Category: Analysis

Mark Delpriora Photo by Randy Nordschow

The six strings of the guitar are as central to the music of America as the six vowels are to our language, whether it’s the slurred speech of an inebriated depression-era hobo or the pithy utterances of the most refined, hyper-educated aesthete. The guitar is the most intimate and personal voice of the people. The guitar has meant many things to many people, but here I mostly steer a middle ground, concentrating primarily on the composers and compositions for classical guitar that I admire and/or I think are historically relevant.

The story of American guitar repertoire begins at about the time of our country’s founding, but the most exciting developments began in the 20th century when important guitar virtuosos nurtured a whole new solo repertoire for the instrument.

Once little more than a novelty, by the late 20th century, the guitar started turning up in contemporary works for chamber ensemble with some regularity and some of today’s most important composers have even written concertos for the instrument. Recently, the electric guitar, an instrument more commonly associated with music outside the proscenium concert hall, has become a timbre to reckon with in today’s cutting-edge contemporary music.

My favorite passage about the guitar, its history and its place, is from Manuel De Falla’s preface to Emilio Pujol’s guitar method. The specific cultural milieu is European and Spanish but the spirit expressed is universal. Falla wrote:

This admirable instrument, as sober as it is rich, sometimes roughly yet sometimes sweetly masters the soul. Through the centuries it has taken up unto itself the values of noble instruments which have passed away, has taken those values into itself without losing its own character which it owes, in its origins, to the people itself. One must acknowledge that the guitar, of all stringed instruments with a fingerboard, is the most complete and the richest in its harmonic and polyphonic possibilities.

Inner Pages:

• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Plucker—The Solo Guitar in the United States
• Where are My Glasses?—The Guitar in American Chamber Music
• Please Remove That Bow From My Eye—The Guitar Concerto

No one has enough time to do anything these days. Early 21st century life is a world of information overload. Channel surfing has become an aesthetic onto itself. An oft-cited criticism of classical music is that symphonies, operas, etc. are just too long. Many classical radio stations these days even play single movements from pieces rather than entire works in response to a society-wide attention deficit disorder.

But, since music is a time-based art, it needs time to get its message across—or does it? How short can a composition get? While three minutes is the accepted norm for pop songs, the Ramones made a career out of 2 minute songs and other bands, such as The Residents and the aptly-named Minutemen, polished off even shorter tracks that last a minute or less. The title track off Sly and the Family Stone‘s landmark 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On cheekily has a running time of 0’00″—perhaps funk’s response to John Cage‘s silent 4’33” which by comparison feels like an eternity.

In the over-argued high art vs. low art debate, so-called serious music has prided itself on being more substantive and developmental than the sound-byte hooks of hit singles. Anton Webern‘s rigorous application of the twelve-tone method was a stepping-stone for post-war serialists both here and abroad, but few composers at the time carried on his equally bold path of severe brevity. Sure, miniatures for various instruments have existed for centuries. They make great encore pieces and, if they’re fast, they’re a great way for a player to show off. (Every pianist wants to play Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” faster than its original tempo.)

The art provocateurs of the Fluxus movement also created a great number of very short musical compositions in the 1960s. Before La Monte Young spent five hours at the piano exploring the possibilities of prime ratio harmonics in just intonation, he created a piece of music where the performer is simply instructed to strike a perfect fifth at the piano. Then there’s “One Note Once” by Phillip Corner whose title says it all. Yoko Ono created a piece for orchestra which consisted merely of asking all the members of an orchestra to walk to a wall and bang their heads on it. And Al Hansen, grandfather of rock star Beck, was the mastermind behind Yoko Ono Piano Drop, in which a piano is dropped from a building making one deafeningly loud crashing sound (a feat later repeated by composer Steve MacLean in 1993 which clocks in at 4 seconds on the Pogus CD, Flies in the Face of Logic). But all of these compositions are conceptual in nature and their brief execution time seems more a function of the activity than a specific desire to be brief.

This Is A Short Piece!

One of my fellow composers wanted to program some of my music. I had met her in the summer of 1966 when I made I of IV and other pieces of electronic music. These pieces were usually about 30 minutes—as long as the reel of tape. She would call me on the phone after that and say that she wanted to program my music—”Haven’t you got a short piece?” Finally somewhat annoyed I responded with This is a Short Piece.

The performer or group comes out onto the stage and takes a performance position.

The performer(s) announces: “This is a short piece,” then, as the lights go out and back on makes the shortest sound possible (e.g. stamp foot or shout).

I performed this piece at UCSD around 1970 one afternoon. I stamped my foot. Later, I was visiting a friend. I reached for a corn chip and took a bite. I discovered that a lower molar was not happy and I couldn’t bite or chew. I went to the dentist the next day and was told that I had a football player’s injury. The reaction force from the foot stamp had mobilized the tooth (a wave equal and opposite to the foot hitting the floor reflected back to my clenched jaw.

Two years later the molar had to be removed. After another two years the upper molar was removed. Problems have continued so This is a Short Piece is the longest piece that I ever wrote.

My friend, Annea Lockwood, tried the piece and bit her tongue.

So, the piece is available for performance but it is dangerous!

—Pauline Oliveros

It seems that it has only been in the very recent past, with our “less is more” mindset, that brevity has really become an aesthetic goal in and of itself. Today, there are tons of composers creating extremely short pieces in a variety of media and for a variety of reasons.

