Tiny Alligator Music

People like shiny things. Human beings seem to have an inherent dislike for well-worn normalcy. From a young age, we can’t wait: we can’t wait for Christmas, for the cookies to come out of the oven, for school to be over.

Most people learn, at some point, that shiny things are not necessarily real. Being a grown-up means appreciating the space between the shiny things in life, understanding the value of realness.

I am dismayed when I hear that the Ford Brothers want to turn my city into what is essentially a cruise ship filled with shopping malls. This is not a plan for a real city. This is a plan for a place where people who wish to feel rich arrive, drop some money in one single area, and never go anywhere else. This plan will not enrich our city. It will enrich a few developers, and a few American companies like “Bloomingdales and Macy’s.”

Building a good city, a real city, is like building a career. It takes time. You have to get to know your work, learn to understand your own strength, and be nice to people. You have to take time to understand who people are. You have to make your best, most sincere and concerted contribution to the world without worrying about it taking too long.

The Ford Brothers’ proposal does none of this. Instead, it whines that the currently-planned development is going to take years, that it is not going to be shiny enough. It wants to cover our city in plastic. It screams “please like us!” without providing the substance that would be a reason for anyone to do so. This plan wants the corner office before it has learned how to work the photocopier.

What dismays me even more is the timing. Jack Layton, rest his soul, taught us how to build real things. His determination and focus on Parliament Hill showed that he understood the time and effort required to build a substantive country. His work in Toronto showed that he knew how to meet people, listen to them, and understand who they are. He knew how to make a place for people to live, not just a place for them to shop.

By cynically trying to play politics with the provincial Liberal government ahead of the upcoming provincial election, the Fords will simply turn more people away with their insincerity and greed.

At Jack’s funeral on Saturday, our city shifted. The streets were filled with people who had admired his work towards building a country with substance. This momentum now needs to be directed squarely at Toronto City Hall. We know what a real politician feels like. What we have in office right now is just plastic.

In Which I am having post-minimalist thoughts, post-production.

I had a great nerd-out this week with composers Adam Sherkin, Alex Eddington, Brian Harman, and Mitch Renaud. Our topic was post-minimalism, and as we started, it became apparent that our first task was to define post-minimalism. The scores that we brought in as examples of the style included elements of hard-core minimalism, but all seemed to use this minimalism less as a style to be adhered to than as one compositional tool available to be exploited. Minimalistic concepts were found to be in cahoots in various scores with post-modernism, DJs, drum and bass, theatre music, neo-romanticism…. From what I remember, the only conclusion we came to was that we will need to reconvene in 50 years, to see if we can make sense of the jumble of new sounds we were hearing. (Perhaps the others can provide a more conclusive conclusion for me?) But it was great fun to think about sound on such a basic level: what is a style of music? How many people have to practice the same style for it to become a movement? Where are its edges?

This is a pretty fun time to be a composer. As I confirmed in our discussion this week, we are intensely lucky to be writing music in a Western Classical tradition now; this is a time when so much has been built up in this art form, so many sounds discovered and tools provided, so many barriers between sub-genres broken down. As a composer, I have instruments, techniques, performers and ideas available to me from literally all over the planet and all throughout human history. I have unparalleled access to information about music, and brand new ways to document what I create and provide it to an audience. Many times, I think this panoply of stimuli leads me to act more as a curator than as a composer. It also opens up all of the questions of classification mentioned above.

These questions come at an interesting time for me. A few months after the monumental effort that was “Safe and Healthy Homes for Children,” I am still feeling a little lost musically. In post-production now (recordings coming soon!), I am completely baffled by the recording of this concert. Over 65 minutes of music, I pretty much pulled in every style of music that I know how to write (and a few that I discovered, listening back, I do not yet know how to write).  In the end, I seem to have produced a series of études about the edges of various contemporary pop music styles; this work is the outlines of some musical shapes that remains slightly obscured to me. Here in the Land of Outlines, I have written music that is so many different things that it is not actually a Thing. What remains now is for me to reason my way back inside to the Land of Things, to clarify the intention of each individual musical shape. It’s time for me to start being deliberate about classification.

