journal as 'an arguing ground' for the writing he was about to produce, either that day, or very soon, as well as comments on the doings of his wife and family, reminiscences, and other vagrant thoughts.

I have decided to keep a journal of a journey that I have started. It will be, I hope, a journey towards fulfillment.

It begins with an illness, and will end with... well, I don't know.

At present, it involves the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, and a malfunctioning 1969 Welson electronic organ. I hope to grasp the one and reanimate the other. And there is a connection between them, as I shall presently show.

2011-11-25T12:48:00.001+11:00

Mumma Get Outta That SUV!

2010-07-29T09:12:00.001+10:00

Words and music © Stephen Gard 2010
Registered with APRA

Down in our village
In a quiet street
We got a elementary school
Where the kids all meet,

Sit together in the class
Study gettin' along
But one thing they be learnin'
I think very wrong:

Every schoolday morning
‘Bout nine-twenty-nine
Thirty-three jeeps
In a conga line
Jeeps roarin' down the lane
Like the bat outta hell
Mummas droppin’ kiddies
Just in time for the bell!

(Chorus)

Oh! Mumma, get out of your S-U-V
Lose ten pounds off your B-U-T-T
Get good exercise stretching your leg
Walk your kiddies to school.

Mumma, get behind that pram and push
Shed some circumference off your tush
Smell the flowers and the fresh-cut grass:
Walk your kids to school.

(Spoken)
You got a cute little name on your licence plate?
Got a sticker on your bumper tellin' thing you hate?
Got a 'Baby on Board'? Now ain't that sweet!
Mumma, set your baby on his own two feet.

Chorus (instrumental)

Verse 2

She a real good Mumma,
She the best kind of wife
But I think she missin' out on
The good time of her life

She jam her kiddies
In the back of the Hummer
Speed downtown,
Late for school – what a bummer!

Chatter all the time
On the cell-u-lar phone
While she drivin’ the jeep
And the kiddies all alone,

Sittin’ in the backseat
Watchin’ their screens.
Mumma, you ain’t teachin’
Your little ones beans!

Chorus

O! Mumma get outta that four by four!
Walk your kids from door to door
Talk with your chillun about the big wide world,
While you’re strollin’ to school.

You spendin’ too much time
On the laptop computee
Just addin’ more
To your B. double-O. T.
Why drive to school,
Then drive to the gym?
Work out walkin' to school!

(Spoken)

Mumma don’t teach your kids be lazy,
They can't cross a street!
Mumma – that is just crazy!

Come on, it ain’t rainin’ ev-er-y mornin’
Get up early, girly – and glory in the dawnin’

Mumma, climb down from that S-U-V
Work some lard off your B-U-T-T
Get more exercise swingin’ the Nike:
Walk your kids to school.

Come on, jump down outta those big black Jeeps!
Walk with your kiddies and teach them heaps.
Tell them all about the world around,
Hikin’ together to school.
Trampin’ together to school.
Chattin’ all the way to school.

Spoken

What’s that you sayin?
You ain’t got the time to walk your kids to school?
You too busy?
Too busy to give your kids a life?
I don’t believe what you say.
I think you talking through your A-double-S-E-T.

Click and listen to this song here.

Chill out... er, dude.

2010-07-15T13:39:00.000+10:00

'... maybe smoke a cigarette you've made yourself and chill...' 'Good to go'?

While I uploaded some music files to site, here's how I was chilled after reading some brain-dead text there:

________________________

Hello? Anyone on this site over the age of 22? No grown-ups at all, huh? Oh, well.

Still, the expression 'Don't touch that dial' is something of a give-way. When was the last time you saw a TV with a dial? Or a radio? Or a phone, for that matter. Hey, you were just being all postmodern and retro. You are all only 22 here at GarageBound, aren't you?

Hey, why must every uploaded musical work here be dubbed a 'song'?

Hey, why do so many pop musicians have the vocabulary of chimpanzees? Starting every third sentence with 'Hey'... some kind of spurious informality, disarming bonhomie, as phony as a Fender Squier... like the over-use of the dated verb 'chill'

Hey, I'm just writing all this while my 'song' uploads.

Hey, would you call the Eroica a 'song', by the way? The Eroica.

Er-o-ica.

It's a symphony.

Sym-phon-y.

By that old dude Bee-tuvven. You know, Tom Hulce played him in that flick, what is it - Amarillo? That crazy guy Scarlatti killed him. Cute - killed him, but with overwork, booked him for too many gigs, Beetuvven had no cash so he took 'em all on. Had to write a musical about a giant snake and some stuff for this guy's House of Worship, whatever. Great plot.

It's total crap, historically, but did that ever trouble Hollywood? Ever seen the original stage play? Nothing like the movie. Doesn't pretend to be anything but a crazy fantasy, a romp, like 'Shakespeare in Love'... but subtlety from Hollywood? Nyet.

No, I think it was Mozart. That deaf cat. Or was it Mahler? No. Mozart. Norman Mahler is dead, I reckon. I've got this cool t-shirt with his face on it, someone's face anyway, could be Einstein, maybe Zappa, who knows from all these old dead foreign-type guys, anyway I got it at a garage sale from this slob my hand to God he weighed 300 pounds and played the lute with his toes. Reached me my change in a butterfly net. Ignatius J. 'Dunces' Reilly in the flesh, hunting cap and all, and we thought you were a fictional character

Is my 'song' uploaded yet?

Hey, if I chill any more, I'll be like a ice-man, that Uzzi they dug out of a glacier in like Australia or one of those Europe places, we went there on a school tour in like the tenth grade, it sucked they didn't even have a Walmart, lol.

This guy in the iceberg was like 100,000 years old and nude, but he had a grass skirt, so it proves how people evolved at the same time as vezdubles, so plants and stuff are like our equals and should get a mention in the constertooshn.

I wrote that in my report and got a C, but no-one throughout the universe, as you say, can prove I'm wrong, ay.

Still goin'?

I could of written in the whole entire lyrics to 'Like a Rolling Stone' here like eight times, hey my 'song' is only like a 3 MB file, hello?

Won't be uploadin' anything else. I wrote and recorded it in less time than this...

The Century of the Common Man - enough, please.

2010-04-24T09:12:00.000+10:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/may/24/news.comment

The Diana Blues

2010-04-17T09:40:00.000+10:00

Lyrics © Stephen Gard 2009

Music © Stephen Gard 2009

Realisation © BlueDawe Stud 2009

When I woke up this morning,
I went right back to sleep again
Well, I woke up this morning,
And I went right on back to sleep again.
Yes, I woke up this morning,
And I turned over and went right on back to sleep again

(Have mercy.)

Well, I woke up and I looked out the window
And I buried my head right under the sheet
Yes, I woke up and looked out my window pane
And then I hid my head right under the sheet
I see old Lady Trouble out there,
Standing on the footpath in my street.

(Lord be my witness)

Well I didn't wake up this morning
'Cause I couldn't get to sleep last night
No, I didn't wake up this morning,
Since I never got to sleep last night
Now, I didn't wake up this morning
No, I never did get to sleep all night.

(Tell it, brother)

Yes, I got the Diana Blues
Those terminal, germinal, Diana Blues
I'm Diana meet her
Diana greet her
I'm Diana unrequited lerrrrrrrrv
Lord, free me from these Diana Blues
And let me get back to my early morning snooze.

(Right on, man)

Lord help me, Lord, help me with my Diana Blues!
When I woke up this morning,
Diana had stolen my shoes.
Lord help me with my Diana Blues
When I woke up this morning,
Diana had stolen my shoes
And if I can't get over my Diana Blues
At least let me get back to sleep again.

(Amen)

Listen to The Diana Blues sung by Cobalt O'Delft.

Le Diable et le Pont

2010-04-15T07:16:00.000+10:00

Lyrics © Stephen Gard 2009 (Grâce à M. Christian Sauvage)

Music © Stephen Gard 2009

Realisation © BlueDawe Studio 2009

La fleuve Lot,
Comme c'est profond,
Si froid, féroce, déchaîné.
Mais les habitants,
De la ville de Cahors,
Ont démander à leur architect
Un pont des pierres
Haut comme un chateau.
Si grand, si fort,
Pour défendre la ville.

Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.
Un pont avec trois tours hautaines!
Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.
Trois tours, et deux chatelets.

Alors, Le Lot entra en colère!
"Mon cours, vous ne toucherez jamais!
Si vous posez ce pont
Sur mes rives si belles,
Je le ruinerai,
La même journée,
Et je noierais vos ouvriers frémissants!
Si vous faisiez un chose
Si effrontée."

Un, deux, trois, quatre - cent!
Une centaine de fois
Je vais inonder la ville!
Vous vous sentirez
Ma fureur si vous osez!

Hélas! Le Diable
Se tapir tous près,
Il chuchoté au architecte
"Je vais vous aider!
Pour un prix modeste,
Je charmerai Le Lot."

"Dîtes-moi", démandé
L'architecte doucement,
"Quel est le prix pour votre aide?
Je ne suis pas riche!"
"Quand le pont est fini,
Vous devez me donner votre âme."

Pierre sur pierre,
Voici le pont de la hausse de haut.
Comme Le Lot reste calme!
Le Diable lui a envoûté.

Enfin, le pont a été complète,
Complet, sauf une pierre
Mais l'architecte,
Jour après jour,
Il a exclu
La dernière pierre.
Le Diable est devenu très en colère!
Chaque soir, il a mis en place la pierre.

"Allons, monsieur l'architecte,
Vous ne pouvez pas échapper au paiement!"
"Mais, mon cher Diable,
Je suis désolé,
L'autre jour, j'ai oublié de mentionner,
Je suis un architecte mais... vous ne savez pas?
Un architecte n'a jamais un âme!"

Ainsi, encore une fois,
Le Diable est tout à fait vaincu.
Il s'accroche au pont Valentré,
Attend d'un architecte,
Il cherche un architecte,
Lui manque un architecte...
Avec une âme.

Rusty Fent's : Ballad of the Ute Muster

2010-04-08T13:05:00.002+10:00

Lyrics © Stephen Gard 2007.
Music © Stephen Gard 2007.
Production © BlueDawe Studio 2007.

Well, when I went down
Down to the Ute Muster,
Every bloke there
He had a ute.

Yes when I went down
Down to the Ute Muster,
Well, every bloke there
He had a ute.

2.
And every ute there,
It had a ‘roo bar.
Yes, every ute there,
Had a bar against ‘roos.

And every ute there,
It had a ‘roo bar.
So every ute there,
Had a bar against ‘roos.

****

3.
And every ‘roo bar
Had fifteen antennas;
There were fifteen antennas
On every ‘roo bar.

Yes, ev’ry ‘roo bar,
Had fifteen antennas;
Fifteen C. B. antennas
For ev’ry ‘roo bar

4.
And every bloke there
Had a bottle of Bundy.
Yes, a bottle of Bundy
For every bloke there

Yes, every bloke there
Had a bottle of Bundy;
A bottle of rum,
For every bloke there.

****

5.
And every bloke there
Wore boots like a cowboy.
There were cowboy boots there:
Each bloke had a pair.

Yes, every bloke there
Wore boots like a cowboy’s.
There were jackaroo boots:
One bloke to a pair.

6.
And everyone there
Had a ten-gallon Stetson.
A big Stetson hat
Was on everyone there.

And even the sheilas
Wore a ten-gallon Stetson,
But the hats of the sheilas
Their Stetsons were red.

***

7.
And the utes of the blokes,
They were covered with stickers,
On the windows and tail-gates,
And on the roo-bars.

Yes, the utes of the blokes,
They were covered with stickers:
On the back window-pane
And on the tail-gate.

8.
And some stickers I saw,
They advertised Bundy.
And some stickers I saw,
They advertised boots.

And some stickers I seen,
They advertised Stetsons.
And some stickers they had,
They advertised utes.

***

10.
But one sticker I seen,
Was from a Ute Muster.
A Ute Muster sticker,
Was a sticker I saw.

It proved that this bloke
Had been to a Ute Muster:
This bloke and his ute,
They’d been Mustered before.

11.
So I’ll never go down,
Down to a Ute Muster.
No, never no more,
To a Muster of Utes.

No, I’ll never go down,
No more to a Ute Muster.
Well, a muster of utes:
What a mob of galoots.

Listen to Rusty Fent's sing this song right here

Rusty Fent's - Little White Japanese Table-top Truck

2010-04-08T12:30:00.001+10:00

Lyrics © Stephen Gard 2007.
Music © Stephen Gard 2007.
Production © BlueDawe Studio 2007.

Spoken:

You know, every Aussie bloke needs a best mate.
An Aussie bloke's best mate might be another Aussie bloke.
It might be an Aussie dog, it might even be an Aussie woman.

And yet, you know, in this multi-culpable Australia where we all live today, an Aussie bloke's best mate might even be an Asian - might even be a piece of machinery!
My best mate is a piece of Asian machinery. And maybe yours is, too.

My best mate, is a faithful, willing, hardworking, sturdy, affordable...

Sung:

Little white Japanese table-top truck
You see them all over the show,
Little white Japanese table-top truck
With a driver who's on the go.

A little white Japanese table-top truck
With a tray or a can-o-py
Little white Japanese table-top truck
And a bloke rushin' home for tea.

