Almamusicosophy

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Welcome to the inner sanctum of Almatexts. Almamusicosophy is their holy core in several ways. First, it both features and frames the one long piece of writing from which most of the short pieces here are drawn. This was a mammoth, mythic labor of seven years, totaling more than 1700 pages. It is the longest dissertation in the history of Wesleyan University's music department, maybe of the university itself--maybe of the universe itself!

I know what you aspiring Ph.D. candidates are asking yourselves: why won't my committee members let me write 1700 pages? Click here to see the letter I wrote mine to convince them to allow it...

Long as it is, I produced it without stress; a few hours/pages a day every morning for seven years, in a situation of support and fertile stimulus and freedom from any other care except its production…call it a successful experiment in Living Well.

To describe this Mater of all Almatexts: a conventional ethno/musicological study couched within an epic saga of reincarnations, time travel, mind travel and other cosmic fancies in the migrations and histories of peoples from Africa to and throughout Eurasia and the Americas over the last 50,000 years and, speculatively, over the next 30. Study and saga weave in and out of the reading like a braid, feeding and feeding off each other.

The complete work is available through UMI Dissertation Services (www.umi.com; search with my last name only to get to it). It sells for at least $23 (as PDF download) to at most $48 (as hardcover), which is quite the bargain in this case, due to UMI's practice of selling all dissertations for the same price, regardless of how many separate 300-page volumes they inhabit (mine takes six). It will also be available through Inter-Library Loan from Wesleyan University and other libraries around the world.

What I offer here adds to the first 24 preview pages viewable at the UMI site, giving interested readers and researchers a more detailed sense of what information is where and how to access it. Much of the dissertation is divided into the separate papers and chapters distributed throughout this site; shorter book versions will be available soon. It is my ur-text...

So--begin reading, please. I will reappear on this blackground between excerpts, to bridge them.

 

 

Northern Sun,Southern Moon:
Identity, Improvisation, and Idiom in
Freie Musik Produktion

including...

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Germanity/Germania, Die Musik/Musica Imperium

This look at German identity in Western music history weaves literary with scholarly conceits to argue a primal connection between "whiteness" and the "blackness" manifested in American jazz. It connects the musical gestures of post-free-jazz German improvisers with figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, JS Bach, Arnold Schönberg and others.
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Selected Excerpts
from Chapters Six through Nine showcase the narrative voice and style couching interviews with FMP musicians.
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a walk on the wild side
in which our scholarly hero's real adventure begins, with his real meeting with a mythical creature in a forest skirting Vienna...

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The Five Horsemen of the Post-Millennium

in which said adventure proceeds through a double consciousness of interviews with FMP artists Wolfgang Fuchs, Johannes Bauer, Axel Dörner, Thomas Borgmann, and Willi Kellers...and a trek from those Vienna woods to the creature's home cave in the Caucasus Mountains (for that account, click her

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The World as Big House,
Fully Stocked and Occupied
Part III opens sometime around the year 2033 (or the equivalent; the dating system has changed). The sixty-year-old daughter of Mike Heffley has come to Berlin to look into the old boxes of papers and notes left by her father before he finished his dissertation's Part III, its raw source material. Her quest is to investigate it for its part in her own closure with her relationship with its author.

Through her voice, we get a picture of how the world has developed since the dawning of the new millennium. It is a world resonant with the larger historical and cultural implications of the process and philosophies of post-jazz, post-Western art music free improvisation of the Europeans and Americans peopling Heffley's study...

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Almaexcerpts 2

The continuation of Geneva's narrative explores issues of race, literacy/orality, eros, and intergenerational dynamics pertaining to the music, all in mythic and personal rather than abstract impersonal terms.
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Theolitically Speaking

is both the climax of the "fictional" narrative and of the way its techniques work with and enhance the scholarship. The latter is a meditation on the larger cultural/historical contexts of FMP and its aesthetic, drawing on German phenomenology and French existentialism, neurobiology as psychology's phenomenological face, the literary universe of Henry Miller as it overlaps with European/American anarchism, musicological studies of time, and a few other pertinent odds and ends.
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Out

And so, as all things good and bad must end (sort of), here do we, on our final note...

Sources