Tag: experimental music

FLUX-PIECE, FLUXCONCERT, FLUXFEST: Maciunas’s FluxFest Kit 2

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Caitlin Schmid - Columns

Fluxus is attitude, anti-art, cultural-social-political revolution, intermedia, renewed Dadaism, art as life and life as art. Fluxus is not a coherent movement, a set form, or a particular style. It is meant to be “grasped by all peoples, not only the critics, dilettantes and professionals,” as George Maciunas put it in his Fluxus Manifesto of 1963.

Maybe for that reason, festivals have always been important to Fluxus. So important, as it turns out, that Maciunas introduced the term “Fluxus” in a pamphlet he handed out at his very first festival in Wuppertal, Germany in 1962. After that, the floodgates opened: Fluxus festivals were produced throughout the 1960s and ‘70s in locations as diverse as Paris, France, and Rutgers, New Jersey. These festivals really did allow a public forum for Fluxus to be experienced by “all peoples.” In fact, the values of Fluxus and the advantages of the festival medium meshed so well that George Maciunas created several art posters that served as an introduction to Fluxus festival production. The first of these was called FluxFest Sale (1966), and the second was titled—even more explicitly—FluxFest Kit 2 (circa 1970). These two documents are conceptually similar (if differently organized), and so from here on out I’ll refer to the FluxFest Kit 2 as a stand-in for both.

An eight column listing describing all of the Fluxus artists' projects

George Maciunas’s 1966 Fluxfest Sale

It wasn’t a total free-for-all. Maciunas had very specific ideas about how a Fluxus Festival should be. What follows (capitalization, punctuation and all) is taken directly from the upper left hand corner of the FluxFest Kit 2 poster—we can think of these as the Rules with a capital R.

Any of the pieces can be performed anytime, anyplace and by anyone, without any payment to fluxus provided the following conditions are met: 1. If flux-pieces outnumber numerically or exceed in duration other compositions in any concert, the whole concert must be called and advertised as FLUXCONCERT or FLUXEVENT. A series of such events must be called a FLUXFEST. 2. If flux-pieces do not exceed non-fluxpieces, each such fluxpiece must be identified as a FLUX-PIECE. 3. Such credits to Fluxus may be omitted at a cost of $50 for each piece announced or performed.

Lesson learned: credit Fluxus where credit is due. The largest part of the poster, though, is a catalogue of approximately half of the Fluxus catalogue. Not all of the works listed were explicitly or implicitly musical, of course, but I can’t get over how many are performative and how many do make reference in one way or another to musical signs and symbols. A few examples, in list form:

George Maciunas, Piece for Conductor, 1965: Conductor steps over podium and takes a conventional bow. He remains bowed while tying shoelaces, polishing shoes, rolling and unrolling legs of his trousers, scratching ankles, picking up small specks from floor, pulling nails from floor, etc. etc.
Joe Jones, Duet for Brass Instruments: Rubber glove is place over bell and tucked inside. Air is blown until glove emerges from bell and is inflated.
George Brecht, Drip Music (Drip Event), 1959: For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel. Second version: Dripping.
Robert Watts, C/T Trace, 1963: An object is fired from canon and caught in bell of tuba.

So, Maciunas created a document that not only provided specific pieces and scores, but also outlined a general format, and even gave a raison d’etre. In other words, this one poster supplied everything a person (musician or layman, artist or enthusiast) could need to produce their very own Fluxus festival. You could become the performer-producer of your dreams.

What was it like to perform these pieces? I wondered. And who is performing them now? Ian Power was born decades after the height of the 1960s Fluxus festival craze. He has never put on an entire festival dedicated to Fluxus pieces, and he doesn’t follow all the Rules. (Ian, have you paid any Fluxus fees lately?) Even so, he frequently programs Fluxus gems in concerts of his own music—Power takes seriously his role as new music composer-performer-producer-advocate. At the same time, he’s living proof of Fluxus’s reach: Power is the next generation of musician Fluxus enthusiasts.

Archival footage from a 1962 Fluxus Festival in WiesbadenA short digression. I’m not here to argue about whether or not Fluxus is music. In some ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t. Personally, I find it hard to ignore that its members—many of whom at one point or another considered themselves musicians and composers—pointed to musical forms and instruments in so many of their titles and with so many of their materials and processes. And it’s hard to argue against the fact that so many of these pieces are performance based, that they move through time, and that sound is purposely juxtaposed with the visual. Regardless of whether or not you buy that, though—regardless of whether or not Fluxus is music—I think that musicians and musicologists (with our focus on sound and temporality) have a unique perspective on these performances, and with that comes the potential to understand Fluxus in new and exciting ways: what happens if we suspend our disbelief and treat these pieces as music?

Now back to Power. “If I program the pieces, it’s because I believe in them as music,” he told me in an e-mail interview. (Good, I thought, we’re on the same page.) “These pieces, even ones without much sound, coax me to attend to time and experience in much the same way (and in some important, invigorating different ways) than any other good ‘music’ might.”

True, and while Power hopes that some of this same attention might rub off on his audiences, he also recognizes that his role as performer—and therefore as a kind of translator—grants him certain privileges and responsibilities. A couple of specifics: during a recent concert, Power interpreted Mieko Shiomi’s “Boundary Music for Piano” as the movement of sheet music from the floor to the piano music stand, all accomplished as quietly as possible. That same concert, he set up Alison Knowles’s “Chair Music for George Brecht” in the back of the hall: he chose to provide a reading light, a book of Japanese death poems, and a biography of Erik Satie, all just waiting for Brecht to appear. Or not.

At one point I asked him: How seriously did you take these performances? Did you ever feel silly? “If I did,” he said, “it was likely part of the learning process essential to arriving at a place where I can really understand the music.” Power embraces the self-consciousness of performing these works, and notes that a good performer can make all the difference in establishing an atmosphere of good will and humor in the hall. “Not to compliment myself,” he said, “but if there’s one thing I can do, it’s commit to a Fluxus performance.”

That commitment is key. That commitment is the reason historical Fluxus has made its way through to the present day. Power wants to preserve the uncanniness, the situational poise, the amazement, the empowerment, and the fun of the Fluxus spirit—a big part, I think, of what makes this music (this art) as exciting and innovative now as it was in the 1960s.

Which brings me back around to the FluxFest Kit 2 and the question of performance. In the very early stages of my research, I’ve found evidence that at least one person did, in fact, follow Maciunas’s poster-art instructions (at least in spirit, if not to the letter). Jeff Berner, photographer and conceptual artist, presented his Fluxfest (a festival in two parts) at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco on March 31, 1967. Tickets were two dollars and fifty cents, and absolutely no cameras were allowed inside. “Experimental is not knowing what the results will be,” reads one of his publicity posters.

The poster for Jeff Berner’s 1967 San Francisco Fluxfest.

Berner, though—Berner was a member of Fluxus. His website notes that he has participated in “the international conceptual/performance art group since 1965,” and so we have to consider him an insider, someone more specific than the “all people” Maciunas dreamed Fluxus would reach. What really interests me is who among us non-Fluxans rose to the challenge of transforming the FluxFest Kit 2 into a real-life, realtime festival. Surely somebody couldn’t resist the possibilities of this performative readymade. Was it you, NewMusicBox reader? Please step forward and identify yourself—we all want to hear your story!

Why Not Include the Bird—Tudorfest, 1964

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Caitlin Schmid - Columns

In the spring of 1964 in beautiful San Francisco, Pauline Oliveros decided it was time for her new music organization, the San Francisco Tape Music Center, to put on a festival. She had recently met David Tudor and asked him to choose three programs of music to be performed twice each for a total of six concerts. The festival—curated by Tudor, performed by Tudor, in celebration of Tudor—became (obviously, inevitably) known as the Tudorfest.

In a characteristic move, Tudor chose pieces by his friends and collaborators: John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Alvin Lucier, George Brecht, and Oliveros herself. It was a hodgepodge of styles, a perfect representation of the sheer range of 1960s experimental music. Ichiyangi’s Music for Piano #4, Electronic Version cuddled up to Cage’s Music for Amplified Toy Piano. Lucier’s Action Music for Piano, Book I provided a nice contrast to Brecht’s Card-Piece for Voice. And if you were particularly in the mood for every variety of Cage, you could hear Atlas Eclipticalis, Winter Music, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Cartridge Music, and Music Walk all on the same program.

But the piece that everyone seems to talk about—even now, fifty-plus years later—is Pauline Oliveros’s Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato. Here’s the set-up: there’s a giant seesaw on the stage. It goes up and down, as seesaws do, but it also moves side to side and roundabout. Seated on one side, strapped in with a seatbelt, is Pauline Oliveros and her giant accordion. On the other side is David Tudor and his more moderately sized bandoneon. Hanging directly over the center is a cage containing a brown-black mynah bird named Ahmed. There was no hard and fast score to follow, though Tudor and Oliveros had worked through improvisation techniques and styles in rehearsal. Instead, the audience experienced a literal whirl of music and motion, a blur of performers and instruments up high and then down low, a constantly shifting understanding of how sight and sound worked in space and over time.

Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato was only ever performed on those two concerts at Tudorfest, and Tudorfest was only ever put on that one year. (Personally, I want to know what happened to the seesaw. Did it become a sculpture in somebody’s garden? Was it dismantled and repurposed into other Tape Music Center musical props? Is it still languishing in a basement somewhere, waiting for a reprise of the Duo?) This was a much smaller operation than something like the New York Avant Garde Festival—which isn’t to say it didn’t attract the same sorts of interested audiences or the attentions of the press. There were critics at the event, and they did write about the performances they attended for their respective papers. These largely positive Tudorfest reviews were a part of the reason that the San Francisco Tape Music Center became known as a mover and shaker on the experimental music scene; in some ways, this was the festival that started it all.

Tudorfest was more than what you could read in the reviews, though. It was more than its success. It was a scramble, a stretch, a compromise—the usual behind-the-scenes madness. (You all know what I’m talking about.) If the festival was put on well (and it was), the critics almost certainly couldn’t have known what took place beyond the clean façade of onstage performance. But that’s what composer Pauline Oliveros remembers—that’s part of what makes this festival so interesting.

The cover of the University of California Press book, The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde

David Bernstein (ed), The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. University of California Press, 2008.

I’ve spent a long time trying to track down what people have already said about Tudorfest. Most of the good stuff—a kind of best-of collection of interviews, retrospective essays, and scholarship—can be found in David Bernstein’s book on the larger group and its doings, The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (go read it—it’s good), and in the program notes by David Bernstein and John Holzaepfel included with the recently released three-disc set on New World Records, Music from the Tudorfest: San Francisco Tape Music Center 1964 (go listen to it—it’s good). Oliveros is all over these sources; her words are on the record and they give us a different perspective than the reviews.

The cover of the CD booklet for New World Records' Tudorfest featuring a photo of David Tudor wearing a jacket and tie

New World Records’ 2014 release of archival recordings from the 1964 Tudorfest.

At the beginning of this article, I wrote that Oliveros had recently met Tudor when she asked him to curate the festival. That’s true, but I didn’t tell you that Oliveros wrote about how she met Tudor at the house of Olive Cowell (aunt of Henry Cowell). I didn’t tell you that Oliveros remembers John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Toru Takemitsu all attending the final performances. I didn’t tell you that she invited dancer-choreographer Elizabeth Harris to stage her Duo, or that she asked Tony Martin to provide the lighting, or that Morton Subotnick, Stuart Dempster, and Ramon Sender (among others) all agreed to be part of the performing ensemble. Oliveros remembers these people because they were friends and colleagues, and because this was the support system that she had in place to produce a festival. This was really the only support system she had in place; she had to rely on this art world of musicians and composers—because mainstream grant foundations weren’t always clamoring to expand or develop experimental music.

To put it plainly: the Tudorfest was a stretch on the resources of the San Francisco Tape Music Center generally speaking, and that meant it was a stretch on the resources of its individual producers and organizers. “In those days,” Oliveros told one interviewer, “I taught a string of students: accordion and French horn. I copied music. I played in a variety of situations…. I have no idea how I did it in a way. And yes, I did do it. You know, you look back on it, and it wasn’t easy. I had maybe $250 dollars a month to get by on.”[1]

And yet, she did produce Tudorfest. She scraped by on $250. She called on all of her friends to help out. She got support from like-minded organizations including KPFA, the public radio station that shared building space with the Center and often allowed Oliveros and her colleagues to record improvisations using their equipment. Maybe the end result was everything Oliveros dreamed of; maybe she had grander plans she had to cut back due to space and time and money constraints. In the end, though, it was a success in the same way that her Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato was a success.

