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I am so in shock. I must have marched in that July 4th parade in the High School Marching Band though I have no memory of it. My sister visited Highland Park and ate at Walker Brothers, the actual crime scene, two weeks before the massacre.
Because I am still outraged and anxious about our future as a country, I have been stimulated to pay attention to Politico and other news outlets, mostly print media, to attempt to grasp just what is happening to our collective society, or at least the society I always thought was collective.
If this were a conversation I would stop here and ask you if you want me to share my thoughts or not. But since it is a blog entry, I’m just going to hope you would have asked me to continue.
These murderers are highly motivated to end everything as we know it. In this case, they are a danger to others. I don’t know if they are suicidal in which case they are a danger to self and others. I do know pyschology has failed for many many years to discern how to tell if someone is a danger to self and others as part of a suicide prevention intervention. How can we expect the state police to figure this out? No, the solution is to remove guns from the populace, like they did in Australia.
But the solution to this is wedded to an understanding that there is a war going on. The fringe is now the center of a very powerful political party. People with a lot of money are funding every Republican and Republicans reward them by voting in a fascist bloc to block gun legislation, the freedom to choose how to bear babies or if babies should be born at all, to block helping those mothers bear the babies, and starving and degrading all people who are not white, who are Muslim or Jewish, or just “other.” Radical Catholics and Evangelical nationalists want power over all of us, just as they have had for hundreds of years and they are pissed off, well-funded, and vote. They have already taken away the right to vote and the Trump coup is just the most obvious example of this. They have taken away the right to choose and SCOTUS’ decision is the nail in the coffin. It is getting darker and more violent because we are about to lose the last vestiges of a democracy and they smell blood. The Timothy McVeigh’s and this Highland Park, Illinois pathological shooter share a bed with the pathological liar in chief, the NRA, and the Koch brothers.
That’s the short answer. I am very afraid. I am Jewish with roots in Eastern Europe and my grandparents left Russia—yes that Russia which is pounding Ukraine mercilessly—because of pogroms and forced servitude.
I hope I’m not being too dark or paranoid. The actions by Nazis who feel they are being “cancelled” might cancel the rest of us. So what was the reason our memories of a rather idyllic upbringing in Highland Park, Illinois have been polluted by violence? And what can we do to stop it from happening again and again? I’m guessing it will take a movement similar in size and energy to the movements that grew out of the Viet Nam war. I do feel that kind of energy building. At this stage of my life I can support them and cheer them on, but my most important contribution has to be through music which is what I am focused on. I have been composing, playing, learning, and expanding my creative understanding of the music. The World Premiere on July 23, 2022 of my latest piece Quantum Butterfly/Adjacent Possibles is partially based on Leon Thomas’s song in Pharoah Sanders album Tauhid with lyrics: “The Creator Has A Master Plan; Peace and Happiness for Every Man.”
We must work to make this happen.
Sorry for the break in my postings. Presenting the initial concert of Qabbala::Entanglement on June 21, the summer solstice, by the Accidental Orchestra soaked up all my creative energy.
I’d like to present to you one of the results of that surge. In order to introduce the entire 12 movement suite I have composed a free piece which starts Ain Soph which I call Ain Soph Aur. It should be self-explanatory so I am presenting it to you here.
The next in the series of three concerts of the Accidental Orchestra playing the next four sephirot of the Tree of Life takes place on the autumnal equinox, Friday, Sept 20, 2019, also at Westbeth in the Community Room. The final concert in the series is on the winter solstice, Saturday, December 21, 2019.
Here is Ain Soph Aur:
AIN SOPH AUR
OPENING THE GATES OF HEAVEN
I SCINTILLAE—non-western instruments
II BEATS–rest of orchestra enters
III CONSOLIDATION–concert E
I SCINTILLAE
The Kabbalah states that the initial form consists of flashes of light which are unable to find sustaining form. They flash in and out of existence before fading away. I hear these scintillae musically as very brief if intense sounds emanating from the primitive nature of the phenomena, played initially by non-western instruments to reflect the prima materia. They are joined eventually (cued) by western instruments playing in a non-western manner, also in short, intense sounds. There must be space to allow the softer instruments to be heard. I have called this pointilistic as a descriptor. There really is no development as the emphasis is on the eternal and not the arrow of time. Another way to conceptualize it is to use the metaphor of quantum foam in which space is empty until a superimposed particle flashes in and out of existence. These particles don’t really exist in spacetime and do so only as potentially existing. Percussion plays throughout and is extremely important.
II BEATS
Strings, then oboe, then flutes, followed by reeds, brass, vibes, guitar, piano, and finally bass enter (no cue–they enter intuitively) playing the highest notes in their range or outside their range but as softly as possible–ppp piano-pianissimo. After some time they begin to descend from the heights and finally end on the lowest notes in their respective ranges. It is musical–no screaming–dissonance. Notes must beat–musicians seek out notes played by others that beat when they play, e.g. minor 9ths, minor seconds, identical but slightly out of tune with each other. The entire orchestra beats–creates pulsations.
III CONSOLIDATION–AIN SOPH AUR
Ain Soph Aur is the reappearance of the light. Ain Soph, the without end, the unmanifested spiritual principle, is now beginning to enter existence in the form of light, the Ain Soph Aur. Musically, they appear at the bottom of the range of the beating orchestra on cue with the entrance of the shofar or the multiple shofars (or shofarot). At their entrance the orchestra opens up the space by remaining silent.
There are three shofar notes. Teki’ah–one long blast, followed by shevarim–three broken sounds, and finally teru’ah–nine staccato notes. The shofar blasts follow a prescribed pattern:
teki’ah‑shevarim teru’ah‑tekiah;
teki’ah‑shevarim‑teki’ah;
teki’ah‑teru’ah‑teki’ah.
