Monday, October 11, 2021

An Electro-Acoustic Shaggy Dog Story

The nature of the shaggy dog story has been nicely captured in the opening sentence on its Wikipedia page:

In its original sense, a shaggy dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.

To the extent that the telling of the story is more important than the story itself, one might view the shaggy dog story as one of the more significant ancestors of performance art. That Wikipedia page includes an “Examples in music” section; but all five of the examples have to do with the text associated with the music, rather than with the music itself.

There are, however, examples in which the spirit of the shaggy dog story has been captured in music without words being involved. The best examples tend to involve a reversal of the usual structure of variations on a theme. The composition begins with some richly thick texture; and, as the variations unfold, that texture thins out until all that is left is a relatively innocuous theme. The best example of this, which probably never involved any sense of humor on the part of the composer, is Benjamin Britten’s Opus 70 “Nocturnal after John Dowland,” in which fragments of Dowland’s “Come, Heavy Sleep” come to congeal into the entire song, but only after the listener has negotiated eight movements, each of which has its own way of disclosing fragments from that song.

“Sunrise,” an electro-acoustic work composed jointly by Jacob Cooper and Steven Bradshaw, takes a similarly serious approach to the shaggy dog genre. The piece will be released this coming Friday as a CD produced by Cold Blue Music. Since Amazon.com seems to have bungled the creation of Web pages for this album to the extent that it no longer shows up on the first page of Google search results, those wishing to pre-order this album will probably do best by visiting the Web page created by Barnes & Noble Booksellers. (Those of my generation with an attachment to New York City are invited to chime in, “Of course, of course!”)

The title of this piece provides the first clue as to what the punch line will be. Nevertheless, most listeners will probably not be aware of what that punch line is or how the path leads to it unless they read the notes provided by the two composers for the CD jacket. They identify the song “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise,” composed by Canadian Ernest Seitz (the pseudonym of Raymond Roberts), setting lyrics by American Gene Lockhart. The song was first published in London in 1919 and first recorded in 1921. Those of my generation probably know it best through a 1951 recording for Capitol Records made by Les Paul and Mary Ford (which was subsequently satirized by Stan Freberg).

That publication date is roughly in the middle of the duration of the Spanish flu pandemic, first documented in March of 1918 and continuing for over two years. Whether Lockhart had the pandemic in mind when writing his lyrics is open for debate. However, the idea of “waiting for the sunrise” in the midst of the current pandemic seems to have motivated the composition of “Sunrise.”

The music was created through a back-and-forth exchange of content described by the two composers as follows:

Steven would record melodies, improvisations, motifs, vocal scrapes, hisses, whispers, and screams; Jacob would sonically manipulate them and generate new material, forging it all into a compositional framework. With a request for more vocal sounds, the cycle would begin again.

The process began in the summer of 2020 and lasted for about a year. The result demands a generous share of patience on the part of the listener, whether or not that listener is aware that the work has been structured around a “punch line.” However, to draw upon a recent metaphor that I evoked, the music does not drag the listener into the Slough of Despond. Rather, the imagination behind the creative process should encourage the sort of positive thinking that I have advocated for prevailing over pandemic conditions.

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