Mumma on Mumma and More

I've been reading the new collection of composer Gordon Mumma's writings, edited by Michelle Fillion, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music (UI Press.)  It covers territory most widely associated with Mumma's career: at the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music in Ann Arbor, with the ONCE Festival, the Sonic Arts Group/Union, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, with colleagues including Ashley, Tudor, Cage, and Oliveros, but also his less familar but equally important engagement with a geographically wider American Music is well-represented here. The volume includes more explicit writings about his own compositional work for both electronic and "acoustic" instrumental resources than has been previously available.  Mumma has a precise and engaging writing style with a very distinct sense of balance between the explicit and the open or (provocatively) unresolved, whether the matter concerns notes, personalities, politics, or something larger we might venture to call a distinctive aesthetics.  (Balance, I have found, is a central concern in his music, whether playfully pushing analog circuitry in or (more productively) out of balance be it by the sounds of a horn or the movements of dances in a real space or working with pitches which seem to be arguing stubbornly against their own axes of symmetry (and in the various-sized -Mographs series for piano(s), tectonically so.)  Fillion's introductory materials are clear, usefully giving context to the writings but also suggesting wider lines of inquiry. I'm biased here — Mumma was/is my teacher, I publish some of his works at MaterialPress.com — but I can recommend this book without

Nicolas Collins, more than a nostalgist

Composer Nicolas Collins, Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Editor of the Leonardo Music Journal, has been very usefully sharing some of his archives online. First off,  he's dedicated a page to the work of Stuart Marshall, composer, film/videomaker and activist, here.  Second off, his website includes a lot of very good things, including his Freshperson notebook from his first class with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan (for the record, Marshall, Collins & this blogger were all students of Lucier (I didn't overlap with either & never met Marshall); also for the record, Collins is a far braver soul than I in sharing one of his undergraduate notebook; with any luck, I've managed to make all mine (helpless, tangent- and bad poetry-filled as they were) go away.) And third off, he's made a web-based recreation of one of his own landmarks of electronic music, the feedback-based Pea Soup, from 1974, here.  This is all new music that remains news, so pay attention!

Ordinary Unhearing

Here's a very good essay by political scientist Henry Farrell on China Miéville's The City & The City. Without giving away the plot, while Miéville is known as writer of fantastic or weird (his preferred term) fiction, Farrell's essay addresses the fact that the most distinctive characteristic of the setting of The City & The City is one which is not fantastic but actually quite real, indeed completely ordinary, the social construction of our environment, what we learn to see and not to see. (One of the great trajectories for the reader involves the gradual realization that the book is not, as a genre, fantasy, but rather more properly police procedural. ) My own personal revelation about seeing and not seeing came first during one of those teenage summer jobs, bussing tables and washing dishes in a restaurant for minimum wage when I discovered, after a week or two, that it had become possible — if not necessary, to both coordinate our ensemble work and to preserve some sanity — to look across a crowded dining room and only see the other employees.

There is definitely an auditory equivalent to unseeing. Obviously, anytime we want to pay attention to a particular subset of the sounds within an acoustically crowded or noisy environment, we try to filter out what we don't want to hear. But there is a more subtle filtering, acquired over long exposure, which is associated with hearing music. I can still recall the shock I experienced when I first listened seriously to live orchestral music (the summer before my 14th birthday, sitting in the front corner of the left balcony in Little Bridges Hall of Music at Pomona College during the last Claremont Music Festival.) I was shocked because I had not yet learned to unhear the thick band of noises and scratches which comes with every bowed string instrument, nor had I learned to unhear key clicking and spit valves, and rustling sheet music and squeeky chairs or crackling parquet floors. And those coughs, those coughs. Sometimes so much distraction, so little music.* Gradually, after years of concert-going, I have learned to unhear much of that sound which we define as not music. I still have problems with the crackling parquet and stage lighting in some of the halls here (the Sendesaal at Hessischer Rundfunk, otherwise acoustically glorious, is my particular bete noire for these particular noises) and I seem to be completely unable to unhear key-clicking or mouthpiece squawks on the saxophone. I love the idea of the saxophone, and have heard some extraordinary musicians wrestle with it, but I just can't hear it as completely musical yet. But, rest assured, I'm working on it and maybe one day will be able to hear much less of the saxophone.

_____

* The classic art history definition of minimalism as "the elimination of distraction" usefully illustrates the degree to which the minimal impulse in the radical music tradition was an impulse with tremendous sensitivity towards the material conditions of music and the environment in which it is made.

