Tag: minimalism

A Drone Too Long

Posted on January 2, 2014 by - Columns

I can’t remember exactly when I first became interested in musical drones, but I think it was around the time I discovered Charlemagne Palestine. I remember being terribly excited about his piano music, with its patient accumulations of plangent tremolo chords. I remember, too, that a lot of people I tried to share this music with seemed completely bewildered by my interest in it. Perhaps because it was so unlike the music I was writing at the time, or perhaps because there didn’t seem to be much apparent craft to his music—it was so simple, so obvious.

I don’t know what to call this kind of music, this music that lives on a different time scale than we’re used to. Pianist R. Andrew Lee has written eloquently about the boredom of minimalism, but not all music termed minimalist has this quality. And there’s plenty of non-minimalist music (e.g. Morton Feldman) that has this quality. It’s not really ambient music, which implies a background role. Instead, this music sticks in your brain in a way that is insistent, even obnoxious at times.

But there’s a therapeutic aspect to it, too. I recently made a pilgrimage to La Monte Young’s Dream House, a white room bathed in purple light where you’re bombarded with sound from four corners. What surprised me was how simultaneously soothing and agitating it was, in a completely non-contradictory way. My visit also happened at the end of a long, stressful day, so I may have been in an especially appropriate state to appreciate it.

The trouble comes when I try to integrate or incorporate this music into my usual modes of listening or composing. It seems to exist completely outside this realm, and the tenuous bridges I try to build between the two seem to collapse under the slightest weight. This is the struggle I faced when I tried to share this music as well, as those with both feet firmly in conventional musical time had no way to approach it. I don’t even think it’s a problem of education or awareness, since I can’t say what led me to this music in the first place. It was like a switch—one day I didn’t get it, the next I couldn’t get enough of it. Is it purely aesthetic preference? Is it neurological? I don’t know.

Fear of Simplicity

Posted on November 18, 2013 by - Columns

The recent death of British composer John Tavener has got me thinking, again, about simplicity and the way we talk about simple music. There’s a weird combination of admiration, envy, and condescension that often comes into play when composers talk about simplicity. We can admire its bravery, its unabashed unembellished-ness. But maybe we’re unsure how to judge it when there isn’t as much on the surface to analyze. And maybe we want to protest, “But I could just as easily have done that,” even though of course we didn’t. Maybe we resent someone calling “dibs” on that idea before we got around to it.

Maybe simplicity is complicated because the difference between a simple idea that is banal and a simple idea that has depth can be extremely subtle. Maybe we can’t tell, at first, which is which. But then, why should this be any different than complexity? Complexity can contain hidden depths, but it can also obscure a lack of substance at its core.

There’s no way to tell, then, on first listen. We can only trust our prejudices or our instincts, and what’s more, we may not even be able to distinguish prejudices from instincts. And maybe the prejudices have rewired the instincts, so that, while being drawn to the immediately attractive idea, we immediately distrust it, because we have been burned too many times by charlatans.
Maybe the non-composer is more likely to trust the naked idea and its fearless charms, while the composer prefers the idea with clothes, with armor. Complexity as a kind of modesty, as shyness, as parasocial anxiety. Maybe this petty yet fundamental disconnect is the source of countless tragicomic misunderstandings between artist and audience.

Then again, maybe I am overgeneralizing (or over-equivocating). There is room in the world for both simple and complex music and for all kinds of interactions between the two, and mapping this strange, non-linear territory is one of the things that new music has gotten pretty good at. The trick is to view it without judging—or to judge anyway while knowing your judgment is wrong. Creation unfortunately demands a perpetual, genocidal sacrifice of possibilities, so we might as well get it over with.

After Einstein

Posted on October 16, 2013 by - Columns

There is a peculiar way in which Einstein on the Beach resists critical discourse. The infamously plotless opera contains so many scenes that defy explanation that to even try to describe them, you risk sounding ridiculous or pretentious or both. Maybe this is why reviews of the production tend to be so polarized, expressing unconditional love or unequivocal disgust. Deeper analysis that might invite nuance or ambiguity rapidly lands you in the realm of the absurd.

But things happen in Einstein that are at least possible to describe, and it’s worth trying to figure out what might give this work its strange power. Because it is strangely affecting, maybe even transformative. I finally had the chance to see it this Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and while it didn’t quite live up to the cumulative hype that I’ve been subjected to over the years, I’m not sure anything could.

For one thing, Robert Wilson’s visual design is impeccable. Some of his images are so instantly iconic, like the tall brick building against blue sky, that I can’t figure out if I’ve seen them before or not. And there’s an extraordinary, almost synesthetic connection between the visuals, movement, and sound. The balletic interludes choreographed by Lucinda Childs, where the patterns in the music and dance seem to be practically identical, stand out in this regard. But there are other synesthetic touches too, like the book-reading figure constantly shaking his head, or the furiously typing court clerks who seem to be synchronized to the fastest arpeggios. Not to mention the various characters who scribble figures in the air, writing on an imaginary blackboard or perhaps spellcasting in time with the music.

Oddly, I find that I have relatively little to say about Philip Glass’s music on its own, maybe because others such as Kyle Gann have already written about it so extensively and eloquently. More often it’s the way that music is used that grabs my attention. The fact that the organ’s bass line (A! G! C!) is already playing when we walk into the performance space suggests that the barrier between the world of Einstein and our own is permeable. I appreciated the ability to move freely in and out of the hall as desired, which I took advantage of once. The music was also pumped into the lobby and hallways, and I enjoyed passing through zones of variable sound quality, meandering through a forest of bandpass filters. With this accompaniment, it’s a bit like you and the other concertgoers are part of the work too, silently waiting in line for the restroom or walking to and fro along lines of hidden navigation.

The text often seems like an afterthought in this opera. At least on Sunday, the volume levels were inconsistent, with some speakers strongly resonant and others almost lost. (An older woman in the row behind me kept asking, “What did she say? I don’t understand!” She didn’t make it to the end of Act I.) The densely patterned, mesmerizing poems of Christopher Knowles are a natural match for the additive rhythms of minimalist music. The texts by Samuel M. Johnson don’t fare nearly as well. I still don’t know what to make of the judge’s speech in the first trial scene, in which he preaches about women’s liberation in a screechy falsetto that’s played for laughs. It mostly reminded me of Kate Beaton’s Straw Feminists. There’s not enough context for me to tell if it’s meant to be critical or sympathetic, but regardless, today it comes off as tone deaf and awkward.

Johnson also wrote the story about lovers on a park bench that is read over the final Knee Play, and I’m apparently one of the few people who have a visceral distaste for this beloved ending. What I find interesting is that, even among those who love it, there’s disagreement about what it’s there for. Some (like the LA Times’ Mark Swed) find it sincerely meaningful, while others find it ironic, a deliberately vacuous attempt to summarize something inexplicable. I think that both interpretations reflect poorly on the work—the former is painfully mawkish, the latter is pointlessly cynical. The reality is probably somewhere in between, and I have to give it credit for that balancing act, but it still rings false to me. The opera has already brilliantly succeeded at melding the familiar and the strange; why do we need a speech to put a button on that? It also puts a sudden teleological spin on the rest of the opera, which is exhilaratingly freeform until we’re railroaded into this destination. The penultimate, climactic spaceship scene may be partly to blame for that, but it’s hard for me to judge that scene too harshly, with the glorious sci-fi high camp of its flashing lights and floating glass coffins.

On Repetition

Posted on August 28, 2013 by - Columns

I love repetition. I also hate repetition. I think I’ve always felt this way–at least, I can’t remember a time when things were different. But it’s also true that my musical education and experiences have intensified and complicated this love/hate sentiment. And in the post-(post?)-minimalist new music landscape, repetition is undeniably an important and divisive issue for everyone.
One of the reasons I love/hate repetition is this very divisiveness, the fact that everyone has different preferences and tolerances regarding repetition. Some people can’t stand more than a tiny amount of it, while others can’t get enough of it. In my anecdotal experience, this divide doesn’t seem to be split along the lines of musical education as you might expect. Sometimes tolerances for repetition seem incongruous across genre lines–someone might despise Daft Punk’s “Around the World” and dig Louis Andriessen’s Hoketus (or vice versa) even though the use of repetition is functionally similar. This holds true even in cases where the repetition is the stated reason for the reaction. This exposes a huge fault line in the discussion of “accessibility” in new music. How can universal accessibility possibly be defined when people are so divided on such a fundamental aspect of music, for seemingly purely aesthetic or even arbitrary reasons?

It is common for composers of a certain vintage–Frederic Rzewski, for example–to rail against repetition (while allowing for its usefulness in certain prescribed scenarios). A professor once told me he was deeply concerned about how technology made musical repetition too easy to execute, with the advent of looping, copying, and pasting. I definitely absorbed some of this attitude during my composition studies, and developed an allergic reaction to repetition in my own music that was directly at odds with many of my instincts. The principle of continuous variation, in which nothing directly repeats, seems in many ways “safer” for a student composer who must demonstrate prowess and progress. Unfortunately this means a lot of music gets written out of fear, which can be productive in small doses but quickly becomes poisonous in larger ones.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more and more comfortable with repetition as a composer, and I’ve begun to feel that the basic emotion behind repetition is joy. It’s saying, “I like what’s happening now; let’s do that again.” Naturally I find it preferable to write from a place of joy than a place of fear. But repetition can take on a host of other meanings too. It can be extraordinarily difficult to grapple with, as anyone who has performed a lengthy minimalist piece can attest to.

Repetitive music often gets maligned as background noise, encouraging passive listening, but it can also encourage the listener to actually confront the musical materials they’re faced with. In this scenario the simplest figures can contain a world of ideas in the mind of the listener. I can think of no better example of active listening.

The Influence Engine: Steve Reich and Pop Music

Posted on March 27, 2013 by - Analysis, Articles

When Steve Reich’s new work for ensemble, Radio Rewrite, was given its world premiere by the London Sinfonietta earlier this month (it was subsequently premiered in the U.S. by Alarm Will Sound on March 16), I was asked to provide a program essay on the influence Reich has had on popular music, and vice versa. Radio Rewrite takes material from two songs by the British rock band Radiohead—“Everything in its right place” from their 2000 album Kid A, and “Jigsaw falling into place” from 2007’s In Rainbows. So the theme of popular/classical cross-influence pretty much jumps out at you.

Indeed, it’s a subject I’ve investigated before, in 2011 for another London event, “Reverberations: The Influence of Steve Reich,” a two-day celebration of Reich’s influence on classical and especially popular musicians. But on both occasions it was a subject about which I felt uncomfortable writing. Reich’s development—from his student works, through the early tape and phasing pieces, to masterworks like Music for 18 Musicians and beyond—does indeed run in parallel with the development of popular music from the 1960s to the 2010s. Many claims are made for his influence on pop, rock, house, techno, and even rap. And there are points of convergence, certainly. But such claims are often made by stakeholders in a narrative of Reich (and/or minimalism) as the savior of Western classical music from its serial/avant-garde(/European) doldrums.

I’ve come to think of this reception mechanism as a kind of “influence engine,” almost as self-generative as Reich’s own early music. Reich’s promoters want to hook him into the popular zeitgeist; non-classical musicians are happy to play along. Popular music appears to gain credibility; new music appears to gain relevance. As long as the “influence” of Reich’s music can be traced back up the chain, the narrative will keep feeding itself.

But there are two risks to leaving the engine running unchecked. First, that we perpetuate a trickle-down theory of musical influence, in which the best bits of popular music are presented as originating only in high (white, Western) art. And second, that classical music can only be validated by the impact it has had on popular culture. We need to ask: How much genuine contact is involved here, and how much wishful revisionism?

Jonny Greenwood playing Electric Counterpoint in Krakow

Jonny Greenwood playing Electric Counterpoint in Krakow
Photo by Tomasz Wiech for Krakow Festival Office. Used with permission.