But even that piece, as Oliveros writes in a retrospective essay, was a series of compromises. The first time Oliveros and Tudor rehearsed the piece she was writing for Tudorfest, the composer-accordionist met the pianist-bandoneonist with a score in hand:

David and I rehearsed at my home in Hunter’s Point, which I shared with Laurel Johnson and her mynah bird, Ahmed,” Oliveros remembered. “As David and I rehearsed the music, Ahmed got very excited. I tried covering Ahmed’s cage to quiet him. Nothing worked. Ahmed insisted on joining our rehearsal. I realized that the bird was picking up on the sounds we were making. So I thought, ‘Why not include the bird?’ The duo became a trio: Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato (1964).[2]

Trio format established, Oliveros asked Elizabeth Harris to find a way to stage the piece…and Harris came up with the infamous aforementioned seesaw. By this point, it would have been hard for anybody to deny that the music was theater, and the theater was music. Oliveros wanted choreography, ways of manipulating the seesaw as a counterpoint to the sounds of the free reed instruments. First, there was the problem of playing an instrument and moving around at the same time: “I had to employ a safety belt to negotiate the swivel chair because of the imbalance of the motion of my accordion bellows,” Oliveros noted.[3] Second, there was the problem of reading a score while playing an instrument and moving around at the same time: “I swallowed hard and abandoned the written score that I had composed and decided on improvisational instructions.”[4] (The draft score still exists, by the way; it lives in the Pauline Oliveros archive at the University of California, San Diego.) A compromise, a collaboration: the line was always very thin—which worked out just fine, given that the experimentalists did their best to walk a thin line.

We can think of these behind-the-scenes challenges as part of the essential nature of Tudorfest, as part of what made the San Francisco Tape Music Center stronger, as part of what influenced the composers both at the time and maybe in their later years—these were the materials they had available, this was their experience, this was what they learned. As for me, I like to imagine that moment when Ahmed the mynah bird first squawked in rehearsal. I can imagine being frustrated, feeling like nothing was going as planned. Then: a moment of appreciation that sometimes the world just works this way, a dim thought, space to let it grow, and finally: What if…? What if the mynah bird became part of the piece? What if we brought him onstage? What will the people say? It’s only fitting to give Pauline Oliveros the last word: “I remember this period as a lot of fun.”[5]

1. David Bernstein (ed), The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. University of California Press, 2008, p105.

2. Ibid, p.86.

3. Ibid, p.87.

4. Ibid, p.86.

5. John Holzaepfel, Program Notes for Music from the Tudorfest: San Francisco Tape Music Center 1964, New World Records, 2014, p22.

It’s Music Because I Can Hear It: 1960s Experimental Music Festivals

Posted on March 5, 2015 by Caitlin Schmid - Columns

Photo by Caitlin Schmid

In the spring of my senior year of college, I burned a piano. Before you give in to the rising outrage—it was more than some college prank: I organized a performance of Annea Lockwood’s 1968 Piano Burning with the composer on hand to lead a pre-concert discussion. I found a “dead piano” as the score required—an upright that had been relegated to the laundry room of a dorm for years, a piano well beyond the concept of repair. I contacted the fire department for a permit; I advertised on posters around campus. I watched as it went up in flames. Hundreds of people crowded around the space we had cleared in the middle of the quad, talking, laughing; a few brave students were allowed early on to plunk out Beethoven and Joplin; I remember the sound of the balloons taped to the lid popping in the heat, the twang of strings breaking under pressure, the whoosh as the instrument was finally engulfed. “This is way cooler than I thought it would be,” a jock-type admitted. Just like that, I was hooked: this music made people think, this music provoked discussions, this music was gutsy and political and sometimes it even required us to reconsider our definition of music.

I went to graduate school to study the sounds of burning pianos and squeaky rubber dolls and trash can lids, scores that instruct the performer to “draw a straight line and follow it,” and realizations of that score involving hair dipped in ink and dragged across pure white paper. The experimental music of the 1960s was (is), to some, ridiculous (and maybe that’s part of its power); to others, it proclaims freedom from genre, border, and label. But the thing that draws me in the most? It was meant to be experienced—sometimes conceptually, sometimes interactively, never by just some small community of musicians, but always by everyone. To achieve this, our intrepid experimental heroes turned to the festival medium.

There’s something special about festivals. All of the musicians, composers and organizers coming together to say: “General public, this is what we are about.” And the audience members responding: “We hear what you’re doing, we’re trying to understand it, and we like it or we don’t.” A festival isn’t something that can just happen on a whim; even the lowest maintenance variety needs personnel, materials, space, some modicum of promotion; a festival is a concentrated effort to self-define and proclaim a particular set of artistic values. For experimental music—meant to be experienced by everyone, remember—festivals were part of the territory, and that was true in East Coast New York (of course) but also in West Coast San Francisco and Midwest Ann Arbor, and across the ocean to France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England. Wherever this extended family of musicians and composers went, they made themselves and their work known.

Here is this week’s example. Charlotte Moorman (famously known as The Topless Cellist) organized what eventually became known as the First Annual New York Avant Garde Festival in 1963. “We wanted for all these new people to see what we’re doing: it’s silly for us to play for all our friends, you know,” she told Harvey Matusow in an interview several years later. What were they doing? That first festival was a series of six concerts spread out over the course of a little more than two weeks, held at the venerable Judson Hall. The first concert was Frederic Rzewski’s American piano debut featuring music by Sylvano Busotti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Giuseppe Chiari. The next concert was a Toshi Ichiyanagi and John Cage double bill (apparently Cage’s Variations III, which involved amplifying the sound of drinking a glass of water, caused several patrons to complain of earaches). There was a chamber concert, an electronic music concert, a Moorman-Tudor concert, and an ensemble concert. Imagine Moorman’s pride as she looked over this extensive and varied program on opening night—the “friends” had made this happen.

reproduction of flyer listing concert programs including works by Cage, Feldman, Brown, Woolf, Young, Corner, La Monte Young, Ornette Coleman, Toshi Ishinayagi, George Brecht and Dieter Schnebel plus all the composers' signatures

A flyer from the first New York Avant Garde Festival in 1963.

The “new people,” on the other hand, were—shall we say—less enthusiastic. Witness that very first concert in 1963. John Gruen of The New York Herald Tribune titled his review “Far Out Concert, Stupefying Boredom” and signed off with “avant-garde piano music is decidedly something to watch—it might even get worse.” He wasn’t alone in his evaluation: Harold Schonberg of the The New York Times left us with this gem: “An evaluation of the work [Chiari’s Teatrino]? Don’t be silly, man.”

The first three years of the festival were held in a concert hall and featured the musical works of all sorts of known composers including Cage, Morton Feldman, and Edgard Varèse. Looking back, we might say it was a fairly traditional concert-going experience, and yet… Year two, October 1964: Carl P. Sigmon’s “Festival of the Avant Garde” for Musical America: “Time and again the potential fun quickly turned to tedium….One could only wonder why the youthful audiences cheered loudly….” Year Three, September 1965: Leighton Kerner reviewing a night of action music by Nam June Paik for the The Village Voice: “Take, for example, the opening night which aged some of us considerably.” So bitter, so soon. Little did the critics know what they were in for.

The letterhead that was used for the New York Avant Garde Festival

By year four, Moorman had radically redesigned the format of this music festival. Held over 18 hours in Central Park, the works of 77 artists from 14 countries were performed simultaneously. Picture this: Ed Summerlin and Don Heckman improvising a saxophone duet early in the morning across the Children’s Pond; Joe Jones riding his Musical Bike; Jim McWilliams staging his Picnic (in which the point was to eat as many hot dogs as possible, even if that meant regurgitating what you had already eaten); Moorman herself realizing Nam June Paik’s Zen Smiles by passing out five thousand pennies and five thousand smiles, one of each to each audience member; Dick Higgins, sitting in a lawn-chair, dressed in a striped tunic, allowing his wife to apply shaving cream to his bald pate in a performance of Danger Music No. 2. This is all faithfully reported in Dan Sullivan and Richard F. Shepard’s September 10, 1966 New York Times article “The Avant-Garde Day in Park Goes On and On.” The reporters ask at one point if it is really music. “‘It’s music,’ Mr. Higgins said, ‘because I can hear it. To the audience, of course, it’s theater.’” Shepard and Sullivan don’t argue; in fact, they give up opinion entirely in favor of description, laced with a healthy dose of skepticism. “[There were] no cogent answers from anyone,” they say at one point. Then there’s my personal favorite subheading of all time, “Clapping Hands – to Ears.” And finally, the last word of the piece: “Nothing was settled.”

After all was said and done, the New York Avant Garde Festival ran almost-consecutively for fifteen years from 1963 to 1980 (excluding three years when Moorman was too sick to organize it). At its peak, it featured the works of more than 650 artists and attracted audiences of a hundred thousand-plus at a time in locations including the John F. Kennedy Staten Island Ferryboat (1967, “Music: Lost at Sea” read one headline in the The Village Voice), the 67th Regiment Armory (1971), and even the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1980). As composers, as performers, as audience members, as passersby, Charlotte Moorman made sure everyone had the opportunity to experience experimental music.

So there it is, a history of the early days of the New York Avant Garde Festival, a bit of proof that festivals and experimental music go together like ramalamalama. In a nutshell, this was crazy music—was it even music?—with festivals that kept getting bigger, and the tastemakers (represented by the newspaper critics) thought it was outré and boring. Done and done. But there is a catch: what I’ve presented to you today as “the New York Avant Garde Festival”—a description of events, documented opinions, all incontrovertible fact—is only what I’ve found in advance press and reviews. It’s not the whole story by any means.

We can never have every detail of any given event; my version differs from yours, and what he saw from the corner won’t be quite the same as what she experienced from stage-center. Plus, memories are faulty and colored by attitude and context. We can’t really blame the critics for their generally less-than-enthused reviews because, let’s face it, these guys (and they were mostly guys) worked for major newspapers in the capacity of music critics. They usually spent their nights seated in a hall on red plush velvet, listening to Bach and Beethoven and writing about whether or not a particular performance did justice to the composer’s vision, not about whether or not a particular performance might be considered music. Regardless of whether these experimental music festivals were objectively “good” or “bad,” critics had a stake in the musical canon (which the New York Avant Garde Festival most certainly was not a part of) and it comes across in their reviews.

History is written by those who write; the critics were writers. What we sometimes forget in our pursuit of facts immortalized in print, waiting for us to scoop up and rewrite into our articles and books, is that history is made by all sorts of people—from the creative composers to the friends of friends who lend their amps in a last minute Situation. What is written isn’t the only version of history, and the critics weren’t the only people at those festivals. There were organizers, there were performers, there were composers—all, one would have to imagine, more committed to the idea of experimental festivals than the critics. And there were audience members—sometimes willing, sometimes just in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time, no judgment).

And so here we are fifty years later, and I have limited options to recover history: I can head to the archives (if there are archives), I can talk to the participants (if I can find them—hello out there?), or I can turn to the microfilms and the internet and pull up the newspaper reviews and the advance press—the easily accessed, written records of these historical events. That last is exactly what I did for you today. It’s not a bad thing (it’s often all we have to go on), but you deserve more and in the next few weeks I’ll give you first-hand accounts from a variety of festival participants. It’s the only way we can even begin to see the whole picture. After all, if I hadn’t told you at the beginning of this article about Piano Burning in my own words from my own experience, all you might have had to go on was this, from the comments section of a review on a local blog: “MHMMMM just wondering if part of our added sales tax for ‘the arts’ paid for this?????”

Caitlin Schmid

Caitlin Schmid is a graduate student in Historical Musicology at Harvard University. Her interests include American music, sound art, feminist approaches to musicology, and (of course) 1960s experimental music festivals. She’s particularly interested in your experience of these festivals – what do you remember? Post your memories in the comments below.

Gelsey Bell: Get a Little Closer

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Spotlight

There is a captivating mix of singer-songwriter intimacy, fourth wall-crushing theatricality, and curious experimental exploration in the work of composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Gelsey Bell.

Performances of her 2011 song cycle SCALING, for example, have her crawling over and around the piano to play from positions that would likely make Tori Amos’s head spin. For “Cradle,” an intimate meditation for voice and metallophone from her 2013 cycle Our Defensive Measurements, she spends some time coaxing the audience to within arm’s reach before she begins to sing.

Bell’s Casio keyboard (down a few keys) has seen her through the creation of a lot of music.

With a background that spans music theater, woman-at-the-piano club shows, and the presentation of experimental work—both of her own design and of composers such as Robert Ashley—the cross-pollination of influences is perhaps to be expected. But the breakdown of walls—both between genres and between performer and audience—remains a tightrope to walk.

It’s also a place of risk and vulnerability that Bell welcomes. “I love an aesthetic of mistakes. I want things to get a little messy. I’m not interested in the sounds of perfection.”

“And I guess getting the audience involved is a great way to do that!” she concedes, laughing.

Even when she isn’t inviting the audience into, say, the bathroom with her for a little acoustic exploration, her preferred ways of working leave her open to the artistic ideas of collaborators both in creation and interpretation, especially through her regular work with collectives such as thingNY and Varispeed. Experimental music has allowed her to take “very seriously the idea of making work with your friends”—collaborations she finds to be fun and efficient because everyone brings a deeper level of appreciation and understanding to the table.

Further explaining her interest in such work and the opportunities it brings, Bell says, “I have full control over my performance and my body, and I’m not interested in having full control over any other performer’s body. I work with a lot of people who are composers in their own right and they have their own musical intelligences, and so I’m much more interested in creating a musical situation where we can all embody that.”

Bell’s score designed for delivery via Rolodex currently in development.

This openness to exploring ideas is one of the things Bell finds attractive about both the experimental music scene and academic environments—two places where she finds she can be playful and curious in different yet complimentary ways.

