Optigan.com has announced a new Philip Glass-inspired Minimalism Optigan disc, featuring the vocal talents of Tara Busch (Analogsuicide.com):

We’re proud to announce the latest in our series of new Optigan discs: MINIMALISM! This is a special release for us, since it marks our first musical collaboration with the fabulous Tara Busch of AnalogSuicide.com. Tara sang the vocal solfege scale for the keyboard, a haunting sound that you’re sure to find plenty of uses for.

The Optigan is a bizarre 70’s musical instrument/music toy that’s features an electomechanical optical sound generator.

It’s available for pre-order now, for $99.99.

Details below.

via peahix:

Now available for pre-order at http://www.optigan.com/shoptigan

Here’s a hot new sound for the 1970s, straight from New York City! Mesmerizing musical kaleidoscopes throb from East Village loft windows and trendy art gallery doors, where less is definitely more More MORE! And you can be right there on the scene with the new Optigan Minimalism
program disc!

Your left hand conducts a tight ensemble of organ, flute, saxophones and bass clarinet- pulsing bass on the special effect tabs, and whirling arpeggios on the chord buttons. Your right hand plays vocal solfege melodies, sung for you by none other than Tara Busch of AnalogSuicide.com!

So fill up your glass and take a deep, satisfying gulp from the sonic ocean of Minimalism!

Performance Notes:

The Optigan Minimalism program disc was arranged specifically to allow for a large variety of extended harmonies by pressing two or more chord buttons simultaneously. For instance, holding down C Maj and E Min will produce a C Maj7 chord. G Maj and D Min combined will produce a G9
chord. Also, since the basslines on the special effects tabs contain no thirds, they can be used equally well in major or minor keys. Let your own imagination be your guide, and make your own kind of music!

Music arrangement and production by Pea Hicks
Vocal solfege scale sung and recorded by Tara Busch
Disc creation software, disc production cover artwork and jacket layout by Robert Becker

Rhythms: 4/4
LEFT HAND: Electric organ, flute, saxophones, bass clarinet.
RIGHT HAND: Female vocal solfege.
SPECIAL EFFECTS SWITCHES: 1. Bb Bass 2. F Bass 3. C Bass 4. G Bass 5. D
Bass.

This video demos 12Step – a neural sequencer developed by Ted Hayes at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) for New Instruments for Musical Expression (NIME).

Software used: Puredata 0.41.4-extended, Ableton Live 8, Native Instruments Akoustik Piano.

via Tedb0t:

first iteration of software model with manual (software) input, demonstrating high-weight selection, multiple concurrent sequences, weight randomization and mode changes.

Philip Glass & Steve Reich, eat yr heart out X-)

Part 2 below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First step: You have to admit you are powerless over hypnotic minimal musical sequences….

“Minimalism” is sort of a generic working title. It’s very specifically and shamelessly Philip Glass Ensemble (circa late 70s / early 80s) style chord patterns. But I don’t want to call it “Philip Glass” for potential legal reasons.

Maybe I’ll call it something a little more clever like “MNMLSM” or “Half Full” or “Fill Up Glass” ok stop me before it’s too late… if anyone has any title suggestions, send ‘em my way!

This disc is intended to be more versatile than simply for churning out fake Glass riffs. Set at a slower speed, it can be used in a more ambient way, and I’ve specifically worked out the voicings and special effects tabs to allow for good sounding extended chords when you press more than one button (ie, Cmaj + Emin = Cmaj7). Also, the rhythms are varied enough that you can get some cool polyrhythmic effects, etc. At this point, the keyboard sound is going to be a solo female voice, singing vowels from the various solfege syllables.

The Optigan is a vintage sample playback keyboard that uses optical discs to generate sound.

ko.yaa.nis.katsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life disintegrating. 4. life out of balance. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

Koyaanisqatsi is a groundbreaking 1982 motion picture essay which looks at modern life and its imbalances.

It was directed by Godfrey Reggio, with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The movie was a cult hit and has proven to be very influential, vaulting Glass to a peak of public awareness and establishing a audiovisual language that’s been mined by others ever sense.

It was the first film in a trilogy which was followed by Powaqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). The trilogy depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature, and technology.

Music credits, beyond Philip Glass include: Kurt Munkacsi, who produced & recorded Koyaanisqatsi; conductor Michael Riesman; and Music Director & Additional Music Michael Hoenig.