In the late 1980s, John Zorn put together a group called Naked City that blurred the lines between jazz, hardcore punk, reggae, country and just about everything else, navigating through musical styles the way a bored suburbanite might click a remote. Zorn’s efforts to tap into our consumer-abetted habits culminated with Naked City’s 1989 release Torture Garden, a collection of 42 “hardcore miniatures.” Each track ended almost as soon as it began, creating an extremely unsettling mood that felt like the distillation of all music history into a single sonic pellet.

Zorn compatriot Elliot Sharp played around with even shorter durations than Naked City in the recordings of his band I/S/M, which included blasts of sound excerpts as short as three seconds which he later blended into a collage composition titled “Sample/Hold.” Sharp refined this strategy with the first State of the Union in 1982, a companion record to an issue of Zone magazine, edited by Peter Cherches. Sharp asked 34 artists to contribute pieces with a maximum duration of 60 seconds, which he then sequenced into a composition. The artists’ version of the President’s annual State of the Union speech, the series had three subsequent installments in 1991, 1996, and 2001. Each includes more composers than the previous edition with the last edition containing compositions from more than 170 composers on 3 compact discs. For Sharp, the idea that listeners would not necessarily know where one composer’s work ended and another began was intriguing: “With the advent of the CD (and being of the post-Cage generation), I was not at all disappointed but felt joy and liberation at the new juxtapositions possible with random shuffle. I put the legend ‘play on random shuffle’ on the compact disc.”

A similar approach inspired The Frog Peak Collaborations Project in 1998. Initiated by Larry Polansky, all the pieces were created as variations on a single sound file of Chris Mann reading a text on collaboration, written especially for the project. The sound file was distributed freely over the Internet. The resulting compositions from composers all around the world were mailed to Frog Peak, and then compiled and released as a double compact disc of 121 pieces by 61 composers. A CD released on Ohm/Avatar five years earlier, Ding Dong Deluxe, collects 99 contemporary Canadian compositions—the longest a staggering 50 seconds (longer by half than the second opus of 33 seconds) and the shortest (Jocelyn Robert’s Pianock #2) a mere 6 seconds.

In 1995, the Paris-based American pianist Guy Livingston put out a call for solo piano scores of 60 seconds in duration. His goal was to assemble 60 compositions that he would play together in a concert devoted exclusively to new piano miniatures. To date, Livingston has received nearly 200 such pieces and built up a new body of solo piano repertoire from which he draws concert programs that have received rave reviews around the world. His Wergo CD, Don’t Panic, showcases 60 of these pieces by composers based in 18 countries and ranging in style from neo-classicism to serialism to post-modernist performance art.

In 2003, Vox Novus solicited recorded compositions lasting less than a minute and received over 190 works from more than 90 composers varying in style, aesthetic, technique, and length (the shortest being 8 seconds). Sixty of the recordings were presented together in an hour-long multi-media event called The 60×60 Project. (A call for works has gone out for a second 60×60 event later in 2004 and a compact disc is to be released soon on Capstone Records.) [Ed. Note: Robert Voisey is the founder of Vox Novus and the initiator of The 60×60 Project.]

So, is societal influence, economic practicalities, or artistic motivation ultimately behind this sudden proliferation of short compositions or are these projects just aberrations? Opinions vary as much as the compositions themselves.

Certainly film, radio, television, recording equipment, computers, and the Internet have each eroded traditional performance constraints to the point that people can now hear any music at any time they want and can listen to as much or as little as they want. Noah Creshevsky regrets the negativity of phrases like ‘short attention span’ and ‘information overload’ claiming that we could just as easily celebrate these conditions with phrases like ‘accelerated comprehension span’ and ‘information wonderland.’ “Short attention spans are deficits,” admits Crechevsky, “but the ability to take in a great deal of information in a short time is a probable asset.”

Capitalist economics dominate the nations and cultures of the Western world, including the entertainment industry. In order to adapt and survive, perhaps composers and musicians are learning to get the biggest return on their creative efforts. Capitalizing on new inventions, using advertising techniques that have proven themselves over the last 50 years of commercialism, musicians are broadcasting attractive bits to hook their listeners, hoping their material stands out from among the many competitors.

If you’re in the business of promoting new music composers, then there’s also something of a cost/benefit reality at work here: If a typical concert of contemporary music presents ten-minute compositions by eight different composers, a concert of compositions lasting a minute or less could give exposure to many, many more, a concept that has the opportunity to both maximize an attending audience (since each composer has a potential fan base) and at the same time not strain the listening ears of an audience not receptive to a particular composer’s style. If you’re bored or annoyed by something, at least it will be over in a minute and maybe you’ll like the next piece.

But do such severe time constraints lead to a different compositional approach? Not necessarily, says Richard
Brooks who has composed three pieces for Guy Livingston— “For me the process of writing a short piece isn’t much different than a long one.”

Creshevsky, who created a composition for the 60×60 project, was less fixated on the time constraints than the format the music was eventually to be presented in. He explains, “What excited me about 60×60 was not merely the opportunity to compose a one-minute piece, in fact, I do not think that was the principal source of my interest. What seemed especially wonderful was the format: 60 one-minute pieces, played in conjunction with a clock.” As soon as the second hand hit twelve, the audience would know that a new piece of music was beginning.

However, for other composers such as Nathaniel Reichman, who has perhaps taken this idea to its furthest extreme yet by creating a series of works each lasting only 2 seconds, the time constraint became an aesthetic end unto itself. As Reichman tells it, “I had just finished writing nineteen two-second pieces of music for a television advertising campaign, and initially I wrote off the effort as being one of many silly things composers do when working commercially. However, divorced from the context of commerce, the challenge of creating something distinctive and complete inside of a seemingly impossible time constraint became fascinating to me.”

