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We've put out a call for music created in response to the September 11 events. We've started broadcasting it last week, and will continue next week, October 13, and November 10 (perhaps on-going if submissions are high).

Submissions to ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/

Some composers have sent earlier pieces that they've brought out again due to these events.

There's a musical gallery up at http://kalvos.org/tragedy.html

Dennis

Thanks for that, Samuel. It's been a rough week, even from so far away. I'm glad you and your family are well, and hope the solidarity march becomes a meme for this time.

Dennis

One of my kids and my ex-wife were missing for 24 hours, due to dead phones and dead subways. My wife watched the towers explode and fall from our apartment on the South Brooklyn Waterfront (due east of the WTC).

I was out of town but came down to hug my wife and my kids, when they showed up. Especially because Hannah had been missing, I was gutted, I can't stop crying. I wake up weeping over all the people, especially those brave, brave rescue personnel.

I am donating to the widows and orphans funds - there are three of them (fire/police/EMT), and perhaps more - like Port Authority Police etc.

I don't have any links on me, but you can go to my company's site www.earthspeaks.com, and find a link there.

We're also trying to organize a solidarity march with the Brooklyn Arabic community. I was from one of the first Jewish families that moved into this largely Arabic community in 1959, and with a few small exceptions, we have been loved and appreciated and treated well by them. It breaks my heart to see assholes blame them (many who've lived here for generations!) for this crime.

It also bothers me that the United States is not doing much soul searching about are part in this or about Karma. This act is stupendously horrific. I would personally excort any of the perpetrators off of the planet with a '45. Nontheless, where is the discussion of the mass deaths we've caused to INNOCENT CIVILIAN NON-COMBATANTS in Iraq in our zeal to punsh Saddam Hussein? Why have we supported Israel when it absconds with land that arabs have held for hundreds of years? Why were non-violent protests by Palestinians during the first intifada suppressed by the media, fostering a totally violent image? We are being manipulated, as bad as the reality is, and I think we have to stop being a new-colonialist power and start treating the rest of the world more kindly.

That said, I know that some of these organizations, bin laden's among them, want to kill me because I'm a Jew alone, or an American alone, or simply perhaps because I am from an infidel culture that must be destroyed based on their warped 13th century interpretation of the qu'ran - They are as evil as anything else on the planet and must be stopped - but how?

I've been predicting this for a long time. My wife has always called me a paranoid Jew when I said the WTC would come done - now, unfortunately, she knows I'm not. I'm hoping to convince her and my kids to move out of town before the nukes and bio-weapons are released, which I think they surely will be, and in the next few years.

Maybe I'll move to Vermont...

Peace folks. My prayers are for all of those who lost so much...

Not that I know of ... I've called several composers, Laurie Spiegel being the closest on Duane Street (5 blocks north). She was okay. There's been a question about LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela, who I'm told live even closer, but I don't know them personally. Margaret Lancaster was part of a Lincoln Center benefit for the Red Cross the other night; she reports on-going sense of powerlessness.

Dennis

>By Kalvos on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 - 09:49 pm:

And then there were several days of silence.
I've heard from 7th Street flautist Michael Laderman, and Jeff Harrington wrote a chilling essay of Seeing It All from Brooklyn. I myself was in Silver Spring, Maryland, and saw smoke rising from the south.

Anybody missing?

Review by Kyle Gann in the Village Voice:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0137/gann.php

Just a reminder ... please visit & contribute to the wonderful site created by Don Corson for Ought-One commentary, photos, etc.:

http://freezope2.nipltd.com/oughtone/

Local review posted here:

http://ought-one.com/ought1-news.html

Beautiful drawings!

Pictures? Anyone take good pix they can send copies of? I'd like to post them on the Ought-One site.

Dennis

Robert Bonotto's drawings are on line. The small versions don't do them justice; when I free us some web space, I'll post the full-size version.

see http://ought-one.com/ought1-bonotto.html

Dennis

Hi folks,
We from Logos appreciated a lot to be invited at the Ought One Festival and we had a good time. We enjoyed to meet you and to share our work with you. Congratulations for Dennis and Stevie who organised all this. As concert organisors at the Logos Foundation, we know all too well, how much work it is to put an event like this together. It's just an incredible effort and what a great opportunity did we all get out of it.
Thanks to everybody and for sure thanks and "hiphiphoeraaa" to the organisors! Looking forward to meeting you in the nearby future at another great occasion like this. In the meanwhile all the best and success with your music!

I just dropped in on this forum from the public library in Amst., where I'm attending another festival, which so far, is not as interesting as Ought-One.

Great job K&D.
'till I get home..

If everybody worked tech for somebody else's show, we'd end up not missing so many shows... and simultaneous shows would be right out. I worked dat recorder for a whole lot of shows and missed about 70% of the festival. I attended a concert where a piece of mine was played, and that left another concert without anybody recording it...alas.

Awesome festival -- awesome weekend! For me, it was just as important to hear and hang with such great folks as it was to share some of my music. Montpelier was lovely.

I second the sentiment to keep multiple venues. Single-venue concerts would likely stretch the thing into the week and musicians would miss each other more often -- people would be flying in and out of town and the "mass of musicians" effect we had would be lost.

