Nancy Zeltsman, marimba
George Schuller, drums
Pat Hollenbeck, percussion
Matt Darriau, alto sax
Caleb Morgan, guitar
Joe Fitzgerald, bass
& the utterly cromulent Gabby Hays, vocals

a piece I wrote for Nancy's group.  certainly dated, but I want to back it up.

Dark Months

Instead of a happy ending, one of our lovers pulls the car over, turns the key in the ignition, and dies right there.

THE END

from Aurelius: Meditations, page 83.

25.  Lucilla saw Verus die, and then Lucilla died.  Secunda saw Maximus die, and then Secunda died.  Epitynchanus saw Diotimus die, and Epitynchanus died.  Antoninus saw Faustina die, and Antoninus died.  And so on; first Hadrian, then Celer.  And those sharp-witted men, either seers or men inflated with pride, where are they?...

The Most Extravagant Act *You* Have Performed in the Service of the Replenishment of the Species?

In my not-so-humble opinion, Windy is the greatest song ever.  Check out the conga part, and witness the wutness!

Frankie, Who Was A Cop, Died Listening To Windy

This just appends Dean Martin's Nobody's Baby to the end.

I apologize to anyone whose patience has been tried by all these versions.  I use SoundCloud as a backup, for safety, among other things.  With all these versions, it becomes possible to go back to any one of them if you decide it's better.  Even with mashups, the time it takes to make it is always greater than the time it takes to listen.

Yesterday's edits had some wonderful accidents that far exceeded in apparent brilliance anything I could have intended myself.  Sometimes accidents happen that are too good to pass up.

"I thought that my lonely would end."  Lonely as a noun.  Because a noun is the loneliest number that you'll ever know.

This is done medium well.  Duh-duh-done.  Finished.  The final cut. Fine.

Love, Death, And Dino -- Lonely As A Noun

Hah.  I appended Dino to the wrong version. 

This is the final fork-tested well-baked cruelly-cromulent version.

-c


Today's Improving Quotation:

From The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer:

Table of Contents:

LX . BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH
1.  Not to touch the Earth
2. Not to see the Sun
3. The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
4. Reasons for the Seclusion of Girls at Puberty

I can just see young Jim sitting around, reading.  "Hey, I can *use* this! What?  Artists are opportunists, girly.  Lessee, Not to touch the earth/Not to see the sun/ Got to hide away when the red blood runs,

Nah.  Too gross. I've got it:

Not to touch the earth.  Not to see the sun.  Nothing left to do but run, run, run.  Yeah, that's it."

Love, Death, And Dino2 The Director's Cut

In our fictional world, the director of this project  -- the renouned Craft Ebbing --was deemed insane and forced to go to Betty Ford, only to find it had been shut down.  He arrives at an abandoned building. The power is still on.  In his manic state he breaks in and begins to impersonate a doctor.  People start to drift in, and he tries to help them. Ebbing gradually realizes he's not a doctor, and is horrified at what he has taken on.

The critics were unanimously caustic -- "A bloated, self-indulgent mess redeemed only by some great tunes" was one of the more favorable reviews.

I think this is great and you can dance to it even more.

Note to self:  Work that Arabian Nights Angle.  For ex.  Strangers in My Arabian Nighty?  Possible title?

how about:  Craft Ebbing:  My Struggle   (?)

maybe:  Craft Ebbing's LOVE, DANCE, & DEATH, the final cut

possible title:  Kiss Me Where it Smells, She Said, So I Took Her to Allston

possible title:  It ALL Comes to Bear

Beats and Bear Spray?

Beary Silly Love Songs

I've Come to Beary Him, Not Marry Him

Full Faddem Five, da Fadda Lies
Full Faddem Five, Fadda to Fly

CRAFT EBBING's The Commingling

actual title: Haji, Haji, Haji, Haji, Haji, Haji, Haji

My teeth fell out and my colon exploded --?
try capitalizing this.

More Slightly Off-Color Arithmetic Problems?

Salacious Math, an Anthology

Dirty Math Problems for Couples

Lubricious Math for Adventuress Couples
(check it out, the adventuress, being a noun, is a lady)

'Til the Fat People Sing?

