Samuel Barber's Letter to His Mother

Sorry for not posting in so long.  I've been in-between states and practicing for auditions and seeing friends I haven't seen in years.  I'll start posting again, but for now I'd like to share a 'coming-out' letter that Samuel Barber wrote to his mother when he was 9.  It's one of the most adorable things ever.

NOTICE to Mother and nobody else
Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense.
...
To begin with, I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I’ll ask you one more thing.— Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football.—Please— Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very),
Love,
Sam Barber II1 

Source: 
Nadia Hubbs' "A French Connection: Modernist Codes in the Musical Closet," GLQ 6:3, 2000.

Steve Reich's Dolly

These two videos are actually two separate scenes from the same work, "Dolly," which is itself only third act of a three-part 'opera' by Steve Reich.  The three movements of this opera, Hindenburg, Bikini, and Dolly, all explore the nature of technology in an ambivalent light.  The first excerpt, which opens the act, is about cloning, and the second posted/final excerpt is titled 'Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality.'  For the libretto/text, which you can read here, Reich collected interviews with some of the most prominent people working in the fields of robotics, cyborg sociology, technology theory, and genetics, including Richard Dawkins, James Watson, Sherry Tucker, and Ray Kurzweil.  Then, using a technique that he uses in several pieces, Reich splices, repeats, and otherwise messes with the interviews (but with minimal hard/destructive editing), and notates the natural pitch and rhythm of the voices so that the acoustic instruments can double/reinforce them.

One of the things that I think draws me to this work (honestly, Reich is sometimes hit-or-miss with me) is the fear and apprehension that frames this work.  He frames this act with a religious/spiritual mysticism that appears to be inevitably doomed for failure.  In the first part, Reich intersperses lines from Genesis, 'sung' by Kismet, a semi-intelligent robot designed by Cynthia Breazeal:

 "And placed him in the Garden of Eden, to serve it and to keep it." 

Cyborg Alice in Wonderland, and What Donna Haraway Found There

So I'm taking an online course on coursera.org on 'Fantasy and Science Fiction,' and had to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. While I was reading, I started imagining Alice as if she were a cyborg.  Then I started thinking, that though she is clearly not intended to be a cyborg in the 'traditional' 'BIONIC' sense, she really does satisfy some of the same fears and desires as her techno-enhanced buddies.

OK, hear me out, please!

Indeed, Alice is sort of a 'stranger in a strange land,' if you will.  She struggles to make sense of her absurd encounters with the denizens of Wonderland and the looking glass country, while her own body literally unravels.  In her first adventure, Alice changes size and shape more rapidly than she can keep track of.  (My favorite part is when her neck grows like a giraffe's and she's accused of being a serpent [original sin, anyone?]).  As Alice attempts to control her own body, she loses control of the world around her.

Steampunk Alice, though, is another story.
(Picture taken from Rebelakemi, on devientart)

The pivotal cyborg moment, though, comes with the realization that these changes are literally a product of her own design and creation, as she is the creator of her own fantasy.  The cyborg as envisioned by Donna Haraway is equally a product of her own potential, who is limited not by her own abilities, but by the limitations and pressures put on by a society that cannot accept the individuality (read:deviance) of the cyborg's powers.

They Gave me Myth

They Gave me Myth

by Chase-Barthes

I’ve got a machine who is powerful

I’ve got a machine who is real

I’ve got a machine who needs me

Ooh the gave me myth

They gave me myth, myth, myth

They gave me myth

Yes, they gave me myth, myth, myth,

Yes, they gave me myth

In it I find him standing

In the next it he’s still

An ore his maching can show me

Oh they gave me myth

They got a hand on an end

Or a world on hand

Oooh, oooh, so on hand

Closed paradoxically

Or a man of power

But I’m represented as magic thought.

Because my machine’s functional

I’ve got a machine who is real

But I almost found my machine

After they gave me myth

Yes, they gave me myth, myth, myth

They gave me myth

They gave me myth, myth, myth,

Yes, they gave me myth.

I've been doing work archiving an old contemporary music magazine called The Ear.  I found this poem, and I liked it.

A Little Vivaldi with your Satanism- Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'Artifice

Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'Artifice.  I'm not exactly sure what the title means, since I speak pretty much no French.  I know from Debussy that Feu d'Artifice means 'fireworks,' and from high school french that Eaux means 'waters,' so is this a play on words that pretty much would mean 'water fireworks?' Anyways, it's a pretty evocative work.  Very surreal.  I especially like the soundtrack- Autumn from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which depicts a drunken peasant, his 'restful slumber' and a hunting sport, in which the animal seems to be chased until it collapses from exhaustion and dies.

Your Voice - Oliveros

XX. Your Voice
Think of the sound of your own voice. What is its fundamental pitch? What is its range? What is its quality? What does it express no matter what you might be verbalizing or singing? What was the original sound of your voice before you learned to sound the way you sound now?
- From Sonic Meditations by Pauline Oliveros

And here are some great words from a letter about her role as a feminist composer-

Actually I am not that interested in composers and musicians. I'm more interested in listening than in being listened to.  Eve's droppings. It's a time of reversals.  As composer I am the audience, as performer I am the critic, as critic I am the maker.  I don't want to lay a trip or an egg.  I want to take one or eat it.  I am the flying daughter who hears what she oughter.

Bjork Again- Her TV

This is one of my favorite Bjork videos. It's silly, but I love it when she takes apart the TV.  I also get this pang of discomfort when she does this because it's not something we're supposed to do.  When we buy a product like a TV, we buy a complete object.  But Bjork is so comfortable tearing it apart, examining the inside for herself, that she breaches a boundary between consumer and manufacturer in a really playful way.  In the end, she gets the most joy from her TV through the exploration of it's insides, not its projected images.  And I think the ending is hilarious!