Phalba (revisited)
by Joseph Celli
NOTE: Composer and oboist Joseph Celli composed Phalba
(revisited) shortly after Jerry's death. He performed it at the Jerry
Hunt Memorial Concert at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, New York on March
19, 1994. These are Joseph's program notes for that performance.
The
all-night talking (it was only two hours from Philadelphia to NYC) punctuated by
toll booths and occasionally my waking as Jerry navigated the turnpikes had a
continuity with all of our other meetings, phone talks, letters and trips: Jerry
provided the context and I was an occasional punctuation mark (a nod, an
"uh-huh", a question). From scorpions in my shoe to nicotine pads, to
new circuitry, to a pop record's chord progressions, to black popcorn kernels,
to gardening, to Indian/Asian foods and spices, to mimetic gestures, to any of a
hundred topics, Jerry spoke and spoke and spoke and spoke and spoke and spoke
and spoke like a mantra of Texas locusts.
And of course, he wrote. Texts that needed an encyclopedia to decipher in the
mysterious use of language so oblique yet so precise, with references to
shamanistic practices, black magic, John Dee, Edward Kelley and others.
Dictionary at hand I would look for skrying, chimanzzi, bitome...often
times giving up and grudgingly agreeing with John Rockwell's description of
Jerry's writing as "...mandarin obfuscation...". Sampling Jerry,
"PHALBA (stream): extractive for mechanic device or system of
devices, alone using electronic adaptive sound recall system...a series of
movement activity patterns as mimetic exercise articulates the skrying of the
adaptive stream...a series flood of incipient, responsive and interruptive
sounds produced by a single isolate source generator."
Jerry in Minneapolis, Jerry in Rotterdam, Jerry in NYC, Jerry in
Philadelphia, Jerry in Dallas, Jerry in Miami. But the image that is imbedded is
the Jerry in Canton with the 600 pound Herefords, Longhorns and Brangus as
neighbors (neighbors who were safe because he was a vegetarian). We climb into
the 20 year old VW bug. I try to move a pile of music manuscript paper from the
front floor away from my soaked shoes. Jerry insists that it remain, and my feet
can go on top of it. He explains that it is only a prop. When he's hired to
write music for a commercial video, film or whatever, he brings in this stack of
manuscript, and the producers are very impressed. When they leave, he and his
friends improvise, and they improvise and they improvise.
Phalba (revisited), 1994, is dedicated to Jerry Hunt, and loosely based
on materials, mimetic gestures, sounds and notations from the original Phalba
(stream): extractive that Jerry composed for me in 1983. I subsequently
presented about 50 performances of the work, including a live satellite
performance at the New Music America Festival in Washington DC. In this
performance, my live signal was sent to Jerry in Austin via satellite. He
processed my sound live, and it was sent back to the performance space and mixed
with my live sound. The festival couldn't afford a sound check on the satellite,
so it was all live and filled with great apprehension. Tonight we don't need a
satellite -- Jerry is getting the signal real clear.
Original Material Copyright © 1994 by Joseph Celli. HTML Coding Copyright
© 2001 by Michael Schell.
All Rights Reserved.