The Commingling of All Flesh

The Blind Commingling

Cometh the Blind Commingling  ********

The Things You Do For Love

With the movie conceit in mind, I attempt a first pass at a 90-minute version.

Possible Alternate Title:  Green Was My Valley; Propitious was my Commingling

?  The Commingling of All Flesh  ??

Dino's 90 Minutes Of Love And Sadness

This simply appends one last number to the 90-minute version and settles on a title for now.

I'd like to get more funny, and more lonely, in the title.  Words like commingle and propitious are funny to me, as are mock-serious titles like Cometh The Blind Commingling.  

But shorter is better when it comes to titles.

The entire story is this:  The Bad DJ is the production company, that hired the director Craft Ebbing to make Frankie and Johnny, a movie about the love affair between a cop (Frankie) and his possibly bisexual lover Johnny, who is a woman.  Craft Ebbing is brilliant but notoriously unstable, and is going through a manic episode.  The filming of Frankie and Johnny gets more and more bizarre as Ebbing tries to pack more stuff in.  It begins to go out of control and sink under its own weight.  The studio -- Bad DJ Productions -- takes over, and hires a driver to take Ebbing to the Betty Ford Clinic.  Ebbing is so nuts on the drive that the driver becomes fed up and dumps Ebbing on the grounds of what they think is the Betty Ford Clinic.  This turns out to be an abandoned building now, though the power is still on.  In his manic state, Ebbing breaks into the hospital, and puts on scrubs and a stethoscope, finding this funny at first.  Then various abject and desperate people start showing up, and Ebbing -- still pretending to be a doctor -- tries to help them.  He actually does manage to help some of them a little.  But then as he regains his sanity, he realizes to his horror that he is no doctor and that people are depending on him.  His character grows and changes, you see.  You will laugh, you will cry, you will sweat, and probably need to use the bathroom. 

Full Title:

The Bad DJ Port of Call Worthington presents The Craft Ebbing Trilogy:  What You Do For Love/A Woman in Your Life/ For Lili, with Love and Squalor

idea:  The Frankie and Johnny story-within-a-story is set in a East Coast ignorant person's vague idea of Texas, with Saguaro cactus everywhere, other anomalies.
It has to be unreal like AI is doing it.

idea: Ebbing's love interest is an entomologist.  We want that Far Side-ish sense of the bizarreness of insect/animal/human existence.  Love courtship of lobsters, for example.  She explains that a lobster is not an insect, and can probably feel pain when it is thrown into the pot.  This causes an argument between her and Ebbing, that further upsets him.  In the film, he gets increasingly worried about squashing bugs, etc.  Ebbing tried to bring lobsters for dinner, which he hopes will be festive, but it precipitates the terrible argument that strains his sanity.  It isn't that lobsters don't taste good, it's just that he should have anticipated his girlfriend's reaction.  He wasn't thinking about *her*, only his own enthusiasms.
How true, how true.  The girlfriend bears an uncanny resemblance to Caroline Ellison.

Freud speculated that dreams about train stations were dreams about death, iirc.

casting idea:  see if we can get Samuel Jackson as the limo driver who throws Ebbing out.

The entomologist's father took too much ketamine and insisted on contacting President Ford to warn him about the dangers facing the nation.  In a comic episode, he manages only to talk to Betty Ford, who is very kind to him.  We set up Betty Ford clinic this way.

Betty Ford is wonderful, wise, kind and lucid, practical, and succinct. Then she goes and drinks frickin' paint-thinner or something and then collapses.  We must do this in a sensitive way.  The scene closes with the agonized look on President Ford's face as he discovers her unconscious. 

possible alternate title:  THEY SLATHERED RAW MEAT ON THEIR GENITALS

hmm.  maybe not.

The Bad DJ PResents The Things You Do For Love

This piece is about my love of the effect of multiple musics playing at the same time.  It is a mixture of of inspiration and just slapping something together.  It's pretty hard to tell which is which here.  This means I don't quite know how to feel about this work.  It's like a big wall mural with many familiar and unfamiliar figures seeming to be in the same space.  It flirts with making sense, but doesn't really, especially as it goes on.  Overall theme:  love and loss, love versus living alone.  Maybe there is padding to make it last 90+ minutes.  That would be the Doors section.  This is the best but also silliest  thing I've ever done.

