Category: Analysis

David Rothenberg in his Element Photo by David Keller

There are at least two ways contemporary music in America has made use of nature—by directly making use of the sounds of nature as musical material, or else in works that desire to imitate nature “in its manner of operation.” That is, they are constructed the way nature is, they work the way nature works, rather than sounding the way nature sounds.

When I put together The Book of Music and Nature (Wesleyan, 2001) a few years ago, I emphasized the difference between these two approaches. Today I tend to think that the most successful musical attempts to learn from nature put these two approaches together.

Why would any composer want to learn from nature? Well, why would music consider anything else for inspiration? Nature is where we come from, and with all the distinctiveness that humanity brings to the circle of life, nature is where we are struggling to get back to. Where all other species and forms of life easily fit into the niche they have been given, humanity has the power and ignorance to destroy the planet. We must fight as hard as we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. Perhaps music can help us.

Inner Pages:

• Music Out of Natural Sound
• Music Formed from Natural Processes
• Collaborating with Nature
• Deep Listening and the Politics of Natural Music
• Some Additional Web Resources

The minute a composer thinks of directly integrating natural sound into music, there is a challenge to our whole sense of musical aesthetic. As austere a commentator as Immanuel Kant realized this in his famous tome on aesthetics, Critique of Judgment, way back in 1790. Why, wondered the great rationalist, do we never tire of listening to the simple melodies of birds, whereas if a human being were to take two or three notes and repeat them endlessly, we would soon get fed up with it? Bird song, Kant decided, was not really beautiful, but actually sublime, something wonderfully alien to our world of understanding, beguiling but always remaining beyond our reach.

Kant admits there is something more powerful about the alien pull of nature’s shapes and sounds. They are wild, irregular, bold, shocking, and can soon make us disillusioned with our merely human arts. Natural sounds are exuberant and minutely complex. We ought be satisfied with the way it is. No human can improve upon it, but in recognizing its imperviousness, might we be able to better ourselves?

Alan Hovhaness realized this when he chose to use actual whale sounds in his 1970 piece And God Created Great Whales, one of his most famous pieces, yet one often derided by critics. Why? Because it does something genuinely risky with those famous humpback whale songs, which are played on tape along with a live orchestra as accompaniment and inspiration for this partly aleatoric work, a rare but successful opportunity for orchestral musicians to improvise in the midst of a symphonic work. Here’s how Hovhaness describes it: “Free rhythmless vibrational passages suggest waves in a vast ocean sky. Each string player plays independently. Undersea mountains rise and fall in horns, trombones, and tuba. Music of whales also rises and falls like mountain ranges. Song of whales emerges like a giant mythical sea bird. Man does not exist, has not yet been born into the solemn oneness of Nature.”

So when the orchestra meets the whales, previous rules are cast aside. Nowhere else in Hovhaness’s music does improvisation appear so specifically. It is as if he is acknowledging that to meet these great alien undersea musicians, the players in the orchestra must cast aside all conventions and play along with the mysteries that happen.

New Zealand-born composer Annea Lockwood, who has lived in the United States for thirty years and has taught at Hunter and Vassar Colleges, recently retired to devote her full energies to soundscape compositions. The word soundscape was coined by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer in the sixties to describe the fact that the world around us can be heard, not just seen. Like the landscape, it varies consistently and can be appreciated and aesthetically judged according to different criteria. Are all-natural sounds better than human ones? Is nature more beautiful than culture? What does it take to make music out of such sounds? Deep listening, careful manipulation, or emulation in music made on human instruments?

Lockwood has written thoughtful and meditative works that take natural sounds at face value. She tends not to manipulate what she records all that much, preferring instead to reveal the richness and beauty of what is actually out there. Her most well-known such piece is Sound Map of the Hudson River, assembled out of recordings of the whole river’s length into a seventy minute flowing work. Lockwood records the Hudson River from its source in the Adirondack Mountains to the Lower Bay of New York City and the Atlantic Ocean. Each place has its own sonic texture, its own particular quality. Indeed, the sound of flowing water is always fascinating, pleasant, and meditative and connects with us in an important, subliminal way. Water sounds are always calming and absorbing at the same time. As Lockwood put it, “It occurred to me that water sounds are so calming because, at one level, it seems as if the sound isn’t really changing. And so the part of one’s audio system that’s scanning for new input is calmed. And, on another level, the intricacy of the sound absorbs the mind, so you don’t necessarily fall asleep or become disengaged. The mind is both lulled and absorbed at the same time. It’s a combination that keeps the listener inside the sound.” Recently Lockwood has been at work on a similar project on the Danube in Austria and Hungary. < /p>

Her World Rhythms is an improvised live mix of soundscape recordings. Most of the sounds are more primal than “pretty”: volcanoes, earthquakes, geysers, and radio waves from a pulsar in deep space. Lockwood’s fascination with the sound of running water lends a more familiar voice, along with lake waves, a fire, and tree frogs, with a single large gong providing a slow, spontaneous pulse beneath it all. The result is an impressionistic sonic immersion, free of the cacophony that can sometimes result from editing together such diverse sources.

Douglas Quin is a fine composer making intricate, interesting works out of a range of natural sounds, which he has collected himself from tropical rainforests to the ice of Antarctica. All his works are described at dqmedia.com, and I was privileged to collaborate with him on the CD, Before the War, available from EarthEar.

Excerpt from Richard Lerman’s A Matter of Scale

Composer Richard Lerman is a populist of natural recording technology. He makes inexpensive (under $1) microphones out of piezoelectric disks (small, flat pieces of metal) and attaches them to blades of grass and lets raindrops fall on them. Sometimes he lets hundreds of ants walk all over them in the desert. The sounds he produces and assembles are immediate, shocking, intensified, and brilliant. His work expands the infinitesimal sounds of the natural world into noises that are wide and surrounding, changing our human sense of scale. In Sonora, which appears on the CD accompaning The Book of Music and Nature, the bass clarinet improvises a place in the midst of this vast and enhanced soundscape. His two released CDs of soundscape recordings, Within Earreach and A Matter of Scale, are the finest examples of how art can be derived directly from the sounds of the natural environment through the careful massaging of recording technology.

In the midst of this piece you will hear rain on the needles of fire-charred saguaro cactus, wasps spinning around in the sand, carpenter bees boring into long-dead trees, and the rustle of small red weeds in the dry wind.

What’s most special about Lerman’s work is the quality of the sounds themselves and the overall aesthetic vision that holds them together. He never claims to represent the world the way it sounds “out there,” but neither does he consider his specially gathered sounds as raw musical material. The sounds instruct the form—through them a vision of how the music ought to be assembled comes to life.

Anyone can afford this inexpensive recording technology, and Lerman will gladly tell you how to assemble piezoelectric microphones out of materials you can pick up at any electronics store. There is a wealth of information on his work on his website. For general information on the many ways natural sounds can be recorded see Gino Robair‘s fine cover story last year in Electronic Musician magazine.

From Nature in Music
by David Rothenberg
© 2003 NewMusicBox</p

Jed Distler multitasking Photo by Randy Nordschow

The great lyricist Johnny Mercer liked to tell the story of how his wife Ginger struck up a conversation with a stranger. Asked what her husband did, Ginger replied that he wrote songs. The stranger replied, “Yes, but what does he do for a living?”

Many composers, in fact, make handsome livings solely from writing music. Others, like me, do not, or I should say, not yet. After all, I subscribe to Virgil Thomson’s succinct definition of composition as “what composers do.”

Still, the non-composing things composers do often generate more buzz. For example, I recently turned pages for my old friend and former composition teacher Andrew Thomas during a rehearsal for one of his works. Andy introduced me to the ensemble’s student musicians, saying I was a composer and pianist. Blank stares. He mentioned that I wrote CD reviews for Gramophone. Suddenly the students got interested. They hounded me with questions. Do you choose what you review? How do you become a critic? I’ve got a friend with a CD out, my teacher has a new CD, and can you review my CD? Gimme, gimme, gimme.

How does one handle this situation? I shrugged off the questions by saying it’s the editor’s decision what discs to review, not mine. That isn’t always true, but at least I got out of the conversation gracefully. Later on, I realized that I lost an opportunity for a horse trade. “Sure, kid. I’ll review your CD. And when will you play my woodwind quintet?”

But that never happens. For starters, as a reviewer, I almost always decline to write about contemporary music. Because I present, perform, and compose new music, I feel it would be a conflict of interest if I wrote about my peers. Other composer/critics from Robert Schumann and Hugo Wolf up through Virgil Thomson and Kyle Gann don’t see it that way, but I hold to my opinion. On the rare occasions I do write about a contemporary composer or performer, it’s usually someone I know personally, and I make my bias painfully clear from the get go. So I stick to, say, Alfred Brendel’s Mozart or Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven. But who knows, maybe Barenboim will someday conduct my music and, after the first rehearsal, ask me just what I meant by his “elephantine tempi” for the Goldberg Variations!

For many composers, the connections between the composing side and the non-composing side are often biographical details left unsaid. If a stranger at a party asks what I do, I simply say that I write music and I play the piano. But I can probably equally be pegged as an established new music pianist, a cabaret accompanist, a society bandleader, a lecturer on dead pianists, a Broadway pit band principal keyboard player, a teacher, an off-Broadway music director, arts panel judge, the world’s most accurate Art Tatum and Bill Evans transcriber, a pop arranger specializing in airline boarding videos, a record reviewer, a ballet pianist, a program note writer, a church musician, a radio personality, and a concert producer under the auspices of ComposersCollabrative, inc., the organization I founded with my wife Celia Cooke in 1987, for whom I serve as Artistic Director. Which of the above is the real me? They all are.

To disparage a life not spent entirely writing music, people like to point to Charles Ives composing at night and selling insurance by day until a nervous breakdown prematurely ended his double life. Ives, for many reasons, was an extreme case. But many composers who’ve had to hold down “day jobs” have made the best of both worlds. By working in music in another ways besides composing, many of our most important composers have changed the history of music in more ways than one. And the influences stemming from such a double life have served both muses.