The Reich Meme
Minimalism’s breakthrough in the mid-1970s coincided with the height of disco. As Robert Fink notes in Repeating Ourselves[1], the premiere of Music for 18 Musicians in March 1976 came just a month after the release of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s 17-minute groundbreaker “Love to Love you Baby.” Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach received its premiere that summer in Avignon.

The release in 1978 of Music for 18 Musicians on the hitherto jazz-only label ECM catapulted Reich and minimalism from the galleries and lofts of New York City into the wider consciousness. Magazines like Billboard and Rolling Stone reviewed the disc—which sold more than 10,000 copies—and the overlap between Reich and popular culture became a serious topic. A live performance of the piece that year sold out the Bottom Line club in New York; just months later, a Rolling Stone feature on Glass attempted to argue that minimalism was a precursor of the disco style. In 1984 an article in Harper’s magazine even referred to Reich’s music as a form of “higher disco.”

It is certainly possible to read (as Fink has done) 18 Musicians in conjunction with disco. They share common features: a sprawling scale, a formal language of extended and repeating climaxes and releases, techniques of layering and cross-fading, and a relentless adherence to the beat. And there were occasional individuals—Arthur Russell, for example—who played with their feet in both camps. Yet how much Reich and disco really knew of each other is beside the point. What is clear is that both were attuned to similar musical and technological currents: Afro-diasporic beats; the technology of the turntable, tape loop and cross-fader; and the possibilities of accumulative and layered musical forms.

There were more easily documented, if less high-profile, points of contact with popular music earlier in the decade. Perhaps the most important of these was Brian Eno’s discovery of It’s Gonna Rain in the early 1970s. Eno began experimenting with out-of-phase tape loops with the King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, resulting in the albums No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, and what came to be known as “Frippertronics.” In 1973 he saw Steve Reich and Musicians at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the influence on Eno’s post-Roxy Music work can be documented through solo albums like Another Green World, Discreet Music, and the Ambient series, as well as his work as a producer. In fact, 1973 proved to be a key year, since it also saw the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, both enormously influential carriers of minimalist DNA.
In 1976 David Bowie attended the European premiere in Berlin of Music for 18 Musicians. He was working with Eno on his Low album at the time, and the pulsing marimbas and vibraphones of that album’s “Weeping Wall” are an unmistakable homage. Bowie was far from the only rock musician to have felt minimalism’s influence. The Who had already quoted Riley’s arpeggiated keyboard style on “Baba O’Riley”, a track written in 1969 and released in 1971, and Reich’s technique of building up textures through closely spaced canons can be heard throughout prog rock. At its electronic fringes, references to Reich are most pronounced: especially brazen is Tangerine Dream’s “Love on a Real Train,” which was used as the theme to the film Risky Business.

Links between Reich and popular music continued through the 1980s, but the most recent and enduring phase of cross-influence was launched a decade later. The Orb’s sampling of Electric Counterpoint for their 1990 single “Little Fluffy Clouds” simply made explicit the sympathy between late ’80s/early ’90s rave culture and Reich’s glittering, pulse-driven soundscapes. Rave’s biggest act, Orbital (who themselves drew on Reichian timbres in the keyboard riff of “Lush 3” and the layered pianos of “Kein Trink Wasser”), paid a technical homage in their arch use of phasing speech loops for the intro and outro to their second (“Brown”) album of 1993.

Yet musical tastes and ambitions had changed since the ’70s. Electronica and minimalism were bridged in the ’90s by the general desire for individual self-sublimation that permeated popular music of the time, from rave to Nirvana. The attraction of Reich’s music now was its glowing mass, the total dissolving of surface into texture, the effacement of the individual. This idea had already been thematized in the 1970s and early ’80s by Kraftwerk, on albums such as Autobahn, The Man-Machine and Computer World. But in the late ’80s and into the ’90s it was everywhere, on albums as diverse as U2’s The Joshua Tree (produced by Eno), My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II.

Towards the end of the century, as techno matured and its producers became more self-reflective, a new genre—minimal techno, or microhouse—was born. The Reich Remixed album of 1999 may have been devised by Nonesuch records to attract a crossover audience to its Reich discography, but it still struck a chord. Producers had begun to create a new form of techno that was more attuned to minute processes of variation and evolution. Several of them, including Carsten Nicolai, Richie Hawtin, and Nobukazu Takemura, have acknowledged the influence in particular of Reich’s early music. Takemura (a contributor to Reich Remixed) samples Four Organs on his Assembler/Assembler 2 album. Hawtin’s Concept series of 12 inches focused with Reichian obsession on single rhythmic ideas; these were later “remixed” by Thomas Brinkmann into new rhythmic configurations by using a custom twin-arm turntable to play the record against itself. Brinkmann himself has taken Reich’s phasing technique to an extreme on his X100 record, which consists of just a click, a tone, and a bass kick recorded on two slightly out of phase grooves for the duration of one LP side. The Reich meme had morphed once more, into the validation for a hyper-modern aesthetic of automatism.

Origins

Before he met Terry Riley in 1964 and began working with tapes and tape loops, Reich claimed three major influences on his music: Bach, Stravinsky, and jazz. The last of these was most influential, particularly the playing of John Coltrane, whom Reich saw play many times at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop club in the early 1960s.

Reich was fortunately placed to be able to see, as an open-minded composition student, the unfolding of one of the great individual creative periods in 20th-century music. Watching Coltrane, along with players such as Eric Dolphy, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison, forge a jazz revolution must have been a little like sitting in on the Beatles’ sessions between Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper, or flat-sharing with Stockhausen in the mid-1950s.

Of course, Reich has acknowledged the influence of Coltrane many times. In particular, he has mentioned the importance of his 1961 Africa/Brass album, and listening back it’s not hard to hear why.
Africa/Brass
Africa/Brass was Coltrane’s first recording (of seven) for the newly formed Impulse! Records. Around this time, Coltrane’s palette of influences opened up considerably. North Indian music, via Ravi Shankar, had already led to Coltrane replacing chord changes with one- or two-chord drones (most famously on the album My Favorite Things, the last he recorded before beginning the Africa/Brass sessions). He had also begun to listen to West African, particularly Ghanaian, music. Hints of structural concepts borrowed from West African drumming also start to appear on his version of the “My Favorite Things” standard, in which sections are repeated until the leader plays a musical cue signaling everyone to move on to the next section.

While preparing for Africa/Brass, Coltrane listened to many African records for rhythmic inspiration. This was partly an urge to get away from the strictures of 4/4 time, but it also contributed to Coltrane’s broader project to move jazz improvisation away from pre-determined changes. By dropping the changes, the musical focus shifted from harmony and towards rhythm and melody. Elvin Jones capitalized on this opportunity to fashion a unique playing style that was indebted to West African drumming. Coltrane used his new freedom to focus on melodic creativity. “I had to make the melody as I went along. But at least I’m trying to think of a melody, I’m not referring to the chords to get the melody.” For the avant-gardist Ornette Coleman, another important influence on Coltrane at this time, this change in emphasis took on political connotations: “not referring to the chords” was an issue of authorship and ownership.

The “African-ness” of this shift runs deep. As documented by Steven Feld[2], Coltrane has become an inspiration to Ghanaian jazz musicians like Nii Noi Nortey, Nii Otoo Annan, and Ghanaba (Guy Warren), who see in him a kindred, diasporic spirit. Nortey says, in Feld’s book:

And the drummers, all them drummers [Jones, Rashied Ali and others], were playing something nearer to what I heard in Africa, in terms of complexities and tonalities and all kinds of things. I heard more of the African things in these drummers. I heard the drums overlapping and hooking up like our drummers do, and over that I can hear Coltrane as a drummer playing the saxophone, working his rhythms too. … He stopped playing all those chord changes and reduced them to one or two, which is also very African, because we tend to move at that level of keeping the music simple.

In many respects—its patterns of repetition, flow, and rupture, and its emphasis on the beat—Africa/Brass is typical of the music of the African (particularly West African) diaspora. To these Coltrane adds modality, an emphasis on massed sound, harmonic stasis, and a way of building form by adding or subtracting layers. We might recognize in these many of the planks of Reich’s minimalist style. Even details such as unison signals to mark the changes between sections are present and have, as we have already seen, their origins in Ghanaian drumming.

In fact, Reich wasn’t just listening to Coltrane at this time. Like the saxophonist, he was also listening to records of African music—conceivably the same ones, even. The timeline is unclear from Reich’s various biographers, but he certainly knew African music in the early ’60s while at Mills, and may have even discovered it in the mid-1950s while studying at Cornell. In 1962, he was taken to the Ojai Festival by his Mills teacher, Luciano Berio, who was the festival’s composer-in-residence. Here he heard Gunther Schuller talk on the subject of African music.

Schuller made reference to A. M. Jones’s seminal study of Ghanaian drumming, Studies in African Music, which Reich bought immediately. In its second volume, Jones’s book sets out some of the first complete transcriptions of Ewe drumming pieces, and Reich gladly immersed himself. Now he was able to see how the music that he (and presumably Coltrane) had been listening to was constructed. West African music, via Coltrane’s jazz and Jones’s transcriptions, was now imprinted on his imagination. When he traveled to Ghana for real, nearly a decade later, he writes of his visit not as a discovery, but as “basically confirmation: that writing for acoustic instruments playing repeating patterns of a percussive nature was a viable means of making music, and had an ancient history.”[3]

The Influence Engine
Music for 18 Musicians
A tangled web soon emerges when one begins to lay out the explicit or implicit relationship between Reich and popular music.[4] A feature of that web is its increasing circularity: the chains of influence rarely extend in single, straight lines, but tend to loop through a small number of nodes. At the start, those nodes are perhaps John Coltrane and Ghanaian music. A later one might be Giorgio Moroder; Brian Eno can certainly be added, as well as Kraftwerk and Mike Oldfield. The Orb, to name just one act, couldn’t have happened without these latter three. As the decades pass, new nodes are added, but the loops continue to pass up the chain. Since the late 1980s and the self-awareness of music history brought about by CDs and digital distribution, curious artists are more easily able to follow these chains of influence back as far as they like.

And those artists keep coming back to Reich. So in recent years we’ve seen Reich perform with Kraftwerk (Manchester Velodrome, 2009); billed alongside Orbital, Richie Hawtin, and Riccardo Villalobos (the aborted Bloc festival, London, 2012); programmed beside Lee Ranaldo, Tyondai Braxton, and Owen Pallett (Reverberations, London, 2011); and performed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (Kraków, 2011). And Reich himself flirted with the idea of writing 2×5 for Radiohead, before turning his attention fully to their music with Radio Rewrite.

I find the resilience of this phenomenon interesting. Why the urge to keep returning up the chain? And why is Reich, not Coltrane before him, or any of those rock and dance musicians in the 1970s from just after he established his style, that chain’s eternal endpoint? The answers to those questions say something not only about Reich’s music, but about our response to it and how we rationalize minimalism’s place within music history.

For those stakeholders I mentioned at the start of this article—critics, marketers, record companies, performance venues, ensembles, and the composer himself—the benefits are clear: the story of Reich’s influence on popular music helps him assert a position against Schoenberg, serialism, and all that. For the composer, it is a way to position himself within a canon of classical forebears who kept open the window between popular and classical music: Josquin, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Ives, Weill, and Bartók are among those names he has mentioned in this context. (NB: His own teacher, Berio, composer of Folk Songs, Coro, and Sequenza XIII, and arranger of Beatles songs, does not make this list.) For popular musicians there are prestige and validation, should they want them. There is a cachet of a sort in being able to claim an aesthetic lineage from an esteemed classical composer.

The influence engine encourages us to view Reich’s music as the fountainhead of so many subsequent styles. Yet I wonder if it might not be more fruitful to think of its persistence as a result of its basis in an Afro-diasporic template—that is structured around repetitions, breaks, and accumulation, and prioritizes rhythm and melody—derived from Coltrane and other musicians, and that itself underpins much black music from blues to rap. In Music for 18 Musicians and other works, Reich brilliantly crystallized that template into something that, as history has shown, could inspire in many different directions at once. He took the biggest step in the chain I have described. Perhaps it will require a similar act of creative reception to refresh our understanding of Reich’s place in recent music history.

