Gary Lawrence Murphy was born in 1957 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Year of the Rooster in the Geographic Centre of North America at the First Light of the Space Age, and that just about sums it up.
While host of the CJUM-FM weekly contemporary composer showcase A Classical Gas, a chance to interview the American composer John Cage led to a life-long and keen interest in modern composition, literature and art, and brief collaborations with Cage and later with Udo Kasements and Stelarc.
Allegretto for Orchestra - 49:39 / OggVorbis / 30MB
scored for 19 players, realized using FluidSynth R3 samples
Creative Commons license: attrib-noncommercial-sharealike
First off, I’ll set your thoughts at ease: I wouldn’t call myself a composer, not in any traditional Conservatory sense or really any sense at all, and I’m not much interested in the timbral weight of sounds per se so I likely wouldn’t sit with the phonometrographists either. What I do with sound and design is toward an understanding of gross anatomy for a remedial sonic therapy, aural healings for chronic philosophical ailments of post-nuclear pessimism, sacred in a medieval sense. This is not music of contrapunctal accolades and clever craft, it is change-work music. I am therefore simply your net-resident Audiologist, and it is a happy accident that my first public release is a 50-minute Hour.
Like Cage’s ego-removed post 4’33” period, I seek landscapes for personal discovery rather than heroic composition and performance spectacle. This is music in the rediscovered tradition of sacred and the spiritual in a music that commands our attention, music that leads our contemplations. Those who persist cannot escape; those who pass casually miss all.
Hard lessons are taught by armies; lessons harder still are taught by artists.
This work is simultaneously familiar and alien. This is not the illustration of great conceptual philosophy, it is the plain and ordinary music from the inside of your head as it really is; we ring a clapper, the bell resonates, such is the nature of the form and metal of the bell. This music is roughly hewn because it is tentative and explorative – if I could polish to final forms, my work would be done, we would have our answer, and art would cease to be any fun. Superficially indeterminant, the work pays homage to the past, leveraging precise processes by which our minds and brains perceive and interact with music, and mindful of the critical social and cognitive roles arranged sounds play in our histories. Where classical aleatoric (chance) music emulates natural soundscapes through extra-human processes, I hold ‘music’ as an anthropological phenomenon and embrace the pattern language of the traditional forms as rooted in the organism that creates it, and I use my audiologist’s apparatus to illuminate where these roots take hold. Meter and and rhythm, for example, are not abstract mathematics, but bound intimately to the simple harmonic possibilites of the human form, the frame of the body, the structure of the lips and throat, hence the inescapable association of composition with dance and voice; we can assert, demand and affirm all we wish, but we cannot escape who we are, not for long.
In looking for these atomic foundational parts and processes, and to escape word-lines that bind and blind, these experiments take form in a geometric and topologically semantic break-out cut-up, more human than a calculated Williams Mix chance arrangement of discreet pieces, yet free of compositional ego (some might call ‘tyrrany’) the works are still a rich field for discoveries both cognitive and musical.
These sounds are not just sounds, they are utterances. They have a context in the reality of the creature who observes them; they are songs. In living nature, bird songs, wolf calls, the cry of the wild goose and the crickets, none are ‘random’ and isolated fragments, it is all fabric and weave, natural structure of an evolved co-communication between the emitter and the receptor. Cage noticed how, on re-listening to recordings of chance compositions or the pairing of compositions to unintended natural drama, melody, dance and pattern emerge. Meaning emerges spontaneously … only this doesn’t mean we are left to decode abstract operatic intellectual messages our composers intend to convey. As with the Aether, this is a false question, as demonstrated by Cage and the other post-WWII world-music aware composers, it is a charged issue, unanswerable through the compositional apparatus, left incomprehensible without programme notes ;)
Nonetheless, given a more suitable apparatus, what may be answerable is the cognitive ‘meaning’ – just as shamanic visual art and zen gardens can illustrate what it means to truly be human (as distinct from our intellectual and philosophical wishlists on the subject), this music seeks to illustrate in sound the fundamental meaning and structure within the context of our human musical comprehension.
While technically Computer Music (and often realized by computer), this is not computer generated sound; while geometric in process, this is also not serialism: I am as much an observer in my experiments as you are, but my compositions preserve our stylistic foundations as recast in new forms through a process conceptually similar in effect and method to the modern mash-up re-purposing of cultural sounds (and tradition) found in the sampling compositions in Hip Hop DJ music. Through these new landscapes emerges a traditional experience in a pre-renaissance aesthetic, similar to traditional fiddle dance music, or modern techno.
