Category: Analysis

[Ed. Note: This article is the first in a three-part series exploring economic issues faced by the new music community. Additional installments will appear each Wednesday in March.]

Of all the ways musicians have devised to draw an audience to new music, doing away with the price tag ranks among the most immediately appealing. There’s no financial risk for the potential listener, the organizers feel empowered to program whatever music they want since they don’t have to try and gauge how much people will be willing to shell out to hear Composer X’s latest masterwork, and the strategy may allow contemporary music to compete more effectively with the other low and no-cost entertainment options available in the community.

New music presenters are well aware of the potential draw as well as the pitfalls of giving a free concert. A lot seems to depend on what audience an ensemble is trying to appeal to. If the goal is attracting those who’ve never heard contemporary music before, freebies can be a successful lure. And without the obstacle of a ticket price, the argument goes, young people and others without a lot of spare cash will take the plunge. But if the goal is to compete with all the other live entertainment options that do charge and to attract people who will return repeatedly and expect to pay, the equation becomes a bit more complex. Will samplers become ticket buyers and not just be interested in free events? Is “success” bringing the music to those who haven’t heard it before, or is it defined by listeners paying for the chance to hear it?

Ultimately new-music performers and organizers decide whether free concerts will be plentiful or few, and there’s little agreement on their value. In this debate, the question is not really about who is right and who is wrong but about understanding what they hope to achieve in such a complex marketplace.

The Knight Foundation made news last September when it released its Magic of Music report, which concluded that free orchestral concerts do not lead to increases in subscription sales. “Free programming and outreach do not turn people into ticket buyers. They simply turn them into consumers of free programming,” declared the report in its executive summary. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra was given a three-year grant by the Knight Foundation to present a series of free events in the community (and not in the SLSO’s downtown home) as part of the initiative in 1996. As the report says, these didn’t lead to many new subscriptions. But—and this was left out of the executive summary, the only part of the report many readers were likely to read—the outreach endeavors were “deemed successful” since they introduced many of the SLSO’s musicians into the community and gave many listeners their first exposure to live classical music.

What conclusions can new-music presenters and performers draw from this? Since they aren’t necessarily looking to attract the traditional symphony orchestra patron, and they have much smaller budgets and play in smaller venues, the correlation isn’t exact. But they still have to find listeners, and the cost of admission is something most people take into consideration when evaluating their entertainment options. A philosophical connection can at least be made.

Firmly in favor of presenting free concerts is Claire Chase, the executive director and flutist of the International Contemporary Ensemble, which presents most of its concerts in Chicago and New York. “When a business is trying to convince customers to try a new product, they give out a lot of free stuff,” Chase says. The key chains and bottle openers that tend to make up that “free stuff” might not seem to bear much relation to newly composed concert music, but Chase sees one nonetheless. Without being exposed to new music, potential audience members have no reason to take a chance on a live concert. If someone hasn’t heard of a new brand of laundry detergent, say, there’s no reason for them to try it. The manufacturer’s enticement, whether it’s made by Chase or Clorox’s CEO, is the free sample.

For Chase, eliminating the admission price eliminates a lot of the risk inherent in trying something new. “New music is a risk, and it ceases to be a risk when you’re part of the academic elite or are a nerd,” she says, quick to point out that she considers herself such a nerd. Despite her interest in contemporary music, Chase says she expects to enjoy only 25 percent of the works on a new-music program. “How can you expect someone to drop $20 on a concert of something that’s that big of a risk?” Devoted listeners are willing to take the chance despite those odds, but those outside this core group will weigh every enticement available before committing. Perhaps only through the free concert will they become comfortable enough to seek out performances of new work regularly.

And yet we live in a society that places a dollar amount on most things, regardless of MasterCard’s claims that certain things are “priceless.” That’s the point stressed by Dorothy Stone, the flutist and a founding member of the California E.A.R. Unit. “It’s very expensive to put on concerts,” she says. “People should realize that.” In the case of the E.A.R. Unit, it’s not a young group just out of college willing to play for nothing, but one made up of established professionals who’ve won hard-earned respect as through years of performances. Should people be able to hear them for free? They pay for sporting events, Stone points out, and “they expect they’ll have to pay for a concert.”

Stone and Chase both stress that the venue also plays a role in determining whether tickets will be given away. ICE performed at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival and Symphony Space in New York, and both venues charge admission. The E.A.R. Unit played at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s famed Monday Evening Concerts for years, and these performances were never free. Stone and the E.A.R. Unit didn’t seek the chance to give free concerts elsewhere due to their philosophical objection to them, and given the success of Monday Evening Concerts over the past 25 years, with the series becoming a cherished part of the LA music world, it seems that the E.A.R. Unit made the right decision. They found and nurtured an audience, which is Chase’s goal as well, but in this case, they did it without offering a free Feldman concert.

Alarm Will Sound finds itself in a situation similar to the E.A.R. Unit’s, according to managing director Gavin Chuck. “All of our concerts have been through a venue,” so no freebies. However, “we recognize that an audience member from the electronica crowd will pay $10 and isn’t used to paying $30,” he says. Since those are the people AWS is trying to reach, that sort of ticketing strategies—charging a little but definitely charging—are the ones AWS is most likely to experiment with.

Chuck and AWS are passionately investigating alternative audience-building maneuvers, however. One is a sort of marathon concert with a handful of sets being played in different parts of a large venue. “You’d pay $10 and see any two sets in the long concert,” he says. “It would be paying for the venue and getting more people through [the doors] in less time.”

“Nobody knows nothing,” runs the saying about how to be successful in Hollywood. It’s practically the same with free new music concerts, with everybody arguing a different point. But the subtle thing that Stone, Chase, and Chuck all know is that they’re looking for a particular listener,

Marc Geelhoed Photo courtesy Time Out Chicago

whether it’s someone who might go to an electronica concert or someone who has literally never heard a note of new music. “Free means more access,” says Chuck. “But art should be valued.” He’s conflicted about the value of free concerts, but Stone and Chase aren’t, with each in an opposing camp. They’re looking for new audiences in different places, and the free concert says something different to those audiences. We need the people throwing the door open to those who’ve never heard contemporary music, but we also need those whose concerts will draw listeners who discern value from price. Each approach is a different side of the same coin, even though the free-concert advocate would prefer the coin not be considered at all.

Evan Johnson

The institutional culture of classical music may or may not be dying, but it is certainly diffusing. There is still an American musical “mainstream,” guarded by the august museums that are major symphony orchestras and opera houses, but that mainstream’s prodigious capacity for self-perpetuation seems to be flagging and its borders dissolving. And in Europe, an institutionally-supported roster of central figures and aesthetic strands is increasingly besieged by budgetary, cultural, and political pressures.

If these traditional currents are in danger of drying up in the face of a rising interest in alternative media, venues, performance contexts, and modes of distribution, though, a nagging reality remains: there are still densely populated American mainstreams with little currency in Europe, and composers and styles that are still relatively central in Europe are not—and have never been—well-regarded or influential here. And even if the major symphony orchestras, opera houses, and contemporary-music festivals are no longer quite the isolationalist arbiters of taste they once were on either continent, there are still deep aesthetic and philosophical divides that have yet to be bridged.

In short, there still exist archetypal “American Composers” and “European Composers,” an archetypal “American Audience” and “European Audience,” with roots in decades-old artistic movements, historical contexts, and sets of priorities. However effectively pluralism may be taking over the world, these old national differences are still with us in fundamental ways.

In what follows I will lay out a general account of this persistent rift. After spending some time defining my terms, I will present a series of 20th-century case studies: one contrasting the self-definition of a trendsetting European Composer with a parallel American case, one demonstrating the culturally localized reputation of the most Centrally European of Central European Composers, and two describing and explaining ocean-spanning success stories. At the end, I will briefly survey the present situation and take a stab at the future of transatlantic musical relations.

Let us define the “European Composer” as a creator (of any nationality) who positions his or her work, implicitly or explicitly, as part of a continual, dialectical process of musical “progress”—or, crucially, a composer whose work can be so positioned by an audience. By “dialectical process” I mean an idea of progress that works not linearly, not simply by consciously building upon the achievement of one’s predecessors, but through a constant process of assessment, resistance, and negation. Hence Pierre Boulez declares the death of Schoenberg, Helmut Lachenmann the demise of Beethoven and Mahler, and so forth. (What this “death” consists of, however, is not at all clear.) The European Composer looks over his shoulder for clues to the way forward, and battles on from there.

An “American Composer,” by contrast, operates—or can be successfully interpreted as operating—without the same sense of obligation to history; his or her concern is the present, the tightly bounded experience of a particular work by a particular audience as created by a particular composer with particular interests. This is not at all to say that the American Composer is ignorant of musical history, or does not care about it—only that his or her work is not conceptualized in a dialectical context, and resists such conceptualization by others. George Rochberg’s celebrated turn away from serialism in his Third Quartet was the act of an American Composer par excellence: he made this fundamental aesthetic decision not because he felt it must be done in a universal sense, but because he felt the need for his own purposes. The European Composer asks, musically speaking, what is needed; the American Composer asks what he himself needs. As the American Composer Charles Wuorinen wrote in 1963 (by which time he had declared that “[i]t is safe to say that the major 20th century revolutions in musical thought are behind us”)—”The young composer has a greater responsibility than his forebears had—all the greater because it is largely or wholly to himself.”¹

In fact, the central repertoire of “mainstream” American music (as exemplified by, say, John Adams, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Rouse, and so on) splits even more dramatically than do Wuorinen and Rochberg with the European-Composer model, in that the idea of “progress”—whether driven by personal aesthetic ambition like that of not only Wuorinen and Rochberg but Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Steve Reich or, as with the European Composer, by a sense of external cultural necessity—is irrelevant to their work. The Mainstream American Composer wants to write what he or she considers to be good music, full stop, historical resonance and overarching “progress” be damned. Wuorinen’s 1963 “responsibility to himself” still involves a concept of advancement of a musical science; that of the truly Mainstream American Composer does not. (In a sense, of course, the refusal to submit to a larger idea of “progress” is itself a strongly progressive move; this is the paradox of postmodernity.)

In these terms, the European Audience—and by “Audience” I mean not only (or even primarily) those hearing a work but also other composers, concert presenters, festival organizers, critics, and the like—wants to conceive of a musical work as does a European Composer, and similarly in the case of Americans. A European Audience will appreciate a work that they can hear as actively engaging, positively or negatively, with the historical state of music and of society. An American Audience—and here I am purposefully speaking in generalities—will respond to a piece of music without regard to its possible larger cultural significance.

Four possibilities present themselves, then. American Composers can primarily appeal to and be supported by American Audiences, and be virtually unknown abroad, or they can find themselves supported mainly by European Audiences. European Composers, similarly, can be appreciated by their “native” Audience and ignored or derided by the American one, or they can enjoy transatlantic appeal. All of these possibilities, in their various combinations, will be encountered in what follows.

Before I go any further, a few of clarifications are in order. First, I am of course generalizing wildly and, perhaps, irresponsibly; I am speaking only of the most general trends. Second, I am defining “Europe,” for now, primarily as Germany, Austria, and France; the role of other national cultures will come up later. Finally, an American-born composer is not necessarily an American Composer, and a European-born composer is not necessarily a European Composer; in many cases, that capitalized designation is not chosen by the composer but is thrust upon them by the interest of the corresponding Audience.

California-born John Cage, for example, makes for a quintessential European Composer. Despite his iconoclastic image, Cage polemicized for his work as historical necessity in such early essays as 1939’s “The Future of Music: Credo,” and positioned his own aesthetics, at least at first, by means of a triangulation with Beethoven and Satie. That his 1958 visit to Darmstadt was so influential, and that so many of his later commissions came from German institutions, is no coincidence. By contrast, Olivier Messiaen, despite his status as godfather to nearly the entire cadre of Darmstadt pioneers and his deep and consequential familiarity with the entirety of Western musical history, is by contrast easily assimilable into American Composerdom; his volumes upon volumes of technical writings explicate his methods, his concerns, his quixotic obsession with birdsong and his Catholicism as motivations for a profoundly anti-dialectical iconoclasm that is fully comprehensible “out of context.” In short, nationality is an unreliable guide. Sometimes, as we will see below in the case of Helmut Lachenmann, a composer’s Europeanness is so pervasive as to render their music untranslatable; but, just as often (as brief glances at the cases of Iannis Xenakis and the pioneering American minimalists will reveal), a composer’s work can be embraced by foreign audiences and musical establishments on the latters’ own ideological terms.

Case Study: Boulez vs. Babbitt

The different attitudes of the American Composer and the European Composer towards the idea of dialectical historical progress are almost comically clear in the parallel cases of Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. Both were involved, starting in the 1950s, in the development of totalizing systems of musical organization. Both, at first, traced their lineage back to the Second Viennese School and saw Schoenberg and Webern as predecessors and influences. When Boulez was reaching his “limit of fertile ground” in Structures Ia (1952), Babbitt was pushing in a broadly similar direction with works like the Composition for Twelve Instruments (1948/54) and Du (1951). But the ways in which they presented their own work, and the attitudes they took towards their chosen predecessors, could hardly have been more different.

The youthful Boulez was an infamously enthusiastic polemicist. Anyone involved in the history of 20th-century music recalls, perhaps with a wince, the 27-year-old composer’s proclamation in the article “Eventuellement…” (“Possibly…”):

What conclusion are we to draw? The least expected: let me state, in my turn, that any musician who has not experienced—I do not say understood, but truly experienced—the necessity of dodecaphonic language is USELESS. For his entire work brings him up short of the needs of his time.²

“Eventuellement…”, though, is only the most famous, and admittedly the most spectacular, example of Boulez’s thorough sense of historical necessity. We also see it in the famous “Schoenberg is Dead” of 1952; we see it in the 1974 article “Schoenberg, le mal-aimé?” (“Schoenberg, the Unloved?”), in which Boulez’s discussion of his predecessor’s messianic attitude reads remarkably like an reminiscence of his own youth. More generally, we see it in Boulez’s habitual use of the plural “we” in describing the aesthetics and importance of his own work:

We thought (and when I say “we”, I mean the generation of composers who recognized each other, in the years immediately after the war, by certain attitudes) that the days of manifestos were long past, and we therefore set ourselves—sensibly, you must admit—to demonstrate the “movement” by going straight ahead.³

Imagine what the Boulez of 1963, quoted here, would have thought of Wuorinen’s proclamation, in the same year, that a composer has a responsibility only to himself!

At the same time, Boulez shows little interest in discussing how his own work is put together. Only in “Eventuellement…” and in the (ostensibly private) letters to John Cage do we get any extended discussion of the constructive specifics of his work; otherwise, the closest we get is in “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” and “Constructing an improvisation,” in which Boulez approaches questions of general form, considerations of instrumental sound, and yet again the imposing force of historical necessity. It was left to determined exegetes like Lev Koblyakov (for Le marteau sans maître) and György Ligeti (for Structures Ia) to discern and disseminate the note-to-note methods behind the musical output of Boulez the polemicist.

By contrast, Babbitt’s writings on the principles behind his own works and those of Schoenberg, with whom he clearly feels a strong kinship, hasten past questions of history and cultural compulsion to settle on the internal properties of pitch structures that capture his interest. For Boulez, Schoenberg is a tragic, if not heroic, figure for whom we are exhorted to have sympathy and after whose hard artistic digging we are encouraged to follow. For Babbitt, he is a masterful conjoiner of hexachords: “Phrases such as ‘historical necessity,’ even ‘inevitability,’ as justificatory were…unfortunate, undesirable, and—beyond all else—unnecessary.”⁴ In Babbitt’s mind, Schoenberg represents “the idea of this hermetically sealed music by a hermetically sealed man.”⁵ Here the American Composer functions as American Audience vis-à-vis Schoenberg, finding value primarily in the internal qualities of a bounded musical experience; Boulez, the European counterpart, finds an equivalent but diametrically opposed value in the way Schoenberg’s work as a whole digests and redirects history.

It has been hugely detrimental to Babbitt’s popular reputation that in writing about his own work, as well, he dwells less on its infectious verve than on abstruse structural considerations. This is not to say, though, that Babbitt’s writings are always internally directed. His gift for the verbal salvo is on par with Boulez’s. But there is a strong and systemic difference: Babbitt’s polemics, like Ives’s before him and Wuorinen’s after, are directed not at the requirements of the past, but at the desires of the present; not at what other composers need to do, but at what needs to be done for composers. “Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History,” “On Having Been and Still Being an American Composer,” and “Brave New Worlds” are strongly worded broadsides aimed at what Babbitt sees as a pervasive intellectual climate of disinterest and misapprehension pressing the American composer on all sides. These writings are not the veiled self-exhortations or pep rallies produced by Boulez but pleas for support and recognition. They are directed outwards, aimed at changing the behavior of everyone else, rather than inwards, towards his musical colleagues and towards himself. Where Boulez calls for the summary demolition of opera houses (itself a particularly, almost quaintly, European image), Babbitt laments his own failure “to secure a mere Guggenheim fellowship.”⁶ The operative pronoun in these American polemical lectures and essays is not “we” but “I.”

The fundamental dichotomy here, between historical progress and scientific discovery, between “what must be done” and “what I want to do,” is precisely the difference between our European Composer and our American Composer. It is a difference in self-presentation, in how one talks about one’s work rather than the work itself, but in turn it affects how audiences that share the cultural milieu of these attitudes receive a new work.

Case Study: Helmut Lachenmann vs. the United States of America

When London’s Royal College of Music recently presented a festival centered on the music of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, the key word in their publicity materials was “Transcendent.” This descriptor aroused derision in the more Continentally-oriented segments of London’s new music circles, for however “transcendent” Lachenmann’s noise-based sonic surfaces may seem, his conceptualization of them are anything but. Lachenmann’s music is thoroughly suffused with history. Even in escaping it, or in capturing and expelling it (as in the concerto for string quartet and orchestra entitled Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied or his multiple quotations of O du lieber Augustin, the German folk song also quoted by Schoenberg), this is music that gets its hands dirty mucking about in the dialectics of cultural progress.

Lachenmann’s influence on later generations of German and otherwise Central European composers (Matthias Spahlinger, Gerhard Stäbler, Beat Furrer) has been incalculable. He is, by any measure, among the most important figures in the institutional musical life of Central Europe. And yet, in 1995, the musicologist and Lachenmann expert Elke Hockings could write in the British journal Tempo that “…to the wider English music public,…[Lachenmann] is little known. There are hardly any comprehensive accounts of Lachenmann in English….The apparent confusion about Lachenmann in English-speaking countries is somewhat surprising.”⁷

Despite the RCM’s recent celebration, the situation has changed little. A large collection of Lachenmann’s writings, entitled Musik als existentielle Erfahrung (Music as Existential Experience), languishes, mostly untranslated. The laudable but isolated efforts of conductor Bradley Lubman notwithstanding, Lachenmann’s influence in American musical culture is essentially nonexistent.