The final tekiah is prolonged (it is called teki’ah gedolah, a “great blast”). Some people have been known to watch the clock during the teki’ah gedolah and time how long it lasts.
The purpose of the blast of the shofar is to awaken spiritual awareness, to heighten consciousness.
Following the teki’ah gedolah,the orchestra plays a concert E long tone (cued). At this point we begin the written part of Ain Sophat LETTER A.
I’ve been rehearsing my newest compositions with the Accidental Orchestra, and the sounds are entering my consciousness which before have been mostly in my mind as intellectual exercises which are intended to invoke a certain meditative state. As I meditate on my meditation it occurs to me that there is in the music exactly what I intended, a quantum superposition of notes hovering around a musical structure that implies rather than specifies what is to come next.
They are deceptively simple, structured to be easily played, leaving plenty of room for improvisation which I encourage to be abstracted from the dense chordal dissonances I introduce. Let me attempt to get inside my musical-philosophical-quantum mind and let out what I hope happens when musicians hear this, play this, and what you as an audience hear and experience when you enter the domain of Qabbala from the point of view of quantum entanglement.
Direct experience of the soul
entanglement with all notes and musically organized sound
establishment of structure in which there are implied infinite possibilities of musical superimposition
the ultimate in associative reasoning bordering on free association
mystical breakthroughs into alternate universes
I’d better stop here so you can generate your own fields. Which you can do by listening to my initial offering by the Accidental Orchestra, the cd HELIX. https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/michaelmoss1
http://www.michaelmoss.bandcamp.com
https://michaelmoss.hearnow.com/helix
On Friday, May 18, 2018 I will be presenting some pieces from HELIX and from a suite of ten works based on the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah: I Kether–Crown/I Am, II Binah–Intelligence, and IX Yesod–Foundation/Basis. Please come to the
HELIX cd release party held in Westbeth in the
Please enter through the courtyard which is located on Bank Street between West St. and Washington St in the West Village to avoid the construction at Westbeth.
All my recent cds will be available for purchase and/or download.
We are on an adventure in superposition! Where all things are created equal and anything is possible! Held together by love where disorder and dissonance are a figment of the imagination. Or as Albert Einstein once is purported to have said, “imagination is greater than knowledge.”
http://jazzquad.ru/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=489
For more than one decade, the name of the multi-instrumentalist-witch and composer Michael Moss is connected with the avant-garde jazz music of New York, the so-called downtown stage. He led projects such as 4 Rivers, Free Energy, Zone, he could be seen on stage with Sam Rivers, Dave Liebman, Paul Bley, Alvin Jones, McCoy Tyner. The music and albums of this native of Chicago are always distinguished by their originality, originality, and often the use of elements of various ethnic musical cultures. Very original and his new project Helix.
For its implementation, Moss collected a very solid, both in size and in terms of performers composition – as many as 22 people. This improvisational orchestra received the strange name Accidental Orchestra in honor of the event that occurred when Moss composed one of the tracks for the upcoming album, an event as prosaic as it was unpleasant – Michael broke his leg. Hence the name of this composition also occurred. What is this orchestra? A very large and representative group of strings, worthy of chamber academic composition. From its participants I will single out such a master as Jason Kao Hwang. A large group of wind instruments, in which the saxophones, trumpet and trombone, which are characteristic of the big band, together with Moss’ not-so-common version of the clarinet, are combined with the oboe and the holographic character characteristic of the symphonic composition. Here, immediately attracts the attention of a powerful (in all senses) saxophonist Rasa Moshe Barnett. And, finally, a large rhythm group, which includes traditional and ethnic instruments, including a tabla musician from Bangladesh Badal Roy. To me this orchestra in composition resembles a real Noah’s Ark, containing a variety of instruments that seem at times poorly compatible with each other. It’s clear that Moss called his 4th Stream Records label. “Fourth stream”, polemicizing in absentia with Gunter Schuller, the inventor of the term “third stream” for music, where jazz meets with classics.
In Helix, there were only two, but very large, compositions. The first, a suite in five parts, each of which is separated into a separate track, is called The Old One. So in due time God was called by the great physicist (and partly philosopher) Albert Einstein. The author himself describes this work as “initiation into the sacred land” and brings it to the music of different peoples associated with communication with the other world – from Buddhist funeral rites and rituals of the Indians of North America and to Mass Bach and the Jewish memorial prayer Kadish. However, the thoughts and feelings of the author of the suite are expressed in the language of free jazz, which does not make listening to The Old One easy. If this composition clearly showed the tightness and elitism of free jazz, the twenty-minute See Sharp or Be Flat / C # or Bb reflects another of its features – humor. Indeed, listening to this thing where the Accidental Orchestra swings, beating Norwegian Wood of Lennon and McCartney, I Feel Good of James Brown and Bags Groove from the Modern Jazz Quartet, is noticeably more fun. In general – an excellent album for advanced fans of jazz music and, probably, quite a complex work for neophytes.
CD Review: http://jazzquad.ru/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=4892
By Leonid AuskernLost in Translation (Russian)
- THE OLD ONE (35:54)
I INCEPTION (9:32)
II BRIDGE/DORJE (2:45)
III QABBALA / TREE OF LIFE (3:33)
IV BARDO THÖDOL / ANGELS AND DEVILS // WIZARDS AND DEATHEATERS (3:42)
V THE MIND OF GOD / STREAMING–>THRONE OF GOLD (15:42)
- SEE SHARP OR BE FLAT/C# or Bb (20:29)
m2theory 