LOVE IS ROUND, a collection 20 long-line sonnets, with coda

ASKO Ensemble, w/ CLIFF CREGO conducting. PART II begins just as the first tape interpolation ends...

One of the many fragmentations of Western musical practice, as we know it, is the fragmentation of sound and place and time of year. I think that is a mistake. The energy of a piece, if its good, if its powerful, naturally resonates with, or is "in tune" with certain times of day and year. DESERTS, for me, has always been such "a winter" piece. It's a vision of a new musical world with unsurpassed richness of composite sound and rhythmic primal corporeal complexity that seems all the more remarkable if it's played well under the faintly returning light of distant stars. See what you think . . . 

There are many reasons why the music of Varese is still important, still relevant. ONE, is an unsurpassed sense of natural complexity in composite sound, that is, sounds within sounds within sounds. Like Ives & Stravinsky, Varese was never handicapped by what I would call the deadend path and way of thinking of Schoenberg and the Vienna school. ANOTHER, is voice. Both of the INDIVIDUAL, and the COLLECTIVE. The music is always fulling visceral and embodied. Indeed, this intensely primal vocal quality is one of its key features, and also what is most lacking in current contemporary performance practice generally. A THIRD which might be mentioned briefly, is geometric tempi relationships. RELATIONSHIP--in Time & Space, in Rhythm & Sound--is everything in DESERTS. From beginning to end.


DESERTS, by Edgar Varèse, for small orchestra & tape (part 2)

THE WAY I see it, there are many rooms, chambers, halls, gardens, and even perhaps unknown hidden places, in what I think of as the Palace of Poetry. They all have their own distinct quality of light, of rhythm, of energy, of the movement of sense and sound. THIS, is the visionary room, with a rather surreal, wild, sempre-forte, fat-tire bike ride with a friend sitting crosswise on the cargo carrier through the crowded streets of AMSTERDAM BY NIGHT. All the great Transcendentalist are there, all of North America's brightest spiritual lights. They even manage to run populist neo-con proto-fascist, Wim Wilders, out of town. Ah, Amsterdam, there's no place like it! The musical coda was recorded in an old church-movie theater in AMSTERDAM, with the ASKO Ensemble playing "Nightwind," a part of a piece of mine called PHAROS.

The text of AMSTERDAM BY NIGHT is at: http://bit.ly/o7AzoW

AMSTERDAM BY NIGHT, a transcendentalist vision, featuring the ASKO Ensemble…

LONG-LINE SONNETS are a new variation on an old form: four stanzas of 4 + 4 + 3 + 3 lines, without end-rhymes, and only with a rough step or syllable count--as in a dance--of ± 12 or 14 steps per line or phrase. As always, what is primary for me is the movement of the sound itself, as a kind of music. Very much secondary is how a poem is written down or notated on the page. Indeed, the notation is simply a kind of elementary score, no more and no less, just as if it were intended for flute or voice, or keyboard.

The series is unified firstly from within by what I sense as a similar sonorous sound, with the long-line phrases all being based on the breath just as a good singer might do. In addition, there's much attention given to what I think of as related species of resonance. The latter replaces--happily, in my view--the somewhat rigid and outmoded emphasis on the mechanical patterns of similarity we call 'rhyme.' 

Second, for me personally, the series is held together by its mostly European cultural theme. In a word, what interests me here is what I sense as a kind of rough-hewn spiritual excellence:--a kind of miraculous clear mountain quartz of the soul just after its opaque gray-green clay is washed off. And this, regardless of where it manifests, whether it be a magnificent cathedral, a defiant old poet on top of an appallingly hubristic dam in the French-speaking Alps, or simply in the care and skill with which a mountain farmer builds his piles of well-composted cow shit. Indeed, this is what moves me to compose and work on them in the first place:--a kind of Heimweh or homesickness for a part of me that is much more European than North American. Part of that is my past. After all, I've lived in different European countries, especially the lowlands of Holland, and the high-country of the Alps and Switzerland, the better part of my adult life. But this is not the Europe of tourist buses and famous attractions known to many speakers of English. It is a far lesser travelled, and yet much more vibrantly alive "old country" which exists in its own, indeed ancient, and to my way of thinking, still relevant time-space.

In this view, real beauty does not grow old.

The beauty and power of a Bach hymn, or of John Dowland, is in this sense timeless. And there is a part of Bach, for example, a depth of feeling and resonance, that I think we miss entirely in North America. The latter must--and I offer this only as a conjecture--have something to do with the beauty of the German language itself, as well as the organic power of the German highland countryside out of which its sound and rhythms emerged. The English spoken in North America is, to my ear at least, still far too young to have developed anything like this kind of deep relationship between sound, meaning, and a love of the living, pulsing land.

