Category: Articles

“We are part of a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The earth is not only becoming covered in myriads of grains of thought, but is becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, so as to form a single vast grain of thought, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in a single unanimous reflection.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard expressed the above sensibilities back in the middle of the 20th century as part of his theory of the “noosphere,” or the sphere of interconnected minds. In recent years, his thinking has been hailed as prophetic by Internet Utopians and others who see the potential of hyperconsciousness in the cyberspace of the World Wide Web. A day of typical Web use and surfing might discourage such lofty notions, until you come upon a site like Cathedral, the brainchild of our guest editor William Duckworth.

One of the things I love about Cathedral is its implicit acknowledgement that we are in the infancy of a profound new technology and way of communicating, which perhaps suggests that larger cultural transformations are gathering. Like a renaissance cathedral, which took decades—even centuries—to build, Duckworth’s cathedral is a functional public space even as its structure and possibility continues to be carved out. Those who contribute soundfiles and text are anonymous builders and artists, participating in a cultural event as much as an artistic one. Cathedral definitely suggests the spiritual possibilities of Web technology, explored by Erik Davis in his 1998 book Techgnosis. Davis declared, “Whatever social, ecological, or spiritual renewal we might hope for in the new century, it will blossom in the context of communicating technologies that already gird the earth with intelligence and virtual light.”

The kind of communal music-making which Cathedral pioneers on the Web is largely lost in western culture, where the dynamic of the individual creator delivering to an audience has replaced artistic experience as a collective and social endeavor. However, we still risk romanticizing how collective artistic experiences function in other cultures. It seems the Internet provides the architecture for a rekindling of communal creativity on a global scale; while at the same time, it perhaps helps to destroy such activity in its “authentic” form.

Any such comparison needs to consider that artistic experience on the Internet, no matter how many hundred or thousands of people you may be interacting with, is a mostly subjective and solitary experience. Are we wired in, or are we wired out? Is such music-making a truly collective process, or is it simply a new instrument that each participant chooses to use differently, in their own sphere of aloneness?

Asking these questions is part of the excitement of these times. Jaron Lanier, in his conversation with Duckworth in our First Person section, raises the question of whether digital instruments can approach the musical sensitivity and nuance of analog instruments. It is a different kind of physical interaction, and it may be that the skill sets of electronic interaction will begin to work their way into the biological evolution of our species. What is the effect of hours, weeks, years of honing “digital” skills before a screen? What happens to minds whose cortical stimulation goes wild for the speed of managing scattered fragments of information? Do we see this already in our popular music, where skills may be shifting more towards keyboard mixing and sampling, and away from traditional instrumental playing and songwriting?

It may be that the possibilities virtual music present will fold back into the entire musical and cultural fabric, and that the online and offline realms will become further integrated, creating a consort unlike any we’ve known before. It’s as perfect a time as any to recall the last line of John Cage’s intro to his Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?: “Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.”

It seems today that many so-called artists, performing organizations, and presenters are guilty of practicing their work as if they are doing no more than delivering a consumable product. Given Al Niente’s review of the Metro Philharmonic in last Thursday’s Daily Times, they are evidently joined in this charade by music journalists.

Mr. Niente’s review (which appeared six days after the concert, certainly too late to help draw an audience to the two performances subsequent to opening night) was buried in the newspaper amidst movie advertisements. This environment of vulgarity, violence, and assaulting commercialism was hardly conducive to reflection about music, and only served to remind the reader of the soulless, empty, nihilistic culture we live in, and that real art offers us little or no hope of rising above the detritus which surrounds us. This of course is no fault of Mr. Niente’s, but is unequivocally the responsibility of his newspaper’s publisher and editor.

Niente did nothing to elevate his work above the morass within which it was presented. His flat, bored tone never seemed to get off the ground, and while his English possessed clarity, he failed to achieve contrast and drama within his text. What might have had the luminosity of insight, or the surging musical excitement of passionate prose, was dimmed by the droll, dismissive, disinterested disposition of his discourse. Some writers are born to move the soul. Others are born to write police reports.

To be sure, Niente’s best moments came in his witty, apt criticism of the Philharmonic’s predictable choice of another mediocre European conductor: “When will orchestra managers stop being seduced by a funny accent—don’t they know it doesn’t make a person smarter?” Having been at most of the concert Mr. Niente reviewed, I would agree that nothing Maestro Schtinkendrunck brought to the evening was worth his hype.

