In the late 1970s at Boston Conservatory of Music, I was dismayed by the “pitch is dead” doctrine, an almost mystical over-intellectualism that eschewed all connections to popular music with smug condescension.  As hip young artists, we were supposed to ignore the gushing fountains of popular music that had turned us onto music’s joy and its power to integrate things previously irreconcilable. Instead, we were competing for who would become the coolest, or coldest, hyper-rationalist in the concert hall.  Years later, I was astonished and vindicated to read an essay by J. Krishnamurti where he described the “irresistible beauty” of a pop tune playing softly on a cheap radio, wafting in from an alleyway in an impoverished Calcutta slum.  Krishnamurti’s recollection refreshingly illustrates the deep peace and cosmic joy found in the moment and, from that perspective, “silly” pop songs are as soulfully nutritious as Beethoven, or as edifying as Hendrix or Miles Davis.  It’s like beauty vs. sex appeal: we all know there’s a difference, but other than our modern reading of the Apollonian/Dionysian split, we don’t have an easy time reconciling the two.  I believe that there’s surprising beauty and masterful structure in what at first appears primitive, and that what makes works of genius really matter is how they feel in your gut.

So it comes as no surprise that Lady Gaga’s bumpy, grindy, sex-bot come-on is full of the same things that make a 1590s Mass for three voices by William Byrd work for me.  Number one: good counterpoint!  Ms. Germanotta (Lady Gaga’s real name, if you’ve been living on Mars for the past few years), along with her songwriting/producing partner, the Moroccan/Swedish musician Nadir Khayat, (a/k/a Red One), may not talk about their music as I will here, but I am confidant that they think about it contrapuntally, making choices critical to the song’s appeal, its natural flow, based on rules of counterpoint that have been around at least since medieval times.

Simply stated, counterpoint is music with multiple parts (polyphony) that is most appealing when the separate parts are as equally independent from each other as they are complimentary to each other. Sitting in my studio, repeatedly listening to Poker Face, I identified contrapuntal quality throughout the piece.  In the main groove of the song, Gaga & Red One illustrate the text with pairs of repeating notes up to the second beat of the second measure of the theme, suggesting a stiff attitude or an inhibition, an audible “poker-face” effect.

Opening ostinato from Lady Gaga's "Poker Face"

Like most good pop writers, Gaga doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, and the song’s introduction unfolds rather predictably in groups of 2s and 4s.  The first change is the entry of the “Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma” figure. This is “sung” by the disembodied male voices on one pitch – the f# – upon which the whole song rests.  It sets up a clear, repetitive boundary for the patterns that will support the monotone of Gaga’s purposeful, almost rapped verses.  The insistent “f#s” tell you she isn’t going anywhere.  They are like a sunglasses-hidden face - no smile, no scowl.  Further, the requisite bashing electronic drums (this is dance music) give a simple and flagrantly grinding physicality to the measures leading up to the voice, so the reality of what’s about to go down here is a seduction/competition that you’ll be lucky to win, lose – or just be included!

Lyrically, I particularly enjoy the irony of her young, controlled, mechanical voice expressing wild fantasy, full of tongue in cheek double meaning: “I wanna hold’em like they do in Texas please, fold’em let’m hit me, raise it, baby, stay with me.” This is another type of dramatic counterpoint – ubiquitous in modern pop songwriting and record production – the contrast between the singer’s vocal demeanor and the lyric’s content. In the Happy Valley Guitar Orchestra’s transposed Poker Face, a guitar will have to impersonate Lady Gaga’s voice by playing an “a” literally hundreds of time with the same slight downward bend towards the softer “g#.” A tune this static constitutes the extreme edge of good melodic writing. Ironically, by being so shapeless, it becomes more expressive. This practice defies what musicians are normally taught – to write melodies that have lovely rising and falling shapes, a climax, and evenly distributed stepwise movement and leaps.

In another of Gaga’s hit songs, Paparazzi, she expertly employs the tools of harmonic surprise and melodic contour. In the opening verse, “We are the crowd; We’re coming out; Got my flash on, it’s true; Need that picture of you,” the synthesizers drone in c minor, illustrating the singer’s apparently empty life, unless and until she can snap the picture and seduce the superstar she’s yearning to be with/to become. The melody leaps down a fifth from “g” to the droning “c” and then hops back up again, sung with a dead-eyed precision that captures the readiness of the stalker and the gravity of her quest. I can almost see her straining up and down to catch a glimpse of her glamorous love object; she will do anything to get closer. Though the verse ends with words of hope, the harmonic return to c minor makes it appear an impossibility: “It’s so magical; We’d be so fantastical.”

