32. Study On Imperfect Dissonances (Or just scroll to the bottom for a song with words)

DAY THIRTY-TWO.

I hope we’re friends.  Would you understand me if I told you I’ve kind of lost my marbles?  Would you forgive me after I lost them and then got them back?  Would you believe me if I told you this doesn’t happen all the time, just on those occasions that I have a solo show at the Knitting Factory falling on February 4th?

EHP @ THE KNITTING FACTORY,  Thursday, February 4; Doors at 8:00; $10, with cellist Brent Arnold and Kelli Rudick.

I’ll be bringing with me only 20 of some new 365 EPs I’ve put together that have 5 songs from The Project.  They’ll probably be buried in the lining of a chair soon enough, so get them while you can still find them!

Today, in light of my show tomorrow night, and the fact that I’ve been completely looney and sensitive today, I thought I might test my own patience, and yours as well.  Rick Gribenas, my teacher and friend I talked about in song #1, made a comment about the final piece I did for his class.  I had the entire class sit in a circle and I surrounded them with tape recorders.  Each tape recorder had the same recording on it, but each played at a different time.  The sounds contained thereon started as pops, scratches, etc., but gradually moved to a Bach Prelude toward the end.  Each sound had it’s own moment and then faded away.  He made an interesting comment to me about each section, “The second I thought I was going to get bored and start tuning it out, it changed and I was brought in again.”  I think about this comment all the time.  Rick had an amazing ear and patience for sound that I don’t think I’ve seen on very many people.

Given this information about patience, I will now tell you a short story about what happened to me today:

I got my cello bow rehaired, and I left to pick it up this morning.  On my way home, I saw a guy sitting in his car with his windows rolled down.  With music blasting, I heard vocals rising from the CD that was playing in his car.  The man started to sing along completely off key.  What a cool sonic experience for me today.  I heard a recording with instruments and a vocal melody line, and this guy is just sitting in his car having a good time and singing a melody that is completely unrelated tonally.  It was such a cool sound that I wanted to recreate it somewhat today.

Another part of this entry is this: I was listening to a friend’s song recently, and I realized that the main harmony in the bass was just a tritone repeated over and over again.  Tritones are so cool (A tritone is an interval that spans three whole tones.)  Want to sing a tritone?  Are you a West Side Story fan?  Remember the song Maria?  The first two notes of the word “Maria” are a tritone.

Okay, so today’s song:

It is eleven different tones cut up and repeated for about 2 and a half minutes.  The first tone is a tritone, then an interval of a minor second (think Jaws Theme) on top of that and so on.  Basically playing with as many dissonances as the memory in garageband would let me.  It crapped out at 11.  The last track I added was a “I’m feeling totally weird today and feel like a total idiot in general,” kind of track- arbitrary information set just underneath the dissonances- a huge weight crushing it.  *Shows are a cause of great happiness and complete anxiety for me both at the same time.  But all will be well.  And then I will have a cookie.

I understand that this might be a little out there.  So, because I love you-  I really do- I am including a live version (newly re-mixed!) of a song I wrote called War.  It’s tonal, loud, and I use the backwards option on my loop pedal.  I’ll be performing this song tomorrow (War, not today’s posting…)

I guess today’s point is the idea that we keep our ears open as much as possible without immediately judging and assigning a quality.  (I’m totally guilty of this…)

As my bow repair guy, Tom Barilla (who is moving to Pennsylvania in March! Saddness!) always says right as I walk out the door: Be well!

EHP

Study on Imperfect Dissonances

War – Live at WhySound, August 6, 2009

Start a war

Brain on Fire

And the tide comes in from the north

Break the skin

Burning through

And I feel the fire

You

Righteous hands

Solid ground

And these bones they’ve thinned

These bones they’ve thinned this skin I’m in

You

Start a war

Brain on fire

And these bones, they’ve thinned

These bones, they feel the fire.

**GLORIA RE-RECORDING:

**I have re-recorded and posted a new version of Gloria (day 3) for you to hear.  The live one has great moments, but the quality wasn’t superb, and I needed a better version.  Happy Listening! -ehp

22. Vorarephilia

DAY TWENTY-TWO

Do you remember Sam McCormally of Ugly Purple Sweater?  From Song 10: A Thousand Thousands?  Since collaborating on that song on tour, Sam and I have become good faraway friends and far away music friends (yay!).  When I was in Portsmouth visiting with Guy Capecelatro, he mentioned to me several different kinds of collaborations he had done with friends.  One such collaboration incorporated the handing over of lyrics from a previously written song to someone else with which to make a new song.  One week ago, I approached Sam McCormally (the assumed formerly O’Gormally – alliteration!) and asked if he wouldn’t mind, instead of using an already written song, writing new lyrics for me, and I would put music to them.  Neither one of us had ever done anything like this before.  Why Sam?  I love his writing style (it’s a plus that it’s also different than mine: he reads books.) and intuition, and he’s as smart as they come, so I knew he would really challenge me.

