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Talk for Harry Potter, Brands of Magic

October 29, 2015 10:35 pm / Leave a comment

Here is the text of the seven-minute talk I gave as one of five panelists at the Harry Potter, Brands of Magic colloquium at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia on October 29, 2015.

I first taught Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stonehere at UBC in the winter term of 2002, in a course, not on children’s literature, but on cultural theory, as a sort of case study around the impacts and interpretation of popular media. With the publication of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2000, and the release of the first Harry Potter film in November, 2001, the publishing industry phenomenon arguably passed its tipping point, and Harry Potter became a name – and a literary brand – that garnered global recognition in the media. In the opening chapter of the first book, as the infant Harry is being delivered to Privet Drive (you all know the story), the wizard Albus Dumbledore tells his colleague at Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall, that he has written a letter to the Dursleys that will enable them “to explain everything to him when he’s older.” “Really Dumbledore,” Professor McGonagall replies,

“You think you can explain all this in a letter? These people will never understand him! He’ll be famous – a legend – I wouldn’t be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter day in future – there will be books written about Harry – every child in our world will know his name!” (15)

I can’t help but hear this passage as J. K. Rowling articulating a playful fantasy of literary success, as she sits unknown and unpublished scribbling in a notebook in The Elephant House tea shop in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s. This passage not only proves to be strangely and accurately prophetic, but it also sets up what I take to be the core quandary of the whole series of books “written about Harry”: how to understand him, how to read “Harry Potter.” That problem of knowing is positioned initially here as a dichotomy, a choice between worlds: magical or Muggle, Hogwarts or Privet Drive. But we have to recognize that, unpleasant as the Dursleys are, Professor McGonagall is also off the mark herself: Harry doesn’t so much choose as negotiate or mediate between those two poles. He enables us, if you think about it, to read our way between the everyday and the fantastical. Harry both enacts and embodies a specific set of reading practices, a literacy; knowing his name means working to acquire that competence, that mobility, that literacy.

In the three or so minutes that remain, I’m going to sketch out three key aspects of that literacy, of what the Harry Potter literary brand represents. Those three aspects of reading – you might call them diagonals through this book, mediating between magical and Muggle being – are the material, the heuristic and the haptic.

[The Material]

When the Dursleys try to escape the onslaught of Hogwarts admission letters addressed to Harry, they end up in “the most miserable little shack you could imagine,” on what Rowling describes as “a large rock way out to sea” (37). Significantly, both Dudley and his father are certain that, whatever else, “there was no television in there.” Hagrid, as you all know, still hand-delivers the letter to Harry amid flashes of lightening – echoes, perhaps, of the scar on Harry’s forehead. Manuscript, signed text inscribed on paper, is consistently counterpoised to electronic media, especially television. (There is no TV at Hogwarts. Mass media, complete with moving images, is displaced into the wizarding newspaper The Daily Prophet, an assemblage of stories, gossip and propaganda that requires reading rather than viewing.) Magic, especially spells, appear to require a return to the material object of the page, the book. And in 2001, too, despite its commercial refiguring in Hollywood movies, “Harry Potter” seemed to represented a resurgence of reading and of book-buying, an antidote to screen and network. Books, as circulating and consumed objects, stood for a particular intimate reactivation of the readerly imagination.

[The Heuristic]

That reactivation is also figured in the books themselves as heuristic: Harry, Hermione and Ron solve problems by learning to be engaged readers. They decode text (as with the mirror of Erised, for example), text we’re meant, arguably, to decode along with them. We’re invited, you could say, to solve the books. But it’s worth noting that Rowling doesn’t offer up singular solutions, or “correct” answers. She doesn’t keep silent because, following Professor McGonagall, that readers can’t understand, can’t cross into the hermetic realm of magical privilege. Rather, it’s because the process of puzzling out what Harry means to discover is pluralistic and divergent. You might recall the Hogwarts school song, which declares that we will “learn until our brains all rot,” is not choral so much as “bellowed” cacophony, with everyone picking their own favourite tune: an enactment of differential community, a solution that won’t resolve or homogenize.

