Category: Analysis

Music, MOOCs, and Copyright: Digital Dilemmas for Schools of Music

I first heard about Coursera a year ago when I was carpooling to a gig with my friend Kate. She told me about a personal finance class she was taking. The class was free, the course materials were really great, and she was attending every Saturday.
“Oh wow!” I said. “So where’s the class?”

Turns out, the class was online. Kate was enrolled in a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) at Coursera, one of the internet’s largest providers of online classes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, MOOCs are one of the biggest hot-button acronyms in education today. They’ve been hailed as both a revolution in access to information and a harbinger of corporatized educational doom.
Calarts MOOCs
At first glance, the opportunity to take free online courses from some of the country’s most prestigious universities—Coursera partners with schools like Stanford, Princeton, Rice, and Yale—sounds great. My friend Kate represents a relatively noncontroversial MOOC student: an educated adult taking a class in a non-university, not-for-credit setting. She’s what proponents of MOOCs would call a “lifelong learner,” and an ideal beneficiary of free, high-quality online education.
But for some educational stakeholders, organizations like Coursera—which is for-profit, funded by venture capitalists, and doesn’t classify itself as an institution of higher learning—represent a threat to higher education as we currently know it. MOOCs are particularly controversial when they are offered for credit in the setting of a university degree program. Holding up MOOCs as a fast, cheap alternative to a traditional college education—which for most American students comes with a heavy price tag—could result in a two-tiered class system in which rich students get face time and poor students get screen time.

MOOCs also raise concerns about attempting to replace or devalue real, live university professors. California legislators recently rejected a controversial bill which would have outsourced some entry-level state university courses to for-profit companies like Coursera and Udacity. The bill was uniformly opposed by professors in the California State University system.

In light of all this possibility and controversy, I was interested to learn that my alma mater, the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, had become involved with the MOOC wave. I reached out to Cynthia Cyrus, my former dean and musicology professor who is now associate provost for undergraduate education. Cyrus has a career-long passionate interest in scholarship’s presence on the web. When she first arrived in the provost’s office in 2011, hardly anyone was talking about MOOCs, she said. Since then, MOOCs have become the focus of a national education debate, and Cyrus has helped oversee and develop the university’s partnership with Coursera. Cyrus described the work as exhilarating. “It’s not very often,” she noted, “that someone gets to start a whole new division of the university.”

In my conversation with Cyrus, I learned a great deal about the particular copyright challenges that schools of music face when it comes to using recordings and other media in the context of online learning. We also discussed how Vanderbilt is choosing to relate to the complex ethical questions that MOOCs raise, offering a window into the important decisions that higher education institutions across the country are making.
Berklee MOOCs
Ellen McSweeney: Vanderbilt initially wanted to have five Coursera offerings—one from each school. Is the Blair School of Music course up and running?

Cynthia Cyrus: One of the Blair School faculty is lined up and ready to teach for Coursera, and that was supposed to be one of our first five offerings. But the copyright questions in music are so much a higher hurdle to cross over that we haven’t actually brought that particular course to fruition.
Some of the other schools teaching for Coursera try to skirt copyright issues by linking to things on YouTube. But Vanderbilt’s policy is that if it’s a violation of copyright in one arena, simply linking to someone else doesn’t get us out of that moral dilemma.

We’re trying to be really mindful about the ways in which musicians are compensated as we move forward in this digital medium.

EM: What would your ideal solution be for the copyright issues that music MOOCs are facing?

CC: The strategy that I’d really like to see come to fruition is for Coursera to do negotiations with one or more of the music aggregators to say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get access to the iTunes list, where students could listen for free during the course and then purchase it later if they’d like?” This is similar to what’s been done with textbooks. That’s my ideal, whether it’s iTunes or Naxos or maybe even a BMI or ASCAP relationship. I think it would be best for all concerned if we have a broad musical catalog to draw on for these teaching purposes.

The second model, which will be [Vanderbilt’s] default if we can’t get Option A to work, is to simply negotiate copyright for each and every example that the faculty member wants to use. But that’s a huge amount of money and a large amount of work. Last year, with no staff supporting the Coursera project, that was simply not an option, which is why the Blair course is still on hold.

EM: Face-to-face university professors can use musical examples without copyright concerns. Why aren’t the use of musical examples in Coursera considered fair use? Is it because the Coursera is for-profit?

CC: It’s not just that they’re for profit, but also that they haven’t defined themselves as an institute of higher education. There is no case law to determine whether there is fair use in this area, and nobody wants to be the one to provide the case law! But there’s a real need, not just for Coursera, but many different providers of intellectual knowledge, to be fluent in the idioms of 21st-century culture that aren’t in any of the protected categories under U.S. law. There’s a real absence of legal framework for handling these kinds of issues.

That’s one of the reasons, if you look at the Coursera course list, there’s quite a list of things that can be taught without copyright-protected musical examples. Faculty members must deliberately restrict what materials they use as illustrative examples.
It drives me nuts a little bit. Without structural and legal support, we’ve categorized an entire area of culture as being off limits for MOOCs. And I have issues with that, coming from a school of music. Although it does remind me that there’s a reason that I like to work on [materials created by] dead people! The 15th-century nuns are not going to object to what I’m out there printing.

How We Learn Now: Education Week

Looking for more Education Week content? Go to the index.

EM: There are major ethical concerns surrounding MOOCs—about who’s funding them, who’s taking them, and whether they’re trying to replace higher education altogether. Where does Vanderbilt stand on those questions?

CC: Vanderbilt is treating Coursera as outreach, as a means of global penetration, and as a way to reach out to alumni and support continued engagement with the university community. None of our classes are available here for credit, and that’s an important distinction.
The model that the state of California was contemplating is worrisome on a couple of levels. First of all, using one school’s intellectual capital to meet your own institutional agenda is a way of ceding your authority as an institution of higher education. Coming from my faculty background, that makes me uncomfortable. The idea of taking, for example, our one-credit nutrition course out of the Vanderbilt environment and having another institution say, “Boom, you complete that course, you get one credit!” is problematic. That needs to go through a university’s faculty governance. Faculty should always be the ones to determine whether a course is meeting their educational vision. Here at Vanderbilt, we haven’t asked any of our faculty to review the MOOCs in a for-credit environment. That’s not what a Vanderbilt degree is about.

While none of our Coursera offerings are for-credit, faculty can use materials developed for Coursera as part of their face-to-face courses. Faculty have been able to do “flipped” classroom teaching, which means that students do passive learning—like watching lectures—at home. Professors then use class time for group activities and active learning that hasn’t always been possible, given the constraints of the schedule.

We’ve also done quite a bit of experimentation with what we call “wrapping,” in which a Vanderbilt professor can use a MOOC as part of their own course content. Professor Doug Fisher did this with one of [Coursera cofounder] Andrew Ng’s courses. Doug taught a class that was “wrapped” around Ng’s lectures. Doug’s course drew on those as a body of common knowledge and a jumping-off place for the students.

The crux of the issue is that what one does in a college class is more than acquire content. MOOCs are great for the content part, but the community insights, the ability to synthesize material, those higher-order processes happen because you are studying a common area. They are not themselves the common area of study. And the thing we know from longitudinal studies of students is that they don’t remember the content, but they do retain the intuitions that they developed while working through that content. That’s the part that we could lose when schools are relying too heavily on digital media.
EM: What do you see other schools of music doing with their MOOC offerings?
CC: Berklee College of Music has a number of Coursera courses, and they have opted mostly for subject matter that doesn’t require too many copyright-protected musical examples: Jazz Improv, Intro to Music Production, Songwriting, Intro to Guitar. There are a variety of music courses out there, but each one of them has had to invent its own solution to the copyright problem. Schools of music are not yet working cohesively as a team to get these issues worked out.
Curtis has a course live now on Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and another one on Music History through Performance that goes live in October. There, I think, they are probably capitalizing on out-of-copyright works. I don’t know what their solution would be for the 20th or 21st century. With older repertoire, they have to worry about performer permissions, but they don’t have to worry about the permissions of composers.

EM: Right! I’m writing this article for a contemporary music community audience, and realizing that we may have particular barriers to participating in the MOOC wave.

CC: Right. It is entirely possible that when we get into pulling courses together, people will be generous with permissions. However, most of the people we negotiate permissions with are lawyers. It’s not the musicians saying yes, I want to compromise and be part of this social good. We’re dealing with lawyers. To me, lifelong learning audiences need to and want to be engaged with the musical details of the music that they’re choosing to hear live. But it’s awfully hard to get through the hurdles of how to get that up and online without stepping on somebody’s toes.

Inviting Possibilities for New Music and Music Education

How We Learn Now: Education Week

Looking for more Education Week content? Go to the index.

How would you feel if you heard your own or a colleague’s music emanating from a high school student’s ear buds or car speakers? How might you feel if, several seconds later, it is heard mashed up with the latest Katy Perry or Kendrick Lamar track? How might you respond to a teenager who is arranging the music for a group of her friends who play various instruments in a middle school ensemble? Can you envision yourself video conferencing with a group of elementary school or university students who recently posted video clips of themselves discussing new music on YouTube or who admitted that they would like to try transforming a piece from the genre into electronic dance music? These questions hint towards possibilities that some may find problematic and that others may consider appropriate and beneficial for new music, musicians, and students. While some might question the ways in which the young people in these images are engaging with new music and aspects of what might be considered participatory culture, others might find it out of place that these young people are even involved with new music in the first place.

Along with outreach and marketing, music education can play a powerful role in expanding the public’s engagement with new music. Closer relationships between new music and music education communities could increase the presence of new music in educational settings. First, though, we need to recognize different ways that people in new music and music education communities conceptualize “music education” and “new music.”

For instance, my default conception of music education conjures images of working with in-service and pre-service music teachers on contemporary approaches to teaching music or with groups of young people engaging with music in elementary, middle, and high schools. However, I understand that many involved in new music also engage in music education in university classrooms, practice rooms, lecture halls, studios, concert halls, online venues, and other settings. Others might wonder if music education still exists in schools (yes, and it is vibrant, thriving, and evolving in the majority of schools across America) or have vivid images of music education consisting of plastic recorders, marching bands, and a capella groups.

Similarly, music educators have different notions of what “new music” means. For instance, many K-12 music educators’ perceptions of new music are sometimes tied to whatever music is marketed to them in specialized magazines, publishing catalogs, or at professional conferences. For a large number of music educators, new music is limited to the composers last addressed in their final undergraduate music literature or theory course. Perhaps ongoing dialogue spurred by NewMusicBox’s education week may lead to an increased number of people who find themselves involved in both new music and music education.

*

The following scenarios are based on my experiences, observations, and thinking as a music teacher educator working with pre-service and in-service music teachers. They offer possibilities of what could be rather than actual descriptions of particular people and places.

Looking in on Contemporary Pedagogy

For years, Bob Hinton stood or sat at the front of his university classroom and lectured. Some of his students joked that he had made a permanent indentation in the floor. Three years ago, he began experimenting with flipping his classroom. In other words, he video recorded lectures and discussions of the music his students were analyzing and performing and posted them online for his students to view prior to meeting in class. This freed up class time to facilitate discussion and engage with music more actively. Last year, he leveraged the multimedia and interactive aspects of the cloud-based service VoiceThread to have his students upload their own text, video, or audio responses around his videos. This led to dialogue prior to class. Skeptical at first, Bob recognized that his students were more engaged and were beginning to make connections to the content in class in ways that many had not in prior years. Students of his who also studied pedagogy in their education courses were able to identify how Bob was transforming his classroom from one that was teacher-centric to a more student-centered setting.

Bob began borrowing strategies he picked up while collaborating with a team of colleagues on a grant that funded long-term partnerships between the music program, local music educators, and K-12 students. He lectured less and began spending more time facilitating projects. He found himself circulating around his classroom frequently as his students collaborated in groups on projects he designed. His students were creating, analyzing, discussing, performing, and researching music around questions such as: How do musicians relate or respond to their environment? How does music reflect or affect society? What is my role as a musician in the 21st century? He began observing how most of the key concepts he planned to address in class emerged from students’ work on their projects, particularly when he asked questions that helped them reflect more on what they were doing and how it related to the course content.

Bob felt himself shifting away from seeing his role as someone who imparted knowledge or delivered content to his students and moving more toward helping them construct their own understanding and meaning of the key concepts important to his course. While he still poked fun at the phrase “being a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage,” it described his developing pedagogy. He was asking questions and guiding students’ inquiry in ways that encouraged them to problem-solve and think critically about the course content and its relation to their lives. He was beginning to see the possibilities of a contemporary approach to his pedagogy.

Looking in on Participatory Culture

Kelly Sutton only recently came across the idea of participatory culture at a music education conference presentation she attended. After eavesdropping on some of her students’ conversations and hearing about the song Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, she started searching YouTube to identify examples of participatory culture by observing how people engaged with the music beyond listening to it.


Kelly first found covers and arrangements of the song and was intrigued by how many different tutorials people had created to teach others how to perform Radioactive on guitar, piano, and other instruments. She didn’t understand why people would create synthesia videos of popular music but figured that it related to the type of animated notation that appeared in video games such as RockBand and RockSmith. She found mashups (NSFW), remixes, sample-based beats and produced instrumentals over which people could rap. Kelly was stunned by how much time and energy people put into creating solo multitracked a capella recordings, solo-multitracked arrangements, and parodies or satires. She still couldn’t quite figure out why someone would use the game Minecraft to create noteblock versions of a song and wondered what other types of technology people used to interact with music. Kelly found commentaries (some parts NSFW) that people posted about the song particularly interesting, since her students were also often interested in discussing their music.

Curious, Kelly looked up the names of other popular songs she found on Billboard’s Top 100 and searched for similar examples on YouTube. Sure enough, she found similar videos and realized how unaware she was of the ways that people engaged with music beyond those in her music program. She then looked for examples beyond a mainstream popular music context and found remix contests related to music released by Steve Reich, Yo Yo Ma, Eric Whitacre, and DJ Spooky. Kelly was intrigued by an app that allowed people to rework Philip Glass’s music and was surprised to find that the Berliner Philharmonic and Brooklyn Philharmonic had made recordings of Mahler and Beethoven available to the public for remixing.

As Kelly learned more about participatory culture and the ways that people were expressing themselves, engaging with music, and sharing their creations with others (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009, pp. 5-6), she recognized how several orchestral concerts she had attended incorporated this type of ethic. She remembered that some people used their mobile devices to tweet during concerts and had heard about blogs and other social media that concert attendees contributed to. She was also surprised to find out about initiatives that involved the general public collaborating on the creation of a symphony and an opera. Kelly wondered what might happen if professional musicians and cultural organizations such as orchestras expanded aspects of participatory culture related to marketing and outreach to connect with educational projects and long-term collaborations with music educators. She was also curious about the potential of integrating aspects of participatory culture into her own program.

Looking in on Contemporary Pedagogy, Participatory Culture, and New Music

During a recent conversation in her evening grad class, Brenda Jayden realized that she had left a gap in her middle school music courses. Looking at the music in her curriculum and the posters of great composers lined up on the back wall of her classroom, Brenda recognized that her students could easily be left with the impression that composers were, for the most part, dead white men from Europe with funky hair. Brenda understood that this was problematic. Slightly embarrassed that she was unaware of anyone currently composing music in the state where she lived and only able to name six living composers other than those who appeared in the magazine from which she ordered music for her classroom, Brenda decided to address the issue head on.
Brenda developed a project with her students to familiarize them with examples of new music and the people involved in the new music community. She searched for and contacted people involved in the field to determine possibilities for collaborating on the project with her students. She also applied what she was learning in her grad class about participatory culture in the context of music education. After several Skype sessions and Google Hangouts with composers and a new music ensemble, Brenda and her collaborators generated the following questions to structure the project: How is music expressive? What makes new music new?
Brenda was unclear about how copyright, creative rights, and fair use applied in the context of her students engaging creatively with the composers’ music in her classrooms and ensembles. Out of respect for the professional musicians, she asked them how they felt about students appropriating their music in an educational context and tried to determine what she and her students could or should do with the music. Shortly after corresponding with the composers, one of them immediately expressed interest in the idea of Brenda and her students engaging with her music by creating covers, arrangements, remixes, and mashups. As students listened to this composer’s music, they discussed their perspectives on how it was expressive and “new.” They also created and performed their own “new” music that expressed what it was like to go through a day as a middle school student.
Several weeks into the project, students formed groups and chose aspects of participatory culture that they wanted to engage with in relation to the composer’s music. Some created remixes while others analyzed the music by copying and pasting recorded excerpts into Garageband along with their own commentary in the style of a radio interview. One group created a music video and one individual was inspired to create his own music inspired by the original. As the students worked on their projects, Brenda moved around to the different groups asking questions that forwarded their work and developed their musical understanding. The students were extremely motivated to work on the project and were gradually becoming fans of new music. They began wondering aloud how they might hear new music live.

The students and composer developed a 21st-century pen-pal-type of relationship, exchanging video posts, holding Skype sessions, and sometimes exchanging tweets. Some students became curious about other living composers and started researching music online. Others began generating playlists of new music on Spotify and purchasing new music on iTunes. One student proposed that the class work with a composer on a Kickstarter campaign to have new music for middle school students to perform that could also be remixed or used in mashups. Students updated the back wall of their classroom by creating posters of contemporary composers and ensembles with whom they felt a connection, having engaged with their music in ways that were relevant and meaningful to their lives.

After completing the project, Brenda maintained contact with several composers and performers in the new music community. They planned to apply for a grant to have a set of new works commissioned that would provide rights for schools to transform and appropriate the work in any way students wished for non-commercial purposes. The ensemble would provide schools with each part recorded individually as resources to use in creative appropriation and for teachers to use in their instruction. Brenda was reinvigorated by the possibilities afforded through participatory culture in her classroom and felt that her students had not only learned much about the expressive potential of music, but had developed as musicians and young people.

New Music in New Music Education?
Trading Ideas
Music education and new music will continue evolving. However, whether they do so apart from one another or in collaboration depends on our actions. The above scenarios invite possibilities that deserve dialogue and debate. A shift towards more student-centered classrooms and projects or inquiry-based learning can provide an excellent context for people to engage with and develop a deep understanding and passion for new music. Likewise, embracing participatory culture can provide people with opportunities to engage with new music in ways that generate interest, develop understanding, and are meaningful to their lives. Those in new music and music education communities might consider collaborating on projects that provide young people with multiple ways of interacting with and learning about new music.

Musicians involved with new music might release audio recordings of music to be remixed, covered, mashed-up, mixed into DJ sets, or manipulated in ways that assist educators in providing students with interesting ways of exploring and interacting with the music. Composers might also allow their works to be recorded and shared as individual parts, stems, or composite recordings for these and other purposes. Music educators experienced with contemporary pedagogies might expand their curricula and open their classrooms to new music. Furthermore, music educators might ensure that at minimum, students are aware of the ways music is being created, performed, and engaged with in contemporary society. Regardless of how intersections of new music and music education might play out, dialogue and collaboration are key in moving forward.

