Christopher Hume Remembered

Chris Hume, madcap poet, musician, composer, and Beanmaniac, left us on Sunday, February 19, 2007. Here's some of what he left us with - some musical selections (check back, I may add more), and some of his correspondence. Have a look and a listen, and I think you'll agree there was no-one else quite like him.

11-28-05
Dansk
  We are the music warriors of our time. In us is the new, I say throw the old away. Lets re-discover the wheel, ride around on it all day, and then re-discover fire and burn it.

1-11-06
Hey man
  I'm writing away. It's really trippy but super focused. It's string theory, if the string is made of camabert. or Brie.
  Dude check me out.

 1-12-06
BEAN!
  Hey. I am back on my feet, sort of, and am trying to get things going in a real way. The Bosendorfer 290c(?) is awesome, but we've had some strange effects from mic choice and position. I like the Dutch tube DPA 4060, but I'm trying to get Bill Curtis to lend me a matched trio of Curtis Tube ALR's but no luck so far.
  I have so much backed up music it is obscene. Good stuff, too, not noodling around stuff, very precise and molecular. Lots of ions.
  Please write me some stuff. I need to get my head clear sometimes things can get intense and delirious. I want to write something special for Ben. Also: thanks endlessly for the really, really moving letter of recommendation. That meant a lot to me. If only a tiny bit of it is your real opinion of me it's very moving and right now I'm under so much negative pressure that something like that is a total uplift.
  I've had technical problems for weeks, but they are hammered out now, so packages will be out in the mail this and next week. VolHumes 1-5 are done, but there are the Particle preludes, the Hibakusha suite and a whole laundry list of things. The piano suite is really something and it can not be rushed
You are awesome
Onmyoji

4-1-06
DANSK!
  I am off to Japan soon. Selling everything. Painful to watch my piano, recording studio, etc. etc. etc. all being savagely taken away for mere money. But there is one good thing: electronic digital stuff is replaceable. No one is going to care that you got a "2004 Digi002" vintage as if it's a '58 gold Les Paul. Or a sunburst strat '62.
  I will try to stay in contact the best I can. It's 13 hours ahead of here, which is symbolic, because it's actually about 150 years ahead of here. I hope that I can still grab that gig in Mito. Mito fucking rocks.
  Not much to say. I am going to spinal surgery in two weeks. On lots of morphine now, and no, contrary to popular belief, it is anything but enjoyable. What is good, is waking up at 6am and not being able to roll over to limp out of bed. So I pop 90mg of pure morphine, and lay my head down, and in 40 minutes I am able to at least slowly creep around. Be doin' creep. Wanna do creep with me?
  Here is something in case you don't have it already. I am thinking of two pieces right now, because I have a lot of bed time laying down flat, called "Onmyoji 1 and Onmyoji 2". Two separate reflections on the mystics of the Shinto, one of the white, the other of the black. A third piece will demonstrate that like the "yin-yang", each piece will be able to be played with the other (they will be the same tempo) to create the illusion of a 3rd piece. Not all of it is worked out right yet, but the overall concept is sound and the materials do work so far. I have decided to commit myself to the constant withdrawal from the music world, and as the years go by in Japan I will explore one thought after the next, and put them down, and when I am done, there will be a pile of single-page pieces of music that are haiku of the best kind, and a series of recordings of each. This way people will one day say: "Who was this person who did this mysterious thing, and what does it mean?". But hopefully, they will think: "I really want this for myself, these little sparkling shiny stones and metals and droplets of water, and keep them in the sunlight in my room and contemplate them forever, and tear a tiny piece off of one of the pages, and burn it with a microscope, and see if the ink is indeed mixed with wasp venom as he said he used to do (Dan: it' an old printer and painters trick: mix wasp venom with zinc and you get a wildly purple ink that used to be thought of as sacred. In Japan there are a Wasp indigenous only there, and it grows to up to 10" long, and kills up to 110 people a year. The venom is like a snake. If you can catch one, you can extract the venom and mix it with zinc and India ink - it makes a wildly smooth, trippy looking ink) and watch the smoke of the venom crawl through the air".
 
