I have no idea whether this is the right place to post this. I think the right place to post this doesn't exist...
Anyway-
I am a composer of art music and I'm looking for musicans who read music and would be interested in forming some kind of chamber group to play some music around the playa. My music tends to be spiritual/tripped out/pretty... difficulty ranges from rather to not very, depending.
2004 would be my second year on the playa, and one thing I really regretted last year was being unable to share my real art with people. Sure, I could jam on the melodica a bit, but that's very different from music I actually wrote. I was thinking about attempting to build something this year, but I've got too much stuff to do (I've got an orchestral commission due the beginning of August and I'm going to be at Tanglewood) in the next months to really make it feasible for me, and besides, I'm no good at building things. What I do is write music. And I'd love to write a new piece for the playa.
I know there was a string quartet who was around the playa last year. If you all are interested in maybe working with me, that would be cool. Or I would be up for forming an ad hoc ensemble, writing a easy work (rehearsable in twoish hours, say) for whomever responds to this post, and going and playing it around. I'm thinking not just center camp cafe, but playing the Temple in the middle of the night, chill rooms, weird spaces in the middle of playa far enough away from the amplified sound. (What would be nice would be if there were some structure on the playa with actual acoustics... but that might be too much to ask.) And I think it will be a wonderful opportunity to present some kinds of music which aren't heard very often at BM but which would be welcome. (I could also do some arrangements of, say, Machaut or Josquin for whatever the instruments are, or we could play In C or something like that... I guess plastic slipcovers or laminating music is the way to go... but that can be discussed later)
Anyway if this sounds interesting, and you're a conservatory/pro-level musician (I don't want to seem elitist here - I have the utmost respect for amateur music-making, and certainly as a performer, I'm love to play/sing/jam with non-pros, it's just that my own music is not terribly "robust", and tends to be a bit tricky, and thus is really better in the hands of professionals), respond here, or write me an email... You can get my address (and check out some of my music) at my website: http://www.joshuapenman.com .
Thanks for reading. Sorry if I sound like a snob. I'm really not, trust me! I think I have something beautiful to give to the playa, but (unfortunately?) I need other people to really make it happen.
--JSP
PS Worst comes to worst, I'm at the very least going to bring a bunch of CDs and spin acoustic psychedelic music (Gorecki, Part, Kancheli, Bach, Balinese gamelan, Qawwali, Tibetan ritual music...) in some chill-out room.
PPS No worries if you play saxophone or some kind of ethnic percussion or some other so-called "non-classical" instrument. I can write for anything. If you read music, and can play that sucker well, good enough for me.
Classical/acoustic/reading musicians on the playa?
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leslielandberg
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Tue May 25, 2004 4:52 am
- Location: oakland, ca.
Elitism
I sympathize. I am an opera singer and composer and this will be my eigth year on the playa, but my first contributing as an artist. It has been hard finding venues for the classically trained...do you write for voice, as well? I don't sing with a company currently, but if you give me an audition you'll be terribly impressed. I sang at Flambe Lounge a couple of days ago: did you catch me singing Turandot? I'd love to be part of the ensemble, live in Oakland and can rehearse here in town, if need be. I also have a big installation planned, so I'll have to be a part-timer, but would like to join in, here and there. Being pro means that I can pull off jumping in, provided that I can rehearse here in town first. By the way, I am a soprano, what they call "light dramatic", very big voice, lower notes are very solid, High C is strong, but it's my top note. BTW, your ensemble would be welcome at my installation, which is a theatre peice called Theatre of the Heavens Mask and Lightbox Installation and Oracle. It is one of the ten dioramas which will be directly beneath the Man this year! Let me know if you can use me...
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leslielandberg
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Tue May 25, 2004 4:52 am
- Location: oakland, ca.
me again
I see that no one has responded. I just reviewed your website. My credentials are hardly as impressive, yet I think you will find working with me to be very rewarding. I am very serious about my music. I am pleased to note you do write for voice. Since I don't currently have a URL, please accept my appologies for this overly long posting. I'd like to share the project I am doing for BM with you here (and anyone else who wanders in...) to show you where I feel there is confluence. In particular, the serious and metaphysical/philosophical bent of your creations seems to intersect with mine. I would like to meet, if for no other reason than to discuss mutual passions and affinities... the conceptual framework for my intstallation piece is below, hope you like it.
love, Leslie
Vault of Heaven: The Theatre of the Heavens Mask/Light Box Installation and Oracle
The highest wisdom of the ancient world was informed by a radically intuitional and deeply felt understanding of man’s nature as a reflection of observable cosmology. Modern man, with his insistent reliance upon mechanics and lenses, mathematics and objectivity has, nevertheless, remained unchanged in his basic nature. In this timeless, metaphysical reality, this void of endless possibility and creation from which we spring, there is nothing “out there” which we cannot immediately access from deep within.