[The Haptic]

Harry Potter doesn’t so much refuse electronic media as reinsert a haptic interface, through the material technology of the book, into the various circuits of public consumption. Books are tactile; they have to be handled, touched, their pages turned. The demise of Quirrell (and the name suggests, aside from quarrelsomeness, a quire, a fold of pages within a book) has to do with his incapacity to read Harry, to interpret what Harry embodies or even to see the mark of Harry’s mother’s love on his skin. That mark, as Dumbledore tells us, is “not a scar” and leaves “no visible sign” (216). The haptic feedback – the touch – that proves to be “agony” for Voldemort and Quirrell isn’t something that we, as readers, need fear – we’re protected, in a sense, by the opaque surface, the skin, of the pages before us. But it functions, nonetheless, as a form of transmission, an ionizing, organic ether, that the lightning-bolt scar on Harry’s forehead metonymically displaces and displays. The transformative power of that touch, the shift from the distracted reception of screened images to the proactive thoughtful connection to a living world, is what reading Harry Potter might just be about.

Edgy Listening: Evan Parker and Jean-Luc Nancy

August 24, 2015 6:27 pm / Leave a comment

[This is the draft text of a paper I am set to present at the 2015 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, on Wednesday, September 16.]

The collective trajectory of this year’s colloquium links practicing various forms of improvisation to nurturing various forms of intersubjective well-being. By attending—carefully, critically and briefly—to solo and to collaborative electro-acoustic performances by the British saxophonist Evan Parker, I want to gesture at the nascent work of remediation that Lisbeth Lipari has recently called “an ethics of attunement,” a close listening that cultivates compassionate alterity within an attentive body: an akroasis—an audition, an audience—that provides a resonant and differential basis for the possibility of what Jean-Luc Nancy has provocatively named an “inoperative community,” a version for me of what Alphonso Lingis calls The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, of our conflicted and diverse human species. Nancy’s philosophical interrogation of listening to music (as “the art of the hope for resonance”) offers contingent conceptual support with which it’s possible to assess the sensibly vibrant sounding of interstices, both between and within each human frame, that constitutes Evan Parker’s improvising.

Claims about well-being and health tend to presuppose an uninterrogated sense of what constitutes a proper, well-ordered body. Rather than extend a critique of what Michel Foucault might have called the “care of self” and its biopolitics, I am going to premise my remarks on improvisation and well-being by assuming that corporeality may also be understood as porous and conflicted instead of individuated, discrete or holistic, and that this porosity is a founding condition both of co-creativity and of lived community. Reworking a Deleuzean pluralism, Annemarie Mol writes of a medical practice that addresses and heals the “body multiple,” which she presents as an “intricately coordinated crowd” that “hangs together” through “various forms of coordination” (55). Following on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David Abram describes “the boundaries of a living body” as “open and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange” (42). I’m interested in pursuing with some rigour those “forms of coordination”—or the textures of that porosity—at the level of acoustic experience, as a humane and ethically preferable set of cultural interactions.

Lisbeth Lipari proposes “interlistening” as a term for “the multiple dimensions of embodied consciousness that vibrate in the dance of conversation between [among?] people talking” (161). Her aim is to delineate discursive practices that listen otherwise, that attend to the presence of others, even as they enable speech.

“Listening otherwise,” she writes,

challenges the ego and the illusion of control and sees how the distortions that arise from our insistence on innocence, certainty, and understanding damage our capacity for compassion. . . . [L]istening otherwise . . . suspends the willfulness of self- and foreknowledge in order to receive the singularities of the alterity of the other” (Lipari 185, 186).

Heavily influenced by Emmanuel Levinas, Lipari also models her auditory ethics on the music theory of Hans Kayser, whose concept of akroasis(the Ancient Greek word for “hearing”) articulates a “theory of world harmonics” as a holistic gestalt-series rooted in Pythagorean acoustics (Lipari 27). Kayser appears to mitigate dissonances in attunement, and prefiguresby several decades R. Murray Schafer’s disciplined “ear-cleaning” of European music . I’m less sanguine about what I know of Kayser, however; without refusing the hopeful tenor of his thinking, I worry that he only re-instates a cult of primeval innocence, a re-tooled Ptolemaic naïveté. It helps me, instead, partially to recover the etymology of akroasis, which occurs in Aristotle as a term for audience and hearing: notably, not in The Poetics nor in the sections of his Politics focused on music, but in his Rhetoric. The ἀκροατής (akroates), frequently translated as “hearer,” is actively implicated in discursive exchange: “Now the hearer (akroatēn) must necessarily be either a mere spectator or a judge (kritēs), and a judge either of things past or of things to come.” That is, listening—at least, to speech—is inherently active and deliberative, and those deliberations, within a polytemporal reciprocity, include critical intellection. Akroatic listening, close listening as thinking, becomes more agonistic than syncretic, more unsettling than epideictic. (Compare George Lewis: “In its marginalization, its often-unseen, intangible presence, which generates new discourses, in its mobility and facility with hybridization, and in its locus, the contestatory space where difference can [be] and is enacted, improvisation’s general importance to the underlying health of the musical ecosphere and the public commons must be recognized, valued and protected [138].”)