*


1. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (University of California Press, 2005)

2. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra (Duke University Press, 2009)

3. ‘Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition’ (1982), in Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford University Press, 2002), p.106

4. Ross Cole unpicks a number of threads from Reich’s San Francisco years in “‘Fun, Yes, but Music?’ Steve Reich and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Cultural Nexus, 1962–65,” Journal of the Society for American Music, vi (2012), 315–48

***

Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes on contemporary music for a number of publications, including his blog, The Rambler. His new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music was published in September.

Intuition and Algorithm in Einstein on the Beach

Posted on March 6, 2013 by - Analysis, Articles

[Ed. Note: The following paper was presented at the Einstein on the Beach conference of the University of Amsterdam, January 6, 2013. The present version is slightly expanded based on questions and comments from that session. All score excerpts from Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass ©1976 Dunvagen Music Publishers. Used by Permission.]

Some of us are old enough to remember the public impression that minimalist music made before the premiere of Einstein on the Beach. Minimalism in its first manifestation was a strict, objectivist style. We thought of it, pretty much, as gradual-process music. Philip Glass’s Music in Fifths and Music in Contrary Motion offered us perceptual exercises in additive process, and taught us to hear the gradual expansion of a time frame. Steve Reich’s out-of-phase tape loops amplified microscopic phenomena of the human voice. The similarly phasing 12-note pattern of Piano Phase created its own objective geometry, as did the change-ringing patterns of Jon Gibson. La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations were comfortingly based in mathematics. Charlemagne Palestine’s piano improvisations conjured up overtones. Only Terry Riley seemed a little loopy, pardon the pun, but even in In C we heard the echoes of melodies as a strict canonic process.

It is odd to remember at this distance how important this criterion of objectivity seemed at the time. We had come out of a period of serialism and strict chance processes, glorifying mathematics and the natural world. In the conditioned milieu of 1960s avant-garde music, mere expression of emotion seemed at the time unworthy of serious study; subjectivity was distrusted. The worship of science was rampant, and music had become scientific. For many musicians involved in the avant-garde it accelerated the acceptance of minimalism, I think, that it seemed to be about natural and or logical phenomena. Some of us weren’t yet ready to return to intuition, art, shading, eccentricity, and the unsteady foundation of personal preference.

There were enough hints of gradual process in Einstein on the Beach, I think, that it was accepted as fitting this objectivist paradigm at the time. The use of numbers and solfège syllables as text facilitated this impression. So did Glass’s liner notes to the original Tomato recording of the work. Of the lightning fast patterns in the Building scene, Glass states that “the repeated figures form simple arithmetic progressions,” and he refers to a figure in the Trial scene which, he writes, “slowly expands and contracts […] through an additive process.”[1] While this is arguably true of the Trial scene, I will show that the progressions of the Building scene are far from arithmetically simple, and also that many of the other scenes are devoid of predictable algorithmic thinking. Looking back in retrospect, Einstein seems a far more intuitively written work than we thought at the time. For several decades the score wasn’t available, and to transcribe these lightning-fast patterns would have taken a lot of patience; we thought we had a pretty good idea what we were hearing. Eventually a score became available via links on Glass’s website, and I bought it in 2008. Upon opening it I was immediately struck by how much more unpredictable the music was than I had remembered it, how circuitous its forms were, how difficult it often was to pinpoint the musical logic. I was struck by how compositionally playful the piece is. In particular it offers some striking examples of recomposition, of writing through the same parallel succession of motives and harmonies several times within one piece and doing it a little differently each time. It is this playful, intuitive technique of recomposition in the composed musical scenes of Einstein on the Beach that I plan to focus on here.

Let me begin, almost pro forma, by reviewing the recombinant elements that make up Einstein, since I’ll be referring to them later. First of all are three recurring chord progressions, one with three chords, one with four, and one with five.
Einstein-Elements
(Glass’s notes also refer to ideas of two chords and one chord, but these don’t appear as frequently.) The famous five-chord progression modulates from F minor to E major, and is the basis of the Spaceship scene, appears in the Train and Building scenes, and is the basis of the internal Knee Plays. Glass refers to it as “cadential,” but the three-chord progression heard in the first and last Knee Plays seems cadential as well: a simple vi-V-I. The four-chord progression appears in the Trial and Bed scenes, always in the kind of slowly arpeggiated motion seen here. In addition, there are a few other features found from scene to scene. The upward A-minor triad with a variety of continuations serves as a prelude to the four-chord progression. A la-fa-la-si-do-si motto in A-flat appears as a kind of section marker in the Train and Night Train scenes, and the following figure of four modules appears in both those scenes and constitutes almost the entire notated material of the Building scene.

Many movements of Einstein seem to be written in a kind of stanzaic form, wherein a movement is divided into stanzas which are parallel in their function and similar (though varied) in their progress through the same harmonies and motifs. Sometimes the beginnings are marked by introductory motives which I will call incipits: such as the three perfect fourths in the saxophones at each new section of the Train scene, the two four-note patterns of Night Train, and the reduction of the Building scene to a 6/8 pattern:
Einstein-incipits-envois
Likewise, some of the stanzas end in signalling characteristic figures that I will call envois, after the medieval poetry term. These include a quick F-minor triad in the Train scene, the solo violin playing A minor scales in Trial 1, and, again, the la-fa-la-si-do-si motive in Night Train. Not all stanzas in the various scenes are marked by these devices, but in those that are the incipits and envois are quite clear in their framing intent.

There are moments in Einstein at which a more stereotypically linear minimalist logic prevails. The most obvious is the bulk of the Bed scene, where the soprano sings over the four-chord progression. As this chart of the rhythms for each chord shows, the length of the rhythmic cycle expands in a fairly predictable manner with each iteration.
Einstein-Bed-process
The voice part, however, is a more intuitive element, drawing lines that use only notes from the four triads. Out of 81 possibilities (not counting octave displacements), Glass chooses only seven of the available such lines and repeats three of them, creating a mild climax by using sevenths in the 7th and 8th cycles. (Each voice line is repeated once before proceeding to the next.)
Einstein-Bed-lines
Likewise, the violin part of the Trial 1 scene does, as Glass says, go through a process of expansion and subtraction, though not in a completely linear manner.
Einstein-Trial1-pattern
The chorus doubles the low C and A in the first part of each pattern; thus, once the music begins leaving this part of the phrase out of each repetition, the chorus disappears and only the violin continues.

At the other extreme is the Building movement, in which only the two organs are notated, as the voices and other instruments drone and improvise. As notated, the piece is entirely in eighth-notes in contrary motion, much like several of Glass’s minimalist works of the late 1960s. (It should be kept in mind that all of these patterns repeat 2, 4, or 8 times before proceeding to the next one.)
Einstein-Building-Organs
The move from one pattern to another, however, is not at all predictable. The following chart of the right-hand Organ 1 part shows all the pitches for the first 30 (out of 37) cycles, lined up vertically to show easily what notes are added or subtracted to get from one repetition the next (here the lower-case “e” denotes the E-flat in the upper octave, and there is a key signature of three flats).
Einstein-Building-analysis
What making this chart clarifies is that the movement is made up of only four modules whose changing combinations make up the form:
Einstein-Building-ABCD
The movement’s seeming micro-complexity is due to the fact that module A is contained in module B, and likewise module C in D. The following chart shows the deployment of these four modules throughout the entire section:
Einstein-Building-plan
At each step one can see a kind of additive or subtractive logic: the 3/8 modules start out with a 6/8 feel, and then the A module is added to give kind of a quarter-note bump to the repetition of BD, then another A is added, then steps 2 and 3 are added together, and so on. After expanding via additions of the A module, the music strips back down to just B and D, after which module C starts to be added in. Towards the end the music begins to emphasize the ten-note pattern ABCD, and finally resolves to the opening BD with which it began. The musical continuity here is not illogical, but neither is there any place where one could look at two or three successive phrases and guess (with any confidence of accuracy) what the next one will be. Glass’s comment about “simple arithmetic progressions” notwithstanding, this is a very unpredictable sequence. And, it must be said, this is all background structure anyway, since in this scene the pentatonic drones and improvisations tend to greatly override the subtlety of the organ patterns.

The Train

The Train scene, one of the most musically complex movements, is made up of three recurring sections, structured in the form ABABCABC. The B sections, which seem to serve a connective function, are instrumental (without voices), using the same four modules from the Building scene that were just identified. The C sections are based on the five-chord cadential progression that is the basis of the Spaceship scene. The A sections are unique to this scene. The first two B sections are identical, the third one considerably expanded. The two C sections are identical except that the chorus is added in the second one; the rhythmic patterns here follow those at the beginning of the Spaceship scene. What is illustrative of Glass’s approach to form in Einstein, though, are the three A sections.

The diagram here outlines the three A sections in a kind of shorthand that isolates an abbreviated set of features, namely the length of the repeated phrases and the notes of the soprano solo (once again in a key signature of three flats).
Einstein-Train-analysis
A three-note drone ostinato in the saxophones runs throughout all the A sections, imposing an underlying 3/4 meter. The voices sing repeated patterns of various lengths, entirely in quarter-notes except for a recurring refrain which I will identify in a moment. When the number of quarter-notes in the voice pattern is not divisible by three, the voices and saxophones run through a brief out-of-phase pattern, and the number of their repetitions must be divisible by three to make the phrases come out evenly at the end of the measure. The numbers on each left-hand column indicate the number of quarter-notes in each voice phrase. A number given as 4×3, 5×3, and so on, indicates that the phrase goes out of phase with the saxophone ostinato. A number given as 6+4+2 or 5+4+3+2+1 points to a subsidiary rhythm within the phrase suggesting an additive or subtractive rhythmic process; note that these occur only in the second A section. In each right-hand column are given the pitches in the solo soprano voice part, and since there are three flats in the key signature, A should be read as A-flat, B as B-flat, and so on. As in earlier examples, all these melodic fragments are stated in quarter-notes except for a recurring refrain in 8th-notes on Ab-F-Ab-Bb-C-Bb, sung on the solfège syllables la-fa-la-si-do-si, which recurs both here and in the Night Train scene as a kind of motto. One can see that here it appears twice at the beginning, and then at the end of each A section.

Other points that could be made here are even clearer in the following example. This comparison of the three soprano parts (and the tenor is always either a perfect fourth or major third below, in parallel) shows that the soprano begins each section alternating between Ab and Bb, gradually making her way up to Eb and then F, then descending back to Bb before concluding with the la-fa-la-si-do-si motto.

Einstein Train melody

click image to enlarge

Notice, however, that the melodic and rhythmic character of the route is quite different in each A section. The first section reaches the high F relatively quickly, the second takes a long time to get there, and the third stays on F and Eb for a long time as a kind of climax. The second section, as previously noted, contains more patterns which contain an internal subtractive or additive process, and the third section contains the only additive process among phrases, and one additional subtractive process. At the end, each of them finally goes into a subtractive rhythmic process of 5-4-3-2 before lapsing into the la-fa-la-si-do-si motto. What is evident, then, is how many rhythmic and melodic options were open to Glass to get him from the Ab up to the F and back to the closing refrain, and how carefully he recomposed this process for three parallel sections achieving the same function through different routes. This possibility of intuitively recomposing a section is far removed from the typical concept of early minimalism as being something logically predetermined. We’re not just listening to nature here; we’re listening to variations in a large-scale melody conceptualized as rhythm.

