Category: In Print

George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music

Reprinted with permission from A Power Stronger Than Itself, by George E. Lewis, published by the University of Chicago Press.

© 2008 by George E. Lewis. All rights reserved.

READ and watch a conversation with George E. Lewis.

AN AACM BOOK: ORIGINS, ANTECEDENTS, OBJECTIVES, METHODS

Around the fall of 1996, I had been promoted to full professor in the department of music at the University of California, San Diego. I was sitting in the office of my colleague, F. Richard Moore, who probably doesn’t realize his role in the creation of this book. Dick had just finished his landmark book, Elements of Computer Music, and was busy extending cmusic, his set of software tools for musical experimentation. Dick saw cmusic as an example of a research project blending creativity and science, and pointed out to me that this was the very sort of project that might not receive support outside of the academic environment, even if the underlying ideas were arguably fundamental to the field of music technology. That was an argument I understood, because as an itinerant artist, I had tried to write on planes and trains, in the manner that one imagined Duke Ellington doing during the writing of his memoir, Music Is My Mistress. Now, I began to wonder about the kinds of projects I could initiate that would best utilize the strengths of the academic infrastructure in ways that complemented or exceeded my already established career as an itinerant artist. I began to think seriously about writing a biography of Muhal Richard Abrams.

As it happened, that year, 1996, Wadada Leo Smith had invited Muhal for a residency and concert in his program in African American improvisational music at the California Institute of the Arts. Muhal had invited me to participate in the concert, and so I drove up to Valencia from San Diego with the intention of sounding him out about the project. We went on a long walking excursion in the desert warmth, ostensibly searching for an espresso bar, although Muhal doesn’t drink coffee. When I broached my idea, he quickly shook his head—but then said that he would rather be part of a book project on the history of the AACM. That possibility had also crossed my mind, of course, and it seemed completely appropriate, since so many of our dreams as members of the collective had focused on creating a book about that history.

In 1981, Joseph Jarman and Leo Smith interviewed each other with a view toward constructing a general history of the AACM. The project was never completed. In the end, realizing such a work requires considerable infrastructure, by which I mean a network of people who are willing to engage the work—read it, comment on it, publish it, distribute it, and provide the time and funds for the kinds of ethnographic and historical research that the life of an itinerant artist makes difficult, even given the amazing achievements of the early twentieth-century African American historians that the late Jacob Carruthers called “the old scrappers,” including J. A. Rogers and John G. Jackson, among others.

I had already begun to realize that the AACM membership would never trust an outsider to construct its history. As AACM cofounder Jodie Christian told me in 1998, “Muhal said that it should be somebody in the AACM, and pretty soon, somebody will write a book; this was four or five years ago. One time I thought he would write one, but he ain’t got time to write no book.” So Muhal and I began talking about what the book could be, and I came away from the project with a determination to begin writing. At the behest of Samuel Floyd, then the dynamic director of the Center for Black Music Research, I had just completed my first published article for Black Music Research Journal, and was ready to proceed with a new project. During a visit to the Midwest in December 1997, I began interviewing musicians, starting (naturally) with Muhal. It quickly became evident that our conversations would range far beyond the biographical orientation that one might expect. Naturally, Muhal was vitally concerned with how the organization would be represented in the narrative.

If it’s going to be a musicology thing, or a thing that includes the AACM and talks about all this other stuff, I’m not going to participate. I’ll just cut right out right now. We’ve waited too long to put out a document. I don’t want to be part of that. . . . I didn’t spend all these years to be put in a situation that didn’t have nothing to do with what I did. This book gives an opportunity to do what the musicians say happened.

It became clear, however, that a book that did justice to the work of the AACM would have to move beyond a project of vindication, and would have to include more than just the voices of musicians. My working method necessarily juxtaposed oral histories of AACM members with written accounts of the period, a process that combines the ethnographic with the archival. I performed more than ninety-two interviews with members and supporters, ranging anywhere from two to six hours in duration, and for the older members, two or three such interviews were sometimes necessary. These interviews provided me with important insights, reminded me of things I had forgotten, and destabilized comfortable assumptions I had made. In many, perhaps most, cases, the remembrances I recorded of Chicago, New York, Paris, and other geographical/historical locations were powerfully corroborative of the written histories of these same places and eras. As a complex, multigenre, intergenerational network of people, places, and musical and cultural references began to emerge in my notes, I saw a responsibility to be inclusive, rather than to concentrate on those AACM members with more prominent public profiles. Even so, certain members have achieved more notoriety than others, and I felt that this would naturally come out in the course of the work. In any event, I do regret not being able to interview everyone I would have liked to.

The worldwide impact of the AACM has been amply documented in many countries—in print, on recordings, and in popular and specialty magazines, academic treatises, and books. As a scholar, it would be irresponsible of me to simply ignore this level of paper trail, or to dismiss these additional narratives out of hand. Thus, the book features a very conscious effort to problematize the “creator vs. critic” binary that both inflects and infects critical work in jazz, while at the same time providing unique and personal insights that only orature can provide.

“I was glad that somebody did come on the scene that was in the AACM and knew some of our members and had a little idea about the group itself,” Jodie Christian observed in our 1998 interview. “Being in the organization, you had a chance to see some things yourself. You could make those kinds of judgments from that period of time. You can do that because you were there. It wouldn’t be something that you surmised, but something that actually happened, and when you say it, it’s authentic.” As a scholar, however, I want to handle the idea of “authenticity” with extreme care. In fact, I was not there when the AACM began, though I am always flattered by those of my forebears who, when memories fail, somehow place me at the scene. My construction of the AACM is but one of many possible versions, and my hope is that other scholars will take up aspects of the AACM’s work for which a more detailed discussion eluded the scope of this already rather long book.

Truth be told, however, the “real” story, if there is one, will not be captured in a set of recordings or an archive of texts. Here, I take my cue from an unnamed AACM musician’s answer to a query from writer Whitney Balliett about “the” AACM sound: “If you take all the sounds of all the A.A.C.M. musicians and put them together, that’s the A.A.C.M. sound, but I don’t think anyone’s heard that yet.” Nonetheless, what I am hoping for is that a useful story might be realized out of the many voices heard in this book, the maelstrom of heteroglossia in which we nervously tread water.

Autobiography—factual, fictional, and virtually every variation thereof has constituted a crucially important African American literary form, both in the scholarly literature, such as Charles Davis and Henry Louis Gates’s classic work, The Slave’s Narrative, and in popular works, from James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man to the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley’s Roots, and the Delany Sisters’ Having Our Say. The insistence on autobiography, as Jon Michael Spencer maintains in his book on Harlem Renaissance composers, The New Negroes and Their Music, became a weapon in the battle over the historicity of the African diaspora, where issues of credit and vindication were of prime importance. In the 1960s, both people of letters and people in the street were vitally invested in this struggle for history.

It should therefore be not surprising that the historiography of jazz is similarly dominated by autobiography, most often in the form of transcribed and published interviews, as well as the frequent “as told to” ghostwritten efforts. For instance, as historian Burton Peretti has noted, the interviewers for the National Endowment for the Arts Oral History projects of the 1970s were largely drawn from the ranks of “veteran jazz writers.” Certainly, historians owe a debt to these writers, who pursued their enthusiasms for their subjects in the face of considerable disapprobation concerning the utility of documenting black music. Nonetheless, for Peretti, “the interviewers tend not to ask the questions that would be of most interest to scholars. They are strong on straight biography, who played with whom, discographies—and anecdotes, anecdotes, and more anecdotes. They tend to avoid addressing issues of intellectual development, social context, racial conditions, or the subjects’ views of culture, history and philosophy.”

The effect of these serious omissions is to decontextualize the music, to frame it as outside the purview of both general social history and the history of music. This experience indicated the need for viable alternatives to the journalistic paradigm that, according to Peretti, still dominates the historiographical process regarding black music. My musician colleagues had been looking for these alternatives for many years. In pianist Jodie Christian’s experience, “There were a lot of hits and misses with people trying to figure out in their minds what this was about and what that was about. Even though they were interviewing people, they would come up with their own idea about what the AACM was about.” On one view, this was certainly understandable; in my experience, the people who were trying to figure out what the AACM was about included, most crucially, AACM people themselves. Thus, my collegial interview/conversations seemed automatically to turn to the very issues that Peretti found lacking in many of the NEA interviews: intellectual development, issues of race, class, and gender, musical form and aesthetics, and the interpretation of history. I began to notice a distinct lack of funny stories and anecdotes, even from people such as the late Lester Bowie, whom we all knew to be given to pointedly ironic jocularity. I imagine that for some readers, these preoccupations could seem unnecessarily dour at times in comparison with other kinds of musicianly texts that rely in large measure on interviews.

Perhaps this serious mien was an inevitable artifact of an interview process that often felt like a kind of collaborative mode of writing history, after the fashion that James Clifford has proposed, even if the adoption of this collaborative ethos seemed to develop spontaneously, rather than as a conscious and studied attempt to address the issues Clifford identified regarding the authority of the interviewer. People felt free to explicitly express their love for the AACM, an organization that in many cases had given them creative birth and nurturing. Interviews served as a form of generational reconnection for some of my subjects, who frequently asked about what had been happening over the years to the people with whom they had been so intensely involved, and about where the organization was headed now. In this way, the book became an autobiography indeed—the autobiography of a collective, a history of an organization that developed into an ongoing social and aesthetic movement. Perhaps at least part of that movement’s dynamism was derived from the clarity with which its members realized that the project could not really be completed; its unfinished nature became its crucial strength.

Historical, autobiographical, and ethnographic processes necessarily cast the historian-ethnographer in the role of intermediary between the subject and the public. The construction of this role during the process of engaging the oral narrative is obviously of prime importance, since the process involves not only transcription, but also interpretation and editorial choices. To pretend that race and gender do not mediate these proceedings is needlessly naïve; at the same time, to claim special advantages based solely on these factors is equally untenable. Thus, a signal factor in the historicization of black music concerns the fact that in the vast majority of cases prior to the late 1960s, as Amiri Baraka pointed out in an important essay from 1963, “Jazz and the White Critic,” those doing interviews with black jazz musicians were most often white, male, and of a different class background than the person being interviewed.

