Category: Analysis

Four actors take the stage. Opposite an ensemble of four musicians, they pace briefly, waiting with self-assured ease, readying themselves for the impending procession. Rolling up his sleeves, Avi Glickstein picks up a pair of boxing gloves, puts on a wig and grabs hold of a broomstick. Fulya Peker puts on a pair of sunglasses and pulls out a compact. Wearing a pair of safety goggles, Deborah Wallace holds a wooden hammer and stands in front of a glass screen. Small ceramic toys sit on a table nearby. Meanwhile, Eric Magnus, wearing a frayed, half-torn tuxedo, sits at a table holding a spray bottle and a tool used for sanding drywall.

The Innova cast in action.

Music and action begin together abruptly. One hears a rhythmically disjointed bed of thudding electronic drum sounds against the chugging of distorted détaché cello and feedback-drenched guitars. Glickstein starts to convulse fervidly, shaking the broomstick in a kind of maniacal trance, while Peker enacts a series of majestically choreographed rock star poses (recalling the stage persona of Dead Kennedys’ one-time frontman Jello Biafra), at times twisting at the waist to view audience members in the mirror of the compact and then pointing violently at each chosen observer. As Magnus rips, tears, and bites at his tuxedo, the overall flow of action is punctuated by Wallace’s ritualistic smashing of the ceramic figurines, each of which she inspects with scientific scrutiny before and following their destruction. Glickstein drops to his knees. On all fours and still wearing the boxing gloves, with his right hand he begins to stab at the floor with a fake knife around the perimeter of his left hand planted on the ground. In front of Glickstein and continuing her intoxicated invocations of punk rock stage antics, Peker sings, or, rather, shouts at the top of her lungs, “Get in there. Come on. / Come on, coward, move. Get in there,” rapping in spurts of hysteria, urgently delivering the text first in Turkish, and then, following more posing, again in English.

The scene described above opens Innova, the latest large-scale opera production by the New York-based music and theater performance group Object Collection. Throughout the piece, the audience is presented with a seemingly relentless barrage of text, action, sound, taste, and smell. (In one scene, performers eat a whole tray of sandwiches prepared beforehand by one of the performers; another scene involves the drunken conducting of an ensemble of applauders following a careful sequence of ritual beer pouring and drinking.) Initially a seemingly unparseable overload of the senses, upon closer inspection the work appears as a nuanced collage of interlocking tableaux; language, music, movement, and image commingle to create a unique tapestry of experience. Presented first in an hour-long preview version at New York’s Incubator Arts Project, January 6-11, 2011, Innova will be presented in its full three-hour grandeur May 13-22, 2011, at Abrons Arts Center in New York City. The music is performed by cellist Jessie Marino, guitarist Taylor Levine, bassist Kevin Farrell, and Travis Just performing computer and percussion; the actors include Avi Glickstein, Eric Magnus, Fulya Peker, and Deborah Wallace; my own role in the opera begins as a guitarist and ends performing alongside the rest of the actors.

Object Collection comprises theater director and playwright Kara Feely and composer/performer Travis Just. Since their founding in 2004, the group has been authoring, directing, and performing large-scale productions conceived as multi-media operas, performance installations, and evening-length concerts. Coming out of traditions of the experimental performing arts, the group’s background includes substantial knowledge of the work of Robert Ashley, Christian Wolff, and Richard Foreman, though they cite equally as influences the Volksbühne Berlin, John Cage, the Situationists, Swiss-German visual artist Dieter Roth, and Prince.

The group’s inaugural performance was a realization of John Cage’s Song Books created at Kunst Station Sankt in Cologne in 2004. This work of Cage’s would become somewhat emblematic of Object Collection’s special layering of musical and theatrical elements, their embracing of various kinds of notation systems (traditional, graphical, textual), and their collaging of texts taken from various authors (in the case of Song Books, Cage used texts by Thoreau, Duchamp, Marshall McCluhan, and Buckminster Fuller). The following year Object Collection premiered its first major work authored as a group, Is this a gentleman? (2005).

In May of 2006, Object Collection presented their second large-scale, self-authored theatrical piece, Evoke memories of a golden age. In this work, four characters (a wolf-man, a talkative corporate traveler, a sword-wielding businessman, and a woman who begins the performance wearing a bathrobe while soaking her feet in a bucket) each perform a series of semi-narrative vignettes that unfold over the course of an hour, often overlapping and communicating with one another. Occasionally the performers engage the audience directly. At times the sound of a broken chromatic cluster performed on melodica fades into the texture; at others, a delicate electronic drone sustains throughout an entire section. An audience member notices the strange quality of the characters’ level of casualness—both with respect to their address to one another and the audience—which seems somehow at odds with the austere sonic atmosphere and the bizarre situations that unfold on stage.

In Object Collection’s first full-scale opera work, Problem Radical(s) (2009), actors used a variation of speech-song to recite text Feely had collaged from speeches and writings of political activists, artists, and thinkers. An elaborately sprawling set made of found objects, trash, piles of clothing, and sets of temporary walls was continuously re-arranged, while miniature blimps floated around the performance space. The sound consisted of squelching slide guitar, sample-and-hold computer stuttering, and sludgy distorted bass guitar riffs, all accompanying the uncannily arousing proclamations, rants, and chants delivered by the actors. Strands of coherence and confusion seemed to enter and leave the work freely. Was this the music-theater of a distant phantasmagoric dystopia? The opera of an imaginary future?

Perhaps even following the operas of the recent greats of postwar European art music (Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Penderecki, Nono), or the notable recent operas by Glass, Picker, and Corigliano, one might greet the notion of a “new opera” with a slightly raised eyebrow. Opera: a genre that began in the early 17th century when a society of musicians, poets, and philosophers from Florence—the Camerata, as they were called—decided to recreate antique tragedy based on the false premise that ancient Greek drama was sung the whole way through. According to cultural theorists Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, opera died long ago. A resuscitation of opera in the present-day, however, may prove to be of critical value. And Object Collection’s reconsideration of the first truly multi-media art form comes at a time when, especially in the context of contemporary art, the peculiarities of specific art forms tend to dissolve into what art historian Rosalind Krauss has called the contextless “international fashion of installation and intermedia work.” What is the status of opera when virtually all of cultural production is absorbed, specific contexts neutralized, by the Gesamtkunstwerk that is Facebook, when the total work of art is equivalent to the latest pop music video, doubtless replete with dramatic narrative, divas, heroes and heroines, a sound effects track, and musical numbers? What might a truly contemporary opera look like?

Object Collection’s work involves the re-articulation of opera as a vigorous, dynamic art form. Dolar argues that if opera is ever to achieve its original objective, it can’t simply function as “a concert in costumes,” nor can it serve as ordinary theater with musical accompaniment. Rather, opera must “stage the power of music itself.” With Object Collection, the meeting of music and theater occurs on a level more substantial than the staging of music that only serves to further the unfolding of dramatic narrative. In Innova, translation plays a special role in this intersection both as metaphor and real operation, functioning on the levels of notation, media, and language. Doubtless the opera is no stranger to translation. Innova‘s libretto is collaged from no less than seven languages (Spanish, Turkish, German, Mandarin, French, Hebrew, and English), each chosen based on the abilities of the actors, however refined or not. The text itself is appropriated from the work of an exhaustive list of artists, politicians, art historians, political and cultural theorists, theater directors, filmmakers, and philosophers, all taken from throughout the 20th century. The appearance of language as a visceral, sensible medium in Object Collection’s work contrasts with the citational mode of the libretto. In addition, the group’s use of the musical score emphasizes language as communication.

Throughout Object Collection’s body of work, notation is used as a prompt to action for both actors and musicians. While actors primarily receive stage direction from Feely, they also work from scores containing variants of music notation (and, as mentioned earlier, even follow the cues of a conductor in one scene). On the other hand, the musicians, while ordinarily reading from different kinds of standard and extended music notation, are at times given instructions in the form of text scores. This interweaving of particular modes of instruction creates subtle differences in performative qualities, demanding special attention from an audience member.

Referring to the epic theater of Brecht and Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that the spectator of a performance “must be confronted with the spectacle of something strange, which stands as an enigma and demands that he investigate the reason for its strangeness. He must be pressed to abandon the role of passive viewer and to take on that of the scientist who observes the phenomena and seeks their cause.” The cause of the musical and theatrical phenomena presented throughout the unfolding of Innova becomes the subject of intense curiosity for an audience member. Just how did that situation arise? What prompted that particular set of sounds, actions, or apparent psychological states? In a recent conversation, Feely explained that, while ordinarily “theater is about perfecting moments of climax, moments of revelation,” her work in Object Collection involves frustrating that focus, privileging “aesthetic complexity” over the lucid straightforwardness found in traditional theater. Interestingly, Rancière’s argument does not rely on any one particular form of performance. In fact, he uses the term “theatrical spectacle” to refer to art forms which “place bodies in action before an assembled audience,” by definition then, a category that must encompass dance, performance art, sports, public speaking, music, and theater proper. It is on this level that the meeting of musical and theatrical modes of performance typified in Object Collection’s work deserves analysis. What follows is a look at some of the various “causes,” the performative prompts to action used in the creation of Innova.

Both the actors and musicians in Innova read from somewhat similarly notated “scores,” texts which incorporate elements of traditional music notation (rhythms, pitches, dynamic levels), along with graphical elements and descriptive components specifying certain aspects of performance while allowing flexibility with others. Actors generally receive stage direction from Feely in a process known as theatrical blocking, in which detailed instructions are given regarding stage positions, emotional states, movement, and action. Actors are also given notated scores for “arias” containing text for performers to speak-sing (a variant of the Sprechstimme brought to life by Schoenberg in his classic chamber work Pierrot Lunaire), along with other musical elements. For example, Figure 2 contains a fragment from the score for the vocal section described in the beginning of this essay, an aria sung by Fulya Peker during the opening scene. Rather than precise pitches, actors receive relative “shapes” which outline approximate pitch ranges and illustrate contours of other parameters of sound.

Figure 2: “Come on coward” fragment

Figure 3 contains a section of call-and-response between actors Avi Glickstein (Performer 2) and Deborah Wallace (Performer 5). A unique effect is created by the elongated, phrase-length glissando Glickstein performs on the line, “And even smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.” The glissando occurs along with an extended ritardando, which altogether function as a kind of word painting; the delivery and meaning of the text seem to correspond to its musical figuration.

Figure 3: “Tear It Down” (click to enlarge)

Rhythms are handled in a manner similar to pitch indications: some elements are left open to chance or the decisions of the performers, while other passages contain precise “hits” coordinated through more conventional means. Generally, however, much of the textures occurring in Innova involve various kinds of syncopation and other kinds of rhythmic diversity: multiple tempi, overlapping arrhythmic parts, and deliberately out-of-sync passages are not uncommon features throughout the work. For example, in the music that accompanies the opening section of the opera (Figure 4), each of the musical parts operates at a unique tempo, coalescing together with the computer part at times of concerted pause, or in the reappearing series of accentuated chords marked marcato in the score.

Figure 4: “Introduction”

Object Collection uses notation as a medium through which different actions are communicated; in addition to conventional and extended musical functions, notation provides various performative frames, windows of interaction between director and actors, composer and musicians. Importantly, the group differentiates between the types of performance required for a “heightened dramatic situation,” and the “do a task” mode, the latter not unlike the style of performance called for in the scores of Fluxus and experimental music, and some of the performance art of the 1960s and ’70s. Interestingly, these task-oriented performances often result equally in sound and action, and come freely mixed with more traditional modes of drama.

For example, as an actor in Innova I was instructed to recreate a staged version of one of several Dutch still life paintings by assembling items selected from a basket of everyday objects (a hat, a fake bird, a container of Wite-Out, a fake flower, a mirror). The audience, though presented with a projected video feed of the evolving mise en scène of objects, never sees the actual visual score from which I read. They are left to their own inquisitive devices. Figure 5 contains a score fragment from a section in which the musicians, each holding a stone, huddle around a set of contact-miked ceramic tiles arranged contiguously on the floor. Individually, they perform different combinations of tapping and scrapping, spelled out as descriptions in the various textual cells contained in the score. The result is an internally complete visual, gestural, and sonic texture, one delicate thread stitching together a moment within the entirety of the music-theatrical fabric of Innova.

There are no typical divas in Object Collection’s operas, no heroines or heroes in the traditional sense. There’s no narrative as such. Theirs is an opera cobbled together from a refined arsenal of musical and theatrical elements; a music combining acoustic and electronic sources, detailed, fleshed out notation alongside unpredictable, indeterminate sound and performance events; a multi-linguistic, pan-cultural libretto collaged from the words of a cross-sectional sliver of modernist and postmodernist history. This is opera that, while distinguishing itself as such, takes into account the cross-pollination of media and art forms following the radical aesthetic transformations that began over half a century ago.

Perhaps what makes Innova an opera is neither simply the presence of arias, nor the combination of music, theater, and the expansive plethora of other media appearing throughout the work. Rather, what becomes important is the kind of interplay between media. It’s as though music and theater “learn” from one another: the techniques, effects, and logics distinct to each art form mutually inform one another as integral parts of the work’s creation and performance. Sure, for most of Innova‘s full three hours of action there’s a band on one side of the stage and actors on the other, but what is provocative is the crossing Object Collection’s work proposes: between the communicative and sensual dimensions of language; the physical qualities of music-making into the inherent musicality of theater; the medial and disciplinary contexts of performance against contemporary culture and the historical specificities of art forms.

G. Douglas Barrett

OBJECT COLLECTION’S INNOVA (2011). Writer/Director: Kara Feely, Composer: Travis Just, Set Designer: Peter Ksander, Lighting Designer: Miranda k. Hardy, Costume Designer: Stacey Berman, Sound Designer: Jamie McElhinney, Video: Daniel Kötter, Performers: G. Douglas Barrett, Avi Glickstein, Eric Magnus, Fulya Peker, Deborah Wallace. Musicians: Travis Just, Kevin Farrell, Taylor Levine, Jessie Marino.

WORKS CITED

• Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death. (New York: Routledge, 2002)
• Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator. (New York: Verso, 2009)
• Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999)

G. Douglas Barrett is an artist, composer, and writer. Drawing equally from the contemporary gallery arts and the performing arts traditions, his work has been exhibited, performed, and published throughout North America and Europe.

Last year the Hammer Museum’s coatroom, located in the lobby under a flight of stairs, was transformed into a theater named the Little William. Every weekend during 2010, you could find musicians performing two feet away from a tiny audience in this 9′ by 12′ space, surrounded by coats and cheap florescent lights. It looked awful in there—and I liked it. For whatever it lacked in visual attractiveness, it became a space imbued with the creative visions of composers, puppeteers, poets, and instrumentalists who brought site-specific pieces to the coatroom every week. The context of a coatroom-theater provided an architectural shift to the expected concert platform and enabled audiences to indulge in short, two-minute works as they entered the museum (or when they checked an overcoat).

My attraction to this type of performance was initially inspired by an interest in architecture and design, along with writings by some of my favorite composers and thinkers such as John Cage, James Tenney, R. Murray Schafer, Gaston Bachelard, and Geoffrey Manaugh. My collaboration with Machine Project, an artist-collective based in Echo Park, further encouraged my interest in developing this type of work through residencies at the Hammer Museum, LACMA, MCA Denver, and the Walker Art Center. The residencies have given me a platform on which to conceive and curate projects like the Little William Theater. Ultimately, my year in a coatroom has led me to more carefully consider context and architecture as a tool for the composer; a way to embrace new paradigms for performance and novel listening practices.

Luke Storm and Aubrey Foard in the Little William Theater Photo by Marianne Williams

THE LITTLE WILLIAM THEATER // FESTIVAL OF NEW MUSIC

The Little William’s Festival of New Music, held from August through the end of November, commissioned 349 short works by 94 composers including new pieces by Christian Wolff, Ben Johnston, Larry Polansky, Peter Ablinger, Anne Lebaron, John Bischoff, Nick Didkovsky, and many others who deserve mention.

The music we received included traditionally notated scores, short text pieces, graphically notated works, pieces in just intonation, complexist to hyper-minimalist, and improvisational to hyper-notated. Some pieces asked the performers to engage in theatrics, move in the space, or give a gift to their stand partner. One of Adam Overton’s text scores could be performed simultaneously alongside other works, as instrumentalists hid quarters from the audience. Peter Ablinger’s piece was a live rehearsal of a work he wrote for the festival. G Douglas Barrett’s incorporated field recordings of a coatroom in the Nationalgalerie Berlin. The experimental nature of the works added to the fantastical quality of the space. You simply didn’t know what was going to happen next.

Furthermore, hearing these works within such a small, enclosed space proved to be one of the most exciting aspects of the project. The clarinetists could play at the edge of possible sound, teasing the audience with subtones so quiet they could only be felt, not heard. In opposition to this, the tubas were so viscerally loud that powerful beatings consumed every interval. The internal resonances of the violin were present, as if you were sitting within the duo. For the accordions, the creaking and crinkling of the bellows proved to be a serendipitous addition to most works. Pieces that asked for long, quiet tones were inevitably accompanied by the perpetual aleatoric nature of the bellows.

ARCHITECTURE // MUSIC

Without the thick, impermeable walls of the concert hall, our contemporary music would not exist in its current form. We have developed a private, silent, concentrated listening space that has enabled the music of Beethoven, Mahler, Feldman, and beyond.

Cultures that have different architectural practices have developed music in accordance with their structures. In the case of the Anlo-Ewe in Ghana and Togo, their music is held in outdoor communal spaces and uses a battery of loud percussion instruments to accompany dance and song. The social architecture of the space has a great influence on form: Drumming does not exist alone, but in tandem with singing and dancing. Each piece has elements that tie into one another, and there is no complete work without all three components. If this music was held in private spaces, it would not have developed into such a communal, complex, and social form. Conversely, Western music’s traversal into private spaces has de-emphasized potential interactivity between audience and performer. There are many things that have influenced the development of music in different cultures, but architecture and context are essential factors in the formation of a music.

