October 1999 Articles
An Art Action Gone Wrong? by Christopher DeLaurenti
Math Mayor Would "Nearly Double" Arts Funding from 1 to 1.5% by Doug Nufer
An Interview with New Music Presenter Herb Levy part 1
Write Your Artist Statement in 30 Minutes! by Christopher DeLaurenti
Littoral Zone: File Under Popular Reviewed by Jon Dumont
Theodor Adorno vs. Green Gartside: A Debate

Mark Taylor-Canfield's protest on September 19 at the Day of Music in Benaroya Hall should not pass without discussion. I believe -- quite irrationally -- that as a Seattle native, I have the privilege to confirm non-natives' oft-voiced sentiment that many Seattlelites respond timidly, if at all, when confronted with even feathery touches of a passionate or vehement discussion. Regardless of his motives, the prevailing timidity of arts activism in Seattle made Taylor-Canfield's actions a bold, foolish, and compelling example for others to avoid or follow.

Objective journalism is a sham, so I won't feign omniscience or pretend to be impartial. Instead I will write what I saw and recount what other eyewitnesses told me. Of course, I will betray my stake in the proceedings throughout the article.

I attended the July 13 meeting of the Washington Composers Forum where WCF director Christopher Shainin presented the possibility of a chamber music performance during the Day of Music at Benaroya Hall. Planners for the annual Day of Music, an all-day cavalcade of solo, chamber, orchestral, and eclectically selected ethnic music at Benaroya Hall, offered a half hour to the WCF, with the requirement that each piece -- for soloist and/or chamber ensemble -- would be a world premiere. Because the deadline for submitting a final lineup was July 21, Christopher suggested that we formulate a program quickly and use the opportunity to carry out the WCF's stated mission of introducing audiences to new music by Washington composers.

Most of the composers present eagerly volunteered, yet when the number of composers exceeded the allotted time, several composers graciously and unselfishly dropped out, leaving myself, Allan Loucks, Gregory Nissen, Mark Oldham, Paul Rucker, and Mark Taylor-Canfield scheduled for the WCF showcase titled "composer as performer" on September 19. I was gratified that the group was very open to my proposal of improvising live electronic music. I eagerly anticipated performing for a new audience.

At a subsequent SoniCabal meeting, Mark half-jokingly mentioned to me and others that he might protest the Mayor's failure to adopt the Arts Task Force's recommendations and the leftover morsels for the arts by attacking the piano at Benaroya during his portion of the WCF performance at the Day of Music.

The Arts Task Force, convened in February by Seattle Mayor Paul Schell and City Council member Nick Licata, presented its recommendations to the Mayor in late June. [See related article on page 6. -- Eds.] In late August, Mayor Schell responded with severely scaled-down suggestions that angered many artists and arts activists including Mark Taylor-Canfield, who had attended the public meetings of the Arts Task Force. Acting as a gadfly-in-residence, Mark did his best to convey his viewpoint as an experimental musician and underground artist to the ATF members; his thoughts on the ATF were published in the August Ink issue of the Tentacle.

Knowing Mark's flamboyant composing and performing style, I didn't take it seriously until a press release from the apparently nascent Northwest Music News Network titled "Composer Vows to Destroy Piano At Symphony Hall!" showed up on several public mailing lists on September 11. Citing an anonymous source from the Washington Composers Forum, the press release stated that Taylor-Canfield "has promised to destroy the piano during his performance at Benaroya Hall. He hopes the act will bring attention to the poor plight of artists in the U.S. and especially in Seattle, where the mayor has recently vetoed his own Arts Task Force proposals to increase funding for the arts. Instead of the proposed $200-million endowment for the arts, Paul Schell approved only a token $250,000 from next year's city budget. Some in the artistic community feel betrayed by the mayor's lack of support."

I had never heard of the Northwest Music News Network, and the anonymous source from the Washington Composers Forum has yet to be identified, but of course I don't know everything; the press release was strangely formatted, too, but then, having seen shoddy press releases from major performance organizations darken the Tentacle's door, correlating legitimacy with a top-notch press release seemed foolish. News is news even if it isn't true. Ideally, all published articles of any kind should be elaborately footnoted, but such a baroque latticework of ethical fact-checking would cost a fortune.

On September 15, Taylor-Canfield emailed a follow-up message to several public lists and replied, "I do not agree with all of the information regarding my performance, and I would like to know who this anonymous source was. I do, however, plan to cause some damage to an instrument during the performance as a protest against a very slick and calculated manipulation of the arts community by the elite administrators who claimed to represent us, and their politician friends whom they sleep with on a regular basis (I am speaking metaphorically, of course). I am angry and I plan to take advantage of this opportunity to express my outrage in a manner which cannot be ignored in a very conservative environment, instead of continuing to preach only to the choir."

Over the next few days, the Northwest Music News Network's missive and Mark's reply fueled comment and debate. Some supported Taylor-Canfield's proposed actions, others opposed them, and a few like myself fell somewhere in the middle. I argued that since a group performance may implicitly convey the endorsement of the group, other performers on the bill should be consulted or at least informed of any protest. I stated that the reason for any protest should be clear to the audience; aside from treating the audience as cattle to be herded into another ideological pasture, attacking a piano without detailed explanation would be a futile protest to sophisticates and new music novices alike.

And, from the damn-the-torpedoes, who-cares-about-the-repercussions perspective: critics have assailed performers from the steel-fingered Bartok to the performance artist Nam June Paik for attacking pianos, so for the furtherance of Art, such an attack had better be damn interesting. Viewed as an Art Action, I thought attacking Benaroya's piano could not help but fail, too. Effective Art Actions incite, arouse, and baffle the audience; their practitioners must act as if aliens have slithered into their souls and enact selected behaviors from nonexistent cultures. Ideally, those who witness an Art Action should at least come away with substantial cocktail party chatter. I could not imagine how attacking a piano could be perceived as anything but an imitation of the past.