The advantages of making music under the radar

The current dramatic cuts in cultural funding — whether due to market or political forces, and whether done in slow steps (as in Germany, where the rapidly rising costs of the rights for soccer broadcasts, for example, are gradually eating up state broadcasting budgets whose fee-supported funding would otherwise be stable or growing) or in sudden cuts (as in the Netherlands, where a nationalist/populist political coalition has found common cause in attacking "elitist" arts organizations, even when some of these organizations are best evidence of what that nation can be) — have been well-described and commented upon elsewhere.  All I can usefully add is a firm expression of solidarity with the protests, as these reductions are being made to institutions which are a essential part of lives led together, if those lives together are to be lived with any purpose more than simple survival, entertainment-fed passivity, and assent to a status quo.

My realistic assessment of times to come, however, is that we will probably have to get used to the largest cultural institutions, if they are able to survive the current rounds, functioning only with dramatically reduced resources and forced to cut back their activities to minima.  That usually means very little for the most adventurous programming, even when such programming ought to be seen and heard, at the very least, as an investment in the future vitality of the institutions. It's a vicious downward spiral, but I take some heart in the fact that no institution can or should be viewed as immortal, and this mortality is actually a good thing in the long term. So long as resources and interest remain or are found for the invention and support of new institutions, there is potential for the creative renewal and reinvigoration of institutional art making.

In the meanwhile, it is useful and heartening  to recognize that most of the work done in experimental and innovative forms and idioms takes place well outside of large institutions. Most new and experimental music does not require the resources of orchestras, state radio stations or opera houses, but is made for soloists (often composer-performers), small ensembles (often composed of collaborating composers-performers sharing resources) and can now include a technical sophistication that is no less that formerly monopolized by the large institutions.  Every composer can now carry the equivalent of a Kontakte-era WDR Studio, RCA Synthesizer and the complete apparatus of Repons in their own laptop.  Most new and experimental music can be performed and heard away from the formality and expensive of large concert halls, can be recorded on equipment and media that one owns at home, and no longer requires a licensed radio station for its broadcasting, nor is that broadcasting limited to the reach of a single broadcast antenna. (It can, however, be limited by the censorship of the PRC or North Korea, or perhaps by an end to net neutrality in the US.)

Perhaps more importantly, in these times, the fact that new and experimental music is essentially invisible/inaudible to the state and corporate apparatus can be very useful.  (James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State is a superb introduction to the limits of the legibility of real, existing traditional structures to the modern state and the disasters that the best of wills have led to because of that inflexibility.)  States and corporations alike prefer and tend to respond only to structures which follow radically reduced schemes and orders.  States and corporations draw straight lines and grids and group things according to least common denominators, losing detail, texture, tone, the nature of which is often more essential than crude, uniform measures. Recognition of this may not make states and corporations pay for our rent or lunch (that's what day jobs are for, buckaroos), but it does suggest a considerable artistic advantage of going under the radar.  

In recent protests against funding cuts in the Netherlands, the police were apparently able to control crowds of protesters because the protesters moved together, with a recognizable front line, and the police are said to have used the protester's own concerted music-making as a cue for their own actions.  How much more effective it would have been had the protesters moved, not as a coordinated mass, but as individuals roughly flocking in a general, but not manageable motion?  And however could the police have taken a cue from the music had it been, instead, sung quietly but independently by hundreds of individuals moving at the own time and trajectories through public spaces?  There's an interesting invitation to compose!  

Erring on the Side of the Angels

At the end of his recent blogged series, The Anosognosic’s Dilemma, Errol Morris quotes Noam Chomsky on the limits of human cognition: 

“We are after all biological organisms not angels . . . If humans are part of the natural world, not supernatural beings, then human intelligence has its scope and limits, determined by initial design. We can thus anticipate certain questions will not fall within [our] cognitive reach, just as rats are unable to run mazes with numerical properties, lacking the appropriate concepts. Such questions, we might call ‘mysteries-for-humans’ just as some questions pose ‘mysteries-for-rats.’ Among these mysteries may be questions we raise, and others we do not know how to formulate properly or at all.” 

It strikes me that musical experiment, the radical music, is always going to tease out such questions, such mysteries, sometimes with success but often courting failure (i.e. music which doesn't "work" or makes no "sense").  In doing so, particularly in accepting the possibility of failure, experimental music distinguishes itself from conventional music-making which more safely plans its effects and affects, using known materials and methods.  Yet, more than that, the radical music errs, when it errs, — and err it does — on the side of the optimistic assumption that the extents and limits of our human musical perception and cognition are just a little bit closer to those of the angels.   

Just a reminder

The radical music isn't so much a way of composing, or even a repertoire of music associated with a way of composing, but rather a way of listening.  And listening not so much to music, as for the possibility of music.