Dances 1 and 2

One of the most fascinating views of Glass’s compositional process in Einstein is the subtle contrast between Dances 1 and 2. Many of the materials are identical from one dance to another, but the second is somewhat transformed in consequence of its use of the solo violin representing Einstein. Both dances contain a trio of drone notes that sound throughout: the pitches A, D, and E. These pitches are heard in the solo voices, the saxophones, and the left hand of Organ 1 in every measure. In addition, a fourth pitch, F, appears in the culminating repetitions of each large section. These drone pitches are recontextualized by the changing harmonies around them. In Dance 1, the arpeggios in the organs and piccolo move among chords of F major, A major, Bb major, G major, and C major, the constant D, E, and A being reinterpreted in each new harmony.
Einstein-Dance1-figures
(Actually, Glass describes it in his program notes as always returning to D, which is justifiable if you consider the F major as part of a D minor 7th chord; but which isn’t the way I hear it.) The singers and saxophones use only the pitches D, E, F, and A, voiced either as quarter notes, dotted quarter notes, half notes, or, at one arguably climactic point, dotted half notes. A listing of the chord progressions and the rhythms in each repetition throughout Dance 1 reveals a clear division into three parallel parts, though these are not marked by clear incipits and refrains as in the Train scene:
Einstein-Dance1-form
Though there is no key signature, the general tonality of Dance 1 sounds to me to be in F major; the piece begins and ends on an F major chord (with an added sixth D), and the phrase rhythm frequently makes F major sound like a resolution, though it can also sound like a flatted-seventh adjunct to G major. Listing the harmonic progressions of each repetition, we see a clear parallelism among phrases 1 to 17, 18 to 33, and 34 to 50. That is, there are 50 phrases in the dance, divided into three stanzas with lengths 17 + 16 + 17. (By the way, the Nonesuch recording of Einstein omits the second stanza, as did the recent production of the opera in Amsterdam.) As is clear from the diagram, each stanza starts by alternating F major and A major, then adds in Bb major, and finally moves to an alternation of G and F, inserting between them a C major chord to make a kind of II-V-I cadence. Although this pattern is clear, there is some variety in the tonal emphasis: stanza 3 spends less time on Bb than stanzas 1 and 2 do, and stanza 2 has a long middle passage on F major lacking in stanzas 1 or 3. Likewise, in an overview of the rhythms of each repeated phrase one can note rough parallels, but no clear isomorphism. In the first half of each stanza there is one repeated pattern longer than the ones around it; in stanza 1 it’s the fourth, in stanza 2 the third, and in stanza 3 the fifth. In stanza 1, half-notes appear in phrases 5 to 7, in stanza 2 in phrases 1 to 4, and stanza 3 contains no half-note rhythms, but offers dotted half-notes in phrase five.

The last four or five phrases of each stanza are rather climactic. While elsewhere the soprano and soprano saxophone use only the pitches D and E, in these final phrases they use a repeating DEFE, as marked in the diagram. Note that the rhythms here are entirely in quarter-notes, and that in stanzas 1 and 2 there occurs a nine-note pattern of DEFE-DEF-DE, a kind of small 4+3+2 subtractive motif. (By the way, we’ll see Glass using this 4+3+2 pattern 15 years later in his Columbus opera The Voyage, and many of these other patterns as well.) These DEFE motives appear only over the harmonic progressions G-F and G-C-F. All of these features point to an overall form divided into three parallel parts, but the musical continuity is so static, with its endlessly sustained A, D, and E, that the listener does not distinctly experience the piece as sectional, but as a smooth continuum with variations in the symmetry of the rhythm.

Turning to Dance 2, we find many of these same characteristics. Again the pitches D, E, and A are sustained throughout, the DEFE motive appears as a kind of relative intensification, and the rhythm moves among quarter-note, dotted-quarter, and half-note beats. But now the saxophones and piccolo are replaced by Einstein’s violin, and the necessity of writing a playable if still extremely virtuosic part for that instrument seems to suggest quite a few alterations.
Einstein-Dance2-form
Most noticeably, the tonality of F that dominated Dance 1 is replaced with a feeling of A minor, or at least an A natural minor scale (denoted here by a lower-case “a”), a tonality that marks much of the violin solo’s music throughout the opera. The tonality of Bb no longer appears. For the first ten phrases the music merely alternates between an A natural minor scale and an A major triad. The DEFE motive appears only twice in the piece, about a third of the way through and for a long time at the very end. Replacing Dance 1’s middle stanza is a long section (phrases 15 to 25) in which the violin articulates a strict process that is both additive (in terms of adding phrases together) and subtractive (in terms of each new phrase addition being fewer notes than its predecessor): it plays a scale starting on A and going up to G, then another phrase going up to F, then up to E, D, C, and B. After reaching maximum length it then begins subtracting the opening phrases one at a time, and I tried to spell out in the diagram the strict process of addition and subtraction. Later, starting in phrase 37, Glass reinserts this scalar process into larger phrases on the chords of G, C, and A, resulting in repetitive sections far longer than anything in Dance 1. At last the chorus and organ suddenly drop out, and the violin is left to play a solo transition to Knee Play 4.

One of the realizations one draws from such a reading of Einstein, I think, is that it does not much matter whether the progression of patterns follows a strict algorithm, or whether the music moves from pattern to pattern more arbitrarily. An algorithm that is sufficiently complex will prevent the listener from gaining a firm sense of what the patterning is; and, conversely, given a severe restriction of material, a series of similar but nonlinear patterns can be interpreted as probably following some pattern too complex to tease out by ear. The effect can be much the same. The two Dance movements are rather different in this respect without the effect being noticeably formally contrasting. However, I think there is one exception to this in Einstein, and it is the Bed scene with which we started, the opera’s penultimate major scene. Here the rhythmic progression is not only linear and predictable, but proceeds so slowly that it is quite easy to count, and the listener will be tempted to do so. In this case I find something nostalgic about the linearity, as it is the one part of the opera that exposes the underlying process in an audibly discernible way, inviting the listener to step behind the curtain, as it were, and find out how the music works. Given Einstein’s historical appearance just after the repertoire of strict-process minimalism, this mood may even be felt as a nostalgia for the musical period that had just passed. As a kind of retrospective adagio, the Bed scene virtually invites us to remember the minimalist works of the late 1960s and hear how far the rest of the opera has moved away from them.

Aside from the special case of sonata form, in which a composer rewrites the exposition as a recapitulation in order to transpose all themes into the tonic, this idea of using several recomposings of the same passage within one piece does not come up often in the history of music. The composer who wants to get from point A to point B typically figures out the best way to do so, and then proceeds to point C. To find three different and functionally interchangeable ways to get from point A to point B and then use all of them in the same piece, as Glass does here in the Train scene, is rather rare, I think. (After all, had Glass merely repeated three identical A sections, how many listeners would have noticed, how many analysts would have found that anomalous in this context?) And one would have to go to the music of Erik Satie, such as the Gymnopedies or the Pieces Froids, to find a composer writing two large movements of a piece with such similar content as Glass does between these two dance movements. And yet the Dance 2 is quite different in feeling than Dance 1, with its focus on the violin soloist, its incessant running up and down the scale, its greater reliance on additive and subtractive process, and its lack or the comforting F major into which Dance 1 tended to resolve. All the usual jokes about minimalism aside, I find it remarkable that Glass could generate 45 minutes of his opera with so little material, shaping each internal stanza so intuitively, and differentiating the two dances into such different purposes and moods. It is a real piece of compositional virtuosity, and not at all the kind of predetermined logic that we tend to associate with early minimalism.

As my predecessor at The Village Voice Tom Johnson wrote in 1981 about Glass’s Music with Changing Parts, “Yet as I listened once again to those additions and subtractions I realized that they are actually rather whimsical. Composers like Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, and William Hellermann have written such sequences with much greater rigor. By comparison, Glass is not a reductionist at all but a romantic.” [2] Romantic is not quite the word I would have used—I would be loathe to think that the mere absence of a generating algorithm suffices as evidence of passion or individualism. (In fact, that Tom would use the word on such minor grounds in 1981 is indicative of the atmosphere I began this essay by describing.) But I do think that there is a kind of inherent mystery in Glass’s circuitous, unpredictable paths through extremely circumscribed material, and that Einstein on the Beach would be a less compelling work than it is had he been more content with mere concept and less generous with his subtly-shaping artistry.

Notes
1. Philip Glass, “Note on Einstein on the Beach,” Einstein on the Beach, Tomato Records, TOM-4-2901 (1979).
2. Tom Johnson, “Maximalism on the Beach: Philip Glass,” Village Voice, February 25-March 3, 1981; reprinted in The Voice of New Music, Amsterdam (Het Apollohuis, 1989)
Copyright 2013 by Kyle Gann

An Impression of Overwhelming Sameness

Posted on February 13, 2013 by - Columns

Last weekend the Experimental Music Yearbook held its first Los Angeles concert of the year at the wulf. Along with Eric KM Clark and Casey Anderson, I performed Christian Kesten’s untitled (placing in space) for violin, soprano saxophone, and accordion. For all its outward simplicity, it is a deceptively difficult piece to perform, with exposed, sustained textures that leave little room for error. But I found myself very taken with the piece, especially its approach to microtonality. At one point, the interaction between microtones creates powerful difference tones that sound like what I can only describe as a furious, blowing wind.
Here is an excerpt from a different performance:


Like a great deal of experimental music, it definitely demands patience from the listener. Another piece on the program seemed to test one concertgoer’s patience to the breaking point, as he attempted to engage his friends in whispered conversation throughout the performance. I wondered for about the zillionth time why this kind of music is so beloved among certain people and completely detested by others.

I will probably never fully know the answer to that question, but there is an approach to sameness and difference in this kind of music that I find fascinating. Often stasis is conveyed through repetition, but this is a different sort of stillness. Perhaps it originates with Morton Feldman, though I find the current vein of experimentalism to be somehow more extreme with its approach to stillness. The general retort is that of course this music is not really still at all—there are fine gradations that are undergoing change at every moment. Becoming attuned to those minute differences (and finding them interesting) is the only way to get anything out of this music.[1]

But I don’t wish to call people who don’t care for it bad listeners. By way of contrast, here’s one of my favorite K-pop songs, “Naega Jeil Jal Naga” (“I Am the Best”) by 2NE1:


While this song is full of apparent changes, a listener fixated on harmony (as I was when I was younger) would find this painfully static. I’m not saying that these kinds of music are similar, exactly, but I can imagine a listener having the same reaction to it, and struggling to discern difference when confronted with an impression of overwhelming sameness.
Avoiding this reaction entirely is impossible, because all music is still in some way. For change to have meaning, an element must remain fixed, and often the most hyperactive music conveys no motion at all. At times I feel paralyzed by this stillness, like the occasional dreams where I want to wake up but can’t move. But if I can accept the stillness, a miraculous change occurs: I can be awake and dreaming at the same time.

*


1. R. Andy Lee has written a great article about this from the performer’s perspective, “Minimalism is Boring.”

Sounds Heard: Sergio Cervetti—Nazca and Other Works

Posted on July 17, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

I was delighted when earlier this year when Navona Records released Sergio Cervetti’s Nazca and Other Works, since it was finally an opportunity for me to hear an entire disc of music by a composer whose music I have been intrigued with since the early 1980s. Thirty years ago I fell in love with a 10-minute piece for solo guitar called Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg that I heard at the Columbia University Music Library when I was an undergrad there. It was on an LP issued by CRI, a label which then had a reputation for primarily releasing austere modernist pieces by composers based in academia. (This was a decade before CRI launched the Emergency Music Series, which redefined the label in its final years.) I religiously listened to everything put out on CRI even though most of it was very different from the music I personally wanted to write. But Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg was music I very much wanted to write—its relentless minimalism felt inevitable as well as bit subversive, although admittedly the latter was heightened by its appearing in the same catalog alongside Roger Sessions, Seymour Shifrin, Mario Davidovsky, et al. Who was this composer, Sergio Cervetti? There was an additional piece of his on the same side of that LP which involved a multi-tracked solo clarinet in textures that can best be described with decades of hindsight as proto-ambient. But, as far as I could tell, nothing else of his had ever been recorded. The notes on the LP offered very little information, not even a photo. He was born in Uruguay in 1940, moved to the United States in 1962 to further his composition studies, and his recent music explored “restricted pitch classes.” (How’s that for a serial explanation of minimalism?)

