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Stuart Dempster: Diving in the Ocean of Sound -- an interview by Annie Fanning
plus: Selected Discography and Dempster: A Class Act by Dennis Rea

Recording the Jungle: A Field Guide by Mike Marlin

Opposing the NEA: A Composer's Experience by Storrs Barrett Booch-Williams

Ink Tank: New Perspectives in Music by Roger Sutherland

In the Field at the WTO, Part 2: Field Recording in the Line of Fire by Christopher DeLaurenti

Cartoon: Noise Lovin' Ned by Ffej

Stuart Dempster: Diving in the Ocean of Sound

Interview by Annie Fanning

It is easy to complain when it is raining. And it is easy to be complacent when the sun is beaming on the mountains. In this climate, vacillating between dreary and gleaming, it is easy to overlook what remains constant, steadfast, and true.

The weather might be an overreaching metaphor for our cultural climate, but nevertheless, to remind us of how sodden and stale we might be, from time to time we should honor our mentors. We should recognize those teachers who have turned us on to new approaches and techniques, to whole worlds of ideas, and espouse their generosity of spirit. Without the influence of such agile minds, where would we be? Left to our own devices and well-worn habits, the Pacific Northwest could devolve into a cultural backwater instead of continuing to evolve as a Port of Authority.

So, in that frame of mind, let me call to mind one of our great spirits: master of the trombone and the didjeridu, professor emeritus, performer, composer, and generous soul Stuart Dempster.

Dempster has a deep understanding of site-specific dynamics and acoustics. He does not plant himself on stage, describing an arc from a fixed point. He gets down and wanders around the room, testing the atmosphere. The notes that issue from his trombone or didjeridu are his means of serious inquiry, yet he frequently investigates the boundaries with nothing more than a simple wooden whistle.

Dempster has a way of searching the architecture with sound. His acclaimed solo album, In the Great Abbey of Clement VI, is as much a portrait of a great building as Umberto Eco's descriptive passages of the same structure in The Name of the Rose. An almost mystical phenomenon, his collaborations with Pauline Oliveros and Panaiotis (aka Deep Listening Band) capture space with resonance -- particularly the albums The Ready Made Boomerang (1992) and Deep Listening (1989), which were recorded inside a cistern at Fort Worden, Port Townsend.

On January 26, Stuart Dempster inaugurated the Wednesday night SIL2K (Strategic Improv Labs 2000) series at Seattle's I Spy club with a set of positive vibrations. Later, leaning on the bar while watching a round of John Zorn's Cobra, Dempster obliged me by dividing his attention to answer some oblique questions. -- Annie Fanning

You have played in quarries, steam plants, storm drains, and ecclesiastical structures. If you could play in any architectural or natural space, real or imagined, what would it be?

Well, the cistern comes really close. It's an instrument you have to learn how to play. On one hand, it's surprisingly limited in what you can do with it, but what it does is so interesting that treating it like an instrument, you learn to play it. You find out what it does, and that's what you do. It's very intonation sensitive, the slightest thing puts you out into very strange places. So that's an issue.

There's not a place that you've always wanted to play in?

It is hard to imagine anything that would out-cistern the cistern. There's various sites that I've heard about. There's the towers down in Tillamook that I have been told about, but I've never actually been there. I've tried the Satsop [decommissioned nuclear power plant], very interesting sounds in the Satsop cooling towers. Hard to work with because of the wind, but the sound is amazing. And the bureaucracy at the time was really hard [to work with] because it was federal government, but now I think it's [been turned over] to the county finally.

Did you find it difficult to get permission?

That was the whole thing with the cistern. It took me 12 years to get it open. Letter-writing, and pissing and moaning. Getting it to happen took a lot of work. The people there were very helpful, particularly Dan Harpole, who was at CENTRUM at the time, but I also had to be a part of that, obviously. And now that there are several CDs recorded, I think that it's pretty much established that it's got reason to be there. At Satsop it was particularly difficult because of the federal control and security considerations.

Were they doing anything with the cistern?

No, they just wanted it closed up. Liability issues. They were afraid somebody would fall down and break their petunia, whatever, you know.

I'm not sure about the timing -- was it in the late 80s that you toured with Merce Cunningham?

I've been on tour with Merce Cunningham on and off since 1971, at least as a guest musician. The major tour was 1976 when I recorded the Abbey recording. Then I had a commission from them in 1995 -- that's what the Cistern Chapel recording was the source for. And I've been doing some touring now. Interestingly enough, my son Loren just got off a seven-week European tour with them, and he's touring with them to Kennedy Center and other places this spring. Somebody in the family has got to do it.

Would you prescribe touring with an improvisational dance troupe as an appropriate rite of passage for any musician interested in collective collaboration?

It's a good thing to do. I've worked with a lot of young dancers. I'm working with a group now called Room with Sheri Cohen, Tonya Lockyer, and John Dickson. We did Bumbershoot last year and some other things. We'll probably do something this spring, maybe with Earshot [Jazz]. We're not sure yet. It may happen in that downstairs room at On The Boards.

So you are still interested in working with dancers.

Yeah. I've done that for a long time. I've worked with Pam Schick and Joan Skinner. At least locally. Llori Wilson and Becci Parsons are people that I have worked with, too. And Robert Davidson and Kris Wheeler. They're all local folks.

It has been over 20 years since the University of California press first published [Dempster's] The Modern Trombone: a Definition of Its Idioms. Acura [publisher of music textbooks and sheet music] currently offers a reprint of the text, which they call "the definitive work on the techniques used in modern 20th century trombone performance." Do you have any thoughts on 21st century trombone technique?

