Counterstream Radio is your online home for exploring the music of America’s composers. Drawing upon New Music USA’s substantial library of recordings, our programming is remarkable for its depth and eclecticism. The station streams influential music of many pedigrees 24 hours a day. Keep listening and discover the sound of music without limits. Click here to open Counterstream Radio.
The public’s behavior is either friendly or indifferent, unless they are intimidated because their spiritual leaders are protesting. As a whole they are always rather inclined to enjoy something they have devoted time and money to. They come less to judge than to enjoy.”
—Arnold Schönberg, “My Public” (Der Querschnitt 10, vol. 4, April 1930)
“Fuck knows what for… but you shouldn’t be doing music for fun … When something happens and before it can be mimicked and you haven’t got a word for it, that’s the ultimate success.”
—Bill Drummond at the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna, Austria, November 11, 2013
I’m finally back at my desk in New York City after orbiting the entire planet. Thanks to flying east for the entire journey, I crossed the International Date Line only once and therefore gained a day, although I actually spent nearly 42 hours in flight. However, that’s quite an improvement over making such a journey in 80 or 81 days. Yet even with all the technological advances that make it possible to travel in such a manner relatively painlessly (so far the jetlag has not completely kicked in), it’s still something of a marvel. While I’ve been all over the world, this is something I had never done before and I remain utterly awed by it since it really provides a perspective on the size of the planet we live on and the significant distances that separate us from one another.
Those significant distances go a long way toward explaining why people in different parts of the world continue to perceive things in different ways, despite all the possibilities for shared experiences via the internet and, for better or worse, the ubiquitous global chains. E.g. no matter where on the planet I was these past two and half weeks, golden arches were always in my periphery. But it is difficult to claim that anything besides those chains is “universal.” In fact, the adjective “universal” is perhaps the most hubris laden epithet in common parlance. How can people who have never traveled beyond our own planet make claims for anything outside our own world?
A shared experience for millions of people daily in Vienna and Hong Kong? Well, not exactly.
And yet such a claim of “universality” has been made for various European cultural traditions, such as classical music and the continuance of its legacy through so-called contemporary or new music. Undeniably, throughout the 20th century and now into the 21st, important contributions to this particular mode of music creation, performance, and presentation have been made by composers and interpreters from nations all over the globe. Curiously, however, this type of music making doesn’t happen with the same intensity everywhere. There have been few additions to the canon of “classical” music from Africa, or most of southern Asia and Oceania. And yet, despite the efforts of extremists in various parts of the world, some form of music is created, performed, and listened to in every nation on the planet; music is one of the few pan-terrestrial human activities.
A sculpture of a giant ear outside the studios for Austrian radio station ORF in Vienna, where a 2013 ISCM concert was held, is an immediate indication that there’s interesting stuff to listen to inside there.
The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), which has convened an annual contemporary music festival since 1923 (alternately called “World Music Days” and “World New Music Days” by its members—more on that later), has had sections based in countries on all six human-habited continents but the aforementioned geographic lacunae are mostly absent. South Africa has been the only African nation that has regularly participated in ISCM. And, as a further reminder of how much still needs to be done to insure greater global inclusivity, outgoing ISCM President John Davis (who hails from Australia) reminded the delegates attending the final 2013 General Assembly (on November 14 in Vienna) that the ISCM’s 2010 convening in Sydney remains the only time that the festival took place in the Southern Hemisphere. The first official ISCM gathering to take place outside of Europe was in Haifa, Israel in 1954 and the next did not occur until the organization’s one and only official convening in the United States in 1976—only one of three ever to occur in the Americas. (The others took place in both Toronto and Montreal in 1984 and in Mexico City in 1993. According to ISCM’s records, there were also “unofficial” assemblies were held in 1940 and 1941 in New York and San Francisco respectively, before the war caused the society to be on hiatus until 1946.) But over the last quarter century there has been a concerted effort to involve more of the world. ISCM has held five World (New) Music Days festivals in East Asia: in Seoul, South Korea (1997); in Yokohama, Japan (2001); and three in Hong Kong (in 1988, 2002, and 2007). The final of these (2007) also included events in Macau.
If the hair doesn’t bring in new audiences, nothing will!
Of course, the only way to make the ISCM an organization that is more representative of the new music that is being made all over the planet is to have a broader definition of what constitutes “new music” and, more specifically, a definition that is considerably less Eurocentric. This will be a challenge for many of the delegates who seem to still cling to a Darmstadtian new music aesthetic, which was an aesthetic that informed a great deal of the music I heard during the ISCM concerts I attended two weeks ago in Bratislava, Slovakia and Vienna, Austria. (The 2013 festival was actually spread across three cities, but I was unable to get to the first of the three host cities—Košice, Slovakia. However, I was happy to see that some of the Košice programs featured some clearly un-Darmstadtian fare. The composers whose works were performed there included Christian Wolff, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Per Bloland, Louis Andriessen, British conceptual minimalist Christopher Fox, Lithuanian microtonalist Egidija Medekšaitė, and Slovakia’s own Vladimír Godár, whose music has been recorded by ECM.) Unfortunately I was only able to attend a total of eight of the ISCM concerts that occured in Bratislava and Vienna, a mere smattering compared to what I was able to experience when I attended the ISCM WNMD in Zagreb, since this time around the festival was concurrent with the 2013 conference of the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC). Though both events were happening in the same cities, activities were all too infrequently synchronized.
William Rowe
What proved to be the most varied was a concert of works for unaccompanied chamber chorus performed by Poland’s Camerata Silesia Katowice conducted by Anna Szostak at the Mittlerer Saal in Vienna’s Urania Observatory on November 13. Among the concert’s highlights were a somewhat surreal composition by Indiana University undergraduate William Rowe (who created his own text for the piece as well) and an extremely unusual piece incorporating non-linguistic syllables as well as some extended vocal techniques called The History of Songs and Words by Japanese composer Yasunoshin Morita, which fetched him the 2013 ISCM Young Composer Award. It was also a joy to hear the premiere of the work that was commissioned from last year’s Young Composer Award winner, Paestum by Eric Nathan, an extremely well-paced and finely orchestrated composition for large ensemble which was enthusiastically delivered by the Melos Ethos Ensemble in the Small Hall of the Slovak Philharmonic in Bratislava on November 8 just a few hours after I arrived there. (I had an opportunity to record a conversation with Eric the next day in between various conference sessions which will appear on this site at a later date.)
Eric Nathan (center) with some American fans following the performance of his ISCM commission: Barbara Jazwinski, FJO (left), Stephen Lias and Ed Harsh (right).
The world would be a far more interesting place if this man was in charge of programming the music piped into shopping malls.
A few of the aforementioned Darmstadtian partisans definitely got their feathers ruffled by Kyle Gann, who was invited to give a talk about the state of new music in the United States during a series of Symposia sponsored by the ISCM open to the general public which were held at the Vienna Conservatory on November 13. After speaking eloquently and passionately about the current compositional landscape, which he attributed to a “decentered pedagogic tradition” and a “marginalization of composers” that has greatly increased over the last quarter century, Gann offered three examples of recent American music—works by Corey Dargel, William Brittelle, and Judd Greenstein. While I wish his range of examples would have been more stylistically, geographically, and socially diverse (all three are Brooklyn-based white men in their 30s), I laud his provocative attempt to subvert the aesthetics of the new music cognoscenti who decried all of what he sampled as indistinguishable from pop music and music that was reminiscent of what is played in shopping malls! (For more details, read Gann’s own account of what transpired.) From my vantage point the music that best meets the criterion for being new is music that challenges our expectations and somehow makes us question our assumption and definitions; at this late date (68 years after the death of Anton Webern), music coming out of the Darmstadt aesthetic, and indeed a whole lot of other stuff we generally describe as “new music,” does not meet those criteria.
Webern’s star still shines in Vienna.
Though, to be perfectly honest, the most talked about composer in Vienna is still this one.
The public day of the IAMIC Conference, which was held at Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center on November 11 also had its share of polemical interchange. The day got off to a fiery start with a talk by Dieter Hasenbach about how to measure success indicators for music. Hasenbach immediately challenged the sometimes hermetically sealed new music environment by stating that “without an audience, music might as well not happen.” But he riled some of the audience when he explained that although the marketplace fails for many types of music, specifically those that are deemed the most culturally worthwhile, no public subsidy will increase the demand for it and that ultimately it “does not make sense to subsidize training for a field where most people will fail (9 out of 10).”
Franz Kasper Kröning offered a fascinating account of how beauty has changed its meaning throughout history. According to him, it morphed from something that was transcendent and conjured the divine in Medieval times to something that accurately mirrored nature or was scientifically correct during the so-called Common Practice period, the era that spawned most of the works that have become the standard repertoire of classical music. But he argued that in the 20th century what mattered most, and was therefore beautiful, was what was socially relevant and that nowadays what is important is what is successful and that success is mostly measured in commercial terms. Karim Fanous evangelized for the digital revolution and how it has enabled a greater proliferation of music as well as a greater opportunity for anyone to reach a wider audience than anytime in human history. Samples he offered included the Harlem Shake and Psy’s Gangnam Style. But Bill Drummond (who is probably most well-known for co-founding The KLF and for subsequently burning one million British pounds) was not convinced and questioned whether viral online phenomena could actually build a sustainable career.
David Keenan, a Scottish music journalist who writes for The Wire, gave an impassioned talk about the Texas-based outsider musician Jandek in which he decried commercial popular music stating that “most pop culture says you must say no to yourself…what would saying yes involve?” In the concluding panel, which was held in German, Gerald Bast, a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, offered some of the most salient comments of the day (which I quote via the real-time translation that I listened to on headphones):
Why are we discussing success? What do we need that for? There has been a tendency for the past twenty years to quantify everything… Why do people make art and why do they stick to it? It gets hard after graduating, one can start to be more successful in a different field. A better question would be a serious discussion about why we need art and why artists exist. Which part of society is represented by political parties? Not the artists. Nobody questions why billions are being given to the banking sector and nobody screams out that this money should go to education and to the arts and to improve the living conditions of artists. It’s a waste of resources.
Although the IAMIC sessions concluded on November 12 and the ISCM sessions concluded on November 14 and I was on vacation from then until now, first spending a day in Berlin and then a week in Hong Kong, which I flew to with a brief stopover in Doha, Qatar, my mind remained fixated on many of the discussions that transpired in Bratislava and Vienna and what it would take to create a truly world-wide new music scene. I failed to find music of any kind in the insane Duty Free mega-emporium that greeted me when I arrived in Doha though some interesting occasionally microtonally inflected instrumental music was piped in on the P.A. system of both the Qatar Airlines’ Berlin-Doha and Doha-Hong Kong flights before take-off. There were some fascinating old Arab movies available to view via the in-flight entertainment though none were subtitled and all were from Egypt (which I learned from doing some subsequent online reconnaissance after landing in Hong Kong).
I couldn’t spot any recordings in the massive duty free emporium that awaits arrivals to the airport in Doha, even folks like me who arrived in the middle of the night, but there were tons of perfume, designer bags, and even cars for sale there, plus–one concession to regional geography–plush camels.
In Hong Kong, I did not have a lot of time to search out music (I was mostly there for family stuff), but I did pick up a pile of qin recordings from the gift shop of a rock garden that is maintained by Buddhist nuns. I also went to several record shops which were mostly located in the myriad shopping malls which dominate the islands and peninsula that comprise the Hong Kong Special Administration Region. While I didn’t wind up acquiring any additional recordings at any of them, I managed to buy over 80 DVDs of motion pictures from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Mainland China, including a bunch of Cultural Revolution era propaganda films. Many of these motion pictures undoubtedly will contain music that I will want to explore further, but that will have to wait until I get over my jetlag.
One of the two branches of Hong Kong Records in Kowloon, which I wound up visiting twice.
On the ride back from Hong Kong yesterday, first to Seoul and then finally to JFK, I tried to listen to as much recent pop fare from South Korea, Japan and the various Chinese speaking territories (which are commonly referred to respectively as K-Pop, J-Pop, and C-Pop) as I could get through. Much of what I heard of this music in the past has struck me as somewhat watered down versions of Western pop music, but I hate to dismiss anything out of hand and certainly haven’t heard enough to have anything remotely resembling an informed reaction to it. I was intrigued by Ayumi Hamasaki’s “Never Ever,” which opened with some really oddball electronic timbres, as well as Nana Nizuki’s “Synchrogazer” which featured some strange chord changes. The thing that grabbed my attention the most, however, was a recording of an indie rock group from China whose album I listened to from start to finish. The album had the word “Hertz” in the title, but by then the battery on my PalmPilot was wiped and I could not turn on my smartphone on the plane, so unless I’m able to find a way to locate a list of Korean Airlines in-flight entertainment offerings online I might be out of luck ever hearing it again. The Google queries I did for Chinese indie-rock hertz left me empty-handed.
It was nice to once again briefly visit the spaces devoted to traditional Korean culture, including traditional music, at Incheon Airport during my layover between flights from Hong Kong and to New York City on Sunday.
But as I was listening for new sounds among the East Asia’s popular music acts, I kept thinking of some of the comments that were made following Kyle Gann’s presentation. The moderator for the symposia that day, Andreas Engström (editor of the Swedish Nutida Musik), spoke briefly in a panel later that day about the underground music scenes in Egypt and Lebanon and how it is worlds away from most of the music that gets programmed during the annual ISCM World Music Days. A truly international representation of new music needs to be open to everything, but such an aesthetic position won’t be readily embraced by the folks who were reminded of shopping malls when they heard the examples of recent American music Kyle Gann sampled during his talk in Vienna. There’s a bit of bittersweet irony in all of this. If only we could get the new music we love played in shopping malls!