Continuing Conversations

The dialogue fostered by education week on NewMusicBox can catalyze ongoing and sustained conversations between multiple communities. This goes both ways. Music educators might identify and dialogue with organizations and individuals dedicated to supporting and forwarding new music. Music educators should also commit to maintaining awareness of the new music world by listening to the music as well as reading online magazines such as NewMusicBox along with related websites, social media, and the blogs of musicians engaged in new music. Likewise, those involved in new music might interact with music educators online, in K-12 or university settings, or at state and national music education conferences. New music communities might also increase their awareness of the varied perspectives and discussions taking place in music education by reading professional blogs or reading related research journals, several of which are open access. In the spirit of discussion and collaboration, I plan on holding a Google Hangout at some point during the Spring 2014 semester when I teach my Digital and Participatory Culture in Music course to foster related dialogue. I hope some of you will consider taking part in continuing the conversation.

The themes of contemporary pedagogy and participatory culture articulated throughout this article can be unpacked, explored, and critiqued in greater detail in whatever context makes the most sense to educators and new music practitioners. More importantly, however, is their potential for collaboration that can contribute to the musical lives of young people, develop the capacity for music educators to integrate new music into their programs, and support those most closely involved in new music.

Food Opera: Merging Taste and Sound in Real Time

[Note: Portions of this article are borrowed from my paper “Food Opera: A New Genre for Audio-Gustatory Expression,” co-authored with Jutta Friedrichs (producer of our food operas), to be presented at the Second International Workshop on Musical Metacreation, and are reproduced here with gratitude.]

Beside the White Chickens: A Summer Food Opera (excerpt) from Ben Houge on Vimeo.

Introduction

Since 2012, I’ve co-produced three audio-gustatory events that I decided to call “food operas.” For each of these events, I composed a real-time generative soundtrack to accompany a multicourse meal, designed by chef Jason Bond of Bondir restaurant in Cambridge, MA. This music responds to events cued by diners, drawing on event-driven scoring techniques adapted from my work in the video game industry since 1996. Each table in the restaurant is outfitted with speakers, one for each diner, totaling thirty channels of coordinated, real-time, algorithmic, spatially deployed sound in all.

The concept is predicated on the acknowledgement of dining as a time-based art form, akin to film, dance, and music. I use the term “opera” for its multimedia associations, describing a hybrid, interdisciplinary work that engages and explores the junctures between multiple senses.

I identify the main innovations in these food operas as follows:

• Real-time scoring techniques adapted from the field of video game music create a custom soundtrack that follows unpredictable, live input from diners.
• Associating sound with taste at the level of texture (somewhere between an individual note and a complete musical phrase) allows for a heterophony in which the two senses can be closely linked while still maintaining a degree of autonomy.
• Coordinating sound across a massively multichannel speaker array allows us to preserve the interpersonal and social aspect of communal dining while also elaborating a large-scale sonic environment. (I spent some time debating whether thirty channels could be described as “massively multichannel,” but I decided in the end to keep the term, as it’s more than what can be deployed from a single computer using a single audio interface, more than you typically find in a movie theater, and far more than a typical home listening environment.)

Each of these innovations on its own may represent a small step forward, but collectively, they allow for what we (producer/artist Jutta Friedrichs, chef Jason Bond, and I) consider to be a new genre of artistic production: the food opera.

One reason we consider food opera to be a new genre is that its expressive potentialities are so vast. The potential to link sound to food, scent, and the tactile sensations of the mouth creates an entirely new field of sensory interplay, which may be harnessed to a wide range of expressive ends. Approaches include theatrical narrative structures (including non-linear or generative narratives) that might tell a story, spatial or landscape meditations that might resemble a sound installation, and ritual events such as a Passover Seder or a wedding ceremony.

As an example, in our second and third food operas, alongside purely musical elements, we incorporated field recordings and interviews from some of the local, organic farms that provide Bondir’s ingredients. Our goal was to tell the story of sustainable food practices by sonically connecting diners to the sources of their meals. We feel that this message was conveyed more deeply and memorably than it would have been using sound or taste alone.

Through the food opera project, we hope to show how the application of real-time music generation techniques, originally developed for use in the virtual worlds of video games, can increasingly be applied to score the unpredictable, real-time phenomena of our everyday physical environment, which we observe to be a rapidly growing arena of cultural production.

Chef&Composer

The chef and the composer. Photo by Melissa Rivard/Andrew Janjigian.

History and Previous Work

The impetus to associate eating with music goes back to our earliest human history; in myriad historical documents, music has been present at feasts, banquets, rituals, and celebrations. Since the development of the restaurant, performers have often been present to provide background music for diners. And following the advent of recorded sound in the twentieth century, recorded music, from jukeboxes to iPods, has increased in prominence in restaurants to the point of ubiquity. But in all of these situations, music, by the very means of its production, has been physically distanced from the table and at best only coarsely synchronized with the meal, with none of the sophistication of interplay between music and other art forms to which we are accustomed in a ballet, a film, or an opera. (For a lively and detailed overview of historical pairings of food with sound, check out Qian [Janice] Wang’s freshly minted MIT master’s thesis: Music, Mind, and Mouth: Exploring the Interaction Between Music and Flavor Perception.)

In recent years, there has been an increase in artistic attention to the sense of taste, while at the same time chefs have been making forays into the art world. Perhaps the most famous milestone in this rapprochement was Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s “G Pavilion” at the Documenta 12 art exhibition in 2007. Other touchstones include Natalie Jeremijenko and Mihir Desai’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club and renowned French pastry chef Pierre Hermé being invited to lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Examples of food-based experiences that incorporate sound are more rare. The most well-known example is perhaps The Sound of the Sea, developed at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England; this dish is served with an iPod in a conch shell allowing diners to hear a field recording of ocean surf on headphones while they dine. A similar approach is used in Volcano Flambé, developed by chef Kevin Lasko and artist Marina Abramović at Park Avenue Winter in New York, which was accompanied by a recording of the artist describing the ice cream and merengue-based dessert and thanking diners “for eating with awareness.” Paul Pairet, a French chef based in Shanghai, opened a new restaurant named Ultraviolet in the summer of 2012, which seats only ten diners per night, and each of the twenty-two courses is accompanied by video projections on the walls and a soundtrack of previously-composed music. (The Beatles’ “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” accompanies a riff on traditional English fish and chips, for example.)

While there has been an increase in art world interest in eating in the last century, much of it ignores the sensory nuance of taste. I dismiss as irrelevant to the current discussion art that incorporates food for purely visual or conceptual effect (e.g., Luciano Fabro’s Sisyphus, Paola Pivi’s It’s a Cocktail Party), performance work that involves eating without an exploration of the sensation of taste (Yoko Ono’s Tunafish Sandwich Piece, Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch, Emily Katrencik’s Consuming 1.956 Inches Each Day For 41 Days), or merely visual representations of food (Claes Oldenburg’s Baked Potato, Francesc Guillamet’s photographs of dishes from El Bulli).

Small Asparagus Opera

Diners waiting in anticipation at the first food opera. Photo by Melissa Rivard/Andrew Janjigian.

My food opera work has its genesis in conversations and sketches dating back to 2006, including a workshop in Shanghai in 2010. The first public presentation of these ideas, and also my first collaboration with chef Jason Bond, was entitled “Food Opera: Four Asparagus Compositions” and took place in May 2012 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, as part of a food-oriented series curated by Jutta Friedrichs, Elizabeth MacWillie, and Sara Hendren, then students in the GSD’s Art, Design and the Public Domain program, headed by professors Sanford Kwinter and Krzysztof Wodiczko. The second event, entitled “Sensing Terroir: A Harvest Food Opera,” took place in November 2012 at chef Jason Bond’s Bondir restaurant in Cambridge, sponsored by Artists in Context; this event incorporated field recordings and interviews with local, organic food providers and sought to explore dining as a narrative form to tell the story of sustainable food practices. The third event, entitled “Beside the White Chickens: A Summer Food Opera,” took place in July 2013 at Bondir and highlighted chef Bond’s local, organic poultry providers, Pete and Jen’s Backyard Birds of Concord, MA, taking as its inspiration the William Carlos Williams poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” around which sous chef Rachel Miller organized the menu.

Disclaimer: renderings of individual textures are interspersed throughout this article. Please note, however, that at a food opera event, none of these would be heard in isolation, but they would merge in space with twenty-five other textures at various stages of deployment to create a dense, rich soundscape.

Space and Massively Multichannel Sound

Pam Joy and Margaret Experiencing Food Opera

Diners enjoying Chicken Galantine au Foin, Lions Mane Mushrooms, White Sage Peach Confit, Broccoli Leaf and Rhode Island White Flint Corn Flour Polenta, Charred Eggplant, Snow Bok Choy, and Cherry Tomatoes in Tomato Honey with corresponding music. (Note the placement of the speakers on the table.) Photo by Jutta Friedrichs.

An overriding goal throughout this project is to respect the integrity and the history of the experience of communal dining: the focus is at the table, not on a stage situated elsewhere in the dining environment. Diners are free to converse during the event. To quote Brian Eno, the music should be “as interesting as it is ignorable,” a statement that also parallels chef Jason Bond’s observation of the manner in which people enjoy his food. The sound is there to enhance and supplement the meal, not to supersede or distract from it. In our conception of food opera, the very physical presence of a live performer alters the calculus of the dining experience to an unacceptable degree; this is why we rely on recorded sound for our event. (However, because the sound is being deployed in real time, it exists, as all video game soundtracks do, somewhere between recording and performance. The combination of video game music techniques and multichannel sound diffusion are the technologies that enable food opera as we define it to exist.)

In our second and third events at Bondir restaurant, each diner has a dedicated speaker through which she or he hears the accompaniment to her or his meal. The small speaker, about 3 inches in diameter, takes the place of a traditional table centerpiece (e.g., a vase of flowers) and rests in a small speaker stand designed by Jutta Friedrichs, which allows two speakers pointed in opposite directions to be directed at two diners facing each other. Bondir seats twenty-six diners, so twenty-six channels of sound are deployed simultaneously to individual diners throughout the restaurant. Six additional speakers (four around the perimeter of the room plus two custom hemisphere speakers, designed by Stephan Moore, positioned on stands in the middle of the room) play a slowly evolving low frequency drone that provides a harmonic context for the musical textures of each diner’s discrete accompaniment.

We do not use any particularly focused or directional speaker technology, and in fact, it is not particularly desirable for our planned experience. Sounds from nearby speakers will naturally blend together, providing a rich field of music, in effect transforming the entire restaurant into a generative sound installation. At our second and third events, diners could make reservations anytime between 5pm and 9:30pm, such that, at any given time, different people in the restaurant would be at different points in their meals; this is why the harmonic and rhythmic coordination described above is particularly important. The overall form of the piece is an aggregate of every table’s individual dining trajectory, which results in an emergent foreshadowing and recapitulation as other diners in the restaurant order the same dishes at different times.

Mimesis and Abstraction

The primary sound sources in our first three events are traditional, acoustic musical instruments: flute, clarinet, bassoon, viola, cello, accordion, a tourist nyatiti from Kenya, a Chinese hulusi, and miscellaneous percussion. This may seem an unnecessary restriction, as the sound is played through speakers, allowing any electroacoustic sound to be employed. We used traditional musical instrument sounds to create an association with the alchemy of cooking: recognizable physical materials are juxtaposed, manipulated, and transformed to an aesthetic end. The sample manipulations we employ are fairly straightforward (e.g., splicing, transposing, applying amplitude envelopes), so that the acoustic source material remains clear.

There is an essential abstractness that is shared by food and music (distinct from visual art and writing, for example), which we sought to underscore. One of the original inspirations for this whole project was to explore the idea of using sound to describe taste, bypassing words entirely. It is difficult for the taste of asparagus, like the sound of a cello, to be “about” anything other than itself. As in dining, mimesis in acoustic music is by far the exception (e.g., the thunder at the end of Berlioz’s “Scène aux Champs” from Symphonie Fantastique).

In addition to these abstract sounds (abstract in the sense of an abstract photograph) intended to evoke or compliment the sensory experience of each dish, the second and third food operas also incorporated field recordings and interviews from the farms that supply Bondir’s ingredients. With the field recordings, the goal was to get people thinking about where their food comes from, using sound to connect diners at Bondir to the farms on which the ingredients for the meal were produced. And in the interviews, diners could hear directly from farmers stories about the labor that goes into producing organic produce, the challenges of sustainable farming, and the histories of obscure heirloom vegetables (such as the Waldoboro green neck turnip).
Interviews accompanied only some of the courses, and the ambient sound served primarily as buffer or interstitial behavior between courses. (After we finished our setup and sound check, but before the first guests arrived, the room was filled with 26 channels of chickens clucking, which was a pretty fantastic sound, and remarkably evocative of the experience of walking on Pete and Jen’s farm.) But since different diners are on different courses at the same time, these three modes of listening (abstract [or conventionally musical], mimetic, and linguistic) were almost always active somewhere in the space and contributed to the richness of the experience.

Video Games in the Restaurant

As video games are inherently organized around the unpredictable input of players, video game music has evolved to be uniquely sensitive to real-time input. In a video game, any event may be associated with a musical parameter, and this concept of mapping between two different types of data is at the core of video game music, and indeed, of digital art in general. These mappings have evolved to be quite sophisticated and can be thought of as the points of convergence between two autonomous but linked systems.
The challenge of composing music for real-time deployment may be summarized as follows: deciding what to do when an event is received (typically the managing of a musical event or transition), and what to do for the indeterminate amount of time between events (typically some kind of continuous or state-based musical behavior). The simplest solution, and historically the most prevalent, is to simply loop a piece of music indefinitely until an event is registered, at which point the music fades to silence over a certain amount of time, while a new piece of looping music may fade in. The disadvantages to this approach, however, are numerous, including tedious repetition and inelegant transitions.

Many more sophisticated techniques have been developed, and while it is beyond the scope of this article to present a full taxonomy, the techniques that we have incorporated into our food opera work to date include the coordination of musical events along a metric timeline, transposition of MIDI-like note data, and the algorithmic generation of musical melodies, pitch aggregates, rhythms, and phrases. In some aspects, our focus on notes and short phrases recalls the DirectMusic system released by Microsoft in 1999. It also draws from work by aleatoric composers of the mid-twentieth century, including John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. (For more information, see my paper Cell-Based Musical Deployment in Tom Clancy’s EndWar, presented at the First International Conference on Musical Metacreation in 2012.)

In our food operas, the sources of real time events are constrained to a fairly limited range: we observe which dishes are chosen by a diner, when each course arrives, and when it is finished. The number of courses is fixed (four for our first food opera, five for the second and third), and for most courses, the diner has a choice between two dishes.

In addition to the events indicating the beginning and ending of each course, the music responds to the elapsed time since the beginning of each course. In most cases, over the progression of each course, there is a gradual decrease in musical intensity, which may be quantified in density of musical events, volume, or number of concurrent layers. An additional behavior, limited in duration, may be associated with the beginning or ending of each course.

These parameters may seem few, but given that diners are coming and going throughout a span of roughly five hours, and that any of the twenty-six diners may be at any point in their meal at any time, the richness and complexity of the overall, emergent sonic environment is significant.

The field recordings and interviews also draw on video game techniques, as recordings of environmental ambiences and dialog are a key component of most video games. Our field recordings are chopped up and shuffled, providing infinite variation. Lines of dialog are also edited into individual files and balanced for volume before being deployed intermittently.

Texture and Musical Granularity

What we mean by musical texture is a convenient middle ground between an individual note and a fully composed musical composition. It is a musical behavior with a clear identity, characterized by instrumentation, melodic contour and duration, harmonic structure, voicing style, rhythmic density, and number of constituent layers. While textures may contain melodic elements, they are not primarily melodic in character. Our textures are designed to continue indefinitely without repetition, using algorithmic techniques to vary, shuffle, offset, juxtapose, and in some cases generate musical material.

Game music may be categorized according to the granularity of its musical components, from through-composed pieces of several minutes in duration to individual notes (or even, in considering real-time synthesis systems, subdivisions of notes). Granularity is linked to responsiveness, which is to say, the maximum amount of time that could elapse between the arrival of a game event and a musical system’s response. By orienting music around texture, we achieve a highly responsive musical fabric.

Texture in our usage is independent of pitch, so that the music may modulate to a new key area while preserving texture identity. Some textures incorporate longer phrases, which are categorized according to the harmonic areas with which they are compatible.
We emphasize texture, because it offers a useful way of defining a musical identity without large-scale temporal expectation; a key aspect of our use of texture is that it can continue indefinitely. This allows for sustained and concentrated evaluation, which in turn makes it well suited to pairing with other multimedia input, such as taste.

We find this approach preferable to playing a completed piece of music, which may contain a conflicting or distracting dramatic trajectory (manifested, for example, as the climax of a phrase or a juncture in a piece’s formal articulation), or which may end prematurely, or which may loop unvaryingly, resulting in fatigue or annoyance for listeners due to unmitigated repetition.
This approach is also preferable to simply sustaining or repeating a single tone, timbre, or sonority, since it provides rhythmic and harmonic context for individual tones and allows for the investigation of the modes of meaning with which music has long been associated, including harmony, rhythm, and melody—the syntax and grammar of music.

Coordination and Modularity

The music for the food opera is coordinated in harmony and rhythm and composed so that this coordination would be readily apparent. As most of our diners are assumed to be musical non-specialists, we decided to compose music that is diatonic and organized around a clear beat referential of 188 beats per minute.

All rhythmic activity is coordinated in reference to a common pulse that is present throughout the work. New events are, for the most part, quantized to start on a beat (although random delays of a few milliseconds may be introduced as a humanizing gesture). There is no concept of meter, only pulse, although events may be assigned to happen on multiples of beats, which creates a kind of local meter within a specific texture.

As the project has evolved over our three events so far, we determined a desire to blur the rhythm at certain points, to avoid an overly metronomic effect. For this reason we introduced the idea of rubato phrases that could be played intermittently, uncoordinated with the underlying pulse.

Over the course of the evening, the underlying harmony modulates very slowly in a random walk among five diatonic key areas excerpted from the circle of fifths: D, G, C, F, and B flat. This provides a sense of harmonic progression and combats key fatigue. A bass drone (generated in real-time from transposed recordings of a viola, a human voice, a synthesizer, and an electric generator used in a chicken slaughtering we observed) articulates this harmonic movement. The bass drone slowly (every forty to eighty seconds) chooses scale degrees from the current tonality (excluding the leading tone) according to a first order Markov chain of acceptable progressions; this allows each texture to be heard with any of six possible scale degrees in the bass, providing additional variation. Key modulations happen every three to eight bass notes (with a weighting towards the short end of that range). We don’t really use MIDI as an interface, but a lot of the system works similarly to the way MIDI does, e.g. handling notes with integer ID numbers.

