Don juan font sample
(Among other downtown musicians on Don Juan, Arthur Russell, who traversed and unified art, rock, and classical worlds, plays cello and sings.) It's Lauten's unwillingness to settle*- Don Juan* is alternately mystical and exuberant it marches stiffly for minutes on end and then dissolves into noodling- that makes it a milestone. In other sections- "Duel" or "Despair"- she hashes noise, samples, speech, and guitar, a marker of a time in composition where, especially in New York, "composers" could've easily been mistaken for lead singers or the homeless. At her most conservative, she hugs traditions forged by Terry Riley or, to an extent, Steve Reich: motorized pentatonic-scale keyboard patterns overlapping endlessly, with melodies swelling out of the mix. Lauten's The Death of Don Juan- a more structured piece- leaves me feeling more ambiguous.
Even when I can't fully immerse myself in it, I leave with the important lesson that there's no inherent grandeur to size, no necessary seriousness to serenity.
Stone even named the piece after the Chinese restaurant of his choice, a self-effacing gesture that acknowledges peace as marketable chintz- where other composers might aspire to recreate ancient prayer scrolls, Stone takes refuge in fortune cookies. And unlike many drones, Woo Lae Oak has no earthy, imperial frequencies, no rumble. As a result, it burdens its audience with freedom- an impossibly unmemorable experience that feels different on every listen. No logic surfaces, no figure takes shape. When Stone layers his sounds, the overall picture doesn't expand, it blurs. Some might hear it as a gorgeous expanse, as therapeutic and undemanding as warm tea others might hear it as foofy, inert bullshit peddled by charlatans to suckers who would stoop to intellectualize a rock.īut for the converted and reluctant alike, some qualities of Woo Lae Oak stick. The problem with assessing records like this is that they rely on the listener's tolerance and imagination, which, comfortingly for all parties involved, nobody has any control over. In the album's original liner notes, Alan Rich called it a "musical ground zero." But more than a ground zero, Woo Lae Oak is an amnesiac for itself, an ever-renewing blank slate. The sounds are recorded onto tape, layered, sped up, and slowed down. Woo Lae Oak, commissioned in 1981 by CalArts as a piece for radio broadcast or live performance, is a drone built on two sounds: an unspecified string, continuously rubbed for a tremolo effect, and air passing through a chamber- a flute, or the sound of someone blowing across the mouth of a bottle. It's not accessible- most listeners don't seek out 56-minute drone pieces- but it is, in a way, approachable. It's music that kept ties to the academy, but didn't bleat its pedigree, music that often sounded uncomplicated small, even.
Thankfully, the reality is as blurry and lustrous as the rhetoric: With two recent releases, of Carl Stone's 1983 tape piece Woo Lae Oak and Elodie Lauten's 1985 opera The Death of Don Juan, they continue to document a post-pattern style of composition that aspired to a humility and looseness uncommon in modern classical music. The Texan label Unseen Worlds reissues, in their words, "accessible avant-garde music"- a claim that suggests they're either idealistic or lying.