Hockings sums up Lachenmann’s American problem when she writes: “On the European continent, Lachenmann’s music is more or less successfully merchandized by means of a highly philosophic vernacular. This dialectic rhetoric has seldom been attractive to English-speaking music enthusiasts.” She all but blames the influence of Babbitt: “English-speaking academia in general…strives for the positivist’s rhetoric, full of factual information and one-dimensional logic.” Whatever one thinks of Hocking’s characterizations, or her obvious sympathies in this cultural collision, her observations have merit. The American musical establishment has, in fact, received Lachenmann’s work with an attitude ranging from indifference to disdain. In a 2003 article in The New Yorker, alongside the misapprehension that “in Germany…a deep mistrust of the musical past lingers,” Alex Ross dismisses Lachenmann (along with the rest of established German musical culture) as “dyspeptic complexity of the Adornian variety.” It is clear that he doesn’t care for the music; but it is telling that he condemns it on philosophical and aesthetic grounds, for what it tries to be as much as for what it is—in other words, for its historical presumption. More recently, Ross entered the ring once again on his blog “The Rest is Noise,” ridiculing a disapproving Austrian reviewer of a Mark Morris Dance Company performance in Vienna as an “Austro-German culture chauvinist.” (Doesn’t the corresponding description apply to anyone who would use such a phrase?) Not to be outdone, reviewers for the American record-review website ClassicsToday.com dismiss collections of Lachenmann’s orchestral music released on the Austrian Kairos label as “determinedly, uncompromisingly unmusical,” and as “more intellectual twaddle from the German avant-garde.”

Lachenmann is among the purest examples of a European Composer, purer even than Boulez. His music is as profoundly infused with history as anyone’s, and a whiff of that preoccupation is apparently enough to send the American Audience away.

Transatlantic Successes: Iannis Xenakis as American Composer, Riley/Reich/Glass as European Composers

We have seen a stark example of the fundamental difference in attitude between the American and the European composer with Babbitt and Boulez, and we have seen in Lachenmann a portrait of untranslatable Europeanness. But European composers can certainly be assimilated into American Composerdom, and vice versa; I will present Iannis Xenakis as an example of a European relatively welcomed by American Audiences, and the American minimalists as adopted Europeans.

In 1987, the Greek-born and Paris-based Xenakis wrote in Perspectives of New Music: “to refuse all rules outside the work is to refuse to be crippled, blind, and deaf.” And: “Nothingness resorbs [sic], creates. It engenders being.”⁸ True, Metastaseis was a succès de scandale at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany in 1955, and Xenakis had a career of the utmost prominence in Europe from then until his death in 2001. But Xenakis’s music, created out of a willful deafness to both his musical colleagues and their shared cultural lineage, has also succeeded in what so many other Donaueschingen-fêted composers, of his era and ours, have not even attempted: by constructing a creative personality based on the resolutely anti-“musical” discourse of symbolic logic and fluid dynamics, and by adopting the cultural heritage of classical Greece rather than that of Enlightenment-era Prussia, Xenakis fashioned himself into an American Composer.

In fact, Xenakis has serious strikes against him from the perspective of the American Audience: not only his prominence on the European festival circuit, but the extraordinary difficulty of his music. And yet he held a residency at Indiana University, received major performances in this country (including a large commission from the city of Ypsilanti, Michigan), and remains a respected figure here in a way that Lachenmann has never been. The creative attitude evinced by his 1987 essay, and the inwardly-directed scientism of his (translated!) tomes Formalized Music and Arts/Sciences: Alloys that places him broadly in the category of Babbitt, cannot be irrelevant to Xenakis’s atypical American reputation.

Steve Reich: “After Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern came a pause followed by Stockhausen, Boulez, and Berio and after them came myself, Riley, Glass, Young, and later, others.”⁹

European Audiences love extremes, without which dialectical progress—a constant process of negation spinning itself out continually since the messianic presumptions of Schoenberg and their later “productive misreading” by Boulez and other Darmstadt-era artists in search of self-definition set the process in motion—cannot continue. Steve Reich and the compatriots he names here, like Cage, and despite their (mostly) all-American background, are thus welcome. The conceptual transparency of these composers’ early works, alongside the structural rigor that Reich himself compares to that of Darmstadt serialism—by which means the dialectical thread is kept aloft—is surely part of what has proved so attractive to the institutional European Audience.¹⁰

The Present

The evidence for the above case studies, of course, is years and decades old. Since Boulez, Babbitt, Xenakis, and Reich wrote or did not write their position-defining works and polemics, fifty years and two generations’ worth of changes in these general musical cultures have occurred. So what is happening now?

For an idea, turn to the mainest of streams in American musical life: the symphony orchestra. A perusal of the American Symphony Orchestra League’s list of orchestral premieres since 2000 turns up, alongside a strong majority of American works by composers of many stripes, a healthy smattering of new European music. Many appear to be the result of the personal advocacy of Europeans with powerful positions in this sector of American musical life (most notably Esa-Pekka Salonen in Los Angeles and Christoph von Dohnanyi in Cleveland, alongside the indefatigable Oliver Knussen, who seems to be everywhere all the time). In general, over the past several years, there have been clear winners in this sweepstakes: Kaija Saariaho, James MacMillan, Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Mark-Anthony Turnage (who is currently engaged in a long-term residency in Chicago).

It is worth noting that only one of these composers, Rihm, hails from what I peremptorily defined above as, for these purposes, “real Europe.” As it turns out, Rihm, certainly a mainstream figure in contemporary German musical life, has come under direct fire from a central figure in another, more echt-European German mainstream—Helmut Lachenmann—for being what we can now describe as “too American”:

A wave of lazy eclecticism, whether Euro- or American-tinged, is splashing over the ears of an astonished and perplexed bourgeoisie, duped by what it imagines to be its openness…and even our New Symphonists [the most prominent among whom is Rihm—EJ] recoil a little, since, after all, they have always regarded their music as a dialectical answer to recognized contradictions with Darmstadt tendencies. ¹¹

In other words, the “New Symphonists” consider themselves European Composers—there are few more European phrases than “a dialectical answer to recognized contradictions with Darmstadt tendencies”—but in his criticism, Lachenmann predicts (and, unsurprisingly, deplores) their American acceptability.

In general, Rihm aside, the role of “outer Europe” has been disproportionate in mainstream American venues. Scandinavians (notably Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg, and Einojuhani Rautavaara), Eastern Europeans (Erkki-Sven Tüür, Arvo Pärt, Peteris Vasks, Krzysztof Penderecki), and citizens of former Soviet republics (Gubaidulina foremost among them) share a role with Americans vis-à-vis central European cultural baggage; having spent centuries in either geographical or political isolation from the tradition that still weighs so heavily on the compositional choices of what we may consider “mainstream” post-Darmstadt Europeans, their works could be expected to be more likely to present a comfortable cultural accessibility to American Audiences similarly isolated from classical music’s history.

In Scandinavia, for example, the looming figure of Jean Sibelius (a near-contemporary of America’s cultural equivalent, Charles Ives) takes the place of the Central European Beethoven and Mozart, creating a tradition a hundred years younger and much less internationally resonant. Furthermore, Sibelius, like Ives, was an outsider in his own time; Vienna’s centrality to European compositional life predates Beethoven, but musical Helsinki was born as a creative center with Sibelius, just as musical Boston and New York were born, fitfully, with Ives and Varèse. And they are still being born. What Lindberg and Saariaho do, alongside more clearly post-Sibelian Finns like Rautavaara, Kalevi Aho, and the late Jonas Kokkonen, will be part of a still-inchoate Finnish musical heritage begun but not necessarily defined by Sibelius. (Even Sibelius’s own centrality, inevitably fading with time, cannot be held as permanent.) Similarly, the seething diversity of American musical activity will be what future generations look back at, concerned with their relation to a historical legacy that does not yet exist.

Americans and Finns, then, along with other “outer” Europeans and composers of other cultures, are in the same boat, not yet in possession of the coherent body of tradition with which European Composers are both blessed and saddled. It stands to reason that their repertoires could so easily coexist.

Finally: Why? Beyond the historical discrepancy just mentioned, I do not intend to dwell long on the reasons for the initial emergence of this divide; one might blame the obvious differences of geography, native culture, and education, and most particularly different national responses to the traumas of the Second World War. (As Germany and France struggled to regain their national identities, the United States rapidly focused on technological and scientific achievements in order to squash the possibility of another, similarly closely-fought conflagration. The correspondence to the musical approaches of Boulez-the-rescuer-of-culture and Babbitt-the-scientist, which were forged at precisely this time, is striking.)

But why has the gulf remained so stubbornly present beneath a surface of alternative distribution mechanisms, performers with world-spanning careers living in hotel rooms, and the emergence of two generations of composers after that of Babbitt, Boulez, Lachenmann and Reich? Why have the personal efforts of Knussen and James Levine, among many others, not sufficed to elide the distinction between Europeanness and Americanness once and for all?

One important and unavoidable continuing difference between American and central European musical cultures is the degree of state subsidy. Only with a hugely different economic model of support for the arts could Berlin maintain (until recently) five orchestras and three opera companies, while major arts organizations in culturally savvy American cities helplessly sink further into debt. The list of premieres of major works by influential European Composers (whether of European or American birth: Lachenmann’s Kontrakadenz, Boulez’s isolated total-serialist Polyphonie X, Cage’s Roaratorio) undertaken by German state radio and their affiliated orchestras is long, and impressive. The New York Philharmonic, which has to answer to a financially minded Board of Directors and to the pressures of the private-sector bottom line, has had less success (and when Pierre Boulez tried to alter this precedent during his brief tenure as Music Director—largely, it should be said, through the aggressive promotion of European repertoire—he was nearly run out of town).

There are non-artistic considerations in both cases, of course; there is no reason to suppose that personal loyalties, careerism, and back-room politicking have any less place in a state-sponsored system than a privately funded one. A well-timed recording can also cover many fault lines, as was the case with Stockhausen’s burst of celebrity in the 1960s amid a series of Deutsche Grammaphon LPs. But, beneath all that, it is understandable that the German and Italian states with their radio orchestras and the French one with IRCAM and the Cité de la Musique feel compelled by a cultural mandate to continue Schoenberg’s self-proclaimed mission—to attempt to ensure the superiority of their own musical culture for as long as possible. In other words, there is a sense in which Lachenmann’s music is central to German cultural history and its reflexive self-perpetuation, and Boulez’s to the French, in a way that no American’s music could be for his or her native land. The American Composer, as many (particularly Babbitt) have noted, remains a peripheral figure even among the intellectual classes.

In the end, we cannot avoid the question of history. Since the beginnings of classical music in this country, since the Dark Ages before Ives, Cowell, and the arrival of Varèse, Americans (composers and audiences alike) have been consumers of European musical culture. As Americans, we know our Beethoven and our Schoenberg and our Debussy, but we do not feel them as a Boulez or a Lachenmann does; that is what it means not to be European. For the European Audience, speaking through Boulez, that makes the American Composer “WORTHLESS”; for the American Audience, it makes the European Composer inscrutable.

A list of examples, counterexamples, test cases, and problematic fence-sitters could stretch on indefinitely, and I do not claim a perfect rate of prediction. After all, compositional careers are (often) long and varied, performers with personal or artistic loyalties and affinities cultivate careers on multiple continents, and nothing happens for only one reason. But despite an ever-thickening overgrowth of complicating circumstances, there is still a line in the sand that keeps Helmut Lachenmann on his shores and Jennifer Higdon on ours, and these cultural attitudes towards musical history may well determine how it is drawn.

As for the future, it is, as always, too soon to say. Politically speaking, European national identities are not as sharply defined as they were after the two World Wars, while the continent’s economy slows and state arts subsidies begin to shrink; these factors point towards an eventual global “triumph” of the American Composer and Audience, alongside our nation’s politics and culture. How tightly all these broad phenomena are joined, and to what degree their musical implications are overridden by localized, incidental factors of patronage, individual enthusiasms, and economic incentive—all this is impossible to determine. Perhaps the only solution is to throw up one’s hands and follow the advice of Milton Babbitt: to “try to write the music which [one] would most like to hear.” What music a composer “would most like to hear,” of course, depends on inherited notions of what one should “most like to hear,” notions that divide the European and American Composer profoundly. The anarchic mantra of the American Composer, then, returns us to where we started.

Notes

^1. “The Outlook for Young Composers,” 54-5.

^2. Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, 113.

^3. “Ten Years On,” reprinted in Orientations, 440.

^4. “My Vienna Triangle,” reprinted in Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, 474.

^5. Milton Babbitt: Words About Music, 24.

^6. “On Having Been and Still Being an American Composer,” reprinted in Collected Essays of Milton of Babbitt 429.

^7. “Helmut Lachenmann’s Concept of Rejection,” 4.

^8. Iannis Xenakis, “Creativity,” reprinted in Rahn, ed., Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, 158-9.

^9. Steve Reich, “Schoenberg,” reprinted in Writings on Music, 187.

^10. Steve Reich, “Conversation with Paul Hiller,” reprinted in Writings in Music, 238.

^11. “Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt,” 51.

[Ed. Note: Robert Ashley’s latest opera, Concrete, will receive its world premiere performances at La Mama in New York City from January 17 through 21, 2007. It is the first of Ashley’s works in which he is not part of the cast. We asked Jacqueline Humbert, who has been part of virtually every Ashley production since 1980, to describe the gestation process of this unique body of work. —FJO]

Jacqueline Humbert

Robert Ashley has been composing new kinds of opera exploring a vast range of techniques for over forty years. In 1962, his in memoriam … Kit Carson presented 256 plot diagrams from which a producer could choose to make realizations for sixteen independent performers or sound sources using any available resources. In 2002, Celestial Excursions called for five voices, any number of solo instruments and real-time computer-realized sound layering. Now, in 2007, we will experience the world premiere of his latest work, Concrete, which yet again introduces techniques that are new both in his composing style and for his performing ensemble. Critics have described Ashley’s work as sounds easy. Performers have described it as exceptionally difficult.

I have had the privilege and the challenge of working with Robert Ashley for over twenty-five years, first as a designer, then as a principal singer with his ensemble. Though my training was in visual art, I was drawn in the 1970s towards developing a style of text-song performance resting somewhere between musical speech and melodic interpretation. I am not classically trained.

In 1980 I embarked on my career with Mr. Ashley, initially designing for Perfect Lives, his television opera produced as seven one-half hour episodes for Great Britain’s Channel Four. Soon thereafter, he invited me to join his performing ensemble, which currently also includes singers, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner and Joan LaBarbara. Robert, Sam and I are from the same region of the Midwest in Michigan. It is probably not insignificant to note that this coincidence often helps in quickly comprehending the musical nuances he may be trying to achieve in some of his writing, which sometimes may lie imbedded inside the natural intoning of that regional dialect. Additionally, the broad definition of song I had developed in my own work meshed well with Ashley’s musical intentions. I have performed in all of his subsequent works to date, slowly mastering their interpretation and, so he claims, providing inspiration for some of his characters. We have shared many, many hours of laughter, hard work and story telling. I have learned a great deal from him about the beauty of the untrained voice, the uniquely intricate and intimate vocal qualities that can be obtained through the use of microphones and the rhythmic complexity of the music inherent to American English with its rapid fire, staccato articulation of syllables.

Ashley has been called the grandfather of rap, one who has had a profound impact on other innovative musical artists, including such figures as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. Often, his texts are intoned through the subtle bending of single pitches in order to extract as much meaning from the words as possible in telling a story. Some try to compare Ashley’s approach to the music of speech with Schoenberg’s “Sprechstimme” as exemplified in his expressionist melodrama, Pierrot lunaire. It is actually very different. In Schoenberg’s idea, the singer must maintain the rhythmic precision of the musical notation, starting each pitch as given, but then, departing from it, falling or rising in a way that works against the perception of singing. The resulting pitched speech must fit the musical constructions, never attempting to evoke mood or the meaning of words, but rather sticking to the musical form and allowing the pure tone-painting construction to render the composer’s intention. The text also unfolds at a somewhat slower pace than the speech rhythms in much of Ashley’s work. Similarly, in traditional opera, if we were to hear singers actually speaking what they are meant to sing, the words would unfold at a painfully slow pace, often taking about a minute or more to say just a few words. In Ashley’s style of singing, the music is inherent in the language itself, in the natural rhythmical and tonal articulation of syllables. For the singer, the work starts with the words. The music is in the words. The words come fast. You repeat a line until it feels right, natural, and find the inherent melody in those words. What you emphasize or stress determines the melodic shaping. Sometimes Ashley intentionally sets syllables in not-so-natural rhythmic structures, placing stresses on syllables that would normally be un-stressed. This can lead the listener to question or re-think meanings.

Unlike classical singing, in which great emphasis is placed on honing the instrument for accurate pitch and tone production with vibrato, proper diaphragm support, etc., this style of singing maximizes use of the microphone to enable extreme subtlety in characterization and de-emphasizes the need for the power of bel canto vocal production. Meaning is given more emphasis than pitch accuracy, inspired by great singers like Billie Holiday, about whom some said, in her day, that she “wasn’t really singing.” The microphone allows great intimacy to flourish, for the meaning to come across over vocal pyrotechnics, without ever having to raise the voice above almost a whisper. And, if one listens carefully, when people are really talking, you find that they are actually singing—it is so musical: they are throwing their pitches all over the place when excited, dropping to hushed, deep tones when serious or somber, radiating a wonderful range of musical expressions.

(L to R) Robert Ashley, Jacquline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, Sam Ashley, and Thomas Buckner (foreground) performing Ashley’s Celestial Excursions. Photo courtesy of Performing Artservices, Inc. ©2003

The process of developing each Ashley opera is different. First the doorbell rings and a large stack of paper arrives, the score. The scores rarely contain much that looks like traditional, five-line-staff, musical notation. Mostly, they consist of pages upon pages of text, all set out in some systematic, graphical way to show the rhythmic structures involved in the lines and the coordination intended among the ensemble members and commonly an underlying, electronic orchestra. Sometimes, a score may simply consist of words on paper, with a single pitch assigned to each particular character. Some scores are in simple time signatures, like Improvement, in which the entire first act is in 3/4 and the second in 4/4. Sometimes it is very different, as in Celestial Excursions, where the rhythmic complexity changes radically from scene to scene, and ensemble members must sing individually difficult, complicated patterns against each other. Sometimes where the syllables fall in time is not specified, but is left up to the performer to invent. Sometimes there are extremely complex rhythmic assignments, with every syllable specified as to where it is to land, pitches changing on every numbered line and ensemble members required to match each other exactly in both rhythm and the nuances of articulation. Sometimes a soloist is free to roam from the rigidity of the notated line, as long as she/he can catch up before the scene changes or dramatic pitch or tonal shifts occur. Soloists may have very different texts from the chorus accompaniments, and the orchestra might be doing something rhythmic or, in contrast, quite arhythmic and disparate. In performances, we are sometimes fed line counts through in-ear monitoring systems, especially if there is little or no rhythmic information in the orchestra, or if various members of the ensemble are following different texts.

Early on, Robert would often send a reading of the score that he had recorded himself with simple pitch references. More often than not, though, we would be sent a recording of a line count recited by Robert along with a click track and pitch cues. Occasionally the electronic orchestra part would be completed in conjunction with the subsequent learning and rehearsal process. More often, however, the orchestra would be added after the group had worked independently without having heard what the accompaniment might be like.

The task is always to tell a story. Often the stories are somewhat abstract or not immediately accessible in clearly linear form. In the moment of telling that story or anecdote, the ensemble must find how to communicate and to bring great joy or break hearts in the process. To help evoke the striking emotional qualities of particular characters, singers might be placed in registers that stretch their vocal qualities dramatically. What has also been unique in this work is that once the singers achieve deep understanding of the compositional intentions, Ashley’s scores actually afford great freedom, though not in the sense of improvisation. The works are always different, and each performer or interpreter really has to invent their character in each piece.

