And I’m all like, “Next week.”

I’m thinking I should’ve asked for another week. But it is coming along splendidly, and I’m making use of pre-existing music to pad things out. That was her idea, and a good one: our choir is notoriously resistant to any new music, no matter how easy to learn it is. So I’m simplifying my language, keeping things short, throwing in solos for the two or three of us who actually WANT to learn something new, and using plenty of old hymns. Oh, and I’m ripping off Bach. Because I can’t outdo him, of course.

Someday I hope to get back to my Rogue’s Gallery of role models, but that day is not today. Anyway, back to work!

In 2006, she released Evangelista, a terrifyingly powerful album filled with ambient drones, piercing strings, and a severely unconventional approach to form. Needless to say, I was hooked. After the album was released, Carla assembled a more or less permanent band for touring and subsequent recordings (currently consisting of bassist Tara Barnes and multi-instrumentalist/composer Dominic Cramp), and thus the band Evangelista was born.

Counting the 2006 release, In Animal Tongue is the fourth album from Bozulich/Evangelista. On previous records, the band aimed for a more readily identifyable post-punk sound, with plenty of drums and guitars and driving rhythm. On their latest offering, however, these traits are largely absent. Most of the songs make sparse use of percussion, or leave it out altogether. The first half of the album, from “Artificial Lamb” to “Bells Ring Fire,” threadbare textures are employed, with seldom anything more than a guitar or organ supporting Bozulich’s voice.

This dark and hollow air is lifted, at least briefly, by “Hands of Leather,” by far the most rhythmically driven piece on the set. Opening with a few contrapuntal voices and guitars snaking up an ascending major scale, it quickly settles into a celebratory dance, driven ever onward by handclaps.

The spell is soon broken, however. The next song, “Tunnel to the Stars,” is driven by a giddily out-of-tune string quartet doing its best hurdy-gurdy imitation, over which Bozulich sings an ode to a lover of convienence. “When you sleep it’s amazing, you hold my hand to your heart like a bird,” she sings sweetly, taking pleasure in their shared warmth. But side by side with this physical openness and warmth, we find a chilly emotional distance: ”it doesn’t much matter…that we should part, or how little we promised.” The quartet circles itself helplessly, unable to strike forward, like a snippet of Luney Tunes music stuck in a perpetual loop. The effect is at once comical and frightening, and serves to underscore the emotional disconnect of the protagonist.

Lyrically, Bozulich doesn’t cover much new territory here. On each of the Evangelista albums to date, she has explored dark subject matter, from time to time also employing radical honesty and an evangelist’s flair to drive home her points. What is new, here, is her occasional break into half-improvised lyrics, reminiscent of Mick Jagger’s work with the Rolling Stones. It doesn’t always work (it didn’t for Jagger, either, if we’re being honest), although it can serve to pull back a listener whose attention has drifted.

What’s most compelling about this album to me is its dynamic range. In an era when artists and producers are sacrificing soft and medium volume levels in the pursuit of loud and louder (much the same way movie theatres switched out small and medium drinks for jumbo and instant-diabetes sizes), it’s spellbinding to hear an album so quiet. On some tracks, like the enigmatic Enter the Prince, even Carla’s vocals are brought down to the threshold of audibility.

In Animal Tongue represents the latest step in Carla Bozulich’s ever expanding range. She’s already light years removed from the punk-tinged country of her ’90s collaborations with Nels Cline, and on each of the Evangelista records she’s drifted further into the avant-garde. It’ll be interesting to see where this journey leads.

-I was named composer-in-residence at the church where I also serve as janitor. It’s not a paying gig, nor are my responsibilities very well-defined, but it is a nice bit of recognition. For my part, I composed two new works for performance: a piece for bell choir and another for vocal choir. I also have started providing contemplative prayer music (read: pleasant & undistracting background noise) for the weekly Sunday service.

-In addition to my compositional duties at church, I’ve dabbled in other music-related opportunites. I conducted both bells and singers on different occasions, made a few arrangements of hymns (including a surf-rock version of “We Three Kings”), and took on a greater role with the praise band.

-Outside the realm of church, I also played bass for the local high school’s production of “The Wizard of Oz.” I also played a couple of open mics, which was fun and a reminder of just how out-of-practice I am as a performer.

-I launched my own website (which really could use an update).

-I recorded an album of original compositions, and posted it online for all to hear and/or buy. More than six months later, I can still count the number of copies I’ve sold on one hand.