Who better to be in charge of an arts organization or a conservatory than a composer? Think William Schuman at Lincoln Center, Peter Mennin at Juilliard or, even better, Howard Hanson at the Eastman School who established that any composer studying there was guaranteed a performance of their music by the orchestra. Who has a better ear to make recordings than a composer? Think Goodard Lieberson, who ran Columbia Masterworks for years, or producers like David Behrman and Richard Einhorn. Or, more recently, John Zorn’s label Tzadik. Who better to make the collections between all the various camps within the music industry than a composer? Think John Duffy who founded Meet the Composer and all the successful composer residencies that organization has engendered for almost 30 years. But, oops, I’m breaking my rule about not writing about new music…

As it happens, I’ve been inventing music from day one. At three or four years old, before I even learned to read notes, I was fascinated by notation, and made circular sketches on blank music paper. It was infinitely easier and more fun to improvise than to sit and practice written music for my weekly piano lessons. Another childhood fascination that persists into my late middle age are large musical projects, in the form of long pieces, cyclical works, festivals, and multi-record sets. I went nuts over Bob Dylan’s increasingly longer and longer songs (to this day I can sing all the verses of Desolation Row from memory!). The more minutes and seconds the Grateful Dead jammed on Dark Star, or John Coltrane improvised on My Favorite Things, the more I needed to hear it. When I caught pneumonia and had to miss two weeks of fourth grade, my parents bought me the Solti Ring to while away my bedridden hours. That led to a mercifully brief yet fondly remembered obsession with the Jerry Lewis Telethon, and I’m ashamed to admit that I audio taped the entire 1968 event on my trusty Wollensak Reel-To-Reel deck (the tape no longer exists, in case you’re wondering). Similar obsessions provided the impetus for my journalism career. I began writing reviews in 1992, largely because I couldn’t afford all those tempting box set reissues flooding the market. Since reviewers usually got free discs and I had pretty good writing skills, I thought I’d give it a try. Amazingly enough, every magazine that I approached took me on, except for the two lowest paying American record review journals.

How do all these activities influence my composing? I can’t say that being CCi’s Artistic Director influences the kind of music I write. Yet the position decisively shaped how I disseminate my music. When CCi commissions new works for the Non Sequitur Festival, we expect that the composer and his or her collaborative partner will honor the deadlines and conditions they agree to when they accept our invitation. Our ground rules reinforce the fact that I need to be as conscientious as possible when preparing scores and parts. Should I not be able to honor a deadline, I make every effort to renegotiate. Sometimes I’m invited to sit on panels for grants. When we sift through the proposals, I find I’m always biased towards clean, well-organized presentations and high quality, clearly marked audio. I used to be rather lax with my own proposals and figured that intelligent listeners could discern quality music making despite substandard engineering. Wrong-o!

And being a performer unquestionably influences how I compose. The more I collaborate with other musicians, the more I take the physicality of their instruments into account, or the possibilities and limitations of the human voice. I’ve learned how to trust really good, devoted musicians and let them muddle through a first rehearsal without my comments. Later on, I can make suggestions. In turn, musicians come up with suggestions that bring me closer to what I had in mind.

Listening to music and studying scores crucially factor into a composer’s formative years. Before I became a professional record reviewer, I used to raid the Lincoln Center Library and spend countless hours pouring over unfamiliar repertoire. I became fascinated with comparing different performances of the same work. And, most importantly, I played through a lot of piano duet arrangements of chamber, orchestral, and operatic repertoire. This not only developed my sight-reading, but also allowed me to experience the music actively from the inside, as opposed to passive (however attentive) listening. As a reviewer, of course, I get paid to listen and compare, and to continue discovering repertoire and performers I didn’t know before. When it comes to music making, excellence simply abounds. I also notice more composers and performers taking the record industry into their own hands, forming their own labels, and cultivating their own followings. That’s the way it should be: from Harry Partch to Philip Glass, from the Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe label to Michael Torke’s newly launched Ecstatic Music. I don’t have my own record label, but I circulate my live performances among tape and CDR traders via the Internet. There’s a huge network of music lovers who trade live concert recordings via the Internet, including myself, and it’s a great way to spread your music and create community with no money changing hands. Free publicity, in other words.

How, then, do I prioritize composing within my multi-faceted, freelance lifestyle? How do I schedule composing time without making it feel like I’m merely “fitting it in,” or writing yet another piece “on the fly”? While I engage in every non-composing project I do with the utmost conviction, I must always make every effort not to let that crazy composer named Distler out of my sight for one second.

“There is no such thing as Art for Art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.”

—Mao Tse-tung

Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and I have something in common: we’re both ashamed to share our home state with George W. Bush. But she’s gotten a lot more attention for having said so. After she dissed the President to a concert audience in London, she and the other Chicks received obscene phone calls, threatening drive-bys, bomb threats, and had their songs blacklisted off of hundreds of radio stations, many of them owned by the right wing-connected Clear Channel Corporation. Meanwhile, John Mellencamp revved up an old 1903 protest song called “To Washington,” refitted it with new 2003 lyrics, and released it provocatively just as the troops were headed for Baghdad:

A new man in the White House
With a familiar name
Said he had some fresh ideas
But it’s worse now since he came
From Texas to Washington
He wants to fight with many
And he says it’s not for oil
He sent out the National Guard
To police the world
From Baghdad to Washington

For that, hundreds of radio listeners called in and said things like, “I don’t know who I hate worse, Osama bin Laden or John Mellencamp.”

No one can doubt that music has a big role to play in the world of political protest. The controversial musicians we read about in the papers, though, are mostly from the pop and folk genres. It’s not only that those musicians are more visible, though that’s certainly true as well. Classical music and jazz seem to have a more long-term, measured, even sublimated approach to political protest, slower to react and more deeply embedded in the structure of the music itself. When John Mellencamp writes a political song, he can use the same old chords and instruments he always uses; political classical composers often feel that the political intention entails a special style and strategy. When Billy Bragg is infuriated by an item in the paper, he can fire off a song that day:

Voices on the radio
Tell us that we’re going to war
Those brave men and women in uniform
They want to know what they’re fighting for
The generals want to hear the end game
The allies won’t approve the plan
But the oil men in the White House
They just don’t give a damn
‘Cause it’s all about the price of oil.

—”The Price of Oil” by Billy Bragg

The classical and jazz worlds, however, generally have a longer turnaround time.

Some composers see themselves playing to such a small audience that they see no point in writing political music, and often they compensate with more conventional types of political activism; Conlon Nancarrow, for instance, didn’t believe in music’s ability to portray anything extramusical, let alone political, but was nevertheless a sufficiently committed Communist to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Others feel, more obliquely and with little opportunity to gather concrete evidence, that through the nature of their music they can encourage perceptions that bring about greater awareness in the general population.

Most problematic of all, perhaps, is classical music’s traditional relationship to established power and wealth. Rock guitarists and performance artists can challenge the status quo without subsidy, but the composer who gets performed by orchestra or chamber ensemble usually does so by the grace of either government grants or wealthy patrons or both. You can write a symphony subtitled “Death to the Corporate Ruling Class” if you want, but think twice about showing up for the orchestra trustee board meeting at which the commission is announced.

Consequently, political controversies involving classical music have been few and far between, and not always attributable to radical intentions on the part of the composers. The few highly visible cases are easy to enumerate. In 1953, Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait—and how can you get any more innocently American than Copland’s narrated tone poem with Lincoln’s words laced by folk song quotations like “Springfield Mountain” and “Camptown Races”—was abruptly canceled from performance at President Eisenhower’s inaugural concert, because an Illinois congressman, Fred E. Busbey, had protested Copland’s Communist connections of the 1930s. Copland had never actually been a Party member, but had written a prize-winning song for the Communist Composers’ Collective, given musical lectures for Communist organizations, and appeared at the 1949 World Peace Conference to meet Shostakovich. Within months, Senator Joseph McCarthy called Copland to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a fate that also eventually befell fellow composers Elie Siegmeister, Wallingford Riegger, David Diamond, and the German émigré Hanns Eisler, who was subsequently deported.

A similar situation recurred in 1973, when Vincent Persichetti’s A Lincoln Address, also based on words of the Great Emancipator, was to be premiered as part of Richard Nixon’s inauguration. Lincoln, however, had denounced “the mighty scourge of war,” which threatened to look like a reflection on Nixon’s pet venture, the Vietnam War. Persichetti was asked to make changes. He declined. The performance did not take place. Apparently the words of Abraham Lincoln are too inflammatory for today’s politicians. More recently, John Adams and Alice Goodman had the choruses of their opera The Death of Klinghoffer canceled by the Boston Symphony in the wake of 9-11 for their arguably pro-Arab (or in Adams’ view, even-handed) stance. The words of that opera, such as—

“My father’s house was razed
In nineteen forty-eight
When the Israelis
Passed over our street”

—were to some listeners, it has been charged, “not a simple statement of fact, but rather provocation.” Nevertheless, despite these isolated headline-grabbers, by and large—aside from the perennial attacks on Wagner’s anti-Semitism that constitute a cottage industry—the world rarely takes classical music seriously enough to protest it.

As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeois epoch has simplified the structure of the world’s class antagonisms into two camps: bourgeoisie and proletariat. (In recent years, the [s]election of former CEOs like Bush and Cheney has eroded even the slim, traditional distinction between politicians and the corporate class.) Virtually by definition, “political music” is understood as music that supports the interests of the working classes, and exposes the corporate/governing class as thieves and oppressors. As Christian Wolff—one of the central composers in this area—has pointed out, almost all composers called political are leftist: there have been virtually no composers whose music was explicitly associated with conservative causes, notwithstanding a number of patriotic symphonies and tone poems penned during World War II. In Marxist terms, composers who write for the delectation of the rich and for their fellow professionals are giving aid and comfort to the bourgeoisie, and are by definition counter-revolutionary, no matter what their conscious personal politics. Most non-pop music of the past century that we think of as political has come from a Marxist, communist, or socialist viewpoint—the composers who come to mind are Hanns Eisler, Marc Blitzstein, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Luigi Nono. Even for composers who write from a feminist or gay or pro-Native American or Save the Whales viewpoint, Marxist conditions for political music tend to be assumed: simplicity, relation to some musical vernacular, non-elitist performance situations.