Recitation:

Well, plumbers, surveyors, gyppos and sparks
Use a little white Japanese truck.
Brickies, chippies, rangers in parks
Choose a Japanese table-top truck

Renovators, estimators, Dingo operators
Drive a Japanese table-top truck
Pest controllers, grass unrollers, power polers, fence-post holers
All own a Japanese truck

Sung:

Little white Japanese table-top trucks
Take a load out to the tip.
Little white Japanese table-top trucks
Take the kids down for a dip.

A little white Japanese table-top truck
Helps a mate who's movin' home.
A little white Japanese table-top truck
Holds a tonne of garden loam.

Recitation:

Now parcel toters, plastic coaters, building quoters
Want a Japanese table-top truck.
Panelbeaters, concreters, groundkeepers, roadsweepers,
Need a little white Japanese truck.

Bathroom tilers, wharf pilers, landscapers, bottom-scrapers,
Get a Japanese table-top truck.
Cabinet makers, antique fakers, lawn rakers, junk takers,
Have a little white Japanese truck.

Sung:

Nissan, Mazda, Toyota
The Aussies have all bought their quota.
Subaru, Datsun, Suzuki:
From Groot Island, right down to Dookie.

Never mind all that talk of Kokoda
I just worship a four-cylinder moda
Inside I go utterly squishy
If I see a brand-new Mitsubishi...

Sung:

Little white Japanese table-top trucks
They're crawling all over our nation
Little white Japanese table-top trucks
From city to outback station.

Little white Japanese table-top truck.
'Real Aussies drive utes!' they remind us.
Little white Japanese table-top trucks:
Those days are now far behind us.

Recitation:

Well, driveway-pavers, life-savers, sign-writers, firefighters,
Buy a Japanese table-top truck,
Oxy-welders, stallion gelders, floor moppers, tree loppers,
Lease a little white Japanese truck.

Part suppliers, scrap-buyers, water-proofers, shed-roofers
Like a little white Japanese truck.
Sandblasters, metal-casters, gutter-menders, house extenders,
Love a little white Japanese truck...

Listen to Rusty Fent's sing this song right here:

Rusty Fent's : The Heywood Tractor Parade

2010-04-08T12:04:00.004+10:00

Lyrics © Stephen Gard 2009.
Music © Stephen Gard 2009.
Production © BlueDawe Studio 2009.

I came to town one Saturday

To buy a pair of Blunnies

And a fairish crowd was gathered 'round

Which seemed a little funny.

So I got me boots from the Co-op Store

And hurried down to see

Just what this Heywood gathering

Might ever prove to be.

Forty antique tractors,

Had come here for a meet!

They were lining up a half-mile long,

To roll down Edgar Street.

Chorus

There were tractors rolling down

The main street of the town

A sight that was a true delight,

And mighty good to see.

Forty antique tractors

Some restored real good

Parading by with heads held high

On the highway at Heywood.

Some were fixed and painted perfect

All polished, nice and clean,

And I even saw one tractor that could run on kerosene,

Some were rusty, some were muddy,

But they all were running beaut

And every tractor-driver wore a great big grin, to boot.

There were Fordsons, there were Farmalls

Massey-Fergussons by scores

Inter-nat-ion-al and Fiat,

John Deere, and Case and more!

And a snazzy-lookin' outfit

From a mob named Deutz-A-Fahr

New Hollands and McCormicks

Just hear those engines roar!

Chorus

Tractors rolling down

The main street of the town

A sight to stir the citizens:

Old farm machinery.

Forty antique tractors

Some restored real good

With a hey! and ho! and P.T.O.

On the highway at Heywood.

They passed Markham

They passed Lindsay

They passed Scott and Hunter, too

As they turned into the Woolsthorpe Road

I shed a tear it's true...

Spoken:

Such grand parade of tractors

On that sunny Saturday!

If it wasn't for me Blunnies

I'd have prob'ly stayed away.

Chorus

Tractors rolling down

The main street of the town

A stirring sight of rural might,

And mighty nice to see.

Forty antique tractors

With flags all round the hood

A bloke could choke from diesel smoke,

On the highway at Heywood.

Listen to Rusty Fent's sing this song right here:
See the video clip on YouTube right here.

Rusty Fent's : You Can't Sing Country Music...

2010-04-08T11:45:00.003+10:00

(... unless You're Wearin' A Cowboy Hat)

Lyrics © Stephen Gard 2009.
Music © Stephen Gard 2009.
Production © BlueDawe Studio 2009

Now, I got out my old black Gibson,
And I strummed up some new country songs.
About folks with lives gone tragic,
About love, with its hurts and its wrongs.

Then I sent off a disc, with my snapshot.
And a note: 'Sirs, I'm hopin' you're well.
Here's some songs that I spun from the skin off my heart,
And I know they'll be hits you can sell.'

But my disc, it flew back like an arrow
With a letter that let loose my tears.
They said, "Son, we are likin' your numbers,
But we can't sign you up, we're a-feared.

You see, we looked at the photo you sent us,
(You're a handsome galoot, that's a fact!)
But wise up, Joe, you got no show,
'Cause you don't wear a ten gallon hat."

Chorus

Well, you can't sing country music
Unless you're wearin' a cowboy hat.
It ain't never allowed.
You'd be booed by the crowd.

No, you can't sing hillbilly ballads
You can't yodel or nothin' like that.
You can't make country music,
'Less you're under a cowboy hat.

Now the pop music kids, they dress crazy;
They wear anythin', long as it's weird.
Cats doin' jazz, they do Raybans.
Them folkies just grow them a beard

The classical symphony people,
They dress like up in black, like a crow.
If you're longin' to blow down the bag-pipes,

You just wrap on a kilt and let go.

You can can wear a fringed jacket, and Levis
And boots with those heels that are high,
A vest all shiny with sequins.
A shoelace instead of a tie.

You can wear a red shirt with blue pockets
With fancy white piping and that,
But you can't be a country musician
'Til you're wearin' that stupid big hat.

Chorus

No, you can't be a country singer
Unless you're wearin' a Stetson hat.
Never mind how you sound,
If that hat ain't around.

You can't be a country artist,
'Less you're wearin' a ten-gallon job
You just won't get that true rural feelin'
Without a big cowboy hat on your knob.

So I went and I looked on old eBay
And I chose a hat tall, wide and mean
And as soon as it come, I said 'Son of a gun!',
And I pulled it right over my bean.

Then I rushed off and looked in the mirror,
And I fainted flat out on the floor.
Cause the dude that comprised my reflection
Was no dude I'd encountered before.

See, I looked like a hick, and a loser,
A chuckle-head Rube, and a jerk,
Like a red-necked, gun-totin' yokel
Lackin' women, and kinfolks, and work.

But that's how you play country music:
That's how you climb to the heights!
You just dress like a dumb, two-bit cowboy
And your name will be up there in lights.

Chorus
No, you'll never make country music
Unless you're sportin' a cowboy hat.
It don 't matter no-how

If you ain't never seen a cow.

No, you can't do bluegrass pickin'
Or thrum on that old dobro
You can't do country music,
You won't learn country music,
You'll never get no spot on the Opry

Unless you're wearin'... a country hat.

Listen to Rusty Fent's sing this song right here.

Camp Melodious

2010-02-06T09:12:00.000+11:00

Just dug this out of my archives; wrote it when at the Con few eons ago:

Camp Melodious

(To the tune of Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours,
and with a bow, of course, to Mr Alan Sherman)

Greetings Ma,

and brother odious,
I repine at

Camp Melodious.
There are nerds here

in profusion;

Let me share with you my sense of disillusion.

You remember

Phillip Deemer?
Horn, with chronic

emphysema?
Half-way through our

Opening Gala,
He dropped dead while playing something loud by Mahler.

Our conductor

is a bully,
Says our hides and

heads are woolly,
Screams about our

intonation,
And we hear he does sick things with his Alsatian.

We rehearse out

in the meadow
Which is bad luck

for Jane Beddoe.
While attacking

Liszt's 'Bohemian',
She was bee-stung, now it seems it's turned toxaemian.

Fetch me home,

O mummy dearest!
My worst

nightmare's

coming nearest:
Weeks of geeks,

and Harry Potter freaks,
With specs.,

and dandruff on their bow.

Bring the Saab!

I undertake to
Practise hard,

and not watch Foxtel.
Don't leave me

under the tutelage
Of creeps

who rave about John Cage.

Thoughts of home are

at me nibbling -
How's my fragrant

younger sibling?
I'm the worst here

at sight-reading,
But the nurse says I'll improve when I stop bleeding.

Wait! There's Rachel

(cello section).
She just winked in

my direction!
What a skimpy

little dress...
Family, kindly disregard this SMS.

Power Crazy

2010-01-29T09:09:00.001+11:00

The slow and careful experimentation with the Brokendorfer (working title for my hand-built analogue synth, also known as the SINph) proceeds slowly and carefully. As previously not advised, we are now working on the innards of a Galanti (aka GEM) F3 electronic organ.

At present, the challenge is to create a power supply for the beast. I accidentally killed the PSU cum audio amplifier that came with it, probably due to creating a short in one of the logic boards that I attempted to resurrect, but in any case, I dislike mains-powered devices, because 240VAC scares me; I've been bitten a few times.

At first I strapped 9V dry cells together and injected their current at various points in the circuit, which worked for a while. The organ's boards require a 9VDC, as well as a 30VDC supply - the hardware is 1976 vintage, so there are still plenty of hefty old transistors and other discrete components to fuel - but tiny domestic dry cells, torch or transistor radio batteries, can't cope with the current. The master oscillator (tone generator) board alone draws 150 mA. And besides, the terminals of dry cells are not easy to solder together in series - 'impossible' is a word that might apply here.

Then I suddenly thought of plug-packs, wall-warts, call them what you will. Those fist-sized plastic boxes that today power so many domestic (and other) devices.* Being a house of techoids, we have a plethora of them, and I do mean 'a dangerous excess', not 'plenty'. I found a box of them, like discarded placentas, in The Shed ® (R 18+) (sinister strings tremble low), the Things which they once powered having long expired, and fished out a 9VDC and a 48VDC wart. All I'd need to do with the 9VDC unit was attach it to the organ circuit where the original supply line left the PSU; the 48VDC pack, however, would need a dropping resistor, I'd need to revisit Ohm's Law, I'd need to rummage among the dusty component boxes in The Shed ® (R 18+) (sinister strings tremble low), I'd need courage because at the naughty end of the device was 240VAC...

I commenced with the 9VDC wart. I measured its voltage with my cool new DMM (Digital Multi Meter, let's talk the talk, k?) and got 11 volts, so it was an unregulated supply. One of the objectives of this project is to reconnect me with electronics theory and practice, with touch which I am out of, and I now had to learn how to build a voltage regulator.

(Irony - you've got to love it. Until May of 2009, The Shed was crammed to its cobwebby ceiling with electronic junk, waiting to be cannibalized. I threw it - nearly - all out in the Bi-Annual Council Clean-up. And now I want it back. )

I did manage to find an LM350 3-terminal regulator in the guts of a dead thing I picked up while walking the dog, during the week of the Bi-Annual Council Clean-up (Irony - you've got to love it). The manufacturer had a downloadable data sheet, with some sample schematics, so I built my first ever 9VDC regulated power supply. That's it at the left, with the white wall wart above feeding.

Pretty it ain't, work it did - sort of. I couldn't get more than 6VDC out of it when it was harnessed to the Galanti tone generator. And the oscillator tone was poor. Finally, I twigged. The white wall wart's label promised that it could deliver 100mA tops. The Galanti needed more.

I was back to Square 1, so I hurried forward to Square 30, the provision of 30VDC from a 48VDC wall wart.

Ohm's law says E = I x R, which is all very well, but I didn't know what I =. An algebraic expression with Two Unknowns was beyond me back in Third Form, and it's beyond me now. In Third Form, I just guessed the answer, and I believe these old traditions should be upheld, so I guessed 200mA.

48V - 30V = 18V. Which resistor would produce the required voltage?

R = E/I. (I didn't work that inversion out, I looked it up.)

Therefore R = 18V/0.2A (that's 200/1000. Units have to be in amperes or a fraction thereof.)

Antwort = 90 Ohms.

And the resistor would have to be a big sucker, too. Not one of those girly 1/4 W resistors you get from Tricky Dicky, like tiny glossy coloured sweets, but something the size of a garden slug that could deal with a current flow of hang on W = I squared times R, that's 3 point something watts, point 6, nearly 4 watts crikey.

So I ratted through one of the bits of gear I didn't chuck out, a military field telephone testing device, built in the mid-60s, and found a 100 ohm resistor as fat as my little finger. Then I took the 48VDC supply and cut off the plug that used to plug into whatever it once powered, a scanner or something, and I took the DMM (talk the talk) and found out which wire was + and which wire was the other one, and marked tjhe + with red automotive insulating tape. The output voltage was 49VDC. I connected my 100 Ohm resistor to the + wire, the one as fat as a finger, and mear

* (Was it not McLuhan who said, 'A great many things have happened in the Twentieth Century, and most of them plug into the wall.' No, it was someone else. That guy. Him. Timothy Leary. Buckminster Fuller, maybe. No, I tell a lie, I found it in Teaching as a Subversive Activity when I was at Macquarie. Postman and Weingartner)

Down our way, we call this 'blackmail'

2009-11-03T16:01:00.001+11:00

This just in, from one of the sites where I upload some of the music I create:

To: All Basic IAC Members

IAC is about to undertake some revolutionary changes and we wanted to keep you fully informed.

