Charles Amirkhanian Gives the Ratchet its Due

Cover of the album being discussed, showing the instrument that inspired it (from the Other Minds Web page for the album)

This coming Friday Other Minds Records will give the ratchet its due. The album Ratchet Attach It is basically an eleven-movement suite composed by Charles Amirkhanian. According to its Other Minds Web page, it was commissioned by Errollyn Wallen, the Royal Composer of the United Kingdom, for the 2021 Spitalfields Festival in London. That text goes on to note that the result reflected the composer’s “career-long fascination with the noisiest of percussion instruments: the ratchet.”

As one might expect, percussion has its say over the course of the album; but do not wait for an elaborate cadenza from the ratchet. The primary departure from percussion comes with a player piano with piano rolls prepared by Rex Lawson. The most interesting of these is “Bum of the Flightlebee.” This resulted from taking a player piano roll of “Flight of the Bumblebee” and playing it in reverse. Another transformation arises when a piano roll for “To a Wild Rose” for a full piano keyboard is played on a pianola with only 65 available keys.

In many ways, this is an album of “in jokes” for well-informed musicians. For the most part, I could “get” and enjoy most of those jokes, sometimes with assistance from the booklet notes. Nevertheless, the playful rhetoric of this album can only go so far. The overall journey of eleven tracks is, for the most part, satisfyingly amusing. However, I suspect that the humor will not hold up over frequent listenings. On the other hand, returning to the album after a few months’ departure will probably be refreshing!

Friday the Thirteenth with Other Minds

Last night I returned to the ODC Theatre for another dose of Other Minds’ Festival 23, Sound Poetry: The Wages of Syntax. The concert was offered as, according to the program book, an “antidote for triskaidekaphobia,” since it was being held on a notoriously auspicious Friday the Thirteenth. The title for last night’s offering was Good Luck With/On/For/In/At.

The program itself offered an assortment of different approaches to sound poetry. Enzo Minarelli gave recitations of his own work, having given the Italian Futurists their due this past Wednesday; but he presented his delivery against a setting of film projections. The final set of the evening, taken by the Festival’s Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian involved both live and taped recitation, also involving projections, this time of videos provided by his colleague Carol Law. Amy X Neuburg interleaved recitation with both song and instrumental performance, all managed through digital control hardware; and the program began with tape music by Mark Applebaum.

The critical benchmark for performance last night was clarity of diction. Once again Minarelli delivered the most impressive account, particularly since most of the time he was speaking Italian, this time without the benefit of the projected scores provided for his Futurist readings. Instead, the presence of projected film led the attentive listener into the spirit of his texts, even if that listener only knew how to follow Italian in a text sheet, preferably one also providing English translation.

In Applebaum’s case clarity was achieved through the deft management of four audio channels. His piece was a suite entitled Three Unlikely Corporate Sponsorships. For those whose primary source of entertainment is television, the piece could also have been called The Revenge of the Mad Men. As most of us know, television advertising has become a mother lode of creative design, editing, and, quite frequently, processing by advanced technology. Applebaum used those same tricks of the trade to bite the hand that was feeding his inspiration. The result was delightfully comic but also thoroughly engaging for the attentive listener, even during those few occasions of minor flaws in the text itself.

Those familiar with Neuburg’s work know that she is an “all-purpose” vocalist. Nevertheless, her approach to narration tended to fall short of the mark, in both content and delivery, more often than one would have liked. This may just be a matter of personal taste; but I, for one, would have preferred more of her singing voice over much of her speaking. Using sampling techniques, she delivered a stunning account of a Sacred Harp hymn, structured in canon form and delivered with her providing all four voices. For my own money, that was worth the price of admission to her set.

One of Carol Law’s images for Charles Amirkhanian’s recitation of “History of Collage” (courtesy of Other Minds)

Amirkhanian closed out the evening by revisiting sound poems he had originally broadcast on KPFA., Those days predated my arrival in the Bay Area; so, for me, these were “first contact,” rather than retrospective, encounters. These proved to be as engaging as Applebaum’s tapes; and they involved “live performance” to boot. Whether or not they (or, for that matter, any of the other works performed last night) had anything to do with luck, good or bad, could be left entirely to the judgement of the individual listener.

Charles Amirkhanian’s “Lexical” Music Finally Enjoys Digital Distribution

During much of the Seventies, experimental music pioneer Charles Amirkhanian spent much of his time working on what his Wikipedia page calls “text-sound music.” This basically involved exploring how many of the techniques behind tape music (the “American cousin” of musique concrète, which grew out of the efforts of Pierre Schaeffer dating back to the early Forties) could be applied to source recordings of the human voice. At that time Amirkhanian was Music Director of KPFA-FM, the Pacifica Radio station based in Berkeley. The affordances of a radio studio and an emerging aesthetic for poetry based on sounds, rather than just words, sparked his creating six tape music compositions that were collected on an album entitled Lexical Music, released in 1980 in vinyl by the pioneering label 1750 Arch Records.

That vinyl is now a valued collectors’ item. As of this writing only one copy is available on Amazon.com at a price of $50. Fortunately for those more interested in listening to the music rather than showing off a rare vinyl album, MP3 downloads of all six pieces, along with an impressive (if not a bit imposing) 32-page booklet, are available from an Amazon download Web page. Three of the selections (“Mugic,” “Dutiful Ducks,” and “Muchrooms”) are “solo” works, meaning that Amirkhanian’s is the only voice. He is joined by other speakers in “Seatbelt Seatbelt” and “She She and She,” as is the case in “Mahogany Ballpark” (created in collaboration with visual artist Carol Law), which draws upon field recordings as well as other speakers.

Sadly, much of the sense of a pioneering spirit in this album may be lost on current listeners who see every problem in terms of its solution through digital synthesis. This overlooks the almost visceral qualities of making this kind of music before computers became “personal.” Schaeffer clearly appreciated those qualities, and many of his results clearly indicate how he could revel in them.  The same is true for John Cage and his New York School colleagues, who tended to align with Cage over the need for method, even when it was unclear where the method would lead. By the time Amirkhanian had begun his gig at KPFA, the San Francisco Tape Music Center had been around for about a decade; and that institution had become a hotbed of “visceral music-making by other means.”

It is thus worth bearing in mind that listening to a recording such as Lexical Music benefits from an approach that is as curious about the processes of making as about the resulting music captured on these six tracks. From that perspective the booklet that comes with the album is as important as the tracks themselves. The contributing essays address not only the theory-and-practice associated with each of the compositions but also the context of what it meant to think about making this kind of music. Indeed, there is something almost joyous about bringing the experience of listening to these tracks together with the adventure of coming to know the history behind them. To the extent that our current culture has devolved into a condition that takes pride in ignorance of history, this new offering is a significant asset that offers much to teach when it comes to those vital activities of both making and listening to music.