Though our ensemble membership has remained pretty constant over the years, we have never all lived in the same city. We work independently with scores and rehearsal tracks and then join our interpretations during rehearsal periods held in the composer’s studio in New York City. This is when the excitement begins. Often, Mr. Ashley cannot imagine what the ensemble will sound like, how the music will work, until he hears it for the first time with all of us in the room singing the complicated, rhythmically challenging materials through his own microphones, his own electronic processors and his own speakers. Sometimes he just listens to us for many hours before giving any direction at all. We invent, bend, try it this way, then that, until we find the right interpretation of the words on the page, the emotions of the characters inside the pitch assignments and the heart of the story. Very often, Ashley gives little or no direction ahead of time indicating simply, “I’ll know it when I hear it.” It is nearly impossible in a single hearing for listeners to capture every phrase, word, syllable and musical element, but when the story washes over the audience, we know we’ve got it right.

A particular challenge in the newest work, Concrete, is that the ensemble is not tied to a time signature or time structure in any way. The electronic orchestra just floats. The singers perform stresses indicated for certain syllables emphasized according to a scheme drawn from idiomatic, colloquial statements contained in the titles of each scene. An example is, “Take time / to think it over…” The underlined, stressed words outline a particular rhythmic shape that will be applied to every line in the scene, but without ever being tied to a beat. The singers must feel the stresses and rhythms of these syllable groups and perform them through pitch and dynamic changes, elongation or any other variations that sound interesting. In the solo sections of this work the performer has complete freedom to tell her/his story choosing pitches from the orchestra sounds, which will be constantly shifting, different and unpredictable in every performance. Mr. Ashley will be generating the orchestra mix in real-time, with the assistance of sound designer, Tom Hamilton. It is a very different work for us in this way, and it will also be the first time Mr. Ashley will not be singing with the ensemble.

***

Jacqueline Humbert‘s work as a performer, visual artist and designer of graphics, costumes and sets has been exhibited, published, recorded, broadcast and presented throughout the world since the early 1970’s. She is particularly well known for her collaborations with leading, innovative artists, filmmakers, choreographers and composers, as exemplified by her 25-year contribution to Robert Ashley’s music as both a principal singer and designer. Other composers— James Tenney, Joan La Barbara, Larry Polansky, and Alvin Lucier— also created work for Humbert’s unique approach to the voice which have been collected on the CD, Chanteuse (Lovely Music, Ltd., LCD 4001).

Steve Dollar Photo by Valerie Trucchia

One day last March, the composer Rhys Chatham found himself seated in the back of a van, rolling down the highway somewhere between Louisiana and Texas, headed to a showcase at the annual South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin. Up in the front, David Daniell, one of the guitarists joining Chatham on a rare American tour, was dialing through the menu on his iPod. The selection could have been filed broadly under “heavy metal”—the 1970s progeny of British bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin that welded blues-rock to gothic mythologies and reigned over a nation of mullet-headed kids getting stoned in America’s high-school parking lots. More specifically, though, the dark materials Daniell was about to unload through the van’s stereo came from a later period, beginning in the early 1990s, when one of metal’s myriad offshoots began to flourish in California and the Pacific Northwest—parallel to the not-unrelated rise of Nirvana and its grungy peers.

The music was heavier than heavy. It sounded like a slower, spacier, iron-legged inversion of the punk-influenced thrash-metal of Sabbath’s latter-day inheritors—wildly popular groups with names like Metallica and Slayer—who combined the form’s prize-fighter punch with speedy virtuoso guitar licks and an appetite for destructive imagery. Indeed, compared to such fierce tempos, this stuff felt narcotic. In the world of metal, whose bands are obsessively categorized into hyphenated subgenres that mutate and multiply like exotic viruses, fans had taken to calling it “doom metal.” Depending on which band it was, or what phase the musicians were passing through, someone might also call it “stoner metal,” “drone metal,” “ambient metal,” or, more to the point, “sludge.” Imagine, if you will, the rhythm of a glacier paving over a Neanderthal village in a blanket of ice or a jackhammer in suspended animation—and the way in which an extremely restricted number of notes might repeat over and over, sour and bleeding with distortion, like a groaning abyss that never stopped swallowing. Think of an endless instant, ripe with distortion, amplified so loudly that the soundwaves induce a physical sensation in the listener. Now hold that thought.

Now 54, Chatham, a one-time La Monte Young student and the founder the music program at the non-profit performance space The Kitchen (when he was only 19), is a crucially important second-wave minimalist. Inspired by his discovery of punk rock and The Ramones at the now-defunct club CBGB in 1977, Chatham introduced the concept of the “guitar army” to the new music canon soon after that. He’s no stranger to the power of volume and repetition. Like many of his contemporaries, including Tony Conrad, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, he was as influential on rock music as it was on him. As the Chicago Reader recently noted, his recordings from the period “sound like the good parts of every Sonic Youth record run together.” In fact, Chatham’s seminal pieces such as “Guitar Trio” (1977), with their deliriously chiming overtones and propulsive motion, anticipated the harmonic hoodoo of bands like SY and other noisy, arty acts that followed. Indeed, some of their guitarists cut their teeth working with Chatham. But the composer, whose work has intersected with everything from punk to electronica, had never heard anything like what was oozing out of the van’s speakers. “What is this?” he asked. As it turned out, the tune was “Dopesmoker,” from the 1991 recording of the same name by Sleep, a long-defunct California act that now ranks among the most influential in the always-amorphous metal underground.

The next day, Tony Chatham was joking around with tour mate and fellow new music rabble-rouser, Conrad—whose early 1960s work presaged the Velvet Underground—and proposed the idea of a “minimalist metal” band. But here’s the punch line: It wasn’t a joke. In 2007, Table of the Elements will issue the debut album by Chatham’s new band Essentialist, a five-piece outfit boasting a clutch of young guitarists. Their music applies some of the lessons of heavy metal in its various guises to the amped-up minimalist compositions that have been Chatham’s calling card. Though the sound probably owes more to the staccato riffing of vintage Metallica shorn of that band’s Wagnerian tendencies, the project also illuminates fascinating connections between already rock-friendly minimalism and the latter-day “stoner”-type metal outfits that sparked Chatham’s epiphany.

“Classical composers have always been influenced by ‘popular’ music,” says Chatham, who wryly comments that he turned from guitar to trumpet during the 1980s because he could never play as fast as Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi. “Stravinsky and Copland, Bartók, certainly, not to mention the Queen Elizabethan composers like Giles Farnaby with compositions like ‘Bony Sweet Robin.’ But here, with heavy metal, we have groups like Sleep and Sunn O))) being influenced by composers like me, Tony and La Monte, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. There is now a real conversation going on, amplified by the record industry mass-releasing all this music, so that everyone can hear it easily.”

Recently, in a New York Times Magazine profile, guitarist Stephen O’Malley of the band Sunn O)))—currently acclaimed as the genre’s leading exponent—namechecked composers like Chatham, Conrad, and Reich as significant influences. Sunn O)))’s music is commonly filed under the “doom” category, even though O’Malley and his partner in the group, Greg Anderson, eagerly work to blur such distinctions. The name Sunn O))) is pronounced “sun,” and is an homage to a brand of amplifiers used by the veteran Seattle band Earth, whose leader Dylan Carlson all-but-patented the drone metal concept on albums like 1991’s Extra-Capsular Extraction. (Carlson still records as Earth, and also collaborates with Sunn O)))’s members on projects for the band’s Southern Lord label.) Earth was first active in Washington around the time O’Malley and Anderson met and began playing together in more conventional bands with names like Burning Witch and Goatsnake. Though late 1980s European acts such as Cathedral (from Coventry, England) are generally credited with seeding the genre, it found particular root around the same scene that produced Nirvana—Earth recorded for the same local (and now-legendary) Sub-Pop label—and hailed as heroes by an art-damaged trio called the Melvins, who combined Black Sabbath sludge with an attitude that was part punk rock and part Dadaism.

O’Malley and Anderson would follow divergent paths, but came back together in the late 1990s to form Sunn O))). They recorded the first Sunn O))) record, The Grimmrobe Demos, in 1999 with a goal to reinvent the form in their own image, throwing out the rulebook with each new project. They were completely underground at first, but their audience has rapidly expanded. Sales of the 2005 conceptual album Black One have topped 10,000 copies—a “hit” for an independent label, though distant from the multi-platinum status of, say, Metallica, who have become the Rolling Stones of metal. Listening to Sunn O)))’s performances, in which single notes flatten the space around them until they sublimate into something atmospheric—like cloud formations dark with raindrops—it’s easy to hear how the band could be the missing link between the slabby mania of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and the supersized drone of Tony Conrad’s Four Violins.

Interviewed recently in the British music magazine The Wire, drummer Chris Hakius, formerly of Sleep and now half of the duo Om, was played Four Violins in a blindfold test. “When people throw around the term ‘stoner,’ I think this is more stoner than us,” he said, “and it’s more stoner than anyone who claims to be that. That right there, without any drugs whatsoever, that makes you feel high.”

O’Malley elaborates a little more: “I’m really into people like La Monte Young and the mathematical intonation they brought into music that’s 4,000 years old.” Of course, referencing such names gets the band criticized by some quarters of the metal community, which can be sharply fundamentalist in its tastes. Indeed, Sunn O))) is linked to a diverse assortment of metal-derived bands that don’t fit the genre’s anti-intellectual image. Groups like the Japanese trio Boris, distributed in the U.S. by Sunn O)))’s Southern Lord label, might even be called “post-metal” in that they approach its various strains as sources to be scrambled rather than canonized. Om has plunged into a style that is profoundly meditative. Satan would be displeased with such minions, but these bands are drawing more art-wise listeners to music they may once have laughed at or dismissed as an adolescent indulgence. That doesn’t necessarily help impress the hardcore metal fans, though.

“They think we’re trying to spruce it up,” O’Malley notes, amid references to Sunn O)))’s interest in using “sound pressure” to shake up its audience’s innards. (Its shows are notorious for long-tone detonations of something called “the brown note.”) Along those lines, O’Malley reflects on a recent tour as an opening act for Celtic Frost, a vintage European black metal act. Its audience, the fiercely loyal kind that buys $25 T-shirts and thirsts for mordant majesty, had mixed feelings about Sunn O)))’s experimental antics, even though the kids probably dug O’Malley and Anderson’s scary black robes. “It was our first show, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and I looked out at their crown and realized we do not have a metal crowd by any means compared to this,” he says. “It was like there was exactly 50 percent cheering us, and 50 percent going ‘you’re fucking bullshit.’ Imagine if it was 10,000 years ago and you had your tribe and you thought you were a metal tribe, and then the real metal tribe came over, you’d lose your territory pretty fast.”

Chatham’s Essentialist and Sunn O))) gigged at the same kind of New York and Chicago venues within weeks of each other—clubs like Tonic, the Knitting Factory and the Empty Bottle—where open-eared listeners bring expectations that are attenuated less by mainstream exposure than insider awareness. “Our audience is pretty diverse,” O’Malley says. “I think we appeal to people who are really interested in sound and music and new experiences and listening.”

But O’Malley is also aware how quickly such territory shifts as tribes—and genres—splinter. Almost no popular music is as mutable as any labeled metal. It rivals electronic music as a constant incubator of new, often amusingly hyphenated categories. “You could have something called Psychedelic Viking Metal,” O’Malley says, “and there would maybe be two bands in the scene. And then one of those bands would introduce a new element and there’s a big shake-up.”

Even without footnotes, though, the parallel developments of minimalism and metal during the past 20 years would offer some heady crosstalk. “I find a tremendous degree of relation between much heavy metal and some of the structurally minimalist approaches to music composition,” says David Daniell, whose impromptu iPod selections jarred Chatham to a middle-aged epiphany and who now plays guitar alongside Chatham in Essentialist. “I’m not just referring to those like Sunn O))).” While working up pieces for the new album, Daniell constructed a four-minute “cut-up” based on loops of the first 20 seconds of Slayer’s song “Behind the Crooked Cross” (from the 1988 album South of Heaven). “Take a listen to the beginning of that song, it could easily have been a Rhys Chatham piece as is. Metal—at least the subset of the genre from which we drew our inspiration—produces much of its intensity through repetition and variation of relatively straightforward musical themes. Riffs, to use the common parlance, with a great focus on tone and timbre as an aspect of the identity of the music. The high volume of this music, much like in the majority of Rhys’ guitar-based works, leads inevitably to the overtones of the vibrating strings emerging as an almost equal component of the composition. Of course, in most heavy metal, these aspects are only there implicitly. That’s where Essentialist picks things up: distilling these implicit aspects of heavy metal, making them explicit.”

And, in a sense, bands like Sunn O))), which also includes the duo’s seemingly endless offshoots and side projects, are working the case from an opposite direction. “What I like about listening to Tony Conrad is that the music doesn’t have to be linear,” O’Malley says. “You can take one point in a line and explore it, looking at that point in depth, as one step. It takes time out of the equation a little bit.”

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Ten Metal Bands Every ‘New Music’ Fan Should Hear

Influences

Black Sabbath

Ozzy Osbourne’s latter-day emergence as rock’s answer to Homer Simpson should not cause anyone to underrate the vast influence of the band that put the “heavy” in heavy metal. Still known to reunite with or without its waddling bogeyman of a lead singer, the group has sustained an off-and-on career since 1968. Its name is drawn from a 1963 Mario Bava horror film, thus prompting suspicions that the musicians were Satanists. [Ed. Note: One of the band’s original names was Earth, a name which would subsequently be used in homage by one of the bands cited below.] Part of Sabbath’s signature sound derives from guitarist Tony Iommi’s signal breakthrough: He downtuned his guitar from E to C#, to make his Gibson easier to play after losing the tips of two of his fingers in a factory accident. The result, with bassist Geezer Butler following suit, was a sludgier version of old-school blooze-rock. During its prime, Sabbath was the noise of choice among the dazed-and-confused crowd in America’s high school parking lots. Now, of course, albums like Paranoid (1970) and Masters of Reality (1971) are considered classics.

Motorhead

Fronted, even now, by gravel-throated wildman Lemmy Kilmister, the British act was a throttling offshoot of the progressive rock outfit Hawkwind. As much punk as metal, its long term effect was to suggest that the genre could make for perfectly good biker-rock shorn of its Dungeons and Dragons elements.

The Melvins

The missing link between Black Sabbath and a generation of Seattle grunge bands—a teenaged Kurt Cobain was their roadie—this Montesano, Washington trio is very nearly beyond category. Its deployment of painfully slow tempos is the trio’s obvious gift to doom metal, extracting extra bang from the hammering nihilism of Swans, a group that emerged out of New York’s early 1980s downtown scene, and the jammy blare of California’s punk juggernauts Black Flag. Given that the band’s lead singer Buzz Osbourne (no relation) called himself King Buzzo, however, its intent has always seemed more Dada than deathtrip. Sample the Melvins most accessibly on its major-label efforts Houdini (1993) and Stoner Witch (1994).

Slayer

Thrash metal’s dark overlords, the California quartet is anything but sludgy, but its sheer ferociousness has made it an influence even on bands that don’t really sound like it at all. Active since 1982, the group existed for fans who thought genre standard-bearers like Metallica and Megadeth were weak. Its classic is Reign in Blood (1986), one of the key albums with which producer Rick Rubin (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash) built his reputation. Erstwhile drummer Dave Lombardo has been the band’s emissary to more exploratory scenes, working with downtown improv guru John Zorn and the group Fantomas.

Stoner Innovators

Sleep

The stonedest of stoner-metal acts, the now-defunct quartet from San Jose, California, never lasted long enough to hear its masterpiece—Dopesmoker—released in its intended form. The band broke up in 1995, disillusioned when its label rejected its efforts as unfit for retail. Twice. Finally issued complete by Tee Pee Records in 2003, Dopesmoker is more than an hour of sheer monolithic slo-mo intensity, perhaps the sound of what it feels like to be a bug writhing in pine sap. Or a very high teenager stuck in a Silicon Valley bedroom. It makes Black Sabbath sound like the Ramones. Drummer Al Cisneros and bassist Chris Hakius went on to form Om, while guitarist Matt Pike now fronts the way-thrashier High on Fire, perhaps the leading hard-edged metal outfit. [Ed. Note: Music Cartel issued parts of Dopesmoker as Jerusalem in 1999.]

Earth

An enduring combo that has existed since 1990, the band hails from Olympia, Washington—in proximity to the emergent grunge scene. One of its founding (now former) members was Slim Moon, who is currently an A&R executive for Nonesuch Records and who started the Kill Rock Stars label, which notably fostered a number of bands involved in the riot grrl movement. Earth has followed its own idiosyncratic orbit, claiming status as architects of purist drone. See Extra-Capsular Extraction (1991), surely the most uncompromised title in the Sub Pop catalog. The group abides today on the Southern Lord label, home to its greatest exponent, the band Sunn O))).

Doom and Beyond

Sunn O)))

Metal is really only a jumping-off point for Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, a bi-coastal duo whose series of albums for Anderson’s Southern Lord label reach far beyond the concept of quaking dirges into improvisational use of sound as an artifact, electronics, subharmonic blamm-o, and collaborative endeavors with performers not remotely metal—including Julian Cope (The Teardrop Explodes) and David Grubbs (Gastr del Sol). They revel in the eldritch trappings of the genre: performing in black hooded robes, or recording a track for its recent Black One album with guest vocalist Malefic miked inside a coffin. But the band’s catalog is much more experimental in spirit. The group’s new Altar is a two-CD summit with the Japanese art-metal band Boris, featuring guest appearances by gospel singer Jesse Sykes. Satan will be very disappointed.

Om

This offshoot of Sleep veers off from doom metal into something almost Zen-like. Indeed, members Al Cisneros and Chris Hakius resemble a pair of dharma bums in their publicity photos. The recent Conference of the Birds (Holy Mountain) posits the duo as meditative seekers, creating extended song-forms that build around chants, metallic textures, and neo-Pink Floyd psychedelia.

Boris

Doom-y only by association but too much fun to ignore, the Japanese trio is the breakout act on Sunn O)))’s Southern Lord label. Named after a Melvins’ song, the group has progressed quickly out of its sludgier phase—sympathetic with national guitar hero Keiji Haino and his jetliner engine improvisations—that Earth’s Dylan Carson once dubbed “sound of two slugs fucking.” Its new Pink album is characterized by extremes that have critics scrambling for footnotes from Sabbath to Sigur Rós. The sharp angles and jostling rhythms are as much zoom as doom.

Yob

Hailing from Eugene, Oregon, one of the more lysergic hippie towns in America, the members of Yob came by their doom metal inclinations almost as a birthright. Though the band has now broken up, its albums—such as The Unreal Never Lived (2005)—became fan favorites. If various precursory acts have detoured off the genre’s mainline, these second-generation acolytes kept the faith by consolidating its strengths.

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Steve Dollar writes about popular culture for the New York Sun, Time Out Chicago, and many other publications. He also penned the liner notes for Rhys Chatham’s latest release, A Crimson Grail (Table of the Elements). His Jazz Guide NYC: 2nd Edition will be published in January by Little Bookroom.

Dennis Báthory-Kitsz as Wolfgang

Nonpop—the term I use for “contemporary classical/art music”—has become effete. Composers are writing less and less, being fussy, appearing to be artistic cowards. But are they? What are the problems? Money, visibility? Is there another field in which low productivity is the norm? And with our low productivity, haven’t we created an environment where Mozart is cheap and Birtwistle is expensive?

Addressed historically, it’s clear that fewer and fewer pieces were being composed as Western music moved away from the classical era, except for perhaps a few Milhauds and Hindemiths. I wanted to ask composers directly so I conducted a survey of them.

