Category: Articles

Whose Classical Music? Assumptions and Representation in Online Participatory Projects

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Joanna Helms - Analysis, Articles

What is a community in new music? A panel of musicologists attempted to answer this question at the second annual New Music Gathering last January. Community might be manifested in an experimental commune, in the practices of minimalist music, in the radical identity politics of an opera, or in the labor of administrators and institutions. Rather than provide a singular answer to what a new music community might be, our panel provided many. Over the coming weeks, you can read our examinations of new music and community from a variety of historical and ethnographic perspectives. We are very grateful to NewMusicBox for hosting this weekly series, to the organizers of New Music Gathering for sponsoring a thought-provoking conference, and to our home institutions for supporting our research.—Will Robin

On February 12, 2016, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir posted a call for submissions to its new “virtual choir” version of George Friderich Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. The virtual choir format (first used by composer Eric Whitacre in his various “Virtual Choir” projects from 2009 to 2013), encourages participants from around the world to submit videos of themselves singing an individual part of a choral composition. Organizers then compile these individual parts into a final audio/video track to form the full choir, often accompanied by impressive animations that emphasize the projects’ remarkable accomplishment of allowing participants to “sing together” even as they do not inhabit the same physical space.

As a form of religious outreach, the Mormon Tabernacle virtual choir had clear ideological implications, many of which were easily read from its original call for participants. The project’s website explicitly encouraged the unification of Christians across denominational boundaries and featured scriptural quotation from the Book of Mormon explaining the spiritual benefits of the act of singing together. The final video—featuring footage from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir alongside clips submitted online—was released on March 13, 2016, just in time to serve its stated purpose as an Easter celebration. These factors clearly delineated the project’s boundaries, as a space meant for the involvement of Christians (and, implicitly, not for people belonging to other faith traditions) and more specifically as a site in which to assert interdenominational unity.

What I want to discuss here, in contrast, are cases in which the ideology behind the use of music derived from a Western classical tradition might not be so immediately evident. Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir performances are only a few of a number of online projects organized in roughly the past decade that use online technologies to call for general participation in classical music making. These projects range from orchestras arranging performances with interactive Twitter components to even more active roles, such as contests in which the winner has a musical composition exhibited (as in the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin’s 2013 and 2016 contests to remix Dvořák and Bruckner) or performs in some capacity themselves (as in David Lang’s 2011 competition to find a featured performer to play his piece wed at (le) poisson rouge).

Such projects often feature calls to—and claims of having achieved—more actively participatory and widespread inclusion, opening up the world of classical music to new groups that might not have had the chance to engage before. But as recent social discussions about diversity, representation, and inclusion in American mainstream culture make clear (think about critiques of the racial distribution of nominees at this year’s Grammys and Oscars, for example, as just one instance of longer term concerns), inclusivity is a tricky subject. Not everyone agrees about what it looks like or how to make it happen. And although it is difficult to start more clearly defining what inclusivity truly is, why it might be desirable, and how it might be achieved, it is an important conversation to have. In the realm of classical music in America, this need is just as strong and carries a great deal of contemporary and historical significance.[1]

Who is meant to participate, who can participate, who ends up participating, and what does their participation mean?

By taking a critical eye to the claims and hidden pitfalls of online classical music projects, I hope to advance a conversation of importance to all music descended from Western European art music traditions—today, in the 21st century, whose music is this? Or, to pose this question less polemically: Who is meant to participate, who can participate, who ends up participating, and what does their participation mean? This issue often comes up in discussions of audience outreach and anxieties about the future of classical music, and is certainly worth further consideration.

I want to be clear that I assume good intentions on the parts of project organizers, even as I critique some of the ways in which these projects are carried out and the ideologies that underlie them. These issues are difficult to navigate from an organizational perspective, and they are ones that I am sensitive to (and vulnerable myself to criticism for) as someone who organizes classical music concerts and who works as an educator in my own community. At the same time, good intentions are usually only the first step toward addressing social issues—it is also necessary to be open to criticism and to make changes.

Let’s begin with a very brief detour into the world of art history and criticism, where participation has—at least over the past twenty years or so—been the topic of some debate.

Curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud invented the term “relational aesthetics” in a series of essays later published in a book of that name, in response to a trend he observed in visual and conceptual art of the 1990s. With this term, he enthusiastically described a socially engaged approach to art, attentive to the relationship between itself and its viewers and concerned with creating works that Bourriaud characterizes as “convivial, user-friendly…festive, collective and participatory.” For example:

Rirkrit Tiravanija organizes a dinner in a collector’s home, and leaves him all the ingredients required to make a Thai soup…In a Copenhagen square, Jes Brinch and Henrik Plenge Jacobsen install an upturned bus that causes a rival riot in the city. Christine Hill works as a check-out assistant in a supermarket, organizes a weekly gym workshop in a gallery…Pierre Huyghe summons people to a casting session, makes a TV transmitter available to the public, and puts a photograph of laborers at work on view just a few yards from the building site. (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 7–8)

As one response to Bourriaud and his supporters, art historian Claire Bishop has claimed in her book Artificial Hells that such a celebration of participation above all other characteristics of art creates two false categories: the passive, encompassing activities more commonly associated with gallery culture such as observing and contemplating; and the active, considered more hands-on, engaging, and inclusive of the audience. Bishop is concerned that this division serves to reinforce deep-seated classist perceptions in the art world, under which the upper class owns (both in a figurative sense, or intellectually, and a quite literal one) the space of the gallery. The middle class, under this model, is allowed the mental leisure and capacity to interpret and consider art, and the lower class is thought capable of only relating to art physically, rather than conceptually or aesthetically.

Class—or at least, access to resources, cultural exposure, and training, in a broad sense—is also at the root of assumptions about who belongs in the cultural sphere of Western classical music, as well as its various new music offshoots. For classical music in America today, obsessively concerned with its own seemingly dwindling capacity to speak to contemporary society, it comes perhaps as no surprise that a participatory message would be appealing. In the past eight years or so, orchestras and ensembles across the US have experimented with audience engagement over Twitter and other social media, including by encouraging audience members to live-tweet performances from inside concert halls or interact before and after concerts using particular hashtags or prompts. The Philadelphia Orchestra has developed its own app that allows audience members to follow live program notes on their phones during performances, originally pairing the service with shorter concerts at a reduced ticket price. Some have gone further still: in 2013, the Houston Symphony and local classical station KUHA sponsored an “air-conducting” contest in which participants uploaded videos of themselves conducting along to recordings of classical compositions. The winner of the competition (eventually announced as seven-year-old Jonathan Okensiuk, who had already achieved viral video fame at the age of three for a video of him conducting along to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) was given the opportunity to lead the symphony in a live concert rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Online projects open up new forms of musical participation to people who would normally take part only as audience members.

Although the social and economic issues vary by region and nation, orchestras and organizations outside of the US have also experimented with online projects that open up new forms of musical participation to people who would normally take part only as audience members. In addition to the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin remix competitions mentioned above, projects like the Tweetfonie (2014, Anhaltische Philharmonic Orchestra Dessau) and the World Online Orchestra / Open Orchestra (2013–, Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra) have allowed participants to experiment with manipulating musical materials themselves. Additionally, a number of standalone projects have explicitly aimed for international reach, even as much of their user base has eventually come from the US and Europe. These include Whitacre’s Virtual Choir (2009–2013) and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (2009/2011).

The use of internet platforms as content generators for musical projects indisputably removes a number of restrictions to participation. Most obviously, physical distance becomes irrelevant: anyone who has technological access can participate. This raises the issue, then, of who does have access. To prepare for, record, and upload a video requires internet access in order to read the instructions, watch a conducting video, view a score or hear a recording (unless these are available to a participant offline), and eventually upload the finished recording. Even with rapidly advancing global internet connectivity, this ability cannot be universally assumed. Some countries have much wider internet availability and usage than others, and this can vary significantly depending on regional infrastructure.

And access depends on more than the ability to get online. Participants also need recording equipment that will capture audio and (usually) video to the standards of the project organizers, as well as the ability to use this equipment without disrupting or being disrupted by others and with a minimum of background noise. At an even more basic level, they have to have heard about the project in the first place, either online through a website, social network, or email list, or through an offline network (for example, as a participant in a traditional community music ensemble). They must be technologically fluent enough to go through the process of creating a video and uploading it, or they must know someone else who can assist them.

Beyond the issue of access is that of representation and inclusion. Western classical music has its own particular set of aesthetic values—simply put, it’s supposed to sound good. A particular set of musical skills is highly valued within the classical world—technical ability, intonation, and tone among them. With the exception of art music contexts that consciously reject these ideas (for example, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, whose members played instruments on which they were untrained to the best of their abilities and whose recordings now live on in viral internet infamy as “orchestra fails”), these values are generally held by classical music performers and ensembles and are required for a musical project to be commercially viable under that genre. Most of the organizations and individuals that host online classical participatory projects therefore have a great deal at stake in presenting something that fits into these aesthetics, because they participate in a system that values this type of skill both intellectually and financially.

Perhaps as a way of compensating for anxieties about not being able to offer the same standard of musical skill as a professional ensemble, online musical projects often justify their value by presenting themselves as performing a type of social work, first and foremost by claiming to increase or broaden participation in classical music traditions. The most common way of providing evidence of increased participation is by emphasizing participants’ geographic locations. This is often done implicitly in smaller projects, especially through reference in publicity materials to participants from the most unusual (or, less charitably, “exotic”) locales. In some of the largest online projects, on the other hand, geographic distribution has been more thoroughly documented and presented. Both the YouTube Symphony Orchestra and Whitacre’s Virtual Choir have emphasized the geographic distribution of their participants, albeit with some distortion. For the 2011 YTSO, ten of the live orchestra’s participants were interviewed in professionally produced “Meet the Orchestra” videos; out of ten videos, two of the members profiled were from the United States.[2] But 42 of the 101 total participants in the orchestra had their home country listed by the ensemble as the US—proportionally, twice as many as were profiled in the video series. Whitacre has emphasized details about geographic diversity for nearly all of his Virtual Choir projects. His 2011 video for Sleep, for example, opens by stating that more than 2000 performances have been submitted from 58 countries, and the names of several of these countries feature heavily in the video’s graphics. The first visible country name is Kazakhstan (0:17, 1 participant), and the names of Croatia (0:51, 1 participant), Sri Lanka (2:32 and 2:51, 3 participants), and Costa Rica (2:40, 1 participant) are prominently visible alongside countries with far more participants, such as the US, the UK, and Canada.[3] The graphics obscure the fact that 1149 videos—more than half—were submitted from the United States alone, and that 80% of the videos come from the five countries with the most submissions (US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia).

In other cases, organizers have emphasized aspects of participants’ identity such as physical (dis)ability—for example when Whitacre shared in an article on the Huffington Post that the Virtual Choir had allowed a legally blind participant to sing in a choir for the first time because he had never before been able to see a conductor. The very young and the very old also tend to be singled out as exceptional. The emphasis on youth in particular is striking, with younger participants often presented prominently as if to assuage common fears about aging classical music audiences. For example, a post published on the Houston Symphony blog by associate conductor Robert Franz praises seven-year-old air-conducting contest winner Jonathan Okseniuk as a modern-day (child prodigy) Mozart. Franz expresses shock about Okseniuk’s familiarity with the piece that he conducted prior to the performance (Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”) the fact that he “not only imitated what he saw and heard, but he internalized it and understood it.” The post’s representation of Okseniuk’s conducting performance hinges entirely on presenting his musical capacity in the context of his age as particularly exceptional. It’s striking to imagine that there are very few circumstances in which it would not seem entirely offensive to make this comment about a person of any other age. But age ranges are useful for demonstrating the broadness of project boundaries, as in the current description of the Sleep Virtual Choir, which claims to include people from “all walks of life, including 9 year olds to senior citizens.”

