Author Archives: David Arner

The Axial Band

The Axial Band
Axial Music & Glossodelia

David Arner (keyboard & percussion)

John Beaulieu (keyboard & electronics)

George Quasha (percussion)
Charles Stein (voice)

Sunday, December 14th, 2014
3:00pm
at the home of George Quasha & Susan Quasha
124 Station Hill Rd.
Barrytown, New York
RSVP is helpful to our planning but not required

The Axial Band has been performing together since 2010, including performances Upstate and in NYC.

Here link to recent performances now online:
The Axial Band (Arner, Beaulieu, Quasha, Stein) at White Box, NYC: https://vimeo.com/48916974

AXIAL MUSIC: Performance follows a principle of spontaneous interpersonal composition without the intention of following precedent or previous patterns, guided instead by radical following of actual sounds and proto-language generated in an intentional field. When successful the sound/language event has a life independent of the musicians/poets and may generate an altered state of listening. In addition to sound events and proto-language components, the performance sometimes has a visual dimension with video and/or the creation of live axial drawings. Language and music become difficult at times to distinguish, like listening to strange tribal sounds in the distance and being unclear as to whether one is hearing language. Of course all this happens in life anyway, but for the most part unintentionally and below the radar.

The axial principle indicates that an event may be radically centered in the actual moment of sound/language/image generation in such a way that we—artists and audience alike—are asked to respond to sensorialy accessible singularity. Our own response then is originary and we are “proprioceptively” enactive of self and other as novel experience. The theory is that reorienting ourselves and our world-sensing to an expectation of the unexpectable or to the radically un-pre-identified is a force with evolutionary potential within mindbody. It may generate a psychophysical still point in which all patterning is suspended and the possibility of reframing experience, indeed of healing, is opened anew.

GLOSSODELIA: Literally, “revealing tongues.” The musicians/poets enter into a state of co-performative inquiry by way of what they use for language. This includes just about anything that can be generated in real (and hyperreal) time, such as sound, text, spoken word, gesture, and a range of semi-definable electronic phenomena (“electronic linguistics”). What they generate through various instruments (“psychotropic languaging vehicles”) becomes a field of strange attractors (“dynamical lingualia”) with a pull toward possible language realities (“lingualities”). Call it a pulsational conversation with stepped-up intensity in which Real Time is invited to show its other side. The confusion of language and music means that each may be viewed as the other.

Note: “Glossodelic attractors,” a term invented by G. Quasha for a performance with Gary Hill at the opening of the latter’s retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle (2012), suggests a range of meanings from the etymologies “glosso-” (fr. Greek “language, tongue”) and “-delic” (fr. Greek “make manifest, visible”) and resonates with “glossolalia” and “psychedelic.” “Attractors,” in addition to the mathematical meaning of “a set towards which a dynamical system evolves over time (e.g., strange attractor),” connects with the “-tropic” part of ‘psychotropic’—attractors that orient the mind, turn the mind in a new direction. Co-performative work involves singular initiations into dynamical/lingual events. As metanoiac languaging vehicles such work reorients the mind by altering our conception of what language is. They attract possible language realities—or, rather, “lingualities.”

 

Deep Listening Art/Science

The first International Conference on Deep Listening

Birdsong and Beyond: The Spectrogram as Score

This presentation explores the nature/spectrogram relationship as a palpable ear-training modality for musicians, birders, and listeners-at-large, framed historically and phenomenologically in the context of bird song.

The marriage of art and science has as one of its myriad beginnings one question, “What bird is that I hear?”  Aristotle, the first person in Western civilization who asked (and answered) that question, also asked, “What is art?”

Ever since, interweaving threads of inquiry, observation, experimentation and creativity on the part of ornithologists, inventors, musicians and an army of dedicated amateur birders continue to ask more questions, seeking whatever insights may come to light.

David Arner’s wall-size spectrogram score for his “Abstract Songs for Birds: American Goldfinch ” will be on display.

Abstract Songs for Birds: American Goldfinch

July 12-14, 2013

Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY

Arner at Roulette

Saturday, March 30, 2013

DAVID ARNER

PAULINE OLIVEROS

DOUG VAN NORT &

FILTER  (Intelligent Software)

 Arner (piano), Oliveros (vox accordion) and Van Nort (electronics)

Interacting with FILTER, the

Freely Improvising, Learning and Transforming Evolutionary Recombination system developed by Van Nort.