The text of HYMN is at: http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/whitebark-falls_8-25-11.html

[PHOTO: WHITEBARK FALLS, Eagle Cap Wilderness, Oregon]

HYMN, a long-line sonnet

DESERTS, by Edgard Varèse, part IV ASKO Ensemble, CLIFF CREGO conducting

ASKO Ensemble, w/ CLIFF CREGO conducting. PART IV begins just as the second tape interpolation ends. The transition should be seamless. Listen for the high g crescendo into the initial attack to the snare drums...

One of the many fragmentations of Western musical practice, as we know it, is the fragmentation of sound and place and time of year. I think that is a mistake. The energy of a piece, if its good, if its powerful, naturally resonates with, or is "in tune" with certain times of day and year. DESERTS, for me, has always been such "a winter" piece. It's a vision of a new musical world with unsurpassed richness of composite sound and rhythmic primal corporeal complexity that seems all the more remarkable if it's played well under the faintly returning light of distant stars. See what you think . . .

There are many reasons why the music of Varese is still important, still relevant. ONE, is an unsurpassed sense of natural complexity in composite sound, that is, sounds within sounds within sounds. Like Ives & Stravinsky, Varese was never handicapped by what I would call the deadend path and way of thinking of Schoenberg and the Vienna school. ANOTHER, is voice. Both of the INDIVIDUAL, and the COLLECTIVE. The music is always fulling visceral and embodied. Indeed, this intensely primal vocal quality is one of its key features, and also what is most lacking in current contemporary performance practice generally. A THIRD which might be mentioned briefly, is geometric tempi relationships. RELATIONSHIP--in Time & Space, in Rhythm & Sound--is everything in DESERTS. From beginning to end.

DESERTS, by Edgar Varèse, for small orchestra & tape (part 4, CLIFF CREGO conducting

TREE OF AWAKENING is a long-line sonnet [see below]. TEXT is at http://bit.ly/1HlAGw4

THE PHOTO is a braided stream in the High European Alps, at a roadless crossing between present day Switzerland and Italy.

The music played in the recording is from my TIMELINE score, a duo for vibraphone & marimba, composed for my late mentor and friend, Donald Erb. The webscore is at score http://bit.ly/dUvMS7 mp3 http://bit.ly/fDCaFe

TREE OF AWAKENING, the world as flowing movement, as sound

EVENING & THE LENS WHICH LOOKS BOTH WAYS . . . 

EVENING, the Rainer Maria Rilke poem featured below, is one of those handful of verses that till this day German speakers may know by heart. The images are striking, and, as is so typical of Rilke, they find a deep emotional resonance with most listeners,or readers, moving from a row of trees, to a stone held in the palm of the hand, to the most distant star.

Bucky Fuller, that great poet of design, frequently would stand in a certain way during public lectures to demonstrate how he could sense "the turning of the Earth," and go on to explain how important that was to his work. "Spaceship Earth," or a sense of the planet as a round, not flat, living whole. Mountains are the place par excellence where we can perhaps learn to sense this movement best. The ever-changing angle of the light, lifting out and bringing to life ridgelines that were just a moment ago completely flat; the play of shadow and light is nowhere so sharp and extreme in its contrasts; and as we learn to return, time and time again to the same, favorite spot, like a small lake or
meadow, then the rock formations themselves work as a kind of primal clock, marking the movements of the day as they ever have, going back almost to the beginning of time itself.

Bucky Fuller was also fond of quoting the great American transcendentalist, Emerson: "Poetry means saying the most important things in the simplest way." He went on to generalize Emerson's magnificent insight in is whole philosophy of design, creating the now iconic geodesic dome—-we alpinists use and depend on them everyday—-strongest of structures, weighing less then the air they contains. 

Rilke can help us here, too, in that he holds the frame of the poem—-his titles are very much like the frames around paintings--perfectly steady, while moving from one image to the next with amazing virtuosity. It is as if the poet had a secret magic wand, turning with a single tap one metaphor into the next, all the while looking both outwardly at the world around him, and inwardly at the psyche that perceives, like a lens which looks both ways. 

Here, Rilke might help us come to grips with the question of "what is a good photograph?" This is no longer as self-evident as it once was now that a camera's onboard digital computer make a clear, clean shot almost too easy. Perhaps a "good photograph" has something to do with giving us a sense of the living Earth as it turns, and this "lens which looks both ways."