Attacking a piano also conflicts with one of my few spiritual beliefs, namely that musical instruments absorb a portion of the soul through human contact and slowly acquire something akin to a soul. For that reason, I do not loan my musical instruments and heartily endorse severe and brutal penalties for the theft, injury, or destruction of musical property.

On Saturday, September 18, another press release announcing that Mark-Taylor Canfield had been barred from performing at the Day of Music in Benaroya Hall was dispatched to various public email lists. The press release declared that "The composer informed WCF President Christopher Shainin on Tuesday, September 14th, that he was willing to sign a statement that he would not cause any damange [sic] to the piano at the Hall, or any other property during his performance. This is Taylor-Canfield's intention regardless of any rumors that may have been spread regarding his upcoming performance." The message also quoted Taylor-Canfield directly: "I told Chris Shainin, and other composers and performers that I would not cause any damage to the piano or the property at the Hall, and was willing to sign a statement to that effect. Yet the aforementioned persons still chose to bar me performing."

Incidentally, the press release came from the same email account as the Northwest Music News Network but contained no mention of the Northwest Music News Network, which struck me as a rather strange journalistic lapse. It also seems odd that Mark told Christopher Shainin on the 14th that he wasn't going to damage any property in the Recital Hall when the very next day, in his message of the 15th, Mark asserted that he would indeed damage an instrument. None of the press releases contained any information about the piece that Mark had offered in July for the WCF program: "Arythmia #2."

On Sunday, the day of the performance, Mark waited at the Benaroya Hall artist entrance along with other composers including myself. Mark joked about the imbroglio and from a thin gold loop dangled the instrument he intended to destroy: a Christmas ornament of a piano! Despite the absurdity of destroying a miniature piano three inches tall, WCF director Christopher Shainin remained adamant. Shainin and the WCF's elected officers had conferred on Saturday and concurred that Mark was no longer on the program because of his statements to the press about his performance.

Should Mark have been allowed to perform? I know Mark fairly well and surmised that he wouldn't damage the piano, but I also reasoned that the WCF and Benaroya did not want to risk a high-gloss Bosendorfer grand on someone who they didn't know personally. I think the whole thing was ill-conceived from the beginning; also, the strange origin of the press releases caused confusion about the upcoming performance rather than stir interest in the Mayor's tepid response to his own Arts Task Force.

Mark's idea to use the Day of Music at Benaroya as an opportunity for arts activism was inspired, but why protest only at the Washington Composers Forum concert? I believe Mark had been removed from the WCF program for his piano-threatening press releases, not for his views on arts funding. In any case, protesters should present flyers and literature so that the general public can judge the merit of the protest. Protesting amidst a performance shared with other musicians also obligates the protesters to seek the consensus or approval of the other performers. Otherwise, an audience may mistakenly assume that all of the performers concur with what transpires on stage.

At the artist's entrance, Mark reiterated his offer to sign a statement pledging not to destroy anything on stage, but when WCF director Christopher Shainin refused, Mark then wondered aloud who would prevent him from entering and performing anyway. The other composer/performers nearby continued their conversations in suddenly hushed tones, or joined me in stunned silence. Christopher calmly replied that Mark was not on the list of performers and would not be admitted at the artist's entrance.

Then I snapped awake and realized that I had better start thinking about my own performance. With only half an hour to get my electronic gear up four floors, set up, and soundchecked, I started to worry. Every other performer planned to use the piano or brought a portable acoustic instrument such as a violin or cello, so I had to act fast. I rustled up a couple of stagehands who corralled a cart and helped me hustle my equipment through the serpentine halls of Benaroya. Someone found a table, so I set up my gear while the preceding performers -- a vociferous velvet-throated girls choir called N.O.I.S.E. (Northwest Opera In Schools Etc.) -- finished their set and flooded backstage.

Fortunately, I was able to set up my gear in time and do a quick soundcheck. I'm not sure what was more astounding: setting up and soundchecking in under five minutes or pegging the background music: the Modern Jazz Quartet's cool jazz classic, Pyramid. During my performance, I didn't espy Mark in the audience, so when I returned backstage I figured that the whole thing had blown over. I was wrong.

Mark later told me that he was initially prevented from entering the hall as an audience member. When he asserted his right to enter, they let him in, but not without sending a security person to sit next to him. Mark recalled, "The guy even followed me into the bathroom!"

Several eyewitnesses told me that after the final piece on the WCF program, Mark stood up from the front row and introduced himself: "My name is Mark Taylor-Canfield..." Suddenly, two nearby policemen converged on him. Declaring that there were people trying to silence him and that he had been involved with the Washington Composers Forum for five years, Mark blurted that he had been barred from performing because he wanted to speak out against the Mayor's mistreatment of artists and the arts.

Backstage, I heard vigorous shouting and saw a cop leap from his stool and dash to the stage. Mark descried the state of arts funding and shouted, "there are other arts activists here who can tell you..." while the police tried to drag up him up the aisle and out of the Recital Hall. Unable to wade through the glut of people milling around in the aisles, the cops hauled Mark up onstage toward the stage door. In the next instant, I saw the grey-and-blue blur of Mark and several cops carrying him backstage. They quickly disappeared and took Mark to the West Precinct where, from what Mark told me, he was held for several hours until the Day of Music was over and then released on his own recognizance.

I suspect it is safe to say that the folks at Benaroya were not pleased, nor were the folks in the Washington Composers Forum, whose future use of the Recital Hall is undoubtedly in jeopardy. The incident did stir up confusion in the audience, and a few folks approached me afterwards for some "dirt," but I was too tired and depressed to say much of anything. I packed up my gear, narrowly avoided an accident while driving home (my dream performance kit will be portable on public transportation), and drank a bottle of wine.

