Bertolt Brecht and Me...

In 1976, at the beginning of my Junior year of college, I was working at a little desk in the basement of the music department, handing out keys to the practice rooms. A professor of mine, John Swackhamer, came by and plonked a 3-inch high stack of xeroxed music in front of me. He had a glint in his eye (he almost always did), and he explained how this score had been smuggled out of East Germany by a fellow professor. It was the piano/vocal music to the Hans Eisler/Bertolt Brecht play "The Measures Taken". He asked if I had any experience in music theatre. "Um... I was a dancer in my high school production of the Music Man...And I sang the little Nazi's song in Cabaret..." Not a stunning resume. But to him it was as if I'd just said I was Harold Prince. "Excellent! There's a director who's putting on this play, and you'd be perfect as the music director! Call him!"

I called the director, who likewise seemed to have no problem with my lack of experience. So I gathered together a ragtag yet spirited band who taught me how to write for their respective instruments, and a choir of 12 or so. I really had no idea what I was doing. But the play was a huge hit. Shortly after, RG Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, opened a new theatre company, Epic West, the Centre for the Study of Bertolt Brecht. He asked me to be the music director. Big names from East Germany came to collaborate and teach, the productions had lots of great Bay Area actors in the casts, and while I was excited to be in the middle of it, my understanding of it all was pretty limited. (It was amusing to have my parents, longtime conservatives, come to the productions which were noisily marxist and densely intellectual. My parents were wonderfully supportive - My mother found and gave me a rare LP of Lotte Lenya singing)

I began to get work with other theatre companies, but my reputation as a Brechtian expert had been solidified, and I kept getting approached to do Brecht and political theatre. Ina Wittich, a famous (in East Germany) East German interpreter of Brechtian songs, came to California for a tour and needed an accompanist. Eisler songs are technically easy, almost like rock or folk music. Ina croaked them in a Lotte Lenya kind of way. But, for her big concert at Mandeville Hall in UC San Diego, she wanted me to play Eisler's Sonata for Piano. I'm not a fast learner, and his sonata is technically difficult, atonal, and huge. And I only had 10 days to master it. I begged her to let me off the hook, but, and perhaps this was the East German in her, she would not change her mind. Onstage that night, in front of 1,000 or so people, I flailed my way through it, just making up whole sections of atonality when the notes on the page blurred before my eyes. Afterwards, at the wine & cheese function, a UC music professor buttonholed me. He wanted to talk to me about my playing of Eisler's Sonata. The cheese in my mouth went dry. He said "That was the most brilliant interpretation I've heard. It sounded so fresh, so new!" Well, yeah, half that music had never been played before, by me or anyone else.

Is there Brecht/Eisler/Weill in the music I write? I don't claim them as major influences, but years of study and immersion must have left some traces. My predilection for simplicity and directness is something I tend to attribute to my rock and roll roots, but it's a strong element in both Eisler's and Weill's music, and in Brecht's lyrics and drama. Maybe it's a combo of both Marx and Lennon - Yar yar yar.

Edward Albee and I Chat in NY

Edward Albee will moderate while I and all the other creators of dramatic works for Playwrights Horizons will chat. Onstage, with you in the audience tossing questions our way. And we'll enlighten you about the mysteries of the creative process (maybe). I'll probably just mumble occasionally and nod my head sagely. I will try hard not to embarrass myself, even. 7:30pm, Mon Sept 13 at the Tribeca 92nd St. Y.

What do I know of Edward Albee? Well, I knew he was famous as the writer of the huge hit film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", but I was too young to see it (or understand it) when it came out in 1966. Ten years later, when I landed the job of music director for the unapologetically political "Epic West" (The Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht), Edward Albee's name was often spat with contempt by the people in charge there. Heck, I was young and excited to be in this radical marxist environment (I'd grown up in a Goldwater/John Wayne household), but I didn't quite understand all the fine political distinctions being made. I didn't really understand Brecht. And I'd never even read Albee, so I always wondered what he'd done to get under their skin so much.

Ever since, whenever I hear Albee's name, I'm brought back to that time in my early 20's when I was trying to make sense of the world of Epic West. Their disdain of Albee was pretty silly - their strict Brechtian dogma did not result in very good theater after all (I could show you the reviews...). And the bits of Albee I've read in acting classes in the years since? I rather like them.