To do this, I am going to step back from the current compositional track on which I’ve been careening lately. “Safe and Healthy Homes” will mark my last self-produced show on this scale. I’m going to take a break from Alligators and focus on writing music for smaller ensembles for the next year: upcoming projects include a piece of art music about contemporary wars for chamber strings and male voice; I’m also working on a pop music/performance art collaboration with poet Linda Besner and singer/songwriter Abigail Lapell about model trains (model trains!). With each of these projects, I am hoping to find myself more in the centre of each respective musical style, instead of mucking about with outlines. I look forward to reporting back in a little while from the Land of Things. 

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Footnote: There are MANY people to whom I owe very much for the time and creative genius they gave me for “Safe and Healthy Homes”. A more thorough thank you will be forthcoming, but right now, the work that Gary Gray is doing on the recording of the show is foremost in my mind. I can’t wait to post the recordings online shortly- Gary has somehow managed to make it sound like we spent days in a professional studio, instead of doing the whole thing live in one shot in a theatre…. Thank you Gary!

By Susan Bond

While Safe and Healthy Homes is in some ways a reflection of Caitlin’s personal experience and situation in Brooklyn, it’s also a meditation on a larger state of affairs. Living on a meagre (but greatly appreciated!) grant that didn’t allow her to work meant that she wound up living below the poverty line in a country with almost no social safety net.
 
Caitlin was disturbed to see that the local government thought it more responsible to post warnings not to lick the walls in older low-income areas (such as the one Caitlin was living in) than to provide health care for the citizens or provide for the clean-up of contaminated areas.  On a surprisingly visible level, the community was unable (or unwilling) to provide safe and healthy homes, be they for children or any other members.

Those of us watching the concert on Sunday are from (or at least in) a fantastic city that can sometimes feel very small, in a country that can seem, well, kind of bland.  Like the woman from the shoe in the first half of the concert, we can be tempted to strike out for more adventurous climes, but to do so we have to give something up.  Specifically, we have to give up a city and a country that care about their constituents enough that they have the goal, though not always met, of providing them with health care and adequate housing.  It’s a hard bargain, and one that we haven’t been willing to make.

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Tiny Alligator Music presents

Safe and Healthy Homes for Children

A song-cycle for jazz orchestra and three voices

Sunday, March 13th, 8:00 pm

The Alumnae Theatre, 70 Berkeley Street

(near King St. and Parliament St.)

$20/$15 for students, seniors and arts workers

buy tickets now at www.tinyalligator.com/events

By Susan Bond

Caitlin’s note: Susan is a fantastic Toronto-based dramaturge who has been kind enough to help me sort through the jumble of ideas I have had about this show. She helped me to fix the libretto before I began reorchestrations this fall. Below, she miraculously pulls together my song cycle into one coherent narrative for you. Amazing!

As the title tells us, Safe and Healthy Homes for Children is about being brave and leaving home; but in many ways it’s more a story about leaving home and being brave.  A deeply personal work, Safe and Healthy Homes came about during Caitlin’s year living and studying in Brooklyn.  The title is taken from a Public Service Announcement about lead paint - one of the traumas of big city living that Caitlin herself got to deal with (a line in her lease forbade her from licking the walls).  
 
The piece starts with our hero(ine) still safe at home: it opens with her (a Sapphic fragment voiced by all three singers) lying in bed; safe, certainly, but isolated and somehow restless.  The second movement is the longest, and in many ways the focal point of the work.  It is a setting of “The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”,  a short story by indie darling Sheila Heti from her work The Middle Stories.  In it, the protagonist takes stock of her current comfortable (but still lonely and kind of boring) life, and decides to leave home.  The moment of her decision is filled with excitement, and the actual leave-taking is a moment of triumph.
 