Gotta go. Ja-Mata!
Your Onmyoji
Christopher Hume

4-1-06
Dansk:
  I have a request, as a friend. Can you write something, one day, as a request only, that fits easily on one page of regular staff paper. No longer. It may use as little of the page as desired. A very, very short gesture.
 
Thank you
Christopher Hume

4-1-06
Dansk:
  Almost everything I've recorded are pieces that were written as a specific request. The piano music was either for money or because a grad student at the UW of Madison wanted to have something original to play for the jury at their graduation concert. It went down really, really well. I realized something afterwards, especially at the party. People were very confused - a living composer??? and because there was a genuine positive response, it really made me wonder. Most everything I've bothered to engrave or record is because of that, people in the audience requesting scores and other musicians wanting to try it out for themselves. It was cool - a lot of pianists at the UW were all trying to get their hands on the scores, and I was flattered. But the general attitude, which didn't but could have easily happened, was who is this person to play something I do not already know, and worse, is written by a living person. It's like religion: people can't deal with thinking, they want the same comforting fluff all the time, and personally if Beethoven or Brahms or on and on are never played again I would be the first one to break out the scrubbing bubbles and wash the "repertoire" clean of past composers and make it a law: No performing anything but your own or someone else's music who is alive today. Fuck Bach recitals.
  Anyway, you ought to throw a challenge at me in return. I think it is very unfair to ask you to write a flute, viola and harp piece - you are setting yourself up against Debussy and that piece is such a breathtaking masterpiece that I'd never want to go against it. It would be like trying to take on Picasso by painting all in blue or something.
  Yeah, they want to take out 3 discs, scrape the vertebrae and re-adjust their angle with screw posts. Problem is, they have to go in through the front - they have to actually take my organs / intestines out to make room so the space is available to get around the spine. Bundles of critical nerves are being compressed by that part of the vertebrae that extends outward like hooks - do you know what I mean??? the fin-like parts of the bone. So they have to cut around that very carefully. Then they want to put titanium springs drilled into the bone to maintain the distance the discs are supposed to be doing, and then graft bone between the vertebrae which will eventually grow and become part of my spine in order to provide support. They say a good year in bed and then wheelchairs, therapy, etc... right now I am on about 90-120mg of pure morphine with 6 40mg time release oxycodone a day so I can walk around, sleep, and not be in very real pain. I can continue the medications, and right now the thought is that it may be wiser to do that until say 10 years from now when maybe they will develop better treatments. Or pain blockers that are not addictive. But I am going to Japan regardless, fuck this place and there is no way I am going to hijack my life's dream and all the work at getting my masters so I can get THIS close to going (the job is waiting) and then do something like radical surgery. This problem has been expected since I was a teen - it's part of a wider neurological disintegration problem - so I've been waiting and HERE IT IS!!!! do you know what it is like to take all this morphine and still be in pain??? I am recording my last piano piece tonight - I am selling the piano Monday and my recording studio as part of raising money for Japan - so I am going and it's sad to watch my access to music being taken away even if it is temporary. I will start over again there - I have a great plan for something I'll fill you in on - and it's going to be amazing. Teaching is where I am at and I've reached a level of understanding and inner development that demands that I teach, it has become a necessary step in my pursuit of something, as I will not be able to acquire it until I myself re-evaluate every single thing from scratch from the viewpoint I am at. There has been a real and serious and to me miraculous revolution in my thinking over the past 3 years and what I am playing and recording is just catching up the old stuff so I can get it out of the way. But fuck sitting at the piano to record is brutally painful. I am in genuine pain when I finish. Fortunately I do not need it to write, but I do not trust others to play my stuff because the point is lost on them, which is not a put down, it's just that the traditional point of view is gone and the use of tempo as a melodic force is lost on them.
  Well, I am off to Japan by LATEST August. I am hoping for a lot sooner, but there is much to do, doctor stuff, selling things, packing, paperwork, translating, blah blah I need months. And I can not rush it, or I may blow a disc and wind up all kinds of fucked up.
 