I've worked with the Brechtians. It was an interesting introduction to theater. Now it's time to chat with Mr. Albee.

"Two Hands" Rockets to #4 on the Charts - Sale-a-bration!

When "Two Hands" was released last fall, I hired a radio promoter and sent out hundreds of copies to radio stations all over the continent. But the promoter disappeared with my money, and all the CDs I sent out went unopened, unheard, and unloved.

So this summer I hired a promoter who has an actual physical address (note: don't trust P.O. Boxes in the Cayman Islands), and I've sent out another few hundred CDs. This time the results are stunning. Stations around the world are playing it and loving it, and it zoomed to #4 on the New Age charts for the month of July!

In celebration, I'm having a sale calculated to get "Two Hands" into the ears, the minds, and yay, the very playlists of every man and woman who reads these words.

From now to the end of September, you can either download or get the CD version of "Two Hands" for a mere $8. Click Here for downloads, or Here for CDs. It's that simple.

Those of you who have already demonstrated your love of and belief in this beautiful music - I thank you. And I ask, nay, I exhort you to tell all your friends, acquaintances and yes, even your enemies about this music. You'll glow in the feeling that comes from sharing something good.

May autumn leaves pour gold upon you - Gunnar

They say the Neon Lights are Bright...

...On Off-Broadway! It's official, the musical based on the life story of The Shaggs, "The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World", created by Joy Gregory, John Langs and Yours Truly, is headed for a major production that is at the pinnacle of Off-Broadway on fabled 42nd street - at Playwrights' Horizons, the people who brought you "Grey Gardens", "Floyd Collins", and Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins", and" Sunday in the Park with George". Co-producing with them for the first time is the esteemed New York Theatre Workshop, whose productions include "Rent" and "Bright Lights, Big City".

Hoo-boy, I can't wait to invite my mama to this show! But first, I have to finish writing it. Yes, I know, we've been working on it for 9 years, you'd think it would be finished by now, but I'm born to tinker, and there's just a few things that need fixing here and there. It's great, it's good to go, but if I gotta rent a tux to go to the opening night, I want to make sure everything in the show is polished to perfection. As I last wrote to you about this, we were just about to do a reading at Playwrights' Horizons in December. That reading went very well, and showed us places that needed work. We worked those places, and had another fine reading in April, where we found a few more things to work on, and also got a fire lit under a bunch of producers. After a couple months of shaking things out, New York Theatre Workshop came on board to co-produce, and now we're on track to a full production this coming spring.

You can read all about it in the New York Times, or the New York Post, or Playbill, or...

The rumors are all true.

Svetlana Village now on DVD/Download!

In the fall of 2000, I traveled to Russia to make a documentary film about a farm that my brother had been working at for the previous 5 years. A Camphill Village, where half of the residents were disabled. I spent a couple weeks filming, and 10 months writing and editing, and then the film was released to good reviews and success. It was selected for the prestigious Ojai International Film Festival, and was picked up by the venerable Berkeley Fine Arts Theatre for a week long run. It played other film festivals and helped raise money for the Russian farm and village.

The film was also released on VHS (the format of the day), and many copies were sold, and local video stores in Berkeley displayed them proudly in their independent features library. But VHS, and independent theatres, are gone the way of the dinosaurs. We are just now witnessing the eclipse of DVD's and the dawn of downloading.

Svetlana Village: The Camphill Experience in Russia is now available on DVD and via download! Restored to the full digital glory which it was originally captured with! Own a DVD your family will cherish for generations, or instantly download it to your favorite viewing device! All proceeds from downloads and DVD sales go directly to Svetlana Village, so you can watch a good movie and do a good deed at the same time!

I'm still researching how to make the film available for free viewing (YouTube does not allow long films). If anyone has knowledge of places that will show the film online so it can be shared with an even larger audience, please let me know.

I'm Alive!!!

I'm alive, baby. I'm vibrating at ultra-high frequencies, even. Below are 4 reasons why you haven't heard from me lately:

1. Rewrite of The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World for another reading at Playwright's Horizons in late April. They're excited about the play, I'm excited about the rewrite, it's a lot of work.

2. Writing music and sound design for a new video game. It's great fun to go back and forth from writing music for a musical to writing music for a horror-genre video game. Variety is the spice of life.