Fast forward several decades. I briefly met Cervetti at some composer gathering in New York City and told him how much I loved that guitar piece. Not long after that he very kindly mailed me a score of it. Returning to the piece so many years later, after all the uptown vs. downtown battlegrounds had lulled to a cease fire at least in my own personal purview, it still stood out and sounded every bit as exciting as when I had first heard it. (An audio file of the piece is on our online library, so you can listen to it, too.) I also managed to track down a few other recordings of Cervetti’s music. There are three captivating and idiomatic yet completely contemporary sounding solo harpsichord pieces on a disc issued by Vienna Modern Masters in 1999. Another VMM disc issued that same year featured an exciting Latin-tinged orchestra piece of his called Candomble II. Some of his music was used in the motion picture Natural Born Killers and the commercially released soundtrack for it includes an edit of his Fall of the Rebel Angels scored for a virtual orchestra. Nevertheless, even after learning about all this other music, having only a handful of short pieces on compilations led to aesthetic experiences with his music which were ultimately unfulfilling. Each of them created such an evocative sonic universe; I found it extremely frustrating every time I was jolted into another reality when someone else’s music, no matter how satisfying it too might have been in its own right, appeared on a subsequent track.

So it is such a pleasure to listen to Nazca and Other Works, the Navona CD devoted exclusively to the music of Sergio Cervetti. I’ve since learned that there are several additional discs of Cervetti’s music for virtual orchestra floating around in the world, so my journey with his music is apparently far from over. Nevertheless, Nazca is a great destination. The disc opens with an evocative single movement work for soprano and orchestra composed in 1991 called Leyenda which uses as its text an excerpt from Tabaré, an 1888 epic by Uruguay’s national poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855-1931). It is extremely lush and expansive, very far removed from the insistent austerity of Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg. But if that early guitar piece is comparable to pieces like Steve Reich’s Violin Phase or Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion, Leyenda is comparable to the music of post-Wound Dresser John Adams.

Next comes the brief Chacona para el Martirio de Atahualpa (“Chaconne for the Martyrdom of Atahualpa”) composed the following year. Composed on a commission to write a work commemorating the quincentenary of the “discovery” of the Americas from the International festival of Contemporary Music in Alicante, Spain, Cervetti chose to create music inspired by the forgotten native peoples of South America. Scored for harpsichord and 11 instruments, the Chaconne evokes the demise of the last Inca emperor Atahualpa (1497-1533) through a wild, relentless and occasionally polytonal conga which eventually peters out, leaving only a jagged monotone on the harpsichord, which to my ears sounds like a great sonic metaphor for the flat line that streams across a vital life signs’ monitor in a hopsital when someone dies. Cervetti’s music here also reminds me at times of the great Manuel De Falla Harpsichord Concerto from 1926, the work that proved that the harpsichord, rather than being a relic of a by-gone era, still had a lot to say in contemporary music. But the Chaconne is only one of four movements which altogether comprise a harpsichord concerto entitled Los Indios Olvidades (“The Forgotten Indians”), which, if the remainder is as exciting as this, would be an extremely worthy heir to De Falla. The total timing of the disc is already over 67 minutes so there would have been no way to include the entire piece and everything else that’s on the disc and I wouldn’t want to lose any of the other works. Still, I’m disappointed to only hear part of the piece, especially since I know from those three Cervetti solo harpsichord pieces how effectively he writes for the instrument.

The majority of the disc is devoted a very recent work by Cervetti, a monumental five-movement tone poem for string orchestra from 2010 entitled Nazca. Nazca is also inspired by indigenous South American traditions. The Nazca civilization flourished in what is now modern day Peru for over a thousand years, from roughly 300 B.C.E. until about 800 C.E. Nazca civilization is mostly known to the rest of the world because of a series of mysterious geoglyphs rediscovered in 1927 which some folks have touted as being an attempt at communication with extraterrestrials. In more recent times, the modern city of Nazca was almost completely destroyed by a 6.4 earthquake in 1996; miraculously only 17 people died and the city has since been completely rebuilt. Cervetti’s music evokes the seeming timelessness of this place as well as its amazing ability to endure. Sections of this piece are somewhat reminiscent of the music of the so-called “Holy Minimalists,” folks like John Tavener or the Eastern Europeans like Arvo Pärt, Peteris Vasks, or the late Henrik Górecki. The work’s finale, “Las Manos, Himno” (“The Hands, Hymn”) additionally conjures, to my ears at least, the angel series of orchestral pieces by contemporary Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. But all is not peace and serenity. The penultimate movement, “Sueños Del Extraterrestre” (“Dreams of the Extraterrestrial”) evokes the unattainable other through music filled with ghostly harmonics, somewhat amorphous low register pulsations and occasionally frenetic rhythms.

Pre-Columbian culture is also the inspiration behind the final work featured on the disc, Madrigal III, which is a gorgeous setting for two sopranos and chamber ensemble of a text by Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472), a non-Aztec Nahuan poet who ruled the city-state of Texcoco in the Central Mexican plateau region. Madrigal III is also the earliest of Cervetti’s works on the present disc; it was composed in 1975, merely one year after that solo guitar piece of his that first intrigued me about his music. It is clearly also the by-product of his then minimalist sensibility. When a full assessment of the breadth and depth of the minimalist movement in music is made one day, hopefully Cervetti’s important contributions will not be overlooked. Now that there is finally some adequate documentation of his music we can be hopeful.

Finally, a word about the documentation that accompanies this new recording: at first glance, the three-panel digipack which the CD is packed in, though attractive, seems to offer only the most perfunctory of notes about the pieces and a very short bio, albeit this time with a photo of the composer. But upon putting the CD into the disc drive of your computer, you’ll discover, as I did, a seemingly endless array of additional materials. I usually prefer listening to CDs in actual CD players rather than through my computer’s audio system since I associate my computer with work and my audio component system with play, but this disc forces me to change my tune. Not only are there a longer biography and detailed program notes for every single piece on the disc, in both English and Spanish, there’s also an extensive video interview with Cervetti filmed on a street in the Czech city of Olomouc (presumably recorded during the sessions for the present disc) in which he talks candidly about the need for composers to take charge of recordings of their own music as well as his lack of interest in Donizetti and Puccini. Though marred by frequent street noises, it’s an invaluable document. If that’s not enough, there are also full scores for every piece that appears on the disc, several of which are also printable off-line, as well as two ringtones based on Cervetti’s music. He’s made quite a journey from those restricted pitch classes!

David Borden: Continuous Counterpoint

Posted on January 1, 2012 by - Conversations, Cover


A conversation at the The Cornell Club: June 30, 2011—4:00 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

In the lists of pioneers of live electronic music, important American minimalists, progressive rockers, genre-bending musicians, and composers born in the year 1938, one name that often gets omitted is David Borden. But Borden shrugs his shoulders and chalks it up to his being a perennial outsider:

I know that no one’s clearly one thing or another […] I enjoy doing my own things and going my own way, and if nobody notices that much, I’m lucky in that for some reason I always get great players who like my music. And we can go and do a few concerts once in a while. And that’s fine with me these days.

David Borden Self Portrait (Ithaca, 1968)

A self portrait by David Borden from 1968.

David Borden’s neglect is somewhat surprising, though, considering his formidable category-defying musical accomplishments which are a direct precedent to today’s largely DIY contemporary music landscape. Borden’s path is so related to the current scene that when The New York Times ran an article about the indie-classical movement in December 2011, the photo they chose to illustrate it with was not of any of the many 30-something composers cited therein, but rather an image of the septuagenarian Borden during a concert appearance at Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room back in June.

The day after Borden came down to New York City from Ithaca for that filled-way-beyond-capacity summer concert, we took the opportunity to finally sit down with him for an hour to talk about his composing and performing activities over the past half century. The story of how he wound up being one of the first people to use a Moog synthesizer in live performance—and how he broke a lot of the equipment in Robert Moog’s studio along the way—is a fascinating journey back to a time it is difficult to fathom now that almost all music-making involves electronics in some way. And the story of how Mother Mallard evolved from a new music group into a composer’s collective, then almost became a rock band before finally morphing into Borden’s own ensemble, is an abject lesson in how artistic sensibilities evolve and transform over time.

Yet Borden is hardly engaged in a nostalgia trip when he continues to play some of his early music decades later. Rather than trying to get older keyboards to function, he is content to adapt the music to work on newer equipment, even if the result sounds considerably different.

I am more interested in the actual notes than the actual timbre. I don’t say that I don’t care what the timbre is, but I mean, not to the extent where I have to have the actual original instruments. That would be fine if someone did it, but it’s not one of the primary concerns to me.

Some other people are starting to tackle this music. He was even invited to Tanglewood a couple of years ago when they devoted the annual festival of contemporary music there to music by composers born in the year 1938, although the only music of Borden’s that was played were his “Happy Birthday” arrangements for some of the other 1938 composers—John Harbison, Paul Chihara, and Alvin Curran. But there’s now a group in California called Brother Mallard that has been gradually tackling the twelve parts of Borden’s magnum opus, The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, a series of inter-related compositions lasting over three hours. Borden’s love of skewed counterpoint and unexpected harmonic progressions in that signature work, which he began composing 35 years ago, make it sound vibrant and fresh to this day, whatever instruments are ultimately used for its performance. While originally composed for just a handful of deft players, it could even be effective if arranged for a much larger ensemble, perhaps even a full orchestra. David Borden is certainly open to the idea. Hopefully an orchestra might step up to the plate at some point.

—FJO

***

Frank J. Oteri: Nowadays, electronic music is everywhere. But when you started doing it, electronic music was music that existed almost exclusively in the studio. Since you were a pioneer of electronic music in live performance, I’m interested in your thoughts about studio versus live electronic music, then and now. I’m also curious about what drew you to the idea of performing electronic music live, given that it was a studio medium up to that point.

David Borden: I used to play jazz a lot. A live jazz performance, as you know, is much more exciting than just listening to recordings. So I’ve always been a proponent of live performance. After I got to know [Robert] Moog, I asked him if we could do this live, but he told me that synthesizers weren’t designed to exist in changing environments. I asked him originally because I’d gotten to know David Tudor and Gordon Mumma and David Behrman and, a little bit, John Cage. They were doing electronic stuff live with Merce Cunningham. I thought that was exciting, although I knew the stuff that we were going to be doing was quite different. Just a few years before that, everyone was criticizing Dylan for going electric. Amplified instruments being manipulated live by human beings was just not done very often, if at all. People would play tapes, which I thought was always a deadly thing. An audience sitting back and listening to a tape recording is kind of stupid, actually; I still think so. So anyway, Moog said, “Yes, you can try it, but I’ll tell you, you’ll be up against a lot of stuff. I mean, don’t let the sun on it. Don’t let the temperature vary that much. But yeah, I can let you use some of these things.” So we started trying it, and the first piece we did was Easter. It was only for two synthesizers plus a prepared tape at the time. We expanded on that and eventually I trained other people to play the synthesizers, and Bob was very generous. We had as much time during the day and night as we wanted to. After the Carlos recording [Switched-On Bach] came out, everyone thought you could go to a concert and hear an orchestral kind of synthesizer live. But that wasn’t true.

Borden, Mumma, Moog, and Tudor

Pioneers of live electronic music (left to right): David Borden, Gordon Mumma, Robert Moog, and David Tudor.

After that came out, Chris Swanson decided to come to Trumansburg, New York, and visit Bob. He convinced Bob to let him be the composer-in-residence. I had no aspirations to be a composer-in-residence. I was making money in other ways. I think Bob paid him a little salary. Chris wanted to make the synthesizer into a Tonight Show band kind of thing with jazz soloists, because he was a big band composer. I just wanted it to sound like it sounded, find the different kinds of sound you could on the synthesizer. But it was tonal. Anyway, it was a different thing. But the thing about Chris was he wanted to do it live, too. So then Bob really got into trying to make synthesizers into more of a live performance thing. He even developed a little memory chip—that was for Chris, so that he didn’t have to worry about re-patching all the time. And it slowly evolved.

