Fractures: Kali 1986

FRACTURES: KALI 1986 ELAINE R. BARKIN HAT HAS KEPT ME LISTENING to and engaged with John’s Kali, besides my flat-out eagerness to get a handle on it and participate in this celebration of John’s life’s-work, is Kali’s multilateral, multifaceted appeal to my sensual-musical-aesthetical heart and brain receptors, as well as the simple—in its many definitions—and almost crudely complex ways in which I enjoy listening to Kali, my curiosity about what it was that made John’s composing persona tick, and the intuitive, albeit not immediately if ever fully explicable, inference that substantial plotting, planning and precisely organized game-playing must have gone into the thought-processes of Kali’s composition. Whether I get to answer all of these queries is moot. John’s CD1 and PNM2 notes describe who Kali is said to be, her appearance, her behaviors, activities, and her role in Hindu-Buddhist thought. His notes about his compositional procedures are clinical and technical; you are told what computer software programs and hardware he made use of to generate the nine-track tape-piece, about parameters and languages and filters and much else of that sort, into and about which I doubt that I’ll delve. Ultimately, and oddly, the descriptions of the mythically real Kali are more awesome and terrifying than is W 204 Perspectives of New Music John’s Kali; nonetheless and the more I listen, Kali does have a menacingly mysterious aura about it, lightly spinning you about at the start, heavily knocking you out and about midway and through to the end-stop. Although John keeps his compositional “cool” throughout, intensity is expressed throughout as well and I am doggedly kept with it, continually wondering what or rather how is next to come for each and all of its nine minutes & twenty+ seconds. BACK STORY At first I considered writing a commentary in which the Kali persona isn’t mentioned, a writing solely about my listening experience, about the sounds and shape of Kali. But the more I listened the more I heard the work as a tone-poem, not quite Lisztian nor Stravinskian, but a Kali sound portrait for sure. I knew enough about Kali to make the connection; any listener would have plenty of juicy stuff to listen to without foreknowledge of Kali or kala (time itself or the Hindu Demon of time). To clinch the deal for me, here are John’s words: “My musical piece Kali attempts to make this persona [this worshipper and perpetrator of death, this devourer of time] present for the listener.” And thus with the connection already made, a naïve auditory experience for me was, alas, unworkable. John, whom I met in 1973 when we were on the music theory faculty at the University of Michigan, at which time he was heavily bearded, has been drawn to mischievousness, to the depiction of “badness & orgies of destruction” as in his year 2000 opera The New Mother, libretto by Suzanne Rahn,3 to the sly and the cunning, to snaughty multi-lingual sensuality and snarky-slithyness always lurking below- and peeking above-ground in his theoretical, analytical, aesthetical and in-honor-of texts. Now and then his work seems to be distant, almost as if he was observing himself in the act, role-game playing. Just as often doth his cheeky wicked wit sting with, concurrently, a raised eyebrow and crinkly grin, nudge-nudge, winkwink (as in his impassive and frosty words written for Jim Randall’s 75th birthday4—not, as Jim used to say “in some sense,” but “in every sense”). Indeed, how do Du do? Ultimately I found it best to listen to Kali with volume up, sitting in the middle of my fairly large room, to be located within, surrounded, enveloped by panning swirling non-discrete fractured notes, tones or pitches, electronic or radio-frequency noise, white, pink or whichever color RF sound is, a regular snare-drummish sound-pattern as propellant smashed to bits by a loud statical punch, down but not yet, not Fractures: Kali 1986 205 ever, out. Kali, in the role by which she is best-known, is such a...