PHOTO: EVENING, last light at Hidden Lake, Autumn, Eagle Cap Wilderness, Oregon

Text is at: http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/evening_hidden-lake_2b.html

DOWNLOAD: #FreeFriday RILKE IN THE WALLOWAS 80 new tr. & 120 photos, by CLIFF CREGO pdf 212 p/ 208 Mb http://bit.ly/mA3Ly7




EVENING / ABEND, a Rilke classic, tr. by Cliff Crego

IMAGE: Climate Breakdown basecamp, the WALLOWAS, OREGON

Photo / text of poem is at bit.ly/f5czpb

WATCH…“i’m too poor in this world, and yet not poor enough…after RILKE” https://vimeo.com/845195766

I’m too poor in this world, and yet not poor enough…after RILKE, a soundpoem

IMAGE: House on fire…
“KRATOS, images of protest & conflict…” on #Vimeo https://vimeo.com/847187605 

KRATOS =  strength grounded in truth…

KRATOS, images of protest & conflict….a soundtrack for the video

A long-line sonnet...

"A song both happy and sad, both bright and dark. No name
Do we have for this round of thirds that is Nature's way... "

Composed upon upon hearing Gustav Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen [Songs Of a Wayfarer], 4th movement, Die Zwei Blauen Augen Von Meinem Schatz [The Blue Eyes of my Beloved], sung by Dietrich-Fischer Dieskau, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Rafael Kubelik, conducting

TEXT IS AT: http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/wayfarer_fallglacier.html

A recording of the Mahler 4th movement is at:  mp3 [9Mb] http://bit.ly/XWmJki

SONGS OF A WAYFARER--a long-line sonnet

SEE performance SCORE & INTRO at 
pdf http://bit.ly/1u9OuiC  
performance model mp3 http://bit.ly/1u9MiI9  

Performance models are with the StarCycle PROJECT
important. Why? This is because they explore a wide
repertoire of new species of musical movement. So
computers are needed, in a way, to make them manifest,
just as computers are needed to make the new geometry of 
FRACTALS visible. So, paradoxically, the machine reveals
a new dimension that potentially helps us transcend the
otherwise dehumanized rhythmical landscape of what much
of Classical Music has become.

StarCycle Project: REGULUS Regulus "The Little King" for piccolo solo

VIDEO for this soundtrack is here https://vimeo.com/912853067

“IF I MUST DIE,” a music of protest, is a tribute to Refaat Alareer (1979-2023). The orchestral sound and pulse of the piece unfold like a slow in- and out-breath from a single vibrating string ground, as do do the vowels and words of the poem; it’s both simple and pure (voice), and harsh and complex (brass and percussion), all at once, and one at time.

Alareer was a leading Palestinian poet, English scholar and professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He co-founded the WE ARE NOT NUMBERS collective that brought together older, more experience authors with younger writers in Gaza; its central idea was and is the power of the human voice and storytelling as a form of resistance.

On 6 December 2023, Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza, along with his brother, sister and her three children.

His tragic death is a great loss to the world cultural community. Anyone who heard him speak in any of his many interviews noticed his perfect, deeply resonant, command of English. “IF I MUST DIE” was his last poem. Poet Mosab Abu Toha has written, "My heart is broken, my friend and colleague Refaat Alareer was killed with his family"

If I must die, 
you must live
to tell my story 
to sell my things 
to buy a piece of cloth 
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail) 
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 
while looking heaven in the eye 
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze
-and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself-
sees the kite, my kite you made, 
flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there 
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope 
let it be a tale

“IF I MUST DIE,” a music of protest on a poem by Refaat Alareer

PHOTO: Arinica (Arnica montana) & Butterfly, the Alps

POSTER is at: http://www.cs-music.com/features/cards/poster_sonnet-XIV-2.html

POSTER pdf is at: http://www.cs-music.com/features/cards/poster_sonnet-XIV-2.pdf

DOWNLOAD: #FreeFriday RILKE IN THE WALLOWAS 80 new tr. & 120 photos, by CLIFF CREGO pdf 212 p/ 208 Mb http://bit.ly/mA3Ly7

RILKE: Sonnets to Orpheus, XIV [second part], German/English, tr. Cliff Crego

(Glaucidium gnoma) NORTHERN Pygmy-Owl duet? Well, this is an objective reality report filtered through the working hypothesis of my ignorance. I bird by ear. Not with my eyes. I generally sleep at basecamps with my finger on the record button. This happened last night. 

I am assuming that the female is the distant voice, about 30m away. (Again. I didn’t actually see them. I was in a tent, trying to remain as incognito as possible.) Her music always ASCENDS; The male’s music always DESCENDS. (Note his percussive high F-pops at the beginning of each phrase.)

Ah, the joys of OBJECTIVE REALITY & MOTHER NATURE!  Where, unlike me, everybody makes an honest living, there’s no endless suffering based on organized religion’s troubling of morality, and there’s no confusion about, well yes:—gender.