The great revolutions in art history are changes of context rather than style. The first big contextual change in Western music occurred when music left the outdoors and entered the cathedral; the second occurred with the appearance of the concert hall and opera house; the broadcasting and recording studio is responsible for the third. Each context produced a plethora of styles but all were governed by the laws of the container in which they were generated. The music of the cathedral is unseen; it rises vapor-like to fill a large resonant space, restricting harmonic and melodic mobility to produce a hazy wash of sound blending with the mystique of Christianity’s invisible God. The music of the concert hall and opera house is both seen and heard. Dryer acoustics favor faster-paced music with greater harmonic daring. It is the music of the soloist and the quick-tempered virtuoso. The broadcasting and recording studio introduced the world to schizophrenia, or split sound, in which any sonic environment could, by means of loudspeakers, be substituted for any other. It pushed music into new places—in fact, any place—and prepared the way for the coalescence we are now experiencing.

—R. Murray Schafer, Music and the Soundscape

Once we realize the emergent potential with architecture and context, we open ourselves to alternative spaces and fresh perspectives on sound. What about music for a long corridor, a rail yard, a flight of stairs, a dense forest, a bank of cubicles, a vast plain, an igloo, a shoreline, a bathroom?

Recently, I curated music on the Santa Monica Pier Carousel as part of the Glow Festival. A carousel is imbued with all kinds of qualities that you would never have in a concert hall: like rotation! Among the group commissioned to create works for our carousel concert, Daniel Corral, a Los Angeles-based composer wrote a particularly effective piece for six accordions. The piece didn’t have a unified ictus and was organized on a time scale, asking the performers to play at different speeds (but generally fast). The stochastic nature of the piece was enhanced by the rotation of the carousel, which created further acts of chance as it spun. One can hear this in two distinct videos of the piece; the first performed on the carousel, and the second as part of the Pasadena Creative Music Series. In comparing these two performances, I believe that the architecture and context of a carousel acted as a catalyst for this piece, changing the nature of the work and enhancing its effectiveness.

As a percussionist I had been directly involved in the gradual insertion of everyday sound into the concert hall, from Russolo through Varèse and finally to Cage who brought live street sounds directly into the hall. I saw these activities as a way of giving aesthetic credence to these sounds—something I was all for—but I began to question the effectiveness of the method. Most members of the audience seemed more impressed with the scandal than the sounds, and few were able to carry the experience over to a new perspective on the sounds of their daily lives. I became interested in going a step further. Why limit listening to the concert hall? Instead of bringing these sounds into the hall, why not simply take the audience outside—a demonstration in situ?

—Max Neuhaus, LISTEN

There is a long tradition of orchestral composers who use off-stage musicians to create a sense of depth and environment in the orchestral hall. My favorite uses of this technique appear in the music of Mahler, Respighi, Strauss, Wagner, and Ives, creating complex sensations of nostalgia (the Posthorn Solo in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 and Respighi’s Pines of Rome), building excitement (Wagner’s Lohengrin and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben), and feelings too delicate to articulate with words (Ives’s Unanswered Question). Henry Brant, David Dunn, R. Murray Schafer, and Max Neuhaus have further developed these ideas with environmental, site-specific, and outdoor music since the 1950s. (I would also like to note the presence of countless composers and sound artists who have developed these ideas and explored projects in outdoor spaces such as Iannis Xenakis, Karkheinz Stockhausen, Stuart Marshall, Gordon Monahan, Leif Brush, Bill and Mary Buchen, John Luther Adams, Bill Fontana, Doug Hollis, Hildegarde Westerkamp, and many others too countless to mention here.)

Ibrahim Duqum, oud in the Hammer Museum courtyard Photo by Anne Hadlock

This is a mode of working that I find inspiring, and through immersing myself in the writings of Cage, Tenney, and Schafer, I began to compose dispersed works in 2007. The pieces incorporate instrumentalists set outdoors at a distance from a stationary audience, placing brass instruments, car horns, and percussion instruments at an equal “mix” to the surrounding soundscape in hopes to set a frame around our sonic environment.

Going outside of the concert hall opened up more contextual explorations in my work including site-specific pieces for elevators, an igloo, and the Amargosa Desert. I want to be aware of the space we all share, so although the medium may change between projects (from amplified tea kettles to trombone choir to Max/MSP ), I do so with the intent of creating something that serves the space; thereby serving those who inhabit it, and encouraging them to wake up to the present moment.

In 2010 I was invited by Mark Allen, the director of Machine Project, to curate sound works for their 2010 residency at the Hammer Museum. The collaboration yielded programming of incidental performances involving chance encounter and multiple independent events happening in one space. Improvising groups, folk quartets, oud players, and experimental choirs were asked to perform for a coincidental audience, and for unconventionally long amounts of time. The musicians became part of the fabric of the space; much like Erik Satie’s Vexations or Furniture Music.

Before radio, the live musician provided background music for royalty and peasants alike. This mode could be considered opulent in the age of the iPod, but having live musicians in a space plays with our expectations and alters the social contract between musician and audience. Furthermore, by placing musicians in transitional spaces, such as hallways or lobbies, we give permission for the patron to pass through the space without stopping. If they decide to stay and listen, they do so in a genuine and organic manner.

COMPOSER AS DESIGNER

Many of Machine Project’s sound programming choices come down to a design prompt: The experience of listening has been reconfigured, and performers are given permission to create music in a different way. One of my favorite examples was a Nap-In I helped curate at the Hammer Museum. A nap area was created with blankets, and musicians were asked to create “music to nap to”. Although the design prompt was non-traditional, the piece was very simple and intuitive for patrons to engage with. Folks felt free to lay down and use the space as they wished; to read a book, or take a nap, etc… I invited soothing, gentle, and quiet performers including solo tampura, an ambient music trio, a keyboard duo, and a singer who brought electronics and her own bed. Most of the music was improvised, and unhurried; perfect for napping. Additionally, there were several layers of engagement for listeners—from sleeping to focused listening, or ignoring the project altogether.

Ultimately, the piece became about permission; giving the audience permission to nap during a performance, but also releasing the performers from the obligation to be interesting or entertaining. The piece is successful if the audience falls asleep, providing an inversion of expectation that is sweet and intimate. Because the event changes the way that you listen as well as perform, the audience and performers take the ride together. It becomes a communal experience that yields new music that wouldn’t otherwise have a reason to be created.

Architecture and context define how music functions. Contextual exploration has the potential to create new forms and directives in contemporary music. This work has the possibility to yield new sounds, new audience, and new ways to listen to music. The imaginative ways in which to play with space, context, and architecture become a discourse on possibility, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Chris Kallmyer performing on a bison horn for a bison dinner at the Museum of Contemprary Art Denver. Photo by Alex Stephens

Chris Kallmyer is a performer, composer, and sound artist living in Los Angeles, CA and is the Curator of Sound Programming for Machine Project. He earned his MFA in music from the California Institute of the Arts, and has presented his work at LACMA, the Walker Art Center, REDCAT, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and small galleries in America and Europe. Chris is thankful to be a member of the vibrant community of musicians and artists living in and around Los Angeles, CA.

Thank you to Mark Allen & Machine Project, Alfred Ladzekpo, and Katie Tate for their support in working on this piece.

Take a conventionally notated score—Bach, Beethoven, whomever.

Let’s agree that when a performer looks at that score, they are being asked to imagine and reproduce a particular sound. Sure, the score only suggests (due to the imprecision of Western notation), but its sonic intention is tolerably precise. Interpretations may differ between performers, but an individual performer reading that score for the first time has a pretty clear idea of what it should sound like, which they discover and concretize as they become more familiar with the piece. That process, from a mental impression triggered by symbols on the page, to something precisely reproducible over and over, is borne along by the tastes and beliefs of the performer—the product of years of training within the restricted tradition of the Western canon. That is, the mark on the page conveys a historically sanctioned idea of the correct and the beautiful that the performer has been taught to read and strives to reproduce.

That process—score, imagined sound, created sound—takes place only because of the physical actions of the performer: rehearsing is partly about fixing the necessary muscle memory so that the music will come out right even under the bright lights of the auditorium. Although there are circumstances in which those actions may become part of the musical material without the need for notation (as in some improvisations), or they may not be a consideration at all (electronic music, for example), once you make a score that you expect people to rehearse and to get right, you are prescribing actions—the sounds are, in a sense, a secondary phenomenon to this.

American-born, British-based composer Aaron Cassidy Photo by Ralf Brunner

In reality, however, the actuality of sounds has become prioritized over their earthly creation. There are exceptions—pianist John Tilbury emphasizes the important role of touch in Feldman’s piano music, for example—but on the whole composers think of their performers as intellectual interpreters rather than manual laborers. Yet the American-born, British-based composer Aaron Cassidy is one of a growing number making productive strides towards rethinking this attitude. For him the primacy of sound is a particularly 20th-century phenomenon, deriving from the fact that most of our listening experiences come from loudspeakers or headphones: we now regard sound as an entity that is immaculately conceived and born into the world without let or hindrance.

Pierre Schaeffer, the composer, theorist, and pioneer of musique concrete, invented the term “acousmatic” to describe purely electronic music that is intended for loudspeaker listening and exists only as recordings. Almost all our musical experiences are now acousmatic: sounds are heard in isolation, at our desks, on our iPods, in our living rooms, detached from their source. We are told, through marketing and through the results of staggering research and development investments, that each of these new technologies represents a better way of listening. Thanks to the scale and power of the recording industry, we live in a world that has more music than ever before but less music-making. Listeners, renamed consumers, can have access to any music they desire without the burden of performers, instruments, or a training culture.

It is a tenet of Cassidy’s composition to resist the acousmatic “ideal.” His credo for more than a decade has been that “the way in which a sound is made, and the sound it makes, are fundamentally intertwined.” This is more than an echo of the UK Musician’s Union slogan to “Keep Music Live,” and it’s more even than a resistance to that commercial impulse that has—from sheet music to vinyl to CD to mp3—driven music technology into areas of increasingly low fidelity for the sake of consumer convenience and more efficient sales. (Although he does not work with electronic sounds, Cassidy is hardly a Luddite, as the computing power behind his sketches will attest.) It’s a belief that when we don’t attend to the role of muscle and sinew, we are losing a substantial layer of what makes music what it is: a human art, for playing as much as it is for listening. If we give that up too easily we risk losing a lot.

Before this starts to sound like a crusade, here’s an observation I can make having spent some time in Cassidy’s company talking about music: he’s also really, basically enthusiastic about finding out what happens when music is turned on its head like this. Even deep in discussion about the procedural nitty-gritty of a certain multi-parametrical operation, you’re never far from a “look—isn’t that awesome” moment. Yes, there may be a purpose, but there’s also the pleasure that comes from creating something new.

Sample taken from The Crutch of Memory (2004) for indeterminate solo string instrument, an example of Cassidy’s earlier tablature style

For years Cassidy, along with a number of other composers, had worked with hybrids of staff and tablature notation. Drawing on previous innovations by Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough, and Klaus K. Hübler, composers like Cassidy, Franklin Cox, and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf have devised methods of instrumental “decoupling” that separate the individual performance actions that make a sound (breath, embouchure, and fingering, for instance), notating them on different staves so that a polyphony of actions might be composed.

But although this notation had provided a remarkably versatile and productive tool through which Cassidy could work out his compositional ideas, there were underlying limitations; his Second String Quartet, composed last year and receiving its first US performances this month in Los Angeles and Buffalo with the JACK Quartet, represents a big step towards a truly new approach.

Cassidy and the JACK’s John Pickford Richards in rehearsal Photo by Ralf Brunner

First, as more detailed performance actions were specified, tablature scores were becoming too hard to read. Pieces like Mahnkopf’s The Courier’s Tragedy for solo cello had grown to spread themselves across ten staves for a single instrument and, even taking into account a tolerable degree of performance inaccuracy, it was simply no longer possible to play this music from the score: it could only be learned and reproduced as muscle memory. Second, and more importantly, for all their radical appearance, the scores remained wedded to a set of cultural norms that allowed for a dialogue between “correct” and “distorted.” Whether based in a particular organization of pitches, or even the “natural” position of a bow on the string, a “ground” is established and then ornamentalized and distorted with layers of supplementary performance information. The Courier’s Tragedy is a case in point: at the bottom of all that performance information are two more staves—like a piano reduction—which show the pitches that should result.

So, discard everything. Start from nothing. No pitches. No dynamics. No “natural” sound. No “correct” way to play the instrument, no tradition. No ground, no decoration. There is no normal anymore. What is left? Up, down, left, right, on, off. Instruments, and ways of making them sound. Simple things.

The sound, look, and feel of Cassidy’s Second String Quartet may be extraordinarily intricate, but its origins are found in extremely basic materials. This is the paradox and fascination of the truly complex in art and nature: when set in the right kind of motion, the interactions of simple things can generate unendingly rich results. As Cassidy talked me through the many stages of planning, sketching, and composing the quartet, it occurred to me that each step was carefully designed to advance the music’s richness without, first, sacrificing the structural propositions of the previous step and, second, requiring him to resort to the limitations of his human imagination. The process appears laborious and highly restricted, but it is designed to generate maximum variety and force innovation, to see the world beyond what we think is visible.

Here’s an example. Because of Cassidy’s rigorous deconstruction of the technical principles of his instruments, at every moment in the piece there are a large number of performing motions available; factor in the many combinations of those motions interacting together and one quickly arrives at an unmanageable pool of possibilities. Cassidy explained that one crucial stage of the sketching process is the drawing of a moving, continually changing “window” of these available options. At some points the window is large and admits many motions or types of motion from which the composer can select; at others it is very small. “So if you know the piece is going to be, say, nine minutes long,” I ask him, “do you just draw these geographical shapes over the top of that nine-minute line,” thinking it would be the easiest thing in the world to freehand draw a series of shapes and contours from which to work. Cassidy laughs. “Well, there are about six stages in between …” The goal, you see, is to create something multi-dimensional, unstable, and extraordinary that couldn’t otherwise have been dreamt up. “When I’ve made attempts to design shapes, I tend to design two-dimensional shapes,” Cassidy admits. “It’s so easy to fall back on these things that are immediately identifiable.” Those elaborate systems of constraint aren’t, therefore, about limiting possibilities but about inspiring the creation of new things never before seen.

In one instance that he is keen to show me, the window narrowed itself to just two gestural options; at the same time the player (the violist in this case) was restricted to using just the frog of the bow. The room for movement was thus extremely tight, but the compositional solution (and striking aural result) Cassidy was forced to devise would not have been found in any other way. “The most exciting bits for me are the places where I’ve somehow backed myself into a corner,” he admits.

Deriving such highly volatile, never-before-heard formations is one thing. Writing them down so that someone else can play them is something else. In many ways this is the heart of the story of the Second String Quartet.

Ari Streisfeld, Aaron Cassidy, Christopher Otto, Kevin McFarland, John Pickford Richards Photo by Ralf Brunner *** Excerpt from Aaron Cassidy’s Second String Quartet performed by the JACK Quartet. Audio courtesy of Südwestrundfunk SWR-2

As the work’s first performers, the JACK Quartet were brought in to help. The group were already comfortable with Cassidy’s style and methods—they’ve played his first string quartet enough times for it to become almost repertory, and their familiarity is such that violist John Pickford Richards was a seamless last-minute replacement when Cassidy’s extremely demanding ensemble work And the scream, Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth was given its premiere last year.

Cassidy prepared several alternative notational systems for his Second String Quartet, and spent sessions with the players trying out what did and didn’t work well with each. A lot of this time was spent trying to devise intuitive ways to notate certain physical actions, such as left hand finger placements. The players would test out the different notational options Cassidy presented, and the one that they could figure out fastest and most intuitively made it into the score. In the case of the finger placements, the solution arrived at was a small box with four columns for the strings and numbers to indicate the finger to be used on each string, a big advantage of which was being able to indicate the spacing between fingers by the vertical space between the numbers.

All this experimentation resulted in an almost entirely novel notation. However, there are one or two precursors from previous attempts to prescribe multi-dimensional performance movements. A notable point of comparison is Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I, although Cassidy says any similarity is a complete coincidence. In that piece, sound produced by the tam-tam player, the distance of the microphone from the tam-tam, and the control of bandpass filters and potentiometers to transform the electronically captured sound are written on three separate staves. The notation is very graphical—a pair of zig-zag lines indicate the movements of the sliders on the two filters, and the distance of the microphone from the tam-tam is similarly indicated by a line that moves between boundaries of near and far. However, whereas Stockhausen was working without precedent with regard to notating live electronic music, Cassidy is engaging with the traditions and expectations of acoustic instruments.

Sample from the second violin part of the notation Cassidy used to create his Second String Quartet

Unlike Cassidy’s earlier works, with their multiple staves per instrument, his Second String Quartet compresses all the performance directions onto a single band of information. The four-line “stave” is in fact a map of the instrument, the lines representing bridge, end of fingerboard, top of instrument body, and nut. Two lines of information are then drawn over this map: left-hand finger placement (in black) and bowing position (in red). As the lines sweep and slide over the stave, so do the fingers and bow move up and down the strings of the instrument. The black lines may come in sets of up to four, depending on the number of strings to be fingered; the boxes described above indicate which fingers are to be used. In another echo of Mikrophonie I, intensity in the red line (that is, bow pressure on the string) is shown by relative thickness.

Sample from the first violin part of the notation Cassidy used to create his Second String Quartet

A third line of information is supplied by a single green line. This indicates up and down motions of the bow (as well as elements such as tremolo). The bow is divided into five numbered zones, from 1 (tip) to 5 (frog), and the line indicates the movement up or down from zone to zone, with bow speed inferred by how quickly such transitions must take place.

What the score represents, then, is a radical analysis of performance actions into separate, independent parameters, and their reconstitution into an extremely fluid and flexible musical continuum. For although the level of parametrical distillation and resynthesis in the Second String Quartet is analogous to the workings of early integral serialism, there is nothing pointillistic about this piece: it is marked by continual transitions between states, a perpetual instability that never affirms a here and now or even a dot on a page, but a continual bubbling of new sound and activity. Normal space doesn’t become distorted but has somehow been bent, folded, and stretched before we even arrive.