Koyaanisqatsi is one of Glass’s classics. He established a new vocabulary for scoring films, demonstrating that minimalist music could be accessible and create a wide range of textures, moods and emotions. Glass also incorporated synthesizer into a classical ensemble in subtle ways that sound as good now as they did in 1982.

All scholars in this area are invited to submit papers. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• both American and European (and other) minimalist music;
• early minimalism of the 1950s and ?60s;
• outgrowths of minimalism into postminimalism, totalism, and oher movements;
• minimalist music?s relation to pop music or visual art;
• performance problems in minimalist music;
• analyses or investigation of music by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Louis Andriessen, Gavin Bryars;
• especially encouraged are papers on crucial but less public figures such as Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, Jon Gibson, Eliane Radigue, Rhys Chatham, Barbara Benary, Julius Eastman, and so on.

Contributions are welcomed in the form of individual papers (20 minutes). Abstracts containing a maximum of 500 words should be sent as email attachments, by October 31, 2008, to kgann@earthlink.net and compositeurkc@sbcglobal.net.

The Society for Minimalist Music exists to promote the intellectual and scholarly study of the music known as minimalism, and originating in the 1960s activities of composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Terry Jennings, Jon Gibson, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock, Barbara Benary, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and others. The Society’s interests are not limited to the music of that period, but also to ensuing streams of music developed from minimalist origins, and also in the relationship of music to minimalism in the other arts. Specifically, the Society recognizes minimalism not only in its familiar idiom of motivic repetition, but also its more general concern with drones and stasis.

Image: Martin Captures

In GLASS: A Portrait Of Philip In 12 parts, Academy Award nominated director Scott Hicks (”Shine”) documents an eventful year in the career and personal life of distinguished composer Philip Glass as he interacts with a number of friends and collaborators, including Chuck Close, Ravi Shankar and Martin Scorsese.

Below, director Hicks offers his insight into the documentary:

Here’s Hick’s explanation of the origina of the movie:

In 1984, my then teenage son Scott took me along to a midnight screening of “KOYAANISQATSI” in Adelaide, and a new addiction was created. From that moment I became a fan of Philip Glass music.

In 1997, while I was editing “Snow Falling On Cedars” I used a track of Philip’s music as “temp” (what filmmaker hasn’t?) for a powerful sequence we were working on. I made contact with his publishing company Dunvagen to enquire about licensing the track, and formed a connection with his manager Jim Keller. It was Jim who encouraged the start of a relationship between Philip and myself, and over the next few years I enjoyed a number of his performances from Los Angeles to Sydney, taking both my sons to see Philip and his Ensemble play live to screenings of movies.

Early in 2005, Jim reminded me over dinner that Philip would be turning 70 in 2007. He asked what I felt about making a documentary about him. I decided right away to do it, without any thought of how or when.

Together with close friend and colleague, Susanne Preissler of Independent Media, my company started to cash flow the project. I bought an HDV camera and flew to Nova Scotia where Philip was on vacation with his family. This was intended as a stopgap until I could afford to hire a cameraman, but what happened was that Philip started a dialogue with me behind the camera. It became apparent that the low impact of minimal crew allowed for a real intimacy and immediacy, which I did not want to lose.

At the same time, I was directing commercials regularly for Susanne’s company, and whenever this work put me into the same hemisphere as Philip, I would seize the opportunity to spend more time with him. I would turn up at his house, knock on the door and see what he was up to. So in a real sense, the commercial work was subsidising artistic passion as the fees I earned were ploughed back into the Glass project. Madison Avenue turns unwitting Medici!

Finance remained a pressing issue but ultimately, the full budget was raised from a small group of private investors in my hometown of Adelaide, South Australia. And there were others who became enthused with my vision for this film, enabling it to happen. Oasis Post has hosted the editing of three of my movies. They devised a post-production path that allowed the film to be pulled together efficiently and with the best technology, despite being shot on multiple formats across three continents over two years. My son Scott Heysen, who had first turned me on to Glass some 23 years earlier, now applied his invaluable creative computer genius to the film.

