Ulysses

James Joyce - Ulysses [film soundtrack]

Happy Bloomsday!

This is actually a 2-cassette recording of the soundtrack from the film adaptation of the James Joyce classic. The soundtrack is not the theme or any indidental music, but only some of the dialogue itself with sound effects in the background. The dialogue is all taken from the novel. The film adaptation of Ulysses was filmed on location in Dublin, where the novel takes place. It was released in 1967.

Obviously, the 2-cassette version presented here is condensed. Side 1 opens with the scene where Buck Mulligan is shaving on a roof-top platform and conversing with Stephen Daedalus where Mulligan brings up the point that his aunt thinks that Daedalus killed his mother. Sides 1, 2 and 3 depict Leopold Bloom's metaphorical The Odyssey journey (or exile from his home) through Dublin. Side 4 is devoted entirely to Molly Bloom's stream-of-consciousness soliloquy (which is over 40 pages in the book, btw). For those struggling with the novel (it can be difficult to read and understand) or those curious yet do not have the time to devote to the book, this would help in obtaining basic knowledge about the work in around 90 minutes.

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Ulysses side 1 {20:53}

Side 2

1. Ulysses side 2 {23:10}

Side 3

1. Ulysses side 3 {24:46}

Side 4

1. Ulysses side 4 {24:39}

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The Bewitched

Harry Partch - The Bewitched-A Dance Satire (1955)

This is a recording of the first performance of Harry Partch's dance-satire, THE BEWITCHED, which took place at the University of Illinois' Champaign-Urbana campus in 1957. The performance featured musical instruments designed and built by the composer and played by the University of Illinois Musical Ensemble. This recording was originally released on Partch's own label, Gate 5.

Excerpted notes and synopsis by Harry Partch:

The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre. It is the opposite of specialized. I conceived and wrote it in California in the period 1952-55, following the several performances of my version of Sophocles' Oedipus. In spirit, if not wholly in content, it is a satyr-play. It is a seeking for release - through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry - from the catharsis of tragedy. It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity, in the feeling that the modern spirit might thereby find some ancient and magical sense of rebirth. Each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease, or - a diametric reversal, which has the effect of underlining the complementary character, the strange affinity, of seeming opposites.

Generally, the Witch occupies a throne near the front of the stage, facing the opposite entrance, draped in robes which assume different colors with the changing lights. She is frequently a dark silhouette, creating the illusion of a presence which the dancers hear but cannot see. She sits immobile, she stands, she moves rhythmically on the throne. Singing wordlessly in a male and female voice, she occasionally assumes command of her Chorus as ostensible conductor.

The instruments dominate the set. They are on risers of different heights, the risers being connected by a stairway, or a nexus of stairways, which mature into an ascent without evident end, at one of the far corners of the rear. This is a true story.

Gravitating to my instruments and to an idea, the "lost musicians" discovered that they were not relegated to a pit, but obligated to fulfill an integral element of ritual, on stage, and they did so. From the viewers' standpoint, the dynamism involved in seeing them as a tumultuous part of a modern whole, along with dancers, actors, singers, medicine-men, or whatever, opens a road to the rediscovering of Western man's ancient past and his present brothers.

The original lost musicians were never involved in a formal staging of The Bewitched, but I found willing proxies at the University of Illinois, and this was the locale of its debut, at the Festival of Contemporary Arts of 1957.


Argument We are all bewitched, and mostly by accident: the accident of form, color, and sex; of prejudices conditioned from the cradle on up, of the particular ruts we have found ourselves in or have dug for ourselves because of our individual needs. Those in a long-tenanted rut enjoy larger comforts of mind and body, and as compensation it is given to others who are not so easily domesticated to become mediums for the transmission of perception, more frequently. Among these are the lost musicians. The present-day musician grows up in a half-world between "good" music and "not-so-good" music. Even when he has definitely made his choice between the two, he is still affected by the other, and to that extent he is dichotomous and disoriented. His head is bathed in an ancient light through a Gothic window while his other end swings like a miniature suspension bridge in a cool right-angle gale. The perception of displaced musicians may germinate, evolve, and mature in concert, through a developing at-one-ness, through their beat.