IMAGE: Wikipedia

Northern Pygmy-Owls, male / female hunting duet…V.27.2024 /23:20 NT at 1330m

FIRST, we see time is not a line.
THEN, we see time is a circle,
a circle turning, in cycle within cycle
within cycle. The birds and plants
have always known this. Only we,
have turned away.

AVIAN soloist: European Backbird; Northen Pygmy Owl hunting duo.
IMAGE:  American Dipper, Hurricane Creek, Eagle Cap Wilderness, OREGON.

ORACLE, a reader of signs….“It took the whole world by surprise”

IMAGE; Eagle Cap Wilderness, the WALLOWAS, OREGON. Both the music & prose poem were composed here…

TEXT and PHOTOS are here http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/photoweek_9-08_3-09.pdf

The AVIAN soloist featured is my friend the Rock Wren, not singing this year it seemx.

WEST WIND AT POP CREEK PASS, a high-country prose-poem……

THIS IS PART ONE of an audiobook I'm making of David Bohm's (1917-1992)essential, ON DIALOGUE. It's intended for some of my friends and students, and all those interested in exploring nonviolence, ethics, the destructive and divisive nature of thought and thinking, in a serious, sustained way. Both alone, and collectively. I also feel strongly that such a dialogue circle forms the basis of a radically new performance practice in the Arts generally. 

In addition, I'm using ON DIALOGUE with my THEATER OF THE NEW project: SEE ON TWITTER at: https://twitter.com/theaterofthenew

SEE FULL TEXT at pdf [150Kb]: http://bit.ly/1JIleaE


DAVID BOHM: On Dialogue, part one

AN EARLY POEM, read & tr.  by Cliff Crego, English/German. TEXTS are at: http://picture-poems.com/rilke/features/summer-meadow.html

PHOTO: August Summer Meadow, the Alps at 1,100 m. [Believe it or not, this is HAY, just a day or two before cutting. Traditional meadows are cared for to this day without artificial fertilizer, and are cut with a scythe by hand. Believe or not, this is HAY that -- I actually counted them I'm afraid! -- is a subtle weave of some 120 native herbs and grasses. Subtle, indeed, like the sound and rhythm of Rilke's poetry...

READING: About my book of translations, RILKE IN THE WALLOWAS http://bit.ly/1sWqMe4

DOWNLOAD: #FreeFriday RILKE IN THE WALLOWAS 80 new tr. & 120 photos, by CLIFF CREGO pdf 212 p/ 208 Mb bit.ly/mA3Ly7



RILKE: [You don't have to understand life's nature] / [Du musst das Leben nicht verstehen]

Philosophically, the idea of END TIMES itself is so bad that it may well indeed create the END TIMES to which it refers. Think of that the next time you take your instrument out of its case….

NOTE: SOUNDS moving in SPACE. Headphones required!

(1) WAVE deterministic chaos
(2) FLARE constant variables
(3) HYMN with interruptions (BACH BWV38 “Aus tiefen  Not schrei’ ich zu dir”)
(4) ECHO call & response…
(5) SCHERZO with polyrhythms
(6) PEDALE melody unfolds into harmony
(7) CODA one as seven/ seven as one

IMAGE: A masterpiece of composite German / American design, the brass bell of a classic BACH trumpet. Much could be said about the flare of the bell and the geometrical flares of timespace featured in the music, but I’ll leave that for a layer date. I sold the last three I owned in 1978—a set of B-flat, C & D instruments—in an unfortunate moment of deep financial chaos in SISTERS, OREGON. I hope somewhere in the world their signature, free, resonant sound is still blessing the Universe.

CYMA, for a circle of 7 C trumpets in 7 parts “Deconstructing Apocalypse”

BRECCIA III, for #violin & #cello score http://bit.ly/1v0uRiA pdf http://bit.ly/1v0uRiD mp3 http://bit.ly/1Ddv7xB

There's also a version for two violins at: http://bit.ly/1DVg0YM mp3 http://bit.ly/1FPnag4

BRECCIA I is also on soundcloud at: http://bit.ly/1Dqq62f

The X-country STRING QUARTET project [soundcloud bit.ly/1Dqp9XP] is an initiative/idea of mine, to form a string quartet that bikes cross country, giving concerts, lectures,  demonstrations of a wide repertoire of new music in small rural communities about every 40 of 50 k during the spring and summer months. 

PHOTO: A Jaspar Breccia, a rock with distinctive, sharp, angular segments that are cemented together, forming a naturally complex composite 


BRECCIA III, for violin & cello, for the young performer, part the X-country STRING QUARTET project

A 17 seventeen-step poem is a kind of generalized HAIKU. How it is notated in the score isn’t relevant. Only the 17 steps as we hear/sense/feel them as a dance, a pattern of movement, is important.