3. The promoter I hired to get "Two Hands" to radio and press ran off with my money and left the project stranded. I'm filing legal papers against her (in case she tries to bamboozle YOU, her name is Kathryn Monohan - be warned!), and meanwhile gearing up to re-issue the CD with a different and much more reputable promoter. It's no small amount of work to launch a recording, and I've got to do it twice :(

4. I'm a stay-at-home dad with a wonderfully intensive boy to tend. I've got my hands full even if 1-3 above were not brewing, you know?

In further news, my 2001 film "Svetlana Village: The Camphill Experience in Russia" is now available on DVD and for download HERE. And, "Two Hands" is one of 5 nominees in the IMA's Vox Pop awards. Please cast your vote for "Two Hands" by rating it on my home page in the IMA widget. Just click on the stars!

I love the recording studio.

I still feel a thrill every time I'm in a recording studio, with the huge consoles full of buttons, the mics, the speakers, the layers of glass between the control room and the recording space. I was pretty stoked my first few times in rather flea-bag 4-track studios, hearing my music with reverb on it, making it sound "just like on records". But I was jaw-droppingly transported when I first was in a top-notch studio (Russian Hill Recording, in San Francisco). The huge 2-inch tape decks, the quiet, the looming mic stands. All the photographs of the Beatles in the studio that I'd studied in my youth - that's what this was like. I'd finally arrived. This was my dream - even more than performing in a concert hall.

For many people, the sense of "this will only happen once, never to be repeated" is what they love about live performance. For me, the same thing is true in the studio. If it's not fresh in the studio, there's no way it will withstand the test of repeated listenings as a recording. You have to stay present, over and over, take after take, delivering the absolute best, liveliest performance you can. And that, to me, is every bit as challenging and exciting as a live performance. Just me and the microphone. And then, when the work is done, it's preserved forever, to be enjoyed over and over. I LOVE that.

Of course, there is no audience in the studio, no sense of love and reciprocity, no implied challenge of winning them over, no applause. So live performance does have some powerful and unique aspects that the studio can't deliver. I can dig that..

But, as in many areas of my life, I can get tired of doing the same thing on a routine basis. Performing in a long run of a play, or singing the same songs night after night... sometimes boredom starts to edge in. I know how to look for the ways of keeping a performance fresh and alive over the long haul (heck, I sang Psycho Killer over a thousand times, and rarely did it ever get stale for me.) But I tend to itch, yearning to move on. In the same vein, I've never been able to stay in a job for long. It's how I'm built.

Being in front of a microphone and exploring the moment and knowing that whatever I do will be captured is an ultimate high for me. And...when the work is done, I get to move on to something new. That's nice!

Happy New Year

Here's a note of thanks for the year just past. Thanks for a son who is insatiably curious and who has a fantastic sense of humor. Thanks for a partner who also has a fantastic sense of humor, and is a polar opposite of me (and is thus a marvelous balancing force). Thanks for the elegant and soul-filling experience of recording "Two Hands" this past spring. Thanks for the energy to do the recording, and the fathering, and all the little chores that are a part of this life. Thanks for the support of fans, who allow me to make a living at what I love. Thanks for all the teachers and caregivers in my son's life.

While the year has presented many challenges, it was filled with much light, and I am grateful for it.

May we all be blessed with a good year to come.
Love, Gunnar.

My Romantic Tendencies

I have always been a closet romantic. I enjoy the sentimental side of things.

As a pre-teen, listening to my little panasonic transistor radio every night late into the night, it was almost all love songs, and the music meant everything to me. (Not the love-song lyrics necessarily - I remembering recoiling in 10-year-old horror at the saccharine "La La La La La Means I Love you " by the DelFonics. But most love songs I blithely took in).

My teen years were simmered in Zappa, who sneered at love songs. I learned to sneer, too. I vowed never to write a sappy love song. I laughed at love songs, ha-ha!

Sure enough, in my writing for The Bobs, I kept love at arms length. Well, more than arm's length. And even when I thought I might try my hand at writing something romantic, it just didn't work for me. I was more comfortable being funny. Yet, I still wanted to write beautiful music. Even when the lyrics avoided romanticism, the music to my songs tended to be consonant, not acidic.

When I write for the theatre or for film, where one writes for a character or a situation, I am able to explore my romantic tendencies.