Well, there are a couple of people who are doing some interesting stuff. Monique Buzzarté is a former student of mine. She's doing, at my encouragement, what I call "color trombone" -- sound based on the colors that go on in her mind. She has perfect color like I have perfect pitch. Or at least that's my feeling about what she does. There will be some stuff that will come out of that. As far as the future, I think it will be combinations of techniques, people choosing different things. I'm doing an update of the book in CD-ROM format, with videos of the pieces that are talked about in the book.

You were born in Berkeley and you studied at SF State, so I assume that your childhood and young adult years were spent in the Bay Area. What do you miss about California?

Well, I miss a lot of things about it. Enough that I may move back. There's been some talk -- my wife and I have been going through all that. The other thing's the weather. It's what you're used to, I guess. Also there's kind of a mentality. There is a difference there. Although I don't know what's going on with the younger folks. I know there is a large alternative scene going on in the Mission. So I want to see what that's about.

Does nostalgia or memory figure into your compositions?

Oh, I would think it would have to, even if I don't know it. It's going to figure into it whether I like it or not . . . Maybe memories of my past life, or lives.

Do you have any insight into your past lives?

Only a little bit. There is one possibility that I was in Holland in a recent past life.

If you were given the ability to channel the spirit of any musician for the duration of only one song, which musician would you channel, and what song would you play?

I'm not sure about what song I would play. I have tried to channel Jimi Hendrix. It was for a specific purpose. For the Jimi Hendrix CD that Robert Priest is putting out -- you might remember him from [contemporary music ensemble] Marzena days here in Seattle. That would be one possibility.

Certainly, there are other people, I suppose. Gabrieli in Saint Mark's [Cathedral, Venice].

Pauline Oliveros. We kind of channel each other when we play in the Deep Listening Band anyway.

No particular song? No song you've ever wanted to get inside in that kind of way?

I've gotten inside so much stuff. There are a couple of songs that I get inside a lot now. One of them is "My Funny Valentine." And the other one is "Over the Rainbow."

Traditionally, [Australian] Aboriginal women were not allowed to play or even touch the didjeridu. Why would that be?

It was just a distinction. You have got to remember that in any tribal society, or most societies, tribal or not, there are distinct roles for women and men. In a Stone Age time, if you mess with those roles, you run the risk of dying. Life is so fragile. We are going through a really interesting time now. The roles can be much more variable and changeable. It may be a temporary condition. I mean, you don't know. Maybe if we get back to an era when survival is a big issue. You may not be able to fuss around with roles -- even though they may be different, they may stay in what I call a "locked difference."

Anyway, the didjeridu is a part of that. There are women's songs and men's songs. There are certain women's dances, men's dances, certain dances of initiation that women are not supposed to see and certain men's dances that children are not supposed to see -- [to see the dances] was traditionally punishable by death. I doubt if that is true any more, because there has been so much acculturation and mixing with white people. There are some women players, didjeridu players. I heard one in 1973 on tape and she was just great. There may be more now. It is still a male-dominated instrument.

It could be an inherently male instrument -- I mean, it looks very phallic.

Yeah, I think that's part of it and that may be one reason why it is. I really don't know. Women play it. I've got a lot of women students. They do great with it.

 

Stuart Dempster -- A Selected Discography Pran: Raga for the Rainy Season (Sparkling Beatnik Records, 1999) New Music for Virtuosos (New World Records, 1999) Under the Earth Tones (Northwest Folklife Recordings, 1997) (with Didgeri Dudes) Suspended Music / Deep Listening Band and the Long String Instrument (Periplum, 1997) A Storm of Drones (Sombient/Asphodel, 1996) Common Threads (Deep Listening, 1996) (with Joe McPhee Quintet) Deep Listening Band: Tosca Salad (Deep Listening, 1995) Underground Overlays in the Cistern Chapel (New Albion, 1995) Deep Listening Band: Sanctuary (Mode, 1995) Drawing Down the Moon / Wind Music of Donald Erb (New World, 1994) Deep Listening Band: The Ready Made Boomerang (New Albion, 1992) Deep Listening Band: Troglodyte's Delight (¿What Next?, 1990) Deep Listening (New Albion, 1989) The Digital Domain, A Demonstration (Elektra, 1983) Stuart Dempster: In the Great Abbey of Clement VI (New Albion, 1987, originally released by 1750 Arch, 1979) Music for Instruments and Electronic Sounds (Nonesuch, 1969) Terry Riley: In C (Columbia) (Performer in group; formed and rehearsed the entire ensemble)

Dempster: a Class Act

Back in 1977, I briefly attended classes at the University of Washington School of Music during a period of personal creative inertia. Having successfully avoided a formal musical education up to that time, I decided that what I needed to do to break the impasse was swallow my hubris and at last put my nose to the academic grindstone.

Of course, I was wrong. Being a fundamentally rebellious self-learner, I found the music-school environment claustrophobic and many of the music majors little better than automatons. I grew so dispirited that I bailed out after a single quarter and, for better or worse, struck out on my own errant path. Yet the experience was not entirely wasted, for it brought me into contact with Stuart Dempster, the most memorable teacher I've ever had.

Scanning the course offerings at the beginning of the quarter, I noticed a class with the ambiguous title "Multimedia Music," taught by some guy named Stuart Dempster. Whatever "Multimedia Music" meant (it was never explained), it sounded like an appealing antidote to a steady diet of orthodox theory, so I signed myself up.

