Post by petrolino on Mar 14, 2021 0:51:38 GMT
Charlemagne Palestine : The Electronic Pincers Of Punk Minimalism
Minimalist composers Phil Niblock, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are all in their mid-80s now. Multimedia audio-visual artist and multi-instrumentalist Charlemagne Palestine is another of the founders of the New York School of Minimalist Music, and like Reich, he's a New Yorker.
Palestine's a good few years younger than these men the music press often calls his contemporaries, but his contributions to art and music began during childhood (he became one of Tiny Tim's sidemen at the age of 12). If you read about his life, he's done some extraordinary things. For example, from 1962 to 1969, he was carillonneur for the Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Manhattan, and during this time he composed a piece of music that consisted of 1,500 15-minute performances.
"Born Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine (or Charles Martin) to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York, Charlemagne Palestine is a musician, filmmaker and visual artist whose contemporaries include Tony Conrad, Laurie Anderson and Steve Reich, but who playfully defies the conventions and contexts most associated with modernist composition. After singing in synagogues as a young man, he became a carillonneur in the Saint Thomas Episcopal Church across the street from the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It’s a sonic and visual pairing that feels apt, considering the interdisciplinary breadth of Palestine’s work and the fact that he’s known to prefer the term “trance music” to “minimal”; in his own words, “a kind of fundamental transportation to leave the ordinary.” Despite this, Palestine’s most well-known work, 1974’s “Strumming Music for Piano, Harpsichord and String Ensemble,” is regarded as a benchmark piece for modern minimalist composition and performance."
- Hanna Bacher, Red Bull Music Academy
"My uncles and my cousins say, that I was in perpetual motion. You couldn’t stop me. The story goes that I was such a nuisance that my father and my uncles would give me little glasses of whiskey to calm me down. I was three or four years old. That’s the beginning of my love of alcohol."
- Charlemagne Palestine, Red Bull Music Academy
Charlemagne Palestine & Seth Horvitz
'7 Organism Study' (1968) - Charlemagne Palestine
Palestine's worked with a lot of great poets, musicians and artists across the decades. This includes people connected to the New York punk scene, such as Michael Gira (Swans) whom he's recorded music with. One of the things that inspired punks who saw him perform live was his "body music", often performed in rooms that look like asylum chambers. You can see him performing body music in 1973 on youtube.
"There are some people who love being a something, but I also got the gist in the 60's when I grew up that you could be, in the art scene, very diverse. I hung around hippie-ish kind of people and, first of all, they never made any money. If you never make any money, you never have to declare any profession! It's not like they'll call you up every day and say 'Are you a plumber? Are you a carpenter? Are you a musician?' I never made any money from my music. Even to this day, I don't make that much; I make it flip-flopping between five and ten different disciplines. I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific."
- Charlemagne Palestine, The Quietus
Art installation in Antwerp
Another factor that drew punks to Palestine's compositions is that his minimalist works would sometimes build to virtual crescendos, or conjure loud passages from within the instrumentation, leading Palestine to describe himself as a "maximalist" rather than a "minimalist".
"My piano music came about when I was a ringer in a Bell Tower in New York (2a,b). Also, I was using synthesizers around that time, with the oscillators making pure tones (3, 4, 5) and I had decided that the piano was finished for me. I enjoyed Debussy and jazz but as an instrument it was no longer interesting for me until I started to use a Bosendorfer Imperial piano (6a, b, c, d) that I had the possibility to play in 1969 and I could hear a fantastic instrument full of overtones, resonances. Also, you could hear so many things inside it, like the sounds of the bell tower and it inspired to me to do piano music again.
My first piano music resembles impressionists like Debussy or Ravel but it's played through four or five hours including some little arpeggios and played over and over again in thousands of different ways ... for many hours. Later on, I began to see that I played the piano like a "flamenco guitar", that many overtones could change and the music that came out had a density and verticality - thanks to the overtones - which was extraordinary. I started to do my strumming (7,8) technique which is basically a kind of "flamenco" playing of the instrument but by holding down the sustain pedal while playing in this way, it can bring out an enormous amount of different textures within the same tones. It's become more and more complex in the last few years. Since the Bosendorfer has an octave lower - nine tones - than any other piano, I've played these nine tones and it's possible to hear it like an airplane engine, or like some sort of "extreme machines" from an inferno (9, 10)... and so, that's my piano!