Troubling, however, was Niente’s failure to accord the world premiere on the program the same critical point of view as the other works he commented on. In assessing the Philharmonic’s performance of two well-known 19th-century European works, Niente offered no perspective on the relevance of this music or its place in contemporary concert life. Rather, he focused exclusively on the quality of the performances, as if the concert had been a sporting event. And his cheap crack about “excellent except for some slips in the brass” is the most tired and predictable comment in music criticism. It’s as if the critic is acknowledging that the only wrong notes to be heard are the obvious ones but—bonJOUR!—there were plenty in the strings, too.

Yet the most compelling part of the concert, a new work by Grant Victor Young, was a wonderful opportunity for Mr. Niente to give his readers something new to read about and consider. Unfortunately, he chose instead to deliver only a vague and stale description of the sound of the work, summoning the hackneyed “Messiaen-like colors” and “minimalist influences”; phrases which also, coincidentally, appeared in his review of a premiere last year. Telling us “the orchestra played with conviction” failed to acknowledge the truly deep preparation by a number of principal players, so evident in the piece’s multitude of solo work. And please, Mr. Niente, for the love of Henry Cowell—learn the difference between a xylophone and a marimba.

Finally, Niente failed to divulge to his readers the audience response to this work—a standing ovation! He happily shared his response, however: the old dining metaphor, that it reminded him of a meal with too many different flavors. Testa di osso! Is it not his duty to report: to use the minimal space he is afforded by his employer to cover what is new in his field, while at the same time keeping it honest? And one must wonder, why did he elect to review this concert, when on the same evening five works were premiered by the innovative and deserving Newmusickos? Are his reviewing choices somehow related to who spends the most advertising dollars in his paper?

Heaven forbid that a critic with his wide readership would avail himself of the opportunity to communicate the uplifting and generous spirit of music, while also fulfilling his professional duty. Or to find a way, in these times, to use his position for genuine reflection and questioning, infused with contagious kindness and magnanimity, as a service to the music and the community. Wouldn’t that, in a sense, fulfill his inner longing and the need we all share—to join in making music?

After reading Mr. Niente’s review and putting down my coffee, I at least had the pleasure of putting the paper somewhere Niente could truly appreciate—in the recycling.

—President, AMC (Anonymous Music Critics)

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

To this day, even though I’m now on the Board of Directors of the Music “Critics” Association of North America, I have a problem identifying myself, or any one else for that matter, as a music critic.

I know that once upon a time the word “criticism” connoted pretty lofty goals, some of which are still in our language to a degree, e.g. critical thinking is still something to aspire to even though there seems to be less and less of it around these days.

But in reality we don’t live in once upon a time, we live now in a world where, for example, the President’s critics are never his fans, and where saying “I can’t really take criticism” never means you hate it when people tell you that you’re great. The word critic implies a negative, and a rather strong negative at that, whether it’s there or not in a review column or any other writing about music. And what the general public perceives drives the medium to a good extent, right? After all, general public perception has been one of the key defenses of the so-called everyman critic, an outsider who is somehow more objective than a practitioner, with all that conflict of interest baggage, could ever be.

I would counter that objectivity is something of an ascetic panacea and that to be totally objective about something you feel passionate about can only lead to stagnant prose, which is the case for much of today’s so-called music criticism. At the risk of being somewhat polemical, my frequent retort to those who say that Schonberg killed contemporary music is, “You mean Harold right?”

As a composer who frequently writes about the music of other people, the last thing I ever want to do is criticize music, which is my passion and my life. Rather I want to defend it! In my writing, I aim never to be “critical” in the negative sense, and I hope I’m not. I do not aspire to a conflict of interest avoiding objectivity, because such an ascetic goal is ultimately futile in a world where we are all connected to one another. At the same time, I don’t lavish praise on things I don’t genuinely like in order to curry favors or performances. Most intelligent people can see right through that.

