Dragoncave

Going back through some older archives, looking at some early visionary Photoshop work, I pulled out a few pieces to make fresh prints of. It's good to look back on the work you did some years ago, to reflect on the process and how it's changed. And how you have changed.

It's interesting to look back over some of this old work, at the moment, as I proceed forward into a new phase of productivity, in art-making and music composition.


Prince of Air (c. 2000)

A piece made for a proposed Tarot deck, actually more of a Jungian archetype deck. A friend modeled for me at the lake, and I assembled this from several sequential poses and images. The feeling I had, as I played with the images, was of that of a man leaping into the air and flying. It was definitely a leap, not just floating up. So I represented the upward take-off as sequential and layered images, with wings on the sides. The side panels are Art Nouveau angels from a decorative clip art book.

This version of the piece, printed and framed at 8 inches square, has been shown in a number of group exhibitions in the Midwest. It was this square version that I stumbled across when browsing through my old archives that made me think to think make a new print edition.



This version was the one that I actually made for the proposed deck of cards. I still work on this deck from time to time, although I still haven't found a publisher for it. There are some 48 or so finished images, with several more still in progress, and a dozen or so images I made that I've decided not to include.

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Gambuh

A self-portrait taken in Surakarta, Central Java, c. 1985. This was taken in the living room of the house I rented. I was dressed in traditional Javanese court garb, and playing a Balinese bamboo flute called a suling gambuh, suling meaning flute, gambuh being an ensemble composed of pairs of these long low-pitched suling played using circular breathing technique.

I don't do a lot of self-portraits, but occasionally as an artist, you need to. Just to see where you're at, to locate yourself in your work. A form of artistic self-assessment, if you will. At this moment, I was studying traditional Javanese court gamelan in Surakarta, on a Fulbright grant. I was studying as a composer rather than as an ethnomusicologist at the time, although of course those interests converged at times.


Gambuh Sunset

In the early 90s, I combined this self-portrait with an image of a winter sunset taken overlooking Lake Mendota in Madison, WI. The pink, orange and red sunlight reflected on the ice of the frozen lake, haloed the trees, and spread across the sky. When I combined the layers I did some dodging and burning, and some masking of parts of each image, so that the elements I wanted to have appear were clarified. For example, I created an oval vignette around myself playing the suling, so that face and hands and flute would not be lost in the trees of the sunset image.

One thing I like about this image is that it combines two climate zones and locations that have been important in my life. It combines the tropical heat of equatorial Indonesia with the frozen sub-arctic tundra of the northern Midwest, my birth home. Some 45 degrees of latitude and nearly 180 degrees of longitude separate the two locales in which the separate images were made. To combine these images like this represents my life's history in microcosm. So this piece is symbolic, for me, of how big parts of my life have merged.


Chamber Music CD cover (1995)

In 1995 I produced and released a CD of some of my composed chamber music. The album had five pieces on it, which I had digitized from the original performance recordings, all originally recorded on stereo reel-to-reel tape.

To make the cover art I re-versioned the Gambuh Sunset piece. A lot of graphic design is re-versioning, when it is based on pieces that were originally stand-alone art pieces. I used two different typefaces for the Chamber Music titling, heavily modifying each word in Photoshop.

Using this self-portrait piece for the CD cover was actually to fulfill a request from a friend, who believed that people would want to knew who the artist was. I'm not big on author's photos on book covers, or composer's portraits on album covers, as I like to think the work can speak for itself. In this case I acceded to the request because I knew I could do something a little different with it, play with the image and type, make it new.

Labels: graphic design, Java, music, Photoshop, self-portrait, visionary art

An important aspect of my musical past is playing Javanese gamelan. This musical culture has had a major impact on my musical life, both as performer and composer.


bonang barung, a gong-chime instrument from the Javanese gamelan

I began playing Javanese gamelan in 1979, with the University of Michigan gamelan group Kyai Telaga Madu (Venerable Lake of Honey), directed by Judith Becker. I played with the gamelan ensemble in Ann Arbor through 1985, when I received a Fulbright grant, as a composer, to go to Indonesia to study gamelan. During the year I lived in Java, I studied much more than the traditional music; I also made many concert recordings, which I am gradually digitizing from cassette, studied batik, gathered materials including numerous books on the arts and poetry; and I got involved with the new music for gamelan scene at the school for the traditional arts in Surakarta, where I lived. I got to know several students and professors, and attended many concerts of new music and dance. When I got back to the US, I stayed involved with gamelan for several years, eventually playing with the gamelan ensemble at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, directed by R. Anderson Sutton. I eventually entered graduate school at UW-Madison, in ethnomusicology an folklore/anthropology; I was the gamelan Teaching Assistant for awhile, too. Nothing improves your own ability at something like having to teach it to others. Eventually, I moved to another city, and became less involved in performing gamelan. But all those years of being closely involved with this music left a permanent mark on me as a composer/performer, and I can trace elements in my own music compositions, as well as my style of jazz improvisation, directly to gamelan's influence.


street scene, Central Java, 1986

On one level what was really going on, at that time, was that when I had finished my Bachelor's of Music in Composition at the University of Michigan, I was wrung out and burned out and exhausted with Western music. The one thing they cannot teach you in music school is inspiration: so mostly they teach you music theory, history, and performance practice. As composers, several of graduated feeling musically constipated (the only way to describe the feeling), having had so much theory shoved down our throats that we didn't know where to begin writing music anymore. Gamelan saved me by taking me away from all that; by being completely different; by being an entirely different musical culture with nothing but positive interest for me; by being a place to turn while my composer's mind rested. I eventually learned to play jazz, and to improvise in general, and that is what eventually brought to composing for Western instruments again. I began by writing for jazz groups, and then in grad school I began composing notated music again.



Balungan is a magazine publication of the American Gamelan Institute, an organization devoted to the promotion and support of gamelan music internationally. There is, for example, a directory of gamelan ensembles, and a Gongcast podcast (available via iTunes).

Balungan used to be published more regularly, but only occasionally at present. Each issue contains articles about aspects of the traditional music, it's theory and performance practice; reviews and interpretative articles; and also scores. New music for gamelan, both within the traditional styles, and more experimental new pieces alike.


bedhaya dance, Central Java, 1986

Back issues of Balungan can be downloaded as PDFs. In the December 1986 issue of Balungan you can find a field note I wrote about my experience of studying traditional gamelan music in Surakarta, Central Java, in 1985-86. You can also find the score for my gamelan piece NightWaters, which I wrote while living in Java. I wrote a couple of other pieces for gamelan that year, and a book of poems, Solo Journey (some of which can be sampled here).

A recording of NightWaters can be heard via the Music page of my own website.

As I wrote in my introduction to the score of NightWaters when it was published:

The mood of NightWaters, as it was felt during the process of composition, is of the deep rain forest soon after the night rain has ceased; water still drips from the trees and all the leaves, pooling on the ground; frogs are chorusing; the air is thick and heavy with humidity; smells of flowers and rich decay fill the night. But also within the possibilities of "night waters" are: the moonlit ocean, light rippling on the far horizon and dancing on the crests of the waves; the silver night reflected from the shallows of a quiet stream, water ringing on the stones of the riverbed. A sense of eternally flowing, quiet waters.

You can listen to NightWaters here: NightWaters    

Or download an MP3 of NightWaters.

(I plan to post more of my gamelan music, both original and traditional, new music and gamelan-influenced music, on my website soon.)

Labels: Java, Javanese gamelan, music, photography