As demonstrated in all of these cases, the desire to justify online projects through their social functions often results in seeking out “unexpected” project participants, leading to the creation publicity materials that reduce participants’ identities to the ways in which they lie outside of an imagined, presumed audience for classical music. David Lang once said in an interview that he saw his piano competition as “the ability for me to date more people.” When Lang points out that he’s going to make new friends, as when he claims in his announcement video that participation “might be a great opportunity for you to get your music seen” by his panel of expert judges (Andrew Zolinsky, Lisa Moore, Jeremy Denk, and Vicky Chow), he points out not only the insularity of his own existing music community, but a preexisting conception about who doesn’t already belong. In the case of Lang’s competition, this imagined group of people wants to belong, knows most if not all of his judges’ names, and is skilled but not particularly well connected. In other cases, the presumed Other seems to have even less exposure to the cultural and social worlds of classical music—it has to be brought to them, and who better to do it than the organizers of an online project? In all of the above cases, the implication is that online projects do important work by bringing classical music to people who haven’t gotten to experience it previously. But in all of the above cases, the oversights about the real requirements for participation and the casual assumptions made about participants arguably distract from actually carrying out the work that is claimed to be done—that is, from finding creative ways to engage new audiences in a thoughtful and responsible way.

What does this all mean for the future of participatory projects within the new music community? Does it mean that we write them off as failures of past project organizers, or that we abandon participatory models because they are necessarily flawed?

I hope not. I hope it means that composers, performers, and the teams they work with to realize participatory projects will think carefully about who they’re working to include (and who they’re not working to include)—and, importantly, that this will be reflected responsibly in the claims they make about their projects. There is often a fine line between using participatory ideals to help provide community cohesion and painting one’s project as inclusive in order to garner prestige and support while casually allowing the sociopolitical dynamics typically at play in determining cultural participation to continue as usual—but better defining that line is an important task.

Joanna Helms

Joanna Helms is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of North Carolina. Her research interests generally center around issues of dissemination, participation, and collaboration in sound and music technologies. She is currently beginning a dissertation on early electronic music and sound art at the Studio di Fonologia, a former research studio associated with Italian state radio and television network Rai.

1. The performance and values of classical music in the US have long been associated with uplift narratives and the American (European-centered) cultural elite. This can be seen in diverse instances throughout the nation’s history, from the establishment of singing schools in New England to teach the right kinds of both musical and social values, to twentieth-century classical radio programming like Walter Damrosch’s Music Appreciation Hour (1928–42), which aimed to educate its listening audiences (especially children) in “good music,” thereby elevating their cultural taste.

2. These videos (titled “Meet [orchestra member’s name]”) are still featured on the YouTube Symphony’s page and can be viewed at this link. I am grateful to Sarah Carsman for sharing her research on the YTSO (in which she points out this and several other marketing strategies) with me.

3. Statistics about participants are taken from http://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir/history/vc2-sleep.

Musicians at Work: Ensemble Residencies as Social Relationships

Posted on July 6, 2016 by John Pippen - Analysis, Articles

Eighth Blackbird fits in a rehearsal during their Curtis residency.

Over the last few decades, many American schools of music have embraced the repertoire and missions of new music ensembles. DePauw, Oberlin, Eastman, Mills College, and even Indiana’s Jacob’s School of Music have opened their doors to the new generation of composers and performers creating new music today. While this is hardly news to the readership of NewMusicBox, it marks a significant change in attitude among American higher education institutions. Take, for example, musicologist Susan McClary’s assessment from 1989 that “both popular and postmodern musics are marked as the enemy, and there is still considerable effort exerted to keep them out of the regular curriculum.” Nine years later, Robert Fink summarized his take on the influence of classical music’s institutions thusly: “For the first time, the production and consumption of contemporary art music has broken quite free of institutionalized classical music.” Fink was writing about groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars and their proclivity for performing outside the hallowed spaces of leading institutions.

In contrast to these dour proclamations, today’s schools of music increasingly view new music as a vital and attractive addition to their education mission. A manifestation of this shift is the ensemble residency. Academies across the country routinely hire musicians to teach students both the art and business of professional new music-making. Last year, I had the opportunity to explore the interaction between ensembles and institutions. I spent time with three groups at different schools: Third Coast Percussion at the University of Chicago, the Playground Ensemble at Metropolitan State University Denver, and Eighth Blackbird at the Curtis Institute of Music.[1]

I begin with a scene from my fieldwork in Chicago with Third Coast Percussion:

It’s 5:25 p.m. and Third Coast Percussion is running through their music. The quartet has spent most of the day here, in their studio space on Rockwell Avenue in Chicago, collaborating with composer Jonathan Pfeffer. The composer prefers to write music for people he knows well, and he spent the last two days experimenting with the group and discussing how the piece might work. Pfeffer left a few hours ago, and the quartet has since moved on to music for an upcoming concert. A brief pause occurs after they finish the piece, the members gathering their thoughts.

“We kind of settled into a tempo, and I think we should just roll with that” says Peter Martin. David Skidmore observes that the crescendo at measure thirty could grow louder. They discuss the dynamics and phrasing for a few minutes, but at some point, without my realizing it, the conversation drifts to the old Nickelodeon show, You Can’t Do That on Television. This type of break is not uncommon for these good-humored performers, but it lasts only a few minutes.

“We should, like, take a day off,” David says.

“Like in 2017?” replies Robert Dillon, a sarcastic grin spreading across his face.

The joke is funny, but rings true. The past week had been especially busy, with residency activities at the University of Chicago, a rehearsal with the Chicago Youth Symphony, and collaborative project with Pfeffer. Besides late night meals and occasional rehearsal jokes, the four percussionists have gone without a break for about nine days, often working long hours and hauling equipment from one locale to another. Phones are always close at hand as members check the progress on upcoming projects, contracts, and gig schedules. After laughing off Rob’s joke, they run the piece again, this time with the lights out as they’ll perform it.

I describe this scene in detail because it is typical to a work routine found among Third Coast Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, and the Playground Ensemble. Long days of work followed by rehearsals for quickly approaching gigs was common to all three ensembles. Performers often strove for a high level of musicianship that requires focused attention and lengthy rehearsals of difficult music. Humor was used frequently to lighten the mood, but nothing could stop the relentless approach of deadlines.

When every moment has potential meaning, it can be hard to relax.

These musicians are, to invoke the buzzword of our time, “entrepreneurs.”[2] They “create success” for themselves, an approach touted by arts consultant Astrid Baumgartner. They innovate, collaborate, and embrace what psychologist Carol Dweck dubs the “growth mindset.” Obstacles are transformed into creative guidelines, and programs created to attract audiences with enticing themes. Entrepreneurialism is celebrated by many in the arts scene, but the reality is less sunny than the image often projected by consultants and administrators. Because it valorizes flexibility, opportunism, and social relationships, entrepreneurialism demands constant work. When every moment has potential meaning, it can be hard to relax.

Third Coast Percussion and Eighth Blackbird work together.

Third Coast Percussion and Eighth Blackbird worked together in the summer on creating a special touring show for the upcoming season. From left to right: Third Coast Managing Director Liz Pesnel, percussionist David Skidmore, eighth blackbird percussionist Matthew Duvall, and production manager Rachel Damon.

And work is constant in a small flexible ensemble. During my fieldwork with these three groups, I saw people working at all hours of the day, often leaving one site to report to another. Even breaks could be filled with work: phone calls to arrange the details of an upcoming gig, meetings with collaborators or students, or attending the premier of a friend’s piece. In one case, I sat down with two musicians for a casual lunch and they started discussing an approaching show, prompting one musician to quip, “Sorry to make this a work lunch!” The flexible nature of these ensembles, a seeming hallmark of the new music scene today, requires constant attention to the dozen or so obligations that, like plates spinning on poles, are poised to fall without warning. A grant application is due. Did you send me that budget? Can you help set up chairs for a second? I need to practice that one part. We have a concert and need some spoken notes. Could you prepare something?

Within the residency, tailoring is the working method of the flexible ensemble. Like consultants in the business world, these musical entrepreneurs maintain an influential if somewhat ambiguous relationship with host institutions (Sennett, 2006). At each residency, musicians designed projects (concerts, presentations, and teaching activities) that were somehow tailored to the needs of the institution and the abilities of the ensemble. Work included a variety of teaching and performing activities, as dictated by the nature of the institution and the contract for the residency. This tailoring required regular communication between ensembles and institutions, a somewhat challenging prospect depending on the number of people involved on each side of the consultant relationship. Furthermore, an ensemble’s impact upon an institution was confined by the temporary nature of the residency itself. None of these musicians were actually full-time faculty members, and their ability to shape institutional policy and goals remained limited by their transience. Nevertheless, it was clear to me that ensembles have a strong and infectiously positive impact upon an institution’s students.

In addition to economic and logistical support, residencies provide crucial symbolic capital.

For all three groups, residencies are a major part of professional life and economic livelihood. The two touring ensembles—Third Coast Percussion and Eighth Blackbird—rely heavily on residencies for their income. Residency activities such as teaching and master classes are often important offerings used to secure gigs within the network of music institutions. Such work varies greatly in length, ranging from a few hours of teaching, lecturing, or coaching all the way to weeks of activities spread out throughout the year (or years, as in the case of Eighth Blackbird’s Curtis residency). For the Playground Ensemble, a single residency provides limited financial support, but gives the group access to percussion equipment, rehearsal space, and performance venues.

Cellist and Playground Ensemble member Richard vonFoerster gives feedback to the composer.

During an open reading session for student compositions, cellist and Playground Ensemble member Richard vonFoerster gives feedback to the composer.

In addition to economic and logistical support, residencies provide crucial symbolic capital. The currency of artists for some time, symbolic capital takes the form of prestige and reputation. It is, in essence, the value of your name. Ensembles leverage relationships, prizes, grants, and endorsements from critics and other influential taste-makers to secure future work. The prestige ascribed to a given institution serves as a sort of sociomusical business card in conversations with insiders and outsiders, as Third Coast Percussion member Robert Dillon told me of their Notre Dame residency:

There’s nothing better than being able to go somewhere and say that you’re tied to this larger reputable institution. For people who know nothing [about new music], if we walk in someplace and say we have ensemble residency at the University of Notre Dame, it’s like, “Wow, you guys must be great!” And if you’re talking to presenters or managers, then they know the person who runs the [DeBartolo] Performing Arts Center [at Notre Dame], and so that’s even better.

Members of all three ensembles described a similar view of residencies. The prestige and respect perceived to be held by the institution was, in effect, transferred to the ensemble and provided evidence of the ensembles’ legitimacy and respectability (see further Kingsbury, 1988 and Cottrell, 2004).

