to

Re-Vision Radio's

TOWER OF SONG
Weekly Program Guide

Program airs Mondays 12 to 2 a.m.

(Formerly Wednesdays, then Mondays 2 to 5 a.m.)

Here you will find the
Manifesto & Visionary Recital

Playlist & Images
To access Playlist & (thematic) Images for Essay-with-Soundtrack topics, click this link or hold mouse over "Program Guide" page 8 on index of pages to left and sub-menu page "Playlist & Images" will appear, then click.

The TOWER OF SONG is the program that's the best kept secret on KUSP's late-night lineup.

What puts this musical and philosophical radio show in a class (genre) all by itself is the fact that it doesn't just play songs—it showcases songs.

 
RE-VISION RADIO is a Musical and Philosophical program broadcast from an imaginal window at 88.9 on your radio dial from the TOWER OF SONG.  It’s hosted by the Gypsy Scholar and Bohemian Essayist, with a flower in one hand (or name) and a sword in the other.  RE-VISION RADIO is a “Soul-making” program, because it’s essentially an “underworld perspective”—a seeing below surface appearances to the occult or symbolic truth of things.  Thus, Everybody Knows RE-VISION RADIO is truly Underground Radio. —"Re-VisionRadio's Manifesto & Visionary Recital" [Scroll down to read entire Manifesto.]


The Tower of Song program was created out of the Gypsy Scholar's love for radio—especially 60's "underground radio." The fact that he couldn't get enough of it when it died out means that it was his "Impossible Love" affair with underground (free-form) radio. This is why the Gypsy Scholar created a place—a late-night sanctuary--where one could go to find an alternative to most of what is called "non-commercial" radio. This is why Re-VisionRadio is a "Soul-making" program. This is why the the Tower of Song  is from the "invisible landscape"—"Somewhere Else" radio.

There is no cure for impossible love when it revolutionizes our lives. When it leads to the future as well as into the past, when it cannot be comprehended on a purely personal level, then it is not an illness, but an initiation. Initiation into depths, but also into longing, and this will not, should not, ever cease. This longing keeps us in proximity to our souls. It reminds us, as we conscientiously go through the obligations and activities of every day, that there is a place, a "somewhere else" where we also belong and need to go to from time to time. We are reminded of this place by a sentence we read in a newspaper, a picture on a subway wall, a memory brought to life by a smell, [a piece of dialogue from a movie that speaks to us, a beautiful face that haunts our dreams, a passage from a book taken randomly off the shelf,] or by a song we hear on the radio . . . –Impossible Love

The Gypsy Scholar  & Bohemian Essayist,  mixing and remixing argument & song—dialectics & music—in a musical and philosophical program,  presents his    Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack,    which "Orphic" Scholarship reveals itself to be a kind of performance-art.

What are the Treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves, are they any other than Mental Studies & Performances? --William Blake
  
The Gypsy Scholar's program,   because breaks down the strict boundaries between conventional radio genres/formats of "music" and "informational" programming,   also breaks down the strict boundaries between high, academic culture and low pop-culture —between "high argument" and "deep song"—, and therefore  ...  is broadcast not  from the "Ivory Tower" but from "that tower down the track / the Tower of Song." 

And because PhiloSophy (as admitted by Plato) is a form of “play” —an artistic endeavor—, it makes the student of philosophy (via radio) a scholar-artist, who is distinguished by his or her ability to synthesize and play with knowledge —"to create a collage or montage of ideas or intellectual mind-jazz." And given that the radio program in Argument & Song is inspired by Orpheus —bard, prophet, master rhetorician and divine musician and "singer of love-songs” — the Gypsy Scholar, exiled from the Ivory Tower, offers the following insights into what he is trying to do with another, higher office (of scholarship) in that "tower down the track, the Tower of  Song":


Ah ye old ghosts! ye builders of dungeons in the air! [ivory towers] why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of nature, and I know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector & delineator of occult harmonies & unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, & wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing, a priest of the Soul yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health & [the] harmonious power [of music].

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation.