Recounting his experiments with the tam-tam during the early stages of composing Mikrophonie I, Stockhausen recalls the anticipation he and his technician had when sitting down to listen to the recording of their experiments, since neither had heard exactly what sounds had been captured by the microphone, or how they had been transformed by the electronics. Likewise, neither Cassidy nor the players can know in advance exactly what sound will result from the various interacting movements that are prescribed. Ari Streisfeld, first violin with the JACK Quartet, says that “when we play this piece, we aren’t necessarily thinking about each individual sound as it is happening, we are thinking about the exact actions that Aaron has notated on the page. While we were learning it we worked to hone each gesture and make each action as elegant as we could. Of course, we are listening to the resulting sound and most definitely reacting to it; however, we don’t really know what the sound is going to be until we start playing it.”

So put aside that Bach or Beethoven for a moment and take this unconventionally notated score instead. The sounds are still there, hidden and unimaginable, but now the performer must make their own way towards discovering them. It is a call to action.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes on contemporary music for the Guardian, INTO, Tempo, and his blog, The Rambler. He is currently preparing the 6th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music.

There is a small but revealing story that derives from the preparation of the first Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986). As usual with a Grove publication, the editor, H. Wiley Hitchcock, was a regular on the conference circuit, discussing the project with as many experts as possible so as to pre-empt any gaps or weaknesses. It was on such an occasion that the American composer Stephen Montague, who had been living in Poland and Great Britain since 1972, remarked that he and several other expat composers were not on Hitchcock’s proposed list. Although these composers were known in Great Britain and Europe, their transatlantic distance had put them beyond the radar of Hitchcock’s editorial advisors. In the end, Hitchcock asked Montague himself to write the missing entries (Keith Potter wrote on Montague himself).

So what does this little story have to say about distance and identity today? In what sense is an American composer still “American” when living overseas? That story dates from the mid-1980s and many things—not least communications technology and the cost of transatlantic travel—have transformed since then. Yet the experience that, in leaving the United States and coming to work or study as a composer in the United Kingdom, one has crossed a horizon is common enough among the American composers I have spoken with to suggest that there is something more permanent and primal separating the two countries’ music than the cost of a Virgin Atlantic airfare.

The perception of distance works in two directions: There is the distance of the overseas composer from his/her homeland, and there is the distance of that homeland from the overseas composer. Distance in one direction is rarely the same as distance in the other. The composer may feel closely connected with home, but that country may regard him/her as a remote émigré, and vice versa. The perception of distance from homeland to émigré is a function of reception; that from émigré to homeland one of poetics. Both stand in a proportional relationship to the construction and perception of identity.

In 1943 at a writers’ congress in California, Thomas Mann spoke of “The Exiled Writer’s Relation to his Homeland.” Mann, having decided not to return to Hitler’s Germany in 1933, was in self-imposed exile in the USA and became an American citizen in 1944. As he observed Nazism’s spiritual and cultural destruction of his country, Mann wrote movingly of the anguish of the writer, “the bearer of a spiritual tradition,” forced to live and work outside of his homeland and mother tongue. “Our books are outlawed, just as we ourselves are; they exist only in translation.”

Mann’s situation, although not uncommon for the time, was the product of extreme circumstances. Few contemporary writers, at least in the West, face his dilemmas. Yet do his acute observations have anything to say to today’s culture?

I sent emails to several American composers who are or have recently been living in the United Kingdom to ask them about their experiences and to put some flesh onto the vague abstraction formulated above. It is impossible, from such a brief survey, to make any sort of generalization about anything so portentous as “The Condition of The American Composer in Great Britain.” For a start, there aren’t many here (nearly all the senior professionals that I am aware of are mentioned in this article, as are many of the current or recent postgraduate students). In addition there is no discernible pattern, trend, or style under which to group those composers: Aaron Cassidy writes at the extreme boundary of the instrumental avant-garde, Bret Battey is an electroacoustic composer dealing in algorithmic and interactive music, and Arlene Sierra and David Bruce write in very different ways for traditional forces.

In fact it is Montague, the émigré of longest tenure, who bears the closest allegiances to an easily identifiable “American” tradition—that of Ives, Cowell, and Cage. Stopping over in the United Kingdom in 1974, after two years in Warsaw on a Fulbright Fellowship, Montague became involved with Dartington College and the Strider Dance Company. He soon discovered that it was far easier to make a living as a freelance composer in Great Britain than the United States, and so he made his home here. After 36 years as an expat, Montague considers that his music “is probably more ‘American’ (if there is such a thing) now, no doubt because I am living in a foreign culture and wish to retain my trans-Atlantic identity….I actually enjoy the fact that I don’t completely fit into British society. It gives me certain license to do what I wish.”

Searching for that slightly anarchic freedom marks a composer who sees himself in the American experimental lineage. But most of the American composers currently in the United Kingdom are a generation or two younger than Montague, and do not benefit from the glow of such a clearly defined heritage. More common today is the composer who sees new music internationally, but who attempts to reconcile this with his/her own, personally defined, cultural identity.

Arlene Sierra came to work in the UK as much by happy accident as design. Having studied in France and Germany she wanted to spend more time in Europe, but the occasion didn’t come until she met the British composer Kenneth Hesketh, who would become her husband, at Tanglewood. They soon moved to London and Sierra is now a senior lecturer in music at the University of Cardiff.

Although she has been the recipient of prestigious US commissions, including Game of Attrition for the New York Philharmonic, Sierra says that she found an openness in the UK music scene that allowed her work to receive a “transformative” welcome. This included fellowships at the Dartington and Britten-Pears Schools, as well as premieres with the London Sinfonietta and at the Aldeburgh and Huddersfield Festivals. “Once these things happened, my work slowly began to get more performances back home in the States as well.”

The experience didn’t only affect the performance opportunities for her work. Easy divisions such as “uptown” and “downtown,” and their insistence that the composer has to be one or the other, have always bothered her. Her own music is neither, but is its own combination of intellectual puzzles, non-tonal counterpoint, and influences from electronic music and dance. In the UK, she says, she found a more “blended, nuanced thinking [that was] open to both American and Continental influences. It was hugely influential to experience this,” she tells me, “right when I was making my first foray into professional composition.”

Other composers find themselves in the United Kingdom as career émigrés. Bret Battey, for example, is quite open about the fact that the opportunities for work in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s were simply better than in the United States. Aaron Cassidy came because of the chance to work at the University of Huddersfield, one of the country’s strongest departments for radical composition.

David Bruce, however, is basically culturally British: his parents are British, he has lived here since he was six weeks old, he was educated here and he cites Harrison Birtwistle and the ‘Faber’ group of composers (British names like Thomas Adès, George Benjamin and Oliver Knussen, all published by Faber and the core of an established brand of British new music) as important influences. He was born in the United States so holds full US citizenship, but returned there for the first time only in his mid-30s.

But that return was for a Carnegie Hall commission, and since then he has made the trip regularly, always feeling the bond to his birth-land “is growing stronger all the time.” As Bruce describes it, “doors seem to have opened much more quickly for me in the US than they ever did in the UK.” This may just be the fortuitousness of events, but it makes for an interesting contrast with the experience of several other composers, who found that opportunities in the United States only began to open up following the increase in profile that they were able to gain in the United Kingdom. One is tempted to make a connection between style and the acquiring of performance opportunities in and out of the United States—does the more approachable Bruce suffer in the United Kingdom and succeed in the United States as a result?—but that’s a hard conclusion to draw from such limited examples, and it is almost certainly too simplistic an assumption.

Friendships and collaborative partners in the US, bundled with his birth associations, give Bruce a strong personal connection to the country, but he has no plans to leave the UK. Nevertheless, something American attaches to his music despite his upbringing: people tell him that his music is very “American.”

What exactly that means, and in what it inheres, is the real question.

For Mann, the writer is crucially identified with their work and thus with the language in which they write. The writer is language: just as his books “exist only in translations,” so too Mann, outside Germany, is but a diminished simulacrum; his true self is lost, only the translation exists.

The overseas writer or artist thus faces a choice either to assert their home language or to leave it behind. Choosing one or the other is a statement of responsibility. It’s not that these questions exist only for overseas writers, but they are rendered more acute by the fact of being overseas and in a situation where one’s mother tongue can no longer be taken for granted and its continuing practical value must be assessed critically.

For the composer there is less of an unbreakable bond with language, or at least the sort of language that can be unequivocally tied to a place. Instead, the composer is in possession of a collection of stylistic allegiances and inheritances, an array of modules that can be selected, combined or ignored as desired. Cassidy, for example, has said that the hyper-complexity of his notation leads many to assume a European heritage in his music, when in fact he feels closer to the particular approach to material, form and perception that characterizes the American experimental tradition around Cage and Feldman. The work of the émigré composer is projected onto a background of such inheritances, which, no matter to what degree it is a factor in the compositional process, becomes a factor in the music’s reception.

It is interesting, therefore, to talk to postgraduate composers on such issues as identity formation or stylistic allegiances because they are, in a sense, experimental cultures in which such things are beginning to take shape. They are in the process of selecting and developing this background for themselves; indeed the process of study in part becomes one of increased awareness of this background. If there is an identity stem cell, it might be easier to locate here. The best student composers are well aware of these growing concerns, and take perceptively self-critical stances towards their work and its relationship to their environment, location, and training.

Those postgraduates I spoke to do, perhaps—and I say this extremely tentatively of composers who are so early in their careers—fall into more of a pattern than the senior composers who have made their homes in the United Kingdom. As a rule they explore more radical, modernistic, and experimental regions on the musical map. But to an extent this group is self-selecting: postgraduate composers who travel tend to do so to study with a particular teacher (and would you travel 4,000 miles to study with someone who wasn’t extraordinary in some way?).

Feelings of cultural displacement are common to many overseas American composers, a sense of being outside something that is personally important: in the responses I received, this is usually manifest in the frustrations of political disempowerment or a homesickness for the comforts of good Mexican food or grid-plan cities. But it was also apparent in feeling out of touch with the music scene “back home”. Ray Evanoff, a student of Cassidy’s, puts it thus: “I suppose I’ve missed a continued and regular interaction with American musicians who are at a comparable stage in their artistic and professional development…to a certain extent I feel like I’ll have to work to reinsert myself into the American musical ‘scene’ at some point, since a lot of my musical activities over the past two years have taken place in Europe.”

Having chosen this displacement at such a crucial stage in their education, those postgraduate composers I spoke to were alert to the possibility of integrating this into their work. Evanoff argues that “living over in the UK has really increased my awareness of my own cultural identity, and how it contributes to my artistic practice.” Colin Tucker, who has studied privately with Michael Finnissy and formally at Huddersfield, sums up the contradiction between feeling very ambivalent towards the country of George W. Bush and a deeply ingrained personal “American-ness”: “Much of my compositional work consciously relates to this contradiction, although paradoxically it has been through living abroad that I have gained a clearer perspective on my own culture and its relation to the rest of the world.”

When talking about this generation of composers, one should even be cautious about placing a national emphasis on the experimental tradition that I have mentioned several times. Joe Kudirka, who left Chicago in 2001 to study at Huddersfield, sees experimental music today as a small community that is scattered all over the world. The commonalities that he finds between people are musically rather than nationally defined: “I’ve found some of the best performers for my music in this country … If there really were a divide between ‘American-ness’ and ‘British-ness,’ I don’t think this would have been the case.”

The technology of the 21st century may have numbed the exoticism that comes with living overseas and rendered the sense of national rootedness more fragmentary and ephemeral. But the creation of identity—a trigonometry of closeness and distance, allegiance and rejection, composition and reception—remains an essential one for any artist.

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote on the “The Philosophy of Travel”: “the more arts and manners a good traveler has assimilated, the more depth and pleasantness he will see in the manners and arts of his own home.” It is not simply that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that cultural displacement renders more precise those aspects of home that make it home. The best composers overseas will approach each new score with a sense of what they feel close and distant from, using that trigonometry to help find a place for themselves in the musical universe. Some come to the realisation that their cultural formation is substantially different from that of a European composer, no matter how much they might admire many of the latter. Returning home after a period overseas forces a reflection on the difference between received wisdom and actual experience and thus a greater understanding of a personal American-ness. As composer and NewMusicBox contributor Colin Holter puts it, “I have a much better conception now of what my job is as a composer in American society than I did before studying abroad.”

“Ulysses remembered Ithaca,” writes Santayana. “With a light heart and clear mind he would have admitted that Troy was unrivalled in grandeur, Phaecia in charm, and Calypso in enchantment; that could not make the sound of the waves breaking on his own shores less pleasant to his ears; it could only render more enlightened, more unhesitating, his choice of what was naturally his.”

Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes on contemporary music for the Guardian, INTO, Tempo, and his blog, The Rambler. He is currently preparing the 6th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music.

Three years ago, I left my job at the American Music Center, New York City, and the two new music ensembles I had founded in order to begin a full-time MBA at the Yale School of Management. My friends at the time were thrown for a loop. A few clearly thought I was selling out, and many more were simply surprised that I would go to grad school to study something other than music composition, on which I had focused so much of my energies up to that point. In truth, I came to business school with the full intention of returning to the arts after graduation, and thankfully I’ve been able to keep that promise. I even chose Yale SOM in part because its liberal electives policy meant that I could almost have earned a shadow music degree during my time there, if the School of Music had been willing to play along. Yet after a year’s worth of required lectures and seminars in everything but music, it was clear that I had found a new calling. For better or for worse, business school transformed me into a different person.

What changed me the most was the exposure to an endless panoply of other areas of human life beyond contemporary classical music. Sure, I learned about assets and liabilities and how to read a cash flow statement, but I also learned about the auction for 3G wireless ranges, competition between Target and Wal-Mart, why Turkey is an emerging power player in the Middle East, and how colleges and foundations manage their endowments. We heard speeches from the president of the Ford Foundation, the former United States Ambassador to the UN, the CEO of Newsweek, the founder of an IT consulting firm that crashed and burned with the last recession and then rose from the ashes. I became a sponge for statistics, ideas, publications, whole disciplines that I hadn’t even known to exist until that point.

In the course of this sudden immersion into what the rest of the world thinks about and does on a daily basis, I came to realize that my former existence had been focused like a laser on about 0.00001% of everything that matters. It was like the veil had been lifted on my life: the choices I faced when I voted in an election or needed to buy produce or searched for an apartment to rent or, yes, chose a graduate school had all been determined by somebody, or more often a collection of somebodies acting in somewhat predictable ways. It became clear to me that I was never going to have control over my own destiny unless I had the capacity to see and understand the external forces that were influencing my circumstances. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, too. So here are a couple of vignettes from my own journey into the belly of the capitalist beast, which I offer in the hopes of connecting my experiences (and perhaps some of yours) to the bigger picture. After all, we are just variations on a theme.

The Pro-Am Shuffle

Back when I was playing bandleader in the middle part of the last decade, I had a six-piece electric chamber ensemble featuring some killer musicians who performed my compositions. Since they were professionals, I paid them for every gig—and if the money from the door wasn’t enough to make for a halfway decent payout for each, as it often wasn’t, I had to make up the difference from my own pocket. (This was on top of rehearsal space rental fees, recording costs, etc.) It wasn’t exactly a recipe for quick cash; my profit margins in 2005 were about -1000%. The low point was when I decided to take the band on “tour” to Philadelphia, driving half of them there in my car with their equipment while the others took a bus or otherwise got there on their own dime. Despite a prime Saturday night slot at a popular hangout with a well-known local band as the headliner, hardly anyone came. At the end of the night, the soundman came up and informed me I had a $10 bill to split up among the performers.

I was very serious about my work as a composer in those days, but the financial return I earned from that work was negligible, if not downright negative. I was not alone. Less than 10% of the 1347 composers who responded in 2008 to the American Music Center and American Composers Forum’s joint survey of composers, Taking Note, indicated that composing represents their primary income; even relatively wealthy composers who considered themselves professionals earned an average of only one-fifth of their income directly from composition-related activities.

Download the report

Researchers Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller (no, not that Paul Miller) came up with a term for these sorts of people in their 2004 monograph for the British think tank DEMOS, The Pro-Am Revolution. Defined as those who “have a strong sense of vocation; use recognized public standards to assess performance; …[and] produce non-commodity products and services” while “spend[ing] a large share of their disposable income supporting their pastimes,” Pro-Ams are seemingly becoming a more and more prominent feature of developed-society life as leisure time becomes a reality for a larger portion of the population and higher education becomes an increasingly attainable goal.

Needless to say, it’s wonderful that more people are interested in creative activities. But that trend has its downsides for composers who harbor ambitions of making a living through music, particularly when combined with the proliferation of technologies that make music easier to produce and distribute to a mass audience than ever before. It creates a new kind of hypercompetition in which composers are not only jostling for attention with greater numbers of their peers than at any time in history—upload a piece to the AMC Online Library, for example, and anyone in the world can hear it, that is if they choose it from among the 4,613 audio samples already available there—they are also competing with every composer who ever lived whose work survived to the present day. (Unfortunately, composers cannot similarly count on dead audience members to be a part of their fan base.)

Making matters worse, composition suffers from the same long-term structural economic challenges that affect the rest of the performing arts (as well as other sectors such as health care and education). As Matthew Guerrieri defined Baumol’s cost disease for NewMusicBox three years ago, “labor costs in the performing arts will always inexorably rise, and at a faster rate than other industries.” Put simply, new compositions are labor-intensive for creator and audience alike at a point in history when everybody’s time is becoming more and more precious. While innovations such as notation software and MIDI renderings can help us increase our productivity as composers somewhat, the productivity increase doesn’t help that much if there isn’t a clear demand for the extra music it makes possible, and even these tools can’t erase the need for countless hours of training and perfecting necessary to meet most composers’ standards of quality.