A SEQUENCE strings 17 of these seventeen-step poems together, like strings of lights on a Christmas tree. Each string has a different color or theme or center.

There are 17 SEQUENCES. Here, we hear the first nine.

Each numbered pattern we hear is a single image or experience from a bike packing pilgrimage made through the mountains of IDAHO and OREGON. 120 days / 80 camps. Many more, new special places and new friends.

TEXT of SEQUENCES I through XI… (rough draft…) is at http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/lost-in-idaho.pdf

IMAGE: My bike packing rig, MISSOULA. I cache the bike, and periodically change over to boots and backpack for wilderness photography work, and then hike back out to my bike.

LOST IN IDAHO, A pilgrim’s notebook….Sequences I through IX

(1) SUNSIGHT! for Bucky FULLER
(2) RILKE: LOVE SONG / LIEBESLIED
(3) UNHOLY LAND “Where not to kill is a sin”
(4) THE BELL (title poem excerpt) 
(5) LOST IN IDAHO:—A pilgrim’s notebook (brief excerpt)
(6) LOSS OF TRUTH / VARÈSE Deserts (excerpt)
(7) Remco CAMPERT: Resistance doesn’t begin with big words /  Verzet begint niet met grote woorden
(8) StarCYCLE DUO “alpha Pyxis’ IV “Ring nebulae”
(9) TRINITY DAY VII.16.1945 5:30am (excerpt)
(10) StarCYCLE DUO “alpha Pyxis’ V “Density Waves, 1/4-tone pianos”
(11) SUNSIGHT! echo of poem in Arabic & Hebrew
(12) ORACLE, A reader of signs “It took the whole world by surprise”

IMAGE: Cooking on Basalt, SUMMER SOLSTICE fire, Whitebark Pine Country, OREGON

TIMES TWELVE:—music & poetry, side by side “SUNSIGHT!”

Even though I’m doing fieldwork in OREGON right now, I feel a strong emotional and personal connection to this event. The small alpine village where I’ve worked for years—the GÔSCHENERALP—is at the same elevation, only 56km as the crow flies east of BLATTEN. 

#ClimateBREAKDOWN The BLATTEN Glacier Collapse: Climate Tragedy in the Swiss ALPS V.28.2025 mp3 [9Mb] http://www.picture-poems.com/mp3/the-blatten-tragedy_swiss-alps.mp3

Avalanche of 3,000,000 cubic meters rock & ice overwhelms historic high alpine village [in places 200m deep]; debris dams the LONZA RIVER, threatening downstream communities 

[composed w/ GEMINI]

IMAGE: w/ GOOGLE EARTH


The BLATTEN Glacier Collapse: Climate Tragedy in the Swiss ALPS V.28.2025

1) FOUR ROMANCES & MYSTERY FLOWER
(2) RILKE “I am home between dream and day”
(3) POD with Simone de HAAN, trombone
(4) VARÈSE: Integrales (fragment)
(5) BLATTEN: A Tragedy in the Swiss Alps
(6) EVERY VALLEY HAS TWO SIDES, for Konrad
(7) StarCYCLE Regulus Regulus “The Little King” for piccolo solo
(8) EIGHT MINIATURES

IMAGE: Slender Woodland Star (Lithophragma tenellum), a Sagifrage, the WALLOWAS, OREGON

TIMES EIGHT:—music & poetry, side by side “BLATTEN, A Tragedy in the Swiss ALPS”

An experimental composite soundpoem essay

TEXT for study and distribution is at: pdf http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/eagle-of-freedom.pdf

IMAGE: Native Buckwheats at 2400m, Eagle Cap Wilderness, OREGON

The EAGLE OF FREEDOM always has two wings, freedom TO & freedom FROM

IN OUR AMERICA panelaço:—A Pots & Pans music of protest

mp3 [33Mb] http://www.picture-poems.com/mp3/in-our-america.wav

score pdf http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/in-our-america.pdf 

TEXT by the “Nasty Women get Shit Done” Collective

TEMPO 160 The 109-step [11,881] full-spectrum rainbow IN OUR AMERICA Flag panelaço

“IN OUR AMERICA [solo master drummer calls]
ALL PEOPLE ARE EQUAL  [collectivo panelaço response]….

[4 x 6beats then repeat]

TEXT by the “Nasty Women get Shit Done” Collective

IN OUR AMERICA panelaço:—A Pots & Pans music of protest

GERMAN version is here: https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/die-todesfuga-paul-celan

A new English translation of Paul Celan’s masterpiece.

Just a rough cut. Trying to find the right sounds.