Our musical textures are transposed according to one of two principles. For musical textures that are rendered using this MIDI-like system, transposition is a trivial affair, involving an integer semitone offset. For textures that involve recorded phrases, transposition is slightly more complicated: based on the current key, we choose from a pre-compiled list representing the subset of phrases compatible with the current key. In some cases, we perform real-time transposition of musical phrases. For rubato phrases that do not need to be rhythmically precise, we have found it musically acceptable to transpose as much as two semi-tones up or down to achieve compatibility with the current key. For phrases that do require rhythmic precision, we may transpose in simple multiples of the original speed (e.g., 0.5, 0.667, 1.5, 2.0) to achieve musical variety and to maximize the contexts in which a recorded phrase may be used (an important concept in game audio development).

As for the musical textures, each can be thought of as an independent algorithmic study unto itself. The only constraint is that it must in some way conform to the current key area and acknowledge the underlying pulse. Textures are composed to be somewhat sparse, with an awareness that they will be deployed alongside other textures, and are designed with registral variation in mind.
The system we used for the first three food operas was programmed in Max. The menu was preloaded into the system, and as diners placed their orders, we input the choices into a patch representing the layout of the restaurant. As dishes came and went, we advanced the musical behavior for each seat. An interstitial behavior, consisting of footsteps from one of the farms providing the ingredients for the meal, quantized to the pulse of the music, played between courses. Ambient sound from the farms played before the first course and after the last.

Foam

Soft Poached Egg (already consumed), Cucumber Foam, Lemon Balm Brioche, Prairie Fire Chili, Brown Butter Vinaigrette, and speaker in position in front of the plate. Photo by Jutta Friedrichs.


Scoring vs. Synaesthesia

A question that has come up repeatedly while working on this project is whether the goal is to attain a kind of synaesthesia. I have observed an increase in discussion around the notion of synaesthesia in recent years, and it is my guess that the reason has to do with the importance of mapping in the growing field of digital art. By now, this concept should be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the genre; mapping, simply defined, is the binding of two sets of data. A classic video game example would be the linking of a vehicle’s velocity to its engine sound’s pitch. In an interactive installation, it might be the association of a viewer’s location in a video image with the volume of an accompanying sound.

Synaesthesia is a hard-wired mapping between the senses. I think of Messiaen hearing a certain sonority as blue-violet or mauve. There’s a notion that a sound has a certain smell, or a color has a certain sound, and it is not a choice or assignation, but rather an inalienable attribute of the thing.

What mapping has in common with synaesthesia is the notion of consistency; once established, there is a fixed method for converting one kind of information into another. The difference between mapping and synaesthesia is that, whereas synaesthesia is somehow hard-wired, a mapping is assigned (we might just as well say, “designed,” or “composed”). This creative aspect of mapping, of system design, is only slowly gaining recognition as a field of artistic activity, but it is not far removed from an aleatoric composition like Christian Wolff’s Burdocks, for example. Tatsuya Mizuguchi’s video game Rez is a famous example of an effort to suggest synaesthesia via a tightly coordinated merging of visuals, music, and (if you bought the Trance Vibrator peripheral) haptic information. On the other hand, there is a preponderance of software that makes it possible to completely ignore this creative exercise, resulting in some very blunt conversions; the famous Aphex Twin example works as a goofy in-joke, but countless others fall flat from what amounts to a lack of understanding of basic artistic materials.

However, neither of these perspectives is quite what I’m attempting to do with the food opera. Instead, I come at it from the perspective of scoring. In scoring a film or choreography or any other time-based medium, the task of the composer is not to simply convert the visual information into sound. Rather, the idea is to add an additional layer of meaning on top of the original source, to create an additional stream of information. (In fact, this is a common exercise for beginning film scoring students at Berklee College of Music, where I teach: to take a film clip without sound and use music to give it several different emotional spins, now comical, now tense, now poignant, for example.) The result is a kind of counterpoint, in which this new stream contextualizes and informs the original information. There’s a potential for ambiguity, which can provide richness and nuance to someone experiencing the work. To simply replicate it in sound would be redundant.

So it is with the food opera; I am presenting not so much the sound of Chicken Galantine au Foin with Lion’s Mane Mushrooms, White Sage Peach Confit, and Broccoli Leaf; but rather a sound of Chicken Galantine au Foin with Lion’s Mane Mushrooms, White Sage Peach Confit, and Broccoli Leaf. Of course, there is an intense effort to present a score that supports the meal in a meaningful way, but the associations are intuitive and arbitrary, and any number of alternate solutions to this compositional problem may be equally valid.

Future Work

We have a lot of ideas about how to take this idea forward; as I mentioned earlier, the expressive possibilities are vast.
On the technical side, there is enormous potential to increase the amount of input into the system generating the music; we plan to explore this potential in future food operas via a range of sensing mechanisms. Accelerometers could be attached to stemware or silverware, or cameras could be mounted above the tables, to name only the most obvious subsequent steps. In some situations, it might be desirable to have live musicians performing remotely, similar to what is currently done in some Broadway productions, incorporating real-time scoring and cueing systems.

There is also considerable potential to expand the concept in terms of visual art, incorporating projections and video displays, by coordinating table settings, clothing, and other elements of interior and set design.

Food Opera – Four Asparagus Compositions from Jutta Friedrichs on Vimeo.

***

Ben Houge

Ben Houge. Photo by Jutta Friedrichs

Ben Houge is an artist working at the nexus of video games, sound installation, digital art, generative video, music composition, and performance. Also an active composer of choral music, his Lao Zhang was premiered by Dale Warland at the American Composers Forum’s ChoralConnections conference in 2012, and other choral compositions have been commissioned by the Esoterics and the Minnesota Compline Choir. He holds degrees in music from St. Olaf College and the University of Washington and recently moved to Spain to help develop and teach in the new Music Technology Innovation master’s program at the Valencia campus of the Berklee College of Music.

The Second Performance and Beyond

Music Stands

“Take a stand!” by Bill Selak on Flickr.

On June 13 in Brooklyn, a triumvirate of concerts occurred that might have been unthinkable 40 years ago. Frederic Rzewski’s musically and politically radical 1971/72 suite Coming Together/Attica was presented at two venues by three ensembles, each of the groups having planned their concerts independently, without knowledge of the other productions in the works.

If such confluence can be taken as evidence that Coming Together/Attica is a part of the contemporary repertoire today, that might come as a surprise to people who were present for the piece’s premiere—or, at the very least, to a couple of critics. Covering what he termed the “local premiere” at the State University of New York-Buffalo for The New York Times on April 12, 1974, the critic Harold C. Schonberg complained about Coming Together—which sets a paragraph written by a prisoner during the Attica prison riots to an insistently repeating five-note motif—that “the narrator operates almost like a tape loop, constantly repeating sentences. A few minutes of this, all right. But 20 minutes, and it ends up music to sleep by.”
Curiously, the Times ran a review just over a year later—on June 4, 1975—of a concert also presenting Coming Together as a premiere. (Perhaps this was the New York City premiere, although the article doesn’t specify.) The piece fared only slightly better this time around. Peter G. Davis wrote of the concert at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, “Mr. Rzewski played his music brilliantly, but diluted the dramatic effect by declaiming the text in a barely audible and unbelievably monotone drone.” That’s all the consideration the piece got in the review of the concert, which included five other works labeled as “premieres.”

It would seem a hard road to travel from dismissive remarks in the Times to performances by Ictus Percussion, ThingNY, and Newspeak all coinciding on the same night. (The first two performances were part of Conrad Tao’s Unplay Festival at powerHouse Arena in Dumbo; the third occurred during the first night of a three-night run by Newspeak with new choreography by Rebecca Lazier at the Invisible Dog Center in Brooklyn Heights.) Of course, how a piece goes from a perhaps uneventful premiere to even somewhat standard repertoire is the new music million dollar question. But one thing seems certain: There has to be a second performance.

Rzewski Opus One LP

The original Opus One recording of Coming Together/Attica is now a rare collector’s item, but there have been at least four other recordings of these works since then.

Coming Together and its companion piece Attica (which are sometimes given the subtitles Attica I and Attica II) did grow in reputation in the years following its premiere performances. Writing about its LP release for The Village Voice in 1978, the critic and composer Tom Johnson said it epitomized a move away from chord progressions among such composers as Steve Reich and Brian Eno. “Of the many recordings of new music that are almost totally unknown, Frederic Rzewski’s Opus One album (Opus One-20) is about the finest one that I happen to know about. […] I’ve listened to it many times, been touched by its political messages, felt its rhythmic power, and strained by concentration to the hilt trying to follow its melodies as they gradually grow longer and longer.” High praise for a piece that, seven years after its composition, was still “almost totally unknown.”

Rzewski’s politically charged diptych has been performed consistently over the years. It has appeared on at least four other albums since the Opus One LP, and with Rzewski’s imprimatur, the score has been available online as a freely downloadable PDF making it readily available for performance anywhere. It’s also been in ThingNY’s repertoire for about five years and they had performed it a half dozen times, including on election night 2012 at Spectrum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, prior to the Unplay Festival.

For the ensemble’s vocalist Gelsey Bell, the piece is still politically and musically relevant some 40 years after its conception. It was Bell who suggested they include the piece (which, not incidentally, was written more than a decade before she was born) on their Unplay program.

“Structurally it feels like a piece from the ‘70s,” she said, echoing Johnson’s assessment. “What’s nice about it is it does leave a lot open to interpretation. It feels like us doing it right now so it does still feel politically relevant. That and the fact that prisons are still a very relevant topic–it’s going to be relevant for a long time.”

The bold repetitions might not be as shocking today, she noted, but that doesn’t take away from the music.
“I think it’s a beautiful piece,” she said. “Now it might not be very surprising. Contemporary new music audiences aren’t so surprised by it, but its beauty is really obvious.”

Younger ensembles playing a piece—as with ThingNY taking on Rzewski—isn’t just a strong indicator of a piece’s chances at longevity; it’s arguably a necessary condition. Without what conductor and percussionist Steven Schick refers to as a “beta generation” of performers, a work can quickly be lost to history.

Schick

Steven Schick.
Photo by Bill Dean, courtesy Aleba & Co.

“There’s this alpha generation of performers who have contact with the composer and will inject the composition into the repertoire,” Schick said. “And then there’s what I think of as the beta generation of performers who maybe don’t have contact with the composer and make it into what we think of it as. The beta generation coming up is the sign of a piece’s success.”
Schick is big on repeat performances and said he’s performed Bone Alphabet—which he commissioned from Brian Ferneyhough in 1992—some 300 times.

“Most commissioned pieces I perform, if they aren’t picked up two or three years after I premiere it, I think something went wrong. Maybe this is more typical in percussion because we don’t have a large repertoire. If there’s a new piece by David Lang and it hasn’t been performed 40 times the day after exclusivity has expired, then I don’t know what’s going on.”

As a conductor, Schick has faced some challenging premieres, notably presenting James Dillon’s Nine Rivers at Miller Theater on the Columbia University campus in 2011. The massive undertaking calls for three stage settings and is intended to be performed on a single night with the audience moving between venues. Five scheduled premieres in Europe were canceled before Miller Theater took it on, spreading it over three nights instead of different venues. But the conductor quit three days before the opening night. Schick was called in to save the day and presented the expansive work again at the Holland Festival in June.
“The idea of maintaining some kind of coherence was very difficult,” he said of the Nine Rivers premiere. “Exactly where you are in the piece becomes a lot clearer on the third, fourth, fifth performance. The first time it was literally a case of ‘let’s get through this without anything terrible happening.’”

Schick will return to Miller this winter for two nights of concerts celebrating his 60th birthday. One night will consist of what he calls “foundational works,” including pieces by Xenakis and Stockhausen, while the second night will feature works he’s commissioned, including two premieres.

Miller Theater will also be celebrating a birthday this fall, marking 25 years since renovating and changing its name from McMillin Theater to its current moniker. Melissa Smey, who has worked with the theater for 12 years and has been executive director since 2009, is well aware of the prestige in presenting premieres, even if it doesn’t affect ticket sales.

Melissa Smey

Melissa Smey.
Photo by Eileen Barroso, courtesy Aleba & Co.

“There’s a received wisdom that they’re newsworthy; you’re adding to the field of music,” she said. “There’s an idea that there’s a glamour in a world premiere, it’s exciting, it’s new. And as a presenter, you’re getting some input as to what the piece will be.”
Smey invited British vocal troupe The Tallis Scholars to perform at the theater this fall (the concert marking yet another birthday, the ensemble’s 40th anniversary) and has commissioned composer Michael Nyman to write a new piece for them. As the commissioner, she said, she is working with Nyman to decide such details as what the accompanying instrumentation of the piece will be.

But when that piece might get a second performance is an open question. It could remain in the Tallis songbook, or of course be picked up by other ensembles. And Miller does make efforts to re-present works that they commissioned on anniversaries of their premieres. But for the most part, she said, the presenter and commissioner’s work is done once the piece is premiered.
“You have dozens of ensembles that are commissioning pieces and then they become a part of their work. It’s different for presenters. You’re serving an audience and you can’t do the same piece 18 times.

“But who decided that it must have a second performance for it to be successful?” she added. “If you were to ask a composer to write a piece and it will get played once or it will never get played, I bet they’d pick that it get played once.”

Certainly that much is true for pianist and composer Anthony Coleman. “Do I actually seek second performances?” he said with a laugh. “I guess as much as I actively seek anything.”

With at least as much history in the world of downtown improvisation as he has in formal composition, Coleman may be more accustomed than some to the sometimes ephemeral nature of musical performance. But of course he’s not inclined to turn up his nose at return engagements.

“You don’t know if a group loves you if they give a premiere,” he said. “You just know they love giving premieres. If they play it the second time, you start to think maybe they like you. It’s like a second date. A first date is so fraught–you come with your shit and you try to think of something to say. When I work with people like Tilt or Either/Or, I get the sense that we’re building a relationship. It’s very rare that the first performance doesn’t have that edge of nervousness around it.”
According to Coleman, a piece needs time—and performances—to really be discovered:

Anthony Coleman

Anthony Coleman

The good performance doesn’t usually come until a few more down the line. I wasn’t at the first performance of the Carter Double Concerto, but for sure people were like, “How is this piece supposed to unfold?” It’s like D-Day with the guns blazing and then after a few performances you can start to see what’s going on.

The first time I saw the Ligeti Études it was by a pianist named Volker Banfield, and it’s no disrespect to Volker Banfield to say he was like an explorer. He was the first person to discover the Zambezi Falls. Now it’s been discovered. It’s been proven that it can be played; it’s encouraged other pianists. And now there’s a lot more quality, there’s a lot more ease, there’s almost a philosophical formula you could say. Once somebody does it, you know that it can be done. And then a piece starts to get its own history, its own culture.

One way of ensuring repeat performances, of course, is to have a standing group—as is the case with the Bang on a Can All-Stars or Steve Reich and Musicians, for example—so that pieces can be programmed more or less at will.

“Premieres are exciting, but I think that when you’re talking about as deep an experience as hearing music, it doesn’t have anything to do with that,” said composer and Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe. “A lot of times people are like, ‘It’s already been done in New York.’ What? It’s a great piece! Why not do it again? There’s always somebody putting together an In C. Something like that, it becomes a cult piece.”

The Bang on a Can organization launched its People’s Commissioning Fund in 1998—well before such crowd-funding models as Kickstarter and Indiegogo—as a way to generate new pieces, and it has averaged three new works a year for its performance ensemble, the Bang on a Can All Stars.

“There are keepers, shall we say,” Wolfe explained. “When you commission a piece, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes everybody is struck by a piece and we say, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to tour this piece.’”
There are many factors other than intrinsic worthiness which determine if a piece will get repeat performances after the annual PCF concert, she added.

“It really varies,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a complicated piece or it involves the composer having to be there. It’s interesting being a composer; you have to make the art and service the art. There is this part of the profession where you are making it possible for people to hear your piece. Some of the most important pieces I’ve written–like, ‘Do I really want to write for nine bagpipes?’–I’ve been amazed they’ve been done again. You just never know.”
Another thing that can guarantee repeat performances, of course, is if the funding for a commission comes with that as a requirement. Chamber Music America routinely makes multiple performances a requirement, according to CMA Chief Executive Officer Margaret Lioi.

“We are making the investment in the commission on behalf of the funder, so just to have one performance seems a little slight,” Lioi said. “We are very committed to living composers and new work, and they need to be heard by as many people as possible. Not every group commissions new work. CMA has many different kinds of members and some members are really very devoted to the traditional, western canon of music.”

Like Schick, Lioi stressed that a piece is unlikely to survive if it isn’t played: “Hearing new music and supporting composers is very much a part of the ecology of chamber music and is what will keep it vital not just for the contemporary audience but in 25 or 100 years.”

Likewise New Music USA–the parent organization of NewMusicBox–funds composers with an eye toward the longevity of their work.

“We rarely fund composers directly but we’ll probably start doing more of that,” according to Director of Grantmaking Programs Scott Winship. “However it would be unlikely that we would fund a composer without some ensemble or presenter backing it up so we see a premiere.”

Under the Commissioning Music USA program, New Music USA has traditionally required four performances of a funded piece and has encouraged that there be more, Winship said.

“It’s important in helping the piece move on,” he explained. “The ‘one-and-done’ idea wasn’t something we wanted to do. Having multiple performances gives the work a chance to shine. It’s really polished after the four performances and getting it out there gives a work a greater chance at being included in an ensemble’s repertoire. Having a piece toured and put before a lot of audiences is great for the composer.”

Eric Lyon may not have the benefit of a standing ensemble of All Stars, but he has developed a close relationship with violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, writing works with them in mind and even giving the duo its stage name, String Noise. Second performances, he said, come “only in my dreams—or nightmares. Most violinists you show my work to, they’d run the other way screaming.

“I used to write for violin or oboe but now I write for Pauline or Conrad,” Lyon explained. “There are pieces I wrote for [flutist] Margaret Lancaster. She has such a strong personality that infuses it. I took the piece and had another flutist play it who was very much a delicate flower, and it became a very different piece. It was kind of shocking.”
Lyon wrote Noise Tryptych and Book of Strange Positions for the String Noise duo and has arranged punk and new wave songs specifically for them, making quick, pounding string minuets out of Black Flag’s “Gimme Gimme” and the Germs’ “Lexicon Devil,” and giving a Reichian phase treatment to Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.” He also scored the Psycho Killer Variations, based on the Talking Heads’ song, for Kim Harris.
String Noise has built up a book of pieces written for them, not just by Lyon but a number of composers, including Petr Kotik, Todd Reynolds, Elizabeth Hoffman, Matthew Welch, and others. And they not only give the pieces repeat performances, they sometimes repeat entire programs based on what Conrad Harris referred to as “cohesive units of composers.”

But, he added, he still anticipates the excitement of the first performance.