When the site began, our emphasis was on finding the best artists we could, to bring to the site. This was how we developed our reputation as the indie leader in quality music. Later on we changed our focus to bringing the numbers of artists in as a better financial model to keep the site up and running and make various improvements over the course of time.

Now, the principals at IAC have determined that the best path to distinguish IAC from the many sites out there is to return fully to our roots. We never intended to be an mp3 parking lot where a lot of hobbyists could toss up any songfile almost as a storage function. We want listeners to be able to know when they enter the site, that they are arriving somewhere that at least the first level of filtering has been done for them, that there will be top notch songs at every turn and not a lot of pages without music or containing artists who took little to no effort in either writing or recording their music.

Thus, we are going to be performing a grand purging of a fairly high percentage of artist pages on IAC, to transform the site into a vetted situation which will only house worthy artists and those who actually do their part in supporting the site. All the basic pages like yours will be evaluated and only 1 of 10 will be kept active on the site, and the others will be removed. However, one way of getting around this is to become a go Prime and become a supporter of the site, and you can still do that at the current low rates. The cost of Prime membership will be approximately doubled when the new system is implemented..."

So - pay up, or be labelled a 'hobbyist' who takes no care...?

Those are the only choices?

Goodbye, IAC.

EuroMusic Volumes I, II and II released.

2009-10-09T10:41:00.004+11:00

At last... three years in the making, and now available for free, on-line listening and download - new music by Stephen Gard, in a variety of genres, from the soundtrack of his travel doco. 'The Gards in Europe', available on DVD.

Stephen Gard: EuroMusic - Volumes I , II and III

Volume I - Listen/download here:

http://www.last.fm/music/stephen+gard/EuroMusic+1

Volume II - Listen/download here:

http://www.last.fm/music/stephen+gard/EuroMusic+2

Volume III - Listen/download here:

http://www.last.fm/music/stephen+gard/EuroMusic+3

Copies on CD of EuroMusic (all 3 Volumes) are FREE.

Please send an e-mail with your postal address to request your FREE copies.

Special offer: the first 5,000 sets of EuroMusic Vols I-III will not be autographed by Stephen Gard! Hurry! This offer can't last!

And thank you for listening...

Stephen Gard

Il Trio Braggadocio

2009-09-04T11:58:00.001+10:00

What is it that the Sicilians say...? Or maybe it's just Mario Puzo. But it's true that revenge is a dish that is best eaten cold.

I went to a rehearsal of my piece 'Threebs'. Il Trio Braggadocio comprises two highly talented babes, clarinet and cello respectively, and a pianist, Clayton Bunge. Bunge is also a hancho of the Faculty where I studied for the last four years. He is in charge of the Music course. He it was who, I believe, awarded a mark to my thesis that was just a shade too low for me to get First Class Honours, and hence I got no scholarship for 'grad. school', as the Vespuccians would call it. This down-sizing of my marks was due to internal Faculty politics too convoluted to relate here: suffice to say, through no fault of my own, I got caught in the cross-fire, and retired, hurt.

The rehearsal was choice: Bunge hadn't practised the piece. He fumbled. He flubbed. He faked. He begged for the tempo to come back down the box by several gears. He grumbled about small infelicities in my score, which was still a first draft - he'd never asked me for a new one, and I had since polished the notation somewhat. The girls poured vast quantities of abuse on him as he fluthered through difficult rhythmic figures; they hooted at him, that the music students he supervises must be a sorry lot if he himself was such a woeful sight-reader, and one who would not sufficiently rehearse. I stood stone-faced by his left shoulder, having been pressed into service as page-turner, and inwardly I rejoiced. How the mighty are fallen. Judge ye not, Bunge, that thou be not judged. Small of me, wasn't it? I loved every second of it. Bunge humbly promised me that it would be All Right on the Night. I enjoyed that humility, and was understanding and compassionate towards him, and sang Bach Kyries all the way home in the car. Loudly.

Next week. The leader of the group, clarinettist Grizel Budlipp, insisted that Il Trio Braggadocio perform their selection of new works in public before proceeding to the recording studios. She arranged a small concert in Blancmange, an atmospheric Soho-ish enclave with its feet in Sydney Harbour, of tight and twisty back streets, peopled by writers, photographers, producers, journalists, university lecturers, and similar hand-wringers and neurotics. The concert was to be given in the paint-peeling chapel of the Sorrymonti School, a Dickensian pile of high, gloomy corridors and mute brown doors, now plastered with the scrawls of children with names like Zarquod, Dasbie and Phamblish, spawn of these affluent ersatz hippies. We were ten minutes late arriving, due to fog on the top of the Pass slowing down freeway traffic, not to mention finding parking amongst the agglutinations of Range Rovers and black Mercedes compacts. Il Trio Braggadocio held the curtain for us, which was decent of them. A small but partisan audience had turned up, and there was a nice baby grand.

My piece was first horse out of the barrier. The tempo was freeway-bumper-to-bumper-through-the fog. Bunge fumbled. He flubbed. He faked and he fluthered... But the audience liked it, and Bunge humbly promised me that it would be All Right on the Day. I enjoyed his humility less this time, and began to be a little troubled, but I was forbearing and gracious towards him, and sang Bach Glorias all the way home in the car. Freely.

Next day. The studios of the DEF. In fact, the same vast room where my piece for the SOS was recorded under the baton of the phlegmboyish Guichard Raoul. Two delightful, gay engineer/producers. Tea. Biscuits. Bosendorfer grand, big as a battleship. Warm and friendly welcomes and amusing chatter. I was pressed into service as a page-turner, for all five pieces, which they were to record in three (!) hours.

Threebs was first cab off the rank. The tempo was one notch higher than last night. Bunge fumbled. He flubbed. He faked and he fluthered. The producer, a polite martinet, stopped the trio again and again, and did re-takes. He sternly pointed at that my score was quite clear about tempi and dynamics, and these too often were being ignored. It took Braggadocio an hour and twenty minutes of their allotted three hours to record my six-minute piece. I stood at Bunge's left elbow, turning pages, and watching the sweat oozing out onto his naked scalp. He said he was coming down with the 'flu. He said he couldn't concentrate. He said the studio was overheated. He quarreled with small blemishes in the score, although I'd brought him a newly-minted copy, with all his previous grizzles corrected and suggestions incorporated, but he wouldn't play from it. He said "it would only confuse him".

(Cellist Riley Judah was in fact in mid-flu, and looked like a corpse, but she sawed away at 'Threebs' with verve and precision.)

I began to be amused. This music business is still the same as I remembered, back in the early 1970s, when I was recording my film score in a commercial studio. The musicians fumbled and flubbed and complained about the score, and the producer pulled them into line. Bunge's feet of Clayton no longer made me feel superior, I began to be genuinely disappointed with and even sorry for the man, as an exposed phony. We got through half of the rest of the pieces before being told to pack up and get out, but by this time Bunge's playing had improved, and the sweat had gone away, because both of these works were familiar to him, and simpler than mine.

On the train home, I sang a Bach Agnus Dei, joyfully. The people in the other carriages joined in with gusto.

I have no idea when Threebs will be broadcast. "Sometime later this year," said the DEF producer airily, his gold ear-stud winking in the gloom of the booth.

The Faded Flower

2009-09-04T11:55:00.000+10:00

Blossom Dearie died in February of 2009.

I stopped reading newspapers years ago, as well as watching live TV and listening to radio, so I hadn't known until I Googled.

I was a fan of Blossom's until the late 1970s. I had all of her records that I could obtain, and played them frequently and with great pleasure.

Then, two things happened. First, she released her 'Winchester in Apple Blossom Time' album which I found sentimental and self-indulgent. There were too many wistful, solo ballads - where were the pulse, the quick, dry wit and deftness of songs like 'I'm Hip', 'Peel Me a Grape' and 'My New Celebrity is You'?

(Or 'When in Rome' or 'A Jazz Musician' or 'I'm Shadowing You' or 'Sweet Georgie Fame' or 'The Shapes of Things' or...)

Secondly, I heard her interviewed on national Australian radio by one of her biggest on-air fans, John West, a well-known ABC presenter who'd been a Blossom Dearie champion for decades, and made Australians aware of the excellence of her work. She was unbelievably rude to him! Egotistical, ungracious, snappy. West wanted to talk about her importance as a jazz musician, her development and contribution to the art. She was just plugging a new album. Play another of my tracks, fella.

Okay, maybe she had a cold, or had broken a fingernail, or Pan-Am had given her food-poisoning, who knows? But that interview cost her a fan. It seems she had ceased being a creative musician, and become a celebrity. Oh Dearie, Dearie me.

When she played with a trio, Blossom swung like the lantern on a freight-train caboose. When she started to take herself too seriously, I lost interest. I still get out 'From the Meticulous to the Sublime' and groove on 'Hey John'... but after that, the flower faded for me.

She was a great artist, not a virtuoso pianist, but a fine one. And her singing wasn't bad, either.

Typed Up Notes

2009-09-03T11:22:00.001+10:00

Thwarting. Sabot thrown in machinery. Luddite. German bombs sabotaged by slave workers.
Deconstructing incidences of technology - dismantle, challenge, destabilize, thwart. Defuse authority
Answering back - limited choices of the machine provided to we users - see Baleani discourse re cheap music, easy to learn, thus commodified. Hammond advert of 1960s. Interrogation the rhetoric of the 'living room' musical instrument.
Replying to perfection - begged questions; device complete and requires no participation form user, who merely operates it.
2WKT-FM - untalented presenters preferred by the less intelligent and education section of our audience; the presenter's very incompetence and gaucherie seemed reassuring to them. cf tapes of 2NBR from Aunt Lessie: the C&W presenter who was just awful.
The obscurantism of microtechnology = convenient, but secret, inscrutable. Snug and smug. Superior.
Electronic music, being a new genre, is as yet still absorbed in means, rather than ends.
There seems more engineering than aesthetics, more artisanship than artistry.
Form has either been abandoned, or ignored, or deliberately defied, due to the philosophical positi0n on iconoclasm (echt Modernity, cf Lyotard and others. New = Good. Old = bad) or nihilism. New sounds must be presented in a new form. Disobedience. cf the rage of the Futurismo manifesto.
cf the current crop of stand-up comics. They don't tell jokes, their act is a formless ramble from one anecdote or comment to another. The Deluezian 'rhizomatic' network instead of the heirarchical hegemony of tradition and structure. Cleese 'They just start writing funny lines, no plot.'

Write to Warren Burt about his calculator music.
Welson becomes Bentstein, Steinbent, Yamahack, Brokendorfer
Impro: experiment ought to lead to development: ideas that spring up should be then isloated and developed and nurtured into whole works, but experiment, ephemerality, the moment, the experience, have replaced planned and reprodublei works, or at least have attempted to stand as their equals.
Note 'table-top' guitar and 'mixer' noise artists: what else can the machine do apart from what it is intended to do
Junk scuplture. Was this a figure-ground exercise, simply seeing another object, a visual pun? Or was it anotehr kind of rebuttal of technological primacy. In the USA, ski-jumps made from hills of refuse.
Quote about contemporary Americans merely wanting to have experiences, not engagements. Keillor?
Being successful without the hard yards required for mastery and attainment. The moment is all that matters. Too many things to engage with, art becomes a theme park of short thrilling rides, akin to junk food: nice while you're eating it, but you cannot live on it. It doesn't nourish.
'Any sound you can imagine' - revisit biblio, revisit this book re his rationale for the requirement fro new sounds.
Serial techniques - hoping that by accident new and unimaginable conjuctions will be found - and that these will be of interest! cf Cage and I Ching and all aleatory musics.
Cage as a phenomnon of response, rather than as a composer: 'Schoenberg - an inventor of genius'
Abrogation of the responsibilities of artists: interpretative, explicatory. Johnson: an author's job is to help us better able to understand life, or else endure it.
Trahaison des Clercs.

The Anxiety of Influence

2009-08-17T13:14:00.002+10:00

Placeholder for notes on this concept - key writer is Harold Bloom

The Mystery of Distance

2009-07-27T11:55:00.001+10:00

This is the header for the notes I made in Hobart after reading of Miletus and then scanning the town with binoculars. Written notes transcription to follow.

What's Inside (Notes)

2009-07-18T11:20:00.003+10:00

Exploring the interior of instruments one plans to circuit bend.
What about such 'archaeology'?
Traces of those who assembled the instrument.
Signatures, production markings.
Repairs
Replacements
Dirt and dust from environments.
The components, their provenance and markings, signs of human error or emotion.

A contact with the human, over the technological;
a triumph over time.
subverting their efforts; enhancing? Ameliorating?

Traces of the attitudes/expectations of the day?

Music created using authentic instruments - contact with the maker and players of these instruments gives the music authority?

The London Consort of Surgeons.