Of course, we live in America, so money had to change hands sometime. The video of the concert and Mark's subsequent protest was sold by one of the videographers and aired on KIRO, which as you might surmise, did not purchase the video for a segment on emerging Northwest composers. Peddled with the standard "teasers," the television story showed Mark watching the tape of his protest and briefly answering a few questions. Since the WCF had signed a document guaranteeing that any video made of the performance would not be used commercially, a deep legal quagmire may await the WCF, which an organization dedicated to furthering new music does not need.

The public does need to be informed of the state of arts funding as well as participate in deciding whose money goes where, but I wonder if the protest at Benaroya raised any interest in the arts funding discussion. We shall see. I hope artists will band together and create an effective lobby to make their voices heard. A professional attitude to publicity, a clearly enunciated doctrine, a consistent resolve, and coordinated flashy PR acts that don't burn any bridges will be required. As a piece of ramshackle journalism, I hope my inescapably incomplete account has offered food for thought and conveyed my unresolved perspective on this event and news reportage in general.

Christopher DeLaurenti is a composer, improvisor, radio host and the Tentacle Ship's Sturgeon.

Math Mayor Would "Nearly Double" Arts Funding from 1 to 1.5%
by Doug Nufer

Sun Ra says it's the place; Captain Kirk calls it the final frontier: space. Any way you spin Mayor Paul Schell's response to the Mayor's Task Force for the Arts, space is the most promising offer the City of Seattle can make to the avant-garde arts community. Whether or not this promise dressed up in capital letters comes true, the City at least recognizes that many of its buildings could be used as performance spaces.

Some of the other bones the Mayor would throw to the arts have grabbed more attention. The proposal to increase percent-for-art money from 1 to 1.5 percent was generously called "nearly double" by the press release and duly ratified by headlines in the Seattle P-I, as arts critic Regina Hackett might have crowned Schell something like Arts Mayor After All. A key part of the percent dickering would make the money available to artists other than visual artists, giving adventurous musicians a theoretical invitation to sharpen their grant-writing skills.

One of the more enthusiastic responses the Mayor made to the Task Force recommendations was to the idea of creating special "Arts Districts." The City would provide "a toolkit [sic] to assist neighborhoods in contacting the City" so the neighborhoods could get the "resources necessary to help themselves develop an Arts District unique to their area." I don't know what's more ridiculous: the idea of allowing Fremont to impose pirate taxes on residents so as to spawn more trolls, or the press release's use of the term "toolkit" no fewer than seven times.

Then, of course, there's the nod toward providing an information center. The City would set up a phone line modeled after the library's quick info line, stoke a Web site, etc.

So, it would be easy to dismiss all this as a civics lesson in the art of the runaround, but the Mayor does propose to "increase availability" of City buildings for use by arts (or is it Arts?) groups. Some places he mentions may be too far out of town to offer a practical solution to artists listed in the Tentacle (Sand Point, the Bathhouse Theater), but the Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Center, the Museum of History and Industry, and Seattle Center's Black Box Theater seem at first glance to be worth investigating. Unfortunately, the rents listed for all of these places are prohibitively high for avant-garde shows. Fixed minimums of $125--200 (Hughes), $350 (Museum), and even $75 (Black Box) won't work, particularly when the City's "other costs" are tacked on. And to make any City-owned venue inhabitable for even a short period by discerning audiences, artists must be allowed to treat the adults in their audiences like adults -- by serving them drinks.

If the City rents space to artists at feasible prices (e.g., a third of the door) and lets artists run their shows without siccing the liquor agents on them, the Mayor and His Task Force might actually Accomplish Something.

Doug Nufer writes fiction that's mostly based on wacky arbitrary constraints and non-fiction according to the rules imposed by various editors. He is also an editor of American Book Review and the Washington Free Press.

An Interview with New Music Presenter Herb Levy part 1

After 24 years of involvement in Seattle's contemporary music community as a concert presenter, radio host, journalist, and record label owner, new music aficionado Herb Levy recently relocated to the sunnier climes of Fort Worth, Texas. Perhaps more than any other individual, Herb was instrumental in exposing Northwest audiences to important musicians and composers in the fields of experimental, improvised, and electronic music. As music director of and/or gallery and its offshoot Soundwork Northwest, Herb presented debut Seattle performances by John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, and many other pivotal figures in new music, and helped foster local talent as well. Herb also filled Puget Sound airwaves with challenging new music for many years as a programmer for KRAB, KSER, and Antenna Internet Radio, released several CDs by notable Northwest composers on his Periplum label, and organized the Northwest edition of New Music America, to name just a few of his many projects. Shortly before his departure, the Tentacle asked Herb to share his memories of the formative days of the Seattle creative music scene and his thoughts on new music in general. The Tentacle salutes Herb Levy for his many years of vital service to Northwest creative music, and wishes him success in all future endeavors. He'll be missed.

Cracked KRAB
I moved to Seattle in the summer of 1975 from Madison, Wisconsin, where I had gone to school and lived for a couple of years. I assumed that moving to a place that was twice as big, there would be more stuff that I was interested in here. Madison had a lot of advantages that Seattle at that point didn't have in terms of performers, because it was only a few hours' drive from Chicago. Somebody who was on the road could actually make the trip, but at that point it was less likely that they would make the trip from San Francisco to the Northwest.

I had known about a few musical things that were going on here. I knew of Stuart Dempster and Bill Smith, who were at the University of Washington, mostly through recorded stuff of theirs from the early 70s. I knew that and/or gallery and listener-supported community radio station KRAB existed here, because I was involved in meetings in Madison to set up a listener-supported station (WORT) that didn't go on the air until after I left.