“When we have six new pieces or eleven new pieces it is a little daunting,” Harris said. “Part of the excitement is actually trying to play it. You’re probably going to have the composer in attendance and you’re going to have the excitement of the people in the audience; it sort of transcends the experience. It gets better if there is a level of excitement; it has a different energy.”
“The point of the premiere is to be all that you can be in the time you have,” Kim Harris added. “People aren’t expecting perfection. Sometimes composers aren’t satisfied or performers aren’t satisfied, but that’s the way it is.”

Kim Harris premiered Variations on Psycho Killer on April 14, 2012, at the Dimenna Center for Classical Music on Manhattan’s West Side. Since then, she has performed the piece at Bowery Electric and BargeMusic and has shot a video for it (the video itself premiering now on NewMusicBox). While the premiere performance was exhilarating, she said, it was also far from perfect. She had received the score only days before the performance and then on the night of the concert she forgot to turn off her bridge pickup before playing the piece, which calls for some fairly aggressive technique.


“Every time I would bow or finger there would be excessive pick-up noise,” she explained. “But just getting through the piece, I think, is part of the whole phenomenon, and not knowing what the piece is going to sound like—there’s no recording you can listen to. The thrill of learning something quickly and playing it for the first time—I’m addicted to it! I keep wanting people to give me something new.”

Flutist Amelia Lukas has been presenting new music since she moved to New York in 2007 under the banner Ear Heart Music, first at the Tank and more recently at Roulette. And while her fledgling organization isn’t in a position to commission pieces yet, Lukas does work to pair composers with dancers, video artists, and people from other disciplines to create a new experience even if it’s not a premiere performance.

“A lot of what I’m doing instead of commissioning is matchmaking,” she said. “They’ll come to me and say, ‘We have this musical idea’ and I can make suggestions about like minded artists they can work with. There’s so much potential for this kind of music to be happening right now. Groups want to do it. Audiences want to hear it. Audiences are looking for that total immersion experience when they go to concerts and I’m just working to provide a space where that can happen, in all ways—space, funding, resources, and developing audiences that have an understanding of music as a social response.”

But while creating a rich concert experience is important to Lukas, presenting premieres may not be one of Ear Heart Music’s primary goals:

Amelia Lukas

Amelia Lukas

The second, third, fourth, fifth hearings are as important as the premiere. Premieres have this built-in promotion machine, but they’re very often just as quickly forgotten about. It’s only when you have these repeat performances that you can sort the catalog and understand where the piece falls in terms of context and longevity.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m very into premieres. If you’re committed to this work, you’re committed to giving premieres. But looking at the back catalogs of composers, you have a much easier time of fitting a work into a program. I really do try to look at the general shape of things and when you look at those back catalogs you can really pick some gems that people don’t know about.
Sometimes it’s fun to be surprised and hear something new and sometimes it’s fun to have certain expectations and have them met or not met and be surprised.

One reason for the prevalence of premiere performances is the simple fact that there is so much more composition being done. As with record production, filmmaking, music criticism, and smartphone development, there’s just more and more music being written and therefore more and more music to premiere.

“You have so many composers, you have so many performances, it’s not possible for anyone to consume all this music,” Lukas said. “That’s why it’s presenters’ and critics’ jobs to help make those discerning choices about what gets presented.”

As Melissa Smey asked, who decided that a work must have a second performance to be successful? But on the other hand, if we drown ourselves in premieres, are we falling short of helping to decide what’s important for future generations?

“We are establishing the 21st-century canon,” according to Anthony Coleman. “There are plenty of performances of pieces by David Lang and Lachenmann. And who is the composer that as soon as they drop dead everyone will start playing? In the middle of all this bullshit, there are some pieces getting played.”

Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms

“For here is true style!” declared Charles Seeger in 1939.[1] Several years after abandoning his career as an American ultra-modernist composer, Seeger had discovered the shape-note hymns of 19th-century tune books like The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp.

Seeger’s proclamation marked the origins of a lineage of American musicians who sought out a maverick impulse in native hymnody, forging connections between the rule breaking of Revolutionary-era composers like William Billings and the rule breaking of the 20th century. From Seeger to his contemporaries William Schuman and Henry Cowell in the 1940s, through John Cage and William Duckworth in the 1970s and 1980s, to young composers like David T. Little and Gabriel Kahane today, the American shape-note tradition has been a steady source for reexamination and inspiration.

Tracing the appropriation of this strain of American hymnody in the 20th and 21st centuries is an intriguing tale, but it requires a bit of historical parsing before it begins.

In the decades preceding the American Revolution, a style of native sacred music developed in the colonies. Protestant churches across New England began singing from books of hymn tunes published in America by local musicians like William Billings, Jeremiah Ingalls, and Andrew Law, rather than the European standards of previous songsters.

Many of these American composers were not professionals (Billings worked as a tanner) and had no European musical training. American composers wrote each individual line of a three- or four-part hymn separately, developing an unconventional style full of “mistakes” like parallel and open fifths. And if the open fifth was the emblematic sound of the so-called First New England School, then the boisterous fuguing tune—in which, after a conventionally homophonic setting of a hymn text, singers rollick through a fast, imitative second verse—was its emblematic form. The freedom of the American Revolution had its own sonic markers, its own distinct musical style. Hymns like Billings’s “Chester” became Revolutionary anthems; Paul Revere engraved Billings’s first songbook, the New England Psalm-Singer.

Paul Revere's engraved frontispiece for Billings's New England Psalm Singer

Paul Revere’s engraved frontispiece for Billings’s New England Psalm Singer (1770).
(The complete book is available for download from IMSLP.)

But elitist musicians and clergy soon sought to replace that rustic native style, and Billings was gradually phased out in favor of European alternatives. Right around the same time, another pioneering development occurred in American music. In 1801, William Little and William Smith published The Easy Instructor, the first hymnal to utilize shape notes. The shape-note system assigned different note heads to specific solfège syllables, so that singers could develop a simple, visual method for sight reading music.
Shape Note Rudiments 1 of 2

Shape Note Rudiments 2 of 2

From the 1860 edition of The Sacred Harp

As an educational tool, shape notes caught on quickly. But as native hymnody was forced from New England by Europe-minded reformers, so too were shape notes. In the first few decades of the 19th century, shape notes and Billings-style congregational music moved out West and South, becoming a local tradition in states like Alabama and Kentucky, whose musicians published their own tune books.

The music of those compilations was Billings-inspired, but also incorporated folk and gospel traditions. Thus, the most famous shape-note tune books like The Southern Harmony (1835) and The Sacred Harp (1844) were commercial products, printed in large quantities and distributed widely, but also part of local folk culture.

Singing from tune books like The Sacred Harp is an intriguing experience. There is, for starters, the unusual sound of music inspired by both the South and the First New England School. Then there is the singing of the shapes: since the early 19th century, singers would first read through the tune on solfège syllables for practice before adding its Biblical text. Finally, the shape-note practice itself has its own oral culture that creates a unique sonic space. Participants sit in a square, facing each other, and belt the hymns at the top of their lungs. It’s loud and entirely participatory—there’s no audience to speak of.

The Early Revivalists

White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands

The first edition of George Pullen Jackson’s White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (published in 1933). The book was subsequently re-printed by Dover Publications (1965) and Kessinger Publishing, LLC (2007).

The composers who drew upon these customs had a more conventional, concert hall audience in mind. Seeger and his contemporaries learned of shape notes—almost entirely unknown to the Northeast for more than a century—via the musicologist George Pullen Jackson. Jackson’s 1933 White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands launched the modern revival of The Sacred Harp and the cultures of the deep South that sang from it, which Jackson referred to as a “lost tonal tribe” of “fasola folk” (an unfortunately primitivist description).[2]

Charles Seeger was one of those re-discoverers, as was his wife, the great composer and ethnomusicologist Ruth Crawford Seeger. In 1937, Crawford arranged a set of twenty-two American folk songs for piano; in a preface to the compilation, Crawford drew strong parallels between the shape notes of the past and the modernism of the present:

Curiously enough, there is part-singing widespread through the southeastern states, and has been for the past hundred years, which revels in these characteristics of “modern music.”[3]

As Judith Tick has pointed out, Crawford adopts the Bartókian conception of the vernacular—abrasive and modern rather than simple and folksy. In seeking out this forgotten repertory, she unveils a past canon of modernists.
Other American composers would do the same. Virgil Thomson once remarked:

When you reach down into your subconscious, you get certain things. When Aaron [Copland] reaches down, he doesn’t get cowboy tunes, he gets Jewish chants. When I reach down I get Southern hymns.[4]

Thomson’s subconscious reaching manifested in his score for the 1937 W.P.A. film The River. In the mid-‘30s, Thomson met George Pullen Jackson and heard his field recordings of Southern singers. Soon after, the composer acquired a copy of The Southern Harmony and began toying with utilizing a few of its hymns in his music.

The River mixes shape-note hymns alongside references to various other American popular idioms. As Joanna Smolko points out in her dissertation, Thomson not only drew upon five different hymns, but also retained their musical language, emphasizing the unusual harmonies (due to their line-by-line composition, tunes are often built on stacks of fourths and fifths) and “mistaken” voice-leading of parallel fifths and octaves. When the film’s narrator describes the post-Civil War destruction of the South, Thomson weaves in the doleful hymn “Mount Vernon”; he retains its sober fuguing tune as well, setting it delicately in the winds.


Pare Lorentz’s film The River (released on February 4, 1938) has been posted to YouTube by the Pare Lorentz Film Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Public.Resource.Org.

Aaron Copland also reached down and found Southern hymns, though with a tinge of the Jewish heritage to which Thomson alluded. In 1951, Copland visited Israel for the first time and embraced a latent Zionism. Around the same time, he began researching American folk music for his set of Old American Songs and read Jackson’s work.

In the Old American Songs, Copland harmonized the tune “Zion’s Walls,” printed first in the shape-note book The Social Harp. In the piano accompaniment, Copland preserved the original’s piquant pentatonicism. He also scrubbed out the references to Jesus in the original hymn text, conflating the Zion of the text with contemporary Israel and, somewhat unusually, wrapping together Southern hymnody with his own Jewish identity.

Grounding the restoration of shape-note hymnody in contemporary national issues, however, was par for the course in Copland’s day. Following Jackson’s research, various musicians resurrected the so-called “white spirituals” in a grand celebration of Americanism in the World War II era, a tale documented in Annegret Fauser’s recent study Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II.

Beginning in the late 1930s, scholar-musicians like Carleton Sprague Smith and Elie Siegmeister created a mythic American musical past for a patriotic present. Siegmeister toured across the country with his American Ballad Singers, an ensemble that purported to perform “native American songs” that forged “a link between American music and the struggle for freedom that has never been broken.”[5] Fauser relates this trend to a broader, international interest in cultural archaisms in the 1930s, a search for national roots in American art.

Implicit in this development was a whitening of folk music. Fauser writes that the “turn to an archaic heritage during the war years brought about a silencing of the African American idioms that had been appropriated—though not always without controversy—by musicians in the 1920s and early ‘30s as markers of an American identity.”[6] On a more global scale, Fauser also points out that the turn towards the Yankee tunesmiths of the First New England School were part of a worldwide neoclassicism: Billings was the closest thing we had to a Monteverdi, the American Ballad Singers our early music movement.

Composers took up this cause not just by performing the old hymns anew, but also by dramatizing their musical processes via the appropriation of the fuguing tune. Imitating Billings was the name of the game. Otto Luening wrote a Prelude to a Hymn Tune by Willing Billings (1937, published in 1943); William Schuman composed his William Billings Overture (premiered in 1944 in an open-air wartime concert); and Ross Lee Finney provided a Hymn, Fuguing, and Holiday that recast the Billings tune “Berlin” (perhaps an ironic use of the name of the German capitol in 1943).

Fuguing tunes represented an archaism that functioned as wholly American, a polyphonic canon but one viewed as distinct from any European counterpart. In a written introduction to a series of punchy orchestral variations on “Chester” (part of his New England Triptych), Schuman called Billings the “father of New England music” whose music “gradually fell into disfavor.” It fell into disfavor because it was outpaced by imported European music—a powerful connection to the past for American composers asserting a national school.

The grand champion of this inheritance was Henry Cowell, who over the course of twenty years wrote eighteen Hymn and Fuguing Tunes for various ensembles. (Ten of his twenty completed symphonies also incorporate aspects of the form.) Cowell solidified the connections between archaic past and modernist present, imagining an unbroken line from Billings to Ives in the same manner as Crawford.

In an introduction to the first Hymn and Fuguing Tune, written for symphonic band, Cowell wrote that the work was:

written in a manner which is frankly influenced by the early American style of Billings and Walker. However, the early style is not exactly imitated, nor are any of the tunes and melodies taken from these early masters. Rather I asked myself the question, what would happen in America if this fine, serious early style had developed? [This work] which uses old modes [and] open chords…is a modern revision of this old style. [7]

In the 1940s, Cowell was transitioning away from his more severely experimental style, and this “fine, serious early style” offered a different path. Cowell’s modality and lack of accidentals imitate the open sound of the Southern Harmony tunes, and shape this far-reaching but neglected repertoire.

Notable here is also that Cowell conflates Billings with the Southern composer William Walker. Walker, born half a century after Billings, wrote shape-note hymns and compiled The Southern Harmony (Sidney Cowell, Henry’s wife, introduced him to Walker’s music and The Southern Harmony; Henry probably gained knowledge of Billings, as many of his contemporaries did, in Clarence Dickinson’s 1940 publication of three of his fuguing tunes). This amalgamation of Southern and New England traditions still marks discussions of shape notes and The Sacred Harp today. The midcentury modernists didn’t distinguish between these separate strands of hymnody, instead imagining a single trajectory that could reach into the present.

Bicentennial Celebrations

Following the wartime resurgence was a 30-year lull. The next major revival of shape-note and Yankee hymns took place in the years around the American Bicentennial of 1976. The national celebrations of the Revolution were the motivation for a great deal of early American music scholarship; they also inspired many new compositions. Alongside a slew of commissions from various institutions, academic initiatives paved the way for a grand return of hymnody. In the years surrounding the Bicentennial, Americanist organizations like the Institute for Studies in American Music, the Sonneck Society for American Music, New World Records, and Recent Researches in American Music emerged—all participated in resurrecting Yankee or Southern hymnody. (The American Musicological Society also launched a critical edition of Billings’s music.)

Just as in the 1930s, these scholarly ventures fueled composition as well. Numerous bicentennial works, from Leonard Bernstein’s Songfest to Elliott Carter’s A Symphony of Three Orchestras, emerged in the mid-‘70s. In 1974, six major American orchestras, in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts, commissioned several composers to write Bicentennial works, including one by John Cage.

Cage Apartment House

In 1995, three years after John Cage’s death, Mode issued the recording he supervised of Apartment House 1776.

In creating his Bicentennial work, Apartment House 1776, Cage investigated various strands of the American past in an attempt to dramatize the multiplicity of communities from two hundred years ago. Four singers represent the Protestant, Sephardic, American Indian, and African-American musical traditions, accompanied by instrumental music based on the Yankee tunes of Billings and his contemporaries such as Andrew Law and Supply Belcher.

In an attempt to “imitate that old music rather than copy it,” Cage was forced to reckon with his distaste for harmony. (You can’t really deal with hymnody any other way.)[8] Cage tinkered with various methods of subtraction, removing individual voices to create ghosts of the rustic harmony, eventually settling on chance procedures to expand and contract certain notes. The result, Cage said, was that:

The cadences and everything disappeared; but the flavor remained. You can recognize it as eighteenth century music; but it’s suddenly brilliant in a new way.[9]

The explorations of Apartment House 1776 led to several subsequent works based on the First New England School, including Quartets I-VIII, Hymns and Variations, and Thirteen Harmonies. (For a particularly enchanting recent interpretation of Cage’s hymn settings, listen to the 2010 Wergo album Melodies and Harmonies, performed by Annelie Gahl on violin and Klaus Lang on electric piano.)

In Some of the Harmony of Maine, an organ work in which three assistants pull out random stops, Cage plays with the echoes of thirteen hymns extracted from a 1794 tune book compiled by Supply Belcher. The occasional fully-voiced major chord appears wholly alien; the bucolic repetitions of the fuguing tunes sound frozen in time, shells of their former selves.

Cage, though, did not seem to demonstrate an interest in shape-note tune books; he stuck strictly with the earliest era of native hymnody. Shape notes returned to the American concert hall in another work inspired by the Bicentennial, albeit five years later: William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony. Duckworth was the first to not only draw upon the harmonies of the shape-note tune books, but also the actual manner in which they were performed: unlike the music of Thomson or Copland, Southern Harmony actually includes the shapes themselves.

Duckworth-SouthernHarmony

In 1996, Lovely Music, Ltd. released a recording of William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony performed by the Gregg Smith Singers.

Duckworth’s engagement with shape notes grew out of a post-Bicentennial awakening among folk revivalists. Neely Bruce, the composer, conductor, pianist, and American music scholar, had started his own choirs to sing shape notes at Wesleyan College, and he commissioned Duckworth to write a choral work. (Bruce has incorporated shape notes into his own music as well.)
Duckworth had childhood experiences singing shape-note hymns in rural North Carolina, and had reencountered the music in the singings that Bruce led. While on sabbatical, he engaged with the original Southern Harmony tune book as a whole:

I would begin each day by singing through Southern Harmony a line at a time for an hour or more. At first I did it to familiarize myself with the music, but by the third or fourth time through it became more of a meditation.[10]

Book I of Duckworth’s Southern Harmony—he composed four books, with twenty pieces total—opens with the plaintive hymn “Consolation,” set in straightforward homophonic fashion. The music then transitions into a wistfully repetitive gloss on the tune, with the singers intoning the shape-note solfège syllables instead of its solemn text. The modular repeats of the syllables—Duckworth reiterates short phrases several times before moving on—recalls the post-minimalism of the composer’s earlier Time Curve Preludes, but also hints towards an even more intriguing predecessor. There is a looming work in postwar American music that also utilizes singers quickly repeating solfège syllables: Einstein on the Beach. Here, Duckworth conflates two separate streams of American maverick music, equating Glass’s repeated syllables with those of William Walker’s shape-note compilation.

Shape Notes in Brooklyn

Today’s young musicians don’t seem particularly interested in the Billings strain or the patriotic fervor of the Yankee tunesmiths and the Bicentennial that renewed them. They are, instead, children of the 1970s revivalists—the most literal example being folk singer Sam Amidon. Amidon’s parents actually sang in the Word of Mouth chorus, a revivalist group whose 1979 Nonesuch album Rivers of Delight brought shape notes to national attention; today, he performs his own quirky reworkings of shape-note hymns.
Composers Gabriel Kahane, Matt Marks, and David T. Little have connected musically with the written artifacts of the shape-note heritage—the books and tunes themselves—as well as contemporary oral cultures. You can sing from The Sacred Harp in meetings in most major American cities today and connect with a vibrant community of singers on the website fasola.org. Now that Sufjan Stevens does it, shape-note singing has lost the archaic significance it had for Seeger and Cowell and has instead become just another unusual strain of Americana.