Philip being Philip, there was never a dull moment. Every day there was something new: a fresh collaboration, renewal of an old friendship, rehearsals for a world premiere of a new work, recordings of film scores (including my own “No Reservations”), sessions with other film directors, time out with his infant sons. Gradually pieces of his rich and varied life revealed themselves as Philip generously opened the doors into his family and friendships, as well as the extraordinary tapestry of his evolution from early days in Paris to the downtown New York art scene of the 60’s and 70’s.

This was a story in which I wanted the participants to be the narrators. I always saw the film as a “mosaic portrait” – dare I say like Chuck Close’s work – where an arrangement of fragments form an overall picture. In fact, I called it “Portrait” precisely because it’s a highly personal, subjective look at a major artist known throughout the world – an intimate glimpse “behind the curtain”. It was never going to be the “definitive” Glass film, or a reverential retrospective of a grand career, or even the comprehensive life story – for that information you can go to the web or find a book. Cinema is not about facts, it’s about emotion.

From the outset, I thought of the structure being in 12 parts – like an hourglass or the calendar – a “Year In A Day” with Philip as it were. Of course there’s the obvious tongue-in-cheek tribute to his seminal work “Music In Twelve Parts” as well as a passing reference to “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould”. Ultimately, each “part” became a portal into the past, or into Philip’s process, or some other facet of his life seen through the prism of the present.

As the material accumulated – more than 120 hours of it – the pressing question for me became, “How on earth am I going to edit this thing?” Enter Steve Jess – a fine editor I had worked with in New York on various commercials. Steve offered to give up his day-job at post-production company Whitehouse for seven months (and they generously agreed) and applied his extraordinary energy to this project. Using CineSync software created in Adelaide by Rising Sun, we would lock our computers together and screen sessions of cuts across the globe – usually very early in my morning, which was late in the day for Steve. We also had face to face editing sessions when I was in New York, and then he came to Adelaide for a month of fine cutting. Steve proved to be a marvellous collaborator.

Recently, people have started asking me, “What is it about you and obsessive pianists?” I have no explanation to offer, except perhaps if I’d practised piano more as a child, this obsession would have been subsumed!

Originally, the film was intended as a tribute to a man I hugely admire on the occasion of his 70th anniversary. What Philip makes of it is another matter. When he first saw it, he remarked, “You’ve made a wonderful film, I just wish it wasn’t about me!” Oh well, as his manager Jim said to me at the outset, “If he likes the whole thing, it probably won’t be a very good film!”

All in all, making this film has been a return to my roots as a filmmaker – pursuing an idea of personal passion, living it by the skin of your teeth, figuring out the financing and maintaining the persistence of vision you need to realise the dream. I’ve enjoyed returning to the documentary form of story telling after more than a decade away from it – with all its unexpected developments, frustrations and delights.

In this classic clip, South Park Elementary presents the happy, non-offensive, non-denominational school play, with compositions by Philip Glass.

Bogus, but funny!

The IBM Glass Engine is designed to enable deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.

The interface is unusual, and takes a few moments to understand, but it lets you navigate Glass’s music in a variety of ways, such as time, length, density and velocity. 

The engine is currently compatible with MS internet Explorer 6 & 7, and Firefox 2 on Windows, and Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X. Medium to high-bandwidth Internet access is highly recommended.

This MIDI DIY project looks at making a MIDI glockenspiel, aka Quasimodo’s Revenge

The idea was to take a child’s toy xylophone and get the computer to play it. Now I know that the computer is capable of making noises electronically but it is much more interesting to watch an instrument being automatically played. I am sure you have all seen crowds around fair ground steam organs, whereas tapes of the same hardly sell at all.

A child’s toy glockenspiel was fitted with solenoids, driven by MIDI through an Arduino board, using midiO and GarageBand to produce some music by Philip Glass.

Here’s a video of the MIDI glockenspiel in action:

“I think that we should pull out,” says Glass. “The Chinese are supposed to be taking care of human rights; they haven’t done it. The only reason we don’t pull out is that people are more interested in money than they are in human rights.

“I think the Olympic Committee should really pull the plug on it.” adds Glass. “Basically, the Chinese commies have been isolated for 50 years; they have no idea what the rest of the world is like. They think that we’re just another province of China and that they can do what they damn well want to.”

“And they’re a bunch of losers. They make a distinction: As long as you’re not political, you can do whatever you want in China. But politics is about the way we live! They’re drawing the line on the very things that matter to us most.

via New York Magazine