The Minimoog was the perfect on-stage instrument because it was not heavy and you didn’t have to put a lot of patch cords into it. It didn’t start out with that idea. It started out with the head engineer, Bill Hemsath, putting together old oscillators into one box to show clients what the synthesizer sounded like without scaring them to death by having to plug in dozens of patch cords. So he said, “Here, I’ll show you what it sounds like.” Bob actually didn’t like the idea. He didn’t see how cool that would be for someone, because it cut off a lot of possibilities. It’s pre-wired in many ways, and Bob wanted an open system for people to do crazy things if they wanted to. Eventually he was convinced. The engineers had to convince him, and then people loved the idea.

He got one huge order a few months before he had to almost declare bankruptcy. They were so borrowed out that they could not order the parts to make the Minimoogs for this huge order they got. It was just bad timing, and it was tragic. Bob left to go to Buffalo, and worked with this other guy. He could have gone bankrupt and forgotten the whole thing, but he decided that he would rather sell the business to this guy and keep the name going. Anyone who had bought his products in the years before could still get them repaired and tweaked. That’s why he did it. So he sold himself into slavery, more or less, for five years.

FJO: I want to go back to what you said about hearing a tape recorder concert and how that really didn’t do it for you. That wasn’t the kind of music that you were into. You were doing jazz stuff, so what got you interested in wanting to use electronic instruments in the first place?

DB: I had listened to a lot of Stockhausen on recordings. I found them very interesting, and actually, during my conservatory years, I was a Stravinsky nut. I love Stravinsky. He had nothing to do with any of this stuff. But when I got a Fulbright and went to Berlin, my teacher took me down to the basement of the Hochschule für Musik and he said, “I’m working on an opera and there’s a lot of electronic stuff. Would you like to see it?” And I said, “Yeah, sure.” So he showed me around, and he said, “This is a synthesizer I made.” They were all specially made things by this engineer, and I found that very interesting. Then I saw a live performance by Stockhausen with all of these strange instruments, and that I found interesting. And that was about it really.

Then when I had this grant as a composer in public schools after my Fulbright, someone where I was in Ithaca, New York, told me that there was this guy in Trumansburg [named Bog Moog] who had an electronic studio that he made himself and that he had a whole business doing this. So that’s when Bob showed me the studio. I walked in and—as I’ve said to many people—it looked like the inside of a cockpit of a 727, which was the Boeing airplane of the day. You look into those and you figure how the hell do these people figure out where they’re going and what they’re doing. So, he calmly told me how it works and what to do. But he was using engineering terms. I had barely any science or engineering background; all of my education had been mostly in music. But rather than embarrass myself, I told him, “Oh yes, I understand.” Then when I started messing around in the studio, after I actually got sound out of it, I found it fascinating. Tudor and Mumma would bring in wired-up contraptions that only they knew how to work; I thought this would be a more standardized way of doing things. It appealed to me, because I had trouble hooking up my stereo at the time. It took me such a long time; it took me six months to actually learn the synthesizer and really be good at it. Bob said that I took longer than anyone else. And in the process, I ruined a lot of the modules and I’d be very embarrassed. When I ruined my first module, engineers came down and looked at it; they were like, “Oh, God.” They were talking all this engineering talk, and said they should call Bob down to look at this. They did, and Bob actually came down and looked at it just for about three seconds, and he said, “Holy shit!” And I thought, “Uh-oh. I’m out of here.” I kept apologizing. He’s not a shoulder-grabbing person, but he grabbed me around the shoulder and said, “Oh, that’s fine, Dave. Don’t worry about it. In fact I’ll take you up to my office and my secretary will give you a key and you can just come in here anytime. And in fact at night, no one’s here. You can use it all night. But just leave it set up, and don’t worry about a thing.”

He was using me to idiot proof the equipment! I reviewed the booklet he gave me in the first meeting; then I broke it down to its simple components. It looks complicated, but there were only three or four things you had to learn. But they took many different shapes and sizes in that module. So in that piece Easter, for instance, that’s a very sophisticated kind of sequencer setup. I mean, it’s very strange and idiosyncratic, but I knew what I was actually doing for most of it.

Easter Lead Sheet

David Borden’s original performance instructions for Easter. © 1970 David Borden, Lameduck Music. Reprinted with permission.

FJO: So basically you got into electronic music by working in a studio as a tester of equipment rather than through any kind of apprenticeship in any of the big electronic music studios. You were coming at it from a completely different place.

DB: Exactly. Yes.

FJO: But you’d heard that music. And so, to spiral back to something we didn’t completely resolve, I’m still curious about what was possible live versus what was possible in the studio. You mentioned hearing Stockhausen’s music. Pieces like Gesang der Jünglinge, Hymnen, or Telemusik could probably never be done live.

DB: Yeah. For the live things I actually ended up making simplified sounds that didn’t take as many patch cords. For our first Mother Mallard concerts, it was not so. Especially Steve Drews would make some beautiful sounds and—he could still do it—change the patch cords pretty quickly. But for the first few concerts we gave, we had rehearsals where we did not play any music. What we did was we’d patch and we’d get it so, if it took us ten minutes to patch this piece, then we got it down to like four minutes. And as long as we knew what the basic pitch was, that the main fine-tuning was going to be C or whatever, then the test would be after four minutes. You’d just hit the note and if it was the right sound, we did it! But still, it was so many minutes between pieces, we used to show cartoons between them. We used to get these really classic Disney things from the ‘30s. One was about mirrors in a crazy house, one was a great one about Pluto, and the audience loved them. One had Rudy Vallee in it, which was ridiculously stupid, but it was very funny. It was campy.

FJO: There wasn’t Donald Duck?

DB: I don’t know if we got any Donald Duck.

FJO: The reason I ask is because I’m curious about the whole evolution of the name Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company and all of the duck references everywhere in your music. What’s that about?

DB: Well, when we started this group, we didn’t want it to have an academic-sounding name. We wanted it to be more in the ballpark of what rock groups were calling themselves, rather than, like, The New Music Synthesizer Ensemble or something like that. I didn’t want to call it my name like the Philip Glass Ensemble because it was not exactly mine. All three members invested the same money to buy the equipment; we were equal partners. I was in the grocery store, and I saw Mrs. Smith’s Pies, and there was this picture of this friendly old lady on the thing. So I said, “I’ll name it after my grandmother.” My grandmother’s maiden name is Mallard—Mother Mallard, that was what people used to call her. So then we added the Portable Masterpiece Company. It was in tongue in cheek so that people would know we were actually serious, but we weren’t going to be terribly formal about it. That’s how the name evolved.

FJO: So what about all the duck stuff? I remember the first time we ever met. There was a piece of yours done at Merkin Concert Hall. I was an undergrad at Columbia, and I wanted to play some of your music on the university radio station, WKCR, where I had a program. So I said, “Please send me something.” And you sent me this cassette with a little duck sticker on it, which seemed odd, but since mallards are ducks I originally assumed there was a connection between ducks and the band’s name.

Mother Mallard with Mallard Decoy

Mother Mallard in concert circa 1974 (David Borden in center), featuring Minimoogs and the band’s keepsake mallard duck decoy. Photo by Jon Reis.

DB: This is weird. We lived on the lake, and the house that we rented came with a little private dock, which was great. It sounds very fancy, but it was cheap. The day after we decided the name, I went out on my private dock, and someone had left a duck decoy there. I thought it was one of those synchronicity kinds of things; yes, the universe was telling me that was the right name. I usually bring it [to concerts]; I didn’t bring it this time. There were so many things to bring, I just forgot. But we usually have it sitting there, the same decoy. I’ve kept it all these years. Then people in the audience would come and bring ducks and give them to us. Little tiny duck items you know. Little schlocky duck things, and I have several of them at home. People would actually mail me things with ducks on them. At first I used to say, “No, no, it’s just named after my grandmother.” But then I said, “O.K., great, thank you.”

FJO: You said something else when you just told this story that I want to explore more. This whole question of naming yourself the way rock bands name themselves. It’s interesting because Mother Mallard went through an evolution. It started as a new music ensemble that played all different music. You played Robert Ashley; you played Philip Glass. In fact, you were the first group besides his own group to play Glass’s early minimalist pieces.

DB: Yup.

FJO: Then since you were all composers, you evolved into something of a composers’ collective, playing each other’s stuff. But in terms of the direction that your various musical muses took you, you weren’t that far away from what was going on in prog rock at the time. And eventually it evolved into your ensemble.

DB: Right.

FJO: So how did those identities coalesce?

DB: When we first started, Steve Drews was a grad student at Cornell in music composition and I was the composer-pianist for dance. We both lamented the fact that at Cornell, there didn’t seem to be any cutting edge music being played. It was all academic stuff. So we learned the synthesizers. We hadn’t started doing them live yet. I had just done a few pieces on my own that I would play on tapes for the dance concerts that I would be responsible for. I had known Gordon Mumma and had met Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Alvin Lucier. They had that group called the Sonic Arts Union. We decided to do music by people like that. And I’d known Dan Lentz; I’d met him at Tanglewood in 1966.

Our first concert had music by Dan Lentz and also Allen Bryant from the Musica Elettronica Viva. We did his piece Pitch Out. One of our friends made the instruments you needed for that. The second half of the concert was called music for artists. We did John Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp, we did Morton Feldman’s Franz Kline [piece], de Kooning, and another one—I forget. And it was a big success. Dan Lentz had a piece about the birth of the baby grand and slides of grand pianos up and going boom, boom, boom, boom—it was a silly piece, but it was fun.

Mother Mallard Poster 1969

A surviving poster from the October 29, 1969 concert of Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company.

People loved that, so we decided to do another one, and I finally wrote a piece. I forget what it was. I think it was called Technique, Good Taste, and Hard Work because one of my teachers at Harvard, Billy Jim Layton, had just recently written a really critical review of a John Cage piece saying what John Cage really needed to do was sit down and get some technique, good taste, and do some hard work. I thought, “Oh, that’s so stupid.” So I named my piece that. And we did Terry Riley’s In C, we did a piece of Jon Hassell, and we did Music in Fifths by Philip Glass. We also did Piano Phase. Well, we did it on synthesizers. I talked to Steve [Reich] about it, and he said, “Fine. Just call it Synthesizer Phase.” And I did.

Original Mother Mallard

The personnel for the original Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company: Linda Fisher (left), Steve Drews (center), and David Borden (right).

Then we said, “O.K., this can work live. We can do that.” And so I did Easter, and then Steve Drews started doing his early pieces. Linda Fisher did a couple of pieces, but she was so self-critical, she didn’t continue doing them and then later she got more confidence and she moved.

Although we had started the band in ’69, we gave our first all-original synthesizer music [concert] in 1970. Then Linda wanted to leave. She got to know David Tudor and Rzewski and those people pretty well and she decided she wanted to move to New York [City] and work with them. So that’s when Judy Borsher joined the band unexpectedly. She had been a fan. I had no idea she had any keyboard technique or anything. We auditioned her, and she showed up and played one of the most difficult of our pieces note-perfect. We said great, Steve and I welcomed her, and she had a good time. We were together for about a year, and then Steve decided he wanted to move on and do something else. Steve was always almost finishing something and moving onto another thing. He now earns his living as a photographer in St. Louis. He’s very successful. We’re great friends still.

Mother Mallard in 1975 @ Johnson Museum Sculpture Terrace

All that equipment. Mother Mallard in 1975 at the Sculpture Terrace of the Johnson Museum. (Left to right: Judy Borsher, Steve Drews, and David Borden.) Photo by Jon Reis.