IMAGE: (Muted) POWDER RIVER at 600m, the WALLOWAS, Northeast OREGON

DEATH FUGUE, on a poem by Paul Celan

IMAGE; Snake River, below the BROWNLEE DAM (left OREGON / right IDAHO)

TEXT is at: http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/rolling-thunder_7-20-11.html

THINK OF A RIVER (as something powerful): a flowform meditation (in geometric time)

FIREFLY/STARLING Project Proposal: One of the species of music I do is algorithmic composition.

The intention is to side-step traditional metric notation altogether, and generate electronic sounds directly from their mathematical description.

TWO projects I’m working on involve the movement of sounds in objective or real space. Inspired by the Varèse, Xenakis, and Le Corbusier 1958 World's Fair Philips Pavilion—we did a reconstruction of this with the ASKO SCHOENBERG Ensemble years ago—I am hoping to implement a grid of a 40-voice sound source distributed over 400 light/speakers.

The simplest and most flexible way to do this would be an APP that audience members could download in situ that flashes colored lights on and off, while at the same time playing pitched percussive sound. This means that there are three versions of a piece: light only, lights + sound, and sound only. All versions could be performed in- or out-of-doors.

The first two pieces I’d like to realize both use simple swarm algorithms abstracted from Nature: (1) FIREFLY (2) STARLING.

FIREFLY: The primary parameter is how the 40 relatively autonomous voices—simple percussive, say, woodblock sounds—move in and out of synchronicity using complex, non-periodic rhythms. Secondary parameters are random spatial and random pitch distribution (a simple 4 octave C2 to C6 1/4-tone field). Other variables are total duration and max/min temporal density limits. 

STARLING: Here, there are two equal primary parameters, with an one octave ‘swarm’ of 1/4-tone pitches at high to low density over a six octave field—always maintaining coherence with the same simple percussive woodblock sound with clear spatial transients—that ‘flies’ around in pitch space. 

WORK PLAN: Start simple with laptop models: scale down to 4 voices in monophonic rendering; then, stepwise, scale up to 40 voices. Once optimal temporal and pitch densities are worked out, scale to spatial distribution adding a dynamic / amplitude 7-step scale ppp=far away // fff=very near, as well as stereo headphones output; from there, scale up to the next level with simple single-purpose smartphone wi-fi/cellular APP.

That’s it. Each piece would last about 10 minutes. They wouldn’t be written down, but generated anew each time.

If you’d like take part the FIREFLY/STARLING Project (pro bono) in any way—whether as coder, mathematician, AI specialist, or APP designer— or offer support in any way, you can email me at cliff@picture-poems.com

AVIAN soloist: An Oregon Rock Wren, recorded in MAY

IMAGE: Whitebark pine atop EASGLE CAP (Lost) GLACIER PEAK in background

FIREFLY / STARLING Project Proposal:—Algorithmic  ‘SWARM’ spatial composition played LIVE!

“Man kann sagen, dass der Faschismus der alten Kunst zu lügen gewissermaßen eine neue Variante hinzugefügt hat - die teuflischste Variante, die man sich denken kann - nämlich: das Wahrlügen."

Hannah Arendt

A draft text for a Symposium / Dialogue Circle on Fascism as a species of human behavior from a natural historical perspective, and from the wider circle of consciousness as whole.

There is enough material here for a full year of reading, discussion, debate, and dialogue.

Draft text is at www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/fascism-times-four.pdf

MUSIC: ICE MOUNTAIN, for my friend, David LANDRUM https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/ice-mountain-m4at

IMAGE: (Muted) Snake River above HELLS CANYON DAM, left OREGON / right IDAHO

ESSAY: Der Faschismus aus naturhistorischer Sicht: Eine Analyse des Destruktiven im Denken

This is part one of an ANTIPHON or Call & Respone interpretation of the famous James Weldon Johnson hymn. It’s in three parts: (1) poem as speech choir; (2) melody as pure sound, sung with ground tone without the text; (3) put one and  two together, but still pure melody.

I actually perform it this way COLD with random audience as a kind of COMING TOGETHER when I do my slideshows, COLD SPRING MOUNTAIN:—Climate Breakdown in Whitebark Country…

If you have a choir, or lead a congregation, you might experiment in doing the piece this way. You really have to know the poem by heart—fully embody it, have it in your BONES, in your FEET, so to speak—to bring it to life. I don’t mean to be critical, but Johnson’s brother, Jay’s harmonization dimenishers greatly and cheapens the power of the sound. It’s also why most contemporary performers miss altogether, in my view, the striking originality of the songs inspiration: liberation.