It has been said that humans were created because God wanted to understand Himself intimately - to dance with his creation; we are all, therefore, dancers in a cosmic dance - our partners the heavenly bodies of the stars and planets - embracing the void from which we are created.
The Theatre of the Heavens is thus the stage upon which man’s cosmic nobility is played out: the cataclysmic rending and reordering, the mystery and infinity. We are the children of the stars. Our psyche and the cosmos are inextricably linked: the cosmology of man reflected in the cyclic nature of the ever unfolding and refolding paradigm: man as the embodiment of the infinite. God laughing at his own reflection.
There are masks. Masks we create and wear and think of as ourselves. Then there are masks that we embrace, encounter on our journey through art and community, such as these. These masks have been made to embody the mystery held within the observable celestial fields, personified and mythologized to express our wellsprings of longing, imagination and power.
The Oracle/Players
Astra:
Astra is the Mother of Humanity. She embodies boundless love and kindness, abundance, personal gifts, and the intelligence of the heart. In Her far-reaching beams of light, spanning immeasurable distance and time, she shows the spirit of giving freely without restraint; spent and dark, Astra bears mute testimony of Her savage decline from the highest reaches of stellar magnificence to cold anonymity - She nevertheless spends Her energy without reservation. Hers is a celebration of the deepest personal commitment without regard for self. In each of us is a similar fount of reckless, boundless munificence.
Helios:
Paternalistic and authoritarian, the blinding power of Helios, our sun, is at once life-giving and destructive. With sprays of jetting, molten fire thrown out thousands of miles into space and with a volume 1,300,000 times that of the earth, the irresistible magnetic attraction of Helios holds fragile Terra captive, while it imbues her with great fecundity: life as we know if could not exist on the earth without Helios’ heat and light energy.
The celebrated warmth of Helios invests our imaginations with creativity, playfulness, and unfettered joy. His healing rays convey a sense of freedom, brotherhood and conviviality. In his warm embrace we gather to play; but at his uncompromising power, we bend to our tasks: we rise with the sun, we toil and make obeisance to His awful authority.
In His diurnal passage, circumambulating the heavens, Helios, with his predictable risings and settings, represents certainty. Little wonder that the ancients felt compelled to sacrifice their most beautiful maidens and youths in his name, in an effort to propitiate His all-consuming egoism.
The gravity of his manifestly material nature is vividly represented in Helios’ twin symbols, the sun disk and the golden coin, the latter often bearing the portrait of all-powerful human patriarchs - temporal rulers, who, in their lust for power, eagerly aligned themselves with the association of the sun and Godhood.
Thus, borne of Helios, each human creation is likewise a conflation of freedom and constraint; joy and tragedy; obligation and free will. Within our own spheres we rise and set, in turn creating life from raw matter and embracing with arms at once both nurturing and deadly.
Luna:
Luna is Humanity’s celestial Sister. She is the Eternal Maiden: serene, inviolable and remote. The horned disk, Her ideogrammatical representation - a solar disk surmounted or surrounded by horns suggestive of Her crescent phase - is held to be both magical and sacred; Hecate, goddess of magic, Artemis, goddess of the Hunt, and Isis, Egyptian mother goddess, and many others, are all depicted wearing Her crown.
Luna monthly retraces Her delicate orbit, at times shyly, at times boldly in her hypnotic cosmic dance across the skys. Throughout her phases, she mirrors life passages. In Her first incarnation, as the New Moon, She is wrapped coyly in a cloak of darknesss, recalling the mysteries of hope, magic, potentiation and yearning. When waxing in ever-expanding crescents towards fullness, She speaks to us of rebirth, renewal, resurrection, regeneration. In Her full majestic radiance and glory, when her transcendent beams are at their apex of illumination, she embodies deepest introspective reflection, radical intuition and madness; She is the sentinel of the subconscious, recalling us to our bestial, atavistic natures. In her waning crescent form, she represents decline and decay: a return to sorrow, redemption, surrender and mourning. In Her Serene Majesty, Luna is primordial - at once tangibly palpable and evanescent. We allow Her graceful beams to move through us as She holds us in her timeless embrace.