Next, in a chorus worthy of Schubert, she sings: “I’m your biggest fan; I’ll follow you until you…” Here, we are set up to expect a return to what would be a crushing, fateful “c”- on the words “… love me,” and, if the music delivered this it would be a different song altogether (maybe by the Smiths, and that’s not a knock on the Smiths). Instead, by gushing an A-flat chord under the same “c,” she transforms it into the glorious major third of a chord. Rays of hope come streaming through, as if in one glorious moment the singer will be lifted over the velvet barricade – to the envy of the world - and swept into Elysium with her famous lover. 

And who doesn’t want a little of that?

20 August – Festival de Moratinos, Iglesia San Marcos (20:30)

23 August – Carrión de Los Condes- Iglesia Santa Maria (20,30)

25 August – Carrión de Los Condes- Iglesia Santa Maria (20,30)

26 August – Palacio Episcopal de Palencia (22,00)

More dates are still being scheduled, so check back please!

9 O-clock Show with Bill Newman: Jesse Epstein, Peter Blanchette, Ish Klein

I am preparing to write a Requiem for the dead. Requiem, the word itself haunts. This Requiem is to those dead from the last ten years of violence; sometimes called war, sometimes called terrorism, sometimes called other offensively obfuscating terms like natural and environmental disasters. Remember Katrina? Not just the storm, but the shocking inhumanity that its response belied. And environmental accidents, like the Gulf Oil Spill, Fukishima Daiichi, Japan, and killer tornadoes in Alabama, Joplin, MO, all causing vast human and animal suffering.

In short, there’s plenty of dying going on. To write a large piece, in memory of those lost in these tragedies, to open up the heart to buried feelings – though the dead will never hear it – seems a legitimate use of music. I have the sense that we’re fighting wars with no end in sight, partially, at least, because we don’t acknowledge the pain, guilt and even neuroses we take on while war progresses in our name.

An older friend once told me that when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, the sublime sadness that is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Opus 11 played on radios all across the country, and it was as if all listeners could feel the unfathomable pain of the Second World War, and even the abyss of sadness from the Great Depression, all in those particularly American tragic tones. My friend opined that, in earlier years, songs like Happy Days Are Here Again were necessary to buck up against the unending misery, but they were also a kind of psychological torture. Then came the moment when it was okay to say, “Death is everywhere and there is great pain from it.” That impetus was FDR’s death, but the real, actual permission, when the tears could flow from life-hardened faces for eight long minutes, was during the inexplicably heart-rending, grievous phrases of Barber’s Adagio.

Above: Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Opus 11. Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo, Maestro León Halegua, Memorial da América Latina.

This Requiem is work to be taken seriously, so I’ve been soaking up musical masterpieces with death attached to them and the stories and legends surrounding their creation. I started with Mozart’s paradoxically unfinished Requiem Mass, with its anonymous, possibly duplicitous patron (and the unhappy rumor that the work killed the composer), and Brahms’ German Requiem, which in its time was a brave assertion of the adequacy of the German language to serve in place of Latin, Bach’s supremely Christian B minor Mass, Beethoven’s mystifyingly complex Missa Solemnis and, finally, Stravinsky’s bold, existential Requiem Canticles.

Because I am a child of the 1960’s, I am also searching for inspiration from the music of my generation – in particular, the contemporary pop song and folk song. It’s remarkable to see how an artist can really pay tribute to a fallen brother or sister within the confines of two minutes and thirty seconds. Compare Mozart’s divine Requiem Mass, even a movement from it, with Dion’s 1968 hit Abraham, Martin and John, composed by Dick Holler. By the way, a little research yields the delicious nugget that the B-side of Dion’s hit, no. 4 in the U.S., and no.1 in Canada, was Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms). And, composer Dick Holler’s previous success, which presumably got the attention of big star Dion who was looking for something “the kids will like,” was the 1966 novelty smash Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. Thus, it’s completely understandable that while Mozart was first gestating the sublime tragedy sewn into every measure of the almost creepy Lacrimosa from the Requiem, he may still have had ink drying on what I can only describe as the “loveable naughty parrot” aria from The Magic Flute.