I went to KRAB within a month of being here and did programming from the winter of '75 until 1984, when the station went off the air. [The station later evolved into KSER and Jack Straw Productions.] For most of that time I did a weekly jazz show in a daily series called "Krabjazz." Each day had a different host, and I was the only one who did weird music on a regular basis. I also did an alternate-week show of new music.

KRAB got up to the Peninsula and down south of Tacoma -- it had a pretty good spread, but covered less area than KPLU does now. KRAB had world music of various types, sometimes produced by people who were from the cultures that the music was from. There was an Indian music show, African shows done by African folks, and some stuff done by ethnomusicology people as well. There was a lot of public affairs [broadcasting], and a half-hour reading in the morning of literary stuff. So it was a broad-ranged community station. The only thing close to it around here now is KSER; KBCS has some aspects of it, but their music mix is nowhere near as broad. Ed Bremer, KSER's director, is really interested in multiplicity of programming rather than a single format to try to get an audience, which is another thing that distinguishes KSER from other public stations around here, like KCMU, KPLU, KUOW, or even KBCS.

There were more [out music radio shows] then, depending on what you would want to count. There was always at least one weekly nighttime show at KRAB. In the context of the jazz thing I did eventually it wasn't even primarily out jazz. As the show progressed over the years, there was a point at which I would play 90 minutes of Laurie Anderson on that show and other stuff that certainly wasn't jazz by anybody's definition.

Chance procedures
From 1975 until about 1980 I was buyer, then manager, of Discount Records on University Way. It was a great place to work, because when I got there, there was a small bin of jazz import kinds of things that they got from New Music Distribution Service, and there were some other things that were around. Anytime somebody bought one of those things, I would talk to them, because I didn't know people [in Seattle]. I would say, "What do you know about this? What other things are you interested in?" And within two weeks of being in town, a guy came up to the counter with 10 or 15 albums, including some things it was hard to believe the store would get to begin with, like a piece for three barrel organs on the ICP label. So I talked with this guy, who ended up being Ken Pickering, who had just opened up a record store in Vancouver called Black Swan with a partner. [Pickering is artistic director of B.C.'s Coastal Jazz & Blues Society and of the du Maurier International Jazz Festival Vancouver.] We exchanged addresses, and since '75 we've been in touch with each other about music. There's always a different range of music and performance stuff in Vancouver. I've probably spent more than a year's worth of time up there.

[At Discount Records] I also ended up finding people that were interested in other kinds of stuff, whether it was the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Dollar Brand, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, whoever.

In 1980, in addition to the radio shows and work in the record business, I began writing for The Rocket for a couple of years. I could write about whatever I wanted to. I was living with one of the editors, Karrie Jacobs, who taught me how to write in a way that worked for me. I did an interview with Anthony Braxton, something about electric Miles Davis, something about Ornette Coleman. I did a Glenn Branca interview when he performed at On The Boards.

Northwest originals
Besides the folks that I mentioned like Stu Dempster and Bill Smith who were at UW, there was always Cornish. When I got here, Cornish's biggest claim to fame in music was still that Cage had invented the prepared piano there in 1938 or '39 when he was working with the dance program. He also did several electronic pieces using electronic devices at Cornish during this period. Since then the school has had an off-and-on relationship with new music. From the mid-1970s on, they've had a more consistent history of doing new music.

Another thing that was going on in the late 70s and into the 80s was the Composers and Improvisers Orchestra, which Jim Knapp had put together. This group had violin and cello plus relatively standard jazz instrumentation for a largish ensemble -- about 12, 13 players usually. They would invite people to town to write pieces for them -- Carla Bley, Anthony Braxton, Sam Rivers, a lot of different people over the years. People from within the ensemble and from around the area also wrote pieces for the group.

Throughout this period pianist Al Hood was active as a player in a kind of post--Ornette Coleman style. He also led a rehearsal band that served as a center for younger jazz players to work on more avant-garde styles.

If you build it...
In about 1979 a woman who had been doing some programming at KRAB named Carla Becker had been in New York and came back having met the musicians in Air [Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall]. Later the band called and said they were going to San Francisco and wondered if a show could get set up [in Seattle]. So she talked with me and Helene Silverman and Gary Bannister (two other people who had also done programming at KRAB) and over the course of a two-year period we ended up doing 13 or 15 shows of mostly jazz-based and improvised stuff. Besides Air, we presented Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Al Hood & Frog News, ROVA in what I think was their first show outside the Bay Area, Betty Carter, Sun Ra's first Seattle show, and a lot of other things. Those shows basically broke even -- nobody was trying to make any money off it. We just put up flyers around town, sold tickets through record stores, and had a mailing list.

We sent press releases to the Seattle Sun and the dailies. Some of the [press] folks had more interest than others, and that's always the case. As a result of those concerts, a writer who had been living in British Columbia and had recently moved to Seattle started to do freelance writing. He wrote some stuff for Downbeat, and then a lot of local writing. That's Paul de Barros.

In some ways, it was easier [to promote this music] then, because it was still a relatively small metropolitan area. There just wasn't as much going on. We did something maybe once every two months, but there wasn't anything else remotely like it. So it was easy to point at it and say "this is something that's happening."

and/or, Soundwork
Within the first couple of months of being here, I went to and/or gallery to see some stuff. That was an artist-run visual arts space. They also had a video program and a music program, both of which had equipment-based aspects to them as well. There was a public-access electronic music studio and a public-access video editing studio. and/or was in the Capital Hill Oddfellows building. They had a cheap deal to use different spaces in the building for possible performance venues.