If the first half of the piece is about leaving home and what makes us do that, the second half is about being brave among the danger of the outside world and the unpleasantness we’re faced with when we try to live there.  Unlike the first act, the majority of the second is set to Caitlin’s own words, drawn both from her own experiences of living and working in Brooklyn, and other hostile environments.  The exception to this is the sixth movement, a setting of a poem by the American novelist John Updike.  “Vibration” expands the reach to more of the outside world - instead of just dealing with the nightmare that Brooklyn can be, it  shows the unfriendliness of a more general urban landscape.  It also serves as a good bridge to the last movement, “Public Service Announcement no. 2” in which our heroine considers the larger world, and possible homes that may or may no be healthy and safe.

Wait. I hate to jinx this, but let’s just pause to appreciate this fact: it’s four weeks before show time, and nothing seriously major has gone wrong yet. This is a first in Alligatorland.

I know, there’s still lots of time for things to explode. And yes, I’ve only handed half of the score to my copyist, I’m still unable to lift my left arm high enough to conduct (after an epic tumble on some ice last week- I really wish someone had videotaped my fall, as I must have been fully airborne for a good ten seconds, and I could have been an overnight Youtube sensation….), we’re seriously over budget, and I’ve been so busy writing the show and dealing with logistics and working two jobs and writing the music for my March 4th Alliance Francaise concert that I haven’t done laundry in way too long….

But I’ve been really encouraged by the support I’ve been receiving from everyone so far for this show. A last-minute save from Meredith White kept me from printing 300 posters with spelling mistakes on them; Jason Logue hired the world’s best sub for a rehearsal; Carissa Neufeld not only took care of renting us a bass drum, she is carting it to rehearsal and gig along with her own set of vibes; Graham Scott saved the day by hosting the new Tiny Alligator website on his own hosting service, when mine was about to charge me a stupidly-high monthly rate; Lina Allemano managed to heal from her own epic ice tumble so quickly that the newly-bionic woman isn’t missing a single rehearsal; many, many new friends have been coming out of the woodwork with helpful suggestions and connections; and I’ve got an army of awesome volunteers coming to help me plaster the city with posters next weekend (want to join us?).

I’m sure I’m forgetting someone right now, but I will continue to be very very grateful for everyone’s help as I head into the final four weeks of crazy. And I will be able to walk a little more slowly, and watch out for ice, knowing that there are such awesome people backing me up.

Citizens of Toronto:

You can send this email, or create your own. Keep it polite, but let him know that transit riders are now his customers. As a self-proclaimed “customer-service” focused man, he needs to know that scrapping Transit City would be a devastating shame.

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mayor_ford@toronto.ca

1 December 2010 21:25

Transit plans

Dear Mayor Ford,

I’m extremely concerned about your plan to scrap Transit City.

As a taxpaying Torontonian, I would be very angry if the tax dollars that we have already spent towards this plan were thrown down the drain by changing course at this late date in the plan. As well, I feel that paying for a new subway line would be a shameful waste of our precious city resources.

The new LRT lines that the Transit City plan calls for are not a “war on the car”. Instead, they make commuting by both car and public transit more efficient. Dedicated streetcar lanes clear up roads and make it easier for everyone to get to work faster, and do so in a very cost-effective manner.

Please, don’t begin your new term with this shameful waste of my tax dollars.

Regards,
—
Caitlin Smith

I woke up this morning with an earworm: the line from “Gemini” (off Ben Monder’s 1997 album with Theo Bleckmann, No Boat). It goes like something like this:

(Feel free to correct my transcription; guitar harmonics not indicated as such. Also, Theo Bleckmann sings this line. With his voice.)

It took me a full twelve hours to remember what the song was, who it was by, where the recording was; an unexpected earworm.

And strange, given that I haven’t listened to this record in months. I spent this week listening to and studying Bach (St. John’s Passion) and Webern (5 Lieder aus Der siebente Ring). These scores landed on my piano because I’m trying to come up with something to submit to the Aradia ensemble’s “Baroque Idol” contest. I’ve been searching for examples of interesting melodies that will shake me out of my usual habits. I’m also trying to figure out how to write something contemporary for period instruments, writing in a way that will be idiomatic enough to fit the context but not sound derivative. Maybe my pre-conscious mind last night was trying to tell me that the place between Bach and Webern is Monder… how will intervals like this ring on period strings?