The survey was open, self-participating, and unscientific. It was sent to various listservs: the Kalvos & Damian composers list; Orchestralist (an international forum for conductors, composers, players, and their colleagues in the orchestra business); the Finale list; the Theremin list; the CEC Discussion list (for Canadian Electroacoustic Composers); and to about a thousand composers on several combined personal lists. About 250 composers requested the survey. Of these, a total of 85, ranging from unknown composers to well-known, provided responses; 76 were from North America and 20 were women. Ages ranged from 23 to 77, compositions from a yearly average of one to more than 100, from three minutes of music completed yearly to more than six hours.

From the results of this survey, which was completed in early June, it appears most do not—or do not care to—think about their productivity, notably when cast as a typical and arbitrary numbers game. Even so, most believe that given different circumstances (more money, more time, reduced external pressures and obligations) they could compose more.

This apparent contradiction is at the heart of the nonpop composer’s crisis of visibility in contemporary culture.

Within the survey’s ten questions were concepts that touched composers deeply, even to the point of despair and anger. The questions were indeed chosen to probe not only the easy options (“Productive, me? I’m an artist, not a machine!”), but the hard ones as well (“I guess I’m a good composer.”)

The survey brought mixed but heartfelt results.

Some composers were unwilling to engage the survey on its terms (the “wrong question” response), but most did their best to address questions that are rarely asked and not part of an artist’s day-to-day vocabulary.

In the arts, asking about productivity may be tasteless, but it reveals the difference between our times and the past. Indeed, the productivity level was even lower than anticipated, with five in eight composers completing less than an hour’s worth of music in twelve months, and half finishing fewer than three compositions in the last year. This is skimpy even in the shadow of Webern’s notoriously small output of 181 compositions (inside and outside the official 31 numbered works) and entirely dwarfed by composers in pre-modern times.

Yet the majority of composers identify themselves as dedicated—in the survey’s terms of coming “before everything else in your life (except perhaps family).” About a fifth are equivocal, and another fifth do not feel they are that dedicated, most faulting the circumstances of the composing life. Canadian composer James Grant had no patience with the question itself:

When I compose, I’m a dedicated composer. When I bake, I’m a dedicated baker. When I teach, I’m a dedicated teacher. As the husband that I am, I’m a dedicated spouse. Composition integrates, but it does not dominate. Composition is not everything. I don’t take my identity from it.

But here’s the thing. Productivity matters to most composers, who feel they could compose more, from twice to ten times or more than they currently write, under other circumstances. Some cite a need for respect or performances, many are pressured by work and insufficient time, and most agree that money would increase their compositional output. One in ten thought no change was likely or desirable, and a few thought it was a bad idea—that they and perhaps composers generally shouldn’t attempt to write more, for productivity wasn’t the goal of art.

But composers do think about productivity enough to evaluate their own output, and the changes they have observed in the results of their efforts; answers reflected a fairly diverse self-evaluation. In some cases, increasing maturity carried with it greater craft; in others, the same maturity demanded more care in their work. Age has slowed some composers, but only two—Steve Layton and Mary Elizabeth—attributed any part of increase in productivity to technology.

Reena Esmail, a composer in her twenties, claims, “I am on my way to being happy with my productivity.” Whereas, Paul Steenhuisen, a half-generation older than Esmail, admits, “I’m both slower and faster. Certain aspects of composing take longer now, others are more efficient.” Erik Mälzner is older still and says, “I become older, thus slower and more deliberated. I omit the unimportant.” Michael Byron, on the other hand, is from the quantity-rejectionist camp, and says, “If I were manufacturing a product, I probably would be decidedly unhappy and dissatisfied with both speed and quantity. But fortunately, I’m not manufacturing a product.” Brian Ferneyhough offers the insightful response of the well-experienced composer, acknowledging that “after so many years, it’s pointless, I guess, to wish myself different.”

When the topic turns to the daily schedule, though, composers feel the pressure. A fair minority do maintain composition routines, but half of those surveyed have none—and all cite pressures from family and friends, academic teaching and the music business, other day jobs, and personal health. Speaking from the pro-schedule camp, Alex Shapiro says, “I think self-discipline is a very natural trait for any artist because we presumably love what we do and are compelled to do it repeatedly.”

If the question is turned around—what would make more composition possible? —the answer is clear: money. But money appears to be the only clear answer from more than a third of the composers. Following that was a need for public demand; ideas and inspiration; time; recognition, prestige and respect; deadlines; commissions and performances; practical help (assistance, technical, legal); and personal meaningfulness, more craft, fear of failure, less distraction, and courage. Some felt they were doing what they could do, and three said the composition of more music was not needed.

Andrew Violette, vacillating between the jaded and the philosophical, writes:

I don’t depend on inspiration. When I finish a piece or a big section of a piece or whatever project I’m working on, I go to the museums and the galleries and look at art. I love the new art and get a lot of ideas from visual artists. I have no deadlines except the ones I make myself. Nobody plays my music and I get no commissions, so by all accounts I’m a failure, which is just as well, since success isn’t worth getting. Most musicians who play new music want an easy piece to premiere that’s about twenty minutes.

Michael Byron turns the question on its head, explaining, “One problem central to composition today is that composers are too prolific. Technology is a special irritant here. As with most other things, its greatest asset is also its greatest liability. Cheating ourselves of deep feeling is a terrible price to pay for abundance.”

Despite a heavy denial of the practical, composers are finely tuned professionals, and more than half actually find deadlines helpful to their work. Nearly all have written to deadlines and is able to deliver the music on time.

Composers’ self-evaluation provided expected responses. Despite being uncomfortable with the question, most composers consider their talents average to excellent (always painfully qualifying their terms). Some are unsure, but only two think they aren’t really good, and one is sure he isn’t up to par—at least by international standards. The best-known composers are the most likely to hand off the judgment of their work’s quality to circumstances—the “I’m still doing it, so I must be good enough” approach.

Naturally that question unfolds into the next—what would make a composer better? Steve Layton writes, “Lots of money, period. Not to make an artistically better composer, but to just be able to do more with what I have.” And Layton’s comment reflects a wide response to this question, but not the leading response, which is the opportunity for performance. Time and study follow closely, and interestingly, money slips to fourth place. Apparently, you can’t buy improvement easily. Composing itself is believed to be the path to improvement, followed by feedback; recognition, demand, and audiences; help and resources; support of the culture; more understanding; talent, expanding the “kill ratio” (keeping only the best work), more concentration, living life, political climate, serenity, attention to detail, and (according to Brian Ferneyhough) “a new brain.” Some don’t offer an answer or believe themselves to be already as good as they can be. Bill Thompson suggests, “More self honesty, more collaborations with others that are fearless, more exposure to artists who are undaunted by institutional, historical, social, or commercial pressures, and a less conservative environment.”

However, the survey’s greatest degree of divergence was on the question of whether a composer today could be a Mozart given the appropriate level of demand and the resultant productivity. Some agree, some agree with qualifications, some are equivocal or polite, and a good minority think it is a terrible idea, abandoning all claim to quality and risking the ultimate in mediocrity.

According to Ferneyhough, “Not everything Mozart wrote was brilliant.” Others offered similar sentiments less bluntly. “The trouble with writing many, many pieces is that it ends up that nothing is special,” explains Mary Jane Leach. “Even composers such as Mozart I have a hard time with, because there are so many pieces, all good but hard to choose favorites (except Don Giovanni), since so many are equal in quality. It’s not that I insist in hierarchies, it’s that there aren’t any that stand out for me.”

But Carson Cooman—a prolific composer with nearly 700 compositions before the age of thirty—is on the other side of the argument. “We should spend our lives trying to become better composers. I strongly believe the best way to become better at something is by doing it,” he says. “The novelist Stephen King wrote that ‘to be a good writer, one needs to read for four hours per day and write for four hours per day.’ I strongly believe that. I think many contemporary composers don’t spend nearly enough time actually listening to music—particularly of our colleagues.”

Robert Voisey, known for his “60×60” project that brings packaged electroacoustic concerts to venues worldwide, also agrees with the premise. “We are all the new Mozarts of this time,” he says, “and it is about time we drop the old clinging to dead music and embrace the new. Close the gap between audiences and new music and start blazing new trails together. My belief is that there is a hungry audience out there waiting to be inspired and touched by the music and ideas that today’s composer has to offer. We are all Mozart, we are also the motivators to make it happen and the time to do it and make this change is now.”

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Dennis Báthory-Kitsz has made work for sound sculptures, soloists, electronics, stage shows, orchestras, dancers, interactive multimedia, installations, and performance events. Dennis co-hosted Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar, co-founded the NonPop International Network, and has been project director for new music festivals since 1973.

Anastasia Tsioulcas Photo by Joshua Sherman

Nearly two years ago, two of music’s most prominent publishing houses each issued four-volume anthologies of American arias: G. Schirmer released American Aria Anthology, while Boosey & Hawkes published American Arias: A Collection of Essential Contemporary Works. Quite coincidentally, the two series were released a month apart in the summer of 2004—and that fluke raises some interesting and timely questions. For starters, how is it that two major music publishers arrived at the same concept at more or less the same time?

In addition, while the existence of two such co-existing (and even competing) series might hearten advocates of 20th-century and new American music, has either series proved successful—not just in terms of giving rather intangible prominence or prestige to certain composers or works, but in terms of the rawer results of sales data? In short: What real impact have these anthologies made on the wider vocal music community?

The nearly simultaneous release of the two series provokes certain comparisons, as does the fact that Schirmer and Boosey now share the same distributor, Hal Leonard. “It’s quite remarkable,” muses Richard Walters, vice president of classical publications for Hal Leonard. (Walters also served as chief compiler for the Schirmer anthologies.) “Before these were published, we had very little in the way of aria compilations available in the market—and now we had two arrive at once! These titles prove that American opera is in itself now a viable body of literature.”

But how was it that the two anthologies were published more or less concurrently? “G. Schirmer has been associated with Hal Leonard since 1986,” Walters explains. “We help develop new Schirmer publications, editions, and collections. Boosey & Hawkes signed a similar deal with us in July 2004, which was the same month that Schirmer issued their anthologies of American arias. By the time Boosey had signed with Hal Leonard, Boosey already had their American arias series in production.”

Although neither series was tied to a particular date or anniversary, Jenny Bilfield, the outgoing president of Boosey & Hawkes, observed that her company’s publication date for their anthology timed itself nicely to two events. “Our series debuted at the NATS [National Association of Teachers of Singing] conference, and we received great response from it there. Also, our anthology was published at the same time that we launched a new opera page on our website and in our catalog, so the timing dovetailed nicely there as well.”

20/20 Eyeballing the Anthologies Boosey & Hawkes <p=small>List price = $29.95 Approx 20 arias per volume Includes CD with piano accompaniments 20 Highlights… John Adams: The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) John Adams: Ceiling/Sky (1995) John Adams: El Niño (2000) John Adams: Nixon in China (1987) Dominick Argento: The Boor (1957) Dominick Argento: Postcard from Morocco (1971) Jack Beeson: The Sweet Bye and Bye (1957) Leonard Bernstein: A Quiet Place (1983) Leonard Bernstein: Mass (1971) Leonard Bernstein: Trouble in Tahiti (1951) Aaron Copland: The Tender Land (1956) Aaron Copland: The Second Hurricane (1936) Jacob Druckman: Medea (1992) Carlisle Floyd: Susannah (1954) Carlisle Floyd: Cold Sassy Tree (2000) Marvin David Levy: Mourning Becomes Electra (1967) Douglas Moore: The Devil and Daniel Webster (1938) Steven Mackey: Ravenshead (1997) Ned Rorem: Bertha (1968) Igor Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress (1951) Schirmer <p=small>List price = $24.95 Approx 40 arias per volume Does not include CD 20 highlights… Mark Adamo: Little Women (1998) Samuel Barber: Vanessa (1957) Marc Blitzstein: Regina (1949) William Bolcom: A View from the Bridge (1999) John Corigliano: The Ghosts of Versailles (1991) Anthony Davis: Malcolm X (1986) John Harbison: The Great Gatsby (1999) Bernard Herrmann: Wuthering Heights (1951) Jerome Kern: Show Boat (1927) Gian Carlo Menotti: The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) Douglas Moore: The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) Thea Musgrave: Simón BolÍvar (1992) André Previn: A Streetcar Named Desire (1998) Richard Rodgers: Carousel (1945) Bright Sheng: Madame Mao (2003) Stephen Sondheim: Sweeney Todd (1979) Tan Dun: Tea (2002) Virgil Thomson: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) Virgil Thomson: The Mother of Us All (1947) Kurt Weill: Lost in the Stars (1949)

Susan Feder, Vice President of G. Schirmer and Associated Music Publishers, points out that her company’s anthology includes arias from operas that have been premiered fairly recently. In fact, six works composed in the past decade are represented, including Bright Sheng’s Madame Mao from 2003 which was literally hot off the presses when the anthologies were put together.

“What we really wanted to do,” says Feder, “was to demonstrate the richness of this art form, and in particular to display Schirmer’s depth in this area.” However, Schirmer’s anthology doesn’t make a firm or non-negotiable distinction between “opera” and “musical theater.” “We included ‘musical theater’ pieces by composers like Stephen Sondheim, Kurt Weill, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern quite deliberately,” Feder notes, “as a way of exploring the range of American musical works for the stage.”

The inclusion of Sondheim, Rodgers, Kern, and other “popular” Broadway composers also boosts the marketability of Schirmer’s series. Certainly, although Feder says that her company wanted to “push the envelope” in terms of repertoire selections, both Schirmer and Boosey created these anthologies with an eye towards their potential customers, particularly students and younger professional singers. Rick Walters says, “With a college market in mind, you try to include famous material as a ‘hook’ of recognition. Around those well-known works, you then build in other pieces that have less visibility.”

Both publishers say that this special regard for a collegiate audience also had some influence in establishing the range of the selected arias’ technical difficulty, although unquestionably some of the selections are vocally quite demanding. “Another factor that we had to consider,” Walters notes, “was the question of whether or not the accompaniment for these arias would even work as piano reductions. Quite often, the answer in contemporary music is ‘no.'”

“American stage music is so diverse,” says Walters. “For that very reason, the Schirmer anthology is titled American Aria Anthology, and not American Opera Aria Anthology. The broadness of the selections points to the broadness of the American stage music spectrum.”

For the Boosey & Hawkes anthologies the idea was to look at repertoire from a programming perspective, according to Jenny Bilfield. For example, she says, “We wanted to create an anthology from which singers could perform multiple—and quite diverse—works in the course of a single recital.”

In addition, the availability of aria anthologies such as these make American opera repertoire far more affordable to students and young professional singers. “For example, if a young vocalist wanted to explore repertoire, buying individual scores would become prohibitively expensive very quickly,” points out Richard Walters. He notes that American music publishers are, as a whole, more collection-oriented than their European counterparts to begin with, as the buyers’ perception is that collections give greater value than individual scores. (Walters hastens to add, however, that European houses are quickly following the American publishers’ lead in this arena.)

Because these anthologies are sold outright to customers rather than rented, there’s no way to track their usage easily. However, according to distributor Hal Leonard, the anthologies combined have sold about 20,000 copies thus far, which Richard Walters calls a “very significant” amount. Indeed, Schirmer’s volume for sopranos has been reprinted twice already, and the mezzo volume has gone through one reprint; similarly, Boosey’s anthology for sopranos has been reprinted. However, Hal Leonard would not disclose specific sales numbers for these two series in any more detail.

As Walters says, “Sales for individual contemporary pieces aren’t considerable, by and large, so the fact that these anthologies provide a wide variety of repertoire is particularly attractive, and provide steady sales. What’s important,” he adds, “is that these anthologies are adopted by teachers, so that then ‘on assignment’ purchases are made by students.”

In addition, observes Walters, he is already seeing those sales translate into audition settings. “I’ve been a judge for the Metropolitan Opera auditions,” he notes, “and I’ve heard pieces that are included in these anthologies being used in those auditions. That’s very heartening.”

New Jersey-based soprano Melanie Mitrano, who uses the Boosey & Hawkes series extensively, says that having this repertoire in a readily available and easy-to-use format has been very important to her. “These publications really fill a void,” she notes. “For example, I used to have some of this material in manuscript form—and it can be challenging for, say, a pianist at an audition to read from those manuscripts. It’s so nice to be able to pass one of these arias in a very readable format to someone I haven’t worked with before.”

As mezzo-soprano Sahoko Sato notes, the kinds of pieces published in the Boosey and Schirmer volumes are precisely what she needs, although as with a number of other singers contacted for this piece, she was previously unaware that either of these series even existed. “These days, singers are always asked for 20th-century English-language arias in auditions,” Sato observes, “and American operas themselves seem to be more frequently performed now.”

“In the past,” continues Sato, who splits her time between New York City and her native Japan, “we always had to look for full scores—and sometimes even those are hard to find. For example, I once had to sing an aria from Little Women, and I had to have a friend send it to me from California!”

Mitrano, who specializes in new music, says that while students in her own studio are by and large not bringing these arias to her, these editions have made it easier to present them to some of her own, more advanced students. However, she uses these works in her own career, particularly in competition and audition settings.

“I’m not sure if singing this kind of material necessarily helps or hurts my chances,” she muses. “That really seems to depend on the individual circumstances.” She does feel, though, that presenting arias of these varieties does help her stand out in a crowded field.

“I really believe that a lot of these arias are certainly tougher vocally than much of the standard repertoire,” says Mitrano, “and I feel that they require more musicianship from singers. They call for more effort, a better ear, and a more acute sense of rhythm—and of course by and large there are fewer models on which to base one’s approach to these arias. It’s not as if one hears them often enough in performance, or can run down to the local record store and pick out ten different recorded interpretations.”

There are differences in styles of presentation between the Schirmer and Boosey series. Perhaps most significantly, all four titles in the Boosey series include a CD; the recording features the piano accompaniment for each aria included in the collection. The Schirmer anthology does not offer this component, but features twice as much material. The Boosey volumes carry a list price of $29.95; the Schirmer volumes list at $24.95. While there might be some potential consumers who would hesitate to spend another $5 on what initially appears to be half the material, the advantages of having an immediately available accompaniment for these arias is already a huge savings.

Jenny Bilfield says that the inclusion of the CD is “an essential component of the series,” considering the target audience for American Arias. While Boosey & Hawkes have also offered accompanying CDs to some of their choral titles and to Meredith Monk publications as well, Bilfield feels it is a particularly strong selling point for their American Arias series.

“A lot of student singers don’t have pianists accessible to them, or have the resources to hire someone to work with them,” she observes. “So having the accompaniment already there, bundled into the book, really provides the proper context for each of these arias, and adds extra value for the buyer.” (In addition, artistic context might be of special importance for those works that are underrepresented—or not at all available—in recording.)

Lack of access to certain individual arias with piano accompaniment has also meant that Sato has felt unable to capitalize on music that is already in her repertoire. “For example,” she delineates, “I’ve sung in three Menotti operas—The Old Man and the Thief, The Medium, and Amahl and the Night Visitors—but I hardly ever sing excerpts from them, simply because they weren’t individually published as arias.” (Baba’s aria “Afraid, Am I afraid?” from The Medium is included in Schirmer’s mezzo-soprano volume, as is “All that gold!” from Amahl and the Night Visitors.)