One final anecdote from my time 2013 ISCM experience that’s worth mentioning was my encounter with a coat check attendant at the Vienna Conservatory who was wearing a John Cage t-shirt. My coat check number was 101 which led to a fun conversation about Cage with her.
[Ed Note: The following essay was adapted from a talk given on October 17th, 2013 at Eyebeam (NYC), sponsored by ((audience)). First suggests clicking on the link below before reading the essay for an audio accompaniment to his words. —FJO]
I can’t remember everything about my formative teenage years, but I do recall clearly the day I came up with my holy immutable worldview. I was in the woods. I lived across the street from Pennypack Park in Northeast Philadelphia. It was called a park, but take it from me, it was the woods. You couldn’t go on picnics or play softball in there. You could only disappear. A hundred feet from my front door and you were gone. I was very lucky.
Anyway, I was in the woods…smoking a joint…when it hit me. There were only three lenses through which to view the world. It was a triangle. One side was science, one was art, the third was religion. The way I saw it, scientists wanted to rationally explain and control all natural phenomena without asking complicating permissions from an invisible Eye in the Sky. They saw the cosmic brew as simply a bunch of solvable formulas and equations with either us, or no one, in charge.
Religious people gave all glory to God or whatever, and were satisfied to live in mystery. They preferred the mystery. They wanted to be taken care of. Or punished if they didn’t obey the rules. A contract.
Artists wanted to have it both ways. They liked the mystery, but wanted to lord over it as well. They wanted to make the rules, to write the contract and be the only ones to sign it. For artists, belief in a Supreme Being was generally trumped by self-absorption, and science existed largely to help create better artistic tools. I didn’t have the discipline, or possibly the brains, to be a scientist, though I loved the trappings of science: lights and knobs and dials and machines and beakers with strange bubbling liquids pouring out.
Religion…well, that didn’t seem like that much fun at all. Transcendent devotion seemed cool, but it was more like something you did when you were through playing around. A religious kid just makes no sense. You’d just have to be aping some adult’s inclinations.
But art…that seemed like the best of all worlds. The pomposity without the responsibility to get things correct or to live correctly. It was pure opinion from what I could see. You had to be convincing, maybe even mesmerizing, but you could shape the game any way you saw it. You could create beauty and you could shake things up. The only limit was the breadth of your ideas and maybe the tools at your disposal. Very romantic. I wanted to be an artist. An artist in sound.
Even as a young boy I never went in much for musical entertainment. My favorite band during the British invasion of the mid-’60s was a band called the Yardbirds. Their lead guitarist, Jeff Beck, was my hero. The Yardbirds were the least entertaining band of the class of 1964-65. Their singer had no charisma and their claim to fame—they did, in fact, have a bunch of hit records—was the exotic sounds they invented. They weren’t ugly dudes. Hell, man for man, they were probably better looking than the Stones. But they were in it for something else. Or maybe they were only in it for the girls, but they didn’t know any better. Makes sense. Musicians probably always think that new musical ideas are sexy. No matter. At any rate, I started playing guitar when I saw the Beatles, but when I heard the Yardbirds, I wanted to be a musician.
Now, the British have a lovely term for people like the Yardbirds: they call them “musos.” I first heard this term during the punk era of the late ‘70s when it was used with great derision underscored by a dismissive sneer. It meant that a player or band placed a way overripe value on traditional skills and musical knowledge. Musos practiced their instruments. The most offensive musos might even be able to read music, but it was bad enough to care too much about being in tune, or to use chords beyond basic barre or power chords. You had to be very careful about what you revealed if you knew more than these things during the punk era. You even had to be careful about letting people know who you listened to. The original bass player for the Sex Pistols got kicked out for being too competent and publicly admitting he liked the Beatles. He was replaced by someone more authentic—someone who couldn’t play bass at all.
I loved punk rock. It was an incredible high point in pop music. But I reckon I was also concerned with being in tune. It was a confusing time. Punk was an attempt to return things back to something more than bloated entertainment. In that spirit, my band at the time, Notekillers, thought we’d try taking things a half-step further by having no front person/singer. We were all-instrumental and wanted it to be all about sound, sensation, and psychosis. We wanted there to be nothing entertaining about us at all. No message. This confused a lot of people, especially the punks.
The Notekillers live in 1977, photo courtesy David First.
I’ve tried to keep to that agenda in the years since. But then a couple of years ago I had a revelation, possibly equal to my teenage science/art/religion triangle. I kept having this vision of the album Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. And then it hit me. No matter how profound, how powerful, how skilled, sophisticated, sensitive, or shocking our work as artists might be, we are all merely Johnny Cash entertaining the inmates at Earthling Prison. All art is nothing more than entertainment.
The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: entertainment.
Pollock’s drips: entertainment.
Beethoven’s 9th: entertainment.
John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: entertainment. Hamlet, Death of a Salesman, Waiting for Godot: all entertainment.
It’s all something to keep people occupied. To distract, engage, and stimulate their senses in order to make them feel something, but not too much. Happiness, sadness, empathy, rage, whatever.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this. Of course, art enhances people’s lives. When Johnny Cash comes to play for us, it’s a brighter day. But that’s it at best. He leaves and we’re still here. If it were any different, then the world would be a very different place. Walking into that building in Vatican City would be transformative forever for every person doing so. It would be literally like sticking your finger in an electrical socket. Hearing “Ode to Joy” would be like eating a poisonous mushroom. Or a magic one. Listening to A Love Supreme would transport one to another physical dimension or another galaxy at the very least. Not just if one were open to it; it would be involuntary. Like gravity. Or getting hit by lightning.
People have been staring at paintings and taking in concerts, dance recitals, and poetry readings for hundreds of years, and what’s changed? The world is as bad off as ever—maybe worse. We’re destroying the planet. We still distrust and hate each other over the stupidest things. And if there has been even the slightest bit of social progress or spiritual growth, it isn’t because of art. I’m not sure those things are even very high on most artists’ priority lists. And if they aren’t, then the resulting work is all just screwing around, putting the icing on a pretty bitter cake. Entertainment.
If you don’t want to hear it from me, here’s a quote I recently found from one of the most unassailable artistic strivers of the 20th century, John Coltrane:
I want to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start immediately to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he’ll be cured. When he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song, and immediately he’d get all the money he needed. But what these pieces are, and what is the road to attain the knowledge of them, that I don’t know. The true powers of music are still unknown. To be able to control them must be, I believe, the goal of every music.
I don’t think he didn’t mean it.
Now, the Pythagoreans had the right idea. It appears that they made no hard and fast distinction among the disciplines of mathematics, music, and medicine. They used math to create their musical scales, then chose certain scales for executing music to heal specific ailments. Was it all gullible placebo? Wishful conceit? Poetic metaphor? We tend to place the ancients in two categories: ignorant but charming superstitionists who thought the Earth rode on the back of a giant turtle, or, conversely, people who ate, breathed, and lived in an environment more in tune with the codes of the universe and who could perform feats of magic well beyond our ken.
Not to be judgmental, but there seems to be plenty of evidence that the former walk among us, more or less, still today. And I believe that the latter may as well. And I believe that artists, more so than scientists or the religious, carry the seeds of miracle works inside them. And I believe we are seriously underperforming.
There’s a wonderful new book by Douglas Kahn called Earth Sound Earth Signal. It is a wealth of historical anecdotes and information on how scientists and inventors and tinkerers of the 19th and 20th centuries spent many dreamy, visionary moments lost in off-hour aesthetic reverie, immersed in what might be called the unexpected byproducts of their research. These often led, in turn, to further technological advancements.
The artists portrayed in the book benefitted greatly as well through both direct collaborations with scientists and the general availability of new tools and data types that scientific research brought about. They often subverted the original purpose of these tools to develop marvelous new palettes for their creative endeavors. And they opened doors to fantastic ways of relating to and embracing our surroundings and internal workings that served as a running poetic commentary on the concurrent scientific breakthroughs.
Those artists who emerged in the ‘60s & ‘70s, especially—the Earth artists and the Body artists and the Street artists—did much heavy lifting to break through the fourth wall artifices, leading us out of the concert halls, theaters, and galleries to a more authentic experience of the ways things are. Many of them took great risks with their careers, and even their lives, attempting to realize visions beyond the polite aesthetic boundaries they inherited. Some began insanely ambitious projects that are still in the act of becoming all these years later. Others left us without ever seeing those ambitions completed.
If one adds in their contemporaries—the free jazz scorchers (including John Coltrane) and the psychedelic travelers, both of whom, in their own ways, tested the limits of what the body can take and what society can handle—a picture emerges of an era in which bravery and edge-walking were palpable, imperative components of creation. Hell, if we’re talking about standing up to societal norms, I can easily throw the Sex Pistols in there as well. Those guys had the whole British Empire boring down on them and were attacked by knife-wielding thugs and beaten up on more than one occasion.
Yeah, sure, you can chalk this perspective up to the cranky idealism of someone who lived through it, but seriously, what has happened since then? All I’ve seen in all the arts since maybe a couple years into the ‘80s is a bunch of folding back: re-examination, recombining, re-creation, refinement—all the “re-” words. Who has gone further? Who has truly challenged society, challenged the role of the artist, and risked what might come back at them in return? I think I’ve been paying attention! Have all of those people been deemed foolish and naive? Did we learn from their mistakes that it’s better not to tilt the game, to just worry about the state of our careers and making interesting work? Or, in fact, were they gods possessing unattainable superpowers whom we can only worship and imitate poorly from a stale distance? In either case, has the jig been up for a long time? If not, how do we, and, more likely, considering I’m no kid any longer, how can subsequent generations fulfill the ambitions the giants, on whose shoulders they stand, whispered of and hinted at?
There are some tantalizing passages in Kahn’s book where, particularly in earlier eras, the researcher under discussion isn’t afraid to evoke the notion of a higher power. If you have a problem with that construction, let’s just maybe call it a stronger power. Most of their technological breakthroughs were made through the attempt to harness stronger powers. And higher power, as with voltages, is stronger, right?
Which brings me back to the third side of that triangle. The side that has never stopped tapping me on the shoulder, whatever twists and turns my musical life has taken. I know religion is a troubling word. And as I invoke it these days, I don’t mean the calcified and corrupted modern day rules and regulations used to control the hoi polloi. And I’m certainly not talking about a grey-bearded Daddy anthropomorphically judging us from his throne in the clouds. But I don’t want to water things down here by switching that word out for something spongier like “spirituality” or some such.
What I mean by religion is simply the willingness to accept the possibility that there is a consciousness exponentially beyond ours. That accidents may just be something else taking control of the wheel. That we—at least in our present state—are not the be-all and end-all of the evolutionary process. I consider the idea that we are to be the height of arrogance and shortsightedness. What do ants think of us? We are, no doubt, an unfathomable force of nature to them. Why is it not possible that we are ants in relationship to something else? Just because it may be a classic acid-tripper’s meme doesn’t make it untrue.
We know the traditional advantage science has had over religion in mapping our world: tangible, demonstrable, repeatable proof. And it would seem that science is getting closer all the time to proving the existence of what might be called alternative realities. But I think it’s the old “half the distance to the wall” paradox, and it’d be a mistake to derisively dismiss out of hand the possibility that religion has something on science in these matters. That proof can also be a dead end. It’s performing an autopsy on a beautiful idea. Taking apart a promise to see what makes it tick. I believe there is a power in never totally knowing, but striving to perfect an openhearted feeling instead. Letting something live to be a real mystery and having a relationship with it built on a trusting handshake—no contract necessary.
As much as there is to learn from reading Hindemith and Cowell and Cage and Stockhausen and Partch and Helmholtz and various books on acoustics, there is a potentially equal influence and deepening of possibilities gained through reading books by another Khan—the philosopher and musician Inayat Khan, as well as Dane Rudhyar, Paramahansa Yogananda, Ernest McClain, Jocelyn Godwin, and others who wrote about something beyond our measurable, phenomenological world. That there is a veil that could be, that needs to be pierced. And that it can be done through diligent, artful means.
*
The Video Component for Operation:Kracpot
Maybe it’s time to mention that I, too, have a scientist/artist collaboration story. In my case, it came about in 2002 when looking into brainwave information for an installation I was creating and I came across, for the first time, mentions of the Schumann resonances. Schumann resonances are quasi-standing waves that occur in the Earth’s ionosphere as a result of lightning constantly striking the globe and causing it to ring like a giant bell. I was entranced by this idea; what musician wouldn’t be? And I proceeded to dive into the internet’s vast trove of links, which were pretty much equally divided between New Age harbingers and scientific researchers. One name that came up on just about every research site was Davis Sentman.
Sentman, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska, was by all accounts on these sites the world’s leading authority on Schumann resonances and related atmospheric phenomena. So, long story short, I searched out his website where, along with a wealth of great info, he cheerfully offered to answer questions. So I wrote and brazenly asked, among other things, where I could find the data and whether there was a way to receive it in real time. He answered all my questions, and by the following day, he had created an application that allowed me to stream said data over the internet and into the Max patch I had already been working on. For the next couple of years, he and I collaborated on performances for which I would give him the time coordinates and he would run the app, allowing me to jam with the Earth.
Sensors, sensor box, and the instrument trailer at the Gakona, Alaska site where the Operation:Kracpot data was being measured and sent.
This project, which I called Operation:Kracpot, was the first time I allowed overt mystical implications to enter into my work. Though, as you can tell by the name, I was still sort of hedging my bet. There was definitely inspiration of a sort to be found in the more fanciful ideas on the New Age sites, that the Schumann resonance fundamental frequency, in particular, was a type of Mother Earth tone, that human consciousness development could be directly linked to this frequency, and that we had all better, if we knew what was good for us, get back in touch with it. There were also more apocalyptic connotations attached to it, that Sentman convincingly poked holes in. The one indisputable fact was that this fundamental frequency, which tended to hover somewhere around +/- 8 Hz, was nestled nicely inside the alpha brainwave range—a restful, yet alert state that was sought by meditators everywhere. This was something even science couldn’t deny.