Dion, [Dion DiMucci, he of Dion and the Belmonts, with his hits "A Teenager in Love," "Runaround Sue," and "The Wanderer."] had a HUGE hit with “Abraham, Martin and John.” Here it is, sung by the original author- a little differently, more of a 60′s white soul sound.

Mozart: Requiem Mass in D minor, K626 (composed, unfinished in 1791)
Lacrimosa (Conducted by Claudio Abbado, in a memorial service concert for the great conductor Herbert von Karajan)

Most significantly, I was amazed to recover a memory that the towering musical influence of my early life, Jimi Hendrix’s album Band of Gypsies, with its central awe-inspiring masterpiece, the crowning achievement in the tri-generational evolution of the Blues – Machine Gun, was nothing less than a Requiem for the victims of the Masters of War. The lyrics, one of the most overlooked aspects of Hendrix’s genius:

Machine gun tearin’ my body all apart
Evil man make me kill you
Evil man make you kill me
Evil man make me kill you
Even though we’re only families apart

Well, I pick up my axe and fight like a farmer
But your bullets still knock me down to the ground
The same way you shoot me down, baby
You’ll be goin’ just the same
Three times the pain
And your own self to blame

I ain’t afraid of your bullets no more, baby
I ain’t afraid no more
After a while your cheap talk don’t even cause me pain
So let your bullets fly like rain
‘Cause I know all the time you wrong, baby
And you’ll be going just the same

Below: The audio is of Jimi Hendrix’s monumental performance of Machine Gun, live on New Years Eve, the final night of the 1960s.
Listen here to Machine Gun (the first nine minutes…)

Machine Gun was the non plus ultra discovery of my childhood musical life. Only later, did Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo similarly affect me. Machine Gun unlocked the power of music to make life meaningful. Before Machine Gun, I liked music, and after, I had to be a musician; I had to make music my life. Correspondingly, I also came to believe, with complete conviction, that war is a class-based tool with which the poor are manipulated for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. This, while Hendrix’s portrayal of the horror of Viet Nam had a kind of seductive, intoxicating sensuality to it- revealing the sick attraction man has to the chaos of war.

Here, I’d also like to share that when I steep myself in the great works from either long ago or from just the other day, I feel increasingly intimidated, and even kind of hopeless to my task. All these works overwhelm me with the shear, hyper-mastery of their composition, as if music written to memorialize was somehow expected to exhibit technique equal to the finality of death. Must one write as if to make a final testimony to the world? Who am I to write about these metaphysical, spiritual, historical, even cosmic themes?

One of the ways I dare myself to do it is that, by the very nature of these almost absurdly diverse compositions, I see the infinite possibilities to the sincere expression of emotions through music. I remember having a thought once as a child, listening to some cheap, cheesy instruction LP on playing the guitar, a velvety, masculine, General Motors commercial narrator’s voice intoned:  ”The musical alphabet is made up of only seven tones, or notes. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti and then back to Do. All the music we make, and enjoy listening to, is made of combinations of these few notes.” I then thought that musicians will certainly run out of possibilities pretty soon, with so few notes. But, that was when I thought of composition as a puzzle, as magically harmonious numbers. And here’s the real trick of imagination: it’s not. Music composition is just pure possibility, a bag full of nothing, a bunch of attractive what ifs, and as Jean Cocteau said, “Art is something ugly which becomes beautiful after a time, fashion is something beautiful which becomes ugly after a time.”

Thus, I am embarking on a journey of discovery, not trying to fill a predefined vessel called Requiem. At its most essential, I am going to make some music with specific instrumentation, specific musicians with their own strengths and weaknesses, and I guess I’ll have to decide on some other aspects as well: Do I want to collaborate with other artists? Do I want a visual element to be present in the performances, or particular texts? Should it be performed at particular events and venues – for audiences who will attach importance to it, or do I just make the music and take it any place I can; play it at a mall, while people are obliviously Christmas shopping?