I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Professor of the Joyous Science, Troubadour of Knowledge, and Orphic Scholar]


Today, in the 21st century, the problem is synthesis—collage—how to put it all together, or put it in juxtaposition so it makes some sense. 

[Jennifer Stone, radio personality]

Re-Vision Radio TOWER OF SONG

Manifesto & Visionary Recital

"Our High Romantic Argument"

RE-VISION RADIO is a Musical & Philosophical program broadcast from an imaginal window at 88.9 on your radio dial from the Tower of Song. It’s hosted by the Gypsy Scholar and Bohemian Essayist, with a flower in one hand (or name) and a sword in the other. RE-VISION RADIO is a “Soul-making” program, because it’s essentially an “underworld perspective”—a seeing below surface appearances to the occult or symbolic truth of things. Thus, Everybody Knows, RE-VISION RADIO is truly Underground Radio.

The experimental format of RE-VISION RADIO is a seamless remixing of argument & song, dialectics & music, or logos & mythos; in other words, philosophical essays are put to music, producing the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. Thus Everybody Knows, since there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song, that RE-VISION RADIO puts its philosophy best in song—as the lyric goes: “That’s why I’m telling you in song.” In mixing and remixing the noetic texts of Philosophy with the poetic texts of Song, RE-VISION RADIO offers its listeners an Orphic soundscape; an eclectic medley of the esoteric and the popular, high academic culture and low pop-culture—high argument & deep song—not from the Ivory Tower, but from “that tower down the track”: the Tower of Song. Because Everybody Knows that to really grok the meaning of a song context is everything, RE-VISION RADIO’s essays contextualize its songs, and, conversely, its songs compose its essay. In the same way, this dialectical relationship between argument & song means that the prose essay contributes gravitas to popular song and, alternatively, popular song gives wings to the essay, composing a Musekal Philosophy. Thus, the fusion of song & argument is the rhyme and reason for the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which, juxtaposing argument with song, makes for melodious (aesthetic) ideas and discursive notes—a kind of Philosophical Concert and, conversely, a kind of Musical Essay. This dialectical inter-textuality creates a novel radio art-form: scholarship as performance art (William Blake's "Mental Studies & Performances"), which is a Romantic way to “associate ideas in a state of excitement” and to “rave on words on printed page.” RE-VISION RADIO’S musical inter-textuality, because it reads metaphorically between the lines of Philosophy & Song, becomes the imaginal hyper-textuality of a Soul-text—a soul-inflected montage of spoken word and music. Thus, Everybody Knows that this imaginal kind of Radio-text, haunted by song, is inspired by the legendary Orpheus, divine rhetorician and magical “singer of love songs.” Questing back—”way, way back”—in search of the magical power of music, with the archetype of Orpheus as its guide, RE-VISION RADIO broadcasts a Musekal Philosophy (by way of the ancient “Sicilian Muse”), which is the perfect union of words and music broadcast through the Essay-with- Soundtrack—the Orphic synthesis of what has been called the “Infinite Conversation” and the “Endless Melody.” This perfect union of argument & song is the Romantic ideal of the synthesis of “poetry and thought,” “a union of fact and imagination;” “not Poetry, but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory.” With this Romantic union of poetic furor and reason, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack becomes “our high argument,” or elevated discourse—“Reason in her most exalted mood.” (Wordsworth) Thus, with the 19th-century “Romantic Essay” as its model, RE-VISION RADIO‘s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is a novel revival of the lost “Art of the Personal Essay” where “Soliloquy bridges the gap between high art and popular song.” The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is designed to communicate a musical sense of philosophy, one that can be understood as “Speculative Music,” from one point of view and, from another, ”Philosophy in a New Key.” Thus, Everybody Knows that the Essay-with-Soundtrack’s musekal philosophy is also a (Romantic) “philosophy of music;" a musekal philosophy that issues not in a discursive but in a lyrical knowledge. And, in seamlessly remixing argument & song through “Mental Studies & Performances” (Blake), Everybody Knows, too, that RE-VISION RADIO’s scholarship as performance art makes philosophy sound more musical and, conversely, music sound more philosophical. Thus, in the TOWER OF SONG, philosophical essays aspire to the condition of music; to the condition of music translated into words: The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which approximates what the Romantics envisioned—the end of philosophy as poetry, or song.