Beyond that, by far the most important tool Sentman shared with me was a formula for calculating spherical harmonics that hewed very closely to the Schumann resonance relationships. This formula was a game changer as it freed me to create a complete alternative soundworld for accompanying Sentman’s data that consisted of a wider and denser range of frequencies than the Schumann resonances, a spherical overtone series that allowed me to construct more complex waveforms, tempo schemes, amplitude and frequency modulations, and various methods for transposition of materials that still retained the unique sonic character of the Schumann resonances.
David First’s MaxMSP patch for Operation:Kracpot
All in all, Op:Krac was great fun and I’d hoped to keep an ensemble of players I’d assembled together long enough to develop our own transcendental tribal rituals. But, at some point, Sentman’s facilities got shut down for repairs and he moved to New Mexico to study other things, including sprites. And I carried on by myself using stored data as well as the formula he’d shown me.
Sadly, Davis Sentman died suddenly a couple of years ago, right after he retired. He was an amazing person, definitely the biggest influence on my life in the last ten years and, along with my electrical engineer dad, one of the two most influential non-musicians for me ever. He would’ve loved Douglas Kahn’s book.
Anyway, I’ve continued to use these sounds, sometimes in standard artistic settings, including one memorable night at the original Silent Barn in Bushwick when my set occurred during a lightning storm one could watch out a huge window off to the side of the stage. But as of about two and a half years ago, I’ve reserved these materials to be used only as a part of another collaboration, this time at an acupuncture center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with acupuncturist Isobeau Trybula.
Actually, acupuncture might be the perfect bridging metaphor for what I’m trying to get at here. Nobody can say for sure—in a strictly scientific manner—how it works, and despite what I’ve said so far, I’m as big a skeptic as anyone. But damn if I don’t walk out of that place after a treatment feeling relief from whatever I went in with. It’s working on a subtler level than we can nail down and yet, more and more it has achieved mainstream acceptance in the medical community. This is what we need more of in our society: openness to the unexplainable.
Now, when someone asks me whether acupuncture works, to me that’s like asking whether country music is any good. And my answer is, it really depends. A lot of it does nothing for me. But Johnny Cash—he’s awesome. And it’s the same with acupuncture. Like most things, you need to find the real-deal practitioners, but when you do, it’s something else.
During our monthly sessions, Trybula typically offers only two different treatment options in order to best set up a common energy loop flowing through the six people that take part in each session. Also, unlike the individual treatments she offers, everyone starts at the same time. Including me. We’re all in it together. And in no way do I play the part of entertaining accompanist. I am not there to create an atmosphere, to set a mood, to perfume the air. I am there to reinforce, to resonate as best I can with Trybula’s treatment. A pair of stereo speakers are set up in two separate rooms with three people in each room, and I am outside the rooms with my equipment, paying very close attention. As I tell my students, we musicians are like pilots of a plane. We must take the same journey as the passengers; if we’re not off the ground, then they won’t be either. But we have the added responsibility of keeping the plane aloft, on course, and seeing that it arrives at its proper destination safely. So, we must learn to be totally functional within a membrane of disorientation. And nowhere is this more the case than in my acupuncture performances.
Two patients receiving acupuncture treatments from Isobeau Trybula along with music by David First. Photo courtesy David First.
Yes, I know, performance is another sticky word. I didn’t really know what to call my role in these things at first. It’s hardly show biz in there. But then I remembered that plate-spinners and rock singers are not the only performers—surgeons call what they do “performing an operation.” So I went with performance.
During the sessions, I build up complex combinations of beating tones in the stereo field, from extremely fine pitch shifts to strong, fairly rapid pulsations. Unlike binaural beating practitioners who aim for the brain through headphones and a single pair of detuned frequencies, I want this to be a full-range, full body experience. And though I experimented early on with a variety of sonic materials, I soon settled on the spherical harmonics. Beyond any New Age virtues they may possess, the thing I like best about them is that their sound has no associative musical correlations. It is devoid of memories or sentiment and you will not find yourself singing your favorite melodies along with them. They are just alien enough to repel cultural attachments and therefore retain a certain experiential purity as physical vibrations only. This is key, as it is most important that one not be left hanging trapped on more superficial levels.
This last part is especially relevant, I believe, when the patient is a musician. Musicians are the ones most susceptible to associative sounds and the goal is to disentangle them from their work during a session. Colleagues that have come in have indicated that, indeed, this approach does allow them to let go more readily.
But, as much as I love when my musical friends in attendance have a positive experience, what’s really gratifying is hearing from people on the other side of the aisle—regular patients of the clinic and acupuncturists themselves who say that something extra special happens during these collaborations between Trybula and myself—that a uniquely palpable space is created where deeply rooted stresses are reached and released. As a result of this feedback, I’ve begun to accept the complicated notion that I am contributing to a physically, and possibly even more profound, healing circuitry. And I am leaning into it more and more all the time.
With that in mind, I suggest that there is one frontier left. And it’s based solely on intention. Not the squishy New Age white bread intention of calming, peaceful relaxation, and selfish self-acceptance, but the rough, rocky intention of what the alchemists called transmutation and universal acceptance.
I say it’s time to attempt fulfilling our mandate as artists here on Earth. I say we work on finding or developing an Underground Railroad that will help people escape, through metaphysical tunnels we construct, this mundane plane of existence. You want to be a defiant member of society? Try defying the laws of nature. Talk about a police state! Clawing for grants and gigs and stature is just playing into the trap. The smug life didn’t choose you. It’s the lowest level. Lower than the lowest level because we are totally misusing our gifts. We are the tricksters, the wizards, the true magicians. And the would-be shamans and healers.
What’s the first step? Well, for starters, let’s decommission our obsession with being geniuses. Three-fourths of the people reading this are geniuses. Who in our world is not a genius? Such a diluted, entry-level position. Such resting on wilted laurels of cleverness. We all took the big leap into pursuing a career in the arts because we were crowned geniuses back wherever we came from. And now it’s the classic scenario: we’re the former high school football stars grateful to be riding the bench in the big leagues.
I’m not saying that we have to completely give up doing artness as usual—everybody needs a hobby. But, please, can we stop being so coy? Can we stop looking the other way and acknowledge the Ganesh in the middle of the room? Stop being distracted by the shiny plastic baubles being dangled in front of our eyes and start living up to our responsibilities, our duties, and change things for real?
There is a huge difference between making work inspired by the Divine, making work that reminds one of the Divine, and actually manifesting the Divine. We don’t need faint echoes or foggy mirrors. We need the direct current. We need all lines of communication opened between us and the Universe. We need to break out of here and bring as many along with us as possible. We need to find the resonant frequencies that will crack the walls. The melodies that will pick the locks. The colors and shapes and words and actions that will melt down the barriers and transduce our molecules and take us to the other side.
I’m here. If you’re sick of sad ego-inflating, self-aggrandizing displays of so-called virtuosity and ingenuity and new, improved methods for getting us nowhere but draining circles of sameness and mediocrity, let’s talk and try things. Maybe we can figure some stuff out.
David First
David First lives, teaches, and works on music in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Current projects include his hypno-acoustic rhythm & drone a/v ensemble, The Western Enisphere, psychedelic noise rock and roll band, Notekillers, and SWATi, a monthly collaboration with acupuncturist, Isobeau Trybula. He curates cooperative collisions under the rubric of New Party Systems
and is proprietor of Dave’s Waves—a Sonic Restaurant, a semi-ephemeral establishment that he hopes you will visit next time it is passing through.
History teaches us that no matter how meticulously we plan, something unexpected will inevitably occur. And if we take the exact opposite approach to careful preparation, which is to completely embrace serendipity and “go with the flow,” life can be an amazing adventure. Take, for example, the life of Kentucky born and raised composer Beth Anderson.
The only child born to constantly quarreling parents who raised her on a family farm between Mt. Sterling and North Middletown in Montgomery County, Anderson did not have a great deal of access to music early on. But her grandmother, who lived on the other side of the county, owned a Mason and Hamlin upright piano which fascinated Anderson so much that she was given a toy piano for Christmas at the age of three. Just before her seventh birthday, her parents sold the farm and the family moved to the town of Mt. Sterling. Shortly thereafter her parents divorced, and as a consolation, Anderson started piano lessons with a local teacher in town; one of the first pieces she learned to play was Scarf Dance by Cécile Chaminade. Around that time she also began to write short piano pieces as well.
“I really was thrilled to find out that there existed in the universe at some point a woman who wrote music,” Anderson acknowledged when we visited her in her apartment across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. But perhaps an even more significant chance encounter than the one with Chaminade was finding a copy of John Cage’s book Silence in the Mt. Sterling Public Library some years later when she started high school. As she remembered, “I fell in love with Cage, and then I read every book that he said to read. I looked up every name. I used it as a catalog of what to care about. He was my guy.”
Against Anderson’s wishes, she acquiesced to her mother’s plan for her to attend the University of Kentucky and again, as luck would have it, John Cage and Merce Cunningham showed up there for a week-long residency in 1968. That initial encounter with Cage validated her own compositional instincts, and she decided to leave Kentucky and head to the West Coast. But once she was in California, she tried to randomly connect to Lou Harrison and soon discovered that pure happenstance doesn’t always yield the best results, as she told us:
I had a friend who had a friend who was driving a race car, and he had to be down in the Aptos area, where Lou lived, at a very early hour. He dropped me off at six o’clock in the morning, and I walked up and knocked on the door. I hadn’t told them I was coming, because I didn’t know I was coming until the night before and I didn’t have the phone number. So I just knocked on the door, and Bill Colvig, Lou’s companion, got up and let me in, and went to start water for tea, and went to talk to Lou, to get him up and come talk to me, because I explained what I was there for. Lou was clearly not having it. He didn’t want to get up. He didn’t know who I was, or why I was there bothering them at dawn. Eventually he came out and we had a little conversation and a little tea. … But he wasn’t at all interested in being my teacher. … That was my experience of Lou in 1969. And then, in ’74, I met him again at the Cabrillo Festival, and … then we were friends. But before that, I think I was just this crazy girl that showed up on his doorstep at dawn.
Still, once she was at Mills, pure chance led her to study with Terry Riley, who had only just begun teaching, and Robert Ashley. Infectious melodies and conceptual work inspired by text would be hallmarks of Beth Anderson’s own compositional style.
Beth then relocated again, to New York City, where she co-edited the legendary Ear magazine, spearheaded various initiatives to promote the music of female composers, and served as a piano accompanist for numerous dance companies while she continued to write pieces that explored converting the letters of a text into musical pitches and left the durations up to the performers. Eventually though, she abandoned this experimental approach and began to compose works that showcased unabashed tunefulness and regular rhythms. And yet, all this music is also the result of a form of serendipity, albeit one that is admittedly more controlled, as she elaborated:
I write little shreds and tatters and then figure out how to have more of this and less of that, and cut them into each other. I can write a whole section that was actually on a drone, like on a C, and then another whole section that was on F. Then I would cut them into each other, and I would suddenly have tonic-subdominant, tonic-subdominant, but they were from actual different pieces of music. People hear them and hear the harmonic movement, but it wasn’t really movement. It was just cut-ups.
Our own encounter with Beth Anderson this past month was also, by and large, a product of chance. Back in January at the Chamber Music America conference, I ran into her and she mentioned that she was writing her memoirs. Then in March, she sent me an email to ask if I knew of anyone who’d be willing to read them through for her before she attempted to approach book publishers. Since I love to read, I volunteered, and she showed up unannounced at my office to hand deliver a copy. On a whim, I started reading it on the subway that same evening. I was so compelled by her story that I couldn’t put it down and I finished the 258-page manuscript within a couple of days. I had known Anderson for many years and had heard a great deal of her music. I was always intrigued, but didn’t fully grasp it on some level. Yet after reading the story of her life, everything finally made sense—the shift in compositional style, the seemingly “normal” sounding music that becomes less and less normal the more carefully you listen to it, all of it.
“I wasn’t into planning,” she explained. “I didn’t seem to understand the concept, and I still sort of don’t. I mean, I brought you that book the other day, and you were totally surprised. I just sort of drop in.”
April 6, 2018 at 1:00 p.m.
Beth Anderson in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Recorded in Anderson’s apartment in Brooklyn
Video and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcription by Julia Lu
Frank J. Oteri: We’ve known each other for a very long time, but I feel like I know you so much better now after having read the first draft of your memoirs. So thank you so much for letting me into your world that way. It was a fascinating trip, and it has helped me to understand so much more about you and your music than I did before. And it also inspired me to want to talk to you about it. Many people like to feel they know something about the composers whose music they care about, but it isn’t always positive. The more I’ve learned about Wagner, the less I’ve wanted to hear his music.
Beth Anderson: There is that. But sometimes it’s fun to know something about the person. I want my music to be paid more attention to. I felt like I’d sort of dropped out. It’s nice to have another way to engage an imaginary public by talking about my life. Obviously, if nobody reads it, it won’t have any positive effect on the number of people that listen to my music, but if a lot of people do, then maybe it would.
FJO: I do think when people know more about a composer, whether it’s some detail about that person’s life or even just a photo, it is possible to have more empathy with that composer’s music. I think this was a fundamental idea that led to the creation of Meet The Composer in 1974. If we want people to think composers are relevant to our world we must show that the people who actually create it represent the broad and diverse community we live in. One of the things that struck me in your memoir was how you learned about Cécile Chaminade while you were still a beginning pianist. I think that set you on a path that you might otherwise not have followed if every composer you studied had been an old dead guy.
“I really was thrilled to find out that there existed in the universe at some point a woman who wrote music.”
BA: I really was thrilled to find out that there existed in the universe at some point a woman who wrote music. That was cool. But it took a long time to find another one. They just did not show up in my practicing Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt, until I found Pauline Oliveros. And there was a big space between Chaminade and Oliveros.