-I bought an automobile, the first I’ve owned in my own name and had to pay insurance on. Considering its age, it gets fairly decent gas milage, and as a bonus it has a tape deck! Finally, I have a use for all those tapes I made nearly a decade ago!

-That more or less sums up the good stuff that went down for me this year. On the other side of the equation, my bank account has dried up, myriad health problems are serving to remind me that I am getting old, I’m STILL living with my parents and working part time, and I’ve written virtually nothing in the past six months. Or at least, very few of the pieces I’ve started are even close to finished.

I do have higher hopes for 2012. I’m currently working out a new compositional method, something structurally unique which is providing interesting challenges. Hopefully it will help renew the creative spark I’ve been lacking. Also, it looks like Tower, the musical that I’ve provided orchestrations for, may get another performance in the coming year. Also, I’ve made it my personal goal to move out on my own by July. Where I go, I haven’t concluded yet. Could be Minneapolis, could be Des Moines, could be the oil fields of North Dakota. One thing is certain, though: I need to be somewhere else, living independent and making my own way through the world. I’m 30 years old for cryin’ out loud, time to take wing and fly.

But that first number Carter shares, the “couple hundred” American composers active in the first few decades of the century, isn’t really much less daunting. How many composers in any particular generation can expect their music, their name to live on? How many brilliant composers of singular genius must be left out of the history books and anthologies?

Hugo Distler is one such composer, seldom even afforded even a little real estate in the footnotes of Twentieth century music history. A German composer active mainly during the 1930s, he certainly faced a compositional marketplace much more overcrowded than Carter’s New England. Distler also seems in many ways to have been born in the wrong century, his music and religious attitude having more in common with Protestant Germany in the 17th century than the decadence and violence of the Weimar Republic or the Nazi regime.

Hugo Distler was a primarily a composer of church music, writing mostly for choir and organ. He worked as an organist and also a schoolteacher; this, coupled with time spent in both Lubeck and Leipzig, serves as a parallel between Distler’s career and that of Johann Sebastian Bach. Distler’s music, however sounds much older.

In the 1920s there were essentially three strains in modern music: a jazz-inflected pop idiom, dissonance-heavy modernism, and a neo-classicism that tried to recreate the past glories of the symphonic age. Hugo Distler lived well outside this realm, composing music that owed more to the austerity of chant and the mystery of Passion plays than to any modern movement.

That is not to say there was nothing fresh or innovative about Distler’s music. His rhythmic fluidity and use of modes may have been borrowed from the Renaissance era, but his harmonic language did have a modern edge: he routinely used the interval of a fourth as his harmonic building block, rather than the more typical third. This decision to expand the harmonic field to include more perfect intervals is perhaps what helps lend an air of antiquity to his works, especially in an age when composers were including more raw dissonances.

I first encountered Distler’s music as an undergraduate, in a counterpoint course. (The professor didn’t care at all for Bach, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise; it was in the same class that I was introduced to another relative unknown by the name of Froberger.) The seeming antique-ness, the clever contrapuntal tricks, and intriguing harmonic field sucked me in immediately. Nor did it hurt that the compositions we studied were easy enough for someone with my limited keyboard abilities to kinda sorta play.

I could go on geeking out over this guy, but it would make more sense to link to some of the dude’s music. (As invisible as the guy is to most of the world, he’s still at least a little known in Germany, and among organists and lucky counterpoint students). I think the real lesson to be learned from Distler, though, is that no composer deserves to be overlooked. True, we simply cannot give each composer her or his due; from a time-management perspective, it would be impossible. And yet, it is possible for us to devote a little less attention to the Beethovens, the Brahmses - and yes, even the Ligetis and Vareses – in order to explore the hidden depths of our musical roots.

But here’s where things get a little tricky: some of the people I want to acknowledge in this series actually make great role models. For example, today’s subject, Hildegard von Bingen.

Hildegard was a 12th century nun. The tenth child of a fairly well-to-do family, she was given to the church at a very young age, offered as a tithe. (Christians were expected to give ten percent of all their earthly goods to the church. Whether or not this regularly included children, I’m not sure). As legend has it, at the age of 14 she was walled into a cell along with an older nun, Jutta, who served as her tutor until her (Jutta’s) death. Jutta taught her to read and write, and it was also during this time that Hildegard learned to play and notate music. After Jutta’s death, the sisters of the convent elected Hildegard as their abbes; she went on to found two other monasteries and lived to the ripe old age of 81.

From an early age, Hildegard suffered from severe migraines, accompanied by ecstatic visions. Later in life, she began recording and compiling these visions, even using them as inspiration for musical compositions. One of these works, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of a morality play. A young woman is tempted by Satan to renounce her faith, when the virtues personified rush to her aid, offering her words of wisdom and encouragement against the devil.