Soprano Mitrano cites Boosey’s CD as being a particular bonus for her and her students. “You know, there are many singers who are not great pianists,” she laughs, “so it’s wonderful to have the accompaniment right there and ready to go. And of course many of these scores are quite challenging not just for the singers, but for professional pianists as well! So having that CD as a resource is extremely helpful.”

Walters observes that perceived value is important not just to his student buyers, but to his market overall. “Generally speaking,” he says, “We find that consumers of sheet music are more conservative than, for example, CD buyers. Purchasers of CDs or other forms of recording might well purchase something on a whim, or buy an album with the knowledge that they might only listen to the recording once or twice. Consumers buying scores purchase them with the intent to use them—to study, practice, and perform from them—for years.”

So has the success of these two anthologies caused either publisher to consider any future projects that might have a similar basis? “There’s no cause-and-effect relationship between the two American arias anthologies and forthcoming projects,” contends Rick Walters, “but certainly there are projects on the way that share something of the same ethos.”

Jenny Bilfield has a slightly different take. “The success of our American Arias anthology gives us reason to look at our other vocal publications with a fresh eye,” she says, adding that collections by Jack Beeson and by Richard Hundley have been published, while another of Ned Rorem’s work is currently on its way. The next “most likely” songbook collections under consideration by Boosey & Hawkes would be of music by Carlisle Floyd and John Adams. Similarly, Schirmer’s Feder notes that Schirmer will be publishing a single volume of American art songs this June, and also on the way is a Menotti project which, like the American Aria titles, will also be packaged with a CD.

Bilfield maintains that the arrival of both anthologies points to a vigorous current in the singing world. “The fact that both sets of anthologies were issued around the same time is really a strong statement about the zeitgeist,” she says emphatically. “Recently, there’s been such a surge of activity in terms of the creation and propagation of new American operas, for one thing, and before we published this series teachers and students alike indicated that there would be strong interest in such a project. For our part, the series was intended to bring the important and creative voices of American composers into the canon of vocal study and performance.”

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Anastasia Tsioulcas is the classical music columnist for Billboard Magazine, and also writes about classical music, world music and jazz, for a variety of mainstream and special-interest publications, including Gramophone, Chamber Music America, Jazz Times, and Down Beat, O (The Oprah Magazine), Travel & Leisure, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York.</p

What is the defining moment in a “successful” composer’s life that could be called a “tipping point”? This was the question, brought up in conversation with a colleague, that became the focus for this article. When I started, I thought it would be short, simple, and to the point. I would interview a representative group of colleagues and, I was sure, they’d all have an event that could be pointed to unreservedly as this magic moment. Would it be a commission, a recording, a publishing contract, a great review maybe?

It turned out to be not such an easy question to answer, either on specific grounds or more general ones; the concept of a tipping point in a composer’s career is something which can’t be accepted without questioning, and what actually constitutes success in the world of contemporary classical music is no easy issue either.

Of late, the term “tipping point” has become quite fashionable, largely due to the book of that title by Malcolm Gladwell. It designates a moment when a series of events or circumstances conspire to create an unstoppable rush to success or widespread popularity. Gladwell uses the paradigm of the infectious epidemic, such as the deadly Spanish Influenza of 1914. His first example is the unexpected fashion success of a type of shoe known as the Hush Puppy.

Most of his examples concern marketing and advertising and deal with phenomena in the world of mass popular culture rather than anything close to art, so I wondered how relevant his ideas and examples would be to contemporary classical music composers. A phenomenon such as the Gorecki Third Symphony, which almost overnight became a “pop” music chart-busting recording in England in 1993, might fit into the Gladwellian paradigm, but I don’t think that heady rush into popularity changed the Polish composer’s artistic life at all; it just confirmed for him the rightness of his direction. After all, he’d written the piece in 1976, nearly twenty years earlier.

These days, tipping point is often used to refer to a point of no return, and is employed rather ominously by science writers in describing the doomsday scenario of global warming. With the ideas of catastrophic climate change and worldwide epidemics in mind, perhaps for our purposes the less volatile term “turning point” might suffice to describe a moment in a composer’s career when she suddenly finds herself successful, or feels that she has “made it,” or something along these lines. But what is it that could be called the signification of arrival in the world of new music composition?

In terms of scale, no success in the contemporary classical music world can match the book sales of millions attributed to The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, one of Gladwell’s more interesting examples of tipping point activity gone wild. But perhaps an unexpected success or sudden rash of publicity can propel a composer into a higher realm of notoriety and engender some kind of elation of arrival, of having made it into the big time.

Classical music composers, compared to their colleagues in the popular music industry, may not have the sales numbers, but perhaps the analogue of the tipping point can be useful. But we have to use the concept somewhat awkwardly. The idea might be that one reaches a point of no return, that one’s music has become sufficiently admired, bought, talked about, programmed, recorded, published, as to dump the composer into a free fall of ecstatic acclaim and acceptance from which he will never return. In other words, his or her stature as a big time composer is solidly locked in; that would have to be the idea, wouldn’t it?

There are obvious examples of composers who, at some point in their careers, went from being strictly underground, cult avant-gardists to widely accepted, famous celebrity artists—almost household names. Perhaps the most glaring example is Philip Glass. When his collaboration with Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs, Einstein on the Beach, was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976, it seemed that overnight, thanks to the publicity surrounding it, he became a “famous” composer. The cultural clout of the venue seemed to be the extra weight he needed to tip over into the limelight, no matter that he went back to driving a cab the week after the big success. Of course, the Met as an institution didn’t produce the opera, but allowed the hall to be rented out on two nights when it was dark; for Glass and his supporters this was a bit of good luck.

Philip might disagree that this was the “tipping point” in his career, but he’d have to agree that his life changed after that. Did “Einstein at the Met” really send him on his way to unstoppable success? I think it did. But I also think that had it not happened there it would have someplace else—although a staging in Brooklyn, Chicago, or San Francisco wouldn’t have had the same cultural clout.

But let us reconsider the Gladwellian model of a tipping point, where a series of small events can escalate and push a phenomenon, whether it be a disease, a type of footwear, or a book, into huge numbers (or relatively large numbers, in the case of a classical composer such as Glass). The escalation seems ineluctable, and it lasts for a relatively long time or creates a self-sustaining system.

Still, it seems to me that there are tipping points that may appear to do that but actually create a temporary rush of success that peters out, so that the artist feels he is back to square one. I suspect that this kind of situation is more common for most composers; in this case, there is a “near miss” pattern where big things seem imminent but somehow the rush to make it into the big league never quite happens. I call this the “Deer Chaser” version of the tipping point.

You might find the device known as a deer chaser in formal Japanese gardens. It’s a wooden contraption through which water is funneled: a slow drip from a source above it slowly accumulates into a carefully balanced trough which, when sufficiently filled, suddenly tips forward on its fulcrum, allowing all the accumulated water to rush down onto a lower level. This process causes a loud thwack to be heard. After emptying, the trough flips back up and starts receiving drips of water again until it reaches its tipping point and repeats the noise-making action. The idea is that the recurrent noises scare off marauding, hungry deer.

In the deer chaser model, the tipping point occurs, but it doesn’t create a steady rush, only a momentary one, and it keeps recurring at set intervals. I think a lot of composers experience this kind of tipping point, where they think they are on the verge of some kind of surge of popularity due to a big event—say a prize, a recording, a publishing contract, or maybe a big commission—but soon enough, as in the deer chaser model, they find that they have flipped back to their old position, the rush of the cascading water with its loud alarm having dissipated.

Certainly there are a number of composers who have truly made it, who have cascaded all the way down the flume and happily ride the waves of acceptance and popularity through the rest of their careers. They have eluded the deer chaser effect. But there are many more who have experienced these occasional big pushes. It seems like everything might change, but it doesn’t quite. Fame is an illusion, and the struggle to pay the bills, fight for the performances and commissions, and play the PR games that more and more seem to be required continues to color the artistic life.

Of course, there are “turning points” that are important to a composer’s sense of self that aren’t necessarily about career success but more about artistic and inner confirmation. And, like the real tipping points, a series of small events can suddenly loom large to create a major psychological shift. So perhaps applying the trope of the tipping point to the careers of new music composers is not so far fetched after all.

In the case of Steve Reich, one might think that his tipping point was not a particular concert or composition, but a recording of one—the 1978 ECM LP of Music for 18 Musicians. This music, which was originally supposed to be released by the august classical label Deutsche Grammophon, was put on hold by them—they weren’t sure how to market it—and picked up by Manfred Eicher, whose Munich based ECM label had a secure market niche with its popular jazz figures such as Keith Jarrett. The ECM recording sold something in the hundreds of thousands and introduced Reich’s music to an entirely new audience.

As it turns out, Steve Reich himself sees things differently. For him, the tipping point came earlier, in the late sixties, before Music for 18 and Drumming. It was the release of Come Out on the Columbia Odyssey label followed soon after by Violin Phase and It’s Gonna Rain on the prestigious Columbia Masterworks label. For Steve, this was a real change, a sign that he was no longer to be consigned to the “experimental” category but elevated into a pantheon of composers like Copland and Stravinsky whose music Columbia had recorded in significant numbers. The LPs were singled out by mainstream media such as Time and New York magazine as among the best of the year.

A few years later, Michael Tilson Thomas put Four Organs on a Boston Symphony concert, both in Boston and New York at Carnegie Hall, where it caused a near riot; this was for Reich another point. In fact, he thinks of these events as a line of points rather then one single tipping point.

In the case of both Glass and Reich there was a discernible tipping point, or line of them, but it was not like the deer chaser—one big gush and then an awkward silence and wait. Both these composers were diehard experimentalists, and in the sixties when they started to develop their aesthetics and styles, their work seemed part and parcel of an ongoing avant-garde scene centered in New York, California, and London. Who would have thought that they would become not only accepted into the so-called mainstream, but—unheard of in contemporary classical music—widely popular, attaining nearly rock star status?

In fact, it’s not so much that they entered the mainstream but that they changed it by bringing along new audiences that they had developed. And, yes, of course, these major turning points didn’t give either one of them a free ride. They must have experienced doubts, moments of bewilderment, and even despair on what was still a rough road to travel.

I thought I’d ask another composer—one who worked within a more conventional side of the new music spectrum—when her tipping point arrived. Joan Tower, who has become one of the leading lights of new American orchestral music, had a quite precise idea of this moment in her career. She wrote to me:

I do, in fact, have a “tipping point.” It was when Francis Thorne (then president of the American Composers Orchestra) asked me to write my first orchestral work Sequoia for the American Composers Orchestra. I was really reluctant since I had basically lived my whole life in chamber music. But he insisted (God bless him) and this piece took off like wildfire and actually changed my life in a big way. The work started to travel from Dennis Davies (and San Francisco) to Zubin Mehta (and the NY Phil—three performances at Avery Fisher and one at the UN—televised!) and then to Leonard Slatkin, who totally flipped out over the piece and programmed it all over the place, put a hold on it for a recording, and then asked me to be composer-in-residence with the St. Louis Symphony!! It was introduced to the orchestra world with a bang and I was spinning pretty wildly after all that.

I don’t suppose this is a unique example. I have the feeling that more than a few composers have gotten quite a career lift from an ACO performance or commission. (That would make another whole article.) But Joan is very sure of this moment; without it, she may have been content to work in the more rarified field of chamber music. I think the tipping point for her was two fold: It gave her a significant career boost, enough to put her on the track of being a self-sustaining orchestra composer; and it gave her the aesthetic go-ahead that the larger forms were hers for the taking and making. So it was an inner and an outer (read artistic and career) turning point.

I posed the tipping point question to John Adams, unquestionably one of the most successful composers of his generation. His reply, a reminiscence of a night in 1976 in San Francisco, was short and to the point:

I don’t much think in terms of “career” moments. If I had to say there was any kind of memorable “tipping point” for me, it was the night of the first performance of Shaker Loops. I recall driving alone along the winding streets of the upper Haight Ashbury to the post concert party in my old Karmen Ghia, thinking that I’d found my voice, and that I knew the image I’d had of myself as a composer since I’d been a boy had finally become a reality.

So for him it wasn’t a career thing at all, but an aesthetic revelation that he was on the right path. And it’s true, for Shaker Loops wasn’t the piece that catapulted him into fame; that most likely was Nixon in China, or maybe Harmonium, or Harmonielehre for that matter. (And The ECM recording of Harmonium must have helped!)

I myself well remember the night of the first performance of Shaker Loops. John had already done a prototype version of the piece the year before with the Kronos Quartet, and he felt it was a flop. But over the course of a year’s rehearsing with his own string septet of students from the San Francisco Conservatory, he was able to craft the piece into its final, exquisite shape. The performance vindicated his work, and he was indeed ready for prime time after that masterful creation.

I think that for many composers the big turning point in their artistic lives is not a career move such as a big commission, a prize, or a surge of media attention, but the simple, successful performance of a piece that seems to authenticate their self-image as composers. Sometimes the big career moments come later. For example, Martin Bresnick, who was the first recipient of the three-year Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters a few years back, doesn’t see such a prize as a turning point. For him, it goes back to his student days, when he arrived in California to study at Stanford. During high school and college on the East Coast, his composition teachers were not as enthusiastic about his career track as he’d have liked. In the less rigorous, more nourishing atmosphere of California, the turning point for him was the composition and performance of his first string quartet and the encouragement of his teacher-mentors John Chowning and Loren Rush.

In 1969-70 he was awarded a Fulbright to study in Vienna with Ligeti, and this, too, was a big moment for him as he found himself among the “elect.” Aesthetically, he sees his piece for eight celli, B’s Garlands (written in 1973 under the influence of Ligeti) as a breakthrough stylistically, and he counts it as a turning point in his artistic self-awareness. And this is true; if you know some of Martin’s music from more recent years, which can be stylistically quite divergent, it’s not so hard to hear in that beautiful choir of celli a range of ideas that will contribute to the mature Bresnick sound.

Martin has been teaching for many years at Yale, and there he has nurtured and encouraged a number of fledgling composers who have gone on to have “big” careers. One of them is Michael Gordon. Before I posed the question of the tipping point to him, I assumed that some event linked to the early days of the famed Bang on a Can festivals might be emblematic, or perhaps he’d point to his breakthrough piece, Yo Shakespeare (in which he deploys irrational assemblages of durations: incomplete triplets juxtaposed with straight eighth notes). But he was not sure if there was one. He sent me a very insightful letter, though, about his thoughts on success and the need to go on beyond it:

I don’t know if I will ever feel like I’ve made it, because it’s not a quantifiable goal like wanting to make 10 million dollars. When you have 10 million in the bank, you can say, “I’ve fulfilled my goal.” But If you feel okay about the music you’ve written, if you can look at what you’ve done and say, “I feel good about this piece or that piece,” it still doesn’t help very much the next day when you sit down to write again. You are still starting from scratch, and even if you’ve acquired a lot of experience or knowledge about the music you want to write, you may still be struggling to find the right notes or concept.

Michael’s candid words bring up the whole issue of what happens after you are propelled out into the limelight. Do you just have an easy life after that because you’ve made it? In fact, the artists who haven’t experienced that real tipping point might be better off than those who have, for they still have that ongoing struggle to breakthrough, to finally be able to say, “I’ve made it; I am who I wanted to be.”

Once you’ve achieved that, well, like Michael you still have to face the hum drum localized struggle of finding “the right notes.” Now, there’s a certain expectation. Now, you are really in trouble!

***

Ingram Marshall‘s orchestral, chamber and electro-acoustic compositions have been recorded by Nonesuch, New Albion, and New World Records. In August 2001, NewMusicBox featured an extensive conversation with him about his music.

Marc Weidenbaum

Inside the Box: The computer comes out to play

There’s often a vertical plane between musician and audience. The sheet-music stand paved the way for the upturned plastic shell of the turntable, and today, chances are that rectangle obscuring the face of the performer on stage is the screen of a laptop computer, which has emerged as a ubiquitous music-making tool.

The laptop, however, obscures more than just the musician’s face. Its uses vary too widely for it to be easily characterized. For some, the laptop is essentially a more portable equivalent of the DJ’s turntables, mixer, and crate of records. But for many, it is a means to bring the power of computer processing into live performance, creating music of the moment that’s comprised of all manner of sonic detritus: field recordings, sine waves, sound bites of pre-existing music, pure feedback.

Computer music is nothing new, though it has certainly blossomed in the past decade thanks to the rapid spread of personal computing. The question is: What’s “laptop music”? How does the fact that the technology now is portable alter computer-enabled music? More than anything, the laptop has brought computer music not only out of the closet, but out of the house. And thanks to the laptop’s compact size and ease of use, it’s triggered several successive waves of adopters. “Laptop music,” as a result, isn’t really a genre, and since the laptop can run such a variety of music software, it may be inappropriate to simply call it an instrument. What is it? A phenomenon.

The laptop is a proverbial black box—well, generally speaking, a silver one, usually in this context affixed with a glowing Apple logo—and it has many inputs and outputs. The same could be said of its history and its future. This overview of so-called “laptop music” is an attempt to see what led up to this moment, to highlight some leading figures, and to look ahead to what “mobile music” might constitute down the pike. The laptop’s a bit like an SUV. It’s expensive and powerful and nice to look at, but how many people actually take it over really rigorous terrain? Well, plenty, in fact, from the microsonics of Tetsu Inoue, to the augmented field recordings of Christian Fennesz, to the spatial immersions of Carl Stone, to the fractured dance music of Autechre, all of whom have made the laptop computer one of their primary tools.

I initially studied computer science in college, and before I opted for an English degree, my favorite professor was an esteemed figure in the field by the name of Alan J. Perlis, a man who won the very first Turing Award (often described as the Nobel Prize of computing) the year I was born. He would often digress from a sequence of code that he was reciting from memory in order to tell us stories about the dawn of the study of computing. From today’s standpoint, in a time of iPods and Tablet PCs, my own college education feels like it occurred during the Stone Age, with those monochrome monitors and rudimentary programming languages. But for Perlis, our cathode-ray computer-lab terminals and the Macintoshes popping up in dormitories were generations removed from his Cretaceous-era schooling.

Prof. Perlis appreciated our difficulty with the problems he assigned each week, those all-nighters we spent eradicating bugs. He told us that when he was a graduate student there was a commonplace way that programmers went about wrestling with a faulty bit of programming: You’d open up the computer you were working on, enter it, sit on a cozy chair and contemplate the machine from the inside. That image has never faded from my memory. If anything, it’s become more vivid as computers have gotten smaller. This primer covering the laptop and its role in music today is a peek under the hood, now that the machines have gotten too compact to be entered directly.

Fast Backward: A brief prehistory of laptop music

In our everyday lives, phones double as cameras, high-tech supertitles accompany the opera, and TiVo automates the recording of PBS’s latest adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Alvin Toffler’s pessimistic “future shock” is experienced primarily in hindsight, when we consider how quickly our lives have been altered; by and large, it’s more along the lines of “past shock,” when we recoil at the idea of life without high-speed Internet access, ATMs, and Netflix. And after momentary consideration, we shrug it off, flip open the latest Best Buy circular and further consume our way into a technologically mediated future.

We could credit ourselves as a species with high points for adaptability, but to do so would be to underestimate how well we’ve been prepared for these seemingly bold technological leaps—often by cultural trends and scientific discoveries that date back not just decades but hundreds of years. Modern robotics had its precursors in the Renaissance doodles of Leonardo Da Vinci, and the modern computer in the decidedly pre-industrial writings of Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace.