Perhaps shorter compositions are a way for a composers to express themselves in a more concise way. Dan Wharburton says that he likes “to work within a pre-determined time frame, saying in advance ‘this piece will last so and so minutes’.” It is also a different approach to interacting with an audience. According to Gene Pritsker, “the more concise something is the deeper the point comes across, just because the listeners have to deduce more for themselves.”

While Steve Reich once described his early phase shifting pieces as putting a microscope to sound, creating extremely brief compositions is an even more direct metaphor for the microscopic. Just as the giant symphonies of the past might evoke mountains or landscapes, these mini-miniatures conjure up more basic granular structures. Vermont-based composer Dennis Bathory-Kitsz posits that “before long we may look forward to the successful three-way marriage of icon, composition, and grain.” For Bathory-Kitsz, it’s the next step in our musical evolution:

In abstract and especially composer-centric music from Bach’s variations onward, the malleable motivic figure offered an opportunity for show, consideration, and even genius. Beethoven’s ‘three G’s and an E-flat’ as Bernstein liked to call them, hardly made up a motive at all—just a raw, sonic source shape. What’s interesting about the Beethoven figure is that it is a rare classical example of sonic iconography. Latter-day icons include the sounds that accompany, say, the startup of Windows or Mac, or the ‘Intel Inside’ audio logo, the AT&T identification, and Rush Limbaugh’s two-note commercial break ID… Are any of these granules or modules or motives in fact compositions? In thinking of a musical composition, we lean toward the recognizably complete. Yet sonic icons are complete—there is no more after they’ve been heard.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect to music of extremely short durations is that it can exist in so many other contexts beyond concerts and recordings. From video games to cell phone rings to telephone hold music to sounds that accompany computer programs (Brian Eno created the music you hear when Windows boots up making him arguably the most listened to composer of our time). Music will then have the power to add new contexts to every day activities in our lives. In Jason Freeman‘s composition Shakespeare Cuisinart, callers are asked to say their favorite short quotation from a Shakespeare play or poem into an answering machine and moments later, they hear a short piece of music generated from slicing, dicing, and layering their voices. Software programs such as GarageBand and Web sites like OpSound now allow anyone to create their own sonic miniatures which they can share with anyone online, perhaps even embedding a “sonic signature” into an email. If only we had some time to listen!

Music that melds diverse styles and “defies classification” is almost its own cliché these days. Yet no matter how many boundary-smashing genres we add to the ever-expanding list, the fence between pop and classical seems to be well patrolled and holding strong. Even for those who listen to and enjoy all kinds of music, that particular dividing line doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Why is that? With all the morphing and mutation that is happening in music, we asked two veterans of the music and culture scene—Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post and Steve Smith of Time Out New York—to weigh in on pros and cons of maintaining the dividing line.

Willard Jenkins

Racism, one of the ugliest of humankind’s most base impulses, is a subject that is broached perhaps more frankly in the arts than in the corporate canyons, but it is never an easy discussion. In the last two issues of the Jazz Journalists Association‘s in-house quarterly, Jazz Notes, I raised several specters of racism in the print media corner of the jazz world. The first installment dealt with such matters as writer Stanley Crouch‘s summary dismissal as columnist for JazzTimes magazine, a complicated matter that has been detailed ad nauseum in the pages of JazzTimes, in Newsweek, etc. The party line is that Crouch was dismissed because the magazine was fed up with his missed deadlines and the tone of cronyism in his pieces. But the controversy was made all the more provocative because Crouch is black and has for the last decade written with a particularly sharp neo-conservative bent. Some found it curious that his dismissal came on the heels of his questioning the media’s elevation of white artists he finds questionable. Opposition to Crouch and his views seemed unusually coarse; response to his sacking a bit too gleeful. Though Crouch has written many things I disagree with, his summary dismissal as an agent provocateur/columnist is to put it mildly, rather fishy.

One central issue in the initial installment of my Jazz Notes column was what many African American jazz observers view with understandable skepticism as the relatively premature crowning of white jazz artists, often at the perceived expense of more worthy African American artists; the jazz media engaging in what to some is a flavor-of-the-month club mentality. Examples in recent times include such green and inexperienced jazz singers as Jane Monheit and Peter Cincotti; and on a grander scale the trio known as The Bad Plus. Testimony on these issues came from several non-white jazz artists. In the wake of that article, a panel discussion was rather hastily assembled for the annual International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) conference in New York. The resulting ill-prepared (the writer was a panelist), train-wreck panel discussion did little to advance the dialogue and much to frustrate nearly all in attendance.

The following issue of Jazz Notes, in the “What’s Your Take” column included a thoughtful reader response to matters raised in the first editorial and at the IAJE panel discussion. The reader suggested:

…There is a larger point and I believe this point is more poignant for jazz than in most other areas. No one questions the origins of jazz or who are its major innovators. [Jazz] was created by black folk (negroes, African Americans, Afro-Americans, people of African descent, take your pick, but from Africa by way of the middle passage, a little seasoning in the islands and the oppression of slavery swabbed by the oil of European instrumentation and southern plantation culture). Everyone agrees that the music is black in origin. However, the interpretation of the music has primarily been filtered through the lens of white folks. Very few black publications have been devoted to the music and those that have were not widely distributed or read. Said differently, the mainstream jazz media has been dominated and controlled by whites. In fact they have controlled the jazz music industry…

Let’s spin this equation around a bit and shine the light on another music arena which black composers have increasingly contributed to over the last three decades. What happens to African American composers who step beyond the black aesthetic of their jazz writing to advance fully notated contemporary composition in the pan-European art music arena? Questions of racism arise concerning the profiling or pigeonholing of these composers. Why is it that in circles which might positively impact their careers, whether it’s from the media, recording industry, philanthropic, presenting, or producing side, such composers are forever branded as “jazz” composers, despite the fact that their current work has drifted far afield from what is considered jazz? Is this branding a product of artistic/racial profiling? As with the letter writer’s contention in Jazz Notes, in this case the perception of these composers is filtered through the white lens.