In Marks’s pop opera The Little Death Vol. 1, released as an album on New Amsterdam in 2010, shape notes function as a kind of disruptive speaking-in-tongues. Towards the end of the song “Dear,” soprano Mellissa Hughes sings part of “When God Dips His Love in my Heart,” a Baptist hymn, and then begins singing the shapes of “What Wondrous Love Is This,” a staple of the Sacred Harp repertoire, over an electro-pop accompaniment. It’s a wholly irreverent appropriation of the tradition—Marks wrote in an email that “I really just wanted to mix shape-note singing with J-Pop style beats and synths”—and demonstrates the versatility with which today’s composers play with the past. Here, there is no attempt to erect a canon of American music stretching across the centuries; “Wondrous Love” merely fits into the eclectic narrative that Marks shapes.

Kahane’s use of shape-note hymnody, though, does resonate with some of the democratic zeal of the 1930s renaissance, especially since it is in the context of dramatizing that very historical era. In the midst of Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States, a work composed for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra which draws on the Federal Writers’ Project American Guide series, Kahane quotes a description of Sacred Harp singing from the Alabama guide in a spoken text. The score then instructs the orchestra players who accompany Kahane, to stand and belt out the fuguing tune “Marlborough,” singing solfège shapes followed by words.

Kahane’s score refers to this as a “Sacred Harp hymn,” though the nomenclature isn’t quite accurate; “Marlborough” dates back to 1793 and was composed by Abraham Wood. (It just happens to have found its most prominent place in The Sacred Harp.) This conflation of the First New England School repertoire with its role in the later shape-note tradition is a common one today. In an interview, Kahane told me that the “the populist and democratic nature of shape-note singing” meshed with the broader message of his Guide: “There’s something about how unadorned it is that I find really moving.” That democracy, too, can be found in the music of Wood, who drummed in the American Revolution.

David T. Little found a different kind of energy in the unadorned quality of shape-note singing. As part of a 2012 multimedia concert focused on 19th-century Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Brooklyn Philharmonic performed Am I Born, Little’s extensive cantata that takes the shape note hymn “Idumea” as a point of departure. Little had become fascinated with the brash singing style of Sacred Harp revivalist groups, which he once called “death metal for choir.” In an interview with I Care If You Listen, Little said that he “followed some of the part-writing rules of The Sacred Harp,” writing cadences that leave out the third and playing with parallel fifths. (Little actually wondered if he himself was a descendant of William Little, the co-inventor of the shape-note system.) The choir opens by singing a visceral setting of the doleful “Idumea” (its first line is “Am I born to die?”), and Little’s buzzy, post-minimalist orchestral writing channels the furor of the Sacred Harp experience.

David T. Little - Am I Born (opening page)

The opening page of David T. Little’s Am I Born. © 2011 by David T. Little and reprinted with his permission. (Click image to enlarge.)

“Idumea” is a Southern classic, probably derived by composer Ananias Davisson from a folk song and first printed in Davisson’s The Kentucky Harmony, one of the earliest Southern shape-note tune books. Intriguingly, though Little mimicked aspects of the shape-note tradition, he actually sought out a source that does not fully embrace that sound. The earliest printings of “Idumea,” from The Kentucky Harmony to the first edition of The Sacred Harp, are written for three voices. The dominant sonority of its beginning, on the word “Am,” is the open fifth of Billings tradition. But more recent revisions of The Sacred Harp added a fourth voice, replacing the open sound with full triads; Little’s setting of “Idumea” retains that fourth voice, making the hymn less pentatonic than conventionally tonal.

Idumea

The opening of the three-voice version of “Idumea” from the 1860 edition of The Sacred Harp.
(The complete 1860 edition as well as a later 1911 edition is available from IMSLP.)

When Seeger declared that The Sacred Harp represented a “true style,” he was equating the uncanny part-writing of three-voice Southern hymns with the modernisms of his era. But with that fourth voice, Little’s “Am I Born” points towards a new modernist tradition, built not on some archaic American past but on a living present. In absorbing the style and sound of Sacred Harp as sung today, Little’s generation recasts a vibrant tradition for a new audience, pointing towards a true style for the 21st century.

*


1. Charles Seeger, “Contrapuntal Style in the Three-Voice Shape-Note Hymns.” The Musical Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Oct., 1940): p. 488.

2. George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Hatboro: Folklore Assciates, 1964), pp. 4 and 160.

3. Quoted in Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 242.

4. Quoted in Joanna Ruth Smolko, Reshaping American Music: The Quotation of Shape-Note Hymns by Twentieth-Century Composers (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2009), p. 16.

5. Quoted in Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 144.

6. Fauser, p. 146.

7. Wayner Shirley, “The Hymns and Fuguing Tunes,” in The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium, edited by David Nicholls (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), p. 96.

8. Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. 297.

9. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 90.

10. Quoted in Smolko, pp. 172-173.

Faithfully Re-presenting the Outside World

“It was then I first realised the difference between a painting and out of doors. I realised that a painting is always a flat surface and out of doors never is, and that out of doors is made up of air and a painting has no air, the air is replaced by a flat surface, and anything in a painting that imitates air is illustration and not art.”

—Gertrude Stein, Paris France

One seemingly unresolved issue in the realm of field recordings is the tension between authenticity and abstraction. One can view an artist’s work with “the field” as existing somewhere between these two different, though not mutually exclusive, concerns. On the one hand, some artists strongly adhere to maintaining the perceptible accuracy/authenticity of their location, whereas others simply take elements from it as necessary, unconcerned with the legibility of the source.
Recording in a field
Let’s imagine a composer who is enamored with the sound of the Swiss Alps and decides to make a field recording there. This composer wants to portray the most accurate, pristine document of the aural landscape as possible. Such a composer is motivated by authenticity, likely hoping to make the listener feel like he/she is actually there, or perhaps hoping to entice the listener to travel to the location. Generally this privilege of locational authenticity is assumed to be the driving force behind field recording work.

On the other end of the spectrum, we can imagine a composer who is interested in using something from the aural landscape, perhaps the canned music played by an ice cream truck as it travels through his/her neighborhood, simply as one amongst many other sounds. In this mode of working, one does not particularly care whether or not the recording’s location (or source) is intelligible. This locationally independent, or more abstract, mode of working is assumed to belong to the realm of electronic music, and furthermore assumed to be different than field recording.
Brandon LaBelle outlines the concern regarding authenticity in field recording work, specifically regarding the R. Murray Schafer founded World Soundscape Project, as follows:

The intention behind the WSP was based on capturing environmental sound in all its breadth and diversity across the globe, preserving important “soundmarks” and gaining insight into people’s understanding and awareness of acoustic environments…To cast a net of microphones across the globe sets our ears on finding the truth of sound, so as to arrive finally at the original soundscape.

Every time I read this quote, though, I have this nagging series of questions in the back of my head: how can one realistically expect to arrive at “the original soundscape”? Isn’t the motivation to record some soundscape fundamentally based on one’s personal interpretation and, therefore, an abstraction to begin with? Could one ever say that my experience of the sound of the Swiss Alps is the same as anyone else’s?

Herein lies the issue with this supposed opposition between authenticity and abstraction: as individual listeners, we each have a different experience of the outside world. There is no perceivable “ursound” (to use LaBelle’s terminology), no fundamental source of the aural landscape in the same sense that there is no perceivably definitive color “blue.” Similarly, the tools (or technology) that one uses to capture parts (or all) of the soundscape have the ability to shape (or abstract) the document of the field further.

Michael Pisaro’s writing on standing issues in field recording work hints at some of the inherent problems in attempting to document the totality of the acoustic environment:

A recording is a reduction. The immersive sensual experience of an environment will in the end be represented purely in terms of sound. It is possible that a sound recording device will in some cases hear more than we do, but it will obviously never capture everything that is sounding. It will be limited in time and in the perceptible borders of the soundscape.

Recording abstracts the environment. Microphones are designed to accept certain frequencies, reject others, as well as accept/reject sounds from certain angles of incidence. Moreover, the impulse to make a recording in a particular place, at a particular time, using a particular set of equipment, abstracts/limits the amount of the field to be recorded.

I am uninterested in starting a kind of “punk or not punk” debate here because, frankly, it is a waste of time (“[name of recording] is a REAL field recording because of [insert rationale regarding perceptible authenticity here]”). What is interesting, however,, is that there are many works that simultaneously present a clear picture of the location and employ extreme abstractions via compositional or conceptual moves. Michael Pisaro’s Transparent City and Toshiya Tsunoda’s O Kokos Tis Anixis (Grains of Spring) seem to typify this friction, and a more detailed analysis of these works will unearth what is unique about attempting to balance both extremes.

Michael Pisaro’s Transparent City

The complete Transparent City project spans four CDs (two double-discs) on the German-based experimental music record label Editions Wandelweiser. Volumes 1 and 2 feature recordings made throughout Los Angeles between December 2004 and August 2006, while Volumes 3 and 4 span October 2006 to February 2007. The liner notes explain:

Each recording is an unedited ten-minute take from a single location. Sine tones and mixing completed in Michael Pisaro’s home studio in Santa Clarita, California. Each ten-minute piece is followed by two minutes of silence.

In short, all four volumes of Transparent City feature three elements: recordings of urban environments in Los Angeles, sine tones, and silence.

Michael Pisaro

Michael Pisaro

The environment presented across these four discs is relatively similar sounding, filled with general city ambience and car sounds. However, Transparent City also features recurring instances of a compositional move that is simply magical: a particular sound will naturally appear/disappear out of the stereo field to reveal a soft, tuned sine tone as accompaniment. In one track, a high tone subtly fades in only to be joined by the sound of a passing car. The car and tone blend seamlessly for just a moment before the car disappears from the landscape. Sometimes the sine tone remains, sometimes it disappears with its environmental collaborator. At another point, a tone becomes a dyad when another one appears, offering a kind of chordal drone under chirping birds and air. When chords are present, the listener realizes that all coincidences of sounds in the environment can be heard as chords, that melodies are unearthed with a subtle shift of perspective across numerous sources.
Pisaro’s unedited field recordings authentically present the aural location but become something entirely other when combined with tuned sine tones. One could think of Transparent City as a kind of training regimen for reinterpreting the soundscape of Los Angeles. In a way, it is a digital proof of concept of Cage’s 4’33”: Pisaro adds simple, musical accompaniment to urban Los Angeles to assert the musical appreciation of the aural landscape. One is also reminded of Joseph Fourier’s theory that any complex sound can be divided into a collection of sine tones. Transparent City proves the utility of this theory, giving the listener countless examples of sine tones disappearing within environmental sounds.


The other significant move in Transparent City is the recurring two minutes of silence following each track. Transparent City retrains the listener’s interpretation of an aural landscape, and then confronts the listener with his current landscape, enticing him to imagine Pisaro’s sine tones flowing in and out of his surroundings. This recurring silence becomes more fascinating as one progresses through all four discs. The final appearance of one’s own landscape at the end of the collection, through ears that have been reoriented to atomize their surroundings, is shocking.

This idea that the aural landscape is endlessly divisible, and endlessly musical, is not a new one, but the sheer viscerality of its presentation, and augmentation, in Pisaro’s hands is truly unique. This extreme re-framing of the field would not happen without the abstracted sine tones or the raw, unedited recordings of Los Angeles working in tandem. Taken together, then, Transparent City is a work which depends on both aural authenticity as well as conceptual or compositional abstraction.

Toshiya Tsunoda’s O Kokos Tis Anixis (Grains of Spring)

Toshiya Tsunoda’s work represents a truly unique mixture of extreme procedural discipline and vivid recordings of the outside world. His work runs the gamut from recordings made via a microphone inside a bent pipe to the sound of a subject’s biological functions (recorded via stethoscopes) while he sits outside listening to his surroundings. O Kokos Tis Anixis (Grains of Spring), recently released on his own imprint, edition.t, is another fascinating example of pushing a procedural operation to an extreme on field recorded source material.

Toshiya Tsunoda

Toshiya Tsunoda

Recorded on the Miura Peninsula (in Kanagawa, Japan) during the springtime, Tsunoda’s work here spreads across two CDs with a simple, recurring compositional device: randomly he loops a tiny fragment of sound for various durations. The first time this happens, it sounds almost like a CD skipping: lush jungle sounds are suddenly interrupted by a few seconds of a harsh, repeating, rhythmic glitch. Though a seemingly simple gesture, Tsunoda plays freely with the length of the loop, as well as how long it repeats and the time between instances of looping.

Throughout both discs, loops start and end without warning, and the lack of consistency across each instance of looping is jarring: a bird singing is suddenly interrupted by some tiny fragment of the background clicking rhythmically for several seconds. Sometimes the loop is long enough to sound like it actually belongs to the environment preceding it, sometimes it is so short it sounds like a drill. The effect is like freezing a tiny atom of time, or like viewing cellular behavior under a microscope.
From Tsunoda’s liner notes:

I decided to present the recorded materials as a composition with the least amount of modification, mainly by replacing one unit with another. This is one of my trials to present a “subject” as a piece of work—which can be called field recordings—that contains the accidentalness. We cannot manipulate the accidentalness. The only way for us to relate to the events is to closely observe what is happening there.

I love this quote because it typifies the give and take between intentionality and chance in field recording work. The only way that we can observe “accidentalness” or chance (or perhaps nature?) is to put the natural world under an extreme microscope. When doing so, we see that our normal fidelity when observing the world glosses over a tremendous amount of activity. Similarly, Tsunoda hints at the play between intentionally choosing a particular location, with a particular set of sounds, to record, but hoping to be truly surprised by what can be found there.

The title of each track allows the listener to zoom in even further on the sounds. Here Tsunoda is even more concerned with authenticity of source than is typical for an artist working in this domain. Tsunoda gives the listener a location (the Miura Peninsula), and then a subset of that location (“the sounds of ashes bursting in the fire built by fisherman”), and then repeatedly pushes the listener deeper and deeper into the sound. At a certain resolution, one is confronted with the grain of the environment (hence the title “Grains of Spring”), the endlessly divisible atoms that make up the outside world. Tsunoda loops the sound to allow one’s ears to adjust to the fidelity of the alien sound world therein, only to suddenly snap back to the normal fidelity of the aural landscape.


Similar to the Pisaro, Tsunoda’s work fundamentally changes our perception of the outside world. If the soundscape is as unstable, depending on our perspective, as it is presented throughout O Kokos Tis Anixis, at what point can we say that we have actually heard it? Does this atomization, this fragmentation, get us closer to understanding the fundamental nature of sound, or does it simply prove that a wealth of activity is occurring on endlessly deeper levels? The disorienting nature of listening to this seemingly random interchange between high alteration of a location, which is otherwise presented to us “as is,” is simply incredible.

Both of these works typify a fascinating interaction between conceptual constraints, or abstractions, and accurate portrayals of an environment. It is clear that a similar effect would not have been possible by simply recording the urban sound of Los Angeles or the natural sounds in the Miura Peninsula. Similarly, though, a sample-based electronic music piece would not have tied these sounds to their origin. It is truly the combination of both, seemingly opposed, motivations that yields a listening experience rarely encountered. They prove that a field recording does not have to merely document some outside landscape, and that one can still document the outside world faithfully while pushing further via extreme compositional procedures. The friction between holding authenticity and abstraction at the same level yields a truly productive experience. We will never hear the world the same after work like this.

Works Cited
Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Brandon LaBelle. 2007.
“Ten framing considerations of the field,” Michael Pisaro. 2010.
Transparent Cities (Volumes 1-4), Michael Pisaro. Editions Wandelweiser.
O Kokos Tis Anixis (Grains of Spring), Toshiya Tsunoda. edition.t.

Eight Waves a Composer Will Ride in This Century

A keynote address delivered by Robert Carl at the third annual Westfield Festival of New Music, presented by the Westfield State University Department of Music on March 3, 2013.

Robert Carl

Robert Carl

I’ve taken a cue from the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, whose Norton Lectures at Harvard (incomplete due to his untimely death) are called Six Memos For the Next Millennium. (It’s a great little book, which although oriented towards literature, will give insight to an artist in any discipline. His essay on “Lightness” is an antidote to all the critical theory—of every stripe—you’ve ever read.) I am strangely optimistic right now, at least for art, despite the enormous challenges we face as a species. Part of the reason is that I feel the forces that I’ll enumerate are in fact moving us towards a sort of new “common practice,” one that is far more diverse and comprehensive than what we call 18th-century Classicism, to be sure, but which is real and perceptible nonetheless. These trends, which I’ll call waves, come partly out of music and art, but they are derived at least as much from the tidal forces that are reshaping human culture worldwide. And I think it’s our responsibility as composers, or let’s go one step further, as creative musicians, to acknowledge them and respond.

Incidentally, before I go further, I think I should say why I think I have any right to make such grand pronouncements. Part of it is just that I’ve been asked to do so—many thanks! Certainly anyone has the right to speak out, and I hope a chorus of voices will emerge addressing these issues. If anything privileges me to speak out, I’d say it comes from the following: my intensive, insatiable listening and study of other people’s music over a few decades now; my initial training as a historian (not of music, by the way), which gave me both the tools and a taste for seeing large-scale cultural forces at work over similarly large time-spans; and my own work as a critic and writer on new music. But most of all, it comes from my teaching. My students have been my best teachers for many years now. They are the window into the future, and their courage and idealism make me want to try to help in some small way to identify the challenges they will be—in fact already are—dealing with. And all the time they are showing me what the issues are, they are helping me to understand.

So my time is short, let’s begin. The first wave driving us is perhaps the most obvious—Technology. My old friend Kyle Gann once made a brilliant observation, that we may not have a common language anymore, but we do have common software. Ever notice how now everyone you see (especially on a college campus) is tied to a device and bent towards it in an attitude to submissive prayer? I’m joking a little, but not much. In every aspect of our daily lives, the predictions of the digerati have come true. We have routine visual conversations across continents via Skype. We can ascertain the answer to almost any question that pops in our head with a quick “wikigoogle.” We composers make our scores on laptops, and listen to mockups of pieces long before they ever emerge from acoustic instruments. (I will say that one of my most notable experiences of change in teaching is the format of the private lesson. For decades a student brought in music on paper, and then we flailed through it at the piano. Now they plug into a little sound system in the office and let it rip. My job has become much more like that of a critic as a result—good for me, since I’m a lousy pianist but a good critic!). The whole act of performance has been enlarged exponentially by the emergence of synthesizers, processors, and now into entirely software-based systems that incorporate all previous advances. And even beyond that, technology is becoming a partner with us, with programs that allow for the computer to contribute material in response to our input, both in terms of compositional structures and real-time, interactive signal processing. In short, technology is becoming the fundamental tool by which we will be able to respond to the other forces I’ll present below.