In addition to sacred songs and recordings of her visions, Hildegard also wrote treatises on natural sciences and medicine. Much of the ideas presented are borrowed from Aristotle, including a whiff of Classical Greek misogyny. But there is still much of interest in her writings, including a novel method of dental hygiene in the pre-flouride era.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hildegard von Bingen was how she bucked the proscribed gender roles of her time. She did not hesitate to write directly to the Pope with questions, requests, and advice, and she was also willing to confront the German Emporer Frederick I. She preached publicly, she enjoyed wide-ranging influence in her own time, and even today everyone from feminists to Popes to new-age hippies looks to her for inspiration.

But of course, I like her music best of all. Her music shares the monophonic, single-line texture of plainchant, but the vocal range is expanded immensely. Her music has a vibrant quality not found in church chant music, or even secular music of the period. Whereas plainchant often sounds like aimless wandering, hovering around a few key notes, Hildegard’s music is much more clearly melodic, with a natural rise and fall of tension and greater sense of direction. Her Ordo Virtutum is an inspired work of genius, with an especially nice dramatic flair in the portrayal of the devil: his part is spoken, for evil is incapable of harmonious tones.

Harry Partch started out normal enough, writing sufficiently normal music and taking in what his professors had to tell him. But at some point, he began to have doubts about music in the European tradition. The main thing that bothered him was how abstract, how artificial music had become, especially in the Austro-German style that had dominated western music since the time of Bach. Harmonic structures were increasingly complex, vocal styles increasingly florid, and in Partch’s mind, all of this just seemed unnatural.

Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar. Partch began questioning everything about western music, including the source of our harmonic complexity: Equal Temperament. What is equal temperament, you ask? Well, the notes of the chromatic musical scale (all the white and black keys on the piano) are derived from Pythagorean ratios: 1:1 gives us an octave, 2:1 gives us a perfect fifth, and so on and such forth. The problem is, certain pure intervals don’t really fit well (fifths are too sharp, fourths are too flat), which made tuning keyboards a very vexing endeavour. And so, in the mid-18th century, a tuning system was devised in which each pitch of the 12-note chromatic scale is equally out-of-tune with the others, hence equal temperament.

For Partch, this equally-out-of-tune method of tuning was the ultimate travesty of artificiality in music. It didn’t account for the many inflections and between-the-notes sounds we encounter in nature and in our own speech. Instead, equal temperament smoothed out those distinctions and idiosyncrasies, replacing them with what he felt was a bland and colourless palatte.

And so, in what amounted to a crisis of faith, Harry Partch burned all his compositions and proceeded to become a professional train-jumping hobo for the next several years. After taking sufficient time to clear his head and decide on a course, Partch reemerged from the wilderness like some mad prophet, preaching the gospel of Microtonality.

Seeking to remedy the evils of the 12-note Equal Tempered scale, Partch devised his own scale, consisting of 43 discreet pitches to the octave. This required a whole new collection of instruments: organs with recalibrated pipes, violas refitted with new necks, spent ammunition casings and glass bowls rescued from junkyards, and marimbas of truly epic proportions.

Essentially, Harry Partch built his own Music from the ground up: scale, theory, instruments, repertoire. He looked back to the Ancient Greeks for inspiration, but otherwise had no musical lineage. This is as new as it gets.

Personally, I don’t really know how I can call him a role model, even though I’ve now devoted a blog column to him in this series. I don’t use his 43-note scale, or any other microtonal scale, really; my own music is firmly rooted in the equal temperament tradition. Likewise, I don’t build my own instruments, nor do I seek out some refuge from artificiality in my music. Still, I admire his chutzpah, his conviction, his relentless pursuit of the Ideal.

That’s what’s truly awe-inspiring about this one-of-a-kind creator, that he would so fully chuck away all the trappings of modern thought and comfort in order to fully realize his own vision. In our modern society, we all too often reduce complex issues – economic, political, artistic, social – into binary “either/or” choices, then immediately discount one of the options and anyone who would argue for it. What a breath of fresh air it would be, for another Partch to come along, look at the two options presented, say “neither,” then craft a truly compelling alternative.

In our personal lives, however, we tend to remember and commemorate the good times. Birthdays, graduations, weddings, children.

And even if we can’t remember the exact date, we look back fondly on first loves, a first kiss, a job promotion, a last loan payment, and all sorts of other little, personal triumphs. It’s in this last category that I place my discovery of Anton Webern.