Prosaic is more than Academic

This is a fascinating confluence of activity:  The composers James Saunders and John Lely have begun a major project about prose scores (here) and Phil Ford of the Dial M for Musicology has been using text based exercises in his teaching and there's some interesting discussion about this at the blog (here) . Also, Frog Peak Music has recently placed Christian Wolff's very influential Prose Collection online (here) and, of course, there is Upload...Download...Perform, which is just chock full of textual/musical excitement (here).

Such text-based exercises or pieces or scores were central to the teaching (in music and extra-departmentally)  of the extraordinary pianist and theorist Jon Barlow at my grad school, Wesleyan, with immediate connections to Cage, Wolff, Oliveros, Lucier, Young, Fluxus, but also to Barlow's other interests, which ran to Euclid, C.S. Pierce, Wittgenstein, Ives,  Baseball, Blake, Faulkner, Joyce, and Stein.  Barlow's student, Kenneth Maue,  investigated the genre in the early 1970's and while Maue's work clearly began in an avant-garde or experimental musical context, it rapidly entered into pedagogical and therapeutic terrain. Indeed, the compositions/piece/exercises in Maue's book Water in the Lake (1979) were probably more widely used in the classroom, in group training for business, and in personal training of a more therapeutic nature.  

It is increasingly fascinating to me how superficially similar text scores can be, but how different their intentions and results may be.  Stockhausen's two collections of text scores are wildly different from Pauline Olivero's Sonic Meditations, while the more conceptual line — from Young and Cage through many of the Upload/Downloaders seems to address more absolutely musical issues than the social processes featured in scores by other composers.  

I have tended to reserved the prose score as an efficient format for broader conceptual work, often as a kind of generalized sketch for a work which might receive more conventionally-notated specific realizations but I've recently been returning to the form for some very specific pieces that could not really have been notated otherwise, and several of my older prose score have had some very good performances, which is very encouraging.     

The radical music will save your life. (Or at least keep you a happy camper. Most of the time. Probably.)

The weekend reading was Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, not an exhilarating and disturbing read like Inherent Vice, but a read all the same, with enough of the characteristic Baker turns (obsessive little stories and jarring non-sequitors top my list of favorite Baker tropes) to make for lively breaks between composing sessions and some escape from a neighbor's hard-hammered house renovations.  The subject and narrator of The Anthologist is a mid-career, middle-of-the-road poet; although he's reached that particular pinnacle of American poets, being asked to edit an anthology, he's in a bad patch with writing, relationships, and day jobs, and so he fills the absences of writing, relationships, and a day job with procrastination, distraction and obsessive little lessons to reader, from the all-too familiar, all-too-slow straightening-up the office to helping a neighbor lay a plank floor to holding forth before us on poetic rhyme and metre as well as a bit of ancient poetryland gossip.  He is, it seems, in the middle of a career writing poetry he really doesn't believe in; he does seem to believe in an idea of poetry — and he can rattle on and about with some passion for a number of 19th and 20th century mainstreamers —but the talents he seems to have as a poet are not those most applicable to the poetry that he actually likes.  Rhyme, for example, is not one of his strengths.  For all of his enthusiasms for rests and enjambments, his rhythm and metre seems a little stiff, too.   But he is worried enough about rhyme and rhythm to share his worries and theories — and modest theories they are — with us. The novel, though, is a comedy, and the summer of discontent was just that; all ends well (too well, if you ask me, like the last act of As You Like It, in which the Goddess Hymen descends, suddenly and without preparation, to put everything in order) : the poet gets over his bad patch, he finishes his anthology preface, his dashes off twenty-three poems during a plane fight, and he gets some steady work, housepainting, for which he seems entirely and cheerfully suited.   But to get there, we had to spend a book-length summer listening to his signs and stories of  frustration and anxiety. All the while reading this, I couldn't help but have one thought: had Paul Chowder, Baker's narrator/poet/anthologist been an experimental poet rather than a poet of the mainstream sort  — and he is mainstream enough, for example, to worry about Poet Laureates of the US or to mention, in passing, that one of his poems got read on air by Garrison Keillor — we would have been saved reading an awful lot about the anxiety that he had for rhyme, metre or status in poetryland.  You see, that's the great advantage of experimental music as well.  Experimental musicians are interested in and work with the same questions of metre and tonality and complexity and systems and style and anything else remotely connected with music that the mainstream gals and guys use, but the detachment or distance necessary to an experimental approach, combined with the in-advance knowledge that a conventional institutional career with prizes and positions is probably not in the works (and when it happens is like an unexpected gift from gods in whom we do not believe so have no need to thank) is also a gift of Gelassenheit, letting-go-ness, an invitation to compose without anxiety.

The Radical Music: Fragments of a Manifesto

Sounds articulate precise dimensions in physical space; musical sounds also articulate precise dimensions in social and private spaces.