This is a classic piece of sophisticated musical humour. Does anyone know the provenance of this cartoon? Where first published? Cannot read signature of cartoonist in this gif, so can't Google. I saw it first as a photocopy in a bookshop.

(If you don't get the joke, then your musical education has been tragically neglected.)

Roland Kirk

2009-07-18T09:49:00.000+10:00

Wikipedia:

"Kirk played and collected a number of musical instruments, mainly various saxophones, clarinets and flutes. His main instruments were tenor saxophone and two obscure saxophones: the stritch (a straight alto sax lacking the instrument's characteristic upturned bell) and a manzello (a modified saxello soprano sax, tuned to C, with an upturned bell). Kirk modified these instruments himself to accommodate his simultaneous playing technique.

He typically appeared on stage with all three horns hanging around his neck, as well as a variety of other instruments, including flutes and whistles, and often kept a gong within reach. Kirk also played harmonica, English horn, and recorders, and was a competent trumpeter. He often had unique approaches, using a saxophone mouthpiece on a trumpet or playing nose flute. He additionally used many non-musical devices, such as alarm clocks, sirens, or a section of common garden hose (dubbed "the black mystery pipes"). His studio recordings also used tape-manipulated musique concrète, and primitive electronic sounds (before such things became commonplace).

Listen to this audio clip · (info)

Rahsaan simultaneously playing flute and singing, punctuated with a siren whistle. (audio help)

Listen to this audio clip · (info)

Rahsaan playing black mystery pipes. (audio help)

Listen to this audio clip · (info)

Rahsaan simultaneously playing multiple saxophones. (audio help)

Kirk was also an influential flautist, employing several techniques that he developed himself. One technique was to sing or hum into the flute at the same time as playing. Another was to play the standard transverse flute at the same time as a nose flute.

Some observers thought that Kirk's bizarre onstage appearance and simultaneous multi-instrumentalism were just gimmicks, especially when coming from a blind man, but these opinions usually vanished when Kirk began to play. He used the multiple horns to play true chords, essentially functioning as a one-man saxophone section. Kirk insisted that he was only trying to emulate the sounds he heard in his head.

Kirk was also a major exponent and practitioner of circular breathing. Using this technique, Kirk was not only able to sustain a single note for virtually any length of time; he could also play sixteenth-note runs of almost unlimited length, and at high speeds. His circular breathing ability enabled him to record "Concerto For Saxophone" on the Prepare Thyself To Deal With A Miracle LP in one continuous take of about 20 minutes' playing with no discernible "break" for inhaling. His long-time producer at Atlantic Jazz, Joel Dorn, believed he should have received credit in The Guinness Book of World Records for such feats (he was capable of playing continuously "without taking a breath" for far longer than exhibited on that LP), but this never happened.

The Case Of The 3-Sided Dream in Audio Color was a unique album in jazz and popular music recorded annals. It was a two-LP set, with Side 4 apparently "blank," the label not indicating any content. However, once word of "the secret message" got around among Rahsaan's fans, one would find that about 12 minutes into Side 4 appeared the first of two telephone answering machine messages recorded by Kirk, the second following soon thereafter (but separated by more blank grooves). The surprise impact of these segments appearing on "blank" Side 4 was lost, of course, on the CD reissue of this album. These spoken-word segments reflected the tenor of the times, so to speak, with the rather pessimistic theme that humanity had "blown" its chance to live in a world of peace and harmony. But this was entirely in keeping with the fact that, despite his loss at an early age of his sight, Rahsaan was very much on top of societal developments, racial and economic injustice and disparity. Indeed, he had participated many years previously in protests against the failure of TV show hosts like Merv Griffin to hire any non-white musicians.

Jeff 'Bomber' Baxter

2009-07-18T08:53:00.000+10:00

Only in America can an expert rock-guitarist become also a missile deployment expert:

From his wkipedia page:

"Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident. In the mid-1980s, Baxter's interest in music recording technology led him to wonder about hardware and software that was originally developed for military use, i.e. data-compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices. As it happened, his next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to an aviation magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular. He became self-taught in this area, and at one point he wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He gave the paper to California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began.
Backed by several influential Capitol Hill lawmakers, Baxter received a series of classified security clearances. In 1995, Pennsylvania Republican congressman Curt Weldon, then the chairman of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee, nominated Baxter to chair the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense.
Baxter's work with that panel led to consulting contracts with the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He now consults to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as for defense-oriented manufacturers including Science Applications International Corporation ("SAIC"), Northrop Grumman Corp. and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. He has been quoted as saying his unconventional approach to thinking about terrorism, tied to his interest in technology, is a major reason he became sought after by the government.

"We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles,"he has said. "My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at."

ACMA 05 Artist Talk

2009-07-14T14:55:00.000+10:00

carriers: an archaeology of the airwaves

abstract

The radio frequency spectrum remains a rich source of audio material for the composer of electro-acoustic works, particularly the motoring sonori-ties of utility transmissions; such radiosonics can easily be generated from a laptop, using freeware.

the project

My album 'Carriers' was both an experiment with 'glitch' or microsound music, and the bounty from fifteen years of short-wave radio listening. The audio material was gathered with commu-nications receivers, by tuning across the entire High Frequency spectrum (from 1.6 MHz to 30 MHz), seeking the odd and beautiful sonorities that haunt the ether: the chatter of data links, the whine of carrier waves, the chuckle and splash of static, the monochrome pipings of Morse, the background hash from stars, and the Babel of voices from broadcasting stations in a hundred tongues. Western nations have largely abandoned communication via the High Frequency radio spec-trum in favour of the Internet and satellite links; HF radio is still used by emerging nations, many of whom employ antiquated equipment and modes; by amateur operators making experimental transmissions; by defence, aviation, maritime and emergency services; by clandestine and espionage stations. This tumulus of signals makes short-wave radio listening a kind of techno-archaeology; perhaps even electro-anthropology.

the materials
Radio and Music are sister arts. Radio has long served as handmaiden to her more strident sibling, providing mode and medium for spreading the Muse. Yet Radio has her own songs and her own voice. And Radio's scale is cosmic.

Radiosonority has polyphony, polyrhythm, ostinato, gesture, dynamics: elementals of modern musics. The 'meaning' of a stuttering radio signal, bearing data, may in truth be banal (measurements of flow inside a gas-pipe, for example), but such info-stammer can also be heard as a signifier of wonder, delight, and alarm. Words, spoken in a language we do not understand, are another kind of 'data transmission', the meaning of which is inaccessible. These are pure 'carriers', a musical, rhythmic, sometimes even beautiful aurality, even when their content is negative, violent, sad.

Music can occupy our minds, but Radio can occupy the universe: electro-magnetic elvers, spawned from the first clumsy sparks of Marconi's savage spitting transmitters, or the latest silky Digital Audio Broadcasts, still writhe outbound past the limits of our galaxy and our imagination.

fore-runners
Contemporary composers, notably Cage and Stockhausen, have employed short-wave radios as aleatoric instruments; artists like Boards of Canada include short-wave samples in their elec-tro-Techno works. The receivers used for such pro-jects are often domestic sets lacking the Beat Fre-quency Oscillator circuitry that enables the de-modulation of additional modes. Nor can such re-ceivers access frequencies above 30 MHz, where the most specialised utility modes are used. New digital modes and devices offer us fresh sound-crops to glean.

gather
Composers can gather radiosonic materials from purchased or borrowed communications receivers. They can seek the co-operation of amateur radio operators, or surf the ‘Net for downloadable sam-ples. See my website for guidance: www.stephengard.com.au/ACMC05.html

generate
Software packages, some of them freeware, are available to generate encoding tones for dozens of digital data transmission modes. Links to down-load sites are on my ACMC05 website. Composers can craft their own ‘shortwave’ sounds, perhaps use these programs for performance. Sonification of text, data and images is possible in a re-discovered dimension, radiospace. An extended technique - new sounds, from old instruments.

ISCM 2006 Entry

2009-07-14T14:47:00.000+10:00

In his earliest works, Stephen Gard had experimented with tape and sound collage, and he now continues this exploration with the compositional possibilities of musique concrète.

For fifteen years or so, Stephen Gard experimented with amateur (‘ham’) radio, becoming increasingly interested in the unique sound-world of the short-wave bands. He also managed a community broadcasting station, writing, producing and presenting many programs, discovering the possibilities of radio as an art form, in its content, and in its technology – the ‘medium’ itself.

Stephen Gard’s electro-acoustic works have been heard at concerts and festivals of electronic music in Australia, and New Zealand, and on Internet radio. He has been invited to present an Artist Talk about his radio-based composing at the next Australasian Computer Music Conference, to be held at the Queensland University of Technology in July, 2005.

Programme note:

‘Babel’ is a sonic essay about the listening Australian ear, alert and tuned to the busy tongues of the globe. Remote, upside down at the bottom of the world, Australia is a vast cultural antenna, feeding greedily on electric messages from the far and busy civilisations that spawned it. Ever hungry to belong, still hesitant to believe, the Australian ear half-mocks and half-admires the cultural clamour from the nations of this world.

This fourteen minute work is a collage in musique concrète, gathered from short-wave broadcasts. For a composer of electronic works, the short-wave bands are rich in polyphony, polyrhythm, dynamics, and gesture, a mad meld of announcement and musics and utility stations rattling out data, spiced with static-crash and star-hiss, with the wonder of the unknown, and the mystery of distance.

Radio voices, speaking in a language not understood, have an acute musical appeal. With meaning absent, vocables reveal their percussive and timbral possibilities. Chains of blunt or lilting syllables can be wrought into arresting melodic phrases, obbligati and ornament.

‘Babel’ was fashioned from this aleatory tumult to express the wry response of the Antipodean ear to world radio, that blind, impudent, magical ambassador of global One-ness.

Aesthetical Connection with the Theme of the Festival.

Radio has no borders. Radio is everywhere on our planet: its frantic waves have invaded even those places where no human has yet set foot, silent spaces where no audience hears. Radio is an invisible envoy with a roving brief. Its myriad voices stir wavelets of acculturation that lap every shore.

We have little control over radio waves, and even less control of what a listener may understand from what is heard. In this, radio as a social code is akin to music: no composer can know what any individual listener will ‘hear’ in their music. Music is not an international language, but every nation hears it as a language. Music bears a cultural freight that can entice even a listener who cannot understand it.

Globalization, like radio, cannot be controlled. It is an ungovernable force generated by the energy of communities, radiating and migrating without plan. Because it is organic, the progress and effect of globalization are as incalculable as the weather. And like the weather, globalization can only be studied, endured, enjoyed.

Waves of globalization are refracted through every community, and emerge with fresh phases and resonances. The fear that ‘cultural imperialism’ will poison a community’s uniqueness dissolves when nations, human-like, grab from the cultural caravan only those stuffs and trinkets that appeal, and flaunt them in their own style.

A community’s response to globalization is voiced through its arts. Art can conceptualise, summarise, make evident. The arts give a people ways to think about and declare themselves and their way of being. Artists can never be controlled by globalization. Art’s impulse shapes cultural currents, both local and distant. The fury, grace, arrogance, and whimsy of art strides through continents with the swiftness of minds that grasp some radiant new proposition about the world and its contents.

The radio receiver is an Australian cultural icon, and wireless pioneering is in our blood. Tyranny of distance has always made us hungry to hear what is happening with our neighbour, and away in the ‘real’ world of ‘overseas’. We are always both excited and afraid of what such messages may mean for us.

The whole of Australian culture is a giant ‘receiver’: we are not well-placed, either geographically or politically, to influence strongly the course of world affairs. But we have always been keenly aware and interested in global doings, and often are able, from our very remoteness, to take a clear and objective view of them.

When the Australian ear hears the Babel of globalization, its response is characteristic of our culture: wry, amused, alarmed, reserved; intent, and intelligent.

*    Year of composition and duration of the work.

‘Babel’ was composed late in 2004, and is 14 minutes and 17 seconds long.

*    A recent photo of yourself

Sent via e-mail 6 June

*    Score x 2 - all performance materials must be submitted. (AMC has the score already)
*    Recording (AMC has already)

Second copy posted to you 6 June 2005.

*    All necessary information/documentation relevant for judging by the International Jury (e.g. a recording, a score, a scheme of the total system, a list of equipments)

Radio is an intimate medium; good broadcasters aim their programs at a notional individual listener, rather than at a mass audience, as in a concert hall . ‘Babel’ is therefore best experienced using high-quality stereo headphones. However, stereo loudspeakers, properly placed for best reception of a stereo image, and preferably in a small, acoustically ‘dead’ room or theatre, could also be used, rather than a large public space, where reverberation would make some of the sonorities muddled, and the multiple elements, the ‘polyphony’ of the piece, less easy to appreciate.

Radio and cultural identity rough notes

2009-07-14T14:44:00.002+10:00

Down at the bottom of the wordl. Australa seems a funel for every clutire draingin away from the old and the new worlds

Babel is a musique concrète essay about the Australian ear, listening to distant voices with apprehension, envy, admiration, eagerness, dismay, disbelief

Ausyralians monmoculturasl, at best two languages, one lfrom home and one learenbd as school.