Roulette

8:00 pm

509 Atlantic Ave (On the corner of Atlantic & 3rd Ave)
Downtown Brooklyn, New York

From The New Yorker:

“The godmother of American experimentalism (Pauline Oliveros) headlines an evening at the essential Brooklyn center for avant-garde music. Her fellow-travelers in improvisatory electro-acoustic tones include not only the pianist David Arner and the sound artist Doug Van Nort but also a thing called FILTER—the Freely Improvising, Learning, and Transforming Evolutionary Recombination system, a machine that reacts to the work of its human colleagues.”

This electro-acoustic improvising quartet features three humans (piano, accordion synthesizer, greis/electronics) and one machine which reacts to its partners, transforming their sound in a musical dialogue.  This set will feature each of the three possible human-machine duos, followed by the full quartet.

Virgo Rising             Doug Van Nort & FILTER

Nodal Virgo              David Arner & FILTER

Virgo Spirit               Pauline Oliveros & FLITER

Vergo Stellium        Quartet

Axial Music + Drawing

BEACH BOX: WHITE BOX   SUMMER SERIES

Friday August 31st, 2012

7:00 pm

Axial Music + Drawing
David Arner (keyboard, balafon, slide whistle)
John Beaulieu (keyboard, harmonica)
George Quasha (percussion, visuals)
Charles Stein (voice, harmonica)
An ensemble of outstanding musicianship.  Boundless imagination.
(Must be heard to be believed.)

Axial Music follows a principle of spontaneous composition without the intention of honoring precedent or previous patterns, guided instead by radical following of actual sounds generated. When successful the sound event has a life independent of the musicians and may generate an altered state of listening. In addition to sound events, the performance has visual components, including axial drawing & video.
The White Box
329 Broome Street
Near the Bowery
New York, NY 10002
(212) 714-2347

Double Bill at the STONE

Sunday, August 26, 2012
DOUBLE BILL at The STONE!!
Not To Be Missed!!
8:00pm
DAVID ARNER (solo piano)
TRANSCENDENTALITIES
Out there with intentionalities, inevitabilities, interactivities, incarnations, indeterminacies, inclinations, inherencies, inventions and intuitions.
10:pm
THE ROSI HERTLEIN TRIO
Rosi Hertlein (violin & voice), David Arner (piano), David Taylor (bass trombone)
Parhelia and other compositions by Rosi Hertlein
August 26th 
$10 admission each set
The Stone (artistic director, John Zorn)
at the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street
See directions below
Rosi Hertlein and David Arner began performing together in 2003 in the New Vanguard Series in Kingston, NY.  Their New Vanguard duo performance In the Language of the Dream is available on the Deep Listening label as a digital download at  http://www.deeplistening.org/site/releasesby/Arner as well as elsewhere online.

Rosi Hertlein was a member of Pauline Oliveros’ “New Circle Quintet,” Cecil Taylor’s “With Blazing Eyes and Opened Mouth,” Reggie Workman’s “African-American Legacy Project.”  She played the Vision Festival with Joe McPhee twice, and has also collaborated with Howard Johnson and Jay Rosen.

David Taylor started his playing career as a member of Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra, and also appearing with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez.  Almost simultaneously, he was a member of the Thad Jones Mel Lewis jazz band, and recorded with Duke Ellington (The New Orleans Suite), The Rolling Stones, and Blood, Sweat, and Tears.  David Taylor and David Arner first played together in 2006. 
David Arner recently performed his “An Invocation fro Hermes Twice Revealed,” for piano and harpsichord at EMPAC in Troy, N.Y. 
His 4-CD boxed set, Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos (RogueArt) with Connie Crothers has just been released.  The online music journal Point of Departure describes the music as “… parallel journeying… evocative… each return to the music yields a different aural itinerary… comfortable with each other’s biorhythms and sense of space… exuberant… dramatic and physically demanding… introspective and intimate… it’s hard to get used to the idea that this is all spontaneously made rather than organized and in some measure pre-set. What has happened is that the two musicians have constructed a vivid, one-use-only musical language, a singleton rhetoric for duo playing that is entirely self-sustaining. Such a thing ought to be, if not forbidding, then at least exclusive, but there is real and deep pleasure in hearing two musicians of this caliber talking through the arcane and technical matter of their craft.  Revelatory music.
Directions to The STONE:
The STONE is located exactly on the North-West corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street.  It is an unmarked building except for the door, which has “the stone” printed in small type.  There is a gas station on the corner across the street.
From the Lower East Side – 2nd Avenue station (for the F or V trains), walk North on 2nd Avenue, then Right onto 2nd Street to Avenue C.
OR…  
From the Delancey Street – Essex Street station (for the F, J, M or Z trains), walk North on Avenue A across Houston Street to 2nd Street, then Right onto 2nd Street to Avenue C.