For many people, music can only be political when it has a
text, and for certain composers, the style is immaterial as long as the text makes its point. The latter group, however, seem to be a minority; most political composers feel that music should be understandable not only by musical connoisseurs, but by the working classes whose interest it represents, whereas writing music for new-music specialists and the upper class is regarded as being of little value or point. Therefore, political music tends to be widely accessible, non-abstract, familiar in its basic idiom, tending towards simplicity rather than complexity. There are exceptions; Nono wrote political music in a serialist and rather forbidding idiom, and Wallingford Riegger was a curiously complacent 12-tone Communist. Leftist composers of the Depression Era believed in using folk tunes to represent, and reach out to, “The People.” Analogously, some more recent composers have believed in starting from a pop or rock idiom, as being the “folk” music to which today’s mass audiences are attuned.

However, as Wolff has written, the conditions through which popular music develops are themselves corrupt and exploitative. Those who take pop music as a stylistic basis may already be, by implication, playing into the hands of the corporate world—unless, somehow, they engage to subvert it. Swerve toward popular music and you may be letting corporations dictate your personal expression; swerve too far away, even in the direction of simplicity and accessibility, and you run the danger, as Wolff says, of seeming merely “eccentric.” As he further spells out the paradox, parsing German social thinker Theodor W. Adorno: if music “lets go of (its) autonomy, it sells out to the established (social) order, whereas, if it tries to stay strictly within its autonomous confines, it becomes equally co-optable, living a harmless life in its appointed niche.” The road from classical composition to the working classes is riddled with pitfalls and chasms.

One of the largest fissures, plaguing politically conscious composers for the last eight or nine decades, is that musical progressivism and political progressivism do not go hand in hand, and often are felt to be diametrically opposed. For music to be abstract, complex, difficult to understand—so the argument runs—supports the power structure of the bourgeoisie, since it provides a harmless distraction from the real conflicts of class oppression. This belief has resulted in the seeming paradox of some of the most advanced and forward-looking musicians—most famously Hanns Eisler in 1926 and Cornelius Cardew in 1971—turning their backs on the continuation of what seemed at the time an inevitable musico-historical trajectory.

Thanks to such paradoxes, unanswerable questions run through the background of the present survey:

1. Can music (without text) express political truths?
2. Does “concert hall” music with political texts achieve any useful end?
3. Can political music made by composers in the classical tradition, no matter how simplified or accessible, do anything besides preach to the converted?
4. Do composers have a social responsibility to attract or address certain audiences?
5. Does who you get your money from affect your art? Should it?
6. Is politics the business of only pop music, while experimental music is already too much of an elitist pastime?
7. Given that the music the working classes are familiar with is exploitatively limited and controlled by commercial and sometimes even right wing corporations, to what extent can the more musically aware composer build on that foundation to reach a wider audience? Is pop music the only possible basis for communication, a contaminated anathema, both, or neither?

There can be no attempt in a survey such as this to definitively answer most of these questions; nor, however, will they be, as they so often are, pessimistically dismissed. For some, answers will forever depend on the consciences of individual composers; others may be clarified as time goes by and our experience of music in differing contexts accumulates. It may be worth keeping them in mind as we discuss individual cases, because I have so often heard composer discussion groups run circles around these questions and get nowhere. If we are to eventually arrive at more compelling answers, the base level of our collective questioning needs to be raised.

The present HyperHistory divides into not historical periods, for the most part, but into strategies for politicizing music. These strategies fall into two clearly differentiated areas: political music with words, and political music without words. Across those two categories does run a rough historical divide: before the 1960s, one’s political views sometimes determined what kind of music one should write, but in the 1960s there was born the relatively new idea of making music a political statement in itself. Of course, this divide does not apply to opera, which has famously been making political statements for most of its history. Hatred of tyranny is implicit in Beethoven’s Fidelio, and an entire economic critique of European society in Wagner’s Ring, albeit one perhaps interrupted and unfulfilled—to accept for a moment Shaw’s view of the case. Interestingly, what seems lacking in today’s operas is political statement, even despite the current trend of historical operas drawn from recent politics. As exceptions one could point to Anthony Braxton’s little-heralded 1996 opera Shala Fears for the Poor, which painted a bitter satire of corporate America—and Conrad Cummings’ Vietnam opera, Tonkin.

In the case of texted political music, there has been a new approach in the last 30 years that scorns the earlier convention of “setting text to music,” speaking or intoning it instead. One political composer closely connected with text, Luigi Nono, can be considered separately as an exception to all rules. The case of non-texted political music diffracts into a rainbow of related concepts, ranging from the denotative technique of direct quotation, to the culturally conditioned but commonsensical reading of music as Social Realism, to the more rarefied approach to musical structure as political analogy. Independently of all this, we should consider the extreme case of Cornelius Cardew, a composer who not only most sharply defined the role of political music by turning his back on the avant-garde, but who also was the clearest and most passionate writer about what was politically wrong with new music.

Inner Pages:

• Cornelius Cardew
• Political Music with Conventionally Set Text: Songs, Musicals, Operas
• The Political Avant-Garde
• Luigi Nono
• Political Music via Song Quotation
• Political Music without Text: Socialist Realism
• Music as Metaphor for Social Order and Process
• Conclusion, with a Last Word by George Orwell

Certainly this survey will be far from complete—by its very nature, political music is typically likely to be, if not censored outright, at least unsupported by the existing power structures, and frequently lost to history, or at least difficult to obtain documentation on. I only hope that I can give a well-rounded list of the various ways in which composers have found to give their music political impact, and bring out the most often-encountered advantages and problems of each. As a movement, political music flourished most during the 1930s and 1970s, the periods of greatest Marxist sympathy in the West, the first spurred by sympathy for Russia, the second by that for China, and both ending in disillusion; the influence of the latter period, though, has convinced a number of younger composers, myself included, to
write the occasional politically motivated work. And as the world continues to change in more ominous directions, it becomes harder and harder for the thinking artist to keep silent—as the Dixie Chicks have realized to their everlasting credit.

Photo By Chris Harris

The music of another time often reveals the most intimate language of the people then, the images and emotions that they truly considered to be real and valued. To experience their interior world, the sound of the music is one of the quickest triggers to evoke sensations, deep proto-memories that seem to create a shared pathway of understandings from their time to ours – a more effective link than perhaps most written histories can provide. Just hearing the sound immediately builds this bridge across time, the way that a scent may suddenly bring back a feeling from your childhood, or upon touching someone’s hand you may suddenly realize that you love them.

The most innovative and revolutionary musical thoughts in America have often first announced themselves in works for the piano: the strange scenes in the 18th-century battle pieces; the exciting new virtuosity and experimental Romantic harmonies of Benjamin Carr and others; the first African-American syncopations from Francis “Frank” Johnson’s band entering a greater public’s consciousness in the 1820s, the totally unique and wildly imaginative creations of the “Beethoven of Kentucky” (Anthony Philip Heinrich) in the 1830s and 1840s; the multicultural music of Gottschalk; “Blind” Tom Bethune’s extraordinary ability to imitate natural sounds and immediately recall over 7000 works at the keyboard; America’s response to German romanticism; the breakthrough of all kinds of regional styles; the rise of ragtime and honky-tonk in the late 19th century; the piano’s crucial role in the first film soundtracks; the profoundly visionary keyboard creations of Ives and Griffes; and the inside-the-piano experiments of Henry Cowell, and later, John Cage; the birth of jazz and the emergence of the “swing” feeling from Jelly Roll Morton and the pianists of the 1920s; the “bad boys” and “bad girl” of music with their dissonance intended to wake up the world for better or worse to a new century; the mutual interchange of pop and concert styles; bebop, indeterminacy, hyper-complexity; minimalism and microtonality; the vast range of spontaneous playing; the continuing evolution of improvised styles; music that incorporates recent technologies and music that avoids them; music that eludes easy definition; and more

And, even more than that connection established through the appreciation of particular “works” from composers, pianists, and composer-performers, there is a time bridge created by the intimate kinesthetic experience of approaching the keyboard for the first time, an experience shared by untold millions over the centuries. At first there is the absolute surprise of pushing down a key and producing a sound. That action spontaneously unites the senses of touch, vision, and hearing. Only a heartbeat later, you have the expectation that repeating the same action will evoke similar results, and at some point an urge arises to use the keyboard as a medium to imitate other sounds you have experienced or imagined.

From that time on, touch, envisioning, and sounds in themselves vie for the newly-born pianist’s attention—that is the subject highlighted in this brief history of American piano music and demonstrated through certain innovative compositions and performers who brought into existence uniquely different approaches to creating music on the keyboard.

Inner Pages:

• The Keyboard Is Filled with Sweet Tunes and Rousing Rhythms
• The Keyboard as a Battleground
• The Keyboard and The Maid and The Love of My Heart
• Papa Heinrich’s Keyboard in the Wilderness
• The Keyboard as a Banjo, a rippling Spring, and the Singer of a Lullaby
• The Keyboard for a New Kind of Virtuoso
• The Keyboard klingt etwas voll und Deutsches in Amerika
• The Keyboard visits the Plains, the Desert, Chinatown and Spanish California
• The Great Ragtime Keyboard Craze
• The Keyboard as a Field of Memories
• From the Keyboard, Past the Hammers, to the Strings Inside
• The Keyboard Images Jump Onto The Wall
• Transformation at the Keyboard: The Birth of Jazz etc.
• The Blue Keyboard’s Sleepless Night
• Bad Boys and Bad Girl at the Keyboard
• The Keyboard Goes Bop!
• The Keyboard of Eternal Change
• The Architectural and the Cool Keyboard
• The Patterns Begin to Move
• The Keyboard in New Surroundings
• A Few More Recent Jazz Piano Greats
• The Heavens Above, The Keyboard Below
• The Perfect and Transparent Keyboard
• Thanks and Some Additional Favorite Piano Repertoire

Nicole V. Gagné playing her Attis-Viol Photo by Cathryn Platine

The term “built environment” is ordinarily used to distinguish the terrains of houses and buildings from the landscapes of the natural environment. When used to discuss music, it directs attention straight to the composer/musicians who make their own instruments. The American penchant for instrument building is essentially a 20th-century phenomenon—in part because the relative newness of so many instruments in the 18th and 19th centuries itself provided a certain spirit of original construction. Yet glimmers of the tradition become discernable later in the 19th century. In 1874, Elisha Gray patented the “Musical Telegraph,” a one-octave keyboard controlling electromagnetic tones. Charles Ives described somewhat ruefully how his father George had “rigged up a contrivance to stretch 24 or more violin strings and tuned them up to suit the dictates of his own curiosity. […] He started to apply a system of bows to be released by weights, which would sustain the chords, but in this process he was suppressed by the family and a few of the neighbors.” Not all the innovations came from the fringe, however. John Philip Sousa recalled conducting the United States Marine Band in the 1890s, when his ensemble employed “a B-Bb bass tuba of circular form known as a ‘Helicon.’ It was all right enough for street-parade work, but its tone was apt to shoot ahead too prominently and explosively to suit me for concert performances.” He consulted the Philadelphia instrument manufacturer J.W. Pepper about “constructing a bass instrument in which the bell would turn upwards and be adjustable for concert purposes. He built one and, grateful to me for the suggestion, called it a Sousaphone.” And the beloved brass boomer has been with us ever since.