In the 1970s, this began to change. For me, and for many musicians, the watershed work of this generation was the drummer Arthur Taylor’s book of interviews with his musical colleagues, Notes and Tones. Taylor’s initially self- published book demonstrated forcefully that the questions that Burton Peretti felt were of most interest to scholars were also of great interest to the important musicians of the period, such as Betty Carter, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and many others. While Peretti’s critique of oral histories does not directly connect the failure of scholars to review these seemingly fairly obvious areas of interest to institutionalized systems of ethnic and class domination, articulated as a form of historical denial, to Taylor and to many of his subjects, this was precisely what was at stake. Thus, Taylor’s book functioned as perhaps the sharpest musician-centered critique then available of the racialization of media access, which both for Taylor and his subjects, amounted to a form of censorship. In a self-conscious act of intervention, Taylor used his insider status as a canonically important drummer to allow his subjects wide latitude to critique the discourses and economic and social conditions surrounding their métier, including possible distinctions between being interviewed by white critics and by black colleagues.

Even as so much African American literature, from the slave narratives forward, favored the autobiographical in some way, it was becoming clear to me that what was needed was not only a compendium of personal reminiscences and observations, but also a framing of the AACM in dialogue with the history of music and the history of ideas. In fact, AACM members who published critical work in the 1970s and 1980s tended to take this approach. Leo Smith’s writings, notably his 1973 Notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music, and his 1974 “(M1) American Music,”12 were closely followed by Anthony Braxton’s massive three-volume Tri-Axium Writings, a work that, while clearly in dialogue with John Cage’s 1961 manifesto Silence, Amiri Baraka’s 1963 Blues People, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1963 Texte zur Musik, extends considerably beyond each of these texts, both in length and in range of inquiry. For me, the works of these AACM members constituted sources of inspiration and instruction for my own research, as did Derek Bailey’s influential book, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music.

With these texts as antecedents, I felt that my goals could be better accomplished by deploying methodologies associated with academic historical inquiry, rather than with journalistic models. Of course, this issue is connected with the writerly voice of the book. Early on, several good friends and colleagues were concerned that the book avoid “academese,” or the arcane jargon that these well- meaning people associated with scholarly books. These associates felt that using more accessible language would produce a friendly and nonthreatening introduction to the AACM and its work that would appeal to a wide audience. The jazz writer Stanley Dance was evidently a devotee of this approach, judging from his critique of two jazz studies anthologies published in the 1990s by film scholar Krin Gabbard, Representing Jazz and Jazz among the Discourses:

There is original thought here, but the reader is immediately confronted by the language academics apparently use to communicate with one another. Sometimes it reads like a translation from the German, at others that they are merely trying to impress or indulging in a verbal cutting contest. Here are a few of the words you should be prepared to encounter: hermeneutics, commodifi ed, contextualizing, conceptualize, hyperanimacy, taxonomic, metacritical, rhizome, perspectivizing, nomadology, indexical, polysemy, auratic, reifi cation, metonymic, synecdoche, biodegradability, interstitial, valorize, diegetic, allegoresis, grammatology, oracy, centripetality, and esemplastic.

Dance felt that these kinds of words “obviously impose considerable restraint on the transfer of knowledge.” Girding against what he saw (correctly) as an attack on his métier, the writer grumbled that “the academics tend to be critical and rather patronizing about the accepted journalistic standards of jazz writing, which, to judge from their back notes, they have investigated haphazardly.” Finally, Dance ventured that instead of drawing from writers such as Gunther Schuller, “Gabbard’s people seem more attached to Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes, of whom the average unscholarly jazz fan has probably never heard.” For me, however, the interdisciplinary approaches to black music and improvisation in the Gabbard texts—the work of Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Walser, Lorenzo Turner, John Corbett, and Scott DeVeaux, among others (as well as the references to Adorno and Barthes) were inspiring, announcing a new generation of writers on improvised music who were, first, declining to conflate oversimplification with accessibility; second, asserting common cause with intellectuals in other fields concerning the ways in which music could announce social and cultural change; and finally, seeking liberation from the Sisyphean repetition of ersatz populist prolegomena that seemed endemic to the field.

Another important book that came out around this time was Ronald Radano’s New Musical Figurations, an account of the career of Anthony Braxton that included a chapter on the AACM that was much closer to my own experience than anything I had read before, and which introduced a new character to the heretofore white-coded historiography of American experimentalism: the “black experimentalist.” These texts helped me to realize that in looking for ways to theorize the music I had been trying for so many years to compose, improvise, and perform, I needed to involve myself with the tools, methods, and discourses that had been developed in a range of fields of inquiry. Doing so would not only allow readers less invested in music but familiar with those discourses and debates to find commonalities with the histories surrounding new music, but could also provide musically oriented readers unfamiliar with those discourses with an opportunity to engage them on familiar ground. As I began to publish, I discovered a rapidly developing, questing new literature, a group of wonderful new colleagues, an exciting crop of graduate students, and an international reading public, including many musicians, who were eager for a new kind of writing about music that did not patronize the reader or assume his or her ignorance of the matters under review. Perhaps most gratifying of all, in these new texts, complex ideas were worked out at sufficient length and in detail in a manner that seemed compatible with my experience as an artist.

Thus, as I told an interviewer/friend in 2002 regarding the progress of this book, “I’ve made some concessions to narrativity. Someone else can write the Cliffs Notes later.” Indeed, in the nine years since I began this project, a new generation of progressive musicians has come out of Chicago, whom I can mention only in passing, such as cellist Tomeka Reid, guitarist Jeff Parker, trombonist Steve Berry, and rapper Khari B; trumpeters Robert Griffin and Corey Wilkes; singers Dee Alexander and Taalib’Din Ziyad; drummers Chad Taylor, Mike Reed, and Vincent Davis; saxophonists Matana Roberts, Aaron Getsug, and David Boykin; bassists Darius Savage, Josh Abrams, Cecile Savage, and Harrison Bankhead; and many others. Perhaps one or more of those people will create a sequel, after one fashion or another. For now, one of the aims of this book is to help those younger artists in dealing with the richness of the legacy that they carry, as well as in understanding what has been achieved, what was shown to be possible, and what remains to be realized.

The stakes are quite high in this endeavor, as I realized when a friend alerted me to a letter in the British magazine Wire from the African American experimental musician Morgan Craft, living in Italy at this writing. I found his remarks both poignant and terribly telling:

So here we are in the year 2005 and I actually agree to sit down and write about being black, American and experimental in music. The genesis springs from looking at a magazine devoted to challenging, progressive musics from around the world, and seeing their top 50 list for last year (The Wire 251) and the only black Americans were rappers (three) and old jazz era men (one living, one dead). So I bring up this observation about the lack of a black American presence on the avant garde scene under the age of 50 just to see if maybe I’m not paying attention. I’m constantly fed this steady stream of future thinking folks from Germany, Japan, UK, Norway, etc, but when it comes to America all I hear about is the genius that is free folk or if it’s black it must be hiphop, jazz, or long dead. How many more articles on Albert Ayler do we really need?

In fact, black artists on both sides of the age-fifty divide shared Craft’s dilemma, and the analysis of this issue is central to this book. Literary critic Fred Moten has expressed this issue so well and so succinctly that I want to preview his remarks here before redeploying them in another chapter:

The idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically—as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black.

Part of my task in this book, as I see it, is to bring to the surface the strategies that have been developed to discursively disconnect African American artists from any notion of experimentalism or the avant-garde. This effort, as Craft seems to have noticed, has now moved into the international arena. If Craft—and Ayler, for that matter—exist simply as oxymorons in an international consensus based on the presumption of pan- European intellectual dominance (a dynamic extending beyond the individual phenotypical to the collective institutional), the histories and analyses that I recount here are meant to shepherd young African American artists such as Craft through the convolutions and contortions that were needed to construct this ethnically cleansed discourse; to encourage younger African American artists to see themselves as being able to claim multiple histories of experimentalism despite the histories of erasure, both willful and unwitting; and to reassure young black artists that if you find yourself written out of history, you can feel free to write yourself back in, to provide an antidote to the nervous pan-European fictionalizations that populate so much scholarship on new music.

The set of issues Craft identifies was also rather well symbolized in a lecture I attended by a scholar who insisted that if academics hoped to have any real effect on the culture, the only music worth studying and writing about was music that “everybody” listened to. As an example, this well-known speaker referred to an even better-known rapper who, despite his misogynistic lyrics, was someone who needed to be “dialogued” with so that scholars could reach young African Americans in particular with more “enlightened” ideas. I was struck by the superficiality of this understanding of the many ways in which music exercises cultural impact. First of all, in my experience, young African Americans are generally particularly pleased to discover the depth and breadth of the cultural artifacts created by their forebears. I write these words directly to those young people who, along with those ancestors, are participating in the development of a most influential panoply of expressive voices, not all of which will be heard by majoritarian culture. Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that much of the most influential music of the twentieth century—music that will probably never appear on any major U.S. television network—was nonetheless being avidly attended to by the heroes of rock, the early rappers, and techno’s originators—or was it purely coincidental that so many early Mothers of Invention fans absorbed Edgard Varese’s manifesto, strategically placed on the back of the albums: “The present-day composer refuses to die!”

On that view, it should come as no surprise that the impact of music on culture cannot be meaningfully investigated simply by reviewing Soundscan figures or tuning in to Dancing with the Stars. Moreover, advocating the neglect of “unpopular” sonic constituencies in favor of yet another safe valorization of corporate-approved cultural production—this time disguised as “critique” or “dialogue”—seemed to revoke local musical agency, even as the term “local” moves beyond its original, geographically centralized meaning toward a technologically mediated articulation of diaspora. As scholars, we ignore at our peril the networks that carry the flows of new musical ideas, since it’s so easy to miss nascent musical phenomena while they are still growing—in other words, the trajectory of hip-hop culture itself, not to mention its heir apparent, reggaeton, a phenomenon that like its predecessor from the Bronx, flows across borders of class, race, geography, and language.

This is not a version of the standard, hopeless rejoinder to those who point out the obvious lack of mass audience for some kinds of new music that “one day,” this music will be vindicated by ending up in everyone’s ear. Rather, I wish to point out that naturalizing this kind of vindicationism as a goal may be misdirected. African American culture has produced a vast array of musical practices, which have been taken up to varying degrees by a diverse array of constituencies. Some of these practices, however, remained indigestible to powerful players such as modern media corporations, whose products, in economist Jacques Attali’s 1977 formulation, were recursively reinscribed through a powerful “economy of repetition” that drowned out alternative voices. For Attali, “Free jazz created locally the conditions for a different model of musical production, a new music. But since this noise was not inscribed on the same level as the messages circulating in the network of repetition, it could not make itself heard.” This observation seems to evoke a special need for vigilance on the part of music scholars. As Attali wrote, “Conceptualizing the coming order on the basis of the designation of the fundamental noise should be the central work of today’s researchers. Of the only worthwhile researchers: undisciplined ones. The ones who refuse to answer new questions using only pregiven tools.” Thus, if we wish to avoid the appearance of positioning not only the musical production of entire cultures, but also our own research, as wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate megamedia, we will be obliged to tune our discourses to the resonant frequencies of insurgent musical forms around the world, to make sure that we can hear Attali’s “new noise.”