There are numerous examples of contemporary African American composers who exemplify this paradigm: David Baker, Fred Tillis, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, James Newton, George Lewis, Wendell Logan, Butch Morris, Billy Childs, Nicole Mitchell, and a host of others. Have their opportunities for commissions and performances of their fully notated contemporary music been stunted by their branding as “jazz” composers? Why are fellow white composers such as John Zorn, who has more than a little jazz-based experience, not thusly branded? Several composers who’ve exhibited “crossover” proclivities, two of whom have written extensively on the plight of black composers, were sought for their take on this issue. Composer William Banfield is the author of Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers. Trombonist-composer George Lewis has contributed an extensive essay, for a forthcoming anthology, on the development of the Chicago-based African American experimental music collective The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), many of whose members have crossed freely between jazz orientations and pan-European art music. Flutist-composer Nicole Mitchell is likewise a member of the AACM.

Composer and author William Banfield

Banfield spoke from a perspective of systemic perceptions faced by African American composers. “Black expression in art does not in the American art music definition calculate as art that matters. So, once a black person aligns themselves culturally with black expression, they run the serious risk of never being thought of as a “classical musician,” no matter their own diverse interests.” As Banfield continued he raised the specter of one of the spiritual fathers of the modern composers who exemplify this sense of broader-based compositional expression, one which blurs the lines of demarcation between jazz and pan-European art music, the historic and under-recognized genius James Reese Europe. Here was a man who not only commanded a fighting black military unit during the First World War, the members of this unit were also working musicians. Europe, a turn-of-the-century exemplar of a proto-jazz aesthetic whose expression varied from marching bands to concert halls, staged notated extended ensemble works by his Clef Club Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

As Banfield suggests, “James Reese Europe was a great American music conductor. Will the band world ever look at James Reese Europe? Have we ever read anything significant about the groundbreaking work of the Clef Club Orchestra? The ‘Black box’ is always bigger than the American box, so it is our gift and our demise in terms of mainstream recognition and appreciation.”

The dichotomy of improvisers entering the world of the fully notated score was a continuing theme of our exchange. “The improvisation that creative artistry, particularly in jazz, has introduced as an expressive staple does not fit into the tradition, scope, training, instrumentation, and psychology of the European and American orchestra,” says Banfield. The impact is largely one of perception—or more to the point mis-perception—which in turn breeds lack or loss of opportunity for the composer who works from such a broad canvas.

Nicole Mitchell, whose CD Afrika Rising features her Black Earth Ensemble representing the jazz corner of her expression, also sees improvisation as the heart of these misperceptions. “Another reason that African American composers are ‘race branded’ is because of frequent use of improvisation in their works. The use of improvisation tends to be intimidating for ‘classical’ artists, and is assumed to be a ‘black’ style. Although improvisation is an art that goes to the core of jazz music, it also stretches beyond to many other methods of approach that are overlooked.” She went on to articulate the obvious Catch-22 that black composers versed in jazz feel when addressing pan-European art music composition. “I find myself caught in a complex situation of definers,” Mitchell acknowledges. “On one hand, I embrace the idea that I am of the continuum of the ‘jazz legacy.’ I connect with African American people and am intent on being relevant and not estranged from a black audience. Yet and still, I understand the limitations that the name causes. There is a definite lack of respect that I experience as a composer and performer when I step outside of the ‘jazz realm.’ ”

The training of these versatile African American composers, particularly those who have arrived over the last three decades, has come in the conservatory. As Mitchell details, cutting to the core of this issue, “I was originally a classically trained flutist, who later learned to improvise. Since I made a name for myself as a ‘jazz artist’ it is a label that I cannot seem to escape. For example, I have written chamber pieces that had no intention of expressing a definitive ‘jazz’ approach. The musicians automatically tended to assume the phrasing in a ‘jazzy’ style. In these settings, because I am more known as a jazz artist, that fact tends to be played heavily in the program, where I would like to stand on my own, as just a composer.”

George Lewis, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a composer who operates in both acoustic and electronic landscapes, has written a very penetrating and revealing article (“Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985”) chronicling the development of the AACM. This unique African American musician’s collective, founded in Chicago in 1965, strongly encouraged original composition and has spread its influential tentacles across the globe. A paragon of experimental music, the AACM has fostered composition among its members that has crossed liberally between roots and improvisation-based music from the African American tradition, to fully notated pan-European art music. Lewis speaks very succinctly of the musical border-blurring of AACM composers, explaining, “To the extent that AACM musicians challenged racialized hierarchies of aesthetics, method, place, infrastructure, and economics, the organization’s work epitomizes the early questioning of borders by artists of color that is only beginning to be explored in serious scholarship on music.”

Starting in the 1970s and culminating in the ’80s, many AACM composers migrated to New York; these included such prominent members as Muhal Richard Abrams and Leroy Jenkins. Composing jazz expressions represented only part of their approach. According to Lewis, “pursuing membership to varying degrees in a panoply of sociomusical and career networks, including those traditionally centering on high-culture ‘art music,’ AACM musicians in New York articulated a definitional shift away from rigidly defined and racialized notions of lineage and tradition, toward a more fluid, dialogic relationship with a variety of musical practices that problematized the putative ‘jazz’ label as it was applied to them.”