IMAGE: Stentinel Whitebark pine, dead already hundreds of years, silent witness of a HOTTER, DRIER climate, key member of what I think of as our beloved Highcountry community. 2500m. The Wallowas, OREGON

LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING: Part I, James Weldon JOHNSON’S poem as Call & Response

LISTEN to an historic recording of Paul Celan performing TODESFUGA mp3 [4Mb] http://www.picture-poems.com/mp3/paul-celan.mp3

TODESFUGA, a soundscape on a poem by Paul Celan

Dutch version of AMSTERDAM BY NIGHT…

AMSTERDAM BIJ NACHT –
 een transcendentalistische visie

Stad der Tolerantie, / Stad der Verlichting, /
Stad waar Thoreau zijn rugzak zou verstoppen,
waar we Whitman zoeken in het stof onder onze laarzen,
Stad waar Emerson de aanval zou leiden 
tegen het Koninklijk Paleis op de Dam.
Stad van kronkelende wateren: 
de trage, donkere, dreigende Amstel
 tegen de felle lichten van Carré.
Stad gemeten aan onze voetstappen, 
aan de omtrek van fietswielen,
aan het aantal kroegen dat na middernacht nog open is,
vol van vrije geesten
die het volgende hoofdstuk bedenken 
in het boek van de Democratie,
Het volgende hoofdstuk in een volkssymfonie,
wilde verzameling van chaos en wanorde 
met een hart van symmetria prisca. 
Kijk! Daar gaat Dickinson op haar roze fiets 
met olifantenvleugels!
Ze jaagt Geert Wilders en de laatste puriteinen de stad uit.
Onder een heldere Poolster, 
Frederick Douglass spreekt, 
en de hele wereld luistert.


AMSTERDAM BIJ NACHT – een transcendentalistische visie

THIS  IS A rough cut dialogue tape. It is a meditation on language. I introduce and comment upon a recently issued warning of the OATH Keepers addressed to the U.S. government about the armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. You hear a recording of the published WARNING, followed by a wikipedia summary of the organization. 

MORE AT: [emphathically: NOT AN ENDORSEMENT] MIDNIGHT RIDE - When Rogue Politicians Call For Martial Law http://bit.ly/1ZSLcVp #OREGONstandoff

MUSIC featured is from JIM-JAM, for #sabar (or #djembe) orchestra w/ 3 voices, one MASTER #DRUMMER, and two choirs, left & right
DOWNLOAD master drummer part pdf (color dynamics) at: bit.ly/1cHZ1sI
GO TO #iPad webscore CS | JIM-JAM (page 1 of 17) bit.ly/U4MdFT
DOWNLOAD performance score pdf at: bit.ly/Qjk5Qu
DOWNLOAD parts pdf at: bit.ly/RZGroy
DOWNLOAD performance model mp3 at: bit.ly/U4Mt87
On soundcloud at: http://bit.ly/1NqH16w

PHOTO: A whirl of confusion, showing in polyphonic multi-layer color & vibrant flowing movement, revealing a singularly & remarkably contorted thought-form of an evidently highly disturbed psyche, a psyche attempting, fighting, struggling to find harmony & order, and that in the darkest of dank & dreary nights, a night in which even the least fearful & the least paranoid among us would shiver with angst for the wholly unforeseen & unjustified bolts of retribution from the godless heavens of a -- not in OREGON we hope -- winter sky.  Let us thank the real gods that it is unarmed.


Nonviolence, Dialogue & the OATH Keepers: a poet's view of the language of threat

A DIALOGUE TAPE celebrating the idea of a LUNAR NEW YEAR & THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY! It's a talk on what some would say the necessity of a LUNAR / SOLAR calendar, and, of course, all the detritus of Western mechanistic culture that's in the way.

"The culture with only one calendar,
is an inherently imbalanced culture."

Is that true? That's what the dialogue tape is about . . . 

MUSIC HEADER & coda is from the 1st movement of the StarCYCLE PROJECT, "spica, for solo percussion.  

INTRO for the entire starcycle is at: cs-music.com/starcycle/intro_spica.html The webscore for this "straight then curved" Movement I is at: www.cs-music.com/starcycle/spica-move1a.html Or get the pdf of first 3 movements at: http://www.cs-music.com/starcycle/pdfs/spica-move1-2-3.pdf

IMAGE: the popular picture-poems.com LUNAR / SOLAR calendar is at: http://cs-music.com/features/calendars/lunar-solar_calendar.html OR the pdf  is at: http://cs-music.com/features/calendars/lunar-solar_calendar.pdf


The LUNAR / SOLAR Calendar, rhythms of the natural year & a revolution of thought