Dennis & David did an amazing job under the most trying circumstances I can imagine (and I can imagine it, having run some festivals myself).

If there's anything that I would suggest for the future, it would be a "PA buddy" concept: if every person worked tech for another's show, it would save these two a lot of grief and let them enjoy the fruits of their labor a bit more. My impression is that there was a dedicated handful that did far more than they should have & that their work could be spread around.

Finally, get the word out! Press coverage helps enormously, especially for raising funds. If this momentum and good feeling results in another festival (and I hope it does), everyone should do what they can to get a buzz going.

Kudos! Long live K&D!

David and Dennis:

Kudos to you on the festival. I was one of the performers with Joe Benzola. Had a great time and appreciated having the opportunity to participate.

Yes there were problems and disappointments.
However, my past experience includes being the Administrator for the 1989 New Music America in New York, and even with an organization like the
Brooklyn Academy of Music behind it, in an internationally recognized arts city, NMA '89 had many of the same kinds of problems you experienced - events that were planned and had to be dropped, events that we went ahead with even though the facilities didn't quite turn out to be what we thought and were sorry, limited corporate sponsors, equipment promised and not delivered,etc.

IT IS A DAMN HARD THING TO DO! The fact that it happened as an affirmation of faith in non-traditional music is the important thing.

At NMA the people who came through and made it happen in spite of this were the performers and composers. Used to being on the fringe they adapted and pulled it off. We may not like always having to work harder than Brittney to get our music heard - but such is the cost of freedom -it's still our music.

Yes it is important to identify the things that can be done better next time - but the most important thing is to make sure there is a next time. Let's make our criticism specific and practical.

Thanks again...

-Doug Kolmar

SCI, Society for Composers Incorporated, is the less-scatalogical and more ecumenical later moniker for the former "American Society of University Composers".

What's SCI?

How long is an SCI regional? How many concerts are there? How many pieces? My recollection is that it's a weekend, 6 or 7 concerts, about 60 pieces. That's about saturation.

Gary, Mike, Doug, others...

You and other folks are right about some important points, such as personnel and time.

Ought-One was a real killer for us. My draft history talks about how we had to decide, seven weeks before the event, whether to go ahead with it. We knew we were going to work non-stop if we said yes, and we did, and we did.

Ultimately, it wasn't enough to make it go well for everyone. The dearth of volunteers (especially two very experienced sound people who promised but never showed) hurt us, as did our individual inability to do everything. We needed for help. Fortunately, most composer angels pitched in.

Mike mentions the website and how it gave the impression we were better organized. It's just that we've been on line a very long time (since 1995), and with my past experience as both a publisher of an underground newspaper and as a librarian, I learned how to organize pretty well and remove chaos. Here's what I wrote to Mike in an email last night: "Interesting your impression of us via the website. Very few people know that David and I are the entirety of K&D, 100% of it. We have no support staff, no webmasters (that's me), no engineers (we turn our own knobs), no format conversion people, no transcribers, and no compensation. The two of us have put nearly $30,000 into doing this project over the past 7 years, and one day, we hope to turn the corner of public visibility enough to make a dent in the perception of nonpop. ... Sometimes, as some soda company says, image is everything."

Those with acoustic performances had access to the Monteverdi school, but on-site setup time was too tight. In part, when we decided not to curate this event (that is, to schedule everyone who asked), we made a good decision artistically and a bad one practically. If the next fest is bigger, we'll have to curate, a role I relish even less than being bashed for bad scheduling and tech!

As for taking too much time, most people didn't, but that still couldn't help those who ended up being hurt by it. I'm not sure how one guarantees a performance length; I've given the hook to only two performances in my life, and it wasn't a very rewarding experience.

Regarding security, we did have one secure location available (Bethany's sacristy), but it was too small for the large amount of equipment that arrived, and there was no one to entrust with the key full-time. Again, insufficient volunteers. So we didn't use it at all.

Doug's comment: We did classify venues. We got a few wrong, based on the information we received and (mis)understood. Christ on Saturday was to be nearly 100% acoustic, back when we through Brenda was doing tubes only. Only PoJo, which had no other place by the time scheduling was underway, was understood not to be acoustic. Trinity was lesser tech, and Bethany higher tech.

But Bethany had to serve double-duty: It had the grand piano. That meant it got both tech *and* acoustic, and was the site under highest stress for setup and use. Gary was a victim of that.

The idea of panel discussions was suggested by both Martha Mooke and Bill Harris. We had rooms for it but no one actually ran with the idea. We weren't ready to add more events, and already time was getting tight. For the future, though, I agree that time to get together and talk is important.

Don Corson writes an important followup: "I have just uploaded the first picture to the discussion board & postcard collection. Thom will be adding his comments soon, so you can link into http://freezope2.nipltd.com/oughtone ASAP so others can wind their voice too."

Finally, for this message at least, I'd like to know how people feel about a longer festival so events can be more spread out. I'll say up front that I'm not in favor of diluting the time and audience, and would much rather have a weekend public festival atmosphere. It's also expensive to stay longer, and more condusive to a retreat or conference than a festival.

However, there is the possibility of coming in a few days early for a 'conference' segment, leaving the festival for a weekend.

All for now,
Dennis