In a 2014 interview, Sonny Rollins repudiates any sort of reflexive intellection as disruptive to improvising, invoking the demanding temporality of playing: “I don’t want to overtly think about anything, because you can’t think and play at the same time — believe me, I’ve tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast.”
http://www.npr.org/player/embed/309047616/309304660Rollins appears to be suggesting that, when you listen to yourself as you play, you lose your through-line, lose the formal sense of your music. But his point, I think, isn’t to romanticize or mystify his artistry—he focuses on his lapses, not his genius—but to assess the cognitive velocity at which that agon, that deliberation, can even occur. What Lipari calls compassionate openness wants to happen not as immediacy but on the fleeting lip of the present, closer to reflex than reflexive. Jean-Luc Nancy refers to “sonorous time” as “a present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on” (13). The challenge, the risk posed by such a hysteresis, is not merely the neglect of what is other—and this is perhaps why thinking about solo music, about the improvised solo, helps us to re-conceptualize otherness as such, not as a condition of the co-presence of individuals but even as a porosity of self, of voice—but also an issue of technique, of the virtuosic coordination of enharmonic singularities as they pass in and out of our membranous bodies. Listening, writes Nancy, “—the opening stretched toward the register of the sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition—can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other’ . . .” (12).

I want to read Evan Parker’s solo saxophone technique as a crucial instance of this intensely vacillating subjectivity (if that’s the right term for a solo voice), of the surging disavowal of self sounding itself. Here is an excerpt of the solo music, recorded without overdubbing, from his 1989 album Conic Sections:

Writing in the early 1990s, John Corbett describes Evan Parker’s seemingly linear, monophonic instrument as more of an “assemblage” of body—“[f]ingers, mouth, tongue, teeth, lungs”—and horn—reed, ligature, keys, pads, bell—“constellated in such a way as to break the seeming unity of melodic expression” (82). But in Evan Parker’s solo playing, both live and on recordings, those fractures are not ends in themselves, and rather initiate—as what Lipari describes as “challenges” to passive listening—the possibility of tonal and linear multiplication, of what the reedist calls, with measured self-deprecation, a form of “polyphony”: “There’s a more complex sense of linearity,” he says, “to the point where the line folds back on itself and assumes some of the proportions of vertical music, and some of the characteristics of polyphonic music” (qtd. In Corbett 83). Combining circular breathing, cross-fingering, tonguing and biting the reed, Evan Parker is able to generate layers of overtones and nearly-simultaneous contrapuntal arpeggios at high velocity, effectively producing a continuum of cascading choruses from a single breath. But while Corbett is keen to endorse Evan Parker’s virtuosity and instrumental mastery, he also notes, as the saxophonist himself does, how accident and uncertainty find their way inevitably into any performance, subverting claims to absolute technique or intention and undermining the “notion of the unitary, intending subject”—that is, of self-expression—in improvisation. As Evan Parker puts it succinctly in a 1997 interview with Martin Davidson, “It’s to do with layering stuff that I don’t know on top of stuff that I do know.” Here, I think, is exactly the looping of self and other, of expressive intention and unruly, noisy sound, that Jean-Luc Nancy describes as listening. Evan Parker’s descriptions of his improvisatory practice align remarkably closely with Nancy’s philosophical investigations of listening:

It’s clear to me that if you can imagine something, you can find a technical way to do it, but if you can’t imagine it, whether or not there is a technical solution never occurs to you because there’s no need to. So it’s very necessary to listen closely to what happens when you try to do things, because usually at the fringes of what you’re producing is something that you’re not really in control of – that there is a central thing that you are fully in control of, and then a kind of halo of suggested other possibilities which have to come with the central thing that you’re in control of, whether it’s a wisp of breath escaping from the side of the embouchure, or an overtone that you could push harder, or some key noise which you can’t escape. There’s always something there, and if you’re listening at the fringes of the sound as well as at the centre of the sound, then you can be led to other things and other possibilities.

