Melody Sumner Carnahan, The Time Is Now.(Review)

Robert Ashley, John Bischoff, Marghreta Cordero, Nick Didkovsky, Barbara Golden, Joan LaBarbara, Elodie Lauten, Maggi Payne, Larry Polansky, Brian Reinbolt, Laetitia Sonami, Susan Stone: Melody Sumner Carnahan, The Time Is Now

Compact disc with 80-page booklet from Burning Books, 1997, FP20; available from Frog Peak Music, P.O. Box 1052, Lebanon, New Hampshire 03766, USA; telephone/ fax (603) 448-8837; electronic mail fp@frogpeak.org; World Wide Web www.frogpeak.org

The Time is Now is another of the interesting collaborative projects featuring musical interpretations of text by a selected author sponsored and published by Frog Peak Music. As a collection of pieces by composers of different experience levels and aesthetic sensibilities, The Time is Now, like its predecessor, The Frog Peak Collaborations Project (based on a text by Chris Mann), provides a fascinating and insightful survey of the music-makers' creative thoughts and processes while also providing a critical introduction to the written work.

Santa Fe author Melody Sumner Carnahan explains in her notes the principal origin of the CD: "I didn't like the sound of my own voice.... Most of my friends were musicians. ... One day I got the idea to have THEM put the words to music so I could avoid having to do readings myself." Ms. Carnahan wrote her first short story collection between 1979 and 1981 after moving to Oakland, California. The pieces resulting from these stories were recorded by the composers during the years 1983 to 1996. All of the works utilize audio technology in some respect; yet despite the lengthy delay between the earliest and the most recent offerings, none sound "dated" in any way. This is a tribute to the integrity and vitality of each composer's musical approach.

While listening to the 15 tracks, I found myself dividing them into separate categories: straightforward and quite well done "traditional text-sound pieces," "kind of goofy" musical treatments, and "genuinely inspired" works. However, Robert Ashley's Victims (1984) falls into none of these easy characterizations. Providing one of the best commentaries not only about Ms. Carnahan's texts but about the composer himself, Victims is simply a recording of Mr. Ashley reading the story of the same title. As someone not previously familiar with the author's writing, I appreciated this approach because it allowed me to hear one of her texts purely as a story instead of a "story with a soundtrack," giving me a reader's rather than a listener's insight. I also found it interesting that Mr. Ashley is the only composer on the disc who uses his program notes solely to talk about himself and not about Ms. Carnahan and her text. I drew the conclusion that in this case the composer enjoys the sound of his own voice and his own thoughts. This delightful egocentricity, however, does not detract from the text, as one would expect, but instead offers the purest appreciation of her creative output.

The more traditional text-sound pieces offer a variety of approaches to the genre. Brian Reinbolt's Tuesday 3 a.m. (1983)and the collaborative Larry Polansky/John Bischoff Cocks crow, dogs bark, this all men know.... (1987) provide the greatest creative contrast. Mr. Reinbolt describes his work as a "heartfelt rather than a practiced reading" and the casual informality of his self-made "gift to Melody" is refreshing in its raw emotional content (it also sounds like it was recorded on a two-track cassette recorder). Mr. Polansky's notes for Cocks crow read like an equipment catalog, and what one hears is a well-rehearsed and executed series of algorithmic vocal processes, admirably crafted but musically lifeless. Utilizing primarily "concrete" accompaniment material for the soundtrack to a story, Susan Stone's Ruby's Story (1983) provides an adequately dramatic interpretation, as does Laetitia Sonami's ...