However, mine is just a voice in the chorus of numerous views. There are as many opinions as there are music critics, or defenders, or journalists, or whatever we wind up calling them. I moderated a panel in Santa Fe in late July for the Music Critics Association in which a daily newspaper reviewer and a freelance music journalist squared off against two composer/conductors about ways to approach writing about premiere performances. Their thoughts and the comments of everyone in the room are presented here in full. We asked Danny Felsenfeld, a composer and music journalist who is not afraid of being critical, to criticize music criticism. We also invited Ned Rorem, Carolyn Yarnell, David Rakowski, John Corigliano, James Wierzbicki and John Zorn to share with us their poignant remarks about the state of music criticism, and as a special bonus this month, we offer a reprint of a 20 year old essay by Ned Rorem on the subject as well as a 1989 Telluride panel on the state of music criticism that included the late John Cage. We ask you to share your thoughts with us as well.

Greg Sandow, who is also equal parts composer and music journalist, offers some end of summer thoughts on animal sounds from the vantage point of his country home. Dean Suzuki delves into the homemade instruments Paul Dresher has created for his Sound Stage. Molly Sheridan spoke at length with Tara Browner, a Chocktaw pow-wow dancer and ethnomusicologist, whose recent examination of American Indian music and dance, Heartbeart of the People, is also excerpted here this month. Amanda MacBlane has contributed musical defense for a record 56 new recordings featuring American repertoire.

Greg Sandow

Warwick, NY: When you read this, it’ll be around Labor Day, time for going back to school, for work, for the concert season, and for other urban pursuits. But I’m writing in the country, on an August night, the air thick with the buzz of insects. So I thought I’d say goodbye to summer by writing about the sounds I hear around our country house. They’re also balm for any sadness on the anniversary of 9/11.

The sounds I like begin with peepers in the spring, a giant cluster of them, their nighttime voices high, mysterious, insistent, somehow always distant no matter where they’re coming from. I hear them first from wooded wetlands far behind our house, an area that’s just about impenetrable. Then they migrate to our pond, much closer to us, but still it’s hard to pin them down. When I walk to the pond, across our driveway and down a little slope, I still can’t find them, even though they’re all around me. They’re everywhere and nowhere.

Then in early summer, after a silent cacophony of tadpoles in the pond, the frogs appear. At night they sing, a group of them, or rather a collection of individuals, each one planted somewhere in the pond or near it, again impossible to find. They seem to listen to each other, or at least to be encouraged because they’re in a group. Often one will start, after a short silence, and others quickly follow.

Then in August come cicadas, or whatever buzzes in the trees. They come, if I can trust my ears, in two varieties, the ones that rasp continuously, and others that keep an intermittent, chugging beat. These last are the only noise-producing animal or insect—around here, at least—that sound as if they’ve found a groove.

Along with all these sounds, there’s choreography. If I sit out while twilight falls, I’ll see swallows, darting in the air. They’re catching insects, which they store inside their mouths while catching more, an amazing feat. But the swallows aren’t out for long. Soon it’s too dark for them, and they’re replaced by bats which dart and swoop. It’s a wonder that there are any insects left.

And then there are the silent animals. The cows, in fields nearby us, might as well be mute. I’m sure they moo sometimes, but I’ve never heard them. Wild turkeys never seem to make a sound, not even when we surprise a flock of them, or come across a mother and her babies, or even when—tonight, when I was on my bike—a group of them scramble off the road to get away from me.

An eagle I saw eating road kill didn’t cry or scream. Deer are absolutely silent, except, of course, when they’re crashing in the brush. They seem, in fact, to have an urgent air of silence, because they listen and communicate. On my bike, I’ll come across a family of them, one or two adults and a pair of fawns. They’ll hear me, and immediately they’ll freeze, turning toward me to see what I’m going to do. Sometimes they stay; sometimes they leap away. But one of the adults must make that decision, letting the others know with such mute, decisive certainty that the silence echoes all around them.

And then there are animals that in fact are silent, but don’t seem to be. Among them I’d list turtles. We have them in our pond. I’ll walk down there in the morning and find them on the banks, baking in the sun. As soon as I approach, they scurry toward the water, throw themselves in it with a tiny little splash, and swim away. The splash could almost be their voice. When I see them walking on the road, their bodies look positively garrulous, as if they were warning everyone to get out of their way. I saw one of them, a giant maybe two feet wide, start across the Palisades Parkway, which was thick with 60-mile an hour traffic. I’m sure that it got crushed (I’ve seen dead turtles in the road with broken shells), but while it lived, it looked as if it thought it made a nobler noise than all the cars.