A Requiem is an attempt to get to the place in the listener’s imagination where the feelings of death live, irresistibly unimpeded by rational thought. Although our perception of ourselves changes with fashion, essential qualities of emotion and reflection remain constant in the human experience. Thus, if we choose to memorialize death and suffering with the 220 year old music of Mozart, evoking architectural magnificence through sounds born of organic woods, horsehair, gut strings, reeds and rosin – it will work; and, if we choose to memorialize death and suffering with the sounds of an electric guitar’s whammy-bar imitating the guns, helicopters and cries of victims and warriors in a surrealistic acid trip – it will also work, but differently.

Simply, a Requiem should make us cry, make us feel angry and hopeless in the face of the enormity of death and loss, make us feel sorrow for the loss of the living and the loss of the dead, maybe even the fear I’ve felt at the immortal words of the great John Lee Hooker (RIP), in his masterful I Hear Them Church Bells Tonin’- “YOU! You got to go!”

Thus, it’s no surprise that classical and modern composers have “pulled out all the stops” to make a Requiem work, used all their craft and artistry to elevate and break down their listeners’ resistance to wrangling with death. Music reminds us that we and the dead are very much entwined. So that’s where I start. No rules, just a lot of connecting with death. It’s heavy.

Igor Stravinsky: Elegy for Solo Viola (The Elegy is a different piece from the Requiem Canticles I mention above. Since Stravinsky lived to his late 80s, and had many friends, he wrote elegies and memorial music for several personalities. Dylan Thomas, Aldous Huxley, and others

Below: John Lee Hooker: “Thought I Heard a Church Bell Tone” from the album, Country Blues 1959

Friday, March 11 at 7:30 p.m.
Northampton Center for the Arts
17 New South Street
Northampton, MA
SOLD OUT.
$12- Tickets still available at the door.
NCFA box office opens at 6:30.

Come spend this warm, early spring evening with friends, enthralled by the sounds of Peter’s ravishing Bach solos. You’ll be thrilled by Peter’s premiere of his delightful new trio arrangements of Scarlatti, Tromboncino, Cara and of course, old Bach, such as no one has ever heard. Guaranteed to awaken the felicity hibernating in your heart!

The Virtual Consort will perform exceptional arrangements of movements from Bach’s 3rd Brandenburg Concerto, the Double Concerto for Two Violins, and some delightful Italian Frottole – popular pieces from the later renaissance that strongly influenced the polyphony style that Bach mastered above all others. Blanchette, “Playing with these versatile and open-minded musicians is absolutely inspiring. And the Brandenburg Concertos, notable for their daring instrumentation and spirit of virtuosic challenge, perfectly deserve such wildly fresh interpretations.”

Why Bach-like? Because these two crazy and brilliant arranger/performers, also known also as Pomplamoose, use some rather strict rules to exploit the endless stream of today and yesterday’s popular music, making it their own. These rules actually free them to celebrate the music’s innate beauty with limitless invention and musicality, very much like Bach’s volcanic musicality allowed him to compose music nearly always in fugue style - a discipline associated with a well-nigh oppressive demand for architectural maturity – and yet with it he produced works of total artistic freedom.

Conte & Dawn call their particularly mischievous art form, VideoSongs. A VideoSong, according to Jack Conte, can be an arrangement of a pre-existing recording or an original song, produced with the following two “promises” made to the viewer/listener:

1. What you see is what you hear; i.e., no lip-syncing for instruments or voice. This rule means that  the camera captures the musician actually performing in real time.

In case you didn’t know, music videos are 99% lip-synced. Think, for example, of some video you’ve seen with the band playing on the rooftop, or in the woods, but sounding like they’re in a concert hall. How do they do it? They don’t! The musicians are acting on location in front of the film crew with the music blaring over speakers, whilst the director guides them through the blocking and they fake it. This technique produces a film made of an idealized performance of the music in stark contrast to the VideoSongs approach where the viewer actually witnesses the best takes as they’re recorded in a visual polyphony. Thanks to modern video editing programs like FinalCut, the viewer sees the source of sounds with multiple frames within frames and rhythmic jumpcuts. It’s a brilliant way to turn what I’ve always found exciting about recording (the documentation of perfected performances) and make it into set of hyper-live, personal moments.

2. If you hear it, at some point you see it; i.e., no hidden sounds. This rule cements the unification of the visual content with the music-making.