I don’t remember the day, but do remember the circumstances of my first encounter with Webern’s music. I was in 11^th grade, taking a music theory course with four fellow students. (It blew my mind that the administration saw fit to approve of this class, even with so little interest from the student body.) As part of the class, we were going to enter a competition being put together by Minnesota Public Radio, called the “Music Listening Contest.” Really, the whole point of the contest was to expose high school kids to the vast world of classical music, from Medieval chant all the way up through postmodern absurdism. In a little subsection which explained some of the things going on in Germany during the Third Reich, entitled “Put Up, Shut Up, or Get Out,” Webern was the representative of the “Shut Up” camp: unable to publish or perform because his music was too outre for the Nazis. We read over the brief yet tantalizing description of twelve-tone music in the study guide, then the teacher put on the recording: Webern’s Opus 30 Orchestral Variations.

Description of this music is as impossible as trying to describe the sunken city of R’yleh. We humans lack the mental capacity to fully understand what is unfolding before, and our vocabulary is insufficient. We could talk about tone rows, about note cells and orchestration, but the music itself evades rational analysis. There is something other-worldly about it, something vaguely suggestive of unplumbed depths, unreachable summits, and untold aeons. I didn’t want to turn from this music, and could not had I wanted to. From the very first chords it was one with my soul.

I then proceeded to seek out whatever else I could from this Webern guy. Keep in mind this was before the internet made all available to all; this was in the dark era of mail-order music stores. I found one, and only one, CD of Webern’s music between the BMG and Columbia House music catalogues, but it would do. This collection was a survey of just about everything he wrote for orchestra, including his Passacaglia, the Symphony, and the aforementioned Variations, along with various & sundry other works.

So far, I have given you a fevered account of my descent into Webernism, but it wasn’t quite as complete as I have suggested. What really held me back was his Symphony in two movements, which sounded appropriately strange, but wasn’t anywhere near as compelling as the other works. So Webern was human after all.

Still, I love this guy’s music so ridiculously much. I loved it before I understood twelve-tone theory at all. I loved many of his pieces from the first listen on. Even the Symphony has grown on me, at least a little, at least certain performances of it. It is true that there are mountains of compositional detail and complexities to be discovered in his music. To see what I mean, track down a copy of Kathleen Bailey’s burglar-bludgeoning tome, “The Twelve-tone Music of Anton Webern.” But for me, that’s not the real joy of Webern’s music – or any music, really. No, I love the sound worlds he explored, the voyages through uncharted territory into realms where few have dared to follow, and fewer still have kept from stumbling. Like Alaska, like Antarctica, like Lovecraft’s unknown Kadath, Webern’s music is as seductive as it is forbidding. This sense of adventure is the best reason I can think of for exploring Webern’s music, and also serves as a reminder that you don’t need to “get” the theory to love the sound.

So, like two minutes ago, I got it in my head that maybe I’d do a series of posts on some of my role models – the artists in various mediums that others either never heard of or don’t seem to care for – and try and explain to the limitless void of the internet just why it is I like them. And since I’ve been reading an awful lot of Lovecraft lately, I figured I’d start with him.

H. P. Lovecraft, for those in the dark, was a horror/fantasy/sci-fi writer in the early part of the 20th century. He was virtually unknown in his own time, submitting his works to pulp magazines like Weird Tales for paltry sums. Really, there aren’t many happy details to share from his personal life, but it’s not my intent to rehash his biography, and there are many other places you can go for that info. What I’m concerned with now is his body of work, his contribution to weird fiction.

Lovecraft is best known for his horror works, The Call of Cthulhu in particular. His monsters were cosmic beings, intruding from outer space or other dimensions, or buried in the sea for untold eons, waiting for the starts to align and the gates to open so they could arise and eat the world once more. These outside forces were wholly indifferent to human concerns, and indeed could not be stopped by human means. Lovecraftian heroes and narrators almost always wind up losing their hope and sanity - if not their lives - by tale’s end.

This, I think, marks the key difference between Lovecraft and the bulk of horror literature out there. Most horror deals with physical fears: torture, mutilation, rape, bizarre methods of execution & disposal of the remnants, etc. If there’s a psychological bent to it, it’s the dreaded waiting for the proverbial axe to fall, the fear that torture and whatnot are imminent. For Lovecraft, what was truly scary was a combination of the unknown and the discovery of what should remain unknown. In many of his stories, the protagonist seeks arcane knowledge, only to be destroyed by the Truth he finds. Each revelation is accompanied by apocolypse. The horror on display here is a creeping, all-consuming dread.