• READ an excerpt from chapter 1 of The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, & Making a Difference (made available here as a .pdf)Reprinted from The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, & Making a Difference by David Cutler. Copyright © by David Cutler and published by Helius Press. Used by permission of the author.
• BUY the book.***Based on both anecdotal evidence and the recent spate of published research on the subject, we are all well acquainted with the idea that the American public’s engagement with the nation’s traditional performing arts outlets is on the wane. However, we also know that plenty of talented and passionate composers and musicians continue to pursue advanced degrees at universities and conservatories across the country. How will they build careers to support their artistry in the coming decades?

  It’s clear it’s going to take a lot more than upping time spent in the practice room, but the standard guidebooks to “success in the music business” don’t often look at the issues facing those seeking to take their graduate degrees and make a name for themselves in genres like new music and jazz. In The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, & Making a Difference, composer and pianist David Cutler collects strategies and success stories from 165 composers and musicians working in these musical arenas and sprinkles them throughout this slickly designed A-to-Z guide covering everything from building up a career to planning for retirement.

  Cutler and I chatted about what musicians need beyond straight-up musical chops to succeed in 2010. You can read an excerpt from the book here and get your own (autographed!) copy here. And, as you might expect from a venture of this nature, there is also a companion website/blog to be found here.—MS

  *Molly Sheridan: You’re a jazz and classical composer and pianist, but you’re also an educator teaching at Duquesne University, where your work includes serving as the Coordinator of Music Entrepreneurship Studies. Sounds like the perfect gig to lead to a book of this nature. Did you determine that this kind of “nuts and bolts” career builder tome of information was needed based on your work with students in that capacity?

  Author David Cutler

  David Cutler: Actually, it happened the opposite way. I was hired to teach composition and musicianship, which put me in close contact with many students. While most were growing into outstanding musicians, few developed the kinds of philosophical and practical skills necessary for success as a professional (opportunity creation, branding, marketing, building audiences, networking, raising capital, business aptitudes, etc). It’s as if they were learning that high levels of talent and artistic accomplishment alone would somehow lead to a viable and fulfilling career. In reality, this is far from true.

  Having experienced a comparable culture in my own education, and witnessing similar phenomena elsewhere, I felt compelled to address these largely absent themes. It just seemed like the ethical thing to do. I initially began discussing these topics with students in one-on-one meetings, and then in class presentations. Eventually it grew into The Savvy Musician, which was written to help cultivate a more holistic breed of artist, offering the greatest chance of personal/professional success.

  My role as Coordinator of Music Entrepreneurship Studies, as well as involvement in many activities I never could have dreamed up, presented themselves as a result of my interest in this area. Which brings up an important point. Following your heart and doing something a little different than everyone else can open all kinds of unexpected doors.

  MS: One thing that really caught my eye about this book is that it addresses jazz and new music composers directly. Rather than adapt advice geared towards illuminating “Ten Ways to Make Your Rock Band Famous,” readers can instead access information about publishing concert works in today’s market environment and hear stories from composers like Jennifer Higdon and Stacy Garrop. Do their challenges differ significantly from artists working in other genres?

  DC: There are many books in print about the “music business.” Most have little or nothing to do with the kind of work done by my students, teachers, friends, colleagues, and yours truly. Several focus exclusively on legal issues for the recording industry, or tactics for becoming a mega-star rock band. One text asks whether or not you must be able to read music in order to “make it”—surely a fascinating inquiry for some, but (with a doctorate in music) it’s not my question! Another publication actually has a short summary about becoming a concert music composer, concluding that there’s no possible way to make a living through this path. Perfect…

  On one level, the process behind selling any product/service is similar, be it a computer, breakfast food, video game, rock band, chamber ensemble CD, or music lesson: Satisfy a need, fill a gap, market like crazy, and connect with your audience.

  But each industry also has unique considerations. Earning a living as a jazz or concert music composer is not the same as working with a rock band (though I hope our work becomes just as popular!). We have different constituents, skill sets, functions, and opportunities. There are also common myths that need to be debunked, such as “jazz/concert music composers have just three career options: 1) film scoring, 2) college teaching, and 3) lawn care.”

  The Savvy Musician includes case studies of musicians with a similar background to many of your readers, illustrating a vast array of possibilities while sharing often innovative success strategies. And being a composer myself, I know exactly the kinds of challenges my colleagues are facing. No need for analogies. Let’s look at what successful jazz and classical musicians actually do.

  MS: You’ve built a companion website for The Savvy Musician, where you continue to push at issues from the book and gather feedback. How has this added to the traditional experience of publishing a how-to, career-help book?

  DC: Some kinds of content are better presented in a book, while others are more effective through the Internet. A website provides unlimited space, the opportunity to update regularly, and a forum to continue the exploration interactively.

  The tag line for SavvyMusician.com is “Home Base for Music Careers & Entrepreneurship,” and I hope you find it to be just that. In addition to book information, the site hosts:

  • Blog. Expands on themes related to the book, exploring categories such as mindset, career, marketing, money, and education.
  • A Resource Center. Over 1000 links to valuable sites: funding sources, summer camps, magazines, music blogs, free resources, and more. Access is free!
  • Videos. Issue Videos showcase inspirational and informative talks by leaders both in and outside the music world. Music Videos feature creations by savvy musicians that are high quality AND unusual, innovative, humorous, or otherwise “purple.”
  • An opportunity to interact. Visitors are encouraged to leave blog comments, submit questions, and offer suggestions.

  MS: Speaking of videos, I love the Zoe Keating clip posted on your blog in which she de-romanticizes quitting your day job to become a professional touring musician. And we’ve all been reading the studies from the NEA and others about the decline in audience participation in live classical and jazz music performance. But that kind of news doesn’t seem to be stopping people from pursuing these careers, often including expensive postgraduate educations. After interviewing all the artists you include anecdotally in your book, do you sense a more positive future for musicians than these studies might indicate, or are many of us just destined for careers at Wal-Mart?

  DC: Great and important question! In the book’s introduction, I ask if there are too many professional musicians entering the workforce. The unfortunate reality is, yes, too many people are competing for “traditional opportunities.” In these oversaturated work environments, there simply aren’t enough positions to accommodate all qualified applicants.

  But for savvy musicians, there is unprecedented potential. For the first time, it’s possible for even an independent artist to compete against major corporations on equal footing, thanks to the Internet. And in our current era, the arts and the creative capital offered by artists is more valuable than it has been in a long time.

  However, for musicians to benefit optimally from these conditions, four attributes are necessary. It doesn’t matter how many diplomas hang from your wall if all areas aren’t present to some degree.

  1. musical skills
  2. communication skills
  3. business skills
  4. an entrepreneurial mindset

  So here’s my answer: There are not too many professional musicians. There are, however, too many of the wrong kind of musician, and not nearly enough well-rounded and innovative thinkers taking full advantage of the current circumstances facing our communities.

  From the book:

  ATTENTION: We Need Leaders!!! The music world is in need of creative artists who understand current realities and are brave enough to experiment with new solutions. There are opportunities waiting to be discovered by performers who bring great music to new settings, educators who instill its transcendent and spiritual values to students, and administrators who foster new audiences while insisting that artistic integrity remain high. There is a shortage of music leaders unveiling new models for success, and artist-citizens leading the crusade to keep meaningful musical experiences vibrant.

  Incidentally, it was delightful to hear many of The Savvy Musician interviewees declare that this is a great time to be a musician. I couldn’t agree more. At least if you’re savvy.

  MS: Say I’m already pretty savvy. What are a couple of questions I might ask myself if I’m wondering if this book would be a good resource to help me reach my music goals?

  DC: The Savvy Musician is not just a primer on basic business skills. It is a treatise exploring ways for high-quality musicians to—as individuals and a community—get more work, attract new audiences, improve financial standing, increase impact, and leave lasting legacies. Whether hoping to augment income, stand out from a competitive field, add variety to activities, or erect an empire, this comprehensive resource delivers the tools and entrepreneurial mindset necessary for increased success.

  I guarantee this book will fill you with ideas and strategies. I’m savvy too, but learned a ton through working on this project and talking with some of the most creative musical voices today.

Reprinted from Terry Riley’s In C by Robert Carl.
Copyright © by Robert Carl and published by Oxford University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

• READ an interview with author Robert Carl.***

  ***

  Introduction (Chapter One, pp. 1-12)

   

   

  So here it is.

  Only one page of score. No specified instrumentation, no parts. Fifty three motives, mostly minuscule. No counterpoint. No evident form. Spare instructions, with many aspects left deliberately vague. No tempo mark. And a title that’s laconic in the extreme: In C.

  This would not seem a likely candidate for a study in a series that seeks to record the process of creation and premiere of the great masterworks in the Western canon. Indeed, when confronted with Terry Riley’s 1964 work, it’s not unreasonable to ask, “Is this a joke?” The work seems to stand the whole idea of musical “progress” on its head. At precisely the same moment of its composition, Elliott Carter was working on his Concerto for Piano, a work Stravinsky was to hail as a masterpiece.¹ Luciano Berio had almost completed Laborinthus II and would soon start the Sinfonia. Karlheinz Stockhausen had just finished Momente. All these works fairly scream their authority, their mastery of overwhelming complexity, mirroring a complex age. They bespeak the composer as an expert in sound, a highly trained professional who is able to harness chaos and force it into a rigorous architecture. Surely, these are the true masterpieces. Riley’s little scrap of score can’t pretend to compete with these modernist monuments, can it?

  Yet In C continues to receive numerous performances every year, by professionals, students, and amateurs. It has had repeated recordings since its 1968 LP premiere, and most are still in print. It welcomes performers from a vast range of practices and traditions, from classical to rock to jazz to non-Western. Recordings range from the Chinese Film Orchestra of Shanghai—on traditional Chinese instruments—to the Hungarian “European Music Project” group, joined by two electronica DJs manipulating The Pulse.² It rouses audiences to states of ecstasy and near hysteria, all the while projecting an inner serenity that suggests Cage’s definition of music’s purpose—”to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”³ In short, it’s not going away.