The Rosi Hertlein Trio

Saturday, July 14th 2012

Music Now! at the Brecht Forum

The Rosi Hertlein Trio

Rosi Hertlein (violin, voice), David Arner (piano), David Taylor (bass trombone)

7:00pm    $10
The Brecht Forum
451 West St. (between Bank St. & Bethune St.)
NYC
212-242-4201
www.brechtforum.org
See full line-up below
Rosi Hertlein and David Arner began performing together in 2003 in the New Vanguard Series in Kingston, NY.  Their New Vanguard duo performance, In the Language of the Dream, is available on the Deep Listening label as a digital download at  http://www.deeplistening.org/site/releasesby/Arner as well as elsewhere online.

Rosi Hertlein was a member of Pauline Oliveros’ “New Circle Quintet,” Cecil Taylor’s “With Blazing Eyes and Open’d Mouth,” Reggie Workman’s “African-American Legacy Project.”  She played the Vision Festival with Joe McPhee twice, and has also collaborated with Howard Johnson and Jay Rosen.

David Taylor started his playing career as a member of Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra, and also appearing with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez.  Almost simultaneously, he was a member of the Thad Jones Mel Lewis jazz band, and recorded with Duke Ellington (The New Orleans Suite), The Rolling Stones, and Blood, Sweat, and Tears.  David Taylor and David Arner first played together in 2006. 
David Arner recently performed his “An Invocation fro Hermes Twice Revealed,” for piano and harpsichord at EMPAC in Troy, N.Y.  His 4-CD boxed set, Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos (RogueArt) with Connie Crothers has just been released.  The British online music journal Point of Departure describes the music as “… parallel journeying… evocative… each return to the music yields a different aural itinerary… comfortable with each other’s biorhythms and sense of space… exuberant… dramatic and physically demanding… introspective and intimate… it’s hard to get used to the idea that this is all spontaneously made rather than organized and in some measure pre-set. What has happened is that the two musicians have constructed a vivid, one-use-only musical language, a singleton rhetoric for duo playing that is entirely self-sustaining. Such a thing ought to be, if not forbidding, then at least exclusive, but there is real and deep pleasure in hearing two musicians of this caliber talking through the arcane and technical matter of their craft.  Revelatory music.
6pm   Ken Filiano-Andrea Wolper-Erika Dagnino
7pm   Rosi Hertlein Trio with David Arner & David Taylor
8pm   Music Now! with Ras Moshe & friends
9pm   James Brandon Lewis-Greg Loewer

David Arner – Stars Aligned

Not five minutes from the campus of Bard College is Barrytown, a shady hamlet of Red Hook tucked along the edge the Hudson.  Sitting there like a tiny toy is the area’s former post office and general store, a one-room 18th-century shoebox reopened this year as the Barrytown Archive arts space.  Inside, David Arner, on keyboard and balafon, and George Quasha, on Roland Octapad and snare drum, are playing before a packed house.  Their unspoken conversation is animated.  The squiggling blips and squeaks and the sampled organ and vibes emanating from Arner’s device comingle with Quasha’s frenzied tapping, which sounds at times like hard rain on a corrugated roof.

Between pieces, Arner looks over at his accompanist and calls out a number.  “32,” he says. Quasha nods dryly, and plays.  The piece ends. “43.”  The next piece begins and ends.  “35.” And so on.  What is this, a secret language?  Some arsenal of obscure aphorisms à la Brian Eno’s mysterious “Oblique Strategies” cards?

Arner laughs when the questions are put to him in his Kingston home the following day.  “No, no,” he explains.  “Those numbers were just the presets for George’s electronic drums, some sounds that we’ve found and liked as we’ve jammed over the years.  What George does with those sounds, and what I do around them, aren’t planned at all.  That music’s totally improvised, with no predetermined ideas.”  With a pianist whose innovations have lately astonished the jazz world, one might be forgiven for assuming the shop talk was yet more evidence of his deep creativity.