Likewise, the laptop music that even today might strike us as utterly new has certain precedents. These precedents prepared our imaginations, even if the technology that allowed the imaginings to be realized was a long time coming. There are numerous cultural currents that brought us to where we are now, but the following are six key 20th-century phenomena that prepared us for the 21st century: musique concrète, serialism, analog synthesizers, and hip-hop, along with the broader matters of the “studio as instrument” and rapid advances in computing.

Pierre Schaeffer in 1952 playing the phonogène à clavier, a tape recorder with its speed altered by playing any of twelve keys on a keyboard. Photo courtesy of GRM.

Before there was sampling, there was musique concrète, a.k.a. tape and razor blades. Its origination attributed to Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) in the late 1940s, and its development to Pierre Henry (1927-) and John Cage (1912-1992), among others, musique concrète took recorded sound as the start, rather than the end, of the compositional process. Tape was cut and spliced, working with pure sound (a bird call, an overheard conversation, an orchestral performance) as an element of construction. Today, Xacto blades are used mostly for opening eBay packages, and audiotape has gone the way of photo-sensitive film, but the spirit of musique concrète lives on in the computer’s agility with sampling and with molding whole segments of sound.

It would be quite understandable that one might glance at this year’s classical concert offerings and imagine that serialism, and by extension twelve-tone music, had come and gone. But even more than musique concrète, serialism foresaw the computer’s ability to perform functions on set blocks of prerecorded sound. Musique concrète may have introduced the idea that sound can itself be subjected to compositional play. However, it was serialism that posited the “row,” or a fixed set of notes, as a sonic object, and thus composition as a paper algorithm that is enacted on that subset. Today’s computer music, especially the live improvisation performed on laptops, enacts those transformations on sheer sound in much the same way. In place of “rows” we have “samples,” and in place of the codified twelve-tone transpositions we have the endless variety of computer mediation, like granular synthesis, in which processing is applied to extremely narrow slivers of sound; surround-sound effects, in which sound can be moved around in three-dimensional space; and backward-masking, that hallmark of tape-editing, just to name a few.

Leon Theremin

We can now perform high-grade digital synthesis on the same machines we use to balance our checking accounts, but the origins of these so-called “soft synths” were the hulking analog synthesizers pioneered by the likes of Leon Theremin (1896-1993) and, later, Robert Moog (1934-2005) and tweaked to the point of ridicule by prog groups such as Yes. The histrionics of those rock performances may have earned some of the resulting backlash, but the globe-trotting bands served the purpose of road-testing the hardware. Even at this stage in the laptop’s ascendance, several well-respected electronic-based musicians, such as Thomas Dimuzio, eschew the laptop due to its lack of dependability. It’s also worth noting that the album Analord, the most recent release by Richard D. James, the electronic musician best known by the pseudonyms Aphex Twin and AFX, was performed entirely on vintage analog equipment—and as if to emphasize the old-school implication, the material was released initially as a series of vinyl 12″s.

The classical music world has, of late, wrestled with bringing hip-hop into the symphony hall. Witness Daniel Bernard Roumain’s A Civil Rights Reader, which adds a turntablist to a string quartet, and the Asian Dub Foundation’s commission by the English National Orchestra for an opera about Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Grandmaster Flash

But hip-hop’s influence on today’s art music is far more elemental than those events suggest. Hip-hop was birthed on the cheap. Its legacy isn’t merely a matter of having brought beats to the forefront of Western music; its legacy, at a more basic level, has to do with making the most of available technology, and with manipulating pre-existing sound in real time. Every time musicians pump a laptop’s sound card into an amplifier, they celebrate the Bronx DJs who made history with two turntables and a microphone.

Those four, fairly self-contained phenomena occurred in the shadow of a broader sequence of events. Like many a revolution, the concept of the “recording studio as instrument” started with a counter-cultural bang and ended up on retail shelves. The Platonic ideal of using the recording studio to capture otherwise un-performable music dates back, in the public consciousness, to the separate but related decisions by the Beatles and pianist Glenn Gould to cease touring in favor of the studio’s seemingly endless possibilities. Certainly there were precedents for “impossible” music—in, among other distinct realms, the tape constructions of Schaeffer and the player-piano machinations of Conlon Nancarrow. But there’s no overstating the impact of a good spokesperson, and in the Beatles and Gould, not to mention the Beach Boys and other aural seekers of the 1960s, the recording studio had many prominent individuals in its corner. The creative use of the recording studio to construct unreal, or “hyperreal,” music continued to evolve through producer Teo Macero’s work with Miles Davis, Steely Dan’s meticulously constructed pop, Brian Eno’s development of ambient and, inevitably and somewhat pathetically, the rise of celebrities who must lip sync their “live” concerts, so unequipped are they to approximate their fetishistically manicured hit singles.

Dovetailing with the steady rise of the studio-as-instrument was a second revolution: the asymptotic advance of the personal computer, and its eventual impact on audio recording. During the past half decade, many professional studios have been shuttered as the computer became the de facto recording studio, trading tape for hard drives and replacing, or augmenting, mixing boards with software like Pro Tools. Portable computers continue to lag behind the desktops for processing power, due to the twin issues of miniaturization and cost, but not long after the Apple PowerBook appeared, along with the equivalent Microsoft- and Linux-based machines, a laptop was capable of producing sounds that could not just entertain a live audience but could capture a musician’s imagination, even if it could not yet serve as a pro-grade console.

All of which has brought us to the present, to a moment when in music, as in life, computer literacy is increasingly essential to daily activity. What’s important to recognize is that for all our easy adoption of technology, there’s a strong tendency to doubt its efficacy, even its appropriateness, in the realm of art. Today, the computer plays a core role for most composers, whether they actively push the envelope with digital synthesis or simply use a software package such as Sibelius or Finale for notation purposes. Whether a composer treats the computer as an appliance or as an instrument is the lingering question.

Joshua Kit Clayton

I attended a lecture recently by musician Joshua Kit Clayton, who is also one of the programmers of the popular Max/MSP software. Max/MSP is a key application on many musicians’ laptops; it’s a language of sorts that allows users to code subroutines that can be applied to sound (and visuals, and more) or to other subroutines. Clayton was addressing an audience of undergrads at a prominent art school in San Francisco. The computer screen projected behind him was a Matrix-like spew, a flow chart of only somewhat comprehensible commands, boxes, arrows, and squiggly lines. It made the new math seem old hat by comparison. Perhaps sensing trepidation among his paint-stained listeners, he paused his geekily charismatic presentation to decry math illiteracy among musicians in particular and artists in general. Clayton sternly lectured the young audience: “Go home, smoke some weed, and get over your obstacles!”

Tool or Toolbox: The laptop’s ever-changing role

Matmos (L-R) M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel Photo by Steven Halin

When the Kronos Quartet performed in April 2006 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, three laptops were in full view—four if you count the guy in front of me who kept pulling out his ultra-portable OQO device, a fully functioning Windows machine smaller than the average paperback. But let’s stick to the concert. One of the laptops belonged to Walter Kitundu, who performed with the quartet at the end of the first set. The second laptop belonged to Drew Daniel, half of the electronic duo Matmos, which joined Kronos for the close of the second set. The third laptop belonged to Kronos sound designer Scott Fraser (an experimental musician in his own right), who sat behind a vast soundboard toward the middle of the hall and routinely checked the computer as the evening progressed.

All three laptops in the Kronos show were Apples. The Apple logo is as ubiquitous in electronic music as the Adidas logo once was in hip-hop, so this is no coincidence, despite Apple’s slim market share. That glowing logo, however, is probably all that the three machines had in common. Even if they were running the same software, which is unlikely, they were being used for entirely different purposes, yet all in the service of Kronos’ performance. Daniel’s was most certainly the source of the pumping rhythms that grounded Matmos’s collaboration with Kronos, For Terry Riley. In that sense, his laptop came closest to what is most commonly conceived of as laptop music: synthesized sound far removed from its raw materials, produced on the fly, generally with rhythmic intent (even when that rhythm slows to the nearly subaural realm referred to as “drone”).

Kitundu’s use of the laptop was less self-explanatory. The presence of the Apple during his piece, Cerulean Sweet III, was, in fact, a little surprising, given that his compositions center on instruments of his own invention, ingenious hybrids that often involve unfinished wood and old turntable parts. Cerulean is an artfully maudlin piece based on snippets of music by jazz great Charles Mingus, and the audience might have surmised that some of those pre-recorded sounds were emanating from his little computer—and not from the strange contraptions he and Kronos were performing on. In this sense, even if Matmos’s use of the laptop best epitomized the aural fact of laptop music, Kitundu’s came closer to an audience’s experience of laptop music: you had no idea what he doing. Perhaps he was augmenting the sound of his instrument, which he calls a phonoharp. Perhaps he was merely displaying the score. During abstract sound-art shows by laptop musicians, it’s not uncommon for someone to ponder whether the performer is just checking his email while the music plays by itself. Such skepticism fades with familiarity, as the rough contours of laptop music become understood and the listener can judge a performance on the basis of the music rather than the player’s theatricality. More on that in a moment.

Walter Kitundu Photo by Donald Swearingen

First, don’t dismiss Fraser simply because of his job designation. It’s unlikely Fraser was participating in Kronos’s sound as a performer, though since virtually all of the pieces Kronos played that evening involved a pre-recorded portion—like the drum machine beats of Clint Mansell’s score for Requiem for a Dream and the old 78-rpm recordings heard in Dan Visconti’s Love Bleeds Radiant—it’s presumable that he was triggering those. Fraser was primarily, whether with laptop, soundboard, or some combination thereof, shaping the way the music filled the hall. Much contemporary electronica, taking advantage of the tabula rasa of digital sound and the computer’s ability to produce immersive multi-speaker environments, is a kind of sound-design as art; Brian Eno’s ambient continues to serve as both metaphor and urtext here. These days, musicians including Richard Chartier, Ryoji Ikeda, and Nosei Sakata have made much of little more than a sine wave.

The variously ambiguous roles of those three laptops at that single Kronos event neither bookend the continuum of laptop music, nor even begin to touch on its breadth, but they do signify how differently the machine can be employed in concert.

It would have been one thing for the laptop to simply have come to serve as a digital version of turntables, allowing the user to cue up prerecorded material or to replicate the multi-tracking duties of a recording engineer. But the key to understanding the laptop’s role in contemporary music is to appreciate how it took the promise of the studio-as-instrument and turned it inside out. The laptop took the home studio and made it portable, portable in a way that even the four-track tape recorder had only hinted at. A musician seated on stage with a laptop has ability to synthesize and transform sound in a manner that a decade ago would have been unthinkable.

The key word in that last sentence is not “unthinkable” but “manner.” Compositional issues as fundamental as matching tempos, or modulating a sequences of notes, or otherwise manipulating self-contained aural elements can be handled, thanks to off-the-rack software, at the level of gesture. Some software, such as Ableton Live, is useable right out of the box; others, such as Max/MSP, provide musicians with a language to learn, but one with which they might craft their own software tools. (Tellingly, many of Max/MSP’s engineers are accomplished electronic musicians themselves, including Joshua Kit Clayton, Les Stuck, and Luke DuBois, the latter best known as a member of the Freight Elevator Quartet.) All of which is to say, not only are decisions that once determined how a composer set pen to paper now in the hands of an improviser, so too are the means by which that composer might have honed the sounds in a studio. Many newcomers to electronic music experience an epiphany when they come to understand how inherent improvisation is to composition on a computer.

The laptop is easy to learn and difficult to master. It doesn’t take much to figure out how to emit sound, especially if all you want to do is let a series of prerecorded songs overlap ever so slightly to produce a continuous mix; iTunes and other MP3 players have automated that task. Beyond that, though, decisions get murky fast: which software to use, whether to add additional physical inputs, like theremin, external CD players, keyboards, and other such triggers and sound sources. Most of the popular software employed by laptop musicians is available on both Macintosh and Windows platforms, and often Linux as well; musicians, like graphic designers, are attracted to the Apple for its elegant user interface.

Some musicians use the laptop as the equivalent of an effects pedal, just one more tool in their toolbox; for others it is the toolbox itself. At least for beginning laptop musicians, the old koan “less is more” is worth keeping in mind. While the software one employs doesn’t directly result in a specific sound, it’s safe to say that someone who employs a wide range of equipment and programs is probably going to make more complicated and chaotic music than someone who cuddles up with a single piece of software and tries to make the most of it.

The word “portability” doesn’t quite do justice to the laptop’s greatest strength. Anyone who has played a double bass has little sympathy for computer-enabled musicians who felt that only with the laptop could they perform regularly in front of live audiences—as if the desktop had been such a hefty or fragile item to lug to a gig. The laptop’s true triumph is about a continuity of technological experience. Jimi Hendrix slept with his guitar. Likewise, one laptop is not immediately interchangeable with another. The laptop gets personalized over time—from big things like which programs are loaded, to small things like the user’s adjustment to the location of the keys or the idiosyncratic hardware issues that computer manufacturers deny but that anyone who’s bonded with their laptop comes to think of as being akin to the machine’s personality.

So, what distinguishes a successful laptop performance from an unsuccessful one? Since I’d gladly attend a concert of nothing but old refrigerators, my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but here goes: Laptop music, whether quiet or noisy, beat-driven or hazy, is generally about process. Most laptop performances consist not of individual pieces but of extended improvisations that run from the beginning to the end of the individual’s set. Listening to a laptop musician perform can be less like listening to a composition and more like paying a visit to an artist’s studio: The real question is less what went into an individual piece, and more along the lines of what the person has been up to recently, what software they have been mastering, what sonic realms they are exploring.

Plastic Devices: Critical laptop innovators and recommended CDs

Any introduction to a specific realm of music necessitates a list of recommended listening. The following are eight individuals, in alphabetical order, who are central to the development of the laptop as a performance and compositional tool, and to its status as a bona fide cultural phenomenon, along with some of their essential recordings. Choosing individuals to best represent such a widespread convergence of technology and culture is a challenge. Come 2006, the laptop is a standard tool, and though innovation continues, the following musicians were actively involved before portable-computing hegemony set in. Also, they all record and tour frequently, which has helped expand their influence and introduce more people to the laptop’s potential. So pop one of these CDs into your own laptop’s disc drawer and think of it as the 21st-century equivalent of a player-piano roll…

Taylor Deupree

Taylor Deupree (b. 1971), based out of New York City, is the proprietor of several record labels, chief among them 12k, whose lo-fi name belies its curatorial focus on high-grade sonic processing, and Term, a trailblazing “netlabel” that offers up for free the occasional recording (often a live performance or a future 12k album-in-progress) to anyone with a good Internet connection and a sizable hard drive. (Visit 12k.com/term.) As a musician, Deupree is an unrepentant minimalist, one who mixes fragility and a mechanistic impulse on albums like stil. (12k, 2002), which revels in its interiority. He frequently collaborates with the musicians who are signed to his labels, notably on Live in Japan, 2004 (12k, 2005) with laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits and Post_Piano (Sub Rosa, 2002) with Kenneth Kirschner, who uses the computer software Flash to compose chance-based works that involve ever-shifting layers of sound files.

Fennesz

Fennesz is Vienna-based Christian Fennesz (b. 1962) with laptop and guitar in hand. It’s difficult to recall, let alone imagine, there was a moment not so long ago when plugging a guitar into a portable computer would have been a headline-making occasion. But it’s true. When Fennesz’s Endless Summer (Mego, 2001) was released, the laptop was still considered a self-contained unit, not to mention one still in its infancy. (This is long before Apple’s GarageBand software made the connection between laptop and guitar part of its marketing.) Endless Summer caused some minor consternation at the time—the laptop had only in the preceding few years gained enough firepower to serve musicians, and already it was being yanked into the past? And hadn’t hip-hop, not to mention rock’s own navel-gazing, killed the guitar? Apparently not. Fennesz defied digital purism in favor of music that tasted retro and futuristic; the title isn’t the only nod to the Beach Boys, not on an album so expressly languorous, the guitar sometimes plucked for rustic-folk flavor, and at others processed into a hazy background soundscape. Subsequent Fennesz recordings of note include the fractured Live in Japan (Headz, 2003), which requires several close listens for proper orientation, and Venice (Touch, 2004), on which he folds in field recordings, feedback, and David Sylvian’s singing.

Kid 606

The jaw-droppingly antic collage music of Venezuelan native, and longtime California resident, Kid 606 (given name: Miguel Depredro; b. 1979), brought him quick and widespread attention following the release in 2000 of Down with the Scene (Ipecac), P.S. I Love You (Mille Plateaux), and the uncharacteristically relaxed The Soccergirl EP (Carpark). His nom du laptop, adopted from an old Roland drum machine (the 808 was already spoken for), is perfect for what has come to be known as “laptop punk”: a riotous assemblage as alarmingly retrograde as it is almost blissfully cacophonic. That the phrase “laptop punk” went from delightful oxymoron to outright redundancy in half a decade is a testament to the movement’s speedy evolution. In addition to the albums mentioned prior, don’t miss Kid 606’s aptly titled Kill the Sound before the Sound Kills You (Ipecac, 2003).

Monolake

Monolake (b. 1969) personifies the convergence of composition, programming, and performance. It is the pseudonym of Robert Henke, a German craftsman of electronica that at its best burbles with a controlled sublimity—as if the music has been pressed, like autumn leaves, between thick plates of Lucite and then illuminated from below. Monolake was a duo until the other founding member, Gerhard Behles, left the name in Henke’s capable hands in order to form a company whose chief product, Ableton Live, is today one of the most popular laptop-performance software titles. Today, one of Ableton’s marquee practitioners is none other than Henke/Monolake, each of whose new full-length albums tend to appear in record stores right around the time a new version of Ableton Live is released (it’s up to its fifth iteration). Henke isn’t merely Ableton’s equivalent of a clothes horse; he’s also an engineer on the software, bicycling once a week from his home to the company’s office to discuss interface design and to report on his latest plug-ins. Each new Monolake album is developed in tandem with the software. Key among them are Cinemascope (ml/i, 2001), road music disguised as sound design, and Hongkong (Chain Reaction, 1997), collecting tracks that laid the groundwork for the digital sedative known as minimal techno. Henke also records under his own name. Robert Henke albums tend to be more spacious, less rhythmic, than the work attributed to Monolake. Check out “Studies for Thunder,” the closing track on Henke’s Signal to Noise (ml/i, 2004), for its application of minimalist aesthetics to (entirely artificial) environmental atmospherics.

Ikue Mori

Ikue Mori (b. 1953), originally from Japan, came into prominence during the 1970s as a drummer in the New York art-punk band DNA. Since then she has been a fixture on the Manhattan music scene. (She records for John Zorn’s label, Tzadik, and the two frequently collaborate.) Mori somewhat famously ditched the drums for a drum machine, eventually developing an intense fixation on the laptop, which she employs for both solo performances and collaborations. Her mild-mannered stage presence masks the fluidity and speed of her music, which is marked by simultaneous layers and samples of traditional instrumentation. She is an equal partner in the trio Mephista with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and drummer Susie Ibarra. Recommended are Mori’s recent solo album, Myrninerest (Tzadik, 2005), which has a certain mystic whimsy, and Mephista’s Black Narcissus (Tzadik, 2002); by positioning her laptop between piano and drums, Narcissus highlights the controlled serendipity she brings to the mix. Also worth tracking down: The Turntable Sessions: 2001-2002 Volume 1, a project initiated by Billy Martin, drummer with the jazz act Medeski Martin & Wood; the album teams her live with echo-laden DJ Olive on three tracks, one a trio with Martin.