Today, I received an email:

Here’s a song! Do whatever you want with it! Use it for a song! Laugh at it! Print it out and use it as bathroom tissue!

But more seriously–any rearranging of things, or adding to things, or repeating things is perfectly fine by me. And you can do it with zero consultation; so if you decide to double the chorus and add a verse about a pie eating contest, then God bless you.
A brief word on the meter: the verses are triambic, so the syllable pattern is unstressed-unstressed-stressed. In each pair of lines, the first is 4 feet and the second 3 feet.. The chorus (the “do you want to eat me?” part) has no particular meter.

Vorarephilia

I can tell by the look on your face that my face

has belied what I mean. Yes, it’s hard:

every twitch, every twinge, every flicker of lid

makes a tongue of its own you must learn

just as sound underwater is faster, arrives

all at once and from nowhere at all

I would speak from inside of your head, I would speak

from inside from inside of your head

(do you want to eat me?

do you want to swallow me whole?)

on the shore, sand in orifices way before

I could speak fell in love with the sea

so I swam, and she kept me afloat with her salt

and I took home a bucket of her

when I drank, stung the cuts in my mouth, made me sick

and left her alone in the sun

after weeks, the only thing that was left was her salt

just the remnants I couldn’t keep down

I would speak from inside of your head, I would speak

from inside from inside of your head

(do you want to eat me?

do you want to swallow me whole?)

I sat with them all day, reading them, singing them.  At one point, after working on several melodies moving from instrument to instrument waiting for some kind of inspiration, I wrote Sam an email saying:

The best way of describing this experience is this:

I have a huge ring of keys: skeleton keys, square-cut keys, round keys, stupid keys, red keys… they are heavy and jingling. I am standing at a door that says, “Sam’s Lyrics. Please Enter.”  There are keys that obviously don’t fit: a key to a Hummer is not fitting in this door, and I don’t have to try it to know that.  However there are some keys that are going in, but they don’t turn the lock.

This is my free-form analogy to how I feel.

That is all.

______

Cello Opening: Going to my cello, I began experimenting with tunings once again.  I ended up with three strings all on D# and let the C down to an A#.  I started playing around with motifs which ended up creating the “prelude” improvisation at the beginning.  I have played some really awesome microtonal music in grad school from the middle east: so fascinating and very difficult to play.  I tried to incorporate a tiny decoration of microtones in this opening, but they are so hard to play accurately, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in reality, they weren’t in there after all.  Afterwards, finding the melody only became easier when I called up Sam and he sung the rhythm he had been intending.  It was important for him to not give me any melodic material: I’m easily affected musical ideas.

Recording: Wanting Sam to put his incredible voice on this song was a priority for me, so I recorded my vocals and cello simultaneously, but purposely leaving vocal spaces for Sam to use at his discretion.  He added vocals to my chorus, and I love it.  Sam sent me his original version of this song, which I refused to listen to until I had sent him mine.  I was such a wuss about it, too… I was sick nervous to send him my version, wondering what he’d think.  I’m unhappy with the performance on my part, but I have to say, doing this song really had me thinking in ways I don’t normally (at one point I thought, “How would Ugly Purple Sweater handle this?”).    Given that Sam wrote very long lines lyrically, it was challenging to find something I really liked that was easy for me to sing, which this is not.  With a little practice and familiarity, I could get these vocals where I want them…and play it live.  (Sam? Trip to NYC, yo!)

The title is one Sam sent with the vocals.  Dad, just go with this definition: Vorarephilia is derived from the Latin vorare (to ‘swallow’ or ‘devour’) and Ancient Greek φιλία (philia, ‘love’).

I am posting Sam’s version and my version of this song.  (These versions are so different from one another.  The coolest thing about today was hearing two very different songs.  I loved doing it, even though I’m sitting here being gross critical of my version, but hey, EHP, let’s stop that.  Sam’s version is unbelievably wonderful…unsurprisingly.)

Vorarephilia (Sam’s Version)

Vorarephilia (Emily’s Original Version)

(P.S. The entire construction and all of Sam’s parts, was done over email this evening.  Sam, you are the best.)

January 27: Remixed version with a bit added, without intro (just in case you were fast forwarding past the intro like I was).  I like this one better, but I’ll keep up the original.  I’m sentimental.

Vorearephilia (Emily’s Remixed Version – No Intro)