tags/musicbloghttp://blog.spang.cc/tags/music/blogikiwiki2010-05-25T02:18:21ZGiraffes? Giraffes!http://blog.spang.cc/posts/Giraffes__63___Giraffes__33__/Christine Spang2010-05-25T02:18:21Z2010-05-25T02:18:21Z
<p>One of my housemates made me and Daf these wonderful mugs which go
astoundingly well with the homemade coasters we got at a
<a href="http://giraffesgiraffes.com/">Giraffes? Giraffes!</a> concert.</p>
<p>They require some degree of caution in order to not poke oneself in the
eye while drinking from them.</p>
<p><img src="http://blog.spang.cc/images/giraffe_mug.jpg" alt="Giraffes? Giraffes! mug and coaster" /></p>
a tribute to the penguin cafe orchestrahttp://blog.spang.cc/posts/a_tribute_to_the_penguin_cafe_orchestra/Christine Spang2010-04-26T07:01:28Z2010-04-26T06:56:06Z
<p>I'm taking this class called <em>Music Since 1960</em> this spring with this
great guy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Ziporyn">Evan Ziporyn</a> (of
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang_on_a_Can">Bang on a Can</a>
pseudo-fame). It's really one of those classes that depends entirely on
the teacher, and Evan makes it a <em>great</em> class, despite being out of
town relatively frequently to play with Bang on a Can. He leads
discussions without dominating them, has street cred, and knows lots of
people who he can bring in as guest lecturers for those times when he is
not around.</p>
<p>One thing we had to do for the class was to come up with a 15-minute
presentation from a post-1960 artist of choice. I chose to present about
<a href="http://www.penguincafe.com/home.htm">the Penguin Cafe Orchestra</a>
(1974-1997).</p>
<p>The Penguin Cafe Orchestra was, perhaps surprisingly, not actually an
orchestra. It was basically a chamber group whose members played
numerous instruments. The membership was fluid, with only the British
co-founders Simon Jeffes and Helen Liebmann staying with the group
continuously, and the rest of the musicians coming and going.</p>
<p><img src="http://blog.spang.cc/images/penguin_cafe_orchestra.jpg" /></p>
<p>The group was created as a response to an experience Jeffes had while in
the south of France, while suffering from food poisoning. He writes,</p>
<blockquote><p>I was laying in bed delirious, sort of hallucinating for about 24
hours. I had this one vision in my mind of a place that was like the
ark of buildings, like a modern hotel, with all these rooms made of
concrete. There was an electronic eye which scanned everything. In
room one you had a couple that were making love, but lovelessly. It
was cold sex with books and gadgets and what have you. In another
room there was somebody just looking at himself in the mirror, just
obsessed with himself. In another room there was a musician with a
bank of synthesisers, wearing headphones, and there was no sound.</p>
<p>This was a very terrible, bleak place. Everybody was taken up with
self-interested activity which kept them looped in on themselves. It
wasn’t like they were prisoners, they were all active, but only within
themselves. And that kept them from being a problem or a threat to the
cold order represented by the eye.</p>
<p>A couple of days later I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a
poem popped into my head. It started out ‘I am the proprietor of the
Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random’ and it went on about
how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness
and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you
suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what’s most
important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be.
It’s acceptable there, and that’s how everybody is. There is an
acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear
in ourselves.</p></blockquote>
<p>(from <a href="http://www.penguincafe.com/simon.htm">http://www.penguincafe.com/simon.htm</a>)</p>
<p>What a beginning for music that came to be described as "exuberant folk",
and which incorporated musical styles from Africa and folk music with
the more complex, "intellectual" classical traditions of upper-class
Europe! Jeffes started out studying classical guitar, but felt that his
studies were dead and lifeless and dropped out, dabbling in rock and
avant-garde before deciding that he didn't actually want to throw out
the whole of the European classical tradition, what he described in an
interview as "the music of our people".</p>
<p><img src="http://blog.spang.cc/images/signs_of_life_cover.jpg"></p>
<p>What came of his choice of direction was "cafe music", as he describes:</p>
<blockquote><p>Ideally I suppose it is the sort of music you want to hear, music that
will lift your spirit. It is the sort of music played by imagined
wild, free mountain people creating sounds of a subtle dream- like
quality. It is cafe music, but cafe in the sense of a place where
people’s spirits communicate and mingle, a place where music is played
but often touches the heart of the listener.</p></blockquote>
<p>To me, it evokes a sort of low-key romantic European cafe, with people
chatting and music that is not too loud, and many many books. Life!
Spontaneity! In many ways I am not a romantic, but day-dreaming about
cafes and beautiful, human music is not one of them. Some of the PCO's
songs are so good in that way that I nearly can't listen to them, it's
too painful. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvbCV6E0Wro"><em>Perpetuum
Mobile</em></a> and
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl9cTgOyupE"><em>Rosasolis</em></a> come to mind.</p>
<p>One good side effect of researching the group for the class was finding
video of the group playing and of Simon Jeffes speaking, albeit most of
it from a
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bbc+penguin+cafe+orchestra&aq=f">bizarre 1989 BBC studio performance</a>,
which includes such gems as Simon Jeffes playing two penny whistles at
the same time (Salty Bean Fumble), and just being able to see what <em>fun</em>
they're all having while they perform.</p>
<p>I also discovered that <em>Concert Program</em> is a wonderful "snapshot"
studio album, not a release of all new music but just a picture of the
group at a particular point in time. It contains some subtle variations
on pieces that I know well from their original releases (<em>Music from the
Penguin Cafe</em>, <em>Penguin Cafe Orchestra</em>, <em>Broadcasting from Home</em>, and
<em>Signs of Life</em>)..<em>Union Cafe</em> is an album that I didn't know about
before researching for the presentation.</p>
<p>Tragically, Jeffes died in 1997 of an inoperable brain tumour. His son
Arthur continues his legacy today with his group <em>Music from the Penguin
Cafe Orchestra</em>, which plays PCO pieces as well as new compositions.</p>
<p>If only all assignments could be so fun and rewarding.</p>