Like other aspects of flexible artistic labor life, residencies are developed through and contribute to social relationships. They allow ensembles to foster new contacts and project ideas. During fieldwork, I witnessed plans for future projects flourish in institutional spaces. Students told me about the important lessons they had learned from musicians, and teachers and administrators hailed residencies as part of a broader shift in institutional culture. This was especially true at Curtis, where composition faculty and director of the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble David Ludwig had spearheaded a broader shift in curriculum. In an interview with me, Ludwig described a new emphasis on teaching Curtis students:

how to be self-motivated, how to have artistic intellectual curiosity and apply that to being in the community and to engaging people. It shows a very different way of thinking […] because the school wouldn’t have even thought of that pre-internet, pre ideas of engagement.

Within this context, Eighth Blackbird figured in many ways as a model for the socio-musical entrepreneurs Curtis now seeks to create. Along similar lines, Prof. Peter Schimpf, Chair of Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Department of Music, described his vision: “I want Metro to be sort of a hub [of musical activity].” Playground, for Schimpf, offered a new music spoke, as it were, on this hub of musical offerings.

Eighth Blackbird fits in a rehearsal during their Curtis residency. From left to right: Lisa Kaplan, Yvonne Lam, Nick Photinos, Matthew Duvall, Michael Maccaferri, and former member Tim Munro.

At all three institutions, ensemble members became, to varying extents, part of the educational life and community of the institution, carving out nooks and crannies, as it were, for themselves and for interaction between themselves and students. These types of social relationships were viewed by all as highly valuable when considering the overall value of the residency. The residencies thus reified these relationships into contracted work.

For over thirty years now, musicians, arts workers, and presenters have been building a vibrant scene of musical activity that provides much needed reform to classical music and an alternative to the stodgy programming common within classical music. Creating this scene requires constant energy, constant work, and constant maintenance of social relationships. Projects and programs must be tailored to unique needs, tweaked after they start, and thrown out when they falter. Though rarely examined in the popular press, residencies are an important site in the production of the new music culture so many of us love.

John Pippen

John Pippen teaches courses in ethnomusicology, jazz, and music and culture at the College of Wooster. His primary research has been an extended ethnographic study of the new music scene in Chicago. Pippen has presented his research at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, and College Music Society, among others.

1. For this publication, I have omitted specific details because of the sensitive nature of musicians’ networks. An important issue that remains to be fully explored in the academic literature, musicians often prefer to keep the details of gigs (fees, contracts, struggles) out of public view.

2. Many in new music are wary of this term, as am I. I have spoken to musicians of varying stature who express sincere doubts about the accuracy of the way Baumgartner and others use “entrepreneur.” Others are hesitant to invoke a term they view as connected with neoliberalism (a view I share).

Queer and Loathing in Las Vegas: Performing Community in Hagen’s Vera

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Imani Mosley - Analysis, Articles

Opera is not readily known for portraying inclusion; while many works perform some kind of exoticism seen mostly through colonialist lenses, the locales reflect a mostly Western world and the characters are generally confined to some kind of heteronormative, European sameness. Opera does have its moments; othering, mis-gendering, and bodily discrepancies do appear, mostly in the guise of the otherworldly or magical, in the strange bodies of the castrato or the playful deceit of the trouser role. However, these attempts at difference do not look to address inclusion. If anything, these bodies and voices are isolated and marginalized, if even human. Aside from these instances, the typical operatic character framework does not present difference of a sexual, gendered, or racial kind.

New stories are being told and the medium by which composers can often portray the non-heteronormative, the queer, the ethnic, and otherwise unseen is through the voice.

The first half of the 20th century saw the demise of the great operatic heroine and out of the fracture arose a focus on male roles, ensemble casts, and female roles singing in a completely new way. And as opera became a more racially integrated affair, new disconnects emerged while similarly allowing for new audiences to see their bodies presented as operatic vehicles. The combination of extended vocal techniques, technology, and radical staging stood as an operatic representation of a seemingly more progressive society. Opera and contemporary culture, for example, have come drastically close to each other in works like Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole, and Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna. New stories are being told and the medium by which composers can often portray the non-heteronormative, the queer, the ethnic, and otherwise unseen is through the voice.

Shequida Hall (Vera); Center for Contemporary Opera, New York City. Photo by Mel Rosenthal

Daron Hagen’s 2003 opera Vera of Las Vegas stands as a meeting of both character and vocal difference set in the underbelly of Las Vegas—a world of strippers, drag queens, INS agents, and gamblers. The opera is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-lite, recalling the structure of Weill’s Mahagonny-Singspiel. The eponymous character is sung by a countertenor, a voice type that is still integrating itself into current performance practice and repertoire. The operatic countertenor is a construct of the late 20th century, one that is now synonymous with historically informed operatic performance practice. Recent operas that use countertenors, such as those by Glass, Adès, and Benjamin, exploit the fantastical, comic, and regal attributes associated with countertenor performance—a recalling of those otherworldly bodies from 18th-century Italian opera. In Hagen’s opera, however, we see something quite different. Here, a male countertenor sings in drag, performing a kind of inverse trouser role. This is most notable when examining the opera’s premiere which featured opera singer and drag artist Shequida singing the role of Vera Allemagne.

Vera herself is a drag queen, complicating matters further as the type of drag vocal performance to which we might be accustomed—where a drag queen either lip syncs or sings “as a woman”—does not seem to translate onto the operatic stage. The Lacanian disassociation of voice from body that often happens by audiences attending opera is further removed here: not only do we not recognize the voice, we do not recognize the body from which it comes. Just as Strauss’s Octavian makes us question exactly who we are listening to in Der Rosenkavalier, Vera’s many gendered levels obfuscates any attempt at locating an Ur-voice or Ur-body. The character of Vera is African-American, an important aspect to the narrative of the story. The singers who have performed Vera have been primarily countertenors of color including Brian Asawa and Eduardo Lopez de Casas, and in his program notes, Hagen compares Vera to Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, conjuring up images of black bodies performing a kind of transcendent yet palpable otherness. While all of these bodily markers may seem defining, the separation that still occurs with the presentation of the high male voice gives the role an emptiness onto which several bodies can be mapped. Hagen notes that this quality made the role “viable for many more audiences.”[1]

Brian Azawa (Vera), Heidi Moss (Doll); West Edge Opera; Oakland, CA. Photo by J Buschbaum

Visibly and dramatically, there is always that flash of maleness, both for the characters within the opera and for the audience as well. We know that Vera is more than she seems. But what some would call the inherent vocal drag nature of the countertenor—a term that musicologist Jelena Novak applies to the castrato—locks the character into a state of femininity, however altered that state might be. This is reinforced dramatically when Vera participates in the act of heteronormative marriage, where she stands in as a bride wed to a male groom. The groom’s awareness of Vera’s double self seems of little issue, reinforcing the female role in this performative marital act for the audience. But despite this final act, Vera’s character is different, and she proclaims as much in her last aria. Her references to Aschenbach and Tadzio, Abelard and Héloïse, display the types of love stories in which Vera recognizes herself, much to her chagrin. The plausibly more well-known relationship of Aschenbach and Tadzio from Thomas Mann’s novella Der Tod in Venedig and popularized in Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice, recalls to those in the know complicated constructions of desire, masculinity, and ephebophilia. For Abelard, the 12th-century French philosopher, and Héloïse, the young French girl of letters, the reference conjures up the secret and illicit, the sacred, profane, mystical, as well as tragic. Vera’s previous encounters with men have placed her in the role of Tadzio and Héloïse, an image she actively denounces while fighting against the realization that this might indeed be part of her truth. She is both normative and non-normative, male and female, empowered and marginalized. And just as those names carry meaning for both Vera and the listening audience, so does her own, as pointed out by John Redmond.[2] Her surname, Loman, connects her back to Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman; she is both the seller and the experience to be sold. She exists as the liminality through which anything is possible.

Catchalls; Opera Theater Ireland, Dublin. Photo courtesy Opera Theater

The ability of contemporary opera to portray radical bodily performances, rather than use race, gender, and voice to uphold ingrained operatic tropes, allows access for underrepresented groups to see themselves depicted on stage. And though, like Mahagonny, Vera presents underbelly and camp, the work is an operatic offshoot of other theatrical arts that present counterculture performance. Vera is a somewhat extreme example—one can look to the male homosociality of Jake Heggie’s Moby Dick as another example of the performing of hidden communities—but it identifies the power of the voice-body construct in opera and its ability to make opera a mirror of a more contemporary audience.

Imani Mosley is a bassoonist and Ph.D. student in musicology at Duke University, specializing in mid-20th century British and American Music, opera, and the music of Benjamin Britten. Her dissertation focuses on the queering of heteronormative operatic tropes in Britten’s mid-century operas and the reception history surrounding their premieres.

1. Daron Hagen, “Vera of Las Vegas: Evolution of a Cult Opera,” https://youtu.be/hGGp5Ko8vRo.

2. John Redmond, “Distrusting the Self,” The Poetry Ireland Review, 71 (2001), 52-57. “For Vera Loman, a cross-dressing lapdancer, nomen est omen … Vera is a seller, in this case of his gender. He/she, like the opera’s setting, embodies the consumerism at the heart of American society; his is a character available for consumption by the other characters; his is an absence of identity, an emptiness reflected by the kitsch casino environment.” (first italics Redmond’s, second italics mine)

Imagining Community at Bang on a Can’s First Marathon

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Will Robin - Analysis, Articles

“Your ideology cannot write the music for you,” declared composer David Lang in a 1988 Letter to the Editor, published in the New York Times. Lang was responding to a profile of composer Charles Wuorinen, in which the elder serialist railed against the dangers of populism, minimalism, and multiculturalism. In a strong rebuke, Lang chastised Wuorinen for his doctrinaire attitude and the stranglehold that serialism had maintained on American composition. He wrote:

We must recognize that a composer’s world is divided into two major activities: writing the music and associating with those who think and write similarly. Such associations may consider themselves schools of musical thought, and members may be proud of their membership, and they may actually believe that their way of composing is the only legitimate way. It is easy to see that if such a school gets in power it might try to remake the musical world in its own image.[1]

Lang signed his letter “Artistic director, Bang on a Can Festival, New York, N.Y.” A month before it was published, Lang and his colleagues Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe had curated the second annual Bang on a Can marathon on the Lower East Side. And in the twenty-eight years since that letter, Bang on a Can has grown into a multi-faceted umbrella organization that sponsors marathon concerts, an All-Stars ensemble, and the Cantaloupe record label, not to mention a summer festival, marching band, commissioning fund, and State Department partnership. The expansion of Bang on a Can—from its first scrappy marathon in SoHo in 1987 to its presence at Brookfield Place near One World Trade Center today—is remarkable in an age of arts austerity. And the Pulitzer Prizes awarded to Lang in 2008 and Julia Wolfe in 2015 might confirm that it is a movement, if not a school, currently in power; one could similarly argue that Bang on a Can has remade the musical world in its own image.

