And Applebaum is an engaging guy—bright, witty, funny. And his music is just as idiosyncratic as he is. He started out by playing a bit of Beethoven and then asking the question—is it music?
He then began to talk about his compositions, among which is the Concerto for Florist and Orchestra (nope—you’re gonna have to look it up yourself). And then he went on to demonstrate a new instrument he had invented: it had, among other things, all the combs he could find in the house, what looked like the ball from a toilet tank, and a coiled metal door stopper).
Right—so that was interesting. Now then, what about the music?
Well, it’s something that used to be called avant-garde and might now be called devant-garde. By which I mean that there was a time, in those days of the sixties, when blindfolded artists were flinging paint at canvases for a set period of time, letting it all dry, and then shipping it off to be displayed at museums, where people would stand about and pontificate. Or, painters would paint a canvas one solid color; there’s a whole room full of such art in the MoMA.
“Are we going to try to take this seriously?” I asked Johnny, who was standing next to me.
“Nah,” he said, and we both headed for the next hall.
Well, we all got busy doing other things, and somehow all that experimental zaniness faded away. So I was quite prepared, in fact very cheerfully prepared, to dismiss Applebaum as another gimmick, another in a long line of guys doing essentially the same thing.
Wrong. I ended liking the piece below, entitled “Aphasia,” which was inspired by seeing two deaf mutes having a heated conversation—a discussion full of affect but with no sound. And it’s clear—the guy must have worked long hours both to compose it and then to memorize it.
So what’s it all about? It’s a metaphor for the “expressive paralysis” that comes on in that dreaded moment when it’s a battle between the empty page of music and the composer—and the empty page is winning. Here’s what Applebaum said about it….
"Kids love it. So do people who need a break from conventional modes of expression."
Aha!—that’s why I liked it!
In
this, however, not all people join me. Has anyone else noticed—the people who
comment on YouTube videos have to be the most churlish in the universe? So I
was unsurprised to run into this: Typical liberal arts bullshit. Trying to be edgy but comes off
looking like something Tim and Eric created.
Tim?
Eric? Who are they?
Well
that was interesting, so what about the piece, Echololia? And what, by the way,
was echololia? Echolalia I knew, as any old psychiatric nurse would—schizophrenics
occasionally repeat the last three or four words of a sentence; kids do too, at
a certain stage of development. The difference? Kids grow out of it.
The
piece, at any rate, is a sequence of sounds that we wouldn’t necessarily
consider music—drills, hammers, the screech of duct tape. Curiously, the only
sound from a standard musical comes at the very end of the piece—and no, I won’t
spoil it. So how would it sound?
Applebaum scores again! And here the churl that inevitably taps out his frustration in YouTube scoffs—John Cage did it all years ago.
Well that seemed like something I had to check out, and yes, as you can see below, Cage did much the same thing years ago.
Speaking of Cage, I didn’t know that he had been Merce Cunningham’s romantic partner for years—a fact of absolutely no significance. Just a drop of trivia dripping into the blog—sorry!
Well,
that got me thinking—there is indeed nothing new under the sun. And I’m sure
that Applebaum knows of Harry
Partch, especially since they are (was, in the case of Partch) both
Californians.
Partch
was a definite loose screw—at one point he was a hobo, at another point he was
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And yes, he too invented his own
instruments—he described himself as “a
philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".
He did
more—he decided to throw out the traditional scale and created, well…let
Wikipedia describe it….
Inspired
by Sensations of
Tone, Hermann von
Helmholtz's book on acoustics and the perception of sound, Partch
based his music strictly on just intonation. He tuned
his instruments using the overtone series,
and extended it past the twelfth partial. This allowed for a larger number of
smaller, unequal intervals than found in the Western classical music
tradition's twelve-tone equal
temperament. Partch's tuning is often classed as microtonality, as it
allowed for intervals smaller than 100 cents, though Partch did
not conceive his tuning in such a context.[28]
Instead, he saw it as a return to pre-Classical Western musical roots, in
particular to the music of the ancient Greeks. By taking the principles he
found in Helmholtz's book, he expanded his tuning system until it allowed for a
division of the octave into 43 tones based on ratios of small integers.
Confused?
Join the club—I had several semesters of music theory, and I can barely wade
through the paragraph myself.
So yes,
Applebaum had people who had trod down the path he’s now treading—so what?
Haven’t we all? And yes, I’ll go along, at the moment, with his answer to the
question of the Beethoven? Is it music?
His
response?
It’s the
wrong question—it should be, “Is it interesting?”
Yes—to both
Beethoven and Applebaum.