The collision of self-possessed declamation and open-eared deliberation in what he calls “trying”—and what I’d suggest in fact takes the form of a musical essay—points up the irresolute multiplicity at the edges of extemporaneous sound, its tensile present tense.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/83893846
Roulette TV: EVAN PARKER from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo.

Gently pushing back at Sonny Rollins, I hear Evan Parker—playing at velocity, going by too fast—as negotiating between an organic immediacy and an akroatic self-scrutiny, as both listening to himself and not in the same breath. Corbett calls this tensioning a form of “research” (85), a science or an intellection, and I’m inclined to agree: this music is, it’s my contention, one instance of practice-based research into the possibility of inoperative community. So, to think about community, and to close my remarks today, I want to listen to a recording of a recent performance of Evan Parker’s electro-acoustic septet at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville in May, 2014. Evan Parker supplies a typically ironic sleeve note: “My art of composition consists in choosing the right people and asking them to improvise.” He playfully refuses the “rampant egomania” both of the improvising soloist and of the composer, preferring an unregimented collectivity. At the same time, the consistent spatial arrangement of the septet onstage—which can be seen both in the inner sleeve of the VICTO cd and in the video taken of a performance at Roulette in New York City, positions Evan Parker at the centre and apex of the group, facing out like the others but occupying the conductor-leader’s chair. There’s much to note about this music, but I want to make just a few points. The three laptops to Evan Parker’s left are able both to sample and re-figure the live improvisations and to contribute other electronic sound textures—this is the key concept of most of Parker’s electro-acoustic groups—which means that the instrumentalist is displaced across the ensemble. On the Victoriaville recording, Evan Parker doesn’t initiate the performance, and—if my ears are right—doesn’t even enter as an contributing voice until the six-minute mark: not through diffidence or even deferral, necessarily, but as an audible disavowal—silence amid sound—of egocentric voicing: he starts by listening rather than playing. A version of his own solo practice emerges into the swirling sonic layers of the ensemble around eighteen minutes into the performance, combining both self-parody—inserting his long-established unaccompanied voice into the group dynamic, which both pushes the tutti back, but also opens up a series of interstices into which other voices might enter. As a model of community, what the group manages around this moment of solo horn is what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “a mutual interpellation od singularities prior to any address in language,” a corporeally-based multiplicitous nudging that, despite the reflective stillness of many of the players onstage – particularly the three at their laptops, who enact the reflexive, deliberative aspect of the music, as opposed to the apparent organicism of the improvisers to his right: the point, for me, is the co-creation of a virtual in-coherence, a playing apart together that inheres in the shared differences among the ensemble members, the byplay between egocentric voice and a yielding to the voices of others. Community, Nancy writes, is not the panacea of delusive “communion . . . nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others” (IC 25). Well-being, as listening otherwise, means neither self-satisfied holism nor ludic conflict, but a sharing that nurtures our mutual unknowing.

Works Cited

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and

Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York:

Vintage, 1997.

Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John

Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an

Ethics of Attunement. University Park: Pennsylvania

State UP, 2014.

Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical

Practice. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. 2002. Tr. Charlotte Mandel.

New York: Fordham UP, 2007.

———. The Inoperative Community. Tr. Peter Connor.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Video: Reading Marilyn Hacker’s "Fourteen"

August 12, 2015 4:46 pm / Leave a comment

This is a test video for a series of video-podcast discussions of poems and of media for my courses this fall. In April, for National Poetry Month, I decided to discuss and then read one of my favourite poems, the sonnet “Fourteen” by Marilyn Hacker. (A blog post here re-types the text of the poem.) There is plenty that I leave out in what I say: the poem is a brilliantly complex and resonant piece of writing, a kind of “presentation piece” as Hacker might have put it. The last line always moves me in ways that are difficult to capture in any formal analysis. And here I don’t really broach the difficult gender-politics that the poem interrogates. I have taught this poem a number of times in first-year lecture courses, introductions to literary studies, so the video is pitched as a kind of introduction to the text.