FJO: But before you learned about Pauline Oliveros you also studied with Helen Lipscomb and learned that she was also a composer.
BA: But the only things I’d ever heard of hers were a trio and her teaching pieces. She did not have a big concert output, as far as I knew. I think that either the music is lost or somebody else besides me has it. One of her relatives sent me the Trio—that same trio, as though it were her whole output—and wanted me to be the keeper of it because I was the only person they could find on the internet who mentioned her name, which is tragic. I had hoped that the University of Kentucky would have her stuff, because she lived in town forever.
FJO: Even though there was this long time between finding women who wrote music, I was struck by something you wrote about your mindset at the time you had discovered Cécile Chaminade: you didn’t realize at that point—because why would you as a little girl growing up who just learned a piece composed by a woman—that there was this really huge disparity between the performances of music by male and female composers.
BA: And the availability of their music—until the ‘70s, when that set of three records came out called Women’s Work. It was sitting in the window of a big book and record store on Fifth Avenue [in Manhattan]; I was walking down the street and I almost fell over myself. My God! Women composers. So cool. There just weren’t any records. I had found Chaminade in a John Thompson book, and I didn’t find anything except Scarf Dance. It’s not like you could go down to the Mount Sterling Public Library [in Kentucky] and find Ruth Crawford Seeger or anybody else. So it was very exciting. It took a long time for that stuff to start coming out, and the musicologists are doing a great job bringing it forward, inch by inch. But Jeannie Pool, a friend of mine from the distant past, was trying to get a master’s writing about women composers, and her committee told her that this was not something that was appropriate.
FJO: What reason did they give her?
BA: There weren’t any primary sources. There wasn’t any music. They thought that it was unimportant and that she wouldn’t be able to find any stuff to write about. So she put out a little booklet about women composers which was very nice. She got a master’s eventually, but in California with different people. I’m not sure what she actually ended up writing about. But in New York, she was definitely told not to do it.
FJO: That’s terrible. To return to the Mount Sterling Public Library and the things that you did manage to find there in your formative years, it’s interesting how deeply some of the things that you found so early on stuck with you—like John Cage’s book Silence. You grew up in Kentucky, which is where bluegrass music began. You do seem to have an affinity for similar harmonies in your own music from many decades later, yet—as far as I know—you were not directly exposed to any of that music. You wrote about an uncle who loved opera.
BA: My uncle hated country music and my mother hated country music. I wasn’t allowed to listen to the Mount Sterling radio station, which actually had people from the hills coming down doing live singing on the radio there. That was discouraged. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a live bluegrass concert. I’d hear it in movies or something, but that’s about it. The music I was aware of was popular music, and piano music [I was studying], and stuff from the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s that my mother sang, so it took a while to get around to other stuff. And hymns. I was big on church music at the time, because they paid me to show up and play.
FJO: And yet for whatever reason, I hear some kind of relationship between your music and bluegrass, as well as the older music from which bluegrass derived, old timey music. And yet it was not because you were immersed in it.
BA: Well, I love folk music. I was a big Joan Baez freak. My favorite song was “Old Blue.” I used to have a big old dog named Blue, and she and I used to sing it together. Every time you say the word blue, she would howl. So, it was a chorus.
FJO: I was struck by your list of the three earliest songs that you remember hearing: “Love and Marriage,” “Lover, Come Back to Me,” and Rosemary Clooney singing “This Old House.” What about those three songs stuck with you?
BA: I think it was the ideas behind the songs more than the actual tunes, because my parents were so busy getting divorced and re-married, and we did live in an old house, then we lost the old house so there were a lot of house and divorce stories going on in my life.
FJO: And music became central to your life after their final divorce from each other.
BA: That’s what I got. I finally got that piano. My grandmother’s piano came to live with us.
FJO: But even before that, you had toy instruments and you tinkered with them. It was almost like you were set up to become an experimental music composer.
BA: I used to think that all those toy instruments ruined my ears as a child because I was clearly set up to become a microtonal composer. Those things are so far off, especially the harp. That was awful. It jangled and circled around a pitch; the strings were colored rubber bands. It was a bad instrument.
A very young Beth Anderson with her kitty at Sideview Farm in Montgomery County, Kentucky c. 1954. (Photo by Marjorie Celeste Hoskins Anderson, Beth Anderson’s mother, courtesy Beth Anderson.)
FJO: So, looking back to the very beginning of you creating your own music, you obviously experimented with the toy instruments. But there’s no surviving music composed for them by you. Did you know about the John Cage toy piano suite?
BA: Not yet, but I performed it on my MFA recital and various moments after that. I love toys.
FJO: But perhaps it was only when you started taking piano lessons and had to learn to read music that other people had written that you consciously started thinking about creating your own things.
BA: Yes, I thought it was fun to write stuff down. As soon as I got a pad of music paper, I was off, not that anybody thought it was a good idea. It takes away from your time practicing, and everybody wanted me to practice more and write less.
FJO: Your mother played the piano, but it was basically a hobby for her. Yet it seems to me that from pretty early on there was this idea that you were going to be a musician.
BA: Well that’s what I thought, but every year my mother would say, “Do you want to quit?” It cost her money and it was money she didn’t wish to spend, and she didn’t see any reason for me continuing on with this. She wanted me to have piano lessons, the way she wanted me to have ballet and tap. She wanted me to have a certain grace, what little girls are supposed to have who grow up and marry doctors or whatever. But she didn’t expect it to be a career, and she was mildly appalled that I kept at it, and at it, and at it. It was not a good thing. Unlike Prokofiev’s family, who kept pushing and pushing. His family was so helpful. Mine was not.
FJO: But since you were an only child, I think that in some ways music became a kind of surrogate sibling to you, a constant companion.
BA: Well, it certainly gave me something to entertain myself with that didn’t require other people.
FJO: But it’s interesting that even though your family didn’t want you to do music, they thought that playing piano was better than writing music.
BA: Well, according to my teachers. My mother didn’t care one way or another. She just was hoping I would quit. She wanted me to play the flute, because she saw that as social and getting out of the house, and doing something with other people, so she was willing to keep paying two dollars a month for the flute forever.
FJO: As it turned out, you wound up playing flute for years in wind bands, even in college. A very big part of your formative experience with music was playing in wind bands.
BA: And marching band was my primary exercise for many years. That was the world’s most exhausting activity as far as I could tell.
FJO: It also exposed you to a lot of repertoire that you might not have been exposed to otherwise. Certainly much different repertoire than the piano music that you were playing.
BA: Yes. If I had been a good enough flutist, I could have eventually played in the orchestra at Henry Clay. But I wasn’t one of those two girls. We had a sea of 30 flutes. The fact that I was eighth chair was pretty good; they had some really good flute players.
FJO: So your school had an orchestra as well as a wind band?
“The fact that I was eighth chair was pretty good; they had some really good flute players.”
BA: Yeah. And Henry Clay in Lexington had a really good symphonic band. We marched in the Cherry Blossom parade in Washington one year with the cherry blossoms falling from the sky. It was so magical. Definitely the best experience I ever had with marching.
FJO: And you stayed with it for years and years, even after you could have done other stuff! What was the appeal?
BA: Well, in college as a music major, you had to have an ensemble activity, and I could already play flute. So I just stayed with the band instead of switching to chorus. Not that I didn’t sing in chorus. I was also in Madame Butterfly one summer. I was one of those girls in a lavender kimono with an umbrella. I liked singing, but I stayed with the band.
FJO: One thing that I find so incongruous about your early musical studies is that when you were studying the piano you were basically playing music exclusively by old dead men, but in band you were playing newer music, undoubtedly including some music by living composers, though probably not stuff that would have sounded like Webern and Stockhausen.
BA: No, but there was Persichetti. There was an awful lot of Leroy Anderson, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Sousa, and re-writes of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. I don’t know why that seemed to come year after year with those clarinets going forever and ever.
FJO: The reason I bring this up is that it seems so whacky that it was one of your early band teachers who first introduced you to 12-tone music. That seems like a very odd person to be the person who did that.
BA: Mr. [Richard] Borchardt. Well, he was a special guy. I wish I knew more about him. He’s not with us anymore. It was [during] a summer band clinic of some sort—we were practicing the 1812 Overture and there was some kind of little composition class. I, of course, got involved with that, and he chose to teach us how to do 12-tone music. I thought that it was the coolest thing in the world. So I wrote this quartet right away, and he put it on the show with the 1812 Overture. That was kind of a fun side by side.
FJO: Does that piece survive?
BA: Possibly. But it’s not in Finale, I’ll tell you. And I don’t know where it is.
FJO: So you won’t be taking it out to show us.
BA: I’m hoping not to. It wasn’t a great a piece, but it was hilarious because it kept being performed. There was a wine glass at the end that was supposed to break, but it never broke.
FJO: Yeah, I love that story. It’s what actually made me want to hear the piece.
BA: With the wine glass hitting the metal and not breaking, just going thump.
FJO: Maybe you should try it again with a cheaper wine glass.
BA: Oh, I think that’s the point. It was cheap, and therefore it wouldn’t break. It was too tough. It bounced. You have to get an expensive, really elegant one.
FJO: One that could cost more than hiring a musician to throw it! But aside from the curiosity factor of the wine glass at the end, there isn’t a lot of 12-tone band music. So it’s notable that the person who wanted to put you in that direction was a band person.
BA: Well, I taught for Young Audiences a little bit. It’s a lot easier to teach something that’s coding or that has a system than to say, “Give me your heart,” in a clarinet solo to a child who doesn’t know what their heart is or even how to write for clarinet for that matter. So it was much easier to tell us, “Take these notes, put them in some weird order, and then turn them upside down” and stuff. You could talk about it, so it’s easier to teach.
FJO: Considering how much band experience you had, it’s surprising that you didn’t wind up writing more band music.
BA: The only other thing I did was a Suite for Winds and Percussion, and that was a re-write of music I wrote for a film score. I just took it and turned it into that because Robert Kogan, who had an orchestra in Staten Island, had asked for apiece that would not use his strings because the strings weren’t very strong at that point. So he wanted me to just use the rest of the people. So it’s not exactly a real band; it’s for orchestral winds and percussion.
FJO: An orchestra minus the strings, like the first movement of Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto. Curiously though, in addition to being turned onto 12-tone music by your band director and then writing a 12-tone band piece, when you were enrolled at the University of Kentucky, one of the legendary band composers, John Barnes Chance, taught there. His Second Symphony and his Variations on a Korean Folk Song are really terrific pieces. But I suppose that by the time you got to study with him, your head was somewhere else.
BA: Yeah, I was into Webern and Cage. I really wasn’t trying to hang out around Korean folk songs. I was going in a different direction. I wanted to know about electronic music desperately at that point, and he made fun of that. He thought it was humorous. He could do it, it’s just that what he was doing it with was so basic that it was absurd. It was useful for the theater department, but it wasn’t exactly something he would call his music.
FJO: So what made you so curious about electronic music? How did you even become aware that it existed?
BA: I don’t know. Maybe John Cage talked about it in his books. I got to UK (University of Kentucky) when I was 16 and started working in the music library. I was reading Source, and I had a wonderful music history teacher, Kathleen Atkins. She played Tod Dockstader in class. That was my introduction to real electronic music, music that took faucets dripping and turned it into something else. I love Tod Dockstader! He doesn’t seem to be the big hit to everybody else that he was to me. Then I started hearing everybody else. Kathy wanted to build an electronic studio at UK, and they wouldn’t give her the money. So I left. When I went back to school, I went to Davis, and they had an electronic music studio, and I studied with Jerome Rosen. I think his level of interest in electronic music was trying to help us learn how to make advertisements using electronic music, because he was always assigning things that were 30 seconds or one minute. He didn’t want to hear a ten-minute electronic piece. He wanted to hear some tiny little gem that would somehow excite him. Then, of course, I finally got to Mills, where they had much more space and an interest in bigger pieces and different styles.
FJO: Let’s stay for a little bit longer at the University of Kentucky and those early years before you went to California. You were able to learn about Tod Dockstader, which is amazing because that music was not very widely distributed at the time. It wasn’t available everywhere, but it got to you. John Cage’s Silence, which was published by Wesleyan University Press, also reached you.
BA: In high school.
FJO: Which is amazing. And also Source Magazine.
“I fell in love with Cage, and then I read every book that he said to read.”
BA: They had a great a music library. They used to have a lot of money for it, and now they’ve got more, because there’s some lady down there in Kentucky that supports a lot of things, including that music library. The last time I was down there, I went over to see what was up, and it’s gorgeous. They have every periodical, even Fiddle Tune News; it’s that big. They’ve got all of it. And it’s not like when I was in NYU; I would go to look up a magazine and somebody had stolen half of the issues. I couldn’t find the whole run of anything. There were just huge holes in their collection. I hope they fixed that. But UK didn’t have that problem. They had a lot of stuff.
FJO: So if somebody was interested, they could find these things and go down that route. They could know that these things exist. That’s really important in terms of developing a sense and a knowledge base, finding that stuff on your own rather than just being told about it. I think it was really important for your personal development that you found those things on your own.
BA: Well, I fell in love with Cage, and then I read every book that he said to read. I looked up every name. I used it as a catalog of what to care about. He was my guy.
FJO: And then by dumb luck, pure serendipity, you go to the University of Kentucky, and he has a residency there.
BA: He shows up, and then I dropped out of school. And I come back and he’s there. He was at Davis for a term. It was freaky and wonderful.