  But then, neither is disco. Popularity and longevity bespeak something that satisfies the human spirit, but they do not guarantee the greatest depth or the quality that we associate with concert music. The modernist works mentioned above are towering accomplishments, unprecedented feats of human imagination and intellect. In C certainly challenges these standards; it is like the scruffy longhair shuffling his feet at the doors of the exclusive club, politely asking admittance, but not changing his appearance to suit the dress code. Can we really make an argument that it deserves a place in the canon, both on historical/cultural grounds and on the basis of the music itself?

  This study will maintain that it does. It will examine In C in the context of the work’s era; its grounding aesthetic practices and assumptions; its process of composition, presentation, recording, and dissemination. It will explore how the emerging performance practice of the piece has influenced our very ideas of what constitutes art music in the twenty-first century, and it will examine its significance through discussion with performers, composers, theorists, and critics.

  Thus, this book has a double purpose. Not only must it tell the story of the genesis of a landmark work in the repertoire, it must also show why that work should be included in the repertoire. While I can only hope this justification will become evident as we explore in depth the history, theory, and aesthetics of In C, it is worthwhile to outline a series of major issues the reader can keep in mind as she or he reaches an ultimate judgment.

  Above all, In C is the founding work of the musical movement called minimalism. It is hard to realize today how marginal and belittled were the efforts of pioneering American composers in this camp. In the early 1960s La Monte Young and Terry Riley had thrown in their lot with this aesthetic (even though it didn’t even have its name yet; music would have to catch up with painting, which had already discovered and applied the term). Both were recent graduates of the American academic system, but hardly the sort of product that won establishment accolades. Young was the older and more theoretically inclined of the two, and his practice included both highly conceptual works in the orbit of Fluxus art, and extremely slow-changing drone pieces (the latter taking their point of departure from serialism but creating a time span that was glacial in comparison to the nervously morphing shapes of most post-Webernian work of the period). Riley, despite studies including a master’s degree from University of California at Berkeley, remained more of a jazzer in his outlook, playing saxophone and keyboards, and improvising as part of his practical, professional life.

  As a background to Riley’s radical achievement, it’s important to realize that “new music” at that time was assumed to share at least some of these four characteristics.

  1. It involved research. This could have to do with new sounds and extended instrumental techniques, as in the work of Penderecki and Crumb. Or it could mean new ways of organizing pitch and rhythm, represented most strikingly by “total” (or “integral”) serialism. While Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono had all created landmark works in this medium, Europeans seemed to have felt that serialism as a specific technique had exhausted itself quickly. Americans, on the other hand, thanks in part to the support for advanced new music in the university, retained more faith in the system, as embodied above all in the work, career, and intellectual influence of Milton Babbitt.

  2. It meant formalism. Even if one did not subscribe to serialism (as in the examples of Xenakis and Berio in Europe, and Carter in the United States), modernist composers still tended to accept that a successful piece was underpinned by premises “outside of time,” which predated the actual writing of a piece. The term “precompositional procedures” had great currency, and it meant more than just sketching. It suggested that a firm set of rules, algorithms, were developed in advance of inscribing the real-time flow of a piece. Like a blueprint, these rules would ensure consistency of materials in all parameters (pitch, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, color, form). This totalism was of course a legacy of serialism, but it could apply to materials that were in no way dodecaphonic (for example, Xenakis’s realizations of stochastic processes based on probability, or Carter’s uses of interval sets to ensure harmonic coherence⁴). In the end, a work was judged successful if its a priori, predetermined elements were clearly and ingeniously conceived and if their application to the moment-by-moment events of a work was consistent. It also meant that once realized in notated form, these elements were fixed.

  3. It meant experiment. This may seem redundant at first, because all the music mentioned to this point posited a scientific stance toward its material, and of course the experimental method is at the heart of all science. But the great “alternative” music of the period, that of John Cage and his followers, took the concept of experimentation in a different direction. “Experimental” composers suggested that the very idea of the experiment, if it opened up new sounds and modes of perception, was valuable in itself. ⁵ It needed no other justification. It was up to the audience to adjust its expectations, to appreciate the sheer novelty and uniqueness of the musical event, even if (and perhaps because) it stretched the very definition of what music could be. Thus a silent piece such as 4’33” could be music, because even if its physical enactment remained the same from performance to performance (sitting before the piano, opening and closing the lid between movements), the ambient sounds during its performance would always be fresh, unexpected, and aestheticized by the seismic shift of listening attitude on the part of the public.

  4. It accepted information density. Almost all music of this period—whether serial, formalist, or experimental—accepted that a greater degree of complexity existed in art than ever before. In terms of pitch, this meant either atonality, or at least a recycling of the total chromatic so rapid as to weaken or obliterate harmonic centers. (And if centers did occur, they usually were overlaid with so much chromatic material that their resemblance to tonal practice was vestigial.)

  Rhythm also had become stretched to where periodicity—the sense of a recurrent pulse or metric pattern—was almost nonexistent. The great composers of the “heroic” modernist generation—Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ives, Bartók—had all extended rhythmic practice to make it more fluid, multilayered, and unpredictable. But they also reaffirmed the importance of rhythm in the process. Within the postwar modernist hegemony, rhythm often became nothing more than the control of duration, and the flow of time became a matter of perceiving proportions between events that floated in a pulseless zone. Other parameters, such as color and dynamics, became ever more varied and kaleidoscopic, again suggesting an accelerating overturn.

  Many of these “modernist” stances in fact continue in minimalist practice, especially the early works of the movement. There is not a hermetic seal between the musical movements of this period, no matter how different they may appear, and a tangential purpose of this study is to reveal connections that might not seem obvious at first.⁶ Nevertheless, In C could not have been more different, more “transgressive” of the standards of artistic validity that modernism had erected. It was pulsed and repetitive with a vengeance. It was modal, often working with pitch sets much smaller than even the diatonic scale. Its instrumentation, even its number of players, was open. It didn’t make a fetish of the score; its very simplicity and economy seemed to mock the complexity of its contemporaries. While it involved open form and a degree of randomness in its improvisatory ethos, it simultaneously rejected Cageian indeterminacy; it was closer to jazz and rock in its sound and in its presentation of a cosmic “jam.” And perhaps most threatening to a sense of professionalism in the classical avant-garde, it welcomed performers of varying levels; one did not need to be a virtuoso to participate in a successful performance. It was simply, truly of its time.

  Thus In C stands as the Sacre of musical minimalism. The following key points are elements of its importance and originality.

   

  West Coast Roots

  In C represents a major shift, perhaps the definitive shift, of dominant musical culture away from the East Coast and its Europhilic aesthetic to the West Coast, and in particular to California. Of course, America’s “Left Coast” had already provided several “maverick” composers who helped define the idea of a national progressive music. Henry Cowell was a prodigious product of Bay Area bohemianism, a sort of musical “wild child” whose development would have been far different elsewhere.⁷ John Cage and Lou Harrison parlayed their relative isolation in California and Washington State into an asset, inventing a whole new vocabulary of writing for percussion (including the prepared piano). Harry Partch rediscovered alternate tunings with his espousal of just intonation. But these composers from just before and after World War II (except Partch, who remained defiantly outside the mainstream and was accordingly marginalized) eventually made the move to New York, where they were able to solidify and forward their career (none more so than Cage). In a sense, while they created a far greater awareness of an alternative West Coast aesthetic, their career course also seemed to reinforce how essential the Northeastern imprimatur remained for ultimate success.

  Riley, though he too spent time in New York, especially after the premiere of In C, ultimately returned to northern California, where he has remained true to an aesthetic that is far looser and more inclusive than that of East Coast modernism. In a sense, he is the first major composer to remain Californian and have a substantial international career (the next in this line, quite different and more traditional but also impossible to conceive of without Riley’s innovations, is John Adams).

   

  Democracy and Community

  In C proposes a delicate balance between the individual and the group, which is deeply rooted in American traditions and unprecedented in its format. It demands of its players a high degree of individual responsibility. No matter how many performers participate, they must listen carefully to one another for the performance to have any chance of success. Each musician must decide how many times to repeat, when to move to the next module, when to stop and when to return, what dynamic and registration are most fitting to the material played at every moment, when to join in unison with larger groups and when to stand outside the group. The music is the result of a group decision, but each entity retains its separate character and autonomy, a great tribute to American ideals of individualism and democracy. Indeed, one can even look at the piece as an exercise in anarchy, though of the most benign and constructive form.

  But In C is also very much a product of community. That act of listening implies that all the players devote themselves to the greater good of the piece, that they not only listen to their interaction with immediate neighbors but also hear the influence of their actions on the total work. One must listen out to the edges of the piece as one plays and adjust decision-making to the amorphous but real will of the collective. In this sense, one could say that In C is a musical ecology, where a network of relations brings forth a continually evolving aesthetic product that has its own genetic blueprint but can never be predicted exactly. This intersection of political and biological metaphor isn’t arbitrary: in America, the relationship between the natural and the manmade world has always been an immediate, palpable issue.

   

  Non-Western Foundation

  In C represents the first major work to accept into its very fabric non-Western musical traditions. I realize this claim may raise objections. What about Colin McPhee’s Tabu-Tabuhan, which evoked the sound of Balinese gamelan in 1936? Or Milhaud’s La Création du Monde, one of a series of jazz-inspired works in the 1920s? Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was influenced by Chinese music, but transcends chinoiserie. In 1964 Berio wrote his Folk Songs, which celebrated vernacular musical traditions worldwide, and in 1969 Stockhausen created Hymnen, using national anthems as the basis of an immense electroacoustic mural. How then is In C different?

  The answer rests in the words “very fabric.” In C‘s “genetic code,” its entire formal/developmental discourse, is responsive to traditions outside the Western classical canon. As in jazz, improvisation is an essential element. Players repeat a figure ad lib until they decide to continue, but they must listen to one another to decide when their change will have the greatest impact. Thus, though the notes and rhythms are all predetermined, the piece creates its own oral tradition. Like rock, it emphasizes a pulsating “groove” that propels the music forward. Though the music may relax at points, the pulse never disappears. Like Asian musics, it emphasizes mode, rather than chords, to generate harmony. In addition, though it mutates through different modal sets in a way that is dizzyingly varied from performance to performance, it also suggests (in its title, as well as its structure) a fundamental harmonic stasis similar to that of Indian music, which has been enormously influential to Riley. In short, the piece has synthesized and abstracted a host of influences, and yet the resulting music seems to have developed quasi-independently of any of them. When one listens to In C, it’s almost as though the rest of music doesn’t exist, that this is a certain essential music-making that’s at the root of the art.