Sorry for such a long letter. I need to record something before I no longer have a piano.
Ja-Mata wa hanashimas anatawa asoko desu!
Christopher "Onmyoji" Hume


6-18-06
Dansk on the Mac-cob:
  Hey man - - - well, I am off to Japan forever on, appropriately enough, Claude Debussy's birthday. So it's good timing. I truly, genuinely appreciate your letter of recommendation, even if it did not have such a good effect it was important to me. Thank you.
  I don't know what else to say right now, as usual I work all night and sleep when that hideous big ball of gas-rolled gravity and fusion called the sun tries to sneak it's way through my eyelid. Fucking sun. My mother and father had a sun. But it burned my mom and my dad couldn't find a home for it, so he sent it 98 million miles away. Anything that curves spacetime is not trustworthy, believe me. I lent the sun 5 bucks and it welched. Mutherfucker.
  Well I'd love to hear from you. Why not write the hume? he has so much private music to share. I have finished both the Manic Depressive Etudes and the Nuclear Mystic Preludes (first 11 elements) so now I am on to the "Klangfarben" tupperware woofs.
  Please write the hume. He misses you so.
 
Christopher

6-18-06
Dansk:
   OH! I read the letter I sent you. What I meant was, it DID have a beneficial effect, but even if it DID NOT it was still important to me. I hope that clarifies things. God - that looks awful the way I phrased it!!!
 
Humesk.

7-23-06
Dansk:    
  It is with great happiness that I send you this letter telling you that after being on (medically, of course) about 240mg of morphine a day, (and yes, I've done the nod) after 2 1/2 harrowing years, withdrawal being like living in a human microwave turning into a dehydrated near heart attack almost psychopath, I've cleansed the poison from my body, and feel like a kid again. I will still need pain treatment for my spine, but the morphine was too much for me, and it was terrifying. Not to mention the brain shock.
  Be wary of doctors who say "oh you can just step down from that stuff" - bull. It grabs you with all the fish-hooks in the world and digs its teeth into your brain like a one-way arrow. Horrible.
  So I celebrate with you.
 
Christopher

8-24-06
I am in Japan, apparently I’ve been placed in the wrong position. It's a total disaster, I will let you know. If it can not be resolved soon, I must return to the states. Where to go, though???
 
Christopher

1-9-07
Baseball? I hope you don't wind up with a mudville.
  I will say this - in my opinion, the worst thing that a modern opera can do is be operatic. People no longer respond to long winded howling yapping and texts that are set in a melodramatic vibrato-soaked soliloquy. Again, it is only my opinion, but understatement and a very austere and honest approach will yield great results. I like simple but poignant lyrics - but, when they become melodies, the melody must rule and the lyrics must be almost forgotten. Someone once said that "no one goes to the opera to hear what the lyrics are, they go for the music.” A wise observation. Look around you. What are people doing? what do you see? what is the most simple but most poetic way of expressing an idea?
  Mozart is my ideal opera composer, especially "La Nozze". It makes my skin tingle, when I hear those exquisite counterpoint melding and lilting together. What really strikes me, though, is that I have no idea of what they are saying, since I do not know the language. This is critical: Never expect the listener to understand the language, just make the most creative music beauty possible. You are one of the finest musicians I ever met, and I know you are capable of expanding beyond the reach of other musicians; your ability to fuse together naturally all forms of music though without a pretentious self conscious ego-driven mentality is a real talent, and I've admired it from the first day I remember, when we were in Leo's class, and you were playing the drums and the guitar at the same time - it was impressive and hilarious at the same time. I can almost recall the riffs you were playing through some bizarre octave or pitch altering device. It was insane and fucking funny as hell.
  Anyway, I hope you are happy with your work. For myself, I've arrived at a point where things flow with an ease and austerity that I always have been aspiring to. This is rewarding personally, but we live in a time is money attitude, so my single page of music is regarded as insignificant, but a 45 minute incoherent and overdone symphony is regarded as profound. Lately, I  have come to see that it is related to my diet. I have a bowl of miso soup, a bowl of rice, a few pieces of eel and various raw fish, and some tea or sake. That to me is true food. All around me is fast food, shopping malls - prefabricated crap that passes for something useful or valuable. I do not want to live in a mansion  - I want a very small but thoughtful place to live, in a quiet place, far away from the bigger is better mentality. This will go down badly to many of my friends and  colleagues, but I prefer silence to music, and really am sick and tired of the attitude and petty quasi-intellectual fame seekers. They are parasitic, crumb scraping wanna-be's that have no dignity. Music is only a means to an end for them, they say "I am a musician" like it's a passport to privilege or status. If you give them 88 pitches they will use as many as possible all the time, and contrive phony complex passages of constant syncopated polyrhythmic polymetric poly-everything as a way of hiding their lack of originality or poetics. I've seen what seems like a trillion scores across my desk like this. Audiences hate it, the performers hate it, but these days style substitutes for substance. I am grateful for the very few people like you, just like Daron and a small handful of musicians who are natural, honest musicians.
  Things here are obviously miserable given my mood. Maybe the desert is where I belong. But I so love the ocean. I am a water addict: I really need the ocean nearby, but if I have to move to Austin to find some form of peace than I will do so. Soon, I will begin compiling all the music I have written I consider to be %100 Hume and engrave them. These will be sent out to close companions and people who have expressed interest. There is a good deal of collaborations, such as film scores, that I have no access to, and a truly great deal of studio work that I can not access, but what can I do.
 