Throughout the 70s, there was a circuit of places for composer/performers to play. Some of it was college town stuff, some of it was artist-run spaces like and/or, the Portland Center for Visual Arts, the Western Front in Vancouver, B.C., New Langton Arts in San Francisco, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in Los Angeles. We would talk with each other from time to time if somebody was coming and needed some extra work on the West Coast to make the money work for them. Those of you who have done some kind of presenting will understand that frequently someone from New York will call and say something like, "I have a gig down at UCSD in San Diego, and as long as I'm going to be on the West Coast, I figured I might as well do something in Seattle, too." Because there wasn't a real sense of geography, people didn't realize that if you had a gig in Miami, you wouldn't necessarily want a gig in Boston within a couple of days of each other. After people learned [how far Seattle was from California], sometimes they would still want to do it. There were a couple of a people who I'm sure ended up losing money just in terms of travel costs. But it was probably also the only time in five years that they were going to be out on the West Coast, so it made sense to them to get their work out to people.

In the late 70s and/or presented Laurie Anderson the first time she was here, Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran, and a bunch of other people. Because and/or had an electronic studio, they would have tape and performance concerts of a lot of people from the Seattle area as well. David Mahler ran and/or's new music program from the beginning, in the mid-1970s. He is a composer/performer who'd come up here from Oregon after going to Cal Arts. By 1980, David did mostly the concert stuff, and somebody else did the studio stuff. The other person who did the studio just before I did was Rene Fabre. At some point in 1981 or 1982, both David and Rene decided to stop doing what they were doing with and/or and focus on other things.

In the fall of 1982 I started to work for and/or, doing both the scheduling for the studio and putting together the concert series. What I tried to in that first concert season was indicative of what I continued to try to do when programming concerts for and/or. I continued to present composer/performers working with electronics, like Ingram Marshall and Alvin Curran, a collective concert of chamber and electronic works by Esther Sugai and other area composers, and a concert of works by Cage, Feldman, and Wolff by a group of Portland musicians; but I also pushed the series into a direction that and/or's music program hadn't been as active in: improvised music, presenting John Zorn, Shockabilly, and a combined concert by Face Ditch and Holus Bolus, two Seattle bands who, at least in part, grew out of very different periods of work by Ornette Coleman (electric and acoustic, respectively).

My sense of progamming has always been to mix things up stylistically, and to actively bring work that I thought would be useful for people in Seattle to hear, rather than just reacting to people who called or wrote saying they'd be in the area.

When and/or stopped in the mid-1980s, the operating divisions (Soundwork, Focal Point Media Center, and 911) all continued as separate organizations. Soundwork became Soundwork Northwest to maintain some sense of continuity while also differentiating between the two periods. Focal Point's video-editing facility became a part of 911's visual art program, ultimately becoming the main thrust of the organization. COCA was formed by a group of people with an interest in building on some of the kinds of visual art exhibitions that were no longer happening without the continuation of that aspect of and/or.

Audience building
One thing that was always important for me was to think of a couple of different kinds of audiences. There's the natural audience of people who are doing that kind of work (so when Nic Collins played there were 3--4 people who had also hot-wired digital delays who afterwards said to him, "I have that box and I do this with it. Have you thought to do that? How did you do this?" etc.). There are composers who may work in a different vein who just want to hear something else for a change. Then there are people who aren't composer/performers but for whatever reasons have a particular interest in the specific work, or a more general interest in new music. And then there are people who may have no idea what the hell it is, but show up because they heard about it somehow.

For almost every Soundwork show we did (and attendance ranged from around 10 people to more than 200 people a night), 15-25 percent of the audience were new names for the mailing list -- even when the audience was tiny. I have no idea how some of those people decided to come there, I really don't. But for me those people are how new music can get to be an integral part of the culture you're living in, and that was something that was (and still is) really interesting for me to push for. So I spent a bunch of time talking to people in the press and making sure there were pictures, when we had them, to try to get some kind of coverage, because that's where those folks come from.

They are hard to get ahold of, obviously (laughs). In a lot of ways, I really don't know how we were able to do that. Some of it, I'm sure, was because we weren't doing one genre of music. So somebody might come to a Shockabilly or Curlew or Gamelan Pacifica show and pick up a flyer for what we were going to do next, and maybe ended up coming to other concerts.

The other parts of what you're doing are obviously important, too: providing people in the field with a chance to hear each other and talk with each other, and generally getting listeners with an interest in new music to get a wider sense of the field. But it's also important to get the music to people with little knowledge of the field. The listeners who don't know the difference between a synthesizer and a digital delay or don't know what circular breathing is are just as important to the life of the music as the people with an interest in all the arcane technical considerations.

There are hundreds or thousands of people every weekend that will go to a movie that they don't really know much about. There are people who will go to a play or a dance performance they don't really know much about. If they don't like it, they don't care. They have something to talk about. Most people don't think that way about music, I'm not sure why. To get a civilian audience and not care if they like it, that's a real important aspect of presenting, and preserving, new music.

Write Your Artist Statement in 30 minutes!
A Tentacle Grantwriting Primer, part 3
by Christopher DeLaurenti

After enduring our Ship's Sturgeon's pompous recitation of his 18 page Artist Statement, the remaining members of the Tentacle Collective impressed him into writing the third and ideally final installment of our grantwriting series. Although not essential, this article will be most helpful if you have read the first (Baseball Bat Symphony, April 1999) and second (Bartell's Ballet, July 1999) installments of the series.

The essential element of a successful grant proposal is the Artist Statement. Your Artist Statement explains and elucidates your artistic endeavors as well as immaculately conveys the essence of your art to someone with the mentality of a television watcher. If you can describe your work in the context of Charlie's Angels or Conan: the Even Newer Adventures then you do not need to read this article.

Why should you hone and perfect your Artist Statement? Isn't it absurd to expect an artist who has devoted his or her life to music or painting or sculpture, etc. to concoct cogent and compelling prose? Yes; however, granting agencies and arts funders require artists like you to justify your artistic activity to save committees the trouble of examining your art in any depth.