Groundhogs don’t seem silent. They’ll root for something in the grass, then rise up to look around. They’re never still; they look as if they’re talking to themselves. Rabbits, too, seem very vocal, though I’d swear that if we heard their thoughts, they’d mostly wail in near-despair. They look so helpless, as if they know they’re prey. We had a clutch of young and baby ones, who’d come out at dusk. We never see them now; hawks or foxes must have eaten them.

But the most impressive sounds I’ve heard from any animal came from a bear. That we have bears around us isn’t news any longer; all of our neighbors say they’ve seen them. I saw one out of the corner of my eye, a low, brown, elusive shape I figured was a deer. But it was too dark for that, too round and compact. A little afterward, my wife and I and some people visiting us came upon some fresh scat, laid down, as far as we could tell, just moments before by something large. A book on animal signs left no doubt that this had been a bear. And then one night I heard it. It was late, completely dark; from somewhere near the house, from our lawn, our driveway, or else the road, or our meadow near the road, I heard a strangled roar. A large animal, I thought. But I couldn’t quite believe it was our bear, until I went online and found a site with bear sounds. They were exactly what I heard; they gave me chills.

But I haven’t mentioned birds. Of course we hear them, mostly in the morning and the early evening, but always, throughout the day there’s someone burbling or crying out in harsh alarm. Crows, I think, are the most outspoken; they always seem to know that someone’s listening when they caw.

But as I listened one afternoon to the aural carpet of birds, woven from many calls and songs, I thought of music. And not because the birds were musical, but instead because they weren’t…

For years I’ve listened to the sounds people make in groups, in parks or restaurants or parties. I’m convinced that there’s an improvised ensemble, an awareness we keep just below our consciousness of what everybody else is saying, and, even more importantly, how they’re saying it. A loud sound from somebody will provoke more loud sounds from others, with a rhythmic impetus that makes me think it’s all coordinated.

Once I taped a gathering and tried to transcribe what I heard. Many years ago, when I was at The Village Voice, I wrote a column about all this. Here’s what I said:

People talking in resta
urants echoed the rhythm and intensity of conversations on the other side of the room, and filled in the pauses of the conversation at the next table. Sounds that reached my window from the street below seemed linked in a loose but unshakable web, no part of which could change without tugging, however slightly, on the rest. Sounds are music, I thought, but with a subtler rhythm, more changeable flow, and more profound counterpoint, in which—like lovers whose thoughts are always of each other, even though they’re faraway—two or more independent parts move forward together without ever marching in step.

…on a sunny Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square and started to listen. At first I thought I was drowning in soup; there were more strands of sound in the music of the park than I’d hear in a dozen orchestras. Soon, though, I noticed radios, rhythmic, insistent, and distinct. After a while other sounds detached themselves from the stew: whistles, honks, the screech of brakes, a baby’s cry. The radios moved from place to place; a crowd watching a comedian in the fountain cheered. Soon the sounds began to connect. A knock or a slap—someone spinning on a skateboard—provoked a whistle 50 feet away. Another knock introduced applause from the crowd around the fountain, which in turn was echoed in a lengthened vowel from someone speaking right behind me. Three emphatic words jumping separately from three nearby conversations rose in volume and in pitch, like hammer-blows reaching a climax, one-two-perfect three, in rhythm. A Swedish girl behind me fit her next remark between two cries from a distant child. Someone matched a peak of music on the radio with a squeal. “Over there someplace,” said a girl in a bubblegum accent; she paused for two slaps from a skateboard and then happily resumed. The park had a rhythm, and everyone with anything to say found themselves joining in.

Birds, though, don’t do this. One day I sat on our porch, thinking I’d listen to the web of bird sounds the way I’ve listened to human voices. But it wasn’t a web. Each song, each rasp, each cry, each caw kept to itself, making no change in the sounds around it. I’ll make an exception for the honking of geese; they do seem to listen to each other, or at least to be joining in some collective effort, egging each other on to produce a heterophony of honks. But the birds near our house apparently ignore each other.