*****

Use the minimum of resources or means required. Less is often more.

Find the core question or idea in a work. Choose and use your materials to best frame that question or idea.

All musical ideas and all musical instruments (save the vibra-slap) are potentially useful. None is universally useful. (Save the vibra-slap, which is never useful.)

But having practiced the virtues of economy, allow yourself, from time to time, a bit of extravangance, some conspicuous production and consumption.   In the end, the economy of musical production is like the bellows of a concertina, expansion necessarily paired with contraction.

*****

Go to extremes, in whichever parameter you use, including extremes of moderation.

Question parameters. A parameter is someone else's way of dividing up the aural experience. Explore the edges and boundaries of and between pitch and timbre and rhythm and dynamic and form. Explore and break boundaries between music and not-music.

Music, the physics of musical sound, the psychophysics of music, and the neuroscience of music are different concerns, each with its own territory and terminology. How might they relate? How might they not relate? What unique elements of cohesion does music bring to these disciplines and how can they extend the potential for new forms of musical activity?

*****

Follow an idea in all its consequences. Find the end of a process or pattern. Push a system to its design capacity and then push beyond it.

However, if the consequences of a process are obvious, is it necessary to carry out the process in full?

Consider the possibility of multiple versions, or realizations, of a work. Or accept the first version and move on to the next work without looking (listening) back.

Break, subvert, or invert cause and effect.

*****

There is an indeterminant number of ways of arriving at the same musical surface and it's not possible to determine the best or most efficient or most elegant way.  Worrying about this is an ethical issue, not an aesthetic one.

Start from nothing, from first principles, without assumptions and build a better (sound) world from the ground up.  Or start with everything and scrape, sculpt, and erase away, making the real, existing (wise, tired) world better. 

Limits and rules: anything we compose could, potentially, be through-composed,  by taste and experience, but sometimes the alternative, carrying out rules applied to a limited set of materials, in the manner of a game (a music game, like a language game) carries much less anxiety and leads to surprises rather than the habitual.

*****

The radical music is about complexity.  But not necessarily that complexity.

Complexity is an elusive quality: It can be algorithmic complexity (for all that's worth) or the complexity of acoustical phenomena when heard in greater detail or the complexity of historical or social context.  Sometimes a highly dense phenomena can only be heard coarsely and sometimes the simplest of conditions can overwhelm the senses.  A universally applicable and acceptable definition of either "sufficient" or "over-" complexity is impossible. (To paraphrase Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it). When people make and listen to sounds, to music, one form or another of complexity is inevitable. Don't give it a second thought. No, strike that, don't give it the first thought, but keep it well in mind as a second.

Every piece of music has an element of the improvisational, extemporaneous, accidental, capricious, prejudiced or arbitrary. Is a piece of music interesting because of this? Is a piece musical because of this?  

*****

Experiment with scale, both the smallest, most local, and the grandest, most global, as well as the most anonymous quantities in-between.

Boredom is only a function of time, and a function with several variables.

*****

Modest work done in a serious way, leavened with levity, can carry large ambitions.

History is both a playground and a minefield, and a composer can and will write and rewrite music history with reckless disregard for the difference between a playground and a minefield.

(2007, revised 2009)

Simmer and reduce

Reduction in cooking eliminates bulk and intensifies taste. The equivalent move in the radical music*, the reduction of materials to a minimum serves a similar function.  I'll repeat, again, the most useful definition of minimalism: "the elimination of distraction" but add this: the intensification of the experience of sound.

Here, from a famous set of small piano pieces for small hands:

In these very famous pieces, the right hand is busy with only five notes at a time in a piece or section of a piece, one for each finger.  The left hand sometimes gets to play with a few more than five.  With so few tones available, and each tone consequently subject to frequent iteration, we should be able to settle quickly into a comfortably familar neighborhood of the tones used singly, in sucession or in combination .  But the composer always manages to surprise, bringing out unexpected depth in what would initially appear to be a rather shallow field of possibilities.  The chord above to which the forefinger is pointing is a case in point.  Yes, this is music about exquisite — and, sometimes, exquisitely familiar if not banal — voice leading, and habits of voice leading should excuse the b in the left hand as a neighboring tone, just passing by, but we do also hear this coincidence of lines as a chord, in its context, and as a very special chord indeed, perhaps the most sonically dissonant possible assembly of three tones extractable from this collection.  Such clear means, such reduced materials, and yet such a complex sensation, at the limits of our tonal sensibilities, conditioned as they are by musical experience and probably some neurological hard-wiring.  Okay, this is not The Famous Minimalism,  and there are other things going on, especially in the realm of metre and accent, but the impulse is the same: simmer, reduce, and the materials are given a new context or frame, one in which we can pay attention to details that would otherwise get (dis)missed.