  As a consequence, In C is eminently suitable for instrumentations that run the gamut of world-music possibilities. The extraordinary recording by the Shanghai Film Orchestra with traditional Chinese instruments is the most radical application of this principle, but a mixed instrumentation, such as that of Bang On a Can⁸ (featuring Chinese pipa and mandolin with amplified Western instruments) is just as compelling, albeit a bit subtler. But beyond the actual instruments used, it is also adaptable to a wide range of traditions.

  The only thing about In C that is truly “Eurocentric” is the fact that it uses Western notation. But that notation is simply the most efficient tool for communication, a shorthand that now has wide acceptance (like Arabic numerals). It is not an attempt to impose a particular attitude toward the role of notation. Thus In C is a work that is truly “trans-stylistic,” and as a result, possibly the first truly “globalist” composition, performable by any ensemble within any musical tradition that is willing to follow the instructions. In a period when the debate over “globalization” is more vociferous than ever, it presents a remarkably benign example, suggesting that a framework loose enough to accommodate cultural difference can exist, bringing forth new art that is neither pandering nor diluted In Comparison to source-traditions.

   

  A New Kind of Improvisation

  This openness suggests a final way in which the work is attuned to the demands of the twenty-first century: In C is a piece of software. I define “software” as a series of rules and predefined relationships that execute a task; the user can then customize input and tweak aspects of the rules and relations to produce a product that is regarded as personal. For example, the word processor that I am using to write this paragraph already defines many of the parameters governing my final written product (orthography, formatting, editing; even spelling and grammar are now under its watchful eye), but the ultimate meaning of my words is still under my control.

  In a similar way In C will generate a performance that is always recognizable as In C. Yet each performance will be different on a host of levels—instrumentation, duration, density, even (as we will see in analyses of different performances) harmonic content. One can again object that this process is really no different from the improvisation that occurs in classic jazz—there is a set of changes that is immutable, over which linear improvisation places a layer of personalized interpretation.⁹ While this is quite true, In C is yet again something new and different, because every single note and rhythm of the work is already determined in the score. The choices that performers make shape these materials via repetition, entry/exit, and dynamics (so as to background/foreground ideas). Otherwise, they do not involve the personal “invention” we usually associate with improvisatory traditions. In this way, In C strangely enough, is highly “classical” in the Western sense, that is, it is drawn from a score that determines the pitches and rhythms of the piece.

  But of course it is resolutely non-Western in a host of other aspects. This paradox is basic to its originality and success. The extraordinary balance between the constrained and free, the ordered and open, the personal and communal, help to make it original, enduring, and an emerging beacon for a global musical practice.

  ***

  Our journey toward a comprehensive understanding of In C begins with the historical backdrop for the creation and premiere of the work. Chapter 2 concentrates on the Bay Area music scene of the early 1960s and is based on conversations with Riley and those who knew and collaborated with him in that period. In addition, it closely examines several works which lead up to In C, and which develop and solidify the techniques essential to In C‘s practice (including the String Trio and Quartet, collaborative works with La Monte Young, the film soundtrack Mescalin Mix, and the multimedia tape piece Music for the Gift).

  Chapter 3 reconstructs the premiere of the piece, based above all on interviews with participants. The sources for reconstruction of the performance have been sketchy and scattered. A host of questions need to be answered, and we are in the enviable position of recording firsthand accounts from those who were present at the event. Questions include:

  How was the piece written?
  What were the stages of its conception and realization before it went into rehearsal?
  Did the piece develop/change during the rehearsal process?
  What were the contributions of other musicians to the final product?
  What were the physical circumstances of the premiere?
  What was its exact instrumentation?
  How long did it last?
  What were the acoustics of the hall?
  What was the effect, if any, on the performance of the other Riley works on the program, in terms of the context they created for In C‘s reception?

  Chapter 4 undertakes the first substantive analysis of In C. The piece has been consistently described in terms of its basic premises and elements, but never examined as a piece unfolding in time. In addition, a number of casual descriptions have summed it up as a series of general modal areas that morph from one to another, but offer no explanation of how they do so. The analysis looks at how the careful progression of motives from one to another affects both the texture and the general harmonic profile of the work. In this case the work is considered “exogenously,” outside of time, as a network of relations between motivic materials that define larger-scale connections. From this perspective, some sense of overall progression is derived.

  Chapter 5 explores a circumstance that is idiomatic to In C, both as a work with its own special qualities and as a seminal work of the late twentieth century. The piece experienced a “second premiere” in 1968 with its release by Columbia Records in a landmark LP. The chapter investigates the process of recording and the implications of the record for the position the piece assumed in public consciousness of the Minimalist movement.

  Among critical questions to consider are:

  Was there any influence on In C of Riley’s works composed during the interim period, such as A Rainbow in Curved Air and Poppy Nogood’s Phantom Band, fruits of his loft concerts in New York?
  How had the work changed since its initial San Francisco performance in Riley’s mind and ear?
  What were the exact circumstances of the recording session?
  What decisions unique to its circumstances were made to define the work’s character?

  Chapter 5 also examines the work from a different analytic viewpoint. The decisions of timing, pacing, and interaction made by real musicians will inevitably bring to the foreground different aspects of the music. By focusing on a particular set of motives, players can create a climax, push forward movement, or hold movement in a static pattern. Further, depending on which motives are held or released at what point, the modal content of the piece at a given moment may be quite different from one performance to another, suggesting variable harmonic profiles.

  Thus, an “endogenous” analysis (within time) of the piece will explore the first recorded performance to determine when motives enter, when they exit, and what rhythmic and harmonic content of the work results.

  Finally, chapter 6 considers the legacy of In C. Part of this is the evolving idea of the piece, traced through observations by the performers who premiered the work in both the concert and recorded versions (a group that contains some of the most important voices in American music). In addition, a variety of prominent contemporary musicians—composers, performers, critics, and musicologists—discuss the impact of In C on their own development as practicing professionals and on their view of music generally. These “post–In C” musicians stand as evidence of the enduring and evolving impact of the piece.

  The “endogenous” analysis of the premiere recording will be extended to a series of recorded performances (in the appendix). Tabulating and examining these results will lead to a developmental map of the work, which then can be compared with other performances to suggest the work’s range of possible realizations. One of the essential aspects of In C is that it can never exist in a “definitive” version. These analyses can only suggest the richness of the piece but can never describe it authoritatively. In C deserves the increased understanding that theoretical study can impart, but our analysis will also reveal the limits of what such an approach can yield. In C possesses certain qualities that will always defy attempts to pin it down.

  ***

  By the end I hope each reader will have experienced an “enlightenment” in regard to In C, similar to what those who undertake a performance of the piece itself experience. This book is our own “map” to follow through the forking paths of In C‘s music and history. Riley speaks of a long process of mastering the basics of a tradition so that one can “speak” within it naturally and fluently.¹⁰ Perhaps by our own immersion within the history, analysis, aesthetics, and performance practice of In C, we as an audience can come to a similarly rich, deep, and flexible understanding.

   

  Notes:

  ^1.David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1983/1998), p. 263.

  ^2.Celestial Harmonies 13026-2 and Wergo 6650 2, respectively.

  ^3.James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 37.

  ^4.Cf. Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music (Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1971); and Elliott Carter, Harmony Book ed. Nicholas Hopkins and John Link (New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 2002).

  ^5.This concept was first articulated by Michael Nyman in his Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. in the first chapter, pp. 1-26. Nyman draws a distinction between experimentalism and what he calls the “avant garde,” which is basically the same as what I refer to as modernist classical music.

  ^6.Robert Carl, “The Politics of Definition in New Music,” College Music Symposium 29 (1989), 101-114.

  ^7.Cf. Michael Hicks, Henry Cowell, Bohemian (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

  ^8.Cantaloupe Music 20014.

  ^9.Indeed, if In C is similar to anything, it is to a raga, whose core information of scales and rhythms intersects with a carefully preserved performance tradition, within which musicians can assert their virtuosity and individuality. And this similarity is not surprising, considering Riley’s lifelong interest in and study of Indian music.

  ^10.Author interview with Terry Riley, Richmond, Calif., December 2, 2006.

Robert Carl

• READ an excerpt from Terry Riley’s In C by Robert Carl (Courtesy of Oxford University Press).[Ed note: Oxford University Press is a proud sponsor of NewMusicBox and this very book has been featured in their sponsored space on this site. However, despite this seredipidous synchronicity, their welcome support for NewMusicBox in no way influences our editorial content.]

  In April 2009, the 45th anniversary of Terry Riley’s In C was celebrated on the main stage of Carnegie Hall in an all-star performance assembled by the Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington. The event included the participation of musical luminaries across a wide swath of genres ranging from Philip Glass and Joan La Barbara to Dave Douglas, Lenny Pickett, and Wu Man, plus some of the participants in the piece’s earliest performances—Morton Subotnick, Katrina Krimsky, Jon Gibson, and Stuart Dempster. Some of us felt it was a long overdue acknowledgment from one of the world’s most prominent bastions of high culture for the historical significance of minimalism and the work which served as a catalyst for establishing this new musical paradigm. Although, fascinatingly enough, the 1968 New York premiere of In C, which directly led to its premiere recording on Columbia Masterworks, occurred in Carnegie’s much smaller, and at the time less high-profile, Recital Hall, now known as Weill Recital Hall. But if last year’s Carnegie Hall celebration confirmed In C‘s status as a landmark in music history, two more recent events reveal In C to be a harbinger of the future as well.

  In July 2009, Oxford University Press issued Robert Carl’s analytical volume Terry Riley’s In C as part of their series, Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, the first work of a living composer to be so accredited. This may seem another accolade in the establishing of In C as standard repertoire, but in fact Robert Carl’s book is also largely about how In C‘s adaptability among musicians of a wide variety of stylistic backgrounds provides an excellent road map for the future of music.

  In November 2009, innova issued In C Remixed, a 2-CD set featuring a crisp performance of Riley’s original score by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble along with 18 remixes and re-conceptualizations of In C by a broad range of people including some of today’s most forward thinking musical creators—e.g. David Lang, R. Luke DuBois, Phil Kline, Mason Bates (a.k.a. Masonic), and Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. D.J. Spooky That Subliminal Kid).