She earned her Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University in January 2015 and is currently at work on a host of new pieces for upcoming performances this spring. On reflection, Bell says she feels somewhat like she’s at the cusp of more fully blending her various pots of experience—pockets that she previously kept somewhat isolated from one another.

I feel like I’m at this place of total exploration and I’m just having faith that I’m going to come out with something. I feel like I’m really in that mode where you’re just like, okay, I’m an artist. I have to let myself fail. I have to try a million things. I have to hate stuff, I have to love stuff, and I have to trust that if I put something on that’s really horrible it won’t be that no one wants to see anything that I do ever again. And just have faith that this kind of dream of some sort of sound that I have in my head that doesn’t have these intense boundaries can happen.

The Banjo Faces Its Shadow

Posted on December 10, 2014 by erikspangler - Analysis, Articles

Image cc by Nic McPhee via Flickr

Is there an instrument that comes with more cultural baggage than the banjo? For many, it evokes a stereotyped image of the rural white Southerner, as in the scary hillbillies of Deliverance and many a comedy sketch. In the 19th century, by contrast, the banjo served as a caricature of enslaved Africans, gaining wide popularity through blackface minstrel shows. The instrument’s deeper story moves around and between the stereotypes. This is a timbre that cuts to some of the deepest seams of America’s past. To a number of contemporary banjo players and composers, the well of history and associations surrounding the banjo becomes a musical parameter to be bent, subverted, or used to evoke a particular landscape or time.

The Birth of the Banjo

The banjo has its roots in West African instruments such as the ngoni, and possibly some Near Eastern stringed instruments which also feature a stretched membrane over a gourd resonator. African slaves on plantations in southern Maryland were documented playing gourd banjos as far back as the 17th century. Later on, white musicians learned the banjo from freed blacks and slaves and incorporated it into minstrel shows in the 19th century, resulting in the first uniquely American popular music.
The popularity of the minstrel show, coinciding with the start of the Industrial Revolution, led to the mass production of banjos using wooden hoops and metal brackets—materials more easily sourced than the traditional gourds. Minstrel Joel Walker Sweeney, the first white person known to play a banjo on stage, has been credited with adding a fifth string to the instrument. While many believe that Sweeney introduced the characteristic drone string, tuned above the other strings with its tuning peg jutting up from the neck, historical evidence appears to contradict this claim. Sweeney’s more likely contribution is the addition of a lower string, as well as the shift from gourds to drum-like resonating chambers. Beginning in 1848, 5-string banjos made by William Boucher in Baltimore were sold through mail order catalogs. Other companies soon followed, as the banjo was “refined” through ornate decorations and promoted as a parlor instrument for the upper class (accompanied by a de-Africanized repertoire and technique, referred to as “classical” style). Eventually these instruments made their way into the mountains and were quickly embraced by the predominantly English, Scottish, and Irish settlers.

Minstrel songs, incorporating rhythms and melodic tropes from transplanted African music, took their place alongside the old English fiddle tunes, old ballads, and new ballads composed by Appalachian settlers to express the social and economic realities of their environment. This hybrid music came to be known as old-time. More directly transmitted influences from African-American music, particularly spirituals and the blues, continued to enter this repertoire into the 20th century.

The Folk Revival
The popularity of old-time music in its native environment had faded somewhat by the 1940s due to a population shift to factory jobs in cities, along with the widespread distribution of commercial music by radio. Yet even while old-time music was becoming an endangered tradition in its birthplace, it began to be rediscovered by folklorists outside of Appalachia. These scholars, including the Seeger family (composers Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, their son Mike Seeger and his half-brother Pete Seeger) along with John and Alan Lomax, sought out and recorded folk musicians, learning and transcribing their songs.

Seeing the Appalachian ballad tradition as expressing the voices of the downtrodden, Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger adopted this music as a rallying cry for social justice. Lomax organized concerts that brought together many of the folk musicians that he discovered through his travels while field recording, and sang the old ballads himself in union halls as well as ethnomusicological conferences. New songs in the older styles were written by Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others, and thus old-time music began to reach a wider audience. Pete Seeger’s banjo became a symbol of the 1950s and ’60s folk music revival, a new political awakening of the union movement, the civil rights struggle, and later of protest against the war in Vietnam.

A Path Through the Bluegrass

In the midst of this folk revival centered in New York City, an independent revival of the banjo occurred around Nashville, Tennessee. In the 1920s and ’30s, the Grand Old Opry established itself as a weekly live stage and radio show devoted to country music, an urban transplant of old-time traditions to serve the many people who had moved to Nashville from the hills. The radio broadcasts also reached those still living in the country, and served to inspire many younger people to play this music. In the mid-1940s, the musical acts featured on this show began to increase the tempo of old songs to match the energy of the urban environment, most notably mandolinist and singer Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys. In 1948 a young banjo player named Earl Scruggs stepped into Monroe’s band and proceeded to redefine everyone’s conception of what the banjo could do. Scruggs developed a three-finger technique of picking, which allowed for a more agile rhythm in the execution of melody than the older downstroke style known as clawhammer. The instrument grew in prominence on the stage from anachronistic musical prop to a lead voice in the new style that emerged as bluegrass. In the early 1960s, the Scruggs technique of bluegrass playing reached a national audience through his recording of the theme for the TV show Beverly Hillbillies.

The fast, energetic finger picking established by Scruggs has become the banjo’s dominant sound image for most people. Depending on the geography and cultural environment in which this sound is received, the bluegrass banjo is often associated with a particular vision of America—either associated positively with the rural landscape, pride, and connection to cultural roots, or negatively to social conservatism or ethnic exclusivity. It is a strong sonic flavor, whichever mix of associations it has for the listener.

Bluegrass technique, defined by crisp rolls (arpeggiation and melodic embellishment across multiple strings) using metal finger picks, became the foundation for many innovative banjo players. In the 1970s, Tony Trischka developed the “melodic style” of bluegrass banjo playing. This style shifts focus away from arpeggiation to full attention on the lead melody, with chromatic embellishments. As a teacher, Trischka has been widely influential, releasing many instruction books and videos, as well as having some prominent players study under him.

One of Trischka’s students was a young Béla Fleck. Toward the end of the ’70s, Fleck adapted the bluegrass technique to harmonic and contrapuntal models from jazz and classical music, leading to a style that has become known as progressive bluegrass or new grass. Fleck is highly regarded as a master of banjo technique on the level of a classical musician, which he has applied to transcriptions of Bach partitas as well as his own compositions, exhibiting a wide stylistic palette. His collaborative exploration of the African origins of the banjo, traveling to West Africa to perform and record with master musicians there, may be experienced in the 2008 documentary Throw Down Your Heart.

Clawhammer Griots
Connections to the musical traditions of Africa may be traced more easily from the pre-bluegrass clawhammer style, which is the dominant tradition of old-time banjo playing. Maintaining a strong rhythmic groove through downstrokes with the back of a fingernail, interspersed with syncopated drone notes on the shorter fifth string (released by the thumb in between downstrokes), creates a strong rhythmic foundation for dance tunes traditionally played by the fiddle. Similar playing techniques with plucked string instruments may be found among griots of the Wasulu people. This connection may be plausibly traced through the little known history of black string bands in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Few if any recordings exist, but we have photographs, letters, and sheet music collections from black banjo players and fiddlers. One example is the Snowden Family Band of Knox County, Ohio—the group that may have taught the song “Dixie” to their white neighbor Dan Emmett, a minstrel singer. The meaning of the song’s lyrics change dramatically when viewed through the lens of this possible history, connected to Ellen Snowden’s childhood experience as a slave in Nanjemoy, Maryland. At a young age she was transplanted with one of the slave master’s relatives to Ohio, while her father remained behind. The black string band legacy has been reclaimed in the past decade through events such as the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina. This conference gave rise to the most famous group of black musicians playing old-time music, the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Modern Perspectives on Old-Time Music

After the initial folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s, old-time banjo went underground. Mike Seeger played an important role in maintaining the fire by finding and promoting master musicians from the hills, revitalizing forgotten performance traditions such as gourd banjo and minstrel banjo through his own recordings, and passing on the craft to younger musicians. The record label Folkways, founded by Moses Asch in the late 1940s and acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, has released many recordings of outstanding artists in this musical lineage who had been discovered and recorded by the folklorists. Meanwhile, the mantle of old-time music has been taken on by a small but strong community that resembles in many ways the dedication and DIY ethos of the new music community.

As a composer and a self-taught banjo player, I have been drawn to the old-time music tradition for a number of reasons. I appreciate the wide expressive palette and range of tempo between dance tunes and murder ballads. I enjoy the ways that a tune can take on a very different sound and feel in the hands of different players, and appreciate that the tradition encourages this kind of personalization. I am also attracted to the variety of tunings used in old-time banjo playing beyond the standard G tuning (gDGBD, the small letter indicating the higher pitched fifth string) that bluegrass players tend to stick to.

Particular songs have given rise to tunings named after them, such as “Cumberland Gap” (gEADE), “Willie Moore” (gDGAD), and “Last Chance” (fDFCD). My own playing and composing for banjo has gravitated toward the relatively more common “Sawmill” or “Mountain Minor” tuning (gDGCD) and the “Double C” tuning (gCGCD, often transposed up a whole step to “Double D” for playing along with a fiddle tune). These tunings in old-time banjo serve to reinforce open-string drones and maximize the sympathetic vibrations within the instrument. Sometimes these drones result in interesting dissonances that are exploited for expressive effect and do not conform to traditional tonal harmony. I enjoy lowering the fifth string to an F# to produce a tritone relationship with the fourth string (bass), following the practice of the old master Dock Boggs. Old-time banjo players sometimes refer to these different tunings as “atmospheres.”

On a more fundamental level, I am drawn to the banjo as a means of grounding creative experimentation within a deep history that is relevant to connections that I am trying to make in my music. The legacy of slavery in the United States is one which is pushed fairly far back in our collective consciousness. The trauma of that institution still reverberates today in our economic structure, systems of social control, and self-segregation within our population. The banjo came into its own as an American instrument in the midst of that experience of slavery. It was brought into the white mainstream consciousness through the blackface minstrel show, a format which also continues to reverberate in mainstream American entertainment. In the process of this African instrument being adopted by popular society in America, it also took on the musical heritage of the English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants. It was embraced as an instrument of the Everyman, especially in the hollers and mining towns of Appalachia, where the banjo became a main outlet for expressing life’s troubles as well as a way of laying them aside through homespun entertainment. For the banjo to carry so many stories within it, charged with painful legacies and conflicting identities, makes it a potentially powerful medium for new music that creatively bends the associations with it.

This understanding of the banjo as an encapsulation of social history is one that makes sense to me when I think about my neighborhood of Hampden, Baltimore. The great bluegrass/country singer Hazel Dickens lived on one of these streets when she first moved to Baltimore from West Virginia, in search of factory work in the 1950s. While living here she met Mike Seeger at a rowhouse basement jam session, and was encouraged to become a songwriter. She remained in Baltimore and Washington DC for most of her life, and yet her songs express a constant sense of longing for the landscape of her childhood home. This tension of country identity and the urban environment is still palpable in the neighborhood today. When I play banjo out on my front stoop I often imagine Hazel’s experience, almost as an immigrant from another country, trying to navigate a new social structure in the crowded city. Hampden was built around textile mills that hired exclusively white workers from the Appalachian/Piedmont region during the 19th century. For many years this community has attempted to maintain an insular sense of itself, built upon its cultural background, as distinct from the city of Baltimore, which annexed it in the late 19th century. After the mills and then the factories pulled out, Hampden went into decline for a few decades. Some of the social tension that followed was translated into racism and suspicion of outsiders. Ku Klux Klan representation in community parades is noted as late as the 1970s. Today, underneath the economic regeneration of the neighborhood’s main street thanks to gourmet restaurants and boutique shopping, there remains a sense of racial tension in relation to the rest of the (predominantly black) city. One of my goals while living here is to start a pirate radio station and live show that will bring together old-time music and hip hop, among other hybridized folk music that mixes identities. It is my hope that through this medium I can make music that dissolves prejudice.

Hill Hop Fusion

The fusion of old-time music with hip hop is a concept that I first encountered through a radio program from the Appalshop organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky, called “From the Holler to the Hood.” This program arose from a perceived need to reach out to the population housed in the numerous prisons that have sprung up in the wake of the declining coal economy in Eastern Kentucky. The prisoners are predominantly African Americans transferred from outside of the region. Appalshop began programming a show called “Calls from Home” during which family members could call in and dedicate songs to loved ones in prison. As the requested songs were mostly hip hop, programmers at Appalshop became interested in the idea of setting up collaborations between hip hop artists and traditional Appalachian musicians. In 2003, a friend of mine from Kentucky played me a tape of one of these collaborations, between old-time musician Dirk Powell and hip hop producer Danjamouf. Since then, the hip hop subgenre known as “hill hop” has been carried forward by the group Gangstagrass, among a few others.

Signifier

Sometimes the use of the banjo is as simple as the desire to evoke a landscape. Since the 1990s the banjo has made occasional appearances in indie rock as a signifier of a different age, or to cast a rustic or countrified hue over a song. “Chocolate Jesus” (1999) by Tom Waits is a prime example, where the banjo is incorporated as an element of a sound that Waits described as “sur-rural.” Other examples may be found in the work of The Magnetic Fields, Feist, and The Books. In these instances, the raw sound of the banjo stands as an alternative to the technology and pacing of the modern urban environment and to invoke a common folk language.