From an economic standpoint, then, assuming composers don’t want to compromise on the type of music they write, they would do well to live in the cheapest circumstances possible, learn as much of their technique as they can on their own, and look for ways to make their creative process more efficient so that they can use the rest of their time to support themselves with unrelated work. Instead, you’ll often see composers clustering in major urban centers with high costs of living and earning a succession of expensive graduate degrees in order to set themselves apart. Indeed, according to the National Arts Index, the number of visual and performing arts degrees awarded in this country rose an astonishing 51% between 1998 and 2007.

The Grad School Racket

As I mentioned, my friends were confused that I chose to go to business school instead of music school. In fact, I almost did go to music school—in 2003. A year out of college, I applied to six master’s-degree-level programs in composition and didn’t get into any of them. It was the best misfortune that’s ever befallen me.

My top choice that year was New England Conservatory. At last check, tuition and fees for the master of music program at NEC run nearly $50,000 per year. My conversations with the financial aid office in 2002-03 made clear that scholarships were not to be counted upon, so in all likelihood the only way I could have afforded my education would have been to take out loans. Ironically, my loan burden probably would have been far more intense for NEC than will turn out to be the case for my pricier business degree, because my business school offers a loan forgiveness program that reimburses up to 100% of the need-based portion of my loans in exchange for working in the nonprofit sector after graduation. No such program could ever exist at a music school. There isn’t a fresh stable each year of investment bankers, consultants, and marketers going out and making six figures after graduation whose fees can cross-subsidize the minority of us who take less in order to do good work for the world. At music school, nonprofit is a way of life.

Well, it is for most. Some lucky stars in the piano, string, voice, or conducting programs might go on to extremely lucrative solo careers. A few composers might score some film gigs in Hollywood and make a pretty penny. But for the rest, life after graduation and financial prosperity don’t often mix. The best one can hope for, economically speaking, is a stable but obscure home in academia—yet the competition for even third-tier positions is notoriously fierce. Those trying to make it on the DIY circuit in an expensive city like New York or San Francisco frequently find that while opportunities for artistic collaboration are plentiful, a day job (or a trust fund) is essential.

Regardless of outside employment (or lack thereof), nearly half of respondents to Taking Note reported a total annual income before taxes of less than $40,000 over the previous three years. Composers are not a wealthy bunch, at least as measured by their take-home pay. And if you have a heavy sack of graduate school loans weighing you down, that investment in your education could realistically be forcing tough decisions decades later.

This is not a theoretical matter. A landmark study of graduates of arts training programs found that only 37% felt that their schools had given them adequate leadership training, and just 3% felt that they had been well prepared in financial matters. Fully half indicated that their student debt burden had influenced their career choices.

That bit of inconvenient truth is the sort of thing one wishes academic institutions would communicate to prospective students before they make what is likely to be the second-most significant financial commitment of their lives. But it’s not in the interests of those institutions to be giving potential customers (because that is what composition students are, whether they think of themselves that way or not) second thoughts about purchasing their product. After all, the more students there are, the more money there is for faculty positions, which of course represent one of the few oases of job security for the composition field in general. Yet no one seems to talk about the fact that a typical composition department might send three or four newly minted Ph.D.s or DMAs out on the job market each year, but only hire a new professor into its own ranks a couple of times a decade. The viability of the academic job track assumes a continual and improbable expansion of composition programs at every university.

Perhaps all that wouldn’t be so bad if conservatories and music departments were proactive about giving students tools to succeed outside of the academy. A few have taken some admirable steps in this direction in the past decade; Eastman School of Music, for example, established an Institute for Music Leadership during the tenure of former Dean and AMC Board Chair James Undercofler in 2001, and the Manhattan School of Music just announced a new Center for Music Entrepreneurship to begin this fall. So far, though, these initiatives appear to be the exception rather than the rule. Where are the conservatory classes and workshops on writing grant applications? Doing your taxes? Copyright and intellectual property? Marketing and promotion? Time management skills from which any freelance professional can benefit? Like it or not, most composers graduating from these programs who are serious about their careers will need to be entrepreneurs and arts administration professionals of a sort. They should be trained appropriately.

The Social Stratification Blues

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Some of you may be thinking to yourselves at this point, “So, you’re arguing that composers can’t make any money doing new music, and grad degrees are expensive. What else is new? And why should we care?” The major problem is that when success requires not only a daunting investment of financial resources to buy the right kind of training, the right kind of connections, high-quality recordings of one’s work, etc., but also thousands of hours of time not spent earning a living so that one can create and promote one’s own work, that field is not likely to have much in the way of socioeconomic diversity. Arts philanthropists consider lack of diversity in the face of changing demographics one of the biggest crises (perhaps the biggest of all) in the arts today. According to the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, African Americans and Hispanics are between one-third to half as likely to attend a classical music event as whites and Asians, and people who make over $100,000 a year are more than three times as likely to attend as people who make less than $40,000. These broad contours hold true for most other disciplines as well. All told, traditional participants (i.e., ticket buyers) in traditional art forms represent a tiny, exclusive slice of the American public—in the case of classical music, a predominantly white, affluent, and highly educated 9.3% of adults. Meanwhile, the United States is projecting to be a majority-minority country by 2042, and California and Texas (among several other states) already hold that status. When philanthropists and politicians consider how they can best serve the public through the arts—and increasingly, whether they can serve the public through the arts—classical music is going to appear less and less compelling to them unless its artists and institutions, reversing a decades-long trend, can be more successful in reaching the other 91.7%. And make no mistake: those decisions WILL trickle down and influence the choices and opportunities you have to pursue your artistic ambitions. Are you going to be part of the solution?

Classical music is not alone in facing these dilemmas. Indeed, in some ways composers have it pretty good, relatively speaking of course. According to the NEA, the unemployment rate for actors in 2009 was a shocking 37%, far higher than for any other artistic profession. And in virtually every survey of artists’ incomes I’ve ever seen, dancers and choreographers come out looking like absolute martyrs compared to musicians.

Moreover, the technological changes sweeping industrialized society are affecting creators of all stripes, not just composers. The explosion of free content and the hypercompetition it foments is creating problems for journalists, movie studios, karaoke machine manufactures—even the porn industry! Whatever challenges our brave new world will throw our way, we can be sure that we won’t be the only ones who have to meet them.

The Composer as Citizen

Despite the doom and gloom that pervades the previous paragraphs, composers have the ability and the prerogative to take their situations into their own hands. But we will need to take several proactive steps to ensure that the 21st century does not pass us by:

• • Broaden the focus. As mentioned above, other arts disciplines and creative industries are dealing with many of the same challenges that face composers. You’ll notice that at a number of points in this article I have switched from talking about “composers” or “classical music” to “the arts.” That’s because, in many more ways than not, the arts are all in the same boat. Accordingly, the bulk of the most relevant and important conversations for composers to take part in today have a much broader focus than one obscure subgenre within a small niche of a single discipline. Did you know that the National Endowment for the Arts along with a number of major national arts funders have begun to focus their resources on urban revitalization through the arts? Did you know that many of the country’s local arts councils, including perhaps your own, have engaged in cultural planning efforts over the past decade? Do you attend conferences or networking events or professional development workshops that don’t have “music” in the title?

• • Read, read, read. Web 2.0 technology makes it easier than ever to keep up with significant developments, share advice, and expand your toolkit of ideas for your compositions and your life. While my blog has been helpful to me in a number of ways, perhaps the most valuable thing it did for me was to teach me how to read other people’s. Essential resources I recommend for any artist include ArtsJournal (the main news feed, that is), Beth’s Blog, GIA News, Michael Rushton’s Arts Admin blog, The Artful Manager, the NEA’s new Art Works blog, and Richard Florida’s Creative Class Exchange. For musicians, I’d additionally recommend Brands Plus Music and the Future of Music Coalition Blog. And if you’re feeling adventurous, you could try the Foundation Center’s news alerts, an economics blog such as Marginal Revolution, or hang out with the 2am Theatre crew (the conversations are often relevant to music as well). I strongly suggest that you learn how to use an RSS reader if you haven’t already—Google Reader works well enough for me.

• Get involved. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had about the future of the arts in the past couple of years in which no actual working artists have taken part. Sometimes the absence is noted, but more often it isn’t, and one is left to conclude that the health of the field is something that only arts administrators care to talk about. (Perhaps that explains why only 11% of the money funneled through nonprofit arts organizations in this country actually goes toward paying artists.) For whatever reason, musicians—composers included—seem particularly removed from these discussions. For example, the Great Recession has put pressure on a lot of states to gut their arts council budgets, and there have been a number of frantic advocacy campaigns in the past 18 months—including particularly high-profile ones in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New York State—to stave off drastic reductions in funding. I regularly read about such campaigns on theater- and visual art-focused blogs, but saw nary a peep on any online music publication. People need to know you exist if you expect them to care about your livelihood. Lack of attendance at national conferences is understandable—travel expenses can add up – but these days, thanks to live streaming, blogs, Twitter, etc., it’s often perfectly possible to be part of the conversation without being there in person. Meanwhile, there are probably numerous local panels, lectures, and networking opportunities at your disposal—and if there aren’t, what’s stopping you from organizing one yourself?

So seek out, show up, absorb, interact, speak up! None of the above advice will, on its own, guarantee either artistic or financial success. But I am a firm believer that knowledge is power, and power is not something that composers have historically enjoyed. If you want to be in control of your circumstances instead of letting your circumstances control you, it might well be time for a different kind of education.

Ian David Moss

Ian David Moss is Research Director at Fractured Atlas, primarily responsible for the development of the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map (BACAM), a new tool enabling better understanding of the arts ecosystem through the integration of multiple data streams. Moss graduated with an MBA in nonprofit management and strategy from the Yale School of Management. While there, he founded Createquity, a highly acclaimed arts policy blog, and completed an internship with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for which he developed the original blueprint for BACAM and co-created the Foundation’s first logic model for the performing arts. A composer since the age of 12, he was previously development manager for the American Music Center and founded two first-of-their-kind performing ensembles: a hybrid electric chamber group/experimental rock band and a choral collective devoted to the music of the past 25 years.

Thomas Shabda Noor a.k.a. Thomas Wirtel ***Two archival recordings from the North Texas days of free improvisation sessions with Thomas Wirtel, trumpet; Morgan Powell, trombone; Lanny Steele, piano; and Toby Guynn, bass, held at Steele’s place in Denton, Texas. All from the ’60s, never released. Courtesy of Wirtel and Powell. Wirtel says: Must have been a day when it was Toby Guynn’s “day to start”. What follows is our response to what Toby was doing. (He was bowing his bass strings on the “wrong” side of the bridge, thus those squeaky sounds.) This prompted Lanny Steele to play around with strings inside the piano, while Morgan and I grabbed our harmon mutes. Wirtel says: We must have decided on “Wide Open” as the initial statement. But what follows was NEVER predetermined. This group was totally “in the moment,” taking chances on the outcome. I marvel at our collective sense of form! * Wirtel’s arrangement of the jazz classic “The Eternal Triangle” composed by Sonny Stitt, and performed by Galen Jeter and The [Dallas] Jazz Orchestra on their CD titled Un-Numbered In The Front. The soloists are Steve Jones on tenor and Scott Marsrow on trumpet.

Jazz trumpeter and jazz educator Thomas Shabda Noor—called in this article by his former name, Thomas Wirtel, which he still used during the period discussed—is a former head of the jazz division in the School of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His doctorate in music composition is from Indiana University and he is an alumnus of North Texas State University in Denton, Texas. Wirtel was a member of the Stan Kenton Orchestra, Chicago’s Jazz Members Big Band, and the Dallas Jazz Orchestra. Since his retirement from the University of Illinois, he has directed the Heartland Jazz Orchestra in Bloomington, Illinois. He still plays with groups in Urbana, notably in the Boneyard Jazz Quintet, led by his old friend, trombonist Morgan Powell.

Wirtel is from Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. He loved jazz in high school, but in the early 1950s, there were no secondary jazz programs. His father heard the famous North Texas State University lab band on the radio and steered his son there. One of the first people Wirtel met when he arrived at NTSU in 1957 was Morgan Powell. They have remained close friends. In 1957 only three institutions in the United States offered a jazz degree: North Texas State in Denton was the first to do so; the Berklee College of Music in Boston and Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles were the other pioneers. In college, Wirtel studied jazz; Powell studied music education.

The following conversation with Wirtel was originally done as background for an article about the long-constituted Tone Road Ramblers sextet, for which Powell was the motive and continues to be a member. Wirtel offered this story about experiments with group improvisation that commenced on a weekly basis while he and Powell were students playing in and writing for the lab bands at North Texas. His approach to improvisation links directly to the ideas that Powell and their jazz student friends developed then to the Ramblers’ improvisations of today, far as they are from jazz idiom. Wirtel’s comments also offer a glimpse into how some musical thinkers of the late ’50s reconsidered the uses of improvisation and began to detach it from jazz under Powell’s leadership.

[Ed. Note: Last year, 90th Floor Records released The Road to Stan, a collection of tunes composed and/or played by the NTS lab band, with special reference to their relationship to Stan Kenton. The CD—featuring Wirtel and Powell, who are both featured soloists, as well as Marv Stamm, Dee Barton, Lanny Steele, and Toby Guynn—includes two original Powell compositions as well as an arrangement by Wirtel. Also worth tracking down is the Ramblers’ CD, The Ragdale Years, issued in 2000. All nine tracks are group improvisations/compositions, perfect examples of the things Wirtel talks about here.]

*

ANN STARR: I’m intrigued to hear you suggest that you and Morgan Powell were doing, as undergraduates at North Texas State in the ’60s, the kind of free improvisation the Tone Road Ramblers do today, with a tip of the hat to jazz but profoundly informed by music of the 20th-century avant-garde. I know you were both stars of the famous North Texas lab bands; you even went out yourself with Kenton. Can you help me connect the dots? From Stan Kenton to the Tone Road Ramblers seems not the most obvious road. Did your North Texas education move you this way?

THOMAS WIRTEL: In high school, I had a little dance band—a little jazz band—my best friend and I. We struggled. We didn’t get any direction. That was before any jazz education became available to us. It’s interesting. Our generation learned jazz techniques at North Texas, and when we graduated, we got jazz into all the colleges. When those people graduated, they got jazz into all the high schools. Middle schools are presently learning to play jazz music. We people who went to North Texas in the ’50s and early ’60s were really quite talented. It was a scary bunch of people. At the time, Dr. Eugene E. Hall—Gene Hall—was running the program. When he left, Leon Breeden came in.

You have to realize, in those days there were hardly any published charts at all. In fact the reason that the North Texas band was called a “lab band” was that it was supposed to be something that all the writers could use to hear what they wrote. That was the initial way they got it into the curriculum. Now, when Leon came in, he said, “Man! You guys are terrific! I’m going to get you guys out into the world,” and that’s what he did. He was a great promoter. Well, actually before Leon got there, we went to Chicago and played for a nation-wide musician’s union dance band contest and beat everybody: We were equal to the professionals!

We all wrote for the band, and it was quite a good band. We had these great people playing, and we wrote things with each other in mind. You knew who you were going to write for. And Morgan Powell’s stuff—you could just see it: Each piece was getting more and more evolved. Powell started writing, I believe, in high school. In fact, Gene Hall, the former director, taught him arranging when he was 16 or 17—something like that.

So, two things happened. When we were seniors and getting ready to do master’s degrees, there wasn’t a jazz master’s degree. So four of us decided we were going to go into music composition and we had a very, very good composition teacher, Samuel Adler, who ended up being the main composer at Eastman.

Sam Adler gave the shortest composition lessons I’ve ever seen. I would go there. He would come in—my lesson, I think, was at 6:30 in the morning—and I would bring him what I had just written and he would look at it. He was so inspiring. He was authentically interested in what I was writing. And I can remember rushing home after a lesson: I couldn’t wait to sit down at the piano and continue writing. He showed me a lot of things that would and wouldn’t work as far as technique was concerned. But mainly he allowed us our own styles. He didn’t give assignments at all. And he was very respectful of our jazz band. And so everybody in that little improv group studied with Sam, all four of us [Wirtel, Powell, Guynn, and Steele] plus Don Owens and Bob Morgan. Sam took us all under his wing and showed us the main techniques of Bartók and Schoenberg and Webern and Shostakovich and all the modern composers.

AS: Did the techniques and the music you studied with Adler have immediate effect on your jazz performance?

TW: All of that information immediately got translated into how we could use that stuff in a jazz setting. For instance, one of my biggest influences as a jazz soloist was Bartók’s string quartets and all the crazy scales he was using. I was listening to all this stuff with scores and under earphones every night for two or three hours not because it was an assignment, but because that was what I was wanting to do.

So that was the beginning of moving away from the center of jazz, widening everything. It was our experiences with new music in the classical mode, or orchestral mode (but I don’t call it “contemporary music”) that we started using all these techniques in the jazz thing.

AS: So Adler wasn’t directing you; he was teaching you what he knew and you were the ones going, “A-ha,” and making connections?

TW: Right. Look at this: So we have all these new techniques going into the jazz writing and that produced a dilemma: What do you do about old-fashioned improvisation when you’ve got all this new stuff in the writing? It’s not going to fit. It’s not going to be based on an old pop tune. So part of what we were doing developed—Well, there were a couple of things.

North Texas was in a dry town, Denton, so there were no bars. Because a Texas town that had a women’s college had to be dry. There was a women’s university on the other side of town [Texas Woman’s University, changed in 1957 from Texas State College for Women], so there was no place to play, other than just in rehearsal. So the way we dealt with it was that we just had jam sessions, usually at Dee Barton’s house. Dee was a wonderful trombone player. He ended up writing a lot of stuff for the Kenton band. Dee was one of the few people who had an entire house. At least once or twice a week we’d all go over there and play half the night and experiment on stuff. That’s one thing that we did.