  Right before the start of this new year, I chatted with Robert Carl about his insightful book as well as the past, present, and future of what is an undeniable musical phenomenon. It is clear that in addition to being one of the most significant pieces of American music created thus far, In C also continues to shape and inform the music of today and tomorrow.—FJO

   

  ***

  

  Listen to Robert Carl and Frank J. Oteri’s wide-ranging discussion of Riley’s seminal work.

  ---

  Audio samples used in the program are pulled from GVSU New Music Ensemble’s new disc on innova records, In C Remixed.

  Purchase:

  Frank J. Oteri: Your book, Terry Riley’s In C, is part of a series of books, Oxford University Press’s Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, which deal with single pieces of music. Curiously it’s the first book in that series to deal with the music of an American composer, and the first to deal with a living composer. There have been analytical books written about other specific books for decades, but books about single pieces of music are a relatively recent phenomenon. A few years back there was an excellent book about Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and there have been books about specific Broadway musicals and jazz albums, as well as close to a hundred books in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series on rock albums. I’m wondering how many of these types of book you yourself have read and how much of an impact they had on your own work.

  Robert Carl: I have to tell you that I’m woefully ignorant about all of this in many ways, but I’ve had this book as a glimmer in the back of my eye for a long period of time. At one point, just looking through the Oxford catalog of music books that turned up one day in the mail, I saw this series which I had never really thought of before. It’s essentially a musicological series dealing with monuments pretty much of the 19th century, maybe the early 20th: very scholarly, very historically oriented, dealing with manuscripts and source material study. And I thought, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be a hoot if In C were part of that?” So out of the blue I emailed the editor, whose name I saw there—Malcolm Gilles. He’s a rather remarkable polymathic man who is a Bartók scholar, among many other things. I asked him whether such a book could possibly be part of this series, even though it was kind of the camel’s nose under the tent, in terms of bringing the 20th century in. And he wrote back, “What an interesting idea. Send us a proposal.” And that’s how it started. It was totally out of the blue. And I think he was as intrigued by the idea that if there was to be a break in the wall of these 19th century monuments that this series was dealing with, this might be a very interesting piece to do it with—that a piece that is recent 20th century and actually in many ways highly experimental and radical in terms of its practice might take its place along with these repertoire monuments. So I have to say that I was more driven by the topic of the book than I was by driven by the genre of the book.

  FJO: A book of this nature is ultimately fundamentally different from a biography or a book about a specific style or time period. Your book is not really a book about Terry Riley or a book on minimalism or the 1960s, although all of those topics get fleshed out in it. By focusing on a single piece, you provide a very specific window through which all of these other things can be observed.

  RC: I should say that, if someone hasn’t seen it, it’s not a big book—it’s about 160 pages. But it is to some degree a portrait or a bio of Terry Riley leading up to In C, so in a sense it’s the first half of his life. When I first met him he did say, “I haven’t had a biography yet, and maybe this is it.” I hope it isn’t; I hope there’s more coming down the pipeline. But it serves a certain function of taking him up to about 1968-69, and it does also deal with the pieces that led up to In C, starting from works that he was writing just after he got to San Francisco and Berkeley: the String Quartet; the Trio; Music for the Gift, which he made in Paris—the pieces that are both acoustic—”classical”—and the pieces that are electro-acoustic. And the influences of jazz and drug use and the culture which was in between Beat and Counterculture in San Francisco at that time, all of those things go into the mix and I think are essential to show how he got to a certain critical point where he wrote the piece essentially in one night in a white heat. That’s one of those apocryphal stories that seems to be true. At least the horse’s mouth says it is, and I believe him.

  FJO: We often talk about composers and principal works of theirs that immediately spring to mind, e.g. Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring. Certainly Stravinsky had a very long career and wrote lots of other fabulous music, but Rite of Spring is the piece that everyone thinks of. With Schoenberg, it is probably less so with Pierrot. People also think of Verklärte Nacht and the development of twelve-tone music, which was later. But Terry and In C are almost inseparable. No other piece he’s done has had quite the same impact. It’s sad that Terry thought that this book will be his biography considering he created so many incredible works for string quartet—he’s probably our most prolific living composer of quartets—plus all the remarkable solo keyboard compositions and improvisations. Why do you think that is?

  RC: For one thing, In C met a particular need with genius at the moment, to work out a strategy for dealing with open form that still preserved character and a certain precision and yet was also so incredibly open. I think the balancing act that he got doing that with the structure of the piece—a one-page score with 53 modules—is a remarkable thing. He himself says he could have gone on and done it over and over again and he decided not to. Only a couple of pieces that followed are anything like this: Tread the Trail and Autumn Leaves. So it stands out because it seems to meet a very particular need for structured and improvised musics melding together. Another thing that I discovered about it listening to a lot of the recordings that have been made over the years is that there are few pieces that are as welcoming to musicians who come from an unbelievable range of experience, not just classical versus non-classical but also Western and non-Western, popular and learned, whatever that is, all of these points on the spectrum seem to be able to find a meeting point in the piece. In that sense, it’s one of the most benign forms of globalization that you could possibly have; it’s a counter-model to the ways that has gone.

  FJO: You mentioned these other two In C-like pieces, which are barely known at all. And I also thought of a third, Olson III.

  RC: Yes.

  FJO: But none of those pieces caught on either. There are no recordings of the two pieces you mentioned, and there’s only one archival recording of Olson III that was issued on CD by the Cortical Foundation in the 1990s. So there isn’t a well-spring the way there has been with In C. And I wonder if perhaps to some extent it’s because the score is so widely available—Terry has offered it for free on his website and links to that score are on other sites all over the internet. Plus it’s so easy to disseminate: it’s just one page and everyone plays from the same page. So aside from all this philosophical stuff we’ve been talking about—being open to all musicians, being a platform for globalization—it’s also downright practical. Anyone can get a hold of it and put together a group of people to perform it without too much trouble.

  RC: I think that’s a great point. I couldn’t agree more. It was an incredibly courageous decision to print the score on the foldout of the original LP. You bought the LP and there it was: white on black, very ’60s! So everybody got the score when they bought the recording, and it immediately became clear how it worked. There was no mystification about what the technique or the process was. You could figure it out in a second. So that was enormously courageous, but at the same time it was prescient because it was like freeware. Free is the new economy, and he did that. And I think no thing was more important to the practical professional aspects of his career than that giving away that he did. It’s had an enormous impact on why that piece is iconic.

  FJO: In terms of contemporary music compositions, I can’t think of any that have been recorded as many times. Having all these different versions of In C out there to choose from is like the access we have to so many different conductors’ takes on the Beethoven symphonies or various Mozart operas.

  RC: I think there’s a subtle but a real difference, though, between the repertoire and In C. In C has an open instrumentation and an open duration. And as a consequence of the kind of accordion structure it has, where it can expand or contract, the relationships between the modules are also different from performance to performance, even though the sequence always remains the same. Every time someone decides to perform it, every time someone decides to record it, it’s a new version, maybe a new realization. Maybe we should be using the word realization instead of interpretation, because interpretation suggests a 19th-century ideal of a score which is a fixed artifact that one is supposed to realize as close as possible to the text. But with In C, you can only get so close and then like a magnet you bounce off it.

  FJO: One of the things I find so wonderful about your book is that you include this elaborate annotated discography of all the different recordings of In C that have come out. There are some listeners out there who are not particularly attuned to minimalism and find constant repetition a source of irritation. To listen to one recording would be a challenge for such a person, to listen to twelve different recordings and to be able to describe how each one is unique would be sheer torture. I imagine you had to listen to each of these recordings many times over in order to get the level of detail that you bring to this. So I’m interested in hearing your analytical listening process and the amount of time you spent with all these recordings.

  RC: There’s a much prettier realization in the book than what I was working from, which were raw sheets. I worked up a template which showed a time grid going from left to right and then from top to bottom the modules. I would just listen and figure out when each module entered and exited, so there’s this series of horizontal bars that are moving their way from left to right across the page and slowly descending with different types of overlaps. I’d do that with each one and over time I got better at it and so it didn’t take so long. The first one I did is the 1968 premiere recording. And, by the way, I’m sure that someone else will listen and will hear differences with what I hear because many of the modules are deliberately close to one another. If you’re hearing one [module] ending you may actually be fooled because it’s the beginning of one that’s very closely structured. It’s one of those things where you try to make the best judgment call you can.

  One of the more unusual In C recordings to be released thus far features the Moscow-based Terry Riley Repetitition [sic] Orchestra.

  The other answer is that strangely enough, precisely because of the difference between the spirit of the different recordings, it almost becomes this adventure of what’s next. What’s it gonna be now? There’s this one Russian recording with a group that’s called The Terry Riley Repetitition [sic] Orchestra. I’m sure it’s not a typo; I think it’s a joke. It’s a performance from Moscow and there are sleigh bells and women yodeling. It’s like Les Noces gone wild and yet it’s the piece; you hear everything in it.

  FJO: I often joke with people about the critics in Gramophone magazine who compare the tempos and differences in accelerandos in different recordings of Bruckner symphonies.

  RC: Indeed, this is Oxford Press, and I do say what the tempo is. It’s very easy. You just have your metronome with you and listen to the pulse very carefully and adjust it until you’ve got the light flashing with it. So that’s there for the documentation. And since the book has come out, two more recordings of In C have come out. It means there has to be another edition; that’s my hope if I can keep up with them.

  FJO: One of the recordings that just came out is a two-disc set of In C remixes by all different people, which perhaps takes this notion of malleability, realization rather than performance, to an even further extreme even though they were all working with the same performance by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble. Some of the resultant pieces are very different, but all of them have hints of In C. How does a process like that create a further interpretative history for this piece?

  innova’s In C Remixed, featuring the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, open up a whole new set of possibilities.

  RC: Terry is very open to whatever people do. He’s very generous and I think he’s inherently curious, so I don’t think he has any trouble with it. I listened once through the whole set, and I think that the works that appeal to me the most are in fact the ones that are so different that they stand on their own as pieces. When you listen to the performance of In C that the group gives, which is a great one—it’s very tight and is actually one of the shortest ones around—the piece still stands as a monument. I hate to use this word because it’s so counterculture, but it still has this quality. Many of the other pieces strike me as hommages. It’s the “Tombeau de Terry” that we have here. But there were two that I was particularly taken by. There are a couple that make it into a club mix that people can dance to, maybe that’s one of the hopes that they had for the album, that it will go out into the world and do that like the Reich Remix album did. But the one by Mason Bates had a really interesting mix between the original sounds and the techno sounds. And then David Lang’s which went completely somewhere else, processed enormously and turned into this big, slowly mutating electro-acoustic texture. It’s like the ghost of the piece floating along. For me, I like the works that take off from it and actually make truly new pieces, but that’s just my taste.