Sources:

Mountain Goats -- "The Things You Do For Love" with puree of gospel music (creating a scale-degree #1 to 2 that is painfully lovely)
My father plays piano
Big Head Todd and the Monsters -- "Midnite Radio" with Boston Police radio murmer, with
Vida Cor Meum -- from movie Hannibal 
Mountain Goats -- "The Things You Do For Love" reappearance
Brookline choir Notify -- "Free Fallin'"
Annie Lennox -- "The Downtown Lights"  with more Vida Cor Meum
------------------
crossfade to "latin vacation" section
including Tito Puente and ending with 
George Duke "If You Will" with slowed-down hermit thrush
------------------
Mahler "Death in Venice" reference melding into Wagner -- Tristan Prelude with
ugly modern-classical blemishes and spasms, with voluptuous images contrasted
with violent lobster-courtship, or insect love.
------------------
Nat King Cole -- "Hajji Babba" -- "...come to my tent, oh my beloved.  bring me your
lips, warm as the sun...come to my arms, my wonderful one..."
with more quasi-erotic excessive spasming.
------------------
from Leonard Bernstein -- Mass -- "And It Was Good, Brother"
gets disrupted by George Clinton -- "Dis Beat Disrupts"  over which soars
Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland, climaxing in 
Bernstein Mass, from which emerges
Roberta Flack -- "Where is the Love?"  with bird-chirp compote
------------------
Techno groove in A fights with Mass
reappearance of "Vida Cor Meum"
------------------
"I go on" from Mass with lots of gnarly underpinnings including a thirsty raccoon, and more Copland
------------------
unknown Swingle Singers-ish version of Bach.  You see, this connotes carrying on despite despair.
Piano music, with Dinah Shore "Chloe".  "...I've got to go where you are..."  Slightly sped up.
trying to escape south to Mexico music
With Morgan's "Lovers Slo-Mo"  and Patsy Cline "Darling You're Stronger than Me" and more Boston Police
------------------
Choir battles, culminating in Big Head Todd "Midnite Radio" reprise with hints of Nietzschian choirs
------------------
Doors "Run With Me" -- this was cribbed from Golden Bough about menstrual taboos.  Then notice how
the song moves to vaginal imagery.  "You won't know a thing 'til you get inside."
Doors "Riders on the Storm".  Born between faeces and urine, bathed in blood, we are cast into the world.
a little Zorba the Greek.
------------------
Carousel of sounds, leading to 
David Lindley -- "Your Old Lady"  (is my old lady too.  One thing I know:  Somebody's got to go.)
with its genius slide-git work.
------------------
Gilbert and Sullivan, Copland Organ Symphony, "Your Mother or Your Wife", Cage: Prepared Piano, 
Doris Day -- "Que Sera Sera"
------------------
Reich:  Music for 18, Big Head Reprise#2, special choir sauce, Deano -- "Nobody's Baby", Mash Theme,
bob mintzer big band, M Jackson tuned down -4 "Don't Stop", Oregon, Mahler, Morgan -- "DC Cutups", 
"A Man Comes Home and Writes", "Tears of a Clown: I'm Goin' DownTown", Morgan: Pojo, 
Belafonte: The Honey Man, and it was good.
I Love Rock N' Roll, Morgan: 3-note open, 4 freshman: Angel Eyes, Morgan 3-note open, We Go Together,
Morgan: Train
------------------
Rex Harrison: I'm An Ordinary Man
Mountain Goats:  Song for Dennis Brown, with Allison Miller: "No Morphine, No Lilies"

Kiss Me Where It Smells She Said So I Took Her To the Dumpster Behind the Chinese Restaurant

Craft Ebbing's last work, the Worthington Trilogy: IF THERE B TIX 2raccons1cup SNARLS OF A SUMMER NIGHT, was thought to be lost, but an old canister was found in a barn.  After being sent to NASA to attempt to salvage what was left of the tape, it was then sent to the FBI and finally the NTSB, who all deemed it worthless.  The signal was fine, it was the artistic merit that was lacking.  You can leave if you want to, we're just jamming.