Locally for several years, however, it was perhaps more as a curator of creativity that Arner was known.  From 2003 to 2007 he ran the New Vanguard Series in Kingston, a vital weekly event that presented performances by the free jazz/improvised scene’s top players.  Yet while he did play occasionally inside and outside of the series, Arner, 60, had largely put his own music aside.  And since moving on from his self-sacrificing role he’s been knocking out acclaimed recordings and snagging high-profile gigs at music meccas like New York’s the Stone and elsewhere.  It’s vindicating to see the pianist, whose startling style blends the bristly dissonance of Cecil Taylor with the fragile lyricism of Keith Jarrett, enjoying the renaissance that has him at last getting the attention he deserves.

Born and raised in Bayside, Queens, Arner was an explorer from a young age.  “I loved riding my bicycle through the side streets, taking the bus and the train into Manhattan and going to museums and performances,” says the composer-musician, who counts among his formative experiences Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s ninth symphony at one of the conductor’s celebrated Young People’s Concerts; a 1964 Living Theatre staging of “The Brig”; a radio broadcast of Vladimir Horowitz’s 1965 Carnegie Hall return concert; a 1967 Joseph Papp production of “Hamlet” starring Martin Sheen; and a 1968 performance of “Astarte” by the Joffrey Ballet.  The diversity of such a list would come to the fore in his work, which besides a wide range of musicians, includes collaborations with artists in dance, literature, and visual art. But it was music that grabbed him first, and his home was filled with it. “There was always classical music in the house,” he remembers. “My parents didn’t play, but my uncle and aunt were serious classical musicians.  My grandfather died before I was born but I do know he played piano for silent films, which is interesting because that’s something I go into doing.”  Arner began piano lessons at age nine and went on to study under the renowned Edna Golandsky. “We had a baby grand in the house, but it wasn’t very good,” he says.  “In high school I got an inheritance and my parents took me to the Steinway showroom to pick out a grand, which I still have.”

It was while majoring in music, philosophy, and religion at Oberlin College that he connected with jazz.  “This kid I made friends with played me three or so records from start to finish,” the pianist recalls.  “Then he said, ‘Okay, now you’re ready” and put on a Coltrane album—My Favorite Things.  That just opened me up.”  For his junior year Arner apprenticed with influential sound artist and composer Charlie Morrow, and a campus visit from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which then included John Cage and David Tudor, was also revelatory.  Although he did play a 1973 one-off gig, on flute and percussion, in a box car in Grand Central Station with poet Jackson Mac Low for the 10th Annual Avant-Garde Festival, Arner remained “afraid to commit myself” to playing music.  Upon graduation he instead worked as a roadie for rock bands, mixing monitors for The Band, the Grateful Dead, the Bee Gees, Labelle, the Jackson Five, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, and other acts.  He also began his ongoing association with the medium of dance, though as not as the simpatico accompanist he’s frequently worked as.  “I went to see Meredith Monk to ask if she needed a sound engineer,” he says.  “She looked at me and said, ‘No, I want you to dance.’  I wasn’t a dancer, but I said OK.”  Arner appeared in Monk’s operas “Vessel” (1971) and “Education of the Girlchild” (1973) and lived in a Soho loft for a year with dancers from choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s troupe and Coltrane bassist Jimmy Garrison and family.

He moved upstate in 1975 and finally and completely turned himself over to music, beginning a two-year regimen of practicing 10 hours daily and performing in collective improv unit Dream Time and various cover and wedding bands.  In 1981 he became the music advisor of Bard College’s dance department, a position he would hold until 2009, and began to take flight as a creator of music for dance performances, serving as music director in Poughkeepsie for Jacques d’Amboise’s National Dance Institute and seeing his compositions for choreographers Aileen Passloff, Albert Reid, and Jeanette Leentvaar presented in Venezuela and France and at New York’s Merce Cunningham Studio.  Arner served as a Bard composer-in-residence in 1998 and continues to teach at Bard as well as at Troy’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In was also the ’80s Arner that began scoring and performing music for silent film.  “I was hanging out with Steve Lieber from Upstate Films in Rhinebeck and he was talking about showing some silent movies,” the musician says.  “And we both thought, ‘Why don’t we do live music?’”  The keyboardist’s first foray as a film accompanist was at Upstate in 1986 for the Buster Keaton comedy The General (1926), and he’s since played for genre classics like F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (both 1924), and Victor Sjöström’s The  Wind (1928); a 2009 retrospective of films by French pioneer Alice Guy Blaché at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and events at the American Museum of the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Art.