The TOWER OF SONG program—“not for everyone, but for madmen only”—is underwritten by its ancestral tutelary deities: Hermes-Mercury—Trickster-god of those radio communications and connecting synchronicities—and Sophia-Magdalene, Our Dark Lady of the Romantic Tower of Song—Goddess-Muse of Eternal Wisdom & Wit and ancient lonely-tower libraries. RE-VISION RADIO is co-hosted by the Angel of Imagination & Music, along with its “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond” in hyperspace, where Ushahina, angel of the hours between midnight and the dawn, gets you on her wavelength.

The purpose of the RE-VISION RADIO program is to help guide its listeners--"in the middle of the night"--in searching for, by following the song, and entering into that long-abandoned Romantic “Lonely Tower,” situated in that alternative mental dimension—the “invisible landscape.” “Oh let my Lamp at midnight hour / Be seen in some high Lonely Towr, / Where I may oft out-watch the Bear, / With thrice great Hermes.” [Milton] Because RE-VISION RADIO is broadcast from this ancient Tower of the “Visionary Company,” where “the poetic champions compose,” in the midnight hour “those funny voices” whisper: “You can call my love Sophia, / I call my love Philosophy.” And, since the beginning of real Philosophy is the “sense of wonder,” Everybody Knows that the “sense of wonder” with radio is all in the mind's eye—radio as Theater of the Imagination—, making RE-VISION RADIO the alternative radio concept that lets you see what it means. And what it means, by way of the Romantic “Arts & Sciences of Imagination,” is that Golgonoozan “artifice of eternity”— The TOWER OF SONG.

The "Manifesto & Visionary Recital" is both a description of the Orphic Essay-With-Soundtrack's synergy of Argument & Song and a demonstration of it (as its content is made up of argument and lyrics from poetry and popular song). To read entire "Manifesto & Visionary Recital," click link which takes you to my Re-Vision Radio, page (#7, halfway down page): Manifesto

Oh let my Lamp at midnight hour
Be seen in some high Lonely Towr,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes.

Milton, 'Il Penseroso' (1633)

"a schizoid polycentricity, a style of consciousness that thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions."

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, in eclectically mixing Philosophy & Music --dialectics/argument and song--, also broadcasts a confluence of the ancient "Infinite Conversation" & "Unending Song." Again, this goes back to the legendary Orpheus, whose favorite pursuits were rhetoric and music--Orpheus, "singer of love songs." And thus Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack mixes PhiloSophy & Music--a harmonious interplay of dialectics/argument and song, prose composition and metrical composition; a concourse of prose discourse and lyrical outpouring that issues in a soulful Radio-text of ideas & music. Thus, Everybody Knows that the ability to put complex (philosophical) ideas into lyrics (of song) is the gift of Orpheus. And, therefore, the relationship of Argument to Song in the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is that the song is a way of saying everything the prose says, but all at once!

"Behind the lyric and the song is the governing, central idea, and you have to keep both of them going, so neither gets bogged down. The trick is to keep them going together.” (Stephen Sondheim)

Therefore, Everybody Knows that the Gypsy Scholar loves to, through the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack,

"rave on words on printed page."

Given that the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist (as intellectual outsider) is in exile from the Ivory Tower and has moved to "that tower down the track"--the TOWER of SONG--, he stands outside the other dominator institutions of church and state, and thus stands with the "Romantic Outsiders" of history; on the side of the popular (outside academia), the profane (outside the temple) the outlaw (outside the state)--on the side of "Always Lost," the "Beautiful Losers" (the bohemian "Beats"), who carry on the "Mental Fight."

In the past few months the Gypsy Scholar has been consistently amazed at the meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) between his program and Robert Pollie’s.  Of course, it would be logically explainable if he listened to the 7th Ave Project when it is originally aired before his program (Sunday afternoons), but the amazing thing is the fact that the GS never listens to it then, only when it’s repeated after the Tower of Song at 2 a. m. Monday.  Once more, if the programs harmonized in content just once in a while, the GS wouldn’t give it a second thought. However, when it has serendipitously happened almost week after week, he can’t help but be amazed.  (I mean, what are the odds of it happening with this frequency?) Therefore, since the two programs complement each other in intriguing ways, the GS thought he would list what he could remember from mental notes taken listening to the 7th Ave Project program on the way home from the station. What follows are the correspondences or "harmonies" between the Tower of Song and the 7th Avenue Project.