FJO: One of the big revelations to me in reading your memoir is that your life has been this chain of seemingly pure accidents that completely flow into each other. You take these sudden turns and then you’re somewhere else, but it seems totally natural even though it’s totally unexpected. Interestingly, it’s similar to a lot of your music, which has been described by other people as collage oriented. I think that word doesn’t give an accurate sense of what it is, because when you think collage, you think these things don’t belong together, but in your music they do. It’s like they’re carefully woven together, even though they’re not connected. So you don’t realize that they shouldn’t work together, but they do, and it’s kind of the same way your life has unfolded.
BA: And the quilt.
FJO: Yes, exactly, we’ll get to that, too, in a bit. You initially didn’t want to go to the University of Kentucky, but your mother wanted you to go there. You wanted to go somewhere else because you were interested in John Cage. But then suddenly Cage was at the University of Kentucky.
BA: And the only reason I didn’t study with Ned Rorem was because I forgot to ask him to hang out and wait for me. The only reason I didn’t study with Pauline Oliveros is because I got a ride past her when I was hitchhiking. I always say, “Well, that’s the universe.” The universe was just going with it, whatever it was. I wasn’t into planning. I didn’t seem to understand the concept, and I still sort of don’t. I mean, I brought you that book the other day, and you were totally surprised. I just sort of drop in.
FJO: And now here we are talking. This happened the same way! It’s interesting that you also had read Ned Rorem pretty early on, around the same time you were reading Cage. I think of Rorem as a radical composer in a lot of ways, but a lot of people didn’t, especially at that time. They thought he was an old-fashioned composer because he never gave up tonality and he never gave up writing beautiful melodies. There was a real braveness to sticking to his guns and writing the music he wanted to write. And you learned about him and his music relatively early on. So in addition to all the avant-garde experimental music you were learning about, you also had a role model for going against the grain and writing really beautiful music, which is what you ultimately wound up doing.
BA: Well, Cage and Rorem went different places. But I thought they were both radicals, and I fell in love with Rorem’s stuff through playing for singers. At UK, that was their idea of modern music, Vaughn Williams and Ned Rorem. And the stuff was gorgeous. What’s not to like? And of course, his books were hilarious and wonderful. I wanted to go to Paris. I wanted to know all these wild and crazy people.
FJO: I feel like Rorem’s influence has even found its way into the writing style of your memoir. You’re just telling the story of your life the way he did, in a very honest and sincere way.
BA: I just don’t know some other way to do it. I haven’t read his books since I was very young, so I don’t think I actually tried to go in that direction. I’m just doing it the way I know how.
FJO: In terms of not planning, it’s very interesting how this played out in terms of possible role models you could have had as teachers. Cage was a certain kind of a role model. So were Pauline Oliveros, Ned Rorem, and Lou Harrison, a composer who found a way to be experimental and beautiful at the same time, writing music that was really original but also very immediate and very moving. And you tried to connect with Lou Harrison when you came to California, but it didn’t quite work out.
BA: [My then composition teacher] Richard Swift and I talked and clearly I wasn’t interested in writing 12-tone music when I was studying with him and that’s what he wrote. So you would think we would not go together as a great teacher-student duo. So he thought that I would like to study with Lou Harrison, and he said, “Why don’t you go see him?” I didn’t have any money to figure out how to get there by paying for the bus, but I had a friend who had a friend who was driving a race car, and he had to be down in the Aptos area, where Lou lived, at a very early hour. He dropped me off at six o’clock in the morning, and I walked up and knocked on the door. I hadn’t told them I was coming, because I didn’t know I was coming until the night before and I didn’t have the phone number. So I just knocked on the door, and Bill Colvig, Lou’s companion, got up and let me in, and went to start water for tea, and went to talk to Lou, to get him up and come talk to me, because I explained what I was there for.
“I was just this crazy girl that showed up on his doorstep at dawn.”
Lou was clearly not having it. He didn’t want to get up. He didn’t know who I was, or why I was there bothering them at dawn. Eventually he came out and we had a little conversation and a little tea, and he agreed with me that perhaps I would enjoy meeting the gardener at UC Santa Cruz that Cage talked about in his books and that yes, in fact there were communes in the hills around Aptos and Santa Cruz and that, if I hitched around, I’d eventually find somebody that would take me to one of these places. But he wasn’t at all interested in being my teacher and having me come and sit at his knee. And Bill—I didn’t know anything about building instruments. I thought it would be fun, but I was starting from zero. I’d never built a bird house, much less anything else with wood. So they just sent me on my way after a couple of hours, and I hitched down to the beach to wait for the guy to come pick me up at the end of the day. And that was my experience of Lou in 1969. And then, in ’74, I met him again at the Cabrillo Festival, and he really liked my piece, and then we were friends. But before that, I think I was just this crazy girl that showed up on his doorstep at dawn.
FJO: That doesn’t seem like a good way to make a first impression.
BA: But if the universe spoke to him and said, “Yes, take this girl and help her,” then something could have happened. But the universe failed to so speak and so duh.
FJO: At least he woke up and spoke to you.
BA: Yes, that was very kind. And Bill was terrific. He really tried.
FJO: Your first encounter with Pauline Oliveros was also really bizarre.
BA: Yes. I’d been wanting to actually meet her for a while. I created this independent study with Nate Rubin at Mills, so I was going to interview Pauline and write a paper about her. Once again, I got some crazy ride down to San Diego, and these people took me to a Salvation Army for some reason. They wanted to buy something, and in there I found this big scroll. It was a paint by numbers scroll of a toreador and a bull. I bought this thing for a dime, and I thought. “Oooh, this is so cool. I got this thing about a bull, and I’m going to see this woman who’s so brave and tough.” I thought it was a great simultaneity, and I went to see Pauline. They dropped me off at her house, and I went in. She was expecting me; I had written her a letter. But she had a concert that night, and on the days of concerts, she did not talk. So there she was not talking, for the whole day, and I spent the whole day in her house. She had this huge cage with multiple birds in it, and they were squawking. Then the women from her women’s ensemble were there. They were cooking things to serve at the end of the concert. So there were the birds, the other women, and the cooking, but Pauline never said a word the whole day I was there. So I wrote the paper about that.
FJO: But at least you did let her know in advance that you were visiting her. So it wasn’t like your first encounter with Lou Harrison. So perhaps by then you had learned your lesson.
BA: Well yes, I had managed somehow by 23 or something to figure out you might want to send a letter. And, in fact, I did bring her some of my really early, awful music, and she turned the pages. She didn’t say a word, but she looked, and I gave her copies of them. And she smiled at me. That was fine. That was sufficient.
FJO: So how did you first become aware of Pauline Oliveros? Was that at the University of Kentucky also?
BA: Yeah, at UK, she was on the flip side of [the LP recording of] Come Out by Steve Reich.
FJO: Right.
BA: And Kathy Atkins played it for us in music history class.
FJO: Wow.
BA: And, you know, it wasn’t that I was so wild about the piece; I was so wild that a woman composer exists, another one. Here’s another one!
FJO: Parallel to your life as a composer, you’ve been a strong advocate for women composers. During your student days, you put together a festival. Then when you first came to New York—I know I’m jumping ahead here—you were the co-founder of a project called Meet The Woman Composer and got the blessing of John Duffy, who had only recently founded Meet The Composer.
Julia Smith (left) presenting the National Federation of Music Clubs Award of Merit for contributions to women in music to Sorrel Hays (center) and Beth Anderson (right) for Meet The Woman Composer in 1977. (Photo courtesy Beth Anderson.)
BA: Well, Bob Ashley basically set up that first festival, but he told me I was in charge. He’d already decided who he wanted to invite. It was a cool array, and you could not find three more distinct people—Vivian Fine, Pauline Oliveros, and Charlotte Moorman. That was a great group. Then when I came to New York, Doris Hays, now known as Sorrel [Hays], was soon to be starting this thing, but she wanted me to do it with her at the New School. She got all the funding from John Duffy for that. Apparently his organization had not existed long, so the idea that he would give us most of his money for the year was really astounding. He was very supportive. We did those evenings—10 or 15, I don’t know anymore—of all those women. And all these musicologists came and wrote articles about them, so it was useful to do. Then [many years later], B.C. Vermeersch at Greenwich House wanted me to do a women composers series at Greenwich House, and that went on for ten years. So, yes, I liked the idea of putting together concerts of women’s music because it’s not heard as much as people currently think it is.
FJO: There are organizations like IAWM, which I think does a lot of really tremendous work, but I know some younger composers who do not want to identify themselves that way. “I’m a composer and I happen to be a woman, but I’m not a woman composer. There’s no need for this.” Then you see something like the announcement of the Cleveland Orchestra’s 2018-19 season. There’s not a single piece by a woman on it. It’s been that way year after year. Same with the 2018-19 Boston Symphony season. It seems pretty clear that there’s a real problem.
BA: You think?
FJO: If there shouldn’t be concerts of just women composers, why are there so many concerts of just men composers?
“There are piles of music that should be performed that aren’t.”
BA: All the time. Or a whole festival, like a hundred composers, and two of them are women. They think they’ve done a big thing, that they’ve got two. That’s ridiculous. Somebody was telling me that he taught composition in Australia and all of his students were women. I don’t know, are men getting out of the field because it’s so badly paid? One wonders. Aaron Copland used to say there were no women composers, which is crazy, or that there were no good ones. None that have been properly educated. There are piles! The Baltimore Symphony apparently has been doing all these statistics, and women are just a very, very small percentage. If you take the ratio of men to women among living composers that are performed by the big orchestras in this country, it’s 85 to 15. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. But if you take the amount of women that are performed, dead or alive, it’s like one percent. Think of all the wonderful women that are dead that have written fabulous things I would love to hear, for the very first time, like Mary Howe. Usually orchestras are good at holding onto the past and presenting that. There are just piles of music that should be performed that aren’t.
FJO: Part of the reason things are the way they are, which rarely gets spoken of, is the economics of it all—the economics of obtaining the music, as well as the time for rehearsing it. I’m a big fan of the music of Louise Farrenc, a 19th-century French composer who wrote three symphonies, as well as the first-ever piece for piano and wind quintet. That alone should earn her a place in the repertoire.
BA: I played a lovely trio of hers once.
FJO: It’s wonderful music. But there are no modern editions of the symphonies. You can get them from one place that charges a crazy rental fee. Then, since the players don’t know the piece, they’ll need more time to learn it. But if they just played Brahms again, they’ve already played it a million times so they can rehearse it only twice and it’ll sound pretty good. Playing an old unfamiliar piece is kind of the same as playing a new piece. Worse, because then it goes to the marketing department and they don’t know the name.
BA: But Henze, which you can imagine would take quite a bit of doing to get on, they will rehearse that to the ends of the earth. They will rehearse anything big that’s dissonant and difficult. They understand that they have to rehearse that, and they’re willing to do that for the guys. But if it’s just a beautiful piece by an antique composer who happens to be a woman, it’s too much of a struggle. You just can’t keep doing the Beethoven Third all the time—lovely piece, but enough.
FJO: Do the Farrenc Third instead!
BA: Florence Price, also. There are so many people.
FJO: I’m very happy to hear you saying this because as important as it is to do music by living composers, if we really want to learn about the full history of music, we need to pay attention to historical women composers as well and embrace them as part of the canon, if we’re going to have a canon.
BA: Instead of an AK-47.
FJO: So how to advocate for this stuff? One issue is making sure that there are editions that are not only available but also affordable. A lot of the older music is now showing up on sites like IMSLP.org, so it is possible to easily obtain some of this music. But then there are also rules to consider. Musicians in most professional orchestras will only play from parts where the paper is a certain size; you can’t just print things out on 8 ½” by 11” sheets, because that’s too small.
BA: Well, that explains why my pieces aren’t performed because they’re only 8 ½” by 11” paper. I can make them bigger. No problem.
FJO: You definitely should. Which is a good segue to get us back to talking about your music and how you came to write the music you write. Connecting with Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros ultimately didn’t work out, but you did study for a time with both Terry Riley and Robert Ashley.
BA: I studied with Terry Riley the first semester he was at Mills; he was new to teaching. Terry taught me what was called cyclic composition, which was South Indian singing. He sang and then we sang. It was just copying, which was the teaching method of the time. But I loved the fact that there was a tal—a rhythm, a beat. Cage was sort of against it. He didn’t like regularly recurring meters, and Terry was trying to figure out what you could do within the meter that was interesting. Terry kept using scale steps and putting things together in interesting ways. The whole thing came out sounding very beautiful, because it had this beautiful big drone underneath it.
“I kept hanging on to this thing that I kept seeing as a process that Robert Ashley kept saying wasn’t a process.”
My oratorio Joan had a big A drone underneath it, partially for the singers so that they could find their pitches relative to the A. That was my plan. Not so easy, but it gave them an A at least. So Terry had a big effect on me, but not right away. I kept hanging on to this thing that I kept seeing as a process that Ashley kept saying wasn’t a process. I was coding words. I like changing one thing into something else, layering things like sedimentary rock. I like to have the same thing done different ways, so that the text that you would hear somebody singing would be changed into the pitches for the instruments, then the meaning of the text would be another text. They’d all be layered, or there’d be some weirdo video thing that would explain the text as another layer. I like layers. Anyway, Mr. Ashley did not see that as a process. I guess he saw it as a layered collage, which is certainly a way you could think about it.
FJO: It sounds like a process to me. I’m very curious about this idea of turning letters into pitches and being so focused on pitch, but not so much on rhythm.
BA: The rhythm was improvised by the player. But I was giving them the pitches and the rules. I would have some rule like, if you leap up from A to E, and got to the end of the word, then you would come back down a half step, then go on to the next word.
FJO: There were also pieces where you’d have certain pitches drop out over time. You’d begin with all these pitches, and eventually have way fewer.
BA: That was a modulating coding system designed just for Joan. It started with just the white notes on the piano from A to A, and then you kept decoding the same text, but you kept using one less letter from the alphabet until you ended up with just A-B-A-B-A-B, B-B-B-B. A-A-A-A. And AAAA.