What might that image be? From the beginnings of Bang on a Can, the collective emphasized community. If for Wuorinen, serialism represented the only legitimate way of composing, then for Lang and his colleagues, community might have represented the only legitimate way of being a composer. The “About” section of the organization’s website declares “Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found.” Or, as Wolfe told an interviewer in 1995:

When David Lang, Michael Gordon, and I found ourselves in New York in 1986, we didn’t see an exciting outlet for our music. Things were very polarized—academic music uptown, with audiences filled with new music specialists, a very critical atmosphere, and everyone in tuxes, and downtown, another uniform, black t-shirts and another serious pretension. Neither side was really fun, and there was a whole new generation of composers who didn’t fit in anywhere.
We wanted to provide a place for new music in society. It wasn’t like other art. People knew who the new painters were, the writers, the filmmakers. But music was perceived as this really elitist thing—academic, clever, scientific, inaccessible. Nobody cared if people came to the concerts. And the music reflected that. It got so removed from life. It was important to us to find a new audience.
So we decided to make a happening. As a joke, we called it the First Annual Bang on a Can Festival. We didn’t think there’d be another one. We put pieces together that were really strong and belonged to different ideologies or not to any ideology, defying category, falling between the cracks.[2]

It is worth examining, then, how exactly that communal ethos came about. If you’ve kept up with our NewMusicBox series, you have already read about several ways in which community is enacted in new music: in the activities of experimental collectives, in the privileging of listening practices, in the aesthetics of avant-garde operas, and in the labor of administrators. Equally essential to the construction of community is the creation of a shared history: a rhetoric and a narrative about who the community is, and what its values are. And in order to create a new kind of community, Bang on a Can had to overplay its hand. Community had to be performed; it was not enough to bring people or musical styles together, they had to be continually emphasized, made a part of the story and eventually the history of the institution.

Bang on a Can’s first marathon, at the Exit Art gallery in SoHo in May 1987, represents an origin point for the kind of community that the founding composers sought to build. So for this essay on new music and community, I’d like to briefly meditate on one particular time slot in that marathon, which has played a perhaps oversized role in the history of Bang on a Can. At 11 p.m., Milton Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer is followed by Steve Reich’s Four Organs–total serialism juxtaposed with early minimalism, uptown next to downtown.

The music of the first Bang on a Can marathon was, as a whole, fairly eclectic: John Cage’s Ryoanji and George Crumb’s Black Angels, Igor Stravinsky’s Agon and Pauline Oliveros’s Tuning Meditation, Lee Hyla’s In Double Light and Lois V Vierk’s Manhattan Cascade. But Reich next to Babbitt wasn’t just a natural result of this mixing of musical styles; it represented a strategic move, one that constructed a specific mission for the nascent organization. In a New York Times review of the 1987 marathon, critic Bernard Holland observed that “the program was arranged with contrast in mind. Thus, as the organizers note with satisfaction, Milton Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer rubbed shoulders with Steve Reich’s Four Organs.”[3] [Emphasis mine.] Bang on a Can not only placed these pieces into juxtaposition, they performed that juxtaposition, making it unmistakable to their audiences. Babbitt himself was certainly aware of his odd-duck status at the concert, as archival audio of his introduction to the Vision and Prayer performance reveals. Following healthy applause, Babbitt slyly remarks:

I’m delighted to hear that my reputation hasn’t penetrated this far downtown, even though I went to school right around the corner. The quiet little piece of mine which you’re about to hear, Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesized tape, is almost certainly the oldest piece on the program – I say almost certainly because we have no chronologies on the program, but I’m almost certain because it’s almost certainly written before many of the composers on the program were born.[4]

And for the Bang on a Can directors, the Reich/Babbitt juxtaposition also had aesthetic implications. As Wolfe put it in 1995, she and her cohort sought out music that fell between the cracks. But they also attempted to program music that they felt represented strongly disparate idioms. In her 2012 dissertation, Wolfe describes the Reich/Babbitt encounter—or non-encounter—of 1987:

Reich entered as Babbitt left, or possibly Babbitt left as Reich entered. There was clearly no interest in meeting on either side. At that point, to our knowledge, no one had programmed the music of Milton Babbitt and Steve Reich on the same event. Babbitt and Reich represented two very different points of view, American Modernism and American Minimalism, or what was called Uptown and Downtown. When Babbitt introduced his piece he joked, “sorry I got here late, but I got lost––Iʼve never been this far downtown before.” At that first marathon concert we embraced this clash of disparate philosophies. We wanted contrasting musics––powerful in their own right regardless of style or aesthetic.[5]

Wolfe titled her dissertation “Embracing the Clash,” and that early “clash” became an all-encompassing metaphor for Bang on a Can, extending out into its programming of non-Western music, rock, and free improvisation. Indeed, the word “eclectic” has clung to the institution more closely than perhaps any other descriptor (the first marathon was billed as an “eclectic supermix,” a phrase that has endured in the organization’s marketing). It is also striking that Wolfe recalls Babbitt as having said that he had never been that far downtown, given that—as Babbitt actually remarked in his introduction—he went to school right around the corner. But the downtown of the 1930s, when Babbitt attended NYU, was quite different from that of the 1980s; it is unsurprising that, in associating Babbitt with the uptown world for which he was later known, Wolfe assumed the composer’s geographical purview did not include SoHo.

The Reich/Babbitt juxtaposition, though, wasn’t only about clashing. It was about resolution: imagining a new kind of new music community, one that would bring together two disparate scenes. As Lang told Kyle Gann in 1993:

When we started BoaC, we looked around and the concerts we saw weren’t exciting. If you went to hear Speculum Musicae, there was invariably one composer doing great stuff in an ugly language, and the others were bad composers working in the same ugly language. Same thing Downtown: there’d be a free, sonic piece by a really good composer and a bad sonic piece right behind it. Pieces were being grouped by ideology, not quality. We thought, “What would happen if you had the best academic piece, the best static piece, the best minimalist piece, the best improv piece, whatever, all next to each other?” At the first festival we played Milton Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer next to Steve Reich’s Four Organs. Musicians knew that if they liked one they weren’t supposed to like the other, but the audience didn’t know that.[6]

Stepping past ideologies, placing oneself not only not within an uptown or downtown camp, but also beyond any squabbles between them, became a core mythos of Bang on a Can. It’s notable that neither the Reich nor the Babbitt was released on the early Bang on a Can albums on the CRI label, which drew from live recordings of the marathons; thirty-five minutes of music within a twelve-hour concert became essential to the history of the institution, not as a tangible sonic document but as a story. Programming Reich alongside Babbitt imagined a musical world in which uptown and downtown were irrelevant, a community that Bang on a Can went on to create in its image.

Many factors contributed to a sense of community at the early Bang on a Can marathons: a cohort of Yale graduates, beer for sale in the back, composers informally introducing their pieces, the motto “Come and go as you like, or stay all day.” But symbolic gestures create communities as well. And this is, in a way, an ideology, if not the pernicious kind that Lang suggests about Wuorinen. Ideology is part of what constructs communities, sustains them, and keeps them together. The ideology of Wuorinen foregrounded a narrow conception of art music as privileged above other styles and genres, what Lang called in his Letter to the Editor “rooting out dissent with the ardor of holy warriors on a serial jihad”; the ideology of Bang on a Can is that of, as its website declares, “building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders.”[7]

Will Robin

William Robin is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Two days ago, he defended his dissertation “A Scene Without A Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the Twenty-First Century,” and in the fall he will begin an appointment as assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland. In spring 2015, the Journal of Musicology published his article “Traveling with Ancient Music: Intellectual and Transatlantic Currents in American Psalmody Reform,” which reassesses the Europeanization of American sacred music at the turn of the 19th century by examining the impact of transatlantic travel. Robin is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and received an ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2014 for the NewMusicBox article “Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms.”

1. David Lang, “Body Count,” New York Times, 26 June 1988.

2. Julia Wolfe, quoted in program brochure for Great Performers at Lincoln Center Bang on a Can All-Stars, 15 March 1995.

3. Bernard Holland, “Music: The Bang on a Can Festival,” New York Times, 14 May 1987. Emphasis mine.

4. Milton Babbitt, spoken introduction at Bang on a Can Festival, 11 May 1987. Author’s transcription of archival audio materials from WNYC archives, printed with permission of WNYC.

5. Wolfe, “Embracing the Clash” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012),

6. Lang, quoted in Kyle Gann, “After Ugly Music,” Village Voice, 1 June 1993.

7. Lang, “Body Count”; Bang on a Can, “About Us,” http://bangonacan.org/about_us.

Forging Institutional Networks through BAM’s Next Wave Festival

Posted on June 15, 2016 by Sasha Metcalf - Analysis, Articles

A 1982 advertisement for Cutty Sark whiskey placed Philip Glass above a scotch on the rocks. Composers aren’t the usual suspects for hard liquor ads, so why is Glass here? Glass recently admitted in his memoir that he agreed to do the ad because he needed the money ($15,000) to fund making the orchestra parts for his opera Akhnaten (1983).[1] Still, a more intriguing question remains: why would the image of Glass appeal to the target consumer of Cutty Sark whiskey? A brief biography in the ad reads, “Success hasn’t made Glass any less of a maverick.” Like the designers of this ad, critics and scholars generally view Glass as the sole agent of his popularity, operating outside of traditional musical institutions as an iconoclastic “American maverick.”[2]

It is true that Glass had achieved considerable fame working independently of the university, which was the main “institution” for contemporary composers at the time. The ad plays to this familiar image of Glass as a self-made man. Glass rose to fame by his bootstraps: he worked as a taxi driver and plumber to pay the bills. His minimalist music first attracted attention in a subculture of 1960s New York avant-garde artists and audiences, the inhabitants of the lofts and galleries of lower Manhattan. Perhaps the quintessential example of Glass’s maverick persona was when he and theater designer/director Robert Wilson rented out the Metropolitan Opera House on its off nights for the 1976 United States premiere of Einstein on the Beach. Beyond the Cutty Sark ad, numerous biographies of Glass memorialize these aspects of his career and perpetuate the idea that Glass rose to fame on his own without institutional support.

In a previous article in this series, Ryan Ebright noted the crucial roles of Glass’s collaborators in seminal works like Satyagraha. Attributing Glass’s success entirely to his creative iconoclasm also ignores the substantial community of impresarios and patrons who have influenced his work and reception history. Just as the whiskey company co-opted Glass’s image, in the 1980s an emergent network of U.S. arts administrators from presenting institutions such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and funding organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation used Glass as the poster child for their own set of concerns. These administrators expressed concern with the scarcity of new American operas and the stagnation of standard repertory in major opera houses of the United States. They were further troubled by the fact that American composers like Glass were receiving more attention in Europe; Glass’s first real opera commissions—Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984)—came from state-sponsored opera houses in the Netherlands and Germany. These administrators devised a solution that borrowed from the vital world of avant-garde music theater, and in so doing generated an institutional support system that sustained Glass’s opera career throughout the 1980s and beyond.

Harvey Lichtenstein (Photo by Catherine Noren)

One of the key impresarios who reshaped the American operatic landscape was Harvey Lichtenstein at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). When Lichtenstein became executive director of BAM in 1967, he refashioned it into a principal center for contemporary dance, music, and theater in the U.S. His undertakings culminated in the Next Wave Festival, an annual two-month program of experimental performances that made him a leading impresario of the avant-garde. One of the most successful offerings of the first Next Wave series in 1981 was the American premiere of Satyagraha by Glass. This production was not a singular engagement; over the years, Lichtenstein consistently promoted Glass, lauding him as a crossover artist whose output could reach a wider audience than the conservative fare offered by traditional opera companies.

Between October and December of 1982, Lichtenstein met with prospective Next Wave funders. He proposed that the festival be the nucleus for a national production program involving multiple presenting organizations. Tours of new large-scale works would expose areas outside of New York to the work of American experimental artists—in particular, those who emerged from the Downtown New York scene. United by their belief in the potential of the American experimental music theater vanguard, the Next Wave meetings stimulated conversation between representatives from corporate, national, and private funding entities and Downtown-affiliated artists and administrators.