Which should really make one wonder why I like it so much. Or at all, really. I mean, for all I play the cynic, I still enjoy being pleasantly surprised when society proves me wrong and gets something right (shut up, it happens sometimes). Furthermore, I’m a Christian, which really takes the sting out of one of Lovecraft’s central theses: that the universe is a cold, indifferent place and there’s no cosmic force concerned with our welfare. Indeed, much of Lovecraft’s output has to do in some way with his own fears: he was a eugenicist and racist who abhorred the notion of interracial coupling (and in his mind, Italians and Hungarians constituted other “races”), he hated fish and seafood, he worried that socialism would give way to degeneracy…really, I have a hard time getting worked up about any of these things. So with rare exception, I don’t actually find his stuff scary. But I do understand how it could be scary.

There certainly are other problems with his work. His racism does stick out like a sore thumb on many an occasion. (Though to be fair, he also will cast white folk as villians and give them abhorrent properties; his heroes, however, are without exception all genteel New England men of good British stock.) There also aren’t any women in his stories. In the three anthologies of his works that I own, containing roughly 80 stories, I can recall a total of five female characters who have anything at all to say or contribute to the story. Also, and this isn’t necessarily a problem, but sometimes feels like one, Lovecraft was given to very purple prose – pages and pages of florid descriptive text, chockful of $20,000 words like “antedeluvian,” “cyclopean,” and “phantasmagorial.” I personally am a slow reader, and given to drowsiness, which means I’m ill-equipped to tackle such dense text.

Yet still I find myself liking the stuff, going back for more. And really, I think it’s because of that purple prose. Because with all those vertiginous walls of text, he constructed magnificent worlds, astounding and imposing landscapes as well as rich histories. No matter how flat and sexless the inhabitants of his stories are, the worlds are substantial, solid. Like his protagonists, we find ourselves wanting to investigate these worlds, to walk those alleyways, climb the forbidding summits, and set sail for fabled lands. Of course we know we should turn back, but it’s too late now.

Plus, even when his stories lack such crucial elements as “plot” or “character development” or even “characters” (an admittedly frequent occurence, especially in earlier stories), there are usually some crazy-neat concepts or weird thingamajiggers just waiting for discovery. As a f’r'instance, there’s the Terrible Old Man from The Terrible Old Man, who pays for his goods in gold Kruggerands and has a collection of glass bottles, each with a piece of lead suspended from a piece of string inside. Or there’s Polaris, in which Lovecraft manages to leave the reader confused as to which of two worlds is a dream, all in the space of about three pages.

As I mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, Lovecraft wrote in the neighboring genres of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. Yet all I’ve really mentioned so far are the horror elements. Which is really kind of stupid of me because, for my money at least, his best work was in the sci-fi realm. His fantasy works are really hit-or-miss, some (like The Quest for Iranon or Celaphais) are just downright bathetic, while others (The Cats of Ulthar, The Doom that Came to Sarnath) are a joy to read, even if you don’t like Lovecraft.

What makes his sci-fi writing really great is that he actually did have a great deal of scientific understanding, especially in the realm of geology, and used that knowledge to make his worlds even more real – even while inviting “windowless solids with five dimensions” into the works. For a perfect blend of science fiction and cosmic horror, I recommend “The Colour Out of Space.” As a bonus, it’s one of his few stories with a woman in the cast, so you can see for yourself just how limited he was working with female characters.

So there you have it. Lovecraft is far from a perfect writer, but he’s an interesting one, provided you have a pot of coffee on hand and are willing to brave a truly cyclopean lexicon.

In all seriousness, I’ve been busier than usual this past week, and for much of the past month. I conducted the church choir this Sunday, and also played in the pit for the high school’s production of “Wizard of Oz.” I’ve done a little composing, I’m joining a writer’s circle that’s just getting underway, trying to motivate myself to bust out the paintbrushes, and otherwise just keep on keepin’ on.

I said about a month ago that I’d only have one or two posts in me before New Year’s, and that still may be the case. This is one of them, however, and I still have a month and a week remaining. Who knows what the future holds for this modest wordpress ‘b’log?

Expect like, two posts between now and New Year’s. And that’s at the high end of estimates. There’s lots I could be doing right now, plenty of projects of all sizes to pursue. But instead I’ve pretty much just played video games, read blog posts, and had serious issues keeping my rage in check.

Will I ever get out of this rut? Will I ever even attempt to accomplish anything with my life ever again? Who knows?

Who cares?