Or this:  I've recently been playing through Charles Shere's sonata ii: compositio ut explicatio  (related to a lecture by Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation and, in one version, playable as accompaniment to a rhythmicized performance of that lecture). This is a large-scale work for solo piano, about an hour in duration, with a particular wealth of variety in registration and texture.  The generous scale of the work and the way in which similar figures and textures are almost rhetorically deployed over its course are so engaging that it scarcely registers that the piece only uses the white keys.*  There is almost too much material in those seven pitch classes.  Additional chromaticism, given the variety of gestures and textures, would probably be a distraction.  Again, simmer, reduce until the flavor is more intense than the sum of the ingredients.

_____

*For more about the Radical Music, see this collection of posts, or these fragments of a manifesto.

** This is also a Stein reference, in that the writer liked to improvise on the white keys only. Virgil Thomson's Piano Sonata No. 3, written for Stein, is also a white key piece.  Another large-scale work for the white keys only is John Cage's Four Walls.  These pieces would make a swell program (hint hint).

     

Setting up shop, new music style, looking for the perfect strip mall

On my last visit to California, it became clear that I had been missing something rather obvious. The Los Angeles strip mall is the distributed center of culinary innovation.   The strip mall is the low rent versatile retail property on the main drags of the city and countless suburbs and fronting residential neighborhoods, many of them centers of immigrant communities.  A strip mall is a place where commercial experiments can be tried out with the most efficient commitments of money and time, and the relatively small size of the shops allows for optimal distribution of the risks of business failure.  The combination of the strip mall as a commercial theatre, an large first-generation immigrant community of uncommon diversity,  geographical proximity to both Pacific Rim and North/South trade in foodstuffs, and well as the astonishing productivity of California agriculture makes for unprecedent variety, both in the number of traditional cusines represented or recreated in every degree of "authenticity"  (note the inverted commas: This I know, I know, for the new musicology tells me so)  and for hybrids and other forms of innovations.  (There are actually even lower levels of commerce: for years, smaller citrus crops like kumquats and mineolas were collected from backyard networks rather than groves for supermarket sales, or the Oaxaquenan woman around the corner who sells tamale in banana leaves with black mole, or the wagons that deliver edible exotica (Korean burritos, anyone?)  crisscrossing the Southland on secret schedules designed to evade health department inspection tours.)

The low-rent path to innovation takes place in music, too, but we don't yet have a precise equivalent to the strip mall.  (For recordings, the internet functions well, but I'm talking live, local performance here.)  Major institutions are simply so heavily invested in capital designed for the most traditional and prestigious forms of music-making, and thus cannot take on the financial risks that presenting music which breaks traditional patterns in one way or another may create. If you have one hall for music in town, and it seats 1000 to 2000 people — which is not uncommon in Southern California suburbs — then you will be looking for events that will consistently bring in 1000 to 2000 people, while innovative work needs the try-out in the hall that seats 50 to 100 people.  

The large institutions, by design, are limited to a small number of newer projects, carried out in slow motion, thus they will forever only be able to support a small number of artists, mostly figures who present the least risk to the continuity of the institution.   That's why, in the era of mainframe computing,  big, well-supported computer music centers were far less successful in actually turning out finished pieces that those working with solder-yourself circuitry and the first generation of personal computers.   But that's also why we won't hear Robert Ashley at the Met or the NYCO and West Coast composers in the experimental tradition are now shut out of opportunities at the Cabrillo Festival in favor of composers, mostly East Coast, who already show up regularly on major East Coast orchestral programs in the regular seasons.       

not(e) on(e) method

...composing, around these parts,  is less about the production of entertainment goods than about discovery, learning more about the world through sound (and sometimes the absence of sound), an enterprise somewhat akin to science or maths, especially so when one observes— with Feyerabend — that the course of real discovery, from piece to piece, or even within a piece, is methodically less systematic than anarchic, using whatever it takes or whatever is available to go forward, aware of individual predelictions and cheerfully accepting coincidence, rather than simply following a strict research plan NEVERTHELESS this madness called composing has its methods, being employed informally, tactically, according to the immediate cause and context, and these fall into three categories or —better — styles which productively play off against one another, the first being preference (or choice or taste or habit) the second being order (or scale or structure or system or process) and the third being chance (or coincidence or circumstance or contingency) and each new composition is a unique optimization of the relationship between these three...