Euroepans often speak severla alnhaguesm, and make shift with severla others. To an Ausyralian raised in a the monocuktuyral enviromenent that rpevailsed when I was young, thetorrent of cuktures and labgaues is both

Langauges which are unitleeltigible are artisically, musically interesting. Each has its own rhythms, gestures, pulses, characterisyic motifs and cadences. They are enoyabke as opure medium, =wherther or not one grasps the message. And arriving with the ;andguage is sa sub-carrier with a historical spectrum, densisyt, - one can sense a nations; story in its vocables.

The many dialects of the Chinese mainland seem more sonorous and tuneful, more graceful in motion than the jerky rhythms of English. One argues an unbroken proveance prvoence of mileenium, a polishe4d and sonorous tonuge: Englsish, nervous, t jagged wfrom waves of invasion and greedy consumption of other tongues.

Just a wlittlwe wry and yet naive and hopeful., albeit a mass media-polished sophistication that has its roots in a culture and rough and energetic as a Showground axeman.

Radio and Cultural Identity

2009-07-14T14:43:00.003+10:00

Points

1. Radio has no borders
2. Globalisation is making for a borderless world.
3. The mass media are a significant instrument of globalisation of culture.
4. Australia is an excellent example of the effect of mass media on culture, because
a. We attend eagerly to messages from the outside world to help us feel less isolated from the main currents of thought and event.
b. We are influenced by the information we receive, though our isolation makes us fearful and sceptical about it.
5. ‘Babel’ is an essay on the Australian ear, listening to the outside world with a mixture of the xenophobic cultural influences we have inherited from our long isolation, and the openness and excitement of a young nation wanting to take part, excited by the cultural possibilities we perceive.
i. We are avid radio listeners – radio is a cultural icon for Australian society. Have used it, from its inception, to learn about each other, and the outside world.
6. ‘Babel’ is a sonic essay about the listening Australian ear: afraid, admiring, amused. The Australian ear listens to a short-wave tumult, and wonders, ‘Where in all this do I fit?’ What can it mean for me, and how can I make a contribution, make myself heard?
7. Radio is everywhere on our planet, its frantic waves have invaded even those places where no human has yet set foot, silent spaces where no audience hears.
8. Radio is an invisible ambassador, with a roving brief that knows no borders.
9. Radio carries cultural freight. In a clear message of opinion and persuasion, or simply the alluring sonorities of an unfamiliar language, the concept that other voices in other rooms exist, and have something to say makes wavelets of globalisation that lap at every shore.
10. A thousand voices, each with something to say, stir wavelets of acculturation that lap every shore.
11. We have little control over radio waves, and even less control of who will receive them, or what a listener may understand from what is heard.
12. In this, radio is akin to music: no composer can know what any individual listener will ‘hear’ in their music.
13. Globalisation, like radio, cannot be controlled. It is an ungovernable force generated by the energy of communities, radiating and migrating without plan. Because it is organic, the progress and effect of globalisation are as incalculable as the weather. And like the weather, globalisation can only be studied, endured, enjoyed.
14. The energy of globalisation is refracted through every community, and emerges with fresh phases and resonances. The threat that ‘cultural imperialism’ will prevail dissolves as nations grab from the passing ‘universalising’ caravan only the stuffs and trinkets that appeal.
15. The response of a community to the influences of globalisation is voiced through its arts. Art can conceptualise, summarise, make evident the changes occurring in a culture, either by laughing at them or simply making comparisons. The arts provide a community with a way to think of, speak and portray itself.
16. The Australian experience of radio is unique. Tyranny of distance has always made us hungry to hear what is happening in the ‘real’ world, and both excited and afraid of what these messages may mean for us.
17. Overheard broadcasts, aimed at a narrow audience which does not included oneself , have a special allure.
18. Globalisation, for those who are trying to control or at least contribute to it, is an attempt at incorporation, participation, communication, and finally understanding.
19. The whole Australian culture is a giant ‘receiver’: we are not well-placed, either geographically or politically, to influence the course of world affairs. But we have always been keenly aware and interested in global doings, and are able often to take a clear and objective view. World affairs may not always immediately affect us, but our European ancestry drives us to make some contribution.
20. Artists can never be controlled by globalisation. It is their response that shapes cultural currents. The fury, grace, arrogance and whimsy of art strides through continents with the swiftness of minds that see and grasp a radiant new proposition about the world and its contents.

Radio – Invisible Ambassador

We live deep in a rich, electromagnetic soup, where the antic currents of radio energy throb through our very bodies. There may be places still on the surface of this earth where no human foot has trod, yet radio has been there already, and it is there now. When the last unconquered peak on Earth is climbed, the last jungle fastness penetrated, the last lonely secret of Pole or desert mapped, the intruders will switch on a radio, and they will hear the perpetual human clamour of music and opinions.

Radio knows no borders. It is an invisible but ever-present cultural ambassador.

Globalisation is not controllable. Like the Internet, it a phenomenon, an organic growth flowering from the

does not create culture, it disperse, focuses, freights it, cargoes and brings it, marching and brassy, through your front door. but it accelerates the mutual influence of cultures, creating a meta-culture, whose essence is a repository of responses, the story of every individual culture’s engaging with the cognate and the antithetical, discovering the warmth of the familiar, shrinking from the incomprehensible.

Cultures cannot influence one another until they are understood, or at least some element within them is, or becomes familiar, attractive, pleasing, or in some other way remarkable or appealing, Cultural elements can be misunderstood, but still assimilated

Culture means ‘a system of shared meanings’. Globalisation disperse meanings, making them accessible and familiar. In

Enclosed is a copy of my CD 'Carriers'. No portion of this 2004 work has yet been included in any concert of electronic works. The track that I think would be appropriate for the ISCM Festival is 'Babel'. It tries to express the experience of being an Australian, one of my Baby Boomer generation, listening from inside a self-contained and virtually monocultural society to a tumult of short-wave radio broadcasts, whose content is sometimes impossible to understand, which nonetheless possesses the same allure, the same mystery, the same aesthetic appeal, as works of music.

Babel is a musique concrète essay about the Australian ear, listening to distant voices with apprehension, envy, admiration, eagerness, dismay, disbelief, and wonder.

Radio listening remains a more mystical experience than television watching can ever be.

VLADIMIR USSACHEVSKY

2009-07-09T13:01:00.000+10:00

Born to Russian parents in Manchuria (now Inner Mongolia, China), Ussachevsky emigrated to the United States in 1931 and studied music at Pomona College in Claremont, California (B.A., 1935), as well as at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York (M.M., 1936, Ph.D., 1939). His early, neo-Romantic works were composed for traditional instruments, but in 1951 he began composing electronic music. He served as president of the American Composers Alliance from 1968 to 1970 and was an advisory member of the CRI record label, which released recordings of a number of his compositions. Recordings of his music have also been released on the Capstone, d'Note, and New World labels.

[edit] Teaching career

In 1947, following a stint with the U.S. Army Intelligence division in World War II, he joined the faculty of Columbia University, teaching there until his retirement in 1980. Together with Otto Luening, Ussachevsky founded, in 1959, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. While acting as head of the Electronic Music Center Ussachevsky specified the ADSR envelope in 1965, a basic component of modern synthesizers, samplers and electronic instruments. ^[1] Ussachevsky also taught and was composer-in-residence at the University of Utah.
His notable students include Charles Wuorinen, Alice Shields, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Charles L. Bestor, Ingram Marshall, Wendy Carlos, and Richard Einhorn.

[edit] Discography

"VLADIMIR USSACHEVSKY ELECTRONIC AND ACOUSTIC WORKS 1957–1972". New York: New World Records (80654-2), 2007.^[2] This is a compilation rerelease of recordings originally issued on various CRI LP's in the 1960's and 70's.

Metamorphosis (1957)
Linear Contrasts (1958)
Wireless Fantasy (1960)
Of Wood and Brass (1965)
Computer Piece No. 1 (1968)
Two Sketches for a Computer Piece (1971)
Three Scenes from The Creation (1960; rev. 1973)
Missa Brevis (1972)

"Vladimir Ussachevsky: Film Music". New York: New World Records (80389), 1990.^[3]

Suite from No Exit (1962)
Line of Apogee (1967)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEShy2QIj4U

http://journals.cambridge.org/production/css/cjohtml.css" Cambridge Journals Online

Organised Sound (2007), 12:143-151 Cambridge University Press

Research Article

Counterpoint and quotation in Ussachevsky's Wireless Fantasy

Richard Beaudoin^a1

^a1Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002-5000, USA email: rabeaudoin@amherst.edu

Article author query

beaudoin r

Abstract

Wireless Fantasy, Vladimir Ussachevsky's 4½-minute tribute to the birth of wireless radio, utilises a rich collection of sound materials, from antique spark generators and shortwave radio sounds to a recorded segment of Wagner's Parsifal. Wireless Fantasy is here examined not as much for the cultural meaning of its sources but for insight into Ussachevsky's dramatic counterpointing of those sources in real time. The analytical methodology focuses on pitch, rhythm, and timbre equally, using both standard music notation and spectral analysis to examine the contrapuntal elements in this classic electroacoustic composition. Special attention is paid to the coincidence of accent between the source materials that generates the work's climax and to the involvement of all the sources in articulating its final cadence. The larger issue of quotation within electroacoustic composition is discussed with regard to an abstract reference in the work's coda.

The Dial

2009-07-07T19:54:00.004+10:00

The hypnotic hold of radio gripped me first when I was a child of five or so. My parents owned a (to me) huge cabinet set, tall and solemn as a Gothic cathedral. It smelt of varnish and hot bakelite, its break-front facade pierced by a dish-shaped dial of yellow celluloid, across its chest a row of carved knobs like the fat buttons on a greatcoat, like the glossy chocolates in a box of Cadbury's 'Winning Post'. In its belly lay a mellow voice, confiding and self-assured, thrumming behind an arras of dun fabric and a frieze of wooden bars.

I was a curious child, make of that adjective what you will, and it was not long before I had dragged the radio away from the wall and stared into its dark interior. Orange and mauve bottles glowed there, globes of secret fire. Dull silver cylinders and bright barley-sugar wires, looped and twined and draped. The sacred heart of the radio seemed a small turreted and cupola-ed city founded on a dusty mesa of plywood, and I saw the Voice, a grey, shivering cone within a steel crinoline.

I spent, not merely hours, but years of my childhood, intent and squatting on a green squashed footrest in front of this booming big brother. I listened and was wafted to worlds, and I wondered, not only at what I heard, but how it came to be hearable, how it came to my ears, into my home, into my ken, over what reaches of dark, evening distance it had leapt towards me, the waves, the words, the warmth, the jollity, the tuneful, earnest orators, the striving violins.

When the program was over, I hungered for more adventure. I went hunting, twisting a cholocate knob, made the white whiskers of the dial sweep back and forth, spanning an alphabet soup of mysterious letters, yellow, sienna, red and cream. KY, UE, GB, FC, these two-lettered friends I knew, but what and where were XY, AY, DU, and GO? If I turned to these, I heard nothing except the lisp of an ill-tuned station nearby. Between them, there were was a kind of sandy, singing silence, with the occasional eructation of static from a storm or the eternal vault of the ether.

I span the dial rapidly back and forward, flicking faster and faster, the passing stations blipped and stuttered, a word here, an um or ah there, a laugh, a fanfare, applause, mumbling, soaring soprano, race-caller, pip-pop-stammer-thud-flub-wub-wab-fub... silence. Or rather, that restless radio silence that is no silence, but like the singing of blood in the ears, song of life and distance.

More alluring even than this babble were the extremes of the dial - I drove the pointer to its end, where no stations or letters lay, a black space of radio-sky with no letters. Here I always found a sole and indefatigable voice, mournful, like a sad clarinet, piping a simple, one note melody. Di-di-dit, dah-di-dah-dah it would weep, and then wait a few moments for a reply. None ever came, and again it would call, Di-di-dit, dah-di-dah-dah, a hopeless midnight bird in some dim forest, a doomed antiphonal plaint. Di-di-dit, dah-di-dah-dah....

Years later, when I obtained a ham radio licence, I learned that this station was a beacon for aircraft navigation, that there were many such, and that the slow song they sang was their identification in Morse code. I'd been listening to the Sydney beacon (SY...SY...SY, it was singing)...

At the other end of the dial, I'd find a kind of hollow grinding, or perhaps gurgling, like the last dribble of my bath water falling echoing away down the drain pipe - I used to put my ear to the plug hole and listen. The grinding sound, I much later learned, was Voice Frequency Telegraphy, and possibly of military origin.

Discovering the dull facts about the source of these signals did not abate their allure for me. They were remote, they were unknowable, and hence they were magical.

