DAVID GRAY PORTER
I really have little to say about any individual piece. What? -- "Events" starts with a canon and uses recurring blocks of sound, "Dawn" and "Noon" and "Late Afternoon" all use real Springtime sparrow calls and have a common theme, and that the percussion studies are free-form? That one of the tape pieces is a fugue, with Sam Yorty's quotes as the theme? That "Walking Bells" is built using the 20-seconds-after-0 as a starting point for events, and that I had no idea when I made the fantasy on "Gimme that pitcher, gimme that glass!" that it'd end up in that piece? That another tape piece uses the Harp music overtracked freely? There's not much to say because I don't lay music out in the usual sense. Who cares that in "Noon" the "Calvary chorus" is in triplets against 4/4 while the carillon is in 12/8, 16th = 16th? Yawn! Who wants to read about that shit anyway? Who cares about that? It's like analyzing tone rows! I'd rather talk about using veal in the meatloaf with the pork and the beef rather than leaving the veal out, or why red onions are better than brown onions. “Well look, this isn't an argument!” “Yes it is.” “No it isn't!” “Yes it is.” “No it isn't!” “Yes it is.” “No it isn't!” “Yes it is.” “Oh, I've had enough of this!” “No you haven't.” “Oh shut up!” “I'm offering you a job.” “With whom?” “‘Who with?’” “With whom?” “[pause] ‘Who with?’” “With whom?” “[pause] ‘Who with?’” “With whom?” “Look—That's why you're For a small sample of my instrumental music, go to: David Gray Porter |
Most people who hear my music hear the influence of the music of Charles Ives, especially in multi-layered pieces such as “Noon in the Quad.” There are other influences. I always planned on being a scientist, and it's a good thing for the world that I changed to music, since if I had gone into science as a profession I'd have created a biological or chemical agent that would scare people. I like the rigor of scientific method but I have a Romantic streak. In college I examined and played John Cage's music fairly regularly (pieces that used both conventional and then-unconventional notation), and I had ample exposure to graphic scores by Morton Feldman and Christian Wolf (Wolf’s In Between Pieces was one of our ensemble regulars). Before that I was into Webern and to a lesser extent Mahler (but not at all into Wagner or Bruckner). Stockhausen didn't interest me all that much but I listened to a lot of his LPs. I did enjoy the Gyorgy Ligeti pieces from the early- to mid-1960s, and not just because Kubrick used them in 2001. I attended LA Philharmonic concerts regularly in the early 1970s (Mom was OC Philharmonic Society President and I got free tickets), and every now and then they'd play something by Ligeti or Varese and piss off the older audience members, but I enjoyed most of the concerts and the different pieces. I'm attracted to Medieval music, particularly Perotin and de Vitry, and the way the pieces are built. They have a certain elegance that appeals to me. My wife of over 30 years, Melinda, is a cultural anthropologist, and I've always been sensitive to the anthropology of our culture. On of my biggest influences on an aesthetic level was Chuck Estes. Chuck used to say, “Music to me has always been a kind of a thing,” and, “What does it matter where a note goes?” He was open to almost anything in music, but not pretentiousness (the kind you'd see in Boulez music of the 1960s and early 1970s). My composition teacher Lloyd Rodgers got me to think in new ways and stop looking for models in old music, and not to dismiss tonality (although we still argued a lot about content). My problem with tonality’s revival at that time was that, like minimalism, it was supposed to be to give peoples’ ears and minds a rest from all that post-WWII music (and some pre-WWII music as well), and not challenge them in any way — let them all go back to sleep (like we did politically and culturally in the 1980s with the whole phenomenon of Reaganism). While I’ve used minimalist devices, I'm not completely comfortable with minimalism as a movement (there’s so much bad minimalist music out there), either in non-tonal or tonal usage, unless it's used as a gesture or overall device in and of itself. I also didn't like “traditional” rules for “composing music,” especially after a poor experience with Donal Michalsky. Michalsky was the kind of musician who put analysis and formal tricks above sound. He told the class things like, “The problems with modern music began with Charles Ives” (which just made me more open to Ives). Often the negative influence seems to be stronger on me than the positive (for the better and for the worse). I worked in a large record store for a couple of years when I was in college, but I had to get out of that. The upside was that I could buy LPs for just over wholesale, and I bought hundreds, often very obscure things (“esoteric” was the polite word for them, and my co-workers let me know just how much they hated my choices for in-house background music). The downside was that I was exposed to a lot of very bad music for most of the 40-hour work-week, and it put me in long depressions about what music was. In the 1980s I worked for an orchestra, but I had to quit that gig too, since the kind of music they had to play most of the time was just the kind I couldn’t stand to listen to, and I almost gave up composing because of it. I liked noise. I still do. I hear musical effects in street traffic and neighborhood noises. For a long time I gave up on written music as such and did “tape pieces,” text-sound and noise compositions that defied rational thought and celebrated cacophony, irrationality and inside jokes. One of these lasts 24 minutes and is unrelenting in the piling-on of tracks of human speech taken from TV and radio broadcasts (unending copyright violations and a real stretch of the “fair use” doctrine, featuring an 8-channel “Evelle Younger rhythm section” in the background and up to seven other tracks, with some tracks being composites of 2 or 3 sub-tracks), and exploiting rhythms from 1950s rock and early ragtime. Another was made to go with a trio for 3 saxophones with a drum set, music which was pure theft, being made out of Robert Fripp's guitar solo from the cut Swastika Girls (Fripp and Eno, No Pussyfooting, 1976) and the formal structure of Frank Zappa's Help I'm a Rock (Freak Out!, 1966). I still like to steal someone's piece and make it unrecognizable except to a very few — recently I completed a short piece which is nothing more than a stripping-down of “Hotel California” (I've improved it). I use quotation of other music whenever I feel like it, either by recomposing it in instrumental music (such as in the “Campus” pieces of which “Noon” is a part), or in the tape pieces when I'd lay in a track of Ives playing the piano against a mangled version of Richard Nixon's resignation speech. To me it’s no different that using a painted angora goat or a newspaper clipping on a canvas. I don't like simplicity unless it's so extreme that it's no longer simple or easily grasped. I read that Antheil's early music had no regard for brevity and that also appealed to me. Some of my minimalist music goes on for interminable lengths (but nowhere as extreme as Feldman's). A parody piece from 1975, Music for Charles Simmons, begins and ends with chords held with no expression or variation for two minutes each with 17 seconds of chaos in between. I like puzzles and I like it when my music surprises me. I don't like being totally in control when composing (but I am a stickler for accurate performance). My life is full of contradictions and I like art that contradicts itself.