  FJO: David Lang has said publicly a number of times that for him and composers of his generation and beyond, In C was the same kind of life changing work that The Rite of Spring had been to an earlier generation of composers.

  RC: It occupies a similar position in the birth of a movement. You can look at Paris in 1913 and say, “Well, there’s modernism.” That’s where it starts. It’s easy to mark it as a break point, even though there are a million things that presage it and you could choose other important strands. It’s the same thing with minimalism, but I think that In C is really such an obvious encapsulation of everything that was going on. Everything that’s in In C was already in the air, but it’s the first piece to bring slow harmonic motion, pulse, and repetition, and actually modal harmonic structure—all of those elements together in one piece. All of those were out in the air but not combined as fully and as successfully as I think In C does. So in that sense it is The Rite of Spring of a movement. I would say one other thing, too. A lot of early minimalism was extremely purist, very strict, rigorous, and abstract. Like the early Reich phasing pieces. They’re enormously different from the sound of modernist music, but actually share a rigorous abstraction that is tied to modernism. In C is one of the first pieces that sounds more like both popular music and world music. Rock wasn’t so much in Terry’s mind at the time. It was much more jazz and world music, Indian music in particular. So it’s opening up to other types of music in the world. Also, it’s much more playful. And that playfulness makes it a kind of post-modern thing as well as minimalist, and I think that’s maybe another aspect of the influence that’s gone on with it.

  FJO: He may not have had rock music in mind but he was a hero to rock musicians. The Who recorded “Baba O’Riley,” and early on there was even a rock band named Curved Air after another one of Terry’s pieces, A Rainbow In Curved Air. And so many rock groups have done the piece.

  RC: Oh sure.

  The Styrenes is one of the rock bands that has recorded In C.

  FJO: In terms of the people who were involved with the premiere and the premiere recording of it, that’s another thing about the catalyst that it represented—there were so many important composers. You mentioned Steve Reich. Reich participated in that first performance. And he hadn’t done those phase pieces you mentioned yet. Those came after In C. It’s Gonna Rain is 1965; that’s a year later. Pauline Oliveros was also involved, as was Morton Subotnick, whose own music was very different. Stuart Dempster was on the first recording, as was Jon Hassell, David Rosenboom, and Katrina Krimsky—all these major figures of the last half century, as well as some important figures who should be better known today like Ramon Sender, Jon Gibson, and Phil Winsor. That’s a really heady group of people.

  RC: Terry inspires a certain loyalty to begin with. He’s very generous and people reciprocate. He actually wrote In C for a retrospective concert in 1964—they were doing it that year at the San Francisco Tape Music Center as a part of a series of local artists each with their own show. And he was just sort of calling people up, getting people off the street. There was one man, a jazz pianist named James Lowe who played in it, who basically was working at the Tape Music Center in a barter arrangement. He did custodial type work and they gave him access to the machines. And Terry said, “C’mon and play in my piece.” It was that sort of thing. Actually Reich said that at the dress rehearsal a couple of hippies came in with a trumpet and tried to start playing and Reich was the one who threw them out. “I just wanna blow, man!” Terry probably would have let them play. But the group was there because they enjoyed the communal experiences that they’d had in a lot of different ways. And they’d been together for a while. Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, and Terry had all been in grad school together. Other people were there that he’d been working with at the Tape Music Center. So it was a good chance to do a kind of community action to express their bonding. And the thing that was great about it, aside from just the fact that it birthed a piece, is that there was, in particular, Stuart Dempster there, who interestingly enough did not play the premiere. He had another gig [that night]. When I interviewed him for the book he couldn’t believe he didn’t do it, but then he went back and looked at his books—he has meticulously documented his life—and in fact he said, “Gosh, I had a gig with the Oakland Symphony that night so I couldn’t have played.” But he played in a revival concert that happened maybe about half a year later, just before Terry was to leave to go to Europe. (That actually didn’t happen; he ended up going to New York.) So [Stuart] knew the piece and he had the score. And when he got to Buffalo, for the Creative Associates program, he was the one who said, “We should do this piece.” And he brought it to the attention of Lukas Foss. That led to some recital type performances in Buffalo and then they took it to New York [City]. And David Behrman had been brought into the mix, so to speak, as a listener. He liked the piece and went back to Columbia [Records] and said, “We should really record this piece.” And one thing led to another.

  Columbia Masterworks’ 1968 World Premiere Recording of In C was akin to a second premiere.

  One thing that is very interesting about In C as a new model in the 20th century is that it is a piece that had two premieres. The concert premiere was certainly incredibly important, especially as an event historically that we can look back on. But if it had only been that, this piece might not have been the piece it became. It was the fact that it had the recording that came out in 1968 on a major label that amazingly enough thought it would actually have crossover appeal going in both directions—to both classical listeners and a counterculture youth audience. They were looking for things that might fit that mold. And that’s something that I’m not sure has ever happened before.

  FJO: The other thing I find interesting about the composition of the piece, which is an extension of its openness and Terry’s own openness, is that the pulse—which is so significant to both the sound and the functionality of the piece—was actually not part of his original conception. The fact that this only emerged during rehearsals strikes me similarly to how I felt when I learned that the poem we know today as The Waste Land is just as much a product of Ezra Pound’s role as its editor as T.S. Eliot’s role as poet.

  RC: This is where Steve Reich comes in. He was part of the ensemble. There were not many rehearsals, by the way. No one knows exactly how many there were. No one really remembers. It was really informal. By what was more or less the dress rehearsal, they were still floundering around, they couldn’t quite keep together. And Reich said, “Well, once a drummer, always a drummer; let’s have a pulse.” They didn’t have a trap set, so they put it on the piano and they had Reich’s girlfriend at the time, Jeanie Brechan, doing it. It’s very interesting. It’s signed by Terry Riley, but there is a Steve Reich thumbprint on it. It probably would have been much more like Music for the Gift which is the electro-acoustic piece that precedes it. It would have felt much more like big amorphous cycles; it would not have had the precision. But again, one of the things that Terry has a gift for is that he says, “Hey, that’s a good idea; let’s do that!” And he’s not appropriative or defensive about where something comes from if it works. That’s part of the collaborative process.

  FJO: One of the stories I find so fascinating about all the composers who were at that premiere is the story you have in the book about the man who walked out, Henry Jacobs. I was hoping you would have done an interview with him. I did some web surfing to find more information about him, and I found a website that purports to have contact information for him. Maybe the site hasn’t been updated in a while. He was involved with Ken Nordine and there’s a recording for sale there called Vortex Sound Experiments which sounds pretty wacked out. So I thought to myself, “This guy’s a nut job! He’s off the wall adventurous, totally my kind of composer. So why is he having a problem with In C?” Seems like instead he should have been part of the performance!

  RC: Somebody who’s a graduate student at Berkeley emailed me about this, too. He’s doing a dissertation on Henry Jacobs. And I wrote back to him and said this is what I have from participants. But I don’t know. I didn’t interview him, I’m not sure if he’s still alive or not. If he is and he finds this, please let me know and don’t be too angry with me! But I think it’s probably like when you have dueling Marxist sects. There is a group of people doing a certain type of experimental thing, which is really their world and they feel that that’s really where it needs to be going. I think he had a series at the San Francisco Exploratorium; I’m just imaging this, but it could be a little bit like an American version of INA-GRM series in France with this very surrealistic San Francisco inflected musique concrète. I could see that if he was doing very wacked out electro-acoustic music, this music, which sounded so relatively simplistic—if you were really involved with complex electro-acoustic layering and textures—might have had markers about it that set off the wrong alarm bells. But this really is a guess. And I don’t want to malign someone without knowing what the truth is.

  FJO: Well, if he’s still around, I want to track him down. You’ve inspired me.

  RC: Please do and please let me know.

  FJO: All of this brings me to talk with you about your own music. In many ways, you’re a back door historian; you’re a composer and that’s primarily what you do. And I find it interesting to talk about these rival aesthetics because your own music is worlds away from In C and from what it engendered.

  RC: It’s hard for me not to like a new piece of music. I can be disappointed, sure, but it’s always a thrill for me. That’s the most facile answer I’ll give, but I’ll get more substantial. I also write a lot of reviews of new music CDs for Fanfare [magazine] and I kept hearing recordings of In C. And my whole idea of it changed as I heard more and more realizations. I realized what a remarkably flexible, open, and adaptable piece it is. And in terms of my own music, I’ve written a lot of pieces and I have a whole category of pieces that are more open form and improvisational. I think that this aspect of 21st-century music practice is only going to get more and more important. The lines between what’s called jazz and classical are melting as we speak. What In C represents is one of many useful models for ways of dealing with that greater interpenetration between different traditions. The other thing is my students at the Hartt School [University of Hartford]. These young composers just take this for granted. The piece is a landmark, it’s an icon, it’s a masterpiece—fine. They are also—let’s call them young classical composers, for lack of a better word—really much more open to using improvisation and structuring improvisation than previous generations. They see it as part of their craft. For me as a composer teaching composition, that led me to think more and more about the importance of this piece and why I wanted to do a study of it. And I feel I learned an enormous amount. Even though, you’re right, my music is very different from what would be called minimalist or post-minimalist. If there’s any tradition it’s coming from, it’s probably more early American ultra-modernism with Ives and Ruggles and then some romantic elements thrown in. But the idea of pacing, the idea of space, the idea of allowing music to open up and take as long as is necessary to do what it needs to do, that’s what I learned from minimalism. Just as I learned from [John] Cage to stop being afraid. Cage is the ultimate model to do what needs to be done and to follow your imagination. There’s a composer to whom in one sense I have no relation in my own music in any sort of technical way but who is an enormous inspiration to me. I probably first heard In C in maybe about ’74, which is six years after the disc came out. And I remember when I first heard it, it was kind of a disorienting experience. I was a late starter as a composer and I was just starting to get involved with writing music. I was in college was very drawn to the music of Ives and Carter—and this music is still very important to me. So In C was a challenge and almost an insult in some ways. I think I was scared of it at first. And I also think that first recording, fantastic though it is, defined the piece a little too clearly in people’s ears. It was much more a kind of carnival and you didn’t hear the structure as well. There are many different aspects to it, and the multiplicity of it got frozen in amber for a while because of that recording. That was the devil’s bargain; that was the trade-off. So, I heard it early on, but frankly it took me a long time to grow up to where I think I could really appreciate it enough to have something that was maybe useful to say about it and that I hope shows a love of the piece. I listen to it now, and after years of hearing all these different performances, I know when this or that module is coming up. When module 35 hits with the long melody I get a rush and think, how are they going to deal with it now? I know that’s kind of insider, but, like any great piece of music, eventually you know it: you know the sequence and you know the tunes and the progressions. In that sense, I can’t imagine being disappointed by it as a piece. I might be disappointed by some performance, though in a way it would have to be really bad. In C is almost indestructible; the performance would have to be really bad for it to be significantly maimed. It could be left kind of anodyne, but not really destroyed.