“The unseen harmony is mightier than the visible.” --Heraclitus

Gypsy Scholar, 2/2/9

7th Ave Project 3/22/9
"Saluting the Birds and Bugs"
Saxophonist and nature writer David Rothenberg studies bird song by playing music with birds. His book is Why Birds Sing.  Rothenberg's book apparently demonstrates that birds are not, as scientists suppose, merely instinctively hard-wired to sing in order to attract mates or establish territory (the "functional" explanation). Even Darwin said that birds have a natural aesthetic sense; they appreciate beauty.)  Thus a bird song can be "an entire musical statement or phrase" and birds in general have a much more varied and complex repertoire than ornithologists know about, one that serves no apparent function; they sing when they don't even need to.  In other words, it seems that birds sing just for the hell-of-it!--just like humans. And so they, too, have a "culture of song." Rothenberg says: "Some of the most extreme examples of bird virtuosity have been shown to have no real connection to easily identifiable function and purpose." According to Rothenberg, science isn't enough of a perspective to answer the mystery of bird-song. In addition to the "science" of bird-song, he talks about the "poetry and music of bird-song." Rothenberg says: "I'm intrigued that the poets were first to really pay close attention to bird-song. The most accurate transcription of a bird-song in the whole 19th century was not by a scientist but by the English poet John Clare. Many English poets wrote poems about nightingales [Wordsworth and Keats] as a symbol of romance and love but they actually didn't listen so closely to the bird . . . ." Nevertheless, despite the actual discordant sound of the nightingale, Rothenberg talks about why the nightingale became to "muse" to so many poets. It was because it symbolized the "exuberant energy" and "desire" of singing. Thus he says "the poets were more able to grasp the rhythmic, direct possibilities of bird-song, because they were looking for new ways to shape rhythmic language. Rothenberg asserts that birds sing just because that have to!

Tower of Song 3/23/9
So here's the harmony of bird and bird-song as the subject of Rothenberg's study and the GS's program.  The GS presented essays (2006) in his "Origins of the Troubadours" series entitled "Mythopoetic Songbirds, Poets and Lovers," which started off with the following epigraph: "In the beginning, the bird is all things: Zen object of contemplation, singer like the poet himself, solitary like the soul—or is it God?—mourning witness to the lover’s blight, innocent, joyful beauty itself—or is that the Lover?  They are clan brothers (some say it is a cabal) these poets and birds, survivors from forever, from the age of dinosaurs, but they are still, stark on the horizon.  They keep us guessing; is he our soul? is she my lover? is she the singer? Does he clarify?  Does he mystify? Will he fly away, just as I thought I finally had him in sight?"  The essays noted all the various song-birds--nightingales, skylarks, mockingbirds, etc.--the poets, from the troubadours to the Romantics (and John Clare was a "Romantic" poet), used in verse, and not only traced this back to the early image of the hermetic song-bird of the mystic poets of Andalusia, but to one of the first objects of worship of our Paleolithic ancestors--the "Bird-Goddess." To the erato-mystic poets of Andalusia and the Provence, the mythopoetic songbird symbolized in one image the beloved (divine and human), the soul, the muse, and the art of poetry itself.  And the GS made the point that these two cultures--one in the south of Spain and one in the south of France--were "cultures of song;" "It was a universe that sang." In other words, the GS's essays in Argument & Song had already made a grand (and continuous) metaphor for what scientist/musician Rothenberg would talk about; or, to put it another way, Rothenberg's book, Why Do Birds Sing, is a reading between the lines of the GS's "Mythopoetic Songbird . . ."  But there's more than just this aspect of harmony in Rothenberg's work and the GS's.  In answer to the question posed to Rothenberg, "Why is a mockingbird's song so musical?, he answers: "From the bird's perspective these songs are not carrying information. Birds have a whole other kind of song that does carry information . . . [bird calls]", but bird-song has no specific information; it's all performance. What excites Rothenberg as a musician is the bird's "inventiveness." "Biology has nothing to say about the similarity. But the mockingbird is interested. The mockingbird plays with these similarities; he mixes them together, he makes a piece out of similarity and difference. You know, which is the way a human musician might work with combining different things.  He's playing around, he's exploring, he's mixing together contrast, similarity, rhythm, and difference. Mockingbirds always repeat their imitations, you know three, four, five, six, seven times in different amounts. If you count the amount of times things are imitated here, it's in a very structured way. That structure doesn't translate into a message. Its the whole ... in the performance, in the singing that the job is done. So, to me, it's much more like music than language." In other words, the GS's "performance art" (scholarship as artistic play) of mixing and remixing Argument & Song just may be an art of imitation--the imitation of the mythopoetic songbird.   Therefore the GS can say, without embarrassment or apology, that his radio program is truly for the (mythopoetic song-) birds!