Scanner

The work of British musician Scanner (a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud, b. 1964) posits the laptop as a passport that allows him to move easily between cultural worlds. One evening he may perform a set live at a club, using the instrument from which he took his name to rip unprotected speech from the airwaves, his laptop emanating an improvised emotional soundtrack that lends context and drama. The next he may be at a museum, performing one of his pieces that serve as both art and commentary, like 52 Spaces (Bette, 2002), an audio-visual reduction of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Eclipse, or the knowingly titled Warhol’s Surface (Intermedium, 2003), which applies his Scanner MO to recordings of Andy Warhol. Rimbaud is increasingly involved in collaborative, event- and site-specific work, like summoning voices of the past in an installation at a 13th-century hospital, or composing for ballet, or doing sound design for a horror movie. It’s the laptop that allows someone so mobile (not just geographically but artistically) to keep familiar tools at hand.

Carl Stone Photo by Takamasa Aoki

Los Angeles native Carl Stone (b. 1953), who studied with composers Morton Subotnick and James Tenney, splits his time between Japan and America. Stone’s music often involves field recordings from his travels, though those sounds might be so contorted, into percussive noise or an ether silence, that they’re nearly unrecognizable. There’s something about his reputation as a peripatetic individual that makes his laptop seem to double as a suitcase, and his performances feel like montage aural slide shows of his latest activities. His frequent residence in Japan has brought him into the circle of indigenous microsonic noise labeled as “onkyo”—represented by musicians such as Testu Inoue, Sachiko M, and Nobukazu Takemura—which is often, though not exclusively, produced on laptops. Stone has a particular interest in immersive installations, and I’ve witnessed him wow both an unschooled audience in New Orleans and a room of his peers in San Francisco with his surround-sound control of space and time. His Nak Won (Sonore, 2003) shows his mastery of choppy momentum, dozens of samples falling down a staircase in resplendent chaos. And even better is pict.soul (Cycling ’74, 2002), a collaboration with the ultra-rarified Inoue, during which they riff with sonic particulates that make most minimalism sound like Wagner by comparison. (And lest this music be mistaken as a youth movement, note that a laptop-wielding Subotnick, born two decades prior to Stone, was a highlight of the 2005 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, at which he collaborated with Miguel Frasconi.)

Keith Fullerton Whitman

Keith Fullerton Whitman (b. 1973), who grew up in New Jersery and today resides in Boston, maintains a second existence under the name Hrvatski, but even dual identities aren’t enough to encompass the breadth of his musical activities. As Hrvatski he has perpetrated some of the most blindingly ecstatic anti-dance music imaginable, beats that shred themselves as they go. Witness the often brazen wildness of Swarm & Dither (Planet Mu, 2002). But in time, he’s emerged from that moniker’s shadow as a thoughtful, knowledgeable musician for whom the laptop is both a room in which he can seclude himself as well as just another piece of equipment in his shed. His best work involves guitar and laptop, notably the lush soundscapes of Playthroughs (Kranky, 2002) which update the live looping pioneered by guitarist Robert Fripp in the 1970s. Whitman has an ongoing partnership with Greg Davis, and the two released a maddeningly expansive compilation of live recordings last year, Yearlong (Carpark). By the way, though Whitman jokes that his home studio does double duty as his bedroom, he isn’t married to his laptop. The album Multiples (Kranky, 2005) put him to work on vintage equipment housed at Harvard and MIT, including the Serge Modular Synthesizer Yamaha Disklavier.

The Incredible Shrinking Computer: Music in the palm of your hand

The riddle goes: What part of your body disappears when you stand up? The answer: Your lap. To rephrase the question: What happens when your laptop disappears? That is: What happens as you get more accustomed to mobile computing and your threshold for acceptable portability becomes even more demanding—and those demands are met? The foreseeable answer is music in the palm of your hand.

Richard Devine

Despite all the activity in laptop music today, it seems unlikely that the laptop will, as a self-contained unit, have the sort of lifespan enjoyed by the piano, the string quartet, or the ukulele. There is no reason to suspect that the laptop is anything more than a transition object, as the computer slowly finagles its way into everyday life. The rise of the laptop has to do not with technology having reached a point where portability made pre-existing computer music feasible for live performance; it’s that the technology reached a point where the portability led to more rapid adoption, which at a certain critical mass led to unexpected consequences, like laptop battles, as organized at laptopbattle.org, in which individuals vie for the reaction of judges and audience; gestural interfaces, like the optical sensors added to CD players; homebrew electro-acoustic experimentation, and so forth.

The watchword for this sort of down-the-road activity is “pervasive” computing. Prognostication aside, it might be helpful, in closing, to just run through a variety of currently existing small electronic devices, some of them laptop-enabled, many if not all of them the spawn (or kissing cousins) of laptop music:

For the most part, this essay has been concerned with the realm of art, but it’s worth noting that the biggest selling category in computer-based music is ring tones for cellular phones. These began as single-line melodic reductions of songs, from Vivaldi to 50 Cent, but as cell phones’ specs have improved, so too has the accompanying music, much to the annoyance of moviegoers and teachers. Today, phones feature multiple voices, richer sound, and the ability of phone owners to shape sounds themselves. Some phones include tools for composing. Much as you can take a photo with your in-phone camera and email it to a friend, so too can you make a little tune and send it out into the world.

In this context, the first truly portable computing device of any practical consequence (attention aficionados of Apple’s Newton: this means factoring in market penetration) was, arguably, the Palm Pilot, later re-christened simply the Palm. Microsoft developed a competing operating system, the Pocket PC, which features a slimmed down edition of its flagship operating system, Windows. Both Palms and Pocket PCs have music tools available, from simple metronomes and guitar tuners to mini-keyboards, samplers, and multi-track recorders. For some examples of this sub-laptop music, check out the community that’s former around Bhajis Loops (chocopoolp.com), a music program for the Palm whose users include electronic minimalist Richard Devine.

It’s been noted that the laptop is significantly more than a digital turntable, but that isn’t to say that the laptop doesn’t serve frequently as little more than an MP3 player that can crossfade between tracks. A recent system called Final Scratch has eked out a common ground between computer and vinyl LP by providing DJs with a hybrid that allows them to use the LP as the interface for manipulating music, even though the music itself is stored not on the surface of the album but in a computer that is hooked up to the turntable. Despite digital reticence on the part of vinyl DJs, the equipment has caught on, in part due to the creative involvement of Richie Hawtin (a.k.a. Plastikman) and John Acquaviva. (There’s a similar system named Serato, manufactured by Rane.)

Many of today’s electronic musicians developed a fondness for lo-fi, synthetic sound while playing video games in their youth. While the soundtrack to the average video game has matured considerably, musicians’ tastes haven’t necessarily. Not only do communities exist for the production at the 8- and 16-bit levels of games of yore, many musicians also produce music on everything ranging from old Atari units to today’s Game Boys. Perhaps in response to this trend, a recent Nintendo DS cartridge, Electroplankton, is a sort of audio game or sound toy. It has no endgame, no specific goal, except making noise with an interactive psychedelic interface. Electroplankton takes advantage of the DS’s dual screens, one of which is touch-sensitive.

Speaking of alternate interfaces, the Tablet PC, on which the entire screen is touch-sensitive, shows a lot of promise for innovation. It’s a standard feature on many Windows laptops, and the company is pushing a new “ultra mobile” protocol that may dispense with the keyboard entirely. Then again, as the iPod’s success has shown, it’s likely that such hands-on computing won’t reach mass popularity until Apple joins the party.

Though circuit-bending predates the laptop, its popularity has surged of late, as electronic musicians have sought out new sources of sound. Circuit-benders take pre-existing hardware—most famously gadgets like Speak & Spells and other children’s toys—and mess with the innards until they squeal to the owner’s satisfaction and, more to the point, surprise. The founder of circuit bending is Reed Ghazala, who compiled his decades of experimentation last year in the book Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments. I recently moderated a panel discussion at the first annual Maker Faire, held by Make magazine, in which I brought together three musicians who make their own instruments: a pair of these circuit-benders, Chachi Jones (a.k.a. Donald Bell) and univac (a.k.a. Tom Koch), plus Krys Bobrowski, whose inventions include a giant glass ‘armonica and horns made of dried kelp. To hear those three tell it, the definition of an instrument is as much in play at the dawn of the 21st century as the concept of the composition was toward the end of the 20th. They, along with Kitundu and folks like Pierre Bastien (who has built his own automaton orchestra), Matt Heckert (of Survival Research Labs), Ken Butler (whose guitars are known to sprout from tennis rackets), and Monolake (who has developed the “Monodeck,” a personalized bit of hardware that serves as a central hub for his software and equipment) are at the forefront of where instrumentation is headed.

Also at the Maker Faire this year was the crew that developed the Monome, a USB-enabled grid that serves as a sample trigger for laptops, though that description doesn’t do it justice. The promise of that particular device, which retails for $500, isn’t just its simplicity or the open-source community of musician-developers who will share the code they program to make the most of the new instrument. The promise is the idea that the mass production of such physical devices is no longer only in the hands of big companies like Yamaha and Korg.

But for all the various small-scale devices being produced today that make music, none has the open-ended potential of the laptop. Laptop musicians aren’t just collectively working to create a shared understanding of how the device functions as an instrument, they are also individually, as they piece together the perfect balance of software and hardware, making singular instruments that are all their own.

David Rakowski Photo by John Aylward

What’s in a title? A piece by any other name would sound the same. Do they relate to the music? Should they relate to the music? Does there even have to be a relationship?

It’s pretty hard answering all of those questions, because the answer is different for every composer—and indeed, even for different pieces by the same composer. Titles are specific and nonspecific, poetic and concrete, generic and particular, clever and stupid (between which there is a fine line). Titles can suggest how to listen to a piece, or give no clues whatsoever; they can link a piece to a tradition or ostentatiously renounce one; they can call attention to technical details in the piece, or they can refer to extra-musical metaphors that may have informed its composition; they can even suggest something of the personality, prejudices, training, or hobbies of a composer. So trying to answer those questions with a yes or no is foolish—since the answer is yes and no. Except to the very first question.

One thing’s for sure—a piece’s title is frequently the first contact between the composer and the listener. It’s through the title that the listener will form his or her first impressions or set expectations (or preconceptions) about the piece and its composer. A perfect example appeared on this website in a review of a CD of music by this writer: “if I were going to infer anything from the titles bestowed upon his compositions, my guess would be that this guy is a total goofball, or at least harbors some strange affinity towards Babbitt’s bon mot titles.” Got it in one.

So what is a “good” title? What is a “bad” title? Are those even pertinent questions? Even the “best” title in the history of humankind can’t save or make up for clunky writing and mishandled form, and by the same token, the “worst” title can’t take away from a sublime moment when, say, the English horn emerges from a busy texture and takes over. Density 21.5 refers to the atomic weight of platinum, but is it a “good” title for a solo flute piece? Daniel Felsenfeld’s Smoking My Diploma reveals Danny’s attitude toward the physical manifestation of the conclusion of his education, but does the title prepare me adequately to listen to a piece for amplified and distorted oboe, cello and piano? Would I listen to the piece differently if it were called Composition for Amplified and Distorted Oboe, Cello and Piano? Hey, supposing the answer to that question is yes, would it actually be a different piece if it had a different title? Suppose Varèse’s piece were called Starts Low, Gets High. Suppose The Pines of Rome were called My Weekend in the Bahamas. Or Smoking My Diploma…

We’re inundated with titles every day, from newspaper articles to books to poems to technical manuals to pop songs to pieces of visual art and a lot more. In most cases it’s the title that is our shorthand, or placeholder, for referring to those things when we think about them or talk about them. So, by that token, it must be good for titles to be unique, or at least distinctive. But, of course, titles are not subject to copyright. I can call my bassoon duo Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor if I want to, or Scrapple from the Apple, or The Wizard of Oz. If titles were copyrightable, there would be no more pieces called Symphony No. 1 or Invention or “Call Me”—indeed, all the short titles would already be taken, and titles of new pieces would be as long as this paragraph.

Let’s talk about popular music. I love the titles of Country and Western tunes because so many of them indulge in clever punning and word play—after all, who could see the single of “All My Ex’s Live in Texas (That’s Why I Live in Tennessee)” at Tower Records and not be tempted to buy it? Or “Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth Because I’m Kissin’ You Goodbye”? It’s a great game making up C &W titles for songs that will never be written—my personal favorite is “Even My Dung Beetle Can’t Stand You ‘Cause You Ain’t S**t.” These titles serve a commercial purpose: they are memorable and unique, so that when you go to the CD store or look online you know what to ask for. And when enough people ask for it, down payments are made on real estate by artists, distributors, agents, and everyone else in the chow line.

The titles of commercial pop songs similarly are meant to be memorable and particular, and in a pretty rigid way. Most often the title comes from the song’s hook. Since the hook usually comes in the chorus, you hear it several times during each play; so naturally when you go get your own copy, it’s the hook that you remember. Think “Let It Be” or “Hollaback Girl” or “Little Red Corvette” or “I Want You Back” or “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” or any one of hundreds of other songs you may know—admit it, when you read the titles it brought to mind a little bit of those songs. (Now quick: Symphony No. 4! What piece came to mind? How about Intermezzo?) Still, pop song titles are not unique—wizened ones may remember that “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips was one of two songs on the Billboard Chart with that name at the time it was making me lurch so frequently to change the channel. And a brief trip to iTunes reveals no fewer than 129 tracks with that name available for download, of which more than half are different songs.

Since mass market popular music is overwhelmingly vocal music (i.e. songs, with text), the relationship between the song and the title is usually straightforward. And titles of songs, and by extension, album titles are generally short. An album’s title should fit on the spine of a CD case, after all. Of course, there are exceptions to this tendency. But I doubt Fiona Apple would get up in front of an audience and say, “I’m going to sing a few tunes from my album, When the Pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king what he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight and he’ll win the whole thing ‘fore he enters the ring there’s no body to batter when your mind is… (That’s just half of the title; I fell asleep typing it). The side of the CD reads “Fiona Apple—When the Pawn.”

In the world of so-called art music, the impulse to sell is less of an issue, hence titles are more abstract and more varied—especially as so much of it has no text from which to draw a title. I imagine that in the early days of notated music, titles were hardly an issue at all. The vast majority of notated music was vocal music, and it was easy to refer to a piece by the beginning of the text (the closest thing the medievals had to a hook). If a composer wrote a polyphonic setting of the Agnus Dei (called in the church “the Agnus Dei”), it was pretty sure to be called “Agnus Dei,” so as to distinguish it from a “Requiem Aeternam,” which has a different liturgical function. When Perotin set a text that began with the phrase “Viderunt Omnes”, I’m pretty sure it was called “Perotin’s ‘Viderunt Omnes'” (and not what several generations of music appreciation students have called it: “the ‘Ee-hee Hee-hee Hee Hee’ song”). I also imagine it became a little harder when composers became suitably prolific to have multiple settings of the same text, especially a Mass. Here’s where the underlying chant material might have been used to identify which mass setting a particular composer did—e.g. the Armed Man Mass.

I imagine that when instrumental music started to come into its own, then titles became more important. No familiar text to quote? How do I think of this music and what do I call it? Hey, how about a canzona per sonare? If you like that, you’ll love Canzona per Sonare No. 2! But those were both just practice for Canzona per Sonare No. 3! So a whole new class of titles emerged having some reference to or derivation from Latin and Greek words for sound and singing. Sonata? Sounding. Sinfonia? Sounding Together. Concerto? Sounding Together. Cantata? Lots of singing. Oratorio? Really, really serious singing. Also, when composers became more particular about which instrument played which part, titles simply referencing the size and makeup of the group emerged: three instruments? Trio. Four instruments? Quartet (or sometimes, Trio Sonata—blast that multiplayer continuo line!). Three string instruments and a piano? Piano Quartet. Four wind instruments and one brass instrument? Woodwind Quintet. Oops. These composers had it pretty easy. Though I do imagine it must have been a little comical for audience members to argue the merits of Haydn’s 57th Symphony over those of the 69th, 72nd, 77th, 78th, and 82nd. It still is.

Abstract musical titles must have emerged not long after it was decided that it was okay for music to be about itself, without an underlying liturgical function, and with some sort of perceived affect. There must have been debates at some point later as to whether music could represent—or at least evoke—something other than itself. Hence titles like Pastorale, and eventually nicknames for pieces originally given generic titles by their composers—Sun, Pathetique, Appassionata, Jupiter, Clock, Military, Rhenish, Resurrection. Once the Romantics took over and gave us titles like “Gray Clouds,” “The Poet Speaks,” “A Frightful Experience,” and “To A Wild Rose”, all bets were off—and the range of possible titles exploded.

Nowadays, just about anything is possible. Composers still write settings of the Agnus Dei and write symphonies and piano trios and number them. Titles don’t necessarily need to be brief for commercial reasons, and there is no length limit. They run the range from the ever-popular Untitled (I wonder who would own the copyright on that one if it were possible?) and its sequel, Untitled, to La Monte Young’s The Empty Base (1991-present), including The Symmetries in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119 and with One of The Inclusory Optional Bases: 7; 8; 14:8; 18:14:8; 18:16:14; 18:16:14:8; 9:7:4; or The Empty Base (1991).

1. Titles Taken from Pre-existing Texts

The most obvious examples of this kind of title are text settings that appropriate the names of the original poems or prose works. But there are also instrumental pieces that draw some portion of their inspiration from a literary work and are titled accordingly. I have encountered at least a half dozen pieces called A Certain Slant of Light (Emily Dickinson). Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy (inspired by the Shakespeare play) is a well-known example, and Anthony Gatto has a violin and piano duo called The Sheltering Sky (after the Paul Bowles novel).

2. Generic Titles

These titles reference a pre-existing name for a form or genre, most often used by composers no longer living, and often let you know how many times a composer used this form before this piece. Sonata No. 1 in C major, Symphony No. 3, Fugue in G, Second Cantata, Fantasy March, Ballade, Intermezzo, Polonaise, Waltz, Song, Blues No. 4, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. [Ed. Note: Generic titles are so, well, generic, that standard usage also precludes them appearing in quotes or italics, which ought to tell you something.]

In these titles, the composer doesn’t mind making at least some casual reference to a tradition—whether it be slavish, ironic, or somewhere in between—and probably thinks that the music stands on its own without any other sort of description. (“This is my symphony, which is mine, and what it is, too.”) The composer hasn’t made a big effort to suggest how to listen to the piece other than in reference to other pieces you know—seriously or ironically.

Generic titles have the potential to cause a little grief in this age of online downloads. To wit, I was recently looking on iTunes for a recording of the Roy Harris Third Symphony and was taken to a Bernstein collection of recordings of American music. The album had three pieces called Symphony No. 3, none of them with the composer identified. If I didn’t already know how Roy Harris’s symphony goes, I wouldn’t have had a clue from the 30 second previews which one I should download.

2a. Generic Titles: Ensemble Division

These titles simply name the ensemble involved: Second Piano Trio, String Quartet, Composition for Viola and Piano, etc. Some composers use these titles as jokes—Bassoon Quintet for a solo flute piece, or Ezra Sims’s String Quartet No. 2 (1962) (written for a mixed quintet in 1975, titled so that a nonexistent piece attributed to him in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary would no longer be incorrect). Again, here the composer gives no immediate clue as to how a listener might approach the piece except in relation to previous piano trios, string quartets, etc.

2b. Generic Titles: It’s Only Music Division

Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Adams’s Naïve and Sentimental Music, and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (which, ironically, I tend to listen to in the morning) range from the generic to the adjectival clause. No assembly required.