FJO: This also sounds similar to what you did in a later piece that you wrote for solo ocarina called Preparation for the Dominant. You have a bunch of pitches in the beginning, but then fewer as time goes by. You have this sort of attrition of pitch.
BA: Do I?
FJO: That’s how it sounded when I heard it. I think it’s a very interesting idea, and I think it also sounds really good. There’s a rigor to it, but there’s also a freedom to it at the same time, which is maybe why Ashley didn’t think of it as a process. But the best processes are the ones that allow you to do your own thing with them.
BA: Yeah, like Schoenberg actually broke his own rules. I love that.
FJO: Exactly. And there are parallel fifths in Bach if you look hard enough for them.
BA: Yay!
FJO: Rules only get you so far, but then you need to make music with them. Maybe that’s something that the folks who were so obsessed with process-oriented music in the mid-century lost track of, the process is a means to an end, but not necessarily an end in and of itself.
BA: That sounds reasonable.
FJO: Well, it certainly seems to be the way that your music has played out.
BA: I like that.
FJO: I only know Joan from the keyboard version that’s on the Pogus CD of your music.
BA: Which had one performance consequently.
FJO: But there was also the performance at Cabrillo of the original version.
BA: KPFA has a recording, and probably Other Minds has it now, because Charles Amirkhanian was in charge of all that. They also have the original She Wrote from Gertrude Stein’s 100th birthday concert in ’74. I was complaining online recently, “This should be somewhere, and I’ll never hear it again.” And Charles wrote me back and said, “Oh! Cut it out. I’ve got it. You can hear it by clicking here.” They probably have Joan somewhere, too.
FJO: It would be so great for that to be out in the world.
BA: Well, you know, it is kind of afflicted by those naked guys, the timpani players, that ran through the middle of it and made the whole audience laugh and carry on. The idea that the critic Robert Commanday thought that that was something in the piece was particularly bizarre.
FJO: Well, how would he know?
BA: I don’t know. Everybody else talked to me—the man from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, as well as the critic from the Tribune. So they knew. But Commanday didn’t ask. He was a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of guy.
FJO: There has been this crazy idea in music criticism that if you talk to the musicians performing a piece or the composer, you’re somehow tainted and you’re going to be influenced so you’re not going to have objective criticism.
BA: I hate that.
FJO: And heaven forbid you’re friends with these people, or worse, that you actually perform or compose music yourself.
BA: Or that you actually know something about it. Now you’re supposed to have a degree in American studies, and you’re supposed to have a general drift of the culture, but you’re not supposed to actually know anything about it. I think that’s appalling. I loved it when Eric Salzman and Virgil Thomson, people who actually wrote music, wrote music criticism. You would know what their biases were, because you’d go listen to their own music. And you could see it. But if you have somebody that has a degree in sociology writing about music, then you don’t even know that their favorite composer is Philip Glass. I used to think that they should list their favorite composers at the top of their columns, so that you would know. Well, if they like this, this, and this, then there’s no big surprise that they didn’t like that. I thought it would be very helpful. But the only way you could get that sense of bias would be to read them for a long time. Then you would see over time what they liked, and what they didn’t like. But I don’t think that there’s a lot of purity.
When I moved to New York, Mr. [John] Rockwell was the best friend of my friend Charles Shere. They had both done symphony or opera broadcasts together in San Francisco. Charles stayed on the West Coast, and John came to New York. When I moved here, Charles said, “You’ll have to meet my wonderful friend John Rockwell.” So I called him up the moment I arrived, and I said, “I’m a friend of Charles, and I’m a composer. I would love to meet you.” And he said, “Oh yes, come to tea.” Then the next day, he called back and he said, “Are you moving to New York?” And I said yes. And he said, “Well, then I can’t talk to you.” And that was that. He wanted to continue that purity, that separation of church and state somehow. But I think that it’s a poor thing. I think you need to talk to composers—especially if you can’t read music or can’t play an instrument. That wonderful man from TheWashington Post, Joseph McLellan, said that he wrote a guitar piece so that he would have the experience of having written something. He could actually play an instrument, and they shockingly allowed him to write criticism for TheWashington Post. But he mainly reviewed parties. Apparently he was the social guy. He went to five parties a week, and then they also let him review concerts.
FJO: You also had a career as a music journalist yourself. You were involved with Ear magazine in its formative years. I’ve always considered Ear one of role models for NewMusicBox.
BA: Well, it is certainly the same kind of exhaustive experience that you’re never done. You do this one, and then the next one’s coming up and how can you get people to give you the stuff that you need for the next issue. I used to have to go over to people’s houses and stand over them, waiting for people to write their articles because people wouldn’t do it. They would say, “Oh, yeah. I’ll do it.” And it wouldn’t happen. But basically Ear was about promoting. I’m not sure we ever wrote anything negative. I can’t remember if we did. But we were boosters for sure. And we were saying, “This is what’s happening. Isn’t this fun? Come play with us.”
FJO: And Ear also had this very key idea that the people involved in making the music should be the spokespeople for it, which I think is a very important thing and a very different model from the separation of church and state, the armchair critic who can’t talk to you if you’re someone he or she might potentially review. Well, it was almost always he, always a man.
BA: Well, there aren’t a lot of women critics.
FJO: But then you had an experience of actually writing criticism that wasn’t exclusively positive when you wrote about the entire New Music America festival.
BA: Oh, that was a disaster. I didn’t mean harm, but I think I was thoroughly hated. The Kitchen never recovered from that, although some people thought it was a great thing because I was the only person that reviewed everything. And not just the concerts, but also the [panel discussions of the] Music Critics Association, which I found really intriguing. I loved hearing the critics read their papers, not having practiced them. They didn’t see performing as something you might want to rehearse. But anyway, Reports from the Front was something I created because I wanted to participate in the festival at The Kitchen in ’79, and I didn’t think that anybody would see it as negative because I was just saying whatever came into my mind. It was so clear that it wasn’t thought out and it wasn’t directed in a negative way. I was trying to describe stuff, and compare stuff to other performances of the same pieces. I thought I was so unimportant that nobody would take it badly, but people did. It angered the whole downtown scene in one fell swoop, in nine days.
FJO: And it also angered the music critics, right?
“I never think about—or never have thought about—consequences.”
BA: Oh yeah, there was that. There were so many times in my life that it would have been a good idea to be quiet, or to just not be there. But I never think about—or never have thought about—consequences. I think about it a little bit more now at this age than I did at that age.
FJO: Despite the lesson of Pauline Oliveros being silent the whole day.
BA: Yes. She sure is a great teacher. I should have paid more attention.
FJO: Before we completely leave California and keep talking about your life in New York, I was curious if you were at all connected with any of the extremely innovative things that were happening in so-called pop music there at the time. Not only was it a golden era in terms of the amazing things people were doing with electronics, plus early minimalism and all the conceptual pieces, California was the epicenter of psychedelia. Were you connected to any of that music? Were you aware that it was happening?
BA: I listened to pop music from ’57 to ’69. Acid rock like Steppenwolf and Blue Cheer—I loved that stuff. But, by then, I was over the edge into Stockhausen and Cage, so that was the direction my listening went.
FJO: All of the seismic shifts in your life feel somehow connected. There was the move from Kentucky to California. Then the move to New York. Those are physical, corporeal things. But there’s another event that happened once you were in New York, which is perhaps the most important shift of all—how you thought about yourself as a composer. And I think that it relates to your dabbling in music criticism. You reached a point where you decided to write music that was intentionally pretty as opposed to something that adhered to some high concept. You approached it initially with an almost revolutionary zeal, being an advocate for beauty. I think it’s possible to hear all of your work as a related continuum, but at the time it seemed like a huge chasm.
BA: I don’t really understand it myself. I know that I was doing this kind of thing. I came to New York, and even in my second concert at The Kitchen in ’79, I was still decoding the word “skate,” all the possible definitions of the word skate [in my composition Skate Suite]. But I also did songs that were actually freely written. At the same time, part of it was [flutist] Andrew Bolotowsky’s influence that everything had to be on staves. If I wrote music on staves the way he wanted it done, I had to assign the rhythms, so that took away the player’s improvisatorial input. I could have coded the rhythms, but I didn’t. I just did them freely. I was still decoding pitches [from words], but then I made up my own rhythms.
Then I met Michael Sahl, and he had very powerful opinions about harmony. His music was very harmonically centered, even more than it was melodically. He was big into this heavy jazz piano, bass, and drums kind of feeling underneath it that I never really got into. I liked cutting up and collaging things, but he still had an influence.
“I want to see you turn on a dime, schizophrenically, and be somewhere else.”
Some people see my music, that’s now in Finale, and when they see the cut-ups they want to finish and stop [the phrase]—lift the bow, then go on. Even though I don’t put a fermata over it, people want to do that because they were taught to do that. But some of my pieces have so many cut-ups in them, if you do that, a five-minute piece becomes a ten-minute piece. It just drags deathly into the ground. That’s the absolute opposite of what I want. I want the thing to lie against itself. I want to see you turn on a dime, schizophrenically, and be somewhere else. So, don’t do that people!
FJO: When a performance of your music is seamless, the effect can be similar to the hemiolas in Brahms or even Carter’s metric modulation; the sudden shifts are very satisfying musical surprises. In some ways, it’s like looking very carefully at the patterns that are sewn on quilts. Quilts have these purposeful incongruities in them because they’re made by human beings so you will get these things that don’t quite line up, and that’s the joy of what a quilt is.
BA: Especially a crazy quilt. There’s a whole lot of different patterns of quilts that are traditional, historic, antique patterns. But those aren’t the ones that are the most interesting to me. I like crazy quilts best.
FJO: Well, one of my all-time favorite pieces of yours is this big solo piano piece, Quilt Music. I assume you gave it that name because you heard that connection.
BA: Yes, it’s like a swale for piano, because the quilt is just another word for that. It’s equivalent to me. Anyway. Yes, I’m glad you like it.
FJO: Tell me more about how it’s put together.
BA: I have no idea. I’d have to get the score and stare at it. You know, it’s old. I mean, it’s long ago and far away.
FJO: Alright, but since you said it’s like a swale, I’m curious. At some point, you started calling pieces swales.
BA: In 1984. That’s the year that the horse named Swale won the Kentucky Derby, the first Saturday in May. And I never heard the word before, so I looked it up in the dictionary. At the time, I was writing a string quartet, and I thought that was a great name for it. I wanted to dedicate it to Mr. James Roy, because he had been so kind to me. He worked at BMI, and he was a friend I could go talk to in the middle of the day without an appointment. He was another one of those people I could drop in on for no reason, and he would see me. So I named it Pennyroyal Swale. I wanted to use his name somewhere in there.
That’s how the first one came to be. Then I wrote another one that Dave Soldier’s string quartet played the first time. The next year they wanted to do another one, so I wrote one for Rosalie Calabrese [who was the manager of the American Composers Alliance]. I named it Rosemary Swale. Rosemary is actually an interesting herb because you can use it to cook and it’s also some kind of an ingredient in the fixative in perfume. Practical and artsy and that’s Rosalie. So Rosemary Swale was that one. And then there got to be lots more.
FJO: So what is a swale for you musically?
BA: Well, that is a collage. There’s no question. I write little shreds and tatters and then figure out how to have more of this and less of that, and cut them into each other. I can write a whole section that was actually on a drone, like on a C, and then another whole section that was on F. Then I would cut them into each other, and I would suddenly have tonic-subdominant, tonic-subdominant, but they were from actual different pieces of music. People hear them and hear the harmonic movement, but it wasn’t really movement. It was just cut-ups.
FJO: But not every piece of yours since then is called a swale. I thought it was very interesting to hear you just say that Quilt Music is a swale, even though you didn’t call it one. What distinguishes swales from the non-swales? I know there was a piece of yours, The Eighth Ancestor, that was performed during the ISCM World Music Days that predates your first swale, but it has a similar form to them.
BA: It was cut-ups. It was from like ’79 or ’80, so I didn’t have the word yet. But I was definitely doing cut-ups, and part of cut-ups comes from not having the time. I wasn’t the kind of composer that took three notes and made it into a symphony. I wasn’t interested in developing the theme and making variations. I was working all those jobs for dancers, so I would write down things that I had just played while they were teaching the next thing. I was just writing like a crazy person while they were teaching the next thing, looking at them out of the corner out of my eye so I’d know what to play next. Then at the end of the day, I would have piles of these little scraps of paper. I would take them home and try to figure out how to connect them, or just connect them or cut them up. Then I could make them into pieces.
FJO: So when you were playing piano for all those dance classes, you were just improvising?
BA: Mhmm.
FJO: Luckily you were able to remember and reconstruct a lot of that music.
“I would suddenly have tonic-subdominant, tonic-subdominant, but they were from actual different pieces of music.”
BA: Well, I think I was a pretty boring dance accompanist, but I did do it for 20 years, so apparently I got away with it. I had certain kinds of things that I did in F, and certain kinds of things I did in B-flat, A-minor, and D-minor; that stuff would just spool out. I had massive amounts that I could play forever—pliés in D-minor, across the floors in B-flat.
FJO: Do you think that working with all those dancers might have led you to create music that had a more regular rhythmic pulse. You mentioned that Andrew Bolotowski wanting you to write music using standard notation is what led you to give up this idea of having improvised rhythms, but you were already forced into creating things that had regular rhythms when you were working with these dancers because that’s what they needed.
BA: For sure.
FJO: Could that have had an impact on why your music went the way it did?
BA: Absolutely. Years and years of banging out things in three, or four, or six, or twelve, unless you work for Merce Cunningham, in which case all bets are off.
FJO: You also wrote the songs for a couple of Off-Off-Broadway musicals in the early 1980s, which is a genre that prizes catchy melodies. When I was 16, some high school classmates and I rented out the Carter Hotel Theatre for a week and presented a musical I wrote, so I was very intrigued to learn that one of your musicals, Elizabeth Rex: or, The Well-Bred Mother Goes to Camp, ran for nearly a month there.