7th Ave Project 2/8/9
“Sound Unbound”
To paraphrase host Robert Pollie: Paul Miller, a.k.a DJ Spooky, is a musical master of the remix. His book is Sound Unbound, a book of essays from a wide range of writers on what Miller calls "remix culture.” The book includes a CD of some of his latest audio creations, combining spoken-word from recordings from artists of past eras along with musical samples and beats from every corner of the globe—“music without borders.” He is one of the foremost musical agitators who confound stylistic classification and make a hash out of genre conventions. Defying traditional categories is much more than musical, for sound artists remixing is a dominant metaphor for the digital age. More than a metaphor, it's a model or living. Samples include mixing folk music from a traditional culture and rock music.

DJ Spooky talking about his book: ". . . and I really wanted to figure out how do we get people to get rid of all these rules and boundaries between high or so-called high culture vs. what’s going on with current stuff, like electronic music and hip-hop--all the different kinds of genres coming out of the late 20th century. And you’d be surprised but people have a lot of genre definition boundaries. And with sampling and this kind of globalization that’s been going on, well music has become more hybrid than anyone is willing to admit.” Miller believes than globalization has scrambled the conventional musical categories and he thinks it’s a good and healthy thing and says he wanted to do “a literary equivalent of that, kind of a literary mash-up.” Host Pollie points out that people have been breaking boundary genres as long as there have been genres. “In the whole history of music it’s always been about mixing things together that weren’t there before. That’s what originality is, at least, partly composed of.” So Pollie wonders why people continue to insist on boundary distinctions, “when you could easily say they were blown out of the water hundreds of years ago.” While Miller admits that we need both rules and rule-breaking, that they go together and that there is a good reason why certain musical forms are different, he points out that the ossification of forms and genres are for the most part not invented by musicians but from those outside the creative process, the critics, leading to categorical imperatives in music.

For Miller, “sound is very much a universal situation, and people will respond to it emotionally, psychologically, mathematically—you name it . . . .”  He explains that his book looks at “sound as an art . . . a manifesto for looking at sound as its own process of thinking about contemporary art, composition, and what it means to be a composer, writer, or artist dealing with this media.” It turns out that as you listen to DJ Spooky you hear a very literary DJ. He cites literary personalities and allusions: Apollinaire, William S. Burroughs, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, etc, whom he remixes to hip-hop and electronic music in order to demonstrate, for example, the literary context that goes into the cut-up technique and for non-linear thinking. He wants to make a case for techno, hip-hop, and etc being the real inheritors of the avant-garde: Italian Futurists, the Surrealist notion of automatic writing, modernist collage technique “So it’s a 20th century acceptance of multiplicity.”