Image courtesy BAM Hamm Archives

Funding meeting minutes from the BAM Hamm archives offer a glimpse of these pivotal administrative discussions. Meeting attendees included representatives from the National Endowment for the Arts, AT&T, the Rockefeller Foundation, Warner Communications, the Ford Foundation, and presenting organizations—Artpark, Walker Art Center, the Spoleto Festival, and UC Berkeley Arts and Lectures. Guest speakers were Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. Also present were two key players in the Downtown arts scene: Roselee Goldberg, director of communications for Diane von Furstenberg, Inc. and former director of performances at The Kitchen; and Tim Carr, a Next Wave program consultant who also worked for The Kitchen. Indeed, The Kitchen, a smaller, independent organization, had been a hub for avant-garde music, allowing composers like Glass to organize their own concerts and hosting its own festival, New Music New York, in 1979. The fact that Lichtenstein hired Kitchen personnel to help design BAM programming was a testament to his commitment to the creative output of the Downtown scene. Under Lichtenstein’s direction, Downtown administrators and artists strategized with corporate and other major funders how to amplify Downtown vanguard works in mainstream institutions and festivals like BAM.

Together, the meeting attendees discussed the difficulties in presenting large-scale works in the United States. Although the Next Wave proposal included a wide range of artistic genres, meeting participants tended to draw attention to emerging forms of opera and music theater—especially those represented by Glass. During the meetings, Glass narrated the history of his large-scale works, all of which premiered in Europe and had only received U.S. exposure in New York. He described the issues artists faced when producing new works with U.S. opera companies: a mentality set against new works, which he believed was an educational problem.[3] Lee Gillespie, a director of the National Opera Institute, agreed with Glass’s assessment and urged a strong promotional campaign for new works, citing statistics that the average age of most opera-goers was fifty-three years old and that they mainly connected to 19th-century opera repertoire.[4] The meeting participants believed that active institutional support—not simply money, but the advocacy of influential impresarios, staff, and, eventually, adventurous audiences—was crucial to the survival of new work. For this reason, the Next Wave program had an outreach component: educational materials and symposia for touring productions.

The meeting attendees also agreed that the complexity of innovative large-scale works required new linkages among presenting institutions, artists, and corporations to facilitate the productions. Anne Alexander, staff manager of AT&T, noted that the cooperation of multiple philanthropic organizations was necessary to realize these works in the manner they deserved. After the final meeting, Howard Klein, arts director for the Rockefeller Foundation, indicated that he was prepared to support the program, but its scale required a consortium of funders to sustain it. Other major funders then joined in. Altogether, by 1984, BAM raised about $1.1 million in public and private sponsors. For a complete accounting of the contributions, see below.[5]

Rockefeller Foundation $250,000
Ford Foundation 100,000
The Howard Gilman Foundation 100,000
National Endowment for the Arts 200,000
National Endowment for the Humanities 40,000
Warner Communications Inc. 50,000
AT&T 50,000
Dayton-Hudson Foundation 12,500
Producers Council 50,000
CIGNA 25,000
WilliWear Ltd. 33,000
Pew Trust 50,000
Walker Art Center 40,000

In this way, Lichtenstein was instrumental in coordinating an institutional network to support American experimental music. Although this network tended not to include more traditional arts organizations like university music departments and the Metropolitan Opera, its existence nuances the “maverick” label that has so often been attached to musical experimentalists like Glass. Glass was both a poster child for the future of American opera in funding meeting discussions and a staple in BAM programming. Throughout the 1980s, Glass’s operas were featured more often than any other opera or music-theater composer. Perhaps Glass owed whatever moneys he made from the Cutty Sark ad not to his creative iconoclasm alone, but also to his ability to find supportive collaborators—especially in the form of arts administrators.

Sasha Metcalf

Sasha Metcalf recently completed her Ph.D. in musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is now a lecturer in the writing program. Her research examines how institutions and impresarios have shaped the history of late 20th-century American music.

1. Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir (New York: Liveright, 2015), 281-2.

2. For representative scholarship on the American maverick tradition, see Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). The American maverick narrative also pervades publicity materials for Michael Tilson Thomas’s American Mavericks Festival. See American Mavericks: Home, http://americanmavericks.org/ (accessed September 7, 2015).

3. Next Wave Patron Council Meeting Minutes, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, October 1, 1982, BAM Hamm Archives.

4. Ibid.

5. The Next Wave Production and Touring Fund Proposal, January 26, 1984, BAM Hamm Archives.

“People Power”—The Communal Ethos of Satyagraha

Posted on June 8, 2016 by Ryan Ebright - Analysis, Articles

In the chilly night air of December 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered outside on Lincoln Center Plaza. Inside the nearby Metropolitan Opera House, the third act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha drew to a close as the character of Mahatma Gandhi proclaimed: “When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age…for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.” Shortly thereafter, Glass led the Occupy demonstrators in a recitation of these same words. Driving home the link between OWS and the opera, a man exhorted departing patrons to cross the police barricades and join the crowd of activists. “What would Gandhi do?” he bellowed. “It’s a real life play! The opera is your life! Your life is the opera Satyagraha!”

“What would Gandhi do?” Although rhetorical in nature, the question nevertheless hints at an ethos that animates both Satyagraha and the OWS movement: community.

The cultivation of community is fundamental to new music, as other essays in this series demonstrate. Community as an ideal takes various forms, from Bang on a Can’s conscious programming of antithetical musical styles to implicit critiques of traditional musical authorship in collectives such as Pulsa and the Theater of Eternal Music. In these, community finds expression through social practice. But how does this communal ethos actually translate into music (as one audience member asked at the recent New Music Gathering)? In Satyagraha, this value is encoded both musically and dramatically. Moreover, community informs not only the relations between artistic collaborators, but also extends to the audience.

Writing for an NEA review of American opera in 1988, Glass dismissed what he called “simple authorship,” which might be understood with reference to the fact that operas are almost always identified simply by their composer: Bizet’s Carmen, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Glass’s Satyagraha. (In reality, the authorship of most operas is more complicated.) Referencing the 1980s influx of experimental artists into the opera world—a transformation brought out in part by a network of risk-taking impresarios and philanthropic institutions—Glass championed a complex model of authorship:

One of the big differences between the Italian tradition of repertory opera and the contemporary tradition—mostly people younger than myself and myself—is that this tends to be group work. You can use the word collaboration…
That’s simply the way we work. I come from a tradition of group theater work…This is the contemporary tradition of theater, which has only just begun to be practiced in the world of opera.
…We’re looking at a real revolution—a revolution in methods of working, collaborative ways of working, ways pieces are produced and ways they ask the audience to perceive them.[1]

Glass’s first commissioned opera, Satyagraha, was the product of this collaborative ideal.

Less than a month after Einstein on the Beach appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in November 1976, Glass had partnered with writer and artist Constance DeJong, a friend from SoHo, for his new project. Within a year or so, Robert Israel—another SoHo acquaintance who happened to be serving a three-year residency at the commissioning institution, the Netherlands Opera—joined Glass and DeJong. Although Glass had the initial idea for the opera’s subject, together these three developed the primary components of the opera—music, text, image. (Movement would come at a later stage via director David Pountney.)

Borrowing a strategy from various mid-century avant-garde theater collectives, Glass, DeJong, and Israel decided that image and movement should carry the weight of the non-linear, episodic narrative of Gandhi’s South African years. In a move that shifted authority away from traditional operatic narrative devices of words and music, DeJong constructed the Sanskrit libretto using excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita, while Glass composed in a newly developed post-minimalist style that resists narrative and representation.[2] In de-familiarizing text and music, the collaborators worked to destabilize conventional operatic notions of authorship. Under this aesthetic, no single element dominates the theatrical discourse, rendering meaning ambivalent.

This, according to Glass’s understanding of Cage’s maxim, leaves room for the audience to “complete” the work. By bringing together the parallel layers of music, image, movement, and text in their subjective (yet communal) experiences of Satyagraha, spectators join in the process of authorship. They derive their own meanings at different points of the opera, and in doing so become part of a larger community.

Satyagraha expresses community through its internal features as well. Both music and dramaturgy foreground the collective human element necessary for the realization of Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience. Although the opera is nominally about Gandhi, the focus lies more on the communities he fostered. This shift in emphasis took shape over the course of multiple drafts of the plot—one of the earliest of which consisted of twelve chronological scenes. In a 2014 interview, DeJong recalled this development:

At some point, everything crystallized and changed when the interest became not on biography but on the genesis of non-violent civil disobedience…now, not only was the subject vaguely interesting, it was superbly interesting and relevant, and it was about an idea and not a person. And that really mattered to me. Then, soon, the opera really became about the continuity of an idea…

The first page of Constance DeJong’s second outline of <em>Satyagraha</em>.

The first page of Constance DeJong’s second outline of Satyagraha.

Musically, this communal ethos meant that the solo vocal virtuosity typical of much opera was discarded in favor of small ensemble and large choral numbers. The chorus shoulders four out of the seven scenes, leading Glass to characterize Satyagraha as “practically a choral opera.” DeJong stresses the importance of the chorus in starker terms:

If you have a political movement, you have to have people. A real central character to Satyagraha is the chorus. They’re not there supporting the soloists, which is a very unusual feature of an opera. They have those big scenes, the most dramatic scenes, actually, in the first and second act. They function as a character. The dimension that brings to the opera musically is huge.

Dramaturgically, DeJong, Glass, and Israel focus attention on episodes from Gandhi’s South African sojourn that demonstrate the power of community. The opera’s second scene, for instance, reenacts the formation of Tolstoy Farm in 1910, a co-operative commonwealth that served as the headquarters of Gandhi’s South African campaign.

Scene Structure of Satyagraha

In an overt testament to their own experiences of communal action, the collaborators chose to have Martin Luther King, Jr. serve as a historical “witness” to the culminating final scene, which represents Gandhi’s 1913 Newcastle March. In a 2014 interview, Israel reflected that the decision to link Gandhi with MLK “couldn’t have happened without young people having been involved in Civil Rights, in concern about the war.” Israel’s wife was one such young person, having served as an activist in 1960s Alabama.

As if to emphasize the importance of collective action, Glass positioned the chorus at the musical center of the final act. Moreover, what is implicit in Gandhi’s closing lines—the reference to reincarnation—becomes explicit in the opera’s staging, as time and space bleed together. In the premiere production, over the course of the final scene Alabama state troopers removed members of Gandhi’s satyagraha army—i.e., the chorus—from the stage, until Gandhi and King were left alone. In the closing moments of the opera, the satyagraha army appeared in the starry night sky behind King, thus visually transferring the idea of non-violent civil disobedience across time and space from turn-of-the-century South Africa to the United States at mid-century.

Production photo of <em>Satyagraha</em>, 1980

Production photo of Satyagraha, 1980

The music of Satyagraha participates in this transfer as well, albeit in a less concrete way. In the opening and throughout most of the Act III, Glass employs a chaconne that slides between two harmonic poles: F minor to E major.

In the final section of the act, however, this relationship between F and E undergoes a transformation which, when heard in the context of the third act mise-en-scène, suggests the transfer of Gandhi’s ideals and legacy to King. Once Gandhi and King remain alone onstage, a harmonic transformation crystallizes beneath Gandhi’s repetitions of a rising Phrygian scale on E. The F minor of the opening chaconne evolves into F major; E major becomes an implied E minor. Only in the concluding two measures does the ambiguity of the E minor clarify into C major—virtue is set on her seat again, the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice.

When Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott reimagined the opera for the ENO–Met co-production in 2007–08 (revised in 2011–12), the emphasis on collective action took on a modified form that later resonated with the Occupy movement. In this rendering, members of the Improbable Theatre Company share the symbolic mantle of satyagraha with the chorus. Garbed in the muted, earthy costumes of a lower socio-economic caste, the so-called Skills Ensemble stands in deliberate contrast to the perceived opulence of the operatic genre. Throughout they remain a continuous but silent presence, creating and manipulating huge puppets, changing the sets, and assuming the roles of Tolstoy, Tagore, and King. Crouch’s reasoning was straightforward: “We wanted to create transformations using people rather than big stage machinery.”

The symbolic role of the Skills Ensemble is most apparent in the closing act, where the temporal blending of the 1913 Newcastle March and the Civil Rights movement extends into the present, as police in contemporary riot gear descend on Gandhi’s comrades. At the opera’s conclusion, the stagehands alone remain on stage with Gandhi and King. This reimagining of the voiceless, lower-caste stagehands—the embodied means of production, the 99%—as the embodiment of satyagraha offers a poignant reflection of pressing 21st-century concerns over rising inequality and political disenfranchisement.

“What would Gandhi do?” Foster community, because ideas ultimately rely on people, much as new music depends on a vibrant network of committed performers, composers, presenters, collaborators, and audiences. In Satyagraha, this communal ethos emerges musically, dramaturgically, and in the acts of creation and audience reception. “Gandhi’s leadership,” Crouch pointed out, “was obviously massively important, but what he achieved was done through people power.”

Ryan Ebright is an instructor in musicology at Bowling Green State University. His research focuses on music for the voice, stage, and screen, with an emphasis on 20th- & 21st-century opera, minimalism, and 19th-century Lieder. His current book project, Making American Opera for the Modern Age, centers on opera in the U.S. after Einstein on the Beach.

1. Philip Glass, “Philip Glass. Composer. New York City,” ARTSREVIEW 5, no. 1: America’s Opera, ed. Dodie Kazanjian (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1988), 18.

2. See, for instance, Timothy Johnson, “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique?” Musical Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter): 742–44.

Communal Experimentalism in the Sixties: The Pulsa Group

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Kerry O'Brien - Analysis, Articles

Serge Tcherepnin, brainwave experiments at Harmony Ranch, 1970

Countless forms of experimental music took place communally in the sixties, but much of that music eludes our histories of American experimentalism. Many groups didn’t produce scores or recordings or even hold formal events or concerts; many people didn’t assemble officially as “groups.” When we do reflect upon communal experimental music, we might recall well-known ensembles like the Theater of Eternal Music/Dream Syndicate and the Sonic Arts Union, or slightly less-known groups like USCO and Group 212. These ensembles were communal to different degrees and at various stages of music making—from the collaborative creation of works to each individual’s prominence within an ensemble to the eventual ownership of compositions and recordings. One collaborative group that sought to both live their lives and make their music communally was the collective Pulsa. As a group dedicated to exploring “perceptible wave energies” through light and sound, Pulsa created art and music that not only made group collaborations audible and palpable, but they also reminded their audiences and participants—through light and sound—that actions have effects.

Pulsa, Harmony Ranch, Oxford Connecticut, ca. 1969 (source)

Pulsa participated in a massive communalist movement in the United States. Between 1967 and 1970, tens of thousands of Americans turned away from outward political action and went “back to the land,” joining what historian Fred Turner has called the “New Communalist” movement. Unlike the more explicitly political New Left, many of these New Communalists believed that the revolution wasn’t outwardly political but inwardly transformative—a revolution attained through interpersonal relationships and experiments with consciousness. Although many who joined communes eschewed electronics and large-scale technologies, a certain strand of this movement embraced small-scale tech like strobe lights, amplifiers, and slide projectors, along with bodily technologies like yoga, meditation, and hallucinogens. Pulsa was thoroughly plugged into this techno-powered back-to-the-land movement.

Pulsa was thoroughly plugged into this techno-powered back-to-the-land movement.

The Whole Earth Catalog—called by Todd Gitlin a “Sears catalog” for the sixties counterculture—is an eclectic artifact of the time period. This catalog incorporated, among hundreds of other things, pamphlets on how to build a teepee, a yurt, or a geodesic dome; tips on organic farming, mountaineering, and hitchhiking—practical information for going “back to the land.” But the catalog also included blurbs about books on cybernetics and early systems theory; advertisements for tape recorders, Moog synthesizers, and John Cage’s most recent books Silence and A Year from Monday. The catalog also featured an ad for the art and science organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), of which Pulsa formed the New Haven E.A.T. Local Chapter.

Founded in 1966 and active through 1973, Pulsa was an experimental collective based in Oxford, Connecticut. The group consisted of 7-10 people working in various disciplines, including painting, architecture, film, music, electronic engineering, psychology, mathematics, and computer programming. They lived together communally on a property called Harmony Ranch, and they also organized events at a downtown New Haven loft where, over the years, they hosted La Monte Young, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Serge Tcherepnin, Richard Teitelbaum, and many others.*

In their essay “Notes on Group Process,” Pulsa—who always published collectively—described their central objective as developing “techniques for controlling perceptible wave energies.” Despite the varying specializations of its members, Pulsa aimed for each individual to be familiar with every dimension of a project to allow for the “complete interchangeability of roles.” By 1969, Pulsa was collaborating with a neuro-physiologist, attempting to model their working processes on the parallel processes of the human brain, which was “capable of simultaneously performing a variety of interactive operations.”

Pulsa described gardening as equal in significance to their more public projects and further emphasized the symbiotic relationship between their creative and agricultural work.

In working with wave energies, part of Pulsa’s work dealt with often invisible or inaudible materials like heat, sound, and light. For instance, in early 1970, Pulsa held an installation in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art’s Outdoor Sculpture Garden. In the MoMA garden, Pulsa aimed to gather “environmental information,” including sound, light, movement, and heat, using microphones, infrared sensors, and photocells. They then fed that information back into the garden using strobe lights, infrared heaters, and loudspeakers. Pulsa’s installation persisted 24 hours a day for two months, in the winter of early 1970, so even in the middle of the night, a strong gust of wind, the headlights of a passing car, or falling snow would trigger a response within the garden. And since Pulsa’s MoMA garden was receptive to heat, the mere presence of a body walking through the garden would be detected by infrared sensors and responded to with strobe lights and loudspeakers.

Pulsa Installation for Spaces Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, NYC, 1970 (source)

Beyond their larger installations, the majority of Pulsa’s work took place at their commune, where they could experiment with wave energies in everyday life, including tending to their farm at Harmony Ranch. In an essay from György Kepes’s collection Arts of the Environment, Pulsa described gardening as equal in significance to their more public projects and further emphasized the symbiotic relationship between their creative and agricultural work.

We grow many kinds of vegetables organically on the farm. Out of a half-acre garden we grew enough vegetables to feed ourselves, supply our neighbors, and barter with organic food stores. Agriculture provides information about long-term growth rhythms and is comparable in scale and as an energy to Pulsa’s other art works.

One of Pulsa’s main investigations with wave energies was conducted through brainwave experiments. In these experiments, participants would attach electrodes to their forehead and receive sound or light feedback when they achieved a certain frequency, most often an alpha state (around 8 to 12 Hz). Energies like brainwaves typically go undetected in day-to-day life, but by transducing it into sound and light, people could hear and see these energies. Such experiments, though, were not concerts or even formal events; they took place most often gathered around a circle at Harmony Ranch.

Serge Tcherepnin, brainwave experiments at Harmony Ranch, 1970 (source)

Pulsa’s experiments worked towards making wave energies more tangible and served as a reminder that when you make music—let alone move or breath or plant a garden—you affect the world around you. Although Pulsa’s example is perhaps an extreme one, it’s also a useful one. Pulsa’s work attested to the myriad ways that human beings are entangled—with each other and with environments—and you can hear this involvement; you can hear community through sound. Pulsa created a musical community that privileged not just the people within it but the sound and energy that sustained them.

* Members of Pulsa have uploaded numerous documents, including photos, event reviews, programs, and essays to achive.org.

Kerry O’Brien

Kerry O’Brien is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Indiana University and a percussionist with Nief-Norf. Her current research examines postwar experimentalism, media studies, and countercultural spirituality. O’Brien lives in Seattle where she is finishing a dissertation titled “Wireless Experimentalism: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 1966-1971.” Her work has been supported by grants from the Presser Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Paul Sacher Foundation, and an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women.

Interview with Daniel Spreadbury of Dorico

Posted on May 20, 2016 by Kevin Clark - Articles

The moment we’ve been waiting for is finally here. Three years ago Daniel Spreadbury and the Sibelius team left Avid, and shortly thereafter work began on a new scoring application for Steinberg, the German company behind Cubase, among other music products.

Last week at a conference in Helsinki the product was announced. It’s called Dorico, named after a Roman music engraver, and will be released in the fourth quarter of 2016. There will be a cross-grade discount (€299) available to qualifying Finale and Sibelius users for a short time after launch.

Hopes for Dorico are high in the field, following a few difficult releases in the other major commercial applications. We were thrilled to be able to ask Daniel Spreadbury a few questions during this busy week about his work in open source and web standards, some of Dorico’s most exciting features for composers, and how Dorico users will benefit from the larger Steinberg ecosystem.

KC: What Dorico features do you think will make composers want to become Dorico users?
DS: Dorico takes a fundamentally different approach to how it thinks about music than existing scoring programs; its music model is much closer to the way that a sequencer or DAW thinks about music in MIDI terms. In a sequencer, a single MIDI note can give rise to a variety of different appearances in the sequencer’s integrated score view, based on the display quantization in use: it might appear as a single note, or as a sequence of tied notes. As the music is edited, the notation is effectively recreated on the fly. Scoring programs don’t tend to work that way: instead, once a note is created, it becomes a rather concrete thing. For example, if you create a quarter note on the last eighth of a 4/4 bar, the scoring program will correctly interpret that as two tied eighth notes either side of the barline. But if you cut and paste that music such that those notes both end up in the same bar, those tied notes won’t be recombined into a single quarter note again.

So firstly Dorico does think about music more like the way a sequencer does, and as you edit the score, the music will be renotated to the simplest and clearest rhythmic notation. However, it wouldn’t be any good if Dorico decided to combine those two tied eighth notes into a quarter note if they ended up, say, crossing the third beat of a 4/4 bar, because as every good music theory student knows, in time signatures with a half-bar, unless you have an established syncopated pattern going, you should always show the beat at the half-bar, so in that case that quarter note should remain as two tied eighth notes. In a nutshell, this is what Dorico does: it has a deep algorithmic understanding of the way rhythm and meter works, so it’s able to produce clear and unambiguous rhythmic notation in any situation.

Add to this that Dorico also provides tools to allow notes to be lengthened or shortened, and for music to be inserted in the middle of an existing voice, all of which keeps the music notated clearly at every point, and this is hopefully a big improvement for composers. Composers who would like to be able to do some composing directly into software and who would prefer to work in notation rather than MIDI from the start will find Dorico a much more welcoming and accommodating environment for their work than other scoring software. Our philosophy is that the user should not be penalised for changing his or her mind at any stage in the compositional process.