All of life responds to Luna’s pull, Her weight, Her gravity. As the scion and upholder of the feminine mystique, Luna honors all phases of female physiologic and spiritual expression, from birth to motherhood, menarche to menopause. She sings to us of longing for home and for compassion. We instinctually move with her, as do the very oceans’ tides and the progression of the seasons and the blood that flows through us, linked in ecstatic, instinctive sympathy.
The Theatre of the Heavens is a collection of removable dramatic masks, displayed in light boxes hung from twisted trees against a blasted, otherworldy landscape. The theatre piece is highly improvisatory and completely spontaneous in participation...all people who wish to don the masks will be led by the stage manager, one at a time, behind the scenes and invited to take the stage to hold forth as the personage they are channeling. The masks are worn by Actors of the Theatre to portray Oracular Personages in interactive theatrical dialogues with the general BM community. The hand-crafted wooden boxes have the dimensions 14" X 20" X 8" and require a generator to stay lit. They utilize low-wattage incandescent bulbs and, in some cases, led's, as does the starry effect utilized with the black velvet backdrop of the installation. The masks are made of lightweight material: plaster of paris infused medical gauze. They are painted and decorated with found objects, then scarf-like material is attached to them and draped around them, as in the Commedia del Arte style. There are currently sixteen masks planned for the installation: Astra, Aether, Vivoa (Comet), Helios, Luna, Maelstrom (Galactic Center), Inferna (the Quasar), Giro (the Quark), Polvera (Interstellar Dust), Galaxia, Nulla (the Vacuum), Aurialis (Aurora Borealis), Rota Universalis - the Cosmic Egg, Perfido (the Black Hole), Pulsaris (the Pulsar) and Nebulon (the nebulae).
Participants encounter the Actors and ask them questions. The Actors, wearing the ceremonial masks and robes of the dieties, respond in character, in Oracular fashion. Since each character embodies unique characteristics revealed deep within each of us, the answers are extemporanious and spiritual in nature. Particpants may find us at the base of the Man, after sundown, each day.
love, Leslie
Vault of Heaven: The Theatre of the Heavens Mask/Light Box Installation and Oracle
The highest wisdom of the ancient world was informed by a radically intuitional and deeply felt understanding of man’s nature as a reflection of observable cosmology. Modern man, with his insistent reliance upon mechanics and lenses, mathematics and objectivity has, nevertheless, remained unchanged in his basic nature. In this timeless, metaphysical reality, this void of endless possibility and creation from which we spring, there is nothing “out there” which we cannot immediately access from deep within.
It has been said that humans were created because God wanted to understand Himself intimately - to dance with his creation; we are all, therefore, dancers in a cosmic dance - our partners the heavenly bodies of the stars and planets - embracing the void from which we are created.
The Theatre of the Heavens is thus the stage upon which man’s cosmic nobility is played out: the cataclysmic rending and reordering, the mystery and infinity. We are the children of the stars. Our psyche and the cosmos are inextricably linked: the cosmology of man reflected in the cyclic nature of the ever unfolding and refolding paradigm: man as the embodiment of the infinite. God laughing at his own reflection.
There are masks. Masks we create and wear and think of as ourselves. Then there are masks that we embrace, encounter on our journey through art and community, such as these. These masks have been made to embody the mystery held within the observable celestial fields, personified and mythologized to express our wellsprings of longing, imagination and power.
The Oracle/Players
Astra:
Astra is the Mother of Humanity. She embodies boundless love and kindness, abundance, personal gifts, and the intelligence of the heart. In Her far-reaching beams of light, spanning immeasurable distance and time, she shows the spirit of giving freely without restraint; spent and dark, Astra bears mute testimony of Her savage decline from the highest reaches of stellar magnificence to cold anonymity - She nevertheless spends Her energy without reservation. Hers is a celebration of the deepest personal commitment without regard for self. In each of us is a similar fount of reckless, boundless munificence.
Helios:
Paternalistic and authoritarian, the blinding power of Helios, our sun, is at once life-giving and destructive. With sprays of jetting, molten fire thrown out thousands of miles into space and with a volume 1,300,000 times that of the earth, the irresistible magnetic attraction of Helios holds fragile Terra captive, while it imbues her with great fecundity: life as we know if could not exist on the earth without Helios’ heat and light energy.
The celebrated warmth of Helios invests our imaginations with creativity, playfulness, and unfettered joy. His healing rays convey a sense of freedom, brotherhood and conviviality. In his warm embrace we gather to play; but at his uncompromising power, we bend to our tasks: we rise with the sun, we toil and make obeisance to His awful authority.