The other thing that we did was—and it wasn’t organized, it was just happening over and over again—a bunch of us, especially once we all got into writing contemporary music, we would go over to Morgan’s house and either listen to stuff or, mostly, it was just to talk about life and what we were doing and what was happening in music and this and that. So part of it was a lot of hanging out. And serious—not serious, but sincere hanging out.

So. Back to our dilemma. What are we going to do about improv?

I was living with a piano player by the name of Lanny Steele, who was also a writer and also part of this group and he had a Steinway grand piano. Four or five of us had taken a house [Wirtel, Steele, Alan Solganic, Charlie Smith, and Don Ratterree] and it had an extra room that could have been somebody’s bedroom but we decided to put the piano in that room. And what we did was every Thursday for about a year, it was [Wirtel on trumpet,] Lanny Steele on piano, Toby Guynn on bass, and Morgan Powell on trombone.

It was a small room and that’s about all we could fit in there. We decided, “So here’s what we’re going to do: We are going to improvise freely,” just to see what would happen. The rule we made—and we kept to it—was that the only instruction that we were going to give to anybody in the whole group was, “So and so was going to start today.” We rotated around. And we recorded everything that we did. I still have all those recordings.

AS: Did you set a time limit, a minimum for the first player?

TW: No, he would just start playing and the others would join in. In other words, it was completely free improvisation. You would come in and out of the texture.

All of us played also in a small group; it was called the Jazztet. It was three saxophones [Jerry Keys, alto; Alan Solganic, tenor; Claude Johnson, baritone (sometimes Ray Kireilis was in the sax section)], one trumpet [Wirtel], one trombone [Powell], and piano [Steele], bass [Guynn] and drums [John Von Ohlen, followed by Gary Peyton]. Morgan started writing what I would call set-ups—written stuff for the horns, ‘set-ups’ for free improvisation. In other words, he would start an idea and then kind of leave it hanging. Out of that the players would improvise the rest either individually or, usually, as a group.

He tried that out first of all with the Jazztet and very soon after that he started doing it with big band. And we were doing back in the ’60s some very far out music that still sounds far out. Now this is something that can go very wrong if you don’t have the right people. It’s a give-and-take thing that can become self-indulgent, where you try to play everything that you’ve ever played in your whole life (“Look at me!”) and that doesn’t make it. People get very tired of that. Or it can be an interactive group thing, which was what we were trying to do. By the time we were doing that, we had been playing with one another for four years continuously. We knew each other well. We knew each other’s styles and had an idea of where things would go and everybody would jump on it.

AS: So there are conditions for free improvisation in a group?

TW: As far as the written stuff, yes. It just gets you started in a direction, and the direction that you go from there is up to you. Every time is different.

Toward the end of our years at North Texas, before everybody left for other things, Morgan gave a concert, his master’s degree performance in composition. We had been doing our improvisation group in the privacy of Lanny Steele’s piano room. Nobody had ever heard us. Nobody knew what was going on except us. We had been performing the things Morgan was writing for other people, but this actual improvisational group never performed anywhere. Only once. And that was at Morgan’s recital.

We thought, “Well, now. How are we going to do this?” and Morgan said, “We should invite Sam Adler to come. We should invite Sam in and ask him to start,” with the idea that he was not going to tell any of us what he was going to do. So we walked out on the stage having absolutely no idea what was going to go on. Sam played this motif and we all just jumped on it, and this big piece happened that had two or three different sections and moods and it was incredible!

Lukas Foss was on campus when Morgan’s recital was going on—there was a composition festival happening and he was the guest artist and clinician. He was at that master’s concert and heard the piece. The next day after we had a clinic with him and he said, “Now that piece that you guys improvised was really marvelous. I want to see your sketches, just to see how you did this.”

I looked at Morgan and he looked at me and he looked back at Lukas Foss and said, “We didn’t have any sketches; we were improvising.” And Foss, he couldn’t believe it. He was just dumbfounded. Because he was doing the same thing, but with sketches and a lot of stuff figured out ahead of time. And they were reading from instructions about where things should go. If you’re playing with people who don’t play with each other every day, you have to keep control and some semblance of order, because maybe it will work out and maybe it won’t.

So, that’s the background. That’s the nest egg.

“Shab” with Morgan Powell

Now, we all had families. We all went off and learned to teach and to play commercial gigs. Several of us kept writing for a while, but you don’t have the daily input of people with the same vibe. When I first started teaching, I was at a little Texas town and there was nothing, nobody—nobody—to interact with. I did electronic music, in the early days of electronic music.

Powell was at University of Illinois, which was a much richer place for creativity and he was able to continue the idea of free improvisation. Little by little he made friends and found people of like minds—mostly he and Ray Sasaki, the trumpet player, just started putting feelers out and eventually, the Tone Road Ramblers came together.

But my point is that that could not have happened without all that background. And Morgan was able to communicate that to the other players. I mean, it’s not like we were the only players who were doing this. Other people were doing similar things in the ’60s. The whole idea was that we had to go beyond the traditional barriers of jazz in order to play the newer sounds; you just can’t play blues licks anymore. I didn’t fit.

Essentially, the way I see it, the Tone Road Ramblers [Steve Butters, percussion; John Fonville, flute; Eric Mandat, clarinet; Ray Sasaki, trumpet; Jim Staley and Morgan Powell, trombones] is the fruit of that improv group that we had at North Texas—on a much higher level of performance. The players are incredible—very creative, very spontaneous, very sensitive, very intelligent. And mature musicians. I have not heard anything that even approaches the level of what’s going on in that group—anything.

It’s Powell’s influence. He is a superb organizer. He gets people committed to this or that project and then he follows through. For everyone in that group, the time they spend with the Ramblers is their escape from the mediocrity of daily life.

AS: In the Ramblers’ music and in Powell’s, what influence there is of other composers is so deeply embedded as to be undetectable. The music is original in a basic sense.

TW: People ask Morgan how he arrived at what he wrote down. Whenever anybody would ask him that, he would say, “I dunno, I just use my ears.” That’s it. That’s not to say that he doesn’t know all the structures. He knows all the stuff and when he gets to a place in the piece when that kind of technique will solve a problem, he’ll use it momentarily. Each piece is a completely new situation.

Morgan’s music is usually written for specific people who enter into the composition act during the performance—for instance, Morgan and Ray Sasaki; they are a unit. And I’ve heard other people try to play Morgan’s pieces that he has written for Ray. Good…Good, but not spectacular. Powell and Sasaki are in a space most musicians can’t understand.

It’s not just about being able to follow what’s going on musically. If you hadn’t grown up listening to the progression of things, I can see how—when you’re just hearing what’s normal…and then someone suddenly slaps something like a Ramblers CD on the radio, it’s like, ‘Whaaaaaat…?’

***

Ann Starr

Ann Starr is a writer and visual artist living in Columbus, Ohio.

It really happened after Morty died. My own personal life became important again. And I started remembering things from my childhood.

She sits at her piano, a vast and meticulously notated score spread out before her. Her flickering eyes sweep softly across the pages; her slightly trembling fingers play the opening sonorities at a slow and contemplative pace. I am sitting next to her, listening intently, following her eyes and the subtle shifts in her body as she paces through this rich and haunting music. I am struggling to hear her sounds with the ears of a trauma survivor, to glean within their sleek vibrations the trove of terrifying secrets I know lay within. But she quickly trails off, stares into space, and keeps her fingers pressed against the keys, long after the sounds have dissolved into the white noise of a sleepy Brooklyn afternoon.

After a few long moments, she re-emerges, takes a long sip of stone-cold coffee, and begins to talk.

When I started this piece, I didn’t remember. I had post-traumatic stress disorder. I had blanked things out.

Thus begins my first interview with Bunita Marcus, a composer whose music I first encountered just four years ago, and a woman whose harrowing story of abuse, survival, and remembering childhood trauma through music has since that time had an immense impact on my work as a scholar and my life as a composer. The story of our collaboration and friendship is rife with startling coincidences, and the story of our ongoing collaborative project—The Rugmaker Project—is one that continues to move and astound me, just as the string quartet after which it is named continues to exert a profound influence on my thinking about memory, composition, and the vicissitudes of telling the truth about a traumatic past.

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I first heard about Bunita Marcus in 2006, when I was a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival of Music. I was sitting in a seminar with David Lang, one of my most important mentors, sharing an opera that I myself had composed the year before, which told an abstract story of going back in time to see what really happened in a forgotten childhood. When I divulged the programmatic ideas behind my piece, however, Lang instantly responded: “I really enjoyed this piece, but I actually kind of don’t want to know what you were thinking. What matters to me—all that matters to me—is that you wrote this music. I don’t need to know how you got there. I just need the music.”

He paused for a moment, and then continued: “You know, this kind of reminds me of this composer named Bunita Marcus. We played a piece of hers at a Bang on a Can Marathon a few years ago, this string quartet called The Rugmaker. And we all really liked the piece, and were really excited to present it. Well, right before the performance we invited Bunita to come up and talk about it. And she stood up and said, ‘This piece is about my father raping me.'”

This revelation, offered by David Lang in an appropriately anecdotal and exemplary manner, was simply astounding to me. Unbeknown to him, or anyone else in that room, I was at that time in the beginning stages of writing my doctoral dissertation on music, synaesthesia, and memories of childhood sexual abuse. I had at that point interviewed a series of survivors whose memories of being abused in childhood were triggered by certain kinds of songs, sounds, or acoustic spaces, and I equated the nature of these memories—such as perceiving a pop song on the radio as a “wet and drippy finger between the legs,” or as a “thick, dense, opaque feeling in the throat”—with the neurological phenomenon of synaesthesia, in which one sense modality, such as sound, becomes translated into another sensation, such as seeing colors, textures, or shapes. I had up until then never encountered a sexual abuse survivor who was also a composer, let alone someone who had composed a piece of music about her own traumatic past of sexual abuse. I found myself suddenly ebullient with questions: who was this composer?

Bunita Marcus in 1996 Photo by Clare Ascani

Why hadn’t I heard of her? What kind of piece could somebody write about being sexually abused by their father? What would it sound like, and how were audiences expected to respond? Finally—and most pertinent to my work—how long had Marcus kept this terrible memory a secret? And how had the music she had written about the event impacted her memory of the trauma itself, if at all?

I was floored when Marcus not only agreed to talk with me about The Rugmaker, but also enthusiastically expressed her solidarity with the political, scholastic, and personal goals of my project. “People need to know that these things happen to children,” she stated gravely, sitting across from me at her work desk and looking me square in the eye. “People need to know that there are survivors of incest everywhere, crying inside, with stories that need to come out. And I didn’t realize it at the time [that I began writing The Rugmaker], but my own story needed to come out too.”

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The opening page of the score for The Rugmaker

As Marcus led me through the gorgeously handwritten pages of The Rugmaker, pointing out salient musical details and accompanying them with strikingly personal reminiscences, it struck me that her process of composing this piece was quite literally her process of remembering the trauma that had happened to her as a child. Before starting the piece in early 1986, Marcus had retained no conscious memories of being abused: no intrusive images, no narrative details, no demonstrative nightmares. Instead, her life had up until then followed a path similar to that of many other young trauma survivors, whose livelihoods, according to the research of trauma expert Judith Herman, often necessitate an involuntary denial of the utter despair that ongoing childhood abuse and violation can engender. A young piano prodigy, Marcus focused intently and exclusively on her musical studies, later becoming one of the youngest doctoral students ever to enter the composition program at SUNY Buffalo, where she became a devoted student (and, later, a close friend) of Morton Feldman. She garnered a great deal of early success with her music, winning international prizes and traveling the globe to hear her works performed at major festivals—accolades which would soon result in a coveted commission by the Kronos Quartet, for whom Marcus wrote The Rugmaker in 1986.

The piece would premiere to great acclaim at the Festival Nieuwe Muziek in Middelburg, The Netherlands that summer, to be followed by a memorably controversial performance at the Darmstadt New Music Festival in Germany,

Kronos Quartet performing The Rugmaker Photo by Bunita Marcus

where—amidst an antiphonal chorus of equal cheers and boos—it would be awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis. Kronos has since performed the work over a dozen times in cities throughout the United States and Europe, and reviews have ranged from favorable to laudatory, many of them referring to the work’s somewhat cryptic title in order to highlight the piece’s clever use of textural details and rug-like tapestries. No one but Bunita had any idea what other secrets the piece contained, what silenced story it was unsilencing—that is, until the fateful moment described by David Lang, at a Bang on a Can marathon in 1993, when Bunita herself came forth and revealed the piece’s true program.

In the beginning, I thought I was making a rug. That’s why I called it The Rugmaker…the detail, and the design, and the patterning of different colors, and putting one strange color against another strange color, and things like that. That’s what I thought I was doing.

Marcus’s choice of rug patterns as the initial inspiration for this work was far from random. By 1986, she and Morton Feldman were close friends and companions, and shared a deep passion for the ancient Turkish and Iranian art of rug-making: their intricate patterns, negative spaces, and “floating incongruous images,” all of which would serve as inspiration for their musical works, as has been oft-noted in studies of Feldman’s output. The pair had even traveled together to Turkey, exploring remote the countryside in search of rug artifacts and rug-making communities. As Marcus filled my ear with elegiac images of herself and her famed companion roaming sun-drenched villages, fingering vibrant textiles and talking excitedly about the implications of the rug-makers’ craftsmanship for their own musical pursuits, my eyes found themselves wandering to the walls of her Kensington apartment, on which hang myriad rugs and rug fragments, softly and silently testifying to her affection for Feldman and their rich musical and emotional connection. My gaze then settled on the Rugmaker sketches that Marcus had just yanked out from within her extensive metal file cabinets: endless grids and colored pencil markings; endless manipulations of pitch sets, painstakingly ordered and processed; and, somewhat incongruously, a slew of pithy, intriguing mantras, scratched heavily onto index cards in thin black marker:

“Color. Surface. Pattern. Form.”
“As Abstract As Possible.”
“Avoid Harmony—Find a Replacement.”
“Collage of Sound.”
“Thought. Experience. Understanding. Belief.”

An occasional funny one:

“Miami Vice Ending.”

And, perhaps most intriguing:

“Question + Thought = Answer.”

Sifting through these loose leaves, these score paper sketches and index cards, I discovered even more evidence of Marcus’s gradual compositional turn from the subject of rug-making to an entirely other topic, one with far more sinister overtones:

“Impending doom.”
“No denouement.”
“Increase the pain and intensity until it is unbearable.”

What were these rather intense and emotive English-language admonishments doing among sketches for an intellectually musical exploration of ancient rug-making? What had been their purpose, among pages of rigorously worked-out patterns and musical formations mimetic of rug stitches and square knots? Marcus explains to me that as she began working on the piece—finding its delicate form, weaving its gloriously cerebral details—she began hearing the timbres of the string instruments in her mind’s ear: the strident singing of the violins; the velvety, hum-like voice of the viola; the low moan of the cello. All of these timbres conjured a slew of unexpected sensations within her body: the sensation of being touched (“there’s a certain ‘feeliness’ to these sounds,” she explains rather cryptically, lightly touching and rubbing her forearms); the sense-memory of her child-self singing lullabies as a child; and the aural memory of her father’s voice, singing Frank Sinatra songs distractedly under his breath. “My father loved the violin, and he loved to sing,” she hazily recalls, her face transitioning from its usual serious intellectual intensity into a deadpan, unfocused glaze….

…And I was thinking about my father, and thinking how he told me one day how much he liked the violin…And I have a lot of loving feelings about my dad, especially from when I was very young. And so those come out in the beginning of the piece. What happens later is another story.

A sweet, child-like lullaby of the sort Marcus describes is certainly audible in the third section of the piece, in which the lone viola, accompanied only by iridescent chords in the other strings, plays an arching, upward, five-note gesture, over and over and over again, its rhythms and transpositions changing ever so slightly each time, but maintaining their identity as a tune, a motive. Marcus describes the process of writing this melody for her father in such a way as to suggest that it was involuntary, an almost unconscious and uncontrollable act or compulsion. She explains that as she continued to write it, more memories flooded back…memories of his touch, memories of their love and its particular intensity, and—as the melody continues and becomes more urgent and intense, migrating from the viola’s high-range velvet to the cello’s mid-range moan—memories of her father coming into her bedroom at night.

We talked about that ascending line that comes in in the cello…and how that gradually builds. And when that started, I knew something creepy was happening with the piece. It wasn’t just a happy little string quartet. Something creepy was gonna happen. And I started to have memories, of my father coming into my bedroom at night.

The order in which Marcus accessed her memories of her father molesting her can be mapped upon the specific order of musical events in the piece: the mysterious, undefined opening, suggesting confusion and complacency; the slow and painstaking ascent through a series of crystalline, staircase-like melody fragments, suggesting the start of a journey through a hallway of memories; the loving, improvisatory lullaby for her daddy, who becomes the star of these memories; the unsteady pause, suggesting a moment of sudden realization; the ominous continuation of the melody, radically altered, in the cello, revealing the sinister undertones of the lullaby; the increasing fragmentation, shattering, and scattering of the melody throughout all four instruments, as the nature of the memory becomes clear; and the final, terrifying, and horribly ceaseless series of down-bow strikes—the section Marcus straightforwardly calls “the rape scene”—separated in perfect and equal time by silences…between which a simpering, falling chromatic line in the high register of the violin emulates what Bunita designates as “the little voice, struggling to be heard.”

And I didn’t really want something creepy to happen. But one day I decided, I said, well, let’s just follow this thing and see where it goes. And it smashed into a brick wall.

Indeed, it does. The piece ends abruptly, unapologetically, with no recourse, no triumph, no discernible overcoming of trauma or redemption of self. For Marcus, The Rugmaker is not narrative of a remembered event, but instead a visceral archive of remembering itself, a physical and sensorial map of memory fragments rendered in the exact language through which they returned to her: music. It is not necessary to know her story of incest to hear and understand the work’s raw and primal intensity, but the story is offered in the hopes of explicating something particular and crucial about remembering childhood trauma—an event that often happens years later, in adulthood, with an adult’s mind that has nonetheless retained and stored within the folds of its body the adrenaline-ridden confusion and anxiety it endured as a child.