Furthermore, Lewis clarifies that the AACM “represents an indigenous working-class attempt to open up the space of popular culture to new forms of expression, blurring the boundaries between popular and high culture. As African American musicians sought the same mobility across the breadth of their field that (for example) African American writers and visual artists were striving for, engagement with contemporary pan-European music became a form of boundary-blurring resistance to efforts to restrict the mobility of black musicians, rather than a capitulation to bourgeois values. AACM musicians felt that experimentalism in music need not be bound to particular ideologies, methods, or slogans.”

In the end analysis, are African American composers who draw from the breadth of their experience—often across such musical boundaries as African American roots music, jazz, electronic music and broader ethnic expressions–and who bring their aesthetics to pan-European art music, subject to the same measuring stick and ultimate access as their white brethren, sans what we’ll call artistic/racial profiling?

There is no easy answer to this sense of branding or artistic profiling, only that it has proven to be yet another
stumbling block to broader opportunities in the ongoing obstacle course faced by these versatile composers.

Also in May:

Opening up the box: Out of Time Got a Minute? A Few Words on Music in 60 Seconds or Less Read the essay

Opening up the box: Rock’s Role Taking Sides—Patrolling the Line Between Pop and Classical Read the essay

Opening up the box: Humor Daniel Felsenfeld wonders what’s so funny Read the essay

Daniel Felsenfeld

Paul Bowles wrote, in his autobiography, of watching his friend John Cage listening, for the first time, to an acetate of one of his own string quartets—and laughing inconsolably. For years, we have been swallowing Cage and the PR machine around him as a truly serious presence, as a composer in the great lineage, and for years avant people have been attending concerts of his music and nodding sheepishly, or basking, or acting (perhaps actually being) profoundly moved, and all the while Cage viewed his own music as hysterically funny. Was he stoned when that first acetate was played? Or was Cage some sort of court jester for the avant-garde, wreaking havoc on the institution, and laughing over the desiccated body of European Classical music. Years, and a few thousand hours of recorded music later, there isn’t much of an answer.

A Serious Explanation of Jokes

First, to define what is funny, and to then ask the question: why is something funny? As a too-academic starting point, Arthur Koestler (a decidedly unfunny philosopher) in his book The Act of Creation coins an excellent term I intend to make good use of: Bisociation. This is, according to him, the ability to perceive an idea or situation “…in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference.” Meaning that two separate but equal ideas, seemingly incongruous, outline what makes something funny (and also, according to him, the other two of the three great, uniquely human endeavors: the Scientific Theory and the Work of Art). To go one further, these “self-consistent” frames of reference are received products of the culture from which they come.

To parse, for a moment, let’s take a classic joke—Henny Youngman saying “Take my wife, PLEASE”—and Koestlerize it, exploring the bisociation and thereby breaking down why on earth that is (supposed to be) funny. It is, of course, about delivery, about timing (like music is), so simply reading it on paper is hardly even deserving of a slight guffaw, much less a laugh (and, for the purposes of this article, only what draws laughs is what is to be considered funny). So a great Borscht-Belt comedian can walk to the lip, and in a conversational way, say: “Take my wife,” to be heard as: “I would like to introduce my wife as an example.” The “zing,” being the thing that makes it funny, is not only to say the word “Please,” but to deliver it in an imploring way, punning on the double, bisociated meanings of the word “take” found in the previous sentence. So the joke, “Take my wife, PLEASE,” is a signifier for “I would like to introduce my wife as an example, and please remove her from my life.”

Of course, there’s more to it than this. There must be, in order for the joke to work (and this explains why this joke, were it to be brand new, would get no laughs today) a receiving cultural climate where making a mockery of one’s wife—even wishing she were not the person to whom you were married; she being, just by her very presence, the thing which fetters your freedom—was an acceptably funny thing to do. Larger, more potent sociological riffs could be made on this point, but suffice it to say that these jokes are no longer part of our particular culture, hence they aren’t at all funny.

Music is also a received cultural idea—it is as difficult for us, without serious study, to wrap our ears around African scales as it is for us to appreciate humor from the United Kingdom (and anyone who has visited, as I have, their equivalent of a Hallmark store and browsed the so-called “Humor” section will immediately understand)—and so being funny in classical music isn’t too common, or, in fact, something that is easily done. Even one of the post-classical terms coined for what we do says it all: serious music.

Is music actually funny?

Of course there is plenty to laugh at in our little art music subculture: from The Marriage of Figaro to the Barber of Seville to Xerxes to Menotti‘s The Old Maid and the Thief (which, when one character hears a bump which frightens her, the reply line is: “That’s just part of the orchestration) to P.D.Q. Bach to David Rakowski, David Lang, and Phil Kline, music can actually cause laughter. But all of the composers mentioned above are funny in three distinct ways: 1) they set a funny text, or dramatized a comic story, or set a text which inherently seems inappropriate for musical treatment; 2) they use funny, ironic titles or 3) they bisociate various musical elements in an ironic way, placing music or a particular musical style within parameters where, ordinarily, it would not be.