KC: You’ve made major contributions to open source and web standards projects for music notation. How does that work relate to Dorico, and what might be possible in the future?
DS: We have been working on the SMuFL standard for music fonts since a few months after we joined Steinberg, and SMuFL is now being developed under the auspices of the W3C’s Music Notation Community Group, which is also now the steward of the MusicXML format widely used by hundreds of music notation applications. As one of the three co-chairs of the group, I’m hoping that we will be able to build upon the strong foundations of both SMuFL and MusicXML to enrich the way music notation is encoded and to open up new possibilities for interactive applications, digital music distribution and consumption, while hopefully making it easier for software developers to handle this stuff.

As for how this relates to Dorico, a lot of the W3C work is forward-looking, so it’s not yet possible to draw too many conclusions about exactly how this will impact the software. In the short to medium term, we aim to have great support for SMuFL, and good support for import and export of MusicXML. In the longer term, we’re excited to see where the community takes the work on standardising the representation of music notation.

As an aside, I’ve been thrilled to see how Bravura, the reference font for SMuFL and Dorico’s default music font, which we released under the Open Font License a couple of years ago, has taken off: it’s now being used in a variety of music applications both on the desktop and the web, and it’s also starting to be used for publications by some of the biggest publishing houses, which is a great endorsement for the aesthetics and practicalities that have gone into Bravura, and I’m excited to see what people can do with Bravura when they get to use it in Dorico, which it was initially designed for.

KC: How will Dorico users be able to benefit from the broader Steinberg ecosystem?
DS: In the first instance, the inclusion of Steinberg’s world-class audio engine as used by Cubase and Nuendo is an obvious advantage. You’ll be able to use any VST 3-compatible virtual instruments and effects in Dorico – and certain VST 2-compatible plug-ins, too, since we know there are widely-used plug-ins that have not yet been updated to the new VST 3 standard. Our vision for Dorico’s playback features is that you will have the most direct control over how your music is realised by virtual instruments of any scoring software, and we’re doing that by borrowing some of the idioms more commonly found in Cubase, such as showing the music in a piano roll view, and allowing graphical editing of real-time controller data.

Over time, we hope to build powerful workflows that allow you to move projects between Dorico and Cubase with ease, since especially in the field of music for media it is not uncommon for a project to start in the sequencer and end in the scoring program if there is a live session to record, or indeed to start in the scoring program and end in the sequencer if a mock-up or virtual realisation needs to be produced.

Steinberg also makes some great virtual instruments of its own, with some new and exciting things coming up in the near future, and the UR series of audio interfaces has both top-notch build quality, audio quality, and solid drivers, too.

KC: NewMusicBox is a new music publication. Are there extended techniques that Dorico will handle particularly well, for instance microtonality, aleatoric notation, or unmeasured music?
DS: The first version of Dorico will not have every possible contemporary composition technique covered, but I hope that what it will demonstrate is that we are willing to tackle some of these areas. Dorico is the first GUI-based scoring software to truly support writing in open meter: in fact, when you start writing in an empty project, by default you get no time signature, and so Dorico doesn’t put in any barlines. You can go back and add a time signature at any time, and soon you’ll be able to simply insert barlines wherever you like to divide up a passage of unmetered music. You can also create a system break anywhere you like – even in the middle of a set of nested tuplets, if need be!

We have pretty good support for microtonality too: although the user interface is not yet finished, our engine has support for tuning systems with arbitrary equal divisions of the octave, so you can easily work with 24-EDO quartertones, 53-EDO Turkish maqam music, or set up your own 72-EDO system. You will be able to define your own system of accidentals, including specifying the number of EDOs that a given accidental should raise or lower the unmodified written pitch, and set up custom key or mode signatures that use those accidentals in any combination. We’re not yet sure exactly how playback of these kinds of microtones will be handled, but the semantics and the graphics will be there from the start.

Dorico also has support for many of the different conventions employed through the last century for accidental duration rules – so if you want accidentals to apply only to the note on which they are first written, and show naturals on all unmodified notes, or not repeat accidentals if the same pitch is immediately repeated, and so on, Dorico has all of that covered.

We don’t have great support for arbitrary graphical notations in the first release. There is so much complexity to producing really beautiful conventional music notation that we haven’t yet been able to focus on the kinds of convention-busting notations that have been used through the latter half of the 20th century and into the new century, but hopefully we will be able to build on our foundations in this area as the application matures. I think it’s worth saying that Dorico’s focus is on music that can still largely be written using conventional staff notation (and eventually tablature) rather than completely arbitrary graphics. I think other software will provide better tools for scores whose requirements barely include any conventional elements at all.

KC: Lastly, is there a way to apply to beta test Dorico?
DS: We are not quite ready to start beta testing Dorico just yet. We have already been inundated with literally hundreds of requests from prospective users from all sorts of musical fields who are interested in helping to iron the kinks out of the first version of our software, and that is incredibly encouraging. We will certainly not be able to accommodate everybody who has expressed an interest, and might even end up with some kind of a lottery system. If I haven’t managed to dissuade your readers from expressing an interest altogether, then of course they are free to get in touch with me, either via the new Dorico forum on the Steinberg web site, or via the Making Notes blog.

*Updated 5/24 at Spreadbury’s request to clarify his orginal comment

Manifesting Community in Early Minimalism

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Patrick Nickleson - Analysis, Articles

What could minimalism possibly have to do with community?

Community is not one of the words typically included in descriptions of minimalism. It does not take its place alongside austere or process or repetition, nor does it fit into the formalist “family similarities” listed in the recent Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, including drone, repetition, stasis, audible structures, pure tunings, and so on.[1]

Indeed, more often than community, minimalism had to do with conflict. Kyle Gann, in a 1998 piece for The Village Voice called “Minimalism Isn’t Pretty,” writes, “By the time minimalism emerged as a public phenomenon in 1973, it was squeaky clean and spruced up for company… Before its emergence, however, minimalism was a nameless, cantankerous Downtown movement of many composers and musicians.” He continues, “So many minds collaborated that it was not always possible to tell who introduced what innovation. In fact, the original minimalism scene so bristled with tension that it virtually exploded, and when the smoke cleared, newcomers Reich and Glass just happened to be the only ones left standing.”[2] Likewise Branden Joseph argues that “the history of minimalist music is, to a surprising degree, a history of authorship disputes.”[3]

So perhaps dispute and tension are more accurate descriptions of minimalist social relations. Nevertheless, an important point remains: scene-based tensions and disputes occur specifically because there is a community. Disagreement occurs within a commons; it takes place on a stage constructed and articulated through community relationships and sense-making.

Disagreement occurs within a commons; it takes place on a stage constructed and articulated through community relationships and sense-making.

In the case of minimalism, eventual authorial disputes were the result of a long series of close collaborative engagements. Anyone familiar with the historical foundations of the “aesthetic, style, or technique”[4] can draw up a list: during the late 1950s at UC Berkeley, the relationship between La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Terry Jennings, and Dennis Johnson are all closely tied up with, among other pieces, Young’s Trio for Strings, Riley’s Concert for Two Pianos and Tape Recorders, and Johnson’s November. In 1964, Steve Reich helped Terry Riley organize the performers for the premiere of In C in San Francisco; he also introduced the pulsing Cs that create the work’s rhythmic grid and, as Terry Riley told Robert Carl, kept hippies out of their rehearsal space.[5] In December of that same year, on the other side of the continent, Young, Tony Conrad, John Cale, and Marian Zazeela were performing their first concerts under the collective name The Theatre of Eternal Music. A short time later, Reich moved back to New York where, in 1967, he became reacquainted with his Juilliard colleague Philip Glass, leading the two to work together for several productive years (including a couple of European tours) during which they developed pieces such as Pendulum Music, Four Organs, Phase Patterns, Two Pages, Music in Fifths, Music with Changing Parts, and more. The examples could continue, though I imagine many readers of this site are well aware of these early instances of collaboration. What’s important is that the subsequent disputes that resulted from these periods of collaboration—between Young and Conrad, Riley and Reich, Reich and Glass, and later Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, as noted by Joseph—frequently overshadow and seemingly negate the original fact of community for many writers on minimalism. That is, the focal point becomes the inevitably failure of collaboration in art music, rather than the results it produces.

What if we consider instead the early foundations of community among the minimalists? What was it that pushed them to collaborate in the first place? Under what principle of community were these collaborations possible? If there can be no dispute between parties that have nothing in common, then the answer to these questions is best found in the years prior to dispute. We can look in particular to early pieces of minimalist writing—particularly by examining what was manifest in a few early minimalist manifestos.

What was it that pushed them to collaborate in the first place? Under what principle of community were these collaborations possible?

The best known of these is surely Steve Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968).[6] While many musicologists have focused on Reich’s claims about process, and subsequently analyzed his works with close attention to the relative “purity” of the process in each piece, different portions of the essay strike me as more important. Reich’s focus is less on the technical application, and more on its perceptibility: “I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” He continues, “to facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.” There is a clear hierarchical relationship between the two terms: it’s not that gradual processes should be audible, it’s that gradual processes are the means towards the end of making structure audible. Listening and perceptibility are prioritized, with process as the means of actualizing the goal. And listening remains dominant when Reich makes his central historical claim. He points out that both Cagean chance and the serialism of Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen—musics thought of as the opposing poles of the compositional spectrum when he was writing in 1968—share one principle of commonality: “the compositional process and the sounding music have no audible connection.” For all their differences technically and stylistically, Reich offers a simple though powerful critique that finds in these opposites a shared, underlying principle. Again: disagreements construct the stage of their own appearance; the terms of their dispute.

From this commonality, Reich sets out his primary goal, which gradual process appears to be the most functional means of achieving: “a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.” Reich argues for an egalitarian practice of music-making in which the composer joins the audience in listening to a plainly audible structure such that he or she, as he quotes James Tenney saying, “isn’t privy to anything.” Indeed, Reich writes this egalitarian listening into Pendulum Music (1968), which he composed alongside his manifesto. Several scholars have noted the relationship between the two, pointing to Pendulum Music as the height of a “pure” gradual process in Reich’s music, and criticized Reich for never having followed up on this rigorous, impersonal austerity.[7] No one, however, has drawn any relevance from the score for Pendulum Music directing the performers to “sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the audience.”[8] That is, scholarship highlights Pendulum Music as a supposedly isolated example of a pure, formalist process, rather than acknowledging how pure process allows the composer and performers to join the audience as one listening community. In all listening together differently, it constructs the perfect stage for dispute.