The history of American instrument building has many pathways. It involves instances of what might be called an aesthetic of instrument building—American composer-musicians (inevitably the same person) becoming inventor-builders (ditto!) in order to articulate a music which they can’t hear on available instruments. It also includes a wide range of music played on non-instruments, from unusual percussion arsenals to the devotees of recycled and found materials, as well as radical reconsiderations of traditional instruments: preparations, new performance techniques, retuning. Another key ingredient in many of these new instruments has been electricity.

Harry Partch‘s shadow looms larger than ever almost 30 years after his death, and his works continue to be performed on his own instruments (or replicas). His example motivates and inspires others, judging from the DIY music makers who have proliferated in the last three decades. Partch proved that it’s worth the effort, that other people do want to hear music made with its own instruments and tuning. A strict diet of music as it is taught, manufactured, and sold in the United States is bad for you—there are special nutrients in music that comes directly from its maker/player, unmediated by the marketplace.

Partch became an instrument builder in search of a sound: a just-intonation, 43-note-to-the-octave tuning system, put to work for what he termed “corporeal” music: “the essentially vocal and verbal music of the individual.” By the early 1930s he was playing his Adapted Viola, designed with a longer neck and played like a cello. Over the decades, Partch retuned a reed organ into his Chromelodeon, developed string instruments (Kithara, Harmonic Canon), and built an array of percussion, from various wooden marimbas to exotica such as the Cloud Chamber Bowls—sections of 16-inch-diameter, 12-gallon Pyrex carboys—or the Spoils of War, with its seven brass shell casings. He created these instruments as sculptural/dramatic presences for his music theatre works, such as U.S. Highball, Oedipus, The Bewitched, Revelation In The Courthouse Park, and Delusion Of The Fury.

An instrument gets built because that’s the only way the composer/musician can break through an impasse and realize a sound that she or he knows exists but hasn’t yet heard. Construction then becomes as vital as raft-building for someone on a deserted island. Former Partch assistant Dean Drummond summed up this special urgency: “I invented and built the zoomoozophone during 1978 because it was necessary for me to continue composing at the time.” Leader of the performing ensemble Newband, Drummond built his 31-tone-to-the-octave percussion instrument out of 129 aluminum tubes; it’s modular in design and can be played by one to four zoomoozophonists.

Ellen Fullman said it all when she commented that her Long String Instrument “sounds absolutely like nothing else.” Ninety strings of bronze harpsichord wire are stretched some 3 feet above the ground, 3/4 of an inch apart, and attached to a wooden resonator. The Long String Instrument is acoustic and takes the size of the space in which it’s assembled. Both the strings and the player’s hands are rosined, and one plays it by walking alongside it. Glenn Branca devised mallet guitars—three-tiered variations of guitar bodies, the strings hammered with drumstricks—for his Symphony No. 2, so he could work with a greater number of open strings. For his Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4, he designed a half-dozen keyboard instruments that pluck their strings like harpsichords. (One rubs the strings with rotating leather wheels.) He used pickups to amplify the partials from the vibrating strings and tuned the keyboards to the first 127 intervals of the harmonic series. Improvisations by Zeena Parkins have combined her traditional harps with a triangular custom instrument featuring multiple pickups and a vibrato bar. Elliott Sharp has created instruments he calls “slabs”: long blocks of wood with bass strings, a movable bridge, and contact mics. He has improvised on his “slabs” and composed music for a quartet of them in Larynx. Two other self-devised instruments from Sharp are the violinoid (a violin neck mounted on a solid wooden body with guitar tuners and pickups on either side of a metal bridge) and the pantar (a steel top from a storage drum fitted with tunin
g pegs for four strings, with a domed cymbal as a bridge and amplified with a contact mic).

The relative newness of the electric guitar, as well as its continuing innovations, have prompted more extreme instrument building. Emmett Chapman‘s “Chapman Stick” suggests a wide and lengthy guitar neck with ten strings and is designed to be played with both hands independent, tapping and holding the strings against the frets. Guitar-maker William Eaton has created instrument designs that meld the strings of a harp or lyre into guitar bodies. Inspired by the African kora, Bob Grawi has designed and built 24-string “Gravikords,” built of stainless steel and amplified with a pickup.

A charming grassroots string instrument worth remembering is the Dulceola, a unique keyboard-harp that was built by an itinerant artisan who also sold them from the back of his truck while traveling through the South in the 1920s. Its sound can still be heard in two sessions of gospel recordings, from 1927 and 1929, in which vocalist Washington Phillips accompanied himself on Dulceola.

The string will always sing, and thus has a never-ending appeal to instrument builders. Yet percussion making has maintained a certain preeminence in the field. When Moondog was a homeless street musician, he often performed on and recorded with percussion instruments he’d built and enjoyed an aspect of Partchian spectacle when he would wear his Viking-like garb while playing his “trimbas,” “yukh,” and “oo.” Composer Lucia Dlugoszewski turned to the sculptor Ralph Dorazio for the construction of over one hundred percussion instruments she’d designed. They’re featured in several of her major works and are the sole instrumentation for her Suchness Concert and Radical Quidditas For An Unborn Baby. They tapped into Dlugoszewski’s own kind of theatre too, and she would play them onstage as Erick Hawkins danced to Geography Of Noon.

Tom Nunn has specialized in improvising on his own experimental instruments, chiefly his many “space plates” (metal sheets with vertical brass rods that are bowed) and electro-acoustic percussion boards (wooden boards with amplified sound-producing items, such as combs and nails). Musician and instrument builder Grant Strombeck has created an array of witty and original percussion instruments using various media. Richard Cooke, along with having replicated the Old Granddad gamelan of Lou Harrison, built his own tuned-bar instruments, including his Free Notes: sets of individual bar-and-resonator units which can arranged in any sequence desired. Leslie Ross plays her instrument using foot pedals to blow air through rubber tubing and into numerous resonators: wood recorders, waste-pipe horns, scrap metal. The young composer Robert Macht was the first person to write scores for the one-of-a-kind percussion instruments invented by Gunnar Schonbeck. Bart Hopkin, editor of the valuable journal Experimental Musical Instruments, has built a range of clever instruments from wooden saxophones and the “disorderly tumbling forth” keyboard to noisemakers, both electric (“Savart’s wheel”) and acoustic (“open siren”). Jody Kruskal has designed and built instruments mostly for the theatre and been a music director and composer with directors Ralph Lee and Julie Taymor; he also founded the Public Works Ensemble, a community music group in Cambridge, N.Y., which uses homemade and original instruments. Mobius Operandi, the performing group of Oliver DiCicco, has employed his innovative instruments, string (triangular 18-stringed zitherlike “Trylon“), wind (two-player, saxophone-inspired “Duo Capi“), and percussion (graphite-and-wood “Crawdad“). The anonymous art-rock band The Residents can be heard playing homemade instruments on Fingerprince and Eskimo. James Jacson, bassoonist in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, built the Ancient Infinity Lightning Wood Drum out of timber from a tree that had been struck by lightning. His performances, drumming with two long hooked sticks, became highlights of Arkestra sets.

Certain builders find their tradition not in instrument type so much as in material; for them, the medium truly is the message. Note the ongoing enthusiasm for ceramics. The clay instruments of Barry Hall include such hybrids as the Stone Fiddle, which can be blown or drummed as well as bowed, and globular horns that incorporate a membrane for drumming. Composer/musician Brian Ransom has built ceramic instruments that cover the spectrum from string and percussion to various wind instruments: flute, reed, and horn. Some are also handsome sculptures, such as Ransom’s series “Deities Of Sound.” Ward Hartenstein has composed for and performed on his own ceramic percussion instruments, notably drums and marimbas. Inspired by pre-Columbian Indian instruments, Susan Rawcliffe has specialized in clay flutes, from traditional designs to her own radical in
novations. The latter range from ball-and-tube flutes and water flutes—both somewhat unpredictable in their tone production—to the two-player Sea Beastie. While living in New York City, Chinese composer Tan Dun collaborated with potter Ragnar Naess to make over 50 ceramic percussion, wind, and string instruments; they were featured in Tan’s Soundshape and Nine Songs, a ritual opera.

Darrell De Vore’s heart belongs to bamboo, from which he has constructed flutes, singing tubes, outer-air aerophones, and an array of percussion instruments, from chimes and marimbas to his own stamped or scraped Bootoo sticks. The Glass Orchestra performs exclusively on instruments that use glass either as the main sound source or to modify the sound. (Yet another beloved medium is trash.)

Instrument building also has its traditions for different kinds of spectacle. How could a classicist like Partch not appreciate the Colosseum-like spirit behind what might be called Danger Music? Barry Schwartz had to wear insulated gloves with metal tips on the fingers to strum his “fountain harp,” in which each 16-foot-long string carried 15,000 volts, and balls of electricity traveled the strings. Scot Jenerik donned gloves wired with contact mics in the fingertips to perform on his “faustschlag”: a sheet of steel covered with flaming lighter fluid. D.A. Thierren, founder of the Comfort/Control group in Phoenix AZ, has worn his “body drum”: The 240 volts and 200 amps touch insulated pads on his skin, and he is then played by a musician who uses equally charged 3/4-inch steel drumsticks. The Damoclesian “hoverdrum” of Timothy North is suspended from the ceiling with the performer inside it, serving as its motor while struggling to maintain control over the instrument. These musicians have one foot in the realm of performance art and endurance art; they share a tradition with the work of Chris Burden, as well as with the sculptors of kinetically violent machines, such as Mark Pauline or Jean Tinguely.

