Daniel Buckley Arts

I’m noticing an unexpected benefit of this audio collage study.

Using Digital Performer 8 and assembling sequences into songs I’m able to hear how different patterns react over time, how various relative volumes create unexpected atmospheres and how well or poorly specific timbres play with each other.

Making quick sound comparisons is as easy as creating a new song file and matching up alternative combinations of sound sequences on the grid.  Not only can one lay the sequences out horizontally (over time) but one can layer them vertically (as potential harmony elements) as well. And you can layer them as deep as you’d like.

It is a very fast process.

Eventually I will freeze the tracks (create audio files from the MIDI events of each) and use the resulting audio and various mixer and filter permutations to add even more malleability to the sound palette.

Posted in Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Music, Uncategorized

Better ingredients

Laying down bassoon tracks tonight on an experimental pentatonic collage piece I started working on about a week back. So far it’s scored for strings, piano and bassoon and runs about 23 minutes long. I expect it will become considerably longer, more dense and variable as it evolves.

I’m trying to create five sequences for each instrument, improvising parts without listening back to other tracks done on previous nights. Some use clipped, fast tones, albeit somewhat sparsely distributed. Others are more fluid and sustained, drawing upon instrumental abilities to swell and fade gradually. And some are somewhere in between.

All use the same five notes, though in widely varied sequences. But when they are randomly combined the generate sequences that are predominantly quiet and sad, with some grit and dissonance sewn in along the way.

Each night after I finish improvising the new parts I toss a few segments into the mix and listen back, sometimes moving the new materials around for better sonic fit.

Eventually I will freeze individual tracks. For those unfamiliar with the term, to freeze tracks is to turn MIDI sounds into audio snippets. The advantage of this is that the resulting audio tracks use less CPU power than MIDI, and are much more mobile on the time line than MIDI sequences in a “song.” One can also fade the audio tracks in and out more efficiently.

Over the next few weeks improvised sequences will be created using all of the instruments of the orchestra. And in the months ahead new layers and patterns will be tried out, hopefully building a piece that is cohesive and interesting.

I trust, as I always do, that the universe will guide me in the direction of something odd and lovely. So far, it has.

Posted in Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Music, Slice of Life, Uncategorized

I was 10 years old, sitting in my fifth grade class, when Mr. Schrader, principal at Irving School, came and knocked on the classroom door. He talked to my teacher in hushed tones. She physically recoiled, put her hand over her mouth and looked mortified by what he had told her.

My teacher returned to the class, visibly shaken, walked over to the door that connected with the sixth grade class and rapped on it. She spoke briefly and softly with the young sixth grade teacher next door. Suddenly that teacher turned white as a sheet and passed out cold in the doorway.

Something serious was up.

It was another fifteen minutes or so before the PA system revealed what had happened. President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.

As I recall, school ended for the day shortly thereafter. I was excited to be heading home because my brother Mike was supposed to be arriving for the weekend from the Marine Corps.  I wanted to know what he thought about this.

But that didn’t happen. All military leave had been canceled and all branches of the service put on high alert. Instead my mother met him at the bus station with a bag of sandwiches and told him he had to head back to Camp Lejeune.

We sat glued in front of the television set over the next few days as the details slowly trickled in. Everyone was in shock. The neighborhood streets, normally full of kids playing after school, were empty.

A day or two later I watched my first murder live on TV as Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby. What the hell was going on?

No single event in my lifetime so changed the world. A young, energetic president lay in a casket, his infant son saluting as it rolled past. Iconic images were seared in our collective consciousness. The Zapruter film. Oswald reeling fro the bullet. The grassy knoll. Mrs Kennedy trying to climb to the back of the limo to retrieve a chunk of JFK’s skull. Crazy shit.

Ironically my brother Mike would be among the honor guard that watched over JFK in the rotunda as Americans filed by to pay their respects.

Pandora’s box was open. Over the next few years assassination became all too common as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy followed.

About a month after the assassination my fifth grade class did a memorial presentation at a school assembly.  Quotes from JFK were read, and the Robert Shaw Chorale’s recording of Deep River was played. When I got my first job in a record store, I bought that recording. I sobbed when I listened to it, not quite wondering why, but knowing that all of the emotions of that time were let loose by that tune.

A portrait of JFK hung in my parents’ bedroom throughout my childhood. It was one of the few effects I requested when my mother died in 2005.