Reich was not alone though; the manifesto seems to have been deemed an appropriate genre by the minimalists for simultaneously outlining their critiques of contemporary compositional practice and supplementing it with their own ideas. A lesser-known manifesto written by Tony Conrad in the summer of 1965 appeared later that year in the journal Film Culture. Conrad gained enough attention for his film The Flicker that the journal dedicated several pages to him, including his own written manifesto about his work with Young, John Cale, and Marian Zazeela. Titled “Inside the Dream Syndicate,” the first-person plural essay outlines the group’s manifestation of compositional collectivism:

The title “The Obsidian Ocelot…” is the one the group used throughout much of 1965 in concert programs. Throughout the essay the twenty-five-year-old Conrad writes in a style somewhere between, on the one hand, quasi-scientific music theory journals of the time like Die Reihe and, on the other, ecstatic, mid-1960s, stream of consciousness political critique. He writes, “Noises are not ever pitchless, to say the least. Pitched pulses, palpitating beyond rhythm and cascading the cochlea with a galaxy of synchronized partials, reopen the awareness of the sine tone—the element of combinatorial hearing.”[9] More importantly, the essay is peppered with collectivized statements of purpose, framed around listening, tuning, and performance practice: “We don’t touch the 5th harmonic… [because] 7 sounds to us as clear as vulgar 5 once did”; “Our music is… droningly mon[o]tonal, not even being built on a scale at all, but out of a single chord or cluster of more or less tonically related partials” which introduce a “a synchronous pulse-beat.” He argues for the “genius of conglomerate action” in that it “raises the overall harmonic operative level beyond what is rationally controllable” by a single author. On their performance practice, he writes, “The string fingerer fights to find the right spot to press a motionless digit for months before noticing the demands of the right arm for microscopic fingerboard digit rockings, compensating periodically for the tiny variations in string tension with each change of bow.” As a result of this collective, long-duration practice, “we fail to have consciousness of [timbral] changes: the voices sound like something else, the violin is the echo of the saxophone, the viola is by day frightening rock ‘n’ roll orchestra [referring to Cale’s work in the Velvet Underground], by night the sawmill.” Because they are “the first generation with tape, with proper amplification,” the necessary technological changes are in place to “break down the dictatorial sonority barriers erected by the master instruments of the cultures.”

Both composers outline their compositional practice in opposition to existing “dictatorial sonority barriers” for Conrad and “secrets of structure” for Reich. In both cases, an appropriate response is formulated to work against those practices, whether it be the use of pure tunings, amplification, and drone for The Theatre of Eternal Music, or gradual and audible process for Reich. Similarly, both focus on moving away from the singular, privileged composer in favour of a music in which, on the one hand, a collective of droning performers can lose track of their own performance as each instrument begins to “sound like something else,” or, on the other, a desire to write a music in which the composer sits down and listens with the audience. Further, both highlight the centrality of listening as a means of breaking down the singular privileges of authorship: whether it be Conrad’s attention to the pitches internal to noise through “combinatorial hearing” or Reich in his central concern that the connection between process and sound be plainly recognizable through listening.

We can perhaps consider one earlier piece of pre-minimalist writing mentioned by La Monte Young in his “Lecture 1960”:

When Dennis Johnson and I were staying at Richard Maxfield’s apartment in New York, we discussed the amount of choice that a composer retained in a composition that used chance or indeterminacy. We generally agreed that the composer was always left with some choices of one sort or another. At the very least, he had to decide what chances he would take or what he would leave to indeterminacy in his composition. [Later] at my apartment in Berkeley Dennis mentioned that he had been thinking of what we had discussed in New York and that he had discovered a piece which was entirely indeterminacy [sic] and left the composer out of it. I asked, “What is it?” He tore off a piece of paper and wrote something on it. Then he handed it to me. It said, “LISTEN.”[10]

Johnson’s piece of paper inscribed “LISTEN,” if we can consider it a manifesto, might be the shortest example of that genre across any artistic or political movement. Nevertheless, it points to the central concern developed by many of the people who would come to be called minimalists a decade later: prioritizing listening over writing is the dominant means of moving beyond the Cagean challenge to authorship. It seems that many of the impulses that define how we think of minimalism—drone, stasis, pure tunings, audibility of structure, process, repetition—developed as means of enacting a non-coercive compositional authority, a way of composing music in which no one has privileged knowledge of the structure. That these features all developed long before 1973 when Gann argues minimalism appeared “spruced up and ready for company,” points all the more to the fact that the sound of minimalism was developed as part of a community that, like any other, was equally open to collaboration and to dispute. The complex problem is this: while minimalism was still cantankerous and nameless, the composers were writing from within a collaborative community; it only took on its historical image as a “pretty” style of repetitive diatonicism once musicologists turned away from the complexity of collaboration, accepting instead the inevitability of dispute.

[1] Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll Ap Siôn, editors, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music. (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 4-6.

[2] Kyle Gann, “Minimalism Isn’t Pretty” in Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 203-7.

[3] Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (New York: Verso, 2011), 37.

[4] Timothy Johnson, “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique?” Musical Quarterly 78/4 (1994), 742-773.

[5] Robert Carl, Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44.

[6] Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34-6.

[7] See, for example: Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983), 54; Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 175; K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon,. 1996), 227; Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 198; Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children: The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965-1966” (PhD Dissertation, Yale University 2005), 59 (footnote 78); and Ross Cole, “‘Sound Effects, (OK Music)’: Steve Reich and the Visual Arts in New York City, 1966-1968” in Twentieth-Century Music 11/2 (2014), 239.

[8] See Reich (2002), 31.

[9] All quotes from this paragraph from Tony Conrad, “Inside the Dream Syndicate”, Film Culture 41 (1966), 1-8.

[10] La Monte Young, “Lecture 1960” The Tulane Drama Review 10/2 (1965), 73-83.

Patrick Nickleson is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of Toronto. His dissertation–supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada—focuses on the politics of authorship, collaboration, and dispute in early minimalism.

Good Career Hunting: On Being a Deer Chaser

Posted on May 11, 2016 by R. Andrew Lee - Articles

As this is my first post for NewMusicBox since my series on entrepreneurship and because this post will be tangentially related, I feel obliged to make one quick comment before beginning. After quite a bit of time and reflection, I wrote a fairly lengthy follow-up to those essays over at my website, which I titled, “Entrepreneurship, Success, and the Illusion of Narrative or How Felicia Day Taught Me That I Was Wrong About Claire Chase.” I believe it offers a more nuanced perspective than my original posts, as well as a much-needed public apology to Claire Chase.

I find it difficult to talk about the struggles I have in my musical career. Part of that is from a desire to maintain a successful public image, but another part is worrying over how it would be received. I worry about sounding whiny and ungrateful to those who are working hard just to get where I am, and I worry about sounding hopelessly naive to those further along. But recent events led me to open up and write about what’s been bothering me.

I have been having difficulty lining up gigs for next season, interest in my albums has been in a bit of decline, and, darn it, I thought there would be a bigger response to the release of my tenth album. I’m not sure what I was hoping for, exactly, but it felt like a big deal to me, and I wanted others to feel the same. I was in a real funk. Then I went to a book signing where I got to meet a woman whose work I’ve admired for years, and in the process I gained some much-need perspective.

I came away from my brief encounter with Felicia Day feeling better about my career than I had in a long time.

I came away from my brief encounter with Felicia Day feeling better about my career than I had in a long time, and I felt inspired to write about why. Here is the tl;dr.

I was one of the last people at the book signing, and as I waited in line for more than an hour, I got to see the labor that goes into such an event. To make each fan feel special in only thirty seconds, to pose for picture after picture (knowing that each will likely be shared online), and even just to sign that many books seemed exhausting. And that’s when it clicked for me. Even though she’s successfully built a company from the ground up and written a New York Times best seller, I’m certain she still has to work tirelessly to keep her career moving ahead. It was a poignant reminder that the work, the pure effort of building a career never stops, and that helped me move forward.

Andy Lee meets Felicia Day at her book signing and adjusts his perspective on career building.

So I wrote about it, and the response was incredible. I received lots of positive feedback and “you’re not alone!” comments, and I realized that many of the respondents were not in my circle of friends even a year or two ago. Moreover, I made new connections as the post got shared, notably among fans of Felicia Day who otherwise would have never encountered my music. (Shout out to Team Hooman!)

One particular response also brought to my attention a wonderful NewMusicBox article from Ingram Marshall, “The Tipping Point.” In the post, Marshall asks several prominent composers what they considered to be the tipping point for their careers. The article is well worth reading in its entirety, but I’d like to draw attention to one particular analogy he uses—the deer chaser.

A deer chaser, or shishi-odoshi, is a style of fountain used in Japanese gardens. Water flows into a piece of bamboo, causing the center of balance to shift and the water to spill out. As the bamboo returns to its resting position it typically strikes a rock, creating noise to scare away deer or other wildlife.

In his post, Marshall uses this image to describe the “near miss” of a tipping point. As he writes:

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

I experienced something quite similar with my album Dennis Johnson: November. It was reviewed in publications around the world, including sources such as The Wire and Gramophone, we quickly sold out of the first two pressings, and it helped me get my first gigs in London and New York. The icing on the cake was making a large number of “best of” lists that year, including the #1 classical album of 2013 in Time Out New York. That in turn landed me a big award from my alma mater and an interview with Colorado Public Radio, among other things.

Yet nothing I’ve done since has been even close to that successful, and I’ve spent many hours since wondering what I might have done differently to make that less of a deer chaser moment and more of a tipping point.

Since writing about meeting Felicia Day, however, I’ve come to think that it’s too easy to chase after tipping points and get frustrated by near misses. Instead, I’d propose thinking of the deer chaser less for its negative connotations and more for the positives the analogy holds.

The work never stops, forward momentum is rarely ceded without a fight, and chasing tipping points is a fool’s errand.

First, a deer chaser makes noise, and that’s exciting. There are a lot of things I want to do with my career, but making some noise and getting noticed seems like a good place to be. Second, all the water that pours out of the deer chaser has to go somewhere. No, we don’t always get to control where it goes, but that water still nourishes the soil and helps create new growth.

Likewise, career progress is often difficult to see. I haven’t sold any CDs as a result of that post, nor have any gig offers come my way, but I’ve expanded my new music network (to use a crass term), and I’ve gotten my foot in the door with an entirely new community. It was also a useful reminder that I enjoy writing. That’s not nothing.

I’ve also used this new mindset to help tackle mundane chores. I’ve complained about how hard it’s been to find gigs, so I’m trying to be more organized in my efforts, to make more cold contacts, and to be more forward in general. I’ve complained about the lack of attention given to my recent albums, so I’m writing about the stories behind them and trying to up my social media game (without becoming a self-promoting drone). In short, I’m trying to remember that my efforts to build a career are not in vain.

Still, while I’ve psychologically gotten over this current speed bump, I know that many more lie ahead. When the next one crosses my path, the first thing I’ll do is give myself permission to vent my frustrations. Somewhere inside my head is a little voice that believes that complaining doesn’t fix anything, but I know better. True, complaining isn’t going to get me a gig, but it may well help me become emotionally ready to press ahead once more in a career filled with rejection and disappointment. And while I’ll allow for a bit of public complaining, I’m also going to use a lifeline (and expired cultural reference) to phone a friend and have a real conversation.

The other thing I’ll do is try to remember my all-to-brief encounter with Felicia Day. Seeing a small portion of the labor that goes into her career brought me some peace about my own. It reminded me that the work never stops, that forward momentum is rarely ceded without a fight, and that chasing tipping points is a fool’s errand. So for now, I’m going to seek contentment as a deer chaser, making as much noise as I possibly can and nurturing my career bit by bit.

R. Andrew Lee

Pianist R. Andrew Lee is one of the foremost interpreters of minimal music. He has recorded ten solo albums with Irritable Hedgehog Music, which have made “best of” lists in The New Yorker, Time Out New York, The Wire, MOJO, and Gramophone among many others. Upcoming projects include previously unreleased piano music by William Duckworth and a 3.5 hour composition for piano and electronics by Randy Gibson, a longtime student of La Monte Young. Lee currently teaches at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, and was most recently artist-in-residence at Avila University.

R. Andrew Lee

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