The field of sound sculpture has seen noteworthy work from Norman A. Andersen, Peter Chamberlain, and Bill Fontana. The focus of this study, however, concerns a distinction provided by sculptor and instrument builder Tom Jenkins: “The instruments I build all produce sound when manipulated by the user. The sculpture, however, operates using an energy source.” Of course there are overlaps here too: John Driscoll has built sound sculptures that the public can play; the amplified screens of Richard Lerman are sculpture as “Sound-Seen,” but can also be used in performance as transducers; composer-musician Butch Morris has collaborated with different visual artists to create his “music machines”: music boxes that combine an original design with an original composition.

Installations and site-specific works are closer in spirit to performerless sound sculptures than to music, yet most artists working in these areas inevitably get drawn into instrument building as well, because the nature of the site dictates the kind of instrument to be used. Patrick Zentz‘s large-scale mechanical structures are designed to “translate” environmental forces, with wind or sunlight or water triggering sound production; his urban-themed “Crank” has drums triggered by photoelectric cells that respond to traffic density. The “Terrain Instrument” constructions and installations of Leif Brush represent a different attempt to sound the music of a landscape. Peter Richards‘ “Wave Organ” arranged lengths of pipe along a seashore to monitor and modify sea sounds. The more hands-on siteworks of Nicolas Collins, such as Water Works, Niche, and Sweeps, have made static architectural spaces flexible by adjusting a tent of sails.

The tradition of American instrument-building also accommodates people who function at the fringe of the musical circles of their day, suggesting an overflow of creative energy that cannot be confined to music’s professional arenas. Their work exists in its own zone, where avant-garde music overlaps sheer eccentricity—they are the “outsider artists” of American music.

Most come to build music through their experience with sculpture. Fred “Spaceman” Long attaches pickups to his one-of-a-kind junk-metal constructions for his series of “Jokers.” The metal sound sculptures of Reinhold Marxhausen produce a tiny fragile music just for their player’s delectation: His “Stardust” series and “Cosmic Cubes” are shaken close to the ear; his “Manual Walkmans” sit right on your ears, like headphones, only the speakers are replaced by clusters of spines to be plucked. The stainless-steel Waterphone of sculptor Richard Waters produces tones on metal rods which are bowed or beaten; the sound is modified by the water within the instrument. Art teacher Bob Bates has developed a series of Converters that create sustained bowed tones through the use of wheels controlled by foot pedals, which continuously rub the strings. A taste for Partchian spectacle informs the elaborate musical sculptures of Arthur Frick: His “Tug” employs reeds that are sounded by a large bellows which two musicians must ride like a seesaw; the “Beepmobile” turns a huge horn into an even larger tricycle.

A few instrument builders, however, come to create music from an inner need, and are, if you like, called to it. One such was Arthur K. Ferris, a New Jersey landscape gardener and autodidact in music and woodworking, who began constructing handsome string instruments in the mid-1920s, when he was about 50 years old. He made an array of them, small and large, over the next 20-odd years, setting harps over the viol’s fingerboard and face to enable its one or more players to combine plucked and bowed sounds.

The multi-traditionalism spawned by instrument building also includes the trend of composers writing for the instruments other composers or musicians have invented, such as John Zorn and Anne LeBaron composing for Partch instruments, or John Cage and Joan La Barbara making pieces
for Dean Drummond’s zoomoozophone. Such cross-fertilizations are just one more instance of the enduring value of the instrument-building spirit in American music.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

The use of non-instruments in place of the traditional concert arsenal is an essential face of instrument-building. “The stealing is one aspect, the recycling is another. It involves looking for a solution,” was how the percussionist Z’ev explained his quest for the sound he wanted to hear. Not surprisingly, the relatively uninhibited field of percussion was quickest to appropriate whatever it needed. Ground—and glass—was broken in the 1930s scores of William Russell: The “Foxtrot” of his Three Dance Movements calls for a bottle to be smashed; Made In America is scored for auto brake drums, tin cans, suitcase, washboard, lion’s roar, a drum kit made of found objects, and a Baetz’ Rhythm Rotor (a mechanical device that produced rhythmic ticks, similar to Leon Theremin‘s Rhythmicon). Russell’s music figured prominently in the percussion concerts Lou Harrison and John Cage began giving in 1939. Tin cans and automobile brake drums were also put to use alongside Asian instruments for their own compositions, which include Cage’s Construction series, Harrison’s Song Of Quetzalcóatl and Simfony #13, and their collaboration Double Music.

This formula of combining American scrap and percussion with foreign instruments also was fruitful for the Hawaii-inspired Exotica Music of composer/arranger/musician Martin Denny. Spike Jones, who introduced the “birdaphone” in “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” enjoyed a vigorous career composing and arranging a gleeful satiric music that employed gunshots, car horns, whistles, cow bells, and much more. The public of course has long enjoyed such music, as evidenced by the unwavering enthusiasm for the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling, which persists decades after they were made. The improvising percussionists David van Tieghem and David Moss have employed novelty devices, such as toys and bottles and vibrators, as much for their comedy as for their musicality. Performances by Triptych Myth—Cooper-Moore, Tom Abbs, and Chad Taylor—involve the audience in building an instrument from whatever’s on hand. For sheer zaniness, the Spike Jones Award must go to the Car Horn Organ of Wendy Mae Chambers, in which auto horns are arranged in the chromatic scale over two octaves and played by a keyboard.

A special tradition exists for appropriating humble debris, as Partch did with the liquor bottles of his “Zymo-Xyl.” The need for a percussion orchestra in just intonation led Harrison and William Colvig to construct an American gamelan orchestra that featured cut-off oxygen tanks, galvanized garbage cans, and a metallophone of cut aluminum slabs with stacked tin cans as resonators. Nicknamed Old Grandad, Harrison wrote several major works for it, including La Koro Sutro and Young Caesar. Barry Hall, along with designing and building his own ceramic instruments, created the “flowerpotophone“: a kind of marimba using tiers of different-sized clay flowerpots. Hubcaps are what it’s about with the “hubkaphone” of composer/musican Henry Threadgill. Stuart Dempster used a plastic sewer pipe as a didjeridu in his ecstatic Didjeridervish – 1976. Peter Van Riper has used cut aluminum baseball bats suspended from a wire stretched across the performance space; played by other bats and by bamboo, wood, or metal strikers, Van Riper describes his “Whomp Whip” (the commercial name on some of the bats) as “a kind of gamelan chimes.” Conlon Nancarrow attempted to create a pneumatic-driven percussion machine that would strike drumheads and wood blocks, but the effort never gelled; he instead turned his attention to the player piano, and the rest was music history. Nancarrow’s check was finally cashed by Matt Heckart, whose Mechanical Sound Orchestra used a computer to play large factory objects.

The more extreme exponents of noise rock have also been ready to appropriate whatever hardware they need. Eugene Chadbourne‘s amplified implements have included rakes and electric drills. Boyd Rice (aka Non) has played a shoe polisher and electric fan through his guitar. Z’ev sought an angry, industrial ecstasy, hammering and hurling tubs and pans and bottles and pipes and springs. Fast Forward found a lot of his percussion arsenal on the street: metal cans, springs, pipes, parking signs, hubcaps. The “Twoba” was made for him by Wes Virginia, using a wheeled coat rack and lengths of cardboard tubing and metal pipes or electrical conduit. Fast Forward’s Dead Thunderbirds combined alarm sirens, steel drums, and hundreds of glass liquor bottles.

The next stop after humble debris is plain old garbage, and this medium has its traditions as well. At its forefront are Skip La Plante and Carole Weber, who founded the composers’ collective Music For Homemade Instruments solely to invent, build, compose for, and perform on instruments made from trash and found objects. Percussion abounds, naturally: marimbas made from cardboard tubes for the “carimba,” and meta
l electrical conduit pipes for the 31-pitch-to-the-octave “coba.” Partch’s liquor bottles are reborn in the pint wine bottles of La Plante’s “boweryphone.” His string instruments include the zitherlike “kanon,” with 17 strings and movable bridges. He’s also produced panpipes made of glass test tubes and other wind instruments played like flutes, horns, and clarinets. La Plante’s homemade instruments are the center of Keith King‘s music theatre piece Second Species; he’s also set them up as outdoor installations and invited passersby to play them.

“I spent a lot of time with found objects and in junkyards,” recalled Pauline Oliveros, who has clamped telephone dial-changer rods to the beams inside a piano and bowed them. Her “Applebox” pieces were just that: appleboxes with contact mics, which were resonated with various objects. Jim Hobart has created instruments from recycled materials: “Buick,” a fretless nine-string harp using a dome-shaped hubcap as a sounding board; “Doorchimes,” a scrap of hollow-core door found in a dumpster, with seven strings spanning its length, each divided into two notes. Ken Butler has built numerous witty and ironic guitars, using for his bodies exhaust manifolds, bicycle wheels, hockey sticks, tennis racquets, hand tools, and much more. His imaginative, contraption-filled installations use weird amalgams of instrument parts, furniture, and machinery, which are controlled by a keyboard. Butler also delights in reinventing string instruments: His T-Square Quartet, composed for the Soldier String Quartet, supplies the musicians with his own violins, viola, and cello, constructed from such homely objects as LPs and t-squares.

The appropriation of natural materials occurs less frequently. One exception is the Semi-Civilized Tree of visual artist Nazim Özel; made from a section of branches, it provides numerous tiers for harp-like strings that can be plucked, beaten, or bowed. Bart Hopkin‘s instructions on how to build a “driftwood marimba” typify the value of instrument building: “Any driftwood marimba you make will have its own musical personality, based on its particular set of pitch relationships, tone qualities, and spatial layout. It will give rise to its own characteristic music.” John Cage overcame his resistance to improvisation by using instruments that were free of the improviser’s tastes and memories: amplified plant materials for Branches (“You’re discovering them […] it very shortly disintegrates and you have to replace it with another one you don’t know.”) and water-filled conch shells for Inlets (“You have no control whatsoever over the conch shell when it’s filled with water […] the rhythm belongs to the instruments and not to you.”).

Appropriation also offers its own spectacles, vast and intimate. Charlie Morrow‘s self-described “event/composition” Toot ‘N Blink Chicago had large boats, anchored in a semi-circle near the shore, sounding their horns and flashing their lights at the radioed commands of a conductor. The Music By Allison of Fluxus composer Alison Knowles used sounds generated by waving various fabrics. La Monte Young‘s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. employed the sounds made by moving the eponymous furniture.