Posted in Daniel Buckley Arts, Slice of Life, Uncategorized

Buckley at 2008 Jonestown Lecture/Demonstration

Playing music is hitting the ultimate reset button.

You are literally bringing sonic universes into being when you sit down to do it.

I try to play music or work on new music at least an hour a day. Some days I succeed, and sometimes I make things up down the line.

Beyond producing a piece of music, playing music is a huge stress reliever. When we get bogged down in the particular problems of our lives we tend to dwell on those issues, to the point that sometimes they block other things needed to move on. The problems loop over and over in one hemisphere of our brain.

But playing the piano or guitar or any instrument that requires both hands breaks the loop by forcing one to shift hemispheres of the brain. You become focused on the music making, and the problem moves farther into the background. After playing for a half hour or so you’re ready to look more objectively at the issue, or just move on. And in the process, you’ve created a new piece of music or added a bit of muscle memory to your kit. You may even have stirred a possible solution to the problem.

At heart I am an experimental composer. Always have been. I was fascinated by the mathematics of music when I was first thinking of becoming a composer. The way harmony is perceived because of the mathematical relationships between sounding frequencies. The way cycles of sound could create complex structures as the elements were looped again and again over radically different cell durations. It was intellectually compelling to me long before I consigned myself to attempting to actually play out what I was thinking.

Technology has helped me along the way, and opened up sonic vistas that never couple have been imagined in Bach’s, or even Beethoven’s, day.

Every night I try to work on another different problem. Sometimes I like to limit the number of tones I might use, or vary specific timbres of things already recorded to hear how different instrumental combinations would vary the impact of my tune.

I still like layering cyclical materials of variable lengths, as well as building click-track created, quantized polyrhythms that rock.

I enjoy using sequencers and, even more, just improvising. Taking an instrumental tone and seeing where it carries me, sometimes with a thought-out premise or mood, sometimes just seeing what my fingers produce. It is never a waste of time.

Posted in Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Music, Slice of Life, Uncategorized

Last night I got an unexpected present.

Click images to enlarge.

Back a few weeks ago I put together a 20 minute reel of video I’d created using time lapse film techniques, for the Glow Festival in Oracle. I also wrote music for each of the five short films.

I was so exhausted from writing grants and filming that I conked out the opening night of Glow, and was filming the Tucson Flamenco Festival the second night. So I missed the show.

But late last week, Sharon Holnback, creator of the Glow Festival, asked if I’d like to have the 5 pieces shown on the side of a building, amidst some highlights form the Glow festival that she was bringing in for the first Toole Avenue Art Walk (TAART). It was a very kind gesture, and an experience I really enjoyed.

Honestly, it was so cool to see my latest art video piece, titled “The Train That Brought My Baby Back From Hell,” projected just feet from where it was filmed, and with the soundtrack pumping from the speakers.  I enjoyed overhearing people’s reaction to it, often without them knowing that I had created it. Most seemed to like it, and that was a relief.

Still, the biggest fun was watching people walk in front of the projector and into the image. Into a sunset or a landscape, or into the path of a speeding train. Into the crowd of people at the All Souls Procession. Suddenly it became shadow puppet theatre. Some stood in still silhouette. Some posed, Some crushed heads. A good time was had by all.

A very close second was watching a young couple hanging all over each other, dancing to my music in each other’s arms.

Never saw that before.

It felt good.

They’d moved on to full-on necking in place by the time I grabbed my phone camera, so I never got a shot of them. But at least I got to see it, and that was wonderful.

Another highlight was seeing a lady spot herself in my slow motion video from last year’s All Souls Procession. “There I am!” she exclaimed delightedly, pointing to a figure walking with the AIDS ribbon.

You never really see your work until you watch others experience it. Then you know you did something that clicked.

Thank you Sharon for a night I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

Posted in Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Documentaries, Daniel Buckley Images, Daniel Buckley Music, Uncategorized

The premiere of the revised video “The Train That Brought My Baby Back From Hell” will take place Saturday, October 5 from 5-10 p.m. at the Tart Walk celebration of the Toole arts district in downtown Tucson.

Click here to see an excerpt, which features video and music by Daniel Buckley.

Material for short film was shot over a four hour period along train tracks off of downtown Tucson, Arizona in the summer of 2013. The soundtrack features steel guitar, prepared piano, electric piano, synthesizers, percussion and 24 bit, 96 k train sounds. The train soundscape was recorded on location, the rest of the soundtrack at Daniel Buckley’s studio in Tucson, Arizona.

