Year one of "Tales of the Chief Describer": list, links and an excel: June-July 2023
Bookmark these pages! I won't put a paywall on it... indexes should always be free!
This begins a week’s worth of posts that will get upgraded as I go, so bookmark for ease of use! This is a full listing to the first year’s contents of the Tales of the Chief Describer’s substack posts via these substacks, or in one convenient, always upgrading excel list that you can download. Both have the direct links to what they’re referring to. Which is why it seemed I was off for a few days. I overestimated my ability to timely copy and paste for hours, but year two will also be marked less by the due-before date!
Note that although this version of the excel spreadsheet is the full first year’s list with links, I’ll keep developing them so I can also include a note whether there is a paywall or not, and how many views the substackbots tell me it got.
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The goal of the substack was primarily to “bring out of hiding” the existence of the New Music America festivals. Prior to this, the only important writing I had done about the festivals had been my 2012 Wikipedia entry, which needs updating but is still the shortest version I have created of the story of the festival:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Music_America
The best way to kind of create an online catalogue of the festivals was to give each individual day its own substack, which was long enough. There were 12 festivals and each had 8-10 days over its 12 year existence. There were a few that were held at the same time but most were at different times of the year, so I used the calendar year to spread out the substack posts for each.
Some days were so heavy with events that I’m sure many people only were able to skim over them, so to repeat a lot of what I had posted, but to profile on the creators, I cross-referenced what people had done over that 12 year period and posted those on their birthdays. I am hoping to create a calendar for 2025 that will have all of the birth dates of participating creators noted, sort of a “Calendar of Composers of the 1980s in America” and have hired an intern to start working on it as soon as possible.
And since the festival started in 1979 and ended in 1990, we effectively have with bookends a look at the development of musics over an important decade, when synthesizers started getting both affordable and integrated into conventional forms of music. Whenever I hear commercial radio’s “hits of the seventies, eighties and nineties”, I think “not my hits.” Thus the title of this specific section of the substacks: The Secret History of Music of the Eighties, borrowed in part from Greil Marcus’ book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, long an inspiration for me as a writer.
In this first year, this section on New Music America has thus consisted of:
Single (sometimes more) day profiles of what happened on that day at a New Music America festival;
Anniversary tributes to participants (who I also call “alumni”) in which all that they presented at the festival through the years is featured; I try to include any recent news when giving the individual’s profile, something hopefully to be expanded when I get a staff of a few people to do what our generation used to call “news”.
Single works that were presented at the festivals, for which I’ve found so much stuff that they need their own page, especially when I was able to find so many versions of a work. Whoda thunk that one of the most y2b versions of a NMA work was Alvin Lucier’s Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra?
Transcriptions. This used to be my day job… I’ve started transcribing the audio of the public sessions of the New Music Alliance, the organizing arm that granted new cities future festivals. I was an official note-taker with a tape deck during the meetings at Philadelphia in 1987, as well as at the meetings in Miami (1988), New York City (1989) and Montreal (1990). I keep saying this is my true rarity apart from surviving audio recordings of performances, as it gets us to sit with a room full of composers discussing how to hold future composer’s festivals… in the 1980s. There still has never been anything like the NMAs.
More transcriptions: I’ve also used my ability to provide transcriptions to radio programs and interviews found regarding the festival, notably the Charles Amirkhanian-Joan La Barbara national broadcasts from New Music America Chicago 1982 and more to come as I find them. I’ve also been transcribing some of the podcast The Relâche Chronicles hosted by Joseph Franklin and Arthur Sabatini who helped put on NMA 1987 - those are actually new from the last year, as we found our projects delightfully fortuitous.
I’ve gotten in touch with David Victor Feldman, one of the original editors of Ear Magazine who’s been posting scans on facebook of the magazine from its very beginnings, and he’s graciously given the green light to my reposting many of them here, since there are overlaps between the 1400 or so creators of NMA with the composers featured in the Ear pages since the seventies.
I am aware that a lot of this stuff is like a catalogue, a dictionary and/or a list which is fine for those of us who were there and can gestalt the missing pieces, but I hope that I’ll be able to provide more materials that would fit a storytelling format, and that will surely be bolstered if I actually start to conduct new conversations with some of the folks that I dearly miss and haven’t seen since the 1990s…
Briefly about the other sections:
♪♪♪♪gd~~~~ is reserved for my own musical and radio creations not necessarily tied to New Music America. I have been teaching myself piano and keyboards only since 2019 at the age of 59, and have recorded almost everything that i have created in that time, using as starting base the fact that I have been typing at around 85 words per minute and there must be some way to make use of those super-fast fingers. And my knowledge of how composition is put together helps as well. That will extend into my duo collaborations with Sol Mogerman (under the undertrademarked name “2Thirds”) and in the trio settings with Mogerman and Scott Henderson (as “Available Moral Outrage” ensemble or “AMO”). New audio creations of mine will also be featured in this section.
Radio of the Next Century: Over the next year, you’ll be able to read transcripts and hear all 100 radio programs that I created at “the Station” and eventually, I’ll get around to the telling of the tale my 18 months there from 2018 to 2019. The section marked Radio of the Next Century eventually will be an examination of “the Station” in depth, and expanding that look at “the dying medium of radio” through the prism that I’m calling Salish Sea radio - the radio confluence of Victoria, Vancouver and Seattle, all which have signals that bleed into each other’s “territories”, often referred to as “unceded” and/or “stolen”.
Rosenberg 3.2 Not Violin Music is a serialized presentation of all 284 pages and more of my book of reviews. These were all reviews of a single work, the Jon Rose curated collection named Rosenberg 3.0 Not Violin Music, and were originally posted on facebook.
After completing the task of providing 284 reviews for each of the 284 pages (“even the blank ones”), my writings were fused with the originals into three art-books presented at the Rosenberg Museum Exhibit of 2016 in Australia (highlighted in the illustrious Contemporary Music Review which is how somehow I made it into that mag and you didn’t) and named Rosenberg 3.1 Not Violin Music.
Unexpected public demand for a consumer version (the art works are still currently valued at around $8000 each) which led to the creation of the self-published volume Rosenberg 3.1.1 Violin Music and sales of these peaked around 2018, so I thought maybe if I applied the Charles Dickens logic of “serials gathering momentum”, I would present all of them in easily digestible two page excerpts over the next year.
Tales of the Chief Describer - Year 1 index with links
Part 1: June-July 2023
All the links to the substack are in the date to the left. If you desire a list with more details, go to the main page of the substack and scroll down. This way is faster.