For I am a romantic. I love beauty for its own sake. In the past I loved music and art that was acrobatic and virtuosic and acerbic and anti-sentimental, but now I crave music and art that tries for beauty. I still like acerbic. I don't like grossly sentimental things. I'm bored by virtuosity. But I love good music. Honest music, I like to call it.

Two Hands? It's my first time giving in fully to my romantic side. It's not written for a play or a character or a commission - it's written to please myself. And St. Cecilia. And anyone who cares to listen in.

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World LIVES!

It's been a few years since The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World was produced. The legal problems which held it back were recently lifted, and an exciting developmental reading is slated for early December at Playwrights Horizons in NYC. I and my collaborators (Joy Gregory, playwright, John Langs, Director) met up in LA recently to look over our acclaimed musical. We came to it with fresh eyes and ears, and while we found many things to improve upon, the overall feeling was of exhilaration at having created such a fine piece of theatre. It's really good (he said with all humility). I'm currently spinning out new music for the reading. While the reading is not big enough to open up to the public, I can tell you that it sports a fantastic cast, including Tony Award Nominee Peter Friedman as Austin, Jamey Hood, Hedy Burress and Sarah Hays returning as the sisters, and broadway veterans Matt Doyle, Kevin Cahoun, Steve Routman and Anastasia Barzee filling out the cast. Returning as music director is the marvelous Aaron Gandy, leading a rocking band. This is, we hope, the first step towards a long run (Off-Broadway, anyone?)!

Recording Bandon at Skywalker (video)

Here's another video taken from the recording session for "Two Hands". It's not the take that is on the CD (that take was not caught on camera). If you compare them you can hear the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in performance. This one has some nice moment (but the one on the CD is deeper and better).

This piece, "Bandon", is particularly poignant for me. In the summer of 1964, when I was nearly 8 years old, I took a two-week trip to visit my great aunt and uncle on their cranberry farm in Bandon, Oregon. All by myself (along with 18 or so passengers, and a very nice stewardess who had very red nails and gave me a pilot's wing pin), I flew up on a DC3 or DC8 or some such old plane. The visit was much more playful than the music suggests, yet this is the music of the memory: Fishing for trout with a spool of thread and a bent pin; the swimming hole with the zip line running from the cliff to the beach; driving a tractor with my uncle; arguments over Elvis vs. Beatles with the local tomboy (in her room lined with posters of the King); picking blueberries; and struggling to sit still while my Aunt Gunny (Gunhilde) painted a watercolor portrait of me. That portrait still hangs on the wall of my parents' house. It's titled "A Poor Attempt at the Beatle - 1964". I must have been a non-stop Beatlemaniac that summer. When they asked if I'd like a souvenir to bring home from the trip (they were probably thinking of one of the locally made toy models of fishing boats) I pulled them to the record shop, where they bought me "Meet the Beatles" - in Stereo! My smile couldn't have been bigger. Their puzzlement couldn't have been deeper (I recall they played nothing but soupy Henry Mancini in their house). Aside from the Beatles, my visit with them was one of the highlights of my elementary school years.

Our Amazing Brains (aka My Sony Tape Deck)

When I was 15, a friend and I worked most of the summer painting my family's house. With the money I earned I bought a reel to reel tape recorder. It was one of my proudest and most useful possessions. Not only could I record my nascent songs, and experiment with sound-on-sound and varying the speeds (the wow when you played something back at 1 7/8 ips was REALLY cool), but at 3 3/4, I could put 2 entire LP's on one 'side' of the tape. 4 LP's on one 7 inch reel! it was an early form of piracy, before piracy was even an issue. But I was a poor teenager, LP's were expensive, and I could borrow records from my friends, tape them, and expand my musical library, while having to live with a modicum of tape hiss.

Here's the really cool part - I had always gone to sleep while listening to LP's. But you only got 20-25 minutes of music that way. But put a tape on, and you got 4 times that amount of music. And the music went deep into my brain, a kind of sleep teaching if you will. And even though my piracy was relatively cheap, tape still cost money, and my listening library was still very small (by today's standards). I listened to the music I had over and over and over.

I didn't realize how deeply this music was in my brain until recently, when I treated myself to a couple of recordings that I'd had on reel-to-reel, but hadn't heard since (the tape deck fell apart from constant use by the time I left for college).