The work will be shown with four other time lapse works featuring music and video by Daniel Buckley. They include two manipulations of material from Tucson’s 2012 All Souls Procession.

The previous version of “The Train That Brought My Baby Back From Hell” premiered in September, 2013 at the Glow Festival in Oracle, Arizona’s Triangle L Ranch, along with the other four works.

All five pieces are copyright 2013, Daniel Buckley Arts/Saguaro Furnace Music.

Posted in Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Images, Daniel Buckley Music, Slice of Life, Uncategorized
Tags: Arizona, Daniel Buckley, Daniel Buckley Arts, Saguaro Furnace Music., Tart Walk, trains, Tucson

Back in 2004, Mariachi Los Changuitos Feos celebrated its 40th anniversary.

Randy Carrillo, right, goes over music with Los Changuitos Feos music director Art Pepin in the late 1960s.

I created some video content for the Tucson Citizen at the time to tell the story of America’s longest continuously active youth mariachi, and to document the group’s 40th anniversary celebration.

The videos include clips with Monsignor Carrillo, whose enthusiasm for mariachi music inspired Father Rourke to start Mariachi Los Changuitos Feos; the families and members of Mariachi Cobre talking about a variety of Changos experiences, Joel Valdez talking about the idea to create college scholarships for the young mariachis, performances by Mariachi Cobre, and what would turn out to be the final performance of the father of Chicano music, Lalo Guerrero.

In 2014 the group will celebrate 50 years in action. This group has in so many ways to Tucson’s transformation, in part from the travels it took, from its notion of creating college scholarships, and from the accomplishments of its many graduates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X9um7APwDs

Origins of Tucson youth group Mariachi Los Changuitos Feos, and memories of its members of places the group traveled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzJN_aXLitw

Family members of early participants in Los Changuitos Feos talk about the early days of Tucson’s first youth mariachi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9MwBpYIrmg

Highlights from the 40th anniversary celebration of Mariachi Los Changuitos Feos.

Posted in Cine Plaza progress, Daniel Buckley Arts, Mariachi blog, Mariachi documentary, Uncategorized
Tags: Daniel Buckley, Joel Valdez, Lalo Guerrero, Los Changuitos Feos, Mariachi Cobre, Monsignor Carrillo

Shawn Herreras

My documentaries have always been stories told by the people who have a particular experience of life.

Nothing is more critical than the interviews with these folks. But the process of turning those hundreds of interviews into a coherent story involves a level of detail most people can’t even imagine.

I am blessed to have an incredible transcriptionist in Shawn Herreras. I send her the audio after an interview and a few days later she sends me back a word for word transcript of everything said.

Shawn has been working with me since I did “Tucson’s Heart and Soul: El Casino Ballroom” in 2012. Our work process has evolved but without her meticulous attention to detail I would be left with the vagaries my limited memory, and truly crappy films would be the result.

Shawn has gone above and beyond to give me a level of detail that should be the model for all doing documentary work. At the top of each page is the name of the person being interviewed at the title of each clip, which is usually a series of random letters and numbers that my camera spits out as I start and stop shooting. At the top of each page she lists how many minutes and seconds into the clip that first passage is. When it comes time to edit, I can quickly find the particular quote I’m looking for and drop it into place.

If there’s a name or term she can’t make out, she highlights it and sends me a note about where it’s located in the total clip. Most times I can fix it without having to go back to the video, but occasionally I do have to find it and correct it, and it’s a breeze because of all she’s done.

Once the transcripts arrive from Shawn on Microsoft Word documents, it’s my turn. On the first pass I go through with a highlighter pen and shade selected passages of interest. I read through everything from a particular interviewee at once. Then I go back and review the highlighted portions, writing what topics they are addressing in the left margin in black ink, and putting stars by the quotes that are most likely to find their way into the film.

Gradually a new document starts to unfold. This one simply lists topics. Under each topic header I list the names of people interviewed who commented on that particular topic, as well as the clip title and page number where it occurs in the transcript. Often a brief synopsis or quote accompanies that note.

Over time, I am able to recognize those topics which are well developed and those that need to be better fleshed out. More interviews may be required, and are scheduled, shot and added to the pool of transcripts until I have the sense that the individual sub-story is ready to be told.