*

There has been extensive controversy over whether memories of traumatic events can truly be repressed, involuntarily forgotten, and later recovered in tact, either through some kind of stimulus (such as music), or as the result of an innovative psychotherapy designed to relax the mind and recover the recollections from storage, or find ways to minimize the symptoms the repressed trauma has caused, as is the goal of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. It is a controversy with no meaningful solution, for the act of remembering itself has proven time and again to be an exquisitely subjective act, an object of study that is paradoxically subject to all human beings’ presumably faulty memories, as well as to the imperfect technologies we have developed to assist us in archiving our lives—video cameras, digital recorders, and the like—whose noisy, grainy representations of reality find themselves just as vulnerable to interpretative distortions and editorial violence.

What strikes me about Bunita Marcus’s story—in which a seemingly repressed memory of a tragic violation becomes suddenly, vividly, and intrusively recapitulated through sound—is its implications for our understanding of how some human brains might negotiate painful memories: storing them, perhaps, within the virtual folds and contours of musical timbres and melodies, displacing their details into more generic forms of color and sensation, and creating a sonic space in which recollections of atrocities can be saved until later, newly recoverable in highly synaesthetic formations, available once again to a mind displaced from the trauma by the cushion of time, a mind that is now potentially much more able to endure them and—with any luck—move beyond them.

Bunita at Age 5

The story of Bunita Marcus’s The Rugmaker—as art object, as artifact, and as drastic musical event—is one that Bunita and I plan to continue telling over the coming months, in the form of lectures, articles, and public conversations. It is my hope that our collaboration will inspire other survivors to come forward with their stories, and perhaps even find the courage to explore the extent to which their identities as survivors might be inextricably linked to their identities as musicians, to their unique ways of perceiving and understanding music and sound.

Like Philomela in Ovid’s ancient myth, Bunita Marcus has woven her tale of trauma into an intricate and fascinating rug, a rug whose musical patterns offer astounding aesthetic pleasure, but also carry a crucial message about child abuse that should not be ignored. While it is a glorious work to behold on its own, far from the clutches of Gnostic scrutiny, The Rugmaker is also a statement of great urgency: the trauma of incest and sexual abuse happens to children. It can be forgotten. But it can also be remembered, even and perhaps especially through the act of making art.

***

Jenny Olivia Johnson composes music that ranges from compressed 20-minute operas to epic pop songs to highly abstract religious masses. Her work is deeply influenced by minimalism, noise rock, 80’s pop songs, and vernacular television, and she also draws a great deal of inspiration from her academic work on synaesthesia, acoustic memory, and childhood trauma. Two of her short operas have been showcased at New York City Opera’s VOX Contemporary American Opera Lab. In the fall of 2009, Johnson joined faculty of Wellesley College as an Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory.

For about six months now, I have had a song in my head. It’s called “Cousins,” by the NYC indie-rockers Vampire Weekend. Vampire Weekend are not even a band I consider myself to like very much, though having one of their songs squatting in my synapses for nearly half a year has forced me to question the validity of this belief. I feed my brain a tremendous amount of music—sitting in my chair at work, I will often make it through about five or six albums in their entirety before noon, and that doesn’t even count the music I pipe into my ears on the subway there and back. And yet, no matter what other music might momentarily take possession of my mind, “Cousins” always eventually resurfaces, like some grinning cartoon character that refuses to be obliterated. Take two minutes and twenty-five seconds to listen to the exuberant little song below, if you haven’t heard it, to get an idea of what I am talking about:

Luckily for me, the mental replay of “Cousins” doesn’t demand a whole lot of my time. If I had a similar problem with, say, Mahler’s Third, I would probably have to be institutionalized. Still, it got me thinking. Most of us think of the phenomenon of the “earworm” in terms of three- or four-note sequences: inane, catchy jingles like “row, row, row your boat” or “plop, plop, fizz, fizz.” But there are as many ways to be caught up inside of a melody as there are melodies themselves, and each of them loops itself into our internal hardwiring in a different way. The manifold ways this can happen are endlessly fascinating to me: Why does the brain seize hold of certain fragments? Why does it worry away at whole passages when I am trying to make dinner or fill out spreadsheets?

As a music critic, feeling my own mind chewing away noisily at a piece of music can be one of the most viscerally satisfying intellectual experiences I know. It can also be maddening or distracting. But above all, it always inspires wonder in me: What exactly is my unconscious mind trying to figure out? What’s going on in the back vaults of my mind as I move through daily life? Sufficiently intrigued, I did a little research, consulted friends and colleagues, and went rummaging around in my own synapses to come up with some partial answers.

The smallest cells of music that get snagged in the mind’s filter tend to be the most stereotypical examples of “earworms”—looping, maddening, well-defined musical phrases that cue up, stop, and start over again like a skipping record no one is tending to. They tend to last about ten to fifteen seconds—which, as Daniel J. Levitin notes in This Is Your Brain On Music, is about the time limit built into our auditory short-term memory. This is called “echoic” memory for a reason—it’s the same low-level playback mechanism that enables you to repeat back a phone number that’s just been read to you.

Sometimes the snippet is even shorter—in some cases, it’s nothing more than three seconds. I think here of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” one of the more immediate pop tunes in recent memory. The only part my brain needs to conjure the rush of the song in its entirety—the only part that I need to plug into to experience that little internal rush of endorphins—is the opening of the chorus. Just “SINCE U BEEN GONNNNE!” That’s all, that’s it. It’s like hitting a button for a pellet. What’s more, it seems to provide the same guilty-pleasure goose pimples when it is playing exclusively in my own mind as it does when reaching my ears through speakers. In a 2005 study called “Mental Concerts“, McGill University neuroscientist Robert J. Zatorre and Andrea R. Halpern of Bucknell confirmed this to be neurologically true: our mental playbacks, they found, stimulate the same auditory cortical areas of the brain that are involved in listening to actual music. The version of the song playing in our minds, in other words, is just as powerful, for us, as the one living out there in the “real world.” There is something lovely to me about this notion: listening to music, looked at this way, is merely a refresher course, a way to fill in the missing lines and sharpen the detail for our inner concerts, which we can carry with us anywhere we please.

My own mind does this to me all the time. Early in the day, when the morning’s first cup of coffee has hit and the promise of the day seems great, I feel myself buzzing with energy, shuffling through tasks with an exaggerated intensity and walking around more quickly; when I’m like this, I almost always hear the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, with its argumentative, inexorable forward thrust, bubbling its way through me, buoying my sense of purposefulness. The movement unfurls steadily in my mind without interruption, for at least three straight minutes, sometimes longer—my brain keeps following the four-note “fate” motif as it climbs higher and higher. The unbroken continuum of the Beethoven mirrors my unbroken thread of attention—later in the day, as my attention flags, my brain will dissolve into a thousand chaotic and competing musical fragments. But for singular, obsessive purpose, my brain instinctively hones in on Beethoven’s Fifth.

I sometimes wonder if I am subconsciously using this movement, and following its mounting, twisting development in my mind, as a focusing tool in and of itself, as a way of locking myself into a state of continuous concentration. Whereas a broken-record earworm tends to pull you out of the moment, an unfurling piece of music can restore mental equilibrium and clear the mind, like an “Om” with a few hundred more syllables. Sacks, again in Musicophilia, also links following a piece of music with focused concentration with his heartbreaking case study of a man who, after a debilitating brain infection, was left with a seven-second memory span—for everything except music, which located him firmly in the Now like nothing else did. The man had no recall of anything past 1965, but he could sit down and play his way through a piano sonata from start to finish and even conduct a choir with zero difficulty. Sacks writes eloquently about the orienting power of music in the mind: “When we ‘remember’ a melody, it plays in our mind; it becomes newly alive….We recall one tone at a time and each tone entirely fills our consciousness, yet simultaneously relates it to the whole. It is similar when we run or walk or swim—we do so one step, one stroke at a time, yet each step is an integral part of the whole, the kinetic melody of running or swimming.” I often feel, on a small scale, that my mind has cued up Beethoven for me with a similar purpose, to weed out clamor and establish a continuum.

Among friends and colleagues I spoke to in preparation for this article, others echoed this idea of centering. Mike Powell, a writer for Pitchfork, the Village Voice, and other places, commented to me: “Earworms have a kind of primal function for me, like a mantra. They have ‘meanings’ per se, but the meanings empty out as you repeat them, until it’s just kind of a placeholder for the moment. They play a real pre-intellect, early-times role in my life. It also makes me think about bird songs, or animal calls: these brief, constantly repeated things that signify that a certain creature is there—a marker of identity or something. Overall though, I’d just say that I find the experience of having something stuck in my head really wonderful—it sort of puts the forward motion of my mind on pause.” Brian Howe, another Pitchfork writer, concurs, adding that the melodies that populate his head feel “more like a shape than information to me. In fact, it is a respite from information and the cognitive heavy lifting which comes with it. I may think about the content of the words, but what I feel is the warp and heft of them. And there is always something faintly lizard-brainy about that shape, like something old dredged from collective memory.”

Sometimes, your brain will start making its own mischief with these shapes. I often catch my mind acting as a cunning editor, snipping the end of a phrase so it can tie the ends together, or finding a way to mash two together to make something entirely new. Late one Saturday night a few weeks ago, for example, I had the residue of two competing song fragments still alive in my brain. One was a four-note, sighed little melody from the bridge of a song by the Baltimore band Beach House. The other was a piece of the backing track to a new Eminem song. The presence of both fragments in my head was pretty traceable—I had listened to Beach House while preparing dinner, and I had sat through the (grimly awful) new Eminem in its entirety the night before because I had to review it. The Beach House song (“10 Mile Stereo”) is in C-sharp major, while the singers on Eminem’s backing track (“Cinderella Man”) are in pentatonic B-flat major. So close, yet so far! What’s fascinating to me is what my brain, with zero input or intervention from my conscious mind, does to reconcile these two scraps of melody. The Beach House, which already has a pretty watery pitch center, is discreetly knocked a few cents down, and the Eminem bit pitched a few cents up, until the two fragments meet each other, in my head, somewhere in the general vicinity of good old C major. My brain then fuses them so that they feed into each other, forming a new, looping melody that doesn’t exist anywhere but in my own mind, which has fashioned something reasonably complete-sounding from the disparate bits of music I have fed it. I have to wonder if this is the sort of process mash-up artists like Greg Gillis (who records as Girl Talk) go through when they are matching up two utterly unrelated songs: Are they pursuing the recombinant dreams of their own internal jukebox?

Composer and writer (and frequent NewMusicBox contributor) Danny Felsenfeld has decided to do more than simply wonder. His “Earworm Project,” in which he solicits friends and colleagues to submit their most inescapable, brain-drillingly invasive earworms so that he may stitch a long-form work together out of all of them, is a blend of the practical, ingenious, and the slightly masochistic. “In a way, it is like inviting the vampire into the house,” Felsenfeld admits. “But I think it is good for a composer to do this from time to time: step down from your own pantheon of what’s holy and compelling and give yourself the conceptual etude of making something you like out of something you don’t.” And having logged so much one-on-one time with other people’s infectious musical materials, what has he observed? “I wish I could answer you patly here and say that I’d discovered each earworm was easily hacked into proper four-bar phrases culminating on a high note on beat 19, etc.,” Felsenfeld says. “But no such luck. I can make some obvious generalizations: most of them are in major keys, many from musicals, and most are songs that have kind of permeated the cultural listening membrane in such a way that you can know them intimately without having ever listened to them on purpose.”

His sample group naturally tended to fellow artists, composers, and writers, with whom a persistent earworm can carry a certain intimation of professional pride. It’s almost like asking a chef what they eat at 3 in the morning after a night out. Says Felsenfeld: “I am tickled that Stephen Sondheim and I share an earworm. (I almost can’t say it because the mere mention of ‘Tomorrow’ from Annie can ruin a whole night for me.) I was also amazed to hear that more people found ‘Tom’s Diner’ by Suzanne Vega to be their inescapable tune. And I am also amazed that of all the composers I know, few found their own work to stick so deeply.”

Why should it be that, out of all the music running through composers’ minds, their own creations are absent? If we’re following the logic that mental playbacks can serve some sort of calming or centering purpose, it almost makes sense that one’s own music, with its private burden of obligation, might not be welcome. There’s a sort of loopy, circuitous logic to it; maybe in the way we cannot sneak up behind and startle ourselves, we cannot write the music that lodges itself in our brains.

Or perhaps not: there is a remarkable story about Copland near the end of his life, when he was ravaged by the effects of Alzheimer’s. In Howard Pollack’s biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, the composer Ned Rorem is quoted on his amazement that “the elderly Aaron Copland, who drew blanks from one five-minute period to the next, was nonetheless able to conduct his half-hour Appalachian Spring from start to finish—though on leaving the stage he could not recall what he had just performed; he had been wafted by the rote, by the inertia, by the programmed kinetics of his own creation.” Shades of the man with the seven-second memory, Copland could still locate himself in the moment through music—his music, in this case, and his most resonant work.

I am oddly comforted by the wonder in Ned Rorem’s voice in that quote; if Ned Rorem is as baffled and awed by the riddle of music and mind as I am, than surely no one knows what is going on. Music in the mind remains omnipresent, but elusive; it can taunt, popping up and disappearing with a logic that seems to defy conscious wishes, mocking our desires to control our own thoughts. It can also feel like a benediction, a gift of grace to enliven an otherwise mundane or unbearable day. But, like inspiration itself, trying to track its echoes to a source is like trying to cradle sand.

Photo by Robin Laananen

By almost any definition of the term, the Brooklyn-based band Zs would qualify as “new music.” The rigor of their notation, the education of the participants, the early collaborations, and the music itself are all indicative of belonging to the same ghetto as any number of contemporary music ensembles. But despite the putatively catholic expansion of many of new music’s boundaries, Zs remains conspicuously absent from the dialogue within that community. Within the scene they call their own—D.I.Y., punk, indie, depending on who you ask—they’ve cultivated an impressive following and garnered plenty of press and even some album sales, the great white whale of any modern musical endeavor.

When Zs formed, there was nothing else on the scene quite like it. Throughout a succession of lineup changes—saxophonist Sam Hillmer is the only remaining original member—they’ve succeeded in bringing intellectual music to the club scene; and, for a while, they brought their raucousness into the realms of concert music. What Zs has done most effectively is demonstrate that there are no boundaries in making art, certainly not aesthetic, and least of all social. Zs has always had an otherness to it—in fact it was generated out of sense of unbelonging—but it’s chameleonic identification with different socialities brought about important avenues for influence and success. They’ve involved musicians from many different bands and ensembles: Extra Life, the Wet Ink Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Hunter/Gatherer, Little Women, Pygmy Shrews, Seductive Sprigs, Music =quals, Moth, to name a few—spanning genres from improvised music to contemporary classical to progressive rock to punk, and beyond. Yet there was never any gimmicky vibe of “rock band playing classical” or “classical musicians going to the club.” Somehow, it all just made sense.

Jazz Dude Goes to Conservatory

A lot of the achievement in American new music in the last few decades has been spurred on by the very particular way that music conservatories seem to frustrate their students. As Hillmer describes it now, “a key vibe in understanding Zs is: jazz dude goes to conservatory—disillusionment.” Hillmer met fellow sax player Alex Mincek at the Manhattan School of Music (MSM) in 1996, both participants in the school’s Jazz Arts program. Within that setting, they discovered that they shared the same interests, and frustrations. Mincek sets the scene: “It was very black and white. Either you were a jazz musician, or you were something else. You were a commercial musician or you were a classical musician. There was no heterogeneous version of any of that. Sam and I wanted to be something that was blurry.”

Within weeks the two were hanging out constantly—formulating, defining, and sharpening their aesthetic goals. They began a discussion group, initially confined to just the two of them, that gradually expanded to include other musicians who were down with what they were after. The ones who stuck were trombonist Jacob Garchik, drummer/tabla player Dan Weiss, saxophonist Andy Noble, and composer Brendan Connelly, and by 1998 the discussion group had morphed into the presenting organization Wet Ink. The group began putting on concerts of their own “blurry” music at MSM, as well as in their own apartments and lofts, which they dubbed “Concerts at the Crib.”

The place the musicians were coming out of is sort of the classic postmodern hodgepodge. Mincek had stronger ties to traditional jazz playing than Hillmer—who for a while had his own free-jazz trio—but also was dedicated to the tradition of Western art music, and through his influence Hillmer also began to write through-composed works. Both had an abiding interest in other genres like punk and progressive rock. The first real Wet Ink season—after the 501c(3) had been filed—took place in 1999, centered around the Manhattan venue Collective:Unconscious.

Z’s 40

In 2003, Zs recorded their third release, the EP Karate Bump. Although the band had been formalized as a sextet by that point, the second track, Mincek’s Karate, strangely featured only the two saxophonists. “I understand how it seems aberrant, but in terms of how the band came together it was not that aberrant,” explains Hillmer. “In terms of the early band, that was sort of the spine.”

Karate was indicative of how Mincek and Hillmer had fed off each other not only as organizers and artists, but as players. The piece is about fusing Mincek and Hillmer’s playing, which were so similar tone-wise, within a landscape that could also be combative—the interplay between unison monody versus combative polyphony. “It seemed to be the perfect mirror to what we were doing artistically, and our personalities,” explains Mincek. “We had so much in common, but we were kind of battling, too. It was a very social piece.” He goes further:

There are certain sports in which you can’t just dominate your opponent and feel good doing it. In order to look good, you have to have a worthy opponent, and the better the opponent is, the better you are. There are certain individual activities that have this property, and I thought martial arts was one of them. Because if you know karate and your opponent’s just a brawler, the shit’s just not elegant; you just kick their ass. You gotta know the other person’s moves; you need a worthy adversary. So Karate was my worthy adversary piece. I can do the things on the saxophone that I can do best because I had somebody else who could also do the same things.