BA: Oh my God. That’s so fun. Isn’t it now the Cheetah Gentleman’s Club? The Carter Hotel was the dirtiest hotel in America. This was not an impressive venue, but it was very close to Broadway!
FJO: Are there recordings of those shows?
BA: Well, there certainly are shreds and tatters of the words and music, but the people on stage were not hired for their musicality. They looked like the part.
FJO:Elizabeth Rex was about this woman who tries to get her daughter not to be a lesbian, so she takes her to see a priest and it turns out that he’s secretly gay.
BA: I love it, but now there’d be all these questions about whether it’s making fun of priests fooling around with the altar boys. And it was pre-AIDS. But it was a very funny show, and I think it could be done as a period piece. We’ll see if somebody might want to do it. And Fat Opera could definitely be done as a cabaret show. It doesn’t need to be done as a musical.
FJO: All in all, I think you wrote three musicals.
BA: Yeah, the first one [Nirvana Manor] has a cast of 20, so that was huge.
FJO: To return to the piece of yours that was performed on the ISCM World Music Days. It was interesting that the piece was chosen by one of the adjudicators at the time, Fred Rzewski, based on what was a misunderstanding of your intentions in the piece. He thought that your return to totality and regular rhythms was a form of irony.
BA: I think he thought it was political, because he’s very political.
FJO: But in a way, it was political, I mean, you wrote a manifesto on why you aspired to write music that was beautiful that is very political.
BA: But it wasn’t Communist. It wasn’t Stalin, Mao, whoever, and it wasn’t Hindemith—Music for Use. It was just me doing what I did. Michael [Sahl] taught me actually at the ISCM to go around saying, “Je fais la musique de la petite femme blanche”—I make the little white girl’s music—as a defense against people saying you have no craftsmanship; you’re not sophisticated. This was the response I got from people there, so I was trying to let it fall off of me like water from a duck.
Michael Sahl and Beth Anderson in 1979. (Photos courtesy Beth Anderson.)
FJO: But there was someone in the audience who did like the piece, a very significant Belgian composer.
BA: Yes, Boudewijn Buckinx, whom I love. But he was far away in a booth. It wasn’t apparent to me that there was anybody there who liked that piece except Michael and me.
FJO: However, despite your feeling such negativity from most of the people there, you stuck to your guns and you stayed on this path, undeterred by what these folks or anyone else thought about your music. And now, decades later, there are four CDs out in the world that are devoted exclusively to your music and several pieces of yours included on other recordings, including orchestra pieces. It’s not as much as it should be and I know it’s not as much as you wish, but all in all, it’s a pretty good track record compared to the trajectory of many other composers.
BA: Well, I really wanted the CDs out so that these pieces wouldn’t just exist in my head or on these falling apart tapes from the distant past. I thought I was going to die at the time, so I really wanted them out before I died. I didn’t think my husband was going to put them out afterwards.
FJO: I know that you were quite sick several years ago.
BA: Yes, but “she recovered!” So onward. But yes, I very glad that the CDs are out, and I would like to do more, but I haven’t organized it yet. My husband assures me that I should not do CDs, that nobody’s buying CDs, which is certainly true. I should only make things for streaming. But then how do you send a CD to a radio station if you don’t have a CD?
FJO: We’re living in a very weird transitional time. A lot of people claim they have the answers, but I don’t think anybody really knows where it’s going. I’m personally thrilled that you made sure these CDs got released. Of course, people stumble upon music online all the time these days, but I love the idea that it is also possible that somebody could chance upon one of these recordings in, say, a library in some small town in Kentucky.
BA: Yes.
FJO: It could change that person’s life, just like stumbling upon a book by John Cage changed your life. The same is true with these memoirs you’ve written, which is why I think it’s important that they are published at some point.
“There are not a lot of memoirs of women composers out in the universe, despite Ethel Smyth doing like 12 or something.”
BA: There are not a lot of memoirs of women composers out in the universe, despite Ethel Smyth doing like 12 or something. It seems like there’s a space for that in the universe potentially. And somebody could find the book. It’s like I found Eric Salzman’s book on 20th-century music and all these other books that were so important to me as a child. Even when you’re not living in the center of the universe, you can find books and recordings in libraries. I’m a big library person.
FJO: But of course now with the internet, anybody can find anything anywhere, apparently.
BA: If you know what to look for. The thing about libraries is, you would fall across them because it was red or something. I read all the books in the Mount Sterling Public Library on theosophy because every one of them was a bright color. I’d see all these old books, and there’d be a bright red one or yellow or blue or green. On the internet, you need to know what you’re looking for a little bit.
FJO: Hopefully people will find your music online through reading and seeing and hearing this talk that we’ve just done.
Back in July, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times called for an end to the practice of blind auditions. “If ensembles are to reflect the communities they serve,” he wrote, “the audition process should take into account race, gender and other factors.”
Unsurprisingly, this suggestion received heavy backlash. Between the Culture Wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the strong opinions of those in the music world, such a statement was bound to ruffle feathers. Pitting what’s seen as meritocracy in its purest form against the diversity standards of the day was doomed from the start. To progressives, Tommasini’s piece was hollow and missed the point. To conservatives, it was sheer blasphemy.
Tommasini’s suggestion came from a well-meaning place: one of newfound discomfort with the status quo. It would be ungenerous to discount the value of that response. At the same time, why diversity matters to classical music was not examined at all.
I’ve called for an end to the practice of blind auditions for years. To me, Tommasini’s piece was both unpersuasive and incomplete.
To make a contentious change requires the buy-in of many different kinds of people. One person’s call for “representation” is another’s outrage at “quotas.” I believe we can—and should—elevate this conversation past that endless, tiresome tug-of-war.
Rather than going in circles, I ask: what would have to be true for all of us to agree on the potential benefits of revising the process?
What follows is taken in part from a piece I wrote in February of 2018, updated for relevance.
For decades, blind orchestral auditions have been lauded as one of the world’s fairest hiring practices.
For decades, blind orchestral auditions have been lauded as one of the world’s fairest hiring practices. Yet the merit-based method reveals one of classical music culture’s most problematic assumptions. It comes with a host of undesirable consequences — one of which recently blew up in our faces.
The assumption in question: How you sound is all that matters.
As a result of this belief, candidates aren’t interviewed. References are not required. When you walk into an audition, you aren’t allowed to speak or wear perfume. A rogue cough can betray your gender. Best not to wear clacking heels for the same reason.
As you enter the audition room in silence, a proctor announces you by number. You then play behind a screen. As a result, the judging panel doesn’t know the first thing about you. Not your age, your race, your gender. Not your pedigree, or where you went to school. Nothing.
Certainly, this process has had a tremendously equalizing effect. For starters: blind auditions have made it possible for women to make tremendous inroads into orchestras.
I believe I’ve been saved by the screen myself. At 23, I played for a concertmaster in the weeks leading up to an audition for his orchestra. He didn’t seem to take me very seriously. I left the coaching feeling a bit pessimistic about my chances. After winning the audition, he told me I was a “great artist.” I‘m pretty sure he wouldn’t have felt that way had he known it was me back there all along.
But in the wake of #Metoo and #BlackLivesMatter, I ask whether “how well you play” is really all that matters in the musical workplace.
Is “how well you play” really all that matters in the musical workplace?
Let’s get this out of the way. For a job in the field of musical performance, nothing matters more than how you sound. In this piece, I hope to make the case for letting other relevant things matter, too.
Tempting as it is, let’s not fall into an all-or-nothing false binary here. Sound doesn’t matter “less” by widening our circle to include other factors. The whole point here is additive.
Even if we believe that how you sound is all that matters, the meritocratic foundation of the concept itself doesn’t hold water. To pick a “winner” who “sounds the best” is not objectively possible. Sure, there can be a general consensus—but never a universal one.
That’s because there is no “universal best” to which all players aspire. In music, excellence at the highest level is measured in abstractions that are deeply, intangibly personal. My colleague Kevin Kumar wrote about this beautifully in his piece, The #1 Violinist in the World.
Consider the following: musicians generally accept that anyone who gets to the finals is qualified for the job, and would fit into the fabric of the orchestra just fine. This truth is especially consoling when the runner-up is you.
Sometimes, on a different day, things could have gone a different way. We all have off days: before auditions, I always used to tell myself, “I wish everyone the best. I just hope my best is better today.”
Plus, the composition of the listening committee can determine who comes out on top on any given day. Swap a committee member or two and you might have a different “best” player based on the collective, subjective taste of those listening that day.
The audition procedure of each orchestra also comes into play here. Does the conductor get to choose from among the committee’s top few? What if the conductor’s opinion is different from the committee’s majority vote? Who played “the best,” or “deserved to win,” in that instance? I’ve personally been both the subject of and a participant in these very situations on both sides of the screen.
At a certain point, “winning” an audition is like catching lightning in a bottle. My own mother once cautioned me against resigning from an orchestra for fear that I wouldn’t be able to “get back in.” While it would have been easy to take that as an insult, she was simply being realistic.
Compare that with the following anecdote. In my early twenties, I had a mentor who helped me prepare for auditions. I’ll never forget her telling me that I had to play with such conviction that the committee would have “no choice” but to name me the winner.
This was a motivating, inspiring, romantic, and idealistic instruction. It’s the kind of thing that puts fire in your belly, motivating you to maximize the one thing you can control: yourself. Your preparation level, commitment, passion, and nerves of steel. It’s exactly the kind of thing you need to hear when preparing for an audition.
But while my mentor’s guidance was both motivating and attractive, it wasn’t as realistic as my mother’s. And here’s the thing: neither of them were wrong. My mentor was right that I needed to do everything in my power to improve my chances. And my mother was right that my chances were exactly that: chances.
Given the above, surely there is room to take more of the person into account. Qualities, experiences, skills, and interests that would further the cause of art music above and beyond “how much more beautifully” the winner played than the runners-up.
Who knows what else they might have been able to bring to the table?
***
Maybe there should be an interpersonal component to getting a job in music.
Maybe there should be an interpersonal component to getting a job in music. Maybe how well you play isn’t where what matters begins and ends. After all, orchestral and chamber music are team sports. Are you likely to “play your best,” anyway, while seething with rage at—or being psychologically tortured by—your stand partner or principal?
When you audition for a string quartet, both musical and personal chemistry matter. What brings out the best in others is ineffable. It’s laughable to contemplate a blind, screened string quartet audition. Why should orchestral auditions be so different?
What other fields vet only one dimension of every job applicant? To assume that someone’s playing tells you everything you need to know about them is simply false. It’s naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Worshipping sound at the expense of character has had consequences beyond missed opportunities. Blind orchestral auditions have led to orchestras filled with wonderful players. But with no other vetting of any kind, many of them are as interpersonally difficult as they are musically skilled. Much of the time, they cannot stand each other, and dysfunction abounds.
Blind orchestral auditions have led to orchestras filled with wonderful players …. but much of the time, dysfunction abounds.
When orchestras have the great good fortune of hiring a player who also happens to be charismatic, generous, and full of good ideas, they go absolutely bananas milking that person for all they are worth. Imagine being able to harness that energy from not a small handful of serendipitous hires, but from an entire symphony’s worth of carefully-considered candidates. Imagine if the orchestral audition process included not only blind listening, an interview, and references, but also:
a trial lesson for an underprivileged, gifted child
public speaking
a chamber music concert and a new music concert
a thorough review of what the candidate brings to the table, including his or her capacity to serve as an effective advocate for the art form
I’m not saying these things are “more important” than sounding good. I’m saying: sound good, and…
As a dear friend put: “even Miss America isn’t just about the swimsuit competition.” I’m the Co-Director of Salastina, a non-profit chamber music series, in Los Angeles. My colleague Kevin Kumar and I play and work closely with wonderful people who are superlative musicians—and… terrific advocates for music.
We value both. We believe in their mutually amplifying capacity. And we have faith in the long-term cultural impact of that belief.
Imagine if diversity were a meaningful factor in the orchestra’s hiring process.
Imagine if diversity were a meaningful factor in the orchestra’s hiring process. If the culture of classical music seeks to enhance its relevancy and diversify its ranks, a more comprehensive approach to auditions would be a wonderful place to start.
There’s something sad and insufficient about post-graduate educational efforts to diversify orchestras. Well-meaning as such designated residencies are, they do too little too late. It’s hard to imagine how a person of color truly improves his or her odds of winning a screened audition simply by having sat in a designated “minority residency” chair for a year or two. In 2016, the League of American Orchestras published this study showing that these residencies just don’t work on the whole.
At the same time, I see their value as baby steps. They have the potential to ever-so-slowly steer the Titanic of musicians’ opinions, thereby improving the chances for more meaningful conversations about orchestral hiring practices down the line.
When it comes to diversity, blind auditions haven’t been a complete bust. They have helped the advancement of women: Asian and white women like me. Beyond that, what truly impedes greater diversity in American orchestras is our insistence on the false assumption that sound is all that matters.
Recently, Irshad Manji wrote beautifully on the merits of diversifying the workplace in “White Fragility Is Not the Answer. Honest Diversity Is” for the Heterodox Academy (July 7, 2020). Her piece helped me reframe anew the friction between creating a vibrant, synergistic workforce and current orchestral hiring priorities.
According to Manji, “honest diversity… recognizes that each of us, whatever our labels, is a multifaceted plural.” Manji contrasts this with dishonest diversity, which “slices and dices individuals into categories, as if directing people to their assigned places.”
Does the following statement sound familiar? “We can have diversity or we can have quality. We can’t have both.”
It’s a mainstay of the culture wars. And blind auditions make a fertile battleground.