Tracklisting:

1. Prologue: The Lost Musicians Mix Magic {18:08}

2. Scene 1: Three Undergrads Become Transfigured in a Hong Kong Music Hall {5:29}

3. Scene 2: Exercises in Harmony and Counterpoint are Tried in a Court of Ancient Ritual {5:07}

4. Scene 3: The Romancing of a Pathological Liar Comes to an Inspired End {5:31}

5. Scene 4: A Soul Tormented by Contemporary Music Finds a Humanizing Alchemy {5:40}

6. Scene 5: Visions Fill the Eyes of the Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room {4:19}

7. Scene 6: Euphoria Descends a Sausalito Stairway {4:16}

8. Scene 7: Two Detectives on the Trail of a Tricky Culprit Turn in Their Badges {5:30}

9. Scene 8: A Court in Its Own Contempt Rises to a Motherly Apotheosis {5:26}

10. Scene 9: A Lost Political Soul Finds Himself Among the Voteless Women of Paradise {5:56}

11. Scene 10: The Cognoscenti are Plunged into a Demonic Descent While at Cocktails/Epilogue {9:17}

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Cascando

Charles Dodge - Cascando

Realization of Samuel Beckett's Radio Play by Charles Dodge

Realization made at the computer centers of Columbia University and the City University of New York and the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Opener - John Nesci
Voice - Computer synthesis based on a reading by Steven Gilborn
Music - Computer synthesis based on Voice

Excerpted from the liner notes:

CASCANDO is Charles Dodge's realization of Samuel Beckett's radio play of 1963. Like Beckett's "Words and Music", CASCANDO has three characters: Opener ("Dry as dust"), Voice ("low, panting"), and Music. "Music" is not characterized by Beckett, but he indicates very precisely in the published play (with rows of dots) where it is to "speak" alone, sound together with Voice, or be overlaid with a comment from Opener. Thus, as Vivian Mercer has remarked in her "Beckett/Beckett", CASCANDO, but could be described as a kind of libretto, and it and "Words and Music" "inaugurate a new genre - invisible opera."

This "libretto" attracted Dodge when, finishing his "Speech Songs" in 1972, he began looking for other material for his "pitched speech" composition. At first the Beckett play seemed too long for the purpose, but Dodge ended up using it entirely, word for word, (plus, of course, music for Music). He worked at it, off and on, for more than five years. Beckett gave Dodge permission to "musicalize" CASCANDO, but initially withheld rights to public presentation. However, on receiving a copy of the finished tape in the spring of 1978, he wrote, "Dear Mr. Dodge: Thank you for your letter of April with the tape of your CASCANDO. Okay for public performance." (Dodge finds the "your" flattering, and we shall see presently how accurate it is.)

There are about as many interpretations of the meaning of Beckett's drama as there have been interpreters of it. Perhaps the narrative Voice is that of Opener himself, the former trying desperately to tell the very last story - to "finish it...then sleep... no more stories... no more words" - while the latter (austere, confident, presiding) opens and closes the bits of story and music, aware (as Hugh Kenner says in "A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett") that he is "incomprehensible to censorious folk called 'they'":

They say, That is not his life, he does not live on that. They
don't see me, they don't see what my life is, they don't
see what I live on, and they say, That is not his life, he
does not live on that.
Pause.
I have lived on it... pretty long.

The story that Voice tries to tell is about a man called Woburn, going out at night on a familiar search ("same old coat... same old stick"), who keeps falling (=cascando) "...on purpose or not...can't see...he's down...that's what counts," in mud, in sand, in stones, finally in the bilge of an oarless, tillerless boat "heading out...vast deep...no more land." Voice breathlessly follows Woburn, dying to end his story ("...to see him...say him"), hoping that "this time...it's the right one." Music is with Voice in this quest; Opener comments, perhaps with wonderment, "From one world to another, it's as though they drew together." But, at the close, although Woburn clings on (to the boat? to the narrating Voice which cries "come on...come on" together with Music?), there is only extinction. (The last word of the play, a direction, is "Silence.")

The well-known internet repository of knowledge, Wikipedia has more information about Cascando.

Tracklisting:

1. Cascando {32:03}

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Feldman: Elemental Procedures

"All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, selfperception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescability of self-perception. "

(text for "Elemental Procedures": Introduction to "Film", 1964, by Samuel Beckett)

Morton Feldman:

1 Principal Sound (1980) for organ

2 Words and Music (1987), radio play

for two speakers, two flutes, vibraphone, piano, violin, viola, cello

(Less Words Edit)

script by Samuel Beckett

3 Elemental Procedures (1976) for soprano, chorus and orchestra

"Words and Music"

There are two recordings released of this piece, one of Feldman's last completed compositions. The first one features the spoken text in English and is impossible to get - and I never had the chance to hear it. The second release is rather easy to get. The Ensemble Recherche does a good interpretation of the music. Problem is, tough - this production sucks. And it sucks big time.