The second wave is Globalism. We see it in the way we travel now. We hop on jets on the shortest notice, we travel to remote places that even our parents (or maybe your grandparents!) would have considered unbelievably exotic. What once was the province of the titled and moneyed is now much more in reach of the average professional woman or man. We similarly communicate with one another across cultures. As just one example, since it’s admissions season at Hartt, I have been interviewing some international students by Skype. I had a charming conversation with a young woman in Beijing, where we had to sometimes shout due to the barrage of firecrackers outside on Chinese New Year! I am truly touched by my foreign students, who have mastered English as the new Latin, and do not in any way see it as a sign of bowing to linguistic imperialism. It’s just the most practical way by which they can move through the whole world and interact with their peers, no matter what their origins. I find it a very beautiful, unselfconscious manifestation of a new global youth culture, something dreamed of in the ‘60s, but now far more realistic and less posturingly revolutionary.

In musical terms, it seems that we are becoming increasingly familiar with and unintimidated by different musical styles and traditions. Within our very American context, this has meant for a long time the willingness to mix “vernacular” and “learned” forms, not just in the postmodern sense, but in such flowerings as the Great American Songbook of the years up to World War II, a burst of art song that rivals that of any Western culture. In this sense, American culture I think has been in the vanguard and points a way for the world at large. This very attitude of cultural openness and omnivorousness has moved onto a new scale. As a personal example, I was just in Kansas City last weekend for the premiere of the first piece I’ve written for zheng, the Chinese zither. And even more striking was the fact that one of the composers with whom I shared the program was a young African-American man, who said that his piece (a quite sensitively written work that was closer to traditional Chinese practice than any of the rest of our pieces) was inspired by the sayings of the late comedian Bernie Mack. And all this seemed in no way unusual or surprising to him. It’s a new world, I promise you.

I’ve spoken about the cross-cultural, which leads to the next wave, which is Cross-Disciplinary Creativity. By this I mean the willingness of artists to enter into fields of activity previously considered outside of their expertise. Exposure to more and more of the world fosters this, and technology helps to make connections that earlier were impossible. In the visual arts, it’s unlikely now to find a young artist who doesn’t engage with a host of different creative media—painters make videos, installations, and do performance art. Sculptors make sound art. Conceptual artists do all of the above. And increasingly composers are following suit. To take an example I know well, the program Max/MSP now includes a suite of objects under the name Jitter that makes it possible to apply compositional thinking to visual elements in real time. (It’s no wonder this program, while originally designed for MIDI music composition, has become enormously popular and influential with installation artists and people working in performing arts other than music). And then of course, there’s the incredible impact of media composition—film, video, and, most cutting-edge, gaming. These suggest a dimension of composing where accommodation with the demands of different media will reshape our very thinking about compositional process and product.

I made a passing reference above to sound art. And this leads to our fourth wave, Sonic Essentialism. John Cage predicted back in the 1930s that music would eventually be conceived as “organized sound,” and this makes him the fountainhead of this art form. We now have both visual artists and musicians who make sound art. The flavors they coax from the field are different, but the product from each is similar enough that it feels increasingly like a new and different animal than either music or the fine arts. One of the finest examples of this, I think, is the collaboration of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who at their best pool their resources as artist and composer to make a compelling hybrid.

And even within “pure music” itself, we are seeing the very idea of sound drifting from a divide between pitch and noise, towards a fluid continuum. In European classical practice, we have spectralism from France (represented by composers such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail), which sees the timbral microstructure of sounds as the basis for the macrostructure of pieces. And from Germany we have a practice represented by Helmut Lachenmann, which sees all possible sounds from instruments, beyond pitch, as material for rigorously structured composition. This is music as sound art. In all cases we go back to sound itself, whether from nature, from culture at large, or from musical sources, and look at it from a fresh perspective. (And, by the way, in composers such as Cowell, Ives, and Cage, we have had a very American precedent of the same thing which happened much earlier.)

We’ve been speaking about crossing boundaries here, between disciplines, cultures, styles, and concepts of music itself. But of course one of the greatest boundaries of all is from one human to another. And this leads naturally to our fifth wave, Collaboration. I see with increasing frequency composers taking collective action. It may mean creating cooperative music ensembles, pooling the resources of composers and performers. It may mean creating group pieces—I see more and more one-hour works, each made of sixty one-minute pieces by sixty different composers. It can mean moving a step further to work on a regular basis with other artists in other disciplines, to create consistent cross-platform work from multimedia collectives.
And of course, it can mean improvisation. We Americans have led the world in this, in particular with the impact of jazz as our great gift to global culture. But the world is rapidly catching up, and we in turn are becoming aware of other great improvisatory traditions that are returning here to fertilize our soil. It used to be that classical composers were scared of improvisation (even though we always read of Mozart and Beethoven dazzling audiences with their off-the-cuff cadenzas). It somehow was “cheating,” abdicating our responsibility for determining every aspect of a work. This was partly a byproduct of the mid-20th-century specialization that had ever-fewer composers as competent performers. As we’ve returned to our performative roots (just as visual artists have learned to draw again after a generation of discouragement from teachers and critics), it’s become natural to bring choice and spontaneity back into the process. Of course, Cage and his school never lost this insight, and it’s one reason he remains so influential. Now any composer should be open to asking her/his performers—in clear and imaginative ways—to create material on the spot. The composer here remains a leader, but the first among equals, rather than a despot.

In a sense this isn’t just improvisation anymore. I think perhaps the more comprehensive term is Openness. This applies to the moment-to-moment materials of music, but also to form, flow, and the very character of pieces. And thus this is yet another wave that emerges from the undertow of every trend we’ve discussed so far. Openness refuses to accept a single version of anything, it stays alert and alive to the continual effect of change. It includes the aleatory, indeterminate, and improvisatory. It allows routes that are both linear and non-linear. And, as we will now see, it provides the basis for our major remaining insights.
We’re almost done, and as we move to the final big picture, I’d like to integrate these elements I’ve discussed so far into two final trends that apply most comprehensively to our 21st-century mandate as composers. As you may have noticed, all these trends I’ve been enumerating blend and blur into one another. They’re points on a spectrum of influence rather than separate entities. The taxonomy is useful, but it’s ultimately illusory. Now these final thoughts show how they are coming together.

The seventh wave is Multiplicity. If you think about it, every element I’ve presented so far is full of multiplicity. Technology is expanding and diversifying every nanosecond. Globalism means that we discover new cultures and art forms each time we surf the web. Cross-disciplinarianism, of course, is a recombinant thing, almost infinite in its permutations. Sonic essentialism, while it seems to plumb into the micro-structures of sound, in fact opens up infinite possibilities too, rather like the exponential options that come from genetic sequencing. And then collaboration is as diverse as the number of humans on the planet who choose to work with one another.

So everything now is multiple. And yet, at the outset I made a reference to an emerging “common practice.” It seems like I cut the legs off my own argument with what I’ve just presented. How can a belief in commonality still stand in the face of multiplicity?
I think the answer lies in the very multiplicity of Multiplicity itself. Our choices have become vast, but our awareness, thanks to information technology, has done a remarkable job of keeping up. We just know more music than any generation in human history. We know music of other cultures, other traditions/styles, other epochs. Who would have thought even thirty years ago that we would now recognize the first great Western composer as Hildegard von Bingen? And in order to make anything, we will have to synthesize. Earlier choices were largely binary (jazz or classical? Pop or concert music? Roots or contemporary? Minimalist or modernist?) But now it takes an enormous effort just to shield ourselves from so much out there, so great an effort that I think it’s better instead just to let it wash over us and see what sticks. We still have to pick and choose, but I believe the eclecticism of such choosing that’s forced on every artist will in turn lead to more and more overlap. This won’t be a “common practice,” but it will be more “commonality of practice.” There are so many different practices that it’s harder for any one to rule out others. This fragmentation makes it easier for different things to recombine and blend, so we maybe should call this “granular multiplicity.” And I see young musicians everywhere, of varying backgrounds and interests, increasingly at ease with one another, trying out each other’s techniques, languages, and premises. They just don’t see the same divides that their elders did, just as they seem happily unfazed by differences of race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

The final wave is one I can’t sum up yet in a single word. (If you can think of one, please let me know.) It’s the Tension between the Individual and the Collective. I know this sounds like we’re back to the Cold War, but not quite. In the 20th century, we did have a great battle between those who wanted to protect the rights of the individual and those who wanted to advance the greater wellbeing of the whole. That was a binary choice then. And the collectivist dream was hijacked and betrayed by many kinds of totalitarianism. But now we can look upon Marx, just as we look at Freud, as a historical philosopher and not a political devil. We shouldn’t pillory either of them just because of the company their legacies kept, as each had no say in the association! I think that the utopian ideal that Marx presented of the withering away of work and the pooling of resources is still a dream worth dreaming, especially for artists, because for them work really never ends because it’s play. (I like Cage’s formulation here the best, when he said—I paraphrase—“I have heard politicians talk about the goal of full employment. I for one am looking forward to the achievement of full unemployment.”) The truth is, the increasing complexity of all life structures and activities means that it’s very hard for anyone to “go it alone.” One colleague, the composer/shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki, told me recently he felt that as a teacher he had to take the attitude of a “curator of knowledge,” knowing when to call in varied expertise at the right moment from the correct sources. And a very bright student of mine, Brian Cook, recently wrote in an artist statement, “in a world where everything is connected, everyone is looking for some sort of deeper meaning, and interactiveness is of growing importance. I aim to create sound, and invite others to create sound, in an attempt to connect humans with one another, and create deeper connections with the natural world, despite the stigma that technology often does just the opposite.” On a world scale, such collaborations will go global: We are going to be faced with an unprecedented challenge of climate change; it is a challenge that will force changes in society and behavior as well as solutions based on collective action—on a level which has probably never happened before in human history.

There’s no doubt that this need to collaborate in increasingly fundamental ways runs counter to the myth of the heroic artist-individual, the romantic ideal we’ve grown up with as composers. I admit it scares me some, for I love the idea and the reality of the single visionary artwork. But neither do I for a moment discount the capacity of individual genius still to assert itself. I think it will have to emerge in new contexts we really haven’t even imagined yet. The internet is a potential model here, but even it is still in its infancy, despite its intimidating sophistication. Upcoming generations will have to meet the challenge of creating excellent, beautiful, exciting new things, but they’ll have to do it by balancing increasing group-consciousness with the special, quirky character that can only come from individual humans. And all this will have to come from the ground up, it can’t be mandated by some sort of aesthetic fiat from on high. I want to remind everyone that my title spoke of waves we all must ride. That doesn’t mean we need to always submit to every trend, and certainly not in every piece! But I do think we need to stay acutely aware of these waves and to deal with them seriously if we are to engage in a meaningful, productive dialogue with our culture and if we want to actually contribute something to it.

And so to those who follow me, having laid out the challenge as I see it, I can only wish a fervent, genuine, and heartfelt—as John Cage said to me the only time I met him—good luck!

The Influence Engine: Steve Reich and Pop Music

When Steve Reich’s new work for ensemble, Radio Rewrite, was given its world premiere by the London Sinfonietta earlier this month (it was subsequently premiered in the U.S. by Alarm Will Sound on March 16), I was asked to provide a program essay on the influence Reich has had on popular music, and vice versa. Radio Rewrite takes material from two songs by the British rock band Radiohead—“Everything in its right place” from their 2000 album Kid A, and “Jigsaw falling into place” from 2007’s In Rainbows. So the theme of popular/classical cross-influence pretty much jumps out at you.

Indeed, it’s a subject I’ve investigated before, in 2011 for another London event, “Reverberations: The Influence of Steve Reich,” a two-day celebration of Reich’s influence on classical and especially popular musicians. But on both occasions it was a subject about which I felt uncomfortable writing. Reich’s development—from his student works, through the early tape and phasing pieces, to masterworks like Music for 18 Musicians and beyond—does indeed run in parallel with the development of popular music from the 1960s to the 2010s. Many claims are made for his influence on pop, rock, house, techno, and even rap. And there are points of convergence, certainly. But such claims are often made by stakeholders in a narrative of Reich (and/or minimalism) as the savior of Western classical music from its serial/avant-garde(/European) doldrums.

I’ve come to think of this reception mechanism as a kind of “influence engine,” almost as self-generative as Reich’s own early music. Reich’s promoters want to hook him into the popular zeitgeist; non-classical musicians are happy to play along. Popular music appears to gain credibility; new music appears to gain relevance. As long as the “influence” of Reich’s music can be traced back up the chain, the narrative will keep feeding itself.

But there are two risks to leaving the engine running unchecked. First, that we perpetuate a trickle-down theory of musical influence, in which the best bits of popular music are presented as originating only in high (white, Western) art. And second, that classical music can only be validated by the impact it has had on popular culture. We need to ask: How much genuine contact is involved here, and how much wishful revisionism?

Jonny Greenwood playing Electric Counterpoint in Krakow

Jonny Greenwood playing Electric Counterpoint in Krakow
Photo by Tomasz Wiech for Krakow Festival Office. Used with permission.

The Reich Meme
Minimalism’s breakthrough in the mid-1970s coincided with the height of disco. As Robert Fink notes in Repeating Ourselves[1], the premiere of Music for 18 Musicians in March 1976 came just a month after the release of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s 17-minute groundbreaker “Love to Love you Baby.” Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach received its premiere that summer in Avignon.

The release in 1978 of Music for 18 Musicians on the hitherto jazz-only label ECM catapulted Reich and minimalism from the galleries and lofts of New York City into the wider consciousness. Magazines like Billboard and Rolling Stone reviewed the disc—which sold more than 10,000 copies—and the overlap between Reich and popular culture became a serious topic. A live performance of the piece that year sold out the Bottom Line club in New York; just months later, a Rolling Stone feature on Glass attempted to argue that minimalism was a precursor of the disco style. In 1984 an article in Harper’s magazine even referred to Reich’s music as a form of “higher disco.”

It is certainly possible to read (as Fink has done) 18 Musicians in conjunction with disco. They share common features: a sprawling scale, a formal language of extended and repeating climaxes and releases, techniques of layering and cross-fading, and a relentless adherence to the beat. And there were occasional individuals—Arthur Russell, for example—who played with their feet in both camps. Yet how much Reich and disco really knew of each other is beside the point. What is clear is that both were attuned to similar musical and technological currents: Afro-diasporic beats; the technology of the turntable, tape loop and cross-fader; and the possibilities of accumulative and layered musical forms.

There were more easily documented, if less high-profile, points of contact with popular music earlier in the decade. Perhaps the most important of these was Brian Eno’s discovery of It’s Gonna Rain in the early 1970s. Eno began experimenting with out-of-phase tape loops with the King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, resulting in the albums No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, and what came to be known as “Frippertronics.” In 1973 he saw Steve Reich and Musicians at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the influence on Eno’s post-Roxy Music work can be documented through solo albums like Another Green World, Discreet Music, and the Ambient series, as well as his work as a producer. In fact, 1973 proved to be a key year, since it also saw the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, both enormously influential carriers of minimalist DNA.
In 1976 David Bowie attended the European premiere in Berlin of Music for 18 Musicians. He was working with Eno on his Low album at the time, and the pulsing marimbas and vibraphones of that album’s “Weeping Wall” are an unmistakable homage. Bowie was far from the only rock musician to have felt minimalism’s influence. The Who had already quoted Riley’s arpeggiated keyboard style on “Baba O’Riley”, a track written in 1969 and released in 1971, and Reich’s technique of building up textures through closely spaced canons can be heard throughout prog rock. At its electronic fringes, references to Reich are most pronounced: especially brazen is Tangerine Dream’s “Love on a Real Train,” which was used as the theme to the film Risky Business.

Links between Reich and popular music continued through the 1980s, but the most recent and enduring phase of cross-influence was launched a decade later. The Orb’s sampling of Electric Counterpoint for their 1990 single “Little Fluffy Clouds” simply made explicit the sympathy between late ’80s/early ’90s rave culture and Reich’s glittering, pulse-driven soundscapes. Rave’s biggest act, Orbital (who themselves drew on Reichian timbres in the keyboard riff of “Lush 3” and the layered pianos of “Kein Trink Wasser”), paid a technical homage in their arch use of phasing speech loops for the intro and outro to their second (“Brown”) album of 1993.

Yet musical tastes and ambitions had changed since the ’70s. Electronica and minimalism were bridged in the ’90s by the general desire for individual self-sublimation that permeated popular music of the time, from rave to Nirvana. The attraction of Reich’s music now was its glowing mass, the total dissolving of surface into texture, the effacement of the individual. This idea had already been thematized in the 1970s and early ’80s by Kraftwerk, on albums such as Autobahn, The Man-Machine and Computer World. But in the late ’80s and into the ’90s it was everywhere, on albums as diverse as U2’s The Joshua Tree (produced by Eno), My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II.

Towards the end of the century, as techno matured and its producers became more self-reflective, a new genre—minimal techno, or microhouse—was born. The Reich Remixed album of 1999 may have been devised by Nonesuch records to attract a crossover audience to its Reich discography, but it still struck a chord. Producers had begun to create a new form of techno that was more attuned to minute processes of variation and evolution. Several of them, including Carsten Nicolai, Richie Hawtin, and Nobukazu Takemura, have acknowledged the influence in particular of Reich’s early music. Takemura (a contributor to Reich Remixed) samples Four Organs on his Assembler/Assembler 2 album. Hawtin’s Concept series of 12 inches focused with Reichian obsession on single rhythmic ideas; these were later “remixed” by Thomas Brinkmann into new rhythmic configurations by using a custom twin-arm turntable to play the record against itself. Brinkmann himself has taken Reich’s phasing technique to an extreme on his X100 record, which consists of just a click, a tone, and a bass kick recorded on two slightly out of phase grooves for the duration of one LP side. The Reich meme had morphed once more, into the validation for a hyper-modern aesthetic of automatism.

Origins

Before he met Terry Riley in 1964 and began working with tapes and tape loops, Reich claimed three major influences on his music: Bach, Stravinsky, and jazz. The last of these was most influential, particularly the playing of John Coltrane, whom Reich saw play many times at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop club in the early 1960s.

Reich was fortunately placed to be able to see, as an open-minded composition student, the unfolding of one of the great individual creative periods in 20th-century music. Watching Coltrane, along with players such as Eric Dolphy, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison, forge a jazz revolution must have been a little like sitting in on the Beatles’ sessions between Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper, or flat-sharing with Stockhausen in the mid-1950s.

Of course, Reich has acknowledged the influence of Coltrane many times. In particular, he has mentioned the importance of his 1961 Africa/Brass album, and listening back it’s not hard to hear why.
Africa/Brass
Africa/Brass was Coltrane’s first recording (of seven) for the newly formed Impulse! Records. Around this time, Coltrane’s palette of influences opened up considerably. North Indian music, via Ravi Shankar, had already led to Coltrane replacing chord changes with one- or two-chord drones (most famously on the album My Favorite Things, the last he recorded before beginning the Africa/Brass sessions). He had also begun to listen to West African, particularly Ghanaian, music. Hints of structural concepts borrowed from West African drumming also start to appear on his version of the “My Favorite Things” standard, in which sections are repeated until the leader plays a musical cue signaling everyone to move on to the next section.

