Did You Mean Music?

On a day off, I am strolling around the vast internetwork, looking and listening. I feel sorrow on finding that the wonderful guitar player Rod Poole was killed in his adopted home of Los Angeles last week. I have been listening to his masterpiece The Death Adder on and off since it was posted at one of my favourite music weblogs towards the end of last year. It is an incredible piece of music, a 45-minute long improvisation on solo guitar with just intonation. It is difficult to believe that it really was improvised, given the structural complexity of the piece. There is something so calming about the tuning. It feels elemental, Pythagorean. One biography of Poole now says that he was "assassinated". It is hard not to feel that way when someone who made such beautiful music is killed by a stranger, in a parking lot, after an argument about a collision that did not occur. Looking back at the posting of that piece of music, I notice that Greg Davis also downloaded the piece, and I begin to read back through some of his weblog. Last year Greg performed John Cage's spoken word Muoyce (1983), and curious to know more, I search for some more information. Google provides a lovely result—the first thing it asks is "Did you mean: music"? I am sure Cage would have enjoyed that. Reading about just intonation reminds me to listen again to La Monte Young's The Well Tuned-Piano, which reminds me in turn of the beautifully typeset Ubuweb edition of Young's Selected Writings, which concludes with this poem—