From Honey to Ashes

History is a narrative of successive events. We like to have a handle on this succession by identifying connections among events; we label these connections change. Political change comes in revolutions, slow, fast, sometimes repetitive or even retrograde. Religious change comes in two modes, the apocalyptic (the sudden revelation favored, for example, by the three middle eastern monotheistic religions, usually associated with personal and social rather than material changes: i.e. Paul's sudden conversion on the road to Damascus) and the metamorphic (the mode of immediate and physical change preferred by polytheists: Daphne turns into a laurel). (cf N.O. Brown: Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.) And musical change? Well, does music change...?

We talk often, too often perhaps, about modulation and transformation. This bit of music is said to become this other bit of music. But each of these bits of music are transients, embedded in contexts that disappear with each vanishing, dissapating, wavefront. No, we don't transform or modulate sounds, we create and manipulate resemblances among sounds; the operations of musical transformation take place at a perceptual level at least one step removed from the sound itself, this change is evidence of composition.

Serial music, in its various appearances, was essentially a music about the unity of the variant forms of a single structure (row, set, series, formula etc.) and the great compositional problem of serial music was that, given this unity, there was no necessary reason for one form to precede or follow another in time, the succesion of events was disconnected from a convincing narrative of change. To the contrary, in the radical music — which was in part a response to unresolved problems of serialism — listeners could no longer could take (apparent) repetition lightly, as an absence of change. The apparent reiteration of a given sound, and its close relation, the indefinite extension of a sound into time, when placed or framed at the center of a composed context, maximized the potential for attending to the smallest and most immediate of differences rather than superficial or abstract resemblances among sounds, differences which were connected directly to the realtime sequence of events. Thus the minimalist impulse of the radical music was, in part, a means of restoring an historical dimension to a musical work

(This is the second of a series of three small items, the first of which is The Raw and the Cooked).

George Brecht

Sad news comes: the artist George Brecht has died, at the age of 82, in Cologne.   His name is probably associated by most with that of the Fluxus scene*, and while his works, both objects and performances, are among the strongest of that association field,  they had their own distinct origins and took a path of admirably independent consequence.  There are two pieces of writing by Brecht that were valuable to me: his 1957 essay, Chance-Imagery, some parts of which are slightly off, but still... and the set of notebooks which begin with the most thorough documentation available of John Cage's course in experimental music at The New School in 1958. _____

*I've long had in mind writing something about Fluxus, but my impressions were fairly negative; under Maciunas's leadership it seemed too commercially-oriented and uncomfortably competitive with when not hostile to the work of others (Charlotte Moorman, for example).  Not to mention the whole Fluxus collectors' scene, an ugly affair, it seems.  Recently, however, a chance viewing of an episode of the current  television series Mad Men, set in a Madison Ave. advertising agency in the early 1960's, has been a trigger for some revision in my thinking about this, especially the character played by Robert Morse, a small role, but one that puts a twist onto an homage of his role in the 1960's musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. In Mad Men, Morse is now the older boss (the Rudy Vallee role in How to Succeed...) instead of the ambitious youth in the mail room. In this episode, he is heard to recommend reading Ayn Rand to a young employee.  Here's the connection: Maciunas was a Randite objectivist and the Fluxus artist provided Maciunas with objects to sell. You read it here first.

Red Meat

Recently, a friend, in a somewhat confessional tone, told me of a regular assignation she has with a acquaintance — like her, a successful professional woman with a big downtown office — at a Argentine-themed restaurant for the sole purpose of eating steak. They don't talk, for they have found in the past that they have little in common to talk about, they eat. They each simply enjoy the periodic company of a partner who also shares the particular sensory pleasures of a medium rare chunk of bovine flesh. Just barely seared on the outside, pinkish in the middle and oozing with the various fluids that are usually induced to ooze through the timely application of heat.

While she was telling this story, I couldn't help being struck by the feeling that she was at once sharing one of her deepest pleasures, but also one of her deepest shames. It was as if she had been describing an affair or a dangerous and illegal conspiracy. And while red meat is not exactly politically correct these days, I believe that it was the extreme element of pleasure involved that was the greater apparent violation of norms.

*****

Sensory pleasure is a largely hidden term in the discussion of music, and modern music in particular. But hidden behind our musical history is a path moving between extremes of pleasure, with, on the one side, sounds and structures which are refined, distilled, and synthetic, often to the point of the complete abnegation of the excess stimuli, Apollonian if you will, and, on the other, the opposing, Dionysian tendency to revel in ever-more intense, vibrant, and inclusive sonic experiences, embracing both sensory pleasure and its necessary complement, sensory pain.