For the purposes of this article, I am going to omit some truly funny things, such as the above mentioned operas, plus some hilarious songs like Samuel Barber‘s “Promiscuity,” Phil Kline’s fantastic Zippo Songs, and even Frank Zappa‘s The Adventures of Greggery Peccary. All of these things are indeed funny, but the words carry the humor, not the music itself. Berio‘s Opus Zoo is cleverly constructed around an ironic and mildly humorous text, and without it the music wouldn’t be bad by any means, it just wouldn’t be funny. Even Carl Stalling, the mastermind behind the best of Bugs Bunny, gets lumped into this category: his music is there to make a story happen, though his sense of comic timing is as impeccable as any great comedian, and as an artist it is nice to finally see him get his due—just not here.

Funny titles get the laughs, and there are some truly great ones out there: Lee Hyla wrote a fantastic piece (of a deeply serious nat
ure) called Riff and Transfiguration, which bisociates a famous work by Strauss with a non-correlative, the usually rock ‘n’ roll term, “riff.” David Rakowski has countless funny titles, like Roll Your Own (an etude on rolled chords), The Third, Man (etude on thirds), Fourth of Habit (etude on fourths), and Take Jazz Chords, Make Strange, among others. His music is technically precise and very serious (for the most part), but there’s something funny about his presentation. Perhaps the “King of the Funny Title” is David Lang, part of Bang on a Can (itself, funny), whose pieces like Bonehead, Spud, and Eating Living Monkeys are all works of a thoughtful, powerful composer, but, like the pieces of Hyla and Rakowski, are given more casual titles, perhaps to set the listeners at their ease.

Possibly the largest and most profligate use of the “funny” in “serious” music is stylistic bisociation—that is, quotes or styles which composers use. John Zorn, a truly funny composer, is might be the contemporary who makes the most generous use of this, sort of “channel surfing” through various periods, ideas, and styles, wherein the utter lack of strong compositional development in the strictest sense actually becomes the ethos of the work: Zorn is at his best, when he is at his most manic—he mocks the acceptable tradition by doing anything but what is expected of a so-called “serious” composer. The other end of that spectrum is P.D.Q Bach née Peter Schickele, whose genius lies in mocking the tradition from the other end, through the lens of a fictional son of Bach. His music is only for lovers of the Great Tradition, at which he cloyingly takes jabs. His funniest pieces—like “Throw the Yule Log On, Uncle John” (to be sung with murderous emphasis on the “on”) to the 1712 Overture to the Concerto for Horn and Hardart—presuppose a certain knowledge. After all, you have to be a bit seasoned in some kind of musical analysis to appreciate his narrating of Beethoven as if it were a football game. Zorn’s music, on the other hand, doesn’t require one to be nearly as steeped.

Even Arnold Schoenberg, fin de siècle Vienna’s crowned musical expressionist prince, manages to be funny once or twice—his Second String Quartet features, in the cello, a quotation of a German drinking song better known here as “The More We Get Together,” and in Schoenberg’s able hands it’s actually hysterical. Of course, he never reached this level of humor again—even when he tried to write some comic pieces, like The Laughing Hand, Three Satires, or his Cabaret Songs; his music was just better suited to great, underlying agony than to mild, divertimento-like entertainment.

Zorn’s downtown mocking has forebears in the fantastically peripatetic Polygraph Lounge, a downtown duo which likely does today what Spike Jones and his orchestra did in the middle of the prior century—they poke a lot of fun, but do it with a fantastic degree of technical musical excellence. Nothing is safe from their well-intentioned barbs; everything from Johann Strauss to Gershwin to Stravinsky to Italian opera to car alarms to Ricky Martin to The Beatles to George W. Bush to Governor Schwartzenegger comes under their knife—they are deviants, along the lines of Lenny Bruce in a more deviant-friendly era (though perhaps not for long), with chops to spare.

Some composers, notably Shostakovich and Prokofiev, were products of the Russian Revolution, and as such had to cow or turn to irony to make their point. Thus, in writing overtly optimistic, state-centered music, they were, in fact, poking fun, not only at their government, but at themselves. But this is by no means intended to be funny—calling this sort of thing comedy is like lampooning those who endured the Cultural Revolution (or, in our own terms, someone who survived a blacklisting by the House of Unamerican Activities Committee). Ironic, perhaps, in a tragic, T.S. Eliot-like way (who liked to superimpose two opposing yet equal ideas not for giggles, but for horror—he called it the Objective Correlative).

Frank Zappa is an odd case, and one who deserves serious mention in this discussion. He was a muckraker, a liberal lunatic (who all seem to be comedians) trying to get a little justice in the world through his music. In all of his records, there appears not to be many serious moments (Zappaheads will—and should—argue with me about this), save for those done with irony. His instrumental music lacks the power of the music wherein he sang, and by all means quotations were part and parcel to the whole Zappa experience. Two excellent records recorded a decade apart by the Ensemble Modern show this clearly—from the odd, grooving orchestral pieces (no easy trick to play) on the Yellow Shark to the uproarious posthumous pieces (rescued from the jaws of a synclavier hard drive) on Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions, Zappa is, as always, laugh-out- loud funny. He engages the bisociation on all levels, with funny words, funny titles, and ironic correlation of disparate musics—it is, after all, really screaming rich to watch an orchestra in Carnegie Hall try to play a Dick Dale-style surf groove, while the singer speaks of an acid trip. But unlike just about every other composer mentioned in this essay, Zappa had a hard time being serious, touching, or even profound; his method was a constant
birdflip to the old, and to the young, and to himself and his family, and basically to everyone who didn’t think exactly like he did—and also, to those who did. Nobody escaped Zappa’s wrath, not hippies, not trained composers, not jazz musicians, not nobody, and after a while, after a few dozen of his hundred or so records, it begins to wear just a little.