The Bluedog Bore

2009-07-07T10:01:00.001+10:00

Notes:

Rage Against the Machine

The newly christened Rage Against the Machine named themselves after a song de la Rocha had written for his former popular underground hardcore punk band, Inside Out (also to be the title of the unrecorded Inside Out full-length album).^[3] Kent McClard, with whom Inside Out were associated, had coined the phrase in a 1989 article in his zine No Answers.^[4]

HeartattaCk

HeartattaCk was an internationally distributed^[2] punk zine,^[3] along the lines of Punk Planet and Maximum RocknRoll with a strong bent towards hardcore punk and anti-consumerism. It was published by Kent McClard and Lisa Oglesby from March 1994 through June 2006.^[2]^[4] In the final years of its publication it remained one of the most popular zines available.^[5] O'Connor describes it as "one of half a dozen major punk fanzines in the USA during the 1990s."^[6]
Its main characteristic was traditionally seen as its refusal to review anything that has a UPC label, considering that to be a mark of consumerism. Some have felt that this has intentionally marginalized the possible reach this zine could have.^{[citation needed]} Nonetheless, the magazine became a presence in the underground music scene, and a champion of the DIY movement.
HeartattaCk published its 50th and final issue on June 30th, 2006.^[7] A number of contributors have created a new zine in the same spirit under the name Give Me Back.^[8]

^{http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/heartattackissue20.html}

^{See wiki DIY article, bricolage}

^{________________________}

1984: did anyone dare tinker with their telescreen? Before they knew it was a surveillance system. cf Internet. Find page where it says 'The sound could be turned down but not off'

Friday's child...

2009-06-19T14:20:00.002+10:00

Well, yesterday I spent with Mrs Wilkop, organising visual and musical material for her nuptial video, so today I'm too buggered to blog, but I will confide that I did decide to enter something in the Paul Lowin, so my major effort this week has been rescoring 'Les Tuileries' for chamber orchestra, and that has been very demanding, as well as alarming, since it is 3 minutes short of the minimum length for works entered. So I shall devote all of next week to furious polishing and composing a new segment, pray for me, St Cecelia, now and in the hour of our demise.

Vico - a critique

2009-06-12T15:04:00.003+10:00

"Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare, and thus comprehend, human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages – common to every nation – constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history."

Wikipedia

Vico's conclusions were made in age which predates the science of empirical historiography.
His assertions are based on his readings of mediaeval texts, which were not subject to the critical umpiring (what is the right word?) of today's scholarship
He is likely then to have had little access to info. about other societies that can be called objective. For example, Livy and Suetonius, were both Roman historians with a heavy bias evident in their works.
Who at the time wrote texts about the Jews and their history - except the Jews themselves. Where is the objective observer?
cf Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' - cyclic model.
The decline of nations is only one model of history. Another could be simply an organic becoming and transubstantiation. What we know of the Babylonins, for example, may represent the best, the essence of their culture. So they, in a sense, exist.
Anyone can detect the cycles Vico identifies in their society, but there are a muliplicity of poetics and barbarities happening simulateoulsy in any complex society - again, the 'becoming' the organic model. The 'periodisation' of human society may itself be outmoded: terms like 'Renaissance' and 'Enlightenment' may no longer be of use now: social change bing multi-dimensional and accumulative. People wearing a multiplicity of fashions in our streets; did Mozart's friends play Ancient Music?

The Welson Blog - Part 2

2009-06-12T14:57:00.002+10:00

I didn't do any work on the replacement of electrolytics today. Feeling a little zonked after four days spent on an editing/mixing/learning curve, with the new Behringer. if I don't rest, I won't be able to tackle next week's important project, which is the editing of my chamber work 'Les Tuileries' for the ISCM Call for Scores, due June 30.

Notes #1 : for week of date shown

2009-06-12T10:49:00.014+10:00

All headings need to expanded at a later date. These are set down so I don't forget them.

This week:

Ordered a book on the repair of electronic organs, dated 1971.Ordered a new monitor and swivel arm for the other G4 (it's royalty time; my ship has come in. Spend, spend, spend. BTW: we didn't get Krudd's $900.00 - we earned too little to be considered.)
This gear is needed so that I can record the mixed output from the DIGI003 to another recorder, in this case, my old G4 with the Audiomedia III card, which still works perfectly. This set-up allows me to record to and then PLAY BACK all 8 channels and record an eight channel mix to stereo final track. Otherwise, I have to set aside two tracks for the bounce. Keeping everything separate for as long as possible is a good idea.
Ordered Reed Ghazala's 'Circuit Bending' handbook. I found that Ghazala's website was established in 2000, so that I can't be accused of stealing his idea of circuit-bending toys: my installation at UOW was begun in April, 1999. Indeed, I put the movement down to zeitgeist, and it will form something of the substance of my thesis. I also found that he seemed little uninterested in any analysis of WHY he and and others wanted toi circuity bend. As he puts it:

I suppose the greatest value I see in circuit-bending, beyond the new palette, is how the art encourages fresh musical thought. It is these two aspects, the art's sound and ideas, that have kept me at the bench and in the studio for decades.

Some artists gravitate to the art due to the anti-establishment aspects, a political stance setting themselves against the standard music industry (instrument manufacturers as well as music purveyors). While conscious of the political subterfuge such an art might engender, I, on the other hand, do not see this as either unusual or particularly important - it is how our machine works.

Part again of the threshold of invention, an unstoppable force.I should mention that in my exploration of "anti-theory" I do not abandon theory as many people presume. I only question it in the way that scientists always question prevailing concepts. I cannot think theory without anti-theory, a devil's advocate, alongside. Theory has been my friend for a very long time, true. But I've found it is not the only way to think, and clearly not the only way to create."

From : http://www.anti-theory.com/texts/

cf John Cage and the 'prepared' piano; Partch's instruments e.g. the flagong; extended techniques of playing orchestral instruments. Any Sound You Can Imagine

cf the two meanings of synthesis: imitation, and bringing together to form a new entity from elements of the old. Hegelian progression.

Got down Rosenthal's McLuhan, Pro and Con from my stock of Pelicans. There's an essay in there I want to revisit, a critic's criticism of postmodern analysis, whose purpose as he puts it, seems only to prove 'That everything is something else.' cf Thurber's 'What are the Leftists Saying?' an 'unmasking the ideology'. This from the 1920s!

Rosenthal mentions the work of Giambattista Vico and in particular his theory of social cycles, culminating in, as Rosenthal puts it 'the barabarism of sensation' but as yet I can't locate the source of this quote. The point being that once this stage has been reached, societies start reaching back for simplification, and dismantling the complexity around them.

"Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare, and thus comprehend, human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages – common to every nation – constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history."

(Wikipedia)

See: the fundamental tenet of deconstruction as a critique; the death of author; all anti-authority and control gestures; Neo-Marxism.

I must order 'Ether: the nothingness' etc and explore his thoughts on radiosonic music, which post-date mine. And I did.

Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. (ISBN: 0816646449 / 0-8166-4644-9). Joe Milutis

Every culture has its own word for this nothing. Synonymous with the idea of absolute space and time, the ether is an ancient concept that has continually determined our definition of environment, our relations to each other, and our ideas about technology. It has also instigated our desire to know something irrepressibly beyond all that. In "Ether," the histories of mysticism and the unseen merge with discussions of the technology and science of electromagnetism. Joe Milutis explores how the ideas of Anton Mesmer and Isaac Newton have manifested themselves as the inspiration for occult theories and artistic practices from Edgar Allan Poe's works to today. In doing so, he demonstrates that fading in and out of scientific favor has not prevented the ether, a uniquely immaterial concept, from being a powerful force for material progress. Milutis deftly weaves the origins of electrical science with alchemical lore, nineteenth-century industrialism with yogic science, and network space with dreams of the absolute. Linking the ether to phenomena such as radio noise, space travel, avant-garde film, and the rise of the Internet, he lends it an almost physical presence and currency. From Federico Fellini to Gilles Deleuze, Japanese anime to Italian Futurism, Jean Cocteau to NASA, Shirley Temple to Wilhelm Reich, "Ether" traverses geographical boundaries, spiritual planes, and the divide between popular and high culture. Navigating more than three hundred years of the ether's cultural and artistic history, Milutis reveals its continuous reinvention and tangible impact without ever losing sight of its ephemeral, elusive nature. The true meaning of ether, Milutis suggests, may be that it can never be fully grasped. Joe Milutis is assistant professor of art at the University of South Carolina.

Readings I'm pursuing

2009-06-05T13:42:00.003+10:00

This is a bibliography of books and articles I need to track and down and read.

Radical Perspectives In The Arts (ISBN: 0140214232 / 0-14-021423-2) Baxandall, Lee (ed)

Penguin, Harmondsworh, 1972, 1972. 18.0 x 11.0cms, 390pp, very good paperback These 19 essays discuss the arts & capitalism; the arts & socialism; the future of culture and the end of 'culture'.

Locate the Frederic Jameson essay about the end and/or impossibility of innovation in the arts.

Giulio Carlo Argan

2009-06-05T13:20:00.001+10:00

Chipp. p. 461

ART AND POLITICS

Giulio Carlo Argan, Italy's leading art critic, professor of modern art at the University of Rome and president of the International Association of Art Critics, has caused a great controversy in the European art world by becoming the spokesman of these "research teams" and endowing them with socio-political ideology.

Professor Argan, making use of unnecessarily difficult language, hopes to reintegrate the artist into a modern mechanized society, asserting that technology needs the guidance of aesthetics in order to function ethically as well as effectively. This guidance, he believes, can come from the "Gestalt research groups" and he traces their history back to the Bauhaus and sees parallels in Wright's Taliesin Fellowship and Gropius' Architects' Collaborative. He is less concerned with the aesthetic results than with the sociological ramifications. The individual in his solitude can, according to Argan, no longer exist in the modern technological society and produce significant works of art. He is being swallowed by the masses, which "in their obedient inertia do not know of aesthetic exigencies and cannot produce art." The group, however, consisting of individuals in meaningful relationship to each other, can be a dynamic "community organized for creative goals."

Many of Italy's established artists, however, protested against Argan's team spirit and reaffirmed their faith in the personal statement of the individual.

Manifesto issued by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, Mexico City, 1922*

Social, Political, and Aesthetic Declaration from the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors to the indigenous races humiliated through centuries; to the soldiers converted into hangmen by their chiefs; to the workers and peasants who are oppressed by the rich; and to the intellectuals who are not servile to the bourgeoisie:

We are with those who seek the overthrow of an old and inhuman system within which you, worker of the soil, produce riches for the overseer and politician, while you starve. Within which you, worker in the city, move the wheels of industries, weave the cloth, and create with your hands the modern comforts enjoyed by the parasites and prostitutes, while your own body is numb with cold. Within which you, Indian soldier, heroically abandon your land and give your life in the eternal hope of liberating your race from the degradations and misery of centuries

* Published as a broadside. This English translation from Laurence E. Schmeckebier Modern Mexican Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1939), 31. The same translation appears in Bernard S. Myers, Mexican Painting in Our Time (New York: Oxford University, '9S6), p. 29.

Robert Simpson Extract

2009-06-05T13:05:00.003+10:00

Text from his essay 'Thoughts on Composing" in 'The Spken Word (1963

THOUGHTS ON COMPOSING

THEY say it is lucky to find a four-leafed clover, but I have rarely heard of anybody finding one by actually looking for it. Your chances of coming across one are slightly improved if you happen to be an observant person, and you can become observant by training your own faculties. But however observant you may become, your hopes of finding a four-leafed clover are still slim. It is an odd fact that many of the greatest discoveries have been virtually stumbled upon-but usually by people whose minds were in a condition to perceive them, who by training and inclination were looking in the right direction. However, the moment of revelation has seldom been coldly calculated-in art, never. But we can at least try to look in the right direction, and this is what I want to discuss.

First, let us get one thing straight. To vituperate against other intelligent people who do not share your views is no way of presenting a positive outlook: to say that certain kinds of music are 'impossible to listen to' is merely to expose your own weaknesses. Plenty of music is difficult to listen to, plenty of it far too easy, but none of it (however bad or apparently contemptible) is impossible. Something can be learnt by the most intelligent and musical among us from listening really hard, even to 'Baa-baa, black sheep'. So it seems to me that we are more likely to get somewhere by thinking in positive terms, rather than in those negative ones that seem to be causing so much argument at the moment. Composing is, after all, a form of positive, creative action in which one has no need to run away from anything. It is no use selfconsciously avoiding this, eschewing that, abolishing this, excluding that. If humanity had never had anything to say, we should all still be dumb: language would never have been invented. It follows that only the positive fact of having something urgent to say can produce genuinely vital expression, whatever form it takes. To many people, this may seem a truism, but there are those to whom it is not, who would rather think it a kind of heresy. To them it is, to put it bluntly, an unfashionable point of view. Let us consider the present situation of the arts.

We are living in an age dominated by science. It is commonplace to remark that science is affecting almost every aspect of human thought, that it has caused a profound change in every single person it has touched, the simplest of labourers as much as the most complicated intellectual. At the same time, a ruthless commercialism is deliberately fostering public philistinism. The artist falls to a confused defensive position and a great schism is created. What is especially significant is the bewildering speed at which these changes are happening. The unintelligent fellow scarcely notices this and settles down comfortably in front of his television set. Intelligent and sensitive people, less content, less stable, tend to become either distraught and angry or so bedevilled by conformist sophistication that they can be easily betrayed into mistaking the wildest nonsense for serious fact. It would not be difficult for a scientific specialist to gull an audience of intelligent laymen into the momentary acceptance of fantastic rubbish. In art, where matters of opinion are so much more treacherous, we are all in a sense laymen, and can, if we wish, gull each other to our hearts' content. One scientific miracle follows another, anything seems possible. Therefore anything is plausible, and a frequent reaction to the most uproariously obvious drivel is 'there might be something in it'.