The class met one night a week for three hours. The first evening, I walked into an oversized classroom already overflowing with students. The overhead lights had been replaced with blue light bulbs that suffused the room with a subaqueous glow, the first indication that this was to be no ordinary music class. At the front of the room, Stuart Dempster sat atop his desk, idly swinging his feet and surveying us with a Cheshire-cat grin -- hardly the comportment of a starchy professor. Tangerine Dream's Phaedra (their last interesting record) was spinning on the classroom turntable; after the entire album side played out, Dempster got up and put on a spacy instrumental passage from Pink Floyd's Meddle, then followed that with an excerpt from Songs of the Humpback Whale. This guy was pretty hip for an academe, and his record selections were a canny way of bridging the musical generation gap.

Fully two hours passed in this way before Dempster ever uttered a word. When he finally addressed the class, it was to say, "This class is very large ... too large." The students looked up, confused. "But that's okay," he continued. "I guarantee that in about three weeks, the class will be half this size." He put on a record of Yoko Ono screaming her guts out, let it play through, and then asked, "Are there any music majors in the room?" Half the students raised their hands. "Well," he said, "You might want to consider transferring out of the class now, because you're the ones who have the most to unlearn." I was instantly won over; for the first and only time in my truncated musical education, I felt like I belonged.

Dempster's prediction was borne out a few weeks later when the class size dropped to a quarter its original number. For the most part, the defectors were either slackers looking for easy credits, or straitlaced conservatory types who were unwilling to immerse themselves in the spontaneous, collective music-making that was Dempster's modus operandi as a teacher. There was no formal class plan as such, and no tests; students were deemed to have "passed" if they participated in a series of group learning exercises designed to sharpen their listening skills.

One such activity was the "rain forest." Each student was instructed to choose a forest creature and adopt its behavioral and sonic characteristics. The classroom lights were switched off, and for an hour or so perfect strangers crawled around beneath the desks hissing, croaking, and cawing at each other. Dempster himself crouched in the space beneath his desk, hooting at intervals like a barn owl. When the lights came back on, we resumed our former identities, slightly embarrassed at having let the id out of the bag. On my way out of the building afterward, I overheard one student saying to her friend, "I was scared -- I didn't know who those people were!" The rain forest "game" was less about music per se than it was about unself-conscious interaction -- a frightening experience in our culture of avoidance.

In another focused-listening exercise, the remaining students (now down to 12 out of the original 60+) joined hands and attempted to pass a sound around the circle in the shortest time possible. Dempster maintained that the quickest way to produce a sound was to suddenly expel the air from one's lungs like a whale clearing its blowhole; as soon as a student did so, he or she would squeeze the hand of the student to their right, who repeated the action, and on around the circle. The first few tries broke down in laughter, but with Dempster coaching, we eventually succeeded in completing the sound circle in under one second. In a later class we repeated the exercise, this time biting apples with each squeeze until our cheeks ballooned like mandrills'.

When the class met on Halloween, Dempster devised a special art prank for the occasion. First, he gave each student a makeshift didjeridu crafted from PVC tubing. (This was long before the current vogue for the instrument in pseudotribal circles.) We then marched down to UW's Red Square, installed ourselves at strategic locations, and kicked up a mighty sonic ruckus to the bemusement (or annoyance) of passersby. This Dempster tradition led directly to the free-improv gatherings held sporadically in Red Square in ensuing years, which in turn led to the formation of such Dempster-influenced aggregations as the infamous anarcho-improv New Art Orchestra of the 1980s.

Dempster's class was easily the most influential learning experience of my chequered academic career. But it was only several years later that I became aware of his true stature as musician. One day, when scanning the cover of Terry Riley's epochal In C -- one of the most influential recordings of the late twentieth century -- I was startled to find my eccentric former teacher listed among the members of the ensemble. I did some more research and discovered that Dempster ranked among the world's leading trombone virtuosi, frequently performing commissions by such vanguard composers as John Cage, Donald Erb, Robert Erickson, Ernst Krenek, and Luciano Berio. In the 1960s, he was involved with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, and other founders of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, one of the crucibles of electronic composition in the U.S. Outside of classical circles, he has worked with improvisers such as Joe McPhee and Fritz Hauser, and his involvement with dance, theater, and performance art has ranged from a long tenure with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to his current work with interdisciplinary Seattle ensemble ROOM. And that's not even mentioning his ongoing work with Pauline Oliveros and others in the Deep Listening Band, which has inspired a whole new generation of microsonic explorers.

Locally, Dempster's influence on younger musicians cannot be overestimated. His former students include numerous members of the Northwest's jazz, modern classical, and improvised music communities, who in turn have influenced others to hear music in fresh ways. He continues to collaborate with younger musicians (for example, the riveting North Indian-influenced Pran duo with onetime trombone student Greg Powers) and to perform in contexts rarely frequented by ivory-tower academics. Dempster finally retired from his post at UW last year, leaving behind a void that will be nearly impossible to fill. As a teacher, he was never didactic but instructed by example, encouraging each of his students to find his or her own way.

Nearly twenty years after I attended his "Multimedia Music" class, I had the great good fortune of sharing the stage with Stuart at the 1996 Earshot Jazz Festival's tribute to Sun Ra. As the band alternated passages of deep-space abstraction and Ra's fetchingly twisted swing, Dempster's exuberant blowing consistently elevated the music to a different plane, the mark of a true original and a great teacher. Perhaps no other contemporary musician has had such a profound impact on Northwest creative music. If the rumors are true that he'll soon be leaving the Northwest, we'll be all the poorer for it.