Dave Douglas HIGH RISK at Performance Works, 28 June 2015

June 29, 2015 10:59 pm / Leave a comment

Dave Douglas’s electro-acoustic quartet HIGH RISK offered a dynamic, edgy and intense set at Performance Works (in Vancouver) yesterday evening. Fusing layered, pulse-driven techno with Douglas’s Freddie-Keppard-meets-Freddie-Hubbard, fiercely clarion trumpet lines, HIGH RISK collectively muster an infectiously celebratory and powerful improvised music that’s as danceable as it is creatively provocative. While Douglas has composed a seven-tune repertoire for this new band – which recorded together for the first time on October 10, 2014, in Brooklyn, a session that resulted in their just-released CD on Douglas’s Greenleaf label – and while each member of the ensemble (Douglas on trumpet, Jonathan Maron on electric bass, Mark Guiliana on drums and Shigeto on electronics) contributes heavily to the collaboration, for me the group concept seems to rest on the innovative, wonderfully fractured loops, samples and laptop conjurations of Shigeto, who bopped, leapt and shimmied with joyful abandon behind a tabletop covered in rheostat boxes and circuitry. The sound palette and rhythmic patter he managed to conjure never obscured its synthetic origins but managed amid the electronica to engender a vibrantly zoetic feel: amazing, richly affective sonorities. At one point, he played in duo with Douglas and the intricate immediacy of his approach became apparent, as he built vibrant whorls and cascades of joyful noise. Mark Guiliana’s drumming is brilliantly propulsive, deep in the pocket yet consistently pushing forward; his multidirectional, quickly syncopated incisions through a four-on-the-floor backbeat were nothing short of genius. Jonathan Maron seemed to remain calm and steady throughout the concert, but his bass-lines – by turns warmly lyrical and darkly palpitating – kept the band centred and present. Early in their set, I thought I heard echoes of the bluesy melody of Miles Davis’s “Jean Pierre,” and Douglas definitely quoted the four-note tag from the Miles Davis-John Scofield line “That’s What Happened”: in some ways, HIGH RISK makes a music that might have emerged from Davis’s more progressive or edgy moments in his later years. But this is a music that’s of its own present tense. Some of the most powerful and moving moments came during the last tune, “Cardinals,” an elegiac homage Douglas dedicated to the memory of Michael Brown. “This is a music that’s about love,” he told the audience. Love names the high risk this music wants to take. In the brief liner notes to the CD, Douglas writes that “improvisation transcends barriers between people and genres. Improvisation models the way the world can work.” My colleagues and I in ICASP and IICSI have been thinking, and trying to produce various forms of practice-based research, along these exact lines. The improvised music of HIGH RISK offers one instance of a hugely successful, motivated and engaged co-creativity, laying the contingent and extemporaneous groundwork for a viable human community yet to come.

Jamie Reid, 1941-2015

June 27, 2015 6:17 pm / Leave a comment

I have just learned this morning that the poet Jamie Reidhas died. He was, as many know, a co-founder of TISH at UBC in 1961, and played significant role in the revitalization of West Coast Canadian poetry. Deeply engaged as an activist with fostering social change, he spent a number of years out of the poetry circuit, but the 1994 book that marked his return to poetry – Prez: Homage to Lester Young – represents a landmark fusion of verbal music and aesthetic commitment.

Here is the joy of pure desire which desires nothing

but to be lost amongst all of the things which are.

Here is a recording of Jamie Reid reading his poetry at Green College, UBC, on January 17, 2013, for the Play Chthonics: New Canadian Readings series.

Samuel Blaser, Francois Houle, Aram Bajakian, Torsten Mueller at Ironworks, Tuesday June 23, 2015

June 25, 2015 8:28 pm / Leave a comment

Aram Bajakian, Francois Houle, Samuel Blaser, Torsten Mueller

A five o’clock set at Ironworks on Tuesday opened with the duo of Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser and Vancouverite François Houle on clarinet, playing music that skirted the boundaries between jazz-inflected improvisation and open-scored new music. This reed-and-slide (Houle’s term) instrumental combination has precedents in Albert Mangelsdorff and Lee Konitz’s Art of the Duo (1988), which built on Konitz’s 1967 Duets, and also – even earlier, and perhaps stylistically a little closer – in Jimmy Guiffre and Bob Brookmeyer’s contrapuntal interplay in trio with Jim Hall in the late 1950s. Samuel Blaser’s fleet, warm tone is closer to Brookmeyer, although he occasionally shares some of Mangelsdorff’s vocalic depth and probing polytonality. Houle, too, has acknowledged some indebtedness to Guiffre’s later, freer musical concepts, although he points to Bill Smith and to John Carter as more compelling antecedents. (Carter’s duos with cornettist Bobby Bradford might also set some textural precedents for Blaser and Houle’s reed-and-slide, as might Gerry Mulligan’s front lines with Brookmeyer and with Chet Baker.) Houle’s playing sometimes recalls Debussy and Messiaen, too, while Blaser – occasionally echoing a little Baroque sackbut – has reframed late Renaissance compositions by Monteverdi, Machaut and DuFay; he and Houle offer a multimodal, polymorphic and richly evocative music.