I have often wondered, am I in a minority, being so interested in watching musicians play their parts? I know what tremendous stamina and craft it takes in the studio to play and merge all the parts, having used the multi-track approach on many of my recordings. Only my first three Archguitar Duo CDs where I played with Peter Michelini, and the 1989 Sleepers, Awake! where I played with Eliott Gibbons are actually duos. On nearly all of my Virtual Consort recordings, I overdubbed the alto, tenor and bass archguitar parts, and added Charlie Schneeweis’ trumpet or Kelly Peral’s english horn or Amy Platt’s clarinet later. Now, upon seeing what an exciting piece of work a VideoSong can be, I wish I had a camera in the room during my sessions!

In a VideoSong, Conte and Dawn are both film makers and musicians. They plan, perform (as multiple musician-characters!), observe, choose (through what must be an exhaustive editing process), and present their own, fresh, utterly controlled interpretations. Their goal seems to be to liberate the static source material (what’s more frozen in time than a recording 1970′s Earth, Wind and Fire dance hit?), from its prison on compact disc and rejuvenate it by reinterpreting every element. Each musical part – from shakers to horns, kick drum to lead vocal – is given close attention. Most parts have been transposed as well; what was played on a synth in the original is now banged out on an old upright piano, what was a lush bass drum is slapped with an open hand on Mr. Conte’s cheek. This is craft on an obsessive level! Ever hear the anecdote about Emperor Joseph II telling Mozart the Marriage of Figaro had “too many notes?” Bach’s contemporaries said he had “darken[ed his music's] beauty by an excess of art.”

Thus, the turbulent 18th century fugue is similar to the 21st century VideoSong because a fugue contains as many as six simultaneous melodies, and a VideoSong contains multiple simultaneous video performances. Imagine yourself in Bach’s world. Back then, before the transformative experience of electric lights, radio and mass-produced print images, you would find a stained glass window mesmerizing; an oil painting would present like a movie; and the rapturous simultaneity of multiple melodies in a fugue – each one discernible, lovely, and yet all interrelated in harmony, a truly mind-bending thrill. Similarly, we modern people are amazed and entertained by the craft of the VideoSong, tiny fragments of that same kind of perfect melodic interplay, but occurring between moving pictures and live sound. The two art forms are examples of the most extreme presentation of creative information, they fit as much as anyone can into an elegant, exciting package.

Furthermore, Conte and Dawn approach this challenge with admirable energy and lots of good, solid musicianship. I realize that this quirky vehicle is made even more quirky perhaps by the “love her or hate her” performance style of Ms. Dawn. Personally, I like her, the way her eyes seem to regard the camera as a friend, in on the joke. I would also like to point out that Mr. Conte’s instruments are almost all recorded acoustically, as opposed to using virtual instruments or digitally sampled sounds ubiquitous in today’s pop music. This means, for example, that his piano is an old upright, and his electric piano is an old Fender Rhodes model, instead of a software program of “vintage keys.” The drumming is also deliciously spare and done with deep attention to the odd and even imperfect sounds of real drums, along with the percussive use of bottles, toy pianos, human cheeks slapped with childish glee, and kick drums struck with muppets.

Note: It seems corporate advertisers have discovered the music of Pomplamoose. I noticed their hallmark sound this past season in Christmas commercials on radio and television for dubious retail giant Target. Also, their rendition of Jingle Bells, edited down into 30-second radio “donut” form, appeared in a Hyundai commercial. Here, they may diverge from Bach, whose persistent poverty and lack of erstwhile acclaim (despite a lifetime of service to the Church), is not to be romanticized, let alone emulated. That being said, I hope Conte and Dawn can cash some fat checks, lock that little apartment door and spend the next forty years developing a sublime artistic maturity.  It took Bach that long.

Pomplamoose’s YouTube channel is here.

Back in the mid 1980s, we found ourselves busking in Florence and Peter knew a lovely young woman named Lily Prigioniero who worked restoring frescoes in luxurious apartments in the heart of this favorite city. A quick Google search today reveals that she successfully writes books about that craft; no surprise. Lily was also a fine singer and, being American by birth, she knew a bunch of sweet old folk tunes.

In those days of busking and endless traveling, Peter and I made cassette recordings, almost compulsively, of live music, our daily performances, snatches of radio and television, and little stories, some spontaneous, others rehearsed – our own little productions. We kept the cassettes in a big cardboard box in the traveling van within which we also lived. On a long late night drive from, say, Florence to Antwerp, we would pop these into the van stereo for a laugh. On one of the cassettes was a hauntingly lovely half-hour of Lily singing, among other songs, Cluck Old Hen.

