http://fullyaltered.com/fa/2015/02/27/composer-ben-goldberg-draws-lyrical-inspira...-on-royal-potat/
Beauty can often be found in unexpected places. On his new album, Orphic Machine, clarinetist/composer Ben Goldberg creates his most beautiful and lyrical music to date. Interestingly, though the lyrics are by poet Allen Grossman, they come not from his poems, but from a book on “speculative poetics.” Grossman’s Summa Lyrica, a collection of blunt, interwoven statements illuminating the place of poetry in human thought, provided Goldberg with the texts around which he wrapped his beautiful melodies and compelling grooves.
Goldberg needed to gather an ensemble of artists able to realize such simultaneously heady and passionate compositions; fortunately, he’s been surrounded with such gifted artists throughout much of his musical life. Orphic Machine features the talents of vocalist and violinist Carla Kihlstedt, his bandmate in the unclassifiable group Tin Hat; Wilco’s resident guitar daredevil Nels Cline, also a member ofGoldberg’s quintet Unfold Ordinary Mind; trumpeter Ron Miles, a bandmate ofGoldberg’s in the quartet Go Home; tenor saxophonist Rob Sudduth and drummer Ches Smith, both members of Goldberg’s quintet as well as Unfold Ordinary Mind; pianist Myra Melford, with whom Goldberg works in her sextet, Be Bread, and in the duo project Dialogue; bassist Greg Cohen, an early musical hero and now member of the Ben Goldberg Trio; and vibraphonist Kenny Wollesen, a member of Goldberg’s ground-breaking New Klezmer Trio.
But the most important relationship on Orphic Machine is not an expressly musical one, but a meeting of minds – one young and impressionable, the other iconoclastic and powerfully original. Many of us can point to one influential teacher who changed the course of our lives, and for Goldberg that teacher was Allen Grossman, whom the young clarinetist met while an undergrad at Brandeis University in 1978. Grossman was teaching a course on speculative poetics called “The Representation of Experience,” and that class introduced Goldberg not only to new ideas but to an entirely new way of thinking.
“I didn’t know that learning could exist on that level,” Goldberg says. “Grossman lived in his own world of meaning and did his best to communicate that to people, especially students. It was kind of like being around a prophet – you can’t quite understand what he’s talking about in any usual way, but his statements just bump into you and start working on your mind. He really grabbed me, and this seed was planted inside me.”
Notes by Ben Goldberg
In 1978 I attended Brandeis University for one year as a freshman. It was my good fortune to get thrown into a dorm room with Tass Bey, a young man from Montreal who believed in the transformational power of literature to a degree beyond anybody I had previously encountered. Tass introduced me to pre-White Album Beatles and the writing of Leonard Cohen. Later he was to introduce me to some other things, but first he instructed me to enroll in a literature course entitled The Representation of Experience taught by a man called Allen Grossman. That course hit me very hard. We read old books – The Bible, Gilgamesh, Moby-Dick, etc., and Professor Grossman showed us into a world where reading, thought, meaning, action, and understanding came together. I wouldn’t say he taught us – it’s more like he embodied the business of knowing.
Years later, finding my way out of a dark period in life, I developed a sudden thirst for poetry. I got in touch with the poet Susan Stewart after I heard echoes of Allen Grossman in her work. Susan invited me to attend a 2006 gathering in honor of Professor Grossman’s retirement from Johns Hopkins where he read powerfully from his poems. I began studying a book of his called Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics.
The book is constructed as a set of interrelated aphorisms whose purpose is “to bring to mind ‘the poem,’ as an object of thought and as an instrument for thinking.”
Around this time I began writing vocal music, when my group Tin Hat embarked on a project of songs using poems of E E Cummings as lyrics. I found I enjoyed the push-and-pull between words, melody, and harmony. (The Rain Is A Handsome Animal, with six of my songs, was released in 2012 by New Amsterdam)
In 2010 Chamber Music America commissioned a composition for large ensemble based upon Grossman’s Summa Lyrica. I had been reading the book for five years, and I intended to compose music based on its structure. But, as a poem cannot be restated in other words (for then it would be a different poem), the book would not allow me to summarize or map it.
I got stuck in that useful way of getting stuck that suddenly opens up new possibility: the aphorisms in the book had been working on me, and I needed to let them work directly on the music, by using them as lyrics for songs. Something about the craziness of the idea – songs based not on poems, but on statements about poetry – writing about writing – really got me going. So I found myself writing songs with words like “The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of the will.”
Orphic Machine, an evening-length work of ten movements, premiered in March 2012 at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley, and at the Blue Whale in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times called it “knotted and occasionally spooky composition marked by dazzling interplay.”
With a 2013 grant from the Shifting Foundation, I was able to record Orphic Machine in September 2013.
Professor Grossman speaks of poetry as an instrument for the conservation of value across time. His work created work for me. Now I hope that you will find something of value in the act of listening.