  FJO: Coming to this piece from being a Carter devotee as well as an admirer of Ives and Ruggles, I’d like to ask you about where you think In C fits in the continuum of the so-called American maverick tradition. Though it sounds very different, what Terry Riley has done here is so individual and is yet another manifestation of this kind of rugged independence. Maybe now that we’re in the 21st century we can look back and perceive connections between—to rehash terms that now seem somewhat quaint, though the tremors of them still have impact in certain places—”uptown” and “downtown”. Nowadays you can do “uptown” analytical work on a “downtown” piece. You can also go hear Carter played at a downtown club. We’ve passed these boundaries.

  RC: It’s sort of a dream. We’re both composers and we’ve lived through the same period and I suspect that we’re both pretty happy to see the way things have gone. It’s not like one side has crushed the other. As a matter of fact, the interesting thing about the youth that I deal with [at Hartt] is that they tend to snarf it up pretty equally. They may write a piece which is quite Zappa-esque in terms of its sound, and yet it’s using complex rhythmic structures that may come out of Carter. Of course, Zappa’s music is complex to begin with, but mixing and matching is going on all the time. I will tell you that when the millennium turned over I said, “I am so happy that I’m now a 21st century composer.” Because when you were a 20th century composer, it felt like there was so much baggage that came with different aesthetics and camps and battles that had been fought. When the clock ticked and it went past midnight, here we are now and we can truly do what we want to do. It’s totally artificial, I know, but it felt that way to me. And it didn’t feel like the post-modernism thing where everything’s fine, we can mix and match, rather we can now work with these materials and make them personal and synthesize them anyway we want and integrate them anyway we want. In that sense, I remain a total Pollyanna and quite irrationally optimistic about the field.

  FJO: So then a final question to bring this back to In C. You alluded earlier in our conversation to the idea that it goes against the counterculture nature of this piece to call it a landmark or a masterpiece, but here we are 45 years after its conception and it is music of the previous century. It’s undeniably part of history, but is it also part of the canon of classical music? To look at it from a counterculture point of view, a canon is what we rebel against in order to create something new. So do we rebel against In C? How?

  RC: The canon itself is constantly expanding as well. It’s bringing in other cultures. We’re not far at all from a point where composers who study what’s called classical music are going to know the major canonical gamelan works and the major canonical gagaku works—you already see it—and certain major pieces and major musicians who come out of African music of all sorts. Classical music, whatever we call it, is just going to keep broadening its definition in terms of what we’re calling a music made for its own sake, concert music of some sort, but it also has a social function. And In C fits very comfortably within whatever that tradition or that field is as a landmark work and I think it will survive. In that sense we don’t need to worry too much; its prospects for survival are excellent as a work of music that people are going to keep doing seriously. And when you mention counterculture, I should mention that it still is in many ways a prophetic work, because it’s one of the greatest examples of human beings getting together to agree to do a communal action where they maintain their individually yet with a prescribed goal. I think it’s a political statement. More than Cage, I think it’s an example of a structured anarchy which is very positive. And as such I think it remains a useful idealistic model for us in terms of all the political and social issues that we have.

Weighing in at 300+ heavily inked pages, Notations 21 carries both the intellectual heft of an academic text book and the intrigue of a good coffee table read. Structured in such a way that you can almost open it at random and sink into something fascinating, we took a peek between the pages with the book’s editor Theresa Sauer to find out how it stacked against Cage’s iconic Notations and what new worlds graphic notation has opened up for composers, performers, and listeners.

Special thanks to Sauer and Mark Batty Publisher for their assistance in assembling the short film that accompanies this interview.

Molly Sheridan: Notations 21 is, of course, an extension of what John Cage did with Notations in 1969. How do the two collections compare?

Theresa Sauer: I felt that there are so many composer/artists who have been influenced by his ideas that I wanted to title my book Notations 21 to honor John Cage.

The two collections include some iconic composers such as John Cage, Yuji Takahashi, Cathy Berberian, Earle Brown, James Tenney, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, and Leon Schidlowsky. Notations 21 has some fascinating original essays included that set it apart. I’m also proud to say that it includes Halim El-Dabh, whose submission for the original Notations missed the deadline by just a hair.

Of course, the Notations 21 collection includes works from the emerging artists since those times. It also casts a wider net around the world, including works by composers from over 40 countries. I’d like to think that John Cage would have wanted to have a more international focus, but with the Internet making the world a more connected place, it was much easier for me to investigate composers from around the globe. However, like Cage, I found that I received submissions in an almost random pattern, and never knew who would contact me next! I still continually receive submissions of composers’ works, and they are now part of the ongoing Notations 21 Project; I hope to make another anthology in the future, because these works continue to intrigue and impress me in extraordinary ways.

There was very little use of “chance operations” in the development of this book. A high criterion for inclusion in this volume was necessary. I have a great respect for the work of Alison Knowles and her original design layout for Notations. I had wonderful assistance from Michael Perry and the people at Mark Batty Publisher for the design of Notations 21. But everything was planned and not left to chance.

I wanted to include biographies and descriptions of the works when composers wanted to include them because I am dedicated to creating a forum for these composers and their music. The Notations 21 Project is becoming a true network, and the composers connect with one another and with me, to collaborate. I am planning performances, concerts, exhibits, and lectures for the future.

MS: What is the place and role of this type of scoring in the larger musical world? What does it uniquely offer?

TS: The role of graphic notation in the world today is to broaden communication between composer, performer, and listener. When Western notation was first developed, the composer was concerned about creating a symbol to represent a sound. Composers still have that viewpoint but now have seen many more possibilities. They have ideas about collaboration, intuition, imagination, improvisation, time, and space, stretching the limits of what we can communicate in symbols.

There are composers who use extended notational language in the Notations 21 collection, including Keren Rosenbaum, Kyong Mee Choi, Brice Pauset, Jef Chippewa, and Takayuki Rai, whose new forms actually assist the performer to more specifically perform the music as it was conceived by the composer, in order to accommodate new musical concepts.

But there are composers who have developed new languages that evolve into events, such as the work of Stuart Saunders Smith. Stuart says, “All Western music notation is a symbol-system of graphic notation which musicians interpret. Furthermore, it is a pre-scriptive notation rather than a post-scriptive notation. I am keenly aware that when I am writing music, I am making a code which shapes the mind of the interpreter. I constantly ask, ‘How will my notational strategy be taken in?’ The score indicates not just what to play, but how to play. Embedded in the design of the symbols are implicit meanings that literally shape the consciousness of the performers.”

At the other end of the spectrum there are examples in the book where the visual art invites complete improvisation. For example, Voya Toncitch’s Indian Elegy and Will Redman’s Book pieces (one of which graces the cover of Notations 21) do this very thing. Will Redman’s directives for his work are simply, “For interpretation, however radical, by any performer(s) in any place, at any time, for any duration.”

The creative genius of the Notations 21 artists and their new musical innovations are creating a new vibrant world that will be moving toward them in the future. Their work is so provocative on so many levels that it draws great interest from those willing to see and hear.

MS: The presentation of these 290 scores by 165 composers is, of course, a principally visual experience. So is it art or is it music?

TS: The scores are music because they were created for performance. However, I would say that many of these scores rival the best in contemporary visual arts. Many of these composers have backgrounds in visual art in addition to their musicality, such as Douglas C. Wadle, Tony Martin, Jennifer Walshe, Steve Roden, and John Kannenberg, and the visual aesthetic is extremely important to these composers for the most part. Notations 21 score samples are a collection of what might be called a “fusion” of music and visual art.

Yes, these scores can be evaluated on a purely visual or musical basis, which makes these scores even more interesting. But I would encourage anyone who does have a volume of the book to seek out the composer’s music. The joy of hearing these new scores while putting this book together was an incredible experience for me.

MS: How did what was going on in the visual art world influence this type of scoring, both back in the 1960s and now in 2009?

TS: Western notated music is highly deterministic, leaving very little to interpretation for the performer. The composer used notation to guide every detail of the performance leaving very little to chance. The rise of the Fluxus movement explored indeterminacy in art and music and was a very exciting time in history. It included such historical stars as John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, La Monte Young, Dick Higgins, and others.

Political and social issues, the idea of freedom and breaking rules, collaboration and community, choices and creating new boundaries…. these were the issues to be dealt with in the 1960’s.

In 2009, many of the composers included in Notations 21 are dealing with new and very powerful political and social issues, ideas of freedom and our environment on a larger and more global scale. These new and old issues are represented in Notations 21 side-by-side. The book explores how John Cage guided his students in the ’60s and how composers are now are addressing issues through the power of musical creativity and art. It has always been music and art throughout history that has made such an impact during times of social change.

You will see that these new, daring musical manifestations are also ideas and philosophies put to paper that should be heard and understood and brought into mainstream consciousness. It is the future of music and art together.

MS: Is there a “type” of composer who scores in this way? Does it delineate a kind of genre all its own?

TS: There is absolutely no “type” of composer who scores in a nontraditional way—there are so many different reasons why someone might not choose to use traditional Western notation. Composers are coming from many cultures around the world and communicating in many languages. That is effecting the development of new notation. New technology and the inclusion of electronic material and new instruments demand new notational languages. When you incorporate influences such as folk music, jazz, rock, spiritual music, sounds from the environment from all world sources, there needs to be a more open mind when it comes to notation. To think that Western notation is going to fit the needs of musicians of all cultures when we are now a global culture is not reality. Notations 21 gives just a hint at what that new reality is and where all music will eventually move. It has to if we are to communicate creatively on a global scale.