The mischievous spirit of appropriation is at its most ironic when toy musical instruments are played in place of real ones. Today, the toy piano has earned itself a flock of exponents, with music written for it by such composers as John Cage (Suite For Toy Piano), George Crumb (Ancient Voices Of Children), Julia Wolfe (East Broadway), and Wendy Mae Chambers (Mandala). The Residents restricted themselves to toy instruments for their Goosebumps EP; the band Pianosaurus concertized and recorded playing nothing else.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

Instrument “deconstruction”—preparation, retuning, alteration of performance techniques—is as much a part of instrument building as construction is. The great innovator in this realm was Henry Cowell, whose piano pieces The Banshee and The Aeolian Harp required the player to pluck and strum the instrument’s strings. Former Cowell-pupil John Cage embedded bolts and utensils and strips of material into the piano’s strings for such classic prepared-piano pieces as Three Dances and Sonatas And Interludes. Cage’s technique was adopted by Conlon Nancarrow for his Study No. 30. (Nancarrow also modified the two player pianos in his studio to produce more specialized sounds: one percussive, the other more harpsichord-like.) The “timbre piano” was Lucia Dlugoszewski‘s development and she gave ferocious performances playing inside the piano with glass, brushes, rubber, and other implements, not only in her solo Five Radiant Grounds, but also in several ensemble works, including The Suchness Of Nine Concerts. Stephen Scott‘s music, such as The Tears Of Niobe, puts ensembles of musicians to work bowing the piano’s strings. The great keyboard improvisers Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor both recorded duets in which they played the piano’s interior: Taylor with guitarist Derek Bailey on Pleistozaen Mit Wasser and Sun Ra with vibraphonist Walt Dickerson on Visions.

Paper and cardboard tubing and water and other unusual materials have also been used to modify the sound and extend the range of conventional instruments. Such techniques have been employed by composers as different as George Crumb (Night Music I; Music For A Summer Evening) and Donald Martino (B,A,B,B,I,T,T). This availability, however, was felt most keenly by a generation of improvisers. Anne LeBaron recalls Davey Williams “using eggbeaters and electric fish to play his guitar”—and encouraging her to use found-object and paper preparations in her harp playing. John Zorn played an exploded clarinet, honking and chirping through its component sections; he’d also blow duck calls through his saxophone. George Lewis was adept performing on pieces of his trombone. Tom Cora played his amplified cello with toys and wires as well as a bow and his fingers. Saxophonist Jim Sauter, of the noise trio Borbetomagus, has used an extended sound chamber with a rubber hose or neck attached to the mouthpiece. Guitarist Donald Miller has written of himself, Sauter, and saxophonist Donald Dietrich, “For years each of us has struggled individually with extending the sonorities of our instruments into new and further realms of brutality.”

A similar spirit exists in certain scores for massed voices, an attempt to melt down the instrument and fashion something new out of it by multiplying it. The connection is direct with music for ensembles of electric guitars, such as Glenn Branca‘s The Spectacular Commodity and The Ascension; Rhys Chatham‘s Guitar Ring and An Angel Moves Too Fast To See; James Tenney‘s Septet and “Water On The Mountain – Fire In Heaven”; and the multi-tracked Pat Metheny in Steve Reich‘s Electric Counterpoint. It also informs more traditional concert scores. Some are (relatively) intimate, such as Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence, Joan D’Arc for 10 cellos, or Steve Reich’s Four Organs and Six Pianos. Others are in cinemascope: the 80 trombones of Henry Brant‘s Orbits; the 100 tubas of Anthony Braxton‘s Composition No. 19; the 30 harps of Wendy Mae Chambers‘ The Grand Harp Event. The music can even be intimate and/or epic, as with Alan Hovhaness‘s Ruins Of Ani for four Bb clarinets or any multiple thereof, or La Monte Young‘s Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F., for “piano(s) or gong(s) or ensembles of at least 45 instruments of the same timbre, or combinations of the above or orchestra.”

A more literal refashioning of instruments is found, not surprisingly, among those in search of tunings. Erv Wilson designed and Scott Hackleman constructed a clavichord that plays 19 tones to the octave and features a unique two-dimensional keyboard arrangement. Arnold Dreyblatt‘s Orchestra of Excited Strings, along with its justly-tuned keyboards and brass, uses two double bass bodies modified to produce a single fundamental tone and its natural overtones.

There are numerous instances of Harry Partch having retuned conventional instruments to play alongside his own ensemble: clarinet, bass clarinet, and string bass in Oedipus; clarinet, bass clarinet, and cello in The Bewitched; string bass in Revelation In The Courthouse Park; baritone saxophone and alto saxophone/trumpet in Ulysses At The Edge. The retuning of conventional instruments has itself become a convention over the years. Composers who have written scores for instruments in quarter-tone tunings include Charles Ives (Three Quarter-Tone Pieces), Alan Hovhaness (O Lord, Bless Thy Mountains), and Lejaren Hiller (String Quartet No. 5). In Changes, James Tenney retuned a sextet of harps in sixths of a semitone, dividing the equal-tempered octave into 72 pitches: “It provides extremely good approximations of all the important just intervals up through the eleven limit. But it’s practical on a tempered instrument.” Among the composers who have gone straight into just-intonation tunings are Lou Harrison (Strict Songs), former Partch associate Ben Johnston (Sonata For Microtonal Piano, Quintet For Groups, Two Sonnets Of Shakespeare), Terry Riley (The Crow’s Rosary), and James Tenney (Bridge). Before he began working with the harmonic series, Glenn Branca employed “somewhere between seven and ten different tunings” for the guitars in his ensemble. His Harmonic Series Chords is scored for a conventional orchestra—but it sure doesn’t sound like one! Other noteworthy microtonal composers include Easley Blackwood (Fanfare, Suite For Guitar), John Eaton (Microtonal Fantasy), and Johnny Reinhard (Odysseus).

A lot of musics include alternate tunings for coloristic effects, but when improvisers change their instrument from equal temperament to just intonation, they’re rebuilding it:

La Monte Young retuned his piano for The Well-Tuned Piano; Terry Riley retuned his keyboards, electric (The Descending Moonshine Dervishes) and piano (The Harp Of New Albion); Pauline Oliveros had her accordion retuned into just intonation. “It took a while to get used to it and to hear how to use it,” she said, “but it worked for me right away.” The ongoing dedication of these artists to their retuned instruments underscores the value of their having made such a leap.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

The pioneers of American electronic music were perforce instrument builders. Thaddeus Cahill built three “Telharmoniums,” or “Dynamophones,” between 1900 and 1906. This keyboard instrument produced sine-wave tones at frequencies corresponding to the chromatic scale. Like an organ, its keys were touch sensitive for dynamic control, and it included filters to provide wind- and string-like timbres.

By the mid-teens, Henry Cowell was exploring the possibility of developing a machine that could generate multi-rhythms unavailable from conventional instruments. His work with Russian inventor Leon Theremin on the construction of the “Rhythmicon” led to Cowell’s 1932 concerto with orchestra Rhythmicana. The “Rhythmicon” was refined to permit tempo modifications and produce sounds tuned to the overtone series. Charles Ives, who financed its construction, wrote to Nicolas Slonimsky, “It relieved my mind to know especially that the new one would really be nearer to an instrument, than a machine.”

This desire for new electronic instruments, enervated by the Depression and the Second World War, flourished in the 1960s. Bye Bye Butterfly and I Of IV are real-time electronic music by Pauline Oliveros, playing oscillators set above the range of human hearing. They generated difference tones of audible frequency, which she amplified and fed into a tape-delay system, which she was also playing. “The instrument is constructed carefully,” she explained, “so I can interact with it at a deep level.” Donald Buchla‘s synthesizer “was probably the first, total home-studio synthesizer in the normal sense of the word,” according to composer Morton Subotnick. The mid-’60s also saw Robert Moog‘s keyboard-controlled synthesizer. The Theremin’s spatial-control technique was taken further by Buchla’s Lightning interface design, which relies on wands and can compute directionality, speed, and acceleration. Buchla’s more-hands-on Thunder design employs touchplates to produce synthesized sound.

Harry Partch may have had no feeling for electronics, but electronic composers have certainly shown great affinity with his attitudes and methods. “I think of a sound I want to hear, then construct a device to play that sound,” said Jim Wilson, reiterating the instrument-builder’s credo. As the music-making duo Voice Of Eye, he and Bonnie McNaim have combined electronic and acoustic sounds, frequently on instruments they’ve built, such as the “Squawkbox,” controlled by bioelectricity from the player’s body. A different approach to electronics is offered by Reed Ghazala, who has used “circuit bending“: deliberately shorting the circuits of audio equipment to produce unexpected sounds. His “Video Octavox” features a synthesizer that responds to the movement of light from a television set; his various “Incantors” create random alterations of synthesized-speech. Chico MacMurtrie‘s Trigram, a self-described “robot opera,” combined 15 musicians with 35 machines of his own devising, which play music and make noise.

In the real-time performance of electronic music, a master instrument builder need never swing a hammer: Laurie Spiegel, for example, devised her Macintosh software Music Mouse to enable the performance of real-time computer music, without relying on an instrumental keyboard or acoustic or sampled sounds. Salvatore Martirano built his Sal-Mar Construction, a 24-speaker synthesizer system, to permit simultaneous creation and performance of improvisatory compositions. David Tudor, having combined live electronics with piano for John Cage (Variations II) and with bandoneon for Lowell Cross (Musica Instrumentalis), began performing on mostly custom-built modular electronic devices, many made by himself. By choosing specific electronic components and transducers and their interconnections, he defined both composition and performance for such works as Hedgehog and 9 Lines, Reflected. Jerry Hunt designed innovative computer systems and employed proximity detectors to trigger electronic sounds in his often highly energetic performances. His Quaquaversal Transmission 4 used two-way telephone lines for live interactive computer-system performance of audio, video, light systems, and micro-robotic groups.

John Bi
schoff, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham Lancaster, Tim Perkis, Phil Stone, and Mark Trayle formed The Hub, connecting and combining their individual computer systems to create complex, live electronic music. Tom Cameron composed and performed electronic music in real-time, combining the structure of hardware and programming with what he calls “spontaneous composition.” The Toy Symphony of composer/inventor Tod Machover uses high-tech Music Toys that he designed with the MIT Media Lab; they serve as sophisticated interactive instruments with which children can play and compose music.

