About Evan Ziporyn:

Evan composed the score for Zipper, one the new works from Misnomer premiering this season. Evan’s bio (pulled from Ziporyn.com) : His compositions have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Bang On A Can, Nederlands Blazer Ensemble, master p’ipaist Wu Man, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Maya Beiser and Steven Schick, Arden Trio, California EAR Unit, pianists Sarah Cahill, Christopher Oldfather, and Cristina Valdes, and Orkest de Volharding. As a bass clarinetist, he has developed a distinctive set of extended techniques which he has used in his own solo works, as well as new works by Martin Bresnick, Michael Gordon, and David Lang. His 2001 solo clarinet CD, “This is not a clarinet” (Cantaloupe) received critical acclaim on NPR’s All Thing’s Considered, PRI’s The World, and on numerous critic’s top ten lists at year’s end. He has been associated with the Bang On A Can Festival since its founding in 1987, appearing as composer, soloist, and ensemble leader. As a member of the Bang On A Can All-stars, he has toured over a two dozen countries and worked with composers such as Louis Andriessen, Iva Bittova, Glenn Branca, Don Byron, Alvin Curran, Nick Didkovsky, Arnold Dreyblatt, Philip Glass, Steve Martland, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Kyaw Kyaw Naing, Terry Riley, Ralph Shapey, Matthew Shipp, Tan Dun, Cecil Taylor, and Henry Threadgill. In addition to writing for the group and co-producing several of their recordings, he has arranged for the group works by Brian Eno, Conlon Nancarrow, Hermeto Pascoal, and Kurt Cobain. He also regularly performs and records as a featured soloist with Steve Reich and Musicians, and shared in their 1999 Grammy for “Music for 18 Musicians”.

JAKI: I’m curious about your own personal process. How did you begin to compose the music for Zipper? Where did you begin?

EVAN: Chris and I had corresponded for some time before we started the process, so I knew a bit about how his mind worked, and I liked his ideas a lot, but I had never seen the company. So I was sort of flying blind - I really had no idea how he’d respond or how I’d respond to his response. Another thing is that Chris’ way of working with the company is so interactive and experiential - i.e., a give and take in response to the moment. That wasn’t going to be possible with the music: we live in different cities, the live instrumentalists were only going to come in at the last minute, etc. We had to find a more modular way of collaborating - i.e., demo recordings which he could respond to, etc. This then posed other problems, because the demos are inherently artificial - computer models, fixed in time and tempo, etc. So much of Chris’ work is about feeling, and the whole thing with demo tapes is that they don’t ‘feel’ like the real thing.

These were very large hurdles to jump for both of us, and in a way finding a way to deal with them was the hardest part of the process. What I eventually did was to make a fairly large number of short pieces - I think maybe 8 or 9 - and send them all to Chris. He then chose the ones that resonated and I then developed those into larger forms. To me, some seemed to fit together and some didn’t, so I had the interesting challenge of making something coherent out of things that went together in his mind but not necessarily in mine. I wrote a couple of other things in response to his reactions, and then began searching for the connections.

The process ended up being very fascinating, actually akin to some of the interactions that go on in “Rock Paper Flock,” (which of course has nothing to do with me). My usual process is not so different from this, but normally I hold all the cards: i.e., I might make a lot of sketches, then gradually decide what to use, and then find a way to make them into a piece. Here I gave the middle part of the process over to someone else, so it was kind of like being an amnesiac, having some part of my consciousness taken away from me and then returned. I found this to be an oddly compelling situation, and tried to incorporate that feeling of absence, or absent-mindedness, into the work - so that there’s always a sense of ‘did i hear this before?’ involved.

That’s also the reason for the title of the instrumental version of the piece, which is called “Where Was I?”

LISTEN to Where Was I
Download audio file (Zipper3.mp3)

JAKI: The choice of instruments, percussion, and musicality are all very different from a traditional sccore. This really is New Music. Can you give us a breakdown of the instruments used? And what went into the decision to choose those particular instruments?

EVAN: It was really about the people rather than the instruments. I had wanted to work with the Real Quiet Trio, and also felt they’d work well with Chris and the company. I also felt it would create an important balance to have the music be performed by a real group rather than a pick-up ensemble, though of course it would have been simple enough to find good players in New York. But Misnomer is so connected to themselves and to Chris’ work, I felt that the music needed to be played by a group that had a similar sense of cohesion.

JAKI: I imagine the roles of a composer and performer are different. How did you ensure the piece is played as you intended, in this case by Real Quiet Ensemble?