Francois Houle, Samuel Blaser (The camera seems to have auto-focused
on the back of pianist Benoit Delbecq’s head — who was sitting in front of me.)

The two-horn line can seem spare and linear, but both Blaser and Houle have a fullness of tone and a sensitivity to space, as well as a willingness to let melody and line resonate and open out into the room. The music builds on close, intimate, mutual listening, mixing counterpoint with thickly vertical harmonizing; playing two clarinets at once, Houle instantaneously concocts Pythagorean-sounding harmonies that make me think of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata and Kirk’s performances with trombonists Dick Griffin and Steve Turre. I don’t mean, by mentioning all of these other players, to suggest that this music is derivative: Blaser and Houle produce music of striking originality and boldness. But I also hear a deep sense of history and of performative inheritance that locates their work alongside that of some of the greatest and most challenging improvisers of this past century.

Aram Bajakian, Samuel Blaser, Torsten Mueller

In contrast, guitarist Aram Bajakian and bassist Torsten Müllerfollowed with a freely improvised duet that focused on mesmeric drones. They began with Derek Bailey-like sparse plucking, but soon morphed into sustained overlapping tones, Müller favouring arco to create a singing, low continuo. Aram Bajakian, sitting to the side of the stage on a piano bench, used a few delay pedals to draw looping hums from his strings. I have to say that for a few moments, or minutes, I lost a clear sense of bounded time as I listened; their interactions were hypnotic and intense, even though both had a fairly modest stage-presence, and were more interested in co-creative agency than in self-assertion. (Interestingly, at a few points in the session police sirens bled through the walls from the streets outside; the musicians, rather than frustrated, appeared willing to respond in kind, drawing the outer world’s aural palette into their own emergent soundscapes.) Blaser joined Bajakian and Müller to make a trio, and again the group primarily concentrated on collective sounding, long, layered lines from which brief shards of melody sometimes emerged, only to submerge again is the collaborative flow. At one point, Bajakian pressed a small motorized wheel into his strings over the pickup to overcome the guitar’s natural decay, developing rich resonances and electrified overtones from the instrument reminiscent of folk violin: concordant depth. Houle returned for a final quartet, a shape-shifting shared composite of the contrapuntal and the harmonic; again, the attention to space seemed paramount, so much so that for the final minutes Müller had stopped playing, bow at his side, intently listening and letting the piece take its course toward mutual silence, as an inspiring set of exemplary, sterling and powerful improvisation drew to a hushed close.

Aram Bajakian (Torsten Mueller in the corner)

Schedule for Time Changes: Improvisation, History and the Body

May 27, 2015 10:05 pm / Leave a comment

Time Changes: Improvisation, History and the Body

June 20-21, 2015, Vancouver, British Columbia

UBC Robson Campus Room C100

10am – 5pm Free

Time Changes is an academic symposium including presentations from artists, performers, scholars and community members from across the continent, with keynote talks by percussionist-composer-improvisers Gerry Hemingway and Billy Martin, who are both performing at the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

The colloquium will focus on social, cultural and artistic encounters with, and depictions of, time and the times in which we live. What does it mean to create in the moment? What are the implications of keeping time or of transgressing time? How does the human body sound its time and place? Can improvisation bring about tangible social or cultural change?

Saturday, June 20^th

All presentations will take place in UBC Robson Square Room C100.

10:00 am

Artist Talk

PrOphecy Sun: The Body, Chance and Improvisation

10:45

Panel: Race, Rhythm and History

Emma Cleary, Staffordshire University

Jazz-Shaped Bodies: Mapping Space, Time, and Sound in African American Fiction

Barry Long, Bucknell University

Freedom Songs at the Intersection of Jazz and Journalism

Brian Jude de Lima, York University

Synth-copated Rhythms: Reanimating Dissonance as a Tool for Rhythmic Prolongation

Brent Rowan, Wilfrid Laurier University

The Impact of a Jazz Improvisation Experience on an Amateur Adult Musician’s Mind, Body and Spirit

12:30 pm Catered lunch

1:00 pm

Keynote

Billy Martin: Wandering

2:00 pm

Film Screening and Discussion

Ornette: Made in America

Moderated by David Lee, University of Guelph

3:30 pm

Artist Presentation

Rupert Common and the Freestyle Rap Alliance: Improvisation in Hip Hop

Sunday, June 21^st

All presentations will take place in UBC Robson Square Room C100.