Steve and I had bought out Linda’s share when she left, then I bought out Steve’s share. It was very expensive, so I actually went back into playing jazz in nightclubs around Ithaca—solo. I really practiced, and I re-immersed myself a little bit more in the jazz world and made friends with Dave McKenna. He just died a couple of years ago, but he was really one of the great solo jazz saloon players. And I studied my Thelonious Monk. I had studied with Jaki Byard, but I don’t have that kind of great harmonic jazz ear. I really have to practice it. If you listen to Keith Jarrett play any of those standards, he’s a master. I’m nowhere like that, but I’m not bad. So I worked in the nightclubs for a couple of years and made enough money and bought out Steve. So I had all these synthesizers and that’s when Chip Smith joined the band. He could read, and he did really well. He was great.

Keith Emerson and David Borden

Keith Emerson (left) with David Borden in 2000. Photo by Vivian Lee.

FJO: So the rock question. You know, around the time that all of this was happening with Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk were happening in Germany and Tonto’s Expanding Head Band was happening in England. Obviously more mainstream groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer were doing a lot of live synthesizer stuff, too, but more in a song-oriented context. But those other groups were doing long repetitive instrumental synthesizer music, with unusual electronic timbres that each of them composed. And all those German guys had studied composition, too. Some prominent German rock musicians had even studied with Stockhausen. And ultimately the music they were doing wasn’t all that different from what you were doing. So I wonder, were you aware of that stuff? Were they aware of you? Were the audiences crossing over? What was the relationship?

The Original LP Cover of Mother Mallard's First Album

The original LP cover for the first self-titled (and self-released) album by Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company.

DB: What I remember is that we had a recording and no one would put it out. We made a recording in 1970. We didn’t get to release it until 1973 (we did it ourselves), but that original vinyl recording only had things that we did from 1970. In the meantime, Tangerine Dream made a recording a year or so before and I remember playing it for Steve Drews, because I said, “These guys have scooped us, and I don’t think they’re as interesting.” And they’re not all really synthesizers; there’s guitar. One piece was kind of naïve, what you could tell they thought was far out really wasn’t. But we got to know each other after that because when our recording came out, and then especially when I did a little music for The Exorcist, they started paying attention. I would get these phone calls from either Franke or Froese. I didn’t ever talk to Klaus Schulze, but the other two would call, and we would talk about the synthesizer and the business. They came to New York once. I didn’t hear them, but their audience was different. There was a real pop audience there. And they had real guitars and their stuff was a lot simpler than ours, but it was in the same ballpark. I’ve known their stuff off and on, and they’re very commercially successful. For some reason, none of us in the band were interested in being that commercially successful. Except for one period. Right before Bob left to go to Buffalo, we thought maybe if we did some rock and roll songs, and used all of our expertise, we could make some money to fund our real work, you know. So we did, but no one was interested in that either.

FJO: So all your original recordings were self-released on, of course, Earth Quack Records.

DB: Right. Exactly.

FJO: But eventually Cuneiform found you. I know they have a broad range. They record folks like Wadada Leo Smith and John Hollenbeck. But primarily what they release is adventurous progressive rock, so there is yet another connection between what you do and prog.

Cuneiform CD for Continuing Story of Counterpoint 9-12

CD cover for The Continuing Story of Counterpoint Parts 9-12 on Cuneiform

DB: I didn’t think about it too much, and I don’t pay that much attention to genres, you know. But Steve Feigenbaum lived in Ithaca for a while, and he knew some of our early concerts. So he asked me to send him any new stuff I was doing. I did, and he said, “Well, we’ve got to record this.” He wanted to record the entire Continuing Story of Counterpoint, which he did. And it’s good. I’d like to re-record some of them now because I can do them a lot better, but I’m always very grateful for that. Steve and his wife Joyce [are among] the few people in the record business who are pretty straightforward. They don’t want to take advantage of you or use your rights for your compositions; they won’t license it to anyone without your approval. It’s great working with them. Then, when the era started where people were getting back into analog after so much digital stuff, that’s when they re-released the early Earth Quack recordings, but we also put stuff on there that had never been released before.

Digital David Borden

A totally digital David Borden in 1990.

FJO: I’ve heard all the Cuneiform recordings many times and have also heard an older recording of just a couple of the 12 parts of the piece, which was actually released on another label, Arbiter. I also heard all 12 parts live back in 1990 at Town Hall and then a couple of the parts last night at ISSUE Project Room. In every performance, this music sounds somewhat different; part of the reason is that you’re always using different instruments.

DB: Right.

FJO: There’s really no Mother Mallard period instrument sensibility. If you’re playing a piece from 1976, you don’t feel compelled to play it on the keyboard you played it on back in 1976. You don’t think that way at all.

DB: No, I don’t.

FJO: But playing the music on a different instrument actually changes it.

Chip Smith and David Borden with duck decoy on Minimoogs

Mother Mallard in Concert back in the analog era: Chip Smith (left), the duck decoy (center) and David Borden (right). (Judy Borsher not pictured.) Photo by Steve Drews.

DB: I am more interested in the actual notes than the actual timbre. I don’t say that I don’t care what the timbre is, but not to the extent where I have to have the actual original instruments. That would be fine if someone did it, but it’s not one of the primary concerns to me.

FJO: Well, it’s interesting because parts two and eleven of The Continuing Story of Counterpoint exist in versions for synthesizers as well as in versions for piano duo.

DB: They were written for two pianos. They were written for Nurit Tilles and Edmund Niemann. Part Two is dedicated to Nurit; Part Eleven is dedicated to Edmund.

FJO: When you performed the entire cycle live at Town Hall those parts were done that way, but on the Cuneiform recordings they’re done with synthesizers.

DB: I know. We didn’t have enough money to actually have a studio with two pianos, and have them do it. So that’s why it’s not that way.

FJO: Another thing about how The Continuing Story of Counterpoint has evolved over time is that it doesn’t seem to have been composed in order. Parts One and Three are both from 1976, but Part Two came later, etc.

DB: Yeah, well, the original Part Two, I thought, “Oh, this sucks. I’m throwing it out.” The same with Part Four. There was another Part Four, I said, “No, this isn’t good enough for this.” I was very serious about that series. I wanted it to be really good and I was just starting to get into habits. I was discovering a whole new process; the four-track tape recorder changed the way I composed. I had always loved the art of counterpoint. I took extra courses and I kept thinking I’d get an epiphany, but I never got the epiphany beyond what I would hear in Bach. I thought they’d tell me the secret of why this is happening, doing what it’s doing, but no one could. You have to figure that out on your own, and have your own sort of inner voice, or inner intelligence direct you to what you think is important. And sometimes you get to it; you get to the piece and you say this is just working so well, and you look at it, and you figure out what’s going on in a descriptive way. Music theory doesn’t exist, you know. I mean, it isn’t theory; it’s description. There is no music theory. I didn’t realize that until this brilliant physicist friend of mine, who’s also a musician, told me that he was really excited to learn about music theory until he discovered it was just description. And I thought, you know, he’s really right.

The basic point was writing lines that could stand on their own, and be combined, and when they were combined, they’d be more than the sum of their parts. Besides that, they would be interesting to listen to in almost a spiritual way, or a powerful way that you couldn’t predict by just figuring out what goes with what. So I started writing single lines. Actually I started playing two lines at the same time, right hand and left hand, and would write those down, and play them, and repeat them a number of times. I’d go onto the next thing, and the next thing, and I did this maybe for 20 or 30 modules. Then I would add another part. I knew if this module was 27 beats long, I could divide it into five fives and one two, or four fives and a seven; then I would take the other person’s part and divide it differently. That’s why, when we’re playing, everybody is in a different meter. I would actually record one person’s part almost, if not all the way through, and then the other person’s part all the way through, listening to the other part. Then I would turn off the original part to do the third person’s and just listen to the second person’s part. I would know the mode and would change scales. Then at a certain point, for some reason that has no planning or anything, I would think, “This needs to be different.” So I would go from C Dorian to E Mixolydian, with no break, no transition. I remember when I first started playing this, I got a review in The Village Voice from Gregory Sandow saying, “O.K., this is minimalism, but he doesn’t understand what minimalism is. Minimalism isn’t jumping from one thing to another. It’s gradually going.” And he would explain how Philip Glass adds a beat at a time and Steve Reich would add a different pitch a little bit carefully. But I just cut it off. And I was thinking, “I understand minimalism, and that that’s what it does, but I’m not doing that.” I never wrote back to him. I think he’s a really good writer and a very intelligent man, and I don’t mean to criticize him, but I’m doing something different than other people. I wasn’t thinking of trying to be different; I was just evolving my voice.

First Page of TCSOC01 Manuscript

The first page of the original manuscript of The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, Part One. © 1976 by David Borden, Lameduck Music. Reprinted with permission.

FJO: Minimalism is a term that both Glass and Reich rejected at the time, although they now say that maybe it applies to their very earliest music, but certainly not what they’ve done since. What are your feelings about that?

DB: Well, I sort of took a humorous tack on it. No one likes to be put into a box. But what I think is the best thing about calling this stuff minimalist, was it made Milton Babbitt go tell everyone he was a maximalist, which I thought was the stupidest, stupidest thing. Nothing against Milton Babbitt; he was a great guy. But just having someone take notice and take that tack on it is sort of an academic kind of—I can’t even think of the word. I’m not sure what academic music means, but certain times people like to have this clarity of what you are. I think that’s what he was looking for. Whereas, I know that no one’s clearly one thing or another, you know what I mean.

FJO: This ties back to something you were saying before about genres.

DB: They spill into each other all the time. But I think it’s there for marketing purposes and for also critical ones; it’s good to have a point of departure when you’re talking with someone. I know it really helps to have labels. You can’t do away with them.

FJO: Well, now we’re living in this era where if you go to Amazon and you just bought Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, Amazon will suggest that maybe you should buy The Continuing Story of Counterpoint.

DB: Yeah.

FJO: So you’d like that?

DB: Well, there’s a certain logic to it.

FJO: And perhaps Amazon would suggest you should buy a Tangerine Dream recording, too.

DB: But I never think of that when I sit down to do a piece.

FJO: There’s a comment that you made that I think I read in a program note somewhere years ago. You mentioned that you had perfect pitch, but you could never understand or hear functional tonality.

DB: I have a hard time with it. The composer Stanley Silverman is an old friend of mine. We used to play together a lot. We were accompanying some singer, so he said, “Oh Dave, this is really simple, just a few chords.” And I said, “Alright. O.K., great.” And I could not. He went from I, IV to VI or something, and I could not hear that it was IV. You know, he said, “It’s IV.” I said, “Just tell me the name.” So that’s my jazz problem right there. I can’t suddenly transpose everything from E-flat to G like so many great players can do.

FJO: The Greg Sandow review you mentioned, where he says that what you were doing wasn’t quite minimalism, is interesting to me because one of the aspects that I love and really relate to about the pieces in The Continuing Story of Counterpoint is how anything can lead to anything else. That’s what makes that music so exciting for me; I don’t know where it’s going from one chord to the next.

DB: Harmony is always very daunting to me. I would kind of cheat on those exams they gave in harmony class at Eastman, where a person would play a chorale all the way through four times and you’d take dictation. You’re supposed to be able to figure it out because you hear the functions of the chords. I would just zone in on the bass line, zone in on the soprano line, then the tenor, and then the alto line, and just write those, because I could hear them. I also can zone in if you’re playing a four-note chord; I can zone in on any note I want to. That’s how I do it. I don’t do it by the function.

I’m not doing the “I’m a poor person made good” thing, but I come from a poor family. My father was musical, but he didn’t have much education. He was a janitor for a living, but he had an appreciation for music. He read the children’s versions of the biographies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to me when I was like four or five. He was looking for a really good teacher for me, and he finally found one. He went to the best music stores in Boston and asked the people at the sheet music counter which music teacher bought the best quality music for their students. Four out of five gave him this name, and it turned out, this guy taught at Phillips Exeter Academy, and took all of Boston’s Brahmin kids and taught them. He said he would consider taking me, and he gave me an ear test. He wanted to see if I could play scales, and I did. Then he told me to go to the other side of the room, and he’d play some chords, and he wanted to know what they were. And he meant major, minor, augmented. So he hit a chord and I said, D-minor, D-minor triad, you know. Then he said, what? I said D-minor triad. And he took one on the low register it was B-flat minor. I said B-flat minor, and then he would hit G-major, then he had a long conversation with my father, and that’s when I found out I had perfect pitch. I thought everybody could do that. That’s how I got to be a student of this really good piano teacher.