Cultural Migration

Because of the banjo’s sonic links to ancient instruments from Africa and even further East, the banjo can take on the role of a shape-shifter in its cultural associations. Multi-instrumentalist Jody Stecher brought the banjo into the field of “world music” in 1982 with his album Rasa, which features Indian sitarist Krishna Bhatt, along with vocals by Stecher’s wife Kate Brislin. Through this album, Stecher, Brislin and Bhatt reveal a natural affinity between old-time/early country tunes and the melodic ornamentation of Indian classical music. Béla Fleck made his own contribution to cross-cultural banjo fusion with his 1996 album Tabula Rasa, a collaboration with Chinese erhu player Jie-Bing Chen and Indian mohan veena player Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. On this album, musical sources from each of the cultures have a turn at center stage while the other instruments provide tightly composed reinforcement and counterpoint. Through the tight interaction of these three players, we can hear a hybrid of complimentary sounds, transcending the specific associations of any culture individually. The erhu, as a bowed string instrument, may remind us of the fiddle that is so often paired with banjo in traditional Appalachian music. The mohan veena is a stand-in for the guitar, another frequent banjo partner. Fleck’s banjo playing defines a well-balanced meeting point and assimilation of different influences.

Played with a bow, the nasal tone and sympathetic vibrations can sound a bit like a sarangi from India or the Iranian rabab. Played with a pick to produce single-string rhythms and tremolos, it can sound like a Berber gimbri. In Morocco, the banjo has effortlessly found its place in the traditional music of that country. A fine example of this cross-cultural assimilation of the banjo may be heard in the music of the Moroccan group Imanaren, with banjoist Hassan Wargui. In the context of Imanaren’s music, the banjo doesn’t appear to reference its American legacy at all. Instead it seems to be a native timbre to their Berber melodies.

Banjo Experimentalists

In experimental and modern classical music, the banjo’s historical weight is treated with a variety of approaches. Eugene Chadbourne has used the banjo in a way that naturally and seamlessly spans country music, punk rock, and free jazz, with a somewhat antagonistic stance toward the white rural culture commonly associated with the instrument. Equally at home within the structure of blues-based chord changes and uptempo drum beats as within irregular rhythms and spasmodic gestures, Chadbourne’s performances convey an intentionally skewed but well-defined aesthetic that he has pieced together for himself. On another side of the spectrum, the music of Paul Elwood moves between old-time/bluegrass sources and modernistic chamber ensemble sonorities. These two worlds are not always reconciled with each other, occasionally treated as juxtaposed blocks of music (original passages vs. quotation/arrangement), and sometimes heard as superimposed, warring influences over the direction of a long-form composition. When the banjo moves beyond familiar bluegrass riffs and explores a greater sense of rhythmic space and pitch direction, Elwood’s music reaches some passages of incredible transcendence. As a listener, I feel that I have been on a journey of clashing cultures and eventually discover a unified sonic field that moves beyond the past.
On occasion the banjo seems to be treated as a stand-in for a mandolin, which has a longer history in the context of classical concert music. In this approach, the instrument is treated purely as an interesting timbre without any overt inference of folk music or traditional playing techniques. George Crumb’s 1969 song cycle, Night of the Four Moons, is one example of this ahistorical use of the banjo. In this work, it is one distinctive tone color among many in a mixed ensemble, supporting poetic images from the selected texts by Federico García Lorca. Through this set of four songs, the banjo explores a variety of textural relationships with the alto voice, alto flute, electric cello, and percussion. Avoiding the rhythmic propulsion of traditional banjo playing, Crumb creates a new identity for the instrument through isolated gestures, and textures based on call-and-response between the banjo and the other instruments in the ensemble. At times the banjo is made to sound vaguely Eastern, though a particular set of intervals used as a mode. Elsewhere, it fulfills an accompaniment role that suggests an older idiom of Western classical music, but nothing tied to the history of the banjo itself.

The kinship with sonorities from the Middle East and beyond may be easily recognized in the playing of Paul Metzger. This Minnesota-based artist focuses on improvisation and composition with a self-modified banjo which has been expanded to include 23 strings. His playing techniques span classical guitar finger style to orchestral bowed textures, touching on many different sound worlds. Within a single piece there seem to be hints of a number of different cultural heritages, woven together to produce a unified landscape. To hear the full range of Metzger’s banjo palette, take a listen to his 2013 album Tombeaux on the label Nero’s Neptune.

Another improviser, Woody Sullender is a multi-media artist, electronic composer, and banjo player based in Brooklyn, New York. While his most recent work at the time of writing focuses more on installations and electronics, he is one of the most adept improvisers in the somewhat specialized field of experimental banjo. His approach is particularly aware of the instrument’s past associations and seeks to both evoke and counter them. Mountain music is suggested in some of the hammer-ons and other musical gestures, which gravitate to open fifths and minor modes. Yet rhythmically and dynamically, listeners are being guided in another direction. His album with harmonica player Seamus Carter, When We Get to Meeting, is available as a free download.
Baltimore-based musician Nathan Bell states that he uses the banjo “as a shapeshifting tool,” describing a fluidity between stylistic associations along with a range of timbres that he draws from the instrument. Bell shifts easily between different styles of playing: old-time clawhammer technique, finger picks, and bowed banjo all occupy a place in his personal soundscape. Auxiliary percussion, such as antique cymbals suspended from the neck of his banjo, are also frequent companions to the sounds drawn from his main instrument. His 2011 album COLORS is an excellent example of Bell’s use of the banjo as a vehicle for defining a landscape that draws on memory and nostalgia connected with the instrument, while coloring our experience of it with effects processing, noise elements, and slowly moving background voices. Bell’s recorded projects may be heard and purchased from his Bandcamp page.

Renegade banjoist Brandon Seabrook of Brooklyn, New York, also comes to the instrument from a guitar background. He claims not to listen to other banjo players and explains his choice of instrument as a way to bring another level of challenge and difficulty into his music, due to the banjo’s shorter sustain time relative to guitar tones. Above all, his playing is defined by dissonance, intensity, and speed. Repetitive chromatic patterns cut quickly to measured tremolos and dynamic builds, always maintaining a sense of urgency. Seabrook brings an aggressive, punk-meets-free-jazz type of energy to his playing, like a prolongation of the most intense passages in Eugene Chadbourne’s music, sounding nothing like the bluegrass type of banjo virtuosity.
In the realm of notated music, Washington DC-based banjoist and composer Mark Sylvester is deeply committed to promoting the banjo in the concert hall. Sylvester comes to the banjo from a classical guitar background, and while he teaches and is proficient in bluegrass and clawhammer styles of banjo, his own compositions place the instrument squarely in a classical chamber music context. Sylvester’s Trio #1 and Trio #2 occasionally employ finger picking patterns familiar to bluegrass audiences, such as ostinati featuring hammer-ons and pull-offs, but largely gravitate toward a style of writing that could easily be conceived for guitar. Progressions of chromatic harmony predominate over more familiar banjo harmonies derived from the open strings.

Continuing the development of notated compositions for banjo as chamber music, a new album by the Boulder, CO-based Jake Schepps Quintet, Entwined, features long-form classical compositions for the traditional bluegrass string band instrumentation of banjo, mandolin, violin, guitar, and double-bass. The featured composers—Marc Mellits, Matt McBane, Mark Flinner (the group’s mandolinist), and Gyan Riley—explore tight ostinato grooves, expansive melodies, and extended techniques, applied within a comfortable blend of styles. Multi-movement works such as Marc Mellits’s Flatiron provide room to range from ballad-like sections featuring a nostalgic harmonic vocabulary to more contemporary-sounding minimalist syncopated rhythmic layers. While enriching the soil of bluegrass/classical fusion, first tilled by Béla Fleck as well as Marc O’Connor and Edgar Meyer, the Jake Schepps Quintet articulates a wider sound palette without anything sounding self-conscious in its merging of musical cultures. The sound of these instruments together is already well-defined in most listeners’ ears, so that modern classical approaches to form can take advantage of expectations of particular roles within the ensemble while exposing alternate timbres from the instruments. This instrumentation may yet become as enduring for composers as the classical string quartet.

The banjo is suggestive of many different things to different people. It clear that it has had a lasting power beyond just one cultural place and time, and that musicians continue to develop new ways of conceiving its sound. Whether it is overtly addressed or not, classically trained composers creating new music with the banjo enter into dialogue with a folk tradition, a history, and a set of expectations on the part of the listener. To use the instrument in a vastly different way from these expectations is a potential tool for shaking up old ideas about its stylistic limitations or caricatured image. To embrace certain musical aspects of the folk lineage and place them in new contexts may be seen as part of a general shift away from an exclusive view of the classical tradition as purveyor of innovation. Today musical experimentation, complexity, and the development of a personal style can be founded on many sounds that are not connected to the concert hall tradition. While the adoption of instruments from other cultural contexts into classical music has been occurring for centuries, this has only recently taken on some characteristics of a two-way communication between musical cultures. Experimental hybrids are continually being created by musicians coming from folk, rock, hip hop, and many other backgrounds. Composers and new music performers are collaborating with musicians from these other backgrounds, often participating in non-classical performance traditions, and collectively shaping new ways of listening to and participating in the music. Examples may be heard in collaborations between Brian Harnetty and Bonnie “Prince” Billy (Silent City, 2009), or Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon (The Only Tune, 2008).

Where classical instruments and musical structures have been founded on an aristocratic legacy, supported by royal courts or the church, the banjo’s historical evolution has grown out of struggle and conflicting cultures. It can be painful to look back on the history of slavery or the ongoing situations of injustice faced by the people of Appalachia. The banjo may be a reminder of these things, and personal reactions to such a reminder may also bring up prejudices towards one group of people or another. Yet the hybrid cultural heritage of the banjo, kept alive by traditional players and continually reinterpreted by musicians from many different backgrounds, may be uniquely equipped to break through the divisions that separate people. It is an instrument that was originally embedded in the lives of enslaved Africans as well as the rural white settlers later on, and it has assimilated musical elements from both cultures. The tangled thread of minstrelsy that endures in popular media to this day is one that needs to be examined and understood in all of its complexity. Artists and musicians should attempt to examine that shadow and address it in a conscious way in contemporary art. The banjo stands squarely at the intersection of Anglo and African cultures at a formative period in American history, spanning different conceptions of heritage. Perhaps it can also be a tool to help to unravel the pain or prejudice and uplift us to better way of coexisting and collaborating in this world.

Elodie Lauten (1950-2014): Channeling Cosmic Forces

Posted on June 11, 2014 by Kenneth Hamrick - Headlines, Ledes

Elodie Lauten in 2011 (photo by Rod Goodman for LESPA inc.)

Praise, admiration, and respect in elegy for the artiste-musicienne composer Elodie Lauten continue to resound since her death on June 3, 2014, with tributes far and wide: she was distinguished, diverse, cross-cultural, international, and—as per her own quest—even cosmic. With conviction and certainty, she proselytized about the scientific-magical powers of music, its essential role in the course of the universe. While she marveled at exploring sound potentials in electronic music, microtonal and foreign idioms, above all else she wanted her music to be performed acoustically with the detailed nuances of Baroque music, and she altogether respected vocal (or as instrumental) lyricism, counterpoint, idiomatic instrumental sounds, and traditional orchestration. She smiled with glee when comparing her music to that of early French masters Lully and Rameau, then of course, Faure, Debussy, Messiaen—realizing that indeed she, and truly all of us, live and work in the ongoing cycle of tradition. She loved and respected music as a spiritual force and, with the wisdom of a sage, passionately instilled in others its importance, power, and significance. Using music, she nobly changed lives; there is no greater compliment.

For the past year, I worked closely with Elodie preparing the debut of the now-definitive version of her opera Waking in New York on the libretto crafted so purposefully by hero-poet of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg. Vibrant and contemporary, altogether it unites old and new world musical styles to express visionary poetry that is considered the voice of modern life. Much admired for its message about community, love, and friendship, it is altogether one of the most beautiful and poignant scores I have ever had the privilege to lead. Though always persnickety and precise about musical details, it was moreover inspiring to witness Elodie praise a young virtuoso, crystalline-pure singer (“my favorite voice type,” she said) with, “That was so enchanting. Do you realize that with such a marvelous sound wave, how you’ve created such a beautiful moment into eternity? Now let me tell you about its meaning; [like Messiaen] it has a . . . (blue, red, yellow) color aura.”

Early this spring, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts gave its 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Award to Elodie Lauten, a peer-nominated accolade recognizing her exactly: for her innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation. This truly honored, humbled, and then inspired her. In his recent tribute, Kyle Gann recognized Elodie’s capacity to create new, certainly inventive, platforms for her music, but stated that it was accomplished by sacrificing herself and living in a state “near-penury.” Actually Elodie was an excellent and hardy businesswoman—skills she claimed were instilled in her from her father, the great jazz pianist (and sculptor) Errol Parker. She was a model of the modern artist’s lifestyle: simple living, strong development-funding skills, “everything lives for the music.” She consistently produced respectable productions of her works, altogether treating (and promptly paying!) musicians as professionals. (Now, in retrospect, they all comment on this.) With her Rauschenberg Award, and also the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on her support team, she envisioned a future for her music launched with her testament opera, Waking in New York.