Four years earlier, in late 1999, Mincek and Hillmer had just started doing gigs together that weren’t part of the Wet Ink series; in fact, they weren’t sure what they were, in terms of their musical goals. Most clear was their ambition: they strove to create as many opportunities to demonstrate their skills and aesthetic visions as possible. They began to wear “uniforms”—souvenier t-shirts from Mincek’s father Zdravko’s 40th birthday. On the front of the shirts the texts said: “Z’s 40.” Within short order Matt Hough—fellow MSM jazz refugee—joined the group on guitar at Hillmer’s behest.

This loose collective, a trio which would incorporate other players like Garchik as the situation warranted, would play at Wet Ink-produced concerts as well as in other settings. The music was largely improvised or based on loose, non-score-based structures, along with several pieces composed by Mincek. The first piece written that was eventually put out under the name Zs was Mincek’s Red on Still, a quartet with Garchik, recorded in 2000 and finally released in 2005 on the Music for Plants compilation. Contrary to the direction the sextet’s music would take, it’s a soft, slow, droning piece, with a delicate guitar punctuating the harmonies in the winds.

Hillmer started work on Olympics in spring of 2001. The piece was scored for the unusual instrumentation of two saxes, two guitars, and two drummers—a furthering orchestration of sorts for the existing relationship between he and Mincek. Olympics is an attack dog of a piece; while canonical structures lie at the base of its structure, it’s immediately grabbing for not only its aggression, but for the extreme precision it requires. In the summer, while working on the second piece for the setup, Retrace a Walk, he ran into guitarist Charlie Looker in Washington, D.C., and asked him to play with the existing group. In the fall he distributed the parts, and that winter rehearsals began.

In January of 2002 Looker played Mimesis, a Mincek composition for two saxophones, guitar, and bass with Z’s 40 at Greenwich House in a program shared with Trio, the improvising project of Christian Wolff, Larry Polansky, and Kui Dong. It was the last performance by the group before it became a formalized entity. But by Hillmer’s reckoning, it was also the first real Zs performance—three of the four principal composers for the forthcoming sextet playing a piece that would be featured on their first record.

Rehearsing the Band

Photo by Peter Gannushkin / DOWNTOWNMUSIC.NET

After Hillmer recruited drummers Alex Hoskins and Brad Wentworth (who had actually already been playing as a duo in a combo at MSM with Mincek and Hough), the group was complete. Intense rehearsals began with whoever was available—Looker, the only non-MSM member, would commute down from his studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut two times a week to join in. The prolific Mincek jumped in to fill out the rest of their repertoire, arranging Mimesis for the sextet instrumentation and writing a new piece, Slalom.

While the instrumentation was conceptually interesting, it also presented certain compositional challenges—saxophone, guitar, and drums are three of the most readily identifiable instruments within popular culture, and the last thing anyone in Zs wanted to do was create music that gave into the inherent expectations that come along with that. Which meant two things: lots of unisons, and lots of what Hillmer refers to as “that pointed ‘bam’ sound”—attack.

Thinking about the group as “one big muscle,” as Mincek puts it, allowed the composers in the group to steer away from preconceived ideas of what the instruments should sound like. “There are so many claims about being hardcore and rocking it and bringing the club scene to new music; but in terms of writing for an instrumentation in an authentic way instead of a pandering way, we were actually doing it. We were saxophonists. We were drummers. We were guitarists. It was internalized with us. So it gave us a good opportunity to take some of the conceptual ideas from the past 20 or 30 years and apply them in a very integrated way towards the instruments in a way that I don’t think many others were doing. I think that was the major triumph of Zs.”

After rehearsing for six months, the band went into the studio to record the four tracks they had worked on—before they had played their first official gig. The music was beyond what any of them had attempted before as performers. “There was no real certainty about whether what we were trying to do was possible,” Hillmer recalls. “It wasn’t like we were doing something within this vocabulary of skills. We just made these things and rose to the occasion. And sometimes, you know, we would have to change what was there.” Mincek puts it more wryly: “Getting a bunch of free-jazz musicians to play rhythms together seemed like a triumph.”

Nevertheless, the first recording session has not aged that well: the two tracks from that session that made it onto their first album, Retrace a Walk and Slalom, ended up being performed far more quickly and dynamically in concert, as evidenced by the 2007 Buck live release. Even after six months of rehearsal, the pieces just weren’t as solid as they would be after gigging them. It was a lesson well considered in the rest of Zs recorded output. Mincek explains:

As a composer, the biggest lesson I learned from Zs: when you finish a piece, the piece is not finished. And this is so sad for the state of composition because when I write for other ensembles, I hear the piece, I hear it rehearsed, I hear the performance, I make some changes, and maybe the piece gets performed again. With Zs, you brought in the piece, and with every rehearsal you could make changes. And then you rehearse it for six months, and after six months you could make changes. And then you toured with it for a year, and a year later you could say to yourself, “This one thing just isn’t right.” Music ain’t finished ’til it’s been out there.

In September 2002, Zs hit its first official gig as a sextet at a noise punk show, and continued to play gigs throughout the fall. That December they recorded Mimesis and Olympics, along with the band’s arrangement of one of Mincek’s pieces; on the record it’s titled Zs, but the members refer to it amongst themselves as “The Anthem.” A guitar plays a lovely progression over light percussion, while the sextet harmonizes ridiculous lyrics about Zs being “a band of mystical bros.” Suffice to say, it sounds like nothing else in their catalog.

The group scored a lucky triumph when it came to finding a label for their first record: Avant-metal guitarist Mick Barr was curating a series on the well regarded hardcore label Troubleman Unlimited, and invited Zs to release what they had. Zs sent the five-piece self-titled EP off to Troubleman that January and continued playing shows throughout the winter before doing a national tour in the summer. Meanwhile Looker composed his first two pieces for the sextet, Play and Glyphs, which were very much in the early Zs style, especially Hillmer’s.

A Brutal Chamber Ensemble

Zs lived a dual life during those three years, before the breakup of the sextet. On the one hand, it was an aggressive band playing within the D.I.Y. Brooklyn scene; on the other, it was a skilled chamber ensemble made up of aspiring concert artists who composed for a wide range of instrumentations. They didn’t attempt to reconcile the two scenes; they simply did both. In each setting, they sought to bring an element of constructive confrontation: “Changing the game through participation.”

On the DIY side, they challenged assumptions about elitism merely through the use of sheet music. It was partly confrontational, but also totally necessary—Slalom, for instance, features a section of continuously similar material which contains about 100 subtly different durations. No one was going to memorize that, no matter how many times it was played. Looker vents, only half-jokingly:

It’s actually normal to know how to read music, at least a little bit. If you’re a musician I don’t think you have to know how, but that is normal. If you took your average sloppy indie punk band and introduced them to a random working salsa trumpet player in Washington Heights, the trumpet player would be like, ‘You can’t read music? But you’re musicians.’ And they’d be like, ‘Oh, you’re all technical,’ and he’d be like, ‘Well I’m not that technical, I just know how to play.'”

On the whole, however, the integration into the Brooklyn scene was constructive and received positive feedback. Zs played with all manner of bands, popular and un-, and made it work through the insistence of their own participation. “In the social ritual of the show, an embedded unity becomes perceptible,” Hillmer explains. “I think not acknowledging this quality of otherness is just sticking your head in the sand, because that’s how people see it. But I think that by styling your participation in a certain way you create the possibility of a perception that there is a larger unity, because everybody totally has the conceptual vocabulary to completely get this music.”

On the concert music side, Zs was perhaps less constructive in the way they challenged the social atmosphere. “Everyone in the new music world is like, ‘such a charming piece,'” Hillmer jokes. “And we were just not on that ‘charming’ shit.”

The music critic Kyle Gann has noted how in the 1980s, every Downtown composer wanted nothing more than to be labeled “kickass,” which lead to a social matrix of inauthentic facades. Zs clearly had no problems with the inclination to write “tough” music (Susan McClary be damned), but it must be an inclination that’s derived from the artist’s life:

I have nothing against un-tough music; but you hear all these people trying to do extreme things with sound, and they talk about timbre and they talk about being visceral, and then they’re pipsqueaks who go home at 8 o’clock and watch Friends and then go to bed. How can you write something that’s arresting and viscerally compelling if you’re not engaged with living? So many people seem so disengaged at the same time they’re trying to write this badass music.

The Zs solution: lead by example. Rejecting the perceived bourgeois manners and politeness in the new music community, Zs created a raucous, rock-star atmosphere in which they could live with and create their difficult, pugnacious art. It would be easy to chalk up their behavior to immaturity, but as musicians completely engaged in both composition and performance they were very sincerely reacting against a phenomenon that they found infuriating on an aesthetic and creative level. “I have serious reservations about how much gravity something can have that’s taking place outside the logic of community,” Hillmer explains.

If you think about every kind of music you can get into—black metal, Detroit techno, early hip hop, whatever—they’re all groups of people who hang out. Except in new music. Composers hang out, but these musicians, it’s like they play a piece, and then when their piece is over they leave before the concert is over. Dude, that sucks. And that affects the music. It’s like there’s this aesthetic of efficiency, like, “How can we all agree to set of parameters that’s going to make it possible to do anything in five rehearsals, and not have to hang out at all, so that we’re getting the highest possible hourly rate for doing this?” That’s what determines the new music aesthetic. That’s what makes all that shit sound the same.

Five rehearsals?

The Center Cannot Hold

After the recording of Karate Bump EP in November of 2003, Hoskins left the band. To fill the vacancy, the band recruited Ian Antonio, an MSM percussionist who had already been playing in Hillmer’s pieces for the continuing Wet Ink series. Today, Antonio is the only member of both Zs and the Wet Ink Ensemble.

From there the band continued writing new pieces, building towards their first full-length release. In 2004 Looker completed Nobody Wants To Be Had, a piece that featured quickly chanted tenor vocal part for Hough and himself in unison with the other instruments. The following year he wrote the vocal-less, entirely monodic B is for Burning. Hough also finally joined the ranks of composers for the sextet, writing the quiet and spacious Magnet in 2004, which was released as a 3” CD single. In 2005 he completed Woodworking, another unison piece that was, “an attempt to be a return to the ‘classic’ Zs sextet sound exemplified in pieces from our first set/record.”

Mincek and Hillmer both composed ambitious pieces that took newfound interest in exact repetition. Hillmer’s I Can’t Concentrate spends its first half engaged with halting unisons played by the entire band before breaking out into more harmonic, contrapuntal textures. It’s the most uncomfortable, truculent piece that was ever written for the sextet. Mincek’s Pendulum clocks in at half the time, but chews through so much material that it feels every bit as epic. It showcased an interest Mincek would carry through to most of his post-Zs music: the relationship between exact repetition and complete difference. Homophony is juxtaposed with polyphony, visceral bombast with tenuous restraint. You could also head bang if you could figure out the beat.

Internally, however, the vibe within the band was souring. Mincek had been accepted into Columbia to study composition in the fall of ’04; while the band continued to play gigs around NYC during that time, touring was almost completely phased out save for a three-date set in March of ’05. All the while the group was accruing enough material for their most ambitious recording yet; Hillmer and Looker were desperate to tour in support. Tempers flared, Hillmer and Mincek stopped speaking to one another, and the dynamic became untenable. On December 22, 2005, Mincek was kicked out of Zs, and Hillmer quit Wet Ink.

Striated Space

There was no thought of recruiting a new saxophonist to replace Mincek. With his absence, the entire dynamic of the band changed. Their dual existence ceased: “That whole era became about getting super hyped about ourselves and about our friends,” Hillmer recalls. “I think the sort of new music involvement for us was representative of this striving to an ideal that seemed beyond us. That was the beginning of the band becoming a band.” Antonio, who had been something of a subsidiary member up to that point, suddenly became much more involved. “I felt like immediately we all had more of a stake in the group,” he explains. “It went from almost like a composers collective that just happened to be functioning more as a rock band than a new music ensemble, to just more of a band.” Wentworth, however, was less committal. He also had little desire to tour for entire seasons, but nonetheless agreed to participate in the recording session for the band’s first full-length, Arms.

The quintet that went in to record Arms was playing sextet music, forcing Hillmer to record both saxophone parts. Pendulum obviously was no longer on the table, leaving the selections at: Looker’s Nobody Wants To Be Had and B is for Burning; Hough’s Woodworking, soon to become a national hit on the Howard Stern show; Hillmer’s I Can’t Concentrate and Except When You Don’t Because Sometimes You Won’t; and the collaboratively written (and fairly goofy) pieces Balk and Z is for Zone.

Hillmer and Looker, now “frothed up” on touring, began to book for the summer even before the new quartet had any music. The band holed up in Hillmer’s parents’ house in D.C. in May to write their next piece; and this time, there was a deliberate change of compositional process. The sextet piece Bump had been written collaboratively on a retreat three years prior; now, they wanted to tap into that same energy in writing one long piece to play on the upcoming tour. The band was now making an effort to bring out the individuality of each member, not just the composer of the piece, by leaving each person responsible for their own parts. To further negate any lingering sense of symmetry from the old setup, Looker moved from guitar to keyboard.

The Hard EP emerged in a nascent version after four days in D.C. “Hough really manifested in that incarnation of the band,” Hillmer recalls, “and in that piece especially. He contributed a lot. His harmonic sensibility is just all over that shit.” The piece functions as a series of panels, rife with repeats; the opening sonic monolith is created through short burst from guitar, keyboard, drums, and screamed-through saxophone, which breaks into a typically Zs beat. More than anything, the timbre of the band had changed, moreso than the mere addition of keyboards; Antonio simplified his percussion setup to include fewer sounds, and Hillmer, as he describes it, “ditched the note vibe.”

I think the absence of a second saxophone player makes playing “notes” less interesting, rather than these textured jabs. I also wanted to get away from it because it was becoming so boring to play so many notes. And that’s a cue I took from Mincek. The Hard EP is more like Mincek’s pieces than my old pieces.

They began their first tour as a quartet in June of ’06, playing a 25-minute version of The Hard EP. When they recorded the piece a year and a half later, it was down to 15 minutes. It had to live on the road before it was done. “It takes a really long time to internalize the form of a long piece like that, and do it as one gesture,” Hillmer explains. “We were going for length when we wrote it, but in executing it a million times, it’s just like, this is boring if this goes on for this long.” From June 17 until July 22 of that year they played 30 shows across the country, not only at the typical stops like Chicago and California, but places like Idaho, South Dakota, and Kansas as well. They were a touring band again.

Mood Music for the Mental Home

A touring schedule that intense is simply not something that everybody could handle. The first casualty had been Mincek, and the second was Hough, who was planning on going back to MSM for a degree in composition. He explains:

The hefty amount of touring that we were planning on doing at the time would not have been possible while being in school full time. I also needed to work on myself as an artist, and to work on my own vision–Zs, conceptually speaking, was essentially Sam’s project, and although the music at the time of The Hard EP was a total collaborative effort, I wanted to branch out into other projects and no longer had the desire to continue putting time into Zs at the expense of my own individual work.

Hough’s leaving would also sow the seeds for another departure the next year; burned out from a summer touring, he also cancelled his participation in an early fall tour with Seductive Sprigs, his duo with Looker. Instead, Looker went on the road as a solo act he called Extra Life.

In the meantime, however, Looker remained firmly entrenched as a critical member of Zs, and arranged his two Arms pieces for the new quartet formation. Hough, however, had to be replaced; the band was not about to rewrite an entire set only a few months after the splurge of creativity that spawned The Hard EP. Looker recommended his student at The New School, Ben Greenberg.

From the first rehearsal, Looker recalls, Greenberg simply nailed it. Hillmer relates what it was like incorporating him into the group:

I feel like Ben is the one who actually made that ‘personalities’ vibe happen. We were all like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be about individuals,’ but we were still stuck in the old mindset. But when Ben joined, he was able to just start there and move on from it, whereas for us getting to it was a major loosening and opening. He just tore the shit up.

Ben Greenberg
Photo by Mercurialn

While he played a normal Stratocaster for Looker’s rearranged pieces (and sang second tenor for Nobody Wants to Be Had), for The Hard EP Greenberg brought his own distinct sound world to the table, and the piece changed significantly. Greenberg’s especially bright timbre comes from not only his particular style, but his choice in equipment: his guitar has a lucite body and aluminum neck, and he plays with a metal pick, creating a sound screaming with upper harmonics. “He has this calculated sloppiness that I think is actually really deep,” Hillmer says. “He’s incredibly zeroed in, but the way he plays is cavalier, shooting from the hip, stumbling but strutting, confident but vulnerable. He’s just a really interesting dude in terms of how he’s relating to the instrument.” It’s with Greenberg’s addition that Zs really started to move in a new aesthetic direction.

In the Fall of ’07, a year and a half after it was recorded and with only three of the original participants still in the group, Arms was finally released by Planaria Records. The band was still playing arrangements of three of the tracks off the album—Looker’s two pieces, and a clapping, saxless arrangement of Hillmer’s Except When You Don’t—but their live set was still centered on the as-yet-unrecorded The Hard EP. However, the band got a flood of press from an unlikely source: Howard Stern.

On November 6, 2007, Stern played several tracks from Arms—most prominently Hough’s Woodworking—and made fun of them. “It’s mood music, if you’re in a mental home,” he exclaimed. Over the next couple days the album kept coming up, eliciting bizarre and often hilarious claims about the total lack of skill of the band, as well as series of not-quite-facts about John Cage. On the third day, the Stern crew brought out their own instruments and proceeded to create their own “avant-garde music,” complete with guitar, trumpet, and bong sounds. “One of the pieces they did was pretty good,” Antonio observes.

This episode happened the same week as a bizarre noise performance on Conan O’Brien by Animal Collective, who had toured with Zs back in ’03. “It was the week the Brooklyn scene blew up,” Hillmer recalls. Along with the rest of the scene, that fall and winter album orders increased, and more people started showing up at their shows. Zs wasn’t exactly hitting it big time, but they were making good on their basic mission: “Get the shit heard.”