I start to see the potential structure of the overall story telling, and the photos and video clips it will take to propel those story elements. A critical mass is achieved and a first draft of the film starts to take shape.

The interviews go on and on, often until just a few weeks before the premiere, to make sure that everything is accurate and that it is told in the best way possible. Sometimes it takes a phrase to two from one person combined with a few sentences from someone else. But gradually it comes together as a cohesive story– hopefully one people will want to hear and see.

At this point in September of 2013, I am still in the early stages of filming interviews for The Mariachi Miracle, even though I have been taping for months. Most of the focus at this point has been on interviewing older members of the community, both to get the full background of what took place, and to make sure that their stories are recorded. Sometimes you lose sources to death, declining memories, Alzheimer’s, strokes and all sorts of unpredictable factors. But when you’re lucky, that generation sets you straight on many things you hadn’t even considered.

I consider it an honor to record all of the people that I interview for my films. They are the people who lived history, even if sometimes they don’t realize it. Sometimes they are disjointed in how they tell their tales. But collectively they create a body of knowledge that comes closer to the truth than any of us individually could see.

History is human. It involves people, some of whom go on to become famous and some who don’t. But famous or relatively anonymous, they all add to the richness of the world around them.

I want my films to reflect that, and work very hard to make sure that the broadest spectrum of voices is heard. In the process I think you end up with a clearer vision of the history in the making all around us.

Posted in Cine Plaza progress, Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Documentaries, Mariachi blog, Mariachi documentary, Uncategorized

Becky Montano

Click photos to enlarge:

When William Ackerley suggested the title The Mariachi Miracle for this latest film project I though, “Great idea.” The name really speaks to the transformational quality Tucson’s mariachi movement has had on our community.

But I didn’t realize how many miracles there were.

Tonight I’ve been pouring through transcripts of the interview I did with Becky Montaño, former Tucson Unified School assistant superintendent of schools, and a 20 year veteran of the Tucson International Mariachi Conference board.

Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán

Hearing her tell about that first year of the mariachi conference, i’s a miracle it ever happened. The majority of folks on the board of the La Frontera behavioral health center, which the mariachi conference financially benefits, wanted no part of being in on this. Most had full time jobs in the real world and absolutely no experience hiring talent, staging a show or even putting a workshop together. But La Frontera CEO Nelba Chavez wooed them in with the notion that they might make $1,000 for the center.

Factor in headliners that would only do the show on a handshake, and demanded to be paid in cash the minute they stepped off the stage. Montaño would head to the Tucson Convention Center box office, gather up thousands of dollars in particular bills and carry it around in a paper sack until the set was done and the money delivered.

Evidently Mariachi Vargas, which was supposed to do the workshops the first year, didn’t understand what that meant. The group came in, played a bit in the morning, then left for the day with conference officials scurrying around trying to produce some semblance of an educational event for the workshop participants.

2013 Tucson International Mariachi Conference masters workshop, taught by Jose Hernandez and Mariachi Sol de Mexico.

Life on the cutting edge of the mariachi conference scene was a tightrope walk, and there were falls along the way. But they kept getting back up and fixed the problems as they came along. They found a stable of workshop instructors, developed a curriculum and appropriate levels of study,and eventually were able to include home grown talent that  wasps good as the imports. They learned to deal with the egos and the contract requests. they rode the tides of popularity from the salad says of the Ronstadt recordings in the late 1980s and early 1990s through the near flameouts caused by the economic decline of recent times.

And through it all they kept the workshops going. Anywhere from 600-1,000 students attended the workshops over the 32 years of the conference. Students came from near and far, traveling longer distances in the early days when there were fewer conferences.

Dr. Jeff Nevin

Finding qualified teachers wasn’t just a problem for the conference. At area schools, as they tried to put mariachi and folklórico studies into the classroom, the lack of degree-bearing teachers got things off to a rough start. But within a few years graduates of mariachi programs and conferences started getting degrees in music education. Former Mariachi Los Changuitos Feos graduate Dr. Jeff Nevin pioneered a college-accredited mariachi degree program, and set about writing method books for school music teachers to help them meet the national demand for mariachi education.

Where a need exists, it doesn’t last long in the mariachi world.