Arriving so chic in a re-styled mink coat (after all, her mother was a noted fashion doyenne with a boutique nearby Paris’s Arc de Triomphe), I accompanied Elodie as she braved New York City’s bitter cold winter, traveling in a friend’s donated gypsy courier limousine from the Lower East Side up to 7th Avenue and 29th Street, to proudly become a professional member (for the first time) of OPERA America. It was a major step for her. She launched her association with our week-long public rehearsal and video filming at OPERA America’s splendid National Opera Center. Surprising and delighting her, the uptown refined national opera association enthusiastically and respectfully welcomed this funky downtown composer into their ranks with glee, full of cutting-edge marketing ideas for production and promotion. Following this meeting, living the appreciative life-of-the-moment she professed, we chose lunch at a nearby café because they displayed flower-shaped cookies painted with psychedelic-colored marzipan. Elodie noted, “Allen is with us… How can we resist?”

The program for the June 1, 2014 performance of Waking In New York featuring Elodie Lauten’s design.

Over the few months since that special day, surely a turning point in her career, Elodie suddenly began her health decline through a sequence of challenges. She was secretive about her condition, steadfast to keep her strong producer-composer image, always managing business details along with the artistic particulars. We rehearsed with the brilliant cast (Mark Duer, Meredith Borden, Catherine Rothrock, and Mary Hurlbut) in Elodie’s large, open studio apartment, with its range of keyboard instruments, acoustic and electronic—some of her own design patents. Elodie would recline almost glamorously on a sofa at the end of the room and listen to the rehearsal, always stopping to discuss “what” Ginsberg’s poetry “meant” with enthusiasm for the details of prosody expounded by great singers. Her coughing and wheezing she would dismiss as “allergies.” To the few of us alert to her declining condition, she vowed that she was “determined to live through for this performance: her music brought to life so splendidly.”

When moved to the hospital “for tests and a few treatments,” she joined and commented on our now-expanded rehearsals, including a celebrity orchestral team, by first complaining about and then even helping construct connections for the hospital’s wireless Skype connections. When finally she was moved to palliative hospice care, still in secret to the cast, declaring, “I want them focused on my music, not on me,” I brought to her bedside on May 31 the superb, just edited film/streaming-broadcast from the National Opera Center made the day before and a copy of the just-arrived, multi-colored printed program. (She even designed the cover artwork.) Always gasping for air in her last days, she grabbed my hand, removed her oxygen mask and muttered the words, “Oh, so beautiful, thank you.”

On Sunday afternoon June 1, she was aware of the successful, well-received public performance at St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. She died on Tuesday, June 3 at 7:15 p.m.—uncannily, on Allen Ginsberg’s birthday.

Kooky, quirky, yet all-the-time brilliant, Elodie brought passion to life, igniting human spirits. Even stories of her travel escapades—when lost, she would rub various colored-crystals to find directions (it worked!)—suddenly make the rest of us wonder and dream and ride along with her with confidence. Brilliant and engaging through her collaborative music, poetry, and visual multi-arts—indeed the true definition of her operas—she continues to ponder, guide, and foster a beautiful, eternal life journey.

From the June 1st performance of Elodie Lauten-Allen Ginsberg’s opera Waking in New York at St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (photo by Milton Fletcher).

Miya Masaoka: Social and Sonic Relationships

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

At the composer’s New York City apartment
May 13, 2014—11 a.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video recorded by Molly Sheridan
Video presentation by Alexandra Gardner

Nine summers ago, there were tons of sound-producing gizmos on display during the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival’s “Homemade Instrument Day.” It was a fabulous way to introduce some really avant-garde music to a very broad audience. Perhaps the most mind-blowing thing people encountered that day was an installation by Miya Masaoka in which sound was somehow emanating from house plants. It was like some weird kind of Island of Dr. Moreau phenomenon. Yet it was also somehow both instantly engaging and musically fascinating as it unfolded over time. It involved a lot of brainy science—electroencephalography, data analysis, and computers—yet it was also extremely down to earth.
While it could have degenerated into a clever gimmick, it was much more than that because Masaoka manipulated the data from the plants to construct a very interesting sonic environment. But because it was all happening in real time, with a group of pots containing seemingly innocuous plant life, it became something much more than just a musical experience—it made the audience think about plants, and life in general, in a totally different way.

Masaoka has been making us look and listen to the world around us in totally new ways for decades. There has been a clear socio-political component to virtually everything she has done, but at the core level her work is ultimately always about finding new sounds. She first came to prominence in the Bay Area for her experiments with the koto, a multi-stringed zither which has played a prominent role in the court music of Japan for centuries. Though she was born and grew up in the United States, her Japanese family included traditionally trained musicians who were her earliest teachers on the instrument. While she initially immersed herself into gagaku and other classical Japanese repertoire, she soon found a way to make the koto a vehicle for a broad range of contemporary American music-making—bowing it, electrifying it, playing it in experimental improvisation combos, performing Thelonious Monk compositions and other jazz standards on it, etc. In so doing, she has made the instrument completely her own.
She has also done a great deal of sonic work involving the human body. She has created musical compositions using the brainwaves of audience members as well as data retrieved from participants via electrocardiograms. Her most provocative work has been a series of performance pieces involving groups of insects (bees, cockroaches) crawling over her own naked body; their motion triggering sensors attached to her which amplify the actual sounds the insects are making. Again, what could come across as gimmickry is viscerally powerful visual and sonic engagement, though admittedly probably not for the overly squeamish. (Although it isn’t to her in the slightest.) As she describes it, it is simultaneously politically charged and sound obsessed:

It’s the most amazing electronic kind of sound and it’s actually coming from a bug. Bees also have a very electronic sound component. But they were chosen not only for their sound abilities, [they were also chosen for] the idea of them maybe being individuals, maybe a colony. … I really wanted to understand and study their social relationships to each other. I’m not allergic to bees, so it’s okay. It was the idea of what the individual is, what our bodies are, and what the relationship is of our bodies to nature. It was searching for some kinds of clues to get closer to that. … Collaboration—whether it’s with insects or plants or people or musicians or the earth’s environmental sounds—is thinking about a sound world and how to enter somewhat of a psychological and sonic space.

In the last decade, Masaoka has concentrated somewhat less on performing and more on creating extended musical compositions for others to perform. She acknowledged when we spoke to her last month that her seeming shift in focus was partially a function of relocating to New York City and having a young daughter, but it’s also a way to channel her experiences and creative energy into larger scale projects that she would not have been able to perform on her own. And the results have been equally stimulating: For Birds, Planes and Cello, an all-encompassing sound-scape in which cellist Joan Jeanrenaud competes against a barrage of bird calls and airplane engines; and While I was walking I heard a sound…, an extraordinary choral piece involving three choirs and nine soloists spatialized in balconies which was premiered in San Francisco by Volti, the San Francisco Choral Society, and the Ensemble of the Piedmont Choirs. Last year, inspired by kayaking on a lake near the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, she completed her first orchestral piece, Other Mountain, which was performed by the La Jolla Symphony as part of the EarShot Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Readings. But she’s still committed to performing. Earlier this season, she performed at Roulette in Triangle of Resistance, a new interdisciplinary work she co-created with filmmaker/videographer Michelle Handelman featuring a score she composed for koto, string quartet, percussion, and electronics, and in a couple of months she’ll be returning to the studio to record a new album of improvisations with Pauline Oliveros, who has been a long-time collaborator and mentor.
After spending a morning talking with her about her music and why she’s made the choices she’s made, I’m even more convinced that whatever she does will continue to push the envelope in ways that are both intellectually challenging and sonically captivating.

Frank J. Oteri: You’ve done so many different kinds of things musically, but people always want to have a tag line, a one sentence sound bite. “Oh, Miya Masaoka, she’s the person who experiments with the koto.” Or “Miya Masaoka, she’s the person who does the music with plants.” Or, “the stuff with bugs.” These projects are all so different from each other and don’t even encompass everything you’ve done. So I’m wondering in your mind if there’s any through line that connects all of these things, something that informs the choices you make and shapes your identity as a musical creator.
Miya Masaoka: Identity is kind of interesting—the relationship between the individual and whatever social context is happening, whatever interaction with the outside world. So it’s really this interior versus exterior relationship, which is something we don’t necessarily have control over. I remember when there were only a few of us calling ourselves composer-performers; it was actually before you could get degrees in such a thing. These terms are really fluid, in a sense, like gender or ethnicity. They’re really social constructs. For example, when I think about what it means to be Japanese or Japanese-American—before my relatives were sent to the Japanese American concentration camps, it was decreed that you had to have 1/16 Japanese blood. This was a definition for if you were Japanese or not, to go to the camps. And so this is what my parents had to contend with. I certainly don’t have to contend with these kinds of blood percentages to define identities, but certainly the idea of aspects of sound, and relationship to architecture, and how pieces are exhibited, or whether there are instruments involved and what the relationship is to performing on that instrument or whether you create music for other instruments—those things are also really fluid and they change from piece to piece. So for me, whatever is fascinating for me and what I am obsessed with at the moment, drives me to create the next piece. I don’t consciously shape an identity. That’s not been so conscious. I wish, in a sense, that things were more narrowed down and could be in a sound bite, because then it would be much easier to do everything in a world that’s sound-bite driven. But I can’t stop myself.
FJO: Sound bites are sort of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they help explain work to people in a fast, straight-forward way, which can be very useful, especially when there is so much noise out there. But in terms of wanting to create the next piece, or actually wanting to create any new work, it creates limitations if it doesn’t conform to the sound bite—you know, that doesn’t sound like what that sound bite tells me it’s supposed to sound like! So it’s a constant battle between how you establish something so people have some kind of grounding in what you’re doing and how you can grow from there.
MM: That’s true. I also like it if I can find a sound bite. That’s how we organize our minds and organize the vast amount of data that we have for so many artists out there. The next piece I’m doing is using three dimensional objects, sculptural objects, as scores. In some ways, it’s a departure from some things I’ve done, but in other ways, it’s not at all. Then I’m coming off of writing for full symphony. It’s completely different to go in towards making these objects as scores, or scores as objects.
A common thread is this idea of a sound and how to think about sound—whether it’s using forces of musicians or whether it’s thinking of sounds in more of a visual sense, whether the pieces are using kinetic motion or a physicality. Are these waves that interact with air to create a certain kineticsm that we experience as sound? How does it deflect off whichever reflective surfaces are there in terms of the architecture? That’s true whether it’s a concert hall, or whether it’s in a gallery space, or an open air situation. So I think this element of experiencing sound is probably the common thread, and how that can be conceived and perceived and achieved in different angles in different ways.
FJO: Now one of the things that’s been a very long-standing interest of yours going back to the beginnings when you first became active in the Bay Area new music scene has been working with the koto. I’m curious about how you first got involved with the koto and what attracted you to it. Obviously you come from a Japanese background, but you grew up in the United States, you were born in D.C., you spent many years in the Bay Area. There aren’t a lot of kotoists here.

Miya Masaoka performing on the Laser Koto. (Photo by Lori Eanes.)