EVAN: I’ve worked with them all as individuals for a long time, we’re all good friends as well, so I know them and they know me. Percussionist David Cossin in particular is an extremely close collaborator: we are members of Bang on a Can together, and have played together literally hundreds of times. So I knew I’d be in good hands. Of course every composer thinks their music needs to be treated in particular ways, but this score was a little unusual: the tunes and harmonies are simple on the surface, and the textures are transparent, but the timings are very subtle and particular, made more so by they way Chris choreographed to them. So I needed a group that would understand all this, and who would bring an acute awareness of sound and timbre to the music. And they really came through, I have to say.

“Stroking Piece,” written by Thurston Moore, performed by The Bang on a Can All-Stars and Thurston Moore on guitar

JAKI: How do you know when the piece is finally done? What is like to finally let go of the piece?

EVAN: Well, um, actually, I thought it was done before Chris did - in fact he made changes right on up to the dress rehearsal…

This actually turned out to be the best part of the process, because on more than one occasion he requested fairly radical changes in completed scores, often in ways that didn’t immediately make sense to me, and which I didn’t know how to accomplish. But in trying to do this, I found new aspects of the music which hadn’t been apparent to me before. It was kind of like dream therapy in this way - finding a hidden meaning and then delving deeper.

In terms of letting go, I’m not sure I’ve done that yet. New pieces are like distorted mirrors - you look in them and you can’t help but see yourself, for better or worse. In a couple of years I’ll be able to listen to it and know what it actually sounds like, but right now I have no idea…

JAKI: What’s next for you?

EVAN: I’m finishing an opera! Premieres in June in Bali and in late September in Berkeley, at least if the economy doesn’t collapse any further. It will involve my group (Bang on a Can), a full Balinese gamelan, 3 opera singers and 3 Balinese singers and dancers.

RELATED LINKS:

Misnomer Interviews Real Quiet Ensemble

Read other posts about Being Together

Visit Evan Ziporyn.com

Watch the webcast of Being Together

Listen : Download audio file (Zipper3.mp3)

I’ll be webcasting Misnomer Dance’s final performance of their 2008 season, Being Together.
This will be the first the Joyce Soho will be streaming a performance live.
I’ll be moderating the live chat, so it’ll surely be a great event.

Hope to see you there (or here)

btw - The Wall Street Journal has a pretty serious video player, eh?

Despite all the votes that are still coming in (provisional ballots, North Carolina, and countless other votes), our country has declared Barack Obama the next president. He has managed to win the seat of the White House by winning an overwhelming amount of Electoral Votes.

For those who don’t understand the electoral votes, I’ve pulled this graphic up to help explain things.

[via The Onion]

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Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell endorsed the presidential bid of Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, during an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press.”

The former Army general, who served as Secretary of State during President George W. Bush’s first term said a number of factors contributed to his decision to support Mr. Obama over Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee.

“I think that Senator Obama brings a fresh set of eyes, fresh set of ideas to the table,” Mr. Powell said, speaking outside NBC’s Washington studio. “I think that Senator McCain, as gifted as he is, is essentially going to execute the Republican agenda, the orthodoxy of the Republican agenda with a new face and a maverick approach to it, and he’d be quite good at it, but i think we need more than that.”

Mr. Powell also said following the interview that the negativity of the McCain campaign was “over the top” and troubled him.

Conservative newspapers have also gone towards Obama.

According to Editor & Publisher, Obama now has a 3 to 1 lead over McCain in newspaper endorsements — 51 newspapers with a total 6,299,363 daily circulation. At least seven of those papers endorsed President Bush in 2004.

I got this in an email today - does anybody know the actual source?

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for ‘The Vagina Monologues’, wrote the following about Sarah Palin.

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don’t like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them.. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story — connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, ‘It was a task from God.’

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist’s baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack.. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, ‘Drill Drill Drill.’ I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler

September 5, 2008

So far, I am connected to over 19,000 people through my family and ancestors.

Check out my tree below.

Or…

For a larger version of my family tree, click the link…

2 males were apprehended around 5:30pm today.
Police chased one of these guys around a few blocks by foot.
The police were hesitant to approach one of the guys - perhaps he had a gun or some other weapon? Does anybody have any idea what actually went on?

[where: 340 St Johns Place, Brooklyn, NY 11238]
The Location on Google maps

DailyKos has touted her as Punky Brewster, while Wonkette touted her a snow dwarf, and a hot lego.

[ via DailyKos ]

watch the video

At the 2:55-ish mark Palin responds to Kudlow’s queries about her interest in being vp by saying “What is it exactly that the VP does every day?”

. . . She is flippant about the job and implies she has better things to do. It demonstrates McCain’s extreme recklesness to chose someone who has no respect for the office. These are serious times and require serious people who care enough to tackle the challenges ahead.