Along with dance and film, a fascination with mythology has informed much of Arner’s work.  This includes two long-form opuses with the poet Charles Stein, 1992’s “Prometheus Project,” which was performed at the Knitting Factory and “explored collective composition though spontaneous consensus and was primarily focused on Greek mythology but covered a wide variety of related interests, including sound poetry, philosophy and tarot,” and “An Invocation of Hermes Twice Revealed,” a nine-part, semi-improvisational suite for piano, harpsichord, and spoken word based on the ancient Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which is part of Arner’s “Planetary Invocations” series and was presented at EMPAC in Troy this past May.

The pianist’s first releases, the overtly named Solo Piano and the in-concert Live from the Center (2002 and 2005, respectively, Dogstar Records), led to his being cited by jazz bible Cadence as “an intense, introspective pianist who methodically constructs sound portraits of shattering dimensions…a discerning musician who retreats inwardly to project his obsessions externally.”  For most of the last decade, though, he was devoted to overseeing the New Vanguard Series, which across 216 shows presented over 150 musicians from around the world.  “[Cottekill saxophonist] Joe Giardullo had started the series under a different name but stopped doing it, so I stepped in,” explains Arner.  “At first I called it New Directions in Jazz, and it was at the [now defunct] Uptown Cafe in the Stockade area.  When the Uptown closed, it moved to the old Deep Listening Space in the Rondout and when that place closed we moved back to the Stockade, to Alternative Books.” For lovers of out jazz the New Vanguard was a godsend, hosting performances by saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Joe McPhee, trombonist Julian Priester, pianists Burton Greene and Dave Burrell (a former teacher of Arner’s), and bassist Dominic Duval, among other icons.  But after four glorious years its booker was spent.  “I needed a break,” he says.  “It was great to do but very time consuming, particularly as volunteer work.”  (Downloads of the series’ mind-expanding sets are now available through Deeplistening.org.)

From the New Vanguard’s ashes, however, emerged the David Arner Trio.  The unit, which includes series veterans bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen, debuted in tandem in 2009 with Out/In the Open, on Polish label Not Two Records, and Porgy/Bess Act 1, the first of two volumes of inspired impressions of music from George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” on the crucial CIMP imprint.  “What really strikes me about David is how he brings his hard-core classical background to the music,” says Bisio, a sometime Troy resident who also performs with pianist Matthew Shipp.  “He’s very gracious as a player and just allows [collaborators] to be who they are.  Also, David’s an expert on birdsong and astrology.  He’s a mystical cat.”

In addition to his performing at Manhattan’s renowned Vision Festival in 2010 with saxophonist Lorenzo Sanguedolce, Arner’s resume has expanded to include work with creative paragons like cellist Tomas Ulrich, guitarist Dom Minasi, and drummer Susie Ibarra.  Another association, with pianist Connie Crothers, has proven incredibly fruitful.  In May 2009 the pair recorded nearly four hours of music at Bard’s Fisher Center, which is newly out on French label RogueArt as the four-CD box set Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos.  As one might expect, it’s a lot to take in.  A pristinely captured epic—or Homeric, perhaps, given Arner’s mythological interests—experience, the album boasts 11 extended, completely improvised pieces, most of which have been titled for their distinct segments (“Suite II: The Metropolis,” for example, comprises the bustling “City Rhapsody,” the tranquil “Night Through Dawn,” and the rising “In the Midst”).  A document of two artists who share an uncanny telepathy, Spontaneous Suites is a modern landmark, the sound of two amazing-unto-themselves universes existing as their glittering constellations overlap.

More heavenly sounds are in store as Arner readies the celestially themed work “Planetary Invocations” and learns to use the Expanded Instrument System (EIS), an electronic signal processing system developed by Pauline Oliveros.  The recipient of a Jazz Fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Arts and several Meet the Composer grants, the pianist says that at this point he’s “looking to get beyond the keyboard.” Considering the transcendent nature of his music, one might say he’s already there.

Peter Aaron, Chronogram, July2012.  Reprinted with permission.

A masterpiece of freely improvised duets

I certainly intend to play something from Connie Crothers’ new release SPONTANEOUS SUITES FOR TWO PIANOS which is

a masterpiece of freely improvised duets with David Arner

— a 4-cd set that I’ve only so far listened to the first disk (about seventeen times! ) — of my thoughts on this, it occurred to me that Connie & Mr. Arner need no music — sheet music absolutely not needed —

the lyricism and cosmic drive just tumbles out of them like a torrent.

KUNM 89.9 FM

Albuquerque, New Mexico
Host MARK WEBER
Thursday, March 22, 2012

Review of Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos,  RogueArt