10:00 am

Artist Talk

Julia Úlehla: The Dálava Project: Meditations on (musical) evolution and (cyclic) time: activating past, present, and future through song, body memory, and improvisation

10:45 am

Panel: Interfaces – Contact Technologies

Kiran Bhumber and Bob Pritchard, University of British Columbia

Neelamjit Dhillon, California Institute of the Arts

12:00 pm

Chapbook and CD Launch

Ammons: A Sheaf of Words for Piano

Kevin McNeilly and Geoff Mitchell

12:30 pm Catered lunch

1:00 pm

Keynote

Gerry Hemingway: Expression in Music: A Look Inside the Personal Language of an Improviser

2:00 pm

Panel: Impacts and Changes

Kathe Gray, York University

All time exists in the present: Utopian moments in improvised music making

David Lee, University of Guelph

Improvised Music in Canada: High Modernism and the Artists Jazz Band

Tom Scholte, University of British Columbia

AYSYNCHRONCITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF MEANING IN THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE: Cybernetically Improvised Performance Texts and their Hermeneutic Impacts

3:30 pm

Artist Presentation

Ben Brown and Michelle Lui: MAM Music and Movement Improvisation

TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival

For the complete Jazz Festival schedule, click here.

Innovation Series Concerts (featuring conference presenters)

The Ironworks Studios 235 Alexander Street

The Pugs and Crows (Ben Brown) Friday June 19^th 9:30 pm

Destroy Vancouver (Billy Martin) Friday June 19^th 11:30 pm

Samuel Blaser/ Benoit Delbecq/ Gerry Hemingway Saturday, June 20^th 9:30 pm

Dálava (Julia Úlehla) Saturday, June 20^th 11:30 pm

Paul Plimley/ Joe Williamson/ Gerry Hemingway Sunday, June 21^st 11:30 pm

Elise Partridge: Particulars of Uncertain Provenance

May 24, 2015 9:54 pm / 1 Comment on Elise Partridge: Particulars of Uncertain Provenance

I ended up sitting front and centre on a folding chair at the Vancouver launch for Elise Partridge’s new and last collection, The Exiles’ Gallery, to a packed house on Thursday evening, March 21, at the Cottage Bistro (formerly the Rhizome Café, near the intersection of Kingsway and Broadway). Many writers – connected to or mentored by Elise – as well as members of the English Department at UBC, where she studied and where her husband Steve teaches, turned out, along with fans of her poetry and other community members, to hear a dozen of (mostly) her fellow poets read a poem or two each from the new book and to celebrate her work. Christopher Patton, Rob Taylor, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Rhea Tregebov, Gillian Jerome, George McWhirter, Jordan Abel, Elee Kraalji Gardiner, Caroline Adderson (reading both for herself and for Aislinn Hunter), Barbara Nickel, Elizabeth Bachinsky and Miranda Pearson each chose poems that connected in some way to their relationships with Elise, both personal and poetic. There were a few moments when readers found themselves buffaloed by stifling tears, but most of the texts – while caught up in the pervasively elegiac tug of her poems – drew not toward lament but instead toward the celebration of the particulate textures of both language and experience in which her writing characteristically engages, her finely-attuned pursuit of “one-liners, testaments, inventories, chants, condolences,” aspiring to “see just so much,” both whelming and delicate, risking the fiercely precious, a sharply-faceted and vatic immediacy (see “Waltzing” and “The Alphabet”). Even so, the poems – each producing what she calls “a landing strip for particulars / of uncertain provenance,” and deliberately opening themselves to (her word) love – also frame a tension around their vestigial metaphysics that often feels like a yearning toward absence, not so much to fill it in as to embrace its lyric provocations. In “A Late Writer’s Desk” – a poem issued as a broadside by Anansi to mark the publication of The Exile’s Gallery – she both describes and celebrates the cobbled, awkward and uneven construction of a discarded “escritoire”: “They couldn’t give it away, I guess, / so left it beside the road, / where, obdurate, it warps.” Gesturing, in her allusions in the poem to the doubled play of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, at a Shakespearean mutability that confuses entropy and alchemy, she uncovers in the desk’s decrepitude and in its weathered reabsorption into natural substance, a decreative attention to the work of poiesis, of unmade making. Its surface pollenated by “catkin loads,” the desk as she describes it might seem neglected and abandoned, but in fact it has been both recuperated and redeemed – a kind of “scrap-yard rescue” as her text puts it – by her own poem’s haptic observance: its reciprocity, its attunement, its listening. Uneven, broken surfaces, with “not a board true,” nonetheless manage and can only manage to bear welcoming witness to “the true,” to the small but miraculous uncertainties of our own brief and all-too-human presence in this world. Listening to Elise Partridge’s poetry read aloud by those who cared and who care for her, I felt I might have caught a little of her drift.