Indeed, your Artist Statement absolves arts funders, committees, etc., of any foreknowledge of any art of any kind. As such, your Artist Statement should be succinct yet comprehensive, engaging yet not condescending, informative not overwhelming, and brilliant but not more brilliant than the people reading it. In short, your Artist Statement should transmit a paper telepathy that enthralls the grant judging panel and subliminally commands "Forget those other bums and GIVE ME LOTS OF MONEY!"

Artist Statement #1
avant-bassist JoEllen Fleeb
Hi, I'm JoEllen Fleeb, I play bass guitar, I do weird stuff to the strings and the guitar body. I make my own strings. I've spent 20 years playing the bass and I share my music once a week at the Downtrodden Coffee House 16 miles south of Whitepeople Mall. I hate folk music because those people are posers living mundane lives instead of strapping themselves to trees in Old Growth Forests and fighting for the Earth. But I'll be honest. I don't give a fuck about the Earth because I am too busy trying to make ends meet. Please listen to my cassette, but fast forward through the first piece. My music uses complex structures like polyrhythms that would take hours to explain. I also use rhodomagnetism to alter the feedback characteristics of the bass pickups. Find my artistic credentials in my music. Thanks. JoEllen

As you might surmise, this example requires folks to conceive and aurally imagine JoEllen's music, which committees cannot do in a single afternoon meeting -- if at all. This terrible example also raises wider social issues, but fails to connect it ("a fuck about the Earth") to JoEllen's work. Naturally, any hint of science or rational intelligence needs to be shrouded in some palatable spiritual gobbledygook. For contrast, let's peruse a flawlessly executed Artist Statement.

Artist Statement #2
Native American Bassoonist Alson Szlezedak-Brown
Peace! I am Alson Szlezedak-Brown and I was born in Neckred, Texas although my soul emerged on this earth in Pueblo, Colorado many, many years ago. I play the bassoon, an instrument usually associated with the symphony orchestra but with roots in the shepherd's pipes of North Africa and Native America. I studied the bassoon as a young person but did not find my voice until I began my spiritual quest in my late teens with Rodon Talboothe-Glow, shaman of the Inner Light. Rodon urged me to fuse my bassoon technique with the playing styles of ancient indigenous peoples. "Our ancestors will sing in your soul - if you listen." Today, I bring the healing powers of my music to all who listen. My playing connects even casual listeners to the serene melodies that wait for us in the Earth.

I hope you will hear joy, peace and pure life in my music. My music is unashamedly about happiness and spiritual fulfillment. I seek funds to continue my trek to the further reaches of our community and I hope to release a compact disc of pieces similar to "Peace Dance" enclosed in my work sample along with an eagle feather. I hope you will join me in my quest!

So how can a prose-perturbed artist compete? In truth, I am not much of a writer, so when my writing looks laggardly I rely on Microsoft's CRAP(tm) -- Comprehensive Compendium for Revising and Redacting Artist and Athlete Prose and Proposals -- which, as power users know, is part of SHOOT -- System for Hedging or Opaquely Obfuscating the Truth -- a handy collection of software utilities created by Microsoft for PR flacks, press bureaus, major television networks, newspapers, intelligence agencies and legal affairs departments in Redmond, Washington and around the world.

While I do not endorse Microsoft, they hired me to help them devise this handy utility, so I can vouch for CRAP SHOOT's efficacy. If you own a computer, stop reading now, go download CRAP SHOOT from www.microsloth.com, run your prose through CRAP and presto! -- an Artist Statement worthy of a MacArthur Genius Grant or a Guggenheim Fellowship will emerge.

Alas, CRAP SHOOT is not available for the Macintosh, but I recommend an excellent equivalent: PIMP HATS -- Prose Intensive Multi-Proposal Honing And Truncating System -- which you can download from many sites on the net. Best of all, PIMP HATS, like CRAP SHOOT, is freeware! For those who do not have net access, I will annotate JoEllen Fleeb's revised Artist Statement as rendered by CRAP SHOOT:

Annotation key:
Fancy Unforgettable yet Cogent Quote (FUCQ)
Least OverWhelming Innovation Quotient (LOWIQ)
Sincerely Uplifting and Cleverly Unassuming Paragraph (SUCUP)
Begging Statement (BS)
Fake Uplifting Traditional Zinger (FUTZ)

"Like a hawk hunting her prey, Whitehawk-Fleeb attacks her instrument in a vertiginous whirl clawing, biting, rending and finding new sounds every time. She reinvents the bass guitar with each performance."(FUCQ) The Seattle Times

I'm JoEllen Whitehawk-Fleeb and I have a unique approach to the bass guitar. Long dismissed as the instrument that keeps pop songs together, I have fused the frenetic movements of modern dance with my self-taught playing techniques into a vivid kinetic performing style. Human motion makes the music.(LOWIQ) Using complex polyrhythms and tensile stop-start movement, I use every square inch of the instrument to wrest an orchestra -- all from a solo bass guitar!(FUCQ) I hope my work sample video, Flexistrings #5, conveys the visual and sonic aspects of my performances. (SUCUP)

From inner city neighborhoods and shopping malls to gated communities and arts venues, I perform as much as possible for diverse audiences. I know that experimental performance can seem daunting to some folks, so I start out slowly and do my best to lure folks into my sonic world. Have ears will travel!(FUTZ) I believe that with ears and an open mind, anyone can savor the excitement of my live performances. (SUCUP)

I have performed at many festivals and seek funds to bring my music to a wider audience through touring and recording.(BS)

Also, CRAP SHOOT and PIMP HATS include substantial tools for creating ethnically ambiguous hyphenated names. What's in a name? Lots of money! If you don't have net access, here is how you can enjoy the benefits of an ethnically ambiguous hyphenated name and palliate grant judging panels who equate ethnicity with artistic creativity.