MM: Well, my cousin and my aunt played koto, and one of them studied in Japan. I grew up playing piano. It was definitely coming from the Japanese American history of trying to be as American as possible because of the camps and the whole wartime experience. At the time in the Bay Area, there were different Asian American musicians like Jon Jang, Mark Izu, and Francis Wong who were keen about Asian American music and embracing these traditional instruments. So going back to these instruments was something that was a part of what was happening. I became a part of that, as well as having it in my family.
I studied traditional koto, and I also started the Gagaku Society. Gagaku is imperial court music. I did that for seven years in the Bay Area. Our master was from Japan and he was working at UCLA. So we flew him up once a month to work with us. And those concepts of structure, and how sound occurs over time, and how it unfolds and kind of builds up a propulsion and momentum were some of the most fascinating kinds of principles that I still live by.
But a turning point for me was when I was invited to play with Pharaoh Sanders for a few concerts at Yoshi’s. From playing with him and improvising with him, I also got introduced to other improvisers in the Bay area, like Larry Ochs and Henry Kaiser. So then I began collaborating with them, and that opened up this whole other door to what they would call non-idiomatic improvisation, free improvisation and that kind of thing.
FJO: There’s an interesting essay you’ve posted to your website that you wrote back in 1997 in response to Royal Hartigan’s issues about taking a traditional instrument that’s in a certain context and recontextualizing it to make it your own. There has been a lot of debate about this phenomenon. These are cultural artifacts of a specific culture which perceives of them in certain ways. So some would argue that to use them in ways that are outside of that culture are somehow disrespectful to that culture. But I find it interesting that the people who make those kinds of arguments about traditional Asian instruments, and also traditional African instruments, don’t make them for European instruments. It’s assumed that western instruments are somehow universal, that those instruments belong to everybody. You can do anything you want, say, with a piano or violin, but you can’t necessarily do anything you want with a koto, or an mbira or a ney. To exempt the West from cultural specificity seems like cultural imperialism and is really disconnected from 21st-century American cultural experience.
MM: I think some of those arguments that took place in the ‘70s and ‘80s have been really superseded by the internet—concepts of appropriation and taking these cultures from developing countries or from non-western countries and that it is somehow disrespectful or impure. Plunderphonics has come and gone, and there’s access to so many different rare cultures that it’s become a moot point to a certain extent. But I think whatever you do as an artist, whatever choices you make, there’ll always be people who will have issues with things. Especially if you’re doing something new and something slightly different, you’re going to have people who aren’t going along with it. So, that’s fine.
FJO: In the age of the internet, it does seem like everything from everywhere in every time is fair game. At this point to say that you’re continuing a tradition, it begs the question, what tradition? We have access to all the traditions, and we’re not necessarily continuing any of them, and not necessarily continuing “Western classical music.” The term seems meaningless to so much of the stuff that we’re all doing at this point.
MM: Tradition is something that people can personally embrace, whether it’s a tradition of American experimentalism, or a certain kind of tradition of minimalism, or certain kinds of traditions of time-based work, or some kind of performance, or generative electronics—modular synthesis has its own tradition. So there’re all these traditions that exist that are very historical and very meaningful, and we can embrace them in various ways, as individuals, to make them meaningful for us.
FJO: You mentioned playing with Pharoah Sanders. One thing that has certainly been a very important tradition in the trajectory of American music is the music that people call jazz. It’s a loaded word in some circles, but it is a tradition and it’s a tradition that you’ve interacted with in some of your work, though not all of your work. I love the trio recording you did with Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille where you’re taking music by Thelonious Monk and completely reinventing it in a way that echoes traditional Japanese music, but that also really is jazz. It really does swing. It feels like Monk to me. So I wonder how you see your own music within the context of jazz traditions.
MM: Well, I grew up playing and listening to all different kinds of music and, of course, studying classical music, teaching myself folk music on the guitar, and studying flamenco music with a gypsy who lived in the town. Listening to rock and roll, listening to jazz—it’s really hard to escape that if you grow up in America. Jazz has this incredibly rich history of ways of being in music and ways of creating music. And I feel very lucky to have worked with some amazing jazz artists. And I continue to work with them.
I think at different times, there’s been a certain fragmentation and diffusion and at the same time a real boxing in of what jazz is into a kind of very boring and negative modality, which it certainly is not. I mean, the history is so expressive. It’s been so influential to so many parts of American culture. It’s had a rough patch, I think, and people like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor have kind of gone through and made it to the other end of that, the narrow definition of what would be swing or how to define jazz. I’m hoping that that’s going to open up again.
FJO: So taking on Monk. Monk’s compositions are iconic jazz repertoire even though he was an iconoclast. He was never conventional in what he did with rhythm. What he did with harmony was also completely unique. You hear a Monk chord, and you know instantly that it’s his. Yet those pieces have become canonic of a certain era in jazz. So to take that on and to do your own thing with it is very brave in a way because people have certain expectations about what that is.

The CD cover for Monk’s Japanese Folk Song featuring Miya Masaoka with Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille.

MM: Well, Monk did an album of Japanese folk songs, so I kind of did a version of him doing a version of Japanese folk songs. And then, like you mentioned, the rhythms are asymmetrical; they’re very spiky and they’re very interesting. It’s definitely very interesting repertoire to dig into. So I thought it was challenging and would be a fun project to do. It’s funny, when I go to Japan, sometimes I still hear it in some of the jazz clubs. They play that record; it’s wormed its way in.
FJO: You did another project that is probably even more clearly jazz sounding—What is the Difference Between Stripping and Playing the Violin?—which for me is definitely coming out of big band music, but it’s also referencing a lot of other things, too.
MM: That was a long time ago. But there was some jazz in there definitely, quotations from Duke Ellington and things like that. I had a big orchestra and I was doing actually something I made up that I called tai chi conducting where I would try to get the energy from the musicians. I used some of the Butch Morris sign language. I also invented some of my own at the time. There were people in that group like Vijay Iyer and Carla Kihlstedt, tons of incredible artists who were living in the Bay Area at the time.
FJO: The more non-jazz improvisatory stuff that you’ve done also in some way connects to jazz’s greater contribution to American culture—this notion of work that’s collaborative in some way, the idea that a group of people can participate in the making of something in real time by responding to one another. It’s not just one person’s vision—I did this piece and now you peons, here are the precise rules you need to follow. Rather you have a group of people who are listening to each other, and they’re responding to each other, and the work becomes what it is because of those interactions. No one necessarily knows what’s going to happen at the end. Something can become completely different from what you had initially envisioned it being.
MM: That’s true. I mean, you know, I’d definitely been open to what kinds of things could change and how that could be meaningful. I did this piece with Joan Jeanrenaud—For Birds, Planes and Cello. Joan was playing the cello and also listening and also looking at some graphic ideas of what to play while she was listening. This was a piece with basically an uncut film recording of the planes at the San Diego airport starting out at six in the morning, and slowly there would be more and more of them. And the birds were in these natural canyons so they were in this enormous kind of sound amplifier; the birds were so loud they sounded like they were being amplified artificially. Whenever a plane went by, they would start screeching with the plane, and then as time went on, there was just more and more sound and it built up to a structural climax with the schedule of the planes kind of dictating that. So in a sense, it’s a kind of a collaboration with the earth, the birds, and the scheduling and creating and taking these kinds of environments and finding some kind of coherence and structure and meaning from them.
FJO: What I find so interesting in terms of the whole sound bite phenomenon is that collaboration has been a hallmark of your work through the last several decades, but the people you collaborate with have been extremely different from each other. So, because of that, the music that results from those collaborations is always very different. I’m thinking of the trios that you were a part of with Gino Robair which can be very frenetic versus, say, your work with Pauline Oliveros, which is often much sparer and much more introspective. I’m curious about what makes you choose a collaborator to work with because obviously those different identities are both you since you’ve done both of those things. They’re both extraordinary, but they’re very different from each other.
MM: Collaboration—whether it’s with insects or plants or people or musicians or the earth’s environmental sounds—is thinking about a sound world and how to enter somewhat of a psychological and sonic space. And a spiritual place you could even say, like with Pauline Oliveros. We’re going to be going into the studio again in a couple of months, actually. She’s an icon, and I’ve been so honored to be able to have worked with her and to work with her in the future. To answer your question about sparseness or density, those kinds of things can be preconceived or not preconceived. Things with Pauline can be sparse or not sparse, or this or not that; it’s working towards a larger whole to a certain extent. There are so many parameters that are a part of getting there.
FJO: So in terms of choosing these collaborators, how do these relationships happen? Who initiates them?
MM: It changes, and it varies. This time this one with Pauline was initiated by Issui Minegishi, a player of the traditional one-stringed koto called ichigenkin. With Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille, there was someone from Germany who said, “Who do you want to work with?” I just named these two names and he got them. It really varies. I often do a lot of just working by myself.
FJO: There is that fabulous album you did of composition and improvisation which is almost completely solo except for the last track that has flute. Once again, from track to track, the music is extremely different. One solo project of yours, although perhaps you might not think of it as solo, is the work you’ve done with bees and Madagascan cockroaches. I find it remarkable, but I have to confess that I also find it unbelievably disturbing, and I think that that disturbance might be an element of why you did it. I’ve never experienced these performances live. I’m not sure I could. I’ve watched the videos online, and I had to stop the recordings repeatedly. It got through my skin, as it were. I felt like these insects were crawling on me.
MM: Well, that piece was about the Japanese American experience. Around that time, they had just come out with some new studies of DNA and the differences with gender and race; people were something like actually 99 percent the same. And it’s really this small miniscule amount that we thought we were different. So I was going back to the 1/16th Japanese that you had to be to go to the Japanese camps. So the idea of the naked human body, as it is, without these ideas being fostered onto it… These large bugs crawling on it, kind of just discovering the terrain, as if it’s for the first time, and seeing this as a blank slate. Now we can buy that or not, you know, in terms of blank slates, but the idea was just having a very kind of cold viewpoint of the human body as the canvas—that was the idea. And then taking the sounds of the bugs, and amplifying them, and making samples of them, and having them create the structure of the piece. So I would be sending an array of lasers over my body, and they would break the beams, and that would trigger the sounds of the piece. The sound worlds are based on their movements.
FJO: So how were you able to do this?
MM: I went to this amphibian store. At the time they were legal to buy and I bought 12 of them. Later somebody took care of them for me and would send them through FedEx to the different places that I would play in Europe.
FJO: But how were you able to have bugs crawl all over you? How did it feel? You don’t move at all during the piece; how were you able to get yourself into that zone?
MM: It’s the idea of the body being this passive canvas that society pushes things upon. And you know, you just do it. I mean, it’s discipline. It’s like anything else. It’s, you know, you just do it.
FJO: What were audience reactions like to that in different venues around the world?
MM: Well, that piece became very popular. It also got picked up by some kind of syndicate in Canada and played a few times. And these Madagascar cockroaches later became much more popular in lots of popular culture. This was before that happened. But, how things get received? I don’t know. I should probably pay more attention to that. I think at the time, people weren’t used to seeing anything like that. Some people thought it was interesting, and some people thought it wasn’t, I’m sure. I can’t have my ear too much to the ground as to how things get received or not received, because it can just get me in the wrong frame of mind.
FJO: I have to confess, before I experienced it, I thought the idea was sort of gimmicky, but then after looking and listening to it, though at times I found it really disturbing, it was also viscerally powerful. But I’m curious about what it means to you as music, because a lot of it is a visual experience, including what you were saying about the body being a blank slate. But it was conceived of as a piece of music, right?
MM: Yes, as a performative semi-installation with music, because that’s my background. I did these collaborations with cockroaches, but their sound sounds like white noise. It’s the most amazing electronic kind of sound and it’s actually coming from a bug. Bees also have a very electronic sound component. But they were chosen not only for their sound abilities, [they were also chosen for] the idea of them maybe being individuals, maybe a colony. I think it’s very fascinating to have a blur of something that’s a whole. Ants are that way, too, but ants don’t have the same kind of obvious sound possibilities as these other ones. I really wanted to understand and study their social relationships to each other. So a lot of pieces from that period have to do with inquiries into the nature of society and culture and politics and sound.

FJO: Now with the bees, there’s the added layer of danger. Cockroaches tend to make people flinch, but with bees you can actually get stung and be physically injured. Is putting yourself in harm’s way part of the aesthetic here?
MM: No, not at all. And I’m not allergic to bees, so it’s okay. It was the idea of what the individual is, what our bodies are, and what the relationship is of our bodies to nature. It was searching for some kinds of clues to get closer to that.
FJO: I found it very interesting when we were talking earlier on about collaborations that you included the insects along with your collaborations with some of the most iconic human musicians. But insects, unlike people, don’t necessarily create a work of art of their own volition, so it’s a different kind of collaboration.
MM: Well, from my point of view, I really try to give the cockroaches agency by having them crawl and their movements create the sound structure for the piece. So I really try to imbue a certain agency for them.
FJO: But they’re not necessarily cognizant of their agency. Or are they?
MM: I have no idea.
FJO: But unlike collaborations with other people which are the creative work of the entire group collectively, certainly work for which you’d all share royalties, you don’t have to share your royalties with these bugs! Ultimately, it’s exclusively your work as a creator.
MM: Correct. But let me tell you about these cockroaches. I would be in the hotel room with these cockroaches night after night, travelling with them, and they were in a shoebox. I stopped taking both males and females, because the males would just attack too much, constantly going after each other and fighting each other. So I ended up with just one male cockroach, and the rest females. But I would just watch the way they interacted with each other for hours and hours in the hotel room, you know, after the performance. They did amazing things—very, very tender things with their antennas to each other, really very dramatic, very erotic things. When they would have sex, the things they would do with their antennas were fascinating. And how they would manipulate each other for food, and keep food from certain other ones. The whole thing was just fascinating. And for me, it was also part of the piece in a certain sense.
FJO: Now, to take it to plants. One could argue that even if insects may not be engaging in the same aesthetic processes that you are in the pieces that you involved them in, they certainly have will. Most people don’t think of plants as having will. I think that what you’ve done with plants is particularly fascinating, because it’s trying to address the living qualities of these life forms that we take for granted.
MM: I don’t think of plants as having will, but I will say some plants are very different from each other, even in one species. Some will be very responsive and some won’t be. I use EEG sensors on leaves, so I can monitor activity, and some plants are really responsive. You can get good readings on the sensors from the ones that are semi-tropical with very sebaceous leaves. If they’re in the jungle, they have to think which branch am I going to have to wrap myself around. Aristotle said the difference between humans and plants is plants can’t move, and human beings can. But actually these plants in the rain forest can actually go several miles by living on the treetops, and then shooting roots down. When they want to go somewhere else, they kill the nutrients off and then they move and get new roots in another location. But there are these plants, of course, like a lettuce, that just open and close; they are kind of like a toggle switch. Other plants grow quickly, and their vines shoot in directions where it’s most beneficial for them. So there’s definitely a lot of going there. These root systems can be considered somewhat like a neuron center of some sort.
FJO: So how does this all translate into music?
MM: Well, they give off mini-volts, which is one millionth of a volt. They recently discovered that plants have ultraviolet sensitivity, which is something human beings aren’t even able to discern. There’s a lot going on there. But it’s like any kind of data piece, whether you’re taking the information from earthquake activity, or wind activity. But my plant pieces were in real time. Often data pieces are not. They’re just taking a splice of something that happened and then interpreting that data. It started from my taking data from people’s brains in concerts, going from brain-activated pieces to using plants’ data. For some reason, those pieces got farther along for me than the brain pieces.