-- Dennis Rea

Recording the Jungle: A Field Guide

by Mike Marlin

This past December 31, as the U.S. populace geared up for terrorist attacks, nuclear meltdowns, and whatever other apocalyptic enlightenment would transpire at the stroke of midnight, I found myself battling a whole other set of adversities deep in the jungles of Central America.

For the second time in three years, I had saved my pennies and traveled south to Belize (formerly British Honduras until its independence in 1981) and into the Bladen Nature Reserve (BNR), a 1.5-million-acre protected wilderness area and swath of pristine rain forest located in Belize's southern Maya Mountains. The purpose of my trek was twofold: to visit my brother and his family, who manage a research station in the BNR, and to record the panoply of amazing sounds made by the diverse creatures that inhabit this tropical rain forest.

As I reported a few years back in these pages, I am visually impaired and as a result seem to have developed a highly attuned awareness of my sonic environment. In urban settings such as Seattle, this awareness can be the cause of much consternation and annoyance, particularly from human-made noises. But in the rain forest, where natural sounds are unhindered except for the occasional British Army helicopter gunship flying in the distance or the generator running the washing machine for a few hours each week, I find myself willing to soak in every vibration, every sound. From the peaceful lull of the cicada chorus to the brash teeth-gnashing and shrill barking of the warrie (wild boar), from the mellifluous symphony of the marine toad congregation to the sudden, guttural yowls of a troupe of howler monkeys, my ears were privy to a magical musical phenomenon I had previously only read about or heard in documentary film scores. I was determined to document as much of the sonar map of the tropical ecosystem as possible.

In my estimation, the value in recording the birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals of Belize in their natural habitat is multifold. As rhythmic, melodic, harmolodic, and dissonant samples of the natural world, these sounds have limitless musical potential, and I certainly held out the hope of integrating them into my own musical recordings as well as passing them on to others for the same use. It is essential, however, to capture as much rain-forest sound as quickly as possible, because the jungle and its native species unfortunately may not be around too much longer. The necessity of creating a historical archive became apparent when I visited unprotected wilderness or developing areas in Belize where species are in decline. And although the BNR and adjacent forest reserves are relatively safe from encroachment now, the paving of the country's southern highway over the next 5--10 years will likely endanger this hitherto undisturbed sanctuary of heavenly sound. Thus, for musical, archival, and aesthetic motivations, I ventured forth armed with a Sony D7 portable DAT recorder and a pair of Sonic Studios 6S/EH binaural microphones, intent on transferring the analog wild kingdom to the inanimate tapes I kept tightly sealed in a bright orange Pelican case.

Pelican cases, ordinarily associated with video equipment and typically sold in camera stores, are purported to be airtight and so invincible that they can be submerged in water without any damage to their contents. Knowing that I might be facing intense downpours and humidity, I packed my gear in a newly purchased Pelican case and pondered how I could avoid the x-ray scanning machines employed by airport security systems. Minimizing the DAT's exposure to potentially hostile molecular influences was paramount since the microphones I use are phantom-powered (run by the deck's own power source). I also hoped that x-rays would not adversely affect the heavy load of batteries stowed in my baggage. (Because of the competing appliances and limited solar power available where I was headed, I could not rely on my rechargeable battery pack.) Realizing that I could not steer clear of some radiation, I opted to pack my recording devices in my checked luggage with a plan to test them immediately after landing. On my previous trip I had tried to place my recorder in the plastic basket where keys and watches are dropped before one walks through the metal detector. But this time the authorities did not accept this gesture, so I reluctantly fed my apparatus to the conveyor belt and winced as it rode through the x-ray machine. Fortunately this time, as before, everything tested positively. My concern with the safe passage of my DAT player and accessories may seem trifling compared with clearing customs sporting long hair and a beard, but I was, after all, on a mission. What follows is an account of my successes and failures with the recording project itself, which I hope will provide a framework for a "how to" of recording the jungle.

Technology, Humidity, and Uncooperative Monkeys

January in Belize is the beginning of the dry season, when temperatures begin to climb into the high 80s just after high noon and drop down into the low 70s or high 60s at night. It still rains, but infrequently and for short durations. It is actually quite pleasant compared to the oven-roasted climate of the late dry season in May, when it is 100-plus degrees in the shade. But in January, and in fact year-round, the humidity of Belize and other tropical countries is extremely high. Oddly, the humidity at the commencement of the dry season is not uncomfortable for the human organism. For digital equipment, though, humidity is an oppressive reality that makes even the friendliest of gadgets shudder with fright. It is imperative, I discovered, to keep all electronic devices, especially digital ones, in dry storage during downtime and in close proximity to large quantities of silica gel when activated. I was able to fit DAT machine, microphones, tapes, extra batteries, and plenty of silica packets in the airtight Pelican case, but when it came time for actual recording, I placed these components in a fanny pack filled with silica packets. There were times when I carted the Pelican case deep into the forest, but the equipment always had to be liberated, and this meant exposure to humidity no matter how cautiously I handled the situation. My constant hypervigilance to the humidity factor proved problematic in several ways.