The Challenge of Phillis Wheatley (poem)

May 8, 2015 9:39 pm / Leave a comment

“Phillis Wheatley frontispiece” by Scipio Moorhead – This image is available from the United States
Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a40394

I’m currently taking a MOOC from Stanford University Online called “Ten Premodern Poems by Women,” led by Eavan Boland. It’s essentially a poetry appreciation course, fostering a broader sense of women’s essential and often neglected contributions to the canon of English-language poetry. Each week, Eavan Boland introduces a poem, and then offers some historical and biographical – and even a little formal – context, and then discusses the poem with a guest speaker, usually (so far) one of the Wallace Stegner Fellows in poetry from Stanford’s Creative Writing Program. The course is very enjoyable and informative, and taking it is giving me a chance to try to re-connect with the student experience: we have weekly writing assignments, informal responses to each text. In the past few weeks, the prompts for these assignments have invited participants to compose poems of their own, either in the style of the work we’re reading that week or in reaction to the context and themes of a given poem. I had never really looked too closely at the work of Phillis Wheatleybefore – the first poet of African descent to publish in English. The facts of her life are well known: at about seven years old, in 1761, she is stolen from her home in Senegambia and transported on the slave ship Phillis to pre-revolutionary Boston, where she is purchased by Mrs. Susan Wheatley for a “trifle” of either ten pounds or ten dollars; “Phillis” has a gift for languages that her new “family” encourages, and by the time she reaches her teens she excels at poetry; in 1773, around her twentieth birthday, her poems are collected and published (in England, not in Boston) as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Read through the lens of our own time, many of these poems can seem deeply troubling, as they appear to praise slavery – in highly conventional late 18^th-century style – as a means to Christian salvation: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” In his 1922 preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson lamented that

one looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land. In two poems she refers definitely to Africa as her home, but in each instance there seems to be under the sentiment of the lines a feeling of almost smug contentment at her own escape therefrom.

Reading Wheatley now, I feel what we get aren’t outbursts but cracks in the mask, in her formal poetic façade, at which something like an agony, suppressed in the interests of her survival as a child in bondage, briefly shows through. What we have, after all, are the poems of a teenager. After her manumission, when she was 28 or 29, Wheatley is said to have composed another 142 poems, now lost; I can only imagine that some expression of that pain must have found its way into that work, silenced by circumstance. One of the ways to honour Wheatley’s legacy, it seems to me, is to risk writing a little way into that silence: not to speak for her – although, in ventriloquizing her seven-year-old self and transposing her voice into an English she didn’t have at the time, I ‘m aiming at least to gesture at that fraught and awful gap, the racially, culturally and linguistically marked distances of the Middle Passage. (“Yummy,” I discovered, is one of a few English words imported from Wolof, Phillis Wheatley’s native language.) I wrote this piece, torsioning the pentameter/hexameter couplets that were a mainstay of her early style, as an homage and as an attempt to encounter those distances. The challenge of encountering Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates argues, “isn’t to read white, or read black; it is to read.” I wanted at least to begin to address that challenge. And since the poem was submitted to a public forum anyway, I thought I might as well republish it here, myself.

“Phillis Wheatley,” July 1761, about seven years old

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate  

Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat . . .

I‘m not sturdy enough. My two loose front teeth

fall out: I make a charm to ward off certain death,

jamming them between tarred planks near the keel

like deciduous tokens. I can’t feel

the ghost of my lost mother’s touch. Wolof

has no such words. Crammed bodies reek; men cough

up on themselves, yoked in rusting collars

to be unlocked only weeks later when we dock.

A lady tours the wharf. For ten pounds or dollars

she gets to become my good Boston mummy.

She gives me an apple. I say, “Yummy.”

She tells me, that’s a funny way to talk,

and makes me leave my carpet-scrap cloak behind,

I imagine because she’s afraid I might trip.

She rechristens me after that bad ship.

If only she knew my true name, I shouldn’t mind.

Flow, Fissure, Mesh