(0)INTRO 
(1) CASCADIA, a brass fanfare (model)
(2) Limits - Pilgrim - Retronyms - Notation, set of 6 MINIATURES 
(3) TIMBERLINE, three prose poems from the ALPS 
(4) SLEEPWALK / SLAAPWANDELING, a tr. from the Dutch of Gerrit ACHTERBERG 
(5) Keyboard Etude III
(6) FIREBIRD, a long-line sonnet from LOVE IS ROUND,
for Igor STRAVINSKY
(7) DOME, for Bucky FULLER
(8) HILDEGARD'S GARDEN, for Hildegard von BINGEN
(9) PERCUSSION STUDY IV, for 5 voices "2:3 shift"
(10) Time - Plants - Justice - Poetry - Science, a set
of 5 MINIATURES
(11/12) RILKE: Titelblatt / Title Page, w/ soundpoem
(13) CROW & COYOTE discuss the Oregon STANDOFF
(14) The way of FORCE, the way of the TAO, & truth in function
(15) CODA: "The Etiology of War"

PHOTO: Spring Crocus, Ohio Country


ConcertMIX picture-poems.com PODCAST for Spring Equinox 2016

Check out “TRINITY, a soundpoem: The Devil asked, "Do you want total war?" And their God answered, "Yes."” from Cliff Crego on Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/842979367

IMAGE: Berlyn Brixner / Los Alamos National Laboratory... TRINITY SITE EXPLOSION, 0.016 second after detonation, VII.16.1945. The hemisphere's highest point is about 200 meters above ground zero.

The AVIAN soloists featured in "TRINITY, a soundpoem," are the Tree Swallow, the Spirit or Varied Thrush, & the Hermit Thrush. Recorded at HEARTBREAK MEADOW, OREGON. The former two species no longer return to the meadow in spring, evidently because of the Sudden Aspen Decline (SAD), and other disruptive effects of a hotter, drier climate.

TRINITY, a soundpoem: The Devil asked, "Do you want total war?" And their God answered, "Yes."

THE PHILOSOPHER’S LYRE

Philosophy? It only takes one bad idea to destroy a man, or woman, or even an entire civilization.

Philosophy is not just something we think about; it is something that we do—a practice—like music or yoga. It goes after the contradictions, the misplaced, broken strings, and tunes and retunes its lyre religiously, each day, to the ground of truth. 




Philosophy sings its songs in the open—honest, naked, direct—and simply listens to how the sound resonates as it rings out, into the Universe.

THE PHILOSOPHER’S LYRE, a soundpoem...

An adagio meditation, on the spirit of 
a WOOD FLUTE'S sound . . .

Recorded in the Eagle Cap Wilderness,
w/ a stream-side Varied Thrush (Ixoreus naevius)--
I call them Spirit Thrushes, because I almost
never see, but go running after their sound
as soon as they return to the high country in May.
Their song is a kind of ethereal frequency modulation
of two mistuned unison tones, occurring in cyclical,
regular way, but w/ a signature SOUND to SILENCE
ratio of about 1 to 8. 

text of poem, w/ photo is at http://bit.ly/XwheFB

WOODEN FLUTES--a long-line sonnet

Should be played without conductor, without music. The tempo tree for the whole is based on the ratio of 5 to 4, which in musical SPACE is the equivalent of a major 3rd. 

Video for this soundtrack is at https://vimeo.com/948286455

More percussion music at www.cs-music.com/drums

The webscore of the simplified study version LOCK 'EM UP is at: http://www.cs-music.com/drums/study_1_1.html

AND the pdf is at: http://www.cs-music.com/drums/study_1.pdf

PARTS of simplified version (without instruments) are at: http://www.cs-music.com/drums/study_1.pdf

“LOCK ‘EM UP!” A music of PROTEST in “4 against 5” for 18 percussionists....

Composer. Writer. Photographer. Former conductor & founder of the ASKO ensemble.

On a bike/ski/hike trek of the Pacific Northwest studying native plants & climate breakdown 🌲 from sagebrush sea to whitebark pine. Composing off-grid the whole way.

#Sun2Sound 🌕 on X

THINKING LIKE A STONEPINE, a soundpoem manifesto https://vimeo.com/844665859

“LOVE & WATER, three thought poems w/ coda, PHAROS for small orchestra, “Nightwind”” https://vimeo.com/847079690 

CURRENTLY on mt bike/ski/climbing trek through Pacific Northwest, working on a photobook about WHITEBARK PINE COLLAPSE and CLIMATE CRISIS. BASES in the WALLOWAS | AMSTERDAM | ALPS. 

WEEKLY photo/poetry updates at www.picture-poems.com & THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE new music, poetry & dance performance project at www.cs-music.com

ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT for progressive, tech-savy, instrumental virtuosi interested in dialogue & collaborative undertakings.

CONTACT cliff@picture-opoems.com
Or on SKYPE or FACETIME @cliffcrego

MUSIC? The one thing humans do,
that makes the rest of nature jealous.

Cliff Crego

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