Although many species emit the same calls or vocalizations daily, often at predictable times of the day, rovers such as kinkajous (a nocturnal, arboreal mammal slightly resembling an opossum), certain parrots, and howler monkeys do not adhere to a particular schedule. The elusive howler monkey -- I developed a strange paranoia that they knew whenever I was coming and grew silent -- may howl and bark for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes at a time. Try to imagine, then, the frantic maneuvering required when, suddenly hearing the howler monkeys begin wailing in a nearby tree, one must unload recording equipment from its vacuum-packed state, transfer it into mobile support with adjustment for ease of use, and then sprint quickly to the source of sonorous primates. On more than one occasion I reached the desired tree only to hear the howling trail off into silence as I placed my finger on the Record button.

Even more frustrating was the seemingly haphazard manner in which the DAT machine would cease all functions except "eject." Without warning, the DAT would undergo seizures because of the excessive humidity. As time passed and I became acquainted with this conundrum, I learned the age-old secret of cooking silica gel. Silica can lose its moisture-absorbing resiliency when exposed repeatedly to damp air, and without being reheated in an oven every week becomes ineffective in tropical climates. So every few weeks the inhabitants of BFREE (Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education) would gather up our silica packets for a collective 10-minute bake-off, thus ensuring euphoric relief for our various electronic gadgets. I joined this practice 10 days into my stay, and would have started sooner had I known about this extra precaution.

Having overcome to a certain degree the technological obstacles to the delicate digital jungle-recording operation -- there is a whole other set of contingencies facing analog equipment users (see postscript) -- I was now free to explore the Bladen River, limestone caves, a lagoon, savanna, and multiple forest trails. But yet another set of obstacles sprang up in my path as I hunted rare sounds.

Buzzing and Biting: The Jungle's Real Session Producers

Although it is startlingly beautiful and lush in the BNR, not all fauna (or flora) are hospitable to the would-be recordist, or any single human wandering along paths strewn with vines and sharp-needled warrie cahoun (spiny palm) trunks at odd hours of the day and night. There are highly aggressive, venomous snakes such as the fer-de-lance viper that pose a continual danger despite my brother's best efforts to catch and then release them on yonder unpopulated side of the Bladen River, and my meticulous waving of my walking staff at dawn and dusk. Then there is the aforementioned pack of wild boars which, although not bred for first-strike capability, are territorial and good for a scare and disruption to one's trajectory. Other meddlesome creatures include the garden tarantula, liable to crawl up one's leg without warning and cause quite an adrenaline rush. But even a swarm of killer bees (incredible sound) cannot match the disruptive capacity of ... the mosquito.

As in almost any recording situation, to maximize sound quality it is absolutely vital that microphones remain stationary. Whether utilizing a handheld microphone or, in my case, stereo mics that dangle from a pair of eyeglasses, the slightest movements will be detectable upon playback. It is also imperative that the recordist remain silent, breathing quietly without flinching in any direction. Proposed fix-it measures such as a microphone stand are clumsy and inefficient solutions at best when trekking deep into the bush, so I was faced with the non-native tropical sound archivist's worst nightmare: the threat of the wanton mosquito bite. Some might argue that there is beauty in buzzing, and I would not disagree. The problem wasn't so much the errant fly-by noises of insects -- rhino beetles, for example, make a wonderful rumble comparable to an early Cessna prototype -- but the difficulty in avoiding utterances of alarm or sudden scratching motions brought about by hungry bugs that interfered with my ability to sit or stand still. If I could have extended my stay by months, or possibly even weeks, I would likely have developed "thicker blood" as I witnessed in expatriate and native jungle dwellers who appeared impervious to mosquito bites.

Through trial and error, I learned two less-than-satisfactory remedies for dealing with mosquitoes. The first method -- simply keeping still -- involved willpower and denial. When this failed, I resorted to a full mosquito-netting suit, including shirt, pants, and hat. While the latter expedient prevented actual bites to the face and hands, the proximate high-pitched whine of the salivating insect as it hovered about my face proved to be a trying moment in the most untimely of intervals. Although I was able to swallow my pride and endure how ridiculous I looked to Mayans and expatriates alike dressed in my swashbuckling anthropologist outfit, I did grow weary of the extra, sweaty garments on more than one occasion, and decided to tolerate the bevy of bites in exchange for some terrific recordings. (Incidentally, bug repellent is not a viable option due to its sticky and toxic effect on sensitive mechanical appliances.)

Further Considerations and Observations

Because I used fairly inexpensive stereo and omnidirectional microphones, my recordings turned out to be sound pastiches rather than typical sound-effects recordings featuring a single bird's or animal's call. In order to capture individual organisms I would have needed a very expensive unidirectional "shotgun" microphone. One disadvantage of the symphonic mix of jungle fauna is the difficulty in identifying the various individual sounds. With microphones trained on a lone oropendola -- a bird that utters such a "silly" caw that I can only liken it to that of the cuckoo bird from the Cocoa Puffs television commercial -- I still picked up the sounds of nearby specimens such as doves, toucans, hummingbirds, crickets, and sometimes my 4-year-old niece running full speed after a lizard in the distance. Similarly, a recording of bufo marinas (marine toads) trilling by the river also included the chirps of fishing bats perched overhead. The ambient mixing of panoramic sounds was, I felt, a small price to pay for its ensuing musical or orchestral effect. And this is the reality of nature: No single sound exists in a vacuum, except through the distillation process of modern recording practices that allow a single instrument to be heard in its own finite space. Our ambient universe, whether ultra-urban cacophony or tropical-soundscape paradise (or the other way around, depending on one's auditory perspective or orientation), is a series of adjacent or overlapping sounds and overtones, and like the visual equivalent of viewing a night sky filled with thousands of glittering stars, the natural world's soundbed can be spectacular.