Tower of Song 2/9/9
There are a number of parallels with the GS’s program here, which are outlined:
1) “confound stylistic classification and make a hash out of genre conventions."
2) "Samples include mixing folk music from a traditional culture and rock music."
3) The GS’s Argument & Song is a metaphor for mixing and remix.
4) ". . . and I really wanted to figure out how do we get people to get rid of all these rules and boundaries between high or so-called high culture vs. what’s going on with current stuff..." This is the main metaphor for the GS’s “Re-VisionRadio Manifesto & Visionary Rectal;” the mixing of high academic culture and low pop-culture.
5) "And with sampling and this kind of globalization that’s been going on, well music has become more hybrid than anyone is willing to admit.” Host Pollie points out that people have been breaking boundary genres as long as there have been genres.  As the GS’s Essay-with-Soundtrack, “The Origins of the Troubadours,” pointed out, this hybridization of musical form can be seen as properly starting in the hybrid Andalusian poetry of the muwashshaha, with its blend of classical Arabic and vernacular Romance language.
6) So Pollie wonders why people continue to insist on boundary distinctions, “when you could easily say they were blown out of the water hundreds of years ago.” The Romantics pioneered post-modern boundary breaking, as in, for instance, Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads,” whose aesthetic manifesto put poetry in the common, everyday language.
7) "the Surrealist notion of automatic writing, modernist collage technique." The GS’s Manifesto (located on the Tower of Song website) advocates a new scholar-as-artist, who plays with knowledge to create a “collage of ideas,” that informs the GS’s Essay-with-Soundtrack, and which is composed, as the guest would say, with “quotation and citation;” a current fascination according to DJ Spooky.
8) “So it’s a 20th century acceptance of multiplicity.” Again, the GS’s Essay-with-Soundtrack, “The Origins of the Troubadours,” discusses the unique historical phenomenon for the medieval period, the multiculture of Andalusia.

The following, then, is a more in-depth analysis of the connections between the content of Pollie’s interview and the content of the GS’s program, which are all the more intriguing since the GS knew nothing of DJ Spooky.

With a post-modernist sensibility, Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, rejects the strict “pure style” notion as an illusion, since he believes that “everything is mixed, and everything will always be mixed;” that the so called “pure style” was at one time a mixed genre and only at some point a line was drawn in the sand, as if to say after this point no more mixing. So it figures that a JD who majored in philosophy and literature would have ideas on this subject that harmonizes with the GS. So it also figures, with this background, that DJ Spooky would offer a book with a companion CD, which contains archival samples of poets and artists speaking mixed with music. (The GS has for years thought that the post-modern writer should ideally have a book/CD.)  We hear a sample from the early 20th-century French avant-garde poet, playwright, theater artist, and occultist, Antonin Artaud, backed up by a quirky jazz tune. (Significantly enough, Artaud was born in the south of France, in Marseille, the home of the troubadours and their monumental innovation for Western culture. And, significantly enough again, Artaud had a radio program in 1948 that was banned because “he was saying all this crazy stuff about magic on the air.”)  It should be pointed out that, as far as poets and spoken-word performance with a jazz background is concerned, it was Jack Kerouac and the Beats who brought this into the mainstream.  And the Beats, like Burroughs, also experimented with cut-up, automatic writing, and spontaneous composition.  And, like the Beats (and avant-garde composer John Cage), Miller is partial to “randomness mixed with selection” in the creative process. (He lets on that his nickname, “The Subliminal Kid,” was appropriated from Burroughs’ novel Nova Express.) Significantly enough, DJ Spooky refers to this mixing and remixing of disparate musical forms—e.g., Gypsy music, classical music, hip-hop—as “an alchemical process.” We next hear the same kind of sample mix from Joyce, who, as Miller points out, appropriated everything around him, even scarps of paper with phrases he incorporated into his novels. He was a master of the “urban fragment.” (It should be pointed out that, although Miller doesn’t mention it, Joyce had an excellent singing voice and often performed for an audience. Thus musical rhythms get structurally translated into his prose. Joyce’s artistic inheritance should also be pointed out, since Miller more than once mentions the idea of culture and art as “fragment.” Again, the Romantics pioneered not only the practice of breaking boundaries and fragmenting strict genres, but also created an entire mythopoetics of the fragment.)