Musicians tend to an odd mixture of prudishness and excess, perhaps simply because making music well require tremendous technical discipline, while the initial impulse, or desire, to make music, is the urge to put a sound or noise into the world unlike any sound or noise before it, hardly the act of the over-disciplined. This tension between prudishness and excess, Apollo and Dionysus, plays itself out in waves of musical repertoire. Romantic against classic. Neoclassic against expressionism. Minimal music against serial music. But most interesting, musically, are the cases in which the tension is suspended in the music of a single composer, even within single works. Wagner and Brahms, Ives and Mahler, Schoenberg and Stravinsky: each had uniquely unresolved positions along the spectrum between nature and nuture. Varese was poised perilously between a primitive noise and the romance of high science. Cage was — thank you, N.O.Brown — the living oxymoron, knowing both Apollonian reserve and Dionysian exuberance. (Ice and fire. No wonder Cage was so fascinated with The Seasons.) The minimal music was, in its origins, with La Monte Young, a recovery of the sensory dimension that had been so neglected by the serial style from which emerged. In this recovery, it embraced both pleasure and pain (we do put pepper on our steaks, after all), from the pleasures of revisiting tonality or low-number just intonation to the pain of more complex sounds amplified, extended and repeated beyond our comfort levels. And much minimal music ultimately embraced a mixture of strict rules or procedures with a real-time execution that includes improvisation* and the acceptance of accidents, both acoustic and human.

With the radical music, and with its minimal tributary, one recovered the raw (remember that radical=getting to the roots) taste of sounds in all the detail that had been lost by becoming part of the acoustic porridge that characterized more notationally complex music or the standardization characterizing more traditional, normative, composition (like the poets, we too have a "School of Quietude" (thanks to E.A. Poet via Ron Silliman for that useful phrase)). It once again became possible to hear each individual ingredient, yep, slow listening.

(This post was occasioned by reading composer Charles Shere's Eating Every Day).

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* I will even give Milton Babbitt his red meat, in that, once the array has been composed, the actual assignment of notes to a score, given that there are no necessary relationships between a PC or time point on an array and a particular note on the page, is ultimately just a form of improvisation.

De Maria

The point I'm making here is that the most beautiful thing is to experience a work of art over a period of time. — Walter De Maria

This1972 interview with sculptor De Maria — whose Lightning Field is perhaps the most impressive single work of art I know — is further evidence of the origins of the practices that came to be known as minimalism in the west coast radical arts scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. There are some unfortunate errors in the transcript (of names, especially: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Loren Rush), but it's nevertheless a valuable document.

WDM: But Lamont's (sic) static music and Whitman's touch, it was really fine. Lamont is only now coming out with records, only now coming out with the second record. Lamont has influenced Terry Riley who has made beautiful records. Terry Riley influenced Steve Reich who has made these records for Columbia and Phil Glass evidently discovered a similar type of music independently. So now they have what they call a Hynoptic School of music. Very static, long long tones without great variations from measure to measure, more like a solid state or a solid feeling. Rather than having great variations in pitch and variations of melody, you carry on solid . . . .

PC: Drone.

WDM: Yeah, almost like the drone is the basis of it. Lamont developed that and I played a certain part in it, making certain tapes like in '64, and Terry Riley developed it in his way using the tape delay, where you play a certain thing and then three seconds later it plays again and then it echoes again and the beautiful N C and Rainbow occurred on Columbia Records. I was very close to Terry and I nearly formed a band with Terry and John Cale. We were playing right in the other part of the studio, had all of the material set up. We were trying, but Terry had his idea, John Cale has his, I had mine. To make a band you have to work out your common feelings and ideas, and it's just too much.

Decay Preserved

The Internet Archives are a very good thing and steadily getting better. Sometime ago, I mentioned here that my copy of the tape part to Douglas Leedy's 1965 theatre piece Decay had, in fact, decayed beyond retrieval and neither the composer nor others connected with early performances of the piece appeared to have a copy. The tape part had been assembled (composed is not exactly the right word) by Leedy with the assistance of Ian Underwood from a collection of old shellac recordings, retrieved from a Berkeley used record bin, of rather bleak piano music improvised (one assumes) for the use of dance practice accompaniment. In performance a live pianist and other instrumentalists improvise in the same style (did I mention the word "bleak" already?) and, in most performances, theatrical events were overlayed. Memories of the sixties being somewhat vague as they tend to be -- under the motto, "if you can remember the sixties, you weren't really there" --, the theatrical events are difficult to reconstruct, but in several productions directed by the composer Robert Moran these apparently included a number of women in bathrobes and curlers as well as conspicuously large brass instruments and their players emerging from sleeping bags. The tape part still appears lost, but fortunately (if that's the right word), a recording of a performance under Moran's direction and service as piano soloist has turned up in the Other Minds Archive*, here, on the second half of a concert recorded by Bay Area Pacifica station KPFA. If you can persist in listening to a theatre piece divorced of its visual components, I do recommend listening long enough to hear horn and saxophone solos** presumably played by the composer and Underwood, respectively. Did I mention that this was bleak?
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*All praises are due Other Minds and their intrepid leader Charles Amirkhanian, for rescuing this among other Pacifica jetsam as well as countless other services well-rendered!
**That saxophone does go on and on, doesn't it?