My favorite recollections of the recording process are ambling out of my tent just before dawn to listen to birds wake in their roosts; the cloud of killer bees feeding on the blossoms of the giant Seba tree; the rustling of iguanas waiting for the sun to rise; and the crashing of armadillos in search of hiding places after a long night's work. I did manage to imprint the sounds of howler monkeys in several configurations, so I achieved a personal milestone in that regard. And although I am ultimately satisfied with the soundscapes and occasional single-source recording, I am not opposed to the isolation-booth approach to recording and would welcome the opportunity to use a top-of-the-line microphone some day.

Recording the jungle, both for posterity and for my own musical evolution, was not an easy task. I am sure I will be back in Belize at my earliest opportunity, ready for another sortie into the incredibly rich environment of chirps, screeches, howls, squawks, roars, hums, croaks, taps, buzzes, hoots, squeaks, yelps, burbles, and rattles that constitute the jungle. I encourage anyone with an interest in location recording to visit the tropics and discover the wondrous ambience before it is gone.

Postscript

While in Belize I was fortunate to compare notes with Jim Arigoni, an intrepid amphibian researcher and archiver of frog calls who used a Marantz field model cassette recorder. Besides the usual problem of tape hiss attributable to analog cassette decks, Jim had also experienced unexpected fluctuations in tape speed due to humidity. But in general the analog recording machine performed more reliably than its digital counterpart. (Another scientist, who was recording light densities at various altitudes in the forest canopy with a digital light-meter measuring machine, undertook precautions similar to my own.) If not for Jim's willingness to guide me through the forest in the middle of the night to record frogs in a pool beyond a dry creek bed, I would never have heard how the forest comes alive while humanity is fast asleep.

Mike Marlin is a librarian, writer, and experimental string (bass, banjo, guitar) musician living in Seattle. When he is taking a break from the Tentacle, he secretly tries to keep pace with his heavy-metal drummer/guitarist 13-year-old son Jesse.

Curious about life in the canopy? Click here to hear selected bird, insect, and animal (mp3) sounds of the Belizean rain forest.

Opposing the NEA: A Composer's Experience

by Storrs Barrett Booch-Williams

Q: Have you any late-hour prescriptions for a young composer, Mr. Stravinsky?

A: If he can turn an honest million outside music he might seriously consider neglecting his talents for a time and turn it. Otherwise, and untempted by all lesser sums, he should go directly underground and do nothing but compose; that is, not strive for Foundation awards, academic prizes, college presidencies, foreign fellowships; not attend culture congresses; not give interviews; not prattle on the radio about music appreciation; not review new scores (except his own pseudonymously); and not push, promote, manoeuver, advertise, finagle, operate.

-- Igor Stravinsky, 1967
(Themes and Conclusions, page 107,
University of California Press, 1982)

Oh the lure and allure of grant money! Persistence in pursuing funds to aid one's work is important but also full of pitfalls. Applying for grants, fellowships, and sundry awards can be very discouraging to a Composer, Artist, and Creative Being. Here is my experience, and I must say that it undermined my own persistence. Is it better to play the game than to be found standing on the shore, skipping rocks? The whole universe is full of choices. Here is a slave's story.

I am rather strenuously opposed to the National "Endowment" for the Arts and just about all that it stands for, in the way that it has been functioning in this country for the last three decades. During the 1970s, when the capable Nancy Hanks was at the helm, I held great hope for the NEA.

The NEA supports "arts organizations," "administrators," and large, important established organizations in areas such as symphony, opera, dance, etc., but gives nary a hoot and provides little more than a slap in the face for the individual artist. Those individuals who do receive amounts, aside from a few well-established "name" arts-community bureaucrats, academics, and suck-ups, receive piddling little amounts to support their endeavors. Such folks apply mostly to add the "NEA this or that Award" to their resumés.

After some of my own life experience, I'm not bitter, just wizened. Let the NEA die a peaceful death. It has been brain-dead and comatose from its inception anyway. NEA = Natty Euthanasia for the Arts. They shoot horses, don't they?

In the 1970s I worked really, really, really hard at establishing myself as a composer. Professor Gwen McPeek, musicologist at the University of Wisconsin, was a profound influence. I strove to avoid entangling alliances and did bread-and-butter jobs, which cost me a couple of marriages. I worked on computer music at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, and studied with John Cage, Larry Austin, Leland Smith, John Chowning, Max Matthews, Jean-Claude Risset, and friends like Andy Moorer, Larry Tessler, H. Lane Colman, and John William Mallot. I also listened and learned from the instrumental acumen of such masters as John Coltrane, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell. Acquaintances like Robert Ashley, Don Buchla, Suzanne Ciani, Allen Strange, and Richard Waters, and light-show artists like Joan Chase of Heavy Water, also inspired me.

I immersed myself in music. At Berkeley Free University and Mid-Peninsula Free University from 1969--71, I led my very original Theory of Performance Workshops. In 1973, I participated in the Expanded Ear Conference with Nicolas Slonimsky and Dane Rudhyar, sponsored by Source Magazine, Music of the Avant Garde.