Instead of delivering their texts in manners befitting Beckett's words and Feldman's music, the two speakers - stage actors of profession - intone and dramatize like it's the end of the world and they wanna show one last time how uber-dramatic and outburstingly expressive they can do their stuff. Before entering hell. Where they belong for this. Along with the vocal director and producers of this record.

Finding this recording unlistenable, I decided to make my own edit of the record, cutting out the speaker-only segments. And lo, behold! It worked. For me, at least. Judge for yourself. The few remaining kagel-lish vocal snippets (didn't want to leave any of the music out) seem a little irritating for a Feldman, okay. But hearing this rather short piece with its greater number of different patterns and pacings from 1987 is almost like discovering a new side of Feldman, after the large-scale reductionist patterning of works like "Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello" (from the same year). I hope you'll like it. "Elemental Procedures"
"... I was given a commission by the Köln Radio, and he thought I fit in fine - it was called the New Simplicity, twenty-five years, thirty years later, there was finally the New Simplicity, and of course my music and Steve Reich, and Phil Glass and the minimal music from Europe. So here he told me the title of the thing, and I got this nice commission, where I could bring in my own soloists, which I did and chorus and orchestra, and write a piece for the New Simplicity. But for some particular reason, that was, being that it was the seventies, and so mid-Seventies, and being that the mid-seventies was, as far as I could see a very - where middle age composers, painters and everybody became very competitive, and very worried, and I was no exception, and for whatever reason, not that I thought I was gonna knock 'em out in Europe, but I found out that the new simplicity was developing into the new complexity. And I wrote, for me, an unusually complex piece. And I was very embarrassed actually the fact that it was on that festival called the New Simplicity ..."

Morton Feldman Lecture, April 17th 1982, Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto, Canada

"Principal Sound"
This exciting piece has a rather strong alienating effect on the listener. Nothing less than "Feldman in Space". And not just on the Moon or Mars, but another Galaxy altogether, with cube-shaped planets and strange creatures that look like organ pipes. Abstract organisms.

Compilation and cover by H.C. Earwicker

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The Nude Paper Sermon

Eric Salzman - The Nude Paper Sermon

* originally posted on November 16, 2006

Write-up by muse1453: A few weeks ago, I shopped for records and books here at the annual friends of the library sale. I was there on a Friday evening which was restricted to those who had paid membership dues to the friends of the library organization. The sale opened to the public on the following Saturday morning. I'm not a member, but luckily I have a friend who is and she let me accompany her since her husband was working that evening. The staff thought I was part of her family as she paid for a family membership. This worked out well for me since I got first dibs on the selections available. I think I did pretty well by buying 20 records that evening. The records cost a dollar each, and I managed to spend all 20 dollars I had at the moment. I had to wait until the next day to withdraw more money and buy some books. Anyway, I scored quite a few records including this one posted. There will be a few more records from the bundle in future posts.

Billed as tropes for actor, renaissance consort, chorus, and electronics, The Nude Paper Sermon is a conceptual audio theatre piece commissioned by Nonesuch Records in 1968. It features Stacy Keach, an actor known mainly by his starring role as Mike Hammer in the TV series of the same name. The piece revolves around texts from John Ashbery's "Three Madrigals" and "The Nude Paper Sermon" written by Steven Wade. According to the liner notes, "The Nude Paper Sermon is about the end of the Renaissance - the end of an era and the beginning of another. Therefore, it is about old and new means of communication, about verbal and non-verbal sound, about the familiar and the unknown, about human activity and the new technologies. It is not a 'neo-classic' work nor is it a collage; rather it is 'post-modern music, post-modern art, post-style,' a multi-layer sound drama that is itself an example of the kinds of experience which it interprets and expresses: the transformation of values and tradition through the impact of the new technologies."

The liner notes claim that The Nude Paper Sermon is "the first 'total' work to be shaped on, by, and through the medium of modern recording; the record is not a reproduction of anything at all but is the work itself. Like a print or film, it has been created to be duplicated in multiple copies."

The entire liner notes explain this interesting recording in more detail and are included in the file.

Tracklisting:

Side One

1. The Nude Paper Sermon [part 1] {20:56}

Side Two

1. The Nude Paper Sermon [part 2] {22:39}

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