With electronics, the instrument maker can also become something of a cyborg builder: Morton Subotnick employed the conductor’s baton to control the electronics in A Desert Flowers; Laetitia de Compiegne Sonami has used her “Lady’s Glove,” an elbow-length, left-handed glove with 16 pressure and direction sensors, to control a computer and create electronic sound. A further cyborg strain involves taking an instrument and redesigning it electronically. In Subotnick’s “ghost scores,” such as The Wild Beasts and Axolotl, there are no pre-recorded electronic sounds; instead, the live sound of the instrumentalist is picked up, modified, and played back during the performance over loudspeakers.

Others have pursued more extreme revisions of their instruments. The “mutantrumpet” of Ben Neill “started out as an acoustic instrument with three bells and a trombone slide, with an extra set of valves for routing the sound into the different bells. It has a number of switches, pressure-sensitive pads, and little controllers that I use to send MIDI messages to the computer to modify things as they’re playing.” Jon Hassell transformed the sound of his trumpet with tape loops, synthesizers, and other electronic systems. Jon English added a tape-delay system to his trombone for Electrombonics. Nicolas Collins employed a trombone as the controller for his digital reverb, using the slide as a digital pot, with a keypad to access the computer that manipulated the reverb. Laurie Anderson has performed on violins interfaced to a Synclavier. Multiple delay systems characterize the justly-tuned “Expanded Accordion” of Pauline Oliveros, who controls the delay time using foot pedals.

“There’s always been evolution of instruments—if you just look into music history, it’s there,” observed Pauline Oliveros, whose vast experience in the field even includes a brief stint in Partch’s ensemble for Oedipus. “There are lots of reasons to invent instruments.” The most important reason remains the same, regardless of the field of instrument-building: to hear the special music that only a new instrument can provide.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

Nicole V. Gagné (shown here playing her attis-viol) is the co-author (with Tracy Caras) of Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers and the author of Sonic Transports and Soundpieces 2. She has written about music for numerous magazines, contributed to the New Grove II, and lectured on music at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Pittsburgh.

David Adler and a few CDs Photo by Dr. Jennifer M. Good

I’m in a Manhattan hair salon, waiting for my turn under the scissors. A DJ on WBLS-FM comments breathlessly on the signing of Patti LaBelle to Def Jam Records. “That’s huge, for both of them!” she exclaims. Why? Because LaBelle remains one of the great R&B divas, and Def Jam, since its emergence in the mid ’80s, is arguably the label most responsible for the mainstreaming of hip-hop around the globe. (Def Jam is now owned by Island Def Jam Music Group, a subsidiary of Universal.) What excited the DJ was an apparent interchange between two powerful forces in black popular music. Both artist and label were defying expectations, broadening one another’s horizons, perhaps even reshaping the pop world itself. (The truth is not as seismic: LaBelle signed with Def Jam’s new R&B imprint, Def Jam Classics.)

It usually takes a DJ, or another type of music industry insider, to notice these things. Ask a member of the general public what label their favorite musician records for, and they’re not likely to know. To many it seems an arcane detail, and in some sense it is. A label is a packager of a product, and consumers, we know, aren’t often conscious of where their products come from. Labels are commonly viewed as a means to an end, as mere conduits rather than shapers of musical culture. We are aware of individual artists but often take for granted the aural and visual worlds that labels create through their catalogs.

Labels can confer badges of identity on their artists; this is especially true in the hip-hop world. In some instances a label name, like Motown or Stax, can become synonymous with a particular style of music. In the jazz world, labels such as Blue Note and ECM have fulfilled similar roles.

Jazz history is to some extent label history. John Coltrane had his Prestige period, his Atlantic period, his Impulse! period. There is a world of difference between Miles Davis on Prestige, on Columbia, and on Warner, or Joe Henderson on Blue Note, on Milestone, and on Verve. In these cases and many others, the labels themselves are landmarks in an artistic journey. But again, these matters are of interest mainly to critics, historians, and other insiders. Even the cultivated jazz fan may not have label information like this on the tip of his or her tongue.

Today, many believe that the “golden age” of jazz has passed. But there are probably more jazz labels than ever before. The vast majority are small, independent operations. They vary widely in terms of artistic focus and level of professionalism. Quite a few are releasing extraordinary music. In fact, a strong case can be made for indie jazz as one of the most vibrant and innovative artistic spheres of our time. Yet like proverbial trees falling in the forest, the labels’ efforts, and thus scores of brilliant jazz musicians, go largely ignored. Jazz, as a result, is often mistaken for dead. The profiles that follow ought to help reverse that impression.

Phil Schaap, the noted jazz historian, has remarked that the album itself is a jazz innovation (as is the live album). But the great rock bands of the ’60s and ’70s were the ones truly to establish the album as the audio canvas par excellence. In fact, AOR or “album-oriented rock” mushroomed into an entire genre of its own. Bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin used the album, rather than the ephemeral hit single, as their creative frame of reference. (Yet it was the Beatles, no strangers to hit singles, who arguably invented album rock with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.) When these bands took to the studio, their goal was not to document a live performance. Quite the contrary, they viewed the studio as a veritable magic shop, capable of generating sounds that were larger than life. The punk movement, by contrast, had little regard for this sort of excess, deriding the culprits as “dinosaur bands.” But still, punk legends like The Clash and The Replacements were masters of AOR, albeit in a different guise.

Jazz musicians, by contrast, tend to be creatures of the bandstand. Many view the making of an album as inescapably artificial — freezing spontaneity on tape, removing the audience factor, and constricting live interplay with headphones, isolation booths, and so forth. While jazz has its share of iconic albums (John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is an obvious example), it has never been an album art first and foremost.

Some of today’s jazz labels remain committed to recording jazz in as pure and unmediated a fashion as possible. Others, following the lead of young musicians raised on rock, hip-hop, and other popular musics, see no harm in jazz becoming a studio art as well as a live art. Jazz cannot help but evolve, just as the album itself has evolved.

At first, an album was simply a collection of 78-rpm singles, grouped together in a self-contained package. (Columbia/Legacy’s mammoth, ten-CD Billie Holliday reissue of 2002 was designed to look like an old 78 album.) Beginning in the 1950s, singles went the route of 45-rpm, seven-inch records; albums transitioned to the short-lived ten-inch format, which was soon overturned by the familiar 12-inch LP. (Ten-inch records are still produced as specialty items—EPs and the like.)

In 1979 the Philips Corporation, co-owner of PolyGram Records, introduced the CD, which by the mid ’80s began to revolutionize the market and temporarily reverse the sagging fortunes of the post-disco record industry. Now, downloading and other new forms of distribution and delivery have thrown the business yet another curve. These technologies may ultimately eclipse the CD as well.

That would be fine with a lot of people. The CD may have gained market dominance, but it was never thoroughly loved. The LP, in contrast, still has passionate advocates among collectors, hip-hop and club DJs, and audiophiles who swear by the organic sound qualities of the format. Many also bemoan the loss of packaging and design possibilities in the switch from LP to CD, from a 12-inch to a 5-inch layout. All visual elements, from booklets to photos to text, have been drastically reduced in size. One-of-a-kind album cover concepts, like the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers or Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, are a thing of the past. Tri-fold Digipacks and other custom CD packaging solutions can never quite match the impressive gatefold sleeves of yore. Even the “compact” aspect of the CD seems questionable. The thing still takes up plenty of room (and is impossible to open).

In the age of downloading, as the act of listening becomes even more disembodied, we are beginning to access album covers not with our hands, but with our eyes, on a computer screen. In time, we might cease to think of music products as tangible at all. Our very notion of ownership could change. Just ask alto saxophonist and jazz visionary Steve Coleman—he’s giving away the better part of his recorded output at www.m-base.org.

But for now, ours is still the CD age, and record labels have made the best of it, figuring out ways to make their products look and feel satisfying. In the jazz world, some dismiss presentation as a superficial matter, a commercial ploy, a hustle—what they associate with the vain, calculating practices of pop music. There’s something to be said for the belief that jazz should remain unsullied by preoccupations with image and appearance. But this view can be limiting as well. As Dave Douglas rightly remarked in the August 2002 issue of DownBeat magazine, “[An album] should be something very special—a product, basically, that people own and have, like a book or a painting, that they can enjoy in their homes.” Shoddy presentation—e.g., unimaginative designs, amateurish photos, liner notes riddled with typos—needn’t be added to the list of jazz’s already numerous marketing disadvantages.

It’s no accident that historic jazz labels like Blue Note and Impulse! had sleek, signature looks (Francis Wolff’s photos and
Reid Miles’s designs in the case of Blue Note, sepia hues and majestic gatefolds in the case of Impulse!). This lesson is not lost on some of today’s jazz label managers. At a time when do-it-yourself productions are on the rise (a phenomenon hardly limited to jazz), label people are using the resources at hand, tapping the talents of their graphic designer friends and extending the collaborative ethos of the arts in the process.

Many of the people interviewed for this series used the word “fun” when discussing album design and layout. That sense of fun, ideally, gets across to the person browsing in the record store, where Winter & Winter discs, for instance, are immediately identifiable. As Peter Gordon of Thirsty Ear Recordings points out, good design is simply an acknowledgement of the way we live now: “We’re looking at screens all day long. Our eyes are talking all the time. [An album package] can be either a valuable space for communication or a wasted space.” Some labels, such as CIMP, define themselves through their recording processes, in opposition to more processed studio sounds. Labels like Playscape, Red Giant and Pi are run directly by musicians and cater to their own highly specific needs; others, like Palmetto and HiPNOTIC, have made their mark not through a specific look or sound, but rather an overarching commitment to musical diversity and grass-roots artist development.

Designing the best possible communication, however, doesn’t ensure that the message will be received. On that score, the signs for jazz aren’t particularly good. For independent jazz labels are plankton in the ocean of mass-market entertainment. And the major labels are the whales.

Inner Pages:

• The Majors/The Big Indies/The Reissues
• Welcome to the Zone: Thirsty Ear’s Peculiar Journey
• Class-A or Bust: The Palmetto Story
• Anti-Plastic: The Case of Winter & Winter
• Anti-Recording: The Case of CIMP
• Of Records and Reform: Tony Haywood’s HiPNOTIC
• Red Giant and Pi: Perfect Together
• Playscape: Remembering Thomas
• More Labels at a Glance

Joseph Dalton

“We should just start paying orchestras twice for playing a new piece—once for the first performance and again for the last performance.”