My own bands and groups included the Once & Future Consort, the Odyssey Stone Rock Outcrop, Big Sur Wind, and the Cosmic Total Environmental Art (TEA) Co., Ltd., who staged incredible events at the Minolta Planetarium and Foothill College Planetarium in California and at North Las Vegas College Planetarium in the late 70s. I was also involved in Friday Night Music, and Experiments in Art & Technology (EAT) in the Greater Bay Area. I made many underground avant-garde connections with many of the younger people in California who were doing anything, including early synthesis with the sensitive but somewhat tin-eared Stephen Halpern (the so-called "Father of New Age Music"), Shawky Roth, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and Marge the Barge & the Merry Pranksters. Sorry for all the poopy name-dropping background, but I want to convey that in the 1970s I worked really, really, really hard at establishing myself as a decent, worthy avant-garde composer.

So as a young and starry-eyed, wet-behind-the ears Composer and Artist, I eagerly attended all the regional NEA information sessions held in Chicago and San Francisco and began applying for grants in music composition. In 1977 and 1978, I did the Herculean amount of work necessary to put together the grant applications and professionally recorded tape samples of two of my finest 1975 compositions, Sunflower for Synthesizer and Jazz Ensemble and SyZyGy for Synthesizer and Concert Band in Cupertino, California. These excellent and somewhat ahead-of-their time avant-garde scores were conducted by the incredible Herb Patnoe, now deceased, who led the national champion De Anza College Jazz Ensemble.

I was rejected for the supposedly $10,000 awards in both 1977 and 1978. Fair enough -- somebody didn't care for my work, perhaps nobody thought it of merit. But this puzzled me. Some of the winning awards seemed to me clearly inferior projects. And I had some clout in my recommendations. I wanted to write a major work for synthesizer and orchestra. John Cage, bless his heart, had introduced me to the great conductor and composer Stanislaw Skrowaczewski of the Minnesota Orchestra, who wrote me a solid recommendation and agreed to look over the score with a view to introducing it and conducting the world premiere.

In 1979, the awards went up to $15,000. With a family to support, I was not going to write a piece of this magnitude without some financial support. So I rigorously and carefully fine-tuned my submission. This year, I thought I had a real chance. Not only had I submitted already twice, and exhibited proper seriousness about my work, I now knew a member of the NEA Selection Committee, Loren Rush, a composer whom I had met at the Stanford Center for Research in Music & Acoustics at the Stanford AI Project. I didn't know or give much thought to all the NEA politicking going on, but Loren told me that he would keep an eye (and an ear?) out for it, and try to help me. Loren's endorsement and encouragement of my proposal pleased me and bolstered my expectations.

Alas! One fine California Summer Day I got the same old diddly-bopping letter of rejection, thanking me for my submission and inviting me to submit again in the next cycle. This made me angry, and of course I was again disappointed. Shucks. I decided to find out who got what, how much they got, and for what kinds of projects. I wrote to the Director of the NEA Music Program and requested the complete report. Surprisingly to me, a fine 1979 Summary Report was sent to me. The report made me feel better, but it also shocked the hell out of me.

Hmmmm . . . $15,000 Awards, plural, huh? There was ONE $15,000 award, and it went to a very well-known eastern U.S. composer. There were a few awards, as I recall, around $9,000, and the average award was about $2,500, including a fairly large number of study and research awards around $500 or something. Pshaw!! I looked deeper. There were only about two awards given to composers west of [Pennsylvania's] Allegheny Mountains, as it turned out. Later that fall, I saw Loren Rush again at Stanford. He told me that he never even saw the piece!

The process was as follows: the whole Music Committee would divide up into groups of three judges, review a batch of applications, and then screen some scores for review by the whole committee. My application never made it out of the preliminary round. There is and was EXTREME ESTABLISHMENT politics going on with the whole thing. Shucks, even I was schmoozing around from the playing fields of Stanford University. There were, Loren said, only three judges on the committee from west of the Alleghenies.

Then I did some more research into the NEA. Get ready to throw up! From 1977--79, 70 percent of the submissions for NEA grants came from visual artists, and they received a paltry 4 percent of the funds. If this could be more discouraging to an artist (or to a composer, with the slap-in-the-face system I have just described), it would have to include suicides and more blood and guts and gore or something. I felt like going into a deep meditation and then immolating myself in sacrificial flames.

Instead, related to the fact that in 1979, at the age of 41, with a special new piece with painting and artful schematics and everything for Amplified and Processed Cello, I was at the last minute barred from the Janos Starker Master Class because I was "too old." I had a major life event. It was either me or the cello, the 1847 "Rockefeller" cello which had been in my possession for 16 years. The instrument came to me through a Dr. Lyon, a 'cellist and former physician to the McCormack family who owned the Chicago Tribune. John D. Rockefeller had purchased this instrument for his daughter, Elizabeth Rockefeller McCormack, probably for about $10, and it was a fine instrument. Not a great cello or anything like that. It had been in a fire sometime during its present incarnation. It was an 1847 "student" cello, and very large and beautiful compared to today's "Kay" junk. In a fit of rage I destroyed my cello after a Cosmic T.E.A. event in Menlo Park. Just picked it up over my head and slammed it in slow motion down upon Mother Earth. Age 41. Ominous behavior. However, I have survived and am happy, with a Cage-like "sunny disposition."

When I was about 9 years old, I ripped up most of the ivory keys on my precious mother Emily Barrett's grand piano. My mother was a child prodigy, playing "beautifully" at the age of 4 and still going at it at the age of 89! She had so much infinite patience with me. From where I sit, not in perfect equanimity by any means whatsoever, but as a Buddhist Gelong [fully ordained Monk -- ed.], I can look on these great Karmic lessons and find laughable elements in all of these events -- the piano, the 'cello, and finally, the NEA affronts.