While preparing for Africa/Brass, Coltrane listened to many African records for rhythmic inspiration. This was partly an urge to get away from the strictures of 4/4 time, but it also contributed to Coltrane’s broader project to move jazz improvisation away from pre-determined changes. By dropping the changes, the musical focus shifted from harmony and towards rhythm and melody. Elvin Jones capitalized on this opportunity to fashion a unique playing style that was indebted to West African drumming. Coltrane used his new freedom to focus on melodic creativity. “I had to make the melody as I went along. But at least I’m trying to think of a melody, I’m not referring to the chords to get the melody.” For the avant-gardist Ornette Coleman, another important influence on Coltrane at this time, this change in emphasis took on political connotations: “not referring to the chords” was an issue of authorship and ownership.

The “African-ness” of this shift runs deep. As documented by Steven Feld[2], Coltrane has become an inspiration to Ghanaian jazz musicians like Nii Noi Nortey, Nii Otoo Annan, and Ghanaba (Guy Warren), who see in him a kindred, diasporic spirit. Nortey says, in Feld’s book:

And the drummers, all them drummers [Jones, Rashied Ali and others], were playing something nearer to what I heard in Africa, in terms of complexities and tonalities and all kinds of things. I heard more of the African things in these drummers. I heard the drums overlapping and hooking up like our drummers do, and over that I can hear Coltrane as a drummer playing the saxophone, working his rhythms too. … He stopped playing all those chord changes and reduced them to one or two, which is also very African, because we tend to move at that level of keeping the music simple.

In many respects—its patterns of repetition, flow, and rupture, and its emphasis on the beat—Africa/Brass is typical of the music of the African (particularly West African) diaspora. To these Coltrane adds modality, an emphasis on massed sound, harmonic stasis, and a way of building form by adding or subtracting layers. We might recognize in these many of the planks of Reich’s minimalist style. Even details such as unison signals to mark the changes between sections are present and have, as we have already seen, their origins in Ghanaian drumming.

In fact, Reich wasn’t just listening to Coltrane at this time. Like the saxophonist, he was also listening to records of African music—conceivably the same ones, even. The timeline is unclear from Reich’s various biographers, but he certainly knew African music in the early ’60s while at Mills, and may have even discovered it in the mid-1950s while studying at Cornell. In 1962, he was taken to the Ojai Festival by his Mills teacher, Luciano Berio, who was the festival’s composer-in-residence. Here he heard Gunther Schuller talk on the subject of African music.

Schuller made reference to A. M. Jones’s seminal study of Ghanaian drumming, Studies in African Music, which Reich bought immediately. In its second volume, Jones’s book sets out some of the first complete transcriptions of Ewe drumming pieces, and Reich gladly immersed himself. Now he was able to see how the music that he (and presumably Coltrane) had been listening to was constructed. West African music, via Coltrane’s jazz and Jones’s transcriptions, was now imprinted on his imagination. When he traveled to Ghana for real, nearly a decade later, he writes of his visit not as a discovery, but as “basically confirmation: that writing for acoustic instruments playing repeating patterns of a percussive nature was a viable means of making music, and had an ancient history.”[3]

The Influence Engine
Music for 18 Musicians
A tangled web soon emerges when one begins to lay out the explicit or implicit relationship between Reich and popular music.[4] A feature of that web is its increasing circularity: the chains of influence rarely extend in single, straight lines, but tend to loop through a small number of nodes. At the start, those nodes are perhaps John Coltrane and Ghanaian music. A later one might be Giorgio Moroder; Brian Eno can certainly be added, as well as Kraftwerk and Mike Oldfield. The Orb, to name just one act, couldn’t have happened without these latter three. As the decades pass, new nodes are added, but the loops continue to pass up the chain. Since the late 1980s and the self-awareness of music history brought about by CDs and digital distribution, curious artists are more easily able to follow these chains of influence back as far as they like.

And those artists keep coming back to Reich. So in recent years we’ve seen Reich perform with Kraftwerk (Manchester Velodrome, 2009); billed alongside Orbital, Richie Hawtin, and Riccardo Villalobos (the aborted Bloc festival, London, 2012); programmed beside Lee Ranaldo, Tyondai Braxton, and Owen Pallett (Reverberations, London, 2011); and performed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (Kraków, 2011). And Reich himself flirted with the idea of writing 2×5 for Radiohead, before turning his attention fully to their music with Radio Rewrite.

I find the resilience of this phenomenon interesting. Why the urge to keep returning up the chain? And why is Reich, not Coltrane before him, or any of those rock and dance musicians in the 1970s from just after he established his style, that chain’s eternal endpoint? The answers to those questions say something not only about Reich’s music, but about our response to it and how we rationalize minimalism’s place within music history.

For those stakeholders I mentioned at the start of this article—critics, marketers, record companies, performance venues, ensembles, and the composer himself—the benefits are clear: the story of Reich’s influence on popular music helps him assert a position against Schoenberg, serialism, and all that. For the composer, it is a way to position himself within a canon of classical forebears who kept open the window between popular and classical music: Josquin, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Ives, Weill, and Bartók are among those names he has mentioned in this context. (NB: His own teacher, Berio, composer of Folk Songs, Coro, and Sequenza XIII, and arranger of Beatles songs, does not make this list.) For popular musicians there are prestige and validation, should they want them. There is a cachet of a sort in being able to claim an aesthetic lineage from an esteemed classical composer.

The influence engine encourages us to view Reich’s music as the fountainhead of so many subsequent styles. Yet I wonder if it might not be more fruitful to think of its persistence as a result of its basis in an Afro-diasporic template—that is structured around repetitions, breaks, and accumulation, and prioritizes rhythm and melody—derived from Coltrane and other musicians, and that itself underpins much black music from blues to rap. In Music for 18 Musicians and other works, Reich brilliantly crystallized that template into something that, as history has shown, could inspire in many different directions at once. He took the biggest step in the chain I have described. Perhaps it will require a similar act of creative reception to refresh our understanding of Reich’s place in recent music history.

*


1. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (University of California Press, 2005)

2. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra (Duke University Press, 2009)

3. ‘Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition’ (1982), in Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford University Press, 2002), p.106

4. Ross Cole unpicks a number of threads from Reich’s San Francisco years in “‘Fun, Yes, but Music?’ Steve Reich and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Cultural Nexus, 1962–65,” Journal of the Society for American Music, vi (2012), 315–48

***

Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes on contemporary music for a number of publications, including his blog, The Rambler. His new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music was published in September.

Reports of the Death of Opera Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Soldier Songs

A scene from David T. Little’s Soldier Songs. Photo by Jill Steinberg, courtesy PROTOTYPE.

Two worthy and penetrating studies of opera take as their premise the idea that the form is dead. In A History of Opera (2012), Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker declare that the genre is “a mortuary” and “a thing of the past” even as they grant that recent decades have seen “a remarkable global increase in operatic activity.” They bolster their mournful claims in part by stacking the deck, paying scant heed to works from the past half-century or so. They sum up Henze, Tippett, and Glass in about a sentence apiece, allot fewer pages to Britten’s operatic output than to Handel’s Rinaldo, and fail to mention Kaija Saariaho at all.

Then again, why kill off opera only once? Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar had upped the ante with Opera’s Second Death (2001). They argue that opera came into the world “stillborn,” “as something outdated.” The notion is tenable given the antiquarian passions that drove the Camerata de’ Bardi and the form’s other progenitors, and the themes of loss, retrospection, mourning, and (would-be) resurrection obsessively revisited in Peri’s Euridice, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and countless other operas throughout the centuries.

Žižek and Dolar propose several candidates for “the last opera,” including three monumental unfinished works: Puccini’s Turandot, Berg’s Lulu, and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. And while they, like Abbate and Parker, acknowledge that composers and wordsmiths go on writing operas, they insist that the genre remains “a huge relic” and “an enormous anachronism.”
To my mind, there are two ways to respond to the gloom that permeates A History of Opera and Opera’s Second Death. The first would be to hide the books from the artists crafting and performing new operas lest they get wise to the idea that theirs, to quote Dolar, is a “zombielike” pursuit. The second, jollier and less obscurantist, would be to invite the authors to New York to sample remarkable work of the kind that I have seen and heard in recent months. (Two birds, one stone: perhaps then Žižek really would host Saturday Night Live.) Incidentally, those imps at Britain’s Royal Opera don’t seem to believe that opera is dead. They recently commissioned four new full-length operas for the 2020 season—inspired by the writings of none other than operatic-prophet-of-doom Slavoj Žižek.
Here in New York, on an icy February night following a brutal storm, Experiments in Opera’s New Shorts program played to an overflowing house at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room. With sizzling playing by Hotel Elefant, ten new ten-minute operas, each preceded by a video interview with the composer or creative team, captivated young and old alike. (The audience ran the gamut from children to golden agers, the latter in far smaller measure than typically seen at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall.)

Abbate and Parker note that nearly all now-canonical operas were seen as “disposable” when they had their premieres, and that exorbitant costs limit the risks that today’s major companies can take with new works. At New Shorts, no-frills direction by Louisa Proske, Stewart Kramer, and David Levine made plain that effective stagings need not be elaborate or costly. (The same holds true at big houses: the Met’s spare-to-the-bone production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, to be revived in May, is one of the company’s most powerful offerings.) As for the fungibility of the New Shorts operas, only time, that most wayward of arbiters, will tell which ones have legs. Their variety and consistently high quality impressed me, though, and the audience’s enthusiasm never flagged during a program of pithy works that added up to an epic-length evening.


Verdi and Britten celebrate landmark birthdays this year, and one reason why their operas endure is because so many were based on works by major writers, including Shakespeare, Schiller, and James. Two of the most compelling New Shorts operas also draw on illustrious literary sources: Bodiless by Gabrielle Herbst and The God’s Script by Justin Tierney. The latter sheathes in fierce, gorgeously orchestrated music a dramatization of Jorge Luis Borges’s “La escritura del dios,” the story of an imprisoned Mayan priest, sung with command by Jeffrey Gavett, who seeks to decipher a divine message encoded in the spots of a jaguar he sees for only an instant each day. Just as the novella’s narrator tells of “vertigo” and a “labyrinth of dreams,” Tierney’s score circles time and again around the same intervals, its claustrophobic darkness pierced by glistening threads of violin tone or washes of flute over prickly percussion.

Bodiless is a surprising title for a work based on “deconstructed text” by the philosopher Hélène Cixous, whose most celebrated essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” extols the “luminous torrents” and “unheard-of songs” that course through women’s flesh. In her setting, Herbst spins a web of soaring phrases and ululations for three sopranos: at New Shorts performed by herself, Ariadne Greif, and Lucy Dhegrae, all wearing lacy, shredded costumes with intertwining tendrils by Zaida Adriana Goveo Balmaseda. With no discernible action or narrative trajectory, Bodiless seems more rhapsody than drama. That said, its repeated phrase “the roar of light” suggests an affinity with Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (“Wie, hör’ ich das Licht?”), an opera whose own static Handlung traces an erotic journey beyond the body, and whose love music, all echolalia and vocal arabesques, similarly eschews singularity and sense.

Collector

Mark Emerson in Aaron Siegel’s The Collector, photo courtesy Experiments in Opera.

At the opposite extreme to Bodiless is Aaron Siegel’s The Collector, a monologue performed with wry brilliance by actor Mark Emerson that layers rhythmic speech over pointillist fragments of melody in a kind of ultimate distillation of stile rappresentativo. The Collector’s colloquial tone, oblique wit, and themes of paraphilia and fixation with ephemera (postage stamps) bring to mind the loopy “pictographic ballad operas” of Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy, the most winsome and intelligent new operas I have encountered in the past decade. Equally droll, WOW by Joe Diebes and Christian Hawkey makes something peppy and exuberant of the superego’s implacable ostinato (“I am ashamed of”), grandly intoned by Jonathon Hampton and Devin Provenzano, juxtaposed with a litany of disgraceful things spoken by Christina Campanella. They range from the usual suspects (“my penis size”) to matters trivial (“what my phone says about me”), earnest (“my hate-filled fellow Christians”), and forthrightly human (“having my butt checked”).

The Mother

Lisa Komara in Jason Cady’s The Mother, photo courtesy Experiments in Opera.

Jason Cady, whose Happiness is The Problem has just been released by LockStep Records, figured as both composer and performer at New Shorts. Sung and acted in dazzling manner by Lisa Komara and Erin Flannery, Cady’s The Mother pairs colorful scoring, sassy rhythms, and sweetly angular melodies with a young woman’s darkest nightmare: being overtaken in art and love by her mother, who morphs by outrageous happenstance from dreary crone to musical prodigy. With Ann Heppermann, Cady also acted in Matthew Welch’s The Three Truths, a robot opera based on a Sufi parable that hints at an elemental unease with the soulless, mechanical underside of vocal virtuosity. Gavett and Anne Rhodes sang with the requisite authority, and Seth Bodie designed the spectacular costumes for Welch’s opera and The Mother.

End Times

Elisabeth Halliday in End Times by Ruby Fulton and Baynard Woods, photo courtesy Experiments in Opera.

Leaha Maria Villarreal’s A Window to a Door, austerely scored for violin, contrabass, and electronic playback, explores music at the edge of silence. Her voice delicate, her presence poignant, Meagan Brus portrayed its sole character, a young woman who is held hostage—in jail? an asylum? a prison of her own making? Set in a dystopian future of planetary meltdown, End Times by Ruby Fulton and Baynard Woods shares the off-kilter humor of The Mother and WOW and shifts between the acid musings of an “existential weather woman” and the rants of a fundamentalist reverend, trenchantly played by Elisabeth Halliday and Robert Maril. The last New Short offering, Mary Kouyoumdjian and Hannis Brown’s I am a Fish, probes quandaries of identity with wild vocal writing, admirably sung by Seth Gilman, and a roiling score shot through with the sting of the electric guitar.

Theo Bleckmann in Phil Kline's Out Cold. Photo by Rahav Segev, courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Theo Bleckmann in Phil Kline’s Out Cold. Photo by Rahav Segev, courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Beyond New Shorts, New York has teemed with vital new operas in recent months. One could argue that Out Cold, Phil Kline’s monodrama that had its world premiere last fall at BAM under the auspices of American Opera Projects, is a monument to belatedness with its nods to Sinatra and Schubert, or that those touchstones along with Theo Bleckmann’s lean tone and conversational delivery represent a repudiation of everything “operatic.” But our current thinking about opera is defective, heedless of the form’s intimate currents—Monteverdi’s Orfeo, after all, was performed in private chambers at the Duke of Mantua’s palace—and bound to bloated 19th-century paradigms. Besides, when Kline cites for his boozer’s late-night reveries the Magic Fire Music that ushers Brünnhilde to sleep in Die Walküre, does he not demonstrate the truth of Nietzsche’s claim that Wagner is “our greatest musical miniaturist”? At BAM, Bleckmann was an opera unto himself, singing, dancing, and acting with forlorn elegance and consummate artistry, and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble made bright the many bewitching hues of Kline’s poison-sweet songs.

January’s inaugural Prototype Festival, produced by Kristin Marting, Beth Morrison, and Kim Whitener, showcased five new operatic offerings, selling out many performances and garnering praise from Justin Davidson, Ronni Reich, and many others. I missed Timur and the Dime Museum but did cover David T. Little’s Soldier Songs for Time Out New York. Like the bare-bones New Shorts presentations, Yuval Sharon’s uncluttered but potent staging of Little’s 2006 opera refuted the idea that opera companies need to bust the bank in order to galvanize audiences. The unit set—a sandbox—deftly conjured up the landscape on which several recent wars unfolded, and perhaps also the puerile and foolhardy spirit in which certain leaders waged those wars. And the image of blood slowly soaking through the business suit and dress shirt worn by the soldier when he returns to civilian life remains among the most haunting I have ever witnessed in a theatre.


Prototype also gave the world stage premiere of Mohammed Fairouz’s Sumeida’s Song, already familiar thanks to its fine Bridge recording and various workshop presentations. Here, too, smart rather than pricey stagecraft carried the day. The revenge-besotted Asakir is as high-strung a leading lady as Verdi’s Azucena or Strauss’s Elektra, yet Rachel Calloway, cannily directed by David Herskovits, made her wild grandeur work in a tiny performing space. And even with the fourth wall mere feet away from most viewers, Alixa Gage’s costumes and Zane Pihlstrom’s abstract set, strands of vinyl tubing aglow with the weird colors of Lenore Doxsee’s lighting, made a credible case for Fairouz’s drama of a family and a wider world undone by violence and abiding rancor. (Gage and Pilhstrom, incidentally, were part of director Gia Forakis’s team for The Kitchen’s poetic staging of Missy Mazzoli’s Song From The Uproar: The Lives and Deaths Of Isabelle Eberhardt last spring.)

The other Prototype offerings were Paola Prestini’s Aging Musician, a work in progress that happily draws on the resplendent tones of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Bluebeard by the Dutch collective 33 1/3. An unnerving work without live musicians and with 3-D video renderings of corpses, body parts, and other ontological terrors, Bluebeard hovers between the post-human virtual and the Lacanian Real: the material ground of existence, unutterable and horrifying, shards of which can erupt in everyday life. (Quick, someone get Žižek and Dolar on Skype!)

For a “mortuary” and a “stillborn” art form, then, opera seems to be going strong, at least in these parts. In addition to the works mentioned here, recent months have brought new operas by Philip Glass, Victoria Bond, Douglas J. Cuomo, Nolan Gasser, Matthew Harris, and Thomas Pasatieri. The coming months will also bring keenly anticipated world premieres at San Francisco Opera (Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene) and Santa Fe (Theodore Morrison’s Oscar). Glancing beyond NMBx’s purview, Operabase lists some sixty additional new operas having premieres in 2012-13, at least one of which, George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, opened to glowing reviews and will tour widely. This season, New Yorkers have also had chances to take in slashingly fine Adès at New York City Opera and the Met, where Nico Muhly’s Two Boys will have its local premiere in October.
Opera, then, seems to me “not completely dead”; in fact, it seems to be doing rather well. Call off the funeral and get in line to see for yourself.

***

Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Marion Lignana Rosenberg. Photo by Maeghan Donohue.

Marion Lignana Rosenberg has written about music, books, and the arts for Time Out New York, WQXR, Capital New York, The Forward, The Classical Review, and other publications. She has also written program notes and essays for Kronos Quartet, The Glyndebourne Festival, and New York City Opera.

Intuition and Algorithm in Einstein on the Beach

[Ed. Note: The following paper was presented at the Einstein on the Beach conference of the University of Amsterdam, January 6, 2013. The present version is slightly expanded based on questions and comments from that session. All score excerpts from Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass ©1976 Dunvagen Music Publishers. Used by Permission.]