Just yesterday I heard dramatic proof of that. It was late. I could only hear two birds. One was an insistent tweeter, sitting on a nearby branch, insisting on tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet, repeated endlessly, sometimes with a stutter thrown in, so that tweet became tw-weet. The other bird was a mourning dove, further away and higher up, probably on a power line or telephone wire. Tuh-woo, it called, dropping down an approximate fourth, as mourning doves do. But no matter how often it repeated that, it couldn’t affect the manic tweeter, which kept its own rhythm, equally not affecting the mourning dove. Birds are intelligent; they make tools, talk to each other, migrate long distances, cooperate on tricky tasks, like driving off a hawk, which I’ve seen three small birds do, working as a team. They’ve been known to bang on windows, asking friendly humans for help. But they don’t make unconscious music together, the way people do.

*

This column is dedicated to Tom Johnson, my predecessor at the Voice, who reviewed a bird one summer, and the next summer a brook.

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

Last month I offered a broad survey of sound sculptures, invented instruments, their creators, and role in modern music. In this column, I will take a closer look at a single work focusing on newly invented instruments: Paul Dresher‘s Sound Stage—an interdisciplinary music theater piece performed by Zeitgeist, the new music ensemble, on a stage comprised mainly of very large-scale instruments invented by the composer. Dresher (b. 1951) is a West Coast composer, based in Berkeley, California, whose work might be described as post-minimal. His work is informed by minimalism, but also embraces elements of world music, rock, jazz, improvisation, and post-Cageian experimentalism.

While Sound Stage has it roots in some of the composer’s earliest musical explorations, it came into being directly as the result of a commission from Zeitgeist, the Minneapolis-based new music ensemble. The group, which has been together for 25 years though no founding members remain, has leaned towards minimalism in its repertoire—recent commissions and recordings include music by Harold Budd, Terry Riley, and Frederic Rzewski—though they have played and commissioned works by Stockhausen, Cage, Eric Stokes, Mark Applebaum, Eleanor Hovda, Mary Ellen Childs, and Martin Bresnick, among others. The music has always been, more or less, traditional concert music. In 1995, with a thought towards expanding their horizons, Zeitgeist approached Dresher, well known for his work in the theater, to create a large scale, evening-length work for them that would, in some way, have a theatrical component. Other than the theatrical element, the commission was wide open.

Dresher’s Sound Stage Photo by Andy Marino

At the outset, it was Dresher’s goal to integrate into Sound Stage several aspects of his musical background—chamber music, invented instruments, music theater, and electronic music—into a single work. After working in the theater for many years, Dresher was well aware that musicians are often poor actors and thus the theatrical component needed to be strikingly visual. Dresher decided that his piece would use instruments that he would invent and that they needed to be very large in scale in order for the work to have the impact that he desired. In fact, the stage set would be composed entirely of the invented instruments, with the music combining these invented instruments and the traditional Western instruments played by the members of Zeitgeist.

Many familiar with his work are unaware that Dresher had invented and built instruments as a young man. While still in high school, Dresher created a number of acoustic instruments. He took woodshop while in high school to develop the skills needed to build his instruments. He began with plucked string, guitar-like instruments, being a guitarist himself. Among these was a 12-string instrument, based in part on the 12-string acoustic guitar, but with a different and rather unguitar-like shape. He later created a 6-string instrument, again modeled after the guitar, but that employed open tunings. As he had an interest in non-Western musics, Dresher made instruments with sympathetic strings and movable frets, inspired by the sitar.

In the late ’60s he encountered Harry Partch‘s work and drawing inspiration from his Cloud Chamber Bowls, built two sets of glass instruments and made his first serious composition, Music for Two Glass Instruments, Electronics and Tape (1973), a work for six percussionists with live electronic processing (filtering) and a tape delay system borrowed from the work of Terry Riley. Curiously, this earliest work contained virtually all the elements that were to define Sound Stage: a combination of acoustic and electronic elements, invented instruments (and an approach to intonation), and (though he was completely unaware of it at the time), a theatrical element emerging directly from the music performance. From this point on, each of these elements developed independently, only to come together again many years later in Sound Stage.

In the mid and late ’70s, Dresher worked closely with Lou Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig on the invention of instruments for the American Gamelan. In fact, the written portion of his 1979 master’s thesis at UCSD, “The Design and Construction of An American Gamelan,” was a complete set of construction plans with detailed diagrams for the construction of instruments that duplicated the instruments of a Central Javanese orchestra from readily available materials and tools. He went on to direct the construction of several complete sets of instruments in Berkeley, San Diego, and Seattle.