Rakowski also engages in ironic quotation, gleefully cribbing everything from “Smoke on the Water” to the 39 lashes music in Jesus Christ Superstar, but nowadays, in the post-postmodern era, quotation is losing its irony. Rock has entered the academic pantheon, hot on the heels of jazz, which makes for little irony in the truest sense of the word—a lot of composers take their blues or Zeppelin quotations seriously, removing the camp and therefore the humor. This isn’t inherently bad, it’s just not funny.

Throughout the ages composers have often sought out to be amusing—or at least witty—in their bisociation of musical styles. Much of what we know about Turkish music comes from Mozart; Brahms had his way with Hungarian gypsy music; Glinka and other Russians were fascinated with the Orient, as were Debussy and Britten; Charles Ives made some of his most hilarious pieces out of his own nostalgia for childhood, particularly when he outlined the horrid music-making which apparently went down in his home town (see the “Putnam’s Camp” movement of Three Places in New England for the most amusingly raucous young Ives experience). But the kind of funny these composers are (or perhaps were) is unlikely to engage our “Ha-Ha” mechanism any more than saying, “Take my wife, PLEASE.” Charming, sure; amusing, perhaps; witty, absolutely; giggle-funny, by no means.

There are, of course, a few notable exceptions. Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, with its unexpected sforzando crash, no doubt caused a titter amongst the royalty, as did the “Farewell,” which featured departing musicians throughout the piece. (An aside: once I heard the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra open a concert with the first bars of the “Surprise,” but rather than the loud crash, they went straight into the Bugs Bunny Theme; I thought to myself that perhaps this is the only way to approximate the effect the piece had once upon a time.) But this is more wit than belly-bust (as Charles Rosen, in his fantastic book The Classical Style, will tell you: “wit” is probably the most often used word in this text, second, perhaps, to “and”) and wit has never caused anyone more than the occasional guffaw. Perhaps Milton Babbitt‘s pieces like The Joy of More Sextets or Robert Ceely‘s Group Sax fall into this category. Who among us, as clever as these composers are, has ever laughed at this? Just like puns, nobody realty finds them any more than mildly amusing. (Think about Proust, in his novel Remembrance of Things Past, speaking of the legendary Guermantes wit—the Guermantes being a fashionable high-society salon which the narrator frequented—as if it were gold, reveals the joke: someone is called a “teaser,” and Mme. de Guermantes says “then he must be teaser Augustus.” Anyone laughing?)

Perhaps the only composer who manages to be funny in a laugh-out-loud way without being dramatic, ironic, or using a cheeky title is Gyorgy Ligeti, whose odd, quirky, quacking sensibility is one of the most singular examples of a latter-day comedian working his charms—and if you don’t believe me, listen to his Chamber Concerto, or the opening bicycle horns of his opera Le Grand Macabre. He rivals the wittiest of Haydn, or the most off-kilter and quirky of Stravinsky (think Circus Polka) but does them one better. Not all of his music is serious—he does know how to let his hair down, especially for a high modernist. Even Cage, for all of his hilarious irreverence, is taken too seriously to be considered funny—though once, when performing 4’33” for a group of non-initiates, I got the idea: they laughed—and were “shooshed” by the class proctors.

Why Do We Laugh?

Ultimately it boils down to this: we laugh at someone else while really laughing at ourselves. The legion of people who find Woody Allen funny are laughing because they see, in him, an exaggerated version of themselves. It is the “Human Comedy” that gets us to giggle (or to weep, or to think, or to pursue an abstract idea) and music is only indirectly human. Stravinsky said that music was powerless to express anything except itself, and I am inclined to agree with him, unless it is serving as a signifier to either another music (like a quotation) or a texted story. Other than that, it doesn’t spell out the great tragedies in our lives and give us an arena to laugh at them; we don’t see in musical figures our own contemporaries the way we do in Beavis and Butthead, The Simpsons, or the prose of David Sedaris; and it cannot allow us to slough off anxiety, or raise an important political issue in a palatable single sentence like our deviant comedians (Al Franken, Michael Moore and Jeanine Garofolo, to name a few). Concert music, like it or not, is abstract, and there really is nothing funny that isn’t vaguely real. This is by no means to say that nothing in classical music is ever funny—quite the opposite. It is just funny simply by association or cleverness, not bust-a-gut raucous in and of itself.

Also in May:

Opening up the box: Out of Time Got a Minute? A Few Words on Music in 60 Seconds or Less Read the essay

Opening up the box: Rock’s Role Taking Sides—Patrolling the Line Between Pop and Classical Read the essay

Opening up the box: Does race matter? Willard Jenkins—Racial Profiling in music Read the essay

Kenneth Goldsmith

Over the past few years, sound art has been more visible in America. The Whitney has been including it in its Biennials and it even had its own section in their “The American Century” retrospective a few years ago. As a matter of fact all over the country, it’s not too unusual to walk into a museum, art gallery, or university-sponsored exhibition space and hear nothing but sound. Websites like my own UbuWeb, the San Francisco-based Other Minds, and numerous independent sites of American composers are sprouting up, offering dozens of hours worth of sound art MP3s for free. Once relegated to specialty shops like Printed Matter, Inc. even record stores seem to be carrying these sort of discs. If you’re interested in sound art, a trip to Other Music in New York City or to the new airplane-hanger sized Amoeba in Los Angeles will prove fruitful, with offerings from everyone from Vito Acconci to Mike Kelley cramming the racks.

