Right, well, what's up of late?
I've been experimenting with creating short pieces - most under two minutes. Mostly it's been about revisiting ideas that didn't quite work and finding not so much that they didn't work, just that trying to turn them into 4-8 minute tracks wasn't the right thing to do. It's been interesting to find that you can do a lot in two minutes. Not sure what will be the end result of all this, but that makes it a lot more interesting. Not just ceaselessly spinning out concept music for gigs.
On the learning front I've been checking out 'Douglas', the radio documentary about Douglas Lilburn, now available from the Wellington Public Library on 10 CDs. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I think his electronic music is the bee's knees.
Learning about the man himself, however, left me a little disillusioned. The documentary was at great pains to show all Lilburn's sides, and didn't hide his less attractive aspects. While Lilburn was undoubtedly a gifted and often visionary composer, he was severely lacking on the personal front. As the doco progressed, his mates catalogued his rudeness, alcoholism, and paranoia. Though very much a product of his age (especially with his 'it's the closet for me, thanks!' approach to his homosexuality) Lilburn's hermit-crab character seems at odds with the openness of his music, and thus a bit of a letdown. Judging by what some of his friends said in the documentary, they felt that way too.
Something of an antidote to this has been reading the biography of Len Lye by Roger Horrocks. Lye, if you haven't heard of him, was a modernist artist who grew up in NZ and made kinetic art in film and sculpture.
Lye was fairly outgoing, fearless, genuinely likable, and adventurous. He spent some of his early years living in a lighthouse, got deported from Samoa, pretended to be a stoker on a passenger liner in order to get to London, spent the late 1920s and the 1930s hanging out with Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, George Bernard Shaw, IA Richards, Gertrude Stein, WH Auden, George Orwell, Sergei Eisenstein, etc, etc. He recorded John Gielgud reciting Full Fathom Five from the Tempest 60 years before Prospero's books. Whoa!
Perhaps key to Lye's rather jolly career was that he got out of New Zealand as quickly as possible and only came back when he was recognised. Not for him the tortured agony of sticking it out here, being frustrated and misunderstood, turning to alcohol and poems about magpies for solace... In fact, without the advantage of having misery as a muse it's a miracle he managed to achieve as much as he did!
Posted by stuart at July 3, 2005 11:54 PM