By 1979, Dresher’s love of gadgetry, integrated performing systems as well as the practical need to have a portable solo performance vehicle for his compositions, led to the construction of an elaborate live recording/mixing multi-track tape delay system (created in collaboration with audio technician Paul Tydelski) which was related to Terry Riley’s time-lag accumulator or Robert Fripp‘s Frippertronics system, but substantially more complex and sophisticated.

For a number of years, this electro-acoustic invention supplanted any purely acoustic inventions and was used both in concert and in his first music theater works, such as The Way of How. This work from 1981, created in collaboration with experimental theater artist George Coates and one of the first works that brought wide attention to Dresher’s music, included plastic tubes (used to protect golf clubs) cut to different lengths and used as resonant percussion instruments.

For anyone who invents pitched instruments, either as an inspiration or simply as a matter of necessity, one has
to make decisions about intonation. In building his glass instruments, Dresher found the seed of his own approach to this issue. Like Partch, Dresher employed commercially available industrial glass containers that often cracked when being cut. However, he discovered that these could be salvaged and modified with a notch that radically altered the pitch and timbre. Each of these salvaged glass instruments was unique, as each had peculiar pitch components, a sort of multiphonics, undefined pitch, and pitches sets whose members were unrelated to the harmonic series.

Indeed, the odd pitch collections in these glass instruments signaled the beginning of Dresher’s notion of what he calls “distemperament”—wildly enharmonic concatenations of pitches that defy systemization into any tuning system but that we hear as both pitch and timbre. As the composer asserts, he appreciates and engages the ambiguity of “distemperament” which becomes more of an element of timbre rather than tuning, per se. As an example, he uses this approach in the sampled prepared piano and electronic percussion parts of “Cage Machine,” the first movement of his Concerto for Violin and Electro-Acoustic Band, in a way that enhances and intensifies the already unorthodox timbres in the work. This idea informs the music of Sound Stage which uses some of the same samples of the prepared piano sounds found in the concerto, but programmed in a different way to complement different instrumentation of that work.

However, as a result of his studies with Lou Harrison and of various world musics, Dresher also developed a solid understanding of just intonation or systems based on the harmonic series. Going into the project, Dresher did not think that systematic tuning was going to be an important issue in Sound Stage, but the physics inherent in some of his new instruments led directly to highly precise just intonation and this became an integral part of the work. One of the inventions is the Quadrachord, whose fourteen feet long strings allow the performer to play the harmonic series with incredible accuracy up to the 22nd partial. Dresher wrote music integrating these pitches (of the overtone series) focusing on the range of 8th to 19th partials and particularly exploring the wildly non-equal tempered intervals of the 11th and 13^thpartials. The violinist and clarinetist in Zeitgeist were asked to match those pitches, through modified placement of fingers for the former and the use of alternate fingerings and adjusted embouchure for the latter.

When building his very first instruments, which were often quite large, Dresher was not thinking of them as theatrical, though others noticed their dramatic presence. Later, after working in music theater, and especially his experiences collaborating with Coates, he recognized the importance of theatricality in his work, but invented instruments did not play a role in his compositions. In 1993, after meeting Ellen Fullman, whose Long String Instrument impressed him deeply, Dresher came back to an understanding of the inherent theatricality and potential of invented instruments. He had been well aware of Partch’s notion of corporeality and the multi-valent impact of the instrument as sculpture, musical instrument, metaphor, theatrical object, symbol, and more, but Fullman’s instrument proved to be an important catalyst for his return to instrument design and use.

A-frame centerpiece Photo by Andy Marino

The construction of the instruments of Sound Stage began in the summer of 1998. Dresher chose to collaborate with Daniel Schmidt, with whom he had worked in the 1970s on the design of American gamelan instruments. The visual and dramatic centerpiece of the Sound Stage is a 17 1/2 foot tall rolling A-frame construction whose every surface is sonically active and includes two 16 1/2 foot long pendulums, one that plucks strings on three giant harps, and one that strikes a variety of percussion instruments. The notion for working with pendulums came in spring of 1998, when Dresher saw Zeitgeist in performance for the first time. They were playing a composition with Terry Riley and it was at this performance that Dresher came up with the image of a giant pendulum and a question about its possible musical applications. He even made drawings of the pendulum on the concert’s program notes. The instruments and the music began to take shape after the image of the pendulum, which became the central icon of the work.