More slow listening

I recommend this interview with Christopher Fox, a composer whose musicality and intelligence I value highly. The money line is the last one:

It takes time to make people hear differently and for me that’s what a composer must do.

The Radical Music: Fragments of a Manifesto

Sounds articulate precise dimensions in physical space; musical sounds also articulate precise dimensions in social and private spaces.

*****

Use the minimum of resources or means required. Less is often more.

Find the core question or idea in a work. Choose and use your materials to best frame that question or idea.

All musical ideas and all musical instruments (save the vibra-slap) are potentially useful. None is universally useful. (Save the vibra-slap, which is never useful.)

But having practiced the virtues of economy, allow yourself, from time to time, a bit of extravangance, some conspicuous production and consumption.

*****

Go to extremes, in whichever parameter you use, including extremes of moderation.

Question parameters. A parameter is someone else's way of dividing up the aural experience. Explore the edges and boundaries of and between pitch and timbre and rhythm and dynamic and form. Explore and break boundaries between music and not-music.

Music, the physics of musical sound, the psychophysics of music, and the neuroscience of music are different concerns, each with its own territory and terminology. How might they relate? How might they not relate? What unique elements of cohesion does music bring to these disciplines and how can they extend the potential for new forms of musical activity?

*****

Follow an idea in all its consequences. Find the end of a process or pattern. Push a system to its design capacity and then push beyond it.

However, if the consequences of a process are obvious, is it necessary to carry out the process in full?

Consider the possibility of multiple versions, or realizations, of a work. Or accept the first version and move on to the next work without looking (listening) back.

Break, subvert, or invert cause and effect.

*****

Complexity can be defined in numerous ways. A universally applicable and acceptable definition of either "sufficient" or "over-" complexity is impossible. (To paraphrase Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it). When people make and listen to music, one form or another of complexity is inevitable. Don't give it a second thought.

Every piece of music has an element of the improvisational, extemporaneous, accidental, capricious, prejudiced or arbitrary. Is a piece of music interesting because of this?

*****

Experiment with scale, both the smallest, most local, and the grandest, most global, as well as the most anonymous quantities in-between.

Boredom is only a function of time, and a function with several variables.

*****

Modest work done in a serious way, leavened with levity, can carry large ambitions.

History is both a playground and a minefield, and a composer writes and rewrites music history with reckless disregard for the difference between a playground and a minefield.

Minimal material, maximum information

In music, there is often no simple reduction to the quantitative and there are certainly no easy definitions of either the complex or the simple. When the radical music turned towards the use of minimal materials, the goal and result of that turn was often anything other than simple. By clarifying one or more aspects of the material environment of music, circumstances could be achieved for for a more in-depth perception of the musical experience.

Christian Wolff's astonishing Trio I (dated January, 1951, the composer was not yet 17!). At first glance, just four pitches: g, a', ab'', c'', but at first listen, much more: a', ab'' & c''' plus rests on the flute, any of the pitches, plus rests , on trumpet, the three lower pitches, plus rests, played ordinario or as harmonics on 'cello, plus combinations of the above, plus dynamic variations. Consider also the instability in the surface identity of the music: is this predominantly harmonic or melodic? Or is that even a meaningful distinction here? (This piece is prescient in other ways as well. The -- presumably Webern-inspired -- symmetries of its construction anticipate later works by Morton Feldman).

As a composer, this little piece demonstrates the clear advantage of a restricted gamut over music which consumes the total chromatic, dynamic range, instrumental ensemble etc.. Details are here framed, made audible, and cherished, while more indiscriminate consumption is ultimately about making details subsidiary to the ensemble.

Tones or aggregates of tones isolated or sustained beyond more familiar musical conditions allow for an altered perception. Here, from the second movement of Douglas Leedy's Trio (1960) for flute, horn and piano, a work which shares features with contemporary pieces by Young, Riley, Jennings, Oliveros, Rush and others:
The sustained wind tones are heard individually and together -- perhaps initially as an octave expanded minor sixth, but eventually as something both more distinct and more anonymous. And how is that lower register minor third in the piano heard? In that register, its identity as an interval takes time to resolve from an initially noisy appearance, and the composer has given us enough time to experience that resolution.

And sometimes the apparently complex is much less so. Or is it? This, from the first movement of Leedy's Trio:
What appear to be complex flurries of notes turn out to be unisons colored by their instrumentation, with something close to a tune frequently emerging from nothing more or less than a major second gently rocking back and forth.