Agonizingly, I recently realized that I’d thrown the box of tapes out in one of my many moves over a tough, five-year stretch. Sometimes, for the sake of progress, you have to lighten the load and things get a little drastic. However, years before pitching the cassette, I produced a multi-track demo of Cluck Old Hen. My version is nothing like Lily’s- hers was sweet and sort of lonesome sounding. After I read about the song’s political connections and having only my own tools to use, I came up with the following:

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Rediscovering the old demo reminded me of how Shakespeare wrote, with utmost brilliance, of how time robs us of the physical beauty so abundant in the spring and summer of our lives. This sonnet is one I’ve known by heart for years, and I always welcome a chance to recite it. I speak it aloud sometimes a couple of dozen times a day if I need to spend an hour driving, or doing errands. (Click for a helpful annotation of the poem). Here, though, I am reflecting on the time having passed since I first heard this lovely song and then, despite initially capturing it on tape, I lost it forever, and then re-discovered a sketch based loosely on the original “flower” of a girl’s voice, so touching, yet meaning little to anyone but me.

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness every where:
Then, were not summer’s distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill’d though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Harry now lives in Dingle, Ireland, where he owns and resides in the Celtic and Prehistoric Museum that he founded. In the 1980′s and 1990′s, we were like busking superheroes (not only in our own minds!), living a swashbuckling lifestyle (and I mean that literally, we actually swashed hundreds of buckles by shared estimation). We competed for the best spots as high-powered CD-selling machines from Oslo to Florence, Harry on his hammered dulcimer and with his constant partner, harpist Steve Coulter, against yours truly, either solo or with Peter Michelini or Elliot Gibbons, with our duo archguitars.

Out of the chaos of wandering, emerged a kind of touring schedule. We roamed through seven or eight countries, occasionally settling in one preferred base for a couple years and going on seasonal trips following good weather and rumors of wealthy tourist crowds. We stayed off the beaten path, in search of towns quiet enough to play our softest music, and yet populous enough to do good business. More often than not, we’d end up in the same city, enjoying the days off together, Mondays, Tuesdays and … rainy Saturdays, the latter quite tragic, since we were trying to earn enough dough to spend the winter visiting friends somewhere beautiful, learning the language of that year’s girlfriend, and finding new music to play. In the winters Harry would also continue to travel – building his astonishing collection of Stone and Bronze Age artifacts that now make up his museum, while I usually made a new recording.

Our camaraderie was essential because busking was a lonely life, despite the never-ending train of fans and new acquaintances. From our bases in Copenhagen or Amsterdam we would trade information and coordinate efforts to avoid showing up at the same excellent spot in Delft, or Bergen an Zee, or some other undiscovered busking pitch (a profitable and convivial street performing spot, in modern Euro-parlance). However, in the interest of moving a few more units, Harry probably kept a few pitches secret from me, and I from him.

Perhaps my fondness for Harry came from these symbiotic yet competitive origins. When you have to share something with someone, something so precious that, if you could, you’d bottle it up and quaff it, a sip at a time, by yourself, for life, you end up either hating that person or really respecting and enjoying the mutual good fortune you have. With Harry, it was the latter.

Since the October 30th Happy Valley Guitar Orchestra CD release show was approaching, one of the work items I had on the calendar during my friend’s visit was a Sunday night HVGO rehearsal. Harry came along and listened while I put the orchestra through its paces working on three of the more challenging pieces: Aase’s Death and In the Hall of the Mountain King from Grieg’s Romantic masterpiece, the Suite from Peer Gynt, and an arrangement of a 19th century Armenian oud composer Tatyos Ekserciyan, working closely with HVGO’s gifted Kevin Germain, one of HVGO’s excellent guitar soloist who also plays oud superbly.

The Grieg pieces have devilishly difficult aspects, particularly for an orchestra of guitars. The swelling from soft to loud, with trembling tension, common effects on violins, violas, cellos and basses, do not directly translate to plucked instruments, whose notes die away the instant they begin. Relying heavily on this swelling effect, Aase’s Death is one of the greatest musical descriptions of the throes of death. (BTW- Aase is pronounced “OH-suh” for those of you unfamiliar with Norwegian.) The back-and-forth rhythms played by the strings are literally the dying breaths of Aase, the protagonist’s mother. (OK, just imagine it’s your mother if you don’t know the story.)