Interior detail Photo by Andy Marino

The pendulum/A frame structure itself is a kind of stage, with two platforms on which members of Zeitgeist, along with Dresher, stand and play. Besides the harps and percussion instruments played by the pendulums, the instrument also contains the smaller (10 ft. long) of the two Quadrachords and what the inventers call “portal drums.” These are three large plywood “sandwiches” that actually provide the essential rigidity for the whole structure, each of which contains many individual resonant chambers that are independently struck and sound like a cross between a conga and log drum.

Other instruments include two PVC pipe “saxophones” or “bass clarinets,” the larger, free standing Quadrachord, and many long strings, up to 100 feet long, running from the stage and over the audience. These are attached to resonating boards rigged to surround the audience (these strings are rubbed longitudinally by hands and rosined gloves after the manner of Fullman’s Long String instruments) and make their striking presence felt in a very theatrical way.

Performers at play Photo by Andy Marino

Dresher is smart and honest enough to acknowledge that he has neither the inclination or artistry to develop the visual, theatrical, and movement components of his works and relies on gifted artist/collaborators in these areas. Beginning with just the kernel of an idea, a music theater piece using invented instruments, Dresher knew from the start that he needed a director/choreographer to give shape to the whole work. He found this and more in his long-time collaborator Rinde Eckert, who also contributed a spare but essential text that connected and humanized the various elements in the piece.

Initially, the work was comprised of music and images. As the piece evolved, in an almost after-the-fact manner, it became apparent that the piece was about the confluence of art, science, and math, the physics of sound and its role in art. The physics of sound became the starting point for Rinde Eckert’s text, which cam
e out of discussions with Dresher. Eckert created a text that helps make sense of the abstract sounds and their physical-acoustical structures. Using humor, poetic sensibilities, and engaging intelligence, Eckert has come up with a text that is stimulating, compelling, and educational without being didactic. While the text may be a bit over the heads of the very young, this is a work that reaches out to children without pandering and losing artistic integrity and merit. After the performance is completed, the audience is invited to become a part of the drama and have a hands-on encounter with the instruments, making their own sounds and experience the music directly. At the first performances, the audience’s (both children and adults) enthusiasm for this exploration led directly to the creation of a separate educational program for schools that now tours in tandem with the full performance, allowing the work to reach a much wider audience.

In addition to playwright and director Rinde Eckert, instrument builder Daniel Schmidt, and visual and lighting designer Alex Nichols collaborated from the beginning and helped define all the visual aspects of the work. In the end, the collaborators have created a large-scale piece that incorporates music, performance art, sculpture, movement, acoustical physics, math, even education.

Sound Stage is a piece which promises to have a future as a performance piece and the catalyst for new vistas, new music (Dresher has already committed to an improvisational duo using the Quadrachord in collaboration with composer and instrument builder Mark Applebaum who will perform on his Mouseketier) and hopefully future large scale works expanding upon the basic idea of the stage as large-scale musical instrument.

Photo by Josh Mitchell

The saddest thing in musical America today is that we are the only century in history in which the past takes precedence over the present and where performers take precedence over the music they perform. A performer of my age and reputation earns in one evening what I earn in a year, and he or she earns it by playing music of the past.

There are less than 100 paid critics of serious music in America today. The New York Times may have five critics, but Time Magazine, which has a pop music critic, does not have a classical music critic. The same is true for Newsweek and other important national publications. Just in the last year, even the Times has dumbed down the “Arts & Leisure” section so that pop dominates, and when classical music is covered, the music of living composers is barely noted.

The music of living composers is not even despised because to be despised you have to exist. Cultured lay people may know about both Dante and Philip Roth, Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock. But if they know about Vivaldi they don’t know about his musical equivalent today. They only know about pop. Pop is the music of the world today, alas.

In the old days a critic such as Andrew Porter would be able to collect his writings into a book. Now not even an important theatre reviewer like John Simon can get his collected writings published. The critic is no longer a fact of life.

[Ed. Note: In 1982, Ned Rorem wrote an essay titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Critic” which was subsequently published in his collection Setting The Tone: Essays and a Diary (Coward McCann, 1983). Many of the issues he raises in this 20 year-old essay are still extremely relevant today, which is why with the kind permission of Mr. Rorem and his publisher, we reprint it here.]