Music theory as it is practiced seems to me to be in a shoddy state, always has.  There seems to be no organized efforts at research, no definitive but interesting texts.  No Manhattan Project, not even a downtown one. There seem to be only some few bright theorists and composers working in a vast landscape of dullness, of papers only about trivial or obvious issues.  Without getting too gloomy, one feels that one lives in a fallen world where one cannot hope to have nice things -- at least in the world of music *theory*.

It's like the world shown in the unfortunately-titled movie Wristcutters* -- the same as the world we know but worse.  Music theory seems like something so relatively unimportant that the current patchwork of semi-nonsense and lies-to-students and puffery and self-promotion is the background.  If you don't want to begin with an overly gloomy movie like Wristcutters, then the first circles of Hell in the Inferno will do -- I mean a place of perpetual semi-darkness illuminated only by the intellects and goodwill of a few standouts.  When it comes to some important things -- like developing vaccines against covid-19 -- the world seems to be getting along just fine.  

Music theory, though, is a sluggish and polluted intellectual backwater.  And this is partly because the daily business of music can get along without intellectual coherence or progress.  Each generation can rediscover the wheel or the goodness of basic musical materials for itself -- rediscover life's simple pleasures.  

It's when it comes to complex, un-simple pleasures that chaos reigns.  A young composition student at NEC once commented with despair that every composer seems to be developing and speaking a different language with different rules.  A tower of Babel -- except in this image few seem to care that no one understands each other.  This idea was strange to me at first because I always had faith that I could find my own way, so the confusion didn't matter.  Now I basically agree with it.  

As an example, consider the disagreement about how to *hear* non-tonal music.  You have Milton Babbitt saying that hearing serial music in tonal terms is like attempting to understand language in terms of inter-language puns.  Sort of like Joyce's Finnegans Wake. You have some theorists claiming that there are specific ways of hearing atonal music, others that hearing is hearing and atonal music is no different.  No consensus.

Or, someone says with great assurance that it's impossible to work backwards in composition -- to fill in a background, then turn that into foreground melodies and harmonies.  On the other hand, you have Charles Wuorinen making fun of the notion that composition is like taking dictation from God.  Rather, for him it's exactly filling in from general to specific or larger to smaller.  People with no experience at composition speak with great confidence, and I'll go with Chuck W. on this one, even though I don't love his music or believe his delusion that his own music is essentially fractal.  No such luck, Chuck.


There was more, of course

Worthington IF THERE B TIX 2raccons1cup SNARLS OF A SUMMER NIGHT

I'm terrible at long-term planning.  I prefer to operate on instinct when it comes to composition, at least to tell me whether to continue.  The dynamic of wanting to post on SoundCloud for the sake of posting will produce much lameness, and you should never be lame.  It's all a little too interesting.  It messes with my head enough that I should stop.

Thanks for any likes.  Hope you enjoyed some of the moments.  I thought the last 90-minute thing is in one sense the best thing I've ever done.  In another sense it's just editing, and using other people's stuff, so it's a lower tier of work.  But really interesting what you can do, I think.  

I personally loathe old-age longevity boosterism.  Stop before you write Stravinsky's The Owl and the Pussycat.  Stravinsky himself knew this.  He said something very Yoda-like, something to the effect that there was no such thing as trying.  You either did it or not.  But he kept working to the very end.  He was a better man than me, and had more support.  Artists make art like trees make sap but that's it for me.  I have a lot of environmental sound lying around but no convictions, no faith that it would be anything but make-work.

It's been oddly enjoyable.  Peace Out.

Peace Out And Thanks!  I'll be stepping away.

Interested in microtonality, neo-serialism, collage or mashups.  The music here is a combination of my compositions, a little guitar, some microtonal keyboard practice, short cues -- usually pastiche, and mashups combining old records with my own pieces. This is an overview of almost everything except jazz tunes and early and student work.  The best stuff is to be found in the playlist called The Best Stuff.  There is also a microtonal list.

N.B.  I don't read comments or attempts to contact me, and so of course I don't respond.  This is to preserve my peace of mind.  It was hard enough to find friends in a music conservatory:  I'm not going to find them in the world at large, especially not in this late stage of my life.  It's too bad, but I'm sensitive, and the internet is insane.

Dark Months

Caleb Morgan

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