Artie J. Spongeberg

A new resident will soon show up in Collagesity. I seem to have a fixed name already: Artie J. Spongeberg. Not Spongenberg, I don’t think. But not Spongberg either. The J stands for Choke Joke. Or a parody. He will be a composer, but has forgotten what he created so far. The compositions, when and if they come, should be real enough. A side benefit is the improvisations, which will also happen hand in hand most likely. Artie will always compose “within the square”. He’ll take a while to develop. An obvious influence is Arnold Schoenberg with his famous 12 tone method. Spongeberg will have a somewhat similar set of rules.

Actual background: Up until even my late 30’s I, baker b., saw myself primarily as a composer. I do not notate or read music. I composed strictly by ear, in both rock and classical genres. My hands remember the pieces and tunes. When I was a freshman in college I started listening to a lot of atonal music, like Schoenberg, like Ives, like Bartok. But mainly, at first, Schoenberg and his famous pupils Webern and Berg. I was also breaking from my tonal past. This also represented a relative dark period in my life, thankfully quite short — a period of about a 1/2 year at best. Afterwards I returned to my naturally sunny self. It was the damned atonal crud affecting me, you see. Or the 12 tone stuff to be more specific. One of the ways I worked through it was to incorporate and transform for easier digestion. Thus was born the CHRO system, which never really circled back to a composing system as I originally intended. It didn’t become a pseudo-replacement for Schoenberg’s 12 tone system. It had a life of its own instead, and also made a bridge between music and art. So for about 1 1/2 years I worked on this system, watching it develop and dimensionalize, and, independent of this, kept creating music by ear in the limited style I was trapped in. This composing style perhaps culminated in what I termed the Antimatter Sonata, which my hands do not remember. Parallel to all this I also began improvising a type of post-atonal classical music with heavier rhythmic disruptions. My goal here seemed to be to leap frog the limitation by partially channeling a future, more fulfilled and less limited composer, communing with the divine when possible. Sometimes it happened. Sometimes it was through a type of free form bird song, a la a Messiaen (just featured in a recent carrcass related post here). But the future composer wasn’t (isn’t) Messiaen. I’ve described him (her?) somewhere as an intelligent squirrel from the 25th Century. But anyways, back to the point, my inability to develop as a proper composer caused a fracture into 3 parts: continued composing by ear (which I’d been doing for about 7-8 years at that point), developing the CHRO system which was potentially an alternate way to compose and also write down music (didn’t happen), and then the improvising.

Later on in my late 30s I returned to composing after about a 10 year gap. The CHRO system had long ago ripened into a tree of latent yet unfulfilled possibilities. Improvisations also resurfaced at this time. This rock-classical style I had developed reached a nature conclusion. Looking back, I am satisfied with this tying up. I have not composed since, and that’s been about 15 years back now. I think it could be time to return to music, however, using a different slant. Parody. Artie J. Spongeberg could be an exciting, new way back in. And the CHRO system is still there, unpotentialized. Perhaps the hands can be retrained. Oh… I forgot I can give links out to the improvisations (!). This is one that might be more accesible than some of the others. Keep in mind I am not a trained musician of any type at all. Here ’tis!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wkav2ye2l33blxa/01%20Track%201.wma?dl=0