One of the albums, Tower of Power's "East Bay Grease", I got a couple months ago. It was SO great to hear it again. It's a flawed record, but there's great stuff in it, too. I was a devoted fan of them when they first appeared on the scene, they gave a great live show, and I devoured their record when it came out. I've listened to it a few times over the past couple months. And then, while gardening in the back yard a few weeks back, I started humming the sax solo from "Back on the Streets Again". And I kept going. And I realized, I know every squeak and honk of that solo, and all the horns hits behind it. It's all in my brain, every moment of it! That shocked me.

And now, just the other day, I treated myself to "The Bill Evans Album", another recording I used to go to bed to night after night. I downloaded it, heard the first notes, and was instantly transported to my 16 year old self, the joy, excitement, and comfort of this music. I LOVE this album. And as it played on my computer, I realized I know every note of every solo. Especially the bass solos, I love humming Eddie Gomez's lines. But I know every stab and comp of Bill's too. This music is deep inside me. I thought I'd forgotten it. But hearing it just once brings it all back instantly. Aren't our brains amazing?

All in Three Quarter Time

Here's something you might not have noticed: All the music on "Two Hands" is in 3/4 time.

I didn't really plan it that way. I did have it in my mind to someday do a follow up to "Spinning World: 13 Ways of Looking at a Waltz ", and so my sketchbooks of ideas did have a lot of 3/4 time pieces. But for "Two Hands" I did not want to be constrained in any way, so I wrote and rehearsed and even recorded some pieces in other time signatures. But none of those pieces fit on the final album. They stood out awkwardly, interrupted the flow of the CD. And some of them are really really good compositions (they will someday see the light).

Even though the music is all in 3/4, "Two Hands" does not feel whirly, or light-headed. Very few of the pieces are played in strict tempo, and those that are ("Oak Sky" for example), are more moody and insistent than danceable. This is not a CD about dancing. it's a CD of mood and emotion - in any way or form. It just happens to be in 3/4 time.

Desert Rocks and Gunnar - the Connection?

Rob Jenkins - master of the lens.

None of us involved in putting "Two Hands" together can explain why Rob's photo (of the mysterious rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley) seemed the perfect compliment to my solo piano music. It just was. We considered lots of other cover ideas, but none was as soulful and complete.

Rob is a charming and amazing guy (you should see the complex shadow-box creations he's made for his wife!), and when he takes a camera into his hands, it dances and finds the moments that beg to be recorded. His nature photography (like on the cover of "Two Hands") is elegant and fresh. His portraiture, especially of kids, is remarkable for its honesty and simplicity and, again, elegance. I know of no other photographer who is so adept at revealing the complex emotions of those fleeting glances that children have. His sense of color is startling, and he frames everything with a true artist's eye. Check out the work on his site RobJenkinsPhotography.com. He's in NYC.

Marie Antoinette & Gunnar - The connection?

I've known Kent Sparling, the producer of "Two Hands", since he was a young man. I've known his music since he was a teenager.

Back in the early 80's I had a few piano students, and one of them was a wonderful teenage girl. She gave me a tape of her boyfriend's band, Riis Spargo. Yeah, okay, your boyfriend's band, sure, I'll listen...

But it was GOOD. I played that little cassette over and over.

Years later, I hooked up with her boyfriend - Kent Sparling. He was in a monoprint class that my wife was taking (Yes, he's one of those multi-talented types). We became friends. I played keyboards sometimes in his follow-up band, Eyeland. Kent is a wonderful carpenter/electrician, and together with a craftsman pal of his helped us build the studio where I've done much of my work over the past decade.

But besides being a visual artist and a songwriter and experimental musician and electrician and craftsperson, Kent had another dream - to work at George Lucas' Skywalker Sound. To get there, he moved to Vancouver, BC, where he apprenticed in the sound for film world. His experiences there filled out his resume, and he returned to the bay area and knocked on the door at Skywalker, and they hired him.

Nowadays, besides being a visual artist/experimental musician/etc., he's also a highly respected and sought-after mixer for films. He's done many of the the foreign language versions of Star Wars, he helped sink the Titanic, he's mixed a ton of films including some knockout ones you've seen and heard, like "Lost in Translation", "Adaptation" and "The Virgin Suicides" and, yes, "Marie Antoinette". And then, he makes his own wonderful, ethereal/trippy music using state-of-the-art retro synthesizers. And he does his own cover art. And he wired his own studio. And, (how lucky can I be?), he's produced 3 of my CDs along the way. More on Kent at his website.