3. Titles That Tell You About Technical or Note-Grinding Processes Used to Compose the Pieces

Spectral Study, Arrays, Dodecafonia—a title I’ve seen several times (I hang out on the East Coast)—and Whole-Tone Etude are examples of such titles. La Monte Young’s title above is such a title. Donald Martino’s Mosaics refers to a technique of generating pitches. I’ve known composers so wrapped up in the particulars of the notes that they come up with titles like Tri Tetra Hexa, for instance, to describe a piece that derives 12-tone sets first with trichords, then with tetrachords, and finally with hexachords. (Babbitt did this in his woodwind quartet, which he called Woodwind Quartet.) I don’t have problems with these titles, though sometimes I wonder if what I’m supposed to do when I listen is engage in advanced ear-training. I have yet to exclaim “Yes! The climax comes exactly where it should: when the first discrete hexachord, so long suggested but never revealed, is finally unfolded!” But, of course, I exaggerate; pieces titled this way are often very expressive and not necessarily just about the notes, despite the titles. I suppose Barber’s Essays fit here, but just barely.

4. Titles That Reference Other Titles

These titles either exactly reproduce or allude to another title, whether it’s a title of a piece of music, a piece of visual art, or something in literature. Hence Milton Babbitt’s Il Penseroso references, well, Milton (John Milton). Kyle Gann’s Bud Ran Back Out references the be-bop standard In Walked Bud. The same composer’s Nude Rolling Down an Escalator references Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Jonathan Kramer’s Notta Sonata explains itself. I find these titles inviting and disarming, as they usually show that the composer has a sense of humor. Though given a program beginning with Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, I’m not sure I would know what to expect, except maybe downward rushing scales. Which is probably a good thing. To call a piece Concerto for Orchestra nowadays, as Lutoslawski, Jennifer Higdon, and Steven Stucky have done, is to reference Bartók’s.

5. Titles That Allude to the Other Senses, Especially Sight

We are chock full of titles that reference other sensations, which quite often are described as providing the inspiration for a piece. Indeed, David Smooke’s Taste Sensation very specifically refers to such a thing, and it’s also a pun. Ross Bauer’s Chimera refers to a kind of musical motive that appears and disappears, well, chimerically. Messiaen’s Chronochromie means time colors. A great many of these titles reference a particular quality of light—a metaphor much used in music through the ages (think nocturnes and Carter’s Night Fantasies). Michael Torke’s color pieces are obvious examples. Jeffrey Mumford, who was trained as a painter, frequently titles his pieces evocatively using visual sensations in combination with other sensations: ringing fields of enveloping blue, in forests of evaporating dawns, amid the light of quickening memory, distinct echoes of glimmering daylight, within a cloudburst of echoing brightness. These titles are very engaging, as they invite a kind of metaphorical listening that can be quite satisfying.

6. Titles That Allude to Something in Nature

Lee Hyla’s Mythic Birds of Saugerties uses some bird calls from species common in upstate New York as musical materials. Messiaen similarly lets us know his affinity for bird calls in Merle Noir, Oiseaux Exotiques, and Reveil des Oiseaux, among others. Crumb’s Voice of the Whale famously imitates whale sounds. Composers have also referenced rain forests, walks on the beach, fish jumping in a stream, the cotton is high, etc. in any number of titles. Again, these titles invite a different sort of metaphorical listening which can be very welcoming.

7. Punning Titles

These titles make puns on other titles, on popular expressions, on well-known lines from poems, books, and TV shows, and are often outrageous. Milton Babbitt’s punning titles have become legendary, for instance: None But the Lonely Flute, The Joy of More Sextets (a reference to the piece’s six-part counterpoint), Around the Horn (yes, a solo horn piece), and—while we’re doing baseball jokes—Whirled Series (also a reference to where the notes come from). Eric Chasalow’s Suspicious Motives, Paul Lansky’s Idle Chatter, Scott Lindroth’s Spin Cycle, Lee Hyla’s Riff and Transfigurations are all pun titles. As Daniel Felsenfeld posited in his NMBx article on humor in music, these are all very serious pieces by very serious composers, and the funny titles seem to be meant to be disarming, to put the listener at ease before encountering some pretty challenging stuff.

8. Places and Times

Partch’s Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California is an example of a title taken from a location—in this case, the location of graffiti that is set to music. There are also composers for whom the place and/or dates where/when a piece was written become the title—think An American in Paris (Gershwin), Grand Canyon Suite (Grofé), The Dharma at Big Sur (Adams), Vermont Counterpoint (Reich), New York Notes (Wuorinen). The titles of the piano pieces recently written by Pascal Dusapin for Marilyn Nonken simply give the starting and ending dates for the composition of each one. It seems like Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, Varèse’s Amériques and Ives’s Central Park in the Dark would also fit here.

9. Other

Every list has its box for the pieces that don’t fit, and this one is no exception. Some of my favorite titles “fit” into this classification—David Lang’s Eating Living Monkeys, the aforementioned Smoking My Diploma, Eve Beglarian’s Machaut in the Machine Age, Lee Hyla’s Amnesia Variance. Let’s also put Untitled pieces in this box.

Like a lot of composers reading this, my titles range from serious to silly to outrageously silly. I have written (as of the posting of this essay) 72 piano etudes, almost all of which have punning titles, and several chamber pieces with similarly funny titles. All of the music is quite serious and detailed, however, so the titles hopefully have the effect of putting listeners at ease. Sometimes, though, the clever title thing backfires. Recently at a concert where the composers were expected to speak about their pieces before the performances, the moderator introduced the other composers with “let’s talk about your music.” I was introduced with “let’s talk about your titles.” I could make a down payment on a house if I had a nickel for every time someone said something, paused, and said to me, “You could use that for a title.”

Believe it or not, when I finish a piano etude, I hardly ever have a title ready. I often take long walks with my wife Beth during which we shuffle through all the puns we can think of for what the etude is “about” in order to come up with a short list (I give her full credit for the “accent” etude title: Accents of Malice). Lately friends and colleagues have been lining up to get in on the act. After I finished an etude for the left hand, people called and e-mailed with their title suggestions as if the future of civilization depended on it. There were advocates for “left” jokes: Left Bank, Left Out to Dry, Left Alone (a finalist), Left Behind, Leftenant. There were advocates for “left” expressed in another language: Sinister Motives (another finalist), Gauche Busters (got a huge number of votes, but I hated it), Yes Sinister, Sinister Cathedral. And the jockeying for titling privileges got strangely intense. Finally, more than a week after I had finished composing it (which took only four days), I got the title on my own: Ain’t Got No Right.

And the Symphony No. 4 that came to my mind was the one by Brahms.

Art Jarvinen Photo by Roman Cho

As we approach Easter, I am listening again to one of my favorite CDs, a recording of an Eastern Orthodox Easter celebration. It opens with the wonderful sound of the simantron. I have been researching this ancient instrument for some time. My interest in it had an odd point of departure—vampire movies. All my life I have enjoyed the vampire genre as entertainment and for a while was reading up on the folklore that is the basis for so many books, short stories, and movies. I eventually came across a film called Vincent Price’s Dracula, which purports to deal with much of the historical and mythological data. Well, I’m not suggesting you go too far out of your way to see this movie, but there is one sequence in it that sort of changed my life and led me into the research that I will share with you here.

In discussing the traditional vampire hunter’s bag of tricks, Price demonstrates a really tiny replica of something called a tuaka. Then some brief but quite beautiful documentary footage of Romanian priests using the real thing is shown. Our illustrious host explains that the tuaka is used to frighten any vampires that might be lurking nearby and to keep them at bay. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox priests are announcing the hours of prayer.

So, what is a tuaka, and how does it work? It is simple indeed—a wooden board, hit with a hammer. Typical examples are five to six feet long, symmetrical in shape and design. A notch is cut away from both edges at the center, for balancing it in the left hand while striking with the right. Most are fairly narrow, but some of the Bulgarian ones are quite wide. Fairly simple design elements are often employed, such as cutting a V shape into each end or, more often, carving each end to a near circle. The Bulgarians seem to like drilling lots of holes in theirs to improve resonance. (It doesn’t, but we don’t need to go there now.)

A simantron of traditional design, photo by the author

Simantron seems to be the most common name for this percussive implement that has primarily ecclesiastical, but also secular, applications. I have also found it referred to as tuaka (touka), simander, simandrum, talantron (or talanton), and klepalo. One Bulgarian researcher refers to it (in English translation) only as a “clapper.” And apparently in some monasteries it is actually named Adam (more on that later).

Obviously, it is known by many names, depending in part on one’s language or dialect. Sometimes (e.g. klepalo—Serbian) the name would seem to be onomatopoeic (like our “cock-a-doodle-doo”; klepalo is not a Serbo-Croatian word). Sometimes (talantron) it might be named for its association with the words of a chant.

The instrument also exists in a variety of forms. The handheld type is wooden, but wooden ones may also be suspended, like gongs. Some suspended ones are metal, and some have metal nailed onto wood. Many references I have found are written by tourists of monasteries, so their information is sometimes a little vague. Sources that would appear to be more authoritative make a distinction between the wooden simantron and the metal talantron, and such a differentiation is, in my opinion, quite likely.

Early in my investigation I happened to run into an acquaintance from grad school, a filmmaker from Romania, so I asked him about this. He knew nothing of any vampire associations, nor did he mention any religious traditions or practices. He remembered the tuaka as a community signal or alarm, used in Romanian villages to get people together; “Come and get it!” basically. Weddings, political meetings, emergencies, any situation in which you wanted to get people to come from wherever they were, even from the mountains, to gather and participate.

The Vincent Price movie includes documentary footage of just such an occurrence. In it we see a man beating a suspended metal “board” that flares out widely at either end, with two hammers held waist-high. He is not playing rhythms as such, just alternating measured strokes fairly rapidly. He is dressed like a villager, not a monk or priest. As he plays, we see villagers gathering.

The tuakas my Romanian friend remembers were big wooden boards, suspended, hit with two hammers, sometimes for hours at a time. In fact, he said, the men who beat the tuaka would try to out-do each other, carving their best times onto the board.

Other than the competitiveness, this would seem to be much like a practice observed in Zen Buddhist monasteries. Traditionally, the han (Japanese for “wood”) is sounded to wake everyone up and call them to the zendo.

I know very little about the han, but in a religious (especially Zen) setting I would expect its use to be a bit subtler than the farmer’s wife clobbering a triangle to announce dinner. One friend tells me that when he was going to the Zen Center in Los Angeles, two men would play, on opposite sides of the room, starting very slowly, alternating strikes, and very gradually speed up, in hocket, until playing what amounted to a drum roll. That’s not “Come and get it.” That is practiced art-making; that is music.

The favorite CD I mentioned in the opening of this essay is Das Heilige und Grosse Osterfest (The Holy and Great Feast Of Easter) by the Choir of the Monks of Chevetogne—or the “Chevy-Tones” as I like to call them—who are Benedictines from Belgium. I highly recommend this recording (Christophorus CHR 77156) for the beauty of the music and the singing, and for a wonderful example of some really serious simantron playing.

The record begins with a 2:30 track performed entirely on simantron. Given the speed and rhythmic complexity of the material, I suspect the main simantron is suspended and played with two hammers, with a second player using a different, possibly hand-held simantron. And they are clearly not improvising or merely making some noise to attract attention. They are playing a composition, a work with form, content, and structure.

Just what are the simantron‘s rhythms, and where do they come from? The specific vocabulary seems to differ among monasteries, as well as countries. But there would appear to be at least one common determining factor, and that is language. Every source I have found that makes specific mention of the simantron‘s rhythms says they are based on words.

A percussionist friend of mine had the opportunity to spend some time in Bulgaria and returned with a photocopy of a musicological article published in 1985, in Bulgarian and English translation, by Dobri Paliev, on the “clapper” and its use in Bulgarian monasteries. Included in the article are transcriptions of rhythmic patterns, variations, and musical motifs. Paliev says the basic rhythm played is based on the words “Touka, touka, touka, touka, vsichki touka” (Hither, hither, hither, hither, all come hither).

I have read that the name “talant(r)on” derives from a Greek chant that encourages the monks to use their talents, for the glory of God—”To ta-lan-ton to-ta-lan-ton, to-ta-to-ta-to-talanton”—”talanton” being Greek for “talent.” That concurs with what John Tavener says in his book A Composer’s Testament. The previous source also says that another rhythm used is “o ad-am o-ad-am o pro-to-plast-is o ad-am” (Adam, First-created Adam). That would explain why some monasteries actually call the instrument by a proper noun.

Paliev gives some variations on the basic phrase, suggesting that some monasteries prefer slightly different versions, and that more artful or technically accomplished players may get just a bit creative, combining them in personal, quasi-improvisatory, ways. He also gives, in “feathered beam” notation, an example of a common motif—a gradual accelerando/ritardando. That is consistent with my own observations. In every recorded example of simantron playing I have heard, not to mention the han example mentioned above and a Basque example to be cited later, the basic rhythm begins slowly and speeds up (the consequent retard seems to be a Bulgarian thing; everyone else just starts again slowly).

Besides its practical function in monastic life and its evocation of particular words, the simantron seems to have some quasi-poetic, almost metaphorical, associations. You will sometimes read that Noah used it to summon all the animals into the ark. (Actually, I suspect most critters would run and hide.) Some authors say that the sound of the simantron is meant to remind the faithful of the crucifixion, the hammering of nails. I suggest that this is an association only, in the minds of some, and does not constitute the specific purpose or origin of the simantron.

The simantron is, conceptually if not strictly-speaking, a bell.

Now let’s talk a bit about the history of the simantron, and its various roles from ancient to modern times. The simantron dates back to the Byzantine period and is still in use in the Eastern church today. (It is used exclusively in the Eastern church, that being one of the ways the Eastern and Roman Catholic churches have distinguished themselves from one another.) It is also closely associated to the history of Russian bell-making and, in modern times, to religious life in Russia.

Bells are expensive, whereas wood is not. And no special or fancy wood is designated for the simantron; they are made from whatever is readily available. So, many churches or monasteries that could not afford bells would use the simantron instead. Even when bells are on hand, they are not always considered appropriate to the occasion. simantrons are sometimes used in lieu of bells, as a matter of protocol, and often in conjunction with bells (or the talanton).

In Communist Russia religious practices were—how shall we say it—”discouraged.” The simantron could be used in place of bells without attracting undue attention. In fact, sometimes an actual simantron was not even necessary. I have read of people simply running through the neighborhood and hitting doors with a hammer to gather the congregation. And, of course, the Soviet government has not been the only persecutor of Christians. Several articles I have read say the simantron has been useful throughout history in circumstances under which the Christian religion has been particularly frowned upon by the ruling bodies (e.g. in Ottoman Bulgaria).

That about covers the ecclesiastical practice as far as I know it. But what about the simantron‘s secular life? Through a friend’s father, I was able to get some comments from an elderly musicologist in Belgrade. This gentleman remembers seeing simantrons used in town orchestras in Serbia playing polkas and Strauss waltzes. He suggests that it might be the original orchestral “wood block.” I’ll leave that research to someone else, but it’s an interesting idea. I think the woodblock in European orchestra music is probably Chinese in origin. But if you don’t have a Chinese wood block and you do have a simantron, why not use it?

It strikes me as unlikely that—unless you happen to be of the Eastern Orthodox persuasion or, like me, just stumbled upon it—you would ever have heard of a simantron or know what it is. So you don’t find the simantron written for a lot. But there are examples of its use in contemporary music.

Percussionist John Bergamo tells me that when he was a student at the Manhattan School of Music in the fifties, he played the simantron part in a percussion ensemble piece. Unfortunately, the incident is now too distant for John to recall who the composer was. And of course they did not have a simantron at the school; John played a wooden box. More recently, John Tavener has written for simantron in his The Veil of the Temple (2003). I have made simantrons for myself and others, and have included the instrument in several works, including Tuaca: outdoor ritual music for three simantrons (2000) and Chasing the Devil (1995).

What does this wonderful thing sound like, what are its acoustic characteristics?

It’s not hard to imagine; It sounds like you probably think a wooden plank would sound when hit with a hammer. The hammer used is not metal. I prefer to use a hard rawhide hammer (as I would for chimes). Traditional simantron hammers are wooden.

A pair of less conventional homemade tuacas that are 8 feet long and nearly 2 inches thick, photo by the author

The sound is piercing, a sharp “clack,” with a semblance of pitch but not really a tone. The instrument is very directional. If you are aiming the tip of your simantron at someone twenty feet away, they are likely to be underwhelmed by the sound. But if you turn so the entire length of it is facing them, it is very loud indeed. This is, I suppose, why the monks carry them around the monastery grounds, playing continuously and changing orientation. (Of course, they could be trying to scare the local vampires.) My piece, Tuaca, was composed specifically for a performance in a park in Pasadena. When we turned around while playing, the clacks echoed off the surrounding hills and moved around the park. It was truly a thing of beauty.

As it is simply a board of fixed length, there is really no way to alter the pitch of the simantron. But it does produce different timbres and overtones depending on where you strike it. Striking it near the center emphasizes the fundamental, with higher tones speaking as you approach the end. In the Bulgarian paper cited above, the transcriptions indicate two pitch areas: high and low. And in the Vincent Price movie, the Romanian priests appear to be striking the boards in two places.

I do not think it is appropriate to consider the simantron a pitched instrument. Byzantine liturgical music is based on a system of eight tones. I have found no reference anywhere to the simantron being tuned or any indication that its “pitch” matters in the least, even when used in a liturgy.

Earlier I mentioned the Buddhist “han,” and the simantron has another relative as well. Basque shepherds have a traditional instrument, the txalaparta, which is a board supported at each end by two baskets full of dried corn husks. The corn husks are supposedly for resonance. I put that idea in the same basket as the Bulgarian holes —but we don’t need to go there now.

Anyway, the txalaparta is now always, it would seem, played by two people together. One player keeps the time, like a metronome but gradually speeding up. In between the pulse, the second player fills in eighths and triplets, ad libitum. This continues until they are playing as fast as possible, at which point they just stop. So, like the han playing at L.A.’s Zen Center and other typical examples of the simantron, a sort of musical piece or practice based on the device of accelerando seems to have developed out of what was originally a signal.

The txalaparta let a shepherd in the hills say “I’m here” (much like an American farmer’s “field holler,” I might add). The han calls people living in a community to a practice which may heighten their experience of being. The simantron calls Eastern Orthodox Christians to worship together.

I see all of these activities as life-affirming, having wonderful musical qualities that we can all appreciate and enjoy, whatever our creed or practice or lack thereof. These instruments and their traditions are celebratory and can uplift us all. That is what music does; that is what music is for.

Bells can be solemn; I can play a bell with solemnity. But I have yet to learn how to play the simantron solemnly or in sadness. Maybe it’s only because I’m a percussionist, but damn do I love to play the simantron! I compose for it, I improvise on it for fun, and I beat it on July 4th to announce that the roast pig is ready. And whenever I play it, people seem to lighten up and enjoy it. I hope you have enjoyed reading about this simple but powerful instrument and its tradition, as far as I can tell it. If you want to buy a simantron, well, I don’t think you can, unless there is a ByzantineEcclesiasticalImplementsSupply.com. If you want to make one, e-mail me and I will tell you how. It’s not hard to do. (I don’t make them for sale, only for my own use and as gifts.)

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Arthur Jarvinen is a devout surf music practitioner and a simantron enthusiast who also teaches composition at the California Institute of the Arts.