7. F for Fake

Knee 2a

Welcome back again. This week I’m talking about the seventh track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘Knee 2a’.

And just in case you haven’t yet checked it out, Dr Balanced (me when I’m DJing) has done a promo mix for The Sixteenth (me when I’m writing music) and it’s up on YouTube, Soundcloud, and Mixcloud right now!

Andrew Lloyd Webber presents ‘The Plagiarist’

Late in his career, Orson Welles made a film called F for Fake, a documentary of sorts featuring a whole bunch of rambling about authenticity, deception, plagiarism, and its relationship with the creative process. The central story involves the art forger Elmyr de Hory, and his biographer Clifford Irving, the latter of whom went to prison for attempting to sell a faked autobiography of Howard Hughes.

I remember it being an unsettling watch, and being confused from the outset whether de Hory was a real person (he was), whether it was actually him in the film or just an actor (it was actually him), whether Irving was real or made up (also real), and so on and so forth. The internet assures me that the film makes a strong case for forgery as legitimate art. I can’t put my hand on my heart and say I took that away from the experience (I was far too bamboozled), but I will say that in terms of late-career Welles, it beats spots off the Transformers cartoon movie where he plays a planet-eating robot god.

It’s helpful for me to invoke the mighty authority of America’s greatest dramatic talent because this week’s piece is… well. It’s Philip Glass, isn’t it? To which the answer is no. It’s me.

Or is it?

Well, yes it is. I wrote that whole thing from scratch myself.

Or did I?

Yes. Sorry, I could string this out all day, but I won’t. I wrote it. But it does sound a lot like Philip Glass. The story is - I wrote a sketch for something that sounded like Philip Glass, and I really liked the sketch, and then I spent a long long time working on it trying to get it to sound like me. Or, I suppose more accurately, NOT like Philip Glass. It never worked. I knew there was something good in there, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it to sound like a finished thing I had written.

The revelation for me came when I flipped the switch in entirely the opposite direction and tried as hard as I could to make it sound exactly like Philip Glass. Suddenly it all came together! And it was awesome! Job done! That organ sound you can hear, that’s a recording of an actual Farfisa Mini Compact organ, of the exact type he used in Einstein on the Beach (the opera that gifted me the concept of knees - of which this is one). I tried getting the voicing of the chords and the accompaniment as close as possible to something Philip Glass would have written, and I ended up loving it. So here it is, somewhere halfway between pastiche, tribute, ripoff, and DJing.

I’m Spartacus (The Farm’s first album)

There are two defences to this blatant plagiarism-adjacent behaviour. The first is a non-defence, in that I just don’t care. As a DJ, some time remixer, long time lover of plunderphonics, and somebody who spent time this week reflecting on the fact that I love Minnie Ripperton now because I grew up listening to The Orb’s A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld (a track which just involves The Orb dropping a bunch of random samples over her version of Lovin’ You), I would happily just drop a piece of actual, real life Philip Glass in the middle of my album if I thought it would be a cool thing to listen to. If it works, it works, and no doubt Philip’s estate would be grateful of the $0.0005 in streaming revenue.

The second defence, if you’re not persuaded by the fact that I don’t care, is sorry everybody, this is just how music works. Before the invention of formal copyright, composers and musicians frequently borrowed melodies, harmonies, and entire compositions from one another, seeing it as a natural part of the creative process rather than an infringement. Not to mention publishers, who would frequently publish works by unknown composers under the name of famous composers to get more sales. If you think the concept of selling substandard garbage by slapping a famous person’s name on it is a modern phenomenon, think again.

I actually studied composition at music college (yes, yes, thank you the wag at the back shouting ‘you can’t tell’). One of the things they get you to do as a baby composer - a lot - is write pastiches of other composers. You go through, as a matter of course, Palaestrina choral harmony, Bach fugues and chorales (I was terrible at both), Haydn string quartets, Beethoven sonatas, and probably some other stuff I’d stopped paying attention to before they threw me out.

I mention this because a very bog standard exercise you have to do on a composition course is to write music for a solo instrument. That’s one instrument, on its own, without any accompaniment, and you’re not allowed to cheat by choosing piano or organ or guitar or something that can play chords. I remember complaining to a lecturer that the problem with this exercise was that it was impossible to do anything original - you just end up sounding like Bach or Berio (two composers who famously wrote really good solo pieces). Her reply stuck with me - “yes, but wouldn’t you be happy if you ever wrote something as good as Bach?”

To which the answer is, yes, but I’m not going to, so let me have a crack at writing something as good as Philip Glass. Except… is it..? I mean… is this Philip Glass? That combination of baritone sax and bass guitar isn’t Philip Glass at all, it’s Michael Nyman. And the solo cello that’s been haunting us since I’m Not Going is back again being nothing to do with either of them. This is actually an act of my creativity, and the choice of imperfections is equivalent to the choice of perfections; they are both mine. In the pantheon of great fakes, it’s some kind of deliferate mistale, like a print of the Mona Lisa, except with the earring on the wrong ear.

Except hang on. Was the Mona Lisa wearing an earring? Can you see both her ears? Which ear was it on in the first place?

Knee 2a

Let’s pull back from the precipice of fakery before I disappear into my own strange loop of postmodern references and get run over at the next zebra crossing. We have a story to tell.

I love Philip Glass (in case you hadn’t figured that out already). His music for me is ‘lucid state’ music, where you are able to concentrate intensely and be carried along in a world of uninterrupted focus. The Mishima Quartet in particular is something I think I’ll never tire of in terms of focussing the mind, but Einstein on the Beach is also the best thing ever, and I unashamedly want the opening of Akhnaten at my funeral (“…take this king to sky!”). Not to mention - come back to mine after the pub, and we WILL watch Koyaanisqatsi. Yeah I know. I don’t care.

And so this knee is probably more important than its position in the album might suggest. What does our protagonist do after being told that he could be happy? Well, he needs to make a plan. The image of this track, and the music, is all about concentrating, stepping out of the ‘doing’ and into the planning part of things, where your mind is in flow and you are just intensely focussed on the logical spool of ideas that will get you from A to B. I love being in this place. In some ways, this is the easy, fun part. The hard part comes next week, when we have to do it.

Oh, by the way, one of the things I wrote in this update is a lie.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of what I’ve made. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!

You can listen to the music here, or through the links below.