One of Miya Masaoka’s performances with plants. (Photo by Donald Swearington.)

FJO: But it’s another one of these things where, if one were to hear it without knowing how those sounds came about, what would be the difference in the experience? And this begs the question of where does the music lie in this for you in all of these pieces—the plant pieces, the insect pieces. What is the musical issue that’s coming out of it for you that led you to create in this way?
MM: Well, they’re very different in a certain sense because the ones with insects are taking the actual sounds of the insects, but the ones with plants are taking their relationship to voltage output. A lot of it is negotiating what’s going to happen, whether it’s an installation, or whether it’s something that’s an eight-minute piece that goes from beginning to end. That’s a challenge for those kinds of pieces, to take the data and to make it interesting. I guess there are different ways of thinking about data, how pure this relationship is to the scientific frequencies coming out or whether that can be interpreted or manipulated for compositional purposes. I always err on the side of artistic license to really take the data and then apply it so that there is some sonic interest and development and satisfaction.
FJO: So how do you know when these pieces end? What is an ending?
MM: For long durational pieces, I think there’s the question of my own attention span and the attention span of the audience, the perceiver, the listener. I’ve been to India many times and have experienced seven-hour concerts, as well as [extended] durational concerts by different composers, like La Monte Young. There’s something very beautiful about this kind of eternity and things going on and on, but I also like something that you can kind of experience and then you have to go back to the memory. Once the piece starts, you start listening to it and then you go back to the memory of what you listened to. It’s like reflecting upon whatever just happened in a time-based way. The last event that happened that was meaningful, maybe you return to that. And then there’s a new meaningful event. And then you return to that along the timeline. And it kind of goes like that. And after a span of time happens, you reflect on the whole experience, and find what was meaningful or satisfying, or maybe what was not. For me, there’s kind of a ratio of attention span plus time plus satisfaction equals end. I just made that up right now. [laughing]
FJO: That’s good! You were talking about using raw data versus manipulating it for aesthetic ends. Even though we’re now in the 21st century, we’re still playing all these games with binaries. It’s either this or that. Either it’s about structure or it’s intuitive. One of the things I was trying to think through for what could be the sound bite to describe your music is its corporeality. At the onset of our talk you described your interest in physical moving sound. There’s a physicalness to most of your music, much more so—at least it seems—than the working out of a rigid process. You do all these experiments, but they’re really about how sound exists in the world more than how it exists in your brain. Is that fair?
MM: Anything’s fair. I think that’s an interesting way of thinking, and that sounds like an approach.
FJO: Here’s where it becomes a loaded gun thing—a lot of recent debates about aesthetics contextualize creative choices in terms of gender. The argument goes that men like to create all these rules which result in highly structured pieces, whereas women are more intuitive and they respond to things. Reality is a lot more complex than that, but this binary is something used to explain, say, why there are no 90-minute symphonies by women composers.
MM: Even 40-minute symphonies, why aren’t there those? They don’t have to be 90 minutes.
FJO: Well, I can think of at least ten 40-minute symphonies by women, but I can’t think of any 90-minutes ones. But is this related to gender and is this kind of thinking an issue for you in your own music making? When we talked about identity before, we didn’t talk so much about gender. How important are those questions for you?
MM: Those questions are very important because they have to do with how we function in our social context. So that’s very important. Some things are just done out of necessity. I would often do lots of solo things, especially in the earlier days, because I didn’t have the funding and the resources to hire people. Then whenever I did get funding, the first thing I would do was create more structured pieces to include more people and hire them. That’s always been something that I’ve done consistently. And there’ve been scores and rules for all of my pieces that have to do with larger groups because it’s too unwieldy otherwise. I think that serialism was kind of an extreme, and certainly it broke down, not just for women, but for men as well, but still there are certain things that are very interesting about serialism. For me, it’s more a question of access, being able to have musicians and being able to get your work performed. These kinds of things are more important to me than thinking that this is generalized for this gender or for that gender, which really is not very helpful for anybody.
FJO: But one thing that certainly is helpful to someone who is creative, especially during one’s formative years, is being able to have role models. While there have always been women composers, they did not really have much of an impact on the greater trajectory of music history until composers of Pauline Oliveros and Yoko Ono’s generation. Before their time, the role models were pretty much all men. I know that Pauline Oliveros is somebody who has been very important to you as a mentor. And on your website you include a fascinating talk you did with Yoko Ono, who also created work that blurs the line between sound and vision and performance.
MM: I don’t consider her a role model per se, but she’s definitely been an iconic artist.
FJO: So who are your role models?
MM: Well, Pauline Oliveros, Kaija Saariaho, Olga Neuwirth… I get very inspired by visual artists as well, like Kara Walker, and writers.
FJO: Everyone you mentioned is a woman.
MM: Well, there are men, too, but they get mentioned a lot. I like to mention people who aren’t mentioned as much.
FJO: The person you chose as your life partner, George Lewis, is also an iconic composer and musical thinker. I’m curious about how having the central person in your life also be a creator has impacted your own work. I know that the two of you have collaborated in the past.
MM: Not for a long time. We have a really separate artistic life, I’d say. We buy different pieces of equipment, even if it’s the same a lot of times, because it just makes it easier. You have your equipment, and no one’s going to mess with it. And then when you need it, it’s going to be in the exact same state in which you left it. Those kinds of things are important. And we have different places where we work. But it’s so enriching, because when we do get a chance to sit down and talk about different things, there’s always something interesting to say. So, I really appreciate that part of it.
FJO: It’s interesting. You were such an important fixture in the Bay Area new music scene, and now you’ve been in New York City for over a decade. Since so much of your music is about the physical world around you, I’m curious about how being in a different place has affected the work you’ve done since you’ve been here.
MM: The work I’ve done here in New York is focused more on composition. I just finished this string quartet. But in some ways, it all somewhat follows a life trajectory to a certain extent, since I’m not in my 20s and 30s anymore. I’ve got a small child. There are these kinds of interruptions of life to a certain extent that affect things. The Bay Area was, too, but New York is such a stimulating place to be, so I love being here every minute.

From the world premiere performance of Miya Masaoka’s score for Triangle of Resistance at Roulette on November 17, 2013: Jennifer Choi and Esther Noh, violins; Ljova, viola; Alex Waterman, cello; plus Satoshi Takeishi, percussion; Miya Masaoka, koto; and Ben Vida, analog modular synthesizer. Conducted by Richard Carrick. Video projections by Michelle Handelman. Direction by Brooke O’Harra.

FJO: You also recently wrote your first orchestra piece.
MM: It was a piece called Other Mountain that was performed by the La Jolla Symphony last year.
FJO: Is that something you’re interested in exploring more now?
MM: Well, the large forces of a symphony are a learning experience, and it’s also a very intriguing way of thinking, how the sounds from each individual instrument work together. It’s something new for me, and it’s been endlessly fascinating. I don’t know really where the future goes with that, but it’s really an incredible thing to be able to have done.

Sounds Heard: Thomas DeLio—Selected Compositions (1991-2013)

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Colin Holter - Albums, Listen

Thomas DeLio
Selected Compositions (1991-2013)
(Neuma 450-108 & 450-201)

Neuma catalog items 450-108 and 450-201 are, respectively, a CD and a DVD (whose job is mostly to support multichannel audio; only one piece includes a video component) that together represent a 22-year retrospective of the music of Thomas DeLio. Twenty-three pieces composed between 1991 and 2013 are included on these discs.

If you’ve ever been curious about DeLio’s catalog, you’ll find plenty to engage with here. If you already hold DeLio in high esteem—he’s been counted by some among the most important living exponents of post-Cageian American experimentalism—you’ll love having all of these pieces within easy reach so you can relive them whenever the spirit moves you. If you feel—as others I’ve spoken with about DeLio’s music do—that this particular emperor has no clothes, Neuma’s collection offers the perfect chance to reevaluate that conviction. And if, like me, you’re pulled cyclically toward and away from DeLio’s music and the discourse around it, these two discs provide an ideal checkerboard on which to allow your feelings about this insistently elusive music to play out once and for all.

The CD booklet includes the following mission statement, one I remember very clearly from my first brushes with DeLio’s output more than a decade ago and which bears excerpting here:

As William Carlos Williams once said of Gertrude Stein: “Stein has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean.” I too admire Stein for this reason and, following in the footsteps of those who have tried to do the same for sound, would like to move away from gesture process and get sound back “clean.” My approach to composition, to which I came quite subconsciously, involves reducing the music’s surface to just a few sounds separated—pushed apart—by large quantities of silence; sound events pushed into isolation. Often writers and scholars comment that my music is about silence. However, it is actually about sound. I use silence, among other things, to frame sound so that we may experience it in new ways, highlighting qualities of sound perhaps otherwise lost. […] I argue for wiping the slate clean and rediscovering sound beneath all the rhetoric and dated mannerisms which have accumulated over so many years and, in the process, really coming to grips with the nature of our own experience—a complex task indeed.

Although I found a great deal to enjoy in these substantial Neuma releases, I did so for exactly the opposite reason to the one that DeLio seems (according to his elevator pitch) to have intended: DeLio’s music purports to get sound back “clean,” but it’s the dirt in his sounds—that which we track in on our shoes, so to speak, no less than that which collects during each piece—that makes these recordings so worthwhile.

There are two kinds of pieces on these discs, more or less: pieces with live performers and pieces that exist on fixed media only (here charmingly called “tape” pieces in spite of their inescapably digital pedigrees). In both kinds, per DeLio’s liner note, isolated sounds are separated by long silences. As Agostino di Scipio points out in “Notes on Digital Silence: Listening to Tom DeLio’s Short Tape Works,” there’s an ontological difference between silence in a concert work for live performers and the digitally encoded silence in a fixed-media piece; either way, however, a DeLio experience (to one who knows what to listen for) is generally recognizable as such, and recognizably distinct from pieces emerging from other experimental music traditions in which silence figures so significantly (scores published by Edition Wandelweiser, onkyokei performances, etc.). In “Luminous Presence: Thomas DeLio’s think on parch,” Linda Dusman writes that DeLio and composers like him reject “the musical languages and forms of the dominant culture and seeks to create newly with each work the distinctive style established by each composer.” Whether or not it can honestly be said to emerge “newly” with each work, the “distinctive style” DeLio has established is unflagging, regardless of medium.

To the extent, then, that hearing one of DeLio’s pieces should be an exercise in the decontextualization of unsullied sounds, the fixed-media pieces and the instrumental pieces function in much the same way. But, as I’ve already indicated, I don’t think these pieces are simply exercises in the decontextualization of unsullied sounds: thankfully, the sounds come pre-sullied. That’s where the meat of this literature lies, for me, and that’s where the fixed-media pieces and the instrumental pieces diverge categorically.
The fixed-media works are full of sounds which are by no means fully drained of the “rhetoric and dated mannerisms” DeLio aspires to eliminate. Indeed, they’re full of gestures, and very sensuous and richly legible gestures to boot. Song: “Foxrock near Dublin…”, the first track on the DVD, has recourse to a bridge-of-the-Enterprise ambience beneath fractured lines from poet P. Inman (a presence throughout the discs—more on him later). Meanwhile …transients, in which DeLio processes the recording of his transients/images for piano and percussion and then strives (in an anti-musique concrète instrumentale) to “project those sonorities not as the products of actions or gestures—the products of purpose—but as purely physical [i.e., sonic, acoustic] realities.” To my ear, this doesn’t really happen: in fact, it’s the traces of the original “physical realities” of performance that are truly at issue in the piece.

Even though DeLio encourages us in words to approach each moment in his music as a lone and unmoored present, the pieces themselves encourage us to make connections backwards and forwards in time. In the fixed-media pieces especially, this is a matter not only of the piece’s duration but also of historical time: on a technical level, the electroacoustic pieces’ use of resonators and phase vocoding point very clearly to the 1990s, an inevitable (but possibly trivializing) result of following Fredric Jameson’s charge to “always historicize”—the last thing DeLio seems to want us to do. “sam”, for fixed-media sound and video, inhabits circling repetitions or near-repetitions for almost eighteen minutes, a lifetime compared to most of the fixed-media pieces on these discs. The version of “sam” on the DVD is an adaptation of an installation, which might explain its length; even in truncated form, it’s a piece that develops its own history and web of internal relationships that militate against the primacy of the sequestered moment.
The instrumental pieces, naturally, avail themselves of a different palette. A word here about the performances: although they’re uniformly superb in both precision and spirit, the works for percussion are especially noteworthy. DeLio is fortunate to have strong advocates (in capacities as varied as conductor, performer, interlocutor, and analyst) in Christopher Shultis and Tom Goldstein, whose efforts have probably brought more listeners into contact with DeLio’s music than any others’. However, all of the renditions showcased here are faithful and tight, and they all deserve praise for keeping the quality of such a huge undertaking so high. (That the Philharmonia Bulgarica recorded the three-and-a-half minute Than is itself remarkable—who expected to find an orchestra piece on these discs?) And of course they all sound great, especially on a set of decent headphones; that’s one way in which “sound” is importantly thematized that I can’t complain about.