Off with its head! Can you just imagine what that Concerto for Synthesizer & Orchestra might have been like if the NEA had been dealing with a full deck in my time. Perhaps the world has been spared one of its more footnotable events. Anyway, I will never write the piece. I certainly don't have the energy or probably the ability to do what I had in mind at the time.

My courage was never great enough to plow ahead in the messy Samsara (the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth we are all caught up in, doing and redoing) [Samsara is the counterpart of Nirvana] as a twentieth century creative musician and composer, as nurtured by the NEA. So many artists and composers have been duped in this country by a government that purports to support its creative people with the NEA. May the NEA and all it stands for have a peaceful and sudden . . . transition . . . a gentle word for Death!

Storrs Barrett Booch-Williams, Composer-Musician, is also known as Lama Kunga Gyaltsen, Spiritual Director of the Vajrayana Pathways Institute Without Walls at www.vajrayana-pathways.org. He is also the Conductor and Music Director of the SAMSARA Meditation Ensemble, and an active member of Seattle experimental music collective SoniCabal and of the Washington Composers Forum. He may be contacted at samsara@speakeasy.org, and welcomes artist-artist dialogue in all shapes and forms.

New Perspectives in Music
Roger Sutherland (Sun Tavern Fields, 1994)

Browsing the gamut of musical texts, or more precisely texts on music (even more specifically, texts on what can be misleadingly termed "serious" music of an iconoclastic or sometimes deliberately obscurantist bent that seems endemic to the latter half of the twentieth century), acclimated readers will likely find the experience reminiscent of the sounds these books describe. The collective tonal dissonance of books on new music varies in quality, in an analogous as well as a literal sense, and tends to fall into various categorical templates: obsessively detailed technical analyses that can often be incomprehensible to curious readers lacking a thorough working knowledge of postwar compositional theory; earnest and/or precious biographical quickies that provide much insight into the given author's character but little in terms of the subject or the subject's music; or explanations of/apologies for specific works by composers that appeal to the aficionado's historical instincts but not to the interest of the common observer.

In contrast, Roger Sutherland's New Perspectives in Music is a singular effort. Were it merely a collection of well-written, engaging, and easily digestible essays on a dodgy subject -- the chain of influence in the already malleable-by-definition field of experimental music -- it would stand out. Yet Sutherland offers a unique outlook and astutely covers areas in the field not commonly mentioned -- much less given detailed examination -- in similar books. New Perspectives in Music also serves as a valuable general resource for enthusiasts and those unfamiliar with but interested in adventurous music, which makes it an essential, updated companion to Michael Nyman's indispensable Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 1999 / Schirmer Books, 1974).

Both Nyman and Sutherland were once members of the Scratch Orchestra, as much a sociological experiment as a musical ensemble, and their proximity to the subject informs their writing; both offer alternative, utilitarian definitions of "music," emphasizing inspiration and process over finished form. Sutherland places an excessive emphasis on the concurrent parallels and overlapping features among musical activities and the visual arts. Chapters are devoted to graphic notation and the sound-sculptures of Jean Tinguely, Harry Bertoia, and the Baschet brothers' musical instruments (which also function as aesthetic visual "objects") as well as to their predecessors, Luigi Russolo's Futurist "Intonarumori." Emphasis is given to composers and groups who concern themselves with extramusical elements, such as the theatrical works of the Fluxus group and Mauricio Kagel. Regrettably, the chapter on improvisation fails to separate the European group-synthesis tradition from American jazz; here the distinction is taken as a given.

Throughout a comprehensive tripartite structure -- "European avant-garde" from Russolo through Anton Webern through the electroacoustic composer Bernard Parmegiani, "American Experimentalists" from Henry Cowell to Cage to LaMonte Young, and "Transatlantic Perspectives" comprising cross-cultural developments in aleatoric, socioscientific music and otherwise unclassifiable genres, as well as technological research -- Sutherland's prose is remarkably clear and concise, concentrating entirely on the book's connective threads with an impressive level of self-referential restraint and only the occasional lapse into opinionated excess. New Perspectives in Music is immensely readable and informative, though never breezy or tangential. (The 12" x 8.5" cloth-wrap format doesn't make for easily portable reading, anyhow.)

The book is heavily supplemented with photographs, score samples, suggested discographies (many selections from which are in print and available), timelines, an excellent section of short biographies, and a thorough index, accentuating its resource functions. It's also adequately bound and professionally typeset, for those who care about such things. Also, despite the publishers' inclusion of an erratum sheet, a strangely disproportionate number of additional misprints and/or spelling errors are in evidence for such a well-crafted production. And given the book's overwhelmingly inclusive tone, its omissions are noteworthy: Sutherland's chapter on text-as-sound contains no mention of the exemplary achievements in Poesie Sonore as practiced by pioneers such as Bernard Heidsieck or Henri Chopin, and given the book's publication date, the fact that one will have to look elsewhere for information about electronic experimentation outside venerable institutions like IRCAM or INA-GRM is a glaring oversight.

Even so, these are very minor objections, and when one takes into account the aforementioned dearth of worthwhile, available musical journalism, they seem very trivial, indeed. Highly recommended.

-- Davey Schmitt

Davey Schmitt is an itinerant worker in and around Northwest underground music. He currently hosts Le Vide, a weekly streaming Internet radio program found at www.antennaradio.com.

New Perspectives in Music is available through Anomalous Records at www.anomalousrecords.com.