But what if a variety of more nuanced artistic skills were equated with quality when considering the sum total of a musician? Powerfully, Manji suggests: “Honest diversity starts with the desire for varied perspectives and rectifies representation to fulfill that desire. To begin the other way around — representation in the hopes of diverse thinking — is to incite needless friction.”
She speaks of having the integrity to value more than diversity data points. I would add that valuing more than how a candidate sounds—on any given day, compared to those present, and to the ears of those who just so happen to be listening—is also a question of artistic integrity.
Valuing more than how a candidate sounds is also a question of artistic integrity.
Here’s where I felt The New York Times piece left itself vulnerable to criticism from all sides. It framed metrics as an expedient end goal. It piggy-backed off of the death of George Floyd to make a statement about the uncomfortable lack of black representation within American orchestras.
But it didn’t get into what really matters about diversity in a compelling way. The why of it all was shallow and implied. As a result, the piece came across as opportunistic on the one hand and inflammatory on the other. It didn’t invite the buy-in of people who all want “the best”—and “fairly”—but have different ideas about what that looks like.
Don’t get me wrong: winning a blind audition fair and square feels AWESOME. It’s a notch on your belt that feels about as objective as success can get. And believe me: we cling to these victories like our lives depend on them. (They actually do.)
Who would want to disband a club into which they’ve rightfully earned entry? It’s too easy—and all too human—for the ego to bristle at the prospect. It’s threatening, like the sudden devaluation of prestige, or the dismantling of personal identity. And that’s to say nothing of decades of back-breaking work, unrelenting focus, and significant financial investment.
I say the following with all due respect. Musicians use the idea that “how you sound is all that matters” as both a source of pride and a crutch. It excuses bad behavior. It justifies narrow-mindedness. And it’s its own kind of complacency.
Focusing only on “how you sound” excuses bad behavior and justifies narrow-mindedness.
What if expanding our values system to include other skills and qualities weren’t a devaluation of the importance of sound, but an invitation to go deeper? Manji put this idea beautifully: “wholeness, by definition, is not a zero-sum game.”
I suspect many orchestral musicians would welcome this kind of shift. How many of us have felt hamstrung, restless, under-utilized, and stifled as a result of the narrow requirements of our jobs? Greg Sandow observed in “Not So Satisfied” that orchestral musicians have slightly lower job satisfaction than federal prison guards. (Those with the highest? String quartet players.) At the same time, orchestral musicians boast the greatest “internal motivation.” My husband likens this phenomenon to “keeping a Ferrari in the garage.”
At the same time, how many administrators have earnestly tried to reverse-engineer additional opportunities for orchestral musicians? Inviting them to become more involved with things above and beyond rehearsals and concerts? Sometimes, these efforts have lovely results; other times, they fall flat.
Most of my 20s was about muscling my way into the orchestral world. Most of my 30s was about gradually transitioning out of it—in part because I felt so musically and intellectually constrained. It’s precisely why a friend and I started Salastina 10 years ago.
But not everyone can, or should, go there. Resources and chutzpah are finite. Perhaps it’s up to the larger institutions themselves to prioritize making musical practice less limited, and limiting, for musicians. Inviting more from us—and more of us—from the start would be a great point of departure.
Again, I come back to the concept of “honest diversity.” It is not self-motivated, either deployed in the service of earning woke points or clung to desperately as a key to survival. It’s not even simply a moral imperative. Rather, honest diversity is intrinsic to creating vibrant, meaningful, synergistic workplaces, cultural institutions, and art.
As Shea Scruggs and Weston Sprott wrote in “Advancing Inclusion: Creative Ways Musicians Can Take the Lead,” the job description for an orchestral position is usually limited to just two words. “Section Violin.” “Principal Clarinet.” “Associate Principal Double Bass” clocks in at four.
What if more thought and care were put into crafting musicians’ job descriptions? What if these job descriptions reflected the unique needs of each orchestra—and the communities they serve? What if skin color and gender diversity followed naturally from prioritizing different perspectives and life experiences as a part of the process, rather than an antagonizing insistence on ever-narrowing metrics?
What’s more, orchestral musicians tend to stay in their posts for decades. What if the creation of each job description were treated more like a mini-strategic planning session? One that takes into account where the orchestra is likely to be in five, ten, twenty, or even thirty years?
It is my opinion that blind listening should always be an important part of the hiring process. But who knows how dramatically musical culture would shift if we valued a more well-rounded kind musicianship?
The days of a one-size-fits-all prescription for “fairness” and “the best” are over.
So what to do? The days of a one-size-fits-all, un-nuanced, and even toxic prescription for “fairness” and “the best” are over. It’s up to individual organizations and communities to determine how best to navigate hiring the most qualified candidates for their particular needs.
What kind of dynamics, literal and figurative, would change for the better? What kind of vibrancy would enter the field? What kind of relevance to today’s world would more naturally emerge from the art form?
What else might we not have to force quite so hard, if we could just loosen our grip on an assumption that’s as tenacious as it is problematic?
I’m feeling like it’s high time we found out.
I’d like to thank the following people for their many insights into this conversation, both recently and over the years: Derrick Spiva Jr., Reena Esmail, Simon Woods, Alexander Laing, Vijay Gupta, my husband Philip White, and my work-husband, Kevin Kumar.
New Music USA announced today its ninth round of project grant awards, determined on June 30 after extensive outside panel review. Totaling $529,420 in funding, this year’s grants support new American music projects in 27 states. The 114 awarded projects include a wide range of activities and events involving new music as a central element; many projects involve collaborations in dance, theater, opera, and the visual arts.
New Music USA’s platform offers important promotional tools for artists that extend the program’s service beyond financial support. As part of the application process, artists create project pages that include narrative descriptions and media samples. These are not available to the public until the awards are determined, when the awarded project pages become part of an online gallery. Project updates from the artists, and the interaction with followers, assist artists in engaging with the broader community and allow the public to experience new work in development.
Interim CEO Deborah Steinglass commented, “This current round of project grants demonstrates not only an enormous breadth and depth of creative work in the United States today, it also speaks to the importance of artists to our society as a whole. These projects touch upon the core of what it means to be human by stimulating our intellects, evoking our internal emotions, creating respite from our daily lives, raising our consciousness around themes of social justice and equality, and so much more; artists are in fact serving as agents of change. I can’t wait to experience the art created from this round of project grants, and it’s my hope that many others will explore and experience this work as well, and make new art a part of their daily lives.”
Launched in October 2013, New Music USA’s project grants program has now distributed $3,396,398 in support of 672 projects. Of these projects, 50% were for the creation of new work. 41% of the project grant awardees are first-time recipients of grants from New Music USA and its legacy organizations, Meet The Composer and the American Music Center.
New Music USA is committed to making the grant application process equitable, and it’s our goal to remove barriers to applying for grants. For that reason, project grants applicants are given simple guidelines and are asked to provide a brief project description and work samples. The project grants peer review process is another example of an ongoing effort to dismantle bias. For this ninth round we engaged a panel of 41 artists and administrators that was comprised of 78% women and 42% people of color who worked remotely online from around the country. The number of applications received determined the number of panelists.
Project creators choose a category during the application process. That choice determines how panelists are assigned. Here are the eight categories and the number of recipients in each category: Dance (30); Electronics (29); Interdisciplinary (56); Jazz (16); Recording (44); Large Ensemble (24); Small Ensemble (56); and Theater (21).
Projects are first screened by our staff for eligibility and completeness to make sure projects contain sufficient information, media samples that work, etc. Projects are then evaluated through a peer review process. Projects are reviewed by the panelists for artistry, impact, and capacity, with artistry taking priority over all other considerations. The panelist criteria for project grants is available here.
Beyoncé’s latest album Renaissance made international headlines last week when Australian disability advocate Hannah Divineycalled out one of the album’s songs, “Heated,” for using an ableist slur in the lyrics and Beyoncé subsequently agreed to re-record the song without that word and replace the track. Earlier this summer, the electronic music community was up in arms when an advance promotional video for that album made for British Vogue showed the pop icon scratching an LP with her fingernails. It turns out that it is a performance technique created by San Francisco-based experimental artist Victoria Shen, who performs under the moniker Evicshen, and she was not credited. But soon after the outcry, the appropriation was acknowledged and Shen was offered an apology. Both of these stories show that even if Beyoncé’s creative team is not always completely careful choosing all the details, they are paying very close attention to how people are reacting to her work on social media. And in Shen’s case, it actually gave her a new level of notoriety.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen) and her needle nails. (Photo by Caroline Rose Moore, courtesy Victoria Shen.)
“The fact that my work was able to reach a much broader audience than I would have been ever able to have, even if it wasn’t credited at first, I think, is kind of amazing,” Shen said when I spoke with her over Zoom a few weeks ago during her residency at Wave Farm. She also pointed out that the concept, while visually startling and aurally fascinating, is perhaps not the most radical idea. “It’s just kind of like a natural thing. I also used to do nails, so this is a kind of thing where you think somebody would have done this already. It’s sort of low hanging fruit. But of course it takes both someone who used to do nails professionally and does electronics that had to make the bridge.”
As I would soon learn upon digging deeper into Shen’s creative output after she was first mentioned to me by my New Music USA colleague Ami Dang, who also creates electronic music and is a huge fan of Shen’s work, the needle nails technique is just one of many new approaches to making sounds that Shen has used in her performances and sound installations. After hearing and watching a segment of her extraordinary Zero Player Piano, in which disembodied piano strings and hammers are positioned along an ascending staircase and triggered remotely, I knew I had to talk with her.
“That was the gateway into more physical, electro-acoustic things I’m interested in now,” Shen explained. “To me, it was definitely a Modernist strategy … Something that’s self-reflexive. Something that is medium-specific. Like: what is a piano? How far can you push it to its logical conclusion while still maintaining we’re still arguing that it is within the medium of piano?”
Although some of her work can sound quite austere at times, Shen is ultimately suspicious of Modernist aesthetics. “I do like the Modernist kind of mission,” she admits, “but I know that it ultimately fails because all value divides contextually, arbitrarily. It could go in one eye and go out another, or it could be worth something based on some arbitrary factor which is like some institution assigns value to it. Or some kind of cultural capital gets ascribed to it. That’s bullshit. And we all know that, so how can we use things that are hyper, or super full of meaning, I call it the landfill of meaning. I use that in some recognized tactical way. I think I try and create this interface between non-meaning, that which is noise, and that which is over filled with meaning, and then take that interface, that line, and mine that for different conclusions as to how we derive our sense of value.”
Shen is also ambivalent about whether or not she is a composer, even though all the sounds she makes are completely her own, often including all the devices she uses to make them.
“I’m not a composer, I think mainly due to the fact that I don’t work with other people. I think composers really shine when they’re able to provide a set of instructions for other people to execute their work. … I think I’m much more of an improviser than a composer. I think part of composition, at least traditionally, is all about having a pre-packaged work being shipped out and executed, realized anywhere. And so for that, you want to control expression of your piece. You want to control the space in which it takes place. And it’s all about control, control, control. To me, it’s sort of the McDonald’s of sound.”
As for Beyoncé, Shen remains a fan though she doesn’t imagine that the two of them will ever collaborate.
I really doubt that she even knows I exist. I think her PR person knows I exist, but that’s as high as it goes. … I would just love to play at her mansion, to play a pool party or something with needle nails, it would be great.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen) during a performance on February 23, 2022. (Photo by Matt Miramontes, courtesy Victoria Shen.)
I just like being able to put in different sounds together at the same time. So Chinese opera, ltalian opera, swing music.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
I’m a very technical person, but everything I do is by feel and not by the interest in pure math or manipulation in numbers or anything like that.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
My identity is something that is completely inescapable. I do like the Modernist kind of mission, but I know that it ultimately fails because all value divides contextually, arbitrarily. It could go in one eye and go out another, or it could be worth something based on some arbitrary factor which is like some institution assigns value to it. Or some kind of cultural capital gets ascribed to it. That’s bullshit. And we all know that.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
I think I try and create this interface between non-meaning, that which is noise, and that which is over filled with meaning, and then take that interface, that line, and mine that for different conclusions as to how we derive our sense of value.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
The rules of music are also arbitrary. So anything that exists outside of these rules is considered experimental or noise. But that’s the freeing thing; there are no rules here.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
In anything that I’ve released on vinyl, on tape, on Bandcamp, digital, I think I’m playing the role of composer with those pieces. But otherwise, I’m not a composer, I think mainly due to the fact that I don’t work with other people.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
Part of composition, at least traditionally, is all about having a pre-packaged work being shipped out and executed, realized anywhere. And so for that, you want to control expression of your piece. You want to control the space in which it takes place. And it’s all about control, control, control. To me, it’s sort of the McDonald’s of sound.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
I always loved experimental music. I was listening to a lot of noise rock and IDM and even psych-folk stuff in high school. But harsh noise was something that was cracked open for me by Jessica Rylan.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
I like to dance a lot. I don’t necessarily consider what I do in my performances as dance, but it could be considered movement.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
For me there has to be some kind of grounded-ness, some kind of gold standard. And the gold standard I think for us is always going to be the human body.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
This is why I think improvisation is so good. It’s because you’re risking it all. With composition you can feel really safe because you have an expectation and that expectation is met. If it’s not met, if it’s underwhelming, then oh well who cares, right? But risk and the position of possible failure I think is very important. ... Failure happens all the time! I’m like, oh I have an idea, it’s spur of the moment improvisation. Let me try this out. Uh, will it fail? Sometimes. Is it embarrassing? Maybe. Move on. You know, but I think that is a point that is compelling for people.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
I did not grow up with records. My earliest memory is listening to Peking Opera on a cassette tape with my mom and we were splitting the ear buds. I wasn’t around records. I had some records, but never really messed with them.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)
I would just love to play at her [Beyoncé's] mansion, to play a pool party or something with needle nails, it would be great.
Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.