It’s not only the sound worlds of the instrumental pieces that differ critically from the fixed-media pieces: because the embodied effort of producing instrumental or vocal sounds is so much greater than the effort of processing or reproducing sounds electronically, DeLio’s instrumental works—which I haven’t heard live in recent years but used to encounter from time to time on programs at UMBC—engage with a sort of economics of sound. Unlike his fixed-media pieces, in which sound is “cheap,” his instrumental pieces are like manipulated markets in which sound is made more valuable by virtue of its scarcity. In these pieces, performers have to reckon with the long silences between sounds, incorporating them into a performance practice. (Goldstein has written about this very consideration.) The piano solo Though, performed on the CD by Jacques Linder, establishes just such a market, and its silences rely on the sounds that they follow to create a sense of desire —at least, this is my experience of the piece: a family of small, handcrafted objects, fascinating individually and as a set, for the next of which we have to wait. As though, another solo played here by Twin Cities percussionist Jeffrey Gram, works similarly, fabricating desire by separating gestures—and let’s not pretend they’re not gestures. DeLio writes:

Among other things, in this work I was very interested in drawing attention to the distinction between non-pitched and pitched sound. Toward this end, I introduced only one pitch into the composition, near the end—one very peculiar type of sound framed by the more complex sounds of the un-pitched percussion employed throughout the piece. My purpose was to try to return pitch to its place as “sound”; to strip it of its function as a mere element of language (melodic, harmonic, tonal or atonal).

There’s nothing “mere” about being an element of language, and even if there were, then shouldn’t the piece’s “more complex” percussive sounds—many of which also carry a perceivable pitch—be held equally accountable? To my mind, the sudden appearance of a ringing metallophone in as though only reinforces the suspicion that the pitch-content to be heard in what DeLio calls the “un-pitched” percussion instruments might be expressive, too. I want to make a mountain out of this molehill, and DeLio wants me to forget about it and direct my attention to the next molehill.

DeLio’s aesthetic is a kind of “innocent modernism” in which we imagine that sound is “just sound” rather than imagining, say, that all parameters of musical material can be graduated into twelve equal-sized slices—both then-necessary but ultimately now-false ideals. It does less injury to “sound” than other kinds of musical modernism, maybe, but the word “sound” has quotation marks around it here because sound isn’t actually a thing you can do injury to. This is the root of my objection to DeLio’s project: every sound that appears in his music was produced by human labor of some kind or another; every sound’s source has an historical specificity; many of the sounds include splinters of semantic languages; all of the sounds in a piece can be related to one another in a hierarchical way (or, more accurately, many possible hierarchical ways). They are not just sounds, and what the lengthy silences that are supposed to cut them off from their kin are actually doing is giving a listener time and space to assemble them into meaningful networks.

Consider American poet P. Inman’s voice, which features in several fixed-media works and whose character at times evokes the stray pre-song utterances found on early Todd Rundgren albums. I’ll digress briefly for a look at Inman’s orientation toward poetry, which mirrors DeLio’s to music in important ways. Dusman identifies an intersection in Inman’s writing (whose fundamental unit is not the phrase or the sentence but the individual word) of the imminent (“meaning is always imminent in his poetry, emerging in the moment from the multiple possible readings produced and present in each moment”) and the immanent (“At the same time meaning is immanent; that is, its meaning wells up from the word itself”). Inman conceives of his work in a political way:

Capitalist ideology hopes to dilute or deny the existence of anything other than the everyday given. By doing so current ideology stagnates thought, replaces the possibility of change with the statistic, frozen black on paper, legitimized by its very inertia.

(That may have been true when Inman wrote it in 1979, but it certainly isn’t now: capitalist ideologies in the 21st century are increasingly predicated on the construction of desire, the commodification of affect. They change constantly and appear in terrifyingly vivid colors. They haunt us so thoroughly that I had to turn to those very terms to properly describe my reaction to Though.)

In DeLio’s case, that meaning emerges in his pieces imminently is clear to me. The act of waiting is an essential part of hearing his music, and not only in Though one hears a sound, and then one has to wait some time to hear another. It’s just that these episodes are cumulative; each new one doesn’t negate all the ones that have come before it. Dusman’s description of DeLio’s music as a threshold experience is absolutely correct; the listener spends a great deal of time on the threshold between the apprehension of the piece he or she has thus far developed and the apprehension of the piece he or she will have after the next sound event, which will necessarily alter the former in an unexpected way. This is an intensely dramatic experience, at least for me, but it only works precisely because meaning in DeLio’s music is not constructed immanently but rather negotiated by the conditional and conditioned particularity of each sound-event within the piece’s world and the resonances of those sound-events in the world outside of the piece. DeLio may want to wash his hands of “geology, astrology, and acupuncture,” to paraphrase Grisey, but we should be grateful that he hasn’t been entirely successful—because this very contradiction is what makes
these Neuma discs so magisterial, their contents so captivating.

Maybe this is DeLio’s ultimate revenge on a new music community bent on overthought, on subjectivity run amok, on indulgences in memory and gesture, both of which he reviles: maybe he’s spent a career writing pieces whose insights are revealed only when the discourse around it is considered and then disregarded. This isn’t a review of that discourse, nor of DeLio’s prose writings, nor of his interlocutors’, of course; it’s a review of a CD and DVD that contain a sizable helping of recorded and fixed-media music. He was very nearly right all along: the worthiest ambassador for DeLio (to whom I’m happy to yield the last laugh) is the music—not to say the sound—itself.

Note: If you’re going to investigate the CD and DVD set, you might as well also investigate Essays on the Music and Theoretical Writings of Thomas DeLio, Contemporary American Composer (Thomas Licata, ed.), a collection of articles and commentaries that argue passionately—if not always, as I’ve opined above, persuasively—for DeLio’s work. I’m pleased to have had the chance to cite its contents several times in this review.

Sounds Heard: These Just Out

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Alexandra Gardner - Albums, Listen

The Puppeteers: The Puppeteers

It’s a charming, slightly romantic notion that musical collaborators who began their friendship at a much-loved performance space would later unite to form a group after that venue has come and gone as a tribute of sorts, but that’s exactly what The Puppeteers have done. In memory of the Brooklyn club Puppet’s Jazz, which closed its doors in 2011, drummer Jamie Affoumado, pianist Arturo O’Farrill, bassist Alex Blake, and vibraphonist Bill Ware have all thrown their creative ideas into the same hat and recorded their self-titled first album. The release is also the premiere recording offered on their new label Puppet’s Records.
All of these musicians have individually made so much music with so many different and amazing groups that I’m not going to venture to list them (although in the “we are all connected” department, it is worth mentioning that Bill Ware was a 2003-4 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute participant), but suffice it to say that the strength of this album lies in the fact that everyone has contributed their own tunes; there is no bandleader. Because the musicians have played together so much, the music is varied without seeming disjointed, and the balance between instruments—especially the agility with which the instruments move between background and foreground to allow for the featuring of solos and prominent lines—is so fluid that the listener barely notices such shifts of texture until they have already taken place. From O’Farrill’s blazingly fast piano lines and Ware’s similarly propulsive vibraphone playing to Blake’s quiet, tuneful scatting over bass improvisations and Affoumado’s exacting-yet-still-relaxed drumming, it’s easy to hear that the four are having a blast playing together, and it’s most definitely a fun and energizing listening experience.

Buy:

Michael Gordon: Rushes
Hitting the streets just today is a commercial recording of Michael Gordon’s composition Rushes for seven bassoons. Named after the tall grass that is reminiscent of the materials from which bassoon reeds are manufactured, Rushes is a triathlon—the piece is written in three parts; two 20+ minute sections sandwiching a short seven-minute movement—of constant musical motion; wave upon wave of repeated tones constantly wash over one another in a multilayered tapestry of darkly beautiful harmonies. It is at first warm and then, over time, becomes somehow electronic-sounding, but without losing the sense that humans are behind the music. (And don’t forget to check out the score and assorted insights into the production of the work.) Like his previous composition in the same vein, Timber, this piece is intended to evoke an ecstatic, trancelike state, and also to “expand the boundaries of a single instrument’s repertoire into hitherto unknown (and at times, otherworldly) spaces.” Mission accomplished.

Buy:
Order from Cantaloupe Records

Joseph Kubera: Book of Horizons
With more than thirty years’ worth of musical contributions to the American contemporary experimental music scene, pianist Joseph Kubera has pretty much played, well, nearly all of it. He is known for unrelenting precision, stamina, and patience—qualities all required to master some of the most challenging piano works of our age, such as those by Feldman, Ashley, and numerous pieces by John Cage, to name just a few. He also has wide-ranging tastes, which are demonstrated on his new album, Book of Horizons released by New World Records. Two of the works, “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s 1994 composition The Drifter and Michael Byron’s 2009 Book of Horizons, were written especially for Kubera, and he has grouped them with Julius Eastman’s Piano 2 and Stuart Saunders Smith’s Fences, In Thee Tragedies. The music spans the lush to the thorny, and the textures range from sparse to brick wall density; the recording below of the first movement of Michael Byron’s Book of Horizons conveys the sonic cognitive dissonance of unceasing tangled fingerings that nonetheless sound strangely effortless.

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Kenneth Kirschner: Pirate This Music

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Spotlight

Before Napster was even an idea living in Shawn Fanning’s dorm room, composer Kenneth Kirschner saw something idealistic and beautiful in the notion of sending his music out into the world in a way that was freely accessible to everyone.
“I’m not telling you to copy other things,” Kirschner clarifies. “But I am telling you to pirate my music because I think it’s important.”

When you visit Kirschner’s über-minimalist single-page website, you get a clearer sense of how central this outlook is to his work. Since its launch in late 2002, new pieces have been posted upon completion (older works have also been added, rounding out the breadth of the catalog) and all are freely downloadable (as MP3s and, since 2010, FLACs). Each work carries a date in a hazy cornflower blue font as its sole identifier—it’s the date that the piece’s concept “crystalized” for Kirschner, a filing system that he characterizes as “a disaster that I love.” The track’s total running time is the only other detail listed. No program notes are offered, no composer bio included. Scroll all the way down the page past the last (which is to say the first) track, May 19, 1988, and you get the only information on the music’s creator on offer here: you can email him, follow him on twitter, or sign up for the mailing list.
The lack of explanatory material about his music on his website is quite intentional. Kirschner wants listeners to focus on the end result and is uninterested in seducing them with detailed notes about his compositional process because “if you don’t like what you’re hearing, the methods have already failed.”

Considering all he’s keeping under his hat, the fact that all the work is available at no cost suits Kirschner. “If you can download it freely, then you can take a risk with it,” he points out. “And I think, being an experimental composer, it’s about encouraging a listener to take risks.” This obviously begs some personal financial questions, and Kirschner is very forthcoming on this point, explaining that he works part-time in an unrelated field as a freelance copy editor. “I basically do just enough work to get by and support my music while giving myself the maximum amount of time and freedom. It’s a tricky balance, and there are definitely tradeoffs.”

To source the building blocks for his compositions, Kirschner works with live instrumentalists, coaching and recording sounds with them. He’s also comfortable enough at the piano to produce what he needs, and isn’t afraid to knock out some of his own percussion as well. Field recordings and sample libraries round out his sound palette. From there, it’s a process of improvisation and chance procedures to build up musical material, and then a lot of editing at a desk in his Brooklyn home until the final piece takes shape.

What electronic music gives you the ability to do is to obsessively edit everything. You have more control than you ever should have. And you can take chaos and take chance and take unexpected events and capture them and let them become an essential part of a composition. So you’re not composing intentionally a lot of the time, you’re reacting to what’s happening with the technology and what’s happening with the parameters that you’ve set up.

When that obsessive editing is complete, the file is posted to Kirschner’s website. A few record labels, including 12k, have put out collections of his work, though the CD covers often carry the printed suggestion that “this music may be freely copied.” While he does occasionally perform live, Kirschner is adamant that the recording is the work. He doesn’t create scores in the traditional sense, associating printed music with a certain anxiety. “I’ve always felt I had some very basic form of musical dyslexia,” he explains. “Notation was very intimidating to me. It was something I could never connect with and I could never have become a musician in any sort of serious sense if I had to go that path.”
Coming of age at a time when synthesizers and drum machines and four-track recorders were at hand, however, meant that he could create music in a way that worked for him and he wasn’t blocked by tools that he just couldn’t use.

I’ve always known this is what I wanted to do. I was fortunately very clear on this since I was twelve or thirteen: that I want to do this kind of music, I want to do it in a certain sort of way, present it in a certain way, distribute it in a certain way, have it philosophically structured in a certain way. And I’ve stuck to that program.

In many ways, Kirschner sees it all as a grand experiment in objectless, abstract music. “I think it’s a cool thing to try and see if it works.”
“And by ‘trying it’,” he concedes, his laugh filling the room, “I mean my entire life.”

Molly Sheridan

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