And that’s another mariachi miracle. People somehow come together, often with medium to low initial interest, and are quickly transformed into mariachi evangelists. They take on whatever chores they are given, and innovate solutions to problems along the way. They learn from their mistakes and keep moving forward. The self reliance of the culture, the sense of community purpose and  unerring  luck have led to bigger and bigger things as time went on since the start of the mariachi movement in Tucson.

Posted in Cine Plaza progress, Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Documentaries, Mariachi blog, Mariachi documentary, Uncategorized
Tags: Arizona, Becky Montaño, Daniel Buckley, education, folklorico, Jeff Nevin, mariachi, Tucson, Tucson International Mariachi Conference, Tucson Unified School District, TUSD

McCain Loop Road

Click photos to enlarge

 

Landscape photography is something that has come rather late in my artistic career.

It’s hard to say exactly what set it off, but when it happened it became a compulsion.

Catalina Mountains

By way of background, I came to Tucson in 1971 to study geology at the University of Arizona. My larger goal was to study the geology of the moon, but in the meantime I would study the planet I could currently stand upon.

And there were similarities. In fact, in Arizona there were a lot of them. A big meteor crater, volcanoes, lava tubes andharsh environments of all sorts.

Train crossing in downtown Tucson

I confess, at first I couldn’t see the forest from the trees. The water and plant life seemed to get in my way in viewing the bare landscapes I longed to see. I sought out barren landscapes and enjoyed them.

As we stopped going to the moon as a species, I had to find something else to do with my life. Art and music filled the void, providing landscapes of the mind as unreachable and fascinating as the lunar surface from my grasp. The intangible kept its hold on me.

Catalina and Rincon mountain ranges under clouds

I worked at composing and becoming a performance artist, and found in those experiences more of a sense of who I was than I could express in words.

Yet words were still a large part of my life. I worked in newspapers to support my art habit. I went to concerts and tried to describe for those there and those not the mysteries that took place in these boxes with variable seating.

Eventually I felt frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the words and struck out to change my view. I started creating multimedia content for the newspaper’s website, and suddenly found myself very infrequently having to be in concert halls. Instead I was on football fields and political rallies. I was watching archaeologists dig the dirt for fragments of the past, and gazing at my viewfinder as fireworks filled the sky.

West of Gates Pass

I was getting older and seeing history in my rear view mirror, coming to realize that all of history is someone’s experience of life.

And somehow I was drawn back out into the desert again, this time fascinated by the water and the clutter of cactus. I set my camera up and let it patiently watch the churning sky, punctuated occasionally by the passing of birds, animals and if I’d set things up badly enough, cars. I sped the footage up and watched the imperceptible unfold, and the magic of it took me to another time of imagination. A time when no cars and far fewer footprints marked the landscape.

East of San Xavier Mission

I saw how different these landscapes had been when I first visited them 35 or more years back. There were fewer and fewer now that avoided population. Our thirst as a species for open spaces has robbed us of the delight we crave. We plunk our houses down and think no one will obscure our view, only to lose that precious view to others who seek the same thing.

The video could show me time but it too was frustrating. Even in high definition the detail was thin, and always the confinement of that tiny box.

I began to experiment at making patchworks panoramas of still photography, stitching them together electronically to create images approximating the broad landscapes that stretched out before me. There are times when what the camera has captured leaves me breathless, and others when I come home hating what I’ve been able to assemble. But when it comes together it tells a story no words can whisper, no phrase can encapsulate, no book can mimic.

View from A Mountain

I am at the infancy of my craft in this respect. Perfecting the techniques that captures the world as I see it takes time. Choosing new landscapes also takes time. And other things divide my time.

I make documentaries now to support myself. I talk with people and have them tell me about their lives and views of the world in their times. I stitch together from these stories panoramas of time and place. Joy and sorrow become sky and ground.

I write music still. There is endless joy in crafting and combining sounds, even if only a few care to hear them.  I make larger pieces from bits of spoken history, layering mosaics of time and space.

West of Gates Pass

Still the earth and sky call me back. I watch the birds head out before dawn and watch them return at dusk. I see the colors and shapes of landscapes and sky. I watch the subtle play of light and dark. I turn my head and the world is different.

I search for places where few reside or even visit. I set my cameras up and methodically record the changes of the light.  I plan the next sortie to some degree, but often find myself just grabbing the camera and running when I see the world overhead coming to volatile life.

It never stops.

 

Posted in Daniel Buckley Arts, Daniel Buckley Images, Slice of Life, Uncategorized