With the organ … I also started that a very long time ago. I love the instrument, it's big, it's monstrous and it's (used and heard) in fantastic spaces like churches. That's also if you see the churches not only as religious places and if you don't see the churches as places only to make sounds. These instruments with enormous pipes - sometimes with thousands of pipes- interest me so much: having the thousands of pipes as oscillators. You have thousands of sounds at the same time! In an organ, you can play many tones at one time without a problem. So this was an instrument that was interesting to me and I made many pieces with sustaining tones.
I realized that if you keep the tones down and you have many different pitches that were slightly different, "out of tune" with each other, they start to beat and shimmer and you hear it as if someone else is playing the organ. You think that you're hearing someone playing incredible melodies, harmonies and rhythms but they're not! It's the organ playing itself!
With the organ … I also started that a very long time ago. I love the instrument, it's big, it's monstrous and it's (used and heard) in fantastic spaces like churches. That's also if you see the churches not only as religious places and if you don't see the churches as places only to make sounds. These instruments with enormous pipes - sometimes with thousands of pipes- interest me so much: having the thousands of pipes as oscillators. You have thousands of sounds at the same time! In an organ, you can play many tones at one time without a problem. So this was an instrument that was interesting to me and I made many pieces with sustaining tones.
I realized that if you keep the tones down and you have many different pitches that were slightly different, "out of tune" with each other, they start to beat and shimmer and you hear it as if someone else is playing the organ. You think that you're hearing someone playing incredible melodies, harmonies and rhythms but they're not! It's the organ playing itself!
I developed music especially for the organ. I chose the tones but the organ plays itself and it's fantastic. People think that they are hearing or seeing hundreds of hands moving across the instrument and playing melodies, harmonies and rhythms but nothing is being played by hand ... it's played by the air, the pipes and the tones in that place. It's an incredible phenomena and that's my "organ story"! (11, 12, 13)."
- Charlemagne Palestine, Perfect Sound Forever
The Divinities
'Negative Sound Study' (1969) - Charlemagne Palestine
Palestine moved to Europe in the mid-1990's and as far as I'm aware he's never left. He spent some time in Amsterdam, Netherlands, but Belgium has become his home; I think he's now living in Antwerp. Interestingly, Phil Niblock's institution for music in New York has a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium. On a final note, Palestine's thankful to the punks that helped him get back in the saddle ... that much I know.
"People came around and started to bother me. A guy from Holland who knew Sonic Youth and people like Glenn Branca, who I had met. They were young whippersnappers when I stopped playing music. They were the new punks and junks and doing a lot of violent music. When I stopped at the end I started to be very violent. In this sort of minimal continuum, that didn’t exist much yet, violence.
I was frustrated – even my pianos had blood [on them], and I was breaking strings. They were youngsters coming to my studio in what would become Tribeca and hearing me, because I used to play regularly. They were even bringing little tape recorders, cassette players. They would eventually become punks. As they became famous 10 years later, they started to look back and I was one of the people on their radar. They found out I was in the middle of nowhere in France, living in an old silk factory with an Italian girlfriend, sort of incommunicado, and a whole bunch of people started to bother me.
They began to bother me and bother me and bother me. Then they realized that I hadn’t any money, I had lost a whole lot of my confidence and my self-esteem, and so they set up very important events at Royal Festival Hall, Impakt Festival, Utrecht, Akademie der Künste in Berlin. I had very important projects and a bunch of money. They brought me out of the boonies."
I was frustrated – even my pianos had blood [on them], and I was breaking strings. They were youngsters coming to my studio in what would become Tribeca and hearing me, because I used to play regularly. They were even bringing little tape recorders, cassette players. They would eventually become punks. As they became famous 10 years later, they started to look back and I was one of the people on their radar. They found out I was in the middle of nowhere in France, living in an old silk factory with an Italian girlfriend, sort of incommunicado, and a whole bunch of people started to bother me.
They began to bother me and bother me and bother me. Then they realized that I hadn’t any money, I had lost a whole lot of my confidence and my self-esteem, and so they set up very important events at Royal Festival Hall, Impakt Festival, Utrecht, Akademie der Künste in Berlin. I had very important projects and a bunch of money. They brought me out of the boonies."
- Charlemagne Palestine, Red Bull Music Academy
The Quiet Room