After watching me conduct, frantically waving my arms about and employing at least one metaphor per musical phrase, Harry remarked, ”You’re really good at translating musical intangibles into language people can understand.”

With HVGO, this is my challenge: conveying to the players that these musical notes are Aase’s dying breaths, more precisely, her last living breaths. An arc takes place; the breaths start as quietly neutral and a bit halting, then they become stressed – something is wrong, not peaceful, now the breaths are heavier with each successive group of four because she is fighting dying. Ultimately, it’s the effort she expends in those desperate breaths that deplete her and, in the middle of the piece, after the last of the increasingly heavy breaths, Aase succumbs. From then on, the breaths are automatic, heaving but weaker each time until … they … cease. And after the last breath, the listener should be standing, tense as a knot, afraid to miss hearing another breath as witness to what we won’t accept.

Much of the technical things we do to present an inspired piece of music are physical: how hard we pick, which string we choose to play a note upon, the angle of our hands, on and on. Thus, as a conductor, I can tell musicians that the first chord is played softly, up by the neck, to give it a soft, glassy sound, and then the second is played closer to the bridge with the pick angled just so, to give it a brassy, colder sound. But really, how I want players to think of the two chords is; “I’ve got … this one, … and now … I’ve got … that one.” Music is always best when driven not by the physical technique but by the imagination. Imagination is the magic musical dust right in your pocket. And without it, even great music sounds pedestrian.

And thanks for tip on Chiang Mai, Harry.

Composer Peter Blanchette will provide live accompaniment to Ernest Torrence (left) and Buster Keaton (right) in the 1928 classic "Steamboat Bill Jr." (Photofest)

By Taylor Adams Globe Correspondent / September 26, 2010

The silence of Buster Keaton’s movies is music to Peter Blanchette’s ears. As a composer, Blanchette says he’s inspired by the celebrated filmmaker’s work. That inspiration will be on display tomorrow when he provides the live accompaniment to a screening of the 1928 classic "Steamboat Bill Jr.," starring Keaton.

"His films are so extremely well edited and cut," the Northampton-based musician says in a phone interview. "They have such an amazing rhythm to them." Blanchette adds that Keaton’s visual humor of ironic misperception is what specifically informs his writing. "That’s a fantastic rhythm or structure upon which to hang music," he says. "Music is all about tension and release and expectation, and either delivering upon that expectation or withholding."

If one’s expectation is traditional silent-film-score fare — "old-timey sarsaparilla-drinking music," as Blanchette calls it — his compositions will come as a surprise. For "Steamboat," the eclectic soundtrack mixes instruments as diverse as the banjo, a playfully anachronistic electric guitar, and an instrument that Blanchette had a hand in inventing: the 11-string archguitar. He described his score as "in the spirit" of Keaton’s film, but fresh, in a "pleasantly compatible" way.

Tomorrow’s event, which is part of "The Sounds of Silents" series at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, is something of a homecoming for Blanchette, a Beverly native, who says seeing compellingly scored art-house films such as Federico Fellini’s "8 1/2" at Coolidge Corner in his teens "pretty much locked me into a life of being an artist." (He has already released one album featuring his own arrangements of music from Italian films, and is planning to record another.) This is his third foray into Keaton’s cinematic world, having scored two of the icon’s earlier pictures — "The General" and "The Navigator."

"Steamboat Bill Jr.," Keaton’s last independent silent film before his ill-fated stint working for MGM, features the performer’s trademark befuddled protagonist as a recent college grad learning to take over his grizzled father’s Mississippi River steamboat business while contending with a host of comical misunderstandings.

Produced by Keaton’s then-independent company, the film is officially credited to director Charles Reisner and story writer Carl Harbaugh. But Keaton is widely acknowledged as the movie’s creative force both behind the camera and in the starring role, to which he brought his characteristic underdog charm and unique brand of slapstick physical comedy.

"The film is so good and so funny that as long as I don’t get in the way of it, it’s a masterpiece on its own," says Blanchette. "I just hope the music maybe sweetens the romance of the characters a little more."

"Steamboat Bill Jr." screens tomorrow at 7 p.m. Tickets : $20 general admission; $17 students, seniors, and theater members.

Taylor Adams can be reached at tadams@globe.com