I hope great success for your opera. If there is anything I can do to help, let me know.
Sincerely
Christopher

1-9-07
Dansk Macabre!!!:
  Hey I always love a fugue. The Fugue, the proud, the Marines. Anyway, it sounds like a digital piano??? Not a criticism - we are all stuck with digital communication; there is no way to avoid the razor wired wheel that crushes beauty as "progress" continues... but a fugue is the mark of the great composer - it has always been my opinion, since studying with a masterful British teacher who specialized in Renaissance music from of all places, Oxford, who was on sabbatical in Minnesota, and put me through the only hellish brutality of hard musical work for 2 years that I came to regard the fugue, and the stretto, as the highest form of musical expression. There is nothing like the fugue anywhere else in the world except in architecture. The ability, to not just "puzzle piece" things together, but to make a fugue that is an expression of pure emotion (I always think of J.S. Bach's 3 voice fugue (the Cmn "Sinfonia") as something that is pure magic. You don't even think it is a fugue - it is so expressive, so delicate, so pure.... oh man.
  This is a very good thing you've done, because you have reminded me that I have totally forgotten all of my inventions and fugues. There is a small book of them - several inventions (2 voice pieces that create the illusion of 3) and fugues that use the vagueness of the elimination of a note to imply any number of harmonic possibilities, such as the whole tone scale, or is it an augemented chord, or is it a sustained series of tones to resolve to anywhere???? Even  I do not know. But I forgot about it until now - My first piece of serious 2 voice "inventions" is dedicated to Daron Hagen, because he, too, reminded me of the fierce discipline of that art form. For a while I floated around, in that hazy world of what am I doing, and ever since then when I can not get any good ideas or I feel lost I pick up my manuscript paper and write down basic counterpoint, fugue, and stretto exercises without any expectation of something good happening, but it keeps me sharp, and reminds me of how small I am compared to a Palestrina, or a Duarta Loboo, or so many of the pre-Bach composers. I am an Atheist, but that is the closest thing to religion that you will find in me.
  Is it not amazing how we regard Bach? he is the Isaac Newton of music, I think. His early work merits serious study - few of us have studied his early works with the flaws - I've learned so much from it. Also, even later, in the Brandenbergs, which are a cornerstone of my musical development, I can show you numerous passages with parallel 5ths, Octs, 4ths, etc... but then there is the Art of Fugue, which is the death sentence for all of us who think we know how to write music "from the ground up", I believe.
  You have not become the pretentious composer, which makes me really happy these days. I know because you noticed the little tremolo at the end of the piece for my mom was sarcastic, but also, I was heading off to Japan and I thought a little flutter of pentatonic jazz would be my "Chris Hume was here, but don't tell anyone"!
  All I have is music now. I am completely broke, and Mike Wacks is protecting my Les Paul because I can no longer carry it around, and it is so valuable by itself, and so priceless to me, that I can only trust him to protect it. I have a bag of some clothes, a few suits, enough money for a bus ticket to Austin, and the Mustang, which I have so altered as to be simply "the humestang". It plays so clear, so perfectly, that even other people who play guitar laugh when they see it but are stunned by its balanced neck, the elegant smoothness of its playability, and the tone.... the tone is amazing. I ripped out all the wiring and put in higher gage (spelling?) gold wiring, re-soldered all the pots, and changed the pickup selector to "cheat" the EPS pickups. I swear, if you plug it into a simple amp straight and dry, it can sound exactly like "Lay down Sally" without any effects. It really sings, it's amazing. Maybe because I've been playing it since I was 16. That makes a difference, I think.