There is something in the mixing and remixing of musical genres, which Miller describes as an art of multiplicity, that involves the social dimension. The GS’s essays in Argument & Song on the origins of the troubadours discover the social dimension (and political issues) of what happened in Andalusia as a background to what the Arabo-Jewish poet-singers were doing in mixing the high, classical Arabic with the lowly vernacular or Romance languages to create a hybrid form of art, one which got a lot of flack from the purist high-culture watchdogs of the time. Andalusia was a pluralistic culture, with Moslems, Jews, and Christians living together in relative peace. In other words, Andalusia was a mix— artistically culturally, and racially.  However, like what happened in Occitania later, with the crusade against that independent mixed culture of the south, the forces of mono-culture, the King and Queen and the Church of Spain reconquered the south in the name of “racial purity” and ended the multicultural experiment that was Andalusia. In each case, in Andalusia and Occitania, the poet-singers had to go into exile in other lands, but this paradoxically lead to more musical mixing, and in the case of the gypsy, or Romani, people from  southern Spain, this mass exile to North Africa and points beyond gave us not only what we know as Flamenco (and Tango) but the Afro-Caribbean rhythms that found their way into American bebop jazz in the forties. This was the message of the GS’s essays on the topic—this and that our post-modern genre of “world music” began in Andalusia.  (Again DJ Spooky’s point—“So it’s a 20th century acceptance of multiplicity”—means that the history and memory (so important to music, as DJ Spooky also stressed) of Andalusia is essential to our understanding of multiculturalism and the culture wars of today.) So the GS was truly gratified when he heard host Pollie say to DJ Spooky, “Historically a lot of times artist distinctions, like among genres, seem tied up with an effort to distinguish social classes or ethnicities or nations or races,” and ask: “Do you think that genre distinctions always reflect some underlying need by certain people to declare themselves separate from other people?” Miller responds in the affirmative and cites the example of the German “Aryan” concept of racial purity in order to separate themselves from other Europeans. However, the GS had already pointed out that this really started with the Spanish Reconquista and the church/state “blood purity” laws that either drove the Jews and Moslems out or forced them to convert. And in the process, the GS pointed out that at that time in the medieval period the “other” was the (black) Arabo-Moor, who, though they had been in the south of Iberia for some 700 years were not considered “European.”  (An ethnocentric and separatist “myth of Westernness” gets translated into the academic discipline of Romance philology in the 19th century, which eschews any attempt to connect the musical Troubadour tradition to origins or influences from Hispano-Arabic Andalusia. Miller’s basic assertion—“nothing is original, nothing is pure”—would apply to the supposedly sui generis invention of the genre of romantic love song by the troubadours.)

Here, discussing the mixing of ethnicities in relation to music, Miller dovetails with the GS’s quest for origins conducted through his Essay-with-Soundtrack (“The Origins of the Troubadours,” which the GS admitted had started as an academic inquiry but became an ethnic search too) when he touches upon the issue of a people (in his case blacks) searching for their ancestral roots. He notes how the “super-scrambled” American ethnic scene (history as remix) is reflected in our music and how black identity and survival “came out of the music and culture of trying to search for a past and to look for some kind of solid roots.”
 
This last topic leads nicely into Pollie’s next guest, the  gypsy or Romani bandleader Dragan Ristich, who combines traditional "Roma" (Pollie’s term) music with contemporary dance beats. Ristich sees his work as a musical as a political statement for cultural inclusion.  As Pollie explains, “the mix isn’t just musical, it has a message.” Again, the GS finds many parallels with his playing with ideas and music on radio through his Essay-with-Soundtrack, of which (especially the series “The Origins of the Troubadours: from Andalusia to Occitania”) can also be said: this musical “mix isn’t just musical, it has a message.”  

To conclude with a note from Pollie’s interview with DJ Spooky, he inquires of his guest about being interviewed on the media as a spokesman for the phenomenon of “remix culture;” about being put in the role of explaining this whole thing to a supposed public that doesn’t yet understand it.  Miller responds by pointing out: “There’s not a lot of DJs who do art, or not a lot of artist who do DJing, or not a lot of writers who are both a an artist and a DJ—I don’t know, it’s a weird thing.”

This radio program, the Tower of Song, proves that there is one here on the Central Coast who is a writer-scholar and a artist-deejay. And the GS has written extensively on his website in order to try and explain just what he’s about with his mixing of Argument & Song. Now, thanks to DJ Spooky, here’s a way that the GS can further explain and clarify his “musekal philosophy.” (“Why, why, why must I always explain?” –VM.)  