It’s a good line and one that Frances Richard, Director of Concert Music at ASCAP, has used many times. But beneath the flippant humor is a truth. As American orchestras perform an increasing number of premieres each season, it is all the more difficult to obtain that elusive second performance. A major roadblock toward that goal is the frequent inability of composers—and their publishers and agents—to secure recordings of concert performances for use in promoting new works.

Recent conversations with composers, orchestra managers, union representatives, and music publishers reveal a sea of high emotions that often go unspoken out of fears of retribution or the worsening of an already bad situation, and an intricate and confusing web of legalities that vary from region to region and ensemble to ensemble. As a result there are numerous look-the-other-way and hope-for-the-best uses of recordings that are obtained from a variety of back-channel sources.

What ultimately determines whether a recording is provided to the composer—or if a concert is even recorded at all—are industry forces far beyond the influence of composers: namely, the often-tumultuous relationships between orchestra players (as represented by unions and membership committees) and orchestra managements. And add to the mix two powerful forces outside the music industry yet which have a deep influence upon it: a poor economic environment and a plethora of inexpensive options in digital audio technology.

In such an environment it may seem remarkable that any music gets performed at all. But it is precisely because so much fine contemporary music is being performed and at such high standards that the lack of live recordings is so critical. Granted, it’s fair to say that with the majority of performances of new works today, the composer is given a recording of the concert. But evidence shows that the more prominent the performers, the less likely it is that a recording is available.

“It’s like a custody battle in a dysfunctional family,” says Tom Broido, President of Theodore Presser, the oldest continuing music publisher in the United States. “Mom and pop are the musicians and the management. Caught in the middle of the battle are the kids—the composers.”

“It is often an appalling situation which we have no control over, even though the piece played is written with our blood,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Kernis.

“It’s everybody’s favorite topic,” deadpans Michael Geller, Executive Director of the American Composers Orchestra.

As with any legal matters, language is crucial. In the research of this article, several important terms were often tossed about with their precise meanings unclear.

Archival tape: The term implies that it sits on a shelf. Can others hear it only when they visit your archive? Or does archival simply mean the opposite of …

Commercial: which would mean on a professionally released CD—though to label professionally released recordings of contemporary music commercial is a misnomer by any standard.

Marketing vs. Promotion: The former connotes the pursuit of earnings and income while the latter suggests the development of a reputation, but the distinction is particularly vague in a field like music. Sometimes when an agreement says that a tape “cannot be used for marketing purposes,” that sometimes means that it cannot be used in commercials, an unlikely possibility.

Pages in this section:

• It’s About The Sounds
• When Things Work
• Static In The Mix
• Whose Work Is It?
• Institutional Struggles
• The Sound of Silence
• Appendix: An Open Letter from Augusta Read Thomas

Robert Hilferty and some of his theories Photo by Randy Nordschow

Blame it on Pythagoras. When the old, ancient Greek discovered the relation between musical intervals and numbers–leading to notions like the “hidden structure of the universe,” “music of the spheres,” “mathematics of the soul,” and whatnot–that was the beginning of music theory. Now we’re stuck with it. And there’s no way out.

I don’t mean to start off on such a negative note. Actually, theory can be beautiful and illuminating (as opposed to complicated, obfuscating, quagmired, self-important, self-absorbed). And nothing could be more human: the desire to create systems out of chaos or near-chaos is a natural and (usually) noble expression of humanity’s ability to reason. (Well, there are irrational pseudo-theories about race, which pose, as rational and lead to nasty things such as slavery and extermination.) And there are theories about everything: Goethe had one about color, Einstein had one about gravity, Eisenstein had one about film montage, Brillat-Savarin had one about eating (in The Physiognomy of Taste), Tarkovsky had one about time-pressure in cinematic images (in Sculpting Time), Lakatos had one about numbers, Foucault about sex, Wittgenstein had one about language, Derrida about writing (or should I say écriture), Freud about dreams. Darwin even had a pet theory (literally). People kill each other over theories (i.e. communism vs. capitalism). And there are countless anti-theories, counter-theories, meta-theories, theories à la mode (pun intended). The list is endless. You probably have one or two yourself.

But music theory is surely the strangest. That’s the burden of trying to make sense of the most ethereal, ephemeral, abstract–one could argue the most free–art form. In a way, from a certain point of view, music needs theory. And the theorists themselves? Most of them bear a striking resemblance to the creepy and slimy Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Well, that’s just a theory…

The problem with theory arises when it does not–and is not willing to recognize that it cannot–explain the most interesting aspects of a piece of music Problems arise if theory becomes a litmus test for the greatness of a piece of music, as in the great “organicist” theories of the West which leave out non-western musics and focus on a small group of pieces, which come out of the Dead White Boys Club of the Austro-Germanic School–”masterpieces” churned out by “geniuses.” They were definitely a talented bunch. (Postmodern theory has tried, with varying success, to take these terms off of their pedestals.) The problem with compositional theory is when, in the wrong hands, it seems to be the sole generator of the compositions, when actually the real music-making must come from a different place (something called imagination and “life”).

Theorists can be freestanding, but there have also been many famous theorist-composers from Rameau to Babbitt. Two of my favorite American theorists, Edward Lowinsky and Edward T. Cone, were both initially trained in composition. [Ed. Note: Cone remains active as a composer who has constantly guarded against making generalizations and then feeling that they ought to be applied to his own music.]

Of course, new theories continue to be churned out. Some are profound, some are shallow… The show goes on, so to speak. For the composer, it’s best to take Ned Rorem’s advice, “Compose first, worry later.” And for theorists, “listen first, theorize later.” And really listen. If it ain’t got that swing…

Inner Pages:

• Live Bait
• The Unification Church
• How Theory and Composition Became the Same Thing
• Two Favorite Theorists
• The Show Goes On

Nicole Zaray Photo by Sean Gullette

Do film composers ever get the fame they deserve? Probably not… They toil long hours for the Hollywood machine behind the heavy curtain of post-production, while the film’s stars and director are already sauntering through candid clips on Entertainment Tonight. Rarely do we see a film composer on prime time television waving to their close friends in the audience of paparazzi.

Some critics and musicians consider film scoring an opportunity for a musician to accompany a drama. But the composer’s place in the process of filmmaking is always evolving and the stories of many who have flourished by balancing stylistic intuition as well as a willingness and ability to work in the collaborative mode of the day are tales worth pricking up our ambitious and creative ears to hear. These interweaving stories began when the last century opened and with it was born a new visual art whose most vital companion was music: the silent film.

With the advent of talking pictures in the late ’20s and early ’30s, music took on a very different role in film. Underscoring motion pictures developed quite early on as did the rules for creating an effective soundtrack that still hold true today. Many film-scoring conventions were codified in the pioneering soundtracks of Max Steiner whose scores for King Kong and Gone With The Wind remain landmarks in the history of film music. As motion pictures became an industry with an almost assembly-line mentality in the 1940s, the independence of the film composer became more marginalized. Composers were frequently just cogs in the machine, creating work-for-hire material that was often not credited.

Some important composers were still able to emerge from this anonymity. Many leading composers known primarily for work in other areas, such as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and even Duke Ellington, would be enticed to create music for the cinema. Other composers, such as Alex North, Miklós Rózsa, Bernard Herrmann, and Henry Mancini, all of whom began their careers as composers of music for the concert hall, brought to film scoring a much wider sonic palette and their long-term relationships with specific directors helped to establish the 1950s as the golden age of film music in America. These composer-director collaborations continued on into the 1960s and film scoring got more and more experimental leading to the almost “anything goes” approach to film scoring in the 1970s. With composers such as Jerry Goldsmith, Leonard Rosenman and others everything from twelve-tone serialism and quartertones to musique concrète and hard rock became part of the film composer’s vocabulary.

Pop music took on an extremely prominent role in the film scores of the late ’70s and the early ’80s as film soundtrack albums became Billboard bestsellers in their own right as music by the likes of Giorgio Moroder and Blondie morphed from film soundtrack to a soundtrack for daily life. In the 1990s, with a century of film-scoring history looming large in the background, many tried and true tricks of the film scoring trade were reused at face value in attempt to play it safe with the tried and true. But at the same time, the first prominent woman film composer, Rachel Portman, established herself on the scene, as did a variety of bright new talents such as Elliot Goldenthal. And Hollywood once again regularly attracted the talents of composers primarily known for their work in the concert hall, such as Philip Glass, Tan Dun, and John Corigliano who is only the second composer since Copland to win both a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar. Now, as film music enters a new century, chances are being taken once again as directors of independent films turn to everyone from free jazz maverick John Zorn to hip-hopster RZA of the Wu Tang Clan to provide the sonic environment for their motion pictures.

Can a film composer ever be sure that his or her work will stand on its own after a film has left theaters or that a film’s audience will rush out to buy the soundtrack and listen to it years after its creation? My own collection ranges from North to RZA, from Mancini to Moroder, from obscure to mainstream. But when I listen to Alex North’s music for Streetcar, I do not imagine Blanche slipping up the steps to her sister’s working class home. Rather I feel the music enlivening my imagination in the moment and I forget that the composer was contracted to create for a specific imaginary event. I merely think of it as “an Alex North piece” rather than “a Streetcar piece.” However, I find it almost impossible to separate Moroder’s synthesized beats from Richard Gere’s sauntering, no matter that Moroder is a personality in his own right and the songs he created for films gained a life of their own even while the films were still in the theater.

Perhaps the compositions created within the old-fashioned studio system do eventually give just fame to their creators. How long it may take is of course a mystery, but one thing is certain: the profession will continue to go through a whirlwind of changes and the wise composer will balance adaptability with stubbornness even more than ever…

Inner Pages:

• Not So Silent
• Late 1920s and 1930s: The Advent of Talkies
• The 1940s: Let the Assembly Line Begin
• The 1950s: The Golden Age, Daddy-O
• The 1960s: More Great Collaborations – We Are One Together (Moon River and Me…)
• The 1970s: Experimentation and New Worlds; Grit and Glitter
• The 1980s: Call Me (Only if you can sell records, baby)
• The 1990s: Re:Generation (And finally, SHEgeneration)
• Now: The New, New Era of “Independents”