  Anyway, I am really happy about the fugue. It has made me remember good things - That teacher really kicked my ass. It was the best thing that ever happened to me musically. The impenetrable foundation it gave me has never failed me in composing music. Which reminds me...
  Do you like being called a composer??? I hate that word. But then what am I? a musician? that sounds to meek, too simplistic. When people ask me what I do, I say "I write music so you don't have to", which gets a laugh here and there, but that is what I feel like, especially since I brought up that piece for my mom. It occupies one page of music, so that pleases me, but I could have put down on that one page something so much deeper and rich with subtle and mysterious ideas, and that bothers me. When you have to mock yourself for writing a piece of music for your mother, that is a problem. But it's not your problem, your problem is that you shave your ass. Have you upgraded to the 5 blade disposable razor? I hear there is a sale.
  I am proud that I have had the experience of influencing each other so much. You've always been someone who listens, and who can give insight and intelligent responses to the great musical things I want people to find amazement in. It is ironic, that I who preach to the masses that if they can not listen to say Mahler's 1st symphony, because their attention span is 3 minutes long, writes tiny little pieces that last well under that length. There are tremendous ideas I have for a large scale orchestra work, or at least a "Book of Orchestral Etudes" addressing the organizational aspects of the orchestra and its unique properties, but there is no way to do it. People always ask me to write music for this and that, but even when the company was at full force, and we were doing truly superb work of which I am fiercely grateful and proud of and stand by, it was back breaking to keep everyone paid each week, and I could see that composers everywhere were getting hit hard by the drop in commissions, and the horrifying and insane collapse of the classical composing community financially, but the point is, I can not survive this way. It is totally unpredictable, and that in no way pays the doctor, or the rent, or anything else really. To create something unique, new, original, and authentic on a single page of music is considered liability. But then, even the "big thinkers" are finding it hard to scrape a nickel off the floor. It has collapsed. And now everyone with a notation program thinks they are Liszt, just like "microsoft word" would make someone a poet. Pathetic. The next MIDI file someone sends me will get a pipe bomb in the "snail mail"!
  I will be sending you something in return. I need to record my inventions, if only to send the 1st one to Daron. You would like it  - in the middle I suspend the rules, and create a sort of psychedelic rhythmic cosmos where time seems to vanish, and then you float softly back into the cold hard rules of the 2 voice fugue.
  Anyway, thank you for the fugue. Do not stop creating them, they will nourish your skills to no end. Not that you need it, but when you get that writers block, pick up a blank page and start doing counterpoint exercises - change the rules, twist things around, make it your own. I believe with the greatest of seriousness, that the more one furiously grabs the "simplest" aspects of our craft, the more amazing the result. Ravel once said "There is a difference between complex and complicated" saying of course that complexity is a natural result of the extension of clarity that comes from knowing the way to weave sound, where complicated means just a pointless mess, like when all your guitar cables magically become nooses in your case when they were separate before. What the fuck? how do they do that? do the sneak around the case? is it some kind of "cable sex" or something??? I'll never know - you figure it out.
 
I am rambling and you already know everything I said so I will say:
 
Sorry to take up a few Kilobytes on your hard drive
Christopher

A Hume Jukebox

The following are a selection of emails from Chris to me over the last year and a half. Chris refered to me as "Dansk," and to himself alternately as "Humeske," and "Onmyoji," which was his Japanese name.