It is curiously revealing to notice that whereas in past periods the creative geniuses, the great exceptions, have, by the subtlety and originality of their minds, often set problems for their audiences, we nowadays (if this is the criterion) are all geniuses, crawling on our hands and knees, groping after fourleafed clovers and banging our heads together. What is more, some of us do it with our eyes shut and with thick gloves on. The latest artistic sophistries would exclude the imagination (which is the eyes and sense of touch by which we might be looking for the clover), except as an afterthought-the haphazard is the thing: chuck the paint at the canvas, devise an arithmetical scheme for your composition, and then see what it looks or sounds like. To my mind, the one great difference between art and anti-art is whether the imagination is exercised before or after the act. Turning specifically to music, it is just as haphazard to devise an arithmetical scheme before considering the sounds it will produce as it is to sling half a dozen cans of paint at a canvas or to ride over a mess of pottage on a bicycle. If you want to do this, fair enough; but even if you solemnly contemplate the result and let it wreak its utmost on your imagination, you must not call it art. Art is doing something imaginative, not passively imagining you have done something.

There are two other ways in which science has influenced music. The first of them concerns music perhaps rather more damagingly than the other arts. Science has provided us with an immense variety of new materials: take, for instance, the field of 'plastics', which has supplied a range of useful items from stockings to buildings. Every week some new 'plastic' material is put in front of our bedazzled eyes. We become fascinated. Technologists devise new formulae out of which exciting new substances spring like corks out of bottles. These materials are meant to be used for specific purposes, and their properties are calculated in advance to suit whatever object is at hand. A new 'plastic' substance (designed, say, for an especially formidable set of false teeth) must have certain characteristics. It must be tough enough to crack nuts, yet not so rigid that it will hurt the mouth in the process. The technologist will work it all out beforehand and if his prognostications are based on sound chemistry the right stuff will emerge. Its 'texture' as well as its other properties must be right-that is to say, it must feel right. But the 'feel' of it cannot be calculated in chemical terms.

The mere production of new textures in this way is a fascinating game in itself, and we are all interested in it. But it has led to strange situations in the arts, especially in music. For a long time now it has been fashionable to cry after new 'textures' in sound. What these new 'textures' are for, no one seems to know-they are just 'textures'. But they are not even that, since if music is a process in time (which I for one think it is) it cannot possess, in the strictest sense of the term, so static a thing as a 'texture'. We use these terms loosely until they cease to mean much, yet we still go on repeating them as slogans. Perhaps that is why they are slogans. Alastair Sim had the last word on that subject, when he described words as 'the anodyne for the pain of thinking'. But assuming that the musician's use of the word is not entirely meaningless, it is no use looking for new 'textures' unless you know what you want to say with them. If you know this, you need not worry about texture because (whatever it is) it will emerge naturally as but one of many properties of the music; always, of course, provided that you are a talented composer. If you are not, you still have no need to worry about it, since nothing you can do will help matters anyway.

Texture is only one aspect of form, and since in all art, good and bad, form and content are the same thing, you cannot achieve one without the other.

I find that if I sometimes carelessly use the word 'texture' about music, what I really mean by it is the surface 'feel' of the music. If you are genuinely imagining music and trying to put it down on paper in symbols that are for no other purpose than to represent the sounds in your imagination, you are expressing human feelings in music. If, like the technologists, without sensuous preconceptions, you are chasing new materials, new textures, new sounds, just for their own sakes, you are in serious trouble, for you will fail utterly to find a new means of expression without something vital to express. If you are content with the attitude that says 'music expresses nothing, only itself', you are voluntarily eliminating yourself, a human being, from the argument, cutting the ground from under your own feet. You may, in a feeble way, dig up some intriguing noise that might, in its turn, release some great artist's humane imagination into vast new fields where you could never hope to follow him. If so, you will have served your purpose. But I doubt if many artists consciously think of themselves in so humble a light.

If you insist on relegating yourself in this way, at least, try to hear, imagine, and feel (not calculate by pseudo-scientific means) what you are going to do. I am certain that many would-be composers fail to fulfil even this most elementary obligation. When, as recently, a young composer conducting a rehearsal of his own work can remain blissfully unaware of the fact that one of the players is maliciously transposing the whole of his part, something is wrong somewhere, and not only in the orchestra. Nowadays many people are pretending to compose who, in Bach's or Haydn's time, would have been watch-makers, gun-smiths, or, on Sundays, finding an outlet for their musical talents, organ-blowers.

The other point concerning science is this; during the past forty years the branch of scientific research that has most influenced other fields of sensitive thought is the ever deeper penetration into the microcosmic. The secrets of atomic physics have been revealed beyond the capacity of the senses to appreciate them-hence the average intelligent man's somewhat woolly idea of the 'insubstantiality' of matter-'insubstantial' meaning simply 'unfeelable', 'unseeable', 'inaudible'-beyond the reach of the crude senses. All this has, I believe, had an effect on artistic minds (which are quick to react to or even anticipate climates of thought and to create analogies to them). While science has so enlarged its frontiers, the scope of art has dwindled, and many artists have stultified themselves by a process of fragmentation that is superficially analogous but hopelessly unrealistic.

Some pessimists might think that with 'the discovery of the single note', we have reached the point of no return from the padded cell of incomprehensible insubstantiality, creeping hypersensitivity, and phoney subtlety. My view, however, is that there is no need for pessimism. We may have reached the nadir, but it is not a point of no return (except for those who have actually got stuck there). Science is at present opening out a new prospect-the exploration of space. This could bring with it a new climate of thought, more expansive and adventurous, perhaps more heroic, arising out of human action as well as mere introspection. At the same time anything artistic that has been discovered in the last few decades will remain, available at the service of a larger, more genuinely human purpose. Really objective art is an analytical criticism of life, not a mere reflection of science. If, as most of us hope, war recedes into the past and a long period of comparatively peaceful stability lies ahead, it could well be that artists will be more outward-looking, less circumspect, more willing to accept the macrocosmic implications of their work than to cringe and avoid, to exclude, to abolish.

Hans Keller observed to me the other day that the human mind is always quicker to recognise pleasant facts about itself than unpleasant ones. This is probably true, and is borne out by at least some aspects of musical history. Beethoven, for the first time in music, laid bare facts about human nature that had been seemingly too unpalatable to be ingredients in a pleasing entertainment. All great composers, in all periods, have hinted at them, but Beethoven was perhaps the first to insist upon them. But he did so only as an aspect of a larger, more universal, objective vision, fundamentally hopeful. After him lesser mortals confused the issue: pessimistic egoism concentrated avidly upon the seamier side of things, and in the first twenty or thirty years of this century the arts began to incur the almost unwitting loathing even of many of their own practitioners.

This process has gone on, but instead of putting the hateful despair and triviality into the perspective of a larger vision that would give them meaning, many would-be artists are deliberately and fatally ignoring the miserable nature of what their work actually says and gibbering over its mere lifeless materials. This is one of the processes that has led us to 'the discovery of the single note'. I expect certain people will call me 'naïve' because I am oversimplifying all this, but since it is my view that the paralysis of many artists arises simply from a fear of being called naïve by their intellectual cronies and critics, I shall not mind that too much. It would seem to me naïve to be preoccupied by limiting one's awareness to a mere fraction of what one is capable of seeing - like a beautiful woman going cross-eyed because of a pimple on her nose. I believe it was Carlyle who said that, after many years of wondering whether or not to accept the universe, he finally decided that he had better do so. At that moment he was a real artist.

As you will have divined, music is for me a matter of acceptance-acceptance of all the resources that are available: consonance, dissonance, melody, rhythm, harmony, tonality, atonality, instruments, voices-all these things and more. But they have to be imagined vividly and with strength of mind. They are there to flow through the imagination, and none of them has anything to do with arbitrary systems of composition or empty theories of construction. I don't care a damn whether a composer is a serialist, an atonalist, or whatever fancy name he cares to call himself (or is called, more often, by other people), any more than I care whether a composer uses the piano to help his ear (I do not use it, often, but Haydn did, and who am I to say he was cheating?). I am interested in the validity of what a composer is actually saying and the skill and judgment with which he controls what arises spontaneously from his mind's ear. Most of all, I am profoundly concerned about the human attitude his music reveals to me: it is important to me that he should say 'yes' to life, not 'no'. Do not ask me how I can tell which he is saying, because I am not always sure myself and the issue is not always obvious - but when in doubt, I am inclined to assume it is 'no'. 'Yes' is more often unmistakable, whether the expression is tragic or comic. The right sort of tragedy can say 'yes' and the wrong sort of comedy can say 'no'. If the basic attitude of its creator is undazzled and far-sighted, it will, whatever its subject, fulfil what seems to me a fundamental purpose of great art, to create confidence in the fact of living, growing, developing.

Only such art is, to me, truly exciting; other kinds may provide momentary sensuous stimulation, passing morbid fascination, or real pleasure; but confidence in our own human potentialities is what really keeps us going, and it is always regenerated by great music. These values have nothing to do with being 'up to date', or trailing after the latest Dior of music, or foisting trumped-up individuality on your audience. There has never been a more dangerous fallacy than that uttered by Sir Winston Churchill in his advice to Lady Violet Bonham Carter on public speaking: 'The most important thing is who you are; next, how you say it; and, last and least, what you say'. The deeper values are true for all times and all arts, and anyone with real gifts who cherishes them will never be merely contemporary - which is, to quote Hans Keller again, to be temporary. These real values are what a true artist should aim at: to fail to do so, if you have a talent, is a betrayal, at worst cynical and at best just messing about. But far worse than even this failure is to hold forth without any intention of saying anything whatever, whether the so-called style you are pottering and tinkering with is Continental, English, Ruritanian, or Lilliputian.

Toy Symphony

2009-06-05T10:16:00.006+10:00

In 1999, as part of my Honours studies in composition at the University of Wollongong, I created an installation title 'Art Music for the Young Audience'. I included a modicum of circuit bending, using a number of children's toys, and surely triggered my thinking in this area.

The Baleani Retrospective

2009-06-05T09:52:00.006+10:00

In April, 2003, I bought a small Baleani 'home organ' from a charity store. I circuit-bent it, I think before I had even heard that others were doing so, but I'll have to check this - diary extracts?

This to me was an example of zeitgeist which led me to me (eventually) to my current thinking about the purpose of electronic music and its essential formlessness.

The Welson Blog - Part 1

2009-06-05T09:22:00.010+10:00

Early in 2009, I bought a Welson 'home organ' from a charity store. I paid $50.00 for it, which was really a bit much, and the price probably reflected the fact that the case was so solid - it's a burden for even three people to lift. Chipboard, but solid timber baulks have been added to the base at some time to make it more stable. I presume.

It is of Italian make, from a company long defunct. It is not in fact an 'organ', even though it is identified as such on the manufacturer's plate on its rear, in the sense that the only two 'voices' offered are 'piano' and 'clavichord'; in every other sense it is an electronic organ, typical of its period, which I think is somewhere between 1969 and 1972, dating it by Internet research and by some of its internal components.

The reason it interested me, is that its circuitry is still composed largely of 'discrete components' that is to say, resistors, capacitors, semiconductors (transistors, diodes) and a great deal of hook-up wire, instead of a half dozen integrated circuits, whose workings are inscrutable. In this case, the circuit can be traced out, and the workings deciphered and understood. I want to understand it, because I want to understand analogue synthesizers.

That is my plan, and of course, I am not certain it will see fruition - my knowledge of electronics is only at the hobby level and even then it's not flash.

The Welson is not working properly; not all the keys produce a note. The brass-wire contacts on each key will need cleaning. The amplifier makes a continual quiet moan, as though every key was being played at the same time: this is a phenomenon of malfunctioning filter capacitors, I have read. So the first task is locate and replace all these. One fat cap. was dated 1972, and made in Italy, and from those data I obtain a rough date of manufacture.

Actually, the very first task is to photograph the internals from every angle, before I dismantle anything. Naturally, a circuit, much less a repair manual or handbook, is unobtainable.

If anyone has Welson documentation for this instrument, or a similar one, please contact me. Click here.

Today, I shall start the first replacement of electrolytic capacitors.

And of course, I was one short = 22uF @ 63V. Damn.

Circuit Bending

2009-06-05T09:18:00.001+10:00

The results of an ongoing Google search exercise to see:

1. Who's doing it out there
2. What they are doing.
3. Why they are doing it.
4. How they are doing it
5. What music they make with it.
6. What music others make with it.

Reading List

2009-06-03T18:24:00.006+10:00

This list of books will be added to. More importantly, the contents of each, as they have a bearing on my thinking in respect of the formulation of my thesis, will be annotated and commented upon as this blog prgresses.

