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Swinging machines
Andy’s Biskin’s ‘Goldberg’s Variations’
BY JON GARELICK

No, clarinettist Andy Biskin doesn’t play Bach — his Goldberg is Rube, the newspaper cartoonist from the first half of the 20th century who became a household name for, among other things, his drawings of complicated, comic inventions like "Self-Operating Napkin" and "Solution for Growing Hair on Balding Men." This Friday, Biskin brings his sextet to the ICA to play live accompaniment to a series of animated cartoons of Goldberg’s drawings.

How Biskin completed this project is almost as complicated as one of Goldberg’s own inventions. "It was one of those things," he says now, "that if you knew what you were getting into you would have never done it." Biskin, whose day job in New York is in film production, was looking to write cartoon music. The poise, humor, and episodic nature of his 2000 CD, Dogmental (it was released on Gunther Schuller’s GM label), would seem to make him a natural for the genre. For a while, he was talking to Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffin about a possible collaboration, but it never happened. Then there was Goldberg. "I can write music that sounds like these machines," Biskin thought. "It’s kind of what I do anyway."

At first, he had no intention of animating the drawings. "I was going to have these pieces that were inspired by drawings but you wouldn’t actually see the drawing — we’d just perform it and we’d say, ‘This is the Self-Operating Napkin,’ but you’d have to guess what that meant." But, as with Goldberg’s inventions, one thing led to another. He first wrote the music by looking at the drawings and improvising. Once the pieces were sketched out, however, he saw there was a problem. Each single-panel drawing came with a written description of how the invention worked. "I thought we’d do it like a Ken Burns treatment — panning and scanning and zooming. But as I got deeper into it, it didn’t seem to really work. Because you’d see, ‘The cat climbs the tree,’ but when you panned to the tree, there’d be no cat up there. So we had to put the cat up the tree." Not an animator himself, Biskin had to learn how to use a complicated software program to manipulate the camera-ready digital images generously provided by the executors of the Rube Goldberg Foundation.

There were other problems he hadn’t foreseen in his original compositions. "I knew that the pool ball hits the seesaw, the seesaw catapults the measles germ, the measles germ infects the doll. But what was tricky was to figure out how long each of these things should take and get the timing right. You want them to take long enough so that you have some time to put the music out there, but you don’t want people to get bored looking at it. There always has to be something happening visually and musically." Then there was the matter of what to do with the text. At first, Biskin considered breaking up Goldberg’s hand-lettered text into subtitles. "And then it seemed like it was too much to have to read and listen and look, so I came up with the idea of putting the words first. But then I had to write more music."

As animator and composer, Biskin was constantly shuttling back and forth — revising the animation, then revising the music to fit the new visual material, all the while struggling with the software. "At one point I found a new computer and then discovered that the music on my old computer was playing a little bit slower than on the new computer."

Goldberg, Biskin points out, wanted from an early age to be an artist, but his father insisted that Rube go to engineering school because, according to Biskin, "Leonardo knew science, so you have to learn science." Biskin, the son of two musicians in San Antonio, was likewise encouraged "to do something other than music." He went to Yale, studied anthropology, and got a post-graduate job working for ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who documented much of his work on film. Film eventually became his means of earning a living (for a while, he made documentaries for the Texas attorney general’s office). He played music on the side. When he moved back to New York, he formed a band, played more and more, and wrote music for the band.

A fateful encounter with Gunther Schuller lead to Dogmental, which for all its antic polkas, marches, and waltzes is full of airy lyricism, true swing, and Biskin’s gorgeous clarinet tone. "There was a period where I wanted to be a great bebop player, like everybody else does. And then suddenly I realized that by writing my own pieces, I could sort of write to my own strengths and obscure my weaknesses. And I felt more fulfilled playing my own music."

The Andy Biskin Sextet — with saxophonist Mike McGinnis, trumpeter Dave Ballou, trombonist Bruce Eidem, bassist Dave Phillips, and drummer John Hollenbeck — performs "Goldberg’s Variations" this Friday, December 5, at 8 p.m. at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street; call (617) 354-6898.


Issue Date: December 5 - 11, 2003
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