counter)induction

“This work is for me a return to the rhetorics and formal structures of my “misspent” youth playing in punk-rock bands on the New Jersey shore in the late 80’s. The music we wrote was music with much ornamentation and embellishment, but little improvisation as the term is generally used— there was little time for expansive guitar solos in songs clocking in at under two minutes. In this temporally compressed grammar ( or perhaps syllabary is a better term) distinctions between phrase and riff and verse were unclear, yet relevant, for this was music with a flair for form, for the form could be felt in the body, not merely heard in the minds eye. Juxtaposition was privileged over transition, and repetition over development. Our ears brimmed with The Germs and The Minutemen, but also the more aggressive side of the British progressive rock scene, especially those who had not gone soft. First among these groups was always King Crimson, and the particular harmonic and formal approaches of that group, and its leader Robert Fripp has had substantial impact on my compositional approach, and my approach to existing as a musician in the late modern. (In fact, counter)induction itself is an experiment in developing a concert music equivalent to Fripp’s “Small Mobile Intelligent Unit” which he saw as the only way forward in a marketplace dominated by dinosaurs. Like the punk-rock models, the symmetry and inevitability of Crimson’s music helped me to trust in the possibility of forms which functioned outside of song-forms. This work is not a particularly good example of the classical construction of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; in that model, the vernaculars of my youth would be raised by my training in European art music would be ‘raised’ into a higher form, or in an alternate be equally telos-driven construction, the desanguinated and rarefied traditions of classical music are reinvigorated by ‘popular’ materials with their freshness and directness. In my experiences, the separations of genre’s and styles are never as real as our stories about them might make us think. In music, there are not two thing which can be placed on opposite ends of a table for study, no Pauli Exclusion Principle keeping musical fermions apart. Repertoire, parts of pieces, and pieces themselves interpenetrate and emerge from ways of being musical, from patterns of doing which result in music. Archetypical tales of transformation might be interesting, but they not as common as they might seem.” – DB