FJO: I’m curious about the vocal lines in the Continuing Story of Counterpoint pieces.

DB: They’re only there when I have a singer, but there are some that have singer parts.

FJO: On different recordings I’ve heard of those pieces, the lines are actually different. But something that I find so weird about the words is that they’re just names of theorists and counterpoint techniques.

DB: Oh, yes. Ellen Hargis had such a great voice. She still does. She’s a great singer. Part Ten, which we hardly ever do, calls for a jazz saxophone player and a soprano. The soprano just says the names of counterpoint theorists. I thought, we’ve got to give them a little credit; so say their names and give them little beautiful things. In Part Three, which is almost impossible to sing, they’re the names of contrapuntal composers. And then Part Four has contrapuntal devices, I think parallel fifths is one of them—things you should avoid.

FJO: You don’t really write much vocal music, or at least I haven’t really heard much of your vocal music. But what’s so funny about it is that so much vocal music is out there that doesn’t have good prosody in terms of how the music works with the text. You can’t really hear the words, or it doesn’t fall naturally. But I understand every word in your vocal music, even though it’s sort of this tongue-in-cheek stuff like names of people and techniques.

DB: Well, that’s a lot because of my jazz background. I always loved jazz singers, and I’ve loved beautiful standards. So I try to make them clear. I don’t try to make them avant-garde, strange, weird, or anything. I like to hear what Alec Wilder used to say was just the natural voice. I picked it up from jazz singers, that way of doing it, rather than the typical avant-garde thing of stretching all the intervals and guttural sounds, or anything like that.

FJO: Those lyrics about counterpoint, though, connect your music to much older classical music. Another thing that connects you is the music you’ve done that’s actually based on previously existing pieces, like that giant piece that you did for Kathleen Supové where you mirrored the exact structure of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

DB: One of my favorite pieces.

FJO: And you re-wrote one of the Mozart Violin Concertos.

DB: Well, not exactly. I didn’t touch the violin part.

FJO: Right, you kept that. But the music that gets played with the solo is entire new and yours; it’s somewhat disorienting.

DB: That’s from the influence of Buckminster Fuller. Synergy is a word that hardly anyone used back in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Then businesses hijacked the word to mean multi-tasking: the synergy of the thing where everyone’s working together. But Bucky Fuller’s definition of it is behavior of whole systems unpredicted by their parts taken separately. So I took the violin part separately, and now, it’s outside of the whole system that it was intended for. I just sort of moved it into a new apartment. That’s how I think of it. It’s now a new whole system.

David Borden's K216.01

A passage from K216.01, solo violin part by W. A. Mozart, from Violin Concerto No. 3, K. 216 (1775), all other parts by David Borden. © 2003 by David Borden, Lameduck Music. Reprinted with permission.

FJO: I’m curious about how those pieces happened. Both of them were created outside of the context of Mother Mallard. There’s another one also, which I still haven’t heard—a piece for two fortepianos and chamber orchestra. I thought that it was a strange piece for you to write, considering that you’ve devoted your life to writing for instruments that were originally touted as being the instruments of the future—synthesizers. But here you’re going in the opposite direction, writing for instruments from the past and doing something new with them.

DB: Right.

FJO: So I’m curious how those things arise, if your approach is different when you’re writing for somebody other than yourself or your own group.

DB: Well, when I was a student, I was a good orchestrator. In fact, I had the graduate assistantship in orchestration at Eastman. But ever since my synthesizer days, I have not looked at the instruments any more. This piece you mentioned is called Infinity Variations, and it follows the same harmonic path as Counterpoint Part 8, actually, or a lot of it. My friend Penny Crawford, who’s a fortepianist, asked me to do this. So I said, “I’m not so good at writing for one piano.” I don’t know why. I would do it for one piano now. I asked her about two pianos, and she said two would be fine. But I was never satisfied with the orchestration. I basically approached it the same way, but the big difference is it’s not as hands on as I want it to be. When I write for the synthesizers, I know that this is the exact way it’s going to sound if I tell it to sound this way. I’ll just program it for the other players to play it that way. My group has been the only one performing what I do, except now there’s a group formed in California called Brother Mallard that meets once in a while. It’s great. They performed Counterpoint Part 8 for me with these acoustic instruments mixed in with the electronic ones. It sounded differently than I would ever imagine, but it was good.

FJO: Were they playing it by ear?

DB: No. About two years ago, John Marr [who put together Brother Mallard] got in touch with me and I said, “You know, it’s great ‘cause you’re forcing me now to look at the scores and make it so that it can be performed by other ensembles.” I’ve known this, but I’ve been too busy doing other things. But now I’ve finished about half of them. Now I can have the scores and they have notes to them, and they have some history in the notes, and they tell you what you have to do and what you can’t do. When you look at the score, you think, “Oh, I’ll get a keyboard and play this.” But then you realize that each staff is for two different keyboards. So it’s trickier than it might seem. One of the reasons that I like doing this with laptops is I can program Reason, which is a program everyone has and it’ll probably be around for a long time, so the people know exactly what I had in mind.

FJO: Well, as far as other people doing your pieces go, I imagine that the pieces for two pianos would be relatively easy for other groups to do.

DB: Yes, they have been done. One was just done in Kansas this past year. A guy was getting his Ph.D. in music and wrote about Double Portrait, so he did Double Portrait.

FJO: Now, the big Goldberg-inspired piece, whose title is an anagram for Kathleen Supové.

DB: Heaven-Kept Soul.

FJO: That piece only exists as piano and pre-recorded sounds. Could that be fleshed out and turned into a piece for multiple keyboard players?

DB: That’s all done with Reason, and that’s in a score form. It’s there.

FJO: Some recent music of yours that you performed last night actually reminded me of Easter. Your music has come full circle back to the very beginning in terms of it playing with timbre more and a bit less with counterpoint and harmony, pitch and rhythm. For lack of a better term, it sounds less like minimalism and more like electronic music. I know that you don’t like labels and terminology per se, since the danger is that such things force you into a box. If you reject the label, you can write whatever you want.

Robert Moog and David Borden

Robert Moog (left) with David Borden in 1999

DB: Yeah. I always thought I could write whatever the hell I wanted. I was so taken with In C when I heard it because I was coming from all those composers wanting you to write nothing but serial music. Gunther Schuller wouldn’t even let me play an octave. I mean, it was ridiculous. You know, “That’s an octave, we don’t do that anymore.” That whole coterie around Milton was all like that. You had to do rows and all the hexachords and stuff. I did that for a while, but I did it through the window of late Stravinsky. He did that, but everyone would say, “That’s not really it.” So I hated all that stuff. In C is great in that, when you listen to Steve Reich and Philip Glass, those are intellectually thought out as well as being inspired and it’s a great balance. With In C all the air is let in and it’s like we’re gonna let a flat in over here and we’re just gonna do the sharp over here. But it’s all gonna be cool and you can go at your own pace. It’s O.K. We don’t care. Just play it as many times as you like, and that’s so liberating. I just love that. It was John Cage-ian in that way, but John Cage doesn’t like you taking that much liberty. If he tells you to do something with how to prepare the piano, and he tells you what to do in the music, he wants you to do that. But In C was just wonderful at the time when it hit. That’s what aesthetically turned me around, that’s what influenced the Easter kind of droning and staying on the same thing, and the technological influence was just Bob Moog, his great generosity and his friendship.

FJO: It’s funny your mentioning Cage in this context since you have a piece C.A.G.E. based on the letters of his name.

DB: I turned C, A, G, E into a tone row, more or less in a certain free way combining the Uncle Miltie and the John Cage folks. Same place.

FJO: But it sounds nothing like John Cage.

DB: It wasn’t meant to sound like John Cage. I did not know him well, but I hung out with him a few times and had several conversations with him. He was always very nice to me, and I think he appreciated that I did that. For a performance of one of his pieces, he wrote to me and asked if I could send him a big tape of it and they would loop it during the performance.

FJO: We’re going to end by me trying to put you in another box: this whole outsider tradition of American mavericks. It’s a tradition of non-tradition, as it were, that spirals back from William Billings and Charles Ives to Nancarrow and Harry Partch through to John Cage, all the minimalists and even outsider rock people. All of these people do it their own way. So do you. You were based at Cornell, but you never became an influential composition teacher there.

DB: Oh, not at all.

FJO: You stayed out of that. You’ve now got records on a respected independent label, but your earliest records were self-produced. All your music is still self-published. You finally got invited to Tanglewood, but that was a bit of a fluke. You were lucky to be born in the year 1938. So you’re not part of the official music establishment in any way, and in a way that’s really great. But in another way, it has left you out of a history that you really deserve to be more a part of.

DB: And don’t forget, no Guggenheims. I used to complain about that kind of thing. Now I sort of enjoy it. I’m not even going to apply for another Guggenheim. I enjoy doing my own things and going my own way, and if nobody notices that much, I’m lucky in that for some reason I always get great players who like my music. We can go and do a few concerts once in a while, and that’s fine with me these days. It wasn’t always like that, but I don’t know how the cosmic thing works. It seems that all so-called serious music is eventually taken over by larger institutions in some way. I think the real art starts somewhere outside the box and eventually as time goes on, you get included more, like when I was invited to Tanglewood. Musica Eletrronica Viva was there, too. They were so out of it; they told Alvin Curran and Dick Teitelbaum and Rzewski that their rehearsal was that afternoon, but they were going to do it without any electronics. [laughs] And Richard Teitelbaum said, “Can you believe it?” I mean, they had no idea. You know what pieces they played of mine there? They told me they couldn’t perform any of my pieces, but I do these variations on “Happy Birthday,” which hardly anyone knows about because they’re only meant for the people who have the birthdays. I usually just record them for the people that they’re intended for. But I had done one for Paul Chihara, I had done one for John Harbison, and I had done one for Alvin Curran, and sent them to them. So that’s what they played. And, actually, they were very well received. Everyone loved them, but you know, that was what they did. They didn’t do any of the heavy pieces.

FJO: So things that you wish, if you were given the keys to say, the Metropolitan Opera, or the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or any other big musical institution in this country? Since this music eventually gets taken over by the big institutions, as you said, what would you want to see happen? What would you want to hear?

DB: Well, I’ve done some pieces that I think I would like to hear other people do. I’ve thought of making a chamber orchestra version of the piece I did for Kathy Supové, just for piano and chamber orchestra. I don’t know. I think electronic ensembles will become standardized in some way, especially with all the computer technology around. And people could do any of my pieces if they really looked at it and wanted to figure it out. I don’t know if they will.

TCSOC02 - First Page of Digitally Engraved Score

The first page of the digitally engraved score for The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, Part Two © 1982 by David Borden, Lameduck Music. Reprinted with permission.

Maybe some of the piano pieces will be more performed than the other pieces. But I think eventually though, there are going to be ensembles that are made up of just keyboards and laptops and other controllers. What I find now is when you say you have a laptop ensemble, most people think you’re just fooling around and that you don’t have any keyboard technique. There’s hardly anyone that has really great keyboard technique who knows a lot about computer software and music for live performances. The people who can do it better than anyone are probably the rock and roll bands, but they tend to play more simple things than what we were doing last night, you know what I mean? So, it’s kind of a problem.

FJO: But one that will hopefully be addressed. You mentioned that you are preparing a performance edition of The Continuing Story of Counterpoint.

DB: Yeah. I’m in the middle of it now.

FJO: So that will be something that ensembles could do. Let’s say a string orchestra wanted to play it, would you be O.K. with it being re-orchestrated?

DB: Yes, I would. Just like The Art of the Fugue is done.

FJO: Hopefully that will happen.

DB: Maybe it will.