Turn and Face the Strange

“Zs isn’t really something you can do half way,” Looker explains. “You can’t just kind of do it while you’re mainly doing some other shit. Really, I was just getting so into being a singer from just casually doing Extra Life. It just became, “Oh, actually, I just want to be all about singing.” And Zs is not something that could have accommodated me being like, “Guys, we’re a cooperative, but I want to be the lead singer.”

Individual expression within a group dynamic has its allure, but it often loses out to the draw of creating objects of purely personal expression. Mincek had clearly placed his priority in being a composer over a performer. Hough left to find his own voice outside of the collective of Zs as well. Now, Looker realized that he wanted to prioritize his own work as a songwriter over the band.

Zs had been playing Nobody Wants to Be Had for more than three years, and B is for Burning for two. The Hard EP had settled into its final form and been their main focus for a year and a half; they had played these pieces at least a hundred times, and were getting burned out. In the fall of ’07 they were talking about moving on to a new creative phase, the next collaborative piece; Looker realized it was the time to leave and focus on Extra Life. His last show was at the Issue Project Room on December 7, 2007, just shy of the quartet’s 90th gig together, two years to the month after Mincek had been forced out. The band went into Greenberg’s basement, set up one overhead microphone, and recorded The Hard EP in one take. It was Looker’s last performance with the band.

Zs in Missoula, MO
Photo by Holotone

Looker’s exit prompted a major dynamic shift once again. The band lost not only the sound of his vocals, but his compositional voice as well. The sextet had been to some degree about the friendship between Mincek and Hillmer; the quartet was about the friendship between Hillmer and Looker. After Looker left, Hillmer says, “It was just three dudes in a room. I really didn’t have a relationship with Ben. There was no precedent for us being creative together, for us even hanging out.” Hillmer, Antonio, and Greenberg decided against bringing in a fourth member in order to feel out the new social and creative dynamic within the group, and took to writing music as a collective trio. Over the winter of 2008, they finished the first version of New Slaves, and brought it on tour in support of the record release of The Hard EP.

“New Slaves, man,” Hillmer lets a knowing grin pass over his face. “Writing and learning that piece was hell. It’s just become fun.” It’s maybe the most ambitious piece Zs has ever done, and certainly the longest at just over 20 minutes. Like many of the pieces the band had been writing since the end of the sextet period, New Slaves is composed of repeating cells; their function, however, has been reimagined. A vigorous three-note riff repeats for almost four minutes before the texture shifts, with the only variance coming from Greenberg’s improvisational flourishes. New elements get introduced, blended together, jerking between new material and old in the most viscerally compelling way. As the riffs keep coming, the grander scheme is revealed: all the material points to the same thing, a sort of über-melody.

“It’s very rhetorical,” Hillmer notes. “It’s sort of like approaching a subject matter and then backing up and then approaching it and then backing up; and then you create this thesis that seems so powerful because you’ve built up this context for it to exist in.” The piece reaches a near frenzy of shifting cells by the halfway point, whereupon it collapses into a loud drone that lasts the rest of the duration.

Well, at least that’s how it ended up. The “long, obtuse riff” that became the generating point for all the material arose out of rehearsals, but the myriad formal elements that make up the pieces, large and small, didn’t end up existing in their current form until it was taken on the road. It wasn’t until midway through the summer ’08 tour that they even realized that they had the form backwards; before that point the drone section had opened the piece. Even more than The Hard EP, New Slaves was largely composed on the road.

Which had its implications for one of the most readily identifiable aspects of the band: sheet music. Initially a score existed for New Slaves, as one had for every piece Zs had written. After just the second performance of the piece, however, Greenberg left his score at the venue and was forced to perform from memory the next night. Antonio forgot his score during the summer tour. “Ben and I never went back to reading music after that,” Antonio recalls. “Because we were just like, oh, we can play this from memory, and it’s better. Sam had one piece of paper that he kept around taped to my bass drum, and then eventually he just stopped using it. Sam actually takes a little bit of paper and puts it on his bottom teeth—a lot of saxophone players do that to protect their lower lip, I guess—and he just kept ripping off that one piece of paper until it just disappeared. He ate the score, basically.”

Something also notable about New Slaves was how far Zs music had traveled from Mincek’s original conception of not “pandering to the instruments.” Rather than now existing in a space where everything amalgamated into a unified arm identifiable as nothing other than itself, each instrument was now engaging in activity that could only be identified as a guitar or saxophone or drums, as almost a caricature. Greenberg even takes a solo over the beginning of the piece. Antonio’s drum part resembles a Neil Peart drum fill, but it’s only a drum fill, played without break for minutes at a time. The use of repetition robs the objects of their cultural identity with each iteration. There’s also an element of sheer physicality that really manifests as a primary concern with The Hard EP, but which New Slaves brings to an even higher level. “The Hard EP was incredibly difficult to play live. It was incredibly physically draining,” Antonio says. “And I think when you realize that, it becomes a challenge for you, and you try to push it even further. And then New Slaves is even more a test of your endurance. There’s a certain pleasure in pain that comes out of that, too, for the audience as well as the performers.”

This Might Be Jive

While New Slaves was being road tested, Zs was presented with the opportunity of joining The Social Registry, an emergent label that distributes Gang Gang Dance’s records. Hillmer knew he wanted to make the next big Zs album, the real follow up to Arms, but also knew it would take another two years. To take up the opportunity with Social Registry, Zs decided to try something completely different. Each member went into the “studio”—Greenberg’s basement—and laid down a track. Then another member would record something on top of that, and the process would go on until they were satisfied with the results. After adding a live recording of the clapping version of Except When You Don’t, the band had its newest release, Music of the Modern White, produced by Greenberg and released in 2009.

“It’s just pure studio experimentation,” Hillmer explains. “Ian was like, ‘this just seems jive to me.’ I was like, ‘Yes! It’s jive! That’s good!’ You’ve gotta be vulnerable. And I think that actually is a fault in early Zs. If you go back, it’s airtight, we’re awesome, it’s killing, it’s clean; but it’s like, ‘okay, good for you.’ It’s about how awesome we are. But you’re supposed to be awesome. Music of the Modern White was really about smashing that sense. It’s about ‘this might be jive.'”

In the meanwhile, Hillmer was still pushing for the creation of the next big album, but the band needed significantly more material than just New Slaves. The first piece to be added was Concert Black—an inelaborate piece for layered guitar harmonics based on a riff constructed by Hillmer (who actually played guitar when it was performed live for a period of time). It might be the simplest piece in Zs history—a direct reaction to the burnout from the compositional acrobatics employed for New Slaves. The other collaborative piece composed during this time was based off a riff that Greenberg brought in, Acres of Skin. The guitars achieve their broken-bell-like sound by crossing each of the three pairs of guitar strings over each other, under which Hillmer and Antonio clap out a supporting rhythm.

And, yes, guitars. Now that the next artistic phase was well under way, the group decided to bring in a new second guitarist to fill out the sound. Hillmer asked Amnon Freidlin of the Philadelphia band Normal Love to join the group; he played his first Zs gig in June of 2009.

The big new album—titled New Slaves after the big new piece that would be its centerpiece—was recorded that fall. “New Slaves is supposed to be the formal breadth and compositional depth of Arms, the execution of The Hard EP, and the studio relationship of Music of the Modern White. That was the idea from the beginning,” explains Hillmer. Yet, despite the major force that is New Slaves the piece, the group had only collectively composed about 30 minutes of music—in order to achieve their aspirations, still more material would need to be written. They came up with a solution that actually harkened back to the sextet’s composer collective: individually composed portrait pieces.

After Concert Black and Acres of Skin open up the album, Greenberg’s Gentleman Amateur amalgamates a collection of electronic banshee wails into a cohesive five minutes. Antonio’s piece Masonry, performed on marimba, functions as palette-cleansing piece before New Slaves. Grandest in conception is Hillmer’s Black Crown Ceremony, a 23-minute, two-movement creation—one part saxophone improvisation, one part musique concrète—that closes out the album.

Freidlin’s Don’t Touch Me not only doesn’t really sound like the other tracks on the record, it doesn’t really sound like Zs at all. “There was something about the band—it’s not that he didn’t get it, but I don’t think it’s what he wanted to do,” says Hillmer. On January 29, 2010, only seven months after his first appearance, he played his last show with the group. The group brought in Tony Lowe—Greenberg’s housemate, former member of the Skeletons, a band that had frequently shared bills with Zs over the years. He was thrown into the fire immediately, given only two rehearsals to get everything together before a tour of Texas for South-by-Southwest. “It was, yeah, intense,” Lowe recalls. “I spent a week of eight- to twelve-hour days sitting in my room learning New Slaves.” In interviews, the other members are in total agreement: Lowe is the right fit.

Act Like You Know

The difficult thing about constructing a cohesive Zs timeline is that while there are clear markers when albums are released and band members change, everything is in constant flux. During the rehearsal for their record release show at the Knitting Factory earlier this May, the band was still making significant changes to the arrangements of not only the set list, but the pieces themselves. Acres of Skin sounds totally different live than on the album; in Hillmer’s basement the night before the gig, the band added a momentary tacit before the loud section at the end, allowing Hillmer’s sax to enter with an entirely unstable and visceral high note. It may now be the most arresting feature in the music, and it wasn’t there until months after it was recorded, over a year after it was written. Even New Slaves received some minor modifications. Mincek’s assertion about when a piece is done might have to be slightly amended in this case: music isn’t finished until you’re no longer playing it.

And it’s surprising how little ego is involved in the process—every member contributed something, many things actually, and perhaps the most complacent was Hillmer, who looked nothing if not pleased at the machinery he had seen through the last decade. Greenberg and Lowe previewed a guitar part they had been working on, which Zs hopes to turn into a piece they can introduce on their upcoming summer gigs in Europe—the band’s first tour off the continent. Hillmer referred to the new piece as “some awesome Terry Riley shit.” He laughed. “I can’t wait to play over that.” The next night they killed it before a crowd of about 200 people. Not a sellout, but as good a showing as you’ll likely find for experimental music of this sort.

When Zs started, it contained a germ that could have sprouted in a dozen different ways—a few different moves, and the band could be one of the most hyped chamber ensembles on the new music scene; or if they had moderated their sound and ideas, they could be totally ensconced in the indie music behemoth that has grown out of Brooklyn in the last few years. But what Zs is most of all is inspiring. It’s a clear signal that composers and performers, given ample vision and skill, can shape their own way in whatever context they want. Anybody could start at the same point Zs did in 2001—disenchanted musicians trying to do something different—and move along their own path. The one action that might be totally futile is trying to follow the same course. Good luck on that.

Photo by Brian Sacawa The preliminary differentiation of musical categories by means of this reasonable and usable criterion of “degree of determinacy” offends those who take it to be a definition of qualitative categories, which–of course–it need not always be. Curiously, their demurrers usually take the familiar form of some such “democratic” counterdefinition as: “There is no such thing as ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music. There is only ‘good’ and ‘bad’ music.” As a public service, let me offer those who still patiently await the revelation of the criteria of Absolute Good an alternative criterion which possesses, at least, the virtue of immediate and irrefutable applicability: “There is no such thing as ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music. There is only music whose title begins with the letter ‘X,’ and music whose title does not.” —Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen? (The Composer as Specialist, 1958)

In 1937, composer John Cage foreshadowed the use of electronic instruments to “make available any and all sounds that can be heard.” It wasn’t long before his prediction would begin to be realized, yet could Cage himself have foreseen the scope with which electronic music would be integrated into our modern world? From underground hip hop (People Under The Stairs) to internationally hailed festivals (DEMF, MUTEK) and artists (Daft Punk, Bjork); from the sophisticated, innovative beats of Aphex Twin to the “soulless electronic pop” sprinkled into the minds of listeners by Lady Gaga (as she referred to her own music in an interview with The Guardian); from funky Nu Jazz to fast-paced car commercials; and from experimental, avant-garde shows at IRCAM to commissions by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, electronic music is a ubiquitous voice in contemporary culture.

Throughout history, musicians and historians alike have sought to qualify music into periods, isms, genres, subgenres, and camps. Not only relegated to classical idioms, music of all styles has been peppered with divisive definitions, rivalries, and, as a natural byproduct of such things, stark restrictions. Yet despite all of these categorizations, what is finally emerging is transcendence beyond such minute distinctions. Looking back over the past decade, perhaps the defining characteristic of early 21st-century music is that the once (often bitterly) divided schools of musical thought are becoming irrelevant in today’s increasingly pluralistic discourse. Indignant and sardonic commentary is seldom printed in musical journals or reviews nowadays (though I imagine the relative safety of intimate social gatherings affords composers and critics a much-needed outlet for their more acerbic thoughts). Indeed, would the deliciously rabid cat-fighting of Schaeffer vs. Stockhausen or Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky or the blanket disdain of Boulez for anyone not a disciple of Boulez find a supportive audience in the current didactic conversion towards a globalized fusion of cultural ideals?

Though a pervasive, polarizing divide between “high art” and “popular art” still exists (a split enforced throughout the centuries by philosophers and historians delighting in their common derision for “lower” art forms), such categorical definitions are quickly evaporating, particularly in the American musical scene. Innovative concert series across the country successfully program multiple genres of music within the same evening (often with electronic-based artists), and are conspicuously forging a new archetype for the concert-going experience. In 2000 Joel Chadabe predicted as much, writing in Computer Music Journal:

At this particular moment in the history of computer music, the flow of ideas between high art and popular art seems to have a particular significance. Indeed, the protective parapet that has long kept high art and popular art mutually exclusive seems to be showing signs of vulnerability. It seems that we are about to enter a new cultural architecture that we cannot yet describe; yet we are aware that technology is changing the world and that it will also change the world of computer music.

So where do we go from here? What is the future of “classical” music when the far reaches of a composer’s mind can be fantasized, realized, synthesized and digitally reproduced within a matter of hours, all from the comfort of one’s own bedroom, all without using a single performer or acoustic instrument? While the symphonic orchestra maintains its status as an important tenant of classical music culture, one cannot deny the cyborgian evolution that is encompassing all walks of life in the 21st century—naturally the increasing digitalization of modern society must find also itself represented in the arts. Traditionalists still extol the virtues of acoustic instruments, established mediums, and historical creations, and vociferously defend centuries of classical tradition and its artifacts. Their conviction is admirable, and their passion for preserving our cultural genealogy is imperative in today’s disposable, distractible, digitally obsessed society. However, polarization between traditionalism and modernism is detrimental to the human spirit; true progress cannot be celebrated if only a select few are privileged to receive it, understand it, and benefit from it. Music technology and computer music are brilliant fields of research, yet the advancements in musical and scientific discovery are sequestered and generally confined to academic circles. The average person knows what an orchestra is but more than likely does not know what a gestural controller is. The average music aficionado can easily identify the melodic strains of a violin yet probably has never heard of FM synthesis. Though electronic music is pervasive in popular art forms, the sounds penetrating the ears of its audience are more then likely 4/4, 120 bpm deep house beats or high-energy, techno-driven laptop performances—experimental, esoteric sounds traveling through multi-channel sound diffusion are generally not found on the dance floor. Yet these two worlds are not so far apart, and collaboration between the two seems an obvious progression in an ideal 21st-century music model. Examples of this can be seen in the music of Jonny Greenwood and Owen Pallett, both of whom use Max/MSP (traditionally used by academic composers) to elaborate their electronic sounds. Indeed it is telling that the company that makes Ableton Live, the renowned music software used primarily by electronic DJ’s and producers, recently co-released Max for Live in partnership with Cycling ’74, the company that handles Max/MSP. The move effectively merges these previously somewhat disparate fields of music creation.

The increasingly successful merging of “high art” with underground art and/or “popular art” can be viewed in the numerous efforts of performers to straddle these two worlds. Innovative projects in this vein are rapidly gaining popularity; pianist Jade Simmons’s partnership with hip-hop producer Robert Reynolds, pianist Kathleen Supové’s collaboration with techno DJ/producer Jeff Mills, and The Knife’s foray from electro-pop into opera are but a few exciting examples of a new paradigm being forged in music, one that eradicates the now-hollow boundaries of genre, form, and tradition. As such projects become more abundant, the dissolution of preconceived notions and prejudices towards art outside one’s sphere of definition has naturally grown more prevalent. In defining this new course, the audience has grown more accepting and adventurous, contemporary music finds itself increasingly hip.

Intent on exploring these questions, I sought conversations with four progressive individuals who consistently utilize new technologies, forms, and sonic palettes to cross boundaries and expand the listener’s expectations for sonic art. Though each descends from traditional classical music studies, each composer/performer/sound designer uniquely merges this foundation with other influences such as trip-hop, noise-rock, dance music, and computer science to create innovative and distinctive electronically infused sounds. Whether wielding an iPhone as a controller (Ken Ueno), using NASA recordings as sound sources (Mason Bates), supervising a hemisphere of laptops (Rebecca Fiebrink), or morphing Brazilian rhythms into dark, ambient sonorities (Ricardo Romaneiro), each represents a unique approach to electronic sound production and performance, successfully cultivating and interfusing their diverse musical experiences into inventive compositions and projects. What follows are intimate discussions of each composer’s work, personal experiences, and philosophies, and their ruminations on life and musical art in the 21st century.

Julieanne Klein

Praised for her expressivity, warmth of sound and “astonishing vocal colors,” New York-based soprano Julieanne Klein is a versatile singer renowned for her ability to bring dramatic interpretations and exquisite beauty of sound to complex contemporary music. A devoted champion of 20th and 21st-century music, she has performed and premiered works throughout North America and Europe, including Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Baltimore, London, Manchester, and Hvar, Croatia. Klein has an intense passion for electronic music of all scopes and completed her doctorate in the area of voice and live/interactive electronic music at McGill University (Montreal). She has presented lectures on this topic at McGill University, California Institute of the Arts, and Chapman University, and will present a lecture at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts in November 2010. Upcoming performances include a world premiere by Zosha Di Castri with the JACK Quartet (New York) and a full concert of voice and live electronic works written for her (Montreal, Vienna).