Having helped curate some of these shows at the Whitney, I’ve found it’s a difficult thing to define what sound art is. Where does, say, experimental music end and sound art begin? Or, take spoken word: can a sound poem—language meant to be heard not necessarily seen—be construed as sound art? But what about opera that slides into performance art? It’s a fabulous mess, where the lines are ill-defined and disciplines overflow into one another and co-mingle in ways that are not easily categorized.

Any survey of this stuff is going to be messy. And incomplete… It’s such a vast field that I’m bound to miss a lot of work that, say, you might consider vital. Fair enough. Let’s call it a start. What follows is a subjective first attempt at breezy chronology from 1902-2002 (when I lecture on this the title of my talk is “100 Years of Sound Art in 90 Minutes”). I don’t have room to talk about more than one or two pieces by each artist. Frankly, every artist here deserves a monograph about him or herself (and many already have one).

We’ll start in Paris with Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp and the early Futurists, and then look at how experimental literature connects to sound art. The story pretty much stays in Europe until the end of World War II, when the art world packs up and moves to New York. By the early ’60s, the whole scene shifts to America for the next two decades, kicked off by the publication of John Cage’s Silence. From there we’ll make our way through the various art movements, to performance scenes, gallery scenes, clubs, and TV shows. Other history meets up with everyone from Karen Finley to Marie Osmond and Michael Jackson, and winds up in the digital age when much of the action has migrated onto our vast computer networks. Finally, we’ll take a brief tour of a few fascinating projects I’ve recently come across.

I’ve always loved the art world. It’s a place where actors who are too weird to make it on Broadway end up as performance artists; writers that don’t write conventionally end up as text artists; and musicians who fall outside of mainstream concerns—be it jazz, classical, or rock—end up as sound artists. I love things that fall in between the cracks. I love people working outside of their disciplines, working outside of what they know. It drove punk rock — DYI: It’s one of the great paths to innovation. And what follows is an edgy survey of informed ignorance; people busting down walls of sound in the name of art.

Inner Pages:

• The Futurist Moment: Howlers, Exploders, Crumplers, Hissers, and Scrapers
• Sound and The Literary Connection
• A Chance Meeting of a Defective Tape Machine and a Migraine
• Fluxus: In Fractured Silence
• An Awkward Pause: Process, Conceptualism and Minimalism
• Bit, Baud, Byte: Entertainment, Technology, and The Body
• Smells Like Booty: Plunderphonics, Samples and Bootlegs
• Surveying the Damage: The Scene Is Now

Benjamin Piekut Photo by Megan Wolf

When I initially spoke with friends and colleagues about the notion of a new “common practice,” I became aware that the concept is not nearly as widely-recognized as I had initially thought. Is it a set of performance techniques? Is it neo-romantic symphonic music? Or could it be defined as an “international style of post-Lachenmann dirty sounds,” as one friend put it? In a discussion group at Music2001 in Cincinnati, one topic under consideration was whether John Adams’s Phrygian Gates could be said to represent the beginnings of a “new common practice.” In the November 2001 NewMusicBox, Kyle Gann has also fantasized about a common musical language based on minimalism that will endure until the end of the 21st century. Indeed, some version of minimalism is usually part of any discussion of the new common practice. Another reference point is Alvin Curran’s 1994 manifesto on the subject. In his poetic portrayal of the contemporary compositional landscape, he manages to refuse the pre- and proscriptions, the exclusions and omissions, that mark the instituting of a “common practice.”

It’s helpful to begin an examination of the new common practice by looking at the older common practice. It seems to me that issues of commonality are fundamentally social ones. What were the social worlds that supported the European common practice period? And how “common” was the music placed under this banner, exactly? Was there ever a “common practice” in the first place? The label itself is highly problematic because of the vast musical differences subsumed under the term, as well as its questionable “invention” of a common audience that, in fact, probably didn’t exist. By the end of the 19th century, capitalism had divided the social body into several potential audiences, and furthermore, had expanded on a global scale, making a single, unified European culture impossible to imagine.

These economic and social changes continued to make it very difficult to form a common practice in the 20th century. The rhetoric of internationalism and universality linked to serialism in the 1950s seemed to point to an imaginary “commonality” of musical experience that was already a distant (or even invented) memory. Now, as multinational capitalism has extended its global reach, commonality is out, and we are encouraged to celebrate difference under the auspices of the unquestioned, naturalized power of world markets.

Hence, the recent claims of “totalism” having common-practice status. This stage of minimalism is certainly more in line with the economic and social realities of late capitalism than serialism was, but the real matter is whether or not this is to be applauded. The problems of re-canonization, the erasure of history and cultural difference, and the misunderstanding of the demise of the original “common practice” period make current fantasies of a common musical language more dangerous than auspicious.

If there is a difference between Alvin Curran’s visionary celebration of “life at the top of the food chain” (as one friend put it) and Kyle Gann’s fantasy about the future of “our” music, it is in Curran’s steadfast refusal to translate his utopian manifesto into a set of codified practices. While Gann has already begun eagerly assembling his canon for future totalists, Alvin is a musical wanderer, content to revel in the rubble. I remember asking him once about the new common practice. He replied with a characteristic freestyle riff on the subject, and then concluded, “New common practice? I’ll tell you what the new common practice is…The new common practice…it’s no common practice.” One can only hope his wide-eyed embrace will be a model for others in the contemporary moment, and that talk of re-creating a common musical language will remain an uncommon practice.

Inner Pages:

• Was There Ever an Actual Common Practice?
• Academic Serialism as Institutionalized Common Practice?
• Totalism as The New World Order?
• No Common Practice, Please…