7th Ave Project 2/1/9
"How Art Beats Science"
Science writer Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, discusses how writers, artists, and poets have anticipated scientific breakthroughs with their work--sometimes by decades. These artists all, each in their own way, were trying to understand their own minds through experience.

Tower of Song 2/2/9
ToS program, being dedicated to the "poetic champions compose" (in the Tower of Song), takes Lehrer's scientific thesis for granted.  For instance, the GS's reliance for inspiration on the Romantic poets has already presented this thesis (like Blake--or Whitman or Proust--anticipating modern theories of perception: "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age"; "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees"): that the poet or artist is a secular "prophet," a Romantic axiom.  It has even been demonstrated that the Romantic poets anticipated the theory of evolution in their mythopoetics. (On a practical level, Shelley was very interested in science. Goethe sought to revise Newton's color theory with his own, and some today in "new-science" seem to think that Goethe was right.)  And even though these proto-scientists didn't have the scientific methodology or tools to qualify their ideas as "scientific," they at least avoided the epistemological trap that all too many scientists fall into--literalism/reductionism; e.g., this function is located in this part of the brain (or even, the mind is "located" in the brain).

7th Ave Project 12/14/8
"How Music Shaped Human Nature"
Interview with Daniel Levitin, author of the The World in Six Songs. The subject of the “musical brain” and the effect of music on the brain. (The GS is familiar with Levitin's books, and has recently gone to them to help clarify and explain what he has been trying to do with his program.)

Tower of Song 9/15/8
The Essay-with-Soundtrack, “History of Underground Radio,” explored innovative ideas getting translated into a musical form (and format).  Many connections between subject of essay and 7the Ave Project interview. Played Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” near end of the essay. Pollie ended his program with same song.

7th Ave Project 11/16/8
"A Happy Story About Brain Injury"
Interview with neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered massive stroke that affected her brain. She talked about the synthesis of the left and right hemispheres and her mystical experience.

Tower of Song 11/17/08
The Essay-with-Soundtrack, “Musical Philosophy” ended with song, “I Forgot That Love Existed,” which alluded to switching roles of head and heart—just like the neuroscientist described her brain hemorrhage effect; the right side becoming dominant and having mystical experience.

7th Ave Project 11/23/8
"The Bottom of Things"
Interview with Nobel Prize-winning MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, who ended the program reading from his book, The Lightness of Being: “. . . our substance is the hum a of strange music, a mathematical music more precise and more complex than a Bach fugue—the music of the grid [time-space].”

Tower of Song 11/24/08
The Essay-with-Soundtrack, “Musical Philosophy (2),” touched upon Pythagoras’ idea of “music of the spheres. (See sub-page "Renaissance Music Magic" link on page #6 "Musekal Philosophy.)

7th Ave Project 11/30/8
"Trust Your Brain?"
Interview with neuroscientist and philosopher Robert Burton.

Tower of Song 12/1/8
The Essay-with-Soundtrack, “Musical Philosophy (3),” dealt musically with many philosophical ideas, which were echoed in Pollie’s interview. Generally speaking, the criticism of the new-age movement's dogmatic certainty and the under-appreciated value of uncertainty and questioning.

Synchronicities in ideas between the two programs:

•    ToS: “feeling intellect” and “sensuous reason” / 7AP: “feeling knowledge”
•    ToS: The Essay-with-Soundtrack issues in “a style of consciousness that thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions.”  / 7AP: philosophical “ambiguity” and “uncertainty.”
•    ToS: the Essay-with-Soundtrack … is about commingling “sensuous reason” and a “feeling intellect,” thereby synthesizing the left and right brain.  “In music, observes,” the late composer and conductor George Szell, “one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.” “If this happens when your brain is on music—and you have followed the song—, then you know that you’re in the Tower of Song.”  / 7AP: “no separation between thought and feeling.”  “… the mind of science can’t give you a sense of purpose, but if you listen to a piece of music . . . you can have an ‘A-Ha’ experience.” (Burton)