First, try and remember your middle name. Got it? Good. Write it down before you forget. Most likely it is as dull as the rest of your name, but if you are lucky, your middle name might impart some ethnic mystery. Insert a hyphen, a vowel or other slight modification and watch the magic happen!

example one: Alan Robert Corbison 4 Alan Roberto-Corbison
This could be improved to Alan Roberto-Cor-Bison or simply Alan Cor-Bison

If your middle name is generic ("Bob" "Freida" Louis" "Rebecca") search your mother's and grandmothers' maiden names.

example two: Louis Ferguson 4 Lou Apporetto-Ferguson
Lou has the added advantage of a unisex name -- great for government job applications too!

If your ancestors were ethnically homogenous, your last hope remains in a spirit quest name. What is a spirit quest? For those not spiritually inclined, a spirit quest resembles a trip to the supermarket, but instead of purchasing a new brand of tomato paste, you purchase a bunch of books that everyone else idealizes (e.g. Gibran's The Prophet, the collected works of Rumi, Linda Goodman's Sex Signs et al.), attend a spiritual retreat (hint: if it cost less than $200, it is probably not very good), take a trip to an extreme environment (deserts, county council meetings, family holiday dinners and hazardous waste sites all qualify) and finally: unquestioningly accept hazy and generic spiritual beliefs that someone else devised and join a group (S&M-friendly Goths, Resort Spa Buddhists, Curved Roof Protestant Churchgoers, etc.) that weeds out the poor and ugly and enforces intellectual, monetary, emotional and sartorial conformity.

Your spirit quest will result in an additional name which you can hyphenate with your old moniker.

example three: JoEllen Fleeb 4 JoEllen Whitehawk-Fleeb
JoEllen got in a car wreck in Whitehawk, Arizona, "saw stars" and found her spirit quest name!

Best of luck with your Artist Statement. Send your success stories to tentacle@tentacle.org and I'll steal your ideas!

Littoral Zone:
File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music
November Books (UK), Autonomedia (US), 1985, 1991, 1993
ISBN: 0-936756-34-9 (pbk)
reviewed by Jon Dumont

Chris Cutler longs for the reappearance of a vital and flexible folk music from which an alienated populace can find sustenance, direction, and the hope of justice. In short, he wants music to save us from ourselves. This is the theme that threads its way through File Under Popular, Cutler's slim volume of collected essays from the early 1980s.

Cutler apologizes several times for his wide-eyed optimism, but then presses on with the conviction and zeal of a southern Baptist preacher. His enthusiasm is contagious -- by the time I had finished reading, I needed to pull out my old Henry Cow records to hear for myself what music sounds like that is completely untainted by commercial concerns and formidable enough to resist the challenges of being reabsorbed over time by capitalism's overwhelming ability to render art a toothless commodity. Fortunately for both Cutler and this reviewer, Henry Cow holds up remarkably well. I can continue to be a believer: A people's music will live, and I join Cutler in thumbing my nose at Theodor Adorno.

The essays are divided, not particularly evenly, into three sections. The first section works hard to tease out useful distinctions between the idioms of "folk," "classical," and "popular." Folk is defined as a music that completely represents the people who listen to it; that is, music from a unified culture, unself-conscious and created purely for the purpose of expressing the norms of said culture. Cutler argues that capitalism and the advent of recording technology have virtually guaranteed the impossibility of the survival of folk music, at least by this rather strict definition. Classical, as defined by Cutler, is bracketed from folk in several immediately identifiable ways. First and foremost, it is a notated music, read before it is ever played or heard, and composed by individuals in isolation who are then rarely, if ever, those who would eventually play it. This tyranny of the composer itself creates alienation and a hierarchy that goes unquestioned, and in fact becomes a part of the value of the music. Popular music is pretty much what's left. Cutler contends that popular music is a 20th century phenomenon, wedded to technology and the means of production. For him, kicking through the mountains of garbage produced by the market's obsession with numbers and sales will yield the seeds of a new music, marginalized for the moment, but healthy, growing, adapting, and holding the promise of becoming "the free currency of a classless society." Yipes! That's a job most anyone would run from.

Obviously, the seeds of this new music are blues, jazz, and its offshoots. Section two (the heart of the book) is comprised of chapters on Sun Ra, the Residents, and Phil Ochs. Each are offered as exemplary musikers striving in their own way toward this potential new era, and examined quite closely (and interestingly) from a sociological much more than a musical standpoint. For instance, were the reader unfamiliar with Sun Ra's music, the chapter on the workings of the Intergalactic Research Arkestra wouldn't bring that person much closer to a sense of whether or not s/he would like it. On the other hand, Cutler provides a wealth of information about how Sun Ra, by carefully guarding the means of production, was able to document hundreds of hours of the Arkestra's music, to explore new and traditionally underused instruments in a big-band context, and to create and perform harmonically and rhythmically "free" music without the prohibitions that even a small and supportive commercial label would have imposed.

The chapter on the Residents is similarly interesting. To Cutler's credit, his commitment to a neo-Marxist theoretical discourse doesn't stop up his ears; he candidly admits that by the late seventies the eyeballed ones had become quite uninteresting to all but their most ardent fans. And, as above, don't come here expecting to find out how the Residents' music sounds. That's left for someone else. Instead, Cutler examines and celebrates the many inventive ways that this group of media manipulators mimic and satirize both the music industry and the music that reflects the dominant values of that industry.

The final section offers a concise history of the more progressive end of the rock music spectrum, filtered through Cutler's peculiarly Eurocentric lens, paying particular attention to the Rock in Opposition movement of the early seventies, of which Henry Cow were founding members. Also included is a generous and well-selected glossary of the rock music that came before and influenced them. The bone I'll pick is that the Syd Barrett--led Pink Floyd gets special and lengthy treatment (Cutler nearly genuflects), while the less well-known but perhaps more influential Spontaneous Music Ensemble and AMM merit nary a mention.