In His diurnal passage, circumambulating the heavens, Helios, with his predictable risings and settings, represents certainty. Little wonder that the ancients felt compelled to sacrifice their most beautiful maidens and youths in his name, in an effort to propitiate His all-consuming egoism.
The gravity of his manifestly material nature is vividly represented in Helios’ twin symbols, the sun disk and the golden coin, the latter often bearing the portrait of all-powerful human patriarchs - temporal rulers, who, in their lust for power, eagerly aligned themselves with the association of the sun and Godhood.
Thus, borne of Helios, each human creation is likewise a conflation of freedom and constraint; joy and tragedy; obligation and free will. Within our own spheres we rise and set, in turn creating life from raw matter and embracing with arms at once both nurturing and deadly.
Luna:
Luna is Humanity’s celestial Sister. She is the Eternal Maiden: serene, inviolable and remote. The horned disk, Her ideogrammatical representation - a solar disk surmounted or surrounded by horns suggestive of Her crescent phase - is held to be both magical and sacred; Hecate, goddess of magic, Artemis, goddess of the Hunt, and Isis, Egyptian mother goddess, and many others, are all depicted wearing Her crown.
Luna monthly retraces Her delicate orbit, at times shyly, at times boldly in her hypnotic cosmic dance across the skys. Throughout her phases, she mirrors life passages. In Her first incarnation, as the New Moon, She is wrapped coyly in a cloak of darknesss, recalling the mysteries of hope, magic, potentiation and yearning. When waxing in ever-expanding crescents towards fullness, She speaks to us of rebirth, renewal, resurrection, regeneration. In Her full majestic radiance and glory, when her transcendent beams are at their apex of illumination, she embodies deepest introspective reflection, radical intuition and madness; She is the sentinel of the subconscious, recalling us to our bestial, atavistic natures. In her waning crescent form, she represents decline and decay: a return to sorrow, redemption, surrender and mourning. In Her Serene Majesty, Luna is primordial - at once tangibly palpable and evanescent. We allow Her graceful beams to move through us as She holds us in her timeless embrace.
All of life responds to Luna’s pull, Her weight, Her gravity. As the scion and upholder of the feminine mystique, Luna honors all phases of female physiologic and spiritual expression, from birth to motherhood, menarche to menopause. She sings to us of longing for home and for compassion. We instinctually move with her, as do the very oceans’ tides and the progression of the seasons and the blood that flows through us, linked in ecstatic, instinctive sympathy.
The Theatre of the Heavens is a collection of removable dramatic masks, displayed in light boxes hung from twisted trees against a blasted, otherworldy landscape. The theatre piece is highly improvisatory and completely spontaneous in participation...all people who wish to don the masks will be led by the stage manager, one at a time, behind the scenes and invited to take the stage to hold forth as the personage they are channeling. The masks are worn by Actors of the Theatre to portray Oracular Personages in interactive theatrical dialogues with the general BM community. The hand-crafted wooden boxes have the dimensions 14" X 20" X 8" and require a generator to stay lit. They utilize low-wattage incandescent bulbs and, in some cases, led's, as does the starry effect utilized with the black velvet backdrop of the installation. The masks are made of lightweight material: plaster of paris infused medical gauze. They are painted and decorated with found objects, then scarf-like material is attached to them and draped around them, as in the Commedia del Arte style. There are currently sixteen masks planned for the installation: Astra, Aether, Vivoa (Comet), Helios, Luna, Maelstrom (Galactic Center), Inferna (the Quasar), Giro (the Quark), Polvera (Interstellar Dust), Galaxia, Nulla (the Vacuum), Aurialis (Aurora Borealis), Rota Universalis - the Cosmic Egg, Perfido (the Black Hole), Pulsaris (the Pulsar) and Nebulon (the nebulae).
Participants encounter the Actors and ask them questions. The Actors, wearing the ceremonial masks and robes of the dieties, respond in character, in Oracular fashion. Since each character embodies unique characteristics revealed deep within each of us, the answers are extemporanious and spiritual in nature. Particpants may find us at the base of the Man, after sundown, each day.
Trombone
Hey Joshi -
I'm a BM virgin, and a Trombone player.
I play professionally, and can read my ass off.
I'll have my horn, and will be staying in the pancake playhouse annex.
I'll probably be working the breakfasts in some capacity. Come say hi.
Hope I can be of use.
-JazzCakes
I'm a BM virgin, and a Trombone player.
I play professionally, and can read my ass off.
I'll have my horn, and will be staying in the pancake playhouse annex.
I'll probably be working the breakfasts in some capacity. Come say hi.
Hope I can be of use.
-JazzCakes