Only this is not DJ music. Letting people do what they do best and leaving machines to do what they do best, like Hip-Hop, these works begin and end in human creative expression, only created outside of the ego-space, as opportunites for discovery intimately facilitated by today’s computing technologies and protocols, explorations that could be made available through no other method.
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Into the Magic Kingdom - a lexical composition
HTML/PDF - Based on a novel by Cory Doctorow
Creative Commons Share and Share Alike license; rights are granted for any commercial or non-commercial use with or without attribution and/or modification provided the derivative work grants these same rights and pending clarification of commercial and attribution restrictions in the licensing of Cory Doctorow’s original work.
This is, so far as I know, the first legally derivative work based on Cory Doctorow’s relicenced Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Trevor repackaged the experience but I have re-invented it, ground up, and created something oddly familiar but completely new.
And be forewarned, this is not fan-fiction for the squeamish. My book is not recommended for younger students or those bonded to fixed dogmas of rightness in literature, language and narrative; I will yank the carpet from under those people, leave them without reference, awash in a tale without end and narry a thread to grab. This is advanced reader material, for those who love language, for those who ponder the relation between language and their mind, for those who love to watch their own brain squirm as it sifts the chaos for meaning and sense.
I expect some will rather stare at a blank sheet of paper, and that is fine. This book is not for everyone, it just is. It is at once a nihilistic anti-book and the apex of geek literary art. Every page is riddled with lucid insights, rife in rich and quotable poetic imagery, all of it bubbling with deep humour. If you’ve read the original, this book may be hazardous to your health.
And now the FAQs …
1. What is this book about? — put plainly, it’s about you. More precisely, it is about your brain — Cory’s original book uses his words to tell his story about his world; Into the Magic Kingdom breaks the bonds of linear narrative using Cory’s words to tell your story. It is the ultimate interactive fiction because it has no meaning at all until you become entangled in it. I know what I think I see; you will get a different surface narrative, but we both experience the same deep story, the first-hand story of the neural-linguistics of our own minds and our experiential perceptions of the topics that emerge from Cory’s words.
This book is also a directed self-examination with a poetic postmodern insight into the cultural phenomenon that is Cory Doctorow.
2. I can’t read it — sure you can and here’s how: Go outside on a clear starry night and look up. Find the Great Bear (big dipper) or Orion the Hunter. A Hindi or Chinese astronomer will see different animals in the sky and tell different mnemonic legends; it is the same sky, yet each of us remain convinced we can see these dramas and we do so by throwing out ‘noise’ stars, only we throw out different stars than do the Chinese or Hindi observers.
Into the Magic Kingdom is like those stars in the sky: you see what you’ve become conditioned to expect, even if you didn’t know that was what you’d learned; if you’re lucky, you see the Chinese sky too.
3. But you didn’t write this, it is not art — it is as much a work of art as Bach’s Coffee Cantata: we both draw from our knowledge and experience to apply specific formulae of transformation to our materials; we both expect our audience to bring certain cultural training and we expect the performer to take liberties with the framework we deliver; we both choose our source material careful and we choose the end result.
Like a Zen Garden or shamanic art, this book leads you inescapably face to face with your real self, both your carefully honed false cultural-mask believed-to-be dogmatic self and your natural true inner neuro-psychological self. This is not just art, it is high art.
4. Is it a novel? — Of course it is. There are places, plays and characters who live, breathe, interact and grow. The more you read, the more their world takes hold of you, the more you want to know about them and where they are going. The difference is while Cory’s original story gave you characters as they unfolded in his head, I give you your characters folded up in your head.
5. I still can’t read it — I’m not surprised. It is, after all a 628 page psychedelic trip, a half-wakeful tumbling future-speak inner dialog of a thousand Blooms, cast in a food court, cut by CB, by IM, SMS, emails, traffic noise and televisions, never alone, never at rest and it never stops, it never pauses, fast forward is useless.
It is also self-similar, like a fractal (well, more like a fractal than perhaps I should tell you) so you can join at any point, wander forward or back, jump about ad hoc (maybe I’ll code a page randomizer someday), explore this space the way we explore our meandering mind in zazen.
Like Erik Satie’s epic Vexations or some Andy Warhol or Michael Snow films, it would take a dedicated adventurer to experience the whole of it. Don’t over do it. Take your time, pace yourself; staring in a mirror too long isn’t good for you.