Peter York: Style Wars. Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1980. Such an acute and entertaining writer! Ephemera of fashion revealing deeper (and significant?) social shifts.
Robert Simpson: "Thoughts on Composing" in Scott, A.F. (ed.) The Spoken Word: an anthology of broadcast talks. London: Macmillan, 1963.His opinion that some contemporary composers, ...'in Bach's or Haydn's time, would have been watch-makers, gun-smiths, or, on Sundays, finding an outlet for their musical talents, organ-blowers' is disturbing to my idea of myself being a creative artist - I may be no more than a doddering hobbyist, fumbling and tinkering in my shed. A phenomenon, a result, not a creator, but a mere dabbler. Not even a dilettante.
Bad Music: the music we love to hate. eds. Washburne, D. and Maiken. D. New York: Routledge, 2004. Should be subtitled 'Bad Writing: the contemporary pseudo-academic, sloppy prose we have come to despise.'

The editors' introduction is so poorly written it detracts from their argument and summary, such as it is. One example: these two use the expression 'eke out' as though it means 'extract' or 'excavate', instead of 'supplement', and as always, this leaves me not only irritated at the abuse of our language (more 'dumbing down', due to the Century of the Oik, the decline of rigour in thinking) but also makes me reluctant to trust the veracity of their research and conclusions.

For, if they are so often clumsy and inaccurate in areas where I have knowledge and expertise, how can I rely on them for accuracy in areas where I have neither? What ever happened to vigilant editors? Or even copy-readers?
Theories of Modern Art : A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Chipp, Herschel B.; Selz, Peter University of California Press, Berkeley, California, U.S.A., 1968.

Especially the chapter 'Art and Politics', where are discussed the ideas of Guilio Carolo Argan, who

'... making use of unnecessarily difficult language hopes to reintegrate the artist into a modern mechanized society, asserting that technology needs the guidance of of aesthetics in order to function ethically as a well as effectively..."

Compare the ideas of Habermas (as described in p. 41 Malpas) re 'emancipatory art'
cf Trotsky (same book) Literature and Revolution (1923)

"... Man has made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils' practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing "on faith' actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will havr rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slighest fear that this taste will be bad ....

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man c the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of om and the same process. All the arts - literature, drama, painting, music, and architecture - will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The fornm of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peak will rise.
Jean-François Lyotard - Simon Malpas. Taylor and Francis (Routledge), London, 2003.
1. Why Lyotard?
2. Key Ideas: The Postmodern Condition
3. Art, The Sublime and the Postmodern
4. Phrases and the Differend: Lyotard's Politics
5. History, Politics and Representation Art,
6. the Inhuman and the Event
7. The Task of the Critic: Rewriting Modernity
8. After Lyotard
9. Further Reading
10. Works Cited
11. Index
"An essential student guide to Lyotard and issues in his work, including modernity and the postmodern, the sublime, ethics, history and representation, art and the unpresentable, knowledge and the university and the future.Jean-François Lyotard is one of the most celebrated proponents of what has become known as the 'postmodern'. More than almost any other contemporary theorist, he has explored the relations between knowledge, art, politics and history, in ways that offer radical new possibilities for thinking about modern culture. Simon Malpas introduces students to issues at the heart of Lyotard's work, including *modernity and the postmodern *the sublime *ethics *history and representation *art and the unpresentable *knowledge, the university and the future. Lyotard's work is impossible to dismiss or ignore for anybody who is serious about contemporary literature and culture, and this guide provides the ideal companion to the wide variety of his critical texts."

His (Malpas's) writing is here and there obscure, but at least he has not adopted the frightful syntax of postmodern pidgin, derived from transliterated French of such as Lyotard himself, with its 'auralities' and 'modernities'.

Malpas Extracts

2009-06-01T12:53:00.000+10:00

pages 16-21

"... culturally significant and influential text, and also one of his most controversial works. Since publication, it has drawn commentaries from writers in a range of disciplines including Philosophy, Art History, Sociology, Politics and Literary Studies, and has set the tone for many recent accounts of postmodernity and postmodernism. In each of these areas, it has generated debates and discussions that have impacted upon the ways in which those disciplines have conducted their work. However, although many writers refer to The Postmodern Condition for its definition of postmodernity, the book's descriptions of contemporary culture and politics have also come in for a great deal of criticism - not least from Lyotard himself in his later writings. It is a book whose arguments we should not ignore, but whose conclusions we might wish actively to question. In order to do so, however, we need to get to grips with the detail of Lyotard's report.

The most frequently quoted and discussed assertion of the book is its definition of the postmodern as an 'incredulity toward metanarratives' (Lyotard, 1984: Xxiv). This description has frequently been treated as a sound bite and all too often has been misunderstood. Rather than simply offering a brief definition of what Lyotard might be getting at when he uses terms like 'postmodern' or 'metanarrative', it is important to work out how this statement emerges from the book as a whole. The aim of this chapter, then, is to provide a basis for an understanding of what Lyotard means by describing the postmodern as 'incredulity toward metanarratives'.

A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE

Probably the best place to begin trying to discover what The Postmodern Condition is about is by looking closely at its subtitle: 'A Report on Knowledge'. As with all of Lyotard's work, it is just as important to pay attention to the way in which he writes, as it is to understand what is written about, and the subtitle of the book immediately gives crucial clues about both its form and content. It is described as a 'report'. Generally, a report is a formal ment 0t the results of an investigation into a specific subject, usually undertaken by experts, that draws together the range of avail,,1)1e evidence in order to set out specific conclusions. The Postmodern Condition's status as a report is evident in the way it is written. One of the first things that is noticeable on reading the text is the amount of evidence that is presented in the footnotes, of which there are over 200 referring to an even larger number of other books, essays, lectures and government documents from many European and ,American countries. Lyotard synthesises this vast range of material

in a text that is often abstract and contains only relatively few concrete examples of specific events. In other words, the main text of The Postmodern Condition provides a summary account of the documents mentioned in its notes. Its aim is to discover underlying trends

and relationships between the different sources, and to trace out as clearly as possible the development of knowledge in contemporary

Western societies.

The other key term in the subtitle is 'knowledge'. Lyotard states

that he is studying the 'condition of knowledge in the most highly

developed societies' (1984: xxiii), but what does this mean? The idea of a report on, for example, the state of the public transport system

in London or a child's progress during their first year at school is quite straightforward. In both cases there is obvious evidence that can be called upon to support the conclusions: the lateness of the average bus, perhaps, or the marks awarded in end of year maths tests. But hat does it mean to report on the 'condition of knowledge'? Clearly, this isn't a question of how much we know nowadays: The Postmodern Condition is not just a list of the recent developments in physics, zoology or computer science. What is at stake is much more fundamental, and much more important.

According to Lyotard, the focus is the 'nature' and 'status' of knowledge: what knowledge is, and how it is generated, organised and employed in contemporary societies. In other words, The Postmodern Condition is a report about the ways in which advanced societies treat education, science, technology, research and development. Lyotard investigates which sorts of knowledge count as valuable, how that knowledge is communicated, who has access to it and what it is used for, who determines and controls the flow of knowledge, and how it shapes our lives and experiences of the world.

The central question of The Postmodern Condition's 'report on knowledge' is thus, how are the lives and identities of people constructed by contemporary structures of knowing? According to Lyotard, this is a fundamental question because 'the status of knowledge is altered as our societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age' (1984: 3). This is the main hypothesis of the book, and the aim of the text is to test whether it is correct and to describe its implications.

POSTMODERN KNOWLEDGE

Lyotard argues that the advances in communications that have taken place since the Second World War have affected not just how knowledge is transmitted but also the status of knowledge itself. It is not just that we can store more information on computers, and send messages across the world quickly by post, telephone and now email. It is also that these changes in storage and communication are transforming how we use and value knowledge: 'the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available and exploited' (1984: 4). In other words, in what Lyotard calls the 'postmodern condition', knowledge itself has changed.

Lyotard demonstrates that knowledge has become a commodity that is bought and sold on the market, and is also the basis of power in society: 'Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major - perhaps the major stake in the worldwide competition for power' (1984: 5). The most powerful nations are the ones have the greatest knowledge resources: those with the best technology; the most advanced communications and weapons systems, most highly developed medicines and the means to collect the most detailed information about their competitors. The global competition for power is now fought out as a battle for knowledge just as it used to be for resources like coal, gas and oil. Lyotard foresees a time when nations may literally go to war over knowledge, just as they have fought over land and raw materials such as oil in the past (1984: 5).

On the other hand, Lyotard argues that states are beginning to lose their positions of power in the world as the most important bodies in this new knowledge-based economy. Multi-national corporations such as computer firms, oil companies and the pharmaceutical industry are replacing them as the key players as knowledge itself becomes a commodity. These multi-nationals fund vast amounts of research and use the patent laws to claim ownership of the knowledge generated by it, which can then be put to use to make money. Lyotard's argument here seems particularly prophetic of the changes that many commentators have identified as taking place during the 1980s and 1990s: international corporations' influence has penetrated to the very heart of the decision making processes of national

overnments, and international treaties (often drawn up by hoards staffed with representatives from those corporations) now threaten to dictate the legal systems and cultural policies of countries throughout the world (for accessible and influential accounts of this process see, for example, Naomi Klein's No Logo (2000) or George Monbïot's Captive State (2000)).

To give just one example of this process, in 2001 the South African government was taken to court by a group of pharmaceutical companies because they claimed that it wasn't respecting the patents they had taken out on anti-AIDS medicines. The cost of producing the actual medicines was minimal so they could be manulactured cheaply in South Africa, but what the companies were protecting was the investments they had made in researching and developing these medicines. In this case then, it was knowledge itself, that was the commodity for the multinationals. The South African government, which claimed it was trying to save the lives of its citizens without bankrupting the country, were accused of stealing knowledge and cheating these companies out of their profits. A compromise was eventually reached, which meant that the medicines could be bought in Africa for slightly less money, but the fact that a state could be taken to court by private companies for breach of patent shows how politically charged the ownership of knowledge has become.

Another thing this example demonstrates is that science and knowledge are not separate from politics and ethics, but are political through and through. The changes in the status of knowledge that are now taking place therefore mark a transformation in the nature of society and human experience. It is precisely this political transformation that is at stake in Lyotard's report on knowledge in The Postmodern Condition. The method he chooses to analyse the changes in knowledge and political organisation that form the condition of postmodernity draws on the idea of 'language games'.

LANGUAGE GAMES, LEGITIMATION AND IDENTITY

Lyotard argues that there are two key aspects to the development of knowledge that was described in the last section. The first is that advances in science have wider implications in society. This should be clear from the example of AIDS in South Africa. The research of the drugs companies is immediately tied to questions of money, power and human suffering; it is not just a question of scientific discovery for its own sake. In general terms, this indicates that an advance in research might well have implications for other areas of social policy, as well as for people's everyday life. The second aspect of the development of knowledge follows from this: there are different types of knowledge at work in society, they have different criteria for being categorised as useful or true, and they must be in different ways.

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard differentiates between two 1naj01 types of discourse: scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge. He argues that 'scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to [. .

narrative' (1984-: 7). For Lyotard, narratives are the stories that communities tell themselves to explain their present existence, their history and ambitions for the future. Although the term 'narrative' is commonly associated with literary fiction, all forms of discourse employ narratives to present their ideas. Examples of this might include History that constructs narratives of the past, Psychology that tells stories about the self, or Sociology that depicts different social formations and their effects on individuals. In the same way, scientific statements are presented through types of narrative that describe the physical world. In order to explain and justify their discoveries, even mathematical sciences are forced to turn their equations into narratives that explain the implications of their findings. In this way, narrative stands at the basis of human experience and society: it tells us who we are, and allows us to express what we believe and aspire to.

Of course, the different types of narrative used in different discourses follow different rules. The different discourses that make up a society's knowledge - be they physics, chemistry, literature, laws, customs, or even gossip - all have different sets of rules for what count as legitimate statements. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard refers to these different discourses as 'language games', a term he draws from the highly influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Drawing this notion of language games from Wittgenstein's philosophy, Lyotard makes three observations about them. First, that the rules of a language game are 'the object of a contract, explicit or not, between the players' (1984: 10). This means that the rules of a particular language game like poetry or biology are not natural but determined by a community. Second, that 'every utterance should j)( thought of as a "move" in a game' (1984: 10). And third, that 'if there are no rules there is no game, that even an infinitesimal moclitication of one rule alters the nature of the game' (1984: 10). In other vords, that all language 'moves' obey rules, but the games of which they are a part are open to change and influence by other games or even as the result of the moves themselves.

Lyotard argues that the outcome of these three observations is that the 'social bond is composed of language "moves" (1984: 11). The cry structure of society is made up of the statements made in it and

the rules it develops to decide whether particular moves are legiti-mate or illegitimate. Just as different types of games have distinct sets of rules, different societies have diverse forms of politics, law and legitimation. As subjects, we exist within this series of language games, whose different sets of rules make up who we are. According to Lyotard,

A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island ... [E]ven before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he s given, the human child is already positioned as the referent of a story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course. (1984: 5)

The organisation of knowledge in society thereby determines the identity - the self-image, the ideas and aspirations - of the people that make it up. A question immediately arises, however: how do we understand this 'organisation of knowledge'? How are the different language games related to each other in a society? How is their importance to that society decided? And why do different 'mcieties have different ways of organising the language games that make them up? For Lyotard, the answer to this question lies in the term mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The organisation of the narratives and language games is performed by metanarratives.