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More Fools Than Wise

from ORDO by Philip Blackburn

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about

More Fools Than Wise is the title I have given to two separate works played together, a Cageian mashup that could have happened in real time but didn’t. Instead of an intimate parlor recital by soprano with piano accompaniment, imagine her in front of you at a windswept cliff edge, with only the orchestrated sounds of all the nearby ships from around the world that day, on a four mile long stage; close but vast.

Nostalgia — if not grumpiness — is, apparently, nothing new. When Orlando Gibbons wrote his most famous madrigal, The Silver Swan (1612), he may have been bitching about falling standards, changing musical tastes, the behavior of dreadful politicians, copulatory vocalizations, or just kids these days. Either way, my swan song derives from a phonetic analysis of the text, exploding and revealing the psychological possibilities of the sound poem: choked, stoic, frustrated, bewildered, indignant, unleashed. It was written at the age of 19 while studying compositional linguistics with Kenneth Gaburo.

The Silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,
When Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
“Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close my eyes!
More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.”

As a guest artist at the 2004 Sound Symposium in Saint John, Newfoundland, I had the opportunity to write a score (actually just parts since there could be no conductor) for whatever ships, trawlers, tugs, and freighters came into the harbor that day, a Harbour [sic] Symphony. Community volunteer hooters and timers boarded the enormous ships and commandeered the horns, and the Coast Guard (illegally) used the emergency frequency to coordinate the start time. What followed was a contrapuntal conversation that was not only unrepeatable, but also different wherever you experienced it (sound takes time to travel the four miles from one end of the ‘stage’ to the other so simultaneous impulses would be experienced as anything but; Einstein would have loved it). The cliffs and the buildings, modulated by the weather, reflected the sounds and became part of the giant instrument echoing the soul of this 500 year old seaport. 100,000 citizens were in the audience whether they knew it or not.

credits

from ORDO, released October 21, 2023
The Silver Swan (1982)
Carrie Henneman Shaw, soprano
Orlando Gibbons, text
+
Harbour Symphony (2003)
For 8 ships’ horns
Saint John’s Harbour, Newfoundland

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Philip Blackburn Saint Paul, Minnesota

Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England, and studied music there and at the University of Iowa with Kenneth Gaburo. He is a public artist specializing in sound — a composer/environmental sound-artist. Blackburn’s works have been heard in ships’ harbors, state fairs, forests, and coming out of storm sewers, as well as in galleries, parking lots, and on concert stages.

philipblackburn.com ... more

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