Finally, there are more than two dozen photos (mostly of Cow and related projects, but also of Soft Machine, Magma, etc.) from back in the day. Some of this seems somewhat self-serving; Cutler positions Henry Cow at the epicenter of a scene that he obviously believes broke new and important ground. Maybe so, but that would probably be better left for others to say, and it strays from the closely reasoned analysis that informs the rest of the book.

It is nice to have File Under Popular back in print as a resource. Cutler wears his very political agenda on his sleeve, which is admirable in these cautious times. He is a true believer, and his little red book just might give some others the strength, and a concisely sketched road map, to carry on.

Jon Dumont works with adults with developmental disabilities in Seattle, and agrees with Frank Zappa that "music is the best," and with the Trashmen about everything.

Theodor Adorno vs. Green Gartside: A Debate

The following is an excerpt from "A Social Critique of Radio Music," by T. W. Adorno, first published in Kenyon Review in 1945. Though written forty-four years ago on the subject of "radio music," it is unfortunately all too relevant still for the discerning listener of any music. Enjoy.

One should not study the attitude of listeners without considering how far these attitudes reflect broader social behavior patterns and, even more, how far they are conditioned by the structure of society as a whole. This leads directly to the problem of a social critique of radio music, that of discovering its social position and function. We first state certain axioms.

(a) We live in a society of commodities -- that is, a society in which production of goods is taking place, not primarily to satisfy human wants and needs, but for profit. Human needs are satisfied only incidentally, as it were. This basic condition of production affects the form of the product as well as the human inter-relationships.

[Adorno states three more axioms related to (b) capital concentration and monopolized mass production of standardized goods; (c) how power employs that standardization to preserve a commodity society as difficulties arise; and (d) how certain "antagonisms" arise in economic and cultural spheres. -- Eds.]

How did music become, as our first axiom asserts it to be, a commodity? After music lost its feudal protectors during the latter part of the 18th century it had to go to the market. The market left its imprint on it either because it was manufactured with a view to its selling chances, or because it was produced in conscious and violent reaction against the market requirements. What seems significant, however, in the present situation, and what is certain ly deeply connected with the trend to standardization and mass production, is that today the commodity character of music tends radically to alter it. Bach in his day was considered, and considered himself, an artisan, although his music functioned as art. Today music is considered ethereal and sublime, although it actually functions as a commodity. Today the terms ethereal and sublime have become trademarks. Music has become a means instead of an end, a fetish. That is to say, music has ceased to be a human force and is consumed like other consumers' goods. This produces "commodity listening," a listening whose ideal it is to dispense as far as possible with any effort on the part of the recipient -- even if such an effort on the part of the recipient is the necessary condition of grasping the sense of the music. It is the ideal of Aunt Jemima's ready-mix for pancakes extended to the field of music. The listener suspends all intellectual activity when dealing with music and is content with consuming and evaluating its gustatory qulaities -- just as if the music which tasted best were also the best music possible.

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) -- philosopher, music critic, member of the Frankfurt School -- studied music early in life, including composition with Alban Berg in Vienna, eventually focusing on other academic interests. He is known mostly for having controversial ideas on the creation of philosophy and art in relation to certain classes, but was also critical of capitalism and the impact it has on music as commodity.

The sole remaining founding member of the British group Scritti Politti (Italian for "political writing"), Green Gartside refined their music from the stark reggae-tinged anti-pop punk hardscrabble of their Rough Trade singles to a smoother, more lyrical sound and mainstream success with such well-known tunes as "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)," "Perfect Way" (covered by Miles Davis on Tutu), and "Boom! There She Was." In an interview in Music Technology magazine in 1988 he said:

Whatever's conventionally thought of as more marginal music -- whether it's the independent scene of whatever, they are the margins of a conservatively designated space -- there's nothing more inherently interesting or expressive or radical happening there than anywhere else. That's why I embraced the idea of returning to a dominant aesthetic and I see no good reason to be anywhere else. Although I might -- the map could be carved up again or I may want to be involved in carving it up again as much as it's possible to do so. I just want to emphasize the fact that I don't think there's anything inherently more challenging or truthful or more radical than where we are. You get involved in minutiae of pop, and the journalists and papers involved in packaging and presenting the consumer with a catalog of choices of musics that he can use to construct or deconstruct himself. That all tends to overlook the fact that pop music in itself is this gloriously enigmatic, pleasurable, meaningless/meaningful thing.

But all you can ever do is talk around music, you can never actually refer to music -- in the same way, music itself doesn't have a semantic level. I became hooked, when I was younger, on finding challenging musics. I would seek out records that initially frustrated me and were unsettling for me. The Beatles were an unsettling thing: each subsequent single was a sufficient departure from the last in terms of its language, its melody, its rhythms, to be a very big thing for a little boy -- a little boy who took it very seriously. These things were thrown down as things of great power and beauty, and troubled me. I searched them out and they led me to listening to rock 'n' roll: Matching Mole, Robert Wyatt, Henry Cow . . .

I no longer have that cartography of the world -- this is difficult music, this is easy music -- I just don't think it's like that. But those musics are there to be found as challenging to listeners throughout the whole catalog of possibilities of music. There are musics that may even seem terribly anodyne to me and you, that hopefully are undoing little boys and girls throughout the country as they did me. I believe that to be the Great Hope. I'm retaining a willful naivetŽ about these things while theorizing at the same time and finding to my surprise and delight that I can keep both of them alive. Music is essentially so resiliently enigmatic.

Although Adorno died long before the formation of Scritti Politti, it may safely be assumed that Gartside has read some of his work. Scritti Politti's first album since 1988, Anomie & Bonhomie, was released earlier this year.