Some of us are old enough to remember the public impression that minimalist music made before the premiere of Einstein on the Beach. Minimalism in its first manifestation was a strict, objectivist style. We thought of it, pretty much, as gradual-process music. Philip Glass’s Music in Fifths and Music in Contrary Motion offered us perceptual exercises in additive process, and taught us to hear the gradual expansion of a time frame. Steve Reich’s out-of-phase tape loops amplified microscopic phenomena of the human voice. The similarly phasing 12-note pattern of Piano Phase created its own objective geometry, as did the change-ringing patterns of Jon Gibson. La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations were comfortingly based in mathematics. Charlemagne Palestine’s piano improvisations conjured up overtones. Only Terry Riley seemed a little loopy, pardon the pun, but even in In C we heard the echoes of melodies as a strict canonic process.

It is odd to remember at this distance how important this criterion of objectivity seemed at the time. We had come out of a period of serialism and strict chance processes, glorifying mathematics and the natural world. In the conditioned milieu of 1960s avant-garde music, mere expression of emotion seemed at the time unworthy of serious study; subjectivity was distrusted. The worship of science was rampant, and music had become scientific. For many musicians involved in the avant-garde it accelerated the acceptance of minimalism, I think, that it seemed to be about natural and or logical phenomena. Some of us weren’t yet ready to return to intuition, art, shading, eccentricity, and the unsteady foundation of personal preference.

There were enough hints of gradual process in Einstein on the Beach, I think, that it was accepted as fitting this objectivist paradigm at the time. The use of numbers and solfège syllables as text facilitated this impression. So did Glass’s liner notes to the original Tomato recording of the work. Of the lightning fast patterns in the Building scene, Glass states that “the repeated figures form simple arithmetic progressions,” and he refers to a figure in the Trial scene which, he writes, “slowly expands and contracts […] through an additive process.”[1] While this is arguably true of the Trial scene, I will show that the progressions of the Building scene are far from arithmetically simple, and also that many of the other scenes are devoid of predictable algorithmic thinking. Looking back in retrospect, Einstein seems a far more intuitively written work than we thought at the time. For several decades the score wasn’t available, and to transcribe these lightning-fast patterns would have taken a lot of patience; we thought we had a pretty good idea what we were hearing. Eventually a score became available via links on Glass’s website, and I bought it in 2008. Upon opening it I was immediately struck by how much more unpredictable the music was than I had remembered it, how circuitous its forms were, how difficult it often was to pinpoint the musical logic. I was struck by how compositionally playful the piece is. In particular it offers some striking examples of recomposition, of writing through the same parallel succession of motives and harmonies several times within one piece and doing it a little differently each time. It is this playful, intuitive technique of recomposition in the composed musical scenes of Einstein on the Beach that I plan to focus on here.

Let me begin, almost pro forma, by reviewing the recombinant elements that make up Einstein, since I’ll be referring to them later. First of all are three recurring chord progressions, one with three chords, one with four, and one with five.
Einstein-Elements
(Glass’s notes also refer to ideas of two chords and one chord, but these don’t appear as frequently.) The famous five-chord progression modulates from F minor to E major, and is the basis of the Spaceship scene, appears in the Train and Building scenes, and is the basis of the internal Knee Plays. Glass refers to it as “cadential,” but the three-chord progression heard in the first and last Knee Plays seems cadential as well: a simple vi-V-I. The four-chord progression appears in the Trial and Bed scenes, always in the kind of slowly arpeggiated motion seen here. In addition, there are a few other features found from scene to scene. The upward A-minor triad with a variety of continuations serves as a prelude to the four-chord progression. A la-fa-la-si-do-si motto in A-flat appears as a kind of section marker in the Train and Night Train scenes, and the following figure of four modules appears in both those scenes and constitutes almost the entire notated material of the Building scene.

Many movements of Einstein seem to be written in a kind of stanzaic form, wherein a movement is divided into stanzas which are parallel in their function and similar (though varied) in their progress through the same harmonies and motifs. Sometimes the beginnings are marked by introductory motives which I will call incipits: such as the three perfect fourths in the saxophones at each new section of the Train scene, the two four-note patterns of Night Train, and the reduction of the Building scene to a 6/8 pattern:
Einstein-incipits-envois
Likewise, some of the stanzas end in signalling characteristic figures that I will call envois, after the medieval poetry term. These include a quick F-minor triad in the Train scene, the solo violin playing A minor scales in Trial 1, and, again, the la-fa-la-si-do-si motive in Night Train. Not all stanzas in the various scenes are marked by these devices, but in those that are the incipits and envois are quite clear in their framing intent.

There are moments in Einstein at which a more stereotypically linear minimalist logic prevails. The most obvious is the bulk of the Bed scene, where the soprano sings over the four-chord progression. As this chart of the rhythms for each chord shows, the length of the rhythmic cycle expands in a fairly predictable manner with each iteration.
Einstein-Bed-process
The voice part, however, is a more intuitive element, drawing lines that use only notes from the four triads. Out of 81 possibilities (not counting octave displacements), Glass chooses only seven of the available such lines and repeats three of them, creating a mild climax by using sevenths in the 7th and 8th cycles. (Each voice line is repeated once before proceeding to the next.)
Einstein-Bed-lines
Likewise, the violin part of the Trial 1 scene does, as Glass says, go through a process of expansion and subtraction, though not in a completely linear manner.
Einstein-Trial1-pattern
The chorus doubles the low C and A in the first part of each pattern; thus, once the music begins leaving this part of the phrase out of each repetition, the chorus disappears and only the violin continues.

At the other extreme is the Building movement, in which only the two organs are notated, as the voices and other instruments drone and improvise. As notated, the piece is entirely in eighth-notes in contrary motion, much like several of Glass’s minimalist works of the late 1960s. (It should be kept in mind that all of these patterns repeat 2, 4, or 8 times before proceeding to the next one.)
Einstein-Building-Organs
The move from one pattern to another, however, is not at all predictable. The following chart of the right-hand Organ 1 part shows all the pitches for the first 30 (out of 37) cycles, lined up vertically to show easily what notes are added or subtracted to get from one repetition the next (here the lower-case “e” denotes the E-flat in the upper octave, and there is a key signature of three flats).
Einstein-Building-analysis
What making this chart clarifies is that the movement is made up of only four modules whose changing combinations make up the form:
Einstein-Building-ABCD
The movement’s seeming micro-complexity is due to the fact that module A is contained in module B, and likewise module C in D. The following chart shows the deployment of these four modules throughout the entire section:
Einstein-Building-plan
At each step one can see a kind of additive or subtractive logic: the 3/8 modules start out with a 6/8 feel, and then the A module is added to give kind of a quarter-note bump to the repetition of BD, then another A is added, then steps 2 and 3 are added together, and so on. After expanding via additions of the A module, the music strips back down to just B and D, after which module C starts to be added in. Towards the end the music begins to emphasize the ten-note pattern ABCD, and finally resolves to the opening BD with which it began. The musical continuity here is not illogical, but neither is there any place where one could look at two or three successive phrases and guess (with any confidence of accuracy) what the next one will be. Glass’s comment about “simple arithmetic progressions” notwithstanding, this is a very unpredictable sequence. And, it must be said, this is all background structure anyway, since in this scene the pentatonic drones and improvisations tend to greatly override the subtlety of the organ patterns.

The Train

The Train scene, one of the most musically complex movements, is made up of three recurring sections, structured in the form ABABCABC. The B sections, which seem to serve a connective function, are instrumental (without voices), using the same four modules from the Building scene that were just identified. The C sections are based on the five-chord cadential progression that is the basis of the Spaceship scene. The A sections are unique to this scene. The first two B sections are identical, the third one considerably expanded. The two C sections are identical except that the chorus is added in the second one; the rhythmic patterns here follow those at the beginning of the Spaceship scene. What is illustrative of Glass’s approach to form in Einstein, though, are the three A sections.

The diagram here outlines the three A sections in a kind of shorthand that isolates an abbreviated set of features, namely the length of the repeated phrases and the notes of the soprano solo (once again in a key signature of three flats).
Einstein-Train-analysis
A three-note drone ostinato in the saxophones runs throughout all the A sections, imposing an underlying 3/4 meter. The voices sing repeated patterns of various lengths, entirely in quarter-notes except for a recurring refrain which I will identify in a moment. When the number of quarter-notes in the voice pattern is not divisible by three, the voices and saxophones run through a brief out-of-phase pattern, and the number of their repetitions must be divisible by three to make the phrases come out evenly at the end of the measure. The numbers on each left-hand column indicate the number of quarter-notes in each voice phrase. A number given as 4×3, 5×3, and so on, indicates that the phrase goes out of phase with the saxophone ostinato. A number given as 6+4+2 or 5+4+3+2+1 points to a subsidiary rhythm within the phrase suggesting an additive or subtractive rhythmic process; note that these occur only in the second A section. In each right-hand column are given the pitches in the solo soprano voice part, and since there are three flats in the key signature, A should be read as A-flat, B as B-flat, and so on. As in earlier examples, all these melodic fragments are stated in quarter-notes except for a recurring refrain in 8th-notes on Ab-F-Ab-Bb-C-Bb, sung on the solfège syllables la-fa-la-si-do-si, which recurs both here and in the Night Train scene as a kind of motto. One can see that here it appears twice at the beginning, and then at the end of each A section.

Other points that could be made here are even clearer in the following example. This comparison of the three soprano parts (and the tenor is always either a perfect fourth or major third below, in parallel) shows that the soprano begins each section alternating between Ab and Bb, gradually making her way up to Eb and then F, then descending back to Bb before concluding with the la-fa-la-si-do-si motto.

Einstein Train melody

click image to enlarge

Notice, however, that the melodic and rhythmic character of the route is quite different in each A section. The first section reaches the high F relatively quickly, the second takes a long time to get there, and the third stays on F and Eb for a long time as a kind of climax. The second section, as previously noted, contains more patterns which contain an internal subtractive or additive process, and the third section contains the only additive process among phrases, and one additional subtractive process. At the end, each of them finally goes into a subtractive rhythmic process of 5-4-3-2 before lapsing into the la-fa-la-si-do-si motto. What is evident, then, is how many rhythmic and melodic options were open to Glass to get him from the Ab up to the F and back to the closing refrain, and how carefully he recomposed this process for three parallel sections achieving the same function through different routes. This possibility of intuitively recomposing a section is far removed from the typical concept of early minimalism as being something logically predetermined. We’re not just listening to nature here; we’re listening to variations in a large-scale melody conceptualized as rhythm.

Dances 1 and 2

One of the most fascinating views of Glass’s compositional process in Einstein is the subtle contrast between Dances 1 and 2. Many of the materials are identical from one dance to another, but the second is somewhat transformed in consequence of its use of the solo violin representing Einstein. Both dances contain a trio of drone notes that sound throughout: the pitches A, D, and E. These pitches are heard in the solo voices, the saxophones, and the left hand of Organ 1 in every measure. In addition, a fourth pitch, F, appears in the culminating repetitions of each large section. These drone pitches are recontextualized by the changing harmonies around them. In Dance 1, the arpeggios in the organs and piccolo move among chords of F major, A major, Bb major, G major, and C major, the constant D, E, and A being reinterpreted in each new harmony.
Einstein-Dance1-figures
(Actually, Glass describes it in his program notes as always returning to D, which is justifiable if you consider the F major as part of a D minor 7th chord; but which isn’t the way I hear it.) The singers and saxophones use only the pitches D, E, F, and A, voiced either as quarter notes, dotted quarter notes, half notes, or, at one arguably climactic point, dotted half notes. A listing of the chord progressions and the rhythms in each repetition throughout Dance 1 reveals a clear division into three parallel parts, though these are not marked by clear incipits and refrains as in the Train scene:
Einstein-Dance1-form
Though there is no key signature, the general tonality of Dance 1 sounds to me to be in F major; the piece begins and ends on an F major chord (with an added sixth D), and the phrase rhythm frequently makes F major sound like a resolution, though it can also sound like a flatted-seventh adjunct to G major. Listing the harmonic progressions of each repetition, we see a clear parallelism among phrases 1 to 17, 18 to 33, and 34 to 50. That is, there are 50 phrases in the dance, divided into three stanzas with lengths 17 + 16 + 17. (By the way, the Nonesuch recording of Einstein omits the second stanza, as did the recent production of the opera in Amsterdam.) As is clear from the diagram, each stanza starts by alternating F major and A major, then adds in Bb major, and finally moves to an alternation of G and F, inserting between them a C major chord to make a kind of II-V-I cadence. Although this pattern is clear, there is some variety in the tonal emphasis: stanza 3 spends less time on Bb than stanzas 1 and 2 do, and stanza 2 has a long middle passage on F major lacking in stanzas 1 or 3. Likewise, in an overview of the rhythms of each repeated phrase one can note rough parallels, but no clear isomorphism. In the first half of each stanza there is one repeated pattern longer than the ones around it; in stanza 1 it’s the fourth, in stanza 2 the third, and in stanza 3 the fifth. In stanza 1, half-notes appear in phrases 5 to 7, in stanza 2 in phrases 1 to 4, and stanza 3 contains no half-note rhythms, but offers dotted half-notes in phrase five.

The last four or five phrases of each stanza are rather climactic. While elsewhere the soprano and soprano saxophone use only the pitches D and E, in these final phrases they use a repeating DEFE, as marked in the diagram. Note that the rhythms here are entirely in quarter-notes, and that in stanzas 1 and 2 there occurs a nine-note pattern of DEFE-DEF-DE, a kind of small 4+3+2 subtractive motif. (By the way, we’ll see Glass using this 4+3+2 pattern 15 years later in his Columbus opera The Voyage, and many of these other patterns as well.) These DEFE motives appear only over the harmonic progressions G-F and G-C-F. All of these features point to an overall form divided into three parallel parts, but the musical continuity is so static, with its endlessly sustained A, D, and E, that the listener does not distinctly experience the piece as sectional, but as a smooth continuum with variations in the symmetry of the rhythm.

Turning to Dance 2, we find many of these same characteristics. Again the pitches D, E, and A are sustained throughout, the DEFE motive appears as a kind of relative intensification, and the rhythm moves among quarter-note, dotted-quarter, and half-note beats. But now the saxophones and piccolo are replaced by Einstein’s violin, and the necessity of writing a playable if still extremely virtuosic part for that instrument seems to suggest quite a few alterations.
Einstein-Dance2-form
Most noticeably, the tonality of F that dominated Dance 1 is replaced with a feeling of A minor, or at least an A natural minor scale (denoted here by a lower-case “a”), a tonality that marks much of the violin solo’s music throughout the opera. The tonality of Bb no longer appears. For the first ten phrases the music merely alternates between an A natural minor scale and an A major triad. The DEFE motive appears only twice in the piece, about a third of the way through and for a long time at the very end. Replacing Dance 1’s middle stanza is a long section (phrases 15 to 25) in which the violin articulates a strict process that is both additive (in terms of adding phrases together) and subtractive (in terms of each new phrase addition being fewer notes than its predecessor): it plays a scale starting on A and going up to G, then another phrase going up to F, then up to E, D, C, and B. After reaching maximum length it then begins subtracting the opening phrases one at a time, and I tried to spell out in the diagram the strict process of addition and subtraction. Later, starting in phrase 37, Glass reinserts this scalar process into larger phrases on the chords of G, C, and A, resulting in repetitive sections far longer than anything in Dance 1. At last the chorus and organ suddenly drop out, and the violin is left to play a solo transition to Knee Play 4.

One of the realizations one draws from such a reading of Einstein, I think, is that it does not much matter whether the progression of patterns follows a strict algorithm, or whether the music moves from pattern to pattern more arbitrarily. An algorithm that is sufficiently complex will prevent the listener from gaining a firm sense of what the patterning is; and, conversely, given a severe restriction of material, a series of similar but nonlinear patterns can be interpreted as probably following some pattern too complex to tease out by ear. The effect can be much the same. The two Dance movements are rather different in this respect without the effect being noticeably formally contrasting. However, I think there is one exception to this in Einstein, and it is the Bed scene with which we started, the opera’s penultimate major scene. Here the rhythmic progression is not only linear and predictable, but proceeds so slowly that it is quite easy to count, and the listener will be tempted to do so. In this case I find something nostalgic about the linearity, as it is the one part of the opera that exposes the underlying process in an audibly discernible way, inviting the listener to step behind the curtain, as it were, and find out how the music works. Given Einstein’s historical appearance just after the repertoire of strict-process minimalism, this mood may even be felt as a nostalgia for the musical period that had just passed. As a kind of retrospective adagio, the Bed scene virtually invites us to remember the minimalist works of the late 1960s and hear how far the rest of the opera has moved away from them.

Aside from the special case of sonata form, in which a composer rewrites the exposition as a recapitulation in order to transpose all themes into the tonic, this idea of using several recomposings of the same passage within one piece does not come up often in the history of music. The composer who wants to get from point A to point B typically figures out the best way to do so, and then proceeds to point C. To find three different and functionally interchangeable ways to get from point A to point B and then use all of them in the same piece, as Glass does here in the Train scene, is rather rare, I think. (After all, had Glass merely repeated three identical A sections, how many listeners would have noticed, how many analysts would have found that anomalous in this context?) And one would have to go to the music of Erik Satie, such as the Gymnopedies or the Pieces Froids, to find a composer writing two large movements of a piece with such similar content as Glass does between these two dance movements. And yet the Dance 2 is quite different in feeling than Dance 1, with its focus on the violin soloist, its incessant running up and down the scale, its greater reliance on additive and subtractive process, and its lack or the comforting F major into which Dance 1 tended to resolve. All the usual jokes about minimalism aside, I find it remarkable that Glass could generate 45 minutes of his opera with so little material, shaping each internal stanza so intuitively, and differentiating the two dances into such different purposes and moods. It is a real piece of compositional virtuosity, and not at all the kind of predetermined logic that we tend to associate with early minimalism.

As my predecessor at The Village Voice Tom Johnson wrote in 1981 about Glass’s Music with Changing Parts, “Yet as I listened once again to those additions and subtractions I realized that they are actually rather whimsical. Composers like Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, and William Hellermann have written such sequences with much greater rigor. By comparison, Glass is not a reductionist at all but a romantic.” [2] Romantic is not quite the word I would have used—I would be loathe to think that the mere absence of a generating algorithm suffices as evidence of passion or individualism. (In fact, that Tom would use the word on such minor grounds in 1981 is indicative of the atmosphere I began this essay by describing.) But I do think that there is a kind of inherent mystery in Glass’s circuitous, unpredictable paths through extremely circumscribed material, and that Einstein on the Beach would be a less compelling work than it is had he been more content with mere concept and less generous with his subtly-shaping artistry.

Notes
1. Philip Glass, “Note on Einstein on the Beach,” Einstein on the Beach, Tomato Records, TOM-4-2901 (1979).
2. Tom Johnson, “Maximalism on the Beach: Philip Glass,” Village Voice, February 25-March 3, 1981; reprinted in The Voice of New Music, Amsterdam (Het Apollohuis, 1989)
Copyright 2013 by Kyle Gann